Missing Scenes

Over the weekend, I wrote a scene between two characters, a revelation scene, that I intended to be the centerpiece of the second-to-last chapter of the secret project. As I'm nearing the end, I feel the need to tell all the secrets I've been keeping for ten chapters, hence these revelations.

I was dissatisfied with what I'd written. In an intense but vague way. It was like indigestion - an unease in the gut, something not sitting right as it works its way through your plumbing.

I compared the scene with an earlier dialogue scene with which I'm far more satisfied. The differences were myriad: ages of the characters, positions of power held by each, what was at stake for each, relation between them, content of the discussion, I could go on and on. The scenes had very little in common. Mostly, though, one was good and one was not. I kept poking at them with sticks until I figured out why.

These are notes Virginia Woolf wrote and drew for her novel To the Lighthouse.

I got this from the fascinating website Woolf Online, which has a huge cache of archival materials about To the Lighthouse - original notebooks that have been both scanned and transcribed, page proofs corrected by Woolf, letters written to and from her about the novel, etc. Check it out.
If you can't read the above, it says "All character - not a view of the world. Two blocks joined by a corridor."

The novel is divided into three sections. The first and third take place over short periods of time, a day or so, but explore in enormous depth what is going on inside and between the characters. Each of these days is of no special consequence to any of the characters - not the day everything changed for them, not the day they learned what it is to be a woman, etc. Just a fairly regular day. The middle section, "Time Passes," takes place over a much longer period of time, 10 or 15 years, I think, but it's only 17 pages long in my edition, and that's because Woolf doesn't go very deep on anything during that time. She instead summarizes with remarkable brevity the major events that occur over that span: births, deaths, marriages, World War I. In between she describes the gradual decay of a summer house et al.

She's up to a lot of different things in "Time Passes," a lot, but I think I figured out one of the reasons she structured the book this way. As readers, we learn a lot more about the characters, and are ironically a great deal less bored, by the little stuff, the days of no consequence that pass in a family life, than we are by the big turning-point moments that matter so much to a character's makeup.

Reading scenes of large, important emotional events is not terribly interesting at this point in literary history. Most people react to a revelation with surprise. They react to loss with grief. They react to danger with fear, and potentially with bravery or cowardice. These reactions do not take imagination to write, nor do the scenes themselves. Twenty-first century audiences have seen and read these scenes everywhere, in old books and movies and in bad TV. Contemporary literature does not need me to write a scene where a woman tells a girl that she has to sacrifice herself to save her best friend; in itself, this situation may not be cliched, but the things that the woman and the girl say to each other during this scene absolutely are. I was bored writing it, which means people will be very bored reading it.

This scene is a key point of drama for certain of the characters in my book, so it has to exist. But the question I began to ask myself as I was thinking about To the Lighthouse, the $64,000 question that may lead to much, much, much better writing: does it have to exist in the book?

Infinite Jest had missing scenes like this, moments the characters kept thinking about or referring to but which were not included in full scene form in the novel. Some of them I kept waiting to read, because I presumed all things of import would be included in an 1,100-page novel, but they never appeared. And I think it's because those scenes were fairly easy for the reader to imagine for herself and would have been uninteresting for Wallace to write.

Woolf, too, decided to dispense with the big stuff in mere phrases and parentheses, and stuck with the little stuff for the main body of the novel. She knew what we already knew about the world, and she knew what she could show us afresh.

What is included and what is not included - but not left out. Discretion that jazz musicians must understand before they can really play. Choices that true craftsmen of short stories comprehend. Judgment that I suspect can be the codex for making a novel that's a work of art, rather than a novel that's merely good to read.

Events in fiction don't have to happen more than once to be what a professor of mine terms "repeated events", which "occur once, but are narrated multiple times throughout the story." Hamlet refers to his father's murder over and over and over and OVER again. Stephen Dedalus's mother's death haunts several chapters of Ulysses (usually with the very same sentences). It's the same little scratch on the roof of your mouth that your tongue keeps returning to, unbidden, but it has a different sensation on day one than it has on day four. The same death, but different reactions, depending on Stephen's surrounding company and the strength of Hamlet's metaphorical sword arm.

So even though this revelatory conversation has to occur, has to keep being considered by the characters, I don't necessarily have to write the conversation into the book. The characters know it exists, and readers of the characters therefore cannot miss its existence. What exact words passed between the characters in that room on that day is not of much importance, because the reader can imagine them and possibly a great deal more than I could put in her head directly.

