A Schedule: First Two Days

Sunday, May 30. Wake 5 a.m. in dread (nothing's really wrong). Coffee on porch, paging through a friend's poems. At 7:30 a.m. decide I must use the cool of the day for brushcutting and lawn mowing. After three hours of that, I shower, lunch, create no-knead bread dough and set it to rise, then, unbelievably, needing to escape the house, I go to the gym, grocery, and gas station. After dinner look at a friend's poems. Decide it's now or never to do my scheduled work. So tired I feel poisoned, but that has killed the dread. Taking up a copy of Rattle, Summer 2010 issue, I find exceptionally good poetry and interviews with Carl Phillips and Aram Saroyan. I read also the author bios. Gemma Mathewson's includes this: "Poetry is, for me, a kind of skywriting. It involves melding the twin vertigoes of altitude and disclosure, in the medium of vapor. " Good read. Want my work in that mag. Bed 9:30 p.m.

Monday, May 31. Wake 6:30 a.m. Feed birds. Bales of straw are required to complete my yard project, but it's too early to shop. I could plant tomato plants, but remembering yesterday, I halt myself and at 7:30 a.m. begin assembling chapbook for Midwest Chapbook Series competition run by Laurel Review, litmag from Northwest Missouri State University. Deadline is June 1; do it now or never. First chapbook competition I have ever entered, following my own advice to attempt the local before I try national. Picking up the contest guidelines I see I've scribbled on it a possible chapbook title: Soviet Life. I like it and use it. Manuscript and mailing package assembled and finished by 11:30 a.m. Manage to do it by literally gritting my teeth. Relieved it's done.

Magical Thinking About Agents

The creatures from the Magic Kingdom of Art, specifically writers, want to attract creatures from the Kingdom of Business called "agents." A great gulf separates the two. Because agents are few and remote and do not care to bridge the gulf, and because we writers are so creative and so broke, we have myths about them. Thus almost everything writers believe about getting an agent is a misunderstanding.

Getting an agent is not "the next step." Just out of school? Just completed your first book? The real next step is to develop grit and a professional attitude, because for the next several years you will have to learn how to act as your own agent, pitching and querying, knowing your market, and selling your own work, and maybe self-publishing it. When you have a track record and your work commands five figures, then getting an agent is "the next step."

"It's almost impossible to publish a novel without having an agent" is untrue. Three times in the past year I have seen first novelists, writers I personally know, get published because they looked for years for publishers, not disdaining small publishers, and they had manuscripts good enough. The hard truth is that most of the time if you can't get a manuscript published it's because it's not yet ready for publication.

Or, you may write very good manuscripts indeed. But agents want manuscripts that appeal to large, established sectors of the book-buying public, and not "writers" as we know them, but writing machines who can crank out similar manuscripts every 18 months or so, if not faster. They get paid only when you do. They don't want to get paid only once.

"I want an agent so someone else will take care of the business stuff so that I can write" is a rosy illusion indeed. An agent has many clients, is not at your beck and call, and is not necessarily accountable to you. What you are really asking for is an accountant.

"A starter agent" is not necessarily a boon. Researching the only agent who asked to represent us, my writing group discovered that he was a newbie, the largest part of his career having been spent in Europe coaching kids' soccer. We decided it was not good business to accept his offer. Later, however, he did develop a track record. We contacted him again, but by then he did not want us. I am so glad we didn't sign on with such a fickle creature.

Never Say Never

In 2001 I published in The Missouri Review an essay I'd worked on hard and liked a lot. Titled "I Want You, I Need You, I Love You," it was all about Elvis Presley's recording of the song by the same name. After it was published I never heard any response; not a single comment except for jokes after I mentioned I'd written about Elvis.

Later I learned that Stanley Elkin advised writers not to try describe music; it couldn't be adequately done. And I looked at what I'd written and published to no account, and thought it a noble failure.

Well, a friend found on the Missouri Review site a college instructor's comment: "As model essays I use several examples from TMR’s [The Missouri Review's online] archives. . . .“I Want You, I Need You, I Love You” by Catherine Rankovic is a lesson in how to describe the nearly impossible—Elvis’ phrasing and singing voice."

And then a paragraph from that essay appears in the Elvis entry in Wikiquote. I didn't put it there but I did correct the misquotations when I found it...

Maybe The King might have liked that some college professor gal took him serious... Moral of the story is, as musician Miles Davis put it: "Don't fear mistakes. There are none."

Keep Up Your Confidence

Read this "How Successful Writers Keep Up Their Confidence." Wise words from a book editor. Link acquired through Tricia Grissom's writer's blog Coffee and Critique.

Who's Your Fantasy Publisher?

Deciding to spend today thinking big, I wondered: What publisher would I choose for my work if I could choose any one?

I'd choose different publishers for different works, but do I know anything about them, really?

Have I looked each of them up on the Net? Visited its website? Looked at, perhaps even ordered its catalog? Checked out its other authors? Know the names of the editors I'd be working with if my fantasy came true? Whether the firm is solvent or if there are rumors of mergers or collapse? Whether it has an ePublishing division?

Why no, I haven't done any of that, even while knowing very well that we all have to know what we want before we have any chance of getting it.

Keeping Writers at Arm's Length

I spent December through March querying agents for our writing group's second book. Score zero. Or, better for my mental health, I can say, "I didn't find the agent who wanted us."

We're now sending the book proposal directly to publishers. More than ever, publishers' listings say, "We don't take "un-agented" submissions, or look at unsolicited submissions." No, not even a glance at a two-page book proposal.

It looks as if publishers think they benefit from a setup that keeps them apart from writers. Now, think: Does that make any sense?