English Major Cashes In

Yeah, I make my living writing after a fashion. And it's not a bad living, at that. But what *else* can you do with those wordsmithing capabilities?

You can win prizes. It's not as though I find this particular piece of prize irresistable, or even that attractive. It's that I could think of a thousand different entries for this particular contest, and it seems like nobody else could come up with one. Okay. Obviously there was at least one more.

About the prize, it's not terrible, but when I checked out the artist's site, I found that I like nearly everything else on it more. Especially the babies. I love the babies. They crack my shit up.

Sending Them Out

I have scrubbed, polished, cut, and otherwise readied my stories Bella and Sacrament for publication and have sent them out to a combined eleven markets today.

Wish me luck!

Chefs Dine In

If you're a good cook, going out to dinner is often an exercise in picking apart your meal and reconstructing it in the perfect world of your own kitchen. "I would have added shallots to the butter." "This isn't creamy, it's just greasy." "I think they could have been more adventurous with the wine sauce." But it's possible to go out and have a meal and think to oneself "I would never have thought of this!"

About once a quarter, I have a similar opportunity. My writer's group, the Zombie Club, meets every other week to review each other's work and provide encouragement. In between critiquing each other's novels, we read our own short fiction, and last night was a fabulous opportunity indeed to hear some really first-rate stuff.

You can see one of my friends, S. G. Browne, reading his prize-winning story "Zombie Gigolo," his selection for last night. I feel lucky that we get to hear this stuff in the intimate setting of the Head Zombie's living room. IT's GREAT to have the privilege of having talented friends.

Writer's Nightmares

Before I went to bed last night, I did a couple of things: I worked on a short story that I need to finish by Thursday, and I thought hard about a book I'm starting and how many more themes I can possibly cram into it. Because gender identity, the culture of youth worship, the writing life, introversion and the individuality of perception aren't enough. I know that I can shoehorn music theory, extraterrestrials, the nature of time and makeup tips in as well.

So, in my dream I was hanging out with the Zombie Club, except that it wasn't the actual Zombies themselves. One of them was a tiny little short man that I've never seen in real life, another was a dear friend of mine that died two years ago. We had all gotten together on a sort of field trip to visit an agent's office, but it wasn't like any real agent's office, I'm sure.

At this particular office, you made appointments with the various agents, and there were about a dozen to choose from. You were allowed to pitch up to six works, but the pitch went like this: first you had a card with six lines on it. On each of the lines, you write three words that describes the work you're pitching. Based on those three words, the agent may ask to see a two-sentence synopsis. Based on the two-sentence synopsis, the agent may then ask for a whole package - a full-length synopsis, sample chapters, etc. So you go in with a suitcase of stuff, but it all hinges on the three words you've chosen for the card at the beginning.

The six of us (there are eight Zombies in real life, but in the dream, only six) sat at a table facing the agent who looked at our cards one by one. He would check off the things on the card that he wanted to see, and each person would then get out their two-sentence thing. When the first agent looked at my card, he just said "Hmmm, no...too dark...no...gloomy...sorry, nothing here." And handed it back.

I was embarrassed and a little angry because he'd only really looked at the first three. I was thinking "You think you're so goddamned important that you can't even look at EIGHTEEN WORDS?" At the end of the day, we'd seen at least four agents, and everyone else had gotten at least two or three requests for samples, but I had gotten NOTHING. I was so angry, because this wasn't a commentary on my writing skills, but on my skills at picking the three words that would market my book most effectively. I have to admit, being still unpublished at this late date makes me keenly aware at how important those things are, and makes me panic a little at not being better at them.

And just to add insult to injury, at the end of the dream, I got separated from the rest of the Zombies and couldn't find the car in the mall parking lot, and my phone got all screwed up and I couldn't even call them.

My dream suck sometimes.

Technofear

I got a new computer today. My old one, a lovely IBM ThinkPad, has become so bunged up with Windows crap that it was taking 30+ minutes to boot, and I long ago decided that Vista was never crossing my threshold, so here I am with a brand new MacBook.

The first thing I like is that it sounds Scottish. I can get behind that. The second thing I like is that mine is a nice matte black, so it already goes with everything I own. No, I'm not goth. I'm just incapable of putting together a matching outfit out of two different colors.

Here's my difficulty: I've always used Windows. I mean, I've used Windows since there *was* Windows. I haven't liked it, but it was what I was used to. My brand new computer is sitting right here, to my right, but I haven't opened it yet. I haven't opened it because I know that the minute I do, I'm going to start feeling stupid.

It's not going to work the way I'm used to, and I'm going to get all frustrated and start calling it names. I'm going to give up after half an hour because I'm an adult and I'm just supposed to be able to touch things and automatically have them work, right? And the worst part is that I'm going to miss out on something really cool that it can do, because I'm too frustrated that "it doesn't work like my old one" and I'm not willing to be patient and interact with it on its own merits.

