16 posts tagged “ws”
Well, you want it alphabetically or in order of importance?
Specifically, this is how it is:
I was just making a spreadsheet to help me keep track of my WS queries. I sent what I thought were "a bunch" on Sunday. Turns out I sent six. But I put in a lot of research as well, which is probably why it felt like a bunch. Of the six, one is closed to subs through June 1. That info wasn't on the agency website so that was a bit of a surprise. I'll try again June 1 if I haven't heard from others by then. I don't expect to.
So anyway...
I decided I'd use my RFM queries spreadsheet as a template. The date on my most recent query-related activity? 5/15/08.
WTF is wrong with me? I sat on two completed mss for a year? Granted, I was revising and also doing fresh writing on Nine, "Inheritance" and some other shorts, plus articles and editorials and TC editing. But still. What am I waiting for?
At least I can say I have some queries out there now and if/when rejections start rolling in, I have to remind myself to kick my own ass about staying with it.
I made a Wordle of the whole WS ms. Vox doesn't like HTML markup so I have to link.
People have asked me a lot over the last couple of months if I'm nervous or anxious about the contest. Sometimes I have gotten anxious. Right now I'm trying to channel that anxiety into reading mss for friends and working on Nine.
If you think about the contest like "American Idol," for example, my theory is this: I don't have to get up once a week and write a new story. My part is done. Once I entered, it was out of my hands. It's in Jake's hands now (the narrator). It's his job to engage a reader, tell a story and entertain. I'm the parent sitting in the audience biting my nails while I wait to hear what the judges say.
I have lived with some version of this story since my first undergraduate writing course in Spring 1991. The challenge was a five page story with "a setting you know," after half of us turned in our first assignment set in New York (or New Orleans), myself included. At the first class meeting after passing out our crit drafts, the professor (the marvelous Dinty Moore) asked how many of us had stories set in NYC. Easily half of us raised our hands. Then he asked how many of us had been there. Maybe two people. Maybe. He said that it showed. His advice was that the setting is another character in the story, that even if it's one we invent, we have to know it as well as any other major character. When we launched our Toasted Cheese, I asked to write our first Absolute Blank article first because I had a particular one I wanted to write: "Setting Yourself Up."
So anyway...
For the assignment, I wrote a story I didn't like and took a draft in on the due date (a Tuesday). I showed him that I'd done the work and I said, "I'm not happy with it. It doesn't feel right." I'd set it in a fictionalized version of the house where I'd spent my teen years, kind of a haunted house mystery thing. I asked if I could have until Thursday to write something else. He quickly looked over what I had and said, "Do something with a wildly different setting and see how it goes."
I moved around a lot as a kid, every couple of years. One place where we actually spent more time than anywhere else was Perry, Florida. Perry has problems, like any small town, but I loved my experience there and there's something that feels very homey to me about it. There's a reason I choke up when I see spanish moss dripping out of live oaks or how easy it is to slip into a Perry (read: south Georgia/north Florida) accent. When Hawk was sick... well, dying actually... in November and I was living in the ICU waiting room, my mind was so absolutely elsewhere that I barely paid attention to what I was saying much less how I said it. Then people started asking me, "Are you from Texas?" I looked down at myself thinking, "Wha?" I say I'm not. Then I got "South Carolina" and I thought, "Why are people assuming I'm from the South?" Then I realized: I had my good ol' Perry accent going on. The very accent my brothers discouraged but my mother liked my picking up b/c it mean that I called her "Maaaa-mah." It used to come out when I got angry or excited. I don't know if it does now. In everyday speech, I'm far more Pittsburghese.
So anyway...
I wanted to write about Perry... somehow. At least about the South because I knew it and I knew it through physical setting as well as through people and my own experience.
Then I thought about a constant no matter where we lived: there was always some house in the neighborhood that we kids were forbidden to go near. It had a History and there were Secrets. I thought, "I want to write about that house."
Who's in the house? I based my character on a lady who lived next door to us in Lake Wales (central Florida by then). Very old school Southern and steel magnolia-y. Her name was Gwen so I named a character after her and the name "Baker" popped in there and voila. I needed a narrator so I made it be a little kid but the kid was an adult looking back. Way too To Kill A Mockingbird, I know. But I was 19 and I wanted to write what I wanted to write.
