I’ve been unemployed now for just over two weeks. Gotta say, Ilike it. Not the lack of money (I am after all applying for unemployment compensation) but the fact that I’m not going in to a smelly day job five days a week. The fact that I’ve got a few hours per day more to work on what I consider important.
And I have been. We found out back in 1995 to 1997 that I could manage my time in a disciplined manner. I wrote, or finished, three novels in those two years, as well as about twenty short stories that mostly sold. Not all and not soon enough to keep me unemployed, hence for the last 12 years I’ve been toiling at a job I did not want and came eventually to loathe. (Not, I hasten to add, the fault of the job. I just didn’t want to be doin’ it, y’know?)
I do have this little problem of no income…
I know what I want to have happen, but the only thing I can currently do is to work at my craft and bide my time and, frankly, hope someone decides I’m worth taking a chance on. It is indeed absurd that I have ten published novels under my belt and can’t currently get a contract. Did I say absurd? It is ridiculous. It is the butt end of a cosmic joke for which the punchline is the heat death of justice, an irony so dense it is a short way till light cannot escape, a joyless black comedy filled with unfunny counterpunches to leave Mike Tyson baffled and depressed.
Yet I slog on.
It may turn out to be that I’m really not good enough, that what I do doesn’t hold up in some unfathomable way that keeps getting me passed over.
Nah. The worst you could say is that I’m not “commercial” enough. Don’t know what to do about that. You write what’s on your mind and in your heart at the moment or you hang it up and go do journalism.
But I am writing like a fiend now. Two weeks, I am on chapter six of Oculus, the sequel to Orleans (which damn well better sell now, as there will be two books in the series), and I have personal proof of the power of the unconsious—or the subconscious—or whatever it is, that which Damon Knight called “Fred” and refers to the pre-conscious machinations of the mind working on a problem absent one’s full attention or even awareness. I’ve sort of experienced this before. Anyway, I wrote a pretty long synopsis for this book about seven, eight months ago, and apparently the hindbrain has been working on it ever since. Because when I opened the file, wrote CHAPTER ONE across the top of the first page, and began writing, well, it just went. It’s going. I haven’t had the usual hiccups yet. Knock on polystyrene, perhaps I won’t. I’m nearly 25,000 words into it, which will count as roughly one fifth of the completed novel. In two weeks!
I am encouraged. This may well work out. Stay tuned.
