So wow, huh. If you’re reading this in a reader, I suggest you come and take a look around. Come see! Come see! It’s pretty! *claps up and down like a chimp*
Anyway. I kind of need your help today. But don’t worry. It’s actually not, like, HARD.
See, ages ago, when I rode a dinosaur to school and Jesus was my classmate, I was fortunate enough to land myself a couple of agents, Michael and Kristina of Ebeling Literary Agency. I had a book proposal that was full of The Awesome, everyone said so, and it was only a matter of time before someone eagerly snatched it up.
Then the crash of Aught-Eight happened.
The publishing world, along with the rest of the world, got burned when the economy plummeted and while everyone agreed that my stuff was great! My numbers just weren’t high enough.
But Your Aunt Becky, she is many things. And she is a tenacious beast, so Round Two of Book Proposals were drafted, incidentally, as Amelia was born, and sent off to publishers. Again, the publishers were interested, but worried. They’d been burned badly. People weren’t buying books in such droves.
New vs. old media! Cats and dogs, living together, mass hysteria, Pranksters!
Publishers, it turns out, they like numbers. No one has said that I don’t have talent or appeal, because if LOL Cats can get a book, I should probably be able to score something.
It’s a numbers game. Publishers want numbers. They want to see big Twitter numbers, big Facebook Fans, huge subscriber numbers, all of that stuff, publishers want.
Along with my new site design, I have a new page up at the top left corner called, brilliantly “The Book.” If, my agents think, I can get a ton of people to fill out their names and email addresses saying that, “uh, hai, we’d order her book, publishers would be swayed over.
But if I need numbers, I need your help, my Mery Pranksters to get them. Blog it, Tweet it, beg people on the street, just please help Your Aunt Becky out.
It’s not money or a credit card I need, it’s just names and email addresses of people who might be willing to buy my book. Consider it a PRE-pre-order. Ask your coworkers, your mom, your dad, your friends, your IMAGINARY friends, whatever.
The higher the numbers (they’re looking for numbers, I emphasize, not your NAMES)(it’s not The Man looking for you, people), the better it looks. And really, this beats me coming around banging on your door and peeking creepily in your windows. WHICH I WILL DO.
I did door-to-door sales for Girl Scouts and I’ll do it again if I have to but I am not going to look cute in a costume designed for a third grader and mark my words, I WILL wear it.
In return for signing up, I will HAPPILY send you a chapter of my book (soon). Really, nothing about this sucks.
Just don’t make me hold a bake sale because seriously, that will make no one happy.
So, Internet, while you’re exploring my new site design and admiring all of the hard work that went into it, done by the disjointed efforts of The Daver, Your Aunt Becky (Sherrick Harks), Keeping You Awake and Mrs. Soup, won’t someone think of the NUMBERZ? By no means is it complete, but sometimes, you have to just get ‘er done.
Let’s get ‘er done.
Can you help me? Please?
I distinctly remember being in the 5th grade, sitting around at the end of class picnic and having to listen to everyone else prattle on about what they were going to “be” when they grew up. I only knew I wanted to be something that made me boatloads of cash without doing any actual work. What job that was, I had no idea.
To be honest, at 10 years old, I’d never thought about future career choices.
So when it came to me, I simply copied whatever the person before me said. It happened to be “a secretary.” At age 10, I wanted to “be a secretary when I grew up.”
I didn’t know what a secretary did, only that it saved me from saying “something that made me fistwads of cash,” or worse, stuttering blankly. Everyone else seemed so sure of what they wanted to do.
Every time I said that I wanted to be a doctor, people sort of patted me on the head and said a condescending “there there.” But a secretary, that seemed to be an okay choice. I turned 10, by the way, in 1990.
I never did find out what a secretary did until I became a nurse case manager in 2006, and I didn’t really let anyone deter my decision to become a doctor until I had a bouncing baby crotch parasite make that decision for me.
It wasn’t that I couldn’t do it, because I was always at the top of my science classes, but that it just didn’t make any sense. Especially with single motherhood looming. So nursing it was, and nursing I hated.
I’ve left the sort of nebulous idea of what I was going to be when I grew up idea to fester until I really had time to pursue it. I plan to go back to school to get my PhD in virology (study of viruses)(I make myself sound so nerdly)(wanna make out?) when the kids are older. But for now, I’m making a go at writing.
And because I’ve never been able to be very successful at anything that I’ve done besides sit at home and eat bon-bons* and watch soap operas, I feel like I need to make a success out of myself.
To prove to myself that I can do something.
Maybe that sounds dumb, I don’t know. But because I’ve never really had the opportunity to have some sort of career that I actually liked or felt like I could be any good at, I am earnestly saccharine about making this work. And I will make it work because that’s what I do: I make impossible situations work. Eventually.
