Cahabitating Is Not a Word

But cohabitate is; funny language, this English.

Becky and I have been cohabiting for a number of months, but only on a part-time basis. She has the Monkey from Tuesday night until Saturday morning; her ex has him the rest of the time. I’m not sure when her mother began saying “See you Tuesday,” when Becky left for work on Saturday, but Becky’s been spending her weekends at the Treehouse since December.

I knew sooner or later I would need to address the wisdom of sharing so much time so quickly.

It started with a toothbrush, permanently installed in my medicine cabinet. It progressed to a razor, living in my shower. I buy half and half (or heavy cream so I’ll have something to whip into fresh cream for berries, French toast, or espresso) even though I drink my coffee black. Five pound bags of sugar used to last the better part of a year. Since moving to the Treehouse in October, I’ve bought two.

Becky’s emotional impact has been less subtle; Akimbo knew me before Andi, and says she’s never seen me this happy.

The flip side of that happiness is the deferred misery I’ve felt the last few weeks. I keep coming back to Matt Prior, Jess Walter’s protagonist of The Financial Lives of the Poets: “It is the only unforgivable thing, really…to feel sorry for yourself.” I’ve quoted it at SwF&F before, and I quote it again to make you aware that I’m aware of it, and hope you’ll forgive the unforgivable. We’re coming up on a year since she said I think we should separate, and it’s certainly time to move on.

Tuesdays have been fraught with misery for some months. Becky and I wake, cuddle, and make breakfast, knowing we’ll be sleeping alone when night comes. I worked later and later every Tuesday, but I had to go home eventually. As months passed, my solitary doldrums stopped being about the loss of my marriage, and started being about the loss of Becky. I went from wallowing on my own to being unable to function on my own. That’s cohabiting’s only real loss; the realization I can function on my own after so many years of making every decision communally. I know I can, so I’m free to move on from that, too.

Becky’s parents are traveling the mediterranean, and we’ve decided to spend three weeks together in a house that isn’t ours. The end of a few weekend nights led to a sadness that made us question whether to keep them going. How difficult will it be to face the end of a few weeks?

Wise or not, I'm loving every minute.

Some Like It Hot

Miami blog collective The Heat Lightning has decided I'm worthy of inclusion. I will have more to say about the mighty David Mitchell in future posts, but for now, check out this link.

If you're a SwF&F regular, you know John Dufresne's seventh rule of revision from Lie That Tells a Truth:

Challenge every exclamation point. Like adverbs, they are intrusive. You get, let's say, three exclamation points in your life. Use them wisely. Using an exclamation point is rather like laughing at your own joke.

Upon editing, The Heat Lightning used two of my three. Other than that, I'm pysched.

Luck is Opportunity Plus Preparation

I had an agent’s attention a couple years back. Before coming to Books & Books, Marissa had ghostwritten a couple of biographies with famous folks and had also interned at several agencies. When she found out I’d written a book, she demanded to know why I hadn’t approached her before. After asking about what I was working on and what I’d completed, Marissa suggested I contact Courtney Miller-Callihan at Sanford J. Greenburger Associates, Inc.

Not only did Miller-Callihan accept email submissions - quick and easy - Marissa had seen her in action and knew she was good at her job.

I emailed Courtney Miller-Callihan at SGA the second draft of Scratch the Dead Places (horror of horrors; at least it wasn’t the first draft). She passed on it, of course. At the same time, she told me she liked my writing and would look at something different. I sent Ming and she responded enthusiastically. I sent a version with some revisions she suggested, along with an outline for parts one and two. She replied with a tremendous email that was two pages long when I printed it out.

I made the changes she suggested immediately. Then I sat on them.

When I sent Ming back, along with a short story collection called Whistling Past the Graveyard to apologize for taking so long, I was shocked to find that a year had passed since our last correspondence.

I’ve since learned how rarely this kind of feedback happens, and how well it portends. I’ve also learned that from an agent’s perspective, when there’s a long period of silence after so much back-and-forth, the agent assumes you’ve used their advice to improve your work, attempted to sell it to a different agent, failed, then come crawling back like nothing ever happened.

Timing is everything. There has to be a reason I didn’t just send it off immediately, right? I had to deal with my marriage breaking up, after all. Cheap excuse. The fact is, I wasn’t aware of those problems until a couple of months after the revised Ming was ready. The breakup prompted me to send my work out, to try and make something of my life.

Am I so afraid of failure I sabotage every opportunity?

When we first corresponded, Courtney Miller-Callahan was not listed on the SGA website. Now she is. I can only assume her plate is fuller than it once was, or (uh-oh) she’s lost interest, or (worst of all) she’s forgotten Ming. Do I follow up? Do I use divorce as an excuse? Do I take it as a learning experience and move on?

I think yes, no, and yes.

I've been preparing long enough; it's time to create an opportunity.

Blog vs. Blog

What makes publishing folks want to turn a blog into a book? Julie Powell decides to record her experience of making every recipe in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in the course of a year. The Julie / Julia Project becomes Julie & Julia. Julie Powell launches her writing career, and eventually the story inspires a movie which gives Meryl Streep the excuse to embody Julia Child.

