Between Me and Embellishment

I revised the boy-and-mom crisis story, and really it turned out much better than I thought. I think the ending is too obvious, though, not obtuse and literary enough. I don't know how or whether to fix it.

On Thursday I started on an essay that's partially about a continuing low-level struggle I've been having with the property management of my apartment complex, but to paraphrase Adrian Mole, it's not really about that, it's very deep, it's about life and stuff like that. It seemed to be going well, but then I accidentally got too drunk to keep going. Kids, don't drink vodka cocktails on an empty stomach.

I've been struggling for years with the essay form. Historically, more of my essays have been accepted for publication than my fiction. I used to think that was because I wrote good essays, but now I think it's possibly because my opinions are potent and I can argue them reasonably well, rather than because my essay writing has any intrinsic merit.

The thing I've been wondering is whether I'm approaching the style of my essays all wrong. When I'm on the writing highway and I decide on an essay topic I want to explore, I usually take the exit for straightforward, Wurtzel-type prose. I'm happy with it when I'm writing and revising, but when I go back and read it later, it lacks power, and it lacks me. Maybe the thing to do is keep driving until I find something that's between this blog voice, right here, and my more decorative, more subtle fiction voice. I don't rightly know what that would sound like.

And I am apprehensive about an essential task for a good creative nonfiction writer: eliding incidents and dialogue in order to tell a better story. The world always seems to slip sideways when I think about that. If I'm going to make up dialogue for her, since I can't remember exactly what she said, why not fabricate other stuff? I can pretend I was addicted to crack while I struggled to quit smoking. It'll punch up the whole experience considerably! I know intellectually that it's not all or nothing, but in practice...for me, there's the truth the way my brain recorded it, and then there's everything else. The line sits there, and all else is shades of fiction. Anything that goes on the page aside from the truth the way my brain recorded it feels dishonest, even if it's in service of the piece, or if it's harmless, or if it's a might-as-well-be situation, or all three.

When I began work on this essay, though - which uses the issue with my apartment complex to get at the problem of who's responsible for a woman's safety in public - I decided I'd try to tell it as if it was fiction. I determined I'd discard what didn't work in those parameters and sub in the closest truth I could. So far I think it's working, but then I really was quite tipsy when I left off in the middle. The alcohol helped me tie in an incident that I doubt I'd be brave enough to include when sober, so that particular brain damage is probably for the better.

I wrote another poem recently. I was doing yoga and I had a very particular sensation, and while in years past I would have rushed to my anonymous blog to describe it, I can't do that anymore. I could have recorded it in my paper journal, but I intuited that exploring it sideways, through the bits and pieces of language that writing poetry necessitates, would yield more interesting results than the narrative version I'd compose in a journal.

I'm very pleased with what came out. I still don't know what I'm doing writing poetry - I don't understand virtually anything about the mechanics, and I can't distinguish a good poem from a bad poem or understand why I like one and not another. But the revision is a bit more fun than with prose, because it's a lot less work to try six different synonyms and see what works than to rewrite entire pages or chapters. And I have pretty much no ambition at all with my poems. I write them to record and express, rather than to communicate or profit. Kind of a steam valve.

In reading news, I read 100 pages of Soon I Will Be Invincible and gave up. I don't know if I was misreading or if the editor was sloppy, but after the second really confusing situational hole - and when we were still doing flashbacks and backstory and totally static exposition after 100 pages - I couldn't hold any more faith with the author. I feel bad about this assessment, because the book was highly recommended to me, but that was what I read. If you are just desperately aching for a comic-book world in prose form, you'll probably see past what I saw, but Ready Player One did much of this better, if in a neighboring solar system.

And I read just the very first few pages of House of Leaves. Dunno. I'm withholding judgment for the moment.

Mining Whilst Tipsy

Matt is rather drunkily slaughtering orks in the computer room. I'm rather drunkily sitting in front of my computer out here. In theory I ought to be plunking down more words in the novel, but I'm not really feelin' it. I'm in a fainting-couch mood, instead. This is a mood where I go into the computer room, plunk down in the empty laundry basket, and give deep sighs until Matt asks me what's wrong. Then I draw a dramatic hand across my forehead, lean back, and tell him that writing is soooo hard. Then we both laugh.

