In the Scheme of Things

In the scheme of things, it doesn't matter, but my cactus is dying. 

I could have written this the opposite way: "My cactus is dying. In the scheme of things, it doesn't matter." But I felt the need to write it the first way, so as to make it clear that I know it doesn't broadly matter before I tell you this thing that matters, to me, in a way I can't defend. 

I think I've written before here about how I kill plants, how I have a brown thumb. It's been a joke in my life for a long time, but there are times when it's not funny. I can do lots of other things, so I try to focus on that instead of dwelling on this thing I can't do: keep plants alive. I've kept this cactus alive for two years. I bought it as one of three matching ones, the other colors were pink and red, this one is yellow, and the other two died but this one lived. I repotted it recently and gave it new soil and some liquid food, but one of those elements has made it very sick, sagging and thin and leaking fluid out its top, and I am fixated on it, my poor cactus, to the point where I had an argument with Matt this week because we misunderstood each other about the roses I needed to prune back, and I couldn't bring myself to prune them back because I didn't want to kill them like I'm killing my cactus, and Matt didn't understand where this was coming from at all and why I didn't just prune the roses like I said I would, and he tried to do it himself and that made me even more upset and I couldn't explain why. 

Keeping a plant alive for two years is nothing in the scheme of things. It is a record-breaker for me. I can't touch my cactus, because it is full of tiny prickles; I can't do anything but look at it lovingly, not like a pet you can bring into your lap. But it is the only nonhuman living thing I am not paid to give love to. It is the only thing in my life I have nurtured that belongs to me (the roses are the landlord's). And it's really sick. And it's my fault. And I cannot stop feeling anguish about this. 

It's stupid. It's just a cactus. I can buy another one for $3.99 at Lowe's. It has not grown significantly in the time I've had it. But it has not died in that time, and it is dying now, and that matters to me. 

--

This week I wrote a roundup of books by Black authors that I enjoy and recommend. Not all of them are directly applicable to the current situation, which was on purpose. Reading underrepresented voices is an end in itself, and it can be a diversion even as it's innately looped in to what's happening. I also edited a review of a book by a poet and felon, Felon, by Reginald Dwayne Betts, and put it up at Barrelhouse. These things I can do, even if I can't do much else. 

--

Jami Attenberg's yearly 1000 Words of Summer event is going on right now and I'm using it as an opportunity to start the next project. I got a little sidetracked yesterday by a frightening episode of heat exhaustion, but I've well and truly begun the work, and I feel good about how it's shaping up. For community and for accountability, I'm posting about it on Twitter once a day - and I forwent posting about it on Tuesday, for the ill-fated "blackout" - but then today I read a well-reasoned thread from people of color about it being insensitive to post about it at all. That made me feel guilty, but also a little annoyed. They suggested we move those updates to a private community/writing group, and I don't have one; my writing group is Twitter, for better or worse. 

In the same hour I read a comment on Facebook in a private group by a white woman feeling as if she's done enough activism (she gave examples), and doesn't deserve criticism for not speaking out in every single platform she has, even apolitical ones. 

I really do not know how to hold both of these views in the same hand. I'm trying to make my feeds mostly about other voices and issues and lives, and a little bit about me, but maybe that is wrong, too? Do my feeds reflect my life? Does my life always or mostly need to be about me? Does the balance I've attempted to strike look as ugly as that white woman's defensiveness, or are we all looking at each other cockeyed anyway, and no one can possibly do it right all the time? Do I reckon with myself, my past/future self, or with what others are doing/not doing? What is my example, my standard? Should it be at-least-I'm-not, or should it be I-could-never-be-but-I'll-try? 

This blog post is about me because this is my blog, not a shared space like a social media feed or a book club or a coffee shop. Or...is the entire internet a shared space? No, that's too far. This is my blog. 

I'm trying to explore and question, not defend. White defensiveness has no utility at all. 

I don't know. 

--

There's something else happening in my life right now that has to be secret for now but is causing me heavy stress. It may come to nothing. We'll see. 

--

At the barn, there's a horse named Mia whom I didn't like at all when I first started working there. She was wary and impenetrable, hard to catch in her stall and evidently uninterested in whether I lived or died. It's exasperating to work with horses like this, because you feel bad asking them to obey you when they clearly do not enjoy even being near you. 

Over time, she started to be nicer to be around. I finally realized she wasn't a jerk, she was just slow to trust, and she had no reason to trust me when she met me. If she were a human she'd be "hard to know." So I hung back until she was ready to know me, and treated her like a co-worker instead of pressing her for affection and obedience. When I hand-walked her I let her walk to the left instead of the right, because she clearly preferred that, even though it isn't how you're supposed to walk horses. Now she's recovered from an injury and is being ridden, which means I tack her up and down instead of just walking her. I've found out that she loves having her face brushed. She stretches out her neck and closes her eyes, and if I stand in front of her she nuzzles my chest and rests her chin on the edge of my sports bra while I brush and brush. 

Since we figured this out, she trusts me more than ever; she now whinnies and trots over to me when I come to her stall, as if I'm her friend instead of her keeper. She gives me all kinds of affection I don't get from the other, more skittish horses. She obeys me readily, which means it doesn't feel so bad giving her commands. We're developing a deeper and more loving relationship because I was patient and listened to her. I judged too quickly, but when I figured out she was just slow to trust, I gave her every reason to trust me instead of insisting that she do so right off. 

Yesterday I had to put a yucky-smelling salve on her nose. Three months ago she would have wriggled and jerked and made it impossible to do this, but I talked to her and petted her and she stood still and let me. I took the time, and was rewarded with trust and more love than I know what to do with. She's a wonderful horse. I never would have known that if I'd stuck with my first judgment. 

I hope I can write about Mia someday as a metaphor, but I don't quite know what my experience with her means yet. For now I just wanted to share it as a story. Working with her is some of the nicest time I spend at the barn, when she used to be a horse I dreaded a little. 

--

I just moved my cactus into the sun. Light will help it, right? Maybe it's leaking because it's purging something bad that came in through its roots. I hope, if that's the case, it gets better. I do not want it to die. 

How You Get Into the Pool

For the first time in a couple of years, I've hung a hummingbird feeder outside my office window. They've started to find it, the little birds, and they come visit me now with fair frequency. It's nice.

Most of my body hurts, and I'm moving pretty slowly. It's because I got a job a few weeks ago as a groom at a horse stable. I adore the job, and I'm so happy to be doing even the crummy chores required of me at the barn, but I won't romanticize what it's doing to my joints and muscles and spine. Going from 500-5,000 steps per day to 18,000-30,000 steps per day is a big change. I've Googled and Googled and yes, this kind of painful adjustment to a job full of physical labor is normal and in a few weeks I will be feeling better. But I'm a little worried. I'm almost 40, after all, and I can't bounce back from major exertion like I did in my 20s.