In the original short story -- I've forgotten the title -- in a little dust speck of a south Georgia town in 1938, Miss Baker has just died in her big red house at the end of the street. The narrator -- JD Dawson -- is trying to find out why the lady everyone vilified when she was alive is suddenly everyone's saint. His dad is a little condescending to his mother (I didn't know that at the time; I thought he was just wise) but he talks the truth to JD. The family -- JD & his parents, Wilkes and Thaddea -- go to church the following Sunday and the minister is pissed off about everyone having treated Miss Baker badly when she was alive. He's angry and ashamed about the congregation's behavior but he also doesn't expect it to change. I forget how it ends but JD's obsessed with the house & finding out who Miss Baker really was.
A couple of years later, I picked it back up and I thought, "I could write more about this." So I did. I turned in entirely too many short stories for upper level undergrad writing classes at FSU that involved this story. It became a lot about the kids and it was fun to write but really, I had no end point in mind.
A couple of years after that, I'd been laid off from the weekly newspaper I wrote for (it closed) and I thought, "I have the opportunity to write a book." So I started working on this again and studying what I'd done. I'd established that the minister (now the age of JD's parents, not the old fire and brimstone minister from the first draft) had grown up with JD's mother in a little town called "Lucy's Cotton" closer to the Florida border than where the main action is set.
I thought, "What's their relationship like?" The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I was far more interested in the minister (Pastor Jake) than I was in JD or Miss Baker or anyone else. So I started over again and I let Jake tell me his story.
He had a lot to say. Right now it stands at 106,000 words, including Maggie Baker's diary entry. I changed Miss Baker's name for literary purposes but I kept "Gwen" for another character. I kept the big red house at the end of the street, with its Mystery and Secrets, and I kept that twisted little love letter to the flawed but beautiful little southern town that inspired it.
And thanks, Dinty, for those extra days and the assignment and the advice. It paid off.
The Publisher's Weekly review of my novel (not just the excerpt) has been posted:
From Publishers Weekly
Every town has skeletons lining its closets, and Blooming Tree, Ga., is no exception. Set in the 1930s, this novel examines the dark past purposefully shrouded by those who live there. When young Baptist pastor Jacob Buchanan is sent to Blooming Tree, he faces the challenges of overseeing a parish (namely appeasing the First Redemption Parish Ladies’ Society) and ends up living on the same street as his former lover, Thaddea, and her family. Since the murder of popular Pastor Joseph in 1909, Blooming Tree’s parish office has had a revolving door. When the purported murderess, Maighdlin Baker, gives Jacob her diary, he is confronted with a conflicting appraisal — villainous, lecherous — of Pastor Joseph. At first doubtful, Jacob struggles to uncover the truth while confronting his own demons and complex feelings for Thaddea. Though the voice loses some clarity in the diary excerpt, it is more of a hiccup than a trend, and, overall, the narration is engrossing and the plot careful and suspenseful, culminating in some satisfying twists.
I need reviews, please. Review activity is important in this round apparently. So download the free excerpt (it's the first chapter), read it (it's a 10-20- min read, max) and treat it like you would any Amazon product, review-wise.
People talk about having playlists while they write or songs that make a soundtrack of a certain book. WS doesn't have a soundtrack. I used a lot of classical music while I wrote WS b/c I like to use period music and when I wrote the early drafts, it's not like I could get evocative 1930s music. I did use some contemporary stuffto write certain scenes, stuff that made a reaction in me that translated to paper. I also listened to a lot of Tori Amos when I wrote the diary bit, which helped give it a different feel than the parts Jake narrates.
"Nine" is being written almost exclusively to "American Idiot." I don't know how that started. Probably b/c it was the CD in the laptop. I'm branching out now and when it's complete, I'll post a "soundtrack."
This evening I was supposed to get my hair done and I didn't get the phone call canceling the appointment (hairdresser had a wreck & is fine but had no transportation). As I walked back out to the car, I thought, "Well what shall I do w/ my free evening?" When I got in the car and the radio came on, the song playing was "Don't Bring Me Down." The Great Mother was giving me an answer to the question I posed inside my head; "Don't Bring Me Down" is the "theme song" of RFM (which I may have mentioned here). BTW: When I told Hawk this story and I got to the song title he said, "So you robbed a convenience store?" Yes: that's how RFM opens. And no I did not.
