Le maudit Mo D.

I write in Austin. Get over it.

It's been years since any of my coasty friends raised an eyebrow at my move to the center of Texas. Austin is cool, and everyone agrees. Every week, arty people from oversized, overpriced burgs like New York and LA wash up on the shores of Lady Bird Lake. Are they settling? Giving up the dream? Or is it our below-median rents and attractive taco carts that keep 'em coming? I came here for library school.

I wrote in Brooklyn once. Lethem used to stab his fingers at his laptop in my preferred coffee shop. LETHEM. I also knew where Eggers lived, up the street, just past my favorite Italian ice shop. I also worked for a giant publishing company, a great overall experience. It was the only job where my superiors were actually, literally, MEAN to me and felt the need to remind me of my low station. I lasted eleven months.

I am a Texas writer whose stories more often than not take place in Massachusetts. The first seventy pages of Novel #1 are in Boston, and all of Novel #2 takes place in working-class Chicopee/Springfield. I guess that's because I mostly wish I could be there every day, so barring that, I pretend I'm there by writing about teenage Catholic girls named Carol Sewicki.

Have I mentioned how nice the writers are here? Sarah B*rd often says hi to me when I run into her around town. I occasionally knit with Spike. Owen waves at me from his bicycle. Amanda responds to my e-mails in less than 24 hours. Best of all, the most published and taken-seriously among us do not pen snark-light for the NYTimes slyly berating those who are trying hard to live the dream, maybe churning out meaningless hipster bullshit in the process. I'm sure if I was at the point in my career when my novels were being taught in liberal arts college classrooms and I had some fancy "writer-in-residence" title to my name, I'd feel okay about being more of an asshole than usual. But that would be anathema to the writing-in-Austin experience. Which is all about smiling on your brother and trying to love one another.

I write in a coffeehouse that's a five minute walk from my house. I don't live in a hip neighborhood. As I write, I gaze out upon the rows of Hondas at the car dealership across the street. When I get home, I smell like the panini grill. Sometimes I run into people I know. Leah once almost got into a car accident waving at me as I waited to cross Koenig. I cringed, but when I saw that she was safe, I smiled. That's why I write in Austin, people.

I think sometimes that writing in a remote part of Vermont would be nice. I've written in West Texas, and though I enjoyed the classes and the air, the ladies there didn't know what the T was. I had to explain the T. I also had to keep my mouth shut about not caring about small Texas towns. Not that there's anything wrong with them, but I was on their turf. Here comes Daddy with a hatchet and a beat-up Chevy. No one who has the ear of the Times writes stuff like that, except maybe Cormac McC.

My chiropractor asks me how my novel is going. I thank her for remembering it as she cracks the sciatica out of my back. The sciatica gets in the way of writing. Sitting in an upright, ladylike fashion is often painful and it means that I can't "find my muse" because there are hot screwdrivers in my hip sockets and I have to go home and medicate and assume yoga positions lest I want to die.

I've been writing Novel #1 on and off for almost ten years. It was only after I turned 30 that I could sit down and write the whole thing in a serious way.

If someone is laughing at me for wanting to write a novel and see it published and have it read in some meaningful way, I can't care. All I know is that person does not write in Austin.

Posted by Zerd at March 1, 2008 11:51 AM