I recognize that I’ve neglected the blog portion of my site for a while here. I’ve never really gotten my feet under me regarding what it’s purpose should be. For about a decade, between when I was twenty-two and thirty-two, social media was appealing to me, but around 2016, I stopped being interested in saying things about life that could be reduced to two lines. I preferred at least a format in which those two lines could be expounded upon, debated. But no one really reads blogs anymore anyway, do they? So starting up again like this is really just for me. I figured that since this is a site that charts my writing, I might as well use the blog to chart my writing journey, my thoughts on craft, my attempts at breaking into a business I don’t really know the first thing about at this point and my experience, going forward, of trying to find an agent for my new novel (which is essentially the first novel I feel I might be able to sell), The Elusive Black Truffle.

I always wanted to be a novelist, so I spent the first five years of my 20s, or actually, to be more accurate, I spend the years between nineteen and twenty-seven or so, writing and revising the same novel, a book called “Barcelona,” whose impetus and eventual demise I charted in a piece I published in the Writers on Writing section of Passages North. When you’re working by yourself, in the dark proverbially, and not sending out your work, you can convince yourself of your own genius, and I certainly did plenty of that. But deep down, I’d like to believe I knew the whole time the conclusion I eventually came to, which was that, while working on it taught me a great deal about writing, the book wasn’t good, wasn’t going to be published.

In the meantime, while working on Barcelona, I had been scribbling poems and stories into notebooks as they came to me. A few of the poems were decent, a few of the stories were too. I hit the age of twenty-seven and met my wife. Well, she wasn’t my wife yet. She wouldn’t become my wife for another five years, but I knew straight off that she was the kind of person I could spend my life with. And one of the things that impressed me was that she had a list of things she wanted to do, positive things, productive things. She had interests and hobbies and goals that she was actually moving toward. I had interests and hobbies too. But I wasn’t moving toward them. I think I was likely scared that if I sent my work out, people would tell me it wasn’t any good, sort of like George McFly in Back to the Future, right? Remember that, Marty goes back in time, meets his dad, realizes his dad writes stories and when Marty asks why he doesn’t send them out, George replies, “What if they don’t like it? What if they think it’s no good?” That was me.

Yet, when I met my wife, I realized that if I wanted it to happen, I was going to have to make it happen. I didn’t really know how though. I was still relatively young, relatively naïve. But I made it a goal of mine for the year 2008 (remember way back then?) that I would start sending out my short work with the goal of being published by the end of the year. And it happened. I got an acceptance from a local journal, Philadelphia Stories, and it felt great. A poem called “Physics,” that I written in my phase of trying to write Charles Simic Poems. And it was eventually reprinted in the Best of Philadelphia Stories, Vol. 2. And the stage was set.

I wanted that feeling again. That Acceptance feeling. So I chased it. I dropped Barcelona. Spent the next few years reading literary magazines and writing short stories, having decided that I wasn’t a poet, even if I still occasionally jotted poems in notebooks. I thought that the way it was done was you published short work, maybe got lucky and placed your work in one of the year-end anthologies, got noticed by an agent, and were off to the races. Which was again misguided. It’s not like most jobs where you work your way up. You have to write a novel and approach them. But I figured if I wrote a novel and approached them, I needed credentials or they wouldn’t even consider me, so I kept going with the stories while pondering a novel. I published a fair amount of stories, and that Acceptance feeling worked for a while until it didn’t. It was sort of like a drug high in that the effect of a similar amount of substance started to wear off.

Don’t get me wrong: it was still nice to place a story. I just didn’t start dancing in my seat at my desk when the news came in like I used to. I realized that I had to find joy in the act of writing itself in order to keep going, and I realized that I did take joy in it. Other writers talk about how painful it is to write, how tormenting, but it’s never really been that way for me. Oh, of course, I have days where what I put down on the page is utter crap, and I get frustrated when I can’t find a way forward with a story or when a story isn’t turning out as envisioned, but that’s part of the creation process and overall, I like doing it. So I again sort of went underground with…well, at least my novel work. I knew that were I to succeed in book publishing I would first need a book, and to write a book, I’d have to learn how to do so beyond my experience with Barcelona.

