Rejected Writing

I submitted a piece on "The Tao of #Occupy" to the Huffington Post a week and a half ago. Never heard back from them. Two days ago, this article came out: Occupy Buddha, by a Buddhist writer and teacher, Lewis Richmond.

A very cute piece, though kind of platitudinal and obvious for my taste. Personally - and I don't mean this arrogantly at all - I thought mine was better.

What sucks about the writing business is that so often they look at your bio before your work. If you don't have a number of impressive publications under your belt already, you can get left in the dust. I have spent my entire life writing and publishing. I had a book of poetry published before I even graduated college. I earn almost no money from my work, even though I spend more than 40 hours a week at it. Sometimes I get frustrated when I get passed over again and again because my personality is not exotic or charismatic enough. I get frustrated when I read interviews with editors and publishers who freely admit that they look for authors with personalities that will sell before they even bother to look at the quality of their work. My writing is good. It's complex, thorough, sometimes meandering, sometimes (I hope) challenging. I strive to avoid platitudes. We have enough of those. I try to write things that really challenge and push my own limits of knowledge, instead of only writing about simple, easy topics that I've already mastered. I figure that if I challenge myself, others will find my work challenging and valuable; if I write only what I already know, then I won't grow and neither will my readers.

Sometimes, I wish my work could be judged on its own merits, instead of dismissed because I'm not somebody the world thinks is important. Sometimes I get so frustrated at gatekeepers who handle their role irresponsibly, chasing profits or popularity instead of quality writing. I get especially frustrated at gatekeepers who pretend that they aren't gatekeepers, who show favoritism for individuals they find attractive or charismatic but get huffy and offended at the suggestion that their own bias might preclude better, more intelligent writing.

Most of all, I get frustrated at how no one seems to be saying anything new. Maybe that's what happens in the Information Age. When everything's been said, than the only people who get attention for saying it are the ones who can say it flashy, with jazz hands and a halo of pop culture enlightenment.

Maybe this is just Saturn Return stuff. I sometimes think that my confrontation with authority will take the form of a confrontation with the Rule of Immaturity. Stepkids, manipulative ex's, and a society that looks more and more like Brave New World even with the best of intensions.

Maybe I should just publish a book, no matter how shitty, if all anyone looks at is the cover.

Reflections on My Uncensored To-Do List

There's an awful lot of taking in compared to putting out on this list. For instance, probably half of the list is made up of various books that I want to read or practices (spiritual or otherwise) that involve listening or receptivity of some kind in order to connect and gain information.

My first reaction is to get down on myself for being too much of a "consumer" instead of a "producer." I should be doing more creative things, I should be producing more writing, more art and/or photography. I should be providing more services to people that they actually want or need. So says the critical voice in my head.

Is that true? When I try to think about it in terms of receptivity versus activity, I can be a little kinder to myself and not tune in as much to the demands of a society that can be very gimme-gimme demanding. Perhaps I am just in a "receptive" phase right now, where learning and listening are key elements and perfectly okay.

I know I'd probably be frustrated if I tried to give up writing altogether, and I definitely have the urge to do creative work (hence the interest in photography that has always lingered). In fact, sometimes my desire to create frustrates my desire to listen and open up to receptivity, so that neither happens and I end up in a stalemate. My fear perhaps is that I can't create until I'm "ready" because otherwise the product of that creativity will be limited, not as well informed as it could be, missing out on something. My best creative work has always come out of my own process of trying to understand, trying to process and integrate what I'm listening to. By thinking of production and consumption as too much at odds, maybe I'm cutting myself off from my source of creativity.

For now anyway, maybe I need to give myself permission to be in a more receptive mode or mood, and to allow whatever writing or creative work I do to grow out of that naturally in whatever way it will. Many of my writing goals are vague and ill-defined - while many of my "receptive" goals are very specific. Maybe I should take this as an indication of where my focus lies at the moment?

Meanwhile, simple rituals of meditation and offerings, as well as regular journaling of some kind, can keep the threshold between receptivity and creative activity open. If I'm not sure what to offer or create, maybe I can start with offering the simplest things.

The purpose of making the uncensored list of things I want to do was to get an idea about what kinds of things might fall into each of the four categories according to the four elements. I'll come back to this list and work at organizing it into four categories (or five, one of the major arcana) in a bit.