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I'm Brandon Sneed. I wrote the book The Edge of Legend, I'm a journalist for GQ, ESPN The Magazine, and ESPN.com, and I edit HeyGoodCall.com. 

I live for great stories—finding them, telling them, living them. This is a running log of all that. It's a great life. (Read this, my short take on why stories are all that matter.) 

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Friday
Aug202010
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The Story I Want To Live (or, "My Entry for Don Miller's Contest")

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Man, my brain is fried.

I’m sitting here, at the computer, with three hours to go before the deadline’s up for this contest I’m trying to enter. I have to write a blog about a story I’m trying to live. It’s for Don Miller’s Living a Better Story Seminar on Sept. 26-27. (For more about it, click here or visit donmilleris.com/conference, and check out the video at the end of this post. If my brain holds off on melting long enough to get us there.)

I’ve been working on this for the past month. I usually don’t even enter contests. But this one….it felt important for me to try, because it demanded I define my life. It demanded I define what I want to do. I needed that.

Me—I’m 23 years old and for the past year and a half have been freelancing as a journalist while living the roller coaster life that is being a first time author. In March 2009, I started working on a book about Harlem Globetrotter Ant Atkinson. It’s called THE EDGE OF LEGEND, and tells an incredible story of faith and basketball. It’s a book about, well, faith and basketball, but also about fathers and sons, and generational curses, and broken dreams and, ultimately, gooseflesh-inducing redemption. I won’t waste your time by rambling on about it here, but you can learn all about it at EdgeOfLegend.com, if you get the urge.

The book publishes in late September. You can probably see where this is going.

I want a million people to buy my book.

Just joking.

Sort of.

Naturally, as an author, and in particular a first time author, I want my book to be a wild success. But truly, I’d be happy if it sold 1,000 copies. Because there’s a secret here.

My brain is fried right now because I’ve spent the last two days fighting with Adobe InDesign to lay out my book. I’m self-publishing it.

That wasn’t the original plan. This was to my plan what chugging milk is to the lactose intolerant. Self-publishing is lowly and vain and just…blech. So I felt.

When I began the book, I just knew this one regional publisher would pick it up. Perfect first time authorship plan. Calling card for the future. Groundwork laid. Dreams coming true. It wasn’t the best plan, but, even though I was getting married, I decided not to take a full-time job, and instead took up freelancing while working on this book.

The Great Recession killed any hope of my planned publisher. My “backup publisher” couldn’t even help me. So there I was, a couple months married, no real job, the ultimate cliché – an out-of-work writer.

Yeah, I panicked. So bad that I ended up interviewing for – and actually getting offered – a job selling some sort of weird air purifiers. I dunno. It felt wrong, and Katie agreed, so I turned that down, too. Not knowing what else to do, where else to go, I just kept writing. Pounded away, wearing out my rapidly aging Macbook Pro, all the while wondering if I was crazy. All the while, feeling the terror.

I lived for the moments of peace, the moments when I knew this was right. Which of course only made me feel more insane. But I knew this could become something good, something worthwhile. A risk worth taking. I chose to believe in that. I had to….otherwise, fear wins. Again.

I don’t want to waste your time with a full character study, but I used to be a really good baseball player. Entered college as this stud, future superstar, 210 pounds with like, 6 percent body fat. Ended up spending most of my career as a fourth-stringer. Fear paralyzed me. It didn’t go away, either, once it killed my career, or after I graduated. It’s a war.

So I soldiered on, in the trenches of coffee shops, trenches filled with distractions and horribly timed frozen screens.

The more I researched and wrote, the better Ant’s story became. Way better than I ever thought it was. So we realized, hey, we have to do something to get this out there. I refused to go the Lulu, or with some other sketchy online self-publishing company.

