to preface this post to say that i am only at the beginning of my marathon, book writing, publishing, promoting course over the next ten weeks and already i’m unable to keep a solid theme for this post, i lost it for a bit there in the middle but then i think i really pull it off there at the end. what do you think? let me know in the comments or @eanweslynn
that being said, allow me to re-introduce myself.
my name is ean weslynn, and i have been abstinent since may.
<circle of anonymous strangers claps hands half-heartedly)
this is the first i've really spoken about it. i don't really mention it and i'm rarely around anyone to mention it to. i'd talk to jones about it, but he's my ass. man, my assistant, man. he knows what i've done cause he's the one that put it in the calendar. we don't need to talk about how there haven't been any fuchsia-color coded events all summer.
why buy the cow when you get the milk for free?
some people are lactose-intolerant, i am not some people. i love milk. heck, i love almost everything dairy (i'm looking at you skim milk), i would dare say that the only thing i love more than milk is free milk. free milk is the best, and it's even better if it's straight from the cow, not some gif of milk on tumblr or amateur milk movies milktube.com. ask any of my irl friends, i have story after story of me getting free milk in cars, on beaches, at a farm..i forgot what i was talking about..
oh yeah, milk represented sex.
i'm not some sex-negative moral-pusher, i just realized that i wanted to mix my metaphor up and have milk be something else for a change. i'd be lying if i said i understood this at the time, but as i was getting more into the series, the less i found myself getting into other people. they say if you want to get over someone turn them into literature. what they don't say is what the literature turns into. it turns into everything for you. at least, that's what it became for me.
this is by far my longest relationship of my adult life, coming in second to my relationship with my non-clicking hand (to be fair, my hand has been involved with the book from the start).
the whole process is joyfully exhausting and i really can't wait for it to be over. like what i imagine a baby's parents feel (in between the crying and pooping) and what i feel about new love. (maybe that's why this is my longest relationship) not because i no longer like the book, but because it's time for us to move on.
this brings me to why i have chosen to become abstinent. because i don't know how someone could do it any other way. as all my fellow self-pubbers know there is no rest for the writer.
if i'm not bookworking, i'm editing, storyboarding, note taking, plotting, arcing, time-lining, critiquing, marketing, promoting, networking, follow-uping, texting, tweeting, facebooking, google+ing, working, socializing, overdrawing, drinking, eating and sleeping. at no point in that list do i have time to think about how cute that guy was or how many days it's been since i last felt a man's touch (117).
mad props to those fabled ones that they write sarah jessica parker movies about, the ones that can have those things. not me. not now at least.
in high school economics i was introduced to cost-benefit analysis. when resources are finite, you have to give something up in order to gain anything. simple enough.
at first writing meant giving up a bit of each day to giving up a bit of me to the page (or the google doc). as my interest and skills grew so did the necessary requirements to sustain such growth. now it is no longer an escape, it is what i do. from now on, this thing, this storytelling, will be the thing that i need escape from.
starting a new relationship is hard enough, but when you are spending most of your time in another world that no one can join you in, not without you leaving a map first. so i’m working on the map and after this first map is finished. i’ll see about having someone else join me on the trail
so i guess to remix these metaphors, until i finish the book, i’m not trying to get any, but once the book is done, i will reassess the situation and when i finally put up a fuchsia-colored event i’m gonna gulp down that big hard glass of free milk like a farmboy back home from thailand.
as always hova says it best, ‘i’m not a business man. i’m a business, man.’ and in order for my business to stay in business there can’t be funny business.
ean.weslynn 