Paul R Monarch

My entire life I have wanted to “be published.” Whenever anyone hears I’ve written books they ask “are you going to try to get any of them published?” Of course I am. But I’m struggling with that dream right now.

Being Published is a strange thing, isn’t it? To people outside of the writer world, Being Published means immediate success. It means a large cash advance, and it says something about how good your book is. It immediately turns what had been a nerdy little obsession into something that is retroactively totally worth all the time you put into it. It means you are a Writer now. Capital W. You get to quit your day job, and you’re probably going to be at least a little bit rich (if not very rich).

I’ll admit, I thought all of those things. In On Writing, Stephen King describes a story fairly similar to that when he got the call that Carrie was getting published. A multi-hundred thousand dollar advance turned his whole life around, and the rest is history.

After spending some time on Writing Twitter (and other research I’ve done), I am increasingly exposed to a different reality, one where authors keep their day jobs and spend every free moment they have grinding away at their books. In this reality, getting an agent does not mean getting published, and getting published once does not mean getting published again. Even traditional publication comes with the expectation that you will market your own book, maybe far more than the publishing company will, and your cash advance will do nothing to move the needle on your financial future or your ability to drop your day job. All of your free time is just time for your second, less reliable job.  

These realities are a far cry from the published=successful image our society has of the Published Author.

On the one hand, that is wholly depressing, isn’t it? Nearly every single one of us dreams of writing for a living, and even the “successful” writers often can’t, or choose not to risk it. For me, finding out that cash advances are often a few thousand dollars and that the publishing house may only print a few hundred copies of the book was very troubling. But on the other hand…is that so different from my life now?

I spend my free time writing now. And I do it for free. I love writing. I love sending off chapters and full works to my CP and getting the comments back. I love talking about it and thinking about it and coming up with new ideas. I’ve never been paid a dime for any of it. If I get published and still have to work my day job, the validation that my book is good enough will still be there, and I’ll still get some amount of money.

But it bothers me. I wish it didn’t, but it does.

Because I don’t want the life I have now. I want a better one. The truth is I want writing to be the escape from my mundane, debt-ridden life. Right now I stress about the safety and progress of my patients, only to go home and stress out about whether my books about badass sexy sword people and dragons are good enough to get published. That’s two jobs. Full time ones. Worse, I know now that even if I do get published, I won’t get to leave any of that behind. I’ll still work my 40+-hour 3-job workweek, plus writing and revising, and more publisher-related deadlines on top of it. I might get some money, but it won’t be enough to pull me out of the debt I accrued chasing the “safe career choice,” let alone allow me to drop that safe career and spend all of my energy where I want to.

So, I’m frustrated. Disillusioned. I want my fucking Carrie moment, okay? The one where a goddamn publishing angel hands me so much money that I know my life has changed forever. I want to wake up every morning and sit in front of my computer in sweatpants, dreaming up worlds and characters and story arcs that other people will love. I want to put away my scrubs forever and let my license lapse.

I know this is what most of us want. It’s nothing new. Or special. Really, it just means that being Published isn’t the finish line or major transition event that I thought it was. We all have to pay our dues, I guess.

And I shouldn’t complain. I may be in debt, but I have a decent job that I only hate sometimes, a loving wife, the cutest dog, a few good friends, and I have more time to write than some people in my position. Also, a taqueria opened a few blocks from my house. I have a lot to be happy about.  

But I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was ten years old. Not someone who writes; a Writer. That title has meaning for me, and it’s hard to let go of that. It hurts to let even parts of that dream die. It even hurts to forestall them.

I hope I can get there someday. I’m not stopping. I just get sad about it sometimes.

For those going through the same thing: I salute you. I get it. I wish you all that success and more.

Until next time,

PRM   

Nearly a year ago I promised I would put more short stories on here. I didn’t. The truth is I do not have very many, and only one really fits the kind of writing I do now. I published that one (The Farnen) on my website in July, and I have been struggling to follow up with more ever since.

Then last week I wrote a post about how hard it is to write while you’re querying, and it seemed to shake something loose. I went on to produce two short stories in as many weeks—one body horror and one dark fantasy. It felt so good to write, to find that flow and ride it from beginning to end.

Now comes the beta-reading and revising part, which is less exciting but no less important. I’m looking forward to it.

Last week I felt lost, like I had no stepping stones toward a successful career as a novelist. These short stories are offering me hope. They may only be first drafts, but I have full stories to work with, which is much better than the partially-started stories that have spent the last few months taunting me.

As I did with The Farnen, I will probably query these new ones, and if they do not find a home in the paying market, I will publish them here and build out my portfolio of short, digestible, free material.

I wish you the best in your creative endeavors.

Until next time,

PRM

Querying has been a struggle, but not exactly the struggle I expected. My CP suggested I share some of my thoughts and experiences, and since she’s always right, I agreed.

