The Riptide That Is My Writing Career
I rode a meteor of possibility into 2017. First, my novella was released by a small publisher in May. My very first traditionally published novella.
And then in September the big invitation. What’s that you say? A monetized blog? I can get paid for my writing? Quantum miracles shift the space/time continuum and new universes are revealed. Then in November over 1k reads and 800 claps for one flash fiction piece! Three weeks behind the paywall and $145 to show for it. Me is happy. Is this the chink in the armor I’ve been searching for since I first tapped a vein and started bleeding out onto the page in ‘97? “Have the gatekeeper’s gates finally begun to crumble?” I ask myself.
December: six months on and I stare down in dismay at my novella riddled with typos, errors, and formatting fuck ups that render the whole thing nearly unreadable. Nice title and cover though. Part of me wishes now that the publisher would have said, “Hey, great first effort. Proofread it and clean it up a little then re-submit it to us” rather than vomiting out the half-baked version that is floating around free in the world with no hope of the fixes ever being made.
And the paid blog thing? Well three months of upward flight on the earnings graph until this month and then I see three weeks into December that I might be able to afford two cups of drip coffee at Starbucks this month. Yeah, dance of fucking joy back to the welfare office for me! Fun way to end the year.
Well, the old shit soup brain chemistry knows how to deal with that doesn’t it. Suck this bastard down into a nice little depression sink hole for a week or so. Meanwhile, I’ll keep plugging away at the two novels I’m currently writing. And submitting my finished novel to the indifferent literary agents (60 so far) that either don’t respond or send the standard “Thanks, but no thanks” form e-mails.
But whining and crying won’t help or change things, so it’s back to adulting for me. My day job is calling.
