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.

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.

Sleep Deprivation and Incoherence

Puntitas’ body clock is a mess. That usually happens when she’s premenstrual (“premenstrual” being one of the predominating subthemes of her blog, according to a male friend who has a period of his own), but that’s not the case this time. The problem began when Puntitas started dozing off during her reading of parallel texts. Now she’s reading trashy novels and drinking real coffee throughout the day so she can wear herself out for the night. Needless to say, her concentration is shot to hell, so her big, ugly translation is moving along sloooowly, and coincidentally, work is moving along sloooowly too.

Puntitas’ job is characterized by much variety and a moderate amount of unpredictability. It requires her services at all hours of the day and night, and it takes her to many strange and wondrous locales. Today’s appointment was an unannounced home visit from a universally disliked social service agency. It involved a remote (“godforsaken” being the more exact word) collection of mobile homes, plywood houses, dirt, broken refrigerators, mysterious metal panels of assorted sizes and shapes, gusty winds, and an unmarked house with four Animal Control vehicles parked in front of it but no signs of life, animal or otherwise, save two hill women on a neighboring stoop, pretending not to notice whose hovel the County car pulled up to. Well, actually, it pulled up to three separate mobile homes (all saggy, peely, and rocky), none marked with a number, before finally parking at the unit with the scrawny meth hag peering out the window in a negligee.

Puntitas brings this up for no real reason except that she would like someday to write a poetry collection about some of her experiences at work and felt the muse following Methie around the nearly empty unit in search of birth certificates and other documents.

And on the subject of altered states, Puntitas is yet again baffled by the vagaries of editorial judgment. Puntitas has gotten more information about her recent acceptance. She submitted two poems, one she has a soft spot for and another, which she likes but which she considered flawed enough to seriously revise after her trip to Kinko’s. When she got the acceptance email, she was told that her poem would be published, but the title of said poem was not specified. A brief email exchange later, she has received the shocking news that the poem to appear in print is the flawed one, and she’s 90%certain that it’s the unrevised version.

Puntitas reads _La Reina del Sur_ by A. Perez-Reverte and _Across a Wild Sea_ by S. Lord.

Perspective

I’ve been less diligent about keeping my blog lately because I’ve been behind on other things. My thinking has been, “Once I get X done, I’ll blog,” as a reward. That line of thought led to my not reading, except what was required for a class, for over ten years. I would say to myself, “As soon as I write this paper, I can read a novel,” or “When I study for this test, I can get back to reading the poems.” I rarely wrote the essays or studied for the exams, so I read nothing, and I felt interest in very little.

Last week, I picked up my largest translation project to date. It really isn’t much larger than the previous record holder, which was one of my early assignments, but I’m feeling intimidated. I haven’t found very many equivalents for much of the terminology, and I’m starting to think I may have to do more improvising than I had expected. To add to the stress, I’m working on a short timeline, and I’m still finishing up an interpreting assignment that keeps me pretty busy.

But I haven’t stopped thinking about the writing. In fact, I almost put everything else on hold to do some last week. The piece was the extraterrestrial story. One of my aunts lives in a city which is alleged by its residents to have a Martian base either under the pier or in the hospital basement. As I’ve probably said here before, the story is set in that city around someone who has grown up with that lore. Because the plot and conflict were prompted by something my cousin said, as reported by my mother, the characters were originally loosely—very loosely—based on my mother’s sister and her two daughters, the protagonist resembling my oldest cousin.

I’ll interrupt myself at this point to say I’ve had very little contact with my relatives. I grew up far away from them, and when we did visit, their approach to me, though courteous, was more remote and less friendly than their attitude to my siblings. This particular set of cousins also lived far from the locus familiae, so my contact with them was rarer still. The last time I was in the same room with either of them, we were in preschool. Not surprisingly then, I got only vague scraps of information about them until three or four years ago, when my mother suddenly developed an interest in and a cell phone plan that allowed for calling them regularly.

I’m saying all of this because I know my cousins mostly the way I know characters in books: through hearsay and the imagination I use to fill in the gaps. Lately, their lives have become eventful (the older one has developed a malignant and apparently aggressive cancer), so the hearsay is coming, not just from her mother and sister, but also from other aunts, cousins, and uncles, who are making the trip out to pay helpful visits. Suddenly, what I know about her, my conception of her, has changed dramatically, and details from previous reports are taking on new meaning. This is an unsettling feeling to have about a real person with whom I have a blood tie.

