I'm a whore

Okay, before anyone gets all up my grill for the title of this post, I'd like you to know that the word "whore" appears in the Christian bible 59 times!

Okay. I just made that up. I really have no idea how many times the word appears, but I know it does. A lot.

So anyway, about that "I'm a whore" thing.

Most of you know I wrote a novel, called The Devil You Don't Know. It's pretty good, I've been told. It took me three years to write and revise it. Three complete revisions, actually. It's been professionally edited. Not once, but twice.

It has garnered attention from some of the top literary agents in New York, two of whom told me I was among the best debut writers they had stumbled across. The managing editor of Writer's Digest Magazine critiqued the manuscript and pronounced it one the best he'd read. I've had requests from agents, but no offers.

I don't say these things to brag. These are facts.

I am almost done with my second novel, which I believe is exponentially better than the first. It's certainly more commercially viable.

And therein lies the problem with TDYDK.

It's a pseudo-Christian/mainstream thriller. It doesn't preach (much). It has very adult themes, including rape, pornography, alcoholism and promiscuity. See, what I wanted to do was rewrite the Bible the way Stephen King rewrote Stoker's Dracula.

I wondered what would happen if the Bible IS true. And what would happen if things predicted in the Bible started to happen today? In this secular world. To real people, not cardboard cutouts from poorly written Christian novels.

You know, it sounded like one hell of an idea back in college, when I thought of it after a long night of booze and dope.

And it turned out to be a damned good story. One person who read it said it reminded them of a weird cross between Stephen King and Saint Paul. I took it as a compliment.

Sadly there is no market for such a hybrid in today's fiction market, I have been told. I wish I had a dollar for every agent and/or person in the business who has told me privately that they loved it, but just knew in their heart that they couldn't sell it because of its "Christian stuff."

To which I say: Bullshit.

Has anyone ever read King's The Stand? That book has more religious imagery in it than mine does. Really. I mean, if you sub the name God for Mother Abigail and the name Satan for Randall Flagg, you have The Book of Revelations. Classic Good versus Evil.

I don't recall that causing any sales problems for Mr. King. Do you?

All of which brings me to my point (and yes, I can hear your sigh of relief out there!).

You see, I'm sitting on TDYDK. It's gathering electronic dust on my computer -- still edited, sleek and ready to be read and enjoyed.

So. Do I leave it there and call it a practice book?

Do I start another round of queries (I've sent 29 so far; most were unanswered)?

Or do I find a way to publish the damned thing myself?

For some reason self-publishing (or e-publishing, or Indie publishing. Are they all the same? Hell, I don't even know) scares me to death. For several reasons.

1. It looks like a lot of work.

2. It requires me to do all the PR work. I don't HAVE that many friends and I hate to pimp myself on Twitter and Facebook (although I will if I have to. See the title of this post).

3. I don't want to screw up any chance I have to traditionally publish the new book, or any future books.

Because as much as I love writing fiction, I also want to make money at it. There. I said it. I am a literary whore. I don't do this for the hell of it. I do it because I believe I have something to say, and because I want people to read what I write. And pay for it.

I write this with no apologies. I mean, you CAN be an artist and make money at it. Just ask JK Rowling. Or Stephen King. Or Amanda Hocking. Or (cringe) Dan Brown.

I'm not saying I'm in their league (well, except for .... oh never mind). You get my point.

So I'm writing this to get your opinions. I know they will be all over the place. I know that some have tested the self-pub waters and found them to their liking. Others, I suspect, have the same fears I have.

So if you were me, what would you do?

When the thrill is gone

I haven't been in a good place lately.

No, I don't mean that I've been lurking in back alleyways or sinister bars. I'm talking more metaphorically. As we used to say back in the day, my head is in a bad place.

How so, you ask? Well. My personal life has been a bit, um, precarious the past couple of weeks. Kids and leaking roofs and bitter disappointments. Rinse and repeat. If there truly is a God, then He's been piling on of late.

But perhaps the biggest concern, for me anyway, is my recent reluctance to write. Be it this blog or my new book, I have been avoiding the keyboard like the plague. It's not even a reluctance, actually. More of an intense YAWN. Like, who the frick even cares?

