So I'm sitting. Sitting and blogging. Sitting, satting, sat. *sigh*
I'm in one of those moods where I want to write but my mind is such a mess that it'll be hard to settle on any concrete topic. Maybe.
So what's going on with me? Hmm.
Torn between friends again. Surprise! No, I don't feel like going into details. Too much anger floating around. Unnecessary, unhealthy anger. I don't deal well with that. Anger is a monkey I beat off of my back years ago, and I sometimes have trouble understanding why others hold onto it so strongly for so long. Anger is not a security blanket. Anger is a sickness.
I'm poor. Creeping up on cardboard box poor. Drowning in debt like the rest of America. My job is teetering on the brink of oblivion. I told my friend Kim that the company I work for was climbing a string. The string could break at any second, plunging us all into darkness (and bankruptcy), but...if they manage to successfully climb that string...there's a pot of gold waiting at the top. So, basically I'm holding on by my fingertips to a job that's either going to screw me over or make me rich within the next year. Yeah, I'm playing russian roulette with my bank account. Every month I pull the trigger and hope for that click.
And then there's my financial trump card, which I've been trying to play for three years now. My novel, The Pull. For those of you that don't know, The Pull is the first book in a five volume series I've been working on since I was fourteen. It's about a guy named Nick who wakes up in the woods one day with no memory. All he has to go on is a pull...a sensation that there's somewhere he's supposed to be. So he follows the pull, makes new friends, gets stalked by a demon, runs afoul of the criminal underworld, and gets labled a super-hero by the media. Yada yada yada. It's like Harry Potter minus the wands and with a lot more angst. Bullshit, it's nothing like Harry Potter. Or anything else for that matter, hence my problem with getting it published.
Publishers and agents alike seem to be terrified of this thing. It's a multi-volume epic, just like the money makers like Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings, but the young adult market (the kids and parents who have been fueling the industry for the past five to ten years) won't embrace it because it isn't PG-13. And the housewives (the ones who fueled the market pre-Harry Potter) won't want it either because there's too much violence.
So...I've got a long list of publishers who love it...but don't know what the hell to do with it. Ace, one of the major imprints of Penguin, tossed it around for quite a while. They had board meetings, apparently they had arguments, and then they passed. They passed because the higher-ups didn't want to take a chance with it. It could have made them a titanic amount of money...but it wasn't a guaranteed sell like the Eragons and the Lemony Snicketts and the Twilights that are raking in the dough now. It aint Faulkner, but it aint JK Rowling, nor is it a memoir about the time some guy was so coked up he tried to bite off his own hand...so the publishers won't touch it, and the agents don't want to invest their time in it.
So here I am, with years and years of work and a story I have the utmost faith could blow the socks off of people...and I have to sit on it because no one wants to take a chance. Ah, how my faith in the formulaic and cowardly entertainment industry swells.
Gah, enough bitching and mental masturbation. Time for the real thing. Kidding. I have work to do.
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Monday, April 28, 2008
Obligation
Pop Quiz, hot shot:
You're on your way out the door one day to attend a play with a friend. Before you go, you discover that your roommate is in intense pain and is about to go to the hospital with her boyfriend because she thinks she has appendicitis.
Your choices are these:
1) Go to the play. You've already blown off your friend twice over the past two days, and feel bad about doing so. You realize that if you blow them off again, it's going to cause a wound in the friendship
2) Go to the hospital with your roommate and her boyfriend. Sure, she already has help, but you'd feel terrible being "the guy that abandoned her in her time of need"
What do you do, kid? What do you do?
It seems that one of the rules of friendship is that you're bound to disappoint each other sooner or later. There's always going to be some event you can't go to that they really wanted you to be there for, or some occasion where two friends want you to be with them at the same time and you have to choose which one to please and which one to disappoint.
It's a fact of life that you can't please everyone. I've learned that the hard way time and again over the past several years of my life. I'm a guy that wants a lot of friends and a lot of good, healthy relationships. But...the more friends you take on, the more of a chance you have of not being able to please all, or even most of them. Hell, even if you only had two friends there would be times when you would have to choose between them.
Sucks, doesn't it? If I could have been at that play and in the hospital at the same time, I would have been. But I couldn't, so I had to choose. Did I make the right choice? Who knows. There's no use dwelling on "could haves" and "should haves". But...I did end up making one friend happy and not supporting the other.
I make the same kind of choices every day. Many times a day, in fact. Do I answer my phone when I'm supposed to be working? Do I tell one friend to hold on while another one calls? Do I make plans with someone for the weekend, knowing that two or three other people will likely want to hang out with me on that day as well?
I make those choices. I never feel good about them, but I make them. I probably have friends who wonder why I don't talk to them as often as I like or see them as often as they ask me to. The reason for that is simple. My life is very much like a party that I'm hosting. I invited everyone, and therefore I have an obligation to divide my time between each of my guests. If I just hang out with one person, everyone else will leave. Sure I'll have a best friend, but it will be my only friend.
So...I have an obligation to each of my friends. I don't always fulfill that obligation as well as I wish I had. In fact, I seldom do. But I try. To some I'm elusive. To some I appear as a loner. To some I may seem too busy. But what I really am is blessed. Blessed by the ability to be a part of so many people's lives, yet cursed with the inability to get as close to any one of them as I wish I could be.
The nature of who I am and what I want will likely always leave me stretched like this. Pulled in fourteen directions at once. The truth is that I like it. I love to be surrounded by creative minds and yearning hearts and strong, colorful people of all stripes and backgrounds.
