loveinmidair

I'm launched - like a battleship!

2010-01-04T05:31:00.000-08:00

My new webpage for the novel is now up and reasonably complete. So from this point forward all future blog entries will be on www.loveinmidair.com.

Visit me, please. It's lonely out here!

I'm keeping this blogspot open as a record of what the last year of preparing for publicaiton was like...something for future internet anthropologists to dig up with their google spades and a record of the fact that writing, selling, editing, and publishing a book is hard. Hard! I don't think I'll be one of those writers who, post publication, forgets how tough the process is and starts giving their fellow writers a bunch of namby-pamby platitudes about the joys of the creative process. I don't THINK I'll be one of those vapid, annoying people but just in case I want to make sure the record of my whining stands. For my own sake, at least.

That's it! Thanks for reading! And please join me on the new site.

Four calling birds

2009-12-28T18:21:00.000-08:00

I always liked the song "The Twelve Days of Christmas" and the idea that the holiday season used to begin on December 25 and continue on for twelve days, culminating in the celebration of the Epiphany on January 6. It seems a more sane and balanced way to celebrate than our modern way of bookending the season with Christmas carols that start on some warm day in October and end about 5 pm on December 25th. The way we do it now, people are ready for Christmas to be over before it even starts.

So....if we were celebrating in the traditional way this would be the fourth day of Christmas. Four calling birds. I don't know why that popped in my head today but it seemed strangely aligned with the task in front of me now, which is writing four chapters in a row. Four chapters at the beginning of the Ballroom book told from the point of view of my main character, Abby. Why am I struggling with this so much? Fighting it so hard? Part of my resistance, I suspect, is that I don't really believe I can sell a novel on spec. I know I'm driving my agent crazy because, as we get closer to the pub date of the first book, I'm driving myself crazy. He's given me a task to keep me sane and he knows that even if we can't sell the ballroom book based on four chapters at least it won't be wasted effort - I'll be that much farther along on the complete draft that will probably really be required.

I know all this, and I know it's smart for me to get a good strong set up under my belt, a segment of 50 or so pages that really establish Abby's voice and lay out the key questions of the book. The trouble is I don't usually write in sequence...I usually bounce all around, writing in an instinctual fashion and then, when I have a bunch of scenes, I go back and think about structure. A lot of stuff gets moved and a lot of stuff gets cut so writing out of sequence isn't an especially logical or time efficent route to a novel but it's the only one I know. The only way I seem to be able to get at the heart of my story and find the voice of my narrator.

And this might be what's wrong with me now. Alison said my character felt distant. This scares me. It means that I haven't yet tapped into the real story or made Abby's voice nuanced enough to seem alive on the page and perhaps I've been working so hard on plot and sequence, i.e., telling the story, that I haven't slowed down long enough to let myself find the story.

I don't know what to do. Soldier on and finish these four chapters, dead as they are? Four four four seems to ring in my head like the four calling birds in the song but I don't know if there's really anything magical about stringing four chapters in a row, Should I maybe go back to my old method of hopping about, writing only the scenes that are speaking to me? Of course, there are drawbacks to that method too. Namely, it takes longer to finish the novel because you spend so much time overwriting and running down blind alleys... and while you're doing all this no one gives you money based on your proposal because you can't get your shit together enough to offer up a proposal and how the hell am I suppsed to live in the meantime?

It's almost 2010. My goal for the new year is to get out of debt. A noble goal and a smart one but a hard thing for a writer to do. I'm trying to write fast and put together a proposal that will bring me an advance...then I can slow down, take a deep breath, and I'll have funds to live on while I finish the novel. But that doesn't seem to be working. So do I make a 180 turn and go into some other line of work to earn money, knowing that this choice will slow the novel down? Perhaps slow it down and make it richer....but definitely slow it down. And the idea of slowing down my already glacial writing pace even further makes me feel a little sick.

I'm in a dither. And the new year approacheth.

The two parts of writing that are fun

2009-12-22T07:07:00.000-08:00

Lately I've been thinking that there are two parts of the novel writing process that I really enjoy. The first is the absolute beginning - when it's all nebulous. It's not a novel, it's a project - it doesn't have a name or a plot or fully-formed characters. What it probably does have, at least for me, is a voice.

So I get these little snatches of ideas. A sentence or two, an image. Someone says something that triggers a scene. I begin to write these snippets down, helter-skelter, and throw them into a folder. I love this part, the very beginning, when it's all embriotic and unformed.

The other part that's fun is the ending. You basically have the book and the structure and now you're tweaking. Going in to expand a scene that has more possibility than you've truly realized, looking for places where you've repeated words, making sure your verb tenses agree, pruning out the extraneous line or word.

But between these two lies the actual writing, especially the dreaded First Draft.

Which is where I stand now with Ballroom. My agent David feels that the hopping around scenes don't give him a strong enough sense of who the main character is and that any future possible one-chance-in-a-hundred buyers, i.e., editors, will want to see that one solid viewpoint character. So I'm back to the drawing board, trying to get three or four chapters in a row at the beginning, from Abby's point of view. And that feels dangerously like writing a first draft.

Yikes. I have a goal. I'm going to NYC sometime in late Feb or early March and I'd like to have the four chapters to him by then. Selling off a partial is a long shot in this environment, especially with my first book not yet out, but I feel I have to try. Otherwise I'm going to end up behind the counter at McDonalds. Or in the loony bin.

How long do you hang in there?

2009-12-14T14:34:00.000-08:00

Last week a woman in my writing group announced that she wouldn't be writing any more. She written seven books over a number of years and spent time revamping, revising, earnestly searching for feedback from fellow writers. And it's led to zilch. She doesn't have an agent or a publisher. She has seven manuscripts that she could work on forever but she's not sure it's worth.

And a couple of days later a close friend said much the same thing. She's more than a decade into the process without any significant publication credits. She doesn't have the heart to start something new.

And then....someone I met at MacDowell sent me an email. He's been following this blog and was commenting on my last post, in which I was basically describing the freak out period I'm in now as I await publication, the "four months out" syndrome. He basically said "enjoy this level of misery for as long as you can because once your book actually come sout, it will get worse."

Writing can be a very dark path. My children are 21 and 25 and if either one of them said they wanted to be a writer I would try to talk them out of it.

And yet....

With writing there is always a "yet." Some book not yet written, the agent you haven't let queried, some subject not yet explored. Because on the night the woman in my writing group said she was done, a man in the group sat there and gave her the standard speech. How you have to do it for love. How you have to do it because you can't not do it. The pleasure and meaning are in the process, not the results.

All those things people say about writing that are corny and trite and true.

But everyone has to find the right balance inside their own head. If it's making you miserable - if the inability to find publication is obliterating the joy you find in the proess it may indeed be time to step away from the desk. At least for a while.

Thoughts?

Doubt

2009-12-09T05:37:00.000-08:00

I'm in such a funk. I did a summary and four chapter package on the ballroom book and sent it to David, my agent. My friend Alison, currently vacationing in Europe, too a look at it too. I'm very excited about the book, excited about the concept and the fact I'm writing in third person from multiple POVs for the first time in my little baby novelist career. Of course I wanted both of them to gush it was the best thing I'd ever written or maybe even the best thing anybody has ever written.

Heard from both of them on Sunday. Nice but somewhat lukewarm responses. They liked the basic premise of the book - but they both called into question my use of the multiple POV. Alison called it "distant." David said "It's not what they're buying." They made the same argument. First person's my forte, after all. Why go against your natural tendancy as a writer - especially in light of the fact the market prefers books that are told from a single character's perspective?

On one level I'm like "Why indeed?" I know I'm stronger, or at least more experienced in first person. As my ever-practical friend Dawn says "That's what editors want and you know how to do it, so why are you so upset?"

Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Right. Everyone is being very kind and logical.

So why am I so upset?

Possible reasons:

1. The first person pov can limit the types of stories you're able to tell, especially in a situation like ballroom where I am writing about the need for community and how the ballroom means something different to every person who steps inside of it. You can get a broad perspective with first person pov but it's harder. I don't want to fall into the classic traps like having the other characters talk to Abby way too much.

2. I'm tired of the limitations of first person. Dawn said "If I could write first person as well as you, that's all I'd do." But she's just saying that because she's coming off two third person novels and she's sick of the limitations of THAT pov. There's a plus and a minus to every choice you make in writing, including pov, and it isn't a matter of one being inherently better than another. It's a matter of how you do one for a couple of projects, get sick of it, and when you switch to the other it seems easier - at least for a while. Then you get sick of it and switch back to your original pov for the next project. No nothing is perfect....but if you have some variety in your writing style you can write longer without wearing yourself out.

3. I don't want to be a one-trick pony. Yeah, first person's my strength but I'm ambitious, so of course I want to move on and learn a new skill. In dance the people who jive want to waltz, the people who samba wish they could quickstep. Part of it is our natural human tendancy to downplay our natural strengths - if something comes easily to us we erroneously assume it comes easily to everyone - but an equally valid part of it is a kind of creative restlessness that artists have to have if we're ever going to grow. The jivers might say to the waltzers some variation of what Dawn said to me, i.e., "If I could waltz as well as you do, that's all I'd ever want to do" - but it wouldn't be true. If we're good at something, we automatically look to move on and master something else. It's what gives us heart attacks and also, I suppose, why our species dominates the planet.

4. This is probably the real reason: I'm just in such an anxious state that I'm going to freak out at anything anybody says to me right now. I know that in suggesting I stick with what I know David and Alison weren't implying that I'm incapable of learning anything else. That's what I heard but the 3% of my mind that's sane also knows that's not what they meant. It's just that as the date gets closer when the novel is going to debut I'm getting crazier. Everything feels like a criticism, even the most gentle and practical (and solicited) feedback.

So there you have it. I have a new task. Write the first four chapters in sequence from either Abby's first person pov or a tight, Abby-centric third person pov. And worry. And stew.

Paging Mrs. Dolenz...

2009-12-02T04:52:00.000-08:00

Suddenly, I'm in one of those periods where things are happening....Aussie cover came. Heard I got nominated for an independent booksellers award. And picked up for an online book club. Am working on summary and sample chapter scenes to send to my agent, David, in hopes of selling the third novel, Ballroom, on spec. I rarely talk to either my agent or my editor but have had contact with both this week, as well as publicist and foreign rights team.

And, so, for a flash, it all seems real again.

I don't want to be a velveteen rabbit - i.e., real only when somebody loves me.

I know that I am most a writer when I'm actually writing. I know it's a trap to feel like you're a writer only when people are talking about your writing.

In fact, this aspect of publishing is kind of upsetting. I've blogged about this before, how strange it is that for long stretches of time nothing happens and your book and your characters live only in your head. If you step off a curb and get hit by a car, they die with you. And then comes a week or so when people are talking to you about what you've written and that's wonderful in a way because it all feels more real. Like this is your career and not some sort of extended fantasy. Sometimes it seems like wanting to be a writer is just a grown up version of when I was twelve and lying on my bed in my parents's home looking up at a picture of the Monkees and thinking that someday I'd marry Mickey Dolenz. It seems adolescent, unrealistic, the kind of story you tell yourself to distract yourself from the fact real life ain't exactly happening for you yet.

Then something sort of changes. You get a flurry of emails or phone calls, some of them from the other side of the world, and you've married a Monkee, at least for that week...and this is troubling in a whole new way. I mean, have you seen a picture of Mickey Dolenz lately? I didn't totally know what I was asking for all those years lying on my bed looking up at my Monkees poster and I don't totally know what I'm asking for when I pursue publication, either.

Talked to Alison yesterday. She's heading to Europe with her girlfriend. I was babbling on and she reminded me that a while back we had made a promise to each other to stop when the good moments come and really appreciate them without "Yes but"-ting them to death. I laughed and agreed but inside me the urge to "Yes, but" was very strong. Yes, I earned out my advance, but it was a small advance. Yes, the Australia cover copy is great, but I'm not as sure about the American. Yes, I got nominated for something, but a nomination isn't a win. I can do this until the cows come home....or at least until Mickey Dolenz loses his hair.

Okay, a couple of days back I declared December to be lovingkindness month and I have vowed to do my lovingkindness mediation every day. I love that particular CD with Jack Kornfield anyway. And part of lovingkindness is being appreciative of times when things are moving, even if the movement makes you a bit dizzy. Being appreciative of getting what you want without letting the "Yes, but" syndrome take over. So that's the focus for December.

And in January something else will happen.

The Aussie Cover

2009-11-25T04:56:00.000-08:00

Woke up this morning to find two emails from my Australian editor. One contained a pdf file of the cover of their edition of Love in Mid Air, one contained the blurbs and cover copy.

Perhaps some backstory is in order. The Australian sale has always been a source of joy to me. All the foreign rights sales have juiced me, but I love the idea of going to Australia - never been there but I did a school report on it back in fourth grade and the continent has haunted my imagination ever since. So when the rights sold there it felt like a special benediction. And they're bringing it out the first day they can, i.e., the day after the US version is released and that seems significant too - like they're really excited about it.

Meanwhile, of course, the experience of bringing a first book out in the US has been a bit of a roller coaster ride. Just last weekend I was at a writing retreat and a poet innocently asked - no one can be quite as innocent as a poet - "So are you just thrilled about your novel coming out?" She was smiling and nodding as if I had answered before I had answered so I smiled and nodded too. But I'm thinking "Thrilled, yes, but not 'just thrilled.'" The truth is that I've written almost as many words about the publication of my novel as are in the novel itself. It's complicated.

So I hold on to the foreign rights sales and an uncomplicated bright spot and today I awaken to find that in the night, although of course it's morning there, my publisher has sent me a picture of the cover and the blurb text. I love what they said about it. I wish I'd had enough sense to describe it that well when I was trying to sell the damn thing. And I think I love the cover but the cover is really hot. Really sexy. Almost the exact opposite of the US cover. Red instead of blue, a woman's body instead of a floating house, big print letters instead of small cursive letters. While the US version implies seriousness, the Australian version screams sex.

So how do I feel about this?

My first reaction was "Yikes," and my second reaction was "Thank god." The book might actually sell somewhere. It might sell in Australia! And from there, of course, the mind runs mad with images of book tours to Sydney and clones of Russell Crowe asking me about the symbolism on page 117. So I'm happy and a little bit excited. And a little bit stunned. After all the months of waiting, this is starting to feel real.

"You're overreacting" and other unhelpful statements

2009-11-17T08:23:00.000-08:00

Twice in the last week I've looked at a writing buddy and uttered that completely banal and useless observation that has been so often leveled at me: "You're overreacting."

In both cases the woman in question is an utterly rational person. Less prone to mood swings than I am, someone who has shown she can persevere in the face or rejections and setbacks and the other inevitable face slaps of the writing life. But in both cases the person in question was getting very upset - upset to the verge of tears - about some very mild suggestions for rewrites of a scene. Suggestions they requested. Feedback solicited from valued friends. Minor critiques suggested in the mildest of tones.

So why would a statement like "Maybe cut the last paragraph" or "I'd like more decriptions of the setting" send them to tears?

I think they're just tired. We all get so damn tired. Tired of endless rewriting, tweaking it here and there, going back through one more time.....we start to think "Is it getting better or is it just getting different?" And after people seek publication over a span of not just years but decades of course they break down. We're like kids on an eternal car trip. No, we're not there yet.

We don't even know where there is.

And both times, shaken by the fact my friend seemed ready to throw in the towel over such a seemingly minor point I compounded the problem by blurting out "You're overreacting."

Upon reflection, I don't know if it's possible to overreact. We feel what we feel and it's real at the time. A remark that would roll off of us on Tuesday drops us to our knees on Wednesday.

Note to self: Don't ever tell another writer he or she is overreacting. Someday she might say it back to you.

God hits the delete button

2009-11-11T13:52:00.000-08:00

Big storm last night which did many strange things in an electrical sense including knocking out my desktop computer. Knocking totally out. I think I lost everything except for a handful of currently active files.

Now normally this would make me insane. I see my computer as an extension of my brain. A computer wipeout is the equivalent of a stroke. But then....on the other hand.

Did I lose anything I really need? I'm always talking about cleaning up my files.....converting to laptop.

Simplifying. Focusing.

So I got my little bitty laptop and no printer and four files.

This could be a breakthrough.

East is East, South is South, etc.

2009-11-03T07:16:00.000-08:00

Just finished reading T.C. Boyle's East is East which includes a hilarious send up of a writing colony. Boyle's fictional colony is located near Savannah but otherwise quite like MacDowell, where he has been a resident....although I suspect it's also like Yadoo or any of the big colonies.

I heard about the book while I was at MacDowell but when I went to the Peterborough library to check it out I couldn't find it in the stacks. I approached the desk with some trepidation. MacDowell colonists are free to use the public facilities of the little town of Peterborough, including the library, but it's no secret we're mildly resented. Maybe because the colony pays no taxes, maybe because New Englanders are inherently suspicious of artsy-fartsy creative types. Maybe because the local rescue squad gets tired of running out to the colony for cases of alcohol poisoning, bear baiting, or half-hearted suicide attempts.

Anyway, the library looks over her half glasses at me and stonily informs me that someone from MacDowell took the book and never brought it back. She refrained from saying "What else would you expect?" but it hung in the air.

So now, a full year later, I have ordered the book off Amazon and I laughed out loud as I read parts, mostly about the over-the-top rivalry of two female novelists at the colony. In real life I never encountered that kind of cruelty at MacDowell. Our readings after dinner - while undoubtedly nerve wracking for whomever was presenting - were fun ways to get together and bounce around ideas and rarely sparked criticism or controversy. I may have been so far out of the loop of name artists there that I failed to see rivalry if there was any... but I don't think that's the case.

