This week probably evens out to neutral if I weigh it all together. Totally rotten stuff happened, annoying stuff happened, strong accomplishments happened, connecting with others happened. I didn't leave the house much, but when I did, I went to a reading and met someone cool.
I'm nervous about August 15, because a bunch of bills are due and a handful of deadlines are happening. I've got work due for the Washington Post and the Women's Review of Books and the books have not arrived at my house yet. I was supposed to have been working on a website recently, but I feel in over my head about it, and I need to put together the materials for a class I'm going to teach in September, but I've just been trying to meet review deadlines. Really I need to go back to using my Excel spreadsheet, with all the books & their release dates & deadlines, but it grew so tiresome to update that I am relying on post-it notes, which isn't working. Organization shall set me free, I know it. But staring at the pile of ARCs in terror is quicker.
My schedule for the year included writing a hybrid essay in July, and I didn't. It's about Last Tango in Paris, which I rewatched early in the month (or in June maybe?), and which, as I said on Facebook, I found very different than when I first watched it, when I was, oh, twenty. Part of this is life experience, but another part is watching so many movies in between and finding that Bertolucci, while he knows better where to put the camera than plenty of other directors, is not the all-time genius I thought he was. Others have done better, even if they didn't get Brando.
It's misogynistic, natch, but I found the misogyny the least interesting thing about the film, and certainly the least curious. Poor characterization, a sort of exuberant attempt at metatext, and unexpected inconsistencies leaped out at me a lot more than the fact that the woman of the pair is usually naked and the man is usually clothed, that he's a weird obsessive creep and she's I think actually a teenager?, and of course The Butter Scene. It's all so run-of-the-mill. Men are trash. I am Jill's utter lack of surprise.
Anyway, the essay is about the uses of the body, and in that way it only glances at Last Tango, so it shouldn't have been such a chore to write that I failed to sit down to it for thirty-one days. But I did. And now it's August and I've got to gear up to write about Mildred Pierce, which I've been looking forward to since last year. Can't decide whether to try and squeeze out two essays in the next six weeks or leave Last Tango for later. Scarf down the broccoli with my eyes shut so I can enjoy the mousse? Or just eat the dang mousse and put the broccoli in the fridge?
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| Or both at once, if you're an UTTER WEIRDO |
My bylines are getting better and better, and my emails are getting answered more often, and I'm proud of that. But - and this is something I learned in high school, and continue to relearn every freaking year - the better one does, the more in demand one becomes, until one's responsibilities crush one like a steamroller crushes a cartoon character. I feel flat. I'm tired enough from assignments and successful pitches that I don't have the energy to pitch books I haven't placed. The backlog grows, and my deadlines loom, and I feel proud but also very tired. I want to get off. I want to stop. I want a week where I'm not exhausted either by work or by guilt for not doing work. Which, truly, are equivalent burdens.
Part of the problem with this profession is the timeline of it all. My non-review work has been rejected a bunch lately, which means it's time to find more markets to send it out to. If I don't do that now, then my lag time, while I wait for responses, will be much longer later, and I won't have anything useful to do with that time. It's like missing a round when you're round singing (eg "Row Row Row Your Boat"): it messes up the pattern down the line.
[This is part of why I haven't found it easy to slow down reviewing, because I worry that if I say no now, I won't have anything at all to write about later. Plus, the timeline for press publicity varies wildly from one book to the next. Sometimes I get info for a book next month that looks amazing, so I don't want to turn it down; sometimes I get info for a book in six months that just looks okay, but my schedule is open for then, so I don't want to turn it down. This is how I end up with two dozen books on my desk.]
The timing issues at the moment are a) researching more markets for the hybrid stuff that keeps getting rejected and b) the sense that I need to query agents. I did some research recently on who might want to see my essay collection. It'd probably be wise to query them now, so when they get back to me in a few months I'll have more completed essays to send them, and hopefully the essays I sent out on submission a few months ago will have gotten accepted.
See how it all fits together? It's obnoxious, having to plan like this, especially when the people you're planning for and around are often bad planners, or at the very least unpredictable.
Oh and: I'm now the sole reviews editor at Barrelhouse. That's great, for a variety of reasons, but it's...more. More work, more prestige, more worry.
In just two weeks I'm going on a kind of vacation, but freelancers out there know that vacation is a trap and a lie, even more so than in a reliably scheduled profession. I'm going to try and schedule out my time this month so as to treat the week like a vacation (I'm planning to write the Mildred Pierce essay that week, so it won't really be a break, but it will be a break from reviews & pitches & editing).
Before I leave, there's a lot to do. I placed a portfolio of eight reviews for September books, so I don't have to worry about pitching them all, but I should probably read at least half of them this month. That placement leaves me with two August books I still have to place and...four? reviews I've placed that I have to write (let's see: Steinberg, Skibsrud, Earley...okay, three), plus three books for Locus. I've settled in to reviewing three books per month for Locus, and I LOVE it, it's some of my most unpredictable and thus wonderful monthly reading, but it's a thing semi-permanently on the list.
Damn. Writing all that out. I guess I do do a lot. Maybe that's why I stopped using the Excel spreadsheet: it's horrible to see the traffic and not know what to do to thin it out.
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