November was like how you get into the pool if you're skittish about water temperature. I wrote one thing, and then I read a book, and then I did no reading or writing for days, and then I read a little  more and wrote a little more...by the end of the month I started feeling more like myself, acclimated to the water, ready to read and write with gusto again. But it won't be like it was.

"Burned out" is not what happened to me w/r/t book reviews this year. I just realized, sometime this fall, that I wanted to do more than one thing in a given day, a given week. As I took on more and more books, I watched fewer films, talked to fewer friends, did hasty work with my other responsibilities. If I had a maid, and didn't have a book of my own to finish, I could've kept it up. (Maybe.) Because I am who I am, though - profoundly scattered among interests and desires - it had to stop.

I'm not shutting down my reviewing work completely, but I'm done pitching reviews for a little while except in the rarest circumstances. I'll keep working for my regular folks, Locus and B&FG and a few others. However, I'm more interested in curating, and working on other parts of my creative life, for the immediate future.

More opportunities for curation will be abundant soon; I've been named the new Reviews & Interviews Editor for the VIDA Review. I'm extremely excited about this, and I feel, as objectively as possible, that it's a great fit for everyone concerned. We haven't had an editorial meeting yet with the new staff, so I'm not ready to talk about volume or strategy or pitches, but I hope you'll put a little bookmark on me in your head if you have something you'd like to pitch in the future.

Some Ceremonials news: I got a Kirkus review (no, I didn't pay for it); the first interview with me about the book has gone up; and I finally found a site that had a graphic template I could use to make a tour date postcard. (Soon to be in paper form; thanks, Moo's Cyber Monday sale.)

Many more guests will read than can fit on this postcard 

I will likely come to the east coast in July, and depending on how the book does, I might do a Midwest/Deep South leg in the fall of 2020. Ceremonials releases in two months and a week, or thereabouts, and I will have lots more news and info for you as the time passes.

A couple of publications I want to share here, in case you missed them:

• An essay about Black Widow, a movie I love with absolutely no cult following at all, for Bright Wall/Dark Room. This was the fourth or fifth thing I pitched or submitted to them, and I had some heartbreaking near-misses, so it's gratifying to have something accepted.
  
• This weird short story called "The First Snow," published in a paper volume of Storm Cellar several seasons ago, newly posted on the website this week. My opinion of my own short stories has shifted so much over time that I honestly have no idea anymore if it's a good piece of writing. I'm happy with what I did, so I'm kinda done worrying about it. 

Look for a short essay on Pink Floyd's The Wall coming soon, something I thought about for a lot longer than it took me to write it, and rambled endlessly to Matt about, poor fella. Listen for a podcast with me and my NB sibling from another...nibling, Ilana Masad, coming soon. Get ready for multiple angsty social media posts as December, my least favorite month of all, wears on.

Irrevocable and Important, Yet So Petty and Dumb

I've now put out all the most worrying fires that got started while I took the month of October off from reviewing. There are plenty of emails that need answering, and a whole chain of labor to do related to a relatively minimal chore (must print shipping label and proofs of freelancer pay, must move printer to desk in order to print, must organize desk in order to move printer, must organize rest of office in order to organize desk, must figure out bookshelf situation in rest of apartment in order to organize office), and o, the pile of books to read. But I feel okay about the future for now.

I do have lots of thoughts and ideas flying around in my head, which is usually evidence that I need to write a blog post. So here I am.

The Additional-Fire Effect

Just now I opened up edits on a review and I had one of those moments where it all crashed on my head, the whole and entire weight of what I've gotten myself tangled up in for the last two years, all at once, CRASH. The edits were asking me to do the exact opposite of what I've trained myself to do because editors generally prefer it (reiterate the same point in the intro and conclusion, don't be too colloquial, don't go on weird tangents). So I thought about putting myself in the mindset of this editor's wishes, when I had just spent the whole morning in the mindset of editing my own non-review-related work, and had only an hour or so before I had to put myself in a teaching mindset, after spending a few minutes first thing this morning in self-promotion mindset...[pop]

All summer, the tarot has been telling me to be patient and things will improve. Things are improving exactly at the time and in the ways the tarot said they would. This is spooky, but also great, but also, even as things improve, my responsibilities are not decreasing. CRASH.

The best thing to do when I'm feeling overwhelmed is to accomplish a pile of small, overdue things. Getting the oil changed in my car, calling my website vendor, doing some chores for an authors' group I'm involved with. But instead I'm just making list after list of things to do and worrying about email replies I haven't received. Rearranging rather than doing.

There's good news. The last couple of weeks have been emotionally unnerving, but I channeled that energy into writing the Last Tango in Paris essay I'd 3/4 given up on. I couldn't stop working on it for the past two days, not even to go volunteer with the horses. Now, it's essentially done. That means I've written nine of the ten essays for Weird New Shit, which means I'm on track, and not behind. I will finish it by the end of 2019. That feels so good that it throws a blanket on some of the fires elsewhere burning in my freelance life. The blanket is semi-flammable. I elect to feel good about the smothering effect today and worry about the additional-fire effect tomorrow.

via GIPHY

In the past couple of months I've stopped drinking almost entirely. I tried this out early in the year as a Decision, but it didn't stick, and so instead I'm trying it as a habit with occasional exceptions. My relationship with alcohol has never been addictive, so my motivations for the teetotaling habit are about feeling good, changing the physical cycles my body goes through daily and weekly, and sitting with psychological discomfort instead of blotting it out. I'm using vaped cannabis a little bit here and there, but it's so different from booze. I can't really get used to it or predict how it will affect me, so I like it less. Also, I have only been marginally successful at rewiring my brain to believe that cannabis is OK. Drugs were very, very not okay in my family, and that training has lasted despite the increasing legality of weed and, you know, being an adult with my own judgment.

Next week an interview that's been in the works for two years is actually being published. I think. I won't believe it until I see it. This week, a review is going up at a publication I labored to break into. Ask me about it sometime.

All right, enough, I need to spend the afternoon accomplishing small, overdue things. Oh fu--CRASH

An Honest Post

There's a lot going on in my writing world - perhaps too much for me to organize my thoughts into one place. I feel like I haven't written an honest post here in a really long time. As the number of people who pay attention to my work grows, I find I'm holding my tongue more and more. I didn't think I'd ever want to do that, but that's where I am. Here's some honesty, though not about everything I have to say.

Weekly To-Do, 3/17/19-3/23/19

Last Sunday I took the entire day off. I did answer one email related to Barrelhouse, but otherwise, I did no work. I sat on the couch. I watched the Lorena Bobbitt docuseries and then about half of the first season of The OA. I vaped a little, midday, which I never do. (With good reason; my brain stayed foggy well into the evening.) It was a great idea; I felt tons fresher on Monday.

