writing
The hardest thing to do is the one thing you desire most
Since I was nine I've wanted to become a science fiction author. I wanted to create worlds and explore amazing things, and over the years that has grown into something not entirely unlike my childish fever-dream. Of course, now that I'm verging on fifty years old, I am now wholly in touch with my depression.
...Not that awareness makes anything better.
Said depression about everything in my life, with diminishingly few redemptive aspects that just makes me even more depressed, is significantly reductive. It saps every last bit of will out of my soul, no matter how fiery and passionate I am about a subject, like writing or social justice or racial equality or anything good and fair, and I just drive, play video games, and watch stuff. To do anything else, to create, to work hard to achieve a goal, dredges up all of those things that push me to crawl under a rock and just stop being me.
I don't know how to break out of that cycle. People will tell me they know, and some will even offer such advice free of charge, but the truth is I don't lack the knowledge. What I lack is the backbone to endure the pain long enough to reap the reward. I stopped smoking after 35 years. I did it in one day. I switched to vaping in 24 hours. No fuss. No muss. It worked because there was no pain. I'd collected enough information and just did it.
Beyond that, I don't know how to fix anything any more. But I can type. And so I will try. I will always question my words, the order I say them in, how readers will react to them, and second-guess myself at every turn, but I will try.
I will try to post one piece of anything length every day.
I hope it works.
Dwelling inside the persistent shadow of creativity
I am a writer.
This is what I do. For a living. Well, not so much lately, but it's the single most salient job I identify with. Back when I was a kid, being introduced to new stuff like Brave New World and Dune and Catcher in the Rye, I fell madly in love with the idea of becoming a writer.
It didn't take long to discover that it wasn't going to be easy.
In fact, it wasn't until 1996, when I was a mere 27 years old, that I started writing professionally. It was work, not something I wanted from writing. With my new wife, before our daughter was born, I edited and updated technical books for a publisher named Sybex. The imprint still exists, but the company is long gone, absorbed into another, larger publishing group. I've always like technology and was good with it, but it wasn't what I wanted to write.
It wasn't science fiction.
My heart sang when treated to the works of Isaac Asimov. I wanted to write about the life of mankind through the filter of a possible future. I wanted to examine artificial intelligence and fear and desire and pain and joy through the lenses of distant stars. I wanted my words, my ideas, to be cherished by someone, anyone else.
Writing as a job didn't work out so much. The computer book publishing industry kinda tanked and consolidation changed things, and not for the better. It became harder and harder to secure editing work, and none of my books ideas were gaining traction. My agent wasn't very helpful, either. She didn't believe that the Blackberry was going to be worth the effort anymore or that small business owners would want to bother learning about how IT people work (I'm still working on the latter, albeit slowly). Lo and behold, Blackberry has a hit with its new Priv handset running Android. It just goes to show that it doesn't matter if you're right if you don't have enough influence.
Eventually, I actually wrote a complete book, all by my lonesome; Getting An IT Help Desk Job For Dummies. It was published last year and hasn't done well. That said, I think it's a pretty damn good book, and I'm pretty hard on myself when it comes to self-review. Sometimes, I think back to when I was writing that book and realize that I wrote 99.8% of those 288 pages (the rest is just filler from Wiley). Those are all my words, which represent my personal experience and observations about the IT industry from 20+ years of being a consultant, engineer, and writer. It was the second book in the series, as well, and it should have been promoted better, but it wasn't.
Que sera, sera, or as the kids say it today, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I don't have a unified, clerical definition about the state of the writer in America these days. I just know that I always feel as if I'm living under an enormous shadow. I am shaded by those who have come before me, and I wither. The collective accomplishment of these men and women greater than I am resilient is a terrible burden for one to carry, especially for me. Those aren't issues to talk about in public, though. Everyone's had a difficult family life in some fashion. I'll freely allow you to let your imagination go wild.
So I keep slogging along. I have two books of fiction I am working on now, and I haven't touched them in months. One would be my first novel and the other is a collection of short stories I had written and writing now. I assigned myself a deadline for last year, and I missed it. It's not the same doing it to yourself as it is having a living, breathing editor huffing down your neck.
So, in the meantime, I write here. I can't even write on my actual blog anymore. It feels like a time capsule of shame and failure, and it has my name plastered all over it. Maybe I will go back to writing there, but for now I'm going to do the deed here.
Posthaven, indeed. LOLZ.