What d20 Publishing Taught Me About My Next Fiction Project

Earlier today, I added about 3,500 words of new content to the Warhol Sleeping draft, finishing up the scenes that needed fleshing out and adding in the interstitial content and “deleted scenes” content that will get added to the final product.

The novella draft is officially done. Now the real work begins, exporting it from Scrivener and starting the process of doing real editorial work instead of patching up the weaker scenes.  Setting up the cover and the marketing copy, working out some pre-release promo, then working out whether the date I’ve earmarked for release is actually a feasible timeframe to get everything done. 

It should be. I dedicated the first year of Brain Jar to short story collections, largely so I could get an idea of how the various systems and tools I’d need were going to work. Now I’ve got them down, which means I can start playing a little more.

And Warhol Sleeping is very much a project where I’m playing, a project that’s being done for the hell of it. 

Many years ago, when I still wrote RPG products, my record for producing a finished product from scratch was something within the region of 24 hours. There was a hot topic on a forum I visited, talking about squirrel-based magic items, and I figured, hell, someone hold my beer, and pushed myself to get something done before the conversation was over.

It sold a crazy number of copies, despite being about a third of the length of your standard RPG product. If I’d been smarter about the way I interacted with the d20 licence and OGL gaming, it would probably have earned me a pretty chunk of change over the years since left game writing behind. Some of other things I wrote back then still earn regular cash, and they’re a fraction of my output.

Mostly, though, that experience of putting together a product about squirrels spoke directly to what I really enjoyed about the d20 publishing boom: the capacity to see a niche, think yes, this thing should exist, and get something out just to see how it goes. Just for the hell of it.

I spent a lot of time talking myself out of doing a Warhol Sleeping book. Telling myself it was too much work to bring an old project up to date, that the odds of selling a second-person, discontinuous cyberpunk narrative were so low that it wasn’t worth the effort.

Once I broke, and admitted this thing should exist, the Warhol Sleeping draft came together faster than any other novella I’ve written. I toyed with the idea of doing it for a while, committed to it back on the 16th of October as something I’d work on in my spare time.

It’s largely borne of the same enthusiasm that guided me through my RPG writing: the work is fun, the process fast, and the stakes much lower than it would be if you had to go through a traditional publishing cycle. All these things free you up to take chances with your work. To try out something for the hell of it, just to see how it goes, because the production cycle is short enough that all it costs you is a short window of time.

That freedom is something I’d missed, when I left RPG writing behind. That capacity to embrace the hold-my-beer impulse and dive into a crazy idea for its own sake.

It took a while for my brain to catch up with the reality of indie publishing: that the only person whose going to stop you from writing something crazy is you, so you might as well get out of your own way and try things.