My twentieth year writing for publication
A summary of my writing, publication, personal development, and reading for this year.
It amuses me to think that for about twelve years, from 2004 to 2016, I kept extremely detailed statistics on how much I wrote each day, each week, each month, each year, with notes on whether or not I had hit my writing targets and how many days in a row I had written. At one point, I had written on something like 1200 days in a row. I hadn’t let a single day pass in four years without doing some writing.
I quit because in 2016, I was in my second year of writer’s block, and I thought: what is the point of forcing myself to sit down and write every day, when everything I write is bad, and I can’t finish anything? At some point it becomes pretty trivial to write a hundred, or even a thousand, words. I have had multiple days when, either for reasons of deadlines or inspiration, I have written 15,000 words. It isn’t particularly hard: I can compose at rate of about 2,000 words an hour, so it just takes some time. But it doesn’t matter how fast you write or how much you write, what matter is whether you can use any of it the next day.
When I started keeping those statistics, in my senior year of high school, writing was difficult and not particularly enjoyable. I had to force myself to sit down and do it. By 2016, I had sold a book, and I had a sense that I no longer needed to force myself to write. I could simply…not keep track anymore, and just write when the feeling took me.
By and large, that has been correct. I have certainly been motivated by contracts and deadlines in the years since. Both my second and third YA novels were completed because I had signed contracts. But my literary novel was under no time pressure, and I did a number of drafts on spec. I also wrote a guide to the publishing industry, a middle-grade novel and a thriller on spec during that time, plus maybe ten long essays and a number of short stories.
Production
For the last year, I’ve had three books under contract, which has provided its own sort of pressure: I am constantly under deadline, and I am constantly waiting for one or more of my books to come back to me. Right now, for instance, I am waiting for edits on What’s so Great About The Great Books, and I am using the interim time to write a fantasy novel.
But I do not consciously push myself to write. If anything, I have gotten more laissez-faire about it. I used to write first thing in the morning, as soon as Rachel was off to work. Lately I’ve been writing later and later in the day, because I find that writing is actually a distraction, a form of procrastination, from other things I ought to handle (showering, walking the dog, etc). But I have proven as productive as ever. Since November 19th, I have written 90,000 words of the first draft of a fantasy novel (the final draft should be about 110,000 to 120,000 words). I’ve also written a few Substack posts in that time, and those are getting kind of long as well!
Anyway, when I was keeping statistics, it was very easy for me to put together these year-end wrap-up posts. I could tell you exactly how many words I had written in a year, how many novels completed, how many drafts done, etc. As I recall, sometimes it was on the order of 600,000 words (most of that was multiple drafts of the same project).
Now I have trouble remembering. Certainly this year I did major edits on my YA. I also wrote another draft of my literary novel, which I subsequently tossed out and didn’t use. I wrote a draft of What’s So Great About The Great Books, and I wrote this fantasy novel, and I wrote about 45 substack posts? Not a bad haul! I am proudest of the fantasy novel, but one is always proudest of one’s most recent work.
I always like to have something I am writing on spec. If you only write under contract, it’s difficult to really chart new directions. For most of the year my on-spec project was a science fiction novel that never quite jelled, but I do have twenty thousands words of it, and it has gone through a number of drafts.
My Substack has been my real baby. After six months of waffling I took the plunge and shifted my blogging to Substack. It was a great decision, my audience has grown tremendously, and I went from a few dozen people seeing my Wordpress posts to hundreds of people seeing my posts on Substack. As soon as I have the time, I plan to wind down my Wordpress site and get my domain pointed to the Substack instead.
It has taken a few months to find my footing, but eschewing culture war stuff has been great—very freeing—and I am still finding ways to write about the Great Books that feel fresh to me. I think the narrower focus and framing of the blog is of great help in finding an audience on Substack. The community here is a bit politically conservative, but overall it has many smart and thoughtful people. A friend asked why so many Great Replacement-type psycho conspiracy theorists were following his left-liberal substack, and I said, “Well if they weren’t open-minded, they wouldn’t have started believing in the dumbest ideas on Earth.” It has been a pleasure to meet so many people who are genuinely interested in literature and in the great books.
