How to turn strangers into friends
Today I told my wife “Naomi is gone; only Crayomi remains.” I am exhausted. When an author says they’re having crazy times that they can only talk about in vague terms, it usually means either a movie or a book deal is afoot. I refuse to confirm or deny either of these possibilities. But publishing is an insane industry.
Hello friends. Typing once again on my electric typewriter gadget. Haven’t used it in a minute, but it is actually good for blog posts. Am reading a lot of poetry these days. Have been making my way through the Penguin Book of Twentieth Century American Poetry. Lots of good stuff. Odd to read it in juxtaposition with the book of Renaissance poetry, since the latter is largely metered while the former generally isn’t. And yet as poets never tire of telling us, unmetered doesn’t mean that it has no rhythm. I’ve been using the book to see which poets I want to investigate further.
You know what I love? Books of Selected Works. God save me from Complete Works. Why would anyone, with the exception of a scholar, want a poet’s Complete Works? There must be so many bad poems in there! Anyway, it’s been perhaps a shopping spree, but I have many, many Selected Works waiting for me.
Writing is going well. I’ve turned our bedroom into an office (Rachel works out of what used to be our storage closet. It’s so claustrophobic in there, but she seems to like it). I have covered one wall with post-its, detailind random to-dos and notes to myself. It’s great. And I have a little bookshelf where I store my various devices. And there’s a yoga ball where I sit when my back isn’t doing too well.
Back pain remains the major problem with working from the bed. I keep thinking I’ll find a solution, but there simply isn’t one: I just need to shift positions regularly.
I got notes back from the editor for a story I have coming in a YA LGBT speculative fiction anthology. My story is called "Nick and Bodhi". It’s like if the cartoon show Rick and Morty had an episode based on Jerome Bixby’s short story "It’s A Good Life" (where a seven year old with magic powers takes over this town and enacts his will without scruple or limit, and the townspeople, to survive, need to pretend that they like it). In my vision, the surviving members of a school’s queer student organization do their best to survive until graduation in a school that’s been taken over by a teenage genius.
(Sidenote: The Bixby story was also the basis for an episode of the original Twilight Zone)
As I get back into writing science fiction stories, I find myself going back more and more to the classic SF stories I read when I was first getting into the field. I went through a period where I was constantly hunting down old anthologies and compilations. I think it’d be not unfair to say that I’ve read most of the influential stories that came out between 1926 and 2000, and it shows. My most recent story in F&SF, "The Leader Principle" was clearly based on Heinlein’s "The Man Who Sold The Moon" and I have a story in circulation that’s based on Robert Silverberg’s "Dying Inside".
I have no idea whether any of these stories hold up. I suspect they do, but I am not going to reread them to find out. Even twenty years ago, it wasn’t really in vogue to read Golden Age (or even New Wave) science fiction. Now it’s really not in vogue. I think that’s sad! There’s a lot of great stuff there. And I say this fully aware of the hit some of these authors have taken for their various stances. Heinlein supported the Vietnam War (in 1968, sheesh) and Robert Silverberg, who is to my knowledge the only major Golden Age figure who’s still alive, got into a very recent online controversy.
Speaking of which, you know who I’m gonna bring into vogue if I ever have the power to single-handedly bring artists into vogue? Cordwainer Smith! His massive shared-universe collection The Rediscovery of Man is so brillig. I reread it so many times in high school and college. Actually now that I think of it, a recent story I wrote (not yet out on submission) is directly based on his first published short story "Scanners Live In Vain"–about a guild of spacefarers who have to electrially suppress their emotions to do their job, and about their resistance to innovations that might make their sacrifices moot. I think about that phrase all the time "Do scanners live in vain?" Meaning, were all these sacrifices worthless? Did they give up everything, give up their humanity, for nothing?
Chills.
As a minor point of trivia, Cordwainer Smith was the pseudonym of Paul Linebarger, an expert in psychological warfare who trained CIA agents, and he is also rumored to be the subject of a classic psychological case study about a sci-fi writer who’s lost touch with reality. I once began so interested in Cordwainer Smith that I actually hunted down a copy of that case study, in a book called the Jet-Propelled Couch, but I no longer have much memory of what was in it.
Got good news about my YA novel proposal. It could all fall apart though, so trying not to get too anxious. As I texted a friend ““I first went on sub 7 years ago. I’ve had two agents. I’ve gone to acquisitions upwards of seven times; I’ve had five separate books go on submission. I can be normal! I can not let this ruin my life!”
So yeah, this is me doing normal things like writing in my blog. SPEAKING OF NORMAL THINGS: you only have ten(ish) more days to nominate for the Nebulas. You don’t need many votes to get a Nebula nomination in the short story category (maybe ten). So if you’re a member of SFWA, read the story my story “Everquest” and consider it for a nomination. If you want to know more about it, the story notes are here.
