Someone Made a Thing About a Thing That I Made and I am Rocked

Seriously... I barely have the words to articulate what this means to me. I haven't gone into a lot of detail about why writing Sixty-Six was such a painful experience for me, and why it's so tangled up with Maladaptive, but I'll just say that I never thought that it would find an audience who felt about it the way I did.

I started posting it on Inkitt to try and clear it out of my system and stop thinking about it as something I failed at because I never had the guts to share it. Writing Maladaptive gave me the guts, but I had zero expectations about it being seen or understood by even one reader.

But someone out there has found it, and they get it, and have even shared with me and the world, how it inspired them to make something, and I'm not just in shock, I'm in awe. Because that's the point, isn't it? To touch someone, even just one person, and inspire something in them.

I have a lot of thoughts and philosophies about art, creativity and inspiration and one day I'll share those ideas in a more detailed post. But for now, I just want to thank art_deco_moga for taking a chance on Sixty-Six and for feeling something about it, and for taking those feelings and creating something new and putting it out there. 

It's an act of courage for an artist to share what they made with the world, and my gratitude and appreciation are boundless. That might sound hyperbolic, but it's the truth.

Sixty-Six Fan Zine by art_deco_moga on Instagram - shared with their permission.

art_deco_moga - thank you for becoming part of the world of Sixty-Six, you're woven into it now. 

Also, for the record, zines in general are SO FREAKING COOL and I don't just love that they made a zine about my book, I love the art and their vision and interpretation of the story is so raw and evocative and colorful and their drawings make me swoon!

(Also for the record, the creator of this zine is a talented writer who is posting their own work on Inkitt. I am currently reading their book Moonstruck Dragonflies, which is beautifully written and told in an original style - for mature audiences only).

To really, really overstate it - this is probably the highest compliment I've ever been given as a writer slash artist slash creator. I'll be basking in this for a long time, and honestly, I think it has propelled me in a massive leap forward in my healing.

Post-Maladaptive Update

Honestly, I’m not sure what this blog post is really going to be about. My mind is all over the place. But I don’t want to just let tumbleweeds start blowing through this blog.

I’m experiencing post-Maladaptive depression, I guess. This always happens after I finish a project, and it’s the worst part of being someone who makes stuff like this. 

It feels so anticlimactic, and I just feel so lost and untethered. My head is still in that world, and I’m not ready for it to be over.

 The Inkitt Experiment

Posting it to Inkitt was sort of a validating experience, as people (well, a few) read and reacted to chapters, sometimes posted comments. It does help to make you feel like you’re not working in a vacuum, which was nice. But of course, when the book is finished and marked complete, the activity starts to wane.

The book was on the Recently Completed carousel for a little over a day before it got kicked off, as other authors finished their books, so there wasn’t much of a boost in activity. A few adds to reading lists, but that’s about it. I saw that happen with the Christmas Interlude, so I was kind of prepared for that. Still, I can’t help but be disappointed.

Posting a book in progress definitely created an addiction to the dopamine hit of reader reactions and comments and watching the page read numbers go up, but now that things have gone quiet, I feel a bit like I’m going crazy.

And I don’t know if it’s something to do with the book, or something else entirely, but all my readers seem to have vanished before even finishing the book. No reads of the last two chapters, which is also another thing that is driving me absolutely crazy. A couple of readers are so close to finishing it, but they just seem to have disappeared.

I realize that people have lives and work. But it does make me wonder if maybe there is something wrong with chapter 46. Why don’t people want to keep reading after that, with just two chapters left?

Sixty-Six

I’ve been trying to distract myself from spiraling about it by posting Sixty-Six. I’m not editing it, except for fixing any mistakes that I find, so it’s not as time-consuming or as immersive of a process as it was posting Maladaptive. I’ve officially posted the 30K words necessary to quality for the New Year, New Stories contest, not that I have any chance of winning it. The winners are chosen by reads, engagement, and overall popularity, and it’s not getting much attention at all.

But I’m not that down about it. It’s absolutely what I expected. Posting it is more of a clutter purge for me, and something to do in the interim. I’m just getting it out so I can stop tripping over it in my mind. That book won’t break me again. I’ve bounced too far back up from the bottom to let it affect me too much. Writing Maladaptive definitely helped me heal from the suffering that Sixty-Six caused me.

Self-Publishing Goals

Another thing I’ve been doing to keep my mind busy is taking the steps to self-publish, if/when I decide to do that. I can’t afford to hire an editor, and so I’ve decided that my 17 versions of the book and all the editing I did myself will have to suffice. That might be a terrible idea (I thought Sixty-Six was in immaculate condition the last time I looked at it, but now looking at it 8 years later, there are some errors I missed).

