Summer's Over, the Hard Work and September Begins — It's Fix-It Fall, Y'all!

If you know me, you know I’m always writing a book.

I have one novel I’ve been working on for more than a decade and other, unfinished novels in the hundreds of pages I haven’t touched in two years or more. I wrote a historical novel during the pandemic that’s an amazing high concept but in dire need of being … completely rewritten.

Right now I’m working on my memoir/humor book about my life with Bipolar disorder. It’s a humor book because, c’mon, I basically grew up like a Cosby kid who could never have “big fun” because my parents wouldn’t let me do anything. There are no real wild stories about irresponsible sex or wantonness unless you count my affinity for “virginal” booty-popping — which is when you’re a virgin but you dance like you’re not and freak out if a boy pays attention to you).

While my story, at turns, can be sad, my “rock bottom” was less sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll, and more like Jessie Spano being “so excited” while hopped up on caffeine pills. Meaning it was sad, small, and kind of pathetic. It involved working at Macy’s in a dying mall in Florissant, Mo., living in my parents’ basement getting drunk off boxed wine from Target, taking some Klonopin, and then calling the suicide prevention hotline looking for any reason to stay on this earth.

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I’ve been working on the proposal, off and on, for about three years or longer now because my biggest problem since becoming an adult writer is one of completion. There are just so. Many. More. Distractions now! Plus I write about me better when it’s not about me, if that makes sense. I’m too close to my own subject and get lost in the belly button lint of my life.

But with summer ending and Labor Day weekend behind me, it’s time to get to work and fix these manuscripts. Yes, “Fix-it fall” is upon us, or me at least, as I focus on writing, working, personal growth and therapy, exercising (I found folks to play tennis with, y’all!), saving money, and making money. Much like how fall has always been about “back to school,” it’s back to work, back to the never-ending grind that I’ve been on since I was about 13 years old, dreaming of being a published author.

My goal now though, is to finally get this done — by any means necessary — and get this book proposal to market, killing the writing and making money birds with one stone, but I do sometimes wish I could do what I used to do as a kid where I was so bored I had no choice BUT to use my imagination to keep me sane.

Back in the day, I could finish my shitty little novels as a child because I had infinite free time. School came easy to me and I had a non-existent social life thanks to parents whose idea of “fun” for their teenagers was to tell them to “stay in the house.” But as an adult, I’d come up with great concepts, write the shit out of the character development, get lost in the relationships and psychology of the characters, then get bored by the time the plot kicks in as distractions like work and dating would come arise.

Most of my novels are like the TV show Seinfeld — they’re books about nothing, as I’d rather prattle on for pages explaining why a character is so messed up rather than just show them doing something messed up.

But this is a pattern for me, a prolific writer who used to update her blog 6 times a day for years, and once wrote about 2 to 3 reported pieces daily for local newspapers at the start of my journalism career, then would go home and write the longest, comic-book inspired screenplays back before comic book movies were a thing.

(I kid you not. Somewhere on an old hard drive is a 12-episode saga loosely based on DC and Marvel characters, but they’re all people of color and it’s somehow really about mental health, the military-industrial complex, and journalism. Hmmm, maybe I should dust that one off?)

But I’ve always been writing. Even as a child, I wrote a little illustrated flipbook for my baby sister and made my own little “magazine” called The Tuesday Times. I wrote my first (terrible) novel at 13 in a large spiral notebook that was 178 pages written in long-hand cursive. With no portable laptops or smartphones back in 1990, several ballpoint pens (in green ink for some reason) and this thick-ass notebook were how I wrote my novel on the go — usually at school, during class when I was bored out of my mind.

My teachers thought I was taking meticulous notes, but I was actually writing a neo-noir-style detective novel inspired by a short story in the “graphic novel” Garfield: His Nine Lives with a main character named after the character Harry Stone of Night Court, my favorite TV show at the time.