How useful this is! What I can put in place of these scenes are scenes that have not been read and seen hundreds of times by a postmillennial audience. Matt said this sounded like an interesting challenge, alluding to a crucial moment well enough for the reader to imagine it rather than just writing it, and I agree. But, for once, such a challenge fills me with happy anticipation instead of terror. Even though it will be hard, I'm not stuck writing boring scenes I don't want to write. And it's all hard, anyway. No writer gets a pass on hard.

The Three Rs and Other Stories

I'm really proud of the two posts I wrote after my blog break in February - the one about an old friend, and the one about how I misinterpreted Lynda Barry. The first one especially got a lot of personal reactions from readers, which tells me that I wrote something well. I hoped I would have equally sharp and thoughtful things to say after this long break between May and now, but I'm not sure it's going that way. Instead, a lot of small stuff is in tow. Nothing big and thematic and relatable like before. Forgive me.

1) Reading. The past month has brought a slew of reading that I didn't really want to do and a good deal that I did. I slogged through a 1794 novel written by Mary Shelley's dad, which was just deadly boring, and worse, I kept sensing that it wasn't doing me any good. Even when I can't write, reading always feels a little bit like creative effort, because my mind is chugging away at the underside of the book: why did the author do this, is that really working, does the other seem bad to me because it's lazy or because of my taste, etc. Caleb Williams was just dull, just obsolete, and the only thing it taught me in hundreds of pages is that a very good plot can do little to jazz up mediocre writing. I did not need to learn that again.

I'm taking the second volume of Remembrance of Things Past with me on vacation next week. For reasons already explored, I decided earlier this summer to give up on my three-years-of-Proust plan (one volume each summer), which made me very sad. But I've improved such that I think I'll be able to do it after all. Now I just have to remember everything from last summer's volume.

Lovely notion, though I felt very, very alone during Caleb Williams 

2) Writing. I've been working with fair diligence on the secret project in the last couple of weeks. Not every day, but most days; not a lot of words per day, but more than none. I feel good about it, or at least about prospects for revising it. I'm not ready to share what it's about yet, because I'm still not sure if it's actually a good idea. That's an odd place to be, to have some certainty about the quality of the work I'm doing and significant uncertainty about the foundational idea of that work. Usually it's the other way around, and I'm sure the idea is good but dubious about whether I'm writing it well. Right now, I know that I'm writing well and/or I can see what I need to fix. I do not know where this critical capacity came from. (Maybe from all that reading.)

I also dreamed a really fun, interesting idea last week that, if I can write it, will wind up being a sort of low-pressure rehearsal for the wikibook. Since it was that project which triggered a giant creative crisis this year (more about that another time, perhaps), I'm goddamn ecstatic about the idea of having a legitimate practice run in the works. The wikibook is the book I need to write, but I'm still scared enough of it that I need all the help I can get. The dream idea will probably end up being another unpublishable, too-long, genre-ish-but-not-really piece of work like so many before it, but if it helps get the wikibook out, I'll accept virtually any terms.

3) 'Rithmatic. I haven't done any math lately.

There are other things, but I want to save them for other posts. Surely they'll be organized better elsewhere. Or will they? Maybe it's all just a jumble right now and I should tell you about the ah-may-zing opportunity I'm getting over Labor Day, and the podcast that made me actually literally shake my fist at the sky, and the From Me to You post I thought up this morning that's about how to revise everything from a sentence to a novel, and this book I read that was so good I ordered ten copies from the publisher to send to friends, and...no, this is just me blabbing. Never mind. I'll winnow it out and give you something logical in August.

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.

Control Ain't Just a Janet Jackson Song

The Girl Scout story got workshopped yesterday. It was a confusing, difficult workshop. There was no consensus; everyone had something different to say about what they wanted it to do and be. Usually when that happens, it means the story needs pitching, not rewriting, but I'm certain that is not the case here. So I don't really know where to go with it, aside from just trusting in what I wrote, which is an extremely arrogant thing to do. I think I'll submit it a few places and then look at it again in six months or thereabouts.

The most worrisome comment was from the professor, who told me that I needed to "let go of intent" to give my work "a more organic feel". This is more or less the same thing that my workshop professor from last semester told me. She gave me feedback that has haunted me insanely since I got it: that my control over the writing was too tight, that the story was constructed too meticulously and that I needed to let go and write with more freedom. I have no idea what this means or how to improve it (particularly with the story I workshopped that led to this feedback, which required strong control, dammit), but hearing an echo of it in another professor, who has no idea what the prior one said, makes me want to wail and rend my garments.

Organic?...

