Picky Picky Picky Contest Guidelines

So this morning I mailed off my entry to a literary writing contest and I’m still reeling.

Contests like those sponsored by the Pretty Nervous Writing Aardvarks, or PNWA, are a valuable way for unpublished writers to get noticed, but I must say that the submission guidelines give a whole new meaning to the phrase “barriers to entry.”

First of all, I’m convinced that the guidelines are a product of years, if not decades, of pet peeves developed by literary writing contest judges, because let me tell you, they are not written with the writer in mind. And yes, I realize that these august personages are donating their time and expertise and any little thing we can do to smooth the path is in our own best interests.

And actually, I suspect that literary writing contests like convoluted rules and submission processes. First of all, they provide a wonderful excuse to reject obviously scrabbled-together, last-minute entries rife with spelling and grammar mistakes. (“Ah, I note this writer did NOT put his category number on the outside of the envelope! Out of the pool!”) Secondly, such guidelines weed out the mediocrities and through natural selection produce the most astute and sophisticated of contestants, those freaky brainiacs who never consider submitting a 5.24-inch by 8-inch SASE envelope when obviously only a 4.125-inch by 9.5-inch envelope is called for. Finally, such guidelines only increase the prestige of the writing contest, implying that due to the enormous volume of submissions, requiring tiny little boxes packed with information on each upper right-hand corner is the only way to preserve the honored judges’ sanity.

It is in this spirit that I offer my own Literary Writing Contest Guidelines. I myself am not sponsoring a literary writing contest (oh heavens no), but it’s fun to assemble those hoops. So I offer this template for any individuals or organizations eager to discover desperate, unpublished writers while garnering a little prestige for themselves, but unsure how to go about it.

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CONGRATULATIONS for choosing to participate in the Picky Picky Picky Literary Writing Contest. We are thrilled to offer this opportunity for fabulous prizes to American authors. Unfortunately due to shipping schedules, we are unable to accept submissions from states that begin and end with the same letter, but we look forward to seeing our Ohioan friends’ work in next months Less Picky Picky Picky contest.

Participants may submit in one of 47 categories. Unproperly categorized submissions will be discarded. Once you choose your category number, put it on everything: your pages, your big envelope, your postcard, your SAS #10 envelope, your check, tattoo it on your forehead. Own your category.

Your submission must be 4 pages, no more, no less. Double-spaced. Writers submitting single-spaced copy will be shot. The Synopsis is page one. The outline is page two. The author’s bio is page three. The table of contents should take up at least half of page four. Of course that means only a half-page is left for your story, but for our expert judges, 125 words is more than enough.

All submissions must be received by Feb. 29, 2013. Submissions mailed after that date will only be accepted through the Space-Time Continuum and received on Feb. 29, 2013. We will not sign for submissions. REPEAT, we will not sign for submission. We are busy people and have no time to sign for submissions. Teach your envelopes to be self-reliant.

Questions? Comments? We do not welcome them. Sink or swim — that’s the literary world today.

Sincerely,

Picky Picky Picky Literary Writing Contest Luminaries

The Magical Thinking Train

So I just finished the ninth chapter of my memoir, which is now at 20,279 words. The last few chapters have gone pretty quickly, since they hewed closely to my blog posts of that time in my life. We have arrived in San Francisco and fought the first skirmishes to find adequate -- if expensive -- housing and childcare. Although this memoir braids together my personal experiences and the broader economic events of 2007-2008, the last few chapters have been all me all the time. I did manage to tuck in some broader context, specifically addressing our landlord company's appalling business model and the challenges confronting San Francisco families. But basically the last few chapters have watched me ricochet from weird situation to weird situation, gibbering madly all the while. I swear, if this book ever gets published, my readers will probably throw this book across the room in disgust. I almost threw my computer across the room in disgust.

The scary thing was how deluded I was, how Mr. Killer Robot and I indulged in so much magical thinking. We just assumed we'd work things out, just boogie along until a perfect solution presented itself. We started July 2007 with a wretched apartment and no child care and ended August 2007 with a ridiculously expensive apartment and ridiculously expensive childcare. Apparently the only way to solve problems in San Francisco was to throw money at them, and if you didn't have any money, you just put it on the credit card. That's what much of the country was doing in 2007, and even if that made us more typical than we knew it didn't make our actions any less appalling. Much of the country was on some magical thinking train where home prices and credit limits always went up. The Dow hit 14,000 the week before we moved to San Francisco, then the stock market started to wig out a bit and the whole country started its inexorable slide to recession, which began December 2007.

