I think your approach is a sensible one. Online writer culture is awful, and it really should be about the work (and it can be, nobody has to do all of that other bullshit unless they want to however much they claim otherwise). And I don't think a couple of years with an agent unable to sell a book is that unusual. I do think people should quit when they want to quit (or take a break for a few years), but it sounds like, as you say, you're just starting a new chapter. Doing it your own way is the only way to write anything worthwhile anyway in my opinion.
This writer thing is brutal, let's face it. (I know I'm not saying anything new. 😄 ) There are wonderful moments, and there's also drudgery and rejection and pain. At this point, I think the best -- maybe the only -- reason to write is that you can't NOT write. It's true of me and I suspect it's true of you also, so I guess we just keep plodding along! Blessings and best wishes to you, my friend.
FWIW, I skimmed your post, told myself I'd come back and read it more closely, and then never did...which is sort of what I expected people to do to mine (haha)? I was as surprised as anyone when the original from a year ago took off, but so far the sequel has failed to do similar numbers. Must have been a lightning-in-a-bottle type of thing. :)
Based on my skimming:
(1) I'm glad to see I wasn't the only one mildly disappointed by both Isaac Asimov and Freddie deBoer this year. Freddie is at his best, clearly, as a blogger—having read both his books, I feel like he struggles to stretch his thoughts out to full-length, which is a strength if you're blogging, less so if you're writing a book. 'How Elites' and 'Cult of Smart' both started strong for me but sort of lost me in the back third.
(2) I was similarly pleasantly surprised by 'Everything's Fine.' Didn't know it was possible to write a rom-com about the politics of the early-to-mid-2010s that wasn't painfully on-the-nose, but Rabess pulled it off. Also, the main character and I grew up in the same town, so that was cool.
In the last 3 years, I’ve “given up” on several really big things and now all I can think is that I should have quit sooner. Sometimes grownups quit stuff and it’s ok.
For those of us who also have the "won't be happy until I publish a book or two" feeling--how did it feel when you held your first book in your hands, and your second one for that matter? Not talking about the bigger questions of trade-offs and whether it was worth the degrading interviews and such; just, did that moment feel the way you hoped it would? Did it take the edge off of that "gotta publish" feeling that had been with you for a long time? Was it anticlimactic? Some of both?
(Asking as someone who currently wishes he could put a stake in the heart of his writing aspirations, since they are beginning to feel like an unhealthy distraction from personal life and professional advancement....but we don't have to dig into that. I'm just interested to hear more about your experience.)
My own experience (which I’ve assumed is quasi-universal, but maybe isn’t!) is that there *is* a bit of a letdown with it. It’s thrilling to hold the book in your hands for the first time for sure, and the marketing blitz, if you’re lucky enough to have one, can be a lot of fun (till you get stuck in a horrible radio interview, lol), but then it’s all over and there’s that day-after-Christmas feeling, y’know? Life just sort of goes on, and you’re not sure what you ought to be doing with yourself, and even if your book got some good reviews or won some awards, it becomes apparent you’re not going to be a Harry Potter-esque global sensation, at least not this time.
But that’s the way it always goes with big life events, right? No matter how beautiful the wedding and the honeymoon were, you eventually have to go back to cooking and cleaning and fixing broken plumbing and paying bills and etc.
I’m curious as to why you’re so down on Mean Girls. It seems like a sure-thing to me, at least from the commercial angle—women my age are *obsessed* with the original (as am I; that movie rules), and they seem to be buying a lot of movie tickets these days, if Barbie was any indication.
And it looks like it’s pretty good—72% at RottenTomatoes, which isn’t great, but is pretty respectable for a musical remake released in January. My guess is that if it’s as good as the Broadway show it’ll benefit from word-of-mouth. (I didn’t think much of the original cast recording when I first listened to it, but once I saw the show, it completely clicked for me. Now I can’t stop listening to the album.)
I loved the original Mean Girls, a sharp, well cast & acted film. The musical remake just didn’t work for me. It has its moments, we’ll see how it fares. For me it lacks, the panache of the original & its weighed down by a mediocre score (it does work better in the show’s context but there’s not even one great number), also it lacks Wonka’s charm & visual invention. I know it’s early but Fridays box offixe numbers for Mean Girls look bad---not that it couldn’t get better with word of mouth. I saw it in an empty matinee showing.
I don’t want any film (and particularly one Tina Fey is involved with) to fail so I hooe i’m wrong and you are right about Mean Girls becoming a hit!
