Book Acknowledgments

 “Thanks to Robert Gottlieb for the encouraging drinks and for keeping me from the razors that night at Plimpton’s.”

“. . . the nearly all-red room on Koitobos Road, the back garden on Eleventh Street, the low table in Dar-es-Salaam . . .”

If this isn’t enough to make you squirm with their private idiosyncrasy, try reading the acknowledgments by authors who thank the shack they once happened to write a chapter of their book in; they thank their hairdresser for making their life whole, which helps restore their self-esteem; they thank their editor for being a genius (God knows why); they thank somebody who’d given them the moral support during their writing, because “Without you I am a quivering bowl of Jell–O.” And if they express their gratitude to their agents, it’s because their agents’ names suggest clout and fame that they as author lack.

But every action in life has a counteraction. Not all authors write acknowledgments. Why? Ask Olin Shiver.

“Who should I thank?” he asked. “My so-called ‘colleagues,’ who laugh at me behind my back, all the while becoming famous on my work? My worthless graduate students, whose computer skills appear to be limited to downloading bitmaps off of netnews? My parents, who are still waiting for me to quit fooling around with computers, go to med school, and become a radiologist? My department chairman, a manager who gives one new insight into and sympathy for disgruntled postal workers? ”

Then something must have dawned on him.

“Oh, yes, the acknowledgments,” he said. “ I think not. I did it. I did it all, by myself.”

I think when my book is published, I’ll borrow a line from Dennis Loy Johnson for my acknowledgments: “But first I'd like to thank my heartthrob, Petunia, for having the wisdom to love me, my parents, for giving me birth and all the people who just exist in my world. Oh yes, and Binky Urban just for the hell of it.”

[Image from www.euroclubschools.org]

The Late Night People

I met a woman

during one of my book signings

She came to the table where I sat with

two stacks of hardcover copies

She picked up one copy and said,

What is it about?

I’m never good at summarizing my work

in a nutshell

for something that had taken me

two, three years to write

Well, I said, it’s on the jacket flap

where she could read what the copywriter

had done

as part of the cosmetic surgery

so the work looks more like a movie actress

than a whore

The woman nodded, but

didn’t read a word of it

where I hoped she might have caught

the advance praises

full of superlatives

that sometimes you thought they must’ve been

copied and pasted in

from another work

But she just wanted to talk

A soft-spoken woman

straw-yellow hair

no makeup

like she’d just got out of bed and

wandered into this place

full of books

like Alice in Wonderland

We talked about pets

and, in the name of God,

she owed at least a dozen cats

some of them neutered

for overpopulation purpose

and pet fish

whose names I forgot

expensive though

She said one of them cost a hundred dollars

And I learned that she worked part time

somewhere in a graphics shop

It was a quiet evening

with no more than three interested readers

who dropped by at my table

but none bought any copy

only she did

without any idea of what the book

was about

When I left she had gone to an in-store coffee shop

sitting on a high stool with a cup of coffee

reading a day-old newspaper

I had to run an errand that evening after

the book signing and when I was done

it was half past midnight

I was driving down a cross-street

two blocks from the bookstore where

earlier I had my book signing

Stopping at the intersection on a red light

I looked over at a donut shop

on a corner

well lit,  near empty

I saw the woman who bought a copy

of my book

sitting by herself

close to the glass

a Styrofoam cup of coffee

in front of her

She wasn’t reading anything

just sitting and staring ahead

I wondered

where my book was

For certain it wouldn’t have fit in her purse

unless she had returned it after I left

for a full refund.

[Image from flickr.com/photos/lunch_meat]

Novelist at Work

My new novel has taken up most of my time now, and I’m called to duty.

Writing a novel, to me, is not only more time consuming than blogging, it also burns a lot more brain cells. Blogging is closer to writing a diary. You blog about your personal thoughts, feelings, experiences and observations of life. You can express them in any free form that serves you best; but once you’re done writing a post, that’s it. You are done. Not with writing a novel. You’ll never get done writing it till you write THE END. And that can be many, many moons away.

So here I am, a novelist at work, who enjoys each creative moment to the fullest, just for the sheer joy of writing. In fact, I never care much for what’s called ‘word count’ or ‘quota’ for each day’s writing progress. Many writers do that because they want to enforce a rule on themselves, which they call discipline. I for one believe in discipline only when it means a self-imposed measure to get the work done. So I’m true to that. I write every day. Yet I don’t care how much I can write. I ask myself, ‘Can you write a thousand words each day and make it your daily writing quota?” I say, yes. You can write a thousand or two thousand words a day, if you must. Only to see that you scrap two-thirds of them the next day when you reread them. No, you can’t force yourself to write when you’ve run out of juice. So, just write!

Another thing is I read a lot between writing. Reading while you’re at work on a novel recharges your battery every day. So I read voraciously while I work on a novel. This time around I will be blogging occasionally whenever my brain, between writing my novel, isn’t so depleted with ideas.

So, I’ll send up a smoke signal now and then—not a SOS, but more like a campfire smoke: Time for a campfire story.