In the summer of 2024, I stood at a crossroads.
My short story collection had been rejected outright by literary agents. My first novel earned me representation but couldn’t find a publisher, despite generous praise from editors at all the major houses. My agent then rejected my second novel and promptly ghosted me. Meanwhile, the animated Manic Expression movie had dragged on for years longer than expected. Consequently, I hadn’t written a word since 2021.
Out of sheer creative boredom, I started tearing apart and reassembling my short stories. There were forty-one of them, all set in the same interconnected universe spanning a thousand years. I wondered what would happen if I rearranged them into chronological order and turned them into chapters of a single book. Almost immediately I saw gaps, so I wrote nine new stories to fill them.
Because I was playing in a sandbox I already knew held zero appeal to agents, I stopped worrying about what they might think. The creative paralysis that had gripped me for three years finally lifted. I felt free.
More than free—I felt the full weight and scope of what I’d built. Nearly thirty years of work. Not commercial, especially not in the age of the algorithm. But ambitious. Bold. Audacious. For some, those words are synonyms for “no damn good.” For me, they started to feel like something worth sharing.
In the fall of 2025, I decided to go for broke. I would give every single thing I’d ever written one final, uncompromising pass. Using a site called Atticus, I formatted it all into clean, professional editions: fifty short stories, a children’s book, two novels, six collections, and the newly chronological Manic Expression book. I was going to release everything—permission from the gatekeepers be damned.
That left only one unfinished piece: my third novel, Backstabber.
I’d been tinkering with it since 2019, but I’d lost my nerve. I knew the story I wanted to tell, but I kept trying to tell it in a way that might please agents—edgy but not too edgy, thrilling but not too thrilling, original but not too original. I would stare at the screen for hours at a time, agonizing over single words, trying to guess what they wanted.
In late January of this year, with everything else finally in order, nothing stood between me and the book anymore. So I sat down and wrote Backstabber without a single thought for what an agent might find acceptable. I knew it would be published no matter what—traditionally or as part of my independent rollout. That certainty gave me room to breathe. For the first time in years, I stopped second-guessing myself.
I won’t spoil Backstabber here (its release is still a year away), but I will say this: it’s not for everyone. It’s a horror novel braided with family drama, where the supernatural elements remain deliberately ambiguous—real or psychological, the reader decides. It offers no easy answers. I won’t claim it’s brilliant; that will be up to you. But I will say it’s challenging.
By the end of the first chapter, I knew my chances of landing an agent with this book were close to zero. One of the central characters is a teenage boy who brutally bullies an autistic classmate. The language he uses is vulgar and ugly because that’s who he is. Certain words appear not for shock value, but because they’re necessary to show the rot inside him. I knew most agents would stop reading right there. So be it.
I have never shied away from the world’s ugliness in my writing. I use stories to try to understand cruelty, and that requires confronting it head-on. There was a time when that kind of honesty was celebrated. Today, the algorithm has made publishers, studios, and producers timid. They want safe, bland, inoffensive work. Their caution doesn’t seem to be improving sales.
Writing Backstabber wasn’t easy. The words didn’t flow the way they once did. I had to unlearn years of received “wisdom” from industry insiders. I wasn’t setting out to break rules—just to ignore them. I pushed myself, stretched my imagination, and finally wrote the story I needed to write.
I finished the first draft in late April. I’ve read it through a couple of times and will read it many more. I’ve also begun querying agents. So far, silence—as expected. It doesn’t matter. Backstabber has a release date: July 13, 2027. One way or another, it’s coming out.
To every young writer reading this, here is the advice I wish someone had given me sooner:
Write the story you actually want to write. Edit it relentlessly. Read it until you’re sick of it, then read it again. Let others read it, and listen to their criticism. Polish it until it shines. Craft a rock-solid query letter. Then, every single day, submit to one agent on Query Tracker—just one, to avoid burnout.
Do this for a full year.
While the rejections roll in, keep polishing. Format the book professionally with Atticus. And at the end of that year, if no agent has said yes, self-publish.
By then you will have queried 365 agents. If none of them wanted it, it’s time to go it alone.
And when you do, don’t just upload to Amazon and hope. Start a Substack. Build a presence on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Patreon—wherever your people are. You are now your own agent, your own manager, your own champion. Don’t say “I think this book is pretty good.” Sell it like you mean it. Call it bold. Riveting. Spellbinding. Enthralling. Believe in it fiercely, because if you don’t, no one else will.
The gatekeepers don’t want you thinking this way. Their business model depends on you believing they’re the only path to an audience. But we don’t need their permission anymore.
Not every book will become a bestseller. Many will disappear into the noise. But they will exist. They will have a chance to reach someone, somewhere, someday. That’s infinitely more than they’ll ever have sitting forever on your hard drive, waiting for someone else to declare you good enough.
You’re good enough right now.
Join me back here on July 7 for Day One of the big launch, when I’ll roll out the first story in this wild universe: Bloodshot.
James Daniel Walsh
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