Hi y’all. Liz here. Just pondering a few things about life as an author in This Day and Age. Next week I’ll talk about booze, I swear it.
Photo by Yasin Arıbuğa on Unsplash
As I peruse the clock app for ideas that won’t take me the better part of a week and way too much make-up to pull off, I found myself having more thoughts about how life as an author today would be unrecognizable to, say, Jane Austen or Edgar Allen Poe or Agatha Christie or Herman Melville. Or even to authors as recently famous as Stephen King or Margaret Atwood even though they are both as Online as is possible for them.
Back in the bad old days it was a matter of:
rise
write
sup
write
drink
fall into bed
lather rinse repeat.
Nowadays it’s more like:
rise
scroll
make more coffee
study computer algorithms and how to beat them
video self dancing or drinking or b*tching about something tangentially related to Books
shove skinny popcorn into mouth while justifying spending hours editing videos
note that it’s almost 4 p.m. and no words have been written
try to write
give up to scroll more and lament lack of likes, follows, and comments
open wine
stare at phone
jam out 2-5k words at midnight
fall into bed
lather rinse repeat
Now, mind you, I’m not naive. I realize that the aforementioned members of the American literary canon were perhaps not full time writers as such. They had their own version of the side gig because at the heart of it, “authoring” can only be a full time, money-making career for a very few people. We’ve seen the movies. We know that the Mozarts and the Shakespeares had to to put in hours teaching piano and voice lessons, or writing sonnets or plays to meet their patron’s wishes, and their true greatness was discovered after their deaths.
Side note: I should create an account where I dress up as all these famous folk and make the sort of tik tok content I imagine that they would. But who has time for that?
It brings to my mind a sort of making the sausage description that is one of my favorites (along with “I’ve seen the puppet strings”). We all think we want to get behind the scenes of our favorite sources of entertainment but sometimes, IMHO, it’s best to simply Be Entertained, then go about our lives leaving the behind part …. well, behind.
So much of the clock app (and other video social medias which is to say all of them these days) content is about “My Life As ...”
This is ME THE AUTHOR drinking my morning coffee!
This is ME THE AUTHOR opening up my laptop and curling my fingers into typing formation as I prepare to add words to my WIP (jargon alert! I’m cool!)
This is ME THE AUTHOR ripping into a box of print books that my publisher/agent/publicist sent me!
This is ME THE AUTHOR being put out about a reader who didn’t like my words and let everyone know about that opinion which has made me Big Sad.
This is ME THE AUTHOR being pirated (cursing face emoji).
This is ME THE AUTHOR being bent out of shape because I have make the very videos that I’m making right now showing you how bent out of shape I am about it.
This is ME THE AUTHOR Having Opinions and Hot Takes about other authors in video form.
This is ME THE AUTHOR wishing I had more time to write.
This is ME THE AUTHOR….I think you get my point.
That is a whole lot of behind my scenes that, frankly, I would like to keep that way. (Ok not the ripping into the boxes of print books but in my case since I am my own publisher/agent/publicist I’m sending them to my own self but who has to know that?)
I’m at the point in my career where I can read or listen to a book and absolutely comprehend how hard it was to write it. I realize how many hours went into tough scenes or certain dialogue. I can practically taste the coffee/tea/beer/whisky consumed in the making of it. I can visualize the household tasks ignored, the families fed cereal or frozen pizza for dinner, the dogs going un-walked in the name of creating it. I get it.
But I’ll admit, I had no idea how much regular consumers of written words wanted to experience all that agony. I mean they really (really) want to see that sausage slaughtered, bled, butchered, ground, rendered, and encased from start to finish, it would seem. Which is exhausting to contemplate.
In 1949 Red Smith was asked if turning out a daily column wasn’t quite a chore. “Why, no,” dead-panned Red. “You simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed.”
I’ve never read a better description of the writing process. But the urge to turn on the camera phone and video yourself choosing the knife, closing the knife drawer, sitting down, pulling up your sleeve or pants leg, and sliding the knife across your own flesh was never one I experienced. Now, I have no choice in the matter. In order to become the Next Colleen Hoover Big Thing with multiple best selling books at a time and people tripping over themselves to laud my Massive Talent, this is what I must do.
Don’t misunderstand me. I’m HUGELY jealous of what authors like CoHo have managed to accomplish using the clock app. But I’m also hugely aware of the effort it took and I don’t know that I have it in me to be so completely Online and Out There.
In the name of full transparency, I follow a successful real estate agent nearby who videos herself blow drying her hair, fixing breakfast, and doing stuff without make up on just to show how her sausage is made narrate her day and more power to her. I lived that life once (selling houses for money) and find myself morbidly fascinated by her ability to just turn on the camera phone and show herself readying for the day as a busy realtor. That is just not me.
Oh, wait. Maybe it’s because I tried it once. In the name of promoting a company I thought I was a part of at the time. I chronicled my pretty steep learning curve in this industry, pulled people into the story and hence, into the tap room by making it 100% personal.
Oh Whoops. Did I give it away? Oh well.
Because ultimately it all got misinterpreted and I guess people got jealous of my success so I was brought low in a big way. Lost my job, lost a business I helped create, and was made to feel like an utter fool for, I don’t know, over sharing in the name of promoting a business. So yeah. I’m keeping the old sausage factory behind closed doors from now on.
THAT said, I am promoting the Official Liz Crowe Book of the Month Club this year. Releasing a book a month is hard enough but I promise you that I drink too much coffee, scroll too much social media, ponder way more about algorithms that is necessary, and manage to jam some words in every day, just like all the Famous Folk do.
Lather.
Rinse.
Repeat.
Liz’s Media consumption report:
I just started watching Station Eleven and while I am literally having PTSD-like experiences every time they show another Day One of the End of the World As We Know It from a different character’s POV, I am enjoying the delicious layers and many connections between the storylines. It reminds me of Geraldine Brooks and the way she will start telling 3 or 4 different stories that couldn’t possibly link up, until she makes them do that very thing. I’m on episode 5 so no spoilers please but I will say that setting it in the Great Lakes is a lovely point of reference for me and I plan to read the book after I’m done having all this re-traumatization over multiple Day Ones. Speaking of that whole Sausage Thing, some books/movies/shows require a bit of behind the scenes to fully value them. Here is one about this show. (I am still trying to decide if that graphic novel is just a bunch of quotes from a middling actor but I digress.)
I listened to The Book of Koli by M.R. Cary because I adored The Girl With All the Gifts way back before they made a hash of it in a movie. Side note: The Girl With All The Gifts is also a fungal zombie concept so I guess I’ve got a bit of a theme going with post-apocalyptic fiction consumption. Because this story is about humans who are living a sort of retro hunter/gatherer, small communities life, way past some unnamed horror plus an “unfinished war” that ended the world and left a lot of “tech” lying around for these proto-capitalists to try and comprehend. I loved it and the narrator, the amazing Theo Solomon. I’m onto book 2 of the trilogy, The Trials of Koli.
Photo by Daniel Herron on Unsplash
I am having trouble settling on a book to read and have allowed myself to DNF a couple that I won’t mention because it’s only my opinion, and one that will go against a lot of others. But I’m finally about to start Now You See Us by Balli Kaur Jaswall.
(Next week I’ll have some thing to say about booze. Promise.)
Liz