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.

Back to Thinning the Herd

Puntitas deleted half of the contents of her nonfiction prose folder. This was hard. In page-length alone, she was two thirds of the way to a collection, and in terms of quality, the pieces she deleted weren’t bad. She deleted them anyway because

 they were incomplete.
 they needed a lot of work.
 the style/voice was so annoying that Puntitas couldn’t stand the thought of working on them even to fix that.
 They covered the same couple of themes and handled them in the same way.
 The settings and characters were so uniformly the same that the pieces blended even for Puntitas.
 No unifying theme suggested itself in terms of how the individual pieces can be combined into a collection.
 Nothing jumped out as far as how to reshape the individual pieces if they were to be revised.

Of the six pieces left, only two will definitely remain essays. A third, the one she has been working on, will most likely also continue to be an essay. The last three, however, will likely evolve into short stories though one of these last can go either way.
Though Puntitas understands that essays are about ideas while stories are about characters, the distinction gets harder for her to sort through when she considers the memoir with the hammer-and-nails part of her brain. One piece is clearly about an idea, which is really only described in the current draft, so that piece will continue to be an essay. Two other pieces cover both characters and ideas, but because Puntitas wants readers to know the experiences actually happened to at least one person and probably others, those pieces will also almost certainly continue to be essays. The other three pieces can be revised to emphasize either the character or the idea, each type of revision calling for more or less the same amount of work.

What she finally does with the pieces will depend on more pragmatic factors. In part it will be based on what the material suggests once she settles down to work on it. In part it will depend on how many pages she needs to complete her fiction anthology. In part it will depend on whether a piece is published as a particular genre. Puntitas is not above sending prose out as fiction if it can pass for it. She doesn’t expect to do the opposite because she doesn’t believe in claiming an experience that isn’t hers, But she also knows that we don’t behave according to our ethics as consistently as we would like to think.

Puntitas reads _the Link_ by C. Tudge.

The Remembered Self

Puntitas has begun to reinvent herself. At least that was the subject of today’s unexpected meditation.

For the first thirty years of her life, Puntitas was anally tidy (books alphabetized and arranged by subject; clothing hung by season, type, and such details as long-sleeve vs. short-sleeve; drawers discretely compartmentalized, even the undies drawer in which all items were folded). Then one day around the time she started teaching, Puntitas decided she’d put something away haphazardly because she had a stack of papers to grade or a class to prepare for, but her intension was that she’d get back to that minor chaos in a few hours or the next day at most.

Teaching kept her busy. Interpreting and translating also took up her time. She kept thinking she really would get to that now handful of troubled spots later.

Twelve years down the road, Puntitas is no longer teaching or doing the same type of interpreting work, and she realizes she’s been living in the sort of chaos that mirrors how she felt about both work experiences. It isn’t that they were bad, by any means. Though there were rough patches, she mostly enjoyed both jobs and learned a great deal from them. It’s that, to a large degree, they were learn-as-you-go situations, so Puntitas associates them with feelings of muddling-through or of also-having-to-deal-with-unpleasant-peripherals. By comparison, the newness factor of her current work is very small, so she only feels uncertain for short lengths of time.

The concept of reinvention came to Puntitas this morning when she decided she’d tidy up the messy zones of her bedroom, one disaster at a time. The first area was the top of her dresser, a pile of partially finished knitting projects, Christmas and birthday gifts, knickknacks, cosmetics, and the remnants of several colds past. She tossed out most of the knitting (all bad projects she finally accepted were beyond saving), redistributed the gifts, added most of the knickknacks to the garbage box, heaped in most of the cosmetics (unused) and cold debris as well, and discovered jewelry, perfume, and a few other mementos of the sort of person Puntitas had been before the chaos set in. Twelve years ago, Puntitas wore dresses at least half the time. She wore nice perfume, and sometimes she wore discrete jewelry. While she was a fashion devotee only for a year or two in her early twenties, when she was thin and young enough to think she might not be plain, she did bother about her appearance for a few years around the time she started her official working life because she felt generally good about herself and hopeful about her future.

