Well, here’s my writer’s year in review. What have we got? Another year of nothing much, unfortunately. Another year of spinning the wheels. Six books in all, though I didn’t write one of them, and only partial for another. I’ve been doing this the last few year, trying to keep track of what I’ve been up to and how far along I’ve gotten. I went back and reviewed the last few roundups. It’s rather distressing – basically, plugging away hard, the same projects slowly advancing or not advancing year by year. Word counts piling up, but an uncertain sense of accomplishment. Anyway, let’s jump in.
DARK CANDLE
I published R.J. Hore’s Dark Candle at the beginning of the year. This was an Arthurian/reincarnation novel. There’s a story to it. It was R.J.’s first novel, written on a Commodore 64, and submitted to Turnstone Press. They considered it for a year or so, it came close, but they turned it down. R.J. went onto other things, and the novel was eventually lost. Then last year, during R.J’s book launch for his Toltec Trilogy, his daughter came up and revealed that they’d found the physical copy in a box marked light bulbs. Out of an excess of good will, I offered to publish it. R.J. retyped it and submitted. There you go.
TWILIGHT OF ECHELON
On the other side of the year, coming out in December, was Twilight of Echelon. This one dates back forever, practically, to late 2021. Robert Pasternak, an artist, had been doing a portfolio series called Echelon. It was shiny, art-deco sci fi stuff, both trippy and surreal. Anyway, Matt Joudrey of At Bay Press had the idea to do a book – a group of writers were contacted, myself among them. The rules were that you couldn’t communicate with the other writers, or with the artist, you couldn’t know what anyone else was doing, or go by titles or sequence. You just took the paintings themselves and wrote your stories for them, as few or as many, as long or as short, whatever.
I took up that challenge with a vengeance, eventually writing 29 stories and 40,000 words. Ultimately, I think, only four of my stories and 7,000 words made it in. As for the 25 stories that didn’t get used, I think I can place some of them somewhere. But it’s a real publisher credit, Canada Council for the arts put money into this. It’s also helped me kindle my friendship with Robert Pasternak. So I’d call it a win.
PERVERSIONS AND INFIDELITIES – UN, DEUX, TROIS
Then there was the Perversions and Infidelities Trilogy – three books or three or four novellas or novelettes apiece. Over the years, I’ve written a lot of stuff. Some of it has been erotica – mainly not shown to anyone, just pieces written or half written, not shared, or if anything, barely shared, tucked away in a corner of the hard drive. I think last year, 2023, or even in my 2022 round up I talked about releasing them
This year, I finally got off my butt to complete them, fix them and get them out in the world. I had Dawne Dominique do covers, I invented and used a pseudonym ‘Eve St. Albert’ in the belief that it might help sales. I actually spent a lot of time and effort trying to get it just right. I thought, maybe erotica might be a way to go. Maybe it is, maybe it’s not, maybe I’m good at it, maybe I’m not. But one thing for sure – zero sales. Oh well.
STARLOST UNAUTHORIZED AND THE QUEST FOR CANADIAN IDENTITY
Then there was Starlost Unauthorized, about the ill-fated Canadian sci fi television series. This actually began almost twenty years ago, when I got hold of some of the episodes, and found rather more than I expected. I’d always heard that the show was garbage, and I was surprised to find the episodes were actually quite good for their time, but also deeply engaged in Canadian cultural controversies. I wrote an essay, it got a little bit of attention Off and on, I wrote reviews, made notes. There was no urgency.
This year, I ended up pulling together all my Starlost writing over the years, and it came to about 35,000 – 40,000 words. I thought cool, all I need to do is slap together 10,000 or 15,000 words, and I’d have a book. Cheap, easy, low impact, a simple little project to knock a book out, while I was doing my more ambitious work – the Perversions trilogy.
Famous last words. My friend Dean Naday talked me into trying to track down the stars and producers for interviews, which actually succeeded with Robin Ward and Gay Rowan, didn’t succeed with Robert Kline or Keir Dullea. I’d corresponded with Norman Klenman, the series story Editor, and of course, everyone’s heard Harlan Ellison’s stories.
I ended up doing a kickstarter, hit 250% of the goal (on the other hand, the goal was modest), did a lot more research and a hell of a lot more writing than I planned to, and eventually ended up with a 100,000 word monster. It also took up a lot of my creative time and energy for a good chunk of the year. It got some really good reviews and notices, thanks to friends and supporters, and financially, it’s my most successful book ever. I plan on submitting it for an Aurora, we’ll see how that goes.