Err, so anyway, I’ve been reading this book of early modern English poetry, curated by one of my favorite writers, John Williams. It’s extremely slow going. Lots of poetry, lots of archaic language. But I think I’m getting a better sense of rhyme and meter than I’ve had before. The problem with Shakespeare (insofar as there is a problem) is that his writing is extremely ornate. This anthology starts with poetry from the Naive tradition, and some of the writers who predate Shakespeare are much more accessible. I particularly liked Thomas Wyatt and John Skelliton. But of all the poems I’d say the one that affected me the most was this one by Robert Greene.
Now that I’m a parent I’m getting sentimental!
Aaaaaand, do I have anything else to say? No, probably not. No. No. No. I don’t think so. No. I am happy and not anxious at all.
Oh here’s something: the pandemic has been great for making friends with other writers! I have several who I text regularly. It turns out that when all social life is cancelled, the only people with whom there is anything to talk about are those who have the same work as me. It’s been unexpectedly fun and sustaining. So I retract everything I’ve said about how writers shouldn’t be friends.
There’s been a lot of gossip online about agents this week. Brooks Sherman getting called out was a massive bombshell. He is probably the biggest agent who’s been called out on Twitter. He is Angie Thomas’s agent and ran the immense auction that sold The Hate U Give. If you want the deets just look him up on Twitter. Anyway, it’s led to people opening up more about agent stuff.
I’ve had mixed experiences with agents, but I can’t complain too much. They’ve sold books for me. But agents can really, really, really harm an author’s career. The biggest issue is when they either refuse to take your book out on submission, or they refuse to do a second round after the first round fails (in Sherman’s case, he allegedly apparently lied about books even being on sub in the first place, which would be, like, sociopathic behavior). At the very least (and I mean this is the absolute least), when an agent signs you, they should be planning to take the book for which they signed you for multiple full submission rounds. It’s not right to simply lose interest partway through, because you feel like it’s a harder sell than you initially thought. And it’s definitely not right to do endless revision on a book and never send it out in the first place.
What authors don’t understand is that agent have certain incentives to not send books on submission. They’re limited in terms of their connections and their capacity. An agent only knows so many editors. And they can, at most, have one book with each editor at a time. If you’re an agent who specializes in kid-lit, as many do, and you know 60 editors, then you can at most have 60 submissions out. With rounds of fifteen, that means four books out at a time. If one of those books sells quickly, then it frees up those fifteen quickly. If it doesn’t sell, then it’s really taking up a lot of your submission capacity.
All an agent has to offer is their taste. Every submission is a job interview: do I understand this editor well enough? If you think a book isn’t going to sell, then it can only harm you.
If books didn’t have authors, it would be understandable to drop books after ten or fifteen rejections. But they do have authors, and you made a commitment to those authors. If you’d told an author up front that you were only going to do ten subs, they wouldn’t have gone with you.
As in most things, it’s a question of integrity. That’s not a popular thing to say. People want everything to just be business. But business requires integrity. You need to be able to trust the people you do business with.
But it’s very difficult to know who has real integrity. And the honest truth is that most people don’t. They won’t go to bat for their clients when it means potential risk to themselves. They don’t see the advantage in being known as someone with integrity. And they also just don’t–they’re too trapped in survival mode–they don’t see that there’s simply no point in doing this if you can’t do it with integrity.
I understand that. We spend so long being powerless that we don’t know what to do when we finally have power. We treat others the way we were treated ourselves.
It’s all understandable, but the net result is that authors lose years of their lives. And it’s not something you can protect against. Angie Thomas was smart to go with Brooks: he got her a massive deal and kicked off her career. Other people went with him, and he ruined their careers. You can talk to other authors and try to get the scoop, but authors lie: they’re so locked into this relationship that they simply do not tell the truth about their agent. You’re simply rolling the dice, hoping you get a good one (or, more likely) you simply never have to face a situation that tests your agent’s integrity.
And that’s all without going into the OTHER major danger of agenting, which is agents who simply shouldn’t be in the business, and who don’t have the connections to really sell books. But those agents are a bit easier to suss out, to be honest.
Hello friends, as you might remember, I’m doing this thing where I only check my old email (which I still use for all business matters) at around 3 PM every weekday. This means I haven’t checked it since last Friday! Who knows what’s in there??? (Probably a lot of rejection). Actually, what’s surprising is usually there isn’t even any rejection. Just zero or maybe one rejection. I don’t really get much email.
I’ve also been off my old Twitter, though I check it at around the same time to see if I’ve any messages that I need to respond to. Like most rules, these rules will inevitably break down after a while, but for the past week they’ve been good. By de-centering the business of writing from my life, I’m more focused on the here-and-now. My other rule, more tentative, is to write fifty words sometime between 9 AM and 10 AM. I’ve observed that the sooner my writing day begins, the better I feel, and that once I start, I get in the writing mood and don’t stop. But we’ll see what happens. Today I just finished a little spate of writing, did 600 words in the novel rewrite, and I do not absolutely need to do anything more for the rest of the day (although I probably will).
