my novel on toast

new novel, new blog

2008-11-08T22:21:00.002-05:00

I started a new novel, and somehow this demanded that I start a new blog.
Check it out--here.

stories are short--

2008-06-10T12:05:00.003-04:00

but it takes a long time to write them. Not as long as a novel, oh no, but it's not proportionate to their size. Sometimes it's a matter of stopping, because you don't know where to go. I've had stories that stretched over years, because I couldn't figure out how to get beyond the 1st 3 pages. Sometimes you just keep slogging, doing a little bit and a little bit more, not seeing the end, or even how you're going to fit in the dead husband on the 2nd floor into the so-called plot.
That's where I am now, struggling with the dead husband (who is also nameless, and maybe that's his problem), and trying to figure out if I want this story to have two points of view or only one. Having multiple POVs is convenient--you can say things from more than one place, put in events that are invisible to the single POV. But convenience isn't all in a story--you can't just keep putting things in like discount appliances that you thought you might like, but now they're cluttering up the counters of your kitchen (I wanted that juicer, but it's so big!).
Anyway, today is a day of not much writing, since I have to go to campus and do various things, and also tonight is my writers group night (ironic: writers group = no writing). Which is why, in this scrap of time before I go and write reference letters and xerox things, I'm thinking about writing instead.

off to novel land

2008-05-29T10:28:00.003-04:00

I'm going to visit the home of my ghost novel--Logan, Ohio--not any longer for research. It's like visiting the homeplace of a long-gone relative--I'll walk around and say, yes, here Carl and Nancy got a sandwich while they discussed whether or not they'd perform an exorcism; and here, Jason ran down to the river while Sierra watched him fondly from the porch of the canoe livery; and so on.
Sorry, I'll say to the novel, I'd like to stay and chat, but I've got some business with a couple of stories--I'll give you a call some time.

summer writing

2008-05-27T11:27:00.004-04:00

Just as we used to have summer reading, either for school, or to win a modest prize from the public library, I've instituted summer writing. I've finished (for now at least) working on my novel (I'd like to think it's totally finished, but it's probably not). I have another novel I want to revise, but I don't want to work on that for a while. And I don't want to start a new novel (plus I don't have any novel-size ideas as yet).
So my summer writing is going to be stories. I spent a week on a writing retreat, and assigned myself to come up with a new story beginning every day (6 in all). And now I'm working on one that has the working title of "Yuma," since it's set there and I couldn't think of anything else. It has 6 characters so far--an old woman, the young woman who lives across the street from her, the girl's baby and the girl's husband, the old woman's dead husband, and a man down the street with whom the dead husband used to feud. How will it go? We'll see, as I used to tell my kids when they asked me questions I couldn't or didn't want to answer.

snowed in, sort of

2008-02-27T12:41:00.003-05:00

And snow is good for revision, but today I don't need it, since I've finished this draft, which means that I can put Carl and Nancy and Isabel out of my head for a while.
It's not that I don't like them, but I've been prodding them with the cursor for a month, and they're a little sullen by now, wanting to know why they can't keep that perfectly good line of dialogue, or why I took the china swans out of Carl's booth at the antique mall.
I have my reasons! But of course all writers say this, don't they?

still revising

2008-02-25T12:43:00.003-05:00

I'm now on part 3, about 1/3 of the way through. So far I've cut abt 30 pp., which I would have said was impossible, but apparently not. It amazes me and shames me a little that I'm finding so much dead wood.
There are several kinds of cutting that I'm doing:
--finding a shorter (better) way to say something, just the most basic kind of cutting
--the parts where someone is getting into the car or opening a door or moving across the room, and the movement itself isn't necessary or significant
--bits where I was interested in something, but it didn't really do anything for the book; hence I've cut back judiciously on Carl's raptures about Ohio history. I did a fair amount of research, and my subconscious writer must have felt it should not go to waste.
--little tangents that I took in the first draft; these narrative tangents sometimes led me to great stuff--the discovery of Lily's next door neighbor Emma, who aims a shotgun at Carl, but then goes with him to find Lily, for instance. But others were dead ends.
--when I repeat myself, which happens especially in dialogue, I've noticed, which is probably because real speakers are often repetitive, saying the same thing in different ways, even with totally different words, but the underlying message is still the same.
This is the 5th draft, I believe, and I'm feeling humbled by how much I found to do.

snow is good for revision

2008-01-20T14:15:00.000-05:00

I set myself to cut 10% from the first section of my novel (on my 2nd reader's advice {thanks Isaurine}), and I managed to cut 9.85878%, which is as close as a clamshell,* so I'm feeling pleased.
The other part of the planned revision is harder, i.e., to make Carl a little more substantial, get him to stop hiding out between the lines.
I ought to thank the snow and the cold, because they made it easier to stay in front of the computer. Every time I looked out the window and saw the giant icicle hanging from my across-the-street neighbor's porch, I'd shiver, and turn back to get some heat and friction going with the keyboard.
My plan for Carl is to give him a failed relationship--a loss in love is always good copy. And maybe something else, something minor, like a passion for trains or a history of thumbsucking (hey, some very brilliant people used to suck their thumbs--not saying who).
*I've decided to start making up my own future cliche similes.

2008-01-15T12:37:00.000-05:00

Outside, it's snowing in a lazy way, and inside my mind is lagging and drifting along with the snow. I've been brainstorming new projects, and nothing is catching me, or catching my interest. My interest is lying somnolent on the bottom of the River of Consciousness, not interested in taking the bait. Or it's hiding in the Jungle of Consciousness, camoflaged by light/shade patterns.
I have time off in which to write write write, and as always at the beginning of that time, I'm floundering. Usually it takes a couple of weeks before I can pull up my socks and start to be productive. If I was smart, I'd build this into my plans:
1/5-1/10: flounder and whine
1/11-1/15: mope and read a mystery you've already read twice
1/16-1/20: decide to redo the dining room and learn how to make strudel
1/21: pull up socks and begin on new novel/novella/story
I've already read the twice-read mystery, so maybe I'm ready to get out the Austrian cookbooks.
Postcript to Nanowrimo: I didn't get anywhere near 50,000 words, but I did come out of it with about 20 pp of a possible novella, sort of alternate-future-ish.

nano-writing

2007-11-01T19:59:00.000-04:00

I decided to do NaNoWriMo again this year. I might not make it to 50,000, but I like the idea of writing along with all the thousands of others who are going to be trying, too. I've already written 1200 words! only 48,800 to go.
The thing I'll be writing is not any of the things I've been working on: something different, a writing vacation.
If you don't know about National Novel Writing Month, click here. It's not too late to sign up.

a fever of words

2007-10-27T19:22:00.000-04:00

Do you write when you're sick?
I find it depends on what kind of disease I have. Writing is perfectly possible with a low nausea or a pain in the knee, but anything that involves the head is right out for me. Whatever is wrong with my head--sinus troubles, aches of the ear or head or teeth, dizziness--fills up all the space in my brain and nothing much can go on up there besides.
Writing when there's something else going on inside your head is asking for trouble. If you manage to squeeze out anything at all, the words will be crabbed and misshapen, the sentences warped, which will make you imagine the inside of your head, the lumps and misshapes of your brain, which even when everything is fine is a squeamish-looking object. Who wants to know how the bones of the inner ear are misaligned when you've had a bout of vertigo? A game of pick-up sticks that no one has bothered to pick up.
All of which is to say that I have a bad cold, with a kind of sinusy feeling of my head being swollen 50% beyond its happy norm, and some disquiet in my ears, and so I am not writing today.
I had my hair done instead, and listened to the phone conversation of the woman who was sitting near me while our various dyes and streaks were being timed. She got 3 calls on her cell, which she stacked up with call waiting, and she told each of them the same thing: "I am so pissed off," which was because she had had $600 stolen "plus other things" which she perhaps didn't want to mention in front of a staid-looking middle-aged woman having her roots dyed golden-brown (me), but which which this woman (me) thought might be drugs.

russian: nyet

2007-10-25T16:33:00.000-04:00

Three and a half months is a long blog vacation, and I regret to say that I didn't spend it learning Russian or waterskiing or crocheting. (Confession: although I'd love to learn Russian, the very idea of crocheting makes my fingers tangle up; and it's way too late for water sports unless they involve a blow-up raft).
But I have a new novel project, while I'm waiting to see what happens with the ghost novel, which is actually an old novel that I mean to revise. So here I am again, trying to think about how a book works, and getting intimate with reluctant characters. I dropped this novel several years ago, because I couldn't solve two problems: 1) what to do about a character who didn't have enough substance, and whose backstory I could never settle on; 2) whether or not to keep in the subplot about finding a cave with archaeological finds in it, and what to replace it if I didn't keep it, or if it should be replaced at all.
Oh, and I guess there were 3 problems, because I didn't know how to end it, even though I wrote my way right up to the end, or where the end was supposed to be 3 times--3 unsatisfactory, annoying, not-in-any-way-good endings.
But I had a feeling that I could tackle it more effectively now, so I pulled it out and we're having another go-round.
In honor of starting another novel revision, I'm taking up the 5 writing strengths meme that Jadepark tagged me for (here is her own post on that) weeks ago.
1. I'm good at dialogue. I like writing it, and I've got a pretty good ear. I'm not bad at making speech sound like the character who's saying it. There's a small flaw inherent in this strength though, because I often write whole scenes where people do nothing but talk, because I like it and because it's so easy.
2. I can do a very good 1st person voice. I like getting into someone else's head and speaking from behind his or her face--it's a form of writer escapism, I guess. I especially like to write 1st person characters who are feisty and maybe a little difficult, which is a way of getting out of my nice-girl role (Catholic school alumni: unite).
3. I can write funny, although I can't do humor, by which I mean that I can be funny if it's the coming-from-the-side, unexpected kind of funny, but not on-purpose funny. Sometimes though I've written something which I think is quite funny and other people think it's depressing (e.g., my 1st novel).
4. I'm good at coming up with what's-next, although only if I'm actually writing. It doesn't work if I'm thinking about writing, only if I'm fingertips-to-the-keyboard, plowing through a chapter. But it's so much better anyway to be writing than thinking abt writing or planning to write, right?
5. I have never given up.

If anyone's interested and hasn't done this yet, I tag Plan B, Madame X, The Cleveland Brawler, Book of Marvels, and the Alternate Side Parker.

the novel as cannibal

2007-07-08T11:54:00.000-04:00

From a review of a book on Bakhtin:
...the novel, that mongrelised genre which--unlike epic, pastoral or tragedy--is entirely without rules, and which in Bakhtin's eyes is less a definable form than a deconstructive force. The novel lives purely in its dialogic modes, cannibalising and parodying them. It is a maverick anti-genre, deviantand non-canonical, a secular scripture which shows up all discourse as partial and provisional.
I once audited a course in the theory of the novel--Bakhtin was on the reading list, and I don't remember anything as interesting as this. Obviously, I needed Terry Eagleton (the reviewer) to explain it to me.
In the excavation of my office, I have reached the layer wherein my unfinished novel (the one I abandoned to write the ghost novel) lies, dismembered, its skeleton flattened by the weight of years and notebooks. Shall I brush the accumulated dust away and retrieve it from its burial place? Maybe.

visiting the past

2007-07-05T17:35:00.000-04:00

I've been living all day long in 1979 and 1982 and 1984--reading my journals and notebooks. Not what you're supposed to be doing when you clean, but I couldn't help but stop to read how I felt in 1977 when I was leaving my 1st marriage, or a list of things to do in 1983. Make pumpkin bread, take raincoat to cleaners, call mother, type plot summary. I had a raincoat then? My mother was alive. I used a typewriter! It's like visiting a foreign country where I used to live, the past as exotic to me as Brazil, a place where I was younger and more interested in shaving my legs (it shows up on many lists).
Here is what I wrote (somewhat later) about my writing classes:
The 1st creative writing class I took--Alberta with her birdlike turning of the head, her twittering, her steely, glinting eye. I wouldn't read my story to the class, so she did. She read it, and I felt stunned, and horrified to hear my words in her mouth.
I remember sitting in class, listening and waiting to say something clever, judging the teacher, my sometimes arrogance. I remember the university as a series of caves--cave-rooms where I studied, flirted, read, talked; and paths--English dept. to the library, library to the Cage, cafeteria to the pool, pool to bookstore. The campus a miniature world, a diorama set in the larger world of the city, places marked by my vision of myself, my long legs in tight jeans coming toward me in the dark glass of Rhodes Tower.

notes and plans

2007-07-04T12:23:00.000-04:00

Still in the office, still surrounded by paper, although some of it has been thrown away (so far, one large garbage bag, plus one Bed Bath and Beyond bag, and one Target bag); and some has been confined to folders. Quite a lot is still sitting around in piles though, with cryptic post-it notes so I'll keep them straight.
All this sounds onerous, perhaps, but I find that I'm having fun. I've come across all sorts of things: old letters; a Christmas card hand written and drawn in pencil by my younger daughter (then abt 7, I think); some ancient poems of my sister's; a sheaf of song lyrics written by my 2nd husband; a list of the people who were in my 1st writing group; and so on. The most fun thing I've done is to weigh the materials, drafts, folders, sources, etc., for the novel I just finished--it comes out to 26 pounds on my admittedly faulty bathroom scale. The current part of this project: entering in all the stray idea notes I've found, on torn-out pages, subscription blanks, post-its, backs of envelopes, etc. Thanks to a helpful commenter on Jadepark's brilliant blog, I've discovered Google Notebooks, where my deathless ideas will be available from any computer and preserved for eternity or as long as Google lasts, whichever comes first.
Random list of notes I found:
--title: "The School for Disembodied Stories"
--the writing group list: MB, MJ, Erieblue, Peggy, Jackie, Joe, Cory, Lisa, Michael (and Ronnie), Paige, Dale. A sunny hi to you all, wherever you are!
--a dream about climbing a rock face scored like corduroy
--a character who makes a living writing (and making up) books of prophecies
--sleeping in a room with birds in cages
--the boy who fell off the bus in Yuma
Now surely I can do something with that...

notebooks

2007-06-29T16:09:00.000-04:00

I like legal pads. I have a habit of starting a list or a string of thoughts or a brainstorming on a legal pad, and using up 1-5 pp. of it, and then putting it aside. Because the next time I want to make a list (the Big List of Everything I Have to Do, for instance) I want a new surface. I don't like rolling the pages back to get at a new one. Hence, the pile of legal pads above, each of which had a few pages used, but which are now fresh (more or less) and ready to be used again.
All this makes me feel as if I'm getting organized, but it may be part of a vast illusion that I succumb to time and again.
Meanwhile, I have revised a story and sent it out--"Bring Sheaves of Corn and Poppies," which is a pretty pretentious title, but I was stuck. I sent it to the Missouri Review, which accepts online submissions. They charge you a fee ($3, I think) but it's well worth it, if you consider postage and the general annoyance of dealing with printing a copy and postage and going to the post office where Len the guy behind the counter looks at you knowingly (why doesn't this woman give up already?).

archaeology at home

2007-06-25T11:42:00.000-04:00

I'm still at it, although the only actual cleaning done was my kleenex dusting as I moved the piles. I've been sifting down through the layers, and according to the sophisticated dating methods I'm using I can put the beginning of the Look at Later Pile at 10/3/2005 or thereabouts, using the note attached to the notebook I left at CVS as a guide.This was thoughtfully mailed back to me by the conscientious clerk, and it was on the pile because I was going to write her a note to thank her, but I left it go so long that I just did it when I went in to get a Snickers bar several weeks later.

The notebook was almost empty--it had a number of coupons stuffed into it (for Chico's, Origins, etc.), a ruler thanking me for giving money to the Knights of Columbus, a student schedule for Fall 05, and a handy list of produce highest and lowest in pesticide residue (pineapples good, peaches not). The only thing written inside was a cryptic note: "Leo Burdette's farm"--don't know Leo, or why I wanted to remember his farm.