First things first: no one makes it through the trenches unscathed. We all deal with the fear, the vulnerability, the hope, and the rejection. In fact, we expect it (if we’ve been paying attention). I’ve certainly gotten my share of all of those things, having queried several stories, a novella, and now the novel I wrote for the express purposes of traditional publication. But there is more to querying than sending out letters and sample pages and waiting for the inevitable bad news. We’re still people during that time. More to the point, we’re still writers.

So, what do writers do while they’re querying? Usually the #writingcommunity on Twitter will urge you to “write something else” during that time, either to distract yourself from the aforementioned uncomfortable feelings associated with querying, or just because that’s what we do. We write. But I think the question is more challenging than it seems, or at least, it is for me.

What am I supposed to write? The sequel to the book I’m querying? If the first book goes nowhere or faces huge revisions, a sequel could become meaningless or require its own significant rewrites. I don’t like writing with an unknown foundation, so I am reluctant to choose that route. What about the sequel to a previous, unqueried book I wrote years ago? Same problem. A sequel to my novella? No. (Are you seeing a pattern here?)

Something new is always an option. But that option kind of hurts, too, doesn’t it? To say nothing of my previous works, I just spent two years writing this book and another year stewing over it, beta-reading it, and editing it. Three years devoted to a single work makes moving on feel like I’ve written it off (apologies for the pun) as a loss somehow.

I love the world that I have created. I love the stories and the major arcs I am building toward. But I can’t stand how fragile it all feels. It’s like I’m building a tower made of shadow, one that might become real someday, but isn’t yet. How do you add another level when the first one is just an idea? Everything new I write has to be written as if nothing came before it, because each new thing might be the first thing I publish. It makes it feel like I haven’t done anything at all, an idea that stands in devastating contrast with the thousands of hours I have spent thinking and writing and rewriting and editing and working through things with my CP.

I know this idea is toxic. It flows directly from the idea that only traditional publishing validates a written work. Unfortunately, it’s one I’ve held for a long time. It’s not one I want to have, and one I would argue against for anyone but myself, but it’s there. It is probably this underlying idea that infects every negative feeling I have about querying and writing-while-querying. It is probably the cause.

Recently, I have managed to throw myself into a post-Roe body horror short story, and that has been a nice reprieve, but it has also felt like a total abandonment of my dark fantasy world that I have put so much into. It’s a dalliance, an aberration. An excuse to work through something else on my mind, but not really the kind of writing that I want to characterize my career.

And I do want a career. I want dozens of books and novellas and short stories, fleshing out a fantasy world and layered, complex stories that people want to read. It’s always been what I’ve wanted. It feels shaky now. I’m trying to get through this uncertainty, but it’s hard.  

I hope your writing is going better than mine.

Until we meet again,

Paul R Monarch

I’ve written three novels (two of them good), a novella, and several short stories. None of these have been professionally published, so I have felt a little silly doing a blog post on craft. Nevertheless, my friend and YA novelist A.M. Root encouraged me to do so, and I trust her judgment that others might be able to learn from my experiences, un-credentialed as they may be. So, I’ll give a bit of insight into my process. I hope it helps some of you, especially if you find yourself, as I have, somewhere between “plotter” and “pantser.”

“Plantser”—apparently—is the term. I had never even heard the term pantser until I joined Twitter (writing “by the seat of your pants,” as opposed to plotting things out, for those unfamiliar), let alone plantser, but I did start to notice a few years ago that if I over-plotted, sitting down to actually write felt pointless. Sure, I would have a finished piece at the end, but what had started as an artistic endeavor now just felt like work. There were no surprises left, no opportunities for my brain to develop anything new, and I positively live for those new ideas that come to me as I write.  

But, neither could I “pants.” Writing without a goal in mind, without knowing I could finish the story, felt like my earliest forays into writing that ended after a page or two, or at most a few chapters, because they were directionless. I needed a general idea, but I couldn’t let myself go too far with it. To do so was certain death of my creativity and my motivation.

Any of this resonating with you? Any plantsers out there?

I wrote two novels without knowing any of this about myself. I think knowing it is important. If you don’t know how you work best, if you force yourself to fit someone else’s mold, I think you’re doomed to fail. Creativity is fickle, especially for those of us on the pantsing end of the spectrum.

That said, don’t be afraid to use what helps from the other side. As I near the end of my books, every single one, I have plotted out the final chapters. By then, I know that my creativity will carry me through, and I just need to work out the appropriate pacing and tie all the pieces of the plot together.

Before that, I have to keep things vague. As I go through my life, I allow that plotter part of me to think up scenes of conflict, turning points, confrontations, etc, and I play them out over and over in my head. If they resonate with me, they become points for me to hit along the way. That way, when I sit down to write, I’m not turning a detailed outline into a narrative form. I am allowing my pantsing brain to find a way to get my characters to the scene I’ve been growing more and more excited to write. Every step of the way provides opportunities for flourishes of world building and character development and more story, things that feed my pantsing heart and add depth to the work. The more my pantsing side adds to the story, the more I can plot out the end without fear of losing steam.

