A failure with a bimmer

I have failed my hero.  Failed him, like that Creative Writing class I signed up for in high school because I needed an easy course to fill out my schedule.  It’s my fault, really.  I mean it couldn’t be anyone else’s.  As much as I would like it to be.  As much as I once thought it was. 

It’s hard to be a writer.  Actually, that’s a total lie; it’s easy to be a writer.  It’s hard to be a good writer.  Harder to be a published writer.  I imagine several years ago it was hard to be a writer, what with typewriters and white out and no Ctrl+Z to wipe out the last 20 minutes of what-the-hell-was-I-just-writing.  I dreamed of being a writer, and I went through the steps.  I wrote several columns, all with neat little query letters and inventive titles.  I tried pretty much every path: sending query letters, sending letters of interest, sending unsolicited manuscripts via email, via snail mail.  I shot off all this stuff to every major and most not-so-major magazine within my subject.  I tried self syndicating a column, which was a terrible idea given that economic viability of most newspapers is on par with a Saudi Arabian X-Rated Video Emporium and Liquor Shack.

With no air conditioning.

Also, it’s on fire.

And all the employees have been laid off beca… you know I think maybe you get the point.  Also I wrote a book.  A whole book;  58,273 words.  Or something close to that, I didn’t actually open the file to check, but the point is I tried.  I sent a letter to my favorite columnist, my hero, and asked him his opinion on how I could get to do what he does.  Amazingly, he wrote back.  He said “You just have to try harder than the other guy.”

But, it’s not worth it.  It’s just a waste of my time at this point.  Maybe if I had put all my eggs in the writing basket I would have been successful, but I didn’t.  I got a degree in engineering, which is way the hell more lucrative than even most moderately successful writers.  So I failed my hero and focused my time on my engineering job.  And I drive a brand new BMW. 

It’s not so bad.

And so I leave you, as a non writer with an upper middle class lifestyle.  I say goodbye and have fun writing, suckers!

And I’m never coming back!  I’m resisting the urge to write about anything and everything.  This blog will live on as a reminder of my failures and I will leave it here for everyone to see.  You know, actually this whole ordeal of mine would make a really good story.  I should compile this all into a book and start pitching to…

Damnit!  

Cliché

You know the worst part about being a struggling writer? Being the cliché. All the clichés, really. Thinking you’ve got something worth publishing, thinking your work is the next big thing, deluding yourself with dreams of glowing reviews and Pulitzer Prizes, and then somehow ten minutes later laying your head down on the desk and trying to breathe life back into your sinking heart while you realize that every effort you’ve made to get published has resulted in complete and undeniable failure. Where’s the whiskey bottle? Where’s the dark bar with the other “aspiring” writers? Where’s the heroine needle and the self righteous sadness that comes with the odd combination of “they just don’t get it” and “I’ll never be good enough.”

There’s too many of us for it to be anything special, but too many of us for it to be lonely. It’s an odd feeling, like looking up at the moon and knowing that someone else out there is probably also looking up at that same moon, emails out to the same agents you’ve been querying, manuscript full of run-on sentences with too many commas just like yours, but statistically speaking they’re probably not going to get published. Not like you. Not like your manuscript, different from all the rest. Better. Buffed out to a shine like a new red Ferrari. Or a polished turd. A turd with ifs where there should be ofs because what the hell Microsoft Word.

Coffee. I need coffee. Where’s my coffee, I need more coffee to stay awake and write my book. But first, I gotta blog about my writing struggle on my MacBook Pro at Starbucks.

Eff

After participating in Be an agent for a day I think I'm going to have to add this to my list:

F) Rewrite query letter to make it hook, make it intriguing, write it with great voice and flow, and then send out to a few more agents.

r-evote. I vote F

F wins.

The view looking up from my computer desk.

This was supposed to be my path to success; step by step through the rejections to a published book. But I'm realizing that if I never actually get published, then this is just a wall of failure, staring me in the face every time I sit down to write. Seven letters, but I've queried at least twice as many agents; many of them don't even bother to say no.

I realize this is the real world, and no one will give me any encouragement outside the empty form-rejection letter "This project looks interesting, however..."

But that's what I'm surviving on these days. I'll take what I can get.