In a fit of ambitiousness – or insanity, your call – my wife, Katie, and I formed our own publishing company. Some might call it a leap of faith. Felt more like basejumping without checking the parachute. (I had good people encouraging the jump, though, so at least I can blame them if we go splat. Even had a New York Times bestselling author blurb it. He’s gotta be crazier than we are. He probably figured we wouldn’t sell enough for anyone to know he’d done that, so it didn’t matter.)

Naturally, starting one’s own publishing company means, well, doing all the little things that come with publishing. You can probably imagine what that was like. ISBNs. Printer guidelines. Design specifications. Copyrights. (We’ll probably get sued.) Production costs. Marketing campaigns. This is the stuff nightmares are made of.

So why am I doing this? Why am I risking so much – thousands of dollars, a year of my life, my fried brains – for so little guaranteed return? Aside from some ambiguous description of peace, maybe the supernatural kind, that I feel about it all?

Well, I don’t always feel that peace, so that’s out of the way. But I feel right most of the time. This is exactly what I want to do. I lose my peace when I start realizing how I’m making no money off it yet. How I’m doing something that most people get paid really good money to do. Sometimes I feel, well, like an idiot. Sometimes I really do fear this ending in a nightmare. I fear not making money, I fear losing the thousands we’re investing in all of this.

I started something else not long ago, something that represents why I’m doing this. It’s called The Lighthouse Project. I went through a pretty clichéd phase of skepticism with my faith. Needed evidence and all that. One day, something inside me said that the best evidence there is for God is in other people’s lives. I ran with that. The Lighthouse Project was originally named The Evidence Project. It’s a blog. A blog I don’t update often enough. I want to, but don’t really have time right now. I want time, but I only have so much of that, and must spend at least some of it on my freelance work, for that is what pays the bills. Helps, anyway.

At TLP, I write about people who show me God, whether they mean to or not.

Some posts are essays. Some are columns. Some, though – my favorite – are sweeping, long narratives that dig deep into these people’s stories. I treat them like I treat my best pieces of journalism, like the in-depth profile I’m doing for Sports Illustrated of Ivan Castro, the only blind active member of the US Army Special Forces. Lost his sight in combat in Iraq. Nearly died. Now, he runs marathons and triathlons.

He knows God, too. Has been pretty bitter with him about everything. His wife just left, too. But, he told me, “I don’t want to be that way. I want to have hope, and I want to still love Him.”

That’s it. That’s what I want to write about. That’s what I want to do with my life. Tell stories like Castro’s. I love exploring stories of people who know God, and who love Him – and have every reason imaginable for hating Him.

I can share Castro’s story with a medium like Sports Illustrated because it connects to something everyone knows. Sports, and the military. There are countless others out there, though, who are more obscure, but also have amazing stories. A perfect example is the story of Todd, which I consider the flagship piece of TLP.

I want to introduce these people and their relationships with God to everyone. I once asked my little brother, Kramer – yes, Kramer; you can laugh, but hey, the Yankees drafted him this summer – what I should write. “What people need to read,” he replied.

People need to read what others – like Castro, like Todd – have learned about God. About Love. I know this, because it’s what I need. I want to help others’ search by sharing what I’ve found in mine. I want a life, a job – i.e. writing and publishing those stories – that lets me do that.

I’ll get there one day, to that place financially where I can tell those stories. I believe that. That’s why I kept writing the book about Ant, and that’s why my wife and I have braved a nightmare.

I just need help getting there. I need guidance. I need insight.

Don does what I want to do. He makes his living off books he writes, stories he tells, and he writes things that change lives. That’s what I’ve wanted since I was a kid, since before I knew writing could be a career, since before I knew who Donald Miller was. I learn best by learning from others. To spend a little time with Don, to get a little advice from him, and to experience his seminar – I really feel like this would show me my best next steps.

That’s why I want Don to fly me to Portland.

 

Living a Better Story Seminar from All Things Converge Podcast on Vimeo.

 

Comment2 Comments | DateAug 20, 2010 |

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