The End of the World as We Know It | Betsy Lerner

All My Bags Are Packed, I’m Ready To Go, I’m Standing Here Outside Your Door, I Hate To Wake You Up To Say Goodbye.

Posted on August 14, 2009 by betsylerner

Dearest darling readers of this blog,

I am going on vacation for a week. Well, if you call a vacation schlepping up to Lake George to defend my title as mini-golf champion of the world.

Future posts you won’t want to miss:

How I Almost Came to Blows With A Writer Over the Use of the Past Perfect

I Love My Kindle: Three Editors Weigh In

The World’s Greatest Copyeditor Reveals Her Pet Peeves

Top Ten Lies Writers Tell

What Publishers Nosh While They Read

See you soon, I hope!

Filed under: The End of the World as We Know It, Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

So You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star

Posted on August 12, 2009 by betsylerner

Tonight, at Cake Shop, Care Bears on Fire. Three fourteen year old girls playing the loudest most pumped rock I’ve heard in a long time. Favorite songs: Get Over It, You Can’t Make Me, and a two minute ass-kicking version of Everybody Wants to Rule the World. Full disclosure, the drummer’s dad is my client. But no arm twisiting was involved. I was born to stand against the dank wall of a basement club.

In 1975, with my babysitting money burning a hole in my pocket, I went into Cutler’s Record Store in downtown New Haven. A new release caught my eye. The album cover was black and white. A woman in a white shirt with a jacket tossed over her shoulder stared out unapologetically. I had to have it, though I hadn’t heard of the artist or any of the songs. The album, of course, was Horses. It changed my life.

Filed under: The End of the World as We Know It | 4 Comments »

The Magic is In the Hole

Posted on July 30, 2009 by betsylerner

You know how lots of paperbacks now have those “Questions for Reading Groups” at the back, which could also be called, “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?” These really idiotic questions that would actually insult a fairly bright fifth grader. Well, check this out.

I recently read Elizabeth Strout’s stories, Olive Kitteridge. I was deeply moved by a few stories and admired the book greatly. In fact, I keep thinking about one intimate exchange between a long married couple. The book is a huge commercial and critical success, wins the Pulitzer, all good. But then, something goes terribly wrong, and I’m not sure if anyone has mentioned it.

When you come to the end of the paperback edition, there is: “A Conversation with Elizabeth Strout and Olive Kitteridge.” Seriously.

Here’s how it begins: “Random House Reader’s Circle sat down with Olive Kitteridge and Elizabeth Strout in a doughnut shop in Olive’s hometown of Crosby, Maine.” Was someone having a cute attack that day at the marketing meeting?

Random House, the author, and her character all chat about lots of literary matters, but then Random House goes for the jugular and asks why doughnuts figure so prominently in the stories. “Olive” answers that they sure do seem to show up in a lot of the stories. Then the author allows how the doughnuts, for Olive, represent “a certain heedlessness in her desire to appease her appetites.” And then (this gets better, folks) “Olive” herself asks her creator if she has a doughnut predilection. And Elizabeth Strout chides her character, “Oh, don’t be defensive, Olive. I know exactly how pleasing a good doughnut can be.”

Am I the only one having an aneuryism here?

Full disclosure and in the spirit of true modesty, I do feel I’ve written one of the all time great doughnut scenes in my memoir, so maybe I’m a little touchy when someone takes the Lord’s name in vain. But for St. Dunkin’s sake, since when is it okay ON ANY LEVEL to have an author interview her character? Are we Pirandello?

Also, I keep forgetting to mention that in Portland, they have this place called Voodoo Doughnuts and they sell BACON doughtnuts.

Filed under: Authors, Books, Publishing, The End of the World as We Know It | 10 Comments »

FAQ: When Will I Be Loved

Posted on July 23, 2009 by betsylerner

I received this letter in my askbetsy box: Dear Ms. Lerner, I’m a writer and blogger, and I’m doing my best to promote my work, get an agent, and move to the next level. Can you tell me why it’s so hard to market and sell a literary novel these days, especially for a nobody like me? I think that writer’s today needs fan’s of their work, people who will fight for them no matter what, but how do you get that to happen?

I’ve had several conversations on my blog about this very issue, if you’d like to check it out. But for someone who has been writing for ten years, building an audience, shaping his work, getting footholds in the literary ezine market… what advice, besides “don’t give up” or “you just have to get lucky” would you give a writer trying to break in for the first time, in this economic climate. Go to graduate school in Iowa, sell a kidney to get into Yaddo, pay a huge fee to go to Breadloaf?

In other words, who do you have to blow around here?

Dear Writer: You’re tired of hearing “don’t give up.” Okay, try this: give up. Walk away. Get out while you’re young cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run. Did I say run? Run like the wind.

I could tell you all the economic reasons why it’s so hard to publish literary fiction. I could tell you about a novel I sent to 32 publishers and couldn’t sell and truly believe it to be the best work of fiction I’ve had the good fortune to work on. That and a token. It’s not hard, it’s nigh impossible. Ask any local bookseller what people are buying, if they’re buying.

Your anguish, frustration, and pain are very real to me. Much of an agent’s work is picking up the pieces (it’s often just as shattering to be published, but that’s a little like telling a single person who wants to get married what a bummer being married can be). But, you know, ten years isn’t really that long. You have to practice the piano longer than that to get to Carnegie Hall.

Is it all about fancy conferences and connections? No, not really. Mostly no. It’s more about luck if you ask me. And since you’re asking, you create your luck. And you’re doing that with your blog, the zine world, etc. Another writer, sitting under a rock, would marvel at your literary life. Everything you’re doing is right.

You may feel that the light is permanently yellow, but it will change. It always does.

