The Other Zone

In my last post, I drop-kicked myself from one zone to another. Just after that taunting of the Muse, I started novel #4. Well, it's #4 if I'm counting the one that stinks and will never see the light of day, and the one that has been in rough draft form for 3 years. Beyond the World is finished--sort of. Five of my seven readers have returned the manuscript with some great comments and suggestions, but I'm not quite ready to do the revisions yet.
So what comes to mind to keep my idle little hands out of trouble? Why, another novel, of course! What better thing could I possible do with these interminable winter days than go to Fictionland where it is summer and I can reside in the mind of my protag who is young, thin, fashion-cool, and on the brink of...you guessed it--true love. Of course, she must suffer some evil and injustice first, which wil also be fun. (Have I taken cabin fever to a new level??)
Anyway, I've been trying to crank out 1500 words a day, which has put me just shy of 18,000 words so far. I have the characters, the time line, the main plot and the sub-plots (more or less). What I don't have is a life. Two of my friends have actually left messages asking if I am all right because I haven't returned their calls. I go days without venturing farther than the bottom of the driveway for the newspaper, and it's been over a week since I left this zip code.
Honestly, I don't know if this new story is worth the time and trouble, but it has me in its grip. Cue the voice of Rod Serling, "You are now in the Twilight Zone." Ha! I should be so lucky....

The Dead Zone

The start of 2010 has been great: BTW went out to my first "readers" and I have 7 short stories bravely taking their chances as cannon fodder with literary magazine editors. The only trouble is that I'm not currently writing. Ideas flit past and shards of stories litter several spiral notebooks in my office, but nothing is growing. It's a dead zone. The harder I try, the worse it gets. How frustrating it is to have a string of snug winter mornings free of commitments, and.....nothing. Nada. Zip. Brain dead.
It seems to follow the capriciousness of the Muse that whenever there is a quiet spell, she is supremely bored. What she doesn't know is that I can see her quite clearly. Today, she is a lithesome 1920s femme fatale. She wears a tastefully sequined mauve dress; her dark hair is bobbed and wrapped in a feathered turban. She glares at me, her crimson moue tightening slightly, reflecting her disdain. The grasping efforts of mortals are so very vulgar. Raising the foot-long onyx cigarette holder which she has delicately pinched in her right hand, she taps a bit of scornful ash on my desk and stalks off to find a more fun party in someone else's head.

Happy New Year

So how did it get to be six days into 2010 and 34 days since my last post??
The short answer is that for all of December I was doing a mad dash to finish my novel, Beyond the World. I had set a deadline for myself--the end of the year--and I scrambled to the final line a little past ten on the morning of New Year's Eve.
BTW is technically my third attempt at a novel, but it is the only one I have taken far enough to send out to a group of "readers." The seven people who have volunteered for this task have my deepest gratitude (and sympathy). If/when the story gets published, I'll treat them all to a champagne dinner at a suitably la-di-dah restaurant.
However, there is still work to be done. I'm counting on those--dare I say it? magnificent 7 readers--to find all the errors and problems to which, after 18 months, I am blind: gaps in the story, dropped subplots, pesky details like arbitrary name changes, blue eyes suddenly being green, spelling errors, etc.
Once the manuscript is "perfect," I need a synopsis. That means taking 60,000 words and reducing them to 250. No prob.
Then, I need a query letter so compelling that any agent will immediately sweep everything else off her desk to give my manuscript her full attention. Right.
After that is done, I have to determine where to send the query. A quick Google search tells me there are roughly 4600 literary agents lurking about. That ought to make it easy.
With a "perfect manuscript," a dynamic query letter, and a scintillating synopsis, how can I miss? The odds against me feel overwhelming, and it would be way easy to shove the thing in a drawer.
But along with a champagne dinner, I'd really like to give my "magnificent seven" acknowledgment of their support in a published book.

Diversions

I should be working on my novel. Beyond the World (technically my 3rd attempt at a novel) is almost finished. Rough estimate: I've got another 10-15 hours of work before I'm ready to give copies to my circle of first readers. A couple of weeks ago at OCWW, the award winning author E.E. Knight critiqued the first 30 pages and was very complimentary, which is a terrific confidence boost. So am I working on the last details? No. I'm goofing around with blogging. In the wee hours of the other night, instead of figuring out the final confrontation between my two main characters, I was tossing around ideas for blog posts. Actually, between 4:20 and 4:27 in the morning, I was hit with a basketful of ideas. If the Muse wants to play games by insisting that I write about this stuff, I won't risk offending by ignoring them.
Among the thoughts that I can still remember are these:

1) Over the Rainbow, Over the Threshold
Because I miss painting and color, I'd like to explore the similarities and differences in visual art and writing. The whole threshold motif is for my written expression (thus Liminalesque), but how do I get color, or at least a sense of color, in my writing? Who are the best writers of color? Dickens was good, but so often bleak. Cather took the detail to minutia. Anyone out there have any ideas?