So just now I thought, "Hey, I could put the RFM 'soundtrack' on my writing blog b/c I've made a rough playlist." Keep in mind I didn't use iTunes or anything while I wrote RFM. I just put CDs on. I then got a little free mp3 player and I put some music on it and I've since added to it. These are most of the songs that helped me create RFM. Music, especially lyric, figures heavily into the symbolic structure of the story.
The ones before the little break actually figure into the story and I listed them here in the order in which they appear. The other songs I think came up alpha by artist. See if you can tell offhand in what what year RFM is set.
Don't Bring Me Down ELO
867-5309/Jenny Tommy Tutone
Bodies Sex Pistols
Baba O'Riley The Who
Smells Like Teen Spirit Nirvana
April Come She Will (live) Simon & Garfunkel
Enter Sandman Metallica
I'm Too Sexy Right Said Fred
Rockin In The Free World Neil Young
Drain You Nirvana
One U2
Purple Rain Prince
Silent All These Years Tori Amos
God Only Knows The Beach Boys
With Or Without You U2
All Along The Watchtower Jimi Hendrix
The Wind Cat Stevens
How Soon Is Now The Smiths
Been Caught Stealing Jane's Addiction
Atlantic City Bruce Springsteen
London Calling The Clash
I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For U2
I Will Follow U2
About A Girl Nirvana
So Lonely The Police
Behind Blue Eyes The Who
The Chain Fleetwood Mac
America (live) Simon & Garfunkel
King Of Pain The Police
Girl Tori Amos
Crucify Tori Amos
Redemption Song Bob Marley
Absolute Beginners The Jam
Nothing Else Matters Metallica
In Bloom Nirvana
Come As You Are Nirvana
Breed Nirvana
Lithium Nirvana
Polly Nirvana
On A Plain Nirvana
Something In The Way Nirvana
Down By The Water PJ Harvey
I'll Stand By You The Pretenders
Brass In Pocket The Pretenders
Losing My Religion R.E.M.
Beat On The Brat The Ramones
You Can't Always Get What You Want The Rolling Stones
These are my favorite ABNA entries so far:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001UG39HO "Mapping the Wilderness" by Deanna Northrup (general lit)
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001UG3A32 "Heart of the City" by Lisa Koosis (sci fi)
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001UG3AJQ "Bedeviled Glass" by Shannon Schuren (mystery)
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001UG39FG "Casper's Children" by Cheryl McCleery (general lit)
And this one is mine:
All of the excerpts are available as free Amazon downloads. I don't know if anything will happen to the entries after April 15 when the top 100 are announced so I recommend grabbing them now :)
From "A Brief History of Jeans:"
Jeans remained the workwear of the rough and tumble West well into the mid-20th century. They started to trickle out to the general public in the 1930s, as Hollywood Westerns started sweeping across movie screens, introducing audiences to macho types sporting jeans as they lassoed cattle, slung guns, and engaged in other cowboyish activities.
So I finished my edit on WS at like 3 a.m. the other night. It's a good sign when you can't put a book down, even if you know what happens in it. Now I just need an agent to feel the same way...
That said...
I need another ellipse here, I think...
Anyhoo, I'm having such residual Jakefeeling that I'm really not able to plunge into another book right now (in terms of editing or writing). Luckily Jam recommended a book to me that I'm really enjoying and it's getting Jake out of my mind. Not that I mind him there b/c I luffs him but if I wanted to move on to something new (which is what Maggie tells him... hrm...)
Ellipse...
So that's where things are. No new writing. No submissions. I should send out that Cole story. I think I have a final draft here. Yeah, maybe I'll do that. Damn I need a title. I think I'll call it "Ellipse."
Dot dot dot.
Last week I was busy putting Nine changes into the electronic ms. I felt very confident that I would get all my changes in in about a week and then I would pick it up and start writing on it again. I don't like it just sitting there. I like the story a lot and I like the MC. I even like writing in present tense (inside TC joke there).
Then on Thursday night Hawk was out (1) at a meeting and (2) playing D&D. So I had the kids downstairs, which is easiest, and I didn't want to play Sims or start a new story. So I looked on the computer and saw WS -- the rewrite I'd done in January 2007 (according to how I titled the file). So I thought, "Okay. I'll read a book."