(She also said the Girl Scout story was "nearly flawless" in its surface aspects. Which is a nice adjective, one I'm happy to take away with me.)

Aside from that, something else happened since last we spoke. Over the weekend, I had a fit that is seemingly becoming a part of my ritual for beginning a big project. I drew you a highly professional diagram for this process.

So this weekend I kicked and screamed and yelled and whined about the wikibook, because no fooling, you guys, I am genuinely scared out of my skull about writing this thing. But I can't keep pretending that I can put it off until next year, or next century. I have to begin. So I had the tantrum, and now I can buckle down.

I have no idea how this project is going to go. Not a clue. Generally it takes me something like a quarter of a year to write a novel (which, please, writers who are reading: don't use that as an example for your own work or a way to shame me about the shoddiness of my effort), but the nature of this book means I could be working on it for much longer. Years, maybe. I hope I won't be, but I'm not eliminating it as a possibility.

Matt advised me to set a deadline for review on it. That is, he said I should work for a certain number of months and then make a mandatory stop to reevaluate the project, see if I should keep going or stop or set other deadlines or what. I thought this was fucking amazing advice, and I plan to implement it.

I don't know how to organize my work on it around my other responsibilities, which have changed dramatically since the last time I worked on a novel. But I hope to get going before the end of October. Now that I've punched pillows and moaned sufficiently, work can really start.

It's work that needs tight control, so I guess my professor's feedback is well-timed. Either that or I'm not ready to write this book at all and it's going to be a big disaster. I guess, in the coming months, we'll see.

Practice Makes...Better

An interesting thing happened last week. I had sent two separate stories to two separate reader-friends about a week apart, and both of them e-mailed me back within a few hours of each other. This was not even the interesting part; the interesting part was that both sets of feedback shared the compliment that I do dialogue well. These are the passages that got those compliments, so you can determine for yourself if these readers are right:

Charlotte scoffed and dropped the lighter on the overflowing coffee table. "If your nose is so keen, what the fuck are you still doing here? You haven’t gotten enough of me?"
"I just love buying you ice cream."
She sat up. "You bring me some?"
"I forgot."
She sat back. "Figures."
Jamie uncapped her pen. "Why don’t you tell me about Estella?"


"Do you have to talk about Raymond so much?"
"All I said was that he used to love this curry recipe too."
"It's like he's always on the side of your life. Like he never really moved out of your head."
"Gene. We were married for twelve years."
"Thanks for reminding me."

Of course I was grateful for the compliments, but I was as surprised as I've ever been about reader feedback. I've never thought dialogue was one of my strong points. I've always considered it a weak point, in truth, and every time I write it, I sweat over each word and revise it with an even more merciless eye than I give the rest of the prose.

The instructor for my UCLA class said at one point that he loved writing dialogue, that it was how he felt himself getting into the story while writing. I marveled at this. I don't hate doing it, but I find it so fraught. So troublesome. I'm constantly afraid I'm doing it wrong: that all the characters within a single story have the same patterns of speech, or that all the characters within all my stories have the same patterns of speech, or it's written unnaturally, or it's written too naturally, or there are too many attributions, or not enough, or something. I never, ever feel like I have the rhythm of dialogue down correctly, whereas I feel reasonably confident about the rhythm of my non-dialogue sentences.

I think this is partly because I like reading dialogue a lot less than I like reading paragraphs. But it's also because I've read so many different kinds of dialogue and yet heard so many teachers/writers say that dialogue has to be this one specific way or it doesn't work. That's contradictory, you know. In genre stories, dialogue can be expository, where in literary stories, its strict purpose is to reveal character. It can't be overly realistic to life or it won't sound right, but George Saunders and DFW write dialogue that's so weird and true and funny that I can practically hear it spoken aloud in the room when I'm reading it. It can't be in big long paragraphs, because the reader won't believe characters could talk that way, but how else can you get a character to ramble, if you need that kind of rambling or if s/he's just a rambler?

If you listen to writing teachers, dialogue seems like it's quite narrow, like it must be a specific way. And yet it can vary so staggeringly among writers. I mean, compare Jane Bowles's dialogue to Jane Austen's. Dorothy Parker's to William Faulkner's. [Read that link, it's short and funny.] Dumbledore's long wrap-up speeches in the HP books; Dan Brown's hilarious expository voicemail messages. A couple of years ago I read The Accidental Tourist, which has pages of dialogue that mostly shoots back and forth unattributed. While I admired Anne Tyler for writing such sharp, highly characteristic dialogue, I was certain I'd never write that way - both because I wouldn't enjoy reading it and because I couldn't possibly write it that well.

