Even though the official release date isn’t until Saturday — about 36 hours from now — a friend of mine has already received her copy of my book. Couldn’t have happened to a cooler person! Thanks for sending me this picture, Janine.
Category Archives: Love Letters of the Angels of Death
News and commentary on my novel
First Review of My Book!
Montreal Review of Books looks at my novel in the Summer 2013 Issue
The summer issue of Montreal Review of Books is out today. And I am thrilled to report it includes Elise Moser’s review of my soon-to-be-released novel. It’s a feature review complete with quotations from emails Elise and I exchanged. Read it here:
http://mtlreviewofbooks.ca/reviews/love-letters-angels-death/
Here’s the first paragraph:
“I think Babies “R” Us is one of the saddest places there is – everyone looking to buy something that will make a very traumatic and life changing experience into something more manageable.” Like her main characters, Jennifer Quist does not hesitate to express firmly held, intelligent opinions. That’s her talking about birth. You should hear what she has to say about death…
Pre-Orders of My Novel Go Live
Yesterday, my novel became available for pre-order on the Linda Leith Publishing website, among other places. Here’s the link:
Commencing Countdown, Jewelry On
The countdown to the release date of my novel, Love Letters of the Angels of Death, has passed the point where the time is measured in months and moved to where it’s measured in days. Look, it’s right there in the column of widgets beside this post. The moment has come to start opening the windows on my advent calendar. The book’s release date is practically here.
Sometime I feel like dressing up like someone who wrote an artsy, Gothic love story because, well…
In preparation, my literary fairy-god-sister, author Fran Kimmel, came along last week and held my hand as I booked a venue for the novel’s launch event. It’ll be happening here, in the small-ish town where I live, on August 29. The timing – a Thursday night right before the last long weekend of summer – is terrible. I know that. It won’t be convenient for anybody. In my head, I’m already composing the passive-aggressive email I will send to all my first degree relatives living within a 100km radius of my house. The message will explain that, while I will try my best to act like a grownup, if any of my nearest and dearest skip my launch party, I might be stuck thinking very, very hard about their absences for a very, very, very long time.
Yes, I’m fighting against an inclination to take the book’s release and launch far too seriously. I keep coming back to that line from the sappy radio follow-your-dreams pop song that made me cry in the car on the way home from the venue last week: “I don’t want to waste this.”
In what was probably not a great moment in Feminism, I spent an hour in my closet trying to figure out what to wear to the launch. My closet is usually a happy place. It has everything from thrift shop finds to fancy satin bridesmaid dresses. But nothing seemed quite right.
I thumbed through the hangers and thought about Trish – one of the many weekend editors I freelanced for at a car-crash of a boomtown newspaper during our years in the north. She was tall and what someone writing a romance novel might call “willowy” – burgundy lipstick and dark, Morticia Addams hair. She wasn’t satisfied with the mug-shot the last editor had been printing beside my columns and called me down to the office so she could take a better one. When we met, she pulled her elegant spider-leg eyebrows together and tried to imagine my face in her new, fabulous arts-chick vision of the newspaper. All she said was, “Oh, you’re such a mom.”
At the time, I hadn’t yet turned thirty and I had three children under the age six. I hadn’t slept through the night in years. I didn’t own any clothes that couldn’t be tossed into a washing machine. The lipstick I’d put on in the rear view mirror minutes before had a distinct rouge-on-the-dead look to it. I typified the shabby, faded waste of talent this lady (who did become a friend of mine) called “a mom.”
There are a host of arguments I could make for why she was wrong and why she was right and why looking like a mom can be glorious. But in the closet, a month before my book release, none of that mattered very much. I was mired in one of the shallower depths of my consciousness – one that dreads anyone seeing me at a podium with my novel and thinking, “Look at her. Oh, she’s such a mom.”
