I said this on Twitter but I want to say it here, too:

So, you’re sitting there as a writer and you’re getting sucker-punched by feelings of fear and doubt. You’ll find yourself face to face with uncertainty over whether or not you deserve success, and the certainty that one day you’ll be found out as an imposter and dragged out into the streets. Where hobos will pee on you.

WHERE HOBOS WILL PEE ON YOU.

I’ve got two books out soon — GODS & MONSTERS UNCLEAN SPIRITS and THE BLUE BLAZES — and this week folks are starting to get ARCs and e-ARCS of the latter of those books and all the while I’ve got that flurry of fear-bubbles in my tummy: egads they won’t like it they’ll despise it I’m going to receive hate mail people might punch me Kirkus and Publisher’s Weekly will probably give me whatever the opposite of a starred review is like maybe they’ll rub a cat’s butthole on my face in public OH GODS THAT’S HOW BAD THIS BOOK IS.

I like to hope it’s a silly fear. The book is getting published. Early readers liked it. My agent let it out the door. The publisher let it in the door. How bad can it be?

But that doesn’t matter. That’s rational. Fear and doubt aren’t rational.

So, to all writers of all stripes —

We all feel this.

We all feel like stowaways on the ISS Penmonkey, sometimes.

We all feel like we don’t belong. That one day our clever ruse will be up.

It seems to lessen over time. It’s better now for me than it was ten years ago. But it’s still there. That haunting specter. That nagging goblin. That ghostly whiff of hobo urine.

Whenever you feel that sense of urgent doubt nibbling at your bowels like a gut-load of rats, know you’re not alone. Somewhere out there some other writer is feeling it. A writer yet unpublished. A mid-lister, a self-published, a Stephen King, the ghost of Marcel Proust.

We are all bound to one another by the ropes of our uncertainty.

Sharing that frequency of heebie-jeebies and jittery jangly nerves.

The best we can do is help one another dispel those fears.

Or, at times, just merely to commiserate.

A brief recent history:

Salon posted an article that said, “Hey, self-publishing is masturbation.”

I responded.

Salon posted a different article by Hugh Howey that said, “Nonsense to that other thing, self-publishing is full of success stories and it’s the better option going forward.”

I responded to that, too.

Then, another thing happened: I was getting a bucketload of views from Kindle Boards (kboards?), and so I popped over there to find out what was going on and saw that some people seemed to think I was bashing Howey (I wasn’t) or bashing self-publishing (I wasn’t), and I thought, okay, I’ll say hello, I’ll try to be forthright and clarify my position which is to say, “There’s no one path up the mountain, no one best way for everybody.”

A fairly uncontroversial opinion. Very moderate. So soft it might as well be marshmallow.

Some folks over there were very nice and well-reasoned and well-intentioned. Howey himself dropped in (as he did here at the blog) and made some polite comments of disagreement. The rest presented, to my mind, a hostile vibe that tells me I probably shouldn’t go to the Kindle Boards anymore because, really, what’s the value? That’s not the hill I want to defend.

What I want to do, however, is to talk a little more about this “indie first” path — the path that Howey and others feel is the best way forward for new authors. This was also echoed a number of times at the Writer’s Digest East Conference, where I spoke this past weekend. Lots of folks were suddenly presenting self-publishing less as a standalone option and more as the new gate (kept or unkept) leading to traditional publishing. Self-publish first, they say, and get attention and audience. You can even query the published story while it sells on the digital marketplace.

It’s an interesting shift. And not wrong or impossible.

But, is it “the best?”

Now, I’m going to quote Howey from the Kindle Boards, and in that I want to make clear that before any self-publishing acolytes get their genitals in a twirl over any of this, I am in no way bashing Howey. The guy should be celebrated. He did it his way. He tried new shit and embraced the options and powers available to the modern writer and it paid off in heaps and mounds, leaps and bounds. No one in their right mind should tell him he did anything wrong.

Hell, I did just as he did (though, erm, to far less success). My self-published writing advice? Coming to Writer’s Digest. Atlanta Burns? Coming to Skyscape Publishing.

