Misadventures in early writing and publishing

11/23/2024 6:54 PM CST

Dear Reader,

I started off the last blog wanting to talk about writing, especially trying to get published, but then I had to start with the concept of reading, as I think reading and writing are obviously linked. I went on a tangent about how I got started with reading and my love of horror fiction. The point is, for about the last two years, I have become a man obsessed with the stories that come to me.

In the last blog, I explained that the first thing I attempted to write ended up being a 180k-word behemoth. I started just wanting to write a short story or two. I knew I could come up with a couple and maybe have enough for a short collection. But what it ended up being was a collection of 30 interconnected stories about a cursed town and the people in it. Think Twin Peaks meets Needful Things with a touch of unexpected extreme horror lite.

There was so much that I just knew had to be in the book, and it wasn’t finished until all of the crazy puzzle pieces were there. I am actually quite proud of it; it took me nearly a year to write and caused my love of storytelling to truly blossom.

Here's where I made my fatal mistake. When I got near the end of the vomit draft (a term I have stolen from May Leitz because it is very apt), I wanted to get feedback and decided to start with friends and family. More than one person implied that they would like a physical copy they could hold in their hands and didn’t want to read it on their screens.

So, I looked into printing it at a local commercial copy shop. At this time, I was thinking of breaking the manuscript down into 6 distinct sections, like issues of a comic book. The cost to print 1/6th of the total book was more than $100 for one copy. Clearly, that wasn’t going to be feasible.

The next logical step was to look for cheaper ways to get my very rough draft into a handful of people’s hands at a very low price. This led me to a major online retailer that offers a publishing service. I spent a full Sunday learning how to format my work for print and published rough drafts of all six "Issues" of my work. I then sent all of these to friends and family.

I know I just used the word "published" several times in the last paragraph, but would you believe me that I didn’t understand that I had OFFICIALLY published my rough draft work?

Flash forward a couple of months. I am learning about how to get an agent and how to query them with your work for representation. I learned that manuscripts for new authors are expected to be in the 60k to 90k range, and you have to build trust before publishers will consider something longer. So, I even took an axe to my work and chopped out all the slowest bits until I had it down to 100k words.

Then, when I went to fill out my first online query form, there was the dreaded question, “Has this work ever been published before?” This caused me a brief moment of terror, and I ran to the nearest search engine and typed the words, “Special Delivery Matthew Jon Smith,” and to my horror, I found that I had published the 6 novellas FOR REAL. There I was on the world’s most famous book review site as the author of such titles as, “SPECIAL DELIVERY (SUPER ROUGH DRAFT): Volume 1,” “SPECIAL DELIVERY ROUGHY TOUGHY DRAFTY WAFTY: VOLUME 2 0th Edition,” and “Special Delevery OMG SO Obviously a Rough Draft: Issue 3 Super Rough Version 0th Edition.”

I can’t tell you how embarrassing that was at first. I immediately went to my publishing account and took them all out of print. As a side note, fewer than 30 copies of the various books I published are out there, so if I ever do become famously successful, those will be intense collector’s items.

Anyway, after I took the books out of print, I asked different people I knew what I should say on the query forms. After some consideration, I decided to play dumb and just say, “No,” to the question about whether or not the book had ever been published, because it effectively wasn’t a published work. I now regret every time I lied on that question and to every agent I lied to. Consider this my confession and apology. I am sorry, and it won’t happen again. Pinky swear.

I sent that butchered manuscript to roughly 60 agents and have a folder in my email with rejection letters from 36 of them. Only one gave me any feedback, saying that the dialogue in my pages was “stilted.” I can’t say I disagree with them. It was somewhat a stylistic choice, aiming for that weird, uncanny Lynchian tone, but I agree that I probably could have executed it better.

I took my rejections in stride and decided that after the whole accidental publishing fiasco, I should probably put that manuscript away and come back to it later. I began working on a novel that initially poured out of me like lightning. 15k words came to me in just a couple of days. But then, it suddenly stalled.

I started writing a memoir of my homeless days, mixed with memories of early childhood and episodes of psychosis. That one is currently at 110k words and still not finished. I started with the intention of making it fit into the 60k to 90k window expected for commercial works, but it wants to be what it wants to be, so I will come back to it later as well.

Finally, I started my attempt at a third novel. Again, my goal was to meet that preferred word count, and so I chose the most generic idea that I had rolling around in my noggin: a simple story about a man, a missing wife, and a haunted cabin. I actually set out to write a generic pulp story that didn’t try to break the medium the way my first novel did, but very quickly I fell in love with the story and had to layer in some hijinks. When I was done with the first draft, it felt so good, and it clocked in at 93k words.

I put that novel away so I could come back to it with fresh eyes later, and I started work on a fourth novel, which is currently at roughly 35k words in the first draft.

When I started thinking about querying that cabin haunting manuscript, I remembered another question I saw: “Have you ever been published before? If yes, what and where?” All of a sudden, I had the bright idea that I better get some short fiction published. I needed to find some magazines, websites, and podcasts that want to put out my work. Your boy needs some credits.

So, around two months ago, I halted work on novels and began to work on short-form horror fiction in earnest. I have a small handful of stories of varying lengths, from 300 words to 6,500 words. I have begun to shop them around various venues while I continue to write more short stories, and I am heavily considering rewriting a new draft of the cabin haunting story from scratch to really tighten it up.

But here is where it gets crazy. One of my stories, “Traditions Tangled in Tinsel,” has been accepted for publication by Dark Moon Rising Publications for their book, Last Christmas: A Holiday Horror Anthology. I didn’t expect to get an acceptance so soon and I am thrilled.

Thanks for reading my rant. More short stories and novels to come.