Day Jobs!

It is a truth universally acknowledged that any person with talent and proclivity for the arts must be in search of a day job.

Apologies to Jane Austen. But it’s true.

Arts, you see, most often don’t pay the bills—at least not when you’re starting out. The singer needs to take years and years of singing lessons before she’s ready even to start auditioning. The lessons cost *money*, yo, and if she’s gotten a degree (undergrad or graduate) from a big-name musical institution, she has student loan payments to pay off too. A singer’s voice doesn’t start fully maturing until he/she’s at least into her late 20s; more often 30s. What to do during those years of training? Then there are actors, going to auditions. Most actors go to dozens, hundreds of auditions, and get five or ten jobs. And I’m not referring to the breakout “Friends” role that’s going to pave their way to fame and fortune; they’re “Third Dead Hooker” roles that require disfiguring makeup and a talent for lying still. Meanwhile the rent is due and really, it’s good to be able to eat.

Writers are no exception. While writing doesn’t cost money, there’s a lot that goes into it. I like to study. I have a dozen-plus books on writing on my bookshelves, which I consult on and off; in fact, I just got into a frenzy and bought six more, which I’m making my way through as they come. (I am not an “intuitive” kind of person.) The books cost money. Getting a degree, as with singing, costs money. Not all writers decide to get writing degrees, but most of them have a Bachelor’s in something, and again, STUDENT LOANS rear their ugly heads. Writers’ groups don’t cost money—yay!—but there’s rent and heat and clothing and food, and all the caffeine you’ve gotta drink doesn’t drop out of the sky! And then there’s the small issue of health insurance, and trying to put money aside for retirement, to say nothing of the rainy days. Where does the money come from?

I’ve had a series of day jobs through the years. Some were better than others. I’ve mentioned that I temped, and usually the temp jobs were surprisingly good. But some of my other jobs were horrendous. This is a description of my first true “Day Job.” Day Job Number One.

I was a fresh graduate of Columbia University. Not as young as most fresh graduates, but still young enough to be naïve and optimistic. (Sigh.) A friend called me up, someone who knew I wanted to be a writer. She worked for one of the preeminent literary agents in New York. I shan’t give names, but anyone in the business would recognize this name. (Friend told me once that she had deposited her boss’s two-week paycheck, and it totaled more than my friend’s yearly income.) She said that her boss, the big agent, had a friend who ran a small publishing company and needed an editor/office manager; would I be interested? It was part time, so I‘d have time to write. Good Lord, I said, where do I sign up?

I interviewed for this position and I was very excited; it was a tiny publishing company that mainly focused on republishing out-of-print titles. The woman I would be working for—let’s call her Jane, just because of the quote at the top of the page—said, “I’ll be abroad a lot of the time. I expect there will be days that you can just sit on the couch and write.”

Two weeks later I had the job. Celebration. Part-time, so I could sleep in (a night owl needs that…or at least wants it), a lot of down time. Fantastic! As far as a part-time salary, well, I’d been living on the student loans for a while and hadn’t had to draw out an actual budget. I had no idea how much I was living on. Fresh and naïve, as I said.

And the first few weeks were great. Jane was in the final throes of putting out her latest book, which was an English translation of a French how-to bestseller. She usually did only nominal publicity for each of her books—they were out of print books, and, well, books often go out of print for a reason—and I got to copy-edit galleys and witness the production of a real book! Jane had high hopes for this one, too; it had been a bestseller SOMEWHERE, after all.

