I sat a different open house today, from the one I’ve been doing before. This one is inhabited, so I didn’t have to bring my folding chair. 🙂 And it went well, though I didn’t get any new contact info from folks.
I know this will be slow building. Still, it’s a little hard, to try, and not get anywhere. I know I should be patient. I know I should trust the process.
But. Hard.
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But tomorrow I go to Seattle! And that is a fine and fabulous thing, and cancels out all the negative energy. All of it, everywhere. 🙂
And H. cooked me a lovely dinner tonight, and we got caught up, and she had encouraging words for me too. Friends are good things.
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And I keep promising to talk about guppies and heirloom tomatoes. So here’s what that’s about.
When you ask for advice from experts, you get expert-level advice. (Usually.) As in: I’m just starting out with a fish tank, I know nothing, I go to the fish store, I look at the jillions of fishies. I ask the aquarium guys about particular fishies that appeal to me. The aquarium guys have been around fish for a long time. They’re experts. They’re bored with the mundane. They’re not going to badmouth guppies, per se; but they’re not going to talk very enthusiastically about them. They’re going to be MUCH more enthusiastic about the fancy, unusual fish. Not because they’re trying to up-sell; just because they think other fish are cooler than guppies. Because duh–what could be less cool than a guppy?
Same thing at the nursery. Last year I went to buy tomato plants. I remember Brandywine tomatoes from the farmers market in San Francisco: god, they were delicious. But Brandywines are very popular heirloom tomatoes. Everybody’s got Brandywines. Now they’re not cool any more. So when I asked for advice at the nursery–even when I mentioned Brandywines–the helpful nursery-person recommended different, more exotic varieties.
(And then we had a crappy summer and almost nothing ripened, but that’s neither here nor there.)
So I was thinking about this the other day: I think, with all this advice-asking, I’m depriving myself of the opportunity to go through the levels of the process myself, of learning to be an expert through experience. I’m glad I insisted on guppies, because I love them–just adore them. They’re gorgeous, and so personable. I wish I’d insisted on Brandywines last year (though maybe they wouldn’t have ripened either, who knows?). (But I will buy them this year!)
And I further thought about this as it applies to my writing progress. I have been working on novels and short stories for some years now, trying to get published, and getting published. But then a few years ago I teamed up with a collaborator who was much more established than me, and gave me access to markets that had previously been out of my reach. His name on a story opened doors. We collaborated in several different ways–each writing portions of a story; one of us writing and the other editing; blending voice–but it didn’t seem to matter, they went places that my own stories weren’t going alone.
Last week I got a story rejected from a market I’d submitted to a while back. I started getting ready to send it to another market, and realized it needs work. It’s not up to snuff; it’s not at the level of that market yet. It’s obvious why it got rejected. But…it’s an older story, from that time of collaboration, and the former collaborator had gone over it and pronounced it ready.
Now, I’m not trying to say anything negative here about the collaborator or the system or anything like that. Because the system is what it is; and it DOES matter to be known. But this is why: the people who get known, they EARNED that. They worked their way up. Once they sell regularly and get reviewed well and win awards and all that, then editors learn they can trust them. They know the product will be quality.
By entering into that collaboration, I got into markets I hadn’t worked up to yet. I jumped in at expert-level. I didn’t do my guppy work.
I know what that story needs, in order to be a really excellent story. I’m not quite sure how to go about it; but I know what’s wrong, and I know how to approach fixing it. I didn’t know this a year and a half ago when I first sent it out.
So, this is progress.