I made it to the Editor’s intensive in Cincinnati, you know, the event in the spring that I was not able to make due to my Grandmother’s final brave round with ovarian cancer and, in a word, it’s been life-changing . . . perhaps more like life-afirming.  Because of the feedback I was given, because I found myself very much vindicated and confirmed by all the things my editor and others around me had to say, I now know, without the shadow of a doubt in my mind, that I can make a writing life work for me.   I know what I need to fix.  I know what I have is not perfect and that’s ok–despite going into this feeling like if another rewrite was suggested I was just gonna throw my hands up and say all this shit is taking too long, I know exactly what to do and I trust myself enough to be able to handle this task in a timely and professional way.

My dayjob has reached the height of it’s ugliness.  I have an opportunity to take a part time job that pays much less per hour but I also have a cushion.  Now is the time to move.

One chance.  One chance is all you get.  One life to live, so many opportunities for happiness, and money has yet to make me happy in a satisfactory way.  Being at that conference and being this close to being fired from work is making me feel very manic and wild like a someone free falling to their death, but what a wonderful feeling . . . what a crazy, wonderful, empowering feeling it is, especially when someone removed from you, removed from your regular circle of friends, family and other writers, tells you that it’s time to stop sitting on the golden egg.

I’m keeping this short and sweet today because I’m a little short on time, but will be keeping subscribers of this page updated as to my next move.  Happy Monday all!

I had kind of a hard time sticking with that book to tell you the truth–things happen very, very rapidly, action doesn’t come across in a terribly visual way.  He’s not real wordy on description when it comes to action and, let’s face it, sci-fi is kind of a more juvenile form of the action/thriller genre, but what really makes his work a treasure in this instance is not so much a heavy hand on science prediction as often seen in scifi pulps of the 1950′s-1970′s, but subtle–an incredibly subtle and slow–build up in the glorification of the gritty.  An ode to the ultimate end to our age of consumption, our relationship to our “creator”, and whether that relationship ultimately holds any meaning.

The reading of this book was rather timely for me.  These last few months, I have had so much of what I’ve had faith in utterly obliterated by this circumstance and that, and at least reading “Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep” restored one fundamentally missing element of faith that I’ve been completely lacking ever since graduating college:  a faith in literature as an art.

but after everything that’s happened in the last week or so I’ve really been asking myself what art is really good for.  What’s my art good for?

PKD’s art was good for the enrichment of the scifi genre.  As Pris Stratton points out to Chickenhead JR isiodore, scifi novels with big-busted women with shiny breastplates parading about the jungles of Venus were all the rage in pre-colonial days . . . When I was a kid I kind of thought of sci-fi as being costumed fun, you know–ray harryhausen special effects and screaming women and giant bugs/rabbits/brains/men.  I think he must have thought the same thing, but I wonder if maybe there was a kind of self consciousness behind the enjoyment of such things, a desire for there to be more meaning to enjoying the genre than simply enjoying the scenery.

Why sci fi?  Why Art?  Why bother?  It’s not like I’m writing on the level he is, not like I’m writing what the public wants right now or what would fit right into the shelves at Barnes n Noble.  Even if I had an agent and a publisher who were on the same page as I was and we were in total agreement with everything and they said OMG you are the greatest writer EVA and we would never dream of letting you slip through our fingers and blah blah blah, would I, as it stands right now, be happy with putting my name on what I’ve created?

. . . sort of.

I’m pretty pathetic compared to the writers I admire.  I don’t have the balls to quit my job and spend all my time typing and creating and living off sheer production, even if that means I only get 3k or 5k a year between advances and royalties and all that.  I know I wanna write.  I know it can be done.  I know I have the passion for it.  I know how to do it.  But . . . in the end, what does it prove?

If I had a safety net, a crystal ball, something that could tell me with all certainty that I was going to make that life work for me and I couldn’t fuck it up, is what I’m working on now be the crown jewels so to speak, of my reader’s experience?

. . . no, but it’s a start.

PKD didn’t start with “Do androids dream . . .”, hell, he didn’t even end with it.  I don’t think he even thought of it as his finest work, and I kind of wonder if it was regarded as a work of significance among the reading public when it came out.  But the art is there, and I can safely tell you that it has all the qualities of those precious works of literary heavyweights of yesteryear . . . and I always wondered who today’s Goethe’s and Yeat’s and Shelley’s and Byron’s were.  probably not Nora Roberts or Stephanie Meyer–I think authors like that make for better studies for students of economics more than literature.  Lots of people say the same thing about Stephen King but I think in time he’ll prove he owns his own little hill of literary authority.

There’s so much crap going on in my personal life right now that it’s hard to think about this stuff and apply it to my own writing.  Hell, I haven’t even looked at it since I got everything prepped for the conference that I couldn’t make it to.  I can’t look at it right now.  Mentally, I am just black and blue, spiritually black and blue, physically black and blue and all I can really do is live in the moment and focus on survival, but always it lingers, this feeling, this love, this desire, this strong, strong desire–but what does it want from me?  Really?  what does it want??

My grandmother is in the hospital, and now my stepfather is in the hospital, and both of them are close to death.  I’m not any one bit happier with life 13 years after starting life on my own as an adult.  I have nothing to show for my years of doing the right thing on the job except for debt and the same type of living arrangements I had when I first graduated.  What do I really have in real life?  Newbie writers always ooo and ahh when I tell them I’ve written two books, but what do those books do?  They sit in my harddrive.  They get pecked around on.  I turn the puzzle pieces this way and that trying to think of ways to make them better but, couldn’t I just as well have said 13 years ago that I’d written a book–two books–and had people believe me just the same?  I mean, no one’s really READ them.  No one but me.  Like something out of a PKD novel huh–the books that only exist in my head and not in print.

