So... How's the Writing Going?

Well. . . I'm in bed at ten.  I set the alarm for five am.  If I'm lucky, I'll have two hours to myself before Dylan gets up.  I wake up around midnight on my side, my hip in a pool of cold wetness, wondering if I've pissed myself.  My bladder is bursting so it's entirely possible.  But I wasn't drinking (and even at my most drunk I've never pissed the bed, I've just heard that's what happens, and that's the first bleary thought I have, I'm not even drunk), I wasn't dreaming that I couldn't find a toilet (which is what I dream about when I need to get up and pee in the middle of the night), and if I pissed the bed then why would I still be able to get up and pee?  But my bladder is sizable, so maybe I have enough storage capacity to piss the bed and still need to use the toilet.  Maybe this is just a surprise my body has unleashed as I approach forty.  Maybe all forty-year-old men start pissing the bed, but they're ashamed of it so no one talks about it; it's just something you discover alone, in the cold watches of the night.

The Secret Handshake: Do You Really Need an MFA to Get Published?

If you answered "no" then click here.

Quotidian. Why use quotidian when mundane works just as well?  Don't try citing some subtle shade of connotation, because there isn't one; they mean the same damn thing, except ninety-five percent of the English-speaking world could tell you what mundane means.  Barring mundane, why not give everyday, commonplace, or ordinary a day in court?  Too quotidian?

Using quotidian, you're not trying to tell us what the office is like, or describe Chester's workaday habits, or what materials an artist used for his pieces - unless you're Lionel Shriver, you're being deliberately obscure to add mystery to your piece, to make the reader work a little harder and invest more of herself.

I see the word all the time.

"Look out! The Quotidians are behind you!"

That, and words like it.  Elegiac ("expressing sorrow") is one.  Anodyne ("uncontentious or inoffensive") is another.  To me, it's all grandiloquent ("Pompous or extravagant in language, style, or manner, esp. in a way that is intended to impress").

I think my vocabulary is better than the average bear's.  If you're not David Foster Wallace, it ain't right to have me running for the dictionary (well, for Google).  It's also no comment on my lack of education (I hope) because it's the same words over and over.

I remember a poster in my sixth grade English class, back in the days when it was called Language.  Flying in the face of the Mighty Elmore Leonard (see Rule #3), this poster declared, "Said is Dead; Use These Instead."  An alphabetical list of words which wouldn't make it past an AP writing class followed- Argued, Berated, Chided, Declared, etc.  Seeing elegiac in four different books I've read in the last two months makes me imagine a spreadsheet handed out at creative writing programs across the country; Simplicity is Dead; Use These Instead.

Leonard says, "if it sounds like writing, re-write it."  John D. MacDonald says, "Author intrusion is, 'Gee, Mama, look how nice I'm writing!'"  John Dufresne says, "thou shalt not be obscure."

Look, I'm all for high fallutin language if it serves the voice of a piece.  I like learning new words, particularly from a Shriver or a Wallace who knows how to use them.  But most of the time these words just seem underlined.  If you tell me your book is a "bildungsroman" rather than "a coming-of-age novel," you're proffering the secret MFA handshake.

McWriterface, listen closely: shake off all those fancy words you discovered pursuing your degree.  They are weighty words and you need to build up your muscles before you can lift them properly.  I see intransigent ("unyielding") and suddenly you're not trying to tell me a story, you're waving your MFA in my face.  You can't expect editors to stop these words because they all have their MFAs, too.  So it's up to you, Authorton.

Only you can prevent grandiloquence, Authorton... only you.

Breaking the Fiction in the A.M. Rule

Because the days are just packed!  If you're unfamiliar with the Miami International Book Fair, it's in its 28th year.

Circa 1984. That's my boss on the left.

Because of Mitchell's involvement with MBFI, and because of our rather large sales tent, folks assume that Books & Books always handles sales for the author events.  This has been true from time to time over the years, but it's never a given.  2011 is a make or break year.  We're trying to be more organized than ever, looking at everything as hard as we can, to determine once and for all whether handling event sales at MBFI makes us money, or if we should hand event sales off to someone else (again).

I mention all of this because MBFI is consuming me.  I do the event appearances for Books & Books, among other things, and I've been tapped to order for this event as well.  It's like being handed a second full-time job on top of my regular full-time job.

Thankfully, some co-workers have stepped up to lighten my load.  Not a lot, but enough to where I haven't actually torn my hair out.

I know, I know, I'm lucky to have a job in this economy.  Particularly a book-industry job.

Then there's being a husband to my love, a father to my other love, Halloween, the After-Wedding Karaoke Jam Party, costumes, cleaning, meals, scratching the cat (no, that's not some gross metaphor).  You know- life.  I could be selfish and lock myself in my room until I'm published, but I don't think that would make me happy.

Besides, art doesn't happen in a vacuum.

I'm trying to keep the faith.  Pushing the cursor isn't coming as easily as it has at certain moments in my life, but I still tell myself most days that it matters.  I will dream big, and not listen to people who aren't.  I will stop listening to the little voice in my head that says "It's been five years, Curtis, who you trying to kid?"  I will follow The Rumpus's rule and Write Like a Motherfucker.

In the meantime, you'll probably find me in Books & Books buying office.  Please send dark chocolate peanut M&Ms and Tito's Handmade Vodka.

There Are Folks Who Hear You

I joined a writer's group last month, my first one in a couple years.  It was all fun and games until I was handed homework.  Homework?  Yes, homework.  I'm a 38-year-old man with homework.

My assignment was to submit my writing for publication.

While I wondered how to do this, Joe Hill came to Books & Books the very next night.  He said he survived the ten years looking for a book deal by always having several stories submitted at once.  That way when he got rejections back, there was always hope that another story he had out there would be published.

Okay, I thought, I will submit one story each week for publication and see what happens.

