Posted on March 14, 2011 by betsylerner
This could still be the oxy talking, but I’m fed up with the whole blogging mishegos. People are mean, the stats go up. I clean up my act, the stats plummet. Are stats all you care about? Yes, motherfucker. I can’t see the forest, the trees, the leaves, the vein in the leaves. Am I really working on my “other projects?” Is Vince Passaro really commenting about the asking of questions. Vince, there is only one question. You told me years ago. Plastics. Rosebud. Mergers and Acquisitions. And that angel Al Desetta with the Robert Lowell hairline and the Buddy Holly glasses and the Levis that fit like love in a bottle limned with luminous sex. O Dear Heating Pad! O Beautiful Books! O darling young writer with beauty and gifts beyond reason, long may you wave. You could be doing anything but you are doing this: this.
What are you doing?
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Posted on March 13, 2011 by betsylerner
To be stuck inside of Memphis with the heating pad blues again. Friends, because I am a bad ass, I turn it up high. All the way. Green. Gold. Orange. Red. I cannot read. I cannot sleep. I cannot swallow. I am in agony without ecstasy. It took me twelve hours to read the NYT front page review of the 25 year girl from Ponashe whose book is being called all the things I hate: luminous, numinous, transplendent, oracular, fablicity, concatacious, obliviosimous. I am as jealous as two slugs fucking in a snot can. Okay: I am weening myself off the oxy. And I promise that if I go to Silver Hill or Betty Ford or wherever Charlie Sheen scratched hash marks into the walls with his purloined Bic pen, I promise that I will not accept a power greater than myself, that I will not admit I am powerless over daisies, that I will not make amends especially to anyone I’ve hurt the worst. They are luminous enough, they are limned with light, they are dead to me.
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Posted on March 11, 2011 by betsylerner
Whenever I was set up on a date or about to meet a boy, I always imagined it was IT. You know, the Big Love. The station wagon with a blue peg and a pink peg and a golden retriever if I weren’t allergic to dogs. We wouldn’t be like anyone we were, flawed and ugly and twisted with shame. We wouldn’t have terrible secrets, or the calloused hands of others all over our bodies. We would be like the stiff spine of a new bank book, a virgin passport, something to swipe for the first time. We would be the first man to ever touch a woman there, the first woman to slip beneath a wave of pleasure. With french fries dragged through thick ketchup, your fingers in my mouth, fat thumb!
This is my weekend: four new manuscripts each one might save me, each one might walk down the aisle, each one might fuck you and you and you and you. This, too, is what I live for, some insane hope that I might cry or forget or remember or torment the small cloud for covering the sun. We read all weekend or go antiquing in hope that a small pot of clay from the 17th century might be glazed with a yellow horse and you alone will understand its terrible meaning. You alone will think these pages, these pages, these pages. Hoof print, lily of the valley, formica boomerang, oxycodone, skim milk, Houdini’s handcuff, the sentences you worship, the thread count. The thread count! Do not be gentle! Do not be kind! Wake me from the almost dead. Hush, Saxon, say it again.
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Posted on March 10, 2011 by betsylerner
Why do you write, why do you write, why do you fucking fucking write. No one cares. No one is waiting. There is no soundtrack, no young men, their legs flexed with sinew, no field of green slick with slugs. Who cares if you find terza rima, or sonnets or villanelles. You can fill hundreds of notebooks and lose them on trains, planes, in Courtyard Marriotts without a courtyard where you rent a three way and get bored bef0re the cum shot. You think about it all day long waiting for a cab, you think about it all night long writing in your underwear, a pack of smokes, a glass of watery gin with lime rinds sucked dry. You will not take a long walk on the beach, you will not binge on orange food, you will not see a Liam Neeson movie you have seen ten times no matter how desperate you are. You will not stumble around in your rented room as if you have a brain injury, you will not change your clothes, you will not open a can of soup the last tenant left behind with crusty opener slick with snail snot. You will remember something you can’t remember. You will stop yourself from starting something. You will touch yourself until you cannot cry. You will not write. No writing allowed. Writing publishable by death.
Process, anyone?
Filed under: The End of the World as We Know It | 48 Comments »
Posted on March 9, 2011 by betsylerner
Betsy, After posting a blog entry about my struggle with the acknowledgments page for my debut story collection, I’ve been wondering what might be construed of as tacky or overkilL I bet you have some good stories about author acknowledgments — the good, the bad, the excessive, the embarrassing, the heartfelt, the beautiful. Any thoughts or stories you’d like to share?
I actually think acknowledgments are gross and if you can leave them off entirely, please do so. The worst is when they they go on for pages and thank everyone including the nursemaid who wiped your ass. They are like the folded up pieces of paper tucked into Judith Lieber bags or tuxedo pockets of academy award nominees. I say thank no one. Kill no one. Swap saliva with no one. And if you absolutely have to thank someone, do it in under a paragraph and try to keep it to people who funded you like the Guggy’s or the National Endowment or the Yadooo foundation for sandwiches and fucking in the woods of Saratoga. Remember: you writ it yourself and you are the god of your page. Fuck editors, fuck agents, fuck reading groups, spouses, first teachers, mentors and especially cats There is a special place in hell for people who thank their cats and dogs and ocelots.
