Off the Deep End

So here we are again. And by “we” I mean me and all the characters that live in my head. It’s November and for the first time in four years I’m back doing NaNo.

Yup, that’s right kids. The time for fiction has returned!

What’s that you ask? Have I gone off the deep end? Let’s just get all the questions out of the way now so we can push on unfettered:

“Um, are you crazy?”

“Didn’t you just start a business with a partner?”

“Aren’t you already working as a writer?”

“How do you plan to find the time?”

“Won’t you miss showering?”

“Won’t you miss your friends?”

“You won’t try to sell this thing you think will be a manuscript, will you?”

“Um, are you crazy?”

For those not in the know on the NaNo skinny (and why any and all of those questions up there are totally valid points)…

The challenge is to write a 50,000 word novel during just the month of November.

Sounds scary right? Well trust me, it is every bit as scary as it sounds. But I’m doing it anyway because fuck it. If I’m going to be a writer then I’m going to be the type of writer I want to be.

That I’ve always wanted to be.

But, there are so many reasons I gave up on the whole idea of being a freelance writer after 3 years. I had to have a long sit-down with myself to figure it all out. Which wasn’t too challenging considering I broke my wrist at the beginning of October. I had more than enough time to ruminate on life and career while I sat around doing nothing.

And, boy, do I ever mean nothing.

I was in a ton of pain, could not type, and I could barely move my left arm at all. Hell, I’m still in a temporary cast right now!

Last month was really a wakeup call in so many ways – personal and professional. I discovered many things that I never would have thought about before the moment when I incapacitated myself.

The biggies:

- Freelancing is not for me after all. Hey, I tried. Honestly I threw everything at the wall on that one and really wanted it to work out because it would’ve been nice to make a steady paycheck as a “real” writer. Alas, no matter what I did or what wall I tossed it at so little stuck that I just couldn’t justify wasting perfectly good shit like that anymore.

- I’m way to narcissistic to be a ghostwriter. Yeah, I really do need to see my own name, in print, on the cover of some amazing book that I wrote. I was good at ghostwriting but part of what I discovered is that my ego needs to release work into the world and, when people read it, they’ll know I wrote it.

- My words are worth more to me than the frustration of working like a dog for peanuts. I can make that writing fiction and have more fun in the craft again. I did make some money as a freelancer, that’s true, which of course was nice because I worked my ass off for it. I just couldn’t ever feel what I was writing.

- Freelance ghostwriting is essentially all marketing all the time. Sure, marketing is super important no matter what field you’re in, but I was always writing with a spin in mind – be it for a product or service – everything I wrote as a freelancer had the end goal of bringing in a sale. Hey, I’m all for that because I have shit to sell too. Which is why I’m glad I took a few years to really learn the concepts so I can now market my books instead of someone else’s product or service I have no vested interest in.

- I was reminded of something I’ve been saying since I worked in retail (circa 1996-ish.) I hate people. Most people are crazy, only out for themselves and pay no mind to your schedule, your business needs or anything else that matters in your life because they’re too busy worrying about all that same stuff for themselves. Just like me. It was time to get out.

Bottom line was that I missed writing from the imagination and not the wallet, I’m glad I learned better ways to sell my books though, and I’m using NaNo as the catalyst toward getting at least four out next year.

Yup. Four.

My goal is to get the heroine from my second book into a series and have her solving crimes all over this great nation for the next year.

Which reminds me…

Side perk of fiction I don’t get as a freelancer? A trip to Colorado can be a write off. Or a trip anywhere for that matter. Score.

By the way, I’m totally using this as word count today.

Just kidding.

No I’m not.

Or am I?

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Have You Ever Just…

…wanted to scream, laugh, cry, shake, dance, yell, applaud, thank and shout all in the exact same moment?

Well if you have then you’ve got a teeny clue about what the inside of my brain has looked like for the past couple months. I used to come over here and use this space to rant as my personal form of therapy when I felt like my head might just pop off at any second.

But since this summer started my ADD and overwhelmed, overflowing, over capacity mind has been in full-steam overdrive and I couldn’t seem to reign it in enough to even rant.

“I feel like I am spinning…”

Every last word of that song just segues so perfectly into the entire point of all of this stupid bullshit that I couldn’t figure out how to stop from taking over my life. But then it all took over anyway.

