Next steps

Dean just finished reading the whole draft of Social Aid & Pleasure, my New Orleans sort-of-fantasy novel, and he's given me brilliant suggestions. He's a poet and he hates novels, but he's always right about my work. Erin Fitzgerald (I love name dropping) read the first four chapters and gave me great notes. I think that I can make the fixes in short time (by early august?), after which I'll start the query process. Query One being, What kinda book is this? Sections of it have already appeared as short stories in Juked, Barrelhouse, Pank, and a forthcoming Killauthor.

Writing the synopsis for this project has been easy and straightforward. I think that's a good sign.

I just got done reading a damp gothic about conjoined twins. I don't want to talk about it. Am now reading Eggars' Zeitoun, which is riveting. I'm only 50 pages in, but the idea of a professional and responsive contractor is deeply romantic.

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.

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.

Fiction Weekly

It'll be interesting to see how this venture works out: Fiction Weekly, coming out of Lake Charles, LA. Neat idea, attractive design. I'm still working through the stories to get a sense of things, though.

Plus, this week's story is by Ryan Crider, PhD candidate in English and Creative Writing at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette--one of the best schools in the world for that sort of thing. Go Ryan!

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.

pick-up trucks and academics

Home in VA now, where I will watch Gustav make a run towards Lafayette, one of my other favorite places. After my husband won a fellowship to take his PhD in Poetics at ULL (back when it was still USL), we left drought parched Ohio for rain drenched Louisiana in a heartbeat. Well really, in a battered Datsun that gave up the ghost shortly after we settled in. I determined that we needed a pick-up truck (we didn’t), and we chugged over to the nearest used lot where I selected a seriously under-powered Ford truck. Because I had made photo copies of Consumer Reports buying guides, I was considered to be the foremost expert car buyer in our family. It’s important to note that I don’t drive. We were encouraged by the approval of our friend, Cole Thompson, then a pre-novelist and drifting scion of an entrepreneurial Texas oil family, because he had a pretty blue Ford truck and declared our engine “nice and clean.”

The tail lights fizzled out before we got the vehicle back to our apartment. Luckily, Cole diagnosed it as a simple fuse issue--the first of many issues. My brothers, Doug and Sam, are both master auto mechanics. It never occurred to me to ask their advice, but if I had I’m sure they would have told me that Ford trucks are well built, they’re just a little cursed.

Months later Cole took us to his family’s 100+ year old vacation home on the Texas Gulf coast, where we got to watch his pretty blue truck slide down an algae slick boat ramp and into Aransas Bay, pulled there by the family fishing boat. That truck filled up to the dash and beyond. The groceries floated. Cole dived down to tie a rope to the truck, and when he came up a big jellyfish (cabbage head or moon) sat on his head like a beret. Cole took a lot of abuse that weekend, from his brothers, his fiancé, and the insurance lady (“well honey, those things don’t float you know”), but Dean and I had a great time. We didn’t have to be the grown ups. There was also quite a bit of southern masculine interpersonal junk--the other guys at the boat launch, the not-very-loquacious guy who towed us home--all of which blew right by us.

Not sure where Cole is now, but the last we heard is that he moved "up north," which is, I guess, a euphemism for landing a university job?