Then I saw a change I wanted to make. Changed it. Kept reading. Another change. Then a line to cut. Then I'm thinking, "Ugh. Why does he keep using all these extra words?" So I start editing in earnest.
Because of his language, I felt distanced from Jake (the narrator) and I felt like I didn't get to know enough about his character. So I kept making cuts, mostly small ones. Then I got further in and I still felt like he was telling me too much and I wasn't learning about who he was. Now I'm getting frustrated.
So I get up to the scene where he goes for tea and it's like it clicks in that all of those things he's telling me in the beginning actually are telling me about him. I know what he notices and what he thinks is important and what he really has on his mind. Then when he goes for tea and Maggie gets him to open up some, I realized, "Okay, here's why he's been kind of a guarded narrator up to this point. Now someone else is making him show things about himself that he might not have wanted to show me (the reader) and he won't have any choice but to open up." I felt like a therapist with a client sitting across from me who wants to tell me things but wants me to chip away at his little layers.
I wondered if that might not be too much to ask of a reader, to stay tuned until we're 40 pages in.
Then I read Pt 2, wherein we switch narrators, styles and time periods. I really, really like that section and I like how it falls into the story. I admit, when I wrote it, I was concerned that the diary format was gimmicky but I forgot that I was reading a "diary" as I read it fresh last night. And yes, when I start to read part 2, I always read it in a day -- a sitting if I can.
I think structurally it hooks you out of part one and pulls you to the top of a hill and you just go with it and roll from there. The pace increases over part 2 and we learn a lot of things that, I think, reflect on and enhance Part 3 (where we go back to Jake and "present day"). I haven't reread Pt 3 yet; I'm doing that today. I need to get more of the stiffness out of Jake. I understand where he's coming from, based on how he would have had to present himself to people and the time when he lives. How he'd be guarded about his thoughts and emotions. But Seth (RFM) is the same way and he didn't hold back. I knew who he was on page 1. So I'm wondering if it really works: is it better to discover who your narrator is as the story unfolds or do you want to know who he is from the beginning? I think it depends on the story.
I'll let you know how part 3 goes and if my opinions change.
And then I'll get those Nine change fixed and then I'll probably dig into RFM again just because.
I finished making my changes to WS and put them on the electronic ms. I'm so much happier w/ WS now. Not that I was unhappy before but I felt I'd gone off on tangents that didn't stay close to the story I wanted to tell.
I really love the different ending & I like that there was that extra scene w/ Wilkes at the end. I always liked his character and the arc he followed but this feels more complete.
I also like Thaddea (I always did but I don't think other readers did) and the way she's written now, I can focus more on her and hopefully she's fleshed out more and might garner a little more sympathy. A little at all would be good.
Now I'm hand-editing RFM. I'm just about to the point where I began writing Jan 18. I should be done by this time next week.
Last night I was chatting w/ Jam and she asked me what it's about. I told her the basics of the opening and then I said "Stuff happens." I added that I'm bad with synopses. She said "stuff happens" is a good synopsis. Then I said, "Stuff stops happening and it's over."
Theryn wrote my WS synopsis, which was way, way better than anything I would have ever been able to do. I'm afraid that once she reads RFM, I'm going to have to ask that favor again. Last time in thanks, I got her a year membership to the Darwin Foundation. If she writes me up a RFM synopsis, I'll have to do something as well b/c I will be so overwhelmingly grateful.
I think I have a block against writing synopses. I have this mindset of "if I could tell you this story in two paragraphs, it wouldn't be a novel." Plus I have certain things I want to say with the story and I'm never sure if they come across. It's nice to know what other people get from it. Unfortunately the person who's read it that I could speak with most in depth has given me his review of "I liked it." He went so far as to add, "It made me miss State College." So I grabbed onto that and said, "So the setting is good? It's accurate? You got a sense of where things were and how things looked and were set up..." He's like, "Yeah."
