The Mad Scientist at the Podium

By gum, I have SO much to say here. I got workshop news and Yes news and readin' news. I shouldn't've neglected this space for so long.

Let's start with the recent stuff, and maybe go backwards in future posts. Last Friday I gave a reading at CSUN, along with my poet colleague Khiem Nguyen, and I thought it went quite well. You can see video of two of the three stories I read on my YouTube channel, or you can just scroll down a bit.

The first video includes a little of the introduction the GRS leader, Freddy Garcia, wrote about me and then read. (The video cuts in a bit late, doesn't focus right away, and then cuts out the applause and the high-five I gave Freddy when I got to the podium.) He was so thoroughly complimentary that the first thing I could say when I got to the mike was "Holy shit." He said things about me being a mad scientist, Frankensteining genre in exciting ways, finding the wounds of the reader and tracing them without flinching. (I think.) It was amazing to hear those complimentary things about me together with stuff that I knew factually to be true.

Freddy and I are in a fiction class together this semester, and this makes me simultaneously very happy and very sad. I have a big friendcrush and a big writercrush on him, but he is near the end of his M.A. and I'm right at the beginning, so I think this is the first and last time we'll be working together. Also, he's a poet (a good one), and as I've told him, I do not understand poetry and I fail at writing it, so I don't know how much use I will ever be to him as a writer-friend. In any event, that's Freddy, speaking first, and then there's me. The story I read in this first video is "Shade," which you can find in Hobart right here.

By the way, you pronounce my name exactly like it looks, cold-iron, like you wouldn't want to iron your clothes with a cold iron. But it's not Freddy's fault that he didn't know that and I wasn't quick enough to correct him. (I go by Katharine Mason at CSUN because it's my legal name.)

Then I read a second story, "Infinite Space," which you can find nowhere but in this video, because it's racked up 15+ rejections. People kept telling me after I was finished reading that they didn't know why no one liked it, because they thought it was good. I think I see why after reading it and watching this video - it's kind of samey and it ranges without satisfying - but I like it enough as-is that I don't want to pull it to pieces and re-build.

I know these videos are a little hard to watch, with just my face surrounded by a pool of darkness, but the GRS readings always take place that way, the only light at the podium and the reader blind to the 20 or so people in the room. I like seeing people when reading, but it's kinder to do it this way, especially if this is the first public reading the reader has given, which is often the case.

Also, I feel that I look a little like a full-throated bullfrog, but that's all right. I read well, and that's the point. I read a third story, too, the Biff Tannen story, but Matt's phone ran out of juice so it is lost to history.

I really enjoyed doing this reading. I enjoy reading, in general. I get nervous ahead of time, but then it goes well, because I've loved reading aloud since I was a wee girl and have worked hard to be good at it, and then I am happy and can't wait for another opportunity to read to people. Hear that, universe? I'd love to read anytime you'd like me to.

Precision v. Grace, Classical v. Jazz (or The Great Oz Has Spoken)

Last week I sort of unintentionally reread some feedback a professor gave me about a year ago.

While this piece feels done, it’s felt done from the beginning, and done in a way that, as impressive as the writing is, feels like there’s a cap on, holding everything together deliberately and tightly. I know this is what most writers aspire to, at least for a while. And then there’s the next stage, which involves letting go of all that tight control to dig deeper, to burrow, to be surprised. I think I already said this, and if not, shame on me. But really, if you can write this well, Katharine, imagine how well you might write if you were really writing. And by that I mean working the language intransitively, not acting upon but acting – not writing about (the self), but writing (the self). You clearly have all the craft skills you need to stop thinking so clearly in meaning. 

This feedback confused me. Even after I achieved some distance and met with the professor, the way forward did not come clearer. (I still didn't understand it particularly well in rereading last week.) But I set it up in the back of my mind, kind of like a canvas backdrop, while I went on and wrote to the best of my ability.

I blogged last fall about how much despair ensued when another professor unknowingly echoed what the first one had said. The backdrop rippled a little, starting to appear more realistic and less like scenery, but I still didn't know what to do with it.

