The Publishing Odyssey Continues to Continue...

So I've decided that this fall will be the optimum time for a renewed campaign to get my book published, and to get published in general.

Unfortunately I've had a hard time mustering up the energy.

I've detailed some of my recent failures and frustrations here in the back pages of this blog. Past efforts to get published have involved perhaps even more work, with even fewer results.

In 2002, for instance, I shopped a recently-completed manuscript (a meticulously-researched but somewhat unevenly-written crime thriller set in 1950s Las Vegas) to perhaps 40 literary agencies via blind snail-mailed queries, and I was rewarded for my efforts with a seemingly endless trickle of slender self-addressed stamped envelopes that arrived back in my mailbox, bearing type-written form letters indicating that my manuscript didn't fit someone's needs. (This is, perhaps, one of the crueller things about blindly shopping a manuscript; your rejections arrive in envelopes COVERED IN YOUR OWN HANDWRITING. It's like your tormentors are too lazy to inflict all that psychic damage on you themselves, so they've cunningly decided to use your own hand against you, like those schoolyard bullies who would grab your arm and use it to slap you in the face, telling you all the while: "Stop hitting yourself!") At first I was a little naive about the process, to the point where I was actually a little excited to see a letter bearing the return address of a literary agency, but I always at least knew something wasn't right when I'd pick up the envelope and feel the lightness of its single-page content. "Hmmm," I remember thinking. "Seems a little light for a contract..."

This, plus my frustrating recent efforts, have left me a little despondent. So I've queried exactly one legitimate publisher this season (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, if you must know) and a couple poetry reviews. Bateau Press has already sent some rejection emails, which is actually fine because I thought they were kind of pretentious anyway; I've also queried the Columbia Poetry Review. (This is perhaps most freighted with karmic potential; I earned a Master's from Columbia University, good ol' Ivy League Columbia in New York, with all the Pulitzers and what-not, but later found myself living near Columbia College in Chicago and making friends with many of its students, so when I'd hit the bars and tell people where I'd gone to grad school, I'd say "ColumbiaUniversityinNewYork" practically in one breath, lest they think even for a fraction of a second that I'd gone to the other Columbia. So either Columbia College will graciously publish my poetry and leave me eternally grateful and incapable of speaking ill or thinking condescendingly of them, or they will laugh manaically and burn my submissions while dancing around and saying, "Who's the good Columbia now, bitch?")

ANYWAY, this "publishing campaign" of mine has been somewhat lazy, the Anzio of publishing campaigns, perhaps. (Churchill said of Anzio: "I expected to see a wildcat roaring into the mountains - and what do I find? A whale wallowing on the beaches!") I became particularly despondent this week when looking at websites from one of the major agencies—William Morris or ICM, maybe—and seeing that they did not even look at unsolicited materials. It used to be that you had to get an agent because they were your "in" to find a publisher; now you need an "in" to get an agent. (The despairing, melodramatic side of me tells me I'll be a literary Van Gogh, unappreciated in my own lifetime. Then I realize I take myself way too seriously, and that Bateau Press has nothing on me in the pretension department.)

On the plus side, my scrappy friends and I have been publishing and distributing a little independent literary newspaper called The Deadline. (No website, but you can pick up your own copies at Chicago's hipper coffeeshops, or submit online at thedeadlinechicago@gmail.com if you're so inclined.) The Deadline is the brainchild of my friend Liz, and she's put an inspiring amount of energy into it over the past nine months. (While I'm not entirely nuts about the fact that we have no online presence, I'm grateful enough for Liz's hard work and leadership that I'm not really complaining; she's the type of leader whose dedication makes everyone around her want to work harder, myself included, and that's a lot more valuable than whether or not we agree on every little thing.) We have a launch party up in Logan Square on the first Wednesday of every month, and we all get a manila envelope or two with a list of local coffeeshops in a particular neighborhood where we need to distribute our copies. I've taken to doing this by bicycle, so I kinda feel like a kid with a paper route, which would be great, except for the fact that I'll be 33 in a couple weeks. Jesus had started a major religion by this age, and here I am rolling off like Don Quixote on a fixie, attacking the windmills of literary pretension and insularity, 100 Kinkos-printed copies at a time.

Still, it beats the shit out of rejection letters!