Publication
On the publication front, I don’t believe anything of note has come out. Early in the year I had an essay in Tablet that I really liked. They were probably the easiest and highest-paying journal I’ve ever worked with, but their party-line has grown so transphobic that I would hesitate to publish with them again. I also had an essay in Lithub that I probably wouldn’t write again today—it’s maybe the weakest of my published literary-critical essays, but it’s still alright. I think that I had a story, “Citizen Science”, come out in Analog, my first for that publication. I genuinely cannot remember what else I had come out, but I don’t think it was anything of note, just a few poems. I also had stories in Best Small Fictions 2022 and 2023, both of which are, I believe, being released this year.
Next year I have a young adult novel coming out, and my literary novel for adults. I also have stories in two young adult anthologies.
Progress
This December marks my twentieth year of writing for publication. It’s certainly been amongst the more pleasant and productive. I hope the next year will match it, but nothing is for certain.
When I was younger I used to read many author blogs, and they would always be rather blasé about everything they’d written and accomplished. Now I cannot help but feeling I’ve become one of those authors. I certainly do not feel myself to be particularly different than I was before selling a book, though it’s been nine and a half years since my first book sold, so I have been doing this for quite a while!
The largest inflection point in my career came late in 2020, when I had spent a year searching for new representation, and I realized that I couldn’t just keep writing books and maybe not selling them. I decided then on two things:
I would start writing anything and everything I could write without a literary agent. That was when I got into writing literary criticism, I wrote a YA proposal on-spec and sent it to my editor at Harper, and I wrote poetry and short stories again.
I would never write something that didn’t have a market (this was inspired by the trans assassin book I had spent a summer writing, which was a good book but rather dead on arrival).
Since then I have faithfully followed those two principles. I pitch almost all of my novel ideas to my agent, to make sure there is a market for them. And I have continued to seek out new areas for my writing where I can have direct control.
A knock-on effect of that realization has been that I’ve gotten much more professional and much less emotional. If someone gives me bad news, I wait before reacting. I don’t make my team responsible for my emotions—it’s not their job to reassure me. And I have started selecting editors, agents, publicists, etc for their honesty. I value a straight shooter. Just tell me what is happening, and give me your best advice, and we can move from there.
I have become very cynical about many aspects of the writing career. I still harbor a lot of anger towards many of the agents, in particular, who rejected my work. But the cynicism has been very freeing. I don’t rely on the industry to validate me anymore—I know that its judgements have nothing to do with my work’s quality. Lately I’ve been taking an honest look at my work and my writing style. I’ve been thinking of the ten years I spent trying to break into literary fiction, and the things I’ve heard along the way. The fact is, my writing style and my particular skills are simply not what literary fiction values. They want work that has a certain verbal texture, and I simply don’t want to make pictures with words. We have eyes to see, and minds to think. There is no need to use words to do what eyes can do much better. I’ve accepted that I am simply more sparing with sense detail than most literary editors and readers would like me to be, and, ironically, my work is also more firmly grounded within the body and the scene than most literary fiction is. I think what’s driven me to write this fantasy novel is the realization that perhaps I ought to be writing commercial fiction. It’s hard to say!
But this year I started submitting my short stories to literary journals, and I just thought, “What’s the point?” This isn’t the change I want to be in the world. Getting into The Paris Review means nothing to me. I don’t read or even particularly like the stories in it. But who knows, next year I might feel quite differently.
Perusal
I went through the following reading phases:
New Directions (January) - I got into all those slim European novels that are invariably published, in English, by New Directions. The best was Fleur Jaeggy’s Sweet Days of Discipline, which is a gorgeous book, but I also loved Dag Solstad. His best, of those I read, was Novel Eleven, Book Eighteen (although the title is terrible, since the book isn’t metafictional in the least.
Transfem Books (February) - I get envious, so for a long time I avoided reading books by other trans-fems, but in February I read several, and they were incredible. The best were Imogen Binnie’s Nevada and Alison Rumfitt’s Tell Me I’m Worthless.