The rest of the week was a little less awesome than Monday. Coping mechanisms kicked in, because I'm stressed out about the near future, and I did a lot of coping instead of working.

On Tuesday I leave for Portland, setting into motion two and a half weeks of utter madness. I think I'm ready. I've done almost all the work ahead of time that I conceivably can do; I'm well-stocked with business cards; our taxes are done. Off we go.

Disclaimer: I'm including selected names of pubs and books because making this list would be ten times harder, and therefore not worth the effort, to anonymize them entirely. Any of the acceptances could fall through at any time. By naming them, I am not badmouthing the publications who rejected or didn't reply. This is data, not trash-talk or promotion.

Writing:
Camp review
Rice review
"After Gardens" edits

Reading:
A Dog Between Us
Choke Box 
Comfort

Pitching/Queries:
Dazed (2) (rejected)
Film journals x4 (responded x1)
CrimeReads
Buzzfeed
Millions (responded)

Followups:
Nylon
WSJ
ASAP
HFR
Advocate

Correspondence:
Barrelhouse
Locus
Various publicists
Eve
Jennifer

Other:
Barrelhouse stuff
[secret thing] for many hours
Assemble Wurth and Choundas interviews
Promote Wurth review

Weekly To-Do, 2/24/19-3/2/19

This week I immersed myself in JT LeRoy based on an assignment. It was not a lot of fun; LeRoy's writing is clearly good, but not to my taste, and their deception makes it tough for me to read them in an unbiased mood.

I also dealt with a pair of emotional upsets that derailed me completely on Wednesday and made the rest of the week not much fun. Maybe this is why I felt kind of at loose ends, work-wise. I see, looking at this list, that I actually did a good deal of work - especially edits and correspondence - but it doesn't feel that way. It feels like I have essentially the same pile of stuff to do and I've wasted a week not doing it.

In terms of reading, there's a particular book it's taking me forever to get through. I read the majority of it and a third of another book, so next week the read list should be longer, even though I did some of that work this week. (Also, I'll be on a plane for most of Friday so that'll be many hours of uninterrupted reading time.)

Disclaimer: I'm including selected names of pubs and books because making this list would be ten times harder, and therefore not worth the effort, to anonymize them entirely. Any of the acceptances could fall through at any time. By naming them, I am not badmouthing the publications who rejected or didn't reply. This is data, not trash-talk or promotion.

Writing:
Best F(r)iends essay
"After Gardens" edits
Sissy edits x3
Revenge edits
Wurth review
Ceremonials edits
Draft Scott review

Reading:
Harold's End
The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things
Sarah

Pitching/Queries:
Popula (rejected)
Vulture

Followups:
Jarrold
Dahlia

Correspondence:
Gertrude
Mieke
Jesi
UMPG
Katrina Wan PR
Marvel team
David
Neal
Barrelhouse

Other:

Watch Author documentary
Submit to GCP micro-chap series
Promote Felicelli interview
Attend job fair
[secret thing]
Promote Readman review

Fully Fused

Part of last weekend was spent like this:

click to embiggen

Oooh, panorama feature. This time really do click to embiggen,
the size of this is just silly and the carpet looks weird. 

I was at work on the scary story. Which turned out to be like 20% fiction. Everything else was personal essay, film criticism, and Southern wives' tales. Oops?

Something amazing happened in this story that I didn't know was happening until I cut it up. I had to cut it up because the sections weren't flowing into each other smoothly and I couldn't figure out what needed to go where until I could look at all the pieces together, instead of looking at them on the computer screen in the order I'd written them. So I cut them up and then I grouped them together by...category, I guess? I put the parts about Django Unchained together, and the parts about Gone with the Wind together, and the parts about my youth together, and the adult anecdotes together, and the fiction together, and the wives' tales together. When these sections were grouped, something became visually clear: I had written three sections of each category, and there were six categories.

That's the amazing part. I didn't know that I'd done that. I didn't do it on purpose, didn't think "oh, I need one more anecdote to make three" or "oh, I need one more category to make six" - no. I wrote it in a messy, disorganized fashion and it just came out in multiples of three.

As Matt said to me once, and as my brain has been saying back to me at appropriate moments ever since, humans like threes. And I know that I tend to arrange my writing in threes, on a variety of levels. But I had no idea that I'd be capable of doing it unconsciously.

It's kind of like that time I put a ticking clock in act three of a novel I was writing without even realizing it. But there's a crucial difference: that ticking clock thing was derived from a lifetime of movie training, and this threes thing is not. It derives not from external stimuli, from other storytellers explaining to my subconscious how stories are told, but instead from me, from the writing brain that tells stories the way I see fit to tell them.

I find this exciting. I find it humbling. I want to jump up and shout in jubilation and then lie down on the floor and cry with relief. Because - in case I haven't said this in a specific enough way, and if you haven't gotten the impression from this blog, if you've been reading it for a while - I think I've learned that artistic prowess grows in cycles rather than in a straight line.

At first, you create per instinct, and unless you're some kind of preternatural talent, your instincts are good and your toolbox sucks. Then you pick up some of what's in the toolbox, and you create per a mixture of your instincts and your tools. That's even worse, because the raw power of your instincts is blunted by the tools and the tools are employed awkwardly because you are new at using them. There's this long apprenticeship where the quality of those two elements twiddles up and down, and it's awkward, for you and for the people who read your work, because this is sincerely the best you can do but it's not terribly good.

You have breakthroughs, small and large ("suddenly", conflict, recursive sentences, organicness, scenes, the truth and trial and absolution of "omit needless words"), but you don't feel like you're moving forward. You feel like you're moving in circles. Because just when you think you've learned something, it's pointed out to you that you don't know that thing at all. You think you know how to write a sentence and then you read Edna O'Brien. You think you know from postmodernism and then you read Moby-Dick. You think you know how to do a fragmented, multi-perspective narrative on a single event and then you read Mary Gaitskill and you really, really want to crawl under the floor and die.

Repeat. For years.

And then you come out the other side of something, some cave-cum-tunnel where you've learned that you do not care about the rules of writing, or the toolbox you need to write, or the way Freytag insists that short stories always are. You begin to do the thing from muscle memory, and it feels as terrible and wonderful as it always did, and it feels about the same when it's finished  (="Yeah, I guess so") as it did somewhere in the middle when you learned to stop loving every word you put on the page. But people tell you it's different. People tell you it's good. They stop kindly being quiet and they start effusing, and their ideas to make it better seem good instead of irrelevant.

At this point, instinct and toolbox are fully fused, and they're a creature of their own. They constitute muscle memory. They're the hamster on a wheel that spins the engine of your work. You do the dreaming on one end and the transcribing on the other end, and you dialogue with the draft until it's what you meant it to be. But the instinct, the power of your voice and no one else's, plus the toolbox - that dual entity is the strongman that's going to lift your work out of mediocrity.

