A Complete Statement on My Middling Success

In the past month I've heard more often than usual that it's hard for friends to keep up with the number of links to my work I'm posting. In reply I have tried to say, yes, me too. Even though that's true, I realize it sounds kind of bad, because I'm the one posting the links, so obviously I can keep up with them.

But I use a spreadsheet. Seriously. It has five categorized tabs and dozens of rows and without it, I would miss all my deadlines, lose all my pitch ideas, and go insane. I updated it this morning. I have filed twelve (12) pieces that haven't been published yet, most of which I expect out in the next month. At least that many again have been assigned to me.

This is not me bragging, I swear. I've been wanting to write this post for a while, and I feel like I've been writing breadcrumbs of it in many recent posts. What I want to say is that being prolific has been primarily a job (and not a very hard one at that), rather than a cotton-candy dream come true, and I don't expect you, friends and readers, to give a damn about every last thing I'm publishing. But I want to say it at length.

Vacation, HAVE to GET Away

I'm on vacation. Sort of.

My family didn't take vacations when I was young. My father was not a vacation guy; he was about as far from Clark Griswold as you can imagine in terms of wanting the family to be a certain way, or building silly/heartfelt traditions, or anything like that. I remember visiting my grandparents on both sides a few times when I was young; I remember going to summer camp; I remember going skiing in the winter. I don't remember going somewhere other than our home during the summer for relaxation and sightseeing. It just wasn't a thing we did.

These days, my husband and I rarely take vacations. We went on a honeymoon in 2011. We went on a trip a few years ago to the state of Washington for a friend's wedding, and extended the stay for a week in which we utterly, totally relaxed. I read Proust and stayed off Facebook. We looked at the view and ate croissants. It was wondrous. Last fall we went to the UK, but due to a miscalculation on my part, that trip turned out to be more stressful than relaxing, and some of it felt like work.

But that's it. We've been together for 12 years and have taken two full-relaxation vacations, one of which was our honeymoon.

Most of our vacation time at present is spent seeing family. Which is lovely, but not relaxing. Relaxing, to me, means zero expectations set or met. It means no sightseeing or activities unless in an equal ratio to napping in a hammock. It means no need to wear pants or makeup. Our families don't operate this way on vacation, so there's always adjustment of expectations at the beginning of a trip. I must remind myself that hammock time may be my priority on vacation, but it isn't my hosts'.

wat

We have friends who go on trips to Japan and Italy who bustle through their weeks there, seeing things and doing things and going to fancy dinners and meeting new people. I have an acquaintance who spent his honeymoon on an African safari. I respect and sometimes love those people, but I still consider them slightly nuts. For me those would be stressful vacations, which is a contradiction in terms, right? Vacation is for fun and relaxation. Information intake is not relaxing to me. I do information intake for a living.

The arc of every Vacation movie involves learning to reconnect with family in spite of all the superficial trappings of whatever the relevant holiday trip is and means. Leaving out those trappings in the first place saves me a bunch of steps.

So here I am on vacation, relaxing to about half the degree I ideally would. Which is great; it's still relaxation. But since I've started working from home, I've lived in such wonderful quiet, with so much time to let my own thoughts bounce around the inside of my head. Being with people who expect my attention is more of an oddity than it is the norm now. So I'm looking forward to getting back home, to the peace and quiet to which I've become accustomed, rather than being here on vacation with animated loved ones who have lots to say and ask.

Out in the world (vacation does not stop bylines):

An essay about non-standard writing reference books at CRAFT. I really enjoyed writing this essay, because you wouldn't believe how often I've tried to insert these books into online advice threads only to be buried by "On Writing On Writing On Writing".

I reviewed New Poets of Native Nations for sinkhole. I called it a perfect anthology and I'm not exaggerating. Buy it. Also, I love reviewing for sinkhole, and hope to do lots more of it.

I reviewed The Blurry Years, by Eleanor Kriseman, for the Masters Review. It was an unusual book. The editor let me get away with a lot of vaguenesses, which I wrote in so I wouldn't spoil the reading experience. I'll say this: the book has a scenario in it that I have never seen in any other book, ever. If you like coming-of-age novels, particularly about girls, don't miss this one.