I have two stacks of books: the Pile of Books I Want to Re-read

and the Pile of Books That Have Been Thoroughly Read and Need to be Put Away

But it's been so long since I read these last that I might read some of them again--you can't read To the Lighthouse too many times--and it's such a summer kind of book.

cleaning up

2007-06-24T18:35:00.000-04:00

All the long time I've been writing and revising my novel I haven't cleaned my desk, or the long table (formerly my mother's dining room table). I cleaned the office a bit, because my office is also a guest bedroom, but on the desk and the table I only pushed the piles of stuff farther away from the edge so they wouldn't be a temptation to Z and C when they're visiting.

But now I'm more or less finished, for now at least (note all those qualifiers!), so I'm cleaning. Some discoveries are good--a book I'd been looking for midway down the Pile of Things I Should Do But Not Right Now; some bad--in the Pile of Things I Should Look at Some Time or Other, I found a bill I hadn't paid.

I also found

-- a recipe for melon soup
--3 NY Times Book Reviews (old, older, and ancient)
--some copies of a story with comments from my writers group
--an envelope with a list that adjured me to clean up my email and decide something about the undergrad meeting
--reminder from my dentist
--one of my sister's poems, with the great title of "Sugar Off, Daddy"
--an envelope with the address of someone I intended to write to 6 months ago: sorry, Theresa
And I found a poem I'd clipped from the NYer by W.S. Merwin, called "To the Book":
Go on then
in your own time
this is far as I will take you

A kind of farewell and elegy for a book which has been written, but not finished:
of course you are not finished
how can you be finished
Merwin asks. Which was a good thing to find just now, after all this long time, although I don't know the answer.

done/undone

2007-06-05T11:19:00.000-04:00

Amazingly, I've managed to cut more than 40,000 words. Who knew I was so good at hacking and burning? I give credit to the lifelong tutelage of S, my 1st and best critic: please take a bow.
Now onto last part, which has 2 components:
--fixing the fixy-up things, listed on legal pad; also should check old revising notes to see if I’ve missed anything.
--writing the new ghost sections; which includes deciding how many more and who they should be; also moving the one I took out of LT’s chapter.
Here’s the list:
Done:
--cut some more: tighten it up until it’s squeaky (it squeaks like a rusty gate; although somehow that is not a pleasing simile in connection with the work of one's heart)
--renumber chapters
--did I cut the Rose Lake chapter??? (no)
--backlight some of the stuff that shows up later (Isabel's money-making plans, eg)
--clean up little stuff
--do I need to cut some minor characters? (no; the only characters I cut was one of the 2 dogs)
Undone:
---put in some more ghost voices
--new names for some chapters
--print it out and send to V
--ditto to S
--send to my agent

cut from the novel, redux

2007-05-30T14:59:00.000-04:00

6 more chapters done. I’ve cut 150 pp (total). Which is good. My shoulders hurt. Apparently my brain can only produce short sentences.

Here's something I cut. But I might put it back elsewhere:

What they would say
The air is thicker than water isn’t that a saying? Air is thicker than water and that’s how we know something. That’s how we do something. When we had hands. The air falls down the steps like water smelling of breath and words. We wanted to leave but the air is always too thick, we wanted to. Now we go from one room to the next with never a way to settle down and do anything. If we stand at the open spaces, the boxes of light, what’s the name of those, you can see that the air is thinner out there. We used to go out there. If someone would call. If someone would put out a hand. The light from that place out there is bright and sometimes a movement sweeps through it. What was that called? It moves the trees, yes the trees. Did we love the trees? did we cut them down? If someone would call. If we had a name.

cut from the novel

2007-05-26T12:46:00.000-04:00

Cut from Chapter 5:
The thing about a cemetery was that it was eventless, Carl thought. You could put flowers down or plant an ornamental bush, but this was only a change in the landscape. He’d spent some time in cemeteries, even before he became interested in the afterlife, because of their importance to a historian, and he’d noticed the tendency of some families, to want to furnish the gravesite as if it were truly a house, or at least a room. Flowers, stuffed animals, photos, flags.
Once in a cemetery in Columbus he’d come across a woman sleeping on a man’s grave, her arm draped around the flat-to-the-ground headstone. Her husband’s or her lover’s. The grave was not too old, for the sod lines still showed in the grass. The woman’s eyelids flickered, and she breathed slowly and regularly. At the time, it had seemed to him extreme, and pitiful. He’d backed away, afraid that she’d awake and he’d have to face her bizarre grief.
Some of the old graves in the Logan Cemetery, behind the Logan High School, were like tiny stone houses, family enclosures. The doors of these were always locked, of course, and so he’d never seen inside. But who knew what might be in there—an armchair, a barbecue grill, a photo album, a set of Dickens.
A classic case of Carl thinking too much.

doing the numbers

2007-05-23T14:50:00.000-04:00

Revision log entry:
5/23/07
went through 2nd chapter—cut out 1024 words (yay!)
Total now: 30,878; 123 pp. Plus took off 6 TNR pp. (total 11 TNR)
Edited 63 pp. Total pp 117;
All of which means that I now have

702 (original pp)
-123 (total cut so far)
579
-11 (TNR pp)
568

Anal? Yes; but it works for me.

re-re-revision

2007-05-21T11:54:00.000-04:00

My metaphorical pencils are sharpened. The toast is crisp, the novel slightly underdone. Time for the 3rd revision, which I hope will be the last, but then maybe you always hope a revision will be the last.

The vision I had of the novel, years ago now, has come down to this piece of worked stone, this crisped and nibbled pile of pages. The question is always--does it come close? how close can it come?

You get tired of it, you feel fond of it, you hate it, you fall in love with it again: blah blah blah.

short story countdown

2007-05-10T18:18:00.000-04:00

I just found out that May is short story month: who knew? And like some others, I'm moved to list, in no particular order, my favorite short stories of all time (with the understanding that "of all time" is a flexible term, and that the list may in future change according to a wild new enthusiasm, or if I take a violent and inexplicable dislike to any of these, although I probably won't).

"The Death of Ivan Ilyich," Tolstoy. I'm always trying to talk people into reading and loving this story, which truth be told is hardly a story, more of a novella. But whatever it is, it's brilliant. Ivan dies, and then lives in back story, and then dies again in slightly slow motion--simple, yes, but it's Tolstoy who's telling this, and he is the master of rendering daily life in high relief, and also of making you see that even characters you thought were contemptible have something else to them, and further that in some ways you are just like they are, with the contemptible and the glorious generously and chaotically mixed. If you don't believe me, read it--I'd love to argue about it.
Quote: "Having told his wife at dinner-time of Ivan Ilych's death, and of his conjecture that it might be possible to get her brother transferred to their circuit, Peter Ivanovich sacrificed his usual nap, put on his evening clothes and drove to Ivan Ilych's house. At the entrance stood a carriage and two cabs. Leaning against the wall in the hall downstairs near the cloakstand was a coffin-lid covered with cloth of gold, ornamented with gold cord and tassels, that had been polished up with metal powder. Two ladies in black were taking off their fur cloaks."
"A Good Man is Hard to Find," Flannery O'Connor. No matter how many times I read this, it hits me with the same well-aimed jab. Unpleasant family goes on a road trip and meet the Misfit, a brutal criminal, with not entirely unforseen results. O'Connor is so unsentimentally sharp you wonder how she lived with herself, but at the same time the characters are shown in detail that is so well observed that it's almost loving. Also it's funny. And has one of the best endings ever.
Quote: "'Now look here, Bailey,' she said, 'see here, read this,' and she stood with one hand on her thin hip and the other rattling the newspaper at his bald head. 'Here this fellow that calls himself The Misfit is aloose from the Federal Pen and headed toward Florida and you read here what says he did to these people. Just you read it. I wouldn't take my children in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it.'"
"The New Atlantis," Ursula K. Le Guin. (I'm pretty sure this is the title.) This is a surreal story, part of which takes place in a tired somewhat future world, where resources are scarce, and people aren't allowed to marry or do anything so useless as play music or make art. The other part is a poetic evocation of the awakening of a longdead land that might be Atlantis--the 2 parts of the story comment on each other, layering and overlapping. A haunting story. (Couldn't find a quote for this on-line, and my copy is not to be found.)
"A Wilderness Station," and "Meneseteung,"Alice Munro. I could have chosen a dozen other Munro stories, because I love her work inordinately, but these 2 go together nicely, because both use "documentary" material to write stories that are alternate histories. "Meneseteung," a fictional bio of an obscure (fictional) 19th century poetess and spinster, collages it up with newspaper articles, poetry, artfully slipping points of view--very postmodern but extremely readable. "A Wilderness Station" is the violent and ambivalent story of what did or didn't happen when 2 brothers and a woman who is wife to one of them go out to try and wrest a hard living from the bush. It's the lady or the tiger, except so much better (I always hated that story).
Quote (from "Meneseteung"): ''Champlain and the naked Indians and the salt deep in the earth, but as well as the salt the money. . . . Also the brutal storms of winter and the clumsy and benighted deeds on Pearl Street. The changes of climate are often violent and if you think about it there is no peace even in the stars.''
"Pilgrims," Julie Orringer. This is from her 2003 collection, How to Breathe Underwater--the story of a sad family who goes to a vegetarian Thanksgiving. It breaks a lot of rules about how to write a short story in the most satisfying way, and uses a child's point of view in a daring and unsentimental way.
Quote: "Ella pushed at her loose tooth wit hthe tip of her tongue and fanned her legs with the hem of her velvet dress. On the seat beside her, Benjamin fidgeted with his shirt buttons. He had worn his Pilgrim costume, brown shorts and a white shirt and yellow paper buckles taped to his shoes. In the front seat their father drove without a word, while their mother dozed against the window glass. She wore a blue dress and a strand of jade beads and a knit cotton hat beneath which she was bald."
"Metamorphosis," Kafka. You knew I was going to say this, didn't you? In fact, I don't always like Kafka, although I always admire him. But "Metamorphosis" is so beguilingly written, so seductive, I can't resist its awful charm. You remember the plot: man becomes bug; goes downhill from there.
Quote: "He needed arms and hands to push himself upright. Instead of these, however, he had only many small limbs which were incessantly moving with very different motions and which, in addition, he was unable to control. If he wanted to bend one of them, then it was the first to extend itself, and if he finally succeeded doing what he wanted with this limb, in the meantime all the others, as if left free, moved around in an excessively painful agitation. “But I must not stay in bed uselessly,” said Gregor to himself. "
"Happy Endings," Margaret Atwood. This is a deconstruction of narrative that makes fun of the plot of all fictions, but still manages to be moving. The beginnings are individual, Atwood reminds us, and the middles can be byzantinely different, but the end of all stories is the same.
Quote: "John, who is an older man, falls in love with Mary, and Mary, who is only twenty-two, feels sorry for him because he's worried about his hair falling out. She sleeps with him even though she's not in love with him. She met him at work. She's in love with someone called James, who is twenty-two also and not yet ready to settle down. "
"Rock Springs," Richard Ford. I don't like Ford as much when he's writing novels and being funny, but when he's writing short stories, when he's gloomy and low-down, I love him to death. In RS, the narrator and Edna plan to go to Florida, but things go from bad to worse, every detail of their miserable road trip lovingly detailed.
Quote: "But we were half down through Wyoming, going toward Interstate 80 and feeling good about things, when the oil light flashed on in the car I'd stolen, a sign I knew to be a bad one."

There are so many other short stories that I love--there's one about a bird expert who gets captured by some guerillas, and another by Le Guin with characters that change roles in each of several sections, and a wonderful one by Toni Cade Bambara that is not "Gorilla, My Love" (although that one is good, too)-- but I can't think of them right now, or can't remember the titles, plus I'm hungry, plus I want to watch Ugly Betty. If you have a list, put it up. If you love or hate these, let me know. I'm open to other people's opinions. Really.

over but not yet

2007-05-01T11:12:00.000-04:00

School is over in the sense that classes are done, but also not over because there is the grading to get through, and last stray appointments, and paperwork (which is always noxious). I've set a date for going back into the novel one more time (one last time, I hope)--in about 10 days. Going back in, which makes it sound like a country, or a jungle, or the sea floor, and it is like all of these: foreign, tangled, deep.
But I'm looking forward to it.
In the meantime, I'm taking up the gauntlet of Isaurine's post on little annoyances.
My Top 10 Little Annoyances:
1. Yellow highlighter in books. I used to be very purist about books and couldn't stand anything written in them at all, but now when I'm reading a book I am mostly charmed to see what someone else thought about a scene or a concept. And sometimes people write mysterious things in books, as if they are sending coded messages. Once I got a book out of the library, a mystery novel, and someone had written on one of the last pages: "you know Bill." Had Bill also killed someone with poison tea stewed from the leaves of rhubarb (as in the book)? Or what?
But I still can't stand highlighter: too disfiguring, no interesting content; too neon-ish.
2. Running out of chocolate. Maybe this isn't a little annoyance though? more catastrophic?
3. Having to return phone messages. I don't know why, but I hate to have to call people back who have left messages on the answering machine. The smart thing to do would be to turn it off; or to always answer the phone (which I almost never do; I also hate answering the phone).
4. Having to get dressed up in something other than a nice pair of pants and a top. Any occasion which requires more means that I will be trying on everything I own and leaving clothes strewn across 2 bedrooms while I try to find the right thing to wear to the English Awards banquet, for instance, or a cousin's 1st communion party.
5. Students' papers which are enrobed in plastic covers: hate them. Too slippery, so you can't stack them; also hard to hold open while reading.
6. The mail, because it is always so boring. This is because of email probably--I get a fair amount of interesting email. But my mail almost entirely consists of advertising flyers and offers from my credit card to pay off my other credit cards and (last week) the offer of an easy-pay plan to buy a spot in a mausoleum.
7. Losing my place in a book and then having to read back and forth (so to speak) to find the spot I stopped. Using a bookmark would take care of this, but I also hate bookmarks.
8. When my sister says she's going to call me back in 2 minutes, and then she doesn't.
9. When my pen runs out of ink. How can this happen so often?
10. Having to buy a new purse. I always put this off as long as possible because I like consistency in my accessories. The purse has to be large enough to put a book into it, and it has to have a shoulder strap, and a zippered pocket, and it has to be not ugly. This doesn't seem like much to ask, but it always takes me months to find a new purse. I could probably do a life of myself by what purse I was carrying at the time: the years of the giant leather backpack-like purse, the canvas sack era, the purchase of the Coach bag (signifying full-time employment), and so on. But I won't.
How about you? what are your top ten?

buswoman's holiday

2007-04-14T22:03:00.000-04:00

On hiatus from writing, what's a writer to do? Write, but something else.
Virginia Woolf liked always to have one or more projects going, something to take up when a novel got slow or difficult. In her honor, and more practically, because why not, I've been working on a story while I let the novel steep and stew.
Excerpt from a no-name story:
Janine unfolded one of the lawn chairs, extending the footrest, and sat on it, leaning back to look up into the night sky. She got out her cigarettes and lit one, the rasp of the match muted, the sound was sucked up into the air. She had claimed not to remembe the man's name, the man in the motel in Arkansas, but it was Geoffrey. And it was actually Oklahoma, a brand-new Days Inn where she stopped on her way to Kansas City. Geoffrey had been married, that was true, and she'd met him in the motel bar. But he wasn't, as she'd implied, a businessman. He'd been camping out by some tiny lake, and the wind, that house-lifting, wicked-witch killing Midwestern plains wind, had been so strong that his tent had started to move along the ground. Even with him and all his gear inside, he said, laughing, and it was going toward the lake.

hear me meme

2007-03-31T14:57:00.000-04:00

Here's a meme I got from Gina at Madame X: the Pick a Band Meme, where you answer a list of questions using only song titles from one band or artist.