In passing, I mentioned my wardrobe silliness to my publisher. I think a part of me wanted her to send me a uniform – a matching Linda Leith Publishing t-shirt and cap, maybe even an apron and hairnet. Instead of sending me a kit, Linda’s advice was simply to wear something that made me feel terrific.
Something terrific would be something I could forget about – something that could fade into the tone and rhythm of the reading and talking and celebrating I’d be doing during the launch. And I was beginning to form a vague, shadowy notion of what that might be. Ever since I signed the publishing contract last winter, I’ve been slowly dressing more and more like someone who’s written an artsy, Gothic love story because – dangit — that’s who I am. I knew the spirit of what I wanted to wear but couldn’t yet read the letter of it.
My glamorous sister-in-law understood. We’ve been together for over eighteen years. That’s her entire adolescence and adult life. She sees me from an angle similar to the one her brother, my husband, uses to look at me – one that somehow makes me appear genuine and beautiful and at the same time, one I hardly recognize when she describes it to me. She took me to her favourite jewelry shop – the place where a nice old hippie guy once diagnosed me as psychic – and helped me choose a pendant I could use to anchor my launch-day wardrobe.
It’s set in silver and shaped like an eye – a blue eye like my eyes, my husband’s eyes, and the ten blue eyes I assembled from the atoms of my own body as the mother of our sons. There — that’s me.
Selfhood, Motherhood, Childhood and How They’re All the Same
My son says this Fever Ray video reminds him of me. Is it the hair, the skinny legs, or all the going off to do weird stuff by myself?
I’m in a thrift store with my sixteen year old son. (Anyone who doesn’t have a sixteen year old son should get one someday. It’s kind of like having a stupid, darling high school boyfriend again only without all the icky tension.)
We get to the furniture section of the store – the part set-up like a dozen crummy little living rooms butted against each other.
“It’s like some old grandpa’s house,” my boy says.
And then, as I often can, I track of his train of thought. It’s passing through the stop called “grandpa,” chugs in and out of the station called “the only dead person I know well” before it screeches to a halt in the busy rail yard labeled “death.”
“This is where they bring people’s stuff after they die,” my boy says.
“Yup,” I agree. “This is where you’ll bring my stuff after I die.”
He doesn’t choke or get maudlin but he does say, “I won’t bring your stuff here. I’ll keep it. I’ll take your computers and find everything you ever wrote and print it out and save it.”
I tell him he’s sweet and we leave the store, bound for another thrift shop. So far, we’ve bought a 1970s era Charlie Brown paperback and a discarded copy of a book I contributed a couple of essays to but we still haven’t found the t-shirt with the graphic of a killer robot with a Korean speech bubble that will be my son’s find of the day. We get into the car, tune the radio to one of our favourite CBC shows – the one I work for a few times a year, – and we back into the Saturday afternoon traffic.
See it? My life – including my life as a writer – forms a part of my son’s life. It’s something he sees as enduring and inseparable from the imprint I leave on the world he is in the process of inheriting from me.
A recent article in The Atlantic entitled “The Secret to Being Both a Successful Writer and a Mother: Have Just One Kid” assumes motherhood and a stellar career as a writer are irreconcilable competing interests. The article’s hook of a headline (which was was not written by the author, Lauren Sandler), is beside the point. This isn’t so much a piece about family size as it is about the level of personal investment it takes to write for a living. On its way, it looks at mother-writers like Susan Sontag and Joan Didion to examine whether these women’s single-child families are the compromise that made it possible for them to excel at their careers while raising children – er, a child.
Of course, there are writers who do have more than one child and Sandler suggests that some of these women preserve their careers by hiring someone else to look after their kids. Her other suggestion is that women writers can thrive in families willing to invert traditional gender roles and cast men as their children’s primary caregivers.
Sandler doesn’t seem convinced that any of these strategies is necessarily enough to transform an artist into something considered a good parent. The article presents examples of writer-mothers being absent, self-involved, and dismissive – sending their lone children away with “Shush, I’m working.” By the end of the piece, it’s acknowledged that there’s a difference between motherhood and “momish-ness” and artists often set the latter aside.
