[ http://www.youtube.com/embed/Q9WZtxRWieM ]

(Amanda Palmer, “In My Mind”)

Bah.

I’m so sick of myself tonight.

I’ve still got the crash proofreading job on my plate–I need to ship it back to my client on Friday morning–so I haven’t touched Cold Black Stars in days. Working on the new book is what helps me keep my shit mostly together while Revolution makes the rounds with publishers. I’ve been here before, when Gail was shopping Drowning Practice around. It was easier then, because I didn’t yet know that good books go unpublished all the time. Or, I knew it on some level but didn’t believe for a second that my book would be one of them. This time, I go in without the protective layers of my obnoxious MFA ego. This time I go in with hope, but also the knowledge that it very well might not happen for this book either.

I spent too much energy today thinking about other writers, writers who are having the career I thought was my due when I barreled out of my MFA program in 2005. I graduated with a finished first novel, a top-tier agent, a much-sought-after residency at an artists’ colony… Followed by my first lit mag publication, my first Pushcart Prize nomination… I was on my way, you know? And from that point in 2005, when everything seemed to be opening up for me, the possibilities in fact started to narrow, little by little while I watched other people get their books published, get nominated for prizes, give readings… They get these things by their hard work, but damnit I’ve done the work too. I continue to do the work.

Maybe there are just as many possibilities as ever. Maybe they just aren’t the specific possibilities I’d thought I deserved. I don’t know.

Here I am, Drowning Practice in the drawer since 2008 but, hey, that’s okay because I took everything I learned from writing that novel and poured it into Revolution and I am so in love with that book. I truly am. But I no longer believe that means a damn thing in the marketplace. This book belongs with a small independent press, and luckily you don’t need an agent to approach these presses, because as I mentioned a few posts ago, Gail and I parted ways. I’m on my own now. That scares me. I didn’t realize how much comfort I’d drawn from having representation until I no longer had it. My first book might not have sold, but I had this powerful person in my corner who believed in me. And as her client I was among the chosen and obviously in a better position than the rest of the struggling writers out there who didn’t have an agent and…yeah… It got ugly around here for a while. I had a lot of reconsidering to do. That played a big part in my blog silence.

I’m submitting The Revolution of Every Day to small presses on my own. I don’t know what’s going to happen with it. I don’t know if those of you who’ve been so kind to me over the years here, who keep saying how you hope one day to read one of my published novels, will ever get to read it. And it’s that awfully self-centered doubt that’s got me so fucking sick of myself tonight. I’m one of hundreds of thousands of writers laboring in obscurity (how fucking grandiose). Some of them are better writers than me. Some of them are worse. It’s exhausting, this jealousy, this wondering if it will ever happen for me.

That’s it… I don’t have any solutions… No charges to myself to remember that it’s the work that matters, that publishing is something entirely separate, that it shouldn’t be important. It is important. And I want it So. Damn. Hard.

I kept this all to myself for so long. I was so ashamed to come here and tell you that I no longer had an agent. That I’m–GASP!–without representation.

Fuck it. I AM AN UNAGENTED WRITER! THE NOVEL I LABORED OVER FOR SIX YEARS IS NOW BEING SENT TO SLUSH PILES!

There. I said it.

1. Yeah…kind of a crappy day. I’ve got a crash freelance job on my desk, which somehow cued the girlchild to wake up every fifteen minutes last night as I was trying to work. That meant I really needed to get a lot done during her nap time today, so of course she skipped her nap. I nursed her for an hour, walked her in the stroller for forty minutes, nursed her for another twenty minutes… Nothing. At that point it was too late to try the big guns–driving her down in the car–because we had to leave to pick Kiddo up at school in a half hour. Second time in twenty-two months she’s skipped a nap and she does it when I’m on deadline. Tell me not to take it personally. Go ahead.

The upside is that she crashed at 6:30 tonight and has only woken up twice briefly (pooh pooh pooh) and I’m getting enough work done to justify this brief sanity/blogging break. (Because complaining to you is therapeutic, you see.)

2. So today, less than awesome. But this! This is awesome: Vanessa Veselka and Lidia Yuknavitch talk about writing violent female characters. And it’s a three-parter, so there’s more goodness to look forward to.

3. And then there’s always Lyle Lovett. You need more Lyle in your life. You really do.

What I’m reading now:

What’s at the top of the to-be-read pile:

What I’m waiting impatiently for:

See that? That’s what you get when you piss off a five-year-old. Those are drawings of me “with poop all over your clothes, Mama.” He hung them up and I said, “Ah, so there’s poop on your wall now,” which he thought was hilarious. At that point I was forgiven, and allowed to help him spell “wall.”

