I can understand fully, the times a person can be currently in. All I have to do is look around me and notice that it has never been, nor will it ever be, a rose garden. It is easy for me to understand thanks to my ability to rationalize and have common sense. That being said, just because I understand doesn’t mean I have to like it. On the contrary, by now the casual reader has probably figured out by now that I have a lot of hate for this world and the denizens who fill it’s void minute after minute and it gets increasingly harder for me not to sound like I’m bitching like a child who just lost his sucker.
Do I enjoy writing? Sure, I enjoy it, and I fancy that I’m good at it too, however, looking at my current book sales, any shyster business type person would give their heartfelt opinion that I suck. Bully for them; if they have never read one of the three books I have out there right now I will never value their opinion. Still, selling one book per year is not going to turn into a meal ticket. Most writers will tell you that you write because you enjoy it, not because you are trying to make money in it, and that may be true, but, damn it, my stuff has been sitting around for over four years! It’s enough to drive me insane because I have all these stories floating around in my head and no time to put them all down because I have to work a blue-collar job to keep the bills paid and food on the table. Very little time is devoted to the art in which I believe I’m good at.
Another thing is don’t try to give me advice, it’ll go through one ear and out the other because you do not know my fucking situation, you do not know my fucking life and you do not know me at all. What system that works for one person doesn’t necessarily work for the other schmuck, such as myself. I follow a few simple rules. Number one is to keep your facts in order and keep an outline. This is Writing 101 here because one time I thought I would be a hot shot and try to write a story straight though and ended up with seventy-three pages of background to the story before the action started. When I read this load of bile I was marveled at the stupidity that fueled me and wondered what possessed me to write in this sort of manner. I, however, didn’t scrap the story, rather, I put those first pages aside and turned it into an outline to go back on later and started the novel where the action began. Now it doesn’t try to put me to sleep, rather it’s more engaging, which brings me to my second rule I go by; GET THE READERS ATTENTION RIGHT AWAY!
I don’t want to bore them and if my story bores me, chances are it’ll bore the bubblegum pop culture brainchild of today’s world. It is hard enough that I cannot explain what kind of genre I write about because I don’t write a set genre. I have one detective horror novel written in first person, one vampire novel that has the central character I created over a decade ago and a collection of stories with one short novel in there which was my second attempt to write something long form and barely any of it seen in the outside world. Still, none of it bore me; rather, they kept me excited.
The third rule I go by is keep myself aware of my surroundings because, really, it’s all I have to go by. News reports, PDF file books, the dusty ones I have at my home, telecasts, or just something I saw on the way to Meijer’s, I try to incorporate it in all I write and do with the written word and try my damnedest not to let my temper get in the way because that would turn me into a stick of dynamite in the side of the wall that would be accepted moral and social behavior. Yet I still think it’s a good idea because there’s no such thing as bad publicity, that’s why I’m currently trying to write a book on a state leaving the union. I’ll either get in really big trouble with it or no one in this world will give a flying fuck. If I were a betting man, my money would be on the latter of the two; I’m easily ignored.
After that, I have no fucking clue as in to what to do about my writing and no one around me has a fucking clue either. They have their own lives to contend with and really don’t give a damn that my books don’t sell and try really hard not to tell me just to give it all up. Personally, I have it in my will, that if I die before I become professionally published to the point where I can enjoy the success that comes with it, that all my writings will be pulled off so that nobody can touch it, not even my surviving family. It costs thirty dollars to get a Library of Congress number for your work, don’t even think I haven’t done that by now, the work belongs to me, not you little hacker twits, and need be, it will go with me to my grave. It is not my fault that the majority of people who run literary agencies and publishing companies are nothing more the self important, uneducated cumshots who wouldn’t know a really good seller if it even decided to crawl up their ass like a butt monkey! I’ve already made up my mind.
Furthermore, I have no fucking clue in how to market myself. I do not kiss ass well, can you tell? So marketing my books and myself is out of the question. And writer’s workshops, well don’t get me started on those. I have a set vision for my stories and it does not fit their rules at all. Yes, dear reader, I have a divine plan. Whether or not that divine plan sees it’s fruition is up to the world to buy the damned books! I’m sick and tired of standing here!
And one last thing, and this is kind of for the writer starting out who thinks it’s a great idea to bypass the rejection letters (I received so many at one point that I didn’t need to buy toilet paper for a year! Imagine my excitement.) and go into print on demand, go straight to lulu.com because that place will not bullshit you and you have some say in managing your work. I went to Xlibris for my first one and I’ve been regretting it ever since. The only good this did for me in spending most of my tax return was the books on lightning source (They tell you Ingram books, instead of Ingrams off shoot service) the Library of Congress number, the official copywrite, and the ISBN numbers, not to mention placement onto amazon.com and a bevy of online bookselling orifices. After that, it has been nothing with them than talking to someone from India about shelling out my hard earned money for a marketing scheme that may or may not work. They even have payment plans for these marketing schemes that are still outrageous. I will not talk to them anymore until I get a telemarketer from them who do two things. Number one; their first language is English; and believe me I can tell by the accent and how they stumble over certain words; and number two; that they don’t mispronounce the title of my collection. It is entitled Listen Like Fiends and to the life I me I cannot even fathom why these people cannot pronounce “fiends” correctly. They always want to say friends. Now I just tell them “I have never written a book with that title.” Normally I hear a good five seconds of silence, then some stuttering, and then they asking me if I’m H.R. Green. Currently it’s fun for me, but after a while it gets old when it happens every month. I used to drive a semi truck and had these fucktards call me while driving down the road wanting to do “business” because my book isn’t “moving.” Well if it is not moving, allow me to take it off your shelves and move it to lulu.com with the l.o.c. number, copywrite, and ISBN intact since I own them anyway. I paid a grand to make that happen. From what I can understand with lulu.com I can pay a little over three hundred dollars for the same effect, without, of course, a marketing plan, and they won’t fucking hound me.
Incidentally, I finally received my first royalty check from Xlibris last year for two dollars. Hardly the royalties I was expecting from selling ten books off their shelves. Of course nine of them were through amazon.com, but it says in their website I get royalties from also selling from other online sites. That’s bullshit, it is just selling off their site. I framed the check. I waiting on lulu.com to see what kind of bullshit they do to me.
Scriptor Caveo.
See you all on the flip side.
H.R. Green, 21st of October, 2009, 12:12 p.m. Burtchville, MI
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