Annette Snyder runs a cool blog called Fifty Authors From Fifty States. She just put up a post by me. Have a look, then check out all the others.
Category: blog
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It’s Friday
So it is. I’ve been crunching away on line edits all week and having a good time. The weather has been pleasant, at least compared to last week, and a couple of mornings I’ve been able to turn off the air and open the windows while working. I loaded up the CD changer with classical—Respighi, Strauss, Grieg—and did fresh ground coffee.
During breaks, I’ve been playing with pictures again. You know, you make damn near anything fascinating, even beautiful in a dark, bizarre way, with enough patience and mods. For instance:
Someone pointed out that in the past something like this would have taken a dozen Kodalith masks and posterization steps. There are about fifteen or so steps in this image and I think it could be a bit better.
We’ll see a friend tonight, go to a really cool party tomorrow night, and Sunday join our reading group to continue Canto X of Dante’s Paradiso. Maybe I’ll get together with some musicians Sunday afternoon to rehearse a couple of things.
Walk the dog.
I’m ignoring the politics going on right now. Just too pathetic to contemplate. Maybe next week.
For now, just relax and chill and enjoy the moment. That’s my plan.
If the above image is a little too weird, let me leave something here a little more normal. But not too normal. Have a good weekend.
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Working
I tell hopeful, wannabe writers all the time, when they ask that marvelously optimistic question, “what’s the secret to being a writer?” It’s a deceptively simple question, because the answer…well, I give the same answer no matter who’s asking, but the expectations differ from person to person. I suspect most want to know what the “trick” is, like there’s a gimmick, a magician’s sleight of hand, a way around the essential thing, which is hard damn work.
But I tell them all: persistence. Those who never make it are those who quit.
Obviously this begs a few questions. What if they have no talent? What if what they’re writing has no audience? What if they’re subliterate? What if they don’t like to read? (This last, while apparently absurd on its face, is nevertheless a more common fact than you might believe—aspiring writers who don’t read. I’ve met ’em, talked to ’em. It’s like a photographer saying he doesn’t like looking at photographs.)
All of that varies, though. The one single element that binds them all together in their quest is persistence. Persist and you will find out. But if you don’t persist, you may never know.
This is what I do. I persist. I refuse to give up. Granted, I have a bit more reason to be optimistic than most, since I have actually published, but that’s no guarantee that you will continue to do so. The market is a fey beast, fickle and heartless, and has crushed the souls of many a writer before. But, smart as I am, I’m an idiot when it comes to this, and it seems to finally be paying off a bit.
I have signed with the Donald Maass Literary Agency. This is a fairly big event for me. I’ve been shopping for a new agent for a long time. This one finally paid off. (My thanks go out to Scott Phillips, who introduced me to the obviously talented Stacia Decker, who then introduced me to the talented Jen Udden, and my thanks to both for taking a chance on my potential.) My last published novel was Remains, back in 2005—almost six years now.
This is not a sale. But this moves me closer to getting back into print than I was three months ago. Both Jen and Stacia have gone over my work, made substantive editorial recommendations, and allowed me to move forward on these books.
I feel very lucky right now.
But also, I have a lot of work to do. I have already rewritten my alternate history, Orleans, per Jen’s recommendations, and she’s beginning work on the marketing strategy. This morning I talked over The Spanish Bride with Stacia and will set to work on the revisions of that novel in the next couple of days.
I have no problem admitting that I need editorial input. And I like it. When someone who knows what they’re doing tells me “You should fix that” and I see what they mean, I’m delighted. (This has changed over the years. Once, all it got from me was a howl of pain—“but I already wrote that one! I want to move on!” But persistence teaches you through experience. If it doesn’t, you should find a different career.) With good recommendations in hand, I can make a better book.
So anyway, the bottom line here is that if I am less prolific here in the next few weeks or months, it’s because I’m working. I will update as developments occur.
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Between
I completed a massive rewrite the other day and sent it out. When I say massive, I mean big, a whole novel. There’s a lot riding on this and I find myself fidgety and on edge in a way I haven’t experienced in a long time. It was an older book, one I thought (mistakenly, as it turned out) was done, complete, just fine. What I found was proof that I need a good editor.
But the work is done and it’s out the door and all I can do now is wait for the yea or the nay. Not sure what I’ll do if the answer is…
Everytime I get to the end of a major project, I find myself at sixes and sevens, loose ends need chasing down, and I don’t quite know what to do with myself. Formerly, some of this time and excess energy was spent by going to a job. That’s not an option now. I used to go through a frenzy of cleaning house as well and I will likely do some of that today. But later. This morning, after breakfast, I opened Photoshop and noodled with a few images. Having multiple creative streams is a good thing when you’re in a situation like this. The above image is one result and I’ve decided to sandwich this post between two pictures.