I did upload Maladaptive to some free versions of writing tools, like ProWritingAid, AutoCrit and Reedsy, just to see what kinds of errors it flags. There were a couple of things it caught, but for the most part it’s flagging word choices that I’m good with and don’t want to change.

The funniest thing was running the report on ProWritingAid that gives you developmental editing feedback. There were quite a few things it flagged, but the one that made me laugh was it calling out the “sudden appearance of monkeys” in the island survival sex scene. LOL. I mean, even the characters were surprised by the monkeys, that was kind of the point! It clearly didn’t understand the difference between the real world and the daydream world in the story, which made me not take the report too seriously. Call me optimistic, but I would like to think that human readers are better able to discern that.

I’ve also put in an order at GetCovers to have a more professional cover designed. That’s in progress, so we’ll see what comes out of that. It’s not terribly expensive, so it seemed like if I was going to spend any money at all, that was a good place to put it.

The ISBNs (print and e-book) have been obtained. Since they’re free in Canada and pretty much instantaneously assigned upon application, that was another thing I could do to prep for the possibility of self-publishing. I know that online self-publishing platforms will assign their own free ISBNs to books, but this way, if I decide to publish on more than one platform, all instances will be tied to one ISBN instead of there being multiple versions out there. It’s just tidier in my mind.

And I tried out Reedy’s formatting tool for print to see what that looks like and get a page count (needed for the cover design, so they know how wide to make the spine). How many print books have I read and I never noticed what the formatting actually looks like? When I saw what Reedsy did, I was like no no no no no, but then I opened up a physical novel to find out that yep, that’s exactly what it looks like.

Social Medi-ugh

I’ve also been thinking that if I’m going to do the self-publishing thing, that I have to get on top of the social media promotion/marketing thing. Which I despise. I did start an Instagram account a few months ago, but I honestly have no idea what to do with it. I’ve seen millions of Instagram posts and reels by other authors, and yet, I can’t seem to translate that over to what I need to do. I don’t know what works. Clearly what I’m already doing isn’t it.

So I’m thinking about other platforms. I signed up for a new reddit account so that any posts I make relating to Maladaptive won’t be tied to my existing account. I do want to try and keep myself separate from my author identity. I haven’t been too active on the new reddit account yet, probably because I have the same problem as the Instagram account of just not even knowing how to engage in a way that doesn’t seem self-promotional.

And Facebook. The most hated of all. But probably also one of the most necessary. I haven’t set up a Zinnia Sherwood Facebook page yet, but I think that’s probably something I need to do soon.

And YouTube. I was thinking about maybe doing video readings of snippets of the book, facelessly of course. Just hold the book up in front of my face or something. I don’t know if that’s something that works, but it would be something I could cross-post to the dreaded social media accounts, anyway. If I even decide to go through with the self-publishing thing.

I keep saying “if”, and yet I’m taking all the steps to get there. I guess I just want to get everything together and ready, even though I don’t feel brave enough yet to go through with it.

What happens to the free version on Inkitt? I don’t really want to take it down. I mean, it’s my book, I can do what I want as long as I don’t commit to an exclusive release platform like Kindle Unlimited. I’ll probably just leave it up for awhile, and then turn it into an excerpt eventually with a link to the official self-published version. I want to give readers on Inkitt a chance to find it first.

Maladaptive: Part 2?

Yeah, that’s something I’m still thinking about, too. I’d love to write a sequel, but I don’t want to end up rehashing all the same themes and tropes from the original. I have a vague idea how it could go. I probably just have to start writing it for those ideas to really form and click into place. I think once Sixty-Six is marked complete on Inkitt and I have all my self-publishing ducks in a row, that might be something I’ll do.

Having said that, if I start writing again, it’s going to make it very difficult for me to focus on building my social media presence, since that’s going to require like ALL of my effort and focus. And I’m not particularly interested in it, so I’m expecting a major ADHD task initiation hurdle there. Why can’t it just go viral without any effort at all like it did for Cara? Because her story is literally my maladaptive daydream? Right.

This Blog…

…might also get a bit of a redesign. I kind of like the idea of having the blog being named Maladaptive, since that’s the framework for the writing I’m doing now. But maybe it shouldn’t be only about that. It’s probably not a high priority, but it’s something I’m thinking about.

Maladaptive is Completed... Now What?

Well, after making some minor tweaks and updates, I’ve finally marked Maladaptive as Complete on Inkitt. Now for the emotional void that inevitably follows after finishing something. It always makes me wonder why I keep doing it, or more accurately, why I decided to start doing it again after deciding I wasn’t going to anymore. Just once I would like to feel something other than total emptiness upon finishing a project. Like, I don’t know, satisfaction would be nice.

