About 12 years ago, I answered a newspaper ad seeking “serious” novelists. I didn’t know if I qualified for “serious”. I’d written only a single screenplay but it was successful enough that the process of story creation, painting images, emotions, and characters became my overwhelming passion. It took me 2 years to write and edit the screenplay and after just five months, I was nearing completion on its novel version. After 35 years of being a polymathic artist and digital creative I had finally discovered what I truly wanted to do for the rest of my life. What I HAD to do. I chose to answer that ad, determining to abandon the whole idea if the writer’s group members judged my work too harshly. So, first-draft pages in-hand I showed-up to an address in North Atlanta where I was welcomed by Professor David Darracott and his beautiful wife Donna. The only other writer in attendance was a corporate lawyer named Larry Kahn, a graduate of Yale University Law School.

A college professor and an ivy league attorney. Needless to say I was highly intimidated. Nearly all of my education had been entirely self-taught, exhausting several genres of fiction, science, and philosophy throughout my twenties. I’ve since discovered people like me do exist, The Accidental Polymath, but at the time, I nervously gave over my pages and accepted theirs, knowing that these two brilliant men would quite likely prove sufficiently advanced that my dream of being a writer would probably wither on the vine of my slowly evolving common sense. We’d meet again the following week.

I took home their sets of pages and eagerly dove into them. It was the beginning of my graduate work. Their characters were warm and inviting, beautifully crafted, long form stories which sucked me in and made me want more. Their conflicts were taught. Everything had a purpose and voice, but they weren’t perfect, so feeling like an imposter, I proceeded to edit and offer suggestions based only on the patterns I’d picked up in my twenties.

We met the following week with a better understanding of who each of us was as a person and why we were there; To share the unstoppable compulsion to write, the meat and guts of the thing. David became our leader, enthusiastically filling our pages with red ink while gracefully accepting and complimenting our edits of his own work. We handed over the next set of pages and my true education began. I’ve never met anyone who knows more about “writing” than David Darracott and Larry Kahn’s quiet brilliance and attention to detail may always be beyond my comprehension, but they became the best of my friends. Together, we embarked on the greatest imaginable journey, that of becoming writers.

Over the years, other authors joined us, came and went, but the core group remained remarkably consistent. Lynn Garson is another brilliant attorney who writes and edits with a rich sophisticated Southern voice. Rona Simmons is a highly productive and prolific whirlwind with amazing editing skills, Michael Geoghgan, a retired salesman for Penguin Press with a lifetime’s worth of knowledge and experience in real world publishing, and Michelle Valigursky with Emory University who managed to make us laugh, cry, and recoil in horror in the space of just two pages. Beyond the dream of writing, we all had little in common, each of us bringing unique individual experiences and expertise as we validated one another’s work, gradually teaching one another to be better writers.

They became my friends and my coaches. Our stories and manuscripts got tighter, relating more with less words and clearer meanings. One by one, when we felt we were ready, we composed our query letters to publishers and agents, the gatekeepers of an industry notoriously difficult to penetrate. And for the most part, we, like most who dare such dreams, were answered mostly by silence or if we got lucky, form letters politely "Thanking" us for considering their agency but firmly expressing no interest in our material at this time. Assurances that we'd be better represented with any other agency and wishes of good luck in our continuing search.

Of course its perfectly understandable. The big publishers receive 3,000 – 5,000 fiction manuscripts a year, yet only 5 – 10 of those will be accepted for publication. Most of those manuscripts are rejected on the first few paragraphs and some aren't read at all. For the big publishers It amounts to a centralized control of who and what sees publication. Agents and agencies become successful only when they represent a hit and their opinions, (or more likely the opinions of their secretaries or personal assistants) are heavily swayed by market trends, currents in the tide which can influence a novel’s success or failure.

Web2 brought Amazon and publishing on-demand which has helped, a little, but for writers who self-publish, they can only ever be as successful as the enormous amount of time and energy they must expend in marketing and selling themselves, or expanding their number of personal followers in Social Media. It becomes a full-time job where energy expenditure is in sales more than the continued creation of the stories and ideas we wish to share.

Why does anyone become a writer? I believe it’s because whether true or not, we each feel we have something to say and perhaps the unique ability to say it, share it - to make others laugh or feel something akin to our own experience. To silently commune with others at such a deep and personal level is the art, to do so while earning enough to survive and do it again is the “dream”.

Whether its ultimately noble or selfish is one of those philosophical questions I may never be able to answer. I’ve deserved accusations of both. But for me, it’s hardly a choice. It’s an imperative, no less demanding than breathing or eating. I suspect the same is true for all accomplished writers, artists or anyone enslaved to the myriad passions which drive them.

I’ve never considered myself to be a true artist because I always secretly knew that my only real genius was pattern recognition. Patterns are everywhere, in art, music, history, science, literature, computers, and within human behavior. I’ve always seen them with extraordinary clarity and when my oldest son suddenly called me suggesting I look into minting my digital art as NFT’s, my mind suddenly exploded with the clarity of how blockchain technology, Web3 will impact everything, democratizing the world’s economy and how we conduct business. The patterns of evolving technologies in our new age of information are, quite literally because of the Blockchain, available and visible to all who wish to see them. Soon, we will equate the years of Amazon and primitive web2 with the same laughably dysfunctional nostalgia of those who recall the thrill of connecting to Compuserve or AOL over the obnoxiously loud, slow and unreliable 14.4K baud modem internet connection.

The days of monopolies and mega-corporation centralization are numbered. The “writing” is literally on the wall (The blockchain). Evolved Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) where governance is bottom - up and entirely democratic will soon rule the world’s economy. It’s predicted to abolish the Hollywood Studio system, fundamentally changing the way movies are financed and made. Arts and music are leading the way. Can publishing be that far behind? The days of Nielson ratings based on estimated demographics are over. Realtime data and instant analysis is the new standard. The prediction of market trends will soon be an outdated, unnecessary step in our evolving democratic economy. For most people, blockchain technology will remain invisible, even as it lies at the core of all internet transactions and activities, but the fundamental shift in Humanity’s level of trust and truth called Web3 will mark the next major evolutionary step for our entire species.

Atlanta Writers DAO, our real world Collective of skilled and experienced writers strongly believes that we deserve a place in this newly evolving economy. That our stories are entertaining, edifying and worthy of the widest possible inclusive distribution. We have things to say and we’ll welcome submissions from other authors as “serious” as we are. Voting on partnership acceptance will be entirely democratic, without regard to predictive “trends”, politics, religion, age, or sexual orientation. If you can write, offer and take constructive criticism, you can share in our pioneering Web3 journey.