For a while I was contemplating hiding my Nintendo Switch, which takes up a lot of excess time, but I realized that I was often playing it when I was tired or just totally out of energy. In keeping with my general feeling that self-help is largely useless, my basic plan is to at all times try and move just one rung up the ladder of useless procrastination. Instead of sleeping, I’ll play games while listening to books, instead of playing games, I can watch TV, instead of watching TV, I can read, etc etc.
Life has been good, no complaints. I’m going to say something that will probably strike many as infuriating or annoying, but I’ve basically read the canon of English prose fiction. From Aphra Behn’s Oroonookoo through Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, Robinson Cruseo, and Journal of a Plague Year, to Fielding and Richardson, George Eliot, Austen, Thackeray, Dickens, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Hemingway, Faulkner, etc, etc, I’ve read almost all the touchstones, including many that are relatively less well known, like Godwin’s Caleb Williams or Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstones or M.E. Braddock’s Lady Audley’s Secret. I went through an 18th century kick a while back, actually, and I had a surprisingly good time–it was nice to read English language fiction that was less mannered than 19th century stuff. I’ve also read a lot of the great novels from other languages: Tale of Genji, Don Quixote, Anna Karenina, War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, Story of the Stone, Madame Bovary, Germinal, L’Assommoir, Lost Illusions, Dangerous Liaisians, Pere Goriot, Les Miserables, The Magic Mountain etc, etc. There are some gaps: I’ve never read Tristram Shandy, Gulliver’s Travels, Pilgrim’s Progress, Gargantua and Pantagruel, but I’ve read a lot of novels.
I began the process of reading these books more than ten years ago, when I seriously committed myself to writing. I was like, “I do not want there to be anything in the world of literature that I do not understand.” And although I started with a long list of great writers, I gravitated towards the novelists, and I naturally tended to complete these first. But along the way I also read the great historians: Thucydides, Herodotus, Suetonius, Tacitus, Plutarch, Gibbon. Anyways, for years, I’ve been gearing myself up to start reading the philosophers. And I’ve made progress with these too: I’ve read a fair amount of Plato and Aristotle, I love Rousseau and Voltaire (everyone does), and I adore Hume. I read enough of Philosophical Investigations to get the gist, though I can’t say I understood it.
But recently I started to peruse Kant, who I gather is the ne plus ultra in terms of difficult-to-read philosophers, and I was making my way through it, and the ideas were interesting, and I could sense there might be some reward in this study, but I was also like…I just don’t care. I have no desire to make my way through this. What am I trying to prove?
I think because I wasn’t an English major, and because I mostly read science fiction and fantasy growing up, I always felt inadequate before the great works. I’d open something like Hegel or Kant, and I’d be like, I want to be able to understand this.
But…it’s just not my thing. I read Hume and I read Wittgenstein, and those too honestly solved philosophy for me. Which is to say, it’s pointless, these questions aren’t answerable through reason. I can see how Kant makes a very good try with his ideas about pure reason, but it just still felt flimsy to me. And I could work through the entire book and figure out why it’s not flimsy. But I could also…not do that.
In the end, I’m content to leave the philosophical world alone. I have my intuition that it’s mostly sophistry, but to confirm that intuition I’d need to do a lot of reading that I don’t want to do.
Which leaves the question of…what to read next?
Of course, there’s the possibility of reading increasingly avant-garde fiction. I certainly didn’t fully understand Ulysses, and making my way through William Gaddis’s JR was more an act of will than of pleasure. I could read Pynchon, find other difficult works. I could also explore the writing of other cultures. I’ve read a fair number of Japanese novels, my favorites are Yasunari Kawabata and Natsume Soeseki, but there exist many more. I’ve read almost no Chinese novels, few African novels, few Portuguese novels. (I only read in translation, so learning another language is also a possibility).
But instead of (or in addition to) doing that stuff, I’ve decided to try and read more poetry.
Personally, I have an arcane system whereby I assign point values to books based upon how long and how difficult they are, and I’ve decided I’m going to read 100 points worth of poetry from before 1900 and 100 points worth of poetry from after 1900. As always, I’ll be reading haphazardly and less-than-systematically.
I’ve read some of the great poets. I made my way through Paradise Lost a few years back, but in general I’ve neglected poetry. I always felt it was above me, that I wasn’t patient or careful enough to understand it. My technique with classic literature has always been to read it just like I’d read anything else–I might not gain as much as I could from a close reading, but it’s much more interesting, and I can’t help thinking maybe closer to the way these works were meant to be read. ANYWAY, I’ve made some progress already. I read a volume of Kay Ryan’s Selected Poems. I was impressed by her rhyming. Really subtle, innovative rhymes. I did sometimes feel like the poems themselves were a bit…empty? That they didn’t arouse much feeling? But maybe that’s only me. And I’m working through an anthology of Renaissance English poetry. Man this Thomas Wyatt guy really loved the ladies! How come there’s not as much poetry about trying to get with some lady anymore? Or feeling sad that she won’t get with you? Poetry nowadays is all about trees and nature and stuff. I guarantee you Thomas Wyatt spent way more time in nature than we do now, but he was like…I wanna bang.
