Oh Salman.

It’s hard to know how to read this letter of yours. Is it carefully constructed to imitate the tone of a curmudgeonly and egocentric fool, which would make it a masterpiece of parody and indicate that you have a sly and self-deprecating sense of humor? Or are you — could you really be — such a petty kind of man, one who would take an attack on his signing rate to be an excuse to start a pissing contest on the letters page of a national UK paper with a bombastic and loud-mouthed writer like Malcolm Gluck? Which is it? I just can’t tell!

Here’s a link to the “controversy.”

And here’s the letter in its entirety, as sent to The Guardian newspaper:

It’s always a delight to return to London from an arduous two-month book tour of North America to find myself being accused of “illusions” – that is, lying – in your letters columns. The weirdest part of Malcolm Gluck’s unpleasant little missive (July 17) is that he begins by saying it’s impossible that I could have signed my name 1,000 times in an hour and ends up by revealing that he did it himself. Anyone who has ever attempted to sign a lot of books quickly knows, as Gluck says, that the key is to have the support of bookstore staff experienced in the construction of a smooth “assembly line”. He tells us he had the assistance of such staff when he did it, but refuses to believe that I could have.

So let me be clear: I did not initial the books, but signed my full name; I did have the support of experienced staff at Ingrams book distributors in Nashville (and at many other US bookstores), who will confirm that among the fastest present-day signers of books are President Jimmy Carter, the novelist Amy Tan, and myself. I understand that Mr Gluck may be miffed that his own accomplishment has been equalled or bettered. That does not entitle him to accuse another writer of untruthfulness, without a shred of evidence to support the accusation. And, if memory serves, I actually signed the 1,000 books in Nashville in 57 minutes as against his 1,001 in 59, so his record is toast.
Salman Rushdie
London

A commentator (OK, it was my wonderful sister, Anna) asked a very pertinent question in response to the last blog post: How do you know if your work really is a piece of shit?

Anne Enright says you must not to listen to that internal voice, but instead practice some “mood management.” You must “…wrestle [your emotions] down to something roughly the size of the page.” While I do think that this is solid advice, there are ways that you can, with some practice, learn to assess your own work.

These methods I’ll call developing your intuition, developing your powers of assessment, and building an external feedback loop. (more…)