Let me share my credentials: I'm the author of
Occupational Hazards, went to grad school at Columbia, and now work as an editor at
Publishers Weekly magazine. Let me share some bio information: I'm 30, married, a dog-owner, live in Brooklyn, and maintain a lightly traveled and
very lo-fi website. Here's the takeaway: I've got both of my feet in different graves ? magazines are in trouble, and there's no money in fiction for most of us.
So, when I agreed to do this, I'd been drinking. It happened in L.A. a couple months ago: I met Jill from Powell's at a BEA cocktail party. I happened to have a book that was coming out, and she happened to be Powell's web marketing person, and here we are.
I told Jill that I'm not much of a blogger and that she could verify this by checking out the posts I did for publishersweekly.com last year. She wasn't having it. I told her she would regret signing me up, and then we went to another party. Anyway, I have a book to flog, so will be here yammering into the void for the next few days. If there's a subtext here, it is this: Buy my book.
My plan was to write five blog posts of approximately 500 words each and have them done the week prior to Aug. 4. Well, here we are on Friday, Aug. 1, and I'm chipping away at No. 1. I'm a little terrified. My average day goes like this: wake up, iron a shirt, go to work, come home, drink a martini, walk the dog, drink a few whiskies, and go to bed. I piss and moan about things while at work (an author's ridiculously over-thought and ill-advised acknowledgements page or pages; author bios along the lines of "Author X divides his/her time between a large, expensive metropolis and somewhere expensive/fabulous/resort-y"; author bios that draw cutesy comparisons between the author's real life and the lives of characters in the book; faith fiction; execratory jacket art, and particularly jacket art that features bare feet; book titles of the formula: The X of Y or The [occupation]'s [relation]; how hung-over I am). Weekends, I go to my Spartan tormented nerd-artiste cave and write. Not much doing here, in other words. Writers ? and I feel reasonably comfortable calling myself that now that the book's out ? are boring, boring, boring. I could regale you with stories about the intricacies of ironing the blue shirt and how it's an easier shirt to iron than, say, the black shirt with white polka dots, but I won't. (The black shirt with white polka dots is a bitch to iron, though.)
I recently quit smoking.
My friend Craig is a poet and thus is no stranger throwing on a sandwich board and hawking his work. I asked his advice on what I should write for the Powell's blog, and he said: "Don't be an asshole like you were on PW's blog."
"I wasn't an asshole," I said.
"You were an asshole."
So: Sorry about that, Angela. Nothing personal ? it was my day to post.