Writing them added meaning to my life . . .made me feel a sense of accomplishment where everything else (except for having kids) has been, by and large, a failure.  If I could just enrich someone else’s life by writing something that makes another human being think about life in a way that I think about it, in the way that I have loved life and have seen the beauty in it, then I’ve accomplished something!  Then I’m successful in something.  I could give two shits if it made me a dime . . .I’m kind of looking forward to running my own pizzaria or bookstore or coffee shop someday But my art, my art–to what end do you tie me?  At what end will I say to you that I won’t or can’t give to you anymore?

A week before, I got a gumption.  I put the money down.  I took time off work and really pushed myself to git-r-done.  I spent that friday at the local library in one of their private study spaces.  It’s a strange feeling to be working on a book in the library.  The doubt takes on a different shape, a different feeling–you’re surrounded by books of all makes and models, of all genres and all levels of literacy, of all desires, of all aspects of the human imagination . . . and not a one of them have a price tag.

The library here has these private little offices that are partitioned off by glass dividers.  there’s a place to hang your coat, a big boardroom like table with popup power supplies, a dry erase board, and these tall, thin windows that, ironically enough for a fishbowl office, are glassless so that all the ambient sound from the lobby bubbles up harmlessly from below.  Standing behind one of these windows, you can clearly see racks and rows full of mystery novels in the fiction section across the way.  I can’t fly there.  Can’t walk across the air.  Can’t swim across the gulf.  Can’t be carried over.

I have a ladder that I’ve built in between my chores.  don’t know how much weight the ladder can bear, don’t know how far it really reaches yet, but minute by stolen minute it has grown substantially, and I was told that this weekend, I needed to get it ready to deploy–now or never, time to cross the divide.

click-clack–things fell together neatly.  I just happened to have $300 leftover from my bonus.  they just happened to want their submissions in 12 pt font, double spaced, new chapters starting on new pages, so the shortcomings I was experiencing with a 10pt, start a chapter on used page format just kind of disappeared.  I felt a little unsure about my rag-ladder, my book -of-many-colors.  I wanted other people to check it, see if it could hold weight, but it seemed to me like instead of holding a burden, it became a burden, but I didn’t let it shake me too much.  It’s no different than usual.  It’s hard to read stuff that’s still kind of in that could-use-a-good-edit stage. I’ve read more than my fair share of stories that have issues obvious to me but not the author, and it is kind of a burden to have to dig up the positive from something you couldn’t possibly believe would be successful.  I paid for the hotel room anyway.

The next friday, I’m still trying to keep positive.  Still trying to just get through my workday.  Still trying to figure out how to ask for help for the thigns that matter to me . . . around the house, around the writing, but strangely enough I felt a little lighter, knowing I wouldn’t be using my every spare moment to write, knowing my lunch hour could be used for something other than spending time at the coffee shop.  Came home, and as I’m turning the door knob my mother calls.  you know when moms call you on a friday night, something’s just about to not go your way.

My grandmother . . .is young.  she’s 68.  She gave birth to my dad when she was 15.  She was in her 30′s when she became a grandmother.  Nobody believed she was my grandmother.  she was arguably the most beautiful woman in the county, real red hair, smokin’ hot body, a penchant for jewlery, a southern drawl with southren sensibilities and a wicked sharp manner that could put Scarlet O’hare in he place.  I’m very proud of her.  I’m very proud to have given her two great grandchildren.  I’d give her more if I thought I could.  I’d have baby after baby if it made her happy.  She has ovarian cancer.  she is going to die.  And that’s a fact i’ve lived with for 7 years.  I knew that tough old bird wouldn’t just roll over and give cancer an easy time.  She had her last chemo treatment the day Asa was born, and when I was pregnant with Seth it came roaring back.  He’s almost 2 now.  They told her then that she didn’t have long to live, but it’s not like she was going to miss out on her beautful great grandson . . .

My mom didn’t want to tell me because I had finally, finally, finally come out of the closet about wanting to be a writer.  She wanted me to go.  She was crying when she told me but it’s not like I could have gone to cinci and had her pass away without me saying goodbye.

i woke up saturday morning just mired in this tumultous feeling between grief and rage.  It’s all for nothing.  It’s a waste of time.  It’s such a stupid, vain thing . . . and I rest so much on it.  I rest my entire life’s worth on these stupid fucking stories.  I have no career.  I live in a rental home.  I have two kids with hand me down clothes on.  Nobody cleaned the house for me.  i couldn’t speak a word all morning.  I wanted to wring someone’s neck.  Seth started pulling out toys while I was trying to clean and threw his ass across the floor.  couldn’t hear him cry over the vaccume cleaner.  Couldn’t hear him cry over those cyclindic thoughts in my head about how stupid and childish I am, how worthless I am, how souless, how wretched.    I took a bath.  The thoughts released their hold on me a little.  I could go on with my day.

So it was Jackson that I saw on Saturday.  Instead of a swank suite with roses and chocolates and the like, my car was sailing by houses made of junk and the wrecked cadavers of cars piled up one on top of the other.  Boarded up storefronts and starving dogs, fighting cocks in the yards of crack dealers ’cause they’re not afriad of the cops, they’re only afraid of their customers.  In the nicer outerbelt of the town, a two story hospital too afriad to tranfer my grandmother to OSU has told her it’s time to call hospice.

In the cold, dry hour of 7 o’clock we go to visit her, and she’s in this room with one single light above her bed.  She’s not talking of death that night, but her eyelids blink slow and sticky, and her body shape in the bed doesn’t look human.  we talked alot, but I honestly don’t remember much about it.

we drove around because I didn’t want to go straight home to the kids.  I jsut drove ’cause I didn’t know where to go . . .hated driving ’cause it just felt like I was goign through the motions . . just wasting time again.  got myself a ski from the gas station, and decided to pursue the sound.

