Getting Published (or: Imagining Sisyphus Happy)

Reading was my second love, after my mother. When I was eight, I read Archie, Garfield, and Calvin and Hobbes comics under streetlights as we drove home from a theme park. When I was nine I got into Asterix and Obelix and Goosebumps. When I was ten it became Stephen King (though it shouldn’t have), Anne Rice and Terry Pratchett. At eleven it was the Lord of the Rings. Throughout my teens, I never went a day without reading.

And so writing might have been inevitable. I began keeping a diary when I was ten. I’d start writing, and then simply wouldn’t stop. Sometimes I’d get cramps and flip back through the pages, realising I’d filled up eight A4 pages talking about my feelings and experiences. It was terrible writing, but it was excellent catharsis for a latchkey kid who needed to work through some stuff.

I started writing my first novel at seventeen, filled with dreams of being a famous author. That manuscript was heavily influenced by my experiences with drugs. It was pretty well received by my friends, and my girlfriend at the time made some really excellent artworks for it (see below). She called them doodles, the humble virtuoso that she was. We lost contact more than a decade ago, but if you’re interested in finding her for a commission, then maybe she still operates her DeviantArt page

Mr. Tunmus (don’t ask)

The many-eyed cave of the messiah

Sazmic the Judnii

I titled that book Lost in Thought, and finished it in 2008. I never got it published. I’d already written it, wasn’t that were the writer’s job ended? Weren’t the publishers supposed to hunt me down?

Well life took a few hard turns, and then a few harder ones. Publishing that book became a lost pipe dream. I told myself that anything I wrote at nineteen couldn’t be very good. Maybe I’m right, but I’ll read it again soon as see whether it’s worth editing, refining and turning into something publishable.

But I still enjoyed writing. I used Facebook’s now-defunct ‘notes’ function to blog there. I wrote 314 posts in two years, never expecting anything to come from them other than discussing them with the few friends who bothered to read. In 2009, I began writing another book. It was supposed to be a story about magic masons living in Atlantis. Those hard turns I mentioned came harder and faster, and I stopped writing seriously. I even stopped reading for a long time. I’d return to this new book every blue moon, writing a page or so every year. This continued through my journalism degree, my anthropology post-grad, and my seven year career in corporate communications. By 2019 I had… a prologue. And I didn’t like it very much.

But by then, life had become somewhat better. I had stalled on the book, but I was seriously invested in a new project: Creating a boardgame. It started as a dream I woke up from in 2017. In it, I played a boardgame where six characters competed to gain control of a city. It mixed elements from DnD and traditional board games and was formatted as a book that you wrote with the other players. I wrote down the gist at 3am, then woke up again at 5am to start compiling a rules system. I wanted to call it Keys to the City, but that name was already taken, so I landed on Keys to Calcoria, an original name.

I developed an entire system of rules (which I really should develop further and publish, now that 3D printers make this kind of thing more feasible). Once it got to the business side of things, I lost steam. However, I did look at my story about Atlantis, and then at the city I’d created for my boardgame, and realised that I should be making an original world for my books instead.

I wrote a whole new prologue, got really into it, and had excellent reviews from my friends. Work got busy and I neglected the book, and for a while, that ground lay fallow.

You might see a pattern here. Some part of me is obviously afraid of trying and failing with these projects - finding out that something I really put myself into is not good enough. Another part just didn’t know how to take them further. Time was also a problem. Mostly I just enjoy the act of creation, and don’t like the business side of things.

But it all changed at the end of 2022, I got married, and moved from South Africa to Hong Kong with my wife. My wife encouraged me to finish the book. I had some savings, and she made a great salary, so I spent a year-and-a-half writing and being a full-time dad. I finished the story, forced it onto my book club for some feedback, and consequently rewrote the entire thing.

Then, once I felt confident enough the business side of publishing began. It took a few stops and starts, before I realised that reputable publishers don’t deal with first-time authors. You need to get an agent to represent you. So new plan. Get an agent. Penguin had a really helpful post, telling me to get the Writers & Artists Yearbook. I bought and perused it, and used its list of agents as a starting point. I made a shortlist and got to work.

This was the part I’d never gotten to. It was new ground. Each agent you approach is basically a job application. You research their company, find the right agent. Check on which previous works they’ve represented and come up with reasons for why you’d be a good fit. You write them a personalised cover letter. You stupidly get your hopes up. And then it takes about three months for the rejection letter to come through, if you’re lucky. But hey, you’re serious about this, so you keep going. You keep looking.

And then the shortlist runs out. You need new avenues to find the right agents through. You notice a lot of agents mention Query Tracker as their preferred interaction method. You check it out, and subscribe. Its list of agents is vast. And then it’s more of the same. Throughout all of this, you continue editing and reading your book. I think I’ve been through those 350 odd pages more than fifty times by now. To the point where I approach other angles of the publishing process. I force myself to put it down to stop myself from those midnight internal conversations telling me to redo the whole thing. My instincts lay there. The writing process is where I’m comfortable, and I need to get away from it for a while.

So I go on Fiverr and commission an artist to draw make me a cover for commercial use. I specifically look for artists who avoid AI, because I want no part of my book to touch it. After a few rounds of revisions, we come up with this:

I might have an alternative option done, but for now I’m okay with this one. At some point, I realise I’ve had over fifty rejections or non-responses from agents. But I take heart. Wasn’t JK Rowling rejected by something like a hundred-and-fifty? I look it up. Twelve. She was turned down by twelve publishers.

There comes a point where I’m more concerned about waiting much longer in a world where AI is serving up slop on every platform. Who knows how much longer it will still be slop? At what point is my life’s dream just dumpstered by an aggregator of the world’s best talents? I don’t know.

But I’m tired of waiting. I’m tired of doing things the traditional way. If this is happening, then I need to do the bits I’d rather not. So I make my website. I create a blog. I build a (gag) social media presence, get on Instagram. I consider getting in touch with Booktok to see if there’s a way of leveraging that.

It’s time. Because if not now, when I’m young, and have the time, then when?