Help edit "Parallel and Perpendicular"

I received a great deal of high-quality help the last time I posted a short story and asked for edits, so I thought I'd try it again. I owe a short story to amwriting.org soon. Any suggestions about how to make this one better before publication would be greatly appreciated. 

Parallel and Perpendicular

                Gary couldn’t sleep.

                Whenever his wife and son got into one of their arguments, it stressed him out. The fights were exhausting for all the parties involved, but their son, Neil, would eventually storm off to his room and decompress with loud music. Gary’s wife, Sofia, would sit down at her computer and read the posts of her most distant acquaintances of Facebook. Occasionally she’d sigh and tell Gary about one that particularly bothered her, but mostly she’d retreat into the digital space, at once a public place and her most private space in the house. Their daughter, Stephanie, who was three years older than Neil, could now drive. When the fights began, she would ask Gary for the keys. They would share a moment of eye rolling, and then she would take off. She had a sixth sense about when it was safe to return. Gary’s sixth sense told him he would be in big trouble with his wife if he tried to escape during the fight, but even bigger trouble if he tried to intervene, so he would quickly find a book, sit down in his recliner, and only weigh in when Sofia asked for his opinion.

                Tonight’s fight started the way they generally did. They were all watching The Daily Show, a show the whole family could enjoy together. They got to a commercial break, and while Gary skipped through the commercials, Sofia looked over at her son. “Neil, will you quit doing that?”

                “Doing what?”

                “You’re doing it again.” Her voice was calm, but there was a dangerous undercurrent, like a riptide.

                “What?” Neil’s voice carried the sneer he’d almost perfected at only 13. Gary marveled at that sound. To the best of his recollection, he’d only mastered that kind of disdain by 16.

                “You’re digging in your ear again. You know that grosses me out. Get a cue tip and do that in the bathroom if you have to.”

                Neil pulled his pinky out of his ear. “I was not.”

                “Neil, I just saw you,” Sofia said.

                Gary tried to steer to safety. He smiled at Neil and said, “You were, buddy.”

                “No I wasn’t. It’s not a big deal.”

                “Well, which is it?” Sofia asked.

                “What?”

                “Either you weren’t doing it, or you were and you don’t think it’s a big deal.”

                “Or I wasn’t but I still don’t think it would have been a big deal if I had been.”

                Stephanie held out her hand. Gary shook his head and continued to aim the remote. If he could just get through the commercial break in time, he thought. He skipped ahead, but it was too far. He tried to go back.

                “Neil, I wish you would just admit that you were doing it, say you’re sorry, and quit it. Then it won’t be a big deal,” Sophia said.

                “I wish you’d admit I wasn’t doing it, say you’re sorry, and leave me alone,” Neil said.

                Gary hit pause and handed Stephanie the car keys. Then he got up.

                “Where are you going?” Sofia asked.

                “I’m just going to grab my novel.”

                “I’m sorry, honey. It’s not a big deal.” She looked back at Neil. “I just don’t like being lied to.”

                “And I don’t like being falsely accused,” Neil said.

                Gary headed off for his book.

                When he came back down the stairs, their voices hadn’t risen too much, and they were still on the original topic. Gary wasn’t sure what kind of omen that was.

                “Maybe I touched my earlobe or something, but I wasn’t ‘digging in my ear,’” Neil said.

                “Well, this is progress. Now you admit you were touching your ear. Neil, your pinky finger was halfway to your brain. I think you don’t even realize you’re doing it.”

                “Then why did you call me a liar?”

                “I didn’t call you a liar.”

                “Yes you did!” Now Neil’s voice didn’t just rise in volume, it cracked in a way that might have made Gary laugh under different circumstances. “You called me a liar!” he tried again, this time without cracking.

                “I didn’t call you a liar,” Sofia explained in a voice straining for patience. “I said I didn’t like being lied to.”

                “That’s calling me a liar!”

                “No, it’s not quite the same thing-”

                “That’s a lie, because if I said I didn’t like you lying to me, you’d say I was calling you a liar.”

                “I am not lying, Neil. I’m trying to explain to you that-”

                “I didn’t say you were a liar, Mom.”

