On Monday, I had a call with my spirituality coach and he asked me what the hell I was doing with my time these days.
I said I was writing a new book.
“What’s it about?” he asked.
“I’m not really sure,” I said. I felt like I needed to fill him in on something else, so I added, “I’m back on the job train. Maybe there’s something there for me, outside of writing. I think this is a good thing to have this realization now. Because I just know, I can’t go another six months of being an entrepreneur—aka romance novelist—but I’m not really being an entrepreneur and making tangible steps.”
“Let me ask you something. Have you ever done a balance sheet where you know where your money is at and all of that?”
“No. I haven’t done that in a little while.”
“Have you ever done a budget?”
“No.”
“Why I’m evening mention this, money is money and if you’re not earning any that’s a concern. You also need to know what you’re sitting on so you don’t have to borrow any.”
“Right. The flow is just getting more down to a trickle.”
“Having been an advisor, if you don’t know what your run rate is, it creates a sense of doubt. Just look into it. We’ll talk about it next time.”
“Sounds good,” I said. “I’ll be honest. My run rate is net negative these days.”
“Okay. Also we need to know the magnitude of your run rate. You don’t have to go into your big analytical thing. You just need to know here’s the assets, liabilities, money from books, and here’s what I’m paying. We just need to know where you stand. That dictates urgency. You’ve been going back and forth on finding a job which would give you a sense of stability. You’ve been dancing around this ever since I’ve known you.”
“I think at this point, the urgency is there. I can’t keep going like this. At the end of the day, I need a positive inflow. I think it’s stifling my creativity at this point to be married to the idea of writing romance, and worried about this. Because I’m trying to keep writing what I did before, but I have to evolve. I also think there’s some very meaningful writing left for me to do in my life. Just because I have a job doesn’t mean I won’t write or do music. And I think my philosophy now is that having a job—and it comes back to what I was saying in the beginning—I’ve had this Peter Pan idea of what my life was going to be like for a long time. Sure, I got thrown a couple curveballs, and couldn’t find a good Spanish teaching job after I got back from the Peace Corps. And I was highly qualified but just didn’t find a position. But basically, Matt, I’ve never done a personal self-assessment, and then went into a job thinking ‘this is what I can do as a person.’ Maybe it’s not my dream job. But that’s life. I need to get a job, start making some money, work for a corporation. I’m smart. I can do it. Even when I got the job at CDW, I did very vague research for it. I met some guy at the bar and he told me I should apply and I got in. Now is my opportunity to go into a job fresh and learn the ropes. And I think having that structure of a job will serve me well, too. I can only really write for one or two hours a day. After that, I’m usually fiddling around and not being productive with my time. It’s something I’ve resisted forever. And it’s time to give in. And it will be good. Financially—a lot of the things I want—a job is the lynchpin that makes all things go. So the urgency is there.”
I sighed. “I’ll keep writing. I’m writing a book about a romance novelist whose love life goes to shit and he has to stop writing romance novels is actually not a bad premise for a book, so I’ll still write that.”
“Anyway. It would be helpful if you had that simple outline. Assets, liabilities, inflows and outflows. Just something that will give me a gauge.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll get the money at some point. I know. But I want to get it writing the books I want to write.”
“So you’re wrestling with that issue. You’re writing stuff that’s entertaining to a lot of women, yeah it’s making their lives better, but does it really light your soul on fire?”
“Yeah. And I could go to these conferences next year—I’m invited to go to Europe next year for these signings—but I just don’t know if I want to go.” Forty-eight books the first day, I reminded myself. It wasn’t just about that I didn’t want to do this any more. It was that the romance genre was becoming more and more saturated. My books weren’t hitting like they used to. “If this book is making five thousand a week, maybe I’m singing a different tune, I guess. But something needs to change. I don’t know.”
“If you’re looking for congruency, then you need to look for your mission, vision, and values. What’s your purpose? What’s your why?”
“Funny enough, there is a book I started writing that’s about a band who loses their lead singer—he dies young. And this is dark, but that tragedy that happened yesterday in Wisconsin—people losing their children—it reminded me that this stuff happens in real life. This is a book about hope, really. There’s no sex in it really. It’s just about a band and what they go through in the wake of their band member passing away. And how they come into a new chapter. It’s also a romance, but it’s very clean. It’s dedicated to my cousin who passed away. It’s called Miss You Always.”
“That has more purpose to it.”
“Yes it has a very strong purpose to it, where it’s almost a therapeutic book. This is what happens. Someone you know died? You could hand it to someone who has experienced a death. The book has the lows. And then it brings you up. It’s the cathartic experience of grief.”
“In that, Lucas, just the way you’re talking about that, it’s got more of your mission your vision and your why. It creates hope for people. And it’s got some potentially healing aspects to it. That could be redeeming.”
“Yeah, you can feel the way I’m talking about it. People would connect with it more than my normal stuff.”
“Well maybe that’s your call. You have to decide. But certainly you’re floundering with the romances and they no longer excite you. Maybe this is a door way. It’s certainly a difference in energy from how you’re talking about the other stuff. I gotta push you a little bit, because I’m afraid you’re going to stall. That’s the worst thing that could happen.”