As black as it was outside, we drove out to Hammertown lake and rolled down the windows.  It was too cold and wet to sit outside.  Just beyond the windshield, just beyond the door, the lushest sound fell down around the perimeter of the lake like a curtain.  I stopped my breathing just to hear it.  This was the sound of the spring peepers.

Ancient sound

Healing sound

if I could just be immersed in it, some part of my soul could be healed.  I wouldn’t need to write.  I could just be.  I could be a little girl again.  I could live on a farm again.  I could slop hogs and get my toes muddy again.  I could see night again, stars again, let time heal me again.

But then I drove off.

the next day we spent most of our time at the hospital.  My grandfather never repeats his words but he kept telling us that he was going to try to have her transported to OSU, that the doctors there would be able to give her a second opinion, that they’ve been through this before.  The pastor entered the room and I left to give them privacy.  when I came back she looked lighter, happier–told me he had sung a few hymns to her and I felt a little stupid that I had to sulk away from that.  It should have been me singing like the spring peepers, of songs telling her how much I loved her.

I tried to think of the words I’d say if this was the last we’d ever speak, and I had such a hard time choking it out.  All I could say was ” I am so honored that my kids would know . . . that my kids would know their great grandmother.”

And she simply slapped me on the hand and said “don’t be sad, honey.  I am at peace.  Smile–you’re too beautiful not to smile.”

She told my husband a story that when I was 3 she took me clothes shopping and I cried when I couldn’t have patent leather high heel shoes, and strangely that made me feel a little better about myself.

I visited with aunts and uncles . . . feeling like I was gonna see them again pretty soon.

Had to go home and wait for the news.

Pasquale is tilling his garden . . . should be time to till mine as well.

the editor at the writer’s intensive moved my dates to septembe so I wouldn’t forfeit the money, gave their condolences.

Work is just as shitty and hateful as always, but work’s got it’s own problems right now.

I have just enough hope to open my netbook and tie another mismatched rung onto my rope ladder.

Behind me I have boarded up storefronts, stories of one factory closed after another, stories of tar paper houses and friend living in garages with their four kids after the landlord sold the property out from under their feet.

I did it for you.  I do it for you.  and I know when I hear that sound of thunder breaking across the heavens, that the valkeries have culled another warrior for valhalla, that my lord Thor has rode his great goat-cart across the skies, a brother,  a father and friend to all warriors, he would have a great friend in her.  She will raise the horn in valhalla before speeding through to the arms of Jesus, and I am at peace with that.

Winter is not easy, it’s not for wimps, it’s not for the easily overwhelmed.  Winter is when abundance is hidden from us, when it’s easy to forget that something could ever spring from nothing.  It’s easy to forget how easy it is to grow or be nourished or to rest.

Winter is the oppression of routine, of gray skies that rarely change, a biting cold to greet you as soon as the door is opened–winter makes you pay for the breathtaking awe you feel in gazing out over blinding stretches of crystal and white.

But days change, and despite the fact that winter’s dominance is all encompassing and inescapable to those caught up in the worst of it, winter must still bow to time, and there will be those of us who will begin to stir and open our eyes from our caves just before winter is through.

I woke up today and realized how to move forward in my writing, and it feels like the sun on my face.

It feels like I’m at the last few inches of the last incline just before the finish line in a cross country race.

Oh snap–I know what my theme is!

When I did my first readthrough of my first draft, I knew that the wrench I needed to tighten up with was gonna be theme, but all the writing books I’ve been skimming, all the exercises had me feeling like theme had to be this laser-precise mission statement statement that could sum up the whole 300 pages into one perfect sentence and that’s really not true . . . that’s really not what theme is or what it has to be.

My book is about having to settle for less in order to fit in to a society that you resent–simple as that.

Yes, it is still about feminine dominance in a world ruined by a man-made atrocity, still about a Man’s struggle to finding a meaningful job and friendship and possibly a relationship in a world where all of these things are discouraged or outright denied to his male brethern, but this book–keeping in mind that this is a series– this book is about having to settle for less, to oppress your own talents or intellect or spirit or experience in order just to survive in a harsh and unyielding world.  and just knowing that, just realizing that, I already see EXACTLY what’s wrong with my rewrite.

So now I have to say this just like a little kid who got the clothes instead of the toys for christmas from their crazy uncle lou — Thank you Terry Bain

His article, “Theme is what unifies your story” in this month’s The Writer magazine sees theme as being much more general than what many writing books want you to arrive at and for some reason, it “clicked” for me, but not until I had some time to sleep on it.

or at least until I had time to get over my own egotistical prejudice in believing that there’s anything any outside writer from that hoity-toity society of the already published that could help me.

So, time and kids permitting, I have a fresh day to get my writing back on track.

and seeing how it’s taken me 2 1/2 hours to write even this much, I think the “kids” part isn’t going to be very permitting today.

But a bear’s gotta forage for what they can when they wake up before the thaw.

Seriously!  I’ve been working pretty hard bailing out the ocean a bucket at a time, working tirelessly to find the owners of lost duffle bags in the Delta airlines lost baggage department, and I’ve also been traveling to all the dams all around the country chewing lots and lots of gum to plug up all the little leaks and springs so that we don’t all die in an old testament style flood.

But really, seriously, no–I’ve been writing . . .

. . . I organized all my files very neatly, like a good little virgo.

. . . I pushed and pushed and pushed forward relentlessly on the piece I’ve been working on like any good dragon trying to raze the castle walls.

I think most amatuers would be very, very happy with the amount of output I’ve made over the last couple of months, even in the face of everything that’s happened, but . . .

If you work in a jigsaw puzzle factory, and keep making the same piece of the puzzle over and over but just with slight differences, you start to think that you’re never going to actually see the big picture.  I’m trying very hard to get over one particular piece, and I think that I may just have, but I’m having a hard time telling when to leave good enough alone.

