Category: publication

Don’t Weep for the Oompa Loompas

I loved Roger Ebert’s wit and lack of pretention.  His movie reviews in The Chicago Sun-Times often struck a delicate balance between honesty and generosity.  He had a great sense of film history and he’d contextualize Hollywood stinkers in ways that made them interesting as artifacts of a silly and unforgiving industry.

Over time, I found his approach to be applicable beyond the movies: first accept that there will be a lot of garbage in a given field or system.  Then understand that garbage can teach you as much, if not more, than quality if you’re willing to pay attention.  That is, if you can continue watching, if you can manage to withstand it and keep your lunch down.

Sometimes, I have a near visceral reaction to pretentious media, especially when it comes to literary fiction and nonfiction.  I can trace it to when I was getting a master’s degree in writing and every other literary novel seemed to be about an attractive young woman on the east coast exploring bisexuality and working in an art gallery.  Most of the stories submitted in my workshops were also about that or something very close to it.  I spent my MFA depressed, alienated from a literary scene steeped in cloying trendiness.

Besides, I didn’t know how to write about that stuff, even if it was required reading in my classes.  My characters, as one of my instructors put it, were rather from the “low end of the service economy.”  And that dog wouldn’t hunt if I wanted a career as a writer.  So she hoped I had plans after graduation.  Maybe sell some insurance or, you know, the Navy.  Half-drunk at a faculty party, I laughed and said something like, “Don’t do me any favors.”  She didn’t.

The formula was ubiquitous in those years and seemed to whip my professors into a lather whenever one of the Big Six offered up another clone—probably because my professors were working writers trying desperately to stay in step with what their agents and editors demanded.  Then Candace Bushnell anthologized her New York Observer columns, which applied the formula to a type of harder-edged, jaded, status-anxious Manhattanite and everybody wanted to be Carrie Bradshaw.

I tried to channel my inner Ebert when writing critiques of the new Bushnellian short stories coming across the table.  I drank my Milk of Magnesia and tried to learn.  And I did learn at least one thing: marketing is rarely about art even when art is being marketed.  But the artists don’t always realize this.  Everyone’s just trying to do their best.  Everyone just wants to be loved in a world that won’t love them back.  So what’s it gonna take?  Go ask Candace.

By the time Sex and the City hit HBO, 9/11 had already seared itself into the national consciousness.  So naturally the usual illicit love triangles, existential crises, career failures and ineffectual husband stories that had been previously set in five-bedroom homes, fancy restaurants, galleries, and uptown lofts—with an odd chapter sometimes taking place at a resort in Vail or, saints preserve us, on a boat off the coast of Mallorca—now featured explosions.

I was advised to rewrite my current novel and make the protagonist a fireman.  A well-known British novelist, who I’d previously considered above all this, published a divorce novel almost identical to his previous divorce novel, save that the new one was set not far from ground zero at the World Trade Center.  My former classmates, now selling insurance, preparing to ship out on aircraft carriers, or working in the low end of the service economy, were suddenly writing stories that read less like quotidian Nobel Prize Alice Munro and more like overheated radio dramas from the 1940s.

Maybe Ebert got his compassionate take from “Sturgeon’s Law,” formulated in 1957 by science fiction writer, Theodore Sturgeon, who declared in a column for Venture Science Fiction that “ninety percent of everything is crap.”  Subsequent writers reformulated this as: ninety percent of everything is garbage meant to hold up the ten percent that isn’t.”  Sometimes, this is referred to as “landfill theory.”  Still, if we’ve learned anything from modern horror movies—a genre that seems densely compacted with trash—one does not take the landfill for granted.

So I tried to embrace the new NPR-coffee-table terrorism fetish like every other young writer planning on attending the next AWP conference, but it was hard.  Hard to keep down.  Hard to contextualize as just another trend.  Reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close helped because I thought it was really good.  Maybe I’d read it differently now, but I remember thinking Foer’s 2005 novel was the only good thing I’d read with 9/11 as a backdrop.  I started to wonder whether the New York publishing industry had the potential to become less squeamish, less trendy, less risk-averse.

