Projects Take On Weight When You Have The Connections To Get Them Published

I remember when I was in my 20s that I could keep three dozen project ideas spinning in my head at any given time. From horror stories, to roleplaying games, to modern fantasy novels, they came out of my brain like cotton candy, and all I had to do to keep them in the air was lightly tap them every now and again to make sure they didn't fall out of place. It wasn't that they didn't have substance, or that it's somehow easier to create when you're young, either. Real talk, it was so easy to keep all those ideas in the air because there wasn't any immediacy to them. I'd work on them as I had time, polish them up, put them in a bottle, and toss it out into the world. They were a gamble that might pay off, but it was equally possible I'd just get another rejection letter to add to my growing pile.

Now that I have a publishing history, industry contacts, and the ability to skip the queue in a lot of circumstances, it's another story entirely. It's not that I don't generate fresh ideas with nearly every breath I take (it's a stress response, and 2020 has been nothing if not stressful). Rather, it's that those ideas are no longer maybe-one-day potentials; they are real seeds I have to make a decision on right now. Because now I can send a few emails, make a pitch, and get these things out of my head and into the hands of an editor as fast as I can commit them to a word document... and that immediately raises the stakes.

Brain to inbox is now a pipeline.

On the one hand, that is an amazingly freeing, powerful feeling. On the other hand it means all those ideas that were just so much fluff in the wind are now lead balls... and I have to throw them extra hard to keep them in the air.

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When It's Time To Put Up, Or Shut Up

Perhaps the most enjoyable part of writing, as a profession, is playing around in the imagination sandbox. It's freeing to make worlds, create characters, map story arcs, and just do whatever strikes your fancy. And when getting those ideas published is still theoretical instead of practical, there isn't really any weight to them. Because the supply chain from your mind to the hands of your readers hasn't been created, so there's no real pressure on your follow-through just yet.

When it does exist, though, suddenly those ideas aren't just whimsical musings; they're raw gemstones. And you have the responsibility of figuring out which ones are good quality before you cut, polish, and put them out for people to ooh and ah over as fast as you can get the tumbler to tumble.

Space opera with a wild West twist? Sure, people seem to like that. When can I have it?

To be clear, I'm not asking for sympathy here. I'm also not trying to pull the whole, "Woe unto the creative genius, for he has universes within his mind, but can only reveal them one galaxy at a time," nonsense. This is more of a tradesman's warning for folks out there who haven't experienced this shift in thinking/fortunes yet.

Because when you're just starting out, you're free to make basically whatever you want, as you want. And when you're wildly successful you can do basically the same thing, except now there's probably a big, fat check attached to it. It's when you're established enough that you can get your projects reliably green lit, but you don't yet have the audience, clout, or sheer volume of past work to coast on, that you find yourself deciding which seeds to plant now rather than later in order to get your garden growing.

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That's all for this week's Business of Writing! If you'd like to see more of my work, take a look at my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my noir thriller Marked Territory, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife as well as my recent collection The Rejects!

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