On Recognition and Accolades: Why I Drank the Metaphorical Motor Oil this Year

OHMFM_Cover_188x300It came as a com­plete sur­prise to me last week when I found out that anoth­er one of my books had been cho­sen by IndieRead­er as one of the best books of the year. Last Decem­ber it was my short sto­ry col­lec­tion The Man, The Myth, The Leg­end, and this year IndieRead­er select­ed my mod­ern pas­toral nov­el One Hun­dred Miles from Man­hat­tan as a Best Book of 2014.

If you haven’t read it yet, con­sid­er pick­ing it up for your­self or a friend as a Christ­mas gift. It’s avail­able as a Kin­dle ebook, or in print.

No writer, if he wants to go on liv­ing, holds his breath wait­ing for good reviews or acco­lades. There are long peri­ods when noth­ing hap­pens on the recog­ni­tion front, and in fact a writer can pub­lish a book and have years go by before any­one notices it at all.

That’s why, when the recog­ni­tion and mod­est acco­lades come in, you have to acknowl­edge them and be thank­ful. As a writer, you cross many vast deserts alone, spend­ing a lot of your writ­ing life thirst­ing and starv­ing for some kind of recog­ni­tion. The trou­ble is, if you don’t get the deli­cious cold spring water and the pic­nic table full of food some­where along the way, you become will­ing to take recog­ni­tion in what­ev­er form it comes to you, no mat­ter how unhealthy it might be.

There’s a scene near the end of the James Bond movie Quan­tum of Solace in which Bond dumps the bad guy in the mid­dle of a desert, prob­a­bly 100 miles from any­thing, and he drops a can of motor oil on the ground and says, “I bet you’ll make it twen­ty miles before you con­sid­er drink­ing that.”

 

Quantum of Solace (2008)

Quan­tum of Solace: Bond dumps the bad guy in the desert with a can of motor oil. Nice.

 

I have to tell you, folks—earlier this year I was in that desert, and I’m ashamed to say that I drank the motor oil.

And rather than quench­ing my thirst at all, it only poi­soned me. I won’t go into detail about the form that that motor oil took; all I’ll say is that I craved the real thing (pro­fes­sion­al recog­ni­tion and sales) so much, I was will­ing to accept fawn­ing and ado­ra­tion as a sub­sti­tute.

But that was ear­li­er this year. As I go into 2015, launch­ing the next Dako­ta Stevens mys­tery, A Truth Stranger Than Fic­tion, on Jan­u­ary 1, I’ve had my hunger for recog­ni­tion and acco­lades tem­porar­i­ly sati­at­ed, most recent­ly by the IndieRead­er hon­or, a long pro­file in The Pough­keep­sie Jour­nal, and a high­ly favor­able review of 100 Miles by Kirkus Reviews.

I real­ize there will be more deserts in my future as a writer, but know­ing what I know now—that the motor oil in no way quench­es your thirst; it only poi­sons you—I won’t be drink­ing it again.

 

By Chris Orcutt

CHRIS ORCUTT is an American novelist and fiction writer with over 30 years' writing experience and more than a dozen books in his oeuvre. Since 2015, Chris been working exclusively on his magnum opus. Bodaciously True & Totally Awesome: The Legendary Adventures of Avery “Ace” Craig is a 9-episode novel about teens in the 1980s. It’s about ’80s teens, but for adults (in other words, it’s decidedly not YA literature), and he’s applied this epic storytelling approach to the least examined, most misunderstood, most marginalized narrative space in American literature: the lives and inner worlds of teenagers.

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