It's a double life and it's exhausting. It's like working two full time jobs: one you can't stand, the other where you're often too exhausted to do what you love.
It's a life of disappointment and discouragement and constant rejection and people who look at you like you're a selfish asshole because you work at your art instead of do all the other things everyone else does. They would be correct - if artists had a choice.
They don't. If they did, they would never waste time and their heart on something that almost no one cares about or, for that matter, will ever even see.
It's goddamn expensive being an artist- supplies, mailings, conferences, manuscript consultations. Directly- in direct cost I can tie directly to my writing, this thing I do has cost me conservatively $75000 over the course of my lifetime. In broader terms, the time I've taken off, the promotions I didn't get because I generally quit jobs as soon as I have enough money to survive for a while and dedicate myself to this bullshit artsy thing the figure is, again conservatively, $500,000. If I had never been a writer, and had stayed in my other life, that of a computer programmer, I would today have half a million more dollars in the bank.
But, as it is with many of my brothers and sisters in art, without a creative outlet, I would have been dead a long, long time ago.
The last several months have been a dark, dark time for me. I was recently so bitterly discouraged, that, at a recent writer's conference, I couldn't even pitch my screenplay and walked out. I knew no one was buying any specs and I'd had enough.
A couple of weeks after that I saw "District 9", a film so well-done it single handedly renewed my faith in what is possible for film to do, even with a severely limited budget.
Days later, some kind person at New Pages, the defacto standard when it comes to reviewing the best literary magazines in the world, read and commented on some poems I had published:
Read This
The review is a small victory. A few people somewhere, that I don't and will, in all likelihood, never know, were moved enough to write about my poems. That's not bad. It's the kind of thing that keeps us artsy fartsy types limping along.
Because whether we like it or not, whether it makes any sense or not, even if it is profoundly selfish:
It's all about the art.
