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Thanks, I failed better.

This July I participated in Camp NaNoWriMo, my first crack at this sort of writing “sprint.” I failed spectacularly.

The original NaNoWriMo, held every November, challenges writers to bang out a 50,000-word novel in thirty days. The “Camp” allows writers to set their own word count goal. The time was right: Finally, after countless outlines, isolated scenes, and false starts, I had a few thousand words of a new novel. I didn’t hate them. That weren’t completely wrong. I knew the story I wanted to tell. I knew the characters well enough to trust where they led me. I set a modest goal: 15,500 words, just 500 a day. I had a lot going on, personally, but I figured I’d work around it. I was determined to try.

I did try, and I failed.

I did not come close. Life interfered, as I feared it might. In all the ways that feed and distract a writer. I wrote a fraction of what I’d hoped. I failed but I wrote 4,349 words. 4,349 new words building on those already written, pointing me more clearly in the direction this novel will take. 4,349 words that brought my characters to life and sent me into fits of deep planning. 4,349 words is not much. Not enough. But it’s a lot more than I wrote the month before.

If I want to finish this novel I’d better return to this manuscript every single day, give myself increasingly ambitious word count goals. I know I can do it. I’ve completed and revised (and revised) two novels and rewritten one word by word. That one, Not On Fire, Only Dying, was published last year.

I will return to it (what a relief!) when I appear at the Decatur Book Festival‘s Emerging Writers Stage at 2:20 PM on Sun Sept 4. I’ll give a very brief reading, followed by a signing. Not On Fire, Only Dying will be available for purchase throughout the festival.

Now I should get back to work. I’ve got lots more failing to do.

What do you want?

Today I am the youngest I’ll ever be again. And I am older. Birthdays aren’t so exciting anymore, are they? Not like when you’re nine, the age I am in this picture. What a great age to be–a kid, not a child. A BIG kid. But not yet ten which is SO OLD, a DECADE!

We were in Jacksonville, Florida, with my dad who was there to give a speech. He gave speeches all the time, but this one was special because it was MY BIRTHDAY and some wonderful stranger made me this DOLL CAKE. I wish I could say I’m grinning because I’m taking a knife to the Patriarchy but that is genuine joy on my face because I LOVED DOLLS. They had everything to do with making me a writer. But on that day in 1977, it was just about that DRESS which I hope you realize is made of FROSTED CAKE.

And the doll really was beautiful, you can’t see that in this picture. With big blue eyes like I wished I had.

On my ninth birthday I knew what I wanted: that cake, that doll. Now? Well, my characters are my dolls. And I can eat cake whenever I want although I try not to because ugh carbs and sugar and but f*ck it–it’s my birthday. I’ll never be this young again. What do I want, this birthday? The best gift I could receive is support for my novel, Not On Fire, Only Dying, which came out last fall. NOFOD is the truest part of me, the most eloquent conversation I’ve ever managed. If you get it, you get me.

So tell me if you read it. Tell me what you liked about it (I will squirm with discomfort but I’ll love it and be grateful.) Ask me questions. Tell other people about it. Review it. Show it off in your hands. If you have a blog, invite me to contribute. Mention it to your book group or favorite bookstore. I’ll read from and discuss it, wherever I’m asked! You’ll make this birthday girl as happy as a DOLL CAKE once did. And that is VERY happy.

xSusan

Talk Talk: news about interviews

I recently found myself in the completely new (to me) position of being interviewed while at the same time I interviewed someone else. Everyone involved is a writer: MaryAnne Kolton, who had wonderful things to say about Not On Fire, Only Dying, is conducting an interview with me. I hope to be able to share news of its publication soon. Her perceptive, thoughtful questions send me into deep memory and contemplation. I find it thrilling and terrifying. It’s a challenge for this introvert, stepping out from behind the veil of fiction.

Of course I am wildly grateful for the opportunity to discuss the book, which I always believed in, even when it seemed it would never find its home. I never expected it to have a huge audience, but I believed–and have since had it confirmed–that some fine people would read it and get it and love it hard.

