Part IV

So, here I am, about to start again at editing Dharma Rain, and much more laid back about the whole endeavor. I am more focused than I ever was, and a more consistent worker. Yet, I am also much more realistic about what I can accomplish. I like to think that I would be a better editor now than I would have been at any time before. I like to think things like this because it makes the passage of events seem destined somehow. Meaningful. It redeems them and me.

I want more than anything to be able to do right by Jackie and her book. I ask a lot of myself. I don’t know how to edit a novel. This is all new. But I can look back to those first experiences with my novella and do everything I can to be clear and precise and to offer her a lot of help.

It’s funny how the press was a real thing to me when it was run by three guys who I respected and envied in terms of their common bond. When they wanted to publish my work, it felt like something solid and real had been set in motion.

My biggest lesson in all of this has been that the publishing company is an illusion. It is a collection of actions taken, usually with a sense of urgency and without much guarantee that things will work out.

-Will the editing be good enough, is the novel even good enough?

-What if the design looks bad, the pages aren’t numbered correctly or the books are printed with crooked margin?

-What if we find a typo after it’s published? What if we say something the wrong way and are accused of slander, or worse, stupidity?

-How do we save enough money to publish these book and who should print them?

-Will anyone distribute them?

-What? You won’t distribute them unless you see our marketing plan and we have 1,000 copies at least?

-What if no one buys the book?

-What if it’s poorly reviewed?

-What, and this is where my heart hurts, if it is a failure and it hangs in the air forever between the writer and editor, an especially sad prospect when the two are friends.

These are the heavinesses I used to carry around with me all the time. That is why I am writing them here, to excise them. And hopefully, with my wonderful new job writing content and doing Web 2.0 marketing for Artspan.com, I’ll finally have found some stability that will last long enough to make a real impact with some of my beloved side projects, like the press.

So, if you are interested, I am going to continue documenting this journey. I will continue to be honest about my own life and my reactions, to daily projects and interests and pains and joys.

As I write this, and look back on these last years, I know that this tool I have been given has been immensely good for my growth, if nothing else. And though I may not be the person to turn for those who want to learn how to run a successful grassroots publishing company by themselves, I think you may find I can teach you what not to do. Or, being less hard on myself, I can share tricks I’m learning about Web 2.0 marketing that may work for my books once I get to know them better.

And I look forward to really making this blog interactive, multimedia, smart, informative, and a joy to experience.

So, I am going to start this week, editing and discussing with you the editing process at these first stages. And I am going to try to be as honest as possible at the risk of sounding whiny and unprofessional.

After all, all that matters is what you learn.

Part III

After the failure with the artists I called it quits on the press. I called it quits on a lot of things then in October 2006. I curled up into myself, lived off unemployment, and finally settled into my mind enough to ask why I kept finding myself in the same unhappy situation, with so much wasted energy and self-sabotage. The answers flowed back to everything from my parents and their troubled relationship with jobs and money, to my own sense that what I really ought to be doing with my time is writing instead of promoting other people’s writing.

To kill the time, I applied to four PhDs. One at Stanford, Berkeley, UC Irvine, and U Washington. One by one, the rejection letters came in. By then rejection felt almost normal. You see, pain and rejection have followed me almost everywhere.

But they follow me because I actually try to do things, often new and difficult things.And the amount of benefit that my life has received from the events that happened in place of say, a guy that broke up with me, a school that rejected me, a person who snubbed me, a paper I got a C on…well, when you fail a lot you learn to not see life in terms of successes and failures. You start to look at what you learned, at how you grew, and to marvel at how little control you really have in the universe but how trying is, itself, the best way to live.

In February of 2007, I refashioned myself as a copywriter and started working at Project Management Institute. Yet another job that was heads above the previous and yet still torturous for me. My need to be perfect, my doubting of my abilities, taking on too much, giving away my power, to need to prove myself while avoiding confrontation has made these situations almost unbearable.

