Just a bunch of SELL-OUTS!

by Rob Hines

Yeah, I said it.

You're just a bunch of sell-outs.

Peevish Penman is Selling Out
on YouTube!

Carrie shared this idea in a recent podcast, which you can view on our YouTube channel. Just because I'm insulting you doesn't mean I can't promote our stuff.

But don't go there yet. Wait until I'm done calling you names.

By the way, Carrie was much nicer when she brought up the notion on the podcast. I, on the other hand, am choosing to paint with the broad brush. So there.

I really believe it's true, though. We writers are all resigned to sell out in at least one part of our lives in order to be "happy" and/or "successful." The life of an author requires a certain amount of fecal material that we're forced to plod through with a big smile because we're LIVING THE DREAM MAN!

No, you say? Well, you're wrong.

"But Rob, I love to write and I get to write everyday so everything is wonderful!"

Excuse me while I wait for the unicorns to finish flying out of your rectum.

Admit it. There's something you're forced to do on a regular basis that allows you to write, but you'd love to not have to deal with it.

Maybe it's marketing (personally, I dig that stuff, but some people don't). Maybe it's dealing with editors. Maybe it's that damn day job that is supporting your writing pursuits.

And maybe it's the writing itself. If you're being paid to write, you're producing for a specific market. This market is now your boss, and you're committed to writing for them, not for you. Sure, it's better than a life sentence in a cubicle, but you're still giving up a little bit of yourself when you put those words on the page. Congratulations, you're selling out.

Can't deal with that idea? Good, that's what the comment section is for. Just promise you'll read the rest of this first. I can't stand commenters who don't read an entire article.

For those who stayed (I like you), I'm not trying to dissuade an entire community of writers from pursuing their dreams. It's just a fact of this life that we all have to accept, and it may help you determine what your writing path is going to be. Currently, I'm a tremendous sell-out because I'm working a full-time job for the paycheck and benefits, freelancing as a voiceover artist for some extra cash, AND attempting to become a professional writer because I want to write. None of these pursuits are going to bring me intense personal happiness because I'm simply serving someone else in each case. However, I choose to sell out so I can satisfy the one part of my life that brings an endless amount of joy: my family. If I get to do some writing for myself on the side, then that's a bonus.

"Well, just quit your job and write from home."

Who are you and what planet kicked you out?

Sure, that's the romantic version of the story. The writer with a dream gives it all up and lives as a hermit to pursue a career, and yeah, that might have worked for me 15 years ago. But the dream didn't show up until a couple years after I bought a home, and just before my son was born.

Romance be damned! I have mouths to feed, so I'm going to sell out with a smile on my face. Besides, selling out lets me come home to this every day...

That's not fair. He's usually pretty happy.
I'm the one that's crying all the time.

If you don't like the idea of being a sell-out, that's fine. Just come up with a way to become a financially independent, million-selling author without giving up a little time or money in the interest of others. And once you figure that out, please share with the rest of us in the comments below, 'cause I got nothin'.

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Are You Ready or Not? New Beginnings

By Molly Field

As a writer, nothing brings you greater satisfaction than penning that crisp sentence, flowing with the prose you not only create yourself, but with excellent writing offered by other authors.

Because we fancy ourselves a complex species, the opposite side of the same coin proposes that as a writer, nothing brings you greater senses of defeat and challenge than the words of other authors.

Spring is coming. The cherry blossoms on our neighborhood trees are pinking and peeking; the cardinals and robins are chatty, looking for wives. The sun is shining a little stronger and a little brighter every day. Spring, brings Macy's white sales and thoughts of purging, spring cleaning, new beginnings. I believe that many "New Year's Resolutions" should really be made on the first day of spring because in the winter, it's still too cold (at least where I live) to begin training for a marathon outside. (Yes, I am aware that not all NYRs focus on fitness.)

So for this month, we are encouraged to talk to you about new beginnings, fresh starts... This is a challenge for me because I am in the throes of a mental reorganization myself. But no time like the present, eh?

I didn't know what I was going to write about today. I get my prompt from our fearless leader, and sometimes I gnaw on a bone and other times I just bang one out. This time, I did a little of both. 

Without boring you to tears, I gave up Facebook for Lent. I'm not terrifically Catholic, but the opportunity was so well-timed and I wanted an out anyway, that I couldn't resist. It had all become too much for me.

My intention was to spend that time working on my book's drafts and edit it, which I have done, but not with the attention I paid to my Facebook "career." So clearly, I've got some work to do. The thing is though, that yesterday, my cousin sent me the cover art for her friend's new book, Flat Water Tuesday, a story about competitive rowing and young love. As an adult rower who hails from a renown rowing town, whose extended family rowed, whose parents met because of rowing, and whose brothers and cousins and now son row, the book has a no-brainer appeal for me.