I'm in a good place on the novel, really. Things are going well. I'm on track to be finished well before my deadline if I don't lose momentum. There are mechanical problems, but they're fixable. My writing is actually smoother and more creative in its smallities than on the previous project; I'm prouder of it on a sentence-by-sentence basis. I'm not positive it adds up to anything, but I think one day it will. I'm also grateful that I have the version of Microsoft Word which shows me, in the bottom bar, how many words are in my document. It's incredibly helpful to see that total and know I'm nowhere near the end of the story. But it also shows me that I'm nowhere near the end of the story. Gaaaah.

Sugar has this to say about writing:

Writing is hard for every last one of us... Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.

It's a quote I relied upon completely when I discovered it back in the fall, and I would not, not, not have completed the Greenland book without it. But the day-to-day experience of writing a novel is indeed not at all unlike mining. It's dirty and unpleasant and hard and from inside the mine, it doesn't look like you've made any kind of progress. For the moment, I just want to curl up in a ball and have someone pet me and say yes, dear, it surely is hard. Poor coal-mining baby.

No one is doing this for me right now, although the alcohol seeping into my brain cells (while it's removing some of them--woops, there goes what I knew about Kierkegaard) is certainly clawing away at the maudlin-ness. See, maybe there's the secret to coal mining. Get good and lubed up before you go down in the pit. Wait, no, that's a bad idea. I think I'm just about ready to get back to digging myself, seeing as how what I'm doing isn't actually life-threatening and I need to ride this buzz before it vanishes.

But first! In other news, I'm rereading Rebecca for the zillionth time. The most recent time I read it was in college, though, and at 30 it's quite a different experience. It turns out that I remember the mood, tone, events, and characters of the book far better than I remember the actual page-by-page experience of reading it. I've always said that it's the book I'd be if Fahrenheit 451 became reality. I still hold to that, as it's just essential reading, but I'm kind of turned off by how much more rhapsodically descriptive it is than I remembered, how much less it is about Big Things and how much more it is about small things. And how much more informed by patriarchy it is than I remembered. Thanks a lot, Mount Holyoke, now I'll permanently notice crap like that. Next on the list is David Foster Wallace, whom I've never read before aside from a short story or two which I didn't much enjoy. We'll see how Infinite Jest strikes me. I'm 1 for 2 on Thomas Pynchon.

It's Great, Really, But How About an Honorable Cash Prize?

Just before the New Year I got an e-mail from Writer's Digest, advising me that my work warranted an Honorable Mention in a recent horror contest. The May/June issue of WD will list my name as honorably mentioned in the contest, and I get a free copy of the 2012 Writer's Market. Which is nice, and the cost of the book means I'm ahead about $10 above my entry fee. Yay!

The story in question is "Gone to Earth", the title of which I blatantly stole from an early-20th-century book by a female author named Mary Webb. A sample (of my story, not hers):

The silence maddened her for the first week, but one day she shut her eyes and sat on the porch and listened, and she heard it finally: the whistling sounds of the trees, the industry of squirrels, the chittering of nesting birds, faraway burbling water. The clamor was deafening if you listened. The expectation of television, of booming car stereos, of next-door Smiths embroiled in domestic battle, had drowned out the real sounds that existed in this place. She was suddenly dizzy with the altitude.

Two weeks later, and she is knitting her fingers into the tiny garden’s wet dirt. A woodpecker is sporadic in keeping her company as she kneels in the damp earth. She hums Springsteen. A pale green tendril from a bush nearby snakes its way around her moving wrist.

She ceases and looks at it. It is still for a moment, and then it moves again, climbing its way up her arm to the crease of her elbow. She stands up at speed and the tendril slips away harmlessly, lying on the ground.

Shelly is shaking, her eyes wide, the tune in her throat forgotten. Her earthen hands dangle. The tendril does not move. It is another three days before she goes to the garden again, and by then the seeds and weeds alike have uncurled into life, the weeds twice as large and throttling the squash.

