FUN TICKETS
I had a lot of misconceptions in my youth. One of them was that making money was life’s ultimate goal. I think finally figuring out this was a bunch of bullshit was one of my biggest lessons in this life.
I started doing regular lawn jobs when I was eight so I always had a little stash of cash on hand. Once I saved for months for a set of walkie-talkies. All I could think about was how cool it would be to be able to talk to someone down the block, wirelessly. This is commonplace now but in 1979 it was still like magic to an eight year old kid.
The thing I discovered is after a few times of using the walkie-talkies is this wasn’t cool at all. They were a burden, you had to buy batteries, my friends fought over them. Really, what did eight year olds have to talk about on walkie-talkies anyway...Saturday morning cartoons? How good looking Daisy Duke was? I quickly discovered that this “thing” didn’t make me happy and I felt robbed.
Fast forward a few decades and I got the bright idea that I wanted to become a writer. I dreamed of having a bestseller and getting that huge advance that would change my life in an instant. I wanted to travel and live the glamorous life. I was an idiot. I worked and I worked for years but that day never came for me. The truth was I was still dreaming of and chasing money instead of it being about the love of the craft, connecting with, and helping others.
Only about seventeen years into my writing career did I change my attitude. Honestly, my spirit was broken by the struggles of this career, hope had become only a dim light in the distance. I was humbled, and had no ego left. I found a little book called, Choose Yourself and read it on a flight to Cleveland. This is when it all changed for me. I started writing from a place of love instead of a place of greed and after a while I saw the world with new eyes.
Last year I received the first batch of royalties for my first traditionally published book, One Word At A Time: Finding Your Way as an Indie Author. Although I was incredibly grateful, the experience felt weirdly anticlimactic. The positive feedback I’ve received from indie authors about how the book has helped them provided me with many more sparks of joy than the money.
I had a wise uncle who referred to money as, “fun tickets.” Only now do I really understand what he meant. Money doesn’t buy happiness but what it can provide is a little independence and, yes, a little fun. The happiness part you must create yourself.
Unless you’re super lucky the days of one single book providing you enough “fun tickets” to live on are pretty much gone. Indie authors must H-U-S-T-L-E and use their ingenuity to dream up multiple revenue streams. By hustle, you need to have the skills to pay the bills. This is accomplished by a mixture of book sales, consulting, freelancing, speaking engagements, merchandising, teaching, and yes, Steemit!
A writer’s life requires spending weekends in cities far from home to visit bookstores, making new friends in foreign places, and drumming up new readers through sheer creativity. My life is far from glamorous but I'm beginning to catch a glimpse of real freedom and what a writer's life is like.
When I’m cramped in a plane or in a loud hotel lobby banging out a blog post I remember all of the positive aspects of this kind of existence. When I’m tired and feeling strung out from getting four hours sleep the night before and waiting for the hotel staff to have the room ready so I can nap for an hour before hitting the pavement I remember how much I love what I do.