1,000 Words About Skin

It's been a busy week. My husband bought me a car. I have all the feels about getting rid of my old one, and am trying to organize my thoughts enough to assemble an essay about the experience.

I did find the time to record something new to put on SoundCloud. This doesn't really have a title, so I slapped a semi-dumb one on it. I'm very happy with the prose but pretty unhappy with the recording; the first two recordings I did sounded a hell of a lot better than this one, and it's been so many months that I don't remember what I did differently to make those sound pretty good and this sound like crap. I can't but say "oh, well" about it. I have limited equipment and even more limited abilities. 

The story of this story is that I wrote about 1,000 words in response to an open call for an anthology about body image. It's not quite nonfiction, but most of what's in it is true. My work was accepted, but I haven't heard anything about the anthology in well over a year, so I presume the editor has lost interest or the project is proceeding without me. Either way, these 1,000 words are orphaned. Finding an appropriate market for them seems more difficult than it's worth. So instead you get to hear them from my own mouth, spoken into a microphone, added to some overly noticeable environmental noise and echo and then piped into your ear. I couldn't be arsed to do an intro, like in the last two, so be ready to listen right when it starts. Sheesh, I'm really making it sound appealing, ain't I?

Oh, well. 

Celebrity Deathmatch: Narration vs. Dialogue

First things first: I recorded another piece of fiction. This one's less than ten minutes! It's a tiny piece of the time book, and sort of a microcosmic version of the book's central fantasy element, but the real reason I like it is the voice. This guy is such a dick. I had lots of fun reading him into the microphone.



In other news, I did some more actual writing this week: I finally started on the airplane story. The concept underlying this story is probably ten years old, and I mucked it up horribly the last time I tried a draft. It's been knocking around in my head ever since then, but kind of non-urgently. Since I thought up a way into the idea a few months ago, it's been pressing on me with far more insistence, but I've tried to ignore it, because the potential act of writing it intimidates me badly. I'm not sure I'm skilled enough to set the story forth in the way I want to. I believe the idea/story could be really good, even great, but I'm afraid I'll muck it up again and then have to set it aside a second time.

[Total sidebar: Stephen King expressed this exact anxiety about one of the stories in Skeleton Crew, "Survivor Type," which was about a doctor stranded on a desert island who becomes autocannibalistic to survive. As I recall, King said that the idea seemed too grotesquely delightful to set down at first, so he didn't write it for a long while, afraid of messing it up. Frankly, Steve? I think you did. While the idea is indeed pretty delightful, the story is drug-soaked and ugly, one of my least favorites in that collection.]

Now I worry I've waited too long, and my own anxiety is keeping the thing from being any good. I wrote a few hundred words, and introduced the first two characters; while it seems okay at this [ridiculously early] stage, the fact that there'll be a lot of narration and exposition in this story weighs heavily on me. (For various in-story reasons, writing more of it in dialogue - creating scenes rather than explanations - is not possible.) Until recently, I didn't worry very intently about the balance between narration and dialogue, figuring both were fine and mostly trying to find a good half-and-half between them whenever I wrote. But then 1) the teacher in my UCLA writing class pointed out that the opening to my workshopped story, which I thought was quite strong, is really all exposition; and 2) I skimmed through the Greenland book and saw how I tend to lapse into Victorian narration in order to storytell when I get too lazy comfortable.

As a reader I prefer narration to dialogue, but over the course of this year, several smart writers at the fronts of rooms full of students have told me that most readers are the opposite way. One of my teachers even said that dialogue is considered a break, while chunky paragraphs are taxing. I found this surprising to the point of astonishment, as for me it's always been completely the other way around. Dialogue is laborious for me to read and beautiful narration just flies by.

Anyone want to share their thoughts on this? Which reads more easily to you?