Week one, I submitted a stub I mentioned a few weeks back to Jai-Alai Magazine.   I could have sent a longer nonfiction piece but my first love is made-up stuff.  I had this tiny piece of fiction which shouldn't have been anything, then I realized that with some polishing, I could use the stub to meet Jai-Alai's 700-word limit challenge.

The verdict is still out on that one.  With University of Wynwood caught up with the month long gorgeous madness that is O,Miami! I don't expect an answer anytime soon.

Week two, I submitted a story to Lip Service.  They picked me.  I'll be reading when they team up with Under the Sun at the Miracle Theater on Saturday, the 23rd.  Instead of rehearsing in Andrea Askowitz's living room, we'll be rehearsing in a recording studio.  How cool is that?

Two people also reached out to me this week.

One of them saw me at a Books & Books event produced by Moya, which I meant to write about but somehow never did.  I'd like to thank him for including me in an evening of music and monologues, and offer a picture to show I was there:

Proof that bigger isn't always better: this shirt.

The first woman was a stranger to me.  She saw my name on the upcoming Lip Service event and remembered me from An Evening of Good Things.  She wanted to let me know there are other halfbreeds in Miami, to wish me luck, and tell me I should keep plugging away with my writing.

The second woman I used to work with at Borders.  We weren't tremendously close, but she was one of the people who got it (and by "it" I mean how absurd life can be), the type of person you're glad to see on a schedule when you clock.  She told me she's been having a rough time lately, and my blog helped her get through it.

It's humbling and moving to know something you've written has touched someone else.  I'm tremendously excited about Lip Service / Under the Sun, but emails from these two women overshadowed that feeling.    

Make no mistake, I write for me.  But it's gratifying to know someone is listening.

This Writing Gig Can Be Frustrating

Opening files this morning and I came across this snippet I really love.  Pardon me while I subject you to the horror of a first draft:

Hannah Delaney sat in the garden of sound, thinking of how wonderful and cruel life could be.

      The pleasure was wonderful.  Hannah was odd but not so odd to think the garden had been made just for her.  Even though it was one of the few pleasures she had in her days, the cruelty it took to create the garden could only come from God.

The Delaneys were big on God.  On Sundays her parents took her to the big gym outside of town, almost twenty minutes away.  She listened to the tall, thin, white haired preacher talk about God and life and television and family, his timbre smooth, his tones bright.  He sounded like a commercial himself, a Voice You Could Trust stumping for a Life You Should Lead.  Every talk ended with the flock bowing their heads.  The preacher talked to God hard.  He invited people to raise their hands if they wanted to be saved.  Yes, I see that hand, the preacher would murmur in a tone like thick honey.  Yes, I see that hand.  Praise God.  Yes, I see that hand...    

Hannah never opened her eyes to see if people were really raising their hands, but she was always curious.  The idea of raising her own hand built over several months of Sundays until she realized she'd never have the nerve.  She gave up, and kept her head bowed and her eyes closed.  A few weeks later, when the preacher asked anyone who wanted God to enter his heart to raise his hand, Hannah's arm shot up at if pulled by invisible strings.  

"Yes, I see that hand," he murmured, sending a flush of pleasure from the pit of her stomach through her entire body.  She would have liked to sit with that feeling for a time, but he'd already moved on to the next person longing for salvation.  Yes, I see that hand...    

  The moment came suddenly, and ended just as fast.  Bookending her as usual, her parents must have felt her movement.  They'd never remarked on it.   

God ate breakfast and dinner with the Delaneys.  God was invoked when her aunt caught the cancer, or her cousin was born deaf.   God was invoked when the radiation treatments worked, or an uncle's business thrived.  God could send a station wagon to kill a beloved pet, God could eased psoriasis, God could inspire good people to do great works.  

When she turned thirteen, Hannah attended youth group on Tuesday nights.  Youth group took place in the chapel instead of the gym.  The chapel was so beautiful Hannah wished the church had never outgrown the building.  It was round, built entirely of wood so dark it was nearly black.  The spire on top was all glass, saving the space from gloom.  The podium was raised, the stage small, the cross simple gold.  She knew growth was a good thing, that sooner or later there'd be enough Christians to save the world, but she never felt as close to God in the gym as she felt in the old chapel. 

There were so many great churches downtown, miniature versions of the old churches of Europe, hulking in stone, swallowing city blocks, stained glass windows, copper roofs turning green, doors painted gleaming red.  She didn't know what kept the Delaneys from 

They didn't finish construction on the new chapel before she was exiled, so she never knew if the new, huge chapel was as warm and beautiful as the old one.   

It's written in a different voice.  I've never used "stump" or "timbre" in my life.  It's a promising beginning, more polished than some first drafts usually are, with a character I knew and a situation I wanted to explore.  Sure, I'd lose the first two paragraphs, but still; good stuff.

I must have been affected by all those churches I saw in central New York on vacation.  Growing up there, I never noticed how many of them there are.  And Garden of Sound is the phrase I think of when I hear one of Becky's favorite songs, Regina Spektor's Consequence of Sound.  I also remember that preacher from when I was born again.  That's where my knowledge of this piece runs out.

She didn't know what kept the Delaneys from- what?  What's the Garden of Sound?  And why was she exiled?  The water was flowing and I didn't get to the pump before it dried up, so I have no better answers than you.  I let the holidays or reviews or blogs came before Hannah Delaney, and she died.

I only knew her for a moment, on Monday December 20th, 2010, but I mourn her passing.

Here's Hoping All These Words Will Matter

When the crowd at Books & Books asked Lane Smith about his process, Lane said it took him ten years to finish John, Paul, George, and Ben.  He works on a lot of things at once.  It takes time to finish a project, time to store it and forget about it, then time to revise with objectivity that only comes from distance.  Meanwhile, he’d visit Mo Willems in his studio nearby.

“'How’s it going, Lane?'”  Smith said, pantomiming a frantic Mo drawing at break-neck speed.  “'I just finished five books this morning.'”