So why did I find Boyle's book so funny and true? Because I've certainly seen artistic envy in action before and I give him credit for having the balls to skewer it. (I give myself credit for using both "balls" and "skewer"in the same sentence.) Part of what made the book so biting is that these colonists are thrust by accident into the middle of a tragedy with international implications and they are so wound up with themselves and their pecking order at the colony that they completely fail to recognize what's happening. Until one of them decides it's her chance to move into the lucrative world of gossip journalism, that is.

God, you've got to love the colony world. It's so weird and self-absorbed and incestuous and out of touch with reality. I hope I get back into it soon.

Northward Ho

2009-10-29T12:03:00.000-07:00

Today I sent off an application to Ledig House in upstate New York, a writing colony that seems to have a particularly international slant in that a large percentage of people attending come from outside the US. Starting the colony application process all over again has made me thoughtful...you have to answer those impossible Miss America-like questions such as "What is your book about?" or "How would you describe your creative process?" You're pulling together the recommendations and the SASEs and writing your little essays and then it begins to feel like you're the world's oldest and most hopeless high school senior applying to a "stretch school" like Harvard. Bottom line is: Everybody wants this. Why should they choose you?

But there was something different about it this time. Ledig House requested a sample of recently published work and I just took an advance reader copy of the book and plunked it in the envelope. That sure as hell was easier than torturing myself with some 25 page writing sample. And I was also thinking it was sort of a strategic thing to do - hard to say who will be reading the applications but it's another way to get my book out there, to have someone outside my small circle come in contact with it. For so long, being a writer has been about explaining what I want to be but at some point - maybe just holding the advance reader copy in my hands - it became more about what I already am.

So I sent off the book and said "I want to write a sequel to this."

There's also the matter of when to go. The book comes out March 29, 2010 and I feel like the Mayans, like my calendar suddenly ends with a set date. I honestly cannot imagine anythng beyond the publication of the book. For all I know on March 30, 2010 the sun will rise in the west. My experiences with my published friends has given me clear warning that problably nothing will change....the book will come out and my life will go on pretty much as it always has. To expect life changing events to follow publication is foolish. The cruel part is that your publisher wants you to be "available" for the first three months following the hardcover publication of a novel, presumably to deal with the flood of interview requests and reviews and demands for appearnaces on Oprah that are statistically unlikely to come. Hard to say what "available" means, but I think most writers interpret it as "at home, waiting for the phone to ring, and not working on anything else."

I know that I can't do this. I have to make plans for April of next year....and May and June and all the months beyond. So I hope that Ledig House says yes. Or MacDowell or Yaddo or Jentel or UCross or somebody.

And then we sink

2009-10-22T12:39:00.000-07:00

Is there something in the air? For the last week I have heard from a wild and random variety of my writing friends and everybody is in some sort of funk, driving themselves nuts with unanswerable quiestions. What should I be working on? How do I get myself motivated to do it? Why isn't my agent calling me back? My publisher? My publicist? My mother?

It seems during the last few months, agents and editors - never a chatty crew, even under the best of circumstances - have become more silent than ever. Is it the economy? If an agent knows that nobody's buying he's not going to feel any time pressure to sign new people up.....an editor with zero dollars left in the till isn't going to read books she knows she can't buy....and a publicist who's been unable to scare up any publicity in this time of folding magazinses and collapsing newspapers isn't eager to tell her writers that um, no, nothing's happening.

So they don't call us or write us or even call us back and write us back. And we writers - always a neurotic crew, even under the best of circumstances - are, in the absence of any real information, left to do what we do best: tell stories. We tell ourselves and our writer friends horror stories, dreaming up the worst scenarios we can. Our agent isn't really an agent, he's a sociopath who actually works at a chainsaw factory and pretends to be an agent in order to lure unsuspecting would-be novelists to his cabin deep in the snowy woods. Our editor has read the new draft and hates it and is busy trying to get our advance stopped before it leaves the accounting department. Our publicist is in rehab - where she's meeting people who have WAY better stories than ours.

Is everybody else out there in a funk? Or is it just my own little circle?

Is a feedback, or merely an opinion?

2009-10-18T10:21:00.000-07:00

Last week Dawn and I were talking about feedback - talking about it in the context of my visit to the independent booksellers trade show and the strange phenominom that once you have written a book people feel like they know you. They touch you, they talk to you in a sort of presumptious way ("You know what you should do? Here's what you should do...."), they analyze your book's title right in front of you as if you're either blind and deaf or not present at all.

It's a bit much and as I was trying to figure out how to process all this I said something about staying open to feedback and Dawn broke in and said "Well, you know, they're not giving you feedback. They're just giving you an opinion."

We began to mull over the difference between feedback and opinions and came up with these things.

1. Feedback is solicited. You pass out a chapter at your writing group or ask a friend to read through your manuscript. This is totally different from strangers who just come up and start jawing at you.

2. Feedback is specific. It speaks to certain flaws or strengths within the work - "The dialogue at the top of page 29 doesn't feel realistic" or "Maybe this chapter should end with the image of the melting ice cream." It doesn't reside in general statements like "I loved this book" or "I just didn't get it."

3. Feedback is directed toward a work in progress. You solicit feedback because the book/story/article is unfinished and the things you hear might help you make the work better. Once it's finished, published, and in the bookstores, it's too late for feedback. All anyone can give you at that point is opinion.

4. When you take all three of these points together, it's clear that indeed the sole purpose of feedback is to make a work better. The person giving feedback isn't trying to force the writer into changing their story or shifting POV or in any way writing the book that they secretly wish they could write. The person giving feedback wants to make this book more of what the writer envisioned, not change the writer's vision. Opinions, I suspect, are more about what the reader wishes was on the page.

So...you know the old rant about opinions. They're like assholes - everybody has one. And this is true, that you can't let opinions hurt you very much because they're not really about you, they're more about the person who is speaking. That's hard to remember in the heat of the moment.

Next time someone offers me their opinion, I'll smile and nod and say "Thank you for your opinion." But I'll also try to let that opinion run over me like water. Because unless their thoughts about my book are a) solicited b) specific c) timely and d) truly in service of the quality of my work, they have no relevance. There certainly are a lot of words in the world aren't there?

Inhale. Exhale. Repeat.

God, but there's a lot of people in this room

2009-10-13T12:49:00.000-07:00

Just got back from California, a trip to Napa and Sonoma to celebrate my son Jordan turning 21. We had WAY too good of a time. Gorgeous weather, stunning scenery, fantastic food...and we sampled 102 wines in three days. Let me do the math for you. That's 34 wines a day. Granted, they were tastings, not full glasses, but once you multiply 34 times anything you get a friggin lot of wine.

Anyway, very fun trip. And the chance to see my son as not just my son but as also a friend/commrade/equal.

While out there, I read Bel Canto. I know, I know, I'm late getting to it but I wanted to read it for two reasons related to Ballroom. (Which is what I'm now calling the book which was previously cleverly titled Book Three.) First of all, Bel Canto involves a hostage situation, which is playing a part in the - and I use this term loosely - plot of Ballroom. Secondly, she uses a multiple third person point of view. I counted as many as eleven point of view characters until I got so overwhelmed that - somewhat like the wines - I simply stopped counting. She happily jumped from one POV character to another within the chapter and scene without space breaks or any structural clues. Someone in my writing group had warned me this would be hard to do but it seemed to work fine. As a reader I was never confused nor frustrated.

So I'm feeling that it's possible. Third person scares me a little. I'm more used to first person. But this book requires a lot of hopping around - a large part of the theme is that different things look different to different people. And there's no way to present this "fractured truth" theme without not only multiple POVs but also rapidly cycling POVs.

Wish me luck.

Tell Them a Story

2009-10-04T09:47:00.001-07:00

I'm in therapy now for the pretty much sole purpose of trying to figure out how to navigate being an author (which feels weird) while at the same time being an author (which feels normal). And while talking to my therapist Kevin it occurred to me that when people ask you a question they don't want you to answer that question.

Of course they don't. I don't know why I've been so slow in figuring this out.

I talked to my friend Jason today. An architect who lives in New York, one of my MacDowell buddies. And he said "When they ask you something like, for example, 'How does it feel to publish your book?" what they're really asking is 'How will it feel for me when I publish my book?'" In other words all anybody really is ever asking about is themselves - and I think he's quite right. He suggested I respond to questions with a question, i.e., when someone says "How does it feel to publish?" I should immediately turn it back around and say "How do you expect it to feel when you publish?"

And once again I think he's quite right - as long as I'm talking ot that person one on one, such as in an interview or as part of my role as a teacher in an MFA program. I owe people something in that context.

But if the question comes in a group, such as a trade show or public reading, I'm not sure I can afford to engage every questioner on that level. Both Dawn and Alison have warned me not to "give too much" and I am beginning to know what they mean. If you engage too personally with every random questioner you'll not only wear yourself out, but you'll also fail to please your listener.

So, along with Keven's help, I've devised another plan. A way to go into a public author persona that both protects me and satisfies the questioner.

And that's just to tell them a story. When someone says "What is it like...." they don't really want an answer to this question. What they want is for you to tell them a story, a nice encapsulated egg-shaped answer. I don't think this will be hard. I have already come up with 20 or so "official" stories about the creative process. The stories are accurate and engaging and interesting - but they're just stories. It doesn't wear me out to tell them. It doesn't make me feel violated to tell them.

So here's the new plan. Don't answer questions. Tell stories. That's what I am - a storyteller. It's a fair thing for them to ask me to do. It's a fair thing for me to do back. I know I've written about this before - bear with me, constant readers - but the idea is evolving and I'm trying to get my mind more solidly around it. I can't be expoed and public all the time. I can't parcel myself out in bits and pieces. Alison tried to do that and it almost wore her out. What I can do is tell them a story.

Post Siba Thoughts

2009-09-27T17:04:00.000-07:00

These thoughts will be few since your girl is pretty much brain dead. My publisher sent 150 Advance Reader Copies of the book down to Greenville, SC for the Southern Independent Booksellers Association trade show and yours truly went down to try and stir up some interest. I spent two hours moving from one table to another at an industry lunch, waving a copy of my book in the air and trying to give them a five-minute summary of why they should stock the book in their stores and hand sell it to their loyal customers.

It was fun and informative. At the author lunch before I met a gaggle of other writers - always a treat - including the woman who wrote Wind Done Gone, the Gone With the Wind parody that stirred up so much controversy a few years back. Very nice woman, actually kind of low key - just further truth that even politically hot writers, those which seem to be courting trouble, are actually introverts and recluses at heart. Then into the luncheon where I went through my spiel over and over until they called time.

Of the 150 books we gave out all but 5. Hard to say if it helped. I'd like to think it did. But like so many of these things, it was largely a blur of new people with no real way to tell which of them will turn out to be helpful to my little baby career. But as a first publicity outing, I feel it was successful....and it's just a relief to have the first one over and done with. What is it Macy Gray said about cherries on Dancing With the Stars?

SIBA

2009-09-23T11:31:00.000-07:00

If you don't know what that means, you're not alone. It stands for Southern Independent Booksellers Association and I'm going to Greenville on Saturday for their big conference. Apparently I'm set to participate in a sort of speed dating situation where authors sit at tables and every two minutes a new bookstore owner sits down in front of you and you've got 120 seconds to describe your book. These are the people who aren't Borders or Barnes and Nobles...the smaller bookstores who, if they like you, might hand sell you book or recommend you to a book club or even invite you in for a signing.

So it matters and it's a little fraught.

I'm excited about it. Slightly nervous, true, but mostly excited. My publishers think I'm a raving extrovert and in comparison to most writers, this is probably true enough. But my extroversion comes at a cost...in other words, I'll be exhausted at the end of it, drained in that sort of soul-level way that only reading or talking about your work can cause.

This is sort of the equivalent of an early political primary for me....a chance to work a few of the kinks out of my pitch, a chance for me to see how well I hold up in this sort of sales environment, a chance to see how people respond to the concept of the book. Keep all fingers and toes crossed, please. I'll post Monday and let you know how it went!

Four things I can do

2009-09-16T12:59:00.000-07:00

Writing makes people nuts. Well, actually, I think both writing and publishing make people nuts. So much of it is out of your control.

A friend just called me, almost in tears. She is about to sign with an agent - supposedly a happy moment - but she isn't sure if she's going with the right person. There are some big red flags. She said "This is the only person in fifteen years of trying to get an agent who's ever wanted to represent me so the only person has to be the right person, wouldn't you say?" I'm not sure how I feel about that, but we tried to talk it through and come up with a list of questions she might ask this agent before she signed with her but the conversation was disjointed and probably not helpful. She was too nervous to process options or to weight out the pluses and minues of different deals.

So....in this topsy-turvy industry where missteps are inevitable and disappointments are numerous what can we do to stay sane and reasonably focused? It's different for each writer, I suspect, but here's what I do.

1. I focus on what's working. In my case, right now, a lot of that has to do with the foreign sales for the novel and the people I'm in contact with at the various presses. Hell, it's exciting and rewarding to be able to even say "my German editor" and even more so if the person who holds that title seems helpful and nice. The foreign rights sales have been sort of a balm for the apsects of publishing in the US which are more brutal. This isn't anyone fault, it's just a result of New York being such a big, bad world with so many books coming out that it's hard for a first time writer to feel valued and acknowledged. So, I like focusing on the foreign publishing houses which are, frankly, more like I thought the whole thing was going to be.

2. I try to get into writing colonies, conferences, groups - anything where I don't feel so alone and stranded. I would have run off the rails a long time ago if so many of my friends weren't writers.

3. I begin new projects while existing ones are in the pipeline of sales and publications. Otherwise you get to intently involved in how the publishing process is going, what you're being paid, how much rejection there is out there, all those yucky things you can't control.... Having a new project underway makes the one currently being published less important to you and that's a good thing.

4. I read. It reminds me that I love books. Reminds me why I'm doing this.

I won't lie. It's still hard. But these four things do help.

Power Versus Precision

2009-09-08T05:46:00.000-07:00

It's no secret that I love quotes about writing - and I love quotes about other things that seem to secretly apply to writing even more. Witness what Billie Jean King said about tennis (another quote from the new writing book I'm reading called "Bang the Keys"). She was talking about serving and how most novice players try too hard to get their serves in the box...how they stand there dinking one ball after another carefully over the net, nervously trying to hit the square and figuring they'll add power to their serves after they get their aim right.

She says it works the opposite - that you must serve with power from the start, even if your balls go horribly awry. (Actually I don't think BJK used the term "horribly awry" - that's my contribution.) Because you can add precision in later, as you go along, but if you don't develop power from the get-go, it's almost impossible to add it in later.

The same thing holds true for writing. First drafts - and probably second and third drafts as well - should be wild and free and a little imprecise. When my friends and I read each other's early drafts we always mark in a few "Maybe too much" or "A little over the top" or "Cut?" comments - they're a sign the writer has done her first draft job and let her mind go wild. You can always rein things in later and make scenes more sensible and neat and precise.

But it's almost impossible to do the opposite. If you start out small and careful you stay small and careful. Too protective of your beautifully polished prose to risk taking a chance - just as I suspect King's tennis students would find it hard when, after months of serving "successfully," i.e., in the box, their belated attempts to develop power mean they're suddenly knocking the ball out of bounds.

Ultimately - whether you're talking writing or tennis - you need both power and precision. But it's easier to move from power to precision than it is to move from precision to power. So serve the first draft as hard as you can. You can worry about where the boundaries are later.

Stealing from your own life

2009-09-03T06:30:00.000-07:00

I like books about writing and recently I got a new one, "Bang the Keys" by Jill Dearman. She's more in the floaty school of writing instruction, more Julia Cameron than Gotham City Writers Group. In other words, more apt to write about meditating to get in touch with the unconscious of your characters than the architecture of plot.

Both matter. It's a good book.

But I was struck by a quote she gave from the filmmaker Pedro Almodovor, who wrote and directed Bad Medicine, a movie I watched with Phillip last year. Almodovor was talking about using his own life as material for his films and he said:

"Anything that is not autobiographical is plagiarism."

I laughed aloud at that. I assume he is kidding, but probably not by much. Almost all writers borrow heavily from their own lives and the lives of people around them....but mostly, I would guess, from their own. At least in terms of feelings. You might not have fought in the Vietnam war but if your soldier-character is feeling frustration, you'd better know how it feels to be frustrated. Better be able to tap into the last time you felt that particular emotion, the thoughts that led up to and away from the feeling, the way it manifested in your body.

Another thing I've heard - not sure where but I think it may have been Julia Cameron. Something about how writing is more about getting things down than it is about thinking things up. I'd phrase it a little differently, saying that there are essentially two schools of writers: those who get things down and those who think things up. I'm obviously more in the first school but my new writing group has brought me into contact with genre writers who are more clearly "creative" in the sense most people use the word - i.e., they sit there and make things up. They make up whole worlds with different laws and money and genders and physical constrants. I'm not sure if they base the people who populate these worlds on their own emotions or not.

Maybe something worth asking at the next meeting.

I'll be drummed out of this group soon, no doubt. I have no luck with writing groups. I think my questions irritate people.

Inevitable Envy

2009-08-31T07:24:00.000-07:00

People are loathe to admit it, but envy is an inevitable (and unenviable) part of the writing life. I have been on both sides of the envy seesaw, and it's no fun either way. Envy has always seemed to me such a sticky-feeling emotion, the kind of thing where you need to shower just after you admit to yourself that you're feeling it. No wonder we call it by so many other words.

