Category: Blog

Edumacation

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A writer friend of mine who won a scholarship to Breadloaf, reported on her return that she’d turned down the critique from the famous author that was part of prize. My friend’s novel had won a contest and the famous author was to read it and give her feedback at the conference.

“But I told her I felt I was beyond that now, that I didn’t need more critique. So we just talked in general, about life and the business.”

I think it startled us all a bit at the time — her writers group — because it seemed, well, arrogant. Our friend felt the other author wasn’t any better than she was. Our friend wanted to be one of the pantheon, not one of the supplicants.

Don’t we all.

It’s a good question: when do you stop taking classes? When have you “made” it and no longer need anyone else’s input?

Faith Hunter, whose books I really enjoy, posted on Facebook this morning that she has published “20 books and I feel like [Skinwalker] is the first.” She’s living Madonna’s “Like a Virgin,” she says, because she feels this one might be IT.

One thing I’ve noticed over time is that the published authors agonize as much as the trying-to-get-published ones. That’s how life is. The ancient Greeks said you couldn’t “rest on your laurels,” referring to the crown of laurels awarded in athletic competitions. You only are what you’re doing right now. Credit for past accomplishments depreciates rapidly over time. Before you know it, you’re in a “What Happened to…” feature. Presuming you were ever interesting enough to rate that much.

Continuing to grow and learn is part of this.

There’s also an idea that an artist can be contaminated by classes or writing workshops. That the originality of her work can be damaged forever. I do believe this can happen, like the phenomenon of the MFA workshopping, which tends to produce writing of a particular literary style, to the point that you can recognize writers from a particular MFA program by the “sound” of their work.

I’m currently taking an online class on plotting. This is in line with my recent efforts to see how I can change my writing style at will. As a writer, I never plot things out ahead of time. I have a general idea of where the story is going, but how I get there is always a surprise.

But I’m not liking this class at all.

And I’m torn: is it because I’m resisting changing my approach or is it because the class really is functioning at a level below my skills? One gal I know already quit the class for this reason. I’m still wondering if I should at least complete the lessons, basic as they may seem, for the exercise of it. But every time one of my classmates exclaims “oh THIS is why I could never finish a book!” I wonder.

It’s a constant choice, when to be confident and when to accept that you can improve. Maybe we need our own little mantra for this, praying for the wisdom to know the difference.

The Rest of the Story

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So, I’ve found myself explaining to various wonderfully supportive friends and family types how the whole “refining my craft vs. selling out” crisis is going, over IM and email.

I figure I’ll write out the update here, then I can tell people just to go read my blog, which saves me typing the same stuff over and over, and has the bonus of irritating people, because I’ve found most people really hate being told to read my blog. It’s the techno version of “come over and see my slide show of my vacation and I’ll tell you about it then.” Beware of expressing idle interest in someone else’s obsession — you’ll regret it sooner or later.

For those listeners at home who may just be tuning in, I’ve been working this last week on trying to discern where the two different voices are in my novel, that this agent identified as conflicting with each other, to the detriment of the book. One is a more commercial voice and one more literary. Guess which has to go?

David, the love of my life, offered to have me read it aloud to him. This is a big favor, because he doesn’t really read fiction. I did once read the entire Ender/Speaker for the Dead series to him over a summer of road trips. Now that we have more comfortable incomes we usually fly places and have very few road trips.

So, I printed out the first couple of chapters, read them to him and he stopped me anytime he lost the thread of the story or thought it got vague. Which ended up being a lot. It’s a good thing he loves me because at one point when he stopped me, I snapped “What? I don’t get ANY description?!?”

But I marked all those sections and our relationship survived and was fully repaired over cocktail hour. It’s funny, because the agent told me that if I could make the fixes, she’d love to see it again, but that she also understood that this was the “hardest and most emotionally frustrating part of the process.” And she wished me luck. Turns out I needed it.

The next morning, I sat down to revise. And decided pretty quickly that David was an idiot who had no idea what he was talking about. All the stuff he picked out was really good stuff.

Just then, an email arrived from a contest I failed to final in, with comments from the judges. Now, I’ve pretty much stopped reading judge’s comments. I enter the contests for the opportunity to put my novel in front of editors and agents if I final. If I don’t final, most of the time it’s because at least one judge REALLY HATED my book. Like giving me a 50% score hated. Usually the other judge will give me a nearly perfect score. So between the two, I don’t get super-useful feedback. Just the love/hate thing.

But I decided to look at these comments, to see if any of theirs coincided with what David identified. These scores turned out to be unusual because all three judges ranked me highly, with just enough points taken off to keep me from finalling. And they ALL picked on the exact thing the agent pointed out. And their comments? Yes: exactly the sections David thought slowed the story.

