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.

Shifting Focus

Puntitas submitted more work today: One short story and three copies of the poetry chapbook. She may have sent two items out one day past the official deadline, but she’s hoping that the reading fee (in one case) and the general shortage of submissions (in the other) will encourage recipients to … well … receive.

The last time Puntitas read some of her work, she realized that she had not included a thematically related poem in the chapbook, So before printing today, she added it to the manuscript and moved another poem to a different place in the collection. The chapbook feels better now, and Puntitas thinks she should reexamine the order of the poems in the book-length collections in case other changes make sense.

She also read one of her short stories before sending it out. It’s ten pages long, which is flash fiction in the wordy realm of Puntitas’ prose. She had revised it carefully a couple of years ago, spending lots of time researching certain details to make sure she got them right. Today she read the story for the first time since then, and she liked it very much, making only half a dozen surface level changes. The story leads up to a small moment that is nonetheless important, as so many small things are. Puntitas likes it and will start sending it out regularly.

While she plans to continue tweaking a couple of poems, revising some drafts, and drafting new ideas, she will start shifting her focus to the fiction on her hard drive. Puntitas estimates that she has about a hundred pages of finished or nearly finished fiction that should be in the mail by the end of November. Beyond that, she’s got a novella and two stories in intermediate draft phase and another story that’s still pretty rough. Her goal is to shape all of these into a book-length collection by this time next year.

It feels like a realistic goal. The poetry books were officially finished almost a year ago. They’ve undergone so many changes that Puntitas has to toss out her old photocopies and consider making new ones. While she’s not completely satisfied yet, she has enough of a sense of completion to be willing to add to Kinko’s economic stability.

Puntitas reads _Where Are the Children_ by M. Higgins Clark.

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.

Celebration and Perplexity

Puntitas sent out her first chapbook in years and got a prompt rejection the following day. That same day, of the five hours spent submitting, she also sent out two poems she really likes and hopes to find homes for. The day after the chapbook rejection, she got a nibble from the journal that received the two poems:

The editor liked the language in both, but found the line breaks distracting. If Puntitas would be open to resubmitting them as prose poems, the editor would love to reconsider them.

Puntitas does not know what a prose poem is. She’s read a few, and she knows they’re all the rage, but the hammer-and-nails part of her brain doesn’t know what to do to a piece of writing to make it a prose poem.

The news was frustrating for Puntitas, so in typical Puntitas style, she sulked, whined to a friend, sat inertly at her keyboard, had absolutely no idea. Then admitting herself desperate for publications and further admitting that she especially wanted these two pieces to thrive, Puntitas pulled up the documents and used the find-and-replace-all command to brutally substitute hard and soft line breaks with regular spaces (after copying the file in case some other editor liked the work as Puntitas meant it).

Sans line breaks, Puntitas read the poems again, only this time she did it the way she reads prose, and what she discovered is that a few of her long, involved sentences collapsed in their own complexity. She fiddled here and there, nothing that anyone would notice, and she put a blank line in whenever she started a new idea. She didn’t think the pieces were any more or less comprehensible, but she did resolve to go back to other poems to read them this way for editing.

When she finished, she resubmitted both pieces. A day or two later, the editor wrote back to say she was prepared to accept one of the poems if Puntitas agreed to a few changes. CHANGES? Who dare talk to a writer about CHANGES? Puntitas read on with a mixture of anger, fear, and shame (not really sure why).

The changes were surprisingly … great. As Puntitas wrote it, the poem is a long fragment, a series of gerundives that suggest a nonstatic moment. Each idea is separated from its neighbor by a semicolon and developed and expanded with commas. There were also lots of and’s to create a rhythm. The editor, got rid of most of the commas, replaced the semicolons with commas, and stripped most of the and’s. The experience of reading suddenly reflected what Puntitas had been trying to do in the language, and Puntitas moved one step closer to understanding what a prose poem is. She’ll have to think about how another one of her pieces may benefit from this form of decluttering.

The other thing that happened when Puntitas read the final version—still no line breaks—is that she was disoriented and unmoored from her own concept of poetry writing. Puntitas wondered, not for the first time, what a line break is supposed to do. Her understanding is that it should create a subtext of its own; draw attention to words, images, and relationships; and make the reading easier. She wondered what other poets think line breaks should be or do, And she wondered whether the line breaks have been a deciding factor for other editors.

