The Thing with Feathers

New Year, New Platform

What a bright, shiny new year. Be a darn shame if anything happened to it.

But of course things will happen. Good things, bad things. Predictable things, things we never see coming, things that we should have seen coming, but we just couldn’t bear to think about that scary shape in the corner that looks like a monster.

This may sound as if I’m feeling doomy and gloomy. I’m not. I’m pretty much Nellie Forbush, although, without the racism plot device. Stuck like a dope with a thing called hope, and I can’t get it out of my heart.

But my hopefulness does not extend to the future of Tiny Letter, the platform I’ve been using for several years for this oh-so-low-key newsletter. This month, I’m hanging up a “change of address” sign at Tiny Letter and moving here. I had my reservations about Substack, but someone reminded me that basically every facet of capitalism is problematic. It’s hard to be pure in this world.

As it happens, my publisher, HarperCollins, is the only publisher among the so-called Big Five with unionized workers and those workers have gone on strike. The union has been specific about how writers can support them. Don’t blurb HarperCollins books. Don’t review them. At the same time, they understand that HarperCollins writers should meet all contractual obligations and have encouraged booksellers to keep ordering/selling the company’s titles.

So here I am, going into 2023 with a beautiful new cover and, as of a week ago, galleys. And I cannot, in good conscience, ask people to blurb my book or promote it in anyway. However, I am allowed to promote it. While it’s not a contractual obligation per se, it is a de facto one. This is the first book on a three-book contract. And although I will be eligible to collect Social Security when this contract is done, I’m not dead yet! I don’t want to go on the cart!

More seriously: No one really knows how long one can keep at the novel-writing game, even in peak health. Philip Roth announced his retirement just before his 80th birthday. A novel is . . . a lot to keep in one’s head. And while it’s entirely anecdotal, my father’s health seemed to falter in his 70s. He had retired in 1995 at the age of 66, but it was a time when there were still paying gigs in freelancing – a book review here, a commentary there. (My dad was an editorial writer and columnist for the Baltimore Sun for 30 years.) My dad believed in writing for money, a value he inculcated in me. Not a lot of money, just – money. As his freelance opportunities began to disappear in the first decade of the 21st century, I encouraged him to start a blog. No, he said, he would not write for free.

And maybe, probably, his decline, circa 2012-2014 had nothing to do with not writing, but it haunts me still.

If you read this newsletter, you may also follow me on Twitter and be aware of the fact that I love a good selfie. What you may not know is the context of so many of those selfies – and you won’t learn it unless you read an essay I wrote for Scribd, which will be available later this year as an eBook. (Look, I’ve got a kid to put through college in six years, I have to be ruthless. Plus, I’m Theo Lippman Jr.’s daughter and he would be so depressed if he knew how much free writing I do.) The one good fairy that came to my christening was the genetics fairy because I know no other explanation for my (so far, knock wood, leave me alone evil eye) relatively good health. But there is no immortality fairy. To quote John Irving’s The World According to Garp, we are all terminal cases.

Read/reading: Lucy by the Sea, Elizabeth Strout; “You Just Need to Lose Weight” and 19 Other Myths about Fat People, Aubrey Gordon; Now is the Time to Panic, Kevin Wilson. A Streetcar Named Murder, T.G. Herren; Really Good, Actually, Monica Heisey; Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin. Also, 12 student manuscripts for my annual workshop at Eckerd College’s Writers in Paradise.

Re-reading: Baja, Oklahoma, Dan Jenkins. Re-listening: One Summer, Bill Bryson.

Me, me, me: Please pre-order Prom Mom. Also, HarperCollins and the union are now working with a mediator, so fingers crossed.