Chapter Three

It’s not a vacation when you’re unemployed…

Quitting your white-collar job to seek the publishing grail feels great. You can drink on weeknights, sleep late, then pad around the house saying to yourself, “Well. This is the life of a writer. I know, because I’m a writer.”

This high lasts until the first bill arrives. Hello, home insurance. It wasn’t a killer or anything—me and the bride had plenty of money saved and invested—but it did tickle an itch in the back of my mind, which said, “Day Seven As A Writer… two thousand dollars out, and zero dollars in.”

Hmmm.

Three weeks later, a similar epiphany struck as the monthly bills screamed for nourishment, but this time the voice said, “Day Thirty As a Writer… seven thousand four hundred dollars out, and zero dollars in.” Writer’s High, meet Writer’s Horror.

The checkbook was bleeding money like a James Cameron production, and not a bloody cent was coming in to replace it. Time to get going on the minimum wage jobs and start writing.

Good doesn’t necessarily mean fun

The more I pondered my idea for the book, the better it seemed. Who among us doesn’t have gut-wrenching stories from some awful job back in our salad days? Who among us doesn’t laugh when friends share their tales? Who among us doesn’t love NASCAR?

The problem with my idea, however, was the reality of the idea: It required actually working these jobs. No, not shadow an employee for a day, or chat with someone about what it was like… I had to go apply, get hired, and actually show up for work.

Can you, my friend, picture yourself adorned in a Burger World visor and nametag?

How about ringing a doorbell, and handing someone their pizza?

Can’t envision it? Me neither.

The other reality that hit me involved a merger of physics and economics: As nature abhors a vacuum, so the world abhors a checking account. And as nature will destroy a vacuum, so the world destroyed my checking account.

After working the appropriate mathematical formulas based on minimum wage paychecks, an obvious conclusion emerged: I could cover our bills working these jobs, provided I skipped lunch and only slept four hours every three weeks. Begrudgingly, I put the word out to my marketing contacts on the street that I was available for freelance and consulting projects.

Over the next year, my W-2 form boasted paychecks from such career endeavors as a pizza delivery guy, an ice cream scooper, a construction worker, an ER tech, a wrangler on a dude wagon train, and a big, fat zero that came from an extensive but failed attempt to get hired on by two of the big box retailers. (Interestingly, I worked a consulting job for a month that paid more than all the other jobs combined.)

The sum total of the madness yielded a manuscript I was proud of, which was immediately overnighted to my agent. A week later, the phone rang.

Agent: Pray, I love it. That’s the good news. The bad news is-- well, you know the bad news. It rhymes with “lurking at a Burger World.”

Me: Dude. Dude, Dude, Duuuude.

Agent: Sorry. Burger World. Gotta do it. Send me the pages when you’re done.

Me: Dude. Dude.

Agent: The name of the book is You Want Fries With That? It’s a little obvious you failed to represent in that particular profession.

Me: Dude.

Agent: Keep it real, Pray. Send me the pages.

With the same enthusiasm the Jewish slaves used stack stones for the Pharaoh, yours truly waded into the combat zone of hamburgelry, and landed a job.

Let me tell you, getting a job at one of those joints is way more difficult than you think—not because the qualifications are anything more than the ability to fog a mirror, but because the managers are either overworked, brain dead, or achieved the Peter Principle back when the previous manager put them in charge of the French fryer.

There were applications bearing my name languishing at nine national chains when I finally confronted a manager by pointing out my application was submitted three days earlier, and since then they’d put out a help wanted sign.

“Oh,” she said. “Okay. You’re hired.”

The job yielded the pages, and the pages yielded a finished manuscript. Bring on the fame!

A couple of weeks later my agent called.

Using the word “I,” he explained, was boring.

“I did this, I did that,” he said. “You’ve got to hack those out.”

“The book is about me doing this, and me doing that,” I replied. “How the hell do I explain something I did without the word “I”?

“They don’t all have to come out. Just, like, 90%.”

“I repeat my previous question.”

“And I repeat my previous request. And since I’m selling the book, it’s probably a good idea for you to figure it out.”

The space above represents the weeks spent eliminating the word “I” from my manuscript. Oh, and if you would, please take an admiring moment to notice the paucity of “I’s” in this manuscript… despite the fact this book too is about “me” doing this and ‘me” doing that.

How do I do it? I don’t know.

Anyway, the revised manuscript flew north. Fast forward a month.

“You’ve got to get rid of all these passive verbs,” my agent said.

“Good Lord. How do you write a sentence without using frickin’ verbs?”

“Passive verbs, ya’ dolt.”

“What in the hell is a passive verb? A verb that doesn’t fight back?”

“Google it. Learn it. Fix it.”

The space above represents the month needed to research and understand active versus passive verbs, then decide to go Texas Chainsaw on my agent, then change my mind due to my fear of re-entering the world of SASEs, then re-write the freakin’ manuscript.

It was an exercise in mental torture. Or, should that say, the exercise tortured me mentally. Yet another manuscript flew north, and I figured that if my book outsold the Bible for two straight years, an average hourly return of minimum wage might be attainable.

Upon receiving the newly morphed manuscript, my agent called to shower me with praise. “Damn, Pray,” he said. “I can sell this.”