Break Out the Bubbly, it's Cappuccino's 1-Year Anniversary!
Somewhere around this day one year ago, an idea was born ....
As a novelist and writer-for-hire, I often find myself having to write about the most excruciatingly mundane topics.
Air conditioning, for instance.
For fifteen years, I had a standing appointment to write about two Houston-based air conditioning companies each month for a local magazine. How on earth do you make overpriced freon atomizers a “fresh topic” when you’ve already written about them over three hundred times? I’d grimly sit in my butt-sprung chair and refuse to move until inspiration had the mercy to either kill me or cure me. Then I’d write the damn thing, send it in, wait for edits, rewrite it, resend it, which is why every single part of this meme is true about me:
“If writing was easy, everyone would do it,” a friend of mine used to say. And it is true that there is nothing easy about writing. A writer can literally stare at a blinking cursor for hours before her creative Muse has the decency to show up. It still happens to me, and I’ve been writing professionally since I was nineteen years old when this, my first (truly awful) book, became a bestseller.
Every writer, I believe, is assigned a Muse at birth. Mine is an incontinent slut who chain-smokes Virginia Slims and upends entire bottles of Ripple. The last thing she wants to do is sit down and help me write, which is why I’m mostly winging this stuff solo.
Me, I love elegiac literary fiction and Edith Wharton, Tudor and Stuart history, the Romantic poets, and other niche subjects so desperately nerdy, I rarely bring them up in mixed company. It’s not easy being this out of sync with a world that avidly follows Kim Kardashian, Doja Cat, and Cardi B. There’s no place for me here. The things I love writing about are nothing but yawn-worthy to an audience whose senses have been dulled (and attention spans abbreviated) by Marvel Comics franchises and TikTok.
What I am is a dinosaur. The only thing I do reasonably well, which is write, belongs to an outdated technology: books.
I don’t need to tell you how abysmal the reading situation is in the United States (which is my culture and my language of written proficiency).
32 million Americans can’t read.
23% of US adults didn’t read a single book in 2021, whether in print, electronic or audio form, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted January 25-February 8, 2021.
I suspect even that ghastly percentage is an exaggeration. Given what I know about our very human tendency to lie and exaggerate, especially when we know that an admission of guilt makes us look like dolts, it’s likely higher.
Of those who read books, 46% prefer nonfiction to fiction, and that’s not including textbooks, which gobble up a sizable percentage of sales statistics.
That leaves us with fiction, which is what I write.
Seven of my novels have been published traditionally. All fall within the rubric of commercial fiction, either contemporary or erotic romance, a genre which, unfortunately, has been mired in controversy and whose sales have been decimated by self-publishing and Kindle Unlimited. By the time I wrapped up my last contract—four romances with Kensington Books—I hadn’t made enough money to fold.
Which brings me back to Cappuccino. Why do I write it? What’s in it for me? At four cappuccini a week (almost two hundred so far), am I that hopeless a glutton for punishment?
Short answer: I write because I not only need to communicate, I have to write. It’s a compulsion. Dinosaur or not, this is what I was born to do. Because a writer ought to have an eye to the market—and I had a living to make—I wrote commercial fiction. But the romance industry is officially over, as far as earning a paycheck goes. White heroines are passé; writing from a perspective of color is cultural appropriation. That doesn’t leave me with a lot of leg room.
Don’t get me wrong. As a woman, I’m all for inclusion. But “funny” things keep happening. My agent tried selling an upmarket women’s fiction I wrote called The Growing Season. I was told—not by one, not by two, but by three editors—that “stories about white women getting divorced” were tired. No one wanted to read them. Obviously, that wasn’t the only thing The Growing Season was about, but it was enough to kill the project (to say nothing of the year it took to write it).
Look, I understand. Publishing is a business. 98% of all fiction books fail to sell even 5,000 copies. And book reading itself is an outdated medium. Few people have the time, the interest, the attention span, or the energy to read a book anymore. Stories are just as popular as they were a hundred years ago; we just consume them differently.
And that’s how I came to write Cappuccino. Maybe people are too busy to read novels. But they can read a short article, right? Something with the narrative voice of fiction, but also the immediacy of current events?
I love being able to speak directly to a reading audience, which is hard to do in a novel where, due to characters and storyline, you’re at a remove. What I especially love is the editorial freedom (read: no air conditioning articles). My drunken Muse? Coloring inside the lines has never been her forte.
While I’ll continue writing novels, I won’t be writing to market anymore. If novels don’t sell anyway, what’s the point? I’m better off thinking about my legacy. What stories of mine do I want people reading after I’m gone? My kids have no interest in my work, but my future grandchildren might. What artistic and/or intellectual riches might I be able to leave them, if any?
And yet, trying to discover who you are as a writer without the rigid structure of commercial writing is also kind of terrifying. It’s like putting your life on hold to have kids only to find that you’re a stranger to yourself twenty years later when you finally get that life back again. Who am I without the tricks and devices, meat and potatoes of commercial fiction? What do I have to say? And do I have the huevos to say it without resorting to the trope of “happily ever after?”
Daring to be unpopular (and quite possibly un-agented and unpublished) is really throwing myself into the breach. But that’s okay. Nobody’s reading books anymore anyway, so does it matter?
That’s why I’m going down with the ship, people. This history-loving, Shakespeare quoting, literary brontosaurus is opening up a brand new chapter in her life. And I’m happy to share the good, the bad, and the ugly with you right here on Cappuccino.
Does it even need saying that what this curmudgeonly old writer-lady can do, you can do, too, and probably a thousands times better? What in your perspective or your life needs a serious overhaul? Are you hanging on to old information? Are you ready for an industrial upgrade?
If the answer is yes, let’s set fire to this crap. Burn it down and salt the earth behind us.
That’s how we can celebrate Cappuccino—by daring to walk the tightrope without a net, in whatever way that scares you.
We can do it together.
Happy Cappuccino!
Do you know someone who might enjoy the gift of Cappuccino? If so, here’s the link you’re looking for.
And I’m looking for your comments, thoughts, and suggestions, too. Let me know what you think.
Congratulations! Let's talk audiobooks sometime. More and more people are listening rather than reading. I prefer reading like you but I love telling stories out loud.
"It’s not easy being this out of sync...." Tell me about it. My muse drinks sloe gin fizzes, eats three-day-old cold veggie pizza topped with peanut M&Ms and fires spit wads at the back of my head like a recalcitrant fourth-grader. I'd like to slap the sumbitch, but I'd have to catch him first, and I'm too damned old and slow. And so I put up with the abuse because it's easier than wasting time trying to trick the little bastard so I can force him into a trash compactor.
Did that seem a bit too overly aggressive? I certainly hope so, 'cuz damned if I don't have some unresolved anger-FUCKING-management issues with my muse. Fortunately, I can usually manage to shut he/she/it (I don't even know what the Hell the thing's pronouns are) up by writing obsessively in my basement.
I may never sell anything, but then again I don't have to. I've self-published a book, I have my own Substack, and I've gotten a boatload of positive feedback about my writing. I write because I'm possessed...er, obsessed...er, half-crazed and I can no more not write than not breathe. I'm not certain that's a good thing, but at least it's safe and it's legal.
I ended my 20-year-old blog on this date last year, and began my Substack on May 4th. So, far, I think only my family, friends, and a few heavily medicated residents of the Oregon State Hospital read it, but in time I'll rule the world. You just wait.
I'm big into self-delusion like that. :-)
BTW, I've long-since forgotten how I stumbled across Cappuccino, but I'm glad I did. Your long-distance friendship and support has been invaluable and greatly appreciated. The fact that you're also a helluva writer doesn't hurt.