Wednesday, January 11, 2012

I'm Not Boring! & I'm Creating Audiobooks

Words: 6,100
Time: 1:30 - 10:30 (2 hr break)
Impression: not sure
Mood: Pretty good

I've been doing a few things since I last blogged. I haven't been writing much since Christmas, but have been doing other things. I made the decision that I was going to start going after foreign markets. A lot of writers talk about the heydays of being a Kindle publisher. Those days were late 2010 through 2011. I missed that. So I figure that it's 2009 somewhere in the world.

I have translated my best selling book into Spanish, German and now French. The French hasn't been published yet, but out of the other 2, German is clearly the leader. So now I'm going to do some investing and get at least one of my complete series in German.

On top of that, I have decided to make the big plunge into audiobooks. I was a professional actors for over a decade and a producer for a number of years so this should just be a slam dunk for me. It should be a slam dunk but it isn't. I did a practice read of the first page of one of my books and it was pretty awful.

I'm no longer expecting to be good at this off the bat. I'm not sure why though because I recorded a reading of the prologue of Run From The Reaper (including it in the book) and the first few pages of Happiness Thru the Art of Penis Enlargement and both were quite good. I'm not sure why my reading of this new book is so bad. Perhaps it just seems that way because the other 2 have been edited while this one has clearly not.

In either case, I'm looking forward to the challenge. As I've said a number of times before, I'm not in love with writing. But now that I will be mixing in some production work and performing as a part of my routine, my future seems less daunting. I think I could get into my future now. They might sell well or they might not, but I'm looking forward to the opportunity to trying.

On a personal point, I was watching the TV show 'House' yesterday. In it House says to 13, "so what. You realized that you weren't boring in the 4th grade and decided that you didn't want to be anything else." That's a paraphrase. But even though I had seen the show before and heard that before, there was something about it this time that really sunk in.

My entire life I have strove to be unique. I could barely stand feeling like everyone else. It wasn't enough that I was taller than everyone and good looking, I had to be unique in almost every way. But at the same time, there has always been things about me that were naturally unique that I tried to hide so that I could seem like everyone else. So there has always been this back and forth in me where I wanted to be boring while at the same time being not boring.

Here's the deal, I'm not boring... and it's a great thing. So long I spent time worried what other people would think because I wasn't boring. But after watching that show I thought, wait, why do I care what boring people think about my not boring life. For the first time last night I thought, fuck them. Why in god's green would I possibly want to be like everyone else, ie. boring. I'm not boring. I am unique! I have always valued uniqueness. I have never valued an ordinary life. And if boring people don't value the fact that I'm not boring, then please just keep on walking because guess what, my life is better than yours because it is not boring, and why would I ever want to spend time with someone boring if you they can't see that too!

It was like a revelation when this thought hit me last night. Seriously, if you don't value my not boring-ness, I don't want to know you. The whole idea is liberating. I don't think I would feel this way if I wasn't now independently employed. I'm sure some of my desire to be normal comes from the fact that I had to live in a world where I had to fit within a mold so that I can afford life. But now that I'm on the outside of the rat race looking in, I am coming into my own. I think that this is probably the person that I was always meant to be. I just took me a little while to get here.