The question for me is, does that make this approach automagically the best?

He certainly believes so. Which is not unreasonable given his success.

From kboards, Howey says:

It’s amazing that I’m being painted as an all-or-nothing Konrath disciple. Just because self-publishing is the best way to get started doesn’t mean it’s the only way. Signing away lifetime rights and control over works that could be available forever is always an option. Just an inferior one.

What I hope to see is that the changes hybrids are forcing on publishing houses will trickle down to the writers who despise us. They won’t even know it’s happening. Non-compete clauses will simply disappear. Finite terms of license will become the norm. Print and digital rights will be negotiated separately. And I won’t care one bit who causes this, only that it happens.

Some of this is pretty admirable stuff. Improving contract conditions for writers is a noble goal and — fuck yeah, let’s see that happen. Though, it should also be clear that some of this is already happening and a good agent will help ensure non-exploitative clauses. (I don’t think any agent worth the salt would allow the author to give over rights forever.) I’m also not sure what he means by “the writers who despise us” — I may be misreading but that seems to lend itself further to the Us Versus Them tribal problem in publishing. Regardless, what I want to talk about today are those two particular words above (italics his, not mine): best and inferior.

I have trouble with absolutes. They’re rarely true outside of, say, math and science. Calling something the best smacks of One True Wayism and does a good job at making authors feel stupid for choosing a path other than the superior one. It’s doubly troubling in the realm of publishing, where so many options exist right now. Which is awesome. Authors have a variety of ways to get their work “out there” — and I don’t just mean trad-pub versus self-pub. I mean, Kickstarter to query letters to slush pile to Amazon KDP to a recommendation from another author to… well, hell, my path began in freelancing pen-and-paper games and took a weird alleyway into screenwriting. Here I am now with over a dozen novels coming out.

My way was pretty rad. Totally worked for me.

Miiiight not work for you. For a whole lotta reasons.

“Worked for me” is not equivalent to “best way for all.”

So: just on the theoretical level, best and inferior sit unsettled in my tummy.

But I promised someone on Twitter that I’d write a blog post detailing specific situations where “indie first!” was not automagically going to be the best way forward — so, let’s detail it.

Here, then, are some reasons that going “indie first” is not necessarily the “best.”

First, genre can be a problem. Not every genre is doing fireworks in the self-publishing realm. Literary work? Crime? Books published in those realms sometimes go kerplunk. Consider, too, that age range is a consideration. YA (Young Adult) is not a “genre,” but studies show that while adults will read YA e-books, teens remain reluctant (though this may be changing as e-readers become cheaper or are passed along as hand-me-downs). Further, YA tends to offer larger advances than the adult market — so, going straight to traditional can pay off.

Second, not every agent or publisher is interested in your self-published book. You think you can just self-publish and start querying. And you can. But some agents and some publishers don’t want to see it. To their minds, you’ve already gone and published. This is doubly true if the self-publishing effort isn’t in some way a successful one: great cover, many good reviews, lots of sales. It looks like whatever audience you had, you burned through them already. If your book doesn’t land in the digital marketplace with energy behind it, with momentum, querying after that will not likely be successful. To clarify, it means you can self-publish a very good book that traditional publishing might have picked up had it not been for a less-than-stellar showing on, say, the Kindle marketplace.

Third, you don’t have the audience. That first Salon article was by a guy who basically tip-toed into a dark and empty room, left his book on the mantlepiece like some kind of Author Elf, and then wandered back out wondering why he didn’t become a millionaire. If you don’t have the audience and don’t have time to spend earning that audience, traditional publishing may be a smarter first step. By dint of being tradtionally published you tend to get a little energy and momentum and audience via the so-called “prestige” of that path.

Fourth, some authors have found success doing the reverse, which is to say, they use traditional publishing to build audience and then leap into that audience with self-published efforts. Not to say this is the “best” way either — but it’s one option, and for many, it’s worked.

