Regrets and Renewal

From: The Universe is a Very Big Place

 

1986

Ernest sat on the queen-sized bed, its mattress old and tired, sagging beneath his slight weight. Lanie hadn’t been particularly pleased about this motel, but it was better than sleeping in the trailer again. Times were hard. People weren’t coming to carnivals like they used to. Theme parks were all the rage and the news declared them ‘safer.’ This made Lanie indignant. In all her days on the road she had only seen two accidents. Granted, one of them had taken a man’s legs, but that was still a pretty good track record.

"We can’t keep doing this, Lanie." Ernest sighed.

Lanie tried to ignore him as she manually flipped through the channels. Almost all static. Nothing was ever fucking on!

"You’re insane," she hissed, trying not to wake the girls. Chloe and Spring lay motionless on the twin bed, spooned up together for warmth. She could hear them breathing, the deep restful inhalations of the sleeping. "You don’t just walk into a bank and take money. It’s stupid. And illegal."

Ernest smirked. "It’s a small-town bank. I’ve been there a dozen times over the last few years. The security guard is basically Don Knotts. I get the money and we run away to Mexico and live like royalty."

She looked at him, her mouth agape. One thing that TV had taught her was that criminals always get caught. "Ernest, I’ve followed you all these years, but I can’t do this. We have kids to think about. We can’t be on the lam!"

Ernest punched his hand into the bed, trying to put a hole in the soggy mattress. It hesitated but bounced back reluctantly. "We are already on the fucking lam, in case you haven’t noticed! Half the f’ing carnies are 'on the lam!.' I didn’t join because it was 'fun,' goddamnit. I’m tired of running. I just wanna get enough money and settle down. This is my only fucking shot. Can’t you understand that, woman?"

They had been arguing about this for a week now, and Lanie thought he would forget about it, the way he forgot about most things. But he seemed insistent. She slumped down on the bed and placed her fingers between her eyes, trying to ease the pressure that was building in her head. He was serious. He really wanted to rob a bank.

"Ernest," she said. "I love you and I want you to be happy. If you aren’t happy here you need to go and find what gives your life meaning. I had always hoped it was me and the girls, but I see now it’s not. I love you and wish you well, but I can’t be any part of this." Lanie looked at her husband, absorbing him, knowing this might be the last time she ever saw him. He said nothing in response as he grabbed his duffle bag, already packed. He walked to the girls' bed and blew them each a kiss and then made his way to the door. He was really going. He smiled at her, opened the door, and left.

That was the last she heard from him, until a few weeks later when he made headlines in a local newspaper for attempted robbery. He was now serving many years in state prison.

When the girls awoke that next morning she told them their father had gone to see a sick relative, but when Spring saw her father on the newspaper as well, she turned to Lanie with a look that said she hated her. And it was three months before Spring said another word to Lanie, or anyone, for that matter.

 

#

 

Lanie lay naked on the top of her bed, three fans blasting air over her body. She had always looked forward to this time of life, the transition from motherhood to crone-dom. But her ascent into sage-hood wasn’t going as smoothly as she had hoped. Besides the hot flashes and the strange cravings and the weird fluctuations in libido (she would never admit this to a single soul but one day she had even found Sam appealing as he was stirring something in a bowl), there lay a nagging feeling deep down inside of her.

She didn’t feel like a woman anymore. Her eggs were hatched. She was on the other side now, beyond the line that separated the fertile from the unfertile, those who could produce and those whose time had passed. She would never have another baby again. Ever.

She willed up memories of Chloe and Spring when they were infants, tiny bundles of pink flesh, wrapped up like flower bouquets in knitted blankets. They smelled so good. Well, most of the time. And they looked up at her with something akin to godliness as they suckled her, wrapping small fingers around her own. Even her grandchildren did not show her that much love. No one had ever shown her that much love––the love of a child in its first years of life.

She squinted, trying to wring out the few memories of her own mother, but like a dried up lemon, nothing was there to juice. She had left Lanie in foster care when she was six and Lanie must have purposely destroyed any images she had of the woman. Either that, or she was getting senile.

"It all changes when they grow up," she said, returning her attention to Spring and Chloe. "All that admiration, gone in the wink of an eye the first time you forget a holiday." Lanie rolled onto her side, letting the fans beat against her back. The air hit a mole (that must be new) and created a peculiar pulsing sensation. "...We’re all judge and jury of our parents."

An image of Spring’s face in the dark beside her, asking if she had really been a bad kid.

There was a knot in her stomach, a memory knocking, wanting to be let in. Lanie tried to clear her mind and practice her meditation, but this one was insistent.

"Your father couldn’t handle you, and neither can I." She had said this once, when Spring was in the throes of adolescent rebellion. She hadn’t meant it, of course. Hadn’t even remembered it until Spring had asked about their father earlier. The problem with words was once you said them you couldn’t take them back. They hung in the Universe forever like wet sheets that never quite dried.

The real truth was that she wasn’t able to cope with raising two daughters on her own. And the fact that their father was never, ever coming back, and she might be alone for the rest of her life. For all her hellraising about women’s lib in the 60s, she hated to admit that being without a man was the scariest thing she could ever imagine.

