three cents: we named the car "Jack"

 

3¢ is about money, creative work, and love, and i send it to you about once a month.

1. a thing about money 

I'm back from my slow-motion book tour for Scratch: eleven events, spread out over almost as many cities, over the course of two months. It was great! I met a lot of wonderful humans! I'm very tired! Herewith, some notes. 

things i bought on book tour: 
—Citizen, finally
— grey silk jumpsuit, used, $20. As a short and non-skinny person, I was always told to avoid jumpsuits, but that is bad advice, this thing is [fire emoji]. 
—Late-night diner dinners for panelists 
—Cough drops, ginger candies, multivitamins, hand sanitizer, neosporin so I could do this icky trick, which... i swear it works, you guys (h/t Austin Kleon)
—A copy of my own book (my author copies hadn't arrived yet at that point) so I could donate it to the Bat Cave, Austin's brilliantly-named free writing workshop program for kids.
—Makeup, in Soho, in prep for TV appearances. I don't wear makeup, like, AT ALL, but the nice man in the black turtleneck showed me how to put on goop that takes away all the color in my face, and then put on goop that puts the color back in. Magic.
—In the course of ten days, on the East Coast leg of the trip: 10 hours of bus rides, 11 hours of train rides, 2 hours of car rides, six nights in hotel rooms, four nights in an apartment, 12 subway rides, and 2 cabs. 

things i stole on book tour: 
—a Sharpie from BookPeople
—a Sharpie from Skylight Books
—a Sharpie from Green Apple Books
—support your local independent bookstore, y'all!

things i learned about promoting a book through live events: 
—Don't skip the smaller towns. Small towns turn it out, especially in winter. Example: in Milford (population: 1001) there were about 30-40 people at the reading (including the local librarian!) and I sold about 20 books. 
—Your oldest friends will always show up to your reading, even if they are not "book people" and you haven't seen them in decades. Friends are rad.
—If you are moderating a panel featuring more than two people, be prepared to read everyone's bios yourself during the intro, because many bookstore workers hate reading long things out loud, and you always want to keep the bookstore workers comfy.
—I don't really buy the prevailing industry wisdom that events don't sell books anymore. I sold a lot of books on tour. But I had help. Even if you're not doing an anthology, I recommend doing talks or panels or sharing the bill at your readings, preferably with local authors. More people = more turnout, you get to meet great peers, and that way even if no one comes, you'll still have someone to get a beer with afterwards.

what i spent on book tour: 
all told, with AWP and everything, it cost me about $4800. That's 1K more than my previous estimate. But I hadn't factored in the silk jumpsuit.

2. a thing about love 
While I was in Austin, Texas, the lovely and talented Austin Kleon took me out for breakfast tacos and then gave me a quick car tour of his old neighborhood, which is where the old airport used to be before the city grew over it. We drove through rows of neat townhouses, some still under construction, and talked about real estate and the hopelessness of being a non-millionaire trying to live Urban Life These Days. In what's now a soccer field in the middle of a residential neighborhood, the abandoned air traffic control tower from the old airport was still standing, now tasked with keeping watch over nothing but the daily traffic of cul-de-sac living. 

Between the blocks of townhouses, at corners and around edges, I could see slivers of open field: greater Texas. Grass out there, and low thick clouds. An expansive feeling, the intuitive knowledge that the horizon kept going long past wherever I was headed. I remembered then the first time I visited Texas, when I was 19, on a cross-country road trip with my best friend. That was the trip on which I learned I actually love America. I don't know how else to say it. I don't mean America the country, necessarily, whatever about countries, I mean America the place. This land. 

It happened like this: One late night in West Texas, Brooke slept in the backseat of the station wagon we'd rigged up as a camper of sorts, sleeping bags and little curtains in the back windows, and I pointed the wheel towards Austin. Tom Waits (early years) was on the stereo, and the view from the dashboard looked like an early Coen brothers shot: dark night, Morse-code flickers of white paint between lanes, alternating rhythms taking me deep into nowhere. The world rewound before me, and space became ... available. It was everywhere, this place. I ate it up, each mile, and there was always more to love.

Here's an excerpt from my old zine, circa 1996, describing that trip: 




3. a thing about creative work 

As I may have mentioned before, I am writing a novel. It has been set aside for a while as I promoted Scratch, and it is damn time for me to get back to it. To do this, I need space and quiet, both mental and physical. I have a very busy job, which I love very much, and so I've been looking at other areas of my life and trying to identify things that I can do with less of, small things that clutter my brain and heart in ways that don't feel productive. Guess what that list looks like?

1. twitter
2. 

Soooo I'm probably gonna quit twitter. Like, entirely. Like, soon. The undertaking is not one without doubts. I've gotten a lot of great community (and, doubtless, career advancement) from The Twitters. But dudes, maybe it's maybe time? I mean, we've all seen Wall-E, right? Some may deem this an act of folly for an author, a backwards move, a "Franzening" of one's life that is not relevant to our current era of publishing ... but I prefer to call it "reclaiming my fucking brain." One of the pieces of advice I always push when talking about Scratch is the idea that every writer is different, and it's important to know your strengths and weaknesses and learn to work around them. Well, a weakness of mine is that I cannot write without a brain, and I cannot write whilst having anxiety attacks about the state of our world/the latest hot take/envy/whathaveyou. 

And honestly, at this point, I just need to get these companies out of my head. I live in San Francisco. I don't need to rub my nose against a corporation's nose all day, to stroke its logo every time I feel lonely. Tech companies, and what they've done to my home, have made me feel lonely enough as it is. Obviously I still use things like computers and phones, but quitting twitter is one very tangible, non-huge way that I can back away from that toxic relationship with corporations who are actively, avidly jacking my flow ... and at the same time hopefully resurrect some aspects of the wildly creative person I have been in the past, calming the editor-hustler parts of my brain so I can actually write again.

Who knows, it might be exciting to experience what and who is out there, once my nose is free to roam. 

see you outside,
m.

linkage:

Scratch roundup: Here's me and Cari Luna on TV. I love the aesthetic dissonance between us and the hosts. And here's just me on TV, sportin' that subtle makeup. I went on the astral projection radio hour and read Margaret Atwood poems and spun songs about money. And my lovely hosts taught me that The Money Witch is a person who exists, and she is available for hire! I'm going with total refusal, because that's just how I roll, but here is an argument of sorts for restraint in social media usage: Against Recommendation.

And here is a panel of men talking about how monetization killed the dream of the internet.  

On the other hand, WE STILL HERE: Why the Internet Didn't Kill Zines.