2) The Firmament
There's some interesting writing in the Book of Common Prayer. How about this for a lead in: "Our days are like the grass,/ we flourish like a flower of the field;/ When the wind goes over it, it is gone,/ and its place shall know it no more." I'm rarely bored in church because under the guise of being pious, I'm searching for new story ideas. Some of them could be lulus.

3) Choir Diaries
Speaking of church, for several years I kept a diary of my experiences in choir, including our trips to sing in English cathedrals. Given the current popularity of memoir stuff, I know I have some good material, and someday, I will put together a book. In the meantime, a blog or two might be fun, as long as I leave out the bad stuff. For now.

3) It's All in the Name
Enough goody-two-shoes-choir-girl crap. I share with friends (who wish to remain anonymous) a little game. We make up nicknames for people we encounter. These are not names to be used in public, and for obvious reasons, I will only divulge the most innocent as examples. "Al Po." First name is Al, last name begins with P-O. "Mr. Lister." This is the most anal person I've ever met--lists everything, including what he eats for breakfast. "Old Yeller." This is the guy who screams at his kids on the soccer field. "Hair Pie." Don't ask.
I bet a blog on this could elicit some great comments, and some ideas for fictional (yeah, right) characters. Who doesn't have a secret nickname for the boss, teacher, student or client of peculiar attributes?

From this point, my sleep-deprived ruminations got a little fuzzier. The Muse, bored again with my mortal limitations, drifted away. Days later, I'm left sifting through the debris like the host of a wild party, clearing up half-empty glasses and dirty plates, hoping to find a scrap of something useful.

If I Were King of the Forrrrest....

So says the Cowardly Lion in Oz when he sings about all the things he'd do if only he had courage. Courage is essential to success. I don't mean the kind of courage that helps you walk down a dark street at midnight or climb a ladder to clean gutters; I'm referring to a subtler kind of courage. It's the courage to try new things and be persistent when the going gets tough. It's the kind of courage that we have as children that often gets lost as we age: the courage to metaphorically stumble, fall, then get up and try again.
By the time we reach our middle years, we're supposed to know what we're doing, be accomplished in our various endeavors, be teachers rather than risk-taking learners. For anyone in the arts, however, there is no such luxury. (Except, of course, for the uber commercially successful who can get away with cranking out formulaic garbage.) Being creative means always striving to do something new, taking the risk that someone's reaction to your work might be, "That sucks."
That kind of criticism isn't constructive, and it's hard to hear. Sometimes, too, a particular criticism isn't even accurate. But more often than not, feedback from a respected source is true and valuable, and if you listen, you learn. When I offer a piece of writing, either a story or just a blog post, for critique, I really do want to know what people think. Being able to take criticism well has taken me a long time, but I've realized it is an essential part of maturing as a writer. I want to know what doesn't work because that is how I'll learn. I may not always agree, but I'll always listen. And if I ever become so commercially successful that I can crank out garbage, I'll still listen--all the way to the bank.
So until I'm made King (or Queen) of the Forest, may the great and wonderful Wizard grant me the courage to write, rewrite and rewrite again, and to be persistent as I follow my own yellow brick road.
Do I really need to say comments are welcome?

Rejection

Okay, that story I was writing when I almost burned down the house didn't even make the online postings in the Trib ghost story competition. I carefully followed the rules--under 700 words, and set in the Chicago area. I'm pissed, because frankly I thought it was pretty good. So I'm posting it here. Since I'm now in that major funk all writers experience when their efforts are so cavalierly treated by the world, I'd really appreciate comments--even (especially) if you think it sucks. Maybe I'll learn something.

Happy Halloween.