Nevertheless, when David Foster Wallace killed himself three years later and Little, Brown, and Company jumped at the chance to publish his unfinished Pale King, it seemed like a new low.  The marketing around the book wasn’t about pushing units anymore or the possibility of an HBO special somewhere down the line.  Maybe no one knew what it was about.  Maybe the reptilian DNA of Little, Brown’s sales reps had finally asserted control and the lizards were running amok in a wild frenzy, fucking and consuming everything in sight.  Then again, maybe I just hadn’t been paying attention.

I had a Skype meeting with an agent around this time who looked very much like the students I used to see coming out of the London School of Economics when I’d get off the Tube at Holborn: impeccably clean, flinty expression, driven, deeply unhappy.  She asked me what the books on either side of my novel would be in the bookstore and didn’t smile when I said, “Well, that depends.  What bookstore are we in?”

I should have said, “On one side we have The Pale King.  On the other, of course, is Emperor’s Children—it culminates on 9/11, don’t you know.”  She knew.  I knew she knew.  And she would have approved. Messud’s Emperor’s Children is the Sex and the City of 9/11 literary opportunism.  For some inexplicable reason, I didn’t say anything like that.  We simply looked at each other for a moment and she wished me good luck.

We’ve come a long way since then; though, it seems like we’re doing the same dance to different music.  Much has been made of the wokification of publishing, whatever that means, and the censorship of Roald Dahl, whose work in its untreated form has now been adjudged dangerous for the youth.  I suspect this has something to do with Millennials and Gen Zs being really, really, really, really sensitive and therefore risk averse.  More than we ever were.  In some ways, I suppose it’s good to be that sensitive.  In others, perhaps not so good.  And Roald Dahl’s estate better watch out.  Because now they’re saying the Oompa Loompas are the “subject of some racial controversy” and I have no doubt they’ll be evaluating the corruptive influence of Switch Bitch and Esio Trot before long.

Still, the cynical insensitive Gen X voice in the back of my head says commerce will undermine equity, safe spaces, and sensitivity readers in the end.  The scaly reptiles of the publishing industry are mostly nocturnal, preferring to stay hidden during the day.  But when they catch the scent of profit, they invariably rise up and stop doing good so they might do well.

Then into the landfill will go yesterday’s social justice homilies along with the newly expurgated Bond books and whatever Dahl stories were rewritten by an administrative assistant at Penguin Random House using ChatGPT.   And there will be a new renaissance of insensitive fiction and non-inclusive speech.  Well, the grave’s a fine and private place.  If Fleming and Dahl are turning in it as a result of all this bad noise, who really wants to know?  Maybe the AI rewrites will improve between now and the next big thing.

I’m reminded of one of Ebert’s funniest reviews: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) which, in the first sentence, he called “a horrible experience of unbearable length.”  Unwilling to pull punches, as this seemed like one of the few movies Ebert really hated and resented having to watch, he wrote that “the movie has been signed by Michael Bay.  This is the same man who directed The Rock in  1996.  Now he has made Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.  Faust made a better deal. . . . The two most inexplicable characters are Ron and Judy Witwicky (Kevin Dunn and Julie White), who are the parents of Shia LaBeouf, who Mephistopheles threw in to sweeten the deal.”

That always makes me laugh.  Yet, this was not one of Ebert’s most compassionate reviews.  It was one where the balance shifted conspicuously from generosity to blistering contempt.  Maybe it was his age or the fact that he was definitely of a less sensitive generation, less concerned with being non-offensive, and it was starting to show.  But there’s no denying that his serrated wit could sometimes reach neoclassical dimensions.  And that may be why we read him—not for how much safety and inclusivity his ingenium could provide, but for how dangerous he could be.

I’ve been absent of late . . .

I think Warren Ellis puts it well in “How to Build a Blog Without Social Media“: “[My website] has always been subject to pauses and hiatuses, chiefly because my job is writing and in busy periods there hasn’t always been enough writing left in me on a given day to sustain this site.”  This is what I’ve been meaning to post here for some time but, precisely for the above reason, haven’t had the mind or occasion to do so.

