bits and pieces

Another week, another Fathers and Sons story written. Well, draft written. I’ve called it “Sins of the Father” and I think the title will stick. It’s not a story I’d been imagining for months and months, the way some of the others have been, but one that grew naturally out of another of the stories (“When We Were Young and Life Was Full In Us”). It’s nearly 4,000 words long, and it could probably benefit with some judicious pruning. I’ll see.

Ten hours from query to offer.

I’ve been keeping this humble blog for nearly five years. In that time I determined that I’ve written four Finnegans novels (one is apprentice work, one might be salvageable, one was lost in a hard drive crash but may be scattered among many emails, and one is about ready to submit), The Sleep of Reason (why is that languishing in my personal motivation?), a good chunk of my novel Larger than Life (two chapters of which I’ve been submitting as stand-alone stories), and more than a half dozen short stories, many of which have been published.

I had no idea I was so productive. But I need to get more focused. I think everything I’ve written in that time was the best thing I could do at that time. Now I need to get more professional about it all. Maybe more quality (in terms of writing, submitting, general businesslike attitude) and less emphasis on quantity?

time well spent

When I decided to devote a weekend to writing at the cabin, I thought it might be interesting to see just how I used my time. To that end, I tried to keep a log of what/when I was writing. My computer problems appeared at first to thwart that idea, but once I realized I could keep writing, I kept paying attention too.

I arrived at my little cabin at 6:00 p.m. on Friday. There was still about two hours of daylight ahead of me, but there is always so much to do when I first arrive: unpacking the truck, checking on the status of things, paying attention to the living wild forest all around me. I ate my dinner and thought about laying a campfire for the evening, but I was so relaxed just sitting on the porch that I didn’t. Nor did I try to do any active writing right away, though I did some research, including determining just how close up you can see when looking through binoculars. (It features in one of my stories.)

At 8:15 I moved into the cabin and hooked up my computer to the storage battery. All systems were go, and I looked forward to a writing marathon for the next two days. I opened one of my stories, called “Little Gray Birds” and tinkered with it, mostly just making notes and fooling around with words but not trying to add anything substantive to it. A half hour later I turned my attention to my story “When we were young” and spent an hour on it. Again, it was more pencil work than ambitious creative work, but I had begun my writing experiment, which was the whole point. At 9:30 I retired for the night.

I rose at 5:15 on Saturday. The whippoorwills were still calling. My computer still had a full charge, so I charged in as well. I began tinkering with a nonfiction road trip story I’ve been working on for a friend. I pretty much have it done, but it never hurts to come back to something with a fresh eye. I worked on that for about an hour. Then I went down to the lake to fish a while. I got one strike, but whatever it was jumped the hook.

I returned to the cabin at 8:15 and turned my attention to “When we were young” again. This is another piece that is essentially done, but every time I return to it, I find ways to make it better. I spent forty-five minutes at this then began working on a completely new story that I had originally intended to call “Alien Invaders” but soon discovered needed to be named “Work then play.” I love it when that kind of revelation happens.

I worked from 9:00 to 11:00 on this new story and got down 1,700 words. But it was then that I saw my computer battery was down to only 61%. I had already drained the storage battery and was now draining my computer’s battery. In my experience, I had about two hours of computer time left, yet I still had at least 24 hours of cabin time before me.

This surprise made me wonder if I ought to have just given up and gone home. Instead, I did another form of primary research that involved a kind of swimming you can do in such remote places with no one around. Why I hadn’t done this type of swimming before is a mystery to me.

After that, I took a nice nap then went into the nearby town for some supplies. (I also dropped off a bag of books at the local library.)

By 2:00 I was back at the cabin and had finished my lunch. I decided then that I should at least jot down some notes for ideas that had been coming to me about “Work then play.” So I got out my visit journal and mechanical pencil (I keep both at the ready down there) and started scribbling. Two hours later I looked up, finished for the present. But I returned to it soon after, and I kept at it until 6:00 p.m. when I realized I had finished the first draft of the story.

I was pleased with what I had achieved. I had my dinner and began laying a fire in the ring outside the cabin. I never lighted it though. It was the night of the super moon and I had this notion that one ought to experience swimming by the light of a super moon. So rather than get a fire going that I would soon have to leave untended, I left it half built and prepared myself for my swim. In the dark. In a remote and private lake. With no one around. Again.

On Sunday morning I spent a half hour reading what I had written on the computer the day before for “Work then play.” I wanted to see how well it meshed with what I had subsequently written by hand that afternoon. By then the computer battery was nearly gone.

