The Relief of Submission

So I finally submitted my first novel to a literary agent. I've been putting it off for nearly a year, going back and forth about how good I thought the book was. I should have done this a year ago. I haven't heard back yet, and that's not that point. I'm prepared for rejection. I've had it before. I'll have it again. It's just the complete and utter release of tension of having one less bit of drama in my head.

Of course it's not like the release of tension that comes from, lets say, sitting in a hot tub. This is more like the relief you get when your irritable bowel switches from constipation to diarrhea. The relief that just keeps coming till you are left as an empty shell.

OK, I lied. If it gets rejected I will cry. But I'll get over it and submit again.

What I'm Reading: IT WAS GONNA BE LIKE PARIS by Emily Listfield

There is nothing surprising in the story of this book. What is surprising is that this novel is written as a sort of free-form journal and that the format enhances the story rather than detracts from it. I've read several novels written in journal form, both structured and unstructured, and liked very few of them. For the ones I didn't like it seemed to me that the story had been forced into the format like a pair of uncomfortably small shoes. In the good ones, like Ms. Listfield's, the story seems to be organic to the format, in this case reinforced by the lack of quotation marks.

Throughout the book we maintain the impression that this isn't a book that was “written” but was jotted down over a period of time. However, when reflecting back you see the well-plotted story structure. Three acts. Character development. The whole deal.

I enjoyed reading this book very much. The story wasn't great, but they way it was presented was.

IT WAS GONNA BE LIKE PARIS
Emily Listfield
Published: 1984
Cost: $1
Bought at: SF Public Library big book sale

The Perfect First Draft

Have you ever finished a first draft and upon rereading it you say to yourself, "Yes, that's exactly what I wanted it to be." Me neither, till last night. I'm not saying it's finished by any means. Typos and unwieldy sentences abound, but the story turned out exactly the way I wanted it. I even reread it just before I posted this to make sure I wasn't in some delusional state last night. I still like it.

Of course, today's chapter remains unfinished. I just can't get it quite right. Ah well, back to work.

THE SAX HEALER eBook

My book of short stories, THE SAX HEALER, is no available for Kindle for a mere $1.95.

Tell your friends. Tell your enemies. Tell random people on the street.

Why writers won't give you constructive criticism

Because they like you, and do not want to make you cry. Oh yes, they will make you cry. If they are as honest as you need them to be, they will, sooner or later, make you cry. That's a lot to ask of someone you hardly e-know.

You can ask my wife. When I'm into a story or novel she is forced to read my first drafts. I have come to know the look all too well, the drooped barely-making-contact eyes. She knows what she is about to tell me will make me cry. What I thought to be my latest and greatest gift to the literary world is actually incomprehensible drek. She knows it, and now I know it. She apologizes and tries to make me feel better. The horrid, "It's not all bad" speech.

Of course, an hour later, I'm over it. She was right. I figure out how to fix it. She reads it and likes it. I know she really likes it because I know she'd tell me if she doesn't. Having an honest reader is the greatest help to a writer, and I wouldn't wish that task on my worst enemy.

So does this mean, when you get no comments to your posted story, that your writing is bad? No, not at all. Even if we like your story, we fear what might come next. If we give you some insightful comment, you might remember us and send us your next piece of writing, and then we might have to make you cry.

Hope for Degeeking

I admit it. I'm a geek. Specifically, I'm an information geek. I am driven to know and understand as much as possible. Every topic gets dissected and deconstructed to the point where it no longer has any meaning as whole, but is merely the sum of its easily-understood parts.

But this is not how writing works. The story, if written well enough, is more than the sum of its parts. There are hidden, even unknown, meanings and feelings. There are often unexpected emotional responses. All this is very scary to someone like me who needs everything to be ordered and predictable.

But there is hope. I was watching TV yesterday and saw something that I did not understand and, for the first time ever, had no desire to understand. It was the first round of Winter Olympics Curling.  

