Sideshows

I've had some e-mail prickings (submission windows closing and direct invites, etc.) that have led me down a few side streets during this novel rewrite. Last week I rewrote the story that was a finalist for Glimmer Train and resubmitted it to three places. I'm finishing up an essay for this invitation.
I'll recommend this book to anyone!

My novel will make good progress before the end of the month. The ambitiousness of the project expands every time I write it. Imagine writing a book about your racial identity, now imagine including your eating disorder history, now imagine setting it in Africa, giving it two narrators and many people and places that would really like to keep their anonymity. Ironically, the trick to all this is to not think about it while writing it. There is no way you can produce anything that does more than touch an certain aspects of all these topics. The trick is to do justice to the aspects you "choose"

Writing? YES!

It's moving! Thank God I'm writing again. That's all I can ask . . .that I don't stare at the screen and hate myself and
wish I didn't have this writerly compulsion that brings moodiness, joy, dejection, and happiness. OK, the one emotion being a writer does NOT create in me is apathy. Is that an emotion though? Is that like debating whether white is a color?

Meanwhile, my impending move to New Zealand yields google results such as
this one

How's the Writing Going?

Generating words has never been a problem. Perhaps the "problem" is that this particular manuscript has already been held by a publisher for a period of time before rejection -- meaning that its well past the insulated pupae stage and more like a winged thing uncomfortably turning around inside a chrysalis. What I have, right now, is 9K words "on deck" and 70+K words in another file waiting to be filtered and attached as I move through with my fine comb. The book was nonfiction for so long that I have to remind myself where I now have liberties . . .like learning the way to key a sticky lock and suddenly having the lock changed. I've also split the narrator into two people. One is a third-person voice and the other a first-person. The implication is that they are the same person. A reader can choose why such a division exists, but each carries a very different voice.

This is my last week working all 7 days at some job or the other. It's also the first week when my New Zealand trip feels 'real'so I get distracted by trying to do lots of little things to prepare for leaving the country.

The Span of Imagination

Without pulling punches I will be running a "JuNoReWriMo" (without caps that reads Junorewrimo) as reported on this blog. I have a novel that begs for rewriting. My month's goal is 80K--completely doable as the invisible back-work of my hippocampus has been computing all this for months. It's already June 1 in New Zealand, so here goes--

More on process

While I'm dealing with reality, I need to acknowledge that for me to write personally satisfying work, work that makes me full, corrects my sense of schism, and (from the few accolades I've accrued) is good, I need to drop down to this very obsessive place and then stomp around in it. I don't in anyway believe that writers and good artists require this kind of unhealthy tremble to create. I don't think good writers need to be alcoholics, Emos, or on medication. But I have, in partnering with someone who is so much more 'on the table' about things found that letting the natural process FOR ME take over appears very, very distressful when viewed by someone with a different creativity.

Still, once I'm "inside" a piece it all irons out. But I'm not great company when I'm writing. OK, at moments I am, but I'm disengaged from a lot of things and people.

Who we are

I haven't hidden much on this blog, though I bounce between funny observations from my daily chaos and soulful renditions of my spiritual health. It's finally ocurred to me that that is my true character: this fragile, cataclysmic, emotional creature, and a jester-like reporter of prickled happines. People like me sometimes earn some non-complimentary terms: unstable, emotionally immature, suffereing Peter Pan syndrome, from poor impulse control, and other caustic and unhelpful descriptors. It can be difficult to remember that everyone who does (or might) use such phrases does so because they wish--in some way--for the freedom to be the type of child I remain. No one has called me names recently. But I feel dealing with truth is more effective than sheilding one's eyes and trying to live otherwise. Kindly spoke, I have an artistic and affective temperament.

There are some young teenagers in my life who are entering the whirlwind course of high school/parental/societal pressures. These are children on whom great hopes are pinned. They are their parent's reasons and redemption. They are tasked with doing what we "failed" to do ourselves. No matter how it is communicated and assured, they know. They carry with them the undone and the unborn. Here, in these developed countries especially, while we say we want them only "to be happy" this is no more true than the idea that college is "years away"--it is true as it is said, and untrue as it is lived. What we risk in this translation with these children is that they "fail" on both counts. They never accomplish what we truly gave them as tasks, and they never find how to create happiness and self-satisfaction in their lives.
What will it take to give them the freedom we truly want to? First, be truthful with ourselves, then forgive ourselves, then set ourselves free.

Foundling

Some writers consider the rewriting of a draft the most enjoyable part, and I'll admit that some of those "AHA!" moments in terms of narrative arc, voice, and plot come together are thrilling, but I currently sit among the memories and detritus of three separate book manuscripts. They're all ambitious works. But "Foundling" is the one that needs to be finished first. Sure, I've been busy . . .that makes a marvelous excuse. But let's take stock of what this particular book is about and why it's caused such anxiety and growing pains. 1) It's about racial identity, particularly mine 2)It's about class structure 3)It involves writing the emotional truth about people still living 4)It involves revealing myself in my least admirable era, something akin to those 'naked dreams' everyone has had . . .

So why write it? My answer is in the last three words "everyone has had . . ." And besides, people love reading about train-wrecks. And God knows we need some openers for frank discussion about race and class and love and humanity. I think I'll do it.

Currently reading this book which I think I would've benefitted more from had I read it five or six years ago. It would be intersting to read it alongside this one if we are really to discuss the "landscapes of Western minds".