Some backstory on Jane and her publishing company: For years Jane had been married to a wealthy man. Extraordinarily wealthy. We’re talking, private jet wealthy. Oil money wealthy. She had been raised with money and then married more, so all her life she hadn’t had to worry about it…until now. She and the extraordinarily wealthy man were divorcing—or she was trying to, anyway. She had initiated the divorce four years earlier, and he was contesting, and New York has some archaic, ridiculous divorce laws, so it was dragging out. As far as I could tell, he had been an absolute bastard to her most of their married life, and since she’d left him he had ratcheted it up. Rich Bastard Husband also cut her off financially (until he was court-ordered to give her money) and told their grown children to choose sides. (They chose the one with the money.) Jane had started her publishing company while she and RBH were still married, so she didn’t worry about her titles making money or not; he put money in, she made books, she was happy. But now she had really high hopes that this French bestseller would become an American bestseller and she could thumb her nose at RBH and his bastardly, stingy ways. (one quick anecdote: the Concorde crashed while I was working there. As Jane often jetted back and forth to Paris, RBH’s assistant phoned to make sure she hadn’t been on the flight that crashed. I relayed that to Jane, and she said, “Ha, I can’t AFFORD to fly the CONCORDE!” with enough annoyance that I realized, this was quite an imposition for her.)

Well, it was a bad book. I read through it and was shocked at the awkward prose. I found out that Jane herself had done the English translation, and it was in final galley form, so it was too late to change. Jane hired a publicist (her first, since this was the first book she actually thought would sell) and really expected the publicist to make it Number One. For weeks, maybe years. This is an expectation publicists are accustomed to, but Jane really put on the pressure. Jane, after all, had spent the past fifty-plus years ordering people around and seeing every wish granted, and thought she could do the same with this book. She absolutely expected an Oprah appearance—for the book’s author and for herself (just to translate, bien sur!).

Our publicist did what she could. And it wasn’t enough, because nothing would have been enough, and the French bestseller became an American dead-in-the-water bookstop. And Jane was angry. Angry at the publicist, and angry at me: we hadn’t done enough. Things became tense. It was bad already because of the tension with RBH; I was frequently a relayer of messages between Jane and RBH (via his assistant, actually, a nice woman) and Jane would say, “Did you tell him I already did that?” Well, no, because you told me to tell him that you were going to do that. “You tell him I already did that!” I’m actually not on the phone anymore. That kind of thing.

Jane also had a drinking problem. I didn’t figure it out for a long time; during her stints abroad she would phone in the afternoon, perfectly lucid-sounding, and ask me questions about the dead-in-the-water book and sometimes about me. I’d answer them in detail. And then the next day she would ask me the exact same questions, in the exact same way (and tone of voice) and I would answer exactly as I had the day before. Confused. Sometimes she would remember that we’d already had that particular discussion, but usually not.

Well, as I mentioned, I had a lot of down time, and I spent several days cleaning out the office. Four years earlier, she and her husband had vacated their enormous Fifth Avenue apartment; she had taken a lot of the junk with her to the office. And by junk, I mean unopened mail—four-year-old unopened mail—and documents and things that didn’t matter a bit. No cool furniture or designer clothing or anything like that (that was in storage), just paper. So I spent days and days and days sorting through paper, throwing most of it out, making the office presentable. There was an enormous table in one corner, and literally, it was like a shelf in a sea of paper; there was paper jammed below it, from the floor to the table, and then from the table to the ceiling. There were cupboards stuffed with it. I was putting garbage bags full of paper into the recycling. I kept a few things, most of which were divorce-related documents. I put them in a small, fancy chest which I referred to (in my head) as the “divorce chest,” filed them chronologically. And read them.

A lot was made in these documents about Jane’s drinking problem. I thought this was interesting, because I hadn’t noticed one. Until she spent a few weeks in town, and returned from a lunch reeking of alcohol. She sounded lucid, but she began asking me the exact same questions she had asked me the day before, in exactly the same way, and didn’t react when I gave her the exact same answers.

Ah ha.

