I feel awful. This sinus infection is beginning to improve, I think, because blood has finally stopped coming out of my nose. At the same time, I am still just tired and miserable. I'm trying to psych myself up by making myself look "presentable for work". I am wearing some of my favorite jewelry and did my best to make my outfit look more on the casual side of business casual but if I were still working at a school it would be acceptable.
I feel like I'm doing these morning pages wrong. They read like a daily diary. I don't start with a topic, just what randomly comes to mind and then I word vomit. Most of my word vomit is about my day, my worries, or whatever trauma I am currently processing. I thought this was supposed to be more artistic. Bloody noses are not exactly artistic, neither is complaining about a constant headache. (All hail the inventors of Aleve because I can think and see straight due to that stuff right now. Nothing else touches this headache. Of course, I'm allergic to ibuprofen which might have worked, but hey, got Aleve, right?)
The mail truck has arrived. As tempted as I am to run out into the raw weather and see if she has my proofs, I am not going to do it. They shipped Wednesday. I don't think they're going to be here until the beginning of next week. I'm pretty irritated about that. When Lulu says they're going to get your proofs to you between a certain set of dates, they're just about always there on the first day. I'd go back to doing everything through Lulu except for the fact that Amazon has the e-book market cornered and their cover creator is better. Still, if Amazon keeps their shenanigans up, I'm going to go back to Lulu for everything except for e-books.
An author I admire, Gabino Inglesias is out there seriously hustling. He's working two jobs and writing. And going out to do stuff like readings and book tours. He's always got a positive attitude, even when he gets kicked in the teeth by life and something gets rejected. The fact that he is always supportive and encouraging of the indie writing community is just another reason why I admire the guy. He is also one hell of a writer. I haven't read Zero Saints yet but I read Coyote Songs and it was a wild read.
I look at myself and say to myself what is stopping me from getting to that place where he is. I ask how can I get over my social phobia enough to talk to the local stores about carrying one of my books and how many I should bring them to put in their stock. I ask myself how can I make an end run around my depression issues so that I can finish some more books and put them out there. I want to be productive. Being disabled, it makes that really hard.
I find myself wondering if I should take a brief break from writing fiction to write some stuff about being disabled. Then I get anxious that someone is going to get offended and I'll be pilloried for what I wrote. Same thoughts go through my head about doing the morning blogs too, to be honest. The only thing that keeps me working on them is the fact that my readership is less than fifty people and that none of them include my family. Things are bad between them and I. Part of the reason why I am disable comes back to the reason why things are bad between them and I. It's also a big part of the reason why I struggle to write.
When you are gaslighted into thinking that you have to have your career going full tilt as soon as you are out of college and the fact that you didn't means it will never happen, it's hard to be motivated to work. When you are consistently told that your degree is worthless and your college education is a waste because you didn't get a big name career immediately out of college, regardless of the fact that work experience is a thing and a shitty job market is a thing, it makes you doubt yourself on the bad days. My parents have always looked for a quick way to make it rich. Somewhere along the line, I think it was when I sat down and wrote my very first novel at 17, they decided that I was their meal ticket and that they had to tell me how to do it or it wasn't going to work out how they wanted it to.
I did everything I could to keep them out of the loop when it came to college. I started taking college classes at seventeen instead of taking the AP English classes because I knew that the AP English 'college credits' weren't going to transfer out of state if I went to college somewhere outside of New York. During that time, my parents tried to take over how I was writing my essays and completing my assignments. I got a couple Cs and an F when they did that (really early on in the course). That was when I started doing my writing assignments in secret (read in study hall at the high school with the rest of my homework). So the only writing that my parents saw me doing was my novel, which they laughed at and basically said I was never going to finish it.
I'm still pissed off that three hundred pages of work (12 pt font, single space, no idea what the word count was) got destroyed. That was after I had sent the enormous rambling thing off to the first publishing contest my parents found and decided I should enter it into. There was not editing, though I knew it needed it. They just basically grabbed a copy, made me sign my name on the entry forms, and mailed it off. I didn't win. The company was trying to keep my manuscript when it was theoretically going to be returned to me (I sent in a SASE as per contest rules to get it back.). So I had to threaten them with legal pressure. What I got back was half of my manuscript. That then got destroyed because my parents said it didn't matter because I got it wrong and I was clearly writing in the wrong genre.
I was gutted. I vowed to rewrite the novel and make it even better. I had my notes. I kept working on those notes. Then, the next year when I went off to college in Maryland, I worked on my novel in every free moment I had between classes and doing homework. Work study found me in idle moments with a notebook working on scenes if I wasn't working on homework. By the end of the first semester, I had a reasonable working draft of book one of the series. Because I realized that this wasn't going to be a single book. Fortunately, when I showed it to my advisers, they were encouraging and told me to keep working on it. (Thank you Sr. Margaret Ellen for tolerating my insanity in changing majors three times and your forbearance with how scattered I was on the academic front. And thank you Dr. D. for your tolerance and bemusement with how I wanted to know EVERYTHING.)
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