There’s a lunch ritual in New York publishing that is elaborate, byzantine, and requires the skill of a master chess player. It’s called the Cancellation and Rescheduling Shuffle and here is how it’s played. First, you must know a real invitation from a lunch gesture. A gesture comes in the form of a business card clipped to a book with a hand scrawled: Lunch? Or a p.s. at the bottom of an email: let’s do lunch. Don’t be fooled; these are not invitations. They are hollow gestures. They are guys who take your number at a bar and never call. By contrast, the Cancellation and Rescheduling Shuffle (CARS) begins with a bonafide lunch date, which can be cancelled by either party. Pawn to queen four. Some of the excuses might be: sick child, author in from out of town, had the wrong date in my calendar. But the excuse is secondary. Who cares if you have to get a bunion removed, a therapy session, a meeting with your wedding planner. What’s important is that you make a new date with absolutely no intention of keeping it. Pawn to Queen’s Bishop Four. And if you’re skilled you can postpone a lunch date for a year. Check. Which gets you bonus points and the opportunity to convert CARS to a game of chicken where the person who bails first loses.
Lunch?
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For me, the whole thing is editing. Yes, I love discovering a mushroom under a rock, yes I love hearing the words, “we would like to make an offer,” yes, going to lunch with handsome young editors who might still change the world is lovely, but it’s the pencil in my hand, turning my mechanical pencil a smidge and writing a note in the margin, or untangling a sentence, or offering a more precise word that I find endlessly satisfying. I love thinking about pacing, tone, and timing. I love taking the back off a watch.
I love these ads for medication where cartoons or puppets go from being slack to sunny. Better are the side effect warnings: extreme high blood sugar, seizures, impaired judgement, stroke, hypertension, shortness of breath, high white blood counts, loss of memory, loss of life. Guess you gotta weigh the odds Pinocchio. May result in loss of fertility, hair loss, extreme rash, or webbed feet. I take four pills a day. I’m told that long term effects are thickening of my heart and weakening of my bones. I fully expect to die of a heart attack while on line at St. Dunkins, my weak bones crumpling beneath me, but my mood will be GREAT. Unless of course I die of anaphylaxis from my nut allergy, my throat closing while my Epipen is in my other purse. I hate when that happens. I’d prefer a literary death: poison, pistols, quill pen. For fuck’s sake I’ve left all these damn diaries. And I’d like a great big funeral where all my writers say great shit and afterwards drink scotch at dive bars with paper coasters.
This post arrives late because I lost the editing on a piece I’d been working on all day. If I could have smashed my head through the monitor to retrieve it I would have. It’s not just the time, it’s that first best energy when you approach a piece of writing. As anyone who has lost work will likely attest, you can recall about 70% of the lost work without much trouble. It’s that other 30% that takes the form of a ghoul and torments you as you stare at a passage for so long you can no longer understand its meaning. The ability to place commas leaves you. And that perfect word you had supplied is just beyond your grasp. Now, four drafts later, I feel the original work has been restored, may be even improved. Would that I were a groom.
Inevitability and surprise. You expect something to happen and it catches you off guard at the same time. The ball rolls toward the cup — then drops. The sun lowers in orange gradations — then sinks. Plip. One small detail returns when you least expect it: a letter, a necklace, a peach pit. Timing. Pacing. The gun is introduced in the first act. A stranger comes to town. A glass menagerie. Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. How do create the high wire? How are suspense and tension created within a work? The butterfly nears the net. The sound of sirens. A scoop of ice cream teeters over the edge of a cone. A child steps off a curb. Can you learn to thread your book so that people keep reading, so that even the most subtle moment pools with suspense. Will she say yes? Is that your last breath? What if I get in bed beside you?
Over the last few weeks I’ve had lunch dates with a really great group of editors from all walks of the publishing spectrum. Young and hungry, eager to prove themselves. Fat and sassy with an impressive roster of writers including bestsellers. Grand and commanding with bittersweet memories of better days. The literary ingenue, well connected, moving as easily through social networking as a Paris Review party.
What do you do when you’re sick of your own fucking voice? This blog is seriously getting on my nerves. And foul language is not going to give me the kick I’m looking for. So fuck that shit. I don’t know. I’m in Tangiers. My boots are caked with salt. I am rubbing a Colonial grave with a piece of coal. A waiter confuses me for a man. The night is patent leather. The day is gorgeous and I can’t take it. Three pieces of chocolate. Two satin ribbons as fat and wide as your tongue. You are this, then this, then this. A movie so bad you had to watch. Are those new glasses? Is your panic attack better than my panic attack? You sound like an asshole. Shhhh. Static. Was that the fax machine? The heat through my house could raise the dead.
Sometimes I think writing and getting published are part of the same continuum, that within the very act of writing is the desire to be published, that we are always hoping to be heard. Other times I think that the two are very separate gestures. And that writing is an end unto itself and can be a deeply satisfying private act. I often talk here about the agony of writing, of being a writer. But tonight, sleepless as she is, I wonder if I’ve got it backwards. Isn’t writing the ecstasy? Publishing the agony? The promise of a lonely night, the comfort of a small island out of season? Is there anything more perfect than a composition notebook and a worn in pencil? The lost thread? The beginning, again? You are here.
I’m teaching a 
Betsy Lerner 