by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I often think that if, one day, I manage to scrounge up the money to visit LA for a few days that I might find unexpected success just by being myself. I could totally see myself randomly being invited to a cocktail party, getting lit and before the night was over have a three picture deal line up.
The usual caveats about all drunks thinking they’re the funniest person in the room, apply, of course. But from what happed to me in Seoul, I know that under the right conditions — usually involving alcohol — I can be quite interesting and charismatic.
I’m a very good at schmoozing when I’m drunk, in other words.
And, yet, at the same time, I continue to struggle to find someone I can pay to talk to about the novels I’m developing and writing. The very people I need the most at the moment — literary types who I need to pay on occasion for a as much as an hour of their time.
They think I’m a kook. They won’t take me seriously enough to even let me pay them to help me on my novel(s.) It’s very aggravating. I can’t help that I don’t fit the Very Serious Literary Type paradigm.
But it’s not like I can change now. I would have to not only get a brain transplant, but scrub about 25 years worth of online activity to boot. So, I just have to factor this particular prejudice into my game plan as to how I’m going to sell as many a six novels.
The thing about writing a spec novel is you just have to believe in yourself. You just have to keep going even if haters want to make you feel bad for what you’re doing. As long as you feel compelled to write and have something to say — keep going. You never know, somehow, someway, things might break your way in an unexpected way.
That’s what I learned with ROKon Magazine. In the end, of course, everything that went wrong with the magazine was my fault, but there was a moment, in late 2006 when I was actually cool and I was able to use my strategic thinking to guide the magazine to places that no one could have predicted.
