I WOULD AT LEAST DO MY PROFESSION THE BASIC HONOR OF TRYING TO SEEM FLATTERED."
I was really, really, REALLY looking forward to seeing The Wrestler, Mickey Rourke's comeback film about a pro wrestler making a comeback. If you know me at all well then you know that I used to have rather an enticing gap between my top front teeth. (For another shortie on gap-tooth pride, see the Notes page on Liz Tamny's Facebook account.)
And then I became a mud wrestler. I know what you're thinking... but I was not an 'exotic' mud wrestler. NO! We were serious artists: this was WWF-style grapplin' that just happened to have an extra fun element of slippery mud, plus the traditional accoutrements: costumes, plots, threats, boasts, double back-flips, secret identities --I was the Incognito Mosquito, dressed like a giant bug -- heads beaten with folding chairs, and some serious, adrenaline-pumping PAIN.
Once in a while there was too much pain. The time, for example, when I fell too hard on my face and knocked out my beautiful misaligned fangs. I still don't know what made me sadder: the fact that the bemused dentist didn't even know how to restore gapped teeth on purpose, or the fact that I was asked to hang up my mask and wings. I didn't even have anyone to be angry with. We parted amicably, the Mud Wrestling Organization and I; it was simply decided that I suffered an incurable inability to respect my own physical limitations, and was therefore an insurance liability. I still root for the MWO -- they're still around, by the way, and have a web site; look 'em up, they may have some shows this spring -- but it was rather a stab to the heart.
So ten years later, they say there's gonna be a Mickey Rourke flick with a pro wrestler making a comeback? Oh, boy, I say, painting on some extra thick eyeliner. This is going to be worth walking to the mall! (The only movie theaters in this town are in the no-peds-land of the mall district, reachable only by walking along the highway or, if you're not blind, prone to panic attacks, or particularly concerned about the future, driving your SUV.) And it was worth it, just to see Rourke's performance, certes, as well as to reminisce over the joys of spandex, endorphins, and bleeding all over the place like AIDS never happened.
But two things marred my joy. One of them was my own goddamn problem, or at the limit, the problem of the U.S. Air Force. What Rourke's character, Randy the Ram (better than my moniker, I have to admit) is coming back from is a heart attack, and anything related to heart problems has got to be my number-one neurosis. If I see somebody else clutch at their chest I immediately get chest pains. Whenever I have a stomachache (which is almost always), part of my brain is constantly pulling on the panic cord labeled "BIZARRE SENSATION IN CHEST AREA! DYING DYING DYING!" I still can barely choke down eggs, even though they've figured out that there's something unsticky about their brand of cholesterol. Thanks for ruining a perfectly good foodstuff for me, Air Force.
The reason I blame this on the U.S. Air Force rather than on my parents, who should have NEVER told me that I had a heart murmur as a baby (I was premature, so it was par for the course, and it fixed itself, so there was no reason I had to know), is because the AF lied about my grandfather, whom they drafted when he was very young, and who went on to remain in their employ until he died of his fifth heart attack, at the age of 52. This did not occur because heart disease runs in my family. It was because of a strange heart defect particular to Grampa. (God, my palms are sweating just typing the word 'heart' so many times.) The Air Force doctors knew this; however, if they had told anyone about it they would have had to release him from their service, and he was a very good, uncomplaining, hardworking piece of cannon fodder. So they let everyone in my family walk around thinking our hearts were time bombs. Is it any wonder I didn't give a damn if you broke a window over my head? They didn't release this piece of information till well after my gap was gone, the fuckers. (I suppose we should have figured something was amiss when neither my dad nor any of his eight siblings suffered a heart attack for the next thirty years, but neurosis can eat up a lot of brain space.)
They also waited till my chest-fear was lodged far too firmly in place to ever get anything but temporary relief, from heavy applications of flesh-wounding and/or alcohol. So imagine my willies when I had to sit there watching a method actor do chest pains for two hours. I have never been so fruck out that I had to leave a good movie prior to this, but at some point during the SPOILER ALERT, SORT OF final scene of The Wrestler, closing my eyes didn't work anymore, and I had to stand outside the door and wait till it sounded like things had either turned out all right for the Ram Man, or not.
But all in all, the movie would have been top-notch fucking cool, if it hadn't been for the execrable performance of the lump who played the Ram's estranged daughter. Evan Rachel Wood, as young as she is, already wears the chronically bitchy, moron-being-sarcastic facial expression of a mad divorced suburbanite. So how is she supposed to amp it up to look situationally pissed off at an absentee, mane-bleaching father? I don't know how this rat-faced no-talent got this job, but she completely ruined the scene where she's supposed to be bitching the Ram out for the last time and telling him to go away forever. She doesn't look hurt in it -- she just looks mean. She probably puts sand in her boyfriends' underwear. She looks like her real-life father has been spit-polishing her ass for her with a soft cloth from the word go.