So this story. I don't know. Matt says I should just write it and see what happens, and of course he's right. I just don't want to expend a lot of energy on it and find that the idea's plain old unworkable after all, or that I'm not good enough to do it justice. Or that I am, but I have to rewrite it once I'm through. I never, ever want to do that. But I'm learning that rewriting is the way to write - gradually, kicking and screaming, I am learning it.

Gone to Soundcloud and Exploring Trunked Work

So, I took an afternoon and voice-recorded a short story of mine, "Gone to Earth," about which I have been proud and happy since I originally wrote it a few years back. It won honorable mention in a Writer's Digest contest (although I have this sneaking feeling that WD contests are just profitmongers and it's actually a meaningless honor), but nooooobody wants it. It's been submitted something like 15 times. Every so often I get fed up with it and move it to my Retired folder, but then after a year I'll read it again and go "Dammit, this thing is good," and dust it off for another round of rejections. No more. I recorded it and that's how it's going into the world.

A bit of backstory: The idea is mine, but I stole the title from a book by Mary Webb, which was pretty successful in its day but has fallen almost entirely into obscurity. This book contains the worst, most incomprehensible dialect of any book I have ever read. And the story feels a little, er...obsolete. But I loved the title, loved what it implied. In the book, the title is something of a metaphor about the main character, her pet fox, and her eventual self-sacrifice, but in my story it's slightly more literal.

"Gone to Earth" is about 4,500 words, and that turned out to be 25 minutes of audio and a whole afternoon's work in recording. I trimmed it a bit, and it's down to 22 minutes, but I don't blame you if you don't click below. Even 22 minutes feels too long to me.



So I'm looking for shorter pieces to record. I have a couple of little nonfictions that I'll probably try, but I want to do a sprinkling of both, fiction and non, and so I looked at some of the longer pieces I've written to see if I can scalpel out stuff that's 3K or less. Seeking excerpts that stood on their own, I ended up skimming two novels I've written and decided to trunk - the time book and the Greenland book - and boy, was that a strange trip.

Both books are probably better trunked for now. I don't like some of the characters in the time book enough to rewrite it with the same people, and it simply won't do as it is. I might rewrite it with the same kind of fantasy-universe rules, but with different characters and a different situation. Kind of taking patches from what exists but sewing a whole new quilt. Some of that book does stand on its own, and there's a short piece from it that I'm probably going to record. There's also a 14,000-word patch (Clara's journal/story, for those of you who've read it) that is one of my favorite things that I've written, but which I'm pretty sure no one but me can love.

Meanwhile, the Greenland book...oh, brother. I'm astonished by the scope of that book and by how inadequately I executed it. It contains reams of Victorian-style exposition text, all of which should have been translated into actual scenes where things happen rather than telling the audience all about it after the fact.

Thing is, I'm kind of dumbfounded by the extent of the universe I created in this book. I made a whole language! Seriously! And I'm still so compelled by the characters. Maybe it's a rookie move to fall in love with your characters as you're writing them, but it's what I do every time I write something worth reading, and that love was still so strong for all three of my main characters as I skimmed over the Greenland book.

I don't think I'm ready to rewrite it yet, but I am determined to do so someday. I think it will wind up very long in its eventual incarnation. Epical. There are well over a dozen secondary characters, all of whom have specific roles to play. I definitely did not make each of these characters clear in the version that exists, and I don't want the reader to get (too) confused, so I might build whole storylines for them and end up with an opus of Game of Thrones length once I'm finished.

What else is happening...I still haven't found time to set aside for writing new stuff, and it's starting to wear on my well-being. I have more story ideas than I know what to do with. Some good friends are moving away from L.A. for new adventures, leaving me and Matt pretty bereft. My group won a poetry contest in my English class, and as a prize, I got a sticker that looks like this:

Artist: Peter Nevins. More good stuff at goodnaturepublishing.com. 

I'd be best served by sticking it over my computer screen, I think - particularly to block out Facebook, if such a thing is possible - but I might put it on my car.

Got a painful rejection yesterday, but the less said about it the better. All part of the cycle. Find new market, resubmit, rinse, repeat.