The Journey to Becoming an Author.
Days since first publication: 1,825
It’s 4:30 a.m. on a Saturday and I’m sitting at my computer half awake. My eyes are still blurry but I had an idea of what to start for a blog and I wanted to start writing while the idea was fresh. It’s worth a shot, right? This will either get the world’s attention or it will sit in the land of obscurity only to be read by a few friends, family members, and one very supportive girlfriend.
My first experience with writing came in elementary school when I won an award for a tall tale competition. This was back in the 1980s when the world handed you nothing. It was either you earned it or you didn’t. Being a child with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and dyslexia, I struggled a lot in those days. I never won at field day, drawing contests, hell, I even failed the attendance awards. So, finding something I didn’t suck at was kind of a big deal.
At this time in school, we were writing in our journals. It was the one thing a teacher asked me to do that I would actually get excited about. I was writing and I wanted to share it with everyone. So, when the teacher asked who wanted to read their journals in front of the class, I eagerly raised my hand. Moments later, the teacher asked me to stop reading.
My writing got attention alright. So much attention that there was a meeting with my teacher, my mother, a psychologist, and some members of the school board. Apparently, there were some concerns about 10-year-old JV writing the next Nightmare on Elm Street. Thanks, Mrs. Palmer! Thankfully the psychologist said he really liked my writing and no, he didn’t think I was going to go on a killing spree.
From here we jump to 1994 where, for the first time, I pick up a book that no one has told me I have to read. I wish I could remember where I found it, but I would guess at a bookstore or yard sale. It was a Stephen King novel, so I doubt it was at a school fair. I’ll avoid a rant about the school system, but I want to say, that maybe more kids would get into reading if we gave them better options than a couple of books about dying dogs, racism in the 1930’s, or a playwright from over 400 years ago.
The cover is what caught my attention because it was one of the bigger and illustrated versions. Never let anyone tell you covers don’t matter. If your cover doesn’t catch someone’s eye, then how do you expect to draw them to look deeper? So, I opened the book up and as fate would have it, I read one of the most iconic opening lines in literature, “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.” I was hooked!
Up to this point, the toughest book I had read was, Where the Red Fern Grows. While I wouldn’t say The Gunslinger is a tough book to read, it was painstakingly slow for someone who was still learning to deal with dyslexia. The key here was, the story was freaking good. I wasn’t a tough kid, I’d go as far as to call 14-year-old JV a wimp. But if you help someone find something they truly love, they will make the effort.
My love for reading was alive and well, even if it took me weeks and months to read what others could in just a few days. I’m happy to report that, 30 years later, I don’t struggle anywhere near as badly as I did in those early years. However, if you don’t keep the pace moving, I will still fall asleep on you. I get writers are trying to give you a full idea of what’s happening, but please, find a way to do it while being entertaining.
All of that is back story to say, I’ve dreamed of being a writer since 1994. I told my mother and my teachers what I wanted to do with my life and I was a little heartbroken and frustrated at their response. Suddenly everyone wanted to push me into journalism. Did they not understand? I had just read this epic story of a gunslinger chasing a freaking wizard through a seemingly endless desert with drugs, demons, people under the wizard’s mind control spell, and some kind of zombies! How did that turn into, you should report the news?
In all fairness, my teachers and mother were happy to have finally found something that motivated me. Up until this point, I had been the kid you didn’t let your kids hang out with. I was smoking, doing drugs, skipping school, stealing, causing property damage, getting into fights, you name it. So, in their mind, they were attempting to get me to focus on something other than my bad behavior. Unfortunately, they didn’t believe being a fictional author was a realistic career path, so they elected to push me toward journalism.
Mom was kind enough to buy me a typewriter. Yes, there were computers back then, but they were really expensive and not very common in the home. I hated that fucking typewriter. Typing was so bloody hard, easy to make a mistake, and when you did make a mistake, there was no fancy backspace/delete button, like the one I just used to correct a typo. No, instead you had to move the paper through a hand-cranked roller and use whiteout, wait for the whiteout to dry, then hope you cranked the paper back into the right spot to type again. All of this only to find out you didn’t wait long enough and just made a mess when you went to type again.
I was in college—Studying business administration instead of creative writing for some reason—when I finally wrote something that could be considered original work. It was a screenplay about a love triangle involving my best friend, my High School sweetheart, and myself. Yes, it is as cringe as it sounds. No, I do not still have it and no, I wouldn’t let you read it even if I did. To make it worse, this was handwritten. Let’s just say 10-year-old JV was way cooler than late teens JV.
Now we’re cooking, I have finally finished writing something and now I can sell it to start my career as a writer right? Oh wait, this was 1998 and I had a handwritten, completely garbage screenplay, and I lived in Colorado, not Hollywood. I had zero connections, no copies to hand out, and wouldn’t know where to send it if I did. So, I purchased a book on writing screenplays thinking it would have the secrets of where to go when I was ready to sell. Spoiler alert, all these books about writing are aimed at making you a better writer and don’t help you sell a damn thing. Of course, learning to be a better writer is great, but if you want to sell your writing, courses and books on selling may be something to look into.
After many years of wishful thinking, fantasies about how I could write that great American novel if I wasn’t working all the time, and that great distractor called life, I realized what I needed to do. No one was going to give me the time and I wasn’t about to win the lottery. It was 2015 and I had allowed myself to stray for too many years. If I wanted to write the novel I always dreamed of, I was going to have to sacrifice.
Dreams don’t make themselves and at the end of the day you have to put the work in. For me, that meant working an office job for 8 to 10 hours a day, going home, and writing for 4 to 6 hours a night. In 2016 I finally had my first manuscript, Unperceived. This time there was no teenage love affair or thoughts of seeing my ideas on the big screen. This was real and worth reading… Or so I thought.
It was much easier to find agencies and publishers in 2016 than it was in 1998. This may be because of the internet and available resources, but it may also be that I was now 36 years old and more determined. I submitted my query everywhere I could find. The world was going to love my story about the monsters hiding in trees, in the candy shop, and under our city!
After hearing nothing but the wind and crickets I decided to take a new approach and wrote my query as the main character. Pouring emotion and creativity and making the character real. Try ignoring that! I finally got a response. It said, “Thanks, we’re going to pass.”. Well, shit balls, this wasn’t what I was looking for.
It took another 3 years before I published Unperceived via Amazon, which it turns out, pays a lot better than traditional publishers. Of course, there’s still the problem that I have to handle all the promoting and have limited funds. That’s ok, we aren’t giving up!
It's been 30 years and the dream is very much alive and still being fought for. It’s not about getting rich or famous, but more about wanting to make a living doing what I love, which is telling stories. I’ve written 2 novels and I’m working on the 3rd. I’m nowhere near quitting the day job yet but the key word is yet. No one ever made it by giving up.
This seems to be getting a little long for a blog post but then again, I’m not sure. Let me know what you guys think. Would you prefer these to be shorter, longer, or is this the sweet spot? Either way, I’ll continue my journey in the next post. Thank you for taking the time to read my ramblings about the past.
