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.

Perspective

I’ve been less diligent about keeping my blog lately because I’ve been behind on other things. My thinking has been, “Once I get X done, I’ll blog,” as a reward. That line of thought led to my not reading, except what was required for a class, for over ten years. I would say to myself, “As soon as I write this paper, I can read a novel,” or “When I study for this test, I can get back to reading the poems.” I rarely wrote the essays or studied for the exams, so I read nothing, and I felt interest in very little.

Last week, I picked up my largest translation project to date. It really isn’t much larger than the previous record holder, which was one of my early assignments, but I’m feeling intimidated. I haven’t found very many equivalents for much of the terminology, and I’m starting to think I may have to do more improvising than I had expected. To add to the stress, I’m working on a short timeline, and I’m still finishing up an interpreting assignment that keeps me pretty busy.

But I haven’t stopped thinking about the writing. In fact, I almost put everything else on hold to do some last week. The piece was the extraterrestrial story. One of my aunts lives in a city which is alleged by its residents to have a Martian base either under the pier or in the hospital basement. As I’ve probably said here before, the story is set in that city around someone who has grown up with that lore. Because the plot and conflict were prompted by something my cousin said, as reported by my mother, the characters were originally loosely—very loosely—based on my mother’s sister and her two daughters, the protagonist resembling my oldest cousin.

I’ll interrupt myself at this point to say I’ve had very little contact with my relatives. I grew up far away from them, and when we did visit, their approach to me, though courteous, was more remote and less friendly than their attitude to my siblings. This particular set of cousins also lived far from the locus familiae, so my contact with them was rarer still. The last time I was in the same room with either of them, we were in preschool. Not surprisingly then, I got only vague scraps of information about them until three or four years ago, when my mother suddenly developed an interest in and a cell phone plan that allowed for calling them regularly.

I’m saying all of this because I know my cousins mostly the way I know characters in books: through hearsay and the imagination I use to fill in the gaps. Lately, their lives have become eventful (the older one has developed a malignant and apparently aggressive cancer), so the hearsay is coming, not just from her mother and sister, but also from other aunts, cousins, and uncles, who are making the trip out to pay helpful visits. Suddenly, what I know about her, my conception of her, has changed dramatically, and details from previous reports are taking on new meaning. This is an unsettling feeling to have about a real person with whom I have a blood tie.

About the story, my conception of it has changed as well. The protagonist is now modeled after my younger cousin, a character I’d initially thought boring, and less of the plot line comes from my head. More accurately put, less of the plot comes from my imagined experience, and more of it is based on what I imagine their experience to be. It’s still by no means a faithful rendering of events, but it is a story about something that can happen to my cousin or someone like her, a story she’s more or less told my mom over the course of the last few months. I feel better about what that story is supposed to do.

Puntitas reads _Three Bags Full_ by L. Swann and _The Barred Window_ by A. Taylor.

Discussing Someone Else’s Writing

Saturday I workshopped with another friend. We didn’t discuss a draft. We discussed a general writing project.

She’s planning to write a murder mystery, has an excellent idea for an opening scene and a good general sense of what she wants to do, but was having trouble working out some of the basics of her plot and characters. Our conversation hovered around these questions:

• Which real people can lend life to the main characters?
• Where may her characters live, and where may the story take place?
• How can other people’s plots be used to guide her through the story line and help her find a motive?
• How can predictable elements be turned into red herrings and plot complications?
• What secondary characters can people the story and stand in as suspects?

We didn’t get very far with this last because she needed time to think through some of the other things, and it struck me that my own writing process is characterized by fits and starts, periods of thinking and reading alternated by periods of taking notes, focused free writing, and actual drafting. For me personally, knowing when to interrupt the writing to reflect is a vital part of the process though I do admit that sometimes I spend too much time mulling and not enough time writing.

Another thing I noticed was that, for my friend, as for me, plots seem to grow around a basic number of characters–the two, three, or four people essential to making something happen or someone discover. Other characters are added as props or simple plot agents, what one of my professors calls window dressing, and sometimes one of those props becomes real, occasionally jockeying an essential character out of the way.

As my friend and I talked, she said something about how helpful it was to talk to people about the story, and I agree. Part of the benefit is the workshop aspect: it helps to bounce ideas off of and get suggestions from other writers, but another equally important aspect is that talking about the craft makes it more real, easier to hang on to through work, bills, and tax preparation (yes, it is that time of year).

As of our conversation, I’ve decided to work on my extraterrestrial story a little everyday, without waiting for the muse or preparing elaborately in any way. So far, I’ve managed to work on it only once this week. I do have the excuses of taxes to prepare and my circadian rhythm to get under control, so I may not get much done this week, but I’m hoping that next week will go better.

Puntitas reads _The Haunting of Hill House_ by S. Jackson.

Step 1

Bill W. is a wise, wise man: admitting to a problem is the first step in finding its solution. This week I admitted to two friends that I am lazy.

I came to that conclusion last weekend while having a conversation with someone. She teaches high school, attends graduate school, and has managed both to translate a short story collection, which she started working on in October (right around the time I started this blog), and to continue with her own writing, which amounts to a completed book of short stories, short listed for an award. She’s a nice person, so Puntitas is harboring no petty jealousy or ill will. Instead, I have been pondering the fact that I have all kinds of time to write, but nothing to show for it.