South Africa (March) - Perhaps the strangest phase I have ever gotten into, in March I got into Black South African literature. It is strange because Black South African literature is not accorded a high place amongst Black African literatures—the general feeling amongst African writers (one that many Black South African writers would agree with) is that because white domination lasted so much longer in South Africa, their literature was a bit stunted, and was too concerned with the fight against apartheid. Essentially, how many novels can you really write about how terrible apartheid is and how racism is bad? But I kind of enjoyed the moral clarity! The best of the political literature was Peter Abraham’s Wreath for Udomo, a roman a clef about various African revolutionary leaders. I very much enjoyed Njabulo Ndebele’s criticism and Nat Nakasa’s reporting. The best novel I read in terms of its storytelling and overall effect was Lewis Nkosi’s Mating Birds, about a Black man arrested for (perhaps?) raping a white woman on a beach. And it’s not South African, but Thomas Mafolo’s Chaka is not only one of the earliest African prose novels (it was written in 1925). It’s an extremely powerful novel about (and indictment of) Shaka Zulu and deserves to be better-known. His was probably the best novel I read all year.
Revolutionary Sociology (April) - I also got into the strand of famous polemical writing about colonialism. I never read Fanon, but I did read Eric Williams’ extremely famous Capitalism and Slavery and Walter Rodney’s equally famous How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. The latter relies on a Marxism dialectical theory of economic development that I don’t think has any real empirical backing, but it is good writing nonetheless. Capitalism and Slavery is a great book that makes a very believable argument (that the slave trade enriched the merchant capitalists, and that the ending of slavery and the slave trade was at the behest of the industrial capitalists). In this vein I also read Harold Cruse’s Crisis of the Negro Intellectual and Albert Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized—a rhetorically powerful study of the psychology of the colony.
Holocaust Literature (June) - I belong to the NYRB classics book club, but I don’t read most of the selections they sent me. However I did pick up Aleksandr Tisma’s Kapo, about a Jewish man who was a kapo at Auschwitz and is afraid of being found out. It was decent, but it led me to his much superior Uses of Man, which deserves to be much more famous: it is an expansive and horrifying novel, about four survivors of the Nazi occupation of Serbia, two Jewish and two non-Jewish, who are brought together by reading their former teacher’s hauntingly sad diary concerning her last days before she died of cancer. Very sad, moving novel. This also led me to Imre Kertesz’s Fatelessness, which is a full-stop masterpiece. Kertesz attempts to show that Auschwitz was simply life—that a footstep at Auschwitz was no different than a footstep at home—and he does this through a very unique voice, a fourteen year old boy who is ingenuous and willfully ignorant about much of what is going on around him. I read a number of other Holocaust books, including Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners (his theory was that the German people really, really hated the Jewish people, and that they were perfectly happy to eliminate them). I read David Cesarani’s monumental and fascinating history of the Holocaust, The Final Solution. And Kuznetsov’s history of Kiev under Nazi occupation: Babi Yar. After Chaka, Uses of Man and Fatelessness were probably the 2nd and 3rd best books I read this year.
Nietzsche and Freud (July / August) - I wrote about them both on this blog, but I got successively into Nietzsche and Freud phases. I found both of them extremely convincing, especially Freud, who seemed very perceptive about human nature, except when it came to his actual theories of infant development, which seemed far-fetched in the extreme. Nietzsche was one of the best prose stylists I have ever read, and a very clear thinker. Thus Spake Zarathustra is a masterpiece. I want to read it again.
Political Philosophy (September) - One of the most controversial posts I wrote was about Leo Strauss’s Natural Right and History, which I still think will someday be a Great Book with a capital G and capital B. He is a masterful thinker and reasoner. I have come to see that his philosophy is considerably more sinister than it appears on the surface, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a good book. I also read Carl Schmitt’s Concept of the Political. As one journal article put it, Schmitt was “an unrepentent Nazi”. This book has become very influential amongst those attempting to justify a kind of might makes right approach to politics, wherein the majority is entitled to oppress the minority. Schmitt is not wrong about how liberalism works (yes, the threat of violence always hangs over every human institution, and to pretend it isn’t there is foolish).