The worst part is, I can see all this coming. *sigh*

To Work or Not to Work: That is the Question

I'm deeply conflicted.

On the one hand, I am an award-winning fiction writer who has yet to publish anything substantial and is just waiting for a chance - a big break.

On the other hand, I am a highly-paid manager at a large company with a mortgage and two children who have big dreams that involve college educations. And I just took on a second job.

There are many things I could do that would help my fiction career. I could sell my house and move somewhere cheaper, quit my job and let my husband support me while I wrote full-time. I know that all it would take is some time, and I don't have any of that right now.

On the other hand, my children LOVE their schools and their friends, and where we're at now we have chickens and a burbling creek. Most people pay big bucks to spend a precious few days vacationing in the kind of place where I live all the time.

I just wish I could figure this out. I wish there were an obvious, win/win solution. I'm not seeing it.

Sources of Inspiration

I've never once suffered from "writer's block." I've never sat at my computer, looking at a blank screen without an idea in my head. My problem is most often the other way around - I have too many ideas running around my head and can't get them all down fast enough.

Where do I get these ideas?

Stuff happens to me. Like...going through my spam folder and seeing the eight million messages that tell me that I should be concerned about the size of my penis. Since "my penis" doesn't exist, should I still be concerned about it? Or should I be even MORE concerned? And is it even worth it to add "up to 1 inch" to something that doesn't exist, leaving me with only one inch?

Or the fact that I'm stalked by meat. It started happening about eight years ago, and it continues to this day. Last month I was at the car dealership getting my car done, and as I was pacing in the parking lot waiting for the Pirate to pick me up, there was a giant slice of ham lying on the ground. It was gone by the time I came to pick up my car.

And the newest, and bestest? A psycho has been BCCing me in a series of emails that outline his ongoing effort to sue the state after an incident last year where he was carted off to a mental hospital. I've talked to quite a few people about whether or not you can "accidentally" BCC someone on a series of emails. No. You can't.

So, now I'm thinking hard about what it means that this person is copying me on what is, essentially, a very self-incriminating series of emails and what he might be trying to tell me.

It makes me wonder if this kind of stuff happens to everyone. It must, because my life is sort of boring, compared to the lives of most people.

Hidden Gems

I'm doing a reading on the radio station KFJC tomorrow morning. I was thinking that I'd do a piece from my last novel, but as I was looking through the contents of my thumb drive, I found a short story that I really loved that I'd written last year. It wasn't edited at all (the word "shit" appeared about fifty times) and when I read it, it came out to about 45 minutes.

Oh, did I mention that I hadn't put on an ending?

The nice thing is that I had a deadline. I have to get this polished and ready for prime time by tonight because the reading papens at 7:20 a.m. PST tomorrow morning. I'm always impressed at the depths of laser-like focus I'm able to muster when faced with a looming deadline, and I was able to write the ending (a different, and I think better, ending than I had originally imagined) and cut a great deal from it in a couple of hours last night. Tonight I do some more editing and then decide on the soundtrack.

The best thing is that after this intensive few hours of work, this story will be ready for prime time. It goes on my list of stories ready to be put out there in the world.

I love when that happens.

The Weather is Here. Wish You Were Beautiful

I'm here at the Desert Nights, Rising Stars writer's conference, and it's been an enlightening few days. For those of you able to make it out to this conference in 2009, I would highly recommend it. The staff and faculty are all accessible, and the variety of subjects presented is phenomenal.

Wednesday was the first day of the conference, and I showed up bright and early at 9-ish to register. I hung out for a while, then attended the keynote addresses from Bernard Cooper and Jeff Biggers. The irony is that Tuesday night my mother had been telling me about going to a restaurant entirely staffed by fabulous drag queens in Greenwich Village with a man who was, at the time, head of Literacy Volunteers of Coconino County. That guy was Jeff Biggers.

I've rubbed elbows with authors and shmoozed at least one agent, and I got to have a conversation with Orson Scott Card, who is the happiest, sweetest guy you could ever hope to meet. He was as nice as Rick Moody, who was not only one of the nightly speakers, but also on the faculty. He gave a great class on story structure, which he entirely based on grammar and sentence structure, and he told me I'm a genius. So I automatically like him.

But it's not just the classes presented that have been enlightening. The interactions between classes have been just as intersting, and are coming thick and fast. In particular, the "small group intensive," a session where your work is being critiqued by a group of 3-4 of your peers, has been...a treat. This is the first time in my adult life that I've sat through a class that has been reduced to a shouting match between the presenter and one of the students.

The class was a playwriting class, and all the participants were to have had their entries in five weeks before the start of the class. I submitted the first 30 pages of my play, one of the other women (we were all women in this class) submitted a single-spaced 44 pages of her play, and the other two submitted far, far less. One submitted 12 pages of a poorly-written play (she later told us that it was three scenes from a larger work)and another submitted 17 pages of character sketch for a novel.

