Was It Something I Said?

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I have a theory that goes something like this. Two types of people find acceptance in this world. People who are very normal and people who are very weird. If you’re normal, then, lulz, everyone likes you. Meanwhile, if you’re very, very weird, you’re always going to find people who are just as weird as you are and then you have a protective bubble from surrounding yourself with freaky weirdos.

But then there are people like me.

I’m an extreme extrovert and I have no idea what I’m doing with my life. I’m a pretty good conversationalist — or at least like to think so — but I just don’t know how to act in a “normal” way that fits into what people I should act.

I bring this up because I continue to feel a great deal of angst about how all these manuscript consultants that I’ve spoken to about this novel project I’m working on obviously have one interaction with me and think, “I don’t want anything to do with that guy.”

It’s very unsettling because it raises the prospect that there’s some sort of mysterious culture clash between myself and the literary world. It makes me fear that I could write a really good pop novel and yet still fail, not because of my writing but because literary types — like literary agents — will simply think I’m too weird once they inevitably do due diligence on me.

This is really causing me a lot of angst at the moment. I hate this because it goes back to how I’m too old to change who I am. The worst thing that anyone else said about me is that I’m a “delusional jerk with a good heart.” I review in my mind what one manuscript consultant said during one of our two Zoom calls and I think she was afraid I lived near her and was going to be some sort of obsessive stalker or something.

That kind of hurts my feelings. I generally mean well, wear my heart on my sleeve and am honest to a fault. And yet apparently to some (all?) literary types I’m a deranged psychopath to be avoided at all costs.

This is all very disheartening. It’s these type of problems that weirdos who aren’t weird enough to have weird friends have to deal with.

Author: Shelton Bumgarner

I am the Editor & Publisher of The Trumplandia Report

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