This blog post does not tidily conclude with me figuring it out.

Worstbest Writing, Worstbest Weather

My to-do list for today involves four writing tasks, two reading tasks, and "change sheets?" I think it's going to be a good day.

So far we've had to do two exercises in my workshop class, and my work on them has been the worstbest kind of work. For each, I've written my requisite word count, and been very pleased with the result, to the point where I think maybe I can fiddle with the result and eventually send it to a flash fiction market. And then as I start to fiddle with it, the thing starts to look bad, and then worse, and then I kind of turn away in shame, like George McFly turning away from that ginger who's macking on Lorraine instead of defending her, while Marty's going all transparent in the corner, like oh, forget this, I don't actually have a solid core of self-esteem, I'll just go home and read my pulp sci-fi mags. Who wants a smokin' hot, boy-crazy girlfriend, anyway?

Of course, we all know that George found it in him to stand up to that ginger and get the girl.
Let it be a lesson to all of us. 

What? You guys don't have Back to the Future memorized down to the last millisecond?

The point is, these exercises have felt really good at first, very solid and forward-moving in terms of my writing ability, and then they collapse under scrutiny. Exercises collapsing under scrutiny is in itself not a surprise, nor even something I can beat myself up about, but it's disappointing to think that I've done well and then discover that I haven't.

I believe I can fix the second one, but I haven't heard from my small group about it. After I do, on Wednesday, I'll let it sit for a month or more before I look again. I've read it too many times. Here's the first paragraph, though.

Obviously the place is unsafe, but it’s a large expanse of flat concrete out of the sun, so the boys go there to skateboard. Skating is transportation, mating dance, and self-expression all in one, so they learn jumps and trade lingo under the corrugated roof of this old warehouse, its viscera cleanly removed, its walls torn off in ragged sections as if eaten. Usually, Dylan’s older brother crams all five of them into his dusty blue Corolla in exchange for weed or gas money, because moms do not need to know about the warehouse, and they roll away the long dog days after school out here, surrounded by loose desert and abandoned equipment, the wind stirring sand into their hair. Yesterday, Dylan’s brother brought his girlfriend along in the passenger seat when he came to pick them up, so Ray and Colin got left behind. 

I actually took this from life. I drove about an hour north of L.A. to see a friend last week, and on the way back I went by what appeared to be a group of abandoned construction sites. Under a former building, which is now not much more than a rusty steel roof and the beams holding it up, I saw the bottom halves of boys skateboarding around. Oddly, their movements reminded me of nothing so much as bumper cars, trundling in little sedate paths. I think it's because they were pretty far away. Whoever those boys are, I doubt they are sedate up close.

One of my writing tasks today is revisions on the dreadful story. A reader gave me a fucking perfect solution to a minor web of problems in the story, so integrating her idea should be like putting a key in a lock. I hope. And then I'll start in on Light in August. Thus I go into undiscovered country in terms of Faulkner, and I'm pretty fearful but naturally I'm looking forward to it, too.

It is HOT here. My Facebook friends in other climes are making noises about fall, and it's kind of disorienting, because it reminds me that it is actually September. (And my friend in Australia is talking about how nice it is to fold warm laundry in the season she's in, but that's a bit different.) Here, September feels like an extension of August - dog-hot, what-are-you-talking-about-Eliot-August-is-clearly-the-cruelest-month August - instead of the transitional month it's always been for me. A few more years in SoCal and I won't associate September with autumn at all any longer.

What It Is I Know Not

This is a great song for those hours of the morning that just slip away while you catch up with what you missed on the internet the night before. You're welcome.

Funny story. I got some shocking but useful feedback on Highbinder a few weeks ago, and one bit of information I couldn't reconcile was about me mentioning 1930s movie stars in the early chapters of the book. My reader said that he found this confusing and odd. I talked it through with Matt, and at length I realized that I was myopic about what these references meant. To me, movie stars are signposts, references that help me determine when and where I am. To others, that's not so at all. They might appear to be name-checking to no purpose, or deliberately confusing, rather than orienting the reader, which is what I intended.