And yet, working is what people do, so I went into the office every day, happy to at least be writing for a living. I wrote eBlasts and flyers and learned how to work with designers and run a concept through creative review. I even did some designing myself. We sat at big white desks in a sunlit room and wore cute clothes. We were a hip marketing department, or so we wanted to believe. But the department was falling apart, two managers left, and the dark underneath started to show. The girl who was also a temp but was my sort of partner was definitely my opposite and I was facing one of my biggest issues: dealing with controlling women.

And, like the year before, I was clinging once again to the press to save me. The very same month that the press landed in my lap, my friend and former SGI leader Jackie finished her first draft of a novel called Dharma Rain. I picked up the manuscript from her and swung by a spacious coffee shop near Pittsford, NY. Resting on a divan, I read page after page, making notes here and there as if it were mine to edit. The story of a magician unfolded, a magician who had lost his sincerity and had grown lazy and arrogant and unconscious. In his malaise, a great evil had entered his house and began to cause havoc in the kingdom he was given to protect. The story held me. Sure, I could see where the pacing needed to be slowed down and the writing sharpened, but the point was I was reading a young adult novel about Buddhism, written by a dear friend, and I had the means to publish it. Or at least the idea of the means: the press.

I knew that I wasn’t ready at the time to publish Dharma Rain through Inconundrum or Phantom City- a sister press to Incon that I wanted to create to publish Buddhist fiction under. But I hoped that someday I would be.

The years passed and I sold a couple copies of 4×1 through amazon.com every month. And that’s it. For all the online marketing I have done for 4×1, blogging about it, creating a website, adding a cart to the website, designing a new site with IX Webhosting, (which has great templates but is terrible to work with when trying to actually customize your page) for all the hours spent fiddling with web pages and blogs and my attempts at design, I still only managed to sell a couple copies a month- and none through the website.

Now this is a good lesson for those of you interested in becoming publishers and determined to do it better then I, which won’t be hard, seeing as how I still have yet to actually publish anything. The truth about books is that you can only do so much online. You can talk to people about the book online, generate some interest, take up someone’s time, etc. but for the most part, I believe that people are more likely to buy books when they can physically pick them up.

Of course, amazon.com makes a killing, but I would guess that it’s from people who know what book they want to get and then pop over to amazon to get it. Books like 4×1 are marginal enough so that they aren’t really a go-to book. 4×1 is the kind of book you collect if you are obsessed with having everything Rilke wrote, or if you are a fan of Pierre Joris’ translation.

Rilke, alone, should have been a good selling point. But it wasn’t good enough. Not without a distributor, not without a book tour or even a book fair. Little opportunities come here and there, though. For example, Pierre is teaching a summer course at Naropa this year and he put 4×1 on the syllabus, bless his heart. This means we might sell 15 or 20 copies all at once. And that is very good, because, as I was about to get to before, in 2007, Jackie, the writer of Dharma Rain, offered her novel to me, to publish under Phantom City. I had created a beautiful website for PC and felt like it might the saving grace of all my lost efforts at Inconundrum.

In that moment, I felt that lightening of the soul, that transcendent innocence that returns to us when we are caught up in the magic of books. It is this luminosity that I believe initially leads a lot of people into the editing and publishing fields. And it is what we have to fight for. In the past three years I have I talked with Emil Steiner, Raquel Pidal, and other writers who are, at times, miserably disillusioned. Granted one was at a drunken New Year’s and another time was at 3 am over gchat, but I find myself returning to this again and again in myself: that childlike wonder that we can experience through reading a good book is worth the trouble of supporting and promoting the publication of new books. It is worth these two years of work and no book to show for it. It is worth learning every single thing the hard way, as it seems I have to.

But there is much that can go wrong along the way. A lot of people and forces that have to collude to make a book appear. When Jackie offered my Dharma Rain, I immediately brought Anders Hansen in as the book designer. He, in one night, created a breathtaking cover and front page design and even found the perfect font. It seemed like finally the people were there who could help and give their good energy to the project. I fretted a little about how to compensate these wonderful people. I still fret about it. I do tend to get caught up on the details. Something I am working on.

I sent my first draft of notes to Jackie. I was stressed at work and once again, heavy under the pressure of a life I didn’t want. When I didn’t hear back from her, I worried that I had said something too harsh, but before I knew it, the press was no longer on my mind. I quit yet another job and, like the year before, saw a relationship go down around the same time. Once again, the same voices asking why I didn’t just write, already. Why I kept skirting the issue of who I really was.