Looks like it was the #1 movie by a pretty wide margin its opening weekend (https://www.boxofficemojo.com/weekend/2024W02/occasion/us_mlkday_weekend/), and globally it's already earned back its production budget. I don't know if it'll have legs (and unlike you, I haven't seen it), but if I were a producer I'd be pretty happy with those numbers. :)
This thread is two weeks old now, but I might as well add: I finally saw it, and thought it was pretty good, though maybe not an all-time classic. Really enjoyed Reneé Rapp's and Auli'i' Cravalho's performances, and I appreciated the effort it made to distinguish itself visually from the original—on the other hand, I spent a lot of its runtime wondering if I would have been able to follow it if I weren't already intimately familiar with the story. Haha.
Aaaargh!! My biggest regret is saying anything mean about Mean Girls the musical. It is my future, my past, my everything.
What I mean is, of course, agreed on the performances, and your response to it was thoughtful and I truly do appreciate you coming back to this in a very kind way.
No more video game movies? Did you even see Sonic and Sonic 2? I thought Jim Carrey's role in The Incredible Burt Wonderstone was peak Jim Carrey, but then I saw him as Robotnik and realized he had not fully begun to Jim Carrey (and now apparently is done Jim Carreying having achieved maximum Jim Carrey).
Wait, you liked the Sonic movies? Can you explain to me what was good about them? I feel like 90% of their success owed to the fact that they had Sonic in them and weren’t quite absolute garbage.
(Burt Wonderstone, OTOH, was great. And yes, I’m aware I’m the only person on earth who holds that opinion.)
Agree to disagree, I suppose, because I thought they were both fun, especially the second one, and I'm not a Sonic fan. It finally got me to note the difference between James Marsden and James Marsters. I also loved BW, so you're not the only one.
I mean, they weren’t awful, but they seemed weirdly uninterested in being faithful to the source material on the one hand or being actually good on the other. They both just felt like exercises in throwing darts at a list of film genres. (“What if Sonic was in a [throws dart] ROAD COMEDY???” The fact that they were about learning The Power of Friendship™️ didn’t really do them any favors, either.
And I guess I’m just a little bored of Jim Carrey’s scthick these days. Every comedic role he’s been in for the last twenty-some years has been “Imagine Jim Carrey as ___!” And then you imagine it, and what you imagine turns out to be exactly what you get when you see the movie.
I think your approach is a sensible one. Online writer culture is awful, and it really should be about the work (and it can be, nobody has to do all of that other bullshit unless they want to however much they claim otherwise). And I don't think a couple of years with an agent unable to sell a book is that unusual. I do think people should quit when they want to quit (or take a break for a few years), but it sounds like, as you say, you're just starting a new chapter. Doing it your own way is the only way to write anything worthwhile anyway in my opinion.
"I fully resonate with all this." said Wilder, as he tapped away at his library desk computer.
This writer thing is brutal, let's face it. (I know I'm not saying anything new. 😄 ) There are wonderful moments, and there's also drudgery and rejection and pain. At this point, I think the best -- maybe the only -- reason to write is that you can't NOT write. It's true of me and I suspect it's true of you also, so I guess we just keep plodding along! Blessings and best wishes to you, my friend.
Thanks Gina. I appreciate you hanging around these parts—really means a lot to me. :)
Back at ya!
I stole your idea and I'm still not popular! (Maybe I shouldn't have hated so many books...)
FWIW, I skimmed your post, told myself I'd come back and read it more closely, and then never did...which is sort of what I expected people to do to mine (haha)? I was as surprised as anyone when the original from a year ago took off, but so far the sequel has failed to do similar numbers. Must have been a lightning-in-a-bottle type of thing. :)
Based on my skimming:
(1) I'm glad to see I wasn't the only one mildly disappointed by both Isaac Asimov and Freddie deBoer this year. Freddie is at his best, clearly, as a blogger—having read both his books, I feel like he struggles to stretch his thoughts out to full-length, which is a strength if you're blogging, less so if you're writing a book. 'How Elites' and 'Cult of Smart' both started strong for me but sort of lost me in the back third.
(2) I was similarly pleasantly surprised by 'Everything's Fine.' Didn't know it was possible to write a rom-com about the politics of the early-to-mid-2010s that wasn't painfully on-the-nose, but Rabess pulled it off. Also, the main character and I grew up in the same town, so that was cool.
In the last 3 years, I’ve “given up” on several really big things and now all I can think is that I should have quit sooner. Sometimes grownups quit stuff and it’s ok.
For those of us who also have the "won't be happy until I publish a book or two" feeling--how did it feel when you held your first book in your hands, and your second one for that matter? Not talking about the bigger questions of trade-offs and whether it was worth the degrading interviews and such; just, did that moment feel the way you hoped it would? Did it take the edge off of that "gotta publish" feeling that had been with you for a long time? Was it anticlimactic? Some of both?
