Who cares what I wrote in 2019
But I'm doing this dumb thing anyway
This* (*the last 4 weeks straight) is the time of year when writers roll out the pieces they farted out over the previous 12 months. I’ve also done this every year since I started putting my writing out into this big garbage world of ours and let me tell you something—it’s a hell of a lot more fun when you’ve had a big! successful! viral! year! than when you have not. The year you did okay will inevitably be the year when it will seem like every other writer’s thread is all like, “I rode vintage motorbikes with Brad Pitt in a red sand desert!” “Oh whoops my book was nominated for That Big Award Thing HOW’D THAT HAPPEN?!?!” (the clip from @BillHaderDancin is a useful visual for this one) or “For GQ-The Paris Review-The New York Times I wrote a trilogy of mega-viral think pieces about the five most culturally-red-hot people you’ve heard of this calendar year and I now live in their many house(s)!”
I had a weird year. Just a real weird year. One that white ladies might even call A YEAR OF GROWTH in an Instagram meme with shitty script lettering placed haphazardly over a dandelion. It could’ve been worse—both my year and the meme I mean. I owe my Very Weird Year to two major things unfolding in parallel:
MY NON-DIVORCE DIVORCE
Last November my future ex-husband and I announced we were separating. We still live together and are still technically married. Very little of our day-to-day lives has changed or really even our social lives for that matter. But at some point we will be divorced. This was our first full year of living through … all of that. People wondering what the hell we’re doing. Me wondering what the hell we’re doing. Ups. Downs. Moments of grace. Crying for weird reasons. If you’re new to this newsletter this would be a great time to mention I don’t love people writing to me and saying they’re sorrrrry about my diiiivorce and am I okaaaaaay???!!!?! Anyway, I’d write more about it here but that leads me to the other thing …
MY NON-DIVORCE DIVORCE BOOK
On December 30th of last year, about 6 weeks after we made our announcement, I spent a day dicking around with short humor pieces when an idea hit me square in the face. I emailed my agent, loosely floated the idea of a book about divorce, and short story short by June I had a book deal. So if you’ve ever suspected authors have an odd compulsion to pick over the bones of their actual lives and cheerfully put it between the cover of a book for strangers and friends alike to judge, well, hello. Hi.
For obvious reasons, I have been mentally consumed by both of these things. How do I have a non-divorce divorce while also writing about what a non-divorce divorce is? And, much more than that, writing about what relationships, marriage, love, aging, monogamy all are? How do we grow up aiming ourselves straight at some of this shit? Why are women made to feel bad about continuing to live? It’s all been … a lot.
This might lead you to believe I had a hard time giving a fuck about writing short humor this year and you would be right. I did it, but I wouldn’t say I did it particularly well. The irony is I thought I was doing it better than I had ever done it but the general public was like GIRL NO YOU DID NOT.
But no matter what kind of year you had, I still completely believe it’s a worthwhile exercise to look back on what you wrote over the previous 12 months. It all gets lost in the rush of chasing the next thing. So, if you can, spend a little time looking back over your published pieces, your drafts, the ideas you keep squirreling away. They’re still all there for you, even if you forgot about them. And you had some amazing ideas! I know you did. And if you care at all about what I did this year (I barely do LOLLLL FER REAL) then this is how I did:
• A SYSTEM: I completely forgot that for a big chunk of this year I wrote the name of a project on each day of the calendar and rotated them in 3-day intervals: PILOT, NOVEL, SHORT HUMOR. Notice that the non-fiction book proposal isn’t even in there! I did a pretty decent job of keeping this going until something finally hit (which turned out to be my book) for me to delete that for the rest of the year and just focus on one thing. It was such. A relief. To focus on one thing. (Also important to mention I was WORKING THIS WHOLE TIME. I am not a full time writer! Is anyone??)
• PILOT: It took me months to finally get just a working outline of the pilot together and approved by the two producers I’m working with. But the book (and my life) made writing that script impossible. In the coming months, as I have intervals where I’m waiting for feedback on my manuscript, I will finally start actually writing this dumb pilot. Lord have mercy on my soul I need to get this thing written ASAP in 2020.
• NOVEL: This is back burnered until the book and the pilot are outta ma face. Still not sure I know how to write a novel! Anyway!
