Postmortem on Self-Publishing The Citidome

The past 6 months have been, quite possibly, the most stressful of my life thus far. With the birth of my son, loss of my grandfather, election shenanigans, an attack on the founding principles of our country, and oh yea, a pandemic, it truly has been...something. So I decided to toss another log on the fire by self-publishing my first novel-length work: The Citidome.

Let me first off start by fist pumping and high fiving myself (social distancing, remember). This book has been in the works for well over 6 years, evolving over time as I grew both as a person and a writer. It's funny to look back on where I was when I started it -- unemployed, single, living with my parents in California-- to now --stay at home dad, married, home owner in Colorado. Seems like a lifetime has passed since the initial spark of an idea came into my head and culminated into what is now available for other real life humans to read. I still haven't wrapped my head around it. My grandma messaged me this morning and told me she read it cover to cover last night. Talk about an out of body experience. Also, fun fact, my grandma now knows that I use the 'fuck' word... yay?

So in keeping with that spirit, I thought it would be fun to ruminate a little bit on lessons learned from this project. What went right. What could've gone better. These are writing related. I promise to do one in the future about the self-pub process and how I went about that whole shebang. As a reminder these are personal lessons. Take them with a grain of salt as they may not be universally true for all writers. Let's get into it:

Ideas are fluid and sometimes have to be flushed

"Duh, Jon," is what you might be gargling through your mid-afternoon coffee (and/or "ew"), but hear me out. When this project started, I had just gotten into reading some classic noir books (think The Maltese Falcon by Hammett). I was enamored with how economical the style could be with words, yet impart such an exciting narrative. It was around that time that I had started kicking around a few concepts for something to write, and I thought, if anything, I wanted to try to incorporate that dark noir style into my writing (I think that attempt is still somewhat evident in the first couple chapters even though I tried to scrub it out).

But I didn't just stop there. Why did noir have to be restricted to stuffy black and white detective stories? Why couldn't I adapt it to something more sci-fi alla Dark City? And so I began toiling away at the most convoluted, confusing narrative that I could come up with. Was there time travel? Oh yea. Was there an alien presence? Maybe. Oh how about a hospital setting and pandemic? Yes! I'm not entirely sure why I thought a sci-fi story had to have such complex elements in it, but that's probably a discussion for a different time. My point here is, about 85% of what I came up with in those very early days of this project was eventually tossed (thank god). Having trimmed that fat, it actually made the story easier for me to see, and probably saved me a lot of painful revision time. Speaking of revisions...

Revising sucks

I'll admit it, revising my work was probably the hardest part of the whole writing process. Since this project took forever and a day to complete, many revisions I did often required correcting voice continuity on top of whatever story changes I was making on top of grammar/line edits-- that was a lot of shit to keep track of! It didn't help that 26 year old Jon was a bit loose with his adverb usage compared to the grizzled 33yo pandemic-survivor Jon (that's going on all of my future business cards by the way). It's really difficult getting back into the same mindset I was in when I wrote some of those sentences X number of years ago. So for my next project I hope to knock out the piece in a much shorter timeframe. Hopefully that'll mean that I have fewer balls to juggle when I do have to go into revision mode.

Knowing your characters ahead of time is kind of helpful

Who would of thunk? Having a clear picture of the actors in your story actually makes writing the story easier! I wrote a lot of The Citidome's first draft with only vague notions of who my characters were. It took a lot of heavy lifting to bring them up from the flat cardboard things they were initially (if I even succeeded, I'm still not sure), but the lesson here is if I have a better understanding of my peeps ahead of time, that'll make my life easier during revisions/rewrites... I guess what I'm learning today is that I should do everything in my power to make revisions easier.

There's definitely more takeaways from this, and honestly, I probably still haven't had adequate time to process them all... but I'm too excited to do that right now. As always, thanks for reading and for your support! If you... ya know... wanna, like... buy my book, you can find it here: