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Showing posts with label laptop. Show all posts
Showing posts with label laptop. Show all posts

Friday, October 5, 2012

The Deal

He said, "I'll make you a deal. I'll buy the laptop for you, but you have to promise to work on your book."
That was 3 years ago. What constitutes "working on your book"? Do 771 blog posts count? What about the 14 journals in my file cabinet and the 195 journal entries on my hard drive? Do they count as working on my book?

I hope so, because otherwise I haven't kept up my end of the bargain.

I really do want to write the book. For a lot of reasons:
1. to tell my story in a chronological and cohesive way
2. to get it out of my head (at least somewhat)
3. to potentially help some other people
4. (because I'd love to be a famous writer, at least for awhile)
5. to make enough money to cover the "debt" of my laptop, and maybe even get an upgrade.

But how do you put a price on a life story? What if I did write that best selling memoir? Would the money make the abuse "worth it"? And for that matter, what about the punishment the latest memoirists have suffered? It's the same old thing -- I've got no proof.

I thought about writing a fictional account. You know, changing the names to protect me from the guilty parties. But it feels too much like the lies I lived with for so long, and I'm really not good at writing fiction -- especially dialogue.

That leaves me with a debt. 

I am writing. And it might become a book someday. How important is it that what I write gets published by a publishing house, and bound in leather or vinyl or cloth or paper? Is the value of having written only determined by the number of volumes I sell or the amount of money I get from those sales? I don't think so.

Money is a nice reward for hard work, and an even nicer one for doing something I enjoy. But the ultimate reward for me is in putting thoughts into words and phrases and sentences -- in hearing from others that my thoughts and words meant something to them. Helped them somehow.

So I keep blogging and journaling and typing and dreaming about that book, but with no clear cut vision of how it would evolve. And I think that's okay. Because what I'm finding along this path is really so much more than a career or profession. I'm reintroducing myself to me.

Money would be nice, but self worth, now there's a reward.


linking up at Red Writing Hood