A Peek Back Through the Salt Water

I just got home from a session in a sensory deprivation tank. For those of you who've never seen that one episode of The Simpsons, it's a tank filled with salt water in which you lie there and float in total darkness and silence until someone comes and gets you out.

I got home and I immediately wanted to come here and write a post. And it's not just because I seem to have taken August off from this blog, totally without intending to, and I miss writing here. It's also because, although this sensory deprivation session did not do the things I expected it to (give me cool hallucinations, allow me to drift into a semiconscious state, open up my chakras, make my brain shut up for 60 short minutes), something it did do was help me to look back. I've spent most of this summer looking forward, particularly as it's been closing up in spectacular fashion, like a fireworks show after a mediocre baseball game. I've needed to focus energy on planning and looking forward and have not spent a lot of time examining what's passed through my mind and body of late.

As soon as I started looking back, I felt the need to record the ride I've been on in the last three months. So here we go.

June:

--The Little Mermaid live at the Hollywood Bowl. Jodi Benson singing "A Part of Your World". Rebel Wilson being amazing. Susan Egan live. Etc.

--Friend home from a year of graduate school in England.

--First session for Tom Servo tattoo. Three hours.

--The Amazing Kathleen in town and on my couch. Meals at Ink and Yamashiro and In-n-Out. Visits to LACMA and the Museum of Jurassic Technology. It was so fucking hot that weekend that we couldn't hike or go to the Huntington, but I made her promise to come back so we could do outside things.

--Aimee Bender and Brian Evenson reading at Book Soup in downtown.

--Dental appointments: 2

July:

--First writing workshop led by me.

--Lidia Yuknavitch and Cynthia Bond reading at Chevalier's in Hollywood.

--Co-worker's sort-of baby shower, which I sort-of helped plan.

--The Killing Joke in the theater.

--Second Tom Servo session. I think another 2.5 hours.

--Weird Al live at the Hollywood Bowl. Matt's birthday.

--Dental appointments: 4

August:

--Sufjan Stevens live at the Hollywood Bowl.

--Star Wars Marathon at the Ace Hotel.

--Laid-back live music party in Santa Clarita.

--Sign lease for new apartment.

--Buy new car.

--Try sensory deprivation tank.

--Start second year of graduate school.

--Dental appointments: 4

Also this summer:

--Got multiple responses on the secret project, leading to all the feels

--Got news about a writing fellowship I didn't get, but I did get put on the alternate list for, which I choose to see as good news (more on this in another post, possibly)

--Got a book review published, first time ever

--Got an acceptance for a fall issue of a litmag, more news on that soon, I hope

--Got two? three? rejections, still patiently waiting for responses on a few others that matter a lot to me and the wait's driving me crazy on the days I allow myself to remember it

--Got raise, plethora of new responsibilities at work

--Hired three new people at work (one of them not my responsibility at all, the other two hired personally)

--Coped with Matt working 80+ hours/week for most of the summer; have not yet been buried alive under books and undone dishes

--Read 23 books, give or take a few

--Two doctor's appointments

--And a partridge in a pear tree

SHARE IF YOU GET IT!!!!!!

None of this is intended to show off, because Lord knows I don't understand how I went to the Hollywood Bowl three times this summer if I did not somehow trade lives with someone richer. Some of the perks (car, deposit for bigger apartment, new teeth) derive from Matt's insane work schedule, and what we materially gain from it, but honestly I'd rather have my husband around than have him make more money.

Also, I know people who would look at this list and go yaaaaawn, because they are busy like this all the time, seeing concerts and traveling and Doing Things on the regular. That is not me. The list above represents 200% more concerts than I generally go to in a season, and a great deal more time in the dentist's chair than I like to spend in a given decade.

In looking back, I see a worthwhile, busy, challenging, fascinating, transitional summer. And I see I ought to be proud that my health has not declined while doing so much. Other things have slid (mostly housekeeping), but I am still getting almost enough sleep and I haven't been sick, mentally or physically.

