Had my biannual videoconference with my literary agent last week (yes, I have a literary agent, but she lives in Canada, you wouldn’t know her), and it was twenty minutes of two miserable faces gawping at each other and half-heartedly apologizing over a broadband connection. Until it got interrupted by a guy handing me a $10,000 estimate.
But maybe I should start at the beginning?
In the first place, it’s not my agent’s fault that my book hasn’t sold (I have to say this, on the off chance that she actually reads this blog). The publishing industry is what it is, and she’s been sick for a year-and-change with long COVID (which I guess is real?). And it’s absolutely not her fault that I’ve failed to provide her with anything else to sell in the two years we’ve been signed (ask me how my WIP is going, or better yet, don’t). But irrespective of all that, this week has been one of the worst of my life—or at least, it felt that way till late Friday afternoon.
It started, of course, when I woke up on Monday to find my HVAC system blowing cold air. Less of a problem with the unseasonably warm weather we’ve been having (not that Global Warming is good—I pray that one day we will have thrown enough paint on priceless works of art to end it), but still a problem, especially in the great state of Wisconsin. My wife helpfully called some repair people, who gave us the totally-reasonable prediction that they would be there sometime between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. the next day. Not a problem; I had my conference with my agent scheduled for 11:30, but the rest of the day was pretty free.1
Yeah, guess when he showed up.
I showed the guy the furnace and then raced upstairs to make it to the conference on time, and my agent and I stared at each other sadly because we both knew my book was never going to sell, and then the furnace guy showed up in the door to tell me I needed a new $10,000 furnace. That was probably the moment I dissociated.
Okay, I’m being dramatic, but I was very cold, and also coming down with some viral crud I was still in denial about, and was trying to talk to the furnace guy and my agent and text my wife with the bad news all at once, and I don’t know if I’ve ever been in a lower, more head-swimmy place.
Fortunately, we’re surrounded by great people, and my week got better.
The first ray of sunshine came Wednesday morning, at my workplace / my family’s church / our kids’ school, when I ran into a friend who was dropping off her stepdaughter. “You’re gonna shop around, right?” she said when I told her about the furnace, but of course it hadn’t even occurred to me that I should shop around, because I’m an idiot (clearly, if I had an ounce of sense, I’d be anything other than a writer). I sought out some other estimates, and by Thursday afternoon the furnace had been fixed for a measly grand.2
By Friday, this viral crud had knocked me flat on my back, and I spent most of the day in bed moaning—but late that afternoon, I got an email from my supervisor saying, “Hey, heard about your furnace; this place takes care of its staff; we’ve halved your kids’ tuition for the rest of the year.”
And—man. I don’t know if I’ve ever been so moved.
The moral here, I think, is to surround yourself with good people. Find a community—a real one, made of meat-based people—and join it. And then quit social media—no, I’m serious.
Maybe I’m beating a dead horse with that one (or maybe I’m just bringing it up again because I know it’s a sentiment that does well here on Substack), but stepping away from Facebook and Twitter and the rest has really left me in a place where I find it much easier to interact with and appreciate the people around me—and, importantly, less worried that they might have opinions I don’t like. People aren’t collections of opinions or lists of the worst things they’ve ever done; they’re squishy, flesh-based things. I’ve finally reached a point where most of my human interaction is with real, enfleshed people, and it’s great.
Meanwhile, I’m about the furthest from professional success that I’ve been in a decade, and I couldn’t be happier. So there it is. 🕹🌙🧸
Hey there, stranger! Welcome to my newsletter. If you sign up to receive it in your email inbox, I’ll send you e-copies of both my published books for free, and enter you in a drawing to win a signed paperback copy of each. You can scroll to the bottom of this post for more info, or else just enter your email address here:
It seems like every year, the Oscar noms get announced, and then every major publication races to wring their hands over why no one cares about the Oscars. This year might be a mild exception, thanks to the Barbie controversies, but in general it’s been true that fewer people have watched the ceremony every year since the turn of the millennium. In this piece, I tried to point out the fairly obvious reason: You can’t be pretentious and elitist about your art form, and then wonder why the average person has lost interest in it.
