But life has a way of disappointing you into a place where you revisit your dreams.
Congratulations, Me! I’m embarking on my self-publishing journey again. Just as a little refresher, I wrote a rather long short story over 20 years ago that I hoped to get published in The New Yorker but was rejected. That rejection was so disappointing and discouraging that I was pretty much scared off of trying again. That is until recently. At the end of 2023, I finally took some action towards an idea I’d been ruminating over for many years – self-publishing my long short story as a short book called a novella.
One of the things that made self-publishing more attractive to me than trying to go the traditional route was that I assumed I would experience less rejection since I was paying for the whole thing myself, but I assumed wrong. People didn’t have to accept the job of editing or creating the cover art for my book. They still had the power to tell me no, and tell me no so many of them did.
Going through this whole process of not only finding someone to hire who’s work I liked, but also someone who liked my work back enough to want to take it on and within my budget became a more daunting and time-consuming task than I ever imagined. By May of 2024 I’d hired two people – an editor, whose sample edit was amazing, but whose full edit turned out to be lackluster, and a book cover artist/designer who I ended up having to let go after just one meeting. By the end of 2024 I ran out of money.
The entirety of 2025 I had no money to pursue this again, so I just laid low. I didn’t bother looking at the story again. Then I had the thought that at least I could do the edit – that doesn’t cost anything. Over a year later, I finally revisited the story and tried to edit it, only to find myself thoroughly sick of it. Try as I may…well, I didn’t try too hard, I just couldn’t do it.
But life has a way of disappointing you into a place where you revisit your dreams. I’d gotten to such an unfulfilling place that I figured if I can put up with this shit, surely I can go back to my story, no matter how sick of it I thought I was. And, so, that’s what I did.
While I still don’t have the money for an editor right now, I can resume editing for free while I save for an editor in the meantime. The bookmark in MS Word was still there when I opened the story again. I simply picked up where I left off almost two years ago. It was on page 16 back then, and in just two days I have already made it to page 30. The total manuscript is 97 pages which will be about 120 pages in book form. I figure at this rate, I just might finish my first pass in a week.
You know what? I think I’m going to make that my goal – finish the first pass by Saturday February 7, 2026.
I’ll report back then.
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