No Secrets, No Lies, Just Books

I write this to you from the Pikes Peak Writers Conference, on my third day out of four. Yesterday was my blog day, if I was going to keep to every-other-day blogging (which only seems to happen for about a week before I have to give it up) but OMIGOD, yesterday was busy. I was rarin' all day long with only a short break before dinnertime to lie on someone's bed and decompress and chitchat. I even quoted Heathers. Everyone laughed.

It is such a pleasure to be here. I'm very tired, wore out like the elbow of an old sweater, because I can't sleep and the elevation affects everything and I had a Severe Digestive Event for hours and hours on my first night here, but it is such a pleasure to be here. I had thought that I hated networking, but what I hadn't realized is that when networking involves just chatting with people about one of the things you love most in the world, it's not work. It's not the atrocious effort involved in the sole networking event I'd previously been to, a government contracting thing about a million years ago. Those people and I didn't have anything in common other than our jobs, and my job was most decidedly not the thing that interested me about my life. The writers here, and the presenters as well, are so intelligent, and so experienced, and so enthusiastic. It's kind of like camp - only it's a camp jammed with new best friends.

I'll be honest and say that the actual workshops and lectures I've been to have been sort of a wash. Some of them have contained useful information, and perhaps information that I couldn't have gotten any other way, but some of them have been inapplicable to what I'm up to with my work and some of them just haven't been very good. Of course, a couple of them have been truly splendid, insightful and absurdly helpful. Much more enjoyable, and involving much more of a sea change to the good, has been sitting around and hanging out, talking and laughing and learning and exchanging.

The most useful thing by far has been learning that editors and agents are human beings. That they are not scary ring-wraith overlords, permanently grumpy and negative and with hopelessly high standards. Indeed, they seem to want to buy work, and very much to want to do their jobs and get books published, and even, to my great surprise, to want to work with writers. They are, so far, super friendly and endlessly intelligent and knowledgeable. They just seem to know exactly, precisely what they want, what works for them and their press or their client list, and there are so. Many. Writers. and they can't possibly publish them all.

It might have been naive of me not to understand this, but I always saw the whole editorial/agenting/publishing complex a little bit like Hollywood, with personal connections and secrets and sleepings-with and cruelty well beyond the reach of mortal, ordinary people like me, and totally un-conceived by the media and the audience who benefit from their mysterious workings. They could be putting on a big show for us, but I am not seeing it this way here. It's just work, like any other industry. But there happens to be an awful lot of shit that gets in the way between the publishing complex and writers, even good writers. And I don't think any of it can be attributed as blame to any party.

I have a lot of good stories, but I'm not sure how much I can say or should say. Certainly it seems unwise to talk a lot while I'm still here, before I've had the chance to process it all. But I'll be decompressing the information I've attained here for a while, and a lot of that will occur right here on this very blog. Lucky you.

An Afforded Opportunity

SO. Writers' conference.

I have a wary relationship with anything geared directly toward unproven writers - conferences, MFA programs, Writer's Digest contests, enthusiastic agents, nondenominational groups that meet at Barnes & Noble twice a month. I fear that, more often than not, these things are designed to take your money and leave your head swimming with feedback that may or may not be of use. Beyond this, a common perk is the dreaded networking opportunity, which, for a writer like me who pines for the garret and the publisher reached by post, is not so much a positive aspect of such situations.

Once upon a time, a blogger whose posts I used to read went to a writer's conference, and I read about his experience. I had a middling opinion of his work; I had never read any of the writing he was trying to flog at the conference and thence had a likely unfair opinion of what he wrote, but I thought his blog posts were fairly pedestrian and undeveloped. He talked about the agent pitch meeting he went to and the people he met and the events he attended and whatnot, and I was burning with such terrible envy that I knew then my days reading his blog were numbered. He could afford the conference, you see. He had the money for it, and I didn't, and hence I would never get the opportunities he was getting.

There's a lot wrong with my reaction to this blogger - way too much to parse in this space - but the point I'm trying to make is that I never thought I could afford a writers' conference, and hence never really wanted to go to one. It was a toy I was too jealous of to try and acquire. I also found the concept of conferences essentially unfair, because if writing is really a matter of being afforded opportunities once you can...afford them, this is extremely wrong.

Now I'm in the position of being afforded this opportunity whether I can really afford it or not, and I find myself still kind of tangled about it. I feel resigned, as if okay, I guess it's time to do this, I've been avoiding it (whether because I genuinely couldn't afford it or just didn't want to afford it) for a long long time and now I really can't say no to this friend of mine who wants me to go and I actually have a decent book to flog and it's TIME TO FACE THE MUSIC.

There's a lot else that contributed to my decision to go on and do this - the location, a part of the country I've always wanted to see; the friend, whom I've wanted to meet in person for going on four years; the fact that Matt will be away in California and I will feel ever more empty and achy without him by late April and will want distraction very badly; and the fact that I actually sort of can afford it (which for various reasons has knocked me flat, emotionally, that I can sort of afford it). Mostly I keep seeing this:

Yeah. When? Huh, genius? Now's the time.

I travel so rarely, and enjoy it so little, that my net reaction is to view the conference with trepidation. There's happy excitement, and there's dread, but mostly just "what is going to happen? what is it going to be like? is anything going to change or will I be the same person, with the same confidence and the same relationship with Dame Fortune, on the plane ride home?"

Most times that I go on and go out with friends, rather than begging off because I'm too shy or home is too appealing for me to agree to go out, I have a good time and don't regret it. All the times I've gone running in the past couple of weeks, I have not once wanted to, but have never regretted it. I'm not sure I'm really getting across why I am reluctant to go to this conference, nor why I decided to go anyway, but I'm more than sure that this will be another one of those times, when I didn't want to, did it anyway, and everything was hunky-dory.

Better Than Nothing

I've been meaning to write this post since Thursday, just to keep that insecure mess from being the first thing you see on this page, and to keep on writing every other day as I had been. But I've also been meaning to answer e-mails to three or four people and write e-mails to at least two more. I'm having difficulty doing anything much except what I have to do, i.e. work and make meals and run on the treadmill (literal and figurative) and teach yoga and keep going. I don't know how it happened, but there don't seem to be enough hours in the day, anymore, again. I think I'm going to have to knock off my copy-editing job one day this week to catch up on e-mails and get a damn grip.

On one of the last two evenings, I don't know which one, I opened up this New Post window to type in a note about what I would absolutely for-sure write about the next day, to motivate me to say something, for sure and certain. This is what I typed:

i'm a fraud, not a grownup 

I don't actually know how I was going to turn that into a coherent post that had something to do with writing, and wouldn't just be a sad admission before bedtime. So now it's kind of a curiosity. I remember thinking something about there being strength in this admission while I was typing it, not weakness, but I really have no idea what subject matter I was kneading at the time.

I still haven't started revising the horror novel! That deserves an exclamation point because I can't believe I haven't done it yet. It now has a deadline for revisions, because Maleesha somehow snake-oiled me into going to the Pikes Peak Writers Conference (WHERE ARE THE APOSTROPHES, YOU'RE WRITERS, GAAAH), and I set up a pitch meeting there, and the finished book that's closer to ready for a pitch meeting is the horror book, and I really really need to get 'er ready. Really. It's only just over a month away. Why haven't I started?

The decision that I made to go to the writers' conference should be a post in itself. Which I think I'll save for my next post (tomorrow? if I knock off work?), because right now I have to go and teach. Where did my hours go?