So the day after I see the movie, after a night of forcing everyone in shouting range to listen to me talk about it, I venture back to the Mall Zone to hit the grocery store. And on a tabloid cover in the check-out line I find a dangerous piece of evidence favoring the disfavored science-ish of physiognomy: Hey, Evan Rachel Wood really is kind of mean! Apparently she went to a movie-star party with Mickey Rourke, where he got drunk and pawed her (why he was doing that when he could have been drinking more for free is beyond me, but that's outside the scope of this essay), and people started to speculate that maybe she was seeing him. Her response: "I'm not attracted to him, he's too old for me." Does she have the faintest idea how unprofessional this makes her sound? She is, apparently, not at all turned on by a master of her own supposed craft. And she flaunts it!
OK, fine, so his fingernails in that film looked a little less than pretty. But for all I know he did something to them on purpose to make them look fucked-up because he figured that's the way the Ram's hands would look. That's the point! He's an actor! He's like the Ram -- he will do anything he has to to make the art exactly right! Bitch, you can't even fake-cry without making me laugh, and you think the world is going to give a damn whether you think the master is too old to be sexy? Christ! I'll concede that, if you aren't attracted to somebody, you can't do anything about it. But you're supposed to be an actor! You could have sucked on his ear, gone in the bathroom, gargled some Listerine, pretended you were still hung up on your ex Marilyn Manson (aim your own smart-ass comment at that barrel of fish), purred 'Tempting, but no!' and we would have been none the wiser. Dumbass.
(P.S. Marisa Tomei was pretty terrific in that film, too, but since she didn't say anything stupid nobody seems to be talking about her. Sorry, Marisa.)
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Feel free to mock the Sanskrit periods that showed up in my NPR post now: An ex-proofreader vs. Rick Moody
So I already knew Rick Moody was kind of a cunt; not only did he declare that he didn’t like any of the music-hall stuff on the Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs, but I was young and dumb enough once to take a college creative writing course, where I was force-fed part of his first novel. This made me feel a little bit less like a cunt myself when I joined the ULA and Karl Wenclas mandated Pavlovian training to make us vomit every time Moody’s name got mentioned; at least I knew what I was vomiting about. But I never had worked up the nerve to read The Ice Storm... until this weekend, when I force-fed it to myself.
See, in my second novel (out late this year on Nine-Banded Books), there also chances to be an ice storm; as a backdrop to my fictional action I was following, with reasonable faithfulness, local and global public events of the winter of 2006-2007, and the damn thing went and occurred. Two of them, actually. It would have been awkward to write around them, so I didn’t. And at some point I gave in to the nagging reality that Moody’s book is, unfortunately, known to enough people that I would have to at least try to turn my ice storm into a bit of a Moody joke, or at least get familiar enough with his text to stop the joke from being on me. So, grumbling, I trudged to the library, because I’ll be damned if I’m giving any money to a so-called Mag Fields fan who can actually suspend his depression long enough to sucker-punch showtunes, for Christ’s sake.
To my relief, not only did Moody not wring all metaphorical possibilities from the subject, he also didn't waste my time completely. Frankly, I expected The Ice Storm to be a lot more boring than it was. Sure, I could have spent that time better. Yes, I had to do some drinking to get all the way through it. But it was nowhere near the torment that followed when I was dumb enough to volunteer to review the second Dave Eggers novel for the Chicago Reader. ( I thought I was going to have to cave my frontal lobes in with a Sanskrit dictionary to get through that one.)
Moody’s second novel was actually entertaining in parts. I laughed out loud once. It even had a reasonably workmanlike structure, despite the occasional mechanical peek through the fourth wall on the part of the pompous narrator (was his pompousness supposed to be funny? Was the tacked-on feeling of these peeks meant as a spoof on the overuse of metafiction? I doubt it); despite the overwritten bits, despite the underwritten ones; despite the pointless concealment of the narrator’s identity as the family’s eldest son and this fact's tiresome revelation at the end (no shit, Holden!)...
OK, so it wasn’t what I would call good. But I had to admit it was better than reading nothing at all. I definitely would not have preferred staring at the wall. And the above are complaints that could be lodged against any number of overrated writers; the experience reminded me that ‘overrated’ is not a shorter way to say ‘devoid of merit.’
