Now what?

I always feel at loose ends after I finish a book. I’m doing the mental equivalent of twiddling my thumbs, wondering what to do next. The obvious answer is keep writing, but after three and a half months of near-daily work on the same story, I feel like I’m grasping at fog when it comes to writing anything else. An equally good answer is keep reading. Right now I’m regretting that I don’t keep a “to read” list handy.

The other issue I now have to deal with is looking for an agent. It’s not an immediate concern, since neither of my books is ready for public consumption, but eventually I’m going to have to sort through the massive haystack that is the Writer’s Market for someone who’ll improve my chances of getting published. The market is shrinking, and so are opportunities for new writers.

Imagine “Chariots of Fire” playing

It’s finished. I was up late last night, a holdover from sleeping most of Saturday, and I figured I may as well make the most of my insomnia.  Clocking in at just over 60,000 words, the story is finally done. I think I may need to write more of a denouement, but it’s out, it’s finished, and I’m pretty pleased with it. It’s freeing to work in instalments, as I did this time around; I wrote almost every word of it in my email account and sent off big chunks to a friend of mine as they came out. It was an interesting experiment, and it seems to have worked out.  There are continuity problems, of course, name changes and details that have to match up in the polished manuscript, but that shouldn’t be difficult. It beats the overthinking and hairpulling I did with my last one.

Speaking of that one, I had a bit of a breakthrough while I was doing some painting. Maybe soon it’ll be time to revisit that story and fix some of its problems.

Holy shit when did that become a book?!

The current… well, I guess it’s a book now, isn’t it? At any rate, it’s topped 50,000 words, which is kind of amazing, considering it was just meant to be something to keep me writing while I struggled with the problems of another book, and considering that I’ve only been working on it about three and a half months. It’s weird what your brain does when you’re not overthinking things. I set a loose goal of 62,500, or roughly 250 pages, which I don’t think I’ll have any problem meeting once my weekend bug clears up and I’m back in fighting form. The story is coming to a head, after gumshoe investigating, a few interviews with demons, and a very brief period of involuntary commitment. I finally know exactly what’s going on; the only question is how everything is going to play out. It’s kind of exciting to finally write a story in order, following the plot as it unwinds.

On the art front, I did my first real painting a couple of weeks ago. It was very strange to realise that I actually do have a talent for something that I’d never discovered before. Not a great talent, mind, but some talent. I haven’t done one since, presumably because my mind has been busy with the story. I’ve got some ultramarine blue that I want to play with, though.

Mister Smith came and went. As fast as the first chapter came to me, it was gone. I suppose that’s fine, since I want to finish what I’m working on anyway.

Trying new things

For some reason, over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been doing less writing and have gotten back into visual art. Let me be frank: I am not an artist. I don’t even think I would qualify as a hobbyist. I tend to go off on drawing and painting jags every so often, and it’s interesting to go from doing something that comes naturally to me to something that I don’t really do that well at all.

I can draw. Given a photo reference, I can produce a reasonable, if flat, facsimile. But that’s not Art, if you want to be pretentious about it. I’ve never been good at bringing something out from within me and putting it to paper. I think visually, but my hands don’t want to cooperate. And since I don’t like doing things that I’m not good at, I tend to get bored with it after a while and wander away. This time around, I seem to be more interested in actually producing something that might conceivably have artistic merit. As usual, however, I keep bumping up against my utter lack of experience and technique. Whoops.

So for the time being I am amusing myself with mediocre watercolours and insipid pictures of flowers. I kind of enjoy being deliberately pedestrian, as long as it’s my paintings that get that label and not my writing.

Almost a story

I knew even before the old man walked in that he was going to be a pain in the ass. You can just tell with some people. Not because he was old– although that’s usually not a good sign– but because he had that confused mien that people always seem to have when they’re about to take up a lot of your time and irritate you. I willed him not to come in, or to make it short, but no dice there. He was all mine.