Finding all the things she once used felt like finding someone else’s possessions and reconstructing that life from those things. It was the sort of exercise Puntitas does when constructing a character, asking herself what such a person wears, eats, does for a living, does when not working. She actually did all of that, stopping only when she discovered she was constructing a memory of herself. Perhaps it is time for Puntitas to reinvent a more life savvy version of who she was.

And two more rejections arrive today. Too bad such an interesting meditation had to end thusly. Ah, well.

Puntitas reads _Dry_ by A. Burroughs and _Siete años secuestrado por las FARC_ by L. E. Pérez.

Ups and Downs

Fortune is a fickle force. The day after Puntitas’ cartwheels of celebration, she received a rejection (form email with her name), and she received news that she did not get very far in the selection process of a job she’d expected to interview for. Then today she received birthday flowers though her birthday was several weeks ago. Ups, downs, and ups again—good thing chocolate is both a reveler and a consolation.

Puntitas has been knitting socks, Three pairs in a two-week period. She wasn’t feeling particularly poetic, so she couldn’t get up the nerve to read her latest set of revisions. Today, in a moment of heel annoyance, she pulled up a file and discovered a burst of poetic mojo.

The incoherent poem she’s been revising is pretty much done now, after more brutal trimming and lots of editing. She used the search-and-replace feature to strip out the hard returns and put pipes in their places. Then she edited as if she were reading prose, and used search-and-replace to turn the pipes into hard returns again. The poem is still one or two readings away from official “finished” status, but Puntitas doesn’t think the future changes will be significant. In fact, she went ahead and put today’s version into the book-length manuscript.

She also read another poem, the one she recently added to one of the books. She made a few minor changes, more editing than revision, and one change that is significant indeed. The literal situation described is one person helping another. Puntitas has worried that, given other details, the person being helped will be perceived as helpless, an interpretation which can obscure the point of the piece. Today Puntitas found a way of redirecting the reader’s perception. She named the character after a well-known literary figure, a truly inspired decision since the character in the poem is doing the sorts of things the literary character is known for. She’s feeling much better about that poem now too.

There’s only one more poem (already in the books) that Puntitas wants to reread and significantly revise, and there’s one draft and one idea she’d like to develop for these books, but she’s feeling comfortable about sending the manuscripts out as they are.

Puntitas reads _The Shadow Wife_ by D. Eden and more of _The Art of Setting Stones_ by M. P. Keane, which is beautiful, but too slow for someone who is often sleepy.

Random Thoughts

Puntitas has been wrestling with random writerly thoughts, most of them negative since she’s also at an inauspicious curve in her cycle. She’s already gotten rejections for two batches of poems from her most recent mailings. The letters themselves have been blandly inoffensive, and the quick turn-around has been a pleasant and liberating change. Still, rejections are rejections, objective reminders of the statistical probability that publishing one book, multiple books, is not high.

Another burst of reality along these same lines came when Puntitas was enjoying one of her favorite television shows, knitting needles in hand, of course. Prolific song writer and producer Kara DioGuardi was asked why she didn’t have a career as a performer since she sang well. She said that it just hadn’t worked out. She’d had contracts with recording studios twice, but neither had turned into an actual album. Puntitas’ mind went immediately to her own fledgling writing career (it’s all about Puntitas). If DioGuardi, who possesses singing ability, a successful complementary career, relevant contacts, and inside knowledge about her industry, hasn’t been able to put herself at the mike and on the CD cover, what makes Puntitas think she can go from half-ass writing to the Nobel committee?

