ninaherenorthere.com

I was inspired by last week’s New Yorker, the one with “Red Death on Wall Street” on the cover, no schadenfraude intended. Despite the nightmares in which I’m greeted by the Grim Reaper in Dennis Rodman hip-hop garb and I cry tears of blood, the Malcolm Gladwell article, “Late Bloomers,” gave me a bit of artistic hope.

It opens with an anecdote (warning: article spoiler) about this guy who quits his job as a lawyer with the dream we all know too well of being A Writer. He has little literary training, but is disciplined. He sells a few stories, and is obviously intelligent, having passed the bar and all. At this point in my reading, I start shaking my head and muttering obscenities. I’m having flashbacks to the Murakami article several months ago (culled from his new running memoir) in which he describes quitting his bar-owning lifestyle to become a best-selling prolific novelist because it “suited” him. I’m not sure if I’m revising Murakami here, but I basically understood his career path as an I-decided-to-be-a-writer-and-so-it-happened tale.

So, this lawyer sells some stories, then there’s a dark period, an unpublished novel, then something in Harper’s, a short story collection, then lots of awards. I’m envious and bitter and pretty sure I’m on the local bus to nowheresville, when Gladwell tells us the catch: the timeline. This lawyer guy’s rise took 18 years. Immediately, I felt buoyant.

The article explores our natural inclination to associate genuis with precocity, using examples like Ben Fountain (the lawyer and late bloomer) and Jonathon Saffron Foer (the precocious genius), as well as Picasso and Cezanne. It debunks some myths and introduces the concept of the “patron,” the person or people who fund the artist on the long walk to glory. I began to find that it helps me deal with my job if I consider my company my patron rather than my employer.

This is one of my favorite quotes: ”On the road to great achievement, the late bloomer will resemble a failure: while the late bloomer is revising and despairing and changing course and slashing canvases to ribbons after months or years, what he or she produces will look like the kind of thing produced by the artist who will never bloom at all. Prodigies are easy. They advertise their genius from the get-go. Late bloomers are hard. They require forbearance and blind faith.”

I like the quote and the article because they give me the illusion of hope, offering a nod to the blind faith that is the antithesis to my logical constitution. It is one of last lines in the article that left me the most encouraged, “sometimes genuis is anything but rarefied; sometimes it’s just the thing that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen table.”

I have more rejections coming my way. More setbacks. More thoughts of failure. More crappy patrons. More ass sores from sitting in that damn desk chair. But someday, I tell you, some day…

Lately, I’ve been turning to the author’s note in nonfiction books for guidance about writing. I think this has something to do with my MFA program. There were only two kinds of classes, one where we offered feedback to each other on our shitty first drafts and another where we read literary masterpieces. How to get from a shitty first draft to a masterpiece was never covered. The how is in the writing process, of course, but in nonfiction I always get hung up on the extra element, the translation of “truth” into story. Or more specifically, I get hung up on truth.

The following is the opening of an author’s note from Jennifer Finney Boylan’s memoir, She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders.

“This is a true story. In order to make its rendition tolerable, certain moments in it have been gently altered–by compressing or inverting the time line, making various people taller or shorter, blithely skipping over unpleasantness, inventing dialogue, as necessary.”

Some of this I consider to be standard for memoir writing and completely acceptable. “Blithely skipping over unpleasantness” is what I consider omitting. It’s the scalpel that cuts the arc of the story, and without it, we’d be reading play-by-plays of people’s lives. The rendition would not be tolerable. This line also tells me that for the most part, Boylan chose to shape her story around the positive aspects of her experience. We all have that right.

“Compressing and inverting the time line.” Fine, I’ll take it. For the sake of tension and Freitag’s pyramid, and for a compelling page-turner of a book. I feel like “gently altered” borders on being an oxymoron, but it’s not. It’s probably a great example of what my teachers meant about the importance of making perfect word choices.

“Making various people taller or shorter” is changing physical attributes of characters. Not a big deal. But the line is kinda offhanded, like she’s sitting in a wicker rocking chair, smoking a Virgina Slims, tossing a hand over her shoulder as she says, “Tall, short, fat, thin, old, young, no matter.”

