I Have Arrived

My apartment is being built as I move into it. I have spent the last two weeks without internet. And I've met about 200 people in the last handful of days. All of these things threaten my sanity.

On the other hand, though, I taught my first class today. And I didn't throw up a dog.

Storytime Thursday: Night School Dream Theater

In times of stress, my body and I are enemies to each other. I stay up well into the morning. I eat boxes of Triscuits with hummus and string cheese for dinner. I hangover too easily. I've been leaving my keys everywhere I set them down, calling one person when I want someone else, forgetting words I know (recently: oxymoron, roving, theremin; at a loss, I asked for a "star-nosed screwdriver," when I clearly meant "Phillips head").

My sleep, of late, is punctuated by vivid anxiety dreams. Some of them are standard fare—like, I'm in a hurry to go do something but I can't for the life of me manage to put my clothes on, or I'm reading a story aloud and my teeth start crumbling into my hands, or I'm crossing the street to get my mail out of the box and I sink into the asphalt like it's quicksand (and then I'm stuck there, helpless, with just my head poking out of the road, facing oncoming traffic).

I am afraid of the MFA program I never expected to get into, and I am afraid of teaching. I'll be confronting both of these fears in about two weeks. In the meantime, I've been devoting myself to incredibly involved, dextrous tasks that forestall active dread of the immediate future. But the dread creeps in while I am sleeping. And so it was, a few nights ago—shortly after I spent two hours trying to teach myself four-ball juggling patterns instead of drafting a syllabus—that I earned the following epic nightmare about my first class.

The classroom resembled most of the spaces where I'd studied literature as an undergraduate—chalkboard in the front, empty TV frame in the corner, windows along one side of the wall, and a long rectangular table in the middle with twenty or so chairs clustered around it, maybe some chairs along the side of the wall, too. I was standing at the head of the table, where teachers stand, and my fresh-faced, non-English-major sophomores were filing into the room in twos and threes, taking out notebooks, fidgeting with phones, having conversations about how hot it is at the end of August. I started the class, introduced myself, and passed around a bunch of paper (like the the booklist, syllabus, my expectations for written work, and other things I haven't figured out yet). I asked if I'd made enough copies for everyone, and then I felt a sharp pain in my stomach, doubled over, and threw up a pomeranian.

Pomeranian
(special thanks to TheLawleys for the photo)

It shot out of my esophagus with the breathless energy typical of the breed and began racing around the table, panting demonically, tearing through everyone's papers, knocking over water bottles, upsetting everything in its path.

A bespectacled redhead gasped, her hand flying up to cover her mouth. An Elijah-Wood-looking guy raised his eyebrows and drew his face down into his neck in sneering, double-chinned disgust. Someone said, "That's sick." Someone else said, "Jesuschrist." I tried to apologize. I wanted to say, "OH MY GOD. I am SO SORRY, YOU GUYS." I made an effort, but my jaw was stuck open, so I managed only "DOH-DAA-GAH," and drooled on myself instead. There was the sound of chairs being pushed back, of backpacks being lifted off the ground. I rested my hand on the corner of the table to stop the room from spinning. And then I vomited a sundry pile of office supplies—scissors, staplers, paperclips, pens and pencils, a three-hole punch complete with its moon-phase confetti. Everyone fled, and I knelt on the carpet, open-mouthed and alone, save for the pomeranian still robotically running circles atop a table of hastily abandoned things. It stopped only to bark a couple of times and do some backflips, like one of those battery-operated flipping puppies from the '80s.

And then I woke up and had a glass of water in the kitchen. Everyone has nightmares. I hardly need to explain that, no matter how ridiculous they seem in retrospect, they are always intense and distressing at the time (and invariably tedious in the retelling; you're welcome).

I went back to sleep and was rewarded with Asphalt Dream Reprise, in which my neighbor and a little boy tried to save me. They said that lying horizontally would keep you afloat, that this was how you rescued someone sinking in quicksand. I even had occasion to think, "Fuck me! I dreamed about this and should know what to do here!" But then the three of us were just drowning in the middle of the street, and the little boy reached through the muck and held my hand.

After that, I got up, went back to the kitchen, took a shot of whisky, watched the sunrise, and got all nostalgic for the days when I would dream about nothing especially memorable.

In short, I am not sleeping well.

