{"id":15679,"date":"2007-08-23T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2007-08-23T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/hameblog\/2007\/08\/23\/untitled\/"},"modified":"2025-09-12T07:49:45","modified_gmt":"2025-09-12T10:49:45","slug":"untitled","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/2007\/08\/23\/untitled\/","title":{"rendered":"Untitled"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>From a chair in the middle of the Edinburgh International Book Festival:<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>There is no &#8220;they&#8221;. There is no club. No one is keeping me from doing this. In fact, we&#8217;re all doing the same thing.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>Looking at the various publishers&#8217; shelves, I felt a pang seeing names of houses that rejected my book. But what they were selling &#8212; histories of Scottish life, memoirs, crime fiction, Scottish interest books, gritty dramas &#8212; my book isn&#8217;t any of those. It wouldn&#8217;t fit with what they sell. Nothing wrong with that. No one to blame.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve gone to the locus of that sinking-stomach feeling about publishing. The feeling dissipates. It&#8217;s fine. I still have work to do, but this event doesn&#8217;t diminish me.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>But of all the people here, the one I find most compelling is the man with the ice cream cart. He&#8217;s wiping it down for the end of the day while people around me sit and talk about the famous authors they&#8217;ve seen and their books. He pulls large metal panels out &#8212; for cooling? Insulation? This work is simple and straightforward, and the value of it is evident in the faces of the people I&#8217;ve seen licking the scoops of frozen, sweetened cream. Of all the people here, the one I most want to be like as a writer is him.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<div class=\"blogger-post-footer\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-content\/uploads\/posts\/1028\/untitled0.jpg.webp\" alt=\"\"><\/div><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From a chair in the middle of the Edinburgh International Book Festival: There is no &#8220;they&#8221;. There is no club. No one is keeping me from doing this. In fact, we&#8217;re all doing the same thing. Looking at the various publishers&#8217; shelves, I felt a pang seeing names of houses that rejected my book. But [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15679","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15679","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15679"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15679\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15679"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15679"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}