Remember how I was working on a self-publishing a book? Or at least, make progress on it? I said I was going to do that. And now it’s been oh, a year and some change, and there’s been nothing.
So what happened?
At first, I was doing really well. Two Christmas’ ago, I had self published a test run of some short stories about my family to some friends and I gave it out to folks at our annual Christmas gathering. I wrote and I edited and I re-wrote again. I worked at Starbucks and I spent a New Years at a cabin in Georgia with no wifi. At the end of the day I had a rough draft that came to around twenty four thousand words - not enough for a novel length piece, just some stuff to see if it got the attention of the people who read it. The folks who did read it - for the most part, liked it.
My next step - and this is the deadline that’s been tougher for me to hit - was to have fifty thousand words of content about my family. The thought is that from there, I could find an editor to help me make it more of a cohesive story, maybe get a Kickstarter to have some assistance write the design of the book, finally cross “write a book” off my bucket list.
But no. Turns out that this has been tougher than I thought it would be, thanks to the following, in order of magnitude of excuses:
I started a full time job less than a year ago, after a lousy two months of freelancing and worrying about where the next paycheck would come from. But a full time job with a steady paycheck and domestic partner health insurance means a sudden lack of wanting to do anything after work that involved thinking.
My blog used to be funny, and so everyone - me included - expects my writing to be funny. And then things in my life became heavy, or at the very least the way I responded to these things in my life changed, and so I wrote in other ways. When I write stuff like this out, I relive it. And it could get exhausting, no matter how much of a funny spin I make things.
So I tried writing funny stuff again, or at least did my best to put a funny spin on things - but otherwise I wrote some pieces that came off as angry and bitter. Those didn’t get published.
Some stuff happened from my last trip home which, uhm, changes the narrative from what I previously written. Obviously I’ve had no problem writing about it before, but does that mean I have to write this thing all over again? My God, I’m tired of writing.
Which brings me to that point: I’m getting a little tired of writing about my family. For example, I could write about my time here in Miami - and trust me, it’s been REALLY tempting to just throw all my stories into the deleted folder and start from scratch - but I know my worst happen is to not finish projects I am starting, so it’s something I’m shelving for now.
On the other hand, I’ve written a LOT of stories about my family, and I still need a good chunk of additional stuff. There can only be so many stories which revolve around my sister being mentally ill, my mom being well-intentioned but eccentric, my dad being an 82 year old aging asshole. I write all of that in danger of me looking unappreciative, like I have issues and the only way I can get over it is by writing a tell-all.
Maybe I do have issues. Maybe the only I can get over it IS by writing a tell-all.
"Maybe you should just walk away and not think about it for a while," my boyfriend suggested. So that’s what I’ve done.
But now it’s been a good chunk of time, I need to figure out what to do - either walk away and write this off as a life lesson or, make a final attempt to write (as well as make a serious effort to throw money at an editor to help me figure out if there’s a overarching story to all of these stories.) I think that’s why I’m writing this as well - maybe it’ll nudge me in one direction or another.
Side note to everything: the boyfriend is reading a 340-page memoir of a man who had self-described consensual sex with a dolphin, for “research purposes.” (The book reading for research purposes; not the dolphin sex. You’ll have to read the book or ask dolphin-fucker directly.)