This past weekend Matt, my mom & I went to see Jason Mraz perform live here in Phoenix. It was the first time I’d seen him take the stage in over four years and I was looking so forward to the show that I could hardly contain my excitement.

As I predicted, the show was amazing. I soaked in all the positivity he spewed from the stage. I let the whole vibe just wash over me like a big fuzzy blanket of awesome and I felt so great.

Then something really weird happened.

The next day we were invited to go and enjoy an afternoon with some great friends. Nothing fancy. No pressure. Just some pool time, wine, fun in the sun. And I couldn’t get my ass off the couch.

All of the blackness that had been bubbling for so long came flooding up through that blanket of awesome, coated it in sludge, and pulled me into its depths of suckage.

Quicksand inside my head that folds my good thoughts into suck-tion and no matter what I do to try to swim out, I just can’t break free.

I was in such a terrible place in my head that I couldn’t imagine spending one second with anyone. I felt insanely vulnerable. Overly self-conscious. But I know it was for absolutely no reason whatsoever.

Seriously, no reason. I look fine. I don’t have any weird health stuff going on right now (thankfully). I just couldn’t wrap my head around anyone being around me. I disconnected. I was sitting here on my sofa with my mom and Matt but I was so far away from present I wondered if I would ever get back.

My mind was racing at a billion miles a second with way too many horrible things. Stuff that doesn’t matter for shit in the grand scheme of life. But stuff that makes me feel like I’m balancing precariously on the edge of that proverbial razor blade.

But I know it’s just me. Sometimes it happens and I have no choice other than to sink into it and let it happen.

I hate it though, especially when it stops me from having a good time, but I realized this morning that I can’t feel bad about it. Because when it happens I always come out the other side of it understanding more about who I actually am. I have a greater sense of what I want, what I need in my life. And also what I don’t.

A big house. A cool car. Half an acre of underutilized land. Makeup in every shade under the rainbow. Area rugs for every room. 6 colors of the same pair of jeans.

Stuff.

So much fucking stuff.

I should really follow around one of these urban legends I’ve heard about and find out how they do it. You know the people – they only work 25 hours a week, make over $100,000 a year, have a spotless fresh smelling home, totally weed-free front yards at all times, homemade organic non-GMO meals on the table every night, and bath towels that don’t smell because there hasn’t been a moment to wash them in 3 weeks.

Yeah, I know they don’t really exist, but in this world of “everything in my life is fucking great!” internet perfection it’s easy to be convinced that they do.

And it’s just too much for me to deal with anymore.

I’m weeding down.

Starting today I’m fleshing out all the things I don’t need in my life. I don’t need a Pinterest account. I don’t need a twitter account for my old company. I don’t need email addresses of people I never communicate with. I don’t need tax files from 1999.

And I don’t need a house or yard this big.

Another thing we did over this past weekend was watch the short documentary movie Tiny: A StoryAbout Living Small and it finally hit me:

Matt and I are killing ourselves just to keep up with some perceived notion of what we should have and how we should live. And for what? So I have a place to store books I haven’t read since I was 10 years old just so I can say I have them?

I started thinking about Jason being on tour. Sure, he’s got a home base where he can house all the things that mean something sentimental or otherwise, but for months at a time he lives out of a bus, or a suitcase even, but he’s enjoying the things that matter and not needing to be surrounded by copious crap all the time just to feel fulfilled.

At least I think that’s the case. I don’t know the guy or anything but based on his own statements I believe that all to be true.

And I believe it to be the most inspiring thing I’ve ever heard.

Because, why should Matt have to work 50 hours a week, me at least 45, just to make the money to pay for all of this stuff we don’t really need? It’s a pitiful existence and causes stupid shit like this to spew out of my fingers but it doesn’t actually do anything for either of us.

All it seems to do is make me feel like crap because I have too much crap. An avalanche of stuff that doesn’t help me feel any happier.

The time has come to sit down together and figure out how to release all the things that don’t matter so we can embrace more of the stuff that does.

Laughter. Hugs. Family. Friends. Passion for my career. Music. Travel. Love.

Maybe if I do that I’ll be able to make it to the next pool party my friends invite me to. Because instead of feeling chaotic, like I’m nailed to the floor but could tornado across the world at any second, I’ll have a fighting chance for a calmer mind. 

