It’s been a while since I wrote anything here on my blog. I have a good reason. I’ve been busy editing and self-publishing my second book called “Nicetown.” That’s a good excuse, right? Publishing a second book is a great thing to do if you’re a writer, and it feels like a very fulfilling task. I’ve invested in this book for a very long time. The idea came to me about two years ago, and it took all that time until last week to actually publish this motherfucker. Well, it takes what it takes, and now this book will be out there in the world on the digital Amazon bookshelf for as long as Amazon will last. And I think that beast will outlive all of us.
The book I am talking about, “Nicetown,” is a collection of stories and poems, both fictional and autobiographical. These are all the stories I’ve been working on for the last five years. It is a random collection of stories I’ve written at different points in my life, mainly about my life and the shit I was going through at the time. There is a bit of a theme in that book based on my personal experiences, letting go of two jobs, driving for Uber for a living, trying to become a writer, struggling and eventually making it all work, becoming a father, and raising a family. This book covers a lot of topics and subjects. Some of them are series, and some are just random shit that I thought would be worthwhile to include in the book. There are some decent poems in this book as well. I think my poetry has improved over the years, and there is a lot of interesting and deep stuff readers might enjoy and appreciate. My first book, “My Poems, My Soul,” was a collection of early poetry. Mostly very mean and depressing poems written by a young wanna-be poet and writer, trying to write like Bukowski and suffering through everyday life, trying to find a meaning of it all. But these poems sound immature and naive in a way, even pretentious. They are essential in my writing life because this is where it all began. This is where it all happened. This is what I’ve been going through over the years, trying to fit my life into a poem. Poems in my latest book, though, are more mature and serious. I am taking it all to the next level here. I am happy about that material and am glad they got their new life in this book.
So how this book came to be? I’ve been writing and posting my stories and poems on my blog for about two years at the time, and approaching the second anniversary, I wanted to do something special. I thought about collecting and publishing everything I posted on the blog into a new book. The original name was “Writing Blog.” I started editing the material for the book, and I couldn’t get myself to finish it. There was always something in a way. It took too much time and effort. I felt fucking lazy to do it. Life got in the way. A lot of changes in my personal life indeed. So I had a plan, but I wasn’t going to follow it for some time. Eventually, in early 2022, I decided to finally get it done. It took me ten months to finish what I had planned, as usual, with multiple interruptions. Fortunately, I finished editing by late October, and this massive stone was off my chest.
There are a lot of stories based in and about Philadelphia and my life and my fictional character’s life, based in Philadelphia. I thought having this book framed around this town would be a great idea. This is my adopted hometown. I lived here for half of my life. So why the fuck not? The name Nicetown means what it sounds like it means. I decided to call this book a Nicetown sarcastically. There is a neighborhood in Philadelphia called Nicetown, and nothing is nice about it. Philadelphia is known to be a City of Brotherly Love. Based on my experience, it has anything but love. So many stories in the book are about getting lost and finding yourself. It is about making shit work, finding your purpose, finding the right way, getting lost, making a living, surviving, raising a family, struggling, and so on. At the end of the day, all the puzzles came together. The stories, the poems, the book title, and the themes inside the book all make perfect sense. They are part of me. They are part of my life. They are part of who I was and whom I became.
It all began mid-2017 when I was let go of my first job. I was lucky then, and I had a new job right after. That new job didn’t last for too long either, and I was fired for the second time in about four months. Fuck. Where do you go from here? I went to drive for Uber. Something that at one point felt scary and liberating, on the one hand, has become my curse for the next eight months and counting, on the other. I had no luck finding a new place for a while, so Uber became my primary source of income. I thought then this was my opportunity to become a writer and write all the time as much as I wanted. But this was a very short-lived feeling. The more time passed, the less money remained in my bank account, and driving for Uber was the only option to keep afloat. And after driving for fifteen hours a day, I had no fucking energy or creative juice to write anything. It all lasted for about eight months until I found a job at a company and industry which I fucking hated the most, but they needed me, and I needed the money and something to put on my resume, so it all began again. The short series of stories, “My Shit’s Out of Luck,” is all about that. There are also a lot of fiction and other stuff I’ve written over the years that are quite an interesting take on life, writing, life lessons, and searching for yourself. This book is dedicated to those who are lost and searching and to those who have found and keep searching. As this search in life never ends until life ends.
It feels good to have something done. It feels good to have a new book out. It feels good to have your second book published. It feels even better when you’ve done it all yourself. It is all yours; I mean, it is all mine. It is a piece of me and a piece of my life, and I am happy to release that burden out there in the world and take that baggage off my shoulders. Let it go. Let it fly. Let it do what it does. Let it live. The future is here. The future is near. The future is all the unwritten books out there in the world. And I will make this future more interesting, as there is just so much more to say and to write and to think about. Life has just begun.