Even if I make enough money that I could quit my job and write full time (and part of me still harbors that fantasy, that my first book will be successful enough that I could be nothing but a writer), clearly I’d fall into the Lane Smith category.  I’ll never be a novel-a-year guy.  

I’d like to think that means I’m about quality, like David Mitchell or Nicole Krauss, but honestly it’s more about attention span.  I’ve already entertained myself in my mind with this story half a dozen times before I sit down to write it.  I know exactly how it will end (well, 90% of exactly) and sometimes getting there just doesn’t interest me.   

I think I’ve found a solution; I’m writing two books at once.  On Mondays I work on The Block.  Tuesdays, the last morning Dylan is with his father, I take the opportunity to sleep in.  Wednesdays, it’s Scratch the Dead Places.  Thursdays, The Block again, Fridays, Scratch again.  The weekends are reserved for whichever one has compelled me less during the week.  When a story is shouting in your head to get out, all you need is a couple hours in the morning to keep it fresh.  If the pump needs more priming, then you’ve got a problem to work out.  You need a solid chunk of weekend time.  

More often lately, I’ve been lazy about my other writing during the week (if lazy can be described as work, cooking dinner, doing dishes, reading, or sharing time with Becky), and I need to spend the weekend on next week’s SwF&F posts, or my monthly book missive for THL, or something Lip Service will hopefully choose for a future event, or a piece for DadsMiami, or whatever I hope someone will publish to increase my profile.  

  I’m enjoying the process, but I wonder if I should push myself harder.  It’s one thing reading four books at once, but working on all these stories at the same time means I hardly move.  I only finished the first draft of my first book because I gave myself a deadline.  Should I do that again?

It feels so early in the process of both books to be worrying about this (even though Scratch is a third draft and The Block a second), but at the same time, I worry about getting older with nothing to show for my work.  Part of me is content to push the cursor a few inches a day, knowing the end will come eventually.  As Sugar says, “Your book has a birthday.  You  don’t know what it is yet.” 

Another part worries the end of me will come before my career ever starts.  

My Love / Hate Relationship with Nicholas Sparks

Man unknown, books unread, I’ve hated Nicholas Sparks ever since I read his contribution to a book called The Making of a Bestseller.  I grabbed an Advanced Readers Copy off the freebie shelf because one chapter featured our owner, Mitchell Kaplan.  I was new to Books & Books, and unfamiliar with his cache in the bookselling world.

Anyway, Sparks didn’t set out to be a writer; he set out to be a bestseller.  He researched bestselling novels and determined that there are only three household name authors in any subcategory of fiction.  You might have dozens of mystery authors, but when you’re searching for Medical Thrillers, you’ve got Robin Cook, Tess Gerritsen, Michael Crichton, and a bunch of talented midlist folks nipping at their heels.

Sparks wasn’t inspired to write The Notebook, he saw that the sub-genre of romantic fiction was “wide open” and crafted a book whose sole purpose was to make him a bestselling author.

Do I hate him because his formula worked?  For being so unabashedly commercial about an artistic enterprise?  Probably a bit of both, but I also hate him because I work from inspiration, and I labor under the delusion that if I love what I’m writing, enough other people will so that I’ll make a living one day.

Cut to Nicholas Sparks’ signing at Books & Books.   We have bestselling authors all the time, but celebrity authors are rare.   Books-into-box office aside, he'd just made the Forbes list of top ten highest-paid authors.  I suggested we order two thousand copies of Safe Haven.  I was given the irksome directive to "wait and see," as in wait and see how everyone in Miami procrastinates until the last minute so it looks like there's no interest, wait and see if the publisher runs out of books by the time we’re ready to order, wait and see until only ungodly rush charges will get us the books in time.

Mitchell choose a number much lower than my suggestion.  The Marketing and Events Coordinator and I yessir’d him, then we decided on a quantity somewhere in the middle.  

Mitchell was worried about turnout.  To hear Sparks tell it, he’d had a signing at Books & Books in 1996 and spoke to five people.  One of them was Mitchell Kaplan, who stayed the whole night.  Sparks said it was Mitchell’s hospitality which brought him back. 

Hundreds and hundreds of screaming fans lined up around the block later, Becky and I used her Barnes & Noble Club Member discount card to empty their shelves (another Books & Books secret: for successful events we’ve underestimated, B&N becomes our fourth wholesaler!).  Running through the alleys of Coral Gables to avoid the crowds, madly ripping B&N stickers off, Becky toppled to the pavement, losing skin, four bags of books, and the toe off a pair of five-inch heels.  Mitchell drove me to Borders (the fifth wholesaler!) to empty their shelves and come back to the store for more back-alley, sticker-ripping fun. 

We made it by the skin of our teeth - seven copies to spare.  


When I heard he'd left without signing some stock, I ran out and stopped the car Sparks was leaving in to get them signed.  It was a gross intrusion I only had the gall to perform because I’d run all over Miami to get the damned things, and he was going to sign every last one of them.  He handled my intrusion graciously, so I can't hate him any longer.  

I love Nicholas Sparks for the same reason I love Ricky Martin, Tori Spelling, Hillary Duff, and most recently (and especially) George W. Bush.  Whatever I think about their celebrity or their books, they sell.  They sell tons, and we all get to eat that week.

Just don’t ask me to read any of their books.

Open Letter to an Anonymous Author (3 of 3)

Reading this might have saved me embrassment.

Note to Self,

You wrote a book, but what do you know about writing a book?  You set a deadline, and four-hundred single-spaced pages later, you met it.  You proved to yourself you could chase an idea for longer than a short story, that a couple-few hours in the morning were enough to eventually have a mountain of words.  

Why oh why did you have to show it to people?  Friends and family, maybe, maybe, but people in publishing?  If you want a part in Clint Eastwood’s next movie, you don’t send him a tape of the play your high school drama club did.

