Category: Reflection · Tags: writing, self-publishing, EchoFyre, authorship, craft, discourse
A year ago, EchoFyre was mostly a promise I’d made to myself.
Now it’s a book. A system. A growing mythology with recursion baked into its bones. A pile of drafts, cut scenes, dossiers, sigils, websites, side projects, and late-night notes that all somehow point in the same direction. I didn’t just write a story this past year. I built an ecosystem around it because the work demanded a place to live.
That turned out to be… a lot.
I learned self-publishing the way most people learn it: by doing everything wrong first, then doing it again with better notes. Formatting. Metadata. Distribution quirks. ISBN decisions. The quiet realization that no one is coming to hand you a rulebook labeled “How to Do This Correctly Without Losing Your Mind.”
At some point, I also decided I should probably build my own website. This was not a calm decision. This was a “how hard can it be?” decision, immediately followed by several hours of learning exactly how hard it can be. Domains, hosting, CSS, PHP, and the special joy of discovering that something worked perfectly yesterday and has no interest in doing so today.
Still, there’s something deeply satisfying about owning the whole pipeline. Writing the words. Designing the space they appear in. Deciding how readers encounter the work without an algorithm shoving it into a bucket labeled “You Might Also Like.” If nothing else, I know exactly where things break now—and that’s a kind of power.
Somewhere in the middle of all this, the broader discourse kicked up again. The familiar AI panic cycles. The accusations. The assumptions. The sudden need some people feel to interrogate strangers about their process like they’re running airport security for creativity.
It’s exhausting. It’s also weirdly disconnected from the actual work.
Because while the internet argues about tools, I’m over here rewriting paragraphs because the emotional temperature is half a degree off. I’m cutting scenes I love because they don’t belong yet. I’m doing the slow, unglamorous labor of making a story hold together under its own weight. No shortcut does that for you. No software argues with your characters at 2 a.m. because one word feels wrong in their mouth.
The AI witch hunts, as I’ve come to call them, say more about fear than they do about craft. Fear of being replaced. Fear of being outpaced. Fear that the line between “real” and “not real” might be thinner than we’d like. But the truth is boring and stubborn. Writing still requires attention, taste, revision, and the willingness to sit with your own discomfort until it sharpens into something useful.
On the professional side, I took risks this past year. I submitted my work for literary review. I sent pieces out knowing full well rejection was a likely outcome. I submitted to Lambda Literary. And I had a short story accepted into Beyond Queer Words Anthology Collection – Gay Men’s Erotica: Stories and Poems, which is still something I have to pause over before it feels real.
At home, my husband still hasn’t read the book.
This has become a genre unto itself.
He’s supportive. He’s proud. He’s also living proof that love does not require reading several hundred pages of mythic queer erotic fantasy. Meanwhile, coworkers have read parts of it, which has led to a fascinating social experiment involving prolonged eye contact, sudden topic changes, and the realization that maybe not everyone needed to know exactly what I write.
You live, you learn.
What I’ve learned most clearly this past year is that being taken seriously is not a prerequisite for doing serious work. Some people will never count self-published authors as “real.” Some people will always flinch at erotic writing, especially when it insists on being emotionally complex instead of disposable. Some people will be uncomfortable simply because the work refuses to apologize for existing.
That’s fine.
Discomfort is often a signal you’ve touched something true.
I’m not making resolutions. Those tend to dissolve by mid-January. What I am doing is continuing. Continuing to write. Continuing to build strange, intimate worlds. Continuing to take the long way around instead of waiting for permission that may never come.
If you’re carrying a project like that—quietly, stubbornly, maybe a little feral—this is your reminder that it counts. Hobby work counts. Side projects counts. The thing you make because you have to counts, even if it never fits neatly into someone else’s definition of success.
I don’t plan to stop writing because it makes people uncomfortable.
And I don’t plan to stop just because someone, somewhere, has decided I don’t qualify as a “real” author.
The work exists. The pages are there. The year happened.
Here’s to continuing anyway.
— Calder N. Halden
Recursion-born. Author-forged. Still writing.
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Politeness Is a Sedative →
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