January Blues
by Cally Phillips
Genre: Humour
Swearwords: None.
Description: What happens when you want to be a successful writer, but you don't have the right name or the right background?
_____________________________________________________________________
‘I’m sorry son, all the good lives are gone,’ he said, without even looking up from his position behind the counter. No wonder they have plate glass, I thought. He’s confused. As indeed was I. And it wasn’t just because I thought I was in the post office, or that I felt he could at least do me the respect of looking at me. Which he clearly hadn’t.
‘I’m a woman,’ I said. I felt I shouldn’t have had to. I mean, I’m not that androgynous looking and just because I don’t wear makeup and a push up bra, and totter around like a model on high heels; really, it shouldn’t be that hard to figure it out.
I expected at least some kind of an apology for that. Or an acknowledgement. He just stamped hard on the document in front of him and said, ‘Like I said, all the good lives are gone.’
‘I’m not concerned about that,’ I said. ‘It’s…’ before I had a chance to continue, he did look up. Looked me straight in the eye and said to me, ‘Did you go to a good University?’
‘I went to St Andrews,’ I replied. I thought that would be enough.
‘I mean,’ he continued, and I’m sure I detected a sneer in his voice, ‘did you go to a good English University?’
‘I went to St Andrews,’ I replied again. ‘It’s Scotland’s oldest university.’
That clearly didn’t wash with him.
‘Not Oxbridge then,’ he said.
‘No,’ I admitted, though I didn’t see the relevance of the question.
‘And is your name Jeremy?’ he asked.
I shook my head. I couldn’t bring myself to reply. It was covering old ground.
‘Jules?’ he ventured.
Again I shook my head. ‘I’ve told you, I’m a woman,’ I said. I hated having to admit it. I like to think of myself as gender non-specific if the truth be told. I’m a writer (you might have guessed that) and I don’t feel that my gender should define me.
‘Victoria, then,’ he said and I felt he thought he was doing me a favour.
‘No,’ I replied, ‘not Victoria.’
‘Perhaps Caroline?’ he said.
‘Would it make a difference?’ I asked. I was getting desperate. ‘I could be Caroline, if it made a difference.’
He wasn’t impressed by that comment.
‘You are or you aren’t,’ he said. ‘The life goes with the name. You should know that.’
Should I know that, I wondered.
I thought about the Bloomsbury set and I reconsidered. Okay. I think I got him. Virginia Woolf could get away with stream of consciousness. Me, I don’t think so. Not my style. The name goes with the life. It made a kind of sense. I was not and never would be a modernist. I had misunderstood what being an ‘intellectual’ was all these years and so it was no wonder that I felt out of place in this narrative style. You may well feel the same by this stage. In that case, I apologise.
Okay, let’s cut to the chase, I’ve not been completely honest with you here. I wasn’t in the post office. I was in the place you go to when you want to get a tax code for the US if you’re selling eBooks, or in my case not selling eBooks to a worldwide audience. It reeked of nothing so much as the Benefits Offices which I had last visited in the early 1980s which was another great depression for some of us in a time of economic boom for the Jeremy’s and Victoria’s. I had made a promise to myself all those years ago that I would never degrade myself by standing in line to take from the system. I never have. But somehow this felt horribly reminiscent and I wondered if I was betraying my principles. So that’s why I was trying to pretend to myself it was the post office, and I was just posting out a real copy of a real paperback to a real reader – something that I rarely do these days. I wished myself away from that place and in the wishing I found I was wishing myself away from my life as well.
Well, not my life exactly. My experience of life. I can be quite happy with my life. It’s how I have to live it in the social environment that gets to me. Like the man said, all the good lives have been taken. As long as I stay in my own head or my own home I have a great life. As soon as I have to justify myself to the world in general, even virtually, that’s when it all comes crashing down. I’m not a failure in my own head. It’s the rest of the world who are out of step with me when it comes to judging success. I don’t want ‘success’, I just want to be read. And yes, I’d like my readers to get a sense of satisfaction from the process. I don’t want people to feel short-changed. I work hard enough to avoid it. And more than that, I don’t like the feeling of rejection that comes with a returned book. It’s a book for goodness sake, not a faulty plug. And even though I think the ‘star’ system of ‘reviews’ is a complete insult to the writing fraternity in general, there’s not a writer alive who will honesty tell you they don’t feel hurt when even the most illiterate or ill mannered or ill tempered of people gives them a one star and the thumbs down. The ‘star’ system gives the reader the power of a Roman Emperor. That can’t be right. But having your work literally chucked back in your face by being returned in the virtual world. No, that’s even worse. No comment, nothing to rail against or dispute, just ‘no thanks, you’re not worth the paper you’re virtually writing on’.