Unscheduled Leaps

I drafted this post in October of 2017. I was too much of a fraidy-cat to post it then, but as I continue to mull and feel things about leaving my job at the end of March (when will I stop feeling things about it? nngh), it begins to seem like posting this is important. So I edited it a little and here it is.

--

There's a lot to tell you about the last three months of non-blogging. A lot of things I did and saw that I want to record and analyze. I read Our Mutual Friend and it put me off reading for about a month; I wrote the beginning of a very hard thing, and keep finding more of it squirting out around my edges; I had some experiences with ...mmmteachingkindof and I really really loved them. I went to Santa Fe and regained my center, the feeling of what makes me me.

But here's the main thing: I'm proverbially riding off into the sunset from my job.

Git along, li'l rexy

Sort of. I'm not leaving my job entirely, and I'm not withdrawing from it soon. I'm planning on working for the law firm I work for essentially forever, or for as long as they'll have me, but I'm cutting about 3/4 of my hours gradually over the next four months. [This turned out not to be feasible, in a way that's still disappointing. That job is gone for good.]

I don't have other plans for money right now. I don't have another job, and I don't have other opportunities on the table - aside from those I've applied for, which has little to do with getting them. But I'm sinking, losing ground creatively and just-general-life-ly, and it's because I spend 7:00 am to 8:00 am every morning driving all of 15 miles to get to work, and then I spend most of my afternoon hours sprawled on my couch or in front of my computer decompressing from the experience of work. I may be a hopeless wimp in terms of how most people do modern American life, but that's irrelevant; what's relevant is this way isn't working for me.

It wasn't any fun to realize I needed to do this, and it took me a year between realization and action. A YEAR. I don't know what would've happened if I'd leapt earlier, but I didn't, I'm leaping now, and here's what happens next.

• I'm teaching a sentence workshop on November 11 for San Fernando Valley-area writers. 
• I'm running a monthly writing group that's growing in interesting ways. 
• I'm volunteering at CSUN, working with students on the literary magazine. 
• I'm in the early stages of partnering with [redacted]. 
• I'm applying for proofreading and copy editing jobs, even weird ones. 
• I'm long-distance-volunteering at [redacted] to mentor young writers. 
• I'm querying agents with my writing craft book and my urban fantasy book. 
• I'm querying small presses with the other two manuscripts: the secret project and an essay collection. 
• I'm making zines of my littler work. 

[I can't believe it, but almost none of this worked out. 

• The sentence workshop was terrif and I want to do another one, but I still suck at promotions & marketing and can't afford to pay anyone to do it for me. If I'm going to teach workshops, something has to happen to draw strangers into them rather than just friends: a book, a partnership, a marketing campaign, something. I don't know how to make this happen other than what I'm already doing. 
• The monthly writing group has dissolved because it was an astounding amount of emotional effort and people kept blowing it off. When I stopped sending emails about the group early this spring, no one spoke up to say they missed it. 
• Volunteering worked out great in terms of enjoying myself, but did not net the main effect I was doing it for. 
• Partnering broke even, but that's about it. 
• I'm not applying for those jobs anymore - no time, with my writing schedule. 
• The mentoring thing totally blew up for reasons not of my making. 
• Still querying but nothing has happened. 
• Making the one zine was a good idea but has netted almost nothing practical (interest from a publisher, etc). I'm trying to decide whether I should attempt something bigger for my next one, still handmade but with a press instead of a printer, but it's too overwhelming to think about with all else going on.] 

All of this is stuff I can do. I know I am weak at marketing myself, but I'm strong at distributing my energy to a variety of points. Like a seed strewer instead of a seed planter. I'm also strong at my passion, so I'm leaning into volunteering for what I enjoy, instead of waiting and hoping for something paid + passionate to cross my path. Yeah, I hope the volunteering will lead to a job somehow, but the volunteering is adding to my life in itself.