Who to pick? Janis Joplin, who else.

Male or female: Tell Mama

Describe yourself: Combination of the Two

Best piece of advice: Get it While You Can

Describe last relationship: One Good Man

Describe last crush: Trouble in Mind

Say something to a crush: Try (Just a Little Bit Harder)

Say something to an ex: Ball and Chain

Say something to someone who's hurt you: Piece of My Heart

How do you feel right now: Summertime

Get your feather boa, and join me at worship in the Church of Janis.

work-in-progress meme

2007-03-14T11:37:00.001-04:00

A novel-writer's meme, which has wended its way through the web: Turn to page 123 in your work-in-progress. (If you haven’t gotten to page 123 yet, then turn to page 23. If you haven’t gotten there yet, then get busy and write page 23.) Count down four sentences and then instead of just the fifth sentence, give us the whole paragraph.

Here is mine:
She finished her hamburger and folded her napkin on her plate. The barmaid was wiping glasses, looking dreamily out toward the front tables. The old man at the bar was bent over his plate and cup of coffee. Voices and laughter drifted thinly from the restaurant, a group of office workers trying to settle the check while the waitress stood indifferently beside their table. Nancy always maintained to Carl that she despised the Sportsman, that she came here only for him, but she had a sneaking love for the wood-paneled dimness, the sound of voices echoing among the ranks of glasses and bottles on the bar, the high, patterned tin ceiling, the closeness of the air, smelling even now in the afternoon of beer and cigarette smoke. It reminded her of the place her grandfather had owned in Cleveland, in one of his more prosperous incarnations, a place where Nancy had washed dishes and done her homework on the bar in the long slow afternoons before it filled up with shot-and-beer drinkers after supper.

This meme came at a good time for me, since I'm girding my writer's loins to go back into my novel one more time, to see if I hate it; to see if it's anything like what I meant; to fix the timing problems in the last part; to interrogate Carl, the main character: is he too passive? maybe to cut a bit more here and there; to see if there's too much dialogue; to check if there's an actual plot.
Some good responses to this meme: No Feeling of Falling, Writing Under a Pseudonym, and Loud Solitude.
Anyone else out there? Book of Marvels? Madame X? Plan B? anyone else writing a novel/long work?

spring break

2007-03-13T12:01:00.000-04:00

Other people go to Barcelona or Florida, but I'm spending my spring break reading, mainly. I am planning to walk around the garden and pick up sticks left from a winter of icy blasts assaulting the surrounding trees, but no serious gardening can be done yet because the snow-melted soil is too soggy. Perhaps a little pruning though.
The reading:
For Us the Living: Robert Heinlein's 1st book, unpublished when he wrote it (1939) and for very good reasons. The characters nearly talk you to death in their eagerness to explain what life is like in 2086. No one has to wear clothes! Marriage is optional and can be terminated at will! They haven't even been to the moon yet, for Christ's sake. It was moderately interesting to skim and skip through, looking for the seeds of RH's later works.
Stranger in a Strange Land: this is the uncut version, published in its entirety after RH died by his widow, to keep the RH flame burning brightly and probably for a little extra cash (but why not?). This I'm reading because I'm thinking of teaching a course that involves sci fi and anthropology, and it might fit in nicely. I'm happy to report that between 1939 and 1960 (when SiaSL was published), RH had learned a few things about writing, although not any more about women (his female characters are always the same girl, a term which I'm using on purpose). But the main character, the human who is also a Martian, is quite well done. RH has a number of stock male characters (as opposed to the one female character), so interchangeable that they could be transplanted from one book to another w/o any other change than a name, but Valentine Smith (the human-Martian) steps away from the stock character box.
Dream Mistress, by Jenny Diski: I got to know JD through her writing in the London Review of Books, and was thrilled to find out that she also wrote books. The first one I read was Skating to Antarctica, which is a kind of combination of travel writing and memoir--wonderfully readable. She reminds me sometimes of Joan Didion, with whom she shares not only initials, but a formidable intelligence and a spare, passionate writing style. Dream Mistress is a little surreal, but grounded in matter-of-factness, wonderful details, both disturbing and lovely. I haven't finished it yet--I'm savoring it. (She also has a blog.)
We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, by Joan Didion herself: this is her collected nonfiction, and I passed it up at the library the 1st time, saying to myself that probably I'd read it all when it was 1st published. But on the 2nd pass, I picked it up, because, I thought, maybe there's something I missed. So far I've only read things I'm familiar with, with the pleasure you feel in seeing old friends. "Slouching toward Bethlehem," the title essay of the book it appeared in, bespelled me again--it's like reading a particularly good Ann Beattie story, except more complex and layered and, of course, true, or as true as cnf can be. (Why, I often think, did other people have so much more fun in the '60s than I did? no wonder I can't write a memoir!)
The Faerie Queen, by Edmund Spenser: I never read this when I was in grad school--avoided it in fact, since it sounded very dull. But it's one of those duty reads that hangs over the heads of lit people, things you ought to have read so you can mark them on your life list: Proust, Cervantes, Moby Dick, etc. But D got it for me for my birthday, and his confidence that I would be interested in it, combined with the long guilt of calling myself an English teacher w/o having read it decided me to read it medicinally, a page or 2 at a time, which I liken to taking a few grains of arsenic so that over a period of months you will find yourself able to swallow a dose that would kill a normal person. I'm afraid that Spenser is no more enlightened that Heinlein in his treatment of women (although I suppose he has more excuse)--they're either evil seductresses or virginal maidens who love purely. I find myself sympathizing with Duessa, who besides being evil, represents false religion.
Julius Winsome, by Gerard Donovan: GD is an Irish writer, now living in the US. He's an amazing writer, one of the kind that you want to read even if you're not interested in what he's writing about. The 2 books of his I've read (the other is Schopenhauer's Telescope) are concerned with men and violence, why we kill, the bonds between killer and victim--not what I seek out usually. But his language is so beautiful (he's also a poet) and his storytelling voice is so compelling, that I don't mind. Julius Winsome is about a man whose dog is shot, and what happens as a result, and in the telling of the story his life is excavated as well as a slice of men-and-violence that goes back to the 1st World War. A lovely book.
To Everything There is a Season, by Thalassa Cruso: this is a late birthday present, a gardening book by one of the last-century gardening oracles. I'm reading it in place of actually gardening, which as I said, can't be done just yet. It's not so much a how-to book; it's more of a romance, the romance of the garden which takes place over the course of the year, and which waxes and wanes with the seasons, the sun, the rain, the frost. More beautiful writing, plus useful tips: remove winter mulch gradually; a lily should be planted as deeply as a tree; grapes should always be pruned before the sap begins to rise.

the searchers

2007-03-10T10:18:00.000-05:00

I just read Jadepark's list of wacky search terms, and decided to do one of my own (you can read hers here).
some of the lucid and wellchosen words that have brought people to this blog:
"how to finish a novel fast": I don't know this! although there were some other promising items on the search page, especially the Novel Fast Predictive Mode Decision Algorithm.
"nun stripper": haven't written this story yet.
"nun's bras": it might look like I have a nun obsession, but no more so than anyone else who went through through 13 years of Catholic education (I'm looking forward to seeing "nun obsession" on my referrals page).
"weird things to put on toast": I don't have anything to say about this except for the blog title, but there were some other interesting things, the best of which was salami. I also found out that there is or has been a model of a casino made entirely out of toast, and why not? Gingerbread can't have all the fun.
There were quite a lot of searches for "novel synopsis," and I think what I wrote about this was that I was hopeless at doing one. Possibly I should be doing some searching myself.
If anyone else is feeling meme-ish, please take up the search-terms torch.

everyone has her own road to success

2007-03-01T14:25:00.000-05:00

Brian at Plan B has posted a peek at his writing process, and I'm inspired to do the same.

My writing process:
1. Write a list of 20 story ideas.
2. Make notes on the 20 ideas.
3. Look a couple of days later at the 20 ideas and decide that several of them are silly; and that several of them are like something you or someone else wrote already; and that another several of them are unworkable. Decide that the one you like the best is not a short story--it should really be a novel.
4. Mope; check out All My Children--is it true that Dixie is dead? has anyone actually seen the body?
5. Take a look at the notes (see 2). One sounds not impossible--a story about a girl who takes the elevator up and down in her pajamas: it could be quirky, symbolically freighted, a story of its times. Write 500 words of beginning.
6. Pick up the girl in pajamas story--but today it seems stale and fruitless. Decide instead to do the story about the woman who was kicked out of the convent, and who later decided to be a stripper.
7. Realize that you know nothing about either convents or stripping. Go to the library and check out all the books they have on nuns and sex workers.
8. Immerse yourself in research. Take lots of notes. Be glad you didn't have a vocation, and that you wouldn't have had the nerve to be a stripper.
9. Decide that the nun/stripper story should really be a novel.
10. Write a poem about the process of writing in which it is compared to a black, bottomless lake with leaden waves falling ceaselessly against a grimy shore.
11. Ask yourself if it's too late to go to law school. You hear there's a lot of reading--you're good at reading. (What is a tort?)
12. Start again at 1.

writing fuel

2007-02-24T12:56:00.000-05:00

I've made it clear, I think, that I think the proper food for writers is chocolate, preferably dark, to be taken 2 squares at a time whenever inspiration wanes. But other foods should not be disdained, especially when you do a day-long writing stint.

All of which is to say that my writing friends and I had another writing retreat day, and our menu included

white cheddar popcorn

chocolate-covered dried cranberries

red pears

mineolas

fresh pineapple

crackers (Triscuits and whole wheat biscuits)

smoked Gouda

an amazing lentil soup

This beautiful and intensely sustaining soup wasn't totally responsible for any brilliant work done that day, but I am thinking of making it when I start on the last (I hope) revision of my novel.

Just to make it clear that we didn't eat all day long, here is a list of what was written:

my sister: a poem about melting ice (which was happening outside as we wrote)

T: some pages of her novel, which is about a brother and sister who are inseparable when they are young, but who as adults have difficulty with each other's life choices

K: working with notes on articles (interrupted by having to meet the plumber at her house to confer over a frozen pipe)

me: the possible beginning of a short story about 3 women discussing their love lives in a bar over margaritas (it's terribly dialogue-heavy though--so much that K or T suggested it should be a play; I do love to write dialogue).

is it still February?

2007-02-18T12:36:00.000-05:00

It is. Still February, still mightily cold, still snowy. I can hear the familiar and homey scrape of the snow shovel outside as D clears our driveway once again (picture above, taken from the warm, unsnowy vantage point of the stairway window).
I'm working on new stuff this weekend, the first time for a long time I've worked on anything else at all except my novel. I feel frolicsome, lighthearted. My head is buzzing with ideas. Luckily, this is a 3-day weekend, so I can let my writing time scroll out, unfold, without thinking too much of what I have to do at work. And tomorrow is a planned writing day--I'm getting together with my sister and 2 writer friends for a Lake Tahoe day, where we recreate (sadly without a beach) how we worked intensively at Lake Tahoe last July.
Yesterday I wrote a poem and a story, which was so much fun, I may try to do it again today. Here are the 1st lines of the story:
Here we are, and it’s nice that we’re together. We are sisters. We may be dead. I don’t feel a need to clear up the question, for what good would it do to know? We might have to take action of some sort, and there are no instructions, no help of any kind on offer.
My sister doesn't like the title, which is "Transubstantiation," and she may be right.

snow filling up the world

2007-02-14T13:10:00.000-05:00

We're slightly snowed in, and we don't have to go to work or school, which is delightful--a happy sin against the Puritan ethic. Inspired by Cookin' in the 'Cuse and Liberty Farm's snow pictures, I took some of my own. (I also greatly admire CitC's impeccable use of apostrophes.)

A long, slow, whitened day: perfect for catching up on reading, doing a little writing, and telling you 5 weird things about me, since Karen at Pen in Hand tagged me for a meme. It was originally 6 weird things, but Karen downsized it to 5.

5 or 6 weird things about me:

1. I once worked in a religious garments supply house, doing inventory. Not a secret, but definitely weird. It was a Saturday job when I was going to college, courtesy of my best friend, whose uncle knew someone who knew someone else who was in the religious garments business. Nuns' bras looked much like anyone else's, except they were always white.

2. I once had a dream about a past life which I died and saw my own grave.

3. I read books from the back sometimes, if I'm impatient with the writing or the plot but I want to find out what happened (in fact, I can't stand not to know what happened, even if it's a very bad book). I'm pretty good at it, but it's one of those talents that will never really do you any good, and certainly aren't marketable.

4. I have around 100 first cousins. Two parents from large families (mother: 11; father: 9), and a procreatively-minded set of aunts and uncles (one side Catholic). It made family reunions chaotic and marvelous; also gave me the chance to have crushes on various cousins, 2nd cousins, 1st cousins once removed. Mike, Bobby: you know who you are.

5. I was 3rd in the state in the Auxilium Latinum Latin contest. I don't remember anymore what was involved--a test of some kind, probably, but I have a nifty silver pin to remind me of my triumph.
6. I still have the hairpiece I wore at my 1st wedding--it's in a decorative gold and white box, still beautifully curled, never worn but the once.

interim

2007-01-31T11:45:00.000-05:00

I've finished the cuts--altogether I cut 103 pp., which is not bad. I was surprised how easy it was after I got a rhythm. I found that my dialogue (which I've always thought of as something I do well) to be particularly cuttable--sometimes I took out a whole chunk of a conversation; sometimes I just nipped and pared until it was shaved down to something more pointed and readable. I'm a lover of he said, she said dialogue tags, but I took out some of those, too, as seemed wise.
The most cuttable thing about my dialogue was that I often had a character say a small paragraph of dialogue, with a bit of narrative interspersed, or maybe just separated by a dialogue tag. I like that kind of interruption, because I think it gives the feeling of a pause, or of real time in a conversation. But often, parts of these dialogue constructions were fat with unnecessary words--repetitive, not in the sense of saying the same words, but repetitive in linguistic content, as when someone says "John, close the window. I'm cold." In this sentence, "close the window" and "I'm cold" mean the same thing: they mean John, I want you to do something for me, and therefore, one of them can be ordinarily dispensed with (I say ordinarily, because sometimes there are good reasons for repeated linguistic content).
Some of the cutting, of course, is just plain cutting, nothing linguistic about it. If you're interested, you can read on and compare the cut and uncut beginning of chapter 25 (I cut about 70 words out of 290).

Original version:
“Now where did you say you’re going?” Granny Plain asked Jason.
He’d stopped by to mow the lawn in front of the barn and possibly get some cookies—a quick in-and-out. But his grandmother wanted to chat. She’d pinned him to the table with a glass of her special sweet tea and a plate of chocolate chip.
“It used to be a prison,” he said. “Out past Somerset.”
“I seem to remember that,” she said. The cat was on her lap, peering at Smokey, who was feigning indifference across the room. “Some of the Graves boys went there on a drug offense back in the ‘80s. Isn’t it empty now?”
“That’s the whole point,” Jason said. “It’s totally empty. Abandoned. No one’s used it for years, just kids coming in and hanging out, probably.” He wished he’d known about it when he was in high school—what could be cooler than doing a sixpack in an old prison? “It’s bound to have some paranormal energy built up.”
“No one got the chair there,” Granny Plain said, “if that’s what you’re thinking. It was strictly for drugs and small-time stuff.”
“Just because they weren’t doing the death penalty thing doesn’t mean no one ever died there,” Jason said. “I bet there were some cover-ups. Beatings. Or stabbings.”
“With a shiv?” Granny asked. She was a big fan of TV crime shows and old prison movies.
“With whatever,” Jason said. “So I’m going to go and get it on film, and we’ll see. Daytime first, and then maybe some night footage.”
“You’re not going by yourself, are you?” his grandmother asked. “I don’t like to think about you out there alone.”
“Smokey’s coming,” Jason said, and Smokey barked as if to affirm this.

