I present you a question from an interview I did with myself about the more personal angle of why I’m starting a new site rather than work with some other project or seek traditional publishing.
Why is it important for you to be working and publishing independently?
I’ve been writing fiction pretty much in a vacuum for, well, a long time, on the assumption that maybe if I edit hard enough and keep trying, maybe I’ll be able to submit something eventually and get published. Which might have been true, had I had some more effective way to “beta” my work, been not sixteen when I wrote the first book, if the publishing industry were in a different place. Etc.
Now it sounds like I’m making excuses, and maybe I am, but it strikes me that even if god flew down and handed me the best book deal in the world, I’d probably still have to have a day job. I even sort of want a day job of some kind (I like the structure, and pace, given a lot of circumstances in my life at the moment.) While having some sort of publishing sponsor would likely get me editorial support (g-d, how I yearn for thee) a bigger audience, it’s an iffy proposition and so the debate ends up being: do I start regularly publishing my own work (like I intend to do with this new site that I’m cooking up) or do I continue to work in isolation with faith that it’ll probably work out in the end?
I think making (science) fiction prose work online is probably the next big thing, which is to say that it’s already underway. 365Tomorrows, EscapePod, Tor.Com not to mention Podiobooks are all forays into this sphere (as it were) and as exciting as all of these ventures are, there is something totally invigorating about doing this on my own.
I’m not saying that I don’t want support, nor am I saying that I’m conceiving this new site as something that will be excessively me--quite the contrary, if it were just me, I could probably orchestrate it entirely out of tychoish. But I very much treasure the possibility and opportunity to give this a go on my own terms.
For those of you keeping score at home, I’m chugging along for a mid/late June launch. I’m probably about half to a third of the way done with the logistical work, and I want to get a stronger habit formed before I start, but it’s very real and coming quite soon.