He coughed. ‘Perhaps you should try writing something people want to read,’ he said. I could see he thought he was being helpful. I wanted to hit him.
‘I never thought of that,’ I replied, sarcastically.
‘Write for the market,’ he said.
‘What do you know?’ I replied. I admit I’d lost my cool. That it was a mistake to show him I cared. I could see his hand tighten round my application form. It would take nothing for him to scrunch it up and then I wouldn’t even get the chance to exist as a US tax entity.
‘You think I don’t know?’ he answered. ‘Of course I know. I see them come in here every day. Just like you. They all think they’re going to sell a million and none of them ever even hit the rate that means they can be tax exempt. Losers. Dreamers. Time wasters. Life wasters. Do you think the ones with the good lives even have to come in here? They have agents and managers who do it all for them.’
‘And ghost writers who write it for them as well, I suppose,’ I spat back at him.
‘I take it you never ‘made’ it, traditionally,’ he said, calmly insulting.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked, thinking it more than impertinent. But then I’ve been stood in the line for entry to the States at Boston Airport, and I know they think they can ask you whatever they like. If you don’t play the game their way, entry is refused. This was a little piece of America right here at home.
I didn’t want to explain myself but I felt the onus upon me. He spared me explanation only because he got in there first. Adding insult to injury.
‘I suggest that you failed in the mainstream milieu,’ he replied, ‘that you appreciate that you have not got what it takes and so you turned independent because of an inflated sense of ego.’
‘Wrong,’ I said. ‘You are inconsistent in your own argument.’ (I knew I should have said, ‘my man’ but then I’m not a Victoria. I’m not even a passable Caroline. And I’d never make it as a Jules or Jeremy.)
He raised an eyebrow.
‘You said, all the good lives are gone. If all the good lives are gone it doesn’t matter what I do or don’t do, I’ll never ‘make’ it because they set the rules and they decide.’ I felt I’d struck a blow for truth with that one.
‘They,’ he sneered back at me. He had an inflated sense of his own importance bigger than he’d accused me of. I swear I saw him form the word ‘we’ silently. Like he was the one who chose who got the good lives. Who did he think he was – Amazon’s representative on earth?
But I didn’t want to enrage him even further. I just wanted to get my point across, get my application approved and move on.
‘It’s like Genesis,’ I said.
‘In the beginning was the word?’ he asked.
‘No,’ I replied, ‘We are pulled up by the magnet, believing we’re free.’ I don’t think he appreciated the popular version of a determinist argument but right at that moment I’ve never felt more like a carpet crawler.
‘If I might suggest,’ he said, ‘I think you need more structure. To be, less random. To write to a formula and stick with it time and again. You are, on your own admission, not a Jeremy or a Victoria. You have misaligned yourself. As a woman, of a certain age and socio economic bracket, perhaps romance would be more acceptable.’
‘Whatever style I adopt, I could write it in blood and give it away with a BigMac and no one would want it,’ I said.
He snorted. ‘Is that the best you can do? Not very literary is it? Not very appealing imagery. Had you considered a career in something else?’
‘Have you?’ I asked him.
Impasse reached. And when I looked closely at him, behind that thick plate glass, I noticed that my application had vanished. My reason for being there went with it. The pointlessness of the whole thing was palpable.
I went home and looked at my writer’s barometer. In January it moves only slightly from directionless to going round in vicious circles under a heavy depression. Progress is slight. And will only come in February, if it snows. Otherwise I’m stuck with an ill writing wind till the spring or maybe even the summer. And by then I’ve given up on the whole thing and gone outside to experience real life in the form of nature. That thing that lives outside my head. The thing that makes me feel small in stature but not small in purpose. Where I can lose myself to meaning and simply be.