Fifth, you’re not going to be a capable or interested self-publisher. Not everybody wants to self-publish. Not everybody is going to be good at it. Despite claims to the contrary, the skill-sets necessary to do traditional and to do DIY are not mirror images (I’ve done both, trust me, it ain’t the same enchilada). Self-publishing is equivalent to running a small business. You’re an entrepreneur as much as an author. Some authors are going to take to this like a monkey to a banana. Some authors won’t be good at it or just find the idea of hiring editors and designers abhorrent. Best for someone? Most definitely. Best for everyone? Most certainly not.

Sixth, you’re going to be a great self-publisher. Self-publishing can be its own reward. “Indie first” presupposes that now self-publishing is a gate into traditional, but some folks just want to do it all themselves. For them, “indie first” also means “indie last, too.”

Seventh, because you’re uncomfortable with the financial risk. Writing and publishing is always a risk, but self-pub and trad-pub offer different flavors of risk. Self-pub is largely financial: you might spend $500 on cover, editing, design, marketing. And it is possible you will never see that money back. Despite what some have suggested, the traditional path is more a risk to time than it is directly to money — there’s little to no money actually put out, and so the risk of losing that money is nil. The result of the traditional process is either “I spend no money and get no money,” or, “I spend no money and I get somewhere north of $5000.” This is not to say going traditional first is best, but it may be ideal for the risk averse.

Eighth, because you want to be traditionally-published first and only. Preference matters. The parameters of happiness and satisfaction are not universal across all of authordom. When you say something is best, you’re speaking in terms so simplistic they’re meaningless. Best how? Best for money? Readership? Respect? Happiness? Everybody has a different metric and so, if your goal is to get the agent, go to a publisher and get on some bookshelves, well, then go that way. Go that way first. Don’t dick around with self-publishing. Chase the dream you want to chase, not the dream other people tell you is best. It’s your life, not theirs. Really, at the end of the day, “because it’s what I fucking want, goddamnit,” is the best metric of them all.

We’re possibly on the cusp of a golden age for writers. We have so many paths up the mountain. Let’s celebrate that. Let’s cheerlead not one option but all the options — and let’s embrace the fact that each path has strengths and weaknesses that’ll suit some authors and repel others. We don’t need to shut down or shout down options. We don’t need to suggest one way is superior. Or that others should feel inferior for their choices.

We can walk the middle road on this. We can take the nuanced, moderate approach and reject solipsism and tribalism and realize that what works for one is not a guarantee for all and that anybody who digs their way into the industry and follows their goals using the tools that suit them should be celebrated. Are you writing? Are you telling the stories you want to tell? Have you studied your options and found the path that suits you? Then high-five yourself, go eat some ice cream, and don’t let anybody tell you that you’re doing it wrong.

As always:

Art harder, motherfuckers.

Play nice in the comments or I’ll bring out the orbital laser. This is not a Cheerocracy.

I don’t read romance. Nor do I read erotica.

I should, though.

You read the work of, say, Delilah Dawson?

Or Karina Cooper?

Or Tiffany Reisz?

They’re damn fine writers.

And they’re writing damn fine books.

Books that are, by genre taxonomy, romance or erotica.

See, it’s starting to occur to me that in a lot of ways even books that are “one genre” should really have labels where the genre components are broken out like ingredients. Horror is a genre. So is mystery. And yet, so many books contain both horror and mystery in some percentage. Further, some books contain romance and erotica (love and sex, baby) in some percentage. These aren’t mere categorizations; these are storytelling components.

Anyway. So.

I’m writing the second book in my YA trilogy.

And it has a lot more romance than the first book.

It even has some sexytimes.

So, I want to read more romance. And erotica.

And you’re going to tell me what to read.

Make recommendations. Excellent writing. Good story. Romance and/or erotica.

Make with the books. *slaps own ass then feels embarrassed about it*

Last week’s challenge: “The Secret Door.”

I love a good opening line.

You lead with a great first line in a story, man, that’s just hooks you right away, doesn’t it? It’s like a key to a door. Opens up the world and your interest in it lickety-split.

So, that’s what I want from you.

I want you to write one opening line.

