Getting Off The Pot: There Will Be Booky-Book

The other night, I'm hanging out in Oliver Campbell's Twitch channel as he plays Enter the Gungeon. I mention that I decided on putting out a book, but I wasn't down on the specifics yet. Well, now I am, and the reason is because of stuff I mentioned and he pointed out that night in chat.

10,000 Pots: How I Went From Writing Papers To This Book (Working Title)

My fiction works are stalled, and I need to do something and get it out. This? This I can do, do far faster, and with authority that you can feel in every word.

I've been writing in some form of another, on a routine basis, on a variety of topics, for almost 15 years. It started with writing papers as an undergraduate, wherein even my underclass courses had me writing something on a weekly basis per course. During that time I had an acquaintance get me set up at Livejournal, back when you needed an invite code. I made use of that for years as my primary blogging outlet. Then I went back into academia for graduate school, moved over to Dreamwidth, and in 2009 I started blogging here at Blogger. I've been doing weekly posts at two other blogs I run for years, and almost a year ago I began doing daily variety blogging here at this very blog. Here, there, elsewhere- millions of words, some informal and some quite formal.

That's discipline, folks. I made a habit out of writing. Sure, some posts and papers were longer than others. Some demanded different tones, different approaches, different voices, and so on, out of me but I did them. Some I did better than others, and where I goofed I figured out (with and without feedback) what I goofed and why.

I did this for years. I had not even noticed it until I reviewed the story about the potters that I reference in the tentative title. (Long story short: pottery students got split into two groups; one group agonized over one perfect pot and the other just made pots until they got it right; the latter group achieved competency faster through iterative improvement while the former got paralyzed through fear of failure.) The point here is that, while I coped with my own fear of failure, I iterated myself into a position of competency approaching mastery with regard to my writing- only specifics remained as frontiers to push, especially in the fiction side of things.

So, this isn't going to be a how-to book in the form of me instructing you how to write. It's going to be a show-you book in the form of me testifying about how I sucked, why I sucked, and how I iterated my way past various obstacles that resulted in you reading this very book. No, it's not going to be that big either; if I hit a page count equal to Gorilla Mindset or SJWs Always Lie, that will be the upper limit.

And this post? Part of what I learned, and I don't just mean building a hype train. Cernovich would get this in a heartbeat, and I bet Vox Day would also, by saying I'm going to do this thing.

Going indie with this, doing a Kindle release on Amazon first and later POD via Createspace, and I'm going to need some help when I get done with the manuscript. For now, if you have any better title ideas, throw them down in the Comments; I'll follow-up later on what help I need.