                “Okay, you did, but please don’t interrupt me Neil, because-”

                “I did not! I said you wouldn’t like me to call you a-”

                “You just did, Neil!” Now Sofia was shouting. “You said, ‘That’s a lie!’”

                “Did not! This is just like the whole ear thing!”

                “Yes, it is. You say you didn’t do that, either!”

                “See? You are calling me a liar, but you also said I don’t even know I’m doing it.”

                “But you can know you’re doing it when I catch you doing it, so just admit it and quit it.”

                “But I’m not doing it!”

                Gary tried to focus on his book. The words made a gray smudge on the page but refused to separate into distinct shapes.

                Sophia leaned forward. “I’ll tell you what you aren’t doing. You aren’t doing all your homework. You aren’t doing the dishes when it’s your turn. You aren’t practicing the piano even though we keep paying for lessons.” She was counting things off on her fingers, and hesitated on the third, her mouth slightly open to let Neil know she wasn’t finished. Then the fourth came to her. “And you aren’t putting your clothes in the hamper.”

                Well, Gary thought, they got past the ear thing. Now we’re up to DEFCON 2.

                Neil leaned forward. “So that’s what this is really about? How I do everything wrong?”

                “Oh, don’t be so dramatic. I didn’t say you do everything wrong. It’s just that, when I come home from work, and I’m tired, and I’m stressed, if you haven’t done something, and I ask you if you did it, just admit it and do it. Don’t tell me you did it when you didn’t.”

                “Mom, did you ever stop to think that maybe I’m stressed and tired, too, and that’s why I can’t do all the things you want me to do?”

                “Neil, I said I understood that sometimes you won’t have done all the things you’re supposed to do. That’s not the point. The point is that you need to just admit it and do them when I ask.”

                “No, that’s not the point, Mom.”

                Sofia fell back heavily into the couch. “Fine. What is the point?”

                “The point was that you were accusing me of digging in my ear. All this other stuff is just a distraction you just brought up.”

                That is a pretty good point, Gary thought. Wisely, he said nothing.

                “There can be two points, Neil. These aren’t unrelated. You say you didn’t do something I was watching you do. Sometimes you say you did things you didn’t do. I think there’s a connection there.”

                That was also a good point, Gary noted.

                Neil fell back against the back of the loveseat. “Fine. Fine. I will try to do everything you want me to do.” He started counting on his fingers. “I’ll try to remember to do all my homework. I’ll try to make sure I do the dishes when it’s my turn. I’ll try to remember to practice the piano.” He hesistated on the third, his mouth open. “Oh, and I’ll put my clothes in the hamper.” Then he exaggerated the fifth, waggling his thumb. “And I will try to stop doing the things I don’t even know I’m doing, okay?” He stood up. “But you don’t have to be such a…” He pressed his lips together.

                Sophia’s eyes got very wide, then very wet.

                Gary sat up quickly, looked at his wife’s eyes, then turned toward his son.

                Neil knew he’d stepped in it. “…mean. You don’t have to be so mean.”

                “Neil,” Gary said softly. “Go up to your room. Right. Now.”

                Neil opened his mouth.

                Gary pointed toward the stairs. He pointed hard. Neil went.

                Gary looked at Sofia. She carefully dried her eyes with one finger, trying not to smudge her eyeliner too much, rose slowly from the couch, and went to sit in front of her computer. The sound of muffled punk music sloshed down the stairs in little rhythmic waves, just loud enough to be sullen, but not loud enough to confront.

                Gary went into the kitchen, but he could still see Sofia over the bar. “Would you like a glass of wine?”

                “Do we have anything stronger?”

                Gary turned toward the cabinet above the fridge. “Um, we might.”

                “I’m kidding. A glass of wine would be nice. Maybe some of the red from when the McCabes were over.”

                He poured it and brought her the glass. She mumbled a thank you, then disappeared into Facebook again. Gary went back to his book. The words resolved themselves, but the story eluded him.

                “What punishment should we give him?” Sofia asked.

                “For sticking his finger in his ear and lying about it?”

                “No. For… Oh, God, do you think I was being a bitch too?”

                “No, of course not.”

                “I was. I was. It wasn’t a big deal and I made it into this big thing.”

