Sunday, October 6, 2024.
9:40am.
Time to shake the tree.
Every day is a casino of email beeps, Slack pings, clingy new-notification dots and a news cycle that never shuts off. A generation ago, people had calling hours. They had writing sheds where they'd go and have a think in delicious quietude with a typewriter and a tomato can of Number 2 pencils.
I propose a return to this golden age of office hours. I don't think our brains are set up for the constant multi-threading social media demands of us. So stop by on Tuesdays and Thursdays between 1 and 3, and I'll be on the porch swing. I may have a plate of cucumber sandwiches.
Seeing Thievery Corporation was, if nothing else, another reminder that we are all getting old. For so long, they were a faceless duo embodying a kind of hazy, late-nightism from behind velvet ropes and bottle service in the world's most expensive cities. But seeing them in 2024, prancing around the stage like a crew of dads having a bit of nostalgic fun offered another ticking of the bucket list and an evening full of sitar and mood, not unlike a two-hour stroll through a Restoration Hardware showroom.
The agent querying has started, and ew god it stings. I knew it would. Rejection is part of the job description of being an author. So I guess it's time to rip off the band-aid.
How's it going? I've already had two polite rejections. I'd read some absolutely brutal rejection letters addressed to authors who are now household names. But from what I've experienced, it seems agents these days may be more tuned into the struggle on the writer's side. They've been encouraging and kind (though detached), in spite of a solid no.
But, ew god it stings. And my query-finger hasn't even broken a sweat. You're not a real author until you can wallpaper an enclosed patio with your rejection letters, says conventional wisdom. I've got a ways to go, yet.
Maybe I’m too close to it, so it not only feels like a rejection of a book, but a rejection of me and those years of struggle and wayfinding. Maybe it wouldn't sting so bad if I'd written an epic science fiction saga or a breathless teen romance instead.
But I'm learning to paint with the heart, not the head. Let disaster happen, and allow all the beautiful catastrophe leak out. At the very very least, it’s out of me. And after a certain age, that's what it all becomes. A race to get all your life out before the brain turns to mush. The urge to chase becomes the urge to archive. (Deja vu.)
I need a hype man.
Revered prophet Andy Warhol had the famous line about everyone eventually being world-famous for 15 minutes. It was not only eerily prescient, but Tiktok has got that down to 21 seconds.
CONNECTION was the promise of social media. Myspace, Facebook, et al brought comfort and acceptance, connecting you with the one shy kid from Norway who liked the same weird music you did. But the law of unintentional consequences has rendered a strange flattening where nothing is unique, sacred or remarkable anymore and every scroll through a feed becomes a potential depression trigger when you see all your secret, liminal spaces regurgitated as mined content.
Some things shouldn't scale.
Surely there is a key to rising above all the noise, but I'm struggling to find the contours of the latest age. And I'm terrible at sales and marketing. Always have been.
I need a hype man.
New York next week. Til then.
10:40am.
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What I’m reading: Anti-Story: The Anthology of Experimental Fiction (Philip Stevick)
What I'm listening to: Hunkpapa (Throwing Muses)
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