As is so often the case lately, knitting has once again tossed me a line of practical advice. I just finished listening to two yarn podcasts. In one, Sue Grafton, author of the Kinsey Millhone (alphabet) mysteries, is being interviewed about the little knitting and crocheting references in her books. At one point, she talks briefly about her writing process, saying that she sits at her computer much of the day, asking herself, “What if …?” in order to develop plot, character details, etc. My immediate realization (yeah, hang on to your seats: the stunningly obvious is coming up) was that I don’t really sit down at my computer to write. Well, I do, but then I get lost in checking my email, visiting favorite web sites, checking more email, and googling for obscure work related terms, exotic recipes, and the occasional piece of writing research. I’m almost always tired by the time I actually finish doing all of that, so buckling down to any writing at that point is … toooooo muuuuuuch.

The other podcast was an interview with Vicki Square. While discussing the research involved in her book on kimono inspired knits, she said two things that stayed with me. One was that she had to really make a conscious effort to focus on the current project because she had the tendency to let herself wander off into other things. The other was that she also had to make herself stop researching and creating in order to be done; otherwise, she would still be reading books, looking at kimono, and designing tops.

As I’ve written in other posts, knowing when to finish is hard for me. Part of the problem is feeling confident that a piece is complete technically and thematically, but just as significant is the psychological willingness to let go of a poem or story, to send it out into the world and believe in it as living, breathing progeny, to escape the mystique that great works of literature take time and serious thought, not a moment or two of musish intoxication. The monkey wrench is that, while I have written some published pieces ploddingly, most have been muse born highs, and I’m really resisting the idea that I have to rely on the muse. Yes, yes, I know that, if I write regularly, etc., I invite the muse, etc., but the presence of the muse in the equation undermines the concept that writing is a disciplined profession and business, like everything else.

What reflecting on my conversation with my peer writer and translator did was to help me understand—yet again—that writing is a little of both: that it must be approached with some reverence for the muse but with a strong sense of project and timeline. I’ve also run up against the bold reality—another “yet again”—that I need to focus. I’d love to write a book of sock patterns and another one on capes, and part of my distraction is that, realistically, I’m putting more time and energy into those manuscripts than into my official writing.

The practical upshot of all of this is that I have plugged my note taker in to recharge the battery and will work on my extraterrestrial story this weekend. Another one of my friends helped me get a firm grip on where to take it by articulating clearly and succinctly her views on Martians and the transcendent, thoughts which mirror my own exactly. A couple of days after that, while in the shower, I thought of a plot line that would better enable the protagonist to play out her inner drama.

Puntitas reads _The Secret River_ by K. Grenville.

Finding the Link

My friend and I took a walk yesterday. We celebrated the turning in of her dissertation by eating Chinese food at a restaurant that is actually frequented by Chinese people. Then we came back to my place, and still feeling very, very full, we decided to walk it off by trekking to the nearest Starbuck’s, only three quarters of a mile away from my front door. Todo por un café.

Well, well, three quarters of a mile is no short distance, however little it may seem by car. It’s even less “little” when being trammeled by one who has used her treadmill as a storage unit for two years at very least. By some miracle, I managed the walk just fine, no exhaustion then or soreness now. The only lingering after effect is that, despite my excessively sensible shoes, my feet blistered hideously. Yes, hideously! I could not bear any weight on them for the rest of the evening, starting with the shock I received on trying to stand up again after sitting for half an hour. I can bear weight on them today, but the fleshy pad below the big toe of both feet is still tender, tender, tender.

I bring this up (well, because I like to whine) because while my friend and I were actually at Starbuck’s, sipping passion tea lemonade and secretly psyching up for the three-quarter-mile hike home, we had a conversation about why extraterrestrials would set up a space station on earth. This is for the short story on extraterrestrials, the one I’ve written very little of, and no, I’m not at all a science fiction buff, and yes, my friend is, and yes again, she got waaaaaaaay too technical and convoluted for me—what with exploitation of resources, colonization plans, and such like.

I was on the verge of tuning her out to wallow in the pedal pain and burning that was already making me think, “boils,” when she said something that woke me up: “It takes a long time to travel to other galaxies, more than a human life time.” Yes, I do know that, but what I hadn’t thought about was what I heard in her voice, an endless kind of loneliness, one that would travel under the skin and in the bones for one or two generations, like the children of Israel who were not readmitted into the favor of the Lord until they had forgotten to want it. That would be the link between the extraterrestrials and the little church across the town square from where my protagonist lives.

The walk home didn’t seem so eternal after that. It was only after my friend left, and I tried standing up again that I winced at the harshness of solid earth.

Puntitas reads _Arráncame la vida_ by A. Mastreta.