OK, the rules are simple enough. The strategies aren't beyond my grasp. What I don't get is why anyone would even do this, and then, having done it, care to do it again, and further, create an Olympic sport out of it. It was at the point of having this thought that I realized that my opinion was based on ignorance. It became obvious to me that there was some zen of curling which I didn't get, and I realized that it didn't matter if I didn't "get" curling. I should just get on with my life and let the curlers curl in peace.

So maybe there's hope for me after all.

Finding your "Voice" vs. learning to write

Thirty years ago I believed what I was taught, that if you wanted to have a unique voice as a writer you had to avoid reading books and not listen to any of the "how to be a writer" advice. It took twenty-five years to shake that off.

I had thought, or perhaps hoped, that the theory of developing your skill/style/voice in a vacuum had been disproved long ago, but today I spoke to a young wannabe writer whose high school English teacher told him that reading too much would dilute his skill as a writer. He had me read a short story he wrote. There wasn't a single sentence that was properly constructed. The story itself seemed non-existent. When I asked him what he was trying to say, he responded that he didn't try to say anything, he just wrote.

My question is; from where does this illusion of spontaneous genius spring? Was there ever some wolf boy that emerged from the woods, pen in hand, scribbling magnificent prose? What made my teachers, as well as this young man's, think they were/are doling out good advice? My only explanation is that they, being frustrated writers themselves, are doing their best to prevent anyone else from becoming a successful writer.

100 Words: Onions

My hands smell like onions. I don't eat onions. I don't work with onions. There are no onions in my room. No one I know eats onions. Why do my hands smell like onions? This happens every time I drink tequila. You'd think my hands would smell like tequila, but they don't. They smell like onions. Are there onions in tequila? I don't think so. I think someone is doing something to me when I'm not looking. They come into my room when I'm passed out and make my hands smell like onions. Do you think this could be possible?

My Dirty little Secret

Maybe I'm an egotistical freak but I simply have to admit that I am my favorite writer. Is this normal? Of course this hasn't always been the case. I have not always had such a fondness for my own writing, but I really like the stuff I've been producing lately.

I should qualify my determination of what I call "favorite." I don't think that my writing is better than other writers. Favorite to me is a subject connection rather than a declaration of perceived quality. For example, my favorite movie ever is THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI ACROSS THE 8TH DIMENSION, but I would never attempt to argue that this is the best movie ever. On many accounts it couldn't even be considered a "good" movie, but I still watch it every time it's on. I LOVE that movie.

So recently I have come to realize that I have developed the same connection with my own writing. I enjoy reading my own writing. Oh the hubris.  

My Book Collection: The Gandhi Pamphlets

An odd addition to be books of special interest. I got these three little booklets at the annual yard sale for The Little Sisters of the Poor. If you go during the last hour of the last day of the sale you get everything you can stuff in a bag for only $5. So I wind up getting some odd things.

This last year I scooped up this booklets, which I thought were about Gandhi. Turns out they were written by Gandhi. They are part of a series. I have numbers 3, 6 and 22. My favorite is #3, THE MORAL BASIS OF VEGETARIANISM, in which Gandhi expounds the virtues of avoid animal foods, but also explains that maintaining your health is also important. To this end he repeatedly defends his consumption of goat's milk.

That points out the biggest surprise from these booklets. They are all reasonable. Gandhi explains and understands the difference between the ideal and the reality. The way politics and religion work in this country it's surprising to see reasonableness applied to both.

However, what really puts my personal value of these booklets over the top is the inscription. No, they aren't signed by Mr. Gandhi, nor the editor nor the publisher. Each one has the identical inscription:  

To Mrs. Katherine Movius
with kind regards
M.Shastri
3.7.62

The signature isn't very clear, but it looks like Shastri to me, which according to Wikipedia is a title meaning scholar. So it's hard to know who really signed the things. I tried looking up the recipient but Katherine Movious is a surprisingly common name. No matter. I think the mystery of who these people were is as Important to me as the booklets themselves.

What I'm Reading: THE BLUEST EYE by Toni Morrison

Great book. Had some trouble with some parts, but that's to be expected. From my experience great books are not perfect, and perfect books are not great. However, and this is a first, my favorite part of this book is the Afterword.