"What I’d give for a do-over, learn a real trade, set a good example for the girls." Lanie gritted her teeth. The mole on her back danced in the wind. Maybe she should get it looked at. "I’m too old to cry over spilt milk now," she said, reaching out to stroke her pig. His plastic, hairless body gave her some odd comfort. It wasn’t a baby, or even real, but it was...something.

It was going to be a long night. She wished she had more of Jason’s insomnia medicine, but it was gone the first day he had dropped it by. She needed sleep.

 

     She was about to shut her eyes and give it a try when a flicker of pale light in the window caught her gaze. At first she almost ignored it, thinking it was just a ghost. But this ghost had an awfully big head. She squinted in the dark to make it out, and then her eyes grew large as saucers.

Diary of an Indie Writer - Step 1

Me, an Indie Writer?  It wasn’t something I had even considered before last year. In fact, if anyone had told me just twelve months ago that I would independently publish my novel The Universe is a Very Big Place, I would have shook my head, laughed, and dismissed them as one pepperoni shy of a full pizza. Self-publishing, at least in my head, was still stigmatized, regulated to those who weren’t good enough to be paid for their work; an army of untalented keyboard peckers who produced pages of nothing but typos and gibberish. Even the term ‘self-publishing’ sounded dirty, like those who participated in this particular activity would go blind or come down with some disease they’d have to treat with online pharmaceuticals.  A real writer, like me, would rather starve to death in some shack waiting for her ‘big break’ than to risk the public humiliation of ‘self-publishing’. I had an ego to maintain. I couldn’t be caught doing something like that. Not in public anyway. Not under my real name. At least that’s what I thought anyways. Back then.

I can’t recall the exact moment when my view on self-publishing changed. I do know that it wasn’t a quick lightning strike to the psyche that awakened me, but a gradual slide in my decade-long publishing consciousness. It began when a good friend of mine – who had been trying to land a publishing deal for years – finally got fed up with the whole system. She was a great writer but her books were too different from what was currently being published. They weren’t quite sci-fi enough, romancey enough,  vampirey enough. They were too…unique, and therefore, too risky.

She didn’t let this get her down and I watched, sometimes with one hand over my eyes, as she took the self-publishing leap. She placed her books on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Smashwords.  I marveled that somehow, the wheels that move the literary world kept turning. She wasn’t mocked, teased, or forced to testify on Judge Judy. In fact, in the vast internet universe she found her audience and they not only accepted her uniqueness, they appreciated it. She’s a cult hero now, at least in some segments of the world. And I hear they have erected some three-headed idol of her somewhere in the South Pacific.

My second paradigm shift occurred at a writer’s conference last summer. It is an annual event and just two years ago I had pitched my manuscript to several agents who were in attendance. I had some success and several of the agents agreed to represent me, contingent upon a few, small, necessary changes in the novel. Deepen the characters. Remove twenty thousand words. Add thirty thousand words. Take all the pages, throw them up in the air, see how they land, and leave them in that order. Every suggestion differed from the last, and though I tried to incorporate many of them (and admittedly some did improve my book) I started to feel like the main theme– finding love twice in one lifetime – had been lost.

It took a good deal of time and distance to find my way back to my original story, and when I felt like I had, I presented it to the agent who had been my biggest supporter. “I don’t take on clients anymore,” she said, as I shoved my sparkling new manuscript in her direction, “I only advise people on how to independently publish now.” She let me know that ‘everybody is doing it’ and left me staring open-mouthed as she sauntered down the corridor to present to a standing room only audience on the joys of formatting mobi files.

What finally sold me on self-publishing, however, was that as I continued to search for agents and publishers  I began to notice that they expected the authors they represented, especially new authors, to do a majority of the work themselves. While they may take my manuscript, turn it into a beautiful book, and get it into book stores, they expected me to do most of the PR alone. Many even have a form you fill out on their website prior to submitting:  Do you tweet? Facebook? Have a website? Can you pimp yourself out to the media? No? Well, move along, nothing to publish here.

Heck, I thought.  Finding someone to represent my work was a lot like looking for someone to have a one night stand with: too much work for something I could just as easily do myself (at home). I had a revelation. I didn’t need anyone. I could publish the type of book I wanted to publish, the way I wanted to publish it, find it an audience, and a home. If everybody really was doing it, why not me?

And so I made the decision to do it alone. But as I discovered, I wasn’t alone. There were whole communities out there, talented people who were making a go of it themselves, and I met some amazing people who helped me every step of the way.

I forgot to mention one other reason I did it, and it may be the biggest reason of all. Why? Because it appeals to my big, writer’s ego. It’s not called self-publishing anymore. It’s called Indie publishing. How cool is that? It makes me want to put on a leather jacket, some dark glasses, and go find a coffee house somewhere I can churn out more novels. Yeah. I’m cool. I’m an Indie Writer. You got a problem with that?

originally published at Theindieexchange.com

http://theindieexchange.com/my-journey-as-an-indie-writer-step-1-the-decision/