The instructor's idea was to tackle the shorter pieces in the first session and spend the other two sessions taking on the longer pieces. But, as the man said, the best-laid plans blah blah blah blah. The man who said that was white. As the woman who completely derailed our sessions would have pointed out. Her 17-page play was three scenes of dialog about a slave woman who was 1) thinking of escaping, 2) about to escape and then 3) had escaped (no, the escape was never shown), but she kept insisting that there were depths to it that we just didn't get. Because she hadn't written them.

Every time the instructor asked a question, she would give him a coquettish look and a non-answer. It didn't help that she had the voice of Butterfly McQueen, which, when she laughed turned into Zoe the muppet. It's hard to take seriously the insistence that someone is a serious scholar when they talk like a muppet and act even less mature.

"You don't give any descriptions. Who is this person?"

[Eyelash bat] "Who do you think it is?"

"You don't give a time or place. When and where does this play take place?"

[Sideways glance] "When do you think it is?"

By the end of the class, we had talked about nothing but her play and she kept going on about how it was full of taboos that were risky and hard to write about, although none of it was in the material we were given, so it was hard to credit her with it. By the end of the class, the instructor was literally shouting at her, telling her that she was being unhelpful and unprofessional. It was uncomfortable for the rest of us, and I found out later that all three of the rest of us resented the hell out of her for dragging the entire process on. This woman kept insisting that the rest of us had no appreciation of the history of slavery in America, of the nuances of African-American culture since then, the fallout, both economic and social of slavery and what it means, particularly to Southern, African-American women. She was taking a huge risk, she said, in just writing this down. Although she had written, effectively, nothing.

On the second day, we did the second short piece, since we hadn't gotten to it on the first. Unfortunately, it was called "Never Cross a Southern Mama," and the muppet woman said "Whose mama? Yours? I was interested in the title, but it was just a bunch of white women, so I stopped reading." Yeah. That's a helpful attitude in a workshop. Without mentioning any of the content of the woman's piece, she proceeded to hijack all further discussion into an indictment of modern society and its ignorance of black history, and once again degraded into a shouting match.

By the time the instructor called for a break halfway through, she started telling us that she "didn't feel safe" offering criticism. When I told her that we were showing respect for her point of view, but she wasn't showing us the same courtesy she cut me off in mid-sentence. I made the mistake of calling her "hon," and she told me "Don't talk to me like I'm a child," and got up and walked out.

The minute the door closed behind her, everyone uttered a sigh of relief.

The amazing thing was the she came back about 15 minutes later and sat there in the room with a book in her hand, making notes on 3x5 cards. I was at least grateful that she'd shut up.

Later that day, I tracked down the coordinator of the conference and told him about the horrible disruption she'd been, and he told me that I was the third person to come to him. The second was the woman who'd written the Southern mama story. The FIRST, was the muppet woman. She'd accused the instructor of being both sexist AND racist, and told the coordinator that she'd felt threatened. What he told me was that she had a reputation around the university as an amateur, as immature and not really ready for workshopping. He felt bad for those of us who had suffered her in our midst, and that he would do "something" to make it up to me.

I suggested that next year, he give the instructors permission to throw out participants who act inappropriately (the instructor said that if he'd been allowed, he certainly would have thrown her out) and publish some code of behavior for small-group participants. He agreed that both of those were worthy suggestions.

We'll see what happens next year.

What about my play? Well, I was given some solid suggestions that I shall spend the next few weeks implementing.

The Play is Done

When I started in 2004 writing "Genius of Want," I had originally envisioned it as a play, but was unfamiliar with the play form. Well, for this year's Desert Nights, Rising Stars conference, I decided to commit myself to taking the playwriting small group intensive. This meant that I had to actually write the play.

It took me two months, but I finished the play last week. If you'd care to, you can even read it by clicking the link in the title of this post. I just ask one thing: if you do read it, I'd appreciate you leaving your feedback in comments, as this is the first draft and it's likely to change significantly.

Another Year, Another Post

Back in August, I threatened to turn my novel "Genius of Want" into a play. I begged for people to read for me, because that's really the only way to get a sense of where it needs fixing. I thought that I could have it done by September, and everyone was keenly on board.

And then...it languished. I've been an accomplishing fool, don't get me wrong. Slacking is not at all why it didn't get done in September. But now, at last, five months after I said I'd do it, it's done. Genius of Want is now a play that has gone back to the original title "Leif the Buddhist Viking and His Epic Search for Love."

I'm thinking as I translate this particular work into a play that I really, really like the play form. I am now seeing a great many of my earlier works in terms of how they might translate into plays. I've promised myself, though, that I'm not writing much new stuff this year. This year, I've promised myself that I'm going to concentrate hard on submissions.

And once Leif the Buddhist Viking is ready, it'll go into the submission bucket.

It's Been A While

So, I haven't written here in quite a while. Why? Let's see...

