It's the one-year anniversary of the Insecure Writers Support Group website, and to celebrate the fine folks behind it are putting together a helpful anthology with contributions from members. We have a choice between three topics: writing, publishing, and marketing. They're asking that we provide in this month's post our contribution, which topic we've chosen, a title, a bio, and whether or not we give permission to use it. So:
title: "Woes of the English Bachelor"
topic: publishing
bio: The author has published such books as The Cloak of Shrouded Men, The Whole Bloody Affair, and Pale Moonlight, and can be found blogging at the eponymous Tony Laplume.
permission: yes
There's a subset of would-be world famous writers who had the misfortune of attending college and subsequently becoming English Bachelors. Now, it's important to note that English Bachelors are not by definition single and alone and did-I-mention-alone, but as far as I can tell from my own experience, this seems to be their natural state. It's a byproduct of their tendency to read and write and did-I-mention-read-and-write during the hours of the day when they are not sleeping or eating (although skillful English Bachelors can combine sleeping and eating with reading and/or writing with little effort), and when not reading and writing trying to spend the rest of that time in activities that will directly promote these efforts.
When they have done enough reading and writing they have the curious tendency to seek the status of Being Published. Being Published is a byproduct of having spent their entire lives reading and writing, more natural than even sleeping and eating. When they discover that the real world is not like the Cozy Cocoon of College (that is also, I might add, located adjacent to the alliterative-friendly Crazy Town) and there are not teems of hapless individuals forced to read and/or publish them, they have two choices: and I don't remember what those are, because I am an English Bachelor, and I've discovered that after the Cozy Cocoon of College, I in fact only had one option after leaving it, which is Crazy Town.
The end result is that they become Insecure Writers, and the byproduct of being an Insecure Writer is finding increasingly orthodox ways of getting published, but not necessarily read, anyway. These English Bachelors are typically Insecure Writers because they learned all the ways to write that no one outside of their subset actually wants to read.
