Rejection? Or High Praise? You Decide...by Jenny Gardiner

Rejection? In the publishing world? Ha! That is downright inconceivable! I mean, isn’t writing all about pouring your heart out into the novel of your dreams and then everyone loves it and you sell it for a fortune and land huge film deals and you earn enough money to quit your day job and take some fun trips and maybe pay off some loans and you all live happily ever after as you write subsequent bestsellers in your lovely Parisian artist’s garret????

Welllllllll….Gather ’round, kiddies, and let me dopeslap enlighten you!

Not to complain, but just to burst your bubble open you to the potential soul-sucking vagaries realities of the publishing business…

Rejection isn’t simply the rejection of your words by agents and editors and reviewers. It’s really more like the endless obstacles that threaten the potential success of your writing career/marathon.

A sample of such things that you might well encounter along the way:

• A director of sales at a publishing house who doesn’t like your book and therefore won’t do much to try to sell it (which means forget it, your book is doomed).
• A publishing house that goes belly-up and you never see payment owed you (don’t quit your day job!).
• Editors who are Goldilocksian in their rejection of your masterpiece (Too long! Too short! Not happy enough! Not sad enough! Lacking character development! Too much character development! Plodding! Too fast paced!). I think if the future of the human race relied upon editors loving someone’s work, the species would be long gone by now.
• An agent who disappears off the planet after you sign with said agent, who then simply never does even the basics of what needs to be done to pitch your book, leaving you flapping in the wind and your career on default life support.
• An editor who leaves the business halfway into the editorial process, leaving your book with no advocate (also known as Dead in the Water; see doomed book, above).
• An editor who loves your voice and loves your book and really wants to publish it, but one editor on editorial board kiboshes it, so it’s not going to be acquired (Dead in the Water, natch).
• A big name author who bails at the last minute with the cover blurb promised you for months.
• You get so bogged down with marketing and publicity that you never write another book.
• An industry that changes like the shoreline, leaving you feeling as if you are trying to capture elusive air between your fingers.
• Life crap that decides to interrupt your creativity so that you fall off the planet and miss the myriad changes that have befallen the industry and, as an added wallop, lose your readers, while you were in a life-induced writing coma.

A career as an author is not for the faint of heart. It is for someone who has deep conviction in their product and one who is determined and hearty and perhaps a little foolish and—despite deeply-entrenched, occasionally self-sabotaging cynicism—holds out a bizarre scintilla of optimism in the face of overwhelmingly grim odds (this could simply be human survival skills at work).

So my advice is this: ignore everything. Ignore it all. Because you can’t control one damned bit of it. Instead, just write. Get back to the basics: read and write and write and read and refine your craft as you so do, and to hell with the rest of it.

In the early days of my career, writer friends and I repeated to one another this mantra: TPT—Talent. Persistence. Timing. Honestly, I can tell you from some books I’ve read that talent is actually optional (though desirable)—plenty of crap books get published, which still mystifies me. Persistence, however, is essential. And timing? Well, that’s the ingredient over which we have little power. If you’re lucky enough to have the fairy dust sprinkled over you and you write a book that becomes a blockbuster and you are the darling of the publishing world, well, hey, good on ya’. But if you don’t, it’s vital that you are able to maintain that very core of what started you on the process to begin with: you love words, you love stories, and you know you have an ability to combine them in a way that works.

And sometimes, that’s all you can hang your hat on.

I was quite frustrated recently, feeling as if launching a book nowadays is sort of like felling a tree in a remote forest—does anyone hear a thing? —wondering how anyone can hear about your book if no one is listening.

And then, voila, I got a lovely review from a book reviewer, which helped me to remember what it’s all about: writing something that will touch others.

Now go. Write. And to hell with all the rest of it.

The first of my IT'S REIGNING MEN series was just released: SOMETHING IN THE HEIR. Here's the cover (alongside the covers for books two and three in the series--more to come!)

 

and some time soon I'm going to reissue Anywhere but Here---I'll keep you posted.

