erazmus

Spiraling downward. It's a nasty feeling, to see yourself slipping backward when you try so hard to push forward. If it isn't one thing, it's another. I'm dodging process servers for an unpaid dental bill (the dentists desk-girl said my insurance company approved the procedure, the dentist insisted it couldn't wait, I paid my thirty percent and the insurance company bounced their part, insisting they never approved it. I just don't/haven't had the six hundred bucks, soon to be plus two hundred court cost). That sucks.

Sucks more, my car threw a rod and I'm basically afoot. I drove that car for seventeen years. We got my wife's car working buts it's a stick and, while I know how, I can't drive a stick. Gout locks up my knees and ankles too often; I sometimes have trouble with an automatic. So I'm looking for a cheap, reliable car I can make payments on. Who isn't?

Sound like I'm whining? Okay, I am. But my point isn't all the money woes crap. My point is despite all this real world crashing down around my ears B-S, I've got other things I should be worried about. In fact, other things I am worried about, and all that B-S just pisses me off because it distracts me from important things. Real, long term, I have to make this work if I'm going to get anywhere things, which for me means my writing.

That sounds like self centered, head in the sand bull crap to most people who don't write and unrealistic dreaming besides, and it is. Its the nature of the writing game that to last in it and even make anything out of it, a person has to be a self-centered egoist of the first rank to even throw his hat in the ring. Any normal, rational person would tell me I need to fix my financial problems, knuckle down, budget better, get a second job, catch up on those bills, get out of the hole I'm in before putting time in on any pie-in-the-sky crap like writing fiction. And to any rational, reasonable person that would be good advice.

I spent almost twenty years not writing because some well meaning person led me to believe I didn't have enough life behind me to write realistic fiction. At seventeen, that was probably true, but I shouldn't have set it aside. I should have kept at it while life inevitably piled on. Instead I spent twenty years not writing and as a consequence fell behind where I should be in many elements of the craft and business of writing stories. That's a mistake that, at forty seven years old, I can't afford to make again. I've committed to making writing my second full-time job and I'm going to stick with that commitment.

In order to make it in the writing game, the first thing you have to believe is that you can tell a story at least as good as anyone. This despite much evidence to the contrary. Evidence like rejection letters. I got my two hundredth rejection letter last year, many from markets I didn't think were really worth submitting to in the first place. I sold a few pieces along the way, some pretty nice stories, but none that placed real super well, nothing that brought in say, and extra car payment. Nothing to tell me I'm right and all those logical people, and all those pro-market editors, are wrong.

All my collection of rejection letters tell me is I've thrown my hat into the ring. I think it was Frank Hebert's Dune, I heard, that got rejected fifty-seven times and took ten years to find a publisher. But Dune went on to become a classic and a blockbuster of the genre, and in the end made many payments, buying houses and cars, for Frank Herbert (and probably his agent as well). I've just this year finished my first novel and just this week received my first rejection for it. I'm disappointed, yes. But not disheartened.

I'm convinced that book is going to pay for my house some day, or at least part of it. If I didn't I'd probably just trunk it, like you hear of so many people doing. Not me. I'll trunk that novel when the last editor of the last publisher working in English takes out a restraining order to keep me from pitching it too him. Somewhere out there there is an editor and a publisher as smart as me. And I'm going to make them rich.

If I didn't believe that, I'd go get a part time job at a seven eleven, pay my damn bills, get cable TV and start following NASCAR. There is, after all, nothing wrong with NASCAR and cable TV, except that I won't spend time following the one and don't have funds to pay for the other. Instead I'm spending my cable money on a cheap (er) internet connection and using my race-watching time writing a synopsis of my novel for a pitch to an agent. I started the sequel but had another story nag me so bad I set the sequel aside to write this other, novel length tale. It doesn't matter to me, so long as I'm writing, finishing what I start and submitting it to editors who can and might pay me for it. Heinlein's rules. They may not lead every author to success, but I can't think of many successful author's who don't follow them. Mostly, anyway.

A quick glance at my spreadsheet tells me I have twenty-eight short stories and six poems in submission. I sold five stories and eight poems last year. I've sold one story and one poem so far this year, all exclusive of reprints. Sixty-one recorded rejections last year alone, and I'll get more this year barring a rush of sales. Because I won't hold, fold or grow too g-d old to keep sending my stuff out. Everything I've ever written is either in submission, under contract, waiting for the rights to revert or in print now. I'd submit my laundry lists if I knew a market who's guidelines they'd fit. I watch Ralan's, duo-troupe, Absolute writers forum, and I have a small list of good paying markets not listed on any of them. I keep my stuff out until it sells.

I can't say this is working for my short fiction but I don't see that its hurting it, and I'll follow the same pattern with my novels. (Anyone want to publish a contemporary fantasy novel about a web-cam girl turned inter-dimensional mercenary and cross-world media mogul? e-mail me.) I write what I want, what I feel, what moves me. Okay, so I'm a weirdo hopelessly warped by late seventies pop culture and SF and comic fandom who dropped out of college because I reject a lot of the pretensions of the educated class. And I work for what I laughingly call a living, sue me. So I'm working on an updated and adult novel set in the Land of Oz, where the people have been frozen in an non-aging, non-growing state of suspension waiting for Ozma's fairy prince to come so everything can start progressing again, and he isn't coming and things are falling apart. (Working title is "Zombies of Oz" and if I can finish it reasonably soon I may be able to cash in on McFarland's gonzo interpretation of an Oz movie and the Zombie book craze, but if not I'm writing it anyway.)

And I'm not taking a second job, though I'll pay off everybody somehow. I'm no dead beat and I refuse to be a loser as well. After all a real loser is someone who gives up on themselves, and that I just won't do. That's what makes me a writer.