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 60s, 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 that everyone can gain from it, or if it’s a celebrity and a vast number of people want to know their story.
Some may think having schizoaffective or bipolar disorder would justify writing a memoir. Still, 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 that I finished writing the new version of my novel. I need to type it up, which will take some 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 suppose I enjoy the creative process, but not the revision and the process of trying to sell it. One writing teacher told me that a good number of queries to agents or publishers is around 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 to give away books for free and fail, whether in print or as an ebook. Seems like an ego deflator right away. So I’m going to type out my current version while plotting out the sequel. Once I type it out, if it’s New Year’s or later, I’ll start the sequel. As I handwrite the sequel, I’ll revise the first novel the best I can.
Suppose that sounds like too much; it really isn’t. For this handwritten version, I started on NYE 2024 with a plan of writing 120 nights based on the 3-act structure. I planned 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 think 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 harsh 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.