Right now, weeks before my debut novel is even released, I’m not what The Atlantic would consider a successful writer. But I’m still free to fret over my own experience raising five children while writing. Am I devastatingly dismissive? Am I “momish?” Do I have to be?
I admit I’m missing some of the traits of momish-ness – especially in the kitchen. If my sons want cookies, they bake them for themselves. I might make something special on holidays but I always garnish it with demands for praise and thanks. “Hey, I made cookies. Aren’t I good? Look at how good I am.” Honestly, I don’t even cook dinner very often. My husband usually does that, without complaint, after a full day of demanding non-domestic work.
But is neglecting cooking enough of an an explanation? Why do I still get prickly when I’m asked how I find time to write? No matter how kindly it’s meant, the question seems to imply neglect and self-centredness – a lack of understanding of my own situation that misleads me to believe I can do two incompatible things at once. I must be either willfully negligent of my kids or witlessly oblivious to reality.
Sometimes, I do put my kids off with my own version of, “Shush, I’m working.” But there are reasons why being shushed by their writer-mother isn’t a developmental disaster:
1) When my sons leave home, they will not be met with people who jump to satisfy all their wishes for food, attention, money, housekeeping, technical support, etc. If I raise them to expect instant service, I do them and the other people who will live and work with them a disservice.
2) By ignoring traditional areas of housework, I help the boys see distinctions between housewifery and motherhood. They are not the same, they are not the same, they are not the same…
3) Because I work inside the house where my kids’ lives are centred, they get plenty of “quantity time” so there’s not as much need to orchestrate fancy “quality time.” I don’t arrive in the house as a celebrity here for a limited engagement. I’m not a special attraction so I can relax and forgo behaving like one.
4) All mothers have interests that eat up time they could spend with their children. It might be paid non-writing work, making fancy scrapbooks, training for marathons, stoking reality television habits — anything. When it comes to maternal attention, my kids aren’t that different from anyone else’s.
5) My sons are not strangers dropped here at random. They’re very much like me. They are writers, artists, and creative people themselves. Maybe they understand better than other people the importance of this kind of work. They know it makes me happy because their own similar projects make them happy. Maybe my self is overbearing enough to convince them to value in themselves what I value in myself.
The self – that’s the core of the problem I have with Sandler’s approach to writer-mothers. She writes of our need to “negotiate a balance between selfhood and motherhood.” I don’t know how these two -hoods could be separated, let alone set on opposite sides of a scale and balanced. The self is far more like a casserole than a bento box. (Hey, it’s a cooking simile – aren’t I good?) Motherhood hasn’t effaced my self but it has been integrated into it. A healthy self is a pliable one, not a brittle one. It’s dynamic and able to accept how impressionable it is to powerful forces including – or especially — kids.
The Art of the Happy Family: Review of Padma Viswanathan’s “The Toss of a Lemon”
A gorgeous novel by Padma Viswanathan, an author who kindly provided a “blurb” for the cover of my own novel.
A few weeks ago, I did my first interview leading up to the launch of my novel. It should appear in the Summer issue of Montreal Review of Books.
One of the questions I was asked began by acknowledging that books about happy family situations – like the high-functioning marriage central to my novel — are scarce. I’ve thought about this a lot since the interview. I’ve tried to make a mental list of memorable, happy literary relationships. Maybe another reader could do better, but for me, it’s a short list – one full of characters who usually end up dead within the first quarter of their books. Most often, a happy relationship is a preamble for a story – a cheap tableaux meant to be quickly dismantled. Otherwise, it’s the pat-ending of a story – the trite song-and-dance finale. The interviewer who posed the question is right. Seldom does a happy relationship make up the balance of a story, especially in literary fiction.
