I'm supposed to be writing. I'm also supposed to be marketing. I'm supposed to be doing research to qualify to go back to school; show job opportunities, industry growth, etc. I'm supposed to fix up an RESP mess that dates back nearly four years. I'm supposed to clean the house, walk the dogs, just be a good overall person in general. Plus, maintain good hygiene.
None of the above is easy. I'm not about lists. I prefer attainable goals. I prefer staying under the radar but love being in yours. I love writing on my own terms which is painful and slow and counter-productive to be self-sustainable in the craft. If I could (and sometimes I do), I'd concentrate on writing what comes into my head, a self-therapy of why who I am where I am because frankly, I've been confused since high school.
I made choices out of practicality, impulse and convenience, not necessarily out of some overall plan. I've jumped the gun on projects and jobs I never should have started. And under it all, I believed if I only tried hard enough, the planets would align and everything would make sense. And you know what, if I'm being honest, sometimes they did. For a little while.
But to follow a plan, that's tough for me. This post isn't spontaneous, it is part of 'the plan' I should follow according to the 'Indie Authors For Dummies' forums I follow. I'm supposed to create a following, to toss out posts like these on social media to try and remind you who I am and that I write books for you to purchase at selected institutions. Then I hope you like or link this post and your friends will check me out, like what I write and like me and so on and so on. Then they follow my page on Facebook or Twitter and I get a Netflix series deal by Christmas.
I simply don't care for self-promotion and I'm trying to adjust to a world of selling myself.
True story. I published a magazine way back in the 90s. It was hard, hard, underfunded work and I was severely under-educated in the field. I taught my way through it. I juggled house bills to pay my printers, I bought bus tickets to different cities and slept on friends' couches. The next day I'd walk all around these cities doing distribution, trying to build that small readership base. Then we were sort of evicted from our house (long irrelevant story). I started working other jobs to make the bare minimum of payments on my increasing VISA. I was in my mid-twenties and still full of cynical hope.
I remember one crowning moment; a film industry book store that was in Gastown, Vancouver. Biz Books. Owned by two women, one named Patricia. Anyways, I'm at the end of my nut, barely keeping my shit together and I go to drop off the critically panned (in my head) 'Monster Truck Film Issue'. I go in, tell her I have the latest issue and she (god forbid) opens it up and begins to read the inside pages RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME.
Now that has never happened. And you know what happened next? She laughed at one small, buried little joke in the legalese you find in the header of all magazines. And she noticed another joke and laughed. It was awkward. Then she asked about a letter in Chinese I'd printed. I told her the truth, we didn't know what it said but it came to our address so we included a note with it asking for a Chinese translator. She absolutely loved it and called her partner over so they could enjoy the magazine together, again, right in front of me. It was surreal.
But in that moment I realized I loved I wrote something which made someone laugh weeks later. It was an odd rush at the time, a brief belief that maybe, with a little more time I could make this work. But as my bank account and self-confidence was stressing, it was too little too late. That was twenty years ago.
Now I'm in my forties and yes, I am still full of cynical hope. Travelling by buses and crashing on couches has been changed by the Internet. I'm still trying to adapt to that. Yet it's still the same thing, spending time away from what I love (writing) to do something I'm not comfortable with (self-promotion).
Next, as part of the 'master plan', I'm going to post this on Facebook and hope that you, dear reader, will like this page so your friends whom I don't know and may never meet will check me out. Maybe they respect your tastes enough they will like my Facebook page, download a free sample of my work here and then maybe buy a bigger sample here.
Full disclosure, I then get a small royalty from that sale - about 30%, paid at the end of the fiscal year.
And if you and they like that sample you all can follow me on my new Twitter account here where I will start posting other entertaining shit because that is what life is all about.
Being entertained.
Good times.
-jay
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