Hark! The Muses of Synchronicity Descend Upon the Diligent

For new subscribers who have no idea who I am, I’ve updated my About Page. Nice to meet ya.Success cannot be pursued—it can only ensue.

I stole those words from Viktor Frankl—maybe not exactly—but here’s what he wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning (1946):

“For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself”

For this novelist in particular, such a “dedication to a cause greater than oneself,” i.e., writing multiple novels (not thinking about writing them) without any hope or despair for what may come, is the only consistent way I’ve been able to make sense of my existence aside from reading Viktor Frankl, whose work changed my life.

The story might go like this: you write a first novel, and it almost surely sucks, and then you write a second one, which is slightly better more authentic, and by the third book, you start to understand where and how exactly you are fucking up vast swathes of text, and by the fourth book you may even begin to have a clearer idea of your specific strengths and weaknesses and avoid writing the extra 30,000 words you know you’re going to cut … but then you wake up one day and you’re thirty-seven years old and you’re only just reading Moby Dick for the first time and you wonder if you need to start this whole book-writing thing all over again.

But that’s as far as I’ve gotten for now—three novels written, two of them published, a fourth in its nascent stages—so don’t count on any more novel-writing wisdom from me.

A first look at the revised Kingdom Anywhere edition of my debut novel, which is really the second novel I wrote, Slim and The Beast (2015). The cover design slaps thanks to Saskia Meiling. Viktor Frankl’s point is well-taken, however:

Devoting oneself to the practice itself is the only way to guarantee the possibility of success, and herein lies the rub about writing novels: it’s very hard to become halfway decent at it if you don’t actively choose to live a lifestyle that affords you the poverty time and mental clarity required to spend hundreds of hours putting words onto a page, a devotional act of solitudinal faith—nay, conviction!—that whatever’s inside your ever-elusive mind is far more important than anything else in the world—which oftentimes means being financially solvent.

In my entirely subjective opinion, to be a novelist is to reject the monolithic idea that the creative life is about financial success or a publicly-approved career. As my dear and prolific author friend says, writing books isn’t a vocation so much as an affliction; and I can attest that the books I’ve published written have only resulted from a mosaic lifestyle that involves choosing time over money—but actually, not in theory—and thus working various part-time gigs to make rent.

Intermezzo: the only time I’ve worked 40+ hours a week in an office was for a UFO religious cult in Paris. I didn’t realize they believed in extraterrestrial salvation until they were paying me, which shall be the subject of an upcoming essay in SOUVENIR magazine, a revolutionary arts & literature publication that harks back to the arts journals of the 1920s and gives voice to the thriving anglophone scene in Paris in the 2020s. You can read more about SOUVENIR magazine here.

“The professional has learned that success, like happiness, comes as a by-product of work. The professional concentrates on the work and allows rewards to come or not come, whatever they like.”

Steven Pressfield, The War of Art (2002)

When I first moved to Paris in 2010

as an aspiring 22 y/o novelist, madly in love with a Parisian woman and with just enough money to pay two months of rent, I was already a fan of Albert Camus famous assertion that, “one must imagine Sisyphus happy,” and I can’t honestly say I’ve ever had the illusion that novelistic “success” is about anything more than a Sisyphean adventure.

Whoever drew this, thank you.

To use Substack as an example, the most “successful” piece I’ve ever written here is entitled “I, Too, Have a Nazi Problem,” which is patently absurd—but so, too, is the world, and if only I could write more, more, MORE! scathing critiques of sociopolitical flamewars, maybe just maybe, one day, I could make it big …

But alas, I’ve settled on defining literary “success” as finding a way to pay my rent and bills whilst working as few hours as possible for other people so that I can maintain enough mental clarity to not just write novels but actually enjoy it.

One of my former definitions of “success” was to have a novel make the front table at Paris’ Shakespeare & Company.

As I recently discussed in my essay about gatekeepers in trad publishing and MFA programs, “success” in the publishing world is at best an elitist chimera, a fickle fantasy, an orgiastic spaghetti wundermonster of the most capitalist kind: sell 1,500 books with a small-time publisher and you’ll be asked why you didn’t sell more; do a reading at NYC’s McNally Jackson’s and the first question you’ll get asked is “who’s your agent?” (I didn’t have one then and I don’t have one now).

Yes, the definition of literary “success” is forever tumbling down other people’s hills, whether you’re a Pulitzer-prize-winning novelist in search of the elusive Nobel, or an unknown novelist who started writing on Substack three years ago and feels extremely fulfilled selling one or two dozen books a month.

This autumn, Kingdom Anywhere is republishing my debut, Slim and The Beast, in a definitive 10th Anniversary Edition. Paying subscribers will receive a copy this autumn.

Sometimes, however, the Muses of Synchronicity descend upon us, revealing previously unforeseen perspectives at the top and/or bottom of new hills.

A few years ago, a kind soul working across the ocean in PR contacted me via Substack and thanked me for my writing. A year or so later, after publishing The Requisitions, exclusively for my readers at first,1 this guardian angel in question was one of the first people to champion the book and praise it not just for the story, but for how I went about publishing it with my partner-in-life, .

Perhaps a year after that, she told me—let’s call her Petya—that she was passing through Paris and wanted to book a walking tour with me—a Hemingway & The Modernists. During our literary stroll, we discussed the challenges of the consumerist corporate world, how to find fulfilling work in a for-profit for-power economy, and the impossibility of being able to succeed as a writing novelist when so much of writing these days seems to only be about selling.2

Fast forward to a few months ago, and call it synchronicity, call it fate, call it “success,” as I was busy going about my creative life (a new solo EP in the works, editing my debut novel to re-publish with Kingdom Anywhere, and working on SOUVENIR magazine—this is the second time you’ve heard about it now), from out of the creative blue sky contacted me, said she’d been following me for a while now, and that she had some ideas as an experienced publicist and would like to discuss working together.

After a decade of going at this independent publishing thing alone, I have a publicist,

a professional fighting for me in my corner—and so a new definition of “success” has appeared in my writing life. Such is my message of encouragement to all of the true novelists out there—the budding novelists, the struggling novelists, the unpublished novelists, the award winners, the runner-ups, everyone writing in the in-between who is perhaps right now, reading this very page, wondering why even though it’s Thursday, it still feels like a Tuesday, and I really should get back to the manuscript before it’s too late:

Success cannot be pursued—it must ensue. The boulder is joy. Just keep on rolling.

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