After the first book came out, there wasn’t any book-related stuff to do, so I was now just her personal assistant. She wanted me to keep track of expenses, which was fine, except that she spent like nobody’s business. She had hundreds of thousands of American Express points and mileage on different airlines (which she kept trying ineffectually to redeem; she’d pester me to try to pay for things with MILES. “What about my MILES, Kathy? Won’t they honor my MILES? Tell them how many MILES I have.” To this day, when I hear the word “miles” uttered that way I shudder. But she didn’t know what MILES actually did. Sad.). By the time I came along she was getting an unholy amount of alimony (or whatever it is when you’re not yet divorced)—I mean, she got per month what I now earn (gross!) per year. Tax-free, and no children to take care of. And she couldn’t live on it. I had to call the bank every day (this was before online banking) and see how much she had withdrawn the day before; it was often in excess of two thousand dollars. (I’d still love to know what she spent it on.) This was on top of credit card expenses; she had 4 credit cards (and applied for one more while I was there) on which she was floating maximum balances, around $15,000. I made her pay them off when she got an enormous tax refund, and within two months three of them were maxed out again. She asked me to get her a debit card and I refused; there was no way I was going to try to manage that one for her. In fact, she didn’t even seem to know how credit cards worked. She wanted to put a $35,000 charge on her cards, but each one had a $15k limit. She said, “Can we just put it on different cards? Two different payments on three different cards?” Unfortunately the $35k balance was due at the end of the month, so those two payments on three different cards all happened the SAME MONTH. Net effect: the same.

I was working part time and netting just over three hundred dollars per week, having figured out exactly what a budget was and realizing just how EXTREME my budgeting needed to be—once I went to Gracious Homes and bought a $2 orange peeler, and I can’t describe how naughty I felt, with that splurge— watching that money disappear into the ether. I was going crazy.

I also wasn’t writing. I had a lot of down time, yes, but I was in that state…that “I want to be a writer but I don’t have anything to write” state. It was awful. There were many days I sat at the computer, staring at the Microsoft Word screen. I tried. But I had nothing.

I made it one year. Truthfully I think I made it that long because she spent so much time abroad. I started looking for a new job in March, but that was just when the dot-com bubble started bursting. Companies were retrenching, not looking for more help. After two months, I found a job on Monster.com, interviewed, got it, and gave notice. Now, the job looked sketchy. I won’t even tell you what it was because that will embarrass me; you would look at it and say, “Really? You fell for that?” (The fact that sixty people came for the interview at the same time—a group interview—and all of us were offered the position might indicate a little something.) I was too happy to look at any real issues.

The funny part is, I was not brave enough just to tell Jane the truth: I’d gotten a new job. I had a perfectly legitimate reason for looking, more than just “I don’t like you”—I could have said, “I’ve realized that I need benefits and a much higher salary.” Instead I made up a completely random, stupid lie and told her I needed to go to Utah for the summer to deal with family issues, and therefore needed to quit. (I have never done that since, I promise. Really.) I gave the two weeks’ notice. Unfortunately, by the time my final day rolled around I had already realized that my new job wasn’t quite real. (Long story…yes, I do take that into consideration sometimes.) I had no job lined up, and no job to go to anymore. No writing that I was doing, no real prospects. It was a long summer.

The following fall I realized I desperately wanted to take a playwriting class. I called the Columbia writing department head, Austin Flint, and asked him if I could possibly do this. I didn’t know how I’d pay for it, but practicality had taken a backseat. (it backfired on me with the job in May, but oh well.) He said yes, and then told me he would give me a fellowship designed for writing majors who wanted to return and take writing classes. I ended up taking the playwriting class for 3 semesters, and paying a total of $180 for all of them. (Back then they would have totaled $9000. More now, I’m sure.) I wrote a full-length play, submitted it to NYU, and got into their grad program.

What was the play about, you ask? Oh, a wealthy woman who’s trying to divorce her rich bastard husband, grappling with money issues for the first time in her life. Who has a drinking problem.

A non-Monday post

In my last entry, I mentioned "The Rejectionist" as one of my faves. Today The Rejectionist (I'm not sure if it's he or she, since it is written in a mysterious "we") has an interview with Daniel Handler, aka Lemony Snicket. I'll let you read the whole interview here. But I will transcribe my two favorite questions (questions in quotes, his answers in italics, my responses in parentheses):

"Living as a broke fiction writer in New York: totally overrated, or deeply formative?"
Both, absolutely. I only survived those years by convincing myself that they would look glamorous and bohemian in retrospect. Sometimes they do but not often enough. (Definitely....not...often...enough...)