• SHORT HUMOR and ESSAYS: I will tell you this right now, this is the worst year I’ve had since I started putting my work out there when it comes to likes/shares/making “best of/most popular” lists (I made none)/feeling like anything I wrote made a dent. It was the first time I felt like I was somehow simultaneously getting better and worse at writing. Like I knew more and was learning more and somehow it was ruining what made me somewhat good at this shit in the first place? I did not … like it. I was writing things I genuinely thought were solid and super funny and they just … cratered. CRATERED. It was the sound of a tumbleweed blowing through a ghost town that isn’t even a real ghost town but just one of those studio ghost towns where the buildings are facades and rats have gnawed off the edges. All that being said, I was in some fucking amazing pubs this year and that is not lost on me! I also had my first pieces on LitHub and The Boston Globe Magazine. Good things! Yeah, anyway, here are my favorite ugly children from 2019:
—The New Yorker: Answers to “Is Your Dog Friendly” Applied to Me and Some Questions for People Who Shout “Wooooo!” During the Hardest Part of a Workout
—The New York Times: Congratulations on the Birth of Your New Baby! Condolences on the Tragic Loss of Your Sense of Humor!
—McSweeney’s: Super Bowl Commercial Bingo, Radiohead or Mueller Report?, Things People Say When You Get Divorced That They Really Should Say When You Get Engaged, Fast Times at Alabama High, Successories for Her
—The Cut: How to Be the Best Mom
—LitHub: Is this my first book tour or my own funeral?
—The Belladonna: We heard you. And decided to do something else instead.
• A LATE-BREAKING SUCCESS STORY: I had vowed to do more original writing on Medium this year, the platform where I got my start with essays. But once the book idea then proposal then actual book took shape that idea went straight out the window. Given my subpar year of actual traction with the American public, it turned out to be pretty damn delightful when just a little over a week ago I wrote a piece in a fury about Adam Driver. It was quickly picked up and featured by Medium and now is the first successful piece I’ve had on that platform since 2018—with over 15k views so far while paying me actual money. It’s a Christmas/Marriage Story miracle! Read it here: Leave Adam Driver Alone.
• ACCEPTANCES / REJECTIONS / KILLED: I did the worst possible job of tracking my submissions this year. I mean, I did it. But forgot about it a lot. For all the reasons above. I actually had a piece out on submission to The New Yorker this past month AND I FORGOT ABOUT IT. I mean 100% absolutely and totally straight up forgot about it. I feel like it’s safe to say I have never forgotten about anything I’ve ever had out on submission and most certainly not something that’s been awaiting a thumbs up or thumbs down from that little known publication. WTF.
—17 acceptances
—20 rejections. This number includes rejections from multiple pubs for the same piece that eventually found a home.
—5 killed. Pieces that either were timely and missed their window (2) or pieces I tried to place and finally just mercy killed (3) because I was so fucking sick of looking at them.
Ah well. Much like hearing stories about childbirth, this rundown is likely not all that relevant to your life. But I hope it will, at the very least, inspire you to do a look back even if you think your year was dumb. (Everyone’s year was dumb) (Except Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s and Jia Tolentino’s and Samantha Irby’s.)
It’s also v v v important to emphasize that none of this writing made me much money! As I’ve mentioned previously I’m an established creative director and copywriter —that’s where 97-99% of my income comes from in any given year. The years when I’ve received a book advance would be the exceptions. Otherwise, regardless of the fancy publication or whatever perception you may have of what “success” looks like for a writer/author/word person, I just tallied up the money the above pieces brought in. That total doesn’t even crack $2500 for everything that’s above, all published between January and mid-December (i.e. before the Adam Driver piece, which has earned me $300+ so far.) So. 🌈ADJUST YOUR DREAMS ACCORDINGLY!🌈
THINGS FROM ELSEWHERE:
Before we exit the holiday season entirely, I wanted to share some pieces that you may have missed during the holiday season shit storm:
• The New Yorker: “New Hallmark Original Christmas Movies from your Favorite Hollywood Directors” by Riane Konc. Excerpt: “Ornamento,” Christopher Nolan. Matthew Mistletoe, a widowed father/corporate hitman, hates the holidays but can’t remember why.
• McSweeney’s: “What It Says About the Christmas Tree in the Bible” by Sarah Hutto. Excerpt: “But lo — I AM NOT FOR CELEBRATING THE CHANGING SEASONS, JUST THE IMPENDING BIRTH OF A SPECIAL MAGICIAN WITH VISIBLE ABS. Now go, and command your people.” And Moses returned to his flock and was like, “You guys are not gonna believe this.”
• 😭A death on Christmas day that has this big-time Peanuts fan all choked up, from The New York Times: “Lee Mendelson, Producer Behind ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas,’ Dies at 86.” Excerpt from his obituary: “Lee Mendelson, an Emmy Award-winning producer who was instrumental in bringing the holiday staple ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas’ to television in 1965 and who wrote the enduring lyrics to the song ‘Christmas Time Is Here,’ died on Christmas morning at his home in Hillsborough, Calif. His son Jason said … his father’s death on Christmas ‘was a pretty serendipitous thing.’”
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