“By a wanna-be fiction writer”

I dropped the above phrase from my standard intro of the show last year. I did not do this out of ego or a sense of accomplishment, but because I received constant emails after the publications of Playing For Keeps that I was no longer a wanna-be. I had arrived. The noise got so loud, and one person even accused me of false humility, that I just dropped the phrase from the intro.

But here’s the thing: I still feel like a wanna be.

I think when we’re unpublished, we see the world as black and white – we are standing outside the glamorous party, the published ones are inside, snacking on crab cakes and drinking champagne, looking tall and sleek in their evening gowns and tuxes. They are in the in-crowd, they are warm, they are welcome, they are pampered. We are cold, left in the dark and the snow, and there is no middle ground.

But when you sell that first story it’s… strange. You wonder what you did in this story that was more special than what you did all the other times. You look at yourself, and you’re wearing the same jeans stained with ink and your favorite ratty old sweatshirt. (Maybe I’m projecting here.) The potato chip grease on your hand hasn’t changed miraculously to crab cake grease. (I could have gone for a better metaphor there.) The story sale doesn’t come with an engraved invite to the ball.

Needless to say, you don’t change. And publishing moves at such a slow rate, any change that comes across you is gradual, too. If I sell a book today, that still means weeks till the contract is signed, further weeks till edits start, further weeks till money comes through, etc. Months or a year+ before the book comes out. This world is not black and white, here and there, wanna be and arrived.

To think of it another way, we all have our own definition of success. And I realized I don’t know precisely what mine is – I think it’s making something close to a real salary just by typing words into this device here. And if it’s fiction words, even better. But I’m not. I sold a book, and I was proud of it, but it was small press, I can’t see it on shelves, and I’m way far away from earning enough money off that book to live by. (I’m not putting down my book, or Swarm Press at all here, it is simply a fact that the sale was not something I can feed my family on. Clearly that didn’t bother me enough to refuse the contract. I’m very happy with what we accomplished with the sales of PFK.)

And even if I DID make like a $30K advance, which sounds awesome, the book came out  last August, and I haven’t had a book sale since. That $30K (before taxes) sounds huge in one big chunk, but definitely would have run out by now. So I’m still a wanna-be in my book. I have not achieved success by my own definitions.

I hope you’re reading the Freelancer’s Survival Guide- Rusch just had a great series on success.