At the same time I interviewed Grant Faulkner. He is a fascinating contradiction: co-founder of the journal 100 Word Story and author of Fissures, a collection of his own spare, exquisitely crafted 100-word stories. He’s also Executive Director of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), that month-long marathon in pursuit of a 50,000-word novel, however rough. This happens to be an exciting time in Grant’s emerging career. The interview was published at Necessary Fiction, where I serve as Reviews Editor.

All this Talk Talk-ing about myself reminds me of the 80s (honestly what doesn’t? I’ll use any excuse.) Gwen, you’re fierce and I love you, but you almost ruined this song for me. The antidote is listening to the original. And for a few minutes: no talk.

Hudson Valley writers! Let’s read.

Writers: Is your work set in the Hudson Valley? Is it your home, present or past? I want to read there this fall and I could use some company. Maybe yours?

Not On Fire, Only Dying is set in the fictional town of Schendenkill, NY, on the west bank of the river in the mid-Hudson Valley. The search for a (possibly?) missing newborn also brings the characters down to NYC’s East Village. Not On Fire, Only Dying was inspired by the years I lived in Kingston, in Ulster County, NY, in an apartment above my tiny used bookshop. It’s where my son spent his first years. For now I live in the South, but my heart and this book belong to the Hudson Valley.

My book tour feels incomplete. It doesn’t feel right, with all the places I’ve gone to promote it, that I haven’t read from NOFOD in the place it began. (And I want an excuse to be there when those colors hit.)

Last fall, when NOFOD debuted, I think I failed to communicate how much this is a book of that region. Now, when I approach bookstores and libraries, I’ll include this wonderful review, which said, among other lovely things: “The author’s poetic, laser-focused empathy unmasks life on the urban edge of Ulster County as Steinbeck’s did Cannery Row, revealing ‘normal’ as a shoddy sham.”

Maybe I’ll also include a tiny excerpt like the one below.

If you’re interested, please get in touch. I want to know the connection between your work and this area. I want to know that our fiction makes sense together. Maybe we’ll meet in the Hudson Valley this fall, sell some books. Maybe we’ll hear each other’s words and swoon.
__________

Excerpt (from Chapter Three):

This week is the ecstatic pinnacle of autumn. The entire valley is aflame. The hills on both sides of the Hudson burn crimson and tangerine. In the weeks to come, the leaves will starve, then drop. Fall is about endings, Marko thinks. Death.

This isn’t the right attitude for a Schendenkill native. Schendenkill has long relied on seasonal visitors, or “leaf peepers.” This is the time of year to hike to the highest point you can: maybe Sam’s Point. From there the Shawangunk Ridge stretches endlessly, punctuated by glassy, sky-mirror lakes. The views are almost too much, too intense. Colors swim as with the onset of a hallucinogen.

His mother, always too sick to go herself, let him hike these trails so long as he was with his sisters, who were older. Hiking alone is discouraged. Someone must be nearby in case you swoon. Someone must remind you that the land you see is not on fire, only dying. Gently, as it’s meant to.

More than chocolate?

10 days until Valentine’s Day! What does your lover want even more than chocolate? (Trick question. Your lover wants chocolate AND other stuff.) May I suggest a copy of Not On Fire, Only Dying?
You may have heard about its desperate, marginalized characters and Lola’s [possibly?] missing newborn, but did you know it’s also a love story? It is, truly. It doesn’t shy from ugliness but it believes deeply in hope and redemption and, yes, love.

Not On Fire, Only Dying is available from the publisher, Twisted Road Publications, your fave indie bookstore, or from one of the big guys—Right now it’s discounted at both B&N and Amazon. Thank you for the love you’ve shown me and my book over the months since its release. I already have my gift (but I’ll always accept chocolate).

xo Susan

__________

Excerpt (from Chap. 5): For the last year Marko has loved Lola from afar, following their one and only time together. Now they’ve just made love a second time.

__________

The night outside is endless black, rising into space. He has stripped off his sweater, at last, and everything else. He is curled around Lola, her bottom resting in the damp curve of his lap. His spine juts like the bony seam of a tortoise shell.