But Shakespeare felt professional envy, probably directed toward Kit Marlowe - in fact, he wrote sonnets about it. Fitzgerald and Hemingway had a famously rivalrous friendship - as did Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. Melville got tired of playing second fiddle to Hawthorne...and I just read that Virginia Woolf, after reading glowing reviews of the "The Four Quartets" by TS Eliot, went out to walk in the fields and tell herself "I am I, and must follow that furrow, not copy another."

So here's the bottom line on professional envy. If you feel it...or rather when you feel it, first of all take comfort that you're in the very best of company.

Secondly, use it as an impetus to write. You can't let your friend get that far ahead of you, can you?

Thirdly, remember that this is a street which goes both ways and that at some point, if you keep writing, you will be on the receiving end of someone else's envy. It might just be a well-turned phrase in a writing workshop, it might be the Pulitzer. Either way when you notice it you're going to feel...a little sticky. Because here's the weird thing about envy. It feels no better to be envied than it does to envy other people.

When I sold my novel my friend Dawn said "The publishing process will be full of surprises. And one of them is that your friends are not going to be particularly happy for you." It's a harsh realization....for years you and your friends are lolling around in the same muddy pasture of despair. No one can get an agent, much less published. It doesn't seem possible. It seems as far away as if you were sitting there saying "Some day one of us is going to fly."

But then it happens. Someone sells her book. And the reaction is not just envy but surprise. Wait a minute. She sold her book? Actually sold it, and she has an agent and an editor and a title and a cover and all that sort of stuff? The land shifts beneath you all a little bit and it's hard not to have a jumble of emotions, with envy certainly among them.

Now here's the conundrum. If your group is full of good writers and you're committed to helping each other, the news that the first of your group has published is both an occasion for envy and, on the other hand, a boon for everyone. There's a little more of a crack in the gate....maybe your friend will ask their agent to look at your book. Maybe they'll help you when it's time to negotiate your own contract or publicize your own book.

But even if the stars align and you're able to help each other beautifully - and indeed it has happened among me and my writing friends - you still have to go through that gate one at a time. Some people have to hang back and watch their friends precede them into the land of the published and that hurts. So I guess the fourth point about envy is...

Accept it as a rite of passage. And in some ways, evidence of how far you've come. Melville envied Hawthorne because he knew him. Ditto for Shakespeare and Marlowe, Sexton and Plath, Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Woolf and Eliot. We envy people who are nearby, who seem just a step or two ahead of us in the process. The language of envy begins with "It could have been me..."

We don't feel that about people who are far above us. You don't lie on your couch and re-read Pride and Prejudice of the 700th time and envy Austin. She's Austin, for God's sake, it would be like feeling envy for an angel. So when your friends begin to improve in their writing....to publish....to win awards or be admitted into colonies, your envy is a sign that you're not that far behind them. Painful as it is, you've moved a step closer to publication.

Because if it could have been you, someday it will be.

The Myth of Daily Progress

2009-08-24T05:11:00.000-07:00

When I was in college the local paper was the Charlottesville Daily Progress - a hopelessly chipper name for a newspaper but one which I think reflects the way we all wish life worked. In the thirtysomething years since then, I haven't encountered a lot of daily progress in my life. I plod. I trudge. I put in the hours. And I endure long periods in which it seems as if nothing is happening - there's no progress at all, much less something measurable and daily.

This is true in all areas of my life.

But the flip side is that after weeks or months of this plodding, just at the point where I am most frustrated and most certain that none of this work is leading to any real payoff, I hit a period of rapid and almost effortless progress. A little blip of time - it never seems to last longer than a week, but is more often just a single day - in which it seems I am reaping the results of all the work I plowed in earlier.

Last Wednesday was one of those days. I was at the studio, dancing with Max and all of a sudden ("all of a sudden" as in "we've been working on these steps for weeks") everything clicked and I began dancing better. It's like in one day, in one lesson, I got drastically better. I know I wasn't just dreaming it - several other people commented on it too. And the next morning after a night of furious dreaming about dancing, in which I went through the tango routine over and over in my dreamstate, I woke up full of ideas for revision for the novel.

What is this? Why do we so rarely get real daily progress and instead get this bumpy learning curve?

I suspect it has something to do with the fact anything we're learning requires a kind of blind loyalty to the process. Periods of time in which it feels like you're wandering the dark and not getting any better. Perhaps this dark night of the soul is a necessary part of the creative process - that if creative work was more like bricklaying (i.e., full of evidence of daily progress) we would be more convinced that it is a result of our will and work and cleverness and not respectful enough of the fact that there is something more emotional and mystical about the process. We'd forget that creativity is the result of more than just putting in the hours.

You still have to put in the hours. I don't mean to suggest otherwise. You have to put in the daily hours but you have to put them in without any expectation of daily progress. It's a leap of faith. The time at the computer when it seems like nothing is happening is the primary sacrament of this strange religion we've all chosen...and the result is the periodic Wednesday when it all clicks, when one step seems to follow the other swiftly and effortlessly, when the ideas are coming faster than you can write them and when it seems, for just a matter of hours, laughably easy.

Knowing what to leave out

2009-08-18T14:21:00.000-07:00

There's a scene in my second novel, The Gods of Arizona, in which the protagonist reflects back on the first time she trysted with the man who ultimately broke her heart. She recalls an expensive bottle of champagne he bought and how - unlike the cheap roses of her youth - it had no color. She says "I was already beginning to understand that what we were paying for is the absense of something." I've always liked that line, since the first moment I wrote it. What often elevates a moment is the absense of something - no noise, no crowds, no hassle, no smell.

I'm thinking of this because recently I was asked two questions about writing. One was "What's the difference between a mainstream novel and a literary novel?" The other one was "How do you develop a free-flowing conversational writing style?"

The first question came out of my new writing group, where everyone but me is doing genre and where I think they often look at me a little warily since my writing doesn't conform to the precepts of more plot-driven fiction. The second question came from a friend whose style has been critiqued as overly-formal. She says she envies my style, which is very much born out of the Southern tradition of oral storytelling.

Two different questions but it occurred to me that they have the same answer. To some degree, fiction is made literary by what the author leaves out. Suppose you have a scene where a secretary marches into the office of her boss and demands a raise. The boss, when he catches wind of her mission, gets up from behind his big desk and closes the door. The mainstream author will tell the reader why he the closes the door - he doesn't want the rest of the workers to overhear their conversation, he knows he's getting ready to get blackmailed, the secretary is his long-lost illegitimate daughter, whatever.....The mainstream writer will saying something along the lines of "Mr. Banks got up to close the door, conscious that the busybody Miss Crebs was lurking to eavesdrop." The literary writer will just say. "He closed the door," thus forcing the reader to work a little harder. Why did he close the door? The author is telling you quite clearly what is happening but she's stopping short of telling you why it is happening. There's a sliver of ambiguity in the scene that makes it inherently less literary.

And as for a smooth writing style....I think that's all about knowing what to leave out. Not constantly stopping the narrative to explain everything. Like being literary, the oral stream-of-consciousness style depends on the reader paying attention and making some connections without the narrative stopping to point them out. The person who asked me this question has a laborious style primarily because she comes out of the academic system. She can't say anything without explaining how she knows it - without practically offering footnotes. These constant small asides to dump in information - with little regard for how necessary that information is and even less regard for whether or not this tutorial style is insulting to the reader - slows her narrative pace to a crawl.

The bottom line? I think no matter how well a scene is written it's worth taking a minute in editing to think about what could be cut. Striking out what's implied, what's non-essential, what's simply in there to show off how much the author knows....and then further realizing that a little strategic ambiguity can be the author's friend. As I said before in the entry "The literary tango" it's a risk to invite the reader into the creative process and trust them to be able to make connections and pick up on implications without constantly beating them over the head with explanation. But it's a risk that often pays off.

The last happy day you'll ever have

2009-08-12T05:46:00.000-07:00

Last night there was big news at my writing group. The leader of the group, who has been writing both fantasy and romance for years, signed with an agent from the large and well-regarded Writers House. It's a huge event, a watershed. I brought her flowers. She was excited and still a little in shock. The contract had just gone into the mail that day.

Later I was telling a (very seasoned) writing friend about the event. I said I'd brought Nancy flowers and my friend replied "Well you should have because...."

And then we said in unison "Because this is the last happy day she'll ever have."

We're actually not as cynical or as ungrateful as that statement would imply. But there is something poignant about that moment in which a dream starts to become reality. Part of it is the very obvious truth that reality never matches the fantasy....Whenever you anticipate an event such as going off to college, your first trip to Europe, getting married, having a baby you can't help but build up this whole dream around the event. Then when it happens it's good....it's just not good in the way you thought it would be good. You're home from the hospital but so sore you can't stand, sit, lie, or walk. Your dorm room is approximately 22 square feet. You new husband gets drunk and throws up the first night of your honeymoon. The cabdriver who picks you up at the Madrid airport looks nothing at all like Antonio Bandares. The fantasy has to make way for the more compromised and complex reality and that happens in publishing too. Getting an agent and a publisher aren't the end of the game, they're the beginning - the first flick of a domino that sets off a series of choices and you'll never know (never!) when you've made the right one.

And then there's the more interior issue as well....getting your dream in a way means losing your dream. You simply don't have a dream anymore. Something has to rush in and fill that space where are the anticipation and yearning lived for years but - at least in my case and probably in lots of people's cases - the new thing doesn't arrive all at once. So, in the meantime, getting what you want feels oddly hollow.

I didn't say all this to the woman in my writing group. I handed her the flowers and said "Congratulations."

Which, in the land of writers, translates to "good luck."

I get by with a little help...

2009-08-11T10:46:00.001-07:00

Just had a long conversation with my friend Dawn. I sent her a copy of the much-maligned second book, The Gods of Arizona. She read it and called me while in the car with her two young sons. Even under these conditions - rambunctious boys in the back seat periodically announcing that they needed to pee, Boston to NYC traffic, the manuscript not in front of her - she provided a cogent and comprehensive analysis of what I'll need to do to take the book to the next level.

One important thing is that she liked the book. My confidence is shaken and I need to hear that right now. But just as important, she saw where it needed to be strengthened and had some ideas on how I might accomplish that.

I feel renewed. Like a have a definite and doable plan for revision. Now I just have to figure out how I can get away for a few weeks and really devote myself to the task. Too late for fall writing colonies. An escape to my friend Laura's house perhaps? She has always made it available to me and it's quiet and beautiful there.

What would I do without my writing buddies? Would I even be able to write?

Please forward all future mail to Sydney....

2009-08-07T06:20:00.000-07:00

So much of what you learn in publishing (and I use the word "learn" loosely since this is a maddeningly slippery world with rules that seem to come and go at random) you learn the hard way... i.e., by experience.

But in the middle of the hard knocks I've had over the last couple of weeks has been a huge ray of sunlight. I got news that the Australian/NewZealand rights sold and that they were going to publish quickly - one day after the book comes out in the US, in fact. So I wrote them offering my author photo, bio, the info I've created for my American website, etc. They were so grateful and so sweet...they said "Our American authors never contact us with anything. If we want these sorts of things for publicity we really have to go looking for them."

So I thought "Hmmm....maybe my other foreign publishers would like this stuff. I could at least offer." I got their email addresses from the foreign rights department of my American publisher and contacted them. Same story. Delighted to hear from me. Grateful for anything I could send.

This has resulted in three things - tighter relationships with my foreign publishers, which I think is bound to help me somehow in the future, a little ego boost in the middle of a lot of ego knocks, and a further understanding that a writer who takes it upon herself to try and help market her book can indeed make an impact.

Feeling helpless sucks. And so much of this process makes you feel helpless. Creating little inroads - even if they lead to Rotterdam and Pisa and Perth - has made me feel (literally) worlds better.

Trying again

2009-08-02T16:48:00.000-07:00

Last week was a setback. My editor didn't like the second book. So I went to the beach to hide out for the week in my mom's condo....to sit on the sand and read through the manuscript and think about what to do next.

And it worked. It was kind of funny in a way because the beach was so windy and here I come over the dunes with my SPF 912 sunscreen and my folding chair and Diet Coke and huge manuscript held together with a rubber band. The book was literally in danger of blowing away. And I just started reading. I came to some conclusions about how to handle the decisions facing me - what book to write next, who it show it to, etc. But the biggest thing is that in reading through the manuscript I was reminded how much I liked it. I was proud to have written it. Just realizing that was a kind of benediction.

So I'm back in Charlotte with some ideas for revision - revisions I want to make, recommended by no one else - and the sense that I want to go back into the book. For now I feel calm and focused. I say "for now" not to curse myself but to acknowledge that staying calm and focused is no easy feat in this line of work. But for now I feel good.

Out back. down under, and other places

2009-07-26T10:05:00.001-07:00

This has been a week of extreme ups and downs. My editor doesn't like the second book. I'm headed to the beach this afternoon to decamp at my mom's condo for a few days during which I can re-read the whole manuscript (funny how quickly you can forget what you've written) and think about what to do next. Rewrite or move on to book three? Hard to say. Not only do I not know what the future will bring but I really don't even understand what's going on in the present. All this is a down but a down that I somehow feel could work to my long term best interests if I can just figure out a way to remain calm.

And in the middle of this, Australian rights to the book have sold and they're publishing it very quickly - one day after it comes out in the US, in fact. So I have been in contact with my Aussie publisher an adorable man who sounds like an even more whisky-voiced Crocodile Dundee. He is funny and nice and interested in my opnions on publicity and marketing....in short, the whole experience with the Sydney people has been a great balm for my battered ego.

My joke is that I tell my friends I'll have to become an ex-pat - move to Sydney or Rotterdam or Milan or somewhere else where the book is coming out because artists are never valued in their country of birth. No man is a prophet to his own people and all that sort of rot. And I laugh because it is a joke of course but at the same time the foreign rights sales have been a large part of what has kept me somewhat optomisitc throughout this process. There are so many setbacks or moments without movement at all....you have to find your comfort where you can. And right now my comfort is halfway around the world.

Ugh

2009-07-22T04:45:00.001-07:00

I've just had a real setback. The editor of my first book has had the second for a couple of months and a couple of days ago I got an email from her. The bottom line is, she hates it. Doesn't relate to the character, think the two key scenes of the book are overdone, doesn't understand why some scenes are in there at all. Sorting through all this is a bit of a shock. Since the second book is based on the same characters as the first it never occurred to me she'd just flat out dislike it. Now it's time to talk to her and I don't know what to say. The things she's saying don't seem like fodder for a rewrite, they seem like a request for an utterly different book.

This is the distressing nature of this business. Everyone says "two steps forward, one step back" but it's actually not even that easy to progress. At times if feels like "two steps forward, two steps back" is more the rhythm of the dance.

How I Became a Famous Novelist

2009-07-19T15:47:00.001-07:00

Just bought a hilarious book, How I Became a Famous Novelist by Steve Hely. Really smart ass, sarcastic, and frighteningly accurate view of the whole process - why we write, how you get published, what happens afterwards. To say this book casts a jaundiced eye doesn't do it justice. Even the cover is yellow....

Back from Arizona

2009-07-15T05:53:00.000-07:00

I just got in from a trip to Arizona. Lots of hiking, spa-ing, etc, but Tucson is also the scene of my second novel. Walking around the desert got me thinking of all the ways that place influences a book. Not just in terms of describing the plants and animals and landscape, although even that is important. My recent Kripalu workshop with Natalie Goldberg made me re-appreciate the evocative power of place-specific nouns such as "roadrunner" versus "pelican" or "barrel cactus" versus "aspen."

But I was thinking more of how metaphor arises out of place. I've been trying to think of a way of saying the Kelly is frozen and stuck and numb in the beginning of the novel and as I walked I kept - of course - seeing these rocks. For some reason it jumped out at me that a lot of the stones in Arizona are approximately the size and shape of the human heart and the phrase came to mind "the stone-shaped heart" and I decided that I liked it.

It's small. It's a line, or not even a line. But it's also the sort of thing that pleases me as a writer. There's a little click that happens in your head when you find a word or phrase that seems right, a sense of completion, like a piece coming into a jigsaw and giving you a stronger sense of the overall picture.

Are we more likely to find these "really right" words or phrases if we immerse ourselves in place? I suspect it helps. Especially if you're the sort of writer, as I am, who is better at getting things down than at thinking things up.

Why is plotting so darn hard?

2009-07-06T07:04:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned in the last blog, I have started compiling notes for the book on ballroom dancing. And it has brought me right up against my worst dread.....(drum roll)......plotting.

Just the word sends a shudder down your spine, doesn't it?

I know it does mine.

Why is this so tricky? And why have I taken on not just another novel but one that has way more characters than I'm used too and thus way more character arcs.....and why have I chosen to toss the word "commercial" around in a cavalier manner, knowing full well that it implies "tightly plotted"?

There is a part of me that relishes the challenge of trying to simultanously advance multiple story lines and bring them all to fruition at the same point....there is another part of me that is terrified of the challenge.

When I get back from Arizona next week I'm going to start research in the form of interviewing. Maybe that will get me going on story and while I realize that story isn't the same thing as plot, they are closely related and maybe that will unfreeze me a bit. Wish me luck.

Plowing

2009-07-02T06:28:00.000-07:00

When I left New York ten days ago my editor told me she would read "The Gods of Arizona" pronto and let me know. My agent told me he was off to France for a week but that when he returned he would follow up with her pronto and let me know.

I still don't know. That's to be expected. Nothing happens fast in this business. There is no pronto in publishing and writers can become paralyzed with the waiting. Paralysis is my greatest fear. So I have spent the past week thinking a lot about the third book, the one about ballroom dancing, the one I'm tentatively calling "The Nature of the Dance." I am trying to produce a sample chapter and a 500-word pitch of the idea.

