Fires of Forgiving

We'll see how much I have left in the tank.  If you followed the blog last week, we had two major developments re: my life and work, which are really one in the same (as Big Tom points out, I don't do much for fun).  My agent officially waved the white flag, leaving me with two avenues left for publishing my memoir.  The first is e-publishing (which we can do tomorrow, if we want, and Michele would be happy to help set that up); the other is to target small, independent publishers.  I am choosing the latter, since it helps me with my primary goal of teaching university-level writing.  Small publishers and agents generally don't work together (there isn't enough money to be spread around), so I'll be doing my own shilling.  Which is both good and bad.  It's good because I am tenacious, and since this is my life, I have the time and energy to plow forward in a full-court press.  It's bad, though, because I am a social retard.  Even writing electronic introductions to strangers gives me anxiety and renders me awkward.  And without an agent I've been dropped back into the nameless sea of anonymity.

The best part about having an agent is you've been bumped up a tier, kind of like having already dated one hot girl; other hot girls will now give you a chance. Everyone wants to be a writer.  Everyone thinks he/she is a writer.  The amount of material produced, unfiltered and unchecked is astounding.  The tiered system, writer to agent to publisher, has its flaws.  Believe me, I know, especially when artistic merit takes a back seat to sales and marketing, commercial elements diametrically opposed to the governing tenets of creation.  But one of the main benefits of this system is that it weeds out the Fires of Forgiving.

The Fires of Forgiving is a novel that had been sent to my former undergraduate writing professor, Tom Hazuka, back when he was editing a Midwestern writing magazine, and which he'd held onto all these years since it, miraculously, managed to violate every single rule of writing.  He used to trot out every year; it was the highlight of the semester.  Tom would read the entire excruciating novel, replete with affected dialect (which mostly consisted of the writer's annoying habit of imitating cowboy-speak by dropping every "n"), during Finals' Week.

There's the line in Sunset Boulevard when William Holden's washed-up screenwriter, Joe Gillis, agrees to take on Norma Desmond's dreadful attempt at a memoir.  " Sometimes it's interesting to see just how bad bad writing can be," Gillis says.  Like Desmond's butchery of the English language, The Fires of Forgiving pushed the limits of this.

The novel (or maybe technically it'd be a novella) was written by a woman in Iowa back in, like, 1954 (not really, but it was written on a manual typewriter, and the author's address was a rural route PO Box in the middle of bumfuck nowhere), and centers on a woman named Brandy, who has a horse, and who is still in love with a hot hunk from her past named Luke (she opined, lustily, as she mounted the sizable black stallion), and some other hot, hunky neighbor keeps stopping by, which provides countless unintentional moments homoeroticism (Brandy didn't like the way the men eyed one another).  In fact, most of the effects of the Fires are unintentional. There is not a single line of dialogue in the entire thing that comes without an adverb, and no one "says" anything; they "exclaim" and "interject," which they frequently do with clenched jaws, through gritted teeth (which is actually quite impossible to do).

There are lots of little tricks one learns about writing, things like never writing "he thought to himself," because one can't think any other way but to himself.  You also learn when a character is speaking, you have two choice when it comes to tags: said and asked.  Bad writers think that they need to find new and exciting ways to tag dialogue, so they "posit" and "offer," but once you do this, you've basically outted yourself as not being part of the club and are now relegated to the book clubs on rural roads.  This poor woman in Iowa had obviously read too many romance novels and didn't know any better, or else she wouldn't have endured a literary legacy as the punchline to an undergraduate writing class.  But the novel was an invaluable (as well as highly entertaining) learning tool, because sometimes you learn more by the examples of what not to do.  You put on your coat, son; you don't fucking "don" it.

Anyway, this is what the agent/publisher system does; she weeds out the Fires of Forgiving for busy publishers.  You have to think of it from the publisher's POV. These houses get thousands upon thousands of manuscripts every week.  Some might be awesome (like mine), but more than most will be like Fires and Aunt Edna's Jams of the South.

Now that I am sending off my own queries, which I've done before (back when I was trying to get an agent in the first place,) I have to resist the temptation, like all writers, to try and somehow separate myself from the pack by not following protocol, invoking a variation of the "Hey, I know you're busy, and I know you get a lot of bad books, but please give my book a chance" introduction.  Nothing will get your manuscript not read faster.  When you submit your proposal or query, you have only one option, kinda like ordering soup from the Soup Nazi.