And yet, by the time I was finished, I was pissed off and actually kind of shocked. Sure, I laughed once – but that’s nowhere near as often as I choked on a typo. Has nobody else noticed all the errors in this novel? For fuck’s sake, did he publish it himself? My first novel has a couple of typos – but I’m the only one who read it before it went up as a POD, and by the time the sample copy came in the mail I was so goddamn sick of it I didn’t open it for a month. But people presumably got paid to keep Moody from looking stupid. Even my cost-free typos make me feel a bit ill. Did he gasp with horror when he saw the finished work? Did he show up at the publishing house a week after it came out, grab some underpaid copy monkey by the collar, and shake it till its ears rang? (Did the Carbondale university library, which always finds funds for physical refurbishments but not for books, get its copy from the ‘not-quite-perfect’ bin? Always a possibility...)
Actually, part of me hopes he did go in and raise hell. When I was a copy monkey, I would have never gotten away with letting a supposedly major author go to print saying things like “These last eight pages were enough to life Paul Hood from the murky bog of self-recrimination” (p. 193) and “The worse such storm in thirty years, according to Mike Powers, spokesman for Connecticut Light and Power.” Come ON, copy monkey! And come on, Rick! OK, so the first example was almost certainly somebody else’s typo; it’s the kind of thing that happens, however unfortunately. And I suppose ‘worse’ could be meant as a direct quotation from Mr. Powers. But it ain’t in quotes, buddy! Fuck! At least try to look like you know what you’re doing! I know how to use the superlative in eight different languages, you can’t do it in one, and I’m sitting down HERE while you’re sitting up THERE?! Don’t even bother to ponder the mystery of whether there’s a god, Rick. ‘NO’ has left its fingerprints everywhere.
Of course, these are petty errors. Whadya want, I'm an old monkey. I can't stop feeling nebulous Catholic guilt either. I suppose a fan might even consider infractions like 'worse' to be charmingly human (why is ‘human’ so often used as a compliment?). But these are but a representative fraction of the typo-age, and I’ve saved the real fuck-up for last.
Dorothy Halford, the hostess of a suburban key party (which is as tiresome as it sounds) is described, on page 107, in a fashionably incomplete sentence, as: “No makeup.” OK. So she’s a minor character, and you’re trying to say something about her personality with one efficient, tangible detail. And we all slip in the odd incomplete sentence once in a while, especially when we’re trying to remind reviewers of how streamlined and energetic and muscular we are as we move four-gram plastic keys up and down. Fair enough. But we shouldn’t employ techniques like this quite so mechanically, so easily, so... so... so ‘just-how-drunk-were-you, Rick?’-ily that we forget ourselves and, a mere eight pages later, toss off another admirably efficient snapshot of the same character by claiming that “For a moment she was frozen, with her carefully lipsticked mouth open wide...”
I guess we’re to take the fact that she carefully lipsticks her mouth as a slam on her character, since worthy people -- literary geniuses for instance -- are never so clench-pussied as to be careful about anything. I know, I know... my old job as a proofreader doesn’t exist anymore. The general public doesn’t need, want, or care about people who read every line to make sure it’s pretty. I see their point; if an emoticon is worth a thousand love poems, does a missing comma keep anybody who isn’t being deliberately obtuse from catching anyone else’s drift?
But think about it, Dicky. What non-nerd reads novels anymore anyway, now that Hollywood can put Beowulf in an ass-kicking (I say this without a hint of sarcasm) CGI epic? That’s right: a rising proportion of the book audience will now be made of nit-picking shits like me. People to whom typos are as painful as a Bic spattered on a Renoir (even if it’s not actually a Renoir, but Dogs Playing Poker). Think about it. You’ve made your pile, I suppose, and we can’t take that away from you, unless we become exotic dancers. But I’m going to go proofread my new book again now, before carefully attributing an example of ignorant-sounding use of the language to a radio announcer during my own ice storm. Most writers, darling, frozen or not, can’t afford to be floppy.
See, in my second novel (out late this year on Nine-Banded Books), there also chances to be an ice storm; as a backdrop to my fictional action I was following, with reasonable faithfulness, local and global public events of the winter of 2006-2007, and the damn thing went and occurred. Two of them, actually. It would have been awkward to write around them, so I didn’t. And at some point I gave in to the nagging reality that Moody’s book is, unfortunately, known to enough people that I would have to at least try to turn my ice storm into a bit of a Moody joke, or at least get familiar enough with his text to stop the joke from being on me. So, grumbling, I trudged to the library, because I’ll be damned if I’m giving any money to a so-called Mag Fields fan who can actually suspend his depression long enough to sucker-punch showtunes, for Christ’s sake.
To my relief, not only did Moody not wring all metaphorical possibilities from the subject, he also didn't waste my time completely. Frankly, I expected The Ice Storm to be a lot more boring than it was. Sure, I could have spent that time better. Yes, I had to do some drinking to get all the way through it. But it was nowhere near the torment that followed when I was dumb enough to volunteer to review the second Dave Eggers novel for the Chicago Reader. ( I thought I was going to have to cave my frontal lobes in with a Sanskrit dictionary to get through that one.)