Yet according to these two readers of mine, I'm doing something right with my dialogue. And here's the point [at long last]: if I'm doing something right, it's because I've forced myself to write dialogue for years, methodically, one word after another, revising its knickers off. I've pounded away at it and approached it like it's a weak point rather than with easy confidence. This is what interests me about this whole incident - that I've practiced at something having to do with writing and have gotten better at it in a way that can be measured. Even though I don't think I wrote dialogue well in years past and don't think I do it particularly well now, I've never had compliments on it before. That shows me that something is different, and I think the something is that I've had a lot of practice.

Which - I don't know if you've heard - supposedly "makes perfect." Uh huh.

None of this is related to the post above.
I Google Image-searched "practice makes perfect" in the hope of finding a snarky retort to the aphorism. This image, which is available on t-shirts, shot glasses, and other flotsam from Cafepress, kind of blew me away, because it contradicts its own corny-ass (and really quite defeatist!) message with such precision that I couldn't have done it more tidily if I'd intended to. (If you're not a copy editor by nature, look at the word "practice" a little more carefully...) The font choices and the person's other merchandise make me think that this was not an ironical choice,
but oh, it should have been. 

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.

Rejection by the Unknown Population

Rejection is funny. When I was first submitting stories some years ago, the fact that I had to wait for six months or longer to hear back from a magazine about my work seemed absurd and frustrating beyond any kind of acceptability. I still sort of think it is, but when I get a rejection like the one I got this morning, I start to wish that such magazines were just a little bit less efficient. I really thought the story was right for the market, and I also thought the story was nearly as good as it could be, and in less than a week, I was proved totally wrong.

I used to yearn for such quick response times, because then I could send the story out somewhere else and start the cycle of hope all over again. Now I wish my hope had hung out on the line for a few months, had been given the time to mellow and relax its grip on me. More time to discover other markets that might like the story, so I didn't hang it all on this one mag.

Perhaps this is crazy. Perhaps I'll feel differently the next time I spend 256 days waiting to hear the fate of a story. Perhaps I just want to complain no matter what editors do, unless it's an acceptance.

I wrote a couple thousand words the other day, and edited them last night. Not shabby.

I read Storm Front, the first Harry Dresden book, this weekend. Also not shabby. The thing I found most wonderful about it (aside from Butcher's subtlety in building backstory and world) was its emotional vulnerability. That's pretty damned rare for a male author, and it took my breath away at various points in the book. I wanted to clap Butcher on the back and say, thank you, this is what more men need to do in writing and in life. Way to forge a trail. Reading it did feel like watching Friends after watching Ingmar Bergman, though, since I started it only a day after finishing The Chronology of Water. Friends has its own merits, obviously, but after such Art it would seem farcical and made of tin and felt, like a puppet show.

Chronology is a book that has absolutely changed my life. In a week. I am waiting to write much about it until I read it again, which I hope to do next week. I want to read it every week. I want to write it on my skin, to chop it into dust and breathe it into my lungs. It feels like the only real book I've read since I was a little girl (aside from books that just broke my heart, like Feed); the word "book" seems inadequate to describe it.

The things that have moved and shaken due to this book are largely too personal for me to want to get into on this blog. My family has access to this blog. And I'm still processing. I just wrote about 600 words related to something that happened a couple of days ago, for instance, that was triggered by Chronology, and then deleted them. It seemed like too big a point to make in a blog post that opened up with me complaining about rejection, and liable to cause reader recoil.

At times like this I really miss my anonymous blog, where I allowed all things to flap out unfettered and waited for people to write in and say YES this is exactly what I always think about thank you or NO you are a crazy wrong person and no one likes you. Writing for an audience who knows me in real life, especially for an unknown population of acquaintances, is a heck of a lot harder. I keep unearthing more and more things I want to say here, but fail to say from fear of offense or dislike of IRL-me.

Sidebar: For what it's worth, I think this is a different if related issue to the anonymous-happy-face-blog problem that I read about a few months ago. Apparently a lot of writers don't give opinions or put a personal touch on their blogs, hoping to win the biggest possible audience by being friendly and generic. This is not how you capture readers, as Jenny Lawson will likely tell you. You be yourself and you draw people in who like the quirks of that self.