                He could hear in her voice that she was crying, and he rose to hug her, but she handed him her glass. “No, I’m fine. I’ll apologize to him tomorrow.”

                “I don’t think you need to apologize.”

                “No, I do. It was… I do.”

                Gary tried to think of something to say while he took the glass back to the sink, but when he turned around she was already heading up the stairs. Soon after, the music stopped, and he thought maybe she’d gone into Neil’s room. He listened, but the only sound he heard was the car pulling back into the driveway.

                “Are they done?” Jennifer asked when she came in.

                “Yeah.”

                “Was it bad?”

                “It’ll be fine.” Gary watched Jennifer roll her eyes, then head for the stairs. He called after her in a barked whisper. “Hey!” She returned. “Hey, why didn’t we ever have big arguments with you like that when you were 13?”

                “Because I’m more like you, Dad.”

                “But you didn’t argue with your mother, either.”

                “Nope. Neither do you.”

                “True.”

                “Love you, Dad.”

                “Love you too, honey.”

                Gary read his book for a while, but when he was sure everyone was asleep, he made his way up the stairs. As he passed Neil’s door, he remembered checking on his son a decade earlier. He felt an overwhelming urge to do so again. Carefully, he turned the nob and poked his head in. Neil was turned toward him, his face serene and years younger. The blankets were pulled up to his neck, but one leg stuck out, almost perpendicular to his body, his foot hanging off the edge of the bed. Disturbed just enough by his father’s presence, Neil swallowed and then made a soft clicking sound in his throat twice, then fell back into a deep sleep.

                Gary continued down the hall, past his daughter’s room, and slipped into his own. Sofia had fallen asleep with her book open on her chest and her end-table light on. Gary slipped around to her side of the bed, gently picked up the book, placed the bookmark in it, and set it down as quietly as he could. Sofia heard this slight sound and swallowed once, then made a soft clicking sound in her throat twice. Gary remembered, at one point when Neil was five or six, he went through a phase of climbing into their bed after bad dreams, and because he made the exact same sleeping sounds as his mother, Gary hadn’t been able to tell if he was there or not sometimes.

                Before Gary could turn off Sofia’s light, she rolled over and pulled the covers up to her neck. Then she pushed one leg out from under them and dangled her foot over the side of the bed.

                Gary went into the bathroom. While sitting on the toilet, he contemplated the ways his wife and son were so similar. Did that explain the tension between them? It must, he decided.

                He was entirely unaware that his pinky finger was buried deep in his ear.  

Short Story: Fea's Tenses

I've written this story for a big-deal writing contest, and I want to get some feedback before I send it off. (That's allowed by the contest, don't worry.) The story is long, but if you have fifteen minutes and would be willing to look it over, please let me know what you think in the comments section below before I send it off. Thanks!

[Update 3/30/12: Thanks to all the folks who've given me feedback, here in the comments, on Facebook, and by email, I've made some significant changes to the story. I want to especially thank Megan Geigner, a PhD candidate at Northwestern (bio here), and Wendy Hart Beckman, owner/president of Beckman Communications, a professional writing service. Both of these friends went above and beyond the call of duty, and I am so grateful for their honesty and thoroughness. I hope they're pleased with the changes. I still have time to make more, so keep those suggestions coming!]

[Update 3/17/13: Though the story didn't win that contest a year ago, I've continued to polish it and get feedback from even more friends and students. The story is now available on Kindle, so I have to remove it from this blog, but if you're so inclined, you can still get a copy (less than a buck!) here:

 
 
http://amzn.to/WthJ3m

 Again, thanks to you all!

Student Wish List, Teacher Heartbreak

I'm in the midst of a marathon essay-grading day, but I have to stop and write about this immediately, because it has to be one of the saddest things I've ever come across.

This year, one of the classes I'm teaching is Language Arts in Spanish. It's not a Spanish class, but a class on reading and writing skills taught in Spanish for students who are learning English in other classes but also need language arts credit. For the semester final, I gave the students a collection of prompts taken directly from the state's example state test writing prompts, just translated. One prompt asked students to imagine they could switch places with anyone in the world and tell the story of what would happen. This student lost track of the prompt during the outlining process and ended up turning in a list of things she wished she could change about herself. It's absolutely heartbreaking.

