All the Horrible Girliness

It's weird to read Miss Snark's blog. I ain't even linking it, because there's a sort of 'community' lurking in her comments section and after a year of posting she already seems put upon. Miss Snark is like that side street short cut in Los Angeles that you guard carefully, and only disclose to your closest friends.

Anyway, it's fun to read about publishing. I think about it sometimes. Probably, Jordan thinks about it more than I do. At least twice a day and sometimes on the john. I don't. I trained myself for a few years not to think of it, and that's the only reason why I feel able to tap out a few lines on the old Playboy laptop lately.

That publishing time stripped my soul thin until I hated writers, hated writing, even hated reading. So torturous was the tumor of publishing that I had zero interest in my favorite pastime since I was eighteen months old.

See, what a bad sentence that was? This blog was like my Emancipation of Mimi, except without the bra and panty ensembles. And the singing. Well, maybe there was a little singing. Writing was fun enough, but then I started to have a little, quiet audience too.

In order to get here, I had to tell myself that it was okay to put the crap up here. Yes, sometimes the junk on this page is uninteresting and badly written, but I thank God for every shitty line, like Salieri.

After a few years of that, I started Ask Samus, a place where silly and often gross teenage boys asked me for advice and I gave it, often with visual aids and a touch of humiliation. That was fun. Never did I wonder whether Ask Samus would turn into something else, be discovered by Jenny Bent and be turned into the next Quirky Bad Girl How-To paperback, complete with a cartoon mascot and corresponding calendars, pencils and dog carriers. Then someone asked me in the thread whether I'd try to make it into a book, and all of it came back to me. I said, as flat as the typed word can convey, No.

Then came the letters to my brother, starting last February when he deployed to Iraq. Those are nothing short of nihilism. My little Tyler Durden letters. I don't save a single one of them, and some are great. The only way I'll ever see them again is if he saves them and shows them to me in the future. I used to keep everything I wrote, and read it again and again, hash over the hoped-for reaction of its recipient. No more.

And now, my creative writing class. God, an excuse to write, every week! Imposed discipline, assignments, editing, but most of all, reading. Glorious, good reading. And writing without an inkling about how I'd summarize it for a prospective agent. Just writing!

Miss Snark reminds me of all those query letters, the rejections, the spreadsheets, the jealousy, the half-hearted golf claps, the loneliness, that first time an agent asked for a full ms and I spent a rainy morning listening to Peter Gabriel and printing out my first novel with joy.

She reminds me of something else, too. That I will publish. I have no doubt. It's never been in question that I'm supposed to write. At the right time, the right writing will get me published. I harbor no notions about Oprah and couldn't give a crap about Rowling's good fortune. I have a husband, a son, and a home to care for. But, for the rest of my life, I will read, read, write, and send it out, rinse and repeat. Something will catch. I won't live off it, probably, but I'm lucky enough for that not to be the point anymore. The point is to write as well and learn as much as I possibly can until I die.

Oh, what the hell. Miss Snark

posted by Samus @ 8:36 PM