Do you hear that voice? Just over your shoulder, at the edge of your hearing. No, not the one yelling about a Meat Bicycle! Or the one saying, “You’re the crunch, and I’m the Captain!” That voice we’re used to dealing with, because it’s the engineer on the Poop Train. Or Hamlet.
And I’m not talking about the Internal Editor. That bastard has been written about far too much.
No, this is the Inner Marketer.
This voice is looking at your first draft short story and saying, “Wait? You’re nearly at 4K words?? And you have two scenes left? You’ll never be able to market that! Shorter gives you a better chance of slipping in!”
Or, “So, this story about the android – where do you think that will get published? What’s your target market?”
Or, “When is the last time you did a blog post?”
“What was the last thing you put on twitter?”
“Have you tried to get your name out there more?”
“You need to work on that novel. No one will ever pay attention if you just keep writing short stories that only one market publishes!”
Notice one thing about this particular beast. Unlike the Inner Editor, the Inner Marketer doesn’t care about the quality of your story. It’s focused on the hustle. The sale. Everything except the quality of the story itself. In that way, it’s way worse than the Inner Editor.
When the two of them combine, they can completely tear your concentration apart.
Did writers of the past deal with the Inner Marketer? The Inner Editor was a bad enough. Adding this new psycho on the shoulder can be a bit much. It almost makes you want to go a little bonkers and say to both of them:
And play hopscotch on their rib cages.
Biomechanoid Blues 