In my documents folder, I have my writing divided up by manuscript.  The main folder has the main rough document–the rough draft that I Resisted the URGE to Edit and just wrote as one, fluid, linear document.  There are a bunch of subfolders that are divided up by Story (my book is a marriage of three short stories in the traditional short-mystery style), then under each story there are subfolders for things like beginings, endings, and thought balloons, with thought balloons being something like a cross between an outline and me just scribbling notes to myself like Ralph Fienes in “spider” (great movie, if only because of him).  If I were to print all these off and squish them together with the main document, you’d have 500 page document that resembles something like a “special edition” DVD with lots of outakes, cut scenes, and behind-the-scenes expos on the making of this book.

I intend this book to be book 1 of a series–a series containing at least 4-6 books ( I know that’s a long shot–NEVER TELL ME THE ODDS, KID!) that I already have synopsis written for, book two already being fleshed out (’cause I didn’t want to wait anymore) with about 15 pages of a particular scene written and a full bodied, full blooded tried and true outline all laid out.

hmm . .. doesn’t do much for me if I’m still standing here in my gray canvas jumpsuit at the puzzle factory turning the same piece over and over again, does it?

I wanted my first book to have a short prologue–eww, yes, I know I said a dirty, dirty word–prologue . . . . PROLOGUE–pretentious, pretentious prologue . . the vehicles of authors far too caught up in the smell of their own shit just to deftly drop all that backstory into the story and get on with it . . . dirty, dirty prologues !  But I’ll tell you why I wanted a prologue–I wanted a prologue because if I were a reader who stuck with a series throughout the life of it’s story arc, nothing could be sweeter than going back and reading the prologue of a story that I completely, totally, and utterly found myself engulfed in.  Tell me, what is more sweet and lovely than the first 30-50 pages of The Fellowship of the Rings?  what could you possible savor more than going back to those summer days when the wardrobe was just a wardrobe, the first time Lucy felt pine trees instead of coats in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe?  Series are a commitment, a journey and a long one at that, so if your reader is going to be with you for THAT LONG, you better make it worth revisiting.

I wanted my book to have a prologue, and it’s a tricky thing because a prologue is something that you have to make ALMOST complete, but not quite, because if it’s too complete, you run the danger of your reader getting just enough of a story to think they’re done with it and move on to something else, but if it’s too loose you run the risk of wasting your reader’s time and then you really would have turned it into a dirty, dirty prologue.  Backstory sucks, plain and simple.  Interesting tidbits rule, like chocolate chips in your cookies, ’cause readers like to think that they’re onto you and that they’re way smarter than ms hoity toity author and can figure the mystery out before anyone else.  Seriously, who can resist reading philip K dick and not grab onto all those weird little nuiances and keep it in their heads until it all clicks together?

I’ve been turning the puzzle in the puzzle factory because I’ve been very torn about using scene vs summary ( . . . I just heard something . . . sounded like a scream coming from the capital building downtown . . no?  just me?  alright move on) in my prologue.  My prologue contains two scenes that tell the reader who my protagonist is and where he comes from and gives meaning to his struggle to find meaningful work as a police officer, but I’m getting hung up on whether or not to tell the story of him actually job hunting and interviewing and landing the job cause, well, we already know he’s going to get the job or we would have the other 300 pages that follow the prologue.  I think if I were reflecting back on a book series that I really love, I’d probably really enjoy savoring a reread of that very first time my protagonist meets the people who will become his female chauvanist coworkers, but I’ve read alot of dirty, dirty prologues in my lifetime that make me all type A and want them to JUST GET ON WITH THE F*CKIN STORY!!!

maybe it’s not that the prologue itself is taking too long, maybe *I’m* just taking too long . . .

In any case, remember earlier when I said that I’ve been writing and writing and writing and have lot of subfolders and lots of beginnings and prologues and all that happy crap that are a lot like the same puzzle piece being worked over but only slightly different?  Well, either which way I go–whether it’s with a wordy, dirty prologue or one that JUST GETS ON WITH THE STORY, those pieces are in the can.

So, now comes the actual story’s time to shine .  . .

. . . and if I step back a little, I can peer through my safety goggles and see that this isn’t just one puzzle I’m working on here at the puzzle factory, it’s pile after pile after pile of them.

. . . I think  I need to go back to dumping the ocean out with buckets

Well, it’s the new year!  People of a writerly bent typically do make resolutions to write more and push push push for that precious output, and nothing makes a better, downright safer, practice makes perfect playland than a blog.

I kept a blog regularly on yahoo360 for many, many years (I had something like 300 entries) that I was really very proud of, but yahoo chose to do away with it’s blogging website altogether and I lost most of it to their less than stellar archive system, so when it came to this blog, although my intention was to make it less about life in general and more specifically about my struggles as an up and coming author, it’s been a little harder to blog because of that subconcious feeling that it’s all going to disappear some day anyway when wordpress goes belly up and dies.  Not to say that I WANT them to–I like wordpress;  it feels a lot more elegant and passably professional than yahoo 360 ever did, but things change, you know.

I really like new year’s day and, well, new years in general because although it’s just a date on a calender and I’ve been through 33 of them, the idea of being able to wipe the slate clean and put the past behind you and create something new is very uplifting.  This new year has been extrodinarily special to me because my family has been gifted with something so precious–time together.  Time just working together as a family, taking care of things around the house, take care of our diets, our bodies, our spiritual well being, all while being in a state of relative (and nothing short of miraculous) financial stability.  Time enough for me to take a step back and put work and domestic issues in a more realistic light.  Time enough for me to be kind to myself and understand that despite the fact that I don’t have that glamerous, important, grown up job that I always visualized myself holding, my work isn’t unimportant.  It’s a job, and I like making money, but my job and I need to have a serious talk about the things I want out of life.

