How I Wrote And Published My First Book

If you are an author, a writer—a hobbyist of any kind, really—you are ostensibly aboard the same never-ending, Snowpiercer-esque train ride as I am. What this means for us is a looping list of self-imposed factors and familiar environments. You make your hot beverage of choice, you shun your loved ones away as if you are an alchemist working diligently under specific conditions, and you hope that by the end of the afternoon, you've walked away with more than 1200 words under your belt.

Some days, it's a whopping paragraph. Others, you've managed to find out what happens when a hot knife tears through a rubber tire. Valuable information, you tell yourself. My main character could definitely wield a dagger heated to ten-thousand degrees.

Days or weeks later, as you're resting your weary head upon one of seven pillows you own or while in the middle of scrubbing your body with a rather zealous, peppermint-scented soap, another idea manifests. Oh, you clench your fists as the rise, that wonderful and dastardly feeling of inspiration climbs its way through the pit of your stomach and up your lungs...

Another idea, half-fleshed out, is tossed to the wolves. My imagery is more along the lines of Dakota Fanning throwing a vampiric infant into a roaring fire.

My first attempt at writing a novel was certainly, uh, inspired.

While the story of how I developed an opiate addiction is much more hilarious than I could probably convince you, just know that I'm clean and thriving.

However, at the time, eleven painkillers a night was pretty much the norm.

I was playing a lot of Mass Effect at the time, and science fiction had always inspired me to great heights. I've written short stories here and there, but had never attempted to accomplish a novel. None of my ideas as a thirteen-through-eighteen year old ever carried enough substance for me to maintain interest. How many books have I read, really, and how many of them were just Harry Potter again?

During a particularly vibrant binge with a great friend of mine, I had the idea for a card game. Opening an empty document, I planned out planets, races, skills, equipment—I even had names for unique individuals. Pretty impressive for someone who couldn't stop drooling all over himself.

The next morning, I scoffed at the messy and rather unobtainable idea of a card game and started to devote those assets to another, much easier route of manifestation: a novel.

My first draft was done in eight months and it was absolutely terrible. It sat on my hard drive, dusty and with more holes than a piece of cartoon cheese. Months later, I escaped the hometown that enabled my abusive behavior and found myself in a rented house with three other 20 year old boys. Yes, the house was smelly, but the takeaway is when one roommate introduced me to—gasp—coffee!

From one substance to another, I was hooked. Waking at seven in the morning to demolish a pot of roast beef flavored coffee by ten, I would have written three thousand words a day. My job kept me tethered to a cubicle miles away from my aging computer tower for six days a week, and that was more of an incentive to make what little time I had valuable.

(Note: we can get into a discussion as to how one places an inherent worth on their creativity as means to fulfill the cycle of Capitalism, but that's another Vocal article for another, equally vocal day.)

My second attempt at the same novel: oof.

Months later, I had accrued life-experiences, knowledge of people that exist in larger towns, in cities! I had more personalities to base my characters on, more trauma sprinkled intermittently during my stay at a 4/1 bereft of central air. It was time to revisit a cobweb-laden favorite.

Let's do both of ourselves a favor and skip a short period of time. The spoiler version of it all is, the book sucked. I had moved into a new apartment with a longtime friend I had met on a Harry Potter chat room and met a whole new crowd of creatives, of unique and—for once—supportive people.

Even with their help, I felt that I had reached a dead end with this story. It was re-written three times with a tentative sequel plotted out. All of the hard hitting moments I believed existed were nothing more than a product of my still-limited experiences. All of the twists were so focused on refusing to be on-the-nose that the only body part focused on was the nose.

The glorious year of 2017.

My roommate had stepped away to move in with her partner and she had found me a replacement couple who were, in all honesty, the worst. Weeks later, THEY moved out and found me a replacement roommate who was, actually, the best.

Another highly creative individual who would sulk in his bedroom and make interest lo-fi music with his guitar, his mousy voice, and brilliant ideas. I felt like I was also allowed to also be in my room for ten hours at a time, even though quite a few of my partners at the time were understandably annoyed.

My job at a mainstream mega-corporation that peddled beans and sugar had choked me to an unlivable amount of hours and my best friend insisted that if I quit, I would immediately have a job as a mattress salesman.

He said, "I work fifty hours a week and see maybe one customer a day. You'll have all the time in the world to write."

Damn, I thought. He's good.

Ten customers a week.

While there was a certain excitement about wearing an oversized tie from Goodwill and baggy slacks, my schedule was as strict at work as it was at home.

