Life really keeps us moving, doesn’t it? Here it is, another year since I’ve written on my “blog.” It’s not much of a blog without entries, is it? Apologies to the no one who is currently patiently waiting on updates from me. All zero of you. It makes me look back and wonder if I still need this site. It’s like the old days on yahoo message boards and xanga.com. The world has moved on, and I’ve grown the hell up.
This year, I decided I was getting old. It took a long time to come to that decision, but when your body starts not liking the things that it used to, and the doctor has you on meds for high blood pressure and everything aches all the time, it’s time to admit you’re getting old-er.
That has given me a lot to think about this year. When you hit a certain age, you start to run through the reruns and replays of your life. There’s a lot of soul-searching that comes along. As one ages up, you start to wonder about your legacy and what you’re contributing to the world as a whole.
That made me come to the realization that I have found the one thing I’ve meant to do on this planet. I’m here to write, whether it’s novels or screenplays. I love writing novels. I wrote my first book thirteen years ago. I’ve written six more since then. Yes. I have seven novels. If you are one of the zero people reading this blog, you’ll see that there are a few missing in these posts.
Last week I finished up a new novel. It was a journey. This book was particularly personal and a writing experiment. I wrote a first-person auto-fiction story based on my senior year of high school. Much of the book is true. Much of the book is fiction. It’s not a game to figure out which is which. It’s how the story is told. It’s a very literary attempt, yet being commercial at the same time. I believe they call that upmarket.
That really made me start to examine myself, and it really threw my age into contemplation. I did a lot of reflecting on happy memories and lingered on the bad ones. I didn’t know that I had a memoir in me or that anything in my life was worthy of a novel. As it turns out, there was at least one. My new book. It made me realize that there were other events in my life that were also probably worthy of being transcribed into a semi-fictional tale. I also realized that I wasn’t going to drum up any of that madness anytime soon. Those parts of my life can stay secret for a while longer.
Last year, I finished up the mega sci-fi epic The Child of the Art. My no-rules writing. 150k+ words of space opera. That was a wonderfully fun ride. I’m starting to enjoy the novel writing process more and more. It is a muscle that you can’t let slip. You need to constantly massage that muscle to keep it going and put out the words. I took a very, very long break after Child of the Art, and it was too long. I struggled to get into the memoir. It was very difficult. Until it wasn’t. Once I was about halfway through the book, the words came out like soup from a ladle. They poured onto the page. I wrote over 55k words in the month of August. That was an insane amount. I shocked myself with that. It felt great.
Once I was finished with the latest, and with my self-doubt brought on by my age, I realized what a sum of work I have. I have seven novels that cross many, many genres. Two of them I failed at self-publishing, and they’ve drifted into nothingness. The other five… have never been seen by anyone except for a few family members and beta readers. Five novels. Thousands and thousands of unseen and unread pages. All of this thinking led to one conclusion.
It’s time to start submitting to agents. You might ask, why haven’t you done that before? I have. A little bit here and there, but I never dedicated giant swaths of time to it. After finishing a book, I would submit a few here and there, but now, I have a library of topics and genres that can reach a broad, commercial audience. I’m a much better writer than I was then, and it wasn’t the time before. Now, it’s time. That’s my quest for the rest of the year. I need representation, not only for my novels but also for my film Galaxie. I feel comfortable pausing my writing now to dedicate some time to monetizing my life’s work. It’s time.
So, if you don’t hear from me for another year, that’s what I’m doing.
Michael Mustizer 
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