(Like the time I ate a whole box of cupcakes in a day)
I don’t go to work and have co-workers and meetings and bosses and feedback and a desk and a commute and coffee breaks and status updates and a help(less) desk and a supply closet. Sometimes I wish I did.
My day is surrounded by small people who poop their pants and teeth on my legs. I love them with all my heart, but I love me too.
I’ve been beating myself about the head with a mallet trying to figure out how I’m going to make something of myself. What I’m going to make out of myself.
I flash back to the 5th grade picnic every time The Daver and I have the same conversation (tri-weekly) that I had that warm, spring day:
The Daver: “What are you going to do? Because you’re miserable here.”
Aunt Becky: “Is this a multiple choice question? I can totally beat those just by guessing. I’ll go with letter C. Always best to go with C.”
The Daver: “I’m serious, Becky.”
Aunt Becky: “So am I, The Daver. C is always the way to go**.”
The Daver: “You need to figure out what to do with your life.”
Aunt Becky: “Wow! Since you put it THAT way! Okay. I’ll draw up a list of options.”
(draws a stick figure of The Daver with Aunt Becky cutting off his head. Doodles blood spurting all over the page. The draws “HEEELLLPPP MEEEEE! I’M SOOORRRYYY! bubble coming from his mouth)
The Daver: “Are you done?”
Aunt Becky: “Yep. I figured it ALL out.”
(wanders off)
It’s not that I don’t know what I want to do with my life, or even how I want to go about doing it, it’s just that these things take time. I’m a writer and the market for writers–even those with agents–isn’t hugely sprawling right now. So I wait.
I sharpen my knife, I pollute the Internet, I try to get my name out there without committing murder and I wait. Eventually, things will happen. My Empire is being assembled.
Bit by bit.
What else should I do while I wait, Pranksters? Because Daver’s right, I can’t live like this forever. I need stuff-n-things to do. Interview me, give me jobs, make me do things, help me, Band of Pranksters, I beg of you. (At least until the weather warms up.)
*WTF is a bon-bon?
**this is a lie.
—————-
I am totally going to make more of those cards available for (free) download. I’m in the middle of a site redesign, and I’ll have a whole page devoted to it because honestly, writing those was more fun than I’ve had in ages. BUT, I need to find more of the post cards that are FREE and not copyrighted.
So, Merry Pranksters, if you know where a certain Aunt Becky can find those (or if you want to make the images yourself and give them to me to use), it’s on like Donkey Kong.
If I were the sort of person that kept a day planner (hint, I’m not), the month of February would have exactly one task: SURVIVE. I don’t mean to sound all OH THE HUMANITY!! on you, it’s just the one month of the year where things just go horribly wrong.
If Caesar was all “Beware the ides of March,” Aunt Becky is all “Beware the month of February.”
Anyway, so I’m kind of in a bad place. I’m feeling pretty low because it’s Chicago and Ass outside right now and tired of myself and tired of being inside and kinda ready to get a sex change and move to Detroit. It seems like a wise idea, right? Don’t answer that.
So last night, I was lying in bed, not sleeping because that’s what people who have insomnia do: they lay in bed and they don’t sleep.
When I lay there, I think of a couple of different things:
1) I try to imagine all of the ways I’d kill the people who come up with the commercial jingles that run in an ever-loving loop in my head while I am lying there, not fucking sleeping. High on my list are the Daisy Sour Cream people and whomever cast Jamie Lee Curtis in the Activia commercial.
Because I’ll give you a motherfucking dollop of Daisy with my glock.
Also, I don’t want to think of your colon, Jamie Lee Curtis. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, I don’t want to think of your COLON.
B) I think of all the words I will ban when I rule the world. Like hymen. And moist. And juxtapose. Because there was this AWFUL girl who sat at my lunch table in high school who was a pseudo-intellectual assbag who was all “juxtapose” ALL THE TIME.
Like, I could eat a sandwich and she’d be all “that sandwich is a juxtaposition of life.” And then I wanted to kill myself. Maybe with a bomb.
Last night, though, because I was feeling particularly vitriolic, I decided that what I needed to do was to create a line of horrible greeting cards for people that I hate. Not like funny cards designed to make you laugh, but cards that say what I really WANT to say.
I’m pretty sure it’s a cash cow waiting to happen. Or at the very least, it’s going to make damn sure you never have to waste a stamp on someone you hate again.
(yes, I made these cards)(no, not the PICTURES. What do you think I am, TALENTED!?! Yeah. RIGHT.)
I’m sure with all of the sleepless nights I have, I could go on and on and on and on. The market will be huge for my cards, I can feel it.
I’m off to wait for Hallmark’s call. I’m positive they’ll be all over my idea.
—————
I’m over at Toy With Me, talking about weird guys I want to have The Sex with. I just realized that I left my new husband David Cook off there which pretty much makes me the worst wife ever. Which, DUH.
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