Yes, Michael. I've been pitching one for two years now. I haven't given up. But I likely will have to self-publish because what I've written is true to its time, its protagonist, who, by the way, is white and male, and true to human nature, as it was engineered.
When I go to press, I will let everyone know. Maybe someone on here will buy a copy.
I’m not white or a man lol but I don’t have a problem with reading older literature by white men. I’m not the prince of Denmark but Hamlet’s emotions are still relatable. This type of literature is just well-written and captures universal emotions, which is why it is still read after hundreds of years and in translations in other languages all over the world. Because people in many cultures and time periods find meaning in it. It doesn’t matter what the race or gender of an author or protagonist is, and I do read “diverse” books not just ones by white men. But I read them simply because they are good. They just happen to be by “diverse” authors. MFA writers may think a book isn’t doing well just because it’s about women or gay or nonwhite people but it’s actually because it’s just badly written. Improve the writing and people will read it no matter what the identities of the characters are.
I've been writing one too - I've actually finished it, and done a couple rounds of editing, and I don't know where to even begin with the whole publishing process because the more I read horror stories like these, the more intimidated I get. But I'm glad there's enough of us out there!
Not old or white but I would love to hear more about your story. As a literature lover I read across a variety of topics and genres. Will follow your stack for your announcement. :)
Thanks for asking. I would call it Mainstream Literary. Sometimes I call it 'aspires-to-literary.' Some might call it autofiction (which I note the MFA cult now looks down upon). I would call it 'fictionalized memoir.' It is highly realistic with an engaging, but not smarmy or pretentious POV character.
I’ve written these novels and even Kirkus has blurbed them well: “a profound examination of violence in the 21st century,” they said of my mass shooting entry. I thought I’d garner a decent male audience but getting people to read novels is impossible. There is something else at work here, not a conspiracy of ideological conformity (because our self-published books are available) but a resistance in readers themselves. I have it too.
I self published a novel that is partly about male isolation and the struggle to achieve something in a world that seems indifferent, white male middle aged protagonist. Literary fiction, no MFA in sight (I loath the concept). You can imagine how successful I was with literary agents.
I teach high school literature and the (handful of) boys that elect to take the class literally BEG for novels where the male lead isn't always an abusive/murderous/manipulating psychopath. And the sad part? It's surprisingly difficult to find relatable modern literature that fits that request. Those books are out there, to be fair, but they're hard to find and even harder to get those books into schools.
“MFA Slop” is the perfect descriptor. A few years ago, I decided to not read any authors with MFA in their bio. Simply pick up a book and you see those three letters, put it back down.
I found this essay genuinely thought-provoking, especially your critique of how MFA workshops can flatten risk and discourage genre, history, and bolder narrative engines. That dynamic is real, and many writers internalize “safe” aesthetics very early.
One place I found myself diverging, though, is in the way the discussion keeps circling prose style rather than reader experience. In my own MFA program, enormous emphasis was placed on sentence-level craft and psychological realism, but almost none on story structure; how attention works over time, how patience is earned, and how expectations are set.
As a reader now (and a former workshop veteran), I’ve noticed that my tolerance for digression hasn’t vanished—but it’s become elastic. I’ll follow long stretches of interiority or exposition if I trust the narrative will snap back into pressure, consequence, or movement. When that trust isn’t established early, it’s less about ideology or aesthetic cowardice and more about attentional fatigue in a very crowded media environment.
That’s why some contemporary novels with “clean” prose still feel alive to me: not because they’re tidy, but because they smuggle complexity, irony, and moral weight inside approachable structures, sometimes even borrowing from genre (romance, crime, suspense) as an engine. The sophistication isn’t abandoned; it’s delivered.
I appreciate your defense of literary ambition and tradition, and I agree that workshops and publishing incentives can narrow taste. I find myself wondering whether the real question isn’t prose style so much as how much responsibility a writer takes for orienting and sustaining a reader’s attention, especially in a market now competing with genres like romantasy.
Thanks for the essay; it gave me a lot to think about.
Leah this comment is so articulate, I feel like you should turn it into an essay. I agree with your views, by the way, but I might have been convinced if I hadn’t agreed with you already simply because you write so specifically and convincingly.