Oh, and I’m mostly going to try and read English poetry. Not that poetry in translation doesn’t have value, but, well, poetry is literally the thing that is lost in translation.
So that’s where I am right now.
STRONG TW HERE FOR WEIGHT LOSS STUFF
So, one reason I was fearful of starting feminizing hormone treatment was that I’ve always been ashamed of my weight. In retrospect, there was probably some body dysmorphia in there, but it’s kind of unproductive to read gender dysphoria into one’s past. I didn’t like my weight. I lost 110 pounds a few years ago, mostly through calory counting, and when it was done, I still didn’t like my body! I still had a belly! I still felt fat!
In the last four years, I’ve regained about 40 pounds, going up to 260, and it’s made me kind of sad. I’d heard that when you start hormone treatment, you often gain weight, or at least it becomes much harder to lose weight.
That hasn’t proven to be the case for me. I’m not on estrogen, because of my blood clot, but I’m still taking spironolactone, which suppresses testosterone production, and it’s been great. My libido is down, but still healthy. I haven’t detected many physical changes, but my appetite is way, way down. Like, I am hardly ever hungry. It is insane. I eat lunch….and then I don’t eat again until dinner! And then I eat dinner, and maybe I eat a snack later…but maybe I don’t!!!! I’ve never experienced anything like this. I mean it’s very early, so it’s hard to tell what the long-term effects will be, but so far I’ve been losing weight, simply because I haven’t felt the urge to eat. I think my metabolism is down, but my hunger is down even more. Long story short, I’m down to 245. I also, totally indepndently, hate my body slightly less! Mostly just feel less dysphoric. Miss being on estrogen though, which was doing good things. But I talked to my doctor (who is trans herself), and there are some options for getting me back on, so whatever.
It’s hard to be me, clearly.
I like self-help books, and I like to do self-helpy things, but I am wary of writing about them, beecause self-help blogs are always so full of improvement, but the person is never like, "I did it! I am better now!"
Self-help does run its course. For a long time, I had all kinds of tricks to write more. I don’t do that now. I don’t monitor my word counts or anything. I write a lot. It’s become a habit.
Anyway, that’s not important. When it comes to the emotions, I sometimes wonder if the best advice isn’t to just suffer. I mean, it sometimes feels like all this self-help stuff is just another way of torturing ourselves. Going to therapy, meditating, being grateful, etc, it just creates and exacerbates a cycle of shame ("Why am I not better? Shouldn’t I be better? Why am I not working harder at not being depressed!") These aren’t solutions to suffering; they’re merely a form that suffering takes.
It’s like writer’s block. When you’re blocked, there are all these exercises you can try, but that stuff just constitutes another way of being blocked. You just do that stuff, or don’t do it, or go to therapy, or start something or try something else, and eventually you’re not blocked anymore. But where’s the causality? Maybe if you’d just not worried about it for a year or two, it would be the same. But trying not to worry is itself a form of suffering!
So the point is that I like self-help, but I don’t expect too much from it. I’ve recently read a raft of these books about how to love yourself and feel less perfectionism. The two best were The Subtle Art of Not Giving A Fxck and The Courage To Be Disliked. The later in particular was great! It had that quality that all great self-help books have, where for twelve hours you feel like you’ve solved all your problems! But then reality comes back.
Anyways, this book, The Courage To Be Disliked, is structured as a dialogue, between a philosopher and a quarrelsome young man who comes to dispute his teachings. They’re both pretty lovable characters, and it was enjoyable even as just a story. I was sad when it ended.
But the philosopher is all like, "What people want, ultimately, is to feel like they’re useful to other people. But they get all worked up and demand recognition from people in order to convince themselves that they’re useful, whereas if they just knew they were useful, then they wouldn’t need recognition, and they could be happy in themselves."
I found it very convincing! I wondered how I am useful to other people. I think a lot of people, particularly marginalized people, derive a feeling of usefulness from the idea that these voices, these stories, aren’t represented in the popular culture. I don’t know…somehow that doesn’t do it for me. I just feel like, well, I have a unique voice, I guess, but if I don’t write something, somebody else will. Or no, not that, I don’t know. It just feels very off for me to be like, "My fiction helps people!"
Maybe it does. Probably does, in fact. Certainly my stories are really different from the YA norm, and there is some small number of people who respond well to that.
