A Room Full of Psychics and Nobody’s Rich

I don’t know. I just don’t know anymore.

All the noise, all the advice, all the bloggers hashing over whether print is dead, epub vs. traditional; the whole thing is just starting to sound like a cacophony of chaos.

Why?

Because nobody knows anything. I mean, of course people know things. I’m not saying we’re all a bunch of quaking airheads out here. But nobody can answer the BIG questions. Questions like, “How do I succeed?” and “Why do some books succeed, and some books of equal or better quality fail?” and “How do I stand out enough from all of the other authors who may very well be as good or better than I am?”

Everyone’s got an opinion. Everyone’s got their spin on the matter. But you know what? If they really knew they’d get out there and do it.

We’ve got a room full of psychics here and none of us has hit the lottery. And the guy that has hit the lottery? You can’t listen to him either. I mean look at this guy: he was living in a trailer park before he blew his child support payments on beer and the one ticket that changed everything.

Maybe I’m stretching that metaphor a little, but I guess what I’m trying to say is this.

There are no experts. Sure there are people out there who have good advice, even great advice. But nobody has the magic bullet. Nobody can tell you, “This. This is what works. Do this and you will succeed.”

Why? Because success isn’t a formula.

Well it is in a way, but it’s not a formula anyone wants to hear. The formula is, as far as I can tell, Hard Work + Luck = Success.

The first term is easy. Well okay, no it’s not easy. But it’s simple. There are plenty of people willing to get out there and do the work. But it’s the second one that’s so infuriatingly elusive. And it’s just as important.

We don’t like to think about luck. We like to believe that if we succeed it’s because we’ve done something right. We look to successful people for counsel and advice, and we follow their words as if they were gospel. On the other hand, we tend to look at a bum on the street and we think, “That guy is probably just lazy. If he got a job and stopped drinking he’d have a better life.”

We don’t like to believe that it’s possibly to succeed simply because you were in the right place at the right time. And we don’t like to think that we can work and work all our lives and not do anything “wrong” and still fail to find the success we’re chasing.

And please don’t misunderstand. I’m not saying hard work isn’t important. It is possible to miss life’s opportunities because we were lazy or unprepared. We should always strive to learn and improve and be the best at whatever it is we want to do.

But sometimes it’s not enough.

We’re not all going to be the next Amanda Hocking (as she so humbly points out in this fantastic and eye-opening post.) We’re not all going to make it big.

It’s nobody’s fault. It’s not because we’re losers.

Losers are the ones who give up. Losers are the ones who say, “I could never write a book.” Losers are the ones who look at the Amanda Hockings of the world and think, “I could never be that successful.” Losers are the ones who look at the long odds and go home.

So don’t be a loser.

Because I don’t have all the answers, and I don’t know anyone else that does either. But I have to believe that someone within this blog’s limited reach is going to hit it big one day. Somebody is going to turn out to be that person that everyone looks at and says, “That guy started out in some trailer park, but one bright day he went to buy beer with his child support payment and the rest is history.”

Maybe it’ll be you. Maybe it’ll be me.

To tell you the truth, I’m really kind of hoping that it’s me.

Dealing With the Doldrums

On the day before yesterday, I had a horrible, horrible day. Actually that isn’t quite true. The day itself was fine. The weather was nice, nothing major had gone wrong with my life, no unforeseen problems forced me to change course from what I had planned. And yet, in spite it all, I was in the doldrums.

You’ve experienced it too: that funk that just won’t let you go no matter what you do, that swamp of  depression that  just keeps pulling you down into its muck and mire no matter how you try to fight it, that shadow that lingers in the back of your mind, darkening a perfectly sunny day.

I can’t tell you how to stop it. Believe me, I would if I could. But I can give this little piece of encouragement. Yesterday, after fighting off the blackness inside for the entire day. All day long I struggled to get through the most basic tasks, and when I went to work I forced myself to smile at the customers while the minutes crawled by. Finally, just as the day was done and I was getting ready to go home from work, an idea came to me.  It was a story, perfect, simple and fully formed.

I looked up at the heavens and said, “Hey, couldn’t you have given me that little nugget a few hours sooner?  I really could have used it back there.”

I’m not going to tell you that every black day is going to bring you a great story idea, but I will tell you that you can push through it believing that there’s something better on the other side. It may not make you feel any better now, but there is hope around the corner. Don’t give up.

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For further advice on dealing with the hard times I highly recommend Mike Duran’s latest blog post about the importance of the wilderness times in our lives.

Also, if you’re interested, I’ll be posting the story I was inspired to write in tomorrow’s blog. It’s a short tale of cruel fate called “A Many-Fingered Demon.”