Jeremiah Tolbert

Yesterday, I released my intensely per­sonal story of death, Led Zeppelin, and how fam­i­lies cope with death, “Babe, I am Going to Leave You” as a CC-​​licensed story. A friend asked what my think­ing was behind doing this, so I thought I’d break it down in a blog post, in case any­one else was interested.I wrote this story, over the course of about a year, in an attempt to come to terms with my own father’s death from can­cer. I always intended to try and pub­lish it some­where like any other story I wrote, but once I tried doing so, I found I had invested too much of myself to be able to han­dle the rejec­tions. Most rejec­tions are slightly painful, but you can shrug them off. I just couldn’t shrug off rejec­tions to this story.

I strug­gled with whether I should essen­tially “self-​​publish” the story. I don’t have a large read­er­ship here. I’m not John Scalzi or Jay Lake, although I hope to attract as many fol­low­ers some day. Am I the only writer who won­ders about max­i­miz­ing the audi­ence for their sto­ries, or do we all worry about that? I don’t make much money from my sto­ries, so I’ve focused on grow­ing an audi­ence more than the money.

I also wor­ried that some would see releas­ing the story myself as a coward’s way out. I do feel guilty for not try­ing harder to find a place to pub­lish the story that could have given it more read­ers than I could on my own. The story is, in a big way, my way of hon­or­ing my father. Did I do him honor just releas­ing it to the hand­ful of peo­ple who read this? I don’t know. I was tired of hav­ing it here, and hav­ing no one read it though. I really wanted to do good with this story. I had expe­ri­enced some­thing pro­found and painful, and I wanted to help oth­ers get through a sim­i­lar expe­ri­ence. The chance to do some good, even a lit­tle, is what con­vinced me it was the right thing to do.

I want to thank those of you who linked my story in your own blogs. I really appre­ci­ated that. It made me feel much more like I made a good choice here. And those of you who have writ­ten me, thank­ing me for post­ing the story. I am glad that it has helped you.

In the future, I will def­i­nitely con­tinue to release reprints of my sto­ries online under the Creative Commons. It can only help a writer at my stage of career. I don’t think I will release any other unpub­lished sto­ries though, because I think it’s too easy and attrac­tive to cir­cum­vent the rejection/​acceptance process.

For exam­ple, I have this story about a plague that turns famous peo­ple into plas­tic stat­ues and about the peo­ple who col­lect the for­merly famous like base­ball cards. It’s got a very polit­i­cal slant, and never found a home prob­a­bly because of that, or maybe because it’s not as funny as I think it is. There’s a strong temp­ta­tion to just pub­lish it on the web, espe­cially because it’s par­tially about Bush and he’s about to leave the White House (I hope) and the story will lose its rel­e­vancy at that point. I don’t know. Maybe I can find a pub­lisher for it int he next 9 months. Or I can sell it as alt-​​history futur­ism later.

Still, regard­less, I am glad I released this one story this way. Thank you for read­ing it.

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Tags: creative commons, dad, death, My Writing, process, SF, Short Story