It goes around and around, still. The strongman needs constant training to lift heavier and heavier concepts. The hamster is not actually going anywhere, even if she runs long enough and fast enough to power the world. There's no Freytag in the actual process of writing, I don't think. You just keep finding the same problems and fixing them, finding problems and fixing them; this applies to everything from editing your sentences to coming up with something to write about in the first place. Circular, not linear.

The point of that whole tangent is to say that when I found those threes in the scary story after cutting it up, I realized that my instinct and my toolbox had formed a viable life form at last. I wrote the piece somewhat artlessly, without worrying about how it would be received or whether it was Freytagian or any of that. And yet the toolbox gave the piece rhythm and quality, while instinct gave it symmetry and imbued it with my particular voice and style.

The author, in Downward-Facing Line Edit 

It was very, very hard. Not the hardest thing I've written in terms of labor, but certainly the hardest emotionally. I kept having to stop writing and shake out my trembling hands. I ate less than usual. It was like being really hung over: that feeling of wanting to die just so it'll end, and knowing you have to wait it out, but having full awareness that the current sensation could not possibly be worse.

I don't know what happens now to this piece, because I'm hearing from readers that it's extraordinary but I am not comfortable sending it out. My professor's going to read it (as well as something I've been considering writing for three years, it's the final project for a class), and maybe he can give me some direction.

It feels good to have it out - empowering, both personally and professionally - but I'm also slightly at loose ends for what comes next. As I said last week, I have a few little projects on my plate, but nothing that's as intense, or as important to me, as this was.

There are always more cycles to come. More circular, asymptotic movement toward mastery.

Such Outward Things Do Dwell in My Desires

Maybe next year St. Crispin's Day will fall on a day when I'd normally blog, but this year it's tomorrow, October 25, 2014, that the anniversary of one of the bloodiest single battles in the history of Western civilization (a more ironic term in this case even than usual) falls. If you didn't know about it, you've got a year to learn until the 600th anniversary. I might throw a party. I threaten to throw a Battle of Agincourt/St. Crispin's Day party every year and never do, but a 600th anniversary of anything is rare enough that I might actually follow through.

Not pictured: St. Crispin Glover

Anyway. Since it's not actually October 25th, and posting the Henry V speech would be a very lazy way to fill this space, I'll address some of the other stuff that was in my Facebook feedback a couple of weeks ago. These are questions that didn't lead to long or good answers, unfortunately, so I'm going with a Q&A format.

Q. Tips about being a good editor of one's work?

A. See, great example. My tips include a) practicing, a lot, for yeeears, and b) buying Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Dave King and Renni Browne. That's it. Not that interesting an answer.

The more you practice on other people's work, the better you'll be at your own. If you don't have any other people's writing to practice on, find a text copy of Oliver Twist or another Dickens novel on Gutenberg and try editing it, just omitting needless words and making sentences clearer and punchier, in your word processor. That sounds unkind, or presumptuous, but...just try it. I think you'll see what I mean.

Art by Kate Beaton

Q. All About Fonts?

A. I sort of love fonts, although having learned about the existence of true font nerds, I don't fall in that category. I really like Bookman Old Style and Book Antiqua, I am not that excited about Arial, and I dislike Courier. Of course Comic Sans is a scourge, and the font that Slate has been using of late is such a travesty that I've stopped reading the site altogether, when it used to be an everyday thing. Those ys, ugh. TNR is completely transparent to me, with no inflection at all, so that's always my preference. I do think fonts have inflection, and affect the way readers read, but I couldn't begin to interpret how they work.

You thought you were writing a joke comment, didn't you? Ha! HA! I even edited down that paragraph because I went on too long about sans serif.

Q. What are they teaching you in that [workshop] class of yours?

A. Lots of stuff. If I learn anything that seems worth chewing over or passing on, I'll probably write whole posts about it, like this one. Sadly, I haven't garnered any more faith in the process. In my workshop class last semester, we focused on "What is this story doing?", which turned out to be a lot more fruitful than other methods. But I think you need a lot of skill, both in the group and in the workshoppee, to do it from that angle.

I could write a whole post about what I think of workshopping, but it would not be especially positive. So I'll set that aside for now.

Here's a hint. Art by Peter Brueghel. 

Q. Writing rituals?

A. It's kind of silly how superstitious I am. However, the only element that's not negotiable is food. I can't be hungry or I can't write. Funny, because historically many writers have been motivated by hunger, but I can't concentrate for shit if my stomach's not full.

Otherwise, this is how I prefer to do it. I keep a notes book, always smaller than 8.5 x 11, where I write down dreams, character ideas, stuff I saw out in the world that I want to preserve for later, etc., all the way up to many-page plot outlines and poorly drawn maps of fictional cities. Any notes I take elsewhere - on my phone, in a .txt on my desktop, etc. - eventually get transcribed in the notes book. I keep a separate drafting book, a lined A4 or 8.5 x 11 Moleskine, where I write the first draft of everything longhand with specific Sharpie pens, which cost too much and don't last long enough, but I'm addicted to them. When drafting is done, I type from that notebook, and in typing I'm revising. So the first typed draft is like the second or 2.5th draft of the work, because I'm usually correcting the draft even as I'm drafting, because I am annoying.

Not everyone needs writing practices this specific.

This was by far the oddest Google Images search result for "meticulous." 

None of these elements other than the full tummy is 100% required. Sometimes I'll write in ballpoint on notebook paper. (Not often, though.) And sometimes I need a small alcoholic beverage to lose my fear of the blank page, but getting too drunk to go on is a bad idea.

Speaking of which, don't let any rogue Agincourt partiers slip you anything too strong this weekend. It's only the 599th anniversary, after all. No need to really let your hair down.

In This Weather, Probably a Hot Mess

Last week I revised the dreadful story, which I think turned out quite non-dreadful. I'm waiting for some feedback on it right this very minute, not that I'm counting the minutes or anything. I'm not. Really. I also asked randomly for a friend's opinion on a story I wrote some months ago and about which I haven't really been sure since then. It pivots on a long sex scene, but I don't think it's exactly erotica, or at least not only erotica, and it was nice to hear from my friend that she didn't think so either. (Although Matt does think so. Which means I need a tiebreaker. Anyone want to read a dirty story for me?)

We started in on writing exercises in my creative writing class and on The Sound and the Fury in my literature class. I couldn't really say about the former, because my exercise didn't get workshopped on Monday and the professor hasn't gotten back to me either, and on the latter...oh, mother of mercy. I loved it when I read it last year, I loved it when I read it last weekend, I loved talking about it in class, I overflowed with it at dinner last night, I could talk about this book forever.