I started and finished Nanowrimo. I was more excited about the story this time that I've been in a long time, and that's an awesome feeling.

I'm heading up the team at work for the Shape Up San Francisco walking challenge. That means not only that I have to do all the team-leader stuff (leading group walks, sending out regular encouraging words, etc.), but I actually have to participate. I have to finish up walking 300 miles in 10 weeks. Not terribly difficult, but it's been very challenging this past week.

It's the time of year at work when I launch the year-end website. Of course that process started months ago, but it's always at the last possible second that everything has to happen. There's a ton of testing, the stuff that everyone left to the last second to create or approve or deploy, the stuff that still hasn't happened that we're waiting for. At this time of year, I end up having to hire a contractor who calls me all hours of the day and night (just ask some of my friends what happens when you call me last on a weekend night).

The hardest thing isn't the contractor or the walking challenge or even writing a novel. The hardest thing is that I still have the most important obligations before me - I still have a husband and children animals and a house to maintain. Mostly, I love all the stuff I get to be part of in having a spouse and kids and animals, but honesly, during November I find myself resenting them.

I resent the fact that they have the temerity to ask me to spend time with them; I resent the clothes they wear because it means more laundry I won't have time to get to; I resent the food they eat, because I've either cooked it or I'll have to wash up after. Sometimes I think that what I want for Christmas is a gift that comes a month early - to be able to have a housekeeper who cooks for the entire month of November. I'll never have that kind of money.

But I can dream...

Conference Wrap-Up

I had planned to blog the conference a day at a time, but that didn't happen because it was 13+ hours a day for four days, after which I got up at bitch o'clock and boarded a plane for home. I had writing assignments and reading and lots to think about, so blogging just didn't end up happening. Neither did sleeping. And precious little eating (the food was atrocious).

On the other hand, I did a huge amount of learning, and a ton of re-thinking much of what I've already done. While I'm happy with my writing as a whole, I know that I can do better.

Some highlights:

• Editing seminar with Betty Webb left me with a much more effective method for manuscript editing that I believe will solve many problems


• Kevin McIlvoy is amazing, both as a writer and as a teacher. His seminar on writing with humor was easily the best I've ever heard.


• I now have some excellent ideas about how to get my work noticed by agents and publishers.


• I also have a much better handle on how to make a living as a writer apart from the income generated by just writing books (thanks, Tania Katan!).


• I met another opera writer who gave me some invaluable advice for completing my libretto and getting my opera put on.


• The proportion of authors to participants was extremely high, which meant that a lot of the authors were actually students in one lecture or another, which was GREAT! It also meant that they were really available if you wanted to talk to them during breaks.

And some lowlights:

• The next time I come, I bring my own food.


• Many of the lectures given by the writers sounded like infomercials for their works.


• The chairs in the hall where the readings were held were designed by Torquemada.


• While overall I had a really great experience of the small-group intenstive, when it came to my turn to have my work reviewed, one of the five in our group didn't turn up, and when I looked at the instructor's notes on my MS, they were illegible and therefore worthless.

Overall, this was the best conference I've ever attended in terms of information received for money spent. The caliber of the classes was several steps above that of the Bay Area conferences I've attended, and the authors were all much more helpful.

I'd recommend this one to anyone who's serious about taking their writing to the next level.

Writers' Conference: Day 1 Continued

Yesterday was the first day of the conference. In the past, I've gone to conferences thinking "I know this stuff already. This isn't helping me."

I don't know whether this conference has much better classes or whether I'm just more committed to extracting every iota of information I can possibly get. For whatever reason, this time around my attitude has been "I'm paying for this, so you're going to answer my questions, dammit!"

The first great lesson came from the editor in chief of St. Martin's Press, who's a sort of nebbish-y looking little guy who was constantly on the verge of losing his voice. But in talking to him one-on-one, he was really great and helpful. I told him about the catch 22 that I find myself in - many agents won't consider you until you have a publishing deal in hand, but most publishers won't consider you until you have an agent.

What he said was brilliant - editors at publishing houses are people just like everyone else. They're looking for the thing that's going to indicate to them that a given manuscript is worth reading, so the thing to do if you can't get an agent is to get anyone you know who's a writer and have THEM read your work and give it a recommendation. If you can say in your cover letter "My dear friend John Grisham read my book and said that it was the best-written three-hanky romance EVER." I also got to spend a lot of time talking to Michael Stackpole about writing science fiction and fantasy. He basically said the same thing - it's all about your network.

Now, this is where my mother comes in. I don't know anyone who's already got a book deal, and if I did, they'd probably immediately stop talking to me because they're too important. On the other hand, my MOTHER knows everyone! She said it'd be no sweat to get my stuff in front of a whole bunch of people who'll just love it and who will gladly write blurbs for it.