Here’s where I get stuck: “Inventing dialogue.” It’s like she’s giving up any pretense of truth. Invent means to create, or to concoct and fabricate. To me, “inventing dialogue” implies that no effort was spent trying to remember the dialogue, as if that would be too much for a reader to expect. Boylan uses dialogue for pacing, and in one scene, I think she put words in a doctor’s mouth, for the purpose of lending them authority.

What are we left with after tossing Boylan a bone for not using composite characters? Well, she altered, gently, the plot, characters, and dialouge, which means the setting is super accurate. The fiction writers I know also often aim for truth in setting.

Perhaps the point then is one that I hear often. Fiction and nonfiction aren’t very different. Fiction has to be believable, and nonfiction has to be salable, I mean constructed, and both have to employ similar techniques in order to be stories. And that’s what Boylan’s book is, a story, and I understand that in the meaningful ways, the ones that are emotionally resonant, her story is 100% true.

To easily categorize this book, it is a transsexual memoir. Somewhere in the back of my mind, even though I know the answer, I wonder why it couldn’t exist as a novel, why the curiosity factor wouldn’t hold up if it were simply a story. Would I feel any better if nonfiction books said, “Based on a true story,” like the movies?

Maybe it would have no impact. I don’t feel duped as a reader, but as a writer. I feel duped into trying to be truthful. That’s not entirely true. My philosophy is don’t get caught. I embellish for humor’s sake. I constantly remind myself that if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, it makes whatever sound I want it to make. I invent my thoughts with the abandon of someone who knows that scientists have not developed a mind-reader to verify them.

But as I learn from continually reading author’s notes, there is a better philosophy than “don’t get caught.” It’s own up to whatever you did, descriptive white lies and made-up conversations, then explain it at the end of the book, where nobody will see it.

I fell in love with public library system sometime after the card catalog gave way to the searchable electronic database. Like most people, I was drawn to the library because of its boundless supply of books and because it’s free, but my feelings for the library grew after I discovered the joy of ordering books online.

Not included the main library, there are 27 branches in San Francisco. If you live near a small, understocked branch, you can borrow books from any other location. No surprise. But did you know that you can have books delivered to the branch of your choice? So, let’s say you’re interested in Knitting lingerie style; more than 30 basic and lingerie-inspired designs. You go to sfpl.org, do a search, find the book, enter your library card and PIN number, and then hit the “request” button.

Ordering books is like using Netflix, except it’s free. Sure, there are some downsides, like the five blocks or so you will need to walk to the closest library to pick up the book. But gone are the days of perusing the aisles, wondering whether it’s 303.457ab B303.475a. You just walk directly up to the counter, give your name, and you’ll have your books before the smell of homeless shelter gets on your clothes.

For a steady stream of reading material, I recommend developing a queue of requested books. Memorize your library card number; it’s way cheaper than memorizing your credit card number. Every time a friend mentions a “must read” book, or you stumble upon a good book review, put in a request. Even if the book is a best seller with “97 holds on the first 47 returned copies,” one day when you’re least expecting it, you’ll get a notice in your email inbox. Lo and behold, your best seller is close by, waiting for you.

The library isn’t perfect and if hardcover books are dealbreakers, then you may not find the true love I speak of. I write this post having just come from the Eureka Valley Bookmobile, a bus that sits outside my local branch for a few hours a week, providing limited services while the library undergoes extensive renovations. I can’t say visiting a bus provides the same experience as a brick and mortar library, but it really didn’t matter when I grabbed my bundle of reserved books. My only hope is that someday the bookmobile will deliver.

There is a post today on the New York Times’ book blog, Paper Cuts, that combines March Madness and creative writing graduate programs, two of my favorite subjects. The goal of the post was to find Cinderella writing schools, the lowly ranked MFA programs that produce a surprising number of graduates on best seller lists. The results are inconclusive (i.e. nonexistent) and the post serves only to prompt MFA bashing and MFA justifying in the comments section.

Scanning the blog post, I hoped that my program at the University of San Francisco (USF) would be like the NCAA basketball tournament’s Davidson, an underdog to watch out for. Unfortunately, USF is ranked #83 in the U.S. News and World Report rankings, and if the NCAA graduate writing tournament is anything like the basketball tournament, there’s only room for 64 teams in the bracket. Hello, NIT.