Lately, I’ve been working on long fiction projects, writing steadily but not visibly or publicly.  I know a growing number of people read my blog and newsletter; though, I don’t often pay attention to the site statistics.  And I’m grateful for any interest and attention paid to my writing—grateful enough, in fact, that I want to thank you for sticking with me during my less visible periods when I have to do the stereotypical fiction writer thing and disappear into the back room for some months.

I am still here, wherever “here” is in a non-local, asynchronous digital medium.  And I’ve been thinking about what’s next.  Here’s an overview of what’s going on and coming up:

  • The Covid lockdown novel had to change as my perception of that time changed.  I’m rewriting the first 190 pages (which is to say, most of it so far).  I thought it was a dead project.  But I couldn’t get it out of my head—more the characters than the setting, but I don’t think it’s possible to separate the two. Hence, the rewrite.  It’s unpleasant and fascinating in equal proportion, not unlike digging myself out of the basement after the house collapsed.
  • The short science-fiction novel about a night-blooming flower (no, the flower is not overtly a character) is going pretty well right now.  It’s about halfway written.  If I can keep writing the way I have been, I don’t think I’ll need too many subsequent drafts.  We shall see.
  • My third book of literary stories, Living the Dream, (delayed two years by the pandemic and the publisher changing countries) is finally coming out.  They tell me it should be available in late April.  This is a good thing, since I already have most of a fourth story collection manuscript put together.
  • I intend to return to my tried and true magazine submission praxis very soon.  So there should be articles and columns appearing here once again.  I can’t predict exactly when or where my work will be appearing, but I guess that’s part of the fun.
  • I’m also still interested in doing an audio-only podcast via my newsletter, where I read poems and passages from books and talk about writers I like.
  • And, of course, there’s the magazine that my friend Kurt and I have been talking about for two decades.  We finally have a talented, serious group, the possibility of legitimate funding, and the will to make it happen.  It’s a big undertaking, but it’s picking up speed and we’re all experienced enough with magazine and small press publishing to know what we love and want to avoid.

So that’s the state of things at the moment.  Watch this space and thanks for sticking with me.  We’ll see where these pathways lead . . .

Michael

Dominance and Submissions

Let’s say you’ve labored long in the fields of creative writing and the People Who Know (or maybe just the people who’ve noticed) have appreciated your talent.  Some have appreciated it loudly and publicly, some quietly to friends in ways that eventually come back to you, some through amazing feats of jealousy, and others through an unrelenting aggressive competitiveness that beggars belief.  The lower the stakes, the higher the vitriol is an axiom of creative culture.

Let’s also say that for the first decade of writing and submitting short stories to magazines with names like Lost Nose Quarterly, Barbaric Yawp, and Bitch Review, the feedback of the 25-year-old readers working on these magazines mattered.  Susie Lillywhite, the fiction editor at Uncommon Snuff, writes you a personalized rejection, praising your “humorous story of cis-het men behaving badly,” and your ever-present grinding self-doubt abates for ten full minutes; though, on minute 11, you wonder how Susie writes dialogue (“Hello, Mister Cisgendered Heteronormative Male.  How are you today?” / “Hello, Thinly Veiled Proxy For Susie Designed To Signpost Authorial Identity And Abate Criticism.  I am fine.”).

You get the inevitable raft of rejections and a few acceptances.  In time, your acceptance average goes up.  You know this because you obsessively gamify your submission process on a spreadsheet like fantasy baseball.  Maybe your box scores show progress.  Maybe all this effort means something—if not anything tangible in your day-to-day existence, then perhaps in a kind of working-fiction-writer sabermetrics that suggests your chosen life direction hasn’t been a horrible mistake.  Maybe the 500 hypothetical readers of Dogwater International are upping your short story RBI.  It’s possible.  Don’t say it isn’t.