The amazing thing about this conference is that I've been downright schmoozy! Talking to people I don't even know like..well, like I don't even know them but they're going to answer my question or me and my shrub of a head aren't leaving. I talked to a woman who wrote an opera about Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding that was put on in New York and is now going to Oregon this season. She was excited to learn that I've written a treatment, and gave me lots of great ideas for finding a composer.

I ended the day feeling like I'd made enormously great use of my time and really invigorated for another go-round.

Writer's Conference: Day 1

I'm at the Desert Nights Rising Stars conference until Saturday night.

Just getting here has already been an adventure:

1. It's Girl Scout cookie season, and my family has ordered a packing crate of cookies. I picked them up yesterday, two hours before I had to leave and spent another hour sorting and re-packing them for the trip. I was originally going to drive myself, but there was no way I was going to be able to schlep a 50-pound crate of cookies along with my other luggage, so the Pirate very sweetly offered to drive me. I swear, he's too good for me.
2. We got to the airport and I was going to do curbside checkin, but the very sweet skycap told me that I'm on the list. Yes, apparently, I'm a terrorist. My mother is convinced it's because I have a habit of leaving rude notes for the TSA in my checked baggage, telling them things like "I've rubbed my dirty underwear all over everything in this bag. Have fun!" There are some folks who'd pay good money to sort through my dirty laundry. Oh, wait. I mean that there are some folks to whom I have to pay good money to sort through my dirty laundry. Anyway, long story short, I got to talk to a kindly TSA agent who told me nothing of use (no, they can't tell me why, when or how my name got on the list, but I might be like 30% of passengers on "the list" who have names that happen to match those of actual terrorists or terrorist groupies or terrorist sympathizers or some such). They gave me an often-copied piece of paper that tells me to contact the TSA with a whole boatload of information to get my name off "the list," which will take 6 to 8 months.
3. I got into the airport and started pacing. It's a 2-hour flight and I wanted to get a little exercise while I could. I was paced by a cop on a Segway. I don't know if you've ever seen a Segway, but the little platform on which you stand is a good 8-12 inches off the ground, and even with that platform, the cop was barely taller than I am (I am 5' 7"). The entire "Toulouse LaCop" image was completely ridiculous, but having already been branded a terrorist, I decided that now was not the time to push my luck by pointing and laughing at a guy with a gun.
4. As I was pacing the terminal and listening to "Augustus," a biography of Augustus Caesar, I happened to walk as far as terminals A1-A and A1-B, the international terminals. They're newer, rarely-used and cleaner-looking than the rest of the San Jose airport. There was one other guy in the terminal, standing there talking on his cell phone. He was obviously looking for some privacy, as the minute I stepped out of the long hallway and into the football-field-sized room, it became too crowded and he left. I walked to the far end, hearing one of the white courtesy phones start to ring. The sound of a phone ringing in a giant, empty room is a very lonely, creepy sound, and the creepiness was only made worse by the fact that as I drew abreast of the phone, it stopped ringing and the silence was even louder.

The plane ride was uneventful, I got to bed at a little after one and was here at the conference bright and early at eight this morning so that I could be sure of getting parking. I've laid out my schedule, which says that I have tonight off, but otherwise I'm here until 9:30 every night. *sigh*

Maybe It's You

I'm leaving tonight for a 4-day conference in Phoenix. One of the things to which I'm really looking forward is the "small group intensive." Me and four other people will be getting together over lunch every day and going over our writing, trying to refine our voices and perfect our technique in an effort to stem the tide of rejection that we all face as writers.

The thing is, as long as you're writing and submitting, you're going to face rejection. There are really three ways to react to the constant rejection that's part and parcel of being a newer writer:

1. You can give up.
   It's easy to say "I just suck" and stop submitting at all. What's worse is when, in anticipation of "I just suck," you don't submit at all. I can't begin to tell you how to develop the thick skin necessary to brave multiple rejections, but there are a couple of things that helped me:
   
   • Have a cheerleader. Having someone who's both unfailingly enthusiastic about your work and at the same time willing to give you honest criticism will help you feel like your work is something you can both take seriously and have some pride in.
   • Have someone else do the submitting. This one's a little harder and involves some expense, but there's no enthusiasm like the enthusiasm of the paid employee. After all, they're not the one getting rejected. It's not like it's any risk for them to keep your stuff in circulation.
   Really, you have to find the motivation and method yourself, otherwise it won't be yours.


2. You can examine your work, make improvements, and THEN resubmit. For me, there's nothing that feels better than getting good feedback on a piece of writing, making some edits, and ending up with a piece that I feel is even stronger. To get to this "no pain, no gain" attitude, though, I had to go through years of writing for a magazine, struggling through every paragraph and sentence, having every piece handed back to me multiple times with advice like "cut it by 150 words."
   
