![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
I'm back.
Back from?
Oh, here and there.
I am looking for ideas on the best way to get my books out there.
Is it blogging?
Tweeting?
Website?
It is time now for me to get out here and pound the pavement getting my books sold...
good times!
So I am going to a writer's conference...and I am going to share that experience here...
along with something I've not done in a long time....
I am going to post excerpts of one of my stand alone novels, Searching for Hemingway.
I hate pretentious people.
At this moment, I was surrounded by them. “They” were the professors at the University and true to professorial form, they were sucking all of the oxygen out of the room. Normally, I disdained this sort of gathering and avoided them at all costs, but I was currently dating one of the pre-eminent English scholars on the east coast, so it was incumbent upon me to come to this bastion of geniuses and half-heartedly listen as they blathered on about things even Shakespeare himself would have found tedious and boring.
Just as my eyes started rolling in the back of my head, someone in the group made some disparaging remark about Amy Tan’s latest article in the Journal of Rhetoric. The article was about demeaning language, and I found it sad that these nobody’s felt the need to demean her.
It was at this moment that I knew I needed to get the hell out of here before my mouth took a turn for the worse, as it tended to do whenever I was being diminished. Okay, they weren’t talking about me, but they were discussing a novelist, and to these thorns of the English rose garden, fiction writers were schlock artists with nothing to offer their teeny tiny esoteric world. To these long-winded snobs, fiction writing should be sold next to the National Enquirer, which didn’t set well with me since I was a writer for a weekly magazine called The Scene. I was also an aspiring closet novelist, but I didn’t let that light shine from under its bushel; at least not with these people. The fact that I wrote for a magazine that covered past and future artistic venues from cooking to music to books was puny in their erudite eyes. They thought that anyone who didn’t know the meaning of avuncular and abnegate must be severely retarded. I have a Master’s Degree in English and I had no idea what either of those words meant, so I tossed the vocabulary gauntlet down for my 160 IQ Einstein, Professor Derrick Robinson, the man who dragged me to this soirée.
“What does avuncular mean?” I asked after the last pretentious party.
“You’re kidding, right? The word is on ninety percent of the SAT exams.” Derrick was hailing a cab and I was behind him, glaring at the back of his head. If I’d been holding an ax, I would have been glaring at the back of two halves of his head. “I must have missed that one, then.”
Two more cabs ignored him. I may not know avuncular, but I knew karma.
“You should read Monty’s book on the history of contemporary language, Eleanor. Very enlightening.”
Two E words I hated. For some reason, both Derrick and my father called me by my full name. Everyone else called me Ellie. If you were a really good friend, you called me El. “I don’t need to read a book, Derrick. I merely want to know the meaning of that one word.”
The third cab pulled over and I folded myself into it. I fold because at 5’10” there’s a lot of me to get in there in a short amount of time.
“It means,” Derrick said, pausing only to give the cabby the address of my destination. “It means doing something in a benevolent uncle-like way.”
I had to laugh. What in the hell does that mean? I mean, when would you use that word? And who would even understand you if you did? I believed language should be used to communicate with, not to be used as a club. Words like avuncular were stupid and were used only by the highly intellectual in order to establish some sort of rancid superiority. “It’s a seriously dumb word, Derrick.”
He shook his head slowly. “Words cannot be dumb, Eleanor. To say so is to speak in a low brow manner. It is not becoming.”
The cab driver looked over his shoulder, but said nothing. I, on the other hand, laughed in Derrick’s face. I mean, I really laughed. “Low brow? You think that was low brow? Saying it’s a fucking stupid word not worth the spit required to say it would be low brow.”
That night, he slept at his house. Apparently, I was too low on the vocabulary totem pole for him to sleep with. Still, he schlepped me to the end of the year bash, where I swore to myself I would use as many low rent words as I could. I wondered if schlepped counted as one.
Oh sure, I could have bellied up to the bar with the other power wives of his esteemed colleagues; doctors, attorneys, one physicist, and two shrinks, but they were just as pretentious as their publish or perish hubbies, so I had no luck there. I cursed myself for leaving my book in the office. I am always reading since I also write book reviews for the magazine. I think people should always have a book with them for occasions such as doctor’s office visits, cab rides, you name it. One Valentine’s party saw me sitting in the restroom for over an hour with a book. I wasn’t really missed, of course; me with my penny ante vocabulary. I mean, who would miss someone who never used the word avuncular?
Sighing, and quickly moving past a conversation about the use of symbolism in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, I made a break for the balcony, praying it would be unoccupied.