Two megabytes spent on the same story, .97 megabytes after your deadline, you finally began a draft you can be proud of... couldn’t you have waited a couple of years?   

Oh, well.  Screw ‘em if they can’t suffer an amateur misstep.  

You recover beautifully.

Sincerely,

Not in the Buying Office Forever

My Favorite Cop in the World

After Friday’s classes, at a delicious restaurant recommended by SIBA, a group of book lover’s sat down to dinner.  Judith Rosen from Publisher’s Weekly; Chris Finan, President of the American Booksellers Foundation For Free Expression; Detective Joe Matthews, twenty-nine year veteran of the Miami Dade Police Department; Mitchell Kaplan, former head of SIBA and owner of Books & Books; Becky Quiroga, Children’s Book Buyer for Books & Books and manager of the children’s section at our Coral Gables store; Les Standiford, bestselling author of nonfiction like Last Train to Paradise and The Man Who Invented Christmas, as well as the John Deal mystery series; and Eric Svenson, sales rep and southern charmer extraordinaire for Harper Collins.

Oh, and me.  I read books.

People who love books tend to two camps; shy (or bookish, har-har) and storytellers.  Standiford and Matthews are storytellers.  Mitchell is one who comes across as shy, but that’s just because he’s as good a listener as he is a speaker.  Through the three of them, we hear the story of how Bringing Adam Home became a book.

It started with the timeline of Adam Walsh’s abduction, a document it took Matthews over two years of constant effort to create.  Hoping it would serve as a warning of what could go wrong if investigations were mishandled, he shopped it to a university press.  The editor-in-chief said, “I’m going to do you a big favor – I’m not going to publish this.”  The Uni editor advised Matthews to take it to a big publisher, where it could get the treatment and audience it deserved.  

A few days later, Matthews was having lunch with a friend who mentioned that attorney Joe Kaplan – once a lawyer for the police unions in Miami – had a kid in the book business (if you don’t know books, that’s like saying Basil Fanshawe Jagger has a kid in the rock star business).  Joe M met Joe K, who called Mitchell, who met Joe, who liked Mitchell, who thought of Les Standiford to make a non-fiction document into what Truman Capote called a factual novel.  

To hear Matthews tell it, he and Les hit it off right away.  They met for coffee at a McDonalds and stayed there for four hours.  “They probably thought we were homeless.”

As martinis, cuba libras, mojitos, and Budweisers flow (along with the occasional soda and Odoul’s for souls brave enough to handle sobriety), talk turns to e-books, family, pornography, and movies.  

Matthews tells a great story about a Hollywood actor who wanted to make the Baby Lollipops case into a movie, or a TV series.  This actor nipped around super-stardom from the seventies to the nineties but never quite made the leap to household name status.  He specializes in soft-hearted tough-guy roles, and sympathetic villains.  For the sake of storytelling, we’ll call the actor Guff.  

Guff and Matthews didn’t quite hit it off.  As a man who trains officers on how to administer lie-detector tests, Matthews is uniquely qualified to tell when someone is full of shit.  Still, Matthews agreed to meet Guff at the bar in a South Beach hotel.  

Guff bullied the servers and spent the evening trying to take the female half of a couple he just met to his room upstairs.  Matthews decided to bow out gracefully.  

Guff wouldn't have it.  He followed Matthews into the street, demanding an explanation.

Like a date gone sour, Matthew knew that they wouldn’t work together.  Also like a date, he tried to come up with reasons Guff would understand which wouldn’t hurt his feelings.  Something’s off, we don’t click, now let’s just go our separate ways, the chemistry isn’t there, I’m trying to spare you here, etc. etc.

None of it satisfies Guff.  He wants a reason Joe Matthews won’t work with him.  Matthews is a cop, used to confrontation and plain speaking.  He’s tried to be gentle, but he’s wasted as much time as he’s cared to on this B-list actor. 

“Listen, Guff – I don’t like you.  Is that clear enough?  I don’t like you, and we’re done.”

Guff goes ballistic.  How dare a nothing like Matthews dislike a successful actor like Guff, a man with his own production company, perfect stubble, and chin that could cut class?  He screams himself into a frenzy.  He promises Matthews he’s dead in Hollywood.  He actually uses the phrase, “Do you know who I am?”  

All that would have been fine.  Rude, yes, but Matthews would have walked away.  Except Guff poked Matthews in the chest to emphasize his point.

Matthews grabbed Guff’s finger and bent it back.  To hear Matthews tell it, Guff screamed “in a cowardly fashion.”

“Do you know who I am?” Matthews asked the actor.  “You don’t come to my city and tell me off.  Don’t ever call me, don’t ever talk to me, I want nothing to do with you, ever again.”

My favorite part of the story was Matthews tone when he described Guff’s scream.  Matthews sounded surprised, like he couldn’t believe what he was hearing for such a little thing.

Clearly there’s a difference between playing tough, and being tough.  

The Brilliance of Mistakes

In my short story “Happy Halloween,” the narrator starts off hungry from not having eaten for a week. Immediately, his narrative is suspect. As he slides into a drunken state, the narrative degenerates. By the time he spins a fellow party-goer around to ask where the bathroom is, our narrator is pretty drunk.

The party-goer is dressed as a mime, with a bullet-hole in his forehead. Our narrator gets a kick out of this and forgets what he was going to ask. It’s first person, present-tense.

I meant to write, I spin him around and I laugh and I forget what I was going to say.

Editing later, I found I’d written, I spin him around and I laugh and I forget what he was going to say. Oh, perfect – that’s how far gone the narrator is.

I wish I’d thought of it instead of mis-typing it, but I’ll take it.

Work It

“If there is a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”
- Toni Morrison

There’s no secret. To succeed, you need to work your ass off. We know this, but we convince ourselves there’s something we lack. We admire her writing, his artwork, her fluency with languages, his carpentry skills, her guitar skills, his sewing ability. We wonder what makes these people so special. Instead of applying ourselves to the skills we admire, we envy those who have already mastered them.