But really, #83? There are three writing programs in our backyard — San Francisco State (#46), Saint Mary’s (#50) and Mills (#62) — that are ranked higher. There are schools in Hawaii and Alaska that beat us. Two schools in the top ten, Michigan and Arizona, are even basketball powerhouses, too.

None of this was news to me. When I tell people about my writing program and they respond positively, I usually point out that they are thinking about SF State not my USF. Also, when I initially looked into programs, I discovered the highly ranked schools focus on fiction and poetry and many lack nonfiction tracks entirely. Since I write nonfiction, the list is useless. As is my graduate degree, which not only says, “The Society of Jesus” on it (damn, Jesuits), but comes from a lowly #83 school.

In my family, personal worth is directly correlated with the ranking of the person’s undergraduate school. Every year my mom pored over the U.S. News and World Report with the rankings. To this day, when I’m at a magazine rack and see the famous annual issue, I check for my undergraduate university, hoping that some useless category like alumna giving will keep it in the Top 5, just behind Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford (three of which rejected me).

I fell for all of the crap when I was younger–the competition, the grades, the importance of going to a top ranked school. I like to think I’m past all that ranking stuff now, but the truth is, I’m not. Going to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop might not have made me a better writer than going to USF, but getting into Iowa would’ve proven that I’m a good writer from the start. And the people who say all it takes to be good at anything is hard work are fools; it takes talent, too. A lot of it. A basic grasp of language and grammar helps, and even with my degree, I’m still figuring out how to use basic punctuation.

But I do want to say that the University of San Francisco has a terrific MFA degree program, and at least some of the instructors went to top ranked writing programs. They are shellshocked. What I learned from them is this: The better the program the more horror stories you will have, and your book advance won’t cover the cost of lifelong therapy.

Next year, perhaps US News will rank the MFA programs by tuition, and perhaps the NY Times book blog will tell us how much money the author of a non best-selling book can expect to make. Then all of us writers will have some truly useful information.

I read Daniel Alarcon’s collection of short stories, War by Candlelight, by accident. I had wanted to read a book, something that would propel me on from page fifty, not end at page ten and start again at page eleven. And I didn’t want to read something true or mostly true or information heavy, what is commonly thought of as nonfiction. I wanted to lose myself in a novel, Alarcon’s new novel, Lost City Radio. He’s part of my obsession with local authors. He lives in Oakland (and is originally from Peru and grew up in Alabama). I’ve heard him read twice, both times from a short story about a modern day gay Abraham Lincoln. It was a bit like fan fiction, or what I consider fan fiction, which to me means turning all the characters gay and then fantasizing about them doing it. I guess Alarcon’s story was more like literary political fan fiction, or maybe just a story. Perhaps if I went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop like he did, I could categorize it. This guy is virtually my age, barely thirty. I fantasize about having his career and his hair. Alarcon has great hair. It is brown, thick and overgrown, wavy with just enough grease to tame the frizz. He’s hot in that disheveled writer way, and I’m into the future of the book business, where it’s not about the books themselves, but the persona of the author, the author’s sex appeal, his hair.

Since I couldn’t get the novel at the library, I borrowed the stories. I read the acknowledgments section first, as I always seem to do, and learned that his very first short story was published by Granta or Zoetrope or somewhere uber-literari like that. People say it’s hard to sell short stories in the current marketplace and this seems to be true, because whenever I come across the collection of a first-time writer, he or she will inevitably write in the acknowledgments, “Thank you to the New Yorker for publishing my first story and taking a chance on me.” There are the few, the talented, the published.

I proceeded to rip through the entire collection, reading them out of order, but in my own noncommittal order of the shortest story to the longest. I have a thing against 40 page short stories or articles. I like to read anything that’s not a novel in one sitting, but I don’t always have time or the focus to read 40 pages. I find long-short standalone stories or articles daunting. The mental investment is high and then it’s over. However, once I started Alarcon’s stories, I could not stop. It was one page-turner of a short story collection, and I moved easily from one teary ending to the next bold opening. “Science of Being Alone” turned on my waterworks, and not just a pooling in my eyes but a splatter onto the page. That story and that last paragraph captured all that is hopeless, fated and lost in love, while also managing to show the pride and acceptance of the defeated. It’s a moment when you want to scream at the protagonist, “Don’t do it you. Don’t do it,” and (maybe it’s because the other character screams it, as well), but when the protagonist does it, bending down on one knee for his annual marriage proposal, it’s only then that you realize he is stronger than you will ever be. The act is not particularly original, but the depth and complexity of the characters and the arc of the story is so well developed that the ending is a light squeeze to the heart.

