Why, it's revision-fest!

Welcome to the fourth annual (fifth? we may have skipped a year)re-write of my West Virginia novel. This year we're working on making it sure it "jells" and features a "plot."

At the cabin right now, and the peepers are outraged.

Slushpile!

Dean came up with this one, a reality show called Slushpile! where desperate novelists try to pitch their manuscripts to agents. Funny and depressing!

back to the potboiler?

so that's two agents who have read the entirety of my WV novel. Both said the same things--love the writing and the characters, but there isn't enough conventional tension. I am convinced by the professional consensus, and I already have a detailed plan. I'd be more bummed if the WV novel was the only thing I had going. But the New Orleans novel is revised and ready (I think!), and I'll start the query process asap.

Despite the fact that I couldn't win these agents over, I'm pleased by the honesty and advice they've offered. And both left the door open for me to send again. This summer I've learned a lot about writing.

is it breathing?

someone just poked my west virginia novel with a stick. good timing, too, because next weekend is the launch party for Gravity Dancers, at Politics & Prose. My story in that collection is called "Moon Walk," and it has zero Micheal Jackson content, but it is derived from the novel.

Going to a different Moon Walk this weekend though. We're headed to the French Quarter where the river walk is named after Moon Landrieu, a politician and businessman credited with revitalizing New Orleans in the 60s-70s.

Then I need to spruce up my synopsis.

revision status

well alrightey, I'm "through" revision 1 in that I've gone through the draft and managed to whittle it down to 330 better pages. I got some great advice about the first 40, which I'm still applying, and now I think I may be at the stage of re-writing the chapter by chapter summary to see what this tighter version looks like, bird's eye view.

one of my worries is that I never really answer the questions of the supernatural phenomenon that drives the plot. all I do is write about the affect on my main character. hope I can get away with that.

next weekend we go to new orleans. whee! research! gonna eat and drink myself stoopid.

revision update (snore)

I'm revising my draft, Social Aid & Pleasure, and that's coming along, but my goal was to shed 70-80 pages of the 386 I ended up with. I'm at about 140 pages now, and I've only managed to dump 20 pages so far. Maybe I'll run into some digressive chapters about knot tying soon, but I don't remember writing any of those.

The main job in the first 40 pages was to make them more active and focused, less expository and discursive. This required me to wrestle with my narrator, who is a naturally loquacious, sometimes affected, dude. Dean read the pages, liked them, but he knows the concept too well to determine whether I'm delivering enough information at a decent pace, so I have two readers on the job (thanks E & D).

I also put a section of dialogue up on fictionaut, sans context, and the folks there are treating me very well indeed. I'm feeling pretty good about how this is going, with the only barrier being the fact that people keep expecting me to work for a living.

The pic is my WV cabin undergoing renovation. If you click on it, you'll see the toilet is outside in the yard, next to the entrance. This is not our preference.

Completed the draft of the Louisiana Novel

it's a mess, but a completely workable one. think I'll take the rest of the afternoon off. the thing is called Social Aid & Pleasure. what dean has read so far, he says is like cory doctorow. my story in Barrelhouse 7 "Wishtank" comes from the novel.

I will celebrate the same way I grieve, with food and alcohol.

so hows youalls novelses goings?

katrina finished her draft, gary hit 200pp, david seems to have gone underground with his. I'm 4 complicated scenes away from my planned ending, having taken a surprise detour into a sex scene that's sorta didactic. it's the last good time in the book, the last time everone's a winnah! now for the collapse of all we know and love.

just finished reading Gillian Flynn's Dark Places, a great book that should be called Grotty Places. I swear each time the locale changes, it gets grosser and grosser.

I'm going to try write all weekend, but if I have to stop, I plan to start reading Light Boxes. hope it doesn't mess me up by being too good. And the thing is so attractive that Dean says he wants to read it. Keeps eyeballing the book like it's some fascinating new pet in the house, but not a kitten or puppy. More like a gecko.

no whining

so the detour with my West Virginia novel did not pan out--the interested party is no longer interested. I'm disappointed and not feeling motivated to continue with the proposed revision right now, even though I think the plan is a good one.

I really want to find the end of the Louisiana book, which has a stronger concept and voice. It's certainly funnier.

But it has only been 12 hours since the rejection. This time tomorrow, I could take up karaoke. the karaoke people are happy people.

the quest

Tomorrow we learn whether we have successfully acquired the land next to our cabin in WV, which would give us a total of about 4.5+ acres. So that's one thing.

The other thing is that someone has expressed enough interest in my WV novel that I have definitely mounted a re-write to increase the suspense. But harder than that is writing the full length summary. I don't know how this effort will pan out in terms of representation and publication, but I do know my new draft will be the lean, dark animal I always intended it to be. Wish me luck.

I've shared the details of the process with a few people, and I'm grateful for all the offers of help. I'll need readers soon, but right now I'm getting help from Jeanette Winterson's The Passion and three or four powerful Lucinda Williams' tracks.

oh, and

my novel board was posted at Paul Toth's super neat Hit and Run Magazine yesterday. timing's a little sad, as I have set the project aside to do a re-write of Unattended, my West Virgina novel.

139 words kicked my ass today

. . . more about that if things develop. sorry to be cryptic, but it looks like I may suspend work on the Louisiana book to mount a re-write of the West Virginia book. that's if things go well. I'm not afraid of re-writes; I take editorial direction very well, and I work quickly under those circumstances.

so. marriage. in your partnership, do you have a permanently designated broken glass picker-upper? or are you like us, where the glass breaker stands in shock (usually barefoot) over the glass they've just broken, while the person who did not break the glass rushes in to take care of the mess?