Cut version:
Jason had stopped by to mow his grandmother’s lawn—a quick in-and-out. But his grandmother wanted to chat. She’d pinned him to the table with a glass of her special sweet tea and a plate of chocolate chip.
“Do you remember that prison? he said. “Out past Somerset.”
“Some of the Graves boys went there on a drug offense back in the ‘80s,” she said. The cat was on her lap, peering at Smokey. “Isn’t it empty now?”
“It’s totally empty,” Jason said. “No one’s used it for years, just kids coming in and hanging out, probably.” He wished he’d known about it when he was in high school—what could be cooler than doing a sixpack in an old prison? “It’s bound to have some paranormal energy built up.”
“No one got the chair there,” Granny Plain said, “if that’s what you’re thinking. It was strictly for drugs and small-time stuff.”
“That doesn’t mean no one ever died there,” Jason said. “I bet there were some cover-ups. Beatings. Or stabbings.”
“With a shiv?” Granny asked. She was a big fan of TV crime shows and old prison movies.
“With whatever,” Jason said. “So I’m going to go in and get it on film, and we’ll see.”
“You’re not going by yourself, are you?” his grandmother asked. “Smokey’s coming,” Jason said, and Smokey barked as if to affirm this.

still with metaphorical scissors in hand

2007-01-27T18:35:00.000-05:00

Sunset yesterday.
Cut from the novel 5:
Isabel had never been the kind of woman who screamed, but she could feel one building, and she fought to hold on to it. Someone’s hand, someone’s body. She forced herself to stand up and go to the door. Later, she thought she should have left, just closed the door and gone back downstairs, saying nothing. Her hands were trembling but she didn’t want to touch the walls for support. She cleared her throat, looking out into the dark corridor, and called for Jason as loud as she could without letting the scream out of her throat.
That Isabel: what a drama queen. She'd be mad if she knew I was cutting her big scene short.

4 more chapters to go

2007-01-24T13:37:00.000-05:00

Cutlet:
Carl looked out at the trees, and thought of the drowned trees in Rose Lake, even though he knew they weren’t there anymore, or not the way he imagined them. Stumps, uprooted logs that had floated to the surface. More likely they’d clearcut the big stuff before the dam went in. But his vision persisted, the giant trees reaching straight up from the floor of the gorge, their branches moving in the water, leaves fluttering with the current.
I might be done with this round of revision by Sunday night. And certainly by the end of January, which is the thought I'm using to inspire myself, when myself is contemplating the snowflakes falling in a lovely but annoying way outside my office window.
Two friends with new blogs: Voyage Artistique (from France!) and The Alternate Side Parking Reader (the NYC parker has started blogging).

cut and cut again

2007-01-21T21:33:00.000-05:00

Cut from the novel 3 (from chapter 20):
1. She fixed her eyes on Dr. Kiniston’s face, which was a teacher’s face, but nice nonetheless. He was speaking in his droning classroom voice about the History of Logan festivals that had been held in the past, and the possibility of having one in the future, if enough money could be raised. All along the table, his listeners nodded their heads and made little mmhmm noises as encouragement, except for Mr. Six, who had fallen asleep. Augusta White gestured discreetly at him from across the table, plainly meaning for Isabel to poke him awake, but Isabel ignored her. Let him sleep, she thought. He’s happy at least. She set her lips in a closed half smile, willing her face to stay that way, and folded her hands attentively. I am interested, her face said. I am fascinated by the possibilities. Under this cover, she let her mind drift and slip away from the crowded room.
2. Dr. Kiniston was coming up in the ‘90s now. “As you all know, the festival was discontinued in, I believe, nineteen and ninety-three.”
“Are you sure?” Mrs. Mock asked. “I recollect that we had one that year.”
“I don’t think so,” Dr. Kiniston said.
“I put it together in my mind with my youngest daughter getting married—I’m sure it was the same year."
The woman next to her put up her hand, as if they were in school. “I thought Jeannette got married in ’92. I remember I wore a green dress I had that year.”
“I’m sure I’m right,” Mrs. Mock said. “And I don’t think you got that dress until much later, because I said to my husband when you bought it how it was so much like one I had, except for the stitching on the front.”
3. There was a story about a ghost there, but it was one of the less creditable ones, the kind of story that high school kids might make up to scare themselves on Halloween, about a warlock’s grave, with an iron fence around it to keep him in. There was a flat stone slab which supposedly was marked by a large crack that would suck you into hell if you stood on it incautiously. But it was only a group marker with several family members buried under it, the fence a common adornment to graveyards, a family boundary inside the larger community of the dead.

linkish

2007-01-16T19:33:00.000-05:00

While I'm cutting, other people are being published! Kris of Book of Marvels has an article on boutique olive oil in the Christian Science Monitor, available online, here. And my friend MJ has a witty and timely piece on the vagaries of parking in NYC, here.
I'm up to 62 pages cut now, which seems like a lot, but also like not enough. On the other hand, that's enough pages for two fair-sized short stories.
Over break, I did 2 day-long writing retreats, one with my poet sister (hi, erieblue), and another with two other writing friends. Chocolate and mint tea were important parts of the inspirational rituals.

cut from the novel 2

2007-01-13T16:15:00.000-05:00

Random cuts from Chapter 18:
1. It was two in the afternoon. She was looking at the ceiling, but for variety, she occasionally turned her head to look out the window at the neighbor’s roof, and the slice of sky that showed above it.
2. She didn’t look at Nancy. Her hands hadn’t stopped moving all the time she was talking.
3. She had a skirt, too, but she’d gotten a stain on it on the first night, at dinner with the principal at her old school. A pickled beet landed with a slap on her thigh, and she’d meant to soak it but forgot.
4. There was a box marked “Snapshots” in the corner, and she pulled it out, brushing the dust from the lid. When she opened it, she saw that they were mostly black and white. The one on top showed three people standing in someone’s back yard, two women and a man, dressed for Sunday. She didn’t recognize them. On the back, it said “Dollie and the two goons.”
5. It had been one of Maurice’s lunatic ambitions to build his own fence right up against theirs. But he had never gotten around to it, so there was chain link on the left, a 6-foot boarded privacy fence on the right, and in the back, one of those ancient constructions of wood posts strung with wire in a pattern of squares, overgrown with morning glory. The back fence was the one Maurice hated the most, and Nancy loved best.
6. She swept her eye down the table. “I for one don’t want to dwell on the morbid.”

so gone

2007-01-11T10:22:00.000-05:00

Cut from the novel 1
OK,” Jason said. “What did he want it for?”
“He had an idea again about where that money might be buried,” Carl said. He heaved in a third box and went around to the passenger side.
Jason nodded. The buried money on Eldon’s farm was an old story. A cache of silver coins, maybe some gold, that Eldon’s great grandfather had buried during the Spanish-American war, when he’d been convinced that the U.S. was going to be invaded. This conviction turned out to be the first part of his going crazy, and by the time anyone thought to try and find out exactly where it was that he’d buried the coins, he was too far gone to say, or maybe too paranoid to trust even his loved ones. The amount that he’d buried was variable, according to who told the story, and had grown over time. Searching for it was Eldon’s hobby, along with auctions.
They rattled half a mile down the road to Eldon’s driveway, and then past his neat fields, planted already, probably in soybeans and the microgreens Eldon had gotten into since he found out how much they were going for in the Athens farmers’ market. Eldon’s house was white, blue-shuttered, with a pond in the front spewing water from a pipe in the middle, and a new pole barn up against the hill. “I’ll just run in and get it,” Carl said, but as they came to a stop, Eldon came out with his wife behind him.
“Well, stranger,” he said to Carl. “And hello to you, too, son,” to Jason. “You know Jason Plain, don’t you, Gussie? His grandmother worships over at the Baptist church.”

snip snipety snip

2007-01-07T18:09:00.000-05:00

I'm on the 2nd round of cutting my novel now, which goes sometimes slowly and sometimes fast. Fast is when you can take out a chunk, as yesterday when I cut out a whole chapter--around 3000 words--chunk, into the virtual wastebasket, otherwise known as another file, because I can't bear to throw it away completely, or at least not yet. Very satisfying.
Slow is when I pick away as if the novel is an iceberg, frozen hard and impervious, and I attack it feebly, the tiniest chips of words and phrases being winkled out, melting as they fly through the air.
It amazes me sometimes how wordy I've been. Sometimes I can see my writing self making my way through the narrative as if it were a trackless jungle, the line of writing my only hope of seeing the other side. I can see the phrases and sentences I wrote while I was marking time, thinking on the page: what will Carl do next? what will he think when Isabel pinches him? who will he meet at the auction.
And I can see the places where I was thinking myself into the scene word by unnecessary word: he got up, he was standing, then he put his hand out to take the Snickers bar--all the gestures that in a movie might be beautifully meaningful and necessary, but that need to be pared away on the page so that the significant gesture, movement, expression stands out and is remembered.

a ragbag collection of this and that

2006-12-31T10:38:00.000-05:00

to end up the old year. My mother actually had a rag bag, which hung in the hall closet of our old house (later in the new house, it was just a rag corner in a linen closet shelf). She especially prized my father's old T-shirts for their dust-catching quality (in the before-Swiffer and even before-Pledge days), but there were also pieces of my sister's and my clothes in there, giving up their last days to dust the piano or winkle out dirt from corners of the kitchen the mop didn't sufficiently clean.
I went to a very good party last night where there were mostly writers--poets, journalists, memoirists, novelists--and their hapless spouses and SOs, and there was a lot of talk about books. Not so much the ones being written (although there was some of that), but those being read and recommended. Here's a gleaning, from conversations and eavesdroppings:
Dashiel Hammett's letters (that was me)
Hammett's Red Harvest (I can't convince Charlie that it's a wonderful book)
Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential
Memento Mori, Muriel Spark
The Working Poor (forgot the author)
The Life of Pi (am I the only person who hasn't read this?)
Sylvia Plath's poetry (with a side conversation on Ted Hughes goodness or badness)
Oliver Sachs's books
Bridget Jones
the Helen MacInnes spy thrillers (this was me again)
Alistair MacLean (this was because at first I said Helen MacLean, conflating these 2 quite dissimilar spy-thriller writers)
Tom Clancy
John LeCarre
Sarah Gridley's poems
Middlemarch, which several of us are reading, although I'm sadly behind.
Some other this-and-thats:
Some kind people have put together a list of underrated writers, a nice way to fulfill any New Year's resolutions you may have about reading more widely. I was charmed to find Elizabeth Bowen on this list, and also Michael Martone (who is very funny and off-the-wall) but most of them I haven't read--new literary fields to gambol in.
Worried about the state of the novel? He's not dead yet--here, from MrBFK is the report of a sighting.
If you're a fan of horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, you'll be delighted to hear that the Library of America had published an edition of his stories. In his review of this and a book-length essay on Lovecraft by the French novelist Michel Houellebecq, Luc Sante lists the fears that fed Lovecraft's horror:
He was also frightened of invertebrates, marine life in general, temperatures below freezing, fat people, people of other races, race-mixing, slums, percussion instruments, caves, cellars, old age, great expanses of time, monumental architecture, non-Euclidean geometry, deserts, oceans, rats, dogs, the New England countryside, New York City, fungi and molds, viscous substances, medical experiments, dreams, brittle textures, gelatinous textures, the color gray, plant life of diverse sorts, memory lapses, old books, heredity, mists, gases, whistling, whispering—
Well, who isn't afraid of gelatinous textures, I ask you?
Happy 2007.

the slow week between Xmas and New Year's

2006-12-27T19:53:00.000-05:00

The week of suspended holiday, the week when the decorations are still up but the relevance is leaking out of them. The shine of the ornaments makes you nostalgic, makes you remember sitting in your father's chair and stairing into the tree as if it were a shadowy, bulb-lit cave with gleaming treasure, and although this is a beautiful memory, it's tinged with all-gone, never-again, back-in-the-dayness.
I like the slowness of it though--a pause before you throw yourself into a new year where you're supposed to be resolving and making goals. I am resolved this week to
--read a lot
--look out of my window w/o thinking consecutive thoughts
--write down notes of this and that w/o thinking of what they might turn into
--look at seed catalogs, and plan to buy seeds of kohlrabi or ruffled lettuces
I'm warming up to the next revision of the novel, shaking the tinsel and glitter of Christmas out of my hair before I take out my metaphorical scissors and snip, snip, snap.
More from-the-car photos:

what's on my mind

2006-12-10T10:00:00.000-05:00

Taking a leaf from Plan B's blog page, this is what's rolling around in my head on this December day:
--Winter, and how it is so wonderfully beautiful (the sun on the snow, the blue sky) today, but how I hate it nevertheless because it's dark by 5, and my winter clothes are bulky, and my garden is just some wilted leaves and dried stalks sticking up out of the drifts.
--The Black Book, Orhan Pamuk's book--I'm almost done reading it and still in the dark about how it works, but still intrigued. It's so closely tied to Istanbul, its streets and people, that I am starting to feel as if I have memories of being there, that I have gone to Aladdin's shop opposite the City of Hearts apartments where Galip's family once lived, that I have gone to the gangsters' hideouts or the pudding shops. Why don't we have pudding shops in Cleveland? instead of all those coffee places? stop on the way home for a cup of tapioca instead of a latte?
--the end of the semester, which is over in the sense that classes are over, but not over in the sense that dozens of students are craftily preparing piles of papers that I will be reading next weekend. Every end of the semester is fiercely desirable, every beginning makes new insight possible. (Every summer is heaven, of course.)
--Xmas shopping, which is done except for those things I can't buy on line--flowering plants (for my Aunt Honey, which I'm safe in saying because not only does she not read this blog, she doesn't have a computer. She thought for a while in her retirement that she might like to get an electric typewriter, but is not interested in the internet, which she maybe regards as a kind of fantasy that her nieces and nephews are collectively having.), and bottles of booze, and the kinds of things that can only be found as you wander through stores in the mall feeling desperate, while you eat a pretzel dog-- Christmas patterned socks, small flashlights that can be rigged as a headpiece, guaranteed waterproof phone carriers, stretchy beaded bracelets, tiny books that offer humorous and ironic rules for living, pierced earrings for the daughter who, I always forget, doesn't have pierced ears, soaps that smell like mango and chocolate, a Hello Kitty calendar. (This passage is an inept but fond homage to The Black Book.)
--my novel, which I set aside during the last weeks of school, and which is waiting balefully, or maybe hopefully? for me to trim, prune, eviscerate, etc.
--my knee, which is slowly recovering from its desire to bend slightly the wrong way.
--the fact that I need a new winter coat, that the one I have is getting shabby, even though it is so warm and so light (down). It's so warm that I've used it for a blanket, notably during one winter residency at Vermont College when the high temperature was below zero for 6 days in a row, and the heating pipes in the rooms where the faculty slept, which had once been dorm rooms to cadets at a military school, groaned and clanked ineffectively. People put food on the windowsills to keep it cold, as in a refrigerator (mostly wine and cheese). The coat was my 3rd coverlet, over the two stiff, scratchy, repellent khaki blankets issued to us.
--my camera--I have become an obsessive picture taker. I'm particularly fond of taking picture while driving in my car. Probably there's a psychiatric description for this. Note above one of my attempts to take a photo of downtown from Chester Ave around 4:45 pm.

driving home

2006-12-01T17:52:00.000-05:00

Rain, rain, rain...

you are such a pain--

you're hurting my brain,

you're really lame.