Aw, c'mon, yes it does

My exercise, though. We had to create something that had a bunch of different methods of narrative all jammed together and jumbled up, i.e. scene --> summary --> gap --> summary --> pause --> stretch --> pause and so forth. In trying to put this together, I gave up on narrative coherence and wrote a weird collage about a day at the Santa Monica Pier. I wasn't sure if it came out a cool mess or a hot mess, but I guess I'll find out on Wednesday. If they like it, maybe I'll post it here next week, if I'm still as much out of ideas for stuff to write about then as I am now. Ha ha. Ha. Ehhhh.

Actually, I've been working pretty busily on the next couple of posts to follow my last one, about submitting work. I'm surprised at how much I have to say about it and how helpful I'm fooling myself into thinking I am. I figure I'll post them on Fridays until I run out of material. But that's really business, not craft, and I prefer writing about craft. Or really about how I interpret craft, and hurdles I meet therein, and how my own work has been informative on my journey into craft improvement. But for any of that to be bloggable, I'd have to be writing. Exercises are close to that, but they are not that.

I've been looking for an excuse to use this picture for a long time. CRAFT, see?

Fall isn't here yet. It's hot as a leather-covered crotch here in the San Fernando Valley. I'm not complaining, because I moved here specifically to trade long summers for long winters, but I'm definitely feeling kind of "next slide, please," about high-nineties days.

Okay, talking about the weather. Time to vamoose.

Dramatic, Climactic Water Revisions

Yesterday afternoon I'd finally had enough of fiddling with Highbinder and I called it good. This is something like my sixth revision since finishing the draft last January, and I'm pretty sure I'm not done, but I'm as done as I can get right now and keep from being able to recite all 325 pages of it from memory. I sent out a few queries and now I've only to write other things while I wait.

Matt asked me if I was happy with the changes I made. The harder I tried to answer that, the less able I was. I made the changes in order to reflect the climax back on the prologue, and the feedback that led me to these changes was directly on point, but it also led me into a kind of tautology that I doubt a reader will notice but that bothers the hell out of me.

Let me just be clear instead of mincing around it, even if this gives some things away. My main character, Berra, has a big problem with water. She can't be immersed in it for very long without harm. In the prologue, which is self-contained, like a short story (or so I hope/intend), she confronts immersion in water, and while she's not permanently harmed, it's a traumatic experience. The big climax of the book, as written and revised last year, involves Berra causing some property damage with dynamite, after which she's arrested. My miracle reader said, yo, why didn't your climax have any water in it? That's her THING, and you missed the opportunity to inject that type of danger into the scene. Berra didn't confront water in a dangerous way at all for the whole book after you set it up so nicely in the prologue. Wow, man, said I, that was stupid of me. And thence followed an entire year of procrastination while I tried to figure out how I could put water in the climax.

Well, I figured out a way, but only after a number of desperate conversations with Matt where I was just tearing my hair out trying, and really he deserves the credit for setting it straight in my mind, but even so, the whole thing seems kind of precarious. I don't really have a concrete plot-driven justification for the water being there, except that it is, for reasons Berra can't discover either. I hope I'll be able to retcon my way into a good reason in one of the sequels - I have a sorta-reason in mind, but it's flimsy - but as of right now I don't feel that good about it.

Nevertheless, I'm pretty sure that putting water into the climax was the right thing to do. The way it reflects on what happened in the prologue is interesting and worthwhile. Do I feel good about those edits? No. But I don't think I would have felt good about any edits after a year of avoiding them and worrying about them. I'm satisfied with them, for the time being, and if I wake up in the middle of the night with a better idea in two months you bet I'm going to plunge right into a seventh revision.

In other news, I've been on an unlucky streak with books recently. Right now I'm near the end of a novel that is more than a little repulsive, but still promises greater satisfaction than I've had out of the previous three. Maybe I'll switch to poetry for a while, or reread something I know I love. The fall semester is still two months away, but I'm already looking forward to it; I got some good news yesterday that I can't share until it's all certain. I really intended to start on a new short story this week, but it might not work out. We're covering structuralism and poststructuralism in a single day in my summer class, tomorrow, so there's a lot to keep my brain cells occupied. There's other stuff happening, too, but I guess I've forgotten it all, what with learning 2,500 years of literary theory in the past month.

Upcoming and Downgoing

I woke up on the wrong side of the week, but I have some administrative stuff to address and a few other things to say, so here's a post anyway.

1) I referred to a secret project a few posts back. Tomorrow, that project debuts: I helped to copy-edit a series of comics for the creator of Ctrl+Alt+Del, one of my two most favorite webcomics. While labor-intensive, this project was so much fun that I am having a hard time adjusting back to my normal copy-editing job. If you somehow got here from there, welcome!

2) I mentioned it on Facebook and in a group e-mail, but not here: Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #45, with my story "Kingdom Automata", aka the crazy robot story, which I have written about at great length in this blog, is available here. For free in electronic forms, and for a nominal fee in paperback.

3) Opera season started on Saturday. Get ready for opera posts for the next several months! Woooo!!!!1!

4) I was the only one to volunteer a story during the first week of workshop in my UCLA class, so one of my stories is going to be drawn and quartered workshopped by 17 other students tomorrow night. I agonized over the choice, and spent most of the last four days regretting the story I picked, but there's nothing for it now and I must have had a reason to select that one in the first place.

The instructor got the class to give me a round of applause for being brave enough to volunteer during the first week, before we know anything about each other. I waved it away: "I'm just a show-off." Because I am.

5) One of our assignments for this class is to find a paragraph or two of fiction that we love and bring it in at some point to read aloud. I am stumped. I looked at all my best-loved books and realized I love them in macro ways; because the story connects to itself, and the characters shift over time, not because one paragraph stands out. (This is not so for movies - I know plenty of movies where just one shot will send me to heaven.) I'd do Chandler or Leonard, because they're masters at the level of the sentence, the paragraph, but our instructor has mentioned that he's going to bring in some Chandler, so.

The one I'm considering right now is Rebecca, some of the first chapter: "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again." Rebecca emerged from my youth as my Fahrenheit 451 book - the one I'd choose to memorize, to become, in the event that books went extinct. Rereading it last year, I realized it's really not a perfect book, but I still stand by it as one of the most evocative books I've read, and one of those books calculated to make you fall in love with itself. So, reading from that first spell-setting chapter seems to fit in with the point of the exercise, even if the book isn't one I can defend on the whole. Maybe I'll figure out something else before it's my turn.

Wish me luck with the rest of the week.

Yours and Mine: A Lament on Revision

Last time on The Fictator:

Matt asked me why I felt the story had to be in a dialect at all, and I didn't have a proper answer for him. Because that's how it sounds in my head. I could strip away the dialect and it would probably be much the same story, but it wouldn't feel right to me. Would it be better, though?

