Each day my progress on Delinquent Lives slows as I recognize all the intricacies built into the original and all the connective tissue that will have to be laid down to make for smooth transitions. Currently as I cut and paste segments I have to hope I don't lose my train of thought right in the midst of a cut and paste. My mind is not what it used to be in following small details.
Obviously, I'm approaching the reconstruction primarily to make the novel more readable for the lay reader who I imagine as very bright but not interested in a novel like Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. The idea, remember, is to create a book that an agent might see his/her way to supporting, to write a book someone other than myself might publish. My friend Carl Tropea read Finnegan's Wake many moons ago, back in our hippy daze. I still recall how he enthused about it. I tried to read it myself but never finished it...as far as I recall.
I'm wondering how much my decade of not writing and working mostly on algebra has contributed to my seemingly clearer vision of the process of writing? Perhaps the alterations my brain went through to understand the schemata of the algebra problem altered my brain as far as it comes to patterning. Is that a correct use of the word schemata?
I'm so far back into the thorny writing thicket that I sent away for Writer's Market 2013 a couple of days ago. I also used Len Fulton's International Directory of Little Magazines and Small Presses in the past. I haven't mentioned those useful books because I was pursuing markets closer to home with the ambition to build local and expand later with a more recent record of successful publications of my poetry, short stories and essays. As I talk about these matters, I almost believe I'm going to succeed. I hope it's not like imagining I'm going to win the lottery whenever I weaken and buy a lottery ticket about every two years or so.
It's raining and 60 degrees outside today, and I'm writing at the Black Rock.
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| Michael J. |
Tired this morning and not up for creative writing. Old age supplies me with droopy days as well as peppy days, and "being 75" doesn't ask me if I want what it's giving me on any given day. Of course, at my age, with my goal to get someone other than myself to publish my work, every delay, every missed day of writing feels like a deep forest deadfall.
However, I've decided recently I'm not going to force myself to write when I'm groggy and sub-par physically, and further, I'm not going to get down in the dumps over it. I've decided to accept those days when I'm not up to the creative task.
Acceptance is a good tool for all problematical conditions. Michael J. Fox in my most recent AARP magazine says that he finds his state of mind on any given day is directly proportional to his acceptance of his condition and inversely proportional to his expectations. I'm all over that, Michael.
This morning my obvious problem is that I didn't follow my new sleeping/waking regime. I was not accepting a condition of modern life and angrily barking late on commentary pages at ghosts and goblins. If I don't get any writing done today, I'll accept that and try to enjoy a sweetly relaxed day today. Maybe I'll go grocery shopping with my wife. Being in love with her is something not at all hard to accept.
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| market research |
As I continue to rewrite Delinquent Lives, I find the novel has a tighter structure than I thought. Close reading reveals chronological details I thought were missing, phrases like "three days later" or "last night" that I missed when I skimmed through. Like improving dialogue, finding the skeletal structure takes attention to detail.
This morning I sent off one of the essays that my local paper rejected to another market exclusive to the Pacific Northwest. I devoted four hours to discovering the new market, rewriting the essay to make it more market correct, and carefully following the submission guidelines.
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| head shot |
I found the new market by gathering up all the newspapers and magazines on the free literature rack in the lobby outside the Cascade branch of the Vancouver Library and studying them to see what to my wondering eyes might appear. I found a new age production which pays with a year's subscription. Again...no money, but isn't that all part of getting things published and building reputation? Submission guidelines also requested a head shot. See photos.
Finally, I've not heard back from the senior publication which asked for writing samples and this blog address. Perhaps I'm 75 years too young (or immature) for the target audience these senior newspapers seek out. That's a definite possibility.
When I admit to the next error in my writing, I have no doubt all real writers will dismiss me as a hack. My only excuse is that this was the second novel I wrote, and it has lain around in my possession for a couple of decades without rewriting. I'm keeping this entry short because wife and I are on the road.
I was looking over a scene between two boys at Lawnwood, the fictional home for emotionally disturbed children central to the novel. The scene wasn't working, then I discovered both boys sounded too much like me. They didn't speak like two of the emotionally disturbed boys I remembered. DIALOGUE problem! I had to go back and research words that rang true for 1970, the year the book is set in.