Moody’s second novel was actually entertaining in parts. I laughed out loud once. It even had a reasonably workmanlike structure, despite the occasional mechanical peek through the fourth wall on the part of the pompous narrator (was his pompousness supposed to be funny? Was the tacked-on feeling of these peeks meant as a spoof on the overuse of metafiction? I doubt it); despite the overwritten bits, despite the underwritten ones; despite the pointless concealment of the narrator’s identity as the family’s eldest son and this fact's tiresome revelation at the end (no shit, Holden!)...
OK, so it wasn’t what I would call good. But I had to admit it was better than reading nothing at all. I definitely would not have preferred staring at the wall. And the above are complaints that could be lodged against any number of overrated writers; the experience reminded me that ‘overrated’ is not a shorter way to say ‘devoid of merit.’
And yet, by the time I was finished, I was pissed off and actually kind of shocked. Sure, I laughed once – but that’s nowhere near as often as I choked on a typo. Has nobody else noticed all the errors in this novel? For fuck’s sake, did he publish it himself? My first novel has a couple of typos – but I’m the only one who read it before it went up as a POD, and by the time the sample copy came in the mail I was so goddamn sick of it I didn’t open it for a month. But people presumably got paid to keep Moody from looking stupid. Even my cost-free typos make me feel a bit ill. Did he gasp with horror when he saw the finished work? Did he show up at the publishing house a week after it came out, grab some underpaid copy monkey by the collar, and shake it till its ears rang? (Did the Carbondale university library, which always finds funds for physical refurbishments but not for books, get its copy from the ‘not-quite-perfect’ bin? Always a possibility...)
Actually, part of me hopes he did go in and raise hell. When I was a copy monkey, I would have never gotten away with letting a supposedly major author go to print saying things like “These last eight pages were enough to life Paul Hood from the murky bog of self-recrimination” (p. 193) and “The worse such storm in thirty years, according to Mike Powers, spokesman for Connecticut Light and Power.” Come ON, copy monkey! And come on, Rick! OK, so the first example was almost certainly somebody else’s typo; it’s the kind of thing that happens, however unfortunately. And I suppose ‘worse’ could be meant as a direct quotation from Mr. Powers. But it ain’t in quotes, buddy! Fuck! At least try to look like you know what you’re doing! I know how to use the superlative in eight different languages, you can’t do it in one, and I’m sitting down HERE while you’re sitting up THERE?! Don’t even bother to ponder the mystery of whether there’s a god, Rick. ‘NO’ has left its fingerprints everywhere.
Of course, these are petty errors. Whadya want, I'm an old monkey. I can't stop feeling nebulous Catholic guilt either. I suppose a fan might even consider infractions like 'worse' to be charmingly human (why is ‘human’ so often used as a compliment?). But these are but a representative fraction of the typo-age, and I’ve saved the real fuck-up for last.
Dorothy Halford, the hostess of a suburban key party (which is as tiresome as it sounds) is described, on page 107, in a fashionably incomplete sentence, as: “No makeup.” OK. So she’s a minor character, and you’re trying to say something about her personality with one efficient, tangible detail. And we all slip in the odd incomplete sentence once in a while, especially when we’re trying to remind reviewers of how streamlined and energetic and muscular we are as we move four-gram plastic keys up and down. Fair enough. But we shouldn’t employ techniques like this quite so mechanically, so easily, so... so... so ‘just-how-drunk-were-you, Rick?’-ily that we forget ourselves and, a mere eight pages later, toss off another admirably efficient snapshot of the same character by claiming that “For a moment she was frozen, with her carefully lipsticked mouth open wide...”
I guess we’re to take the fact that she carefully lipsticks her mouth as a slam on her character, since worthy people -- literary geniuses for instance -- are never so clench-pussied as to be careful about anything. I know, I know... my old job as a proofreader doesn’t exist anymore. The general public doesn’t need, want, or care about people who read every line to make sure it’s pretty. I see their point; if an emoticon is worth a thousand love poems, does a missing comma keep anybody who isn’t being deliberately obtuse from catching anyone else’s drift?
But think about it, Dicky. What non-nerd reads novels anymore anyway, now that Hollywood can put Beowulf in an ass-kicking (I say this without a hint of sarcasm) CGI epic? That’s right: a rising proportion of the book audience will now be made of nit-picking shits like me. People to whom typos are as painful as a Bic spattered on a Renoir (even if it’s not actually a Renoir, but Dogs Playing Poker). Think about it. You’ve made your pile, I suppose, and we can’t take that away from you, unless we become exotic dancers. But I’m going to go proofread my new book again now, before carefully attributing an example of ignorant-sounding use of the language to a radio announcer during my own ice storm. Most writers, darling, frozen or not, can’t afford to be floppy.
