the Value of Experience

Puntitas has organized her favorites into four nice neat folders, one of which is “Writing,” so she feels very accomplished. She has also set up her kitchen cum postage scale, and after some experimentation, she has discovered that she can accurately weigh her manuscripts, provided she paperclips the top and bottom edges so that most of the physical document is on the weighing platform. If she lays the document flat, like a leggy damsel with limbs aloft, the weight is off by one to two ounces.

The other thing Puntitas discovered is that she’s been putting way too much postage on her manuscripts. After using slide rule and graphing calculator (okay, Puntitas exaggerates, but only a little) combined with new scale and USPS website, Puntitas has determined that six forty-four-cent stamps are more than sufficient for her fifty-five-page document, plus cover letter, plus SASE, plus post card, plus entry form where applicable.

The other literary activity Puntitas engaged in (minimal writing has occurred since last post) is that Puntitas and a friend went to an experimental theater production yesterday. It was fun, four Poe selections partially read, partially dramatized in various rooms of the university library. The first was “The Raven—all screams and hurling self onto floor–which was Puntitas’ least favorite performance, as she imagines the speaker of the poem to be crumbling in a fidgety quiet. The rest of the pieces—“The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Black Cat,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart”—were more low-key, but there too, the performances tended to characterize “madness” with the hysteria of someone who has never actually been around people with delusions and other mental illnesses. The interpretations also lacked the nuance that only comes of having ten or twenty years worth of experiences with people and life. In “Amontillado,” For instance, the narrator carried herself with a venomous intent, which is how Puntitas imagined the character when she was younger. Now, however, Puntitas imagines the serenity of a decision made and the strain of giving the self courage enough to seize the opportunity. After all, maturity gives one both the tolerance to deal with unpleasantness and the patience to take action when tolerance is exhausted, and Puntitas makes this remark after an especially unpleasant experience at work.

Puntitas also noticed that the productions, which were understandably low on scenery, were also disappointingly low on sound effects. Poe is full of sound, creating much of the tension by describing stillness, the ticking of a clock, the jingling of the bells on someone’s hat. He is so meticulous about sound that Puntitas suspects he was a predominately aural person or that he spent enough time drinking at night to value his hearing. Puntitas thought that greater tension would have been achieved with subtler acting, more sound effects, and greater experience of life.

When Puntitas is being sensible, she thinks that her eight years of percolation between graduation and the present have been good for these reasons, but Puntitas is rarely ever sensible for very long.

Puntitas reads _Reflections in a Golden Eye_ by C. McCullers and _Bridget Jones Diary_ by H. Fielding.

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.

Other Readers Needed

Thanks to a recent bout of insomnia and to a slow work week, Puntitas has been putting a lot of time into revising her narrative essay. She was surprised to read it today and discover that minor changes would fill in a lot of gaps, hint at back-story, support themes, unify apparently disparate elements, and address many of the evils she had worried about last night. She was satisfied enough with the day’s revisions to send the draft on to a friend for feedback.

Puntitas really needs an outside reader for this piece since her emotional response to it on first reading tells her she’s still too close to the subject to gauge the work objectively. The person she sent it to isn’t an ideal reader in that she shares a characteristic with Puntitas that is likely to filter her interpretation, but Puntitas wants to hear what she has to say anyway because Puntitas values her skills as a reader and because their shared characteristic makes her a good person to discuss the subject with. After their conversation, Puntitas plans to go through another round of revision. Then she may ask another friend, who does not share the characteristic, to comment as well, but that will depend on how she’s feeling about the piece at the time.

Inviting others to experience a foreign world is a hard task. Puntitas hadn’t thought about how hard until recently, when she read Dry by Augusten Burroughs, a memoir about a gay man going through rehab and trying to maintain sobriety despite the illness and death of a friend and former lover.

Puntitas was able to identify with much of the book. The narrator’s friendships reminded her of her own friendships. His experiences with addiction and recovery connected her with the people she knows who are in their addictions or recoveries as well as with aspects of her job. Specific scenes and moods evoked parallel episodes in Puntitas own life and in that of her friends’.