Everyone might not have the potential to be world-class at a given activity, but who can say? I heard on NPR once that it takes fourteen years of effort. If you started playing piano tomorrow, it would be fourteen years of practice before you played a solo concert at Carnegie Hall. In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell expresses this as ten thousand hours. The Beatles’ voices and fingers weren’t blessed, their minds weren’t filled with melodies and lyrics sent by God, they just practiced. A lot. Ten thousand hours worth.

I'm not sure if that relates directly with the Morrison quote, but I do like the two ideas together.

Let’s get crackin’.

Luck is Opportunity Plus Preparation

I had an agent’s attention a couple years back. Before coming to Books & Books, Marissa had ghostwritten a couple of biographies with famous folks and had also interned at several agencies. When she found out I’d written a book, she demanded to know why I hadn’t approached her before. After asking about what I was working on and what I’d completed, Marissa suggested I contact Courtney Miller-Callihan at Sanford J. Greenburger Associates, Inc.

Not only did Miller-Callihan accept email submissions - quick and easy - Marissa had seen her in action and knew she was good at her job.

I emailed Courtney Miller-Callihan at SGA the second draft of Scratch the Dead Places (horror of horrors; at least it wasn’t the first draft). She passed on it, of course. At the same time, she told me she liked my writing and would look at something different. I sent Ming and she responded enthusiastically. I sent a version with some revisions she suggested, along with an outline for parts one and two. She replied with a tremendous email that was two pages long when I printed it out.

I made the changes she suggested immediately. Then I sat on them.

When I sent Ming back, along with a short story collection called Whistling Past the Graveyard to apologize for taking so long, I was shocked to find that a year had passed since our last correspondence.

I’ve since learned how rarely this kind of feedback happens, and how well it portends. I’ve also learned that from an agent’s perspective, when there’s a long period of silence after so much back-and-forth, the agent assumes you’ve used their advice to improve your work, attempted to sell it to a different agent, failed, then come crawling back like nothing ever happened.

Timing is everything. There has to be a reason I didn’t just send it off immediately, right? I had to deal with my marriage breaking up, after all. Cheap excuse. The fact is, I wasn’t aware of those problems until a couple of months after the revised Ming was ready. The breakup prompted me to send my work out, to try and make something of my life.

Am I so afraid of failure I sabotage every opportunity?

When we first corresponded, Courtney Miller-Callahan was not listed on the SGA website. Now she is. I can only assume her plate is fuller than it once was, or (uh-oh) she’s lost interest, or (worst of all) she’s forgotten Ming. Do I follow up? Do I use divorce as an excuse? Do I take it as a learning experience and move on?

I think yes, no, and yes.

I've been preparing long enough; it's time to create an opportunity.

Writing My Heart Whole

I’m editing, deciding if I want to replace the file last saved on February 9th 2009 with this morning’s file. Have I been out of the game so long? Blogging and journaling have kept my writing skills limber, but being pulled along by my imagination is a the feeling I started writing to pursue. Has it really been over a year since I got off on making stuff up?

Ah, a fresh reason to be angry with my ex. I was worried for a moment there.

In all seriousness, lately I find myself almost constantly on the verge of tears. Any time I have a moment to myself, when I stop reading, writing, working, or watching TV on DVD (pabulum I love such as Friends, Seinfeld, and South Park), the lining of my throat gets thick and the back of my eyes sting.

How long does it take for the misery to end?

Longer, I suppose, when you’ve buried the hurt in new love. I was too cowardly to face my pain all at once, so I’ve decided to dole it out over a period of…who knows how long…and compound it with the guilt of making Becky feel like she’s not enough to keep me happy.

Of course, no one is enough to keep another person happy; ask a suicide. The only person responsible for one’s emotional state is one’s self. Yet if I allow myself to be miserable, it’s tough for Becky not to take it personally. And I don’t want to hurt her, so I keep it inside.

I’d like to be over my marriage, over Andi, over the hurt, over the anger. I’m not. Knowing when I will be would be nice, but the heart is not a wind-up toy.

Crying doesn’t help. Drinking doesn’t help. Writing my stories, much as it pains me to admit it, doesn’t help. It’s been divine losing myself behind fiction lately, remembering there’s more to pushing the cursor than hashing and rehashing the past, or worrying about the future, or decrying the present, but it’s no different than watching a Sex and the City marathon. It’s doing so I don’t have to think.

My not wanting to be in pain has no bearing on whether or not I am. The only thing that helps me feel better is writing about my feelings. For a Child Of an Alcoholic – and this is psychology talking, not just me – it’s tough to even know what I’m feeling, let alone articulate those feelings or explore their origins.

As frustrating as it is to have lost so much time being miserable, and writing about being miserable, these weeks of getting back on schedule have taught me I’m not ready. The number of stories I had running all at once before my life changed, it’s overwhelming. I can’t work like I did. In some ways, this is good. I was being pulled in so many different directions at once that I never moved. Focusing on just one story, I have the chance to move forward and finish something new.

In the meantime, there’s still some crying to be done.

I'm Back, Baby! (Sort of)

Now I remember what it felt like to be in the grip of a story.

To find my way back to writing fiction, I needed to give up the project I had on the front burner before my marriage fell apart - the third draft of Scratch the Dead Places, the final draft, which is really fucking good, if I say so myself. Unfortunately, parts of Scratch are a little too close to reality.

My second-burner, part two of the Ming trilogy, is in the safe terrain of almost pure imagination. It also hasn’t compelled me in the slightest. Even if they use different processes and have different views, most authors agree that when the story stops, it’s because you’ve taken a wrong turn. I know exactly what parts two and three entail. I have whole scenes just ready to type like dictation, but the main character – Levi – just isn’t speaking loudly enough.

