My one-hundredth post. Honestly, I never thought I’d make it to my twentieth, but lo’ and behold, people actually visited my blog. And despite my poorest blogging efforts, they keep Googling my name and revisiting my blog. Now, the total number of comments has surpassed the total number of posts (victory is mine!).
So, the weight of the approaching hundredth has been on my shoulders for some time. I’ve been making less and less posts a week, knowing that with every one, I’m inching closer and closer to the big one-oh-oh. And if there’s one thing long-running television series have taught me, it’s that the big one-oh-oh has to be special. Super monstrously special. And I was prepping something sorta cool, and I’m still working on it, but I don’t think it’s quite enough for a hundredth.
The hundredth has to be poignant, something special, a raah-raah deep reflection on my experiences as an author – you know the drill. It has to be a moment. So, at this point, I’m wondering, do I just show some more author-photo outtakes and take the piss out of the whoa-I’m-so-deep-and-profound expectation (yes, there are more outtakes, just as unfortunate and lolarious as the last), or do I, for one brief moment in my life, not be an absolute smart-arse?
I’ve settled for poignant moment. Cue ninety percent of visitors sighing and closing the window.
What’s it like being an author? I mean, this is pretty much everything I’ve ever really wanted. Sure, I’ve wanted other stuff, but authordom has always been a bit of an obsession for me. I wrote, wrote and wrote… I don’t know why. Some psychologist will tell me a little later in life that it has something to do with a need to escape, to be in control – whatever, I didn’t just like it, I loved it.
I’d marry writing if it wasn’t a verb.
The actual technical side of being an author, the writing part, is the best. But that isn’t all that there is to being an author. It’s a difficult profession. There’s lots of self-selling, there’s a lot of pleasing a lot of people, there’s a lot of second-guessing yourself and there’s lots of regretting lots of the stuff that you do when you’re out self-selling, pleasing and second-guessing. And even after all the hard work, and I mean hard work, nobody knows who the hell you are. And nobody cares.
Again, the writing bit – fantastic. But there’s one thing I’ll never forget:
A friend of mine and I go to a bookstore, intent on doing the ol’ let’s-pretend-to-be-interested-customers-while-we-check-how-well-your-book’s-selling routine, and mid-routine, we can’t find the book anywhere in the store. I immediately go into author mode. I introduce myself to a saleswoman and ask if they if they’d like any of their copies of Loathing Lola signed. She’s keen, checks it up on the computer, and they apparently have seven in stock. So, she goes off to the section to find it – and it’s not where it should be. She checks again. She checks other sections. She apologises. She, as my friend and I watch on, gets another salesperson to help her shift a display, to raid the excess Christmas stock in the boxes underneath said display (’twas for Twilight, F.Y.I.). After an embarrassingly slow process, she gets up off her knees and smiles and says: “It looks like we sent it back to the publishers to make way for other stock.”
Ouch x 12.
See, I had these wild daydreams that being an author meant you were a fixture of shelves for ever. Obviously, there’s only so much shelf space, and you can only last so long. This was in February, and I hadn’t expected my moment in the Sun to be so brief. It was one of the saddest moments of my life, but one that I completely and wholly understood. Sure, I can spin it comically, “William has sold close to ten books including the seven he’s bought himself”, but as an author, I don’t really want to have to. I can’t blame anyone. I did the interviews, I did the legwork, I visited the schools, but some books just aren’t monster hits, some books don’t sell.
Maybe it’s because I’ve written absolute crap. Google Loathing Lola. While there have been some fantastic reviews, there have been some absolutely scathing ones. I mean, Maurice Saxby, God bless him, just stopped short of calling for my immediate execution for literary crimes against humanity. I could start a rant about him being the least likely reader to assign the task of reviewing a quirky, bitchy angsty book about technology, reality TV and all things post-WWII to, but I won’t, on account of not being a smart-arse for the sake of the moment.
There are bad books out there, some books I hate are selling quite well at the moment, and maybe I’ve written an absolute piece of shit in Loathing Lola. But I never made room in my daydreams for not being successful. I was going to be Morris Glietzman, Enid Blyton, a regular Roald Dahl, full-stop. Now, almost a year since publication, I’m off the radar, my book is slowly being bumped off the shelf in stores by each subsequent month’s releases, and I’m left right where I was two years ago, when I was freshly signed with Pan Macmillan: a virtual-nobody staring opposite a blank page.
Do I still want to be an author? Do I want to do it all again? Do I know I’ll just be back in front of a blank page in two years’ time?
Yes. Yes. I won’t answer that last one.
A big thanks to all the positive reviewers of Loathing Lola, to the commenters on this blog, my Facebook fans, my Twitter tweeps, the people who’ve laughed at my jokes at school visits, the people who’ve emailed to say they loved Lola – you’ve all made a bumpy ride a little smoother. And I think, staring at the blank page thinking of pleasing you, all eleven of you, feels far better than the thousands upon thousands of imagined fans I dreamt about when I was drafting Loathing Lola.
Because you’re 100% real.
And yes, I’m well aware of how dirty that ‘pleasing you’ sounds if you read it that way, but I’ve kept it in there, on account of the lulz. :-)
pitbullsquad, 
It sobers up by the end…
Christian, 
Jennie, 
JamesT are discussing. 
Laura-Jayne, and 
Hayley, 
Laura and 2 others are discussing. 
Laura XD 8:04 am on April 30, 2009 Permalink |
LMFAO.
THAT IS SO FUNNY.
Omegle is AWESOMEEEEEEE.
Ellie 6:54 pm on April 30, 2009 Permalink |
I am such a winnaaarrrr!!!
…and i’ve lost all my omegle-innocence.
pitbullsquad 8:36 am on May 1, 2009 Permalink |
mobozo.com FTW – upload your Omegle chats!