This is the exciting part of the process. The beginning, when the horizon is flat and broad and there is the sense that the story could go anywhere and that your heroine could become anything.

This is also the part of the process where you go into a bit of a fog. First drafts are physically exhausting to write. They really force you to go deep into the subconscious mind. My grandmother used to use the phrase "plowing the field" to describe complete exhaustion as in "I feel like I've been plowing the field all day." She was born in the rural south in 1905 and knew what plowing really felt like. I've never had my hand on a piece of farm equipment but first draft writing feels like a kind of plowing - taking this unbroken landscape and beginning to dig ruts in it, to create perameters and rows, to decide what goes where....to begin to enforce a type of order onto nature. You have to throw your back into it. You strike a lot of rocks.

So I walk around in a fog, obsessed with the story. The kind of headspace where you walk into the kitchen and wonder why you're there, where you pull off the road into a parking lot and begin to scribble notes onto a receipt you dig out of your purse. Oddly happy and oddly distracted.

When I first started writing, I never thought about publishing....or, if it did flit across my mind it was only in the context of "I need to sell enough to allow me to keep writing." That's pure and proper - publishing should always be in service of writing. But at some point things shift. The publishing part of it grows bigger in your mind and if you're not careful the tail begins to wag the dog (another one of my grandmother's pet phrases) and you find yourself spending a lot of time wondering what will make a book sell. Instead of "I need to publish so I can afford to keep writing" you begin to think "I need to write what I think they'll publish." In some ways that doesn't sound like much of a shift because both are important - you won't have any sort of career in the long run unless you give serious thought to both the creative and the financial side of your decisions. But even taking into account that both matter, the writing still has to come first.

When I told my editor I was thinking of a book about a ballroom dance studio her eyes lit up and I thought "I can sell that book." All I had was a concept. But in the ten days since that my mind has been furiously churning....who is this woman who has begun dancing? What does she want....and will I give it to her? I guess I'll give it to her slant, as in Emily Dickenson's line "tell the truth but tell it slant." That seems the way people always get what they want - they might get what they originally wanted but then find they don't want it anymore, what they think they want changes over time, they come to an understanding of themselves that renders the original desire moot. There are a thousand variations of this story and the parallels between Abby's pursuit of dance trophies and my pursuit of publication are not lost on me.

I may have started this book based on my editor's reaction, and the fact I thought I could sell it but the deeper question is: Can I fall in love with it to the degree that I would want to write this book even if I knew I could never sell it? In the meantime I just wander around dreaming the story, stopping sometimes dead in my tracks when a phrase or idea strike me as being real.

This is the exciting part of the process. But god do I need a nap.

Wild Mind Weekend

2009-06-28T13:10:00.001-07:00

Last weekend I was in Kripalu doing a memoir workshop with Natalie Goldberg. I always approach workshops with "name" teachers a little warily but this was a good one. Not a lot of ego on either side of the podium. We wrote and wrote. Prompt after prompt.
Natalie kept saying "I want to make sure everyone gets their money's worth." So Friday we wrote until 9 pm and we were going to reconvene Saturday at 8:30 am and she gave us three prompts for homework. So we show up Saturday and we write until 11:30. Reconvene at 1:30 and guess what? Two prompts to do over lunch. By the end of the Saturday afternoon I was brain dead. I had definitely gotten my money's worth but the workshop, following directly on the heels (I first wrote "directly on the hells" - interesing slip, Dr. Freud!) of the time in New York was just too much. I didn't do my Saturday night homework (and felt strangely guilty about it...where are you, Sigmund, when we need you?) and took off Sunday without attending the final session. I wanted some time to explore the grounds, sit in the hot tub, hang out in the bookshop, just chill.
Yeah, I was burned out when I showed up, thanks to NYC, but more to the point I really wonder how much first draft writing I can do in a single weekend without it making me spacey, queasy, and borderline sick. I can revise and revamp and research for hours. All those words that start with "re" - they just don't take that much out of you.
But that word that starts with W, as in "write"....it'll just about kill you.
Like I said, good workshop. I liked my roomies, had a nice walk to the gorgeous Kripalu lake and during the writing sessions I generated a lot of material for what I'm calling the God-help-me-third-book (catchy title, don't you think?) So the time was well spent. But it proved to me once again that when it comes to first drafts I need to pace my energy. I drove home from Massachusetts in a complete mental fog.

Jiggity Jog

2009-06-24T03:28:00.000-07:00

Home again from my never ending trip up north. I'm tired, but it was all so worthwhile. Here's a synopsis of what I learned:

I have to go to New York more often. I don't know why I treat it as some big deal. But it was almost immediately apparent upon my arrival that there's no substitute for actually meeting with editors and agents face to face - for being a real person to them and not just a voice on the phone or an email address. The standard thing everyone says about editors....ie, that they're distracted and overworked....is actually quite true. When you're there sitting across a dining table from them you move, even if just for that hour, to the top of the pile and have their true focus and attention. I got more feedback in four days than I've gotten in a year at home.

The first day I went to Grand Central, ostensibly to meet with the publicity director about my first book, Love in Mid Air, the one that's coming out in March. And meeting the publicity person is a big deal, but I also had the secret tiny hope that my editor, who received the second book, The Gods of Arizona two weeks ago, would like it enough to make me an offer. An offer on Gods would solve a bucketload of problems, some of the financial and some of them emotional. A lot of novelists are one-hit wonders who spend years writing the first book (God knows I did) and then either never produce another or wait so long to produce another that everyone forgets about them, including their own publishing house. So if she committed to a second book I'd feel like I was really developing a career with my publisher, that my first book wasn't just a matter of "let's throw this against the wall and see if it sticks."

So I get off the elevator and almost the first thing she says is that she's sorry, but she hasn't finished the second book. In fact she had just started it and was only about 70 pages in. We soldier on, talking about publicity for the first book and what they will do (spend time) and won't do (spend money) to promote it. As we're all heading out to lunch, I'm swapping my heels for flats for the walk and make some comment about protecting my feet and we end up talking about my passion for ballroom dancing. I say, honest-to-God casually, that I want to eventually write a book about a ballroom dance studio and my editor just lights up. She loves the idea.

So now I'm thinking that maybe there's a third book in the works and that maybe even she'll buy the second book, for which I have a draft, and the third book, for which I have a one-line concept. It's unlikely on one level....everyone is saying that the market sucks, that it's an impossible time to come out with any sort of book at all, and that publishers have stopped giving big advances or multi-book deals. But on another level I saw that she was excited about the ballroom dancing idea and her interest in book three might nudge her to make a decision on book two. When I talked to my agent the next day, he thought so too.

After that I couldn't get this mythical third book off my mind. Started taking notes for it on the train back to Massachusetts, free-wrote on it during the writing retreat with Natalie Goldberg (more on that later), and was scribbling more notes while driving south on I-95 on Monday. And it seems crazy in a way to always be moving ahead developing new ideas before previous ideas are sold or even consolidated in your mind, but that seems to be how things have to work. Not every idea pans out....who are we kidding? Most ideas don't pan out. So you have to have a lot of them in order to survive this nervous marketplace. And then psychologically I need to feel like all my eggs aren't in one basket.

So....I'm tired, but it was a productive trip on all sorts of levels. I'll report more later.

If I can make it there.....

2009-06-09T12:51:00.001-07:00

A little excitement this morning. The UPS driver dropped off a nice big box of my advance reader copies for "Love in Mid Air." It's a kick to hold it my hand, looking like a real book and all.

Leaving Thursday for the major northward trek. Going to see Laura in Virginia, then Dawn in Mass, then NYC for four days to visit with editors and my agent and friends there, then to the Natalie Goldberg memoir workshop at Kripalu. All in all I am gone about two weeks and it's like zones of experience I'll be driving in and out of, each requiring some pretty significant shifts of focus (as well as some pretty significant shifts of wardrobe...you should see my suitcase).

This is also when I'll find out:
What publicity is being planned for the first novel
If my editor for that novel is interested in acquiring the sequel

Scary stuff. I'll report in the minute I get back.

The Twelve Smartest Things Ever Said About Writing

2009-05-31T19:25:00.000-07:00

The Twelve Smartest Things Ever Said About Writing

The truth will set you free. But first it will piss you off.
_____Gloria Steinem

I am going to write because I cannot help it.
______Charlotte Bronte

Publishing isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. But writing is.
_____Anne Lamott

Pleasure is not always at the time.
______James Salter

The only advice I have to give a young novelist is to fuck a really good agent.
_______John Cheever.

Nothing is as important as a likeable narrator. Nothing holds a story together better.
_____Ethan Canin

The protagonist cannot be a perfect person. If he were, he could not improve and he must come out at the end of the play a more admirable human being than he went in.
____Maxwell Anderson

You must be aware that the reader is at least as bright as you are.
_____William Maxwell

The story is always about the person who is telling it.
_____Jack Heffron

The subconscious mind seeks truth. It wants truth so badly that it will cease to speak to anyone who wants something else more than he wants truth.
___Anne Sexton

The work will show you how to do it.
____T-shirt

Hard days, lots of work, no money, too much silence. Nobody’s fault. You chose it.

____Bill Barich

The Chapter Cometh

2009-05-25T08:59:00.000-07:00

Okay, now this is freaky but true. I was down at the beach over the weekend and while I sat under my beach umbrella looking out at the gorgeous ocean I was also performing three writerly tasks:

1. Proofreading the galleys for Love in Mid Air, which were mostly fine.

2. Rereading the second draft of the second book, which I plan to send to my agent and my editor sometime this week. A little traumatic because while there are certain parts of the book I really like there are some definite chunks missing, especially this one part about 2/3 of the way through where I know I've always needed a scene. Not just a scene. A strong scene showing a strong internal shift.

3. Reading this absolutely infuritating book that I found in the back bedroom of my mom's condo. It's about writing so I can only assume that I bought it at one point during the 34 years she has owned this condo and left it there but I don't recall ever reading this book. Of course, come to think of it, I might not recall reading this book since this is the kind of book that gives you a stroke. It's all about how it's easy to get an agent and a publisher and just so long as you take care of your work and create the best manuscript you can that it will certain find itself a home. So Pollyanna-ish, so unreal and unhelpful, that I can't believe a published writer would say this to hopefuls. A pox upon her!

Anyway, I get home yesterday afternoon with a buttload of work to do because this is a very full week and I'm still missing this scene. So as I'm drifting off to sleep last night I summon the ghost of my dead father and any other random general benevolent spirits from the other side and say "Send me the scene."

And I woke up with it. Pretty much the whole bloody thing. The only thing I didn't have was a good last line, but hell, the rest of it was exactly what I needed and it might be the strongest scene in the book. I scrambled out of bed and came straight to the computer at 6 this morning and began furiously typing notes...just a brain dump and then I stood up and went into the kitchen for a cup of coffee and then, for some reason, I said "Amen."

So I rushed back to the computer and wrote "For some reason I said 'Amen'" Which is the perfect last line for the scene.

I've got to start praying more often. And I am NOT kidding.

Oy

2009-05-19T05:02:00.000-07:00

This has been a rough week. Not only did I get this bizarre attack (dutifully described in the "ouch" entry) on a scene from the second novel, but I have also been getting a lot of feedback on the first novel as well. The finished one. The whole thing is making me feel horribly exposed.

It started like this. My publisher sent me four sets of galleys to have when I visit workshops and conferences this summer, in case I meet someone artsy who might want to blurb the book. (Well...no one wants to blurb the book. Maybe I should say someone I can persuade to blurb it.) Since it was two weeks before the Queens session I decided this was a good chance to give some friends and family members a preview. They'll have to read it at some point and I suspected it would be upsetting for some of them. I figured this way we'd have ten months for them to read it, digest it, and get used to it before the book actually came out in print. So I start sending these four sets of galley copies around.

Some people were fine. A couple of friends/family members were very supportive and complimentary. A couple were lukewarm. A few struggled, clearly bogging down in attempts to figure out who the people in the book were based on, what was true and what was fiction, etc. A couple of people were hostile in a passive-aggressive way, either opting not to read it or claiming they couldn't finish it, based on the fact it was "chick lit." I found this last response the most insulting. ...I think when men use the term "chick lit" they almost always mean it in the most dismissive way possible. Some people offered suggestions for revisions as if they didn't realize that the book has been sold and this is the version that's actually coming out in print. In short it was pretty much what writing has taught me to expect, i.e., you can't predict how people are going to react to material. Some people who you consider to be experienced readers respond in a very simplistic way, people who you think might get upset are fine, people who you never thought about reacting in a thousand years get completely ripped out of the saddle.

But the aggregate of so much feedback over the course of ten days has laid me low and made me remember why I have a policy of not showing work in process to anyone who isn't a writer. Last night I went over and watching the Dancing With the Stars finale with my writing buddy Ed and his wife, my dancing buddy Schelley. He said that she is his first reader and Dawn says Steve is her first reader, but I can't imagine using a spouse as a first reader. I'm glad it works for them but I find this mystifying and wonder if I'm doing something wrong....if I show work to non-writers it seems that have trouble seeing it as a) a story and not either a confession or some secret message to them and b) my story and not theirs. I dread the moment people who know me read my work, dread the discussions which inevitably follow....so why do I have so much trouble doing what other writers seem to do easily?

Maybe it's just a matter of the material I work with, which tends to be about suburban life in Charlotte and thus easy for people to read me or themselves into. Maybe it's the fact I seem to know a lot of blocked creatives and they can't resist hijacking any story in progress and trying to turn it into the story they'd like to write. Maybe I present things in a defensive way, unconsciously looking for trouble and ergo I find it.

I honestly don't know. I just know this has been a tough week. Dawn and I have been talking a lot and it's got me thinking that feedback comes in three forms. There are the people you don't know at all - the anonymous readers who buy or don't buy the book, the critics, the reviewers, the people who rate your book on Amazon. There are the people you know slightly - the people in the community who take offense for reasons you never could have seen coming, the friends of friends who want to be writers and who thrust their manuscripts into your hands, the people you read for at workshops or conferences. And then there is that inner circle of friends and family, the twenty or so people whose reaction could have a huge impact on your life. That's the circle where you think you'd find your most support but it's where I seem to find a strange mixture of support and trouble.

At least it's almost past me. Three people have the galleys in hand right now. After I get it back from them, I'm not going to hand it out any more. I guess I'm glad I did it, and I'm definitely glad it's over.

Ouch

2009-05-12T12:34:00.001-07:00

I am a little stunned right now. I sent a working scene to a friend, a scene from the second book...Granted, it's a violent scene and violent in a sexual way and this a double risk....but it's pivotal to the story I've imagined and I've just talked to him and he hates it. He hates it in a way that I couldn't even respond to. I just caught this torrent of words and now...I don't know what to think. This is the midpoint scene. Other scenes either lead up to it or devolve out of it. The thing is, I like the scene....or at least I think I do. I'm rattled right now. I haven't had anyone jump me like that in years. So now I have this scene that's pivotal in a book I'm going to show David and show Karen in a matter of weeks and someone whose judgement I trust has just eviserated it.

The scene is risky but I think I like it. Until about an hour ago I was sure I liked it and if you ask me an hour from now I might it again. But right now I am rattled to the core and wondering if he has really hit on something that's to be extremely upsetting to lots of people (he kept using the word "repugnant") in a way that makes the whole book unreadable or throws it into the category of pulp fiction....or is he just having a personal reaction to what is, on some levels, a rape scene?

What do you do with feedback like this? Or is it even feedback? I'm shaken.

I'm gonna call it "serendipity"

2009-05-07T15:15:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I heard that the workshop I was suppose to teach at Tinker Mountain was cancelled due to low enrollment. It wasn't a total surprise - Fred, my friend and the director - had been making noises about how hard it was to get students this year for some time and in fact the most recent issue of Poets and Writers talked about conferences and workshops being cancelled across the country. And then the same day I hear from UCROSS - the colony in Wyoming and the last of the four I applied to this year - that I didn't get in.

Not that any of this is particularly great news but it didn't throw me. In some ways it's easier to plan the summer now, knowing more about what is and isn't going to happen. And it occurred to me that I had scooped out this nice full week for Tinker Mountain and this might be the perfect slot of time to visit New York. I've needed to go for months - touch base with my agent David and my editor Karen about the novel and talk to Laura, my editor at Fodor's for the Disney book, as well as see my buddies Alison and Jason and Jan.

And the funny thing is I started calling and emailing everybody and it all fell together. Everyone's in town. Everyone can meet me. So I have a great trip to NYC planned, and also now a built in time clock, a date by which I need to have finished the present version and have it mailed to David and Karen. It's a lot to do in the next few weeks, but the bottom line is, I feel great.

Change to Questions from Mike

2009-05-03T14:38:00.000-07:00

Oops. The first question to the following post somehow got cut out. This is an interview with my friend and fellow writer, Mike.

His first question was:

Mike: "If you had an author superpower, what would it be?"

Questions from Mike

2009-05-03T14:12:00.000-07:00

Kim: Cool question, but I actually already have one....invisibility. When I was a kid I wanted to be invisible. It was the Cold War era and I was always pretending I was a spy. Constantly hiding behind the couch to eavesdrop on the adults, that sort of thing. It turned out to be excellent training for growing up to be a writer and I still love to sit somewhere in public and pretend to be reading while actually I'm spying on people and/or recording their conversations. It gives me the chance to be, for at least a few minutes, invisible.
If I could choose a writing superpower I didn't already have, I'd become Sequencing Girl, able to know exactly where each scene belongs in a novel. Because now I spend so much time in cut and paste frenzies - moving stuff all over the place, trying to get every line, scene, and flashback into the right sequence.

