She Lives!

Puntitas is officially well now. She’s been well since Monday, and she knows she’s well because she’s interested in reading, knitting, and eating–three activities she engaged in without much vim or vigor.

She’s also avoiding work, a project which is long over due. Bad Puntitas. Her goal is to work on that today and to officially submit Big, Ugly Translation, which she still hasn’t finished because of a few words that will most likely turn into explanations, rather than translations.

Puntitas current obsession is to get the overdue editing job out of her life and to prepare for an interpreting exam, which she is not optimistic about passing. Puntitas knows this is not the attitude needed to slay the dragon, so in addition to reading in general and reciting probable vocabulary, she will tell herself she will do well, and well she will do.
Needless to say, no official writing is on the agenda for Puntitas. She has had ideas in her head and some desire, but both are probable avoidance mechanisms, especially since both intensify whenever she thinks about editing or studying. It really is a pity that Puntitas’ self-discipline didn’t come back with her good health. Then again, “back” suggests prior existence, no?

Puntitas reads _Bitter Sweets_ by R. Farooki.

Down Sick

Puntitas has been down with a bad coughy thing since Friday, July 3. She went to the doctor on the sixth day, unable to hold out the official seven, which makes western medical professionals very happy. The doctor, whom Puntitas sincerely believes is interested in her well-being or his license, which is close enough, almost sent Puntitas home with a pat on the head and the advice to return at the end of the seven days, but his other motivator (more billing) prevailed, and he prescribed Puntitas antibiotics and cough suppressant while telling her to return in a week for cholesterol and other testing.

While Puntitas thinks such testing would be wise, given her general flabbiness and whatnot, she doesn’t think she’ll actually comply because she believes those tests will result in a never ending series of follow-up appointments, which will inevitably begin ninety minutes past the time printed on the clever little card and cost Puntitas what she used to make on a very good day when she worked in the theoretical realm of J&S.

Puntitas is starting to feel better. She still can’t talk very long without coughing, but she has enough energy to get out of bed and finish the big, ugly translation, sans a few terms that need to be researched. She still stops whatever she’s doing to lie down several times a day, and showering still seems to require more energy than she possesses, mantras like, “only a few more things to do,” getting her through the process and longish sit-downs in one comfy chair or other being necessary once she’s out, but she does once again imagine a life of normal activities without the pressure in her chest.

Puntitas had hoped to start her vacation on a far more positive note.

Puntitas reads _The Sparrow_ by M. D. Russell, _The Ministry of Special Cases_ by N. Englander, _The Finishing School_ by M. Martinez, _Dirty Blond_ by L. Scottoline, and _The Silent Lady_ by C. Cookson,

Penelope and Life Choices

These last couple of weeks have been quietly eventful for Puntitas. After Jerk and Spurt, her sticky handed drain-on-tax-payer-money of a boss, offered his interpreters and translators the chance to sign a three-month extension of the contract he hasn’t bothered to honor for about two years, Puntitas notified him that she wasn’t planning to renew. Since said notification was sent via email, Puntitas wasn’t present when he received it, but she imagines the scene involved wild desktop dancing and choruses of “Ding-Dong the Witch Is Dead,” because, a few short hours later, Puntitas’ voicemail included several messages from regulars whom she hadn’t worked with recently, telling her they’d miss her and wishing her luck. Sadly, J&S isn’t as adept at processing contractors’ payments as he is at being petty and useless.

About the decision itself, Puntitas had come to it long before she told her boss, but it was a decision that was ninety percent made, a die that wanted very much to remain uncast. Puntitas genuinely enjoys her work, and she thinks it’s important, so she finds a lot of satisfaction in it, but what convinced her not to renew were the obvious realizations (1) that the contract was being extended only for three months and (2) that J&S would simply continue to ignore the inconvenient parts of the agreement as he has with the current version. Giving notice was an easy decision to make once Puntitas articulated that for herself: if both parties aren’t willing to play by the contract’s rules, signing is an empty ritual.

The process of searching for reasons to renew was slow. Puntitas used her idle waiting room time to knit socks, a pair of anklets with short-row heels she’s near-completed and frogged four or five times since March because they didn’t fit just right or because some technique or other didn’t turn out very well. At some point in all of that, she lost interest in finishing the pair but continued to work on them because knitting small projects that can be picked up and put down at a moment’s notice is the best use of her waiting room time.

