It seems as if it’s time once again to talk about the nay-sayers: talk about how to deal with them. It is a topic I bring up in panels at conventions, and I’ve blogged about it here and there over the past six years. But the message is eternal, because it is an endless war—a “psychic war” to quote Blue Oyster Cult. And it is a war far too many creatives must face day in and day out from the moment they announce they are pursuing a writing or art or music or sculpting or comic or any other creative career.
So let me tell you about a big slice of my life, and maybe it can help you. I’m going to be half a century old in two years. I started my writing career when I was forty-two, give or take. You have to understand that I’ve always written. My first short story, a tale of volcanoes on an alien world full of rock spiders, was received to accolades by my fourth-grade class.
Writing is what got me through high school and how I excelled in my Graduate and Masters programs. Writing is what I do (when I have the time, Aaron Michael Ritchey). Writing is in my blood and my brain and in the very fiber of my being. I write, and I like to think I’m at least passably good at it.
So, Sherman, if that is your real name, set the way-back for around 1978.
I’d become enamored with Star Wars and was gorging my brain on volume after volume of The Science Fiction Hall of Fame. I immersed my developing brain in the writings of Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, Zelazny, Laumer, May, and a litany of others.
I realized then that what I wanted to do with my life was write. I wanted to become a writer and strive towards joining the ranks of those authors who had inspired my creativity and intellect and philosophy. I wanted to spend my life contributing to the body of speculative fiction that is as important a facet of human culture as just about anything. It shapes minds and encourages people to think and explore and reach for unattainable horizons.
It was a very young dream in a very young and relatively fragile mind.
Enter, my father: “So, you wanna be a starving artist the rest of your life?” Over and over again.
Do you know what the horse latitudes are?
They are an equatorial region of this world’s seas and oceans where wind is scarce, if not non-existent.
One etymology of this idiom—although there are several—is that during the age of European sea-faring expansion, the captains of sailing vessels would include a large number of horses in their cargo. When they reached the horse latitudes, they lowered the horses into the water and lashed them in a long line in front of the ship, as if the horses were pulling a wagon across the plains.
Then a few members of the crew, including the caretaker of the noble beasts, would go out in front in a row boat and lure them forward. Diligently, faithfully, and ever so slowly, the horses would tow the ship into stronger breezes.
And when those breezes began to fill the sails, the horses were cut loose as the ship sailed on. It was simply the cost of doing business.
That dream I had wasn’t the wind. It wasn’t the ship or the sails. It was the horses, left behind in the sea as the notion of commerce sailed on.
So, I went to school with the secondary hope of becoming a teacher of writing and literature. I guess I wasn’t thinking about commerce so much as stepping in line and towing it like I was expected.
The funny thing about pursuing a career in education is it’s not really a goal of commerce so much as one of passing on to others what little you know in hopes that they have the opportunities and support mechanism to chase their own dreams. It’s a vicarious sort of living, or at least it was for me, but it was enough at the time.
My trouble, when I’d finally left school, was that the dream of creating was still there, itching and twitching at the back of my mind, incessantly driving me towards something.
To make a long story short, I ended up in web design. And that was the entry drug for nearly twenty-five years in Information Technology that was lucrative and turned me into a completely miserable asshole.
There are plenty of apologies I have and should make about the man I’d become, and I still lament what it turned me into and the prices I paid over those difficult years. At the end of that age of commerce—like in so many other ages—the organization’s notion of commerce drove them towards laying me off.
There I sat, a pink slip in my hand on top of a handful of checks that represented about a year of life.
“What the hell am I going to do now?” I found myself saying as I stared out onto a sunny, Tuesday in July.
The answer wasn’t long in coming.
Write, that itching and twitching voice said with more resolve than I thought possible.
I was once again faced with a decision to make. I could have gone back to IT, made more money, and gone right back to being a completely miserable asshole. Or….
Or.
After a fair amount of thought, I came to the conclusion that I would rather die a starving artist that was happy than spend another second as the man I’d ben for two and a half decades. In hindsight, it wasn’t much of a decision at all. There really was only ever one choice… a choice I should have made when I was young… when I had the time and a lesser burden of financial obligation to hearth and home.
I won’t lie to you. These past six years have been hard. I’ve worked seven days a week for long stints. I’ve sacrificed time at home for time on the road. And because of my circumstances, there has been eighty tons of back breaking work.
But I’ve been living the dream, as a friend of mine likes to say.
It’s a mantra for us, a chant we use to get over the humps of struggle and doubt and wondering where the next mortgage payment is coming from.
But I haven’t given up. I’ve done everything I could to pursue and even accelerate this rather bizarre career track I’ve chosen. The rewards, however, continue to be manifest. I have three novels published—the first one independently produced. I have a litany of short stories out, I have fans across the country and people at the last four shows who asked me when the sequel to my first book is coming out. I’ll be in a major anthology release from Baen next year, and I’ve just been offered a pro writing gig for a media tie-in.
Now, I can’t say that everyone who tries to become a professional writer will make it. That would be foolhardy and bad advice. Hell, I haven’t even made it yet. What I can assure you of is that if you don’t quit, if you write as much and often as possible and you put your words out there—without quitting—the odds of you making the transition to full-time writer go up ten-fold.
You have to have a one-, two-, five-, and ten-year plan. You have to treat your writing like the business it has to become. And you have to never give up. It can be a hard and lonely choice, but the rewards can and must come to you in time, with the only delta the scale of those rewards as they arrive.
And if you have nay-sayers in your life, you need look them square in the eye and say, simply, “Go to hell. I don’t work for you.”
Don’t quit your day job, and make sure your bills are met, but you don’t need fancy cars, or big houses, or credit cards and going out all the time. You just need the will to become the writer that is itching and twitching inside you, struggling to see the light of day. You need a place to write and the means to put your words into the hands of others.
It’s a psyching war you’re in, with assaults coming from within and without. And it never ends. But I can say with absolute certainty that I have no regrets and I wouldn’t go back for anything on Earth.
So, to hell with the nay-sayers.
Write.
Here are the lyrics to Veteran of the Psychic Wars by Blue Oyster Cult:
You see me now a veteran of a thousand psychic wars
I’ve been living on the edge so long
Where the winds of limbo roar
And I’m young enough to look at
And far too old to see
All the scars are on the inside
I’m not sure that there’s anything left to me
Don’t let these shakes go on
It’s time we had a break from it
It’s time we had some leave
We’ve been living in the flames
We’ve been eating up our brains
Oh please don’t let these shakes go on
You ask me why I’m weary, why I can’t speak to you
You blame me for my silence say It’s time I changed and grew
But the war’s still going on, dear, and there’s no end that I know
And I can’t say if we’re ever…
I can’t say if were ever gonna be free
Don’t let these shakes go on
It’s time we had a break from it
It’s time we had some leave
We’ve been living in the flames
We’ve been eating out our brains
Oh please don’t let these shakes go on
You see me now a veteran of a thousand psychic wars
My energy’s spent at last
And my armor is destroyed
I have used up all my weapons and I’m helpless and bereaved
Wounds are all I’m made of
Did I hear you say that this is victory?
Don’t let these shakes go on
It’s time we had a break from it
Send me to the rear
Where the tides of madness swell
And been sliding into hell
Oh please don’t let these shakes go on
Don’t let these shakes go on
Don’t let these shakes go on
https://play.google.com/music/preview/Tqapnkn2xrfgoz2mdvutdk5kzre?lyrics=1&utm