You’ve got a novel in progress.  This goes without saying.  Everyone has a novel in progress.  Your screenwriter friend, Gaurangi, tells you she has two novels in progress, a poetry chapbook in progress, and a book of essays in progress.  Yet, she’s miserable and hates her life.  “Is that because you’re still assistant manager at KFC and can’t break through the glass ceiling?”  “No,” she says, “it’s because you’re a fucking asshole.”  You’ve been friends for 15 years.  Her name means “giver of happiness.”

There is no joy like mine, you think.  I am a cherry blossom adrift in the infinite cosmos.  The form email from GOAT Bomb sits in your inbox.  You can see that it begins, “Dear Valued Author, thank you for submitting to GOAT Bomb . . .” but you’ve been meditating.  And if zazen has taught you anything, it’s that impersonal form rejections are naught but the transcendent meanderings of The Great Vehicle.  The rejections aren’t depressing you.  It must be something else.

So let’s say you’ve also learned how to save money as an effective freelance survival tactic.  Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you’ve managed to eke out an existence as a ghost writer and a copyeditor.  Let’s say, also for the sake of argument, that your cousin, who thought college was stupid, now makes low six figures as a construction manager and thinks you’re hilarious.  You see him at Christmas dinner, a rosy-cheeked beer-drinking construction Santa with a twinkle in his eye.  And he asks you the same thing he asked you last year: “Are you a mental midget?”  He finds the question hilarious.  “No,” you say.  “I mentally fidget.”  He can’t stop laughing.  “With your digits!”  In this family, we come together through spontaneous and combustive rhyming.  You don’t take it personally.

But you don’t follow baseball.  Thus, your spreadsheet submission game perpetually teeters on the edge of something else, deep and dark, eldritch and unspeakable, an existential abyss.  Why do you do it?  How does publishing another story in The East Punjabi Fiction Annual (that took you six months of sustained before-dawn writing sessions and seven painful drafts) matter in the construction management food-on-the-table sense?  You joke, but there are no rhymes for it, at least none that would entertain your cousin.

The fact is, you are a mental midget.  You must be if you still have to worry about putting ten more dollars on the credit card for a sandwich at Safeway—which isn’t Joe Biden’s fault.  So don’t start.  The supply chain is effed-up, yes.  Covid is ineffable, yes.  The pandemic shooed you out of Bangkok one step ahead of the Thai quarantine police, yes, and now you’re living in a Hawaiian jungle, but that has nothing to do with anything.  Here you are.  The feral rooster outside goes, “KEEEEE-YAAAAW-KOOOOO!”  And the great world turns with its comings and goings.

Smoke three cigarettes with Gaurangi in her Kia in the parking lot of KFC.  It’s midnight and she is off work.  You drove into Hilo just for this because it’s a miracle that you both now live in the same place and she texted you: come smoke a cigarette with me so I can cope with the fact that I manage idiots.  She won’t smoke at home because she has a two-year-old daughter and cigarettes are poison.  “I should move back to L.A.” she says.  “The fucking Big Island’s getting me nowhere.”  “You married a Hawaiian.”  She looks at you, drags deeply, and smiles.  “Yes.  That probably has something to do with why I’m here.”

One manages a KFC in Los Angeles if one wants to be a screenwriter, a whole different fantasy ballgame.  One brings one’s Hawaiian husband to a bungalow in Glendale.  Maybe one sells the script for She’s Gotta Have It 2, earning $135,000 for the original screenplay, including treatment, and suddenly it’s all cheddar.  One writes one’s friend in the jungle: I don’t hate L.A. now.  It is what it is.  Now one can calm down and finish that poetry chapbook in peace.

You’re drinking too much coffee and you read a lot of news. Some nut writing for The Conversation says Covid and climate change are going to turn coffee into a rare luxury item like Kobe beef or Cristal.  But the enormous tin of Safeway Select on top of your refrigerator suggests otherwise. You wonder how much the writer got paid to cook up a pandemic scare piece on coffee. What if you pitched something similar about a thing everybody wants being unceremoniously taken away by forces beyond one’s control? What about cheese: “Is Cheese Systemically Racist?  Biden Might be Coming for Your Gruyere.” Or sex: “The Death of Intimacy: Gen Z Prefers Online Porn to Sex and Who Can Blame Them?” Or healthcare: “The GOP Thinks Letting Grandpa Die is Good for the Economy.”  You write these ideas down and fire up the laptop.  There’s rent to be made.

