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| Richard Dawkins talking |
My query letter,
nice little worm, must be getting more attractive. Two nibbles. An
agent wanted 5 pages but quickly got back to me. Did not "draw her
in", her nice note read. The other, a small Portland publishing house,
wanted 4 consecutive chapters. Sent that off this morning after dealing
with fear because it also requested my ideas for the dreaded
"marketing".
Now for some discussion of language as written and as heard. If
we listened to ourselves speak while we're speaking, we'd realize how
we actually "sound". Novelists who use dialogue realize there's a line
between how our language sounds and how it's written. Enjoyed this article which contained a discussion of Californian language.
The section about "hella" in the article points up my thoughts. "Hella" is a contraction of "hell-of-a" so it's not really a new word; it's a contraction. I worked with troubled teens in the past and, for a long time, I couldn't understand what a couple of Cincinnati teens meant when they said, "fingo". Later, I realized "fingo" was a contraction for an Appalachian phraseology, i.e. "fixing-to-go" as in "I'm fixing to go shoot that man if he don't quit singing."
Deafness contributes to changes in language too. In the 60s, people used to speak of "boogieing" as in I'm going to "boogie it out of here", meaning get out quick from the frenetic dance, boogie-woogie. Wasn't many decades after that phrase appeared before I began to encounter the written word "book" in place of "boogie". Now people were "booking it" out of somewhere. Phrase made no sense except to the ear. Recently, a friend, Carl Tropea, pointed out that "book it" might be a phrase coined from "booking a flight". That makes sense.
The personality trait about myself hardest to accept is that I'm a writer. Came through to me two days ago when a publisher I queried asked to look at Angie's Choice and also asked for "intended audience, marketing ideas for your work". These days the writer not only writes but he must market his work. Panic! I never took a course in marketing, have no talent for selling myself or the book I've written. The thought of selling myself terrifies me.
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| my hidden nature |
I don't know marketing from grocery shopping or networking from fishnet hosiery. I've been writing about my life and the reality it exists in since high school with absolutely no financial success or major critical acclaim. If I'm not writing a poem or short story, I've been at work on a novel, most of those unfinished. Those times when I'm not working on creative stuff, I'm pounding away at internet debates with strangers, letters to the editor, emails to friends and family, and essays or journaling, now blogging or Facebooking—thousands and thousands of pieces of my reality all over the place—plus those scholarly term papers when I was in school. Several decades ago I got tired of carrying them around and found a home for them in a dirty green dumpster. Could it be, I ask myself, that I'm trying to disprove the idea that if a writer sticks with it, he'll make it. "Make it" itself is loaded with ambivalence and ambiguity.
Here's the problem in a nutshell: What is it about a human nature that it must have someone other than itself approve of what it's doing before the value of the doing becomes evident to him or her? At the top, I've included a photo of klipschutz, a poet/songwriter who understands the art of presenting the self. His work is pretty damn good also. Take a look at it. We published him long ago in a microzine wife and I published and edited: George & Mertie's Place.