I laughed about this for a long time, because that is what comes of being too obsessed with cinema for one's own good - feeling like, well, mentioning Garbo is helpful, because her American career was at its height in the 30s. How could that not be helpful? If, unlike me, the average person doesn't think about Garbo in any given week, it's not helpful. It's actually the opposite of helpful. Well, now I know.

This is Garbo. For me, the question is really how you can not think of her in any given week. 

--

Recent reads include Toni Morrison's Jazz, Sharon Olds' Stag's Leap, and Mary Gaitskill's Don't Cry.

Jazz: I don't know. I feel unqualified to talk about Morrison's books. I felt the same way after this as after Beloved: WTF was that? Did I like it? Am I supposed to feel white guilt? Am I supposed to feel rapture? I have no idea. It was Something, but what it was I know not.

Stag's Leap: Whoooooo. If you've ever been in a relationship that has ended (and duh, who hasn't?), these poems will bring up some stuff. What a gutsy, straightforward, marvelous collection. Even a little fun at times.

Don't Cry: Er...reply hazy. I don't think I got some of the stories, or perhaps I didn't like them. Others I liked a lot, even loved. She definitely has a grip on language that is entirely her own. Reminds me of George Saunders in a way - they don't write very much alike, but they do both write quite idiosyncratically. This made me want to read more of her work in the hope of understanding it better, which I guess is a positive reaction.

I also did a bit of reading of early Joan Didion from Slouching Towards Bethlehem. A very small bit, just a couple of essays, and I enjoyed them. I've read two? three? of her books and have not yet liked her work over the long haul, but I've put her collected essays on my Amazon wish list anyway in the hope that I will come to my senses.

Up next is A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan and a book of poetry by a fellow named Erik Campbell, whose poems (these poems, in fact) I read in Prairie Schooner and loved enough to buy his book, and then maybe I'll get back to some genre reading. I like switching back and forth between genre and literary, and it's growing easier to figure out when it's time to do so - I'm getting to know the signs of becoming exasperated with one set of characteristics or the other.

--

Last week was physically challenging for me, so I did a lot of lazing around and feeling impotent. I read (obviously) and I watched MST and I did crosswords, in between resting. Real work was actually impossible for a lot of that time and seemed impossible later on.

I'm putting together a short story in my head, about two women, but I haven't opened up my notebook just yet except to take notes. There's work I could probably be doing on the wikibook but I am not doing it. After a big 4,500-word release on that project, I haven't done anything else but notes and thinking, and I don't know if it's because I'm still in the Let's Fuck Around For A Few Months Before Getting Down To Business stage of the book or if I'm in the No, I've Gotten Started stage and I'm just completely denying that I need to do any work on it at all for the book to spring magically into existence.

In either circumstance, I need to work on it. Don't I end my blog posts with that imperative a lot?

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.

Dialectic Feedback

I've blabbed a few times about this weird story I wrote about a boy on a garbage scow. I am too lazy to look up every reference on the blog, but here's a recent one, after all the book talk. The other day I got back some feedback on it that indicated the pidgin I wrote it in was an unpleasant part of the story. The feedback-giver noted that she had a "poison eye" (what a great phrase) toward dialect in general, so she wasn't sure she was impartial about the dialect in this story. She said the story itself was good, but her feedback was more limited than usual; I think she wasn't able to give it as close a read as she usually manages because the dialect bugged her so.

How do you feel about dialects? Love 'em or hate 'em? I think they can get irritating over the course of a whole book, especially if I can't quite parse how they sound. I never did get the hang of some of Hagrid's speech patterns in the Harry Potter books, not until I heard them from Robbie Coltrane. But I really enjoy dialects in short stories, usually, because they're like dropping in on a world I'm not familiar with and then leaving it before I discover all its downsides.

Here are the first two paragraphs.

Me n my Pa always lived here, on the river, is what I tell them when they come. The pretty ladies in their paperdoll dresses. They hold little lace hankies on their faces n they always frown, always, their foreheads creasin like the inside of an elbow. Different ladies, I think, or at least different hats n different shapes under their dresses, n they always ask how can you live here, my dear little man? Me n my Pa always lived here, is what I tell them.

