I keep telling my friends how great my experience at MacDowell was and how I wish I'd known about colonies years ago. And I've presently applied to four - Jentel, Ucross, Yaddo and VCCA. Two of them are in Wyoming, hence the title of this post, and I have high hopes since I would dearly love to spend a month this summer out west.
But the point of this blog is something that hit me when I was encouraging my friend Jennifer to apply to a colony. I was giving her the obvious reasons - uninterrupted time to work, the chance to meet other artists, a sort of geographically-induced focus - when it hit me that I am always slow to confess the thing about colonies that mattered the most to me. I was respected there. The colony formed a boundary around me and the real world and the tenacity with which they held that boundary showed me that I should do this for myself, that I should value my time as much as MacDowell does, that should take my work (even my unformed work) as seriously as they did.
Bottom line is that being in a colony made me feel the way I thought being published would make me feel. It sounds ridiculous but on some very sub-sub-subconscious level I think I thought getting an agent and selling the book would be more like crossing a personal Rubicon. I assumed it would make a bigger impact on my life, maybe even be a life-changing event, and that even if publication didn't leave me richer or more famous or much successful in some societially-recognized way that I would feel different inside. That didn't happen and I pushed the disappointment down. (Not too far down, as my friends would attest - it kept popping up like a beach ball in a pool.) But I did try to push it down.
Ten months later I went to MacDowell. I wasn't expecting much beyond time and I was grateful for that. But when I got not just the time but the sort of emotional boost I hadn't gotten the winter before it took me a couple of weeks to even realize what was happening. I'll say it again - being in a colony made me feel like I thought getting published would feel. It made me feel like a real writer.
I'm sure a more dedicated artist and a better person wouldn't need any outside support at all. Yeah, right. We all need support and that might be the single greatest thing a colony gives us. Right now I am waiting to see if any of the four come through for summer. I have a book that needs focus. And I have emotional well which, while not bottomless, does need to be replenished periodically. So wish me luck. And if you're reading this, apply somewhere. It's one of the few things you can do to take your creative fate into your own hands.
Showing posts with label MacDowell Colony. Show all posts
Showing posts with label MacDowell Colony. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
Feeling Like a Cop
Somebody once told me that being a writer is like being a cop - long stretches of boredom periodically punctuated with little blips of pure terror. That's been re-proven to me in the last couple of days.
To recap: I have one book "in the works" that my agent sold about a year ago and which is due to publish about a year from now. In other words I am at the exact midpoint of a two year publication process. I have no idea why it takes this long. My editor required virually no rewrites and just a couple of small additions which I had in within a month of the purchase. But never mind, everyone assures me that this is how the process works. So in the meantime I'm sitting in my squad car, eating donuts and casing the joint.
Uh oh....movement. This could be good or bad but either way it feels a little surreal because after hours and days and weeks and months Something Is Getting Ready to Happen.
There's two reasons why this shouldn't surprise me. For starters I know that the publishing world works like this. On the Thursday before Christmas someone at my publishing house wrote me an email saying they needed a picture of me for the catalogue. A picture with all these stipulations about pixel size and high def and all these photographic terms I didn't get....but suffice to say not the type of picture a friend takes out in the yard with her iphone. A very high tech specific type of picture and they needed it the next day.
Luckily, I had exactly what they were looking for, since just the month before I'd been at MacDowell Colony and part of the deal there is that they send a very nice photographer named Jo around to take professional pictures of the artists "at work." In some cases, I imagine this could lead to cool pictures - a violinist or sculptor at work might actually be an interesting sight to see. But what could be more boring than a picture of a writer writing? Jo had been doing this for years and she was great - helped me to relax, kept snapping while we were chatting. And the the result was several nice pictures of me gazing out at the distance with a kind of alertness, sort of like the expression of a coon hound on the scent. I bought a few copies of them, one for my mom for Christmas. So I happened through the wildest of coincidences to have a recent picture of the type they needed but this is just how it all works. You don't hear from anybody for forever when you get an email on Thursday saying they need something by Friday. Nothing....nothing.....emergency.....nothing.
The second reason I should have seen this present situation coming is that I invited it on myself. I want to sell my second book, the one I'm working on now and I would dearly love to sell it off a proprosal and sample chapters, i.e., to get enough money in the hopper to sustain me while I finish the book. Not only would this help my cash flow situation (which is at present pretty stagnant) but it would also ensure that the second book would be locked and loaded and ready for release fairly soon after the first one. My fantasy is that the first book will be popular with book clubs - I think it's slanted toward that kind of reader - and I know from past experience with my own book club that once people read an author that they like to read something else by that author in pretty short order. My book club got on jags where we'd read four or five books by the same person in a row and I don't think that's uncommon. So it makes sense to me that by the time Love in Mid-Air is ready to go into paperback, I should have The Gods of Arizona ready to come out in hardback. Which means it's time to get moving.