First word I replaced was "gym shoes". In the 1970s the best word for gym shoes was "sneakers". Next I thought about what derogatory words teens used in the 1970s. I selected from a long list the word "dipshit" which felt just right. No sooner did I select that word, then one of the real teens I'd been a cottage parent for during those days, popped into mind, and I distinctly heard him speak that word, attitude included.
I had begun with the thought that the task of dialogue editing would be monumentally long and boring. The dialogue work may certainly take time, but the scene, with a few more corrections, came so alive that I was excited about the prospect of doing this kind of dialogue reworking throughout the entire novel. The old Beat Boomer Silent has learned another lesson. Where has my common sense (or is it the courage to work at it) been all these years?
Dear George,
We are pleased to inform you that we would like to publish your piece, "WORKING WITH MEN IN THE MODERN WORLD".
WORK Literary Magazine
So...another poem finds a nest, and the writer/poet is momentarily happy, but tomorrow is another day with its own moods and writerly problems. Publication date is not yet set.
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| the old |
Last post, I said I planned to take a break from writer's piston knock and drive to the Washington Coast. I did take that escape for a day, via Oregon's Route 30 through Astoria, an historic town at the mouth of the Columbia River.
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| the new |
The photos reveal two views from the same spot that I took while stretching my legs along Astoria's riverfront walk. The first represents old Astoria. The next photo which is 180 degrees opposite the first represents the new. There you can see the condominiums that now multiply on every beautiful place found beside the rivers of the United States—starting price $249,000.
My imagination is always stimulated by sites that reveal the more rugged past in U.S. history. Beside that old fishery wharf, I imagine a saloon where fishermen drank and found solace in the arms of painted women. In my black and white imagination, there's always a bar and a painted woman, but those images, like the old and rugged days of fishing, are visitations from the past. They come straight out of Turner Classic Movies.
Next entry, if I remember to, I'll discuss an interesting lesson in dialogue that I'd have thought I long ago had learnt. (The construction of that last sentence is perfectly legal if somewhat quaint.)
Thursday, I sent off a short story contest entry and $15 of my Social Security check to Glimmer Train Press. The contest is for "new" writers, i.e. those writers whose fiction has not appeared in a press run of more than 5000 books. That's just about most of the writers in America. I'm a really old, "new" writer under those terms. Such contests are what's left for writers of "serious literary" fiction nowadays.
My goal remains steadily before my eyes...to get someone other than myself to publish a book of mine. My own situation isn't so bad. I know personally two novelists whose first books were published by major publishers but who have never—yet—got a second book accepted. Talk about a big freekin' CARROT! By now, the vegetable no longer dangles before their noses. It's stuffed up their _ _ _ _ _! I'm telling you, folks, this writing game ain't for the weak.
There was a time when I earned money for a couple of poems I wrote as witnessed by the two photos. I received money from The Anglo-Welsh Review once upon at time...about $22 in American money. I cashed the cheque and kept one dollar to frame. I'm still proud of that acceptance. The English pittance came my way not too long before I found an agent for that novel I spoke of. I thought I was there, ready for fame and fortune! The bleeding novel was called, at the time, Children Of God. Now it's called Angie's Choice.
Today, I'm going to forget all my trials and tribulations and, as soon as I pay some bills, I'm going to drive off under the sun to the Washington Coast. Wife is very busy today, and my plan is to stay out of her hair for awhile.
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| the whole scene |
Of my four completed novels—The Man In The Mirror, Delinquent Lives, Angie's Choice, The Porno Writer—the book I'm currently rewriting, Delinquent Lives, is the most difficult to disentangle. I've been forced to sit down and graph the plot.
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| a detail |
When I wrote this book, I didn't rely on plot. By switching back and forth between two limited points of view, I saw the book as developing by giving the reader bits and pieces of information about each of the two main characters that would add up to a full psychological profile of them and justify how they came out as the novel concludes.
Delinquent Lives does develop along a chronological order, but I've used so many flashbacks, I can see where a reader might be put off from reading to the finish. Continuity is problematical. I was letting my love of Fellini's "8 1/2" influence me. Fellini believed his audience had the knowledge to understand what he was doing, but reading a book is different than watching a movie.
I can see the psychological rationales to most of the decisions I made about scene placements, and I tried to make each event have it's own intrinsic tension, but as I rewrite all these years later, I discover scenes and information whose necessity I have to question. Again and again I learn that an old cat can learn new meows if he's motivated enough.
