February 19th, 2020
Family Day
Every since Dalton McGuinty brought a February holiday to Ontario in 2008 and called in Family Day, I’ve been uncomfortable with it. No one in the past twelve years has listened sympathetically to my discomfort–indeed, some folks seem really irritated and upset that I’m critical of this mid-February holiday–so here we are. Blogs are for working out the weird thoughts.
When I say I don’t like Family Day and people tease me it usually takes the form of 1) but don’t you want a day off work? <b>Rebuttal</b>: Sure, yes, but whether I spend it with my family or not is no one’s business, and yes, as the re-rebuttal would suggest, I can ignore the name, but the name exists–why not just call it civic holiday? The name is there for a reason. What’s the reason? I think I know, and I don’t like it.
2) But don’t you like your family? <b>Rebuttal</b>: Sure, yes, they’re lovely, in-laws too, and I’m happy to spend the day with them, in mid-February or any other time, but that is not the government’s business. Also many people would not or cannot do this, and although, again, the name of the day is not law, it does imply some are doing it right, or some HAVE the right things, and others do not. Aside from “I see you” social media posts, what are we doing for those people? Why not just leave them alone in the first place and not keep instituting holidays to celebrate what many lack? Again, I think I know why, and I don’t like it.
Family is the way our current society moves wealth through time. Fight me. Seriously, prove me wrong, because I would love that. Inherited wealth=feudalism, but it’s also capitalism somehow, unfortunately. And the focus, the neverending, condescending focus on familial love, familial care, at the expense of civic love, civic care (and holidays) leaves out anyone who is not in your bloodline–wealth and care is not necessarily shared in community, it is not shared with people who are a little bit further away from us culturally, whose experiences are harder or different.
Despite the ideas about meritocracy and working our way up, which does happen sometimes, of course, a lot in our lives is determined by what our families can give us–money, of course, stability, the promise of a soft landing if things go wrong, support, care.
There is so much baked into our society that privileges those with family or partners over those without. Marriage was invented as a way to consolidate land holdings. Again, this was in feudal times, but it still applies to Toronto real estate.
My opinion is, enjoy your day off in whatever way your want, with whomever you want. Don’t worry about me or Dalton McGuinty or anything if you don’t want to. But if you DO want to, maybe consider who our cultural norms encourage us to care about, and who they leave out. Are we always being pushed to care about parents, children, and partners, people we are already have a financial stake in, one way or another? Are we encouraged to care about community, strangers, people who look different from us or have different things or not enough things? Maybe not.
Let’s face it, if I go out and buy my nuclear family a “gift”, it’s still in my home, contributing to my net worth (and if it’s a book I can read it later and if it’s candy I can eat some). But if I give a gift to someone I don’t cohabitate with, then it’s really gone–there’s no benefit to me in that book or candy…at all! Family Day strongly encourages us to bolster people who will bolster us–people who live with us or interact with us or have a financial connection to us.
What if we had days in our society where we were encouraged to give to people in a way that forged new connections instead of burnishing the ones that are already valued? What if we actually got involved with the people in our community who need help instead of dropping some boxes of spaghetti in the donation bin? And what if that were the main point of the holiday, instead of an afterthought that you might get to but might forget if things get too hectic?
That would be a holiday that does not currently exist on our statutory calendar because that’s not the way our society functions. And I’m not saying I’m above it–I do love my family and we went bowling on Monday! But I’m saying there’s a reason I’ve been uncomfortable with Family Day for 12 years and I’ve worked on it and here it is.
Family Day is feudalism. This is possibly my most annoying opinion, according to people who talk to me regularly but if I could have shaken it off in 12 years, I swear I would have.