Oscar nominations just got announced! There were surprises! And some predictable stuff! And . . . other stuff?
K, I’mma be honest, I didn’t really look at the nominations that closely because I just . . . don’t . . . care. And, accordingtoaverypopularheadline, I’m far from the minority there. At this point, it’s become a bit of a cliché to point out that no one cares about the Oscars—but it isn’t wrong. The TV viewership of the Oscars has been in a freefall for at least a decade, as this chart helpfully shows:
So what gives? Has the public just become a mob of knuckle-dragging morons who only care about movies that feature capes and explosions? I mean, yes, but I think there’s a structural problem much deeper than that. It’ll take me a second to explain it though, so bear with me here… (Read more here!)🕹🌙🧸
Stuff I’ve been enjoying lately
Maybe you all knew this was coming, but I’m not sure I did till this moment. I’ve watched a ton of good movies lately (if you haven’t seen Drive My Caror American Fiction, make sure you check them out), but the one that’s been living rent-free in my head for the last few weeks is the new musical take on Mean Girls.
I don’t know if it’s good, but I really liked it. Probably the worst thing you could say about it is that it’s not at all clear who it’s for—are they going for fans of the original, fans of the Broadway musical, kids who are actually currently in high school? I have no idea, and it’s possible this movie will appeal to none of them, but I liked it, mainly because it avoids the biggest pitfall there is when it comes to adapting a stage musical to the screen: They didn’t just film the play and call it a day.
Often, what seems breathtaking on a stage can feel cramped and lifeless on the screen (for proof, go watch that terrible 2005 take on The Producers); getting a movie adaptation right requires an eye for how to expand and deepen sequences to make the film world come alive. The new Mean Girls, for my money, really gets that right, reimagining the song “Revenge Party” as a confetti-filled music video and filming “I’d Rather Be Me” as a single-take close up of Auli’i “Moana” Cravalho as she makes the entire school her personal kingdom.
The new film also fixes my biggest complaint about the Broadway show—namely, that the song arrangements were a little too ✨Broadway✨ for their own good. It was hard to buy the characters as teenagers when their thoughts were expressed in tap-dancey orchestral numbers (especially when you compared the show to other high school–set shows like Dear Evan Hansen or Bring It On); fortunately, the movie version makes the wise choice to popify the songs a bit with settings suggestive of Billie Eilish and Ingrid Michaelson.
Is it a bit how-do-you-do-fellow-kids? Maybe! But this fortyish dude really dug it. Whether you’ll find it grool, I can’t say. 🕹🌙🧸
Favorite comment of the month
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. —Lynda E. Rucker🕹🌙🧸
You should subscribe, because reasons (i.e., free books)
Hey, thanks for reading! If you’re new to this newsletter, here’s how it works: everyone who signs up to receive it in their email inbox gets free e-book copies of both my published books, plus you get entered in a monthly drawing for a free signed paperback copy of each! Why? Because I like you.
So, just for signing up, you’ll get:
Ophelia, Alive: A Ghost Story,my debut novel about ghosts, zombies, Hamlet, and higher-ed angst. Won a few minor awards, might be good.
Those of you who obsessively follow my life will notice that I’m glossing over the fact that I actually work till 10 every morning these days, which I’m leaving out mainly to be concise. But yes, there was some drama around that as well: They actually promised not to come till 10:15, and then texted us right at 8 the next morning telling us they’d be there any minute. That was one more reason to be annoyed (and fortunately we got it straightened out), but it didn’t seem interesting enough to mention in the essay itself.
It is a very old furnace, so we will have to replace it eventually, but hopefully by then we’ll be in a less dire financial situation. (But who knows—no one has ever accused me of being good with money.)
If beating this particular dead horse is wrong, I don't wanna be right.