exactly, perhaps too much Carver worship in college(also being, like, the living proletariat in some of the women's groups I used to hang with) but I can't help noticing the cottage-industry aspects here. I just found out there are people who charge for racial-sensitivity beta-reads and such.(Shame on the people complaining most vociferously about this on FB today...maybe you are the reasons we don't have nice things.) Being racially sensitive is the right thing to do, and I hope it gets beyond a trend to real understanding and reflection of a variety of perspectives in art.
However, I am beginning to hate the sense every newsgroup and publication and whatever has that caring about your creative work means that you have both art-student friends and "a few hundred dollars" to throw at your cover(I spent birthday money on a beta read and line-edits once...would never skimp on line-edits...too many e-books, in particular, go out looking like shit and I don't want to join the brigade. I also provided a friend with a side job when she needed it, but I think she's doing something else now.) But, then it's like "Boring cover letter? For just *two hundred American dollars*, I, a stranger with a blurb in all the writing advice mags, can help you stop being a windbag(or, if you're too shy, sell yourself like you're on Van Buren after midnight) I thought about paying too because maybe her advice was good, right?
But maybe she's ableist and we spend the whole of my paid-for correspondence talking about my being "wedded to the whole wheelchair thing" or something, in which case it would have been like being swindled by an artistic sweetheart scam(this may not be true...I never even talked to this woman, but I have occasionally run into that kind of mindset outside of the class strata where people might expect it, so just paypalling money into(let's say) Connecticut wouldn't completely ease my fears. Then, there are conferences, which I can't get to, but would get me some sweet agent eye contact for 5, 6, 7, hundred.(yeah, dream on.)
I wonder if that's why some people get so intense about rejections...well, between that and the epic lack of personal contact, or indeed, any sense that anyone ever looks at the piles of formatted homework required by both magazines and agents alike these days, but add money in, and it seems way too serious. No wonder reading how many times someone passed on "The Help" is no longer the cure for what ails in the same way that that whole fable about "Confederacy of Dunces" cheered us as undergrads. Which is really kind of a sick extension of every twenty-year-olds yearning to tell the disbelieving guidance counselor to suck it, but worse, because Toole's mother got all the love after he was dead by his own hand, so I'm not sure that's a vindication myth we're looking for, even those of us with our own unstoppable mothers.
Maybe I could trade a crip-read with somebody? It's a thought...
Sometimes i think that if I had that kind of money around, I wouldn't want to write as much, but I don't think that is quite true. But I could probably write better without it being my big Rescue Fantasy(TM)
ReplyDeleteI also suppose that from time to time someone, somewhere, has looked at my work...it just doesn't*feel* that way, although plainly, I haven't knocked many socks off yet.(Or maybe some of these firms really aren't looking that much, but if the second coming of "Gone Girl" hit someone's desk, I guess in theory they're there to take it up.)
ReplyDelete