I have other ideas. And I have essays and books to write. And I have piles and piles of other people's books to read. It's all too much to do while holding down a decent job, so the job had to go [this was the main truth I avoided facing for too long, and now that I have, it's so much better] ...or at least to morph. I was scared to ask, but I did, and it turned out okay. 

So here I go. Leaping. 

High hopes for a soft landing

If you want to help, subscribe to my newsletter, tell someone else about my blog or my newsletter, or share links to my work. You can also spread the word about me locally, if you live in LA. If you want to partner with me to teach workshops in your area, I might be down for that.

If you don't want to help, cool. Not everyone has to love me. 

Pictured: me when excited to see someone

(Truth is, the gifs I got when I searched "cat leaping" and "dog leaping"
were so amazing I couldn't stick with just one.) 

A Networking Story (with Parentheticals)

What a month it's shaping up to be. Six of my reviews will appear in four publications, plus there are six more that could appear this month, plus a super-fun listicle I can't wait for you to read. I've attracted a lot of wonderful books to myself in the recent past, even if some of them are very long. The past week has not been especially productive, but I think I was burned out. I read 21 books in June. That number includes a couple of 40-page chapbooks and a couple poetry books, but still. That's a lot.

In another week I'm going on vacation and I'm taking both work books and fun books with me. I decided my trip-out plane book will be The Grip of It, which I really should've read last winter when duncan recommended it, but now it's finally on my coffee table. Can't wait.

Today I want to tell you a story. I constructed it with fictional names and titles to make it clear, but still anonymous.

Sawdust in My Gas Tank

I did not ask my therapist this week if her other patients are being as strongly emotionally affected by domestic news events as I am. Did not, but wanted to. I retreat deeper into my creative life and further away from what's out there, and I feel ever guiltier about it. I know myself well enough to know there isn't another choice, and that what I really think, it's not a good idea to spread it around. I was wrong about Melania, I think - not all the way wrong but mistaken about her willingness to be used politically - so it's probably best not to use my brain on such things. I'm okay being wrong; I'm not okay being in a state of hyperalert despair all the time.

can't sleep, CNN'll eat me

That said, the news from the creative side is largely good. I'm relieved to be running slightly ahead of schedule on books for review - have read all the July and August releases in the pile, have reviewed almost everything with a deadline, am working on reading and placing September and October releases now. With two exceptions, one of which is 450 pages and already out, one of which is 530 pages and due in August. So I'll be okay, but I can't exactly relax.

I wrote a tripartite essay that I've been prevaricating about since January, so I feel great that it's done (though not without whining). I'm waffling on whether to try and write another one before July 5. There's a deadline that day that suits the essay very neatly, but I really don't know if I can put it together in a week.

A crème de la crème publication expressed interest in a pitch but is taking an anxiety-inducing amount of time to get back to me about the finished piece. A publication that's a big goal of mine for essays accepted a review pitch. (Subtopic: I feel weird about saying in bios and pitches that my work has appeared somewhere when it's a review, and the pub is best-known for a specific genre. Especially a genre in which I write. But it's technically true.) A publication that's almost as big a goal of mine accepted a regular pitch and I'm deeply afraid I'll fuck it up. Two! two! editors responded to my pitches saying they'd read my reviews. My response was this tweet:

Swerving between feeling bigheaded with proof that my writing strategy of the past six months is working, and feeling naked and weirded out and terrified that I probably just put sawdust in my gas tank and it's going to sputter and stop any time now

— Katharine Coldiron (@ferrifrigida) June 25, 2018

And for the past couple of weeks I've been participating (very badly) in the #1000wordsofsummer project, where Jami Attenberg writes us a note of support every day and we hold each other up on Twitter. I thought this project might, at least for a couple of weeks, get me to work more consistently, instead of the way I do it now, where some days I write morning and afternoon, some days I read in the morning and write in the afternoon, and some days I read both morning and afternoon and don't write at all. And it isn't predictable or dependent on a schedule, it's just what seems like the right thing to do that day. I also hoped that I'd be writing purely creative stuff for all of the daily pages, preferably all on the same project.

