author Rosellen Brown
Sometimes the only thing that helps when you are a writer is to read other writers’ takes on how this mysterious profession plays out for them. Here is a list of the columns the NY Times has published over the years. Happy reading!
photo: Jane Eaton Hamilton kanzen cherry 2015
Labyrinth
I go outdoors into the corridors of plum and cherry blossoms, the florid wisterias with their dangling racemes, their whips you must cut back three times a season or they will eat your cat, your car, your house. Here on the street the magnolias lift their cups waiting for spring to pour itself down. I know what’s in there. I know they have crowns, Kinder egg treats, their surprises, their jesters’ hats with dangling gold bells. The air is tinted with scent of hyacinths: Carnegie, City of Harlem, China Pink, Woodstock. They grow ceraceous, stiff along their water-filled stalks, blossoms further apart or closer together depending on light conditions—in my garden with its parsimonious sunshine, they can only try hard, but they give off their kick of perfume, they string it out, they let me have it anyway. Spring is soft as cotton batten, and some moments it goes gaudy as a circus. Watch the chestnut leaf unfurl. Watch the Clematis coil around the stem. Watch the talented beak of the finch as it cracks a sunflower seed. Watch the spotted towhee peck, the variegated thrush as it hurries to hide itself. The sempiternitous sky carves its bowl of the possibilities up beyond the clouds where rockets shoot, where astronauts imagine, where Sally Ride rode her lesbianism into blue space, where Christa McAuliffe exploded when I still lived in the house with the climbing tree.
I kick off my shoes, pull at my socks. The crust of the earth is chilled under my feet, dark, but the wet flock of grass stalks, the brush-cut of green against my toes is a party, takes me into the scrum of childhood when lawns were made for kick-the-can and there was no Round-Up and the measure of a good summer was whether you got enough callouses that you could walk across sharp pebbles and how big a cannonball splash you could make. I spill my hand over a Kanzan cherry trunk, bark rigid and broken. I unwrap the perianth, the floral envelope. A whole bough is Kyoto in April, the Philosopher’s Path, the wandering maiko in their wooden shoes, pink kimonos and white faces, elaborate combs. The individual petals in my hands weigh less than air; weigh less than the eyelashes I brushed last weekend from my lover’s rose-pink cheek. The petals are translucent, pink, silky. I don’t lift my arms, but lifting my arms is what I mean, into the symphonic air.
One year, when I had greatly suffered, when my body was giving itself up, when I had lost all in the world there was to lose, except my life, and was losing that as surely as if I had a hole in my toe through which it drained, I heard a woman playing, on violin, Bach’s Violin Concerto No 1 in A minor, and I was drawn by the threads of music like a rat behind the Pied Piper of Hamelin, and I sank to a bench to listen, and was contrapuntally struck. Terror, relief. Pain, pleasure. Hatred, love. Sour, sweet. The labyrinth we all unwittingly walk, where everything horrible is eventually overwritten by beauty. Everything beautiful is eventually overwritten by horror. And repeat. I know this as a simple truth. This is ever reliable.
I was for the first time in a year of fear not trembling.
Instead of writing the composition, the way as a writer I was prone to do, or capturing the composition the way as a photographer and painter I was prone to do, somehow I became the composition indivisibly and then, just as mysteriously, I melded with air and breeze. I was still me, old and challenged and broken, and not me, too. I was as much the musician as I was her audience. The violinist drew her bow under an ornamental plum tree, white-blossomed, through which sunlight dappled and sky showed cerulean, and all of these things merged—Bach, the poise of her wrist, how hard she had worked to stand under this blossoming Vancouver tree on this too-cold spring day, the sunshine, my own sorrow and grief and sour-hearted blood mechanics—and I was saved. I had not been able to live, and now, via this merging of talent and music and blossom and chill, I could, again. Happiness filled me as if the hole in my foot had healed and instead had become a hole in my head, and the filling was as complete as the emptying. Where I had been but a shell, I plumped. My corpuscles danced. My mitochondria laughed.
