Tag Archives: TV

My Sales Numbers

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I found something more cutting and disheartening than getting rejection from literary agents. My book sales numbers. I just got my Q2 numbers back and yeah, um, not the fly-off-the-shelf numbers I would have liked to see. At first, I was laid low. But then, I got some perspective. Very few authors are ever going to get the Harry-Potter-Twilight experience. Very few even get the midlist, big-publishing house experience. Most writers write a book, several hundred people read it, and ten minutes later it’s at the Goodwill for 10 cents.

However, instead of getting a dozen donuts and watching Buffy The Vampire Slayer, I went mountain biking. And I haven’t mountain biked in months. So there I was, huffing and sweating and puffing and cursing the mile I rode up the mountain, climbing, climbing, climbing, when a walker came by and I stopped, er collapsed, to let him walk by. And we had a typical exchange.

Walker: Hard work, huh?
Me: Yeah. Brutal, but fun.
Walker: Good for you though.

He went on by, I clipped into my pedals and continued the climb and it struck me; the writing game is good for me. All life is a struggle. That’s one of the themes in my novel, The Never Prayer. Maybe you are one of the lucky hundred to have read it.

All life is struggle, and me struggling in the writing game is valuable to me, to those around me, to other writers. It’s brutal fun. And it’s good for me.

The story doesn’t end there. So I’ve been watching a lot of House M.D. I’m struggling through season 8 to get to the finale and God only knows why they didn’t keep House in prison for half the season. House in prison was delicious.

So while I’m biking, I’m conceding that the writing game is good for my psyche, however painful and however much of a struggle it is, and I think about House M.D. and happiness. House believes that only people who lie to themselves can be happy. That life is inherently too difficult to be enjoyed.

That may or may not be the case. However, having a dream, having a goal, believing the lie that maybe, maybe I’ll be one of the lucky writers to break through and make it, well, it keeps me going. It doesn’t keep me happy, but in the better moments, it keeps me satisfied.

And maybe satisfaction is enough no matter what my numbers are.

Happy Days Destroyed My Soul

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I watched a buttload of T.V. growing up. Funny, that. Buttload. How much is that anyway? In kilograms? I don’t know. But I would watch around seven hours of T.V. a day growing up. My parents were absentee. I was neglected. Poor me.

A quick google, and it seems people watch around 5 hours of T.V. a day. Ha, I had that beat when I was ten years old and we didn’t have no new-fangled streaming Netflix streaming, or cable, or satellite, or video files on smart phones, none of that. I had four channels. Four. Ha. I dare any of you to watch the same four channels from 3 p.m. to 10 p.m. day in, day out, for years on end. And no remote control, so changing channels required a commitment.

So yeah, I’m old.

And my grip on reality? Tentative. I was raised , not by parents, but by situation comedies, and they ruined me forever. Basically, I want my life, every part of my life, to have a nice solid story that takes about 23 minutes to complete and where I always get the girl, figure out the problem, get closure. This, of course, led me to despise the messy, unclosure of real life. I am not the Fonz. Oh, the Fonz, how I long to be the Fonz, in my leather jacket, slicked back hair, tough as nails, easy on the eyes, hard on the ladies.

Alas, I was not the Fonz. When I did venture out into the sunlight of real life, real girls would look right through me. I would snap my fingers. Nothing would happen. Seriously. Nothing. And I would slink back into the basement, turn on the T.V., and get lost in 23 minute chunks of funny dreamland. This lasted through college. Seriously, through college.

Again, googling, how I love to google, in the average 65 year life span, people spend a full nine years of their life watching T.V. Watching things happen to other people. Life lived as a voyeur.
I was not created to be a voyeur. I was created to live, to seize the day, carpe diem, boys, seize the day. But real life is scary, messy; snapping your fingers rarely results in magic. It can be disappointing. On the other hand, the raw realness of it is what makes it so wonderful.

Holding a trembling girl, dancing to music, smelling the trees in the morning, these require a full body, a full reality, to enjoy. And it’s up to me to seek closure, to make sense of the mess, and to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

And really, the Fonz lost his cool when Richie Cunningham left. Such is life. Me? Every year, I might lose more hair, but I get a little cooler because the essence of cool is to believe in your own divinity. To live as if at any moment, a finger snap will turn on the juke box, and you’re favorite song will come blasting through, because it does happen. Of course it does.