Dear Betsy,
I am a blog follower whose debut novel is coming out in April. We are having a small book launch in a friendly independent bookshop in London. I haven’t spoken in public since my sixth grade debating team and I am afraid I will shrivel up and forget my first son’s name. What suggestions do you or your readers have for 1) being relaxed not drunk 2) making people laugh or be interested in what I am saying and most importantly 3) choosing an appropriate passage from my novel. Should I choose something saucy? something introductory? For how long should I speak/read? It is a women’s commercial novel and I don’t have a strong speaking voice. Should I ask a friend to read who speaks BBC English?
Thank you, NAME WITHHELD
Dear Debut Author:
First and foremost: Congratulations. What a great accomplishment. If you like, send in a link to the book so we can all decide if we are happy for you or jealous of you. As to your questions: I think you should read and speak for three or four hours without ceasing. Ask your friend with the BBC English to ask three-part questions from the audience. Have her ask some in a cockney accent, and an Australian accent for fun. Saucy is good, but dry is better. It will be easier to make people like you if you wear something super tight, preferably your DVF wrap-around, and give out good swag. Oh, and ask your son to wear a hat that has his name on it. Be creative and good luck!
Anyone have anything to add?
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Got back on the horse tonight, meaning I sent the beast out again. Click. And with it every wish I’ve ever had since I wrote my first pear. A good friend recently said, all you can do is get it out there. I am a murderer of dreams. So, here it is, the foot on the other shoe, the cake you made, now sleep in it. We must, we must, we must increase out bust. This is your brain, this is your brain on submission. The only bad review is no review. Does the word matter if it sits in your desk, if your desk belonged to Jackie O, if the night and sleep are the best part of the day only you can’t sleep. The bed is cold. Your nightgown holds on to its last button. Where is the Benadryl? Click and you are dust, you are golden, you are sitting on the train, and out of the left window a sunrise that means absolutely nothing. This is not a sign.
I can’t tell a lie: I’m trying to write this post during the commercial breaks in AMC’s season premier of Mad Men.I’d give my left testicle to be a writer on the show. Guys, I’m feeling really sorry for myself tonight for no good reason except I’m in the all too familiar hell of waiting to hear from someone about my blah blah blah. I’d like to be the Silver Fox with his insouciance and never ending cigarette. Or even a secretary with a paper dress and colorful cardigan draped across my slim shoulders. I’d like to put Brill Cream all over my body and fuck somebody standing up. I want to be Betty Draper, skittish and angry and girdled. Or Joan, post-partum Joan. I want to be one of the kids on the creative team yukking it up in the coffee room. I’m a jealous son of a bitch. I hate everyone.
This is your writing. This is your writing on drugs.
I call it the twilight zone. It’s that fateful time between when you’ve corrected your proofs and when the book comes into the world. Apart from social networking yourself up the ass, there is nothing you can do: you’ve written your book, it’s been committed to type, it’s going to the printer, it will emerge with its own jacket and bar code. Fine, if only the writer could put his brain on ice, or escape to a tropical island, or whip himself into a frenzy attacking a new project. The last is the only inoculation I know of that staves off pre-publication shpilkes.
I heard this NPR segment today about the harvesting of organs. Apparently, after they take you off the ventilator to make sure you are brain dead (and you are), they put you back on the ventilator to oxygenate your lungs and organs so that they are in the best possible shape for transplant. Some believe you are alive when they hook you back up and this makes the harvesting process seem somewhat disturbing. Others understand that the person is gone and the organs are being kept vital.
Do you ever feel free? I remember writing poetry before I went into the MFA program and that was the last time that I “just wrote.” I wrote whatever I wanted and I didn’t expect to get published, didn’t particularly care, at least not yet and not for a while. I spent more time writing in my diaries than anywhere else. And it was in those diaries that lines took hold, became first lines, became poems. And it was a mess of private associations and agonies. It was all under the cloak of my own darkness. It was a girl whose fingers were blue and flat with the pressure of a ball point pen writing as fast as she could. I would like to get that back.
I’m at my sister’s and I’m looking at her bookcase, which isn’t organized in any particular way. THough in her guest house, where I’m staying, the shelves are filled from her life as an MFA student in theater. So there’s lots of heady stuff along with the classics like Ibsen, Chekov, and Shakespeare. Upstairs, there’s everything from Roberto Bolano to Prep. The requisite Franzen. This guy Jonathan Tropper who she loves. Lots of contemporary fiction. The novel, at least around here, is not dead.. When I used to date (which is euephemism for two week stands), I’d always check out the guy’s bookcase. I’d flee if he had a tattered copy of The Fountainhead or On The Road, and stay if he had Fitzgerald or Lawrence or Hawthorne or Melville. And to this day, if there is a bookcase in a room, I will always gravitate toward it and construct an identity based on what I find there: a person’s tastes, moods, passions, perversions. I will fill in the blanks, pass judgement, and often rethink that person based on his shelves. Not to mention the sheer beauty of book spines. It just can’t be the same as scrolling through a KindleNookIpad.
I met with my youngest client today. He had just finished his first book and the mood was festive, or was that the Sauvignon Blanc speaking? I asked what the reaction had been among friends and family, and he said reactions had ranged from tepid and dismissive to sometimes hostile. The young man was surprised, possibly hurt. And I say possibly because he seemed to take it all with a grain of salt. I asked about his parents, and even they, who had always been supportive of his writing career, now when he finally had something to show for his efforts, were somewhat indifferent. More than a few friends barely feigned interest in his book, others were happy to exhaustively describe the book they wanted to write. I understand jealousies and rivalries between writers but where was this coming from?
Betsy Lerner 