When most readers want to know how to behave and be happy in a family, we reach for the self-help shelves of the bookstore, not the literary fiction section. I think the reasons we’re not interested in seeing happy families in fiction are fairly simple. Happy relationships are typically written as uneventful. They’re boring. Their sweetness is cloying. It’s mapped out in cliches and feels contrived.
And that’s a mistake. It’s not the relationships that are boring but the way writers approach them. Happy families come with their own difficulties and complexities – ones I find fascinating. They’re surprising, interesting and, obviously, I believe they ought to be explored in literature.
I recently came across an example of a novel that portrays a generally happy family in a way that’s both believable and compelling. It’s Padma Viswanathan’s The Toss of a Lemon. Set in the final decades of colonial India, spanning two world wars, and sweeping changes to the traditional Hindu way of life, the book comments on the intricacies of religion, class, and politics without the tedium of a history or the tiresomeness of a polemic.
It also presents a picture of a large, mulit-generational family that manages to function and produce healthy, happy members in spite of inevitable adversity. The central character is a matriarch, a child-bride widowed and left with two children by the age of eighteen. She manages to maneuvre within the strict limitations of her caste, her gender, and a crushing notion of fate to shield her grandchildren from the self-destruction of the family’s patriarchs. There’s an amazing irony at work in the book: the place where the matriarch seems to be weakest – her utter servitude to oppressive customs that keep her marginalized and invisible to the world outside her family – is also the focal point of her greatest strengths.
The rest of the cast of characters is large and complicated and badly flawed in places. Like any story meant to deal with realistic ups and downs of daily life, the books has its share of illnesses, untimely deaths, and family spats that drag on for years. Yet the tone of the book is not dark or dour. It’s sun-lit and warm. The book’s heart is like a real heart – one that is much more than the sum of its parts. Its warmth is at once miraculous yet credible with a bittersweetness that only comes with honesty.
I really enjoyed this book. It was strange to find myself feeling so at home in a novel set in a Brahmin household. Maybe the familiarity springs from the lines Viswanathan drops into the narrative expressing sentiments exactly like ones I’ve felt in my own family life. For instance, when she says that certain burdens only become heavier when we share them, I know just what she means. Sometimes, even in a close family, the best way to handle suffering is privately. For me, Viswanathan is not only a story-teller. She’s someone who seems to understand family in much the same way I do.
A large part of being happy in a family – or maybe in anything – is understanding and accepting the limitations of what it can make possible and forgiving and forgetting the absence of what it was never meant to provide. That’s what the women in The Toss of a Lemon do. As Viswanathan writes of them in the aftermath of a disaster, “We were not shattered.”
In writing the book, Viswanathan drew on her own family history. Maybe that’s what gives the story its organic, authentic, universally relatable feel. Reality — even an unseen, faraway reality — comes with a badge of truth.
Thanks to my family history, writing about a happy family came naturally for me. That’s what I told the reporter when she asked me if writing a good marriage was difficult. I don’t know why, but it’s my excellent fortune to have only ever lived in happy families. It may be a rare way to live but it’s real and it’s worth the work it takes to give it a voice.
Lost in the Post: My Silly Ambivalence for Epistolary Novels
The first epistolary book I ever disliked.
At one point during the painful process of compressing my novel into a tiny synopsis to print on the back of the book, we ended up with a paragraph that described the book as a series of letters. Letters — I guess the connection between the book’s back cover copy and the title, Love Letters of the Angels of Death, on its front should have been obvious, especially to me. So it must have seemed pretty strange to everyone else involved when I objected to seeing “letters” mentioned in the synopsis.
I blame L.M. Montgomery for my aversion to the epistolary novel — a work of fiction imagined as a bundle of personal correspondence. Yes, I said Lucy Maude Montgomery, the Canadian author of the Anne of Green Gables series – the woman I hold personally responsible every time I cringe at a fellow Canadian using “delicious” to describe something that cannot fit into a mouth. She’s also prone to portraying fat people as bad and birch bark as important enough to interrupt everything with a lengthy description of it. She might be onto something with the birch bark but she’s definitely wrong about the fat people.