One part of the book, however, that she was less able to connect to was a certain portion of the gay story line. Puntitas isn’t gay or particularly oriented to finding a life partner of any type, so love stories are generally interesting as curiosities (hence Puntitas’ fascination with formula romances). This one was more interesting than usual in that it was about someone who has to “fall out of love” and maintain a friendship with a person who doesn’t reciprocate. The story drew Puntitas less when the former lover develops AIDS and dies, prompting turmoil in the narrator, which eventually leads to relapse.

Stories about terminal illness are generally hard to pull off because they tend toward the sentimental or sensationalistic, because characters’ reactions follow a few expected paths, and because the death, which comes at or right before the climax, leads to a handful of predictable events. Puntitas has an especially hard time with stories about women with cancer and (A) big families or (B) close friends.

The few books Puntitas has read by contemporary gay writers have tended to figure a character (major or minor) with AIDS (often in its more advanced stage). For Puntitas, who is an outside reader, this feels like a cliché, but she suspects that, for the gay writers and readers, the AIDS character is an acknowledgement of someone who is part of their landscape and that other characters’ responses to him are significant markers within the community.

Puntitas’ own narrative essay risks the same kind of resistance that characterized her reading of Burroughs AIDS story line. The piece is about exclusion. That will be clear to anyone who reads it. But because so much memoir about this topic centers on exclusion, readers may not bother to tease out the subtleties of the type of exclusion being described. The nuances aren’t buried enough to actually need teasing out. But the readers’ expectation and lack of direct experience or real empathy dull their perceptions. This is why it will be important for Puntitas to have outside readers.

Puntitas reads _The Link_ by C. Tudge.

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.

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.

One Rejection and One Submission

Puntitas received another rejection on Friday. It came from Triquarterly. The form letter was less generic and sterile than most. It was printed on a strip of paper as wide as a standard 8-1/2×11 sheet, but only one third that height.

Puntitas must be producing additional layers of skin because the rejection caused only a brief sting. No mental depictions of cruel and unusual demises followed, and neither was there any frantic rush to the PC to record the event.

Puntitas is also too preoccupied with other things to obsess properly. She’s got some editing to do and more translation both due soon, and her job situation is nearing a head. Fortunately, Puntitas is sleeping better now, more hours at more sleep appropriate times, so she is lucid enough to do what she needs to and avoid the stuff she really shouldn’t dwell on anyway.

Much of today has been spent scanning a bilingual legal dictionary. Puntitas has managed to not-scan this dictionary for a year, but this morning she woke up thinking that it would behoove her to devote one or two days to scanning so that, over the next couple of weeks, she can just look terms up rather than continue her current method of reading four or five texts on a subject to figure out what something means, then reading twice as many to figure out how to translate it. Puntitas will probably have to keep doing some of that, but reducing the number of occasions is definitely a move toward efficiency.

Few things are as tedious to Puntitas as scanning a book. Yes, one positive way of framing the activity is remembering that it takes less than a minute to magically turn a page of dictionary into nice searchable text on the hard drive, but Puntitas, being cranky, rarely frames things positively when she is sitting lump-like at the computer for hours, pressing an open book down on a flatbed scanner, waiting forty-five seconds for the image to be captured and converted to text, turning the page, and repeating the process, and repeating the process, and repeating the process until she’s done and can spend three times as many hours ridding the scan of most of its errors (e.g., revising “judliciai” to “judicial”).

Days spent this way are made up of more hours than ordinary days. They also prompt Puntitas to hurl invectives at publishers, who don’t make all books available electronically to people who can’t just grab and read because they can’t see the print, process the writing visually, or hold the book and turn the pages.

As she invects, Puntitas remembers to mention that she sent out one more batch of poems last week—the writerly act of the week.

So far, only one book rejection. More should be coming soon.

Puntitas reads _Bloody Secrets_ by C. Garcia-Aguilera and _Mistress Bradstreet_ by C. Gordon.