February 7th, 2020
Post-manifesto post
In my previous post, I laid down a lot of musts and shoulds about creating a realism that actually makes logical sense within itself, mainly for myself as I struggle with my new novel, but also for a lot of other writing I find frustrating and weird and that I want to be better. A few people seemed to agree with me on social media, and some to disagree, so ever self-conscious, I wanted to clarify: I don’t think it’s an inherent good to set up this kind of fictional reality–I think for the sort of writing a lot of us want to do, where there are characters that feel like people we could meet, living lives that feel real to us in places it seems like we could go, it is necessary to do this sort of world-building infrastructure to make the fictional world make sense to a reader. Just like I don’t think the *point* of a city is roads and sewers, but we need them if we’re going to have a city, if you have a character who owns a house the author must create a logical sense of where they got the money to buy the house, and a character is 45 and claims to have a storied romantic past, they can’t be shown in a scene being completely floored when a date tries to kiss them. The world just needs to make sense enough to keep the reader from crinkling her nose and going “wait what?” and looking up from the book in bafflement (the reader is me in this scenario but also, the reader is everyone). This is the same reason copyeditors and proofreaders strive to eliminate grammatical and spelling errors from books–there’s no moral good in a lack of spelling errors, but if those are errors are going to distract from the story you actually want to tell, better not to have them! ALSO there are loads of kinds of fiction in the world, which are not realism and don’t need these kind of “receipts and motivations” logics (but every book needs copyeditors and proofreaders!) Surrealism, magic realism, other fun dreamy landscapes where you don’t get as sunk into the practical details. And that’s fine. I didn’t say that in the previous post because I was mad (at me? yes–writing is hard) and also it’s my blog, I can do whatever I want. So yes, ahem. That’s my deal, explained. As you were.
February 3rd, 2020
Manifesto
- If the character has a thing–a home or a vehicle, a hat or a latte–it should make financial sense in the fictional world how they got that thing. The author need not provide receipts, but it needs to basically be in line with the reality that the author has created–the author needs to at least create the impression that a receipt exists. This applies mostly in present-day and historical fiction, but if it’s a starship or the planet Zerix and people pay in platinum droplets, how many platinum droplets would this character reasonably have? No more 9-bedroom villas for art teachers, no Ferraris for dog walkers.
- Think of the children. It is EPIDEMIC in entertainment both on page and on screen that children are like fold-up umbrellas, useful for being cute or telling a secret at a pivotal time, and then disappearing when adult people want to go on high-speed car chases or have sex. Where is the place the children could conceivably be at this time, if it isn’t with the main characters who are their caregivers–is it at school? Do they have a nanny? Is there ever any mention of their going anywhere at all, or do they simply collapse into dust when the author doesn’t need them as a plot element? As it is in real life, so must it be in fiction–if you don’t want to figure out where the children should be every hour of every day, you can’t have any children.
- How long do things take? It happens more often than you’d think, people get into a car to drive from Toronto to Niagara Falls or put a roast in the oven, or begin to do another thing that explicitly takes several hours, then they have an eight-sentence conversation, and now the thing is done. That is what time breaks are for, or some narrative bridge-building, or some gd thing, but it is very distracting to not have known time-markers obeyed.
- Where is everyone supposed to be during the day? As in the second bullet, but for characters who are adults, who either have jobs or are in school or have other responsibilities. If you must, make the character another god-damned writer (which honestly seems to be code for unemployed in books, given how much writing they seem to do–you’d think the person writing the book would know it doesn’t work like that) but at least they have a flexible schedule. No more bankers and lawyers running out of the house first thing on a Tuesday to do several hours of non-banking and non-lawyering. No more characters who do not seem to work at all ever but still maintain an income (see first bullet).
- If a person enters into a romantic relationship and they are not, say, a teenager, it’s weird to never mention what they understand and believe about romantic relationships. Not that that could have reached that stage of life with no notions about relationships, but there’d be some baggage from that too. Actually even if they are teenagers! A popular trope in fiction is that a couple falls in love when they are very young, then is somehow separated and then reunited after many years, with nothing that happened in the intervening years mattering to them in the slightest, if in fact the author even mentions that anything happened at all. Authors who cannot incorporate personal history into their characters are doomed to write all their novels about newborns.