Odd though, how something that just started out as this fiddly little side project really became the centerpiece of the year – my biggest book in literally every possible sense.
INGRAMSPARK AND OTHER PLATFORMS
I uploaded a lot of books this this year to IngramSpark, on their print side. Twenty-five in all, eighteen of them mine. Major thanks to Alex McGillivary and Dawne Dominique for their help with formatting my book covers for IngramSpark.
IngramSpark is the big print book distributor with access to 40,000 markets, including the brick and mortar stores. Unfortunately, to get to the brick and mortar stores, you have to give a deep discount (40% to 55%) and accept returns. I won’t do returns, in small volumes, that’s a great way to lose your shirt. Still, the idea is getting onto more market platforms might make a difference. I actually sell on IngramSpark now and then.
And of course, I uploaded all the year’s five current books to Amazon, Smashwords, Draft2Digital, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Google and IngramSpark in both their ebook and print editions. Basically, Starlost, Perversions and Dark Candle. Echelon was through At Bay so no legwork there.
One thing that the IngramSpark effort has taught me, is that I need to update my catalogues everywhere. Basically, in every book – ebook or print, I have a section at the back for my other titles.
Well… I keep writing new titles. So some of my book catalogues are very out of date, as much as four or five books behind, or with obsolete book cover pictures. It’s a giant pain in the butt, since I’ll have to do it over and over again for Amazon, and D2D, Kobo, Google, Smashwords (I’m not bothering with DriveTrhu), and both in print and ebook. Giant pain in the butt, and maybe a project for 2025 – this year I just wanted to make sure my current uploads to IngramSpark are reasonable.
I’d love to do audiobooks, but currently that’s outside my abilities. Another project for the future, when I actually have enough sales to justify the experiment.
SHORT STORIES
Beyond that – A couple of short story sales for the beginning and end of the year – My story, Flirtin’ Out Back With the Sasquatch Kid was published in CelticFrog’s anthology, Bigfoot Country. Meanwhile, the Echelon story, Last Woman From Earth was picked up by Graeme Cameron’s Polar Borealis. So two short story sales.
Of course, I submitted perhaps a dozen more stories this year, getting back to that market – all of the rest of them were rejected. But that’s kind of standard, you send them out, they come back. You send them out some more. I was only submitting to the toughest markets, mainly. I think about half of them were new work the last couple of years. The thing is, I haven’t really been doing much with short stories. I’ll write one, tuck it into the hard drive and forget about it, and go do something else. They can pile up. At least I’m making the effort to get it out.
THINGS THAT DIDN’T GET OFF THE GROUND
Projects derailed – I was going to publish my Vampire novel, Bloodsucker through Fossil Cove this year – But Renaissance Press bought that, so I decided to go with a real publisher credit. Last I heard, I’ll probably see publication sometime in 2026, hopefully. I guess there’s a long lead time with publishers – Echelon also took a few years. I think I’ve been spoiled just knocking my work out into the world on my own.
I was also going to publish a horror novel, Squad 13, this year. But I decided to put it off to a kickstarter for next year. I think that it might do well there. 2025 for sure. I was going to do Swordswoman in Love, as a subscription based serial novel. That was written and ready to go. But Starlost and that kickstarter just sucked up the time and energy. You know what? Everything takes so long, most of the original work for Squad 13 was in 2022. It’s taking two or three years to get out of my queue. I need to work harder, and faster.
Finally, Torakar, a barbarian swordswoman novel, that I had gathering dust for years, I was going to release on a subscription model, and again, didn’t have time. Again, laziness and indolence. Also 2025 for sure.
And there’s an adult novel that’s complete, that I just didn’t have time to get to.
There were a couple of non-starters, the pieces were assembled, but the opportunity to follow through just wasn’t there. There was a non-fiction book about the Norther Flood and Manitoba Hydro that I wanted to do, but couldn’t get participation. There was a sequel/follow up to my Cthulhu/Atlantis speculation books, but I only got halfway through reorganizing and revising the material, before other stuff distracted me.
If I got my ass in gear, was more organized and less lazy, I could probably have released at least four more books without any significant extra effort. Or six more with some effort and organization. So next year, it’s just getting them moving in the queue.
