I recognize that I haven’t been posting much over the past few several days. Intense stomach pain and nausea, prevalent for the past two months, has compromised my writing productivity. Doctors first tried a mainline anti-nausea pill, Zofran, which usually knocks most persistent nausea out. That didn’t work. Then we switched to a powerful PPI, a proton-pump-inhibitor, which reduces the amount of digestive stomach acid the body produces. That didn’t work, either. I have lost forty pounds in three months, but I don’t recommend doing it this way.
The only option remaining is an endoscopy, which means I’ll have a tube placed down my throat with a video camera attached. Fortunately, I will be placed under for the whole of the procedure. I’m told that the likely culprit is either an esophageal ulcer or some sort of intestinal infection. Both will be treated with strong courses of antibiotics. The issue is that my procedure won’t be until the 28th, so I still have a ways to go. Patience was never my strong suit. That’s why, for example, I find I make several slight but exasperating typos with every draft I slap up here, then hastily try to correct them in a timely fashion.
I write this to let you know that I try to never let any subject matter pass me by that might serve as writing material. To wit, I recently read the most comprehensive biography yet written about the short, but highly productive life of Sylvia Plath, published in October of last year by Heather Clark. Plath, like me, suffered from bipolar disorder. She was also highly prolific, churning out story after story, poem after poem. At over 900 pages in length, the biography took quite a long time to plow through, but it was well worth the effort. I’m about to read a biography of the poet Robert Lowell, himself an influence on Plath’s later poetry, and a close personal associate with herself and her husband, British poet, Ted Hughes. Lowell also suffered with bipolar disorder and underwent numerous hospitalizations, particularly for mania.
Memoirs about chronic illnesses, particular mental illnesses, are about a dime a dozen. It’s good to be reminded that we are survivors and to tell our stories, but they’re often about a mile wide and an inch deep. I have used my own personal struggles in my short fiction and here on some of my posts, but I’ve always tried to keep such topics from overwhelming my main idea or leading to navel-gazing. The more interesting and unique anecdotes gleaned from my disorder will always have their place, but beyond educating a populace still riddled with stigma about mental illness, they have limitations. Memoir is a genre that, unless it is especially novel and unique, often fails to catch on in a large way.
In reading the Plath biography, I couldn’t help but long for the days, before the Internet and online submissions, that hard work, a lucky break or two, and graduating from the right school meant routine publication in print. Largely unknown about Plath is the vast number of what she would somewhat derisively called middlebrow pot boilers—stories served up on a routine basis to publications like the Saturday Evening Post, Seventeen, or Mademoiselle. They are well-crafted, if not necessarily complex and, most crucially, they paid in cold harsh cash.
Flash forward sixty years. Most publications do not pay their writers a single cent. The ones that do are inundated by so many entries that what passes muster are held up to very exacting and subjective standards. I publish two to three short stories a year and wait months before publications, magazines, and literary journals respond to my submissions. The challenge for me has never been constructing stories, a process I genuinely enjoy, though with practice I have gotten much better, but it has been to muscle my way into formal publication and learn the rules of the road without spending too much money in submission fees, contest fees, and writing services that charge a pretty penny to show a prospective writer the tricks of the trade.
There is an obnoxious amount of busywork that goes into promoting oneself: cover letters, word counts, margin lengths, formatting of file names, and other minutia that essentially save time for one’s judge, jury, and executioner. If they don’t want to do it themselves, you have to do it for them.
But I will say this: though it is unlikely that I will ever have children of my own, I do want to leave behind a legacy for future generations. I see my own father growing angrier and angrier with every passing year and it breaks my heart. I want to mellow out as I grow elderly. I want to be the sort of well-respected old man who is kind to children and missed by many the day he dies. I have been writing professionally for the last fourteen years, and though some of my early work makes me embarrassed to read now, I am proud of most of what I have produced. And I’m not done yet. The future fills me with possibilities.