doing our best to corrupt!

BTW, I bought a copy of your book the other week for my local library!

What’s the title of your book?

P.S. I saw you read this summer with your mom in the audience, and it was brilliant and adorable.

Just looked up your book and the cover’s cool!

I’m breaking my maiden, as horseplayers say. My first novel comes out in July. Good luck to us all.

“It baffles them how you can write so slowly. How the things you’ve published are so hard to find. How you are never, or hardly ever, paid for your work. How, after not being paid for twenty years, you continue to call yourself a writer. And yet, that’s what you are. And you know the big break will come soon. It must. Because you’re good. Because you have things to say. Because you know your writing is better than the books on the bestseller list, or it will be after this next revision.”

These are some of the reasons I shy away from calling myself a writer. I’m too insecure in my own work to own the title and, without outside validation…

re: secret whiskey club, that’s what i’ve heard. i won’t know until feb. 1st and supposedly i can’t tell you until your book comes out.

yeah, you’ll probably see a bit of my comment in a post….i woke up five minutes before reading and commenting.

you have good lead time on your book. need any help on my end, let me know.

Yes, I’ve heard all the horror stories about how a new book has only 2 or 3 weeks to start flying off the shelves or they shred the books in the B&N basement. I want to see a TNB post from you that opens with that kickball line… it’s awesome and awful and true.

I’m very much looking forward to the secret Irish whisky club. I hope, and same with heaven, that someone didn’t make all of that up!

(P.S. Fearful Symmetry was so bad, I was almost in shock. Love the first 5 or 7 chapters, though. Still, good for her for the advance she got. It will allow her to slow down and get the next book just right.)

my book is out feb. 1st.

and then…..

writers have always told me the second book is the hardest to get published b/c they look at the numbers on your first book and if it doesn’t hit it out of the park….yadda, yadda. we’re stuck in a numbers game.

and if it gets harder than this, i’m going to lose my mind, more than i’ve already have.

i haven’t read it in 15 years, but there’s a book called ‘hunger’ by knut hamsun, that really affected me. partly b/c i’m 1/2 norwegian and i finally understood grandpa and mom and these toeheaded blood cells who can’t play with the italians too well…and partly b/c of my manic obsession to become a writer.

what’s crazy is i actually thought i was a writer 15 years ago, now i feel like less of one, but people give me money for it and i have the novel coming out. i feel like i’m on the playground, but i got picked last for kickball and i made it to first base once.

i’ve also heard you don’t hit your stride until your fourth novel. i don’t know who said that or haven’t really thought about applying it to a writer i enjoy, i’ll have to give it a whirl.

then all these damn writers like celine who hits it out of the park on #1, and audrey niffeninen.nen.nen.ger, who slices open my heart with time travelers wife, and her fearful symmetry gives me a shrug of ….that was cool —> i think i read that… (oh poor audrey, count that money, get that film option, keep writing)…

then kerouac hits it with #2.

but, a huge lesson i’ve learned…don’t tell your family or non-writing friends of any aspirations of this writing game…they don’t understand how slow it goes….next time i’m saying, yes grandma/auntie/bartender friend, i’m a journalist and this one’s a fluke. oops, another fluke. oops, don’t know how that happened. is that my novel, oh sure, it makes me millions, it’s easy, i had an idea and boom, i’ve been counting my money ever since…..i know you have an idea for a story, you’ve been telling me the same idea for the last 15 years when i said i’m a writer…boy, was that a mistake, no, not your story, sounds brilliant. really? thanks for letting me use the idea. i’ll give you 20% of all the proceeds that naturally come with ideas.

congrads on your novel as well.

i’ll see you in the secret novelists’ clubhouse soon. i hear they take the marshmallows out of lucky charms and put it in bowls. their calorie free and tom waits takes our drink orders…but it doesn’t matter what you tell him, he always comes back with irish whiskey.