At this point, there are many possibilities.  You’ve moneyballed your way into 30, 40 magazine publications.  You have three published story collections and a multitude of columns, articles, and essays floating through the aetheric digitalia.  But you still live in the jungle.  You’ve got a neighbor up the dirt road who deals with his emotions by smoking crack and shooting cats with his Marlin 60.  You’re still getting rejections from 25-year-olds and machines that go, “While we appreciate your interest in Dark Pissoir . . . “

Occasionally, some acquaintance on social media will pay attention to you for more than 30 seconds and wonder how you exist.  How do you make a living (or How can you possibly make a living?)?  You say as best you can.  There are 25-year-olds publishing novels with Random House.  There are 25-year-olds managing construction sites and getting welding certificates and buying their kids $900 gaming consoles.  And there’s a fine line of termite dust along the base of your hovel’s north wall.  Are you discouraged?  What does that mean, exactly?

Writing the Hard Thing

Writers on the pain of hindsight in publishing: 'It's like a bad breakup – you have to move on ...

If I could tell you the number of stories and novels I’ve begun writing and not finished, we’d be here too long.  But “not finished” doesn’t mean “discarded.”  It means what it says. 

The difficulty comes when I’ve convinced myself that I’m one sort of writer (the consistent, cheerfully productive kind) as opposed the other, less glamorous (or, at least, less visible) sort—a slave to the vicissitudes of the moon or some shit, the guy with 25 ongoing projects and an inability to stop working on any of them. 

I know this about myself.  I tell myself that it’s all part of the bigger creative process.  I imagine all these incomplete pieces fermenting, cross-pollinating, mutating.  Nothing lost.  Everything in motion.  And I take refuge in those ideas and metaphors so I can keep working.  Being a writer, I tell myself a story.  But it might be bullshit self-deceit.

The Romantics smoked opium to get closer to the moon and further from the Victorian head trauma of  “productivity.”  And when my genre writer pals do highly Victorian social media posts that go, “Sigh.  Only 10 pages today,” I wonder whether they’re writing from inspiration or simply turning a lathe in some Dickensian word factory.  Productivity equals commercial success, while moonbeams are their own reward.  Still, I have word count envy no matter what I do. 

The problems of productivity and self-deceit are at the center of trying to write the hard thing.  They are the essential obstacles in making the fiction I came here to make instead of clocking in and lathing out a bunch of words to satisfy something or someone else.  I don’t want to produce that which has been assigned to me by industry, necessity, or convention.  I hate obeying.  But am I achieving anything in my disobedience?  For that matter, is achievement even the point?

When yet another publishing industry blog post comes out sounding like the vehement Alec Baldwin scene from Glengarry Glen Ross, I feel repulsed.  I don’t want to spend time creating a fucking audience platform.  Being an artist is not about “closing.”  Just doing the actual writing takes up all my energy.  I don’t want to frame pieces of my fiction as marketable units.  I want to sit in a moonbeam and make something that arises from my own unique imperatives and disposition.  I want the serendipity of inspiration.  I live for it.  And I resist the overtures of commercialism dedicated to consumption and to bullying artists into seeing themselves as part of a service industry.

Unfortunately, I also can’t avoid wanting the world to read my work and maybe give me some money so I can feed and clothe myself.  It’s terrifying sometimes.  Years ago, at an AWP conference, talking with a publisher after I put out Gravity, my first collection of stories, I felt like Nunez in “The Country of the Blind”—faced with the choice of getting what I loved if I voluntarily blinded myself or seeing clearly and climbing out of the hidden valley forever.  In the end, I chose to keep my eyes.

