Migration
Autumn is my time of year and October my favorite month. It’s always meant change for me. I’ve often talked of it in migratory terms. The sound of geese and sandhill cranes gathering in flocks to head south – like their return in spring – seems to mark most of the major changes in my life. I once looked at my job history and realized I had changed almost every single job during either the spring or fall migration. It’s like some instinct from ancient DNA said you need to move on, sustain yourself, feed your intellect. I submitted Black River to an open call in fall last year. I left my full-time job to focus on my health last spring. It’s fall again and here I’m working on that transition from “writer” to author, learning new ropes as I realize everything I learned about publishing has changed in the last decade or so.
I’ve always been a writer. I think the things that have scared me most in my life are when some medicine (my response to anesthesia, for example) or trauma silenced that inner voice and creative commentary as I narrate my experience with the world. I didn’t write for a long time – other than academic writing which was like its own assassin of creativity – but that narrator had to escape. It came out in random song lyrics (quickly forgotten) or blank verse or hand-written thoughts that pile up as a collection of ideas that had to escape like too much popcorn in a bowl, paper scraps and sticky notes that will eventually be recycled and lost forever.
Publishing has changed, radically. As a journalist I see it most profoundly in the death of newspapers and the narrowing of content to AI-generated blurbs and aggregation sites that pull from fewer and fewer original sources, stifling our knowledge of the world. Algorithms force us to more and more channels that merely echo our interests and sources of perspective. Local journalism suffers the most. That’s where democracy lives: in knowing how our local boards and councils decide to spend our taxes or fix our roads or take no action at all. As those papers consolidate, we lose touch with what happens in our communities. We’re inundated with more and more noise, but less and less content. It’s easy to see how we start to become cynical, lose trust and fall prey to falsehoods and conspiracy theories.
Fiction, too, has changed. Many decried the gatekeepers who determined what was marketable, which characters would have a life beyond the phosphors within our computers. Someone, at least, could weed out the truly bad writing. But at the same time, worthy but perhaps less “marketable” also failed to make it. Or authors found consolidated publishers no longer supporting their books. Reading itself has changed. When I took my break from writing to do Life™ eBooks were in their infancy. Self-published work was vanity material and there were reasons it hadn’t made it through conventional publishing. Back then, publishers even marketed the books for their authors.
Everything has changed and as I enter the fall migration season I’m again working on sustaining – on trying to relearn this publishing world, struggling to figure out this concept of self-marketing (I have really never been comfortable selling myself – it feels icky). It took just one publisher to say yes to open a door to again reopening the creative vein. It’s time to take wing.
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