Another writer friend told me she read her novel to her tattoo-artist boyfriend, who was not a reader, but spends his days talking to people. She says “I’d want to kick him when he’d stop me and say ‘what? wait? what?’ But he was invariably right.'”

There’s been discussion lately on the FFP loop, about finding someone to critique your work who understands your particular sub-genre. Several people have chimed in that their best critiquers don’t write anything remotely the same, but they know a good story.

I lost a page and a half in the revision of Chapter 1. I read it again to David and he didn’t stop me once. He was surprised when I stopped at the end of the chapter, he was so caught up in the story.

So, yes, it’s painful. But I see that I can do it now. One of the judges clearly also writes in first person and she warned me to watch out for “I wondered,” “I thought,” “I saw,” “I heard” and “I noticed,” as constructions that yank the reader out of deep POV (point of view). She means that it brings in the narrative voice and the reader loses the sense of being in the character’s head. She’s dead right. I’ve been searching for those phrases and they cluster in the “slow” sections. Alas.

I suppose it’s part of life, that you never stop discovering new flaws. As you get things polished and handled, new problems are revealed.

Guess I won’t run out of stuff to do!

I Know You Are, but What Am I?

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Pacer Guy was back today.

I wouldn’t call him a rec center regular, because he’s not there every morning. He’s not even there on the Monday, Wednesday, Friday mornings, like the three Walker Ladies who spend more time yakking while they “stretch out” than they do on the weight machines or on the walking track, where they insist on walking three abreast, which annoys the people trying to jog in the outside jogging lane.

No, Pacer Guy shows up more or less randomly. Often on Friday mornings, however. He’s distinctive in the lemon green ball cap that never comes off his head. And his behavior.

Pacer Guy had just gotten off the leg press machine when we arrived. Knowing from past experience that this is his favorite machine, with which he has a tumultuous relationship, I took the opportunity to get on the machine, hoping to use it before he returned. Cuz that’s what he does — he apparently leaves. Sometimes he wanders around the central pulley machine to stand and watch Fox news for a while. (This is Wyoming: of course they play Fox News in the gym.) Other times he’ll head off down the hall, past the basketball courts, through the glass doors to the atrium. I’ve seen him get all the way to the front doors — a straight visual shot from the weight room — before he turns around and comes back.

As I worked my leg press repetitions, Pacer Guy circled back a couple of times and I realized he wasn’t done. In some ways, it seems he never is. I finished and he jumped on, quickly shifting the weight pins to his preferred load. He did three or four reps. And headed out the doors.

He came back, of course. Pacer Guy does this most with the leg press machine. But, when he was safely on the biceps curl, apparently done with the butterfly one (can you tell I’ve never bothered to learn the actual names for these?), I started in with that. Every time I stood up to increase the weight, he jumped up from the biceps machine, only to retire back to his seat when I saw I wasn’t abandoning the field. Finally, he popped up and paced off somewhere. I finished and Curiously Tense Blond Jogger Girl got on. Pacer Guy returned, saw someone ELSE was on the machine and took off again. Then New Overweight Guy, who’s being very dedicated and earnest so far, marking all of his weights and reps on the spreadsheet the personal trainer gave him, used the machine. This was the last straw for Pacer Guy, who disappeared after that. I thought he’d left, but David, who was dodging the Walker Ladies on the track, reported that Pacer Guy had gone upstairs to stalk around the treadmills and rearrange the Pilates balls.

Yesterday I went to Denver to visit my mom. She’s back in the neighborhood for the summer, so we went for lunch at the Bent Noodle and hit Nick’s Paradisical Garden Center for supplies: pink impatiens, tadpoles and water hyacinths. She said she didn’t know Ruth has dementia. And we talked about how hard those debilitating chronic diseases are on the caretaker. I saw how it drained her, during Leo’s long decline.

“I don’t think Mother had Alzheimers though,” she said.
“Why not?”
“Because she always knew who we were. She didn’t forget things. It was more like…like her anxiety overwhelmed everything else so she couldn’t function.”
“That’s true.”
“I find myself doing that,” she admitted.
“Hell — I do it!” I told her. “I suppose it’s just a constant battle not to let emotions overwhelm what’s rational.

By 6:30, the weight room had cleared out. The machines quiet, ready for the next wave.

Nicely Done

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For someone who has a bit of a rep as not being a “nice” person, I sure do get myself into binds because I’m trying to be nice.