(Asking as someone who currently wishes he could put a stake in the heart of his writing aspirations, since they are beginning to feel like an unhealthy distraction from personal life and professional advancement....but we don't have to dig into that. I'm just interested to hear more about your experience.)
My own experience (which I’ve assumed is quasi-universal, but maybe isn’t!) is that there *is* a bit of a letdown with it. It’s thrilling to hold the book in your hands for the first time for sure, and the marketing blitz, if you’re lucky enough to have one, can be a lot of fun (till you get stuck in a horrible radio interview, lol), but then it’s all over and there’s that day-after-Christmas feeling, y’know? Life just sort of goes on, and you’re not sure what you ought to be doing with yourself, and even if your book got some good reviews or won some awards, it becomes apparent you’re not going to be a Harry Potter-esque global sensation, at least not this time.
But that’s the way it always goes with big life events, right? No matter how beautiful the wedding and the honeymoon were, you eventually have to go back to cooking and cleaning and fixing broken plumbing and paying bills and etc.
Agreed on musicals & how surprisingly good Wonka is! I think Mean Girls might set the cause back though.
Meanwhile, I love your writing here & look forward to future novels.
Aw, thank you!
I’m curious as to why you’re so down on Mean Girls. It seems like a sure-thing to me, at least from the commercial angle—women my age are *obsessed* with the original (as am I; that movie rules), and they seem to be buying a lot of movie tickets these days, if Barbie was any indication.
And it looks like it’s pretty good—72% at RottenTomatoes, which isn’t great, but is pretty respectable for a musical remake released in January. My guess is that if it’s as good as the Broadway show it’ll benefit from word-of-mouth. (I didn’t think much of the original cast recording when I first listened to it, but once I saw the show, it completely clicked for me. Now I can’t stop listening to the album.)
I loved the original Mean Girls, a sharp, well cast & acted film. The musical remake just didn’t work for me. It has its moments, we’ll see how it fares. For me it lacks, the panache of the original & its weighed down by a mediocre score (it does work better in the show’s context but there’s not even one great number), also it lacks Wonka’s charm & visual invention. I know it’s early but Fridays box offixe numbers for Mean Girls look bad---not that it couldn’t get better with word of mouth. I saw it in an empty matinee showing.
I don’t want any film (and particularly one Tina Fey is involved with) to fail so I hooe i’m wrong and you are right about Mean Girls becoming a hit!
Looks like it was the #1 movie by a pretty wide margin its opening weekend (https://www.boxofficemojo.com/weekend/2024W02/occasion/us_mlkday_weekend/), and globally it's already earned back its production budget. I don't know if it'll have legs (and unlike you, I haven't seen it), but if I were a producer I'd be pretty happy with those numbers. :)
Happy to be wrong and always glad for a Tina Fey win.
This thread is two weeks old now, but I might as well add: I finally saw it, and thought it was pretty good, though maybe not an all-time classic. Really enjoyed Reneé Rapp's and Auli'i' Cravalho's performances, and I appreciated the effort it made to distinguish itself visually from the original—on the other hand, I spent a lot of its runtime wondering if I would have been able to follow it if I weren't already intimately familiar with the story. Haha.
Aaaargh!! My biggest regret is saying anything mean about Mean Girls the musical. It is my future, my past, my everything.
What I mean is, of course, agreed on the performances, and your response to it was thoughtful and I truly do appreciate you coming back to this in a very kind way.
No more video game movies? Did you even see Sonic and Sonic 2? I thought Jim Carrey's role in The Incredible Burt Wonderstone was peak Jim Carrey, but then I saw him as Robotnik and realized he had not fully begun to Jim Carrey (and now apparently is done Jim Carreying having achieved maximum Jim Carrey).
Wait, you liked the Sonic movies? Can you explain to me what was good about them? I feel like 90% of their success owed to the fact that they had Sonic in them and weren’t quite absolute garbage.
(Burt Wonderstone, OTOH, was great. And yes, I’m aware I’m the only person on earth who holds that opinion.)
Agree to disagree, I suppose, because I thought they were both fun, especially the second one, and I'm not a Sonic fan. It finally got me to note the difference between James Marsden and James Marsters. I also loved BW, so you're not the only one.
I mean, they weren’t awful, but they seemed weirdly uninterested in being faithful to the source material on the one hand or being actually good on the other. They both just felt like exercises in throwing darts at a list of film genres. (“What if Sonic was in a [throws dart] ROAD COMEDY???” The fact that they were about learning The Power of Friendship™️ didn’t really do them any favors, either.
And I guess I’m just a little bored of Jim Carrey’s scthick these days. Every comedic role he’s been in for the last twenty-some years has been “Imagine Jim Carrey as ___!” And then you imagine it, and what you imagine turns out to be exactly what you get when you see the movie.