I think the title, War by Candlelight, which is also a title of one of the stories, sets the mood for the collection. Each character is in a sense at war, and regardless of whether the battle is waged on the streets of Lima or in a small apartment in New York, on the outskirts of a prison or an earthquake shattered town or in the mind of a soon-to-be illegal immigrant, the characters are all fighting for survival. For pennies, for freedom, for love and meaning. And the stakes are death or akin to death. Bombs, bullets, poverty, prison. The stories are like flares shot from a deserted island or matches burnt inside a cave, dim sources of hope in the vastness of despair. When you read a good short story, it’s as if the small selection of scenes and moments become emblematic of an entire life, as if you’ve been given everything in a few pages to understand all that is this person. A good short story tells of worlds and places and experiences that that are foreign yet common. These ones are terrific, quietly explosive. They’re really worth reading.

After Friday at the San Francisco Writers Conference, Day 2 and Day 3 felt like a sequel along the lines of The Next Karate Kid. So rather than feign my own interest and produce a dull post, I’m going to be brief. Or at least try.

An Interesting New Website: Red Room, “the online home of the world’s greatest writers.” It’s some type of social networking site aiming to bring authors and readers together. This might mean a forum for authors to collectively self-promote. I hear Amy Tan wrote her very first blog post. Is that exciting? Regardless, after my first brief site visit, I’m intrigued.

A Cool Person: Jane Ganahl, co-founder of litquake, long-time journalist, author of Naked on the Page: the Misadventures of My Unmarried Life, and author liason for Red Room, surprised me by being one of the few presenters at the conference I sorta wanted to be friends with.

Advice I’ve Already Heard and Still Hate: Platform, marketing, publicity, platform. You must have a web presence. Blog. Participate in the interactive community: post comments, comment on comments. Most of the annoying advice came from Kevin Smokler, a public speaker who packs a punch, a guy with a quote for every occasion. He’s also a likable fella, even though I’m not into inspirational speakers; they all remind me of evangelical preachers. Throughout the conference, Smokler held fifteen minute consultations for $50 each (he donated all the money to conference scholarships), which means his going rate is $200/hour? He really must know his stuff because his entire schedule was booked up with one-on-one conferences.

Another Interesting Website: Booktour: Where Authors and Audiences Meet. Kevin Smokler founded this site and promotes it as a revolutionary all-encompassing list of literary readings. The readings are searchable by author and location. Even people in rural Mississippi can find out when John Grisham is coming to the local Borders.

Most Embarrassing Moment: Pitching an editor at Random House/Broadway Publishing. I thought the Editor’s Round Table was an event where a group of people sat at a table with an editor and asked questions about publishing, then rotated tables. I sat at a table with a sign for the editor at the biggest house at the conference. Why wouldn’t I?

Well, as it turns out, the point of this event was to pitch this editor. Okay, sorry, despite what editor Christine Pride said, I do not believe she looks at unsolicited, unagented submissions. Anyways, I was second in the circle. Yes, we did this in a group setting, and about thirty people crowded around the table waiting for the next chairs to open up. A timer was placed before me. I more or less read a piece of scrap paper that will eventually become the first paragraph of a query letter. Pride smiled sweetly and said her house isn’t interested in transgender themes; they already published a book with such themes this decade. Shucks. I did hear that the book, She’s Not There, is quite good, and I heard the author, Jennifer Boylan, read at Writers With Drinks last week. She’s a better writer than I am, but I think there’s room for two of us, just not at Broadway Publishing.

Least Embarrassing Moment: I helped an elderly man in a wheelchair during a couple of breakout sessions. When I finally said bye, he replied, “Thank you, son.”

Event I’m Happy I Missed: Speed-dating for agents. The line to enter the conference room snaked through the whole lobby. The event was broken up into 3 hour-long sessions. Each person had three-minutes to pitch an agent (one-on-one at least). It was the first time I felt bad for the agents.