After unlocking the door, I would quickly submit all of my morning work and get right down to writing. Or, rather, staring at the same pages I had been staring at for years. It was difficult to renew interest and more difficult to convince myself to start something new.

During my tenure as a (terrible) mattress salesman, I managed to have a full-blown spiritual awakening. Yeah, thanks YouTube.

Many of my early childhood experiences with spirits, with psychic phenomena were being affirmed before my eyes. If I was able to identify spirits clairsentiently, I could expand my abilities to do much more—

Suddenly, I was living as though I were a main character in one of my short stories.

I had practiced several psychic abilities such as channeling, Tarot, astrology—you know, all the fan favorites. During this time, I listened to other channelers who told me of matriarchal aliens who practice meditation and wish to reach out to humanity in order to give them a boost to a higher dimension.

Oddly enough, this was the exact premise of the damned book I've been writing since I was high off of Vicodin at nineteen.

2019, the prelude to a chaotic year.

Still practicing as a psychic for supplemental income, I had quit a great job (due to distance and being without a vehicle) to settle for a Bulgarian-owned donut shop near my new house. They had been around for several years with subpar products and stagnant success, yet were able to open a second location around point-one mile away. Yes, they had a separate building in the same parking lot—just on the opposite side, the geniuses.

I was one of three employees dedicated to guarding the drive-thru only donut and coffee spot where, once again, I encountered something like five customers a day.

Inspired by the inundation of zombie/infected media, I had started a series of short stories involving survivors of a brief infection brought on by cats. Each in the anthology involved conspiracies, nuanced perspectives, and a whole new writing style that I finally felt comfortable with.

The art above was accomplished a friend and an early-beta reader who had offered to draw fan art—which, by the way, is the highest honor anybody can give you. Not even a Pulitzer Prize could compare.

I had several of these parts written and stored on a website nobody visited, and there they stayed, more-or-less edited and ready for anybody to laud. With diminishing statistics on my author's website, I left them alone.

2020, that chaotic year we were talking about earlier.

Boom. A virus sweeps across the world, carrying with it many conspiracies and was apparently beget by means of... Bats?

While I was initially stunned, I had a lot of fun telling people that I predicted the outbreak of Coronavirus a half-year before it was ever spoken about. The more I talked about it, the more intrigue it gained. People asked if they could read it, but explaining that all of the chapters were located on separate files found only on my website revealed itself to me as a bad idea.

My birthday was months away and I wanted a published book to my name. I reached out to Cindy, the artist, and asked if I could use the image for a book cover. The answer was yes. I reached out to the roommate I had lived with before she moved away with her partner about editing the book. She said yes. I dedicated this time to beefing up the chapters, refining the dialogue, even adding additional content. Most of my time, however, was spent figuring out how on Earth it was possible to self-publish a book.

I had spent so much of my time as a writer disavowing the idea of self-publishing, considering it merit-free and unaccredited as a form of media. One more YouTube rabbit hole later, I found out that I could own all of my work as long as I paid a hefty fee for an ISBN. Fine, I conceded. Let's do this before the subject is no longer topical.

Day one was devastating.

An old friend-turned-enemy had left a one-star review on my book within an hour of it existing. I had never felt so much pain in my life. It was as if watching my own child being thrown into a fire by Dakota Fanning: there was nothing I could do other than reach into the flames and get burned.

Contacting him via email proved fruitless and the painful knot in my stomach tightened every day. Then, miraculously, another review popped up. Five stars, from somebody who took the bait from a targeted ad. Okay, I sighed. A three star book. That's better than a one star book.

Then, support came like a tidal wave, at first showering me with gentle criticisms, then reviews from literary magazines. Five stars here, four stars there. The ratings did not matter anymore. Someone could slap a one star review on my book because it was too slow, because it was never the point to be anything other than "a slower, more meditative web of stories".

It was as if I displayed the innards of my brain for everyone in the world to see and my readers were actually on the same page as me. They understood my words—the tone of them, the implications of strangely curated metaphors. The ending ripped straight from The Sopranos.

I'm no longer worried about being on-the-nose. I'm no longer worried about how long it will take me to finish my next project, because experiences flow in and shape you and the filter of how you perceive the world on a minute-by-minute basis. Allowing yourself to experience reality as a non-judgmental bystander allows you to take in patterns—of people, of global events—and write about them in a way that could effectively be referred to as nothing short of a psychic predilection.