TUESDAY, 29 MAY 2012
14:22
I am currently going through my notebooks from the years 2005 to 2011.
Two remarks:
1. Every now and then I took a few minutes from my very busy schedule of almost full-time failure to produce notes of highly usable quality.
2. If I had done a personal writing project after 2004 but failed to include an honest assessment of my many failures between 2006 and 2011, the project would have ended in weak, half-hearted attempts. Because of my experiences over the past few years, my manic working style and the less than positive results, I am likely to produce another personal project. And the notes that I have dutifully made will, as always, be indispensable.
One more remark: I have to stop nurturing the false and inaccurate notion that the period 2006 to 2011 in my life was one big nightmare full of failures. A writer needs a life to produce material. For a better one, I could not have asked.
19:22
By the time I was closing up tonight, two thoughts were rolling around in my head.
Thought one: the material from 2005 is a different story, but the notes from January 2006 to this year are starting to look like a big, new project – a “second” Personal Agenda, as it were. The “first” Personal Agenda dealt with my struggle for identity, place in the world, purpose of existence, meaning of life, why I continued living knowing that I could give up, and what to do when you have discovered and worked out all these things. The “second” Personal Agenda would deal with a struggle that is familiar to most adults – the struggle to make money. It may sound trite, but I reckon a brief narrative of my dozen efforts to make money and my perseverance after repeated failures might just be worth reading.
Thought two: It seems that I have quite a lot of work to do. With the skills I have developed, and lessons learned about marketing and publishing your own literature, my literary projects could possibly be considered as more than just personal work – it may actually be time to look at it as a source of income.
It is as if I have come full circle. At the beginning of January 2006, I was very serious about publishing my writing. Then I discovered that I could make money from home, on my computer connected to the internet. For the next more than five years, I moved away from my writing, in an effort to make more money. The plan was, first financial independence (“Everything seems so possible!”), then I can pay other people to proofread and translate my material. Five, six years later, I am back at the beginning: Similar financial situation, and me deciding I cannot wait any longer to publish what I have written.
So, money or no money, I am working on my writing again. If my books eventually make money, pay the rent, buy food and other groceries, and make it possible for me to take my wife out for a nice meal and a movie, and maybe even to afford a weekend in the mountains, I would reckon that I didn’t do too badly. I would certainly not have been able to conjure up a better story.
______________________