And then I’ll pick three.

And if those three people are in the United States, I’ll send them a copy of my book, The Blue Blazes, when it comes out. If you’re in the UK or anywhere else across the big wide world, you may have to settle for a digital copy, but I’ll make sure to get you one just the same.

Now, some rules:

A line means one sentence, not two, not three.

You get one entry, not two, not three.

Put your entry in the comments below.

I’ll pick three of my favorites by the close of Thursday the 11th (11:59PM) and then the following challenge next Friday will be for you folks to pick one of the three opening lines and write a story based on it. Which means you also might want to take a gander at these suggestions:

Shorter is better than longer.

Try too to keep in mind that you’re writing an opening line for other stories; the trick is to write something engaging while still writing a line that could apply to a great many styles and genres of story. Something that appeals and hooks in this case not just readers but other writers, too.

You’re writing lines for potential, is my point.

That’s how I’ll pick my favorites. Based on their potential to make interesting stories.

So! You’ve got a little less than one week.

One opening line. Let’s see what you’ve got.

Forgive me if I sound a little exasperated.

Hugh Howey wrote a thing at Salon and it’s a very interesting article and you should go read it. It is, in my probably-not-that-humble opinion, a fascinating mix of artistic wisdom and business fantasy where anecdotal evidence once more becomes artisanal data and we are told that because you can meet 100 very successful self-published authors that is now officially the way to go and oh, by the way, it’s totally the future of all publishing ever.

I distrust fortune-tellers, to be honest.

Mostly because it’s made-up horseshit.

Further, you can’t just canvass a handful of successful people and immediately declare that their success draws the map to the One Shining Path Up Authornuts Mountain. If I talk to 20 traditionally-published bestselling thriller authors, they’re going to say, “Write a thriller, get published by the Big Five.” If I talk to 100 self-published successes, they’re going to say, “Self-publish everything.” If I talk to 100 self-published failures, they’re going to say, “Fuck that noise, I lost my shirt.” If I talk to 100 dentists, they’re going to say, “You should be a dentist, dumb-ass, NOW LET ME EAT YOUR TEETH,” then he’ll eat my teeth because my dentist is actually some kind of teeth-eating monster, but whatever, that’s a story for another time.

Here’s the thing: Howey’s by all reports a very nice guy. And obviously smart as hell. And more than a little lucky. His article is well-written and buried in there is a strong cry to bolster craft and for you, the writer, to write first and foremost for the love of writing.

To which I say: fuck. yeah.

But, he also says stuff like:

But what is becoming more apparent with every passing day is that you have a better chance of paying a bill or two through self-publishing than you do through any other means of publication.

Italics his, not mine.

I self-publish. I do pretty well at it with a number of books (and for those asking, I will have another writing book out within the next three-four months, alongside a book of recipes and essays and Search Term Bingo called Revelations of the Bacon Angel).

I traditionally-publish. I do pretty well at that, too, I think, and actually over the last two years have well-eclipsed anything I made self-publishing.

Just the same, I don’t think one is better than the other.

So, here’s my response, which you already know because I’ve said it a hundred times before but fuck it, I’m nothing if not a fan of reiterating my own bleating and barfing:

Hey, self-publishing is cool!

Traditional publishing is cool, too!

Both have strengths. And also weaknesses.

Not everybody is fit to be their own publisher.

Not everyone is fit to deal with a traditional publisher.

Something-something Kickstarter! And Amazon! And literary agents! And small presses! And big presses! And this genre and that genre! And Wattpad and Book Country and Goodreads and Bookish and Twitter and iBooks and Smashwords and Simon & Schuster and Barnes & Noble and blargh and flargh and zippity-motherfucking-doo-dah!

The reason we don’t put all our eggs in one basket is because broken goddamn eggs!

No one way exists!

Try lots of shit!

Leverage one thing against another thing!

Don’t join cults!

Self-publishing isn’t The Future, it’s One Possible Future!

Educate and inspire instead of segregating and pointing fingers!

Beware easy answers!

This isn’t a war! Nobody has to win!

