Stop Doing The Math

Hi friends.

Greetings from Dulles airport. I’ve got a night flight to Dublin and then I’ll be at the Write By The Sea festival with my dear Rosie Schaap, long-lost friend (and #1000wordsofsummer contributor!) Sinead Gleeson, this seasons’s superstar Rachel Kushner, and a whole lot of brilliant Irish writers. I am going to do a 1000 Words workshop there as well as a conversation. I’ll be in Florida and Chicago later in October, but after this I’ve got a few weeks free. Have I worked enough for a while? I think I have.

After four days on the road I woke up this morning in a hotel room in DC a little tired of myself. No one’s fault really. And honestly I was more interested in the downfall of Eric Adams then my thoughts on my new book.

I sat in bed for a while reading the news and then I closed my laptop and thought what do I want? What will make me happy? And I realized I just wanted to write. So I dug into my draft and played around with that for a while and I am not even kidding when I say that it was actually fucking heaven. I just want to be in that bubble for the rest of the trip whenever I feel like it. And so I shall be.

Later I went to lunch with Kyle. A thing I was looking forward to all week just as I had been looking forward to dinner with Courtney and Laura and drinks with Maris and Lizzie and seeing Mary and meeting Linda for the first time and on and on. I love to hang out with writers. But with Kyle we had a specific meal and destination in mind: the salad Niçoise at Le Diplomate. The perfect salad.

I’ve known Kyle since he was a young pup out there hustling for work, before he became a fancy New Yorker writer. He’s smart and talented and endlessly curious. I think he’s a visionary and it’s been fun to watch his trajectory. Also he’s just a good egg.

We talked a lot about how books end up working these days, as in how they succeed upon publication. Most don’t. The math of it all is dizzying. I said I wished I could write an essay about putting out a book the same week as Sally Rooney but I didn’t think I could get away with it, and then Kyle suggested I paywall it and we both laughed.

Why are paywalls funny? They just are.

We discussed our works in progress. The giddy state of developing something new. A book baby. I already want to read whatever his book turns out to be. It sounded so smart and good.

I talked a bit about wanting to expand this project—1000 Words—whatever that means to expand. I have a wariness of messing around with it too much because it feels so good right now. Even putting out the book version of it felt a little risky and dangerous but it seems to have worked out OK. I’ve watched the Nanowrimo disaster happening and…no thanks, not for me. I’m trying to keep things lean (and unproblematic).

But we discussed big picture ideas for a while and he had some helpful suggestions from his Study Hall days. I might just take that advice. However, expanding online is less interesting to me than expanding in person. And when I told him my secret smaller scale but in real life dream, it was the most fun thing of all to talk about. I’ve never wanted anything more then to make nice things that felt easy and without layers and would inspire people to write. I have so many ideas. But how to make them all happen?

I am always trying to figure out how to land the plane.

On the way home we stopped in a few bookstores to see if they had copies of my new book to sign but both stores oddly only were carrying the same exact thing: a single copy of a paperback of The Middlesteins, which was published ten years ago next month. I cannot describe to you how that felt. More math, I guess.

It was a good, long lunch and a nice walk. It’s smart to get some exercise before you get on a plane ride. And the salad was très magnifique. We bid goodbye and Kyle promised to come to New Orleans. After the election. We all just want to get past that.

When I got to the airport I saw that my novel had been picked as an Editor’s Choice this week by the NYTBR. A win. When I got to the ticket counter I asked them if there were any upgrades available and they said they had just given their last one away. A loss.

Stop doing the math, I thought.

See you next week.

Jami

You are reading Craft Talk, the home of #1000wordsofsummer and also a weekly newsletter about writing from Jami Attenberg. I’m also on twitter and instagram.