Writer's Secret Weapon Volume 6
Cycles of Boom and Bust; wrestling for horses; wrestling with doubt
Welcome to the sixth volume of The Writers Secret Weapon and judging by the metrics, Volume 5 did not go over particularly well. I appreciate all the feedback and your patience in letting me try it out, and while it might be weeks where I go back to audio, it’s going to show up far less than I originally planned.
There are FOUR weeks until the paid subscriptions start in addition to the usual free Secret Weapon. Subscriptions start at $9 a month and the subscription Secret Weapon covers one writing/publishing/creating business topic a week.
Onto this week’s Weapon.
I - Thinking
For about a third to a half of the year, the world has less color in it. Or at least that’s how I perceive it. The world is less bright, fun things are less fun, joy is more fleeting, and it’s easier to slip into the background of the gray skies and grey landscape waiting for the few moments of pleasure I might find.
Or to put this another way, I spend a third to half the year deeply depressed to a level that is at the very least “concerning” according to friends and loved ones.
This is pervasive - extending throughout work into my free time into my waking hours into my sleeping hours. It is inescapable when it’s got me suffocated in the full throes of me not being good enough, my work not being good, my life barely having any existential value, and my purpose being obscured through crippling doubt and anxiety.
(Hell of a way to start a newsletter, I know, but trust me, this is going somewhere)
As I write this, it’s early April, and I’m still experiencing it. It starts somewhere in November and runs through most of April, at least until the weather shifts and the light is at least eleven and a half hours. It’s miserable. It’s the scratchiest sweater on a cold day. It’s like a humidity inside my body: something I can never adjust to get comfortable or get away from. 0/10, would not recommend.
Contrast that with what should in theory happen any day now as these thick clouds of life-is-terrible break. I’ll sleep better. I have pride in my work. I’ll question fewer things, have more confidence, and generally enjoy my time sitting in the chair, happily making all kinds of content and not thinking that at any second everything could come to some kind of deserving instantaneous end.
I’m not meaning to make this sound melodramatic but I find that when I’m choking on my depression, everything becomes more melodramatic. I’ve tried turning it off, but the switch is stuck. I just sound like this sometimes. Yes, it annoys me as much as it might be annoying you right now.
This up-and-down, boom-and-bust cycle is something I find mirrored in the work I do. There are stretches of people writing and putting out books, and there are stretches where releases are few and far between. There are stretches where the marketing is heavy and I can’t go more than a few clicks without seeing some kind of ad or promotional link and there are times where things are absolutely silent.
This extends into how things are sold as well. Let’s say you put out a book, doesn’t matter what genre or even what the price is, but you’ve got this hypothetical book and you’re putting it out there into the world with a decent marketing campaign of regular social media posts, some blogging, maybe a pre-sale newsletter and a launch day newsletter. This is a typical amount of marketing, regardless of platform.
And that strategy will net you let’s say 30 to 50 sales. This is a boom period. A lot of writers will capitalize on those numbers by pushing more marketing by doing something impromptu (like a stream or a video or a giveaway) and while that might not bring more people to buy the book, the enthusiasm is infectious and feels good.
But when it’s over, it’s over. The 50 sales drops to 1 or 2 and the excited people go away. Welcome to the bust part of the cycle. Here’s where writers tend to leave the door open for self-doubt and start trying some maybe slightly desperate things to get that 1 or 2 sales back up to the 30 to 50 level.
It’s never going to get there, and that sucks, but publishing has a very funny way of working its peaks and valleys. Traditional publishing set the standard of behavior here, that your success is only as good as your peak sales, and the rest of the time you need to chase those numbers and exceed them, consistency be damned. To see this idea worm its way into self-publishing spaces is frankly bullshit, but it’s here in the water supply and so many people are staying really hydrated metaphorically speaking.
It doesn’t matter if you never get back to the 30 to 50 sales point if you’re able to consistently generate sales overall. The strategy shouldn’t be one where you chase anything - sales, money, happiness, metrics, whatever - it should be one where we look to build for stability.
How do we do that?
1. Well-written work - because nothing can go forward if the work isn’t in its best shape
2. A variety of marketing approaches on a variety of platforms - so that you’re not getting all your eggs in one basket and then paying for it later (like what’s happening to me with Twitter)
3. A do-what-works-for-you balanced approach between marketing existing and upcoming stuff and doing the work needed to create that upcoming stuff - so that you’re always tipping the scale towards doing the work
4. Managing the worry that you’re not doing enough or not doing it right - so that you’re not losing yourself to anxiety that will stall your progress to your goals
I’m making this sound a little simpler and easier than it likely is, but in boiling it down I think it’s easier to get practical in terms of what you can focus on or accomplish.
Because this should be doable, by everyone, in some way/shape/form no matter what they’re doing.
