5
Eric woke at ten. He’d
stayed up late again because years ago he’d read somewhere that deep exhaustion
actually spurred creativity. It was that or get drunk, and Eric kept his
drinking to a minimum. In college he’d come dangerously close to having a
problem.
He looked
over the five hundred words he’d typed last night after reading an old news
story about some guy from Philadelphia who staged car accidents, got the
so-called victims to treat with the right doctors and therapists, then billed
the insurance company. It was a great opening to a novel.
Or so he’d
thought.
The writing
was crap, calling the main character two-dimensional would have been an insult
to the dimensions of length and width, and the opening should have been
exciting but instead it was just all internal shit the guy was thinking or
feeling. He’d written barely five hundred words and he’d already lost the plot.
Usually that took a bad writer a solid fifteen to twenty thousand words, but
Eric had somehow managed the feat in the course of an hour’s worth of writing.
Time to
call Guinness so they could update their Book of World Records.
He saved
the Word document and moved it into his Could
Be Made Good folder.
“I’m
blocked,” he said. “Totally, completely, fuckatively blocked.”
He got up,
stretched, put on some sweats, paced. Paced some more. How could this be
happening now?
Eric took
off his sweats and jumped in the shower. Usually he got a lot of ideas in the
shower because it was the closest thing to sensory deprivation he could find.
Just him and the hot water. No phone, no TV, nobody talking through the walls
of the apartment, no cars, no emails, no books, no porn, nothing.
He got out
of the shower with exactly zero new ideas.
Eric put
his sweats back on, found a semi-clean t-shirt, and put on some socks. He
didn’t want to leave the house until he had a clear plan of what to do.
It had been
a month since he’d put anything out. Over the last four years he’d built a
small, but respectable following by writing quality books at night after a long
day’s boring work, self-publishing those books electronically, and keeping the
prices of his novels low to encourage readers to give the new, no-name guy a
try. At first, the sales had trickled in but over time he trended up and, after
a decade of writing and saving money and learning his craft, he’d decided to
take the plunge.
By quitting
the day job.
It had made
perfect sense at the time. His income from writing hadn’t quite matched his
working income, but that was okay. In fact, that was incentive. He had written to deadlines his whole life and knew if
he could devote himself fully to writing fiction, he would be able to produce twice
as many quality books in the same amount of time, if not more. Eric didn’t
aspire to write literature and scoffed at the idea of penning the Great
American Novel. The professors who decided
what was good and what was not from the tenured safety of their ivory
towers were well-meaning, but ultimately dead-ass wrong. There were all kinds
of readers and all kinds of writers.
Eric didn’t
want to write the next Gatsby or the next Stranger or even the next Catch-22.
In fact, he knew he didn’t have any such thing in him. He wasn’t that kind of
writer. But he knew he could write page turners. And more importantly, loved to write page turners.
It was the
perfect time to quit his job too. He’d just paid off his car, the healthcare
exchanges were operating so he could get reasonable insurance, and he was still
living in his first apartment so rent was cheap. Eric knew how to live low on
the hog. He got his books mostly from the library, didn’t have cable, and had
no one but himself to worry about.
It all made
perfect sense.
But of
course the plan assumed he wouldn’t get writer’s block.
His last
day at work had been two months ago. With his hours suddenly his own, he’d set
the lofty goal of writing one book per month for the first year. He had no idea
if that kind of pace was possible but figured if he didn’t reach Mars, at least
he’d get to the moon.
The idea
was to build up a “backlist” of titles to give readers on the interwebs many different
ways to find him. The more virtual shelf space he had, the greater chance he’d
get discovered.
Of course
he’d already blown his first deadline, today marked his second month in this
great self-publishing experiment, and he had no idea what he was going to write
about next.
He plopped
down on his sofa and went online. First thing he always did was check his sales
on the sites. Yesterday had been a slow one and this morning there wasn’t much
activity.
From there
he checked to see if there were any new reviews of his five thrillers. Only
one: somebody had left him two stars because they found his second book too
violent.
The second
book, of course, was a mystery set in the world of underground mixed martial
arts fighting. Which was all spelled out in his product description of the
book. How the reader hadn’t expected a lot of violence was beyond him.
“Awesome
fucking review,” he said.
The word
awesome made him think of Meredith from the bookstore. He couldn’t believe he’d
almost asked her out last night. A date would have been a painful disaster. He
was glad he’d clammed up.
From there
he checked email. Readers occasionally messaged him, which was really fucking
cool, especially when they wrote to ask about the next book.
The usual
spam and automated crap he got all the time.
Except for one
email.
It was from
christie17, but the user’s account didn’t reveal any other details. He opened
the email.
Mr. Hanlon – I
reread The Hard Woman last night,
which is saying a lot. I rarely reread these days because there are just too
many new books I want to get to. It is really good, even better than I
remembered. The relationship between Janey and Craig was really interesting…and
hot. It was so real that I figured you had to draw on some life experience for
it…anyway, just wanted to drop you a quick note. I know you’re busy working on
the next book, probably. Which will be out when?
Eric was
humbled. He thought his books good but hadn’t ever thought of them as
re-readable. He hit REPLY:
christie17—Please
call me Eric, and thanks for writing! I loved the Janey-Craig dynamic but never
thought I did it justice…anyway, to answer your question vaguely: yes, I
modeled their relationship on personal experience. It’s really a boring story
so I’ll spare you the details ;-) Hard at work on the next book and hope to
have it out
He had
almost written this month. But was
that even a possibility? He didn’t want to piss off a fan by blowing a
deadline.
next month or the month after. Thanks
for reading.
He tried to
go back to writing but again couldn’t get anywhere. Maybe it was time he
stopped acting like a hermit and bounced ideas off somebody else. He called his
buddy, John, and asked him to meet for lunch.
At
someplace cheap.
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