To that end, in 2014, I decided to participate in NanoWriMo, only I did it my way. I started in October with plans to finish by December 31st. I had recently read an interview in Tin House Magazine (one of my all-time favorites; sadly discontinued) with Karl Ove Knausgaard about his writing process. I hadn’t yet encountered My Struggle or read any of it. He was a new writer to me, but I loved the way he described his process of sitting down and just writing about his life. This, coupled with the influence of David Shields selling his “fiction is dead” message of writing works that are more reflective of real life (which I encountered in Ecotone), led me to write a book called Personal Time, about my day-to-day existence, or, to be more accurate, one day in my existence. By September of 2014, I had been married to my wife for three years and we had a daughter nearing two years old. We had moved from Center City Philadelphia to the suburbs and it was a huge adjustment. I was now a husband and a father, and I was in the process of redefining myself as such. Who was I? at this junction.

I’d read all the mid-century white male suburban writers, Updike, Roth, Cheever, Yates. And they’d had various solutions to this question, but their answers weren’t my answer. So my book was in a way in conversation with their viewpoints of masculinity and sexuality and responsibility. Generally, they wrote from a viewpoint of dissatisfaction, of falling out of love, of having affairs to replace the emptiness of modern suburban life. But I liked where we lived, and I like being a dad, and I loved my wife (still do) very much. There were still plenty of problems despite that. Coping with aging for example. Recognizing that, if everything worked out as it should, my course was now set for the rest of my life to a large extent. Navigating the fact that even if you love your spouse, you’re still going to argue. In point of fact, my wife and I had recently had a disagreement over the fact that I had eaten leftovers she had wanted. A very simple argument, sort of like in the William Carlos Williams poem, “This is Just to Say.”

My wife and I aren’t unique among couples, and are likely like many others in that we don’t always resolve disagreements right away. So that was what I figured could be the driving tension behind Personal Time: it takes place the day after that argument when we’re not speaking. I know that I should apologize but I haven’t worked my way around to it yet. I go to work and experience the workday, all the while reflecting on the fight, on past events in our relationship, on past relationships that were easier until they ended because they didn’t carry the weight with them that marriage does. I can’t remember if I had started to read Knausgaard by then or just had an idea of how he wrote, but everyone at that time was talking about his books as though they were the Ulysses of autofiction, and I gave myself the challenge that, if he’d written the Ulysses of autofiction, I was going to write the Mrs. Dalloway.

Bold, right? Hubris, right? Over the course of three months, I threw everything at the page that came to me. I just had to meet my quota of words that day, which I had set at 500. I had always wanted to do standup comedy, so I mixed in potential bits I’d written in my head but never had the courage to get onstage and do. I charted the history of the suburb to which we’d moved, the suburb I had grown up in. I wrote the first half in third person, the second half in second person, and the final product, delivered on time in December, was an absolute mess. But I had a 90,000 page book and I had something to at least work with. Over the next year, I settled down on telling it in first person and got to editing. I edited every day, in the office, over my lunch break, which also happened to be when I wrote it. And by the end of the edit, I had something I really liked, something I stood by, something where, I could publish excerpts from, such as the first chapter, “First Kiss.”

But it was too personal to send out. I let friends read it. But I didn’t give it to my wife. She knew what it was about. She was okay with me having written it, but it was maybe too honest? I loved it. I loved the book, but I figured it wasn’t right for a wider public, so I didn’t proceed with querying agents, finding one, trying to publish it. And the moment passed. The vogue for autofiction died away. Knausgaard had his moment. And by the time enough time went by that I felt comfortable pursuing publication of Personal Time, it was clear that it didn’t meet where the market was. So I shelved it and decided to write something else. But as this entry seems to be getting a little long, defying the rules of blogging where it’s supposed to be short and too the point, I’ll leave off here and pick up the thread in my next entry, where I’ll talk about my next step in the journey. Until then…