In other news, I begin packing for the big move in earnest this weekend. For this reason, and with gratitude for your understanding, the posting around here might be light for a couple of weeks.

What Form Rejection Means to Me

The following post is offered in celebration of The Rejectionist, whose blog has just turned one year old! Hooray to that! Let's hope I'm one of the five randomly selected winners of her anniversary uncontest! Because I really want a SPECIAL MIX CD of MOSTLY BON JOVI SONGS that she picked out just for lil' ol' loser me.

All of the form rejections I've received have come from my efforts to win literary contests and get published in literary magazines. I will admit right now, at the cost of my pride, that I have never managed to make this happen. But I firmly believe that failure is a staple of the writing life. I am doing what I'm supposed to be doing; and inuring myself to form rejection, in particular, is an essential skill for psychological wellbeing in the field. If rejection didn't happen frequently and to everyone, form letters would not be necessary; and the fact that I have a bunch of 'em means I'm writing, or, at least, trying. Trying and failing is better than not trying at all, so the old saw goes. And I'm getting really, really good at failing now, which means getting good at success can't be far behind, right? At least this way, I'll really be able to appreciate that when it happens.

To me, form rejection letters are artifacts of a brief and unsuccessful courtship, the kind that ends before it has a chance to begin, the kind that happens the most when you're young and working really hard to figure it all out. You're left with so little information at the end that it's sometimes difficult to tell what went wrong. You stand there, dejected, wondering what did it, exactly. "Why won't you love me?" you wonder. "Is it because I wear leggings as pants? Because you noticed my lisp? Because I kissed my dog on the nose?" and, of course, "Can you at least tell me so I don't do it again in front of someone else?"

The more you get rejected, the faster you learn that it's bad form to ask questions about it. This may be true generally, but it goes double when you're being fed a line. The underlying force behind the form letter is the fact that the sender simply does not have the kind of time necessary to respond to your desperate questioning. Under those circumstances, it is in fact counter to your best interests to go forth demanding that kind of individual attention. I'll 'fess: I responded to my first form rejections. It's instinctive; we're an inquisitive species, and when things go wrong, we like to know why, because we want to improve ourselves. I never got a response. In fact, when I think of the questions I had for the readers/editors/judges who rejected me, I cringe a little bit. Failure analysis is better carried off on one's own time—by reading the stories that won the contest, or taking a closer look at the stuff the magazine does select for publication. All the effort that goes into negotiating rejection should be yours, unless someone offers otherwise.

The other reason it's bad form to question failure is the that it's not always all about you. Sometimes "sorry we can't use this" means just that. Maybe there have been too many stories about dying grandfathers/talking cats/hoarders/time machines this time. Maybe your story just can't play well with everything else in the issue. Maybe there just isn't room for you. Occasionally, form rejection is the equivalent of "It's not you; it's me," and sometimes it's true. It is your duty as a writer to take it like a champ and move right along. That's life.

In the last couple of years, a handful of magazines have started accepting submissions online. Narrative and Glimmer Train, for example, have submission forms on their webpages. This streamlines the process for everybody. The very concept of the rejection letter is itself streamlined, trimming away the faint modicum of personality that good old-fashioned form rejection used to offer the well-versed. Let me explain: Once you've received a fair quantity of form rejections, you start to realize the individual personality of each; that is, you find yourself personalizing the impersonal. I have noticed, for example, the antiseptic, almost refreshing brevity of SmokeLong's letters, the distinctly biting quality of Iowa Review's, the high quality of Granta's paper. When you use online submission forms, the form-rejection experience is effectively transcended, distilled down to a single word.

So, rather than amuse myself by distinguishing differences in personality from letter to letter, I am now gathering a smart collection of euphemisms for "fail"—like "complete" and "pass"!

(Clicking on these images will make them more readable, and will also reveal where they came from.)

Stuff like that makes you positively romantic for a real form rejection, doesn't it? Well! I WILL NOT DISAPPOINT. There are plenty of literary magazines out there that welcome online submissions without compromising a writer's well-deserved sense of failure. Conducting such exchanges online, via email, may even introduce new and unprecedented variables for contemplating the personal nuances of one's rejection. As a case in point, I offer you, in all of my shamelessness, my new favorite rejection letter. I received it in January of this year, from The New York Tyrant, and it would not have delighted me nearly as much if email didn't always come with a timestamp.

