Photos slipped from their right angles, the ghostly glue a Rothko rectangle. A world in a shoebox. A balled up piece of waxy paper. A chewing gum chain. A postcard from a distant port. A coupon. A kiss. Diaries scrawled in a mad hand. A phone number. A book mark. A photo strip. A typed letter on lined yellow paper. From you.

What do you save ?

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For the nine millionth time, my mother has given my contact information to one of her friends who knows someone who knows someone who is writing or has written a book. She swears she will never do it again, and then just like most promises it somehow gets broken. The worst, by far, was about the twins, separated at birth, who meet again at a boxing championship. There was the guy with the book about license plates. There was the book about education reform and the memoir of a world traveler!! I’m aways polite, I always say: sure, send it. You never know! And the truth is: you never know. Anything could be something. It can come from anywhere. The real problem is when people who are not writers (meaning they haven’t spent hundreds of hours writing), sit down in front of a screen and believe they can write. And believe what they write should be published. And they know someone who knows someone who knows my mom and she pimps me out, again.

Who do you know? Or want to know?

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Here’s a new one: I feel good. I still hate myself in that essential artificial log glow way. Yes, the house of cards is a mild breeze away. Yes, the thrum of poetry I used to feel could fill a thimble. Yes, my boots are near collapse, my skin flaking. Do you ever as a writer get a break from fucking yourself in the head. Can you remember dancing in a Quebec disco, your body breaking for the first time. A doctor speaking gently? A pregnant woman on the subway so depressed you could weep for the fabric stretched taut across her body.  Now, feel this. Your desk is your temple. Your mind is on fire. Forgiveness rests her gentle hand on your warm forehead. This is your time.

What could you fit in a thimble?

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I watched a movie over the weekend called Margaret. The movie was many things, but at its heart a powerful mother daughter story, or at least that’s how I read it. It said everything I’ve been trying to say with my so-called movie. Only I realized that I have been writing with crayons. Fuck shit piss. It sucks when you realize how low you really are on the ladder of who gets fucked and who doesn’t. And this brilliant movie by Kenneth Lonergan was apparently put on ice for twelve years over disputes among the producers and only just released on Netflix. No red carpet, no party, no Box Office returns. It’s from the same director of You Can Count On Me, which was a near perfect evocation of adult siblings dealing with an infirm father. Laura Linney. Philip Seymour Hoffman. It’s really okay. Every way to look at “where you are” in the great food chain of work getting produced is subject to nausea, panic, and delusional thinking. You just have to keep working and hopefully improving. I’m not giving up the ship, just a little wind taken out of my sails. Margaret, are you grieving, over Goldengrove  unleaving?

What have you read or seen lately that made you feel like a piece of shit?

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Please come hear Bill Carter read from his new book, BOOM, BUST, BOOM A Story About Copper, The Metal That Runs the World. And join us for a drink and writer talk on:

Tuesday, October 16  

Half King

  505 West 23rd Street   NYC

     7pm

Yes, it is a requirement to be devilishly good looking as well as a damn good writer to be a client of mine. Bill writes in the tradition of Jim Harrison and Sebastian Junger. He has written about the war in Sarajevo,  commercial salmon fishing in Alaska, and here about the world’s largest and most toxic copper mines — a dazzling work of reportage about the red metal.

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Don’t start your query letter with the name of your character. Lucy Links is on the rebound! Martine Kessell grew up in Capetown. Carl Noop never thought he was meant for great things.

Why? Why does it always sound…silly?  Or cartoonish? Is this just me?

Nora Elle Martin is heading home for her high school reunion! Arthur Horowitz walks 2.2 miles every day on the tread mill in the hopes of seeing Binny Abromowitz. Abigail Stone, when left to her own devices, thought about shards.

I think it has to do with the fact that the character doesn’t exist. THere is no context. You’ve gone off the deep end before knowing if the pool was filled. Is this making any sense? I get query letters like this every day and and they make me groan.

Ronnie Melt couldn’t stop thinking about the time she and Pablo Anger made out in the back of her father’s Jaguar. Farnia Parnassus always dreamed of flying. The first time Ricky Pert went to rehab would not be the last.

You can start a novel with your protagonist’s name, but I counsel against it int he query letter. But I’m just one literary agent.

Come on, give us a really bad sentence.

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I ask a writer to add a scene so I better understand a character. He invents a scene that blows me away. It feels so real that I privately think it’s autobiographical. Of course I don’t ask because that would be a) naive b) uncouth and c) uncool. Why does my mind jump there? How much of fiction is autobiographical? Why do we read made up stories? Are we children? Why do we hope to extract truth from fiction? Can you write anything that doesn’t come from your own experience, even in that abstractified, personalized, emotional, autumnal way? Robots, vampires, gullions, wasps. C’est moi.  On the 5:40 train this morning, from New Haven to New York, a woman named Laura said over and over, “Mom, we will mail the check to Gordon on Friday. Yes, by mail. Yes, mother. This is Laura. I’m going to the city. I wrote it on the calendar. We will mail the check, yes, mail.”

Is is true? Does it matter?

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To a startling and terrifying extent, I think about home invasions. I think about deer turning mean and deadly. I think about being run down by a bike, a car, a bus, a train. I fear running over the Holocaust survivor who jogs by my house every morning at 5:20. I fear squirrels when they stop chewing and take you in their sights. I fear people have died when they are late to meet me. Or that when they show, I won’t recognize them.  I fear that a bitchy email goes astray. I fear that people can read my mind. I fear my mind and the sink holes it seeks. I fear that I will always live in this body or never appreciate it. That I will fall out of  a helicopter. That I will be decapitated by her blades. That too many people will want to speak at my funeral and it will go on too long and that is all that anyone will remember instead of all the wonderful poems and songs and tributes to a person who lined her casket with bad jokes and Playbills from every show she’s ever seen.

What do you fear?

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Dear Betsy,

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