I have created a page to include all my publications and other writing successes. I always keep my resume updated with my professional publications, but I also want a place to include my creative publications.

My success as a writer has been fairly modest. My poetry publications have been appeared in very small literary magazines. The copy of Superior Poetry News, in which my poem “Fair Warning” appears, is photocopied pages stapled together with a construction paper cover on which the title is handwritten. So, yes, rather modest. But success, nonetheless.

My short story, “Drunk Monkeys,” received an honorable mention in a Writer’s Digest contest. Me and 100 other people. Not the most exclusive of awards, but I’ll take it.

Of course, I am hoping to build on this modest success, so we’ll see what happens. I would like to post more here about my writing thoughts and projects as I have sporadically in the past. We’ll see what happens with that as well.

The NY Times ran an interesting article on how some self-published books found their way into local libraries. Local patrons were asking librarians for a certain kind of urban fiction that the libraries were not carrying. The books were self-published and sold on street corners, so the librarians bought copies from the street vendors to add to their collections.

I mentioned in my initial post that I wanted to say more about my issues with the publishing industry and my decision to publish my creative work (which, I promise, is forthcoming). To say I have “issues” with the publishing industry sounds more negative than I intend. As I also mentioned, I recognize the reality of the business end of the publishing world and realize that the main criteria for getting published is having a book that will sell.

Part of this reality is that getting published is very difficult. Very few people (relative to the number who write) get published and only a small fraction of those people sustain an independent writing career. Because supply exceeds demand, the process of getting published becomes rather tedious. It’s akin to getting a degree and looking for a job: you can’t get a job without experience and you can’t get experience without a job. Which is to say, the best way to convince someone that your work is publishable is to be published.

The process, as I see it, is:

• get stories published in genre/literary magazines
• write a novel/collection of stories
• try to convince an agent with a 1 page letter and 1 page synopsis that your work is salable (not necessarily that it is “good”), doing this 1 agent at a time
• hope those 2 scant documents are enough to convince him or her to ask for pages
• hope that the agent thinks he or she can make a buck off your work
• wait for agent to submit to publisher
• maybe get published, maybe not. If not, start process again with 1 other agent.

I don’t mean this as a harsh criticism, only as an explanation of what I perceive to be the realities of the process. And a slow process at that. Your manuscript can get tied up in this process for years.

And the bottleneck starts right at the beginning. Literary magazines are awash in manuscripts. They can get hundreds of manuscripts a month and may, perhaps, publish a dozen or two a year. The math ain’t pretty.

Which has me exploring options. As I mentioned before, self-publishing has a bad reputation. Those writers I referred to with lousy queries to Query Shark? They may get frustrated and self-publish, and there’s no one to stop them. Being a terrible writer is extremely easy and self-publishing is becoming cheaper and cheaper. How is a serious reader able to wade through all the self-published junk to find the occasional gem? What incentive do they even have to do so, what with the plethora of great books already in libraries and bookstores? With some exceptions, self-published books are not vetted through the same review process as traditionally published books. Self-published writers are left with self-promotion and word of mouth. Luckily, we’re at a point now where word of mouth (in the form of Web 2.0 technologies) carries some weight.

What writers can do now (as I am attempting to do) is to put their writing out on the web and see what happens. At a certain point in one’s life, the perceived benefits of getting published are outweighed by the tediousness and uncertainties of the process. Blogs allow for feedback, making this form of “publishing” not so much publishing but a thinking out loud, a conversation of the work at hand. And, yes, it is a self-marketing tool as well. But, for me, the discussion is the most important thing. If nothing else happens, I’ve lost nothing and may received helpful feedback that will enrich my writing experience.

I started my first blog, In the Realm of PN1997, in April 2005, mainly to chronicle my experience at the Philadelphia Film Festival (back when I lived in Philadelphia). I kept up with it for 5 whole months before I stopped posting. It was my first attempt at a blog, and, as it seems, it met the same lonely fate as a lot of first blogs.

