Tag: publishing

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38

What is it about upcoming birthdays that makes you reconsider every decision you’ve ever made? Betty & I, despite our protestations, are getting a little too close to the big 4-0 these days for our own comfort. I can’t speak for her, but for me the past couple of weeks I’ve felt torn about everything in my life: the writing, my sense of home & family, work, money, you name it. The only things I feel sure of are Betty and the kittoi, all of whom bring me joy every single day. They all make me laugh in ways that do my serious soul some good.

Whenever people complained about getting older, my father has always said, “well, you only have one other choice.” Some days that’s not so funny, but other days it reminds me of the deep & abiding pragmatism I was raised with: either you bellyache about it & bore yourself & everyone else, or you just get older & get on with things. But then, peace is easy for a man who is happiest eating hot dogs & watching baseball. Some of us don’t find joy as easily as that.

There are days I wish I could, & other days when I am convinced I could be that way – if, if only, if only something. But that’s not what the Buddhists tell me: they tell me it’s mine if I want it. Because I could moan & whine about the nerve.com interview that was supposed to happen but didn’t; I could complain about the marathon bookkeeping sessions I’ve done in past months; I could curse whoever’s in charge of this universe for their bad administration.

& I do, oh, surely I do. But eventually I get bored of that & find something to do, even if that something simple is cleaning out the litterbox for the umpteenth time.

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Letter to a Hopeful Writer

I get a lot of emails from people who want to publish a book, which is an entirely different thing from wanting to write, and that’s a distinction hopefuls should be clear on. Writing is something more like a calling – you do it or you don’t do it, you can write your whole life & never publish, you enjoy it or you do it because something in you compels you to.

Being a published writer is a whole other can of worms, since publishing comes with agents and editors and publicity and amazon.com sales ranks. That’s a different game altogether, but I assume that most people who ask me about writing their own book want to know what it’s like publishing their own book. I recently wrote back to one such person and this is what I said:

I wouldn’t write if I could do anything else. It’s just too hard. Your books are your babies, and as soon as you write something, people assume it’s okay to rip you a new one. That is, I don’t mind bad criticism – well I don’t like it either – but you learn how to deal with it in writing workshops. At least I did. You want to write better, and good critics can help you do that, if you listen to them. However, there are a lot of people who are just hyper-critical, & you have to deal with them, too, which is not always as easy.

Then, there’s very little money. One writer I know who had a bestseller won’t quit her day job because as the publishing industry will frequently remind you: you’re only as good as your last book. Richard Russo didn’t quit teaching till he won the Pulitzer! So the reality is, with writing, you always need another job, and it’s very hard to do two jobs well. That is, if you love the 2nd job, it never gets as much attention as you’d like, & neither does your writing. It’s always feeling a little torn in half. So the ‘making a living’ aspect of it pretty much blows.

What else? It’s hard. It takes patience. If you’re ever in NYC I can show you my stack of rejection letters, and there’s no writer alive that doesn’t have a bunch of those. (Ironically, I think it’s Melville who holds the record, & most of them are rejection letters from publishers who didn’t want Moby Dick.) There’s a lot of ways to be cheated – by publishers, agents, etc. – that you have to be on the lookout for, and publicity support from publishers is getting worse & worse.

& Of course you have to keep track of your ego, realize that people think they know you even when they don’t, and you have to be able to speak well on radio, on TV, & anywhere else.

Mostly I’m appreciative that the books I write have helped people. It’s a pleasure to be able to use whatever communication skills I have in order to relieve some people’s suffering. I haven’t had a novel published yet, but even having friends read my fiction is satisfying. Basically, there’s this unnameable thing about writing that is cool and satifying in a deep way for me, and as Betty would tell you, I never radiate more “happy buzz” than when I’m working on something.

But do I like it? No. If I could find something else that would scratch that existential itch the same way, I would do it. But short of creating Tibetan sand mandalas, I can’t really imagine doing anything that feels more time-consuming, detail-oriented, or more tenuous. A long time ago, & without my permission, writing became my way of talking with myself in order to make sense of my world. It doesn’t always work, but it keeps me from gunning down strangers, at least.

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A Little Rant

Sometimes a book gets inordinate attention, especially books that reaffirm & reify the gender binary. But there’s plenty of interesting books about gender out there. & Some days, when I see a review of the book The Female Brain in a cool magazine, I wonder why they bother. I mean, bad publicity is good publicity, ultimately: it just wins the author, who the reviewer (and many others, including myself) disagrees with, more airtime, while other books, which are more feminist in terms of their take on gender, don’t get covered at all.

& I’ve always wondered why magazines – especially indie, cool magazines that are mostly written by indie journalists & others like me who understand exactly how poor an industry publishing can be – give airtime to stuff they don’t like instead of giving airtime to stuff they do. Readers will buy a book that gets a bad review, just to see if they agree or not, & while I understand editors tend to think it’s Important, in a Fourth Estate kind of way, to rebut publicly some of the ideas coming from certain corners, it seems like it’d make more sense to help an interesting writer whose ideas they do like to sell a few books.

