Geoff: Are you sure the turkeys we keep seeing are owned by someone?
Me: I saw them in the yard of that house on Main Street, the red one that used to be for sale and then the For Sale sign went away and now it looks all falling apart and abandoned.
Geoff: I don’t think anyone lives in that house.
Me: Clearly the turkeys terrorizing Middle Sackville do.
I’ve slumped.
Sometimes I’m going along really well, writing, reading, editing, that I can’t imagine not continuing on that path forever. Then, all of a sudden, I stop, unable to figure out what happened. Well, summer happened. Going on vacation happened. A stream of people visiting me happened. Still, I have time. If I really cared about writing, wouldn’t I find a few pockets here and there to scribble something furtively down?
The answer, it seems, is no.
I read a book last week, plenty of recommendations on the cover, write-ups in The Globe and Mail, and just felt like shit afterwards. As I flipped the pages, I thought to myself I write better than that. As I read each page, I felt like grabbing a pen and marking up where the story needed edits (I was reading on my iPad so I refrained). When I got to the end and saw how many of the stories had been published elsewhere, including in fancy literary journals that, as of yet, have not accepted my stuff, I got angry. How can these stories, with inconsistent voices, over-expositioned, and obvious narrative be published while I languish here, unloved and unpublished? I asked myself. I stomped around our rental cottage. I yelled at Geoff how unfair it was.
Geoff reminded me that I had been published – just not a book. And he reminded me we don’t live in a meritocracy. It doesn’t matter if my stuff is better (as amorphous and vague as that can be for fiction). People aren’t published over other people because they are better. People get published because of talent, connections, being in the right place at the right time, knowledge, bribes, favours, and mostly luck.
And, of course, I haven’t been writing much. I can’t really expect celebrity to fall into my lap when my body of work is negligible. I can’t be a writer if I don’t write.
I’m trying to unslump (inflate?). My course starts in September. I was accepted into an online writing group. So I’ll have accountability. Still, something inside me still nags me quietly to give up. Sometimes when this happens, I suddenly get an acceptance that buoys me back up. Other times, I have to make myself work on my own. I think it is one of those other times.
Another year passed. Tesfa eagerly gave me a present yesterday morning:
Those who spent time with me in Costa Rica or Ethiopia may remember my love of these Dollarama clothespins, and no, I haven’t shut up about them. Even my four year old knows how much I love these clips.
A commendation to Geoff for taking a kid to Dollarama and getting out unscathed (and with only two additional suddenly necessary in a four year old’s mind purchases) and a commendation to me for knowing how awesome these clothespins are.
Spent two and a half hours yesterday unclogging the washing machine’s hose. Got sprayed with all varieties of dirty water. Super pleasant.
I got Love in the Time of Cholera out of the library (I know – I need to do another library haul photo soon). It’s the Knopf 1988 hard-cover publication (because my library has many older books) and I’m reading it and thinking “Did anyone at Knopf actually want me to read this book?” The book is slightly too large and too heavy to hold comfortably, there doesn’t seem to be any care taken with cover design, and worst of all, the font: it’s some sort of dingy font that looks typewritten and smudged with thin margins that is a pain in the ass to read. Did no one design books in the 1980s? Reading a poorly designed book is tedious, no matter how enthusiastic I am about the content.
Don’t even get me started on how poorly arranged some professionally published e-books are.
I’m thinking my faerie story might actually work better without faeries. How vital are vampires to Twilight? I think I fail at YA paranormal writing.
Unsticking my last plot-hole with magic has only led me to another sticky plot-hole situation further down the line.
Because there are only so many stories you can write about unhappy people doing horrible things to each other, I’ve been trying to write a more upbeat faerie-based YA thing. I’ve been slacking a bit this week, partly because of playing too much Civ IV, partly because of a sticky plot point that wouldn’t resolve itself, until I realised that I am writing something with faeries so the obvious solution is magic.
So yes, I magicked away my problem. This is much easier than actually, logically solving anything. I can see why so many people want to write fantasy now.
Those following me on twitter know that I had an unhappy brush-off the other day regarding writing. So I decided to make a list about being a real writer to cheer myself up.
You’re not a real writer if:
So yes, I have no novel and only short fiction and maybe not in the most prestigious journals and mainly online, so what? I hate the hierarchy that I’m not real at what I do and it rankles because this isn’t the first time this happened – as an undergraduate female in a STEM field at a university that has huge problems with male privilege (which doesn’t need to be the case as where I went for graduate school in the same field was awesome and had none of the problems my undergraduate school had), I had to constantly justify why I deserved to be there when others around me with dicks didn’t. Now I have to justify that my little steps to success aren’t valid until I write the big, important novel.
Maybe I will write a novel. Maybe I won’t. But you’d think in a field that is all about narrative, that we’d be able to allow more than one narrative to define literary success.
For example, I paid inside the gas station rather than at the pump like I normally do (but that was since the credit card reader at the pump was broken). I am trying to do new things, however small, to encourage Tesfa, who tried soccer for the first time last night and melted-down about the possibility before the fact. So we will try many new and (low) risky things over the next while in the hopes that Tesfa becomes more exciting than I am.