Instead of either of these big projects, or beginning yet another short story (in keeping with the writing queue as kitchen metaphor), I dug way back in the freezer.

How long has The Block been there? I know sixty-four pages of a WordPerfect second draft were written in October 2006, that the original was written on a floppy disc then transferred to a hard disc, before CD-ROM, before jump drives.

Re-reading the eighty-seven pages of the third-draft in MS-Word (although since none of these versions were completed, calling them “drafts” pushes kindness into the realm of fabrication; let’s call the hundreds of pages devoted to The Block on floppy, hard disc, and CD-ROM false starts), I was surprised by how good it is. I never finished it because it felt too easy. It’s basically one story of hundreds I used to tell myself as a child to pass the lonely hours. When you live with a story for that long, you stop thinking it could have value for anyone except yourself.

The Block has been the perfect medicine because it is easy. I know exactly where it’s going and who the characters are (if not necessarily how they get there), and it’s all made up.

It’s also unpublishable. Even though books can get away with a lot of things movies and TV shows can’t because of the audience’s smaller scale, I can’t imagine a publisher tackling the legal hassles associated with having Barbie as the main character.

Supposedly one writes with an ideal first reader in mind. With this story, I’ve rediscovered myself as my first reader and it feels just fine. Whether anyone else ever reads it…

But the feeling I refer to in my opening sentence is not the joy of using imagination instead of reality to push the cursor, but the frustration involved in having a job. Short stories are one thing, but tackling a novel in the space between sleep and work is tough. If writing was sex, it’s interrupting foreplay to pay bills. If writing was food, it’s knowing how delicious the main course will be but trying to fill your stomach by nibbling appetizers because you’ll never be served. If writing was art, it’s penciling an outline, mixing the paints, dabbling a few colors, then cleaning your brushes because you know everything will dry before you find time to finish.

I wish there was a grant for authors who’ve written a Young Adult fantasy Bildungsroman with an adopted Chinese girl as the protagonist, which is the first of three, who need a few months off to hammer out the rest of the trilogy.

Maybe I should look for a sugar momma.

Specificity

This morning I made an edit which changed “My girlfriend thinks a psychiatrist cured [my nightmares], so I can’t reach out for comfort.” to “My girlfriend thinks the psychiatrist she recommended cured [my nightmares], so I can’t reach out for comfort.”

Both sentences involve the conflict of keeping secrets from a significant other, but the second sentence gives the girlfriend more weight. She’s been with the narrator long enough to notice a problem, recommend a psychiatrist, and see the treatments (she believes) work. I had been struggling to impart the seriousness of the relationship without resorting to a clunky “live-in girlfriend” or “long-time girlfriend.”

Point one: I knew Laura had recommended Tom’s psychiatrist, but it wasn’t on the page. I’ve got to be careful about re-reading things with fresh eyes. Or get back in a writing group.

Point two: I communicated the conflict and the seriousness of the relationship simply, in a way that’s invisible to the reader.

I may remain unpublished but I’m getting better at this shit.

Another Confession

I was doing fine. I could sit at a keyboard and just push the cursor, exploring my thoughts and saving worry for later (you know worry, right? Worry about plot, structure, and syntax, worry over whether I’m any good, worry if I’ll ever be paid to do what I love). The worlds in my head proved fine places to spend hours of morning frolic.

Nine AM was like a doomsday bell so I decided to move to part-time. Instead of two or three hours of writing, I would do four or five. I'd wander into Books & Books around eleven, then I’d leave early, ensuring Andi and I had a healthy dinner. She’d been lax with her diet (I mean diet in an end-stage-renal-failure, dialysis, waiting-on-the-transplant-list way, not an her-ass-was-big way) and it had cost her.

I didn’t mention to Mitchell that I felt my marriage was coming loose from its railings, but he went for it. When I moved out a few months later and money became paramount, he was just as happy to keep me at full-time. He also offered stellar advice. There’s something good about working for a man, vs. The Man.

I’ve covered how the separation has affected my writing in some detail (like here and here), as well as the tentative steps to recovery. I had a string of days when I’d gotten up to write, and I believed the worst was behind me. Then I agreed to meet Andi for coffee.

I’ve looked back through my journal. Do you know how many times I’ve used the word “divorce?” Three. First was the hopeful and pathetic, “We’re not divorced yet.” Second was in a book title, File for Divorce in Florida Without Children. Finally, I was speaking of how I agreed to have coffee with Andi because I thought it would be odd otherwise. “Haven’t spoken in a while, how have you been? Great, sign these divorce papers.”

How many times have I used the word divorce in this blog? I can’t do a “find” search like it's a Word document, but I’m going out on a limb and claiming a big, fat goose egg. I’ll bet a week of dinners that I've talked separation, dissolution of marriage, failure, etc. the same as in my journal, but have never used the word divorce.

Weird, how you can anticipate a thing, even actively work toward it for months, yet shy from naming it.

Naming something doesn’t help get your mind around it. If there was a word describing how it feels to sit across from someone you’ve been in love with for years and seeing her as a closed door instead of a sanctuary, feeling a bubble of hurt and hate and resentment in your gut and wishing it outweighed the love and knowing it never will, would having a word which encompassed all that help me feel it? Let’s try calling it flarg.

“I sat there, holding my latte, feeling flarg as we discussed our divorce.”

“I looked at her for the first time in months, surprised how her hair had continued to grow despite my absence from her life. Flarg pounded through my veins as she sat down.”

“Our body language makes it obvious to everyone. I see them trying not to stare, pretending to read and talk about other things while they watch us share flarg.”

Nah, doesn’t help at all.

The morning after coffee, the snooze button was once again my best friend. Not a coincidence.

I wouldn’t call this writer’s block. When I think of writer’s block, I imagine staring at a blinking cursor wishing your brain could talk your fingers into moving it, or someone sitting at an old-school typewriter, pulling page after page from the roller and crumpling them in frustration; I’ve just been sleeping.