A couple weeks ago, a friend hurt herself badly. Yesterday, there was a terrible home invasion, a harsh injury, on a street where I love people. Yesterday a friend wrote to say that even so people save themselves with minute beauty. I knew she was right. I have done this over and over and over again through my life, redemption (if you like, though I might call it retrieval, or restitution) through the communion wafer of nature, through the holy drink that is nature. People save themselves on buttercups under chins to say if they like butter. People save themselves with raccoon kits, bees’ wings, and bird babies in the eaves. These accidental evolutionary goodnesses. People save themselves with kittens, and lambs pronging in fields, and the slap of a horse’s mane on their hands as they ride barebacked through meadows. People save themselves with good cups of coffee or food. People save themselves with tickles, with hand holding, just by meeting someone’s eyes. People save themselves with hikes or bicyling or long runs. These spices of experience. Fragments of mercy.
I am as dunderheaded as a person could be, but, yet, even so, even despite my flaws and weaknesses and losses, this reliable lift I feel because of the intricacy of a poppy unfolding crumpled petals, is there, is real, is find-able, is replicable, is mine for the looking. You won’t find it where I find it, because we are not the same person, but someday when the intricacy of terror and ruination lift, you will find it all the same–in a child’s giggle, a moon shadow, or in the way birch bark curls.
It is yours.
Emma Coats from the Pixare team has summed up what makes a great story. You don’t have to telling stories for kids to realize the value in this advice.
Don’ t miss these poignant, important pleas to US voters…
Pam Houston’s writing is my weakness…
Over at Lit Reactor, Christopher Schultz has compiled some great one-liners of advice from well-known authors in this article here.
magnolia: Jane Eaton Hamilton, unknown year
Instead of asking me to repeat myself, why don’t you challenge yourself to expand? I am not ever going to make myself smaller, my talents fewer, my range tiny, in order to garner your praise.
What makes a great fictional character? Do you know how to develop one? Here is a course with MacArthur Fellow Yiyn Li about writing character-driven stories. There are other courses available here, too, by such lit lights as Susan Orleans.
photograph: Clematis, Jane Eaton Hamilton, 2015
It’s a good feeling to finish up a second draft of a novel–even a romance novel.
Novel draft, check. Lilacs on the table. Check. Candlelit dinner. Perfect view of Seattle’s Space Needle. Check. Scintillating company. Check.
Realizing that I dropped the dog out of the book by the first third, so it is wandering around an island by itself for perpetuity? That’s why I call myself the adequate writer.
sketch: Jane Eaton Hamilton, acrylic, 2014
Right now: You people who are walking around with functional bodies, I want you to take off your clothes in front of a mirror and pat yourself all over, and as you go, say, “Mind, you work,” “eyes, you work,” “ears, you work,” “breasts, you work,” “hips, you work,” “knees, you work.” Etc. And then the rest is up to you.
l-r: Jen Pastiloff, Jane Eaton Hamilton
There’s something I can’t get off my mind; it’s been nagging.
A couple months ago, Jen Pastiloff came to town. She’s the wunderkind behind the online home for great essays, Manifest Station, and a yoga/writing workshop phenom. I first came to know Jen through her site when she published my essay about Paris, ‘Things That Didn’t Happen,’ which now appears in the Caitlin Press anthology This Place a Stranger, about women traveling solo.
All this is a long-winded introduction to the fact that Jen asked me to attend her yoga workshop here in Vancouver, BC, when she came to town earlier this year at Semperviva Yoga, and, reluctantly, I went. (Jen knew getting me out of my house was like pulling teeth, but she kept at me.) Despite a background in dance, I’ve never been a yoga enthusiast, and I’m also an atheist, and morbidly shy, and the whole spiritual thing makes me roll my eyes. I slid down the wall at the back of the room, gamely played along to the limits of my creaky old body, and kept my eyes and ears open.
And, folks, a bunch of things happened.
She calls the workshop, after all, “On Being Human.”
But the transformative thing, the thing that hasn’t gone away, was this:
Women are hurting.
I’ve started this post several times and dependably backed away because I don’t know how to talk about this.
Folks, these were not my people. I’m a wanna-be-butch dyke who has always wavered in my gender identity, and I’m old and my body is utterly broken, and the attendees were straight women mostly in their 30s who had maybe tried for:
Meet the guy of your dreams, have 1.6 children and a dog. Live happily ever after.
And somehow nobody told them the whole freaking enterprise was broken, and that when an enterprise is that broken, it breaks its participants as surely as if they were just sticks.
Crack, crack, crack.
