Pictured: The publishing industry

(titled with apologies to Karen Elizabeth Gordon)

Spring: that magical time of year when a young graduate’s mind turns to gainful employment. And if you’re of a bookish bent, that means hustling hard to become an entry-level cog in the publishing machine.

Now, because I’m an adult—somehow??—I find myself in the position of getting a flood of requests for informational interviews come April/May-ish, and while I sincerely wish I could take every last starry-eyed hopeful out for a cappuccino and a hearty dose of advice, the fact is that if I did that for everyone I’d die of caffeine-related palpitations in, like, two days.

So instead I am putting together this guide of best practices, FAQs, and other Hot Tipz on How To Begin To Live The Dream. Please bear in mind that I have gotten exactly one (1) job in publishing myself, and that your mileage may vary, one size does not fit all, and no two publishers are alike. Anyway, onward.

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When you write a book, people will want to know what your face looks like. I don’t know why, but it’s true. Maybe the reading public has been burned one too many times by the Carolyn Keenes of the world and needs reassurance that you’re not secretly a conglomerate of underpaid ghostwriters, or maybe they want to scan your forehead for telltale talent bumps in a kind of 2-D phrenological exam. Either way, a headshot must be taken.

Step 0: Eliminate all the pictures of your face that you CANNOT use.
It’s the new millennium, which means that in addition to wearing unisex silver leotards and commuting to work in pneumatic tubes, every person on earth has a digital repository of face-photos somewhere. Don’t believe me? Just tap into your phone’s “Selfies” folder:

In a word: barf city!!! (Okay, that’s two words.) Still–these are all terrible and will not do. A snapshot of yourself with stick-uppy purple hair and sunglasses you took in the front seat of your Volvo 240 while stuck in traffic on the way to a Christopher Moore signing does NOT a professional headshot make.

Step 1: Identify all of your flaws.
This should be very easy. In my case, we have the following issues:

Intractable hairline cowlick (A)
Bald eyebrow spot, here filled in with makeup (B)
Nose that appears strangely flat in profile (C)

Gross! Now, short of a head transplant, there’s really nothing you can do to FIX these, but you CAN dwell upon them obsessively and try to hold your face in a strange rictus that obscures all flaws from view at once. Practice in the mirror.

Step 2: Know somebody who owns a camera.
Ideally this is a friend of yours. If you do not have a friend with a camera, you will have to pay someone with a camera to be your friend for the afternoon. No, I don’t know how much it should cost—three thousand dollars? That sounds about right, right? All that flash powder and developing fluid adds up, surely.

Step 3: Pick an authoritative background.
Put the “author” in “authoritative” by insisting on posing in front of bookshelves. If there is no bookshelf in your photo, people will forget that you are a writer or even that they are holding a book at all! Don’t let this happen. Even if the shelf is full of something like the complete 1982 Encyclopedia Britannica or a bunch of Goosebumps books, it will lend you gravitas. “Yes,” a full bookshelf says. “She has scanned her authorly eyeballs over all of us, and drunk in the knowledge imparted on our pages. She is therefore wise, and her book is sure to be a good one worth at least $17.99 plus tax where applicable.”

Step 4: Dress appropriately.
Pick a power outfit that says something like “I’m sexily intelligent, or intelligently sexy, but I could also kill you with my bare hands OR go onstage to accept my National Book Award, all in this same multipurpose sensible ensemble.” Also no loud prints or pastels.

Step 5: Have somebody else paint your face normal colors.
Your face probably has a lot of problems (see step 1) so this is a good opportunity to pay someone to lacquer it up with skin-colored goop so that no one can see your pores or even your nose-holes. Unsure of what to ask of your maquillagiste*? Ask for “the regular human face.” She’ll know what it means.

*Not a real French word

Step 6: Drench yourself in glorious light.
The sun doesn’t count, and neither does your novelty leg lamp. If your camera-friend is worth his or her salt, he or she should have one of those upside-down umbrellas with a light in it and also something called a “B light.” Also, if you’re a woman, you should be backlit so that your hair lights up around your head like a nimbus of gold.

Step 7: Pose.
Under no circumstances should you hold your body the way your ordinarily do, you slob. Pretend an invisible string is pulling up the top of your head. Pretend another invisible string is pulling up each of your shoulders and elbows. Now dance! Ha ha, I made you a marionette.

