My anti-resume

Monica Byrne made an anti-resume way back in 2013—it’s a spreadsheet that lists all her publishing failures and puts her success into context. This is a cool and punk-rock idea! It reminds me of Kat Huang’s Failure Resume that I spotted just earlier today.

Anyway, the conclusion Monica gets to is what’s the most interesting thing to me:

The overall lesson is this—and it’s not necessarily how I think the world should be, or wish the world would be. It’s purely practical: that if you’re a writer, even a very talented and hardworking writer, writing must be its own reward, or you’re going to have a rough time. Recently a friend ask me if my novel publication date now felt like the proverbial apple in the Tantalus myth and immediately I was like, “No, I get the apple every day, because I write every day.”