When I started blogging I promised myself three things in this order:

1. No blogging about my cats.
2. No blogging about my personal life.
3. No blogging about writing.

We all know how that turned out.

So I’ve decided that I might as well go over the final line and talk a bit about writing. But, it makes me deeply uneasy to do so. There’s few things more awful and ridiculous than Z list writers talking about writing. It’s on par with a photographer taking pictures of cameras. The only writing blog I ever liked was Melly’s and she quit doing it. She was off topic a lot of the time anyway. And one thing I’m not going to do is give advice. Anyone could be as successful at writing as me. Most people are. Writers or not.

But I’m expecting another rejection note sometime soon. It’ll be for an ultra-violent science fiction novel that I wrote a couple of years ago. (The pace of editors dealing with slush piles could best be described as glacial.) The book has already been rejected twice. Both times with a personal touch, which you start appreciating after building a stack of form letters.

Once it was rejected because the incredible levels of violence made it impossible to sell to schools or libraries. The other time it received a few compliments on the characters and ideas but wasn’t what they were looking for. Whatever that means.

I don’t really care about publishing, funny enough. I write because I love the process. The only reason I try to get any of it published is for the money. I might as well send the stuff out because I have nothing to lose. I write anyway and will continue to do so, so I might as well try to get paid. There’s no harm in it.

But I’d be lying if I said that rejection letters didn’t bum me out. Especially for this particular book. I think it’s really good and I certainly don’t feel that way about everything that I write. You see that picture up top; Jeff Lemire* drew that – and a few others – for me after he read it. It’s a good picture and it’s a good book. I’ve acquired blurbs for it from two really good, well known writers, Robert J. Sawyer and Minister Faust, which are on my MySpace page, but no one will buy the damn thing.

Failure is bad enough but failing when you’ve done the best that you can is horrible. At least I count the book itself as a success. I just think it deserves a place in published science fiction. Until it gets there, I think that it and the genre are being ripped off. I like both too much to think that’s acceptable. That’s likely arrogant but it’s how I feel.

And I must be a special kind of moron. The novel I’m working on now is even more violent – though I think it’s also much better. But who in their right mind gets rejected for violence and then decides that they didn’t have enough pedophilia in the last one? Me, I guess. I must be fucking stupid or something.

*I reviewed Jeff’s new graphic novel over at BlogTO. It is an amazing book and I’m not saying that to be friendly. I’m not a kiss-ass and I don’t associate with people I don’t respect. His work is just that bloody excellent. If you like graphic novels at all, you should buy it. I give it the Grumpy Guarantee of Quality. That means, if you don’t like it, you’re still out the cash but you’re also totally insane.