Shocked it's my second video? Me too!

Well, that happened. lol.

Life is so wild. Last Monday I had the Dua Lipa video finished and uploaded. All I had to do was hit publish. I figured I’d do it at noon from my phone.

But as noon approached my vision started getting messed up. Little twinkly curlicues expanding to build a wall of static. It’s happened to me before. It happens when I’m stressed on a deep level.

I sat on a park bench and closed my eyes and took deep breaths and waited half an hour until my vision returned to normal.

Maybe I sensed I was at a fork in the road of my life’s journey. That sounds dramatic, but my inner narrative thinks I’m a character in a 19th century novel.

I knew my Dua Lipa video had the best chance of blowing up of any video I’d ever make. But I wasn’t just hoping for a viral video. The cynical reason I started this channel was to see if I could catch a literary agent’s eye after 70 of them rejected queries for my first manuscript. Maybe if I made a literary Youtube channel, I’d get a couple subscribers and some agent would give me the time of day.

So last summer I took a break from working on manuscript #2 to research a thorny literary topic: who could write whose stories. I figured it was a bad fit for YouTube. YouTube viewers want book reviews and BookTok takedowns, not a 36 minute video in which I quote Harold Bloom saying, “the aesthetic demands deep subjectivity and is beyond the reach of ideology.”

Right?

Except… making that Who Can Write Whose Stories video was fun. I liked that I had picked a difficult topic. The fact that no one would watch it liberated me to be weird and make the video I wanted to make. If anyone did watch it, I was scared the comment section would be full of strangers calling me and each other racist.

That first video didn’t blow up, but my friends watched it, and even some random YouTube people saw it. Most amazingly, the comments were thoughtful. Was the internet not as toxic as I’d imagined?

For video #2, I decided to swing for the fences. Make the video I guessed had the greatest chance of attracting views. The real topic was a journey through the literary interview landscape. Only I’d bury that inside an exploration of what made Dua Lipa a great interviewer.

I worked on the video for five months. The research doc / script was 60 pages long. I cut and cut the video until it was half its original length. I wanted it to have no down moments.

I was proud of the video, no matter how many views it got. But on the park bench with my eyesight breaking, my body knew what I was hoping for: that the video would get big and that I would use its success to land a literary agent, and someday my novel would see the light of day, and some stranger would read it and laugh and cry and feel an odd but compelling connection with a distant human. Or something.

When my vision returned to normal, I hit publish. I sent it to friends and family.

Nothing much happened. On Tuesday night someone commented:

And then, it started going. Up and up. Views in the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands. The comments were… unreal. I had made a video that some people said was among their favorites? Me?

My head was swimming. My heart racing. I felt both revved up and also a bit unlike myself. It was thrilling, but not in a purely enjoyable way. It was intense. At first I tried responding to most of the comments, but they came faster and faster. I left my phone in the kitchen when I went to bed so I wouldn’t be tempted to check it in the middle of the night.

I started to worry. Why couldn’t I just feel joy in this moment? This was what I had dreamed of! So many people would give their left arm to get these comments, to have their second video blow up, and here I was feeling… conflicted? What was wrong with me?

I found solace in… an author interview. The one between Ottessa Moshfegh and Jaylen from Reading the Room.

“If you feel disappointed by positive reviews, it’s okay. That’s very normal. Very normal.” - Ottessa Moshfegh

I wasn’t feeling disappointed exactly, but it was helpful to hear her validate that I could be having contradictory feelings.

The internet is strange. While the real me sleeps, the me in the Dua Lipa video creeps onto your phones and computers, and you watch “me” and comment. It’s like there’s a ghost version of me traipsing around YouTube, forever making the “that does pair well” Christmas Blend joke.

It reminds me of a long way back when I did some internet dating. I remember one time sitting on the toilet and my phone buzzed and it was a message from some lady saying, “hey you look nice!” A very strange message to get while on the can.

Of course, there was another version of me. The dating site me who was being as charming as I’d made my profile. The me on the toilet was unknown to that stranger. But the digital me was winking at her.

Maybe the young digital natives have no idea why I’m stressed by this. But for me, the oldest Millennial, this digital world is electrifying in both senses of that word.

I am deeply grateful so many people enjoyed the two videos that I labored over for so many hours. I feel blessed.

But to keep writing fiction, to keep making videos, I need to basically pretend that nothing has changed. That you, reader, don’t exist.

If you’ve written me a comment and I haven’t responded, it’s nothing personal, trust me! I just need to go slow and figure out a way to balance creating for a community on one hand, and creating as though I were the only audience, on the other.

Wherever this goes, I’m really grateful to have you along for the ride. Whoever you are.