Not to be melodramatic, but in some ways I’m facing a turning point. I have to do Something. Almost 30 years ago I set my goal to become a published writer. Much to my amazement, I succeeded, but the effort birthed the desire to do this as my main work, which means I have to keep publishing. Whether we like it or not, we need money to live, otherwise I could quite contentedly (I think, I tell myself) write for my own pleasure and use this medium or others to put the work out and not worry about income streams. But it’s not just the income and anyone who writes for a living knows very well that this is true. After a five year spurt of publishing intensity, things have ground to a virtual halt. There are a number of reasons for this, some of them entirely my fault. But I have to turn it around and soon or walk away.
I’m not at all sure I can and remain whole.
Of course I have this older art, photography. I can, with some difficulty, get a freelance business up and running. There’s music, too, although I am years from the kind of proficiency that would adequately supplement my income. Tomorrow I’ll be playing guitar at the anniversary party of the business of a friend. An hour or so of my ideosyncratic “stylings” as a favor. For fun.
These spans of dry time between projects require distraction lest I tumble into a tangle of self-pity and despair. It never lasts, I’m not so stoically romantic that I can sustain the dark time of the soul connected to artists denied their opportunity. For better or worse, I seek happiness and am constitutionally incapable of living long in depression. If not today, then by Monday I’ll be at work on something new or a new twist on something old and I’ll be trying again.
And for the time being I feel like the rewrite just finished is pretty good. I have confidence in it. I will let you all know if the news is…
Well, whatever it is.
Have a good weekend.
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The Fruits of (Fun) Labor
For whatever reason, I put 32 images in each of my online galleries. Don’t know why, I just do. No cosmic significance, it just worked out that way when I started, so I’m sticking to it.
That said, I have filled a new gallery with work done since I began using my new camera. I’d like to share with everyone. So here:
As always, all these images are for sale. Click on the one you think you’d like, copy and paste that URL into an email message to me, and tell me what you’d like. I’ll send you a quote.
Soon as I get the current manuscript done and out the door, Donna and I have tentatively scheduled a long day on the road to get some other shots besides stuff just around our house. But I’ve always been a firm believer in looking closer at what there is right to hand. It’s amazing what you can find even in your own back yard.
Enjoy.
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Post Manuscript Depression
Sort of. I have just completed a marathon session (about four weeks straight) of disassembling and revising a novel I thought I’d completed years ago. The rewrite came at a request. I may have news, but not now. That’s for later.
I don’t know about others, but when I finish a big project like that, I tend to have a day or two of complete confusion. I don’t know what to do with myself. For several years, I cleaned house afterward, which occupied the time I might spend brooding, used whatever left-over energy from the writing process, and performed a domestically useful job. But I’ve been home now for almost two years, the house is fairly clean as a matter of course, which leaves only major jobs to do (my office ceiling needs repair, I have to build new bookshelves again, and the garage still requires attention) and I frankly don’t want to do any of that.
After the work is done, I tend to feel depressed. Not gloomy, just enervated. This morning I straightened out my desk, cleaned up some unused files on the computer, and puttered. I have to walk the dog yet and see about lunch. Much of the day will be spent waiting.
Waiting for what? Good question. There are phone calls I’m waiting for, but none specifically for today. Emails as well. I came close, I think, to botching something yesterday of some importance because I got tired of waiting. Waiting requires a state of mind I do not possess. I can act like I possess it, play-act the role of the calm, confident individual to whom things will, by dint of zen gravitas, inevitably come. But that’s not me, not really, not ever.
I have a model kit that has been waiting for me to build it for several years now. Yes, I said years. I acquired it because I had it as a kid and really liked it—the H.M.S. Victory, Lord Nelson’s flagship—but I didn’t build it then.
There were three model kits I clearly remember having as a child that I did not assemble. My dad did. There was a balsa wood and paper bi-plane that actually flew (a Jennie, if I recall correctly); a beautiful 1933 Mercedes Benz touring car; and the Victory. I didn’t build them because my dad wanted to see them “done right.” So he built them while I watched.
Well, watched some of the time.
Admittedly, he did an amazing job on all three. When he finished, they were spectacular. He even did the rigging on the Victory with black thread (the kit at the time did not include the rigging, but he found a guide for how it should look). I really liked that ship. So I always thought I’d someday get that kit and build it myself. Just to say I’d done it.
I’m a sloppy craftsman. I admit it. I have no patience for fine, meticulous detail work. And model kits used to puzzle me no end because I have never found joy in the actual building, which is what you’re supposed to discover. The “purpose” of such things is to teach the appreciation of assemblage, of patience, of doing a job of some duration and doing it well.
Screw that, I wanted the finished product. I would probably have been happier if I could have bought the damn things already completed. But they didn’t come that way, so…
My models were always characterized by poor joins, glue runs, and, if I painted them, bad finish. But I was happy—I had the thing itself!
So why am I a writer? (Or a photographer, for that matter?)