Sleeping with Ward Cleaver

Slim to None

Anywhere But Here

Winging It: A Memoir of Caring for a Vengeful Parrot Who's Determined to Kill Me

Accidentally on Purpose (written as Erin Delany)

Compromising Positions (written as Erin Delany)

I'm Not the Biggest Bitch in this Relationship (I'm a contributor)

And these shorts:
Idol Worship: A Lost Week with the Weirdos and Wannabes at American Idol Auditions

The Gall of It All: And None of the Three F's Rhymes with Duck

Naked Man On Main Street

find me on Facebook: fan page
find me on twitter here
find me on my website

When Hook-Ups Go Bad...Sorta ;-) by Jenny Gardiner

            A few weeks ago my son lost his phone. Which is not such an unusual thing; people lose phones all the time. But one minute he had it at work, the next, it seemingly evaporated.

            Now, normally, we'd have left it at that and not bothered to intervene in attempts to unearth the missing device — Kyle's a grown man, he could figure it out himself. But soon after the thing went AWOL, we realized this meant we were incommunicado with our son at a time in which we needed to figure out complicated scheduling details. With three kids returning from school and moving out of dorms and apartments, we had a lot of logistics to map out in a short period of time. Which meant many calls and texts between all kids to reach consensus. Orchestrating five people to settle on mutually agreed-upon dates is hard enough without one basically being cut out of all means of communications.

            Worse still, the battery hadn't been holding a charge on the phone, so its findability was dwindling with the passing hours. Oh, and that Find My iPhone app, designed to, uh, find your iPhone when it disappears? He hadn't remembered to download it. Oops.

            About a day or so after its mysterious disappearance, one of Kyle's friends came up with the clever idea to try to see if "he" showed up on the Tinder app. [Tinder, for the uninitiated, is a widely-used dating app that uses Facebook profiles to match compatible participants based on geographic location, mutual friends and shared interests. The app allows users to anonymously "like" or skip others, and if two users "like" each other, Tinder introduces enables to "chat", or, if things really go your way, hook up.]

             So his friend decided to check Tinder to see if my son's phone was beaming out its location, and sure enough, it emitted weak signals indicating it was within two miles of where they were.

            The problem was Kyle was in the midst of finals, with no time to embark on a wild goose chase hunting this thing down.

            But then I had what seemed like a brilliant idea: if indeed the phone was within two miles, that meant it was likely somewhere still at work, downtown. Which meant if someone closer to downtown logged onto Tinder and tried to locate my son's profile, it might confirm the phone's general location, greatly narrowing down the hunt. A no-brainer, if you ask me. And as the life-span of the dying battery was withering away, I knew we had to act fast.

            So I called my husband, who was, conveniently enough, downtown.

            "You've got to join Tinder, fast!" I urged him. And yeah, he had no idea what it was either, so I gave him a two-minute primer and pressed him to download the app and get to work.

            Five minutes later I got a phone call.

            "Man. My friends and I were single in the wrong century," he lamented, noting that Tinder seemed like a veritable free-for-all that would have meant nary a night alone back in the day. "But forget about that. Right now I'm having a big problem."

            Seems as soon as he entered his information and linked it to Facebook, he started being bombarded with "likes" from women nearby interested in "chatting" with him. It was like the slot machine bells pinging when you get three cherries on the jackpot, coins spilling out onto the floor. Which meant that in small-town-everyone-knows-everyone Charlottesville, soon someone would start wondering why my husband was seeking dates online. Bad enough. But worse still because he soon realized that he'd never find our son while looking for women on Tinder, so he had to change his preference. Which would have been even more provocative for the cognoscenti in this town, wondering why my husband was suddenly in search of men. Not only men, but substantially younger ones, because he had to narrow it down to Kyle's age in order to connect (never mind that little detail that Kyle would have had to stipulate that he was interested in not just men but those more than twice his age, so it was all a moot point, we realized too late). Names and pictures were popping up all over the place and it was all tied to my spouse's Facebook account, which was no doubt a rather amusing place to watch as this unfolded.

            "Help!" he said, stymied by the app. "I can't seem to stop all these people from connecting with me!"

            Of course by then I had tears streaming down my face, laughing as I was. "Call one of the kids to find out what to do. Meantime, I have to call my friend, who is going to love this story."

            Alas, said friend wasn't available, so I relayed the story to her husband. Who then decided to play a trick on my spouse and contacted him.

