Uncreated Conscience

According to Abner, I am on the wrong career path; instead of publishing, I ought to be in the espionage business. Here is a girl, he says, who is fluent in three languages and conversant in a handful of others, jumps out of perfectly good airplanes and scuba dives for fun, knows martial arts, fencing, and horseback riding, who can also behave properly at formal social functions (thanks to cotillion). On top of that, who would suspect the cute little Asian girl with hipster glasses and a bowler hat of being a spy? Certainly not our enemies! Uncle Sam would snap me up in a second, Abner claims.

Ah, but you see, Abner, Uncle Sam has already had me on the radar for a long time. I can’t count the number of times the FBI, the CIA, and the military have tried to recruit me (mostly for my language abilities). Unfortunately I am chronically uninterested in working for the government as bureaucracy and I don’t mesh very well. I love my country, don’t get me wrong, but my love of books and stories far outweighs my patriotism. Besides, I think being a skydiving pirate would be far more fun.

Although a diplomatic passport does sound tempting, considering JJ’s Law (in which the world conspires to prevent JJ from having a pleasant flying experience…EVER).

However, despite incentives to the contrary, I do think publishing is the right business for me, even if reading queries does give me a horrific headache.

More liveblogging of queries!

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…that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone?

I am on an upbeat Joni Mitchell kick that I must sing to myself since Endymion the iPod has fallen into his enchanted sleep at last and cannot even be restarted. I have been having no luck with my Apple products recently, but in all fairness, Pantalaimon the iBook is nearing 5 years old and Endymion is even older still. They have had a good run of things. Soon I shall buy another laptop using Bear’s med student discount and get a free iPod with my purchase. Score.

Last night I came home and slept for 12 hours and it was glorious. Last night my mother also sent me a package of some recent fashions in Korea because she had just come back from a business trip. But because I immediately zonked out, I decided to open up the goodies this morning.

My first thought upon opening my package was Did my mother just send me an old lady blouse?

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I don’t care if that isn’t grammatically correct in the French. (Does French have two forms of the verb “to be” like Spanish? There’s a slight temporal nature to estar over ser in Spanish, but I digress.) I am simply done with being social for the next couple of weeks or so unless it is to see my Teddy Bear and take a nap together or something. Right now I can’t stand to see another person, whether they be my friend or no. I love my friends to bits and pieces but being sociable is so draining that I’ve gone the other way around and become an insomniac. I can feel the edges of my bipolar disorder seep into my consciousness. Manic creativity is at my fingertips. This is bad, y’all. Not bad for my artistic output, but bad for…well, every other aspect of my life. Like walking into work well-rested and not zombie-fied crazy in a few hours.

So this isn’t to say I don’t love all of you, but I refuse to have any communiqué for at least a week. This week I plan to come straight home every night, do some yoga, and then revise and draw and code and design and not talk to a single person. I desperately need to find some mental peace. I’ll probably try and get back into the blogging groove as well since I was so preoccupied with being my bubbly, sociable self for the past two weeks I haven’t had the time. So it’s just going to be me and White-Harp for a while. I am looking forward to it.

Randomly (because my brain is on crack with the onset of manic periods), I have eaten an entire dark chocolate Easter bunny and I need a new computer so badly it’s not even funny. Tax return, where art thou?

Some of my old friends might remember my 2003 self when I was a bright-eyed and unsullied freshman at good old NYU, during which time I blogged every day, sometimes even several times a day.

I wonder where she’s gone.

I always have things to say on my blog but when you work in the business of trimming and editing other people’s words, your own seem to dry up when you get home. I have a newly found appreciation for agents who blog, for my work isn’t nearly as hard as theirs yet they find the time and energy to educate aspiring writers. I barely have the energy to make myself dinner once I get home. I’ve also been working 5 days a week instead of the usual 3 (and I don’t have access to internet at work), so any pithy comments or observations I might have made about this industry wait until I get home, by which time all I want to do is curl up with a good book and sleep. (Yes, I can still read other things while working this job.)

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I have been struck with a sudden fit of nostalgia for London. I miss London everyday, but the memory of the experience of living there has been fairly faded in the three and a half years I’ve been back in the States. But lately small memories have been flaring with sharp clarity in my mind: the way the city constantly smelled of damp and wet and stone even on a clear day, the feel of the wrought-iron fences lining Russell Square, how I would wander by the fountains playing and walk past Senate Library and around the British Museum on a long, meandering walk back from class to my flat back in Clerkenwell. The taste of Marlboro Reds and the warmth of the lights under my hand as Sofa and I talked long into the night sitting in the niche behind The Guardian building. How Tesco and Sainsbury smelled. The sound of tuna cans clinking against my leg in their plastic grocery bag as I walked over the cobblestones outside Exmouth Arms. The unexpected jolts of bright red and green and blue and yellow and saturation in a City that I always think of as perpetually grey. How I never felt as though I knew her completely, the city, the way I know New York now, the way I knew Los Angeles then. I think I miss the feeling of being lost, of being new, of not knowing and finding my way.