The death of reading and the death of publishing go hand-in-hand. The solve is not likely to happen inside institutions – by which I mean the overly consolidated publishing industry, and the education industrial complex, where a young person can spend 16 years in school and never read a book. The solve has to be grassroots, and ground up. It has to start in homes, with parents modeling and encouraging reading in children. It has to get traction in social reading – by which I mean lone wolf individual readers, which most readers are, coming together to read together, either in person or online. Substack is a beautiful place for that. The co-reading that happens here, hosted by amazing people like Simon Haisell, not to mention the potential to reinvent the kind of serial publication that made the novel the dominant art form of the nineteenth century, are, I hope and believe, signs of a quiet revolution that is no less urgent for being peaceful.
Why aren't young people reading? I blame the teachers. Yes, the teachers, along with the; MFA crap pushers. You have to wipe the slate clean so that you can imbue the youth with the shiny new ideas. I blame teachers and teachers' unions.
The admins who choose the curricula are not making kids read whole books either because "they don't have to read a whole book on the standardized test". Both Jared Henderson and Dissident Teacher (who are here on Substack) have written in more detail about this.
Kids are actually showing up in college who can't read a whole book. They can't hold the characters and various subplots for long enough. It's because they've never been made to read an entire book.
Interesting. Yes, because we have to learn how to read. And that's a process, starting with Dick and Jane, and proceeding to Magic Mountain. Good point!
Excellent piece! Thank you so much for this! I am myself a writer unattached to the MFA industry and I had to immigrate for the second time in my life--I left America because I had become unpublishable. And unfortunately, the publishing industry was not destroyed by money-driven capitalists, as American academics would want us believe, but rather by them and their uncreative, unintelligent, unoriginal vision of "writing". A "writing" uprooted from any tradition and from life itself.
Alright, I’ll start this response off by saying Happy MLK Day, Liza! Also, please ignore Echo Tracer’s very rude and profanity-laced comment with no point to it. You are 1000% right. The publishing industry is gradually dying precisely because everything about books has become uniform and sterile. The publishing industry has only a few big publishers which is a monopoly and monopolies are never good in a capitalist society. All books have basically the same recycled plot, all are written in the same style, all have similar types of characters with noting distinct or interesting about them, all have similar ugly modern art designs on the cover, and all are so dumbed down a third grader could understand them. No thinking required with modern mainstream literature. No author is allowed to be unique. When you wrote Blue Snow ❄️ you did all you could to slowly build up to the protagonist’s main conflict. You sought to tease it out and leave people guessing what it could be.
This by the way, is how someone with mental health issues would talk to their therapist in real life. That’s how us humans talk you know, we get distracted, go off on tangents, don’t get to the point, take time to explain things, need space to think things through and talk things out, etc. It also makes the story much more intriguing and gets you interested in finding out what happens next. But literary agents complained it was too long, not clear enough and that they couldn’t follow it. Probably because they have the attention span of a Goldfish. So you had to rewrite the whole thing from scratch and start all over again.
When it was more in line with what for them, fit the mold of a great novel then all of a sudden a literary agent was begging for you send them their manuscript. That is just absolutely pathetic! Hey guys! The whole point of literature is to give people complex stories that make them think and view life differently. Why shouldn’t the industry showcase different styles of writing, tone and storytelling? Most people do want complex, interesting stories! Which is why you aren’t making any money off the garbage you’re selling now. You are actively shooting yourself in the foot by publishing generic trash. Books like Where the Crawdads Sing, The Fault in Our Stars, Twilight, Fifty Shades of Gray, The Hate U Give, The Underground Railroad, and American Dirt suck because they utilize concepts that we’ve all seen in novels a hundred times.
They are literally just a carbon copy of something that came before. MFA has indeed ruined everything. Outside of small MFA circles, who reads this garbage? No one. You wanna know why Lost Paradise, Romeo and Juliet, Moby Dick, The Great Gatsby, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Sherlock Holmes stories, A Farewell to Arms, The Grapes of Wrath, Frankenstein, Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1984, The Master and the Margarita, Crime and Punishment, All Quiet on the Western Front, and War and Peace are still widely read today and no one will remember trash like The Hunger Games series or Normal People? Because the former all have characteristics that make them special and thoughtful ingenious really, stories with universal overarching narratives we can all relate to and important moral lessons we can all benefit from. You wanna start earning money again Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster? Then take risks! Take a gamble on a book like The Lilac Room, The Leverkuhn Quartet or Blue Snow!