For Puntitas personally, one of the functions of the line break is to establish that what she is doing is writing poetry. For her the distinction among creative nonfiction prose, fiction, and poetry is nebulous, and the distinction between such forms as prose poem and flash fiction is too confusing to ponder. So writing in line breaks and attending to their meaning makes her mindful of the need to compress language and convey abstract meaning through sensory experience, evocative action, and physical contour—what the sighted world summarizes in the visual metaphor of the image. Hence her reluctance to instantly do away with all the line breaks she’s worked so hard to develop).

One or two days later still, Puntitas received another acceptance. This one was in the form of a letter that was both sharp and funny, the sort of missives cranky old nuns fire off in novels and on TV. This editor was also inclined to accept a piece if Puntitas allowed her to make changes, like capitalize a proper noun, correct a spelling mistake, and remove a lone parenthesis. Puntitas actually fought the urge to bow her head and whisper ma’am when replying to the message to agree to the changes and apologize for her slovenliness.

She’s contacted the other journals about the acceptances, but she’s a little nervous about it since the pieces aren’t actually in print yet.

Puntitas reads _Garden of Lies_ by E. Goudge plus the two knitting books. She’s found a couple more knitting books that she can’t wait to get through.

Acting Like a Writer

Puntitas has had quite the writerly week. It began last Friday with an acceptance, which felt amazingly good. It involved submitting a digital photograph and an audio or video recording of the two poems. Puntitas doesn’t like having her picture taken, so she asked a friend for a copy of a photograph that was taken last summer on a weekend trip to the coast.

Then she contended with the recording process. Not adept with Goldwave, which is neither generally difficult nor stupid-friendly enough for Puntitas’ limited skill set, she decided to try her mp3 player-recorder. That worked surprisingly well, even the file conversion process.

The hard part was actually reading the poems so that they sounded out loud the way they do in her head. Though she practiced for half an hour, her trial readings sounded like an insomniac counting sheep. She next opted for memorizing the text so that she could pretend to act them out on stage. Though the poems were short, memorization took a long time, and so did working on the delivery. When Puntitas felt ready, she paced up and down the hall, recorder in hand, and eight or nine restarts later per poem, she was ready to move the files to her desktop. If Puntitas were more ambitious, she would have tried again to get a better delivery, but having spent the entire day on less than three minutes of simple voice performance, she had concluded that she was definitely done.

The next writerly activity was revision. While she was preparing for her recording, she noticed a poem had one of those shrieking minor problems that should have been corrected within days of its composition. Halfway through the piece, all the plurals mysteriously turned singular. Why has Puntitas never noticed this in the ten years she’s tinkered with the damn thing? Once that was corrected, Puntitas went back to other things that needed work, like the Miltonian sonnet, completely reworking the sestet, using only a line and a half from the original. She made noticeable changes to three other poems; she reshaped some rough drafts to get them closer to intermediate drafts; and she read two others to get a sense of how much revision they would need after all.

The third writerly event of the week was experimentation. Puntitas read a call for submission for an anthology of hint fiction, the ultimate in short shorts that evokes a scene and situation, but includes enough ambiguity to suggest several interpretations. Since Puntitas’ fiction tends to run longer than most journals read, she didn’t seriously consider visiting the web page for guidelines, but then again, she was bored and uninterested in getting back to work, So she clicked anyway. The entries had to be twenty-five words or less. The examples sounded like compressed poetry fragments, Some more poem-stanza and others more cliff-hanger in tone. Puntitas wrote two, one based on a poem draft and the other based on a completely new idea. While both sound incomplete as poems, they do sound like good drafts, and the experience of compression has really been a learning opportunity in that it makes the writer conscious of what is most important and how that concept is most succinctly and concretely conveyed. Puntitas will probably try to flesh the pieces out to make them into short poems.

Finally, Puntitas sent out a couple of submissions. There are two or possibly three more she wants to mail out by Tuesday. She’s trying to be more organized in that she’s collecting e-copies of the submissions in one email folder and emailing herself the postal submissions to store in the same place. Her wake up call came when she visited one journal’s submission manager, remembering that she’d submited once, but discovering that she’d submitted twice, each batch including two poems.

Puntitas reads _Scandalous Deception_ by R. Rogers, _Milagro en los Andes_ by N. Parrado, and _The Knitting Goddess_ by D. Bergman.