Home again.

what I'm reading now

2006-11-30T13:01:00.000-05:00

What I read over the Thanksgiving weekend:
Lisey's Story, Stephen King: absorbing, and has some great parts in it (as when Scott gets shot) but not his best. There's a writerly metaphor made physical at the heart of the book that's interesting to think about--I wish he'd had more about that part of it.
Under Orders, Dick Francis: Sid Halley returns to solve a new horse-fixing mystery; readable, but again, not his best. It made me want to read Nerve again, which is my high-point Dick Francis book.
Sleeping with Fear, Kay Hooper: one of a trilogy about psychic FBI agents; bonus--the main character had amnesia. It held my interest until about 3/4 of the way through, when I got impatient and read the end.
The Black Book, Orhan Pamuk: I'm still reading this, very slowly, for the beauty of the prose. I'm on a part now where the main character is pondering the letters in faces, mysterious signs that must be read if we are to know our lives.
A mystery set in 1906 Vienna, with Freudian undertones: beautifully written, with a lot of interesting police procedural stuff of the day. (I'll put in the name later if I haven't taken it back to the library).
The Writer on Her Work, edited by Janet Sternburg: this is a re-read--I like to go back to it every once in a while for inspiration. A quote from Joan Didion's essay, "Why I Write":
To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.
Yes!
The Big Book of Trucks and Tractors, can't remember the author: this is mostly pictures, each labeled with its name: dump truck; small excavator; forklift. I read this many times, and by the end of the weekend Z could point w/o fail to the dump truck, and was starting to master the various excavators, distinguishing them by their colors.

early reading meme

2006-11-19T12:11:00.000-05:00

Kate of Kate's Book Blog started this meme--look here for her own post and a set of links to other reader/bloggers who have chimed in.
1. How old were you when you learned to read and who taught you?
I think I was 4--I already knew how to read when I went to kindergarten. I sort of learned how by myself, since my mother found out when she caught me reading headlines from the Cleveland Plain Dealer. There's an apocryphal story that I asked her what "murder" meant, and of her snatching the paper away, and so forth, but who knows? I don't remember learning how to read, and in fact, don't remember not being able to read. I wish I did--I'd like to get the feel of the turn, when letters and sounds coalesced and became words, and the connection that these words on the page were the same as those spoken by my parents and cousins and my friend Barbara next door.
I remember always feeling friendly about words--liking them sometimes just for themselves, their sound (silver, princess) or even how they looked on the page (late, amuse, road). But even though my mother didn't set out to be my reading teacher, she was, for she bought books, and she read books to me and my sister, giving us a vision of reading as a pool we might dip into.
2. Did you own any books as a child? If so, what’s the first one that you remember owning? If not, do you recall any of the first titles that you borrowed from the library?
My sister and I got books as presents for every Christmas and birthday, many of which I still own, and in fact can see from where I'm sitting at the keyboard: Caddie Woodlawan, The Little Lame Prince, Heidi, Robinson Crusoe. I don't remember which of these came first, although I remember reading The Little Lame Prince under our play table, sitting with my back straight and my head not touching the table's underside, which means I must have still been pretty small. I loved it not only for the stories, but also for the pictures of the prince flying over the land on his magical fur cape (I wanted one--it was obvious to me that I was never going to be able to fly on my plaid woolen winter coat).
The Betsy Tacy books were among the 1st books I took out from the library--I remember my glee when I found out that there were a lot of them. I wanted to hoard them, to make them last longer, but it's not in my nature, and I read them all as fast as I could.
3. What’s the first book that you bought with your own money?
I never thought of buying books myself until I was in high school. This was also when I started having money of my own, an allowance that was for busfare and lunches. I started going to my 1st bookstore love, Schroeder's, which was on Cleveland's Public Square in a now-demolished building (where the BP building is now). I have an idea they sold other things, but I don't remember what, because I always went to the back where they had racks of paperbacks. I know I bought Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'urbervilles there (I still have it) and a book about philosophy, which I thought I wanted to know more about (I didn't, but I still have that, too).
4. Were you a re-reader as a child? If so, which book did you reread most often?
I was definitely a re-reader, and still am. I shamelessly read for plot on first reading, and whether I reread or not when I already know what happens is a mark of how much I like a book. Anne of Green Gables might have been the 1st re-read--I got another one in the series, and wanted to read the beginning of Anne's story before I went on. Among my recent re-reads: Lady Oracle, because I heard Margaret Atwood read at the library and someone mentioned it in the Q&A; one of Helen MacInnes's spy thrillers; Muriel Spark's Loitering With Intent; and James Baldwin's Another Country.
5. What's the 1st adult book that captured your interest, and how old were you when you read it?
The 1st was War and Peace, but although I opened it up several times before I was 10, and read some pages, I didn't actually read a substantial part until I was a teenager, and I didn't finish it until I was in my late 20s. A better candidate for this question is The Winthrop Woman, which was included in one of the volumes of Reader's Digest Condensed Books in my parents' bookcase. I was probably 11 or 12, old enough to have inklings about sex, but not old enough to understand the allusions to it in the book--I knew something was going on, but I couldn't figure out what had these people so het up. (Maybe I should re-read it--that might be interesting.)
6. Are there children’s books that you passed by as a child that you have learned to love as an adult? Which ones?
I never learned to love Tolkien--I didn't read him young, and when I tried him later, it didn't take. But I love the Narnia books, which I didn't read until I was an adult (except for The Silver Chair, which my sister got as a birthday present)--I've probably re-read them half a dozen times.
This is a volunteerish kind of meme--so please chime in.

reading for language and the country that lies behind it

2006-11-14T11:59:00.000-05:00

An excerpt from Pamuk's The Black Book:
In the poem's distant golden age, action and the things we kept in our houses were one with our dreams. Those were the happy, happy days when everything we held in our hands--our tools, our cups, our daggers, our pens--was but an extension of our souls. A poet could say tree and everyone who heard him would conjure up the same perfect tree--could see the word and the tree it signified, and the garden the tree signified, and the life the garden signified--without wasting any time on counting the leaves and branches. For words were so close to the things they described that, on mornings when the mist swept down from the mountains into the ghost villages below, poetry mixed with life and words with the objects they signified. No one waking up on misty mornings could tell their dreams apart from reality, or poems apart from life, or names apart from people. No one ever asked if a story was real, because stories were as real as the lives they described. They lived their dreams and interpreted their lives. Those were the days when faces, like everything else in the world, were so laden with meaning that even the illiterate--even the man who could not tell an alpha from a piece of fruit, an a from a hat, or an alif from a stick--could read them with ease.
You can't read it looking for a plot, but who cares?

litblog skippy-dipping

2006-11-10T22:31:00.000-05:00

A bit of this, a pinch of that.
I found on Languor Management that I could sign up to read by email on Daily Lit. You can choose from a limited but choice list of classic authors and books, sign up, and then receive emails at your chosen pace (daily, only on weekdays, etc.) that will take you through, for instance, Gogol's Dead Souls, or Emily Dickenson's poems. I've signed up for Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell--I've always meant to read something by her and now I can, in 322 installments. (Psst, Gina--they have The Beautiful and the Damned.)
Maud Newton has a nice Hemingway quote from his Paris Review interview, now out in a new book of PR interviews, which I'll requote, since I can't figure out how to link to the post itself:
It is very bad for a writer to talk about how he writes. He writes to be read by the eye and no explanations or dissertations should be necessary. You can be sure that there is much more there than will be read at any first reading and having made this it is not the writer’s province to explain it or to run guided tours through the more difficult country of his work.
I've recently found Jenny Diski's blog, Biology of the Worst Kind. She's one of my favorite writers in the London Review of Books, and also, she is a good friend of Doris Lessing's (a brilliant recommendation, for me; not unlike having known Virginia Woolf; not quite, but in the ballpark). She's got a good post currently on being read, after you've written.
And here is a very funny piece by Ian Frazier in the online NYer on the dangers of book addiction (found courtesy of Dorothy W). Here's a quote:
If every American back in 1950 had quit buying novels and invested money in high-yield bonds, today we would be looking at a savings surplus of several trillion dollars, and Social Security would not be in the mess it’s in.
If only my parents had stopped buying me books for my birthday, I'd be a rich woman today.

the other elizabeth taylor

2006-11-05T20:08:00.000-05:00

is a writer, born Elizabeth Coles, British, died in 1975. I just finished reading my third book of hers, Palladian (1946), which was her 2nd novel, and I loved it as much as the others (At Mrs. Lippincote's, 1945, and In a Summer Season, 1961). This one was a little more melancholy than either of those, but still drily and mordantly funny in an understated way, with beautiful and elegant prose. It's presented as a sort of romance--Cassandra Dashwood (an echo of Austen?) has been left alone in the world, both parents having died, and in the 1st chapter she is being packed off to be governess to a child at a house in the country. The child has a father, and the father is a widower with a secret sorrow (shades of Bronte!). Cassandra herself can't help seeing her situation in terms of the books she's read, and she's afraid she doesn't measure up:
She knew that Jane Eyre had answered better than that to her Mr. Rochester. She looked into her empty coffee cup in panic and then, fearing lest he might take it as a hint, jerked up her head and tried to glance at him.
She expects to fall in love with him before she sees him, and she does. But it's not a romantic tale--almost anti-romantic in the way it overturns every sentimental expectation. The secret sorrow turns out to be untrue, both sordid and pitiful. The real love story is in the past, dead and unretrievable. Cassandra is saved, or is she?
There are wonderful characters. Tom, who is in love with a dead woman, a doctor who drinks instead of practicing, and who makes intricate drawings that are part portrait, part medical illustration. Margaret, who has come to live with her cousin during her pregnancy, and is a secret eater, sneaking down to the kitchen when Nanny is out. The pub owner's wife, who is in love with Tom, and who can't keep a secret even though the telling of it hurts her. Sophy, the child, who keeps a diary where she gives herself points for her behavior during the day:
Goodness. Fair....
Industry. Made bed. Learnt vocab. Did the Pliny. Forgot to turn the mattress though.
Bravery. Not.
Honesty. O.K.
N.B. Must not be morebid any more.
The end is masterly, although I won't tell it--you have to read it for yourself.

a year of blogging

2006-10-28T15:26:00.000-04:00

Happy anniversary to MNOT. I feel I should have gotten a piece of toast into the picture somewhere.
Should I be changing the name to My Revised Novel on Toast? or maybe My Novel on Revised Toast?

writers I don't love

2006-10-27T22:10:00.000-04:00

Ayn Rand: just read that scene in the train tunnel and you'll see why.
Anita Brookner (I know a lot of people love her, but I just can't get past the 1st pages of any of her novels).
Barbara Pym (ditto).
Annie Proulx: too many dashes.
Tom Wolfe (I'm more OK with Thomas Wolfe).
Arthur Conan Doyle: I like him better when Basil Rathbone is playing Holmes.
Anthony Trollope (maybe I just can't stand how fast he wrote).
Jasper Fforde (I know, he's very clever).
William Trevor (just can't warm up to him--too many farmhouses, too many depressed women anxiously wiping their hands on a towel).
Hawthorne: house of the seven comas; and I hate that birthmark story.
Ayn Rand: one of her heroines is raped but loves the man who did it; plus it's worth saying twice.

writers I love: Tolstoy

2006-10-25T20:43:00.000-04:00

I reread "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" for the 10th or 12th time today, because I'd assigned it to my intro fiction students. Just as every other time, I was swept away, overwhelmed, seduced. It's such a wonderful story, although story is a misnomer--it's at least as long as a novella. But who cares what it's called--it's a juggernaut.
If you haven't read it, the plot is that Ivan dies. It begins with his funeral and after looping back at the end of the service, ends with his death. Nothing else--just Ivan dying for ever so many pages, and yet it's suspenseful and tender and amazing. It reminded this time of a story by Margaret Atwood, "Happy Endings," which isn't so much a story as an essay, where she deconstructs the ur-plot of the story--the thing that lies behind every story.
She begins
John and Mary meet.
What happens next?
If you want a happy ending, try A.
There's an A, which is a happy story; then a B, which introduces some complications. Then C, which introduces Madge, Fred, and James, and adultery. D features a tidal wave, and so on. At the end of the story:
You'll have to face it, the endings are the same however you slice it. Don't be deluded by any other endings, they're all fake, either deliberately fake, with malicious intent to deceive, or just motivated by excessive optimism if not by downright sentimentality.
The only authentic ending is the one provided here:
John and Mary die. John and Mary die. John and Mary die.
Ivan Ilyich dies. But in between the funeral and the last breath is a world of piercing and beautiful prose, a story that uses irony but is not ironic. It says some witty things, and some wise things, and some horrible things that people do and say, but don't want to admit. It made me cry, not for the first time; and think, not for the first time, that yes, Tolstoy is amazing, that if there was a Religion of Writing, he'd be one of the gods we ought to pray to.
Here's the full text.

cutting vs. embellishing

2006-10-21T14:55:00.000-04:00

My novel needs cutting, and this made me think about the crucial writing question--is it easier to cut a draft or to add to it? My sister the poet is firmly on the side of cutting, which to her is the easiest thing in the world, especially when she's talking about my prose. ("You don't need that beginning--just lop it off!")
I'm not sure what I think. I do find word and phrase cutting pretty easy--I've often cut something in a snip-snip way so I could do it at a reading and not exceed my time (and often I find many of the cuts to be so reasonable that I let them stand). But I'm by nature an embellisher--when I sit down at the computer my brain starts going with new characters who must be put in, a subplot here, a new complication there.
I've started thinking in terms of scenes that might go. I love the chapter where Carl and Jason go out to look at the iron furnace out in the woods and Carl falls in and has to be rescued, but maybe it's not essential. And then when Carl and Emma go to look for Lily in Conkle's Hollow--does that really need to be two chapters? Couldn't it be one, and much shorter?
What do other writers do with these short-circuited chapters and scenes? I myself preserve them frugally in a separate folder and I tell myself that maybe I'll use them later, in a short story of their own perhaps. But mainly I save them because I can't bear to let them go absolutely, which is probably one of the 7 deadly faults of writers, an idea which maybe deserves a post of its own.

back at the computer

2006-10-17T18:01:00.000-04:00

I went off to Logan over the weekend, and all the time I was gone didn't so much as look at a computer, except when my daughter was downloading the 63 pictures I took of my grandsons and various trees and hillsides and cloud formations. It was a nonword weekend, or I suppose a nonwriting weekend, since words were used. Z and C are getting into the wordly frame of mind. If you say something, Z is likely to say it after you. They're both in love with animal sounds: I don't know when I last said "moo" or "baaa" so many times. The words for various vehicles are also important: Car. Truck. Tractor. The weather was particularly fine, and we spent a fair amount of time outdoors, which made me realize how indoor a person I am. The computer is indoors, of course, which is part of it, I suppose. But I do have a laptop now, so theoretically I could take it with me and write anywhere: the park, the library, on a rock overlooking Lake Erie. I can be one of those serious people in coffeeshops, although it often turns out that they're playing solitaire or sudoku online. But if I can I'd rather be looking out at something that looks like this.

I believe that my writing might somehow become more lofty, more expansive, if I looked up from the screen at this curve of hill, the soft brushy grass, the height of these pines. But maybe not.

what meetings are good for

2006-10-12T22:07:00.000-04:00

I find that it's good to go to meetings with a legal pad and a pen, because then you write down this and that and you look terribly engaged. Because of the suggestive atmosphere created by the legal pad ("I'm all business! I'm seriously interested in bureaucratic matters!"), you can write any old thing you want.
Thus, I put in some fruitful time this morning at the meeting. I covered 2.5 pp. of the legal pad with notes, thoughts, reminders, etc. Some were purely pragmatic (meet with Erin at 2 on Monday, or Buy milk!). But at least half of it was taken up with the great over-arching epic idea I had for another novel.
No, I don't want to say what it is, because that would feel so unlucky. It even feels unlucky to say I had an idea, but I find that having a blog draws these admissions out of you, whether you will or no.

who am I if I'm not writing the novel?

