When Being A Creative Person Is As Much Fun As Putting Your Head In A Washing Machine

I give the finger to everything. You win, mean old world.

So, the book is published, hundreds of people have read it, everyone has delightful things to say about it, yay, etc. People stay up all night reading it, can’t put it down, wish there were a sequel, blah blah. This type of feedback gives me moments of high-on-crack elation. Followed by moments where I want to run away to Costa Rica forever. Because I can’t figure out how to turn hundreds of readers into thousands. Because being creative and putting out a good product isn’t enough. In addition to creating things, you also have to have the Best Business Brain Around in order to make ANYTHING of your creations. And in a cruel twist of human nature, creative people often have the business acumen of a sandfly (myself included) – we’ve just used up all our juice making things. No juice left to figure out how to trick people into buying things.

And here’s the worst thing about being a self-published author: the media wants nothing to do with you. I can’t get ANY magazines to review my book, including my own university’s magazine! Including dinky little local papers! Including book blogs! Mainstream media wants nothing to do with self-published books, which I’m certain will change over the next few years (self-pub is the wave of the future), but unfortunately we 2011 self-pub authors are just to early on the uptake. And we’re screwed. For now, at least.

I couldn’t even get a book publicist to TAKE my money. She told me that the media is still so wary of self-pub writers that no matter how good the book is, she can’t get an author ANY press, and she wouldn’t want to take my money for nothing. Good on her for not robbing me blind, but I GIVE THE FINGER to the shortsightedness of mainstream media.

So instead I’ll just try to network my way from hundreds to thousands. If I can get some big-name endorsements, perhaps that’ll get a bigger ball rolling. I just need to meet some famous people who I can convince to read my book (because I know they’ll dig it). Or maybe I can just run into Oprah and smile so charmingly that she’ll automatically give me her book-club-gold-star. Cinchy. No problem. I’ll just start calling up famous people.

[she throws a pillow at the wall, yells “I hate everything,” sits down to write new blog]

Sometimes, this endless cycle – create something, try to figure out how to promote it, discover inadequate business acumen, accept that product will likely never bring widespread recognition – takes me so low that I don’t know how I can ever create anything ever again. But then I remember that when I’m not writing or recording or performing, I’m only a withered shell of myself, and so I do it all over again. I’ll write another motherf***** novel and record another motherf**** album. Because I have to. Because that’s who I am. Tortured and rowing ever-forward into the roiling, venomous sea of creativity.

The brilliant angry insightful Charles Bukowski understood me (and every other aspiring author), like nobody else:

so you want to be a writer?
By Charles Bukowski

if it doesn't come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don't do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don't do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don't do it.
if you're doing it for money or
fame,
don't do it.
if you're doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don't do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don't do it.
if it's hard work just thinking about doing it,
don't do it.
if you're trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.


if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.

if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you're not ready.

don't be like so many writers,
don't be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don't be dull and boring and
pretentious, don't be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don't add to that.
don't do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don't do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don't do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.