Another beautiful day in the time of Covid-19. Clear skies and temperatures in the low forties in the afternoon, much colder at night and in the morning. Our hummingbird feeder is still frozen solid but I have heard a humming bird zipping around back in the shadows. Gulls are singing their spring song downtown where the long liners are bringing their black cod catch in. I saw a group of people, (six feet apart) cutting collars out of the black cod heads down on the waterfront yesterday. There was no herring fishery this year because there was no market in Japan apparently. The roe is generally given as a special gift during a spring celebration this time of year and it goes with large gatherings… which have all been cancelled. Many people in Sitka including the tribal members are just as happy that the fishery did not happen. The herring did spawn but not near town this year but further off shore of Kruzoff Island I was told. We will probably get some spawn inside a little later.
I wanted to remind any of you who would like to write to me you can do it here through the contact page and I wish you would. Please give me some feedback and ask me any questions you have. Do you like having daily postings now? Is it too much? Too little, in that the posts are too short? I know the recordings are not of the highest quality but I’m working on that. I may work up to having something like a pod cast but I’m not sure what that entails. I’m not really an entertainer and need to write. I find this blog is very time consuming for me but I have to say I enjoy it. Particularly now when I’m not really sure about the book I was going to write. It feels like the ground is shifting under my feet concerning that planned book.
My mechanical proficiency is not great as you can also see. But I would love to hear from any and all of you. I will try and write you back. Again I don’t respond to flamers, that is people who seem to enjoy being hateful. I will respond to genuine kindly expressed criticism to which I will respond graciously, and gratefully as long as I am not overwhelmed by other commitments. If I am, I will still get to you, it just may take some time.
Buds on the Cherry Tree I planted in 1982
Which reminds me. I often get questions from students who are working on research or homework assignments if they are in high school or middle school and of course I am honored and really want to help. It’s important that you tell me if you have a deadline so I will know to put it up to the top of my list for responding. If you write me late on Sunday and need it that night to hand in Monday morning. You might not get it, but you certainly won’t get it unless you tell me it’s a rush job.
Also, I’m sorry but I just don’t read long manuscripts unless we have a well established relationship. To ask me out of the blue if I will read your novel or recommend you to my agent if I’ve never met you or never read anything by you is unrealistic. (Trust me, this happens.) To read a full length manuscript and make useful comments on a eighty thousand word manuscript is to ask someone (or me at least) for more than ten days of full time work. At least. That’s not even line editing, that’s just me reading and making notes and sorting out plot, style, diction and basic editing suggestions. Most professionals would charge anywhere from five hundred to two thousand dollars for that service. It is just something that you shouldn’t do as a young writer. I know. I did it myself and I regret it to this day.
What I will do and have done is read your query letter and your query package that you want to send off to a publisher. Then you and I can work together on making it the best possible writing you can do. I can also read up to five pages of any of your work and tell you what I think.
But you should beware, I am blunt. If I don’t like it I will tell you so. And please don’t write to me if you want me to tell you whether you have what it takes to be a writer. Should you go ahead and make the sacrifices to keep writing? I happen to think that most people who write to me don’t really want to be writers, I think most people want to have creative and expressive lives and there are lots of great ways to do that without writing. I have told lots and lots of people to give up that dream. Writing is terrible job. It doesn’t pay well for 99.5% of the people that go into it. It is not all that satisfying for those that do find work. It’s more of a compulsion than a calling. The real question is can you stop writing?
I do know that writers, like boxers need to be able to take a punch. You shouldn’t like it, but you got to expect it and learn to take them. But the point is to win. Enjoy the game. Enjoy sitting down and doing it. If you do then you have your answer. If you don’t, become a cowboy, or a fisherman/woman or a detective, or a ski bum or a mountain climber.
But I know, there are some people that just write. They usually love to read, they might be like me, dyslexic and slow readers but they still love books. They love the dream worlds they create and the magic of how just the markings, the little scratches of black and white can imprint on your brain, stretching and pulling what feel like memories into brand new forms and create new stories that may have once been true in places that may have existed or things that never happened in places which could never have been real. For these people reading and writing is addictive. Now….you may or may not be addicted, but you CAN cultivate that addiction by just throwing yourself into it, which is what I did after I wrote two horrible and unsuccessful books, I told myself, “I don’t care if I’m a fake and a poser. I don’t care if I end up obese with six inch long fingernails in a filthy basement cackling that ‘No one understands me!’ I’m going to write one more book and I’m going to work on it and have tough readers, and I’m going to listen to their advice until I’m absolutely certain in my own heart that it is a good book. Then it doesn’t matter if it gets published or not. But at least I will know I did what I set out to do.” And it took me seven years, but I did, and the first place I sent it to published it and it won the best first private eye novel of the year. Not the pulitzer prize but not a poke in the eye with a sharp stick and not the lonely life in a basement apartment, either.
Sturdy Young Pine
One last thing from yesterday. I am not a class warrior. I just don’t believe in the supremacy of the individual. Society involves cooperation and cooperation required communal action and generosity of spirit. I simply feel and think we need more of that spirit now and we need to apply more generosity to more members of our community. That’s all I was trying to say.
Early spring,
nothing in bloom
but your red lips.
jhs
Here is a recording I made in a very quiet downtown Sitka this afternoon. No Dot, a couple of sloppy edits because I had to take two calls from Jan who was at the doctor. I read from my book Cold Storage, Alaska while sitting in the park during the Coronavirus pandemic of 2020.