She starts by saying she'd like to be taller, because she's sick of being called a midget. Then she says she'd like to be prettier, because she's sick of being called ugly. She capitalized Ugly, as though people use this in place of her name. Then she wished she had blue eyes, that her hair weren't so black, and that it weren't so straight. She also wished she could be a bit fatter so people would stop calling her Skinny. She wished she could do well in school so that someday she could become a lawyer. Then she wished she were more intelligent. She wished she could speak English better so she could speak to more people at school. Finally, she wished she could get a job so she could help out her family and contribute more to her household.

I certainly can't reveal this student's identity, but I think I can share this essay because there are a half a dozen girls in that class who could have written this list, and dozens of boys and girls in my other classes who could have written a variation on it in English. Here's what I can't figure out how to say to her, and to all those students, male and female, carrying around all this self-loathing: "These values you aspire to are cultural constructions. You want to be fatter because you get called Skinny, and some of the other girls are risking their health and maybe their lives because they are so afraid of being called Fattie. You want blue eyes because that's the color of the contact lenses the models plop in before the photo shoot. You want curly hair while the girls (and boys) with curly hair want straight hair. And those desires to reach an unattainable standard of beauty (a standard that has been intentionally designed to be unattainable so you will buy lots of expensive and unnecessary beauty products to look any way but the way you were born to look) will eat away at you on the inside until you are filled up with anger and pain. And then you will lose the best thing you had going for you, your kindness. That warm smile you wear when you come into my classroom will fade and be replaced by a sneer. That great, quiet, nervous laugh you have will become a derisive snort. And someday you will see someone who looks just like you, or just the opposite, or anywhere in between, and you will call her Ugly. Please, oh please don't let that happen. Do not accept the behavior of the kind of asshole who would even consider calling you Midget or Skinny or Ugly or anything other than your given name, and don't replicate that behavior yourself. And don't internalize that kind of person's judgement, or you will find yourself in relationships with people who hold just as low an opinion of you as you do. Don't let that happen. Please. I'm begging."

But I can't say that (and only partly because I shouldn't be using the word "asshole" when talking to my students, even when I'm referring to someone that fills me with rage). I'm going to try to get her an appointment with one of our school's counselors, and I'm going to have a talk with one of her other teachers, a smart, successful Spanish speaking female teacher I think this student will more readily accept as a mentor. But I also can't have the conversation because there are two competing voices in my head, and they both make me so angry that I'm in no position to calmly share my fears with this student. I hear these voice coming out of my TV, I read them in the comments sections online, and now I can't get their echoes to stop. Here's what I'd like to say to those two voices.

"Hey, doofy, naive, post-millennial 'liberal' voice, shut up. No, I'm not going to tell her that she'll be a super model one day. No, I'm not even going to tell her that she can be anything she wants to be, and that, if she tries really hard, she can become a lawyer. She can hardly speak any English, and unless she stumbles on a pot of leprechaun's gold, she's going to go to work to help out her family rather than continue her education long enough to make up for the deficiencies in her English skills. Your ridiculous notion that everyone can be exactly what they want to be is well-intentioned, but also hurtful and stupid. I'm not going to tell my kids to settle, but I'm also not going to tell them that they will have it all. Self-esteem like hers is a real problem, but a self-concept that is out of touch with reality is just a gateway to narcissism, or to a crushing disappointment when she finds out that the people who told her she was perfect were liars. She is good and kind. Why isn't that enough? And why do you want me to lie to a good person?"