About the story, my conception of it has changed as well. The protagonist is now modeled after my younger cousin, a character I’d initially thought boring, and less of the plot line comes from my head. More accurately put, less of the plot comes from my imagined experience, and more of it is based on what I imagine their experience to be. It’s still by no means a faithful rendering of events, but it is a story about something that can happen to my cousin or someone like her, a story she’s more or less told my mom over the course of the last few months. I feel better about what that story is supposed to do.

Puntitas reads _Three Bags Full_ by L. Swann and _The Barred Window_ by A. Taylor.

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.

Stalling

Work was slow enough at the beginning of the week for me to do a lot of stewing. Stewing is bad–makes the neuroses come to the surface—so I spent a lot of time pushing myself to do things. Nothing as taxing as writing or housework. I made phone calls I’d been putting off and other inanities of the kind. Yet another reminder that happiness is as much about a set of habits as it is about a state of mind. Ah, well. What I haven’t managed to do is to push the habits beyond a nonproductive rut. Perhaps that should be my goal: to write, to maintain a routine, to think in active channels. Fortunately, the last two days became unexpectedly busy, and my ánimo, such an apt word for one’s general state of well being, seems to have recalibrated to the degree that I’m not thinking of a phone call as a major accomplishment.

I did nothing writingwise except think about it. I thought about dropping a character from my very fledgling extra terrestrial story (still at 300+ words), and I thought about sending manuscripts out.

I don’t know why I don’t send manuscripts out. When the reality of large manila envelopes, stamps, and SASEs is not on the day’s schedule, I believe in my own writing, but when it is, suddenly my work sounds like crap. Really need to get past that thinking. The Nobel committee hasn’t found my hard drive.

My current excuse for being stuck is that the extra terrestrial story is the one I want to work on right now, but I don’t have access to the setting, one aspect of which is key to the unraveling. I visited the location thirty-five years ago, when I was a child, so I have some vague memories to draw on. I’m reading blogs and touristy sites to gather more info. I’ll also ask my mother, who visited a couple of years ago and has a great sense of detail. She’ll probably hesitate to tell me what I want to know because she’ll think I’m making fun, mockery being something I’m accused of regularly, but it’s also very likely that she didn’t pay much attention to the feature I’m interested in. I’m sure I’m making this more complicated than it needs to be. The book I’m reading this weekend is set in India. It’s got lots of details about the culture, but so far, nothing is as specific as my head is telling me I should be, so odds are, my problem will be solved if I change the narrator’s profession from travel writer (really local news anchor who squeezes a free trip out of her boss by promising to do some nostalgia pieces for viewers far from home) to something less demanding on me.

Puntitas reads _A Child Called It- by D. Pelzer, _Cold As the Grave_ by P. Robinson, and _Holy Cow_ by S. MacDonald.

Getting to Know the Book

The working title is Fat Girl. Yeah, I know, it’s awful and politically incorrect. At the time I started, I needed a title that would help me keep track of the book’s controlling idea. When I was a student taking first- and third-year comp, I wrote papers called “Abortion” and “Sex Education: Why It’s So Important” for the same reason. Now that I read and write a lot more than I did then (and now that I’ve read ten years worth of student essays as stunning [and that really is the word] as my own), I know that the title and the controlling idea are two separate entities and that getting the former to express the latter takes a great deal of thought and experience. I also know that titles can be changed, so I’ll leave mine alone for now and deal with it later.

The plot is simple:

Amanda, the plain and plump, and Hernan have grown up together. She’s madly in love with him, but she knows he’s got a crush on her beautiful but disdainful sister Gabriela.

Those really are the only characters in the novel. A few other people (their parents, Gabriela’s boyfriend, some of the people who work with them) wander through the text from time to time, but they’re not well developed, serving as window dressing, as one of my professors would say.

The setting is a spacious house in an upscale neighborhood and an equally upscale boutique. Having just skimmed the first chapter, I think I’ll tone the upscale down. Most likely, I was going through my Danielle-Steel-diamond-cage phase.

The point of view is first person singular: Amanda. I remember that at one time it was third person, but I think I may have gone through the text and changed that twice.

The first paragraph is this. I’m not sure that I like it:

I stood on the landing above the great room surrounded by potted plants and cooking smells, looking myself over in the mirror beside the fanlight, and wondering if the dress I’d tried on in Hernan’s shop would really help. Hernan had said it would, and they always did. But scanning the homely face and the plump body in the oversized T-shirt with baggy jeans, I reminded myself that Illusions could only do so much.

The third paragraph may be a better start:

I shook my hips in the landing mirror, remembering the feel of the dress: the gauzy fabric, the dark background, the discrete white bouquet print. It had taken at least twenty pounds off me, and if I kept my back straight and my chin up, it actually gave me breasts, a waist, and hips.

Or deciding now may be premature.