So she knit and frogged desultorily, and Penelope came to mind, the woman who spent twenty years weaving and unweaving her work to put off marrying one of the louts occupying her home while her husband had adventures and got laid. Even as a sister fiberista, Puntitas has always thought those twenty years had to have been tedious in the extreme.

But over the last few months, Puntitas has realized that the tedium gives way to an idle kind of curiosity. It’s probably the minds way of engaging with something. Puntitas went from just whipping up a pair of socks; to keeping her hands busy; to trying different pattern stitches, wrapping techniques, cast-ons, and bind-offs; to experimenting with methods for interacting with the work itself (holding the needles, counting the rounds, sliding the loops along the shafts, etc)—all minor variations on more finished results. It became the Zen of knitting with a twist of hyper neurosis.

Puntitas’ haphazard penchant for knitting things with some flaws, but not too many screeching errors, gave way to a desire for perfection (esthetic balance in the stitches used, tidiness of construction in the heels, etc.), , without caring about how long it took to make the socks. Then as she frogged the heel back for the second or third time, she discovered that her sense of perfection had changed, less emphasis on the esthetic balance and more on the tidiness in the heel construction. Last year, she came up with a short-row heel of her own. It does a better job of covering the holes, but it’s not very elegant in its appearance, so she’s been shifting back and forth between smoothing out glitches in the more usual short-row heel and tinkering with her variation.

And all that tinking and frogging gave Puntitas the calm to think about whether to sign the contract or not, and when she finally gave notice, she felt that sense of lightness and relief that indicates it’s the right decision for her, but she’s also scared because … well, she’s essentially quitting her job in the middle of a recession. She’s taken a few steps in the way of preparation by working a little harder at picking up other jobs and other clients, but work will be slow for the next year or so while she builds up a new set of regulars and while something else comes along. Ultimately, Puntitas wants to work for someone other than herself because she wants benefits, stability, and less travel.

The subject of her more recent waiting-room-sock jams has been that one of the positives of leaving a job voluntarily is that the leaving becomes associated with encouraging memories. Several of her regulars have been very sweet, giving Puntitas kind words, small gifts, and even a little party, so she presently feels strong and confident enough to find another job, emotions that she knows won’t last. They’re the same feelings she has every time she sends out a book manuscript or a batch of poems: she is certain beyond a doubt that something will be accepted, but it’s not.

And that’s another thing Puntitas is in a funk about. Her book-length manuscripts keep getting rejected (one or two more form letters since last post), and so do the individual poems (one more letter to a journal she’d forgotten all about). She knows this is part of the game, and she knows she just needs to keep sending out, but she’s feeling no real motivation right now, and she’s feeling entitled to a good sulk about it.

Puntitas reads _The Year of Living Biblically_ by A. J. Jacobs, _Gods Behaving Badly_ by Marie Phillips, and _the Secret Pearl_ by M. Balogh.

More of the Same

Puntitas has been away because she’s still being a diligent little translator. She is about three fourths of the way through her big ugly translation, and she is starting to feel that it will all be over soon.

She hasn’t gotten any writing done (well, except for three lines of a poem this morning while testing her netbook), but she has received another poetry book rejection, which was impersonal and, therefore, much less shattering than the previous one. She knows she must send more poems and books out, but she’s not going to bother about either proposition until the translation and an editing job are out of the way, which means she’ll go to the post office after July 1.

Puntitas has also been trying to update her computer skills, No mean feat for one who can fairly be called a technophobe. She is still slowly learning her translation software. She is additionally learning to use a netbook, which is set up differently from her desktop unit, and the experience reminds Puntitas yet again that she has developed very specific notions about what makes a comfortable writing environment. The netbook will be a good friend to Puntitas once she has adjusted to the keyboard, conquered the Office 2007 learning curve, fine-tuned her screen reader, and accepted that her new device is not a clone of her current one, the beloved George/Jorge, depending on the language they’re communing in. Puntitas pledges to issue an upcoming post from her new mini bad boy.

