You’ve got to try.

I was on a bus this morning (because I’m a sucker for sharing my travel time with twisted broke fuckers) and spotted an old school friend who I haven’t seen in a while. We had a bit of a catch up on the way to our mutual destination and he asked what I had been up to.
‘I finished my novel’ I said. It still fills me with pride to be able to say that, despite the fact I know the hard part comes next.

I told my friend that I had been in touch with a girl from our school year who had her first novel published last year to ask if she had any advice, she did; she was very helpful. It’s annoying because I am jealous of her, as we should be because she’s done it, she’s got to the goal that I can’t get out of my head, she tried and she got there and a lot of the time that is all it takes, a point proven by our continuing conversation on the bus this morning.

My friend said to me ‘did you know [boy we were at school with] just bought an Aston Martin?’
‘Oh wow’, I replied, ‘that’s awesome. I’d love to be in that position one day’.
‘Yeah’ my friend replied, ‘it makes you wonder what you’ve done in your life to not have deserved an Aston Martin’.
I couldn’t help but dwell on that statement. Firstly there is nothing to say that our fortunate school friend deserves that, he may be excellent within his field (which I’m sure is the case) but he could be killing people for money, or worse still, be working in banking. What matters is that he tried, and this may be a point that some of you disagree with me on because it’s quite a new concept to myself. I wonder if my friend (the first friend mentioned, the one on the bus) has tried to be in a position where he could own an Aston Martin, if he has given it his all, because as humans that’s all we can do really, just give it a shot. I know that’s what I am doing, there’s no guarantee that anyone beyond my close friends will ever read my novel but I’m going to try and make that happen and maintain that nobody deserves anything.