“Is he dead, Lola?” he whispers. He strokes a fingernail along her arm, watches the goose bumps appear and disappear.

She says nothing, but he knows she’s not asleep. Her breathing is light and irregular. For a moment she doesn’t breathe at all.

“Our baby,” he presses.

“We don’t—”

“Fine, Lola. Your baby.”

“Don’t you really want to ask, ‘Is he real?’”

“Is he?”

This takes her a moment. “As real as I am.”

“Is he dead?” Marko repeats.

He would rather be quiet. He wants to be here, with her, for as long as she’ll allow. Let her speak in riddles, or say nothing at all.

But now he’s asked, he must know.

It’s not her fault, so sick and no one watching her. Her sickness metastasized, but no one checked. She kept the extent of it hidden from everyone, even him. It’s not her fault, if one day she got confused. If she forgot the baby was real and fragile. It’s not her fault that being needed panics her.

They will bear the detective’s disgust together. Marko will stand beside Lola and explain that no one helped her, not even him, and she can’t be held responsible. He won’t let her live in a room without visitors. He’ll come as often as they allow and bring everything she likes: her cigarettes, cream for her coffee, the Swedish fish candy she told him she ate as a child. He’ll smuggle in tiny wedges of hash for her to pinch into sandwiches, to take the edge off the fluorescent lights. What else? He would find out what else.

Hold me responsible, he’ll tell the detective. I should have kept myself curled around her like this, always.

Or he’ll help her disappear, if that’s what she wants. There’s a throb of pain, at the thought of losing her again. But he will help her, however much it hurts him.

__________

Let’s soar together in the New Year. Let’s roar.

According to shitty magazines, new mothers should get their bodies “back” roughly six weeks post-birth. After I had my son in 1998, it was almost a year before I recognized my body. Even then, weighing the same as it did before growing and delivering a healthy human child, it was different. I did not get my body “back” as it had been.

Publishing a book is often likened to childbirth. Both involve tremendous work before and after. The debut changes everything. Long before I knew Not On Fire, Only Dying would be published, changes in me were underway. Writing this book reframed my self-perception, forced me to deeply consider what I meant to say. The manuscript, my thumping heart, was thrust into disinterested hands until the word “No” became a background thrum. Like most writers, I had hopeless days.

And then—the euphoria of acceptance, but, with it, fresh challenges: asking for blurbs, for opportunities to read and promote, for reviews; not to mention traveling to bookstores, standing in front of audiences, fielding questions—none of it came easily to this introvert. Sometimes I was hugely uncomfortable. But I did it. Of course it changed me, summoning courage over and over. I became myself. Stronger. I began to speak my mind in ways I hadn’t always, reject old roles I used to play. Once again, the shape of me changed.

On September 15, 2015, Not On Fire, Only Dying was born. Now it exists in the world independently, like my child. Some people connect with it and say lovely things about it. Some people don’t care that I made a baby or a book. This year I learned that some (who knew me once but not recently) just want me to be quiet. Compliant. They want me to play along. But I can’t do that and be this person I’ve become. This person I am.

A writer must reject those who prefer her as she was before her book, just as she must reject the gossip rag shaming a new mom for looking different. As if for months she did not make room inside herself, withstanding exhaustion and discomfort and fear of the pain of birth, of the baby not being what people hoped, of it being her fault. As if she did not suffer as her body wrenched apart to push this baby from cozy uterus, through cervix and vagina, and into other people’s hands.

As if she did not survive it, and triumph.

2015 shook my foundation and sent me soaring. With any luck I’ll have another year just like it soon. And I wish you nothing less. Let’s soar together in the New Year. Let’s roar.

Every picture tells a story don’t it.

As I pause for the holidays I’m finally starting to absorb and appreciate these last couple of months, which had me hopping here and there to promote the release of Not On Fire, Only Dying. It was thrilling and humbling and daunting and SO MUCH FUN. I wanna do it again. And I will–details TBA. I’m hoping to come to Philadelphia and Denver and the Hudson Valley. Where else? Wherever. Let me just catch my breath a sec, put up the Christmas decorations and restock the menorah candles (so early this year!)

