The Mind of Bryan Lee Peterson

The Oral History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark

By Bryan Lee Peterson

Polonius paced the dressing room space nervously, trying to pull his lines back up from memory. He’d been going like this for the hour since he’d arrived with Fortinbras, who lay asleep on a hard wooden bench.

“And keep these precepts in memory: Look after your…thy character. Give your …thy thoughts no tongue, and no unappropriate thought an act. Be familiar, but in no way vulgar. The friends you have, their adoption tried, Bring them into thy soul, and hold them like steel. Do not dull thy palm with the entertainment of every new hatched, un?edged comrade. Beware entrance to a quarrel; but, finding yourself there, bear it in mind that the opposed may be wary of thee,” Polonius said. He scratched his head and then started over. He’d never been this nervous before a performance in all his time in performance.

“I hardly remember these lines. How long has it been?

Fortinbras lifted his head only enough to directly address Polonius.

“Too long,” he said, and put his head back down. He had large bags under his eyes, they hadn’t let him sleep either.

“I’ve lost track of the last time we did this. When was the last time we were even together? I was in the camp for months, I know. Before that, there was a time where I never saw day or night, and I lost track of time. None of us knew what day it was. There were only days.”

He shook his head.

“I lost track as well. After a while I stopped wondering, it caused too much pain.”

“There are so many lines to recall. Why was I cast as Polonius, anyway? He just goes on and on. He’s a prattler, and I’m not a prattler by nature.”

“Sure you’re not,” Fortinbras said.

“Maybe a bit when I’m nervous.”

“Sure,” Fortinbras said with a sly nod, and a slight wink. “When you’re nervous.”

“But there’s so many lines to remember. It just feels so much like it was another age when we last did this. So much has happened to us.”

“Hm,” Fortinbras grunted in agreement. “Last time we had better accommodations.”

“We’ll never get back to that, will we? This performance can’t possibly change anything for us, right? I’d like to think that we could somehow make it out, but that doesn’t seem very likely.”

“To thine own self be true,” Fortinbras said.

“Is that the next line? I wish I had a book somewhere.” Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s another couple things to think about.

How much time do we spend researching, and sending submissions out? In the amount of time that would be spent choosing a market, writing a cover letter, getting it bundled up, sent, again and again over and over, how much more could I have written? Quite a bit more. And when a story gets published, how long does it take to actually reach its audience? I had a story once take three or four years to get published. Genres have come and gone in that amount of time. I had even forgotten that it had been placed by then. This submission and resubmission process is similar to what the film industry calls “development hell.”

I lose the familiarity with the current market that I’d have if I kept buying and researching magazines, but I don’t really do too much of that anyway, and I don’t pay much attention to what the market does. I prefer to pay attention to what my mind does. I know, that isn’t what they recommend, but it’s how I work.

Obviously I’m grinding obsessively on this. That’s my personality. I’m going to make a decision by the end of the weekend.

So I have only begun to start promoting this website. I installed stapress on Jan. 10th as I figured out that the regular stats program was completely useless. In those 12 days, I have had 108 visitors who looked at 275 pages.If that stayed the same (which it will certainly increase as times goes on), after 3 months, a relatively average submission turn-around time, I’d have 810 visitors, with 2,062 page views. As I think about what I want to do, is it better to have had 810 people looking at my stories, maybe coming back for more, plus all of the tags and search terms that might have brought more visitors to my site, or is it better to have one editor read my story over and reject it in that time?

Let’s look at another way. I wrote a bass scale manual and submitted it once. It was rejected by Mel Bay. I put it up at Lulu.com, and didn’t really promote it, as I was working on a follow-up that I’d promote alongside it, and a lot of other projects. You’d think it would get hits, but in possibly a year, I haven’t sold a single unit. I put the same text up at scribd.com and in 19 days, had 408 people view it, 8 people favorite it, and a comment sent saying:

This is wonderful, I’ve been playing bass for a long time and I’ve never came a scales book so detailed for the instrument. Great!

What did me better?

I’m in the market of promoting myself. I’m in the market of promoting my novels and podcasts. I want to find an agent. If I have a following of 5,000, an agent or two will be among them. I can prove how many viewers I get, my following. I can show comments, actual input from fans, and interaction. I can prove that I have a core following that will translate into sales, and isn’t this all about sales in the long run? What do I gain from submitting a story to a siminishing market that is largely backwards in its practices? Sure there’s a point to getting paid, and there’s a point to getting industry recognition. If I put a story up here, it doesn’t go out for a Hugo Nomination or anything like that. But that can come with time. I can bypass the slush pile by having a following, to a certain extent.

In my thoughts, the scales are tipping towards just releasing my stories when they are ready here. Does anybody else have an opinion? Leave me a comment. Please. Somebody play devil’s advocate.

*This post is about the status of a particular project. When the project updates, I will update this page rather than make a new blog post. To view the list of projects, click the link to the category “In development” on the right. Completed will go into the “Complete projects” category. Samples will go into the “Portfolio” Category.*

Sanitorium

Type: Short Story
Genre: Sci-fi
Status: Concept
Synopsis: The lives of people housed in one place to contain a deadly space disease.