Saturday, January 10, 2009
I promised, and I deliver – which would be much more exciting if anyone cared, but at any rate here’s my short but sweet e-mail friendship with an NPR employee who I would bet money was named after Alan Alda।
Attn: book reviewers: John Kennedy Toole reincarnate... briefly
Now, we all might intuit that the parlor pinks of National Public Radio could give a rat’s ass about writers who aren’t already hip and safely encased in a charming Manhattan two-bed -- but now we have proof। Although, as my dear friend Brendan of the Royal Pines told me, “This is a good-e-mail, Ann, but I bet they get crackpot shit like this every day।” (I mention that he’s a dear friend because no other kind of entity that likes heshit’s face arranged the way it is currently should say that kind of thing to a Capricorn।) This is the sole attempt at publicizing my first novel for which I found time in fall 2008, while I was being worked (or working myself – it’s finally occurred to me that the one good thing about the amount of unpaid labor involved in a graduate degree is that, since it’s unpaid, you’re free to flunk or walk away) into a bilious pulp (not to mention butterfly net number three)।
-------------- Original Text -----------------Date : 9/14/2008 11:17:16 AM
Dear NPR,
After my habit of blathering about suicide while in my cups got me chucked in the looney bin twice during the four years it’s taken to get no response at all, from any editor at any level of the publishing industry, to my first novel -- a murder-mystery spoof about, ironically enough, the corruption of the newspaper industry -- (deep breath) I have given up and self-published the poor thing as a POD on Amazon।com। Now I would like to emotionally blackmail you into reviewing it। However, budget considerations such as the rising price of bread and peanut butter make it seem wise to send an e-mail asking whether there’s a chance in hell you’ll read the book before I pay Amazon.com too much money to send you a copy. So RSVP. If you’ve read this far, perhaps you would like to see the ad copy I wrote for Amazon:
“Join Edgar Rodger, a fledgling private eye and former murder-desk rewrite man for a Chicago daily, as he descends into the bizarre world of the city’s favorite artsy-cultural alternative weekly paper. Inspired equally by Wodehouse and Chandler, Girl Detectives lightens the murder-mystery brew with social satire and sick slapstick as it conjures up a fun-house milieu where nobody can seem to be themselves -- not even a corpse. Kimmie Wrigley, a functional illiterate whose family fortune helped her skate into a job as a Chiculture staff writer, was driving her editor to drink when she disappeared. She was also busy stealing a man from Maurinette Meede, the imperious, blue-blooded food critic. But the paper’s proofreaders -- all slightly unhinged by their intellectual dead-end jobs -- also hated the dopey heiress on principle. With so many potential killers, there’s only one thing for Rodger to do: blackmail them till they sign on as deputy detectives and rat each other out.”
If that doesn’t pique your interest, I guess I’ll go work on my second novel -- which is better than Girl Detectives and nearly finished despite my exhausting job, thank you very much -- or cry।
Yours,
Ann K।F. Sterzinger
Dear Ann,
Thank you for contacting NPR’s All Things Considered.
NPR welcomes the sharing of thoughtful diverse perspectives and occasionally provides on-air "reviews." To submit material for consideration, please send to:
All Things Considered
NPR 635 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20001
Please note that a submission does not guarantee an on-air review. Material submitted will not be returned. If we have further questions about your submission, we will contact you.
Thank you for listening to All Things Considered, and for your continued support of public broadcasting. For the latest news and information, visit NPR.org.
Sincerely,
Alan, NPR Services
NPR invites you to join its audience advisory panel, NPR Listens.Learn more at http://www.npr.org/listens/
Charming, but I never wrote him back. After all, he would never remember which of his crackpot pen friends I was. And anyway, the only thing I could think of to say – well, the only relatively civil thing – would be:
Hey, Alan:
What the fuck are the scare quotes around “reviews” about? Is “spoken” “language” not “really” “language” – or are you saying they’re not actually reviews at all, but mini puff pieces about NPR employees’ kids? Yeah, I thought so। Well, at least you didn’t call the cops...
