Acceptance Hurrah

Puntitas is a happy gal. She had a pleasant work experience. The last three, which occurred in a four-week time frame (ah, the joys of self-employment), required interactions with the stupidity and ignorance of the less evolved. Today’s went well (short and sweet, but fully paid) and included a ninety-minute panoramic of the drought stricken and economically depressed west San Joaquin Valley. Only good friends, cola drinks, and bags of corn nuts can turn that into anything but grim—except for the whole ninety minutes of lost aspect.

The other two pieces of good news are

1. The friend who drove Puntitas to her job (today dubbed her “assistant”) received some hopeful news on the job prospects front.
2. Puntitas received an acceptance.

Today’s acceptance supports Puntitas’ belief that publishing is more about luck than strategy. Two poems were accepted for an anthology scheduled to appear in February, if the funding gods are smiling. Puntitas almost didn’t respond to the call for submissions, and when she did, she acted more from momentum (it was during one of her submission frenzies) than conviction since she didn’t really think the poems matched the call. But they were accepted, so … who’s to say … ?

Of course, Puntitas’ enthusiasm is tempered by the fact that she keeps checking two online mags for her latest hits, and the new issues aren’t up. She isn’t really expecting one to be ready until December or January, but the other one should have been up by now. Obsessing, she Googled her way to a Wikipedia entry on the journal and learned that the publication schedule is irregular, so patience is called for and the inability to brag keeps her silent.

Puntitas reads _The Sealed Letter_ by E. Donaghue.

the Value of Experience

Puntitas has organized her favorites into four nice neat folders, one of which is “Writing,” so she feels very accomplished. She has also set up her kitchen cum postage scale, and after some experimentation, she has discovered that she can accurately weigh her manuscripts, provided she paperclips the top and bottom edges so that most of the physical document is on the weighing platform. If she lays the document flat, like a leggy damsel with limbs aloft, the weight is off by one to two ounces.

The other thing Puntitas discovered is that she’s been putting way too much postage on her manuscripts. After using slide rule and graphing calculator (okay, Puntitas exaggerates, but only a little) combined with new scale and USPS website, Puntitas has determined that six forty-four-cent stamps are more than sufficient for her fifty-five-page document, plus cover letter, plus SASE, plus post card, plus entry form where applicable.

The other literary activity Puntitas engaged in (minimal writing has occurred since last post) is that Puntitas and a friend went to an experimental theater production yesterday. It was fun, four Poe selections partially read, partially dramatized in various rooms of the university library. The first was “The Raven—all screams and hurling self onto floor–which was Puntitas’ least favorite performance, as she imagines the speaker of the poem to be crumbling in a fidgety quiet. The rest of the pieces—“The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Black Cat,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart”—were more low-key, but there too, the performances tended to characterize “madness” with the hysteria of someone who has never actually been around people with delusions and other mental illnesses. The interpretations also lacked the nuance that only comes of having ten or twenty years worth of experiences with people and life. In “Amontillado,” For instance, the narrator carried herself with a venomous intent, which is how Puntitas imagined the character when she was younger. Now, however, Puntitas imagines the serenity of a decision made and the strain of giving the self courage enough to seize the opportunity. After all, maturity gives one both the tolerance to deal with unpleasantness and the patience to take action when tolerance is exhausted, and Puntitas makes this remark after an especially unpleasant experience at work.

Puntitas also noticed that the productions, which were understandably low on scenery, were also disappointingly low on sound effects. Poe is full of sound, creating much of the tension by describing stillness, the ticking of a clock, the jingling of the bells on someone’s hat. He is so meticulous about sound that Puntitas suspects he was a predominately aural person or that he spent enough time drinking at night to value his hearing. Puntitas thought that greater tension would have been achieved with subtler acting, more sound effects, and greater experience of life.

When Puntitas is being sensible, she thinks that her eight years of percolation between graduation and the present have been good for these reasons, but Puntitas is rarely ever sensible for very long.