“If you want to get a second book out using the momentum of your first,” he said, “you need to complete the manuscript in less than a year.  More than that and people forget who you are.  You won’t be able to position it.  You’ll be starting over.”  Six years later, my second book was done.  And he was correct: from the marketing, word factory standpoint, I was starting over.  From a creative-process standpoint, those six years were predicated on the six that came before.  I wasn’t starting over.  I was writing something hard that had emerged from my ongoing creative process, something I couldn’t have written in under a year.

Finishing writing in one’s own time instead of in service to the word factory is difficult.  Discovering one’s limitations as an artist and then transcending them is very difficult.  Putting in the years is difficult.  Doing this up to and beyond age 30 is not only difficult but scary.  Nevertheless, all can be accomplished if one is willing to believe in something greater than the word count.  One says, it’s all part of my creative process and tries to calm down.  One decides not to read (or write) certain self-aggrandising Facebook posts.

Of course, there might not be a bigger process.  Maybe there is only Random House, Amazon, AWP conference ugliness, building a platform, positioning and branding, and Best American Monotony.  Maybe.  Maybe we exist in a world full of cynical anti-creative money-making ventures, cautious art, and nothing else.  It’s always possible.  The thought of it sometimes keeps me up at night, especially in those blocked periods of worrying and not writing.

It’s like reading about nuclear war or the earth dying from climate change: you have no agency, no option to mitigate the damage, soulless politicians are making horrible decisions, and there is only one way this can end.  Apocalypse.  Tragedy.  No one at the wheel.  Inhuman corporations controlling everything.  And death, ignominious and unnoticed, unless you get with the program and start churning out formulaic units. 

Capitalism wins.  It usually does.  But if there is a bigger process at work in your struggle to be an artist, it can’t have anything to do with metaphors of productivity on a factory timeline.  That is a reality you must not accept.

How does a writer know what’s real?  Is it moonbeam or production line?  Is it both?  Can it be both?  Andy Warhol, Ernest Hemingway, and David Bowie say yes.  For the rest of us, maybe not.  For every Warhol, Hemingway, and Bowie, there are multitudes who weren’t lucky enough to have their unique artistry coincide with commercial demand. 

Hugh Howey likes to write about Wool the way Elon Musk talks about launching a roadster into space: let me tell you about my unique genius and the origin of my success.  But self-publishing fame and running a car company have one thing in common that never gets discussed: they exist because they are timely.  So it is with any highly lucrative creative effort.  And that intersection has to do with luck.  Meanwhile, someone out there is no doubt making Peking opera, but they are unlikely to be buying villas on the Riviera anytime soon.  Nobody cares.  Their units don’t ship.  And yet they also have the favor of the moon.

Writers are especially predisposed to misunderstand what is real—what is objective versus just a moonbeam.  They spend a lot of time deliberately thinking in metaphors, some more useful than others.  And if they’re not paying attention to their minds, they can mistake such metaphors for objective reality (which, incidentally, has nothing to do with capitalist realism).  Over-absorption in a world of imaginative metaphors can become a source of anxiety when the non-make-believe world reaches out and reminds us that we can’t live totally in our imaginations.  Make your Peking opera, sure, but also accept that the six years you put into it mean nothing in terms of branding and positioning.

A writer will see something and begin to imagine things about it—everyone does this, but writers seem to do it with particular intensity—and before long the writer starts to feel like he or she knows it or, even worse, is it.  Then something from the world of physics and money communicates: no, you are not that.  You can’t imagine yourself to fame and fortune if you’re doing original work.  You might get lucky, yes, and I hope you (I hope I) do.  But commerce and true creativity exist in different spaces.

So I look at my 25 open projects with a bit of trepidation as the days go by.  I’m turning 46 this month.  I’ve published a lot of stories in magazines and two books.  These have been hard things.  Are they enough?  Will they ever be enough?

Don’t worry, I tell myself.  There’s bigger process at work.  There must be.

FYI: New Story Forthcoming in Visitant Magazine

A recent short short of mine, “You Are Somewhere Else,” is forthcoming in Visitant and should be available online.  As usual, I will post the links when the story comes out. – M