Occasionally I get asked writing advice. And my advice is always WRITE A LOT.

Volume! Volume! Volume!

One of the most successful franchises you've never heard of if the GOR (Chronicles of Counter Earth) series.

38 books. Close to 11 million copies sold.

And the first books aren't good! Slow, plodding, no real magic.

And the whole series was suppressed!

The entire conceit of the series is this blend of Evo-psych and bondage, that human women in this world naturally submit to slavery, because slavery is good.

Really out there verboten psychosexual stuff, that's only gotten more forbidden since the first book was published in '66.

And yet Norman just kept putting them out. And it seems his writing really improved.

It wasn't til the 80s, nearly 15-20 years after the first book, and 14 books into the franchise, that it really found an audience... and it wasn't til the 90s and really not even modern day that there was really much buzz or discussion of it.

And yet he kept putting them out, and horny men and women kept finding them... and eventually a sub-culture formed around the books that even other (more feminist) BDSM subcultures took pains to distance themselves from.

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SO WHAT THE HELL IS YOUR EXCUSE!

If some autist writing his forbidden messed-up fetishes and 10,000% forbidden social theories... badly. If he can keep putting his work out there and slowly improve and build an audience of like minded BDSM brained weirdos...

Then why aren't you writing!?

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People sit around waiting for some kind of permission, for someone they respect to tell them that they're good enough...

What the hell!?

Do you think the worst author at the bookstore needed that permission? Do you think whoever they spoke to was right to give it to them?

Grasp the pen like a sword!

Carve out your fantastical kingdom, not with permission, but with DEFIANCE of all good taste, social nicety, or basic morality! If god himself would stand against you, then let him be poorly defamed in your amatuer pen.

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Someone is going to be the worst author in the bookstore, someone is going to write the worst fanfiction on the web. And someone is going to reveal the single most deprave and embarrassing fact about themselves in their subtext.

And its almost certainly not going to be you! Because that would actually take a fair bit of uniqueness and talent, and you're probably going to be pretty average and workmanlike when you start out.

You need to write for a few decades! Once your have a dozen or so books under your belt, then you'll be capable of something truly embarrassing!

"But couldn't i try to progress and make something good"

Sure whatever, however you think you can build that audience.

The point is VOLUME!

Stop trying to be the soulful little romantic that produced one flash in the pan hit after 10 years and then goes into an immediate nervous breakdown at the thought of producing a second. Instead start trying to become the real hack who puts out 10x the word count in a single month.

Shakespeare wrote a play nearly every six months. There's a reason you haven't ever seen a staging of "Timons of Athens" or "King John", they aren't that good.

But when you're putting out works as fast as you can you're doing something more important than building an audience:

You're improving.