"And you, callous, privileged "conservative" voice, you can just shove it. I hear what you're muttering under your breath. One minute you're saying poor people need to just pull themselves up by their bootstraps. The next you're whispering about illegal immigration and English-only education. I know nothing about her legal status, and neither do you. The difference is that I don't want to know, because I know that we're all better off if everyone in our country is educated, while you want to pass moral judgements based on an over-simplified view of a deeply flawed system you don't understand. I do know a bit more than you do about teaching people English, and I know that if I'd dropped you into a Chinese or Iranian school when you were a kid you would not have been a big fan of Chinese-only or Persian-only education. Guess what? You probably wouldn't have learned Chinese or Persian as quickly in an immersion model, either, but you would have been so focused on learning Chinese or Persian that you would have fallen years behind in science and math and never caught up to your Chinese or Iranian classmates. So don't tell me my business. Now, as for your pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps BS, here's a perfect example of why that's garbage, and only somebody who starts out with some advantages (white, male, intelligent, or wealthy) can possibly let those words come out of his mouth without sarcasm. She's right in front of you. She's a human being. She has all kinds of disadvantages, and she won't just catch up no matter how hard she yanks on her bootstraps. Don't you look away from her! She's hurting right now, and your entitled disregard for her pain is disgusting."

So you can see why I'm the last person in the world who should try to console this poor kid. There's too much shouting going on in my own head. But she handed this wish list to me. What does that say about the rest of her world?

Killing the Pain of Rejection: A Writer’s Failed Experiment

Today I shot my rejection letters. It didn’t make me feel better.

Sharing this story may be a mistake. It’s very bad form to whine about rejection letters. For one thing, it is whining, and that’s bad enough. No one likes whiners. But it’s even worse when it seems that a writer is slagging on an agent, so let me be very up-front about this: I am not angry with the two agents who rejected my most recent novel this week.

I have a great deal of respect for literary agents. This isn’t some form of brown-nosing because I want one of them to accept my work. I respect them because I understand what they do. Even this knowledge has been gleaned thanks to the generosity of agents; I’ve never been an agent nor do I know any personally beyond a few evenings’ conversation, but some agents keep great blogs about their work, and these give insights into why agents do what they do. First of all, agents love books, love writers, and love connecting writers with readers. They’re our advocates. They’re on our side. The trick is getting a generic someone who is generally on the side of writers to become a very specific someone who is advocating for you, personally. That’s arduous, to say the least. But I believe it’s worthwhile, and not just because of the dollars and cents (though I’ll be the first to argue that taking 15% off of something is better than keeping 100% of nothing). But agents also make our work better, and not just once we’ve acquired one. Trying to please these gatekeepers forces us to ask important questions as we write. “Who will the agent sell this to?” forces us to think about audience. “Will this grab an agent on page 1?” forces us to write a first page that will also hold a reader. “Can I pitch this to an agent in under thirty seconds?” forces us to think about theme and character in a way that can increase the coherence of a novel. Agents serve us before they ever hear from us.

And then, when they do hear from us, they try to do right by us. If they love our work and believe they can sell it, “doing right” involves signing us, helping us edit the manuscript again, and pitching it to publishers. But when they have to reject us (and they do), they really are concerned about our feelings. I’ve never met or read about an agent who took that duty lightly.

So why do rejection letters seem so curt and even callous? There are a few good reasons, none of which make a lie of the agents’ concern for the writers they deal with. First of all, if agents wrote lengthy, detailed rejection letters, they’d be wasting the time they owe to the writers they’ve already signed. An agent who writes you a five page rejection letter is an agent you wouldn’t want signing you, because she would then spend her time writing five page rejection letters to everybody else in her slush pile instead of selling your work. Besides the time management issue, agents don’t write long letters because they are making a clean break with you. Think of that horrible ex-boyfriend your friend was dating. Instead of breaking off the relationship, he acted like a jerk until she finally did it. He was a coward, and it hurt her more than if he’d come clean when he didn’t want to be in the relationship. Agents don’t want to send the false impression that they might say yes if you tweak this or that part of the manuscript. When they write “It isn’t right for me,” by “it” they mean the whole thing. That doesn’t mean they hate you or that the book is garbage. They mean they can’t enter into a relationship with that book, even if it stops leaving the toilet seat up or does the dishes more often.

I was lucky. I’d met both of the agents who rejected me at last week’s Willamette Writers Conference. They were kind and encouraging in person and followed up with supportive letters that were much longer than necessary. I would have understood if they’d sent me a one line reply, but one of them gave me two paragraphs. Both of them are on my short-list for future novels if this one doesn’t pan out. I sent them short thank you notes in which I said I was genuinely grateful for their time and consideration, and guess what? I was being genuinely genuine.