Returning

I know now that it is true: in the late autumn when the leaves are burnt gold and the skies deepen, when sunlight slants acutely in the afternoon and fades to the obsidian evening, the veil, that amorphous distance between two worlds, grows thin. For me to accept this had not been easy.
As a toxicologist for Abbott Laboratories, I was not by nature or habit given to flights of fancy. Research and rational thought, preferably expressed in scientific terms dictated reality for me. My wife, Marissa, was far more imaginative. Indeed, it was her effervescent personality that enchanted me when we first met, and her cheerful attitude was often just the tonic I needed when work or the word in general depressed me.
Two years ago, we decided to move from the large house where we had raised our children to something smaller. We chose a charming little Victorian in Lake Bluff. The realtor had shown us through the octogenarian house on a bright Saturday morning in September. Her nervous little admission that the previous owners believed the place was haunted amused my wife, but carried absolutely no weight with me. The house, recently remodeled, suited our needs perfectly. It meant a much shorter commute to my North Chicago office. There was a fenced-in yard for our two dogs, and Marissa was delighted by the third-floor view of Lake Michigan. We moved in on October 19th.
It was the dogs who knew first. Watson and Crick--two pleasant, well-behaved golden retrievers--had been part of our family for nine years. Even before our children grew up and moved away from home, the dogs had been slightly spoiled. They ate their home-cooked dog meals when we ate our dinner and slept at the foot of our bed every night.
The first night in the new house, both dogs whined about climbing the stairs. I was all for leaving them in the kitchen, but Marissa wouldn't hear of it. I carried Crick up the stairs. Reluctantly, Watson followed behind. But the night didn't go well. Twice, they woke us barking their fool heads off. At three in the morning, Watson began frantically scratching the bedroom door, destroying paint and woodwork, while Crick set about howling in a way that made my blood run cold. They bolted down the stairs the minute I opened the bedroom door. Later, I noticed that one of them had, uncharacteristically, urinated on the carpet. They spent the rest of the night outside. Fro days, rain or shine, they refused to set foot in the house so that we had to take them to stay indefinitely with our daughter.

With the dogs gone, Marissa changed. My sweet wife, who had disliked reading newspapers because she thought they were too depressing, became obsessed with morbid stories. Every day, she walked to the Village Market to buy a paper. She studied accident reports, murders, and death notices. At dinner, instead of her usual cheery conversations about Garden Club or a new recipe, she would recite the grim statistics of the dead. In less than a week, she lost weight, her hair hung in dull wisps, and her face took on an unhealthy pallor. I began to avoid her company.
Work kept me occupied, but the commute became a problem: I dreaded time at home. The logical escape was household chores, so late on Halloween afternoon, I decided to clean the gutters. Never acrophobic, scaling a ladder to the roof-line of a three-story house did not distress me. I clambered up the rungs with the energy of a man half my age, and began the messy but necessary task of clearing dead leaves and debris. Leaning far out to my left as I reached around a dormer window, I was concentrating on my work, so I did not see, until too late, the waxen face grinning viciously at the window.
Now I, too, await the autumn twilight when we souls, no longer within our corporeal selves, try to find our way home.

Writing Can Be Dangerous

Last Wednesday was, without doubt, the quintessential autumn day. The misty rains of early morning stopped in time for me and Woki to walk to the Lake where the sun was just burning through the clouds enough to make the trees glow in all their brilliant splendor. The streets truly were paved with gold. No sooner had we returned home than I set out again, this time for a run along other roads where the ravines looked like Aladdin's cave of treasure. An hour later, back home again, I dutifully sat down to write. Immersed in a new short story ("Returning"), I took breaks only to refill the tea mug and make a few quick preparations for dinner. At 2:30, when I still had enough time before my first student of the day, I impulsively decided to squeeze in another walk--I'd been working hard.
Ah, it was so lovely! As Woki and I walked along, I congratulated myself on my efficiency. I had done my household chores, written steadily for several hours, and could continue to ponder my story as I enjoyed the lovely weather. Was the tone right? Had I created convincing characters? Did the end come too abruptly?
Twenty-five minutes later, walking up the driveway, I heard a funny sound. It got louder on the deck, and louder still as I came in the back porch. Frantically, I fumbled with the key when I simultaneously realized that the buzzing noise was our smoke detector and I had walked off and left Woki's chicken livers boiling on the stove.
Burnt chicken liver smells really, really bad. Angry gray smoke was wafting through the entire house. I grabbed the pan off the stove and carried the noxious mess to the backyard. Since I gave no more thought to grabbing that pan handle than I had to leaving the house without checking the stove, I was very lucky that the pan had been top quality. Past tense. The thing was absolutely black. Any lesser piece of equipment would likely have started a nasty fire. I repeat--I was very lucky.
I learned some valuable lessons: First,if I am caught up in Fictionland, I should never multi-task with anything involving fire or water. Second, things can go terribly wrong on a beautiful day, which creates a certain tension that is much more pleasant to read about than to experience in real life. Third, all life experiences are fodder for stories. I may use some of this at some point, but relax, Julie Powell, I won't be attempting a blog on cooking.

P.S. Ironically, that morning I had seen a news story advising people to check their smoke detectors. I know mine work. Please check yours.