“Confidence is going after Moby Dick in a rowboat and taking the tartar sauce with you.”
― Zig Ziglar

I have a new respect for bloggers since I started writing for my website. It keeps me busy. Before, when I was writing my book I was more static, stationary in terms of where my writing mind was. Now, I have to be able to move from one thing to the other, be it writing about writing or working on a fantasy story or something else. As a blogger, I’m still “filling out” so to speak. I enjoy it, but the freedom of it can be daunting.

I spent so much time every day writing my novel, which I am pitching to literary agents that I rarely, if ever, peeked out of that world to write anything else. Now, a little over a year away from finishing the book and working to get it traditionally published, I have found new latitude to play with as far as writing goes. I think blogging, or at least attempting to, has improved my writing agility to some degree. It has given me better range.

Some days it feels like I’m typing my life into some great, yawning maw of obscurity. It’s a bit frightening. To think all the work you’ve done, all the time you’ve spent and words you’ve strung together over the years might be for nothing. It might be a tad dramatic to say as much, but I think the fear itself is legitimate. But isn’t this what every writer ever has had to go through? Is this not what I trained for? Am I not entertained?

I remember when I got my first rejection from a literary agent, I was telling a friend about it, and he said, “You’re in the game now.” He’s right. It took me a long time to get to that point, where I was ready to throw myself into this massive Thunderdome* of literary proportions, but here I am. “Two men enter, one man leaves?” No. It’s not that easy.

Writing is like being born or dying, you do it alone, and it’s painful. Querying though, that is something else entirely. Being a writer is a funny thing. You spend most of your time in your own head, up in the clouds or down in the dungeons but rarely with everyone else around you. Then, when you’re done putting what you’ve seen on paper, you have to become an outgoing introvert. You have to ask a stranger who has never been to your world to enter it, understand it, and be your champion.

The game has changed over the years, even in the years I’ve been writing, training, and honing my ability to get to this moment. I don’t know for certain if it’s better or worse, harder or easier, it’s just the way it is. One thing I am sure of though, is that it takes a certain kind of mettle to keep going. Whether it’s straight out bravado, confidence or insanity I don’t know. Whatever it is, I have it and so does everyone else who knows what I am talking about.

Fifty years ago, writers typed their manuscripts on a typewriter, had to go through them page by page, make their edits, and then retype it. When he was writing, On the Road, Jack Kerouac famously taped a string of pages together to feed into his typewriter so he could continuously work without stopping to put in a new page.

Back then, once the edits were done and their book was ready, the writer had to mail it to an editor (actually put the manuscript into an envelope, take it to the post office, and mail it.) There was no world wide web then. There were no bloggers, Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. In those days, social media required people to be, well, social. You had to go places and meet people. Back then, there wasn’t anything but a newspaper, magazine or a book that would connect the minds of writers with the rest of the world. There was just a man or a woman in a room tip-tapping the keys and slapping ink on paper. Nowadays we can post content on our websites by phone. Back then, you had to physically go to a phone, not carry one around in your pocket.

Today, there are so many platforms to post your work, whether it is your writing, your art, or random thoughts and observations. It’s a great way to get your words out there and I am glad for it. I came a little late to the social media game though, and it is still an adjustment for me.

I wonder how well Shakespeare would have done with Twitter. He wouldn’t be able to send sonnets, he’d have to settle for haikus.

Shakespeare changed everything. He brought common English to the elites of the world and made it legitimate. He brought high art to the common folk. He united the people of the streets with the people of refined society and their lofty heights. He tied heaven to earth and now we all have the same language, though our economical demarcations remain.

How would the world be different if history’s great authors, poets and playwrights had social media? What would T.S. Elliot be like on Facebook? How about Van Gogh on Instagram? Had he been on social media, a man like Charles Bukowski might have ruled the world.

In today’s arena of self-published authors, it is a little intimidating trying to publish through the old ways. Getting an agent is not so simple. It certainly is not as easy as I had initially thought it would be. This has been quite the learning experience for me. Then, how often is something as easy as you thought it would be? I may have to self-publish. It is a thought that has occurred to me. I am still holding out for the traditional way, which is a testament either to my stubborn resolve or to a fear of the unknown. It’s still too early to tell.   

Every day on Twitter or Instagram, I see new notifications of authors who have published their novels and hold up their brand new, shiny books for all to see. There may be more writers in the world now than there has ever been, and that makes the Thunderdome decidedly more crowded. There’s more competition, more fellow writers vying for the page. That makes it harder, yes, and easier for my voice to get lost in the clamoring cacophony of voices. That just means I have to be sharper, I have to be better than I was yesterday.

Writing is exercise for the soul. It can make you stronger, deeper and perhaps more fit to be human. In the end, having more writers ultimately makes for a richer world, and maybe that is enough.   

If you enjoy 80’s pop culture references and movies as much as I do, then click below for a treat. Thanks for reading! *Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)

Independence Day

“Our lives begin to end the day we remain silent on things that matter.”

 – Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Around the world, about 225 countries have a day they claimed their sovereignty in one form or another. More than 160 of them celebrate that day annually. 243 years ago, America became an independent country. It was the rise of a new nation. We claimed our freedom from our English parent with the rousing words, “All men are created equal.”

All people are created equal, but they’re not all treated equal. That is true of the human condition the world over throughout all time. We have it all here. We are a country of contradictions. We fought for our freedom from an oppressive monarchy and wiped out the people who lived here before us. We enjoyed our freedom as we took it from others and forced them into slavery. In some states, men can marry men and women can marry women. All over the nation people of every creed, color or religion can work together, live together, love, hate the same things, and argue without killing one another, usually. We can get better though, and I believe even through these times we live in now, we will.