Who do you have to thank vs. who do you want to thank?
Filed under: Protocol | 56 Comments »
Posted on March 8, 2011 by betsylerner
I pulled out my back yesterday and I write to you from a raft of valium, percocet and ibuprofen pills the size of horse tranquilizers. I am drifting in and out of consciousness and I am reminded of my twenties. Only now I have shit to do and this actually isn’t any fun. Was it fun then? Not for me, not really. I just wanted out of myself. I never really partied so much as tried to stop my brain’s overdrive. Tried to stop the train I desperately wanted to get off. All those afternoons in my backyard, the Dead blaring on crappy speakers, a frisbee snapped from my wrist floating into an eternity of self loathing suspended for an instant. I spent today drooling on a pillow, a recurring nightmare visited upon me: a faceless person chases me and I can’t call out. A terrible sound escapes from my throat.
Drugs. Dreams. What does this have to do with anything?
Filed under: The End of the World as We Know It | 44 Comments »
Posted on March 7, 2011 by betsylerner
The Hose and I sent out our script to two more readers for notes and they were excellent. One had the forest in mind, forcing us to take a closer look at our main character.The second reader saw the trees. Like a dowser, he picked up every piece of dialogue that was off, every bit of illogic, and stuff that simply could and should be better. He also, without knowing who had written which sections, praised all of the Hose’s writing, while mine were meh.
Hey, I’m a professional. I can take it (up the ass). Look, great feedback, even good feedback, is very difficult to come by. I’m grateful for it, inspired by it. Do I also have script-fatigue? Yes. Get over it. Don’t seek and use feedback at your own peril. Do you believe the truism that the comments you hate the most are probably the most useful? Kill your darlings, blah, blah, blah? How do you handle feedback?
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Posted on March 6, 2011 by betsylerner
I just finished reading a manuscript that brought me right to the edge of tears. The restraint on the part of the writer was remarkable. In the novel, there is a moment we have been waiting for though on some level we don’t even know it. And when it finally comes, the author pulls back. The reader is desperate for the character to be saved, for something to makes sense, and the author offers nothing more than a brief memory, a moment in time that wants to stand for everything but in the end explains nothing. It just is.
I’ve always believed that readers love to cry. But there are tears and there are tears. What Woody Allen says in Annie Hall, that if you get a laugh out of a stoned person it really doesn’t count, sort of applies. I mean if you schlock it up and get people to cry, does it count? Or are tears tears? I will cry at almost anything. Scratch that: anything. I remember my older sister mocking me for crying at an episode of The Patty Duke Show. I love to cry. The most manipulative movies will work their worm on me. And yet, like the novel I read this morning, I also relish that other feeling of not being manipulated, but of being truly moved as queer as that sounds.
The first books that made me cry buckets were I Am Third, Bang the Drum Slowly, Of Mice and Men, In This Sign and Love Story. What makes you leak?
Filed under: Writing | 96 Comments »
Posted on March 3, 2011 by betsylerner
I always promised myself that if I ever sold a book, I would buy myself a Cartier tank watch. I got the idea in my head from reading Michael Korda’s superb book on publishing where he tells the story of how Jacqueline Susann’s husband had a Cartier tank sent to him, which he assumed was an expression of thanks. Only, a bill followed. If memory serves, Korda returned the watch. He said he’d buy his own damn watch if he wanted one. For some reason, I got it in my noggin’ that I had to have one of these watches. So when I sold the Forest for the Trees, I marched my fat ass into Cartier on Fifth Avenue and did just that. I couldn’t contain myself and told the salesman how it was a present to myself for selling my first book. He acted impressed and said that he always breaks down and gets himself a gift whether he meets a goal or not.
What are you gonna get?
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Posted on March 2, 2011 by betsylerner
For some reason, all of my lunch dates over the past two weeks have been with thirty-something editors. I still can’t quite fathom how I got to be the geriatric half of the lunch date equation, no matter how young, hip and cool I am. Still, I’m the one being courted by ARP, have a teenager, and get erratic periods. I often time travel a little during these lunches when I am visited by visions of my younger self, and I wonder how I ever pulled it off given my powerful impostor complex coupled with a tender misanthropy. And yet, and yet.
There was a two pack a day phase when I wore Ann Taylor suits, carried a Coach tote, and slept with crime writers. When I swam laps at 5:30 in the morning, wrote eleven page editorial letters and threw publication parties in my apartment with the brick fireplace. I hunted blurbs like large game, spent six weeks in London publishing, made a friend for life. Shrink after shrink after shrink. Husband. Baby. Promotions. Miscarriages. When I was in my publishing thirties it was musical chairs and making love to my Selectric. I don’t know how I pushed myself, or what compelled me. Love of language? An Amex card? A place at the grown-up table? And now, what? What?
What do you dream of, my darling young ones?
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Betsy Lerner 