Maybe all this publishing business was bullshit and distracted me from my real work. When I still didn’t hear from Jackie, I figured she had gotten caught up in teaching and life or was just having trouble finding the motivation. I was so focused on my own life that I let it go. I took it as a sign that it wasn’t the time.

And to be honest, it wasn’t the time. I ended up leaving Philadelphia in November 2007 and traveling to Florida, where I thought I would stay with my parents for a month or two, do some freelance copyediting work, and then return to Philadelphia. I was not working, blogging, or concerning myself with the press. In fact, a deep resentment toward the press had resurfaced, first realized in 2006 when I was on unemployment for the first time. I resented all the work I had poured into it and how it stood before me, nothing.

I felt like a monkey could have done more than me. In real terms, the most effective thing I did the entire time was to send copies of 4×1 to amazon when they needed a refill. I got Robin’s bookstore, Garland of Letters, and even the Pittsford Borders to carry copies of 4×1. And getting the money from local bookstores has always been a hassle and requires multiple phone calls and letters.

What I find, more and more, is that there are so many little details to be aware of, to take care of, for every single thing you want to do for your press. And I had finally, at 29, come to a point where I had to cut my losses. I continued to ship copies of 4×1 to amazon when they wanted them, but that was it. I let that knot that I always held in my chest, that tension that I kept around the press and the ideas and dreams I had for it had to be let go.

And I became happier. I became clearer. I am a writer. And yet, I am also an euntrepreneur, a doer. I like big ideas, I love marketing online and promoting other people’s work. It is not so black and white. And when my hotmail account was phished and everyone on my contact list, included Jackie got a weird email asking them to join some terrible marketing plan, it was actually serendipity. Because it got Jackie and I back in touch. And what I found was that she had never received my email with the first round of editing revisions. Way back last summer she had never received it. And for some reason she hadn’t written to follow up, probably believing that I was having a hard time of things. I was having a hard time of things, but then again, I always was and that wouldn’t have kept me from trying to edit the book. Because, that’s what I do. I do my best to honor my commitments. And that is why I am so hell bent on being more thoughtful about what my commitments are these days.

Part IV

Part II

So, the following two years offered labor and loss and failure and yet an incredible education. In my vain attempts to ‘make this thing happen’ I taught myself a lot about the internet, about marketing, about selling books and talking about books. I, alone, had to play the role of every person in the publishing house.

And whenever I tried to bring people on to help me, it didn’t work out. Most of them were much like Cullen and Peter and Shahrul…in their mid-to-late twenties and still idealistic but short of time and money. And they were smarter than me, maybe, because they knew enough to not put their priorities with this nebulous mess. But it was my nebulous mess with the face only a mother could love. And I was its new mother.

I had moved to Philadelphia to parlay my short experience as a reporter and my years teaching composition into a copyediting job at Aramark. There I learned basic copyediting skills, what human misery looks like up close, and why the fear of corporate life that had always been with me was completely rational. As is the storyline for all young people out to seek their fortune, we were terribly treated and given the wrong work tools and supervised by people who had no idea what our jobs really entailed.

I didn’t know any better. I figured that was just the standard. I went to work stressed and inevitably missed things. Lowercased words that should be capitalized. the correct placement of a colon or comma. We were given time to go through a 200 page document only once. It was speed copyediting, which is impossible to do well and is a torture that should be listed under the Geneva Convention.

We all missed things. We started becoming defensive and accusatory, the way people do when they are asked to accomplish an impossible task under the auspices that that it is possible. And yet, under these war conditions, deep bonds were formed among us. Two of which, for me, were Raquel and Kalonda.

Gone were the days of running a college classroom, driving home down green hills to my apartment by the edge of the woods. The existential crises I had suffered constantly when I was a teacher had left me insecure and emotional. But the soulessness of that office, the hard edges everyone wore, the long hours afterward drinking beer in stilted, unhappy conversation about work were too much for me by far. They were, in fact, the manifestation of every belief I had about the corporate world and why I had stayed out of it until then.