Naturally, after our visit to Prince Edward Island when I was nine, my mum bought me the first book in the Anne series. Maybe because we moved so much, we were often without many books to read and I was stuck with Anne. Then came the rest of the series. I enjoyed the books well enough that I started adding to the collection myself. They were great resources for soaking up vocabulary and learning to discern the sublime in domestic life.
The worst of the Anne books is Anne of Windy Poplars. It does nothing to advance the larger story arc. It’s like a long detour. And it’s the volume of the series written as a collection of letters. I must have balked at the idea of the novel I’ve written getting filed in the same letter-book category. The little girl reader still working somewhere inside my consciousness didn’t want our work to bear any similarities to the book we remember as one of the most boring reads of our adolescence. Readers accumulate some strange, complicated baggage.
It’s true that my book’s title does contain the word “letters.” But my book lacks the form and lexicon of letter writing – or even diary writing or any of the other gimmicks that flag a book as epistolary. There is no “Dear,” no “To Whom it May Concern,” no “Yours Truly” with a signature at the end — not even a token date dashed beside the chapter headings.
The reason I put “letters” in the title is to orient readers to the book’s second person narrator. Most of the writing we produce and read – all of our emails and texts – is written in the second person. Poetry and song lyrics are typically written this way too. A second person narrator speaks as “I” but he doesn’t just ramble to himself. He’s talking to “you, you, you.” With all our experience reading short pieces in the second person, it didn’t seem like much of a stretch to ask readers to follow this familiar point of view throughout a book-length piece. An introduction to a second person narrator, along with an informal, intimate tone was all I wanted out of the epistolary form.
I was about to say Anne of Windy Poplars made such an enduring, negative impression on me because it was the first epistolary novel I ever read but then I remembered Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. (This one counts as epistolary even though its second person messages are sent through prayers.) I read this book during the same time period (ahem) as the offending Anne book but I’m fairly certain it didn’t bore me.
With more thought, I realized there were other fictitious diaries and letters I had forgotten on my bookcase. There’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Anne Brontё’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Douglas Coupland’s Hey Nostradamus!, my husband’s copy of C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, and Christopher Priest’s The Prestige – a novel I’ve been meaning to return half-read to my brother-in-law for ages.
I enjoyed some of these books – but not all of them. When I was enjoying them most, their letter-writing form slipped past my notice. While I didn’t remember that Dracula was epistolary, I do remember getting up at night to quiet my baby while I was reading it and being idiotically afraid of running into undead Lucy in the hallway. I felt many things for all of these books but I never felt confused or alienated by their narrative styles. It works.
I’ve over-generalized my dislike for the epistolary form. Rejecting it was silly – the result of a tenacious childhood prejudice. I wrote an epistolary novel. And that’s okay. It’s not the kind of thing that should amount to a scrap with an editor — though I did feel a little lighter when I flipped my advance reading copy onto its back to read the synopsis and saw the word “letter” had disappeared.
Linda Leith Publishing, Montreal QC
A Note from JQ: I admit I’m jealous this blogger, Erinne, has met my publisher, Linda, in person while I have not — jealous of her and grateful to her for the look inside the far away company. Hooray for the interwebs!
(April 21)
The drive to Montreal from Toronto, at five hours, seems quite short after northern Ontario. For the first few hours, things are great. The sun is out (dare I call it… spring?), the tunes are blaring, and I just snagged one of the last Roll-Up-The-Rim cups from the Tim’s. (Please Play Again…sigh.)
But as soon as I drive past the Quebec border sign I’m hit with a wave of anxiety. I’m in Quebec. I’m probably going to have to speak French. Here’s the deal: I’m an editor. I HATE making mistakes. In French, I KNOW I’m making mistakes.
And my vehicle, oh my vehicle. I’m not good at cars, but I can feel something wrong. I place both my feet on the floor (cruise control) and can feel grindy vibrations through my flats. I’m terrified that at some point a seam beneath the car will…
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Crybaby Reads Her Book
Me and my advance reading copy, taken from my good side.