I suppose it makes sense as I’m coming upon my quarterly “Why aren’t the Libertines still together as a band?” hissy fit. It’s like clockwork, really. I listened to them obsessively in the summer before I went to stalk Carl Barât study abroad and they played on my iPod (known as Gerty MacDowell then–I have since learned not to name a piece of technology after a 16-year-old Irish schoolgirl with a limp as my iPod continually broke down) as I wandered up and down the streets of Camden Town and Whitechapel. The result of this hissy fit is me working furiously on the thinly-veiled screenplay biopic of the band (similar to Velvet Goldmine) called What Became of the Likely Lads? I actually really love this screenplay to death but it’s a side project on which I’m frittering away.

The other is that a new scene unexpectedly arose in ELIJAH’S CHARIOT during revisions in which my three protagonists are wandering around Bloomsbury and I remember with such sudden fierce detail the bookshops and teashops and pubs and cafes of the neighbourhood. ELIJAH’S CHARIOT takes place in London, of course, or my version of Londinium which is an amalgamation of the Edwardian London I read about in fiction and the London I knew when I lived there in the fall of 2005. The ache of missing that city is now acute and specific, rather than the dull ache it normally is.

Oh well, back to revisions. Although it isn’t helping my strange nostalgic mood any.

You know, the longer I live on the East Coast, the more I’m convinced the gorgeous spring day where it is warm and clear and full of sunshine is a complete myth. It has rained nearly everyday without fail since April decided to show up. While I’m grateful it isn’t ass-cold anymore, the new sogginess I could do without. It doesn’t help that my hair has reached that annoying length where it is just too long to be straight and just too short to wave properly. Any hint of dampness in the air = JJ’s hair going out of control. Back into a ponytail it is, then.

Yesterday I got my first request for an explanation of why I passed on a query. I will say first that the writer will never get a response. I am sorry and I wish I could help him/her out, but unfortunately I just can’t. The first is an issue of time. It takes me anywhere from a half-hour to 2 hours (or more) to craft a reader’s report or an editorial letter. (Longer if I have nothing positive to say about the partial or full. Because it isn’t constructive criticism to send the writer a letter that reads “THIS SUCKS.”) What with reading manuscripts and dealing with existing clients, I haven’t had time to blog as much as much as I used to, let alone individually reply to the bazillion queries we receive.

The second is I can’t remember to which work the writer is referring. I read so many queries that they all end up blurring together. If it had been memorable, it would have already been requested or else relegated to the “batshit insane” pile. (I love those. I admit to photocopying a few to keep in a file to giggle over when I am having a tough day.) There are many reasons I would pass on a query (the first being vagueness), but I can’t possibly remember why I passed on this particular one if I can’t even remember the original query in the first place.

Part the last of my 100+ query liveblog. I trudge onward to work now in the pouring rain where the editorial letter from Hell awaits me. What do I say? “Dear Author, your first 100 pages were cute with some revisions that I think it needs here. However, on page 101 it went somewhere from where I’m not sure it can recover”? La Junior Agent told me to write down my first impressions before toning it down to professional politeness otherwise I’ll end up with editorial constipation. It might be a good idea.

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I read a manuscript yesterday that was so searingly bad I swear it singed off my eyebrows. I can only suspend my disbelief so far. And it was all going along so swimmingly in the first 100 pages or so and them bam! it jumped the shark. Well, it wasn’t that it jumped the shark so much as it got eaten by Jaws and left me with a mangled corpse that I am somehow expected to fix. El Jefe has left the editing and editorial letter to me and I’m not quite sure how to go about this. There are only so many ways you can nicely say “WHAT IN HOLY FUCKING HELL???????”

Anyhow, part three of my query “liveblog” follows beneath the cut. I’ve noticed that I’m an eternal optimist. I’ll request many things from slush, hopeful that it will be brilliant. Unfortunately, so many fail the partial stage. But that’s another post.

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Hopefully today will be slightly less slushful at work so I can concentrate on these editorial letters I have to write. One is a direct request from the author; I wrote a reader’s report for El Jefe a few weeks ago and he liked it so much he took me out to lunch and then attached it DIRECTLY in an email to the author. The author emailed back specifically asking me to “give him guidance” on where to go next with the manuscript. El Jefe called me “brilliant” in the email which is incredibly flattering, but now there’s all this pressure to live up to that too.

Anyhow, I now submit for some more amusement, the next 25 of the 100+ queries I read yesterday under the cut.

P.S. For those who wanted to know what the “batshit insane query” was, all I can say is that it involved schizophrenia and Anakin Skywalker. I wish I could make this sort of stuff up.

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