Hi. Yeah. It’s me. I guess I’m back. At least, I mean to be back. I’ve missed you. Does that count for something? Surely it must. (Though, dear ones, I’m on Twitter pretty much every day because it’s so much easier to find a few moments to talk to folks in 140-character bites while chasing after two kids. So if you’ve REALLY missed me you can always find me there.)

Meta Pole. Random photo because it pleases me. Though it pleased me so much more in person.

What’s finally gotten me off my ass to talk to you again? I wanted to say something on Twitter today and just couldn’t do it without spreading it out across ten tweets or more. At which point I realized that…Oh yeah. That’s what I used to use the blog for, right? To talk to people for more than 140 characters at a time? And I recalled that I liked it. I liked it quite a bit. And here I am. Are you still here?

What I wanted to talk about: process and the new novel. As you may recall from about three posts and three months ago, I had put the new novel (aka Novel Numbah Three, aka Cold Black Stars) on the back burner to finish revisions on The Revolution of Every Day and was finally able to pick it up again at the end of October. At that point it had been sitting for so long, and with only one thin little chapter to it, that the only way to pick it back up was to begin again. So at the end of October I did just that.

It took a year to write the first draft of my first novel, Drowning Practice (may it sleep comfortably in my former agent’s drawer. Yes, I said former agent. Yes, there’s a story behind that. Today is not the day for that story. Suffice it to say I still love her and she still loves me and we have parted on the most amicable of terms possible). I wrote that one while I was getting my MFA and the poor thing got workshopped nearly to death. In fact, I think it might not have been relegated to the drawer had it not been dragged through workshops before I even knew what it was really about and what it wanted to be. (Maybe someday I’ll pick it back up and try to find those shards worth keeping but it feels like something a stranger wrote, some thirty-year-old girl in Brooklyn with pink hair and no kids and a drafty old crumbling house.) I learned a lot about my revision process from writing that book, but perhaps not so much about my first-draft process, because of those workshops. I did, however, learn an invaluable lesson–one of the most important things I drew from that MFA experience: I never, ever, ever show a single word of anything to anyone when it’s in first draft. Maybe I’ll show second draft to my most trusted draft readers. Usually, though, I keep it to myself until third draft. It’s just too dangerous for me to have someone else’s ideas on a book or story before I truly understand where it’s going myself. I’m highly suggestible, I suppose. Because I was workshopping that novel as I wrote it, large parts of it got worked over and rewritten and reimagined several times before the book even had an end. I don’t recommend that, at least I don’t recommend it to myself anymore.

Everything was different with The Revolution of Every Day. I started it on the first day of a month-long residency at Ragdale in the fall of 2005 (oh the luxury of being a childless writer! I won’t see the inside of an artists’ colony for another ten years or so because I’m not the sort who likes to be away from her kids). I kept it to myself and worked steadily for that month and several months after, but by then I was working with my agent and there were more revisions to be done on Drowning Practice before it went out to publishers. I was pregnant with the kiddo and it was important to get the revisions nailed down before he was born because she and I both knew not much work would get done after his birth for a good long time. Revolution was set aside.

(By the way, if you can ever arrange to be pregnant at an artists’ colony, do so. Naps whenever you want them and someone else cooking your dinners.)

And then Kiddo was born. I didn’t write a word of fiction until he was about eighteen months old. Yes, that hurt. It hurt a lot. He’s worth it.

I have no idea how long it would have taken me to write that first draft of Revolution if Kiddo’s arrival hadn’t been a factor. It took six years to write eight drafts, but I don’t remember exactly when I finished that first draft. I know it was more than a year. And I know that I didn’t write it straight through from beginning to end. I did a lot of backtracking as I went. I reached the hundred-page point and went back and did a major rewrite of that whole first third. I did that a few more times as I worked my way toward the end. Only the final third fell out all in one piece, but that’s how the endings tend to come if you’ve taken the right path to get there.

Rachael and I talk craft a lot, and I find her process fascinating because it’s so different from what I’d done with the first two books and with my short fiction. She writes her first drafts incredibly quickly. She’s a firm believer in the Shitty First Draft. Now, I write a loose first draft, too, and I always write blind–I’m not an outliner by any means–but there’s always been that backtracking and tinkering. I’ve never started at the beginning and plowed straight on to the end, giving myself permission to write badly along the way, with the understanding that that’s what revisions are for.

Mind you, Rachael hates writing first drafts and loves to revise. I love first drafts and only tolerate revising because it’s necessary. I think she writes her first drafts that way because she’d rather get it over with as quickly as possible. But you know what? She gets results. She gets those first drafts done, and then digs in and gets her revisions done and has some damn fine books to show for it. (Especially one that hasn’t been published yet that is going to fucking blow you away when it comes out. No, it’s not a romance. Yes, it’s fiction. It’s… It’s amazing. Just you wait.)