The sight of a thick, yellow envelope postmarked from Montreal usually means a happy day for me. It’s mail from my publisher, Linda Leith. The most recent envelope was closed around an advance reading copy of my unreleased novel, Love Letters of the Angels of Death. I was as happy to see it as I can get without crying.
The same week, my brand new writers’ group had its first meeting. Each of the members was invited to bring “one or two pages” of work to read aloud. The timing was perfect. Here was a small, low stakes environment where I could make an early attempt at reading my novel in public.
It sounded easy. As long as it’s all talk — no singing or yodeling involved — I’m comfortable with my own vocal performance skills. I already had the chops I needed to do a reading from my novel. All that was left for me to do was pick a short section out of the book, read through it once, jam the pretty new book into my purse, and show up at the meeting as if I do this kind of thing every day.
The first step — choosing a selection — was harder than I thought it would be. I’m ginger with other people’s time so I wanted to be sure I read something I could end neatly when I reached the equivalent of the roughly two 8.5×11” sized pages I’d been invited to share. It meant simply reading the first chapter of the book wasn’t an option. I also wanted to avoid spoilers, which meant the last third of the book was off limits and I had to be careful about what I chose from the middle.
And then there was one more consideration. I wanted to read something gripping. But it also had to be something that would not make me cry. If you know me, you know that’s asking a lot of myself.
I may have held it together the day I found the ARC of my book in the mail, but I can still call myself an easy crier. It’s awful. I hate it. Everyone hates it (especially my teenaged sons). I am such an easy crier that my own novel – a story I wrote myself – still makes me sniffle two years after I’ve finished writing it. The last sentence in it is only two words long and it makes me choke into tears almost every time I look at it.
Don’t misunderstand. I am not emotionally delicate. I react with appropriate sorrow when something terrible happens but I’ve never struggled with enduring feelings of depression or anything crippling or frightening. Alarming as it may be, I simply relieve tension best by crying. And it’s not just negative tension. It’s the positive too. When a stranger stopped on the Alberta Autobahn and helped me change my flat tire last month, I was so touched by his kindness I could hardly speak to him. I knew if I loosened up, I’d start crying. Stupid crying – or even just the dread of ending up crying — it taints most of my best moments.
I guess I should be grateful my emotional depressurization system isn’t any more complicated than simply opening the valves of my tear ducts. It’s a fine mechanism in private but in public it’s an embarrassing mess.
Back to the book: chapter nine was where I found what I was looking for. I chose a main character’s quick flashback to a bad teenaged romance. That was my selection – the very first part of my novel I would ever read aloud in public. I’ve always thought the passage was strong. It has everything except something to cry about.
Still, when the time came to read it to a room full of friendly, un-threatening writers, I felt shaky and unnecessarily emotional anyway. And when I was finished, I was a little mad at myself for being too high strung to read it exactly the way I had wanted to. I’m experienced in speaking about many things. But my novel isn’t one of them – not yet. I’m still cagey and protective when it comes to my book and the secret well inside me that it sprang from in the beginning.
Here is yet another aspect of this career as a novelist that I hadn’t anticipated. Once again, writing the book wasn’t enough. I guess I need to become slick, smooth, and professional at reading my novel out loud. Even though its opening chapter is a little long and a lot emotional, I need be able to chew up it until I can recite it with a fluent, steady voice. I need to hone my reading until those two tight passages where it’s easy for me to get overwhelmed don’t squeeze me anymore. I will transform myself into a flesh and blood book-on-tape. There – I’ve decided.
“No,” one of the nice Nancies (there are two of them) from the writing group gently protested, “the fact that your book means so much to you made it mean more to me.”
And with that, I’m weeping all the way back to where I started. Dang it, Nancy.