Because I want the finished product and I want it to be just so. I have to do it myself. I have forced my natural lack of patience into a straitjacket of control that occasionally slips, but which I yearly gain in competence. Because ultimately the only way to get what I want is to practice something for which I have no natural affinity.
Which leads me to my current depression. What I ought to do is sit down and carefully consider my next project. My impulse is to just open a file and start banging away on a new story. But I don’t have one that appeals to me just now and I have all this other stuff that needs doing.
And I know that, although this rewrite is “finished,” there will likely be corrections once Donna gets through the manuscript.
It might be a good time to start that model kit. But I have no place just now to work on it. I need to clean a space for that. Bother. Might as well just walk the dog and eat lunch.
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First Image
I’ve been dutifully reading the manuals for the new camera, even though in some cases it is high order calculus to my primitive mind. Still, I wanted to show something for the expense and the effort, so…here is the first image, from Saturday evening.
Whenever possible, I like to start with something DRAMATIC!
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Slogging Through
I’ve been going through this novel like a reaper, cutting and slashing, removing viscera, changing things around. It’s fun so far. The request was to knock between 50 and 100 pages out of the manuscript, which roughly equates to between twelve and twenty thousand words. So far I have flensed the text of seven thousand. This may sound like a lot, but the book was nearly 140,000 to start with, so it can lose a little weight and probably be much better for it.
The weather has been beautiful and since I am working in my front room, by the big picture window, it’s been pleasant. At the rate I’m going I ought to have a new draft of the book in a few more weeks. At which point I have a half dozen other things in need of tending.
Meantime, as well, I’m slogging through Paul Johnson’s Birth of the Modern: 1815 – 1830. It is the estimable Mr. Johnson’s contention that these were the years which gave birth to our modern world, the period during which everything changed from the old system to the new, and, 400 pages in, he’s making a good case for it. Of course, any historical period like this is going to have some sprawl. He’s had to go back to just prior to the American Revolution and look forward to the Civil War (using a purely American point of reference, even though the book is attempting to be global). I can think of worse markers than the end of the Napoleonic Era for an argument like this and he is certainly one of the more readable historians. Occasionally his observations are a bit surprising, but in the main this is a credible piece of work.
I read his Modern Times a few years ago and found it very useful, even though some of his interpretations of major 20th Century events I found surprising. As always, it is necessary to have more than one source when studying history. Interpretation is a bay with hidden shoals and can be perilous. But this one is a good one.
Just updating. Go back to what you were doing.
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Rewrites and Retirement
For the next several weeks I’ll be engaged in rewriting a novel, one I thought I’d finished with a few years back. One of the frustrating things about this art is that often you cannot see a problem with a piece of work right away. It sometimes takes months to realize what is wrong, occasionally years. You work your butt off to make it as right as possible and then, a few years and half a dozen rejections later, you read it again and there, in the middle of it (sometimes at the beginning, once in a while at the end) is a great big ugly mess that you thought was so clever when you originally wrote it. You ask yourself, “Why didn’t I see that right away?” There is no answer, really. It looked okay at the time (like that piece of art you bought at the rummage sale and hung up so proud of your lucky find, but that just gets duller and uglier as time goes on till you finally take it down with a sour “what was I thinking?”) and you thought it worked, but now…
This is what editors are for. This is what a good agent is supposed to do. This is the value of another set of eyes.
Anyway, that’s what I’ll be doing. And I have the time because last week I “retired” from the board of directors of the Missouri Center for the Book. I served for nine years, five of them as president. Per the by-laws, after nine years a board member must leave for a time. This is vital, I think, because burn-out is like that manuscript you thought was so perfect—sometimes it take someone else to notice that everything’s not up to par.
During my tenure as president, a few changes were made, Missouri got a state poet laureate with the MCB as the managing organization, and a cadre of new board members revitalized the whole thing. Look for some good programs to come out of them in the next few years.
What I find so personally amazing is the fact that I got to do this. I mean, be president of essentially a state organization. Small budget, sure, but it is connected to the Library of Congress and we do deal with the governor’s office and what we do has relevance for the whole state. I started out doing programming for them and for some reason they thought I should be in charge. Well, that’s a story for another time. Suffice to say, I have no qualifications (on paper) for that position. None. The first year I got the job I characterized my management approach as throwing spaghetti. Something was bound to stick.
It was an education. And I got to work with some very talented people and made some friends who are inestimable. My horizons were expanded and I was able to play in a sandbox of remarkable potential.
The timing couldn’t be better, though. I have this novel to rewrite and, as it is the first part of a projected trilogy, I thought I’d go ahead and finish the second book after I fix the first one. Yes, there are things in the offing which I shan’t discuss right now—as soon as I know anything concrete, you will, should you be reading this—and Donna has graciously cut me another several months’ slack to get this done. She is priceless.
Meantime, I may be posting here a bit less. Not much. But a bit.
Stay tuned.