Conclusion: I’m cured! My desire to work in the publishing industry is crushed, just as I hoped it would be. I can’t pinpoint exactly what did it–the people, the conservatism, the business aspects, the fear of working on books and projects I hate (many of them), or if it was seeing agenting and publishing for the reality not the fantasy. After this conference, all I want to do is ignore concerns about publishers and agents, avoid other writers, close my door and write.

Below are some highlights and lowlights from my first day volunteering at the San Francisco Writers Conference on Friday.

Creating Spiritual Alchemy by Putting Spirit into Words: My first assigned session. My duty was to keep time by raising placards at 10 min left, 5 min left and STOP. I introduced myself to the speakers. Then Andrea Hurst, the moderator, reiterated my duties: “He will hold up the signs.” It’s going to be one of those days, I thought. Not that I mind passing as a guy, but surrounded by women in sweater turtlenecks, sheer floral blouses, hankerchief scarves, and blazers from Talbots, I knew I’d get lots of double-takes in the women’s bathroom.

Eric Brandt (Exec Editor at HarperOne) told us, “Jesus books always sell.” Reverend Alan Jones ranted about the commodification of spirituality. During the Q&A, a person asked what to do about the fact that her book could reach many people, but unfortunately the subject of spirituality made their stomachs turn. Stop proselytizing? Everyone left believing that she can write the next Eat, Pray, Love, which means I’ll see many more spiritual memoir submissions at the literary agency in which “a moment changed my life and opened my heart to the peace and wisdom in the universe.”

The Right Word at the Right Time: Or dialogue 101. In summary: use dialogue to characterize and move the story, no “chit-chat,” fictional dialogue isn’t real dialogue, no adverbs, and use only the tags “said, ask, and reply.” The speaker, Sheldon Siegel, a charismatic Jewish corporate lawyer from Marin County reminded me of my dad, if only my dad wrote courtroom thrillers. He told the crowd that it’s okay to open a book with dialogue. This means I’ll be reading many more “commercial fiction” submissions in which I cannot tell who is speaking, where the characters are, and what is going on until the third page.

Lunch: As a volunteer, I wasn’t invited. But there were empty seats and so I got free food: creamy orange bisque soup that could’ve been lobster bisque without lobster; mashed potatoes, broccoli rabe and salmon; cheesecake and coffee. Score. From the speakers: Kevin Smokler quoting Eleanor Roosevelt, “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” Daisy Maryles, editor of Publisher’s Weekly, rattled off statistics like, 200,000-300,000 books are published each year. There sure are an awful lot of unread books.

Q&A Session with Nonfiction Agents: With no more volunteer duties, I attended this by choice. In a packed room, I even had the balls to raise my hand. The moderator (agent and conference founder Michael Larsen) sensed my balls, made eye contact and said, “The gentleman in the back.” I stood and asked about the necessity of a book proposal for a hybrid of personal narrative and reportage. Ted Weinstein, a local nonfiction agent, said I could probably get away with proposal, rather than having to write the whole thing first, the standard procedure for memoir.

The session had the quick pace of an auction and the best question came from a guy who asked: “If I have two books, one a memoir about being a gay bullrider and the other about gardening, do I need two separate agents?” The answer is: the “gay bullrider” book sounds more viable than another gardening book in a saturated gardening market. The other answer is that agents are not looking to sell individual books, but build careers. Of course this means more query letters at the agency from people offering their careers by saying, “I have five novels and an idea for a trilogy, all with screenplay potential.”

I also learned from Kathryn Sands (agent at Sarah J. Freyman) about the genres: faction, reality fiction (aka post James Frey creative nonfiction—ouch), stunt memoir, and chick non-fic, but Sands doesn’t believe in categories. She described knowing she has a good manuscript by having a “dowser” moment. Her body starts shaking and she can’t wait to share the info. I recommend slipping her some muscle stimulants along with your manuscript.