“I’ve already been stalled. There’s no question about that.”
“So you’ve got to get going, man! Write Miss You Always. Do it. You’ve got to follow through. I’m not familiar with the industry but I do know you’ve got to get something to get yourself moving. It could be a job. But also I want to see the financials. If you’re going negative it should inspire you to get your ass moving a little bit more.”
“Yeah.”
“If it means you’re writing two or three days a week and you’re doing something else, maybe that’s good for you right now.”
“Yeah.”
“Alright Lucas. Get to work on Miss You Always, get your resume going, and we’ll talk soon.”
“Sounds good.”
I hung up the phone, and thought about writing Miss You Always, but instead I decided would continue writing about the romance author who didn’t think he could fall in love again.
When Carter came out of his room, I said good morning and then went into my room so I could type out my thoughts and not bother him.
On Tuesday, I ignored Matt and my conversation and I didn’t work on Miss You Always.
I was really great at coming up with big plans, and then not acting on them.
Besides, I had to drive to the suburbs to go to the dealer and figure out why my key hadn’t been working. On the way to the suburbs, I listened to a voice message one of my classmates Maria from Australia had left me:
“I don’t know how woo woo you are, but I’m pretty fucking woo and into the consciousness space. I have an astrologist I’ve been working with and she’s been giving me astrological deep dives into the transits and how that’s been affecting different things in my life. She said my saturn return, which is the three year transfer from about age twenty-eight to thirty one, she said that ‘your sat return is pretty much themed around having discipline in the house of your creative legacy.’ So my biggest imprinting and wounding I have in my life is all around creativity. Your biggest wounding is also your biggest gift. If you can work with it, and transform that energy, it becomes your biggest strength. So I have all this stuff around creativity and creative legacy. My mercury is also in leo in the ken house. So that means my career is all about being on stage. It’s around creative expression and writing and speaking. Being a performer and being on stage. So everything in my soul blueprint points to me doing this, and this being a really big thing for me. She said this book is actually the gateway to my career taking off, and if I can write the book during this time—before the fifteen or sixteen months is up of my Saturn return—and I apply discipline during this time, I’ll be greatly rewarded later in life.”
Wow, I thought.
Your greatest wounding is also your greatest gift.
She went on. “When people talk about astrology they talk about, like, waves of energy. If you can kind of catch a wave, like you’re surfing, you can jump on one and you can ride the wave all the way to where it takes you.”
I pulled into the CarMax and was waiting in line so I texted with Maria. She asked me what my book was about and I said it’s about a writer who is desperate to write a book but doesn’t want to write about his past.
Channeling your inner Hank Moody, she said.
I asked her what her favorite books were in the Moody/Bukowski/Henry Miller realism vein.
“It is weird if I just say The truth?” she laughed. “I feel like there aren’t enough great books in that genre. And maybe there are, in which case, I need you to send me reccomendations. I love that genre and yet I feel like there just aren’t that many great realism stories. In that kind of tragic, bittersweet, almost dirty sort of vibe. I love that as a genre, and I feel like there needs to be almost a renaissance of Bukowski into a more modern era. It was such a long time ago and it was a different day. I can really appreciate—almost like a homage—the nod to that point in time. But can there be a set of writers that create that for our modern day and age. You know what I mean?”
I heard a voice speaking to me outside of my headphones.
“Mr. Rutledge?”
“Oh, yes?”
“Are you next?”
I took my headphones out of my ears. “I believe so.”
“What seems to be the problem with the car?”
A Hispanic man with black hair, a big smile and the nametag Edwin came out from behind the desk.
“You’ve got the 2018 Suburu Forester?” he asked.
“That’s me.”
We walked outside to the garage.
“What seems to be the problem with the car?”
“Well, the key sometimes sticks when I turn it off.”
He nodded. “Okay. Can you show me?”
I turned the car on, then turned it off. Of course, the key came out perfectly this time.
“I swear. It’s been doing it every time I turn the car off. Let me try again.”
I did it again with the same result, so I tried one more time and thankfully it stuck.
“See? Can’t pull it out. This has been happening a lot.”
“Oh yeah, I’ve seen this before. Let me try.”
We switched seats so he was in the driver’s seat. “You just need to push in when you turn. See?”
He did it four consecutive times, flawlessly turning the car off and taking the key out of the ignition without it getting stuck.
“Okay then,” I said. “Amazing.”
“What else you got?”
“The clock,” I said. When the battery died, the time malfunctioned and I haven’t been able to fix it since.
The time currently said 4:07 P.M. It was just past nine a.m.
He fooled around for a few minutes and then got his phone out.
“Something I’m missing,” he said. “Alright. When all else fails.” He got his phone out.
“Are you looking up YouTube?”
“Or google.”
In about twenty seconds, he found some information, clicked a few buttons, and found the time control. The key was a little rectangular knob.
“You gotta be kidding me,” I said.
“There you go. What time is is it?”
“Nine twenty three.”
