I’ve spent most of my life in one closet or another.  Around the age of 14 or 15 I started to get inklings that I might be attracted to boys.  I successfully hid that from myself for quite some time, and let me tell you, the human mind is an amazing thing to enable a guy to spend hours making out with his college girlfriend and go straight to the computer lab to look at gay porn, and never consider that he might be into guys.  On my 18th birthday I was suddenly struck with panic attacks.  I turned to people I love, people from whom I had generally hidden my emotions, and they helped me through it.  I had to face the truth, but it still took me until I was 25 – 7 years! – to really accept myself and come out to my friends and my family.

Despite that learning experience, and the relief of being out and open about myself, I retreated right back into a different sort of closet.  This time, it was my true self, my own personality, that ran and hid.  As I entered the world of gay clubs and parties, and started really drinking for the first time in my life, I began to pretend to be someone else.  I took up the popular persona in the gay community, the cynical egomaniacal loner.  I played the part so well that the first time I watched “Queer as Folk,” I thought I was seeing myself in the character of Brian Kinney – but what I was seeing was the disguise, the person I was pretending to be.

A couple of years after that, I stepped into yet another closet, and this time I pulled someone else in with me.  I can’t go into details on that here, because it would violate that person’s privacy, so please forgive me for being cryptic.  What I can say is that I hurt that person severely, and now that all I want is to throw open all the closets in my life, I’m not sure that I will have the chance.

We all hide in our own ways.  We all wear masks.  It’s easier, and safer, to show others what we think they need to see in order to get the results we want.  It’s a way of defending ourselves against pain and fear and manipulation.  But when you hide, you live in fear.  You aren’t true to yourself and your desires, you are living for other people.  The pressures you feel on you are inspired by the people and the things in your life, but they come from you.  They are your fears, and if you let them control you then you will never be truly happy.

I found an expression recently.  ”Fear less, love more.”  It’s pretty simple, and  yet it’s something that I completely lost sight of in my own life, and let me tell you it cost me.  I’m even thinking about getting it tattooed on my wrist so I don’t forget again.  I don’t want to live my life in fear.  I don’t want to make decisions out of fear.  I want to live my life in love.

It pains me to think about the years I have spent hiding from love, and hiding my own love.  How I have played cynical about life, and told myself and the people around me that I don’t believe in ideas like commitment, and marriage, and that I don’t believe in true love.  Many of us do it, because love is scary.  We don’t tell the people in our lives how we care about them, what they mean to us.  We don’t let them feel how special they are to us.  We do it because love is risky.  It’s scary.

But we cannot give in to that.  We can’t fear the one thing that can make human beings truly happy. We have got to embrace it, throw ourselves into it, even if we are terrified and even if we get hurt.

Let me tell you, fellow writers, this absolutely applies to us as authors also.  Fear leads us to avoid risks.  It leads us to keep ourselves out of our stories, and write dry unemotional adventure stories instead of investing ourselves into real emotion, real human experience.  Fear makes our writing flat, dishonest, and disinteresting.  Fight it.

As for me?  Here’s my confession, and let me tell you I’m terrified to make it:  the real me absolutely does believe in true love.  That’s something I haven’t admitted to myself in many years, because I was hurt in the past and I was afraid.  The real me is incredibly sensitive, and measures every encounter, every personal interaction, for its deeper emotional meaning – enough that it sometimes (often) crosses into hysterical over-thinking.  The real me is a nerd, who loves Wikipedia and Skeptoid and Good Eats because he loves to learn new things and find new ways to explore and enjoy this world.  The real me plays Dungeons and Dragons.  He is attracted to boys, but he is also attracted to girls (and if you don’t already know from personal experience, let me tell you how lonely THAT is).  He loves to dance, and loves to sing along really loud with his favorite songs, especially in the car.  He enjoys sappy movies, as long as they are well-written, and he takes a lot of his lessons on life and love from art, movies, and more than anything from music.  The real me loves to cook, loves to go on adventures to new places, and loves to stay at home with someone he cares about and just lay around together.  He loves to explore new cities, to just wander with no plan and discover the tiny details that other people forget.  The real me cries every time some television show or movie or something starts getting all patriotic about freedom and liberty and such.  The real me is fiercely individual and independent, but he also really wants a partner, a person with whom he can share his life and his dreams.

I know that fear will never go away.  I know that a part of me will always be drawn to that closet, to hide away from the world where things are safe and no one can hurt me.  The trouble with that logic is that there will always be one person inside that closet: me.  If no one else can hurt me, I can certainly hurt myself, and I can absolutely hurt other people.  Take my word on this – it may seem stupid to try and learn from a trite blog post, but recent experience has taught me the hard way.  It’s a lesson I don’t plan to forget.

Now and then we have a few beers and compare notes on searching for representation in different fields.

