Folowing the Yellow Brick Road

Puntitas seems to be in congress with her muse—a beautiful thing, to be sure. Yesterday afternoon, she started a poem, which she finished lunchtime today. It didn’t just flow from her fingers to the keyboard. Much sitting around and engaging in the typical web surfing, email reading, kitchen snacking, telephone talking pursuits took place, as did some thoughts about how the poem wasn’t really worth continuing, but Puntitas kept on keeping on, and she’s now got a very solid draft on the hard drive.

As she researched the exact spelling of the title and did a little reading to make sure the term was appropriate, she learned a few more details that may help her give the poem a specific structure. The title refers to a dance concept. Puntitas thought its meaning was more general than it actually is: it isn’t X, but a specific type of X with a particular sequence of elements. When Puntitas next reads the draft (in a few days or a week), she will think about whether the poem works as it is or would be more effective if it paralleled that sequence.

Today’s poem and one of the two she finished recently are part of Puntitas’ campaign to write less depressing work. She decided to try Uplifting after attending a Naomi Shihab Nye reading, which featured lots of optimistic poetry and a few comments about using the art form to offer hope. Puntitas has written a handful of pieces that end on a positive note, most of them being ecstatic romps in odd places, but the romps tend not to go anywhere. That was Puntitas revelation of the day:

She doesn’t write optimistic poetry because she’s afraid of doing what her first-year composition students do–write complex narratives about interesting events that end on clichés, which have little to do with the text as a whole.

The key is to follow a journey that ends in a good place or in the possibility of a good place. These two poems go, in one case, from depressing to comforting and, in the other, from humorous to serene. Puntitas thinks both make the journey from A to B, with B serving as a plausible destination. Puntitas is considering revisiting two of her “finished” poems to make those romps more of a journey. She’s also got two other ideas she’d like to draft. One will definitely end on a cheery note. The other one is still undecided.

Not that Puntitas will stop writing her trademark grim poems. The one using the almond research is a downer and will stay that way. The idea for the other piece starts grim and gets grimmer, but Puntitas doesn’t have a clear idea of where the journey will end. She’s had the idea in her head for almost a year, and her assumption has been that the ending will be grim too, but pondering the idea in terms of a journey that ends in hope may be more productive. Who knows? This broadening of Puntitas horizons makes her feel like something of a beginner again. Definitely a sign of necessary growth.

Puntitas reads _The Other Daughter_ by L. Gardner and _Child of God_ by C. McCarthy. _La hija del canibal_ is temporarily on hold: Puntitas has low tolerance for post modern touches.

Two in Process

Yesterday was a good writerly day for Puntitas. She spent the entire day writing, with much simultaneous emailing, web surfing, and other fiddling around. Distractions notwithstanding, she nearly finished two poems by the time she went to bed.

One is the draft she discovered a couple of days ago, the one she’s been working on since, moving things to more impacting places, then moving most of them back to where they were originally. Right now, she’s feeling that the poem is done and basking in the glorious feeling that the Nobel Prize is only twelve months away. The hardest part was the ending, working from the second to last stanza to the last line, which became a short stanza. Puntitas will read it again later in the week and again in about a month to make sure all is as she believes. Most likely, she’ll do minor editing, but she doesn’t expect to make any significant changes.

The other one is the poem she started a month or two ago, the one that involves her research on almonds. It went well in the beginning. Then progress stopped at an expositional section, which got all prosy, with Puntitas unable to cover the information in a lyrical fashion. Yesterday, when she read the poem fresh, she realized that the breakdown happened when three consecutive stanzas had no images at all (i.e., not a single concrete noun anywhere). Some of the fiddling was about Puntitas imagining how she’d represent the moment of each stanza in a film. As ideas came to her, she adjusted appropriately and wrote on to the end—slowly, ploddingly, dully. The poem still needs work, but it’s got a beginning, middle, and end, and Puntitas is clear about the kinds of things she needs to do to finish.

Today Puntitas hasn’t done any official writing. She thinks she’ll read a trashy novel for a bit. Then try again.

Puntitas reads _the Priestly Sins_ by A. Greeley and _La hija del canibal_ by R. Montero.

Three Down–Four Counting Puntitas

Puntitas is a Philistine. Last night, she went to a play, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui by Bertolt Brecht, with all its manipulations and murders (a broccoli cross between Othello and Macbeth), and despite the big pronouncements and groovy Polynesian drums (Puntitas was especially impressed by the drum and piano version of AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” jammed before the performance), she fell asleep during the first half of each half of the play. Since she really liked the parts she experienced, she thinks she would have liked the parts she slept through as well and blames her crassness on the theater’s enthusiastic heating system and her most recent bout of insomnia, which culminated in three hours of sleep the night before.

Puntitas has also received three rejections this week. The first was charming. She sent a holiday poem to a journal seeking holiday fiction, attaching her work to a groveling email which acknowledged the discrepancy. The reply was sweet and witty, and Puntitas plans to submit some of her fiction in a month or two. The other two rejections were

1. an amazingly long list of winners, runners up, and honorable mentions to a chapbook contest, which made Puntitas wonder who the other two people not on the list were.
2. a form letter rejecting two sonnets, which Puntitas had high hopes of being accepted.

The two bright spots in the week were

1. Two of Puntitas’ poems are out in the world, and few things beat that high.
2. Puntitas found a draft of a new poem that was better than she remembered it. She’s close to finishing that piece and interested in working on some of the other new drafts. Promise leads to willingness to develop more promise.

Puntitas has also started applying for full-time jobs, another submission process she must be diligent about, whether she feels up to it or not.

Puntitas reads _La hija del canibal_ by R. Montero and _Beyond the Sunrise_ by M. Balogh.

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.