It’s not every day a beloved commenter shows up with a brilliant idea for a sly marketing ploy disguised as a guest post with a fabulous offer all rolled into one. Without further adieu,  Spring Chicken, aka Andrea Dunlop.  And take her up on her offer to explain publicity.

You know what used to make me livid? When people would tell me to self-publish my novel. This usually came from well meaning strangers at cocktails parties or clueless boyfriends who wanted to provide the solution for my unpublished writerly angst. I was always aghast. I used to be a publicist at the biggest publishing house in the world! I had an agent once! I wasn’t going to self-publish. How dare you.

Up until recently, self-publishing conjured images of desperate authors with their garages full of molding paperbacks from a vanity press.  This was not the domain of real writers. Until suddenly it was.

I’ve been back on the west coast for almost two years now and it’s shifted my thinking. The New York book world is ruled by the old school and the big six whereas Seattle is ruled by the flashy, techie Amazon and the wild west culture of the mad geniuses who flock here to give their ideas room to grow.

In Seattle, it seems all anyone wants to talk about is ebooks and self-publishing and the digital revolution that’s sweeping the industry. But instead of the fear that hangs over these discussions in New York, here they’re met with excitement and a sense of free-for-all opportunity. Slowly I came around. I joined a freelancer’s collective.. I started taking on self-published clients. I got a Kindle.

In the meantime I branched out with my writing starting a blog and getting myself a weekly column on theGloss . I started to feel jealous of those who had the courage to go it on their own while my own novel sat there, dead as a doornail. So I got out the paddles and brought it back to life. I made it into an ebook and got my editors at the Gloss on board to run it as a weekly serial. And suddenly I feel something about my work that I haven’t felt in a long time: excitement.

The serial begins today on the Gloss  and if you want to check out the novel itself, you can do so here.

Thanks for letting me crash today; I’ll be taking questions about publicity in the comments if you’ve got ’em.

–Spring Chicken

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 I’m returning my car to the Thrifty Rental Car Return (cause that’s how power agents roll), when two men, a woman, and a baby girl get off one of the airport shuttles and proceed to unload nine suitcases, most of them huge. The woman fills two bottles with orange juice and takes a long, slow pull off the carton, the pleasure of which registers in her neck. Her skin is so pale I wonder if she is wearing powder. Her cheekbones redefine cheekbones. Dark hair pulled into a tight pony tail, and yes some loose strands have escaped to tempt the gods.

The men. Could be brothers, so close are they in physical characteristics. One openhearted, clean shaven, thin, muscular. The baby is his daughter. Later on the bus, he will kiss her hand over and over, make a game of it, and she will laugh each time with the same amount of pleasure. The other man is also handsome, he wears a closely cropped beard, doesn’t take any joy in the baby’s laughter.

None wear wedding rings, but I am certain the clean shaven man and the woman are together, and are the parents of this child. I am also certain that the bearded man is in love with her. A man on the bus with a black cowboy hat asks where they are going with all that luggage. The bearded man says, home, and shuts down all further questions with his clipped delivery and withdrawal of eye contact. I imagine the bags are filled with cocaine, with cash, filled with organs, monkey paws, filled with worn clothes from the Salvation Army and a few personal effects grabbed in haste.

Home. A house bleached with sun, paint peeling like bark on a birch. Curtains that filter light like leaf cover. An enamel pail. A field full of fire. I get off the bus having fallen inexplicably in love with the couple and the baby. The bearded man continues to glower. I want to save him. A Foreigner song comes on the radio. He mouths the words.

What short story did you step into today?

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Sitting on a plane with my manuscript next to a woman reading on her K. I realize that a year or so from now, she will be reading the book I am working on in a million pixels. But I will still be the lucky bastard who got to read it first, who offered notes and thoughts on structure, on the title, on a plot point. I will be the one who first admired this simile, that character detail. I will still live in a tactile world where raptors drag devices through the Colorado desert, where water will find its source, and the last printing machine will suffocate beneath the plexiglass, the small plaque unread. Born. Dead. What are you reading, I asked.  The Help, she said.

How do you know when you’re dead?

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I got up again. Got up in the dark and parked my ass in front of my computer and starting working on the screenplay that will never be optioned, sold, made or streamed. The reason I did it is because I can’t bear not to finish it. Because some tiny part of me believes that there is a Santa. And that if I want to sit in his lap, I have to be a very good girl. I also love my characters. I love them so much that I can’t believe people don’t like the main guy. I know he’s an asshole, but he’s my asshole, if you read me. I probably love the very worst parts of my screenplay even more. Here’s what I’m saying: so fucking what. Finish it. Start a new one. And then one after that. I was never Cinderella.

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Saw Moneyball over the weekend. I would have enjoyed it more if I hadn’t been thinking about publishing the whole time, namely the phenomenal success of Michael Lewis: Liar’s Poker, The Big Short, The New New Thing, Moneyball, The Blind Side, etc. My daughter pipes up, “Mommy, why don’t you get Michael Lewis for a client.” Sure, sweetheart, I’ll do that as soon as grow a third leg.

