The Superversive - Quotha

If a writer has trunked a novel – which they genuinely feel is good enough but just couldn’t sell for whatever reason – and has written something else and is now querying with that, what good reason is there not to self-publish the trunk novel? I can’t think of one. Even if a writer wanted to completely disassociate themselves from the book (for whatever reason), they could always publish it under a pen-name.

—David Gaughran

A question I asked myself about the Filthy Screed, which mouldered for years in the bottom of the Tickle Trunk after some of my Loyal Readers expressed their opinion of samples thereof with a hearty raspberry; and you know, I’m just as stuck as Mr. Gaughran is for another answer.

I am doing a light final edit — writing some insert scenes and giving the prose a haircut — before I push it out into the cold, uncaring world. My motives are frankly mercenary: it might make a few dollars, and at this time, I need all I can get — but more to the point, it is a scratch monkey for other pieces of useless muck novels that I may wish to inflict on an appalled humanity self-publish. If this one should crash and burn because I made a foolish beginner’s mistake, I won’t mind so much.

And now to work. More cutting, cutting cuttingCUTTINGCUTTING your hair, er, I mean, the manuscript.