I read a publishing blog daily and feel like I'm up on trends in the industry. And I'm again taken by how different the publishing universe is today than when I began, at least for "serious" writers. (Or are there any serious writers left?). We never, never talked about sales! We were not aiming to write "best sellers." Our high goals were to publish a story in The New Yorker or Esquire, get published and reviewed in the NY Times or New Yorker and selected as a Best Book of the Year or Best American Short Story (I made all but the last cut, the "Roll of Honor," three times). Sales? I swear, sales never entered the mind. We weren't writing genre fiction, after all. We were trying to write literature. The only possible way to make money at this was to sell the book to LaLaLand. But this had nothing to do with us. Our agents handled all that sort of thing.
You can't find a more different universe than the one today. Fascinating.
In today's universe, in fact, I doubt if I would have aspired to become a writer. Why? There are easier ways to make money, if that is the goal.
I should say that I feel great this morning! The first few hours of the day have been pretty good. Then, apparently, the heart starts misfiring and I start dragging ass. Obviously the doctor isn't overly concerned about the timing here, there is no rush to give me my pacemaker. The physical and mechanical aspects of the heart are good, he says. It's just old and not handling electrical charges right. Poor conductivity. That's my understanding, anyway.
H is more stressed out by all this than I am. I'm getting used to dragging ass. It's a little like being high. As long as there is nothing I have to do, I can almost "get into it," a kind of fuzzy surrealistic drag ass world where nothing is in sharp focus.
H leaves for Canada Thursday and definitely wants this settled before then. We'll see.
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