Dusting Off After a Stumble

A rejection sure can take the wind out of the old sails. Puntitas was feeling very writerly and accomplished all week. She revised, pondered, experimented. She had a positive workshop with a friend, who really liked her narrative essay and gave her helpful suggestions. She had an idea for a new poem. Then she received yesterday’s rejection, which was especially disappointing because she thought it was the most likely of the journals to take her work.

Today Puntitas caught up on email, had lunch with a friend, floated around the house doing very little of consequence, spoke to two other friends on the phone, finished the fudge in the kitchen. She thought about working on the essay, thought about working on her tables of contents, thought about revising her resume for a couple of possible jobs. But she didn’t do any of those things, and she didn’t turn off her computer because the week’s activity had gotten her into the habit of writing, and not writing was making her restless.

So Puntitas decided she’d do a little writing anyway–start that poem that had been rolling around in her head, the one with the ending, but no beginning or sense of voice. She wrote a few short lines that didn’t grab her, a vague description that didn’t do much even on the literal level. She thought about them to figure out what to do next, And she realized that the items she described were nested, like Russian dolls. That was the first metaphor she came up with—Russian nesting dolls, which is physical enough and universally understood, but not really part of Puntitas’ experience, more a literary cliche. She asked herself what other mundane thing nested or stacked naturally, and she thought about the almond tree she grew up with, the nut inside a woody shell inside a suede-like hull. She added that to her draft, only she didn’t know the name of the hull, So she went to Wikipedia to read about almonds.

Wikipedia is a beautiful thing.

Puntitas learned lots of interesting things about almonds. They’re native to the Middle East and Mediterranean. The wild varieties have pink blossoms and are poisonous, even lethal in large enough amounts. the domesticated varieties have white flowers and are safe to eat. The almonds themselves are technically not nuts, but a drupe. If the shell has been removed, they’re shelled, and if the shell is present, they’re unshelled—the most amusing part of the entry hands down. They’re related to the apricot, And forty-two percent of the world’s production is cultivated in Puntitas’ home state.

She read the entire entry mostly as an avoidance mechanism, but when she returned to her draft to properly name the shell and hull, she discovered she could use these details to shape the poem, to develop the speaker and set up the conceit. She wrote two expository stanzas and thought about what images and information they would lead to. Then she stopped, with the plan that she would continue tomorrow. She doesn’t think this poem will draft itself, but she does think that it will allow her to discover its rhythm and help her write it.

Puntitas is sleepy now. It is time for bed.

Puntitas reads _The Link_ by C. Tudge and _first Comes Love_ by M. Balogh.

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.

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.

Revising at This Late Stage

After a couple of months of not thinking about her book-length manuscripts, Puntitas woke up last week with the thought that one of her poems would benefit from the addition of two details. She spent most of the rest of the week distracting herself with other thoughts because, well, the manuscripts are done, but then yesterday, she paused in her distraction to add the details, put the entire poem into the present tense, tinker with the ending, and prune some of the prosier language.

She did hear the sentence, “That’s why it hasn’t been published,” cross her consciousness, and after inserting the revised poem into the manuscript itself (Puntitas revises the individual poem file first and then goes to the book to remove the old version and insert the new), she was glad she’s been too lazy to make new copies of the book.

Puntitas also had the sobering realization last night that save for one or two journals, which escape her at present, she’s pretty sure she’s received rejections from everyone she submitted to in February, so she must send out more poems.

A poet’s suffering is never done.

Puntitas reads _Blood and Guts: a Short History of [Western] Medicine_ by R. Porter, a book which, though readable, informative, and interesting, is nonetheless not as entertaining as the title suggests. In fact, Puntitas might have skimmed and fizzled if she were not reading it for an editing project she’s working on.

Puntitas Has an Interlude with the Muse

A friend and I went to hear Naomi Shihab Nye read her work tonight. She was great. Her poetry is accessible, vivid, and compelling, using ordinary things to talk about profound truths.

I came home feeling poetical and wishing I could write something as simple and meaningful as her work. Then I sat down at my computer to check my email, startled by a lovely message from a yarn craft list about knitting hexagons and all the wondrous possibilities in such a simple form. I experienced that writerly burst of energy that turns to restlessness or … crime (it’s a real possibility) … if it isn’t channeled into some aspect of a manuscript. I typed out a rough draft of a poem (my first in months) about knitting (a subject I’ve wanted to take on for the longest time). I’m so excited that I would spend the next couple of weeks revising if I didn’t have my translation due.

I’ve written as much as I can now to get the general structure of the poem down and to create toe holes for the expositional details that give the knitting meaning beyond the literal. The actual knitting part needs little revision. Most of those details are concrete and clear. But the other parts (the thing I’m comparing to knitting) need lots of work. I plan to do some knitting to refine some of the images and details that connect the knitting and nonknitting elements of the piece, but the bulk of the revision involves developing the thing for which knitting hexagons is a conceit and whithout which I’d just have a set of rambling instructions.

I really enjoy the discussion list that gave me the idea for the poem. We talk yarn and drift off into other realms. When I told them about my book rejection, one person commiserated with me by saying something like, “That’s awful. It’s like being told you have an ugly child.” that felt so exactly right that it made me laugh and went a long way toward cheering me up.