"Your first novel was rejected thirty-seven times, according to your Wikipedia entry (in retrospect, the idea that The Basic Eight is "too dark" seems almost quaint). We wouldn't have rejected it, because it's awesome. Anyway, what kept you going before your unexpected success as Lemony Snicket? Were you ever tempted to throw in the towel as a writer?"
I was sorely tempted but could not think up anything else to do. This is how it is for most writers I know - they soldiered on simply because there was no Plan B.
(how many times have I said to friends, "I just can't think of anything else I want to do"?? How many times????!! And I go to Craigslist or Monster or job search websites or headhunters--I have a Master's, for crying out loud--and think, but would I want to spend the rest of my life doing that? Is that better than writing? Would I like it? and inevitably, the answer...is NO. Sigh. It's commitment, baby, with a touch of narcissism and a soupcon of insanity. And it's good to know I'm not alone.)

Book blogs!

A gray, rainy, windy day. I really prefer days like this to be Fridays; that way, it’s a depressing day but you can go home and take a nap and watch TV without that oppressive “school night” feeling—especially the “It’s a Monday and the whole week is ahead of me” school night feeling. Sigh.

I need to amend my earlier resolution, that about blogging every week. I will hereby state that I will blog every Monday except holidays. If I’m off, I’m not online. I have dial-up on my home computer for the specific purpose of keeping me off the internet when I should be writing. I figure, I have Ethernet at work, and that’s plenty. Of course, when I need to email my manuscripts to people, it’s annoying. But it keeps me off the internet. Therefore I can find my distraction with magazines, recipes, staring out the window, deciding that I have to find my old glowing pen right now, and all kinds of cleaning that won’t get done otherwise.
However, the internet has a whole lot of writing resources. I think today is going to be an ode to the best, the sites that I can’t live without, the sites that have taught me what it’s like to be a working writer and yet haven’t persuaded me to change my focus.

Query Shark: http://queryshark.blogspot.com/
This is first because, once you’ve written the book, the query is the first step. Janet Reid is a literary agent for Fine Print Literary Management, and she knows her stuff. She also has a non-query-oriented blog, http://jetreidliterary.blogspot.com/ in which she discusses conferences and some of her clients. Both are definitely worth checking out.

Nathan Bransford: http://blog.nathanbransford.com/
A San Francisco-based agent who also gives a lot of inside scoops on the state of the industry. He’s a writer himself, with a YA book, JACOB WONDERBAR AND THE COSMIC SPACE KAPOW, due out in 2011. Unfailingly encouraging, not snarky (though I do love me some snark; I wouldn’t like Query Shark if I couldn’t handle snark), and, judging from his picture, rather handsome.

Kristin Nelson: http://pubrants.blogspot.com/
She blogs from (and works in) Denver. She has been very educational lately, posting *successful* query letters (and why they worked) and good opening pages from queries. She talks about the ins and outs of contracts, tiny details you might not think you need to worry about. But worry you should. She’ll tell you why.

The Rejectionist: http://www.therejectionist.com/
My current favorite. Sarcastic? Sure. Hilarious? Always.

Editorial Anonymous: http://editorialanonymous.blogspot.com/

On the marketing side: Market My Words, at http://faeriality.blogspot.com/ -- a writer and marketing consultant combines her two fields and blogs about them for your benefit!
(even if she does give time and space to one of The Hills’ vacuous stars—I won’t say her name so she won’t get the Google Alert)

Pimp My Novel: http://pimpmynovel.blogspot.com/ The same theme as Market My Words, but a different style altogether. Has a handy weekly roundup thing on Fridays if you can manage to check only once a week.

These are my go-to sites; I check them early and often. It helps a lot to be well-versed not only in what publishing professionals like, but what they’re seeing, what they do. Reading blogs can be misinterpreted as a waste of time (fie! And that doesn’t apply to this one!) but, if you find your overly active conscience reprimanding you for that, try to internalize the idea that knowing about this industry is just as important as writing.

Not as important as writing/a definite waste of time (but oh-so-enjoyable): Crazy Days and Nights. Try it, get sucked in. My apologies.

Small victories

This is not me. In case you were wondering.