Mike: Do you have any superstitious rituals? I met with this editor lady who says she always writes better in her lucky pajamas....

Kim: I'd love to have a pair of lucky pajamas. I don't have any particular rituals, although I do write better in the mornings so I structure my day to take advantage of that fact. And if I get stuck, I switch venues and write in public. Most of my first draft writing is done in coffeehouses and cafes or on planes. Planes, come to think of it, focus me especially well. Maybe because part of me feels like I'm getting ready to die.

Mike: Who do you model your writing after?

Kim: No one. When I was in school I did like Melville, Fitzgerald, and Joseph Conrad especially well, which may be where I got my penchant for first person POV. But I would say that my style is my own.
Last week I was talking to a writing buddy who said an editor once gave her a spectacular line edit, which is interesting because I can't stand to be line-edited. I think it breaks voice. I'd much rather an editor tell me to change the plot or a character...I'm like "Sure, I'll kill off Litttle Susie, just don't ask me to cut the word 'very' from that last sentence."

Mike: Is there a book out there that Love in Mid Air would remind people of?

Kim: I was very impressed with Tom Perrotta's Little Children and I think my book is thematically similar. My story is nowhere near as dark as his.

Mike: What do you enjoy doing when you're not writing?

Kim: As followers of my blog know, I dance. American Smooth - the foxtrot, tango, and waltz. I'm obsessed with it. It scratches the same creative itch that writing does, but it also has a performance aspect to it, which I love.

Mike: What would you be doing if you weren't writing these books?

Kim: Talking about writing these books. I always knew I had to be a writer. There was no Plan B.

Mike: Will Love in Mid Air be part of a series?

Kim: Yes. It's like Elvis Costello says in "Everyday I Write the Book"....I own the film rights and am working on the sequel.

The literary tango

2009-04-29T08:49:00.000-07:00

My favorite move in the tango is the corte. In it, the woman lunges forward in a single dramatic and glamorous step, arches her back, bends her knees, tosses her head….great stuff.

Of course it goes without saying (although I'll say it anyway) that if the woman is to step forward, the man has to step back. Dancers call this "creating negative space," and it's just what it sounds like - using your body to create a kind of container on the dance floor, a very certain and specific space for your partner to step into. Sometimes the lead dancer is a big clingy. Hesitant to step back enough and if the man doesn't create enough space for the woman to step into....well you can imagine the disasterous results.

I think it's equally important for a writer to learn how to create negative space. The writer can’t always be the one to advance, just as the man doesn’t always advance in the tango.

But it's hard for writers to step back just as it's hard for men to do it on the dance floor. I don't think it's a matter of ego. I think it's more about the fear that comes when we give up control....Stepping back feels like giving up control, which is ironic, because I'm actually starting to believe that your ability to create negative space is the ultimate demonstration of your finesse.

Bear with me. Here's what I'm trying to say. In a cortes, it's easy to assume since the woman is the one stepping forward the woman is the one leading the move. Not so. The man is using his body to tell her to go forward. It's not like he has let her go totally - not like he says “Hey, babe. You’re on your own. It’s free expression time. It’s fine with me if you want to go over by the bar and start to cha cha.” Quite the contrary. When the man steps backward he is still leading and he is leading her to go into a very specific place on a very specific beat. The cortes is a controlled, technique-driven move. Creating a space and inviting the other person to step into it - which in dancing circles is called “back leading” is a demanding and sophisticated way to dance.

Women love cortes. In my class the women always want to do them and they'll happily dance with any man who knows how to lead a corte. Easy to see why. It’s a fun and flashy move and also - at least from the woman’s perspective - not that hard to do. Men are always less enthused, because backleading is damn hard. The man has to do several tricky steps in order to create the space the woman is stepping into. So for the woman it’s a double blessing - an easy step that makes her the star. And for the man it’s a double curse - a difficult step he doesn’t even get credit for. Leading a woman into a corte is a generous gesture on the part of a man….and it’s equally generous when a writer invites a reader to step forward. A movement away from the idea that this story is somehow something that the writer is doing to the reader and a movement towards the idea that this story is something they’re in together, like a dance.

The poor guys at group dance class. They really struggle. Inexperienced dancers think their job is to grab their partners as tight as they can and march forward, forcing the woman to go backward with every step. There are two problems with this. Number one, a man dragging a woman from one side of the floor to the other is not much of a dance. People who dance like that are said to be "dancing tight" and that's not a good thing. Women don't like men who dance tight. You can drag a woman across the floor but you can't make her like it. Next time she's going to dance with somebody else, somebody who can come up with more varied and creative moves, somebody who lets her in on the action. Somebody who dances loose.

Number two, if marching forward is your only move pretty soon you’re going to find yourself in a corner. And once you're a corner, you’ve got to think of a way to get yourself and your partner/reader out. What writer on earth hasn’t at some point gotten into a plot corner? There's no graceful way to get out of them. After you've been stuck in a few, you eventually realize that you have to figure out a way to build the back and forth movement into the dance, so that you never get into that corner in the first place.

In my second novel I am trying to figure out how to write loose, how to create times when the reader knows more than the narrator, when the reader can predict the next move, when the reader can figure out things on her own, can enter in the story as a participant. It's hellishly hard. It gives me more understanding and greater sympathy for the guys I dance with. Creating negative space isn't the easiest move to pull off....but I know what a supreme pleasure it is, a borderline spiritual/sexual pleasure, to be led by someone who knows what he's doing and I'd like to create that sensation in anyone willing to plunk down $24.95 for my book. I want my readers to feel like they're dancing with a pro.

Zen and the art of publishing

2009-04-22T12:43:00.001-07:00

The last week has been very full and productive and I'm on one of those elusive writer highs. Also been meditating faithfully every day (possibly a correlation....hmmmm.....) and just a few minutes ago, while listening to my beloved Jon Kabot-Zinn CD, I remembered something that happened a long time back. Ten years maybe.

I was in New Mexico, on my way to a Native American retreat. It was a typical western landscape, i.e., very blank. One narrow road through a rocky red landscape, one dusty gas station beside that road. I stopped and was shocked when a man actually came out to pump the gas. I was rummaging in my purse looking for cash because it also hit me that this gas station probably didn't take credit cards. As he was standing beside the car holding the pump he had time to take his measure of me, the rental car, the new-agey books in the back and he asked, sort of grumpily, if I was going to the meditation center. I said yeah - probably 99% of his clientele was either coming or going to the meditation center, there didn't seem to be anything else on this road - and he said"You don't have to go to a place like that. I can tell you the secret of life."

I had the feeling I was getting ready to get a great big jolt of Jesus but I nodded anyway and he said...

"Just don't take everything so damn personally."

Through the years I have thought about him several times. I don't know that anyone I've ever met, and I've known my share of philosophers and brainiacs, has ever improved upon his advice.

It's good council for the ups and downs of publishing. You send something out and you don't hear anything back and in those long weeks of waiting it's easy to tell yourself all sorts of stories. None of them kind. None of them fair. Or it's so easy to take the absense of a marketing campaign or a low advance or a bad review too much to heart. They don't like me. They don't like my book. It's easy to lose sight of the fact that publishing is a large, lumbering, and multi-headed beast and that very little that this beast does is a direct reflection on Kim Wright Wiley of Charlotte, NC. If I could just let things happen without rushing in to define and analyze the situation I know I'd be a happier person. Probably a better writer too.

I'm glad I thought about the gas station prophet during my meditation. And I will try to not take everything so damn personally. At least not today.

"What did you do last night?" "The wrong thing."

2009-04-17T08:21:00.000-07:00

This has been an insanely busy week. Not just the stuff about getting the webpage up and going (which, thanks to my sainted friend Jason of MacDowell Colony fame, is going very smoothly) but also....

I told my agent I would send him the first draft of the second book by the end of this week. So of course I look over it and of course now that I know someone else, someone important to me, is actually going to read it, I spaz out. Everything looks wrong. I start polishing and trimming and then of course of course of course the missing scene, that place in the manuscript where I had actually typed INSERT SCENE HERE comes to me in a rush. So I start writing that too. Polishing the old stuff and pacing and fretting and adding new stuff and pacing some more. But it is the most incredible high when a whole scene comes to you. Real life fades away. You live in the book. It's strange but it's also a rush.

Yesterday I was sitting in the coffee shop reading draft number 314 of the new scene. It was afternoon and the shop was almost empty and as I go up for cream one of the bored teenage girls behind the counter says to the other one "What did you do last night?" and her friend answered "The wrong thing."

What a great exchange! It's perfect. I rushed back to put it into my scene. Because that's the thing about a writing binge - and make no mistake, the last four days have been a writing binge - the whole world seems like it is conspiring to help you write. People speak in dialogue, colors seem brighter, metaphors leap out at you as you walk down the street.

It doesn't happen often. But it does happen

Where does inspiration come from?

2009-04-11T07:30:00.000-07:00

I've been working on my author interview for the first novel - quite a few of my friends responded with questions and I'm in the process of answering them. Here are the first two:

What inspired you to write about this subject?

When I got divorced twelve years ago, two weird things happened. First of all, women started spontaneously telling me their bad marriage stories, even women who I thought were perfectly happy. If you get divorced in a small town, you’ve screwed up in a very public way. All of a sudden you become the person it’s okay to confess to and women were practically flagging me down in the supermarket, leaning over my cart and saying “You know, things aren’t that great at home….” I became the repository of a hundred women’s secrets, and the notes I kept from that period became the basis of Love in Mid Air. The stories were altered, of course, a loose amalgamation of what was happening to me and my friends. For so long I had thought it was just me who was unhappy but now I was being shown the whole spectrum, the oceanic quality of female discontent. I walked around for a year saying ‘Wow, isn’t anybody happily married?”
The other thing I realized is that there were very few books that dealt with the subject of divorce in a realistic manner. Most of the books were about men leaving women, even thought it’s more statistically likely for a woman to initiate divorce, especially after the age of 40. And there was often some sort of quick fix - the deserted woman ended up falling in love with her attorney or some hunky handyman who showed up to help at her new house. I resented this whole idea that divorce is about swapping one man for another - ideally as fast as possible - with little exploration of the affect a woman’s divorce has on her friends and the whole social web. I knew that needed to make it into the story as well.

Is the material autobiographical? Are you Elyse?

I’m Elyse, but I’m also Kelly and Nancy and Lynn and Belinda and even Gerry and Phil and Jeff. For me, a novel is like a dream - all the characters are aspects of me, in dialogue with each other. But while the material isn’t literally autobiographical, it’s emotionally autobiographical. I’ve never been kissed by a stranger in the traveler’s chapel of the Dallas airport, but it’s the kind of thing I’ve wished would happen. It’s not hard to imagine how it might feel.

A little irony on a Tuesday morning

2009-04-07T06:49:00.000-07:00

There has been a sudden flurry of activity about preparing publicity for the first book. The people at the publishing house have been talking to me about websites, email blasts, author photos, etc. (Even though the pub date has now been pushed back to March. Don't ask.)

The tasks at hand are to make a list of questions for reading groups (i.e., book clubs) and to do an "author interview" both of which will go on the website when the hardback debuts and which will be included in the paperback. I'm not having any trouble coming up with the questions for the book clubs but I'm having trouble thinking of how to interview myself. I'm glad they are letting me do it...and I appreciate that it's my background in journalism that's making them think I can easily do it, ergo the irony.

Turns out it's hard to interview yourself. Turns out that I'm a bit secretive.

Also turns out that the only questions I'm coming up with are questions I already know the answers to, i.e., it's tempting to torque this opportunity toward subjects that I want to talk about. To lob myself pitches I know I can hit out of the park.

I might be missing the chance to ask something fresher and more surprising.

So....do any of you have any ideas for author questions?

My velveteen characters

2009-04-02T04:59:00.000-07:00

At what point does a character become real?

At waltz class last night I was talking to Ed, a fellow dancer and sci-fi/fantasy writer, who was saying what I've heard so many other writers say, i.e., that at some point in the story his characters begin to take on a life of their own. I'm not a writer who tends to have that sort of experience - I always remain conscious that I have created my characters and that to some degree I am moving them around like chess pieces - but there is a funny and quasi-magical moment when other people begin to think of them as real. Like for example I've just finished looking at the proofs for Love in Mid Air. An exciting part of the process. The book was very lightly edited, hardly any changes at all except for things like comma additions. but at one point there was a back and forth exchange in the margin between the editor and copy editor. They write in different color pencils so I could see the dialogue and the comments were about a line in the book, near the end, when Kelly casually mentions that back in high school Elyse was the homecoming queen.

It is a somewhat significant exchange despite the off-the-cuff way in which I've set it up. Throughout the book we see that Elyse thinks Kelly is beautiful and perfect....that she's blind to her faults in that way women often are with their best friends. Since the book is told from Elyse's POV it's easy to assume that yes, Kelly is the princess and Elyse is less-so. This exchange is my hint that Elyse's POV might not be entirely accurate and that, in fact, Kelly sees Elyse as the blessed one, the one who was always confident and beautiful and full of friends, an angle that is explored in the second book, which is told from Kelly's POV.

It's not a major point - just a nod to the fact that women sometimes put their friends on pedestals and yet are blind to their own beauty.

But then there is this dialogue in the margin in which the editor says that it seems more likely Kelly would have been the Homecoming Queen and the copy editor writes back that he can totally see Elyse being the Homecoming Queen and then the editor writes something else back.... The comments required no response from me, but it was a strange moment, a realization that Kelly and Elyse were real enough that these two people would believe they had a past, that they once were in high school, that they would debate (with a high degree of insight) about which of them might have been more popular 30 years ago.

It reminds me of the time this same editor required an additional scene and I was telling this to my agent. A three way conversation followed in which I proposed a scenario and both of them sort of said some version of "No, I don't think Elyse would do that." Which was fine - maybe my original idea wasn't the best and I later came up with something better - but it was another funny moment, having the two of them tell me what Elyse would or would not do. I felt like saying "I'll gladly come up with another idea but - just for the record - Elyse will do anything I make her do. She's not real."

I think in the long run this may be one of the more rewarding aspects of writing a book, having people react like this to your characters. For me their evolution was so incremental that I can't point to a single moment and say "This is where Kelly became real" but it pleases me to see, in hindsight, that at some point, without me fully realizing it, she must have taken on a bit of a life of her own.

Legacy Burden

2009-03-27T06:31:00.000-07:00

My therapist has given me certain tasks before our next meeting, one of which is to explore my family's particular "legacy burden" and how this affects me as a writer. I think this is significant because I come from a family of perfectionists and perfectionism, I'm convinced, is the diametrical opposite of creativity. Not to mention that it can cripple someone who is getting ready to bring out a book and thus subject themselves to public analysis. So I need to think about this, break it down....and get over it. It sounds stupid when you write it down but here goes - my attempt to analyze my family's philosophy.

There is shame in the act of wanting something. I remember an aunt telling me, following the bruising of my first romantic breakup, “Act like you don’t care.” I believe that line is on my family crest.

Act like you don’t care.

I have a cousin who went to college to study French, aced her placement exams and wound up in a hard class, and immediately switched her major rather than to admit she didn’t understand what the other students were saying. I understand that sort of decision, that sort of flight, because another family motto is “If you can’t do it well, don’t bother doing it at all.”

If you can’t do it well….don’t bother doing it at all.

Ergo a family that rarely ends up taking risks or doing anything new. Ergo a family of teachers, people who feel comfortable explaining things to the peons but who would rather die than be caught in the act of learning something themselves. Learning something is shameful, because if you were really smart and capable, you would have been born knowing how to do it. Line three of the family crest would be

You should be naturally good at things.

At the roots of all this is not just fear, but a deep and crippling perfectionism. Hard on anyone, but perfectionism can absolutely cripple a writer. I think this is the legacy burden I need to drop in the upcoming months as I prepare for the publication of my book. I have to overcome the shame of publicly wanting something…deliberately going after something….making mistakes along the way and …having to learn as I go. These don’t sound like appalling crimes when you list them. But in my family they’re the ultimate no-nos

Why I want to wear the turquoise dress

2009-03-20T11:21:00.000-07:00

Went to see my therapist this morning and spent the session talking about what I'll need to do to get emotionally ready for when the book comes out in January. She sent me away with two tasks - one, to describe why I want to be an author and two, to list the things that are going well about the process. My struggles to accentuate the positive are well-documented in this blog so I've decided in this entry to discuss the first task.

So why do I want to be an author? The thing is, being an author is very different that being a writer. I always think of writer as being present tense verb-driven, i.e., someone is a writer because they write. You are an author because you have written. The word implies a finished product, probably in the form of a published book. It's more about the role you play in the world after the book is written. It's about being seen, reviewed, critiqued, idolized or rejected. It's struck me lately that the world "publication" means just what it sounds like it means - you're moving a book (and its author) from the private realm to the public realm.

And that's what I'm struggling with, this upcoming move from the world of the writer, which is private, to the world of the author, which is public. As I've said before I see my experience as a dancer as a chance to practice being more public. You can certainly dance just for the fun of dancing, with your friends or in a studio with an instructor and many good dancers never take it further. They opt not to compete - just as many good writers never seek publication. It's not like it's absolutely mandatory for any creative person to ever go public with their art. In fact, you could argue that there's a deeper beauty in not going public because you're left with the sheer joy of the activity. I know the joy of writing. I know all about that faint tingling feeling you get across the top of the skull when the work in possessing you - when it feels like you're falling. You don't have to publish to you get that feeling. In fact, publishing carries you farther away from that feeling.

