A Veblenesque Gorge

Biggest Announcement of My Whole Life: I’m Writing a Book!

It is with so much happiness (and a healthy amount of stress, now that the reality of a manuscript deadline is part of my life) that I announce that I have sold my book, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors, to Amazon Publishing.

And because this is Amazon Publishing, the recently launched publishing arm of Amazon, there will be some experimentation — namely, the book will be released first in serialization. You buy it, a new chapter automatically pops up on your Kindle/Tablet every week or two. The hold-in-your-hand, made-of-paper version will be released Summer 2014, and I am basically breathing into a paper bag right now.

S. Jam Fitzgerald was the first person I told the idea to, and he liked it. Thus emboldened, I continued batting it around for a few months, then pitched it to the woman who would become my agent, Brandi Bowles, who proceeded to do all the necessary publishing business things with it that are completely foreign to me, including guiding me through the writing of a book proposal.

Since this is a book about the process of writing, it’s only natural that readers of this Tumblr will be subjected to my own writing process as I scramble to get the thing done. I’m going meta like that. More to come soon. I’m so excited. 

I Am Writing This Blog Post for Free

I’m sure by now every freelance writer in America has read the post by Nate Thayer documenting his exchange with an editor at The Atlantic, who asked him to write 1,200 words for free. It looked completely familiar to me. Examples: I’ve let the Huffington Post, against every fiber of my being, reprint materials for free that I’ve written for other publications; The New York Times asked me to blog about the 2010 Winter Olympics for free (I’m a former competitive figure skater, so came not only with the writing chops, but also expert knowledge of that event’s most popular sport). I can say that the HuffPo editors are shameless on this front. The New York Times editor was not, and I appreciated it, even though I declined the “work.”

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I Relate Completely, only Replace “Russian” with “Simultaneously Funny and Profound”

Buying Freedom for $10

In my ongoing quest to defeat the Internet, I downloaded the program Freedom sometime last week. The program claims it can get you off the Internet and working again. It cost $10, an amount that, if it worked, seemed a devilish bargain. Improve my writing ability exponentially for a mere ten bucks? People spend $60,000 on perfectly good MFA programs and come out still wasting five hours every day refreshing useless webpages. 

When opened, the program prompts the user to choose an amount of time she’d like to be blocked from the Internet. After designating that time period and clicking okay, the program makes sure she knows what she’s about to do to herself by prompting her to click “Begin Freedom,” at which point, poof, every webpage that has ever eaten away at her ability to write a coherent couple of pages ceases to exist.

Freedom is the enemy of the Internet and the enemy of this blog, which are both the enemies of my writing career, which makes Freedom my new best friend. That picture up top, of a Russian woman who looks like a barbie doll, is there as a reminder of exactly the kind of thing I’ll no longer be obsessing over at 2pm when I have a deadline at 5.

Today I am fed up with my career as a writer, which entails so much work, so much Internet distraction, and so little money. So I’ve been brainstorming alternate careers. Here’s what I’ve got so far:

-Running a bathing suit store in Rockaway.

-Typing the words “Ryan Gosling” over and over like a kid in trouble at the chalkboard. I think this will generate a lot of web traffic for me.

-Writing chick lit about Ryan Gosling. 

(I realize that two of the three options technically involve writing.) What do you think, do I have a bright future or what?

What Richard Price says in the this interview for Bold Type expresses exactly why the taco shack has become an important outlet for me:

The thing about writing is that because it’s such a solitary activity, at least for me, I need to find projects that involve a little bit of social interaction or I’d go nuts.

I was going somewhat nuts. Now I speak words to people’s faces on some days of the week. And sitting in a room by myself the rest of the time has been relieved of its crooked, distracting glow.