Fifty-two minutes, my friends. You'll notice that I submitted at booty-call hour, and that it took Tyrant a snappy fifty-two minutes to confirm their inability to publish it and notify me of such. That's fast! That's the fastest turn-around dumpage I've had since middle school! (Was it my reindeer sweater? Or my nervous stuttering? What happened during that near-hour? IT WAS MY STUPID SWEATER, WASN'T IT?) It's okay. I don't take it personally anymore.

Spending this much time as a reject has been good for me. I've learned so much that I was able to craft, for the first time this year, my very own form rejection letter. I'm quite proud of my gentle hope-dashery, apart from the canned-response quality of the phrase "does not meet our needs." What can I say? These things have a language of their own. I'm fluent now.

Special thanks, once again, to Le R., who fills my life with awesome on a regular basis. Happy anniversary! Here's to many more!

I Don't Actually Know Anything, and other clarifications

Since last week's post, I've been called a few things: naive, idealistic, antidemocratic, elitist, snobbish, ignorant, out of touch. Most of these conversations were in person, though one especially good one took place on someone else's blog. It's okay. My self-confidence can weather it (not really, but whatever, if I can write it, I'm halfway onboard). If I express passionate opinions with fighting words, I should well expect to get passionate, fighting words in return. That's discussion, and it's valuable. But so it was that I linked my vitriolic post elsewhere and was smacked down so righteously and with such eloquence and erudition that I ended up profusely apologizing for my pea-brained conceits before drinking a whole bottle of prosecco and intermittently weeping into my pillow for fears of my future for several hours until I finally fell asleep. It wasn't even that harsh! But being a person in transition is taking a pretty heady toll on my security in what I try to think, write, and do; and there's never really been that much space between comfortable confidence and crippling self-doubt for me, anyway.

I'm also getting a bit too old to plead the newbie defense. I'm not just a kid anymore, and there are things I should know better by now. Central among these is my tendency to assume altruistic motives in people (to such a degree as to constitute a character flaw). Over the years, I've thought a lot of hilariously stupid things, like "These drug addicts want to be my friend!" or "My foster family loves me!" or "Insurance companies want what's best for people!" or "I can do anything I set my heart on!" Life's rough, innit? Last week, it was "Books get published because enough people think they are good!"

No: Books get published when the amount of time (money) invested in them is calculated to at least match the returns on that investment. The man who schooled me said it best: "The gatekeepers of publishing are not altruistic protectors of high culture, they are sellers of pop (as well as high) culture whose primary motivation is making a living from their profits." Whether something can sell, or whether it is good, are two entirely different things. Plenty of great writing never sees print because people think it won't sell; and plenty of crap gets published because people think it will.

Last week, I wrote that people's opinions of navigating a post-publishing world would have a lot to do with "how much time you've spent with unpublishable writing"; and when I said "unpublishable" I meant "shitty." This was stupid and unfair. More to the issue, it betrays my inexperience: clearly I have not spent enough time with unpublishable writing to know that some of it well deserves publication. When self-published authors complain that no traditional press would give them the time of day, it's wrong for me to assume that the reason has to do with the quality of the work they've done.

The "rule of the few" that I found myself defending is not merit-based. A more democratic medium, glut or no, better allows what is good to rise to the surface. For me to say, as I did, that editors and publishers "facilitate good decision making for the general public" disparages the perfectly apt faculties of judgment many readers possess, and it rings like the same sort of anti-populist, anti-Internet grousing I criticized in Keillor's op-ed. Still, I value the work of reviewers who have the talent and expertise requisite to furnish my powers of discrimination with greater detail. When I go to a bookstore, or to Amazon, or to the library, my decisions about what to read are easier and more informed because those writers do the work that they do, and while their judgment isn't something I'd substitute for my own, it's certainly a helpful supplement. Sure, reviewers have their darlings, backscratchers, and check-writers, but I'm still inclined to believe that they provide a service in the public interest. An extension of this logic holds, though, that the best and most honest reviewers actually come from outside the publishing industry. Independent book bloggers are, for example, less concerned with their images as public dictators of taste (or with quid pro quo) than they are with promoting the works they feel deserve promotion. In short, the prettiest flowers aren't always in the walled garden.