Of course, I pitched my novels, Princess of Asylum and The Luck to several Agents this year. No love. Oh well. At this point, over the last three or four years, I’ve pitched maybe close to a hundred agents in several different ways. Frustrating.
Apparently the average is something like a hundred and eighty or two hundred. I find the whole pitching process frustrating and time consuming. You can never know if you’re doing it right, or if it’s you, or the material, and even if you do everything right, it feels utterly arbitrary. Every now and then you see a youtube video or article from an Agent going “what to do if you have multiple agents wanting to represent you.” Yeah, well, it don’t look like that from here, folks.
Maybe I should write some new novels to pitch. We’ll see if there’s a slow month.
I wanted to experiment with a serious advertising campaign. I wanted to try some subscription projects. Start a newsletter. Experiment with Large print books. Particularly, I wanted to experiment with a series of promotional /free 99% mini-books. A lot of this was marketing projects, not new ones.
Oh, and I got scammed by a sleazy little low life – local this time. I’ll mention his name sometime. Comes with the territory. The writing field is overrun with chiselers and scammers at every level, it’s unavoidable. Didn’t lose much money. It’s just annoying.
YOUTUBE AND MEDIUM
I did a lot of non-fiction this year. I started writing and uploading essays to Medium.com. All sorts of stuff – politics, middle east, history, personal, reviews. I think I did about sixty in all, average maybe 1500 to 2000 words. I’d ballpark around a hundred thousand words there. A lot of work, not much in the frame of readership. Maybe I’m just not that interesting.
Oh and youtube – I did about thirty youtube videos. Mostly reviews, book promotion, and writers advice – five to fifteen minute segments. This was a collaboration with my friend, Dean Naday, former film-maker. I’m in front of the camera. He edits and produces. Once again, not setting the world on fire. We’ve got about a hundred subscribers. I think views average a few dozen to a few hundred. Our best videos probably has a thousand views. But it’s a learning experience, and we’re getting better.
I guess the thing with Medium and Youtube, is that it is a learning process. I think that the first step to these things is to master the basics, the discipline to produce. But there’s a thousand bits of detail that you then have to go on and master. I’m certain that I do good raw content. I’m certain that I or we will do better refined content – we just need to figure out how to refine. As to whether we’ll ever get a following? Who knows.
CONVENTIONS, PRESENTATIONS, PANELS AND PRETENDING TO BE A WRITER
It felt like I spent a lot of time being a writer, rather than actually writing. I did an Artificial Intelligence presentation for the Manitoba Writers Guild, a couple of copyright presentations for writers groups in BC and Ontario (thank you, Zoom). Did a couple of podcasts; attended book launches in Montreal and Toronto.
Conventions: In no special order – Keycon in Winnipeg, did five panels; North American Science Fiction Convention in Buffalo, eleven panels and readings; When Words Collide in Calgary, four panels, World Science Fiction Convention in Niagara (Zoom), two panels; Can-Con in Ottawa, one panel; Winnipeg Comic-Con, one panel; Indy Writers Conference in Toronto; Writing Day Conferences in Toronto and Atlanta (that one by Zoom).
In aggregate, or as part of Conventions, I think I participated directly in roughly thirty Panels, solo presentations, workshops and launches. I enjoy doing panels and presentations and I’m very good at them.
But some of them… next time I’m invited onto a tropes or genre panel, just shoot me, that meta-writing stuff is tedious.
You know what? Too much.
The travel was exhausting and expensive, I’m really not good at networking and I’m not sure I’m getting better. I need to dial back a bit.
The truth is that I like writing a lot more than I like being a writer, if that seems counterintuitive.
Still, When Words Collide was great, going to do that again. The Indy Writers Conference was an amazing development experience that inspired my kickstarter, and gave me ideas and options for a number of efforts that I just didn’t have time for. I’m definitely doing that again. Buffalo was fun. The Writers Day Conferences were good in terms of getting face time with Agents, though nothing came of that, I think it’s worth taking another kick if it comes around.
I went in on book tables at Keycon and When Words Collide, sold eighteen and six, plus a couple of books in person at Can-Con. I may try direct selling at tables in 2025, just for the experience. Honestly, the thought of manning a table full time for a weekend at a Comic con or something gives me the jeebies, and I’m deeply unpersuaded as to the economics of it all, but I should at least give it a kick. Who knows, maybe it’ll help with my interpersonal skills.