I want to remember the red hot artist, the genesis, the spark, the raw, new creativity that refuses to believe that every story in the world that could be told has been told.  I want to not be jealous anymore of other people’s accomplishments and recognize that I hold the genius of myself back when I tell myself that it will never amount to anything.  Therefore, writing, move over good buddy–you’re not going to necessarily ride shotgun anymore.

I do not have a “writing” resolution on my list.  I do not have a weight loss resolution on my list.  I do not have a “I will buy a house” resolution on my list.  These are all things that are incredibly important to me, but they’re not on my list of resolutions.  They’ve been jockeying for position for years now and honestly, I’m sick of seeing them there.  I want to see my works in print.  I want to share my stories with the world, but I want them to be more than just good enough–somewhere out there is someone like me who’s lost all interest in reading fiction because they can’t remember what makes a book–paperback or hardback, big name author or no name–an unforgettable, intregal piece of their soul.  That the art can’t be seperated from the spot it’s touched inside . . . that shareable piece of your soul that can help someone cope with a loss, that can inspire someone to look beyond themselves and see how important life is to live in the here and now . . . that flame that cannot be extinguished by the apathetic critic or creator, and while I think productivity and output is really very important to someone who wants to take writing seriously as a career, I am comfortable . . . backing off of it for a little while.

This is not to say that I won’t be writing and that I won’t be blogging–I will, I think just as a bodybuilder typically doesn’t exclusively work on their biceps, in order for my work to really take on a more full-bodied soul, I need to round out my art and expand my experience with it.

Having all this time off work has allowed me to remember that I really DID use to read alot, and that I really DO love exercising and using my body, and I really DO like to wear makeup and look nice just like any other woman.  Weird what the mind forgets when you’re just trying to make it another day.  I really DID use to create oil paintings and spend hours getting lost in the process of creating with sheer color–no words needed, no plot, and yet the experience is so similar.  The texture of the brushstrokes tells the story.  The waves left behind by the paint knife tells the story.  I don’t know why I spent so long just telling myself that it wasn’t a part of me anymore, that it wasn’t important, that my books would be the only thing that could potentially promise a paycheck.  I love you, writing, but you haven’t been the only one.

I am proud and happy for the people who are determined to blog more–it has certainly served it’s purpose with me in the past.  I need balls enough to leave writing alone for a while and not suffocate it with expectations of fame and fortune.  I need to meditate, paint my nails, take a freakin’ shower (all of which are things I frequently sacrifice in the name of getting some writing done while the baby is asleep).

I’ve got some great ideas brewing for book #2, but I’m looking to have my creativity massaged before I really start work on it.

and blog wise–eh, it’s not like you have to have a whole lot of creative massaging done there   It’s a blog people, not shakespere!!

A query letter??!  GULP   !!!

You mean, showing how GREEN I am to someone who’s seen this kind of stuff a zillion times before?  Who chews up and spits out people like me for breakfast?  Who sees through my amateur attempts to break into the upper crust of literary society, composed of those who have been published???

Surely, I’m not that stupid!  I’m not going to be THAT person, am I?

See how nice I am in allowing the other voices in my head time at the keyboard?  You would think that there’s nothing that you’d want to do more than fire off a few query letters after completing a manuscript that’s taken over so much of your life. Got 100,000 words in logical order?  Hell yeah!  fire off a query letter!  What does one page have against 350?

Well, what does 1 line have against 350 pages?  How is it that a title can be a ball buster, a make-or-break element, when it has so very little overall to do with the immerse experience that you bring to your reader?  One page gets your foot in the door.  One paragraph on that page is supposed to convey the soul of hours, days, weeks and years spent building a 350 page symphony to the things bouncing around in your head, and believe me, when you have absolutely no–none, zippo, zilch–prior publishing experience, that one page can make you sound like William Hung in front of the American Idol judges.

So why don’t I expose my readers to my working query letter here, in the safe confines of a blog in it’s infancy, so that if I sing bad, it won’t necessarily result in my humiliation . . . unless of course, the people who surf by here post YOU SUCK comments!

[oh, an I do think I have a few agents in mind that I'd like to query, but I'm leaving those names out here just because . . . well, just because.]

————–

Dear [superfreak]

I am seeking representation for my book, titled Man in the Abandoned World.  At 82,500 words this completed novel with both sci-fi and mystery elements is being written as a serial with work on the 2nd book already underway.

Man in the Abandoned World is a futuristic police story focusing on a young rookie seeking to shatter the granite ceiling by training to become a peace officer in a time when the rate of male births is only 1 in 10,000, but he quickly finds that he has no place in any law enforcement role in his home city-state of Agra–a female centric, utopian society built underground after the great cataclysm.  Desperate to prove himself, he applies to a precinct above ground, in the ruins of patriarchy, where killers, gangsters and crazies go to escape the justice of Agra.  Aided by a mysterious ex-cop who is plagued by anxiety and ghosts from her past, can he make a name for himself by bagging the bad girls or die of boredom first?

[me] is a small town turned big town gal who attended a small liberal arts college and earned a Bachelor of Science in English.  A fan of Science fiction and Mystery, she is seeking to breathe new life into both genres by blending the two in much the same way Paranormal Romance or Urban Fantasy have been successfully blended from their respective root genres.  With a healthy dose of gender bending (or gender challenging) philosophy, this book is sure to be of interest to those in the gay community, or to those who simply do not see sexuality in black and white terms.

If you would like to learn more, I can send sample chapters or the whole manuscript.  I look forward to hearing from you soon!

