On the Raw: I am crap and this is crap, but I’m going to do it anyway.

I’m a highly awkward, socially challenged, heavily medicated high school / college dropout.  I have lots of ideas, but less training in the art of writing than your average baboon.  I’m slightly ahead in that I’ve got opposable thumbs, but well behind in that I cannot tell a cohesive story.  

Sure, I can make words follow one another to a certain desired word-length.  Characters?  Interesting developments?  Narrative prowess?  Zilch on all counts.

This was recently pointed out to me by an author I asked to read the first installment of Temple.  It did not go well.  Bear in mind, that’s two rewrites on, months of work, and hundreds of dollars in assets and editing.  And that’s what I have to show for it.  Nothing of value.

It sounds like a whine, but you have to understand why I’m doing this.  I’m trying something so out of my regular purview because I wish to rise above my failures.  I’ve been fired twice now, I’m a horrible father despite my wife’s protestations to the contrary.  I’m terrible with people, and terrible to people.  Yet I had hoped that with writing, I could find something that I’m good at.  That I could finally have something to build my life upon. 

That’s gone now, washed away in the face of unrelenting waves of reality.  I’m not good at writing.  I may never be good at it.  So my last bastion of hope for a meaningful existence is yet another torrent of failure leading to the vast ocean of my iniquity.  It hurts to fail at everything I try so desperately to be good at.  It’s painful to keep standing up, only to fall over and over and over.

In the end, I was faced with a decision.  I could quit, and move on with my dreams and passions.  That 100% guaranteed to lead to failure.  Or, I could press on, into the cold and dark, holding my meager torch aloft, and hope that somehow there is shelter ahead.  That’s 99% guaranteed to be a vain hope, and will most likely consume me in the end. 

Yet that’s the life I have now.  I’ll never get a good paying job.  I lack the qualifications or the experience.  I’ll never have an opportunity to create anything else, as I lack the dexterity or the vision for crafting material goods.  So this is it.  This is all I have left.  This is quite literally my last shot at making something out of my life other than a future which contains working until I die with no chance at retirement or fulfillment.  I wish the stakes weren’t so high, or that it wasn’t me facing such stiff odds.  In the end though, I’m all I’ve got.  It’s time to put all my chips on black, and hope.