Puntitas reads _Reflections in a Golden Eye_ by C. McCullers and _Bridget Jones Diary_ by H. Fielding.

Dusting Off After a Stumble

A rejection sure can take the wind out of the old sails. Puntitas was feeling very writerly and accomplished all week. She revised, pondered, experimented. She had a positive workshop with a friend, who really liked her narrative essay and gave her helpful suggestions. She had an idea for a new poem. Then she received yesterday’s rejection, which was especially disappointing because she thought it was the most likely of the journals to take her work.

Today Puntitas caught up on email, had lunch with a friend, floated around the house doing very little of consequence, spoke to two other friends on the phone, finished the fudge in the kitchen. She thought about working on the essay, thought about working on her tables of contents, thought about revising her resume for a couple of possible jobs. But she didn’t do any of those things, and she didn’t turn off her computer because the week’s activity had gotten her into the habit of writing, and not writing was making her restless.

So Puntitas decided she’d do a little writing anyway–start that poem that had been rolling around in her head, the one with the ending, but no beginning or sense of voice. She wrote a few short lines that didn’t grab her, a vague description that didn’t do much even on the literal level. She thought about them to figure out what to do next, And she realized that the items she described were nested, like Russian dolls. That was the first metaphor she came up with—Russian nesting dolls, which is physical enough and universally understood, but not really part of Puntitas’ experience, more a literary cliche. She asked herself what other mundane thing nested or stacked naturally, and she thought about the almond tree she grew up with, the nut inside a woody shell inside a suede-like hull. She added that to her draft, only she didn’t know the name of the hull, So she went to Wikipedia to read about almonds.

Wikipedia is a beautiful thing.

Puntitas learned lots of interesting things about almonds. They’re native to the Middle East and Mediterranean. The wild varieties have pink blossoms and are poisonous, even lethal in large enough amounts. the domesticated varieties have white flowers and are safe to eat. The almonds themselves are technically not nuts, but a drupe. If the shell has been removed, they’re shelled, and if the shell is present, they’re unshelled—the most amusing part of the entry hands down. They’re related to the apricot, And forty-two percent of the world’s production is cultivated in Puntitas’ home state.

She read the entire entry mostly as an avoidance mechanism, but when she returned to her draft to properly name the shell and hull, she discovered she could use these details to shape the poem, to develop the speaker and set up the conceit. She wrote two expository stanzas and thought about what images and information they would lead to. Then she stopped, with the plan that she would continue tomorrow. She doesn’t think this poem will draft itself, but she does think that it will allow her to discover its rhythm and help her write it.

Puntitas is sleepy now. It is time for bed.

Puntitas reads _The Link_ by C. Tudge and _first Comes Love_ by M. Balogh.

Another Rejection

Puntitas received another rejection today, a form email beginning, “Dear Writer,” from a journal she thought would probably like her work. The poems she sent were strong, and the audience seemed ideal.

Very disappointing.

Puntitas reads _The Link_ by C. Tudge, which is really short and interesting, but slow-going somehow.

Other Readers Needed

Thanks to a recent bout of insomnia and to a slow work week, Puntitas has been putting a lot of time into revising her narrative essay. She was surprised to read it today and discover that minor changes would fill in a lot of gaps, hint at back-story, support themes, unify apparently disparate elements, and address many of the evils she had worried about last night. She was satisfied enough with the day’s revisions to send the draft on to a friend for feedback.

Puntitas really needs an outside reader for this piece since her emotional response to it on first reading tells her she’s still too close to the subject to gauge the work objectively. The person she sent it to isn’t an ideal reader in that she shares a characteristic with Puntitas that is likely to filter her interpretation, but Puntitas wants to hear what she has to say anyway because Puntitas values her skills as a reader and because their shared characteristic makes her a good person to discuss the subject with. After their conversation, Puntitas plans to go through another round of revision. Then she may ask another friend, who does not share the characteristic, to comment as well, but that will depend on how she’s feeling about the piece at the time.