But I had my press, the whole time, to sustain me creatively. And I befriended designers and learned more about production. I had long conversations with Kalonda about the future of media and her web development ideas. She was teaching herself flash and reading up on the burgeoning world of 2005 online. Perez Hilton, youtube, banner ads, movies online, basically everything that is now called Web 2.0. She already understood. She saw it. She had the juice. Three years ago she was saying what everyone is saying now about social networking, information sharing, and free content. And god bless her, she was irreverent as all hell, which made me feel empowered. .

I went to work at Educational Testing Services next, where Raquel had also moved on to, copyediting work that was more my fare. GREs, SATs, and other educational tests. The whole day with Wikipedia open and actual information passing before my eyes, not just marketese. But within two months, a deep malaise had overtaken me. Raquel had left for graduate school at Emerson College to get a degree in Publishing and I sunk into despair.

Raquel’s story had been somewhat similar. She had worked for a writing resource center in Bucks County until unwise budgeting had forced it to go under. Already the pragmatic daughter of a Cuban émigré and a Spaniard, this experience reinforced in her the need to approach publishing as a business. Too often, the people who get involved in publishing are dreamy-eyed, failed writers who love literature or just love going to parties and saying they are in publishing, but refuse to do what is necessary to make their enterprise solvent.

So, because of someone’s neglect, Raquel lost her job and had to come to Aramark where she got to meet me and Kalonda but also had to pay for it by carrying the scar of Aramark starman that all who have passed through do. It is a scar etched close to your heart, but to be fair, it isn’t the worst of what is out there.

So, Raquel had kept me sane during Aramark and ETS, but now she was gone and I was dealing with the dual stresses of being in a relationship that wasn’t working (though it was with a person who gave the press a lot of help and encouraged me greatly) while I was trying to actually produce my first book as publisher.

My misery had been siphoned into this wild need to REALLY make the press work, so as to prove that I wasn’t actually a corporate shill but was doing interesting and authentic things that set me apart. This desperation lead me to take on a project publishing work by a noted poet and his partner, a performance artist. She contacted me, seeing if I wanted to publish CD covers and linings for CDs that they had made. I jumped on it- an easy start and VERY artsy. A project that would be doable and have real IDEALISM merit. For months I researched production elements, how to produce their duel CDs and to create lovely CD books to go along. It was supposed to be an easy project, a good starter.

I discussed designs for the covers and my then-boyfriend even designed a flyer to give out in France, where they were spending part of their summer. But as the project grew and grew, the artist demanded more and more time, money, energy. To the point where she wanted to add a whole online element and sort of invited herself to come down and work one-on-one with Kalonda on an interactive website, making sure it turned out exactly how she wanted it.

Kalonda had, out of the goodness of her heart, offered to help with the promotional website, but here was a classic example of the artist/author who wants complete control over the product. I used to think ,a s awriter, that the publisher should take less money and have less control than they normally do. I don’t anymore. If you are a publisher, you must cling to your power and be certain of your position in the relationship. You are the investor of time, money, and energy to make someone else’s dreams come true. Do NOT give up your authority, no matter how much you may want to please your talent.

And I certainly wanted to please my talent. Every day I wrung my hands, realizing that production costs for these two full-color CD books were going to be over $3,000 out of my pocket and when I crunched the numbers, it looked like it was most likely going to a project that lost money. I didn’t even mind losing money, it was that I minded not being able to compensate others.

Looking back, what I was really up against were my own perceptions. At the core, I did not believe that I deserved to be in control of my own company, or that I deserved to really ask for committed help that i couldn’t compensate with money. And regarding my day job, I did not believe that I could have a job that flowed naturally with my talents, sleeping patterns, and moods. I cried almost nightly about work, my relationship, the project. Nothing was working out, once again.

I finally had to bite the bullet and tell the couple that I couldn’t produce their cd-book. I offered them a plan to do it online, which Kalonda helped me form. It was savvy and forward-thinking but I knew they wouldn’t go for it. They are older and used to publishing meaning something that you can touch and see and sell at book signings. And more than that, I know the allure of the physical book with your name on it. It means something tangible. The ego identifies with it. I am a writer. I understand.