From Idea to Contract: Agent Ted Weinstein on the business of book publishing, or the Ted Weinstein Show: a salvo of advice and aphorisms recyclable at any writer’s conference. “We work for money, we live for acknowledgements.” “Oprah has done more for books than any other human being.” “My agent’s an asshole. My asshole.” “If you’re coming to us for feedback, you’re making a big mistake.” “It’s the role of the West Coast agent. We’re like Lewis and Clark to the rest of the world.”

After the session, I got in the front of a long line of people to speak with him. I introduced myself to him, described my project, and received the standard “send it to me,” as well as a decent, but somewhat cryptic piece of advice.

The Gala Party: I had not expected to stick around for the schmoozing. The one thing I didn’t mention so far is that throughout the day I met other volunteers, several writers, and former USF classmates. I bumped into a random friend and received a few introductions through the agents I read for. So, by the time the party rolled around, I wanted my free drink and actually had people to schmooze with. Many strangers introduced themselves and everyone offered recommendations for agents and books to read, as well as helpful tidbits from their own lives. Some say that “Writer’s Conferences are institutionalized discouragement,” but I think they are expensive group therapy. For the most part, I did a good job of not mocking people in my head. Especially since many of them are published authors and I’m not.

My best move of the day occurred when the bartender turned around. I snagged an extra free drink ticket poking out from the coffer. In a room full of writers, that qualifies as smooth and I received a round of high-fives from my new friends and a glass of wine that would’ve cost $8. I stuck around, chatted some more and was one of the last people to leave the hotel.

The words prequel and sequel are helpful when I’m about to indulge in anything. To avoid the hedonistic implications, I often have dinner the prequel and dinner the sequel, as well as dinner. I also do prequels and sequels to Sunday, because doesn’t everyone want Sunday the sequel instead of Monday?

The SFWC is the San Francisco Writers Conference, which is coming up this weekend. I’m overusing the acronym to avoid Googleability, which makes me the world’s only blogger who doesn’t want a bigger readership. I can just see someone Googling the conference for directions, finding my blog and booting me off the volunteer squad before the damn thing starts. I’m being particularly ridiculous because I attached this URL to my bio on the volunteer page, which means that I basically invited and encouraged those I’m in fear of to visit this site.

The SFWC is three days of speakers, breakout sessions, Q&As with agents and editors–a smorgasbord of networking opportunities with infinite possibilities for self-promotion. Don’t leave your business cards at home! There is even a horrific-sounding event called “speed dating with agents.” Participants with sweaty palms stand in long lines, waiting for their three minutes to sell an agent on their manuscript. Agents practice looking interested so the participants stop shaking and stuttering. Or so I hear. The truth is I tried lesbian speed dating once and it will be a long time before I go near any speed dating again.

I’m vaguely interested in the keynote speakers: Clive Cussler, Tess Gerritsen, Daisy Maryles, and April Sinclair. (If you are interested, these speaking events are open to the public at $10 each.) My volunteer duties, as I’ve simplified them in my head, consist of introducing and providing water for the moderator and keeping time at five breakout sessions over three days. My assigned sessions cover spiritual writing, technology, blogs/podcasts, building literary community, using dialogue. There are a bunch of other sessions I’d like to attend in my free time about pitches/queries, magazine/internet writing, getting paid to write your book, and one with the intriguing title, “What do editors do all day.”

There will be about 300 attendees, 40-50 volunteers, and 80-100 speakers; I’m sure I’ll feel out of place amongst them all. I get this sense that for unpublished authors this is a big chance to make the connections that could one day result in publication. I don’t have any high hopes for meeting an agent or editor to advance my career. I’m just excited that it’s in a fancy hotel. I’m also excited because the whole thing is about books–writing, editing, promoting, marketing, and selling them. While a lot of writers I talk to dislike the “book business” part of the process, I find it fascinating. I love book talk, even when I think the person talking is not too bright. So, in my cynical way, I’m looking forward to the conference. Maybe I’ll even have something substantive to say about it.

I’ve been goosed, as in published. Not as goosed as a former classmate of mine, George Dohrmann, who sold his nonfiction book about youth basketball to Random House for what must be a six-figure advance. My piece in Lost Magazine is 500 words and did not come with an advance. But I’m not complaining. This guy is a Pulitzer Prize winning Sports Illustrated journalist and it was only a matter of time before his book found a publisher. I just didn’t expect it to be the week of my itty bitty publication, which will no doubt be listed right below his achievement in my MFA program’s weekly bulletin.