How I (Almost) Botched My Writing Career
Writing in bed on a tea tray — like a boss
Last night I attended my very first writers’ group meeting – a “writers’ salon” at the home of a local wire-tap-transcriptionist turned edgy poet. And I’m realizing now that my late entry into a writing group is yet more evidence that I have gone about my writing career the wrong way – the hard way, the backwards way.
Let me explain exactly how I’ve botched it – so far.
1) I should have joined a writers’ group years and years and years ago. All you kids at home, don’t wait until the advance reading copy of your first novel arrives in the mail before joining a writers’ group.
I’m in the habit of not showing my serious writing to anyone – not my husband, not my sisters, no one. My utter lack of writing colleagues meant I mistook my work-in-progress manuscript for a finished book, started submitting it too early, and inadvertently ended up work-shopping it with the few gatekeepers at literary agencies and publishing houses who were thoughtful enough to jot a line or two (never any more) about why they were rejecting it. It was a traumatic, slow, costly, and stupid way to get feedback.
Don’t be like me. Before anyone in the business reads your work, make friends with writers with similar interests and better abilities than your own. Read each other’s work and offer feedback. Share contacts and news. Learn to be gracious.
2) I’ve never taken a creative writing course. When my publisher and I were looking for a “blurb” for my book, Linda suggested I consider my former creative writing teachers. It would have been a good suggestion if I’d had any. It’s not that I didn’t take university-level literature classes. I took them and I did well. But I never took any courses dedicated to creative writing. I’ve never had my work assessed and graded in an academic setting.
It’s not a fatal mistake. Many writers spring up outside post-secondary creative writing programs — but not as many as I used to think. So far, most of the people I’ve met in the working writing community have some past or present connection to writing as an academic field. They don’t talk about writing as a vocation merely in a romantic, figurative sense. They mean it the same way plumbers talk about their vocations – as papered credentials and regular, paying gigs. There is middle ground between an institution-centred career in writing and never enrolling in a class. And I should have spent some time there.
3) I haven’t read much of the current literature in my field. Instead of keeping up with the industry, I’ve used my precious reading time to polish off classics and to survey the YA books my kids are reading. By now, I’m pretty well-versed in Dostoevsky and Dickens. And I know my way around J.K. Rowling and Daniel Handler. But I don’t know much about – whoever the heck has been important in literary fiction since the 1990s.
This was a bad move. Stay tuned to the tone and the content of the industry. Don’t raise your head only to when the mainstream media starts clamouring about yet another wave of erotica. And don’t worry about being unduly influenced by other artists. It’s the post-modern age – a time when humans have been reading and writing long enough for all of us to be a little derivative. There’s no way to avoid it and the best we can hope for is to be able to admit it when our work looks like a freaky chimera of Carol Shields, Emily Brontё, and Napoleon Dynamite.
4) I don’t have a physical space set aside especially for writing. I write on my lap, sitting on my pillow, leaning against the head-board of the bed where I sleep at night. It started as a desperate play for peace and quiet in a large, busy household. I guess that’s still what it is. It’s bad for my mattress, my spine, my wrists, and my temper. Get a desk – or at least a chair.
That’s a short list of a few of my most obvious missteps. I won’t repeat them during my next project — except for the bed-desk.
But there’s something like irony at work here. I failed in all these ways yet I continued to publish anyway. All my stumbling around with an unsuitable manuscript served to match my timing up with Linda’s and we found each other at just the right moment. There’s no fail-safe formula for good fortune.
And on top of all these errors, I did do something right – something vital. I finished the dang book. I took good advice when I was finally given it. I kept revising and submitting. I kept fighting. Of all the things I’ve heard people name as the undoing of their literary ambitions, not finishing their projects has got to be the most common.
Maybe that’s the biggest, most valuable lesson of all the ones I’ve learned so far — the one I’d leave with everyone, the one I kept repeating like a holy mantra at the writers’ group last night. Finish it. Keep going.
Jennifer Quist, PhD 