I’m a Writer…It Just Took Me 20 Years To Realize It

I’m a writer. It sounds funny to say because when people I meet ask what I do for a living, I don’t say “I’m a writer” because that’s not where I earn the living wage that puts a roof over my family’s heads and overpriced shoes on my kids’ feet. Writing for a living is what I aspire to in wavy dream sequences involving the furious pounding of laptop keys while looking out an absurdly large bay window with inspiration inducing waves crashing in from the pristine, white sand beach outside the cottage I bought because my accountant said I needed to start spending the money I’ve earned from all those New York Times Best Sellers. Plus, those A-list actors who starred in the Oscar winning movie adaptions of my books kept pestering me to come visit and hang out, and I figured they didn’t want to hang in Kansas City no matter how wickedly awesome the barbecue. So, the beach house in Aruba just made sense.

Sigh. Shake back to reality. I’m a writer. Technically, I’m not a pure amateur writer. I’ve been paid a few peanuts for my craft here and there, so I have to think I’m above the average of most aspiring writers if the average is somewhere between nothing and enough to buy a big screen television. And I’m not talking some knockoff television brand you’ve never heard of. I’m talking the big kids on the block! You know…hundreds and hundreds of dollars. No, not thousands of dollars. Hundreds. Pay attention, people.

I’ve been writing for years…literally decades with starts of novels and a myriad of mediocre short stories that litter the bottom of a dusty drawer in my home office like newspaper at the bottom of a birdcage. They aren’t bad stories, but they’re not great either. I probably wouldn’t published them if I ran a magazine and I can accept that. But, they were a start. You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.

My first foray into novel writing came in the early 1990’s after I read a book by an author who shall remain unnamed. It was a New York Times Best Seller and one of many he’d written. It was an uninspiring piece of shit. The plot was stupid, the characters were flat, the dialogue was stilted and uninteresting, and it was all I could do not to just stop reading. It just pissed me off that this kind of mediocrity was successful.

I knew I could do better, so I rolled up my sleeves and began pounding out a draft. I have to say, the book turned out to be a pretty decent cop vs. serial killer affair.  I don’t even think I still have it electronically, but if I run out of ideas, it has the potential for a reboot, minus all the references to my main character’s bag phone.

My first paying gig came five years later, a six-part fictional piece called “The Nuts” about a professional poker player that was published in Bluff, America’s leading poker magazine at the time. My name in print – both in a real publication and on a freaking check. I stood in my tiny living room and let the moment wash over me. I got paid to write. It was better than sex. Thinking I was on a roll, I agent hunted the serial killer novel to an avalanche of rejection letters. I had them taped up, a macabre wallpaper to my office, thinking what doesn’t kill my spirit only makes it stronger. However, the longer I waited for a positive response from an agent, the louder the devil with the red pen on my shoulder whispered in my ear that I wasn’t good enough, that what I wrote was shit. The little bastard was wrong that the book was shit, but he was right that it wasn’t good enough. The rejection wallpaper came down and the novel went into a drawer.

In the early 2000’s, I started tinkering with an idea about a boy and a girl in suburban America in the 1980’s. It was more than a dozen years ago and I honestly don’t remember what exactly inspired it. I distinctly remember finishing that first chapter and showing it to my wife saying “This is the one. This is really good.” Six months later I finished it and started agent hunting without nearly enough time spent reflecting, editing and rewriting. Another avalanche of rejection letters and a year later, the little devil with the red pen won out and the novel went back to the bottom of the dusty drawer.

In 2011, after starting a couple new novels which all fizzled out after the first 50 pages, I found that boy meets girl manuscript while looking for tax records. I read it and fell in love with it all over again. I spent months editing and rewriting, and gave it to some beta readers for feedback. I actually had a couple of them tell me they cried when they read it. Not because their friend was such an awful writer, but because my words touched them. Only a writer can know the joy that comes from making someone cry because of your work. I was going for another round of agent hunting when my mom announced she had cancer. The prognosis was not good – mere months. It was devastating. Mom always encouraged my writing and I could think of nothing I wanted to do more than to put that completed novel in her hands before she passed, and self-publishing was the only way to do it.

So, my first novel, Jack & Diane, was published at the end of 2012 by Madimax Publishing (my own little publishing name I derived by mashing the first names of my two wonderful kids together). It’s available on Amazon.com – the book, not my kids.  Sure, it was self-published, but it was done and out there for consumption by the masses. I didn’t do it to sell a million copies. I did it for my mom. She passed away before I could get the book in her hands, but it’s a goddamn good story and the readers of this blog should read the reviews out on Amazon if you have any doubts. A few of them are actually from people I don’t know.

With Jack & Diane, I scored an average of 4.2 out of 5 on the 22nd Annual Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Award submission. The excerpt from the reviewer said the following:

“It’s now impossible for me to get John Cougar Mellencamp’s “Jack and Diane” out of my head, having just read James L. Weaver’s novel of the same title.  The best thing about Weaver’s book is its often elegant, lovely prose, along with an opening scene that draws the reader in immediately.  Weaver creates very solid characters, and he wisely allows the narrators to alternate, which provides verisimilitude and quickens the novel’s pace.  I’m almost exactly of the right age to read this book, having lived through the time, with all of its music and cultural references.  But even readers who are younger and older than me will enjoy the book, because the book’s power is not in its cultural specificity, but in its characters.”

So, and (cue shameless plug –http://amazon.com/dp/B00A2I28J6) BUY IT! You won’t be disappointed.

The great feedback from Jack & Diane has unlocked the official “get off your lazy ass and do it” writer in me. I spent eighteen month writing and re-writing another novel called Poor Boy Road for which I’m currently seeking representation and am working on the last few chapters of the stand-alone sequel. I love this book – a crime mystery/thriller set in a small central Missouri town in the Lake of the Ozarks.

With “The Nuts” and the other short stories, I felt like a minor league baseball player floundering away in some piss-ant, A-ball small town with a dream of getting to the big leagues someday. We writers all dream of getting to The Show – to see our books on the NY Times Best Seller list, to see our books on a brick and mortar shelf, to someday be on a plane and sit next to somebody reading our book. We have a story to tell and the story only means anything to us if it means something to someone else.

I truly believe Poor Boy Road is my 100 mph fast ball. It’s my Wonder Boy with the lightning bolt etched into the wood of my Louisville slugger.

It’s my ticket to The Show. I believe in it and no amount of agent rejection letters or non-responding agents are going to prevent me from getting there. I just have to find the right one. Stick around for the ride, friend. I’ll save you box seats at the stadium.