I Finished Serializing My First Novel

it was a lot of fun

I have a new piece out for Sublation, arguing that the Civil War established an American ethic of self-ownership through bloodshed. The piece is the kind of work that never gets the audience I would like, so if you like it please share it. Remember that you can follow my freelancing career on my professional webpage.

I finished putting out all the chapters to my first novel, and you can read it all here. It’s the story of a young woman living in a world ravaged by climate crisis who goes in search of a cure for her sick brother and in doing so finds herself caught between two factions vying for control of the world’s remaining technology. I had a blast and I’m proud of what I made. And it was fun, oddly enough, to write with a sense of insecurity about my own abilities again. I haven’t felt that way with nonfiction in a long time. (This is less arrogant than it sounds.)

I should acknowledge right off the bat that there were months and months where I was negligent about keeping up with serializing the novel, titled The Red, The Brown, The Green. This was mostly owing to my terrible track record with keeping things straight (I always intend open threads to be a weekly thing and then I just… forget) but also was a result of my desire to do a little surgery with the plot, which I never actually did. I wanted to add something and took a run at it several times but just couldn’t work it out. I don’t want to spell things out too much, in hopes people will still read the book with an open mind, but I will say that I never could quite find the plot beat that helped the character of Mac pay off a little bit more. This issue was exacerbated by Mac’s fundamental (intentional) uselessness. I would have liked to find a way to bring him full circle a little bit more.

Still, I’m happy with the story. I think in terms of basic narrative structure it has the bones, and I’ll always have affection for the main character, Haojing. The cool thing about all of this is that I wrote it with no expectations and thus no psychic need to get it published. (It was a way to pass the time at work - sorry CUNY.) I did take a run at selling it, before I had an agent, and got nowhere; I sent dozens and dozens of queries to editors and imprints and not even a single “no thanks.” And then I got an agent for my first nonfiction book, and we immediately got meetings, and at the meetings my agent knew the people there by their first names and shared private jokes and such, and ever since my first piece of advice for people who want to write books is to go get an agent. I just went through selling a book again and got literally the exact dollar amount I was hoping for in an advance, and having a good agent was essential. The process is really discouraging in general and too hard without an agent.

I am so indebted to Vika S., the illustrator, who perfectly captured what was in my head. That was my favorite part of the project, and she more than earned her money. I’m also grateful to my brother John who was the first reader and provided me with some tips, and to whom the book is dedicated.

I have no plans at present to put this together into an ebook file or PDF, as some have asked, though I guess with the text out there nothing’s stopping you. I maintain some hope that I will someday be able to hold a physical copy of this book in my hands. Of course, having serialized it for free will probably eliminate the chance of a publisher wanting to do so in the future, and I’m not desperate enough to pay to have copies made. But who knows? If I sell a piece of fiction and it does well enough, maybe I can work out a deal with a publishing house. I’m always working on something.