Procrastination (Working Title)
On what happens when the excuses run out and you actually have time to write.
Procrastination.
Pro – meaning forward, or ahead of, or even in favor of. Crastinus – of tomorrow. Also pro – professional. Etymologically speaking, I am full of both. I am now a professional procrastinator, and it’s a very strange role for me to be in. Let’s dawdle through it a bit while I ignore what was actually on my to-do list for today.
About a year ago my Mister did something I never expected (although he’s done it in the distant past, that’s a story for another time). He took a boring timecard job outside the house and told me to take a backseat to the financial responsibility of our household. It met both of our goals to have me full-time focused on building out my writing skills while also building out our tiny home property, and on paper that is living the dream. In reality, a year in, it’s proving to be a lot more difficult than I ever would have expected.
Excuse me while I ramble from a place of self-aware privilege.
As it turns out, having all the time in the world apparently means having just enough time to find out how under-educated I am about the literary business. Yes, I’ve been a self-published author under my own name and a separate pen name. Yes, I have been writing content for the internet in the form of blogs and essays for over 20 years. Yes, I do identify as a writer, and occasionally I even get paid for my work. But I have no idea what I am doing once I step out of the authorship ecosystem I have built for myself.
I own the outlets I publish articles and essays on. I wrote, edited, formatted, exported, and designed the cover art for my direct-to-kindle published works. At no point did I run into any kind of barrier-to-entry or jury of my peers beyond what I could learn from google or YouTube about self-publishing. I just brain-dumped onto a page and hit “publish” hoping for the best, and not having one iota of understanding about how “the grown-ups” made a career out of this. But I’ve always held back and only published what I thought would be financially beneficial to me. Industry insight and how-to’s and other search engine friendly content made for the digital age.
I have a giant body of work swimming around in my head that I’ve made so many excuses for not writing over the years that they’re starting to blur together. If I didn’t spend my writing “juice” on earning a living. If I had more time. If the kids didn’t need me so much. If dinner wasn’t burning and the car didn’t need an oil change and the dog wasn’t breathing so loud and if and if and if. There’s always been an excuse that felt really valid in the moment, but looking back I realize that I could have prioritized my time and skill usage better. I didn’t need to wait for permission or a perfect scenario to write. I just needed to do the writing and figure out how to get it in front of the right eyeballs.
Now with all this time on my hands I am quickly learning that’s probably what college was supposed to be for. Not to teach me HOW to write, but to teach me how to navigate the business of writing. What the markers of conventional success actually look like. Where the milestones are and how to get from one to the next.
In an effort to educate myself, I’ve signed up for free courses and newsletters, began attending zoom call conferences, and spend hours a day refining my “roadmap” and researching the way others with a similar trajectory to mine have reached goals that are still far ahead of me on my own list, and to be frank, it’s overwhelming as fuck. It also gets in the way of the one thing that will help me move forward; Writing more.
Part of my research has been to listen to other memoir writers… did I mention that writing an essay-driven memoir and having it picked up by a real publisher is my pie-in-the-sky goal? Well, I’ve been listening to the memoirs of other interesting people, all narrated by the authors themselves, and have learned a lot about what resonates with me and what I could have lived without. Their paths to authorship vary so wildly that there’s no real way to reverse-engineer the steps I should be taking. So I keep listening, and instead start recognizing cadence, pacing, how the stories were pitched, what the pivotal moments were for each author that made their story something a publisher thought the public needed to read. Would pay to read. Because I have been the publisher. I have had to decide what was financially worth spending time and type on.
I’ve also begun researching and applying for grants, without any success so far. I only learned this year there are actually grants out there that will help offset the financial cost of focusing on your art for writers, not just visual artists. Silly me. I assumed all writers just took on commercial writing or teaching or even waitressing until an agent read a snippet of theirs, loved it and miraculously got them a book deal with a fat advance after years of querying. I’ve been selling advertising space by the click for 2 decades when I could have just asked for money from a foundation or ten for the same payout and far less groveling.
This is what I’m talking about. I’m 46 years old, 20+ years into a writing career, and also feel like it’s my first day of school every single day. By the end of the week I am so overwhelmed with what I didn’t know and how much time I feel like I have wasted by doing things “the wrong way” that I just clock out. I clean a storage loft or draft the garden overhaul or find some in-person physical project to work on here on the property so I can see some external sign of progress while my writing sits at a stand-still. Again. New excuses not to write are always available.
And I feel guilty. Guilty that the Mister has made the sacrifice of his own creative time to sit in a building 10 hours a day, dealing with an inane management structure and petty workplace drama, doing a job that is hard on his body to provide me with the financial stability to chase my dreams. I want to be sure he can SEE he’s getting his money’s worth. His effort’s worth. I mean, we’re GenX – We measure our worth by our productivity, right?
So I make sure to update him on all my classes and queries and learning efforts, and walk him through the property to look at every shifted stone and pounded nail. He reassures me and reminds me of times I took the financial lead while he found success in music and recovered from injuries and ailments. He supports me and cheers me on and brags about me when I’m not around to hear it… and in a town as small as this it takes two seconds for those brags to circle back to me.
So with that ridiculous level of support and encouragement I sit down in front of my laptop as a woman going through a mid-life career shift, and I stare at a blinking cursor, willing it to tell me what we’re going to write about today. Apparently today we’re writing about a functional freeze loop I get stuck in, while calling it procrastination.
Well, look at that. Over 1,300 words. I guess I do write sometimes.
Drinking: Coffee with sugar free cream because apparently that’s what we do now.
Listening To: “How To Murder Your Life” by Cat Marnell