2006-10-08T18:56:00.000-04:00

Writing a novel is good, because for all the time you're writing it, you have a purpose, a reason to be in the world. What are you doing lately? someone will ask, and you'll say (modestly or with bravado, as fits your personality), I'm writing a novel. Or possibly you'll hide it, you'll answer this question with some nonsense about your job, or what you've planted in your garden. But even so, you'll know that the true answer is--I'm writing a novel--and the knowledge will give you strength. You'll feel the pleasure of your secret, you can see yourself as a spy in the house of literature (to paraphrase Anais Nin, which I feel guilty about doing, since I dislike her writing so much; but that is a good title).
But then you are not writing the novel, and you have to say much more boring things like, I'm taking some time off from writing, or I'm thinking about some short stories, and your listener will be able to sense your restlessness and dissatisfaction.
Virginia Woolf said that she always liked to have another project to turn to when she finished a book--in her case, it was to stave off a killing depression. I'm not so worried about that, but I did think I'd like to have a project in mind--what will I be working on when the novel is finally and truly done? I've set myself to think about this several times, and so far have no answer. I've toyed with past ideas, but nothing has stepped forward to say, "Write me." So I don't know. My idea files are full of wonderful stuff--titles, first sentences, vague ideas, bits of dialogue, as here
"My father got a speeding ticket the year before he died."
Or
a story abt the guy down the street, his PTSD, his Vietnam history, his feud with sometimes other neighbors; his little dog; how he scraped and painted one side of his house per year, meticulously; how at the height of his feud he dressed in camo fatigues and spoke about doing reconnaissance, going in country, etc.
Or
a story called "The Dream of Snow
Or a character named Aunt Babydoll.
But what I wish right now is that someone else would write about these things. And then I could read them.

revision marathon

2006-09-30T18:34:00.000-04:00

I'm about 2/3 of the way through the book doing light revision--typos, looking for small problems, finding things I want to weave more tightly into the fabric of the book, etc.
My thought is--I really need a massage. Sitting at your desk for this long is serious wear on the body. My shoulders are tight and my spine is twisty. Plus, I need more chocolate. I've eaten most of a Lindt 70% bar, a chili-spiced Dagoba, and a leftover Godiva truffle I found in my purse. For a while I had a cacao high going, but now I've crashed.
Tonight, D (who is doing all the revision-era cooking) is making venison stew, there are brownies in the freezer, and we're going to watch some Bob Newhart (the 1st show--I hate the 2nd innkeeper one). Plus I've bought a copy of Soap Opera Digest, so I can enter more fully the restful world of daytime TV. Is Reva really going to die of cancer? I'm looking forward to worrying about someone's characters besides my own.

writing is an extreme sport

2006-09-28T09:24:00.000-04:00

Check out this great post by BlogLily on what happens when you're writing and you get to the edge of the known. It's the best description I've read of what happens when you've started, and maybe you had to scourge yourself to sit down at your desk and you didn't want to start and you put it off by checking your email obsessively or playing computer games or re-ordering your post-it collection, but you're at your desk and kind of grumpily writing this and that, moving through the scene that you set yourself to write for the day and all of a sudden you're in new territory. All of a sudden you realize that Carl has gone on this walk so he can go and look at the family cemetery that's back up in the hills behind the farm, and that this connects with about 8 other things you've got going in the novel and therefore is inspired, except that you bypassed inspiration and the scene is coming straight out of your fingertips. You're writing something you hadn't thought of, but it's pretty OK, and the grumpiness is gone and you let the post-its slide to the floor because you're writing yourself into a new place. This is the greatest writer feeling in the world.

word count

2006-09-24T21:09:00.000-04:00

WordCount is a sehr cool website I just found (sorry--I've been playing with online foreign language dictionaries). It describes itself as an "interactive presentation of the 86,800 most frequently used English words," although so far they only go up to 53000 something. It's irresistible to a writer!
Again, quoting the site, "Each word is scaled to reflect its frequency relative to the words that precede and follow it, giving a visual barometer of relevance. The larger the word, the more we use it. The smaller the word, the more uncommon it is."
All sorts of interesting things emerge. For instance, I now know that my name is the 2nd most frequently used female name. You can look up a word to see how popular it is: "feckless," a favorite of mine, is # 35,486. Or you can surf WordCount looking for felicitous word combinations, like "kill creation governments" which are #s 2137-39. "Wife" (566) is more used than "husband" (899); but "man" (142) more than "woman" (393). "Novel" and "toast" are more than 4000 words apart, although I did find the happy combination of "Indian roof novel" and "subjective toast curiosity" nesting together.
It also does a nice swoopy graphic thing when it zeroes in on a word. Can there be a better time-waster for the procrastinating language-lover?

and yet more

2006-09-23T21:06:00.000-04:00

I've started reading the novel over and doing a light revision. So far, so OK.
In other news, here is more of the un-novelish thing:

When we decided to shoot the pistol at the last minute, it was because Brandon came home from his job early. He and John got the pistol out to look at it, and then, while the kids were trying to entice the kittens out from under the porch, they set up a target on the little hill behind the chicken coop. Everything was packed into the car, but the day was so mild, so sweetly hazy, so tenderly sunny, that Sophia and I were not annoyed by the delay.
We all gathered to watch, leaning against the front of the truck and sitting on the hood. Eden put the lead on the dog and brought out bottles of water: loganberry, cranberry, cherry. I put my hand to my face to hide my mouth which was stretching into a smile. Who was she kidding? She was just a baby, she didn't have a kitchen in there behind the screen door (although I had seen it, I had sat in it, sliding my feet on the floor), her Play-Easy refrigerator was only two feet high and although it had a light, it was decorated with stickers of Mickey Mouse--it wasn't cold inside. She gave me loganberry without asking. I loved her so much.

more of something that is not-a-novel

2006-09-13T18:48:00.000-04:00

There was something strange about visiting someone who was to all of us a former child--Eden. A former child who was married. Oh, it didn't bother her sister or her cousins. Her sister was waiting for that to happen to her, to become a former child. Maybe Kelly, too, a little bit: she was fifteen. It never entered Brandon's head, I'm sure. But her aunt, and John, who had known Eden as a child, and me, her mother--it was different for us. How to accept a glass of water or a cookie baked by her own hand in her own kitchen? How could we hide our smiles when she talked about redecorating, or spoke on the phone to her boss? Eden's telephone voice was the voice she had used when she and her sister played School or Office.
But it had been a good visit, relaxed, full of various delights: horseback riding, long walks, discussions on the porch while drinking endless small bottles of flavored water. John had gone out with the gun and the springer spaniel. He hadn't shot anything, there was nothing to shoot. It was the wrong time to shoot anything except crows and woodchucks, which, the farmer who rented the fields in front of the farmhouse told us, were varmints. Varmints were always in season. The crows didn't seem to know it. They hung in the sky, flipping their wings, diving, cawing as if they were in a horror movie. The woodchucks had made themselves scarce though. There was not a woodchuck to be seen, although earlier we had found the entrances to their tunnels in the mowed field on the other side of the pond. You could find these by looking for the places where the grass was a darker green, the farmer's son told us, but when we asked him, he could not say why.

les vacances

2006-09-10T10:38:00.000-04:00

Here's a piece of something I'm working on, during my vacation from the novel:

At the last minute before leaving, we decided to shoot the pistol. We had been taking pictures of each other lying in the hammock, or standing in the field talking to the farmer, or pretending to weed the garden, that we would later show to Grandma and Grandpa, so that they could see how their first married granddaughter was doing, where she was living, what the house and the fields and the barn looked like in the full golden summer light. There was one picture of Robert jumping from the porch banister, staged to capture him in full flight with all the rest of us looking on. We hoped that one came out.

It was a .357 Magnum Ruger Blackhawk, western style. John had brought it because he never had a chance to shoot it in the city. In the city, it stayed in its bag in the basement, oiled, cleaned, and unloaded. He had a friend who belonged to a gun club and who sometimes invited him to come and target shoot, but this didn't happen very often. But out in the country seemed a good place to bring a gun, here, in the hill country, here, on the farm.

Now that I read it over it sounds very Richard Ford-ish, which I'm not sure is what I was going for.

road trip

2006-08-31T09:25:00.000-04:00

I'm off to the wellspring of my novel, which sounds like something Henry James or George Eliot might say, don't you think? Logan, in other words, which so far as I know is unchronicled by James and certainly not by Eliot. There was a Logan native poet, but I can't remember her name just now. Alice something?
It seems like a good time to go, novelwise--I'm in the limbo between draft and revision. I gave myself a month to do ordinary things like start my classes and go grocery shopping and buy some new shoes--revision starts on or about September 17. Otherwise, it's always a good time to go to Logan, because my daughters and grandsons live there. They've gotten pretty good at sliding down the slide--which takes skills you probably don't remember acquiring--but they don't climb up ladderlike steps yet, so someone (me, for instance) has to lift them up as far as possible so they can slide back down. Plus, there's swinging.

hmmm...

2006-08-27T09:57:00.000-04:00

Here's a wonderful memoir-essay by journalist-novelist Andrew O'Hagan on reading and writing, which I found through Light Reading. An excerpt to show the flavor, both nostalgic and acerbic:
There weren't any books in our house apart from the Kilmarnock telephone directory, which had its uses (especially the Emergency pages). I once bought a children's encyclopedia in 10 volumes at a jumble sale for 50p, but one of my brothers wrecked each of the set by trying to cut a square hole through the middle pages so that he could use it as a stash for stolen matches. (He observed the technique in one of the James Bond films.) The books were in ribbons before I got to learn about the sun rituals of the Incas or the combustion process in a car engine.
I'm working on a short story, which seems like the strangest animal in the world after all the time I spent with the novel. Or like living in a small room after inhabiting Severance Hall. Or, or, or--

not-writing

2006-08-23T10:22:00.000-04:00

I'm still in a not-writing state, which is strange, but restful. I'm reading a lot, and yesterday I went to East Harbor beach w/o so much as a notebook or a pen and spent a whole afternoon with D--lying on the almost deserted sand, running into the waves, taking photos of my Evian bottle and the back of D's head.

I've found some interesting stuff while internet trawling. Here is Quickmuse, a site with poems written in 15 minutes. Various writers are asked to write a poem about a given topic and their efforts are on the site both as a finished product and as they are being written in real time (or rather recorded real time). I read a nice poem on decapitation by Mary Jo Salter.
And for the terminally cluttered booklover, I found BookMooch, where you can list books you don't want anymore; when someone requests a book and you send it to them, you get points so that you can get someone else's book. I found this on BlogLily, a highly entertaining and literate blog.
Kate's Book Blog has an interesting post on signpost books, books which are not necessarily life-changing, but significant in some way. Of Books and Bicycles has a post on Colette, one of my favorite authors. And Tales from the Reading Room has a post on Virginia Woolf (another favorite), claiming that reading VW is like "taking an extremely safe form of narcotic."
More on influence: here, Jennifer Egan (author of The Keep), discusses 5 books that have influenced her. I'm so with her on The Wizard of Oz. (I found this mentioned on Bookslut.)
And finally, the Wayward Armadillo has a great list of writing exercises.

post-novel tristesse

2006-08-17T10:40:00.000-04:00

But actually, I don't feel any. Is it like Emily Dickinson--"a formal feeling comes/The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs"? Probably not, but I love that poem. I looked it up just now to get the quote right and found it on Quotations About.com, a carelessly literate site where they called it "Poem lyrics," and misspelled Tombs. If you want to read the whole thing, it's here, spelled correctly, and with Dickinson's dashes intact.
Ahem, you may say, you are meandering, and it's true. I am happily unfocused, at least for a while. The novel is living in another room just now--we're separated. I'm planning a reconciliation in a couple of weeks, after school has started and settled down, after Charley O has read it and told me what he thinks; after my sister and I have talked it over. It's not you, I told the novel, it's me--I need some space. And the novel took it well, retreated to its disks and CDs. It's biding its time--it knows I still love it.
Since I wrote The End (metaphorically; although why didn't I? it would have been fun), I've been to the Catskills for my niece's wedding. (I took the novel disks and CD along in my plaid bag, because what if burglars broke in, etc.?) I've worked in the garden (lots of weeds, few tomatoes), and tomorrow D and I are going to start canning the motherlode of peaches from his father's 2 trees, planted on his tiny Parma lot (along with an apple and a pear tree). Plus I'm doing some fascinating reorganizing of the majors' files at school. Is there Life After the Novel? Yes, but it's a strange and cloudy life. I think I might write a short story or two, but the novel is tapping its foot. Remember me, it's saying. Or else.

done

2006-08-08T12:53:00.000-04:00

626 pages: a fat draft waiting to be cut and cosseted and lovingly revised.

ultima thule

2006-08-06T12:13:00.000-04:00

I’m quite close to the end, and this is terrifying, actually. The terror consists, I think, in two things: that I won’t be able to write the end; or that I will, and it will be over, for better or for worse. (Maybe there’s a sub-terror to the 2nd one—that I’ll finish it and the end will be awful.) But of course, I comfort myself, it won’t be over—for there’s Revision; and if it’s awful, Revision will answer this, too, as well as it can.
I've realized that's there's a time problem with this last part I'm writing: that I envisioned the last scene happening as dusk is falling--the time when it's not day any longer, but not quite yet night. And I've already written myself into the dark in the scene just before the last scene. But this doesn't seem too impossible to fix, and I even think that I'll leave it for Revision.
Will the last scene say anything like what I want it to say? I have no idea. It's to have the dusk in it, and a white dog, some ashes and a china cup--which sounds quite poetic, and frankly I'd like to write a poem instead of a scene, because it feels as if it would be easier (apologies to my sister and all other poets everywhere: I really know it's not easier to write a poem).
Here is one of the white dogs who were my secret models (that's her at the top, too, in a more pensive, evening mood).

various sorts of bookish news

2006-08-04T09:54:00.000-04:00

I've been procrastinating the headlong and furious writing of the last pages of my novel by bloghopping, and am pleased to offer the following gleanings:
Book Kitten says that Nicole Kidman is going to play the beautiful and evil Mrs. Coulter in the movie of The Golden Compass (1st book of Philip Pullman's trilogy).
I found some great pictures of writers' homes posted by Danielle at A Work in Progress--from a book, American Writers at Home. I am envious of Mark Twain's library that opens into a conservatory--two of my obsessions in close proximity.
Here's a wonderful bit of witty dialogue from Dorothy Sayers's Strong Poison, which I read (although not for the 1st time) on Kate's Book Blog:
‘Well, I wouldn’t have the muck in the house,’ said the Captain, firmly. ‘I caught Hilda with it, and I said, “Now you send that book straight back to the library.” I don’t interfere, but one must draw the line somewhere.’
‘How did you know what it was like?’ asked Wimsey, innocently.
‘Why James Douglas’s article in the Express was good enough for me,’ said Captain Bates. ‘The paragraphs he quoted were filthy—positively filthy.’
‘Well, it’s a good thing we’ve all read them,’ said Wimsey. ‘Forewarned is forearmed.’
‘We owe a great debt of gratitude to the Press,’ said the Dowager Duchess; ‘so kind of them to pick out all the plums for us and save us the trouble of reading the books, don’t you think, and such a joy for the poor dear people who can’t afford seven and sixpence, or even a library subscription.’ ***
The Master Procrastinator Award to Samuel Johnson, who became overwhelmed with the work required to put together his famous dictionary. He completely stopped working on it for a while (possibly several years). New research suggests that it was "only a threat to break into his house and seize the manuscript - which the publishers mistakenly thought was almost finished"-- which got Johnson back to work." Read the article here (I found this 1st in Maud Newton.)
Cleveland's independent bookstores have a website that maybe everyone else knows about, but which was new to me.
Here's an interview with Charles D'Ambrosio on Bookslut. His last collection of stories is called The Dead Fish Museum, and even if I didn't already love his work I would have wanted to read it because of that title. My sister will know what I mean. ****
There's a One Book meme going around--one book that changed your life, one book you'd take to a desert island, etc. I've read several, all interesting, but my favorite so far was from Mark at The Elegant Variation--check it out here.