It is not ironic (rather I consider it cosmically inspired) that when that cover art came to me, I was also on the phone being wooed by an exiting board member of my novice son's rowing club to be... yeah: president. I have attended one general membership meeting. They do have their ducks in a row over there, but my "pedigree" was undeniable and most of the board members are land lubbers. I said yes. (D'OH!) We'll see how it goes. It could be great. New beginnings, right?

The energy of these new starts, beginnings, etc., theme is intoxicating; it reminds me of when That Boy looked at me for the first time. The theme for today's post is coursing through me like whisky. I am simultaneously totally psyched and utterly petrified. 

It was one year ago this week, that I sat on my cousin's micro deck beneath the unseasonably warm sun in Buffalo where we talked about her friend's book. He'd just signed on with an agent; a publisher was totally interested. The energy was ramping up. They were talking contracts, money, real business. A part of me died inside when I heard all this. I thought, "I'll never be there... this guy's amazing..." and yet a part of me never died, because that summer I wrote my book. The one that needs the editing and the love I need to give it. I can't blame Facebook; I blame me.

I'm stuck now, just a little, but stuck enough to say this about new beginnings: I am considering writing my foreword now. However, I have this sense that I'm going to end up writing a whole new book, in fact the feeling that I will end up writing a whole new version of that book is undeniable. Is that so bad?

I am an Adult Child of Alcoholics, plural. We ACOAs don't have much luck or experience finishing things, but I know this: if I get started on something that I love, I never give it up. I push and push and push. And while I know that writing that first version of my book was cathartic and amazing, the next revised version, the one that spawns through this foreword, is going to be even better, even clearer. I just need six uninterrupted weeks. Why did I say yes to the rowing club?

But I have to be careful. As an ACOA I am constantly doubting myself, my intuition, my gut. I question the enthusiasm I have for something, I wonder if what I'm doing is enough or valuable. I get so caught up in the questioning of the act that I seldom act. It seems the only thing that fuels my fire to get up and keep going is a silent rage that is borne of the frustration that constant second guessing yields.

People who don't know the world of an ACOA look at us when we talk about it as if we have three heads. "What do you mean you hid under your bed for hours listening for your angry parent to close their door for the night?" or "What do you mean you cooked your own food when you were five? Who does that?" or the other ACOAs in your life will nod knowingly. Either way, you end up talking about that stuff for hours until you can't anymore; you're either sharing stories with people who also survived it, or your busy trying to convince people that those memories were real. It can be taxing.

I'm writing about all this here, so candidly, because I can. It's my literary place under the bed. I'm 45 years old and I'm still worried that my parents will be mad at me if I write about my life. The spiteful kid inside me, my Peter Pan, says this, "Do you think for one minute they considered your anger feelings?" and I think for a moment, sigh, look into the distance and tell Peter, "I have no clue."

Just to be clear, I didn't grow up in tatters under a shanty on a mountainside; we had no want for anything material. My parents were well-educated, connected and intelligent people. I was constantly reminded of my potential, that I could be a concert violinist if I wanted, but I didn't want that. Because they are also ACOAs, my parents knew the damage that negative talk can do. However, it can sound cliché, but it was what they didn't say that spoke louder than anything they did say.

Right now, I can feel the energy ebb a smidge, but the passion is still there; the nagging thought that this foreword can be the jack to "unstuck" me must be attended to. It must be honored.

New beginnings are here for all of us. You don't have to be an ACOA to have them. You just have to be willing to leave the past in the past and if you can summon any ounce of courage from those crushing days that kept you going to today, use it to move you to tomorrow and get that book published.

We are writers. Let's do this.

come out come out, wherever you are. photo credit: me

   

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The Hopelessly Romantic Writer (Emphasis on the "Hopeless" Part): A Micro Rant On Love, Loss, and Getting Through February Without Having a Complete Mental Breakdown

by Jody Aberdeen

All aboard the Bitter Train, with whistle-stops at Singlesville, Lonesome Prairie, and, you guessed it, the Heartbreak Hotel. Get your tickets out and hold on tight: this ride's gonna suck and we don't serve peanuts. (Wait, they do serve peanuts on trains, right? No? Well, they do now.)

I've never been a fan of February even before it became the unofficial "Love Month" after about a decade of chocolate hearts and exchanging Valentine's cards at school ("You Choo-Choo Choose Me", in keeping with the train theme). Even when I was in my relationship, the lead up to February 14th and even the rest of the month was just one giant bubble of peer pressure to out-romance the other couples in our networks.