I devoted the rest of the morning to actual chores around the place, dipping into my journal to scribble down notes as they came to me.

In all, it was a successful experiment. I intend to contrive a chance to do it again, and with my lessons learned, I expect to do even better.

more that I learned from my writing weekend

The next time I devote a weekend to writing at my remote cabin in the woods, I’m going to plan a whole lot better. I got a lot done last weekend — an entire short story — and I’m pleased with the productivity, but I can see now that I could have managed my time better.

I had gone into the weekend with mighty ambitions. Too mighty ambitions. I was going to read through two novels of mine. Work on their query letters. Toss off a few short stories. Write some nonfiction. And still manage to have two campfires (with Jiffy Pop!) and at least one swim in the lake.

What I found was that I had successfully written the first draft of one story (with the coincidentally working title of “Work then play”) and made notes for a few others. The lack of power for my laptop may have been a factor in this kind of concentration, but maybe it was an instructive factor.

I think if I had tried to pursue all of my ambitions for the weekend, I would have been spread too thin. I would have achieved a lot of surface work but no substantive work. I don’t need to steal away to a lonely cabin for a weekend to do that; I can get that much done in soulless suburbia.

What I’ve learned, instead, is that I should go into these weekends — and there will be more! — with specific goals in mind. I’ll have options, of course, in case my specific goal goes bust, but I clearly need to focus, to work well on one thing rather than pretty good on a lot of things.

As I said, I wrote the first draft of one of my Fathers and Sons stories, at least half of it with paper and pencil, over the weekend. I’m pleased with that. An entire story in just two days. It’s nowhere near finished, of course, but the core of it is there. (Remember my recent posts where I spoke of compelling myself to just write the damned thing rather than wait until the story was fully realized in my head? This is the fruit of that realization. Is the story perfect? Not yet. But is it less than it would have been if I had allowed it to present itself to me slowly over the years? I don’t think so. And I didn’t have to wait years.)

Life is choices, isn’t it?

I also learned that ice packs won’t keep beer cold for two straight days. And that sub sandwiches get soggy after a day. Bagels dry out in that time. A big tub of store-bought broccoli salad gets monotonous long before you’ve reached the bottom of it. The nearest town is about ten miles away. I can get anything I need there, and just as with my writing goals, I would probably do better bringing less baggage along and replenish as I needed in town rather than try to bring it all with me from the beginning.

I didn’t have those two campfires. I’m nervous about fire in my woods anyway, but being alone, it seemed like a pointless indulgence. I did lay a fire on Saturday night in the fire ring, but I never lighted it. (By now I suspect it’s fallen to pieces and sodden with the half inch of rain that fell after I left.) As for my swimming in the lake, that’s one of the reasons I didn’t have a fire on Saturday night.

In my Father’s and Sons stories, there is a kind of informal baptism in the family’s little lake. This involves fathers (and grandfathers) dipping their naked baby sons in the lake. They, too, are naked. I know. It sounds weird, but it seems natural in a way. And liberating too. Well, how can a fellow possibly write about swimming naked in a lake without having experienced it ever in his many decades of life? Thus I felt I had to do some primary research.

The serendipity of a super moon on Saturday night told me that the gods wanted me to go skinny dipping by the light of this moon. It’s research, folks. It’s honorable. It’s worthy. And let me tell, it’s wonderful!

everything and nothing

I’m back from my weekend in the woods where I intended to get some focused writing done. It turned out that my time there was nothing like I had imagined yet everything that I had hoped for.

I have no plumbing or electricity at the cabin. The former is not really a problem, but the latter was a challenge. And it was a challenge I thought I had conjured a solution for. My dear little laptop will operate on battery power for about three hours, which is sad enough, but that’s a different gripe. Three hours of work is hardly enough time to warm up to writing, much less to give over a whole weekend to. My solution was to use a storage battery I have had for years to be my portable power plant. You may be familiar with these things. They’re sold commonly for roadside emergencies; you can start a dead car with one, inflate a flat tire, and so forth. I had already determined that it would keep my laptop fully charged, so I trotted off to my off-the-grid cabin expecting a couple of long days at the keyboard, where the ideas would come and the words would flow.

That’s not how it worked, however. Because the gods hate me, or because I don’t really understand technology, I only got four hours of energy out of the storage battery. About mid-way through Saturday morning, the thing was drained. I wasn’t using it to power a lamp or run a carpet sweeper (though I could certainly use both at the cabin!). I had only my Mac plugged into it, and I’d always understood laptops to be frugal power sippers. By the time I realized my laptop was no longer charging, I had already used one third of its own internal battery supply. So there I sat, with a day and a half of solitude before me and essentially no computer to write on.

