![The Inverted Euphemism - by: Grant David Anderson II - [G.D. Anderson II - Enterprises Un-LTD]](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCS5PzhdSBgjThcGh_ADx-rmpTIDk7FiBrpjt_T_BZrfwpQKbxWvVaiN7QbxX_aSAdKWjQ9DEPuq555lb0nG1LLFbDLctb43zmHC6DwabX5pX2L15EplknsRwo4nGP_Bj_NwFsHt0hBw4/s1600/Inverted+Euphemism+Banner4small.jpg)
It's funny how times change... The last post I had on here was from 2015, predicting the future. As a life-long lover of time travel and the thought experiments it brings about, I have to laugh. I missed almost every single beat in the last decade.
It just goes to show you no matter how much you get out your ruler and try to extend the lines you're seeing, they're going to zig and zag. In 2015 I would not have predicted Trump winning the election, a global pandemic, world-wide riots in a reaction to George Floyd being murdered, Russia starting a land war in Europe, or any of the pivotal things that actually happened. If we've learned anything, when in doubt make it funny.
A lot has happened in almost ten years. The point of this blog was to continue to challenge myself creatively out of Under-grad. Originally I wanted to post a photograph every day. As you go through the archives I achieved that for the better part of five years. This forced me to head out into the world, practice my art, and stay ahead of the posting schedule.
My own sense of time is completely skewed. In many ways the age of MySpace and LiveJournal seem not that long ago.
I wanted this blog to be a catch-all for creative projects, and it is that a blog from the a simpler era of the internet when people wrote and every influencer didn't need their own you-tube channel or production company.
Ultimately this practice of daily posts tapered off due to two factors, one being that I had secured a job at Apple. For all their groundbreaking innovation, Apple makes it positively clear that you can be fired for anything you say or do on social media. Many of my co-workers, myself included, completely shut down our online presences just to avoid conflict. It's odd that an employer could have so much power over your private life, but their view is that as an employee of the company you are a representative of them at all times, even when making rants into the internet. Hindsight being ever clearer, we see that in the wake of the me-too movement and this cancel culture (read: consequence culture) this probably was a solid policy from a company risk management perspective.
That begs the question: What did I get up to if I wasn't logging into my blog every day to post things?
I feel like I did what everyone else was doing. I got a job, I moved from that job to another job, I moved from that job to the one I have now. Each time I traded something I wanted for something I would sacrifice.
I was constantly balancing the infernal triangle of Time, Money, and Motivation; ever lacking one of the three components to spring forward with success.
I fell in love, got married, got a dog, bought a house. All the big milestones on the game of life. Each step adding richness and more complexity to life. Slowly and surely time to sit and post thoughts to strangers on the internet waned, faded, and disappeared.
"Care is an enemy to life." Shakespeare reminds us in Twelfth Night, as Sir Toby Belch extols his philosophy that having too many cares interferes with his want for hedonism. But I would argue that the opposite is true, that when life seems cozy and put together, it makes it hard to care about other things, about writing, about ambition, about politics and prose. Yes I traded daily blogs for lazy Sunday naps, cuddled up with my wife and my puppy as the dappled sunlight steams in through rippled hundred-year-old glass. Most days that seems like enough, it is enough, but comfort also feels like complacency.
In 2011 I started writing my first novel. It began as a joke. I was on Yahoo answers, if that tells you how old it was. For those unfamiliar, Yahoo answers was one of the first forums where any user on the internet could post a question, and any other user, regardless of qualifications or expertise, could answer that question.
I ended up finding a post of a women who was soliciting feedback for baby names. (A Great way to get character names by the way.) Her list comprised of some great first and middle combinations. On that was Axel Harlow, Isabella Grace, Jasper Johns... and being the snarky sunnovabitch that I was at the time, I replied with: "Are you trying to name a baby or cast a detective novel?"
I then wrote out a paragraph of parody using all the names. I have looked and looked and this paragraph is lost to the internet, and I suppose I never saved it anywhere. But it began something like: "Tempers ran hot when the Santa Anna winds blew through my Los Angeles apartment. I was Axel Harlow, private eye. I have seven shots in me, one is lead, and the other six are bourbon... etc. etc." I was heavily influenced by the Guy Noir private eye bit from a Prairie Home Companion at the time.
The woman, was NOT enthused, and I completely forgot about those names until one evening over margaritas with friends, the topic turned to a hypothetical treasure hunt through time. On a napkin I jotted down fun eras and times to visit and that evening and on into the course of the next two days, I wrote 30,000 words of what would be the rough draft of what was then called "The Paradoxical Adventures of Axel Harlow: Time Detective." Every event was written up to the end of the Russian Ballroom and I hit a wall with the Center for Chinese time tourism and then, like many things. Life got in the way.
