Wanted! MWF, Shallow and Insecure!

I’ve been in kind of a funk lately. This afternoon I snapped at Bee so many times that he had to give me a firm talking-to, as if I were a five-year-old. I hate to blame my moods on PMS, but maybe that’s it. Or maybe it’s that lingering suspicion that I’m not nearly as awesome as I think I am.

Take this blog, for instance. I started it initially to post some of the writing I’d done, but hadn’t done anything with, if you know what I mean. I supposed I hoped to be one of those Jen Lancaster, Julie and Julia success stories, where my work was discovered via the Internet and my credibility as a writer grew from there. Then I wouldn’t have to actually take the terrifying step of coming up with a complete book in advance and sending it off to eighty-five publishers, only to be dismissed by every one. My word-of-mouth-popular blog would do all the work for me! Book deal, here I come!

I have to admit that I never wanted to be a blogger. Even the sound of the word (‘blahg’) is sort of repulsive to me. I view blogging the way I view Tweeting and Facebook: am I really that into myself that I think everyone cares what I'm thinking all the time?

Well, obviously the answer is yes, but I won’t admit that out loud.

I swore when I started this blog that I’d write only posts that were meaningful and thought-provoking. If you’ll scroll through my blog archive, you’ll note how well that turned out. In my quest to write only deep things, I hardly wrote at all. So then I set myself the goal of writing twice a week, allowing myself one of those posts to be total fluff, whilst the other had to have at least a modicum of meaning.

If you’ll scroll through my blog archive, you’ll note how well that turned out.

Sadly – and you may be shocked to read this – after nearly a year of actually updating my blog on a semi-regular basis, the book offers have not come pouring in. Come on, Publishing World, don’t you have room in your printing houses for another narcissistic, insecure, marginally-talented writer with very little previous publishing experience?

The pathetic thing is that I view my blog, with its tiny readership that I assume is mostly family, friends, and spammers from Malaysia, as my popularity meter. I check its statistics page several times a day to see how many people have browsed its posts. And I spend so much time writing on it in the hopes of getting a book deal that I never have time to actually work on my book.

What book, you ask? Why, the one I’ve been working on for three years! And it’s not even that good! In fact, it is, apparently, so terrible that the few people who’ve read the first rough draft couldn’t even figure out how to give me constructive criticism on it, so they sort of ignored it’s existence! That book!

My blog posts are becoming, perhaps blessedly, more and more sporadic. So then I feel guilty about not living up to my posting-twice-a-week goal, and it hangs over my head until I throw something out. Then I'm depressed that what I've written isn't any good. And I wonder why I obsess over it, anyway, since only three people have read my last post. (By the way, even Bee refuses to read my blog, finding it 'over-the-top' and 'offensive'.)

I am officially In A Funk. But, hey, it’s after midnight as I’m writing this, and I haven’t been sleeping well, so maybe tonight will be my night and things will look better in the morning.

Of course, by then this whiny post will already be published, and it’ll be too late to regain my professionalism. But at least my fan base in Malaysia, the ones selling the onlyne digrees and the teeth-wittening, will have something new to ponder.