So...what are you going to do with your future? Imagine yourself leaving a fertile mountain range to trek across a desert plain to another mountain range, that you hope is fertile. I did that, I made some mistakes, I adjusted, I learned. I'm doing those aforemention three, seems almost by the second. I'm still trekking. The other range of mountains isn't so hazy now. I'm sure there will be some last minute pitfall, "beelzebub has a devil put aside for me." A ravine into which everything could tumble might appear beneath my feet at the moment I reach the edges of the other side.
"We don't plan to fail, we fail to plan," said Harvey MacKay. I remember thinking that the muse would compel me to the writing desk. I would walk, hypnotized to the laptop and begin typing in a stream of consciousness, a masterpiece of universal renown. At the end, I would print it, call my publisher, who would overnight a SASE for my manuscript. Okay, not really, but very early on I was deceived by moods of inspiration and held them in too high regard. I thought I had to sustain these moods, like a dopehead thinks he needs a doobie to think clear. That slowed me down for years. I would only write when inspired. That was a bad plan. I was waiting...and if you are waiting for inspiration, you're not a writer, you're a waiter. My plans kept crumbling. I stayed in the foothills of my comfort, venturing on the edges with an outburst of inspiration once in a while. You can't plan on inspirational moods to drive you across the desert.
That was a long time ago now. I'm not an inspiration junkie now. I've been sober for a while. What you have to do is plod relentlessly across the barren landscape. Very simple. That's "the plan". Write. Write some more. Then ...write again. When you're done with that, write. <repeat> Then, amazingly, what happens is that when you fathom what you've done--a 409 page MS Word manuscript!--you get inspired, really inspired. You start to think that you're really going to pull this off. That your characters really are going to intrigue people, that the story will take the readers by the throat, heart and mind.
Doing this for the money is laughable. The odds are too great. What keeps me going is thought of giving the reader the emotions I had when reading a great book, or watching a great movie, something lasting, unforgettable. If someone tells me that, it will be worth it. I heard that the odds of writing a New York Times bestseller are slightly better than dating a supermodel.
So as Jim Carrey said in Dumb and Dumber, "So, you're tellin' me there's a chance...yeah!"
ART