Nobody had told them this, or they were so busy with the job and the kids and the hubby, so overworked and mega-stressed, that they had no time to hear. All they knew, really, before they landed at Jen’s workshop, was that they got a measure of peace from yoga, and otherwise, they were in trouble, and they were going down the tubes in a big fucking smear of shit.
They couldn’t save themselves. Anytime they tried, they felt overwhelmed and under-capable and completely lost. Anytime they tried, the drain just burped up more crap at them.
These were women living under seige.
Make no mistake: life with a career and young kids (why aren’t they born with volume knobs?) and aging parents and a sputtering relationship and financial problems and medical problems and indecision and no respite bites the big one.
Quiet desperation, which I define as even one fleeting thought about hurting yourself or your kiddos, bites the really big one. (As an aside, people may know that I decided to kill my children when they were 4 and 1, and wrote about it, and why I made that agonizing decision, and how I did not do it, but how I saved them from a molester instead, in my memoir ‘No More Hurt.’)
Women have always written about our dilemmas. Remember Charlotte Perkins Gilman and her “The Yellow Wallpaper”? Nothing here is new, but we’ve ramped it all up lately with the addition of technology and Super-Mothering. When a woman is under that kind of stress, when it feels like every goddamned new thing that happens is peeling off layers of her skin, it feels new. Bloody hell, does it feel new. And it feels like it’s gonna hurt someone.
It feels like someone’s gonna die.
That’s where Jen Pastiloff and her Beauty Hunting come in.
The workshop participants were there to tell Jen that their fairytale broke. They were there to tell Jen they were profoundly unhappy with their lives, and scared, and broken.
Now let me tell you what transformed me, and what I have not been able to forget or get over:
Women are hurting in huge numbers. Women at the apexes of their lives are in grave trouble.
It made me sad in a quintessential way and it has not stopped making me incredibly sad. Every time I hear that Jen is giving another workshop, I flash back to that crowd of 60-odd women in Vancouver speaking about grief and fear and loss, and I imagine more women in trouble, room after room full of more women in trouble.
(A message here for women-in-trouble. One or two things I know for sure, to plagiarize Dorothy Allison: It gets better. If you hurt like this now, it does not mean you will always hurt like this. It gets a whole lot better.)
Here’s the thing about Jen Pastiloff, folks. Here’s the revolutionary thing.
She listens.
She listens with an intent focus, a focus that follows your words inside you. Because she has hearing problems, she watches your lips as you speak, and she plucks the ash of your words from the air and takes it inside herself and lays it beside her heart, where before too long your words start beating as if they were strong, capable, living mammals. And then she gives them back to you.
Boiled down, this is the secret to Jen’s popularity. She can call what she does Beauty Hunting–she is for sure out there helping people find beauty. She can start a campaign called “Don’t be an asshole” and remind us all to stop a second and please, please, please be our better selves. She can use words like attention, space, time, connection, intimacy. She can ask participants to answer questions like What gets in your way? What stories are you carrying around in your body? What makes you come alive? Who would you be if nobody told you who you were? All of that is what it is. But why it works is because of her kind of listening.
And what her kind of listening does is simple:
It saves lives.
Here at Scratch Mag is a compilation of (admittedly American) paying sites. Have at it.
sketch: Jane Eaton Hamilton 2014
We’ve all been there on the receiving end of rejections that are ill-conceived and thoughtless. Your work is crap, these notes say, in whatever arguably neutral language they couch this in. Your work made me vomit. Go shovel walkways. Go work at Goonies. Just go away and please, please, please, and whatever you do, stop writing.
They aren’t actually that bad, and most of them aren’t bad at all. But we feel like they are, right?
It may be that, in fact, our work is crap. It happens to the best of us. After 35 years at this, I still write reams of garbage, and, sometimes, I send it out. But regardless of the status of my submissions, good or bad or in between, the stats for rejection/acceptance stay about 20-1. Which means that I get one acceptance per couple dozen rejections.
Does being queer enter into that? Of course it does. Pieces aren’t judged only by merit. Unless there’s a push for affirmative action at a magazine, an article/story/poem that is even tangentially about being queer is often overlooked. Oh, we published a lesbian piece last month. Not quite for our demographic. A little too avant garde for us.
Do I care? Yeah, a lot. I hate homophobia, and at my age, it’s a tired old saw. Go play with knives, already. Get over yourselves and ask more of your readers.