Then I did something radical. I decided to keep writing, using a pencil and a paper notebook. I know. Old school!

I was frustrated, and I assumed that I would simply use the paper and pencil approach to jot down the story ideas that had been coming to me. I had begun thinking of just going home since the writing weekend was a bust. But I found that as I scribbled down my notes, the ideas kept coming. Scenes developed. Dialogue emerged. Relationships in plots across my Fathers and Sons stories did their own call and response before me.

I found I was filling pages and pages of my journal with story material. I couldn’t write fast enough. Perhaps I was using a different part of my brain by channeling the words through a pencil rather than a keyboard. Whatever the reason, my time was quite productive. I was pleased with what was happening, and even during those times when I tore myself out of the cabin to do some chores, I was talking to myself about further story ideas, eager to get back to my pencil and paper to jot them down.

Would I do it that way again? Certainly, but I still want to find a way to power my laptop through the weekend. I’m sure it can be done, and if I propitiate the gods or get myself more technologically savvy, that’s what I intend to do.

offsite insight

If all goes according to my devilish plans, I should spend an unplugged weekend at my cabin in the woods beginning this afternoon and stretching into Sunday. Just me and my computer. And a large storage battery and some fishing tackle and some food in a cooler and copious amounts of iced tea and a couple of changes of clothes and a swimming suit (or not!) and The Sound and the Fury (or not) and a big dose of ambition to DO SOME WRITING!

I don’t know what to expect. I don’t know what to attempt to do.

I could certainly devote all of my free time to the many stories in my Fathers and Sons cycle that keep presenting themselves to me. (“When We Were Young . . .” is monopolizing my mind these days. I’m questioning every single word, rearranging sentences, considering and reconsidering character motivations, looking for ways to sustain and enhance the tone, and trying to forgive myself for doing what I’m doing to my two protagonists.)

Or I could do that read through of Finnegans Deciphered that I must do before I begin submitting it around. I should give some effort to polishing the draft of the query letter I’ve written for it too.

Or I could do a long-overdue read through of The Sleep of Reason so I can feel comfortable submitting it again. I’ve been relying on a recycled submission letter and fading memories about the novel, and I should probably pump up my commitment to it more.

Or I could embark on that Faulkner-influenced short story I’ve spoken of before. It’s about time to apply myself to it — my reading group is now discussing The Sound and the Fury for the next few months.

I have a piece I’m writing for a friend that could use some follow up. I have several short stories I have tinkered with that could use some attention.

But I keep circling back to the Fathers and Sons stories. Most of them take place in and around a cabin in the woods. And that’s where I’ll be. I’ll be doing primary research. I ought to make the best use of it.

But it’s good to have a lot of options. I can focus like a laser for a few hours then refocus on something else (which might including fishing, swimming — the forecast calls for the upper 80s — hiking, sitting around a campfire, and suchlike). A lot of it may be determined by how well my laptop and the storage battery interact. Experience has shown that they are compatible, but I’ve never hooked them up (so to speak) for a weekend together at a lonely cabin.

A lot of insights come to me when I’m away from my writing desk. Many come while I’m in the shower, which i know is cliched, but I’ll take them. And when I’m working for the man at the office, my suffering brain occasionally rewards me with fresh ideas for story development. Even driving down the road seems to relax my brain enough to let ideas flow in. Perhaps that will happen at the cabin.

I’ve written on this humble blog before about how I’ve used unfamiliar settings to do my editing and how fruitful I’ve found that. I suppose, for me at least, being in a different place — most commonly the library — has allowed me to catch a lot of typos and spelling errors that I’d read through dozens of times while sitting at my familiar desk in my familiar room. So if nothing else, perhaps the weekend at the cabin will give me the humbling experience of finding out how many typos and spelling errors I am truly capable of.

bits and pieces

I received one rejection this week. It was from PANK, and it was for my submission of “The Death of Superman.” This was the magazine that had specified a theme: parenting. I had said in an earlier post that I was approaching their theme from the opposite direction, in this case the son now taking care of his father. I realized it was a long shot, but I’m glad I tried. And I have the story out to four other publications currently.

My story that I lamented last week as reaching only 227 words is now at 1,707 words, and I think it’s about finished. I still have insights about it daily, mostly to do with word choice, but in terms of substance, I think it is all there and about in “final” form. I think next week I’ll send it to a couple of readers and see what they think.