With this third book, I decided I wanted to try something new. This was going to be the Do What Rachael Does novel. I decided I would write the first draft in three months. I would not backtrack. I would write fast and loose and let things fall where they fell and just trust that if I could just get it down I can fix and tweak and reshape in subsequent drafts. Because what the hell? I’m only thirty-eight. This is only my third novel. I’m too young and too new at this to be claiming a process set in stone–especially when the experiences of the first two books were determined by grad school and new motherhood.

I was dubious. I was afraid I was going to waste my time and spend all the juice of this story on a clumsy cluttered nonsensical mess of a draft that would be too far gone to revise into anything worth keeping. But I did it anyway. You know what? It’s been amazing. Working that fast all kinds of wonderful surprises are cropping up, all kinds of connections clicking into place as I go. It’s been so much easier to get out of my own way moving this quickly. I’m 70k words into the first draft, and it feels like its only got another 10 or 20k left in it. I’m aiming for a finished draft on my arbitrary deadline of February 20th, my half birthday. Yes, that will be a somewhat short manuscript, but I do seem to be consistent so far in writing very short first drafts and then expanding and layering in revisions.

And with this little girl getting older and more independent all the time, it won’t take me six years to get to a final draft on this book.

I’m hoping I’ll have a draft ready to send to readers by summer. We’ll see, though. It’s all new territory. But a first draft in three months! So fucking exciting.

Out of nowhere, I swear, I have the sudden strong urge to learn to play the ukelele. I know…they’re everywhere now. Maybe my brain finally reached optimal uke saturation or something. But mostly, it’s Amanda Palmer’s fault. Check out this:
[ http://www.youtube.com/embed/79c5gffVqnc ]

and this:

Now tell me you still don’t want a ukelele.

Lorajean and I have a date to take a beginner’s ukelele class in early December. If I like it as much as I feel like I’m going to, I’ll buy one and go for it. Strum strum strummity strum strum…

Kiddo is really into music. I’m thinking I can learn the basics and then get him a little uke of his own and teach him what I’ve learned. Though if you could hear the way he already instinctively strums his kid-sized acoustic guitar or plays his drums you’d know that he’s going to take those basics and leave me in the dust in about five minutes. Natural musician, that one. It’s going to be a challenge to keep a light touch about it as a parent and not try to live through him, because damn am I envious of that gift he’s got.

The Revolution of Every Day is done. Started October 2005, finished October 2011. Eight drafts. I printed it out, gave it a big wet kiss, and sent it out into the world. Fingers crossed, yeah?

This means I get to turn my attention back to the next novel, started in–when the hell was it? 2009?–and then back-burnered so I could do some needed heavy revisions on Revolution. I was only one chapter into the first draft when I set it aside, and now it’s sat for so long the only way back into it is to start over again. The original working title had been Cold Black Stars. Then it became Damascus. Then Joshua Mohr published his Damascus, so… Yeah. He kindly offered to share the title, but I think I’ll let him have it. (He offered this on Twitter. How unexpectedly magical and uniting has Twitter proved? It’s a tool, folks. All in how you use it.) So we’ll just call this one Cold Black Stars until and unless another title asserts itself in the writing. If its lucky enough to find a publisher, the marketing department will rename it anyway.

My first two novels were set in New York. This one is set in Oregon, and it feels like the first time I dreamed in Spanish: I truly live in Portland now. No longer a New Yorker in exile. It’s good to be home.

Today, presumably under orders of Oakland, CA, mayor Jean Quan, police used rubber bullets and tear gas to break up a completely peaceful demonstration.

Here’s an account posted by a journalist on the scene.

Here you can read the Twitter feed as the raid happened, and watch a video.

Outraged? Let them know!:
Mayor Jean Quan 1 Frank H. Ogawa Plaza 3rd Floor Oakland, CA 94612 Contact phone: (510) 238-3141 fax: (510) 238-4731 TTY: (510) 238-3254

In all my non-blogging, I failed to let you know that two of my friends have new books out.

Rachael Herron has two books out now:

Wishes & Stitches is the third book in her Cypress Hollow series. Rachael is a terrific storyteller, and writes some of the best dialogue you’ll find anywhere. AND this one is her best yet. She sets up the romance formula in this novel and then subverts it in the most wonderful ways. It’s smart as hell, this book. You’ll enjoy it.

A Life in Stitches. I already loved Rachael before I read this collection of essays. I love her even more after reading it. It’s lovely and heartfelt and honest.

You may know Sara Shepard from her best-selling YA series, Pretty Little Liars. Her second adult novel, Everything We Ever Wanted, has just been released. I was lucky enough to read it as an early manuscript, and I’m looking forward to seeing where she went with it in its finished form. Here is my interview with her, from when her first adult novel, The Visibles, came out.