Low Maintenance Writer

I enjoy my limited conversations inside the publishing industry, and recently I was privy to a rant offered up by a literary agent (not mine!) who was lamenting the "high maintenance" writers she works with. Well, I'm not one of them. In fact, I'm so "low maintenance" most people wouldn't even know I exist, and I've got a lot of loose wingnuts.

High maintenance writers are those who, typically, call their agents several times a week to "check in" or who make demands upon publishers and editors that are unrealistic. Many regard themselves as "artists" of the pen and regard their work as superior to the pig-Latin works that others compose.

Me? I can go for weeks (even months) without a single conversation with my agent. No one has to tighten me down or keep me on an even keel. I don't expect caviar. In fact, while I'm waiting for word on a book proposal or a story or an essay, I'm usually creating two more. No sense waiting and wasting time in expectation. Better get jiggy with it.

My wife knows I'm low maintenance also. And I'm married to a low maintenance woman. Our children are low maintenance, too (for the most part). I can go days, weeks even, without speaking their names.

My wife understands that, if the laundry doesn't get done on the weekend, that's okay. I can go months wearing the same T-shirt and sweat pants for my workouts (and frequently do). What's the point of doing a wash if I'm gonna sweat in these clothes anyway? I still write on a 15 year old computer with floppy disks. And I haven't demanded a meal in months since my wife has been in night school after teaching a full day. She doesn't complain about my cooking either, and we've now cycled through the entire corpus of Hamburger Helpers. And listen, if I don't have hamburger, I cook the box anyway. She doesn't notice. She's too tired. So am I. My son opens cans and lives on the same protein supplement I consume by the pounds. He's learned to love it. He stopped complaining when he was twelve years old and realized I wasn't listening.

No, I'm not high-maintenance. And as for the editors out there, most of them have a difficult time understanding why I keep sending them work even though they've been rejecting me for decades. But the way I figure it, one of these days they'll get tired of working with the prima donnas, the caviar-eaters, the Lexus-drivers, the delicate artists . . . and they will want to work with a sweaty, can-eating, socket-wrench like me.

I won't demand a thing.