Inviting others to experience a foreign world is a hard task. Puntitas hadn’t thought about how hard until recently, when she read Dry by Augusten Burroughs, a memoir about a gay man going through rehab and trying to maintain sobriety despite the illness and death of a friend and former lover.

Puntitas was able to identify with much of the book. The narrator’s friendships reminded her of her own friendships. His experiences with addiction and recovery connected her with the people she knows who are in their addictions or recoveries as well as with aspects of her job. Specific scenes and moods evoked parallel episodes in Puntitas own life and in that of her friends’.

One part of the book, however, that she was less able to connect to was a certain portion of the gay story line. Puntitas isn’t gay or particularly oriented to finding a life partner of any type, so love stories are generally interesting as curiosities (hence Puntitas’ fascination with formula romances). This one was more interesting than usual in that it was about someone who has to “fall out of love” and maintain a friendship with a person who doesn’t reciprocate. The story drew Puntitas less when the former lover develops AIDS and dies, prompting turmoil in the narrator, which eventually leads to relapse.

Stories about terminal illness are generally hard to pull off because they tend toward the sentimental or sensationalistic, because characters’ reactions follow a few expected paths, and because the death, which comes at or right before the climax, leads to a handful of predictable events. Puntitas has an especially hard time with stories about women with cancer and (A) big families or (B) close friends.

The few books Puntitas has read by contemporary gay writers have tended to figure a character (major or minor) with AIDS (often in its more advanced stage). For Puntitas, who is an outside reader, this feels like a cliché, but she suspects that, for the gay writers and readers, the AIDS character is an acknowledgement of someone who is part of their landscape and that other characters’ responses to him are significant markers within the community.

Puntitas’ own narrative essay risks the same kind of resistance that characterized her reading of Burroughs AIDS story line. The piece is about exclusion. That will be clear to anyone who reads it. But because so much memoir about this topic centers on exclusion, readers may not bother to tease out the subtleties of the type of exclusion being described. The nuances aren’t buried enough to actually need teasing out. But the readers’ expectation and lack of direct experience or real empathy dull their perceptions. This is why it will be important for Puntitas to have outside readers.

Puntitas reads _The Link_ by C. Tudge.

Riding the Revision Trail

After many days or weeks of writerly slovenliness, Puntitas has done some revision. Last night, she worked on one of the poems she’s been revising lately, the one she discovered to be absolutely incoherent ten years after it was finished. The changes are still more than surface-level editing, but they’re no longer about changing the whole direction of the piece. After last night’s session, Puntitas thinks the poem will change very little from now on.

Today she also worked on a nonfiction prose piece she considered done. Its “done”-ness was determined ten years ago, so Puntitas believed it prudent to read it before launching it into the world.

As far as revisions go, most of what Puntitas did was surface-level, cutting wordiness, getting details to match up, clarifying vagueness, and removing repetition. While she’s happy with that work, she’s not willing to say the piece is done. Her plan had been to read the piece from beginning to end without tinkering, but she started to notice the sort of little glitches that are easy to forget, so she tinkered as she went along, losing all sense of the voice and tension of the piece. She’ll need to read it again in a day or two because she isn’t sure that the narrator’s central problem is clearly set up, explained, or resolved. The sections that are supposed to do that may not do enough and may commit the additional sin of interfering with pacing.

On a personal level, the piece made Puntitas cry, not that her writing is particularly moving, rather that the problem is still unresolved for her, a state of things which she knows, but was not expecting to react to so strongly. The piece may require an objective reader after some revision.

Puntitas reads _The Link_ by C. Tudge.

Hard to Publish

Puntitas doesn’t remember when she last posted or what particulars she was rambling about. Lately, She’s been coming out of the residual funk of quitting her job. Some decisions require grieving even when they’re the right ones.

She’s been revising the incoherent poem (yes, that was one of the topics of her last post), a task she feels she’s close to completing, and she thinks she’s finished revising one of the poems that sprang from reading someone else’s blog. She likes the new poem very much, plans to send it out, in fact, but she’s not sure it’s all that different from the source, and she suspects it lacks the punch and clarity of the original.