- Almost anything can happen, including extremely implausible things–in fact, most very implausible things HAVE happened, once, somewhere. But it there are circumstances that cause implausible things to happen and people notice them. If everyone in the book individually has a lot of inherited wealth and doesn’t have to work, and you are writing in the present day and not about 19th century aristocrats, that’s weird and characters who act like real people will notice and also feel weird about it. It’s not unheard of for a lone person of colour or queer person to hang out with a group that’s very demographically different from themselves, but there will likely be some uncomfortable moments, and some acknowledgement of the difference and the discomfort. People do leave each other at the alter sometimes in real life, but that is actually a very strange and hurtful thing to do, and friends and family will feel compelled to say something about it long after the veil has been put away. “It’s a thing that could happen,” is not a sufficient reason to put it in a book–it has to actually make sense with how the characters operate in the world and with each other.
Did I write this manifesto for other people or for myself??? YOU DECIDE!
January 16th, 2020
Based on real life
I rarely create a character by simply attempting to describe a person I know in real life and have them act on the page. Sometimes I will take single facts or idiosyncrasies about real individuals and collage them onto a largely imaginary character that I’ve created, but rarely just a whole person transposed from the world into a book. In fact, you could say I’ve never done it, because the only people I’ve attempted to import to fiction as themselves are people I barely know and find bizarre or incomprehensible in real life, so I write them to supply them with the motivations and inner life in fiction that I’ve been so longing to know in reality. It’s almost impossible anyone I’ve ever done this with would recognize themselves in the stories, which is why I feel comfortable with it–and yet satisfied that I’ve told myself (and others) a story that makes enough sense so I can stop worrying about the real people that inspired it, though my stories undoubtedly have nothing to with them.
This is all a long way of saying I ran into one such person yesterday, waiting for an elevator. This has actually never happened before! I took me a minute to realize why I was having such a visceral reaction to a fellow chilly, early-morning soul in the grey foyer–and then I remembered. She didn’t seem to recognize me, which is an advantage of years and reconstructive jaw surgery, but as I say, we never knew each other much to start with. But she was uncomfortable with something, whether it was the vague sense she knew me from somewhere or that I was hiding my interest in her face–the lines on her face, which weren’t there before–less well than I meant to.
Almost definitely the latter. She hadn’t gone on in the life I imagined for the character, I could tell by her sweater–disappointing but a natural consequence of fiction. After we got off the elevator, we waited in the same line for a moment, and then she sped off and I’m sure was glad to leave me and my greedy curiosity behind. I could google–everyone’s google-able, and I actually have done this for her in the past–or if I worked hard enough I could maybe think of a mutual friend somewhere and try to work her name into the conversation, see what comes up.
I don’t think I’ll do those things–the temptation is there, but what purpose would it serve? The character got a spark from the person once, but at this point the two flames burn entirely separately.
January 9th, 2020
2019 in review, and 2020 in …preview?
This (now that, I suppose–I started writing this when it was still 2019, but now it isn’t) was a weird year. I liked it! It was challenging. I did not write as much as I wanted to, I didn’t travel much, I maybe saw fewer people than I wanted, but I also did more new things, more hard things than in many previous years, and also did more good for others and the world than I have in a while–and that was great for me ironically. You can sort of see me hinting at this plan to do more good and less navel-gazing in the second half of my birthday post. That’s what all the more awareness of death and the news, more willingness to own my privilege and try to give in accordance to what i know I have was about. What I meant was that I was going back to volunteer work, something I did seriously for years when I was younger and then stopped nearly cold turkey as I got into my thirties.
But I didn’t come right out and say what I wanted to do in the post, in case I wound up not doing it–I make a lot of resolutions and only follow through on a fraction–but then, I did! I started tentatively volunteering with a climate change activism group and it made me feel so. much. better. about things. I do believe the world is burning–it IS burning–and it makes me panic. But there are better things to do than panic and it makes me feel better to do them. It makes me feel hopeful. At least about myself and my capacity to grow and change, but also maybe about human beings and OUR capacity to grow and do more and help where help is needed–and save the world? Well yes–I am hopeful.
