The Floating and unhinged in the Middle

I'm still trying to figure this whole professional writing thing out. It might be just me, it might be just some floating sense of existentialism that fades in the morning when my alarm clock wakes me at ass o'clock ant the weekday begins with a screeching jolt that leaves my head pounding and my innards twisted with hate. Hell, if I feel like this tomorrow it'll be an improvement over most of my early mornings.

I am a writer. I am the god in my own little world. I go out and I network with writers, we tweet and we blog and we share. We gladhand and we encourage. We send each other off to fight out own literary foes. In my mind, I want to believe they are my compatriots, not my competition. but essentially, down at the core of it, this is a lie. We are all struggling for the chance that our work will be seen, our work will be loved, and as much as I love my writer friends, there is a dark a jealous voice that makes me keep my SECRETS to myself. My Manuscript, my precious, might be hinted at, alluded to, even quoted... But I don't tell them all of it. I don't share the best bits and the deepest part. I've become so secretive that even those BETA reading don't know where the next turn might lead. This is probably good for them.

But it doesn't change the fact that sometimes you fall into that fugue, that transitory middle, you hover somewhere in space, and you see the person who just got signed, launching their book after X years of toil. Then you see another, still toiling, swearing that THIS WILL BE THE ONE. You see yet another, whose first and second books are out, and they juggle the same madness finishing a third, wishing their bills were paid and yet posing like a celebrity before their rabid fans at a book signing.

It's like an insane asylum filled with people left to roam free, all with the same disease. We talk to our imaginary friends, live their lives, make them suffer and make them triumph only to break them down again. We make friends with other writers and we encourage each others madness, all making noises of how exciting it all is, while deep down hoping our work does as well, does better, isn't sunk by them.

And here I sit, less than a year in, grinding on this book like maybe it'll be published tomorrow... And maybe it will. Yet I feel even giving voice to that hope will leave me torn asunder by the others with the same madness. I want my book to fly, to rise free and unfettered from the ashes and be glorious. Yet it seems everyone wants to burden down optimism with stones of 'sage advice'. This took YEARS to create. This took dozens of drafts. I didn't find an agent for a decade, and by then I'd resorted to eating shoes. I exaggerate, but it's sort of like telling a teenager they'll 'understand when they're older'.

My book isn't ready yet. But it's getting there. It already does-not-suck and it's on it's way to becoming exceptional.

I'll tell you a secret, here on my blog where no one else will hear us...

I hope to get it agent worthy in a year.
I hope to have an agent tell me how glorious it can be within a year after that.
And hopefully sometime after that, I'll have found someone to publish it.

I can hope for these things. Chances are, I will be waiting much longer. But I will not give up the path while I wait. I will not neglect my craft while my opus gets ready to fly.
Hell, if I work very hard, and nothing causes me to go into a coma...
I should have the first three books drafted and arranged in two years.

That at least is a goal I can achieve.
Failure may be a possibility.

...but quitting is NOT an option.