Puntitas reads _The Winthrop Woman_ by A. Seton, _Phantom Prey_ by J. Sandford, _Heartstones_ by R. Rendell, and _Sexstrology Anthology_ by S. Giron.

The Ego Is a Fragile Thing

This has been an odd week for Puntitas. She received another book rejection. This one was far more discouraging than she expected. The letter was not a form letter, though it was as sterile and formulaic as some she’s received, and something about the specific wording gave Puntitas the impression that her manuscript was rejected because … well … it sucked.

The rejection was so discouraging, in fact, that Puntitas didn’t do any of her usual procrastination and work avoidance in order to dream up book tours and Nobel Prize acceptance speeches. She actually spent most of her time working on her big, ugly translation, a tedious editing job, and a short translation, the last of which went quickly and smoothly enough to restore Puntitas’ faith in her own abilities, a faith seriously shaken by the big, ugly document.

This week Puntitas also scanned more of the bilingual legal dictionary and started learning Trados, An overpriced application which is designed to make projects like the big, ugly translation easier, but which Puntitas has resisted because she has a good memory and is well versed in Word features like cut and paste and search and replace. Her initial efforts (thanks to the help of other translators) went well, but they’re definitely initial efforts and will probably not help much with the big, ugly translation itself.

Another factor that added to Puntitas’ general productivity was the temporary demise of her mp3 player, which allows Puntitas to lose herself in audio books while engaged in less exotic activities. Nevertheless, the yucky rejection letter was so devastating that she continued working after the device came back to life. It is hard to believe that there’s any point in developing one’s craft when one’s writing … well … sucks.

Puntitas reads _The Winthrop Woman_ by A. Seton.

Second Book Rejection

Puntitas hasn’t checked email since early Monday morning because she’s been incredibly busy. Today, Wednesday, she woke thinking that a response to her book-length manuscript would arrive soon. This noon, when Puntitas finally got online, she discovered that one arrived a few hours after she last logged on.

It’s a beautiful rejection, comforting and kind on the ego, but it is hard nonetheless. Puntitas cried a little over the state of poetry sales in presentday publishing, and that’s okay too.

It reads as follows:

Dear Puntitas:

Thank you for sending us a copy of your manuscript XXXX. I thought the poems that I read were wonderful–tough, powerful, and beautifully crafted. I’m sorry to have to pass on such compelling writing, but we’ve almost categorically avoided poetry projects in the last several years: no matter the quality of the writing, we haven’t found a way to get them to large audiences and recoup our expenses. I’m sorry to disappoint you on this, and I truly hope that you have better luck elsewhere.

Kindest regards,

Puntitas reads _Mistress Bradstreet_ by C. Gordon and _The Winthrop Woman_ by A. Seton.

One Rejection and One Submission

Puntitas received another rejection on Friday. It came from Triquarterly. The form letter was less generic and sterile than most. It was printed on a strip of paper as wide as a standard 8-1/2×11 sheet, but only one third that height.

Puntitas must be producing additional layers of skin because the rejection caused only a brief sting. No mental depictions of cruel and unusual demises followed, and neither was there any frantic rush to the PC to record the event.

Puntitas is also too preoccupied with other things to obsess properly. She’s got some editing to do and more translation both due soon, and her job situation is nearing a head. Fortunately, Puntitas is sleeping better now, more hours at more sleep appropriate times, so she is lucid enough to do what she needs to and avoid the stuff she really shouldn’t dwell on anyway.

Much of today has been spent scanning a bilingual legal dictionary. Puntitas has managed to not-scan this dictionary for a year, but this morning she woke up thinking that it would behoove her to devote one or two days to scanning so that, over the next couple of weeks, she can just look terms up rather than continue her current method of reading four or five texts on a subject to figure out what something means, then reading twice as many to figure out how to translate it. Puntitas will probably have to keep doing some of that, but reducing the number of occasions is definitely a move toward efficiency.

Few things are as tedious to Puntitas as scanning a book. Yes, one positive way of framing the activity is remembering that it takes less than a minute to magically turn a page of dictionary into nice searchable text on the hard drive, but Puntitas, being cranky, rarely frames things positively when she is sitting lump-like at the computer for hours, pressing an open book down on a flatbed scanner, waiting forty-five seconds for the image to be captured and converted to text, turning the page, and repeating the process, and repeating the process, and repeating the process until she’s done and can spend three times as many hours ridding the scan of most of its errors (e.g., revising “judliciai” to “judicial”).