And there’s the rub. Rejection hurts. Some writers hide from that pain by blaming the agent. “She didn’t recognize my genius!” they seem to say. Bull. First of all, appreciation for any given novel is subjective. What one person my find brilliant, another may find tiresome or confusing or in need of major revision. That’s not the agent’s fault. Criticizing her for that is like saying she has the wrong favorite color. Also, agents are working, not just reading for pleasure. Maybe she enjoyed your book but didn’t think any publisher would buy it. More specifically, maybe she didn’t think any editor would buy it from her, in which case she’s done you a favor by directing you to find someone who thinks she can sell it.

Some writers blame the whole industry. I think this inclines some people to look to e-publishing, indie-publishing, or vanity publishing (not the same things, mind you). That decision should be based on other factors, like platform and audience, rather than on a knee-jerk reaction to rejection. The great thing about the self-publishing world is that there are no gatekeepers. Consequently, some readers who wouldn’t have been served by the traditional market are being connected with some writers who would have been barred by that system. But those readers have to wade through a sea of mediocrity and worse to get there, and that sea just gets more polluted when writers who fear rejection throw their muck into it without concern for who their audience might be and why the traditional publishing industry isn’t snapping them up.

Some writers turn that rejection inward. “She’s saying I’m a worthless human being.” Again, writing is subjective. Plus, she’s not saying anything at all about you. She’s saying something about your manuscript. It’s not personal. Of course it feels personal to us, because we poured our soul into that book, but, at this stage, it’s important to remember that we’re more than one novel. Faced with the choice between blaming the agent and blaming myself, I think it’s healthier and more honest to take responsibility, as long as it motivates me to write a better book next time, but not if it makes me want to reach for the bottle of vodka in the back of the cupboard.

But the pain is still there. I can’t let it consume me, and I can’t direct it at the agent who sent me the letter. So what am I to do with this feeling?

I had an idea. I decided to try to externalize it and attack the feeling directly. I printed out the rejection letters, then added a digital “REJECTED” stamp and crosshairs. They looked like this:

Even before I shot at them, I suspected it wouldn’t work. For one thing, I don’t go target shooting out of anger. I’ve only recently become a gun-owner, and I bought them for a number of reasons. First and foremost, I want to be prepared should I ever need them to feed or protect my family. Second, firearms are an interesting subject to learn about, and I’m only now realizing how completely ignorant I’ve been regarding this vast area of study I’ve completely neglected. Third, I’d like to come across as at least somewhat believable when I write about people using guns in my fiction. Finally, I admit, it’s a lot of fun. None of these reasons inclines me toward any kind of hostility involving firearms. They were the wrong tool for my purposes. I’d brought a gun to a feeling fight.

But I tried. I shot the ever-loving s--- out of those rejection letters.

As I’d expected, the exercise did little for my emotional well-being. It got a few chuckles out of some friends and family when I explained my plans. But once I was shooting, the pleasure of the experience came from trying to hit the target. I completely forgot about the abstract emotional goal. I could have been doing any other fun, competitive task. I might as well have been practicing my free throws or trying to learn a musical instrument. It had no effect on my feelings about rejection in general, or the specific disappointment those letters produced.

That shouldn’t surprise me. I’m sure there are more emotionally evolved people who can export specific feelings, physicalize them, and confront them. They’re probably mostly Buddhists, and they are unlikely to project those emotional constructs into paper targets and shoot at them.

I’m not a Buddhist. I’m just a writer. I shape feelings into letters and words and sentences. Then I hope that someone is willing to read those sentences. A reader’s empathy provides the comfort that small, singed holes in paper never can.

That’s the moral of the story: To confront rejection, put the gun away and get back to work.

