Category Archives: writer's life

Big day in book-writing land

Posted on November 30, 2010 | 7 Comments

I was on my way out the door today, when Mr. Williams, our doorman, stopped me and said a package had arrived. I grabbed it and hurried out to get a cab to a meeting. (It’s 32 degrees and I had on a skirt, what can I say). In the cab, I flipped over the package and tore it open, and lo and behold, there it was: my book. The very first sighting of it in its full, printed, glory.

I was so excited I had to show the cab driver. (This is the life of a writer–because your day is spent largely solo, you end up sharing big moments with cab drivers, doormen, and baristas.)

Yes, it’s been three years nearly to the day that I was bracing myself against the December wind as I crossed the Michigan Avenue bridge, on my way to the restaurant to meet my sister for breakfast and to await word from my agent on the bidding process that was to commence at 10am.  I’m not sure if the shivering was from the cold or my nerves.

My sister and I made small talk over french toast, but really, we were waiting for that phone to ring. Finally, with my second cup of coffee just delivered, it rang. The bids were starting to come in. It was a whirlwind of good news followed by better news. I could not believe it. This kind of thing just does not happen to me. Usually, I have to call with tamped down news, to which my mother usually says, “oh well, you can’t expect miracles,” or something equally uplifting (we were not of the generation where everyone wins for just showing up).

But in this case, the news kept getting better. I was ready to jump at the Simon & Schuster offer, but our agent said, hang on, Random House has yet to chime in. And sure enough, the next call was theirs. It was a great offer–but the best part, for me at least, was the editor herself, the much adored Toni Burbank. She’d been with Random House for most of her career, and when we pitched the book to her in person, I felt a connection. She “got it.” I wanted to learn from her what it was like to write a book. And so, we clinched the deal in January 2008.

And today, a mere THREE YEARS later, after much turmoil and publishing’s economic meltdown, in which we lost not only Toni to layoff, but our next editor, Philip as well, and other unforeseen delays (thank you George Bush for publishing this fall),  I have in front of me the final book–and no small thanks goes out to our lovely and talented editor, Angela.

Having gone through the entire process now, from writing a proposal, to getting an agent, to pitching a book and having it go to auction, to writing draft after draft after draft after draft… to edits, and copyedits, to book covers, and flap copy, and blurbers, and marketing pushes, and media tapings (mortifying), and … the list continues— the book is finally, irrevocably done. It hits the bookstores in less than a month.

And if that weren’t enough fun for the day, I ran across this video at The Brow, a terrific blog by a NYC writer. “So you want to be a writer…” It made my day.

Favorite line:  “But I’m the talent, that’s what editors are for.” OR

“I’m going to take a copy to Random House. They’ve never seen anything like this. I know that they’ll want to talk to me right away.”

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Posted in book publicity, getting published, writer's life, writing nonfiction

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Barnes and Noble is on the chopping block –yet another hit to the slow decline of the written word

Posted on August 4, 2010 | 3 Comments

In yet another sign of our declining commitment to the written word, Barnes and Noble is putting itself on the sales block. Borders is on the skids as well. Now granted, these two behemoths aren’t exactly the high point of the literary life. When you’re more likely to find a pez dispenser than “As I Lay Dying” in Borders, you know “the word” is in trouble.  Mom and pop bookstores, where you could find oddball authors and be introduced by quirky, passionate staff to new writing you would have never found otherwise, have long been fighting for survival.

As a twenty-something in the 1980s, I not only witnessed the change, but lived it. Back in the day, I worked in bookstores to pay the rent. (Clearly, rent was cheap.) My first job after moving to Chicago was in the decrepit, cavernous Aspidistra used bookstore on Clark St. I was so green to the literary life that I had to look up the origins of the name–Orwell, by the by.

Aspidistra was run by two quirky, passionate leftists who I suspect had dropped out and tuned in a few too many times. One day, as I waited dutifully at the still-locked front door, I saw a bum with greasy, long stringy gray hair wearing an equally greasy tan corduroy jacket fast approaching. I prepared to avoid him, when I suddenly realized it was my boss!

The interior of the store was no less disheveled–and dishelved. They didn’t believe in organizing the rows upon rows of used books, other than under broad categories like “history,” “fiction” scribbled on faded, yellowed tags. Books were stacked in the aisles, on radiators, and in long-forgotten corners. There were no neat sliding ladders to reach the top shelves, just cheap foot stools. In the far corner behind the counter, near the one slant of light that managed to force its way through the grime on the window, sat Paul, a pinkish, sweaty monument to inertia, charged with fixing the price of each book. From a never-diminishing pile of books on his left, he would pluck a volume, peer at it with his severely far-sighted eyes just inches from the page, and pencil in the price on the inside cover, derived in some arcane calculation of the book’s worth.  The book would then move to my pile, and I would decide where to shelve it. And so it went, the two owners, Paul, and me, day in and day out, in some sort of Bartelby the Scrivener purgatory of old, dead book dust.