He walked in and asked where Long’s was, and I told him that it hadn’t been in the building that still said Long’s for a couple of years. He was looking for engineering supplies. Eventually, after a few minutes of telling me about how his daughter said she’d get him an engineering notebook and how that was seven years ago, I told him that Long’s had moved. It was now a Barnes & Noble (isn’t everything? ). If he’d walk just a few blocks south, it would be on the same street. I didn’t think then that a man who was at least in his sixties probably didn’t consider five blocks a jaunt so much as a trudge.

He said, “I don’t suppose you’d be familiar with their line.”

Why yes, sir, I frequently find it convenient to know exactly what our competitors stock at all times. “No.”

It’s kind of amazing how many people expect me to know the inventory of stores I don’t work in. I nodded politely as he went on to talk about engineering notebooks and how, if you had just a pad, the pages were likely to come loose, and sometimes you had to go to court, and those pages were evidence, and he knew that because he’d had to find some automotive engineering work he’d done, only the pages were loose, so they’d been lost, so he couldn’t imagine why his daughter would think he’d need something like an engineering notebook. I rolled my eyes when he turned his back and waited for him to shut up and go away.  I had a book in my lap and a sheaf of work on my desk. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to work on either while he was there, because pain the ass people need you to focus on them while they get their shit together.

Finally, blessedly, he made to leave. He thanked me for the information in a voice that I wasn’t sure wasn’t sarcastic. Nothing occurred to me while he was there. It was after he left that the irritation cleared, and I thought about how old people always seem to want to tell you more than you need to know, about how they seem to think every precious hour is story time. Maybe part of it was that presumed authority, that “I’m old, so you’ll listen to what I have to say, you goddamn kid.” You see it germinate in the attitudes of certain middle-aged women who have children and thus seem to see everyone under 25 as some sort of analogue for them. You’ll do what I tell you to do, young lady, or so help me I’ll call your manager, and just you wait until he gets home!

I wish I could say everything else had occurred to me before the old man left, that I had my sad little moment of clarity while he was still there and had had a storybook change of heart. Unfortunately, my introspective processes often lag a few minutes behind current events, maybe because my brain is too occupied with the difficult and tedious protocols of human interaction. What I really feel doesn’t catch up until later.

It wasn’t until a few minutes after he’d walked out that I thought about what it must be like to be old. I wondered if the old-people habit of talking too much and overexplaining– a habit I share myself, I realise even now– stems from a perceived position of authority, or if maybe the fucking guy was just lonely and wanted to talk to someone. I’ve read a lot of books, and I can imagine a lot of things. I can imagine sitting at home alone, because I do that. I can imagine thinking that young people, who nod and smile at you but whose eyes gleam with suppressed aggravation, are a bunch of little bastards. I do that, too. I can’t imagine having kids.  I thought about his daughter after that old man walked out, and I wondered if she treated him like a burden, if she rolled her eyes and sighed at him  and, “Yes, dad, I’ll come get you. What do you mean you don’t know where you are? Look at the fucking street sign. Okay, I’ll be there in a few. Stupid old bastard. Should have him put in a fucking home.”

Maybe that’s not how his daughter treats him. It could be she’s a perfectly nice lady and that she did, in fact, get him that engineering notebook seven years ago. Things slip your mind as you get old. Your brain doesn’t work so well anymore. Your body either. Your hip hurts, your feet hurts, hell, your everything hurts. You’re looking down the wrong end of a spyglass with your life seeming very small in the other end. We hate old people for lots of reasons. They’re slow, they’re fussy, they talk and talk– and they remind us of what we have to look forward to. I don’t mind the thought of being old so much, but I definitely mind the thought of what comes after that. I can’t imagine having it stare me in the face every day, the face I recognise only because it’s changed with me over the years, a face I can still remember as relatively smooth and unlined. I don’t want to think about it.

And that’s the trouble with stories. It’s frustrating when you want so much for things to keep going, and it’s surprising when things seem to go on so intently that you have to run to catch up. Once you have one, you kind of have to follow it. Sometimes it goes places that you don’t want to go.