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.

The Muse Is a Flirt

Puntitas has been visited by the muse twice this week. The first time was when she read someone else’s blog. The post begged to be recast into a poem, so Puntitas requested permission from the blogger, and having gotten it, has been Googling her stubby little fingers to the bone to learn more about a couple of the concepts. She is pondering the possibility of other types of research because she thinks the poem would benefit from it, but thus far, she has limited her creative efforts to copying the triggering post, trimming most of the prose elements, asking the blogger about an important detail, and identifying the kind of information she wants to know more about. She had considered one direction for the poem, the same point and direction taken by the blogger, but as she has been reading, she feels her mind moving somewhere else, though she will need time to figure out where that is.

The second visitation came last night. Puntitas was editing a very short text for a friend, when she had one of those mental hiccups that leads to confusion about uncomplicated things, like which preposition to use after the word connect. Puntitas’ own spasm concerned which Spanish verb to associate with the making of compost, so she Googled around for blogs and videos that might help.

Puntitas learned lots of fascinating things about gardening, so many and so fascinating that she didn’t get back to the blurb for at least an hour. The thing that stayed with her most was this:

People spend lots of money on expensive activating agents to make their compost piles start composting, but there is no need as human urine is an effective activator.

This is a quote, and the woman who imparted it was muy de la high, pausing ever so slightly before and after “human urine,” as one would expect from a lady who knows herself to possess the highest sensibilities but knows, nonetheless, when she must needs take her skillet by the handle.

Well, need I say it?

Puntitas had a sudden and nearly uncontrollable urge to find a compost pile and … well … activate it. The thought of gathering the leaves and paper into a heap or barrel, squatting over it, urinating into it, and revisiting the garden over the days and months to spread the compost and eventually to eat the produce it fed had Puntitas-poem written all over it. Puntitas got as far as going through her list of friends and accomplices to identify one or two she be willing to piss on a pile with, but she couldn’t actually name one she could really squat with. Plus she started thinking about the mechanics of keeping her jeans dry while crouching, which led to a review of all Puntitas’ skirts and other minutiae.

Of course, Puntitas will not start this poem or continue to work on the other any time soon since she is certain that all this poetic activity (or activation) has been prompted by her realization that the big translation she is also working on has progressed slowly this week, so Puntitas will probably not post much over the next two weeks, by which time the muse will have chosen to visit someone else.

Puntitas reads _La sombra del templario_ by N. Masot.

The Submission Blues

In terms of submitting either individual poems or my full manuscripts, I’m going to have to come up with a better plan of attack. I’ve spent my day at my computer, reading submission guidelines and articles on writing contests. So far, I’ve submitted one batch of poems and worked myself down into a pit of publishing despair.

It all started with a short-lived happy moment, wherein I found some fragments of old poems. A couple of them got summarily deleted, but three had interesting images and suggested interesting possibilities, though the actual directions they took were mostly not worth the travel. I also found one very long poem, which is very exciting. In its current prose form, it’s five and a half single-spaced pages, and it’s a lot more polished than I remembered. By the time it’s done, it can turn out to be a chapbook length poem.

The word “chapbook” was where the downward spiral began. The moment I had that thought, one of the Main Street Rag judges comments came into my head, something like “There’s a chapbook in there somewhere.” Suddenly my nicely photocopied manuscripts swam to the forefront of my consciousness, weak poems getting weaker by the minute.

To keep from hyperventilating, I reminded myself that, when I settled down to serious revision, I didn’t use a third of the poems on my hard drive. Half of the poems I did use underwent enough revision for even a casual reader to notice. So while some poems may be weaker, they’re not necessarily weak.

Then I decided to submit one of those weaker poems, and I spent an hour or more revising it yet again. I changed lines, phrases, and words, nothing substantive enough for anyone else to notice. The poem is written in blank verse with a relaxed ABCCAB rhyme scheme. Though I paid attention to the line breaks and feel good about most of them, I stopped editing when I started experiencing the overwhelming compulsion to turn the poem into free verse. Yes, the form is important to me, part of the tribute to the content, so no, I don’t really want to change it.

Anyway, I added the changes to the manuscript file, submitted the revised poem, and called it a day. I’ve got so much work pending that I may take a few days off from this while I figure out how to submit without getting incredibly discouraged.

