Once you’ve put a new book out into the world and have done all you can to sling it on street corners, there is nothing left to do but begin writing again! In my case, I’m going back to a novel I’ve been working on for years—so many years that a notecard I once jotted ideas for the book on and attached to a bulletin board has faded to the point where I can’t read it any more, even though my writing desk doesn’t get any direct sunlight. As I look back on my past drafts and try to sort out how to fix it, I feel a little like Dickens’ Miss Havisham in her room full of cobwebs:
I just need to find my notebooks and pens underneath all those cobwebs and give it a try again. I had considered moving on from this book and I even started a different project, but during my period of confusion about what to do with it, I managed to find a wonderful new agent, and she has given me smart notes about how to improve it…and I am feeling not smart and not sure about how to proceed, but that’s basically how writing almost always feels for me so I guess even as I stare out at the cobwebs, brainwork is happening? I’ll try to move forward on that assumption.
The Assorted Whimsy Portion of The Tumbleweed
I’m concerned that the prior section of this newsletter came off like, as the British say, whinging. Since I whinged, I owe you some whimsy. This is the last month of 2021, so I will now round up some stuff I noticed over this past year that amused me. First, there was the time when the fire hydrant down the street wore a jaunty corduroy beret:
I checked it every day as I drove past, and visited it on foot several times. Would the owner come to retrieve it? Would the wind blow it away? In the end, the corduroy beret endured on its post for about three weeks.
One of the things I’m most thankful for this year is that the cover of my daughter’s algebra book is illustrated with an Anaheim pepper wearing headphones:
Maybe this image ended up on the book randomly, through some algorithm, but instead I like to think that there was a book designer who showed up at a concept meeting for this project, spread his hands out on the desk, and said, “I’ve got a great idea for the cover of this Blitzer algebra book. Just hear me out.” And whatever he said related this headphone'd pepper to algebra so well that it blew everyone’s minds.
On Halloween, I reached into the vegetable drawer in my refrigerator to get supplies for soup, and I came out with these spooky carrot pants:
I danced them around the house a bit, and my kids told me to stop being weird. So, reader, I cooked them.
The Book Review Portion of The Tumbleweed
In the subtitle of this newsletter, for those of you who were paying attention, I promised some books about nuns. This month America magazine ran my review of two novels I thoroughly enjoyed, Lauren Groff’s Matrix and Claire Luchette’s Agatha of Little Neon. I wrote:
“Two new novels, one a demonstration of continuing virtuosity by a much-lauded writer in mid-career, the other a smoldering, graceful debut, explore the lives of women religious. Both reveal the inner lives of sisters: women who, as Claire Luchette writes in Agatha of Little Neon, ‘were the opposite of invisible, but still difficult for people to see’…Matrix and Agatha of Little Neon differ in their historical settings, the temperaments of their protagonists and their prose style, but they both center on women perceiving the ways of the world with absolute clarity, realizing the extent of their power and deciding to use it for the good of others, no matter how many people that decision upsets.”
Like I said, these novels were very different—I could see them appealing to entirely divergent types of readers. Unless you’re like me and see a bookstore as an all-you-can-eat smorgasbord and just grab everything.
The Q&A Portion of The Tumbleweed
In the November edition of the Tumbleweed, I wrote a lot about how important it is to just keep trying and not give up when you write and submit, because the process takes a long time, and there’s a lot of rejection along the way. A reader emailed to say that she had been trying a looong time, and asked if I had any other advice, beyond just “trying,” for aspiring writers. First of all, I hear you, Sister. I know all about the years represented by the extra o’s in that looong. And yes, I do have some thoughts about how you can be sure your efforts to keep trying are targeted in a fruitful direction.
Get feedback on your writing and try to improve in every way you can. Find some readers and writers you respect, and offer to exchange work. You need to be a little careful about this, because you don’t want to listen to just anyone’s advice. I like Neil Gaiman’s thoughts about how to process the comments you get on your writing: “Remember: when people tell you something's wrong or doesn't work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.”
If you are lacking fellow writers to give you feedback, there are so, so many community workshops and online workshops to try! I like Lighthouse Writers Workshop, but I’m a little biased because I teach there. They have a wide array of online and in-person options. And it seems like more and more organizations and individual writers are offering writing classes, from Catapult to my friend Kathy Fish’s flash fiction workshops to my friend Ashley Shires’ generative writing classes. If classes aren’t for you, you can hire an editor to read your manuscript. (I read manuscripts for people, and love suggesting how writers can fix everything up.) Lighthouse has its Book Project to march you through completion of a manuscript, and I also take pride in helping writers finish (or almost finish!) books in two years through the Mile High MFA program at Regis University.
When you’re ready to submit a book, essay, or story give it a good try—I’ve gotten certain stories accepted after submitting them 75 or more times. I think I racked up 60-100 rejections each time I searched for an agent. Why do I keep going? If I notice that along with a rejection, I’m receiving some encouraging feedback, I keep going. Almost every time I’ve gotten some hint of encouragement about a piece, if I just keep submitting, someone will accept it eventually. I just have to find the right someone. If I’m getting nothing but form rejections, sometimes that means it’s time to pull the story and revise. To check if your rejection is an encouraging or form rejection, compare it to others using the Rejection Wiki.
Keep the writing and publishing questions coming! Leave a comment here or send me an email.
The Self-Promotional Portion of The Tumbleweed
Did you notice the air in Boulder smelled different this month? That’s because KGNU and the Boulder Book Store picked Mixed Company as their radio book club selection for December. Listen to KGNU on December 23 at 9 a.m., or find it at your podcast source of choice. Here it is on Spotify.
5280 suggests you should give Mixed Company as a gift this holiday season. And I don’t know about you, but when a four-digit number issues a command, I obey.
Denver bookstore The Tattered Cover, which has been my BBF (Best Bookstore Forever) forever, has invited me to read from Mixed Company! I am worried that I’ve already exhausted all the people who might attend such an event, but I’d be delighted to see you there, at the Tattered Cover Colfax on January 27 at 7 p.m.
I wrote “How to Write an Ending” for Catapult’s Don’t Write Alone, a series of writing advice articles.
At the end of the year on Twitter, all the cool writers and some of us totally cringe writers engage in a practice of rounding up the things we’ve published that we’re most proud of this year. So here’s my list:
My book, Mixed Company. It took me a decade to publish a second book, so I am partying over this one! (November 2021).
Dear McSweeney’s: Two Decades of Letters to the Editor from Writers, Readers, and the Occasional Bewildered Consumer. I was so proud to have a piece of satire in this anthology (September 2021).
“Lucia Berlin: My Mentor in Being an Outsider” for Poets & Writers (Nov./Dec. 2021).
“The shooting at my King Soopers also destroyed a haven of warmth and inclusion”—a sad essay I wrote for the Washington Post (March 2021).
“Remember Me, Your Travel Coffee Mug?”—a bit of satire for The Museum of Americana (February 2021).
“The Sit-In,” short fiction in the Santa Monica Review—not online, but you can find the story in Mixed Company (April 2021).
"Playing Graveyard," a piece of flash nonfiction in The Cincinnati Review (March 2021).
Congrats on the book club pick from KGNU!!