I’ve been thinking about submitting pitches and such again to publications, and that naturally led me to thinking about my hangups with submissions, promoting, and being in public in general. I feel as though I come off as unconfident but I’ve never felt like an unconfident person, and I’d say this comes out of a general not-fitting-in. A big part of this is that I am not a fan of things and I don’t make friends easily. It leads me to thinking that I should be seeking out somewhere else to lay my head, a place that I never seem to find.
Now, look, this is going to be a sad blog in part and that’s unavoidable, but I’m trying not to dwell or brood. This is primarily a reflection on my lack of publication and how I can deal with that going forward. Like I’ve said before, this writing is an exorcism – possibly more than ever, for me – so the point is to bring these things I’ve been thinking about to light so they can be avoided. I’m against “positive thinking” but I am trying not to jump to negative conclusions. That said, I can’t lie to myself about any negative feelings. Housekeeping over.
I remember once getting an agent (not my agent, I don’t have one) to give me feedback on how I could get myself noticed more. What they told me to do was to find communities where people were into similar things and become better-known there. A lot of advice I’ve found about publishing, finding an agent, etc. is similar. Look for writers you like and see if their agents are looking. Write to an author that you admire and see if they have tips. Submit to magazines you’re reading. So on and so forth.
This all makes perfect sense in a vacuum. There are issues I’ve had with the advice, but I don’t want to talk about the details right now. I want to talk about the basic premise. That’s what I’ve always had an issue with. The idea that I should simply find a community where I can set up roots. It’s not that I disagree with the advice, it’s that I don’t have the motivation to settle on a group.
I chose my words there carefully, hopefully carefully enough, but I’ll expand. My problem isn’t that I’ve never found groups, online and offline, which broadly align with my interests. My problem is that I am usually not interested enough in the core topic to stick out issues that crop up between me and other people, or even to stick it out if I don’t quickly find friends there.
I was once on a forum for a wrestling simulator game. I liked the game, I did writeups (we called them “diaries”) of my gameplay, I read other people’s, it was fun. I ended up leaving after two things in particular, the details are again not important, but let’s say they were disputes. Now, it’s not as though the majority of the people on the forum or even a minority were against me in these; it was mostly what I’d call “bystander effect” (I know the theory is discredited, but you know what I mean when I say that). The problem was that I was not invested enough in the game and the community to decide it was worth it after these disputes.
The details are important, obviously, but they’re important to me. This happened years ago. As it regards my attitudes on “getting myself out there”, as it were, what’s most important is that I didn’t have a strong enough attachment to keep myself in that community. Interpersonal issues are one thing but that core interest carries a lot of the weight, a lot more than I wanted to put stock into.
Think about people at work you only talk to when it’s about sports, or friends who you only hang out with because you all smoke weed.
I’m just not a fan of things on that level. I don’t feel a strong draw to groups just because we share a basic interest. I didn’t stop playing wrestling simulators because I left that group, just like I didn’t stop reading fantasy when I left fantasy groups, I didn’t stop listening to metal if I left metal groups, and so on. It’s just that if something irritated me within the group enough, I would leave, and it wouldn’t have to be that much in a lot of cases.
What I took from this at the time, however, was that I simply needed to find a different group. The people I’d landed among were just not my style for whatever reason and I would eventually find a group where I’d mesh better, where I’d make better ties with other people in the community, and then if I had issues, it’d be those community ties which kept me there and not the core interest.
I’m not saying that this is a bad thing to have or want, obviously. What I’m trying to say is this: my experiences led me to believe that I needed to have a “real” connection with a community or topic or thing in order to have a worthwhile interaction, a connection which I never really felt.
In publishing, this means that it has always been difficult for me to imagine submitting to places or agents where I don’t feel a strong amount of buy-in for what I want to do. I’ve had a lot of criticism in the past for places like Strange Horizons and a lot of contemporary sci-fi and fantasy publishing because there’s a focus on less fantastic and more contemplative stories in a way that precludes the fantastic; this has been my criticism, at least. As a result, after I started to feel that the publication was intrinsically hostile to what I wanted to do, I stopped wanting to publish there. It’s not that I felt that their publication shouldn’t exist or anything like that. It’s that I felt that, since it didn’t really align with me, I should never reach out to them.
I’ve stopped posting “as me” on social media at this point; I’m not going to unpack what this means, but I’m going somewhere. When I was posting “as me”, I had a hard time with left-wing publications because every person that I talked to had beefs with people on these publications and reasons why these publications were no good. At the same time, a lot of these people really respected particular journalists who wrote for these publications. But because the outlets all seemed compromised, and because their politics were not totally aligned with mine, I stopped considering them as places where I might want to submit work.
This idea that I need to find a group that I totally align with before I can seriously interact has been a hindrance to me. That’s clear at this point. That said, there is a reason that I held myself back, and it’s the idea of authenticity. It’s always been emphasized to me that I need to find authentic interactions, and that has I think installed in me a fear of inauthentic interactions. More than that, there’s always been the sense that other people will know if an interaction is inauthentic, and that would eventually lead to conflict.
Where I think I’m coming to is that there isn’t a binary between authentic and inauthentic. There isn’t necessarily a full alignment to be found. On the level of publishing and of reaching out to people, the amount of alignment doesn’t need to be complete. I don’t need to be a fan to reach out, even if I’m always being told to pose as a fan.
What this means for me in community, I’m not sure. When we’re talking about publishing, we’re talking about work, right? Community, especially community of topic, is based on choice. There’s no need to be “professional”. If I don’t feel enough of a tie to running wrestling simulators, I don’t need to prove my endurance by ignoring disputes. That said, maybe understanding better that some communities are of topic – and not of abstract solidarity – will help me to better navigate such issues in the future.