Sincerely,

Me

—————–

Completely, utterly, hopelessly unprofessional, right?  hehehe well, it is what it is.  I bought all this fishing gear–now I wanna put out my lines and see what can be caught.  ‘Could be a guppy or a Big Mouth Bass, I don’t know.  Having a nice healthy pile of rejection slips would still be pulling something out of the ether to prove that this whole writing thing doesn’t just live in my head!

To make a long story short, my husband had a stroke.  It’s not that my husband was in bad physical shape, or that he smoked, or snorted a bunch of coke or drank his liver into oblivion–he weighs all in all about 170lbs at 5’10, takes vitamins and supplements by the handful, and eats mostly salads and vegetarian at home.  He suffered what’s called a watershed stroke — it’s a very rare kind of stroke that comes about as a result of the brain not getting enough blood supply because your blood pressure is too low.  He’s only 37, so when he first exhibited signs of changes in his personality, I really and truly thought it was just because he had a bad cold.  Turns out that even though the coughing and sneezing only lasted two days and had long been gone out of his system, he was walking around with pneumonia in his lungs and we didn’t even know about it.  I took him to the emergency room on November 13th . . . They’ve had him inpatient at the hospital ever since.  So now I’m not at work, but let me tell you, I work 6 times as hard now as I ever did sitting on my fat ass collecting a paycheck!  I’ve got two kids–a boy, 6, who is also autistic, and a baby boy 18 months old who is very, VERY high spirited and bullheaded and aggressive and whiney and bitchy and throws things and throws himself and grabs glasses and pulls hair and jumps off the bed . . . Plus I have a husband in the hospital, who may or may not make a full recovery.

Being alone doesn’t suit me very well.  I used to think that if *I* were the stay at home parent, I’d MAKE time for writing and composing query letters and getting exercise in and all that happy crap, but by the time I get my oldest to school, clean the house, get baby ready for the sitter, go to the hospital, wait around for the doctors to tell me, again and again, that what’s going on is a TOTAL mystery to them and we should consult Dr. House Ha ha, listen to Aron struggle to understand what’s going on and watch him get increasingly agitated and blame me for all this and get upset when I leave because he thinks I’m abandoning him, rush home so I don’t have to pay the babysitter another $10 per hour, rush to get the baby dressed and get my oldest boy, go to the grocery store/park/library/whatever gets them out from under the TV, surrender to the goddamn TV cause they won’t leave me alone, fix dinner, run a bath (for them . . . Not sure when the last time I bathed was!), get pajamas on them, give out midnight snacks, read stories, rock the baby, get them to sleep, THERE IS ABSOLUTLEY NOTHING LEFT AT THE END OF THE DAY  but a very few impotent brain cells that want little more than kalua over ice cream and spider solitaire  .. . . And maybe light conversation with someone over the age of 6 on places like facebook and myspace.

I always get kind of a feeling of guilt when I’m watching a lot of TV or spending a lot of time on the aforementioned websites ‘cause I know that time could definitely be better spent.  Every time I see someone else’s story play out on the screen I can feel some little part of my soul scream out like it’s in this dungeon somewhere decaying.  Every time I see someone’s updates on face book swooning over the Twighlight characters I get angry at myself for letting my stories dribble and dry out instead of roaring through like a rushing river.  It’s not that I don’t have a good excuse, it’s that I cannot escape that feeling of “now or never” and I don’t ever want it to be a never, if that makes any sense.   I don’t want my books to sit in the drawer or on the shelf, I don’t want them to be just for me . . .

I’ve been thinking of starting something new because I think part of what challenges me the most about this rewrite is that I have to spend a great deal of time using critical thinking to rework scenes so that they both maintain interest and support the greater story.  Writing first drafts really doesn’t demand a whole lot of brain power–first drafts are nice little playspaces if you play your cards right.  Sometimes first drafts can kind of rob you of your confidence if you start and restart and restart and restart as sometimes happens when you just can’t leave well enough alone.

So yeah . . . Back to being a Mom.  Back to keeping my head above water.  Back to thinking about what I’m going to do for a real job in case this whole crazy turn of events lands me back to living at my mother’s house ‘cause we have no other friends or family members to lean on in case he still needs 24hr supervision after his release from the rehab center or nursing home or wherever he may end up.

One funny thing to share that happened today:  While I was visiting, someone from speech therapy came in for an evaluation.  Speech therapy is a fascinating job–my son goes through it for his Autism, and it’s they’re job to link the words and pictures and gestures and memories with the thoughts and speech.  The therapist had also seen him on thanksgiving day before I came to see him.  They talked a little about what was done that day.  The speech therapist gave him a prompt and asked. “Besides being a stay at home dad, you also told me you were . . . . ?”
My husband smiled and twisted his beard a little, but the words were stuck.
“That you’re a writer!  And a poet . . . And that you’ve had a few articles published.”

A little bittersweet for me today, but it was good to see such an earnest smile on his face.

***POOF***

The book is done.  Every word, every scene, every sentence is essential.  It is flawlessly written–no grammar, syntax or spelling issues, no plot holes, no loose ends, no pointless characters or abandoned ideas.  Within the confines of this well dressed, beautifully printed and perfect manuscript writhes a living, breathing being, capable of communicating with other people, capable of creating new worlds within them, capable of creating the surrender of disbelief–the TOTAL, willing surrender of disbelief.  To gladly trade realty for hours on end within this world.  Every word is like a scale, every sentence a sinew of muscle, every chapter a bone or elbow or knee or a face.  That’s what I want for this book.

And When I send it off to the Agent, he takes his time with it.  He sees through the more contreversial stuff to the heart and soul of the book, to it’s message, to it’s themes–you gotta make do with what you got; everybody is equal despite gender, despite sexuality.  He calls me.  He offers strong guidance.  He asks permission to send it along to a few people he knows within the publishing business.  He and I both know what we’re bargaining with.  We are loooking for a publisher to treat the book with respect, to recognize that this will be a dependable money maker for years to come and that it will easily be a popular adult series.  We work together, proofing the manuscript, taking advice on further rewrites, artwork for the cover, etc.  I’m offered a contract.  I gladly accept the responsiblity of marketing and promoting my material because I believe in it, and I can make money for the publishing house that gave me a chance in this dream field.