This October is the third anniversary since I started my blog. It is quite a new milestone for me personally, and it is this new activity that kept me going and kept me writing and trying and posting regularly. I created this blog with a simple idea to write regularly and share it with other people. I used to spend a lot of time trying to submit to other websites, publications, literature contests, and all that other shit, and as time went by, I figured it was such a fucking waste of time, money, and energy. I could’ve been creating more instead of trying to get some assholes to accept and publish my poems or stories on their sites. At one point, I looked up several of those publications and their shitty websites, and I thought, fuck them all. Who is going to find and read my stuff there anyway? I might as well create my own site and post there any fucking thing I want, as often as I want, and make this site as good as possible. And one sunny day in October of 2019, I fucking did it. I created my own website, and the John Loraine Blog was born.
I was still early in my writing life and was writing sporadically here and there whenever I could. I had my moments of inspiration, and I wrote a lot, but then I had some long holes where I couldn’t bring myself to write a fucking thing. I always knew I wanted to be a writer, and I knew that a writer’s job is as little as sitting down and writing. I didn’t have any discipline. I lacked character. At times I didn’t know what to write about. I was overthinking everything. Then I waited a long time for the perfect moment to come to sit down and write, which never came. I wasn’t any fucking good, to begin with. Not saying I am any fucking good now, either. But all those years of writing weren’t wasted, and I’ve evolved as a writer. My writing has improved, and there is so much more of it now. So this blog became my new writing destination and the main reason to keep writing and posting regularly. In the “About” section of my blog, I wrote this, which pretty much defines the primary purpose of this blog and its identity: “This blog is a place for me to practice and share my writing, go crazy, pour out my inspirations into something, and primarily post shit that would never be published anywhere else by anybody. You might find typos, grammar mistakes, incoherent sentences, and random thoughts jumping from one topic to another, and that’s alright. Nobody’s perfect, and neither am I. The point is to share my personal experiences, struggles, hardships, thoughts, ideas, and whatever else comes to mind.”
Since the start, I have shared some stories that shaped me into who I am today. There is a three-stories series called “My shit’s out of luck,” where I describe some real-life events and my struggles with writing and life in general. These stories were to shape the theme of my blog, and they are very close to my heart, and they made me who I am today. The first story, or rather a rant, which I wrote and submitted online back in 2018, has been accepted by a lady from England from the New London Writers organization. She decided to post it on her literate website. That has been my main writing breakthrough moment. That fucking moment changed my life. At that time, I felt that I was being discovered and would be a public writer, so to speak. I felt super fucking hyped and excited after receiving an acceptance email from the lady in England. Then I started to freak out. I thought, fuck, this piece is such a crazy fucking thing to go public. How would people respond? How should I feel about this now being in the public eye? Should I change my name? I was out of the two corporate jobs around that time, driving for Uber for a living, and I surely didn’t want to fuck up my job searching process. So I decided to call myself John Loraine instead of my real name. The lady from the New London Writers didn’t mind me using a nickname for this publication. John is a prevalent name, and it also belongs to so many great people and writers. In my mind, I dedicated this name to John Fante. The Loraine part came from the one historic building I have been obsessed with since I first saw it, the Divine Lorraine Hotel in Philadelphia. I removed the second “r” to make it easier to spell. This is how my pen name came to be.
So this is how it all began for me. We had another conversation with New London Writers about posting regularly on their platform and becoming a member of their organization, but the conversation dropped off at some point. I am trying to remember exactly why and when. I think I blew it off. I guess I was too damned occupied, busy driving for Uber, and scared to get my work out into the free world. I needed more material to be published, and I already felt too much pressure from my future regular submissions. It was a mistake on my end. This fucking publication was off the hook. They would publish my stories with all my profanity as long as it was not “borderline illegal.” Where could you find a platform like that anymore? I felt like Bukowski for a moment. I felt like, fuck, this is it. Almost 100% of publications I was trying to submit and have been 99.9% rejected were super woke and polite and very fucking flamboyant platforms publishing flamboyant writers. In comparison, this place in England seemed to be groundbreaking. The New London Writers doesn’t exist anymore. I think they ceased to exist shortly after our partnership. Not because of me. I assume because there was no gas in the tank. They ran out of resources, and whatever they had going there probably didn’t monetize.
But I have survived. I’ve learned my lesson. In 2018, I had 0 experience with blog writing, writing, publishing, and creating anything on WordPress. A year later, I matured, and I figured out I could do this independently. I could create my website and blog and start writing and posting whatever I want there. I’ve learned from online videos how to create a blog and then looked up some other technical shit to make it what it is today. It was quite an undertaking for me at the time, but somehow it all worked out. JohnLoraineBlog was born in October 2019 and is still alive and kicking.
