A funny thing happened on my way to becoming a professional writer. I became a professional cartoonist instead. Hopefully not “instead,” rather, “as well.”
I’m not sure exactly how it happened, but The Advocate, the quarterly magazine which is mailed to all 10,000 lawyers in British Columbia, is paying (!) me for an ongoing comic strip I’ve written called Bluster. It looks like this:
More cartoons to come!
Bill
1. You hate your job so much you spend your day pulling out precious tufts of your already-thinning hair (if you could just rip out the grey ones, that would be okay, but it doesn’t work that way).
2. People say you should write a book but their ideas for the subject of said book are terrible.
3. You read 50 Shades of Grey, puke, pull out what hair you have left, and despair for the fate of literature and the English language. Secretly, you are insanely jealous.
4. You spend months researching the publishing industry and discover that writing literature has little to do with book sales; it’s all Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and Instagram and Snapchat and blogging and writing conferences and author websites and establishing your social media platform and your “personal brand.” You delay starting your book so you can do all that stuff.
5. You quit your job and spend two years writing in a coffee shop, spending more on coffee than you could possibly earn if your book becomes a best seller.
6. You hire an editor whose notes of things wrong with the manuscript are longer than the manuscript. You do nothing for a month, wallowing in depression. Then you re-write your entire book.
7. You hire another editor to review the second draft. The second editor provides less guidance than the first editor, but charges more. You spend several months writing draft three.
8. For six months you send query letters to potential agents. You learn that memoirs were hot three years ago, but now if a book isn’t pornographic or have “Chicken Soup for the……..” in its title, it won’t sell.
9. Random House won’t take your calls. You find a small publisher in a Surrey strip mall, squeezed between a pawnshop and Payday Loans.
10. Your publisher’s advance is $500, for three years’ work. You’re one of the lucky ones.
Author’s Note:
Don’t despair, dear reader. It doesn’t have to turn out like this. I’m still writing draft number two, so who knows what will happen next? As I said in a previous post, I don’t doubt for one minute my choice to become a writer. I rejoice in my decision to discard my old, ill-suited profession and embrace this artsy world of creativity and uncertainty. Knowing what I know now, I’d do it all over again.
A year living in France. That’s bound to affect a person, right? All it did was lead me to the blindingly obvious conclusion that I couldn’t continue with my profession of 25 years. So I quit law to write a book. I should have figured all this out a LONG time ago. Or dared to do it…..it wasn’t a money thing, although money is important (if you don’t have any). What held me back was fear, insecurity, depression. And now to make this a happy ending, I just have to finish my book! At the risk of sounding all Deepak Chopra, here’s a list, in no particular order, of all the positives that came from my “year in provence”:
I avoided talking to any lawyers for a year.
I lived happily without a smartphone interrupting me while I was doing something more fun than speaking on the phone (which is everything).
I travelled across Europe with kids old enough to appreciate it.
I learned how to break into a public phone in Amsterdam (faithful blog readers will know about this one).
I walked everywhere, slowed down, reflected.
I gave my kids a real education, and gave them huge confidence.
I became more relaxed, not so anal, a bit more patient.
I cleared our North Van home of clutter, pared down our possessions, learned to let go.
I learned a lot about Canada by living in France (I already knew about the substandard bread).
I think about and appreciate food much more.
I happily lived with less, lived more simply.
I realized that I don’t care about possessions.
I spent a whole year driving my Peugeot in a huge video game without getting killed.
I perfected the art of doing nothing.
I learned to give FULL attention to every task.
I solidified an already solid marriage.
I avoided working until 75 (the average retirement age of British Columbia lawyers).
I decided what my perfect life would be, and then made it (to learn how to monetize it is a different story…but then I don’t want to travel in circles where people use the word “monetize”).
I realized WHY the law wasn’t right for me (part of it was being a big-picture guy in a world of weasel words and exclusionary clauses).
I learned not to care what others thought (but I want you to like my website and read it every day!).
I learned what was important in my life, what I valued.
I sat for a year on my terrasse, looking at a Provençal valley, listening to birds and cigales, and thinking.
I found the courage to completely change my life.
I learned to not be afraid to think big.
I learned to just let go.
I became comfortable with embracing change.
I learned to look forward, with no regrets.
I became brave enough to choose the non-paying or low-paying career path (that bravery has a direct relationship to the level of my wife’s patience).
I think I’ve found my passion….but maybe I haven’t, and that is still OK.
I don’t have to pretend anymore.
I have an “examined life” (in fact, I’ve examined the hell out of it).
I better appreciate my friends who support me (emotionally, not financially, although contributions are welcome).
I better appreciate what I have.