But I think what gives me more meaning is this blog, to be honest. I feel as if the writing world has so much falseness out there. So much posturing. So many status games. I like aspiring writers. I mean, I often don’t like their work, but I like that they are such dreamers. The artistic world is a bit harsh towards dreamers. We don’t trust them. You’re supposed to check all the boxes. You’re not supposed to come in from the outside. But I just think it’s nice that in our field, a person with no connections, no background, no publication history, can still maybe have an impact. It’s really beautiful and sustaining.
I think because I believe that newcomers genuinely have a chance, and that they may have something to offer, that I don’t peddle myths. Like, yeah, you are not gonna be able to sell a book to a major publisher if you don’t have comp titles (other recent books with similar content, style and themes that have been commercial successes). I know we have a lot invested in that not being true, but why bullshit people? Or when I used to talk to potential MFA candidates, I’d be like, "This is a great program, but it’s also pretty austere. You won’t get a lot of mentorship from your professors outside of class." I’m similarly honest when people ask me about my various agents or publishers. I understand why people try to softpedal, but I’m not sure they understand peoples’ lives are at stake (it’s for this reason a friend became convinced that I am the YA call-out account @YAWhispers. I’m NOT, but I wish I was).
If life is about being useful to people, that’s where I find the most use. Which begs the question: why write fiction at all? I don’t know. The truth is that the impact I can make on peoples’ lives with a novel is probably less than that I can with an honest blog (just because the latter is so rare). But obviously all of my writing is of a piece, and it all partakes of a similar worldview. But still…the fiction isn’t that high-impact.
Oh well! I don’t know! I just like it! Writing fiction is a fun and harmless way of occupying oneself. Not every question in life can be answered by referring to the teachings of a Japanese self-help book.
I had a pretty bad yesterday. I don’t know if it’s been clear from this blog, but for the past six months I’ve been looking for a new literary agent. Yesterday I decided to push for responses, and I shook loose a few rejections, which never feels good. To be honest, I feel pretty inadequate over the whole agent thing. The last time I looked for an agent, it took two weeks!
I know part of the problem is I’m querying with a literary novel, which is just a harder business. I also have a killer YA proposal (about a trans girl who’s accepted to an all-girl’s school in DC) that would get me an agent in two seconds flat, but then I’d just be in the same place as I was with the last two agents, where they’re not really interested in my writing for adults. On a sidenote, you’re not supposed to talk about your agent search (or really any sort of failures) online, for two reasons:
When it comes to social proof, my attitude is meh. If I cared about fronting and tying to appear to be a success, I’d live my life totally differently. I also don’t believe in false modesty. I am what I am. I’ve done what I’ve done. An agent has my work in front of them, and they ought to trust their judgement.
The wariness is legit. Author / agent relationships are complicated, and I’d definitely hate if an agent said bad things about me. But ultimately it’s like with any relationship–you’ve just got to trust me to know where the boundaries are. I’ve never said anything, I think, to harm anyone’s professional reputation, and I never intend to.
Anyways, being patient is hard! I’m not good at it! To some extent that’s a strength. I don’t think it makes sense to wait longer than six months for an answer from an agent, for instance. But it also doesn’t make sense to sit anxiously in front of my phone, refreshing my gmail all day.
To that end, I decided on a new initiative. I’ve anyway been meaning to get a new email address to reflect my new name, so I went ahead and did that (naomi dot kanakia at gmail), and that’s now the account linked to my phone and all my devices. My old account, which I’ve been using for upwards of fifteen years, I’ve decided I’ll only check once per day, and only after the end of the New York business day.
I also decided to do the same with Twitter. I hate Twitter. It’s a nightmare wasteland world. But for some reason my wife shares articles with me all day through Twitter DMs (immunologist Twitter is such a better place than author Twitter, you have no idea). So I made a new Twitter account just for her and a few people I know in real life.
Facebook I kept as is. I like Facebook! Facebook has been good to me! Anyway, we’ll see how it goes. I’ll tell you something, when you’re not anxiously refreshing your email or your Twitter, there’s a lot less to do on your phone.
Other than that, let’s see…recently I’ve started doing this thing where I target specific publications to try to get into them. It’s honestly just a way of guiding what I write, sort of providing me with a prompt. The places I want to be in right now are Ellery Queen, Tor.com, and one of the Reviewses of Books. So I’ve got stuff at those places. We’ll see what happens!
Err…I’ve got title concepts for my Cynical Guide to the Publishing Industry. They’re all beautiful–they look like real books, which is all I wanted. I hate when a self-pub cover just doesn’t look like a real book.
And I’ve been pitching my trans woman assassin book to small crime imprints. It’s already out at one! Then of course there’s the aforementioned killer YA proposal, which is with my editor at Harper. So things are happening!
My general air when it comes to writing is one of pessimism. It’s only in very, very rare circumstances that I allow myself to believe something might happen (and even then it usually doesn’t), but I really like having things out there. And somehow, I know not how, I’ve ended up with stories and novels published. Which is definitely a cool thing.