Building Two Tables of Contents 1

Since I tend to get more done when I don’t let myself think before I act, I accomplished something important today. I turned my list of poems into two preliminary tables of contents.

Monday morning I got up at 3:00 a.m. to finish the translation. I was done at 6:00, which means I could have slept two more hours before getting ready for my first appointment of the day, a 10:00 that is twenty-five minutes away. I did go back to bed, but I was too wired to get back to sleep, even with the final chapters of The River Wife to slow my mind down. I was sleepy most of the day, but I kept myself awake to maintain a healthy sleep schedule. That night, I went to bed at 9:00, got through one short chapter of the addictive vampire book I’m reading now, and fell asleep.

This morning my body woke up at 3:00 a.m. again, and no amount of lying still, breathing deeply, or finally breaking down and reading got me back into Morpheus’ embrace. Eventually, I got up (at 5:00 or so), came in to my office to Google knitted glove patterns and tips, and generally started my day thirty minutes ahead of schedule.

I was ready almost thirty minutes early, so I made up my cards, one poem title with number of pages per card. I took them with me to work, instead of my knitting, to sort through during my off moments, none of which presented themselves.

This afternoon, at home yet again, I felt really, really sleepy. I toyed with the idea of taking a nap, but moved to action by guilt, I pulled my cards out and got to work.

From both my thesis and my previous effort at assembling a table of contents, I knew what some of the book sections would be. For example, I knew I had lots of poems about poetry, and I knew I had lots of poems about places I’d visited, so I knew one section would be about poetry and another would be about travel. I would start by laying the cards out across the bed as for a game of solitaire, stacking cards into these groups as I went through the deck.

That worked really well. Four piles emerged with a growing stack of uncategorized titles. Initially, the uncategorized pile was bigger than expected, and its existence was daunting, but by the time I’d sorted two thirds of the stack, I had some possible additional categories in mind for those cards.

When I got to the end of the full “deck,” I picked up the uncategorized pile and sorted through it. Two of the new categories were clear to me. The third is something of a potpourri. I think I called it, “Domestic Life and chores” but it occurs to me now that it can just as easily be called, “Exhausted by Sense.”

At any rate, I wound up with seven piles, really eight since one of them includes a ten-page poem and twelve or thirteen pages of other work. When I counted the page-lengths and added them up, I discovered that most sections were ten to twelve pages long. One was only eight, so I pulled a couple of pages out of the longer sections to get a minimum of ten pages per section. The travel section was longer than the rest (fifteen or sixteen pages), so I pulled a couple of pages out to redistribute, and I separated the ten-page poem from its pile.

When all was said and done (as one of my writing teachers is fond of saying), I had eight sections of ten to twelve pages, arranged in fairly clear categories (well, except for the domestic hodgepodge). The whole process was surprisingly quick, half an hour or forty-five minutes, and the emergence of the new categories was surprising too. The poems were all grouped in ways that I had thought about way back when I needed to write a thesis, but at the end of my M. F. A., when I was ready to put all my work together, I didn’t have enough poems or pages to make those groupings work.

In something of a creative fever, I went on to define the books. First, I organized each stack alphabetically to sort through later. Then I made two piles of stacks, one for each book. Some of the decisions were easy though they were made for reasons that had little to do with real content. For instance, I put the ten-page poem in one book and the other ten pages of poetry on a similar theme in the other, so as to spread the goodness as it were. One of the poems in that latter stack has a section that is similar in construction and comes in at more or less the same point as in a poem of another section, so I put that other section in with the long poem. The last three stacks got assigned more or less at random, the only other significant decision I made being to put a really depressing section in one book and a really passionate section in another, so as to avoid the idea that one leads into the other. Yes, I know, I should probably not be concerned since at least half of the poems aren’t actually about me, but I am concerned that the subject of either section can be dismissed or diminished by such a juxtaposition. Oddly, this was the hardest and most exhausting part of the process, so I bound each stack of cards together with a butterfly clip and stopped.

My next step is to count the pages in each book and to organize the poems in the individual sections. There’s enough section overlap to allow me to move a few pages from here to there, so I shouldn’t have any difficulty getting the page lengths to work out. Also with four sections, I get to add four pages to each book, which means I don’t have to finish the last poem right now.