I am 90% sure that my actual parents don't read this blog, but I don't really know. And there are lots of other parentlike loving adults who are part of my audience. So I'm a bit reticent to give my opinion on things like S&M, which was tied up with the 600 words I deleted. Ha. Tied up. It's not that I think at a certain age you automatically become a parentbot with no other function and are unable to think and read about squicky issues without shutting down, but when you're on this side of it you wonder how squicky issues are taken by the parentbot, and whether the parentbot wishes you would please just be the PG and PC version of yourself for its own comfort. I wonder how people like Yuknavitch do this. I don't really care about opening up to the masses, what I think and what I feel and what I've experienced, but when I think about such exposure to people who know me mostly from family gatherings or from high school, I don't really know what to do. The brave thing is probably to open up and let chips fall, etc., but this is a blog with all of a dozen followers, not a professionally edited book published by a national press.

It's a tough spot. And thank you, dozen followers, I'm so glad you're here.

Yanno, I think I can actually tie this back up with where I started: rejection. That's a sort of kissing cousin to what I'm worried about. I know that people are less normal and more open-minded than you'd think, that the things they love are weirder and more unique than you'd think, and that actual rejection by loved ones is much harder to come by than I grew up thinking it was. But I'm always afraid that something's going to come out of my mouth that's going to make people think of me differently than they did, irrevocably, and that change is going to be bad.

I'm going to open this up to the floor. What do you think? If you keep a non-anonymous personal blog, do you worry about this? If you're lurking, come out, come out, and tell me what's on your mind.

Feedback FTW / Enlightened by Edna

I had another one of those Lost Days yesterday: I got home from class fully intending to work for a little while, and then knock out the last revision of the [non-]horror novel, and then go back to working, meeting my responsibilities for the day with some time to spare. But it didn't work out that way. I didn't do any paid work at all, in fact; I revised for most of the day, into the evening.

Although I have a far better handle on my work schedule now than I did in, say, February, I am still trying to figure out how to make it more intuitive, more like something that I just do without thinking about it, the way I just got up and went to work and then got up and went home when I had a day job. The situation is so loose that I don't feel like holding myself to a specific schedule is necessary - nor do I think it's really the way in which to get the best work out of myself.

In any case, after yesterday's edit, I am through with actively revising for the moment. The book is starting to all blur together and not be new anymore, so I'm going to take notes on the feedback I get from here on and wait a month or two to implement it. I have been getting a LOT more discussion and feedback from readers on this book than I did on the Greenland book, which is either a good sign (because I wrote a more interesting book) or a good sign (because I was clearer with my readers). It's lovely to hear from so many people, especially the unexpected or critical feedback. Keep it coming, folks.

This weekend I have to get down to business on the promo materials I'll take with me to Colorado - synopsis, elevator pitch. I thought I might draft a query letter, too, while I'm at it. Matt gave me a terrific opening for it, so I think it'll be a bit easier than other queries I've written. Since I need to update my website, too, I've got to put together a synopsis and blurb for the Greenland book, which I find a dreadful prospect. I always find that I have either one sentence or three pages to say about that book, because it's so weird and straddles a few different things.

I'm almost finished with a book of Edna O'Brien short stories. The first book of hers I read was The Light of Evening, which is on my Special Shelf. I was utterly bowled over, and very nearly decided to stop writing altogether after I read it. I was overwhelmed by how not as good as her I would always be - how very minuscule and worthless my talent was compared to hers. (The reason I changed my mind is an entirely other post.) Then I read In the Forest, and I was sort of...disappointed. It was a great book, beautiful and vague in sort of the same way, but not a totally Other experience the way Evening had been. I thought, okay, well, she had an off (ish) book. I'll try again another time. So I got this book of short stories, and now that I'm all but two finished with it, I'm feeling the same sort of way: but...but...this was supposed to be otherworldly! It was supposed to knock me flat! And this is just...highly accomplished. It's still fiction I could never write, it just doesn't seem like it came from the pen of God, as Evening did.

I don't know what's up with this, whether maybe it's me, but I partly wish I hadn't started on her oeuvre with Evening, hadn't gotten my expectations so worked up. I'm going to keep trying - I just requested the Country Girls trilogy from the library, the books that got Ireland's panties in a bunch when they were published in the 60s - but I'm going to lower my expectations a bit.

Also, read The Light of Evening. You will never be the same.

Although "Completism and Infinite Jest" Sounds Like a Decent Thesis

In the same day, I finished episode number 45 of Monty Python's Flying Circus, and page 981 (the last page before ~100 pages of footnotes, which I also read (except for the one about Pemulis's calculus equation, no, sorry, but no)) of Infinite Jest. Marathons, both, and now completed. And not entirely dissimilar, for what it's worth; interesting to consume in tandem. There's a little sadness in my heart for both completions. I'll never watch any Monty Python sketches for the first time again, which is a little sad. And I'm finished with a Big Literary Project - certainly the biggest and most difficult single book I've ever read - which, while frustrating, had moments of great transcendence that I'm sorry to let go of.