But even so, if I send a piece out–no matter what kind of piece it is–for long enough, with enough diligence, it will eventually find its home, and that won’t be the bottom of the barrel, that’ll be at a magazine/journal/online site where I’ll be proud to publish and they’ll be proud to have you.
Most of being a writer is showing up, keeping at it, being persistent when the whole damned enterprise seems keyed to shutting you down.
Here’s what I know, though. You can do one thing better than any other writer anywhere: you can be yourself.
Authors might have talents and skills you don’t have, but you have talents and skills they don’t have, as well. That’s the thing that strikes me over and over in this long-game: No one can write like I do. Often I whine and grumble about that–how I can’t stop being me for five minutes in order to write as brilliantly as, say, Eudora Welty–but really, ultimately, my uniqueness is a good thing. In fact, in an over-crowded marketplace, it’s the sum total of what I’ve got. My idiosyncracies? Those are my only commodities in publishing-land.
Do I wish I had other styles, other skills, other talents? Of course I do. Absolutely I do. If I could write like Arundhati Roy, or Karrie Higgins, or poetry like, say, Alice Anderson or Jane Hirschfield or Marilyn Hacker, or essays like Roxanne Gay, or one true sentence the way Ray Carver could, or a Lidia Yuknavich short chapter, I would die a perfectly fulfilled human being. If I could turn a sentence like Rebecca Brown or Lorrie Moore or Mavis Gallant or Toni Morrison I would be incandescent. But I can’t. That’s them. That’s their kick at the can. It’s not supposed to be mine.
Mine is the bit I got.
And that’s a lucky thing. Because if we all wrote like each other, reading would be a grim task indeed.
Your work is crap? Make more crap. Do it the Beckett way: If you’re going to fail–and you are going to fail–fail better.
photo by: Jane Eaton Hamilton: orchid
“In an experiment in NY in the mid sixties, they asked elementary school children to draw their parents. They were too young to have any attitudes or opinions; they saw things directly, from experience. They came up with the most amazing symbolic drawings: Dad’s big as a barrel, with beer cans on his stomach; Mom’s tiny, standing next to a Matterhorn of laundry. The symbols were vivid and stunningly revealing. This is what Flannery O’Connor was talking about when she said a good story is literal in the same sense that a child’s drawing is literal. From this idea you take the faith that what you are really after in describing experience is to recover the direct gaze of the child, to be an infant with speech. The symbols and even the meaning will take care of themselves, if you can be simply, straightly clear. Forget everything you think you know and just try to be clear, try to render exactly what your direct gaze gives you to say about the instance you’ve created. It will have so much less to do with what you think than it will with what you ARE. And you may not even be particularly aware of it; in fact, it’s probably better if you aren’t, even though what it amounts to finally is something that others will call your vision. Trust that. It’s the most beautiful thing about this work.” Richard Bausch
from
The Writer’s Handbook – 1988 by
1. Be talented
This, of course, is the killer. What is talent? I can hear someone shouting, and here we are, ready to get into a discussion right up there with “what is the meaning of life?” for weighty pronouncements and total uselessness. For the purposes of the beginning writer, talent may as well be defined as eventual success – publication and money. If you wrote something for which someone sent you a check, if you cashed the check and it didn’t bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented. Now some of you are really hollering. Some of you are calling me one crass money-fixated creep. And some of you are calling me bad names. Are you calling Harold Robbins talented? someone in one of the Great English Departments of America is screeching. V.C. Andrews? Theodore Dreiser? Or what about you, you dyslexic moron?
Nonsense. Worse than nonsense, off the subject. We’re not talking about good or bad here. I’m interested in telling you how to get your stuff published, not in critical judgments of who’s good or bad. As a rule the critical judgments come after the check’s been spent, anyway. I have my own opinions, but most times I keep them to myself. People who are published steadily and are paid for what they are writing may be either saints or trollops, but they are clearly reaching a great many someones who want what they have. Ergo, they are communicating. Ergo, they are talented. The biggest part of writing successfully is being talented, and in the context of marketing, the only bad writer is one who doesn’t get paid. If you’re not talented, you won’t succeed. And if you’re not succeeding, you should know when to quit. When is that? I don’t know. It’s different for each writer. Not after six rejection slips, certainly, nor after sixty. But after six hundred? Maybe. After six thousand? My friend, after six thousand pinks, it’s time you tried painting or computer programming. Further, almost every aspiring writer knows when he is getting warmer – you start getting little jotted notes on your rejection slips, or personal letters . . . maybe a commiserating phone call. It’s lonely out there in the cold, but there are encouraging voices … unless there is nothing in your words which warrants encouragement. I think you owe it to yourself to skip as much of the self-illusion as possible. If your eyes are open, you’ll know which way to go … or when to turn back.