            "What in the world is going on?" he texted. "I'm getting calls from women asking if I know you because they saw your picture on some dating thing on Facebook and want to go on a date."

            My husband was mortified. All he was trying to do was locate the darned phone before the battery died forever. And now he was going to be seen as a serial creeper. He hemmed and hawed, tried to explain what was going on, when our friend burst out laughing. In the background was his wife, cracking up loudly over his quandary.

            At last my husband figured out how to delete his existence on the app, my dubious idea having backfired, albeit not without a large dose of entertainment. And a short while later, a co-worker found Kyle's phone, which had slipped behind a drink cooler, none the worse for its wear and tear. Giving us just enough time to figure out our kids' collective moves, while making sure no strange women would be making their own unwanted moves on my unwitting spouse.

  Sleeping with Ward Cleaver

Slim to None

Anywhere But Here

Winging It: A Memoir of Caring for a Vengeful Parrot Who's Determined to Kill Me

Accidentally on Purpose (written as Erin Delany)

Compromising Positions (written as Erin Delany)

I'm Not the Biggest Bitch in this Relationship (I'm a contributor)

And these shorts:
Idol Worship: A Lost Week with the Weirdos and Wannabes at American Idol Auditions

The Gall of It All: And None of the Three F's Rhymes with Duck

Naked Man On Main Street

find me on Facebook: fan page
 find me on twitter here
 find me on my website

Help! I've Forgotten and I Can't Recall! by Jenny Gardiner

            Yeah, I know, sort of a lame take on the iconic 1990's television commercial featuring an elderly gal with a medical emergency who urgently needed assistance with her feeble self. Thanks to "Life Call," she had someone who was able to prop her up, and all was well.

            So far I'm not in need of Life Call to rescue me from a frail bone-related fall, but I am in dire need of some sort of life call to save me from an increasingly enfeebled brain. They say the mind is the first to go, and my memory--which until recently I'd successfully prodded into action with a regular machine-gunning of reminder alerts on my iCal each day--has taken a day at the beach and decided it doesn't want to return just yet, if ever.

Thus, I have placed practically my entire memory in the evidently disabled hands of my MacBook's iCal, which it seems has aged in dog years itself and is failing in its own wretched memory to remind me of all that I can't help but forget. Two operating systems ago, my iCal reminders worked regularly, even though I overloaded the application with unrealistic demands: most every function of my day popped up to remind me to do it, short of basic hygiene functions such as "remember to brush teeth." So many demands that while it reliably reminded me, it also crashed constantly. So I upgraded to a new operating system and the failures became rampant. My reminders would pop up for one event, but not for the next. But I'd not remember to check my calendar to see what it was forgetting to remember. The next upgrade failed me even more. I'm a victim of the memory of both me and my fail-safe computer, failing all over the place.

Since my calendar can't even remember to remember, I'm holding out hope they soon come out with helper dogs for failing memories.

I felt a little relieved after chatting with my friend Tana the other day on the phone while she was preparing to leave for the gym. As she was talking on speakerphone, I heard water running in the background.

            "Don't worry, I'm not going to the bathroom," she said. "I'm just filling up my water bottle."

Well, of course any woman with good girlfriends knows that occasionally we all happen to race into the loo while on the phone—it's a hazard of friendship. So I just laughed and told her it wouldn't have mattered regardless. We talked for a minute more when suddenly Tana stopped.

"Oh, crap. Where's my water bottle?" she asked.

As if defining my dilemma for my own affirmation, she did what I regularly do: forgot the simplest of things in the shortest period of time imaginable. It's what we do best. All day long. And fight it with the meager tools at our disposal to keep us from having to purchase ear horns and walkers and resign ourselves to our dwindling age and capabilities.

The other day I suffered the hat trick of memory shortcomings. First, I lost my reading glasses in the time it took to swap out shirts. A few minutes later, I became vexed because I couldn't find the enormous pile of tax information it had taken me an entire day to find, which I'd then put somewhere I'd know where to find it. Shortly thereafter, I needed to recall the brand of car I'd rented a few days earlier, as I wanted to be sure we didn't consider it while shopping for a new car. I'd made a point of remembering the brand. To no avail.

