On Strength…

We hear that a lot in writing, and in life in general.  You have to be strong to survive.  You have to be strong to realize your dreams.

You have to see the walls and obstacles between you and your goals, and smash right through them.  That is real power.  That is true strength.

If you’ll excuse me, that’s bullshit.

Sometimes, oftentimes, the objects and obstacles between us and our goals are people, or a certain group of people.  You can’t power through them.  You can’t simply brush them from your path.  That’s why things like murder are illegal.  Sometimes, in writing as in life, there isn’t an easy way.

So what are you to do, when these immobile objects insert themselves in your way?  Are you to quit, as the path you’ve been walking leads only here?  All your work, all your efforts, all the quiet moments and the dark times have brought you to this monolith.  You could keep trying the things which have lead you to this moment.  

Yet that way lies madness.  Albert Einstein famously stated “madness is attempting the same thing expecting different results.”  If you continue trying what you’re doing, in the hopes that it will someday work out better yet being unwilling or unable to modify your goals and expectations, you’ve failed the test.

The test of strength.

The quality and measure of someone who is strong isn’t that of a over-muscled super-hero bursting through various strong things.  We have to work in real life.  In real life, no one goes around surviving physically impossible things in a suit of metal armor, or punching through brick walls with their bare hands.  

No.  In the real world, heroism is most often the single mother who works two jobs and still finds time to go to her daughters recital.  That’s fucking super-hero stuff right there.  No thank you.  I’ve neither the heart nor the determination for such displays of prowess.

I do have a modicum of strength however, more than your average every-day dreamer.

And the key to that strength is this: When you find yourself in that moment, staring at the monolith which shall never yield to you or any other mere earthly power, you must be willing to change.

When I set out with the release of Temple, I did everything I could to set the table for success.  I did an enormous amount of research on things that would yield the most reads, the most reviews, ways to obtain editing and cover work for cheap, etc.  I spent months analyzing and plotting the best way I could make my entrance.  I picked the genre I was most comfortable with, and went for it.

Cover art, professional editing and outlay, the works.  I did everything I knew how and some things I didn’t know I knew how.  

End result: $1.98.  For almost six hundred dollars of investment, I got a double cheeseburger.

Yeah.  No.

Action Jackson was better planned, more economically sourced, and just as fruitless.  I went wider, worked harder, promoted more and more diversely.

Nadda.

Twice now, I had sunk hundreds of hours of work and labor and anguish and sweat into a project that amounted to me pissing into the wind.  I had stepped back, readjusted, and picked a new path not blocked by the immortal guardians of get-lost-scrub.  

Second verse, same as the first….

I have projects in motion.  Things that I am actively working on every day.  I have a project nearing completion that will probably be a few months in the editing just because of how deep and complex I went with it.  I’m going to have to once again try and source out cover art.  The awesome artist behind the Action Jackson cover has a life and her own priorities.  I can’t expect or ask her to do something exclusively for me when I can’t even pay her.  That’s no fair, and she’s more than just some random picture thrift-shop.

All of this has lead to the unassailable truth: Writing isn’t my job.  It’s my hobby. 

It’s a thing I’m passionate about.  It’s a thing I’m willing to continue doing.  Yet I’ll probably never get to escape the hamster wheel that is having a nine to five.  Like most Americans, I’m just going to scramble furiously, getting nowhere, smothering slowly in a growing pile of debt I’ll never have a chance to escape from.  

I’m strong though.  I can pivot like that, I can back up from the goals and dreams and ambitions that I have, and move in a new direction.  It hurts.  It’s painful.  It crushes my soul a little more every time I’m forced to do it.  

But I’m an author and I’ll always be an author.  The money part just has to come from somewhere else.