But...I do wish I had more hours in the day, and more of an ability to fulfill my obligation to each of the people I care about.
You're on your way out the door one day to attend a play with a friend. Before you go, you discover that your roommate is in intense pain and is about to go to the hospital with her boyfriend because she thinks she has appendicitis.
Your choices are these:
1) Go to the play. You've already blown off your friend twice over the past two days, and feel bad about doing so. You realize that if you blow them off again, it's going to cause a wound in the friendship
2) Go to the hospital with your roommate and her boyfriend. Sure, she already has help, but you'd feel terrible being "the guy that abandoned her in her time of need"
What do you do, kid? What do you do?
It seems that one of the rules of friendship is that you're bound to disappoint each other sooner or later. There's always going to be some event you can't go to that they really wanted you to be there for, or some occasion where two friends want you to be with them at the same time and you have to choose which one to please and which one to disappoint.
It's a fact of life that you can't please everyone. I've learned that the hard way time and again over the past several years of my life. I'm a guy that wants a lot of friends and a lot of good, healthy relationships. But...the more friends you take on, the more of a chance you have of not being able to please all, or even most of them. Hell, even if you only had two friends there would be times when you would have to choose between them.
Sucks, doesn't it? If I could have been at that play and in the hospital at the same time, I would have been. But I couldn't, so I had to choose. Did I make the right choice? Who knows. There's no use dwelling on "could haves" and "should haves". But...I did end up making one friend happy and not supporting the other.
I make the same kind of choices every day. Many times a day, in fact. Do I answer my phone when I'm supposed to be working? Do I tell one friend to hold on while another one calls? Do I make plans with someone for the weekend, knowing that two or three other people will likely want to hang out with me on that day as well?
I make those choices. I never feel good about them, but I make them. I probably have friends who wonder why I don't talk to them as often as I like or see them as often as they ask me to. The reason for that is simple. My life is very much like a party that I'm hosting. I invited everyone, and therefore I have an obligation to divide my time between each of my guests. If I just hang out with one person, everyone else will leave. Sure I'll have a best friend, but it will be my only friend.
So...I have an obligation to each of my friends. I don't always fulfill that obligation as well as I wish I had. In fact, I seldom do. But I try. To some I'm elusive. To some I appear as a loner. To some I may seem too busy. But what I really am is blessed. Blessed by the ability to be a part of so many people's lives, yet cursed with the inability to get as close to any one of them as I wish I could be.
The nature of who I am and what I want will likely always leave me stretched like this. Pulled in fourteen directions at once. The truth is that I like it. I love to be surrounded by creative minds and yearning hearts and strong, colorful people of all stripes and backgrounds.
But...I do wish I had more hours in the day, and more of an ability to fulfill my obligation to each of the people I care about.
Saturday, April 26, 2008
The First Step
They say the first step is always the hardest. Maybe that's true, but sometimes I think it's the easiest. I write because there's a part of me that has to. I'm not a singer. I'm not a painter. I'm not even a very good photographer. No, what I am is a writer. That's how I express myself best. Even the words that come from my mouth do no justice to the feelings that pour forth from my fingers over a keyboard or a typewriter.
I've always been that way. Maybe it's because a part of me believes that the words I write down will never be read by anyone, and therefore I can say what I want without fear. That mindset has come back to bite me in the butt a few times, and likely will again. I'm sure I'll say some things on here that will ignite anger or resentment towards me, or hurt feelings and bruise egos. Seems I can't help but do that from time to time. I think that's because the same voice that tells me to write...tells me to write everything.
No matter how close to my heart. No matter how painful or secret, I long to express it. My friends can vouch for that. Many times have I come to them and said or shared something that they had no business knowing. It's just my nature. I can be mysterious, but I can also be an open book.
I kind of like it that way.
So, friends, strangers, and future friends...welcome to my blog. Little bits of my story, spattered on your computer screen for you to peruse and laugh at, skim and agree with (or disagree). And comment on. Can't forget that. Whenever I post something, there's always a moment of panic where I realize that other people will read this. But then the comments come in and I sit back and read them with a gleeful sense of accomplishment. The realization that, through my own feelings, I made others feel as well. Whether it's laughter, pleasure, pain or regret, I see through these comments that I'm not the only one feeling the way I do. There were many before me, and there will be many after. It's good to know that sometimes.
Happy reading. ;)
-Rob
I've always been that way. Maybe it's because a part of me believes that the words I write down will never be read by anyone, and therefore I can say what I want without fear. That mindset has come back to bite me in the butt a few times, and likely will again. I'm sure I'll say some things on here that will ignite anger or resentment towards me, or hurt feelings and bruise egos. Seems I can't help but do that from time to time. I think that's because the same voice that tells me to write...tells me to write everything.
No matter how close to my heart. No matter how painful or secret, I long to express it. My friends can vouch for that. Many times have I come to them and said or shared something that they had no business knowing. It's just my nature. I can be mysterious, but I can also be an open book.
I kind of like it that way.
So, friends, strangers, and future friends...welcome to my blog. Little bits of my story, spattered on your computer screen for you to peruse and laugh at, skim and agree with (or disagree). And comment on. Can't forget that. Whenever I post something, there's always a moment of panic where I realize that other people will read this. But then the comments come in and I sit back and read them with a gleeful sense of accomplishment. The realization that, through my own feelings, I made others feel as well. Whether it's laughter, pleasure, pain or regret, I see through these comments that I'm not the only one feeling the way I do. There were many before me, and there will be many after. It's good to know that sometimes.
Happy reading. ;)
-Rob
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