Tang Poetry (October) - Another thing I wrote about extensively on the Substack. I fell in love with Tang Dynasty poetry. I recommend Five Tang Poets and David Hinton’s Selected Poems of Tu Fu. Tang Dynasty poetry is very compressed, very imagist, but also personal and emotional. Tu Fu constantly returns to the same themes of death and calamity (he wrote during a civil war) and the frailty of all things.
Icelandic Sagas (November / December) - By now you must be tired of hearing me talk about these, but the best ones I read were Njal’s Saga, Vatsnal Saga, Laxdael Saga, Saga of Grettir the Strong, Gisli Surrson’s Saga, Saga of Hrafnkel Frey’s Godi, and Vinland Sagas. I’ve also been reading some of the literature that’s not in the realist family saga genre, the best of these were: King Hrolf’s Saga and The Saga of Arrow-Odd.
This list only includes my passing interests, and it doesn’t include some of the best books I read this year. I finally read The New Testament, which I probably ought to have read before I read any other book. I loved Nguyen Du’s Song of Kieu, which is out in a beautiful new translation from Penguin Classics. I read the poems of Cavafy. I read a great collection by contemporary Russian dissident poet Kirill Medvedyev. I really liked Michael Gasda’s Dimes Square And Other Plays. It’s not by a Black author, but Leonard Thompson’s Survival In Two Worlds is an incredible biography of King Moshoeshoe, a contemporary of Shaka Zulu and the founder of Lesotho. His canny maneuvering and sagacity are a wonder to read about. I read The Aesthetic Education of Man, by Friedrich Schiller, which very much informed by Great Books book. I enjoyed two WWI novels with very similar themes, Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero and Humphrey Cobb’s Paths of Glory. The latter is a military ethics book that reminded me very much of The Caine Mutiny. It was turned into an excellent film by Kubrick that I also saw when it was playing at my local Alamo. The Lonely Crowd by David Riesman wholly convinced me that other-directedness was the only natural way to survive in contemporary times. I read Kagero Nikki, the Diary of a Mayfly, a 10th-century Heian diary, and one of the earliest extant works of Japanese literature. It’s about the miserable home life of the author, who is only known as Mitshishune’s Mother. I spent several weeks reading Ippolito Nievo’s Confessions of an Italian, which is the other huge 19th century Italian novel (after the much-better-known The Betrothed). It is slow going, but excellent, and very cunningly structured. The first third, a pastoral romance set in a decaying province of the Venetian Empire, lends poignance to the remainder and its struggle for Italian unification.
And of course I read Julien Benda’s Treason of the Intellectuals, which I liked until I realized that fascists love this book too! To them the treasonous intellectuals are the woke professors! I think the book only really makes sense if you understand how powerful nationalism was, as an idea, and how new and provocative it was in 1927. Today nationalism is about the only unifying force that we have left—it is the animating force between every freedom struggle and every liberal attempt to keep the union together. It is very hard, in 2023, to think of nationalism as inherently dangerous or as something we can dispense with.
Almost none of the books I read were originally composed in this century. If I was to pick my favorite 21st century book amongst my reading this year, well, it’d be a bummer, because the book is so popular and this pick seems quite basic, but Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women is an incredible look at women’s sexuality. It feels unbelievably intimate and real. I listened to the audiobook, very worthwhile. This year I read approximately 160 books.
Personal
On the personal front, nothing of note occurred. The year began with a trip to India so Leni could see my grandmother. It was difficult, but made my parents and grandmother happy. Leni was also potty trained and began preschool. The latter was great for her social life, but even better for mine! I’ve become very involved with her school; I’m a member of the PTA, and I’ve been making friends with other parents.
Oh yes, I got surgery! Facial feminization surgery. It went extremely well, and I now am gendered correctly much more often. Also made sundry corrections to my appearance that have reduced dysphoria. Finally made an official change to my name and gender marker. Insurance paid for it all, which was shocking, because I have an HMO and it was out of network.
It’s very strange to have a home, a wife, a child, a dog, a cat, two cars, and a literal picket fence and everything else most people seem to want out of life. These things were never major objectives of mine, but I definitely enjoy them!