It hurts to be in love

It hurts to be in love.

There is so much about it that hurts.

People don’t admit it, don’t talk about it. But I doubt if I am alone.

By "it", I mean IT, the need, want, passion, prayer to write. Often it’s lit inside you in childhood, after falling into the disturbing wonderland of books.

When I look back on it all, my “writer’s journey” (as so many of the more sickening how-to books call it) has been rocky in the extreme. Long stretches of struggle and hard work with tiny rewards, except for getting it down on the page. Brief upflashings of what can only be called inspiration. One sweet, almost unbelievable passage when I published my first novel and received the kind of reviews a writer can only dream of (only to be followed by negligible sales and quickly turning into box office poison).

Following that, I had a void. I had an abyss. I had a time in my life when I wandered strange. I don’t know what caused it. I had no way out, no compass. All I had were a few friends to wave at me as I stumbled by.

During this interminable time, I wondered if it was “all over”. It FELT over. I poured my feelings into a journal so self-absorbed that I would never consider showing it to anyone (though someone suggested I turn it into a blog – at a time when I barely knew what a blog was).

I can’t remember, except that I do, when the spark flared. I can’t quite find the end of the ball of string. Except to say I had Turner Classics on (which I suppose reveals my age, something around blltxyx years). It was a silent movie, black and white, and someone was walking away from the camera. I could only see his back.

His back was – what shall I say, jaunty? He was in character, obviously, and this was the way he walked.

After a few seconds, I said out loud, “That’s Harold Lloyd.”

I was not sure I knew how I knew, and this reaction was to come up again and again in the next couple of years while I beavered away at the novel. Yes, the novel: The Glass Character, a fictionalized account of Harold Lloyd’s life seen through the eyes of an obsessed fan who virtually stalks him for 300 pages.

Something happened then: I fell back in love with the process. Every day I approached the computer with excitement and joy. Surely THIS was the best thing I had ever written? If not, why did I feel that way? I spent a year and a half researching and writing about Lloyd, falling so in love with him along the way that I wondered if I had lost my objectivity.

During the writing, I would not talk about the project. I was close-mouthed. I knew if I talked about it, I’d kill it. I sometimes blurted things to my husband, just so I would not go insane with it, the isolation. When it was finished, I cautiously talked about it to people who asked if I had written anything lately (hoping, in that manner of people who hope you will fail, that I would avert my eyes, shuffle my feet and say, 
“Well. . . “)

Almost to a person, when I said it was about Harold Lloyd, I got a puzzled look. One of those “I really do think you’re out of your mind and are making things up, but I’ll iron out some of the crinkles in my forehead and tone down the gimlets in my eyes in order to humour you”. Then when I explained, stumblingly, “He was the silent movie comedian who climbed up the side of a building and hung on to the hands of a huge clock”, I almost always got, “Ohhhhhhh, THAT Harold Lloyd!”

And I’m sure they didn’t know how they knew.

My dreams were high and dizzy.  There would be a movie version, surely (which I cast in my mind: never mind who, I’m not that masochistic), or at very least a decent-sized book contract. I began the heartbreaking process all over again.

Every time I talked to anyone about trying to market a manuscript, they always seemed to say, “Just get an agent.” The “just” (which I am going to blog about, as I think it’s a casual form of sadism or at least dismissal) felt like a sort of “oh, quit kvetching, it would be easy if you did this the right way”.  One, two, three, and you’re in.

Oh yes, I tried! I tried. With my typical savage perseverance and propensity for running headlong into a brick wall, I tried. I did work with an agent in the mid-2000s, and at that time she actually approached me, a dizzying development. Of course I grabbed at it, even if it didn’t work out.

This time it was different.

Agents have to make a go of it, and I can see why taking on things like books of poetry and literary fiction won’t sustain them. They’d make next to nothing and starve to death, as would their authors. That said, it was pretty heartbreaking not to be considered at all: most of them would only look at non-fiction and children’s books, preferably series.

