The first thing you realize, when you are seventy and decide to become a writer, is that your career will be a short one, and you can’t afford to spend months at a time waiting for rejection slips; you don’t have the months to waste.
“Youth is wasted on the young.” Said old George Bernard Shaw about another type of squandering, and oh, how right he was. I would love to have a lot of months to fritter away, drowning my anxieties in wine, women, and song between bouts of depression at having gotten another of those nasty slip slaps to my ego delivered through the agency of the United States Postal Service.
But I don’t.
“The publishing business is in the toilet.” They say.
“You need to get an agent.” They say.
Ha! Just try getting an agent in these days of the publishing business in the toilet.
“Self-publishing is the only way to go nowadays,” They say.
That makes sense, so you spend a thousand bucks to have your book put on the Amazon print-on-demand list, and nobody buys it but a few of your friends and family. Who else knows it’s there, among the ten million or so other books?
Still, when that first royalty check for thirty-seven ninety-five arrives in the mail, you can at least convince yourself that you’re a writer.
If you have a lot of money to throw around, you can engage in all sorts of marketing techniques – until you no longer have a lot of money to throw around. If you’re like us, having squandered most of your inconsiderable fortune floating around the world like dandelion seeds for the last twelve years and forced to live mainly on the largesse of the social security system, you don’t have any money to throw around at all.
“Maybe you should get a blog.” They say.
So here it is.
We hope that this blog can be a meeting place for the self-published, the ordinarily published, and wannabes. Perhaps we can be of some help to each other with questions or problems about writing and publishing.
But more than that, we invite everyone to post samples of his own writing for comments, criticism, and hopefully, gasping admiration.
We aren’t sure how this will work, we’ll just have to figure it out as we go along. It could be fun. It could be a complete disaster.
What else are we doing?
