three cents: everything is free

I hereby declare this email a presidential election–free space. Okay? Okay. 

1. a thing about money
I walk to work every morning, from the train to the office, along the Barbary Coast Trail, or so the gold medallion markers embedded in the sidewalk tell me. The Barbary Coast Trail is, I think, mostly a marketing/tourist thing, but the Barbary Coast itself was very real. It was a particular, then-portside area of San Francisco during Gold Rush days. You know the drill: sin and squalor, miners and dancehalls and mud. On the Barbary Coast, money really was a current. It flowed and roiled through the gutters of San Francisco, as unpredictable and powerful as the ocean itself. 

In recent months I've started, then stopped, counting the people who ask me for money on my path to work every day. For a week or two it was between three and five, just from home to the train (four blocks), then another several between the train and the office—and that's just people who ask, not people who need, people who are too afraid or ill or traumatized or angry to ask. It becomes normal so quickly: bobbing and weaving to avoid outstretched hands, shaken-out blankets, bloodied and calloused skin, the immorality of this disparity. "It's like a dystopian book," is not something I can say about my city anymore, because what it is like is reality. I don't understand how there can be so much money, and yet so little. In addition to the sheer volume of human suffering on display and the ease with which we sidestep it, what unnerves me is the tremendous capacity of humans to continue living through it. All that hope, it wears me down. I know empathy and I know urban steel and I know right from wrong, but lately I don't know how I can love the world and still protect myself from it. 

All of which is to say, I've started giving again, keeping a dollar or two tucked into the outside pocket of my bag ready to pull out and palm. I give to anyone who asks me, until the dollars are gone, then I start over again. That dollar bill doesn't buy redemption, for me or the people who receive it, but it allows me to answer a simple question at face value: Can you spare something? Sometimes, in my myopic focus on my own hardships, real or perceived, I forget that the answer is yes. Yes, I can.

2. a thing about love
ON A LIGHTER NOTE...If you've known me for a while, you know that I play guitar. I write songs; sing them too. Or at least I used to. There were some attempts at bands and then there weren't, and then there were years of persistent, low-level guilt: I'm not playing, I should be playing, I know I feel better when I play. A couple years back, though, I decided to stop self-flagellating and accept with my temporary state of rocklesness. I chose one creative thing to excel at, and it was writing. My electric guitar is boxed up, but my acoustic — my mom's gorgeous old round-bodied Ovation from the sixties — still stands in a prominent corner of the living room. One of the songs I loved playing on this guitar was Gillian Welch's "Miss Ohio." It's in my range, it wants to be played slowly, and it has very few verses and is thus an excellent singalong song. The refrain — I wanna do right, but not right now — is a perfect lyric in so many ways. I whisper it to my guitar every time I pick it up, dust it tenderly, and put it back down unplayed. Not right now. 
 
3. a thing about creative work 
I am on a social media break until after the [redacted] next week and like everyone who goes on a social media break I have enjoyed it very much, but I will still probably go back on Twitter after my break is over because "I need it for my career." Don't worry, I'm not going to go long on this topic—by this point if you are a person who makes or pays attention to cultural or media artifacts, you understand social-media breaks and how they make us reconsider our priorities but then we don't listen to ourselves about it because this shit is addictive as all get-out and ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. But now seems like an appropriate time for a perennial reminder: Social media (including email newsletters!) is free labor. Especially if you're a writer. It becomes normal so quickly, doesn't it? We are all literally writing for free for giant corporations. We get things out of it, sure — career gains, networks, friends, a temporary blurring of the omniscient specter of mortality — but occasionally it is necessary to remember that what I am doing when I type these words into this box is working for free. 


linkage:

Speaking of writing for pay, have you looked at Who Pays Writers lately? And have you contributed your own rates to the database? See, the way this whole transparency thing tends to work is, you gotta give some to get some.    Q: Can bigtime, moneypants author James Patterson teach you how to write a bestseller? 
A: Probably not? 
  Or perhaps poetry is more your thing: "At night she wakes and feels the money move." save the date:
Scratch, the anthology I edited, is coming out January 3. That is actually rather soon! Advance reviews are coming in and they are very good! You might consider pre-ordering it for yourself and all the creative people in your life! If you're in the Bay Area, there will be a launch event at Green Apple Books on the Park on Monday, January 9. And if you're outside the Bay Area, stay tuned for more tour dates... I'm comin' for ya. 

Now is the part where I say, if you are affiliated with a university or organization and you want me to come talk to your peoples about how creative people make a living, drop me a line by replying to this email. If you are a book reviewer or know a book reviewer who should be reviewing this book, drop me a line. If you want to interview me for your magazine, newspaper, podcast, or weblog... you know what to do. 

Next time I'll write all about the three steps to a successful book marketing campaign, I swear, 
xo,
Manjula

PS — If you have not signed up to receive this newsletter in the email inbox of your choice, I'd be thrilled if you'd do so here.