Monday afternoon, I heard a crash outside. I looked out the window, which is right over my desk and saw a beige pick-up pulling away. The back of the truck was very near our parked car, but the car kept going so I didn’t think much of it.

Less than a minute later, the doorbell rings. A woman with a red geranium perched in one hand and a little dog circling manically at the end of a leash in the other says “Is that your green car out front? Someone just hit it! Backed into it and drove away! But I got the license plate. Mouthed to the driver: ‘I see your license plate.’ She kept going. Turned right on Grand.”

I should have run out when I heard the crash, I suppose.

As it was, I went to our neighbors across the street first. Ruth and Mike are in their 80s, very pleasant neighbors. From what I saw, the truck had backed out of their driveway and was likely driven by one of their many grandchildren who come to visit. Only Ruth was home. Given her dementia, the conversation was unproductive. She can make neighborly conversation, but has no idea who’s been there visiting or not.

I called the police. Gave them the plate number. They said they’d look for the vehicle. Called insurance. The whole deal. The damage almost certainly exceeds the value of the car. (No, no — it was the Buick, NOT the Jag!)

When Mike came home, David talked to him, told him what happened. Mike immediately phoned up the grandson, who came right over. They examined our car and his beige pick-up, then came over.

We had the conversation in our entrance hallway. The grandson says he thinks he would have felt it if he hit our car. He is twenty-something and earnest. Mike clearly believes him. Mike says how’s there’s no damage or green paint on the grandson’s truck. I refrain from pointing out that the kid has had three hours to clean it up. They also note that the paint left on our car is white. I don’t ask how beige scraped over dark green looks different than white.

What I do say is that right now the cops have the kid as a hit and run and he should go to the cop shop. I figure they’ll deal with it, match the paint, etc.

The cops call later, say the kid is playing dumb and they can’t do anything without my witness. Whose name I neglected to get. The insurance company is not so sanguine and is talking about having the claims agent check the kid’s truck while they check ours.

I’m torn. For us, there’s no fault. There is a $500 deductible. And it annoys me that the kid isn’t taking responsibilty, though I also believe that will catch up with him.

I keep seeing Mike’s face in our evening entranceway, the weariness on it. The need to believe his grandson wouldn’t lie. Mike and Ruth no longer make their annual trek to the sunny Southwest and instead have stuck out the last two long Laramie winters. Ruth is too far gone for it.

We’ve knocked on the neighbors’ doors, looking for the woman with the red geranium, who told me she was there visiting her dad on the corner. No luck. We’ll run a classified in the paper through Sunday, looking for her or her dad.

After that, I don’t know. Maybe it’s worth $500 to leave Mike alone.

Dying in Bliss

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Alas Air France 447. It’s looking like we’ll never get to know what happened. What with the whole black-box-at-the-bottom-of-the-ocean thing.

I’ve mentioned before that I have a plane-crash, well, “obsession” is probably a fair word. I find that a big part of this is the wanting to know what happened. I can’t help but envision those final moments. What was it like for the passengers? Were they sleeping when the plane hit the ocean? Had they already vaporized before that?

However, I’m finding that knowing doesn’t provide full satisfaction either. In fact, knowing too much can be a real detriment to enjoying life. I work on tap water — I know what I’m talking about here. Sometimes the illusion of safety is what gets you on the plane in the first place, and in the 211th place also. Which is why I’m kind of sorry that I read the cockpit recorder transcript from Colgan Flight 3407. You know the one, the turboprop plane that iced up and fell from the sky like a big rock onto someone’s house in Buffalo, NY.

The kind of plane I fly on all the time between Denver and Laramie, through blizzards, etc.

You trust in your pilots. You have to. And you make certain assumptions in that trust: that they’re not exhausted, that they’re well trained, that they know what they’re doing.

You can read the whole transcript of course. I confess I skimmed. The interesting part is at the end, of course.

Which is also the really scary part. For example:

“I’ve never seen deicing conditions. I’ve never deiced. I’ve never seen any–I’ve never experienced any of that. I don’t want to experience that and make those kinds of calls. You know, I’d’ve freaked out. I’d’ve like seen this much ice and thought oh my gosh we were going to crash.”

That was from the young co-pilot who was only making $16K and had to still live with her parents, commuting from Seattle.

The pilot has asked her to see if there’s ice on her side of the plane, too. He talks about being a Florida guy, how all his flying hours are around the Phoenix area, how he’d like more flying time in the Northeast before he upgrades to a bigger plane. He does the wrong thing when the plane stalls.

One of the worst parts is the top of page 55, where they reel of the standard spiel about cell phones, seat backs and tray tables. Meanwhile the pilots are saying to each other “son of a gun, look at all that ice — wonder why we’re not crashing?”