It wasn't.
A tall, dark haired woman was leaning on the railing looking out over Manhattan. I’ve traveled a great deal in my thirty years but few things are as pretty at night as the New York skyline. It’s breathtaking. Apparently, the woman thought so as well, because she didn’t hear my footsteps. She was mesmerized by it, and for some reason, I by her. She had a Joan Crawfordish stature but with softer tones around her face. She wore all black, including a very stylish black hat. Very few women can get away with wearing a 1940’s style hat, but this woman was one. She looked like a living anachronism…my first 64 cent word.
“Bored by the prattle of self-absorbed educators, Ms. Malloy?” She spoke without ever turning around to look at me.
“My ears are bloody stumps,” I said, joining her at the railing.
“How their students keep from slitting their wrists out of sheer boredom is beyond me. I could barely breath in there, stuffy old coots.”
I knew the feeling. “How did you…”
“I read your column religiously, and so far, you are seven out of eight on your fine observations and reviews of the novels.”
“What was the eighth?”
She grinned wider, still not looking at me. “I am quite sure you know which one. Even your review was a tad…wishy-washy.”
I studied the skyline and nodded. “It was Tainted Wine, wasn’t it? I think I felt wishy washy when I wrote it.”
She nodded and only then, turned around. “Your review wasn’t convincing, but I thought perhaps it was my own perceptions about your work that made it appear…gray.”
“Gray?” It felt as if I had just walked into the middle of a conversation.
“Yes. As if you were afraid to commit. I have noticed that about your writing in recent weeks. Don’t get me wrong. I believe you are an excellent writer and a fine judge of good writing. May I assume you are…” she lowered her voice. “Writing the Great American Novel?”
I know why she lowered her voice. I hadn’t even told Derrick that I was writing a novel.
“I write, yes.”
She barely tilted her head. I realized she was wearing Ben Franklin-type glasses. “Such a succinct answer. A rare quality at a party full of windbags. Are you far along?”
I nodded, but the truth was, I had been suffering from writer’s block. “Half way, more or less.”
She seemed to be studying me before she asked, “Might I give you a bit of advice?”
What was I supposed to say? No? “Umm, sure.”
She turned back to the view and was silent for a few moments. When she spoke again, her voice was barely above a whisper and I had to strain to hear. “Women too often surrender their dream for love or they set it aside in lieu of someone else’s. You are struggling with your writing because ever so slowly, yours is being sacrificed. For whatever reason, you do not understand the worth of your words. You can be a diamond in the rough, Ms. Malloy, if only you would allow yourself the luxury of guilt-free writing.”
“Guilt-free wri…”
“Yes. You need to find a way to untie it and release it from whatever has captured it.”
I wanted to ask her a million questions, but Derrick chose that moment to find me. “There you are! I’ve been looking all over for you. I checked the bathroom, in case you found something to read in there.” He came over and hugged me.
“Hardly,” I said, pulling away.
“Forgot your book, didn’t you?”
I grinned. “Yes, damn it, but that’s okay because I’ve found this remarkably interesting woman who…” when I turned to introduce her to Derrick, she was gone.
“Who?”
“She was here a second ago. You must have seen her. She was wearing all black with this big black hat.”
“I think I would have seen a woman wearing a big black hat.”
"She was here a second ago. You must have seen her, she was wearing all black.” I moved quickly to the first door to look for her, but the party was packed and I would never be able to get through the crowd. “Where could she have gone?”
Derrick joined me at the door and put his arm around me. “One more hour. I promise.”
Walking back into the main room, my vision kept sweeping back and forth in search of the woman in black. I never did find her again, and though I didn’t know her name, her words were ringing in my ears even when we left the party.
“Something on your mind, sweetheart?” Derrick asked as we got into the cab. “You seem distracted.”
“I was just thinking about my writing,” I said, snuggling up to him. Derrick was the kind of soft man that a woman could snuggle up to and not be touched by rough hands or an unshaven face. He had a square jaw that my best friend, Paula, called a Dudley Do Right chin. He did look like Dudley Do Right in a lot of ways. He had that same curly-ish blonde hair and deep set blue eyes that I’m sure all the little college cuties swooned over.
“Still bothered by that pesky writer’s block?”
Sighing, I stared out the window and thought of the woman on the terrace. "Bothered? Not any more. I think I know what my problem is."
"And what would that be?"
Facing him, I smiled. "I'm working on a novel."
"You're what?"
Turning away, I sighed. Guilt free writing. Maybe she had something.
