The Endless Wheel

I believe that I wrote my first story when I was 9. It was not very good in an objective sense, but it was okay for what it was.

I wrote my first story for “mass consumption” when I was 13. I was proud of it. It wasn't very good in hindsight, but it had promise.

I wrote my first proper attempt at a novel at 22. It was also not good.

I finally published my first novel when I was 34. I think it's decent. It's not perfect, and there are definitely things I would change about it in hindsight, but I feel reasonable about it and about what I released.

Practice makes perfect, but I am still improving and nowhere near “mastery”. Every story has been a chance to hone my skills and my craft, and I have gotten four novel-length things into the world. None of them have been runaway hits, but I know I am a weird writer with strange ideas.

So, why was all of this on my mind?

The short answer is the drama surrounding The Age of Scorpius (a year later) has been populating my feed of late, and it got me to thinking a bit about the process of being a writer and how I got there.

I think there’s a perceived need in the modern age to appear successful from the outset, to project confidence until your success manifests. A lot of the hype around The Age of Scorpius came from how much the author sold their credentials and their abilities, claiming mastery from the time spent working on it and being outwardly confident that their book was great, that it was a masterpiece that would set fire to the literary world and that they would revolutionize publishing (somehow).

The line between confidence and delusion gets blurry at times, and I do feel like there’s a bit of a need for that overly delusional confidence to really sell yourself and your output. That is, for me, a bit of a problem.

I’ve never liked “selling myself”.

As a kid, I was one of the “smart kids”. In a small community on a military base in Germany, I was a decently sized fish in a small pond, and my father loved to parade me and my brother around like show ponies to impress his coworkers and subordinates. Coupled with seeing the people who would sell themselves hard, it left me with a bit of a complex that way.

I don’t like to brag about my achievements, and I’ve never liked to brag about them. I’d rather set expectations low and exceed them than to set expectations high and deliver disappointment. While I’m not lacking in self-confidence, I am lacking in it in the way that I don’t enjoy telling people that "I’m great at something.

That seems antithetical to the modern approach. There’s a seeming need to appear successful; even if you’re not successful, the illusion of success can beget success if you sell the fantasy and illusion convincingly enough.

As a writer, I’ve jumped around a lot. I’m not like the creatives who’ve had worlds they’ve built up and built around over years, if not decades…worlds I tend to build are more “purpose built” for the story, and I tend to build as I go more than building before I jump in.

While I published a duology, the projects were originally done as a single volume that wound up too large to comfortably put out as one volume. I rarely do follow-up and sequel projects (or prequels), though I’m open to it if the stories land well enough for people to want to read and have me expand upon.

But part of the fun is exploring new worlds and treading new ground. Doing one world for 10+ years doesn’t presently appeal to me, but I can appreciate the craft to weave together something carefully crafted with attention, love, and thought.

As someone who writes single-shot stories for the most part and someone who’s not comfortable with saying “my books are great and the best things ever published”, it feels a bit tricky to get traction. I would rather have someone be pleasantly surprised than bitterly disappointed.

In a way, I need to figure out a more effective marketing strategy. And that’s something I’ve been looking into. The key is to market myself without feeling like I’m being dishonest, which wouldn’t be much of a success at all.