Also, in my forties, it’s just great and enlivening to do a new thing. I don’t mean to trivialize the act of fighting the climate crisis but if it can ALSO be a spur to be out in the world, having new experiences, meeting different kinds of people, putting different skills to use, so much the better. And I learned so much–so so much, in six month including, always, how much I have yet to learn. Intersectionality is just a word, until you try to actually intersect. I have long ways to go, but at least I’m going.
What else should a person who is very concerned about about how long the earth will be viable do but make the most of every single second I have here? This year I protested for the earth, I walked into traffic, I lay down in the street, but I also protested for trans rights, I marched in the women’s march in the freezing cold, I gave blood, I gave money to causes that are important to me, I bought less and thought hard about what I did buy, I thought about what I ate and wore and drove, I was SO awkward and weird when I spoke to so many people, but I also made an effort not to focus on how self-conscious I feel all f*cking time but to look around the room and see who else feels uncomfortable and talk to them. It didn’t always work–it sometimes worked.
I read a lot, but less than I have some other years. I started an Indigenous Authors bookclub at work, and it has really helped me to have a place to go to talk about this world of books I’m just starting to explore.
I screwed up a few times on work stuff and life stuff. I learned a long time ago that no excuse is as good as “I’m sorry”–that’s not a new lesson for me–but somehow, I still need to keep learning it.
We got rid of our car and I do miss it, despite not really needing a car or liking to drive.
Moving forward into 2020, which I keep calling “the year of perfect vision,” which is surprisingly not catching on…
I developed a serious punctuality problem in 2019–I’m not sure where that came from, as I’ve always been fairly punctual, but instead of analyzing it I’m just going to start getting up earlier every damn day and leaving the house earlier for most events.
I also had a tonne of dental problems in 2019, which the dentist said might be remedied by giving up my one vice, pop! Everyone is always cheerfully saying they will be enjoying their red wine and weed gummies but Diet Pepsi is the devil, which seems unfair. Nevertheless, fine, I’m going to try to titrate off pop again, although that hasn’t historically gone well. I’m just going back to coffee as a source of caffeine, so don’t get too excited.
In 2019, I invested too much time in people who aren’t very interested in me. There’s being nice–I always want to be nice–but I don’t have to expend energy trying to help folks remember to show up for stuff they’ve said they “want” to do but never show for. This is an endlessly hard lesson for me to learn. In 2020, I want to back off saying yes just because someone wants me to–or simply because I hate to say no–and concentrate more energy on the best people and projects.
I would like to write more, and in a more focused, systematic way. 2020 will be the 4th year of my creative life I spend on a project that still has no contract or editor, and no ending. If I can’t come to some conclusion about how to finish it by the end of the year, the problem is either me or the book, but either way, one of us has got to go.
I would like to finally send off my files to the archive that actually wants them, which is a huge honour that I have been ducking like a lunatic.
There’s probably more–there’s always more–but I’ll run away from the temptation to make this into a list of all my flaws and just say, I wish us all a healthy, happy, and adventurous 2020. Thanks for reading.
December 5th, 2019
Heritable Privilege or, the Story of My Futon
Yeah, so I didn’t post for six months and I also did not finish my novel, but SURPRISE, I did try to finish my novel and this at least resulted in my thinking a lot about it.
One of the things the book is about is inheritance, in a more literal fashion than novels tend to take on this topic–what does inherited wealth and attitudes towards wealth look like and what happens when there isn’t any? (it’s actually kind of a funny novel, I swear–this is only a small aspect of it!) A way I work on fiction, and probably one of the reasons why it takes forever, is to look at what my characters are going through and try to see how that same issue is played out in my own life, or how it could be–is that autobiographical writing or the exact opposite of autobiographical writing???? I don’t know.