2. Be neat
Type. Double-space. Use a nice heavy white paper, never that erasable onion-skin stuff. If you’ve marked up your manuscript a lot, do another draft.
3. Be self-critical
If you haven’t marked up your manuscript a lot, you did a lazy job. Only God gets things right the first time. Don’t be a slob.
4. Remove every extraneous word
You want to get up on a soapbox and preach? Fine. Get one and try your local park. You want to write for money? Get to the point. And if you remove all the excess garbage and discover you can’t find the point, tear up what you wrote and start all over again . . . or try something new.
5. Never look at a reference book while doing a first draft
You want to write a story? Fine. Put away your dictionary, your encyclopedias, your World Almanac, and your thesaurus. Better yet, throw your thesaurus into the wastebasket. The only things creepier than a thesaurus are those little paperbacks college students too lazy to read the assigned novels buy around exam time. Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule. You think you might have misspelled a word? O.K., so here is your choice: either look it up in the dictionary, thereby making sure you have it right – and breaking your train of thought and the writer’s trance in the bargain – or just spell it phonetically and correct it later. Why not? Did you think it was going to go somewhere? And if you need to know the largest city in Brazil and you find you don’t have it in your head, why not write in Miami, or Cleveland? You can check it … but later. When you sit down to write, write. Don’t do anything else except go to the bathroom, and only do that if it absolutely cannot be put off.
6. Know the markets
Only a dimwit would send a story about giant vampire bats surrounding a high school to McCall’s. Only a dimwit would send a tender story about a mother and daughter making up their differences on Christmas Eve to Playboy … but people do it all the time. I’m not exaggerating; I have seen such stories in the slush piles of the actual magazines. If you write a good story, why send it out in an ignorant fashion? Would you send your kid out in a snowstorm dressed in Bermuda shorts and a tank top? If you like science fiction, read the magazines. If you want to write confession stories, read the magazines. And so on. It isn’t just a matter of knowing what’s right for the present story; you can begin to catch on, after awhile, to overall rhythms, editorial likes and dislikes, a magazine’s entire slant. Sometimes your reading can influence the next story, and create a sale.
7. Write to entertain
Does this mean you can’t write “serious fiction”? It does not. Somewhere along the line pernicious critics have invested the American reading and writing public with the idea that entertaining fiction and serious ideas do not overlap. This would have surprised Charles Dickens, not to mention Jane Austen, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, Bernard Malamud, and hundreds of others. But your serious ideas must always serve your story, not the other way around. I repeat: if you want to preach, get a soapbox.
8. Ask yourself frequently, “Am I having fun?”
The answer needn’t always be yes. But if it’s always no, it’s time for a new project or a new career.
9. How to evaluate criticism
Show your piece to a number of people – ten, let us say. Listen carefully to what they tell you. Smile and nod a lot. Then review what was said very carefully. If your critics are all telling you the same thing about some facet of your story – a plot twist that doesn’t work, a character who rings false, stilted narrative, or half a dozen other possibles – change that facet. It doesn’t matter if you really liked that twist of that character; if a lot of people are telling you something is wrong with you piece, it is. If seven or eight of them are hitting on that same thing, I’d still suggest changing it. But if everyone – or even most everyone – is criticizing something different, you can safely disregard what all of them say.
10. Observe all rules for proper submission
Return postage, self-addressed envelope, all of that.
11. An agent? Forget it. For now
Agents get 10% of monies earned by their clients. 10% of nothing is nothing. Agents also have to pay the rent. Beginning writers do not contribute to that or any other necessity of life. Flog your stories around yourself. If you’ve done a novel, send around query letters to publishers, one by one, and follow up with sample chapters and/or the manuscript complete. And remember Stephen King’s First Rule of Writers and Agents, learned by bitter personal experience: You don’t need one until you’re making enough for someone to steal … and if you’re making that much, you’ll be able to take your pick of good agents.
