The Wrath of Khan<\/em>, but I don\u2019t constantly talk about it every time a new sci-fi movie comes out, or whenever I\u2019m on Facebook, or when I meet some random stranger whose name is Khan.<\/p>\nAnyway\u2026 So, the stupid memoir is the book that happened. And now that a book happened, another book needs to happen. This is the cardinal rule of writing and publishing. Authors struggle with this, of course. They spend a decade getting their book out on the shelves, buy expensive champagne when they sign a shyster contract, and then spend the next six to nine months horrified by the publishing process. That\u2019s followed by six to nine months of increasingly awkward and difficult promotion. Meanwhile, they\u2019ve failed to produce a workable follow-up title. Suddenly, a year after publication, their book is on the backlist. Sales slow down, the publisher moves on to the next round of releases, and the debut author is left sitting in the basement with a stolen gun and a single bullet, quietly writing a note to their loved ones who stopped talking to them months before after being forced to go to multiple stilted readings. <\/p>\n
What they should have been doing during the whole process is writing the next book. The goal should be a book a year, or, at most, every two years. <\/p>\n
Now, I know: Gosh, Nacho, writing a book is hard! <\/p>\n
Well, yeah. So? You\u2019re the one who wanted to be an author. Shut up and get to authoring! <\/p>\n
My excuse is that I run a publishing company and I get hundreds of manuscripts every week and I want to dieeee<\/em>\u2026. But! I did just resign from my day job to focus on writing and publishing, so now I have no excuse.<\/p>\nLuckily, last summer, I returned to that sci-fi novel I\u2019ve been plinking away at for *cough* 20 years now *cough* and I said to myself: Dumb Motherfucker (my actual given name), you\u2019re gonna sit down and finish this bitch.<\/p>\n
At the moment, I\u2019m two-thirds finished, and I\u2019ve written the ending. So it\u2019s just a matter of filling in this last section and, viola, I\u2019ll have an unreadable and appalling first draft! My goal is May 1st for that completion date, at which point I\u2019ll give it to a trusted editor friend who\u2019ll tell me everything I did wrong and spend the remainder of 2018 getting a viable manuscript together, with a shop-around date of December. Ideally, it\u2019ll get a late 2019 release. <\/p>\n
Or\u2026I\u2019ll light it on fire in a parking lot, which will be a good way to make my Instagram account more interesting.<\/p>\n
Long ago, in the beforetime, I started Greatsociety (then Dirtyfreaks.com) with the idea that it was a \u201cresource\u201d where \u201cwriters could practice writing.\u201d I had these lofty goals (this was nearly 20 years ago, by the way), where I thought maintaining a blog would help me focus on writing. All based on the \u201cWrite X words a day\u201d principle that pedantic creative writing instructors advise. If I wrote a blog each day, I\u2019d hone my writing talents and be on the shelves lickety-split. <\/p>\n
Of course, that shit ain\u2019t true. Writing is a discipline, but not in the way teachers of writing think. It\u2019s not about how, when, or how much you write. It\u2019s about not being a lazy, solipsistic twat.<\/p>\n
But, sometimes, you need a break from your main project. And, when I hit that point in the sci-fi novel, I thought of this elderly and neglected blog of mine. I\u2019ve realized, over the last 70,000 words of sci-fi, that I haven\u2019t completely blown the last book out of the front yard of my brain. So I thought to myself: I\u2019m going to take a day, listen to loud music, not put on pants, and write ten 1000 word articles, posting every Tuesday for ten weeks. And not edit them! Let\u2019s go.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I wrote a memoir about my family that\u2019s full of neglected children, poisoned ice cream, and major crimes committed by lunatics simply because they wanted to watch the world burn.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[410,397],"class_list":["post-4282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rants","tag-10000-words","tag-rants"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4282","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4282"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4282\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4311,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4282\/revisions\/4311"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}