The Lake Always Tells Me the Truth

 

Sometimes it takes a visit to the cottage to put everything into perspective.

The cottage is always the place where I work things out, and talk things out with my husband. It's a place with no social media, and little contact with the real world except for the occasional visit with CBC Radio.

Most years, I arrive at the cottage miserable. One year, I was working the whole time editing books. That was the same year we brought Gordie the pug, and Scott had to leave immediately to return to the city to have the poor little fellow put down. I remember walking in the lake, all by myself, and wailing because nobody but God and the lake could hear me. 

Other years, I've been between jobs and worrying about the future, or fretting over waiting for a security clearance to come through, all the while battling disturbing heart palpitations. Yet another couple of years, I spent trying to bolster the spirits of my friend Jennette who was dying of mouth cancer. It was heartbreaking  watching this brave little soul as she endured the indignity of blenderizing her steak supper.

For the most part, I'm miserable company at the cottage. Ask my friends whom I'm sure thought they'd arrived for a calm vacation, only to realize they had Beelzebub as their host. I don't know why the cottage brings out the worst in me, maybe it's because I finally am forced to sit with my thoughts, chew them over, mourn bad decisions of the past, and bury them in a vat of tequila and red wine.

This year was different. I had just come off the successful launch of my book, Distressed Pavement, a little ditty I wrote during the pandemic basically to save my sanity. I published this book because it was on my bucket list, that with losing weight and getting healthy. It seemed much easier to clang out a book than face my demons, and so I did it, and put it out in the world.

This year, for the first time in eight years, I could celebrate a success of sorts.

And yet, the nagging voice coming from the lake reminded me that I had a new life to face when I returned to Ottawa. I was now a "senior" with arthritic joints and a throbbing knee, someone who was facing financial challenges unless I found a part time job to supplement the stipend the government sent me.

Surely, the lake told me, you don't think you can make a living as a self-publishing author, a person whom most publishers and agents would laugh at, someone who was too impatient and bull headed to ever be a success. Agents are like those people in those terrible car ads on television, you know the ones.

"How is she supposed to publish a book without us checking in?"

They're right you know. My books paid for the publishing but not much else. I actually got a royalty cheque the other day for $10.99 via Paypal, not even enough money to transfer into my bank account. I have thirteen people waiting for my book at the Ottawa Public Library, so I have that going for me, except for the fact the books at the library cost me twenty bucks to produce.

As for those books I've successfully placed in book stores? They each cost me a buck after paying the printer and the book store commission.

And best of all, now that all the congratulations are in the computer cache, I'm getting emails from friends who are sending me to sites that teach novel writing, even after I've written one. They mean well, and I take their suggestions with gratitude because they are right you know, I'm not a novelist.

I'm an essayist, and a pretty good one, too. It's just too damned bad that nobody buys essays anymore, and so again, I'm here in this space writing to whomever wants to read my blather. Sitting in front of my computer asking readers to love me.

Meanwhile, the voice from the lake continues to rumble, and its musings continue to resonate in my ear. 

So, the lake says, now that I have your attention Rose. What are you going to do?

I don't know, I say. I guess I'll figure it out.

Tick tock, says the lake, tick tock.