Is this me giving up? I mean, maybe, I guess, sort of (Monthly update #4)

Plus: Wonka, Taylor Swift, Asimov

I turned thirty-nine last Tuesday; I also started at my first “real job” in ten years, and I’m not sure how to feel about that.

Let’s answer the obvious question first: it’s a part-time gig running the front desk at my church and its affiliated school. Not a terribly fascinating job—just a lot of answering phones and letting people into the building (or keeping them locked out in the event that they’re carrying AR-15s). It’s just a few hours a day to help pay the bills, but it’s also the first time in ten years that I have to get up, shower, shave, put on pants, go somewhere, and clock in. And it feels a little bit like giving up.

If you’ve been following my career with bated breath (and obviously, you have), you know I’ve been trying to make this ✨writer✨ thing work for a while now. Ten years ago, my first child was born, and I was let go from my umpteenth unfulfilling teaching gig. Around the same time, I realized I’d never be happy until I published a book or two, so I set to work on making that happen; I didn’t expect to get rich doing it, but I thought maybe I could earn some supplementary income while staying home with the kiddos. Over the course of the next few years, I managed to publish a couple of well-received books, and my wife managed to land a job that paid far better than either of us had ever hoped, so eventually (with her blessing), I quit doing all the gig work I’d picked up along the way (editing, running social media, writing clickbait, etc.) to focus on what I really wanted to do—writing novels.

Buuuut, that was two years ago, and since then I’ve failed to sell a single book (nor are my various works-in-progress coming along all that well). Meanwhile, inflation has gone through the roof and that sugar-momma paycheck isn’t stretching as far as it used to, and my kids are comfortably school-aged, so back to the workforce I go!

So, am I giving up? Maybe! As the years go on, I do find myself caring less and less about professional success. I look around at the sorts of books that sell, and I think back on the degrading interviews I’ve had to do to promote my books, and I gaze with horror into the toxic abyss of online “writer culture,” and just sort of wonder why I ever got into this. Meanwhile, the world as a whole has gotten, so, so stupid—I used to think that one of my strengths as a writer was that I could speak to the various camps in the so-called Culture War pretty fluently, but in the last ten years, I’ve seen them all abandon their best principles and triple down on their dumbest ideas, and I wonder if I have anything left to say to any of them. If I’m ever to achieve any kind of success, I want to do it on my own terms—and unless your name is Frank Sinatra, doing things your way is rarely much of a moneymaker.

So here I am, at this church desk. But I guess I haven’t really given up, because behind that desk I’m still tapping away at my next novel (please don’t tell my supervisor¹). And my agent is still out there fighting the good fight, trying to sell my last novel. So it’s not over. It’s just a new chapter. One that involves a lot of peering at a security camera monitor, trying to figure out what’s a backpack and what’s a semiautomatic rifle. 🕹🌙🧸

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Poll of the moment

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⬅️ In case you missed it: Every book I read in 2023, ranked (definitively)

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Stuff I’ve been enjoying lately

If you read me regularly, you know I’m kind of a huge sucker for a good musical—you give me a soaring melody, some jaw-dropping visuals to accompany it, and an honest emotional place for all of it to come from, and I will unironically sit there with a gaping smile on my face and tears running down my cheeks (as we manly men do). But honestly, I did not expect Wonka to have that effect on me—multiple times.

My doubt stemmed, mainly, from the conviction that a Willy Wonka origin story was an absolute bottom-of-the-barrel idea: Who asked for this? Not everything needs to have a Gritty Reboot™️ or a Cinematic Universe™️! Can’t we just leave some mysteries alone??? But honestly, that’s what Wonka gets right: Up until its last couple of minutes (at which point it’s earned it), the film remains entirely unconcerned with just-so stories about how things arrived at the starting point for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Instead, it’s just a man-against-the-world tale of an idealistic chocolatier finding his legs in a cutthroat market, and changing a few lives along the way—a story that owes about as much to Charles Dickens and The Music Man as it does to the original Roald Dahl novel.

But despite avoiding these pitfalls of prequelitis (or maybe because it avoids them), it still manages to feel a lot like something Roald Dahl himself could have written—often moreso than many direct adaptations of his work. Like Dahl’s books’, Wonka’s is a world that operates on pure dream logic—a world where you can sneak into a zoo, milk a giraffe, and escape to the air via a bundle of helium balloons (while singing a gorgeous duet, natch); a world that’s unimaginably, impossibly cruel—but where the victory still, somehow, belongs to the small, the innocent, and the wide-eyed.

Now that superhero movies appear to be on the wane, I’ve heard certain Hollywood insiders speculate that the Next Big Thing in movies might be videogame IP—to which I found myself muttering, “Please, God, no.” As much as I love videogames, the world does not need more movies based on them. But hear me out: What if, instead, the Next Big Thing is musicals??? Not the lavish, overproduced roadshow musicals of the sixties, or the self-congratulating, prestige-hungry musicals of the aughts, but just fun, mid-budget musicals. Wouldn’t that be refreshing? And with the success of Wonka and The Color Purple—and with Mean Girls launching to its built-in audience today—it doesn’t seem impossible!

Let’s do it, guys! Let’s make “fetch” (i.e., musicals) happen! 🕹🌙🧸

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Favorite comment of the month

Here's my take on Asimov: Asimov’s early novels aren’t really novels, but short stories or novellas linked thematically or otherwise together. I think The Gods Themselves is brilliant, but it’s the most uncharacteristic or least Asimovy of his books. You might just want to try reading the short story Nightfall, which is, I think, great while also feeling very much like an Asimov work; and also short, so there’s no commitment.

I hope you don't mind, but I’m stealing your idea. —Hal Johnson 🕹🌙🧸

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1. This is a joke. She knows.