I Don't Want to Do This (An Introduction)

This is my fourth attempt at this post.

That’s not an uncommon problem for me.  Starting is always hard and no matter how much sleep I lose at night thinking about the words I want to write and no matter how clear the idea is in my head, it always slips away when I open my laptop and see a cursor blinking on an empty, white screen.  I joke that one day I’ll just line through every failed intro and leave it so the whole world can see how much of a challenge the first paragraph is, but honestly that would just lead to an annoying number of pages of lined out sentences and half paragraphs.  What I’m supposed to be doing here is introducing myself.  This is supposed to be the first step in building an audience, and eventually a brand, something to make a literary agent think I have enough potential to be worth their time.  There’s probably a dozen tutorials online about what I should be writing here, explaining all the ways I can optimize this post to garner more traffic and look more appealing and I’m probably already fucking it all up because writing intros is hard and the truth is I don’t want to do this.

By this, I don’t mean writing.  I WANT to write.  In the 10th grade I almost flunked geometry because I was too busy writing fiction in my notebook to focus on sine and cosine.  As far back as I can remember I’ve been compelled to put words on the page.  There are hundreds of pages of my writing slowly yellowing in a three ring binder hidden away in a box along with a dust covered hard drive containing hundreds more.  Words I wrote that no one has ever read and no one ever will.  Forget my novel.  Forget this blog.  Forget market forces.  Forget supportive friends.  Without any of it I’d still be grinding out words if for no other reason than to get them out of my head.

No…I like to write.  It's almost a compulsion. I have always and probably will always do it for free.

What I mean when I say I don’t want to do this is…this…audience building, branding, marketing…. I don’t want to do this shit.  I'm only here because I wrote a novel that most of the folks who’ve read it say is pretty good and I’d like to see it published.  The “experts”, at least the ones you can find for free via an easy Google search, say if you want to get published you have to build an audience, that before a literary agent will touch you they have to know you’ll be able to market and sell your work.  So here I am…setting up a blog like some kind of fucking influencer, wondering how video platforms like Instagram and TikTok are supposed to work marketing a written medium and if it’s even really worth the effort.

This isn’t me.  I’m a 46 year old ex-soldier/ex-cop turned stay at home dad.  I have a 2.0 from a Louisiana public high school and four semesters on the dean's list at a commuter school one step up from the University of Phoenix.  I’ve been lucky enough in life to Forrest Gump my way through some big adventures but I’m under no illusion that I deserve an audience much less a big enough audience to make me rich and famous.  Truth is I don’t really need the money and the idea of being genuinely famous scares the shit out of me.  I’m not built for it.  But I want folks to read my stories.  I want to have a hardback copy of my novel to slip into one of those little free library boxes.  If I’m dreaming big I’d like to see it adapted into a TV mini-series and every bit of advice I’ve read suggests that if I want to get there I have to do distasteful things like “optimization” and “brand building” and “marketing.”  

So here I am.  Blogging.  Like some pretentious Brooklynite with a trust fund.

I made myself a promise that I would try hard for two years to get my novel published before looking into self publishing, so that’s the plan.  I’ll use this space to talk up my novel, the characters and whatever plot I can get into without spoilers.  In the meantime I plan to post at least once every two weeks, mostly essays, but maybe some short film stuff, and short fiction if I find inspiration.  I don’t plan to put anything behind a paywall, but I do have this vague idea of maybe writing a detective story and releasing it as a serial and I’d maybe charge for that if there’s enough interest to justify it.  I dunno.  By now y’all gotta know I’m just winging it.  

If nothing else this forces me to keep grinding out words and putting them out in the world.  Maybe, hopefully, some of them will be entertaining.  I hope you enjoy and thanks for reading.

-Hammett