My mom asked me if it was good, if I enjoyed it, and I said that I couldn't really answer that. I told Matt that I enjoyed it immensely on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph basis, because the writing is so utterly unlike anything else in its virtuosity. So enjoyable to read Wallace doing that work - like watching Baryshnikov dance, I told Mom. But on the whole, it was a slog, and I won't pretend that it wasn't. I'm not smart enough as to have picked up everything that went on, and I think ultimately I am not smart enough not to be frustrated by the lack of conclusion in the book. I think Wallace had a real intention and purpose in beginning and ending thoroughly in medias res, without starting a story or ending it in a way that makes linear or traditional narrative sense. But I like to read, and I do not like to be a literary critic, and I wanted a conclusion.

See here for some reactions of readers upon reaching the end of Infinite Jest. I identify most strongly with "Ongoing"'s two sentences. I also listened to this half-hour interview with Wallace, done in 1996, about the book, and felt on the whole much more settled about having read it, less of a love-hate rage, after hearing his nice measured articulate voice and foul mouth. Despite the business about having actually structured the book mathematically, to which my reaction was "ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?" However, smart as he is (and popular as he apparently is), I found the interviewer intolerable to listen to, and I don't know how he got into radio.

Next on my list is Then We Came to the End, which was a seriously hot book a couple of years ago and which I'm just now getting around to. 50 pages in it's pretty good and lots of fun, and maybe I'm seeing phantoms, but I see some annoying Wallace influence in it - the sort of bunch-of-random-sentences-squashed-into-one-paragraph thing, which I am not really in love with as a style. I thought it would be a relief to read something NOT written by someone brilliant beyond the ordinary realm (sorry, Joshua Ferris, but I hope you know what I mean), and it is, but Edna O'Brien is next, and then Meghan Daum. I'm tired of dudes.

As for my own work, a couple of lovely people got back to me about the Greenland book, and their feedback was helpful. One reader had this very interesting approach to certain aspects of the story, one that I never, ever would have thought of, not if you'd given me a hundred years to sort through potential reader reactions. I wish I could be more specific. Take my word that I was flummoxed and amused.

Also, I think I'm finally ready to stop fucking around and revise the horror book. I bought a red pen especially, and more than one person has agreed to read it. This process is so frustrating, y'all: writing, then revising, then reader one (Matt), then more revising, then additional readers, then hounding them all for feedback, then MORE revising, and then putting together the materials to begin hounding agents/editors, which I'm not even ready to do yet. I find myself wondering (wistfully) how people even wrote good books before the present day, when it was all typewriters and garrets and letters by post.

I read a book last fall that was set in the early 19th century in Britain wherein the main character wrote and then sold an adventure novel. It was all so simple. She wrote it, longhand, exactly as she intended to write it, and when finished, read it through once without doing much of anything to it. Her local bookshop-owner read it, loved it, and sent it to a publisher-friend. With some mild edits, it was printed and published and she received a draft for a few hundred pounds in the mail. *snap* Like that. Now I'm all wrapped up with revisions and platforms and the rules for writing a winning synopsis, and ensuring that I get enough reader feedback to make sense out of my draft, and serious novelists taking four years to write a book, and blaaaaaaaah. Can't it be more simple than this without questioning oneself? Or is it actually better this way, with more committee action and extroversion?

I wanted to write a post relating the experience of reading all six books of the original Dune saga to reading Infinite Jest, but this post just didn't turn out that way. Maybe another time. For those of you who know what's involved: yes, I really did read them all, every page. And it taught me an excellent lesson about being a completist, namely that being a completist just is NOT worth the trouble for certain aspects of life. Which is part of why I may not ever read The Pale King.

The Kind of Marathon Where You Sit on Your Couch

For the last week, I've been marathoning episodes of Monty Python's Flying Circus, between two and five a day. This is how I enjoy watching television: on DVD sets, in great vast gulps of hours and hours of the show at a time, galloping through the entire series in a matter of days or weeks. After Matt bought me the seven seasons of The Mary Tyler Moore Show as a gift, I watched all 168 episodes in less than 30 days. I am uncomfortable with public knowledge of this habit (which, YET AGAIN, is why I'm sharing it with the entire damn internet), because I know it seems a little crazy, because I kind of don't want to do anything else but eat and sleep and finish out the next disc while I'm in marathon mode. It's not pretty to witness.

