THE HORROR OF HUMANITY: I DON’T KNOW WHAT THE BIG DEAL IS ABOUT WRITING? BY CHAD CLARK

I don’t know what the big deal is about writing. You just sit around all day and make stuff up. I wish I had that kind of time. I’d love to write a book.

Would you? Would you really love to have that chance? Because the reality is that you do have that chance. More than people realize. Sure, your output may be more in the tune of George RR Martin or Thomas Harris. But you do have the time to write a book. So what’s really stopping you?

Sure, there’s plenty to writing a book that people don’t see or understand. It’s like cooking an egg. Yes it’s a relatively simple process but it takes skill to do it right. Such is the case with writing but that isn’t what this is about.

All you do is sit around and make stuff up.

Sure. No big deal. All you do is expose yourself to every possible nasty and mean-hearted comment from any person from across the planet. And I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the Internet these days ain’t exactly a happy and sunny place. Publishing means putting your own self esteem and value down onto the chopping block of society’s narrowing restraints and all you can do is pray that you aren’t killed.

All of that is absolutely true. But for me, publishing has led to a completely different kind of fear and anxiety. Not that people will see your writing out there and respond with the meanest, most vile comments you could imagine. For me, it isn’t the fear of what people might say.

It’s the fact that people will see my writing and say nothing.

You aren’t terrible at what you do. You’re just irrelevant. You’re like tap water. No one hates tap water. But no one is going out of their way to get it, either.

I remember when I was getting my first book ready for publication. I had a tally in my head of the number of people who had promised to buy it when it came out. I was setting myself up for my first hard lesson of publishing when the day finally came and I watched my reports top off at twelve copies sold.

Twelve?

That didn’t make any sense. At least forty people had pledged their support. Surely Amazon must be slow in reporting their sales. That had to be it.

Still, that proved to be the extent of my first release day and in the weeks to come I would find even fewer reviews being posted. And as depressed as I was in the wake of this, I can only be grateful that I didn’t know then what I now know, that pitiful performance would prove to date to be my second most successful release, in terms of initial sales.

It’s not at all the challenge I was expecting going into this. It’s easy to imagine the fear of being mocked, rejected and put down. But almost worse than that is the notion that you’re so bland and un-noteworthy that readers can’t even work up the energy to insult you.

It’s a torture that often seems custom-fit for my own sensibilities and weaknesses. Like a shark that instinctively hones on my weakest areas, that’s the publishing industry for you. Growing up, I experienced several moves to new neighborhoods and new schools. I don’t say this to put blame on anyone, it’s just the way it was for me. And the result was that I didn’t have as strong a sense of that core group of friends that the people around me had, growing up. It’s not that I didn’t have friends, I did. And I think that I developed an inherent ability to kind of float from group to group, never fully rejected but also never feeling completely accepted, either.

Here’s how I behave at parties, just to give you a sense of my mindset. If I’m lucky enough to have someone engage me in something, I’ll happily prattle the night away. But if that doesn’t happen, often you’ll find me awkwardly standing amongst a group of people chatting away in their own conversations, seemingly oblivious to my presence. I don’t try and insert myself into any of it so I just end up feeling rejected from everything. I’m there physically, but in the same sense that the couch or the coffee table is there.

I only recently realized this about myself, or at least I think I only articulated this to myself recently but my personal hangup comes directly from always feeling like I’m on the outside, looking in. A tolerated member of a club that no one really wants to be around bit doesn’t want to outright exclude.

Absent any conflicting evidence, my default belief is that no one likes me.

If someone doesn’t seem talkative at work, it’s because there’s something wrong with me. If a post on Facebook about my books gets no engagement, it’s because no one likes me or my shitty writing. If I release a book and sell a grand total of one copy, it’s because I’m worthless and no one is interested in what I have to say.

There are obviously much more grounded explanations for bad sales. There are literally millions of authors out there and thousands of books published every day. It’s next to impossible to get noticed in that storm. But that’s not where my brain goes. That’s not what my brain uses to flog my already pathetic self-esteem. My books don’t sell because, unlike my various author friends out there, no one finds me compelling or interesting. Not enough to read a book, anyway.

I said recently that the best way to prove how irrelevant you are is to publish a book. How do I navigate this emotional mine field where the mines seem to go off on their own? Where every day I have a sales dashboard to permanently record how uninteresting and untalented I am? How do I convince myself that I’m any better than ground down dog shit when I’m also the one convincing myself that that’s exactly what I am?

But yeah, it’s no big deal. It’s just sitting around, making stuff up.

I don’t know why I do this. I honestly don’t. When every day passes with no change and everything I try just seems to immediately fail. I’ve told myself so many times that I should just quit. Walk away from all my non-existent readers who probably wouldn’t even notice if I was gone. It’s irrational. Makes no sense.

Still, I persist.

But that determination isn’t easy. It takes a mountain of willpower and resolve to continue publishing my work into a vacuum of seemingly permanently uninterested readers. I publish my work knowing that it’s only going to be further proof of my own inadequacy.

Still, I persist.

I wanted to be able to land this on a somewhat optimistic tone, hope for the future, hope for change, hope for anything different. Hope for the day that I don’t immediately notice when a new review has posted because I’ve long since memorized how many reviews all my books have. But I honestly don’t know if that hope will ever be anything other than just hope. I don’t know. I can only persist. I can only put my next foot forward. And forward. And forward.

Because I do love what I do. And at the end of the day I sometimes have to accept that even if I’m the only one in the auditorium, the acoustics in here sound beautiful. And I have to remind myself that this happiness has to come before my own emotional need for someone to see me, to show interest in what I do. I can’t turn off that voice in my head that tells me that I’m shit. I just need to cram a few cheerleaders in there as well.

Every day is a struggle of trying harder to see my own value. To not see things that aren’t there and to not imbue things with power that it doesn’t have. I can’t wait around for people to tell me I have value. I have to see my own value. That’s just not the easiest load in the world to pick up.

I try to have faith. That one day some heads might turn. That someday a book of mine will generate some interest. That one day someone out there might poke around to my website to see when the next book is coming out. I try to hold the torch of my own faith high enough to see the possibility of all those things that could change for me.

Of course, I could just be making all that stuff up.
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Came Madness To Me by Chad A. Clark 

There are other worlds all around us.Every day, there are near brushes with those worlds, though we rarely know it. Sometimes, the bubbles of existence that compromise everything we know and don't know come close enough to collide. Sometimes they merge and become defined as each other. Those other worlds can be seen in the abrupt acts of violence perpetrated upon the unsuspecting. It can be as simple as the sudden, darker aspects of the people we encounter in our lives. Those other worlds can be glimpsed in the random moments of impossibility we seem fated to encounter. Our lives are constantly on the precipice of sanity and reason.As are these tales.

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