TAKE ONE DOWN AND PASS IT AROUND, OR 300 BOTTLES OF BLOG

The purpose of all goal achievement is to develop a sense of mastery. -- Mike Mentzer

Yesterday I posted the 300th blog I have written for Goodreads. I do not expect you to be impressed by that. As the saying goes, "That and five bucks will buy you a cup of coffee."

For the independent author, however, even these pebbly little milestones can have great significance, if only by a species of necessity. When I began blogging here in 2016, I had just released my first novel, CAGE LIFE, and was clumsily trying to learn how to navigate the seas of independent authordom. To paraphrase one of my favorite songs:

There was I time I saw a man
Who traveled in a caravan
He said "seek and ye shall find"
But I haven't found
And I wonder where you are
Curious

And to continue with a paraphrase of the same song:

eight years down the road
haven't found the pot of gold

Yes, it's been eight years. Kind of hard to believe, really. I find myself older, less ignorant, much better regarded, and not terribly richer than when I set out. I've received more awards and accolades than I can list, I've been an Amazon bestseller on many occasions in half a dozen different countries, but if I piled up every coin I have ever earned in the writing game, it would come to a little less than twenty thousand dollars. I had a fairly famous literary agent once, but nothing came of it, any more than anything came of those damnable Hollywood meetings I used to have two or three times a year, in which I sat in the presence of the great and powerful and got a great deal of smoke blown up my ass and nothing else out of the experience save a free lunch.

Am I discouraged by this? Angry? Bitter? The answer is yes on all fronts, but to a varying degree. Discouragement is not really part of my makeup as a writer. As yet another song goes, I get knocked down, but I get up again – and quickly. In fact my whole tenure as an independent author comes out of a brutal defeat I suffered at the hands of a movie producer who balked at a script I had worked on in tandem with a well-established partner for no less than six years. I spent one day in denial, three days in an alcohol-soaked depression, and then dusted myself off and put plans in motion to publish CAGE LIFE independently, a decision that changed the course of my life. This resilience not courage nor is it pride. It exists simply because writing is not something I do, it's something I am. You cannot separate me from it, we are one and the same. Step on a flower and it's still a flower, however crushed in appearance. Tear it out of the ground and it leaves its roots. Dig out the roots and, well, you get the picture. There will always be some spore, some particle of creativity within me that cannot be extinguished so long as I have breath and life. This of course does not preclude anger or bitterness. I do get frustrated sometimes, frustration is just a type of anger, and in my weaker moments I do succumb to bitterness. I've had my share of successes, but they never seem to resonate, never seem to lead to anything more substantive. The dream – the one in which I am free to do nothing but write for a living and not keep a “day job” – remains just that. And of course this situation can also lead me back to discouragement. It's a loop, and there is not a helluva lot of comfort in the knowledge that every artist who has ever lived, regardless of medium, has walked this circle at some point or other in their career. Vincent Van Gogh walked it all the way to his grave, which is not a pleasant thing to contemplate. I should not care to achieve massive success when I am in the ground and unable to take pleasure in it, or to see the pleasure it produces in others.

There is, however, more to an independent writer's life than absinthe and self-pity. There is also freedom. Every writer I know under a traditional publishing contract writes books in the same vein because this is their brand. The mystery writer writes mystery, the erotica writer, erotica, and so forth, into infinity. None of them are permitted to deviate from their chosen or appointed genre, unless of course they do so under a pen name, which is not as easy a course as you might think, since debuting a new line under a pseudonym means sacrificing your name recognition and starting again from scratch with no built-in audience. Traditional authors, too, are subject to the “slate,” the schedule of releases which often delays publication of their work for several years after its completion. Then there is the money. Even successful mid-list authors cannot live solely on the income they derive from writing. The fact is only a tiny fraction of writers, barely rising to the level of a measurable percentage, make enough money to live exclusively on their royalties and production deals. For most of the rest it is (at best) a lucrative side-hustle, or (at worst) an expensive hobby. In other words, writing is a business in which you can make a killing, but not a living.

As an indie author I can write whatever the hell I want and publish whenever the hell I wish. I am not subject to the whims of an agent or a publishing house or even my own audience, since by embracing no one particular genre, my audience, such as it is, are buying the books because I wrote them and not because they have any particular label assigned. It has taken me eight years, but I now have a small but slowly growing cadre of people who will buy anything I release whether it falls in a genre they ordinarily read or no. I am my own boss, my own guiding star. And it follows that this is more valuable than you might expect.

When I still lived in Los Angeles, I knew a content creator on YouTube who, despite having no master but himself, and while still in his 20s able to live a life of fairly exaggerated decadence in the sense that he could sleep as late as he wished, stay up all night, work the hours he chose, produce the content he wished, and so forth, nevertheless felt oppressed and exhausted by the necessity of doing what amounted to the same thing every day in a different way. His “brand,” you see, was commentary on the video game industry; his audience was interested in him only for that reason and any time he tried to move away from that subject his views plummeted and he was forced to return to his principal, indeed only, subject. While still very young he was already burning out from the demands imposed upon him by his narrow specialty. There was so much more to him as a human being, but no one seemed interested in it. In my present guise I will never have that problem. The problem I have is actually several smaller problems balled together to form one large trouble: lack of recognition leads to lack of money which leads to the loop previously mentioned. Egoistically or no, I crave more fame and more cash; but while I may be a shallow, materialistic fool in this regard, and sacrificing some abstract level of credibility in the artistic community for not starving impassively in my garret with the dignity of a true martyr, I am not such a complete fool that I believe there is a moment in which anyone truly “makes it.” Your profile grows larger, your paychecks have more zeroes, your ability to do things or buy things increases, but you remain a human being with all of a human's attendant problems and worries. They simply change in character. I will give you an example from my own experience, since I have no other to offer.

When I received my black belt in White Tiger Tae Kwon Do, my master smiled at me in his cheerful but slightly sadistic Korean way and said, “Now we can begin.” For him it was an axiom: the black belt was not an end point, it was a turning point. It marked the moment in the education of the student where he had proven he was capable of absorbing knowledge, submitting to discipline, and mastering the fundamental techniques necessary to advance further. Nothing more than that. And I guess that is the way I view myself presently: as a student who has advanced his studies to the point where greater responsibilities should now await him: not greater successes per se, but greater challenges with longer odds but also longer payoffs. Because, you might care to read this twice as it is one way of summing up everything I've learned in the last eight years in a sentence, perfect freedom is not the freedom to succeed but the freedom to fail. This is also perfect democracy. The reason people resent "industry plants" like Billie Eilish is not because life positioned them for success, and not even because they usually lie about how they came to that success, but because mastery is supposed to be a difficult proposition. It is supposed to come about by an effort of will, by constant homage to both an inner and an outer discipline, by humility in the face of superior knowledge, and by a great deal of effort and hard word spread consistently over time. It is not a mantle to be inherited, a crown to be passed on. It is a process. And in order for the process to have validity it should be the same for everyone. Not what they experience through the process or what they take away from it but rather what they endure going through it.

You may think I have lost the thread here. Not at all. We are speaking of freedom, which also includes the freedom to suffer for your choices, or in this case for your art. Art and suffering walk hand in hand in this journey. Meaningful art may be produced in a state of bliss but far more has been born out of pain than any emotional state. A writer operating in a state of security who has not paid any dues nor undergone any suffering nor submitted to any school of discipline may produce art out of sheer talent but he will certainly not develop his talent to its fullest extent. He will be like a flower that grows in shadow, which however large and beautiful it comes to be, never actually fulfills its potential.

Some might be tempted to believe I am smoking copium of the highest grade but it is they and not I who have lost the plot. Many roads lead to the same destination and many words describe the same thing. When I describe freedom I am describing suffering and when I describe suffering and I am describing freedom. I suffer by necessity because I am, or rather I was, the artist I am describing above. I was born into security and paid no dues and refused to submit to discipline or training. In spite of this I was able to be traditionally published at the age of seventeen and to place in various prestigious literary contests by the time I was twenty. I came to believe I was perfect as I was and could succeed on sheer talent. I paid very dearly for this mistake, but everything I am now and everything I have produced is the result of the suffering I experienced in consequence; the freedom I now enjoy is the result of the life experiences granted to me by my failure to achieve wealth and success at a young age, when I took them as my due and therefore could not have appreciated them nor experienced any gratitude as a result of them. My development as a writer and a human occurred because of negative consequences. Over and over again in life I am reminded that we value only that which we have struggled to obtain and the greater the struggle the greater the value. I have not been positioned for success, but I have positioned myself for success, so success when it comes will be all the sweeter even though it is not the endgame. There is no endgame for a writer except to write great words, to brood over them, to crush out the cigarette and sip the whiskey and blow away the pencil shavings and try and make the words greater and greater still, until finally there is nothing to add or take away and they must be released to their audience, be that a single individual or ten thousand individuals. But even if no one ever reads another word I write I would write for the void. I do not have any choice nor do I want one. Like Sherlock Homles, I play the game for the game's own sake. Until then I remain merely your Watson.