So I decided if I can’t write, then that’s what I should write about, but it turns out that writing about not being able to write doesn’t make for very good reading. At least, if you write about it while you are still unable to write.

Even for a blog, it’s a little too little of something, and a little too much of nothing.

So my mind began to wander to a book I’m reading by Donald Miller about how his life changed when a previous book he wrote was made into a movie. If you don’t know who Donald Miller is, he’s kind of the male writer counterpart to Anne LaMott, who I’ve written about before. Miller’s earlier book, Blue Like Jazz, was made into a movie after being financed through the organization, Kick Starter, when the original Hollywood financing fell through. Because I gave some money for the production of the movie, I got all sorts of emails and phone calls from people I didn’t know thanking me, and then I got an associate producer t-shirt and a movie poster, and my name listed (with a thousand other people) in the movie credits.

And that got me thinking about Kick Starter, because I actually have a project which has been approved by Kick Starter, to raise several thousand dollars for a number of book promotions that the publicist suggested I do. The way Kick Starter works is that once you start your fundraising project you only have something like thirty days to complete it, and if you fall short of your financial goal, then you don’t receive any of the money people pledged. You can raise more money than you aimed for and get it, but raise less money and your project is a complete failure. So before launching a Kick Starter campaign, you should have all your ducks in a row so to speak, meaning you should pretty much know that you have enough people who want to see your book do well and will give money to help. All that planning and networking scares the shit out of me. So I have a project sitting on the shelf at Kick Starter that I may never launch because I don’t want to fail.

Which got me thinking about failure. Failure is the kind of thing that, if you are afraid of it, then you are pretty much married to it for life. It doesn’t go away with avoidance.

Which made me think about Kick Starter again. Which made me wonder how many people would actually give money to help me promote Alabaster Houses. Which made me think about the thousand fans that I have on the Alabaster Houses Facebook page and how if each of those fans gave only five dollars apiece, I could make my goal. But lots of the fans on the Alabaster Houses Facebook page are in their teens with really angry and sometimes scary profile pictures, which makes me wonder all sorts of things about my book. And while I’m really, really happy, (and a little puzzled) that they like my book, I think it might also be some kind of inside joke, and so I’m not sure I could count on a lot of money from my fans. And I guess I’d also prefer if they are going to be my fans, that they actually read the book if they haven’t, rather than give me money.

So then I started thinking about having a thousand fans, and how that’s not very many compared to people like Donald Miller and Anne LaMott who have tens of thousands of fans. If I had ten thousand fans I would want to stay in my house all the time for fear of running into one of them. Which made me think about failure again, because how much success could I really handle if I’m afraid of having tens of thousands of fans? Which reminded me of what Donald Miller said about fear, that it’s not just “a guide to keep us safe; it’s also a manipulative emotion that can trick us into living a boring life.” I never thought my life was boring, but now I wonder if I should ask someone else about it. I feel afraid of all sorts of things, like having someone yell at me for no apparent reason, and throwing a party where no one shows up. Actually that last thing has happened to me. Once I threw a party for another person, and no one but her showed up, and another time I threw a party for two people and every single person showed up except the two people. The only thing worse than having a party where no one shows up is having a party where the people who do show up feel more rejected than you do and you can’t go to bed and cry yourself to sleep because you have to entertain your rejected guest(s).

Writing this non-blog is not helping me feel less depressed, so I’m going to stop now. I’ll try again next week.