Days spent this way are made up of more hours than ordinary days. They also prompt Puntitas to hurl invectives at publishers, who don’t make all books available electronically to people who can’t just grab and read because they can’t see the print, process the writing visually, or hold the book and turn the pages.

As she invects, Puntitas remembers to mention that she sent out one more batch of poems last week—the writerly act of the week.

So far, only one book rejection. More should be coming soon.

Puntitas reads _Bloody Secrets_ by C. Garcia-Aguilera and _Mistress Bradstreet_ by C. Gordon.

Real Adventures Versus Sham Ones

Thanks to bad seasonal allergies, which some health insurance companies that Puntitas has applied to consider an incurable disease and reason for charging higher premiums (incidentally, , one of Puntitas’ friends says the same of that dreaded preexisting condition menopause), and insomnia (hello, Insomnia, my old friend), Puntitas has read an entire book by Victoria Alexander. The book didn’t actually grab Puntitas very much from the beginning, but she read it all the way through because she read an article last year citing Amanda Quick and Victoria Alexander as queen’s of what she thinks of as “the sparkling period romance,” the more-or-less Regency era love story with repartee, intrigue, and a handful of scenes involving extraordinary impropriety.

Puntitas likes Amanda Quick for her smart, spunky heroines and for her tension, both sexual and suspenseful, though the plots themselves, especially the mystery component are flawed and underdeveloped, even as subplots: pivotal events just sort of happen without an abundance of preparation or explanation, and one event doesn’t necessarily follow clearly from another.

So Puntitas decided to try Victoria Alexander, and the conclusions she has come to are (1) that there’s no pressing need to read more by the same author right away and (2) that Puntitas’ problem with the adventure genre is the concept of adventure for its own sake.

The book Puntitas just read is about a foreign princess who seeks out her estranged English husband, claiming to need his help to research the life of a self-exiled great aunt. The princess’ story, which fails to convince either her husband or the reader, covers a more sinister plot—restoring her country’s crown jewels to their rightful place despite the efforts of a distant cousin, also hoping to recover them in order to gain the throne, a chain of events as probable, intrinsically compelling, and realistic as the ones on General Hospital, the soap Puntitas follows while getting her nails done.

But she digresses.

Being a person of depth and numerous emotional demons, Alexander’s heroine distrusts, omits, and lies every chance she gets, inadvertently and advertently bringing more adventure and sexual tension upon herself and Hubby, neither of which does much for Puntitas, who has been wondering from Page One why the princess doesn’t just take the more direct route of laying the matter out before her great aunt’s English descendents, who have proven themselves loyal to her father but who figure no where in her scheme until ….

Yes, as luck would have it, the climactic scene takes place in the home of the great aunt’s descendents, where the jewels have been waiting for the heroine simply to come and get ‘em. Well, it would have been that simple if she’d done that in the first place. What happens instead is that all her intrigue has led the rival distant cousin to the jewels, so the princess must confront a pistol toting virago in a private sitting room and choose between duty and love in a ballroom filled with gala clad Nobility.

Of course, the princess’ motives are as layered and complex as her lies are convincing. She wants to restore the jewels to her country both to serve her royal house and people and to gain personal autonomy. She wants to involve her estranged husband (this is a sequel to another book in which the princess escapes her minders, falls in love, gets married, and goes back home a la Roman Holiday, the 1953 film starring Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn) in order to regain his love, and she repeatedly justifies both courses of action by saying she wants to have an adventure.

This last is the reason Puntitas hasn’t been able to make much headway in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The plot of that work is simple too: take the ring and leave it where it belongs. The characters so charged don’t know where that is, so they must ask around to find out where that place may be or who may know more about how to find it. Puntitas understands all that and is willing to play along as difficulties arise on the way to the next clue or informant, but she loses all sympathy for everyone as characters are asked, “Do you want to take the shortcut, or would you rather go the long way and have adventures?” and reply, “Oh, I want adventures.”