Nothin was different for years. They come twice a month or so. They bring hard bread n the clearest water you ever saw in tin cups. Sometimes they sick up, when they think no one’s lookin, over the side of Maurice. My Pa named it that, he tell me, for his own pa. I ask him once if I should rename it Alfred when he pass on, when I come to be Lord of the Barge, but he din’t answer.

Annoying?

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?

I've prepared three essays in the last couple of weeks. All three are about feminism issues, but they vary greatly in tone. I pitched the most serious one to a favorite website and got a response that was a sort of favorable rejection; the essay was three times too long for them, but they wanted to hear more pitches from me. So I'll wait a few days and pitch the second one. The third one's already gone to another favorite website.

I've also written a couple thousand words on the wikibook. Too soon to say if it's going to become something. I'm trying to write it in miniature pieces, just a few hundred words at a time, so I don't get overwhelmed by the project.

There's lots of other news, but none of it fits here. Let's all just keep on truckin'.

Hey Pretty...

Snippets.

--I keep getting e-mails from people who want to add me on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Google+. I do not want to be a part of any of these networks. I get an e-mail from one of them once or twice a week. I'm starting to see how Baby Boomers feel when people tell them they have to get a webcam, or a smartphone, or a whatever. LEAVE ME BE, WHIPPERSNAPPERS.

--I thought I'd be working on House of Leaves for at least a month - it took me ages to read Infinite Jest - and I finished it in about a week. Very surprising, particularly since in the early sections it took me an hour to get through 15 pages, but then later there were whole chunks of pages that just raced by because there were only a few words on each page. I think that either Johnny or Johnny's mom conceived the entire thing, stem to stern. My main pieces of evidence are the grammar and punctuation oddities that persist in every incarnation of text throughout the book, but there's also the Pelican thing, the different languages, other stuff I read on comment threads that fits in. I think the house is the mind, and the horror in the house is the fact of death. (Highlight to read; do not comment and spoil, just e-mail me if you want to talk.) I also think that Mark Z. Danielewski read Infinite Jest in 1995 and decided he just had to make his own. But if I'm wrong about that, I apologize personally and profusely to him.

Did I like it? Sort of. I found it interesting to pick up and study from all angles, like a mutant in a jar. I found it useful when considering my own future project. I found it exasperating. I think I like the experience of looking back on it far more than I liked the experience of reading it. In places it was fascinating, revealing a writer with a powerful stylistic gift and a dark and scintillating imagination. Those moments were frequently buried under semi-scholarship and wearying footnotes. But I did learn the term "ergodic literature" in the process of reading it, which is almost worthwhile on its own.

--Months ago I changed my e-mail notification sound to a lightsaber unsheathing. Despite hearing it a dozen times a day, it hasn't gotten old in the least.

--Blogger doesn't work very well with dual sign-ins on Google, and neither does Google Docs. This has become a giant headache since I got a new job that uses Google Docs almost exclusively. It means I have to go through a big hassle to blog here. Which I do not like.

--I have a date to see The Great Gatsby this morning. My anticipation, bosoms a-heave, and the reasons therefor could be a really long post in itself.

--Haven't written in about a week. Reeeeally itchy to get started on something already.

--I did come up with a new load-bearing plot line for the Marilyn book. It and the weird wiki/CYOA project are vying epically for my favor. I want to write (or at least make a significant effort on) one of them this year. Before fall. But I don't know which one, and I'm mentally dawdling around trying to choose when I ought to just pick one and go.

--My website keeps popping into my head at odd moments. I desperately need to set aside a half-day and update/fix it. It's pretty much a year out of date at this point. That's embarrassing.

--After the last piece of feedback I got, I suddenly lost all patience with the writing process and the thoughts and emotions it stirs. At that moment, I no longer wanted to write for the consumption of others, and I understood better than I ever have the people who write novels and never show them to anyone. Not through twisted perfectionism (that's a mechanism I understand very well), but because they wrote for themselves instead of for an audience. I wish I'd believed I should be writing that way all along, because I don't think I'd be so unhappy with my work now.