Then, when I became single, and those couples disowned me (as couples tend to do when le divorce strikes their comrades), the new challenge became fending off the artificial pressure to find someone so I could have this perfect "Valentine's" moment, along with balancing my own feelings of loneliness.

Well, fie to all of that. Fie, I say!

Now, these aren't uncommon complaints, but as it happens, I am a writer and a creative person, and at the risk of sounding like a stereotype, my skin is thinner than most people, despite my best efforts at swagger and confidence when I'm out at parties or at my day job in retail.

And so having a holiday about love, sex, and romance that's grown, amoeba-like, from the 14th of the month into the month itself, I think I could be forgiven if it opens up a few things that I normally keep locked up under my bed the rest of the year.

Write For Catharsis

My first book, Convergence, is a science fiction romance, consisting of about 1/3 an old idea about soulmates and alternate dimensions, but 2/3 catharsis as I worked some psychological damage control after my marriage ended three years ago. As such, I have a track record of successfully processing out heavy emotions involving love and loss into a great piece of writing.

To that end, I've started an erotic sci-fi/horror story, hopefully finished by the end of next week, that will hopefully capture these feelings, honour them, and then put them somewhere safe and half-way productive, kind of like a carbon sequestration for the soul.

If the bad feels lead into a great story and get me a writing credit to boot, then it's almost worth it. Almost....

Sex Transmutation, Winter, and the Kobayashi Maru of Positive Thinking

Thing is, I'm not completely satisfied with writing catharsis, because around this time of year, the feelings run on this spin cycle, like a Superstorm Sandy of confluences between the winter weather outside (I read somewhere that NASA astronauts on long duration missions would experience similar emotions to SAD because of the lack of the colour green in their experience) and all of these feelings that Love Month drums up for me. Everything just swirls around until the spring, and the sky may be bright and blue one day, but get cloudy and sleeting the next.

Writing is indeed my One Thing that I'm going to be doing the rest of my life, regardless of pay and benefits, but when it becomes almost exclusively a tool for emotional stability rather than a creative outlet, it stops being fun, and then I just don't feel like doing it. That short story will probably miss its deadline unless I have some kind of turnaround on the inside.

But I'm also tired of my personal development practices that tell me to be positive all the time just like that: to me, that's a dishonouring of my authenticity. Sure, I'll get back there, but I have to process first.

Yet still, I have to be careful not to start re-ingesting the crap I've been venting out (sorry for the image, but it's the only way to describe it accurately), which then just feeds the cycle.

The whole thing is a little like the Kobayashi Maru (watch Star Trek II or even the J.J. Abrams movie if you don't get the reference). Nothing really to do but keep going. That's the key: persistence.

Interestingly, our fearless leader Carrie Bailey recently mentioned Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich. There's a chapter on "Persistence" that I read over and over again when I'm on my upswing. Check it out if you haven't, as well as the chapter called "The Mystery of Sex Transmutation", which I recently blogged about on my site and which is in keeping with Love Month.

Life vs Fiction

(Audible sigh). I guess I don't know how to end this mini rant. At one of my writer's guild meetings before Christmas, we had a deep conversation about if many writers become torn between creating interesting characters and becoming them. Hemingway is the chief archetype of this idea, but you look at the lives of most writers in the English language, and you see this Bohemian blend, contrasting stripes of tragedy, emotional instability, privilege and poverty, and almost always a touch of otherwordly inspiration: all traits that themselves are worthy of novels.

Yesterday, I saw The Words starring Dennis Quaid and Bradley Cooper, one of the finest and accurate (and devastating) movies made in recent years about the reality of becoming a career author. Near the end, someone says the following line: 'You have to choose between life and fiction. The two are very close, but almost never touch."

More than most, Love Month makes me highly self conscious, which hurts my ability to write about anything else other than my own life, one that isn't nearly as interesting or as relevant as Hemingway's, I'll admit (though it would make a fantastic comedy of errors, I'll admit, perhaps starring George Lopez as my older, wiser self).

As always, though, I have my vocation to get me through the winter, at times like these I can't help but think about the improvements I need to make in my life, especially in the romance department: putting myself out there again, taking down that ten foot wall around my heart or at least expediting the search for the girl with an eleven foot ladder cleverly concealed in her deceptively small purse. Or, possibly just dropping the pursuit altogether and seeing what else I can do to fulfil myself.

I'll be fine come the spring, honestly, but for now, I do what I was born to do, and write my present truth in fiction.

(This is the part where I'm supposed to refer back to the train metaphor I started with, but I'll leave my fellow Peevish citizens to do that...what do you guys think?  Try to make it end on a high note: this is admittedly a downer post).


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