Then tell me where to go. Yeah, however you wanna take that. Tell me where I can find you and your small press fiction-loving friends. Are you a writer too? Let’s read.

In the meantime, check out some photos I assembled of NOT ON FIRE, ONLY DYING – THE BOOK TOUR (SO FAR) Every picture tells a story, don’t it.

This fall I didn’t need Thanksgiving to remind me to be grateful. Thank you to the bookstores and reading series and homes that opened their doors to me. Thank you to everyone who showed up to listen and cheer me on. Thank you to those who picked up a copy, at a reading or anywhere.

Hope to see you In Real Life soon.

Time has come today.

This week I finished up the events scheduled to promote the release of Not On Fire, Only Dying (more are in the works–TBA soon!) Finally, I’m home. But…

For the last 10 years, when I say “I’m home” it’s followed by an immediate hesitation, because while, yes, I’m with my husband and son and cats and dog in the house we own in the Atlanta burbs, it doesn’t really feel like Home. Especially when I’ve just returned from the Northeast, which is where my heart lives. I feel it most acutely when I’m the NYC Metro, where I grew up, and in the autumn, and when I’m thinking about or discussing NOFOD. It’s set in New York’s Hudson Valley and, in some ways, it’s a love letter to the region. Twisted, obsessive, and desperately hopeful–like any worthwhile love letter.

I was in New Jersey most recently, at Labyrinth Books, across the street from Princeton University which I visited throughout my childhood, accompanying my father to his Class of ’54 Reunions, and then later, visiting my sister, Class of ’91. For 5 years I worked as a Book Buyer for the wholesaler Baker & Taylor in Bridgewater, NJ. My son attended a woodsy day care in Flemington where he fed goats and rabbits and came home exhausted and gloriously filthy every day. We bought tomatoes and corn at nearby farms, giggled through corn mazes and hay rides and took the train into Manhattan all the time.

In Princeton I was reminded that, to me, New Jersey looks like Home. It smells like Home. It sounds like Home (if you live in a place with an accent–or language–different from what you grew up with, you understand. Maybe you don’t miss the familiar sounds like I do, but you understand).

Still, this Southern suburb is my home for now, and where the people I love most reside. It’s also where I’m finding inspiration for my…deep breath…next novel. And it’s time to turn my attention to that, at last. This year has been a steep but thrilling learning curve for me as my book was edited and published and then I did everything I could think of to help connect it with likely readers and reviewers. I discovered that reading in front of a crowd, once something I dreaded, is actually something I kind of enjoy. I love talking to readers about what they see in the book, what questions it raises for them, how it frustrates or moves them. I love expanding the conversation to ideas in general or their own writing. And of course I loved meeting fellow authors and visiting these fabulous independent bookstores. But the truth is I haven’t written much since I hopped on the Debut Author Roller Coaster. I miss writing like I miss the flavor of a perfectly ripe Jersey tomato. Or a slice of New York pizza. Or a decent bagel.

I AM excited to be home, where I have a folder of scribbled notes for my next work-to-be, where I have roughly 70,000 words written–all of which will probably be scrapped, but for me that’s a part of the process. I have to write my way to the story. I’m on my way to that next novel, if not yet on my way Home.

From “Time Has Come Today” (the Ramones cover, natch–I played that Subterranean Jungle cassette until it broke). I think it’s time I got to it.

Now the time has come
There are things to realize
Time has come today.

It is necessary.

This morning, Facebook — keeper of our collective if incomplete memories — informed me that exactly one year ago today I officially took the reins as Reviews Editor for Necessary Fiction. Back in 2012 they published my story The Worst Girl’s Best Day, followed by two book reviews. Editor Steve Himmer helped me sculpt my story into what I’d intended from the beginning. When Michelle Bailat-Jones decided to move from Reviews Editor to her current position as Translations Editor, I came on board. I’d enjoyed working with both of them and knew them to be nice people and excellent editors. I was thrilled and honored to join them.