‘Write for a market. Write what people want to read.’ I couldn’t get his words out of my mind. If only it was that easy. What do people want to read? Everyone wants something different surely. One man’s flash fiction is another man’s short story. One man’s monologue is another man’s diatribe. One man’s thriller is another man’s political satire for goodness sakes. Amazon can’t even categorise things properly. You’ll find Wuthering Heights in drama and sometimes in non fiction. What’s that all about? The market giveth and the market taketh away. You can’t please all the people all the time and in my experience you can’t please the market any of the time because the market sets the rules and keeps changing the goalposts. Because, as the man so rightly opined, albeit subtextually, the market hands out the good lives to the Jeremy’s and Victoria’s who attend the best Universities and ‘make something of themselves’ and who know where to place the apostrophe in apostrophe’s and just which homophone to avoid; and the rest of us – now rebranded as the digital masses- we miss out again. We’re the digital equivalent of cannon fodder. We can write till our fingers bleed but we’ll never find more than a bloody handful of other people who understand what we are talking about. Because everyone is chasing after the ones with the ‘good lives’ hoping that a bit of that ‘success’ will rub off on them. And if they can pick it up for free, so much the better.
Vanitas vanitarum. Is this the definition of the writer without a six figure publishing deal? Do we write for vanity? No, we write to be heard. We are the voices of those who, by an accident of birth or a quirk of fate, somehow didn’t ‘make’ it, or get the good lives or go to the right school or university or party or make the appropriate social networking connections in order to flourish. We are the literary unwashed. The ones screaming in the e-revolution about the birth pangs of a nation and going largely unnoticed. Some days modern digital publishing seems like a brave new world. Some days it feels like going over the top at the Somme. You can write the most perfect, wonderful piece but when it leaves your head, and when it enters the world of the free market, you have so little control that you might as well not bother. Because all the good lives are already taken. Your face doesn’t fit. It’s nineteen eighty four writ large. So to keep writing is an act of folly. But it’s also an act of revolution. And when they were handing out the lives, I got the label ‘revolutionary’ attached to me. We are pulled up by the magnet remember. What else can we do? Lenin and Tolstoy asked the very same question. Did they have good lives? It’s a moot point. The sort of discussion Jules and Virginia will play around with when they next meet up to compare their literary masterpieces. Jeremy and Victoria don’t have to worry. They just sip their Pimms and count their royalty cheques.
Swearwords: None.
Description: What happens when you want to be a successful writer, but you don't have the right name or the right background?
_____________________________________________________________________
‘I’m sorry son, all the good lives are gone,’ he said, without even looking up from his position behind the counter. No wonder they have plate glass, I thought. He’s confused. As indeed was I. And it wasn’t just because I thought I was in the post office, or that I felt he could at least do me the respect of looking at me. Which he clearly hadn’t.
‘I’m a woman,’ I said. I felt I shouldn’t have had to. I mean, I’m not that androgynous looking and just because I don’t wear makeup and a push up bra, and totter around like a model on high heels; really, it shouldn’t be that hard to figure it out.
I expected at least some kind of an apology for that. Or an acknowledgement. He just stamped hard on the document in front of him and said, ‘Like I said, all the good lives are gone.’
‘I’m not concerned about that,’ I said. ‘It’s…’ before I had a chance to continue, he did look up. Looked me straight in the eye and said to me, ‘Did you go to a good University?’
‘I went to St Andrews,’ I replied. I thought that would be enough.
‘I mean,’ he continued, and I’m sure I detected a sneer in his voice, ‘did you go to a good English University?’
‘I went to St Andrews,’ I replied again. ‘It’s Scotland’s oldest university.’
That clearly didn’t wash with him.
‘Not Oxbridge then,’ he said.
‘No,’ I admitted, though I didn’t see the relevance of the question.
‘And is your name Jeremy?’ he asked.
I shook my head. I couldn’t bring myself to reply. It was covering old ground.
‘Jules?’ he ventured.
Again I shook my head. ‘I’ve told you, I’m a woman,’ I said. I hated having to admit it. I like to think of myself as gender non-specific if the truth be told. I’m a writer (you might have guessed that) and I don’t feel that my gender should define me.
‘Victoria, then,’ he said and I felt he thought he was doing me a favour.
‘No,’ I replied, ‘not Victoria.’
‘Perhaps Caroline?’ he said.
‘Would it make a difference?’ I asked. I was getting desperate. ‘I could be Caroline, if it made a difference.’
He wasn’t impressed by that comment.
‘You are or you aren’t,’ he said. ‘The life goes with the name. You should know that.’
Should I know that, I wondered.
I thought about the Bloomsbury set and I reconsidered. Okay. I think I got him. Virginia Woolf could get away with stream of consciousness. Me, I don’t think so. Not my style. The name goes with the life. It made a kind of sense. I was not and never would be a modernist. I had misunderstood what being an ‘intellectual’ was all these years and so it was no wonder that I felt out of place in this narrative style. You may well feel the same by this stage. In that case, I apologise.
