This past week has been kind of momentous for my writing. On Sunday I got word that my essay “When Your Rape Doesn’t Count” has been accepted for the upcoming book Queering Sexual Violence, pending revisions the editor and I have yet to discuss. It’s been a while since I’ve had anything published, and this will be my first time to be published in an actual book. This inspired me to look at recent calls for academic essays, and I found one that’s kind of irresistible for me. It’s been a very long time since I’ve written a major-length research paper, but I’ve put this one on my to-do list for late this summer.  I also started on the first draft of my second screenplay, and I’ve been fine-tuning my first here so it’s letter-perfect when I get around to shopping it out.

Perhaps most importantly, though, I finished the rough draft of my second book this past Tuesday. This wasn’t quite the experience that finishing my novel last month was, though.  Part of that was simply because the experience of doing anything that big for the first time is always going to be bigger, and this second book isn’t nearly as long as my novel was, so it wasn’t as big of a mountain to climb.  The book is also non-fiction, and the rough draft was kind of easy to churn out because for the most part I was writing out things I’ve had in my mind for decades.  (Long-time readers probably know what the book’s about; the rest of you will have to wait until it gets published, I’m afraid.)

As much as I’ve tried to focus on writing and the joy of creation, though, it’s been hard not to feel depressed over all the other work ahead of me.  I’ve been reading lots of books about publishing and networking online via Websites and Twitter, and I’m just daunted at all that awaits me.  It’s bad enough that traditional publishing is going through so many difficulties right now, but in all likelihood, even assuming I can find a publisher for one or both of my books (and even that, regardless of how good the books are, is still far from assured), I’ll likely be forced to do most of the marketing and publicity for the book since publishers aren’t doing that any more in order to cut costs.  The upcoming editing I’ll have to do to both books will be intensive enough — it will take much longer than the original writing process took — but at least I have some idea of how to write and edit.  Having to promote my books, and more importantly, myself, is something I have little experience with, and I’ve yet to find any book or online resource that makes me feel like I’ll be able do perform those tasks adequately.

For many authors, self-publishing is becoming a more attractive option, and it’s certainly one that I’ve given a lot of thought to.  The problem with self-publishing is that, if I want to keep teaching and working my way up to a tenured position somewhere, self-publishing would be a huge negative.  When it comes to getting tenure, it’s having others publish your work that counts a lot, usually the most, in terms of climbing the ladder of academia.  (Sad to say, how well you teach usually doesn’t matter much; it’s harder to get tenure if you’re a bad teacher, but the difference in success between an okay teacher and a great teacher is minimal.)  If I were just interested in being a writer then I’d probably be taking a much closer look at self-publishing, but right now it feels like more of a fallback position to me.

I realize that there’s more to being a writer than just writing, but so far I’ve only had to deal with the writing (and revising and revising ad nauseum).  It’s taken a very, very long time for me to get to the point where I can write at a level where I feel like my work can get published, and even for the books I’ve written, there is still much work to do on them before I feel they’ll be of publishable quality.  Realizing that there is so much more to be done after that, before either book can see the light of day, is kind of intimidating.  I’ll put my head down and figure out how to do it well, and I hope I’m successful, but for all the hard work I’ve done already, it seems like the final goal marker is moving away faster than I can approach it.