Up next are my revisions for the literary book, which are so good, they’re gonna make it like ten times better. I also have to do edits on the cynical guide, including everything needed to turn it into a real book. And maybe write some more stories. I’m also reading a book I want to pitch for reviews: it’s an NYU english professor analyzing the ‘femme’ quality of guilty reads–the way that the pleasures they offer are curiously feminine. Definitely resonated with me!
SO I AM WORKING HARD. But I also might just play video games all day too. Ciao.
Hello friends, I’ve been feeling the tiniest bit inadequate lately, so I thought I’d write in my journal! The blog has gotten a few new subscribers lately, which hadn’t happened in some time. It’s actually had a bit of a resurgence, which is nice.
I celebrated my eleventh sobriety anniversary a few days ago. I quit drinking eleven years ago, in 2010. It’s no longer as big a part of my identity. Sometimes I forget I’m sober. It just doesn’t come up that often, especially since we’re not doing big gatherings.
In recent years sobriety has had a resurgence. I started hearing about dry January, for instance, and a few friends have quit drinking in the same way you’d quit, like, eating processed sugar. It’s a major change, or you wouldn’t need to do it, but probably not as epochal and life-defining as getting sober was for me.
Still, I welcome all sober people into the big sober tent. I’ve even made my peace with people who never started drinking alcohol in the first place! I don’t understand them (alcohol is so good, it makes you feel very happy), but it’s fine. They’re cool. I sometimes see people who are less on the addiction-recovery side of sobriety write about how they resent that our culture is "so centered around drinking."
Personally, I wouldn’t call our culture centered around drinking at all. I can’t think of the last time I was around somebody who was really drunk. At the gatherings I go to (went to?), it’s not socially acceptable at all. But the world is a big place, and I’ve definitely been to parts of the country and to social scenes where drinking to excess is extremely common. Mostly I just find this impressive! I quit drinking at age 24, because I was certain that it would kill me if I continued. Like, I would die next week or next month, or, at the latest, sometime next year. To see people still drinking heavily well into their fifties and sixties is just impressive! Of course, those are the survivors. The dead can’t represent themselves. And some people take up alcoholic drinking at older ages too.
You know, when I used to go to AA meetings, the people who were also drug addicts would always, always, mention it. They definitely thought their addiction was more legit than just being addicted to alcohol. I personally never bought it. Alcohol is just as deadly as any drug. You can overdose and die on alcohol. You can die from alcohol withdrawal. Just because you recovered from heroin doesn’t make you better than other people.
But being addicted to heroin has its own contours. It certainly sets you outside society to a greater degree. And people wanted to retain that identity. They felt apart from mere alcoholics. And that’s okay. In the same way, I feel apart from people who merely quit drinking, but I also don’t feel that proprietary over the term ‘sobriety’. It’s okay. The purpose of these labels isn’t to set ourselves apart and to find an identity, it’s to help people. I genuinely think that drinking, even relatively moderately, is harmful, and that most people would be better off without it. It’s okay if what for me was a major turning point is for other people merely a lifestyle choice. Just like yoga is a religious practice for some people, and it’s a form of exercise for others–c’est la vie.
It feels like people today are so hungry for an identity, but identity isn’t individuality. The whole reason there’s a label for something is because that label denotes some commonality of experience. Maybe as a trans woman of color, my experience is different from white trans women, but it’s also similar in some ways. I don’t know. It just seems pointless and petty to police boundaries this way. Ultimately, everyone is an individual, and everyone has their own individual experiences. Nobody is more unique than anyone else. Obviously, other peoples’ sobriety experiences don’t mirror mine exactly. My experience has nuances and contours. For instance, I took LSD and psilocybin mushrooms well into my sobriety (though no more), and found these to be pretty positive experiences. Does that mean I’m a demi alcoholic? That my alcoholism is unique and different and excluded by mainstream sobriety groups? I mean…sort of. But this story also isn’t that uncommon. I know more than a few drug addicts who stopped using hard drugs, but can now use alcohol moderately. It’s just an experience.
We always want to know what a person is: to pull out their race, gender, politics, profession, mental health and disability status, to tug on all those strings, and in the intersection of those characteristics you find the person. I’m not immune from that desire. It’s like when trans people online are like, "It’s rude to ask about a person’s genitals!" Well, yeah, it’s most definitely rude…but don’t you want to know? Or if you see someone who’s racially ambiguous? Don’t you want to know? I love to sum up and categorize people. He’s rich, she’s snobbish, they went to Harvard, he’s a first-gen college student, they’re Republican, she’s a hard-core feminist, but sort of the old school type that’s in favor of tougher criminal sanctions for sexual violence and domestic assault. I think there’s a lot of value in categories, in finding patterns. It’s a dynamic tension we all have to navigate not just in our own lives, but when we look at other people. Everyone is unique, but everyone is also a type.