Okay, let’s cut to the chase, I’ve not been completely honest with you here. I wasn’t in the post office. I was in the place you go to when you want to get a tax code for the US if you’re selling eBooks, or in my case not selling eBooks to a worldwide audience. It reeked of nothing so much as the Benefits Offices which I had last visited in the early 1980s which was another great depression for some of us in a time of economic boom for the Jeremy’s and Victoria’s. I had made a promise to myself all those years ago that I would never degrade myself by standing in line to take from the system. I never have. But somehow this felt horribly reminiscent and I wondered if I was betraying my principles. So that’s why I was trying to pretend to myself it was the post office, and I was just posting out a real copy of a real paperback to a real reader – something that I rarely do these days. I wished myself away from that place and in the wishing I found I was wishing myself away from my life as well.
Well, not my life exactly. My experience of life. I can be quite happy with my life. It’s how I have to live it in the social environment that gets to me. Like the man said, all the good lives have been taken. As long as I stay in my own head or my own home I have a great life. As soon as I have to justify myself to the world in general, even virtually, that’s when it all comes crashing down. I’m not a failure in my own head. It’s the rest of the world who are out of step with me when it comes to judging success. I don’t want ‘success’, I just want to be read. And yes, I’d like my readers to get a sense of satisfaction from the process. I don’t want people to feel short-changed. I work hard enough to avoid it. And more than that, I don’t like the feeling of rejection that comes with a returned book. It’s a book for goodness sake, not a faulty plug. And even though I think the ‘star’ system of ‘reviews’ is a complete insult to the writing fraternity in general, there’s not a writer alive who will honesty tell you they don’t feel hurt when even the most illiterate or ill mannered or ill tempered of people gives them a one star and the thumbs down. The ‘star’ system gives the reader the power of a Roman Emperor. That can’t be right. But having your work literally chucked back in your face by being returned in the virtual world. No, that’s even worse. No comment, nothing to rail against or dispute, just ‘no thanks, you’re not worth the paper you’re virtually writing on’.
He coughed. ‘Perhaps you should try writing something people want to read,’ he said. I could see he thought he was being helpful. I wanted to hit him.
‘I never thought of that,’ I replied, sarcastically.
‘Write for the market,’ he said.
‘What do you know?’ I replied. I admit I’d lost my cool. That it was a mistake to show him I cared. I could see his hand tighten round my application form. It would take nothing for him to scrunch it up and then I wouldn’t even get the chance to exist as a US tax entity.
‘You think I don’t know?’ he answered. ‘Of course I know. I see them come in here every day. Just like you. They all think they’re going to sell a million and none of them ever even hit the rate that means they can be tax exempt. Losers. Dreamers. Time wasters. Life wasters. Do you think the ones with the good lives even have to come in here? They have agents and managers who do it all for them.’
‘And ghost writers who write it for them as well, I suppose,’ I spat back at him.
‘I take it you never ‘made’ it, traditionally,’ he said, calmly insulting.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked, thinking it more than impertinent. But then I’ve been stood in the line for entry to the States at Boston Airport, and I know they think they can ask you whatever they like. If you don’t play the game their way, entry is refused. This was a little piece of America right here at home.
I didn’t want to explain myself but I felt the onus upon me. He spared me explanation only because he got in there first. Adding insult to injury.
‘I suggest that you failed in the mainstream milieu,’ he replied, ‘that you appreciate that you have not got what it takes and so you turned independent because of an inflated sense of ego.’
‘Wrong,’ I said. ‘You are inconsistent in your own argument.’ (I knew I should have said, ‘my man’ but then I’m not a Victoria. I’m not even a passable Caroline. And I’d never make it as a Jules or Jeremy.)
He raised an eyebrow.
‘You said, all the good lives are gone. If all the good lives are gone it doesn’t matter what I do or don’t do, I’ll never ‘make’ it because they set the rules and they decide.’ I felt I’d struck a blow for truth with that one.
‘They,’ he sneered back at me. He had an inflated sense of his own importance bigger than he’d accused me of. I swear I saw him form the word ‘we’ silently. Like he was the one who chose who got the good lives. Who did he think he was – Amazon’s representative on earth?
But I didn’t want to enrage him even further. I just wanted to get my point across, get my application approved and move on.
