Christmas 2013
By Jeff Hampton
Stuart didn't know why his heart felt so heavy, but he believed it might have something to do with feeling like he was being pushed around by God for reasons that he didn't understand. And if not pushed around, then just left dangling in the wind to be spun and twisted right and left and back again until he could hardly speak or think straight.
The most recent bout of this ailment was brought on by the arrival in the mail of a royalty check from his publisher that would barely buy a muffin and a tall coffee at Starbucks. He'd poured out his heart, he'd worked hard, he'd sat at tables in bookstores waiting for people to buy books who were more interested in renting another movie to entertain their obvious shallow minds and feed their empty souls. He'd waited three months for the check after receiving one that was even smaller in the previous quarter, and now that this one had arrived he couldn't imagine waiting another three months for a slip of paper that told him nobody really wanted his book. The previous check had come in the heat of summer. Now it was chilly and raining. By the time the next check arrived, the tulips would begin to show their heads in the garden. The waiting was aging him because each check pushed the calendar further and further into the future.
He was of a mind to quit the whole thing and go back to work that paid, but he had two more books at the publisher and he had committed himself to seeing them through, which meant proofreading and negotiating a cover design with an artist he'd never met and then getting the word out and once more sitting in chairs at tables and waiting for people to walk up to him and buy a book that they had never heard of and now that they had, they really didn't want. What they really wanted was to walk past the books to the movie section to pick out another movie. You know the one, about the alien invasion that is launched against the earth but is thwarted by the vampires who join forces with the zombies and are led into the final apocalyptic battle by the kick-ass president with a grenade launcher strapped to his back. Stuart thinks he might like to see that movie too -- because he hasn't seen a movie in months -- but he doesn't have time because he has to proofread that manuscript that the editor sent back to him.
The only thing that kept him moving forward was Katy and her unwavering belief that he had something important to say and that people needed to hear it. He would never think that -- and certainly never believe it himself. (Okay, he sometimes felt that way when he first thought about writing something, but then his self-conscious angst would always get the best of him and he was certain that he had churned out a pile of crap by the time he finished it.) But he loved Katy and trusted her instincts and opinions, and if Katy believed it and said it, then he was willing to indulge her.
More than that, he was willing to trust her with what he once upon a time had told himself was his "calling." It had welled up in him three years earlier while in the seventh year of a changeless and ultimately meaningless job. He had allowed himself to believe that the calling was real to the point that he quit the job. He enjoyed the freedom he had to think and write about things that he believed were meaningful. But the money was not coming in, and he was still living in a world and with a mindset that said success was measured by what you put in your bank account. Yes, he enjoyed the accolades, and they came frequently with his weekly blogs and his occasional short stories and essays. But none of that generated any income, and that dampened his spirits.
So when Katy convinced him that he should publish one of his manuscripts, he pursued it because he believed that if he could create a book, he could sell a book. And not just one copy, but maybe dozens, even hundreds, perhaps thousands. He could create a small name and a reasonable living for himself and Katy doing something that he really loved to do. He could even quit doing the little freelance jobs that made him feel like he was contributing and concentrate solely on books.
But six months after the first book was published, he'd only sold a few dozen copies. Actually he had sold a couple of hundred copies, but most of those were to people he knew. Out in the real world of bookstores and websites where total strangers vote with their dollars on who the great writers are, he had only sold a couple of dozen. Which meant he was a faint blip on a radar screen that nobody could see unless they were really looking for it. On the website of the most popular bookseller, his book was ranked at about two million out of the more than eight million titles they sold. The high mark had come a month earlier when the sale of a paltry eight books in one day at a signing boosted him to about fifty thousand in the rankings. Oh how he longed now just to be ranked at one hundred thousand again.
And now he had two more books at the publisher, one that had come back with edits that needed his attention by this time next week, and the other that was lost somewhere in the unknown jungle of children's book illustrators, which worried him because it never really was strictly a children's book but had been written by a middle-aged man who had childish thoughts that he liked to share with other childish adults. And downstairs on the kitchen table was another manuscript that he had finished and he needed to read again. But he wondered if it was worth the effort. Katy liked it -- she loved it in fact. Stuart himself believed it was his best work because it was his most personal work. It was a story about people who were far removed from his own experience, but into their stories he had weaved his own joys, his pains, his aspirations, his defeats. But it wasn't enough that he and Katy liked it. Or that friends who liked his first book would like it (or say they like it and support him by buying it). He needed total strangers to want it and like it and buy it so that a royalty check would buy him more than just a muffin and a cup of coffee.
Stuart was pondering that and everything else that was wrong about what he was doing and how it was all going so poorly when he had a sudden wave of inspiration. He needed to get started on the annual Christmas story that he promised Katy he would write. Off and on over the previous decade he had written Christmas stories and emailed them to family and friends as a sort of Christmas card. He wrote one two years ago and it was well received, but when he tried again the next year it had come out so poorly that he refused to send it. Katy agreed that it wasn't one of his best stories so he put it aside and they sent out regular Christmas cards instead.
Now, as the rain that had been falling for two days began to subside and the sky lightened from dark gray to translucent white as the sun peeked from behind the thinning clouds, he had an inspiration for the beginning of a story and he sat down to write it, his fingers moving swiftly over the keyboard as he typed out sentence after sentence without stopping to think or read or edit as he went.
But then he paused to refill his coffee cup and when he came back to his desk and scrolled back to the top of the document, he saw the title he had written an hour earlier, "Christmas 2013," and then he began to read below it. He put his coffee cup down and rubbed his face with both hands. What he had written was not so much a story as an autobiographical rant about his failure as a writer. He read it again and, actually, it wasn't half bad; it was edgy, raw, honest. He liked it. Still, it had nothing at all to do with Christmas. And, he doubted that anyone would want to read it, let alone buy it.
THE END
Copyright © 2013 by Jeff Hampton