I have a post on brew, but not on tap yet, and I hope I get to it before the end of next week. I'm going off-grid for Labor Day, on the same writing/yoga retreat I did last year. It's going to be pretty splendid if my teeth don't get messed up again. I just hope nothing else happens between now and then. Enough has happened to me recently, I think. Enough.

A Year of Procrastination, Two Days of Work

On Friday and Saturday of last week, I sat down at last, at long-ass last, to revise Highbinder. I have had this endeavor on my to-do list since June of 2013, since I got some catalytic comments from a reader-friend. I can't believe it took me a fucking year. And I'm done with the first pass, because, as predicted in my New Year's resolution, it was really not that much work. It was burdensome psychological work to get myself to sit down, was all.

I did line edits (cut about 200 words that way, from just under 96,000), but more importantly I changed around the climax, some stuff throughout that informs the climax, and some of the (fictional) engineering of the world. I also removed most of the F-words in it (I resisted him, but my reader was right about that), which made me sad. I like F-words. I'm pretty sure I didn't fuck it up, but I'm going to let it sit for two weeks and then go through the whole thing again.

This revising entailed a full read of the book for the first time in many months. (For those of you following along at home, I finished the draft in January of 2013.) I shouldn't be surprised about this, but it felt...well, it's very much a book I wrote over a year ago, before I took the Esalen workshop, the UCLA class, or any of the CSUN classes. The prose often seemed clumsy, even though in reading I could remember firsthand the effort I'd put into the placement of every word. It's also very much a genre novel; everything was way overexplained, the dialogue sometimes told the story, and the narration is so far inside the protagonist's head that I should've been able to hear her heartbeat.

Ultimately, all of this is okay with me. I think the book works well enough as it is, for what it is, that I don't feel the need to start over from the top and rewrite it. (If it gets roundly rejected, maybe I will, but so far the only rejection has been because "I just didn't fall in love with the characters".) I worry a little bit about writing the sequel, because either the style will be quite different or I'll have to rewire my brain in order to put it together. The latter sounds exhausting.

It was an uneasy couple of days, but it was also such fun to dive back into that world. I enjoyed building it, and I can't wait to share it.

I don't know if it was the revising or something else, but a couple story ideas have dropped onto the pile, my first in several months. I think that means I need to get to my notebook this week. One of them came from work and the other from one of the weirdest damn dreams I've ever had, which linked sex with trains. Don't ask me. I mean...trains?

And not all delightful and sanitary like this 

Various Benedictions

Finally, finally, finally, I wrote something over the weekend. On Saturday night, when I was all by myself. It's not the main idea I've been suckling for far too long, but an idea that occurred to me only a few weeks ago that was much easier to get at. It felt exhilarating going on the page, and I hope it'll feel that way when I pick it up again to revise after my mandatory two-week waiting period.

I've spoken before about how much of a relief it is to write when it's been a while since I've written. How my cup runneth over with anxiety that the machinery just won't start again, and how like a cool rain on a hot day it is when the words finally patter out in ink. Yes, it was the same way. And the resolutions were just the same, too; this time I'll keep up with writing at least some fiction at least once a week. Even if it's just an exercise. I will, I will. And, increasingly, I know this is a lie before the thought has even finished its circuit. (It must be like what alcoholics mutter to themselves in the harsh morning. This time I'll do it right. I won't fuck it up. I'll keep to the program. Oh, Christ, what'll I do?)

Aside from this writing goodness and...mixed emotional reaction, I got some very, very, very good news on Sunday: one of my shortest and most recently written stories has been accepted. At a literary magazine that is established enough to have a Wikipedia page and a couple thousand followers on Facebook. This may seem to be rather an empty honor to you, but to me it is a benediction from heaven.

Ah, how well you capture me, Mr. Lichtenstein

I'll keep you posted as to which magazine and what story when it appears. It is a pretty black tale (unsurprising, since I wrote it), but I had fun playing with the concept. It was the first story I've ever written into a final form and then rewritten from scratch, trying a whole different direction.

In social media news (shudder), I've opened my own Facebook page to followers. And consequently I'll try to write some public posts.

