When I was a kid, I played a
strange mental game. Several days before a trip away, I would imagine that a
monster was out there in the darkness, stalking me.
Each night he would grow closer and closer and
closer until finally… he would arrive at my house to find I had left. Howling
in frustration, the vile creature would then sniff the air and begin the long
journey to wherever I was visiting. But just as he was about to arrive there…
surprise! I’d be gone again, usually back home.
I’m not sure what started the game
or how I could overlook the glaring logical fallacy that was part of it. Why
didn’t he just wait in my room until I got back? Was he on a deadline or
something?
The funny thing is: I barely remembered
this game until I started thinking about this column. I couldn’t figure out why
it even came up in my memory—and then it all clicked.
I get asked a lot why I
self-published my novel or whether I’m actively seeking a traditional publisher
(I’m not). I can offer you plenty of logical reasons: the indie label has
become more acceptable, the agent querying process was taking too long and the
economics of delivering a self-published work have dramatically changed with
the development of the ebook. All of these are good, true answers.
But they aren’t the main one—at
least not for me.
The truth is I’m running out of
time.
Writing novels was something I
always wanted to do. In many ways, I feel it is the thing I was born to do.
Like many other writers, I am sometimes only 50% engaged in actual real
life—there are always stories playing out in my head and they can be rather
distracting. Yet for something I genuinely enjoy and view as my destiny, I have
wasted a tremendous amount of time NOT doing it.
We can partly blame the traditional
publishing houses for this. I finished the first draft of A Soul to Steal in 2001, and had reworked it substantially by 2004.
But when it came time to try to publish it, I realized I was up against a vast
black wall that was so dark I couldn’t see through it, and so high and wide
that I never saw the end of it. It wasn’t that publishers were rejecting the
novel—I never even got to that stage of the process. I couldn’t even get agents
to read it. It was so disheartening that when my life got busy—kids, more
challenging job—I just directed my focus elsewhere.
But it would be a mistake to blame
this mostly on the Big Six publishers. I think we all know who the real person
to blame is—and I see him in the mirror every day.
It’s true I couldn’t see a way to
publish A Soul to Steal. I invested a
lot of blood, sweat and tears in that book, and it was going nowhere. But
rather than persisting in writing, I gave up. Some of my distractions were
legitimate, like my family. Some were definitely not, like trying to reach 100%
completion in the single-player mode of Red Dead Redemption.
Two things woke me up from my
stupor. The first was reading about Amanda Hocking’s success in publishing her
books on Kindle. The second was watching my dad’s progressive deterioration
from Alzheimer’s.
I don’t want this to become another
post about this, but my dad was diagnosed when he was 63. At the time, he could
blog and still carry on a conversation, but writing was difficult. Fast forward
six years, and even talking coherently is a challenge for him. It’s been
incredibly hard on my mother, my sister and myself, but it has also
unfortunately represented something else: my future.
My dad’s mother had Alzheimer’s. Of
her sisters who lived long enough, they all succumbed to the disease. The odds
that I will eventually get Alzheimer’s are extraordinarily high. When I see
what my father has become, I weep for him, but I am also terrified for myself.
His mother was diagnosed at 74. He was diagnosed at 63. For some reason doctors
can’t explain, people are getting the disease younger and younger.
So if this is my fate—if I’m even
fortunate enough to avoid all the other things before then that could kill me,
like cancer or a runaway lumber truck on a highway—it’s possible, even likely,
that I will be diagnosed even earlier than my father.
Which leaves me wondering: how much
time do I have? I’m 37. Can I make it another 26 years until my dad’s age? Or
will it be more like 20? 15? 10?
So the decision to self-publish was
ultimately an easy one.
I could sit on the sidelines and
wait, hoping that somehow I would break through that huge barrier in front of
me and score a traditional book contract. But would that ever happen? And how
old would I be if it did?
Or I could publish my book, roll
the dice that readers would find it and enjoy it, and try to make my dream come
true. I looked at the number of years I might have left and decided to focus on
doing what I believe I was meant to do.
I read somewhere once that there
comes a time when you realize the distance between who you are and who you want
to be becomes an insurmountable gulf. I wanted to leap that chasm before it became
too wide.
I decided to self-publish because I
understand now that the monster I pretended was hunting me when I was a kid
wasn’t made up. It’s real and it has a name. It’s called mortality. And it has
teeth.
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