May 30, 2024
I always forget to put the date on these things.
Nine years and two days ago was the day I got dumped. I remembered, I just didn’t write anything.
It doesn’t really seem like much to commemorate.
So, I approached a married man who’d complained about his marriage all seventeen years I’d known him, had an emotional affair for four months, he moved out and said he was divorcing, then nine years and two days later … he’s still there. He does not visit this website anymore, so it looks like he’s always going to be there.
Turns out this scenario is very, very common and this is how it always turns out.
Serves me right, doesn’t it?
Although, I have to say, if a guy will hang out on a website for NINE years after the affair is over and still hang around TWO more years once asked to leave, something must have been going on.
It was just never my problem. It was never my problem, and I couldn’t fix it. So, that’s the end, and it’s over. MY REAL PROBLEM
My real problem is I’m 56. (Or I’m going to be.) That’s pretty close to 60, which is pretty close to being dead.
My other real problem is, I have a dead life.
I’ve been running across some verrry interesting articles on the publishing industry, like this one: ‣
and this one: Making a living as a book author is as rare as being a billionaire (theintrinsicperspective.com)
which pretty much confirmed everything my late husband and I suspected years ago: Book publishing is mainly about moving millions of units written or ghostwritten by celebrities. Only a tiny handful of wannbes even make it to a larger publisher, and those publishers will give you $5000 for years and years and years and years of work, and then they throw your book at the wall like spaghetti along with about fifty others and see if it will stick. If it doesn’t sell, you’re done.
I always suspected this, but now I know it. Aaaaaand I’m going to be 56 years old, which is too late to do much of anything. All the years I should have spent hustling went to family caregiving instead.
Your only real hope is to try to get up a following just by grassroots, and I am failing miserably. Two of my original fiction novels, while getting shortlisted for the Wattys in the same year … pretty much bombed as far as finding an audience. I tried a third one and that didn’t even get shortlisted.
Twenty years ago, a very upset me quit writing fan fic because it “wasn’t real writing” and if I wanted to be published, I had to write an original novel.
Sadly, at the time, I had a Star Wars fan fic that had proven to be very popular and that some considered to be a classic. I had people emailing me about that fic literally YEARS after I had taken it down, looking for a copy because someone had told them about it and they wanted to read it! If you’re trying to get a novel to sell, THAT IS THE KIND OF BUZZ YOU NEED!!
And I HAD IT. Twenty years ago.
If I had been thinking, I would have held onto that fan base and built an email list then. I should have done it THEN. But I didn’t know anything about email lists then and didn’t know how. And then the aunt and cousin fell into my lap and I spent the next fourteen years dealing with nursing homes and then my husband got a brain tumor and then he died and then I got involved with a married guy and ended up absolutely fucking devastated.
So now here I am, twenty years later, belatedly appreciating the readership I HAD—which is a fucking HELL of a lot easier to get writing fan fic than trying to share an original novel anywhere, let me tell you—only to discover that times have changed and the fandom has moved on.
The same fan fic that got tons of attention twenty years ago, when the prequels were just coming out and Palpatine was a topic of fascination, don’t do so well now that there are, like ten Disney shows and too many movies and people were disgusted with Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.
Is there ANY area of my life in which I haven’t shot myself in the foot???
And, if you’ve only ever dreamed of writing your whole entire life, ever, ever, ever, and now you’re going to be sixty soon and you see NOTHING AT ALL IS EVER GOING TO HAPPEN, and I mean E-V-E-R …
What the fuck are you even getting up in the morning for??
Oops. I know. To go to work to pay bills to go to work to pay bills. Until I’m too old and sick to work anymore and it’s time to let social services put me in a nursing home on Medicaid, where I will linger in dementia until I die.
*looks at Universe*
Okay, I know I made this trip to learn some lessons. I learned them. But couldn’t I have designed something better than this to experience at the end of my life after all this bullshit???
The truth is, I never really had a chance.
Those of you interested in married people? Knock it off. 99.99999999% of these people are so terrified of money problems, social and family disapproval, and what divorce will do to the kids, even if they’re almost forty, that they will use you and drop you like a hot potato.
Do not get attached to these people. It will ruin your life. Period.
Also, try to pick out parents that will steer you towards work YOU will like, not work that will validate them. When I was growing up, I never even completely understood that there were these things called “publishing houses,” and that people worked as editors in them. Or that every TV show I watched was actually written by someone. If I had, I could have gotten into a field like that out of high school, instead of miring myself in a career that validated family I’m no longer even speaking to and then had to struggle to make up lost time in a career notorious for its lack of pay, work-life balance, and free time.
And maybe if I could have understood from the beginning what a low-odds, miserable, unwinnable battle traditional publishing really is, maybe I wouldn’t have been so down on myself most of my life for not being “good enough.”
After all, it’s unrealistic to be down on yourself for not being “good enough” in an industry where tens to hundreds of thousands of people aren’t good enough to earn a living wage writing fiction and there are only about 550 people who are.
And the married guy? You can’t BE good enough for someone like that. Because nobody is.
I guess the only good thing about seeing all these things in hindsight is, I don’t need to blame myself for not being good enough or smart enough. Nobody’s good enough to succeed in publishing, nobody’s good enough to win in a third party triangle, and that’s just the way it is. That’s the good news.
The bad news is, here I am at almost sixty trying to pick up the pieces, when there really never were any pieces there anyway.
Maybe I can just go volunteer at a soup kitchen instead.