When I was starting out as a writer, I would have been ecstatic to hear from the editor of The New Yorker. Now I hear from him almost weekly, in a mass email, touting a piece of writing in his magazine.
I was talking to a writer friend, a few years older than I am, who told me he'd recently been reading things he wrote when he was young. He was struck by how good they were, and how rich the language in them. "I used to have fun with words," he said. "Now it's just get it down quickly and move on."
I knew what he meant. And I wondered: Is it our age, or the age?
Yesterday I received an email from an editor I'd recently written for that began "Oops." Never a good sign. It was followed by a message from a reader chastising me for calling Justin Trudeau the "new president" of Canada and adding that, as a neighbor, I should know that Canada has a prime minister.
A few hours later this same editor emailed me saying that he believed he'd heard from every Canadian living in South Florida. I was tempted to schedule a press conference for this morning during which I could offer a full, public, and heartfelt apology.
Of course I knew that Canada has a prime minister. How could someone who wrote in the same article (which was on Toronto) about the Japanese cheesecake shop on Bay Street, the Polish neighborhood of Roncesvalles, the whimsical painter William Kurelek (none of which of course I got any credit for) not know that? Writing "president" instead of "prime minister" was a slip of the tongue (or fingers across keys) made by someone overwhelmed by blather about his own country's presidential campaigns.
That is not an excuse. I should have caught my error, on my numerous rereads of my story, when I dutifully double-checked the spelling of Roncesvalles and Kurelek. It's simply an explanation of how, sometimes, the obvious things get overlooked. But not by readers. Canada, your citizens truly stand on guard for thee.
It's been almost 12 months since I left my magazine job and went back to freelancing full time. It's been a tough year, with one exception: I found a publisher for my book. Now one of my goals for 2016 is to find a way to be endearingly self-promotional.
The challenge of writing is abandoning the world to stare at a blank screen and there create a world so vivid and vibrant that it successfully competes with the other.