II. Thinking, part 2
I am competitive. I think I’ve always been competitive. I know I haven’t always been successful, I have a win-loss ratio for things that’s clearly way more losses than wins, but I’m still competitive and at times aggressive about it. Maybe that makes me more Washington Generals than Buffalo Bills in terms of getting close to victory.
To me, I’d say competition brings more of my drive out of me. I don’t always feel it (see previous statements about half a year feeling awful) but when I do, boy do I feel it.
It leads me to take big sometimes foolish projects on, it leads me to try new things that do work out (podcasting for instance), and it often leads to me saying some really outlandish things for attention or engagement or clicks or views or praise or whatever.
Like: I’m going to snort this hot sauce off this filthy table or If I can edit your 175k MS in 3 days, pay me an extra $75. (By the way, never snort hot sauce off a filthy table and if you’re doing that much work that quickly, charge more than 4/5ths what you would per single hour)
I’ve said a lot. Some of it has blown up. Some of it pays off though. But I am far from undefeated.
I wouldn’t for instance say “I’ll marry you if you beat me at Mario Kart” because I am not great at Mario Kart and I’m not sure anyone would marry me solely for my ability to drift as a blue Shy Guy.
I might win a few times, but not all the time. Not the way Khutulun did.
Khutulun was the great-granddaughter of Genghis Khan, and as far as Mongols go, Khutulun was tough and feared, though not because of her ability to rock Rainbow Road.
Khutulun was the daughter of Kaido, the Khan who ruled the Mongol Empire in the late 1200s to the early 1300s. Khutulun was the fourteenth or fifteenth child of the Khan, and as such she was prime marriage material. (Thanks patriarchy)
Except Khutulun did not want to get married. Not because she was opposed to marriage, she just didn’t think anyone was on her level. And her level, if we’re being honest, was pretty high.
In battle she was known to run into fights and pull-throw (suplex) men from their horses and then break one of their limbs before kicking their head in. Didn’t matter if the guy had a spear or a sword or whatever, she would unseat him and start stomping. That takes a certain level of courage.
The only thing Khutulun loved more than fighting in battle was wrestling. Mongol wrestling wasn’t Greco-Roman wrestling and it wasn’t professional wrestling, it was more like unsanctioned Fight Club MMA, where you fought your opponent until they were unable to continue. “Unable to continue” has a pretty wide definition ranging from “compound fractures of multiple limbs” to “partially paralyzed” to “dead” to “toothless” according to Rashid al-Din Hamadani, an Iranian doctor and diplomat who we should also talk about in a Secret Weapon volume.
Kaido loved his daughter but knew the right thing to in order to maintain his patriarchal hold on the Khanate would be to marry her off. So, as if in a Disney movie, he put forward a challenge - anyone who could compete and win a challenge set by Khutulun would marry her, and if they lost, Khutulun would name her prize.
Khutulun made it very clear - anyone who could defeat her in a wrestling match could marry her. If she beat them, she’d take their horses, somewhere between 1 and 10 horses a person. Wealth in the Khanate at the time was measured in horses - more horses = richer guy.
That’s the modern equivalent of giving up your house, car, internet access, and money. A horse was EVERYTHING to a Mongol.
So the first men showed up to wrestle her. And after ten days (she wrestled mutliple guys a day), Khutulun had fifty horses. After a month she had 300 horses. After six months she had a thousand horses.
By most estimates, she eventually had ten thousand horses. That’s ten thousand fights during a time where the Mongols constantly went to war with not only other nations, but internally as well. All Khutulun ever had time for was fighting. And she was very very good at it.
She bragged about it so much that even after she married someone (depending on the text it was either a prisoner of war she captured or a soldier she fell in love with), people introduced her not as the daughter of Kaido or the wife of her husband, but as “the taker of horses.”
Khutulun, as a woman, never got a chance to rule the Khanate, and died in 1306 from food poisoning.
What impresses me most about Khutulun isn’t the 10,000 horses, since I can’t picture 10,000 objects or the space they’d require, it’s the fact that there were thousands of fights. Bare knuckle, bone crunching, violent, painful fights. I know how sore and tired I am after an hour at the gym, and cannot get my head around the idea that you have to get up and fight more on a Tuesday after fighting on a Monday. Unbelievable strength, skill, and confidence to wield that kind of competitive spirit.
Two last Khutulun notes: If you’re wondering if Khutulun inspired anything other than this section of a newsletter, yes, two things and you’ve definitely heard of one of them and maybe the other. There’s an opera, Turandot, written first by Gozzi, then Puccini, where a young woman defeats suitors. And there’s this small character in pop culture called Wonder Woman who’s battle prowess is partially modeled on Khutulun.
III. Feeling
I am finishing up this week’s newsletter from a very clean spot of a partially clean room in an upsettingly mess house. It is overwhelming at times, that pressure that things can be, should be, and could be better. That all I have to do is just consolidate baskets of clothes or return things to bookshelves or stop leaving things on the floor in the first place.
