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Be Careful What You Wish For

Be careful what you wish for, for you just might get it. This is an old saying which has an unfortunately high frequency of coming true for me when I don’t really want it to, or don’t have a clear picture in my head of what it is that I really want. My most recent example of this is the state of my professional computer consulting career, which at this moment is pretty much non-existent.

I’ve been out of full-time work in my field for just over 4 years now. My last full-time contract was ended early instead of being renewed. I had been telling a few select people that had befriended me that I was hoping that it would be my last full-time contract, and that I had hoped to be able to re-launch my writing career, as well as get into scoring soundtracks and recording a few fellow musicians/ composers. Well, all parts of that wish came true, but in unexpected ways. It was my last full-time contract, I did relaunch my writing career, and I did do some recording.

None of it came out as I’d hoped. I was able to land a book deal only a couple of months after my contract ended. But it was a lot of work, a lot of long nights. Ultimately, even though the publisher doesn’t exist anymore, they managed to screw me over long-term. They snuck some changes in on the second version of the contract, which claimed my writing was “work-for-hire”. By the Bern Copyright Convention of 1972 - which all United Nations member nations follow - I would normally own the copyright to my writing. Unless I signed a work-for-hire contract. Which apparently I did. Me, a person who studied a great deal about contract law for writers for 10 years, still managed to get shafted. (Yet I didn’t know this until 2 years later, after the publisher went under and their titles were split over two acquiring publishers.)

In the meantime, my paltry advance didn’t last long, since I was essentially out of work. And not enough copies of the book I designed, but only co-authored, were printed for me to ever make another cent. Three 3 months of intense writing, diagramming and programming went into the book, and I figure I made less than minimum wage over all during that time. At one time, writing a computer book would have brought between $30-40K, minimum over 2-4 years, and sometimes much more than that. In fact, some computer programmers launched lucrative writing careers. But that was before the big chain bookstores existed. Their demand that that publishers give them 30-40% discounts on books - previously unheard of in the publishing industry - changed everything for writers trying to make a living.

I tried to no avail to convince my editor that my additional book proposals had some merit. No luck. As my money ran out, what followed next was a sequence of creditors calling me, asking why I wasn’t paying my bills. Eventually, I lost my cell phone plans, my Internet, digital cable TV, and later my car when the lease expired. All the money I had saved to buy out the lease had to go towards paying bills. I had also been sponsoring 7 foster children all over the world. It was hard, but I had to cancel my support. Unfortunately, the person whom I spoke to misunderstood, and a few months later, when I was scraping by, a series of my cheques bounced. The agency had reinstated my support via auto-withdrawal on my credit card. I had to phone up the non-profit agency and explain the situation to them. I had to beg them to understand that someone mistakenly debited me, and that I wouldn’t be able to pay my rent if I didn’t get credited immediately. It was a sad truth, and a low day for me. I felt as if I was effectively taking money from poor children in third world countries.

I had already started sellibg off the majority of my guitars, synthesizers, and recording equipment at about thirty to forty cents on the dollar. I used the money to supplement part-time jobs worked at minimum wage. I had nothing left in terms of possessions, except a bed, a desk, my clothes, my books, and an old computer. Only a few mixed blessings got me through the rough period. A number of people, including friends, family, and acquaintances, helped me get through many of the rough spots by both small and large kindnesses including, but not limited to, money, work, coats, etc.

Through it all, a few things in particular helped me through it all emotionally, and some gave me fodder for my fiction:

• My brother bought me a cell phone, which made it easier to get work. Both my parents lent me money. My mother’s help got me into cooking school, which helped me get restaurant jobs. Those in turn, after a couple of years of minimum-wage, exhausting work, made me realize that I never again wanted to be a line cook, getting yelled at, and cutting my hands when I wasn’t getting burned. But these jobs still reinforced a Buddhist ideal to make sure that everyone you interact with in more than a casual manner gets fed if they need it.
• An old acquaintance who owned a nightclub gave me a job doing coatcheck on weekend nights. This was a mixed blessing. The pay was low, although on a good Friday night, I ended up tip money with which I could splurge at the local Farmers Market on Saturday mornings. But I had to put up with an unbelievable amount of verbal abuse and general condescending rudeness by drunk guys, and sometimes drunk girls. I was less than a bug in their eyes. Most of the time, however, I managed to take my experiences and observations and produce tons of fictional content from the perspective of a barfly-on-the-wall, so to speak. It’s odd what perception of people you get when you’re sober and they’re drunk and stupid. It made me realize what an absolute fool I must have been in my mid-twenties, in my crazy, drunk, punk days in Toronto during the mid- to late-1980s. It also made me truly understand the meaning of the saying “don’t judge a book by its cover.”
• An old punk rocker from Toronto, with whom I’d previously unwittingly crossed paths in our common favourite hangouts, kindly befriended me and gave me two part-time jobs over 3 years, one working for his own business. We ended up spending a lot of time working together, laughing a lot, and reminscing about our party days in Toronto. This caused great jealousy in his girlfriend, who constantly caused problems and took things out on me in subtle ways - ways that Dave never saw and always blamed me for. Ultimately, her attitude towards me got to me. We all three ended up going our separate ways. It made me understand the dynamics of non-sexual relationships, and also how political even these can become.
• I’m not entirely convinced that my cat, Aeric Sir Stinkybutt Half-a-Cat The Lion-Hearted Munchkin King of Roo Zoo - or Aeric Stinkybutt for short - isn’t my writing muse. He’s probably my familiar, at least. Anyone who is single and is feeling lonely should look into the therapeutic value of having a loving pet. Aeric was partly named by my friend Coral’s husband, and her step-daughter. The Half-a-Cat part is a reference to an old Monty Python British comedy sketch about Eric the Half-a-Bee. Roo is my “Dr. Suess/ Whoville” name, but as a fan of the book “The Tao of Pooh” (Winnie), it could also be a reference to Roo the kangaroo. Aeric, by the way, sometimes thinks he’s a dog. He was just one of my then “zoo”, consisting of fish, birds, lizards, and snakes. Hence, Aeric represents a lot of aspects of my life - an apt role for a familiar. I thus wrote a series of short stories in which Aeric is an ubiquitous but background character. It was my attempt to manifest some Zen concepts in short fiction.
• My conversion to (Pureland) Buddhism, a few years previous, got me through all the negative experiences, teaching me a great deal about pragmatism. At least, it did when I wasn’t slipping into “Broodism” and angst.
• My pseudo-orchestral music and composing allowed me to express myself aurally. Science Fiction writer Harlan Ellison once wrote a short story called I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. Without my music, that’s what I would have felt like.
• Journalling was the other outlet for my creative energy. I started an early form of an online journal/ blog (web log) on a domain name I owned called punkmonk.com, which is owned by someone else now. It was called “Punkmon’s Tough Love”. But after I lost my cable TV and Internet connection, I lost the original posts. I didn’t start writing an online journal again until last June. But I did write nearly every day, using word processing software to record everything. At last count, about a year ago, I’d written nearly a million words in 3 years. I stopped keeping track after that. (William Zinsser, in his book On Writing Well, and quoting another famous American author whose name escapes me, said that the first million words that you write are not important. After the first million, your writing starts to achieve new levels of clarity, and you are better able to say what you really want to say.)

Ultimately, every one of the experiences I had in those 3 tough years taught me valuable lessons too numerous to go into in a single journal entry. Blogging (online journalling) has given me the motivation to once again do something with my life. While it’s not yet earning me a living, blogging and online freelance writing seem to me to be the way to go, and the most suitable career for my current skills. This time, however, I’ll be more careful what I wish for.