Dangerous Day Job

In his book ‘On Writing’ Stephen King mentions that in his early career he kept all the rejection letters from all the publications that didn’t accept his stories by spearing them on a large spike mounted above his writing desk. He did it for motivation, to remind himself to keep going despite the lack of success. In a way, a spike with dozens or even hundreds of rejection letters built up is an achievement of its own. It occurred to me today that because I do everything online, I can’t do that. In fact I have very little physical evidence of any achievement, and none at all concerning the work it took to get there. All of my rejection letters are emails piled up on a server somewhere, and all of my stories are kinda just the same thing. Text on a server somewhere.

I wasn’t sure before if I wanted to try to get something published in print or just make an e-book, but now I’m certain I’d like to have a physical copy of a book to hold in my hands. Unfortunately, that means self publishing is either out of the question, or extremely expensive. I always planned on doing some querying, but I guess now if I really want a copy to hold it’ll be my only option. If it doesn’t work out I’ll still self publish whatever I have (after paying for some edits of course). Maybe I could find a way to publish a single copy or two just to have.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley