Peel that Skin Away

After all this time I’m still on the line
With a case to prove and a public to move
After all my turning this fire is still burning
And I’m back on show
With a mile to go
With one more mile to go
--Mike Scott, “Sunrising”

I’m working on my escape plan.

There are certain songs I just want to crawl inside of and listen to over and over again.  They’re almost never songs about love.  The idea of love, of intimacy is, to me, a momentary abstraction.  It’s something to contemplate, but as an object of art to be set back on its mantle or returned to its hanger.

I don’t identify with the songs that make me want to love.  I much prefer the ones that make me want to leave.

The problem is, though, I’m always afraid to leave.  I seek out things that make me feel safe and comfortable.  I seek out routine and familiarity.  I seek out stability and the mundane.  I seek…well, I seek the life I never wanted.  All the while my dreams slowly fade toward obscurity.

I fear my dreams.  They beckon me, call me to bare my soul, to struggle mightily, to risk failure, to prove that I am not as small and as weak and as pathetic as I sometimes seem to be and often think I am.  My dreams, in short, are worth pursuing.  But it is that worthiness that makes them so very terrifying.

I’m at the point where I have literally everything I want and am looking for excuses to want more.  I have become the ideal American: flush with disposable income and in love with the consumption of random gadgetry for the sake of consuming random gadgetry.  I have an iPhone 3GS, a new enough laptop, and a brand-new desktop computer, all of which more than suit the needs for which I purchased them.  Today I was looking at the Asus Eee Slate.  I’ve also been thinking of getting a Motorola Atrix.  Why?

Fuck if I know.

This is what happens, though.  This world we live in strives to kill our dreams.  “You don’t want to follow your muse,” it says, “You want this new toy.”  And so we do what we need to get that toy only to find that it does not offer us the same satisfaction we’d sought.  But getting that toy was easier.  It took less time, less work, cost a lot less.  Well, assuming the soul has no value.

What did the wise man say?  It does you no good to gain the world and lose your soul.

So I find myself on the cusp of 30 making money a lot of people my age would love at a company most people would kill to count as their employer.  It has allowed me to accumulate all the toys I want.  But those toys have cost me quite a bit more than money.  They’ve cost me my freedom.  They’ve cost me my soul.

It feels like such a horrible thing to complain about this, my good fortune.  It’s unsightly, untoward.

My company has a little ritual.  At the beginning of any department- or company-wide meeting there is an announcements section.  People who hit service milestones during the previous quarter are recognized.  People with five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, thirty years of time, work, and experience get named and the crowd applauds.  There are always a lot of names, too.  It comes on the heels of the new hire announcements, so those newly-acquired folk are told, “This is what you can expect here.  This is what you can look forward to.”  It is, for most, a good thing, a positive thing.

I’m always depressed by the end of those meetings.  I can’t imagine being here for ten years.  I’ve already almost got three under my belt and imagine five will be inevitable.  I also hope I’ll manage to not have a nervous breakdown when my name is announced at the company-wide meeting.

It’s not that there’s anything wrong with my life.

It’s that this isn’t the life I want.  This is the life I lead because I am terrified of the life I want to lead.

So it’s time for me to make my escape.

More precisely, it’s time for me to stop putting off doing the things I know I must, so when the time comes I can actually make my escape in a methodical and well-planned series of actions.  But that second way of saying it is incredibly unwieldy.

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Here’s the thing.  My greatest desire has also been relatively easy for me to ignore, as I want to be an author and, holy hell, that’s a tough thing to be.  I’ve never, to the best of my knowledge, gotten off the slush pile.  No one knows who I am and no one apparently cares too much.

Over the last year, however, I’ve noticed that this has changed.  The revolution that has destroyed the music industry as we knew it ten years ago is now in the process of doing the same thing to the publishing industry.  Thanks to the Kindle, the Nook, iBooks, and Google Books, self-publishing is actually something that a lot of authors can turn in to a worthwhile venture, rather than a costly hobby for people with more money than brains.

So here’s my (well-considered and methodical) plan:

Sometime this summer I’m going to run an experiment.  I’m going to run out an anthology of short stories that have never been published for a low, low price just to see how to do it and if I can figure out marketing.  By this time next year I plan to take what I will most certainly learn from that experience and publish a novel.  There’s a good chance it will be the re-write of Second Chances I’ve been claiming to work on, but haven’t done much about because I couldn’t see the utility in doing such a thing.

I’m not planning on changing the world here.  By the same token, I would like to be able to make some money off of writing and at least have the option of not feeling trapped and hopeless whenever someone’s thirty-year anniversary with the company is mentioned.  Most importantly, I’d like to feel like I’m not growing older while my dreams are slowly dying and I’m doing my best to ignore them and hoping they die quietly in a corner.

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Odds are, though, I’ll need some help.

First off, if anyone knows a good copy editor who’s willing to work freelance for a reasonable sum, let me know.  I’m assuming I’ll need one.

Second, if anyone actually knows anything about how this stuff works from personal experience or knows anyone who does, I’ll take any help I can get.

Third, any advice on self-promotion would be really, really helpful.  As everyone who reads this knows, I am not big on self-promotion.  Chances are good that I’ve spent more time alienating than welcoming you if you are a regular reader over here.

That last one is probably key.

Oh, and fourth: random encouragement would probably help, too…

Comments

[GailVortex]

My nook is sitting waiting for your stories.

[jessa]

Random encouragement! I am sending it your way. It comes in beam form, if you're wondering.

[bluefrog]

Can't help with editing, publishing, or promoting--but if you'd like encouragement, it's yours. I'll also buy your stories.

[kirenos]

Just one small quibble. You're consistent, at least, in your misuse of "in to" instead of "into" (as seen surfing around many of your very good posts). There is a difference between "turning someone in to the police" and "turning someone into the police". It seems to me that you should be using "into" most of the time, and I have yet to see that word in your writing.

Other than that - I wish you luck (and all of it good).

[katster]

Haven't alienated me. :)

The post rings some familiar bells of longing and such. I need to do much the same, at least, in pursuing my dreams and not being scared by them. So I may not be walking the same path, but I think I've got one parallel to yours.

Anyway, here's random encouragement for you. Go Geds! Yay Geds! Geds rocks! (Does that help?)