Still Tinking

Puntitas has received two more rejections since her last post. She didn’t have much hopes for either (well, a little hope for one), so the news wasn’t very disappointing. She did entertain the thought of assigning an acceptance probability rating to each submission, but entertained it briefly on considering that such ratings would only highlight her inability to predict the likelihood of success. Puntitas is no stranger to self-flagellation, but she isn’t into cesspits of despair.

She missed some manuscript deadlines, the books to have been sent out by Saturday, but she’ll send them out tomorrow anyway on the assumption that editors will want the money enough to accept them. Her excuse of the day is that she was having serious trouble sleeping for much of last month and couldn’t think clearly enough to finish the revisions and editing she had in mind, then was suddenly overtaken by sleep the last few days. Even now, she’d rather be sleeping than typing though dinner is still a couple of hours away.

Today’s poetic efforts have centered around reorganizing the poems in the books. In one book, she has moved two poems in one section, moved one poem in another, and removed two poems in a third. In the other book, she’s thinking more work will be needed. Two sections make sense, one sort of does, but the third doesn’t at all. She’s thinking about changing the title of the book, but hasn’t quite figured out how to organized the two iffy sections.

Since her last post, Puntitas has also been working on two new poems. Well, she hasn’t made much progress at all with the almond poem (waiting to be less sleepy), but she did start another one, a Shakespearean sonnet on a subject she’d written about before (she destroyed the previous poem because it didn’t really do what she had intended).

She’s thinking she really does need to finish up a couple other drafts and maybe strengthen the pieces in one section. She’s thinking she can’t believe she thought her books were done last year.

Puntitas reads _Amy, Come Home_ by B. Michaels and _Wicked Game_ by L. Jackson. These were a nice Halloween break. Today she resumed the other stuff where she left off.

the Difference a Line Break Makes

In her many wanderings on the web, Puntitas found a journal that publishes Senryu and kyoka. Since she didn’t know what the forms were, Puntitas did some Googling:

Senryu is a haiku that comments on society rather than nature. In English, the form is a three-line poem divided into five, seven, and five syllables. It does not contain a nature word, and the tone is reminiscent of the grumpy old guys on The Muppets or of any gathering of Puntitas and her collection of displaced friends.

Kyoka is a tanka with senryu convictions, the English form having five lines divided into five, seven, five, seven, and seven syllables.

Since Puntitas still isn’t comfortable with very short forms or capable of saying anything succinctly, she decided to turn both of her twenty-five-word short shorts into tanka. Surprisingly, having a line break to organize ideas around was really freeing. Puntitas was able to cut words and set up images more easily than when she had nothing but punctuation to work with. She likes both poems (which are even shorter now) better than she did before though she is not confident enough about them yet to make firm decisions about including them in her books.

She did submit them to the senryu and kyoka journal. If the work is rejected as favorably as before, she will probably add them to the books. If not, she will keep working on them, possibly expanding them though only a little. What Puntitas thinks she did well is to pick subjects small enough for the form.

Puntitas reads _The Link_ by C. Tudge and _What Was Lost_ by C. O’Flynn.

Rethinking the Tables of Contents

Puntitas’ single writerly act of the day has been to move two poems in one of the books to reflect the change she made to the chapbook. As she read over one of the tables of contents to make sure it had updated properly, she realized that some sections make more sense than others, so one possible mission this evening is to rearrange the poems in the books.

She may put it off, however, because she’d like to add at least two new pages to each book. She’s got a couple of drafts, but she isn’t sure whether/where they’d really fit in, and she’s had one idea (complete with closing) that has been eager to get out on the page, but she hasn’t settled on the tone or the beginning. She also has a long poem that is more finished than not, which would really pad out the pages, but she isn’t sure that it will be ready enough by next week, which is when she wants to send manuscripts out. Whatever she does, Puntitas needs to hurry up and decide.

Oh, yes, there was one other writerly event. Puntitas noticed that one poem was one page and two lines long. She tinkered with the line spacing around the epigram, and now that poem and the book it’s in are both one page shorter, Making each collection fifty pages in length.

Puntitas reads _The Link_ by C. tudge and _What Was Lost_ by C. O’Flynn.

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.

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.

Riding the Revision Trail

After many days or weeks of writerly slovenliness, Puntitas has done some revision. Last night, she worked on one of the poems she’s been revising lately, the one she discovered to be absolutely incoherent ten years after it was finished. The changes are still more than surface-level editing, but they’re no longer about changing the whole direction of the piece. After last night’s session, Puntitas thinks the poem will change very little from now on.