Whether I go to bed at nine PM or two in the morning, I’ll still hit the snooze button for hours. Soon I realize I’ve squandered my writing time and need to get to my job. Getting out of bed for my job is too depressing to contemplate, so I just lay there, staring at the ceiling, purring cat on my belly, trying to cajole myself out of bed.

I watched South Park on DVD last night until exhaustion took me some time past midnight, but my eyes popped open just before my alarm rang at five. I hit snooze. I lay there, remembering when every morning felt like a reward, a fresh page, a new chance to get it right. I asked myself what I wanted to do with my life. I stopped snoozing.

The few paragraphs of fiction I pecked this morning took an hour and fifteen minutes. I couldn’t believe how much time had passed, how little I’d done, but I know when it’s time to move on to other things… like whiny blogs.

Not much, but it’s a start. Again.

My First Publication

I was first published in Junior High. My family was going through counseling for problems associated with alcohol abuse – my parents in Alcoholics Anonymous and Adult Children of Alcoholics, my siblings in Ala-Teen, myself in Children of Alcoholics. Families rarely undergo real change; this period as much as any explains my adaptability.

The poetry I wrote at this time was a few degrees removed from stream-of-consciousness emotive rants, but one or two of them inspired others in the program. COA’s empathized. Their parents understood what they were putting their children through, sometimes for the first time.

The lead counselor was Paul Curtin. The new Phaidon rep I met this week, I couldn’t remember his name for love or money, but Paul? I haven’t seen him for twenty years, and I didn’t even have to think.

I wonder when I became so anti-therapy.

Paul wrote a book and used two of my poems, crediting me as an anonymous child of an alcoholic. As part of the publishing business, I now understand that no one would mistake Paul for John Gray, but I still think of this as my first published work.

All the attention felt good, but I couldn’t see what the fuss was about. I just wrote what I felt and prettied it up a little.

My second publishing experience was an opinion piece on racism that I wrote for the Herald-Journal in High School. This was also my first experience with the editing process outside of a classroom. The man who ran the teen section of the paper, I can’t remember his name but his fingerprints are on Sweet with Fall and Fish. To this day, part of my editing process involves taking out all of the “I thinks” and “to mes” and “I feels” to strengthen my voice and streamline my message.

I was proud of all the work I put in, proud that a photographer came to my house to take a byline photo, proud of having an entire third of the front page of the section.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get a pass before the column was published.

My final paragraph began, “When people look scared passing me on the street, I try to believe it’s my age group or because I’m so tall rather than my features.” As part of strengthening my voice, the Herald Journal removed “I try to believe.” Give that line another read without “I try to believe” and you’ll see the whole meaning is changed. It made the struggle to ignore racism that I’d outlined in the preceding paragraphs into childish puling.

Take a look at my photo. I have no idea how you perceive my race, but as a man moving from central New York to Miami I’m qualified to tell you that you’re only as ethnic as the people around you. I may seamlessly blend into the cultural mash that is Miami, but in East Syracuse I was once mistaken for black.

But my point is not whether or not I was subjected to racism as a child, or that you should have final approval on everything you publish; I wrote this blog because the Herald reporter told me that if I ever had something else close to my heart which I felt like writing about, I should give him a call. I thought contacts and opportunities like this would be available my whole life. I figured any time I wanted to express myself, someone would be there to bring my words to a larger audience. Charmingly naïve, or just naïve?

Beyond these two early brushes with writing success, there were awards and recognition for my art and backstage work, IQ tests, my SAT and ACT scores, a scholarship to a school I didn’t want to attend. Daily, I heard that I would do amazing things with my life. What I want to know is, when does an individual’s promise become promise unfulfilled?

Cassandra Wilson didn’t put her first album out until she was forty-two.

When do people stop encouraging you to follow your dreams and tell you to be realistic?

Julia Glass was forty-six when she published her first novel, the best-selling, National Book Award-winning Three Junes.

When does limitless potential become limited choices?

Ben Fountain was forty-eight when his first book Brief Encounters with Che Geuvara stormed the literary world, the mighty Charles Bukowski's first book wasn’t published until he was forty-nine, Alfred Hitchcock didn’t change cinematic history until an amazing string of films beginning at age fifty-four, pieces Cezanne painted in his mid-sixties are worth five times the art he painted in his twenties.

Artists who don’t have children are judged less harshly. If I decide to live in a Treehouse with few amenities and a fiscally tenuous position in the hope that I’ll someday work at something better, it affects no one but me. Meanwhile, parents are admonished to think about how their decisions affect their children. This is valid, but only part of the story.

I’d rather teach my child to work for his or her dreams than for a paycheck.

My First Edit

My seventh grade advanced English class studied the descriptive paragraph. We read one aloud, then picked one to memorize and perform in front of the class, and finally we had to write one of our own.

The example we read aloud was of a t-rex coming through the trees in the most re-published short story of all time, Ray Bradbury's A Sound of Thunder. We underlined adverbs and circled adjectives, then looked up definitions and synonyms. We learned about the Butterfly Effect.

I was reading Frank Herbert's Dune, so I pulled a paragraph from there which starts, “A pre-dawn hush had fallen over the desert basin.” I don’t remember the rest.

The last part of the assignment is trickier to recall. I wrote a paragraph about a guy who visits his dead wife’s grave. Our teacher, Mrs. Temple, ripped it to pieces. When I applied her notes, the man became much older. He needed help getting out of his car. Before placing flowers on his dead wife’s grave, he he’d wrapped them in a wedding vale that had yellowed with age (“swathed in a yellowing wedding vale” was the line, God help us; what do you want, I was thirteen), and he leaned heavily on a cane for support.

Mrs. Temple read both drafts in front of the class, one after the other, and critiqued both. I remember getting odds looks from people after she read the second draft. They weighed me with their eyes, discovering me for the first time.