. . . So just a little blog today.  I encouage you to write your own **POOF** statement and see where it goes.

Eventually we went through some sort of lockdown in study hall and we were all forbidden to talking to one another, which was fine, really–it was kind of nice to remember that my schoolwork actually did interest me a lot more than having to maintain eye contact with this kooky chick throughout her non-stop stories, but the mandatory quiet time didn’t exactly silence her.  Day 1 of mandatory silence and she brought out this giant red notebook, college ruled, brand new, and she just started writing and writing and writing and writing–didn’t waive hi, didn’t attempt to get my attention, didn’t even stop long enough to look around the room to see what anyone else was doing.  She just wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote . . . And I never saw a word of it.  Just before that year was up, she gave me a folded note that was no more than a paragraph long that very neatly summed up all of the stories she had been telling me:  “I miscarried.  Bobby is going into the army and I am going to go to embalming school in Toledo to become a funeral director.”

Had she started with that line, I think I would have been hooked from the beginning, but let me tell you, I didn’t get any of this as she was telling me the story.  Her stories were just one big, horrific blur with no beginning, climatic happenings would give you a right hook out of nowhere, leaving this audience of one stunned with no time in between punches to make sense of any of it.  She must have told me at least 4 or 5 times per hour that she was raped or beaten by her boyfriend or stepfather or her uncle’s neighbor’s grandfather’s farmhand while she was out drunk, milking cows.  She must have miscarried at least as many times as the Duggar’s have had kids.
And sometimes, right as I’m about to hit the keys, I think of her, and I freeze.  I write a line or two and I choke.  I write a line or two, then let the backspace key eat the words back up again like Pacman gobbling power pellets.

There was another girl that I was kind of sort of friends with who was pretty, intelligent, thin as a rail and far, far more crazy than my table buddy from study hall, and for good reasons.  Her parents lived in this strange hillside junkyard, coincidently, not far from the haunted cemetery my study hall girl always blabbered about.  This girl was always picked on in school even as far back as elementary school because her family was so incredibly poor.  They lived in a tarpaper house overrun with inbred cats with malformed limbs and old, sick, incontinent dogs.  Her room had posters of Alice Cooper hanging wherever there was drywall enough to tape them to, wherever there weren’t fist-holes through the walls or foil-backed insulation bulging out of the sides.  She had a metal-framed spring-cot for a bed and a lamp with a bare light bulb sitting in the middle of the floor.  I went there with a friend of mine a couple of times as just a silent tag along, and this girl too was into telling big stories . . . Mostly about going to Columbus with a cousin or a boyfriend we’d never heard of to see Alice Cooper.  She at least smiled when she was lying.  At least her expression changed as she sweetly relived sneaking backstage at a concert that never happened, treating Alice like an old boyfriend, describing to us in graphic detail the romps they would have.  Of course, this made for great driving conversation between me and my other friend as we headed back home from her place.  All we had to do was look at each other and one of us would start rattling off some bit of her story in a crazy voice, and we‘d laugh all the way home, sometimes sitting in the car laughing so hard we couldn‘t leave the car because every muscle in our bodies hurt.

But one time–and I do mean, this one single time– we went to her home and she had this notebook.  This notebook was full of drawings that were gory and sexy and absolutely flawless in execution.  There were no do-over lines, no erased guides, no eraser marks or blot-outs.  The friend I always went there with was an artist.  She and I had had a comic strip that we wrote just for us while we were in Junior high.  She took up the notebook and studied these pictures, and you could see in her face this kind of far-away look wash over her, a mixture of awe and jealousy, of possibilities and shame.  This notebook also had a lot of poetry–poetry that sounded more like lyrics taken from a King Diamond album–and a few short stories that I had the chance to read over while the other two girls talked.

By this time I was a Sophomore in college, getting ready to decide once and for all on my major, already encouraged by the faculty to enter the English Literature program, already writing my own short stories and the beginnings of what would be my first novel, and reading over these short stories, I was dumbstruck.  Her short stories were astoundingly descriptive with a subtle yet pervasive mood, short horror stories no less creepy and unsettling than a tale composed by HP Lovecraft.  I remember asking her about them, and she just kind of shrugged it off–they didn’t matter, the drawings didn‘t matter.  She was going to be a rockstar’s girlfriend for life.  The only other thing she would consider doing career-wise was to be a tattoo artist, but according to my other friend, she never made it out of the junkyard.

And sometimes, when I put my hands to the keys, I stop and think about the time I’ve spent, the time I’ve stolen, hammering away at something I have a hard time sharing with other people.  I look around my own rented, broke-down townhouse, housework undone, mountains of laundry piling up, food all over the floor that the baby has thrown from his highchair, dirty dishes in the sink, a sea of papers spilling and crashing every time I go to find something I’ve lost, I think about how much junk I share my life with and I wonder if I’m ever going to make it out, or if I‘m using my writing as an out.

My writing’s been suffering a little bit lately because I feel I’m just going through the motions.  I’m writing words but they don’t’ feel like they have very much dimension.  I’m typically very dutiful to my dream of becoming an author, and spend at least an hour or two each day trying to rework the book I’ve already written.  I’m pleased that I’ve made it to twenty pages (of 250) so far, but I do get into that funk that asks, What’s the point?     What’s writing ever done for me, really?