***this is the 2nd time I've borrowed from Kate--I hope she'll forgive me for being such a mooch.
****for a wellwritten review of one of the stories in Dead Fish, see Plan B.

back, with new pages

2006-07-27T18:32:00.000-04:00

I wrote almost 5000 words while I was away, and I did it while looking at this:

So I guess that proves something about writing away from my comfort zone (that is, my messy desk/office). Also much swimming, some hiking (it's chastening to hike at high altitudes when you're over 50), a little shopping, and communal cooking (3 women in a kitchen!). Here's the view from 8000 feet. If I was a better photographer, you'd be able to see a sliver of blue that is Donner Lake.

no retreat, no surrender

2006-07-18T12:04:00.000-04:00

But I am actually going on a writing retreat, an informal one, at a friend's house in Lake Tahoe (or is that at Lake Tahoe?). I'll be there for a week, writing like crazy, hoping to finish or nearly finish my novel. This makes me feel great trepidation. There's something about the idea of going some place particularly (and only) to write that gives me performance anxiety. I feel more secure if writing is something that has to be tucked in, or even wedged forcibly into a day that has other purposes. A leftover from when I wrote on the dining room table after the kids went to bed.
Maybe this week at Lake Tahoe will allow me to claim my writing in a new way.
Some books I'm taking with me:
Nobody Knows My Name, James Baldwin
The Polysyllabic Spree, Nick Hornby
That damned copy of the Missouri Review given entirely over to Rick Bass that I still haven't finished reading yet.

beware of theme

2006-07-15T22:04:00.000-04:00

I distrust the idea of theme, which seems to me to be a kind of high school English concept, and one that you should forget immediately when you start to write.
But Flannery O'Connor says it far better:
When you can state the theme of a story, when you can separate it from the story itself, then you can be sure the story is not a very good one. The meaning of a story has to be embodied in it, has to be made concrete in it. A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell him to read the story. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning, and the purpose of making statements about the meaning of a story is only to help you to experience that meaning more fully.
I got this lovely quote from Kate's Book Blog.
I've been reading short stories, and it's making me want to write one. Which of course I must not do until I finish the novel.

halfway through summer

2006-07-10T16:42:00.000-04:00

More or less halfway. Summer is a precious commodity, and in July I start to feel it slipping away, time speeding up so that the days tick by as if I were on a train, each day one of the little towns you pass through, so small that they don't have a station. I used to take the train to school in Chicago, and I remember feeling sorry for those towns and the people who lived in them as if not having a station said something definitive about their lives and possibilities: I was a goony teenager.
I'm always hoping though that I'll turn out eventually to be a glass half-full person instead of the half-empty type I've been up to now. Half the summer left!
I'm reading Virginia Woolf again, the letters this time, which I haven't read so often as the diaries. I can barely write a letter without putting it off for a month--how did she have time to write those countless volumes of letters and diaries, and still turn out 8 or so novels? (I also can't keep a diary--when I did I only wrote when I was feeling depressed or whiny; and I was never witty, as VW is at the drop of a hat.)
Here she talks (in a letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell) about writing letters with an audience in mind:
Do you think people (I'm thinking of Lytton and Walpole) do write letters to be published? I'm as vain as a cockatoo myself; but I dont think I do that. Because when one is writing a letter, the whole point is to rush ahead; and anything may come out of the spout of the tea pot. Now, if I thought, Ottoline will put this letter in a box, I should at once apply the tip of my finger to the end of the spout.
And here she is on her new car:
I was going to say our car has come--silver and green, fluid fly wheel, Tickford hood... It glides with the smoothness of eel, with the speed of a swift, and the--isn't this a good blurb?--the power of a tigress who has just been reft of her young.
Did I say that I love Virginia Woolf?

novel writing: the ultimate excuse

2006-07-06T20:44:00.000-04:00

Excuse for what? Not to clean or cook, of course. My sister has given me permission not to clean the house until I finish the novel (I guess that had better happen fast, for reasons of health and sanitation). And D is still valiantly cooking his way through the Wok Cookbook.
This morning I was back in Jason's head--I'm quite comfortable in his POV, which maybe should worry me, since he's a little strange and about 30 years younger than I am. But my sister has also given me permission not to worry about anything until I finish the novel, so I'm just dismissing that.
I gave myself permission to read any trashy book I come across (until I finish the novel), and so yesterday I read Michael Crichton's Sphere, which I recommend only if you want something that makes you read bits of it aloud to your unwilling partner so he will see how truly ridiculous it is. I suppose though that if I was in a high-minded mood, I might say that it can be read as an extended metaphor of the perils of the writer's dependence on imagination. Don't read it to find out what this means.
Also, at Crazy Diamond's request, here are pictures of the uncleaned and supremely cluttered living room. Literature comes at a price.

Shoe Repository

Sofa Bookshelf

Yes, those are dead flowers.

wishful ending

2006-07-04T12:38:00.000-04:00

More calendrical calculations: if I'm writing for so many days in July, and doing an average of so many words per day, then the world will be saved, i.e., the novel will be finished.
Today--a love scene. Much easier to write about ghosts than love, I find.

love post to John McPhee

2006-06-29T10:50:00.000-04:00

I'm going away for the weekend to a place where there will be no computers, no email, no novel (well, actually I'm taking the 8 disks that my novels parts and notes are on because I am paranoid; suppose a novel--stealing burglar broke in while I was gone?)
But I had to put up these links to John McPhee-abilia.
Here's an interview in the NYer online and another on NPR.

from my horror reading list

2006-06-28T10:24:00.000-04:00

Warning to my sister: I posted this already on the bookchat blog we're both on (I can hear her whining: "I've read this already!")--reposting here because I'm lazy and also because it really is such a good book.
I love global warming. Yes, it will be a bad thing, but I still love reading about it. My newest fix is Elizabeth Kolbert's Field Notes from a Catastrophe, part of which was 1st published in 3 installments in the NYer. This is the best written one I've read so far--it's lucid, has both statistics and human data--her research is from books, monographs, interviews, travel.
She goes and looks at the permafrost (which is decreasing rapidly, causing houses in Alaska to sink or fall apart in some places) and visits the Netherlands to see firsthand how a finger in the dike isn't going to work anymore (they're building amphibious houses, that will float in a flood: seriously).
Some of the stuff in here I've read before (the 300-year drought in the Middle East that turned the mighty kingdom of Akkad into a 3-foot layer of sterile soil [dating from 2200 to 1900 BC] where there weren't even any earthworms; or the abandonment of the Viking settlement on Greenland, ditto the mystery of Roanoke), but of course this is like the 7th or 10th book I've read on GW, so that's not surprising: no one can resist Akkad. Not even me--did you know that archaeologists found a wall that had been abandoned halfway through, as if the workers said "Hey--what's with this 300-year drought--we're out of here; a kind of Marie Celeste of the desert. Kolbert quotes from a poem written about a century later--"The Curse of Akkad," which is a litany of ecological disaster. **
I highly recommend this book if you're at all interested in global warming, or the ecology, or horror.* One of the things that I've been coming to realize in all this CO2-fed reading is the fragility of what we think of as our normal climatic state. Even beyond the dire facts of the impending global warming and our sorry part in it, I've started to see that the climate of the Holocene (where we are now in the great march of geologic ages) has been very unusual in the history of the world--highly benign and conducive to the rise of civilization, etc. It's as if humanity has been unknowingly living on an extended vacation, which could be cut short at any time when the world reverts to one of its states of extreme variability.

*Scary quote: "the last time carbon dioxide levels were comparable to today's was 3.5 million years ago... and it is likely that they have not been much higher since the Eocene, 50 million years ago. In the Eocene, crocodiles roamed Colorado and sea levels were nearly 300 hundred feet higher than they are today." If I move to Cleveland Heights will I be above water?

**from "The Curse of Akkad":
The great industrial tracts produced no grain,
The inundated tracts produced no fish,
The irrigated orchards produced neither syrup nor wine,...
He who slept on the roof, died on the roof,
He who slept in the house, had no burial
People were flailing at themselves from hunger.

551 pages

2006-06-25T12:02:00.000-04:00

Which is how many there are now (double-spaced, if they were printed out, but they're almost all virtual pages). Will it never end? Sometimes being a writer seems self indulgent, as when I write 3 pages (as I did this morning) and come to the end of a section and feel as if I've accomplished something. Did I save the world? No. And (as per the Coupland quote, see here) I'm not boiling the carcass of the old order either.
Possibly I'm thinking these thoughts because I've been reading Field Notes on the Compassionate Life, which is just the kind of book to make you feel as if all you ever do is eat chocolate and think about what color to dye your hair. I'm planning on reading some Hunter Thompson and the new Janet Evanovich to counterbalance it.

writer's un-block

2006-06-20T16:20:00.000-04:00

I started on the novel again after a break (week in SE Ohio, grandchildren, auction, the Washboard Festival, etc., etc., etc.), and 1037 words rolled off my fingers. I think this might be the first time I've come back after a hiatus and was able to start right in w/o a lot of grief, doubt, psycho-wrangling, and all that other not-fun stuff. It was helpful that I knew where I was going--that I was going to start writing the scene where Jason goes to the abandoned prison (the section is called, helpfully, "The Abandoned Prison").
I'd thought I might go and visit the actual prison this is based on while I was down there, but I totally forgot about that until I was sitting in front of the computer this morning. But I have a lot of notes from when I visited it last time, also some pictures (unfortunately not digital, or I'd post one).
I took a lot of books down there to read, but I found myself reading the same essay in Nobody Knows My Name (James Baldwin) every night in the 2 minutes before I fell asleep, although there were, of course, numerous readings of Moo, Baa, La La La* and other classics.

*a thrilling and transgressive book dealing with the importance of the animal voice

quote of the week

2006-06-13T10:44:00.000-04:00

“If you’re not spending every waking moment of your life radically rethinking the nature of the world—if you’re not plotting every moment boiling the carcass of the old order—then you’re wasting your day.”
From Girlfriend in a Coma, by Douglas Coupland

thoughts chasing themselves

2006-06-10T16:11:00.000-04:00

Thoughts of the novel are running around in my head, even (especially?) when I'm not sitting in front of the computer. Some ideas about time—how it should probably start at the beginning of summer, more or less, and have events distributed so as to fill up the summer more equitably. Or, maybe my thing of having it end at Halloween is silly? misguided?? Or maybe it should start later, in July? Nothing pragmatic is occurring to me.
Isabel and Jason go to the prison?? is this at all believable? What else is happening at the same time? What are Carl and Nancy doing? do they talk about what happened at Mr. Six’s? Or avoid each other?
Carl should see Lily in some way or other; maybe she asks him to come over and move some stuff for her; and gives him something as a keepsake. Nancy—I have no idea what she’s doing. Her mother comes to visit? Or one of her friends from Cleveland???
Remind myself that the end of June is a goal, not a whip to beat myself with.

To avoid the above questions and others, I spent some time trying to read Erich Heller's "The Artist's Journey into the Interior" but sentences like this discouraged me:

From Winckelmann through Keats and Holderlin to Nietzche's own Birth of Tragedy and Rilke's 'Torso of Apollo,' European poetry and aesthetic speculation assumed again and again, as if under compulsion, the stance and posture of Goethe's Iphigenia as, exiled to a barbarous coast, she seeks with her inmost soul the land of the Greeks.

Now that I've typed that out, though, I have to say it makes more sense. And I quite liked "the art that, in all its scenes, shows... the scenery of the farewell bidden to the external world by the soul of man," which is about the Romantic vision, I think.
Hegel is mixed in to all this somehow--he's in the subtitle ("A Hegelian Prophecy and Its Fulfillment"), but I haven't figured out how yet.
But maybe I'll give it at least one more try.

what I'm reading now

2006-06-06T12:09:00.000-04:00

Jinx High, Mercedes Lackey. Second of a trilogy about Diana Tregarde, witch, sorceress, and Guardian of the helpless and innocent. Imps, demons, body-jumping evil sorceresses, etc.--all the paranormal fun you could wish for.
Collected Poems, Edna St. Vincent Millay. Still making my way through this--both highlights (poems about her lovelife) and lowlights (poems about death).
Tolkien's letters. More interesting than I thought they'd be.
The Soul of a Chef, Michael Ruhlman. 3 chefs, 3 philosophies, much time spent in the kitchen, plus some recipes at the end.
Bookmarked to Die, Jo Dereske. A mystery: the amateur sleuth is a librarian. Another library patron has been murdered! A cozy of the new sort.
The Artist's Journey into the Interior, Erich Heller. I picked this up when a colleague of mine put out the books he didn't want to take with him when he moved to New Zealand. It's the kind of book that I sometimes think I should read, but then when I do, I find insufferable. But I'm giving it more time.
Another Country, James Baldwin. Rereading this for maybe the 5th time--it's my favorite of his books. The first chapter is 78 pp. that stands among the best writing of the 20th century. One of the back-of-the-book blurbs says "The book itself is... an act of violence," and maybe it was perceived that way in 1960--possibly because it says (implicitly) that American society is a killer of black people; and possibly because it features a black-white romance; and maybe incidentally because some of the (sympathetically portrayed) characters are gay. But it seems to me to be a tender and intimate book that focuses on the importance of love and friendship in the face of despair and horror. Also, one of the characters (Vivaldo) is a writer, which I'm always a sucker for.
A Multitude of Sins, Richard Ford. Short stories--I just started this although I bought it in April. The synopsis claims that each story focuses on "liaisons in and out and to the sides of marriage," and the last seems to be a short novella (I love novellas).
The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs. Jacobs died recently (last month?) and I got interested in this book from reading all the encomiums in her obituaries. Have only read the first chapter so far, but I can tell anyway that she's a good writer, and likably passionate about her subject.
Finally, a lot of vintage cookbooks that my son-in-law found for me at a garage sale last week--one is entirely filled with recipes using Knox's unflavored gelatin.

passing a pagestone

2006-06-02T17:27:00.000-04:00

I went over 500 pages today, which is good. But shouldn't I be more excited? I guess I'd be more excited if I was done.