It's very hard, I've found, to honestly lay out all the fateful and wrongheaded decisions Mr. Killer Robot and I made and not turn the whole thing into a pity party. Obviously the situation was kind of impossible, but nobody put us in that situation but ourselves.

Still, I'm kind of grateful to be out of that first week we arrived in San Francisco and I can take a broader look at things again. But a big financial blow awaits our family in August 2007 and I'm kind of dreading that. It's about a credit card bill and I can remember that day as if it were yesterday, sitting on a folding chair with the bills strewn on top of unpacked moving boxes.

But, thank heavens, I'm finished writing for today, so I'll think about that tomorrow.

Dithering

I’ve been reading a blog called “Cup Runneth Over,” or something like that. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but a blog name is never just a blog name if the blogger is a literary author. With these guys, every damn thing in life must be delved or chewed or spun out ad infinitum. So there's a little box on the blog explaining the name, something about how reading and writing and loved ones fill the Cup of Life or something.

(Actually, the title and explanation are something different, but while I like to poke fun at literary authors, I do admire them and don't care to use their real blog title and mess up their fun.)

Anyway, this Cup Runneth Over blog has a neat feature that asks writers to detail how they spend a typical day. One day followed this short story writer who's published a book "to international acclaim." She helps get her daughter to school, then spends the day in her nightgown, typing on her laptop, which I think is cool. She admitted to spending a lot of time just messing around with her writing, puzzling out what to do next. She spoke of the process as a conversation between her and her story, back and forth, until both satisfied.

I like that, because I can get so impatient sometimes. (Who, me?) I start thinking that if I really knew what I was doing with a project, I wouldn’t have to change my mind every two seconds about what to do next. (Should I start the next chapter with the medieval legend, or a description of my new apartment's dirty floor? Maybe I should talk about the San Francisco commercial real estate market. Or the sounds of the city waking up, or a paragraph about eating a breakfast orange: "The sweet rind of my old life peeled away...)

Hmmm ... let's try to focus here.

Anyway, I liked how that writer described her process. It helps me give myself permission to dither. Dithering is important. This society doesn’t really support dithering: We’re supposed to be decisive, confident, able to make immediate, well-grounded decisions. I can do that if I have to, but if given the option, I'd rather dither.

The definition of dither is “to be uncertain or indecisive” in Britain and “to be in an agitated state” in the U.S. It kind of means both to me. The word actually comes from the 1640s, where it meant “to quake, tremble” and was a variant of the Middle English word didderen (late 14th-century). The vacillating, anxious connotation comes from the 1800s.

It’s a good word, and it has another connotation for me: I see dithering as a luxury, and you could even argue that it denotes status. After all, dithering takes time, and time is a resource increasingly rare these days. Only upper-class parents, for example, have time to dither over the best playdates, summer camps, tennis leagues or summer camps for their children. Only salaried professionals can dither over the best day to take off for a day trip or whether to visit the gym before or after work.

Hmmm, I’m starting to sound like one of those literary writers, taking a perfectly clear word and beating it half to death. But it’s okay to be little literary — I mean, isn’t the purpose here to write well? There are all kinds of ways to write well — sometimes you’re fast and careless and slapdash, and sometimes you dither and the next thing you know, you’re looking up medieval roots of words. It’s an occupational hazard.

Anyway, it’s time for this lady to end her typical day, and for me to end this post. So she put away the laptop and watched the Daily Show until she fell asleep. And now I'm thinking about how I’d like to spend my days, starting next week when my Robot Kid starts 3rd grade and I hope to begin writing in earnest.

But that’s for another post. I need time to dither.

Reliving That Year

So when you write a memoir about one of the most difficult years of your life, you find yourself — and I can't be the first one to have noticed this — reliving that difficult year in your life. That means I'm reliving March 2007 to March 2008, and let me tell you, it's not doing much for my equilibrium.

Thankfully, of course, I'm writing a financial memoir. There's no childhood trauma, no wartime struggle, no drug use, only a smattering of alcohol use. I didn't live on the streets or sell my body or hike the Mojave ... gosh, now I'm starting to wonder ... will anyone even read this book?