Focusing NaNoWriMo

I tried NaNoWriMo once, sincerely. Failed very early in the process because my head, like yours I bet, is jammed too far up my own hole to free write any more. Now I sponsor and host NaNo events for the Mason community because I admire how the event provides 1) permission to be creative & 2) loopy constraint for those who need it. A more specific reason I like NaNo is that it demystifies novel writing by reducing the activity to just that, activity. It may be a lie, but exposing the process in this way provides an experience we can’t offer in academic workshops, not really. (I tried last year. My understanding is that most academic novel writing workshops devolve into support group sessions) We train students to write short stories because that’s what we can manage within the physical realities of class size, semesters, etc, and isn’t that just as artificially constrained as reasons for not teaching novel writing? Worse, students come into fiction workshops believing that short stories are easier to write because they are, er, shorter. I always stress writing in the form that one reads for pleasure, and that the forms have different aesthetic shapes that are far more important than word counts.

But back to the demystification angle. I’ve never met a successful novelist who described novel writing as anything other than painful. I’ve never met a student novelist who described novel writing as anything other than joyful. I’ve never met a novelist who could tell me how to write a novel. Or maybe they can and they don’t wanna? So we learn by doing, doing, doing. In the absence of any other willing authority, NaNo exhorts us to do, do, do. I know this sets aside the old whiskey breathed chastisement, “A writer writes”—which may be true after all—but that’s not a good enough answer to any question. It’s certainly not education.

aaargh. NaNoWriMo is a Ninja

what? it's oct 15? just two weeks to go? yikes. over the past two years i've volunteered to coordinate a few nanowrimo activities (National Novel Writing Month)for students at George Mason University. This year, being insanely busy, I forgot about NaNo, and now I'm getting messages from students and faculty about what we're gonna do this year. We've tried a few things, but what the people really want are write-ins--time in a room together writing. I find it weird, completely at odds with the loneliness of noveling, but really fun to observe.

Chris Baty visited mason a year ago to talk about NaNo, and he did a really cool routine about the tyranny of revision impulse and how everyone has a perfect first chapter.

new toys, ready to rock

I have a new porch toy (yes I know it looks like a sex chair, thanks), and I've worked out some stuff for the end of the book. An outline won't work, hence the indecipherable whiteboard. No I probably won't kill Elvis. Jackie the dog is visiting for the weekend.

I really want to write, but I bet I'll end up reading instead.

It's the foot rub, stupid

I've had a great writing weekend despite heightened workplace stress and the collapsing economy. Last night was me at the cabin, sipping wine, listening to jazz on the XM, and sailing past page 200 in my novel draft(the Louisiana book). The end of the book revealed itself to me, and I'm both frightened and thrilled by its complexity. Hope i can live up to it. I also wrote a seduction scene that culminates in a post-coital foot rub, included as evidence of my main character's genius with women, an instinct that has been dormant all his life because he's humiliated by his weight. I think the foot rub has been sadly underutilized in mainstream erotic writing.

There's really no sex in my other novel (the West Virginia book), which is complete but without representation. Probably not smart of me but I wanted to avoid rom com cliches, and write about a mature woman who could have adventures without leaning on a romantic partner. Instead of lovers she has friends who find her independence frustrating, and of course they are always trying to get in her shit.

1968

I’m not sure I want to write about this because I’m feeling both insecure and excited about the Louisiana novel, but I don’t want to be superstitious and I don’t want to forget this moment. Earlier this week I was overcome when I realized several parallels between my plot and that of Le Guin’s Lathe of Heaven. I had to do the inventory a few different ways before I convinced myself that the similarities were not so substantial—after all I’ve never even read LoH. What followed then was a rush of new ideas, all of which are careening into the absurd, and as far from serious science fiction as I can scramble. What am I talking about? Well, for starters I’m bringing back Elvis and I’m giving women a third eye. Wish me luck.

Bad Brain

These feel like related issues in that they flirt with superstition and mystic irrationality but really speak to the fact that my psychology hates me—

1) I dreamed about the West Virginia novel being published and immediately turned into an indie film, and conditions I thought were crucial had been altered with no loss of effect—main character male not female, the setting was a village in northern England not rural West Virginia, things like that. The dream bugs me because I’m always harassing my students to make sure, even in their so called genre or pop writing, that their choices are always essential, in-extractable and un-swappable.

2) I’m going back through the first 100 pages of the Louisiana novel and I’m really surprised and pleased at how naturally it writes itself. Even when I don’t want to write, I know that I can open up the file and it will change my disposition.

Check out youtube clips of Derren Brown’s stuff. It helps.

unpacking

We're back from the beach, and while it was too cool to swim, we were treated to some heartbreaking sunsets. As far as the novel goes, I didn't write much new material, but I did manage to whack some sense into my chronology. so far each "chunk" has been drifting in time, but now I have begun the messy but grown-up work of writing the story in order--you know, with some respect and concern for dependency.
I also need to bite the email bullet, but before that happens I must scrub the sand and salt out of my chiweenies.

Beach in 4 days

I haven’t made many entries lately because I’ve been sick for almost two weeks now, and every shred of focus is going into comments on student writing. I’ve got my grades in, but with the novelers, grades are almost insultingly meaningless. My friend S said, when I mentioned a colleague picking up the bar tab for a group of writers: “I know students are strapped, but they really want your time and attention much more than they want your money.” Grades are like money, to my mind. And the whole thing reminds me that this was a very tough semester, beginning with me un-hiring a boatload of excellent instructors because enrollments were too soft. It was a frustrating time, and we weren’t getting accurate information or appropriate support from the administration, but when I tried to explain myself to the incoming chair he misunderstood my rant/wail as a threat. Wanted to know if I wanted more money. I told him I wanted more time, could he get me some of that?