Boy, You Gotta Hammer That Nail

I am tired of rejections. That's all I have to say about it right now.

Recent reads include the fifth Chelsea Cain thriller, Kill You Twice, which was as awesome as the rest of them, if not more so; Tana French's first book, In the Woods, which didn't commit as much Olympic-level emotional archery as Faithful Place but which was very nearly as good; Lorrie Moore's Anagrams, which was genuinely interesting but not something I'd necessarily recommend; Douglas Starr's The Killer of Little Shepherds, which was fascinating and well worth reading but stopped just short of being ah-may-zing; and Elyn Saks's The Center Cannot Hold, one of the best books about mental illness I ever hope to read. Remarkable in more than a few ways, and gave me a far superior handle on schizophrenia than I'd had before. Also, I finally finished Ghosts by Gaslight, and what a mixed anthology. Some of the stories bored me silly, and others were so captivating I wanted to read them again when I was finished.

I know there are more books I've finished recently, but I neglected to write them down. Do you guys want me to link to Amazon for this stuff? I could, but I don't figure I have the kind of influence where you want to run right out and buy a book that I've loved. (Plus, four of six of the books above came through my library. Love your libe!)

...

Okay, so maybe that wasn't all I had to say about rejections. I reread my New Year's resolutions this week, and one of them was to be in beginner's mind when writing. I think I'm succeeding at this, slowly; trying to just write well, make each story better than the last, and zip up any consideration of anything else. I get frustrated with the question of how good it has to be before I get a bleeding acceptance, of course, but attempting to write well for the sake of writing well feels good.

Nevertheless, when I am certain I'm improving, when I've read stuff in the market that's exactly like the stuff I'm sending, when I just want to be thrown a bone, it's depressing.

Too, this has been on my mind a lot lately. Go skim it and come back.

The list of mags that's rejected him and the number of times they've done so (near the end) just will not leave my head. 13 tries at one magazine? I never ever would have thought of being so persistent. After five tries, I'd probably say "okay, their style and my style don't mesh" and move on. But no, not this guy. And I note that he has piles of publishing credits, all over the place, and I think, well, obviously he knows something I don't know. And I think the thing he knows that I don't is PERSISTENCE, which is a different quality than persistence. (I'd like to pin this on gender, but that doesn't seem like a wise idea.) The latter is just continuing to try and get published, sending stuff out to market after market; the former is hammering at the same nail until it goes directly into the concrete.

I don't know about that, though. Aren't you just going to bend the nail? Further thought is needed.

On Sunday I drive north to Big Sur, to Esalen, where I'll be at a week-long workshop with Cheryl Strayed and Pam Houston. I am looking forward to this so much that I'm jealous of myself. So, until next week (or perhaps the week after), adieu.

Seven Devils in Your House

I am drafting this nearly two full days before I intend to post it, because I have to dismember a head of cauliflower for dinner and there is no vegetable I consider such an effing chore as cauliflower. Procrastination ahoy!

I have been reading Marianne Moore's poetry and Lorrie Moore's prose, along with a memoir by Pam Houston. I am surprised at how little I like Moore #1 and, by contrast, at how Moore #2's turns of phrase seemingly jump out from behind a door to be astonishing and brilliant in the midst of a somewhat ordinary tale. I want to devour all of what she has to offer. Houston's book was fine. It covered a lot of the same ground as the other two books of hers I read, which leads me to an interesting notion I appear to have learned about writing: it is possible to keep telling the same story over and over for an entire career without being laughed out of the room. I haven't finished thinking about this, but I'll blog about it when I do.

Yesterday I started a story based on a mother-son idea I've had for a while. The first 1,000 words came really slowly and unpleasantly, and I have the feeling it's going to be a good exercise in rewriting. As of yet I have no idea what its audience is, whether it'll turn out literary with genre elements or just unsaleable.

Lately, with no concrete story ideas, I've been thirsting to write about ghosts. I don't think it's just due to the Ghosts by Gaslight anthology I'm still inching through; the more I think about it, the more I realize that I like ghost stories above nearly all genres. Yet they're so unusual these days, and even more rarely are they genuinely spooky and well-told. (Gregory Maguire's Lost is a good one, FYI.) Also, like going around and around the same jogging track, I keep mentally returning to Florence + the Machine's Ceremonials, an album that is just packed with ghosts and ghost stories, whispered and half-understood. Since first listening to it, I've wished I could write a novel that somehow accompanies the album, the way House of Leaves and Poe's Haunted go together. I'm not Flo's sister, though, and I really haven't the foggiest idea what she had in mind when writing the songs on that album, so it's a pretty impossible notion. The songs are just so evocative, of dark hallways and fluttering dresses and the wind through chimes and things half-seen in mirrors. I want to evoke in words and story what's evoked in music there.

On Monday I wrote the initial draft of an essay about breasts. I don't know if it's any good, or if it'll evolve into being any good. I also went back to a short piece I wrote in the middle of March (which was, happily, better than I remembered) and gussied it up for publication. Several hundred words of miraculously speedy feedback later, my gussying was shown to be for naught, and I'm not sure whether to plow into more work on the piece again or let it sit for a little while longer to see what happens. I do think there's something there, but it was starting to read like gibberish after the third revision.

Similarly, in my day job, I seem to have lost the ability to determine when commas are used correctly in long sentences and when they aren't. I think it's because I edited a long piece written in very muddled English last week, the kind where by the end you sort of forget what syntax is supposed to be because you've seen so much of it that stinks. Since then I've been editing kind of stoned, not really sure what's firmly correct and what's just up to the Comma Gods to decide in the hereafter, man. Ultimately we're all just commas in the long, architecturally unsound sentence that is Life. You know? Like, little splicey commas, all of us. Wow, I'm hungry.

So I guess I better chop some cauliflower.  :(