Warning for high salt-content.
I’m tired.
I’m not the only one. I was discussing with a fellow author this morning, about how it feels like the Hunger Games* out there. Authors scrabbling and brawling for scraps of attention and approval in a machine designed to chew us up and spit us out.
I’m outraged too. I’m outraged that some of the finest writers I’ve ever read have been relegated to obscurity. I shake my head how people who write prose that could rip your heart out, tie a ribbon on it, and hand it back to you bloody – for which you would thank them – are ignored.
I’m outraged that young writers who are lucky enough to get that glitzy debut are given the old bait and switch and left to fend for themselves without support and wonder what they’ve done wrong.
I’m outraged that self-published writers who write books every bit as wonderful as anything you’d see on a bookshop shelf, and do everything entirely by themselves, crumble, bit by bit, as they’re compared by people (who’ve never picked up their work and actually read it) to the worst examples or even AI slop.
As for me, I write stories about humanity, good or bad. Mostly I put them in short stories, but sometimes longer work. Science fiction, fantasy, and those weird in-between spaces are my playground for exploring life and the world we live in, or might live in. Often I write flawed characters, losing situations, broken systems, but with friendship and solidarity and hope thrown in so readers can feel and recognise but not drown in the enormity of our existence.
I write, and I hope someone, somewhere, might read it and, if they feel like it, tell a friend.
The games we play
In order to get anyone, anyone to read the stories I write, I have to hustle, push things on social media, beg for attention. And some folk look down on it. “How dare you put a link to the thing you wrote? How dare you share something you’re proud of?” Trust me, I don’t wanna.
This is so not my bag. I’m confident but also an introvert. Every time I put something out into the world and then tell people about it, I feel guilty. It doesn’t help when a lot of social media posters recently have been ragging on folks that try to sell books on Bluesky.
Like, I wonder how they think people are ever supposed to find new work to read?
I want people to read my work and suggest it to their friends. But how can one do that when authors have to plug their wares pretty much all alone? If you’re lucky, as I have been with some of my pieces, the publisher will post about it themselves. Sometimes, even this doesn’t happen. I’ve read far too many accounts of people not getting even a post on Twitter from their publisher on launch day.
So, yeah, this is me responding not well to people dragging writers for self-promo.
I was taught not to brag. Not to say anything I did was good or worth attention. To sit down and shut up. And that’s not great when you’re trying to increase readership.
I get more numbers on social media shitposting and showing pictures of my garden than for any fiction piece I have written. Why do you think so many authors post pictures of their pet? They know full well that it’s easier to get likes for a puppy than a story you’ve spent a hundred hours dreaming up, drafting, workshopping, betareading, editing, subbing, subbing, subbing…
Writing a story is hard. It takes a lot out of a person. It goes through stages and stages of polishing and tweaking and batters up against the gauntlet of submission processes and is rejected and resubbed over and over and over… until hurrah! It’s out there, finally. But you aren’t even allowed to tell anyone? And even if you do, no one clicks or reposts?
What the ever-living fuck.
You can get more likes having a cute dog do a fart. It’s no wonder every writer’s convention I’ve ever been to has basically drank the bar dry by the end of the first day.
What has she even done?
Maybe you saw I have a story out with PodCastle right now, “Godzilla as a Young Man Named Mike“.
It’s a story about disability and systems being broken. There’s probably some irony in there, one of my biggest sales to date still feeling like I have to do the monkey dance to get anyone to even think twice about it. And I got such a stellar narration from Eliza Chan to boot. People who have listened liked it! A lot! But their numbers have been few. I’m not feeling the Hugos calling (haha, some hopes).
I’ve had a novella out for a couple of months, “Bring Me Home“. One day I’ll discuss the rollercoaster of getting that even published, but not today. Again, reviews or blogposts about it are few, though I think it was received well by those who did read it. I’ve published short stories in Strange Horizons, ParSec, and Shoreline of Infinty, co-edited an anthology with my writing group, and other things. Here’s a list of every published piece, if you’re really that curious.
It’s okay, I expect you’re here more for the saltiness than actually wanting to read the stories. 💀
I wrote a whole collection of story with women and female-coded protagonists. I won a British Fantasy Award for it, too. You’d think that might provoke a conversation about how that should not have been a remarkable thing, how entirely female protagonist story collections should have been a dime a dozen, de rigeur, no biggie, but no. It was published, it had a good moment, it sank, it was hardly a blip on anyone’s radar.
Now that collection waits for someone, (most likely me), to pick it up and run with it, as it’s out of print for the moment. I keep meaning to do something with it, when I have the time, energy, and the funds to do something. See if a small press might take it. Buy an ISBN and self-publish it so at least it’s out there – but the only realistic prospect I have for that is with Amazon, and so many people now denigrate self-published works that it would be almost the same good as if I threw it in a bin and set fire to it.
If I’d already been famous, it might have had success. If I’d been a television celebrity having a dabble, a Tiktok or Instagram account with huge follower numbers, or a writer from the time before now who had already enough momentum, there might have been discussion, thinkpieces, coverage on broadcast media.
Worse, if I’d written a book of stories entirely consisting of male protagonists under a masculine pen name, more folk might have paid attention, said things like “it was a brave choice in these woke times”.
If I had enough left in the tank after ejecting a huge chunk of my soul and putting it onto a page, it might have done better. If I didn’t have to pick myself up, plaster on a smile and say “Please consider reading my story?” every single time.
