Kill The Author

My birthday month just passed in October. Normally, I collect coupons from various restaurants and retailers. They all wish me a happy birthday and promise a free bowl of noodles, double bonus points and extra discounts. In the past, I spent the whole month shopping and treating myself in a manner I don’t do during the other months of the year.

This October was very different. I’m still looking at all my coupons which are no longer valid. I saved the e mails which stare back at me each time I access my inbox. I know I should just erase them but I can’t. It’s like erasing hope. Hope that I might come up with a few dollars to at least redeem one. Hope that I may stop in at Noodles and say, “Hey I was really broke on my birthday but I found $5 on the street yesterday so I was hoping you would give me my free noodles.”

I guess, it’s this luck that I hope for every day. Each day when I log on to my direct publishing account and hope the graph goes above 0. Each day when I look at my author standing and hope I’m not further than 5,000,000th on the list.

This is what people tell me. “Don’t give up. You never know. Some day you will get lucky and someone will see your work and promote it.” At 51, I’m not sure how much longer I want to hold on the thought that one day I might get lucky. That one day I won’t have to wear the same broken down thrift store clothes I’ve been wearing for years. That one day, my bank account won’t be teetering on demise after the monthly bills are paid. That one day, someone other than 10 people will read my work and get something out of it.

On Thanksgiving Day, Chance Chasers: Volume 2 of The Chubby Trilogy is scheduled for release. I used the last $1000 of available credit on a 22% interest rate card to finance it. I used the other $3000 of available credit to publish Chubby Chasers. I piled this $4000 of debt on top of another $6000 of miscellaneous debt which is the frosting on the $250,000 of college debt I have for mine and my children’s education.

I signed up for NaNoWriMo to write Volume 3 of the trilogy. It is titled Challenge Chasers. I, however, lost my steam when my gofundme campaign failed.

Failure. I set myself up for it when I published Chubby Chasers in April. This was supposed to be my big comeback after the church I worked for ripped my heart out and stole my extra source of income.

Chubby came from my pain and from the author in me. The author who writes to invoke a reaction, to get people to think, to get people to feel, to entertain, to make people laugh, cry and jump for joy.

I’ve tried everything. If you go to my youtube channel you will see the proof of that. I speak with a publicist who also tells me I did everything right. I just want to make a decent living and have people read the books, I ripped from my soul. I don’t know how to do that.

This week when my gofundme failed, I realized I have to stop marketing to friends and family. Out of the 80 people on my facebook, only 5 or so actually share my posts, comment or read the books.

I read a marketing blog that said you should use your personal facebook for marketing but I don’t believe that anymore. I would suspect most of the friends and family on my facebook stopped following me during the marketing of Chubby Chasers. It goes in the not interested bin.

Today, I decided to do this. It’s because the author in me is very sad. I get up and go to my job and do things to pay my bills and feel no connection to any of it. The only thing I feel a connection to is those books. I can’t afford to edit and publish anymore books, I have no available credit, I am penniless and in debt.

Putting the author to rest is not an easy ordeal. The author is fighting for her life and it hurts. I sit at my job writing this and the author keeps hitting me over the head saying try one more thing. The girl just wants to crawl under the desk where no one can see her failure.