The Book That Didn’t Sell by Nasrin Khosrowshahi

She sits in front of the computer. She starts typing. Life passes her by. She is not

happy. She feels like disintegrating and melting into the keyboard. Words cannot

describe, how she feels. Especially, ‘because her typing speed seems to be one word per

minute. She ponders if she has what it takes to be a writer. She feels like crying, loudly,

unceasingly, here in this boring library in this boring world, in the middle of Vancouver,

in the middle of a so very hot summer, sometimes in 2008. She ponders if she should put

a date in her story, given that this her story might be published two years from now. If

this story is part of a collection of short stories, that hit the stores in 2010, everything will

be dated, old and stale. Who wants to read a fictional account of 2008 in 2010. It doesn’t

make sense.

Narratives pass her by. Whatever that means. Coherence is only a word she types

into the computer. She feels like crying. Only the act of repeating the same sentence

again and again keeps her from crying. Her words are doing their own thing, they splash

all over the monitor, meaningless hieroglyphs that do not illustrate each and every

moment of this so very weird, so very non-functioning existence of hers.

She is fifty-three years old and feels very, very old. Outdated. Grey-haired.

Utterly wrinkled. Over-weight. Hungry, too. Kind of thirsty, too. She wonders, why the

VCC library has a sunroof in the middle of the library. Not exactly a sunroof, more a sun-

umbrella, the kind one can buy at Costco, cheaper if combined with patio furniture.

She scratches her head. Her typing speed is snail like, sooo very slowwwww. She

just came back from the small press publisher in Gastown, where she had sent her

manuscript some three weeks ago. They were not supportive there, none of the people

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thanked her enthusiastically for choosing them as a prospective publisher. They let her

walk out the door, taking her talent with her, her utter intellect, her paramount ability to

wordsmith, her fascinating, well, talent, her exuberant brilliance, her uncanny ability to

partner exuberant and brilliance in one sentence. Oh, doom should come on both their

houses. Actually, she just went in person to one publisher, but she had actually sent her

manuscript to another publisher in town, too. Some place on Main Street. She picked

them out of the Yellow Pages, chose the ones that started with an A. She hates the

publishing industry, ponders if she should send her 270 pages off to a university press,

MIT being her favourite. They are engineers, they like any kind of prose. Shabby poems

like hers impress the numerical crowd. Homo fabers are easily impressed. Bullshitting is

tough for scientific creatures, easy for a loser like her.

Yesterday was Canada Day. She sat in Chapters and read a book about Mordecai

Richler, how he started out, what he had to say about writing. A colleague. She smiles,

humility, modesty are not necessarily her forte.

She is wearing an ugly brown T-shirt, full of beige scribbles thereon. She ponders,

if the words T-shirt and thereon go together. She ponders a lot these days. She ponders

about the word count of this writing, she ponders, if she is going insane, she ponders, if

she should start screaming. She ponders if she should behave. She contemplates

punctuation, orthography, she does not know whether to use British spelling or American

spelling, she ponders what to wear to her nephew’s wedding in Toronto, she ponders

which literary agent to give her manuscript to, she ponders, she ponders. These are her

pondering days. The computer here is for VCC students and employees only, she is

neither. It is her obligation, though, to write her masterpiece at this very moment. She

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ponders if the librarian might approach her and throw her out of this place, but she might

just hide behind her washed-up housewife persona, displaying an aura of inadequacy and

despair. World literature will thank her.

A year ago, she had no idea that she was a writer, she thought she was an

animator. An F in experimental animation put an end to that. She ruminates about that

failure a lot, ever so slightly leaving the world of visual arts for the universe of words,

letters, prose. Lines are lines, whether they are words or an outline of a horse.

She ponders whether she should pepper her writing with sex and/or violence,

whether she feels like selling out to the marketplace. N-E-V-E-R. She has integrity. She

thinks so. We are all prostitutes. This was an inscription on a T-shirt. Her ideas, her

knowledge, her philosophies, her politics are manufactured by other people’s T-shirts. By

the messages on them. Somehow this has something to do with Marshall McLuhan.

She used to allude ever so slightly to different ideas, to philosophies, but she is

jaded now. Spells everything out, tries to be as clear and concise as possible. She

foregoes aesthetical concerns, slaughters metaphors and similes left and right, smashes

beautiful poetic constructions in order to make herself crystal clear. Form follows

function.

It is five minutes after three, she is out of words. She has nothing more to say.

Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Nothing. N-O-T-H-I-N-G.

She feels philosophical in her utter, so very visceral nihilism. Air conditioner

hums, computer flashes its purple light at her. Every seven seconds. She wrote 906

words, already. She read somewhere, that a writer should pen at least 1000 words per day.

Each and every day. At least. Who makes up these random rules? And, furthermore, who

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reads them? And puts them into her memory bank? And who uses clichés like memory

bank. Some would-be-writer, whose book was rejected by the small press in Gastown.

She gasps for air. She should read through her output, try to hunt down inconsistencies,

glitches, she should storm back up the stairs to the small press and start crying and

whaling :”publish me, publish me, oh, please, oh. please” she should sob uncontrollably

instead of sitting calmly and collected in front of a computer in some public college

library, typing away.

The woman in the beige T-shirt said “we will get back to you in several months,

feel free to submit your manuscript to other publishers”. Which means, of course, “we

hate you”. She took what was left of her pride and went to the next Tim Hortons and had

a tea with cream and no sugar and a Blueberry Cheese Danish. And she cried inside

without shedding tears, bottling it all up, crying on the inside, while smiling on the

outside. This was a very dramatic day, so full of rejection, so very boring, so on the

opposite side of achievement, accomplishment. No resting on her laurels for her. There

are no laurels, she smushed them all. And she feels like crying. And she said that before.

She should go up to the second floor and have chocolate mousse. Drown her

disappointment in gooey, sugary, artery clogging mush. That is the way we roll. We

survive.

Yesterday, she thought she is a literary giant, today, though, she holds her head

low, staggers through downtown, rejected, penniless. Well, not exactly penniless, but the

pennies are not made by putting words on paper. The pennies should be made by putting

words on paper. Worked for Hemingway. She feels like an Old Woman Not in the SEA.

Actually it is The Old Man and the Sea and somehow she is not able to transform that

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into a semi witty “something”. She does not even know the exact literary term for that

“something”.

She should go and have her chocolate mousse, she should end her account of

today’s non-events, she should construct a meaningful, insightful ending to this writing.

She should go out with a bang, start with a bang, end with a bang, that seems to be the

formula for great writing. Her bangs today are mere whimpers, creeping slowly over the

monitor. Gooey, glue-like, utterly monotone, smushing any slight shade of wit and

insight. It is tough to be a writer, but it is better than being a grave-digger. How is that for

a bang?