Well what else was I supposed to do?!

You may have noticed I haven’t been blogging much, and that I’ve only been posting fiction weekly. In theory this was to allow me more time to write, except that plan got slammed in the sensitive bits by  a dual attack of a frigid Mother Nature and a muse who decided to cop a walk just when things were getting good. My melancholy hit a peak today and I decided to spend the entire day watching Zero Punctuation. So if you watch a few episodes and then attach his voice to this rant, it might end up being funny.

Emphasis on might.

Ten years ago, when I was a young and feminine lad of 25 who got a surprisingly large amount of pity pussy, I imagined myself living someplace foreign while I worked in a lucrative but menial creative role and raising two self-centered, spoiled bastards.

One out of three is interesting, because while I have indeed managed to travel to Italy, I “work” as an unpaid hack, and it’s my “delightfully” prejudiced and slightly schizophrenic little brother who gets to raise rugrats. Whereas I get the noble role of childless crazy aunt who no one in the main family likes to talk about in polite company.

Basically, I’m Auntie Mame, but without the money.

I can’t really complain about the childless bit, I suppose, since I did voluntarily go in to have that Thailand trim job. The family jewels didn’t seem to be working anyway, so it hardly seems like an issue. But now every time I look at any child, I have to look away or risk bleak depressions. And wouldn’t you know it? Every day this week I’ve found some way to wander outside just in time to watch another happy family wander up the block and remind me that I’m as sexually complete as your standard issue blow-up doll.

Sure, all the nerve endings still work, but the important baby making bits weren’t standard equipment. Besides that, even though I’ve got a uterus donor in my family willing to spare me the equipment, the only woman to ever attempt such a surgery predictably died from tissue rejection. Even if they could make it somehow work, I’m doomed to a cesarean birth, but without the sparkly boyfriend gnawing my cooter to make it more romantic. And when you combine that kind of body strain with the fact that I have Multiple Sclerosis and I’m 35, and no doctor worth his salt is going to go in for that kind of medical risk.

But what I’m saying is, IF I could afford to have such a surgery, my choices are die straight away from tissue rejection, die during a noble and hopefully historically memorable pregnancy, or die after giving birth and leaving it up to my poor husband to take care of my scientifically-engineered mutant-spawn demon-seed.

But never mind all of that.

*takes deep breath.*

It’s true that at 25, I assumed I’d be working for some animation studio as a useless cog, someone you see as name number 25 in a 25 name list of “key animators” for a Pixar-like film company. But instead I’m a writer still trying to crack into the business. The only agents ever willing to represent me were the red-flagged assholes, and okay, fine; they never charged me a dime and rewrote their “NO EXCEPTIONS” contract to make exceptions for me. But between their reputation and my shitty editing, our attempts at peddling a book about a gay super villain kidnapping a shrink and killing half a fucking city were met with something less than giddy enthusiasm. Hmmm, can’t imagine why.

I have made some improvements in my writing since then, but whether submitting properly to an agent or a publisher, I can’t catch a break to save my life. Someone out there might try to cheer me up by pointing out that I have a novella coming out this year, but the fact is, I self-published that on the web, and the editor decided she liked it anyway. I got to write in an extra bit at her request, and the whole thing will get a great editing job. But the point is, I didn’t sell it “the right way,” which means I’m still not where I want to be.

Selling work online isn’t the same thing as submitting and going through the slush pile, and there I rarely make it past the query stage because I’m so abysmally bad at elevator pitches that even my husband cringes at my pitch sessions. He always reverses his opinion once he’s read the book, and he always insists that I need to  come up with a better pitch. But when I ask him how I do that he gets quiet and wanders off.

I don’t mean to complain…no scratch that, I do. It’s just that at 35, I wanted a job with a decent enough paycheck to either bribe someone into raising yard monkeys with me, or I wanted enough funds to go buy a kid illegally from Thailand or someplace like that. In fact, for years, I was writing shopping fantasies about adopted kids who were little more than fleshy dolls spoiled by snotty know-it-all compute nerds. (Also known as Mary Sues. And no, I never tried to sell those. Even then, I could recognize a dung heap when I sniffed it.)

I digress, the idea that I’d be sterile, broke and too fucking insane to care for kids had never crossed my mind. (Then again, I was already crazy at 25. I just wasn’t lucid enough to recognize it yet.) And while I’m at it, moving to Italy probably wasn’t that good an idea when I’d spent a few years brushing up on Japanese. Whoops.

I also didn’t imagine that after four years of publishing online, a few thousand downloads and a couple hundred sales, I could still go this long without finding a larger audience, or at the very least, a large group of people begging me to stop. If I have to base my skill off of the response from publishers, maybe I should stop.

On the other hand between 120 to 200 people show up to my site on any given day, and I keep thinking that one day, I’ll write something good enough to actually get you to visit the Web Fiction Guide and rate it. It’s just that so far, I still haven’t found anything to do that yet. In fact, I can’t even excite you enough to get a star rating when the bar for it is directly below my post.

But is that your fault for being  indifferent to my pleading requests for help with reviews and ratings, or is it my fault for not being good enough to generate more interest in my work? Add your typical blank stare response with my performance with the publishers, and I’m going to go with column B being the real problem. It’s not you, it’s me.

So sometimes, just a few months out of every year, I stop writing and ask, “But really, what the fuck am I doing this for anyway?” I’m not doing it to get published, as I seem to be incapable of writing a novel that can make it out of the slush pile. I’m not doing it to raise funds for anything, and if I was, I’d have to be even more melancholy than I already am now.

Sure, I’d like to be able to afford better medications for my MS. I’d also eventually like to return to Thailand and get the second stage of my surgery. But every year, I still fail to either:

A) Get a novel accepted, or;

B) Earn enough sales to finance my medical expenses.

The prices of the things I need keeps going up with inflation, so even if my regular readers all decided to buy every copy of every book I sell, I still wouldn’t have enough money to afford anything.

So please, don’t take this as a call to arms, or some kind of accusation that you aren’t doing enough for me. What I’m going on about is that I’m apparently not good enough to make the cut, and not bad enough for you to beg me to stop. Which puts me in a blind spot in the social radar of most people. I’m okay, but not good enough for you to rave about to your friends.

So getting back to my main question, what the fuck am I doing this for? During weeks like this, I just don’t know anymore.