I'd really like to write a longer and more exploratory post about this, but it might not be forthcoming anytime soon.

Why, no, that experience has nothing to do with not having written anything since. Nothing at all.

--

Random Capitalization is KING

I made this on Pulp-O-Mizer.

I love it. I'd've preferred to have the title splash diagonally across the page above the airship, and to remove Amazing Wonder Stories, but neither of those were possible with Pulp-O-Mizer's presets. As it is it's mostly what I had in mind.

I'm most of the way through Fifty Writers on Fifty Shades, and get this: the two most thoughtful, well-written, and filler-free essays I've read within were by writers named Sassafras Lowrey and Sinnamon Love. Clearly, being judgmental about people's chosen names makes an ass out of u and me.

I don't have any writing news, except that I got a rejection for a literary story - shrug - and found another market to which to submit it. And summarily did. And I'm hearing a few things here and there from friends about KUFC as they read it. All are gratifying, some are thought-provoking. Love love love feedback.

It's not yet 8:30 here, and if anyone else reading this is on the West Coast, and you have the capacity, try this to get you through humpday morning.

Ten Pints of Blood

I was driving along in Idaho the other day, heading home, when my phone did the Darth Vader breath, which lets me know that I have a new e-mail. I very stupidly and illegally looked at it, and saw that the return e-mail address was that of the agent to whom I sent the [non-]horror novel back in April. My heart sank. I knew instantly that it was a rejection, since she would have called me if she wanted to take me on. When I read the e-mail (illegally and dangerously!), she said that the idea was extremely awesome but the execution made her doubt that she could sell it, and also noted that she'd attached her intern's comments and critique.

I shit you not, this song was shuffled to the top by my iPod mere moments after I'd read this e-mail:

I sat in despondency for a little while, and then rallied. My idea was good. There would be revisions suggested in the attachment, and if I made them well enough, maybe she'd want the book after all. If not, hey. This is not the last book I'll ever write. Yes, I thought it was as good as it could be, but it wasn't, and I have more to do. Okay. I can live with this.

Of course I waited until I had pulled over for lunch before I read the attachment. I don't actually have a death wish. When I opened up the doc on my phone, I was in the parking lot of a semi-kitschy diner just inside the north end of the Targhee National Forest.

Oh. Oh, God. Oh, fuck.

Write Me

One of the best pieces of feedback I've gotten for the [non-]horror novel so far is a reader saying that the main characters seemed to be eating an awful lot, constantly sitting down to meals. She said would probably be too upset to eat most of the time. Due to my blood sugar issues, I'm constantly thinking about my next meal, and I know I transferred that to the book in a way it doesn't really belong. The problem upon revision is what activity I can give my characters to gather them all together periodically so they can have conversations. There aren't any TVs where they are, and it's hard to imagine them just kind of sitting together in the same room with no purpose to the gathering.

I gave it some thought, and hey, you know, maybe they'd play cards. It feels like an antique activity to me, but what do you do when you're stuck in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of other people? You do what your grandparents did. I had a brainwave that one of the characters could play clock solitaire, a game I played when I was a little girl (I was an only child), because, you know, the book is about time and it's clock solitaire. But I couldn't remember how to play clock solitaire, and I'd need to know that to put it in the book.

I looked it up on the internet, but the instructions on the internet were completely different from the way my mom taught me to play, and much more complicated. The notion wouldn't leave me be last night, before I went to sleep, that I had to remember how to play. It felt a little desperate that I couldn't recall. So I unearthed a deck of cards in my house and laid out the clock on my bed.

After a few rounds, I remembered how I used to play, but it took the physical act of laying out the cards to jog my brain. The cards I found have never been used, to my memory, and they were slippery, sliding toward me over the sheets. And I couldn't win a hand. I was tired, and ready to sleep, but I was just determined to win a round before I put the cards away and went to sleep. I played for nearly half an hour, the pre-sleep white-noise app on my phone creating a thunderstorm around me, and ultimately never did win. I want very much to go back to it this morning, to play until I manage to organize the cards in the proper way. And I can't cheat. I cheated at Solitaire when I was a lass, but I'm too damn old to do it now and look myself in the mirror.