For all this, though, I still have trouble shaking my prejudice against self-published literature. Earlier this year, Virginia Heffernan argued in the New York Times that "it's hard to remember the stigma that once attached to self-publishing." The article features a quote from IndieReader (an online distributor for self-published books) encouraging readers to "think of these books like handmade goods, produced in small numbers, instead of the mass-marketed stuff you’d find at a superstore.” I'm not sure I agree that the quality of craftsmanship we typically associate with handmade goods is present in the product pushed by self-publishing companies. The analogy strikes me as a little bit misleading. Self-publishing companies may publish fewer books per author, but they're still mass-producing a ton of books for as wide a profit margin as they can. And the product is a far cry from the beauty and originality of the hand-hewn that IndieReader intends to evoke. Still, it's what's inside that counts; and I have my doubts about that, too.

Perhaps there's more to be said for dodging the gatekeeper boondoggle than I had originally thought, but based on my (admittedly limited) experience with self-published work, quality control in self-publishing remains a concern for me. Part of what I mean by "quality control" implies, minimally, the number of people who look over an entire manuscript before it turns into published material.

Consider, as an example, the several-step process of academic publishing: once a manuscript (MS) has been tapped for publication, an outside reader (sometimes an expert in the subject of the work) verifies the validity and relevance of the author's arguments and may make various alterations or suggestions to the work; the author might then get the MS back and then submit a revised version; the revised version of the MS then undergoes copy- or line-editing and fact-checking, usually by at least two editors who look it over several times; the MS is then returned to the author, who reviews the copyediting and suggests final changes to the work; the MS is then passed along to the publisher, who manages the layout, typesetting, house copyediting, etc.; the publisher then sends the MS (now in proof form) back to the managing editor, who in turn passes the proof to the copyeditors and to the author, who may or may not make final changes before the work finally goes to print. My point is this: by the time the manuscript reaches the point of mass distribution, it has been reviewed by no fewer than five people (excluding the author), many of whom have gone over the work with a fine-toothed comb more than once. It's not a hassle-free process—it's time-consuming, there's a lot of back-and-forth, and sometimes feathers are ruffled—but at the end of it all, the author has the satisfaction of knowing that the work published under his or her name is the best that he or she is capable of, and oftentimes these writers are outspokenly grateful for everyone's efforts.

If self-publishing authors were to seek out the same level of pre-production scrutiny for their manuscripts, it would be at their own expense, which means it usually doesn't happen. As such, circumventing the middlemen also means circumventing the refinery of the editorial process. In my opinion, it's everyone's loss when that happens. I take no joy in reading a book with misused or misspelled words, decorative punctuation, characters whose names change, or other common mistakes. The text should never be an obstacle to the experience of reading it. Honestly, when I see a row of exclamation points, I assume the author does not read widely. When I see an egregious error, I assume the author doesn't even read or revise her own work. And when I see enough of these authors all frothing at the mouth for me to read their books, it makes me fear for a future in which everybody's talking but nobody's listening.

Time will tell, I suppose. Meanwhile, I'm done spreading my know-nothing around. Until next week.

Submitted Without Further Comment

From the monthly Q&A sessions at the Chicago Manual of Style's website:

Minding the Pile: A Newbie's Old-fashioned Woes of Writing in a Digital Age

I got my first magazine gig in the summer of 2008, just before the economy imploded. While I was experiencing the first-blush thrill of seeing my articles in print, Rolling Stone shrank, newspapers all over the United States were declaring bankruptcy, the legendary "long lunch" of magazine publishers evaporated, the death knell for journalism began to sound, so on and so on. The magazine I'd just started working for stopped being able to pay its contributors for several months, and we produced the thinnest issue in the history of the publication that November. Now, here I am sitting on my unfledged novel manuscript, and the same scene unfolds (according to some sources) for traditional publishing. It's sometimes hard not to feel that I was born too late--or, at least, at the wrong time.

Garrison Keillor's death-of-publishing op-ed piece speaks directly to that anxiety. Lots of smart, well-spoken people have said and written quite a bit in response to this, so I won't belabor it, but the fact of the matter is that I'm impressionable. I will believe anything for approximately 5-7 minutes, at least. And so when I read Keillor's closing sentences ("It was beautiful, the Old Era. I’m sorry you missed it."), I kinda pulled a muscle in my chest. I'm old enough to have known what the publishing industry was like when I was developing my what-I-want-to-be-when-I-grow-up narratives. For Garrison Keillor to steamroll my childhood fantasies and slam the door on future generations is a damn shame. His piece seems to me less the nostalgic musing of a curmudgeonly humorist than it is the sour grousing of a nasty, alienated old man.

In the Baltimore Sun, Keillor's editorial ran under the title "When Everyone's a Writer, No One Is," which purports to shift the emphasis a smidge, though the content is of course the same. About a month after Keillor's screed landed, author/editor Laura Miller wrote an article for Salon likewise examining the consequences of the digital self-publishing trend. Her perspective is much more judicious. Where Keillor says, "editors will vanish," Miller offers the finer-tuned argument that "if the prophecies of a post-publishing world come true, it looks, gentle readers, as if that dirty job [as agent or editor] will soon be yours." (Or, to paraphrase, "when no one's an editor, everyone is.") How you, as a reader, might feel about this scenario has a lot to do with how much time you've spent with unpublishable writing.

When I think about slush piles, I think about Freud. In his 1908 essay, "Creative Writers and Day-dreaming," Freud had this to say about the distinction between the daydreamer and the writer:

You will remember how I have said that the day-dreamer carefully conceals his phantasies from other people because he feels he has reasons for being ashamed of them. I should now add that even if he were to communicate them to us he could give us no pleasure by his disclosures. Such phantasies, when we learn them, repel us or at least leave us cold. But when a creative writer presents his plays to us or tells us what we are inclined to take to be his personal day-dreams, we experience a great pleasure, and one which probably arises from the confluence of many sources. How the writer accomplishes this is his innermost secret; the essential ars poetica lies in the technique of overcoming the feeling of repulsion in us which is undoubtedly connected with the barriers that rise between each single ego and the others.

I've always enjoyed his matter-of-fact attitude about how the phantasies of the nonwriter "give us no pleasure....repel us or at least leave us cold." It makes me picture Dr. Freud sitting in his armchair, on the receiving end of something interminable and grotesque, wishing things were different. So it is with the slush pile. Talented writers and, well, let's call them "daydreamers" both contribute manuscripts to slush piles. You never know whether the next thing you pull out of there is going to (as Freud has it) seethe ars poetica and bring you the kind of pleasure that deepens when it resonates with your own experience or, alternatively, sap your faith in humanity and populate your nightmares for months. There's an overwhelmingly large proportion of the latter, and for it to "repel us or at least leave us cold" would be putting it mildly. I've spent a little bit of time with fiction slush, and between thinly veiled rape fantasies, passionately anti-Semitic recastings of the Holocaust, druggy and near-unintelligible ravings about who only knows, and the par-for-the-course awful grammar and general pointlessness, it was dark business indeed. Contrary to Freud's evocation of the shameful turd-burying habit of the daydreamer--and this is just my own Dunning-Kruger-effect-inspired generalization--it seems pretty typical of the slush pile (and sometimes, by extension, of self-published work intended for a general readership) that the skill of the writer is often in inverse proportion to their lust for publication, which is to say, to their perception of the value of their own work. (Here's a fine example. Here's another one.)

It's certainly true that self-publishing eliminates the so-called gatekeepers, the "old guard" of editors and agents whose job it is, more often than not, to protect the public from (forgive my bias) the unbridled textual excrescences of the unwashed masses. It's also true that the new era of digital self-publishing makes it that much easier for would-be authors to circumvent the middlemen and sidestep the steady diet of rejection accorded by the writing life while quality control goes out with the bathwater. Make no mistake: The slush pile is coming to an online distributor of print media near you. Nothing can stop it. I assume that this is what concerns Keillor when he opines that book publishing is "about to slide into the sea." The tide is flowing, for sure, but his conclusion is overly grim. As John Williams of The Second Pass puts it, "Publishers are not frightened by the latent powers of the slush pile, believe me." (And for what it's worth, he has a much more diplomatic view of slush piles than I do, and far more experience with them.)

So, say the pile goes public and the marketplace swells to bursting with the literary endeavors of the self-published. Say, even, that the act of publishing becomes entirely meaningless. What then? What we read (or don't read) becomes a study in the psychology of choice, and the result is effectively a "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" scenario. In Miller's words,

[A]s observers like Chris Anderson (in "The Long Tail") and social scientists like Sheena Iyengar (in her new book "The Art of Choosing") have pointed out, when confronted with an overwhelming array of choices, most people do not graze more widely. Instead, if they aren't utterly paralyzed by the prospect, their decisions become even more conservative, zeroing in on what everyone else is buying and grabbing for recognizable brands because making a fully informed decision [read: being your own gatekeeper] is just too difficult and time-consuming. As a result, introducing massive amounts of consumer choice leads to situations in which the 10 most popular items command the vast majority of the market share, while thousands of lesser alternatives must divide the leftovers into many tiny portions. This has been going on in the book world for at least a couple of decades now, since long before the rise of e-books: Bestselling authors continue to sell better and better, while everyone else does worse and worse.

[Even if publishing becomes meaningless and people find new ways to discover things worth reading], we'll still wind up with a literary marketplace in which a handful of blockbuster names capture most of the sales and attention, personal connections are milked for professional success, and relatively few authoritative voices have the power to lift some artists into the spotlight while others languish in obscurity. Writers who are charming in person and happy to promote themselves and interact with fans will prosper, while antisocial geniuses may fail. (It's unsettling to wonder how the Salingers, Pynchons, Naipauls and David Foster Wallaces of tomorrow will fare in a world where social networking and glad-handing are de rigueur. Why should extroversion be required of a great novelist?) The result: not a whole lot better than the system we already have, but also (hopefully) not much worse.

—Laura Miller, "When Anyone Can Be a Published Author"

This is the most informed, practical, and realistic prediction for the industry I've seen yet (sadly). It's difficult to disagree with Miller's argument, and anyone who would dance on the grave of traditional publishing and bang pots and pans for the DIY revolution would do well to consider it. (It is, after all, a chief complaint of authors who resort to self-publishing that no one else would pay them any attention.) In a literary age where so many options exist as to induce analysis paralysis, it seems to me that agents and editors, those "relatively few authoritative voices" are more important than ever. Far from being relics of a decaying institution, their skills and judgment should be in greater demand than ever before. If anything, there should be more of them. But I guess I shouldn't hold my breath.

Several months ago, I was considering applying for a renowned, fancypants fiction-writing fellowship. In a discussion with a friend of mine, I said it was longer than a long shot, that the judges would want the sort of author they could easily fill up a press release about. I'm not that person, I said. I haven't published anything. I'm a nobody. "How is being published still a thing?" he asked me. "I mean [and here he directed me to an Amazon page featuring an absurd, vanity-press-produced book], even that lady is published." I explained that what I meant by "being published" was "being published by a reputable press," and that (to me at least) it was even more of a thing now, owing to the glutting of the market. But to people who don't love books and know them well, a book is a book, no matter where it came from. Small independent presses have stronger identities than big conglomerates or their imprints--it's a part of what makes the titles they publish appealing to readers in the know. If a writer is shopping a manuscript, it's part of her job (or at least it used to be), to get acquainted with those presses (and ultimately to get rejected by many of them). DIY publishing shows a lazy disregard for this entire process, and the product is poison to the marketplace. If a writer's work is really fit to print, I'm inclined to think (perhaps naively) that a proper press somewhere would eventually pick up and follow through. If writers are really, truly struggling to find good publishers for good work and failing, then there must be too few independent presses publishing good books right now. (Sound crazy? I'm not the only one to suggest it.) However, if writers resort to the instant gratification of self-publishing instead, there will probably be even fewer small-press opportunities available in the future.

In short, the advent of Web 2.0, the burgeoning popularity and affordability of ereaders, the limitless online marketplace, and the DIY spirit make it an essentially forgone point that publishing is not, now, what I thought it would be like when I was younger. I say I was born too late, because I imagine it now essentially the way it used to be; and I say I was born at the wrong time, because I expect that the industry will come out of its current birth pangs well enough to thrive and sustain good writers and their work by the time I'm done trying to accomplish anything. But what I see in my immediate future is this: a monstrous slush pile, a dwindling and overworked contingent of agents/editors/professional book critics, a decreasing number of small presses, and an awfully inopportune time to be an awkward, self-loathing introvert. I'd rather be a fetus with a Facebook page already. Give me a do-over.



...



No, I'm not going to go out like that. It's too sad.

As a writer, maybe I don't need to concern myself overmuch with the ins and outs of the publishing industry. It's fine to do, if I feel I need to pull my hair out every now and then--especially since the pace of life today would have you believe that you need to keep as many plates spinning as possible--but even though much has changed (and will continue to change), most of what made the world of words wild and wonderful to me as a kid has stayed pretty much the same. Take, for example, the story of the last great book I read, Tinkers.

Six years ago, Paul Harding submitted his novel manuscript to a number of agents and editors in New York City. All of them rejected it. He was told that no one wanted the kind of book he'd written, that it was too meditative, too slow, too quiet. Over the course of the next three years, "Tinkers" (the manuscript) sat in a drawer. And then, finally, Paul Harding found a publisher: the Bellevue Literary Press, a small, nonprofit "project" affiliated with NYU's School of Medicine. Bellevue's editorial director helped push the book (Harding's debut novel) to independent bookstores, whose staff read it, loved it, and raved about it everywhere they could. (I was turned on to the book by Michele Filgate, events coordinator at the RiverRun Bookstore in New Hampshire.) But while Tinkers was making rounds in the indie circles and on litblogs, major media outlets weren't reviewing it, and the book was more or less ignored by the public at large. By the end of the year, though, Tinkers had made "Best of" lists at NPR and The New Yorker. And then, in April, Paul Harding won a Pulitzer Prize. The New York Times called his success with Tinkers "perhaps the most dramatic literary Cinderella story of recent memory." It's proof that the old channels aren't broken. It's a credit to the agents, editors, reviewers, and readers who do their extremely valuable and underappreciated work the way it's supposed to be done. It's everything Keillor avowed was only happening "back in the day." It's a measure of hope.

Marilynne Robinson, Harding's friend and former teacher, told the Times that she sometimes has difficulty making her students believe that they "can write something that satisfies their definition of good, and they don't have to calculate the market." (She added, "Now that I have the Paul anecdote, they will believe me more.") Her advice is heartening to me. Maybe I don't need to fret about all-consuming slush piles, or the crest of the self-publishing wave, or what either means for the publishing industry. Maybe I don't need to worry about the number of people reading the stuff I like to read (or write), or about the market appeal of either of those things. Maybe all I need to do is develop and trust my definition of good, and strive to achieve it.

Put on a Happy Face

If you've been visiting the site, you might notice that things look a little different around here! I've redesigned. When I first launched this blog, I spent a lot of time selecting just the right shades of dark gray for page- and post-backgrounds and lighter gray for the titles and body text. When I invited an editor friend of mine to check out my brand new thing, he found it "wicked hard to read" here. "Think of your elders and our sensitive, failure-prone eyesight," he said. (It bears mentioning that "elders" in this context apparently means "late thirties," which means I was being encouraged to consider an even greater contingent than the word itself suggests.) I was resistant to the idea (eat more carrots! use a feed reader!), but good editors generally give sage advice, and the internet seemed to agree that black text on white background was best for big chunky blocks of words. So I put "change color scheme" on my longlist, but what I said to my friend was this: "Maybe it wants to be gray. Maybe the text does not want to be read."

This is a tic I have. The fact that I devote a considerable amount of time to creating things that I have no desire to share makes me question the wisdom of pursuing a writing career. The notion of presenting my work fills me with anxiety and self-doubt. Most of the time, I have to force myself to do it, and then I get to questioning the value of what I'm offering, and it all goes downhill from there. For example, I was happily active on Fictionaut for several months, but when the site came out of beta and all the stories went public, I hid everything I'd written and I stopped commenting on other people's work. It scared me.

Of course I don't want to be like this, and I've come to figure that the best way to fight the problem is perhaps to behave as though there simply isn't a conflict when I do the opposite of what I'd prefer. I find myself thinking of the one-line refrain in Wilco's "How to Fight Loneliness"--it's "just smile all the time." Smile when you don't want to. Everybody loves a smile. (Or at least it makes a predator hesitate, right?)

So, along with my renewed dedication to regular posting, behold my blog's happy new face: higher contrast, larger font, better kerning, and by all appearances greater willingness to be read. (Which is good, because those carrots weren't doing your eyesight any favors.)