Each Monday we publish a review of a recent book from an independent press. There are outstanding works of fiction included here: novels and novellas and collections and forms that defy easy categorization by authors from all over the world. They are inventive, risky, ambitious. They are obsessed with language or big questions or both. Every week of this past year I heard from publishers, publicists, and authors with news of books forthcoming. My own debut novel was published last month by a small press: Twisted Road Publications. It was a remarkable experience, preparing for my book’s publication (for the first time, seeing it from the inside), while editing reviews to help introduce other small press books. As someone who was once mostly concerned with “big pubs” and high-profile titles backed by national media campaigns (as a Book Buyer for the wholesaler Baker & Taylor), what I saw and learned this year was enlightening and empowering.

If you’re like me, you try to be a good “literary citizen” but it never feels like enough. Sure, I give time to Necessary Fiction and the journal escarp. I buy small press books from the publisher (usually). I live way out in the Atlanta ‘burbs but I go into town for (some) readings. I’ve written reviews, not nearly enough. I try to share other writers’ good news on social media. But so much is missed. So much isn’t done. We have our own writing to nurture, after all, not to mention careers and families.

This morning, after the latest review went live at Necessary Fiction, I listened to Episode 3 of the Citizen Lit podcast, which states an intention to explore “what it means to be an active member of the writing world.” This week’s episode features poet and Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) founder Erin Elizabeth Smith. Host Jim Warner describes her as someone who “is a builder of community and epitomizes the term literary citizen.” A lot of you probably already know Erin but I just met her last month, when I read from Not On Fire, Only Dying as part of the SAFTA Reading Series. I knew of her involvement with Sundress and Firefly Farms but did not fully understand the number of irons she has in the literary fire. I enjoyed listening to her discuss, among other things, how she creates opportunities and spaces where writers can learn, get work done alone, or share it with others. Give the episode a listen and then subscribe to the Citizen Lit podcast. (In Episode 1, you’ll hear me read a small excerpt from my novel.) Consider donating to SAFTA’s “Jayne for President” campaign, raising funds needed for a barn at Firefly Farms.

As I celebrate one year as a slightly more active literary citizen, I’m reminded that there is always more we can do to support this community of upstarts and artists and writers who are readers. It’s not just the right thing to do, it is necessary.

But is it art? On book reviews.

I’ve had this button since the ’80s and I still don’t know the answer. Back then, as an art-loving, art-making student, I took this question very seriously. Those two (white, male—but let’s not get into that right now) critics, although humorously drawn, were exactly the sort of gatekeepers I thought I wanted to impress. Now, not so much. Now I’m just looking for genuine connection with like-minded readers. Those are the people I want to impress. I’ll let them tell me if it’s art.

It still boggles my mind that people are not only reading my debut novel, NOT ON FIRE, ONLY DYING, but that some of you have been kind enough to let me know you liked it. Some of you liked it a lot, and said so publicly, via reviews posted to Amazon and Goodreads. These reviews mean everything to me, and for reasons that have nothing to do with the aspects of book publishing I enjoy least: Marketing! Publicity! No, seeing these reviews fills me with such deeply-felt gratitude because they confirm that my writing has resonated with you. You heard music in my language. Something made you think. You wanted to know what happened next. It connected you to me, however briefly.

I serve as Reviews Editor for the webjournal Necessary Fiction, so every week I read many reviews of books forthcoming from independent publishers. These are publishers taking real risks. Not burdened by the extraordinary commercial expectations that have ruined—too strong? okay, how about: damaged—so much of mainstream publishing, these small pubs fiercely support, rather than discourage, controversial form and subject matter. They embrace traditionally marginalized authors and characters. Their authors are my comrades. From tiny platforms we shout our stories into a large, noisy world. Each and every reader who shouts back in recognition is a hero, truly.

So, is it art? You tell me. If you are so moved, please write as little or as much as you like about NOT ON FIRE, ONLY DYING, on Amazon, Goodreads—or, if you’re a writer who publishes book reviews, please consider submitting one to your favorite literary journal.

Thank you for hearing me. Thank you for shouting back. I hear you too.