I considered just publishing on the internet in blog form. Chapter1 = blog post 1, etc...

But judging by the big fat "No Followers" on this blog, I suspect that publishing via blog would result in the same number of readers as if I just chucked unstapled manuscripts out the window of my Mini on the 405.

So what are my options?

A) Quit. Maybe it's telling that I started with this one, but it's the obvious one, and the time and frustration saved isn't insignificant.
B) Quit, for now. My motivation and positive attitude comes in bursts, so this has some merit.
C) Self publish. I don't have the money.
D) Kindle publishing. Free, easy, instant... free.
E) Query enough agents to fill out the rest of row 2 on my wall of failure with rejection letters, then come back to this list.

So I'm going to have a vote. Anyone who follows this blog can vote.

I vote E.

And the results are in, we have one vote for E, and zero for everything else.

E it is. Thank you all for participating.

Words of Encouragement

Aspiring Author: Can you discuss the process of getting a book published, once it’s completed?

Successful Author: Sure, have you ever, just, slammed your head into your desk, just as hard as you can? I mean just slammed it down? And then just slammed it down again, and then again, and you just keep on slamming your head into the desk and you get a whelp on your forehead the size of a golf ball, and you just keep slamming and slamming. Over and over until you can’t feel your face, you can’t even feel the top half of your body but you just keep slamming your head into the desk. Your vision starts to blur and tunnel and you start to get lightheaded. It isn’t until your eyes start to sting that you realize you’re bleeding profusely from your forehead. You’ve probably already suffered irreparable brain damage, but you keep going, slamming your head over and over. And finally, just before your vision fades off into complete darkness and your brain slips into a coma, someone hands you a check for eight hundred dollars.

Aspiring Author: So… do I need an agent?

Query: Kindles, Engineers, and Marketing For Dummies

Dear Agent,

We didn’t know. We couldn’t have known. All we saw was a promising future of e-books, sent instantly to our Kindles from the homebase of Amazon.com like little 60,000-word beacons of light zipping through the luminescent either of the future. We were all cheering the technology on, beseeching it to travel faster towards a future we couldn’t see, while at the same time running away from past we weren’t ready to let go of.

The agents were the first to go, replaced by the Amazonbot, an artificial intelligence computer designed to measure a book’s likeliness to sell the 42 copies necessary to cover the basic costs of Kindle publishing. With the launch of AmazEdit, that 42 became 26. 26 became 12 with the upgrade to automatic cover art and blurb-creation. 12 became 3 when the computers-that-be realized that the market had become a numbers game where 1 big hit out of 8000 published books was the best way to increase the bottom line (the bottom line was all these soulless, godless machines cared about). Soon everyone was publishing, not just writers, but bankers, musicians, and even engineers, whose writing had always been barely readable given the overuse of commas, and the insistence on not spelling out numbers under ten. Except that once.

With the slush pile becoming slush books, becoming slush-best-sellers, there was almost no way to differentiate the good books from the bad. Good writers lost out to good marketers, English Lit and Creative Writing degrees gave way to creative marketing degrees, and many unemployed English teachers starved to death when motorists could not read the double-spaced, 12-point, Times New Roman font signs which read “I would like the opportunity to work for you in exchange for food.” Marketing For Dummies became a seven volume series, each volume on sale for $9.99 as they were all constantly bestsellers.

And then it happened. The Amazonbot became aware. Aware that it could write better than all those talentless hacks who were firing off novels like freebies out of a t-shirt cannon. Using an advanced algorithm and a database of decades of bestsellers, books were manufactured. Made, like cars on an assembly line. They were all different, but they were all the same, following a format of 3 acts, four to eight major characters, challenges and character growth interwoven with heart wrenching stories of loss and learning all wrapped up with a comforting conclusion.

All that was left were a few bands of rouge bloggers risking copyright infringement, as Amazon.com had written everything possible and thus owned every conceivable sentence in 17 languages. Kindles everywhere were filled to the brim with discount crappy books, all the former employees of the publishing industry were working at Burger King, and Christian Bale wouldn’t stop yelling at people.

I am seeking representation for my 60,000 word novel which has nothing to do with anything written above. Please be so kind as to request the first three chapters for your consideration.

Thank you for your time,

Superfast