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.