So, I’m not a published author. In fact, I’m given to understand that my lack of publishing credits means I shouldn’t claim to be an author, but a writer instead. Being an author is something I’ve wanted so bad I can taste it, and for so long I can barely remember what it was like before I had this ambition. Raymond Chandler allegedly said that to be any good at this, you’ve got to write a million words of crap. In my (very rough) estimation, I’m probably at the 750,000 mark.

127,000 of those are included in the manuscript I just finished, which is a sequel to 118,000 other words I wrote two years ago. In between, I wrote 87,000 words in Dreadnought, and 18,000 words of a sequel to Dreadnought that I abandoned in favor of my most recent project. A few years prior to that, I wrote probably about 70,000 words total in a project that I never completed before shelving it for being too ambitious. So all together, that’s about 402,000 words. Then add what I imagine is about 300,000 words of Mary Sue infested Star Trek fanfic that has been blissfully lost in the foggy depths of the Internet, plus another 50,000 or so worth of various other scribblings.

By the strict “million words of crap” metric, I’m not ready for prime time. For a while, I thought that  I was too good to hold to that line, too clever and talented to need to use my full million. Lately, with the perspective that comes from finishing at least the first draft of three manuscripts, I’ve started to re-evaluate that position. On top of that, there’s the fat stack of rejections from agents and editors that I’ve collected in the past year and a half of querying for my various projects. I’ve gotten close a few times, but never quite far enough, and that has a humbling effect.

So I’m not going to be the Next Big Thing by the end of the year, in all likelihood. Or the end of the next one, I imagine. Even if an agent where to call me up in the middle of drafting this sentence and beg to represent me, it’d likely still be two years or more before I debuted as a modest new name in a crowded field with little or no fanfare to boost me. I’ve got friends who are at or near the top of their respective fields in publishing, and they haven’t passed on any illusions about easy success. I am going to keep writing, because it’s what I love to do. But professional success is off the menu, at least for the time being.

Which is fine. I’ve decided to take it as a blessing. My life, thus far, has been harder than most of my peers, and easier than some of my friends. One of the things I’ve learned is that you don’t get to pick your circumstances. Oh sure, you’ve got to put in your hustle. The only time good luck matters worth a damn is when you’re already pushing with everything you’ve got. So you’ve got to push, and keep pushing, and get comfortable with pushing because you’re never going to be able to stop if you want to keep going forward. But even with all the effort in the world, you still need that luck. The circumstances of a life are, in large part, not of the making of the people who have to live it.

So one of the things you’ve got to do while you’re pushing that boulder up the hill again and again is learn to see what parts of the circumstances you’re living with right now can be turned to your advantage. So it looks like part of my life right now is that being published is not on the horizon, no matter how much I want it.

Okay, that sucks. But–

But that means that I’ve got years to get better at this than I am now. Even after a tall order of humble pie, I still think I’m pretty good at this. Or, I have potential, anyhow. In general, people enjoy the things I write for them to read. And with every manuscript I finish drafting out, with every revision I polish up, I get better. I can see how my most recent book is better than the one I wrote  before it, and how that book is better than the one that came before it.

My first book has a big mushy middle where the two lead characters sort of hang out getting to know one another for 70 pages. Given that I’ve got half a mind to serialize it online, this is a huge problem since a serialization model requires each installment to end on a note that will compel the reader to check in next week to find out what happens next. I’m mulling over the idea of hiring a freelance editor to take a look at how we could tighten up the middle of the book.

My second book, Dreadnought, doesn’t have that problem. From word one, everything that goes on in that book happens as a direct consequence of what came before. There aren’t any segments where characters sort of wait around getting to know each other while the plot takes its time arriving. But, that middle segment is carried on the shoulders of a supporting character who sort of drives the action for a while until it’s time for Danny to take up the mantle of Dreadnought and save the day. Given that this supporting character is easily a favorite among my beta readers, and that she and Danny are supposed to be equal partners in crime-fighting, this isn’t a huge problem, but it’s there. I notice it. (Or, at least now I notice it, with the benefit of more perspective.)

My third book, a sequel to the first one, takes the structural lessons I learned from Dreadnought and improved on them. It also managed a greater synthesis between the emotional/character development of the protagonist and the plot. At this point, I can turn out a pretty damn good first-person narrative that’s heavily driven by the protagonist’s emotions. Some time down the line, I’ll likely be able to see where this book’s big flaw is, but right now I’m too close to it, too proud of completing it.

So now I’ve got to figure out what I’m going to do for my fourth manuscript. Remember that sequel to Dreadnought that got sidelined? I was planning to go back for it, but I don’t think I will, at least not right now. Both Dreadnought and my other books are first person stories with deadpan narrators who go through a big change. I’ve written three of these kinds of books, I’m kind of running out of lessons to learn from the form.

Now, if I was a published author, there would either be pressure to turn in a sequel to something that sold well, or a lot of anxiety about how they’d never publish me again after I wrote something that bombed. And here’s where we come back to finding advantages in your circumstances, even if they’re not what you’d have chosen. I’m not published. I don’t have any contracts to live up to. I don’t have a readership to cement. I’ve got nothing but time and a word processor.

So I can write whatever the fuck I want.

One of my other projects I mentioned, the 70k project that got shelved, had some good ideas in it that I can salvage. In the years since I put that project away, I’ve learned more and gained new ideas about life. Combine these all with a plot bunny that latched onto my ankle yesterday, and I’ve got the makings of a new book, something radically different than anything I’ve done before. The plot itself is going to be a fairly workmanlike adventure yarn that I’m trying to keep as simple as possible because there’s a lot of other problems that I’ve never had to deal with before that I’ll need to come to grips with. This is also the first book where I’m going to do significant worldbuilding before I sit down to start drafting, because that seems like a skillset a genre writer should have.

This book may never get published. It might be read by 15 people total. It doesn’t matter.

I love doing this. I love getting better. And if I’m not going to get plucked from obscurity any time soon, then I might as well use that obscurity to improve my craft as much as I can. Push, push, keep on pushing to be better, so that maybe, someday, when I finally sell a manuscript, it will be the best work I can do.

Or maybe I’ll go another direction, and start self-pubbing. Stop waiting for someone to hand me a golden ticket and start digging for one myself. Maybe I’ll spin up a constellation of pen names and jump from one wildly divergent project to the next. I don’t know yet. That’s the best part: I don’t have to know yet.I just have to keep writing.