Nobody promised us a rose garden, yet here we are anyway, trying to make it as writers. Today's guest, fantasy writer M. K. Theodoratus, has been wending a crooked path through the garden of words, looking for a place where her career can blossom. She shares a bit about her journey so far.
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Twist & Turn – It’s Not a
Dance, It’s a Writer’s Life
by M. K. Theodoratus
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After four, maybe five,
writing careers, I feel like I’ve seen it all. Publishing now is nothing like
when I started writing.
How have I sold over the
years? Confession magazines (if you can remember them). Short newspaper
features back when they took freelance human-interest stuff. A weekly political
column back in the Reagan years. Multiple sales of the same article to lots of
little magazines who only bought one-time rights. Now, I’ve been playing with
fantasy fiction.
Yeah, my “writing career” has
done a lot of twisting and turning over the years as the publishing industry
has changed. All the time while, I wrote bits and pieces of fiction, mostly
unfinished.
I can verify that change equals opportunity.
If the indie publishing movement hadn’t gained a foothold, I wouldn’t be
writing this.
My most recent publishing
venture started out at a writer’s conference when an indie (aka mom & pop)
publisher said they were interested in my dark YA fantasy novel, There Be
Demons.
Hooray for me. I got a
contract that included nice royalties and a hard cover as well as an ebook. Got
some wonderful editing which made the book totally better. Started building a
social media platform to help with the marketing of my book, by revising and
publishing some of the short stories languishing in my computer. Then, the
publisher got sick, and the publishing process has stalled until she recovers.
Welcome to the real world of
publishing. A world where writers have to twist and turn in order to survive.
Bummer. Publishers and editors no longer hold a writer’s hand and teach them
their craft or publicize their books unless they are A-list.
The good news in all of this
turning: the “platform” I built now includes eight epubs – four free short
stories and four 99c epubs. In them, you can see how I twisted away from one
world – the Far Isles Half-Elven – to another – the world of Andor where demons
roam.
My world of the Far Isle
Half-Elven started when I was searching for a new idea to write about and began
wondering how genetic drift within an elf-human population would influence the
politics of a magical medieval world. I immediately had conflict in the change
from a feudal society to a mercantile one plus the conflict among various
individuals based the levels of magical power they controlled. I didn’t have
any characters to play with until Mariah jumped into my mind, standing on a cliff
in the midst of a receding gale. She was miserable because, after 400 years,
her life had turned to dust.
Result: 500,000+ words
sitting in my computer, a draft of Dark Solstice (a completed novel without a
home now), plus some novellas and short stories. The free stories are
downloaded frequently. The 99c novellas sell at a sick snail’s pace, though
most of the reviews are nice.
Of course, you should never
put all your stories in one world. I wrote other stories but nothing captured
my imagination until I wondered about the problems gargoyles faced.
Night for the Gargoyles,
which sold to a British e-magazine, was born. I liked the idea so much I
drafted a complete novel, There Be Demons, switching points of view between
Gillen, leader of the gargoyles guarding Trebridge, and Britt, one of the teens
drafter by the angels to help the gargoyles. Snarky teens, conscientious
gargoyles, and demons bent on conquest. What’s not to like?
The publisher liked it so
much she wanted a sequel … and maybe a trilogy. My story writing twisted only
enough to revise some stories to exist in the world of Andor where the demons
roam.
End result: I’ve self-publish
four Far Isles Half-Elven epubs and four Andor ones. Who know where my next
twist will take me?
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