Part of what wouldn't let me alone about this experience was the deck of cards itself. The only cards I knew we had in the house - unless I had given them to charity, which I thought I might have, and I was so relieved when I found them in the little drawer where they've likely been sleeping for about five years - was a deck of Marilyn Monroe playing cards given to me by an ex-boyfriend. He gave me a lot of little Marilyn things like this, because I got interested in her while we were together. The idea of the novel I want to write about her had started to stir and wake even then, all those years ago. Marilyn magnets and bargain Marilyn photography books and a Marilyn purse, he gave me. I still have most of it.

Last night, the pictures of her on these cards were...haunting is the wrong word. She doesn't haunt me; she's too alive, too dynamic to haunt. Mesmerizing isn't quite the right word either, too dark. Impelled me, these cards did, implored me: write my book, Kat. Write me. Set me forth, the way you've been telling yourself you will for six years.

I've got to finish the sci-fi story, about which I'm pretty confident, and I'm thinking of doing a couple of other, smaller projects in between, but the Marilyn book is the Next Big Thing. I'm just ultra-anxious about it, too anxious to begin. I made a start on it years ago, and my pages were rotten. Too fawning, too personal. I have a decent story and thematic construct in my head, which is more than I had then, but I'd like to have a better handle on it all before I get going. A lot of books about her (some claiming to have new information and insight) have come out in the last six or seven years, and I really should read some of them, not depend solely on Spoto. I'd also like to be sure that it's not going to implode once I get in there. But I guess you can never really know that, right?

Oh, and Whatever You Do, Avoid Sex

I am concentrating so poorly on work that it's time to think about something else.

I've written 6,000 words on the sci-fi story. It's gone in a direction that I'm not sure I personally agree with; the central why-I'm-not-human thing that my android is focused on has turned out to be a different actual thing than I wanted it to be. I'm also worried that I've done fly-bys on too many big ideas for such a small space. And that I'm too much influenced by Penny Arcade's brilliant Automata series. I admit to writing in that world, a little bit - not trying to poach their idea, but sketching a story that sort of overlaps that world. And I definitely borrowed the word "automata" from them.

But I'm traveling on into it. If it turns out all wrong, at the end, I'll just Fictate its ass. Go back and rewrite. Re-right. I'm pretty sure I can finish draft one before the end of the week - tomorrow, in all likelihood.

The thing that's most prominent on my to-do list is getting back to people. Three separate people deserve reader feedback from me, and I've only done about half the reading I need to do for them. After that is the day job, which went well enough for me yesterday that I went to a matinee of The Cabin in the Woods, which I'll get to in a moment. Beyond that is cleaning. People are coming over to the house in about a week and a half, and the house is in no state for visitors, not in the least. I've been living like a bachelor. Possibly like a fraternity brother. It's made me far happier than I expected to just let go of all that worry, all that self-abuse, but it does mean that there's a lot more to do to make the house appropriate for others to enter. (I'm not gross, just messy as hell. Shoes left where I stepped out of them, clothes flung everywhere, books and mail not put away or sorted, etc.) The writing, though, is floating over all those priorities. As long as I'm ready to put words on the page, that's first. I'm just not always ready.

The Cabin in the Woods was such a pleasure. So expertly written, from skin to bones. No one has captured this generation's voice better than Whedon, and even though there's something a little precious about his style, he still writes the most natural dialogue in Hollywood. And he was the perfect guy to co-write this movie, because deliberately tropey characters need good dialogue in order not to bore the audience to tears.

For those of you who have read my time-manipulation book, the [non-]horror novel, I set out with sort of the same goal in mind as Cabin's creators obviously had. I put my monster under the stairs; I had six "sexy teens" come to a lodge in the middle of nowhere. I evoked some of the standard identities, a little - the clown, the ditz, the hippie chick. (No jock, that didn't interest me.) In my latest draft, I succeeded in making my main character say she'd be right back when she definitely wouldn't. I had hoped to hide a bunch of other horror cliches in the book, too. For fun - for my own amusement, and for that of the audience, whoever noticed the nods. Ultimately the writing took me to a deeper place emotionally than I expected, so I abandoned much of that, which is why it's a supernatural thriller rather than really being horror.