None of which happened! I didn't write every day, I "cheated" by writing reviews on some of the days (it's way easier to make myself write reviews than creative work), and I varied what I worked on, depending largely on fancy. I think this might've been my last major attempt to train myself to write every day. My one half has tried to teach my other half that I'm untrainable in this regard many, many times. Maybe this time my other half will goddamn listen.

But I did finish that essay during the two weeks, and wrote something fun about Celine Dion. It was a helpful exercise to participate even as much as I did, much more so than not doing it and being petulant and snotty about it, which is what I always do when NaNoWriMo comes around.

Out in the world:

This month's Books I Hate (and Also Some I Like) was with Eileen G'Sell, whom I admire a lot for her astounding fashion game as well as her skill with words. Check it out.

I reviewed my mentor Dr. Haake's book for Anomaly. I filed this review in late 2017, but delays on one side and then another have pushed it to now. I think it was worth the wait.

I reviewed a fascinating thriller for LARB, The Captives, by an author who can boast a gap of 20+ years between her first book and her second. The gap reminds me of Tillie Olsen, but the book sure doesn't. It's an extremely good thriller and I'd love to mail you the ARC if you want it.

KBO

Some months ago I listened to a five-year-old interview from the Longform podcast. I believe that a lot has changed at Longform since October 2013, which was when the interview was conducted, and I'm certain that a lot has changed in the life of the subject, Elizabeth Wurtzel. So I can't really guarantee anything about how this interview went, or could be interpreted, except for what I got out of it.

Wurtzel is a tricky figure. She ripped the lid off mental illness with Prozac Nation, made it a topic that was no longer taboo (even if it's still not as easily discussed as it could be), and then she did a whole lot of drugs, wrote some weird books, and behaved really weirdly on the public stage. She seems like she's a difficult person, generally, and that her solipsism has been nurtured in an unfortunate, almost pathological way by her early fame. As a writer she is not someone to rely upon, or even admire, but I believe she's always going to be someone to watch.

I listened to this interview because Prozac Nation meant a lot to me when I was in my late teens and early 20s, and I wanted to know what she'd sound like. She sounds weird, is the answer. She self-contradicted a lot, and when called on it, used slippery rhetoric and arrogance to elude admitting she was mistaken. She redirected or restarted her sentences more often than not. She said some generally insulting things and threw her weight around inordinately.

Nevertheless, there's a certain quote from this interview that I've been mulling over since I listened to it. Which was when I still had a day job, so, like, in March or before. I can't stop thinking about it.

E: I also did not stop bugging people. I mean, people don't know how to do that anymore. They think that you can get things done with a text message. You can't get things done with a text message.

Q: What does bugging people mean to you?

E: It means asking people if you can do something until they say yes. I mean, you just have to ask until they say yes. 

The context had to do with how to get opportunities as a writer. She emphasized that you have to beat doors down and be insistent and annoying before you get the kinds of opportunities you want.

I've pitched reviews to a certain editor at a prominent publication at least a dozen times. Probably closer to two dozen. When I was about to give up on his publication a couple of months ago, he wrote back, with the email subtext of a heavy sigh, to tell me that he'd ask his colleague if they had anything for me. He never got back to me with an assignment, but even that email was proof that being persistent was closer to the answer than giving up was. I mean, you do risk being annoying enough for an editor to block you or ignore you or continue turning you down forever. But as soon as I think in that direction, I think about this Wurtzel quote.

To break it out a little further: a) Giving up is not going to get me closer to a yes from that editor, or any other. That's a guarantee. No one who gave up has reached the top of any mountain. b) Every editor interview I've ever read that talks about the submitting styles of men and women says that generally, men keep trying forever, while women give up after some variable amount of rejection. Considering that, men are statistically more likely to get published. That's not a VIDA thing, that's a pure numbers thing. Men try more, so they succeed more. The person who keeps trying is statistically more likely to get up the mountain. c) It's possible that being too annoying is going to get me no further than giving up. But I don't know that.

That means, if only in percentage, not even considering what feeds the soul, there is less harm in being persistent than there is in giving up.