Since the beginning, I have been trying to post regularly, at least three to four times per month. I combined the prose with poetry to keep it more interesting for the readers and myself. My goal wasn’t to reach many people. My goal was to publish something as if many people were expecting something from me every month. That mentality kept me going through the last few years. I wrote a lot. I wrote consistently. I have the material. I wasn’t afraid anymore of sharing my writing with the world. It was OK. It felt great. I felt accomplished. And now, I’ve become a true working and published writer, an independent writer who wrote his mind and soul. I hated the idea of writing to support an agenda or try to fit into some establishment. I didn’t give two fucks about any establishment. It was me, myself, and my writing. Free as a bird in the sky.
Toward the end of 2019, I decided to publish my poems as a poetry collection book, of which I had over 200 in total. I knew that it would take forever and more to try to get some publication involved. So I’ve decided to self-publish my first book. With today’s resources, it is easy as anything. I’ve found a designer for a book cover who did a great fucking job. I reviewed, rewrote, and edited all of my poems. It took me a while to go through everything and put my manuscript in order, but I did it. In mid-2020, when the pandemic was roaming the world, I locked myself out and finished the book. In early July, “My Poems My Soul” was up on Amazon. I cannot describe how happy I was then. What an accomplishment for a struggling writer this moment has been. What an achievement for somebody who just a few years back started to write poetry, imitating Charles Bukowski and dreaming about becoming a published author one day.
At the time of this writing, I’ve already finished collecting material for my second self-published book. This upcoming book will include my blog posts for the last three years. The idea came about last year. I originally planned to publish this book in 2021 to celebrate two years of JohnLoraineBlog, but somehow I was never able to find time for it. This year I took it seriously, and I did the work. I went through everything I wrote and posted on my blog, edited and rewrote, and organized it all, so it is now ready to be published. Why did I decide to publish what was already posted on my blog? I felt bad for all the work I’d done over the years, and it would be an injustice to leave everything up there like that. It would make me a more accomplished writer if it all became a book. I needed to have it collected in a book to keep it alive. This blog might cease to exist at some point, but the book will live forever.
So what does the future hold? Fuck, if I know. One thing I know for sure is that I am not planning to stop writing. It will go on. I am increasingly convinced that I should be writing and trying different things and getting better at it. I know that this is a journey. I realize that life will come back at me kicking and screaming and fucking me over like it usually does. But I know something else. The more complicated my life is, the better my writing becomes. I have two drafts of two novels and three great ideas for three more books. All it takes is to sit the fuck down and start writing them all out. I will accomplish something someday. I want to become a famous writer. It is a crazy idea, but all the greats have started somewhere. I want to dedicate more and more time to my writing, regardless of anything else going on.
I also have a screenwriting project idea, which could become something great one day. As far as my blog goes, I’ve renewed my domain license for another three years, so that fucking thing has some more life in it, and I will be taking advantage of it. Depending on the circumstances, I’ll continue posting here at least a couple of times per month. I also joined Substack, where I haven’t done much, but that fucking platform seems to be something I wanted to create with my blog three years ago. It has it all in one place. I need to do some more work there as well. Maybe, at some point, I’ll move to Substack entirely to keep things simple and all in one place. Will see. Time will tell.
The sad thing is that I have yet to have a single subscriber from my website. I don’t know if there is one person that reads my blog regularly. Probably not. Even though I see around a hundred visits to the blog every month from around the world. Social media sharing did not prove to be any fucking useful at all. I keep posting on both Instagram and Twitter about every single fucking post, and I have no idea how many people that channel brought over. I get a few likes here and there but doesn’t mean shit. People like the picture for the most part, which is not even pictures I took. I get them all from Pexels. My point is that it is tough to break through even though there are so many fucking channels and all this technology available to make it so easy and quick. However, this does not discourage me. This only makes me work even more and work harder.
I do it all for myself first. I want to keep track and a trail of my writing and my progress somewhere where it is visible. At one point in time, I can say, damn, I wrote so fucking much, and it all can be found here on my blog. Joe Rogan once said about his podcast that it was never about getting millions of listeners; it was always consistent and honest work and real honest conversations. In the end, he has the number-one podcast in the entire fucking world. That idea was on my mind when I started writing this blog. It only has been three years. The world is changing every day, and nobody knows what the future holds. Maybe, at one point, this thing will come to fruition and become a go-to blog for many people.
In conclusion, I would like to say thank you to all who visited my blog, all who read anything on my blog, and the few people who bought my poetry book. I don’t give a fuck about popularity, although it would indicate that I have achieved something in my life as a writer. Again, this is my battleground and my practice field, and it makes me happy to post anything every so often. So I will continue writing and posting on my blog in the same spirit for the next few years. And even if this writing passion takes me nowhere, I will have a pretty damn good amount of material and evidence that I am a true writer with a solid book of work. Writing is all that matters here. Writing is all that makes me feel happy and accomplished, and I will move forward in that direction. Happy third-anniversary, JohnLoraineBlog! I raise my glass today to so many more productive and creative years and for a bright and free future for contemporary writing and blogging. Cheers!
