I picked my poor sensei's brain for over two hours with questions of what to do with my newly written rough draft of a collection of 16 autobiographical short stories from my life. He gave me excellent advice and first hand knowledge I mightn't've received elsewhere.
One thing that he said struck me and I really didn't want to believe it: he said that from his rough draft completion to the time his first book was actually published was over two years in the making.
"Two years?!?" I thought at the time. "That is so NOT gonna be me and my book."
Now I look back and laugh. One year and 7 months later and I still haven't published my book. While I do not believe it will be a whole two years before its release, I do think there is validity in not rushing one's art. It's certainly not like I haven't been working my ass off on gettin' 'er done.
This, what I deem now as my first collection of essays, has gone through more re-writes and edits than Joan Rivers' face. It has survived a name change, and story switch out, thousands of hours of editing, writing contests, countless nights of changes, shape shifting, and NYC street cup-game-esque switcheroos. What once was 16 is now my first anthology: delightfully and more appropriately re-titled as
Dancing in My Underwear.
After a lot of soul searching, researching, number crunching, and workshop attending, I have also presently decided to (bum bum buuuuum) SELF PUBLISH my work. This was not an easy decision to make, but one I stand by wih conviction. This way my first contribution to the art of literature is completely under my artistic and administrative control. This way I retain 100% of my originality and zaniness. This way it is released and presented to the public the way I want it to be. Self publishing allows me to release my art on my watch, on my terms, exactly how and when I want it to be expelled out into the world.
I have a lot of marketing strategies under my belt as a soon to be officially published abghes (Autobiographical gay humorist essayist). In the coming months, I'll be promoting more and more the release of the first part of Dancing in My Underwear and warn all my friends and love ones to bare with me as it will soon become all I can talk about.
All I know is I am so very bloody excito to finally get DIMU out there so all you biatches who have been bugging me to read my stuff can finally get a chance to. That and I can finally divert my total creative energy into what I've been doing the last few months: finishing my SECOND book.
As always, dear people of my page:
Thanks for reading!
#grateful
#loveoneanotheralways