SO one thing I’ve been looking at is thrift. I am extremely thrifty–I am organized and responsible about money and I like to save, sometimes to a silly degree. I have the time and energy to invest in thriftiness almost like a mini-hobby, which is of course the result of middle-class privilege. People who are in more precarious financial situations do no have the time or focus to work on getting the best possible deals or finding a way to do without certain costs by putting in time or energy. I’ve become increasingly aware as adult that my ways of saving money are the result of having a bit of it to start with.
A very simple example of this sort of thing is insurance premiums and deductibles. With most insurance plans, what portion of any insured cost (say, damages from a car accident) I would have to pay (the deductible) is determined by how much my monthly payment is (the premium). So if I can pay only $100 a month, my deductible might be the first $1000 of any repair costs, but if I am willing to pay $150 a month, maybe the deductible would only be $500 (these numbers are pretty random, I’m not an actuary–it’s just an example). Basically, if I can float a bit more on the monthly cost, I can prevent a giant emergency cost down the road. Who can afford that? Not everyone.
But all insurance is a gamble, and this is strictly a dollars game–I wanted a richer example that’s more about inherited privilege and family support. Here is something I remembered from my own life, which I think demonstrates what I’m driving at a little better:
When I was in first-year university, I lived in residence but in second year I moved into an apartment with three friends–cheaper, more freedom, more fun. My parents helped me get some furniture before the semester started and instead of a bed I asked for a futon. That way I could have both a bed and a couch for the price of one! I also asked for a slightly nicer futon–I remember the bottom-of-the-line futon and frame cost about $250 and mine was over $300, because I wanted it to last a long time. I was able to do this, of course, because my parents bought it for me, helped me transport it to my apartment, and set it up.
Then it was my bed/couch for three years, until I left Montreal, and here is where the story gets a little extra. When I moved back to Ontario, I opened the phonebook and found a mover to ship all my battered university girl sh*t back home for me. I had too much stuff for anyone to take it in a car but not really an entire moving van’s worth of stuff, and anyway, no one wanted to drive it for me. Most people I know who left the city sold all their stuff they couldn’t carry for a few bucks or just gave it to friends who were staying or left it on the street on moving day for whoever wanted it.
Not me! I shipped a used dresser I had bought for $20 and which had the date 1984 painted on it, my kitchen table and chairs, several bookcases, lamps, all my kitchen stuff, a coffee table, even my broom and mop, a tv, and yes, that futon. All this cost me several hundred dollars, which was probably far more than the street value of the contents of the load but crucially, would be far far less than it would cost to buy it all again, not to mention the time and effort associated with doing so.
Obviously, I took money from my parents to do this, since I was unemployed at the time, and then I stored all that stuff in their garage for months while they parked their car in the driveway and I looked for a job and we all studiously avoided talking about where this situation was leading. Then eventually I did get a job (two actually) in Toronto and I lined up an apartment I could pretty much pay for and my parents took my stuff out of their garage and drove it to me in their station wagon a little bit at a time until I was reunited with all my belongings and became what we all pretend to understand as an independent woman, since I stopped living with or taking money from parents at that point.
But hahaha, right? Sure, I was working and paying for my own apartment but my apartment was full of furniture my parents had helped me buy and assemble and ship from another province and store and then brought to me??!?! Also through it all, I had tonnes of emotional support and encouragement and cheerleading, which is another kind of privilege. I should point out, the employment situation I moved to Toronto for was fairly precarious, and someone from a less privileged and supportive background, someone who didn’t know she was free to fail and retreat to her childhood home might never have tried it in the first place–and I wound up with a fairly awesome career because I did try and persisted trying. Hmmm…
And that futon persisted too! I’m not sure at what point this moves from being an interesting point about inherited privilege to a sad story about a woman who lives with all her furniture from the 90s, but here is the rest of the history of that futon: It was my bed and my couch in my first, bachelor apartment in Toronto, and then graduated to being my couch in the living room of my one-bedroom, and it is now that couch in my home office. I sleep on it occasionally, if I’m sick and too cough-y to be pleasant company in the marital bed, and it’s definitely not what it once was, but it’s still comfortable enough for a decent night’s sleep, and allows me to be reasonably hospitable to others when they need a place to crash. FYI!
