The Business of Words

The arts should not be big business.  I hate the fact that someone with nothing more to offer the world than another trashy book about a voluptuous farm widow finding love in an unexpected place can make millions and millions of dollars while people with legitimate talent get nothing but rejection after rejection.

My husband got another one of those emails today, which I maybe shouldn’t discuss out in public.  But it hurts him every time, and when he hurts I hurt as well.  He is amazingly talented, as anyone familiar with his work knows.  But no one pays attention, no one gets it, and no one cares.  Twenty more vampire romances will have come out by the time you reach the end of this paragraph, but he has been published exactly once.  It is unfair.  It is ridiculous.  More than anything it is sad, because the world loses something every time a writer or an artist gives up for the last time.

Jesse will persevere like he always does.  He has far too much passion to quit.  But how many voices will go silent today because some greasy-haired, suit-wearing ass who probably doesn’t even read told them they should never put pen to paper again?  The idea sickens me.

This is why I blog.  I am given free reign to post anything I want whenever the mood strikes me, and I don’t have to wait on some douchebag in a Benz to get back to me six months later just to tell me ‘thanks, but no thanks’ anyway.  I am here.  My words are in print and no one can take that away from me.
 
Sure, there is no money in this, but who cares about the money anyway?  If you are writing just to make money, you are in it for the wrong reasons to begin with.  This is a calling, a mission.   And to make it into anything else is just gross.

Maybe I’m just ranty and full of bile today, but  I’m sick of everything being an ‘industry’.  It’s at best counterintuitive and at worst insane to push real talent aside for mediocrity and pomp.  Do we, as a society, really want to go down in history as vapid and culturally bankrupt?  I don’t know.  I guess maybe we do.  ‘Keeping up with the Kardashians’ is still on, after all.

It doesn’t matter, really.  Maybe I’m the only person on earth who feels the way I do.  It’s probably just another manifestation of my insanity.  But whatever the case, I’m moving on.  No more worries about agents or cover letters or queries or any of the bullshit that gets in the way of my saying whatever the hell it is I need to say.  I will say it regardless of pay or fans or any of it.  You can read if you wish, and to those of you that do, thank you.  You are my reward.