I am really bad at this

It occurred to me today, after having started another… I can’t bring myself to say the word… another thing, that rather than doing the whole played-out angry rant thing, I should go back to writing about what I think about the most: writing. I’m not very good at keeping this sort of thing up. I have a very short attention span, and without any sort of two-way communication, it feels a bit like shouting into the void. But it does help me to order my thoughts, and there are conclusions I reach only after I’ve spent a few hundred words on the thoughts that lead up to them. So I’m giving this another go.

Mister Smith never ended up going anywhere; I’d forgotten about it completely until just now, when I read my “about” page to find out just what the hell I’d put in there. The untitled novel is still “finished,” if by finished we mean, “Goddammit, I’m going to have to write more.” It’s good, really good in places, but it’s missing something that I have as yet been unable to produce. I’m torn between thinking it’s one of those things that isn’t going to come to me until the time is right and wondering just how long I can fuss over a manuscript before it’s ruined.

I keep coming up with ideas for shorts and not following through. I’ve always had trouble limiting stories to a few pages, but it’s becoming a problem. Shorts are more likely to sell than novels, at least that’s what I hear, and I’d like to get a few credits under my belt before I flog anything longer. More than “I’d like to,” it’s a really good idea. I know that my chances of publishing are about nil without either an agent or a credit or two (both would be ideal), so I should work on both of these things.

On the plus side, I’ve gotten back in the clichéd saddle with my newest story, which somehow became a book when I wasn’t looking. I’m wary of the term “urban fantasy,” because to me it evokes shades of Neil Gaiman, but that seems the best way to describe it. Slightly supernatural, but less concerned with the doings of demons and pixies than with human beings. Now if only I knew what the hell exactly was going on in it. You’d think that by 115 pages I would know, but no. Just goes to show that writers usually don’t have the first clue what they’re doing. The ones who say they do are full of it.

Wait, is that it?

I am slightly suspicious of this thing which I call ‘being finished.’ Could it be? At somewhere around 90,000 words, could I possibly be done with this thing that’s dogged me since October?

Since I’m still awaiting the judgment of my Constant Reader, I guess it’s just as well that I don’t feel finished. I always have the terrible suspicion after I send her a segment that she’s going to tell me it’s complete crap, and how dare I think I can end the book that way? Mostly because she’s always right about that sort of thing.

I still have a lot more work to go. It’s taken me nine months to write this book (no pregnancy jokes, please), which is a year and three months faster than the last one took. Five or six years ago. Now it’s time to let the manuscript settle, to let the words and phrases and characters seep out of my brain like every other piece of information does, so that I can look at it in a couple of months with new eyes. Hopefully in the confines of a new flat in a new country. Time will tell.

On Chesil Beach

I love Ian McEwan, but there were lots of things about that book that bothered me. Not the sexual issues so much (those, I thought, were spot on) as the smaller things, like the fact that there was this constant tone of THE YEAR WAS 1962, BEFORE SEX WAS INVENTED. Yes, we get it, there’s a major cultural shift coming, but constantly reminding the reader of it really made it difficult to stay in the story. I don’t think it was necessary to beat the reader over the head with the period, because really, that sort of awkwardness and failure is still pretty common (especially amongst people who wait until they’re married, I would wager). It’s like McEwan wanted to blame their sexual failures on the era they grew up in or on their families or on vaguely mysterious childhood traumas instead of the simple fact that they were human beings who were getting mixed signals about sex their entire lives. Especially poor Florence.

I’d be very interested to know what a guy would make of the book, because obviously my sympathies lay with Florence. Raised from a young age to believe that “good girls” don’t have sex before marriage, it became this kind of terrifying spectre that loomed over her life. Sex with your husband is good and great, but don’t you dare have it before then! And remember that you have to make him feel good (never mind about her pleasure) and make him feel like he’s done a good job, whether he has or not. I find it interesting that Florence got herself a manual whereas Edward’s only thought was for what he was going to feel and how great it was going to be, not how to go about it. Edward expected a miracle, whereas Florence expected hell. Neither of them got what they expected.

