My First Time: Shannon Huffman Polson

My First Time is a regular feature in which writers talk about virgin experiences in their writing and publishing careers, ranging from their first rejection to the moment of holding their first published book in their hands.  Today’s guest is Shannon Huffman Polson whose memoir, North of Hope: A Daughter's Arctic Journey, will be released on April 9.  Polson lives and writes with her family in the Pacific Northwest.  In previous years, she has worked as attack helicopter pilot and business manager.  She spends as much time outdoors as she can with her family.  She started and finished North of Hope from a tiny log cabin in central Alaska.  Find Polson at her blog, A Border Life.

My First Agent

“How long do you think you need, a month?” my boss asked, when I told her I was quitting.  I looked hard at her because she was looking hard at me.  I tried to look respectful, not show my disbelief.  I was leaving to write a book.  She thought it would only take a month?

“I think closer to a year,” I said.

Her phone rang.  She answered it.  “Yeah.  Yeah, I’ll be just a minute.”  She set the phone down.

“So do you want to work part time?  What are you thinking?” she asked.  Something dinged and popped up on her computer.  She glanced at it, then back at me.

“I’m going to need to focus exclusively on writing,” I said, hearing my own words with an even greater dose of disbelief.

This was crazy.  I’d always taken the secure path, the one guaranteeing success within a framework that I could learn and operate within.  College.  The military.  Business school.  The corporate jungle.

I’d written an article for a magazine, and written a book query to one (yep: one) agent, and that agent had asked for a proposal. I didn’t know what a proposal was.

I’d written the first part of the book two years before.  I began in the months after I took a trip down a river in Alaska’s Arctic, retracing the route my dad and step-mom had taken the year before when they were killed by a grizzly bear.  I’d given my few chapters to someone for her thoughts.  In a nutshell she said: this doesn’t work.  I don’t think you’re ready to write this.

I put my writing to the side.  I worked at my day job in business management at a technology company.  Then I started again, this time working on the article, which Alaska Magazine published.  I went to a couple of writing conferences, one big, one small.  I took classes at the Hugo House, our local writing center, on proposals, on essays and memoir.  I wrote several chapters, worked on my outline.  Another year passed.

That's when I sent my first query, the one that was accepted.  I had the talk with my boss.  I quit the job.  My last paycheck came in the mail.  I looked at it for a long, tender minute.

“This might fail,” I said to my husband, whom I’d met at business school and was happily stressed out in the world of start-up companies.  “Maybe no one will like it.  Maybe it will be good but nobody will want it.  Maybe it will be terrible.  I don’t know if this will work at all.”

“Just like a start-up,” he said cheerfully.  I worked to internalize his cheer.

Proposal class under my belt, I sent out my proposal to the agent who’d asked.  She turned me down.  I sent out more queries, which were mostly accepted, and then proposals, which weren’t.  Despite my ability to crank out college essays, creative non-fiction was an entirely different beast.  Things weren’t looking good.

I applied for and was accepted by Seattle Pacific University’s low-residency MFA program two months after I gave birth to my first son, because apparently, I didn’t think I’d have enough to do.  Unlike many, if not most, MFA programs, this one didn’t let you work on a book.  I put my manuscript aside, and while juggling diapers and doctor’s appointments, wrote essays about my military experience, about climbing mountains, about music, about faith.  I tried different forms.  I published a couple of essays and articles in magazines.  I read books on craft, and immersed myself in reading essays, memoirs, biographies.  During the summer months off between quarters, I went back to the manuscript.

The fall of my second year in the program, I sent out queries again.  That night I tweeted: “Sending out queries for the book!”  And someone responded: “Sounds interesting.  Want to send a copy my way?”

It was a colleague in my program, someone who had just graduated.  I hadn’t known he had started work as an agent.  We emailed back and forth.  I sent him a packet.

Long story short, he accepted the proposal, and four months later I was in talks with a publisher.  Of course, that’s just the beginning.  A longer beginning than I thought it would be.  A three-year long beginning (not that I’m counting).  A whole new world of beginnings.

Sunday Sentence: "Running Alone" by Halimah Marcus

Simply put, the best sentence(s) I've read this past week, presented to you out of context and without commentary.