Real Adventures Versus Sham Ones

Thanks to bad seasonal allergies, which some health insurance companies that Puntitas has applied to consider an incurable disease and reason for charging higher premiums (incidentally, , one of Puntitas’ friends says the same of that dreaded preexisting condition menopause), and insomnia (hello, Insomnia, my old friend), Puntitas has read an entire book by Victoria Alexander. The book didn’t actually grab Puntitas very much from the beginning, but she read it all the way through because she read an article last year citing Amanda Quick and Victoria Alexander as queen’s of what she thinks of as “the sparkling period romance,” the more-or-less Regency era love story with repartee, intrigue, and a handful of scenes involving extraordinary impropriety.

Puntitas likes Amanda Quick for her smart, spunky heroines and for her tension, both sexual and suspenseful, though the plots themselves, especially the mystery component are flawed and underdeveloped, even as subplots: pivotal events just sort of happen without an abundance of preparation or explanation, and one event doesn’t necessarily follow clearly from another.

So Puntitas decided to try Victoria Alexander, and the conclusions she has come to are (1) that there’s no pressing need to read more by the same author right away and (2) that Puntitas’ problem with the adventure genre is the concept of adventure for its own sake.

The book Puntitas just read is about a foreign princess who seeks out her estranged English husband, claiming to need his help to research the life of a self-exiled great aunt. The princess’ story, which fails to convince either her husband or the reader, covers a more sinister plot—restoring her country’s crown jewels to their rightful place despite the efforts of a distant cousin, also hoping to recover them in order to gain the throne, a chain of events as probable, intrinsically compelling, and realistic as the ones on General Hospital, the soap Puntitas follows while getting her nails done.

But she digresses.

Being a person of depth and numerous emotional demons, Alexander’s heroine distrusts, omits, and lies every chance she gets, inadvertently and advertently bringing more adventure and sexual tension upon herself and Hubby, neither of which does much for Puntitas, who has been wondering from Page One why the princess doesn’t just take the more direct route of laying the matter out before her great aunt’s English descendents, who have proven themselves loyal to her father but who figure no where in her scheme until ….

Yes, as luck would have it, the climactic scene takes place in the home of the great aunt’s descendents, where the jewels have been waiting for the heroine simply to come and get ‘em. Well, it would have been that simple if she’d done that in the first place. What happens instead is that all her intrigue has led the rival distant cousin to the jewels, so the princess must confront a pistol toting virago in a private sitting room and choose between duty and love in a ballroom filled with gala clad Nobility.

Of course, the princess’ motives are as layered and complex as her lies are convincing. She wants to restore the jewels to her country both to serve her royal house and people and to gain personal autonomy. She wants to involve her estranged husband (this is a sequel to another book in which the princess escapes her minders, falls in love, gets married, and goes back home a la Roman Holiday, the 1953 film starring Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn) in order to regain his love, and she repeatedly justifies both courses of action by saying she wants to have an adventure.

This last is the reason Puntitas hasn’t been able to make much headway in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The plot of that work is simple too: take the ring and leave it where it belongs. The characters so charged don’t know where that is, so they must ask around to find out where that place may be or who may know more about how to find it. Puntitas understands all that and is willing to play along as difficulties arise on the way to the next clue or informant, but she loses all sympathy for everyone as characters are asked, “Do you want to take the shortcut, or would you rather go the long way and have adventures?” and reply, “Oh, I want adventures.”

Life offers complications aplenty without needlessly manufacturing drama and adventures that put people and relationships at risk. Puntitas supposes that for those who enjoy adventure for its own sake (and drama too—The Tempest is an utter mystery to Puntitas), there’s probably a high in activity even when the activity is purposeless in general (as in The Tempest) or purposeless to achieving a goal (for Alexander’s princess, lying to her estranged husband doesn’t actually win him back, one reported goal, and not-visiting the great aunt’s descendents prevents her from going to the most likely source of information about the jewels, another reported goal). But for Puntitas, the high lies in knowing what is to be accomplished and in doing what needs to be done, two things that are difficult and adventurous enough on their own.

