I have a friend named Marlene. She’s 90ish? She has written a book’s worth of short stories about family and history and things she remembers from growing up. Most are pretty wholesome and sweet- imagine something you’d read in Reader’s Digest or “BLANK for your soul!” type books.
It’s hard to read them all. They’re fine for the appropriate audience- which isn’t me. But that’s ok. She really wants/needs help putting them into a format for a book to try and market it and she really wants my help but god I don’t want to do it. It’s so much work and so little reward- hell, her son will take anything that’s made from it to fund his “business”.
Uhg. I’m a bad guy.
My own grandfather wrote a rambling detective story on a typewriter 40 years ago and wanted me to somehow create it to something that could be sold so he could be the next great American writer. I was impressed he wrote so much. But it was… just so… hard to read through.
I never got through the thing. I still have it. It’s in a notebook somewhere. His life work- how fucking lame. How horrible & lazy am I that I never scanned it or tried to edit or sell it?
But- it was not good. At least in my idiot brain. I should try to work on that and get something done with it.
But
But
What does it say about a generation that spends its time writing about it’s favored time in life and then demands the younger generation finish that work so they can benefit from the money and glory of that work without doing the hard work of marketing and prepping the stuff for sale.
Why the fuck am I supposed to do that for them- just because they’re my elders and we’re supposed to do that out of love- respect- or what?
I write- crap mostly.
I do not, in any way, ever expect my kid to take over when I’m older and do all the work editing and formatting and prepping it for publication. If that’s important to me- I fucking need to do it.
I have this website of some of my stuff. Stuff that I’m confident enough to publish. Or drunk enough to not care because literally no one else will ever see it.
But it’s mine. I wrote it, I edited it, I hit ‘publish’. Mine all mine baby. I haven’t asked a single other soul to do anything to make me famous.
I created this place on a drunken whim with a friend of mine- the “co-author” who has not really found the time to ever contribute or post recently but that’s ok. This has kinda become my thing and I’m good with that. I welcome him back whenever he rediscovers this particular corner of the internet. But fuck me if I ever demand that he contribute or god forbid- demand that he edit and package my writing to make a buck. Why… how… would I ever ask him to do all that labor just so I can have what- glory? Riches? What?
I cannot even imagine.
Yet here I sit with 2 separate manuscripts of the writings of my elders, hoping I can work some magic and get them sold so their heirs- of which I am not one- can make a buck off their work.
what.the.fuck.
