It has become apparent to me
from reading the relative blogs on the subject that self-epubbing as a means of making a living is not the “normal” way to go about it. If there is a “normal” way to do this I don’t think it’s going to survive in its current state for much longer. And for my part, doing things off the beaten path is not so unusual for me. In fact, should I ever come across a path I expect I would panic and dive off into the bushes again.
I have been traveling off the beaten path for the better part of my life, you see. I never went to school, for starters. Needless to say, this had a profound impact on my childhood: free from tests or classes or grades, I pursued whatever interested me, however trivial. Doing so required a modicum of self-motivation, and a good deal of determination. And since everything I did, from learning to ride a bike to learning to identify birds based on their flight patterns, was done via self-teaching, the idea of doing everything myself is not an alien thing to me. Indeed, I find it comforting. To me, it is normal.
This determination has become something of second nature to me. Nothing so perfectly illustrates this as the time when I was eleven and teaching my horse to do flying lead changes. A flying lead change is a fancy way of changing which foot your horse leads with when they are at the canter. Horses do this all the time on their own, but teaching them to do it on command can be difficult, especially when you have an opinionated horse like my mare.
We drilled together, around and around and around in a figure-eight, until finally she agreed to change leads correctly. It was only after that my mother and trainer noticed that my hands were raw and bleeding from the constant working on the reins.
This was not the last time my hands have borne the results of my grim determination: in 2008, when I was training to be a raft guide, I rubbed my knuckles raw practicing getting into the unwieldy rubber rafts. There is still a scar from where one of the wounds was reopened when, a few months into the season, I actually had to pull myself in in the middle of a trip.
My hands, I think, could tell you rather a lot about me. In addition to the old scars on my knuckles there are the calluses on my palms from years of mucking out stalls, and I have a peculiar pad of skin on the distal phalange of my left ring finger. This cropped up in 2003, the result excessive pencil-holding from all the drawing I was doing. It has been with me ever since.
The kind of determination that leads to bleeding blisters, and eventually calluses, is the kind of determination that I have grown up with. It is what has allowed me to write and illustrate a 2,000+ page serial comic while at the same time keeping up an active art blog and writing several stories a year.
So when I read about self-epubbing being hard, taking a lot of effort and… what was that word? Oh yes, determination. It takes a lot of determination, well, that just makes it all the more appealing to me.
I was eleven years old, cantering around and around, my hands burning from the blisters that had long since broken and were bleeding lymph and other fluids over the reins, because my horse would not change her lead correctly and we were going to get it right, dammit!
I didn’t give up then, I won’t now. I’m in this for the long haul, no matter how long it takes.
I’ve got time, and I’ve got plenty of determination. My hands can tell you that.
*
This was supposed to be the triumphant update in which I announce the release of my short story collection, Fiddler’s Dream and Other Stories, but PubIt seems to have gaffed on their half of the bargain and is refusing to make it available on their store for some reason as yet unknown to me. However, for impatient readers (of which I am fairly certain I have none) it is already available on Amazon and iTunes.
Oh well, I’m sure it will get sorted out eventually. By which I mean, my future self will undoubtedly find a solution. She is good at that. For now, I have to go spend some of that determination and get to work cleaning comic pages for Chapter 114 (114, people!) of Angeldevil.
—Goldeen