• I have a bachelor’s degree in writing; she has one in musical theater.
• I spent ten years writing, revising, polishing, and rewriting the novel I’ve been shopping around; she did years of summer stock theater, working as a chambermaid or making props by hand in between performances, to build up a marketable resume.
• I mail out query letters, sample chapters and synopses, and have been quietly building up a collection of almost fifty very polite rejection slips; she mails out hundreds of headshots and resumes, and hears nothing back from most talent agents.
• I spend hours every day slaving over my next novel, carving out time around my day job at considerable cost to my social life; she spends hours every day running, working out, tanning, and otherwise keeping her appearance marketable.
• I comb through online listings like QueryTracker.net and AgentQuery.com in search of agents who haven’t yet rejected me; she spends hours reviewing listings on the web for available background gigs while she tries for her big break.
• Potential best-case scenario for me: several best-selling novels, film deals, and many millions of dollars; potential best-case scenario for her: starring in several top-grossing movies, and many millions of dollars.
• Odds that either of us attains that best-case scenario: one in a number best expressed with scientific notation.

Now, here’s where there are major differences:

• I am 31 years old, and if I were to be published today I’d be relatively young for my industry.  She is considerably younger than me, but she is acutely aware that she’s running short on time.
• To have any hope of succeeding in her industry, she had to move to New York – though she could have chosen Los Angeles.  Remaining comfortably in Philadelphia is in no way detrimental to my cause.
• Working background means working very odd hours that may start and end at any point on the 24-hour clock.  It’s almost impossible to have a day job.  I set my own writing hours, and I am fortunate to have a day job that I am passionate about and that pays pretty well.

So what’s my point?  For me, it’s a reminder that we aspiring authors are not the only folks who need to jump through all sorts of hoops, and invest tremendous time and energy, in a frustrating career quest that may never bear fruit.  Compared to some, in fact, we have it easy.

I also recommend that aspiring writers have friends who are aspiring actors, and that the aspiring writer pay for the drinks.

By the way, my friend has a blog of her own, where she posts about the adventurous life of a starving actor and sometimes-model.  You should check it out – her stories are more interesting than mine, and she looks a lot better in a bikini.

Writing has been a lifelong hobby, and something I have wanted to do professionally since I was about eleven or twelve years old.  It’s what I went to college for, and though I have a day job that I find quite rewarding for an organization I care passionately about, my career ambition remains to become a full-time novelist.  This is not easy.  It takes a lot of time and hard work, a lot of luck, and a very thick skin to break into the industry, and just getting a book published is very far from earning a living wage as a writer.

Most of the agents who express an opinion on this sort of thing  seem to agree that it is important for an aspiring writer to have a web presence.  I’m also savvy enough to realize that if I am lucky enough to be published, and luckier still enough to have readers who enjoy my work, the first thing they are going to do is take to the internet – and I’d better have some way of connecting with them, particularly during that window of time following publication of a first novel, when I don’t yet have anything else to sell.

Which brings me to the topic of blogging.  As it happens, I’ve been blogging for almost ten years.  I had a blog on WordPress called “The Hanged Man” where I expressed my thoughts about politics and pop culture and posted photos of celebrities I found attractive.  I got a couple of thousand hits a day, but it wasn’t exactly the way I wanted to represent myself professionally.  So when I got serious about  pursuing publication, I made some changes.  I migrated the blog to a personal web space, I deleted all of the more juvenile posts about half-naked celebrities, and I decided to keep my posting related to my would-be profession.

Two things changed.  My traffic dropped to two visitors a day, and I stopped writing content.  My internal censor seized control of my writing brain and nixed every idea I had for a new blog post.  I was terrified that literary agents who received my queries would pop my name into Google, visit this site, and reject me because of some remark I made about David Beckham’s abs.  Nothing seemed professional enough to fit my new guidelines, and so the blog started growing cobwebs.

Eventually I changed my mind about content.  I realized that if I were going to write, I had to be myself, and that while I’m willing to work to market myself, it’s not worth giving up my personality in the interest of making money.  I’m still terrified of literary agents who plug my name into Google (and I suppose this post is really written for them more than anyone) but I’m also guessing that any agent who is going to reject me outright because of what’s on my blog is probably not going to back me up artistically if we do work together.  So while I’m not about to go back to writing posts about Jessica Alba’s behind (we do all mature, at least a little bit) this blog will be whatever I feel like it should be, even if there are some warts

So I guess what I’m saying to any visiting literary agents is this: If you can get me a contract, I’ll take this blog down in a heartbeat.

No, just kidding.  But we can talk about it.

Though Volve and I have been through at least six major revisions, I had never before sat down with such a clear goal: reduce the length of the work.   I wound up learning a valuable lesson about my writing.  When I first sat down, I thought I was going to have to approach the book with an ax instead of a scalpel.  I started thinking about which chapters I could lose.  In the end, though, I was able to cut 11 thousand words without losing much substance.

I did this by cutting away unnecessary adjectives (amazing how clearly unnecessary they become when one needs to cut away a tenth of the manuscript), losing redundant information, and approaching the manuscript with one question in mind: does this matter to the reader?

I found that there were many passages, spanning from a few words to a paragraph or two in length, that communicated little relevant information to the reader.  They didn’t advance the plot or story, they didn’t reveal anything significant about any character, nor did they describe any physical aspect of the environment that was relevant to the reader.

This is the absolute best and most marketable version of Volve that I’m currently capable of producing.  It’s time to move on to other novels and other ideas.  I’m crossing my fingers that this query process leads somewhere, but even if it does not I can take something worthwhile out of the revision and rewrite process.  I’ve certainly learned why agents generally agree that a writer must complete three novels before he writes one worth selling.