A few at least allowed me to send a sample of my work. The one that sticks out in my mind is the agent who asked for “the first two pages”. I had to blink twice before that sank in. The answer, based on those first two pages, was no.

That’s kind of like evaluating a speech by the intake of breath before the speech even begins.

I’m not crazy enough to get into the ins and outs of approaching conventional publishers, except to say that one submissions page currently says that it is permissible (though ONLY after your manuscript is accepted for publication) to mail it to them on floppy discs.  But along with this startlingly modern, Jetsons-like form, you must also mail the printed manuscript (typed on 8 ½ x 11” white paper, double-spaced, on one side of the page only and in 12-point pica type or larger) along with it.

And all on your own dime.

Am I complaining because nothing has happened? I don’t know, maybe. Have I just killed my chances because I quoted something from a publisher's web site, nearly verbatim? (To deal with the literary world is to be on permanent eggshells.)  Is this novel not quite as good as I thought? Hard to say. Did I lose my objectivity, fall in love with Lloyd to such a degree that I could never write about him with the proper detachment?

So what DOES sell now? Fifty Shades of Grey, bad soft-core Mommy porn. Maybe I should have had Harold Lloyd tied up and whipped.

Oh, and another thing I constantly hear (along with, "Wasn't the fun of writing it enough?") is: “JUST self-publish”. Or epublish, interchangeably. It’s a fast way to jump over all the barriers that “paper” publishers erect. It’s true, this new-ish form does open a gate that often seems permanently closed and barred. But the problem is that there are no standards. None.

I’ve been a book reviewer for 30 years, and I think I have some capacity to judge. It’s the Wild West: one big tidal wave of good, bad and indifferent. And the thing is, if your work really is good and worthy to be read, how will anyone ever pick it out of the flood?

People always quote an epublished success story, a “for-instance” like Fifty Shades or the latest Stephen King, but isn’t that something like winning the lottery? After all, SOMEBODY has to win, don’t they?

But unless you were born under a brighter star than I was, I can almost guarantee you that it won’t be you.

"You had me at hello"

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

The evidence is here: Why Oscar Levant Wasn't Just a Crazy Person

Oh yes. Do you know why all this is happening? Three guesses. Because I can only cure one obsession by taking on another.

And why did I need to cure my obsession with Harold Lloyd? Three guesses. Absolutely no one wanted to publish my novel about him (The Glass Character),and my heart broke. It shattered. No matter how much I am bombarded with imperatives to epublish it, I can't buy it, I don't think I'd sell more than a couple dozen copies, if that. Just more discouragement. I have no idea how to promote it, and surely the market is flooded by now. As far as I know, there are no editorial standards for ebooks, similar to the paper self-published books I've seen (which so far have all been dreadful, just screaming for an editor). Around here, traditional publishers are so freaked out by the new forms that they won't go near you, so you will be basically stuck at that level. My paper books sold poorly enough, and I am not convinced sending it out into the ether would net me more than a few hundred at most. I could go on, but I won't.

Therefore the only way I can avoid major depression is to take up my next obsession, which I will NOT NOT NOT write a book about. I have promised myself, and I will stick to it.

Anyway, Oscar Levant, genius, creative polymath, crazy as a hoot owl (speaking of birds), and father of three beautiful daughters - wait! Could this be right?

Oscar Levant had a whole 'nother life besides the grumbling, Buster-Keaton-faced, piano-dextrous sidekick in innumerable movies. He was a chick magnet. I can't find a good photo of his first wife, but I know she was gorgeous in the plucked-eyebrow way women were back then (showbiz women, anyway). Once they split, he pursued singer/actress June Gale with obsessiveness and fervor, and it worked.

I get the feeling June Gale was one of these glamorous women who was tough as nails inside, and it was a good thing because she would gradually evolve into her husband's caregiver. Oscar would fall apart and drag himself up again over and over, until he took final refuge in his bed. I wonder if his wife had to go up to his bedroom 30 or 40 times a day to supply with him with coffee.