And that's the thing. I'm always putting things where I know I'll remember them. And rarely do. I walk to a food cabinet while fixing dinner, forgetting in six short steps what I'd gone there to retrieve. I wake at 3 a.m. with brilliant ideas, but don't want to wake completely to write them down, certain I'll recall by dawn. Never do. Yet then I wake up in the middle of the night over mundane things, like forgetting to soak black beans for dinner, only to not be able to sleep, recalling everything I need to remember to do that I haven't done and worry that I won't remember to do it. I leave notes everywhere, only to not know where the notes are. I record reminders on my phone. Only to forget to listen to them later.

Maybe life's pressing needs are actually squeezing my brains dry. Sounds like I could use a good vacation.

A conversation between me and Tana these days goes something like this:

"Did you hear about, oh, what's her name? Long brown hair, lives up that narrow mountain road."

"Yeah, the gal with six kids?"

"Exactly. And that dog that smells like death. Her husband played in a band when he was in college—"

"Oh, what is her name? It begins with a P, doesn't it?"

"It rhymes with my mother's middle name, I think."

"What's your mother's middle name?"

"Amanda."

"Nothing rhymes with Amanda. But anyhow, we'll think of her name. But did you hear--they're getting a divorce."

"No! I always knew he was up to no good."

"Who? Her husband?"

"Yeah. What's his name?"

Well, you get the idea. We have all the minutiae committed to memory but the barebones facts have evaporated from our gray matter, by some brain-fog that has settled over our memories, doomed to cloak our thinking and force us into some Sherlock Holmesian effort to recall. Our trail of deduction requires mental bloodhounds, and it seems as if our dogs have got up and went.

"Between the two of us we have a brain," Tana said. And she's right. Which makes me think maybe I need to simply be paired up with someone, 24/7, from here on out. Because clearly at this point two heads must be better than one.

Slim to None

Anywhere But Here

Winging It: A Memoir of Caring for a Vengeful Parrot Who's Determined to Kill Me

Accidentally on Purpose (written as Erin Delany)

Compromising Positions (written as Erin Delany)

I'm Not the Biggest Bitch in this Relationship (I'm a contributor)

And these shorts:
Idol Worship: A Lost Week with the Weirdos and Wannabes at American Idol Auditions