I’m going to try to have the books in the mail by the weekend. This is a tentative goal, but I’m really going to push for it. What I noticed, as I went through the cards, is that I have serious misgivings about many individual pieces. I’d get past the uncertainty by reminding myself that some of those very pieces have already been published, but the voice of self-doubt is a damned screeching harpy (with the head of all of my hideous, incompetent bosses). Anyway, I had planned to go back to a few pieces to make sure the last set of changes worked, but I’m not sure that I will. In this frame of mind, I’m likely to talk myself out of using the poems at all.

Puntitas reads _Blood Ties Book 3: Ashes to Ashes_ by J. Armintrout.

Plot and Collaboration–a post that is less interesting than the name suggests

Puntitas has been feeling very philosophical this week. She has done no writing, but she has read a lot and thought many writerly things.

Well, I did do a little pre-pre-writing. I’ve been eating lots of figs lately and getting poetic vibes from them, so I spent an afternoon searching for fig references in the Bible. The line that jumped out at me as being most obviously lyrical was this one:

Isaiah 28:4
That fading flower, his glorious beauty, set on the head of a fertile valley, will be like a fig ripe before harvest— as soon as someone sees it and takes it in his hand, he swallows it.

But more inspiring was the closeness with which the fig is connected to the body. It’s a symbol of security and stability (the Israelites repeatedly complain to Moses that there are no figs, olives or grapes where he has taken them, and the prophets often speak of the possibility of a land where each person can sit under his/her fig). Its leaves clothe Adam and Eve after the fall; it stands in for people or valuable goals in prophetic discussions in both testaments; and Jesus curses it in a wonderful show of humanity (Matthew’s version is the most lyrical and didactic, and Mark’s being the funniest: Jesus curses it in one passage, and in another he and his disciples walk past it, which prompts Peter to say, “wow, that tree you cursed sure is shriveled”).

The next step in the plan was to go outside, examine the tree, and eat some figs while pondering figly things, but I haven’t made it that far because it’s been way too hot outside and I haven’t managed to talk myself into the long sleeves that will keep the fig rash down to a minimum. Why Adam and Eve would put the leaves against their crotches is the real mystery.

What I did instead was finish reading The Shack, which led to thoughts on plot and collaboration. The book itself struck me as a nice read for a young protestant soul of about high-school age, new to pondering spiritual dilemmas. (Puntitas deletes a couple of catty sentences about the writer’s self-aggrandizement and moves on to her point.) Young says that he sent his manuscript to a writer he’d knew casually, that the writer contacted someone involved in writing for the screen, and that the three of them collaborated on the project. He’s vague about the nature of the collaboration, but my sense is that the writer friend gave him general advice on craft and workshoppy feedback on the manuscript, while the screen writer gave him advice on how to turn a philosophical discussion into a filmable plot.

I know one piece of advice I give to students and to people interested in the craft of writing is to imagine what this situation would look like on film, and I asked myself a variation of that (how can you say that in images?) a lot while revising my poems, but being of the Henry James half-the-story-happens-in-the-head school of thought, I will have to remember to ask myself this question frequently when I start revising my stories.

About collaboration, I’ve always wanted to do it. A couple of my friends and I have talked about it. One friend and I even wrote a few chapters together, and another friend and I tried it as well. But I’m not sure how it’s done. What I’d like to do is to collaborate on a story written from two points of view, where we agree on characters and a general plot and each person writes from one point of view, either responding to the other’s or writing from the outline and general discussion. What one friend and I did was talk about the story; then he wrote a draft and I revised it, a la Arthur C. Clarke and Frederik Pohl in _The Last Theorem_; but I don’t think he was as happy about that arrangement as I was.

My editing project has been the closest thing to collaborating that I’ve done. I don’t count it because I don’t have any real say in the planning and because I don’t get real credit for it, as far as I know, but once the manuscript is in my inbox, I have card blanche, so I should be more positive about the whole experience.

I’d ramble on longer, but I just noticed the time, and I have a play to get ready for.

Puntitas reads _Medicus_ and _Terra Incognita_ by R. Downie. She has a secret crush on Simon Vance, who reads everything beautifully, has an excellent sense of timing, and will find himself drawn to her when he goes through his dumpy-round-forty-somethings-with-poor-social-skills-and-shabby-job-prospects phase. She is still on hiatus from _The Secret Magdalene_ by K. Longfellow though she did read a chapter or two at some point.