I honestly spend very little time thinking about the future of the publishing industry. I find the blank page intimidating enough as it is, and I don\u2019t need additional reasons to feel insecure about what I\u2019m doing.<\/p>\n
I try to avoid news about who is merging with whom or what Mrs. Megapublisher\u2019s stance is on digital rights because I know what would happen if I ever started down that particular rabbit hole. My eyes would be opened to a larger reality that would do nothing to instill confidence in my aspirations. In turn, I would feel the need to exhaustively search for as much positive news as I could, stories about how it\u2019s not nearly as difficult to break in as I had feared.<\/p>\n
(For the record, I equate the difficulty of reaching and maintaining success in publishing somewhere on the order of surviving Thunderdome.)<\/p>\n
I would pretend that all of this research would be worthwhile. After all, I want to be a professional writer, and I need to understand the landscape of the industry. Right?<\/p>\n
Maybe. But that\u2019s wouldn\u2019t be the real reason I was Googling and reading and chugging massive quantities of Diet Dr. Pepper.<\/p>\n
In truth, it would all be an exercise in fear. Not fear of the publishing industry, but fear of the act of writing itself.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t need additional distractions. I already want to run away from the blank page every time I sit down. Even if I know what the chapter or story is about and I have a decent outline, typing that first sentence can sometimes feel like stepping off a cliff. (And sometimes the idea of just stepping off a literal cliff seems preferable to slogging through another book that people may or may not like.)<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not saying my aversion to staying abreast of the publishing industry is a good strategy for everyone. Hell, I\u2019m not even saying it\u2019s a viable one for me. I just know how my mind works. If I take that deep dive and begin educating myself before I am ready, I will become overwhelmed, I will become disheartened, and I will want to quit.<\/p>\n
So instead, I say, \u201cFuck it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Learning about the big, bad publishing world is not my job right now. I know just enough to get by, so instead I focus on crafting a decent tale, one that people like or at least appreciate. And I work on making my prose progressively less shitty.<\/p>\n
Like a twelve-stepper, I take it one day at a time. I try to have faith that if I cobble together a good enough story it will eventually find a home, and everything else will take care of itself. If not, well, then my stupid ass shouldn’t have been in Thunderdome in the first place.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I honestly spend very little time thinking about the future of the publishing industry. I find the blank page intimidating enough as it is, and I don\u2019t need additional reasons to feel insecure about what I\u2019m doing. I try to avoid news about who is merging with whom or what Mrs. Megapublisher\u2019s stance is on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[296,398,886,887],"class_list":["post-8092","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-distractions","tag-fear","tag-publishing","tag-publishing-industry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8092","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8092"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8092\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}