Get Your Motor Running

Head out on the highway

Samuel Johnson (not shown) spent nine years writing the first comprehensive English language dictionary. The equivalent French tome took 40 scholars 40 years to complete. So the fact that I’ve yet to publish the sequel to my first novel ten years later is…

Reprehensible. Ok sure, I’m being hard on myself (thanks Mom). In my defense, I completed Breaking Point’s first draft I dunno, five years ago? You see what happened was…

When “my” agent couldn’t place Reservation Point, I lost faith in my literary chops. I self-published and returned my attention to blogging.

Embarking on a six-month motorcycle touring blog adventure (The Wandering Jew). Which proved no more popular — if significantly tastier — than Colgate lasagna.

Not to put too fine a Point on it, I was distracting myself from novelizing by doing the easy thing. Scared of spending my rapidly diminishing life beavering away on novels nobody will read.

And then, a week ago, TikTok talked to me. An influencer told me lean into your fear you sad scared little man. Or words to that effect.

Knocked for six by a bad romance, I was mentally and emotionally fucked-up enough to finally confront my debilitating insecurity (thanks Mom). And get back to work.

And now? Now I’m polishing a chapter of Breaking Point’s final draft per day, preparing it for Kindle. Discovering that my crime/hypnosis novel’s deserves some attention. If only my own.

Truth be told, publishers don’t like publishing self-published books any more than they like picking-up the bill for a three-martini lunch. At the same time, AI has sucked-up my entire online opus; it can now write anything in the style of Robert Farago at the press of a button.

And? And now I’ve ended my decades-long writer’s block and given the march of technology the middle finger. Following Winston Churchill’s sage advice: if you’re going through Hell, keep going!

I’m applying a lesson I’ve learned via my new pool-playing aspirations. Success doesn’t build confidence. Confidence builds success.

Which begs the question, how can you be confident when you’re not successful? To which there’s only one plausible indeed practical answer: a leap of faith.

Call it wishful thinking. Call it “manifesting.” I call it sheer bloody-mindedness powered by a combination of delusion and desperation.

I also take my [non-pool] cue from Virgil. When someone asked the poet how barbarians could possibly defeat the mighty Roman Army, he said “They can because they think they can.”

All I have to do is repeat the Little Blue Engine’s motto: I think I can, I think I can, I think I can. Can do!