Which brings another topic to mind.

This new poem is likely to be labeled a poem about “disability.” Since Puntitas has one, the subject falls into her list of themes. She’s got a number of such poems, enough to fill a chapbook, which she’s organized and also plans to send out. The interesting thing is that only one of the poems in said chapbook has been published, even though Puntitas thinks others are well written and worthy of appearing in print.

She’s made the same observation about her poems on “ethnic themes,” and she wonders what, aside from submitting to specialty publications, she can do to make this type of work attractive. She’s not convinced that saving it for the book, like the lesser songs that make an album, is really an option since this work takes up large chunks of her manuscripts. She hasn’t even found a way to think about the problem or coincidence. She’s certainly sending out the work as often as she does pieces on other subjects, and she’s tying them to the journals’ themes and wants as much as she can. Puntitas has some mulling over to do.

Oh, Puntitas changed the title of one of her manuscripts after adding the newly finished poem. She’s thinking she’d like to finish another poem and use a line from it instead.

Puntitas reads _Scandal Becomes Her_ by S. Busbee, _God’s Middle Finger_ by R. Grant, _The Art of Setting Stones_ by M. P. Keane.

Back to the Mail

Puntitas is in the throes of much writerliness and knitting. About the latter, she’s making a long and flowy cape, probably the longest and flowiest of her collection. Currently rows are about 650 stitches long. By the time she finishes, they’ll be at a thousand.

About the former, she has sent out five more batches of poems. She has reread the individual pieces before printing or emailing. In half the cases, she has been satisfied with the poem and sent it out as is. In the rest, she has revised, cutting or reworking an awkward line or word in some instances, moving or adding whole stanzas in others. Rather than frustrating her as it has previously, the process has felt reassuring, proof that she can read her work objectively and that she does generally like it.

When she reread her Miltonian sonnet, the one that responds to “When I Consider How My Light Is Spent,” she decided it needed much work. The images she had been most concerned about were the most effective; the ones she’s been comfortable with needed the most work. The conceit in the first two stanzas wasn’t clear enough on a literal level, so she changed it to one that had seemed trite when she was drafting, but now efficient (more expected by the reader) and apt (appropriately descriptive). Initially, she thought that going with the familiar meant falling into cliché, but now she thinks that clichés can be revived with original details and that they can shortcut readers to a frame of mind that is the first step to the ending of the poem, which will hopefully not be cliché.

Now the greatest amount of work is needed in the sestet. Puntitas read both Milton’s sonnet and the passage in Matthew that it eludes to many times while writing her response, and for other readers to make sense of Puntitas’ sonnet, they would need to read both many times as well. Without that background, the octet and the sestet don’t make sense together and her comeback to his last line sounds like a digression. All in all, she can keep half the lines in the last section, but will probably need to do a lot of reshaping.

Oh, and another rejection arrived last week, an optimistic form letter from the North American Review. . Puntitas thought she had exhausted her supply of pending rejections from the previous mailing.

Puntitas reads _The Friendly Young Ladies_ by M. Renault.

Lies and Distractions

Puntitas has not been feeling well, not sick exactly, but tired, achy, and stressed—like the beginnings of sick or the drag of PMS–so she’s done some lying around between appointments and sessions at the computer. She started reading The Likeness by Tana French while still only a few chapters into the Masot because she really liked the first TF she read and wanted something along those lines to help her unwind while lying around.

The book is engrossing: a police officer goes undercover to investigate the murder of a postgraduate student who looks uncannily like her. As in French’s previous book, this one deals with the themes of friendship and of the effect of personal baggage on the choices we make. It also spends a lot of time on dissimulation. Most interactions involve fake responses and half truths, even between people who are expected to be honest with each other.

