How Much My Novel Cost Me
Writer Emily Gould on writing books, going into debt and navigating relationships. An excerpt from MFA VS NYC: The Two Cultures of American Fiction:
It was more like the failure occurred in tiny increments over the course of two years, after which it was too late to develop a solid Plan B.
I spent some of the advance on clothes that no longer fit my body/life, but mostly I spent it on taxes—New York even has a city tax, on top of the state and federal kind—and rent. I lived alone for three years in Brooklyn, paying $1,700 a month ($61,200 all told) for a pretty but small one-bedroom within eyeshot of the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway. I also spent $400 a month on health insurance. At one point I thought I would find another full-time job after finishing the book, but then I must have convinced myself that teaching yoga part time would better enable my writing. I also thought that I would immediately start another book, which I would sell, like the first, before I’d written half of it. In order to believe this I had to cut myself off from all kinds of practical realities; considering these realities seemed like planning for failure. In retrospect it seems clear that I should never have bought health insurance, nor lived by myself.
In Drag, It Turns Out, There Are Second Acts
Inside the long career of RuPaul Charles, “the world’s pre-eminent drag queen.”
RuPaul Charles zoomed down Sunset Boulevard in a 1979 red Volvo he inherited from his mother. He wore a pinstripe suit and an open-collar shirt revealing a wedge of shaved chest.
“Hollywood is an idea,” he said, as the Bee Gees blared on the radio. “It’s not a real place.”
He stared down the road through oversize sunglasses. “It’s more of a concept,” he continued. “So, to step behind the curtain of the dream factory, things are never what they seem to be, and that is by design.”
Follow The Blood Money
Adam L. Penenberg investigates the international cash-for-martyrdom industry, wherein secret US banking operations help fund suicide bombers:
What struck Osen was how organized the whole process was: the banal evil of the international cash-for-martyrdom industry. After a suicide attack, a caseworker from one of Hamas’s social welfare institutions would sit down with family members and take down information on a standard set of forms. The documents resembled the kind of forms a mortgage applicant might fill out, except with a cover page that translates into something like “The Martyrs Receive Reward from their Lord, They and Their Light.” The caseworker recorded the applicant’s closest relatives, family income, number of dependents, whether they were particularly in need of money, as well as banking and contact information, including cell phone numbers and home address.
Ghosting: Confessions of a WikiLeaks Ghostwriter
Andrew O’Hagan, in the London Review of Books, recounts the disastrous experience of trying to ghostwrite the autobiography of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. (The publisher later released an unauthorized early draft of the book):
I wrote through the night to assemble what we had. The thinness could become a kind of statement, I asserted; it could become a modernist autobiography. But the jokes wouldn’t hold and Julian, despite promising his publishers and me that he’d produce pages, paragraphs, even notes towards his book, produced nothing in all the months I was there. Not a single written sentence came from him in all that time. But at the end, from all those exhausting late night interviews, we assembled a rough draft of 70,000 words. It wasn’t by any means great, but it had a voice, a reasonable, even-tempered, slightly amused but moral voice, which was as invented as anything I’d ever produced in fiction. Yet it hadn’t felt like creating a character in a novel, so much as writing a voiceover for a real person who isn’t quite real. His vanity and the organisation’s need for money couldn’t resist the project, but he never really considered the outcome, that I’d be there, making marks on a page that would in some way represent this process. The issue of control never became real to Julian. He should have felt worried about what he was supplying, but he never did – he had in this, as in everything, a broad illusion of control. Only once did he turn to me and show a glint of understanding. ‘People think you’re helping me write my book,’ he said, ‘but actually I’m helping you write your novel.’
The Business of Being Born: A Reading List
This week’s picks from Emily include stories from MSNBC, The New Republic, The New Statesman, and Slate.
How America’s Soldiers Fight for the Spectrum on the Battlefield
The U.S. armed forces dominates the land, air, and sea. But it also must dominate the electromagnetic spectrum by jamming and counterjamming communications to remain effective on the battlefield:
It is well known that America’s military dominates both the air and the sea. What’s less celebrated is that the US has also dominated the spectrum, a feat that is just as critical to the success of operations. Communications, navigation, battlefield logistics, precision munitions—all of these depend on complete and unfettered access to the spectrum, territory that must be vigilantly defended from enemy combatants. Having command of electromagnetic waves allows US forces to operate drones from a hemisphere away, guide cruise missiles inland from the sea, and alert patrols to danger on the road ahead. Just as important, blocking enemies from using the spectrum is critical to hindering their ability to cause mayhem, from detonating roadside bombs to organizing ambushes. As tablet computers and semiautonomous robots proliferate on battlefields in the years to come, spectrum dominance will only become more critical. Without clear and reliable access to the electromagnetic realm, many of America’s most effective weapons simply won’t work.
What We Talked About on Campus This Week: A Reading List
Higher education is a hot topic because it’s so familiar and so easy to criticize. Even if you haven’t gone to college, you get what it’s about. And the complaints – about tuition, about culture, about curriculum – happen on campus, too, and louder. Here are six articles that prompted discussions inside the Ivory Tower this week.
Interview With a Pregnant Porn Star
What to expect when you are expecting, and also happen to make your living in porn:
Q: It seems like some people might have a hard time with the whole porn-star-becomes-mom thing.
A: Yeah, they kind of don’t mesh well. I remember when I first met porn stars, I was like, “You have kids? How do you do that?” But being around it, I got used to it. I mean, I was shocked when people started having kids just in general. People I went to high school with. You hear about it and you’re like, “Are you old enough for that? Is that OK?”
Obviously there are gong to be things. Like, I’m not going to want her to dig through certain boxes in the garage. But on the other hand, there are so many worse things that I’m going to have to steer her through in life. I don’t know if you saw [our pet] bunny sitting in the window? This bunny is awesome. She’s six years old. Best-case scenario, she’ll live to be nine years old. So I’m gonna have this baby, she’s gonna be attached to this bunny, and right when she’s most attached, this rabbit’s going to keel over on her. I’m gonna have to explain death to a three-year-old.
A Journey to the Center of the World
Jacques-André Istel and his wife Felicia built the tiny town of Felicity, Calif. in the middle of a desert. Istel convinced a county board to recognize Felclity as “the center of the world” and has been at work building monuments depicting the “History of Humanity”:
The afternoon that Istel walked me through the monuments, six or seven other people were ambling around, too. This was high season for tourists. Istel does not advertise and almost never approaches the media. His attitude is: There will be plenty of time for humanity to appreciate what he built. But every winter, retirees from frigid places like Edmonton and Idaho take up residence on tracts of nearby land and sometimes wander in. From the highway, you can see their white R.V.s clustered in the emptiness, like desert blooms.
Istel was glad to have guests. “Welcome to Felicity,” he said, bowing and clasping the ladies’ hands to pantomime a kiss. “What do you think of this?” he kept asking. Their responses did not seem very satisfying — nearly everyone said, “It’s very interesting” — but Istel seemed genuinely touched. “What do you think of this?” Istel asked a large man from Missouri in jean shorts. The man was wheezing a little — it was hot. After a beat of silence, his wife said, “A lot of engraving!”
Swiping Right in the 1700s: The Evolution of Personal Ads
Our latest Longreads Member Pick, by Noga Arikha, author of Passions and Tempers, on the the history of personal ads. The essay was first published in Lapham’s Quarterly.
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