I had been accepted into the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for their BFA program. So writing plans were put on hold and I packed up all my belongings and moved to the Windy City for what would become some of the worst, most stressful days of my life.
That winter, stranded in my miserable studio dorm on the tenth floor of the Chicago Building at 7 West Madison, I pulled up the manuscript and wrote the last half of it coming in at just under 50,000 words. I was really giving myself a nice pat on the back at this point, because technically 40,000 words constitutes a novel and anything shorter is a novella. Graduate level courses, an incredible workload, and an absolute shoestring budget drew my focus away from things like writing and the manuscript was tucked away in a google doc.
I kept telling myself during this time that it was almost done, I just needed to edit it. One more pass and it would be ready to go. Ha.
Fast forward to twelve years later. I was now married, a home-owner, and determined to claw my way out of the post covid funk that I found myself in. I resolved to get up every day at 6am. Monitor my calories. Have a cup of coffee, have the same thing for breakfast and to journal and document my mental health journey every day. I accidentally forced myself to write several thousand words every morning, every day, for months and months. When January of 2024 rolled around, I was the healthiest I'd ever been, mentally. I'd started a new job, and for the first time in ten years felt like I was on top of this mess we call life.
I can't begin to tell this story without my wonderful wife Sarah. Early on in our relationship she had eagerly read my manuscript and left me more than 1800 comments. Comments that I had avoided going through for most of our time together. In January I still had it in my head that all I needed to do to get my book finally over the finish line was to go through and approve or make changes to her comments. Again hubris takes the stage. Over the course of three months I turned a 48,000 word rough draft into a 138,000 word novel. I re-wrote the whole thing. I wrote nearly double that in terms of backstory and behind the scenes world-building for my own benefit. Sarah went back through the entire thing and as an editor I've learned that she doesn't pull her punches, and the writing was all the better for it.
Suddenly after 13 years, the pot that was on the back burner was instead on full boil. In many ways I couldn't fault myself for waiting. I had developed so much as a person between my twenties and thirties that my perspective and talents as a writer had monumentally shifted. Had I forced the book to be complete in 2011, it would not be the completed work it is now. Nor can I say without my wife, would it have been nearly as good. She really was instrumental in keeping it on track and reigning in my crazier tendencies. Even though she would gaze up from whatever book she was reading with exasperation when I would come in grinning from my office with yet another premise to discuss with her.
"We do these things, not because they are easy, but because we thought they were going to be easy."
This sign hangs in my office, and so far accurately describes the writing process.
I love writing. I find writing to be utterly transporting. In the same way that one can get completely immersed in a good book, I find that when I'm in the zone writing I might as well be standing there, living the experiences I'm imagining. At one point I sent my characters to be stranded on a tropical island and I remember looking up from an eight hour writing session to be astonished that there was snow outside. Like I'd simply forgot that winter had existed for a moment.
The editing, the second guessing, the tweaking and prodding. I like less. Querying and soliciting for an agent has been like pulling teeth. As the son of a dentist, I've had my fair share of teeth pulled let me tell you. I get why the query process exists. Logically with how many submissions are out there and how many people think they're accomplished writers natural methods of filtering out the chaff were bound to develop. I can only imagine if I was a literary agent and had to sort through page after page, letter after letter from authors trying to justify why their ideas were good. Everyone wanting to stand out. Everyone wanting to convince you that their book is the next best thing. Everyone missing the mark pretty much every time.
I've learned that querying agents is the cost of doing business. You want to be an author? Well, you need to be able to articulate to someone else why they should read your book, articulate in what market it would sell well, take off your writing hat and put on your capitalist marketing hat and put on your sunglasses that have dollar-signs over the eyes. Not only that but you need to write and submit letters in a format which is both universally expected and not hard enforced. Your homework is figuring out how to write in this specific format to both meet all the standards of what a query letter asks for, while not sounding trite, egotistical, or out of touch, and still paint your writing work as something of value. The ultimate irony is that once you do strike gold and secure an agent, and lets say you get a best-seller... then you'll need query letters less and less.
This may be the only post on here for the next ten years. I don't know. Maybe life takes a turn and I suddenly need a place to showcase all of my accomplishments for the world. I realize that a completely dead social media presence is not great if you want to self publish a book.
If you're someone who is reading this, I'm going to suspend my shock and amazement and simply say. I hope things are going well. That life hasn't gotten completely in the way of what fulfils you.
Thanks for reading,
Grant
