2020: There Can Be No Purpose In This

In trying to figure out this post, my mind kept drifting to the early Neil Gaiman graphic novel Signal to Noise.  Excepting a couple of volumes of The Sandman, it's my favourite thing Gaiman's written, and it's always stuck with me, but I'd rather hoped that its tale of a dying writer pressing on with a final project he knows he'll never complete wouldn't ever feel as relevant as it does now.  Not that I'm dying - I mean, not that I know of - but I'm three months into a book it's unlikely I'll even be able to finish, let alone attempt to sell.  Right now, I'm writing because, with months of near-total isolation behind me and many more ahead, I've no idea what else to do with myself.  Though I've effectively been out of paying work for half a year, I have underlying health problems that make hunting a new job in the middle of a pandemic a particularly dicey move.

And so I find my brain coming back to Signal to Noise, and especially to that one quote: "Today I did something strange.  I started to write.  There can be no purpose in this.  Still, I am writing."

2020 wiped me out in pretty much every conceivable way.  But specifically for the purposes of this post, it's left my career in tatters and killed off any real possibility that I can keep writing full time, with a large percentage of my output in limbo or languishing in other ways.  No doubt that has a lot to do with the pandemic that's wrecked so much for so many, so it's not like I feel singled out, but it's hard to know to what extent the year wouldn't have still gone disastrously if it had only thrown up the usual share of mishaps and complications.

I was supposed to have six and possibly seven books out in 2020.  Only one made it, my SF novel To End All Wars, and so far the sales figures for that - a book I poured more of myself into than anything I've written and, for me, definitely among the best I've produced - have been the lowest of any I've released.  Truth be told, I've had other books not do so great, and of course it's never fun, but those didn't break my heart so hard as this one.  I feel like there's a parallel universe somewhere where To End All Wars must have found its audience and connected with a bunch of people as something pretty unique, First World War-set science fiction mysteries with gay protagonists not exactly being ten a penny.  Hopefully publisher Aethon might yet figure out how to reach that readership, but in the meantime, if you've enjoyed any of my work and not yet picked it up, maybe now's a good time to?

As for those other five books, they were all with Michael Wills and his outfit Digital Fiction, which has been my principle publisher for the last four years.  One, of course, was the fourth and final entry in the Black River series, Graduate or Die, and another was my novella Graveyard of Titans; both are finished and have been ready to go since early summer.  The other three were my debut Tales of Easie Damasco series, which Michael persuaded me to withdraw from their original publisher Angry Robot so that he could give them a fresh lick of paint and an exciting re-release.  Clearly, none of that's happened, and I'd be lying if I claimed I know why.  Michael has mostly ignored my emails since the back end of 2019, but what he has said is that he's had a tough time in the pandemic and that he's seriously considering closing Digital Fiction, which already appears to be largely shuttered.  He's also, in fairness, said he still intends to put out these five books, but won't tell me when or discuss details.  With 2020 over and not a ghost of a release date, there doesn't seem much room for optimism.

All of that bad news would have been easier to suck up if there'd been any good news to counter it.  I guess the one book I haven't mentioned, the mysterious novella I'd hoped to have announced by now, falls into that category, except that here we are and I still can't, so the best to be said on that front is that it'll hopefully be a positive note in the very near future.  As for the short fiction side of things, the year got off to a fantastic start, with Ghost Drive in new market Hybrid Fiction and Not Us going to Nightmare, along with reprint sales of Casualty of Peace to The Dark and Parasite Art being picked up for this year's NewCon Press SF best-of.  Had it gone on in that vein, I'd have been more than happy, but the last nine months have been a wasteland: there's one sale I can't reveal yet and, fingers crossed, another coming soon, but given the staggering number of hours I've put in to revising and submitting short fiction, the results are effectively a disaster.

If all of this sounds as if I'm giving up, it's not like I've much of a choice at present.  I've no writing income and no particular hope of more coming along in sufficient quantity to save me from ruin.  But I have a couple of novels finished and a couple more at first draft stage, and I've spent a lot of the last six months readying a second short story collection, compiling and polishing a bunch of work I'm especially proud of, so I guess the time will come when I make moves in those directions.  It just won't be my priority if an alternative should come along.  Even were it not for the financial pressures, I don't have the heart for it right now.  Frankly, the publishing world hasn't treated me too kindly for the most part, and that's been particularly true of the last few months.  I am, at the very least, ready for a sizable break in which I try to figure out what the hell it is I'm doing.

Fortunately, there was some good that come out of 2020 - I've finally learned some slightly more than basic cooking skills, thanks to the rather brilliant Simplycook, my oldest friend has moved to the right end of the country, and at the very least I've enjoyed writing an absurd number of anime reviews - but my professional life has mostly been one long kick to the face, and I could do without twelve more months of that.  Up until recently, the plan was to wrap up the first draft of a book no one would read and then, assuming I could do so without major risk of death, look for whatever jobs people do who've gone from being self-employed in a profession nobody respects into an employment market ravaged by months of plague and government incompetence - but given the present vaccination schedules, even that's starting to look optimistic.  So who knows, maybe this new book will end up getting finished after all, whether I want it to or not?