Shuffle and Reshuffle

Puntitas had an exhausting day. She spent most of it avoiding and delaying. The computer was up, and word was loaded, but the various printing and skimming tasks Puntitas had scheduled for herself didn’t get done.

Puntitas likes to blame it on the emotional aftermath of having dealt with yet another particularly ignorant clump on Friday, but the truth is that she’s feeling vulnerable and afraid of more rejection, especially since she knows barrels and barrels of that will come in any day now.

Her one real moment of work (downloading audio books doesn’t count) came at the end of the evening, when Puntitas got around to moving the poems around in the books according to the revamped tables of contents she wrote out … a month? Ago. One book was revamped in a relatively short time since the revamping consisted of substituting two pieces and reordering half a dozen others. The other book is being revamped more substantially, so Puntitas stopped for the evening after revamping it for thirty minutes.

Moving poems around in Word is a little fiddlier than Puntitas expected. Simply cutting and pasting isn’t ideal as the stanza breaks tend to disappear in transit. What yields better outcomes is to highlight and cut (ctrl+x), then to insert the file (alt+I, l, file name) in the appropriate place. Better still is to remember to cut before the page break; otherwise, the heading attributes that generate the table of contents get erased, and the end user is forced to swear loudly against her will.

Puntitas would actually like to finish now, but she’s tired and susceptible to the kinds of careless mistakes that make whole documents vanish. She will power down for the night, in the hope that, when she wakes tomorrow morning, she will remember that one perk of self-employment is time for writing.

And with her final burst of energy, Puntitas officially renamed one of her manuscripts.

Puntitas reads _the Sealed Letter_ by E. Donoghue, whom Puntitas didn’t remember reading before until she read the list of other titles. If Puntitas had remembered, she would probably not have read the writer again so soon, but she’s enjoying the book, so it’s just as well.

Poetic Stress

Puntitas had a small but important revelation concerning the almond poem and her poetry in general. While she’s liked the idea and the overall shape of the piece, she’s had trouble finishing it. The problem hasn’t been trouble moving from Point A to Point B or trouble resolving a technical issue. It’s been lack of motivation, which is odd since Puntitas is generally interested in writing this poem.

She’s noticed that this lack of enthusiasm is sometimes overcome by a little formal poetry, either reading or writing it, so she started writing another sonnet, and she spent some time on the web Googling around for other forms and for articles on forms.

Two stayed with her, and now that she wants to cite them properly, she can’t find them. Ah, well …. One was an interview, and the other was the forward for an anthology of formal poems. Both talked a lot about sound.

The first said that a poem is different from prose in that the former seeks to create an emotional effect, which is reinforced by the sound of the language, sibilants for soft soothing poems and plosives for capturing terse, harder pieces. He used many of the terms high school English teachers quiz their students on: assonance, alliteration, caesura.

The other said that the problem with free verse is that much of it is actually prose with arbitrary line breaks, prose and poetry being distinguished thus: prose is stressed roughly every ten syllables while poetry is stressed roughly every four. He talked about other things as well, most especially the line break and the need for concreteness not only in the imagery but also in the experience or moment described. But he returned to the sound of the piece, echoing the first writer’s thoughts about the connection between the emotional impact and the aural experience.

Puntitas’ first revelation was that her almond poem was stressed like prose. When she went back into the text to stress it more poeticly, she discovered that she was more motivated about working on it because the piece sounded like a poem again, and she realized that she is very aware of the way her work sounds. This is in part because of her writerly esthetic, having grown up on formal poetry, lived around songs, and listened to, officially studied, and worked around the rhythms of speech, but it is also due to the way Puntitas writes, typing to the echo of a robotic synthetic voice and considering a piece to be finished when she stops being aware of that voice. When a draft isn’t working or when it contains lots of research, she gets stuck, and she often finds that what produces her stuckedness is a prosaic rhythm, which she either modifies to something more poetic or emphasizes for something prosy.

Her second revelation was that she isn’t clear about how important sound should be in her own work. Some of her poems are rich in sound, working hard to reinforce the content aurally. Others strive for a starker soundscape, letting the content carry the burden of impact. Puntitas own impulses are toward valuing sound, but she wonders whether that isn’t an old-fashion tendency, since much of the poetry she reads has a prosier feel.

Puntitas reads _The Elegance of the Hedgehog_ by M. Barbery, _Dirty_ by M. Hart, _Hell House_ by R. Matheson, _siete años secuestrado por las FARC_ by L. E. Perez, and _The Link_ By C. Tudge. She has decided to finish books she’s started. Three or four are left on the metaphorical stack.

Some Rejections Are Good

Puntitas has received two rejections since her last post. One was for the tanka, a short formulaic note with her first name in the salutation, but nothing else to suggest it was written especially to her. The other one was more encouraging.

It was for a group of poems Puntitas sent out last May. It appears to be a surprisingly positive standard rejection with a personal note imbedded. The text reads as follows:

Dear Puntitas (last name included):

Thank you for sending us your poems (listed by title).