****
Back from?
Oh, here and there.
I am looking for ideas on the best way to get my books out there.
Is it blogging?
Tweeting?
Website?
It is time now for me to get out here and pound the pavement getting my books sold...
good times!
So I am going to a writer's conference...and I am going to share that experience here...
along with something I've not done in a long time....
I am going to post excerpts of one of my stand alone novels, Searching for Hemingway.
I hate pretentious people.
At this moment, I was surrounded by them. “They” were the professors at the University and true to professorial form, they were sucking all of the oxygen out of the room. Normally, I disdained this sort of gathering and avoided them at all costs, but I was currently dating one of the pre-eminent English scholars on the east coast, so it was incumbent upon me to come to this bastion of geniuses and half-heartedly listen as they blathered on about things even Shakespeare himself would have found tedious and boring.
Just as my eyes started rolling in the back of my head, someone in the group made some disparaging remark about Amy Tan’s latest article in the Journal of Rhetoric. The article was about demeaning language, and I found it sad that these nobody’s felt the need to demean her.
It was at this moment that I knew I needed to get the hell out of here before my mouth took a turn for the worse, as it tended to do whenever I was being diminished. Okay, they weren’t talking about me, but they were discussing a novelist, and to these thorns of the English rose garden, fiction writers were schlock artists with nothing to offer their teeny tiny esoteric world. To these long-winded snobs, fiction writing should be sold next to the National Enquirer, which didn’t set well with me since I was a writer for a weekly magazine called The Scene. I was also an aspiring closet novelist, but I didn’t let that light shine from under its bushel; at least not with these people. The fact that I wrote for a magazine that covered past and future artistic venues from cooking to music to books was puny in their erudite eyes. They thought that anyone who didn’t know the meaning of avuncular and abnegate must be severely retarded. I have a Master’s Degree in English and I had no idea what either of those words meant, so I tossed the vocabulary gauntlet down for my 160 IQ Einstein, Professor Derrick Robinson, the man who dragged me to this soirée.
“What does avuncular mean?” I asked after the last pretentious party.
“You’re kidding, right? The word is on ninety percent of the SAT exams.” Derrick was hailing a cab and I was behind him, glaring at the back of his head. If I’d been holding an ax, I would have been glaring at the back of two halves of his head. “I must have missed that one, then.”
Two more cabs ignored him. I may not know avuncular, but I knew karma.
“You should read Monty’s book on the history of contemporary language, Eleanor. Very enlightening.”
Two E words I hated. For some reason, both Derrick and my father called me by my full name. Everyone else called me Ellie. If you were a really good friend, you called me El. “I don’t need to read a book, Derrick. I merely want to know the meaning of that one word.”
The third cab pulled over and I folded myself into it. I fold because at 5’10” there’s a lot of me to get in there in a short amount of time.
“It means,” Derrick said, pausing only to give the cabby the address of my destination. “It means doing something in a benevolent uncle-like way.”
I had to laugh. What in the hell does that mean? I mean, when would you use that word? And who would even understand you if you did? I believed language should be used to communicate with, not to be used as a club. Words like avuncular were stupid and were used only by the highly intellectual in order to establish some sort of rancid superiority. “It’s a seriously dumb word, Derrick.”
He shook his head slowly. “Words cannot be dumb, Eleanor. To say so is to speak in a low brow manner. It is not becoming.”
The cab driver looked over his shoulder, but said nothing. I, on the other hand, laughed in Derrick’s face. I mean, I really laughed. “Low brow? You think that was low brow? Saying it’s a fucking stupid word not worth the spit required to say it would be low brow.”
That night, he slept at his house. Apparently, I was too low on the vocabulary totem pole for him to sleep with. Still, he schlepped me to the end of the year bash, where I swore to myself I would use as many low rent words as I could. I wondered if schlepped counted as one.
Oh sure, I could have bellied up to the bar with the other power wives of his esteemed colleagues; doctors, attorneys, one physicist, and two shrinks, but they were just as pretentious as their publish or perish hubbies, so I had no luck there. I cursed myself for leaving my book in the office. I am always reading since I also write book reviews for the magazine. I think people should always have a book with them for occasions such as doctor’s office visits, cab rides, you name it. One Valentine’s party saw me sitting in the restroom for over an hour with a book. I wasn’t really missed, of course; me with my penny ante vocabulary. I mean, who would miss someone who never used the word avuncular?
Sighing, and quickly moving past a conversation about the use of symbolism in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, I made a break for the balcony, praying it would be unoccupied.
