TRAVERSING Z

rejection

ketchup

by

One of the many problems with writing is that its long, long lulls can give you an awful lot of time to overthink it all. You eyeball other peoples’ careers and achievements and feel your own pale in comparison; you look at the long list of projects and feel yourself quake at the prospect, all that time, all that effort, for what could well be nothing. You start to worry about money, you self-impose deadlines, you notice fresh white hairs and you find yourself awake at 2 am wondering why you ever started all this in the first place, you’re never going to make it, you’re turning yourself inside out when you’ll never be more than a mediocre writer at best.

Yesterday I had three rejections in one day; I also realized that one of my stories that I had already sent out doesn’t actually work, it’s flat and cliched and just plain wrong, only I was too caught up in the rush to submit to admit it to myself. All of which capped off a bad week on every front, and nudged my mild blues into full-blown depression.

So today—that is, when I could finally get myself out of bed—I made ketchup.

If you want to immerse yourself in process; if you want to be reminded of how much work goes into the most basic things; if you need to relearn the lesson that the best things take a vast amount of energy + patience: make ketchup.

ketchup 1

I love ketchup. I was a brown food child: I would eat anything as long as it was battered or breaded and came with ketchup. We didn’t eat out a whole lot, but when we did sometimes the ketchup would be a house recipe, not the Heinz I was used to, and those variations seemed to me the height of aristocratic dining. Homemade ketchup! That you could make that magic substance yourself, with all kinds of subtle variations, never ceased to amaze me.

It’s only been in the last few years that I’ve learned how much freakin’ work goes into this particular condiment. The pan above is a fraction of the 4 pounds of tomatoes I cooked down today, and I was making a half-batch. Pounds of tomatoes, onion, pepper, cupfuls of vinegar and sugar, heaping spoonfuls of spice. The cooking down, the relentless milling of the vegetables to coax a knuckle’s height of precious puree from a morass of skins and seeds . . . and then more cooking, so much cooking, the little pan steaming and simmering and slowly thickening. All to produce 6 4-oz. jars.

ketchup2

A pointless exercise, when you can just go to the store and buy any ketchup you can imagine. A waste of time, of energy—think of all the work I could have done this afternoon. And yet when I open one of these jars it will taste better than anything store-bought, and our meals will be a little more special for having it.

So too with writing. The weeks, months of work vanish when I reread something I’m proud of. All the unwritten backstory, all the possibilities carefully considered and eliminated, all the details that need to be imagined—they all fade into that satisfying whole. It is a supreme act of funneling, evinced by the six, eight, ten versions of even the shortest flash that pile up on my hard drive. I don’t know any other way to do it, just as I don’t know how to get that rich red-brown concoction in forty minutes instead of 4 hours. But I think, now, as I mop up the tomato splatters and lick out those last sweet-tart smears from the pan—I think I am overdue to accept my pace. Otherwise it truly will be wasted time.

writing ego

by

So I’ve been thinking a lot today about the long haul of writing, about rejection and acceptance, about my own anxieties about the work of writing and how they dovetail into greater social insecurities. Which is to say, I’ve been doing some me-work, but I kept thinking back to this thing a workshop instructor once told us.

It was at the end of the course, and he was making some general Writerly Advice kind of pronouncements with which to send us out into the world. The students were all women; the instructor was a man who by then had a MFA and a couple of nice books and awards and things under his belt.

And he told us how, when he was in his MFA program, he noticed a trend in how the women and men dealt with rejection. When a woman’s story was rejected, her initial reaction was, “my story wasn’t good enough.”

When a man’s story was rejected, his initial reaction was, “they don’t get my genius.”

Now this was all part of a larger monologue about being selfish about your time, and trusting your voice, and so on. That we could all use a little ego. And at the time, I felt like I was taking his words on board; certainly since then I’ve gotten pretty thick-skinned about rejection letters and the like.

But I found myself coming back to it today. Because it’s not just about rejection letters, this writing ego. It’s about getting the words on the page in the first place. It’s about reader feedback, good and bad. It’s about all the varieties of rejection letters, not just magazines and journals but agents and editors and presses large and small. It’s about one-star reviews and getting left off the program. And it’s about realizing just how many other great writers are out there and trying to justify your space among their number.