But my interest in blogging was not dead. In March 2006, I took a pre-conference workshop at Computers in Libraries (I should mention, for those who don’t already know, that I am a librarian. The aforementioned PN1997 is a reference to the Library of Congress call number for films). Being a librarian means that I spend way too much time trying out new web gizmos and that I also spend a disproportionate amount of time thinking and talking about them.

In preparation for this workshop, I decided to start a new blog in order to play around with some of the things I learned. That blog, Tombrarian (originally here), has been going strong, more or less, ever since and has made me quasi-famous in certain library circles.

For a long time, Tombrarian served as both my professional and personal blog. Recently, I made the decision to split these two aspects of Tombrarian and created Being and Formulating as my personal blog. I intended that blog to be a place where I could reflect more thoughtfully about things going on in my life (as the title suggests), but it turned into a place where I posted pictures from vacations and pictures of our pets. For whatever reason, I quickly lost enthusiasm for it. I also had a very short-lived blog about our move to Las Vegas, but I got too busy with the actual moving to keep up with it. I know having a blog wither and die on the web happens for a lot of people which is why I’m going into some detail here about my rationale for started yet another blog.

I say that Being and Formulating whithered for “whatever reason.” Actually, I think I know the reason. I have always avoided blogging about one important facet of my life and that is the part dedicated to writing. One reason I have excluded this topic from my blogs is that I have (or had) some desire to become a professional, published writer, and I always thought that putting my work on a website would undermine my chances of getting published through traditional channels. “Self-publishing” is often looked down on, and once something is “published,” even on a website, getting it “published” elsewhere becomes difficult. As you can see by my use of quotation marks, I have some ideas about what getting published means, especially in light of the ease with which one can now self-publish. I intend to speak more to this in future posts.

Another reason why I hesitated to reveal my writing life on the web is my shyness about it and my natural inclination against shameless self-promotion. I write mainly out of some strange compulsion and for my own self-enjoyment. Any desire to publish is, in a way, merely an afterthought. In fact, I often question my desire to publish. I’ve been writing since I was about 15, so after so many years of this being a personal endeavor, I guess something else should happen. Something needs to change. If my work is not a good fit for the traditional published world (or if I’m just too lazy to navigate it), maybe there is another way to share it for someone else’s enjoyment as well.

I also have been hesitant to share because I’ve known too many writers who over-share. And this ties in a bit with self-promotion. I’ve known writers who talk a lot about being writers but who are unaware of their own limitations. In other words, they stink. I never wanted to be one of those people who go on and on about being a writer without having anything to show for it. Writers often over-estimate their skills. A look at a site like Query Shark reinforces this notion. At this site, you can read drafts of agent queries that run the spectrum of quality. Some people have really bad ideas and can barely form a sentence, yet they have written novels that they think are publishable.

Based on some of the queries the author of the site and her commentators like, I get the sense that the kind of things I write may not be a good fit for traditional avenues of publication. I’m not getting this idea solely from this site but from years of paying attention to the publishing industry.

I don’t mean to suggest that the things I write are in any way so radical that they defy conventional standards. I don’t fancy myself this daring and misunderstood writer. As I have gotten older and have come to understand more about the publishing world, I’ve realized that it is very much a business, which isn’t meant to suggest there are not agents, editors, and publishers who are devoted more to quality than to the dollar. The reality of the publishing world is that if books don’t sell, even the most noble of these people will be out on the street. What I mean to say by this explanation is that the type of things I write are not easily marketable. They are not particularly literary nor do they fall neatly into a specific genre. Again, I don’t want to give the impression that I think I’m doing anything special here, just that my style isn’t market-ready. Or, perhaps, I just stink and don’t know it. Hopefully, the feedback I get via this blog will help me figure all this out.

Which is why, now that I’ve finally decided to do something with my writing, a blog feels like the ideal venue. I don’t want to put my writing on the web merely for vanity’s sake. A blog allows this endeavor to be a conversation, and I am hoping people will be interested enough to engage me in this discussion, not only about my own writing, but also about writing in general, about creativity, about the publishing world, and about whatever topics that are tangentially related.