Other random thoughts in no particular order:
 In The Friendly Young Ladies by Mary Renault, two of the important characters are writers. One of them, a formula fictionist, thinks about what her characters are doing when she stops writing. X spends the night in a burning shack while the writer sleeps, or Y goes to bed and lies there all weekend long till the writer has time to get back to her manuscript. I think of my characters that way, and those moments of suspended tension help me write more.
 In the afterward to the same book, Renault claims (a little too insistently) that she never censored herself as she wrote. On the subject of explicitly rendered sex, she says that it’s not necessary to describe people making love since the reader will know how a given character makes love if s/he is drawn well. I like this idea—that, without being told outright, the reader knows what a well developed character is likely to do and is capable of doing even in situations that aren’t spelled out on the page. This is not a new idea, to be sure, but put this way, it gives me a more concrete way of thinking about the kinds of details that go into developing the individual.
 In a recent revision session, one of those tinker-before-submitting-rushes, a series of vastly improved poetic lines came to me as did a handful of minor but vital changes. My long poem starts with a short section that is thematically important, but clunky to read. I remember reading and rereading it to smooth out the language, but the line breaks remained pretty hopeless. This time, the fixes were obvious, bluntly so. As I revised, I wondered why they hadn’t been previously. Distance? The powers of mental percolation? Whichever the case, it’s interesting (miraculous).
 In an interview, John le Carre said he didn’t like to spend a lot of time with the literati. He would rather spend the day talking to a wood cutter than a writer because he likes being around the primary sources (i.e., the people he’s likely to write about). I agree with this. I stood under my fig tree three days ago and felt the sparks of a poem, one I’ve tried to write before. The images were clear. So were the details I’ll need. So were the biblical references I spent several hours researching last year. So were surprising new thoughts based on the real experience. I could have written my poem without the real tree, but I needed the tree to write the real poem. This doesn’t mean that a writer must die to write about death or become a drug addict to write about that experience. It means that the writer renders a richer, more significant experience if she or he has had an encounter with death or observed the encounters of others.
 In its mission statement, a literary journal, which is preparing for its inaugural issue, calls for literary work that is lyrical and explores Christian themes without darkness. My initial reaction was typical of someone with a secular education: how limiting. Then when I realized the description applies to some of my work and to some of my favorite reading, I laughed. Joyous does not equate with cliché or platitude. Literary writers and those who aspire to that forget.

Puntitas reads _The Stone Flower Garden_ by D. Smith, _Eve: a Novel of the First Woman_ by E. Elliott, _Constantine: the Man and His Times_, by M. Grant, and _In This House of Brede_ by R. Godden.

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.

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.

Repetition for Character Development

Puntitas is feeling blog blank. This happens sometimes. She’s grateful because she’s not feeling blank about her job related writing and because she’s got ideas and eagerness to work on her own writing. But she hasn’t written in the blog because she hasn’t had many writerly thoughts.

Well, there was one. It’s a technique oriented observation from a book Puntitas read. She likes the trick and wants to use it herself in a piece of writing, possibly the next novel in the queue, the one she’ll start after she finishes everything that is on the hard drive now.

The novel I read is Broken, erotica or maybe porn. I’m not sure what the difference is. At any rate, it’s about a woman who meets with a stranger once a month to share lunch in a park. After several innocuous conversations, they fall into a pattern: he tells her about a sexual encounter he’s had that month.

The novel is complex. The woman is married, but she no longer has a physical relationship with her husband because he had a skiing accident five years before, and she doesn’t have much of a marriage because of the emotional after effects of the injuries. The meetings with the stranger give her a fantasy life, which only highlights the many ways her marriage isn’t what it once was.

The technique I want to borrow is this:

The stories about the stranger’s sexual encounters follow a sort of formula. They tell the reader how he meets his one-night-stand, how she comes on to him, what prompts him to make his first move, what kind of sex they have, and how the encounter ends. The details about him are consistent from story to story, minor behaviors blossoming into telling details, but new information is also added. The effect is that what begins as a stock character becomes … hmm … fully fleshed and that we get to know his appeal for the married woman listening to him, which means we get to know more about her as well. It’s a great technique because it allows him to become a meaningful character while the obvious energy and focus of the story is on the woman’s marital conflict.

