Will Anyone Even Read This?

It doesn't matter, I'm doing it anyway...

Not this post. That’s not what I’m talking about.

I know very few people will read this. That’s okay though. I’ve always liked to take things slow. Six months into this publishing company, I don’t feel like I’ve really accomplished much. It didn’t really bother me at first, but it’s something that’s been edging closer away from the back of my brain, bullying it’s way front and center like an asshole at a concert trying to get right up to the stage. 

Starting a company takes time, I told myself. Building a new career is a lot of work. I’ve been writing since I was in my early teens. It’s all that I ever really wanted to do with my life, and I knew even then that it was something that I wanted to do forever. I was a theatre kid in high school, so it started out with plays. I wrote a lot of one-acts. I always wanted to move too fast. I always wanted to get right to the good stuff and I could never carry an idea to whole, full-length completion. In my senior year of high school, I wrote a musical. I was in a special performing arts program and that was sort of a keystone project. I wrote the book. A classmate wrote the music. We performed it in the spring of 2005. I never wrote another play after that, and none of my stage work ever went anywhere. 

I was okay with that though. My naïve passion for theatre waned and I moved into the English department to pursue creative writing. I wrote and workshopped like crazy. It was some of the best times I ever had. It was my friends and I, making art, going to poetry readings, really living the hell out of that white middle-class bohemian lifestyle. I had a problem though. 

I kept getting rejected. Now, I knew that I would face a lot of rejection. I even kept all of my rejection letters in a filing cabinet. This was back in the day when you mailed manuscripts and query letters in big manila envelopes and included a SASE (a self-addressed, stamped envelope for the uninitiated) so that you could get a reply. You got a hardcopy rejection letter back. Sometimes it was boilerplate. Sometimes it had some useful criticisms. I never once received a truly mean-spirited rejection. My classmates were getting published. They were editing literary magazines. They were getting by-lines in honest to god print. In the fall of 2008, I received the worst rejection of them all, from the magazine published by my own English department which published only work from University of Louisiana students. If they wouldn’t publish me, the people I knew and had beers with on the weekends, then who would?

The rejections didn’t stop. By the spring of 2009, I was rejected from every single graduate writing program I applied to. The woman I was dating at the time (who would later become my wife) told me that I didn’t apply to enough schools. I still don’t know if this is true. I applied to four programs. I guess I took for granted the fact that my brother applied to two on a whim and got accepted to one. His masters is in Information Science, I get it, it’s different, but I never thought getting an MFA would have been that hard. 

I’ll spare the gritty details, but if anyone remembers the job market circa 2009, they remember how grim it was. I was graduating with a BA in English into what we would later call “The Great Recession” in a mid-sized city in South Louisiana. 

Man I was fucked. 

I ended up working at Target making $8.75 an hour, moved in with my wife - then fiancé - and began a decade of self-loathing. I didn’t write at all. I didn’t want to. I wanted to forget that I’d ever even had such idiotic dreams. I got a slightly better job at the most batshit company ever  (no, really, the owner sued Google, ran for Senate, and challenged David Vitter to a cage fight. The internet never forgets - l if you’re really interested). Then came a job in North Carolina. I’d gotten married by then and hadn’t even thought about writing in years. We bought a house, had a kid, tried doing everything “right”.

Then in 2019 a weird thing happened. I started writing again. It wasn’t much. Some little poetry during my lunch break to deal with some feelings I was having about stuff. 

An even funnier thing happened after a few months. I submitted some poetry to an online magazine and it got published. 

An even funnier thing happened after that. I submitted a chapbook to a little, independent press in Arizona (I think) and it got published. 

So all of a sudden I have this new career as a writer. I had a novella I was trying to get published, and a novel I was (and still am) trying to finish. I started looking for my next project. 

I’d been gaming on and off this whole time, mind you. Since I started playing AD&D back in 1997/98ish, it was something that came and went but I never really stopped doing. I’m still not sure what possessed me, but I decided I wanted to write games. I wanted to write adventures for games, and supplements. 

So I did. 

But I had no idea what to do with them after that. I’d never researched the TTRPG industry at all. I didn’t know how to query publishing companies about buying your stuff. I sent a few emails around (none of which got a response). I made some social media posts asking for advice but didn’t really get much. 

So I said “fuck it, I’ll do it myself.” 

So I did.

Now, this is an incredibly difficult thing to do if you have the perpetual imposter syndrome like I do. I still do. I think I always will. But I did it anyway. I came up with a name for a publishing company, a brand, something I could throw some weight behind. I filed for an LLC and I got a bank account (later I would learn I didn’t need to do all this, but what’s done is done). I designed a little logo and started throwing stuff up on DriveThru. People actually paid me for it. They liked it. They emailed me telling me they liked it. 

Sales are okay. I put everything up as pay-what-you-want. I’m okay with that. Up to now I’ve just been doing these little supplements like The Pauper’s Page and Downsized Dungeons. I look at them as marketing more than anything, just like these little newsletter posts. It’s brought in a little revenue that I can reinvest into my first game when the time comes. When I actually put it out, I’ll have some name recognition. That’s the plan anyway. I don’t know if it will work. 

So I don’t know if anyone will read this or not. I don’t know if anyone will read the next thing I put out or not. I don’t know if this whole thing will take off like a griffon, or crash and burn like the Hindenburg. And I still don’t really have any idea about what I’m doing. But I’m going to keep doing it. I’ll do it for now at least, and I really hope you come along on this adventure with me. Maybe writing this will make someone who is out there wishing they could make games will just dive in. Maybe my weird little tale will inspire someone to make the changes they need in life, and do the things that make them happy.  One thing I believe, cliché as it may be, is that a rising tide lifts all boats, and no one wins unless we all win.

I usually play a Dwarven Ranger. So if you want to join the party, grab your dice and lets fucking go.

-Dave Serrette
Founder/Writer/& Cetera @Downzied Press