I’m a classic amurrican striver.  An entitled colonizer.  A zombie to crapitalism.  I’ve got this asinine notion that if I just get my hot amazing sexy ideas out there, people will jump on them, and I will make a bank full of money.  Be positively swimmin’ in ducats.  Doubloons.  Krugerrands.  Simoleons.  Smackeroos.  Showering my flesh with gold dust and blood diamonds.  Getting a miniature robotic Lamborghini to chauffeur my stretched Lamborghini around Lamboville.

I kid, I kid.  I genuinely don’t give an earthly fuck about wealth, do not want a single one of those things.  But I do want the ability to take it easy, to know that I and my loved ones won’t be ruined 5eva from a single run of bad luck.  I want security, and in this country, that’s expensive as hell.  So I want just that much, and then I’m chillin’.

The place where my zombification comes in is this:  On some primal reptile level of my brain, I can’t help but believe in that dream – that completely baseless delusion – that if I just do the right clever thing, I will get a windfall.  My merit will shine through and I will get all the money I ever needed.

Until the inevitable day when this dream is utterly disproven to me personally, it will continue to drive my ambitions.  I am thinking about this because I fucking hate the day job, and was recently approved to return to full time hours at it, which means my spare time became a lot more rare and precious.  So what should I be doing with that time, to fulfill the Beautiful Dream?

The project I have that is closest to completion is The Septagram, a urban fantasy adventure with dark elements and a lot of humor.  It’s one of my longer books but a little slight in length for a fantasy novel, about 100k words.  One of the main characters is asexual, another is gay, and the others mostly don’t have any cause to fuck, so it’s not very commercial.  Also, the genre was inspired by Hideyuki Kikuchi’s Wicked City and Darkside Blues, mashed up with a contemporary american setting, so it’s not very familiar territory for most readers.  Nonetheless, it would be the easiest thing to get completely finished and out the door.

I have a project in the Dan Brown thriller model, which is much less gay and experimental, while being similarly adventurous, called The Refinery.  There’s a lot of writing left to do on it, but it is intentionally commercial.  Even came up with a butch pen name for pitching it, haha.  I plan on finishing the first draft of it this July’s novel writing month.

I have a magical realism literary fiction thing, barely more than a novella at 50k words, but with one of those clever concepts that get people interested, and a lot of humor.  It’s called Swine and Camus and the first draft is complete, but the second draft is gonna involve a little heavy lifting.  Still, could be it’s got legs.

I have a cheeky scifi adventure about 75k words called Centennial Hills, you might recall.  How well do you think that thing would sell?  Two greyliens come to Earth and have edgy experiences.  A fictional stand-in for shitty etln mvfk features in it significantly.  The final draft of this one wouldn’t be wildly difficult.  I don’t see any structural editing or original writing being involved.  Should be a quick one.

I have a complete short novella called Mitosis – a take-off on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, featuring a trans woman as the main character, set in a 1990s college campus.  A dubious metaphor for gender dysphoria.  I’ve actually pitched this one to a few dozen agents with no bites.  But a lil polish and I would likely self-publish.  I thought the edgy concept would win some interest, but this has not proven to be the case.  What about you, though?

The Vaccine Scene is pretty close to complete as a novella, and despite the cheekiness of the concept – Reefer Madness with vaccines as the drug – it has become rather emotionally intense and literary.  Wouldn’t take much longer to finish it.  Would it be worth my time tho, financially?  Or just to catch people’s attentions, build that career?

My most heartfelt and epic story – Rent is Theft – has a completed first draft around 135k words.  Again with a trans woman as the main character, magical realism, urban setting, some heavy issues, some humor, a style that involves a lot of storytelling within the story.  Call it literary fiction.  Capitalism is the enemy.  But could this sell?  The next draft will involve a lot of rewriting and new writing, making it a big effort, and the concept is very uncommercial.

Of course, I can also ditch literature and finish my screenplay Gun Lemurs, which is pretty damn decent, if you ask me.  These days, however, hollyweird is not valuing original writing like they should.  I doubt this will go as far as I’d prefer.  Still, I get the feeling screenwriting is a less crowded field than literature.  Or am I completely wrong on that?  Cursory googling suggests I am.

As far as how I sell it, I had a bad time pitching Mitosis and am not going to pitch a book with queer main characters ever again.  The fuckos say they want to see that represented, but they’re full of shit, as evidenced by what actually gets published.  I’m going to pitch The Refinery and if I can’t get anywhere while selling out my identity and chasing trends, I’m done with seeking traditional publication altogether.

That gets me to the problem of how the hell to sell shit.  All of the markets are flooded with garbage from dollar-chasers and spambots.  Getting seen requires advertising.  I’d drop a lil dosh on that, but not anything outlandish.  I’m not doing too well financially.  Like, let’s say $600 could get my ad seen by 40,000 people for a few minutes.  I might consider that, just to see what the results are like.  Let’s say it’s a lot more expensive or being seen by the population of a USian suburb only gets five bucks worth of sales.  I’d never do it again, try to find some other kind of angle.

I once thought this blogging angle might be a good way to flog some products, but my audience is maybe a hundred people and of those, how many would buy something?  The profit margin on books is chump change.  Twenty sold is not enough to justify cutting my hours at work.  Ain’t gonna get me interviewed by chucklefucks on yewed choob.

What would jeezis sell?  What would people buy?  Holler at ya comrade.

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