Allison Strong
The Radioactive Patient
Sometimes I think writers are selfish. Let me explain-right before Christmas, a friend who said he’d help me with my website blew off my emails, even the email that simply wished him a Merry Christmas.
Wow. Just Wow.
In the five years that I’d known him, we’d grown quite close, shared authorly hopes and dreams and always responded to each others’ communications. At one point in time, he’d hoped to get a literary agent and as I finished my memoir, I hoped he and I would be in the querying trenches together.
He taught me about beta-readers, and so here’s how it went; he’d read my chapters and, because he’s hugely prolific, I read nine advanced review copies of his various thrillers and proofed them for typos. In turn, he taught me track changes and other functions in Microsoft Word. The fellowship was incredible.
Sometimes I was asked to turn his books around rather quickly. So upon his requests, I’d drop everything I was doing and read the books in one fell swoop. This would take about ten hours of my time. I figured that when the time came, he’d respond in kind. (That was my first mistake).
The first time he’d come over, it was clear that I’d need help migrating all the blog posts and comments from my WordPress site over to this blog. When I asked about SEO (I mean, what do I know?) he said “I don’t have the time.” Then he offered to come over in two weeks and help me out a little more. But when the time came, he blew off my emails. Maybe he was unable or unwilling to tell me he couldn’t come over.
The whole thing left me feeling like he didn’t give a crap about whether or not I succeeded in building a website that would aid in my search for a literary agent for my memoir. That was the hardest part to wrap my head around.
But after six days of feeling ashamed, angry and wondering what I did wrong, I realized, my friend and I are on two separate and distinct writers’ journeys. I’ve been published in literary publications, daily newspapers and mental health magazines and am shooting for traditional publication, while he is a proud and prolific indie author with no desire to deal with gatekeepers. And I have to agree with him on one thing: the query process, hell, even preparing for the query process is a real soul crusher. My indie writer buddy is probably tired of hearing about the agent/publisher crap. It’s just not his jam.
Simple deal: He didn’t want to come over on the days he’d offered to. Simple. He just didn’t want to. And as much as I’m intimidated by the prospect of building a decent website, it’s no good having someone come over who doesn’t want to be there in the first place.
What kind of friend would I be if I expected him to do stuff he didn’t want to do? Right?
We can still be friends, but I can’t put in any more time that leads me to have expectations. Even I know that expectations are horseshit. I wish I’d come to this realization sooner, but unfortunately, it’s taken ten days. And the website is coming along. Little by slowly.