      The mass is not benign.  It is a stage three malignant tumor in her left breast, and it has spread to her lymph nodes.  Treatment is an accelerated course of chemotherapy and then a single mastectomy.  Worst-case scenario: she is dead within the year.
      Her husband Albert is with her during the second appointment when she gets the news, and he looks when he hears it as if the soles of his feet have fallen off, and that the contents of his body--bones, muscle, blood, and sinew--are spilling out through his feet, like the drain at the bottom of a bathtub.

 

"Running Alone" by Halimah Marcus
One Story, Issue #176

Friday Freebie: The Darlings by Cristina Alger, This Will Be Difficult to Explain by Johanna Skibsrub, and All That I Am by Anna Funder

Congratulations to Jim Mastro, winner of last week's book giveaway: A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki.

This week's Friday* Freebie is another triple treat.  One lucky reader will win a copy of all three of these books: The Darlings by Cristina Alger, This Will Be Difficult to Explain: And Other Stories by Johanna Skibsrub, and All That I Am by Anna Funder.

The Darlings is being called a Bonfire of the Vanities for our times.  Since he married Merrill Darling, daughter of billionaire financier Carter Darling, attorney Paul Ross has grown accustomed to all the luxuries of Park Avenue. But a tragic event is about to catapult the Darling family into the middle of a massive financial investigation and a red-hot scandal. Suddenly, Paul must decide where his loyalties really lie. Debut novelist Cristina Alger is a former analyst at Goldman Sachs, an attorney, and the daughter of a Wall Street financier. Drawing on her unique insider's perspective, Alger gives us an irresistible glimpse into the highest echelons of New York society—and a fast-paced thriller of epic proportions that powerfully echoes Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children and reads like a fictional Too Big to Fail.

In This Will Be Difficult to Explain, nine loosely connected and hypnotic stories introduce an unforgettable cast of characters. A young maid at a hotel in France encounters a man who asks to paint her portrait, only later discovering that the man is someone other than who she thinks. A divorced father, fearing estrangement from his thirteen-year-old daughter, allows her to take the wheel of his car, realizing too late that he’s made a grave mistake. A Canadian girl and her French host stumble on the one story that transcends their language barrier. Youth confronted with the mutterings of old age, restlessness bounded by the muddy confines of a backyard garden, callow hope coming up against the exigencies of everyday life—these are life-defining moments that weave throughout the everyday lives of the remarkable characters in this book. Time and again they find themselves confronted with what they didn’t know they didn’t know, at the exact point of intersection between impossibility and desire. In This Will Be Difficult to Explain Skibsrud has created a series of masterful, perceptive tales.

In All That I Am, award-winning author Anna Funder delivers an affecting and beautifully evocative debut novel about a group of young German exiles who risk their lives to awaken the world to the terrifying threat of Hitler and Nazi Germany. Based on real-life events and people, All That I Am brings to light the heroic, tragic, and true story of a small group of left-wing German social activists who mounted a fierce and cunning resistance from their perilous London exile, in a novel that fans of Suite Francaise, The Piano Teacher, and Atonement will find irresistible and unforgettable.  Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin, praised the novel by calling it “an intimate exploration of human connection and our responsibility to one another.”

If you'd like a chance at winning a copy of The Darlings, This Will Be Difficult to Explain, and All That I Am, all you have to do is email your name and mailing address to thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line.  One entry per person, please.  Despite its name, the Friday Freebie runs all week long and remains open to entries until midnight on March 28—at which time I'll draw the winning name.  I'll announce the lucky reader on March 29.  If you'd like to join the mailing list for the once-a-week Quivering Pen newsletter, simply add the words "Sign me up for the newsletter" in the body of your email.  Your email address and other personal information will never be sold or given to a third party (except in those instances where the publisher requires a mailing address for sending Friday Freebie winners copies of the book).

Want to double your odds of winning?  Get an extra entry in the contest by posting a link to this webpage on your blog, your Facebook wall or by tweeting it on Twitter.  Once you've done any of those things, send me an additional e-mail saying "I've shared" and I'll put your name in the hat twice.


*No, your eyes are not playing tricks on you--this Friday Freebie is being posted on Saturday.  Chalk it up to my broken arm and the fact that I was on the road this week with readings at Auntie's Bookstore in Spokane, Powell's in Portland, and Elliott Bay in Seattle.  I got a little behind on blog maintenance.

In Which the Ping of a Basketball Changes My Life Forever: John Updike's Rabbit, Run

Today marks what would have been John Updike's 81st birthday.  In honor of the occasion, I thought I'd share this essay which originally appeared in the When We Fell In Love series at Three Guys One Book.