I was also taken with the whole method of evaluating “underperforming” players and their likelihood of getting on base known as sabermetrics. I kept wondering if there was an equivalent system in publishing by counting reviews, features, NPR hits, an author’s Twitter followers, Facebook friends, high school creative writing  prizes and willingness to blow Comedy Central hosts to determine if they could get on the bestseller list and in what position, top five, bottom five, extended list, etc.

Is the game stacked?

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People often ask me why I left editorial and became an agent. It’s a good question but I’m tired of it. Why did I leave Judaism and become and atheist, why did I quit heroin for methadone, why did I cut off my beautiful long hair for this veritable shrub? Why did I stop writing poetry for screenplays? Why Coke Zero instead of Diet Coke? Why did I cut off my left foot in favor of my right, why did I pluck out both of my eyes? Why did Celeste give up her throne? Why did Antigone die alone? Why did I change from a butterfly to a cocoon. Friends, I had my reasons.

What about you?

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I’m back from the brisket brigade, otherwise known as New Year’s dinner at my mom’s. I have to hand it to her, at eighty she still makes homemade gefilte fish, matzoh ball soup, brisket, chicken, potatoes, Kasha varnishkes and honey cake. This post is an appreciation of the woman I never really appreciated. My mother always made us look words up in the dictionary. “Mom, what does Blah mean.” “Look it up,” she’d yell back. And then we’d have a conversation about usage. My mother admitted to me that she had picked out a pen name from a young age when she wanted to be a writer. Lynn Carter. My mother smoked Tarryton’s and drank scotch. I can’t believe she didn’t put pen to paper with those vices. She was a big reader, and I remember her reading to us in bed, taking turns between my older sister’s and my twin bed on alternating nights. And how I loved having her in mine when it was my turn.  She was very theatrical and gave her thumb a good lick before turning a page.

What about your mom? Oh, happy new year.

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Today, I received a three page query letter from a man who had one project ready to go and four others he wanted to mention. If you know me at all, you know I think query letters should be about a paragraph or less. Great title, brief description (no plot if you can help it) and your creds. If you know me at all, you know that I think it’s advisable to pitch one project and one project alone. And to lead with your best and most recent work. To make matters worse, this writer couldn’t settle on a title and devoted an entire paragraph to what amounted to a brainstorming session on titles. Normally, I would jot “please decline” on the top of the letter and shove it into an inbox near my assistant’s desk, and within a day or so, an intern would send a rejection letter. Basta.

Only, I liked the sound of the book. And so I kept reading, and I liked the sound of the other projects. And I invited the writer to send me the book that was completed. I know there’s a moral to this story and it has to do with a mythical beast and a pocket full of change. Who knows, there’s a good chance the pages are not up my alley, not my cup of tea, that they won’t rock my world or float my bloat. There is also a good chance the world will explode and single cell amoebas will vote on the next National Book Award winner and it will go to my twin sister Hela.

Are rules made to be broken, or are they marvelous?

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This is a shout out to my client William Todd Schultz and his new book An Emergency in Slow Motion about Diane Arbus. When I was studying in London for my junior year, I lived in a single room in a dorm in South London. All the girls ditched the dorm in favor of a flat on the King’s Road. But I stayed. I craved solitude more than anything. And this cinder block room was the room of my own I had longed for. It was the year I read Hardy, Dickens, Hopkins, and Larkin. The year I drank red wine and ate peanuts from a cellophane sleeve while I read aforementioned writers. It was the year I started to write academic papers in the first person. The year I saw Truffaut’s Wild Child. It was the year I went hunting for psychedelic mushrooms with a pale young man who looked a little like a mushroom and wore crepe soled shoes. And the year I hung exactly one poster in my room: twin girls  in matching dresses and hairbands.

Thus began my love affair with Diane Arbus. And so it was my great good fortune to connect with William Todd Schultz who was at work on a psychobiography of the photographer. He had even been in touch in a series of long phone calls with Arbus’ last psychiatrist. But more than this extraordinary new window into her life, I loved his approach to understanding this great artist. He looked at each of the central mysteries of her life in a way that I found thought provoking, tempered with common sense and respect, and complex. Ever since I was a teenager, I have always been fascinated by the great artists who took their lives. This book is tremendously helpful in thinking about the making of art and the unmaking of a life.

It’s such a huge topic, artists who take their lives. I don’t know where to begin to ask a question.

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I was at a dinner party over the weekend with a group of people I was mostly meeting for the first time. One of them turned to me at one point and said that she had read my memoir. She wanted to know if it had been difficult to write. It wasn’t. In fact, it was easy. Even the parts I sobbed through. I knew what I wanted to write. I had over twenty diaries from the time period I was writing about. I had an in-depth outline, but more than that I knew every key scene I had to write and the way each one connected  to the next like the stars in the big dipper. I knew what I would say and what was off limits. It was all clear to me, there for me.

What was hard were all the terrible false (fictionalized) starts I had attempted over the years. What was hard was the outsized jealousy I felt reading one memoir after another, believing I could do better while unable to write anything at all.  Funny how that works. I had made many mountains out of my little mole hill.

WHat’s more difficult: writing or not writing?

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