Starting, and ending, with magic

The whole story of Arch/Eternal (up to now)

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Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash

It started with magic

When I first started writing fiction, as a little kid, it was play. It felt like I had discovered a great and beautiful secret: anything you could think of, anything you could imagine, you could write. Words were the magic that conjured dreams into reality.

But over the course of more than twenty years, that unselfconscious love of writing left me. Instead, I learned to write for attention, for money, for praise, for ego.

Then one day, I woke up to the tragic trade I had made. The craft of writing had become fraught and tortured to the point that I swung painfully between compulsivity and ardent avoidance.

What could I do?

I could go back to the beginning.

One of the first stories I started writing as a kid was based on an imaginative world I had been building since before I could remember — part Star Wars, part Mormon cosmology, part Narnia, alchemized by my own unfettered fantasy. I spent much more time in that universe throughout my earliest years than I did in my own difficult, disenchanted reality.

Naturally, upon discovering the joy of writing fiction, my first and most earnest effort to conjure something with the magic of words was centered within the imagined universe I had spent so much time in.

However, after many weeks (months?) of fevered, monomaniacal filling of college-ruled composition notebooks, I looked back on my work and realized that much of it, most of it, was pretty bad. This was a hard revelation to absorb, and I believe it was the first step on my very predictable journey of creative neurosis. I didn’t have anyone to explain to me, over and over the way a patient mentor must, that it was OK that most of my work was garbage. That this was not only normal, but necessary and unavoidable.

Instead, I concluded that this story was beyond my talents, and abandoned it.

Periodically, I made short-lived attempts to go back and try again, but always with the same result. Too big, too complex, too far beyond my skill and stamina.

But then, as a grown-ass man in his mid-thirties, with plenty of experience and a full-blown creative crisis on his hands, I thought to myself…

“If not now, when?”

So I started writing Arch/Eternal, motivated only by the objective to rekindle my love for getting lost in my own imagination, conjuring material out of the raw dust of daydreams. I wrote with a fierce determination to keep it to myself, protecting the work from the egoic fixations that had slowly stolen my vital energy.

Soon, and perhaps unsurprisingly, I realized it was my best work — the best characters, the best scenes, the best prose I had ever written.

Wouldn’t it be a shame if I never shared it with anyone?

OK, but in order to not sabotage my primary objective, I committed to letting the story take as much time as it needed. No rush. Its core purpose would remain unchanged. Or, in other words, my own joy had to come first.

Which is why the first draft of Arch/Eternal took forever. Years!

The Publishing Dilemma

One of the biggest reasons I launched Dispatches from Inner Space was to have the option of (maybe, potentially) publishing it here.

Some of you will remember I did start serializing the second draft. But even after getting stuck halfway through, and concluding that Substack might not be the best platform for the book, I consistently rejected the idea of traditional publishing.

Why?

I could rattle off five hundred reasons without breaking a sweat. Or, more truthfully, I would be sweating all the way through, because each and every one of them is based on fear.

And the root fear, at the very bottom, underneath all the others, is the fear of rejection.

What if I try to publish traditionally — spending countless hours and months — and ultimately no one wants it? Or, what if I do get it published by some small publisher, but the book is a total failure, sells no copies, and that’s it? Would all my hopes and dreams and sweat and tears have been for nothing?

Not that I’d admit this to myself.

No, I preferred to cycle through some of the best hits from that list of five hundred other fears:

• The publishing industry is dying

• Publishing houses themselves are parasitic and backward

• No literary agent is going to want to rep a white dude yoloing his way into middle-age

• These days, you have to already have a significant platform for anyone to be interested

• Traditional publishing isn’t even worth the work anymore, since you still have to do a ton of independent promotion if you want anyone to actually read your book, so why not just do it all yourself anyway and save yourself the hassle

And so on.

This was my (shields up!) attitude all the way until I finished the second draft, and then used my big platform (/s) to collect some test readers. I even told those readers (angels, every single one of you) that I didn’t intend to publish traditionally, in an unconscious attempt to preemptively reject certain kinds of criticism, like: This isn’t marketable enough. It isn’t aimed at the right audience. Its tone and structure don’t follow vital conventions. Blah blah blah. I didn’t want to hear it.

I just wanted to know if anyone would like it at all.

Well wouldn’t you know it, the very first person to finish the book liked it so much they told me I was an idiot for not trying to publish.

That was when I finally realized how afraid I was. I’ve wanted to be a published author since I started high school. But I’ve done almost nothing to make it happen. I’ve practically hidden my writing. I finished a YA novel in my early 20s and never submitted it anywhere. I rejected it before anyone else could.

Unmasked, defanged

The thing about fear is that once you really name it, call it out, trace its shape and understand its nature, it loses most of its power.

All the convoluted justifications boil down to one simple question:

Do I want my fear to be my master?

No.

The answer is always no.

Which means, despite every single one of the five hundred reasons not to try the traditional publishing route with Arch/Eternal, I’m going to do it anyway.

But it’s going to be hard!

Hard goals need lots of planning, practiced discipline, and constant iteration. So here is my initial plan to get Arch/Eternal distributed by a legitimate publisher:

• Ingest and implement all the great feedback I got from my (sublime, beatific) test readers.

• Research and compile a big fat list of literary agents to harass.

• Write query letters.

A friend who’s been at this game for a lot longer than me suggested that it would be a good idea to send out queries before the middle of October, since — well, it’s complicated, and I’m not sure I remember the reasons, but I trust him.

Anyway, it means I have about three weeks to do the three things I just listed. But I’ve worked it out, and I’m confident I can do it all if I dedicate a minimum of 90 minutes a day over that time.

Often, I can be confident I’ll show up and follow through.

But not always. And I need it to be always.

Will you help me?

As with any big personal goal, the biggest failure condition is a lack of accountability.

Here’s how you can help me help you help me help…you?

[Ahem.]

Here’s how we can help each other.

Every weekday, I’ve carved 90 minutes out of my calendar, from 8:30 to 10am PST, to work on this stuff. I’d like to invite you to join me.

I’ll set up a remote meeting situation, where we can work quietly together in the same virtual room. At exactly 8:30am, we’ll say hi, spend a minute or two setting our intentions, and then work until 10am before signing off.

I did a test run with a friend a few days ago, and it worked beautifully.

If you’re interested, let me know.

Don’t worry about the logistics — I’ll handle all that. All you need to do is tell me which days of the week you’d like to join me for a quiet work session from 8:30am to 10am PST.

It ends with magic, too

If I’m paying attention, the unspooling of creative energy into words still delights and astonishes me. But since starting Dispatches, I’ve discovered another kind of magic, which begins at the point of sharing, and has the capacity to grow beyond all bounds of expectation or even comprehension.

With only my limited experience, I’ve come to believe that the greatest purpose for the first kind is to catalyze the second.

In other words, I’m glad you’re here. Let’s keep making magic.