xoxoxox,
RADAR
Attn: book reviewers: John Kennedy Toole reincarnate... briefly
Now, we all might intuit that the parlor pinks of National Public Radio could give a rat’s ass about writers who aren’t already hip and safely encased in a charming Manhattan two-bed -- but now we have proof। Although, as my dear friend Brendan of the Royal Pines told me, “This is a good-e-mail, Ann, but I bet they get crackpot shit like this every day।” (I mention that he’s a dear friend because no other kind of entity that likes heshit’s face arranged the way it is currently should say that kind of thing to a Capricorn।) This is the sole attempt at publicizing my first novel for which I found time in fall 2008, while I was being worked (or working myself – it’s finally occurred to me that the one good thing about the amount of unpaid labor involved in a graduate degree is that, since it’s unpaid, you’re free to flunk or walk away) into a bilious pulp (not to mention butterfly net number three)।
-------------- Original Text -----------------Date : 9/14/2008 11:17:16 AM
Dear NPR,
After my habit of blathering about suicide while in my cups got me chucked in the looney bin twice during the four years it’s taken to get no response at all, from any editor at any level of the publishing industry, to my first novel -- a murder-mystery spoof about, ironically enough, the corruption of the newspaper industry -- (deep breath) I have given up and self-published the poor thing as a POD on Amazon।com। Now I would like to emotionally blackmail you into reviewing it। However, budget considerations such as the rising price of bread and peanut butter make it seem wise to send an e-mail asking whether there’s a chance in hell you’ll read the book before I pay Amazon.com too much money to send you a copy. So RSVP. If you’ve read this far, perhaps you would like to see the ad copy I wrote for Amazon:
“Join Edgar Rodger, a fledgling private eye and former murder-desk rewrite man for a Chicago daily, as he descends into the bizarre world of the city’s favorite artsy-cultural alternative weekly paper. Inspired equally by Wodehouse and Chandler, Girl Detectives lightens the murder-mystery brew with social satire and sick slapstick as it conjures up a fun-house milieu where nobody can seem to be themselves -- not even a corpse. Kimmie Wrigley, a functional illiterate whose family fortune helped her skate into a job as a Chiculture staff writer, was driving her editor to drink when she disappeared. She was also busy stealing a man from Maurinette Meede, the imperious, blue-blooded food critic. But the paper’s proofreaders -- all slightly unhinged by their intellectual dead-end jobs -- also hated the dopey heiress on principle. With so many potential killers, there’s only one thing for Rodger to do: blackmail them till they sign on as deputy detectives and rat each other out.”
If that doesn’t pique your interest, I guess I’ll go work on my second novel -- which is better than Girl Detectives and nearly finished despite my exhausting job, thank you very much -- or cry।
Yours,
Ann K।F. Sterzinger
Dear Ann,
Thank you for contacting NPR’s All Things Considered.
NPR welcomes the sharing of thoughtful diverse perspectives and occasionally provides on-air "reviews." To submit material for consideration, please send to:
All Things Considered
NPR 635 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20001
Please note that a submission does not guarantee an on-air review. Material submitted will not be returned. If we have further questions about your submission, we will contact you.
Thank you for listening to All Things Considered, and for your continued support of public broadcasting. For the latest news and information, visit NPR.org.
Sincerely,
Alan, NPR Services
NPR invites you to join its audience advisory panel, NPR Listens.Learn more at http://www.npr.org/listens/
Charming, but I never wrote him back. After all, he would never remember which of his crackpot pen friends I was. And anyway, the only thing I could think of to say – well, the only relatively civil thing – would be:
Hey, Alan:
What the fuck are the scare quotes around “reviews” about? Is “spoken” “language” not “really” “language” – or are you saying they’re not actually reviews at all, but mini puff pieces about NPR employees’ kids? Yeah, I thought so। Well, at least you didn’t call the cops...
xoxoxox,
RADAR
Saturday, December 20, 2008
Hearing myself type
Ok, so here I am! Selling myself! First post! Go! OK!
...
Shit, I should have picked a subject for this blog.
I mean, a subject besides my books. I've only written two. That's not a lot to talk about -- particularly if you consider the spoiler-avoidance factor.
When I was 31 or 32 and trying to sell my first novel I started thinking about suicide a lot. It gets expensive to mail sample chapters to publishers, and if you send them an e-mail you worry that it didn't get there, but actually you know that they're just ignoring you because you are one of the approximately 20 percent of the 6 billion humans on this planet who are trying to get someone to publish their books, and they haven't heard of you, and they don't have the time it takes to read the sentence or two that will let them know whether you're Schopenhauer-approved or a rambling shithead.
It's a hopeless waste of time, money, and energy. It's like trying to hit a pinata, only the pinata isn't actually there, and the blindfold is soaked in chloroform, and the last thing you hear before you pass out again is Joyce Carol Oates laughing at you.
In four years of trying, I had one indie publisher, once, ask to see a full manuscript. I sent it. I felt hope -- what a moron. I waited month after month with no response. Finally, after several more e-mail queries, they sent me a form rejection.