Hello Puntitas (first name only),

Please do accept my apology for taking so long with your poems. It was not that they were languishing, but that they were under consideration. While these particular poems were not what we were looking for, I would be pleased to see more of your work in the near future.

Thanks and hope to hear from you again real soon,

Poetry Editor, (name of) Journal

Unfortunately this particular piece was not a right fit for the journal, but we were very impressed by your writing. We hope that you will feel encouraged by this short note and send us something else.

We look forward to reading more.

Sincerely,

The Editors

Puntitas is very happy. She would have been happier if she’d been accepted, of course, but this is good enough for now.

Puntitas reads _What Came Before He Shot Her_ by Elizabeth George. She is still reading _Siete años secuestrado por las FARC_ And _The Link_. Both are interesting, but the George is quite the page turner.

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.

A Little Hope

Puntitas was thinking the other day that she’s been expecting more rejections without receiving any. This week two more arrived. One was for a book, the list of winners. It’s been so long that she doesn’t remember submitting. The other one is for her short shorts.

This last was one of those nice rejections that almost feels like an acceptance. It started with her name and the usual form letter blah-blah thanking her for her submissions, which couldn’t be selected with the overwhelming number of work, and wishing her luck with her writing. The letter was so generic that she almost didn’t bother reading to the end. then the title of one of her pieces caught her attention. The editor said it was nicely done but didn’t win him over in the end, he was afraid. Then he suggested she submit it to a specific editor.

She might, just because.

Puntitas reads _Desire_ by A. Quick and _The Well-Dressed Ape_ by H. Holmes.

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.

Damn Swans

Fortitude in the face of frequent rejection appears to be a cyclic virtue. For the last few months, the letters and emails that regret not publishing Puntitas’ work haven’t bothered her, except in that vague feel-bitchy-must-make-a-voodoo-mono kind of way that is more posture than actual emotion.

Suddenly that’s changed. Puntitas received one rejection in yesterday’s mail and two more in this morning’s email, one of them in response to a batch of poems she sent out so long ago that she doesn’t actually remember doing it. She tensed noticeably on opening the envelope, knowing exactly what the news would be, and she fought a very strong desire to skip the emails, not wishing to read yet again that the work was not good enough.

The odd thing is that the last few rejections arrived only days ago, and while Puntitas wasn’t wholly indifferent to the responses, she didn’t feel especially deflated or disappointed. Now, however, she’s having serious doubts about the quality of her work and the advisability of pressing on.

She’s also curious about the very abrupt and very forceful grief these last rejections have prompted. The letters themselves have been neutral or upbeat slips that are far preferable to the ones obviously cranked out by a bitter writerly eminence. The number of envelopes and email messages received does feel overwhelming, but Puntitas understands that this number is misleading as each poem has been rejected only three times.

Puntitas suspects that the problem is related to the voice of convention that dwells in each intrepid soul, the sensible representative of the ubiquitous white swan, which comments on probability and the normal. This voice is dangerous for the far less common, but very real, black swan—the aspiring artist, the self-employed, the other—because its world nullifies all other realities and because its power lies in the fact that its truth and that of the other sometimes overlap.

This crisis may be Puntitas’ cue to let the current books alone and to start concentrating on the new one and the fiction. For now, she’ll send out more poems and let that idea percolate while she gets more practical work done and applies for stable jobs.

Puntitas reads _Dirty Girls on Top_ by A. Valdez-Rodriguez and puts Godden on hold since she’s feeling shallow and escapist.

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.

Down Sick

Puntitas has been down with a bad coughy thing since Friday, July 3. She went to the doctor on the sixth day, unable to hold out the official seven, which makes western medical professionals very happy. The doctor, whom Puntitas sincerely believes is interested in her well-being or his license, which is close enough, almost sent Puntitas home with a pat on the head and the advice to return at the end of the seven days, but his other motivator (more billing) prevailed, and he prescribed Puntitas antibiotics and cough suppressant while telling her to return in a week for cholesterol and other testing.

While Puntitas thinks such testing would be wise, given her general flabbiness and whatnot, she doesn’t think she’ll actually comply because she believes those tests will result in a never ending series of follow-up appointments, which will inevitably begin ninety minutes past the time printed on the clever little card and cost Puntitas what she used to make on a very good day when she worked in the theoretical realm of J&S.

Puntitas is starting to feel better. She still can’t talk very long without coughing, but she has enough energy to get out of bed and finish the big, ugly translation, sans a few terms that need to be researched. She still stops whatever she’s doing to lie down several times a day, and showering still seems to require more energy than she possesses, mantras like, “only a few more things to do,” getting her through the process and longish sit-downs in one comfy chair or other being necessary once she’s out, but she does once again imagine a life of normal activities without the pressure in her chest.

Puntitas had hoped to start her vacation on a far more positive note.

Puntitas reads _The Sparrow_ by M. D. Russell, _The Ministry of Special Cases_ by N. Englander, _The Finishing School_ by M. Martinez, _Dirty Blond_ by L. Scottoline, and _The Silent Lady_ by C. Cookson,