But even though that year's struggles might seem trivial to some, they certainly don't feel trivial to me. When I look back at that year, the strongest emotion I remember is the fear. I spent that year walking on a precipice, convinced that the smallest slip would cast us into financial failure. I choked on that emotion, walking around every day with my chest constricted. It was often an effort just to put a pleasant look on my face, since I often considered other people — even my own family — as unwelcome distractions from my single-minded focus on Getting Us Out of This.

Now, when I sit down at my laptop and fire up the next chapter (I just finished Chapter Five) I must drop myself into that cauldron of swirling feelings again. Every so often I have to come up for air, remind myself that we don't own a house anymore, we're not in debt anymore, we have money in the bank. Not the Suze Orman six-months-of-expenses money in the bank, but a tidy sum. Enough to help me sleep at night, when I'm not freaking out about our credit card APRs in July 2007. Actually, we don't even have any of those credit cards now. Nope, not even one. We had nine cards at the height of our debt in 2008 and now we have two. And neither one carries a balance.

I had to keep reminding myself of that when I wrote a difficult chapter, a chapter with a fight between Mr. Killer Robot and me about our biggest credit card. In July 2007 we went over-limit on that card — a card with a $25,000 balance. And $18,000 on the second-biggest card! It takes my breath away. Exceeding the limit on the bigger card triggered an APR hike from 9 percent to 29 percent. It nearly sunk us.

I hate writing about that month. I hate reliving those days. But I have to because, well, that's the whole point of the book, how we navigated a volatile economy and the consequences of our own choices. How our mistakes made us vulnerable, while the housing crisis and investment banking mess and December 2007 recession almost finished us off. I'm writing this book to try to make sense of what happened, to both my family and a country as a whole. And I can't do that unless I relive the summer of 2007 during the summer of 2012.

Short Play Project

When I'm not working on my recession memoir and having tiny anxiety attacks about it, I'm pondering a submission to 3Girls Theatre here in the Bay Area. The theater is soliciting plays by Bay Area women about family dysfunction over the holidays. They'll pick one to be a part of their Holiday Showcase in December.

So I'm developing a script for it. That sounds impressive, but what it really means is "I scribbled some ideas on the back of a hotel room receipt in Eugene, Ore." But I like writing 10-minute plays — it's a lot of fun — so I'll try to have something ready by the end of August.

Old Mortgage Company Declares Bankruptcy

I haven't gotten to the short sale part of my financial memoir yet, but I plan to detail the horrendous paperwork process with my mortgage company. While doing research, I discovered that AwayGo Financial (its nom de plume until I figure out what will get me sued and what won't) has declared bankruptcy. Ha! I'm surprised it took so long.

Actually, as traumatic as the short sale process was for me, it actually was a lot better than most experienced with AwayGo. I'm guessing it's because it was clear we couldn't keep the house, we were current on payments (despite pressure to default) and it was a relatively small amount.

This news is yet another reason to include an epilogue in this memoir detailing not only what happened to the Killer Robot Family, but to the the other characters and companies in this saga. It will take a page just to list the bankruptcies. I'm just grateful we weren't one of them.

The Perils of Consumerist.com

So apparently I'll be unable to read any mortgage related posts on Consumerist.com while writing this memoir, because I'm sure that the site's take-no-prisoners community will make short work of this book if it ever gets published.

In this post, a young couple moved into their first house a few years ago. Then the husband lost his job and they couldn't make the mortgage payments. They asked their lender PNC Mortgage for help, and we all know how that goes.

They moved out of the house, sold their Pottery Barn and Crate&Barrel furniture, and moved into an apartment with some IKEA furniture. They still pay the HOA fees and are trying to negotiate a short sale. PNC is being awful and now calling their relatives about the missed payments. Now there's a short sale under review and the bank's locked them out.

It just seems like PNC has made a bad situation unnecessarily horrible. They're obviously doing their best, though, so why is the Consumerist community piling onto them and treating them like whiny ax murderers? The reasons are legion:

1. They had Pottery Barn furniture.
2. They had Crate and Barrel furniture
3. They signed a mortgage, so tough titties.
4. They didn't have enough savings -- obviously because of the Pottery Barn and Crate&Barrel furniture.
5. They bought IKEA furniture.

So I've decided not to read Consumerist posts about mortgages for a while because there's no way I can write this memoir with visions of the Consumerist hive screaming for my blood. But this does remind me to keep the "poor little me" attitude out of my writing. I must never forget that Mr. Killer Robot and I got ourselves into this situation. The recession just made it worse.