The Weird Time Delay on Writing and Publishing Mistakes

So I’ve started publishing books again, after an unintentional hiatus.

The weirdest thing about publishing is this: you don’t pay for your mistakes in real-time. Stopped writing because of a serious illness? The books and stories you’ve already sold will keep appearing for another six months to two years, after which there will be a mysterious gap and the deafening silence feels like the end of your career.

Did your layout and design computer go boom, preventing work on new books in your small press publishing queue? The books you’ve already developed will chug along for a while, and it’s not until three-to-six months later that you’ve got no new releases and your cash-flow becomes the stuff of nightmares.

And the worst part: you forget the awful stuff happened. The flow of cause-and-effect gets muddy, and it never feels like you’re not publishing because bad stuff happened a while back, it feels like some personal flaw that means you should pack your bags up and give up this writing and publishing malarky for good.

Half the reason I embrace writing weekly newsletters about Brain Jar and my writing is so there’s an archive I can refer back to when it feels like shit is going wrong. I can trace the current problem back to its origin and see the decision I made at the time. It’s the back-up for my very fallible brain, which is prone to catastrophic thinking around pursuing a creative career.

Back in May, I made mistakes. Brain Jar Press went through a fallow period, where no new books were coming out. Those computer issues created a knot of problems that took time to work out, but they were hidden by projects that were already underway and ready to release when the computer noped out on us.

And yet, we’ve been quiet for three months now. The books that came out weren’t new releases, but projects from the in case of emergency draw. I went back to old logs a lot to remind myself how and why it was happening.

And now we’re through the gap, and the books are starting up. We’ve announced Sean Williams Little Labyrinths, and Kim Wilkins’ Headstrong Girl. The next round of books is underway, and it’s business as usual once more.