Have you read or seen the play or movie Proof? We just finished a unit on the play in my literature class, and I'm freakin' gobsmacked at it. Layers upon layers upon layers. The play has a precision that's just breathtaking as you circle closer to its heart. The movie is okay, but doesn't communicate this quality as well as reading the play does.

I recently read another book that I adored in exactly the opposite way: with my heart, my whole heart, instead of mostly my brain. It was Elizabeth Wein's Code Name Verity, a historical YA novel set in WWII - and two out of three of those criteria make the book really not my sort of thing at all. Still, I'll never look on its like again. What a treasure. I don't want to tell you about the time that my heart stopped and didn't really get going again for another two chapters, or the time I cried, or the other time I cried. It's all too spoilery. Just read it, one page at a time, and DON'T read the summary on the jacket.

Again an accurate depiction of my emotions

The tour de force of Code Name Verity was why the book I finished over the weekend was such a disappointment. Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, a finalist for the Booker and a big hoopdy-hoop book back in 2005, was an obvious allegory on the macro level and a pale copy of other IP I've encountered on the micro. It was written in a very simple and repetitive style, which was almost certainly part of the point re: the main characters, but the effect was dull and irritating. Everybody loved it, critically, and I'm at a total loss as to why. The YA book of the previous paragraph, which hasn't won anything like a Booker nom, was superior.

Do snooty lit critics just not read decent genre fiction? Ever? Because seemingly if you mix one mediocre speculative element into an otherwise very blah book by a big-name literary author, critics just seem to go insane. I can't think of other examples of this phenomenon right now, but I know I've read a couple. I want to grab these critics by their lapels and scream THIS ISN'T THAT GOOD, YOU DUMMIES. Read some damn Bradbury. Read some Valente. Read some Tobler. Read some LeGuin.

All Perfume

The workshop on Wednesday night was not what I expected. Everybody [who talked] was more engaged with my story than I thought they would be. An aspect of the story that had never occurred to me (and probably never would have), but that I consider a major problem, was brought to my attention, so YAY for that. Overall the experience was less scary and frustrating and a good deal weirder than I thought it would be, based on prior workshoppings in which I've participated.

After I finished the Greenland book and gave it to Matt to read, and we talked about it, it was truly, genuinely funky to hear my characters' names coming out of his mouth. I'd e-mailed about the book with other people, but there's no substitute for hearing names spoken aloud that you've made up and endowed with meaning yourself. The same freaky feeling happened here. (Especially since the names in this story are odd: Shawnboy, Cee.) I don't remember this happening when Matt talked to me about Highbinder, but I don't know if that's because I'm used to him being part of my internal writing world now, or because Berra's realer to me than anyone else I've created.

Not for the first time, I wish I had a workshop group. After hearing from these ladies and gents, I wanted to know what they'd make of some of the other stories of mine that need work. Alas, alack, Alaska.

--

Guess what I did yesterday?

I FINISHED ULYSSES. 

This is not me; it's a German fencer named Peter Joppich in 2010.
But it might as well be me.
Srsly. 

I listened to the very last "yes", the absolute final one, read by dear Marcella, and I put down my iPod and breathed an enormous sigh of relief. Done. And, unless for a class, probably NEVER AGAIN.

Don't get me wrong. There were parts of Ulysses that I loved. There were things about it that tickled my intellectual fancy, and aspects at which I marveled. I kept finding little corners where other high-literary books I've read have called back to it, which was interesting. But holy hell was it a slog. And the more obtuse sections were as exasperating as anything I've ever read, even Infinite Jest (which, in truth, I had an easier time with, although I don't know what that means).

I hugely enjoyed Molly's soliloquy, and it reminded me that before about episode 12 (the damned Citizen), there were parts where the book clipped right along for me. It lost me pretty much entirely during episode 15, the longest, which was written in the format of a play. But all throughout, the characters of Bloom and Stephen and Molly were as real as real humans, as risible and endearing, which is an accomplishment indeed.