Write your ass off!

Art harder!

Exclamation points!

Words!

Nap!

*zzzz*

This is not going to be a particularly cogent post.

It will, however, be a spoiler-filled one.

So, warning: when you bite into this donut, SPOILER JELLY GONNA COME OUT.

That’s also what I call my semen, by the way. Spoiler Jelly. When we conceived of our son, I yelled to my wife, “Spoiler Alert: YOU’RE PREGNANT!” Then I did the Konami Contra Code and flew away on a rocketship made of Pac-Man corpses.

I’m lying about all that.

Still, I think I’ve given enough space, but once more for good measure:

SPOILER.

WARNING.

Okay.

Let’s get into it.

So, you know by now there’s this game. Bioshock: Infinite. It’s a sequel (not really, which will soon be apparent) to what is certainly one of my favorite games of all time: Bioshock.

I finished it last night.

My head’s still twerkin’ it against the walls of my skull.

I mean, I think I know what happened. The game ends up being a lot more about quantum mechanics and alternate realities and — in a way, the very nature of experiencing story and narrative through the particular and peculiar lens of playing a game — than you’d think. On the surface it seems like a game that’s about racism and nationalism, about prejudice and religious zealotry. And it is. In part.

But all that’s just a ruse.

It’s a game about choices.

Those choices are expressed by the obvious decisions you make as a player inhabiting a character and also as the myriad realities (which are just a shift from the reality you begin with) opened and explored by Elizabeth, your “ward” through the story.

For a long time I played the game looking for what I hoped were literal connections to the narrative of Bioshock: you find all these little moments and aspects reminiscent of that first game, and to a degree, the second. Elizabeth has the vibe of a Little Sister, and of course has her own version of the Big Daddy in the form of the very fucking big Songbird until you soon start to realize that in a sense you’re her Big Daddy (B.D. = Booker DeWitt), a thought evoked even more during moments like when you help Elizabeth scamper up into a vent (in that case to kill Daisy). Further, it becomes all the more clear when you realize hey, you’re her real Daddy, not just her protector (but give it a minute, we’ll get into that).

You’ll find other things, too: the falling/fallen city above the world instead of below it. Tonics and automated security and vigors and Plasmids and on and on. Plus, the protagonist of Bioshock is a child seemingly created out of Andrew Ryan’s genetic structure and Elizabeth is seemingly a child created from the genetic structure of Comstock and both are “special” and are potentially secretly controlled at the outset. Further, in Bioshock 2 Sofia Lamb has a daughter, Eleanor Lamb, who helps the Big Daddy protagonist of that game (albeit at a distance), not unlike how Elizabeth (also called The Lamb) helps Booker DeWitt inside Infinite.

So, my head was spinning: is Elizabeth somehow connected to the Big Daddy program? Does she change her name and go on to be a part of Rapture? Is she Sofia? How does it connect?

Then you find out: it doesn’t connect. Not in a straight narrative line.

You get to the end and realize not only is Elizabeth your daughter but that all these narrative hooks you’re finding aren’t literal connections but rather thematic bridges — constants in the quantum game of “constants and variables” — that show you these games are connected not so much by plot chronology so much as by the abstraction of multiple realities. Realities expressed by choices. Realities where things change less than you’d think, even though the trappings are different. Where the constants outweigh the variables.

And that’s what’s fucked up. That’s what’s got my head all goofy like a kinked-up garden hose. Bioshock is about choice: the Ayn Randian individualist genius-fed ethic versus the collectivist altruism of, say, Sofia Lamb. The protagonist, Jack, has the choice of how to deal with the Little Sisters (which is admittedly a little blunt and obvious, one of those classic videogame moral choices of “Feed the orphan or kick him to death”), and those choices add up to a different ending depending on how you played.

Infinite has no alternate endings.

And it has no real choice.

