Beginnings

Who I am, and why I'm doing this

Dear reader,

It’s good to meet you finally. 

It has taken me a long time to get here. I’m not sure what here is yet, but I look forward to finding out. This will be an experiment like anything else in life. Some experiments lead to a door that leads to another, and some stop right before they begin.

I am trying something new here, something I have never done before, to establish an online presence as a writer. I have a Facebook I don’t use and an Instagram I use to post only pictures and thoughts on concerts I have gone to. My Instagram and Facebook accounts were made for me by people in my life when I was younger, who were more excited than I was to participate in the novelties of what our generation promised the future. This Substack is my own doing, and its success or failure will also be mine.

 For I do hope these words find you well. I have a confession to make. I call myself a writer, but I have not yet published a word. In the past two decades, I’ve called myself many things: a filmmaker, a writer, an actor, a poet; in the bio of my Substack, I almost put aspiring therapist. An insecurity derives from my calling myself a writer, as I have established an identity as one in my close community. However, despite my efforts to become one, I feel as if I have very little to show for it. It is how my friends see me. It is the work my family knows that I pursue. It is what I tell strangers I meet that I am. I’ve created this identity for myself because I believe it to be true, in how anyone believes anything to be true, say if one believes in God or not or whether they think the earth is flat. You’ll receive a different response depending on who you ask, and your opinion of them does not change their reality. If you are not a person of faith, let’s say, and talk to someone who is devoted to a god, prays five times a day, goes to church every Sunday, doesn’t drink alcohol, doesn’t have sex, guilts themselves in engaging or thinking about wanting to engage in life’s simple free pleasures, all for the chance that when they die, they will go to a place, that based on no scientific evidence, exists because you were told it does, believe it to be so, and that you will be judged to enter, based on how you have lived your life and how you plan to live it moving forward; and no matter what anyone tells you, to sway you, does it change your mind. 

Maybe it’s me getting older, but I have come to a place in my life where I don’t believe myself to be anything other than who I am—a writer. I no longer need external validation to consider myself one, but a song with no audience is a song that does not exist and is the saddest thing in the world. So, I don’t feel guilty saying I want to be read.

I love to read, write, and engage with people who do, too. That’s why I'm here, why I’ve come to you. I’m reaching out with my hand to make a connection. I'm open to you, and you can take this bid of offering to connect if you want. I’d love to have you.

Calling myself a writer is not totally false. I have written a novel and am well on my way to writing another. So I do write. I write every day, actually. Writing is what I love. It is my religion, my spirituality, my obsession, and my passion, but also the bane of my existence.

Not so strangely, though, I have an inferiority complex when calling myself a writer as I have yet to get my novel, which I worked on for five years before attempting to put it out into the world, published. I am 32 years old and unemployed. Seven months ago, I was laid off from my job as an Associate Producer, working weekends for editors who would make commercials for clients like Verizon and Chobani. My job consisted of babysitting the adults who worked for these clients, who made their way too high up the Capitalistic food chain to get their hands dirty and serve them in any way they needed. It wasn’t a bad gig for a writer because I would get much time to write. Once I got everything in order, when the editors and their clients were off to work in rooms they called Bays to make their commercial art, I had a whole office to myself to work. Then it ended after two years, and at the time, I lost my job, my wife lost hers, and we were in a place neither of us had ever wanted to be in. Unemployed and paying Manhattan rent.

Instead of looking for work speedily, like I should have, I used my time in sending query letters to agents, burning myself out in doing so, feeling I was so close, writing and rewriting the queries to experiment with different forms, figuring out new angles to sell my story to make it more attractive to various agents. I wrote to both agents in the States and abroad and sent the requested 5 pages, 10 pages, 20 pages of my manuscript, hoping they’d request to read more, which neither of the 100 or more so agents I queried have. 

This is not an unusual story, of course. I know only a few writers who succeeded early in their attempts at garnering an agent who believed in their work enough to attempt to sell it to publishers and get it published. And yet, when failure happens to you, you feel as if you are the only one it’s happening to. Writing is a lonely medium, and I'm not a hermit; I love people, and I love to connect. Writing is the great connector of my life and my most excellent mentor. Because of the vulnerability of writers who came before me, who devoted their time in this short life to curating their inner voice through language and characters and plot onto paper, is why I am who I am today. And I like who I am for the first time in my life, and it has taken me forever, not just to say those words, but actually to believe them. And I believe my pursuit as a writer, despite my failure as one, made it so. Unfortunately, pursuing a career as a writer does not take away the pain of failure but instead exploits it and makes any attempt to live a regular life impossible. You become unrelatable to your closest friends and family members. You watch those you grew up with become the adults society always wanted them to be. They have children, cars, houses, 401k’s, and financial stability; they invest their money into Roth IRA’s, go on expensive vacations or don’t go on vacation to save their money, wear nice clothes, have dogs, have cats, host parties, have time to learn a new skill and pick up a hobby, but most importantly, let those dreams and desires they had as children die, to move on to live their one life happy.

I am told I often compare myself to other people. It's a bad habit, but if life is anything like the tortoise and the hare metaphor, what else are you supposed to do when your tortoise has paused in the marathon to drink water and forgot why all the hares are running in the first place? 

I have been doing this too long to stop. The work I did to pay rent never helped conserve the energy I needed to put into my creative life, and because of that, my working life always came up short. I could only work jobs that allowed me to write. Even if I overworked myself, I still felt like an imposter. I could not compete with those who wanted to do the job more than me. Who, unlike me, was not governed by their ambition to do things outside of the office. I felt like I was two Sisyphus’s with two boulders, climbing two mountains.