I'd love to sit down over coffee (or shots) with somebody about this book, because I feel quite clueless about it and my reactions to and interpretations of it. It'd be nice to pick the brains of others. I read over the SparkNotes for it, and although I think a lot of fans of Ulysses would say this is the worst way to enjoy it, I found them incredibly helpful.

And now I can read other stuff! The pile of books I want to read is tall and teetery indeed. I hardly know where to start.

Only Good News Can Cool My Desire

Here's a little Boss for you. Cracked recently taught me that this song was banned by the BBC and Clear Channel due to the conflict in Iraq and after 9/11, respectively. Neither I nor Cracked understands what this personal, crazy sexy song has to do with world conflict.

I post it here because, you see, I'm on fire. I got an acceptance on Friday, for an anthology related to women and body image. Although I'm really excited, because this project is such a wonderful, necessary idea, I don't want to yell and scream too much about it. I've known anthologies not to pan out; my work was accepted on spec, on a paragraph rather than the full piece; and I'm to be paired with an artist (in theory), which I freely admit might make it all go wrong (fault mine). If it does pan out, I will be thrilled and honored to be a part of the project.

But that's not the only reason for the burnination. I finished the first draft of KUFC. Finished it. Done. Finito.

I wrote the last chapter on Friday, and then on Saturday I rewrote the prologue completely. I originally wrote that prologue last summer, and I made it all fancy and beautiful, with embroidered prose. But the rest of the book didn't get written like that, and some other aspects of the book changed along the way from what I'd written in the prologue, and two test readers didn't like it anyway, so I decided to redo it altogether once the whole draft was done. On a nice walk on Saturday, Matt compared the function of my prologue to a tutorial mission in a video game, which is an ideal analog. And that means I might have to rewrite it again and again, a bunch of different ways, to communicate everything I need to communicate so you're not jumping into the game without a clue about the mechanics.

But the point is, I'm done with the draft. I spent nearly all my waking hours on Sunday, from 10 AM to 9 PM, polishing it. I still have much more to do (as they say, writing is rewriting, much as I wish it weren't so), but there. It hovers at 92,500 words. I am dying for someone else to read it, because I am sofa king excited about Berra Thorntree and her death-defying adventures that I want to introduce her to other people, too. Of course it's not ready to go out yet, because Matt needs to tell me about the things I totally forgot to notice and it needs to sit for a while so my self-indulgence can be recognizable. But SOON. When I was done with the first read on Sunday night, though, I posted a remark to that effect on Facebook, and a bunch of people jumped in to like it and tell me they wanted to read it, which made me all warm and fuzzy inside.

Matt claims to be excited to be the first other person to meet Berra, but I've been telling him repeatedly how much I look forward to him reading the thing for many weeks, so if I were him, I'd pretty much be playing along by now.

Anyway! Acceptance! Completion of fourth-or-potentially-fifth novel! BIG YAY!

PHEW

I don't know how it is for other writers, but every time I take a long hiatus from doing fiction, I always have this little needling worry that when I decide to write again, the machine will be broken, and somehow words won't come out when I put my fingers on the keys. It's a relief when the machine chunka-chunka-CATCHes back up again, coughcoughSPUTTER, and the words come.

Last night I wrote my prologue. Just shy of 2,000 words, and I wrote it good, in words I'm proud of.

The ache in me won’t subside. Couldn’t Racchi have been kind? To betray once, and then twice, and for it to have cost him nothing, encourages a cool voice to say that I’d been wrong about him all along. That there is no taming a thaiad, even a half-blood, and he was just a chimpanzee trussed up in evening clothes of my manufacture. He’d still screech and mess himself. Nothing but an animal.

But then, perhaps the same is true of me.

I decided semi-firmly to write this one in first person. I've stayed away from first person in the last few years, for the most part. Most of my juvenilia is in first person, and I tend to get lazy when I write in it. I make my character a lot more like me than like herself (or himself), and I do a lot of asides and emotional explaining, and the whole thing gets to be a lot more like a blog post than a work of fiction. So it'll be a disciplinary exercise to write this in first person and not do all of that.