The Gall of It All: And None of the Three F's Rhymes with Duck

Naked Man On Main Street

find me on Facebook: fan page
 find me on twitter here
 find me on my website

Failure To Communicate by Jenny Gardiner

A while back I made the deliberate choice to take some alone time, which is how I ended up traveling on my own hiking in Switzerland and Italy a few months back. Those days during which I walked exclusively for hours on end reaffirmed something I already knew quite well: I'm sort of a people person, and get sick of being by myself pretty quickly. Which certainly begs the question: well, then, why did you go off alone? Don't ask. But being on my own made me very much appreciate the gift of being with others, something I'm afraid so many of us take for granted nowadays. I realized this yet again the other day when my husband and I were having breakfast. Nearby sat a couple with two elementary school-aged kids. As I spied on them (sorry, the writer in me compels me to snoop sometimes) I felt sad, because no one in that family appeared to make much of an effort to communicate. The parents sat in silence, faces aimed downward, typing away on their smart phones. The kids were glued to theirs as well, barely coming up for air, let alone conversation. The family couldn't have been less together had they been in separate corners of the restaurant. This was something I noticed so often while in Italy. I was fairly starved for communication with someone familiar, having been walking for sometimes up to eight hours during the day without seeing another person. As it is, my family occasionally cringes at my tendency to strike up conversation with complete strangers (yes, even in elevators), and that's when I'm not craving human contact. They couldn't imagine the lengths to which I about went to speak with people — in another language, no less — when deprived of normal discourse for even a few days. I got to the point that I'd chat up anyone who would listen to me (and put up with my rusty Italian at that). When I ended up in larger cities and found English speakers? Jackpot for me. Poor English-speaking tourists who sat next to me during a meal! Who knew just hearing someone else speak my language would be such music to my ears? That concept of quiet self-reflection and alone-time upon which my trip was intended must've jumped right out the window. Yet wherever I went, I noticed that so many other people gathered together never seemed very together anyhow. I would see a table full of people, with everyone transfixed by their mobile phones, the cool glow of the lit screen reflecting off their faces, completely ignoring each other. I felt such a pang of jealousy for them being able to be with friends and family — yes, even though I'd made the deliberate choice to not be with mine. Here they had people right there, yet they chose instead to hone in on the digital brain in their hands, that whole other world hidden in their smart phones. Now don't get me wrong. I spend far more time than I ought to online. Between the unlimited accessibility to information that the Evil Genius Google provides, and the non-stop chat-a-thons available via Facebook, Twitter, or far too many other social media to even list, I often allow the Great Time Suck to get the better of me despite my good intentions to the contrary. I can be like a heroin junkie, seeking just one more fix. I follow a link to a compelling story which leads me to a link to another compelling story and so on, and the next thing I know I've frittered away hours on nothing other than added fuel for my brain full of useless Jeopardy factoids which I'll never use anyhow. It was a huge gift for me to be a stranger in a strange land on my own and appreciate how wonderful it is to be able to be with those you love. And to give me some time to break away from that electronic addiction to which most of us are enslaved these days. I befriended an Australian woman who just completed walking the entire length (about 1300 miles) of the pilgrimage route on which I hiked. She's been walking since late August from Canterbury England, and arrived in Rome a few days ago. She claims to be an introvert, yet reading her blog daily, I can see that she has been, nevertheless, desperately lonely. It's hard to walk alone for hours on end, often seeing no one, then arrive in a town, have to find a place to sleep, while hoping to find a restaurant or bar in which to find some food, and with any luck, maybe some human contact. You find yourself going out of your way to talk to anyone when you have no one there. If given enough time I'd likely have been known as the strange babbling woman, frankly. One of those mad-professor types with a crazed glint in her eyes, rambling ceaselessly. I don't think I'd have it in me to have walked alone for three straight months for the sheer lack of engagement with loved ones with which I'd be missing out. Clearly I'm not one for the lone pursuit experience for very long. I know I took for granted the ability to be with those I love and care for. As I reflect during the holidays time, I'm all the more grateful for those who have made my life more interesting, engaging, and exciting. For those who have shared their love, their hearts, and themselves with me. And for my not having to follow link upon link to find them; rather to know that they've been right here all along.



Slim to None

Anywhere But Here

Winging It: A Memoir of Caring for a Vengeful Parrot Who's Determined to Kill Me

Accidentally on Purpose (written as Erin Delany)

Compromising Positions (written as Erin Delany)

I'm Not the Biggest Bitch in this Relationship (I'm a contributor)

And these shorts:
Idol Worship: A Lost Week with the Weirdos and Wannabes at American Idol Auditions

The Gall of It All: And None of the Three F's Rhymes with Duck

Naked Man On Main Street

find me on Facebook: fan page
 find me on twitter here
 find me on my website

I'm Hitting the Road by Jenny Gardiner

Forgive the late nature of this post -- I've been swamped this week as I am preparing for a big adventure. I leave Sunday for a long trek in which I plan to walk from the Swiss Alps to Rome for a month. And to prepare for just me and a small backpack for a month, I have to get through a lot of have-to's, it seems. I hope you'll follow me as I undertake this journey. I'll be walking part of an ancient pilgrimage route known as the Via Francigena, which extends from Canterbury, England to Rome. That would take three months to traverse, so I decided to take on a more manageable chunk of it. I hope to walk about 16 miles a day, and I will post more on my blog as I get ready to leave and while I am on the road. I hope you'll stop by and follow my adventure, and you can also find me posting on Facebook and Twitter (see below links). My blog will have details, including information about a charity I'd like to raise funds for while I do my walk (which I hope will total about 500 miles by the time I complete it). Hope you enjoy it! Jenny


  Sleeping with Ward Cleaver

Slim to None

Anywhere But Here

Winging It: A Memoir of Caring for a Vengeful Parrot Who's Determined to Kill Me

Accidentally on Purpose (written as Erin Delany)

Compromising Positions (written as Erin Delany)

I'm Not the Biggest Bitch in this Relationship (I'm a contributor)

And these shorts:
Idol Worship: A Lost Week with the Weirdos and Wannabes at American Idol Auditions

The Gall of It All: And None of the Three F's Rhymes with Duck

Naked Man On Main Street

find me on Facebook: fan page
 find me on twitter here
 find me on my website