After I wrote that, I started to go off on a long tangent about changing things in my work despite not wanting to, and decided that it would make a better separate post instead.

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.

Done and Done and Done

I'm sort of wrecking the scheduling on this blog by getting way ahead of myself - a temporary condition, to be sure - but I wanted to note that I wrote the last post on the weekend before the Boston Marathon (13th-14th) and planned to post it on Tuesday the 16th. Instead I wrote that far more somber piece on Monday the 15th and wanted to give it time to sit before posting anything else. By Monday the 15th, a lot of the discomfort from the suture sites had cleared up (although by no means all of it), and I was able to concentrate enough to finish drafting the mother/son story on Tuesday, before I even posted my complaint that I couldn't finish it. (Also, I was healing quickly enough that I had the sutures removed on Friday the 19th, and I nearly wept with relief. I'm still healing, but it's SO much better to have them gone.) I think I fucked up the ending very badly, but I'll look at it in two weeks and see what there is to see.

Similarly, some of this post was written on Wednesday the 17th. If I was more willing to embrace the ups and downs of my ability to write here, rather than insisting on twice-a-week posts, no more or less, we wouldn't be in this mess.

So. Here's the slightly old news.

I mentioned offhand a while ago that I had an idea for an experimental choose-your-own-adventure/Wikipedia kind of novel. I'm thinking of developing it as my next project, because I'm excited about it now and striking in the excitement phase always seems like a good idea when I'm considering creative work.

The other night I was talking through the idea with Matt and I had an "it comes in pints?" moment. He suggested that I add a layer of revision history information into the book, just like the one they have on Wikipedia, and I said something like "You can just look at that?" and he said sure, look at the site, there's even a comment thread sometimes that you can read. So this morning I had a look.

OMG.

I had no idea that the underside of Wikipedia's existence is so easy to reveal, nor that it was so incredibly detailed. Looking at revision history is easily as much of a black hole as is the upper side of the archive, because even beyond comparing revisions, you can click on any number of the usernames and see what else they've edited, what people have written to them, etc etc. So many conclusions to draw, so little time. This project is looking more challenging, more unmanageable, all the time, but I really want to do it.

I read Natalie Serber's Shout Her Lovely Name last week, and found it a bit uneven. The first story was a gutshot, unforgettable and remarkable. The rest of the book...less so. I'll look forward to more work by her, but this was difficult to love unconditionally. I also saw The Future, Miranda July's second film, for which I saw the trailer in the theater a long, long time ago and got really excited. The movie itself was a letdown, I'm afraid; it was really not much different than the short stories of hers I read, with the same blank spaces, weird quirky happenings, and fascinating (if sometimes unexplained) moments between people. It was slow and cerebral and twee. Watch the trailer instead and imagine your own movie.

I also went back to revise two strange stories, the one about the boy on the garbage scow and one about stalking, and I think they're both pretty neat if really weird but I honestly have no clue if people outside my head are going to feel that way. My usual #1 reader has been too busy lately to have a look, so I'm kind of treading water in the community pool of uncertainty until another reader gets back to me.

And I did a bit of work on the breasts essay. It didn't turn out like I hoped. I think I've gotten too accustomed to blog format to be able to write essays decently at all. I still have more work to do on it, but it might go in the bin.

There. All caught up. Next week I'll actually be blogging in real time, it seems.

Try, Try Again

Life goes on. Over the weekend, and during a long spell yesterday, I made initial revisions to the KUFC draft. I know I need to give it one more thorough read to make sure I revised it correctly before I start sending it to friends, and I will. Just not...this second.

I realized recently that my job as a copy editor has helped me enormously with my fiction writing. It was a surprise, because the two jobs shouldn't theoretically have much to do with each other. I copy-edit largely meaningless factual articles, all of which have to be written only to a certain point of excellence and not beyond. The New York Times it ain't. Since November of 2011, I've rearranged countless sentences, deleted infinity+1 unnecessary prepositional phrases, and written a great deal of copy even though I didn't want to and wasn't inspired to. All that rearranging and deleting and rewriting has shown me that no sentence has an imperative form, that English is crazy mutable (something I knew vocabularily, but didn't get on a structural level), and that all you need to do in order to write is put one word after another.

The imperative form thing has been the most useful lesson. In the past I tended to think of narrative writing as much more concrete than I now believe it is. Each sentence, I thought, should be structured in one way and one way only, and generally the best way to build the sentence is the way you came up with first, because that's how it feels right.

[your laughter here]

Let's bring in an example. Here's a sentence from the prologue of KUFC (which now has an actual title, Highbinder):

I don't often do jobs across the bay, in part because it's too easy for ferry stewards and M-line attendants to remember seeing me, instead of being able to pass through Ortassi unnoticed like I usually do. 

I know this is sort of a rambling, unsound sentence, but I'm leaving it the way it is. If I wanted to edit it, I would look at it and consider the information I'm communicating in it: 1) Berra (that's "I") doesn't often do jobs across the bay; 2) when a passenger crosses the bay, it's easy for transportation employees to remember seeing him or her; 3) usually Berra goes through Ortassi (that's a city) without being seen. Conclusions we can draw from this sentence are 1) she does most of her "jobs" in the city, and 2) these jobs are of a nature that it's better when she's not being seen.

So, how can I edit the sentence while leaving the information and conclusions intact?

I don't often do jobs across the bay. One reason for this is that ferry stewards and M-line attendants might remember seeing me. I'm pretty hard to spot when I work in the middle of Ortassi. 

This is the simplest edit. It breaks the sentence into thirds and sets its information out to the audience straight, no mixers. With rare exceptions, I just don't write this way. It grates on me and I don't think it communicates nuance the way that something with more style does. Her ego about her abilities shines out in the first edit in an indefinable way that I don't think it does in this edit. You'll notice where I struck through six words that I wrote initially, but didn't need.

Take three:

Most of my jobs take place in the city, so I'm used to passing through Ortassi unnoticed. Going across the bay means encountering ferry stewards, who don't see many people come and go at night. M-line attendants, too, tend to remember seeing you get off at the last stop. 

This is better, stylistically more like me. The similar sounds in "passing/Ortassi" and "attendants/tend" would mean more revision for me, along with the use of the second person in the last part of the last sentence, but other writers would prefer this sort of rhymeish syntax and the genial feeling the reader gets from "you". There's also "see" in two successive sentences. I wouldn't leave it this way, but this is an example.

Take four:

Crossing the bay for my work is unusual. The ferry doesn't see a lot of night passengers, so I might stick in a steward's memory more easily, a problem for someone in my profession. Most frequently I take jobs in the city, and don't encounter too many people who'd remember me for more than a few moments as I flit by in the dark. 