One of the ways I got around this problem in the past was by writing shifting first-person for my sci-fi novella. I had a genuine purpose to the three characters I chose to rotate - they all had very different things to contribute to the story, and they shared a particular fate that took place at the end - but when I read over it the last time, I agreed with one of my beta readers that shifting between the characters, all "I"s, was a little confusing. I think I managed to give the characters distinct voices, but when they were working on the same thing, sometimes you didn't notice the name change in the chapter break.

In any case, I think I'm going with first person for this one. I might change my mind a few chapters in, if I can't distinguish Berra's voice from my own, or if it doesn't feel right. This decision was also drawn from the urban fantasy I read - two of the series books I read were in first person.

Speaking of reading, I am finally almost done with a steampunk anthology I started about a month ago. It's a 500-page anthology, in my defense, but honestly, after this experience, I don't know if anthology reading is for me. I find it emotionally exhausting to read all these different authors and all these different stories all mashed up against each other. The same is true in miniature in books of short stories by the same author. I get immersed in the world and the characters, and then the author yanks me out of it and we go on to the next thing. Like living a hundred lives in a single day.

Finally now I have read good steampunk, thanks to this anthology. I enjoyed some of these stories immensely, and some of them I found really blah. All of the writers seem to have enthusiasm for the trappings of steampunk, but not all of them make those trappings integral parts of the stories. Some of them are just telling a story with clockwork and airships duct-taped on top. (Dear God, please let that not be true of what I'm writing now. I don't want to overdo it, and I don't think pure steampunk is really me, but there will be clockwork and there will be Victorian fashion. Later there may be Zeppelins.) I wish I hadn't felt compelled to read every story in the book for the sake of Research, because I might have enjoyed some of the stories a lot more and felt free to skip others that weren't working for me. Oh, well. Nearly done now.

In other news, this week I saw Don Giovanni in a summer encore movie-theater presentation. (No need to read the next few paragraphs if you have no interest in opera.) I feel like an uncultured jerk, but I didn't love it as much as I hoped I would. There are a lot of parts to why:

• The staging was not terribly interesting. Straight-up late-1700s costumes, a sort of multiple-balcony setup that they really took zero advantage of, and taking the words of the opera literally. (I started imagining a staging in the 1970s with Giovanni as an actual pimp, and the last scene with all the food referring to girls, instead. I kind of love this idea, and any opera-stagers reading this are free to steal it.)
• Some of the cast actually seemed incompetent to the task of the opera. There were some not-quite-hit notes and some inability to keep up with the tempo of the syllables. I know how this sounds, because they know opera better than I'll ever know opera, but I don't think I was imagining it.
• One of the sopranos (Donna Elvira) seemed to have a range wrong for the part; she was loud and soft at weird times.
• All the above bullets despite the fact that this was the Metropolitan Opera of New York. WTF?
• Mostly male voices. Male voices do a lot less for me than sopranos, in general. (Tenors fail to move me at all 90% of the time. Crazy, right?) This show was mostly baritones, and Giovanni himself had a lovely rich velvety voice, but I just didn't feel very much.
• The last scene. Although it included the biggest laugh of the production thanks to Don Ottavio (played by a very homely fellow with few acting skills, unfortunately)'s sole good acting instinct, I found it totally tacked-on and lame. The supper scene was arresting, astonishing, I felt absolutely stripped when Giovanni got dragged down to Hell, and just when I thought I'd leave in a post-opera emotional fog, the whole cast tramped in and distracted me out of it. Learning that this scene was mostly omitted until the 20th century made an awful lot of sense.

Like I said, uncultured jerk, right? Flaubert said that Don Giovanni, Hamlet, and the sea are the three finest things wrought by God. I'll agree with him on the last two - I reffed Hamlet in my writing last night, because I wrapped it up in the last two things I wrote, and why break tradition and write something new? - but Giovanni just didn't captivate me. It could have been due to the not-quite-live performance; I know that the orchestra sounded a lot flatter than it should have in the movie theater, because I didn't have the same shock-to-goosebumps that I always have at the opening notes of the overture. But I think ultimately it's just not really the opera for me.

