Not enough time
Mar. 13th, 2003 08:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gordonzolaI’ve decided I can’t review books anymore for MaximumRocknRoll. It just takes too much time that I could use for other writing. If I was getting paid, that would be one thing. But volunteering my labor to write articles no one will read just seems useless. I don’t need the practice anymore.
I didn’t write for years. There were many reasons for it. I was too burned out from school. I was too tired from my job. It was too painful. I didn’t have the energy to put out my own zine so why bother. Even with all those excuses I felt like I was missing something. I felt like I should be writing and I felt guilty that I wasn’t.
Though it has come under much criticism in the last generation or so, guilt can be a very useful emotion. Sure, sure, sure. There’s a lot of downside to it. But think of the upsides: it keeps therapists* employed, it makes for new and interesting fetishes, and it can sometimes actually help people push away the inertia and change things they don’t like
Because while I needed a break, I also needed to not give it up. Guilt was the lifeline to the skills I spend years acquiring but didn’t want to lose forever.
After a few half-assed attempts to write article for other people’s zines and one pathetic try to do one of my own, I e-mailed Doug Holland and asked if I could do reviews for Zine World. I needed something that would make me write regularly, even at 75 words a shot. From there, I started putting out a newsletter at my workplace with an intensely obsessive person who would hound me into completing my articles. I was actually really proud of that publication which was, unfortunately, under-appreciated and stopped altogether after 4 issues. Somewhere along the line, a co-worker asked me to do zine reviews for MRR and a few months later I somehow agreed to do book reviews too.
The book reviews have become a turning point. Here’s the thing: If I’m going to do a good job reviewing a book, it’s going to take me a few hours to read it (skimming heavily, the current one I’m working one has taken me 3.5 hours and I have a third left.) then an hour or so to do other research (general review of the similar existing literature) and probably an hour or two to write the 1000 words or so, including editing/proofing. So at minimum, that’s about 8 hours. But keep in mind that this is a book review for MRR. Does anyone even read that section?
Of course not.
I can easily justify reviewing the zines because there are so few outlets for zine writers to get exposure. And I know that a really positive review will usually bring them a few orders so someone, even if it’s mostly just other MRR workers, is reading that section.
But it’s crazy that the response to almost anything I write here on my LJ is so much bigger than any response I get to writing in a 10,000 circulation zine. And it’s especially galling when a book review takes so much of my free time. It just feels completely wasted, especially since I never felt any of my book reviews were my best work. I realized pretty quickly that to do a review I wasn’t slightly embarrassed about, I’d have to spend even more time on the book reviews in order to compare the books to others in their genre. Since that wasn’t really an option, I just muddled along writing flat, unexciting, and mediocre reviews for an audience that didn’t read them anyway.
More than that though, I feel like I’ve gotten over the tricks I needed to play on myself to make sure I started writing regularly. All the people who’ve read my LJ over the last year have been a big part of that too, so I guess it’s also time to say thanks. My goal now is to figure out where I really want my writing to be, not just where I can easily get it published. That, and to write things that will actually be read.
* I keep double-taking this because for some reason the font I’m using has an extra, but not full, space between the e and r’s. I keep reading "keeping therapists employed" as "keeping the rapists employed" and it’s creeping me out.
I didn’t write for years. There were many reasons for it. I was too burned out from school. I was too tired from my job. It was too painful. I didn’t have the energy to put out my own zine so why bother. Even with all those excuses I felt like I was missing something. I felt like I should be writing and I felt guilty that I wasn’t.
Though it has come under much criticism in the last generation or so, guilt can be a very useful emotion. Sure, sure, sure. There’s a lot of downside to it. But think of the upsides: it keeps therapists* employed, it makes for new and interesting fetishes, and it can sometimes actually help people push away the inertia and change things they don’t like
Because while I needed a break, I also needed to not give it up. Guilt was the lifeline to the skills I spend years acquiring but didn’t want to lose forever.
After a few half-assed attempts to write article for other people’s zines and one pathetic try to do one of my own, I e-mailed Doug Holland and asked if I could do reviews for Zine World. I needed something that would make me write regularly, even at 75 words a shot. From there, I started putting out a newsletter at my workplace with an intensely obsessive person who would hound me into completing my articles. I was actually really proud of that publication which was, unfortunately, under-appreciated and stopped altogether after 4 issues. Somewhere along the line, a co-worker asked me to do zine reviews for MRR and a few months later I somehow agreed to do book reviews too.
The book reviews have become a turning point. Here’s the thing: If I’m going to do a good job reviewing a book, it’s going to take me a few hours to read it (skimming heavily, the current one I’m working one has taken me 3.5 hours and I have a third left.) then an hour or so to do other research (general review of the similar existing literature) and probably an hour or two to write the 1000 words or so, including editing/proofing. So at minimum, that’s about 8 hours. But keep in mind that this is a book review for MRR. Does anyone even read that section?
Of course not.
I can easily justify reviewing the zines because there are so few outlets for zine writers to get exposure. And I know that a really positive review will usually bring them a few orders so someone, even if it’s mostly just other MRR workers, is reading that section.
But it’s crazy that the response to almost anything I write here on my LJ is so much bigger than any response I get to writing in a 10,000 circulation zine. And it’s especially galling when a book review takes so much of my free time. It just feels completely wasted, especially since I never felt any of my book reviews were my best work. I realized pretty quickly that to do a review I wasn’t slightly embarrassed about, I’d have to spend even more time on the book reviews in order to compare the books to others in their genre. Since that wasn’t really an option, I just muddled along writing flat, unexciting, and mediocre reviews for an audience that didn’t read them anyway.
More than that though, I feel like I’ve gotten over the tricks I needed to play on myself to make sure I started writing regularly. All the people who’ve read my LJ over the last year have been a big part of that too, so I guess it’s also time to say thanks. My goal now is to figure out where I really want my writing to be, not just where I can easily get it published. That, and to write things that will actually be read.
* I keep double-taking this because for some reason the font I’m using has an extra, but not full, space between the e and r’s. I keep reading "keeping therapists employed" as "keeping the rapists employed" and it’s creeping me out.
