what hasn’t worked for you?

Sending you big love and encouragement today — Fridays, as you’ll remember I recently decided, are my writing days. They’re supposed to be days that I devote just to my own writing stuff, and not to workshop stuff or day job stuff or other people’s writing stuff.

So far today, I’ve spent about 30 minutes on my own writing and 4.5 hours on reading the local weekly cover to cover, weeding through email, reading facebook, researching computers, making tea and breakfast, following friends’ facebook links to other websites that needed in-depth exploration, a day-job work conversation (which was with a friend, but it was about work, and either way, it was not about or doing my writing), playing with the computer to make the monitors work right, making more tea … so, maybe I should say more honestly that Fridays are devoted to procrastination.

I’ve been devoted to writing since I was 6, and wanted to be an ‘author’ since I understood that that’s what the people whose job it was to make books were called. For the past 10 years I’ve been writing with some desire for publication, and have had some stuff published. I’ve written with many people in that time, and have learned some stuff about publication from their experiences, too.

Here’s what I’ve learned doesn’t work to get your writing published:

– leaving it in the notebook and expecting an editor to manage to find it when she’s randomly flipping through the pages while she waits in a long line for your bathroom during one of the big parties (that you actually never throw);

-typing it up and leaving it on your computer and hoping that an editor will somehow break into your machine from afar, across the Internet,  just because she got the idea that you must have good stuff in there that you’re not sharing and she must use any means necessary to find it;

– spending the better part of a day (that you’d originally planned to spend doing something else, like going to the dentist or depositing your paycheck or going on a date) getting a piece ready to send out to a call for submissions because you realized that the deadline was at 5pm that day, and then discovering that the deadline was actually a year or — OR realizing that the piece had to be usps-mailed and received by the deadline, not emailed — OR getting fed-up and discouraged with the piece (and depressed by and for your future) and thereby missing both the deadline and your date;

– hoping that somehow playing on facebook or reading blog posts or creating reading lists on Amazon will somehow convey to the world that you are a thoughtful, risky, innovative writer whose words deserve a book contract and six figure advance…

These have been among my favorite and most used methods of trying to get published, and I can report to you now that they have been uniformly unsuccessful. What attempts at publishing haven’t worked for you?

Today I’m going to try that one last method that I attempt much, much less frequently — actually sending a piece of writing to an editor.  Wish me luck.

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Today’s prompt (and write!) — “13 ways of looking at a blackbird.’ Pat Schneider re-introduced me to this prompt, and I’ve offered it with each of my three workshops this week.

Create a short list of things or places that are interesting to you or your character or bring you or your character joy — try not to think about this too much: rubber bands, icicles, teacups, etc. The more ‘mundane’ the better!

Then take as your model Wallace Steven’s poem “13 ways of looking at a blackbird” — choose one of the items on your list, take 20 minutes and write a number of small ‘ways of looking’ at that thing. (When I’m doing this exercise with an erotic writing workshop, I like to use Letta Neely’s poem “8 ways of looking at pussy” as our model.

Here’s one of the writes I did to this prompt this week:

10 ways of looking at a candle

1.
bright yellow flicker strobing my too-early morning eyes

2.
quiet heat holding up the corner of the altar and i kiss the glass with my 2 fingers and name this flame for you

3.
this one burns hotter than that one, honey — it’s ok if you yelp when the melt hits your skin

4.
one more flicker in an angled raised platform of glass votives here in this church — I take the stick and pull flame form one to light the other. Might not be my faith but it is my mother’s, so I offer her prayer in a language she can understand

5.
little pointy face pushes to find the source of the heat and singes whiskers

6.
when the long holiday table is weighted down with the meal, we turn down the overhead lights and let the edges of platters and good once-a-year silver glitter and glint in the silence

7.
somewhere there’s a picture of us holding the shamos together to light the menorah that first year in our new house — your crazy fat wrought-iron art piece menorah on the stone hearth — and every year now I miss the ritual I left behind, and I still think of kissing good luck every time a candle burns out and the warm smoke spools up from the wick

8.
it doesn’t feel like another year older unless I’ve had at least one, plus a song

9.
the kitchen smells like honey as I pour melted beeswax into the glass jars we found at the yard sale — a year from now, outside Denver, the thick fluted glass will split when my father’s wife lights the wick I set into the wax, but for now I am proud to have created something so sturdy and functional and sweet.

10.
if you put it here under this dusty pot, we can keep looking at the stars while the water heats for tea

Thank you for the ways you can laugh at yourself, how you keep your own faith, and for your words. (Your words, your words!)