First, I loved it because I hate forwards and never read them till I'm done with the book anyway, so afterword is perfect. Second, reading Toni Morrison's feeling towards this book, her first novel, was an epiphany of empathy. She writes about feeling that the book didn't communicate her intended message. She discusses difficulties with some of her technical decisions, and surprisingly she echoed my own difficulties as a reader.

The reason that her self-criticism is so moving for me is that I am going the same process with my own first novel. I keep tearing it apart, and I need to stop doing so. I may never think that this is a great novel, but it's as good as it's going to get and I need to move on.

I don't mean to compare my novel to Ms. Morrison's. She has a gift for language and character that I will never equal. However, that doesn't degrade my work. I'm more of the small cult following type of writer. What I need to learn to do is revel in that.

THE BLUEST EYE

Toni Morrison

Published: 1994

Cost: $1

Bought at: SF Public Library big book sale

The Joy of Tweeting a Short Story

OK, I'm not the first person to have this idea, but I'm having a ball doing it. It's like one prolonged writing exercise. The constraints of Twitter force some creative solutions upon sentence structure. The need to maintain the story context, and to have every tweet be its own mini story, has forced me to rethink my writing style. It's taught me that I've been rather lazy about my sentences. I have not been creating and/or releasing tension on a granular level. I've been leaving that responsibility to the chapter. I see now that have to bring that function to each paragraph and every sentence.

On a more practical level, one of my dislikes of the Twitter fiction genre is the lack of physical context. For example; with most stories if the tweets got reordered you would have no idea how to reassemble them. To prevent this I created a simple code. I add the initials of the story title and the post number to the beginning of each tweet. So for this story, INCIDENTAL CONTACT, now at the 20th tweet, today's post starts with, “IC#20”. It takes up some characters, but I think it helps the reader.

To see what I'm talking about, take a look at my Titter feed. (http://twitter.com/thetomflanders)

If you like it, tell your friends. If you don't, tell your enemies.

100 Words - BARBARA'S VEGA

Barbara was an instructor of high-impact yoga. She drove a white cam-backed Vega. That's how she and Bob met. He saw her car in the super market parking lot and he went over to check it out. It was identical, except for the color, to the one driven in bad weather by his fifth grade teacher. In good weather she rode a Honda 750 motorcycle. Bob remembers nothing from fifth grade except that he had a pretty blond teacher who rode a motorcycle and drove a red cam-backed Vega, and like all his other teachers her name was Mrs. Johnson.

Hating What I Wrote

Don't read your old stuff. It's just not worth it.

At the time I wrote these stories I thought that they were they best things I had ever written. Actually I was right, but fortunately they weren't the best things I would ever write. Some of them are just not very good. Some of them are stomach wrenchingly bad. It's embarrassing.  

So what do I do about this? Do I go back and redo them? What purpose would that serve? Is it my job to erase the mistakes of my past?

No, I don't think so. I think these stories served their purpose. They were my finger paints. The first step on the way to oils. Would you tear up the kindergarten drawing of an adult? Of course not. It's simply time to except that I wasn't born a perfect writer and move on.

Besides, the premises of most of these stories are so bad that they just aren't worth the effort.

Why I Like: William S. Burroughs

Insanity channeled. So much stream-of-consciousness writing, my own attempts for example, rapidly degenerates into nonsense, like a schizophrenic rocking back and forth in the straight back chair that they're tied to for fourteen hours a day shouting lists of rhyming transgressions to nobody in particular. Ah, but Bill never falls for such folly. Staying sane inside insanity.

As with most Billophiles my age, my first experiences of Bill came not from his writing but from his performing. A strange man with a gun in the barn of an odd little film found at an odd little video store. A gravely voice shouting phrases somewhere in the background of a Laurie Anderson song. Then his written words are discovered.

And what words they are? Not light or easy reading to be sure, but glorious words all the same. Insane, sharp, scary but somehow comforting. It's OK to be insane. It doesn't matter that the world you experience doesn't match the one that everyone else describes. Write it down. The words will explain it to you. Bill is like my literary nightmare teddy bear.  

