Ten months ago, I made a pledge to have a draft of my BDSM history book done, even if it was a rough draft, and start sending it to publishers, by my 40th birthday, on October 27th.
I have not completed that. In fact, I am about where I was when I made that pledge.
Various excuses/reasons:
- Prolonged unemployment, with a lot of my time and energy going to job search.
- Concern about the health of certain members of my family.
- Depression, related to the above issues.
- Another large scale writing project, which seems to have stalled out.
- The interest from an editor, who prompted me to seriously rethink this project from the ground up and hopefully recreate it in a new, more commercially viable form.
- Learning that the aforementioned editor has just lost her job, part of a major disruption in the entire publishing industry.
On the upside, I have transitioned this blog to a new and better website, with vastly increased traffic (over 13,000 unique visitors in September, mostly from Reddit).
Where does this leave the future of this project? I will continue blogging. However, getting a steady income from one source or another has to come first. I would like to say that once that is in place, I can devote some energy to the book.
I’m also considering self-publishing some of my material as ebooks via Amazon/Smashwords/et al, mainly for publicity, not revenue. I’m actually somewhat discouraged by the thought of having to go through all the struggle with agents and publishers and maybe not getting anything for it.
Nonetheless, I still believe in this project. I believe this is a story that no one has told before, and needs to be told. If you think of all the things human beings do as a tree, this is one twisted little branch of it, but to me it is an interesting and even beautiful little branch.