And if you can stomach any more of my babbling about these Fathers and Sons stories, I’m marveling at how they are evolving in my mind. I’m seeing parallels and contrasts in the stories that are sensible, even integral, yet they are things I was never consciously aware of. All kinds of foreshadowing and fulfillment ideas are flooding in.

I’ve written here before that I sometimes feel as though the stories exist “out there” and that I am given the privilege of writing them down if I will listen carefully (and write quickly). I know that’s rubbish, but it sure feels like true right now.

Below is the text of a post I wrote three years ago and never put online. I don’t recall if I considered it unfinished or if I was worried about too many posts lamenting what I consider a debilitating devotion to the “rules” of grammar by too many creative writers. Anyway, here it is:

I believe that as creative writers we have the privilege and perhaps even the obligation to break the grammar and usage (and even spelling) rules if that will serve the needs of our writing and the glorious evolution of our language. I believe that effective communication with our reader is the only rule we need to serve, and by “effective communication” I don’t necessarily mean “easy communication.”

I don’t believe (as many assert) that one must know the proper rules of grammar before one dares to break them. I think that one can accumulate an informal and perhaps even subconscious understanding of the basic devices of communication through reading and conversation and then happily write or speak a persuasive or memorable sentence even if the subject and verb don’t agree or a participle dangles (and perhaps because of it). We each of us know wise and capable people who have never spent a day in college, and I think the same can be true of creative writers. They can write articulate fiction yet not know the formal rules of grammar.

Grammar, I think, has its uses and its limitations. If we are teaching college students basic composition (as I did for years), then maybe Strunk & White is a useful tool. The fact is that most of those students will never be creative writers (and how much of that might we attribute to the debilitating effects of rule books like Strunk & White?), so a basic grasp of the shared rules of communication is important for them to get on in society. And if we are writing business reports or operation guides (as I also did for years), we need to be succinct, precise, and clear. But we are not writers of term papers or technical manuals; we are creative writers. We should be crafting magnificent sentences and compelling word images. We should be rising above the everyday with our prose.

I think that for those who want to write fiction, more attention needs to be paid to the rules of rhetoric than the rules of grammar. I wonder how many of those bloggers who make their didactic posts about the importance of grammar even know what a zeugma is. Do they ever consider the value of a chiasmus when they want to stress the balance or parallelism of some important points in their tale? Maybe not, but they might have some intuitive sense of such things (and the dozens of other identified rhetorical devices) because they have read and internalized good writing. And if they don’t have a sense of such things, I think their craft would be better served by studying the rules of rhetoric than the rules of grammar.

And then it will be time to break those rules too.

traveling too light

How many times has this happened to you? You submit a short story to a publication, a hundred days go by and you haven’t heard anything, then suddenly you get an email from the editor there saying that your original submission seems to have gone astray and would you kindly send it again?

This is the first time in my recollection when it has happened to me.

Back in January, I had submitted my story “Travel Light” to a regional literary magazine. The story has a significant regional connection, and I thought it had a good shot at this magazine, which favors the region in question.

So off it went. The submission guidelines at the magazine were a bit vague, and I had ended up sending it to two different people there. That may have explained how it got lost.

But what’s unexplained is the courtesy and professionalism of the editor. This is not to say that editors aren’t, as a group and individually, both courteous and professional. Rather, it is to say that this editor, who must be as awash in submissions as any other litmag in the land, somehow noticed the missing submission and then took the time to pursue it (rather than simply delve into the slush for other worthy candidates).

So off it went again today. I’m resetting the clock at Duotrope’s Digest (where I’ve logged the submission), crossing my fingers, and getting busy on other things.

“Travel Light,” you may recall, is the second chapter of my eternally-in-limbo novel Larger than Life. I continue to believe it is a viable story, and I continue to make notes for it. I have another chapter of it in circulation as well. I suppose if that’s all that ever sees print, I could be satisfied, but I hate unfinished business.

progress, thy name is persistence

I’ve astonished myself in recent days by “completing” yet another story in my Fathers and Sons cycle. In my “227″ post last week I spoke of the struggle I was facing with embarking on this new story. I had hoped that I would overcome some hurdle and the words would flow.

Well, “227″ has now become “1436.” I think the first draft of this thing is complete. I credit persistence and time in the chair for this success. (Also, copious amounts of iced tea, unsweetened, of course.) I’ve worked very hard on maintaining/evoking just the right tone with this story. (It’s so brief a tale that I needed to ensure that there was more to it than just plot. Of course, a writer should do that with every story regardless of the length. I know that. So lay off, okay?)