It's a new year, as everyone knows. In fact, it's 11 days into the new year. What have you accomplished?? How many goals are you still adhering to?

I'm still in the process of deciding mine. As I mentioned before, I don't necessarily like setting firm goals; I'd rather just decide I'd like to do smoething and do it. I'd like more to decide that in the middle of the year, instead of on January 1 and becoming one of the masses. Let me set my goals on a random day in April and be unusual. Or at least, someone who thinks of herself as unusual.

January is not a good time at the gym. Every January since Ih ave been a member (10 years now!) January is inevitably SLAMMED. I don't like waiting for machines; I'm impatient by nature, I guess, and I don't want people waiting for me to get off and thus pressuring me to leave before I want to. Harrumph.

Gymgoing is a pretty necessary party of writing. Writing, as you may have guessed, is SEDENTARY. Sit at a desk, working your wrists hard, unfortunately does nothing for toned muscles or a slim waist. And if you're genetically predisposed to, uh, girth...this is something you ought to take seriously.

I joined my first gym in January 2000 (NOT as a New Year's resolution; I had awakened very late, like eleven, and wandered from my bed to the couch with a book, and I thought, "I'll be dead of inaction before I'm thirty" and marched to New York Sports Club and joined.) and, but for an eight-month period in 2005, have been a somewhat-regular goer since then. I am somewhat poor (I'm a writer!), and as a result of that, I'm cheap, and for me, paying a large sum of money to a gym every month, automatic withdrawal or not, pretty much ensures I will be at that gym, calculator in hand. New York gyms are expensive. when I joined NYSC, I think it was $67 a month, so I would say to myself, okay, if I go twice a week for four weeks, that makes it a little more than $8 each time I go. And I would picture handing over $8 every time I walked in that door. The idea was abhorrent. So, okay, if I go four times a week for four weeks, that's $4 each time I go. That was more palatable. Going five times a week was better, because that was $3. And yes, ladies and gentlemen, that was the the entirety of my motivation.

I kept going regularly until 2003, when I started grad school. Then I was faced with a dilemma: go to NYU's (free) gym or keep my gym membership? And quickly that dilemma was subsumed with reality: I had no time! Argh. My membership fee had gone up to about $77 a month, and I made it to NYSC once a week, thereby bringing my per-visit total to just under $20. Ridiculous. And yet I continued.

One of my prouder moments was wearing the same skirt to an end-of-program party that I wore to a beginning-of-program party. I will tell you why this is at all remarkable: I had only gone once a week, but that was once a week more than many of my classmates. I loved them, and I don't want to make fun, but...let's just say a lot of them were not wearing the same clothes at the end.

Okay, so the program ended and my dreams of graduating and landing a primo writing gig were not realized. I was quite sure that I would sell something right away, however, so I decided just to temp for a while. Temping is not great fun. When it works well, it's great (a salary but no commitment) but there are huge down sides: no benefits, no stability, occasional involuntary dry spells. And the salary is pretty low. NYSC kept raising its rates, and I kept getting more irritated at them, and in one involuntary dry spell I got annoyed to quit.

This was mid-summer, 2005. I didn't know if it would be forever, but I thought that might be a possibility. And I stayed out of the gym world until December. What prompted me to go back? Well, I had gone to Brazil with my family the previous summer, and my dad took pictures. He showed them to us at Christmas. There were some with all of us at the beach. Among them...was a picture of me, taken from the back... in a swimming suit.

Oh boy.

I joined Crunch the next week.

This was 2006. I lost a lot of weight going to Crunch, gained it back, have lost a lot of it again. Crunch promised me they would never, ever raise their prices, and that lasted for 2 years; now they raise them every January. I still pay less than I paid at the end of my NYSC run.

Why am I regaling you with this, dear reader? Why, for the simple reason that I have made a new resolution. It's been increasingly difficult to get to the gym at night; I return home from a day at work and I want to write and go to the gym, adn most nights I can't get in both. I always have the best of intentions, but if I'm writing well and on a roll, I don't want to break free; and if I decide to go to the gym, often it's a *process* that takes at least as much time convincing myself to go as it would take me at the gym. And then I decide, no, I'll go tomorrow. It won't be so cold tomorrow. I'll write tonight. No, I'll take it easy tonight. I'll read. No, I'll...I'll...something else.