Having taught MFA for 25+ years and having heard this complaint many times I do not find it convincing,
my students had a wide array of styles and aesthetics, including digressive, expansive work
A more authentic charge is when the writer becomes so invested in craft the work lacks heart, or soul if you prefer
- work that does not matter
I will agree that big digressive novels don’t sell like they used to, but that’s a cultural trend because reading has been devalued and current generations have been trained by media.
They don’t want a lot of words, they want you to get to the point and move on, and that will be even more so for future generations of readers.
I also agree that the industry has consolidated itself and commercial work is valued over literary work
I have not sold a work to the industry in so long that it embarrasses me to tell you
But I don’t sit around, whining about how unfair it is, I am a writer and the literary life has always been a hard row to hoe
Friend of mine once said if it was easy, everybody would go down the street and get some
I don’t sit around whining when it comes to time to pay the freight for being a stylist
I’m the one chose to be a stylist and if I had to start over again, I’d make the same choices,
It's not just writers who are demoralized by the state of publishing. I have friends and colleagues—editors, agents, publicists, et al.—who are also demoralized. As an foresight-ing editor friend of mine said 15 years ago, "I will reach retirement age at a publishing nadir and I'll be happy to get out."
This is spot on Liza. I had so many “suggestions” for my novel Time Enough: “you can’t have two protagonists;” “too many characters,” “use AI book cover” (mine is by a fine artist) and the list went on! I finally found a small US publisher Oprelle, who said, “You had me at hello.” I find I can’t even read most of the so-called award-winning books! I wrote a book I’d want to read. I agree with everything you said, and my sales, mostly in person, confirm it!
I am just not so sure if this is the issue, not sure that people are just learning a new taste. I think the greater problem is that people do not live their own lives anymore. Young people live vicariously through other people because of the internet and the little of their lives they do live, it is still processed to a sterile state for social media. MFA or not, it doesn't change the fact that we cannot write well what we do not understand in depth. "We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others, that in the end, we become disguised to ourselves." — François de La Rochefoucauld
That quote is priceless. It definitely sums up the world we're living in. And as someone who worked full-time as a sportswriter under my real name until recently for a large global corporation, I doubt most people realize just how accustomed to disguise so many people are. I felt like I was working for a cult half the time of painted smiles and scripted language. I'm so glad that I left.
Oh shut the fuck up, how many books about WW2 exist? How many detective novels?
Like for fucks sake, would I read any of this shit? No. But the mainstream is always crap, you just loved it when it was your flavour of crap because at heart you don’t have any fucking taste, just a victim complex.
You were never entitled to succeed and you probably don’t deserve to. I’m not gonna read the shit of a midwit who’s mad that other midwits are getting published, none of you are worth reading.
This reminds me of how architects keep pushing big white boxes without any soul onto us to live in.
I once lived in an appartement building and met any of my neighbours on a random chance maybe once per year. There was no depth to the interaction created inherently in this space. And when I ask architects about this they imply it looks good on the rendering at least.
In the current modern, western, world there is no room for frivolities. Everything needs to be efficient, and efficiency is soulless. In my own house I'm now espousing cluttercore as an aesthetic.
As a reader I'm focusing my attention more and more on books that are not mainstream in order to widen my perspective and see the whole forest and not just my side of it.
Good luck publishing your book! After recently 'reading' (the arduousness of the book makes me put it into quotations) Notes from Underground I'm looking forward to pick up yours!
True say. No way can I read all the books I want to read from 19th and 20th century before I die. And I keep finding more obscure books n'all. I'm into Gustav Meyrink's work at the moment.
One reason I refuse to submit my work anywhere and just publish independently instead is that I break all the rules. Genre-fusion, tossing tropes I don't like, keeping tropes that I like, and even borrowing tropes from other genres that I don't fuse together highlight my work.
My intuition also tells me how to write. Sometimes, it's minimalist, but most of the time, I dig deeper, highlighting my works' themes and putting them front and center. The absolute last thing I want, though, is for my work to sound soulless. And if that's what the publishing industry wants, I'll refrain from submitting until it comes to its senses.