“Wow. That is not intuitive at all. But thank you.”
Edwin fixed the clock, smiled and shook my hand.
I felt, honestly embarrassed that the fixes had been so simple. All they had taken were the simplest of google searches to fix.
I exited it the parking lot and parked for a minute.
“Yeah, about the renaissance, that’s an interesting idea to have the renaissance of that style. You know what? I wrote a very simple—if people read what I wrote, I truly wonder what they would think. After we got off the call last Tuesday, I said to myself, ‘Neil says just to write this moment right now. Alright.’ I’d been toying with that idea and I just started doing it. I sent this to one of my romance beta readers and I told her, ‘I’m basically taking thins that happen in my life and I just told you them.’ And she said, ‘yeah it’s really entertaining.’ I said, ‘why do you want to read it though?’ I have a theory that comes back to what you said.”
She told me she was in Bali and it was 10:48 p.m.
“And my theory is that we’ve gotten so far away, as humans, from any semblance of reality. So many people are living in these escapist mindsets—romance like me, living in these fantasy worlds, and we’ve forgotten what real life is like. Especially during COVID, we spend so much time in our heads and in this alternate Netflix universes. Most people. Not everyone. But a lot of people. So I thought, ‘why is that entertaining to read?’ Maybe we’ve come so far from people who are truly describing the experience they’re having, accurately, that people are afraid to say that. Think about all the social media bullshit. We throw around the term ‘vulnerability’ until it gets diluted and loses its meaning. ‘Hi everyone! I’ve come so far in my journey. Look how great my ass looks after these twelve months. Gotta be vulnerable, ladies.’ It’s like, ‘what? That’s vulnerable? This is bullshit. What the fuck is going on in the world that people think that? Anyways, so I wonder if, just by writing what’s actually happening, that’s a simple concept that no one has decided to do.”
Maria: LMAO @ the ass comment
I felt fired up so I went on. “Who is actually telling the truth in their books, that’s not this drummed up positive mindset bullshit about, ‘this is how great I am?’ Me, I’m already writing these alpha male romance books, so I understand that concept. I’m writing about these idealist alpha male people who women want to be with. Like billionaire dude. I’m not a billionaire. I’m barely a thousandaire at this point. Nor am I some professional athelete stud. So when I write these things, it makes me feel sort of weirdly insecure. Sorry, I’m going off on a tangent. I’m all caffeined up.”
I hit the road and didn’t even bother to put any music on.
My mind raced. I thought it was good to drive without music from time to time. And Maria’s questions had me thinking about my book and what it was really about.
I thought about how I’d told Matt yesterday that I would be writing Miss You Always today and I really didn’t think I wanted to be doing that.
Miss You Always would be an easier, more virtuous book to write. I didn’t want to write a non-fiction book that could potentially depict my private life if I put it out there. We kept our private lives private for a reason. That’s why we called it our private life.
Everyone talked a lot about ‘vulnerability’ but truth was it seemed like there were a lot of downsides to sharing yourself with the world. If you were going to be successful, you wanted to keep this image of you in people’s minds, at least for a time.
Even though people also said that true love began where the fantasy ended. I didn’t wanted to date someone who didn’t have a lot of baggage. Maybe I didn’t deserve that, though. I certainly had the baggage now. I’d always thought that was weird when people talked about baggage when I was younger. That was before I’d had my own, though. Now I could relate. You didn’t live your life without picking up some bags along the way.
But if I put the book out there, I’d be inviting the world to take a seat front and center to my fuckups, my lack of self-awareness, my lack of gratitude for the amazing gifts I’d had put in front of me, and all of the contradictions I was finding within myself the more I wrote.
I’d put the words down on paper, I’d publish the book, and they’d be out there, forever, for people to read. This stage of my development would be crystalized. Like Neil Strauss who would always be best known for The Game, whether he liked it or not, I’d be known for being the hopeless romantic who had a tough time getting over an ex during the pandemic and had to stop writing romance novels. Who wrote an album of love songs about the cycle of love and heartbreak.
I wanted to be known for something better, something more positive. Something that had nothing to do with exes or romance or the past. I wanted to be known for creating something new, and unique, and beautiful.
Was it correct what Maria had said? Your greatest wounding was your greatest strength? Was there some group of happy, healed people waiting just on the other side of writing this book, that, like Plato’s cave, I couldn’t see until I crawled my way out to the top and saw the sun?
Because right now all it felt like was an illusion. I felt like I might be better off making a transformation Instagram or just writing platitudes and not going in so deep and thinking. I was certainly triggered by something out there. Why would I critique body transformation? Why couldn’t I just admit that, yeah, I was a healthy male and I did like a woman with a nice ass so what in God’s name was wrong with posting transformation photos? Why was I hating so much?
Where you hated, that was a trigger for growth. So where was this trigger coming from?
I stopped at the grocery story on the way home.
I pulled into my parking space behind our apartment. I was about to turn off the car when I heard two people moaning through my speakers. Having sex.
Yeah. I glanced at the name of the track listed on my car’s Bluetooth radio:
Big Booty Latina Fucks