Writing continues around the constraints of the dayjob. The novel I'm working on is meandering but moving in directions that interest me; and another short story demanded to be born, and was duly delivered. The story that was on-hold pending the results of the UK election has gone into the "finished" folder.
That short, together with some stuff on Twitter recently, has led me back to thinking about writing and why I do it and, by extension, to thinking about publishing. I have an ambivalent relationship with publishing; on the one hand it is nice when people say nice things about something I've written, on the other hand that isn't why I write.
In the first instance I write for a target audience of one--me. That isn't to say I don't have other people in mind, because I know what I write will get shared with a handful of people whose opinions (and patience) I trust and value; it's just that I would write anyway even were they not there, though their feedback always makes my stuff better.
What I mean is that I write for my own satisfaction, entertainment and enlightenment; to work out something that is teasing me with its potential.
My model for this, oddly enough, is something that Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh said a lot about how the Grateful Dead went about creating music. Garcia talked about finding the form beyond chaos; Lesh talked about the search for improvised epiphanies. It's why I often say my first drafts need "less narrative and more weirdness." To the extent that I'm finding a voice, if I can say that without pretence, it is in stripping away my expectations of a narrative to let the story come through. Elsewhere I've described this as looking for something in the story to reveal itself to me, the ghost in the story, the presence behind the narrative, and then finding a way to make it manifest to a putative reader.
That's why I'm half-hearted about publishing. Were I in my twenties and keen to be a writer and make some kind of living off it, or were I desperate to have 'writer' as a gilded lapel badge, I might be keener. But I'm not. I'm in my late fifties with a couple of careers behind me, I own my own house outright, and have a reasonable, if meagre, pension waiting for me when I finally retire. Crudely, I can give time to writing for its own sake without worrying about much else, and I can write what I want without any concern for externalities like proposals and outlines (or commercial potential).
I was thinking about this because of some exchanges I've been watching about the small-press business. A theme emerged of exhorting people to head to Amazon and give 5* reviews because it makes a big difference "in an algorithmic world" and is a necessity if one wants to read something other than "corporate fodder". I understand the point, but I also know of people publishing under several noms de plume who cross-review their own work and use that as marketing for their various identities. There is a kind of desperate deceit going on there, including self-deceit.
Small presses make a huge difference and are important--the novel I'm currently reading is from a small press and I'm enjoying it very much, just as much as I enjoyed the same writer when they were published by a bigger publisher--but there is as much "fodder" in small presses as there is from the big publishers.
So where I'm going with this is that I'll continue to submit stories from time to time if I see something, but I'll continue to write anyway. Publishing is sugar-frosting.
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