BOOKISH: Mr. Positive

The days have been warm this fall. But finally it’s cool enough for jackets. Mornings are lighter, clearer, the blue sky washed with titanium white. The same watercolorist is dabbing the trees with yellow, and a copper hue found no where else. Our squirrels are happy. We have a bumper crop of walnuts, and every squirrel has one in his mouth, heading god knows where. The walnut fruit looks like a small pale-green apple, and the skin has a sharp, familiar odor. It takes a moment to come up with it.

Hai Karate aftershave. There we go.

I crossed the small park close to where I live, actually whistling. They’ve cut the water and drained the fountain. This is just good sense. I’m meeting friends for an outdoor cup of coffee. Writing friends, the best kind. I haven’t brought my own writing. The real writing is in the late-blooming coneflowers and slender blue sativa columns in city planters and that acid washed sky.

Emily looks up from a tiny wrought iron table, the kind you imagine in Paris. “Here he comes,” she says. “Mr. Negative.”

Derek, Seth McAlpen, Walt Freeman, and two young women sat at tables, pulled close. Freeman grinned. He’s an MFA instructor. He loves to see me needled.

“Negative?” I nodded at everyone. “I don’t know about that.” It was too nice a day to fight.

“You think everyone’s wasting their time,” Emily continued, sipping. She had a few under her belt, so to speak. Her brown, almost black eyes glinted with an aggressive light.

I got my own coffee and found a chair. I sat so I could be seen by the two young women. They looked like writers, with scarves and berets. They didn’t know me, and I am always looking to make a favorable impression. It was too late for the rest of them.

“All you talk about is failure,” Emily said.

This one needed rebutting. “I’m all about success,” I said. “You should call me Mr. Positive.”

“How can you say that when you don’t believe in the process?”

“Which process?” I bantered. The women were smiling. I can work a crowd.

“Getting published!” Emily is a believer. Most writers are. She is offended by contrary views. Freeman displayed a resentful scowl. He made money off the whole thing. I wouldn’t like me either.

He piped in. “I think you’re way wrong, he told me, about getting a novel published.”

“You mean queries?” I asked. We had argued before.

“Among other things,” he said.

I told him “Listen, Walt. Book queries are just a way of getting rid of the writer. It all started with email. Before that, writers hand-mailed entire manuscripts. Publishers hated that, but kept their door open. Otherwise they looked bad. Today, agents and publishers can just request a query. That way they can continue to ignore us, without all that messy paper.”

“You still don’t think queries work?” Freeman asked.

“It makes no sense they would. Only one writer in a thousand has a finished, market-ready manuscript. And of a thousand finished, market-ready manuscripts only one has a chance, maybe, of catching the eye of a publisher. Do the math. Who wades through a million queries for a maybe? No agent I want.”

“What are we, the poor writer, languishing in our garrets, supposed to do, then?””

“Get off the query merry-go-round. Post your stuff online. Write for magazines. Let the industry come to us. Every writer I know will give them whatever they want. A manuscript? A query? You name it, but you have to ask.”

Freeman had no more questions. In any disagreement, he stakes his claim, then retreats into a professorial silence. Not too dumb.

One of the women spoke up. “What’s your advice for someone starting out?”

That one was easy. “Have fun. Write whatever you want. Read all the time. Look at flowers. Make friends. Especially with other writers, and people in the industry, if possible. Live it up. Have new experiences. Tell the truth, always.”

“He doesn’t sound negative to me,” she said to Emily.

“You have to get to know him.”

Thank you, Emily. That’s actually a compliment. And all any writer wants.