When was the last time I wrote something and really felt not only proud of it, but that it kicked ass, that it was a damn good piece of writing? Because those are two different things. You can be proud of your work and still believe it pales in comparison to everything else in the world.

I am blessed to know a few wonderful women writers, and I am always cheering them on: your story rocks, I love what you did with x and y, you’re absolutely amazing. And I mean it; it’s not empty language, I truly believe their work is amazing. But when was the last time I thought of my own work that way?

Even imagining it feels . . . well, silly. If I imagine myself saying that about my own work, saying “I am an amazing writer”, I start blushing with embarrassment. I can get as far as saying “I’m a good writer” without cringing and even then I feel the urge to qualify it in some fashion. Do I believe my work is amazing? I can’t even tell, because I feel so damn tacky, so gauche, just thinking about it.

Yet I’m starting to think I need to work on this. Not just for myself, but for everyone around me. How can I really value another’s work if I don’t value my own? How can I make a case for the strength of women’s work if I think my own is just okay? If we all sit around telling each other we’re great but we can’t say it about ourselves, doesn’t it risk becoming empty cheerleading? Because my praise of others won’t negotiate a better pay rate for either them or myself; while it might get them to submit to that exclusive publication, it won’t make them promote themselves once they’re accepted, it won’t make them see that acceptance as anything other than a wonderful one-off. Without that deep-seated faith in myself—and even here, see, even here my instinct is to softpedal and say “faith” and “belief” rather than “pride” or “ego”—but without that deep-seated pride in my own work, I risk starting every new story from zero, rather than placing it in a larger career arc.

I’m good at reacting. I’m good at taking the rejection and moving on; I’m good at seeing people talk about some trait I lack, some trait they believe is necessary to be a writer, and thinking “fuck you, I am a writer.” But when I’m all alone with the words, when it’s a matter of the work before me and how I see it? I’ve got to figure out how I can hold out my words to the world and say “look at this, it’s damn good.” Full stop.

 

finding myself on a map

by

photo

It can be hard, when you’re out of a day job and the only “people” you speak to throughout your day are small and furry . . . it can be hard to feel like you’re accomplishing anything. Especially with a novel; especially with a novel that’s Mostly-Written. Everything is now fine-tuning, but it’s an odd fine-tuning: poke it in one place and another place suddenly pops out of whack; change a phrase and a whole chapter suddenly becomes disjointed. And meanwhile there are All The Other Things you were going to do with this little window of unemployment, and the days just keep sliding past.

It all makes me want to take a nap. Or, barring that (because let’s face it, the nap will not help productivity issues), it makes me want to find some kind of higher ground to see where the heck I am, where the **** I might be heading, and what are my chances of finishing a piece of writing ever again ever ever ever.

(A friend of mine has floated the idea that in my newfound freedom, and the pressures I’ve put on myself about using this time to the utmost, my inner censor might have taken the opportunity to break out of her cage. This may well be possible.)

This week was a good reminder to let go of all that. Let go of the view from above, let go of the need to finish and submit and publish:

–”Littoral Drift” had to be bumped from Lackington’s issue 4 for copyright reasons: let’s just say that it involves a character quoting an old poem, but Not Quite Old Enough, and we are right on the cusp of public domain freedom. So it’s bumped now to issue 6, with fingers and toes crossed that we’ll have everything sorted by then. This story is dear to me; it was also a hard one to place, being neither fish nor fowl, and quite frankly if it doesn’t work out with Lackington’s it will have to be put aside for now.

–I have word, finally, that there is a good chance of another story getting picked up .  . . and published in May. Which was great news until the inner censor helpfully pointed out that if this happens it will be eighteen months from writing to publication, and how many other stories have I written since then? Which I am trying to turn into the more positive reminder that a) publication takes time and b) obsessing about publication is pointless; it’s the work that matters.

And some writing has happened in these last few weeks. Two flash-y length things got written and the first two chapters of Talassio are now pristine. Plus the conlang is shaping up beautifully, research is happening, and yes, even a few things got done around the house. If I could only feel a bit more in control of my time, a bit more energetic about it all, life would be smashing. Must work on that.