But seriously. Here are some classic looks for an author:
Crossed arms
Crossed arms with chin on fist
Crossed arms with chin on fist and one finger delicately raised against one’s cheek, as if to say “tee hee, what a fascinatingly bestsellery book idea I’ve just had”
Hands on hips
Whoa, not so aggressive! Hands GENTLY on hips
Fingers hooked weirdly into front pockets
Casually leaning against brick wall
Lying on chaise longue, one arm flung over eyes
Aggressively pointing at camera while mouthing “YOU, YES YOU, BUY MY BOOK”
Exaggerated wink/thumbs-up combo

Step 8: Shoot!
Once you’ve picked some poses, just sit back*, relax**, and let the camera do its magic!

*Do not sit back.
**Do not relax.

Soon you will have a bevy of appropriate and flattering shots to choose from, such as:

What

DEMONS

what are you doing DON’T DO THAT

Step 9: Despair.
God, what were you THINKING, trying to take a photo of your face? This is worse than school picture day and a dentist’s appointment mashed together! Brainstorm alternatives: maybe your publisher will accept an oil painting of your face, or that caricature of you and your dog you paid $20 for in the seventh grade? Maybe you can claim you’re in the witness protection program, except then what if your publisher calls your bluff by offering to pay for plastic surgery to distance you and your young adult romantic comedy from your crime-filled past as a bookie? Look enviously at your dog, who is lying on the ground, dead asleep, and does not have to worry about things like getting his picture taken, because he barely understands how a mirror works, let alone a three-jillion gigapixel DSLR with wide-angle lens.

Step 10: Take a picture of your dog instead.

Perfect. They’ll never know the difference.

Pictured: me, toiling

I have always wanted to be asked about the secrets to my success, because such a question presumes that I HAVE success, and that is very flattering. I also love that profiles of famous people dig so deeply into the mundane details of the Famous Person’s life, as if starting every morning by eating half a tree-ripened avocado spritzed with lemon juice will immediately transmogrify you into Reese Witherspoon. It won’t! I tried!

Anyway, until I have the kind of glamorous, sophisticated-but-youthful life that the readers of PARADE magazine are desperate to emulate, I will content myself with this inventory of low-stakes lifestyle “hacks” that I have employed to fashion myself the into gainfully employed gangling twenty-something that I am.

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One of the great perks of having a Spotify-equipped smartphone is that I can listen to my playlist of sea chanties wherever I go. With the tap of a touchscreen, I can turn mundane commuter purgatories like the subway and the one tunnel outside Suburban station where the train always goes realllly sloooowly into a vessel drunkenly bobbing on the whitecaps of the high seas!

This was a very important thing I kept up for MULTIPLE WEEKS

I hate to call myself a trendsetter, mostly because sea chanties are not actually trendy, but suffice to say that if they DO ever enjoy a resurgence I want at least a footnote on Wikipedia. Because I love ’em! It’s weird! Whatever! Sea chanties possess two different but not wholly incompatible aesthetics for me: the jolly, rum-soaked “hey ho” type songs about sweet Roseanna or getting shipped to South Australia, and the wrenchingly poignant ballads of lands and love lost to the LIFE OF THE SEA. I start to get REALLY emotional about the plight of cod-fishermen in Newfoundland. They had to work so HARD and the sea was CHILLY and FULL OF DEATH and England was VERY VERY FAR AWAY >:(

And why should I care? I’m not from Newfoundland, I think fish is disgusting, and I don’t even like being on boats, especially! But there you go. Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait pas. Le bon vin m’endort, l’amour me reveille. Maybe it’s like how country music is really popular in South Africa, or maybe I’m an 18th-century fisherman stuck in a 21st-century girl’s body, or maybe songs of the sea are so transcendent and universal that they can set even the stoniest heart (i.e., mine) aflame with longing.

Anyway, I don’t know what to make of this obsession except that maybe I should learn how to play one of those little Mr. Smee accordions. But if you’re looking to start a sea-chanty obsession of your very own, I present you with the following primer.

(NOTE: If you are a jerk and just went to look up “sea chanty” on Wikipedia, you will notice that there is a very technical definition. How technical? THIS technical:

A sea shanty, chantey, or chanty is a type of work song that was once commonly sung to accompany labor on board large merchant sailing vessels. The term shanty most accurately refers to a specific style of work song belonging to this historical repertoire.

I am going to be much more generous with my criteria and define sea chanty as “song about some aspect of maritime life, or maybe just about drinking, or maybe that just SOUNDS like it could’ve been sung by sailors at some point, okay.”)