He also liked the sex scenes. He said, "There's a lot of sex in it." I said, "Well yes there is but it's important to the story. Every time it happens, it has some kind of meaning." Then I counted and said there are six sex scenes. Hawk said, "Seven. Are you forgetting the guy in the truck?" Yes I was. I didn't think of it as a sex scene b/c Seth doesn't consider it as sex. Anyway, I did do some cutaways. I didn't show every single little thing (some "literary" sex). I had in mind something Theryn said when I took up knitting. I said to her that I would probably have characters now who knit (Thaddea took it up in the rewrite but we never see her do it). Then I said, "How do you describe knitting?" She said something like, "It's not about showing the knitting. It would be about the motion of the hands, the knitting project, how the knitting is part of the scene, etc." That's how I approached the RFM sex scenes. If something was important, I had to show it. I did some blocking and I tried to go inside Seth when he'd let me and when he stayed external, I did as well. I also tried to add some realistic details. Like I finished the dorm scene last night and I have the details about the narrow bed being right up against the wall (and the wall was always cold, ya know?) and the books falling off the shelves and stuff like that. None of the sex scenes are gratuitous. If I wanted that, I would just write an erotic short story.
Anyway, he also said, "There's a lot of drugs." Yes, there are a lot of drugs. Or a lot of one drug really. It's important too, when it shows up. It's never arbitrary when Seth decides to toke up or get drunk. Same as it's never arbitrary when he's working on his poems. I have a strong feeling Hawk read the story and that's what he took away: just the story. He made an edit note on his copy and he'd told me about it when he read it. He said, "I think you have the wrong sister's name in one place." Entirely possible. I said to mark it and I'd read it on my edit. Here's the line, from the August 1989 flashback chapter:
“Kristen,” I say, staring at the money. “He hurt Kristen. I don’t know where my mom and Jessica are. That bitch left Kristen behind.”
He thought the first two Kristens should be Jessica. That he thought that was a typo means he missed the entire impetus behind the scene, the crucial moment in the main character's life that influences the entire action of the story and the development of the character.
Here's the rub: at first, when I saw that correction last night, I thought "I didn't do my job." Then I realized that he wasn't reading it to get all of the literary stuff out of it. He read it (1) b/c I wanted him to (2) to see State College circa 1992 and relive his glory days (I don't think his college experience was much like mine, even in the same place) and (3) to read the sex scenes. I don't think it's saying anything too inappropriate that I had gone to bed when he stayed up to finish it and he came to bed "ready to celebrate." Sure, I'm happy that element of the book worked but I don't know if "horny" is the primary reaction I want from a reader.
When Erin said it made her cry, I was overjoyed (sorry Erin) b/c that meant I had done my job. That meant that I'd created multi-dimensional characters, showed her what happens to them and made her care about them. The only review Fredlet had for me was a spelling correction and "sell it." I assume she liked it.
I'm so needy and desperate. I just want someone to tell me that s/he got something out of it beyond the story, fell in love with a character, that I captured something perfectly... anything. Even "I liked the names" would be a boost to my ego.
The other reason for this post title is that once I finish my edit on RFM and I get fb from my writery friends (after the UPOP, of course), I'll start querying again. I posed the question on a related entry at Miss Snark (but I don't think it'll be answered) about whether to query two mss together or to query one and say "btw, I have another completed ms here waiting"). And then which do I query? Hawk refuses to read WS again; I don't know why. I told him it's all changed and I need the fb. He loved it the first time & had more to say about it than about RFM so I don't know why he's being a stubborn prick now except that he's just being a stubborn prick in general. I've told him there's sex in it and still... I say, "You could read Jake for me" and his response is always, "I already read Jake." I say, "But it's changed." He walks away.
I think he thinks RFM is about him (and he likes that). I know he does. Beyond the fact that he attended Penn State, grew up in a trailer and once held a baseball bat in a threatening way against Jed, the similarities end there. I'm more Seth than he is. I had to tell him just the other day, "You are not the bright, shining center of the universe." Seriously. Ugh. Yeah, there's more there than just the self-centered reading but this isn't the place for that rant.
Anyway, I have to write new synopses, which I suck at, and start querying again. I assume that the way to approach it would be to query RFM. I don't know which I have a better chance with. RFM is more me, more indicative of my style and the stories I want to tell from here on out (yes I have a new one in mind, vaguely) but I do think that WS would have a broader appeal, as I wrote before. When it comes down to it, if someone said to me, "Will WS sell?" I would respond, "I think so. I hope so." If someone said to me, "Will RFM sell?" I would say, "Yes."
I might play around with this new idea but the main thing I want to do now is write some short stories and publish. I need fresher credits.
So that's where things stand, kind of whimpering in the corner and saying "Love me." ;)
