I’m a month into having released my first self-published space opera/space western book The Harbinger, and boy, has it been an adventure!
I first sat down to write the story in 2013. As a professional mariner, I found myself with a lot of time on my hands (both out at sea and during the months I wasn’t working). I got 60 pages into my first iteration when, to my chagrin, the hard drive on my POS computer decided to crash. Had I backed up any of my work? Well… no. (A lot of mistakes were make during this process, let me tell you).
Losing my work sucked, of course, but I wasn’t totally convinced of the direction I was heading. I just sort of sat down one day and started writing, interested to see where the ramblings of a modestly-educated mariner could take me. This was an opportunity for a fresh start. Anyway, I re-started from scratch, forging ahead in a newish direction.
Another 40 or so pages in… THE SAME GODDAMN THING HAPPENED AGAIN. Clearly, I hadn’t learned my lesson (I’m stubborn that way… or stupid. Yeah, I think the word I’m looking for is stupid). I threw up my hands, cursed the universe for apparently not wanting me to write a book, and pouted for the next year and a half.
After having sufficiently forgotten the anguish to which I’d subjected myself, I blasted off once again in 2015. A friend from school helped motivate me while we were at work, away from our home and our wives with nothing but a crew of smelly mariners for company. I plugged along slowly, conjuring ideas, rewriting chapters and perspectives, and tossing out ones that didn’t hold up (I swear I wrote the book 2 or 3 different times if you add up all the abandoned material).
Then, while in quarantine for COVID in 2020 and awaiting the birth of my child, I finally had a finished manuscript in hand. Now to be honest, I was pretty lackadaisical with my writing. It was definitely more of a hobby than a job, and I mostly wanted to go climb and ski and mountain bike when I was off the ship. But during the times I was motivated to write, I would crank out words like a madman. After finishing the manuscript and editing 17,000 times and endlessly agonizing over the minutiae, I started submitting to traditional publishers.
Had I been smart, I would’ve done this before the 2020 book-writing explosion. But let’s be honest… it probably wouldn’t have mattered much. I spent the next 3 years getting rejection letters and, more often than not, receiving no response. Finally, I got fed up with the whole process and decided to self publish, which let me tell you, has been a rollercoaster in its own right.
For how many times I’d been over the manuscript (along with the number of other people I’d submitted it to), I was baffled by the number of errors I kept finding. At times, it felt like the first round of edits. Stupid spelling errors, dropped letters and words, incorrect margins… I was pulling my hair out wondering if I would ever get The Harbinger to publication. The number of times I had to resubmit to the printing platform was staggering… I guarantee I am on some kind of blacklist. (Ominous right?)
But when that first printed copy showed up on my doorstep, and I held it in my hands, I finally felt a sense of completion. It was an intoxicating moment and one that made all the heartbreak and tears worth it. After years of giddy highs and bitter lows, the thing that I had spent so much time and energy tweaking and perfecting (though far from perfect) was done.
Well… except for all the abhorrent marketing crap, but that’s a different story.
H.K. Farrell 