This one is passable, but too wordy and not emotionally nuanced at all. It sets its information forth in an obvious way, which is an advantage for some writers, but not always for me. There are also several simplistic modifiers, like "too" and "more" and "many", which sometimes means I need to break out the thesaurus to say what I really mean, or (as in this case) I'm writing lazily, rather than taking trouble to find the right flow. This version I would strike completely and rewrite rather than trying to cut and paste the pieces together a different way.

Cutting and pasting and rearranging is what I do in my copy-edit job all day long, and the constant question of "How do I put this a different way?" has helped me to read every single sentence in my fiction with the same question in mind. In the past I might have left a not-quite-right sentence as it was just because I didn't think it could be written in a better way. (That sounds egotistical, but what I mean is that I thought there was no better syntactical arrangement of words in English that would say what I wanted to say, not that no one could ever possibly write a better sentence than me.) My assumption was that if I could write it a better way, I would have written it a better way the first time I wrote it. This is bunk and hogwash, but I can only see it as such after having rearranged so many sentences in the past year that I can't even begin to calculate them.

This is what the sentence originally looked like:

I know the formatting's all fucked up if you're reading this in the blog.
Blogger doesn't have a manual picture sizer, because of reasons, I guess. 

So it hasn't changed much. I forgot while I was drafting that I meant this scene to be in the present tense, and later I changed "someone" to "me" to bring the focus back to the main character. Some might argue that I should revise the sentence so that "do" doesn't appear twice, to remove "being able", and so it's clearer sooner that passing through Ortassi refers to I, not to stewards and attendants. But after considering it, along with the other thousands of sentences in Highbinder, I like it the way it is.

The point of this whole exercise is to explain how copy-editing the work of others has helped me with my own, and the biggest change is that I'm able to discern the point of each sentence upon reading it. If I were a more literary writer, the point would be art; if I were a more straightforward writer, the point would be information. For me the point is to communicate information in a specific way, with a specific mood and feel. Doing so often requires breaking the sentence down to its component information and discovering how to retool its syntax to say exactly what I want, exactly how I want. Interestingly, the flexibility of English grammar means that you can often say the exact same thing, with all the same nuance, in half a dozen different configurations. So sometimes revision entails a lot of this, writing and erasing and trying again in a sense that's little more than carpentry.

So, if anyone asks you whether or not writing is an awful lot of work, having read this post, you'll say...?

92 Reasons I Won't Recommend This Book

Is this song cheesy or comforting to the heart? I love it, but the internet has said that it sounds like a song from the credits of a third-rate 80s movie.

I think I've written 10,000 words on KUFC this week. Not shabby. I would have written more if I could stop fiddling with the last two scenes that I typed up (dammit). I keep remembering things like "if she was eating grapes she'd have to spit out the seeds, no seedless grapes in 1940" and "wait, I have to point out that there were grapes on the coffee table in the first place" and "she forgot to put her coat back on before she went outside" and such. It's stupid little stuff, consistencies and anachronisms, but it's the kind of stuff I'm afraid I'll forget entirely if I don't put it in (which simultaneously feels too irrelevant to take notes about).

Also, the book is becoming much queerer than I intended it to be. My MC is bisexual, which was part of the plan all along, but it's turning out that there are more homosexual scenes/couples in the book than hetero ones. I think this is hunky-dory, but since this just happened, I'm slightly worried that I'll scare off publishers the same way Soderbergh scared off distributors. (Best comment I heard on that nonsense: "Now I'm just curious...how gay is this thing?") Ah well. Now is not the time to worry about that. And anyway genre fiction needs more healthy queerness and fewer spider-queens with eight boobs.

Speaking of scary monsters, I am reading this book:

And I think it will be the last advice book about the publishing industry that I read, unless I am recommended one after a serious, thoughtful conversation. I've read ten or so, all told, and a plethora of publishing advice on the internet. They always have the same effect. They make me insecure and arrogant in equal measures (i.e. "oh God, I'm not doing that, I'm not thinking about that, I'm a horrible writer, I'm dooooomed" intertwined with "I totally knew that, I'm brilliant, I'm way better than the herd, I'm gonna be a millionaire"), sometimes in the course of a single sentence. They get me spun up and competitive about who could be in the slush pile with me, and force me to obsess over why the process has to be so fraught and lottery-like. They make me angry because they contradict each other and themselves, sometimes in two neighboring paragraphs, as this one did. And because they codify everything about the process of publishing into secret handshakes that differ from book to book, indicating that the codification is thoroughly variable and meaningless.

To sum up: they keep me from doing good work. They take my focus off the book and onto myself and my ego, whether inflated or punctured. They advise less than they obfuscate. So I'm finished. Me and my perfectionism would rather do everything the exactly-right way to increase my chances of acceptance, but if I've learned anything at all from these fussy, confounding books, it's that the only part of the process that doesn't vary from house to house and agent to agent is do good work. (And tell the truth, but I've got that one down.) So fuck it. I'm just gonna do my best, and make the book part of that best, rather than merely my forward foot.

I note that this book, 78 Reasons etc., is apparently out of print. I'm not surprised, because the author's advice on self-publishing is no longer correct in the slightest and he doesn't mention e-books once. (It's from 2005.) However, its advice is otherwise no different than most of the other books I've read about writing and publishing. It's no outlier on the bad end. It's just as irritating and distracting as all the rest.

FWIW, I liked Self-Editing for Fiction Writers - it supplied practical, applicable advice to someone who abhors revision - and I liked The Fire in Fiction, although I suspect the latter was good because Maass is just a good writer. But, you know, those are craft books, not publishing books. Both invoked the carrot of "you want to be published, don't you?", but neither was specifically about how to get into print.

Okay. Rant over.

I'm trying very hard to do less Facebook lately, and it is a serious challenge. It's difficult on a minute-by-minute basis. And it makes me feel amazingly isolated. But I can also feel my life cracking open to let other things in: old habits, new uses for time. So...yay?

Just Eat the Dang Chocolate

Phew, that's over. The secret project is completed, and I am so happy to be able to stop worrying about it until the spring.

I went back and read the urn story on Monday. The first half isn't working, but the second half really, really is. I think the contrast is between a half where the narrating character interacts with another person, and a half where the narrating character is mostly inside her head. I put in the bit with the other character because the rules of writing told me I sort of had to, couldn't write a story that was all internal, but it so clearly isn't working that I'm wondering if I'm supposed to just stay internal for this one.

My plan is to write the beginning a few different ways and see what fits, although I haven't put my money where my mouth is in that regard just yet. I was thinking it over in my thinkin' chair and I began to wish that I had a sort of twin writer-companion. Someone 100% available whom I wouldn't feel bad about nagging on a regular basis, someone with whom I could knead out the whole stinking thing through all its drafts without guilt for taking him/her away from his/her own life. "Do you think this adjective is better than that one? What if I strayed from grammar here? Is the sardonic thing working or is it just weird?"