I went to France a lawyer…..and came back a person. At least something more closely resembling the person I want to be. The jury is still out on how that’s going to work out.
Three shoe salesman incidents are seared on my brain, and unsurprisingly, two involve nudity. At 16, I needed a job to help finance a school trip to England. Why I thought, why anyone thought, I was qualified to sell ladies’ shoes is a mystery. I worked Thursday and Friday nights and all day Saturdays at the Foot Pad, a tiny shoe store plopped in the middle of a large department store. I remember the day I received a five cent raise to reach $1.95 per hour.
Incident One
I was working alone one afternoon, dusting the glass shelves which held only right-foot size sevens, listening to the canned mall-music. A raven-haired, 25-year-old braless beauty in a flowered print sleeveless shift stopped to browse, bending low to grab a shoe. I faked dusting as I eyed her with my superhuman peripheral vision, and was rewarded when her right breast popped completely out of her dress. I don’t know what it feels like to have breasts (an ignorance I intend to maintain), but I would think that one would be aware if one’s bare breast was set free. Wouldn’t its unrestricted weight be noticeable? Wouldn’t it feel cooler from exposure to the air? The woman seemed not to notice, and continued browsing. Obviously, I wasn’t going anywhere, and I openly stared at her, mouth gaping. She stood and faced me, handing me a shoe.
“Do you have this in a size six?”
I looked directly at her breast, a beacon to my desires. It was large, the largest I had seen as a teenager. Don’t judge me – remember, I was only 16 that day at the Foot Pad. I don’t know how much time passed, but the woman finally realized I had neither responded, nor looked at her face. She glanced down, discovered her exposure and immediately……did nothing. Not a shriek, not a coverup. She looked up, looked me right in the eye, and smiled. When my face had completed its conversion to firetruck red, she casually tucked in her breast. I went to the storeroom to find her size six and to recommence breathing.
Incident Two
Late one Friday night, a lumpy woman, continually fussing with a lock of hair which stubbornly fell across her face, rushed into the Foot Pad.
“Yes, can you help me, I have a formal dinner to go to tonight, I need black shoes, open toe, perhaps two straps, something like that,” she said in one long sentence. Before I could respond, she pulled a shoe off of the display and continued, “Oh, this one is nice, and I think it’s my size, let me slip it on, yes that’s good, can you get me the other one, I think I’ll take them.”
I went into the storeroom and found the box with the matching shoe covered in tissue paper. The woman handed me the shoe she had tried on and I placed it in the box with its match. As I rung up her purchase, she said, “Thank you so much, I’m in such a rush, I’ve never bought a pair of shoes so fast before, but I have to run home and get ready right now. I might just make it. Bye.”
I felt very good about myself, helping the woman prepare for her fancy night out. This feeling quickly dissipated the next day when she returned to the Foot Pad in a fury to show me that the shoe I retrieved from the storeroom was not in fact the match to the shoe she had grabbed from the shelf.
Incident Three
A 30ish woman in a short dress asked to try on a sandal. She sat down and waited for me to retrieve her size from the storeroom. I placed the shoebox on the carpet and knelt at her feet to help her try on the sandal. I buckled two straps for a comfortable fit, and without looking up said, “How does that feel?”
The woman did not immediately respond, so I raised my glance, only to see, to see…..uh-oh. While I had been fiddling with her sandal, the woman had spread her legs quite wide, and I assume she knew that she was as panty-less as Britney Spears exiting a sports car. What was she thinking, what was her plan? I wouldn’t say that I quickly glanced away, but to my credit I soon stood up and pretended that nothing was amiss. I can still see details of this woman’s dirty bits in my mind, but I can’t for the life of me remember if she bought anything that day.
What weird job have you had?
You may have realized by now that the announcement of my new job with the Vancouver Canucks was a fiendishly clever April Fools joke. Some of you may have received my blog later than noon yesterday, which is technically cheating, but I had a problem with my website.
First off, I would like to thank many (surprisingly many) of you for your heartfelt congratulations – it’s quite a compliment that you actually thought the Canucks would hire me. Maybe you forgot all the nasty things I’ve been writing about the legal profession lately. Don’t feel too badly if you were fooled; many of my law school classmates, who should know that I’m not smart enough to be the General Counsel of anything, called to say they always knew I could do it and that writing thing was never going to amount to anything anyway.
The person most disappointed to learn that this was a joke was my mother, who thought her wayward son had finally gotten a real job.
My favourite response came from my friend Carlo, who said, and I quote, “You are NOT giving up on your dream…….so this must be an April fools joke…..” I didn’t think Carlo knew me that well, but he was right. I am not quitting until my book is finished and I’ve strong-armed every one of you into buying it. And after all Carol has been through, she would never let me give up at this stage anyway. Onward!