But in every case I've done so far (Star Trek: The Next Generation, MTM, The Sopranos (years ago, didn't get past the 3rd season, that box set has been on my Amazon Wish List for about five years), Firefly, Dead Like Me, others), it is so superior to experience a whole berth of a show this way, without coming up for air. It means that the show hangs together thematically as an entire body of work, and the evolution of the show is crystal-clear in a way you just don't get from gradual consumption. The different moods of the seasons of MTM were fascinating to see. For instance, Mary's responsibilities at her fictional job changed very suddenly in about season 5, and that altered all sorts of things about the structure of the show and how the other characters interacted with her. Whether that was done because of the departure of her two best friends, or because of feminist motivations, I don't know, but it was a big shift. And I think it was only so noticeable because I was watching, on average, two and a half hours of the show per day.

Monty Python is an interesting experience, because sketch shows are by nature uneven. There doesn't seem to be a progression toward better or more interesting or even just different work as the seasons (in England, of course, they're series) move forward. But they refer back to earlier work in a sort of unique way, and watching it all together means I generally have the prior work still hanging around in my neurons, and can realize exactly how funny they're being by referring to it.

I haven't come to any conclusions about the show on the whole by watching them all this way, except that I see now they've got a limited stable of the types of sketches they do. I.e., this is an interview-show sketch; this is an Eric Idle sex-or-language sketch; this is a domestic-hilarity-ensues sketch; this is a sketch so far into the realm of absurdity that it's just Pythonesque and doesn't have a more specific type. Hence, I can generally get my arms around the intentions of the sketch type, if I can identify it. This is more analysis than I've ever been able to accomplish with comedy; I'm not really skilled at it. So that's sort of edifying. Maybe I'll have more to say about the shape of it all when I'm finished. I'm halfway through now.

Speaking of edification, I am over page 400 in Infinite Jest. My ability to advance in it seems to come and go. I've been hovering between 390 and 420 for the last couple of weeks, instead of getting on with a few dozen pages a night as I was doing. But I will finish it, I will. If for no other reason than I really want to get on and read this.

Along with Monty Python, I've worked a great deal in the past week. There's been a lot of work for my copy-edit job, and last week marked the final week of the crazy glut of subbed yoga classes in which I've been drowning since before Christmas. This upcoming week is the first normal one, teaching-wise, in ages. Also, I've had some wonderful readers get back to me about my book, and they were so helpful. That was more work (even if it was great work to do), as I had to get back to them in detail in the hope that they'd further get back to me. I'm still waiting to hear from at least two more folks, but after that I think I'll be ready to edit. I feel pretty confident that I know what I need to do. I'm very concerned about further growth in the word count, but there's really nothing for it. I hope I can slide by on the "fantasy" label, as fantasy novels are generally longer.

And a wholly separate reader got back to me about a new story that I wasn't sure about, so I owed her analysis on her own story and on her analysis of mine. There was further work I did that I didn't even mention, and work I should have done this week and didn't get around to. Plus, I was quite ill on Tuesday. It was a full week. I kind of want a vacation. Monty Python is comforting, but it's really compressing my time. Damned marathoning.

Auditioning My [Un]talented Child

Waiting for people to tell you what they think of your work is a special kind of hell, I think, and I can't imagine it's a whole lot more fun for the people who are reading the work. The last time I sent work out to friends was...gosh, two, three years ago? Neither friend ever finished reading what I sent (to my knowledge), after being so enthusiastic about it. One friend read about a third of the material and talked to me in wonderful detail about it, so helpful, and then it dropped off his radar and I never heard about it again. The other friend never got back to me at all.

I'll grant you I was pissed off at the time, but since then I've let go of it. (Oh, how generous of me.) I put myself in their shoes, and imagined having this obligation that I thought was going to be a pleasure, and embarrassing myself by being excited about it and then not getting around to it for days stretching into weeks, and knowing that my friend really, really cared about this thing that I was starting to consider a stone around my neck. What a very yucky feeling. Or, worse, maybe I had read it, and didn't like it, and didn't know what to say; maybe I'd presumed it was going to be a lot better than it was (or at least a lot more polished), and didn't know how to explain that I'd been disappointed.

On my side of the fence there's this beautiful albatross, this beloved child of my typing fingers, and I need to send her out for auditions, so we can find out from an unbiased source whether she has a shot of making it to the big time. To do this, and wait at home for my pretty child to return with a bevy of information about how to improve her weak voice and her droopy tits and then to hear nothing nothing nothing, is torment. But the people in whose hands is the work, it's not their fault. They have a lot of auditions to get through. My albatross is no more important (much less, in fact) than all the other items in their lives. She's my kid, but she's their burden.