But since this is my blog, I’m going to focus on my “thingy,” which isn’t so much a story, or flash nonfiction, as it is a scene with the theme of loss. It’s called “Transportation.” It was called “The Old Man and the Bicycle” (for lack of a better title), but it’s in this section of the magazine, below the fold or visible only by scrolling down, called Departments, so I guess my “thingy” falls in the department of transportation. Makes sense since it’s about a bicycle. But there’s something about the heading of Transportation that makes me expect a bus schedule below.

Some of you might recognize my “thingy” from the earlier version posted on my defunct bike travel blog iamawinner.net. I wrote the original over 4 years ago. That is how long it takes me to polish 500 words. 4 years. I did work on other projects during that time, but little is published, proving that I turn out approximately 125 quality words a year. I’m trying to up my speed. Last week, I worked on a 600 word travel article assignment and it only took about 18 hours. Keep in mind it hasn’t been accepted yet, and if there wasn’t a deadline, I would’ve worked on it for years.

Why does it take me so long? As two editors have pointed out to me lately, I “overwrite.” I add in excessive descriptions and unnecessary adverbs. I explain my motivations and describe my feelings and generally treat the reader like a big bozo who can’t understand what is going on from dialogue and action. And sometimes I try too hard to be funny. From my bicycle thingy, the words “crotch,” “ass,” “tampon” and “sexually” were all edited out, and not by me.

Some writers might call what happened during those 4 years from original to final, revision. One of my teachers liked to tell a story about either Kafka or Proust (he always used those two examples) who when asked about his work for the day said that in the morning he wrote one sentence, and in the afternoon he erased it. Another teacher told his class that he had 29 versions of his faculty bio. He contemplated bringing in the 29 versions but decided against it, telling his class, “It’s one thing to soil your underwear and another to bring in the soiled underwear.”

I think part of my recent “overwriting” problem has to do with school. I can analyze a paragraph in enough detail to write a three page paper on it, and so when I write a paragraph, I want to show off everything I learned. The other problem is I still hear all the squeaky vermin voices of workshop: what’s your motivation? what are you feeling? what does it look like, smell like, taste like? When I answer all those questions, I overwrite. Yeah, yeah. It’s all part of the whole educational process; I have to learn everything before I can forget it.

But really, I think it is just incredibly hard to balance the overwriting with underwriting. As long as I’m on a USF kick, I recently read The Descendants, by Kaui Hart Hemmings. The novel is an easy, quick read, partially because there is a lot of dialogue, and the timing and pacing of the scenes are so well done. The author never says too much, but says just enough for you to infer the rest. Reading her novel is like running down a road with breaks in the pavement that you don’t notice are there; your body leaps naturally over them. The whole time I read the book, I wanted to call it “simple.” It’s the kind of book one might read and think, I can do that. But I know this is not true. Because it took me 4 years to write one decent scene. Since it might take another 4 years for the next scene, you should probably read this one.

I feel like I’m stuck in bad game of Duck, Duck, Goose. And the kid tapping heads is one of those attention-starved rascals who teases with false alarms and circles endlessly until a supervisor puts a cap on the number of laps allowed. At which point, the kid shouts “Goose” at his best friend, a popular kid who has been called upon so many times that the sweat dripping down from his temples has left dirt-streaks. Meanwhile, I haven’t been pronounced a Goose at all, and most of the kids are so indifferent to me that hands barely make contact with the top of my head.

I’m talking about rejection, mostly rejection from places I send my writing. I could be talking about jobs, too, but to be more accurate, that would be called “non-responses.” The few resumes I’ve sent out have disappeared into the universally recognized black hole of cyberspace, and about five hours after my sole interview, the company reposted the job description, a somewhat passive-aggressive rejection. Oh, and I’m about to be rejected for an unpaid “internship” assisting a freelance copywriter. Maybe we should all keep our fingers crossed for that rejection based on the unpaid aspect.

For the most part, when I receive a response from a magazine, journal, radio show, or whatever, I consider that an accomplishment. When I see that SASE in my own handwriting or an email subject “RE: Submission” I think, “Wow, this did not get lost in the junk mail folder, or underneath a desk, or in a stack of papers left for an intern not-yet-hired.” My spirits perk up as I can’t help but believe that someone pretended to read my submission.