I’ve been reading about this new movie by Lars Von Trier and let me tell you something right off the bat:  I really don’t like Lars Von Trier.  I don’t really consider myself a film critic or a cinema geek, but I’ve seen a lot of truly poetic, artistic films and I know how they feel, I know how they look, and I know that even if they don’t always make immediate sense, great films have a presence that touches you and stays with you a long, long time, just like a good book.  If you’ve never seen a film by Andrei Tarkovski, now is a good time to get a subscription to Netflix (because that’s the only way you’ll ever get a hold of one of his films without shelling out boucou bucks for an import) and just load up on the stuff that he’s created.  It’s best to view his last film and work your way back, because otherwise, the earlier films really won’t make any sense whatsoever.  The first Tarkovsky film I ever saw was “The Mirror” . . . and I HATED IT !  It was long, boring, made absolutely no sense–didn’t have a plot, didn’t have characters really, didn’t even have but maybe 7 or 8 scant lines of dialogue, in Russian, scattered over almost 3 hours of film!  But the trick was that we kept talking about it, and talking about it and talking about it, and it seemed to me like the very fact that it was filmed in the Soviet Union, in the 70’s, during a time where Russia might as well have been Mars to people living in the United States, I felt more and more humbled that the images conveyed, the mood they presented, the aesthetic quality of it, COULD mean something to me, a person raised in Appalacia, whose friends live in tar paper homes or use rap and miscarriage as forms of entertainment.

I bring up Lars Von Trier because “Anti Christ” was released this week in the United States, and if you haven’t heard anything about the film, I want you to pick a time sometime either today or tomorrow while it’s fresh in your mind and look it up on Wikipedia, ‘cause you’ve already made it this far in yet another one of my long, rambling blogs–I don’t need to insult your intelligence by giving yet another sloppy rehash of the plot.  When I first read that wikipedia entry, I laughed.  I laughed out loud, literally, because it’s astounding to me that anyone would a) agree to fund a script like this to the tune of 11 million, and b) because it’s just so typically and painfully Lars Von Trier that it just seems like someone is paying him (we, the movie audiences are paying him) to stay stuck on himself, to stay in this same place straddling porn and commercial-ness, with art really not being that much a factor into the equation.  If you read the wikipedia article carefully enough, you’ll find that this script was supposed to be heavily inspired by “The Mirror” and he does, in fact, dedicate the film to Tarkovsky.  I’ve seen Dancer in the Dark and Dogville, and in both of those films, you can feel Von Trier’s presence, and a an almost assumed air of greatness, but he always does just something, usually a big something, to cheapen the film so badly that it almost stumbles over itself to get to Cannes.  I like to think of his as a Kmart-level Tarkovsky–the cinematography is there, the themes are there, but the plot, or the quick disentigration of the plot, cheapens it to a point that you know you’re always going to finish a Von Trier film rolling your eyes or feeling like you want to vomit.

But I have to thank Von Trier for at least giving me some food for thought this last week or so.  I’ve been thinking a lot about what kind of storyteller I am.  I’ve been thinking about what, ultimately, is the point, of telling these stories?  I guess in my mind Writing is impetuous to making money, a way for me to get further away from the junkyard, to travel to the places in the world that are more or less as distant as Mars to me, to really embrace art and make evident those themes, those souls that I see in life that it feels like other people–not everybody but just other people–are sorely lacking in their lives.  But how is that any different than the armchair quarterbacks that are my age, weigh 300 lbs and still think they’ve got a crack at the NFL?  Is there something else that I can do with my life that’s going to help me get to Russia, or the Pyramids, or to Norway, or to Sweeden so I can kick Lars Von Trier in the ass, tell him to get over himself, and stop sabotaging his own films just to get ticket sales off of cheap thrills?

My Father’s side of the family is absolutely chock-full of natural story tellers.  When I was just a little kid, just about every single weekend no matter if it were spring or summer or fall or winter, my uncles–all 6 of ‘em–would get in their trucks and plow them up this deep trenched, muddy backroad to Uncle Carson’s house and gather around this firepit that someone had made out of a dump truck’s wheel well.  They’d sit around and tell stories about my grandfather getting into fights in ever y port while he was in the navy, about my Uncle Art’s exploits as a wealthy Michiganer working for GM, about my Grandmother’s gambling habits and how she gambled away my father’s crib when he was just a baby, of how my Grandfather had swindled just about everyone in southern ohio playin’ poker, on how my Dad had swindled just about everyone in southern ohio playin’ pool.  And I found, as I got older, when I’m together with my friends, that’s all I really want to do is tell stories . . . Remember that time we went to Kathy’s and her mom mixed cat food with her hands on this big cookie sheet on the kitchen table for all them messed up cats?

I have two books in my boy’s room by Paul and Jean d’Aullaire that I had as a kid, and every time I walk by I have to fight the impulse to stop and read and remember what it was like to spend so many long hours just reading and rereading the same stories.  In Thor and Odin and Zeus and Mecury I saw my uncles, my friends the dryads in the trees I spent many long hours hiking with amongst in the woods.  I absolutely hear my voice in those words when I finally do get the time in between all this outside pollution of having to take care of adult things to sit down and write.

To write–it is incredibly important to me that it comes out the way that I see it play every day in my head because if it doesn’t, then some element of the girl in study hall, the girl in the junkyard, will present itself to my potential publishers because they get this, in their everyday work pollution.  They probably have traveled the world, seen the things that are just cartoonish concepts in my head, and are asking, where is the art?  Show me the art!  Show me why yours, of all voices, deserves a chance to survive?

I’m not writing Hemmingway, I’m not writing Chekov, I’m not even writing Nora Roberts or Danielle Steele, but somewhere in this world, the people who don’t even have a fire to sit around and bullshit with other people with, will at least be able to bullshit about my book, if to no one else, at least in their heads.  Von Trier, I haven’t even seen your movie, but it’s been great fodder for face book friends and certainly a great way to pass the time, looking for movie reviews on my blackberry.

Chaos Reigns!