Book Collection: THE GREEN MILE by Stephen King

Most books I buy get read then donated. A few books I read and put on a shelf to be reread at some theoretical future date. Then there are those rare books that I collect. The funny thing is that, for me, the criteria of collection rarely includes my enjoyment of the book.

For example: THE GREEN MILE. Or rather the serialized version of THE GREEN MILE, all tucked into the nice little box designed to hold the books. I liked the book, though having previously seen the movie, I couldn't get Tom Hanks' voice out of my head, but it wouldn't be a book that I would normally keep.

Except for those little books in that little box. When I was very young we had a bookshelf full of my mother's father's books. Among those dark heavy books were piles of little unbound pamphlets containing one chapter each of many Victorian era serialized novels. I never actually read any of them, I have still not acquires a taste for Dickens, but I thought they were so cool. Something about their cheapness and immediacy struck a chord with me.

So after reading the little books of THE GREEN MILE I found a special place on my bookshelf for the little box. The first book in a slowly growing collection of books worth more to me than the words printed in them.

Books Vs. eBooks

I don't know if I'm a freak or what. I love books. This wasn't always the case. It used to be that I avoided books by any means, but a side-effect of trying to become a serious writer is that I have become a serious reader. However, when compared to other serious readers that I know, I have one major difference. I have no reverence for the concept of “The Book.”

To me most books are disposable items. Once I've read them they go into the donation bin. Only one in about twenty get put on the keeper shelf, and that gets culled every other year or so. So I have no inherent dislike for e-books as a concept. I do however doubt that I will ever buy an e-book reader.

Why? For the same reason that I don't buy new books. Money. My average outlay for a book is $1.50. Do they even sell used e-books? I know, I could get a reader and raid Project Guttenburg and spend a year or so in bliss, but then what? What if I want to read something written after the copyright became institutionalized? Tough luck unless I want to pay up.

The other thing; if I have a brain fart and forget my book on the bus, I'm out $1.50. If I lose my e-reader, I'm out hundreds of dollars. I'm too much of a flake to take that risk.

Books on Writing

I've now read three books on how to be a writer. One, a gift from my wife, was very useful. It wasn't preachy or formulaic. It didn't promise to make me a better writer, though I believe it did. Then there are the other two. (Which I bought myself.)

I should state here that I learned important lessons from both of these books. However all that I learned was contained in the first chapter. Past that was nothing of any interest or value. In the first case, chapters two through fourteen were nothing but rewordings of chapter one. In the second case, the later chapters were not related to learning to write at all. They were anecdotes about the writer's experiences about sitting at tables in cafes trying to write and the interruptions she experienced. Some were interesting, but none reinforced the useful lessons learned way back at the beginning of the book.

So what is the lesson here? Always sample multiple chapters before committing to a book you may be basing your career on. Or, more importantly, remember that most books found in the bargain bin are there for a reason.  

Another Book Unfinished

Today I stopped reading PICTURES FROM AN INSTITUTION by Randall Jarrell after only 30 pages. It's probably the best book that I didn't finish. It's not the first. There have been others, but they went unfinished because they were monumentally bad. Most of these were science fiction novels which lived up to neither of the genre's title words. In almost every case the book committed the unforgivable sin of assuming I was an idiot.  

But this book, does not assume that I'm an idiot. It assumes nothing of me. For that matter, cares not one jot for my being its reader at all. I am not its target audience. This is not the problem however.

The problem is that I am just not in the right state of mind to sit through a couple hundred pages of inside jokes and snide comments about academia in the early 50's. Yes, I did laugh with recognition at some of the characters and situations, and the writing itself is fine, though the overall flow is a bit choppy for my taste.

So why the guilt? I guess as a writer I would want my readers to finish my books. Not finishing a not-terrible book seems like a betrayal to the profession. A commitment of the sin of the whim of personal preference. Don't I have a duty as a writer and a reader to fulfill the sacred bond entered into when I read the first words of the first sentence of the first paragraph of the first chapter of the book?

No. Not today. I'm just not in the mood.