   I knew that my editor liked my writing. I knew that he wasn't criticizing me as a person, my style, my education, my "voice" or anything else personal. He was looking at the layout and seeing too many words for the amount of space he had on the page and needed fewer words. Or more. Or a lede with a better hook. Or something. He seemed to like me as a person just fine, but he was also tasked with making the writing for the magazine the best it could be. Other editors at other magazines for whom I don't work feel the same way, and it's up to you to take their rejections for what they are - indications that your writing may be just fine, but it doesn't work for the space the editor is trying to fill.
   
   It's rare when you get an editor who's willing to give you feedback on your story. If you get some, listen carefully to it - this is the voice of your potential audience. In most cases, though, you're going to need to recruit your own editors and get them to give you feedback. Don't use your mother, who's likely to be unfailingly generous and tell you what a genius you are for being able to spell all the words correctly. Find other people whose writing you know and trust - people who are willing to tell you the truth, but in a tactful way. I'm always wary of the person who says "I have to be honest with you..." and ends with a searing, insulting rant.


3. You can assume that anyone who rejects your work as "not good enough" is a moron and die bitter and alone. I've run into a ton of these people, and so have you. Their work may have the germ of a good story, but for whatever reason, it's not publishable. Instead of looking at their own work and saying "Readers don't understand it. I should fix that flaw," they say "Readers are a moron and don't deserve a genius of my caliber." I have been told by many an insufferable hack that I'm "too stupid to appreciate" his/her work. They rail against the publishing system that only rewards vapidity and commerciality (okay, that's partly true); they rail against editors who are all untutored fools who wouldn't recognize a good book if it landed in their laps; they rail against the reading public who are stuck on conventions like plot and readable sentences. Bastards!
   
   Their fiction is PERFECT. And not only is it perfect, often it was perfect on the first try. "Take that, Anne Lamott! Take that, Strunk & White! I don't need any of you because I am capable of wiping my ass and producing a work of inutterable...genius. I can dash off a first draft that's so far above anything being published today that no editor or publisher is even CAPABLE of recognizing its true genius." Sound familiar?

I have decided to spend more time this year polishing up my own prose, finishing things that need finishing and in general putting in the effort to get more of my stuff published. I have a plan, and that plan includes taking some serious time for reflection and learning from my past.

What's ironic is that I've been having a series of discussion with the Pirate about folks we know who are in this exact same boat - with their love lives. We know people who have just given up, too defeated to do the very hard work of fixing things. We know people who put a lot of time and effort into changing the things in themselves that they see as obstacles to romantic happiness. We also know a few people who have stated in no uncertain terms that they are PERFECT, and that the world is a MORON for not being able to appreciate their perfection.

The point is that publishing is a for-profit business. Publishers are looking for books that are going to sell lots of copies and therefore justify what it costs to produce them. Similarly, life is a for-profit business for each and every living creature. Individually, we are looking for people and things that add pleasure, or at least don't actively piss us off all the time. Being defeatist - giving up and never looking at yourself and your own actions - guarantees that you're never going to find what you're looking for. The other end of the spectrum, being so egotistical about your own worth that you think that the world should love you as you are, despite empirical evidence that it doesn't, is equally doomed. The people who are the most successful in publishing and in romance, are the ones who are willing to admit that they need some work, put their heads down, and get to it.

The Joys of Dissection

I was just talking to a good friend about things we've read: specifically about authors who are very popular but not very good.

I'm not going to get on my high horse here and claim that I've never read trash. I'm not even going to claim not to have enjoyed it. It's just that when I'm reading something strictly for pleasure - something I know is not going to illuminate ANYTHING, I don't question it. I just let the words wash over me and create the story and forgive them when they suck.

Mostly, though, I read stuff that I want to learn something from. I'm reading nonfiction to figure something out, or reading the work of authors I'd like to emulate. When I'm reading those things, I'm not a fast reader. I will read the same paragraph many times to figure out why it made me feel a certain way. I will look at how a very skillful writer weaves imagery without necessarily resorting to metaphor or how verb choices set the tone for an entire scene. I like noticing the use of color and texture in writing, and whether or not a writer pays attention to the musicality of the work.

I can tell you, in lengthy and vivid detail, why I like the authors I like. I can tell you what distinguishes them from other similar authors and why I think they're better or not as good. I can tell you their weaknesses and their strengths.

I hope, at the end of the day, all this comes out in my own writing.

Sundance Film #10: Once

Once
A Dublin busker, who ekes out a living playing guitar and repairing vacuum cleaners for his dad's shop, meets a young Czech immigrant who sells roses on the same street. She likes his song, and what's more...she has a broken vacuum cleaner! They soon find themselves playing music together in a nearby music store (since she can't afford a piano, the owner lets her play his floor models). Over the course of a week, they form a musical rapport and, newly inspired, decide to record an album.