And at first, that’s frustrating. (From a gameplay perspective, it still is.) Narratively, though, it adds up: all the choices Booker DeWitt thinks he has — and you think you have as a player — are hollow. It all goes the same way. You always become Comstock in one reality and, as Comstock, always go to your other weaker self in another reality to buy your own daughter back so she can become the Lamb. And though there exists the razzle-dazzle of infinite lighthouses and myriad realities, you see that it always goes down the same way, a way expressed by Sofia Lamb way back in Bioshock 2:

“For every choice, there is an echo. With each act, we change the world. One man chose a city, free of law and God. But others chose corruption. And so the city fell. If the world were reborn in your image, would it be paradise, or perdition?“

Choices and echoes of choices. Choice and change still goes the same way: cities fall. Machine men still walk. Men still augment with tonics and Plasmids and Vigors. Paradise becomes perdition. Opposing forces still clash. Men are still revealed to be selfish and blood-thirsty.

Power corrupts. Mankind is lost.

And so choice is revealed to be an illusion.

At the end of the game you even have a scene where Elizabeth stands over her own crib as the Lutece “brother” (not actually a brother but an alternate world version of the Lutece “sister”) and tells you, essentially, that no matter what you think you’re going to do, at the end of the day you have no choice: like in nearly any video game you’re on rails, you poor motherfucker, and you’re going to hand the baby over because otherwise the game won’t progress.

(There’s even an earlier conversation with the Luteces at the start and the end of the game about how you, the protagonist, “doesn’t row,” which one wonders if that’s because you don’t have the ability as a video game character to row. Or maybe I’m just reading too much into it.)

The very, very end of the game is a knife in the ribs, really — as opposed to the ending of the first Bioshock, which literally had me cheering and tearing up — where you realize that there may be one last choice to make and that choice is to kill Comstock at the time of his birth, and that’s when you realize that his “birth” was the literal “born again” moment of a baptism where the persona Booker DeWitt is washed away and Comstock emerges. (This is one point of the game that I don’t quite understand — all the quantum dickery afoot tends to be explained by machines and theory and sci-fi wizardry, but the seemingly literal rebirth of the baptismal moment must be entirely mystical. Unless it’s less literal than I had imagined?)

So, there at the end the one choice is to kill yourself.

Or, to die by the hands of Many Elizabeths, all of whom drown you together and then disappear one by one until only one remains (and there I’m left to wonder if even that one Elizabeth flickers out of existence). It is again evocative of the endings of the previous two games: potential death, several Little Sisters, the culmination of a journey, the aspect of water. (There’s a scene after the credits that maybe confuses this a little, or maybe instead just suggests it’s all going to replay again and again and even death cannot stop the snake eating his own tail.)

Tricky stuff.

Great game.

Amazing story. Strong acting. Killer writing.

Art direction was profound and perhaps the prettiest I’d ever seen in a game. Though sometimes a lack of interactivity (can’t crack glass with your Sky Hook, if you step in front of a lit projector it shows no shadow, etc) were a bit puzzling surprising how incredible the scenery was.

Gameplay felt incredibly well balanced, if a little old-school. Greater variety in how to approach enemies would’ve been welcome, I think.

The “bad guy motivations” of racism and nationalism and religious zealotry got a little muddy and obvious — it’s on par with making the Nazis the bad guy, though then that gets appropriately and wonderfully more complicated as the downtrodden rise up and become as bad as the oppressors. (Though that may be making a controversial statement, one that could be interpreted poorly though it’s certainly bound up with the themes of the game.)

(Also a tiny part of me wonders what the game would look like without the violence. Still first-person, but driven more by mystery and adventure, not “kill these dudes.”)

The lack of choice is wildly appropriate given the story, but just the same I felt like Infinite was missing that kind of player assertion, if only from a “personal satisfaction” standpoint. As a player inhabiting a character, you want to feel like what you do matters, and the first two games had alternate endings and this one, ennh, didn’t. Again, appropriate to the story they’re telling and thematically on-point, but that’s not always satisfying. If we are to assume that there are constants and variables I would’ve liked to have seen these variables still be a… well, a constant. (The first two games focus on mercy as the choice and I miss that here.)

So, that’s that.

Love to hear your thoughts if you got ’em.