Posted by Michael Coorlim on Aug 30, 2024
The page itself gives a pretty good overview of what I'm all about, but you might be curious about how things turned out that way. The short version is that in the early Obama years I stopped being able to find work and ended up couch surfing for a few years, jumping from friends' place to friends' place in an attempt to avoid wearing out my welcome too quickly.
Let's back up a bit further. I've always been a storyteller, even before I could write. I'd fill spiral notebooks with stickman comics. Put on weird little plays with stuffed animals for my grandparents. This eventually evolved to writing short stories, though I didn't do anything professional with it - in the 90s and 00s I was too busy roaming the country like a fekcless vagabond, living out of a suitcase and taking temp gigs like "third shift janitor in a state mental hospital", "QA in a chemical plant", and "sandwich artist."
Time was you could pull up stakes and just set out, confindent in your ability to find a new job in less than a month. I lived a lot of life, had a lot of weird adventures, was desperately poor, and had no time to write or do anything more exciting than slowly get ground down.
This brings us to "couch surfing." The big difference was that I couldn't find work any more, and I couldn't afford a place of my own. I'd always wanted to be a writer - bought a few Writer's Market books, sent away for guidelines... but never seemed to get around to submitting anything.
With no job or income, running out of both my meager savings (and my friends' patience), I decided writing stories might be a better use of my time than filling out endless applications.
So I did. Wrote a 10 page story about the end of the world, looked up paying markets on Duotrope, sent it off, and forgot about it. A few weeks later, I got a response - "Brutal in a 'Lord of the Flies' way. An Almost." A rejection.
I was elated. My first submission, and I got a personal rejection. I knew the market well enough to know that it was a good sign. I took the story, went to the second market on my list... and paused.
I remembered reading about this 'self-publishing' thing. You could try and sell fiction directly now, on Amazon, on Barnes & Noble, on Apple. Instead of waiting a month for a response and then a months (years for novels) for payment, I - who had no source of income - could make money right away.
And so I did. Month one, I made $10. By the end of the year I was pulling in a hundred a month, and by the end of the next I'd forsaken short fiction for novels and was making four figures. It wasn't a lot, I was still pretty poor - but it was mine. The booksellers shares were minor. For the first time in my life, no one was profiting more from my labor than I was, and that felt good.
And that's how the next ten years went, more or less.
I wrote a few novels a year, though by 2015 the market was already slowing, the gold rush over. People weren't buying as many books, and my various side-ventures... podcasts, full-cast audiodrama serials, consultancy, freelancing - weren't picking up the slack. Then the pandemic hit, and everything started to get more expensive.
Around 2022-2023 I decided to pivot to games, and we all know how that's been going.