If you ever find yourself in this position (I'm substituting myself for any author, here), please know that I want to hear about it if my kid sucks. If you're an early reader, it's not awkward for you to tell me, "Wow, I really thought this would be good, since you spent good years of your youth on it, but it stinks like yesterday's diapers, and here's why." Not awkward. Exactly what me and my kid need to hear, so we can get voice lessons and a boob job and move forward, marching on to Broadway.

(Did that [long-term] metaphor work? I feel like it did, but I'm not sure. See, this is why we need readers.)

The point is, we're both in shitty positions, the author and the readers, and I'm taking this opportunity to acknowledge that I know it. That for me to sit here and bite my nails bloody is no harder than for a reader to look at the manuscript sitting in the corner and know that she has to get back to it eventually. I know that. And what we both need to do is just let it be, calm down and do what's needed (even if what's needed is to walk away and never look back).

Whilst waiting for my dear, dear readers to get with the program finish their extremely difficult task, I've gone back to work on a horror novel I started two winters ago, and it's very slow going swimming back into it again. I don't know if the 30-some thousand words I already have on it are any good. At all. I don't know how to add another 40-some thousand (or more), when the story's pretty simple and I don't have a great deal more plot. Of course, that was my problem during the second half of the Greenland book, too, and now I have too many thousand words. If Matt will once more brainstorm with me and give me exactly the right book to read, I'm sure I'll be fine. Until then I'll flounder on.

In other parts of my life, I continue to cruise along in uncertainty. Christmas approaches. The thing I chose for my homemade gifts this year is by necessity a last-minute thing, so I'm planning to get to work on it tomorrow. There's this little panic critter in my head hollering that I'm running out of time and have nothing prepared and there are so few days left! and I'm having to remember over and over that it's a last-minute thing, I can't prepare any more than I already have. CHILLAX.

That's kind of the leit-motif of this month, actually. When I remember to take that advice, everything's awesome.

The Broken Speedometer

Matt finished his reading of my Greenland book this week. He's the first person to have read the majority of what's in there, and even the experience of hearing him say my characters' names was weird. It's been a private experience to write the thing until now - which has really not been a positive thing - and to suddenly have someone else know what I wrote has been both wonderful and kind of unsettling. He helped me with some minor problems and suggested solutions to some major ones, although so far I've been too lazy to take them. (That's my task for today. Thus far I've accomplished a lot of reading on Longform.org and this blog post. Well done me.)

On Tuesday into Wednesday I did another read-through and fixed small issues, eliminated a lot of dialogue tags that weren't necessary, and looked for the right place to incorporate the one new scene Matt suggested. He also advised me to rewrite the ending and gave me a context for a new one that is probably better than the one I have, but I'm very reluctant to do that because of how much fun I had writing the current one. When those changes are completed, I'm planning to wheedle help from some more friends. (Some of whom are likely reading this. You poor saps.) I think what I'm going to do is print the book as a private project on Lulu, order five or six paperback copies, and send them out that way. It'll be a lot easier for my unlucky friends to read than a honking great sheaf of paper, and while I don't think I'll actually save money on paper and toner cartridges (although I might), it'll be simpler and easier to ship.

Technology, man. Can you imagine when I would have had to type carbons? Egh. The very thought of it makes me queasy.

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I told Matt yesterday that I think my anxiety-meter is broken. If you'd told me six months ago that my life would be situated the way it is, with so little security and so much chaos and every day bringing new uncertainties, I would have fainted dead away and had a panic attack upon awakening. But I've got this eerie new confidence, not only that things are going to be okay but that they're going to work out the way they ought to (whatever that way may be), that in the meantime we'll manage, and that all the things that appear to be obstacles are really just smoke and mirrors. I told him I thought my anxiety-meter, previously such a source of terror and heartache, was now like a broken speedometer; no matter how much I gun the ignition, how fast things may be hurtling by outside the windows, the needle rests patiently at zero. (Incidentally, in this metaphor, I'm driving a kickass Chevelle Super Sport.) I am imperturbable. It's kind of like the beginning of Office Space, when thanks to that shrink, Peter is just...chill...about his workplace all of a sudden.

Maybe I'm just mentally ill. Maybe someone's been feeding me Quaaludes. But I'll take it, you know, it's a zillion times better than the awful scratching anxiety, which makes the inside of my head sound exactly like this all the time. It means I can write, and sleep, and devote real energy to teaching my yoga classes. I don't really need to know exactly how fast I'm going.