377 days - Blog #43 how buying a car changes my value of writing

So today was full of things that I find very distracting to the purpose of Tuesday’s theme.  I really have to buy a new car.  So, of course, I’ve been evaluating options – or trying to validate getting a newer (but not new) Prius.  It also comes with the headache of reigniting a debt that I didn’t so long ago pay off.

Yeah, that doesn’t leave much room for imagining plots or character development.

Especially when that expense cuts into the storyland vacation I want to take next year.

So I start thinking about how to get more income.  Is there anything at which I am good enough to get more than my relatively modest non-profit mid-level salary?  I like to think I’m a good writer.  Good enough that people will want to buy what I write?  People who aren’t my friends?

I realized over the last year – and even more in recent discussions we’ve been having with the WWC, that I am horrible at selling my novel.  If someone wants to read it, I almost shove the copy into their hands and get embarrassed if they want to give me money.  That’s great salesmanship.  And really great confidence in a talent I like to think I possess.

In a lot of ways, I’ve outgrown Lizzie Watson.  I needed to write that book.  It was a great purging of my soul in so many ways.  And the further I get away from that winter of 2008-2009 (the winter I bought my car, hm), the more I see the angsty prose.  Which is fine… in the context of my early 30’s.  But now, after the sobering of some of life’s disappointments and the humbling of its shortcomings/loss/surprising twists of fate to good… it is so not me.

But… just because it isn’t me (totally me), do I hide it away?  I have had some readers.  And most of those some have given positive feedback.  Feedback I did not expect.  I have readers in Canada.  I also believe that as much as this book is mine, it belongs to the readers now.  Maybe… maybe it is them where it isn’t me.  Maybe it is just the perfect antidote for another angsty thirty-something navigating the mystery of her karma.

Maybe I just realized something… something that I’m going to need to chew on a little bit more.

But my brain floats back to this 2011 Prius that I keep looking at.  

And, the fact I have to let go of my Kermit.

It’s a car.  But I drove a lot of miles in it for two and a half of the five years I have owned it.  Driving time is good plotting time.  Even when the drive was from Newton to JP… I had to have something to distract me at the traffic lights in Newton Centre.  Nanowrimo concepts.  Music to which I listened on repeat and repeat and repeat because the mood of its melody was exactly perfect for the scene or plot I was trying to piece together.  I got this car as I was wrapping up that very first, very rough draft of An Ever Fixed Mark.  But that means… well… that means I wrote three other books in my driving daydreaming.  And dreamed up at least one more.

All those hours of stagnation on the Pike.  How did I endure it?  Writing scenes in my head.  Putting together sentences for a blog on some little burr stuck in my brain as I passed a stupid bumper sticker or the emblem on a truck.  Snarky Facebook statuses that I would complete when I settled at my desk for the day.

I wrote a lot in that car.  It is full of creative energy.  Too bad that doesn’t have any value on the tradein.

On the other hand, I think this major purchase is forcing me to take my writing seriously.  As something that is worth a few pennies.  And that is a plot twist I am ready to start playing out.