Months later, I’m still struggling with depression. In this post, I talked about how depression is like night and day.
What happened? Winter is very hard for me. It’s dark, it’s cold, the days are short and the nights are long. There’s not much to do. I don’t go cycling, swimming, or walking in the woods.
All I do is to work, and at one time that work gave me hope for the future.
Then after seven months of crap, where I struggled with depression every stinking day, spring was dark, wet, cold, miserable, and it went on forever.
This has been the crappiest summer on record in recent years in terms of cold, wet, dark, windy and cloudy conditions…
Some little thing triggers depression, it doesn’t even have to be much. I think I was at a low ebb anyway, since my dad and my grandmother died last fall. Grief has its own logic.
Thinking about my father always brings sadness. My grandmother was over a hundred years old, perhaps that is the difference. She wanted to die—ever since my grandfather died, she prayed for God to take her. For her, death came as blessed relief.
Depression is a physical illness, with physical symptoms.
In spite of that depression, I wrote another novel, my eleventh. That novel has been submitted to a major publisher. The work is the only thing that keeps me going sometimes. Yet there are times when I don’t want to come home.
I have to go home, otherwise I don’t eat and have nowhere to sleep. The thought of going home, working on a book or story, one that is not going to change or even improve my life, is tough sometimes. And yet it’s all I have. It’s all I fucking have.
I have some thoughts on the subject of book submissions. The odds of that novel being accepted are very slim—about one chance in ten or twenty thousand. It will take eight or nine months to get a rejection slip, and the number of major publishers who do not require an agent is small. It’s a short list. It could take years at that rate to go through all of them, and the odds don’t improve in any way.
Smaller publishers have fewer production slots to begin with. They tend to be more conservative, they tend to take fewer chances with the corporate wallet on new, unknown and untested authors.
My books are always just a little bit different. They’re looking for the next Harry Potter, and I don’t write that sort of thing.
And when all else fails, the specter of do-it-yourself vanity self-publishing looms before me.
You know what I’m talking about: Amazon, Smashwords, Nook’s Pub-It, Createspace, etc.
It is clearly vanity publishing—for to publish in vain is what it is for most of us. Some of us don’t have much ego left. It’s all been smashed out of us.
I get to stand on a big cliff and pitch my book into the black hole that is the fate of most self-published authors. I get to read enthusiastic blog posts by newbie authors, who are brimming with confidence and have no idea of what they are talking about, and then there are the blog posts by successful authors, brimming with confidence and who have no idea of what they are talking about.
I’m sick of it all. Unfortunately, I’ve spent thirty years leading up to this writing, this ability to write well.
It seems like a terrible waste of time.
I have never considered what else I might do.
That was clearly an oversight, but nothing else really interests me. I’m fifty-four years old, after all.
See, here’s one of my problems: book cover images. It might cost as little as $35.00 for a pro marketing image, an image that will be virtually indistinguishable from ten thousand other marketing images in a given genre. Good covers help to sell bad books. We all know that.
Unfortunately, I’ve been on a provincial disability pension—one that is thirty-five percent below the poverty line, for the last sixteen years. I’ve lived in pain, poverty and deprivation for over twenty years. I can’t afford twenty or thirty marketing images, all of which would have to be paid for by subsequent books sales. I would still have to go without food, or make some sacrifice to come up with the money in the first place. I’m already lining up at food banks three or four times a month. I would like to know where is the slack in my budget, where I could cut something out and get that money in a reasonable time-frame.
A better solution would have been to use my Smashwords royalties, along with a GST cheque and a Trillium Benefit cheque, and buy a $500.00 computer, one that has a minimum of Pentium IV, so that it is capable of running Adobe CS-6. I would have to go through the learning curve, and then I could create my own covers.
Kick-Starter and other crowd-funding sources would be deeply misunderstood by the Ontario Disability Support Program, and so it’s unsuited to my needs. They would consider it ‘income,’ even though I might not have access to the funds and the funds would of course be dedicated to those marketing images, (a legitimate business expense if almost any other person in the whole wide world were to do it.) I can’t do it on the sly, as the world is full of rats, and I have been subjected to trolling in some small degree in the past. It’s not worth losing my pension over it, and then having to fight the ODSP for the next two or three years while they wriggle, squirm, and force me to prove my innocence—a perversion of justice in anyone’s book.
Unfortunately, Smashwords decided to withhold 30 % of my earnings in taxes. This is a bit odd as they cheerfully admit to having my ITIN, (U.S. tax number) on file. So no new computer for me.
It took me four fucking years to earn that computer. Unfortunately, Smashwords knew better.
The neat thing about depression is when it flips over into anger mode. When I think of all the crap people keep bottled up inside, out of politeness, or not wanting to draw negative attention to themselves, for surely few people will understand, (or admit to understanding,) it’s no wonder people go postal sometimes.
They can’t deal with it.
They keep it inside just a little too long, maybe.
When that happens, all bets are off.
Here I am looking at another long winter without much to do except…fucking write, in the rather forlorn and unrealistic hope that it will, eventually, help to change my life. And with every year that goes by, my time on this Earth gets shorter, and shorter, and more precious and valuable with every passing day. I despise wasting my precious time. I fucking loathe wasting my time, ladies and gentlemen.
I’m also a bit tired of being alone all the time.
Surely I deserve so much better than this.
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All my books and stories are currently free from iTunes and other fine online bookstores.