‘It’s like Genesis,’ I said.
‘In the beginning was the word?’ he asked.
‘No,’ I replied, ‘We are pulled up by the magnet, believing we’re free.’ I don’t think he appreciated the popular version of a determinist argument but right at that moment I’ve never felt more like a carpet crawler.
‘If I might suggest,’ he said, ‘I think you need more structure. To be, less random. To write to a formula and stick with it time and again. You are, on your own admission, not a Jeremy or a Victoria. You have misaligned yourself. As a woman, of a certain age and socio economic bracket, perhaps romance would be more acceptable.’
‘Whatever style I adopt, I could write it in blood and give it away with a BigMac and no one would want it,’ I said.
He snorted. ‘Is that the best you can do? Not very literary is it? Not very appealing imagery. Had you considered a career in something else?’
‘Have you?’ I asked him.
Impasse reached. And when I looked closely at him, behind that thick plate glass, I noticed that my application had vanished. My reason for being there went with it. The pointlessness of the whole thing was palpable.
I went home and looked at my writer’s barometer. In January it moves only slightly from directionless to going round in vicious circles under a heavy depression. Progress is slight. And will only come in February, if it snows. Otherwise I’m stuck with an ill writing wind till the spring or maybe even the summer. And by then I’ve given up on the whole thing and gone outside to experience real life in the form of nature. That thing that lives outside my head. The thing that makes me feel small in stature but not small in purpose. Where I can lose myself to meaning and simply be.
‘Write for a market. Write what people want to read.’ I couldn’t get his words out of my mind. If only it was that easy. What do people want to read? Everyone wants something different surely. One man’s flash fiction is another man’s short story. One man’s monologue is another man’s diatribe. One man’s thriller is another man’s political satire for goodness sakes. Amazon can’t even categorise things properly. You’ll find Wuthering Heights in drama and sometimes in non fiction. What’s that all about? The market giveth and the market taketh away. You can’t please all the people all the time and in my experience you can’t please the market any of the time because the market sets the rules and keeps changing the goalposts. Because, as the man so rightly opined, albeit subtextually, the market hands out the good lives to the Jeremy’s and Victoria’s who attend the best Universities and ‘make something of themselves’ and who know where to place the apostrophe in apostrophe’s and just which homophone to avoid; and the rest of us – now rebranded as the digital masses- we miss out again. We’re the digital equivalent of cannon fodder. We can write till our fingers bleed but we’ll never find more than a bloody handful of other people who understand what we are talking about. Because everyone is chasing after the ones with the ‘good lives’ hoping that a bit of that ‘success’ will rub off on them. And if they can pick it up for free, so much the better.
Vanitas vanitarum. Is this the definition of the writer without a six figure publishing deal? Do we write for vanity? No, we write to be heard. We are the voices of those who, by an accident of birth or a quirk of fate, somehow didn’t ‘make’ it, or get the good lives or go to the right school or university or party or make the appropriate social networking connections in order to flourish. We are the literary unwashed. The ones screaming in the e-revolution about the birth pangs of a nation and going largely unnoticed. Some days modern digital publishing seems like a brave new world. Some days it feels like going over the top at the Somme. You can write the most perfect, wonderful piece but when it leaves your head, and when it enters the world of the free market, you have so little control that you might as well not bother. Because all the good lives are already taken. Your face doesn’t fit. It’s nineteen eighty four writ large. So to keep writing is an act of folly. But it’s also an act of revolution. And when they were handing out the lives, I got the label ‘revolutionary’ attached to me. We are pulled up by the magnet remember. What else can we do? Lenin and Tolstoy asked the very same question. Did they have good lives? It’s a moot point. The sort of discussion Jules and Virginia will play around with when they next meet up to compare their literary masterpieces. Jeremy and Victoria don’t have to worry. They just sip their Pimms and count their royalty cheques.
About the Author
Cally Phillips was born in England of Scottish
parentage. Now in Turriff, she has lived most of her life in various
parts of Scotland, urban and rural.
Cally works for Ayton Publishing as series editor and also promotes the work of “Scotland’s Forgotten Bestseller” S. R. Crockett through his online literary society, The Galloway Raiders www.gallowayraiders.co.uk
Cally works for Ayton Publishing as series editor and also promotes the work of “Scotland’s Forgotten Bestseller” S. R. Crockett through his online literary society, The Galloway Raiders www.gallowayraiders.co.uk