12. If it’s bad, kill it
When it comes to people, mercy killing is against the law. When it comes to fiction, it is the law.
That’s everything you need to know. And if you listened, you can write everything and anything you want. Now I believe I will wish you a pleasant day and sign off.
My ten minutes are up.” –Stephen King
For more advice from Stephen King, check out his Reading List for Writers.
Reprise # 19
“You never really learn to write as it is usually conceived; there is no template you are trying to decipher. What you learn, eventually, is how to write this one thing you’re working on. It’s no accident that we feel as if we have to learn everything all over again each time we try to do it. Because that is indeed the situation. You have to learn how to write each one, and each one contains secrets and mysteries that you have to solve, and those secrets and mysteries change as the story changes, and so you have to learn it all over. The thing you can treat like a template is HABIT, the habits of work that you develop, that you can strive consciously to develop. The habit of being shrewd about it all: practicing the habit of working without demanding too much in the way of specific conditions (silence, certain light, certain time of day, certain place), teaching yourself to work in changing conditions and with the noises and distractions of being alive on this very hectic and un-peaceful planet. Just visiting it each day, let it know you’re there. So I am really seldom teaching writing: I’m teaching habits, and revision, and practice, and understanding that confusion is quite normal and even healthy because it leads you into what you don’t know about what you thought you knew.” -Richard Bausch
sketch: Jane Eaton Hamilton 2014
Know what separates the people who’ve published books from the people who haven’t? You think it’s connections, talent, luck, skill, but it’s something a lot more basic–it’s tenacity. It’s perseverance. It’s not giving up. It’s sticking with a piece after you screech and tear your hair out. It’s staying put, bum to chair, for as long as it takes.
I just finished a travel essay, The Blind Warthog, about a trip I took to Namibia. The essay grew too big for its britches, fast, and broke off into the possiblity of multiple essays, even a book of essays if I include other countries. I pushed and pulled and snarled and snarked and moaned and groaned, tried this, tried that, and eventually, over days, a 2000 word piece strung itself together because writing is, at its essence, allusive, and the secret to getting the first draft is just staying put and getting any words on the page. I didn’t ball those up, all those wrong words, and toss them. I hung tight with them because one wrong word suggested another wrong word eventually suggested another right word in that freeway pile-up way words have if you let them have their heads.
Eventually, that gave me a schematic from which to go forward, a hint of a piece. A friend offered an ear so that I could identify the flaws while reading aloud, always, for me, a productive process (because the embarrassment of having my mistakes seen by someone else highlights them for me). A little too much this. Not enough that. Stylistic blunders. Bits that got dropped in but not expanded. Bits that need to be moved out.
Back to the hopper it went. Squash this this way. Squash that that way. Tinker this, tinker that. Absorb central metaphors; working?
Leave some time.
Rinse and repeat.
At that end of all that, I had a first final draft of just over 3000 words. This is the one that’s good enough to submit. This is the draft that’s like a small goat proinging through a meadow; all joy and exuberance.
But here is where the best person in my world comes in: My editor.
I’ve had hundreds of these folks, and working with each is different than was the last, but working with each is also, always, deeply satisfying. All those things that were suggested in your piece but didn’t make it to fruition because you were busy with nuts and bolts? She will find them. She will ask you to enhance them. The things that kinda sorta worked but really didn’t? She will ask you to turf them.
DO WHATEVER SHE ASKS is my rather-strongly-held opinion. If you don’t trust her, keep a copy of your piece as it stood before the changes. But make the changes she suggests with an open heart. And here’s why: Your editor is engaging your work with fresh eyes in a way that you have not and can not, and because of her suggestions, so will you. It will open your work up. You will learn things. Your piece will very likely get much better.
You can see it as criticism. You can see it as plundering. You can see it as mean.
But trust me when I say if you participate, your work will come alive (and if it doesn’t, you still have that original to fall back on). Understand that you and your editor share a goal: to make the piece the best it can be.
Here’s how I see it:
An expert’s got her fingertips on my work–for free. If she doesn’t pull her punches–please, editors, give me a hard edit–luckier still, the luckiest author alive.
I can’t wait.
Eaton Hamilton 