There is evidence, slim but fascinating, of this other life, a much happier one: dare I say it, almost normal? I only found a few photos of June Gale, but she is a knockout's knockout, dazzling even by Hollywood standards. Oscar wasn't exactly anyone's idea of handsome, but he had a "something", no one could figure out exactly what it was, some odd kind of charisma or tidal force that dragged people into his sphere of influence and wouldn't let them go.

He would come up to women and drape his arm around them and murmur to them in that distinctive low tough-guy voice, and they'd melt. These weren't necessarily affairs, but rather Levant experiments to see how far he could get: and he often got pretty far.

Anyway, on to his daughters. I found only a couple of poses, one in which Oscar receives a kiss from his eldest daughter with visible affection while holding the youngest rather awkwardly on his knee. Obviously happy, he DOES look handsome here. Fathers didn't get down on the floor then to play Lego or take their kids to the park in a stroller because such things didn't yet exist, but there is no doubt Oscar loved these girls and gave them all he had, all that his crippled, fragile, crushed but valiant heart could give them.

Oh, and this picture of the three girls - they all have the full lips and sleepy-lidded, haunting Levant eyes, and to be honest it looks a lot better on them. He has stamped them all with his crazy DNA, and one wonders what happened to them (though the biography claims they all went on to solid careers in different fields), whether they struggled the way he did to stay upright, to stem the force of his tidal despair.

So Oscar wasn't really alone, not at all, he had a beautiful and devoted family (with June fighting like a tiger to keep him out of the hideous cuckoo's- nest sanitariums of the day), but it didn't really save him. I find this incredibly sad. What would have saved him? I'm not sure. His meeting George Gershwin was the best and worst thing that ever happened to him: the bio quotes someone-or-other saying, "What makes you, unmakes you." Even after Gershwin's death at 38, Levant would forever walk in his shadow.

(Looking up something else, I found this little splash of delight about his disastrous purchase of a "summer house", in which he functioned about as well as Woody Allen on a game farm):

The transition to country gentleman was not an easy one. The quiet, the sound of crickets, the animals rustling through the underbrush at night were a torment to Levant. The first day in their new house, he went out to take his walk, as was his custom in the city. Almost as soon as he stepped out of doors he saw two black snakes undulating along a rock. Certain they were poisonous, he scuttled back into the house, where he remained for three days.

The next time he emerged, the sight of a hedgehog terrified him. Insects gave him anxiety attacks. Even birds, with their restless fluttering, upset him. Levant, his nerves already unraveling, found that the most anxiety-producing creature in all the woods was the hummingbird.

'The hummingbird is crazy,' he confided to the journalist Maurice Zolotow. 'I make that statement flatly. The hummingbird is psychotic. If there were psychiatry for birds, they would have to analyze every hummingbird.'

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

Order The Glass Character from:

Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Barnes & Noble

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-glass-character-margaret-gunning/1117863913?ean=9781927068885

Thistledown Press

http://www.thistledownpress.com/html/search/genre/Fiction/the_glass_character_p580.cfm

Chapters/Indigo
http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/the-glass-character/9781927068885-item.html?ikwid=the%

Just sayin'

For some reason I'm thinking about an old rock'n'roll song: I first heard Herman's Hermits do it (not that I remember them). "Don't know much about history/Don't know much about (whatever it was, biology?)". . . I fall under the category of "don't know much, just enough to feel extremely intimidated".

I'm kind of getting it from all sides that I should e-publish. I sort of know what they mean. I should produce a novel that can be published in non-paper form, seen only on a glowing screen and paid for, presumably, by some magic machinations of a credit card.

I'm s'-pozed-ta get something out of this, myself. Like, royalties. Not royal-teas like Kate Middleton or that chick with the pretzel on her head, or somesuch, but money, the kind of money writers are always surprised to get. (Hell, I'm surprised to get anything. My royalty statement from my first publisher now shows a negative balance. How can this be, when almost all the reviews were good?).