So.....why be an author?

When I was getting ready to take the stage in the dance competition last weekend I saw a woman I sort-of know waiting to take her own turn on the stage and she looked terrified. She glanced at me and muttered "I don't know why I do this to myself" and indeed you can make a good argument never to do this sort of thing to yourself. Why expose yourself to the pain of being ridiculed or judged? The performance aspect of my work, whether it's dancing or writing, is never going to be as emotionally rewarding as the creative aspect...it's probably going to be a best a mixed experience and possibly a downright humiliating one.

So....why I doI want to be an author?

Here are some of my reasons:

Money ( a puny reason)
Fame (ditto - not because money or fame are puny, but because novel writing is an unlikely path to either)
I'll feel important
People will listen to me
At long last I'll be sitting at the cool kids table
I will be participating in the global exchange of ideas.

Because it's the only item on the list that doesn't make me sound like a total fool, let's ponder the last point. I was envious when I saw my friend Alison's bookshelf with the foreign editions of her novel and each time I to into a bookstore in Europe I am struck with a similar envy for the American authors whose books are on sale there. I've always wanted to be able to call myself a citizen of the world and what better way to earn that title than with international publication, the dizzying idea that someone will be sitting in a coffeeshop in Siena or Munich or Rotterdam reading my book? It's my small chance to participate in the global exchange of ideas. Just thinking of it makes me so happy I want to weep.

And then there's another point, also a little grandiose, but here goes. Once I was sitting at a sushi restaurant working on a manuscript and the waitress asked me if I was a writer, as waitresses often do. I said yes and she said "I love to read" and for a moment her face was flooded with happiness and hope. She was a dark, nearly goth looking little girl, with bitten down fingernails with green polish, someone who was trying really hard to be tough and cool but when she said "I love to read" everything in her turned porous and I could see the real person inside and she looked me right in the face, in the way few people look at each other, and she whispered "Reading sustains me."

That's it. That was all. She turned away, shut back down. But I've never forgotten her. She was right. Reading sustains people and thus writing sustains people. It's important work.

And this would be a nice way to end my list of "reasons I want to be an author," with the ideas of sustaining young gothic waitresses and participating in the international commerce of thought. A smart person would stop typing right here. But I think I'm doing an injustice to myself if I don't consider the reasons at the top of the list equally valid. The ones that sound shallow like fame and money and being important and having people listen to me. Because I want those things too. Of course, of course....I write because I love to write just like I dance because I love to dance. But there is also a time when you step forward onto the lighted stage and show yourself. When you admit how much you want it and you risk being judged. Not everyone has to go public, but I have to do it because if I'm drop-dead honest with myself it's part of the reason that I write. It's time for me to put on the turquoise dress and get comfortable with the fact that people are going to see me. I think I can get used to it. I don't think I have any choice.

Revision and other endless pursuits

2009-03-15T11:17:00.000-07:00

Over the course of the last week I've run a copy of the manuscript, and carried it in pieces each morning to the Starbucks. Sat and tried to read it fresh, as if it had been written by someone else. And the funny thing is, at times if felt like that. Late November was the last time I really read the novel from start to finish and in that short time I've already forgotten stuff. I kept coming across sentences and paragraphs I couldn't remember writing. It's a funny phenom, when you don't recognize your own work, even work from just a few months back.

I made notes all over the pages and now I am in the process of revising. Dawn called me at one point and said she had a feeling the first book was going to do well, that it was going to be one of those little underdog books that does better than people anticipate. I hope she's right and - not to kill the karma - I've had the same sense about it. There are advantages to bringing out a book with low expectations. I've cleared my calendar for the first four months of next year because that's all a book has, really, a narrow window of opportunity to find its market before it's remaindered and the next season's wave of books begins. So I know I'll be doing my publicity myself - creating mini-book tours in cities where I have friends willing to help me. Like my friend Kathy, for example, who lives in Seattle who offered to line up a few independent bookstores, bookclubs, groups to speak to, etc. before I come out to visit her. I can stay with her - which will be both cheap and fun and will ensure I have a built-in means of emotional support - and use her house as home base to pivot in different directions trying to work the Seattle market. And I plan to do this in several cities. I know it's up to me. I'm small potatoes at my press and nobody's spending any money on publicity in this horrible market anyway and besides...Here's the bottom line. There is a certain dignity and calmness in accepting that it is up to me, that the fate of my little book is in my own hands and those of my friends.

Otherwise, I bump up and down. The revision will take a couple of weeks and then I will step back again, look again at the holes that need to be filled, the plot lines that are petering out to nothing, the scenes that don't pay off. Yesterday I learned I didn't get into Jentel, one of the colonies in Wyoming. That sucks. It's a small colony and I thought I had a pretty good shot. Three still out there for summer and I also just re-applied to MacDowell for fall. Something will come through.

Dancing With the Scars

2009-03-09T07:54:00.000-07:00

I just got back from a dancing competition - my first. Waltz, tango, and foxtrot at the Grove Park Inn, this cool old hotel in the mountains that still has a ballroom and a stage and the sense that you're on the set of a old MGM musical. The experience was pretty brutal - I danced in a hard heat and didn't advance, which is the sort of thing that kicks me in the ego. But as I was hanging around the spa after the competition, feeling sorry for myself, I remembered this vision-like thought that came to me last summer, when I first started taking dance lessons.

First of all, I love dancing. When I dance I feel pure joy. Remembering this helps me to know that despite little setbacks along the trail that it would be tragic if I allowed anything to make me stop dancing. So that even though I felt like pulling a major pout, hopping in my car, and heading back to Charlotte I knew that would be self-sabotage of the highest level.

Secondly, I dance because there are body issues, gender issues, issues with simply releasing control and learning to follow that dancing helps me deal with. Releasing control is not easy for me or, I dare say, very many women of my generation. Maybe it's hard for all humans on the planet Earth, I don't know. But once again, to have turned tail and run would have been to deny myself the chance to learn a major lesson in letting go.

But there's a third point. Ever since I started, I have had this persistent sense that dancing would help me learn how to deal with the publication of my novel. I realize that doesn't sound logical but here's how it seems to work. Writing a novel is a private and largely solitary occupation. Publishing a novel is excruciatingly public. All of a sudden you're expected to brand yourself, market yourself, answer interview questions, read reviews, expose your thoughts to strangers and family/friends alike (the latter is the harder of the two) and just generally go naked on the page. Writing taught me how to hide. Dancing, which is a performance based and public art form, is helping me become more comfortable with being seen. Maintaining dignity and pride under trying circumstances. My instructor keeps hissing at me "Keep your chin up" which I think is generally good advice for all situations.

Friday morning when I went on the dance floor I was aware I was competing against better and more experienced dancers on a crowded, brightly lit stage. Terrifying. But the most terrifying thing about it - or at least the most foreign - was that I knew I wasn't supposed to let my emotions show on my face. No matter what, you keep smiling. You stay serene. You act like you meant to smack right into that other dancer. It's good practice for someone from the oh-so-private world of writing. When I get a writing-related blow, like last week when I saw the cover of my novel for the first time, I can at least lick my wounds in private. I can pace and curse my fate and bitch and moan to my friends and gradually compose myself. But with a dancing-related blow you have to compose yourself immediately. Keep moving. Take the next step. And then the next. Literally move past it. Keep your chin up. Somehow I suspect publication requires a very similar emotional process.

Colony Westward Ho

2009-03-04T06:51:00.000-08:00

I keep telling my friends how great my experience at MacDowell was and how I wish I'd known about colonies years ago. And I've presently applied to four - Jentel, Ucross, Yaddo and VCCA. Two of them are in Wyoming, hence the title of this post, and I have high hopes since I would dearly love to spend a month this summer out west.

But the point of this blog is something that hit me when I was encouraging my friend Jennifer to apply to a colony. I was giving her the obvious reasons - uninterrupted time to work, the chance to meet other artists, a sort of geographically-induced focus - when it hit me that I am always slow to confess the thing about colonies that mattered the most to me. I was respected there. The colony formed a boundary around me and the real world and the tenacity with which they held that boundary showed me that I should do this for myself, that I should value my time as much as MacDowell does, that should take my work (even my unformed work) as seriously as they did.

Bottom line is that being in a colony made me feel the way I thought being published would make me feel. It sounds ridiculous but on some very sub-sub-subconscious level I think I thought getting an agent and selling the book would be more like crossing a personal Rubicon. I assumed it would make a bigger impact on my life, maybe even be a life-changing event, and that even if publication didn't leave me richer or more famous or much successful in some societially-recognized way that I would feel different inside. That didn't happen and I pushed the disappointment down. (Not too far down, as my friends would attest - it kept popping up like a beach ball in a pool.) But I did try to push it down.

Ten months later I went to MacDowell. I wasn't expecting much beyond time and I was grateful for that. But when I got not just the time but the sort of emotional boost I hadn't gotten the winter before it took me a couple of weeks to even realize what was happening. I'll say it again - being in a colony made me feel like I thought getting published would feel. It made me feel like a real writer.

I'm sure a more dedicated artist and a better person wouldn't need any outside support at all. Yeah, right. We all need support and that might be the single greatest thing a colony gives us. Right now I am waiting to see if any of the four come through for summer. I have a book that needs focus. And I have emotional well which, while not bottomless, does need to be replenished periodically. So wish me luck. And if you're reading this, apply somewhere. It's one of the few things you can do to take your creative fate into your own hands.

Six and a half weeks

2009-02-27T06:16:00.000-08:00

To continue the story....

I emailed my agent and suggested that we show my editor the plot treatment and the 100 sample pages. I also told him that I was trying to get into writers colonies this summer and that if I did I should be able to finish the book within a matter of weeks.

He wrote back quickly, but he must have misunderstood my email because he said "Well, since you're within a few weeks of finishing it, we may as well wait until you have the whole thing."

I started to correct him. There's a big difference between being a few weeks away from finishing it right now and going to a colony next summer and then being a few weeks away from finishing it. But once again I did this thing I rarely do, but need to do more often. I paused. I let time pass.

And during that time I talked to my writing friends, a couple of whom are farther down the path of publication than I am and who pointed out a very real truth. If you show a half-finished manuscript to an editor she might like it, she might take it, she might give you money for it. And that's all great because it gives you a cash cushion during the time you finish the book and because it shows your editor is committed to your long term development as a novelist. But what isn't so great is the fact that if an editor buys a book based on a half-finished novel or plot treatment she's going to create in her own head a sense of how that book is going to be as a finished product. By selling a book to an editor based on an idea, a plot treatment or a half-finished work, you invite a sort of collaboration.

And from watching the careers of my more experienced friends I know that this sort of collaboration has its dark side. It can plunge you into a circle of hell known as collaborative rewrites. I sold the first book intact. It took a while to sell it, granted, but once I finally found an agent and an editor who liked it, I knew they liked it as it was and they made virtually no suggestions for changes. A couple of additional scenes and I was good to go. This spoiled me. I didn't have to go through the months or years of rewrites some authors experience, trying to incorporate the suggestions of the agent and then the editor.

I mulled. My agent was thinking - erroneously, but optomisitcally - that I could have a rough first manuscript to him within 6 or 7 weeks. Could I? Could I push through and finish the draft earlier than I planned? If so, perhaps he could sell it and and then I spend the time this summer polishing an existing manuscript. It was a tempting thought.

I wrote him back and told him I'd have the full thing to him by the middle of April.

Maybe nutty, I know. But as I said in the last email I sense a window of opportunity is open to me now and I want to at least try to poke the second book through it.

Wish me luck.

You Can't Judge a Book By Its Cover. No, Really. You Can't.

2009-02-23T05:12:00.000-08:00

Last week a lot of things happened, including the fact my mother was hospitalized. She's okay now but in the middle of all this - and it always seems to happen this way - I finally heard back from my agent and my editor. Yes, both of them. In the same week. Which I think is one of the signs of the end of the world in the book of Revelations, right after the plague of locusts and all the oceans turning to red.

For those of you who have lives beyond this blog, I'll recap: I had sent the plot treatment for my second novel, which is a sequel to my first, to my agent about four weeks ago. It was my fervent hope that he would fall in love with it, send it along to the editor of my first book, that she would fall in love with it and from there the dominos would all fall into a wonderful pattern.

Instead, I heard nothing. After two weeks I wrote him and nudged him and he said he would get to it soon. Two more weeks passed and then....

I got an enthusiastic letter from my editor talking about the first book. She used the word "thrilled" three times and the letter had two exclamation points. It also said that a jpg of the cover art was attached and that everyone, including the sales reps who had seen the catalog, loved it. The letter seemed a little effusive, especially in light of the fact I hadn't heard from her in months, but I took it as a good sign. I was at lunch when the email came in and I couldn't open the jpg file on my iphone so I rearranged my afternoon and ran by my house specifically to look at the book cover.

Here's the sad part. I think this is supposed to be one of the experiences that writers describe as fun.

I hated the cover. It was a sick pale turquoise color and the word LOVE was huge and the word AIR was huge and the words in mid were very small and tucked in the middle. It looked like the title of the book was LOVE AIR. Plus my name was wierdly big and they had the words "a novel" on the cover which I thought was strange too and there's a drawing of an upside-down house on a cloud. Overall, not exactly what I had pictured. Overall, quite cheap looking. Why had they asked me what sort of cover art I liked if they were going to create something that was the absolute opposite? Wy did they ask me what sort of art I liked if they weren't going to show me the cover of the book before the final decision was made? Now for the record, I sent the file to my friend Laura in tears and she didn't think it was that bad. But my reaction was like being kicked in the gut.

In a rare moment of lucidity, I decided not to respond to my editor at all. No response was really asked for or required....the cover was already distributed to the sales reps and set for the catalog and if they hadn't shown it to me for approval in advance it seemed unlikely that they would do anything about my dismay at this point. Which goes back to my earlier point - when you've sold your book, you've sold your book. In other words, someone else owns it. It's just like selling a house and you can't knock on the door months after you moved out and say "Excuse me, but why on earth did you paint my house that awful turquoise color?" I figured if I called my editor while I was upset, I would say the wrong things and I would say too many things. When I had called Laura all I seemed to be able to say is "They flushed it. They took my book and flushed it down the toilet." I didn't figure me ranting about flushing would help at this point and besides, the week was still falling around me in shambles. I closed the file and went back to the hospital to fetch my ailing mother.

The next day it occured to me that, for whatever reason, my editor did indeed send a very positive letter. When I saw the book cover my first thought is that she'd sent the positive letter because she knew the cover was awful and I was being placated. Not much money to spend on her book, not enough to get an art director for the cover or send her on a book tour, but we'll send her a real upbeat letter and that will have to be enough. But after talking to Laura another possible interpretation emerged - as difficult as it was for me to believe, just maybe my editor really did like the cover and maybe she had meant the things she said in the letter about being optomistic about the book. Maybe the window of opportunity was open an inch or so.... maybe it was open wide enough to slip the second book through.

Because here is how it works. I don't understand much about how publishing works, it's all through-a-glass-darkly stuff to me but I do think I'm right about this. Editors and agents are easily distracted. They have a lot of people and projects vying for their attention. When you are on the top of the pile of things they have to do, they give you a lot of focus. This focus usually only lasts for a brief period of time and then something else moves to the top of pile and takes their focus. If you try and contact them when you're not their top priority, they won't respond at all.

When you're a writer you live on maybes. You suck them in gratefully, like air.

So, I figured, at least my editor is thinking of me right now. It might be a good time to hit her with the news that this book she says she's so thrilled about has a half-finished sequel.

I wrote my agent. Please contact my editor, I said, trying to write in a way that didn't sound like begging. Tell her about the second book. I know that the odds I'll be on the minds of both my editor and my agent on the same day are astronomically small but still, I thought I had to try....

And that's where the story gets complicated.

Complicated enough to require another entry on another day.

But in the meantime, I have a blue book.

Lame Joke

2009-02-15T08:36:00.001-08:00

There's a joke I always do with my Queens classes. It's not a very funny joke. When we get to the part about writing query letters and being willing to do something on spec and all the various hoops writers have to jump through in order to get the attention of editors and agents, someone in the class often ventures a word of protest. And they should protest, because it's painful to realize we've chosen a profession in which we're constantly auditioning, selling outselves, being critiqued and being ignored.
Okay, so somebody often interrupts at this point. They state the obvious - that all the power seems to be in the hands of the publishing industry and the writers cluster around like extras on the set of Oliver. Grimy street urchins, their hats in their hands, saying "Please, sir, please." Does it ever get more fair? Do the scales ever level themselves? I suppose that in some cases it does get easier and some writers attain levels of popularity and success that make them more powerful than the agents and editors, levels of success that make them the sought after parties. But that's rare. Usually the writer is the one doing the asking. Usually the writer is the one who has to put his work, and his ego, on the line. So yeah, we query. We offer to show them more ideas. We offer to show them more ideas. We ask if we might contact them again, at a time more convenient. We offer to do write without a contract, to give them a look for free. To cut a 100 pages, to add 100 pages, to switch the voice, to change the title, to begin it in a different place.
Ergo, my lame joke. I look the students in the eye and say "They don't call the process by which writers get published 'submission' for nothing."
Like I said, it's not a very funny joke.

And now a few words from our sponser

2009-02-14T07:29:00.001-08:00

I'm leading a workshop on the ups and downs of freelancing at Hollins University this summer, during the week of June 14th. I've done a mini-version of this class each semester for the students at the Queens low-res MFA program and this is my chance to expand the workshop and really get into the nitty-gritty of the writing life. For details, or to register, go to www.hollins.edu/tmww.