Thaaaaaaat episode of our show ended in Loony Bin Field Trip #1.
So I told myself, OK. Life is painful and failure is humiliating. I only expect you to take just so much of this, kiddo. If you still haven't published a novel by the time you're 35, and it still hurts you this much, I am going to squelch the curiosity that is keeping us in this mortal coil (will the Packers EVER win another Super Bowl? Oh, so close! Guess I'll drag the corpse around another year...) and give in to your urge to do whatever it takes to check out of Hotel Hell-Planet.
So this summer, as I nervously approached 34, I found out that Amazon.com will charge you very little to put your book up as a publish-on-demand sort of thing. You get to design your own cover, set your own price, ya-ta-ta-ta... and they just take the production costs as part of what they take out of your cover price. The rest is yours. Granted, they probably take out about 500 times what it costs to actually print the thing... and my paranoid Googling resulted in lots of hits on people saying that Amazon is evyl, that they force small publishers to do something or other, that they stomp on the small press...
To which I said, "Good." It was a small press that put me over the edge. It was a small press that ripped off Lisa Falour when she wrote her autobiography. Small presses, no less than large presses, generally release crap, and they generally release crap by their friends, and isn't the market clogged enough? It's a small press that put out the crappy book of a former acquaintence, who is smug. So fuck 'em.
And so I put my fabulous novel (Girl Detectives, a sort of murder mystery/old-school British farce hybrid) up as a POD, sticking out my little pink tongue. And then I got too swamped by my job to do anything to promote it. (Except write a suicide e-mail to NPR, with mildy ironic results -- see it in my next post!)
I was busy asking myself whether this POD thing meant I had to go on living after 35 even if I never really got anything published, when I got stuck in the looney bin again after having a Thanksgiving breakdown. After I got out of the hospital, for some reason I could not make myself leave the house before dark for a week, so I called in to work nuts. Maybe it was because I hated the people I was working for because they overloaded me till I lost my head, but I knew that my immediate supervisors were actually nice people who were underfunded -- they told me they really should have three people to do my job; they genuinely seemed to wish they could treat me more humanely (not that they did much about it), so I wanted to wait to put myself back in contact with them till I could be civil without short-circuiting. (Although that theory admittedly doesn't explain the overwhelming aversion to daylight.)
This was a really odd time for Chip Smith (Hoover Hog, Nine Banded Books) to pick to e-mail me and ask how I was doing.
I'm surprised I got out of bed to check my e-mail that week, actually.
Must have been bored on the way back from the toilet.
Anyway, he tells me about this publishing company he's started (see above). I've only met the guy face to face once, and we were both too drunk to talk, but we read each other's zines back in the 1990s, and... you can guess where this is headed...
It's the only way anybody not to the manor born ever gets published, it seems. Somebody you've known for a long time starts a company and asks if you've got a manuscript. I always figured that, if it ever happened, this is how it would go. I just thought I'd be a little more bashful about the irony, having spent my adult life seething over nepotism.
However, I honestly admired the prose in the books Chip sent me that he had already published; for example Bradley Smith, who wrote The Man Who Saw His Own Liver, is a novelist who's practically a poet, but he doesn't bash you over the head with it; there's a thick bed of thought under the pretty words, and he's entertaining. And I've always thought Chip was a good writer himself. Nine Banded Books is exactly the kind of project I want to be associated with. (Except for the fact that it's not large and powerful, of course, but even after four years of nut hatches and empty bottles, I still have some pride: I ain't swinging at the damn pinata no more.) And it's not like we were college roommates or drinking buddies or cousins. I'm thinking: maybe he's one of those mythical, leprechaun-type people who publish books because they actually LIKE THEM -- not because they seem marketable, or are about Bettie Paige, or because they owe somebody a favor; and without necessarily knowing the authors well enough to know whether they'll like them personally. He knew me just well enough that I didn't happen to have to sit and wait on his slush pile.
So... we're still sending the contract around in the mail, and I'm still finishing the damn thing, but it looks like... well, unless something goes wrong (always likely), I'm either going to have to go on stumbling around this jolly globe, or renegotiate my suicide deal. Sorry, gang! Maybe I'll help reduce the population some other time.
...
Shit, I should have picked a subject for this blog.
I mean, a subject besides my books. I've only written two. That's not a lot to talk about -- particularly if you consider the spoiler-avoidance factor.
When I was 31 or 32 and trying to sell my first novel I started thinking about suicide a lot. It gets expensive to mail sample chapters to publishers, and if you send them an e-mail you worry that it didn't get there, but actually you know that they're just ignoring you because you are one of the approximately 20 percent of the 6 billion humans on this planet who are trying to get someone to publish their books, and they haven't heard of you, and they don't have the time it takes to read the sentence or two that will let them know whether you're Schopenhauer-approved or a rambling shithead.
