Catapult Yourself into the Sun

nothing is real

Nothing is real. This year was insane. I got a book deal. I got the words Taco Bell Quarterly printed in the New Yorker. I read on stage for the first time. Actually, it was my first time reading in front of people, period. They have special foundations and clinics now for the anxiety issues I had as a kid. I smoked enough weed to become a 3D hologram of myself and stepped into a fever dream.

I don’t even know how I made it there. It was an 8-hour flight and I’m terrified as fuck of flying. Naturally, I asked a stranger from the Internet to come with me. We weren’t total strangers, they were a contributor to my literary magazine, and then I decided they were the editor a few months earlier, and then I decided we were best friends, like I could just ask them to babysit me on an acid trip, except it was a cross-country flight to a literary conference.

Then in April, an editor from a big 5 imprint asked my agent what I was working on. Now the dream sentences were happening to me. I’m writing a book called JUNK, about the relationship between nostalgia and identity and capitalism.

One time I won the big prize at the carvival playing ring toss. I love games that are dumb luck and flings of the wrist disguised as skill, like ring toss, claw machines, and creative writing. Everyone watched as the guy handed me the oversized dragon with enough styrofoam beads to be an EPA violation. I was the short king big shit of the carnival. It was my dream.

Soon I landed back in reality. I was living with three other roommates and an assortment of everyone’s significant others and there was no room for an oversized red dragon with googly eyes in my bedroom. I stashed it downstairs, where the twenty pounds of polystyrene quickly absorbed the smell of litter boxes and wet basement. I gave it away during a house party where some drunk guy slung a leg over it and rode it out the front door. You hope everyone has their time with the dragon.

If you want an inspirational after age 40 story, I’m your guy. I’ll be 45 when my first book comes out. I would tell my younger self this: No one can see you trying. No one can see you die at this. No one can see you right now, and that’s the point. Just keep doing it, especially when it feels like you’re doing nothing. Put yourself out there, even if there is no great way to do it and you don’t know how, and you don’t know what it’s about, what it’s supposed to look like, or even who you are in this process.

For so much of this, you will be your only supporter, your only funder, your only hope, and the only mourner. For so much of this, you will be the first and the last person to read it. There will be no editors, no back and forth passes, no collaboration, no validation. You will publish in things no one else has heard of. You will write in places here and there, which are also nowhere, in corners of the internet and back pages of notebooks.

How will you know how much to give away when you have to give away everything? What will you save of yourself? What will you save for the book? What book? What if there is no book coming to save you? Run towards it anyway. Bang it out anyway. Blog. Submit. Send. Bleed it out on social media if you have to. Let it out. It’s not art, it’s only a pressure valve.

And when you get the chance, let it explode. Catapult yourself into the sun. No one pays attention until you set yourself on fire.

TBQ7 is coming in the new year, as soon as I finish sending rejections. The writing process has been a bit like trying to figure out how the googly eyed dragon fits into my life. It’s going to be a unique transitional issue, with writing that’s very much at the edge, looking out unafraid, curious, unblinking. I’ve been in a state of transitioning as well. We’re also considering a print format for TBQ8.

This newsletter will always be free, but if you want to pay, it funds the lit mag, and we pay $100 per piece. I intend to update the newsletter more and share more thoughts on the writing process in the new year. In the meantime, my advice is go for it.

-MM