There have been many o’ mornings throughout my life that I have laid in bed, fighting with the snooze button on the alarm clock, wishing that something would happen in my life that would make work go away forever.
We all know the old saw: Be careful what you wish for because you just might get it.
Well, I got my wish.
I just didn’t expect it to be answered in the form of a debilitating lung disease.
I was hoping more for…oh, I don’t…newfound riches…being elected king for life on a small tropical island…alien abduction…just about anything other than what I actually got.
But as the new saw goes: It is what it is.
So now what?
Before the lung disease, I was messing around with that leukemia thingy for the past year and it had kept me and my family plenty busy. I was back and forth to the hospital so much and feeling so crappy I didn’t have the time or effort to do much more than sit around, take my meds, and feel sorry for myself.
But just when I was starting to feel somewhat like what I used to feel like before all that leukemia thingy…just when I was beginning to ponder what it was going to be like returning to a normal life (normal meaning back to the daily morning battles with the alarm clock, the cursed commutes, and, of course, work)…just then…without any warning…BOOM…the doctor dropped the bomb on me.
Lung disease.
A lifetime with the constant feeling of slow suffocation.
A lifetime of high, daily doses of steroids.
A lifetime with the constant threat of diabetes and of osteoporosis.
A lifetime with a degraded immune system.
And, by the way, a lifetime of no more work.
I didn’t see that coming.
So much for my dream of helping to build a small company into a megarich, international conglomerated corporation and becoming rich enough to buy a professional sports franchise.
I guess I’ll just have to stash that dream away with my other unrealized dream of becoming an international rock star.
It all still hasn’t really sunk in yet.
I’m only forty-five years old. Regardless of my disease, I plan on hanging around for a very long time.
What the heck is a guy who has reluctantly been holding some form of drudgery…er, I mean, a job…since he first started delivering newspapers sometime around the time our nation celebrated its bicentennial birthday supposed to do with all of his newly “free” time?
What the heck am I supposed to do with myself for the next however many years I have left on this rock?
Well, I do have other yet unrealized dreams.
One of them is to write.
Not just bloggery writing like I am doing right now.
I mean to really write.
To write books.
And not just to write them.
To have them published.
And not just to publish them but to write them in a way that people want to read them.
I want to write in such a way that enables me to be able to proudly call myself a writer…An Author!…and not feel like a creepy, amateurish dork when I do.
So that’s what I’m doing.
I’m writing.
I’ve written.
I’ve written a novel called THE SEA TRIALS OF AN UNFORTUNATE SAILOR.
I’ve written a collection of poetry called POEMS FROM THE RIVER.
They will be available via e-book and pdf on (fingers crossed) February 19, 2011.
You can read a synopsis and first chapter of the book at bojiki.com/book.
But you know what? I wrote most of the novel and the poetry collection before I had all this free time that I now have. I wrote them slowly, sporadically, painfully, over a fifteen-year or so period when I was a working class stiff.
Now that I can fully devote myself to writing I should be able to blissfully write for hour after hour every day, right?
I should be able to crank out a novel every six months, or so, right?
Well, maybe…but, I have quickly discovered that writing fulltime is hard.
I am finding it hard to be disciplined enough to write every day.
It’s hard to sit down with laptop in hand…er, I mean on lap…and to think of stuff that other people might want to read.
I am finding that writing is like…
work!
Back when I was writing while I was still working out in the real world, writing was more like a hobby. I didn’t have to do it. I did it because it was fun…or at least cathartic.
It was fun writing crappy poems and crappy short stories and a crappy novel because I didn’t have to worry about feeding my children from the proceeds of their sales. I could pretend I was a writer without actually having to make the commitment of calling myself a writer.
Sure it stung a bit every time I received a rejection slip from publishers, but who cared. I still had a day job.
But now I have no cover. I have found that writing full time is hard work and I have no fallback position.
Well, I’m on disability so I guess I could always fall back onto the position of doing nothing. Do nothing but sit around, collect my monthly payments, and…
wait…
for…
something…
to…
happen.
Zzzz…
Who the hell wants to do nothing for the rest of your life when you have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to recreate yourself into whatever you want to be (provided that whatever you want to be can mostly be accomplished within the confines of your home…and the internet)?
I have declared that I want to be a writer.
And I find that’s it’s hard work.
And now I feel a little exposed.
And a little vulnerable.
And a lot like a creepy, amateurish dork.
But I don’t wish for it to be any other way.
Because we all know to be careful of what we wish for, right?
