One Year In
Fiction, audience-building, and what comes next
My last update post was 11 months ago. It was released two weeks after leaving my corporate job to write fiction full time, and since it’s been almost a year, I wanted to write a quick update post.
When I finally made the decision to leave last year, I knew that while I had found the core of what I wanted, I had also opened the door to a lifetime of learning and mastery. Most of last year was dedicated to not only continuing to develop the prose and storytelling skills required to write fiction professionally, but also developing the frame that would allow me to settle into a pathway of continuous growth and improvement.
Each story I wrote last year not only helped me improve specific aspects of the craft, but also develop softer skills alongside it. These are the things outside of the writing itself, such as the unique social, emotional, and relational aspects that come along with being in that career.
A lot of these skills were associated with continuous exposure to increasingly challenging inner work or social situations until they became commonplace in my life.
All of these were necessary developments. Another related development was seeing how the initial intuitions would play out over time.
I had a strong intuition that when I started, the fiction I’d write would mostly be speculative fiction (science fiction/fantasy). After testing a bit, speculative fiction provides the lane that allows me to explore the ideas I care about.
It makes sense.
I see myself as something of an explorer of ideas at the frontier of our culture, mostly around consciousness and technology. That’s to say, I love looking at the preeminent problems and ideas of our culture and wrapping story around them to create something like a behavioral map. While the Frontier Letter is a great medium for exploring these ideas through essays, story is my preferred mode of exploration.
So while last year involved solving the fiction-related questions and the associated softer problems, the beginning of this year’s inner work—which has come alongside my most recent novel—has faced me with the game of social media and persona.
Social media has been a big question for me over the last 6 months given that it’s intimately intertwined with promoting a work of art these days. I’ve been negotiating and navigating this question and have come to a tentative solution. It turned out that my social media aversion was intimately intertwined with the persona.
I have a larger piece on persona coming soon, but the short version is: shedding the persona is typically the first step of individuation. Mine had been shed for years, but I made the mistake of becoming hyper-averse to it, whereas the mature solution is conscious integration. A consciously constructed persona allows for easier social integration and creates a stronger foundation to scale through social media and more importantly, is a container for authentic public output.
Once the persona was consciously constructed and settled, it became a matter of figuring out which social media channels act as the proper output to achieve my higher orientation.
The current guidelines I’ve come to are:
Thinking out loud about ideas loosely on YT: approximately 1-2 videos a week.
2-4 shorts a week, clipped from YT and recorded.
The YT and TikTok/shorts content acts as a front door.
1 FL a month.
During the drafting phase of writing, it was challenging to keep up with Frontier Letter, but I do really enjoy writing on Substack, so I’m going to try and stay consistent now that I’m settled in with a consistent process.
While I don’t discount social platforms serving as a place where deeper connection is formed with an audience, I see my novels as where the true connection between an audience will form.
This serves a higher purpose to fulfill the meaning of writing a story. While I love to explore ideas, interact and reach into unconscious space, and write for its own sake, it is far more meaningful if I can inspire, impact, and be an individuation guide through story for others. Being a professional writer means I need a connection with an audience to fulfill this meaning.
In terms of writing, I’ve come to a very solid cadence for my weekly novel writing. I’m working on the third draft of my novel now as I integrate some early feedback.
I’m extremely excited to get this story, The Donation, to the finish line and update you—rain or shine—on the results of querying. I’m also excited to start research and brainstorming for my next novel in this series.
I’m going to keep my novel updates here on the Frontier Letter, but if there is a need to create a new newsletter specific to my book updates, I’ll make an update here.
With social media in motion, I now see my time outside of fiction pulling me toward creating some of the necessary aspects to market a book which will serve me well whether I get traditionally published or self-published.
The week before I left my job, I was hit with a surprise appendectomy. Afterward came a flurry of muscle issues I’ve been monotonously dealing with every day. And by nature of leaving previous social structures, seemingly minor social issues became real challenges: being at family parties in my new identity, unsure if I was accepted; worrying about what people might say when I wasn’t there; feeling the insecurities of others projected onto me; and watching my own insecurities make all of it land more painfully than it needs to.
Inner work has made it so that all of the above feels so much smaller than it did. What was an obsessive thought is now only a footnote. And I feel like I’m close to being on the other side of the challenges, born anew into the start of something potentially big.
Thank you to those who have followed along and supported this experiment. I’m excited to start sharing the stories and to keep sharing everything I’ve learned along the way.
Dom