To be genuinely exciting, adventures need to be meaningful for the characters and for the world they live in. Having characters create them simply to test their metal is like attempting suicide to understand how important life is or doing drugs or booze to get a sense of happiness or relief. The events are almost always meaningless, and the insights they produce are unsatisfying counterfeits of real thought. An adventure story is particularly meaningless if, as in this case, there would be no story (in its present form) had the character taken the most obvious course of action, given her realistic options, in the first place.

Puntitas reads _Her Highness, My Wife_ by V. Alexander, which is less exciting than Puntitas made it sound.

Less Is More

On the recommendations of friends, I’ve been reading more formula fiction than usual. The realization I think I’m coming to is that less is definitely more as far as plot twists and social issues go. The last two books I’ve read serve nicely as case in point.

Both are mystery series, revolving around unconventional women. The Spencer-Fleming (written currently) is about a female Episcopal priest who serves in a small Midwestern town, has a relationship with the police chief, and manages to get herself mixed up in high profile crimes. The Forrest (written 20 years ago) is about a lesbian police officer who works homicide in the city of Los Angeles and keeps her sexual orientation to herself (more don’t-ask-don’t-tell than actually closeted).

The latter is about half the length of the former. It’s plotline is relatively simple, focusing on one crime, dispensing with secundary crimes and red herrings relatively quickly, and organizing the personal subplot around a clear central idea, how one gets over a past relationship. For me, this simplicity makes both the story and the characters more compelling and the plot twists and red herrings more surprising and effective.

In the former, so much is happening that I find myself spending as much energy trying to figure out how characters and subplots go together (not because the writing isn’t clear) as I do on following the action, and I notice myself thinking, “How clever” and “of course,” rather than “Oh, wow” or “Oh, no.” I also find myself making evaluative comments about how the social issues are dealt with: illegal aliens, age differences in romantic relationships, old guard vs. new guard, intercultural/interfaith relationships, public vs. private. While the story was well crafted, more of the characters were flat, relying on the series, not the individual story, to give them depth.

Now that I’m starting to think more about writing and revising prose, I realize that I felt insecure about keeping plotlines simple, but lately, I’ve been thinking I shouldn’t worry.

Puntitas reads _The Diary of a Nobody_ by G. and W. Grossmith, _I Shall Not Want_ by J. Spencer-Fleming, and _Murder at the Nightwood Bar_ by K. V. Forrest.

Repetition for Character Development

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

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

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

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

The technique I want to borrow is this:

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

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

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

First Acceptance in Three Years

Puntitas is a happy, happy person! She’s had an acceptance: one or two (can’t tell from the letter) poems to appear in a chapbook. It’s neither her greatest poem nor the greatest chapbook anthology ever, but both are fine and she’s damn proud. Details will be posted when the chapbook is a reality. For now, the acceptance is reason enough to bust out a few cumbia steps. Be grateful Puntitas does not own a web cam.

The email came at just the right time. Puntitas went to visit her accountant today. Yes, she has one. Originally, he was a low-key verging-on-sixty tax savant, the kind who is so low-key as to be mistaken for unpromising. Then he sold his business to work for the private sector. His replacement is earnest enough, but less wily about what the self-employed can deduct, and Puntitas has not been reassured by his having to interrupt to take a call from the IRS regarding another client’s audit.

Bravely, Puntitas persevered with her interview. Today’s foray into Puntitas’ financial affairs led to a discussion of her delusion that she is a writer. She has claimed to be one for two years now, and because she has made no money at it, he suggests that this claim be downgraded to a hobby. Few things are as shriveling to the ego as the juxtaposition of one’s degree, aspirations, and oeuvre with the government’s thoughts on hobbies and failing businesses. Puntitas supposes that she and the IRS are more likely to reach a happy medium if she were to sell the chapbook in which her poem(s) appears to a recycler for a profit.

In other news, Puntitas is a third of the way through her big, ugly translation. Reading in Spanish, even on something unrelated, while translating such a long document into that language has really been helpful. Puntitas has noticed many improvements in her style, and she has been much more successful at researching terms. She hasn’t been posting here or sending manuscripts out because she’s been so absorbed with that project, but she’ll need to take a day off to do some more mailing.

Puntitas reads _La reina del sur_ by A. Perez Reverte and _Say Goodbye_ by L. Gardner.