Meet Stephen Kozeniewski

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Stephen Kozeniewski. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Stephen below.

Stephen, so great to have you with us and thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts with the community. So, let’s jump into something that stops so many people from going after their dreams – haters, nay-sayers, etc. We’d love to hear about how you dealt with that and persisted on your path.

I’ll tell you something interesting about the haters and the nay-sayers, and, trust me, I’ve encountered a mass of them over the years. Each of them has a little black hole inside them, one that can never be filled up, now matter how much garbage they dump in it. So you can look at this two ways: you can either obsess over the vacuum hearts and try, perpetually to fill them up by feeding them others in the hopes they won’t turn on you. But they’ll always turn on you. The other option, the one I tend to pursue, is to leave them to their own devices. They’ll devour themselves. And it drives them absolutely nuts when you don’t feed them, not even a scrap of bad emotion.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

I try to release about a novel a year, maybe more, maybe less. I release about as many short stories as I can sell, which varies quite a bit. In the last few years I’ve started a micropress to assist a few other eminently worthy authors, so you’ll also see me promoting the occasional anthology I’ve edited or longer work from another author. And when I’m not doing all that I’m helping my fiancée in the balloon studio in our basement.

My latest personal release is a Frankenstein’s monster: a blend of a short story collection with interstitial story notes so extensive they form an autobiographical narrative of the time when I was writing the shorts. It’s called YES, I AM A VAMPIRE. To answer your next question: no, I am not a vampire.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

1. Thick skin. I have been rejected well over ten thousand times in this industry. That’s including agents and editors when trying to get published, and bloggers and reviewers when trying to get reviews and market. That’s probably not even starting to count all of the readers who just plain didn’t like my work, or slagged me on a review site. I’ve learned to love rejections. Trust me, they’re better than radio silence.

2. Kindness. I used to look at old black and white photographs of Pete Townshend sitting down for a beer with Mick Jagger and I’d think, “Aren’t they competitors? Isn’t this like sleeping with the enemy?” It took until I was published and surrounded by a veritable army of fellow writers that I realized it’s not a competition. We are all fighting the same enemy: irrelevance. And there is no one you can bond better with than someone doing the same thing you are.

3. Patience. There was a time when I couldn’t wait to hear back from an agent or an editor about whether they were accepting one of my stories. Over the past eleven years I’ve waited so long on so much that I’ve completely reversed my position. I want more time to do everything. I guess there’s no way to develop that skill except to live through it.

All the wisdom you’ve shared today is sincerely appreciated. Before we go, can you tell us about the main challenge you are currently facing?

As I mentioned in the last question, authors aren’t really competing with each other. I know sometimes it feels that way, for instance when you’re at a book fair and a reader buys a book from the table to your left and then bypasses you to buy a book from the table on your right, but the truth is a rising tide raises all boats. The more my peers encourage people to read in general, the more the readers will begin discovering me, and vice versa.

Our real competitor is obscurity. With every new release I have to stare deep into that pit of, “Will anyone buy this?” You know who often helps me with that? My fellow authors. Some of them will buy and read me, yes (all authors are necessarily voracious readers) but also they’ll encourage me, share my work, recommend it. And that’s heartening. And then I do the same for them. We’re all fighting obscurity together.

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