What’s depressing is that I think some of those ideas are still fairly prevalent. Edward isn’t thinking of how (in the literal sense– I don’t mean his fantasies of mutual bliss) he can make her feel good; he’s thinking about how soon he can possibly get to that fabled land called Orgasm. Everything– the wedding, the honeymoon dinner, the touching– it’s all just a prelude to penetration, and moreover his self-worth hinges on being able to hold off his own orgasm for some unspecified period of time. And the assumption is that Florence will enjoy it simply by dint of being involved. We can see how well that turns out. Because of their fucked-up ideas about sex, his failure becomes hers, and they blame each other for it.

I didn’t like the ending, not so much because I thought it wasn’t right, but because it would have been so easy, if one of them had only let go of his or her presumptions, for them to have reconciled. I was indignant that instead of making any effort to understand each other, they simply walked away. I also didn’t like the allusion to paternal abuse. It seemed unnecessary. It felt like McEwan was looking for a simple explanation, something pat, and that’s one of my pet peeves when it comes to characterisation. Sometimes people are the way they are for complex reasons that work together in ways we don’t understand. Not every personality flaw has to be the result of one particular thing. It oversimplifies, in my opinion, and reduces people down to a misleading idea: a mental illness, a childhood trauma, a bad relationship. (There’s also the implication that women who are ‘frigid’ are that way because there’s something ‘wrong’ with them. I don’t think that was McEwan’s intention, but nonetheless, as a woman and a feminist, I find it insulting that apprehension about sex or outright fear of it is caused by anything except years and years of careful societal brainwashing. End digression.)

I also didn’t understand why McEwan focused on Edward at the end and filtered Florence’s accomplishments through his lens. I might need to reread the last few pages to try to understand what his intent was in doing so. Perhaps it was to emphasise that Edward seemed to have regrets about it, whereas Florence… er, flourished.

This is definitely not my favourite of McEwan’s, but I think it serves as an excellent example of how badly things can go wrong when two people enter into a relationship with unrealistic expectations and then completely fail to communicate meaningfully with each other. If I were Boss of the World, I would definitely make this required reading simply because of that.

The currency of communication

There’s a peculiar sort of mood that comes over me when I read, a deep sort of thoughtfulness that’s the older sibling to my usual tail-chasing navel gazing. I can’t quite put my finger on what it is, except to say that somehow after I read something, things feel more ordered. There’s a way stories have of making you feel like the world isn’t quite so confusing, that life isn’t just a mess of coincidences and accidents and deliberate misdeeds. For a moment, in a story, there’s truth. The world is a certain way, and you leave that world with a sense of settlement. Words have a particular order, sentences have a logic and a structure that you can’t really change without making yourself incomprehensible. Everything makes sense when you read it, even if it really isn’t sensible at all. For a little while you can think in paragraphs and dialogue tags and nouns and verbs and adjectives, and that gives a sense of order to the jumbled mess of your brain. It combs out the tangle of synapses into a cord you can weave together, if you’ve got the right tools. It makes the incoherent coherent, and it describes just as much as you need to see the story while letting you imagine what ought to be left unsaid.

Words are order. They are the building block of consciousness that can be understood and interpreted; they are a way to make what is intangible tangible, and they are the only thing that can really express what you want to express. You can paint a picture, but you will want to describe it to someone. Words are required. You will see a sunset, but only words can convey it to someone who was not there. You can feel, taste, hear, see, and smell anything without words; your mind exists in a place that is not governed by grammar or language, but you are alone in your senses unless you have words to express them with. Words are representations of everything that exists, has ever existed, and will ever exist. They are the currency of human experience, and they are how we pay our way with each other.

Never mind April

February is the cruelest month. I’m 2/3 of the way to my target and stuck in a rut. Fortunately, it’s nothing to do with the story itself (which is coming along nicely) and everything to do with seasonal depression. I’m ready for spring.