It's been incredibly wasteful and frustrating, and the cheap side of me realizes that going twice a week makes it more than $10 every visit! Three times a week, it's still $8-plus! I need to go five times a week!

So I'm going at my lunch hour. I have a gym 3 blocks away from the office, so I just hustle over, change, run on the treadmill for 35 minutes, quickly stretch, quickly shower, and hustle back. It's been great so far. Then I get home and I have no excuse: I have to write. And I got a great laptop for Christmas, which is new enough and enough of a shiny toy that I actually want to!

Victory all 'round!

Blizzards and security breaches

Okay, my bad blogger thing continues. Last week I was on vacation; yesterday I was in transit. I did start an entry last week, and it was irredeemably boring. Consider last week’s inaction a “save” from a boring post.

I am now back into the swing of things after my Christmas holiday. I always try to bank up my vacation days so that I can take a couple of weeks at the end of the year. Happily we have a fairly liberal vacation policy at the office, so that doesn’t mean I’m chained to my desk for the rest of the year; I can still take a few days off here and there. But the big trip is always at Christmas.

Travel karma totally went my way this year. I was scheduled to fly out on a 5 pm flight on December 19. Now, I normally don’t book pm flights in the wintertime; I always try for the first flight out. However, there simply wasn’t one available this year, so I reluctantly took the 5 pm. I wanted it to be that Saturday, rather than wait for Monday, because the closer you get to Christmas the worse the travel conditions become. So, 5 pm the 18th it was. And everything looked completely fine until the Wednesday before, when they started hinting around about snow. I still wasn’t worried. “We may get a flurry or two,” they said. “It depends on how closely it hews to the coast.” Thursday: “Well, we’re probably going to get a bit of a snowstorm.” Friday: “Buy food and blankets and batteries! We’re in for a Nor’Easter!”

I decided, at 1 am Saturday, to see if I could rebook. Delta had helpfully canceled my 5 pm flight and put me on a 1 pm. (though somehow the idea that SOMEHOW THEY SHOULD LET ME KNOW didn’t occur to them.) But the 1 pm went from Newark to Atlanta to Nashville to Salt Lake, which didn’t seem to be the most practical route. So I rebooked online to go, at 8 am, JFK to Chicago to Salt Lake, with a two-hour layover. It was the best we could do, and I was happy to take it. The thing is, by this time it was 2:30 am and I still had crap to do. And by “crap” I mean “pack.” (This does not mean I was procrastinating. Remember, I had thought I had until 5 pm. I was not procrastinating! I was doing other things! And by "other things" I mean "watching Mad Men.") I rushed around and finished everything by 3:30 and got to sleep around 4:15, with the alarm set for 6:00. Yah-hoo. I didn’t sleep much on the first flight (on which they booked me first class, for some reason) and I was just trashed in Chicago. (I expect that by this I join an illustrious list of people who have been trashed in Chicago.) There was a gate area they had cleared of seats, and a few people were flat on the floor there. I walked by a couple of times, staring longingly at prostrate (sleeping) people, and then said, “I have no pride” and joined them, and I slept for an hour and a half on the dirty floor of the Chicago airport. And I would do it again.

I came back yesterday and flew into Newark. My boss was scheduled to return from his vacation, flying into Newark, on Sunday, but they didn’t arrive until 3 am Monday because of the crazy security breach. I had almost scheduled my return flight for Sunday, but didn’t; I figured that Sunday might be one of those awful “everyone’s coming back at the same time” days and Monday might be better. Now, the Good Worker part of me (whether it’s a big or small part of me, I haven’t yet determined) said, Monday is the first day of the work week; I should be back on Monday! I should arrive at the office at 9 am, ready to retackle my job and my life! But I didn’t. On a whim, I decided to give myself that one extra day and fly back on Monday. Oh, how the whim paid off! Thank you, Travel Gods; and Good Worker, go sit in a corner and eat cherry pie with Early To Bed and Regular Gym Goer while I figure out what to do with you.