National Gallery of Writing

Writing My Way Through a Short Summer

So I recently returned from a trip to London, Paris, and Madrid. I took a group of forty high school students, parents, and fellow teachers. Great fun was had by all, and much exhaustion was produced. If you'd like to read about the trip, I blogged the whole thing here at:

Central High Europe Trip

Now, after some days of decompressing, I am finally getting started with a real summer break. My plan was to put in flooring, dry-wall, and a drop ceiling in an unfinished room in our new house, but according to the guy at H&R Block it takes two to three months to get the eight grand stimulus-for-buying-a-new-house-money from the gov'ment. Without that job, I thought I'd work on school stuff, paint myself a copy of Picasso's Don Quixote for my classroom, maybe paint the walls in the living room (if Paige and I can agree on colors), and generally sit on my butt until early August, when we head out to Cincinnati to see my family. It's my mom's sixtieth birthday (man, that sounds weird. Mom can't be sixty!) and she wants to go to Dollywood. As much as I'm looking forward to the time with the family, those of you who know me can probably imagine just how well I'll fit in at the Country and Western version of Disneyland. Imagine a half-naked, foam-cheese-hat-wearing, body-paint-covered Green Bay Packers fan screaming his head off at Wimbledon, or a golf tournament at Pebble Beach, or a televised chess match. That will be me. I haven't worn an earring in five years, but I'm thinking of finding my old skull and crossbones earring and putting it back in just to heighten the effect.

Anyway, that leaves a month in the middle for my summer. So I started the painting of Don Quixote, then realized that, as much as I love the painting and the story, I really should read the book. So I started it (spoiler: it's really good) and I got an idea for another novel. Now, I know I haven't finished the trilogy (quadrilogy?) I'm two books deep in right now, but since no one is nibbling at those, and this will probably be more marketable (what the hell do I know about marketability?) I've started writing this new one, and I'm going to see how much I can crank out over the next month. It's fun because I'm writing in the voice of a woman looking back on her high school years and a) I'm not a woman, and b) she's funny, so it's really challenging to get her voice just right. I considered teasing out the first few chapters here, but I know I'll want to do lots of editing before I take that leap, and, at the very least, I should let Paige read it before I completely humiliate myself. Still, I think the project has promise. Wish me luck!

P.S.
Does one wish writer's luck? Actors are encouraged to break their legs (it's a dangerous profession). Should you wish me carpal tunnel syndrome?

Writing the Perfect Query Letter

As is my habit, I've written another novel, then buckled under my overwhelming fear of failure in the face of the challenge of selling it to an agent, then a publisher. But this time, I decided to acquiesce in a new way; instead of giving up entirely, I'm asking for help creating the perfect query letter. Maybe, if I can gain enough confidence in the letter itself, I'll be motivated to repeat the process of sending it out and receiving regular, crushing rejection letters in my email inbox.

(Note to agents: I don't hold rejection against you. That would be like holding it against a reader when they struggle with an unwieldy sentence I've written. It's your job to reject the stinkers, just as it's my job to go back and agonize over that sentence until it's clear. I know I'm supposed to be thick skinned, but I'm sure you'll forgive me for not being Mr. Spock.)

Thanks to an article on Slate.com asking folks to help write Obama's Inaugural Address, I found Mixedink.com. It's a service where anybody can go on and help edit a document, basically making your document a wiki or a Googledoc open to the world. I've decided to see if anyone would work on my letter.

So, if you are interested in giving me a hand, I posted the most recent draft of my query letter. I'm not married to any of it (even the book's title), so feel free to hack away, here.

Thank you!

Thank you, Timothy Egan

Timothy Egan has written a wonderful column for the New York Times asking, cajoling, begging, and shaming publishers into refusing to publish books by the likes of Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin. Amen, amen. And yet...

Here's the problem, Mr. Egan: As a writer, you know that we need to focus on our audience. So, who's the audience of this piece? I have a few guesses.

Publishers don't want to hear it, and though they might need to, they're unlikely to be convinced to abandon lucrative sales in the name of good taste or fealty to the English language. Sure, they say they publish garbage so they can afford to publish real literature, and sure, that's often a justification to cash in, but considering their circumstances, can you blame them?

And your audience certainly isn't Joe the Plumber or Sarah Palin. No one, including Sarah Palin, knows what newspaper she reads. But anyone who's read some of her responses to questions and wondered how someone managed to convert oral blather to written drivel knows she doesn't read enough. And as for Joe the Plumber, could anything possibly convince this guy to avoid the spotlight for one second? If anything, you've done these two the favor of offering them some free press.

