Chace Randolph

Blog Post Number 60 Written: 05-04-2023 Uploaded: 06-02-2023

Now that I have made it through my prewritten blog posts, and I am home sick from work, feel too bad to sleep, but can’t focus well enough to edit, I’m going to write another blog post. Gotta keep rolling with it. So here I am, chugging hot tea, and slurping the spiciest Ramen noodles, to tell you, not to give up. Even when you’re low, and down. Don’t quit. You can’t stay there. If you quit now, you’ll forever be at the bottom. Let me share some of my recent experiences, perhaps give you a little pep talk, because as of late, it had gotten low for me, and I want to share the light, that has kept me out of the darkness.

In April of 2022, the publisher I had been working with, due to a slew of small reasons, decided to shut their doors. Thankfully they returned all the rights to The Descendant back to me. That sucked. My published book, taken off the market, the sequels, already written and in the proves of editing, shelved indefinitely. The audio book I had recorded never got to the mixing/editing stage, much less ever released.

Sure, that hurt, it was after all a big setback. I no longer had an amazon link, or store pages, or websites to send people to when the asked about my writing. But I didn’t stop, I was far from being ready to quit. I immediately took my manuscript and started querying agents, looking for a new, bigger, better publisher. Planning to rerelease a second edition of The Descendant, and get on to the sequels.

But that wasn’t good enough. I was told no one would pick up an already printed book. It wasn’t fresh and shiny. I set about changing it. I gave it a new tittle. And The Descendant became the Altar or Scales. The four vignettes I had written as promotional teasers for the publisher website, that now, no longer exists, were broken up into six chapters and added into the manuscript, increasing the word count from about 60k, to just over 73k. Making nearly 15% of the book different.

With new tittle, bigger and better manuscript I went back into the querying trenches as they say. Having sent roughly fifty query letters in the last year since the old publisher shut down. But I got no bites from this second round of queries. That is where I got real low. When I wanted to quit. To stop writing, to put my thumb drive in a drawer and forget about the half million words I have written on it.

Partially out of frustration, partially out of needing to satisfy impatient beta readers, partly out of wanting to get the ideas out of my head so they don’t get lost or forgotten, I wrote the next book in the series. And it became so thick and meaty, we decided to split it into two books. I finished that, and gave the rough draft to my beta readers for Christmas 2022. That, is when it got real bad. I spent January sending a few, I mean like five half hearted query letters. Then I just sat on it, I sulked about it. I felt bed, I got discouraged. I not only thought about it, I talked about giving up, out loud. Not being a writer anymore.

I got a call from a friend of my fathers, a grumpy old red neck that has learned and forgotten more about cars, motorcycles and revolvers than I will ever know. I love that man, in the way you look up to the cool uncle that gives you stuff because he’s too much of a man savage to settle down and have kids of his own. This grumpy guy in his mid-sixties that only reads westerns got ahold of literally the last existent paper copy of the original The Descendant. He loved it. He went into it, expecting to be bored and hate it after the first few pages. But he read the whole thing, And was impressed and while I am not going to credit him with saving my writing career, because in truth, I can’t not write. I have to write to make room inside my head for my soul. But this grumpy old man, who is far from my target audience found my Russian Space Tarzan story good enough that he verbally shoved my ass back into gear. I wont credit him with saving the book, but I will credit him with saving time. Who knows how many weeks or months I would have moped before getting something done. So, thanks to that crusty old man, sure he swears too much, talks too much and is not the kind of person you have around nice company, but that’s why he’s the greatest. They don’t make people like that anymore. That raw, unfiltered, unflinching, get your shit together, put it in a back pack, so it’s together, and get your shit together attitude.  Spurred by his boots, that are probably older than I am and dusted with Utah mud I realized that the Tucson Festival of books was coming up. At the end of February, or something like that. Maybe the first weekend of the month after.

A couple authors I have met personally before were going to be there, and one of them Weston Ochse, who was giving a presentation on how to write query letters of all things. Sat through that lecture, my lovely wife went with me, I took a page worth of notes on the notepad I carried, and that was good stuff, worth the trip just for that.

I carried a few things, I also had my trusty “working copy” USB with the latest and greatest version of The Altar of Scales, as well as one of the handful of paper copies of The Descendant I still have hidden in my closet. I spoke with a half dozen, maybe as many as eight small publishers that had booths there. (I remind you the Tucson festival of books is a fairly big event, and people come from all over the country to peddle their literature and associated wears.) I collected a few business cards and stickers. No one was immediately willing to jump on the grenade I was carrying. But I met another author. A nice, enthusiastic gentlemen from Wyoming, an anthropologist who get this, writes western fiction about anthropology, like sixty of them. This guy W. Micheal Gear, not only was interested in my book, offered to read it and give me feedback on it. What was more, he offered, that with his blessing, I could send it to the chief sci-fi editor at one of the old big five publishers from New York.

I tell you, that was exciting. I waited, very … enthusiastically. Couple weeks went by, because this was all done through snail mail, with paper copies of everything. Guy is old school cool like that. Anyway, he wrote me a 3 page letter in reply. Telling me it wasn’t ready, and then proceeded to list all the things wrong with my book. Sure, that wasn’t fun, but it was what I needed. It was raw, honest feedback. Telling me, specifically where I was lacking. (Namely Passive voice.) Now that these problems have been pointed out to me, they feel glaringly obvious, and I have spent the last month editing through the book. I am currently rewriting a whole chapter in the latter third of the book. I am roughly 100 pages through the 145ish page book, my word count slowly creeping closer to that 80k. When I am done with this, I’m going to shoot my shot, and send it up to that big wig as was suggested to me. It’s not done, but it’s so much better now. My only concern is just how long it will take me, to make it good enough. I know, perfection is not possible, but it seems the more I do, the more I find little things I can fix, to make it better. Either way, soon It’ll be back and better than ever.

Since I am home sick, I hope to get some good editing done today, but my cold medicine is starting to wear off and my joints all still ache. That will have to wait until after a nap.
I guess the moral of this longer than normal blog post, is to not give up. Even if it sucks and things are down, don’t give up, because it’s the consistency that wins the game, and you never know how far you from the finish line, it is after all, a marathon, not a sprint. Even if you don’t want to, keep going anyway, because in the end it will be worth it. Even if you never get paid for your words, you’ll still have them, and you can still be proud of them.

In this case, and in other cases before, like the debacle with the cover art, a specific speech from Neil Gaiman has helped me out. Its twenty minutes long, and I have listened to it three or four, or five times. It is a kind of Zen goodness. I’ll add a link here. Anyway, do your thing, damn what the world says or makes you feel, just make good art. Now… about that nap…

P.S. on the weekend of May 27th/28th I finished my edits, the book is now 76k words and I have much higher hopes for it. I have given it to three alpha/beta readers for review, and as soon as one of them gets back to me, I’ll send it off to aforementioned big old publisher.