On my old website, I wrote a blog about how I wasn’t really using the blog. I had well-reasoned arguments, I swear, but all of it ultimately boiled down to the fact that time in life is extremely limited, and for the most part I’ve been trying to write the type of thing I really feel passionate about rather than wasting that time with short things you can find more or less anywhere else on the internet. This means writing long-form pieces and trying to get them published and all that nonsense.
I have a lot more to say on the state of publishing and its relationship with art and all of that nonsense, but now isn’t really the time for that. There may never in fact be a time for that, which is also ok–my thoughts are certainly not original. They weren’t when I first wrote these, and they’re not now, either. I’m annoyed that this piece of writing died, along with other blogs I was gradually putting up, but it’s not a big deal, and since then the state of my mind has changed a lot.
Over the past year(s), I’ve dealt with therapy and drugs to help with my depression and anxiety, while at the same time having bouts of depression and anxiety as bad as anything I’d suffered before. I’m doing more or less ok now, which I mostly feel fine about saying because this statement is so vague that it basically means nothing. The end result, though, of crunching to finish American Saint, many more rejections, frustrations with work, frustrations with everything else, means that if anything I’m more determined to spend my writing time working on the sort of nigh-unpublishable writing that led me into this weird hole to begin with.
This blog is rambling, I know, but that’s ok–one of the points of these right now is that I’m not going to go back and edit them to make sense, rather I’m simply going to put them up. This is in line with one of my main goals in life right now, which is try and rediscover my joy of writing. Spending so much time over the past few years making changes for other people and hitting deadlines has really driven that out of me. I’ve found that I sit down to write and I’m filled with dread, doubt, self-hatred, and a whole ugly bag of other negative emotions. All of this, even though my writing itself seems to have improved a great deal. I’m less happy with the process now than when I was much less skilled, and while I realize that’s how so many of these things tend to go, I think it’s far more related to the business/publishing side of things than it is about how I feel about the writing itself. What cripples me is thinking about spending months on something that will never get published no matter how good it is, plus the time spent trying to get something published when I’d much rather be actually producing work… or doing anything else for that matter.
A lot of this has been, I realize, the result of trying to find a job in creative writing. But over the last year or so, it’s been dawning on me that this just isn’t going to happen. I don’t mean this in a fatalistic way, just a realistic one. My wife’s generosity has allowed me to spend so much of my life on this goal over the past year, but at this point it’s finally clear that the chances of this happening are akin to suddenly being published in The Paris Review next week. I’ve needed a lucky break of some sort for years, and I simply haven’t gotten one, which isn’t a surprise since most people don’t get one. So much of the goal of getting things into somewhere prestigious, or caring about sales and reviews, is related to this, though. The fact is that so long as I get to keep writing books, I don’t much care about those things, but I’ve had to care about them because getting a position teaching creative writing requires them. We’re told to write without thinking of these puerile matters, but this mentality assumes independent wealth or a plethora of jobs.
So whatever. This has made me bitter to an extent I’m quite unhappy with regarding so much of publishing. So I’m trying to stop this cycle and just, well, move on. Put the work first, do good shit and make that the ends unto itself. While there’s intrinsic difficulty in this mentality (art, writing in particular, is about communication, so you can’t just ignore that part of things), I think it’s where I personally need to get to. If I’m writing just for myself, I don’t feel so anxious and deflated, instead I’m just having fun producing what I want, which was always the goal anyhow. Or at least one of the goals.
Years ago, I wrote a piece about Federer and my mom and getting old while playing tennis and published it on Medium. Medium is a pretty bad place for weird reasons, but I knew that I’d prefer putting something there to simply having it die on my computer or spending months (or years!) sending it out and then negotiating with an editor about changes. Making this even more obnoxious was the timeliness of this piece, and since time was an important theme of it, putting it out couldn’t wait so long. The weird thing is that despite being essentially self-published and read by practically no one, I was happy with how all of this worked out. The essay was what I wanted it to be, and it was read by a handful of people, and that’s all totally fine. I’ve long admired Jim Joyce and other zinesters for making their stuff for the sake of making it, and knowing from the get-go that any sort of wider audience is never the point. Medium is, in a sense, my way of doing that, and while sure I wish my writing would come out in somewhere schmancy, I’d rather finish things and not think about them anymore. Move on to whatever’s most interesting to work at right now.
All of this is a long way of explaining why I’ll be putting a series of short essays about Weezer albums onto Medium next week. Will anyone read them? I doubt it. But I’ll be done with the goddamn essay and can think about other things in life; submitting it will no longer be polluting my head. Right now, that feels more important than where things get published, and hopefully that will still the case for a long while.