It’s also the reason I didn’t by my first actual non-futon couch until I was 35 (when Mark and I moved in together, he had one, but then the cats destroyed it). I guess I have low standards and don’t necessarily get charmed by new stuff unless the old stuff has disintegrated, but of the things that were in that moving truck in 2001, I kept the bookcases, the microwave, and cutlery until I moved in with Mark in 2011, and I still have 1.5 of the lamps (1.5 broke along the way), the shoe rack, the coffee table, the kitchen table, two chairs, many books, a plastic cupboard, and the futon.
I’d say I got my money’s worth. Which in itself is an interesting expression, isn’t it?
June 17th, 2019
The House I Grew Up In
I bought a new phone last weekend and the people at the phone store wouldn’t wipe the old one until I checked it to make sure there was nothing on it I wanted, even though I insisted there wasn’t–I guess they’d had some run-ins in the past! And when I downloaded everything off it at home, it turned out there were a few photos I guess I took in a panic the last day in the house I grew up in, which may well have been Father’s Day 2017, shortly after my dad died. You can tell I was a bit alarmed because of the finger in the first one:
Ok, now I can junk the phone. I won’t miss it. Of course, there was a time when I thought I wouldn’t miss that house either, but now I do.
May 31st, 2019
Learning Things in My Forties
1) My senses haven’t dulled–or at least, not all of them. My taste and touch senses are about as sharp as ever, and my already terrible vision is not noticeably worse. BUT my ability to hear and smell things have gone through the roof. So this is why old people don’t like rock and roll–it IS too loud. Everything is too loud. Noises that I think are also too loud that other people do not even acknowledge are noises at all include the internet router, pop bubbles bursting in a glass, the overuse of toilet paper by people in other stalls in public washrooms (I apologize for the image but omg–I know too much), and the twisting of a lid on a pen. Also many things are too strongly scented–almost anything that is artificially scented, actually. I can’t even walk down the cleaning products aisle at the grocery store anymore–Mark has to get the detergent. There’s a whole dollar store in Scarborough I won’t go into because they use some terrible air freshener in there. (I still like rock and roll, though.)
2) Things hurt more, but not enough for me to do anything about it. I have definitely reached the age of random aches and pains, but not the age of caring about them very much. Like, sometimes my knee or my stomach will hurt for a couple days, and I’ll wonder why, and then it’ll go away and I’ll be like–great–and not think about it anymore. It’s possible this would derail me more if my body had heretofore been in perfect working order, but since I’ve generally been used to having some sort of ailment, throwing in a few more inexplicable ones doesn’t bug me much. I can also still do what I want–run around, sit on the floor, take ballet classes–so my body is giving me what I want it to. There could definitely come a time when it doesn’t. I am watchful.
3) I no longer think people are that paying so much attention to me. Many years ago, my old friend John said, “Self-consciousness is still self-absorption.” At the time I boggled at how insightful that was, but it has taken me a long time to fully internalize it–I’m still not sure if I quite have, but I’m getting there. Certainly, if I wear weird shoes or make an odd face in a photo or fail to turn up at an event for someone I don’t really know, I no longer assume that everyone is criticizing me because that would imply everyone is thinking about me, and why would they do that? I’m just not that important. It has really been immensely freeing to realize that I am not at the centre of most people’s thoughts most of the time. However, I have learned the hard way that this is a lesson that everyone comes to in their own time–if a friend is fretting endlessly about what to wear to a party, “What makes you think everyone is going to be looking at you?” is not an immensely helpful thing to say.