Anyhow. On to the subject: e-publishing, or epublishing, or ehhhhpbpbpbpbllt. This doesn't cost anything, or very little, and people ARE reading these books, yes they are, and it's practically a guarantee they'll be reading even more of them in the future. Hell, now that I've started a blog and have a web site and even gone on Facebook, anything is possible, and I may end up with a Kindling or whatever it is. My husband has been threatening to buy one for months but is waiting for the price to go down.

But here's the thing. The concerns I have are manifold. I've spent most of my adult life approaching publishers with queries and sample manuscripts, and after decades of beavering away, I've published two novels the old-fashioned way (one might almost say the hard way). But in order to reach that happy state, there was a process, a long and rigorous one.

To get to the point where a publisher would even request to look at my manuscript, I had to first convince them it was worth their while. This in itself takes time, energy and a sales/promotional savvy that I've never really possessed. One must boil years of work down to a single page, and that page must be snappy and engaging. This is called a synopsis. But you also have to tell these folks who you are, what you've done, what your education is, what you've already published and etc. and etc. and etc. and etc. and etc. and

In other words, these folks don't want to take a gamble on someone with no credentials and no track record.

Then comes the evaluation process. This often takes months, during which time the writer either withdraws with a bottle of Wild Turkey or goes away and eats 17 pounds of Cadbury Mini-Eggs. Then comes more waiting. Then.

Then, usually, a no.

But, even if it's a yes, another process begins: working with an assigned editor who will (once more) evaluate and weigh and measure and advise.
What I'm trying to get across here is that there are standards. I'm not sure such standards exist in e-publishing (God, that word is hard to type). Can't you just put anything up there, or out there?

OK, another related topic. If there's no formal evaluation before it goes out there, are there reviews? Reviews don't necessarily "sell" books, but they publicly acknowledge that the book has been published, and also evaluate its quality or lack of it. It puts the book (and the author) out there in the public consciousness. Of course it's subjective, but it's not true that all reviewers are drooling idiots or failed novelists with a grudge.

So now we come to the issue that is very, very, very, very (OK, stop Margaret) touchy: awards. Writers all say awards don't matter and they don't even care if they're eligible or not. Then they grind their teeth to powder when the announcement comes out about who won the Giller or the Governor-General or the Booker or the Leacock or the Nobel or, on and on and on.

Awards don't matter unless you get them. When you get them, your sales can skyrocket, if even for a little while. And it might just improve your chances of publishing again, which is what most of us want.

Is an e-book eligible? For any of this? I suppose there are Eebie awards and such, but - do I sound like a snob, a Luddite, a - ?

I'm a writer, and, hey, I want an award. It'd be cool on my mantle, and maybe I wouldn't have a negative royalty balance. I don't like to think my book could be casually deleted, and thus no longer exist at all.

I like picking books up, and smelling them. I like how they clutter up my house, get old and fall apart. I like finding a paperback that originally cost 17 cents. In short, I like books just because they're books, and I like signing them even more, in spite of my miserable, stunted, dorky signature. Can I sign an e-book?

I think this is one of dem-darr paradigm shifts that everyone blathered on about in the '90s. We're between systems. Traditional publishing often seems to be moving very slowly. I know, I sound like I'm facing backwards, but to be honest I prefer the seemingly glacial evaluation period and being strained through the fine sieve of reviews and award eligibility over a method that (to me: don't know much about his-to-ry) feels too easy and does not demand real dedication, the kind that yields a high-quality, readable result.

There are those who will say, but look at all the dreck that comes out every year. Perhaps. But when the gate is this wide open, when standards no longer exist, when (as Moxy Fruvous once sang) "everyone's a novelist, and everyone can sing" ("but no one talks when the TV's on. . . "). Excuse me. I lost my train of -. When everyone's a novelist, and libraries no longer exist, and a moth will fly out of every rare edition of Dickens -

Someone will come out on top. Look at Stephen King. He can do it! Why can't we? But next time you're in an airport, just try to buy an e-book along with your Evian natural spring water and 500-gram bag of Skittles.