What Am I To Do With My Life?

Over the course of the past couple of weeks, I arrived at an epiphany after doing some serious soul searching. I wrapped up writing my book, Shithead, in October of 2019 and as I round the corner of the second anniversary of my completion, I had to reflect on the very real fact that I haven’t really accomplished shit over this time.

In my pre-completion naive state, I thought that once I wrote my book, it would all just magically fall into place and I’d get it published right away and all would be well and wonderful. Clearly, that’s not what happened, but only because that’s never what was going to happen.

I’ve covered this a bit before, but I’ll reiterate it again now, if one wants to get their book published in the traditional sense like from a publishing house – as I do – one must first secure a literary agent. Publishers do not accept manuscripts from authors, only from agents. So, in order to get myself a literary agent, I had to create a book proposal, which is essentially a business report all about my book and its marketability. No one wants to publish a book that isn’t going to make any money, so this report showcases my understanding of my own work and involved a great deal of research and statistics of my target demographics and what have you. Writing it was very tedious and boring and made me feel like I was at work, but in all reality, I would’ve been wise to realize I was.

Becoming a published author and living off my literary works would be a genuine dream come true and ideally how I would love to live my life. It goes without saying that parts of such a lifestyle would most definitely involve a business aspect. After all, my writing would be my business, so for me to ignore or minimize this crucial role of my reality does nothing but derail me further from my future. I’ve worked in business my whole life and am more than capable of embracing this unavoidable responsibility.

Sadly, it took me two years to realize a very simple fact: I wrote a book. Like, I literally wrote a book! I took the time necessary to construct an entire 206 page manuscript of a fully detailed story (or stories in my case) and pieced it all together to create a cohesive narrative! I did that. I know plenty of people who struggle to write so much as a text (no offense to anyone), so for me to have written a book, honestly, puts me in a truly unique category. I don’t know why it took me this long to own this accomplishment, but I’m here to own it now, and to put my purpose into motion.

I can now proudly say that I’ve finally gotten off my ass and have kicked myself into high gear! I’ve recently emailed my proposal to a handful of literary agents, so now the waiting game begins, again. To be fair to myself, I did actually dabbled a bit in this before. In the very early part of 2020, just before the pandemic, I emailed a half dozen literary agents and received an equal number of rejections. The turnaround time for responses from these agents was always between six and eight weeks, so I began receiving my thank you, but no thank yous in the early months of the shutdown. I felt so preoccupied with so much else during that time that I definitely strayed away from sending out anything more and figured I’d take myself a lil’ break. Well, that lil’ break ended up being about eighteen months. Oof. You know what, it is what it is though and I’m no longer spending any time looking back, only ahead.

So, while the title of this post suggests I’m at a Crossroads and unsure what I’m to do with my life, it also borrows these hauntingly beautiful lyrics from Britney Spears smash hit, Overprotected. Like Britney before me, she realized that there’s only two types of people in the world, the ones that entertain and the ones that observe. I wrote a book that’s sole purpose is to entertain. What in the world was the point of writing Shithead if I’m not willing to work towards that entertainment? For too long I’ve been treating my writing like my hobby when all along I needed to be treating it like my primary job. After all, I’m confident that one day, it will be.

Well, as always, THANK YOU so much for your continued support! I feel like I’m in a really good place right now and it means so much to know that so many of you come back time after time to view my work. PLEASE feel free to leave me a comment below! I LOVE reading and responding to them! I’ll be back soon with a Retrospective on mine and Melissa’s Colorado Vacation that’ll have a handful of stories that I didn’t have time to share in the photo blogs, but until then, I wish you all, all the best!