It wasn't.
A tall, dark haired woman was leaning on the railing looking out over Manhattan. I’ve traveled a great deal in my thirty years but few things are as pretty at night as the New York skyline. It’s breathtaking. Apparently, the woman thought so as well, because she didn’t hear my footsteps. She was mesmerized by it, and for some reason, I by her. She had a Joan Crawfordish stature but with softer tones around her face. She wore all black, including a very stylish black hat. Very few women can get away with wearing a 1940’s style hat, but this woman was one. She looked like a living anachronism…my first 64 cent word.
“Bored by the prattle of self-absorbed educators, Ms. Malloy?” She spoke without ever turning around to look at me.
“My ears are bloody stumps,” I said, joining her at the railing.
“How their students keep from slitting their wrists out of sheer boredom is beyond me. I could barely breath in there, stuffy old coots.”
I knew the feeling. “How did you…”
“I read your column religiously, and so far, you are seven out of eight on your fine observations and reviews of the novels.”
“What was the eighth?”
She grinned wider, still not looking at me. “I am quite sure you know which one. Even your review was a tad…wishy-washy.”
I studied the skyline and nodded. “It was Tainted Wine, wasn’t it? I think I felt wishy washy when I wrote it.”
She nodded and only then, turned around. “Your review wasn’t convincing, but I thought perhaps it was my own perceptions about your work that made it appear…gray.”
“Gray?” It felt as if I had just walked into the middle of a conversation.
“Yes. As if you were afraid to commit. I have noticed that about your writing in recent weeks. Don’t get me wrong. I believe you are an excellent writer and a fine judge of good writing. May I assume you are…” she lowered her voice. “Writing the Great American Novel?”
I know why she lowered her voice. I hadn’t even told Derrick that I was writing a novel.
“I write, yes.”
She barely tilted her head. I realized she was wearing Ben Franklin-type glasses. “Such a succinct answer. A rare quality at a party full of windbags. Are you far along?”
I nodded, but the truth was, I had been suffering from writer’s block. “Half way, more or less.”
She seemed to be studying me before she asked, “Might I give you a bit of advice?”
What was I supposed to say? No? “Umm, sure.”
She turned back to the view and was silent for a few moments. When she spoke again, her voice was barely above a whisper and I had to strain to hear. “Women too often surrender their dream for love or they set it aside in lieu of someone else’s. You are struggling with your writing because ever so slowly, yours is being sacrificed. For whatever reason, you do not understand the worth of your words. You can be a diamond in the rough, Ms. Malloy, if only you would allow yourself the luxury of guilt-free writing.”
“Guilt-free wri…”
“Yes. You need to find a way to untie it and release it from whatever has captured it.”
I wanted to ask her a million questions, but Derrick chose that moment to find me. “There you are! I’ve been looking all over for you. I checked the bathroom, in case you found something to read in there.” He came over and hugged me.
“Hardly,” I said, pulling away.
“Forgot your book, didn’t you?”
I grinned. “Yes, damn it, but that’s okay because I’ve found this remarkably interesting woman who…” when I turned to introduce her to Derrick, she was gone.
“Who?”
“She was here a second ago. You must have seen her. She was wearing all black with this big black hat.”
“I think I would have seen a woman wearing a big black hat.”
"She was here a second ago. You must have seen her, she was wearing all black.” I moved quickly to the first door to look for her, but the party was packed and I would never be able to get through the crowd. “Where could she have gone?”
Derrick joined me at the door and put his arm around me. “One more hour. I promise.”
Walking back into the main room, my vision kept sweeping back and forth in search of the woman in black. I never did find her again, and though I didn’t know her name, her words were ringing in my ears even when we left the party.
“Something on your mind, sweetheart?” Derrick asked as we got into the cab. “You seem distracted.”
“I was just thinking about my writing,” I said, snuggling up to him. Derrick was the kind of soft man that a woman could snuggle up to and not be touched by rough hands or an unshaven face. He had a square jaw that my best friend, Paula, called a Dudley Do Right chin. He did look like Dudley Do Right in a lot of ways. He had that same curly-ish blonde hair and deep set blue eyes that I’m sure all the little college cuties swooned over.
“Still bothered by that pesky writer’s block?”
Sighing, I stared out the window and thought of the woman on the terrace. "Bothered? Not any more. I think I know what my problem is."
"And what would that be?"
Facing him, I smiled. "I'm working on a novel."
"You're what?"
Turning away, I sighed. Guilt free writing. Maybe she had something.
****
Leave a comment
excited
