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So Authentic.

For you, not for me. I'm spending a lot of time writing. Or thinking about writing. Or getting drunk and talking about writing. I'm covered with ideas, they spill out all over my desk and on to the floor and even as I try to write them all down so I can come back to them later, I lose more than I save.

But for you, there's nothing new to see here. Move along. It's just a stale entry that you read yesterday or the day before, or maybe the day before that.

I went out with my cousin tonight. She's a lawyer. She's got a house and a great husband and a dog. And at the end of the night she paid our tab, gave me a hug and headed home.

Our tab was nothing outrageous and I'm pretty sure for her it was an afterthought. I found myself thinking "man she's lucky, having money to spend like that."

But it's not luck. She put in the work. She did well in college and went to law school. She works hard at a job she's good at. She wasn't born a lawyer, she's just reaping the rewards of everything she's done up until this point. It has nothing to do with luck.

People tell me that I'm lucky to have a site under the Rudius banner. Or that I'm lucky have a job with Rudius Media. And if I could talk about the project I'm currently working on, people would tell me that I'm lucky to have that.

Lucky is being born with a trust fund or an eleven-inch cock. Lucky is an accident of genetics. Lucky, most of the time, is a detriment. People who are lucky rarely understand what they have until it's gone and then it's too late. Luck is bitterness waiting to happen. Luck is hubris. Luck is all the people who won the lottery only to go broke. Despite what they'll tell you on homicide shows, sometimes it's actually better to be good.

And that's why this is the boring part. Because right now I'm putting in the work and the work isn't sexy or glamorous or exciting. In fact you can't even see the work. The work is spending five hours on a four-page scene which takes minutes to read. The work is doing a ton of research so that the reader never gets pulled out of the narrative. The work is writing yet another revision, which means trashing a lot of work that came before it. Let's face it. The work sucks.

It's the payout that's cool. It's connecting with the reader and knowing that they appreciate what you've done that's sexy. But I wasn't born with a trust fund or a pornstar dick. I've got to put in the work and that means that this is going to be boring for a while.

For you though, not for me.

When this site went live in October I was obsessed with page views. I wanted to build stupid levels of internet crushing traffic so that advertisers would beg me to let them put their ads on my site.

I've found that traffic generally increases the more I post. So for a while there, my traffic would be high on a Monday because that's when chapters S&KS came out and then it would fall throughout the week. I could always get a bump if I posted something on this blog though.

So for a while I really considered trying to write one post a day, getting out there and networking with other bloggers, building this place to be one of the premier blogs on these here tubes. But when I started to really think about it, how to get a new post up every day I realized something important.

I don't want to be a blogger, I want to be a writer. And while it might be possible to write a post a day or every other day, there's no way I could write a short story a day or even a week. S&KS took me six months and I had been thinking about that story for years. This current thing I'm working on, I'd be surprised if when it's all said and done, it didn't take me a year of straight work. It seems that the pace of blogging and the pace of writing fiction aren't that compatible.

And while I'm sure that some people can sit down and write a blog post every day, I'm not one of them. Some days I'm too busy either with my job or with writing fiction, some days I'm too lazy and some days I just don't have anything to say. I try only write these posts when I really want to think something through and get feedback from you out there.

It's liberating to realize that and it's led me to a series of good decision. One was to release S&KS as a pdf* which was nothing more than me understanding that it didn't matter whether people were reading it on this site or if they were printing it out and reading it on the train on the way to work, the important thing is that they were reading my words.

It also probably saved the story I'm working on now. I was obsessed with having it ready to go the week S&KS was done so that my traffic wouldn't fall off. And so I overlooked some of the problems with the story in the interest of having it ready to go immediately. I kept thinking "well, it's not perfect but it's ready" which is stupid beyond belief.

Now that I'm not obsessed with my page views I've been able to slow down and start a serious rewrite that should fix the problems in the current story.

So what's all this have to do with advertising? It's easy to get caught up in that short-term "take the money now" attitude. From day one it's been my goal to really good fiction, the kind of stuff that I read and love. But if I get wrapped up in that page view / advertising dollar trap, then I undermine the whole reason I got into this in the first place.

Put another way, if you want to be a blogger then it makes sense to play that page view metric game. But if your goal is something else, then stay focused on that goal and don't get wrapped up in the short-term ups and downs.

*Download it, read it, love it, forward it to friends.

Or I thought I wanted to write for film and TV. I'm not so sure anymore. Casting is exhausting. I had thought that it would be easy, you just sit there are watch people read a scene or two. I didn't realize that you get sucked into the process. There's a real emotional investment in watching these people play out a range of emotion in front of you.

It's frustrating because the majority of what you're watching is people failing. I don't know how many people audition for each part but it's a lot. And obviously only one person is going to play that character. So for two hours or so you're watching people who don't have what it takes to play whatever character they're reading for. It's not about whether they're a good actor or actress or not. It's that you're looking for the perfect person to fill that role. I saw some very good actors / actresses who just weren't right for the parts they read.

What makes it all worth it though is when someone actually hits a role. A couple of people read today that I think* are going to be cast and watching them get it right was very, very cool. It's this "holy shit" moment when you can see the role come to life in front of you, instead of picturing it in your head.

What was even cooler though is that until now, the script was just words on a page to me. Seeing people act out the scenes really brings those words to life. For the first time, you get a real sense of how this thing is going to look when it's all put together.

And I'm not even a writer on the screenplay. I can't imagine what it's like when it's your own work.

*I don't know for sure. I was just there as a third wheel.

Feel free to forward it to friends, family, agents, publishers and everyone else in your address book.