I've been struggling with scumbag brain again and the haunts of past derision regarding my dream to be a professional author when I grew up. I can almost hear K. telling me that I had no hope of getting anywhere with out a business degree and that I was going to need her to be my marketing manager. I was seven. I was still writing stupid and poorly executed stories about unicorns. I can hear G. telling me that I was wasting paper, resources, and time with my writing when I should have been working on something 'useful'. It was brutal to have them try to take control of my writing life. K. has always told me that I should be writing children's fiction. Apparently, in K.'s mind, children's fiction is easy to write and I should be able to crank out a whole series in a brief matter of time. And that the market is in such demand for children's fiction that I'll have a contract immediately. Especially if I let K. choose where things get submitted.
It was at K.'s insistence that I entered my first novel into a novel writing competition. Supposedly, the winner got a book contract and free copies of the book. You just had to pay a fee to compete. I didn't win. And I had to fight with them to get the manuscript back, despite the fact that I sent it with a SASE. K. told me that I shouldn't have done it and that I made a bad decision to try to enter that competition. Never mind the fact that K. picked the competition and pressured me until I finally entered my manuscript. K. decided that it was all on me that I didn't win and that I was going to be a failure as an author if I didn't write what she wanted me to.
That was when I stopped talking to K. and G. about my writing. I had a poetry notebook that K. would sometimes go through and read. She regularly commented that my poetry wasn't very good and that I was wasting my time writing it. It didn't help that K. was looking for my daily journal and not finding it in the stack of books that I wrote in on a daily basis. Sometimes the best way to hide something is in plain sight among a huge pile of similar things. K. only found my daily journal once and all hell broke loose because she didn't like what she read in it. K. retaliated in the only way she could think of, scathing verbal abuse. Now, I never wrote about K. and G. in my journal. They were on a list of people and situations that didn't show up in my journals. I had gotten into more trouble in the past when I was writing about them obliquely. Being beaten for writing 'lies' in my diary at six almost made me stop writing. I didn't keep a daily journal or a diary for ten years because of that experience.
I haven't spoken to K. or G. in almost three years. I haven't seen them in that length of time. It's been good for my mental health. I struggle some with guilt that I am a bad person for going no contact. But given how toxic they are and things like their propensity for gaslighting and manipulation, it really is best for me to stay away. I get angry when K. tries to say that she's always championed my writing. She didn't really give support until she realized that I could actually write a halfway decent novel. Then she saw dollar signs and decided that she was going to direct me in my writing career to topics she thought was best for me.
The funny thing is, I write a book and self publish it. Next thing I know, K. is talking about how she is going to write a book and self publish it. She's making all of this noise about how it is going to be perfect for the niche market she's picked out and that she's going to make some "real money" with her book. That was ten years ago. K. hasn't written even an outline or notes for it. While I was still in contact with K., she would tell me that she has all these plans for her book and tell me that she was going to do better and show me how to make a book that is profitable. I know that if K. had written a book, she'd have been crowing about it so loudly. She would have made a point of contacting me to rub her success in my face.
I may not have a big following. But I've written multiple books and made a little bit of money off of them. I'm starting to figure out how social media works. I'm blogging (which K. said nobody would read because nobody would be interested in anything about me). All of these things that K. said I couldn't do or shouldn't do because she was sure that I would be wasting my time, I'm doing them and building my audience. So, all in all, K. can go and be miserable wherever she is off at right now with G. And, if I happen to wind up on a best seller list or get established in bookstores as well as online, they can see how much I did with out their influence and eat their own hearts out with bitterness. Because I'm not an investment or a cash cow, which is how they treated me. I am an artist who is learning how to sell their art but working to perfect their art in the process.
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