*

The good news to come out of last week, after two years of procrastination and focusing on everything but, I finally started a new novel.  Pretty excited about this one.  I've got characters I know well, with an arc all mapped out.  It starts out in Northern California up by Eureka, and will end down in San Diego, an exercise in metonomy, centering on a 16-year-old kid (Kyle) raised by his cousin, who works the pot trade in Humboldt, with a Sparksian love story at its heart.  When a sale goes bad, Kyle is forced to hit the road, eluding the cartel he (along with his cousin) just fucked out of some big money, as he goes in search of his long-lost brother, who is a movie producer in Hollywood, and falls in love for the first time.  The early draft has the feeling of a YA novel, although I strongly suspect the violence and drug use will push it more in the territory of my writer friend David Corbett's latest, Do They Know I'm Running? (http://www.davidcorbett.com/do-they-know-im-running.php). And since it is going to be quite a while until mine is finished, and since even when it is it very well could suck (he fretted, hesitatingly), you might as well pick up the Corbett book.  Because it's really fucking good.

But there is a price for writing the new novel.  I only have so much time/energy/inspiration in a day. I've been directing a great deal of effort into this blog, striving to post daily (or close to it).  I would still like to do that.  Let's hope the tank's got enough left in it before I go all Jackson Browne on your ass.

Frankenlove

Apologies for an entire week of groveling, begging, bitching, kvetching, whining and cats.  So let's wind the week down by offering a little perspective.

It's been a rough one.  For the last two years, there was the consoling thought that this could be the day I'd get the call.  My long-sought-after, elusive book deal.  And it was not without merit.  I could paste some of the e-mails forwarded by Michele, my agent, by the editors and publishers who read Junkie Love, and when you saw them, you'd be left scratching your head, asking what could've possibly gone wrong.  These weren't lukewarm responses; these were over-the-top ecstatic, read it in one sitting, where have you been all my life responses.  I actually used one of these letters for the first post on this blog, but since only two people were reading it back then, you probably didn't see it.  It was from a publisher, who shall remain nameless, and my comments were not very nice, and it was pointed out to me that if I ever wanted to do anything in the publishing industry I'd be smart to delete that post.  And they were right.  It was unprofessional of me, and stupid, and counterproductive.  But I was frustrated, and my reaction, I think, was a natural one. After all the praise several acquisition editors had heaped upon my memoir, I had no choice but to wonder what the fuck went wrong.  And the answer to that question is simple.  The sales team didn't think they could sell it.

It's one of the more frustrating aspects of being a writer, this never-ending hall of hurdles.  The first, of course, is writing the damn book.  If you are not a writer that might not seem like such a daunting task.  After all, a writer writes, right?  Sort of.  I mean, the fun part of writing is before writing is a job.  Like back when I was 16 and writing shitty poetry culled from an assortment of Pink Floyd songs.  Mostly these were very long poems with titles like The Die is Cast or Mistress of Wyoming, even though I don't know what outcome could've possibly been determined by age 16, and I couldn't point to Wyoming on a map if it was on a test (it never was).  If you think there is an undercurrent of bitching and whinging now, Jesus, you should've read that shit.

Though these early efforts weren't entirely without merit.  Already there was an understanding of how sounds and musicality work in language, if obscured by clouds of pretension and outright thievery.  Problem was, I had nothing concrete to write about.  You have to write what you know, and what did I know at 16?  Hadn't left my hometown, a hometown, by the way, that was so lily-white and sheltered that I cried the first time I saw a black man.  I was 8.  I hadn't fallen in love and had my heart broken, had my dreams stomped upon, or been tested for chlamydia.

I understood this lack of experience, and in place of writing about something, I wrote about nothing.  I made vague references to pain and darkness and eternal soundless voids in nuclear win'ers (that's the same as "winter," but without the "t." 'Cause it's classier.  Like all British and shit), the same crap most deeply affected 16-year-old boys heavily into Rod McKuen write about (that isn't mine.  I once read that describing the Neal Peart's lyrics.  It's fucking true.  That guy might be, in addition to severely overplaying the drums, rock's most cringe-worthy lyricist.  Next to Eddie Vedder, of course).

(Hi, I'm Rod McKuen.  I have a throaty voice, and like six thousand poems about sunsets.  Would you like me to read you some in my boogie van?  It has a fondu maker and shag carpeting...)

