If you’re on any of my social media, I hope you’ve noticed that I’m linking away from that social media more often than I used to. Those links should be bringing you here, to Egregious.
I stepped away from self-publishing novels a few years ago now. I’ve put out a couple books since, and I’m still writing a ton, but I leaped off the treadmill of production that a lot of content creators continue jogging on.
Though I’ve talked about that decision a lot elsewhere (and don’t feel like rehashing it at the moment), it never really answers the question of what I’m actually going to do next, because I don’t know what I’m going to do next.
Quitting self-publishing isn’t like quitting another job or selling a business. I still have all the assets, like contacts and a reputation, if you want to consider those things as assets. I’ve got a literary agent to collaborate with sales to tradpub, though I’ve had two books bounce off the process. There is some quantity of people who associate my name with self-publishing broadly and urban fantasy specifically (and if you came to me through Tarot Witches, you know me as a smut peddler par excellence).
I’m lucky that some people still care about what I’m up to.
And I am up to…something, I guess.
A lot of that is artwork, like digital illustrations, mixed media, or fiber work. This year, I have been doing a whole bunch of movie reviewing and watching. I’ve always been a huge movie fan of course. I just didn’t really have the skills I needed to satisfactorily remark on movies until recently. (The pandemic tossed me down a depression hole where I spent months doing nothing but Watching Things and my analysis skills sure got developed.)
I’m still not prepared to be Working around any of these things, exactly. I can do the labor of writing articles for myself. The effort of packaging, maybe a bit. (The site is fun.) But marketing remains vastly distant from my interests, and I have a bad relationship with it after self-publishing, and I don’t think there’s any kind of self-employment that isn’t going to demand marketing myself.
Maybe I’ll be ready to Work again someday. I hope I won’t completely lose the eyes and ears of the online network I share: the fellow creatives, authors, and readers who are Real People to me, even if they are Very Small and Mostly On My Phone. If I need to Work again, I’ll need help.
So by having a unified website like this, I can hopefully gather some of this community around in case I do a thing someday.
And if I don’t do a thing, maybe there’s a chance that just enjoying myself will turn my career in an unexpected direction. I talk a lot about hope and fantasies when I’m analyzing romcoms, and part of that is because I love living inside my head with my own fantasies. If I keep my heart open to potentialities, if I keep committing my time to stuff I’m passionate about, I think maybe opportunities will make themselves happen. Possibly I don’t have to be all crazy and intense about Forcing Myself To Work and things will just…work out.
Delusional? Oh, maybe. But I’m not going to borrow stress from the future. Right now I can spend my time pursuing stuff that makes me happy, and it’s all going to appear here, on Egregious.
Hence I hope you will follow me. Use an RSS feed reader to keep up! Sign up in the sidebar so you can leave comments and get emails. Let’s stay in touch in case I Do Something or You Do Something. Let’s be a community, a little bit.
