irresistable

I love a bargain; it’s in my blood. When I was a young girl, a couple of times a year, my mother would take me & my sisters clothes shopping in the bargain department stores in downtown Brooklyn & we’d come home loaded down with enough rags to keep 3 of us decently attired for school & parties for half a year, which is a lot for young girls.

My mother never bought anything that wasn’t on sale; I watched her flip expertly through the racks coming up with prized styles of dresses, sweaters, skirts, everything reduced, marked down, and I’m the same way now.

At Loemann’s Department store yesterday I made a bee line for the racks marked, “sale.” Here’s where I’d find my prize. Sure, I didn’t need anything but a bargain’s a bargain. Right? It’s like a sport.

And sure enough I spotted a pair of Les Copains cotton + spandex pants, navy blue, smooth cut, side-zipper, straight leg, size 8, fit perfectly except they were too long, which is an easy fix. According to the price tag this irresistable Italian designer item started out from the manufacturer priced at $315. Loemann’s was ready to sell them in their fancy pricey Back Room for $69.99, which I might have paid given the fine fabric, how finely they were cut & how well they fit. But now, for some reason I’ll never understand, they were marked down with a red label to $21.97, which I surely would have paid because such a bargain doesn’t come along every day. But wait, the red label meant “take another 40% off the price,” which brought my total cost down to $13 and some change. I grabbed the pants & headed to the cashier. My mother would have been proud of me.

I nearly bought a beautiful pair of red & purple Diesel sneakers, on sale with an additional 20% off, but fortunately the size 8 was a bit too short. That’s Diesel’s mistake, not mine, and their loss.

Henry Miller wrote an essay once, while living in poverty, unable to sell his books, asking his friends to buy his paintings or bring him food & clothes. He mentioned his shirt size, collar & sleeve, pants, shoes… I would have sent him something but by the time I read this essay he had become the Henry Miller, great published writer, living in Big Sur, messing around with a pretty young Japanese piano player, painting her portrait, you know how it goes... He didn’t need my help anymore.

I can’t sell my book no matter how hard I try. My agent was unsuccessful, after passionately pushing it to the top 15 mega-multi-media giants in New York. I’ve tried sending it out – unsolicited – to various smaller presses & lesser agents. They all politely refuse. Politely meaning they praise the work, say the writing is good, good story, well done… but they’re not convinced they can publish it successfully. It’s a question of marketing. They’re afraid to take a chance.

So I’m slapping a red sticker on my manuscript; it’s a thick pile, 336 pages and 139,224 words long. Take 40% off & it’s yours. A bargain! Like my Italian pants it can be shortened a bit with good editing. How can you resist?