Bernards New Jersey, Between Monday, September 21st and Friday, October 9th, 2020
“On wanting to be a rich prosimetrist or ‘physics #2’ or ‘a third iteration of a first sketch of a philanthropist reflecting on being rich’”
For Ashley
How surprisingly exciting! For the first
time in my 21 years or so[1]
of creative writing
I sent a piece—a poem–
to publishers.
I felt a shiver as I electronically delivered it and finally considered
sharing beyond
Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, my blog,
and creative writing workshops. What gave me the nerve
to claim it might deserve,
might be worth preserving
in a literary journal or medium… with operations beyond
my immediate control,
published by some other
soul or souls?
My original/initial
hope was that my writings would go viral, explode on social media
like fireworks, the glows flowing to the eyes of the publishing industry
inspiring their interest in me and offering me…
…a book deal
and advance
(really optimistic I know, but there’s always a chance!) And then, look at it
become… a best seller (!)…
And even some of the literary critics deem it “stellar!” … …And all of a
sudden, I’m rich (!!!!!!),
which, however, I’d only attribute to luck, physics, inevitability, and
fate.
And either way, whether rich or poor, come whatever may in life, this
concept of fate
has weighed heavily
on me, and I hate the limits
on my control
over it,
most specifically its unfair portioning
of fortune and misfortune
in any given context. Some have special abilities, make billions and live
beyond a hundred years, own beach front homes on Caribbean islands,
some only get minutes, suffer from treacherous disabilities, diseases, live in
poor villages or slums on dirt, crumbs, and tiny sums, get raped and shot to
death by heroin and guns…
…so I try check my privilege and keep a modest perspective when I think
about my ambitious wish to get rich…but I also don’t won’t give up… as my
success, should I succeed, sharing the story, spreading its seeds of
inspiration could be at least one new good deed…
END NOTES:
[1] I do not find it exceptional, but it is nonetheless the fact, that like many creative writers, my efforts dawned when I was a kid, roughly nine years, typically in the form of short ghost stories. (My third-grade teacher used to read us ghost stories from a series of books called True Ghost Stories when there was free time. This, mixed with the observation of classmates reading the Goosebumps series books, had sparked my interest in both fiction, horror and parapsychology). When I was roughly eleven years old, I began writing screenplays, mostly so I could start making my own (often monologue) movies. This was because actually my greater interest was acting—I wanted to be a movie star like John Travolta (I had watched Grease in an acting class his charismatic presence impressed me). One of his other popular movies is Saturday Night Fever and although obviously geared towards an adult audience and being very over my head (what was a “cunt?” I often wondered, for example…) I watched it a lot, enjoying most of all, Travolta’s disco dancing. In the midst of that context, Christmas of 1999 I think it was, my brother decided to buy me the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. I fell in love with the Bee Gees’ love songs and wanted to write my own. And so emerged my sprouting love for poetry. I wrote mostly song lyrics, but I also experimented with free verse. Around 15 or 16 I also began writing novellas and prose poems. Every time I produced a book length worth of material, I would staple them together and title them but never shared them with more than a few acquaintances. THAT, in my opinion, is the motif of the story about my creative writing, to put in short.
That is to say, I always resisted sharing my work with any degree of genuine confidence. In 2010 I did self-publish my book Lovers, Other Stories and Words but the self-publishing was my effort to evade giving literary agents and book publishers the opportunity to reject my writings. After a year of trying to sell the self-published book, I quit the effort. Ever since, all of my attempts to gain recognition and readership were confined to my blogging and social media interactions. Why? I took it as a given that I’d be as lucky as a lottery ticket jackpot winner if a literary agent or publisher even read more than a sentence of a query letter, let alone a short piece or manuscript. Why not then take it straight the readers? As soon as people started to like what I shared on Facebook, WordPress, YouTube, et cetera, via word of mouth, I’d go “viral” and capture the attention of publishers and attract a book deal that way. Of course, not only did this cast an unmerited and presumptuously negative light towards the publishing industry, but also, obviously, I still lacked sufficient self-confidence. Until now.