I think there was a paragraph we had to edit to make descriptive. The elements were there; the man, the car, the grave, the cane. Actually, all I remember for certain was the cane. In my first draft, the cane “kept rhythm with his spry step” as the man walked away, which doesn’t sound much like visiting a grave (unless you’re glad this person died, an entirely different kind of descriptive paragraph). In the second draft the man “leaned heavily on his cane” as he shuffled away. Did the cane bow with the weight of his aged body, with the weight of grief in his heart? I’m sure it would if I wrote it now...and I'll probably look back on that with disdain in years to come, too.

I remember how much I liked the image of the cane, tapping rhythm with the man’s shiny black shoes. Maybe that was one of the problems Mrs. Temple addressed in her notes, how out of place it seemed at a gravesite. Maybe there was no grave at all, and the only image I had was of the cane so I changed the destination. Who knows?

Memory is a strange thing. I’m wise enough now to know that my memory and facts are not the same things. However it happened, seventh grade English was my first lesson in the importance of the editing process, of taking work I’d done to entertain myself and changing it to communicate something with a reader. There is nothing a like a fresh, objective, keen set of eyes on a piece to make it sing.

I’ve been in Lip Service twice now. My favorite part of the process both times has been those rehearsals at Andrea's house the Wednesday before, a bunch of writers fueled by wine and snacks, eager to view each-other’s work and make it better.

It’s what brought me back. Reading in front of a crowd was mostly an afterthought.

You Should Read Elmore Leonard

“You asking me,” Catlett said, “do I know how to write down words on a piece of paper? That’s what you do, man, you put down one word after the other as it comes in your head. It isn’t like having to learn how to play the piano, like you have to learn notes. You already learned in school how to write, didn’t you? I hope so. You have the idea and you put down what you want to say. Then you get somebody to add in the commas and shit where they belong, if you aren’t positive yourself. Maybe fix up the spelling where you have some tricky words. There people do that for you. Some, I’ve even seen scripts where I know words weren’t spelled right and there was hardly any commas in it. So I don’t think it’s too important. You come to the last page you write in 'Fade out' and that’s the end, and you’re done.”
- Elmore Leonard, Get Shorty

My preferred method of recommendation is quoting an author’s work. As you can see from the paragraph above, Elmore Leonard is funny, real, and spare. He’ll never come up with a line so poetic that hipsters want it tattooed across their shoulders, but if there’s another writer as masterful at revealing character through dialog, I’m taking nominations. Whoever you want to bring forward, it would still be called the Elmore Leonard Dialog Award.

He’s created some of pop culture’s most memorable characters, folks who populate his fiction and film. Chili Palmer. Karen Sisco. Ordell Robbie. Of course, for every Out of Sight and Jackie Brown, there’s a Big Bounce or a Stick.

As is so often the case, you’re better off with his books.

More than providing hours of page-turning entertainment, I have Elmore Leonard to thank (or blame) for buckling down as a writer.

When Andi and I first moved to Miami, I was a mess. Looking for the job with the least amount of responsibility long before Lester Burnham, I’d gotten a job as a dishwasher at Bennigan’s some years before. Why go to school to teach yourself to be an artist? What did it matter what you did to keep food in your mouth and roof over your head? The work mattered, not the job.

Of course, this was before I knew what the work would be. That fundamental weakness in my pursuit of art led to a lot of late nights, LSD, and – most shamefully – to my spinelessness when presented with a dollar raise. I forgot my job was a necessary evil and not a calling

Airbrushing supplies gathered dust. T-squares collected cobwebs in corners. Paints dried up. The writing was dump and flush, amateur hour, the drivel of a dabbling dilettante (yes, I know that “dabbling dilettante” is redundant, but who can resist the alliterative pull? Say it five times fast, drivel of a dabbling dilettante, drivel of a dabbling dilettante… might make a better blog tagline than that if I care how others perceive my passions stuff. I’ll change it after I change the About Me section of my profile to “twat with a Tank Girl tattoo.”).

When Elmore Leonard pushed me into the writing life, I had the day off from my management job at Borders. I was watching a DVD of Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown, which is based on Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch. I’d seen it so many times, just watching the movie wasn’t enough of a distraction. I decided to watch it with the text commentary.

During the scene when Samuel L. Jackson's Ordell Robbie shows Robert DeNiro's Louis Gara a video called “Chicks Who Love Guns,” these words flashed across the bottom of the screen:

Elmore Leonard’s Rules of Remaining Invisible:

1) Never open a book with weather.
2) Avoid Prologues.
3) Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.
4) Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said.”
5) Keep your exclamation points under control.
6) Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”
7) Use regional dialect sparingly.
8) Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9) Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.
10) Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

All these rules have exceptions but the most important thing is- if it sounds like writing, rewrite it.

I hit the pause button on the DVD remote, sat up on the couch. The first draft of my first book opened with a prologue in which a person with a thick northeastern / reservation dialect talks about the weather (and how I heartily wish that was a joke). Clearly I had a lot of work to do. I ejected Jackie Brown from the DVD player and got to it.

I printed Elmore Leonard’s Rules for Remaining Invisible above my desk, imagining them posted above typewriters and computers across America. I started a program called “Mind Pissings” with the words what to write when you have no idea? Mind Pissings became my journal, my drawing board, the place where I wrote every morning at five am before my judgment bone woke up and stopped the circulation of my imagination.

At a Books & Books appearance some years later, Augusten Burroughs told aspiring writers to write every day, and on the days when they had nothing to write about and no ideas, they should write about having nothing to write about and no ideas.

It’s the habit. Like pushups and sit ups before bed. Switching fried food for salads. Thinking before speaking. The tiny, healthy steps which, in the fullness of time, will get you where you see yourself. It takes build up to make big leaps.

Thanks, Mr. Leonard. I build my room in the Tower of Babble by your grace.