Writing my novel and watching it slowly take shape and come to life was an incredible experience. It gave my life meaning when I felt like nothing else was happening. I started writing prose as a jaded filmmaker, wanting to try something new, and my novel was a way into that new ground. I didn’t take it seriously at first. I think I tricked myself into writing my book. I did not think it would take me as long as it did; I didn’t think I would ever want to get it published. I had wanted to write a novel for years but lacked the confidence to try. I would hold a four-hundred-page novel and marvel at how someone wrote a coherent story filled with just words. Words, for me, at that time, lacked the depth of an image from a film camera. They were black pieces of pigment on an augmented screen or a printed page in a book. I did not see the depth of the beauty they created, and yet, I loved to read. I loved holding books before I had the attention span to finish them. But when I read, I could not follow multiple narratives. I would drift off between paragraphs, fall asleep, read for an hour, and barely remember what I read, what the characters were doing, what characters did what, and how they were all connected. But when I started writing prose, over time, that all changed. I became a better reader and then a better writer. I learned to read me.

My bandwidth for receiving and synthesizing the world created by an author's prose had expanded. I could see the transitions of paragraphs and overlapping timelines of several characters. I could see the depth of the world that words could create. There was so much freedom; I felt like I had grown spiritually. I could articulate myself differently when speaking in public. I had come out of my shell. I was able to perform in life at a higher frequency than I had before. I had finally found myself.

Cinema has given me a lot and even influenced my prose, but it never gave me a platform to showcase my voice. Which is okay; it can be for others. I was just happy I had found my voice after searching for so long and not giving up.

It was such an intimidating thing to try and write a novel. It felt easy to give up on any fleeting attempt to want to try. Until I did, and it was like I had given birth, not just to the book but to the person I always said I wanted to be. I created something that felt real to me, that had a pulse. I had successfully placed myself inside a medium I felt compelled to create in after trying for over a decade to do so in the medium of film. I wrote a novel that only I could write. I finally understood what those words meant.

I am very proud of my novel, but I am not telling you here that I am the greatest unpublished novelist who has ever lived or that I have written some magnum opus. It was not always the case that I liked my novel. As I said, it took a long time to write it, and I think one of the reasons why this novel took me so long was that while figuring out the story, I also had to learn to write syntax correctly or learn whatever the fuck syntax was and how to read like a writer.

Every writer should love what they put out into the world; otherwise, what is the point? Getting the work right should take as long as it will take. I wanted to make sure that when I put my work out into the world, the people who read it, the agents of the world if they were to reject the book, I would disagree with their rejection. I wanted to write the best book that I could so that when someone took a shot on me and wanted to submit my work to publishers so that it could be bought, I could receive some money to work on the next book comfortably and continue that cycle. That’s all I wanted to happen, yet it did not. I showed up for myself. I made it possible that if an opportunity arose where someone would ask me if I had a book, I could confidently answer with an astounding Y E S.

Yes, with a capital fucking Y.

Like anything I've created, the book was my chance to live the life I saw myself living—a life that I desired and dreamt of inside my head, like the god-fearing man dedicating his time on earth to living his life to appease his Almighty, to enter their Garden of Eden, all to find at the end of his life, when taking his last breath and closing his eyes for the last time, seeing only darkness.

The book's completion was the closest I had ever come to believing it possible to live a life I had always imagined. The freedom that comes with being a Writer. Even if it was fabricated, a writer’s wet dream, and totally unlivable by any realistic standards, I was still willing to walk through the door of my dream life and face it, head to head, to see its true face. And maybe I have. Maybe I have walked through that door and don’t know it yet.

Again, this isn’t about the quality of my book. I understand that a work of art is entirely subjective. Every agent who sends you a rejection letter will ensure you know that. I am writing to understand what it means to dedicate your life to something, a craft, for the love of it and curiosity to grow in its confines and understand every inch of it, and believe that you found something, you achieved something great in it, after years of doubt, and hard work to get no result that aligns with the reality you are living in.

A reality where a criminal can become a two-term president.

When I was laid off, I thought at least I had built something substantial to carry me in ways any job I could get could not. After getting fed up with how long it was taking me to write my book, my mantra when writing was, “Take the time necessary to write the book well, and it will serve you for the rest of your life.” Those words came to me like an epiphany, and I believed them. Maybe the book is unfinished; I still make revisions. I still have friends read it, and I revise and revise and revise.

I want to think of my Substack as a pilgrimage to being published. As a subscriber, every now and then, you’ll receive a post similar to this one, me sharing my rantings and thoughts on writing and the pursuit of publishing a debut novel. 

If you pay the 6-dollar monthly fee, you’ll hear from me weekly, sharing insights on everything I love. I’m an avid concertgoer, reader, movie watcher, food lover, traveler. Something I enjoy most for fun is recommending things I love to the people I love, and I plan to share those with you here. Things like the books I'm reading, records I can’t stop listening to, playlists I create, and films I watch and can’t stop thinking about. This is what I do in between writing, which influences my writing and helps me stop thinking about what I’m writing.

As Bruce Springsteen said: “I take my fun seriously.”

 Also, to those paid subscribers, as long as it doesn't interfere with my being published, I plan to include chapters from my book, short stories, and poems I’ve written. The small fee will help me continue these posts ( it took me four days to write this!) and give me more time to work on my writing. If you found anything valuable here, I highly recommend subscribing or sharing among those you think it might. You won’t regret it; it would mean the world to me if you did.

I want to grow with this community. I have a lot to learn. I am open.

(Photo of me by my dear friend Harriet Olive; whose substack you can subscribe to here)

Thank you for reading!

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