Not that any of the passengers could have done anything. Except trust that their pilots have the knowledge to take care of everyone on the plane.

Sometimes knowledge is power. No matter unblissful it might be to know.

Lilacs for Terry

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This time last year, I ordered flowers for David’s Cousin Terry.

I remember it because I called the florist in Seattle and asked if she could do lilacs. The shop was next to the big medical center performing Terry’s latest MOAS. (Mother of All Surgeries, as Terry’s sister dubbed them — a good name since the surgeries were too complex for a simple word like “bypass” or “extraction.” They seemed involve opening Terry up and scraping cancer off every surface they could reach and clipping pieces off of whatever organs were too far gone to clean.) So the florist was helpful, had a listing of patients, but wasn’t sure if she could find lilacs or not.

When she asked me what the card should say, I answered that I’d like it to say “The lilacs are blooming here — come home soon.”

She paused a moment. “I’ll find some lilacs,” she promised me.

I don’t know if she did or not. You don’t expect a thank-you note from someone who’s had her third MOAS. And by Thanksgiving, Terry was gone.

The funeral was Catholic and obnoxious, with the priest talking about how joyful Terry would be to be rejoined with her maker. How all the pain she suffered was for a reason. I wanted to stand up and shout that, no, there was nothing joyful about this. That she died far too young and in conditions no one should have to go through and that her death was a waste of a vivacious and beautiful woman.

But I bowed my head and pretended to pray.

Life Lessons

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I bought more flowers yesterday. It’s that time of year. When all the potted plants go outside and get supplemented with fresh annuals.

So, there I am, browsing through the Kmart offerings, since I’m all about the inexpensive and temporary this summer. Transient me. They have those tall, many-shelved carts, that they wheel out to the sidewalk on sunny days. One row against the brick building, one at the edge of the walk, creating an aisle between. (Tip: dig deep to the back for the impatiens that haven’t gotten sunburnt.)

This young mother and her little girl walk by. The girl is two or three, wearing a cute denim sundress. Mom has her hands full of petunia six packs. It’s a gorgeous day.

“I think I’ll just take this off,” announces the little girl.

I glance down and she is already slipping the buckles on her straps and shucking her dress to her ankles.

“No!” Mom yelps, shoving her flowers onto the nearest open ledge. She’s down on her knees, pulling the dress back up. “We can’t just run around in our panties! It’s indecent exposure.”

I laugh at this and the mother rolls her eyes at me.

We wonder how we learn things.

Let the Sun Shine In

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I must have spring fever.

Or summer fever, since today is the last day of May and it’s finally summer in Laramie. Characteristically having skipped spring altogether.

We turned the heat off yesterday and took off the storm windows to replace them with screens, in preparation for our open house. A steady stream of people came through, our agent reported, while we were off hiking. It feels like the switch has turned on and we’ll get an offer soon. Apparently we very nearly had an offer before, but the woman decided against our house because she was afraid her grandchildren would drown themselves in the back yard fish pond. What? Oh, two feet deep. Yeah.

But my mind is quiet today.

I know, not like me. But it’s better than I was last week, when I posted on Facebook that I was “of two minds. Or three. Or four or more. Like a tree in which there is a flock of grackles.” Now the chirping and fluttering has diminished. Robins are singing in the happy warmth. A juvenile hawk whistles nearby. I feel good about my plans to revise Obsidian.

Apparently a storm hit Vedauwoo right after we were hiking up there: three to five inches of hail. But for us, the sun shone.

At Julianne’s birthday party last night, her photographer husband told me he’d hear our radio debate about the voice in my book. I asked what his vote was. He says he creates for the joy of it. If people like it fine, if not fine. He doesn’t worry about it. I’m not worried either.

But I do know what I want.

Selling Out

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I’m not sure if I believe such a thing as “selling out” exists, even as I’m thinking of doing it.

Alas, the irony.

Over the past few years, I’ve desultorily pursued the history of the term. I wrote to The Word Detective about it. (He didn’t answer.) The Wikipedia article on the topic is tagged with warnings that its neutrality and factual accuracy are disputed.

The trouble with the concept of selling out is that it requires that you accept certain assumptions. If selling out is compromising artistic integrity for commercial gain, then you have to accept that there is such a thing as artistic integrity. And that making money automatically compromises it.

I had a great conversation last night, both on air and off, with two writers, Julianne Couch and Paul Bergstraesser. We were doing the final show of Speaking of Writing on our little community radio station. Julianne has been keeping the show going for five years now and I’ve been a co-host most of that time. Paul is a recent addition to the UW English Dept faculty and has been co-hosting also.

