So "Paisley," how goes the writing thing?
It's a question as old as time, which is about a week if you ask a photon.
The writing thing is going okay. I have found one (yes, just one) keyword on Amazon that is profitable, and I use that term loosely. It is a keyword that only around 200 people search for per month, so even if I somehow murdered all the other sci-fi writers using it, I would not be making a living from the proceeds.
But I have found one. That means I am half way to finding two.
I’ve also finished a few good ads for Who Built The Humans? and prepared the relaunch. The pandemic destroyed my original 2020 promotional plans, which included yelling at strangers in bars and not much else. If you remember, yelling at strangers was banned.
I’ve booked Halfplanet Press a slot at Manchester ComicCon, and I’m looking into flights to America to visit a friend who is so passionate about my writing that sometimes he reminds me to keep at it when designing all my own adverts leaves me feeling burnt out.
On top of that I have finished my next short story collection, Hologram Kebab. I’m just polishing it off now. It’s going okay. No pre-orders for this one as I want to just drop it into the world when it’s done, without warning.
I do wish I kept to my “one book a year” thing, but I moved directions. I became a publisher as well as an author, and I have been teaching myself everything from cover design to writing coaching over the last three years.
I’m getting back into coaching. For £50 and an hour of someone’s time I reckon I can work out exactly what is wrong with their story or their writing philosophy, because that’s what I did at uni, and I was good at it. There was a Writer’s Workshop module that honestly kept me on the course when things got weird. I loved editing and pointing out things the writer hadn’t notice. My most recent client was authorinmyhead on instagram, or Maria Mavridou if you’ve read her work. I swooped in and pointed out some tonal shifts and structure issues in her manuscript. They were very minor, but she told me that these were the parts that had derailed the whole thing. With these small blips altered, the manuscript flowed a lot better. I was able to be really useful to someone, and that isn’t something I feel I’ve been for a while.
That last sentence is grim, but it’s true. I know I’ve helped people laugh and think with WBTH, because some of them have told me, but I wanted to contribute in a bigger way to society. I guess that’s why stand-up comedy appealed to me so much when I was younger (and it is doing again). There’s this idea in my head that if I can make more people laugh and think, and make them understand their creative processes better, I can improve my little corner of the Earth. That’s all I want really.
Don’t cringe too hard. This is the one time I will be honest. Right after this I am going back to dark comedy.
So really it’s been a journey of understanding my own skills. I tend to play them down tremendously. Acting less smart than you are is a useful defense mechanism when you’re a kid and you are being bullied by idiots, but it’s not so useful now those idiots are dead and I’m 29. It took my poetry prof at uni to take me aside and tell me “You’re a poet” for me to realise that yes, after writing 600 poems before uni and making at least 4 of them worth reading, I might actually be a poet. The same happens with fiction, and it doesn’t help that after reading a particularly awful line of short story collections at uni I actually quit writing short stories for a while because I couldn’t tolerate being associated with the form. Funny how I then emerged after a year’s absence with a debut book that is… a short story collection.
Like I said, I play my skills down. I would like to blame the writing community partially for this. There’s a gross pervading myth that confidence = arrogance and I’d like to kill that myth with a hammer. But the writing community is good aside from it’s more embedded beliefs and memes. I guess that’s true of all cultures. The individuals are fine, it’s the coagulating of personalities into mobs that worries me.
I forgot what I was talking about. Oh yes. I’m looking for work as a writing coach. If you know anyone who has £50 and will trust some guy with an MA in Creative Writing to rewire their brain in an hour, email me at halfplanetpress@gmail.com
£40 for the first 5 people to email me. And I’ll probably go over the hour with no extra charge. I’m the ranting type.