Today she also worked on a nonfiction prose piece she considered done. Its “done”-ness was determined ten years ago, so Puntitas believed it prudent to read it before launching it into the world.

As far as revisions go, most of what Puntitas did was surface-level, cutting wordiness, getting details to match up, clarifying vagueness, and removing repetition. While she’s happy with that work, she’s not willing to say the piece is done. Her plan had been to read the piece from beginning to end without tinkering, but she started to notice the sort of little glitches that are easy to forget, so she tinkered as she went along, losing all sense of the voice and tension of the piece. She’ll need to read it again in a day or two because she isn’t sure that the narrator’s central problem is clearly set up, explained, or resolved. The sections that are supposed to do that may not do enough and may commit the additional sin of interfering with pacing.

On a personal level, the piece made Puntitas cry, not that her writing is particularly moving, rather that the problem is still unresolved for her, a state of things which she knows, but was not expecting to react to so strongly. The piece may require an objective reader after some revision.

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.

Ups and Downs

Fortune is a fickle force. The day after Puntitas’ cartwheels of celebration, she received a rejection (form email with her name), and she received news that she did not get very far in the selection process of a job she’d expected to interview for. Then today she received birthday flowers though her birthday was several weeks ago. Ups, downs, and ups again—good thing chocolate is both a reveler and a consolation.

Puntitas has been knitting socks, Three pairs in a two-week period. She wasn’t feeling particularly poetic, so she couldn’t get up the nerve to read her latest set of revisions. Today, in a moment of heel annoyance, she pulled up a file and discovered a burst of poetic mojo.

The incoherent poem she’s been revising is pretty much done now, after more brutal trimming and lots of editing. She used the search-and-replace feature to strip out the hard returns and put pipes in their places. Then she edited as if she were reading prose, and used search-and-replace to turn the pipes into hard returns again. The poem is still one or two readings away from official “finished” status, but Puntitas doesn’t think the future changes will be significant. In fact, she went ahead and put today’s version into the book-length manuscript.

She also read another poem, the one she recently added to one of the books. She made a few minor changes, more editing than revision, and one change that is significant indeed. The literal situation described is one person helping another. Puntitas has worried that, given other details, the person being helped will be perceived as helpless, an interpretation which can obscure the point of the piece. Today Puntitas found a way of redirecting the reader’s perception. She named the character after a well-known literary figure, a truly inspired decision since the character in the poem is doing the sorts of things the literary character is known for. She’s feeling much better about that poem now too.

There’s only one more poem (already in the books) that Puntitas wants to reread and significantly revise, and there’s one draft and one idea she’d like to develop for these books, but she’s feeling comfortable about sending the manuscripts out as they are.

Puntitas reads _The Shadow Wife_ by D. Eden and more of _The Art of Setting Stones_ by M. P. Keane, which is beautiful, but too slow for someone who is often sleepy.

Long Drawn Submission

Puntitas has spent seven hours on revisions and submissions today. She started at three o’clock revising a couple of the poems she read the other day. Most needed minor work on a tricky stanza or line, but one, which she’s read and reread for years, made no sense. It still mostly made sense when she read from beginning to end. Then when she took it line by line to check for rough patches, it was incoherent—incredibly incoherent—all the way through.

When she had revised to the halfway point, Puntitas decided she was exhausted and needed to read fresh another day. So she moved on to submissions.

This took up most of her time, at least five hours. She only sent out six packets, including a chapbook (her second; The first failed attempt was years ago), and stopping at ten o’clock, she’s still not sure why the process takes so long.

Her routine is this:

 She reads the submission guidelines and a couple of sample selections if available.
 She takes a minute to think about which poems are most appropriate.
 She fills out her form letter.
 She either copies and pastes the poems into the body of an email or inserts them into a new document.
 She skims to make sure all poems are complete and consistent with the cover letter.
 If hard copies are involved, she has someone label envelopes, etc., while the printer is humming away, or she visits another web site and starts preparing another submission.

Only occasionally does she actually read a batch and revise or edit thereafter, and when such is the case, she rarely spends more than five or ten minutes on revision, opting for a different poem if more time is required. Nonetheless, each submission takes an average of forty-five minutes to prepare, assuming multiple copies are not called for.

Puntitas will probably not send out more submissions for another week or two. Tonight she is especially tired.

Puntitas reads _The Wedding Dress_ by K. Cates.

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.