Filed under: Rejection, The End of the World as We Know It, Writers | 6 Comments »

Don’t Knock a Teapot**

Posted on July 11, 2009 by betsylerner

I didn’t have a particularly literary day, unless you count going to Marshall’s, Home Depot and Trader Joe’s cause for a sonnet. I’m leaving tomorrow for the Tin House Conference. In preparation, I bought a new shirt and two bras at Marshall’s. I hope this will make me appear more perky than I feel.

I may not be able to post again until I’m back on Thursday, unless my plane crashes. In this case, I have left eleven poems, three screenplays, a third of a manuscript about my eighty-three year old pottery teacher, clay and loneliness, and thirty or more scorching diaries. I also have every letter I’ve ever received, including nearly fifty from someone in high school I never loved well enough, which I planned to use as the basis for a young adult novel. I ‘m sure I would love posthumous fame were I around to enjoy it.

**Don’t talk foolishness (from Hooray for Yiddish)

Filed under: The End of the World as We Know It | 3 Comments »

Sincerely

Posted on July 2, 2009 by betsylerner

The best thing about getting published, aside from the heaps of cash, are the fan letters. One of my clients recently forwarded a fan letter he received with the note: makes it all seem worthwhile. I knew exactly what he meant. When all the dust settles, the reviews (good, bad or non-existent), the sales (good, bad, or non-existent), the expectations dashed, the dreamed of prizes and literary acceptance proven elusive, you might be lucky enough to receive some letters from readers who felt you understood them, maybe even changed them, entertained them, and finally compelled them to write to you and say as much.

typewriter_jpg

I have this fantasy when I’m in the nursing home, wearing purple and smoking Marlboro’s, that I’ll read through all the great letters I’ve received. The best one was typed on a plain white postcard with one single sentence across it: What a fine book is The Forest for the Trees. I taped it on the wall next to my desk. I don’t look at it for encouragement or succor. It’s the look of letters banged out on an old typewriter and the odd syntax that give me hope.

Filed under: Books, Client, The End of the World as We Know It | 1 Comment »

You Say You Want a Revolution

Posted on June 30, 2009 by betsylerner

I am writing from my childhood bedroom. Some of the books that still line the shelves: The Yearling, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, On the Road, The Tempest, Rabbit Run, Deliverance, The Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, The Ox-Bow Incident, Franny and Zooey, Final Harvest: Emily Dickinson’s Poems, and Hooray for Yiddish.

When cars come down Northrop Road, their headlights ricochet through the room’s corner windows. Tucked into my bed, at ten years old, I often imagined I was Anne Frank as the high-beams circled the room, soon to be followed by angry Nazi boots on the stair. Only we lived in a ranch. Later, I imagined a Helter Skelter scenario in our suburban neighborhood; when I learned that Sharon Tate was murdered on MY BIRTHDAY, I nearly plotzed*. But my most terrifying fantasy of all was imagining that we were the Clutter family, waiting to be murdered in our sleep by some two-bit criminals immortalized in one of my favorite books of all time.

I know, it explains a lot.

*Plotz: plats (standard) Yinglish, with juice. Rhymes with “dots.” German: platzen: to burst.

Bust, burst, explode (“I laughed so hard I thought I would plotz!”)
To be aggravated, frustrated, or infuriated to an extremity. (“He was so furious he almost plotzed!”)

–from Hooray for Yiddish, Leo Rosten

Filed under: Books, The End of the World as We Know It | 3 Comments »

Another Thing I Really Hate

Posted on June 28, 2009 by betsylerner

I know, with the cinematic magic out there like The Hangover, The Proposal, and Year One, it’s no one’s fault but my own that I went to see My Sister’s Keeper.

So, I go up to the candy counter and order two small popcorns. The well meaning girl with a jagged part and tilted visor says brightly, “For twenty five cents more you could have a medium.” No thanks.

Then, I order a water and a small iced tea. “For fifty cents more,” she says, still upbeat, “You could have a large.”

What’s up with that? Why can’t I be trusted to know what size beverage or popcorn I want? How many people actually “upgrade” upon hearing of these tremendous savings?

Then, she asks me what movie I’m seeing. Why? For a quarter more could I run the fucking studio? For fifty cents more sit on Robert DeNiro’s lap? For seventy-five cents more tell Hugh Grant that it’s really okay if he doesn’t want to star in my screenplay. I’m over it, really.

Filed under: Film, The End of the World as We Know It | 3 Comments »

If I Thought Dreams Could Be Seen, They’d Surely Put My Head In a Guillotine

Posted on June 24, 2009 by betsylerner

Just came from my thrice yearly dinner with my oldest publishing friends. Did I say dinner? I meant bloodletting. I’m talking about the kind of gossip that soothes the soul. We also talked about a few books: Man Gone Down, Olive Kittredge, Eat Pray Love (her ex-husband just sold his memoir — Starve Sin Hate), Eden’s Outcasts, Words In Air, The Looming Tower.

Lest you think we’re just a bunch of publishing bitches up to no good.

Filed under: Publishing, The End of the World as We Know It | 1 Comment »

Sublime, Meet Ridiculous

Posted on June 19, 2009 by betsylerner

Had the great pleasure of seeing Conor Lovett of the Gare St. Lazare Players perform Beckett’s First Love. I usually nap for the first twenty minutes of any play, but I was riveted by the performance, the language (omg), and the great themes: love, abandonment, loss, death. Heaven, I was in.

Then, as if that weren’t enough, Paul Muldoon on the Colbert Report. Poets, tempting as it may be, do not go on the Report. You are not helping the cause. You will only look shaggy and twee. Unless you’re Mark Strand.

Genius talk show host: 1 Esteemed poet: 0

Filed under: Poetry, The End of the World as We Know It | 2 Comments »

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