Once may loosely be classified as a musical, but it has a refreshing verite inflection. Conceived by director John Carney as a "video album," it sports a scrappy, unembellished naturalism. Carney took a risk in choosing professional musicians over professional actors, but Glen Hansard (of the well-known Irish band the Frames) and Marketa Irglova (a Czech singer/songwriter) are not only remarkably charming together but they're equally adept with the more melancholy shades (Hansard's lonely soul, stuck on an old flame, Irglove struggling to support a mother and daughter). Burdened and brokenhearted, their musical bond is the heart of the film and their love.

Great music aside, what makes this film special is how little effort it seems to exert. If it's possible to be blindsided by simplicity - a light touch, Once does it.
(John Nein, 2007 Sundance Film Festival catalog)
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Once again, John Nein sees WAY more in a film than I did. I have to admit, I'm always wary of romantic films. I don't like people acting unnaturally in the name of "love," but I'm happy to say that it didn't happen here. Irglova was charming in the way that children can be charming - insistent in drawing Hansard into a good time that he looks like he desperately needs. The romantic tension of their initial first "date" is broken by the fact that she's dragging her broken vacuum cleaner behind her like a boxy blue dog.

I put "date" in quotes because this isn't a love story as such. It's obvious that the characters find each other attractive and they are obviously musically compatible, they never actually kiss and they don't end up together. Essentially, we have a very sweet story of two people who get together to make an album. That's the beginning and end of it.

Our tickets were for the World Audience Award for dramatic film. When the program director who introduced the film got up, she said that this was the first time she had ever seen an audience give a film a standing ovation. Between that and the fuss made about the outstanding music, I knew to be on my guard.

Sure enough, at the end of this sweet but not outstanding film, two of the folks in the row in front of us jumped to their feet during the applause. The Pirate leaned over and said "This is worse than San Francisco," referring to the tendency of San Francisco audiences to give a standing ovation to anything with a spotlight, including a drug deal on a well-lit streetcorner.

Besides the non-love story (with which I was perfectly okay), the music wasn't really my thing. It was the same kind of whiny-boy music that just makes me want to scream. It would have been okay if there had been a lot of varied sound, but they played the same single song over and over. It was during that song that I realized that two days ago, as the Pirate and I were walking from one film to another, we walked by two street musicians. At the time, I was surprised at what a huge crowd two unremarkable street performers had gathered. Now I realize that it was them, staging a performance for...I don't know what. I thought the song sounded sweet, but it wasn't enough to make me want to stop and listen. And that kind of sums up how I felt about the movie, too.

The Pirate says: Predictable, whiny music, otherwise unremarkable. It wasn't some fantastic thing, but it wasn't really horrible.

Sundance Film #9: Enemies of Happiness

Enemies of Happiness
In September 2005, Afghanistan held its first parliamentary elections in 35 years. Among the candidates for 249 assembly seats was Malalai Joya, a courageous, controversial 27-year-old woman who had ignited outrage among hard-liners when she spoke out against corrupt warlords at the Grand Council of tribal elders in 20003. Enemies of Happiness is a relevatory portrait of this extraordinary freedom fighter and the way she won the hearts of voters, as well as a snapshot of life and politics in war-torn Afghanistan.

Amidst vivid, poetic images of Joya's dusty Farah province, the film tracks the final weeks of her campaign, when death threats restrict her movements. but the parade of trusting constituents arriving on her doorstep leaves no doubt that Joya is a popular hero. Among her visitors is a 100-year-old woman who treks two hours to offer loyalty and herbal medicine. King Solomon-style, Joya acts as folk mediator and advocate, adjudicating between a wife and her violent, drug-addicted husband and counseling a family forced to marry off their adolescent daughter to a much older man. Protected by armed guards, Joya heads to poor rural areas to address crowds of women, pledging to be their voice and "expose the enemies of peace, women, and democracy." In the presence of her fierce tenacity, we can imagine the future of an enlightened nation.
(Caroline Libresco, 2007 Sundance Film Festival catalog)

preceded by the short Make a Wish
A young Palestinian girl will do anything it takes to buy a birthday cake.
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Just as the short that preceded Offscreen should have warned me that the coming film would be disturbing and bizarre, the short Make a Wish warned me that the coming feature would be sweet and heartbreaking. Make a Wish showed two little girls trying to buy a birthday cake. What they endure trying to buy the cake is positively post-war Italian in its sadness, and when they come home triumphantly with their cake, their worried-out-of-her-mind mother grabs the older girl by the arm, making her drop the cake. Crying ensues, but at last we see why the cake is so important as the girls and their mother all sing happy birthday around the cake with the lit candle and the oldest girl whispers to the picture of her dead father "Make a wish, papa."

You'd pretty much have to be made of stone not to cry at that.

About Make a Wish the Pirate says: It was very sweet.

My face was still wet when Enemies of Happiness started. Our ticket was for the World Documentary Grand Prize, and although they released the names of all the prize winners at eight o'clock and we were in line for the film at 8:15, nobody knew what film it would be.