In 1980, I was ready for John Updike.  I didn’t know it at the time, but my childhood was about to vanish with the single bounce of a ball on a city street in Pennsylvania.  I can trace the divide between Boy-Me and Man-Me to that solitary ping vibrating from the hollow air inside a basketball as Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom barged uninvited into a pick-up game on his way home from work.

It was a spring afternoon.  I sat in the third row of my English class, a windowless room filled with the insect-buzz of fluorescent lights.  I was 16 years old and I gripped a yellowed, musty paperback of Updike’s Rabbit, Run in my hands.

Boys are playing basketball around a telephone pole with a backboard bolted to it. Legs, shouts. The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires. Rabbit Angstrom, coming up the alley in a business suit, stops and watches, though he's twenty-six and six three. So tall, he seems an unlikely rabbit, but the breadth of white face, the pallor of his blue irises, and a nervous flutter under his brief nose as he stabs a cigarette into his mouth partially explain the nickname, which was given to him when he too was a boy. He stands there thinking, the kids keep coming, they keep crowding you up.

I saw myself in duplicate on the page: at 16, I was one of those kids passing the ball back and forth; but yet I identified with the man in the business suit (at 26, an ancient adult from my perspective).  I externalized the boys, my peers, and internalized Rabbit, the adult I was yet to become.  I stood on the divide between them.

I looked around the classroom.  Some of the other students were reading their own books, but others were scratching initials on their desks with the tips of penknives or playing with the ends of their hair, bored and waiting for the bell to ring.  I was alone with my Updike.

On this day I first met Rabbit, I was a high school junior enrolled in an honors English class, one of those self-designed lit courses where advanced students get to pick their own novels. My classmates chose such literary classics as The Outsiders, Jonathan Livingston Seagull and Love Story.  For whatever reason, I picked up Rabbit, Run by some guy I’d never heard of before. Maybe I thought it was like that Watership Down book or maybe I was going through a Trix cereal phase...I don't know.

What I do know is that I was holding in my hands a new kind of novel, a book that burned with sex and cynicism and moral decay—all elements of the adult world I was about to enter, but which were indistinct through the fog of childhood that still clung to me.

I was a sheltered, naïve kid with few friends.  I liked to hang out in my bedroom and read Hardy Boys mysteries and the prairie sagas of Laura Ingalls Wilder.  My favorite TV shows at the time were The Waltons and The Andy Griffith Show, fantasies of a grown-up Pleasantville that never existed outside a cathode ray tube.  Even in my late teens, I still burrowed deep in my simple, uncorrupted life—sex and alcohol and cigarettes were still two years in my future when I would taste the world at college.  At the time, I still listened to Barry Manilow, fer Chrissakes.

Then came Rabbit.

In those first pages of the novel, he watches the street game of roundball for a few minutes, feeling the tug of the sport from when he was a star player on his school’s team.  Now he is a man in a business suit who sells MagiPeel kitchen gadgets to five-and-dime stores.  As he stands there, the ball rebounds over the heads of the players and he catches it with lithe quickness.

     Then the ball seems to ride up the right lapel of his coat and comes off his shoulder as his knees dip down, and it appears the ball will miss because though he shot from an angle the ball is not going toward the backboard. It was not aimed there. It drops into the circle of the rim, whipping the net with a ladylike whisper. "Hey!" he shouts in pride.
     "Luck," one of the kids says.
     "Skill," he answers, and asks, "Hey. O.K. if I play?"
     There is no response, just puzzled silly looks swapped. Rabbit takes off his coat, folds it nicely, and rests it on a clean ashcan lid.

From one side of the divide I now straddled, I read how this adult tried to force his way back to his youth but found the way blocked by the surly boys who resent his intrusion.  They don’t look at him, they don’t speak to him, they barely pass him the ball.  As Rabbit plays, Updike writes, “he wants to tell them there's nothing to getting old, it takes nothing.”

There it was. I was about to slide into adulthood and the transition would be seamless, invisible, the ground crumbling under my feet as I walked along the cliff’s edge.  It was time to turn off Andy Griffith and shelve The Little House on the Prairie.  This was when I needed to bend down and lace up my shoes and start off into the world spreading wide before me.  I would run to meet it.  Ah, I would run, run, run.

Sunday Sentence: Red Moon by Benjamin Percy

Simply put, the best sentence(s) I've read this past week, presented to you out of context and without commentary.