But what a treasure trove it was. You could find anything in there, and I mean anything. Of course, you had to spend half a day poking through all the piles and shelves, but that was half the fun. The two owners had committed the stock to memory somehow, so if you were on their “good” list, they might tell you if they had a particular book. If you looked at all like a yuppie, they just barked “don’t know: go and look.” Customers earned their place on the “good” list by honing their quest to worthy books only. If you asked for a copy of say, Rilke or Mann’s “Magic Mountain,” you were in the club. “Confederacy of Dunces”: borderline. Danielle Steele: blank, deadly stare.

I spent hours reading things I had never known existed. It was like browsing in the stacks of a decidedly quirky university library, where sheer happenstance finds you hours later, holed up in a corner reading a new, old author. It was an education on so many levels (including the weight of newly acquired books when you move to yet another third-floor walkup.)

Alas, as much as I adored the book stock, the owners I could not stand. After being asked to tamp down the garbage by jumping on it in dumpster permanently parked out back, I’d had enough. I moved to the shiny new B. Dalton down the street in the equally shiny new vertical Century Mall. Yes, this was the era of  “books cost too much” commercials featuring that annoying business-school upstart at Walden books. It was also the beginning of the end. I had entered the world of efficiency planning, sales goals, and corporate dictates from on high for which books to display, replete with step-by-step instructions for how to unfold and erect the life-sized cutout of Danielle Steele.

Soulless comes to mind. While my little crew over at Aspidistra might have been snobs, they at least knew their books. The people B. Dalton hired were more about business than books. I’ll never forget the time a French woman walked into the store asking for a book about idioms, and my fellow clerk just stared at her blankly and asked her who it was by. I’ll also never forget the time during Christmas rush that we clerks were all subjected to a lie-detector test when we came up a couple hundred dollars short one night.

So it was only a short hop from lie-detector tests and corporate ideas about book-selling that we arrived at the online version of Amazon, and my life as a bookstore clerk–along with all the other truly wonderful independent book store owners– was on its way out the door. (And I’m sorry, but the self-serving “you might also enjoy” tagline that Amazon attaches to every freaking purchase is not the same as a good bookstore clerk–even a snobby one.)

This shift to big business and warehousing books has not surprisingly run alongside the demise of our own literary pursuits. The slow joy of reading a good book, and the patiently accruing benefits of so doing, are dying. And along with it something more important–our ability to think.

As Tony Judt so masterfully put it in a recent essay on words and articulacy, “If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have.” He goes on:

inarticulacy surely suggests a shortcoming of thought. This idea will sound odd to a generation praised for what they are trying to say rather than the thing said. Articulacy itself became an object of suspicion in the 1970s: the retreat from “form” favored uncritical approbation of mere “self-expression,”… [the school of ] “Don’t worry how you say it, it’s the ideas that count.” …

For many centuries in the Western tradition, how well you expressed a position corresponded closely to the credibility of your argument. Rhetorical styles might vary from the spartan to the baroque, but style itself was never a matter of indifference. And “style” was not just a well-turned sentence: poor expression belied poor thought. Confused words suggested confused ideas at best, dissimulation at worst….

And how do we master words? By reading–and not just the latest best-seller you can pick up with the hand sanitizer at Wal-Mart, but those quirky, difficult, dusty books that the likes of Aspidistra specialized in. So the trends go hand in hand. Bookstores got bigger and more chock-a-block of gee-gaws, while publishers (whose own demise would take another blog entirely) pandered to the the efficiency experts at the big chains, and book clerks became interchangeable with pimply-faced 7-11 clerks (and more lately computer algorithm), and our articulacy fell along with them. I’m not exactly sad to see the likes of Borders and Barnes and Noble bite the dust. In fact, maybe it’s time for a resurgence of the independent bookstore. Let’s take a page from the “green” movement playbook. Maybe the slow-food and artisanal movements in cooking and eating can spark the reintroduction of a locally grown, slow-bookstore movement.

So a call to all you readers out there: visit your independent bookstore and start a movement.

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Posted in publishing industry, writer's life

travel writing

Posted on June 28, 2010 | 3 Comments

There’s something about the tropics. I’m sitting here on the balcony of our hotel in Sarasota after a late breakfast. It’s early enough that the day is still fresh, and the humidity doesn’t yet smother you like a wet towel. It reminds me of my mornings on Guam back in 1993. Rex and I were living there for a stint, for the adventure of it, and so he could get a foot in the door teaching. I’d take him to work every morning halfway across the island in our blue Toyota Tercel with its old-school knobby shift and sand embedded in the carpet. The morning deluge of rain had momentarily deepened the lushness of the island. The palm trees dripped and the lizards skittered across the coconuts rotting on the spongy ground. I’d drive barefoot with the windows down, in a pair of old shorts and a tank top, hair still wet from the shower, and feel a freedom I’ve not felt again in many years.

It’s true there’s a languor to islands that you don’t find elsewhere. We haolies, as the Americans were called, would fight that languor for our first year on the island, bemoaning the loss of all our mainland conveniences, like lettuce and fresh milk. We’d roll our eyes at the manana attitudes and the utter lack of efficiency everywhere. We’d go red in the face fighting to make an appointment for an oil change, say, and then show up on time only to wait for an hour or more, if they had us down on the books at all–only to be sent home when we didn’t bring our own oil. Don’t even try to get a phone installed. But eventually, we gave in, and slowed down. And what a joy it was to truly slow down. I’m not sure many Americans understand that concept, and certainly not now as tethered as we are to our machines.