One more point about point of view

2009-02-07T06:24:00.000-08:00

Talking to Laura yesterday got me thinking....

Much of my theories about first person point of view - which, God help us all, I am actually going to be lecturing on this summer at the Hollins College writing workshop - stem back to a single event from my childhood.

I was three or four. This is the first memory which I'm sure is an actual memory, neither a story I was told by my relentlessly story-telling family or a snapshot I saw in an album. The reason I know this is that I don't see myself as a character in the story - I see the story as I would have seen it if I were actually there.

Here goes. The entryway to my family home was a staircase of brick, leading up to a landing. There was a row of shrubs in front of the house. I would play out in the little protected area between the brick wall and the shrubs, pretending this was a fort or a castle or a boat or whatever the fantasy du jour required. Also, I realize now, when I went out into that little space I was hiding. I was always hiding as a child. Hiding and spying. It was a behavior that would serve me well in my later life as a journalist and novelist.

On this particular day my father was working in the lawn and my grandfather, who lived next door, approached him. They began to argue. I didn't know then and don't know now what they were fighting about but I instinctively knew that I was overhearing something I wasn't meant to overhear. Neither man had noticed me behind the shrubs or I'm fairly sure the argument would never have taken place - we were a dignified family, not inclined to open confrontation, and the adults certainly did not fight in front of the children. That's probably why I found this scene so fascinating. Up until that day I don't think I'd even known if was possible for adults to disagree.

Now here's where point of view comes in. On two sides I was surrounded by brick. On one side the shrubs were high and the only direction in which I could see out at all was partially obscured by lower shrubs. It was literally a limited point of view. I was so absorbed in trying to figure out what my father and grandfather were doing that I was shocked when suddenly (at least suddenly to me) my grandmother appeared. She had been standing on the lawn too, but on the part of the yard I couldn't see, the part obscured by the brick stairwell. She ran up to them and put her hand on my grandfather's arm and just then I was conscious of a noise above me and realized that my mother had also observed the fight. She had been standing in the doorway at the top of the stairwell.

When I think about point of view this simple little story always comes back to me. Partly because it's such a concrete way to consider what point of view means: Where is your character standing? What's her angle on the action? And fron that angle what would she logically observe or notice? But also I think this story has stuck with me because it shows that point of view is partly about what the character sees - in this case the argument between my fahter and grandfather - but that point of view is equally about what the character doesn't see. I couldn't see what was on the other side of the brick wall or above me on the stairwell so it was a shock when my grandmother and mother appeared.

Ergo my conclusion. First person point of view is just as much about what your character doesn't know as it is about what she does know.
Now I try to ask myself: What does my character fail to understand about the situation? What does she not know about herself? Where are the literal and metaphorical blind spots? What in the story is going to surprise her when it appears? Will there be things that the reader will see before she does?

And this also speaks to something I think is a misconception about first person, i.e., that the narrator knows the exact same amount that the writer knows. Someone once said to me that he was surprised I was so wedded to the first person pov because it had a single major drawback, i.e., you lose the omniscient voice. I agree that this can be a little problematic....your character can't know about conversations that took place when she wasn't in the room, or describe the troubled childhood of someone she just met. But there are ways around these limitations and most writers figure them out quickly enough. I think my friend who was critical was speaking of a deeper issue - the belief that the first person point of view forces the reader to accept reality just as the first person narrator is dishing it out to them. I disagree. I think there are plenty of ways for the author to alert the reader that the narrator is wrong about certain things.

Still with me? It's hard to talk about these things and that's why I'm nervous about the Hollins lecture. Maybe an example would help. My first novel is narrated by a character named Elyse who is essentially a reliable narrator, i.e., she isn't insane or mentally handicapped, she isn't on drugs or on trial for murder or a 2 year old child. The reader can basically accept Elyse's interpretation of events as sound. But yet Elyse is flawed, as she must be in order to work as not merely the narrator of the story but also the main character. Her primary flaw is that she is impulsive. One of the ways I showed this in the story was to write in present tense so that we see her doing things and regretting them or questioning them almost immediately. Another way is that I have her frequently interrupting other characters when they speak, cutting them off midsentence in her impulsive, impatient way.

Here's what I hope. That the reader will understand that while Elyse sees a lot and knows a lot - she's presented as a bright and thoughtful person - that she doesn't see everything and know everything. I hope that the reader will sense when Kim the writer is pointing out "Elyse shouldn't have interrupted Kelly there....Kelly's making sense" or "Phil has a point, Elyse just can't see it" or even "Elyse is totally wrong on this one."

So there's a point of view within a point of view. Kim the child standing behind the bushes can't see much. She's the first person narrator of the story. Kim the adult remembering the event can see more - she knows what happened later, she realizes that the mother and grandmother were also in the yard, she can come up with more elaborate interpretations of what caused the fight. She's the writer of the story. So if we accept that the writer and narrator are different people it seems logical that we can also accept that the writer knows things the narrator can't know and can thus use the poor narrator's blindness, or at least her limited point of view, as a means to advance the story.

Hard to talk about as this blog, I fear, painfully illustrates. But still I think, worth considering. Sometimes I just stop myself while writing, while sailing along on the wave of a first person narration and ask myself "But what's there that this person isn't seeing? What's on the other side of that brick wall?" This question almost always leads me to something interesting. Maybe even a plot point. And God knows we can never have too many of them.

But that's another subject.

Like Tom Petty Says

2009-02-01T06:52:00.000-08:00

The waiting is the hardest part.

About two weeks ago, maybe three, maybe four, I sent the plot treatment and 100 pages of novel number two - which I am tentatively titling The Gods of Arizona - to my agent.

My fantasy is this. He loves it, he sends it to my editor. She loves it and offers me a decent advance (by decent I mean larger than my first advance....Okay, who am I kidding? Much larger). The advance buys me time away from the freelancing to devote the to the book and then, bingo bango, I get invited to a nice writing colony. Like Yaddo. Or Ucross. Or Jentel. And I go there for a chunk of time this summer, finish the book. When the first book comes out it does well (Who am I kidding? Very well) and the second book is already in the pipeline, locked and loaded and ready to follow shortly on its heels.

That's the fantasy.

The reality, at least for now, is that I'm waiting. Waiting to hear from my agent which is step one of a sequence of events which may or may not go the way I'd like.

After a couple of weeks I sent my agent an email asking if he'd read it yet and he said that no, but he'd get to it asap and in the meantime a couple of other people in the office "Had read it and enjoyed it very much." Hard to know how to take that. While it's certainly good news that someone somewhere has read it and likes it and certainly good news that David will pick up the pages with a positive first impression there is always the paranoia that a) no one has read it and he's just trying to humor me b) the reason he personally hasn't read it is that I am his 3956th most important writer c) these unnamed people who are enjoying the book are the non-English-speaking office staff who are using the pages as cleaning supplies or the ever-popular d) an asteriod is going to hit the earth the day before my first book is due to come out and this whole process is inherently doomed.

In the meantime, I wait.

The Great Escape

2009-01-25T06:59:00.000-08:00

My dad was really into World War II movies and when I was a kid I used to watch them with him. We saw all the classics - Von Ryan's Escape, The Dirty Dozen, Bridge on the River Kwai- but his favorite was The Great Escape. I probably saw this movie 5 or 6 times as a child.

Which makes it so strange that I only remembered half of it. I rented the movie as an adult and realized that, as a child, only the first half of the movie had made any impression on me at all. In my memory the whole movie was the POWs digging a tunnel in an effort to escape the Nazi internment camp. I was especially gripped by the image of Charles Bronson, who did most of the digging and was in fact dubbed "The Tunnel King" even though he - irony alert - was horribly claustrophobic. When the tunnel was complete and the night for the long-planned escape arrived he panicked and refused to go back into the tunnel this one final time. A friend had to drag him.

I suppose all this would make an impression on an impressionable child such as myself. I liked Charles Bronson. I identified with him. To the degree that all I really remembered about the movie, despite multiple viewings, was him on his belly in the tunnel. I forgot the whole half where they got out and scattered across Europe with the Nazis in hot pursuit. I even forgot Steve McQueen on his motorcycle, which was a seriously kick-ass sequence.

Now why, you might logically ask, is all this in a blog about writing? When I speak to MFA students I always mention this movie as the perfect analogy to writing. The process of writing (especially something long - like a book, like a novel) is much like digging a tunnel out of a POW camp. You work alone, at night, crammed into tiny spaces and moving in small increments, digging your way forward with any tool you can find. Hell, half the time you're digging with a spoon, like I think poor Bronson did at the end. Would any logical person try to dig a tunnel with a spoon? Periodically the tunnel collapses on you and your friends have to pull you out as you sputter and cough up dust and curse the fact all your hardwork was for nothing. And then you start again. The Great Escape people started three tunnels - the Nazis found one, another collapsed midway through beyond repair. Despite their careful calculations, the third tunnel came up 20 feet shy of the woods and they had to, at the last minute, change their plans and just make a run for it.

So many analogies to writing. The solitude of the work, the endless digging, the claustraphobia, the need for faith even when 2/3 of your projects don't come to any fruition at all and even the measly 1/3 that you do complete don't end up remotely like you'd planned. You dig for months and still end ups 20 feet shy of the woods. You plan and plan and end up making a run for it.

And I think most writers and teachers of writing focus on this process because you have to, it's compelling. The digging of the tunnel is so compelling that they forget the last half of the movie. They talk constantly about writing but never about selling, about publication. Maybe they can't bear to. Maybe the second half of the movie is just too upsetting. Because it seems like after all you've gone through to get to that point, life should pat you on the back a little. It seems like when you stick your head up from the tunnel with your completed book under your arm, the world should applaud and say "Nice job, man...you dug all that way! With a spoon! In the dark!"

But they don't. You finish digging and you stick your head up and the first bullet comes whizzing by your ear.

You spend the rest of the movie trying to get to Switzerland, to the promised land of peace and plenty - or at very the least, good reviews and a book that stays in print. Your friends are shot. Captured. Disappeared. The odds are astronomically against you...

Because here's the second way that The Great Escape is a perfect analogy of writing. There's attrition at every point. I'm going to get the exact numbers wrong, I'm sure, but the percentages I'm getting ready to quote are pretty accurate. The Great Escape was based on a true story, an actual breakout. Originally they planned to take 200 men out but that soon proved impractical and the planned number dropped to more like 100. The Nazis caught them a little over half of the way though the breakout so only about 60 actually went into the tunnel. Of those sixty about half were captured and returned to the camp. About half were killed. Three escaped.

Again, much like the numbers for publishing a book. Of all the people who talk about writing a book, only half actually start one - and that's probably a generous estimate. Of the people who start one, maybe about half finish. Again, I'm bordering on the wildly opptomistic with that estimate. Of those that finish, a fair percentage of them are gunned down (i.e., their books never get sold at all) and another large chunk are returned to the POW camp (i.e. the books do okay, but not great, and the authors end up right back where they started, spoon in hand.) Maybe about 3 out of 200 make it, i.e., are successful enough in the marketplace that they can be said to have won the war and these - another irony alert - are known as breakout books.

By this point in my little pep talk most of the students are looking at me like I'm nuts. Or at least very mean. But I don't consider this analogy particularly depressing. It's just the way it works. Writing a novel is hard. Publishing it is harder. If you can't accept that truth you shouldn't go into the tunnel in the first place. The men in the Great Escape knew it wasn't going to be easy to break out of a Nazi POW camp but they tried it anyway and there's a certain nobility in that, a nobility that makes the title apt. It was a great escape, with the greatness based more on the vision they shared than the numerical results of the breakout. And besides, I belatedly learned that this whole escape was designed to coincide with D-Day, a created distraction to pull the Nazis away from the coast and have them chasing down these prisoners all over Europe. There was a hint of self-sacrifice about the whole mission from its inception and yet they went into the process with heart.

I try to be one of those writing teachers who talks about the last half of the movie, who discusses the realities of not just writing, but what happens after you write. I try to tell the students things I wish somebody had told me. Still, I know every writer has his or her own path and no one can really tell anyone else anything...it's a ridiculously individuated process. But I hope that there are certain times in their own process whether it's at a point of despair that the damn book will never be finished or a point of overwhelm that seventeen agents in a row have rejected them that they remember the analogy of The Great Escape and know that a) they are not as alone as it seems they are and b) there is something noble about this mission, no matter where you end up.

And it's not like there's absolutely no hope. Charles Bronson was one of the three who made it.

The Muse Comes at Three

2009-01-14T06:16:00.000-08:00

Yesterday morning at 3 am I was awakened by a smell. My dog Otis had dropped a pile of poop of such malodorious magnitude on my bathroom floor that it actually woke me out of a dead sleep. I tried to ignore it but finally got up and started cleaning, scolding, dragging towels and bathmats to the washing machine, scrubbing my hands and arms with antibacterial soap, throwing my nightgown in the laundry too....in short I was throughly awakened. Awakened in the worst way. Four hours of sleep wouldn't be enough to see me through the day but it was just enough to make me pretty sure I either couldn't go back to sleep at all or, if I did, I would fall asleep about 5 and then doze away half the morning.

Otis, needless to say, was happily snoring on the pillow beside me.

Damn Otis.

But the muse comes in many forms. As I was lying there in the dark, wondering if I should make coffee, walk out for the paper, cut on the computer and officially begin the day I suddenly began to have a rush of insights about the second novel. A literal shitload of ideas. Four or five plot points - a couple of them quite elegant - came to me at once.

I cut on the light and began to scribble notes.

What exactly is this strange aspect of the creative process? Why do we sometimes work and work on some aspect of our stories without really getting anywhere and then suddenly have these moments of clarity when we can see exactly what needs to happen?

And can these moments of seemingly random inspiration - my grandmother's best friend, an elderly and over-the-top poet, used to call them "wooing the muse" - be more predictable, and thus more productable, than we think?

For the last three days I have been working on a chapter summary for my second novel. Hard work. I went to bed the night before my 3 am fit inspiration having just wrapped ip a 3500-word plot synopsis, wondering if it all held together. I had shown it to Laura, an editor friend with a good sense of the linear, and she had pointed out that I had a character in the story that might not need to be there. I knew what she meant - the character shows up, says some stuff, does a few things, but doesn't really tie into the resolution of the book. But I wanted Tory in the story. On an instinctive level I thought she had an important role to play. There were a few more dangling plot threads....things that, like the character of Tory, were in at the beginning but didn't seem to have any crucial function by the end. But once again I was loathe to cut them out.

In the creative process, I strongly believe that our subconscious minds run ahead of our conscious minds. They rush forward, preparing the way, clearing the forest and leaving trail markers for our slower-moving more cautious conscious minds to follow. Novels really point out this out to you because they're so long and have the potential for so many dead ends. Several times while writing I have put something into the story without knowing exactly why it's there. And early readers (who constitute only my most trusted friends) have done just what Laura did, gently pointed out that this material doesn't fit. Most of the time, I nod and cut it. At other times I have left it in....not knowing exactly why. I am not in general a stubborn writer. Not a prima donna. Over my long years as a nonfiction writer I have been both edited badly and edited well and I know that work exists to be changed. When people give me feedback, I do not throw up my hands and shriek "But I am an artist!!!"

So these periods of stubbornness are selective. I think they mean something. I think they mean that my subconscious mind has put this seemingly random material in for a reason and it knows that my conscious mind will figure it all out at some point down the road.

Because I went to bed that night thinking I didn't want to cut Tory out of the story and that I should leave in a couple of the other seemingly non-essential scenes as well. Went to sleep mulling it over, exhausted and sick of working on the scene sequence. I slept. Otis pooped. I woke up. I cleaned. Otis slept. I got back into bed and suddenly saw how the Tory story fit into the whole and how one of the questionable scenes was indeed her logical route back into the book.

It's exciting when this happens. It's why we write. I'm trying to figure out how to get it to happen more. And I suspect that taking the time to write out plot treatments and chapter summarys, tedious as these activities may be, are actually the ways in which we build bridges between the conscious and subconscious minds. The way in which we allow them to - at least for a few hyper-productive minutes - walk the same path. Because I think that's what preciesely these moments of "effortless inspiration" are, a link up between the conscious and subconscious minds. We not only know what we should do next, we see clearly how to do it.

If I had not done the chapter summarys in sequence I would not have known where the holes in my story were. A major event happens to my heroine at about 2/3 of the way through the book. I knew I needed to show how this event changed her, to put a little rest beat into the rhythm of the book, a sort of pause-and-reflect chapter. So I wrote in my plot outline that chapter 17 needed just that and moved on to chapter 18, picking the story back up.

But if I hadn't known exactly where that hole in the plot was, would I have so easily come up with a way to fill it? It's one thing to know what something is missing....it's quite another thing to put the conscious mind to work outlining your plot and seeing exactly where the gap is. At that point I believe my subconscious mind sprang to work sorting through the options, shuffling a sort of metaphorical deck of cards, until it found the right material. Material which came directly from those "loose thread scenes" I had been reluctant to cut.

Speaking of metaphors, have I mixed up enough of them for you? Walking in the forest, leaving clues, building bridges, shuffling cards... It's hard to write about this. We don't write or talk or even think about these things very often and it's hard to find the words. But I do know this. The subconscious mind wants to help the conscious mind. When the conscious mind is stuck it tries to send it hints. We need to listen to these hints, sure, but I suspect we can also be more proactive and actually invite the subconscious mind to dialogue with the conscious mind. I think I did just that with my chapter summary outline. In essence I said to my subconscious not merely "I'm stuck" but instead "I'm stuck right here. Can you come help me?"

