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Personal News and/or Shoutouts for Pals
Hey CNFers, The Front Runner is officially out. I like to think I don’t ask for much, but now is the time buy a copy or three and, if you read it, you know the drill, need ratings and reviews. I won’t read them because I don’t want to be driven insane, but that’s the world we live in: ratings and reviews. Your call to action to support the book, me, and ye ol’ CNF Pod. If you’re still on the fence, and why would you be, there’s an excerpt of the book over at Lit Hub. Dig it.
Next two events are July 27 at Gratitude Brewing for a live taping of the podcast, 1 p.m. and July 31 at Laurelwood Golf Course from 3-6 p.m.
I also started what’s proving to be a pretty popular venture called Pitch Club. It’s at welcometopitchclub.substack.com and I have a writer audio annotate a pitch. It’s tactical and it’s practical. It’s going to help you get where you want to go.
“Yeah, join the club of people who feel inadequate.” — Dana Jeri Maier, a cartoonist and author of the graphic book on creativity Skip to the Fun Parts.
Link to a mostly accurate transcript for Ep. 480.1
This incredible artist is the author of Skip to the Fun Parts: Cartoons and Complaints About The Creative Process. It’s one of the best books on creativity because it deals with doubt, it deals with jealousy, it deals with ideas, it deals with perfectionism. Dana is a hilarious cartoonist and you should pick up a Front Runner and also a copy of Skip to the Fun Parts.
I’ve long wanted to be a cartoonist. I know there’s no perfect job, but I love the idea of creating something funny and whimsical and not having to talk to as many people as being a biographer entails.
Dana, Dana, Dana, is a contributor to the New Yorker Daily Shouts and the creator behind the cartoon series The Worried Well. She has illustrated for The Phillips Collection, the DC Public Library, Politics and Prose, and Museum Hack. She’s into improv and she lives in DC with her two cats and man husband.
We talk about her influences, voice and style, how she doesn’t trust anyone with a neat desk, bad ideas, jealousy, and a lot more. She’s a real treat.
Learn more about her at danajerimaier.com and on IG @danajerimaier.
CNFin’ Snippets (TK
“It never feels good to get rejected. I always have to remind myself that’s the natural state of things being rejected.”
“What I always found is that whatever you get down and do it, it’s not as bad as it was in your head. And I’m like, relearning that lesson over and over again for some reason.”
“It’s really accidental. It’s funny, you get those those questions a lot like, how do you how do you come up with your style? You are stuck drawing or stuck writing, like a lot of it is so not up to you in the first place. You work with what you got and then refine it to the best of your ability, and somehow that becomes your style.”
“Acknowledging it is almost self indulgent in a way. It’s like, yeah, yeah, fine. Join the club of people who feel inadequate, you know, just, just get on with it.”
“I don’t trust neat desks anyway, so, you’re just over-cleaning because you’re avoiding something. A messy desk means you’re actually working.”
“When you publish a book, like, you don’t necessarily make any money, but you do make friends.”
Dana’s Recs
Jeff Maurer’s “I Might Be Wrong” on Substack
Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton
The Four Seasons on Netflix
Parting Shot: Spin Rate
For a couple days, there was a foul smell coming from what we thought was our pipes. Maybe a P-trap issue. It smelled like rot, like sewage. It was in our main bathroom, but also in our garage. Called the plumber. They immediately ask where the crawlspace is and I tell them it’s in the closet in my studio, which has all my live recording gear and book boxes and some nostalgia boxes. It’ll take me about ten minutes.
One of the guys starts donning a fucking hazmat suit, got the mask and everything. Now the crawlspace, earned its name. The height down there can’t be more than three feet, so the poor guy had to to army crawl down there. He’s down there for a good twenty minutes. The dogs are going ape shit.
When Ray surfaces, he’s got a garbage bag with two dead nutrias in it. And the stench was a match. We had two mutant rats who had somehow burrowed into our crawlspace starting kicking the shit out of each other, died, and decomposed below the areas where the stenches were strongest.
Glad we found the problem because it was BAD. I woke up at 1:30 last night, not that I need help waking up at 1:30, what with the book panics and all and worrying I’m going to get scooped on my next book and wondering why I keep procrastinating almost like I’m inviting getting scooped, the stench was brutal. Opened all the windows, vented the place.
But have you ever seen nutrias? They’re like a rat-beaver hybrid. Nasty fuckers. But at least the problem, for now, is solved. Now we might need to get an exterminator in here to find out where they got in to prevent them and rats from getting into the crawlspace.
But is this a parting shot on spin rate…
Now, maybe I’m totally making this up, but I feel like I heard it somewhere. Where baseball pitchers, they need to show that their ball has a certain spin rate, which is to say the speed of its revolutions from the moment it leaves his hand to the time it hits the plate. Elite pitchers have more spin, more spin means nasty junk. And, from what I understand, this is a metric that can be picked up fairly early, might even be somewhat genetic. Which is to say, maybe even when you’re a kid, a coach or scout might evaluate your spin rate and say right on the spot you have no shot at making the pros or even a decent college roster. So should that kid give up?
I thought about this as it relates to writing … Some people have greater junk, spin rate, they spit it out and it has something extra that mortals — like me — don’t have, won’t ever have. Does that mean I should give up? What’s the goal here?
There was a moment in my baseball career that it seemed pointless. I was no longer going to advance to the next level and it seemed futile. Why even play this damn game? I had it all wrong for so long. It’s why it was almost unilaterally never fun for me, for even as far as I made it, which is farther than 90% of baseball players in the country. I’m making that number up, but it’s probably pretty accurate. If my goal was merely fun, then it would have been far more satisfying. That doesn’t mean you eschew the necessary grind of being in the cages and taking reps.
Same is true for writing, just because we’re not going to be George Saunders or Susan Orlean, John Jeremiah Sullivan or Melissa Febos, does that mean we give up? Only if your metric is this hedonic treadmill of publication status. Only if you’re playing the game of who can get on the highest profile podcast or get the best book contract, or win this award. Then, yes, give up, it’s a horrible way to create if that’s how you measure success in this subjective racket.
But if you love spinning yarns, talking to people, platforming people; if the act of creation is fun and buoyant in this world that aims to muzzle you, then that is the win. So long as that is fun and nourishing and you take risks and earn little and big wins and weather the incalculable losses, then don’t let these metrics of the spin-rate metaphor keep you from trotting along your path.
I’ll keep mixing metaphors mainly because it’s something I need to hear. Look at the starting line for any marathon. 99.9% can’t win the race. They show up anyway because for the vast majority, the only race that matters at all is the race within, of challenging our past selves, of bettering or past selves. Someone finishing that marathon in six hours is just as happy as the person finishing it in 2.5, because winning was never the goal. It was testing the boundaries we so often put on ourselves. That’s what I want to see from your writing, your books, and certainly my own.
I’m not much of a rah-rah guy, but for some reason, I felt I needed to riff on this. It’s not always about spin rate and being given a thunderbolt for an arm at birth. It’s about the daily grind, it’s about lifting others up, it’s about building your platform so you can better platform others.
Many Moons Ago
400 Episodes Ago
The Wild Life of Elizabeth Marshall Thomas
300 Episodes Ago
Lindsay McCrae — A Year Among Penguins
200 Episodes Ago
Laura Todd Carns and ‘Searching for Mr. X,’ an Atavist Original
100 Episodes ago
- Please check the audio against the transcript if you care to cite this for anything. Also credit me and the podcast. … And leave a rating and review. ↩︎