4) Impostor syndrome remains, but its hold is weakening because I have precedent. To be honest, I still believe I’m going to fail at most things most of the time. It’s not a conscious thought, just a background burble of “You suck, every time you haven’t sucked was a fluke or a lie” that I don’t really think about. However, when I’m actually trying to consider/plan what i really can and cannot do, I drag those thoughts out into the light and examine them. I also hold them against years of so-called flukes–my nearly 20-year career in publishing, my three books, my lifetime of mainly walking down stairs without falling. And because this history is–at 41–so considerable, it starts to constitute something somewhat like proof. At the very least, I feel that if the catastrophic failure I fear comes to pass, it will be in the context all those other times I didn’t, or at least seemed not to, fail, and people will give me the benefit of a doubt. So I give myself the same benefit.
5) I am fairly worried about death now. Not so much my own, as I will not be here to have to cope with that–though I do consciously think to myself that I have to remain alive because other people would be devastated if I died. It’s not that I don’t want to be alive, it’s more when I’m jaywalking and see an Uber barreling towards me with the driver on their phone–my mind flashes to an image of dear people crying, and I realize I should have just walked to the light. I also think quite often of how sad I would be if people I loved died, which I didn’t do when I was younger and none of them ever had.
6) I am doing better about following the news, and thus much more upset about it. This sort of follows on from the previous entry and also attaches to the next–I am aware of both mortality and the next generation, and the idea of the young people I know now getting to have full lives and not having to spend most of them digging up from the f*ck ups of previous generations is paramount to me.
7) Young people are ever-more charming to me as I start to notice how they are different from me. I have spent my whole life feeling as though I am 16 years old, and I’ve only just started to notice that I’m not. Recently I mentioned to a colleague that I will often watch one (1) episode of a TV and then stop–even a show I like a lot–and that’s why it was taking me so long to watch a series he wanted to know my opinion of. He was so baffled by this tendency that I finally described it as a generational difference–he is a whole ‘nother cycle of the year of the horse, 12 years younger than me. I said I have a “90s attention span,” a holdover from broadcast television when there was only one episode available to watch. That’s a silly example, but they are starting to crop up–I am different from young people. I mean, I’ve known intellectually that I am for some time, but I’m starting to actually feel it.
8) I can own privilege better. There is LOTS of room for improvement on this, but it has stopped feeling excruciating to say that my success came from, yes, my own hard work and brilliance but ALSO from me being positioned by my privilege in a number of ways to have those things pay off when many equally hard-working and brilliant but less-advantageously positioned people didn’t see the same results. It is SO CHALLENGING to accept that I didn’t do everything on my own, because I did and do work hard, but that’s the thing–it’s not about undermining myself, it’s about building others up. What benefits have I been given as a white woman? As a cis-gendered heterosexual married woman? As a person who went to excellent schools? As a person with educated parents (huge, and often overlooked, my friends)? AND HOW CAN WE MAKE THOSE THINGS AVAILABLE IN A WAY THAT’S FAIRER THAN “SOME GET LUCKY”??
9) It’s my time to give. For so long I have thought of myself of both young and sort of incompetent–I’d be lucky if I got anything done at all, I would need tonnes of help to do things properly, the kindness and support of others would be the main thing that stood between me and catastrophe. And I don’t know if I was so wrong about any of that–I’ve been pretty incompetent, and whether that’s #4 talking or not, I’ve definitely received tonnes of really generous, really fun, really helpful help. Almost every time I didn’t know what to do, someone reached out to me with an idea or a clue. So. I’m 41 now, and competent or not, I’m definitely not young, and I’ve been trying a little bit for the past few years to pay forward all of the kindness I’ve received. I think I need to try harder and make contributing to the communities I care for a higher priority in my 41st year and onward, even though it still seems strange to me to be on the other side of things, even just by virtue of seniority. I’m still working out what that might look like for me. Stay tuned.
May 17th, 2019
How blurbs work: blurber perspective
Following on from my last post about blurbs, this one takes the perspective of one who writes them instead of the one who solicits them. I’ve been lucky enough to be asked a bunch of times to write blurbs for Canadian books and I’m always thrilled to be asked (seriously, who doesn’t feel great when they are told their opinion matters?) I’m hardly an old hand at it, though I have blurbed some great books (I’ll put a list at the end of this post!)