These are all themes that are near and dear to my own heart, the last being especially on my mind lately because it is such an integral part of the work I do. People lie to social service and government officials, and on the opposite side of the equation, they lie to colleagues and clients. They lie to family members and to superiors, and they lie to themselves. I know this because the details of a single exchange don’t add up and because I’m privy to several conversations involving one person in two or more contexts. The reasons for lying vary from a desire for gain, to denial or avoidance, to simple habit. What I became aware of as I read the French is that, in and out of my job, I notice the lies, predict them accurately, and assign motivations to them, which in most cases, also explain and predict other behaviors. In life, the manner of and reason for the lies are telling when trying to understand someone. This is true in fiction to, but in fiction, lies are sorted out by comparing responses and details from scene to scene. For the reader, the trick is to sift out all the distraction between the scenes to be juxtaposed. For the writer, the trick is to distract, without letting the reader notice and to allow oneself to be distracted when developing a set of characters.

I think I’ve written about this subject. If I had more energy, I’d check to find out whether I’ve changed my mind about it.

Puntitas reads _La sombra del templario_ by N. Masot, _The Likeness_ by T. French, and _Bone by Bone_ by C. O’Connell.

The Poetry Reading

The friend who was in Korea during my post office crisis has returned with the news that she’s accepted a job offer there. She doesn’t leave till the end of the month, but we met tonight for our last or second to last evening. Though I’m really excited for her, I will miss her very much because she is one of my closest friends. She is also the person with whom I spend most time at the bookstore, and she has a knack for turning metaphors into disconcerting social events. Today, for instance, Puntitas learned that writing a dissertation is like a bowel impaction that requires much time at the toilet, a considerable amount of grunting and groaning, sundry medical consultations, more straining, sweat, pushing, heaving, fiber therapy, enema therapy, and a final surging-tearing-thrusting-expelling passing through. Puntitas learned too that she didn’t have to eat all of her refried beans and that she’d lost her craving for a dessert of flan.

After dinner and coffee, we came back to my house to talk more about my friend’s new job and all the packing, selling, and storing she’d have to do before the move. As we were sitting in my study, where my manuscripts live in their yard-tall Federal Express boxes, she asked if she could read my work. This wasn’t the first time, but it was the first time I said yes (except for the one time I showed her something in progress [after much begging on her part] and got annoyed at her lack of workshop skills). Today the experience was very different.

Initially, it was boring because my friend just read silently, giggling or making the odd Hmm or huh.

Then it was mildly annoying when my friend suddenly started commenting on one of the poems, a sonnet. A word was misspelled. The final image didn’t make sense. The speaker wasn’t very sympathetic. The annoyance was not about the feedback itself, which was useful. It was about the insistence. Puntitas was done with the poem. Yes, she’d revised it the weekend before. Still, she was done, and she had finished, and the only thing she had any interest in doing with it was putting it in the mail. Then that indifference was its own revelation, and Puntitas sat back to let time keep on slipping, slipping, slipping into the future.

Several hours or minutes (depending on the specific time continuum) later, my friend went back to reading, and the experience got interesting. As she read, my friend announced the title of each poem. She giggled or grunted as before. This time, however, she also read lines or images out loud, or she made brief comments at certain points. In other words, she did what people do when they’re reading a book for pleasure. Those comments, brief and spontaneous though they were, provided lots of helpful information about how the work was coming through to her. Her other observation—that, if she didn’t know Puntitas personally, she would assume Puntitas to be a lesbian—went into the same mental compartment as the dissertation-as-bowel-impaction image.

After my friend had left, I thought more about the sonnet. It wasn’t the usual obsessive thinking that belongs to a work in progress, rather the indifferent consideration of someone who has no stake in the outcome. My friend was right about the ending. It includes an image that explains the speaker’s attitude, but the image doesn’t make sense because it can’t literally be true. I opened the file and began by tackling the misspelling. The changes came relatively quickly—all in the final sestet. The finished poem reads more like natural speech; the rhyme scheme is less slant; and the closing image works on a literal and poetic level. I think both the temporal and emotional distance were what made the revisions easy.

Puntitas reads _The Barred Window_ by A. Taylor.