(Remember, I was a child and these were my inspirations. A cartoon cat built for capitalism and a TV show with Marsha Warfield. It was a more innocent time, y’all!)

After that foray, I would go on to write about three or four more “notebook novels” throughout junior high and high school, mostly about college kids (thanks to my other favorite TV show A Different World). Mostly because I hadn’t learned the mantra “write what you know” yet. I remember I once used the term “over-sexed” on the “cover” of one of these novels, alarming my 7th-grade Speech teacher who, brilliantly, asked to read my book rather than jump to conclusions. She quickly upon purusal realized I had no concept of sex whatsoever, didn’t know how sex worked, and there was no actual sex in the novel. I was using the term, incorrectly, to mean “girl-crazy” for my male main character. She seemed so pleased to hand the book back to me knowing I was just a goofy child with a large vocabulary that I only barely understood.

I didn’t attempt to write what I knew until my senior year in high school where I tried to write a novel about high school but got bored halfway through it because I preferred to write a 200-page “screenplay” on my family’s old Hewlett-Packard personal computer inspired by the Jodeci album Diary of a Mad Band and a Vibe Magazine article about their story of going from gospel singing choir boys to carrying machetes on stage. I even drew a picture from the cassette tape art that still hangs somewhere in my familial home in Florissant, Mo. It was in my bathroom in the basement for DECADES.

Eventually, my writerly inspirations would mature right along with me, especially after taking African-American literature, English 101-102, creative writing, and media theory classes at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville in the mid-to-late 90s. I would go on to read James Agee, Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, Ralph Ellison, James Weldon Johnson, Joan Didion, Alice Walker, Joe Eszterhas, Ernest Hemingway, Toni Morrison, Wallace Thurman, Nella Larson, and more. I would write papers about my favorite writers in the style of epic, tragic Greek poems and funny short stories. My favorite Black writers were mostly from the Harlem Renaissance period and all my favorite white writers were now old “new” journalists. I even named my one and only pet cat after Hunter S. Thompson (the “S” stood for “Shaggy.”)

At the time, SIUE’s mass communications program was in transition and being overhauled, so it was exceptionally rigorous and very grounded in reality as my professors all were former working journalists, some quite cynical about it, who did not mince words about how tough this industry would be. I would go on to rule the roost as the editor-in-chief of the student paper, The Alestle, for two years in a row, out of the 3-and-a-half-years I was in undergrad.

Unfortunately, while my writing improved drastically with college alongside my first two journalism jobs in Midland, TX and Bakersfield, Calif., my completion skills for my book projects became non-existent. Again, I could write 100 pages of exposition but would be so worn out by the time the plot kicked in I wouldn’t finish the book.

Today I have a lot going on. I’m on this fitness and personal health journey that I’ve been adamantly into since about 2021 — graduating from high-intensity training classes to playing tennis and rediscovering pilates. I’m finally making some real headwinds on some long-standing mental health issues I neglected around my spending and dating life. I worked with an amazing executive coach for nearly two years — the incredibly brilliant and thoughtful Sandra Cohen, who helped me adapt to my new role as EIC of HuffPost while getting me to “silence” my inner critic that kept undermining my success. I’m sweeping up the cobwebs of my life and tying up the loose ends. I’m reinvesting in myself and my relationships and experiencing this amazing thing called “growth.”

Meaning — This adult is adulting as hard as one can adult. Now I just need to … finish this proposal, work with my editor on polishing it, and get this bad boy to market — again, by any means necessary.

Will it be any good? God, I hope so. I hope didn’t half-write thousands of pages of unpublished manuscripts and screenplays to NOT see one make it to the finish line. Much like how I felt like I just needed one romantic situation to make it past four dates (or, shit, one date) to eventually find real love, I just need one book, y’all. One book to ideally lead to the many.

I’m working on it. I’m working on everything. Let’s get it going this fall.

The Substack of the Writer Formally Known As The Black Snob is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.