Stalling

Work was slow enough at the beginning of the week for me to do a lot of stewing. Stewing is bad–makes the neuroses come to the surface—so I spent a lot of time pushing myself to do things. Nothing as taxing as writing or housework. I made phone calls I’d been putting off and other inanities of the kind. Yet another reminder that happiness is as much about a set of habits as it is about a state of mind. Ah, well. What I haven’t managed to do is to push the habits beyond a nonproductive rut. Perhaps that should be my goal: to write, to maintain a routine, to think in active channels. Fortunately, the last two days became unexpectedly busy, and my ánimo, such an apt word for one’s general state of well being, seems to have recalibrated to the degree that I’m not thinking of a phone call as a major accomplishment.

I did nothing writingwise except think about it. I thought about dropping a character from my very fledgling extra terrestrial story (still at 300+ words), and I thought about sending manuscripts out.

I don’t know why I don’t send manuscripts out. When the reality of large manila envelopes, stamps, and SASEs is not on the day’s schedule, I believe in my own writing, but when it is, suddenly my work sounds like crap. Really need to get past that thinking. The Nobel committee hasn’t found my hard drive.

My current excuse for being stuck is that the extra terrestrial story is the one I want to work on right now, but I don’t have access to the setting, one aspect of which is key to the unraveling. I visited the location thirty-five years ago, when I was a child, so I have some vague memories to draw on. I’m reading blogs and touristy sites to gather more info. I’ll also ask my mother, who visited a couple of years ago and has a great sense of detail. She’ll probably hesitate to tell me what I want to know because she’ll think I’m making fun, mockery being something I’m accused of regularly, but it’s also very likely that she didn’t pay much attention to the feature I’m interested in. I’m sure I’m making this more complicated than it needs to be. The book I’m reading this weekend is set in India. It’s got lots of details about the culture, but so far, nothing is as specific as my head is telling me I should be, so odds are, my problem will be solved if I change the narrator’s profession from travel writer (really local news anchor who squeezes a free trip out of her boss by promising to do some nostalgia pieces for viewers far from home) to something less demanding on me.

Puntitas reads _A Child Called It- by D. Pelzer, _Cold As the Grave_ by P. Robinson, and _Holy Cow_ by S. MacDonald.

Temporarily Out of Commission

I’m sitting in my bedroom with a humidifier, trying not to cough. Illness is such a humbling experience, stripping us of all the airs of grandeur we dress in daily. This morning I got out of bed, smelling of menses and urine from when the cough was so bad I voided. I went straight to the shower, unable to stand myself. After that, it was breakfast, a conversation with my mother, and more cold medicine. I think I’m back to the yearly thing, the one that requires antibiotics and a stronger than usual cough suppressant. My mother says it’s time for the doctor, but since I haven’t had this long enough to obviate the lecture about how colds and viruses need a week to work themselves out of the body, I disagree. I want my $100.00 and my two-hours wasted to result in a prescription, not a follow-up (i.e., no prescription, one condescending lecture, an appointment for another $100.00 and two more hours wasted). By this point in my life, I know my own body and my own ailments well enough to distinguish between a cold and something more serious.

I’m not sure why I’m bringing this up here, in a blog about writing, except that Adrienne Rich has a poem about how coming out of a fever is like a resurrection, how you feel like a survivor afterward, like you left someone else behind. I always think of that poem when I’m sick because she captures exactly what it is to be well again.

I think too that it’s hard to write about the way the mind betrays us when the body doesn’t respond to whatever power we think we have over it. My novella is about a person who is falling apart in mind, body, and spirit. While each collapse has its source, the collapse of the body exacerbates the other two. It affects her judgment and her responses to things. When I had a friend read an early draft, she could not understand why the protagonist couldn’t just do this or that more obvious and normal thing, so I realized that I hadn’t done a good job of reproducing that mindset.

Speaking of mindsets, I started the story I mentioned last time. I got 345 words down. I don’t really know where I’m going with it. Usually I’ve got a good idea. But I’ve decided I’m going to go ahead with it because I’m afraid of talking myself out of it the way I talked myself out of writing the poem with the ball, the swing, and the woman at the foot of the stairs. This story is about extraterrestrials, not at all my cup of tea, so developing the right mindset for the characters and in turn for the reader is important.

Now I’m going to stop. I’m rambling far too much. Between the humidifier and the last of the cough medicine with codeine, I’m having to work less hard at not-coughing, so I may be able to sit here and knit while listening to one of my famous audio books. The one I’ve got on the player now is not very good. It’s called The Lost Diary of Don Juan. Normally, I love retellings, hearing the story from another character’s point of view, etc., but this very obviously made-for-film novel has so little to do with the play that I suspect its writer hasn’t actually read the source of his narrative. The two clearest details in support of that fact are that the galanteador of the retelling is in love with a woman named Ana while the one in the source play is in love with a woman named INEZ and that the Don Luis, best friend of Don Juan and betrothed to Dona Ana (with whom Don Juan has a payback quicky before meeting the saintly Dona INEZ), of the play is no where to be found in the novel. I haven’t read the poem by Byron, so it’s possible that this novel is based on that. Anyway, aside from giving me an excuse to be pedantic, this book is helping me understand that I stop reading altogether when I lose interest in something. I still can’t bring myself to not finish a book, however crappy, so I suppose that finishing it slowly is better than not finishing it at all.