His hair is the color of electricity.

Red Moon by Benjamin Percy

Friday Freebie: A Tale For the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

Congratulations to Peter Armstrong and David Pittman, winners of last week's Friday Freebie: The Coldest Night by Robert Olmstead and Wild Delicate Seconds: 29 Wildlife Encounters by Charles Finn.

This week's book giveaway is  A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki.  Here's the publisher's description of Ozeki's new novel:

In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there’s only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates’ bullying. But before she ends it all, Nao first plans to document the life of her great grandmother, a Buddhist nun who’s lived more than a century. A diary is Nao’s only solace—and will touch lives in ways she can scarcely imagine.  Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox—possibly debris from the devastating 2011 tsunami. As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is pulled into the past, into Nao’s drama and her unknown fate, and forward into her own future.  Full of Ozeki’s signature humor and deeply engaged with the relationship between writer and reader, past and present, fact and fiction, quantum physics, history, and myth, A Tale for the Time Being is a brilliantly inventive, beguiling story of our shared humanity and the search for home.

If you'd like a chance at winning a copy of A Tale For the Time Being, all you have to do is email your name and mailing address to thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line.  One entry per person, please.  Despite its name, the Friday Freebie runs all week long and remains open to entries until midnight on March 21—at which time I'll draw the winning name.  I'll announce the lucky reader on March 22.  If you'd like to join the mailing list for the once-a-week Quivering Pen newsletter, simply add the words "Sign me up for the newsletter" in the body of your email.  Your email address and other personal information will never be sold or given to a third party (except in those instances where the publisher requires a mailing address for sending Friday Freebie winners copies of the book).

Want to double your odds of winning?  Get an extra entry in the contest by posting a link to this webpage on your blog, your Facebook wall or by tweeting it on Twitter.  Once you've done any of those things, send me an additional e-mail saying "I've shared" and I'll put your name in the hat twice.

There's Nothing Funny About Breaking Your Humerus

Ouch

You're looking at an X-ray of what used to be the unblemished rod of my upper right arm bone.

At approximately 4:45 p.m. yesterday, that bone snapped like a breadstick.  The bone is called the humerus.  I'm here to tell you there is nothing funny about breaking your humerus.

Of course you'll want to know how it happened.  At approximately 4:44 yesterday, I was in my wife's soon-to-be-opened vintage merchantile shop here in Butte (The Backyard Bungalow at 1305 Kaw--for those of you who happen to be in the neighborhood with a bulging wallet).  I was standing on a ladder, holding a board I was about to screw into the wall.  We weren't sure if that board was straight or not, so my wife asked me to move to the right so she could see.  I moved to the right.  "A little more," she said.  I moved a little more--without thinking of physics or consequences.

On the .75-second journey to the floor, I thought, “Well, that was stu—”

I didn’t blackout.  It was more like I had a supreme moment of being Dazed and Confused.  Shock and Awe.  When I lifted my head, I could see my arm lying on the floor off to my right.  It didn’t look like my arm.  It looked like a Thing disconnected from the rest of my body.  When I tried to sit up, it went off in a different direction.

My wife feels terrible about this whole thing, but I assure her that she's not to blame.  It's all the fault of that little fleshy fold of my brain called Common Sense (aka the Duh Center).  As part of my penance, I suppose I'll have to make a ladder-safety video for OSHA.

So here I sit writing this to you from the cumulonimbus of Percocet and pecking each letter on the keyboard one at a time with my left index finger.  Of course I broke my writing arm--this story wouldn't be interesting if it didn't have a plot twist.  And hey, it only took me three-and-a-half hours to write this blog post!

So, because I'm now a rightie forced to live in a leftie world, The Quivering Pen will probably go dim for a few weeks.  Not completely dark, but posts may be a little sparse as I heal.

But hey, it's all good.  Because this is the first bone I've ever broken in this half-century of life (I'm not counting a hairline fracture on my collarbone from a childhood sledding accident), I'm treating this as an opportunity to do research on a future character who's missing the Duh Center in his brain.

