Athazagoraphobia *

As I get older I find myself more and more envying babies I see sleeping in a car seat, or a stroller or their mother’s arms. I can remember times I’ve envied stray dogs sleeping in the sun. Envy has always been a problem for me. Lust, excessive wealth, gluttony, large breasted women flinging themselves on me begging for love, and other deadly sins have regrettably never been problems for me and in fact seem to take care of themselves without any input of discipline on my part. But envy – no. As my guy Father Delmar pointed out, of the Seven Deadly Sins it is the only one that has no pleasure in it. Nobody ever says “Come on baby, let’s get high and do some heavy envy.”

I regard myself as an apprentice writer because it gives me a certain margin of freedom, just as if I were to regard myself as a child I might feel a certain amount of freedom. I’m a published writer as far as the technical term goes, but I think of myself more as an advanced amateur because it gives me the freedom to remain undefined and unbranded and seek out knowledge from others. I take some comfort in telling myself I’m still learning to walk and eat solid food and some day I’ll stop sucking my thumb too.

In one of the craft books I’ve studied, the author grumbled that her writing students seemed more obsessed with having a web presence than with the donkey work of actually writing something. They had a blog, they had an author’s site, promotions trailers, twitter - and big plans lemme tell ya - but didn’t exactly spend that much ass-in-chair-time crafting new work. It reminds me a little bit of an interview I read by Keith Richards. The reporter asked what went wrong with Brian Jones, one of the founding band mates who was kicked out of the Stones and came to a bad end. Richards said “He cared more about being a rock star than he did about being a musician.” These days there’s so many indespensible doo-dads out there I think this is becoming a problem for a new writer, even if you don’t want to be a literary rock star.

Self promotion or money in general is something the craft books never talk about, as though there were something unseemly about it. Writing for a living has always been the dream and even the greatest writers dealt with it. Shakespeare was a theater owner and he wrote plays for his own troop, "The King's Men", which he hoped would be popular and sell tickets. Not for nothing are his best stories filled with witches, ghosts, dirty jokes, cross dressing lovers and lots and lots of sword fights. Chekhov wrote short stories in the beginning to support his family and he certainly cared about the money. As soon as Dickens books began to move he dropped his day job and hit the American stage to give readings to packed houses. But according to Stephen King today in the age of the internet and the eBook only about 4% of working authors make a living solely from writing fiction.

Part of my motive for joining the Oh Get a Grip blog was to have a chance to expose more people to my name and my writing style and of course the ever changing little side bar there that shows what books we have out. But it really hasn’t translated into sales. It’s been mostly a wonderful creative experience, I like it here fine, but publicity wise not so much. In fact I don’t know anybody who has cracked this particular nut.

I think this weeks theme of self promotion is kind of a sore spot for a lot of wannabes like me, because really what we want is to write and learn our chops and let the promotion business take care of itself because we’re so effing brilliant or something we think people will discover us, or that our publishers will have an investment in our success and get our name out there for us without our effort. But what you find out is that to a large extent you’re on your own. Old school Minnesota boys like me tend to be a shy lot who don’t like beating our own drum.

My self promotion so far has consisted mainly of sending out stories, as anyone does, and soliciting reviews, and I find that these things are much like the experience of prayer. That is, your plaintive and carefully chosen words go out and there is no answer. I find people rarely say no these days. They just don’t say.

I think there is an added problem in the genre that we work in. Erotica is such a controversial media, it’s not something you always want to attract attention to. I envy writers who go on book tours, compared to some of us who scuttle about hoping not to be noticed under our real names. Most erotica writers work under a pen name because they don’t want people picketing their house much less a book signing. It’s always taken a certain kind of kamikaze guts to write this stuff even though things have changed a great deal in the last few years. I’m old enough to remember when you could get busted and even do felony prison time for coming through US Customs with a copy of Tropic of Cancer in the bottom of your suitcase or for even sending it in the mail to somebody. Hell, now you can read it free on Google Books. In fact you can peruse modern translations of the Kama Sutra complete with nude photographs not of swanky models, but of real couples having actual intercourse also right there on Google Books.

As an apprentice I can still find some shelter from these things by telling myself I’m still learning the ropes. But after a while you start to feel like a bit of a poser. When will you grow up? Do you know you're grown up when the act you found such pleasure in starts to become dull? I don’t think I could do this for a living anymore than I could make love for a living.




* "the obsessive fear of being ignored or forgotten."

C. Sanchez-Garcia