Alone, in a crowd of other people saying the same, while readers hurry past, avoiding meeting eyes, on their way to the big parade for the chosen writers who have made it.
All alone together
Every author I know is currently feeling it. We’re drifting on our own little rafts, being dragged further out into a sea of AI slop pumped out by people who don’t care about writing and don’t care about reading.
A large follower account on social media can post about their toenail fungus and get more traction than a small account talking about art they’ve painstakingly and lovingly produced. It hardly seems fair, but it’s dog eat dog out there.
In fact, some authors have made a name for themselves by explicitly dragging down other authors. Even after “cancellation” their names keep showing up. Again, negative behaviour is worth more in the current publishing ecology than supporting each other. Some even get that attention by dragging readers, screenshotting negative reviews and putting it on social media to cause frenzied dogpiling, doxxing and even death threats. And worse, it works.
Desperate behaviour
Of course, the number of people who would proudly say, as I heard on a podcast just last week, that they didn’t read science fiction because they were “adults” and had left that behind, or thought it wasn’t for them because they were women, makes me want to weep. Perhaps they have the impression that everything SF was boys’ own adventures with big guns and rockets that go brrr. I mean, there’s plenty of that out there, but there are so many more that aren’t. Certainly stories about women, the marginalised, the disabled, or even just nuanced explorations of what it truly means to be human in a speculative setting don’t get a lot of attention, so perhaps that explains it. Or perhaps it’s because every five seconds there’s a reboot of a movie franchise that has been out for half a century or longer.
Sometimes it feels like it would be easier to write something egregious, to get people frothing at the chance to unleash outrage. To betray my own principles in order to make any kind of a dent on the wall of indifference. To write the kind of SF that so many people have “aged out of” because it threatens nothing and says nothing difficult. Or to cause hurt, never apologise, grow a crowd of angry supporters who double down with me. To claw my way up the ladder by stamping on the heads of everyone else trying to climb it.
Meaningful change? I have doubts
If only we shared and engaged with things we thought were good or, gasp, worthy, as much as we did the things that made us angry.
If only the hype machine worked for pieces that quietly broke and mended hearts, or showed a messy character getting their shit together, in spite of being the furthest thing from a chosen one. If only things subtly crafted got as much attention as things written in strokes broad enough to obliterate any attempt at profundity. If only the hype machine worked for anyone but the strongest and nastiest among us, or the ones that align most with someone’s online tribe, or the ones boosted into a favourable position by wads of cash thrown at the problem by their publishing machine, or those singular, lucky unicorns we all think it’s possible for us to be, some day, if we keep holding on…
Some of you might rally behind smaller time writers like me and decide to repost a few of your favourites, or leave a review when you can. I speak on their behalf when I say our exhausted thanks cannot be adequately expressed. Please keep doing it. We have an entire world against us, the machinery of power we cannot possibly fight, so, knowing you are there, that you saw and understood us for just a moment, really does help us to not rage-quit and burn everything down. 🔥🚒
But please also don’t be offended when I say you, too, are just small drops in this ocean. Algorithms driving sales has been the norm for a while now. And reviews and reposts are chickenfeed when there aren’t algos and money on side. But yes, please keep your humanity, and please keep at it. Rage against the dying of the light, eh?
She ain’t all that
For clarity, I don’t claim that all my stories are good. Or any of them, in fact. First of all, art is totally subjective. Who knows what might hit someone just right, but completely miss the mark for someone else? Who knows what level people are engaging at with a piece? Not everyone has the juice left after their own hard life in the same world as all us are living to give a book a considered, chin-stroking analysis. Sometimes we just want something to stave off the darkness. I don’t blame anyone for that, and sometimes I write for the exact same reason. But yeah, who am I to even complain? I guess I always hope that the fact some publishers have taken me on shows I’ve passed the sniff test a number of times. I hope it garners some trust, but I know that isn’t enough, know it all too well.
I still feel I’ve got a long way to go and a lot to learn. I hope some of my stories and books might please readers but I can’t swell up and pretend that I can’t do better. If I did, I’d stagnate, grow predictable and stale, as some with of the more famous writers who grew so powerful editors would not even dare to edit them. (And it showed.)
I can’t say nobody else could do them better, either. I’m always in awe of my colleagues who have such skill and are truly artists at the written word. I can only say I did my best at the time.
I think that might be part of the problem to be honest, perhaps if I presented every crumb of text that’s ever flowed out of my slightly broken brain as if it were a gold-plated classic worthy of worship, I’d outrage enough people to catch that wave. (Apart from anything else, gods forbid a woman have confidence.)
The trouble is, I know what would work better than what I’m currently doing.
About that…
Dividing people is easier than uniting them. This has played out in recent history in ways far too depressing to enumerate. But I’d rather not buckle to the temptation to use these tactics. I’d rather stitch folk together with spider silk and the warmth of a heart. Healing people is not big business. It should be, but it’s not.
There’s a reason hope was left at the bottom of Pandora’s box. It was the thing people overlooked. But it was the best thing in there.
So, in my darkest moments, I wish I’d written something bad. Something that hurt and divided. Because there would be a chance it’d ever be read.
But I can’t. So, tiredly, I pick myself up again, plaster a smile on my face, and say, “Please consider reading my story?”
* Oh for a scintilla of the hype that series got. It’s a unicorn, an outlier. For every series that made it as far as a Hollywood movie, thousands on thousands of manuscript-shaped corpses are scattered on the field of ruined dreams.
