Thank you for entering our Juniper Prize competition. I am sorry that your entry was not chosen. I hope you will enter again in August 2014.
Monday, May 5, 2014
Sunday, May 4, 2014
Friday, May 2, 2014
Thursday, May 1, 2014
"A wondrous and exhilarating novel. This family is unforgettable in all its catastrophic dysfunction but also in the capacity of some of its most broken members to fight their way toward salvation. [Name of Novel] is an unflinching, fantastical and unexpectedly healing act of the imagination. You won't have read anything quite like it, and you're not likely soon to forget it either."
Wednesday, April 30, 2014
No part of my paid writing is very meaningful, of course, or very good for that matter, but I take a certain pride in getting it done to the satisfaction of the people paying me. Of course my creative writing is very meaningful, at least to me, and we'll see how it goes with the rest of you in November. In the minutes between being paid to write, I've always found spare time to work on my own projects: novels, stories, essays, occasionally even a book or two. It's a huge balancing act, and I realize I should be grateful for all the years I've managed to have something weighing down both sides of the scales: dollars on one side, fiction on the other. It's not been easy, of course, but whose writing life is easy? My books take an eternity to finish, in part because they are written in the cracks between paid gigs. But it's been all right. In fact, looking back it's been pretty good. I wish I could take back all the worrying I did over the years. If I could give young W,R some advice, I'd say, "Calm the F down, little dude. It's all good."
Coming home from the writing retreat this weekend, I did have to wonder, probably for the first time with any seriousness, what it would be like for me to be able to work solely on my own creative projects. Could I do it? Would I really want to? I'd be very poor, of course, and probably ultimately homeless, and potentially un-spoused, and maybe a little bit feral. But I do know people who live their life this way for art's sake. I've seen them. I've met them. They are scrappy and have truck loads of integrity because they don't hire themselves out to write about smart phones and pharmaceutical drugs and psoriasis.
I'm not sure I'm cut out for that kind of deprivation and artistic intensity though. It seems supremely hard to me: both logistically and creatively. It would be like always worrying about money, and always staring at the blank page at the exact same time, but maybe also it would be amazing. Maybe my work would blossom and not be such a struggle. Who knows?
I pretty much always felt the need for a mix of things: having someone tell me what to write has actually offset the difficulty of knowing myself what I should be writing. Plus I work well under deadlines and time pressures. They seem to give my life purpose, though I do see what a trap that kind of thinking can be. Before you know, time's up and you've been writing about health insurance, paint colors and what-not.
I could live in the woods. I could eat berries. I could write all the day long. But probably I won't. I'll stay in my house and pay my mortgage, and have annoying clients who email me constantly, and call me with issues and problems and edits and advertising crises that in the moment seem so important, but really are not. And I will be slightly annoyed by the whole thing, but still grateful for them.
In the aggregate, it has really all been just fine the way it happened to play out.
Saturday, April 26, 2014
I accepted the invitation, of course, which would bring my coming out a bit earlier than expected. The announcement of AWP panels and speakers (should this particular panel be selected) is in August 2014, the book comes out in November 2014, the panel is April 2015. The idea is to use my real name in the announcement in August, and I suppose, and to bill me (the real me) as host to LROD/Writer, Rejected.
Seems like a some sort of new level of something-ness has been reached here at the good old LROD Ranch.
So, maybe I'll see you, then, at AWP next spring.
Friday, April 25, 2014
And yet, this retreat feels different. I am actually not probably going to end up using it to write on the page. Instead I am thinking and reading and having feelings. I am proofing the galley, and feeling sad and grateful at the same time. I realize too that it would be really good to have some sort of process for letting go of this particular novel after so many years. Because it's done now. And that is weird. And I feel so many things about this fact, and surprisingly, not all of them are good.
For a long time with my first book (a collection of stories published when I was pretty damn young, come to think of it), I always felt like it still needed editing. I'd pick it up flip to a page and see all the things that needed to be revised. (Was it Barbara Kingsolver who said something about knowing a book was finished when her editor ripped it out of her hands as if to suggest the writer is never the one to know when it's done, or maybe that it's never really done.) That feeling of wanting to edit my first published book lasted for years, and, frankly, it really cut into my enjoyment of the published experience. I don't know if "enjoying" is the right word for a writer's experience of a published book, but, if not, it seems like it should be.
I don't want to have the same nagging experience with this novel; I don't want to constantly think I could have done better, should have not written that word, could have made it read more smoothly. I've worked so hard on it. I've poured everything into it, and then I've taken so much good stuff out of it, just so it would float. I want it to be its own thing in the world without my internal criticism constantly weighing it down in my own mind.
What's true: You can't write a perfect novel. Or, anyway, I can't.
I can only write what I wrote (and wrote and wrote and revised and rewrote and tore up and cut out and revised and wrote some more for 15 years +.) So, maybe that's the key to letting go. I don't know. Is it? Do you know? Is this what writers go through when they publish a book? Or is this just what I am going through?
Remember the prayer-mat makers who always include an imperfect stitch in a perfectly wrought rug, so as to remind themselves that only God can make something perfect? Maybe it's like that. Maybe I am being arrogant to think I can write any better than I can write. Maybe I can gratefully accept that this is simply the thing I am putting forth in the world with all its imperfect stitches. Of course my imperfect stitches aren't intentional at all, but what can you do?
Conclusion: I've worked so hard to get here and I don't really know what I'm doing. I didn't know with the first book either, but at least now I can see more clearly how much I am just completely winging it.
Alas, as the fine rejecters of the world sometimes say.
*I do amuse myself.
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