Of course, this could mean nothing. But I’m taking it as an auspicious sign…a good 2010. How often do Travel Gods rule in your favor? Almost never, I tell you. I should also play the lottery, play in the road and take up smoking, because at the moment odds are in my favor.

Writing Groups Part II (Two days late)

Caught up in holiday madness. I knew I needed to post on Monday, to keep with my new goal, but I was occupied pretty much all day. I am home for the holidays (because I caught a flight early Saturday a.m. out of New York, thereby escaping the blizzard/travel insanity, thank heaven) but I spent Monday and Tuesday occupied with the nephew, who is almost two and can't be left alone for a second. Adorable, if exhausting. But, I owe you all a post this week, and a post you shall get.

I said in my earlier post that writing groups are a tremendously valuable part of the writing process, and I meant it. For my first book, Did I Expect Angels? I know I wouldn't have finished the book without the group. Around Christmas of 2001, I had a general idea and theme in my head, and over that Christmas break from work I sat down at the family computer and wrote about 15 pages. And then I left it. (This was my habit in those days: starting projects and never seeing them through, all the while thinking, "I want to be a writer." Of course, writers have to write--and more than that, they have to finish things. I knew this, but couldn't quite get over that hurdle.) So I had 15 pages and a vague sense of dissatisfaction with my life.

Fast forward to Memorial Day of 2002. I had lunch with a friend, who told me she was also working on some writing projects. We talked it over and agreed that we needed some extra help getting things done (in my case) and getting feedback (hers). So we each recruited a friend and set up an online writers' group. We set up a schedule where every Monday one of us would email the others a selection of pages, maybe 15 - 20 at a time, and the others would have a week to read and write a critique. We'd email our critiques to everyone the following Monday and the next person would email her pages.

Suddenly I had a deadline! I sent out my 15 pages the first week, and I had 3 weeks more to produce 15 pages. And I actually did. I got going and wrote pages! For the first time I had an actual direction and motivation to finish something, and it was wonderful. And I discovered that I was not a great writer. I remember being told that it read like a short story, because I *talked about* things happening, rather than putting the reader in the moment and showing what happened. "Everything just kind of zooms past," was what they said, as well as I can remember. This was a revelation. I had had writing classes in college, but we'd done short stories, where it's more acceptable to sum (some) things up just to conserve space; with a 4000k word limit in many magazines, you know, some summation is in order. But this doesn't apply nearly as much in novels, which I was trying to write.

Through this writers' group, I finished my book. I worked on it actively from that June through January of 2003. I am very grateful to this group.

I cannot say that we were free of drama. There was one member whom I inadvertently offended. Several times. Consistently, weeks on end, it turns out. I have no idea when it began, but apparently it grew and grew until we hit the boiling point, and she sent out comments about my latest installation that ... well, they weren't constructive, they weren't helpful; they were just angry. "I don't like this...I've already read this so many times I don't care..." (yes, she had, but part of the writing group experience is reading revisions) "... I don't agree with this sentiment and I don't care to read anything that says it" etc.

I was confused. My friend told me that this woman was incredibly angry with me because I hadn't begun my critiques with positive comments first. Apparently this is a rule of most writing groups; but I had no idea. And no one mentioned it to me after they noticed that I was ignoring/ignorant of the rule. Angry Woman had sent my friend a draft of an email that she wanted to send to me, telling me how rude I was and how I was affecting her mental health; she was agoraphobic and couldn't hold down a job and unhappy and I was making everything worse. My friend told her not to send the note, that I was just more blunt than other people. So she didn't send it; instead she got angrier and angrier every time I didn't start with the positives. Sigh.

