Greetings, writers—
Once, in a long-ago writing seminar, I was asked to make a list of four things that I was an expert in. I wrote: contemporary fiction, celebrity gossip, self-loathing, and cats.
I don’t know what year it was or who taught the seminar—I only remember only my list. Maybe I was working at Publishers Weekly, where it was my job to know about every novel or short story that was coming out (contemporary fiction). Or maybe I’d sold my novel on proposal and moved to Oregon, a state my Random House editor claimed he’d never heard of, and where, instead of writing said novel, I was reading other people’s novels (contemporary fiction) and wasting time on D-Listed or Perez Hilton (celebrity gossip). In either case, I would’ve had my cat, Esme, because she was with me for 19 years (okay, so I wasn’t an expert in cats so much as an expert in her). Self-loathing? That could’ve been anytime during my late 20s/early 30s, and it would’ve had everything to do with whether or not I was writing enough, and whether or not that I thought that writing was any good.
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