Powell was so successful that it made other authors get gimmicky. The Year of Yes. Yes Man. A.J. Jacob's began with reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica in Know-It-All, progressed to following every (EVERY, not just the Big Ten) rule in the Bible in The Year of Living Biblically, and moved on to a variety life experiments in The Guinea Pig Diaries. But as good as these books are, they're off-topic. None began life as blogs.

Being an asshole is another way of getting a book deal. Not just any asshole; you need to be an asshole on a scale so grand that you could smuggle illegals over the border in your rectum and they would thank you for the experience and remark on the luxuriousness of the accommodations.  I’m speaking of Maddox, techo-geek-craptastic-testosteroney-self-aggrandizer behind The Best Page in the Universe and eventually, The Alphabet of Manliness.

More recently, I’m speaking of Tucker Max, whose online recounting of partying and fucking became the bestselling I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. I don’t know what happened with the movie, but when I saw they chose a cozy-looking actor who is actually less good-looking than the author, I decided to take a pass. I’m going to judge the movie sight unseen and say it tanked because they tried to soften the prick’s personality by going with an affable guy. Who’s interested in a soft prick?

Really, the most successful way to get your online baby reborn in print is by using a business axiom you’ve heard before: Do One Thing; Do It Well.

Think of high-concept fare like Hot Chicks with Douchebags (yes, I'm using high-concept correctly; not to be confused with highbrow, high concept is all about the idea). HCwD posts pictures of sexy women next to guys who make you wonder how the coupling came about, then he ridicules the guy and drools over the woman. That’s it. But it’s huge.

Do One Thing, Do It Well. Justin Halpern’s dad is good at dispensing off-color wisdom. Justin is genius at boiling these bits of advice into hilarious Twitter updates. Not a blog, but Sh*t My Dad Says still emphasizes my point.

Do One Thing, Do It Well, and why not put other people to work while you’re at it? Send me pictures of crazy things people will stick in their faces and call food. Send me passive-aggressive notes. Send me odd portraits of your family. Send me embarrassing text messages. Send me pictures of hipsters. Send me pictures of cute animals. No, I mean really cute animals. The list goes on and on.

I'll publish a book one day, but Sweet with Fall and Fish will never be a book because I write about what I feel like when I feel like writing about it. I could have compartmentalized. I could have called it My Sudden Single Life, written exclusively and obsessively about the break-up of my marriage, then dated my way through Miami and shared all about it.

 I could have called it Racial Profiling, asked for photos of cigar store Indians, black-face salt and pepper shakers, Mexican caricatures on cable TV shows, then categorized by race and type.

 I could have called it Cooks with Books, written about the process of choosing a new cookbook each month Bottega Challenge-style, coordinating chefs and a menu, and inviting folks to the Biltmore to eat a fabulous meal.

 I could record my attempts to be a published author. I could anonymously trash retail, or bookstore customers, or the book business (I actually did this once after a particularly harsh day; I wrote one or two posts, couldn’t remember my password, and decided the site was too bitter to continue anyway). Instead, I’m just me, writing about stuff.

At least I’m good at being myself.

It Could Always Be Worse

Clichés are the bane of a writer’s existence. They are also comforting for people in turmoil. In titling this post, I asked the writer version of me to turn aside in favor of plain old Aaron.

I just re-read a scrap of diary I titled Dark Night of the Soul, a perfect piece for putting my current misery into perspective. I’m frustrated over how long losing the defining relationship of my life has hurt. Understandable. But think about Tuesday, October 6th, 2009, when I came closer to suicide than any point in my life since 1980 [Yes, I tried to kill myself when I was eight years old, but the difficulty I’ve had editing this proves it’s more than I can explore here. In the end I removed that experience from this post. Suffice to say it was a genuine attempt, and it caused my parents to finally look at what alcoholism was doing to our family]. It’s a common experience for the third-born Child Of an Alcoholic, called the Lost Child, to attempt suicide without knowing why. Last fall, I knew exactly why I wanted to end my life.

A David Foster Wallace character said you kill yourself for the same reason people jump from a burning high-rise. He’d know, of course. I might not be able to describe the exact mix of emotions which leads to the point of desiring oblivion, but the Wallace quote does a decent job.

Although I’ve contemplated suicide often enough over the years, I’ve never forgotten how God spared me as a child (to clarify, I use God and Satan metaphorically, as shorthand to express myself, not to imply a biblical faith or a religious belief; human thoughts can not measure or define God). Even on my worst Dark Night of the Soul, I still believed that God never tests us with more than we can handle. You promise yourself the burden will become easier to bear, so you’ll carry it another day.

Then it gets better.

You’re humble enough to ask for companionship, and your friends surround you like campers nurturing a lick of flame into a fire, and it gets better.

Your family listens to you ramble, and it gets better.

You find a group of amazing women, ostensibly to discuss books, and it gets better.

You see a soul-fueling concert, and it gets better.

Your cat comes home, and it gets better.

The frangipani blossoms fall, Coldstone Creamery serves a Milk and Cookies shake, you write, you drink, you bike, you work, you think, you breathe in and out, and it gets better.

You meet someone special, a Queen of the Nile who feels like finding shelter after months wandering a storm, and it gets better.

I promise, it always gets better.