The Truth Behind My Fiction (Or, Why I Should’ve Been a Podiatrist)

The Truth Behind My Fiction (Or, Why I Should’ve Been a Podiatrist)

My novel is off to readers. I’m telling you, that is one terrifying sentence to type. It’s right up there with, “I’m now going to experience Chinese water torture, then have a gasless tooth extraction.”

It’s the immense vulnerability that makes me wish I would’ve chosen to be a podiatrist specializing in corn removal rather than a writer. What if my readers hate it? What if they sit down with that stack of pages, read through the first chapter and whimper that there are nineteen more to go? What if they find the dust bunnies on their baseboards more entertaining than my manuscript? What if the characters are too flat–or, far more likely where I am concerned, blown out of believable proportions?

The instant I knew my novel had reached its first reader, I felt like I was back at my first day of kindergarten when I never actually made it to kindergarten because I barfed all over my jean jumper as soon as I saw the school. Although I didn’t lose my breakfast after an email confirmed my novel’s arrival (I hadn’t eaten anything anyway; I was too busy chewing my fingernails), I did scramble back to my laptop and speed-read through the pages.

Boys and girls, it was as if editing blinders had fallen from my eyes, for I saw those once pristine pages were now soiled with mistakes. The irony is, I had actually warned my readers that the manuscript would still have errors; but when I wrote that, I was riding such a literary high I felt like the love child of J.D. Salinger and Harper Lee. I thought, Shoot dog, if this novel don’t win that fandangled Pulpitzer Prize, I don’t know what will!

Then the blinders fell off and the truth was seen: my novel had ways to go. Not only that, my very intellectual peers were soon going to discover that I didn’t know POV from a KOA. That when one of them had worn a t-shirt to English class that said, “Have Grammar?” to poke fun at the “Got Milk?” advertisement, I hadn’t gotten the joke. That I could place someone into a coma easier than I could place a comma, and that my poor readers were probably going to end up in a coma by the time all my superfluous commas were sought out and destroyed.

Why oh why didn’t I just enter the medical field instead? I would’ve been a great podiatrist. I just loooove feet–or, I guess, shoes….But doesn’t that count for something? If I was in the medical field, I would get consistent pay (okay, pay at all would be swell); I could wear clothes with bunnies or teddy bears on them and no one would bat an eye like they do now; I would have friends that would talk back to me and something to leave to my children besides rickety social media platforms.

Oh yeah, I kinda remember why I never scampered across that medical field: I’m not so good at math…or chemistry, or–or anything, really, to do with science. The closest I have ever come to surgery was when my brother shot bullfrogs in the pig pond, and I waded into the sludgy water and dragged them back to shore by their tiny little arms. I then searched and searched their slimy green skin for symptoms of injury, and when the BB was spotted, I’d squish it out with my fingers and the tiny copper ball would roll into my hand like smuggled treasure.

See? Would a fancy-pants podiatrist ever compare a BB squished from frog skin to smuggled treasure? I think not. Those kind of writing skills have to be worth something.