Let's skip ahead to the part where you leave your hometown, learn that the word "just" is seldom needed, you stop dangling your participles (at least in public), and suffer through enough writing workshops that your thin skin gets a little scarred over and you accept that you are not the second coming of James Joyce (whose work you could never get through anyway), and you take a plot class and stop writing 80 pages of pithy, clever, multi-layered one liners in diners where nothing ever happens, and you actually start--and finish--a book that doesn't totally suck. It's not impossible.  It happens.  Knew a guy who did it once.  But no one is going to read this book and have their socks knocked off.  You think they will, that you will hand it over, and they will be dazzled.  Only two people will respond that way, your mother, and your girlfriend.  There will always be ways to make it better, and this is a long, long, long process. 99% of good writing is rewriting, and everyone is a critic, and you need lots of critics and cooks in the kitchen, while never surrendering so much control that your voice and vision are lost; it is a delicate process.  And it's maddening.

In the workshops he teaches, my writer friend David Corbett talks about the two stages of writing: the "I'm a genius" stage, and the "I'm an idiot" one.  During that first part, you trust your gut, believe in your brilliance, and you ride your unparalleled awesomeness to the end.  But then you have to sharpen an uber-critical eye, be merciless in your self-judgement; you have to be your own worse critic, because if you are not, trust me, someone else will be, and you don't want that someone to be an agent or anyone else up the food chain, because you aren't going to get many cracks at this.  When you are ready to start querying agents, you need to have your piece polished, precise, and as perfect at you can get it.

And that's what I meant earlier, about the frustration, because this is not a quick turn.  There's the story about how Kerouac wrote On the Road in a few weeks, and then there's that guy who wrote Bridges of Madison County, but the "spontaneous" prose of Kerouac is an overblown, exaggerated, revisionist myth--the guy edited and reworked his books, extensively, like all great writers--and the other book is Bridges of Madison County.

You are going to spend years--not weeks, not months, years--writing your book, and rewriting, and revising, and sharingeditingcryingandrewritingsomemore, and then you send it agents, who pass it down to their underling helpers, the same grad student dillweeds you spent the last three years debating the verisimilitude (or lack thereof) of Derrida, and you never hear back, or maybe you do and it's a polite "go fuck yourself, you talentless shit" (it might not actually say that, but believe me, that's what you'll read), but if you keep at it, keep hammering away, don't take no for an answer, and if you are any good, you'll find an agent who'll take your book. Which counts for a whole bunch of...not very much.  Like I wrote the other day, that only gets you invited to the party.  And it's a big party, with lots of floors, and stairs that are guarded by large, spiteful people in jumpsuits, but if you make it to the next level and get past the acquisition editor, which isn't easy to do, you still have the sales team with which to contend, with their peanuts and numbers and beans to crunch.  It's like playing the Legend of Fucking Zelda.  Soon as you think you've saved the princess, you've find another big, ugly dragon to slay, stronger than the last one.

Let's face it, books don't make money.  Harry Potter.  Twilight.  James Patterson. These make money.  Nick Sparks makes money.  Stephen King makes money.  You don't.  The staggering vast majority of books don't make jackshit.  Not for the author.  Not for the publisher.  Not for the agent.  There's some money being passed around, otherwise people wouldn't be doing it, but it ain't much.  Most books, like most men, lead lives of quiet desperation, only die unnoticed and broken in oblivion.

*

My friend Sean Kenniff (http://www.etrethecow.com/) got a hold of me yesterday. We were talking about a script I'd sent to NBC at his behest a few months ago (never heard back.  Shocker), but the person I sent it to just went to work for CNN, and he was telling me to be patient (which I find virtually impossible, I'm so goddamn anxious about everything), and of course we were talking the latest developments with my books.  Sean has always been among my biggest supporters.                         

"Before you e-publish your memoir, write a novel with a very commercial premise," Sean said.  "Call it 'Frankenlove.'"

"What's it about?"

"I don't even know.  But that's the title.  Make it really monstrous.  Throw in some stuff chicks will like.  After 'Frankenlove' is a hit, they'll be begging you for your memoir."

I like it.  Not sure what I can do with it.  But I like it.  I see a girl, who after an unfulfilled summer of interning at a glamorous fashion-related company filled with people who, while beautiful on the outside, are ugly on the inside, spends the final week of summer at her dying parent's cottage at the beach, maybe in New Jersey, where she falls in love with a boy, who at first seems rough because he has a tattoo but who has a really great heart once you get to know him, and has to choose between true love and the job she always dreamed of or some endangered osprey that need protecting or something.  Not sure how I fit in the monster part, though. Maybe someone turns out to be merperson or a reanimated seahorse corpse.  

It's not like I have to figure it out today.  I won't have a draft ready to go for about five years anyway.