a beer or five and some dumb tv show
(An alternate Coffee & TV)
This is something I wrote back in 2014 (!!) on tumblr (!!!) that I wanted to send again today, as I’ve been thinking about what Emily Books has meant to me.
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Feb ??, 2014
Yesterday I gave an informational interview to a woman who went to Carleton, just like me. She’s rebooting her career at age 28 by moving to New York and attempting to get into agenting. It kind of cracks me up that I could be considered an “expert” in anything, except having a lot of different jobs, but as a matter of fact I am an “expert” at this exact activity, having done it myself six years ago. We talked about that and a few other publishing matters and then I said, “Honestly, if I could go back in time ten years, I would tell anyone trying to get into publishing not to do it, and I feel like I should say that to anyone trying to start now. Do anything, anything else.” She asked me a good question then, which is, knowing what I know now, what would I have done differently? and I gave the trite answer that goes something like Nothing I suppose as the experiences of your mistakes and bad decisions are necessary to create the current incarnation of yourself and that self’s successes as well as failures. I’m not sure I really believe that. But it’s true that had I not moved to New Zealand, I would have never started writing, and without attending and then dropping out of grad school and also without getting fired from a job for terribly dumb reasons, I would never have started Emily Books, and those are things I like about this current self, so.
After I said goodbye to Alex and wished her luck, I went back to work at my job that is not writing or running Emily Books, the job that actually pays for my rent and groceries and the interest (but not the principal) on my student loans. This job involves a lot of cross-checking for tiny line items on multiple spreadsheets and wrestling with an idiosyncratic, counterintuitive database and close-reading emails that contain a lot of legal data conveyed in 4-level outline format (that’s 3.A.iii.a if you can’t immediately recall your Tools of the Research Paper high school class). I’m pretty good at it, but it hasn’t been going well lately. I just spent ten minutes trying to describe the various shitty reasons it hasn’t been going well, but they were boring and tedious and came down to the same three reasons that make everyone’s job suck so I’ll just list those: money, people, and respect. Money of course is the most pressing. My salary’s been stagnant for 3 years. I’ve been working on a plan to change that, but it just got rejected. My living expenses, on the other hand, have increased apace with inflation and the ever-rising cost of living in New York. The grinding depressing daily math of this was one of the many things I was trying to make real for Alex when I told her not to go into publishing.
Recently I’ve taken on some freelance editing work, and while I love it, it’s probably a little too much to have on my plate at the moment. It definitely vampirizes any energy I might have for my own writing. Today, before deciphering six months’ worth of contentious legal correspondence, comparing three very similar but slightly different spreadsheets, composing a conciliatory email to an enraged person, and rescheduling everything that had to be rescheduled because of the snowstorm, I edited the first draft of a short story and wrote an editorial letter. I also edited an essay that’s going up on the Emily Books website soon and fielded three different EB customer inquiries about various complicated technical issues. Somewhere in the middle I made an honest and small but careless and unfortunately-timed error at my job-job, which will probably reignite a dormant standoff with someone who doesn’t like me very much and certainly not bolster the argument that I should be making more money.
After 5:30, once I was truly on my own time, I took a deep breath, got a glass of water, and commenced the task I’ve been dreading and putting off all week: calling Paypal customer service to ask why the 2013 Emily Books financial reports they’ve generated don’t match the ones I’ve created myself. I need to reconcile those reports so I can file the Emily Books 1065 so Emily and I can then file our own taxes so I can then (hopefully) get my refund so I can purchase transportation to one of the four weddings I have to go to this year, that or pay back some of the money I owe my sister. The Paypal customer service rep was not super motivated to help me – I don’t know why he would be, given the minuscule amount Emily Books contributes to Paypal’s bottom line or his personal life satisfaction – and when I realized the futility of what I was attempting to accomplish, I hung up the phone in the middle of my own sentence so he would think we’d been cut off. He called back but I let it go to voicemail.
I love everyone whose wedding I’m going to this year, but I also irrationally resent them a tiny bit for making me think about weddings and relationships and marriage and thus my own love life and confusion about or lack thereof, which, talk about anxiety-producing. I’ll be 33 in a few weeks. Every time I think of that I think of the way Bridget Jones says “Age: thirty-three,” in the (execrable) movie adaptation of Bridget Jones’s Diary. I know this is selfish and weird and none of it really matters, and yet, I can’t stop myself from thinking these things or hearing the echo of Renee Zellweger’s despairing voice.
What I am trying to say is that I was exhausted and disappointed and frustrated and near tears when I checked my email one last time. I saw I had a note called PROOFS? from Ann, the woman who looks after Heather Lewis’s literary estate. (Heather killed herself in 2002.) I cringed. Correcting the errors that existed in the original Serpent’s Tail edition of Notice plus the ones introduced in the ebook conversion has been an irritating and arduous process, not least because Ann – bless her heart – packaged and stamped her only copy of the corrected manuscript and left it at her door for the mailman which would have been fine in the East Village of thirty years ago but you can’t do anymore because of Terror. Neither of us has seen it for weeks. No matter what errors Ann found, I did not want to log in to the three different websites necessary to download, correct, and re-upload the manuscript, and I did not want to then repeat the process for the Kindle edition. When I got her email all I wanted to do was find my Advil and order some food and drink a beer or five in front of some dumb TV show and turn my brain completely off for the foreseeable future. This was my heart’s true desire, even though I knew I couldn’t order takeout or buy beer due to my bank account balance, which is somewhere between $4-$5 at the moment. That unignorable and unpleasant fact also made me disinclined to open her email and reluctant to do anything besides feel sorry for myself. But like a lot of depressives I do kind of enjoy feeling sorry for myself, so I opened the email.
There were some corrections, not many. Ann said what a great job Emily and I had done putting out Notice. “We love that NOTICE is an EMILY BOOKS February pick, as February 28th was Heather’s birthday,” she wrote.
This is what ultimately made me cry, and this is what I wish I could have told Alex: If you’re going to do it, you have to find something that makes it worth it. It’s just that sometimes that thing is strange and weird and there is no way you could have predicted it six (ed update: eleven) years ago.
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