Soup and Salad: Ben Fountain's Dead Novels, The origins of the English Department, Jenny Milchman's neverending book tour, Yaddo is officially historic, Hollywood calls on Calling Me Home, Jennifer Spiegel's confidence, Women's Prize for Fiction longlist

On today's menu:

1.  At Bloom, Ben Fountain talks about the novels he wrote before last year's masterpiece Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk:

Is the novel dead?  I don’t know about the novel, but I have two dead ones sitting on the shelf in my office closet, representing, between them, more years of work than I’m willing to admit.  It’s a cliché, but one of those true clichés, that your greatest strength is also your greatest weakness.  Over the course of my writing life I’ve discovered that I am, for better or worse, insanely stubborn—I’ll keep going back to a piece over and over until I think I’ve gotten it right, and this hardheadedness helped me bust through a lot of the inevitable obstacles that confront anyone who attempts this kind of work.  I wouldn’t have had anything like a writing career if I hadn’t been so stubborn, but that same stubbornness kept me going on those two novels for years after I should have set them aside.

Remind me sometime to tell you about my early failed novel which, like Fountain's, died a merciful death.  It was called The Last of Anne and it was written out of my anxiety at being a new husband.  It was horrible--the novel, that is, not my marriage (Jean and I will celebrate 30 years of wedded bliss this December).


2.  Check out this post at Alaska's 49 Writers blog.  In the first half, novelist Andromeda Romano-Lax talks about the just-concluded Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference--to which I didn't go (yes, I wish I was in Boston; and no, I just couldn't afford to take time off from the Day Job; and yes, I'm already making plans to be there at AWP when it's held in Seattle next year).  It's the second half of Andromeda's blog post which I found to be most fascinating, however.  To wit: the history of the study of creative writing, as reported by D. G. Myers in The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing Since 1880.  I gleaned several cool nuggets of trivia, including:

• The study of English--literature or composition--was not part of American higher education until after the Civil War.
• When the study of English literature was finally added, it tended to stop at Shakespeare and Milton.
• In America, early literature classes tended to be about literature (hard dry facts, historical dates, and so on), without requiring the actual reading of literature--and certainly no enjoyment of it!  Actual reading was considered an extracurricular activity.

3.  At Shelf Awareness, Jenny Milchman (Cover of Snow) is writing regular dispatches from the road where she's on what looks like it could be the Longest Book Tour Ever.  Between now and August, she estimates she'll have logged 40,000 miles on her auto odyssey from bookstore to bookstore across America.  She and her husband will be "car-schooling" their children on the trip (which, I'm assuming will include lots of reading....and maybe counting license plates).  In the latest installment, they encounter blizzards, a pearl-encrusted statue of a bison, and foot-stomping readers.

4.  Yahoo for Yaddo!  The renowned writing retreat is now an official National Historic Landmark.

5.  Congratulations to my fellow Book Pregnant gal pal Julie Kibler.  Her debut novel, Calling Me Home, has just been picked up by Warner Brothers.  The book is inspired by events in Kibler's family and revolves around the relationship between 89-year-old Isabelle McAllister and her hairdresser, a black single mother named Dorrie Curtis.  McAllister enlists Curtis’ help to drive her from her home in Arlington, Texas, to a funeral in Cincinnati.  Along the way, McAllister reveals the secrets of her past, in which she fell in love with the black son of her family’s housekeeper to tragic consequences.  I'm sure Hollywood picked up on the whole "marriage between The Help and Driving Miss Daisy" angle, but can you blame them?  I, for one, can't wait to see the movie.  But I'll read the book first.


6.  Virginia Pye (River of Dust) has a great interview with Jennifer Spiegel (Love Slave, The Freak Chronicles) at her blog.  I was especially struck by what Jennifer had to say about self-confidence: "I will say—and I don’t mean for this to sound cocky—I believe that writers who make it are confident in their abilities.  They think they’re good.  They have to believe this.  If you’re going to make it, you have to think, I’m good and people should read me."


7.  The longlist for the Women's Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize) has been released and it is bursting at the seams with strong contenders, among them Hilary Mantel, Zadie Smith, Barbara Kingsolver, Gillian Flynn, Shelia Heti, Kate Atkinson, A. M. Homes, and Maria Semple.  The shortlist will be announced April 16; the winner will be announced June 5.  One thing's for sure: I would not want to be a judge in this year's competition.

Trailer Park Tuesday: The Sunshine When She's Gone by Thea Goodman

Welcome to Trailer Park Tuesday, a showcase of new book trailers and, in a few cases, previews of book-related movies.  Unless their last name is Grisham or King, authors will probably never see their trailers on the big screen at the local cineplex.  And that's a shame because a lot of hard work goes into producing these short marriages between book and video.  So, if you like what you see, please spread the word and help these videos go viral.

