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.

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.

When All Is Said and Done

Puntitas almost had a good cry after her last post. Thoughts of the money wasted and the pointlessness of it all swirled frantically in her head. Then she reminded herself that the choice to submit or not to submit was very much her own, so she should just do it or not and shut up about it.

She did it, and she shut up. Puntitas sent out both manuscripts and the chapbook each to one source. She prepared letters for more mailings, but nothing else is pressing, so she’ll send out the rest in a week or two, probably sooner to keep from changing her mind.

She also sent out six poetry submissions and one fiction. There were a few other journals she intended to send to, but having spent the entire day from 7:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. with a combined break time of three hours for meals, bathroom, and general whininess, she is much too exhausted to do any more tonight.

Among other things, Puntitas did the following today:

 changed one word in one poem, but it was a very important word.
 cut the last line of another.
 read a poem that is finished and surprisingly nice even though she remembers it as being incomplete and crappy.
 Sent out the newly finished poem for the first time.
 Sent out the one she’s been revising lately.
 Sent out one she hardly ever sends out.
 Experienced an existentialist moment in which she questioned the value of her life’s work.

Puntitas will go to bed now. She may not read a damn thing.

The Submission Routine

Puntitas is in the middle of one of her moments of self-pity and recrimination. Today’s episode of pointless drama stems from her tendency to put off for next week what should have been done yesterday.

The current example is not preparing a submission whose deadline is today. She’s known about the deadline for several months, and she’s been thinking about which pieces to send out since the middle of last week, But she didn’t get around to filling out the accompanying application form or printing out the various copies until three o’clock this afternoon, only a few short hours before most of the post offices in town close for the night. Then there was the ritual processional of the ever phantom post office, the call to friend (not available), and the sad trip home. … Oh, and let us not forget … the heart-rending decision to mail out anyway in the futile hope that the work will nonetheless be read.

Today was the first time in several years that Puntitas sent out a short story. She’s been a little afraid to read what she has because she doesn’t want to discover that her fiction is crap.

She knows that her chronic procrastination comes from an overwhelming sense of vulnerability, one of having her best efforts rejected and her dreams quashed, one that grows with each rejection, that prompts an examination of what is believed to be in reach, what is real and what is perceived. It is the fear of uncovering a delusion.

Puntitas reads _The Cardinal Sins_ by A. Greeley, _Double Take_ by B. Joyce, _Knit One, Felt Two_ by K. Taylor (which, like _The Knitting Goddess_, she reads in bits and pieces), and _The Wedding Dress_ by K. Cates. Puntitas really does have a fondness for relaxation reading.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.