Wednesday, December 3, 2014

IWSG December 2014

The Insecure Writers Support Group released the book it had members help create.  You can read about that here.

I'll use this meeting to wrap-up my year in writing.  Technically I made horrendous progress in my attempt to make people pay me for writing.  I sold virtually no books and publishers were as usual completely uninterested in me and my inadequate attempts to convince them to think otherwise.  I released a book in February and the one person who read it hated it.  I mean hated it.  Can I emphasize that any more?  Hated it!!!

So, as far as my ego went in 2014, it probably has a number of bruises still looking to heal up.

But the thing is, I think this was an incredibly crucial year.  I worked on a number of projects and had some breakthroughs that could very well lead to that golden future I aspire to.  Yay me and all that.  I'm not even just about talking my fiction.  One of the biggest projects of several big projects I tackled this year came at the very start, something I finished after starting a year ago this month, a complete Bible commentary, something I hadn't even intended to do when I decided to finally read the Bible all the way through for the first time.  I'm thinking of releasing that as a book.  If any significant readership materialized for it, I'd probably have to talk myself out of a lot of controversy, but I'm okay with that.  I more than okay.  I'm at a point in my life where I need to start asserting myself.

The Star Wars project was a personal triumph and came with great creative fulfillment, and that's as much as any writer should ever really hope to expect.  I think the more I pushed to finish it before the end of the year the harder I made it for the few readers who cared to continue doing so.  That's okay.  The "comic strip" I'm wrapping up soon went the same way.  Early in the year I had a wealth of support, but it vanished the longer it went on.  But for me, it represents closure, having finally figured out the full shape of a story I've been trying to tell since high school.

I finished writing a very long novel in the early months, and then tackled the start of a very short one in the closing ones.  (Maybe I'll still finish the draft of that one before the end of the year.  It doesn't matter.  Circumstances I won't discuss here drastically affected the shape of the whole year, and my ability to continue writing as I normally would.)

And various insights on old projects as well the conceiving of new projects entirely.

But I should stress that 2014 also walloped me good!  One anthology that would've been the culmination of a writing group filled with people I knew in another lifetime vanished.  Another seems destined, officially, to go nowhere.  The last of three comic book biography scripts has been spinning wheels looking an artist for more than a year now.  I failed completely in a writing contest, not even being selected to enter the voting rounds.  And I know with absolute certainty that if I expect anyone to randomly find my books on their own, much less like them, I can probably sell myself a bridge, too (but don't worry, it's a nice one with historic value and a whole ode dedicated to it by the poet Hart Crane).

Maybe next year I'll have better things to report...

10 comments:

  1. Sometimes it's not the sales but the growth as a writer that matter more.
    And you were in on anthology that's successful so far - the IWSG book is really doing well, even on Amazon where people are paying for it.

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  2. Replies
    1. The greater point is that the one review was a lousy review, regardless of who it came from.

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    2. The book was lousy; the review was just honest. Boom! Mic drop.

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    3. And perhaps, in the future, when the writer telegraphs the response a mile away, perhaps you will simply walk away.

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  3. So sorry this was not your year, Tony. However, it sounds like you're taking it amazingly well. The good thing about you, I mean the BEST thing about you is that you never give up. If you learned from this year, then it is not all lost, right?

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    Replies
    1. I try to take something positive from all my experiences.

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  4. Onward and upward for 2015, Tony! I also feel like I had a bit of a 'meh' year, creatively. But I hope that 2015 will be a lot nicer ... especially after I set up my writing space in my room, hopefully by February's end at least.

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