So I'm going to be persistent. I'm going to keep pitching that damn editor, asking him if he has anything for me, bugging him, until he says yes. I got a third rejection from a women's mag the other day that said "please keep pitching me." Early last week I got a nibble on a pitch at a super-snooty publication, and that guy didn't write me back after I sent the full article, so you better believe I'm gonna ask him about it early this week. If he didn't like it, I'm going to try it somewhere else, and somewhere else, and somewhere else. Until it lands or becomes irrelevant, I'm going to keep trying it.

So thanks, Elizabeth Wurtzel, for giving me the words to whisper to myself every day, staring at the inbox. Just keep bugging them until they say yes.

Somewhat related: I got started on writing 1,000 words every day on Friday. I really wish this had not started on a Friday, but it did, so I got going. I picked up where I'd left off on the Citizen Kane essay and I have a pretty good trajectory for what's going in next. I'm a bit worried that the ideas won't all hang together once I'm done drafting - more so than I have been on a trifecta essay thus far - but it's early yet to be judging.

My ARC pile is juicy right now, and everything is decently far off, so I'm happy. Full measures of good and bad in the past week in terms of writing news.

Out in the world:

VERY IMPORTANTLY: I wrote a long, wacko essay about Sean Penn and Amanda McKittrick Ros, and the Millions very gracefully accepted it. I am sharing this piece everywhere, persistently, annoyingly. I love and am proud of it and perhaps I'll tell you why in another post sometime. Though I did already write this about it.

I interviewed Kelly Sundberg for TRUE. Her memoir, Goodbye, Sweet Girl, is a stunning piece of craft with an amazingly confident voice for a first book. Grab it before it becomes the next Wild and you're mad you didn't get in on it early.

Scraps from an Off Week

Let us say that this week included multiple self-inflicted setbacks. One of them involved fire. Not a metaphor.

Onward: I signed up for this cool thing Jami Attenberg is doing where we're all together supposed to write 1,000 words per day every day for two weeks in late June. You can sign up for it yourself here. I signed up with the idea of knocking out a substantial chunk of the Casablanca novel, but now I'm not sure. I have a lot of little projects I'd like to get done. My plan from last week to write an essay every day this week didn't pan out; see the short paragraph above. Maybe next week I'll do the little stuff to make way for something bigger.

I don't usually get upset about celebrity deaths, but losing Anthony Bourdain leaves a big hole in culture shaped exactly like himself and no one else. We'll be sorting out his legacy on gastronomy, travel, encountering the Other, and a smattering of other cultural matters for a long time. It'd be nice to've had him around to help us sift through all that.

I've got a music memoir on my ARC pile, so I pitched a handful of prominent music mags this week. They got back to me lightning fast - all with passes, but friendly and encouraging and unbelievably speedy ones. Part of me wishes I'd followed my college-era bliss and become a music journalist after all. I'm sure there are downsides to that profession, but at the moment I can't think of any.

Some days I want to stop doing this altogether, particularly when the reasons I do it are so esoteric. Higgs once assigned us a paragraph about why we write, to be handed in the following week. It took me longer to do it than assignments of many, many pages. And then he forgot to ask for it, so we never handed it in. For me it's not as simple as self-expression or leaving something behind or ego; elements of all that, sure, but it's more about communication - the hope that someone is out there reading, needing me to write exactly what I've written for her brain to hum in just the way she likes. Still, the confirmation that I'm communicating with people who want that hum is rare, and the sense that I'm sliding down into a muddy pool hole filled with dead bodies is frequent.

I cannot more highly recommend Ghost City Press's summer microchapbook series. I've been getting it in my email for two weeks now and YOWZA. It's free. Sign up. Start every day (through September!) with cutting-edge contemporary poetry.

Out in the world:

I reviewed a wonderful novel, a lovely deep-dive novel-type novel, for the Arts Fuse. It's about these two badass Surrealist artists who went on to spread propaganda against the Nazis at great risk to themselves. I loved it. And I think I'm going to read the rest of Rupert Thomson's work, now, too.

I also reviewed a hard-to-pin-down book of cultural criticism for Cleaver. It will interest a really small slice of the population, I think, but it was worth reading.