It's a hopeless waste of time, money, and energy. It's like trying to hit a pinata, only the pinata isn't actually there, and the blindfold is soaked in chloroform, and the last thing you hear before you pass out again is Joyce Carol Oates laughing at you.
In four years of trying, I had one indie publisher, once, ask to see a full manuscript. I sent it. I felt hope -- what a moron. I waited month after month with no response. Finally, after several more e-mail queries, they sent me a form rejection.
Thaaaaaaat episode of our show ended in Loony Bin Field Trip #1.
So I told myself, OK. Life is painful and failure is humiliating. I only expect you to take just so much of this, kiddo. If you still haven't published a novel by the time you're 35, and it still hurts you this much, I am going to squelch the curiosity that is keeping us in this mortal coil (will the Packers EVER win another Super Bowl? Oh, so close! Guess I'll drag the corpse around another year...) and give in to your urge to do whatever it takes to check out of Hotel Hell-Planet.
So this summer, as I nervously approached 34, I found out that Amazon.com will charge you very little to put your book up as a publish-on-demand sort of thing. You get to design your own cover, set your own price, ya-ta-ta-ta... and they just take the production costs as part of what they take out of your cover price. The rest is yours. Granted, they probably take out about 500 times what it costs to actually print the thing... and my paranoid Googling resulted in lots of hits on people saying that Amazon is evyl, that they force small publishers to do something or other, that they stomp on the small press...
To which I said, "Good." It was a small press that put me over the edge. It was a small press that ripped off Lisa Falour when she wrote her autobiography. Small presses, no less than large presses, generally release crap, and they generally release crap by their friends, and isn't the market clogged enough? It's a small press that put out the crappy book of a former acquaintence, who is smug. So fuck 'em.
And so I put my fabulous novel (Girl Detectives, a sort of murder mystery/old-school British farce hybrid) up as a POD, sticking out my little pink tongue. And then I got too swamped by my job to do anything to promote it. (Except write a suicide e-mail to NPR, with mildy ironic results -- see it in my next post!)
I was busy asking myself whether this POD thing meant I had to go on living after 35 even if I never really got anything published, when I got stuck in the looney bin again after having a Thanksgiving breakdown. After I got out of the hospital, for some reason I could not make myself leave the house before dark for a week, so I called in to work nuts. Maybe it was because I hated the people I was working for because they overloaded me till I lost my head, but I knew that my immediate supervisors were actually nice people who were underfunded -- they told me they really should have three people to do my job; they genuinely seemed to wish they could treat me more humanely (not that they did much about it), so I wanted to wait to put myself back in contact with them till I could be civil without short-circuiting. (Although that theory admittedly doesn't explain the overwhelming aversion to daylight.)
This was a really odd time for Chip Smith (Hoover Hog, Nine Banded Books) to pick to e-mail me and ask how I was doing.
I'm surprised I got out of bed to check my e-mail that week, actually.
Must have been bored on the way back from the toilet.
Anyway, he tells me about this publishing company he's started (see above). I've only met the guy face to face once, and we were both too drunk to talk, but we read each other's zines back in the 1990s, and... you can guess where this is headed...
It's the only way anybody not to the manor born ever gets published, it seems. Somebody you've known for a long time starts a company and asks if you've got a manuscript. I always figured that, if it ever happened, this is how it would go. I just thought I'd be a little more bashful about the irony, having spent my adult life seething over nepotism.
However, I honestly admired the prose in the books Chip sent me that he had already published; for example Bradley Smith, who wrote The Man Who Saw His Own Liver, is a novelist who's practically a poet, but he doesn't bash you over the head with it; there's a thick bed of thought under the pretty words, and he's entertaining. And I've always thought Chip was a good writer himself. Nine Banded Books is exactly the kind of project I want to be associated with. (Except for the fact that it's not large and powerful, of course, but even after four years of nut hatches and empty bottles, I still have some pride: I ain't swinging at the damn pinata no more.) And it's not like we were college roommates or drinking buddies or cousins. I'm thinking: maybe he's one of those mythical, leprechaun-type people who publish books because they actually LIKE THEM -- not because they seem marketable, or are about Bettie Paige, or because they owe somebody a favor; and without necessarily knowing the authors well enough to know whether they'll like them personally. He knew me just well enough that I didn't happen to have to sit and wait on his slush pile.
So... we're still sending the contract around in the mail, and I'm still finishing the damn thing, but it looks like... well, unless something goes wrong (always likely), I'm either going to have to go on stumbling around this jolly globe, or renegotiate my suicide deal. Sorry, gang! Maybe I'll help reduce the population some other time.
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