I wrote the story a few years ago, and although it really does belong in the stable of genre work, not literary, it was still (at the time) the closest I'd ever come to writing exactly what I had in mind. A piece of work I'm proud of. One day I want to place it in Weird Tales - it was rejected two years ago, but maybe with some more work it'll be worthy.

As I said a while back (while I was agonizedly editing "Gone to Earth" down for this very contest, in fact), I don't really know what's up with contests, how they work, but thus far this is the third one in which I have been granted an honorable mention. I'm pleased that I warrant mention, especially of the honorable sort, but I'm kind of starting to wonder what's up with this. (I'm an Honorable Mention winner from way back, all the way to science fair projects in elementary school and whatnot.) What do I do to break through from "yeah, we liked it" to "this is outstanding by any measure"? More characterization? Fewer adjectives? Thicker paper?

In other news, I bought Florence + the Machine's new album (Lungs has been listened to a nub, or would have been, if it hadn't been listened to entirely in digital form), and have discovered that noise-canceling headphones are really the only way to listen to Florence + the Machine. I just want to lie down and let her voice soak into my body, maybe for a day or two straight.

Also, totally blocked from working on the horror novel, either through laziness or perfectionist fears or whatever else is making me chemically unable to put one word in front of the other. I think this evening I'll try lubing up with a cocktail and see where that gets me. Yeah, not a wise habit, but it worked nicely with the Greenland book, and I didn't wind up with an alcohol problem after it was all over, so I think I'm OK. Also also, someone with more talent in the tip of her nose than I have in my entire brain has just e-mailed me a WIP for me to read and chat with her about, so I am apparently being revenged for my impatience with my readers. I can't wait to dig in.

Vice Versus Om

Over the last several months, alcohol consumption gradually became a nightly thing for me rather than a few-times-weekly-if-at-all thing. Every night I was so frustrated by what had happened during the day that the mental and emotional smear resulting from a glass of wine or a bottle of Leinenkugel became something of a crutch. I never went beyond two drinks in an evening, and didn't frequently go beyond one. (It also helped me get over my fear of the empty page so I could ease into nightly writing.)

This worried me, as I watched it happening. I knew that I wasn't exactly in wino territory (and that it might be a little absurd to worry about one drink per evening), but growing dependent on that mild smear was troubling, nevertheless. When things changed again a few weeks ago, I stopped drinking altogether - didn't have the time - and I was glad to find that the crutch wasn't actually a dependency.

What I did do a few weeks ago was smoke a single clove cigarette. I had had a few left in a pack that I kept in my glove compartment "for emergencies" for the five years that I haven't been a smoker, and one night when I really desperately wanted one, I smoked one. I wrote a very good essay about it and quashed my guilt as best I could. Matt and a friend have insisted that it's all right for me to let loose some stress by smoking once in a very great while, and I'm choosing to believe them. Unfortunately, clove cigarettes were outlawed during the five years I wasn't smoking them, and now you can't get them in this country. You can get clove cigarillos, which I'm guessing are virtually the same product, and yesterday I went to a tobacco shop in downtown Annapolis and bought a pack. (Of 12. For $8. Gaaaah.)

Last night there was a yoga class I had planned to attend, but all I could think about as I was leaving work was the pack of cigarillos in my purse and the lone Leinie's in my fridge at home. That was what I wanted to do with my evening. I'm 90% over the cold that's been dogging me for over a week, and I wanted to smoke a clove on the way home and then make dinner and drink a beer and get going again on the Greenland book. I didn't want to go to yoga and purify; I wanted to consume chemicals and toxify.

I went to yoga. Despite traffic, despite hunger, despite the crowded room, I went back to the mat. I knew it was the right thing to do.

It was a good class. I really like this teacher. He's not obsessed with strength, he has a good presence and a good voice, and his adjustments are great. I might have even gotten a story idea out of class; time and drafting will tell.

This evening, though, nothing is going to keep me from my vices. I really want to know what these cigarillos are like, and that one beer in the fridge has to be lonely. I'll happily end its suffering.