A friend of mine made his first professional short story sale yesterday. It’s been an immensely long time coming.1 He was writing at a professional level years ago. Why does it take so long? I have no idea. Just luck. It’s hard to stand out. Sometimes I sell a story these days, and I’m like, “This story feels like a story I would not have been able to sell five years ago.” The opposite also happens. Editors get tired of you. The stories you send in are just as good as before, but that’s the problem, they’ve published too many, nobody wants them.
When you haven’t broken in, or when you’re being kicked out, there are things you can do. Switch stuff up, try new venues, give up writing for a while and come back, switch forms and formats, write longer, write shorter, read differently, etc. But to be honest that’s the stuff writers are always doing. You do that like you breathe, just because of curiosity and playfulness and a desire for new challenges.
With two books out and thirty-five sales at ‘pro’ rates, I’d say I’m not in my early career anymore. I feel early. I still feel like I’ve done nothing and haven’t broken in. But that’s not objectively true. I’m definitely in the part of my career where I’m just doing whatever.
The other day I was talking about revision with a friend of mine, and I said I’m not a big believer in it. My experience is you can completely rewrite a novel, and peoples’ reaction to it will be more or less the same. You get the same criticisms after the rewrite as you did before.
She said that was ironic, because I am the biggest rewriter she knows. We Are Totally Normal was completely rewritten three times at least, and my current literary novel is going on five or six rewrites (I am talking blank page rewrites). I said yeah, but I just do that to make the book better, not because it affects the reception.
I’m feeling pretty contented these days. And by these days, I mean Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday morning, because all weekend I felt miserable over problems with my current rewrite. I still have those problems! It’s an utter mess! But what can you do?
I would definitely like to be a bigger success. I think that I deserve it. I think my work is really good. I think I’m a good writer. But, you know, lots of other people in the world are good writers too. My friend deserved to have a pro sale years ago. He wrote stories that were better than lots of stuff that’s in the magazines! So what can you do? Today I was thinking that failure (or at least ‘not earth-shattering success’ like my own, because I am definitely not a failure) can be a blessing. You can just do your own thing, write, be terrible, no expectations. if I was Junot Diaz, I couldn’t submit my terrible poems to all kinds of third-tier literary journals. It would be embarrassing! And it’d be even more embarrassing that I have no idea the right number of ‘r’s in embarrassing. I’d need to conduct myself entirely differently if I was Junot Diaz. I have none of those artistic restrictions now. I can write whatever I want.
That’s a blessing. If I was Junot Diaz, I would have fame, I could give lectures, I’d be interviewed, maybe even get on TV occasionally (bit not often, I mean I’m not Norman Mailer, I’m Junot Diaz). But when I woke up in the morning, I wouldn’t be able to write what I wanted. That’s an immense cost. And it’s one Diaz has clearly suffered from (witness the ten years it took to follow up on his acclaimed first book, Drown).
I’ve been reevaluating a lot in my life lately. Mostly as a result of reading Torrey Peters’s book, Detransition, Baby. This is a bourgeois domestic novel (her words, not mine), with trans women as protagonists. I am writing a bourgeois domestic novel with a trans woman as a protagonist! But my book has been rejected by many people, including Peters’s own literary agent. It’s hard not to feel envious. But I really liked her book! It enriched my life! And, more generally, my life has been enriched by the writing of other trans women, queer people, black writers, and a whole host of other writers whose success has made me burn with envy.
I was discussing with another writer how difficult it is to read honestly when you’re reading a contemporary’s work. It’s so hard to be generous and to engage with it as it’s meant to be read. And that to me has been the biggest cost of envy. It’s one thing for me to be miserable, but when envy starts harming my aesthetic judgement, it’s just too much.
There’s been a reckoning. I’ve been thinking about the roots of my own envy, and how they go back to all those years of struggling, when I was overweight, socially anxious, alcoholic, underemployed, celibate, and just generally rejeected in a whole host of areas of my life, including my writing. I built up this idea that I was the most brilliant and intelligent writer in the world and BY GOLLY I WOULD SHOW THEM ALL.
And that myth was very sustaining. For some writers, that sort of myth kills them, closes them off, makes them bitter and convinces them there’s no reason to work. For me it did the opposite, I said I would batter my head against the wall until it fell down. I was frequently very confused. My work was so brilliant! Why was it being rejected!
It’s easy to say, well, maybe the work wasn’t good enough. In a lot of cases, that’s true. But it’s hard to know for certain. Maybe if an early story had gotten picked for an anthology or won an award, my career would’ve been different. Maybe if I’d gotten into Iowa or won a Stegner, who knows? Or if I’d sold my first book as a literary novel instead of as YA. You can never know.