In the abstract, that’s so easy to say. And equally easy is the guilt and shame and anger I heap on myself when another day passes and I find myself stepping around yet another thing or another pile on the floor. That sense of failure. That sense of “if only things were different….”
This is a relatively new development, this lack of hyper-cleaning and mega organization. I don’t think it’s depression, though maybe it is. I don’t think it’s me pushing back against some societal norm, though maybe it is. What it probably is a misalignment of my expectations with the actual amount of effort it would take.
See, I was raised/abused into thinking that anything less than a very tidy place reflected on your goodness and value as a person. Messy people were less than. Messy people were sinners or they lacked good character. Take that idea and let’s add to it that my father, though he made clear these rules, didn’t have to follow them, and my childhood home was dominated by piles of his stuff and things left out, whereas when anyone else did the same thing, their property was “shit”, as in “your mother’s shit is all over the room” or “you need to move your goddamned shit.”
I know I took all those things with me. I took those attitudes. I took that language. I took that thinking. And maybe that stack of legal pads by the bed where I’ve been idly scratching together notes on streams isn’t just evidence of me working, it’s some kind of rebellion against the thoughts installed in my head.
I am thinking about this today and feeling quite a way about it today because I see parallels in how we talk about our writing and lives as creatives. We make shit, other people’s stuff are books and movies. Other people have nice neat spaces where everything has a place and everything could be Instagrammed and Pinterested at a moment’s notice and we have the packaging from that new mop next to the table.
We’re a mess. We’re never going to succeed. No one’s going to like our work or love us. They know what they’re doing. Everyone will fall all over them. They’re making moves and signing deals and never worrying about anything. They’re perfect.
But again, here comes that misalignment between expectations and reality.
We do not know the reality of how someone else is or how they’re creating unless they share it without filter or varnish. We do not know if all their perfect photos of their desks are shot with their backs to a huge pile of unfolded towels and a stack of boxes needing to be recycled. It’s exactly the same as them not knowing the scene of yours they just read took you two hours and not four.
Everyone sets an expectation tempered by their baggage. We know how to act in certain situations because we’ve been there before. We can estimate things based on prior experience. But when we lack specifics, our expectations start skewing rapidly. And in the absence of more information, the skew increases until we’re paralyzed or until we’re swallowed by self-loathing and anticipating failure.
One of the things that frustrates me the most about social media and about “business” as a whole is the idea that you have this mask disguising reality. You have a “professional” self separate from the rest of you, and there are reasons all of a sudden why you can’t share reality lest you pierce some grand illusion and cost yourself sales, customers, clients, money, and numbers on a screen.
It’s that professional mask that prevents us from ever knowing how someone is ever actually doing. That’s not to say that if you do know how people are doing that professionalism has gone out the window, since knowing someone doesn’t preclude someone from working or being something. But that mask keeps the messiness hidden. It lets the misalignment do the talking and shoves the reality off to the side.
I would love for writers and coaches and editors to talk about how much they get paid, and how much they write or don’t write, or what deals fell through, or why things cost the way they do. I don’t like having this huge disconnect between the reality of “hey my laundry hamper in my bathroom is full and I have been meaning to do that laundry for two days” and the image of “I am a serious writer who writes books without any kind of other stuff happening in my life.”
I don’t want there to be piles of shit and piles of stuff. I want us to ditch the masks and the shame and the fear and find out that yeah, getting those root beer bottles out for recycling took like 2 minutes and did not actually mean you’re not worth being cared for.
In the absence of masks, we are who we are. And sometimes that means we don’t write because we’re tired or overwhelmed or because we wanted some dopamine. And sometimes that means we think our writing is way worse than it really is because we see the flaws magnified and the successes or beauty minimized. And sometimes that means we had this or that thought or we left some clothes on the floor.
I’m not talking about judgment. I’m talking about acceptance. Not resignation. Actual acceptance, acknowledgement of who you are and what’s going on and what you need to get where you want to go and what you’re afraid of and what you’re wanting and what you’re proud of.
Yes, the room is messy. Yes, there’s more work to do. Yes, it could have been cleaned up and the work could have been done differently. But here I am, and this is how things are. None of the problems, none of the fears, none of the bullshit I worry about, none of the lack of writing on a particular day, means I’m a bad person, unworthy of love or pleasure and it certainly doesn’t mean I am undeserving of good things and successes.
That’s what I’m thinking about today.
Love you. Talk soon.
Thanks for sharing.
As you rightly pointed out, I'm always anxious to open up about how much writing I'm doing because it feels like nothing compared to how much a writer should write on any given day. Knowing that others struggle much the same way does help. But for me, unless I'm convinced my work is good and that I've wrote enough to meet my target, I'll always feel inferior. That's hard to reconcile sometimes. Reading this helped.