Julianne asked me to share my recent agent rejection. I thought it would be boring to read on air, but Paul — who I was meeting in person for the first time — jumped in and said I should, that “this is in the trenches stuff!”

I’ll just share this bit from the agent with you here:

I finally had the chance, over the long weekend, to give this manuscript my full undivided attention and see it through. You are such a terrific, vivid story-teller, and I really was absorbed by this fantastical world and intrigued by its bizarre rules and culture. However, though I could gush and say many wonderful things about this novel (and indeed I wouldn’t have kept reading at any point if I hadn’t been truly enjoying it) I want to say upfront that I don’t think it’s for me. I think that you are two kinds of writer in this prose. There is the Jeffe the Writer who is highly literary and has a beautiful, sometimes surprising turn of phrase that catches the reader off-guard, and there is the Jeffe the Writer who is more informal and intimate with the reader, with the classic approachable style that makes for great commercial fiction. I see both of these writers inside you, but they conflict pretty often on the page in this novel. You are clearly both versatile and professional, with a wide range and diverse capabilities, but I think that there’s an uneven quality to this prose that was disconcerting and sometimes distracting for me, as if you would have been better off sticking to one style or the other.

She went on to give me very specific plot critique, but this is the part that broke my heart. And caused my mini-crisis of this week. Plot stuff is an easy fix. My writing style though — should I consider altering the way I wrote this book to make it more commercial?

Paul stared at me like I was an idiot. “Of course!” he says.

After the show we retired to Bud’s Bar, official watering hole of Speaking of Writing, where they pour Jamesons with a very free hand. We wished that conversation had been recorded, too. We talked about whether there’s such a thing as selling out, as artistic integrity. We all agreed that making our living as writers is the brass ring — everything else is gravy. As Paul pointed out to me in a most pragmatic way, it’s still me writing it and, as authors, we often change our style depending on the audience, whether for a magazine article or an anthology. Then he asked what kind of fool was I to bypass an opportunity like this. Fix this to have a commercial style and I can write all the lyrical stuff I want.

Maybe it was the four fingers of neat Jamesons, but it felt like an epiphany.

So, I’m going to try it. The big question now is whether I can do it. I might have to look for a good critique partner(s) who can help me untangle the two voices from each other.

Anyone out there interested? I’m willing to trade anything but sexual favors. Even if you ply me with Jamesons.

Wisteria Hysteria

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This morning, I finished putting out the plants.

Another annual ritual completed. A labor-intensive one. We have this sunroom, one of the things I love most about this house, where I overwinter all sorts of potted plants. Once I feel more or less confident that the spring snows are over, I begin shifting the plants out to the patio, gradually hardening them off.

For those who aren’t experienced with this, indoor plants transpire more moisture through their leaves, because it’s a moister, more contained environment. When you move a plant outdoors, especially in our arid climate with the intense mountain sun, you have to do it gradually, to allow the plant to acclimatize. The leaves get waxier in some cases, and the transpiration pores shrink. Depending on the plant, they also develop a bit of “sunscreen.” Putting an indoor plant outdoors and leaving it there is akin to sticking a Wyoming person on the beach in Florida for the day. Not pretty.

So the first day, you put the plant out for an hour or so and bring it back in. Becauase I have way too many plants, on this schedule, by the time I got them all out, it was just about time to bring them back in again. The second day they can stay out for three to four hours. The third day, yesterday, they stayed out all day and came in at night.

Finally this morning I set them out in the permanent summer spots. No more dragging back and forth. There they’ll stay, unless we get a freak snow storm, which hopefully I’ll know about before it hits.

It doesn’t escape me that this is another last, the last time I’ll perform this ritual in this house. With our move in mid- to late August, the plants will all be still in their places. On my list: find out if I can bring plants into Canada. It sounds silly — maybe not worrying about whether a carpet is happy silly — but some of these plants I’ve had for twenty years. The bougainvillea that David and I bought in the first apartment we shared, back in 1991. There’s my hibiscus, inherited from Val when she moved to Seattle, grown from her grandmother’s plant in Casper more than twenty years ago. I really want to take the orchid David gave me for Valentine’s in ’95 — I’d love to give it a climate where it might do more than subsist.

Perhaps I’ll have a big plant sale. Maybe I’ll just give them all away to good homes and start new.

I won’t have this ritual in Victoria, I think. Freezes there are less rare. I don’t know if people leave plants out all year and only bring them in when there’s threat of frost. Something I’ll learn.

I do know this: the first thing I’m going to do is plant wisteria. Always wanted wisteria.