An overdue review

Wayyyyy back in 2017, when my book was just coming out, my adviser from back in grad school hooked me up with a review in the American Book Review, which focuses on small market books. In return, I said I would review a book for someone else. I was assigned "Outside is the Ocean" by Matthew Lansburgh. I waited and waited for it to show up. The author's publicist contacted me a few times. I wrote my former adviser, asking if she could explain what had happened. She assured me that was just the pace they worked at.

I felt terrible, because I'd gotten my review, but hadn't paid the love back. It was bad literary citizenship on my part, or at least it seemed that way to me, even though I'd read the book as soon as I was assigned it and had a review off within two weeks. Turns out, the magazine just changed editors and they lost my review. The new editor was nice enough to include my review in the most recent edition, although it being two years after the author's book came out, it's probably far too late to do him any good.

The moral to me is that serious fiction outside the few stars selected for fame is a tenuous business, kept going by golden-hearted volunteers who nonetheless are overworked, doing it as a second or third or fourth job, and the whole thing is likely to be error-prone. If something goes right, count yourself lucky. If it doesn't, count yourself lucky anyway that you have a life free enough of real troubles that you get to worry about what happens with your writing.