When I Write The Book

It didn't take long, but once again I've ripped-off another title from the '80's. This one is from Nick Lowe's band Rockpile. It's a shame they didn't have more than one album, a band with Lowe, Dave Edmunds & Billy Bremner is a winner by my standards. In any case, they came and went like a fart in a summer breeze, leaving me with this title as a lead-in to my thoughts...
As a person who'se pretty creative, but a rotten businessman, I've spent many hours dreaming up all kinds of bizarro ideas. When my last girlfriend split, also back in the '80's, I was so irate, that I sat down at I think it was a typewriter and just started pounding out my thoughts. After writing several pages, I realized what a waste of time and paper it was, because nobody would have any interest in reading any of it. My friends weren't the literate type, reading was something they had to do in school, it wasn't something one did for relaxation, enjoyment and to become more informed. So pawning my attempts at literary freedom off on any of them was like pissing into a gale force wind. So I channeled my lack of prowess winning women's hearts into a more marketable medium, a novel. I wrote, rewrote, edited and rewrote some more. I finally ended up with what I considered to be something pretty decent. I had zero knowledge on how to submit works to be published. I thought one just mailed copies of their manuscripts to the various publishing companies and hoped they got lucky. That would have been easy compared to the bitter reality of it all. I bought a subscription to Writer's Digest, in hopes that would give me some insight as to the process of getting something published. Boy, was I naive!
At the time I was working at a car stereo shop, and making about fifteen grand a year. I found several "Publishers" that catered to unknown writers in the magazine, and submitted my work to them. One sent back a reply that stated that the plot was interesting, the characters were memorable and for fourteen thousand, seven hundred and fifty dollars they would publish and print up one thousand copies of my book, the marketing was up to me. Am I crazy for not taking that super offer? My sister had friends who worked for Proof Reading companies. They were essentially the same thing, charging a fee to read and critique new "talents". She told me that most of the people were crack-whores who hated their lives, and wrote novels about crack-whores who hated their lives. Hmmmmm, that's a stretch. But one thing she also said was, they never told the people who submitted their tales of woe that the work was no good, they took the money and coached them on ways they could improve their manuscripts. Kindling came to my mind.
As time progressed and I bounced from one job ot the next, I ended up working at a concession at the local thoroghbred racetrack renting binoculars. It was the late eighties at that point and televsion sets were replacing field glasses as the preferred way to view the races, so I had a lot of down-time. I brought my old computer to the track and used that to write and rewrite several sequels to my first unpublished novel. Now I've got a whole series of works that nobody has ever read. Wow! The '90s came and went, and I watched my income slowly diminish as fewer and fewer people attended the races. This allowed me more time to write. I still think that my work could be sold, but getting it to the attention of anyone with clout is a talent that I don't possess. In the 2000's I decided to try E-Publishing, figuring that anything is better than nothing. It turns out that most works submitted for on-line reading must be in the format of Microsoft Word. As my luck would have it, I used Corel Wordperfect. I got my program at a computer show for thirty dollars, so I figured that if I had to buy a new word processor program, it might set me back $49.95 or something like that. Boy, was I ever wrong!
Microsoft Word is still in the two hundred dollar range. Even if I could afford that, I don't think I'd contribute to the Bill Gates's Offspring College Fund. I have no idea why it is so damn expensive, or what features I get with it that make it so much more valuable than the Corel or Brand-X word processing programs. So as I sit here typing out a blog that nobody will read, I wonder if my novels are really unintersting to everyone except myself, or if I'm sitting on an unopened treasure chest? I know that I don't read other people's blogs, so it isn't unexpected that nobody would read mine. If I had friends that read, it would be one thing to send them the links to my mental farts, but I think that most of it would fall into their definition of "spam".
On the plus side, my fingers will never be obese.