Freyed out

I like what Dr. Maggie MacCary had to say about truth, memoirs, and storytelling in general (I like the idea of memoir as fable, though I don't think Frey was attempting to write a fable about his life when he fictionalized so much of the book).

I am getting burned out on James Frey. I realize Oprah had to run for cover once the media and general public opinion plummeted as the breadth of Frey's dishonesty became more and more apparent--but there's a point at which I have no desire to watch this particular train wreck anymore. Still, I wonder. Why has this guy's agent not said Word One? As a fairly new writer, I would suspect he deferred to the words of his agent and publisher--in my opinion, Nan Talese seems to have been a huge part of this equation, and his agent probably was, too--but the agent been absolutely silent.

Speaking of the writing world, I've weathered two agent rejections in a very short period of time--but another great rejection from Molly Friedrich, who wrote me a really beautiful letter on watermarked paper (with a real signature, not a form rejection). She said that my book sounded "interesting and intelligent," but she was not taking on any new projects and was feeling a bit tapped out at the moment. So, there has been a "no"from six agents (only six--some folks go through three times that before they find one), and thus I will be sending out more queries in the next week. This weekend, I am sending my book of poems to Milkweed Editions, as this is their open reading period.

I'm on Week Two of The Artist's Way. I've gone through this workbook before and remember the feelings that surfaced during the early weeks--mostly of the "tortured with self doubt" variety.
Very slowly, I have been regaining a sense of happiness about being a creative person. One thing I've been doing is putting gold stars in my Artist's Way journal when I complete a weeks' worth of Morning Pages--I found (at Kaleidoscope in Santa Cruz) the TRUE gold stars (which are gummed and have to be licked, then stuck on the page), as opposed to the PRETENDER gold stars, which are like regular stickers (okay, either of them are equally as good-I have two packs of the sticker kind, but the gummed kind were what I craved as a kid, and NEVER GOT--I got crappy blue stars much of the time, and red, but never gold). It sounds so silly, but it really makes me feel happy to be the master of my own gold stars!