Anyway, I can’t decide if this is the best thing I’ve ever done or just a shaggy dog story. I mentioned before that most of the plot occurs in the last few words. To a careful reader, it’s hardly a surprising conclusion, at least to the plot, but it sure shakes up that hard-won tone. It will go to my usual beta readers, but I want to find someone whose forte is this kind of story telling. (“This kind of story telling”? What could I possibly mean by that?)

I’ve also mentioned before that these Fathers and Sons stories of mine are presenting themselves with pleasing regularity. As I worked my way through this story, which has the tentative title of “When we were young and life was full,” (is that alluringly evocative or just twee?) I had plenty of revelations about a subsequent story that grows naturally from it. My characters are putting on more flesh, and the universe they inhabit is becoming more tangible to me.

It’s intoxicating to be in this creative place right now. (Though that might be the iced tea talking. Check back with me at the end of the week when I’m drinking decaf tea and see if I feel the same way.)

227

It’s been quiet around Lucky Rabbit’s Foot in recent days. I’m sure you’re finding ample ways to fill the cultural void I’m leaving, right?

I, on the other hand, have been wrasslin with 227 words. I’ve embarked on a new story in my Fathers and Sons cycle, and it’s one in which I want to capture an exact tone. That’s hard work. Hard because I think I know the tone I want to represent, but I don’t know just how to do it. I’m casting back across the decades, trying to recall what it was like to be 17 (which is a bit younger than I am today). I can feel it, but I’m having a tough time putting it into words. Any suggestions you have will be appreciated and appropriated.

So I struggle. With 227 words because that’s all that I’ve written of the story. The barest introduction, and yet I am anguishing over it, rewriting sentences, substituting words, changing the order, re-imagining the scene. I worked long and hard on “The Death of Superman” (no news on its many submissions as of this writing), and I think I did a great job with it, but I don’t think I gave it nearly as much attention as this story I’m working on now.

Sure, I have plenty of notes for this story. Images I want to include, the development of the plot (what there is of a plot — it all mostly comes down in the last few words). Dialogue. The tone! With every little change, I feel that the work is better. But I hope I can get over some hurdle and begin setting more story down. At my current pace — one sentence a day — I’m going to be at this a long, long time.

bits and pieces

Do you use a thesaurus when you write? I do occasionally, usually when the right word is swirling just beyond my recognition but never as a means to puff up my word choice. Yet a certain successful genre novelist has supposedly said that  writer should never use a thesaurus, that if you have to look up a word this way, then it’s the wrong word.

I don’t get it. Maybe I’m missing some essential context for that admonition, but why would a person who works with words want to surrender an essential tool? Wouldn’t that be like disdaining a dictionary or spell checker?

I spoke bravely last week of intending to send my story, which is titled “The Death of Superman” by the way, to several lofty markets. (Given that it is part of my Fathers and Sons story cycle, you can probably suss out the theme based on the title.) I can report this week that it is now out to a half dozen magazines. A couple are publications I’d like to see my work in. A couple are places where I had some near misses in the past. One has an upcoming theme that might (or might not) fit that of my story. (I’m approaching their theme from pretty much the opposite direction from what they seem to be looking for. I’m hoping they find that intriguing and refreshing.) Since the story is “literary,” there are hundreds of potential markets for it, so in the weeks to come, I should be sending out to plenty of other places.

The story is 4,800 words and, oddly, that’s been a problem in some cases. Several magazines I was interested in have an upper limit of only 3,000 words. It’s not like this is commercial fiction; readers of litfic tend to have the attention spans (or endurance) to read longer pieces. When I saw that limit at one publication, I wrote the editor saying I had what I thought was a story that perfectly suited their point of view but was longer than their requested maximum. She wrote back saying, sensibly, that as a print publication, they have limited space, and in order to be able to include diversity in their selections, they have to restrict size. Okay, that makes sense. But ezines?

I use the term “story cycle” for my Fathers and Sons pieces in part because I like the sound of it and in part because it does seem to encapsulate the relationship of these stories. Yet I’m finding that because these stories involve only three characters as protagonists, and because they span three generations of living, I need to pay close attention to the relationships/implications of what happens in each story to foresee how it will affect the other stories. It’s getting to be more like writing a novel. Such are the troubles in my life.

“Velvet Elvis” has been nominated for the Million Writers Award. I’ll find out in early May that it was not selected as one of the Notable Stories among those nominated. And then I’ll find out at the end of May that it was not selected for the Top 10. But it’s an honor just to be nominated, right?

No thesaurus was used in the writing of this post (but I would have used one if I felt I needed to).