2001-04-10
I have not heard from my agent. I can not imagine that this indicates anything good. But I've had some other stuff on my mind and I'm not really losing sleep over it.
Actually, I did have an unusual bout of insomnia from 3:30 to 5:30 this morning, but I wasn't thinking about the book. I wasn't thinking about anything in particular, other than the fact that I was not sleeping.
I wrote the following to a friend:
Last night I went to a reading at [the independent bookstore in my town]. It freaks me out to be in bookstores--all those books, esp the new hard cover ones, the vast majority of which will sink without a trace. The whole writing thing seems pretty futile. Not in a bad way, just kinda laughable.
My friend, a writer who works in a library, replied:
yes, the book world is quite tragi-comic... i recently weeded out a bunch of novels here at work; amazingly dated looking 60s, 70s, even 80s things. i ran across books by this guy i know slightly, who, unbeknownst to me, had written several novels back in the early-to-mid 60s. There on the jacket he stood, looking all younger and arty and serious... what can u say?
Then I replied:
Funny, I was just wondering last night about that process of how libraries weed out old fiction. For some reason that overwhelmed feeling I get in bookstores doesn't happen in libraries.
What you said about that guy you know makes me think of this time a couple years ago around the time the stories came out I was at my father's and this woman who is an old friend of his told me that she had some short stories in Seventeen magazine in her youth. Kinda made me realize that mine were not necessarily going to "lead to" anything, either. But I suppose in a way it is good to be humbled by all this. Right? Or maybe not. Beats me. Tragi-comic is the perfect term for it all. Kind of like if you didn't laugh you'd have to cry.
And now back to me, now. It's really so terribly fleeting. You work so hard to overcome the inertia and resistance and actually start writing the thing, then you work to finish it. Then you work to get an agent and hope and pray she sells it. Then you hope and pray and do all kinds of tricky things to get it noticed and reviewed and bought by stores and -- oh, sorry, this is getting kind of self-pitying. What was that I said recently about privilege?
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