PLANS FOR 2025 AND ONWARDS
In terms of emptying out the hard drive, releasing or finishing old projects, I think I’ve probably got another ten books in there. But I sense we’re entering the law of diminishing returns – I’ve published all the low hanging fruit, and increasingly, I’ll have to put a lot of time and energy into refurbishing or fixing up and finishing what’s left. There are a few things that are still ‘ready to go’ but fewer, and more that are just going to take work. I’ll still move them out steadily. I have about five years left in me, that’s enough time.
I think though, I might want to start shifting a little focus to marketing and new ambitious writing.
But is that it? Would I do better if I just focused on playing the mainstream/medium/small publisher’s game game, rather than doing my own thing. Should I stick to something and just hammer away for years? I’ve sort of been doing that with my ‘commercial’ projects – hammering away at the gates of agents and publishers with three or four novels. What’s the answer – write more novels and keep hammering at the mainstream?
Honestly? I really like writing. It’s satisfying, it makes me feel happy, balanced. It’s fulfilling. All the rest is just baggage. I actually want to buckle down and write some novels – I’ve got a Mermaid’s Tale prequel in mind, a Dragon-based fantasy, Vampire comedy and a Drunk Slutty Elf novel, Empress of Asylum and Mu. It would be so nice to just set aside all the bullshit, and sit down and focus on some satisfying ambitious work, get two or three done.
The Indy publishing thing has been more successful, but only for a given value of more. When I started down this road, it was mainly to get things out of the hard drive and into the world – short story collections, nonfiction works, works that were ‘burned’ as far as real publishers were concerned. Short story collections are pretty much death in the marketplace. So no surprise. Maybe the surprise is doing as well as I have. I really haven’t cared about anything more than getting it out there into the world in the time I’ve got left.
But as mainstream publishing continues to elude, maybe I need to go back and address this Indy stuff systematically? Actually bother with things like kickstarters, ARC’s and reviewers, pre-sales, promotions, advertising, marketing, subscriptions, newsletters. Move past simply getting things out into the world, and maybe taking a strategic approach. I think the Indy Writers conference is valuable for developing those kinds of tools. I should look around for a mentor, someone that actually knows what they’re doing. There’s such a goddamned learning curve everywhere I look.
I feel like I could have done much more with Medium, or maybe Substack, and definitely with Youtube. Partly it’s just been about developing the requisite skills – Youtube in particular has been excruciating, but I’m getting there. But I think beyond raw basics, I really need to figure out what to do to meet an audience halfway, to recruit and hold an audience. In terms of Youtube, I certainly owe it to Dean to get it right. And actually mastering that format will eventually allow me to move into TikTok.
I have a bunch of projects lined up for the 2025. We’ll see if any of them gain traction. The thing with writing, call it Pratchett Syndrome – you don’t know what’s going to hit, until something hits. My work this year, as in past years, has been eclectic and all over. Some things are sort of kind of semi-successful, but nothing’s really hit.
LOOKING BACK OVERALL AT 2024
Overall, summing up my year as a writer – it doesn’t feel like a lot, but it kind of looks like that on paper. That’s kind of a paradox.
I achieved maybe a third or a quarter of what I wanted to get done. As an example, I got five books out, but if things had shaken out a little differently, I might have had ten. I had a half dozen marketing plans, I did one. I pitched a dozen agents, scored zero. A lot of the work and projects that did get out or make progress had been years in the pipeline.
It’s frustrating, I waste so much time, and I’m so incorrigibly lazy. I really do need to buckle down.
Overall, for all the work, not a lot of accomplishment. Some outright failures, a modest success or two, and just… Effort. I don’t feel a lot of work got me anywhere. A lot of spinning of wheels, as per usual.
Overall, once again, it feels like I’m working really really hard for what seems like, at best, a mediocre career. And once again, I have to ask myself, is this the best thing I can do with what’s left of my life?
I honestly don’t know. Maybe I should just focus on the day job and the career, while it’s still there, concentrate on making enough money to keep me afloat for at least a while post-career. Being old sucks, when you have money to live on and family to rely on. Being old homeless and alone sucks so much more.
Maybe I need to focus on actually having a life, doing social things, hanging out with old friends, making new ones.
Sometimes it feels all I do is work, go to the gym, write and goof off doing nothing.
But I do like writing, and I want to do that. And while the baggage that comes with writing is annoying, maybe I really should work on that a bit.
Maybe this is not the best thing I can do with the time remaining to me. But it makes me happy and gives me purpose. That’s not a bad thing.