I'm pleased to have my new scene. Pleased that Tory is back in the book. Pleased that waking up at 3 am resulted in scrawled pages of very good notes. But there's one more thing I have to wonder. I don't want to wonder this because it seems like a direct contadiction of what I wrote above, i.e., that creativity is the result of cross-pollenation between the conscious and subconscious mind and therefore not only within us but something we can learn to cultivate. But what if there's another component, something beyond our own heads? If Otis had not taken a poop when he did, and if that poop had not been quite so pungeant, would I have missed my moment of inspiration? Would the same thoughts have been patiently waiting for me when I woke at 7 am... or were they just there, floating by, momentarily up for grabs in that silent stream of early morning? It's strange to think the role Otis might have played in all this (should I mention him in the acknowledgements?) and even more strange to comtemplate that my writing process might be helped along by unseen forces. When my grandmother's friend the poet used to talk about "wooing the muse" I always that she was affected and silly. But then I sit down and write for 30 minutes about how dog poop gave me the missing chapter of my novel.

Otis is usually very regular.

Feeling Like a Cop

2009-01-07T07:09:00.000-08:00

Somebody once told me that being a writer is like being a cop - long stretches of boredom periodically punctuated with little blips of pure terror. That's been re-proven to me in the last couple of days.

To recap: I have one book "in the works" that my agent sold about a year ago and which is due to publish about a year from now. In other words I am at the exact midpoint of a two year publication process. I have no idea why it takes this long. My editor required virually no rewrites and just a couple of small additions which I had in within a month of the purchase. But never mind, everyone assures me that this is how the process works. So in the meantime I'm sitting in my squad car, eating donuts and casing the joint.

Uh oh....movement. This could be good or bad but either way it feels a little surreal because after hours and days and weeks and months Something Is Getting Ready to Happen.

There's two reasons why this shouldn't surprise me. For starters I know that the publishing world works like this. On the Thursday before Christmas someone at my publishing house wrote me an email saying they needed a picture of me for the catalogue. A picture with all these stipulations about pixel size and high def and all these photographic terms I didn't get....but suffice to say not the type of picture a friend takes out in the yard with her iphone. A very high tech specific type of picture and they needed it the next day.

Luckily, I had exactly what they were looking for, since just the month before I'd been at MacDowell Colony and part of the deal there is that they send a very nice photographer named Jo around to take professional pictures of the artists "at work." In some cases, I imagine this could lead to cool pictures - a violinist or sculptor at work might actually be an interesting sight to see. But what could be more boring than a picture of a writer writing? Jo had been doing this for years and she was great - helped me to relax, kept snapping while we were chatting. And the the result was several nice pictures of me gazing out at the distance with a kind of alertness, sort of like the expression of a coon hound on the scent. I bought a few copies of them, one for my mom for Christmas. So I happened through the wildest of coincidences to have a recent picture of the type they needed but this is just how it all works. You don't hear from anybody for forever when you get an email on Thursday saying they need something by Friday. Nothing....nothing.....emergency.....nothing.

The second reason I should have seen this present situation coming is that I invited it on myself. I want to sell my second book, the one I'm working on now and I would dearly love to sell it off a proprosal and sample chapters, i.e., to get enough money in the hopper to sustain me while I finish the book. Not only would this help my cash flow situation (which is at present pretty stagnant) but it would also ensure that the second book would be locked and loaded and ready for release fairly soon after the first one. My fantasy is that the first book will be popular with book clubs - I think it's slanted toward that kind of reader - and I know from past experience with my own book club that once people read an author that they like to read something else by that author in pretty short order. My book club got on jags where we'd read four or five books by the same person in a row and I don't think that's uncommon. So it makes sense to me that by the time Love in Mid-Air is ready to go into paperback, I should have The Gods of Arizona ready to come out in hardback. Which means it's time to get moving.

Of course a lot of things that make sense to me don't seem to fly in the world of publishing so I ran this idea by my agent without particularly high hopes. Sent him an email yesterday asking if he'd like me to come up with a proposal and sample chapters for the second book with the idea of showing them to my existing editor. The second book is a sequel to the first so it's hard to imagine she wouldn't be willing to at least look at the proposal....

So I sent my agent an email and he wrote back pronto and said yeah, to come up with a proposal and sample chapters and we'd take it from there. And now I'm in a tizzy. Not so much the samples - I got a couple of chapters in pretty good shape for my reading at MacDowell, but writing a plot summary is tough. I asked for this job but when he said yeah, go ahead, I felt a little freaked out. Makes no sense, I know, but welcome to the glamorous world of being a novelist. I'm excited. I'm edgy. I want to show the second one. I'm scared to show the second one. I have plenty to show. I don't have enough to show. I want them to commit to me. I don't want to be locked in. Sometimes I think I became a writer only because I'm not sure how to spell the word "schtizophrenic."

The Greatest Fiction About Fiction

2009-01-02T06:09:00.000-08:00

A couple of days ago someone said to me "Now that the novel has sold are you still going to do non-fiction?"

Which may have been an understandable question for a civilian but the person who asked me this defines herself as a writer. She is also independently wealthy which may account for the fact she can literally afford to be unaware of the financial realities of publishing. The question still irritated me.

Of course I'm still going to do non-fiction. For one reason, I like it and find the research - which involves traveling and interviewing, i.e., leaving my house and actually talking to other people - a good counterpoint to the solitude of fiction writing. But the reason I found my friend's question astounding is that of course I'm going to continue to write non-fiction for another reason as well : the regular sale of non-fiction is the only way a writer can financially survive.

I think there's a myth out there that if you sell a book, you get a big chunk of money - or at least enough to change your life. And that does happen to a sliver of the population. It happened to two of my close friends and for a while it affected my own thinking. If selling their first novel gave them enough cash to live on for years maybe lightening will strike a third time right over my head. But rationally you have to step back and see how rare that is. Most novels sell for an advance of less than $100,000 and in fact most of them sell for a lot less than that. And most authors have spent 4-7 years writing that book. Do the math. You'd make more money working at Starbucks.

I know all this well, but my reaction to my friend's innocent question is telling. I was able to calmly respond "Yes, of course I'll keep doing the non-fiction as well. I like it. I like talking to real people." And she nodded and I smiled. Grimly. There are so many myths about writing, especially about the writing of novels. Such as....

1. All it takes is a "good idea." In fact, if you ever hear a story about anything odd happening to anybody, the person telling you this story will inevitably add "You should write this down. It would be a freakin' best seller."

2. There's something romantic, perhaps even magical, about the process. The muse lands upon your shoulder. You go into an altered state of consciousness and awaken to find 350 well-typed pages on your desk. Or, my personal favorite, your characters speak to you and tell you what they want to do. They take over the book and in essence write it themselves. (This has never happened to me. I apparently have lazy characters. They seem to clock out the minute I do.)

3. People in New York are very enthused when you tell them you have a novel. They urge you to fly up immediately so they can take you to dinner and hear all about it.

4. They then give you lots of money for it. Enough money that you end up in a Hamptons white beach house somewhat like the one where Diane Keaton lived in "Something's Got To Give." Or maybe an upscale cabin in the Vermont woods with a big hairy dog or on a houseboat in Key West. Somewhere cool, that's for sure.

5. And you write the second one in about a week and a half.

Oh well. My friend's question was innocently meant. And, as I said, I look to non-fiction and fiction to give me entirely different things, both mentally and financially. So it's hard to say why I was so irritated....

More to mull.

The Curse of Great Barrington

2008-12-28T08:39:00.000-08:00

I can't remember how many years ago it was when this happened, but I suspect it's been a few. Six, maybe even seven. I was in a writing conference in Great Barrington, Massachusetts with a group of people who were then and still are, perhaps even more so, terribly important to my life. I had met Alison at a writing conference at Wesleyan, Dawn and Laura and Priscilla at a conference in Charlotte, and I had known Fred the longest of all. I met him at a confernce on the coast. He was our teacher. There were others there too, of course, but they don't matter. As I age, I grow ever more ruthless in my editing.

Great Barrington was wet and gray in November and the inn where we stayed was charmless. Our toilet seat was not attached to the commode, there was a lot of faded chintz everywhere and each room seemed, mysteriously, to be either way too cold or way too hot. I roomed with Alison and I annoyed her because I snored. The others all knew each other but it was the first time she had met everyone, including Fred, and I was eager to braid together the various strands of my writing life back then. It's a project I've long since given up on, but at the time it seemed desirable that all my "writing friends" would know and like each other. Perhaps I had fantasies of starting some sort of salon - which would be tricky, since the people I listed all lived in different states. God knows what I thought or what I hoped for back then. But I think I knew on some cellular level that this group of people assembled in this dreary inn would turn out to be very important to me and important to my life.

Either way, we were slogging through the conference and one night - wet and dank like all of them seemed to be - the entire group decided to go out for Japanese. The restaurant had a sign saying - rather unpromisingly - that they had the best sushi in the Berkshires. But they were unprepared for a party of 12 or 15 or whatever we were so we stood, crammed in our damp coats in the tiny foyer,and waited and waited while they attempted to put together a table. Fred went out, perhaps to smoke, I can't recall, or perhaps like me he was just overcome with claustrophobia. I went out on the street to join him. It was incredibly misty, like something out Sherlock Holmes or the Legend of Sleepy Hollow. We stood and shivered and he looked at me and said "You know, three books will come out of this conference. Yours, and Alison's, and Dawn's."

It was an astounding thing to say. Three books don't come out of any conference, at least not a tiny one somewhere in the Berkshires populated with a group of never-published would-be novelists. It's the statistical equivalent of stopping an elevator in mid-rise and turning around and saying "You know, three people on this elevator are going to win the lottery."

Fred was prone to grand pronouncements. He liked big, bitter, grandiose analogies - I remember the first class I ever had with him in which he compared the world of publishing to a demolition derby and said the last car moving, no matter how battered, would be the winner. But this statement struck me hard and has stayed with me all these years precisely because he didn't say it grandly. His voice was devoid of inflection. He said it matter-of-factly, like one would say it was night, or we were in Massachusetts, or we needed a table for 12 for dinner.

The ramifications of Fred's prediction turned out to be many and complex...and probably fodder of a future blog entry. For a while I even considered writing a memoir entitled "Three Books" based on his casual prophesy. But for now, let me just tell you what's got that night back on my mind. Recently, when I was at MacDowell Colony, I met and befriended a young architect named Jason. Jason is freakishly smart and not a writer so he could ask some very apt questions about the writing process that always caught me off guard. One night I told him this story. Probably in the context that I usually do - that Fred was right, that Dawn and Alison published first, that I feared I'd never sell my novel, but then I finally did, and all my usual moaning and whining. Because to me that's the heart of the story....that Fred made this outlandish prediction and it came true. Now before you say "Well he must have known they were good books or at least had the potential to be good books..." let me hasten to assure you of two things. At that point it would have taken Nostradomos himself to have seen the potential in any of these books. Fred probably recognized we were all three good writers but there is nothing special about that. The hills are full of good writers. The vast majority of writers, even good writers, never publish. Especially not novels. To me it is still amazing that he saw this would happen.

And I probably told this story to Jason in just this way, as a prophecy, but Jason's reaction, as it often did during our weeks together, surprised me. He said "He cursed you."

Hmmm....Cursed us? All writers want to publish and nothing can stop them from wanting this, although some don't have the balls to admit it and very few have the balls to survive it when it actually happens. Still, it was hard for me to understand what Jason meant by saying Fred had cursed us. And when I asked him about this all he said was that he didn't know, that it seemed like an expectation and that expectations are always loaded. I started backpedalling from my own story....maybe the fog wasn't as thick as I'd originally said it was. Maybe the night wasn't so dark. Maybe the toilet wasn't as broken as I recall. Surely dear Fred, my friend and mentor, would never casually curse three women while waiting for a table at a sushi restaurant.

But it all stays on my mind. Is a prediction of publication a blessing, a curse, or merely somewhere between the two, i.e., a prediction?

More to come....

rest stop story

2008-12-26T04:20:00.000-08:00

I'm writing in the dark morning hours of December 26th, and it's rather pleasant. A few days ago I was talking to my friend Dawn about the solstice and she said "But I like darkness...." and maybe she's right.

This weekend I am going to work on a short story, one of the ones where the idea seemed to fall out of the sky. A few weekends ago I visited Ginny in the mountains. She's a poet and I always read a lot of poetry when I'm up there....she has journals and chapbooks everywhere. The American Poetry Review, circa 1999, in a magazine rack beside the toilet, that sort of thing. Anyway, I was coming back to Charlotte on the Monday after the weekend, a little high on well-chosen words, and suddenly the idea for this short story came to me. Not exactly full-blown, but pretty much so, and I pulled off the road at one of those places labeled "Scenic overlook" and wrote the main idea down in my journal. Scribbed notes, so I'm not sure exactly how much I have, but I think it is a nice arc and that is what I intend to work on this weekend.

I love short stories. I consider them the purest American art form. I wish there was more of a market for them. Sometimes I think they're being weeded out like VHS or 8-tracks, that the whole word is being reformatted for novels.

But this weekend, I write.

Seven Pounds in the Bucket List

2008-12-23T12:40:00.000-08:00

Due to my decision to positively, absolutely wallow in despair I'm actually feeling much better today. Following on the heels of taking my recently widowed mother to a viewing of the new Will Smith comedy Seven Pounds I rented The Bucket List, lay down on the couch and sobbed my eyes out.

I cry at stupid things. I cry at things that are designed to make me cry. Terms of Endearment? Sob-a-rama every time. So even though The Bucket List was manipulative in the extreme (although, in my defense, what sort of hard-hearted bastard wouldn't tear up at the demise of Morgan Freeman?) it was still a great relief to let it out. And my friends have galloped to the rescue in their horseless fashion, many of them sending sweet emails or calls since they knew I was blue. Happy holidays everyone!

Writing resolutions for 2009

2008-12-22T07:00:00.000-08:00

Hmmm...

A couple of days ago, following a conversation with my writing buddy Laura, I drafted a list of resolutions for the upcoming year. They don't have anything to do with word counts, hours at the keyboard, pages submitted, etc. In some ways they're easier resolutions to keep and in some ways harder. They're all about the mental part of the game. Here goes.

For 2009 I will:

1. Keep the holy trinity going. Each day I will a) dance b) meditate and c) journal. I know all these things work wonders for me in terms of my mood and my sanity so why do I have so much trouble doing them?

2. Look for more writing colonies. Stat!

3. Practice gratitude daily. Hokey, yeah, but I suspect it might be the key to everything that matters in the creative process.

4. View the things that happen in the publishing practice as learning opportunities not punishments from a vengeful god. With this in mind, I've started a file literally labeled "Things I'll know when I sell the second book," which reminds me.....

5. Write the second book.

6. Hold tight to my writing friends and foster a sense of creative community. Encourage other writers, not in a vapid "Love ya, babe" sort of way but in terms of telling them repeatedly where I feel their writing strengths lie. I think most people know what they're doing wrong but I'm not sure most of us know what we're doing right.

7. Don't take everything so damn personally.

8. And on a related note...don't react quickly to anything and everything that happens on the publishing side, whether it's emails from my editor, reviews, feedback etc. Wait twelve hours (twelve) before responding.

9. Continue to develop my craft through both teaching and taking classes from other writers I admire.

10. Try to remember what initially drew me to the idea of writing a novel. Sometimes I feel that inital impulse waning, slipping away, being drowned out by the louder noises from the marketplace.

The old ennui

2008-12-22T05:43:00.000-08:00

Well, guys, Christmastime is coming....my dining room is full of wrapped gifts, my inbox is full of well-wishes, my calendar is full of upcoming events and all I can do is sit and ponder my - and I use this term loosely - writing career. How sad is that?

Tomorrow will be the anniversary of the day I sold my novel. Grand Central has decided to title it, Love in Mid-Air, ergo the title of my blog. (I call this "marketing.") But the novel, alas, seems also to be in mid-air. Publication date pushed back to January 2010 (which feels like forever) and I never hear anything from my agent or my editor. I'm well aware that the next year will be very challenging for me and part of the challenge will be my efforts to go from a "writer" (i.e., someone who lives alone, works alone, shuffles around in her bathrobe talking to people who don't exist, but who at least has complete control over her work) to an "author" (i.e., someone who is expected to have a public persona and convince people to buy her book and who has absolutely no control over anything.) This scares me.

Okay, now I'm getting ready to say two things that are contracdict each other and are yet equally true. I am afraid nobody is going to buy this book. I have a lot of friends who are writers and I'm painfully aware that there's a long list of things that can happen when you publish your first novel and that one of those things is "nothing." My agent only took me on as a favor to my friend Alison, who is an important client of his. My editor seems to have fluctuating enthusiasm for the project. I didn't get a big advance. Or at least not an advance of a size that will force them try and create publicity for the book just to protect their investment. I fear my book falls into the publishing category of "Let's throw this against the wall and see if it sticks."

And I'm afraid that somebody is going to by this book and that I will be the one thing I've feared most in my life. I'll be seen.

I know, I know. I'm bitching and most people don't have an editor, an agent or a sold book at all.

I know, I know. Even authors who get big advances and have the publicity pushes and involved agent/editors often deal with the same sort of worry and disappointment.

I know, I know. I am, with no sarcasm intended at all, among the blessed of the earth.

Yet still I ponder and still I stew.

My only prayer for surviving a year of waiting, I think, is to try and find some lesson in this process. Try and make some sense of what's happening to me and what's not happening to me. That's why I've started this blog. Stay posted. I have only yet begun to whine.