Barrett’s Privateers

This is it, the ultimate song of seabound camaraderie by the ultimate Canadian latter-day sea chanteur. I probably shouldn’t put it first because it’s so definitively good, but I also can’t NOT start with it—particularly because this video is SO GOOD. Just a bunch of 70s-era guys in wide collars and neckerchiefs singing their hearts out and thumping a rhythm on a Nova Scotian kitchen table.

I have taught my entire family this song, including my favorite 8-year-old child, who can sing the whole thing from memory and does the “God DAMN THEM ALL” with particular gusto. We sing it every Thanksgiving.

Northwest Passage

On the “unhappy songs about longing” side of chanties, though, this one is probably your apotheosis. It works on a literal sadness level (the Franklin expedition was so tragically doomed!) and a metaphorical sadness level (because what is LIFE if not “tracing one warm line through a land so wide and savage”). All is vanity, Canada is very cold, and the harmonies on this are hard to sing. The end.

Le Bon Vin

It’s a drinking song, but the French makes it classy. “Good wine puts me to sleep but love wakes me up again,” innit that cute. These guys are also Canadian and do a mean bodhran.

South Australia

Back in the day, Australia was not a good place to go! It meant you were a criminal and likely to die being stung to death by killer spiders the size of Uluru. This one could feasibly work as an actual work song because it name-drops heaving and hauling, which are very important.

England

By contrast, England was a place that seamen (heh) missed a lot. They were stuck in Newfoundland, far from children and wives, and for WHAT—cod? Gross!

Black Sails Theme and Variations
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7n_FdlZbiuQ

Not even really a chanty! Whatever! This is the theme song to a show I have never seen and know pretty much nothing about except that it has some SICK hurdy-gurdy riffs in its opening number. I hear this and I’m like “lace up my corset extra tight and GRAB MY CUTLASS because we are TAKING TO THE SEAS.”

Le reel à bouche

Just a lot of guys going “hey dum de dum” a lot, but in a rhythmic and exciting and French way.

The River Driver

I maintain that sea chanties do not forcément have to involve the sea—any body of water will do, even a river. Et voilà! A song of toil and wasted life aboard a fluvial vessel.

The Parting Glass

A good song about leaving, or dying, or both. I have been known to sing this a cappella around bonfires when the mood strikes.

Wait, who were all these people?
My internet friends. My friends, from the internet. Yes, I’m a total #Millennial—I fly halfway across the country to hang out with strangers I’ve only ever seen before in a Twitter avatar, and it worked out great.

Why were you there?
My friend Kate Brauning—writer, editor, intelligent and magnificent human being—invited me to celebrate the launch of her debut novel, How We Fall, and her friend Nikki Urang’s debut novel, The Hit List. She hosted ten of us for a retreat and then a Big Ol’ Party which her staff videographer/husband livestreamed to the Internet™.

Where at?
Omaha, City of Dreams!

Did you—
Yes, I ate a steak, duh. I also saw the Mutual of Omaha building.

Did you guys, like, drink and stuff?
You tell me.

What did you do?
Sat around and typed. Mostly, we took over the little high-top bar-table in the lobby and clear away the weird centerpiece baskets of grass ball-things so that all eight seats could be filled with writers writing (in Alex’s case, VERY AGGRESSIVELY. Girl types like a machine gun).

What did you do?
I was working on the twenty-fifth version of the first day of school scene in the book I’ve been writing for two and a half years. I worked pretty hard on Saturday and really hard on Sunday and by the time we were loading up the car on Monday to get to Sioux Center for the #official #YALaunch party I decided that I had to scrap it all, again.

Oh. So then what did you do?
Alex and I sat in the backseat of Kate’s car and I read aloud a book about Chardonnay grapes and switched accents every paragraph. French was my best and Irish was probably my worst (I think I got about 12 accents in, total).

No, I mean about your book.
Right, so, when I was out of accents, Alex and I sat down and plotted out what my three main characters Wanted and Needed and how that could manifest through every scene in the first third of the book. I made a lot of useful notes and Alex got a little carsick from the smell of beef jerky (sorry!) Then I talked a lot with Bethany about retellings, and points of view, and characters, and it was useful and she was smart.

(This was directed at the book, not Alex)

My solution came on Tuesday morning when I sat down to write an edit letter to myself. It’s the best idea I’ve had so far and I think it’s gonna work.