And they were upset with me and declined the substitute offer and to this day, we haven’t spoken.

And it reminded me of one summer when I had written a full-length screen play and tried to film and edit it it all myself with 13 actors. I could not finish it. I just couldn’t do it by myself. And I know there were some people who were disappointed. I know I wasted some people’s time.

And I also know that I’m damn smart. And creative. And ambitious. And that maybe I just don’t offer people enough of a sense of ownership in these projects and that is why I don’t get the help I need. Or maybe I need to control too much or I have trouble asking for help. Either way, for all my abilities, I end up with a castle in the air and a couple rocks rolled up underneath it in lieu of a foundation. And that’s as far as I get besides getting tired, and resentful, and disappointed in myself and people.

So, here is one lesson I learned: that people like me, who have big dreams, need to have people to help us. We try to do too much on our own. The problem is that I almost never find a partner who is willing to give even a fraction of what I give to a project. I cannot offer money…I don’t think I should have to offer money. These endeavors have never offered me money.

I have also learned that I have inside me an imbalance, a sort of fundamental tilt away from taking care of myself and toward pleasing others. This is not a good tilt to be at when running a business. I have made too many decisions out of emotion. And yet, the great clincher in all of this is that although the press has taken more than it has given in some ways, in other ways, it has given me so much in terms of just personal growth. As if it were, instead of a hen that lays golden eggs, or even a field that tends to bears good grain…it has been more like a tool, like a hoe.. something that in using its implements has made me a good farmer. Not rich or well-known, or even successful, but good with a hoe.

to be continued in four parts…

Part III

“And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!”

-A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens

I must implore…
Though my mistress is deserving,
I deserve more,
For I do the serving.

Part I

The creator of Inconundrum Press, Shahrul, is a logical man. He is more logical than any single person I know. His tastes run to the literary, but even that could not suppress his eventually getting an MBA. When he started Inconundrum Press, it was with the help of two English-major friends: Peter and Cullen.

Shahrul had a head for business. He tended to clarity and keeping things simple. His motto was to exact the greatest gain from the least amount of effort, like any efficient system. Therefore, the three of them acquired a manuscript from a noted author, published it, ran a contest to drum up attention for the press, and then sold the book online. There was no marketing plan, per se. There was no elaborate strategy to get distribution for the 3,000 copies of this book that had been printed. They would do more books and those books, in turn, would generate more attention for the first book.

The problem was that the follow-up books didn’t happen. Interest fell away and the attention and care the press needed was too much. The book didn’t really sell well at all and Shahul was getting his MBA, Peter was finishing his PhD, and Cullen had other interests to pursue.

Meanwhile, it was 2005 and I was living in Pittsford, NY. I had finished my MA in English a couple years prior and had been teaching English comp. and lit. at two community colleges. Teaching was a ride and a labor and a love at times, but I was losing interest. After three years, I quit teaching and spent the summer in my sweaty apartment, living on crackers and cheese. I sold my air conditioner to pay part of the rent and my poor brother and I soaked all summer. It was a hard time for me. I couldn’t even get a job at Borders. I am a Buddhist and I chanted every day to have my mission revealed to me. Day in and day out I seemed to float in this haze of fear and anguish. It might have also been malnutrition.

I found myself returning to writing, as I always do when I face myself in the starkest moments. Before being a teacher, a publisher, or an editor, I am a writer. So I searched through my computer files for old stories and ideas, to remind myself of how long this commitment to writing has lingered. And I came across a manuscript.

A short novel I had written in three days in fall, 2000 as part of the Anvil three-day novel contest. I had not won. But Shahrul and Cullen, who were starting their press, read it, and Shahrul (more than Cullen) liked it. And he said he wanted to publish it with their new press. And he said, in his stern, steady, Shahrul way that I would have to sacrifice something in order to get the novel to where it could be. I was in my first semester of grad school. What he meant was that I would have to take time away from school and devote it to the novel.