I kind of thought I would write a wrap-up post about the book, about the characters, the themes, etc. as I’ve been doing throughout the process of releasing the chapters, but I’m at a loss for what to say. I think I wasn’t ready for it to be over, but at the same time, I’m also a little bit tired of thinking about it. I hate this headspace.

I hate it so much that I actually already started posting a new story. Well, not exactly a new story. Another story. The story that broke me and made me actively decide to quit writing/creating, back in 2018. Eight years ago. That seems so long ago now.

That story, my first attempt at a full-length novel, is called Sixty-Six.

 

If that sounds familiar, it’s because that’s the name of Cara’s manuscript/web series project in Maladaptive. I kind of gave it to her, as a way to symbolically release it into the world through another entity, I guess. She needed a project, I had an unpublished manuscript… it just made sense to make it hers.

The world has changed since I wrote Sixty-Six though. It’s set in the not-too-distant future (2066) and back in 2018, I had made 2020 a pivotal year in the story’s history. I couldn’t have known that it would become a pivotal year in actual history, for completely different reasons.

Anyway, to distract myself from feeling so meh about finishing Maladaptive, I decided I would dig up Sixty-Six and start posting it on Inkitt. I’m entering it into the New Year, New Story contest, even though technically it’s not new. It’s never been published, so it’s new to Inkitt, and I think that qualifies it.

I’ve had to change a few things, like the references to 2020, for instance. And a scene early on between a teenage couple trying out consensual choking on each other that I didn’t remember as being so shocking. It’s kind of important to the story though, so I’ve toned it down a little and added a trigger warning. But other than that, I’m not bothering to edit the rest of the story. It is what it is.

And honestly, it’s not really about this particular story. It’s too subjective, and never really had a shot at being anything other than a self-indulgent personal struggle project. But since it does now have a connection to Maladaptive, which I’m not ready to move on from, it's kind of part of that world. If Sixty-Six, which never had a chance, could keep Maladaptive breathing, that could maybe at least give it a purpose, and make me feel like the effort was worth it.

That’s not to say there aren’t things about Sixty-Six that I don’t love. What an odd way to say that there are things about it that I absolutely love. There are some characters who are dear to me (Vincent, especially), and the central idea of the young and the old coming together to save music from the clutches of corporate commercialism and give it back to the people through a revolutionary concert is something that I still think is really… something. I really wanted someone else to write it, you know? I wanted to consume it, not bear the responsibility of putting it out into the world. And now here I am… doing it anyway.

I will say, that the idea I mentioned in my last blog post of a Maladaptive sequel, that idea hasn’t fizzled. I think I might want to do that. I don’t have a plot yet. But I’m not ready to let that world go, even if I’m putting it on hold for a bit to try and purge Sixty-Six from my system, yet again (the first purge being, fine, dammit, I’ll write the stupid thing so the idea can stop screaming at me).

The other thing I’m thinking about is… maybe publishing Maladaptive to another platform. Maybe Amazon. That feels pretty overwhelming. I need to format for epub/print on demand, either learn to do it myself or pay for a service to do it. I’d need to get a more professional cover made. I probably need to hire an editor. But I definitely don’t have the money to pay for any of those.

Having gone into debt and never recovering expenses for past self-publishing ventures, I’m reluctant to go down that road again. Still, the idea of listing it on Amazon is alluring. But then there is the marketing side of things. Getting ARC reviews. Building a mailing list. I don’t even know where or how to start. And I’ve given up on Instagram. I have no idea how to make that work.

How awesome would it be if Cara’s viral, no-marketing strategy marketing strategy could magically work for me in the real world? LOL.

I apologize if this post is a mess. I just don’t know what to do with myself. I don’t plan on doing a play-by-play discussion of Sixty-Six chapters as I’m posting them. I’m just trying to hit the 30K word milestone to qualify for the contest entry by February 28. Given that it’s already written and I’m not planning on editing it, I’m just going to post multiple chapters a day until I qualify. Maybe I’ll even post the entire book by the end of the month. I’m not trying to draw this out and make it a thing. Like I said, it’s serving an entirely different purpose from its original intent.

Maybe the best headspace I can put myself into for now is to think of Sixty-Six as actually belonging to Cara. She and I have the same pen name, after all. So maybe it’s not “me” publishing it. It’s Cara. Styles did give it back to her. So what if this is Cara publishing her first attempt at a novel as a follow up to her book, Maladaptive. That feels kind of fun, and keeps me grounded in that world.

It really is all about perspective. Crazy.