Anyone who has survived the boot camp of parenting--i.e., the six weeks immediately after the Blessed Event of Birth when sleep deprivation, confusion, and midnight joltings-awake with a little dictator screaming in your ear--will have an visceral, PTSD reaction to the trailer for Thea Goodman's debut novel The Sunshine When She's Gone.  The video has two competing soundtracks: a squalling baby's insistent cry and a bright, jangly ragtime tune.  If this doesn't make you break out in diaper rash, then you obviously had a much easier, quieter, sleep-filled experience than 99.9 percent of the rest of us parents.  We hate you.  But from the looks of it, most of us will love Goodman's novel which tells the story of John and Veronica Reed, fragile new parents on the edge.  One morning, Veronica wakes up with a strange feeling.  That's because she's just had a good night's sleep.  And that's because her husband and baby are gone--fled to the Carribean for some R&R (though how John thinks he's going to get any rest or relaxation is beyond me).  Parental abduction seems like it would make for some rather dark material, but critics have praised the novel for its wry satire of modern marriage, as well as calling it a suspenseful page-turner.  Nell Freudenberger, author of The Newlyweds, said: "Thea Goodman has made something I would've thought impossible: an edge-of-your-seat narrative about parenting a small child. Her emotional investment in her characters is complete as they confront each other, themselves, and the heavy weight of new love."  Look for The Sunshine When She's Gone in bookstores now.  Baby wipes and burp cloths not included.

My First Time: Ron Currie Jr.

My First Time is a regular feature in which writers talk about virgin experiences in their writing and publishing careers, ranging from their first rejection to the moment of holding their first published book in their hands.  Today’s guest is Ron Currie Jr., author of the novels God Is Dead, Everything Matters!, and the recently-released Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles.   His writing has appeared in Glimmer Train, The Sun, Other Voices, The Nervous Breakdown and several other places.  The Believer has called his fiction "bladder-threateningly hilarious."  Currie has received the New York Public Library Young Lions award, the Addison M. Metcalf award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Alex Award from the American Library Association.  Click here to visit his website.  You can also find him on Facebook and Twitter.

My First Resolve

In November of 2000, a few days after the presidential election but a month before the Supreme Court would kiss the ring of George W. Bush, I was freshly sprung from a mental hospital following the second massive depression of my life.  I say "following," but that's not quite accurate.  The depression hadn't ended--not by a long shot--but I had been deemed fit to be alone around sharp objects and belts and such, and so I got my walking papers.  I was wide-eyed, rail-thin, stumbling around on legs shaky as a newborn fawn's.  I was barely employable, though my workplace at the time was kind enough to keep me on, in an extremely part-time capacity, until my mental convalescence was over.  I spent a lot of time surveying the smoldering remains of my mid-twenties, and what I saw, among the shitty jobs and empty bottles, was the pile of short stories I had worked on in earnest but not yet been able to, quite literally, give away.

One thing I knew was that I couldn't keep working jobs I loathed in order to support writing that no one wanted.  Something had to give.  Either I would demonstrate to myself, finally, that this writing thing was viable (though I had no idea what "viable" meant, beyond writing at least one story good enough that somebody would want to publish it), or I would jettison the whole idea of being a writer, go back to school, and find a job that paid more than $18k a year and didn't make me want to hang myself every other day.

I gave myself a deadline six months away, on my 26th birthday.  If no one had accepted a story of mine by then, I was all done.

It seems laughably dramatic, from this side of the divide--the notion that if I hadn't published anything by the ripe old age of 26, I was useless as a writer.  Ah, the narrow perspective of youth.  But it also focused me, because I knew deep down that I really, really didn't want to give it up.  And the focus paid off--just a couple of weeks before my birthday, I got my first acceptance, from a new online magazine.  The magazine was named for a writer whose books had recently become holy texts for me.  It paid nothing, and was read by nearly no one.  I was overjoyed.  I was galvanized.  Twelve years and three novels later, I still remember the moment, and its effect, as though George W. were still just stumbling through his first inauguration speech.

Photo by Lisa Prosienski

Sunday Sentence: Red Moon by Benjamin Percy

Simply put, the best sentence(s) I've read this past week, presented to you out of context and without commentary.

She feels something deep inside her--maybe fear or fury--springing open like a black umbrella.

Red Moon* by Benjamin Percy

 

*Click here for more of my thoughts on Red Moon at Writers Read