Six more days until my debut novel “Nothing to Get Nostalgic About,” is officially available to the public. The publisher started their promotional campaign earlier today for it, I hope it will get some attention for the story. I really hate soliciting help from anyone about…well, anything but if you’re reading this and you have a Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Telephone, Carrier Pigeon, Know Morse Code, or are a master at the art of smoke signals, I’d really appreciate if you could throw it out there to your friends, co-workers, relatives, neighbors, local grocer, pediatrician, accountant, or favorite barber/hairstylist that there is this book that is coming out and they should check it out.
Is it wrong that I am more worried this thing is going to remain in obscurity than excited that it even exists at all? Last night I had written a blog about my son Dylan’s new favorite song. For one reason or another when I published it, only half of the blog went up. In that moment I realized that I had one of two options…re-write it or toss my laptop across the room. I wound up watching videos on You Tube and wondering why for the past two weeks I have been experiencing such fatigue. Its not completely unreasonable for me to be so tied. I am the stay at home parent to do boys aged three and one. My youngest is in the early stages of beginning to walk. He is also in that exciting refuses to sit peacefully in the carriage at the grocery story and opts to try to crawl out of it or turn to pull his big brother’s hair. This usually has me trying to break up a fight between the two in the middle of the produce section while also fighting off the anxiety attack that comes when I feel like people are judging me or labeling me an unfit father. Then there is job hunting, which a friend asked me today…” How is it going?” My reply? “About as good as job hunting should when you’re in the middle of a pandemic that has left millions of people out of work and desperate to find anything to feed their families or pay their rent.” That is when I realized…oh yeah, that is right. It is also 2020, the most exhausting year I am sure any of us have ever lived through and we are not even close to it being over yet. To most, the year ends on December 31st but for a lot of other people (including myself) the real end of this tedious and perpetual nightmare is November 3rd. That was when I realized why I wanted to take a night off from politics, promoting this book, and frequent (obsessive and exhausting) inbox checks to see if any of the number of jobs I had applied to were willing to give me an interview. It was not a compelling post, nor was it one that was going to change anyone’s life. It was just about how Dylan discovered Areosmith’s “Sweet Emotion,” from a recent Dick’s Sporting Kid commercial and declared it his favorite song and how when I played in the car for him? You would have thought I just told him that his future college tuition and first automobile were already paid off in full. It was pure magic and excitement. Then…it refused to post. In that moment, the house that refuses to stay clean for five minutes. The refusal of my oldest to hold my hand in parking lots. The unfathomable fear of this book being unremarkable and ignored. That anyone reads this blog at all. And for lack of a less snobby response? Being an educated person with two degrees and a published book is going to wind up back to scrubbing toilets and mopping floors again if no one else thinks I’m qualified to do anything else. And I just clicked out of the page and let myself shut down. I think that is alright to do every so often. It beats the alternative. So, here I am on a word document so I can ensure that all my words don’t vanish into a technological abyss faster than I was able to put them down. And now I do not even know what I want to say. I certainly do not want this post to be a drag for anyone including myself, so I guess I’ll just do what my therapist tries to get me to do every appointment. Rather than define myself by the negative aspects of this week, I should focus on the positive.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
September 2021
Categories |