I’ve also said no to blurbing a bunch of probably also great books (well, some of them). The thing about writing blurbs is that if I’m going to be in the ecosystem, I need to do it, but at the same time it is unpaid and time-consuming work to do well (I neither want to read carelessly and give a stupid quote, nor have my name associated with a stupid book). Here’s how I handle the process–would be curious if others who blurb occasionally have any different approaches…
I read every request with the ardent hope I can say yes, yet knowing I can say no for any reason at all. In truth, I never find it easy to say no to anything (something about being a woman, maybe??) but sometimes it should be easy: rudeness (the guy who wanted me to blurb because he already had two men and needed a woman for balance and he’d “heard” my work was great), unreasonable timelines (I once nearly cried saying no to a request for a blurb in WEEK!), subject matter not in my line (this has never happened to me, but anyone ever asked for me to blurb, say, a sci-fi adventure, I’d say no because sci-fi readers don’t care what I think). I also mainly say no to digital copies–I don’t have a digital reader and I feel really aggrieved spending time and money figuring out how to print an entire book so that I can then do someone a favour. I have done it in the past, but I probably won’t again. That last one is a me thing, but whatever–any reason at all.
So if the request is polite, the book sounds interesting and appropriate for me, they’re willing to give me some kind of hard copy, and I have enough time, I’ll usually agree to take a look. I always clarify that that doesn’t mean I’m promising a blurb–I might not like the book, love it but have nothing to say, or simply run out of time before the blurb is due. I’m simply agreeing to give it a shot. I think most people in the publishing game know this, but it never hurts to be extra clear. I do try very hard to read at least a chunk of everything I’m sent for blurbing, though I don’t 100% manage.
If I can’t do it, it often goes down to the wire. I wish this didn’t happen, but if I’m running out of time I’m always hoping I’ll find some and if I’m reading the book but not loving it, I’m always hoping it’ll get better. In the end, I do always follow up with the publisher or author, whoever my correspondent is. I usually just apologize and say I was unable to provide a blurb–no one needs to know which ones were time constraints and which ones were books I just didn’t click with. I wish I were able to get back to people earlier–I think it would probably help them in their planning. No one has ever been anything less than lovely about hearing no, which just increases my guilt but is also how it should be. Let’s all be lovely and hopefully there will be another opportunity to work together down the road!
If I start reading and the book seems like my jam, I try to read faster in order to get the blurb in earlier. This often does not work out, but it’s a thought. Blurbs go on book covers and that requires some designing so, better get it in early if I can. Once I sent a blurb very late and it did not get used!! That was very frustrating but largely my own fault! Anyway, I usually send maybe 3 sentences, knowing they all probably won’t get used, or the whole thing will go on the website but just a bit on the bookcover. I also offer to revise the thing if it’s not what they wanted–I really don’t want my words edited without my knowing about it, so I figure offering to revise it myself might cut down on that. Truncated fine, edited no.
I support the book in other ways if I can. I usually mention the book on social media when it comes out, go to the launch if I can make it, and generally do all the signal boosting I can. One of the first literary events I ever attended in Toronto was an awards night a friend took me to for a book he’d blurbed. I had it in mind after that once you blurb something you’re invested–you’re part of the team. I like that feeling.
Here are some books I’ve enjoyed being on the team for! (Am I forgetting one or two? I think…maybe? If I forgot your book, it is not because I didn’t love it–just because I am old and absent-minded! Please tell me so I can add it!)
- Late Breaking by KD Miller
- The Weather Inside by Emily Saso
- Circle of Stones by Suzanne Alyssa Andrew
- Resort by Andrew Daley
- The Work by Maria Meindl (forthcoming from Stonehouse Publishing)
Fellow blurbers, what is your process? What do you love and hate about blurbing?
Buy the book: