I May Not Publish Anything Until I Retire, and I’m only 47

After some thought I decided I’m not going to try to publish anything for a while.  I always liked the fact that the author Frank McCourt did not publish memoirs until he retired in his 60’s, after a career as a teacher in the Bronx.

I mentioned this as I think memoirs in general are troublesome. They include the people in your life. Not everyone wants to associate with the crazy things you did in college or whatever setting. Unless it’s so unique everyone can gain from it, or if it’s a celebrity and a huge amount of people want to know his or her story.

Some may think having schizo affective or bipolar disorder would justify writing a memoir. But I know that many people went through the same or worse. In the past I’ve tried to write memoirs. A middle school one, one about a bookstore I worked at, one about hurricane sandy, and another about my 2016 psychotic episode. For each one I worried what the people involved would think. In 2023 I even tried to find people from my past on facebook to clarify things. That project I gave up on.

The good news is I finished writing out the new version of my novel. I need to type it up, which will take time, I’m hoping to have it typed by New Year’s. However I got a craving to start the sequel, to keep the momentum going. I don’t want to revise, beg my friends to read it, and try to get an agent or publisher. I guess I like the creative process, but not the revision and trying to sell it. One writing teacher told me a good amount of queries to agents or publishers is 100. And all these queries should be individualized letters. You’re supposed to query agents that publish books similar to yours. You need to state contemporary books that are similar to yours. I read at a slow pace, and I mostly read classics. I don’t have time to read books that agents represent.

Self publishing seems worse. I don’t want to try give away books for free and failing, print or ebook. Seems like an ego deflater right away. So I’m going to type of my current version while plotting out the sequel. Once I’m done typing it out, if it’s New Year’s or later I’ll start the sequel. As I hand write the sequel I’ll revise the first novel the best I can.

If that sounds like too much it really is not.  For this handwritten version I started on NYE 2024 with a plan of writing 120 nights based on the 3-act structure. I planed to write most nights and be done sometime in May. That ended up taking longer which is okay. My writing sessions were an hour or less. So taking the time to revise the previous novel while writing out the sequel should not be a problem.

Hopefully I can keep at this rotation of writing until I feel the series is complete. A trilogy may be more than enough but I feel I created a fictional world that could be more than that. Also with sci fi books publishers have a strict word count of over 80,000 words. What’s wrong with ones that are 70,000?

The publishing world is tough right now and the pandemic did not help. I’ll wait it out, keep writing and revising my work for a long time. Perhaps until I retire.

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