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You’ll Want To Read What I Can’t Write

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I’m trapped inside a novel that pitches well, but writes hard. That’s how I roll, yo. The ideas I can pitch well I can’t write. But the stories I love don’t pitch well. Irony has made me her bitch.

So, let me give you, the world, an example. Hello world. Hello Aaron. Nice to meet you. I wish I could say the same. Damn you, Irony. Queue Alanis Morissette.

So, I just finished the second draft of a wonderful book about a shy, withdrawn teenage girl whose grandmother has been comatose for fourteen years. The grandmother wakes up, calls the girl and says she needs to get to France before midnight on Halloween night to meet a prince she loved from another world. See! You’re glazing over. You’re thinking, who cares? Grandmother? Shy girl? Prince from another world? Who cares? My pitch blows. The book glows. It rhymes, so it has to be true.

Now, the other book I’m working on, I can pitch in two words: magic addicts. Hmm, you think. Magic addiction. Fresh, cool, intriguing. How does that work?
Gets better. A magic addict wants to recover, but giving up his magic will destroy the world.

Stakes. Good. You don’t want the world destroyed, but you don’t want some addict running around miserable or stealing your lunch money. Which book would you want to read? The Magic Addicts. Which book am I having trouble writing? The Magic Addicts.

So then the voice of reason rings out! Work on only one book at a time and you’ll figure out how to pitch it. Yeah, well, in my writing life, reason is like Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club: in the back of the room, not quite there, shaking her dandruff over a picture. I have destroyed reason and now I flit around, flitting. Uncertain, knowing that I’m blowing it.
However. Take note. I do have a book I love, and that is a wonderful thing. I’ve spent time on books I don’t love, and it’s blood work. If the secret to life is doing what you love, why angst over what you don’t?

But it pitches well, damn you. It pitches well.

Textbook Golden Moments in Houston, TX

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I’m a guy who likes a perfect moment. As I’ve said before, my whole sit-com condition makes this more difficult than it probably should be. If I’m alive and not on fire, that is a perfect moment, or it should be. But I have a sit-com condition. I want what my mind thinks is perfect. Which means very specific details.

I get a perfect moment every once in awhile. When I was eighteen, the summer before I went to college, I kissed a girl that I had dreamed of for years. A perfect moment. A dream grasped, finally. When I was pining for my high school years, I used to call them textbook golden moments, and they were. I’ll list a bunch, really quick like.

Talking with Ryan in his gold camaro outside of my house even though it was past curfew. Hanging out in our group. Walking to the river with Owen through the pine trees under the Rocky Mountains. Darlene teaching me how to smoke outside of Fuddruckers in her gray car with the bench front seat pulled up as far as it would go so my knees were under my chin. Things like that.

But it wasn’t just high school stuff. I remember being in the Himalayan mountains in Nepal, climbing up a grassy mountainside with our Sherpa and our porters crawling up the trail, and it was perfect. I was on an expedition in Nepal and it was hard and dramatic and perfect. And my wife and I spent a month housesitting at a mansion in the Rose Garden area of San Jose, California when we were first going out. Our own “Enchanted April”. There was one night, well, I’ll keep that to myself.

I got the edits back from my editor at Crescent Moon Press. I was working on them in the Houston airport during a layover and guess what? It was perfect. It was wonderful. It made every breath sweet.

Ideally, as I’ve said, every moment we’re not being tortured should be a perfect moment. But I live thinking I’ll never die and nothing will ever change, and so the seconds come cheaply, and I use them cheaply. Such is the tragedy of human life. This constant forgetting that life is precious.

But after twenty years of work, I’m drawing paychecks and getting paid off in perfect moments. It was worth it. Lord, was it worth it.

Why I Want To Fail Miserably

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I don’t want to believe that there is such a thing as writers block. Like Bob Mayer says in his book, The Novel Writer’s Toolkit, writing is just like brick laying, you build a wall one brick at a time, and you write a novel, one word at a time. No drama. Just work. Get to it. Writer’s block is just laziness. Writer’s block is for suckers, sissies, and pansies.

I’m a pretty pansy. I might have writer’s block. Because of success. I have a book contract with a publisher. I am a finalist in the RMFW Gold Writer’s Contest. My rejections I get from agents are gushing. The words “obvious talent” are used often. I have obvious talent. I wish I had none. I want to be dragged from my house, tied to a tree, and laughed at for thinking I can be a writer. Rotten tomatoes to the face. Have them all go Middle Ages on me.

Because, deep down, at the very guts of who I am, I despise life. I believe the world is an awful place and death a welcome release from all the misery. I’m a dark-hearted pansy.

And the most precious dream I have, is the dream of writing and being good at it. My brother was an athlete who got all the girls. I was a bookish, chubby kid who could write a pretty cool story, and that was about it. For long days at a time, writing was all that kept me alive. My little, fragile dream of writing successfully.

So you see, success at writing means the world is good, that there are bunnies and kitties and happy butterflies flitting about. It means life is good. And I don’t want that. It shatters the dark, cramped dungeon I’ve made for myself, inside myself. And in the end, I don’t want the freedom.

So I’ve stopped writing, critiquing, showing up. But as a friend of mine said, now is not the time to wuss out. Now is the time to screw my courage to the sticking place, whatever the hell that means. It’s time to be a brick layer, laying bricks, one at a time because life is good. There are bunnies and kitties and happy butterflies flitting about. And I am meant for greater things than being imprisoned in doubts I only half believe.

A quick afterword. My writer’s block lasted three days. Because I have tools, and friends, and with help, I can bash right through anything. Thank all that is Divine.