After the fall

“Have you still got stuff inside of you that you want to say? Yes, I have.”

Welcome, new subscribers! Thank you for being here and supporting this work I’m deliciously in love with. To learn more about Dancing When the Bomb Drops, you can read the inaugural post. You can also learn more about me here.

In my early 20s, I wanted to be a motivational speaker. Like, as my career.

I was going to write self-help books about the Law of Attraction, a positive mindset, leadership, you name it.

And my go-to case study would be Duran Duran’s rise to fame.

Because let me tell you, they followed the playbook without even knowing there was one.

They had a vision, a mindset, and a plan summed up in one statement:

Hammersmith in ’82. Wembly in ’83. Madison Square Garden in ’84.

And they achieved it, right on time.

They also had a mission statement that wasn’t articulated until an early interview:

We want to be the band to dance to when the Bomb drops.

They worked their asses off. They started with little, and they knew how high the stakes were.

And yet, in such cases, there’s often little to lose at that stage.

In 2010, when I decided I wanted to be a full-time author, I followed a similar trajectory in that I had a vision, worked my ass off, and had little to lose if I didn’t make it.

After all, I had a full-time teaching position with benefits. I was able to pay the bills. I lived in a comfortable apartment. That security didn’t suck.

By 2015, I had a literary agent, a two-book deal, multiple books in the Kindle Store Top 100 (not in specialized categories, but the entire store), and a six-figure career.

And I didn’t want to do anything else.

All I wanted was to be a full-time author, publish at least one book a year, and live off those royalties.

Yours truly in 2014 presenting at WriteNow! in Raleigh, NC, and showing off my T-shirt to a fellow Duranie attendee. I was living the dream.

And then, by the end of 2016, just a couple of months after getting married, I crashed.

My publisher parted ways with me. Those two books in the two-book deal flopped commercially. The bottom dropped out on royalties with the introduction of Kindle Unlimited.

Duran Duran faced a crash in 1985 following their number one Bond-theme, “A View to a Kill” (the first Bond theme to go to number one).

The band split into solo projects Power Station and Arcadia, and when it was time to regroup in 1986, two band members, Andy Taylor and Roger Taylor, didn’t return. The band also split with their management.

The MTV landscape changed as well. Music videos had become ubiquitous. (Kind of like e-books by 2015.) Music formats were changing from vinyl (we didn’t even call them vinyl until the turn of the century; they were “records”) to tape cassettes, and CDs by the end of the ’80s.

Notorious went platinum, but Big Thing and Liberty were commercial flops.

Dare I say, the ’80s began with Fast Times at Ridgemont High and ended when Wham! did.

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My point is this:

Everyone touts the rise to success, but no one talks about what to do when you get to the top.

No one talks about the crash.

Because there’s almost always ultimately a crash.

What goes up must come down. Trends change. Markets change. The shiny new thing eventually becomes a staple or, in some cases, obsolete. The novelty wears off. The romance fades. Technology evolves. Audiences move on.

Yet we were led to believe that once you make it, it’s all coasting from there. Like reaching peak altitude. You can relax and take a break. Stop working so hard. It’s all going to be easy from now on.

You’re not told that you have to make a new goal. Modify the vision. Change your expectations.

You’re not told you have to adapt to change. Pivot. Adjust. Step aside.

(Same thing after the wedding, generally speaking. But that’s another post.)

What fascinates me now is what happens after you make it, whatever it is.

If I were that motivational speaker, that’s what I would speak and write about today.

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I don’t know what Simon, John, and Nick were thinking and feeling when Roger and Andy left.

Did they grieve? Did they panic? Were they OK with the new sound and new look?

Were I to interview them about that time, I would ask them if, knowing what they know now, they would have done anything different then.

Because I know the answer in my case:

Yeah. A lot.

I would’ve launched my newsletter sooner. Would have kept in better touch with my agent. Would have returned to teaching the moment the royalties dropped. Wouldn’t have assumed the next two books were going to do as well as the last two books.

Most of all, I wouldn’t have panicked. I wouldn’t have coasted. I would have set new goals rather than desperately cling to what I had already achieved.

And I would’ve grieved sooner.

Ed Catmull, who was head of Pixar when Toy Story premiered, wrote in Creativity, Inc about the need to immediately pivot to a new goal after becoming the first company to create and produce a full-length, computer-animated feature film.

He knew they couldn’t rest on their laurels. He also knew there was no second first time (see what I did there) when it came to being a groundbreaking animation company.

Good for him.

But hindsight only gets you so far.

On December 27, 2019, one month before my 50th birthday, Showtime aired a documentary called There’s Something You Should Know about the life and career of Duran Duran spanning 40 years. I still can’t stop thinking about what Simon Le Bon said:

The first time it [commercial failure] happens, it’s really scary because you thought you would carry on forever. . . . And the next time it happens, it’s not so bad, and the next time it happens, it’s not so bad. And then you get to a point where you just relax and think, “You know what? Let’s just do what we do. Do we believe in the music we make? Yes, we do. Can we go in and write new stuff? Have you still got stuff inside of you that you want to say? Yes, I have. Yes, we can.” Then you do it.

It’s taken me almost seven years to do more than aspire to this.

It’s taken me ten years to recover from the crash.

I can’t go back and do any of it differently, nor can I waste another moment lamenting that I didn’t do it sooner, or at all.

Which means I have to be here now. Even if it means starting from the very bottom again, with little left to lose because it’s already been lost.

Duran Duran has never wavered from who they initially wanted to be: the band to dance to when the Bomb drops.

The “bomb” changed over time, but go to a live show and watch us all dance.

Even though I’ve tried to do other things and pivot to other professions these last ten years, I have never wavered from what I initially wanted to be: a full-time, sustainable author.

I know for sure that I don’t want to do anything else.

The form it takes remains to be seen, as do the journey and the stakes.

But if Duran Duran has taught me anything, it’s that after the fall, after the flops and the setbacks and the disappointments and the change, you get to a point where you just relax and think, You know what? Let’s just do what we do.

I’m there. Finally.