What else did you do?
Laugh like a crazy person. Drink like a fish. Put really nifty scribbly nail decals on my fingers (poorly) and make my hair do that thing. Sleep too late EVERY DAY and then have to awkwardly launch myself from bed when the maid knocked on the door so I could politely explain that, no, sorry, I’m not yet awake at nine in the AM, could she um please sorry come back thanks? Go around the room and read from our writing—every person, and every person was good. Answer interview questions ON CAMERA like a REAL FAMOUS PERSON and wonder if I should really write that book about centaurs. Make this gif, I don’t even know:

 Get gas at a Kum-and-Go (cultural touchstone of the Midwest). Watch the swirling midnight Iowa snow outside the car windows on the way home and feel suddenly very, very sad in the pit of my chest. Make friends. Gossip (a little). Leave my EpiPen in a restaurant like a dingus only to have our very kind waitress return it to me the moment I recrossed the threshold. Fly home, optimistic, laden with ideas, and sleepy.

Please list all the inside jokes.

1. Omaha, City of Dreams!
2. This version of the Jurassic Park theme song
3. This version of “Wrecking Ball”
4. This version of “My Heart Will Go On”
5. Okay, really just anything involving recorders
6. “Just use another cheese as the cracker for the cheese.”
7. Cake Brauning, Éclair Thornburgh, Alex Yuschip (or Yuscheese)
8. That one time I made Alex cry with laughter when I brought up the Chicken Bone Incident of ’13 at dinner
9. Geckos
10. BLOODBEARD, my as-yet-nonexistent feminist heavy metal collective

Please list all the snacks, sparing no detail.
Triscuits, Wheat Thins, microwaveable cakes, pumpkin bread, baby carrots, snap peas, sharp cheddar, another block of cheese that I think was Monterey Jack?, herb brie, Cheetos, beef jerky, Fritos, Cheese-Its Snack Mix, almonds (not for me), KitKats, Reese’s Cups (also not for me), Starbursts, M&Ms, Dove chocolates (the kind with inspirational messages on the wrapper), smoothie shots, fruit-flavored water, Goldfish (crackers), apples, the good kind of very dark purple grapes, smoked Gouda, mini cupcakes.

What was the best part?
Nearly everything.

I admire Kate so much: she is driven, smart, inventive, generous, kind, articulate, and a fantastic writer. She is just on, man. And what a thing to do for so many people. I suggest you go Buy! Her! Book!

What was the worst part?
When I came downstairs at 9:15 and the hotel breakfast was already out of egg-and-spinach sandwiches even though breakfast was not officially over until 9:30, dammit.

Oh God!!!! What did you do?
Ate two instant oatmealz and listened to Daft Punk. U no how I do.

Let’s get one more gif of you and Alex, please.
Done.

I.

It hurts.

II.

How’s your day so far? the dental hygienist asks.

My dress is rumpled and the stained part of the slip is probably showing. My hair is sticking up weird, even though I put in the extra five morning minutes with the blow-dryer. I look terrible and I feel like throwing up.

None of this is her fault. But what does she expect me to say? Does anyone enter a dentist’s office with a cheery demeanor, knowing what’s in store there? It’s never good news to be in a dentist’s office. It’s the ‘we need to talk’ of physical locations. Pain is waiting, just beyond the beaming posters of multicultural people in multicolored crewnecks whose only common attribute is their gleaming white teeth. We’re all in this together, they are saying. Dental work is just part of being human, like headcolds or sunburn or heartbreak. Sorry, but you’re asking for it simply by having a corporeal form. Smile.

Just okay, I say. I am here to get a tooth drilled, after all.
She smiles politely, without showing her teeth, and leads me back to my chair.

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I am learning to draw, and I suck.

Three weeks ago I marched myself into the art store around the corner from my office and purchased my stuff: big sketchbook. Three pencils. One eraser. One sharpener. Then I marched myself home and spent an hour squinting at myself in the mirror and drew a self-portrait.

I woke up like this.

Well. All the trusty muscles in your fingers and hands can be so amazingly goddamn slow when you haven’t used them to do the thing that you’re doing. I perch on my couch after work with whiskey and my sketchbook on my knees and drag the pencil back and forth in an attempt to render whatever’s handy: usually a literal hand, sometimes a foot, once, a grapefruit. They come out okay.

Drawing is loaded. I’m the daughter of and sister to two very talented illustrators. But I want to learn, including the part where I suck a lot, for a very simple and self-indulgent reason: I want to draw my characters.

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