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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.

Postage Scale

Online shopping is a beautiful thing. Puntitas has just ordered a talking postage/kitchen scale. It has both a platform and a bowl and handles up to six pounds and ten ounces in weight.

She has spent at least two years of her life drooling over such a device for her knitting obsession, but she has taken the step of buying one to more accurately calculate the number of stamps required by her manuscripts. She thinks she has been over stamping, and since she has more submissions on the horizon, she wants to keep her stamp expenditures to a minimum.

This purchase adds forty-seven dollars to her ever growing pile of money pissed away on writing pre-first book. Perhaps this should be another blog category. Perhaps not. Puntitas is fairly certain she is close to the one-thousand dollar mark already, which is what she can reasonably expect to gain if she wins a book contest.

Puntitas reads _Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Other Stories_ by T. Capote.

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.

A Little Hope

Puntitas was thinking the other day that she’s been expecting more rejections without receiving any. This week two more arrived. One was for a book, the list of winners. It’s been so long that she doesn’t remember submitting. The other one is for her short shorts.

This last was one of those nice rejections that almost feels like an acceptance. It started with her name and the usual form letter blah-blah thanking her for her submissions, which couldn’t be selected with the overwhelming number of work, and wishing her luck with her writing. The letter was so generic that she almost didn’t bother reading to the end. then the title of one of her pieces caught her attention. The editor said it was nicely done but didn’t win him over in the end, he was afraid. Then he suggested she submit it to a specific editor.

She might, just because.

Puntitas reads _Desire_ by A. Quick and _The Well-Dressed Ape_ by H. Holmes.

The Remembered Self

Puntitas has begun to reinvent herself. At least that was the subject of today’s unexpected meditation.

For the first thirty years of her life, Puntitas was anally tidy (books alphabetized and arranged by subject; clothing hung by season, type, and such details as long-sleeve vs. short-sleeve; drawers discretely compartmentalized, even the undies drawer in which all items were folded). Then one day around the time she started teaching, Puntitas decided she’d put something away haphazardly because she had a stack of papers to grade or a class to prepare for, but her intension was that she’d get back to that minor chaos in a few hours or the next day at most.

Teaching kept her busy. Interpreting and translating also took up her time. She kept thinking she really would get to that now handful of troubled spots later.

Twelve years down the road, Puntitas is no longer teaching or doing the same type of interpreting work, and she realizes she’s been living in the sort of chaos that mirrors how she felt about both work experiences. It isn’t that they were bad, by any means. Though there were rough patches, she mostly enjoyed both jobs and learned a great deal from them. It’s that, to a large degree, they were learn-as-you-go situations, so Puntitas associates them with feelings of muddling-through or of also-having-to-deal-with-unpleasant-peripherals. By comparison, the newness factor of her current work is very small, so she only feels uncertain for short lengths of time.

The concept of reinvention came to Puntitas this morning when she decided she’d tidy up the messy zones of her bedroom, one disaster at a time. The first area was the top of her dresser, a pile of partially finished knitting projects, Christmas and birthday gifts, knickknacks, cosmetics, and the remnants of several colds past. She tossed out most of the knitting (all bad projects she finally accepted were beyond saving), redistributed the gifts, added most of the knickknacks to the garbage box, heaped in most of the cosmetics (unused) and cold debris as well, and discovered jewelry, perfume, and a few other mementos of the sort of person Puntitas had been before the chaos set in. Twelve years ago, Puntitas wore dresses at least half the time. She wore nice perfume, and sometimes she wore discrete jewelry. While she was a fashion devotee only for a year or two in her early twenties, when she was thin and young enough to think she might not be plain, she did bother about her appearance for a few years around the time she started her official working life because she felt generally good about herself and hopeful about her future.

Finding all the things she once used felt like finding someone else’s possessions and reconstructing that life from those things. It was the sort of exercise Puntitas does when constructing a character, asking herself what such a person wears, eats, does for a living, does when not working. She actually did all of that, stopping only when she discovered she was constructing a memory of herself. Perhaps it is time for Puntitas to reinvent a more life savvy version of who she was.

And two more rejections arrive today. Too bad such an interesting meditation had to end thusly. Ah, well.

Puntitas reads _Dry_ by A. Burroughs and _Siete años secuestrado por las FARC_ by L. E. Pérez.

When All Is Said and Done

Puntitas almost had a good cry after her last post. Thoughts of the money wasted and the pointlessness of it all swirled frantically in her head. Then she reminded herself that the choice to submit or not to submit was very much her own, so she should just do it or not and shut up about it.

She did it, and she shut up. Puntitas sent out both manuscripts and the chapbook each to one source. She prepared letters for more mailings, but nothing else is pressing, so she’ll send out the rest in a week or two, probably sooner to keep from changing her mind.

She also sent out six poetry submissions and one fiction. There were a few other journals she intended to send to, but having spent the entire day from 7:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. with a combined break time of three hours for meals, bathroom, and general whininess, she is much too exhausted to do any more tonight.

Among other things, Puntitas did the following today:

 changed one word in one poem, but it was a very important word.
 cut the last line of another.
 read a poem that is finished and surprisingly nice even though she remembers it as being incomplete and crappy.
 Sent out the newly finished poem for the first time.
 Sent out the one she’s been revising lately.
 Sent out one she hardly ever sends out.
 Experienced an existentialist moment in which she questioned the value of her life’s work.

Puntitas will go to bed now. She may not read a damn thing.

The Book Submission Blues

Puntitas has had a long, exhausting day. She printed out 1 copy of each manuscript (2 books and 1 chapbook), which took about 3 hours. She read contest guidelines, wrote cover letters, and swooned at the $365.00 in reading fees that she will be kissing goodbye by day’s end.

She is feeling bitter and bitterer and bitterest as she realizes she is unlikely to reap any fruits from this outlay, especially as this month has also involved spending $231.00 on a new cell phone, which in turn involves an extra $44.00 monthly fee to her cell phone bill—all because her current quasi employer likes to text and because Puntitas decided in one clearly stupid moment that she would be accommodating. Puntitas’ old celular barato texted just fine; Unfortunately, none of the currently available screen readers worked with it. So yet again, Puntitas has to be richer than most people she knows to go about her daily life, which is really pretty ordinary.

Though Puntitas is also ecstatically happy to report that work has picked up this past month, a perusal of her accounts indicates that it has only picked up enough to cover those two expenses plus one month’s cell phone bill and maybe a falafel plate at the local Mediterranean place.

When Puntitas is in one of these moods, she is not at all sympathetic to the struggling independent publisher. Sales are low because struggling writers can not afford to buy every lit mag or book ever published, nor do they want to as reading them only feeds their sense of being passed over by less talented souls who don’t mind putting out. Today Puntitas has been especially vindictive since her skimming of previous contest winners produced list upon list of fine Western European names, which prompted her to meditate on her own more southerly name, her own unconventional subject matter, and her money that buzzes and fizzes from her savings account, like a farting balloon.

Puntitas reads _Lost Girls_ by G. Shuman.

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.

Offspring

Puntitas is very happy. One of her publications is out in the world. She visited the web site and emailed her friends the link. Another online mag should update soon. Puntitas is doing cartwheels.

Puntitas reads _The Art of Setting Stones_ by M. P. Keane, _Stuff White People Like_ by C. Lander, _Fearless Fourteen_ by J. Evanovich, _Chemistry for Beginners_ by A. Strong, _A Face at the Window_ by S. Graves, _The Road Taken_ by M. Heart, and _The Memoirs of Mary, Queen of Scots.