There are three more summer encores in July, and I haven't decided whether I'll go to them or not. They're showing Lucia, which I don't plan to attend because I had such an unforgettable experience with that opera and don't want to blot it out even partially. The other two are operas I'm not familiar with, Les Contes d’Hoffmann and Der Rosenkavalier. I mean, $13 for an opera is the best deal ever. So I'll probably go.

THERE, done. Now to work...and thence to writing, this evening. I'm actually excited to get to work again, instead of feeling dread and inadequacy like I have for so many weeks. Oh, but I have a question for you. Answer the poll, pretty please?

Phew

For the last couple of weeks, I've been waiting to start an at-home job, one which I hoped would solve several of our problems at once. But my start date was delayed, and then delayed again, and then delayed a third and fourth time. So I started to worry, like crazy, that in fact it wasn't going to work out, that I would have to return to the outside world and legal work. But I got some solid data about it yesterday: yes, I was actually hired; yes, the work does exist (even if it doesn't really exist this week). There is a big IT transition going on, which is the reason for all the delays, and that means that there might not be much to be paid for in the first couple of weeks. But it seems real enough, the job and my ability to do it. I think - I hope - that it's going to work out all right. There are things about it that aren't as...solution-oriented as I thought they would be, but I'm going to hope for the best. This is the third time this year that things have turned around at my blackest point of despair, and each time was accompanied by a spate of new ideas and greater hope for the future.

In other phew-related news, I did a complete read-through and first skinning of the novel. (It took me about seven hours, all told, which is not encouraging moving forward.) Oh, my dear Lord, what work I have to do. I have to rewrite and rework the whole opening, two or three chapters, and I suspect I'm going to end up adding another quarter of its length to the danged thing in new scenes and greater depth. But inconsistencies were helpfully apparent on this read, and I wrote them all down in the margins with my red pen, making notes on the backs of pages. Now it's on to write a detailed timeline and adjustment of ages, events, and spacing as needed. I also have to come up with a few more names and vocabulary, and start writing a sensible Luquenora glossary. I had suspected that I'd need to put an actual glossary in the back of the book, and yeah, on this read I determined that I do. Feels kind of like a failure, that I didn't make the language clear enough. Oh, well.

Yesterday I finished up editing a story I'd written and submitted it to a publication that's probably way over its head. (I made up my mind to reach for better publications in the future, to just grip writerly arrogance by the neck and continually presume I'm better than I am, so that eventually I'll become better. ...I think I'll write a whole post on this conflict another time.) The story was inspired by something in yoga class, as I mentioned a while back, but what's interesting to me is that the story in its finished form has no reference at all to its inspiration.

I was lying in savasana and the teacher came to give me a little thai-massage head-rub, and I used my neck muscles to "help him" lift my head. This is not helpful to the masseuse, as he needs you to be untense to give you a decent massage, and he whispered "Relax."

This gave me the idea for a story about a woman in this exact position whose reception of "Relax" was to remember a date-rapist whispering this to her as he did the deed. (Am I the cheeriest writer you know, or what?) After I thought through the story a few times, it became a man with this memory, and then I added some other elements and had a pretty good setup and conflict, I thought. I still had the yoga class in there as a framing device for the first few drafts, but when I came back to the story a few days later, it didn't fit. At all. Just cluttered up the raw experience of this poor character. I wanted to add more about him and his situation, but I wasn't writing a novel, just a little story, so all the fat got excised.

It's still really interesting to me that all elements relating to the inspiration for the story got tossed. I'm pleased with my results, but where it came from would be really convoluted, were I asked to explain.

I've been listening to Joanna Newsom almost exclusively for the last 24 hours, while I read and edited and worried over my new job. She has this strange ability to make you forget that there are other kinds of music than her own. Her music is so indubitably odd that you wouldn't think she'd have this quality. But it all seems so normal after a few spins, the harp, the voice, the symphonic construction, the appallingly poetic lyrics. What would you even need an electric guitar for?