& Yes, in this case, I mean a book like mine, which nearly is a straight-up rebuttal of all the hogwash in The Female Brain.

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Five Questions With… Virginia Erhardt

Virginia Erhardt, Ph.D. is a licensed therapist, a founding member of the American Gender Institute, and the author of Head Over Heels: Wives Who Stay with Crossdressers and Transsexuals. She published her first article concerning the partners of trans people back in 1999 after publishing a workbook for lesbian couples called Journey Toward Intimacy. She is a regular at trans conferences like the upcoming IFGE Conference.

(1) How long did it take you to compile the stories in Head Over Heels? Where did you find partners who were willing to talk about their experiences?

It was about two and a half years from the point at which I began soliciting participation in 2002 and then sent out questionnaires, until the time when I had created “stories” from the SOs’ responses to my questions. During that time I also worked on my substantive, didactic chapters. It took another two years and a few months from the time when I completed the project and signed a contract with The Haworth Press until Head Over Heels was in print.

I put out a Call for Participants to every online listserve and transgender print publication I could think of. I also requested participation from people at trans conferences at which I presented. Continue reading “Five Questions With… Virginia Erhardt”

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AMS, PGW, Avalon & Perseus

The big news in publishing is that AMS (American Marketing Services), the company that owned one of the biggest book distributors in the country, PGW (Publishers Group West), filed for bankruptcy a couple of weeks ago.

It’s huge news because PGW’s distribution services effectively enable tons of small independent publishers to get their books out there, publishers like Soft Skull (who published Charlie Anders’ Choir Boy) and Cleis Press (who publish some of Tristan Taormino’s books) and McSweeney’s (who publish things like The Believer magazine and authors like Dave Eggers and Nick Hornby).

I’ve been very lucky in all of this, because my publisher, Avalon (APG) has been purchased by Perseus Books, who have their own distributor and a reputation for giving independent imprints room to be – well, independent. Avalon was the umbrella group for both Thunder’s Mouth Press (who published My Husband Betty) and for Seal Press (who will be publishing She’s Not the Man I Married). That is, I dodged a bullet because APG was first in line to be purchased, which is not true for other smaller independent presses like Cleis.

The final impact of AMS filing bankruptcy is yet to be seen. What’s being predicted is that many small publishers will just disappear without a distributor that serves their needs, and also because many of the moneys they were owed will not be paid to them, or because any buyout of AMS will mean investors will be able to buy for pennies on the dollar. It may turn out that Perseus will help PGW, which is good news indeed: PGW was created decades ago in a publishing environment that was much friendlier to growth than the current one is.

All in all it’s a huge mess with too-numerous legal battles to follow.

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The System

So I said the other day that I have a system for seeing what change I will try to effect for myself in the upcoming year. I came up with it a couple of years ago when I realized I had certain goals re: my writing career but ones that I could easily & endlessly put off if I didn’t pay attention. They weren’t big things – things like getting an essay into an anthology, or getting 10k copies in print – but I simultaneously realized that I tend to be somewhat Auspergerish in my single-mindedness, so that if I focus on one thing – like weight loss – I tend to get it done & then everything else turns to crap.

A friend of mine used to refer to this as Getting Your Ducks in a Row: that once you got one errant duck back in line, another, or two, would have slipped out & wandered off.

So in order to be effective I had to keep my eye on a couple of ducks at a time, I decided I’d have four areas of self-improvement (or self-actualization, or whatever New Age-y thing you’d like to call it). Within those four areas, I break the larger goal into 12 smaller ones, & then try to get one done a month. I “check in” with my goals early in the month to see how it’s going.

& No, I’m not kidding.

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Boxing Day

So how did it get to be December? – and not just December, but the day after Christmas?! That seemed fast. I’ve had people older than me tell me that the years go by faster the older you get, & some days that seems to be very, very true. Now there are these few days between Christmas and New Year’s Day left of 2006, and it was – looking back – an exhausting year. Granted, a year goes by very quickly when eight months of it are spent writing a book, but still – December already! Astonishing.

Sometimes at the end of a year I like to wonder what (1) I want to be different in my life a year from now; (2) what I thought would be different from a year ago that is or isn’t, and (3) which kinds of changes I seem to be the most effective at bringing about. There are wishes of mine that are totally unreasonable – like living in a less cluttered apartment – that will probably never happen; now I’m of the opinion that if we moved to an 8-bedroom house we’d still have too much crap – it’s just who we are & in the greater scheme of things, it just doesn’t matter to me very much. But then there are other things, like losing weight, that can be more feasible some years but less feasible even than getting rid of clutter other years.

I’m sometimes good at predicting, but I’m better still at pushing myself to achieve more than I think I can & so achieving some respectable changes. These are the kinds of things I think about when I put together my New Year’s Resolutions lists, so I don’t feel like a failure when I haven’t totally reorganized our bookcases by the end of January or something.

I’ve got a system, even. Maybe I’ll share it on another day. Right now I’m still getting over a cold, though, so it will be another night of Nyquil sleep for me so I can kick this thing once & for all.

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Aurora

On my desk, on my envelope full of proof pages, and about as tired as I am of editing.