6: publish or perish or both

Thanks to the magic of Blogger, I am writing this on day 5 of TTWD, but you are reading it on day 6! Maybe, hopefully.

That makes it hard to know what verb tense I should use here. I will be going to/am in Lancaster tomorrow/today and will therefore be/was therefore in the car at the time I would have been/am posting this. I have taken out 3 audiobooks for this purpose -- Melissa Bank's The Wonder Spot, Roddy Doyle's short stories of some kind and Jonathan Franzen's new collection of essays about his childhood -- and am looking forward to/have really enjoyed listening to them.

I'm especially happy that I found and was able to interlibrary loan an audio copy of the Melissa Bank book, because I went to a reading she did at C*rnell a few weeks ago, and it was flat-out amazing. She is all the reasons I want to be a writer. After the small discussion group in the afternoon, my friend convinced me it was OK for us to go up to her and the other authors and act like freaky fan girls, and I introduced myself by saying that I'd interviewed her once upon a time and now was trying to get my own novel published very unsuccessfully. The timing was perfect, because the book had just been rejected once again by someone I thought I might have had a slightly better-than-average chance with, and I was experiencing my usual reaction to the rejection, which is to want to light the manuscript on fire and then light myself on fire and then go hide under the covers for approximately a decade.

Not surprisingly, Melissa Bank did not think that was a good idea and instead very earnestly told me that she had been rejected for years and years, and that to keep going is the best and only thing you can do, and it'll happen. She then inscribed the book, "Gwen, Keep going -- don't forget, it's an endurance test." which I need to hang as a permanent fixture in front of my face or something. I have been struggling not to sleep with the book under my pillow.

So, I'm looking forward to spending a long, boring, rush-hour drive with her tomorrow. She reads the book herself (which must be a really weird experience for an author), so it will be just like spending time with her, right? Something like that.