In any case, there's such a small cache of lovely smart horror films like this one (Scream leaps to mind; it never gets old for me), and while I still think slasher flicks that are written straight can be a lot of fun (jeez, look at Drag Me to Hell), watching it all get deliberately offered up to the maw of Audience God was even more fun. Not to be missed if you ever cackled at a topless, fake-blood-drenched chick with a fake knife sticking out of her back.

How's that for alliteration?

This Post Is Made from 100% Procrastination

For the first time I'm understanding the difference between wanting a vacation due to desiring a break from a job I don't like, and wanting a vacation due to a sort of tired burnout. Maybe this is naive of me, maybe people who like their jobs are saying DUH, but at this point I could really use a couple of days where I don't have to do any work. I enormously enjoy each category of the work I'm doing, all for different reasons, but I'd really love a breather. My body could use a respite from teaching, too. I've been subbing a lot in the last couple of weeks, and although more money is always good, I think I'm ready to drop back to my regular schedule of (now) 6 classes a week rather than, for example, this week's 8.

My first reader has gotten back to me about the Greenland book, and because he's very kind, he has allowed me to go back and forth with him at great length about the manuscript. Last night I composed the third in a series of e-mails to him in Microsoft Word before pasting it into the body of the reply; with his paragraphs and my responses it was about 5,300 words. I feel guilty asking him to talk about my work in such great detail, but he continues to insist that it's okay.

The actual substance of his feedback has been very surprising. He told me that I've written a bummer of a book, something which is okay with me but which I hadn't really connected the dots to realize. He said that it was actually interesting and not impossible to follow the language, and that he didn't find the setup too holey, issues I worried over endlessly. He noted that there are many more characters than a modern novel usually has, and I honestly hadn't really thought of that. I don't know if it's a flaw per se, but both he and Matt said they had a hard time following who was who, so I think a family tree in the back of the book is in order. Just, like, not a complete one, or some surprises will be lost.

While I'm pleased to see that I've still got enough of the book in my bones to talk to him about it in detail, I find that I have zero motivation to dive into re-editing it. I definitely need further perspectives - especially from women, especially from people who like reading novels more than this friend does - but there are even a few easy fixes my friend pointed out which I could implement easily enough now, and I haven't exactly jumped right on that. I could do it, it's not a confidence thing, but I'm totally not interested.

I think it's because I'm working on the horror book, and don't want to dilute my writing energy back to a book with such an enormously different group of characters. So perhaps, after all, it was a bad idea to jump right into the new book without being completely finished with the old book. Of course, at my current rate of work, I'll be finished with the horror book by my tentative deadline (April) and definitely by my drop-deadline (June), and will be able to take a break between the full closed-door draft and the first open-door draft to hunker down on the Greenland book. Plus, I won't know until June whether my Greenland book won grant money, and I can't really send it out for publisher approval until I find that out. So maybe it worked out better this way, rather than worse. I'm just worried that the feedback will kind of dim in its fresh usefulness in my mind, and I won't remember all the resolutions I had for making things better.

Last night I knitted myself a coaster for my desk, so I could get rid of an old coaster with bad memories (um...never mind) and I put on The Social Network to amuse me whilst working. I still stand in utter awe of that movie's script. It's like All About Eve; I could put it on a continuous loop for about 14 hours and listen to it and feel smarter and smarter all the time. Every time I see it, someone else's performance jumps out at me. This time, again, it was Andrew Garfield's. I wanted to steal his character out of that movie and run off with him to Mexico the first time I saw it, and I felt that way all over again this time.

This was the result, by the way:

Turned out a little lumpier than I expected, but I don't have any emotional turmoil attached to it, and it'll keep condensation from ruining my desk. Which is the point.