Which brings us to our third possible audience: The book buying public. We are most to blame for what publishers publish, just as we're most to blame for the rise of media freak-show acts like JTP and Palin. We're also to blame for the quality of the news we watch right before we go out and applaud politicians who criticize the media. We're responsible for the sex and violence in the movies we pay to see before dismissing Hollywood as too depraved. If we're really honest, we know we're responsible for the kid who hasn't seen his dad in five or six years because we threw him in a cell in Guantanimo and forgot about him. We're responsible for that errant bomb that landed in a school in Kabul or Baghdad, and we're also responsible for the correctly-aimed one we built and sold to somebody who sold it to somebody who sold it to somebody who dropped it on somebody else. Why start teaching Americans about personal responsibility when it comes to the crappy books we buy, and why stop there?

You see, Mr. Egan, my fourth guess is that your audience is really folks like me. I'm sitting here, working on the tenth... no, twelfth, no, fourteenth re-write of Chapter 12 of a novel no one will probably ever read, and when I take a break to catch up on some news I find your article. And there's the problem: You've written a very nice sermon to the choir, and worse, a choir filled with people who, categorically, don't matter. You are defending a bunch of nobodies, Mr. Egan.

It's almost as though you want to live in a world that listens to nobodies instead of paying attention to people like Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin.

With those kind of ideals, I can't believe you found a publisher.

Two Book Recommendations

I know I haven't posted in a while, which means I'm breaking the two cardinal rules of blogging: Posts should be frequent and short. Well, I'll try to manage one of those by keeping this brief (I know. Too late.)

I would love to say I've been slaving away at my lesson plans for this next school year all summer, but that would be a lie. I've been camping a lot. And napping a lot. Everything else has fallen by the wayside. I have been trying to catch up on some reading, and I've just finished two very good books. Normally, a book recommendation is the worst kind of advice to give me. I write down the title, say I'll get to it one day, and promptly forget where I put the name. If you, dear reader, have the same proclivity, this might help. These book recommendations have time limits, because both these novels are being made into films, and after reading both, I fear the movies will be monumentally awful. They will either be overlayed with voice-over narration because anyone with any sense wants to make them into movies because of the beauty of their prose, or they will be vapid chronicles of the events in the books which really aren't the point of either novel.

Read The Lovely Bones. I am not a crier, but I teared up more than once. The writing is very good, and the picture of a family dealing with grief is so spot-on that you forget your first reaction, which is that the idea of a murder victim narrating her observations of the living is at best clever and probably lame, and instead decide it was brilliant. This isn't true, but the quality of the writing almost makes it so.

Time Limit: Read by 3/13/2009
(Peter Jackson is attached, but I'm worried this will be far more King Kong than The Lord of the Rings. At least it won't possibly be Meet The Feebles.)

Read The Road. Imagine Mad Max meets No County For Old Men (a novel also by Cormac McCarthy) but with a father and son set-up that rips your heart out over and over without ever getting schmaltzy. Not even once, and that's saying something. McCarthy could teach Hemingway a thing or two about the economy of language. It was the first time I ever felt a physical pain in my chest caused by words the writer didn't include. McCarthy plays with your ears, so you hear things the characters don't say on the page, and sometimes you're deafened by their silences, too. The text itself is scant, but the thick subtext (midtext?) makes you read the book more slowly, like a great basketball player who knows how to control the tempo on both sides of the court. When I finished I was so full of feeling it reminded me of the kind of passion I could manage as a teenager, only the book indulges (and even exhorts) an adult recognition of nuance so that I can't understand, let alone articulate, exactly which direction these feelings are pulling. When you finish it, please post a description of your emotional reaction here, so I can use your road map to navigate my own.

Time Limit: Read by 11/26/08
(The cast looks amazing. Charlize Theron, Robert Duvall, Guy Pierce, Viggo Mortensen. At the height of their powers, these folks might be able to convey a lot of what's going on inside these characters. But then we miss out on the prose. Plus, they'll need someone with Robert Duvall's skill and resume to play the four or five-year-old boy. Macaulay Culkin will not do.)

Okay, well, now I've managed Infrequent and Long. If you still have any free time left, read both these books.