Birthday Week, and I Have to Sell
The Worst Seller in the World, Part 3
It’s Monday, seven in the evening, and I still haven’t announced my book club. I wrote two paragraphs justifying why I hadn’t. I deleted them. I talked to Claude and he told me: publish now, there’s still time. He’s right and I take the hit. Two minutes in Figma. Less than one to post the story on Instagram. Fuck.
I breathed deep when I realized how easy it was. I felt light. I stared at my phone for a few seconds and closed the app. I also felt ashamed, because I’d rather write about not being able to do something than do it. Because the writing took me almost forty minutes.
It’s Tuesday, it’s my birthday. I worked as much as I had to and then poured myself a rum and Coke. The story from yesterday is still pulling in emails. Twenty-six so far. Plus more than twenty-five hundred on Substack I’ve built up over the past year. All of them are getting the offer they can’t refuse.
The glass is empty now and soaked in the smell of rum. It’s beautiful. I’m planning tomorrow’s announcement in my head — everything lives in there — and an idea blows up in my face, because I’ll have to record a video and kill that particular shame. It doesn’t scare me to do it badly, or to get criticized. What scares me is that it won’t come out the way I want and then I’ll think (me) (about myself) (about my own self) that I made something dumb and boring. I never want to be dumb and boring.
The storm’s coming in. The power went out and the internet died. The power came back and the internet stayed wherever it went. Time to eat. Time to forget about all of it. Now it’s more rum, hugging my daughters, kissing my wife. It’s my birthday.
Shit. It’s Thursday already. Wednesday was a write-off, work-wise, because I had responsibilities with my daughter: fucking school. She’s starting high school and they read you every one of their rules, which make the place sound more like a prison than somewhere you learn.
While I’m putting the book club together, a message comes in from my business partner — I’m his ghostwriter — telling me the client isn’t too happy, and the strategy we built won’t pay off for three years. In this model I don’t exist. We’re two people pretending to be one guy. He sells, I write. It’s not bad work and it’s not a bad client. But the message reaches me secondhand. He answers the client secondhand. (I need to exist.)
My morning and half my afternoon are gone. What’s left is working fast enough to announce something. Tomorrow is the last day of July and my book club starts on the third. There’s still time. I put together an email in Substack and send it, while my partner asks for more.
Last night I slept badly because Pepe, my dog, was scratching like a maniac. He licked his paws and it sounded like a slobbering sea breaking against the shore. He paced back and forth. I flipped the pillow looking for the cold side, but my brain switched on and so did my bladder. I ended up in the bathroom, pissing and thinking about how tired I was. I went back to bed and the same phrase detonated in my head again: sell sell sell.
It’s Friday, and another night of bad sleep. This morning, while I delivered other people’s work, my mind wandered into the complexity of being a father and a writer and a businessman at the same time. With the girls home the distractions multiply, and so do the whys. And then, after a couple of runs at the keyboard and two deep breaths, it’s eight at night. My family is waiting for me to watch a movie. The book club post is already up on Instagram. I’m finishing this piece and somehow it feels unfinished.
Translated from the Spanish by the author, with help from Claude.