It's time to fight for focus.

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I Should Just Stop Saying “This is What I Want to Do!”

Because the minute I start doing the thing that I really want to do I end up losing all my inspiration.

Maybe I’m just meant to be on this planet to be a muse for everyone else. I’m like Salma Hayek’s character in Dogma. I can come up with a million ideas for everyone else but can’t seem to keep any for myself.

But does that mean I should just go be a stripper?

<insert hysterical laughter here>

Because, yeah, I’m sure that an almost 41 year old, pasty white and 25 pounds overweight woman with sagging boobs is exactly what all those drunk guys are looking for in a stripper. Then again, maybe they are…

Anyway, I’m not going that route but I just can’t seem to wrap my head around anything anymore. Not where my work is concerned anyway.

I’m planning and working toward launching a new venture later this summer that’s plucked right out of my writing experiences. There’s going to be a new book and I’m going to start formatting a coaching/mentoring program for self-publishing Authors so they can actually finish a book and bring it to market. The same basic gist of what my book is going to be about.

Sounds great right? I’m excited about it but every time I sit down to start populating my blog or getting some stuff together for guest posting opportunities that will help with my authority in this niche I literally go freaking blank.

It’s hard to pull out just a portion of the information I want to share with would-be Authors so I can get my posts going when I’m also going to need to create a small giveaway, then a book, then a coaching program all based around the same concept.

But the thing about today’s market is that if you have a product to sell you have to give away free informational shit first so people want to buy your even more informational stuff. Or at the least look forward to engaging with you about the content.

All the business owners in the world who have started something and run it successfully would say this is the part of the process where I need to push through, continue to try my best to get things going. Because this is the part where fear stops most other entrepreneurs in their tracks.

I want to be a successful business owner. I’ve wanted to be a successful business owner since I picked up my first package of Avon catalogues about 100 years ago and tried to sell makeup for a living.

Over the years after that I moved on to every other possible product that I could sell door-to-door – Tupperware, knives, memberships, and maybe more but I’m blanking now on what they all were. But I avoided selling the one thing I knew I really wanted to sell because I was so afraid that when I got there it would all end in a similar fashion and I’d have to admit defeat.

Of course I’m talking about books.

But I said screw it and wrote one anyway. The sense of accomplishment I felt after getting that first proof copy in the mail was like an enormous weight being lifted off my entire body. I felt like my efforts, all the odd jobs, the time I’d spent doing everything I didn’t really want, led me to the very thing I was born to do.

I got a plan together, finished it and put it out there.

And guess what happened when I finally lived my dream, wrote some books and tried to market them? Yeah. Epic fail.

But it had less to do with my writing (I hope) and a whole lot to do with my knowledge of marketing. I just can’t seem to break through that little wall in my brain that allows me to market appropriately. Hence the lack of inspiration now.

And so the merry-go-round spins. And I’m still on it, going around endlessly where I know I’m really good at what I do but struggling big time with how to get the rest of the world to see that while I’m moving in slow, measured circles that never get me closer to anything.

How am I going to coach other Authors if I can’t even do the stuff I plan to tell them to do?

I’m so sick of starting, going nowhere, stopping then starting over again. Especially when this is it. This is the thing. I’m done searching endlessly. I know what I want to do with my life. So why the fuck is it so difficult to just make it happen?

I get that whole bullshit cliché about nothing worth it will be easy but I’ve been working for this for what feels like forever now. Can’t I just get a little something for all the fucking effort I’ve been putting into being a full-time writer for the past 5 years? Can’t I just inspire myself for once and figure out how to make this work?

Because I can’t go back to working as a corporate drone. I can’t NOT be a writer now. But I need to make this a real business because I can’t stop eating or paying my bills either. I’m not afraid anymore. Not afraid of being successful.

So where the hell is the success? I’ve been asking for it for so many years now that I can’t help but think of a couple more clichés – quitters never win but the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over & over expecting different results and never getting them.

Maybe I should just chuck it all and move into a tiny house with Matt in upstate NY, eat twigs and trap geese. Abandon the internet altogether and become a crazy shut-in lunatic who writes a 4000 page manifesto.

Of course, then I’m going to want to sell it…

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