Your Mom’s Pool

When did I start to hate going in the pool?

No, seriously. I mean pools never did anything to me but for some reason every time someone asks me to go swimming now I make up an excuse that is so overused and unrealistic that I sound like I have PTSD. Did a pool drown me at some point? Or steal my manuscript and pass it off as its own, and it was so traumatic that I just blocked it completely from my memory and all that remains is a forceful desire to NOT get in the pool? 

I really couldn’t tell you, but I sincerely hope that the latter is not true because that would really suck. Writing an entire manuscript only to get the byline changed from “Chloé Johnston” to “Your Mom’s Pool.” What a waste of a perfectly good manuscript…

Honestly, though, I would be more than a little impressed if my pool even got the manuscript published because that shits hard.

I would venture to say that the writing of the book can sometimes be the easier part of the job, only because of the amount of time and energy it takes to find the right agent, write a convincing enough query letter and book proposal, get rejected a million and one times, take a brief interlude to wallow in self-pity until you suddenly realize that the whole process just sucks and the literary agent that said your book idea was terrible was just being a duck, get back on the horse and submit more query letter’s, maybe get an agent, only to then realize that now you have to either write the book or go through rigorous edits, layout challenges, and cover designs, hit a few more bumps in the road, and then, finally, have a published product… That you now have to promote the hell out of in the hopes to get good sales so that maybe another book will be picked up cause now you have credibility. 

I realize that this is a run-on sentence but we’re going to ignore that because this is a blog and not a book.

Even if it was a book, I would probably still keep the run-on sentence because, hello! Creative license here! As a now published author, I should totally have the ability to have atrocious grammar in my own book for the sake of conveying a very convoluted point that will most likely be lost on a lot of people. Nonetheless, the sentence stays. We’re no longer negotiating because if I’m going to beat a published pool in the rankings my book needs to have originality. Duh!

Maybe I should write a book about a pool stealing and publishing a manuscript which then, plot-twist after her PTSD amnesia clears she’s motivated to write the world’s best book which is about a pool stealing her manuscript. I think it has promise.

As in, I would most likely need really deep pockets to self-publish and then hand out a bunch of copies to people randomly, who get really weirded out by a pool stealing a book. But wait…I think that’s happened before? Ok, not really but the rich person with the book thing is totally real.

When I was going to school, at a small community college in central Oregon, I happened upon a book one day while clearing out some space in an old desk at work (I worked in the Admissions office by the way). Now, I couldn’t tell you a single thing about the book except it was sea-themed and the synopsis on the back read like someone had taken a tab of acid, went for a boat ride on their yacht, and then decided to write a book while on the said tab of acid. Point is, it didn’t make a lick of sense. But wait, there’s more.

As I was looking at the book, one of my coworkers let out a really exasperated sigh and said something along the lines of, “That damn book is cursed. We keep trying to get rid of it and then it miraculously shows up again!” According to them, this very wealthy and eccentric man decided to start writing and self-publishing his own books (like I mentioned, deep pockets are a must) and the only way he thought to promote them was to give them away for free on our campus.

I’m not sure if he did this elsewhere but he was kind of a legend around campus as the man who gave away terrible books. If you just so happened to not be in the loop on this guy’s shenanigans, you’d end up taking one of his free books only to realize how bad it is and then, ultimately, you’d leave it somewhere on campus hoping someone else would unknowingly take it home. I’m not even kidding. This actually happened. A lot.

I can’t tell you how many times I ended up in a professor’s office and I happened to find this book and they would just give me the look of, “I can’t get rid of it so I might as well make it useful as a paperweight” type look. 

I did get to meet the fabled man myself once on accident. He had set up camp at a table overflowing with books in one of our corridors and, not knowing this was the guy, I went up to the table to see what was up.

I was tricked! I thought he wasn’t the guy because the weird acid-trip-sea-book wasn’t there, in its place was a steam-punk or weird post-apocalyptic book about…something. To be honest, I didn’t even bother reading the back of this one. But I did take a book and the CD. Yes, he made music too. Based on the books if I’m not wrong.

I ended up finding myself on his website after someone at work had rained on my free book parade by telling me I had just met the weird rich guy that writes bad books. It was a total train wreck but a fun one. Because who doesn’t love ogling at weird people and the weird things they do? 

As I realize that I don’t have anything else to say about this story and the weird man, I’m now coming to the conclusion that my website exists for the very same purpose and that feels weird and not fun because now I know people are going to judge my pool and the terrible manuscript it stole with all of the run-on sentences (like this one). I started this post as a writing exercise but I now realize it is an existential crisis manifested in the form of a manuscript stealing pool. 

Maybe this is because I’m feeling stressy about the query I just submitted and I’m just distracting myself from the awful possibility that it won’t be published, not because it’s not good enough but because a pool stole it instead. I think I’d rather know that a pool published a book that I couldn’t instead of not publishing at all. 

So the moral of this post is that my pool can totally go ahead and steal my manuscript and get it published…but I’m still not going to go in it.

p.s. I’m totally fine guys, just a little tired and reflective about the very real possibility that my pool stole my book idea.