Once I was aware this was a problem, I sent her a note. I apologized for having harmed her so grievously (though I didn't include the sarcasm, I promise I didn't), said I was unaware she'd been having these problems, and maybe she could let me know when I offended her, and we could just start again. Well, this made it worse. She emailed back a nasty note. I wish I remembered what it said! It would make this post a lot more amusing. But I don't remember, so I can only talk about it. (Writing lesson! Talking about things -- aka "telling" -- is not as interesting as showing them!) I do remember she said something like, "I was just being blunt. Maybe you can't handle bluntness." Angry Woman emailed us all and literally asked the other two to take sides, because she couldn't handle being in a group that tolerated my kind of behavior. Please let her know, she said, if we wanted her out of the group. She ended the note with, "I await your decision."

Of course my two other friends wouldn't kick her out. They told her the decision had to be hers, so she needed to let us know if she wanted to continue or not. Within a day there was an email labeled "resignation" in my inbox. (as I think about it, that's not terribly specific; she could have been announcing her resignation to the idea of remaining in the group that included such an ignorant boor as myself.) Consensus on the sane side was that she had some problems bigger than this, and had been looking for a reason/way to get out of the group.

We continued on for a while. It was a lot harder with only three members, however. Somehow, having two weeks in between submitting was quite a bit harder than having three. More than three would have been too long, but two was way too short. We soldiered on as best we could, but also found that only two outside opinions weren't as helpful as having three (even if one of them was angry).

A few months later we recruited another writer, who wrote restaurant reviews (my dream job!), and she was low-drama and low-key and gave helpful critiques. Unfortunately, soon after this, I started grad school. (Unfortunate for me being in the group; not unfortunate for me.) My writing in grad school was focused on stage and screen, and I simply didn't have time to continue writing prose. And if I sent the group my playwriting, by the time I got their comments back I had already submitted that piece of writing and gotten graded on it--the program moved fast. So I had to bow out, and I was sad to do it.

I have great memories of that group. We saw each other through some interesting times and crises and frustrations, buoyed each other through some things, and then I managed to ruin someone's life. I guess I still love them since it was not *my* life that was ruined.

writing groups!

Ever had this happen?

You have a great idea, you’re on a tear, you’re particular inspired by a tear-jerking movie, you’re drunk (ahem) or just delirious because this is the third day you’ve gotten less than 4 hours sleep. You go to your computer and write something at breakneck speed, and you’re convinced this is the greatest thing you have ever produced. You finish the piece, sigh happily and hit Print, then go (back) to bed to revel in that feeling, that joy, that knowledge: You Are A Great Writer.

Oh, the pain of the mornings.

Now imagine a slightly different scenario. You’ve labored on something for days/weeks/months/YEARS and you know it’s the best thing you can do. You’ve gone through it dozens of times, found typos, found inconsistencies, realized that perhaps this line where Kaylee screams “I’ll find that rare stolen coin if it’s the last thing I do!” (a) reads like she’s a psycho or (b) is perhaps a tad on the melodramatic side or (c) is a placeholder you wrote because that is in fact what she’s looking for but you planned to come back later and make it a little less like an infodump/less freakishly awful. And then you forgot about it and on the seventh re-read you found it.

And suddenly you think, “What else have I left in there that I forgot about?” If you have a long piece, you just can’t remember all the places you do something like that.

What to do?

Beta readers. Readers are incredibly important. And make sure it’s someone who won’t smile and say, “I loved it!” Because as good as that little ego stroking may feel, ultimately it doesn’t help. I assure you, agents and editors will not smile and say “I loved it!” when they come upon someone shrieking, “I’ll find that rare stolen coin if it’s the last thing I do!”

Now, it’s also a big favor to ask, having someone read a completed 100,000-word manuscript. Friends will often do it for several reasons: they’ve heard you talk about this piece for days/weeks/months/YEARS and they’re curious. They’d like to write, but never have. They’re good readers. Or perhaps they have nothing else to do. But nine times out of ten, their feedback isn’t going to be that great. Why? Simply because they don’t do this very often.
A better option is to have people reading what you’re writing as you go. It’s less painful to read six pages, rather than two hundred fifty. The reader can also pay closer attention to little things. It’s hard for your readers to get the big picture (actually, nigh on impossible) but…because you have also read their submissions as the weeks go by, they wn’t be as offended when you ask them to read the whole thing in a big gulp.

I will talk more about the writing groups I’ve been part of…later.