So how well does this work for me? I would love to say it works perfectly, but I have been writing “seriously” for ten years now, and that time has been riddled with long stretches of intense writer’s block. When you rely heavily on pantsing at the beginning, a lack of muse can stop you in your tracks fairly easily, and your resistance to plotting at that point keeps you on page one for what feels like forever. As of now, my two novels that I am proud of each took me two years to write, and my novella started as a month-long novelette, which was extended into a novella over the course of another month seven years later.  That’s about 4.2 years of successful writing over the course of 10 years. That’s not great.

My advice for getting past this is multifold, and I’m still working on it myself.

First, get a critique/creative partner who likes your work, whom you trust, and who is honest and helpful. Work with them often. I work with mine on a two hour video chat every Monday night, and nothing has been more helpful than this. With your CP, I recommend chapter-by-chapter edits. You finish a chapter, you send it, you get feedback. If you have something glaringly wrong/bad/plagiarized (unintended, of course), you can get feedback immediately before you’ve invested 80k words or more into an idea. It’s also hugely motivating to have someone to write FOR. You have an audience in mind, and that can focus you. Even just getting feedback is motivating for me. I know what works, what doesn’t, what can be changed, and the dreaded typos my own eyes miss because I’m the one who wrote them. Make sure you have a CP who tells you what works WELL, not just what doesn’t. Both are essential pieces of feedback, and it can be demoralizing and de-motivating to hear only criticism of your work.

Secondly, find another goal other than word count. Finish a scene. Solve a problem. Create a conflict. Resolve it. These are attainable goals that do not sound as sexy as being able to tweet “I wrote 6k today, you may now worship me as though I were a god,” but an emphasis on word count can discourage us from thinking critically about what we’ve written and lead to a reluctance to delete what isn’t working. It can also make you feel needlessly awful about NOT getting a “good enough word count” for the day, when what you did accomplish may be worth lauding. I once spent two full days of writing on a single description comprising a single paragraph, and it was entirely worth it in the end. You are creating art, not word counts. Focus on the art.

Thirdly, get comfortable deleting things. My pattern of writing (pants first, plot later) can leave me high and dry a lot. It means I write, and delete, and start over. A lot. I wrote maybe forty first-pages to my latest novel, and it only took one time, one opening line, to get me on the right track. Try different angles, different perspectives, different points in the action. Try again. It may be better than grinding away at something that feels wrong.  

Finally, trust your instincts. Hand-in-hand with the “delete things” idea, is that pantsing/plantsing requires that you love what you’re writing. If the words aren’t coming, something may be wrong. Maybe your character has the wrong motivation, the wrong attitude, or the wrong conflict. Maybe the story isn’t going where it really should. If you can’t bring yourself to write that next scene, don’t. It may not be what is supposed to happen. I write on instinct, especially at the beginning, and I always let instinct win over plotting. As far as I am concerned, it has never steered me wrong.

When your muse is with you, it can be like riding a burning wind of imagination. I wrote my latest short story in 24 hours, and it left me exhausted and exalted. I will be publishing it here soon. When your muse leaves you, it is absolutely crushing. You doubt whether you’ll ever write again, wondering whether you’ve lost it for good. It’s awful.  

All I can say is keep trying. Keep writing. Keep deleting and writing again. And more than anything, keep thinking about your world and your magic systems and all those things that make your ideas yours. The more you live in your world, the more you can imagine characters and conflicts within it. Stuck? Think up a new country, a new problem, and new social dynamic, a new threat. Let your mind wander about and imagine wonderful and horrible things.

That’s what I do, and it’s served me fairly well so far.

Thanks for reading. I hope some of this helps.

Until next time,

Paul R Monarch

I’ve decided to publish short stories here.

I do not write in a way that fits with current lit mag aesthetics, and every attempt to do so has been folly. When I write with that goal, I find I am no longer writing the way I want to. I am not writing for me, or for my CP, or for the same audience that my novels are meant to speak to. I am writing for a lit mag editor who I can already hear rejecting me as I put words on the page. I thought this was a good strategy to help me collect writing credits. It probably is, but in practice, I can’t. With the pressure to match a certain style, my writing grinds to a halt, and I am stuck in a cycle of revising and scrapping and starting over. That doesn’t happen when I’m writing what I want to write.

            So, when I receive my final rejection for my new short story, The Farnen, I will publish it here. I believe there is an audience for my work as it is. It may not be the same audience as the one that reads short stories in literary magazines, but it might be an audience that would like my novels. That’s what I’m really hoping for: to reach people who would enjoy my larger works, like my upcoming self-published novella, Webs and Iron. I am going to keep writing shorts to give glimpses into my style, my voice, and my fantasy world. I am going to publish them here so that you can read them and see if that world has anything to offer you.  

            I have not abandoned my dream of traditional publishing. I just hope to build a bit of a readership first. Maybe offering a few brief forays into my writing could help with that.

            There should be a new story here within a month. I’m so excited to share it with you.

Paul R Monarch

I will be honest–this is not one of my strengths. I am in no way a web-developer or a technical writer. I prefer fiction, diving into a character in a world I have created. I will do my best with this website, but please bear with me.

All the best,

PRM