As a side note: Under my real name, I used to work full-time as a tabloid sportswriter, and I encountered the same issues. My directors would sanitize my voice until it was basically their work with my byline. I felt like I was writing for them as opposed to writing for sports fans. After a few months of that nonsense, I said, "I'm outta here."
I wasn't about to let anyone else water down my writing. At the end of the day, it's their loss, not mine.
That’s a good question, Noor. For me, so far, it’s yes and no. I don’t necessarily write about my experiences, though I do write about why I like to break rules and things like that.
It hasn’t made me anywhere near a full-time living, so in that context, it’s a no. But I have also limited myself to selling e-books priced between 0.99 and $2.99 at my own Payhip store. That said, I have had a career as a writer, making full-time income since Aug. 2020.
As for a readership, I have experienced a lot of positives. My engagement is high in my weekly emails, with open rates between 45 and 50 percent across a readership of about 1,750 subscribers through MailerLite.
I have also seen readers on my list become repeat buyers of my work, so that’s another positive. For 2026, I’m expanding into physical copies through Lulu (I tried this with one book already and the quality of those physical copies is top-notch as opposed to KDP). Also, I’ll be expanding into audio, plus serial fiction right here on Substack.
So, 2026 is definitely the “testing year” to measure true financial success once I have different cash flows, incentives (buy my next book, get a complimentary 10,000-word companion story), and bundles.
I’m definitely excited to see where it takes me. Overall, I would call it a slow burn, but one that has netted quite a few positives.
Exactly. Jesus: Can we finally get some novels that represent real people? How about male novels that show mens' real experiences?
Yes, Michael. I've been pitching one for two years now. I haven't given up. But I likely will have to self-publish because what I've written is true to its time, its protagonist, who, by the way, is white and male, and true to human nature, as it was engineered.
When I go to press, I will let everyone know. Maybe someone on here will buy a copy.
Best!
I’m not white or a man lol but I don’t have a problem with reading older literature by white men. I’m not the prince of Denmark but Hamlet’s emotions are still relatable. This type of literature is just well-written and captures universal emotions, which is why it is still read after hundreds of years and in translations in other languages all over the world. Because people in many cultures and time periods find meaning in it. It doesn’t matter what the race or gender of an author or protagonist is, and I do read “diverse” books not just ones by white men. But I read them simply because they are good. They just happen to be by “diverse” authors. MFA writers may think a book isn’t doing well just because it’s about women or gay or nonwhite people but it’s actually because it’s just badly written. Improve the writing and people will read it no matter what the identities of the characters are.
Thank you. Nice to know you're out there!
Amen! 👏🏼
I've been writing one too - I've actually finished it, and done a couple rounds of editing, and I don't know where to even begin with the whole publishing process because the more I read horror stories like these, the more intimidated I get. But I'm glad there's enough of us out there!
Not old or white but I would love to hear more about your story. As a literature lover I read across a variety of topics and genres. Will follow your stack for your announcement. :)
In what genre are you writing? Interested.
Thanks for asking. I would call it Mainstream Literary. Sometimes I call it 'aspires-to-literary.' Some might call it autofiction (which I note the MFA cult now looks down upon). I would call it 'fictionalized memoir.' It is highly realistic with an engaging, but not smarmy or pretentious POV character.
We definitely need more of them, and you'd have a reader right here.
I’ve written these novels and even Kirkus has blurbed them well: “a profound examination of violence in the 21st century,” they said of my mass shooting entry. I thought I’d garner a decent male audience but getting people to read novels is impossible. There is something else at work here, not a conspiracy of ideological conformity (because our self-published books are available) but a resistance in readers themselves. I have it too.
I self published a novel that is partly about male isolation and the struggle to achieve something in a world that seems indifferent, white male middle aged protagonist. Literary fiction, no MFA in sight (I loath the concept). You can imagine how successful I was with literary agents.
I teach high school literature and the (handful of) boys that elect to take the class literally BEG for novels where the male lead isn't always an abusive/murderous/manipulating psychopath. And the sad part? It's surprisingly difficult to find relatable modern literature that fits that request. Those books are out there, to be fair, but they're hard to find and even harder to get those books into schools.
