The Most Miserable Profession
I cannot easily think of a profession more miserable than that of an unsuccessful novelist. Of all the failed artists in the world, I suspect we occupy the most wretched rung.
A painter or a musician has a technical gulf that sets them apart from ordinary people. Even a failed guitarist can clown around on a street corner and earn a round of applause. If he can't even manage that, the bastard isn't a musician — he's a con artist.
A writer is different. A failed writer is nothing more than a loser who isn't better than anyone at anything. Wind the clock back a thousand years and the mere ability to put words on a page might have earned you some respect. Not anymore.
A newborn taking its first steps is newsworthy. A twenty-four-year-old adult taking first steps isn't even worth a joke. Wait — what the hell am I even talking about?
A thought occurred to me then. There had been a time when I was more driven than this. Only a few years had passed, and yet it felt, strangely, as though a decade or more had gone by.
The good parts of the past flee like a train. I'm a fragile human being; I can't catch them. Even a Hunter who specialized in speed probably couldn't catch that.
I had heard that line more than a few dozen times. The editors' answers were so thoroughly canned — a macro, basically — that the words had scabbed over in my ears. Eventually I could recite them myself without missing a beat.
Boiled down, what they meant was this: my novels had no commercial value. I hadn't written to the public's taste. I had written what I wanted to write.
Of course, some editors had kind things to say. But those weren't genuine compliments. They were the byproduct of an effort to reject me without hurting my feelings. In the end, my masterpiece never saw print.
I loved books. Not just reading them — writing them, too. So I had been writing since middle school. I even placed in a composition contest. In those years I worked the newspaper club hard, rattling my pen for all it was worth.
That was also why my grades had fallen off after elementary school. My editorials were the only part of the class paper that anyone at our middle school actually read.
My thoughts became reality. That was how it felt when I wrote. I had found something worth enjoying at an early age, and I enjoyed it. When you do something you love, time runs like a thief. My school years didn't fly by on a magic carpet. They fled on manuscript paper.
In high school I started thinking about writing full-time, and from then on I prepared in earnest. After graduation I didn't look for a university. I looked for publishers. The manuscript I always carried against my chest was the thing I had rendered down from those school years.
I believed it was a tremendous work. I use the present tense because I still believe it. But the stupid public couldn't recognize my genius. I use the present tense for that, too, because they still can't.
"A story about another Earth where monsters, Hunters, Dungeons, and mana don't exist… That's quite fascinating."
"Haha. Right? The humans of that world fight using nothing but science and technology. With no monsters around, humans fight other humans. This novel covers two hundred years of that world's history."
"A world war! Nations across the globe going to war amid a tangle of competing interests. How unconventional."
"I put a lot of work into the details, too. I burned through entire school vacations just on research."
My first novel was a doorstop of a book — 2,306,001 characters crammed into 1,982 pages. Three years of my life, poured in without remainder. Writing it had been so much fun that it felt, subjectively, as if I'd finished it in three days. Honestly, even if someone told me to write a novel like that again, I don't think I could.
The editor at the first publisher I took it to read the opening with genuine interest. He then made a sincere effort to get through about three hundred pages.
The positive comments he offered were more than enough to paint the inside of my skull rose-colored. In that moment, the me inside my head had already debuted. I was collecting enormous royalties, furnishing a luxurious house, taking yacht trips.
At the time, I didn't understand that this was a polite refusal. It was the sentence that announced the failures I would go on to experience countless times after.
"Readers these days don't go for this kind of story. Why not try writing something more popular?"
Match myself to the public? It was the most obvious advice in the world, of course, but it didn't feel that way to me then. Back then, it sounded like being told to make the target hit the arrow.
After that I made the rounds of dozens of publishers, and as if they had all gotten together and agreed on a script, I heard the same answer everywhere. For several years more I kept resisting the public. At the time, I didn't even know how arrogant that was.
I stubbornly knocked on the doors of tiny, threadbare presses, hunting for someone who would sell my novel. I never found a place willing to take a chance on a book that was almost certain to be ignored.
I considered self-publishing, then gave it up. If I went that far and the public still turned its back on me completely, I was afraid I would come apart.
What I chose was a moderate compromise. I took the editors' well-meaning advice to heart. I compromised with the world. No — this was a compromise with myself.
I stopped looking for a publisher with the eye to recognize the great unknown literary genius. And I started writing what actually sold. Extremely explicit adult fiction.
Surrender was easier than holding out, and sweeter. The price, however, was a luxury house, a beautiful yacht, and the immense fame of a great man of letters. The bank of dreams went bankrupt. The promissory note of success that my younger self had signed so neatly had its due date postponed to the next life. What I got in exchange was just enough living money to scrape by.
"Nngh. If I just slap some bodies together at random, I'll get ripped apart in the comments again. Tch! For a bunch of idiots who read porn, they sure want a hell of a lot."
The shameful truth is that the rent gets paid with money those idiots give me. I entertained that blasphemous thought without a flicker of guilt, the kind of thought that would have my readers wallpapering the comments with curses if they ever overheard it.
What I write is adult fiction of an extremely high temperature. Spurred on by an editor telling me to try writing something that sold, I had gone after the far end of commercial writing itself: smut.
I don't pick a genre. No — smut is my genre. Rape, tentacles, torture, and dismemberment are the baseline. I've even written scatology. At the start I couldn't find my bearings, so I tracked down videos to study, and for a while after that I couldn't eat chocolate.
Thanks to compromising with myself, I can, if I keep putting words down, at least keep food in my mouth. Compared to the NEET years when I was draining my parents dry, it's a tremendous leap forward. Of course, my literary ability and my accomplishments haven't advanced an inch. This is what happens to an artist who falls into the real world.
"Ugh! I can't come up with a single good idea."
When it comes to this, the only move left is a sex scene dropped in out of nowhere. I'll get cursed out by the bucketful, but I'm used to it by now. My subscribers read my novels while complaining about them anyway. There aren't many adult-fiction writers who go as far as I do.
I stood up from the bench to put an end to a hike that had produced nothing. My phone still had more than half its battery. More than enough to get down the mountain.
No flash of inspiration had arrived, but the night air had cleared my head. I stretched and got ready to head home. And then something strange caught my eye.
"Huh? What's that?"
It was a faint light. Not moonlight, and not the flashlight on my phone. Streetlamps, obviously, were out of the question. This was the middle of a mountain. Even a mountain people mock as a hill is still a proper mountain.
From behind the dense undergrowth, a small glow stretched out like a signal flare. Was someone else hiking at this hour besides me? It could be a dangerous person. Or maybe a monster, dangerous beyond any comparison to a person.
I swallowed. Curiosity and a sense of danger crossed paths. The battle between the two emotions was short, and curiosity won. Rather than stepping back in fear, I took a step forward.
That was a surprisingly accurate assessment, actually.
If I thought about it, my attitude was only natural. A pathetic habit of the writer species. I hate sitting on a question more than I hate dying. Well — that's hyperbole, of course. Obviously I'd rather not die.
Even so, investigating that small light didn't feel like it would put my life in danger. It didn't seem like the kind of glow that came from a monster's eyes. So I gathered my courage and moved forward, little by little.