But what’s not good is that I’m still in that angry place, even as the level of self-deception needed to maintain the illusion (that I am the best) has grown increasingly untenable. And I don’t know what meaning or purpose any of that scaffolding serves. At the point when I am rewriting a book despite not believing it’ll make a huge difference in how it’s received, I am way beyond temporal ambition, and it’s become about something else. Maybe just having fun!
Which is to say, I’ve been dropping some of my envy, and it’s been great! No regrets. I am not dropping, however, my ability and desire to make snap judgements about whether or not an artist is overrated, and then to gossip about them with my friends, because that is a pleasure too exquisite to be denied. I just won’t do it from a place of envy.
Goddammit, I wrote a whole post and then it somehow disappeared. TL;DR I read Luster by Raven Leilani, and it’s really good. Some very solid storytelling choices. Almost unbearably sad, though.
I also finished that Natascha Stagg collection. The end is a series of trenchant observations about a slice of fashionable culture in New York. I liked it! I’ve never felt that New York thing: the thing that makes people want to move to New York to experience the big life. Maybe if all my friends hadn’t moved to San Francisco in the two years after graduation, I would’ve made my way there, though. Then I wrote a bunch of stuff about the various social scenes I’ve experienced. But it’s all gone now forever.
Hello friends! I’m feeling better about my health and transition stuff. I’m working on worrying less about things I can’t affect. And by ‘working’ I mean I’m trying to figure out a way to make some tiny amount of progress towards the impossible goal of worrying less about things I can’t affect.
I think the solution has something to do with being healthy-minded? And focusing on today? Who the heck knows. All I know is I refuse to meditate. It’s boring! Meditation is boring! I feel like meditation is for people who don’t like to read, because reading is a lot like meditation–it requires clearing your mind and staying in the moment–and it’s also fun.
I like reading. It makes me happy.
I put on my makeup today, and I looked in the mirror, and I actually liked what I saw! A shockingly unusual occurrence.
Writing-wise, I’m sort of puttering. Have lots of projects. Realized that revising my literary novel will probably take much of this year, so I am focusing on shorter-term goals, like revising my assassin book (just need to clean it up a bit), so I can pitch it to small crime imprints, and working on putting together my long-delayed Cynical Writer’s Guide to the Publishing Industry. I think it’s one of the best things I’ve ever written–will be happy to have it out there–but at the moment is a bit rough. I wrote it in a frenzy last February and haven’t really looked at it since.
My baby is teething. She has teeth now. For the last six months whenever she has been fussy, we’ve been like "Maybe she is teething". But now it’s happening for real, and she is miserable. Poor little baby. Such a tiny, cute, and poor baby.
I’m trying to be more emotionally healthy all around. I want to have less invested in my self-identity as a writer and a smart person. I am more than just a really, really smart person, I said to my wife, and she said, "Uh huh, I’ve always known that! I always loved you for more than that!"
I said, "Yeah, compared to you I’m not even that smart!" (She has an MD/PhD and is a professor of immunology and infectious disease).
I recently watched the show Ted Lasso on Apple TV. I HIGHLY HIGHLY recommend it. Has some of the same vibes as Queen’s Gambit, it’s about people coming together and finding the best in each other. What stands out is the coach of this soccer team is like, "I don’t even care about winning. I just want all my players to be their best selves." It really struck me that Ted Lasso was one of the most secure and generous people I’ve ever seen on TV, and that I am nothing like him!
In the writing world most people are seething vats of envy, but there are some few people who are genuinely good-spirited, and you can always tell just from the way they talk about the books of their contemporaries. They are not only willing to gush about books, but you can tell they’re also very generous readers. They take the book on its own terms, and they respond to it honestly, without reserve.
I am not like that! If a contemporary novel captures me, it’s almost unwillingly, grudgingly.
But the people who are generous in that way are invariably the most beloved people in the industry. My good friend Erin Summerill is one of them. Everybody loves her, because she really likes and gets excited about other peoples’ books. And I don’t know her well, but crime writer Steph Cha, who is the new series editor for Best American Mystery Stories also has that quality. She’s always getting excited about books, and they’re not just the usual suspects either! It’s really nice!
Someday that will be me! I don’t think this means setting your taste or your standards aside, it just means leaving your ego out of your reading. A book isn’t a competition–it’s about what I can get from it.
One thing that’s helped me a lot is reading some of the astonishingly petty and ungenerous reviews that well-known writers will give to books in the various literary reviews. I’m thinking, in particular, of Lorrie Moore’s review of Normal People, in the New York Review of Books. It was good reading. I enjoyed the review. But it also seemed a little mean and ungenerous. It felt like she wasn’t responding to the book the way she’d respond to a book that wasn’t fantastically popular. Not that Rooney needs our compassion! It’s fine if people write negative reviews of her. But I don’t want to BE the small-minded person who pens those reviews. That’s not the energy I want in my life.
Now how to actualize these intentions is another matter entirely, so we’ll have to see.