“MFA Slop” is the perfect descriptor. A few years ago, I decided to not read any authors with MFA in their bio. Simply pick up a book and you see those three letters, put it back down.
Guess you're too good for Flannery O'Connor, huh?
I suspect an MFA from the 1940s is not the MFA from today…
Yes! 🙌
I found this essay genuinely thought-provoking, especially your critique of how MFA workshops can flatten risk and discourage genre, history, and bolder narrative engines. That dynamic is real, and many writers internalize “safe” aesthetics very early.
One place I found myself diverging, though, is in the way the discussion keeps circling prose style rather than reader experience. In my own MFA program, enormous emphasis was placed on sentence-level craft and psychological realism, but almost none on story structure; how attention works over time, how patience is earned, and how expectations are set.
As a reader now (and a former workshop veteran), I’ve noticed that my tolerance for digression hasn’t vanished—but it’s become elastic. I’ll follow long stretches of interiority or exposition if I trust the narrative will snap back into pressure, consequence, or movement. When that trust isn’t established early, it’s less about ideology or aesthetic cowardice and more about attentional fatigue in a very crowded media environment.
That’s why some contemporary novels with “clean” prose still feel alive to me: not because they’re tidy, but because they smuggle complexity, irony, and moral weight inside approachable structures, sometimes even borrowing from genre (romance, crime, suspense) as an engine. The sophistication isn’t abandoned; it’s delivered.
I appreciate your defense of literary ambition and tradition, and I agree that workshops and publishing incentives can narrow taste. I find myself wondering whether the real question isn’t prose style so much as how much responsibility a writer takes for orienting and sustaining a reader’s attention, especially in a market now competing with genres like romantasy.
Thanks for the essay; it gave me a lot to think about.
Leah this comment is so articulate, I feel like you should turn it into an essay. I agree with your views, by the way, but I might have been convinced if I hadn’t agreed with you already simply because you write so specifically and convincingly.
The death of reading and the death of publishing go hand-in-hand. The solve is not likely to happen inside institutions – by which I mean the overly consolidated publishing industry, and the education industrial complex, where a young person can spend 16 years in school and never read a book. The solve has to be grassroots, and ground up. It has to start in homes, with parents modeling and encouraging reading in children. It has to get traction in social reading – by which I mean lone wolf individual readers, which most readers are, coming together to read together, either in person or online. Substack is a beautiful place for that. The co-reading that happens here, hosted by amazing people like Simon Haisell, not to mention the potential to reinvent the kind of serial publication that made the novel the dominant art form of the nineteenth century, are, I hope and believe, signs of a quiet revolution that is no less urgent for being peaceful.
Why aren't young people reading? I blame the teachers. Yes, the teachers, along with the; MFA crap pushers. You have to wipe the slate clean so that you can imbue the youth with the shiny new ideas. I blame teachers and teachers' unions.
Testing culture has tied teachers hands. Respectfully, a former teacher who fought with my hands tied until I had to leave the classroom
Yes, testing culture. I would add another thing... the inability of teachers to eject disrespectful students.
The admins who choose the curricula are not making kids read whole books either because "they don't have to read a whole book on the standardized test". Both Jared Henderson and Dissident Teacher (who are here on Substack) have written in more detail about this.
Kids are actually showing up in college who can't read a whole book. They can't hold the characters and various subplots for long enough. It's because they've never been made to read an entire book.
Interesting. Yes, because we have to learn how to read. And that's a process, starting with Dick and Jane, and proceeding to Magic Mountain. Good point!
Excellent piece! Thank you so much for this! I am myself a writer unattached to the MFA industry and I had to immigrate for the second time in my life--I left America because I had become unpublishable. And unfortunately, the publishing industry was not destroyed by money-driven capitalists, as American academics would want us believe, but rather by them and their uncreative, unintelligent, unoriginal vision of "writing". A "writing" uprooted from any tradition and from life itself.