Puntitas reads _the Abduction_ by M. Gimenes.

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.

Puntitas and the Ignorance of Others

After a computer calamity, Puntitas has been working on her big, ugly translation project, which she has had to start over because of said event. She has finished reading Blindness by Jose Saramago, which she dislikes for a number of reasons, the easiest to sum up being that responding to a metaphor (i.e., the eyes are the windows of the soul) is ignorance and masturbation if the response isn’t informed by active inquiry (i.e. interrogation of the assumptions that underlie the metaphor, observation of the literal components of the image, experimentation that leads to deeper reflection on the subject). Puntitas’ appreciation of the novel has suffered further after a consultation with an oral surgeon who thinks it’s amazing that blind people can walk and impossible for them to participate in a routine doctor-patient encounter. (The surgeon kept talking about having someone translate for Puntitas and was bothered when Puntitas asked why that would be necessary as both were speaking the same language. Puntitas almost … skin-of-the-teeth almost … added, “I mean you’re speaking in Stupid, but since I hear that language quite often, I’ve learned to puzzle it out.”) Puntitas believes that this surgeon very probably shares Saramago’s perception of the blind as a helpless collective of shit covered needs–alegories about alienation, blah-blah notwithstanding. No, Puntitas hasn’t gotten over either the awful surgeon or the fact that the only characters in the novel who have ordinary rational thoughts are sighted. But Puntitas leaves all that for another day.

In the realm of Puntitas the emerging writer–another rejection arrived today. It came from the Missouri Review, a typical form letter on a half sheet of paper. Someone wrote a note, thanking me and telling me to try the magazine again some time. I would have taken it for a generic kindness, like Howard Junker’s “onward,” except that the person who wrote it actually used my name. That almost made up for the writer’s not wanting some of my best work.

I’ll need to send more batches of poems out soon.

Puntitas reads _Maridos_ by A. Mastreta.

The Muse Is a Flirt

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

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

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

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

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

Well, need I say it?

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

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

Puntitas reads _La sombra del templario_ by N. Masot.

New Year, New Plans

I’ve been meaning to post long before now. I’ve got a rough entry about my adventures at the MLA convention to put up, and I’ve had a few thoughts about the new year to write down. I think I’ll focus on the latter today.

I’ve been keeping this blog for a little over a year. I think the first entry was in October of ’07. My goal was to make myself think about writing or actually do a little at least once a week. At the time, my approach to working on my poems, stories, and novels was earnest but haphazard. I had hope and faith in the blog’s ability to help me settle into a routine, but I also imagined that eventually I would run out of steam. Hence the pseudonym.

What has been amazing to me is that, over the course of a year or so, I have truly learned to think of myself as a writer. I have learned to invest in my writing, reading more books, attending plays, setting time aside to write, engaging in research activities that feed my work. I have finished two book length poetry manuscripts, and I have plans for both writing more poems and revising my fiction.

I haven’t done much of anything for the last month. Part of what’s happening is that I’ve wanted to rest and clear my head from the experience of writing the poetry books. I’m trying to make the shift from a highly detailed line oriented writing style to a style involving long series of expository passages and action sequences that need to be retained in the head and merged in the text.

Too, work has really picked up lately. I’m trying to get used to making time and finding the energy to write between appointments. More than that, I’m trying to figure out how to keep the writing from interfering with my work. I notice that, when I’m going through an intense writing phase, I have a harder time interpreting, my writing language (English) becoming obviously dominant. To compensate, I’ve decided to read more Spanish, one book or three academic articles a month, but I’m sure I can do other things as well.

This year’s plan is to get some of the short fiction published, to finish the novella, and to get the novel close to ready.

As I write this, I think the novel may be a quicker project. I’ve got one hundred fifty pages of material that needs little revision. It accounts for about three fourths of the novel. Based on very good workshop advice, the first bit of revision is to start the novel a few scenes before my current starting point. I’ve written ten pages of prenovel material so far and expect to write another ten or possibly fifteen more. I’ve also got a very detailed summary of what comes after the one-hundred-fifty-page core. The summary is twenty-two pages long. It may double in length when all is said and done, but I don’t expect it to grow much more than that.

What keeps me from working on it are two things. One is that I think I need to do more background reading on history and philosophy, the specific areas my protagonist is interested in, and the other is that I feel I need to travel to Barcelona to get more of the place details right. The story is set there, partly because I wrote the first draft shortly after taking a trip and partly because the location seemed to be a good way of isolating the protagonist and prompting her to think about ambivalence.

I’m having a similar problem with my novella, which I realized several years ago covers the same ground as the novel only with a different outcome. (One ends in despair; the other, in hope.) The novella is set in Mexico, in a reconstructed hacienda outside the city of San Luis Potosi. I don’t know enough about the history and geography of the region, so I’d really like to visit to explore.

I’ll probably have to make due without those trips, or I can try publishing some of the other stories to get the sort of job that will allow such travel. I’ll start by getting my passport in order. I think it expired three years ago.

Puntitas reads _Blind Spot_ by T. Persons and _One Thousand White Women_ by J. Fergus.

The Submission Blues

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

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

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

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

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

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