I was driving down some long highway a couple weeks later, on my way back from a visiting a friend in White Planes when I realized I was terrified of editing my novel. I was clinging to this idea of being published. It gave me a sense of confidence, identity. I was 23 and I wanted to “arrive”. I had tried to rewrite the opening chapter, to restructure the plot. But I had no idea what I was doing. Sharhul would say things like: “this needs to be more vividly written” and he would pass on some smart writing techniques from Douglas Glover, the Canadian author who was teaching a graduate fiction writing course at Albany at the time.

I was just, well, too unfocused and immature to deserve the opportunity. I couldn’t edit my own work. I couldn’t see the larger picture and I didn’t really know what ways of saying things were better than others. I mean, give me one sentence and the idea behind it and I could make it conform better. It was my best gift. But give me a whole mess of sentences, with an amorphous, shifting idea that wasn’t formed, and in fact, I was trying to form through the making of these sentences…well, I didn’t know what I wanted it all to mean and so I never quite got my footing.

I never officially admitted to myself or to Shahrul that I had quit the novel, but I left for South Africa in July 2001 and I didn’t return to Albany ever again. I was consumed with graduate school and my new Buddhist practice, and I was still deluded and young enough to not allow myself to just directly face that I had failed.

I don’t stay up nights thinking about it. There was a musical in highschool I had a lead in that I lost because I stopped working hard at it. To me, that is more tragic. The novel had merit, but rewriting your own novel, at 23, with a decently bad case of ADD and too much of an inferiority complex to actually ask for help…well, I generally forgave myself.

But in 2005, while plumbing the depths of my computer files, I came across the novella. It was called “The Shape of the Butterfly” after a metaphor I wanted to pull out of the chaos theory concept of the Lorenz Attractor. A summer of intense introspection and sweating had left me leaner physically and emotionally. I allowed myself to feel the remorse I had for wasting my chance to publish a novel and to take advantage of a friend’s generous offer.

I wrote an email to Shahrul immediately, thanking him for the opportunity and apologizing for not following through with it. He wrote back in his kindly, staid manner and said that it was alright and that he would call me. He called and I asked him how the press was going, how their book was selling, etc.

He said that it wasn’t really going anywhere. And my perception of these young, savvy guys in Albany, NY living the intellectual-bohemian lifestyle and making things happen like making books appear in the world, died. Or it began the very first twitchings of the long, slow, disillusioning death that it would take over the next two years. Because it was still quite alive a moment later when he said: “You want to take over the press?” And I screamed, “Yes!”

What followed really did change my life, but not for the reasons I thought it would. What I soon learned was that the press was no more than an idea, a floating signifier, a “magic” ring given a hero to supposedly summon bravery from some supernatural source, but it really just a bit of polished tin. There was nothing concrete or actual about what I received when I got the press. I was given no start-up money and I know that Sharhul had taken a substantial loss, as he was the one who put up the money for the 3,000 copies of 4×1. And now, I have sold enough copies to equal about $600 in profit- over 3 years. And hundreds of hours of work. Yes, I know. Bad business decision.

But I am not a scrooge, and I tend to follow the spirit of that old miser’s nephew Fred who loved Christmas and said: “And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!”

to be continued in four parts…

Part II

What if the one thing that kept you from being a great writer was that you would have to tell the truth to the world?

This is the first in a series of online conversations between myself and interesting people taking place on Friday nights.

Tonight I spoke with Raquel, a writer/editor who is finishing her MA in Publishing, and Brooke, who is finishing her PhD in Visual Anthropology at Temple University. Her forthcoming essay “Grief: Reflections on Ethnography” will be published by Encyclopedia II.

As you may know, I am a writer with an MA in English, concentration in Literary Theory. My list of pubs can be found on my Write page.

I hope you will find some use of our conversation and if you have any thoughts to add, please comment.

Friday, May 9, 2008

10:17 PM me: But there is so much here…where my philosophy and sensibility comes from…from growing up in mediocrity…I still havea lot of resentment and maybe writing it would just serve as catharsis, nothing more. But, I don’t know. I have real problems with the general sensibility of middle class white america and i am afraid that if i let myself go, i’d just skewer everyone except the very best of people (like you two

10:18 PM Raquel: yeah i’m sort of a bitch