Alright, I’ll start this response off by saying Happy MLK Day, Liza! Also, please ignore Echo Tracer’s very rude and profanity-laced comment with no point to it. You are 1000% right. The publishing industry is gradually dying precisely because everything about books has become uniform and sterile. The publishing industry has only a few big publishers which is a monopoly and monopolies are never good in a capitalist society. All books have basically the same recycled plot, all are written in the same style, all have similar types of characters with noting distinct or interesting about them, all have similar ugly modern art designs on the cover, and all are so dumbed down a third grader could understand them. No thinking required with modern mainstream literature. No author is allowed to be unique. When you wrote Blue Snow ❄️ you did all you could to slowly build up to the protagonist’s main conflict. You sought to tease it out and leave people guessing what it could be.
This by the way, is how someone with mental health issues would talk to their therapist in real life. That’s how us humans talk you know, we get distracted, go off on tangents, don’t get to the point, take time to explain things, need space to think things through and talk things out, etc. It also makes the story much more intriguing and gets you interested in finding out what happens next. But literary agents complained it was too long, not clear enough and that they couldn’t follow it. Probably because they have the attention span of a Goldfish. So you had to rewrite the whole thing from scratch and start all over again.
When it was more in line with what for them, fit the mold of a great novel then all of a sudden a literary agent was begging for you send them their manuscript. That is just absolutely pathetic! Hey guys! The whole point of literature is to give people complex stories that make them think and view life differently. Why shouldn’t the industry showcase different styles of writing, tone and storytelling? Most people do want complex, interesting stories! Which is why you aren’t making any money off the garbage you’re selling now. You are actively shooting yourself in the foot by publishing generic trash. Books like Where the Crawdads Sing, The Fault in Our Stars, Twilight, Fifty Shades of Gray, The Hate U Give, The Underground Railroad, and American Dirt suck because they utilize concepts that we’ve all seen in novels a hundred times.
They are literally just a carbon copy of something that came before. MFA has indeed ruined everything. Outside of small MFA circles, who reads this garbage? No one. You wanna know why Lost Paradise, Romeo and Juliet, Moby Dick, The Great Gatsby, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Sherlock Holmes stories, A Farewell to Arms, The Grapes of Wrath, Frankenstein, Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1984, The Master and the Margarita, Crime and Punishment, All Quiet on the Western Front, and War and Peace are still widely read today and no one will remember trash like The Hunger Games series or Normal People? Because the former all have characteristics that make them special and thoughtful ingenious really, stories with universal overarching narratives we can all relate to and important moral lessons we can all benefit from. You wanna start earning money again Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster? Then take risks! Take a gamble on a book like The Lilac Room, The Leverkuhn Quartet or Blue Snow!
Having taught MFA for 25+ years and having heard this complaint many times I do not find it convincing,
my students had a wide array of styles and aesthetics, including digressive, expansive work
A more authentic charge is when the writer becomes so invested in craft the work lacks heart, or soul if you prefer
- work that does not matter
I will agree that big digressive novels don’t sell like they used to, but that’s a cultural trend because reading has been devalued and current generations have been trained by media.
They don’t want a lot of words, they want you to get to the point and move on, and that will be even more so for future generations of readers.
I also agree that the industry has consolidated itself and commercial work is valued over literary work
I have not sold a work to the industry in so long that it embarrasses me to tell you
But I don’t sit around, whining about how unfair it is, I am a writer and the literary life has always been a hard row to hoe
Friend of mine once said if it was easy, everybody would go down the street and get some
I don’t sit around whining when it comes to time to pay the freight for being a stylist
I’m the one chose to be a stylist and if I had to start over again, I’d make the same choices,
And pay my dues without whimpering
It's not just writers who are demoralized by the state of publishing. I have friends and colleagues—editors, agents, publicists, et al.—who are also demoralized. As an foresight-ing editor friend of mine said 15 years ago, "I will reach retirement age at a publishing nadir and I'll be happy to get out."
This is spot on Liza. I had so many “suggestions” for my novel Time Enough: “you can’t have two protagonists;” “too many characters,” “use AI book cover” (mine is by a fine artist) and the list went on! I finally found a small US publisher Oprelle, who said, “You had me at hello.” I find I can’t even read most of the so-called award-winning books! I wrote a book I’d want to read. I agree with everything you said, and my sales, mostly in person, confirm it!
I am just not so sure if this is the issue, not sure that people are just learning a new taste. I think the greater problem is that people do not live their own lives anymore. Young people live vicariously through other people because of the internet and the little of their lives they do live, it is still processed to a sterile state for social media. MFA or not, it doesn't change the fact that we cannot write well what we do not understand in depth. "We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others, that in the end, we become disguised to ourselves." — François de La Rochefoucauld
That quote is priceless. It definitely sums up the world we're living in. And as someone who worked full-time as a sportswriter under my real name until recently for a large global corporation, I doubt most people realize just how accustomed to disguise so many people are. I felt like I was working for a cult half the time of painted smiles and scripted language. I'm so glad that I left.
This is so good. Thank you for being bold enough to talk about these things.
It’s hard to know how to go forward though. Trying to get a novel traditionally published often feels inaccessible now.
Love following your work!
Oh shut the fuck up, how many books about WW2 exist? How many detective novels?
Like for fucks sake, would I read any of this shit? No. But the mainstream is always crap, you just loved it when it was your flavour of crap because at heart you don’t have any fucking taste, just a victim complex.
You were never entitled to succeed and you probably don’t deserve to. I’m not gonna read the shit of a midwit who’s mad that other midwits are getting published, none of you are worth reading.
🎯
This reminds me of how architects keep pushing big white boxes without any soul onto us to live in.
I once lived in an appartement building and met any of my neighbours on a random chance maybe once per year. There was no depth to the interaction created inherently in this space. And when I ask architects about this they imply it looks good on the rendering at least.
In the current modern, western, world there is no room for frivolities. Everything needs to be efficient, and efficiency is soulless. In my own house I'm now espousing cluttercore as an aesthetic.
As a reader I'm focusing my attention more and more on books that are not mainstream in order to widen my perspective and see the whole forest and not just my side of it.
Good luck publishing your book! After recently 'reading' (the arduousness of the book makes me put it into quotations) Notes from Underground I'm looking forward to pick up yours!
This is why I mainly read novels from before the 21st century. There are plenty of them; I won't run out.
True say. No way can I read all the books I want to read from 19th and 20th century before I die. And I keep finding more obscure books n'all. I'm into Gustav Meyrink's work at the moment.
One reason I refuse to submit my work anywhere and just publish independently instead is that I break all the rules. Genre-fusion, tossing tropes I don't like, keeping tropes that I like, and even borrowing tropes from other genres that I don't fuse together highlight my work.
My intuition also tells me how to write. Sometimes, it's minimalist, but most of the time, I dig deeper, highlighting my works' themes and putting them front and center. The absolute last thing I want, though, is for my work to sound soulless. And if that's what the publishing industry wants, I'll refrain from submitting until it comes to its senses.
As a side note: Under my real name, I used to work full-time as a tabloid sportswriter, and I encountered the same issues. My directors would sanitize my voice until it was basically their work with my byline. I felt like I was writing for them as opposed to writing for sports fans. After a few months of that nonsense, I said, "I'm outta here."
I wasn't about to let anyone else water down my writing. At the end of the day, it's their loss, not mine.
Curious to find out if self publishing has worked for you, given that you like to break rules. Do you write about your experience?
That’s a good question, Noor. For me, so far, it’s yes and no. I don’t necessarily write about my experiences, though I do write about why I like to break rules and things like that.
It hasn’t made me anywhere near a full-time living, so in that context, it’s a no. But I have also limited myself to selling e-books priced between 0.99 and $2.99 at my own Payhip store. That said, I have had a career as a writer, making full-time income since Aug. 2020.
As for a readership, I have experienced a lot of positives. My engagement is high in my weekly emails, with open rates between 45 and 50 percent across a readership of about 1,750 subscribers through MailerLite.
I have also seen readers on my list become repeat buyers of my work, so that’s another positive. For 2026, I’m expanding into physical copies through Lulu (I tried this with one book already and the quality of those physical copies is top-notch as opposed to KDP). Also, I’ll be expanding into audio, plus serial fiction right here on Substack.
So, 2026 is definitely the “testing year” to measure true financial success once I have different cash flows, incentives (buy my next book, get a complimentary 10,000-word companion story), and bundles.
I’m definitely excited to see where it takes me. Overall, I would call it a slow burn, but one that has netted quite a few positives.