Of course a lot of things that make sense to me don't seem to fly in the world of publishing so I ran this idea by my agent without particularly high hopes. Sent him an email yesterday asking if he'd like me to come up with a proposal and sample chapters for the second book with the idea of showing them to my existing editor. The second book is a sequel to the first so it's hard to imagine she wouldn't be willing to at least look at the proposal....
So I sent my agent an email and he wrote back pronto and said yeah, to come up with a proposal and sample chapters and we'd take it from there. And now I'm in a tizzy. Not so much the samples - I got a couple of chapters in pretty good shape for my reading at MacDowell, but writing a plot summary is tough. I asked for this job but when he said yeah, go ahead, I felt a little freaked out. Makes no sense, I know, but welcome to the glamorous world of being a novelist. I'm excited. I'm edgy. I want to show the second one. I'm scared to show the second one. I have plenty to show. I don't have enough to show. I want them to commit to me. I don't want to be locked in. Sometimes I think I became a writer only because I'm not sure how to spell the word "schtizophrenic."
To recap: I have one book "in the works" that my agent sold about a year ago and which is due to publish about a year from now. In other words I am at the exact midpoint of a two year publication process. I have no idea why it takes this long. My editor required virually no rewrites and just a couple of small additions which I had in within a month of the purchase. But never mind, everyone assures me that this is how the process works. So in the meantime I'm sitting in my squad car, eating donuts and casing the joint.
Uh oh....movement. This could be good or bad but either way it feels a little surreal because after hours and days and weeks and months Something Is Getting Ready to Happen.
There's two reasons why this shouldn't surprise me. For starters I know that the publishing world works like this. On the Thursday before Christmas someone at my publishing house wrote me an email saying they needed a picture of me for the catalogue. A picture with all these stipulations about pixel size and high def and all these photographic terms I didn't get....but suffice to say not the type of picture a friend takes out in the yard with her iphone. A very high tech specific type of picture and they needed it the next day.
Luckily, I had exactly what they were looking for, since just the month before I'd been at MacDowell Colony and part of the deal there is that they send a very nice photographer named Jo around to take professional pictures of the artists "at work." In some cases, I imagine this could lead to cool pictures - a violinist or sculptor at work might actually be an interesting sight to see. But what could be more boring than a picture of a writer writing? Jo had been doing this for years and she was great - helped me to relax, kept snapping while we were chatting. And the the result was several nice pictures of me gazing out at the distance with a kind of alertness, sort of like the expression of a coon hound on the scent. I bought a few copies of them, one for my mom for Christmas. So I happened through the wildest of coincidences to have a recent picture of the type they needed but this is just how it all works. You don't hear from anybody for forever when you get an email on Thursday saying they need something by Friday. Nothing....nothing.....emergency.....nothing.
The second reason I should have seen this present situation coming is that I invited it on myself. I want to sell my second book, the one I'm working on now and I would dearly love to sell it off a proprosal and sample chapters, i.e., to get enough money in the hopper to sustain me while I finish the book. Not only would this help my cash flow situation (which is at present pretty stagnant) but it would also ensure that the second book would be locked and loaded and ready for release fairly soon after the first one. My fantasy is that the first book will be popular with book clubs - I think it's slanted toward that kind of reader - and I know from past experience with my own book club that once people read an author that they like to read something else by that author in pretty short order. My book club got on jags where we'd read four or five books by the same person in a row and I don't think that's uncommon. So it makes sense to me that by the time Love in Mid-Air is ready to go into paperback, I should have The Gods of Arizona ready to come out in hardback. Which means it's time to get moving.
Of course a lot of things that make sense to me don't seem to fly in the world of publishing so I ran this idea by my agent without particularly high hopes. Sent him an email yesterday asking if he'd like me to come up with a proposal and sample chapters for the second book with the idea of showing them to my existing editor. The second book is a sequel to the first so it's hard to imagine she wouldn't be willing to at least look at the proposal....
So I sent my agent an email and he wrote back pronto and said yeah, to come up with a proposal and sample chapters and we'd take it from there. And now I'm in a tizzy. Not so much the samples - I got a couple of chapters in pretty good shape for my reading at MacDowell, but writing a plot summary is tough. I asked for this job but when he said yeah, go ahead, I felt a little freaked out. Makes no sense, I know, but welcome to the glamorous world of being a novelist. I'm excited. I'm edgy. I want to show the second one. I'm scared to show the second one. I have plenty to show. I don't have enough to show. I want them to commit to me. I don't want to be locked in. Sometimes I think I became a writer only because I'm not sure how to spell the word "schtizophrenic."
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