7 more chapters

2006-05-30T22:25:00.000-04:00

I've just determined, perhaps erroneously, that I have 7 more chapters/sections to write, which has made me very happy. They even have titles:
Zener Cards
The Logan Fair
Homecoming
Lily in the Fire
The Prison, Revisited
Halloween
Ghost Walking
The titles are sort of like reminders to myself of what they're supposed to be about--another way to focus.
In other news, I've planted 13 of my 23 tomato plants, most of them heirloom varieties: German Johnson, Cherokee Purple (pictured), Yellow Brandywine, Yellow Pear, a red grape type, and some other ones I can't remember. My (very small) yard is a forest of tomato stakes.

the long road leads to chocolate and millay

2006-05-22T11:43:00.000-04:00

This morning it took 3 squares of Lindt's 70% Dark Cocoa chocolate to jumpstart my writing: where will it end? To counteract the dark lovely bitterness of the chocolate, I read a few poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay. I bought a paperback of her collected poems when I was in high school--one of the first books I bought for myself, at Schroeder's Bookstore on Public Square, now and for a long time defunct. I keep reading them trying to imagine what my fifteen or sixteen-year-old self thought of them. I'd already decided I wanted to be a writer, but I don't remember ever thinking, I want to write a poem just like "The Suicide," which is pages long and very gloomy:
"Curse thee, Life, I will live with thee no more!
Thou hast mocked me, starved me, beat my body
sore!"
And so on, for hundreds of lines. She liked exclamation points a lot, at least in her early poems. They are arranged chronologically in the book, so I'm now in the midst of her third book, published when she was around 29. There are more fun ones than "The Suicide"--a jaunty poem called "The Beanstalk," for instance, which familiarly addresses the giant, and which I take to be about being a poet and a woman in the early part of the 20th century.
My favorite so far is "Passer Mortuus Est," a witty and delightfully snide comment on love that's over, with a soupcon of feeling coming out at the end. Check it out, here. The title is from a poem by Catullus on the death of his mistress's sparrow (prose translation here), and Dorothy Parker was similarly inspired--see her not quite as delightful poem, here.
"Passer Mortuus Est" is also mercifully brief, after all those long, long, long poems on death and betrayal and grief. I believe that she had a pretty good time as a young woman in the free-loving post-WWI American years--but you wouldn't know it from the early poems.

ny times best of list

2006-05-16T10:49:00.000-04:00

The NY Times has a list of the best works of American fiction in the last 25 years--see here. Not to be a feminist or anything (but wait: I am a feminist)--has anyone noticed that there are only two women on this list? And isn't it excessive to have 5 books by Philip Roth? (I know--these are the choices of eminent literary sages; but still.)
What about Jane Smiley? What about Grace Paley? What about Rosellen Brown?
As homework for this course, please read A Thousand Acres, Paley's Collected Stories, and Brown's Civil Wars.
For extra credit, propose your own list.

coming back to the novel as to a lover

2006-05-13T15:10:00.000-04:00

I took several days off the novel to do end-of-semester reading and grading (some very good stories), and then today came back to the page (481 to be exact), and to Carl and Jason with a sigh of relief and affection.
They'd been suspended at the moment of pushing off into Rose Lake with a party of disaffected canoers and a high-spirited dog, many questions hanging in the air. Will someone fall in? will the little girl in the party want to play with the doggie, even though he's in another canoe? will they look down into Rose Lake and see the ghosts of settlers who might have lived there before the river was dammed up and the gorge became a lake?
So far, Jason and Carl are just having an argument, and they stop to hear someone shouting over the water about the war and the murder of the American people, with more to come.
In other news, now that the semester is over, I can devote myself to the finalization of my summer reading list (still taking nominations). I've started on The Time Traveler's Wife (by Audrey Niffenegger), lent to me by one friend who recommended it with reservations (another friend recommended it w/o reservations). I like it so far. It switches time a lot, but I'm dealing with this by not paying too much attention to it. The only thing maybe is the relationship between the 2 main characters--am I creeped out because he meets her when she's six? I'm not sure yet.

back on the track of the elusive plot animal

2006-05-04T18:12:00.000-04:00

One of the nice things about writing is how it lets you revisit things you've liked or loved--as with the aforementioned Rose Lake, a teacup of a lake (compared to Lake Erie, as all lakes must be to a Clevelander), with a hidden, secret feeling, ringed by trees, beautiful but with a hint of danger (because it's so deep).
The revisiting applies to other things--Wolfe Cemetery, which came in earlier, and the Moonville Tunnel--the same kind of pleasure you might get from a photograph, or a souvenir of a trip perhaps.
Of course, this revisiting may also be less pleasant, for unless we're writing a relentlessly cheerful and upbeat book with no conflict or unhappiness (and how good a book can this be?) we have to go back to the things and places and events that have brought us sorrow, shame, regret, despair, to give those things to the characters walking through the landscapes we've created, or recreated.

But now I'm in the thick of the Rose Lake scene. Carl and Jason are about to embark on a canoe trip with a dog passenger--could anything be better?

boredom

2006-04-30T11:53:00.000-04:00

I’m bored with the Rose Lake chapter. I feel as if I’m getting no nearer the end, even though I now have 474 pages. The end keeps receding. I remember a bit of this with my last novel, but it seems much worse now.
But also I keep thinking about what’s the point of this book, etc.--which is fatal. Or rather, I’m thinking it now, meaning that I feel stuck and blocked, and out of sorts. I wasted the morning in doing email and blog stuff, which is annoying. I sent off a story to the Mid American Review, which I pretended was productive, but it really wasn't.
Why are Carl and Jason going to Rose Lake? Is it for a good (novelistic) reason, or is it just because I liked Rose Lake and thought it was pretty, and because it’s in my notes, and therefore I ought to use it? I was interested in it because it's deep--70 feet. It was once an immense ravine that was dammed--not sure when. The deepness is interesting--Lake Erie is only 50 feet deep on average. Also, when I was there once, I heard someone shouting across the water, something about war and death. I suppose Rose Lake has an apocalyptic but scenic ambience for me. But is that a good reason to put it in the book?
The good part of writing this is that it inspired a blog post (yay—a new place to put my crabby thoughts about writing), and also, that I figured out why things that I write in Word come out funny on the blog. Blog—2 ; Novel—0.
It’s the end, stupid. Why can’t I get at the writing of it? Do I need some kind of intervention?
My writing friends gather round me in a comfortable, well-lit room with only one entrance. One of them takes my hand, possibly my science fiction writer friend. “We understand. We've all been through this. But it can’t go on.”
Another, the saintly T, says, “Yes, we’ve been worried about you. But you have to know that we all love and support you, no matter what.”
My sister (who is famous for her frankness and hatred of wasting time) says, “You have to end this novel, or else.”
Then we all have doughnuts while a single tear makes its way down my weathered cheek. I go home and practice writing "The End" over and over. I do epiphany exercises. I dream of closure.

further consideration of the summer reading list

2006-04-28T21:08:00.000-04:00

On my list:
1. the new book by Julia Child and her nephew (I've forgotten the name)
2. all the books of Robertson Davies, now that I've become a Davies fan
3. Lady Oracle: re-read (this is Atwood's funniest book, as far as I'm concerned; there's an artist that works with roadkill--need I say more?)
4. another novel by Balzac; I've only read one (Cousin Bette), and I feel I ought to read at least one more
5. The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan; actually I'll probably read this next week, which is technically before summer, even before the academic summer, which begins as soon as the grades are turned in
6. a new book of short stories by Richard Ford that I bought on deep reduction at the campus bookstore (can't remember name)
7. Dreamweaver for Dummies (I'll probably just browse this though)

More later.

my summer reading list

2006-04-14T15:02:00.000-04:00

I've never actually had a list of books I was assigned to read in the summer for school, and maybe this is why I so love to make up one for myself. I always think of summer as a time of infinite leisure, when I will have time to read for hours, even though this has been proved false over and over again. But it's good to have goals.
I don't have a list assembled yet, although I have some ideas. Proust is lurking in the back of my mind: read me! And I was thinking I might like to reread some things, like Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, and Atwood's Lady Oracle. Possibly some Henry James? I haven't read enough outside the English language--I'd like to get into some more French, German, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, etc., etc.
My plan is to start assembling books in a special pile, the summer pile. And maybe if I want to read Proust I should buy it instead of getting it out of the library and then renewing it for several months. I need to find a new reading position, since lying on my stomach now makes my back hurt if I do it for too long. Also, I'd sort of like an Adirondack chair with its wide chair arm for drinks, for outdoor reading in my garden.
Reading has always been like heaven for me. Or like meditation--a way to turn off the annoying ching-chang of my brain. I've read so much that I have a recurring crick in my left thumb, which I use to hold books open. I've read my way through at least 15 pairs of glasses (estimating a new one every three years). One of the best sounds I know is the flick of the page, laid on the silence of an empty house, counterpointed by the cycling rush of the refrigerator or the heater--a space that fills up over and over with words.
About the list: I'm looking for recommendations--what have you read that's worth recommending?

on site research

2006-04-10T20:35:00.000-04:00

I visited the place where my novel is set--Logan, Ohio--over the weekend. My real reason was for my grandson's first birthday, and I didn't do any actual research. But I did spend some time dreaming, gazing out the back window, which looks out on a hill.
There's a hill that rises away from the back of the house, and some immense pine trees that look ancient (but probably aren't because pines grow quite quickly), and some woods at the back of the field, and a fence that comes across diagonally. It's not an exotic view, probably pretty typical in Logan. But whenever I look out of the window (which I do fairly often, because it's the window of the room I sleep in there), I start to think of the farm that once occupied the place where the ranch house is now, and how the farm stretched from one hill and over across another, all the way maybe to the family cemetery that's around the corner of the road.
The farm was broken up probably in the '70s, part of it given to a daughter when she got married. The long years of the farm, growing crops and raising cows on somewhat unforgiving land--it's hilly in Logan, and the topsoil isn't terribly deep--sometimes I feel as if all that labor is still in the soil, and that when you stand on the hill back of the house, as I did with my grandson yesterday, you can feel the chaos and turmoil and sweat of that work rising out of the ground.

We stood on the hill and I told him things like "There are the pine trees. This is the barn." I was holding him because he learned to walk in the winter and all his walking has been done inside. He didn't like the grass--it probably seemed treacherously uneven and soft to him. We stood on the hill and I told him, "Here is the sky. That is a fence," and he listened, either to me or to the wind.

Conrad: the heart of whining

2006-04-03T11:05:00.000-04:00

This is for writers everywhere and anyone who's ever moaned about a deadline:

"The other day in a moment of mental aberration I allowed myself to be pinned down to a date by a wild (but amiable) American publisher. He’s gone back, whooping, to his native wilderness of skyscrapers with the signed contract at his belt — and I wish it had been my scalp rather."

A quote from a letter by Joseph Conrad, which I found in Maud Newton (a great literary blog)--she was referencing an article by Curtis Sittenfeld on the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia (a sort of literary museum).

But isn't it true that writers also love deadlines? Don't we get used to them in school (have that paper in by Friday!) and then, ruined creatures, long for them ever after? (Unless we're journalists, who have found a writing life that incorporates deadlines.)

I have a writer friend who always used to say that she wished she had an agent because then the agent would make her write (i.e., give her deadlines). She has an agent now, and a recent deadline, and she moaned all the way to the finish (with her friends cheering her on). And she did finish, so maybe she was right in her longing.

One of the various hard things a writer has to do is to learn how to work in a life without deadlines. For many of us, no one is waiting with anticipation for us to finish our poem, short story, novel, no equivalent of Sister Pancratia, my sixth grade teacher at Blessed Sacrament School: have that poem in by Friday or you'll lose points! (It's also not necessary any more to put JMJ at the top of all my written work.)

It's a wide and deadly space, a no-woman's land, that I imagine right now as something like the moors in the Bronte sisters' books: gray, featureless, with sleet sweeping across it, no shelter, no stone or tree to fasten yourself to.

re-up

2006-03-31T22:39:00.000-05:00

This is what they used to call it when you re-enlisted in the Marines (and maybe they still do). There was a monetary bonus for re-enlisting, as I recall, and all the Marines said that the money wouldn't make any difference, they'd never re-up, no way, no how. But then they did, some of them anyway. (As a Marine wife, I found a lot of their behavior inexplicable.)
Unfortunately, there is no monetary bonus when you start working on your novel again. I've gained words (about 3000 so far), not dollars. Carl is giving a lecture on ghosts, standing on a shaky stage in front of the stained glass window that used to be in the Elks Lodge. Something is sure to go wrong, and I have to be there to catch it as it goes by.

synopsis, part 2, plus miscellany

2006-03-24T12:08:00.000-05:00

I'm now working on an attempt at a synopsis of the last part (that is, the unwritten part). I have a list that includes such exciting (and probably misleading) items as
the fire
Halloween: cemetery
jail?

but also the more mundane--
walking with the dog in the woods
visit to the old man
Carl goes to church

I'm going to the dentist this afternoon, and this will probably prove fruitful. There's nothing like the dentist to provoke brainstorming, the writer's vain attempt to distract herself from the drill. Then, an evening of soft food and books from the library. Listen, young readers, and beware: the future awaits.

planning the end

2006-03-17T11:29:00.000-05:00

"Planning the end" is the folder where I'm spending my novel time right now. Although it sounds like the title of a brochure you might get in the mail from your neighborhood funeral home, it is in fact full of hope and high expectations--because I can see the end in sight (even if dimly). The name of the file I'm working on is the story of what's coming up, a sequel to the story of what has happened so far, and so far it's a giant list of everything I thought might be in the novel but haven't used yet, culled from a raft of post-it notes, backs of the cards stuck in magazines, McDonald's napkins, and envelopes that once contained urgent messages from my bank, my electric company, my credit card people. These are all reminders of fleeting thoughts I've had while writing the novel, and it's a reminder of how fleeting my mind is, how tangential, how associative, how obsessed with trivia and minutiae--all of which is a strength I embrace and a weakness I'm always trying to cure.

meme-ified

2006-03-09T18:31:00.000-05:00

I've been tagged by Erin O'Brien with the 7-songs-I'm-into-right-now meme. Just the very thought of having songs I'm into makes me feel like a giddy 18- or perhaps 23-year-old, which is a stretch. But here they are, in no particular order, songs I would always, always listen to when they come on the radio:
1. "Brown-Eyed Girl," Van Morrison. This reminds me of my 2nd husband.
2. "The Habanera," as sung by Maria Callas in Carmen. My sister and I absorbed this as we lay under our play table listening to the 2-record set, bound in a brilliant red, with Maria C's tortured face on the front. It's a hell of a song.
3. "Atlantis," Donovan. A lovely, spooky song that is about things that are lost and will never come again.
4. "Pink Cadillac." This has been sung both by Bruce Springsteen and Natalie Cole (what a pairing!), but the version I prefer was sung by D, when he was in a country western band. He was the bass player, and in a group with two (and sometimes) three other big egos, he didn't get to sing very often.
5. "The Sultans of Swing," Dire Straits. This is totally out of my era, but I just like it, so there.
6. "The Way," which improbably enough seems to be sung by someone named Gigi D'Agostino. This was playing the summer that my parents were dying, and I fixated on it. I suppose it isn't a great song, but it has some haunting lyrics.
7. "Ball and Chain," Janis Joplin. A song that says love hurts, but so much better than the song with that title, by whoever it was who did it. Nazareth?
I am tagging Plan B, Crazy Diamond, and Isaurine.

imagining the novel

2006-03-05T15:14:00.000-05:00

The novel is a house I have entered: I knew how to get in, but can I find my way out? The novel is rope to hang myself with.
The novel takes a nap, bored, while I check my email for the twentieth time.
When the novel goes out, it has my face--everyone knows what I'm thinking.
The novel is pile of post-its, a legal pad with a grease spot, a jar full of used up pens.
After the novel: there is no after.
If the novel is dead, who are the suspects?
The novel is an ache at the base of my spine, a burning in my eyes.
The novel dreams that Virginia Woolf has read it and thrown it down violently.
The novel is a part-time job, with no benefits; or if there are benefits, they are metaphysical. Note: to register for the metaphysical HMO.
The novel is a series of tea cups, crumpled chocolate wrappers, cracker crumbs sifted through the keyboard.
The novel says, “I am brilliant.”
The novel, wearing sunglasses, refuses to give an interview.
The novel is a glass of bourbon, drunk while weeping over the keyboard.
If the novel is tired, it will sleep, surrounded by thorns, for a hundred years.
The novel is a country whose language I had to invent before anyone could speak.

the dreaded synopsis

2006-03-01T13:07:00.000-05:00

Today I wrote the story of what has happened so far, which is a story about my novel, or, if you must, a synopsis. I've avoided this all along--avoided first of all writing a real synopsis, because I don't like to think too hard about what's going to happen when I write; and avoided second because I'm not good at summarizing in this way; and avoided third because I was afraid to stop writing for even a day and take time to think in case the thought that came to me might be something like: are you crazy? And then I would have stopped writing and be forced to go to one of my alternate life plans, like learn to graft fruit trees or go to law school.
But, at 438 pages, I thought I might have passed this state of panic, so I decided to stop and consider--both what had happened so far, and what will happen in the remaining pages.
I also made a point of view chart, marking how many times and in what chapters the four main characters take the stage (or page). Then I gave them each a color so I could see the pattern they form in a spatial way. Carl is blue, Jason is teal, Isabel is red, and Nancy is copper.
Stay tuned to see if all this was a bad idea.