America is a great country. I believe that with all my heart, but I also know it tends to be greater if you’re white, if you’re male and if you’re heterosexual. Even greater if you’re rich.

We are a complicated people. As we celebrate our freedom today, little brown-skinned children, whose parents were seeking a better place for them to grow, rot in cages in Texas and Arizona. In some parts of this great nation, a woman who is raped must not only live with the terror of being raped, but the sentence of the life growing inside her. In America today, a man or woman of color who gets pulled over runs the risk of getting shot to death, even if they run away.

No heterosexual has ever had to hide that fact. No straight man has ever had to worry that his liking women would get him beat up, ostracized from his family, or murdered. People want to be free to determine the course of their own lives and to do so without fear.

America is a great country. I love it, but my love is not blind. We have problems. We are not perfect and what country ever is? Loving requires open eyes. We have been the hero at times, and at others, we have not. We are going through a tough time as a nation and it is at times such as these that we need to think about what we are doing, about what we are allowing. I love this country for all the things that it can be. I believe we can be better. We’re by far not the worst place in the world, but that shouldn’t stop us from improving. Yes, we can be great. If we don’t look at ourselves honestly, see where we were wrong in the past, and where we’re wrong now, then how can we even be good?

When the idea of something is greater than its reality, raise the reality to meet the idea.

Some people might be angry with what I’ve said here, yes. I understand that. I don’t like looking at my flaws, I certainly don’t like them pointed out to me. I don’t think anyone does, but you don’t strengthen the foundation of your home by ignoring the cracks. You see them, you point them out, you see how deep they are and then you fix them. We have been great, yes, but only for some, now let’s be great for all.

But this blog is supposed to be about writing right? It is. All of it is. Writing is thinking. Thinking is freedom. When a person can think for him or herself, then they can act for themselves.  

Naming something is a form of writing, even if you never put a pen to paper. When you assign a word to identify someone, you are naming and you are writing that name in your mind and in the mind of everyone else who uses that name. 

When I was in second grade, I had the nickname, “Chip.” School kids loved it. I hated it. I was teased and taunted, and not being much of a fighter at the time, I decided to handle it a different way. I went to my mom after school one day and told her I wanted to be called “Chad,” instead of Chip. I made my case and to my surprise, it worked. The next day, my mother and I went to the school and told the officials I would go by “Chad” from then on. We were only changing my nickname, my legal name, which didn’t seem to fit me then, would not change.

For twenty plus years, I was Chad, and Chad was an angry, narrow-minded man. I moved to Arizona where I met a woman who was into East Indian meditations, Zen meditation. I was attracted to her so naturally I decided to try it. I had a lot of unresolved issues at that time and I didn’t know what to do with them, or in fact, how to identify them. Meditation changed my life, and I changed my name again, (though not legally). I was editing myself and I didn’t know it.  

I meditated every single day. It was tumultuous time for me mentally. I had a narrow view of the world then and my place in it. Despite the meditation I was still stuck, trapped in a room where the walls closed in. I couldn’t get out of it. So I did every kind of meditation, cathartic, dancing, and sitting in absolute silence. I watched my ego dissolve to some degree then. I was hungry to learn more so I submitted my name and my photo to an ashram in Poona, India and received the name, Kranti Chaitanyo. The name was meant to be a message for me, its meaning; “Revolution of Consciousness.”

Asking people to call you by a different name several times in your life is, of course, a bit drastic and a little ridiculous. But for me, at that time in my life, I felt it was necessary. As strange as it sounds, I never felt like me. So I took the message of that strange name to heart and changed from Chad, to Chai. The meditations helped me become more aware, and helped me to identify my anger and how I was projecting it onto others. I learned to take ownership of my pain and to learn from it. None of this was easy.

I went by Chai for about ten years. Then I went to college, where I rediscovered my love of writing and took all the courses on it that I could. When I graduated and began working in the professional world, I was ready to accept the name I’d avoided my whole life, the name I was born with, Albert. As I rewrote my name, I rewrote my life. A constant work in progress, but one for which I could be proud.

What does my changing my name have to do with America or writing? Everything. Each and every one of us here lives a journey uniquely American. Regardless of how we got here, whether we were born here or brought by our parents or moved here seeking a better life. Our lives are written in the story of this country, now and forever.

For so many years, I was not free in my own head. despite all that meditation, despite all the ways in which I’d learned to examine my thoughts, my feelings and my impulses I was still so often a little kid stuck in a room. Writing made me free. It makes me free.

Writing is the sword to slay monsters. It can break the chains of the mind.

Our ideals must be continuously earned. Freedom, like consciousness is an ongoing exercise in staying awake. I had to become independent from my past self, and even from my projected future self. We are in constant rebirth from the moment we come crying from our mother’s wombs. We write and rewrite our lives every day.

We are all America, and each of us has to fight for the freedom to be ourselves. Sometimes the best freedom is escaping your own mind, or getting away from bad habits, the thousand tiny strings that tie us to where we were and keep us from being where we want to be. Freedom is not letting something or someone else define you. Only we can determine who we are. Freedom isn’t a song, or a salute, it’s the heart of every living thing. Freedom is being alive.

We are all America. This is our time to acknowledge our failures, our shortcomings, look our fear in the face, and move forward. Freedom isn’t afraid. Freedom is about being knocked down and getting back up again. It doesn’t matter how many times we fall, or how many times we fail, we have to get back up. Just get the fuck back up.

We are all America. Freedom is always do or die. It’s when the odds are against you, when all signs point to failure, that’s when you get back up. Independence is not about winning and losing, it’s about standing up when you want to sit down. It’s about rising to that moment when you think you can’t do it, that you can’t make it, or that you can’t be the one.

You are the one. We all are.