Sometimes the Writer's Life is Frustrating

Life is, naturally, full of both wonderful things and the less wonderful (and I am not about to talk politics or climate change just now), but there are times when writers can't help feeling stymied.

I speak here not of writer's block, but of ways in which we find ourselves putting in a lot of time on tasks necessary to our writing work that nonetheless often make us feel like we are banging our heads against a wall.

To give a couple of examples from my weekend: after devoting the first half of Saturday afternoon to my taxes, I turned to what I hoped would be the more pleasant task of looking up presses that might be interested in considering my novels. The said novels are, to be sure, under consideration at a few places already--mainly contests that award publication and some prize money--but it's best to maximize chances of acceptance. And so, after spending several hours investigating the websites of quite a few small presses, the end result was that two did not have functioning methods of submitting work online because they had not updated their websites from previous years and the links were dead; some presses refused to reveal how they acquired books (or indicated that they do so by contacting writers whose work they see elsewhere); several other presses looked like good bets for one or another project but were not presently reading submissions (natural as they do not have a huge staff, but still... irritating); and hardly anyone was revealing when the next reading period would be. Some presses encourage us to sign up for their email lists, which is not unreasonable, but on the other hand when one is already inundated with emails of every description, the likelihood of noticing Press X's announcement of an open reading period is rather slight. With that in mind, I did not sign up for anyone's email list, although I know it makes me seem like a difficult character to please. Anyway, after all of that, all I managed to come up with was a contest for fiction collections, so I submitted my collection to that. Saturday afternoon was not a total loss (I made progress on my taxes and submitted one book to one place), but it felt lossy all the same.

My Sunday, I thought, should involve sending out some queries and proposals to scholarly presses, as I am preparing an anthology of Czech modernist texts on art, visual culture, and aesthetics. I read over the requirements at one possible press, spent a good while crafting the required query letter (this press wants queries prior to proposals, which is reasonable), but soon received a form response stating that the editor in question has left the press and no replacement has not yet been found. While other members of the edtorial team are dealing with the Art workload, it would obviously be a silly time to re-send my query to one of them as they do not normally focus on the press's Art list. After all, they can't even keep their website up to date (unless the said editor just left) to say there is currently no Art acquisitions editor.

I daresay that this afternoon I will go on and query or propose to another publisher or two or three, depending on how much I need to rewrite my query letter and/or my proposal for each one, but it was not encouraging for the very first one to be a waste of effort.

And of course I also have other weekend tasks, such as looking over the paper proposals for this year's Czech and Slovak Studies Workshop, and putting together two bookcases purchased to replace one which collapsed shortly before Christmas.

Julie Zigoris, Slavicist and YA Author

Julie Zigoris and I have known each other since grad school, when she was in the Slavic Department writing about matters Russian. From her PhD work came her first book, Belomor: Criminality and Creativity in Stalin’s Gulag (Academic Studies Press, 2014, as Julie Draskoczy). Through the magic of Facebook, we've stayed in touch and come to know each other a little better, which is how we discovered that both of us were planning to attend the AWP writers' conference in 2019. Two Slavicists who are also fiction writers!

Julie writes Young Adult fiction and recently signed with an agent, so I expect we'll soon see her new book Trees and Other Teachers in print. You can learn more about her work at her website, Julie Zigoris, where she blogs and offers a free newsletter with writing tips, book recommendations, and behind-the-scenes insights on her path to publishing.

56 Books By Women and Nonbinary Writers of Color

Over at Electric Lit, the novelist R. O. Kwon provides a handy guide to 56 Books By Women and Nonbinary Writers of Color to Read in 2020. Kwon's list includes both new and classic writers from around the world. I'm looking forward to reading more of these!

Moving into the 2020s

It's perhaps cliché and obvious to say this, but entering the new decade feels... a bit strange. Not exactly momentous, but peculiar in a way that 2010 didn't. A little more like 2000, but then 2000 was a whole new millennium, so there was widespread excitement and anxiety about that.

Since I particularly study the 1920s and 30s, I may be extra prone to feeling that I don't quite know how to take it being 2020. The days of the flappers don't seem all that distant to me. My grandparents were young and starting their families--both of my parents were born in the 1920s. Toyen and the other Czech avantgardists were in the same generation as my grandparents, although they experienced the period rather differently in Prague than my grandparents did in rural Minnesota. Still, we have photos of one of my grandmothers in short hair and jodhpur-like gear, climbing around some rocks on a California beach. She and Grandpa had driven their car to California and did so more than once, being part of that first generation to have cars almost as a matter of course. Grandpa, in fact, owned a garage for awhile and later a car dealership, in addition to farming; I'm sure he would have been very surprised to learn that his father (gone before his birth) had gone into the car business too, down in Texas.

I suppose it's this odd mix of family lore and scholarly familiarity that renders 2020 rather curious. And so, there's that temptation too to review the past decade and muse about the new one.

In 2010 I was hired tenure-track and bought a house, developments that would have surprised me some had I had a crystal ball in 2000 and that would have seemed utterly unexpected from my 1990 perspective. Academically, things went along in a fairly normal manner for me during the decade--I taught, published, and served on various committees--apart from the fact that in 2019 most of our faculty, myself included, were out on the picket line in the snow for one of the longest higher-education faculty strikes in US history. The support we received from community--students, other unions, non-union faculty, local restaurants, etc.--was impressive and we're eager to return the favor as needed (in the fall I spent some time with the UAW strikers, for instance).

During the 2010s Magnetic Woman was contracted and University of Pittsburgh Press has set a November 2020 launch date. I'm looking forward to putting together some book events to celebrate and promote it! But the 2010s also saw me gradually getting back in gear as a fiction writer, after having neither time nor energy during grad school. While for the most part I worked on novels during that decade, I did get a few short pieces published--one of which had been written thirty-six years earlier. I'm hoping that in the 2020s the speed of publication picks up a bit. It's not like I began publishing late in life; I first published fiction in a respected journal when I was 23.

For the 2020s, I worry about the climate crisis, ecological damage, and the rise of fascistic and racist activity worldwide. But I don't want to focus on that today. There are things each one of us can do (some easy, some hard) to make the world a better place, and I want to do more of those. Maybe I'll write a separate blog post about that. From a personal perspective, though, I'll just say I'm looking forward to seeing Magnetic Woman in print this year and hope to have at least one other book (either a novel or the anthology I've been preparing) accepted this year. And to finish at least one more novel this year. Aim high!