But as I sit here feeling the humidity rise, and the day begin, I miss it. I was working as a journalist then–the daily fluff pieces for the local paper and a long-form piece for the local business magazine. I’d tool around the island interviewing elders about the old traditions or a new restaurant owner on his hopes for moving beyond Spam. But what I really loved was travel writing.  I had the fortune of living in a part of the world not many people travel to, so my pieces were “exotic” enough to get published in the mainland outlets. Sweet, I know.

However, travel writing is not as glamorous as you’re thinking, believe me. For a story, I did thing I’d never do, like braving five days on a 100-foot brigantine off the coast of Saipan (seasick the entire time); or squelching the rising panic as I dipped into a creepy primordial lake in Palau to swim with stinger-free  jellyfish so plentiful they literally bounced off my arms and legs; or ducking fruit bats the size of foxes while kayaking in the stunning sea caves off the coast of Palau; or soldiering through the repercussions of eating kingcrab that had been in the sun too long on the island of Yap while interviewing an elder about the lost art of seafaring canoes.

I’m not complaining, mind you–but it takes a hearty soul to be a travel writer. I’m way too spoiled for all that now. I like my vacations easy these days–no doubt the residue of the many adventures that came my way through writing. I know what you’re probably thinking: why would you avoid adventures in favor of sanitized Ritz Carletons or Montego resorts.  Well, the towels for one.  Travel writing is all about gentile deception, you see. Not deliberate, outright lies, but a tendency to wax poetic about insect bites and cigarette butts in the sand.

Good travel writing–not the catalogue-of-attributes kind, but the kind that comes from immersion and insights–can pluck the reader down into the sights, sounds, and smells of the foreign. It can bring the world to the page, and make the reader want to buy a round-trip ticket to exotica. But woe is the poor writer who has to suffer through the taxi driver with the smorgasbord of nervous tics (many of which require no hands on the steering wheel) while ascending the high Atlas Mountains in Morocco, or the cockroach running across one’s foot in the middle of the night while doing one’s business on a squatter toilet in the jungles of Thailand. It’s only when the panic or disgust subsides and the thankful-to-be-alive adrenaline rushes in that  the travel writer turns out the gorgeous descriptions of lavender in bloom on the mountainside or the wild poppies that rival the setting sun in casting the land in orange.

No, you rarely write about the daily travails–unless they are so over-the-top as to be hilarious to the armchair reader. I used to devour travel writing–of the likes of Jan Morris, Paul Theroux, and many more I’m forgetting right now. I loved the personal challenges–trekking across the Sahara from east to west, or having hot flashes in the jungles of Borneo. I even took a class in reading travel writing in college. I aspired to it, to be able to combine the adventure with a literature of personal insights. But then I just got lazy. And honest. I’m not that adventurous by nature now. I like the familiar. I guess I can thank Starbucks for that.

And yet…. there’s something about travel that grabs you and sucks you in. It’s a lot like childbirth I suspect. You forget the pain and remember the joys, in this case the joys of discovery. Too much of the same and it begins to look like airports or strip malls that dot every single American city. Apparently Americans are not at heart travelers gauging by the environs they’ve built. We like it familiar. Given the option of going to a roadside crab shack or Tony Bahamas, I’ll put my money on Tony Bahama’s as America’s first choice. I was thinking this darting up and down the Gulf Coast of Florida, passing yet another string of strip malls melding seamlessly into another and another.

But then Rex and I took a trip on the blue highways of Florida, straight across the paper-flat south central Florida, the part that lies between the coasts, the part where towns with names like Belle Glade assemble in a motley mix of cement-block homes and mobile homes, where the two-lane highway cuts between a shack selling alligator, frogs legs, and shrimp on one side and a gas station on the other. Between these tiny towns are endless sugar cane fields, like the rows and rows of soybeans and corn in Indiana, and the occasional maximum security prison. We stopped in a little shop on the side of the road that advertised hand-packed ice cream on a hand-lettered sign. It was Sunday and nothing was moving on main street except the shimmer of heat on the road. It was a little ominous in fact, like a Western town just before the gunfight. The bell above the door tinkled as I entered the cavernous shop selling day-old cookies and some microwaved sandwiches. (What is it about shops in these small towns– they’re always so BIG, and feel so empty.) The moody and pimpled teenage boy mumbled a forced hello. I tried to make small talk in my best small-town ways, and he brightened a tad as he scooped out a cone. But not much. We paid up and were out of there.

I felt for the kid, growing up in that town. But then, maybe he likes it, knowing everyone, family close by, friends to go hunting with and talk girls. Plus, he’s probably on Facebook with 113 friends from all over the place. The ice cream, btw, was delicious. Despite the flat endlessness of that three-hour drive, it heartened me. America has a lot of these blue highways. We still have a unique regional cast about us–although even in the middle of the swampland of Florida, the signs of conformity are encroaching. Maybe it’s time to put on the travel-writing hat and take a road trip. But I’m staying in nice hotels if I do it.

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Posted in millennials, writer's life

A writer is a control freak with a pen

Posted on June 25, 2010 | 2 Comments

Stage 5 in the editing process–the bound galleys–has arrived. And wow does the book look, well, like a book. It’s real.  Oh so real. I’m a little queasy actually. Can’t we just hit rewind and go back to the heady early days of this project, walking into Random House to pitch the book after a day spent pitching about a half-dozen other publishers? You know, when everything was still theoretical, still a possibility. Can’t we go back to book: BC–before completion?

The writing life has a lot of perks, mind you (your own snacks, afternoon coffee, shopping when the crowds are at work), but the trade-off is needy self-doubt. People are critics, let’s face it. We all have an opinion about someone or some thing, and we all voice those opinions freely. Writing begs for critique. It’s subjective after all; the reader’s own life shapes how he or she interprets and reacts to what’s on the page. I’ll never forget those Sunday mornings on Guam, when my story for the newspaper would come out, and my phone would ring. I’d pick it up, expecting to hear a big thank you, only to get an earful. “You didn’t talk to so and so, he had a different take on the story.” Or, “I didn’t mean it like that when you quoted me.” I’d sometimes go back to my notes in a fit of self-doubt, but there, in black and white on the page was the exact quote as I’d written it down.

A book is essentially a self-doubting control freak meeting its chorus, front and center. Not a pretty sight.  Writers write and rewrite the same chapter driven by that phantom critique on our shoulders. We change a word, recast a sentence, strike out another–over and over again. We will keep going like that until someone–our lovely and detached editor–puts us out of our misery by typesetting the book and telling us we have to pay for any changes from now on.

Finding the perfect word may be what we tell ourselves, but really, it’s fear. Someone said to me recently, You must be so relieved to be done? You can’t do anything about it now; it’s in print. It’s out. of. your. hands.

Those, my friend, are the least favorite words of a writer/control freak.

What comes rushing in with those words is the memory of draft 15 of chapter 3, when in a fugue state of revision, when you no longer knew what you’d written  because you’d revised it so many times, you threw up your hands and said, oh screw it. No one is going to read this anyway. It’s good enough. I’m done.

The horror of that decision now comes lunging at you. Too late, because now, here it sits–the bound (and gagged) galleys. Done. Finito. Out. of. my. hands.

So, when you’ve turned that last page and are pausing for a moment of reflection, be gentle on me, dear reader. Lie to me even. In the meantime, I’m in sunny Florida for the week, steeling myself against the initial readers, our blurbers, by immersing myself in a real estate hunt that demands all my energy. I can judge other people’s lives–and furniture choices–for a change And let me just go on record here: I LOVE your pastel wicker as a furniture choice.  See how easy it is? Love it, love it, love it.

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Posted in writer's life, writing nonfiction

I’ve been marked down…

Posted on May 27, 2010 | 5 Comments

I write today at ground zero of capitalism’s meltdown–Wall Street. I’m here in New York for a couple of reasons, one of which was to take my editor out for lunch. I love lunch.  I took a stroll this morning around 9am amid the canyons and cobblestone streets down here at this southern tip of Manhattan. It has that old world Euro feel of narrow, winding streets hemmed in by brick and mortar with awnings advertising shoe repair, delis, and espresso. I like it. It’s not the cigarette-scarred cement and cheap purse vendors of Midtown, or the prim and preppy Upper East Side. It’s the old world holding its own against progress.

New Yorkers are a scrappy bunch. Just watch them line up at the cross-walk. All hopped up on caffeine and pressure, they jostle for their spot at the front of the pack– a pack that is now halfway into the street, with cabs honking and buses trundling by. “Wait” for a New Yorker is a four-letter word. The other side beckons. This side is so yesterday. As soon as there’s the tiniest semblance of a gap in the traffic, they bolt, double-espresso teetering atop a plastic cup of yogurt, their blackberry’s twerping in the other. Push your way through or risk getting lost in the masses. It’s a city that demands self-promotion in the literal sense of that word. Or maybe self-propulsion.

Self-promotion is not something that comes naturally to me. Tooting my own horn is frowned upon where I come from. Here, though, if you don’t plant your flag, you might as well not exist.

I had a moment of inconsequence as I arranged to messenger the galleys of the book over to Random House. Three years of work was being bundled up– the last changes made, the writing finally over. I was thrilling a little to the moment, to the words “can you messenger this over to Random House.” Yep, I was an author, if anyone cared to ask. (No one did.) But then, the desk clerk said to the messenger service:

“No, it’s not big. It’s a pile of, you know, copy paper, about two inches thick.”

Wow, in one sentence, 3 years of hard work was effectively reduced to “a pile of copy paper.” Pffft. Ego checked.

Now it’s back to Chicago to start book #2 while waiting for the horn-tooting, publicity push to begin. But first, I must travel to Iowa for a week. Our favorite mother managed to throw out a disc in her back “just standing there.” Actually, she was trying to lift a cement block in her garden. This little tidbit was only divulged under the haze of pain killers.

She is under doctor’s orders (problem #1) to rest (problem #2), stay in bed (#3), and take medication (#4,5, and 6).  My sister was there this week and I’m going next. I actually think they’re keeping her in the hospital the entire time (lord help them), so I’ll be spending time with Dad. One thing for sure. I won’t have to jostle for space on the cross-walks in St.A. (are there even cross-walks?) and everyone still knows who I am.

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Posted in book publicity, dotty, getting published, personal meanderings, writer's life

On leaving home & writing

Posted on May 3, 2010 | 5 Comments

There’s been much ado lately about the state of publishing on this eve of the e-book. The Kindle and iPad are supposedly revolutionizing publishing. We’ll see. As my friend Jenny says, was the paperback really such an unwieldy form? Let’s see– it’s light, portable, effective for conveying the written word. Doesn’t blink off when the battery is dead.

But, cry the devotees,  you can’t download the entire New York City public library with a mere paperback! What if you don’t like the book you’re reading when you’re on vacation at the beach? With the iPad (and stale gum for that matter), you can toss one and unwrap another. (But…can you actually see the screen on the beach? And what about the sand? My god, the Kindle might be the end of beach reading!!)

As for the presto-change-o availability of books on the e-reader, I have to side with Paul Theroux in the most recent issue of The Atlantic. When asked whether the migration to e-readers increases access to good stories or diminishes it, he agrees that it greatly increases access. “I could not be more approving,” he says, “But free libraries are full of books that no one reads.”

Sigh– and so true.

In the same article, he also has this to say about advice for young writers.

Notice how many of the Olympic athletes effusively thanked their mothers for their succes? “She drove me to my practice at 4:00 in the morning” etc. Writing is not figure skating or skiing. Your mother will not make you a writer. My advice to any young person who wants to write: leave home.

(Notice how I brought this back to young adults.)

Anyway, he’s right. Leave home and/or have a crazy mother. That’s the ticket. I think I had both.

Leaving home injects you right into the unknown–that stressful, exhilarating world of newness that fires the creative spark (as well as brooding depression–always a plus for a writer). My first sniff of independence came during the many trips to Minneapolis (the Cities, as we call them in StA) with my parents.

It was there, sitting alongside the adults in the Little Wagon, Russells, and a steak joint whose name escapes me that I caught wind of a different life. The glamour (mink coats!) and the fun they all had, cocktails in hand, telling jokes that went right over my head.  And what characters those Grain Exchange men were. Bob White– a 6′ 5″ Mr. Magoo with a serious cocktail habit–was my favorite.  He’d tower over everyone with his loud jackets and white leather shoes (it was the 70s– we can forgive him). He wheeled and dealed at the Exchange,  dodged taxes, never put an asset in his name, and drove a Cadillac always with a “traveler”  in his makeshift cupholder. His second wife, Elly, was a gravely voiced former hostess who lit up a room. They lived the high life– a life absolutely anathema to the prim streets and neat corn rows of rural Iowa. And I sat with my Shirley Temple and took it all in.

From then on, I fancied myself a city girl. But it was a summer or two later, when I was about 12, that the freedom and anonymity a city offers really sunk in.  We were visiting my Aunt Bette and  Uncle Dick in Philadelphia. It had been a long day of sightseeing and as we emerged from a museum with a stoic set of stairs not unlike those Rocky Balboa scaled, my Aunt Bette unceremoniously plopped down (as only Bette can plop) on the steps. I was so trained in the small-town obsessions of what other people think and what someone might say, that the thought of just sitting down on the steps was shocking. No one else was sitting!

I looked around–mainly at my horrified mother–and sat down beside her. No one cared! No one even looked at us. What freedom. Truly, if you’ve never lived in a small town, where your every move is dissected, you don’t know what I”m talking about here. Life in a small town is like living in a bell jar. Even today, after more years living in cities than in small towns, I feel the eyes on me as I walk (walk!) to the grocery store or head to the tennis courts when I’m home visiting my parents. No wonder no one goes out, except to the safety of their back yards. Small towns are seemingly empty of people, because when you do go out, everyone watches you from behind the curtains. Believe me. Even when you simply walk around, you feel judged.

So it was to a city I fled when I turned all of 18. Whether it made me a writer, I can’t say. But the trials and newness, the new friends and new ideas, and yes the loneliness and confusion–they all contributed to an adult life that has challenged me at every turn. There’s nothing like realizing you’re just a little fish in a big pond to drive you on. And there’s nothing like realizing you can metaphorically sit down on any old set of steps and just be.

So, living at home might be safe (and cheap), but life only really begins when you leave.

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Posted in personal meanderings, writer's life, writing nonfiction

Tagged , , ,

My mother can once again ask about the book

Posted on April 21, 2010 | 2 Comments

The book is moving squarely into the marketing realm now. I’m reenergized seeing it come to life. For the longest time, the manuscript was in a state of suspended animation as it wound its way through layers of editors at Random House (and layers of editors kept getting laid off). This process is a bit of a letdown, if you must know. You spend days on end, weeks on end, writing. More weeks panicking. Months go by as you fret and fuss over the words, the ideas, the main arguments. Does it have enough narrative juice to pull the reader along? Is there a point here? What on earth AM I arguing?

But finally, you find yourself at Kinkos making three copies, and the girth of the final manuscript seals the deal: you’ve written a book. In a fevered frenzy, you send it off to the editor, who you just know is waiting with bated breath for the manuscript to arrive (ha!). Then you wait. Little by little, the air seeps out of your balloon.

My mother, bless her, has so much faith in me that she has politely stopped asking about the book, not because she knows it’s like being pregnant and having everyone ask, “have you had the baby yet?” No, she stopped asking because she thinks the book is dead in the water and doesn’t want to cause me any pain.  Yes, my mother missed Mothering 101: Believing in Your Child, against All Odds.

She’s convinced that the book should have come out early last year because the topic is “getting old now.” Yep, buck me up, mom. I try to tell her that these things take time, but she is not a patient person. I just have to look at her walls for evidence of that.

Mom is quite the painter of rooms–especially in January and February in bone-cold Iowa. Yet painting in her mind’s eye is the point when you unroll the rugs (oh, who’s kidding whom: she never rolls up any rugs to paint), move the furniture back into place, and stand and gaze at the transformed room. It is most definitely not the two days (ha!) spent taping around windows and ceilings, getting the proper paint brushes, priming, and then, lovingly applying the final two coats. No, mom condenses that down to this:

Buy a can of paint (like vanilla in baking, she is not a believer in primer), get a ladder, pour some paint into the roller-bin, and begin rolling it on. She gets as close to the ceiling as she can with the roller (sometimes bumping right into the ceiling), and then heads down to the basement for a brush sticking upright in a Folger’s can of congealed paint thinner leftover from the last job. The brush has a bad case of bed-head by now, and is as stiff as a corpse, but no matter. A little more paint thinner and away she goes. Did I mention there is no taping involved? Yes, she just steadies her hand and goes for it. Inevitably, there’s a wavy line at the seam, some splash-over onto the ceiling– but who’s going to look up there anyway? Within an afternoon, she’s done, and the furniture is back in place. pronto.

Usually you can see the brush strokes when the sun shines in, because she doesn’t believe in priming, and often doesn’t have the patience to do a second coat. But no matter. It’s the effect that counts.

This, btw, must drive my dad batty. He is the ultimate German perfectionist. The furniture he used to make is a marvel to behold. Every seam is airtight. Every corner is perfect. His finishing is silky smooth. He has lately taken to building model ships, and he and a neighbor spend hours together hunched over these exquisite wooden ships with miniature rigging that has the substance of a spider web. He apologized for one nearly invisible glue clump when he gave me one of his early creations. The neighbor had gotten a little slap-happy with the glue one day and Dad didn’t get to it in time before it hardened. That one tiny blob of glue drove him nuts.  And now, largely confined as he is to a chair in the living room, he sits and stares at mom’s handiwork on the walls. It must be like Chinese water torture.

Actually, my mom’s vision of painting is shared by a lot of would-be writers. They like the part where you’re on the talk shows, but actually writing the book, word by painful word, that’s another story. If I had a nickle for everyone who has said to me, I could write a book if only I had more time… Really?

Plus, if they realized that after writing it, you sit and cool your heels for about a YEAR, they’d certainly decamp. Yes, it’s been a year since I stood at Kinkos watching my book put on weight. And that was after a year of writing and revising. I have files on my computer dated January 2008.

So it’s a relief to see the book coming to life. We have a title. Cover is coming soon. We have the tipsheet that marketing will use to convince the sales reps to get excited about this book. And we even saw the typeface for the book–way cool. Next will be bound galleys for blurbers, which I’m trying to line up as I write. (I personally think we should all have blurb writers on call for our life. “Barbara Ray’s life is a smart and liberating romp through adulthood that redefines what it is to be a woman in today’s world…. With keen wit and unparalleled insight, Ray began life as an editor…”)

The best part of all this, I can once again relieve mom of her awkward attempts at being supportive (“oh who cares anyway, so many books are published each year”) and tell her that the cover is imminent. “Oh good,” she’ll say, already consigning it to the remainders bin with the books on military ships. “What are you going to do now?”

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Posted in book publicity, dotty, getting published, writer's life

We have a title!

Posted on April 6, 2010 | 3 Comments

It’s been awhile since I’ve revisited the process of writing a book. Let’s just say, it’s a process with a capital P. After the heady experience of walking into Random House, seeing all those great authors in the display cases in the august lobby, and pitching our book proposal as if our life depended on it, Rick and I got down to the business of actually writing the darn book.

Yes, dear reader, we were signed by Random House–woot.  Lest you think we were simply lucky, let me say this. Not. It required months of finessing a proposal, writing the perfect cover letter (thank you Jeff Herman) and seemingly countless hours poring over the A Writer’s Guide to Book Publisher’s…and Literary Agents to get just the right agent, followed by a ton of envelope-licking and SASE postage. And rejections. Did I mention the rejections?  Curt, dismissive dismissals. Ouch.

But shortly, we’d meet with luck, and we signed with an agent. More  rewrites of the proposal would follow (thank you Joelle), capped off by a one-day whirlwind trip of shameless, pressure-cooker salesmanship (tip to authors: polish that elevator speech because it’s all the time you get). Eight hours, eight publishing houses– and a stiff drink at the Algonquin following.

I will say, though, that the punchy, testoterone-soaked day of pitching the book in NYC, and then the heady bidding war that followed, was enough adrenaline to carry me for several months. Until the drudgery hit of putting word after word on the page and hoping it makes sense.

Ok, drudgery might seem like a pretty strong word. Most people envy the life of a writer. Sleep late, work in your sweats, put in a few hours at the computer composing brilliant prose, cash the royalty check and head out to the local pub at night to live up to the stereotype of a writer, get in a fight or two, slay a lion– oh wait, that’s Papa Hemingway.

Mostly it’s this: wake up, read a boring research paper, realize that you’ve left out a very important point that boring research paper raises, try to figure out how it will fit in your airtight framework, realize said airtight framework is falling apart, and you’re a complete fraud who has no clue what you’re doing. Breathe. Feed cats. Decide to cling desperately to the framework because it’s all you have. In the meantime, read the New York Review of Books for inspiration. Hate yourself even more. In fact, you now despise all books, and fantasize about a 9-5 job as a hotel concierge.  Berate poor unsuspecting husband for not folding the socks just so. …

Day 2.

And so it goes, until you have 100,000 words on the page. Nothing to it. (and did I mention you’re expected to do all the other work of your “real” job on top of it?)

So, after about 6 months of this torture, you have something on the page that resembles a first draft. And then, lucky you, you get feedback. From everyone. There are two things in this world, people and opinions. Or as the old joke goes, opinions are like  *–holes, everyone has one.

Yes, dear reader, it takes a certain ballsy certainty to be an author. Ego I think some call it. At first you welcome the input. (But not really. Who’s kidding whom?) Yet, being the product of a midwestern “don’t get too big for your britches” childrearing policy,  I took those comments to heart. It’s ME who is the failure. It’s MY logic that is faulty.

But at some point, about month 15, when person A has suggested you rearrange the chapter to stress a certain point only to have person B suggest it another way, and person C, or D, or E (you’ve lost count) circles back  to the original point, you begin to suspect that this world of publishing is an arbitrary game of Chinese water torture.  Which it is. So you strap some on, write a chapter that makes sense to you, and move ON.

And eventually, we come to the reward– the final edition. The one you send to copyediting. This is the one that has gone through so many revisions that if it were a pair of jeans through the wash, it’d be threadbare. It’s been pored over so many times that I don’t even know what I’m reading anymore.This is the one that says, make your final changes now because in the next step, galleys, we’ll charge you for them. No pressure.

But you know what, the book is good. It really is. I read it for the last time poolside in Miami, and I have to say, I’m happy. I’ve been pushed far beyond my comfort zone. I’ve been pummeled beyond recognition. I’ve complained and doubted and bolted upright in cold sweats at night (that could, however, be menopause), but in the end, it’s a good book.

And so we leave the editorial side of things and enter the dark world of marketing– with a brand-spanking new title. The title? Drum roll please:

Not Quite Adults: Why 20-Somethings Are Choosing a Slower Path to Adulthood and Why It’s Good for Everyone.

The tearsheet, catalogue copy, blurbs, and cover are to come. And then the marketing onslaught begins in earnest, followed, miraculously, by December 28, when it hits the bookstores. So you all can BUY a copy.

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Posted in book publicity, publishing industry, writer's life, writing nonfiction

what was I thinking?

Posted on March 5, 2010 | 3 Comments

Awhile back I decided to explore my future options, disgusted as I was by the book business and the writer’s life. What a luxury, I thought, to go to an office every day, knowing what you are going to do, being able to focus on one, maybe two things during the day (not the 15 I usually juggle), and just be paid a reliable salary every month for showing up and doing a good job. Heaven.

So I started to explore far and wide, seeing if I could use the skills I have somewhere else. Turns out my aptitude is in things like forensics. Cool, I think. If I could do it all over again, I’d be a homicide detective in a heartbeat. So I actually started toying with the idea of something like forensic accounting. How awesome to be the Jimmy Stewart sort who felled the Madoffs of this world by following the money.

Well, cool that is until I had to do my own books. I have only recently emerged, stunned, from the hell that is end-of-year fiscal accounting for companies (Hiredpen is an official corporation). March 15 is d-day. I even have an accountant–that’s the sad part.

The thing with numbers– I never really got confident with my ability to find the right answer. I do love the fact that there are right answers–no gray: all black and white. None of this theoretical b.s., just concrete right and wrong. But when I was in high school first learning algebra, I could never quite get the hang of those equations. Lisa Leraaen– math whiz extraodinaire–would whip through the equations with a sense of mastery. I was never there. I was always, always faking it, stabbing blindly at options,  never, ever coming up with magic number. The teacher would pass back the tests, and Lisa’s would have one red mark on it, and an A+ at the top. Mine would be all red. All. Red. Stabbing in the dark at equations is statistically a losing proposition.

My confusion started Day 1, when the instructor (a football coach, need I say more) started writing on the board: a = b+c/a. Why are we using letters I’m thinking? Aren’t I in math class? I looked around. People seemed to be writing things down and nodding in recognition. I reapplied myself. But where were the numbers??? Why are we using letters???

It only went downhill from there. I tried asking the teacher. “I don’t get it!!!” I implored, as only a teenager can. He looked at me, and just repeated what he’d said in class, as if I were a foreigner trying to understand his new language. Come to think of it, I was. Talking louder, however, did not help.

I managed somehow to avoid math class for the next four years (it was the “anything goes” 70s). I also managed to skirt math in college by taking astronomy and something else (until I dropped out that is). My hubbie Rex tried to teach me algebra later in life and it wasn’t all that hard in the end. But wedged in my brain is this lack of confidence when it comes to math.

So when I’m faced with my own accounting books, I rely on the computer to guide me in profit and loss statements and general ledgers–thank you Quickbooks. When a glitch happens, as it inevitably does, I painstakingly go back through every bank statement or transaction until I find the problem, pulling my hair out and imploring to Rex– I just don’t get it! I check and recheck my estimates, my balances, my thinking.  I call Rex in to double-check my logic in subtracting this from that to find the bottom line. He peers at me over his half-moon glasses and gets to work– with confidence.

My accountant Stuart is my godsend. He’s one of those guys who just digs accounting. He has a dusty beige office, whose decorative motif is a table full of old-fashioned adding machines. The pictures of his kids are about 10 years out of date, and the plant in the corner lives on despite itself. Stuart scares me a little, though. He talks very fast and says things like, “why do you have an accounts receivable with a negative balance?”He hates it when I just round up.

Pinned in that chair in front of his desk, I flash back to my own dad, another math whiz who would ask things like, what interest rate are you getting on that, or how much is your overhead? He can calculate corn futures on an envelope with a pencil– or more often just in his head.

When you’re not confident in your math skills and people ask you those kinds of questions–even if you know the answer–you freeze. Complete brain cramp. Or at least mine does. Interest rate, what’s an interest rate? Accounts receivable? Uh….

So, although the two days of year-end bookkeeping were torturous (even with wine), I did learn something. There is no future for me in forensic accountant.  I do believe I’m stuck with the logic that I can handle: moving from point #1 to point #2 to #3, and then wrapping it all up in a nice summary. That’s the only puzzle I really enjoy: starting with a blank page and ending with a conclusion, nice and neat.

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Posted in personal meanderings, writer's life

Are writers chumps? Part II

Posted on February 23, 2010 | Leave a comment

I was lolling about on Sunday reading the paper when I came across this article, “Keeping the Plates Spinning.” The story is about a woman who is the managing editor for a daily newsletter. She was humming along, managing a small freelance staff, working 9-6 everyday from home, producing an informative piece of news every day. Happy, happy.

Soon after, however, the advertising dept decided they could sell ads to a new market, so management asked her to start another newsletter. Fine, she said. Then came another, and another, and another–until she was editing 11 weeklies. For no additional money. Yes, she was producing 10x the work AT NO EXTRA COST TO THE EMPLOYER. She was hiring writers who were willing to work for FREE. Her other workers took on more work for no more money. “We’re asking more of them, and frankly we’re not paying them more. But they do it, because we’re a team and they’re nice people.”

She takes no vacations, works most holidays, and says she is “giddy with hysteria” trying to keep it all running smoothly. Yet she’s not complaining (!). “This is just the new reality” she says.

Say what? I have to ask myself, would bankers take on 10x the work for no additional money just because they’re “nice people?” Would Wall St workers? Would anyone? Come on people. If you say yes to this kind of servitude you’re setting the bar low for all of us. Writers are professionals. We do a job few people can do–we write clearly and quickly. We know not only how to write a good sentence, but how to string them together in a coherent way, with some punch, with logic, and we unpack complicated ideas and present them in ways that readers can grasp. It’s a skill, equal to creating fancy derivatives with math equations.

I wonder if this is a gender thing? I remember my mother, a licensed Water Safety Instructor with a lifetime of teaching swimming under her belt. Every day all summer she would teach one 30-minute class with five squirming children after another, for about 5 hours a day. When it came time to charge for those lessons, she would say, oh, just give me $5. My father would be apopletic. That doesn’t even pay for the chlorine in the pool, he’d say. But she couldn’t bring herself to tax others’ wallets. She was nice. People would sometimes try to force a check into her hand, which she’d wave off.

I’ve had a hard time learning to charge for my services, but I’ve come around. Interestingly, I find that when I undercharge, I lose the bid. They think I’m not worth it. Overcharge and I lose as well because people are not used to thinking of writing as a profession. They tend to think, “I could do it if I just had more time.” Well, you know what? You can’t. Believe me. I’ve seen your work.

But mostly I battle against my fellow writers and editors, who undercharge, setting the bar so low that we can barely make ends meet. This leaves the client seeking that “housewife” who is doing a little editing or writing from her kitchen table while she tends to the children. Seriously. I’ve actually been told that after I sent in my quote.

I realize times are tough and writers are being laid off right and left. But that is no reason to capitulate and do work for a pittance. It devalues our livelihood.

Maybe we should all ban together to form a writer’s union with some teeth. I realize there are some such organizations out there now, but I don’t see them doing too much. Maybe there’s too much resistance. I don’t know. But we can’t go on writing 11 newsletters for the price of one. Or writing online “content” for literal pennies on the word. Something’s gotta give.

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Posted in writer's life