It occurs to me that I have a short story that uses a variation of this technique. It contains several scenes in which the narrator is playing cards with her uncle and having a conversation about the same guest. This may be why I noticed it. But the book uses the technique to achieve a more sophisticated effect. I think too now that it would actually work well in my novella, which includes a couple of scenes that recur in variation.

Puntitas reads _The Proposition_ by J. Ivory, _Broken_ by M. Hart, and _The Serpent’s Tale_ by A. Franklin.

Sleep Deprivation and Incoherence

Puntitas’ body clock is a mess. That usually happens when she’s premenstrual (“premenstrual” being one of the predominating subthemes of her blog, according to a male friend who has a period of his own), but that’s not the case this time. The problem began when Puntitas started dozing off during her reading of parallel texts. Now she’s reading trashy novels and drinking real coffee throughout the day so she can wear herself out for the night. Needless to say, her concentration is shot to hell, so her big, ugly translation is moving along sloooowly, and coincidentally, work is moving along sloooowly too.

Puntitas’ job is characterized by much variety and a moderate amount of unpredictability. It requires her services at all hours of the day and night, and it takes her to many strange and wondrous locales. Today’s appointment was an unannounced home visit from a universally disliked social service agency. It involved a remote (“godforsaken” being the more exact word) collection of mobile homes, plywood houses, dirt, broken refrigerators, mysterious metal panels of assorted sizes and shapes, gusty winds, and an unmarked house with four Animal Control vehicles parked in front of it but no signs of life, animal or otherwise, save two hill women on a neighboring stoop, pretending not to notice whose hovel the County car pulled up to. Well, actually, it pulled up to three separate mobile homes (all saggy, peely, and rocky), none marked with a number, before finally parking at the unit with the scrawny meth hag peering out the window in a negligee.

Puntitas brings this up for no real reason except that she would like someday to write a poetry collection about some of her experiences at work and felt the muse following Methie around the nearly empty unit in search of birth certificates and other documents.

And on the subject of altered states, Puntitas is yet again baffled by the vagaries of editorial judgment. Puntitas has gotten more information about her recent acceptance. She submitted two poems, one she has a soft spot for and another, which she likes but which she considered flawed enough to seriously revise after her trip to Kinko’s. When she got the acceptance email, she was told that her poem would be published, but the title of said poem was not specified. A brief email exchange later, she has received the shocking news that the poem to appear in print is the flawed one, and she’s 90%certain that it’s the unrevised version.

Puntitas reads _La Reina del Sur_ by A. Perez-Reverte and _Across a Wild Sea_ by S. Lord.

Rejections and Loss

Two pieces of mail came in from the publication front. One was a rejection from the South West Review, an impersonal post card, the most sterile mailing so far. It was pretty disappointing as I had high hopes for the poem, a long one, but there are other venues, and I can always try sending something else to this one.

The other piece of mail came from a poetry book competition. The last time I used my bank’s automated system, I noticed that two poetry checks have not cleared. One of them came back to me in the mail unsigned today. The contest holders were nice enough to let me resend it, which tells me they are low on manuscripts, as, in a previous submission spurt, I had another such check returned with a snippy note.

I’ve spent most of my time and energy this week working on my translation. During one of my breaks, I checked out some publication opportunities. A couple have March 15 deadlines. I wasn’t really planning on submitting because that would mean spending a few hours away from the other work, but with all these rejections, I’m thinking I may take care of the ones that are due this weekend. I’ll have to think about it, maybe use my break time for that.

My cousin, the one who prompted the extraterrestrial story, died yesterday morning. She is my age, and certain aspects of her life parallel mine, so her death has started the chain of what-if’s often triggered by such things. I haven’t allowed myself to think about that very much because that line of thinking doesn’t really get me anywhere. I had a lot of out-of-the-house work today and a social obligation afterward. Now I’m reading in order to slow my mind down enough to get back to work. I’d rather be working on the story, and I want to get some acceptances. That is more important to me now than ever.

Puntitas reads _La reina del sur_ by A. Pérez Reverte.