by Chris Harris
It’s the New Year, 2026 and I’ve been looking at what I’ve been doing and what I want to do next, I keep coming back to a simple thought. This blogging is easy and very satisfactory.
My two blogs are going well, my main blog very well, and I can genuinely see myself doing this forever, happily, with no great angst about whether it adds up to something bigger. For a long time I’ve assumed blogging could be my sole writing endeavour and I’d be perfectly content with that. It is something that works well with my business, that I can write ten blogs in a week or one. I can get the sites designed properly and the number of views monthly js rising in a highly satisfactory tangent. Yup, it fits me very well.
The book of short stories has been a labour of love, anyone can blog, not everyone can write a good book, albeit, at the moment just short stories.
Eight stories, finished with Louise halfway through editing them. I started writing the second book, the first story of which I have to admit it’s probably better than the other eight. Which is mildly frustrating in the way writing often is. When you write your first book of short stories, the work tends to get progressively better. You learn as you go. You get sharper. You stop doing some of the clunkier things. You become more confident about what you’re trying to say and how you want to say it.
So you end up facing this slightly awkward scenario: the second book is probably going to be better than the first, yet you’re creating your first book, trying to get it out there, trying to get someone to eventually take note. There’s always the fear, isn’t there, that you’ll run yourself into the ground trying to make the first thing happen, when it turns out the second , thing might have been the one that landed, the one that someone actually said yes to.
Part of you thinks you should rewrite it all, but then part of you thinks of all of those great first albums from your old favourite bands and how that initial rawness and simplicity, before they developed and matured, was what got you into them in the first place and was their defining sound.
So, over Christmas, I decided to stop the second collection of stories, add the ninth to the first book, ‘Ordinary Lives, Extraordinary Messes’ and concentrate on writing my own first proper novel and also focus on getting book one finished and punted out to publishers and TV and Film companies.
My first proper novel, a satire on a non league football club in the same village my short stories is in, Denham Phoenix FC, is coming along nicely. Very nicely. I’m writing it in weekly instalments and blogging it, and it’s set around. I’ve managed to curate roughly 2,000 words per week for the serialisation. That may not sound like much, but it’s been a huge thing for me because it means I’ve shown the discipline. It all needs pulling together better and shaping once the first run is done, but as things stand I’ve got about the first quarter of that second novel sitting there, written and banked, and that feels like a genuine achievement.
Christmas was a bit of an eye-opener in other ways too. On Monday morning, I went to meet Louise, and we did what we usually do: caught up on how the editing was going, talked through the plan. The general plan had originally been that once the editing was finished; I’d self-publish the short story book.
But over Christmas I started researching properly and discovered something that changes the order of everything.
Publishers, generally speaking, don’t want to consider something that has already been published, even if it’s only been self-published. If you’ve put it out there, you’ve used up the “first publishing” moment. You’ve taken away part of what they’re buying. So the original plan—finish edits, artwork and self-publish, and see what happens, starts to look like the wrong way round.
The new logic is almost the reverse. Try the traditional route first, punt out to publishers first, If there’s no joy, then self-publish.
I’ve also been reminding myself of what I already know, even if I don’t particularly enjoy it: if you’re going to approach somewhere like HarperCollins, you need a literary agent to get your foot through the door. Not that HarperCollins is remotely in my league, but the point stands. Big publishing is designed to be gated, and the gatekeepers tend to want their gatekeepers. That’s how it stays big.
What’s been more interesting, though, is discovering the scale of the independent publishing world. There are, from what I can gather, something like 2,000 independent publishers in the UK alone. A large chunk of them won’t be interested in what I do because my work doesn’t neatly match the big genre lanes. There’s no romance. No sci-fi. No fantasy. If a publisher is built around those markets, then I’m not their person and that’s fine.
But a good number of independents do take submissions, and some will accept material directly. I can send them my work for consideration, and it’s at least a path. It may be a slim path, but it’s a path.
I’ve even done the modern thing and stuck the material through ChatGPT to see what it makes of it in terms of likelihood. It thinks there’s an average chance 35-50% which I’ll embrace with open arms. It also floats “high chance” in places, but I’m not hanging my hopes on a robot’s optimism.
The same goes for film, TV, and radio. We’ve been following the suggestion to send material out to those outlets too, and again the broad message comes back that the sort of thing I’m writing is “match fit” for those mediums at the moment. That doesn’t mean anything will happen. It doesn’t mean anyone will read it. It doesn’t mean someone won’t roll their eyes and delete it within five seconds.
Because getting your foot through the door in that world looks almost impossible. It’s gatekeeping on top of gatekeeping, and the volume of people trying is enormous.
But we did find something useful: some companies who accept unsolicited material. In other words, they have enough foresight to recognise that there’s a lot of talent out there, people with ideas and scripts and stories, who simply don’t have the time, energy, money, or inclination to play the full industry game of making everything “solicited”, packaged, introduced, championed, and networked into existence.
And I’m absolutely one of those people. Not necessarily one of the talents, but certainly one of the people who hasn’t got the time or appetite to spend years trying to position myself into someone’s neat, little package. I have a life. I have a business. I have other writing. I need to pick my battles and allocate my time properly.
I also don’t want to become one of those people who are remorselessly chasing fame and fortune, only to be slowly hollowed out by rejection. Not because rejection scares me, I’m not interested in living like that.
And, in truth, rejection doesn’t bother me at all. I’ve built up plenty of those in life over the years, and I have enough going on in my life that I’m not emotionally dependent on someone in publishing or television saying yes. If it happens, great. If it doesn’t, I still have the work. I still have the writing. I still have blogging, which I actually enjoy.
This is simply a punt. I’m giving it a go. I have no illusions that any of it “deserves” to be published or made into anything. But I’ve always been someone who likes to try.
And if nothing else comes of it, I’ll still be where I started: in winter, in 2026, sitting down to write, happy enough to be a blogger.
Make both our days by buying a copy of my book!
Something About England: Amazon.co.uk: Harris, Christopher, Turner, Louise: 9798174255661: Books
Welcome to Denham, a fictitious Sussex village where behind respectable doors, well-tended gardens and familiar faces, things have a habit of going badly wrong.
Obsession, ambition, deception, jealousy and petty rivalry run through this collection of tragi-comical and satirical short stories. From poltergeists and lottery winners to cricket club feuds and environmental disasters, ordinary people embark on discovering just how quickly an ordinary life can unravel into an extraordinary mess.
Darkly funny, occasionally poignant and populated by characters who are rarely quite what they seem, these stories explore the peculiarities of Middle England, and the uncomfortable territory between respectability and ruin.
