Books, blogs, and the future

Author T.L. Davis emails:

Luke:

I have been watching some of your videos, reading your blog and some of your interviews and intend to do so in the future. You have a good presence and a frank delivery that seems unclouded by emotion or self-defense.

I ran across your videos on LiveVideo where I do video blogs. As a writer myself (novelist, playwright, screenwriter, freelance, etc) I find my world changing. I’m not even sure I want to put in the time and effort to write another novel. I have mostly written "westerns" that are not genre enough to be purchased by the major publishers, who aren’t buying Westerns anyway. I’m not sure what any of it means.

What does it mean to be "published"? I’ve been published in magazines, novels, short story analogies, etc. It doesn’t feel like it means anything unless a desire to impress is the only goal.

After a ghostwriting gig where I produced 90,000 words in 90 days, and could claim none of the fruits of that labor as my own work, I nearly quit writing for good. The ghostwriting paid well enough and the work received good reviews, as good as any other review I had ever received. I was getting paid for writing spy, terrorist, type plots that I really didn’t want to write. So, my career came down to writing what I wanted to for little or no money, or writing what I didn’t want to write and making a meager living at it. Since then, (1997) the whole world seems to have changed.

The purpose of this e-mail is to encourage you to seek out this question with the influential people you talk to. What does it mean? What is it about todays media that we can rely on for the future? Is it more important today (I mean for the future) to have a popular blog than a great novel? Are videos and popular video makers the filmmakers of tomorrow, or the just the stars of tomorrow? When it all shakes out what is the best place to put one’s efforts?

These are just some of the thoughts that go through my head as I finish up a screenplay that no producer will probably ever see, before I start work on a Western no publisher will ever want, and do video blogs that have as good a chance at making me successful as anything else I am doing.