Moon's Mutterings: Thoughts

This year I was egotistic enough to enter two books in the Independent Publisher’s review process.  I submitted both nationally and regionally. At the time I stated that I had no expectations, but along the way I have dreamed about what it could mean. It is time for the results of the competitive process to be posted. Today I looked. I got nothing. I didn’t even get an honorable mention. Despite my cavalier attitude, I was and am disappointed.

Having had some moderate success in my first few attempts to write, I thought I could challenge the world and be noticed. My success thus far enabled me to try to compete on a much larger scale. My life-long philosophy has been, “It is better to be a big fish in a small pond than a small fish in a big one?” I had the audacity to violate that principle. Now my ass is smarting from the whuppin’ I took in the larger pond.

After scanning the many categories multiple times my deflated ego allowed my mind to see some truth. I am naught but another erstwhile writer in a lake of erstwhile writers. For a few weeks I have forgotten what my purpose was in writing and how it has evolved. I started this journey because I wanted to write some story-poems and publish them. It was a small dream I never allowed to surface until a very few years ago. I wanted to share some stories that people could not tell about themselves. I hoped to pen some of my own. There were no aspirations for wealth. There were no thoughts that I would be widely read. I hoped to matter to even just one person, to share something meaningful to a very few people. My financial goal was breaking even so perhaps I could do it again. It was, and has been, nothing more than that.

My being involved in a second book with other veterans I have come to know, respect, and love, had the same goals. I was challenged to do something besides poetry, thus I wrote my first book of short stories. The task was daunting to me. The costs far exceeded anything I planned initially. The goals were the same, albeit the financial one a much loftier target. I have a distance to dogpaddle before I can breathe well again.

The point is, I let my ego convince me to go from a lake where I felt loved and respected, and appreciated, into a lake where snapping turtles lurked just beneath my webbed feet. In so doing, I took the focus off feeding my heart and honed in at stroking the ego. I changed purpose and simply quadrupled the anxiety in my life and the possibility for disappointment. Failure is growth. I have not failed, however. I made a misjudgment. It is time to revisit my purpose. I do want to sell more books.  It takes money, no matter how cheaply you imagine you can do it, to market.  I may expand my audience, but in so doing I push my break-even point further away. I have floated into another dichotomy.

To add lead weights in place of the water-wings  I once wore, today I heard another ripple of discontent among the people with whom I have lovingly chosen to associate. There is another wave of belief in my beloved MWSA that we little guys, we erstwhile writers, are undesirable among the geese and swans in our small lake. Our founder’s original purpose was to get stories told, to get small time writers a home where they could learn and grow in the craft. He wanted personalities in the more successful, more professional author world to mentor us, love us, respect us, and inspire us to grow in a wonderful, challenging craft. As happened four years ago, briefly again a little more than a year ago, we have once more become a burden and undesirable. We don’t belong among the professional, or more professional, writers. There are other groups where they could gather, but they came to us —with the knowledge of our founder’s ideals—and now want us to become what those other writing organizations are. They apparently do not like seeing us well received, even on a limited basis, and must feel we contaminate their efforts.

Now I find myself marking twain. I looked not for shallow water. Neither did I look for water too deep for me. I wanted a lazy river where I could glide along in my inner tube soaking up rays of wisdom, yet be prepared by the guidance of those more experienced so I could survive the rapids I knew would be somewhere downstream. I wanted people sharing the river with me who knew more, who would critique me in such a way that I would learn and grow. I wanted to share the current with those who could and would respect my goals, my dreams, my talent if indeed there were some.  I wanted to pay tribute to them and respect them and thank them for allowing me a peek inside their world, for allowing me to float along with them, but not in their way. My inner tube is composed of those people, the kind I define herein, that are essentially my writing world’s circle of friends. I had no plan to prick their inner tubes, nor did I expect them to want to prick mine.

There may be wiser ducks in my pond. There may be more talented ducks in my pond.  But there are no larger hearts in my pond than my own. The ducks here are not better ducks than I. 

Now I am once again faced with a question. Do I leave the pond to them or contine swimming because of my respect and appreciation for our founder? Do I stay because of the people who do like having me here, who do care about me, who don’t feel threatened by me for some unknown reason, and for those whom I have come to love? 

I am in those rapids ′bout which I earlier wrote. There are rocks in them I did not anticipate. Do I fight my way through or struggle to the shore where I can collect myself and look for another pond?

Mike Mullins, 5.4.12