For the past couple of years, I’ve been listening to my inner voice, and it just keeps saying: Stay the course.

So I did. I kept reporting and writing and writing and reporting and living life and everything. But lately, everything is screaming: GET THE BOOKS OUT!

I have at least 3 novels I’m sitting on. I’ve edited them and had them looked over by my favorite beta reader. But my publishing journey is such a mixed bag that figuring out what to send where has become a complex algebraic expression.

I used to always stand by starting big and going from there. I queried hundreds of agents, multiple times for multiple projects throughout the years, with a couple of bites but no deals. Once I got through the queries, I started on the mid-range and smaller presses that took direct submissions and fit my work.

It has served me well. Then, after the polarization of 2020 and the hatred flung at conservative authors in the aftermath, I went ahead and self-published a book. It did pretty well. It sold more than a lot of my indie books that went through small presses.

Which brought me here. I just signed another contract for a Chicken Soup for the Soul collection and have expanded my publishing credits to photography as well.

I have no idea where to start with the new projects, but writing always seems to come full circle. It might not loop exactly the same, but it coils around and makes you dizzy.

Reading between the lines is key.

Virtually no agent publicly states: I only take progressive work. Or: Sure, I’ll consider the conservative stuff.

If they did, a lot of writers wouldn’t have to dance around trying to figure out what’s going on with these gatekeepers and what agendas they are pushing through to the very propagandic mainstream publishers.

I always say, I’d get a million-dollar book deal if I wrote a children’s story about a transgender eggplant. But that goes against my values that children should NOT be sexualized and children’s work should be fun and untainted by adults’ political battles. (It’s the same reason why BRAVE books annoy me. They’re conservative, but their books aren’t fun. My kids want to enjoy their childhood, not be horrified by the terrors of communism in an illustrated children’s book.)

Can we make books fun again?

I really don’t know. The Big 5 are so stuck on leftist propaganda that I’m pretty sure seeking an agent for my home birthing comedy book is useless.

~How dare women have babies without the medical industry sticking its hands all over her and her baby and charging an astronomically insane amount! Gotta make that paper, right?~

I’ve written a historical fiction novel about Cleopatra’s daughter, but again, that centers on her life in Rome and coming to terms with the destruction of her former life and accepting her adopted family. It’s a story that very much heralds femininity, motherhood, and family, something the mainstream wants nothing to do with. And it’s a Pagan book (since I’m a Pagan conservative), which means the Christian conservatives probably won’t go for it either. So do I self-publish?

Honestly, if anyone wants to sell books through self-publishing, they need at LEAST $1,000 start-up. You have to buy the ISBN, ASIN, the barcode, and promotions. Sure, self-publishing with Amazon looks free until you realize they own the ISBN, ASIN, bar code, and basically everything but the words themselves so…

What’s an indie author to do?

I could go all R.L. Stine and start my own publishing company. That gives me full creative control. And I did start my own magazine, but I’m dyslexic, and editing other people’s work is way easier. I need outside help to ensure that my work is readable.

Still, there’s that hope. That dangling glimmer. It’s so annoying. Yet, it keeps me going.

Comedian Norm Macdonald joked about it in his book, Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir. He told a lot of whoppers (those are jokes for old people), but he also spoke about his gambling issues and how it wasn’t winning that he was addicted to. Gamblers are known to lose. It was the hope. That moment when anything and everything can happen. That HOPE is what drives a lot of us to keep going in any endeavor. We need it. Crave it. Breathe it.

And I have a million lifetimes’ worth of hope in me.

That means, I guess I have to try. I have to seek out an agent who just might give this crazy full-time writer a chance. I have to hope they will “get” me and my work. I have to hope they can reach a publisher who cares enough to read the work. I have to hope I can keep taking the rejection shots and bounce back and charm a small press. Mostly, I have to know that my work is worthy and that it will get published, whether anyone else wants to publish it or not.

I have to go back again and start big.

I will query, I will submit my work, and if all else fails, self-publishing hasn’t done me wrong.

No matter what you’re working on, you have to have some hope. And I hope that my hope gives every single one of you more hope. That’s a LOT of hope. haha

We’ll get there. No matter what.

Time to get the work out!