I’ve received so many rejections in January it’s as if editors across the nation made New Years Resolutions to get through their slush piles. I have enough rejection letters that I can (and will, now that I think of it) critique and rate the quality of the various letters. Since that might take awhile, for now I’ll just tell you about some of the rejections:

I was REJECTED from an all female writer’s colony in Washington State. Judging by the name, Hedgebrook, there’s a good chance I saved myself from voluntary commitment to a sanitarium. Hedgebrook told me the notification letters would go out at the end of December, but I, an extra special rejectee, received mine in November. I probably never made it to the second round of consideration, which would mean only my “Why do you deserve to be here?” essays were rejected and my writing samples never looked at. Not so bad since I probably don’t deserve to be there.

I was REJECTED from This American Life, but who hasn’t been. I was also REJECTED from a magazine called make/shift, but the editor said I could submit again, probably because the submission numbers are low, or because that is simply part of that magazine’s form letter. I should point out that in all the rejection letters I’ve received none of them have even a quick hand-jotted, “entertaining.” We all should have goals and mine is a personal comment on a rejection letter.

I was REJECTED from reading at not one, but two local literary series. These hurt my feelings, one more than the other. The call for submissions asked for humor writers to read short personal narratives like those of David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs at a first-time unestablished event. This is what I do. This is all I can do. Write and read funny shit aloud. That rejection hurt. A blast of mace to the heart. And I’d be a jerk to call the other event that rejected me dinky, because it isn’t, but is there anyone who wants me to read anything anywhere?

“Writing is Rejection,” teachers say. That is when they aren’t saying, “Writing is Revising.” (It was disappointing to find out I have to do all this revising only to be rejected.) Today I arrived at Chapter 5: The Rejection Section in the book I’m reading called Putting Your Passion Into Print. (PYPIP is a pretty decent guide to publishing, proposals, the book business, despite having what I consider to be a tacky title but according to what I’m learning in the book, exactly the kind of marketable title appropriate to the content.

There was one thing I expected to read a lot of in this section: anecdotes of success stories and a list of the many famous writers who have been rejected, or as the punk who scribbled in my library copy wrote about the rejected: “The whole wide world of writers!” The chapter opens with John Kennedy Toole and the Confederacy of Dunces, an anecdote with the lesson that you should not to kill yourself before winning the Pulitzer Prize. There are also quotes regarding famous books once rejected as manuscripts, and statistics, which I like, specifically, “Joe Quirk wrote five novels and received 375 rejection letters” before publishing a bestseller. Just when I started to feel inspired, I realized that the PYPIP authors did not include the multitudes of people who write and submit and write and submit and write and then die. Rejected. And, the rejections the authors are talking about refer to book-length manuscripts, one hell of an accomplishment to complete such a thing. I’m getting rejected over twenty pages tops. I don’t even have a manuscript available for rejection. And, the authors are talking about manuscripts that are rejected for a variety of reasons usually regarding marketability, and not the most common problem I see at the literary agency where I intern, which is the quality of writing just isn’t good enough. I know this is often a problem with my work, too.

Things I try to remember: collect as many rejections as possible in order to find the elusive acceptance. This is why I used the word rejection so many times in this post, to get all the rejections out of the system. Unfortunately, I had an essay that a respectable website wanted to publish and pay me for, but because the essay had previously won a contest, I couldn’t offer the magazine first time rights and they wouldn’t take sloppy seconds. And that same essay is being considered for an anthology, but will most likely be rejected since the reader said it was “overwritten,” cliched and had too many adverbs, even though she still put it in the “maybe” pile. (Assume it is rejected until I tell you otherwise.) My point and the problem is that this one essay that editors have expressed some interest in is ruining my accumulation of rejections statistically necessary for an acceptance somewhere down the line.

I hope I didn’t get too depressing with this post. I’m not depressed. I’ve been rubbing sandpaper on my body and now I have calluses and a lizard-like exterior made up of super thick skin. And get this, I asked a few former co-workers and supervisors if I could use their names as references in my job search. None of them rejected me. None. They might even say something nice about me. How cool is that.