Being an inquisitive little bugger, I've spent several days researching my dilemma and I believe I've stumbled upon the answer.

I am, in a word, paralyzed. (See? I'm a genius, aren't I?)

There's a reason for my nascent malaise, I believe. I suspect (or at least, I hope) some of you can relate. See, I spent so much time earnestly working on The Devil You Don't Know, naively believing that I would write my masterpiece and then, somehow, just get it published!

I mean, duh. Why would I not want to publish it? So, having no clue as to what I was doing, I rolled up my sleeves (as best I could, since I tend to write in tee-shirts) and wrote my book. Only after the two years it took me to write it did I learn enough of my craft to realize that it's JUST NOT THAT EASY.

While I'm not ready to say just yet that TDYDK will never be published, I admit I'm not as confident as I once was.

And now, I've sat down and started writing book two, Empty Spaces. It's a really awesome book, if I may say so myself. Really, really good. I've done my homework. It has pacing, snappy relevant dialogue, a smart plot and enough tension to string it between two electrical poles.

So what, you ask, is my problem?

To be honest, I sit and allow myself to look forward to another year or two of incredibly hard work, only to find myself right here again.

Look, I am a writer. I must write. Or die. It's that simple. But like most of us, I secretly want to succeed at it, to have others read it. To have an agent and ultimately a publisher love it as much as I do.

I want to -- let's be honest here -- make money at this thing called fiction writing.

I would give anything to go back in time, to that point when all I did was sit down and write, without worrying about all the crap that was to come.

So tell me, how do you soldier on when the thrill is gone?

ROLLER DERBY UPDATE: For those who care, my beloved Hard Knocks lost 134-109 Saturday night. It was a great bout and a tremendous success. The place was sold out, alternative rock and roll blared and the media was all over it. Very cool. And the wife took a teeth-jarring hit and bounced right up, although one girl on the other team was knocked unconscious for a few seconds.

Like monks on a roller coaster

I've done a lot of things in my life, most of which I won't go into here. But this writing career thing I've embarked on has to be the wildest emotional ride I've ever been on in my life.

My confidence level can go from zero to sixty in about three minutes. And then back again. And then back yet again. And so on.

Take this past weekend, for instance. A follower of this blog offered to read the first fifty pages of The Devil You Don't Know to, you know, get me to quit whining. She liked it, but had some very solid advice on how to make it better. I worked diligently on it for a couple of days, rewriting the entire beginning of the manuscript. I tossed out entire chapters and then went completely nuts and reworked the entire book.

I managed to cut more than 10,000 words from it -- a good thing, since it was too long. I sent it back to her.

And she LOVED it. Raved about it. She wanted to read the whole book. So I sent it to her and she read it in a day and a half. And LOVED it. I was thrilled and, quite honestly, got to feeling pretty cocky. She helped me with the query letter (which I posted earlier this week on this blog) and I immediately sent it out to a handful to agents.

A handful of really good agents. Like Janet Reid. And Nathan Bransford.

I mean, I was feeling good. You know?

And they rejected me. In record time. Poof.

Shit.

So then I sank into a massive depression. I suck. My book sucks. Everything about me and my life sucks. I don't deserve to live, etc. You know the drill.

By yesterday, I had decided to give up writing for good and get a real job. Again.

Now at this point, you're probably thinking: Well, something good must have happened today. Right?

Uh. No.

The only thing good so far is that I haven't received any more rejections. But it's only 4 p.m. here in Illinois, so I suppose that could change.

Sigh.

But here I am, still plugging away. I might lack the talent to become a published author, but I'm starting to believe that I don't lack the tenacity. And I keep hearing that tenacity is one of the key ingredients to making it in this business.

In the meantime, I've switched gears again. I have put the political novel on hold (temporarily) and I'm researching an idea I had over the weekend for a big kick-ass adventure thriller with a solid, original plot. I spent an hour at my son's Little League game last night sketching out the plot. I love it.

So I'm going to write it. First. Before I finish the political one, because this one feels right. I can't really explain what I mean, it just does.

So how about you guys? Are you up one minute, and down the next? How do you deal with the emotional roller coaster that comes with writing a novel?