No one has that. I just have to do it on my own. I mean, I could audition people until I find the right one, and then kidnap her and keep her in my closet, feed her gruel until her spirit is broken and she accepts her new role as my revision slave.

It provides thoughtful commentary or else it gets the hose again.

But there are laws against that sort of thing and I suspect I'd feel even guiltier ruining her life than I do about asking my friends to read my work and get back to me when they feel like it.

Yet I seriously considered sending the draft at this stage to my miracle reader and asking him if I'm right that the first half isn't working. I've found in recent months that I am a pretty crummy judge of what qualifies as The Good Stuff in my own work. People tell me that stuff I tossed off and don't care to revisit is the stuff they remember; they tell me that a character I felt eh about moved them more than the one I am devoted to. So maybe the first half of the story is working and it's just not particularly what I like about the story.

I dunno.

The other problem is that when the urn story is finished, I'll have four literary stories that I'm sure are ready for submission, and only vague ideas of where to send them. I have two markets in mind, but my confidence is super-duper-low and my brain's playing this dumb game where I'll "ruin" the markets if I send them the work. It's the same old hoarding instinct: if I use up the market by sending it a story and I get rejected, which feels inevitable, then the possibility of that market is gone. I know intellectually that this is stupid and the only way to enjoy anything is to participate in it - i.e. eat and appreciate that delicious chocolate you were "saving" before it gets chalky and bad - but it's a very old emotional habit and hard to break.

I don't mean to gloat, but I am so happy not to be traveling during this Thanksgiving, or putting on uncomfortable shoes, or awkwardly answering questions about myself, that I could break into song. I love my adopted family very, very much, but I've never felt connected to Thanksgiving and would have been just as content to stay at home in my PJs and eat leftovers like we did when I was younger. And this year I get to. Although I did buy a frozen turkey-and-stuffing entree from Trader Joe's, and have to go out today to get gravy. That'll be fun and stress-free, I'm sure.

Maybe There's an App for "Write It Anyway"

I'm starting to feel like I'm getting my groove on. The secret project is going okay, I came up with a good and sad idea in my dream last night to supplement a story I'd started tentative plotting on, and I'm on task for assembling a submission and pitch for the Monstrous project.

Also, last night I revised the ugly story. I'd been putting this off, because the revisions I knew I needed to do seemed like they would add several hundred words, and I wanted the thing to stay excessively lean and mean. I had to balance out the narrator to make him slightly less of a monster, and I had to do some explaining, which I hate doing in stories. No matter what, I always feel like I'm doing it wrong, whether at too much length or too much subtlety, or putting it in the wrong place, or using the wrong types of words, or whatever.

Amazingly, when I was done with my revisions, I'd only added 150 words. This morning I added another 100, which are also okay with me, and the thing is still plenty lean and really, really mean. I don't know if I'm actually finished with the story, but the revisions improved it a lot, which is nice.

I got three rejections in the last week. One of them indicates to me that a story needs to be retired; it's just been rejected too many times and I'm tired of screwing with it. (Yo writers: when do you decide to retire a story from trying to get it published? Is there some point, some rejection, some thing that tells you it's time?) Another one just needs me to research another market at which to try it, because I know it's worth publishing. Ugh. Don't wanna.

Speaking of don't wanna, the thing I have not done is reopened KUFC to write on it. I had hoped to do this during November - every day during November, actually - and there are a lot of piddly little reasons why I haven't. None of them are really any good, but my brain seems to have put its foot down on the matter. Hopefully there will be more on this as it develops. I really don't want a stalemate between me and this book.

I'm still pushing away at my poetry experiment (namely Kat Reads Poetry Without Giving Up In Frustration). I finished Louise Erdrich's Baptism of Desire yesterday, which sounds as if it's a cheesetastic kind of racy and naughty, but isn't, is instead majorly potent stuff. I loved it, for the most part. Then I read about half of Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red and, I'm awfully sorry, I don't like it much at all. There are incredible sentences here and there but in general it's not for me.

In other news, I've started listening to an Andrew Johnson iPhone app before I go to bed each night. He's a Scottish hypnotherapist who has a dozen or so different mini-programs in the iTunes store to download, each focusing on some issue - quitting smoking, gaining confidence, public speaking, etc. At first I was very uncomfortable with a hypnosis tape, because all I could think about was that passage in Brave New World - "Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children" - but I listened to the program when wide awake prior to listening to it before going to sleep to make sure there aren't any "fly, my pretties"-type suggestions hidden in it. So far so good. The one I'm listening to every night right now is for procrastination, which has been a problem in ways both big and small for me over the last several months. It actually seems to be making a difference.

Speaking of which, I've got to get on with today. This blog isn't a tool for procrastination, but revising my posts into the ground is.

I Do Not Like the Cone of Shame

This morning I started with "Come As You Are" and then listened to all of Thom Yorke's The Eraser. At first it was a weird juxtaposition - 14 years and a whole universe away from each other - but then the latter seduced me, utterly, as it always does.

I don't know what to tell you today. I wrote a longish post about the migraine I dealt with over the weekend, but I don't really feel good about posting it. In reading it over I'm happy with the product, but it doesn't have much to do with my purpose on this blog.

The editing that I mentioned in Saturday's post, with the darling-killings? I thought I got what killing your darlings was about, but I was ever so wrong. There were whole pieces of this story, passages of multiple paragraphs as well as one entire scene, that I wanted to leave in for the sake of saying what I wanted to say. I thought they served my point in writing the story. Not just things I was proud of having written, but things that I thought were essential to the story as I'd envisioned it.

Well, the story as I'd envisioned it wasn't working, and these passages were some of the reasons why. I had to toss them and redo the inner clockwork of the thing, and my own conception of it. It was kind of like performing amateur surgery on a beloved pet.

But now my pet is mobile and chipper and ready to play, instead of limping around inside a Cone of Shame. And having done this, I'm a lot less afraid of doing it with other stories. It'll be okay, now. More suffering transmuted into learning.

Nearly done with Dubliners, about 2/3 of the way done with Inside Scientology. I absolutely recommend the latter if you're interested in Scientology (and if you're not, I kind of want to know why; it's one of the most interesting subjects I know), but it gets quite harrowing about halfway through. As for Dubliners, I'm finding it a mixed bag. Certain stories I had to grit my teeth and keep reading through excessive boredom ("Ivy Day in the Committee Room"), and others I totally adored ("Counterparts"). I can hardly think of any books of stories that have been so varied in catching my regard.

However, I'd like to note that this is the second book of short stories I've read by a highly lauded Irish author (Edna O'Brien was the other) which portrays the Irish as a bunch of inveterate drunks. It bothers me, because I can't believe it's correct, and it's insulting and adds to a stereotype.

Happy Halloween. (Those rotten kids better not take all my mini Heath bars and Dum-Dums.)