The Thursday before the Great American Eclipse, I was sitting at my first networking event in about a year.

I wasn’t thinking about the eclipse to occur on Monday.

Life had truly been a blur.

I was so excited in 2015, dutifully completing my first Copywriting course ever and reading every book I could find on Copywriting.

Between 2015 & 2016, I tried to network and attend as many small business events while temping at 20 or so odd non-profit to profit businesses.

Towards the end of 2016, I decided to try my hand at an Advanced Training in Copywriting course in hopes of landing my first client.

Well, I didn’t grab a single client in 2016.

There I was as most people are on January 1st 2017 wondering what had not happened in 2016. This was no ordinary first day of the Roman calendar year. I was sitting in the emergency room with my dad after he had suffered from a stroke that day.

Unnnggghhh! Another setback.

Between that time and then, I’d been closely monitoring my dad & floating between temp. jobs, producing my monthly blog posts, and completing not nearly enough writing assignments.

Then about two weeks ago, I got an invite from the New American Chamber of Commerce…..Oh okay! Somebody out there remembered me!

The invite was to a store in Harlem called “The Brownstone.” I sat there envious of an immigrant who had not even been in the United States for a month & was already at a networking event beaming with energy about what good old America had to offer.

What had I missed?

I got up and introduced myself as a copywriter. Just hearing myself say the title “copywriter” created a jolt in me.  At “The Brownstone,” I made a statement about being authentic but got the response that I didn’t want to hear, “Faking it until you make it.”

Hmmmm, is that what I had been doing from temp. job to temp job, “faking it until you make it?”  It has been just one frustrating experience after another.

You can’t fake disappointment. You can’t fake, I’ve been working but not as a copywriter. No matter what you do, you can’t fake a JCPenny special and pretend you’re wearing a Jones NY outfit. Un-manicured nails, a boxed hair color and a soap and water facial is all I presented that night. The whole point of the networking event was about the “10 Step Program to Personal Presentation.” You guessed it, I’d missed all 10 steps, just as I was going to miss the eclipse. By the way most writers don’t care about a polished look. They’re too busy rearranging words.

Can you fake that you had seen an eclipse?  Either you saw it or you didn’t. I myself was at work during the eclipse, and no one was offering a “temp.” the time to go out & pretend to see an eclipse that was mostly covered by the clouds in the New York City skyline.

Something strange happened AFTER the eclipse.

I got a call from a radio talk show saying that they heard about my writing a new book and that they were inviting me onto the show.

Jogging my memory, I did say at the age of 18 that I would write a book.  I called the radio talk show back to say that I had not written a book but that I had copywriting services to offer.

This eclipse thing is an illusion. The moon appears as large as the sun.

So were my aspirations. Bigger than my reality. So is “faking it until you make it.”

Such is life.

My networking machine is revving up. I’ll be onto another networking event next week ready to tell someone else that I am an aspiring copywriter. Then as I twiddle my thumb, I’ll wait for that paid writing assignment.

Until that time, I’ll continue to blog, chug along in the copywriting world or rather finally write that book.

That’s how you “fake it until you make it.”

And that eclipse, you either got to see it or you didn’t. Or rather you’re either working as a copywriter or not.

I’m beginning to think that I should be writing that book instead.

Till the next eclipse.