Enemies of Happiness starts with footage of the speech that got Malalai Joya banned from the Grand Council two years earlier, then shows her in the present during the few weeks right before the elections. I was really afraid that we'd see her, get attached to her and then watch her gunned down or blown up in front of us, and I was thankful it never happened. In the Q&A after the film, the director said that Joya, whose district is an outlying one in the south of Afghanistan near the Iranian border, has moved to Kabul and is still working hard in parliament for the rights of women and against the institutionalization of the kinds of laws enacted by and for the warlords who have controlled Afghanistan for so long.

The speech she made in 2003 gave Joya a great deal of credibility with her district, and she becomes the neutral third party that many people come to with their problems. We get to see her mediating on behalf of several people, and she comes across as trustworthy even though she never tells anyone "I can solve your problem for you."

In politics, she's very passionate and I worry that she won't heed the advice of one man who told her "you can't chop down a tree with one stroke. You have to take a branch off here and a branch off there and that's how you do it." Joya is all for ridding the country of the warlords who control huge private militias in one fell swoop and her passion has already made her a target. I'm excited to see her working so hard to make a difference, but I hope that she sees that she can make more of a difference as a live politician than as a dead martyr.

The Pirate says: Inspiring. It was a really good documentary of a politician in a difficult circumstance.

Sundance Film #8: Chicago 10

Chicago 10
As one of the seminal political events of the 1960s, the Chicago Seven trial seems to come from another era, but filmmaker Brett Morgen, in his third trip to the Sundance Film Festival, has created a film that is much more than a look back. Indeed, Chicago 10 takes a stylized, innovative approach that gives contemporary history a forced perspective. He boldly mixes original animation with extraordinary archival footage to explore the buildup to and unraveling of the infamous conspiracy trial. Set to the music of the revolution then and now, Chicago 10 is a parable of hope, courage and challenge as it portrays the struggle of young Americans attempting to confront an oppressive and armed government...their own.

The 1968 Democratic Convention was a watershed event in the ongoing opposition to the Vietnam war. Protestors clashed with Chicago police, and the ensuing battles were witnessed live on television. In an effort to find a scapegoat, eight protestors were charged. The trial became a circus, and the abuse of individual liberties made this event one of the era's most significant.

But this is not the focus of either the film or our choice to have it open this year's Festival. Chicago 10 is much more than mere historical drama, and its creative artistry and inspiration are at the core of what makes this documentary and its subject as relevant today as it was 40 years ago.
(Geoffrey Gilmore, 2007 Sundance Film Festival catalog)
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From an early age, I have always had a taste for history that wasn't limited to wars and political boundaries. I like knowing how normal people lived, what they thought, and how the events of the time affected them. Chicago 10 set the events surrounding the 1968 Democratic Convention and the trail of the Chicago Seven in the context of the people in and around Chicago and other places where Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin spoke to people. At one point, in a piece of archive footage, a reporter asked a young black woman how she felt about the events going on uptown (the Yippie protests were held in Lincoln Park in Chicago, not in the poorer [and more predominantly black] south side), the woman squinched up her face and expressed her opinion that she was glad it was happening in someone else's neighborhood, and that she didn't feel sorry for the white guys getting beat up by the police.

The director apparently went through hundreds of hours of archival film and audio and tens of thousands of pages of court transcripts, but because the courtroom portions of the movie are stylized animation, it's hard to tell how much is true and how much is "dramatized," especially since Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were pretty dramatic already.

Abbie Hoffman, being the biggest clown of the group, ends up getting the most screen time in both real archive footage and animated footage. He said more than once that politics, and his trial in particular, were theater - this movie took his words and turned them into performance art.

I want Peaches to see this movie, just to give her some context in American history that she probably won't get otherwise. The Pirate and I had a long discussion (on our way to the next movie) about what lessons were learned as a result of the events of the late 60s, and much has changed - but for the worse. Democrats and other people more liberally inclined have decided to try taking the moral high ground - not once are you going to hear Barack Obama yelling "Fuck you!" at Bush or any of his supporters - but they've also decided that they have too much to lose by speaking out. Tom Hayden was carted off to jail at least once, and every protestor in Lincoln Park knew that they had a very real chance of being taken out of the park by force, and they accepted that. In the trial, the Chicago Seven were labeled as terrorists, but after the trial every day they left the courtroom without guard, boarded planes, and went on speaking engagements.

If the same sort of thing were to happen today, there would be no public trial because they would have been branded "terrorists," making them "enemy combatants" and stripping them of their legal rights. They would have been held in jail while their trail by military tribunal went on without them, and they would have been unable to tell anyone about what they were going through. Knowing that, liberals today cluck their tongues at the antics of the current administration and talk in hushed tones about how they could do better.

If Abbie Hoffman were still politically active in the same absurd way today, he would point at the current regime and say loudly for all to hear that not only does the emperor have no clothes, but that he thinks it's a great idea and everyone should join him. And then take off his pants for the camera.

The Pirate says: It was interesting, engaging; it made the whole thing very exciting.