Life offers complications aplenty without needlessly manufacturing drama and adventures that put people and relationships at risk. Puntitas supposes that for those who enjoy adventure for its own sake (and drama too—The Tempest is an utter mystery to Puntitas), there’s probably a high in activity even when the activity is purposeless in general (as in The Tempest) or purposeless to achieving a goal (for Alexander’s princess, lying to her estranged husband doesn’t actually win him back, one reported goal, and not-visiting the great aunt’s descendents prevents her from going to the most likely source of information about the jewels, another reported goal). But for Puntitas, the high lies in knowing what is to be accomplished and in doing what needs to be done, two things that are difficult and adventurous enough on their own.

To be genuinely exciting, adventures need to be meaningful for the characters and for the world they live in. Having characters create them simply to test their metal is like attempting suicide to understand how important life is or doing drugs or booze to get a sense of happiness or relief. The events are almost always meaningless, and the insights they produce are unsatisfying counterfeits of real thought. An adventure story is particularly meaningless if, as in this case, there would be no story (in its present form) had the character taken the most obvious course of action, given her realistic options, in the first place.

Puntitas reads _Her Highness, My Wife_ by V. Alexander, which is less exciting than Puntitas made it sound.

Revising at This Late Stage

After a couple of months of not thinking about her book-length manuscripts, Puntitas woke up last week with the thought that one of her poems would benefit from the addition of two details. She spent most of the rest of the week distracting herself with other thoughts because, well, the manuscripts are done, but then yesterday, she paused in her distraction to add the details, put the entire poem into the present tense, tinker with the ending, and prune some of the prosier language.

She did hear the sentence, “That’s why it hasn’t been published,” cross her consciousness, and after inserting the revised poem into the manuscript itself (Puntitas revises the individual poem file first and then goes to the book to remove the old version and insert the new), she was glad she’s been too lazy to make new copies of the book.

Puntitas also had the sobering realization last night that save for one or two journals, which escape her at present, she’s pretty sure she’s received rejections from everyone she submitted to in February, so she must send out more poems.

A poet’s suffering is never done.

Puntitas reads _Blood and Guts: a Short History of [Western] Medicine_ by R. Porter, a book which, though readable, informative, and interesting, is nonetheless not as entertaining as the title suggests. In fact, Puntitas might have skimmed and fizzled if she were not reading it for an editing project she’s working on.

Less Is More

On the recommendations of friends, I’ve been reading more formula fiction than usual. The realization I think I’m coming to is that less is definitely more as far as plot twists and social issues go. The last two books I’ve read serve nicely as case in point.

Both are mystery series, revolving around unconventional women. The Spencer-Fleming (written currently) is about a female Episcopal priest who serves in a small Midwestern town, has a relationship with the police chief, and manages to get herself mixed up in high profile crimes. The Forrest (written 20 years ago) is about a lesbian police officer who works homicide in the city of Los Angeles and keeps her sexual orientation to herself (more don’t-ask-don’t-tell than actually closeted).

The latter is about half the length of the former. It’s plotline is relatively simple, focusing on one crime, dispensing with secundary crimes and red herrings relatively quickly, and organizing the personal subplot around a clear central idea, how one gets over a past relationship. For me, this simplicity makes both the story and the characters more compelling and the plot twists and red herrings more surprising and effective.

In the former, so much is happening that I find myself spending as much energy trying to figure out how characters and subplots go together (not because the writing isn’t clear) as I do on following the action, and I notice myself thinking, “How clever” and “of course,” rather than “Oh, wow” or “Oh, no.” I also find myself making evaluative comments about how the social issues are dealt with: illegal aliens, age differences in romantic relationships, old guard vs. new guard, intercultural/interfaith relationships, public vs. private. While the story was well crafted, more of the characters were flat, relying on the series, not the individual story, to give them depth.

Now that I’m starting to think more about writing and revising prose, I realize that I felt insecure about keeping plotlines simple, but lately, I’ve been thinking I shouldn’t worry.

Puntitas reads _The Diary of a Nobody_ by G. and W. Grossmith, _I Shall Not Want_ by J. Spencer-Fleming, and _Murder at the Nightwood Bar_ by K. V. Forrest.