Quick Whit

On the Bandwagon

Welcome to the inevitable Seahawks post.  Yes, we’re going to the Super Bowl.  Again.  And we really couldn’t. be. happier.  Not if one-thousand days of sunshine overtook the always-cloudy skies, nope we wouldn’t be happier.  Because it’s in the water here, a love for the Seahawks.

 

I posted some relatively obnoxious (by my standards) pictures to my Facebook page during the game this weekend – I was all decked out in Seahawks gear.  The shirt, the tuke (look it up:  it’s Canadian), a lime green scarf and nails, and of course, a faceful of temporary tattoos.  Appropriately, my best friend commented, who are you and what have you done with my best friend?

 

You see, I’m not known to be much of a sports fan.  Growing up, I thought that learning sports was by far a less worthy time investment than, say, learning the arts.  You can imagine, then, how I felt about watching sports.  Waste of time.  Not for me.  Granted, in high school, I enjoyed a few basketball games very much, watching the action over my shoulder while I conducted the pep band most of the time.  But all in all, I had no warm feelings toward the game, and by extension, toward sports.

 

But then again, before last February, I had never lived in a town with a professional team of any kind (except hockey).

 

Enter 2014 and my big move to Seattle.  I buy a house here and the Hawks win their first Super Bowl.  Eleven and a half months after moving here, they’ll be playing in yet another Super Bowl.  Every grocery store, street corner, and storefront with even the slightest self-respect is colored blue and lime (or, shall we say, “Seahawks green?”) – even the homeless woman who begs down the street from my house decorated the tree next to her with a Twelve flag and sported a Seahawks cap this weekend!

 

At the risk of upending my entire reputation, I have to admit, it’s fun.  It’s fun to feel part of a home team.  Maybe because Seattle is such a hard place to live – with it’s sunless days, gut-wrenching traffic, and obstacles to making friends – having a team to rally around means so much to me.  Maybe because, until now, the only winning football team I ever spent any time around was the Boise State Broncos, and as a University of Idaho Vandal, I am strictly opposed to all-things-Bronco on moral grounds.  And so, now I can’t help it:  it is fun to be on the bandwagon.  Besides, to see a major metropolitan area come together for anything is nothing short of spectacular.

 

And while I still think arts are a more worthy endeavor than sports, I no longer believe one has to exclude the other.  Go Hawks!

Meetup

This morning, I participated in my first writing group.  I decided during my first draft to keep my writing strictly to myself, thereby giving me the freedom to put thoughts on a page without making myself vulnerable to criticism.  My strategy was two-fold:  on the surface, it prevented me from getting stuck reworking only certain passages (based on feedback) before fully completing the initial conceptualization of the book; underneath, it prevented me from giving up on the whole project before it was done, out of discouragement.  I am glad I made this decision, in part because it accomplished both goals, but more importantly, because my rewrite is already one-hundred times better than my draft!  Even the rewrite needs work – lots of it – but one thing is certain:  I hope my first draft never sees the light of day.

 

The writing group proved to be a good one.  Organized via Meetup just last week, it offers a format where writers read from their work for about ten minutes and receive immediate feedback from the other writers present.  Three of us showed up today, and I can say with confidence that we were a talented group.  One participant wrote with such clarity and directness that it felt perhaps like wearing reading glasses for the first time, if I needed them.  The other wrote with such presence that, even in the din of the coffee shop, I could see what her character saw and feel what her character felt.  Both demanded of me to be a better writer just by nature of their own work, and from them I gleaned powerful insights.  I will be attending this group again.

 

Over the years, every author I've met or read about mentions that writing a book is a community effort.  I never really believed them, though.  What a cute thing to tell your audience, I would think.  But now I’m beginning to realize how true it is.  Sure, writing the first draft as an insular artist gave me the cocoon I needed to start, but I don’t have enough tools in my own arsenal to see this project to its successful completion.  Not yet.  But I can learn.  With the help of other writers, other artists, other dreamers, and a handful of experts, I can make this book into what I want to it be.

 

Thank you, Meetup group!

The Luminaries

I just can’t contain myself, I have to tell you.  I’m reading the funnest book right now.  (What?  You say “funnest” isn’t a word?)  It won the Booker Prize in 2013, it’s more than 800 pages long, it’s written in a high-Victorian/nineteenth-century tone… Basically, it’s a lot of things that might make a person think it couldn’t possibly be as much fun as it is.  And maybe it will change, but I'm already 400 pages along and I haven't stopped having a great time.  If I didn’t enjoy it so much, why, I might sit down and read it straight through, finishing sometime in the wee hours of tomorrow morning, but I want it to last.  I want it to keep inspiring me, because what’s even more fun is that the author is the youngest person to ever have won the Booker Prize.  She’s also a woman.  Hence, inspiring.

 

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m on a mission to read as many Booker Prize winners as I can this year.  I’ve never disliked a Booker Prize book, not even the runners up.  Yet.  If Life of Pi isn’t enough to convince a person that these books are a list worth reading, then I dare you to read 2014 runner-up We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves and tell me what you think.  DO NOT READ ANYTHING ABOUT THIS BOOK BEFORE READING IT.  Don’t read the back cover, don’t read the reviews, don’t listen to anyone telling you anything about it, just trust me that it’s SO MUCH FUN and thank me later.  (That’s exactly what my best friend did when I gave her the book for Christmas with a note blocking the summary on the back cover.)

 

There are plenty of heart-wrenching, prose-swimming novels amongst the winners of the Prize, and I love them equally.  My favorite book of all time, The God of Small Things, falls into this category, as does last year’s winner (which I can’t stop raving about), The Narrow Road to the Deep North.  I even loved Midnight’s Children, the 1981 winner that I found worn to shreds at a bookstore years ago.

 

I should stop and tell you right now that no author in the US-born author has ever won the Prize.  This has more to do with the contest's rules than any lack of talent here, but last year, the rules changed:  for the first time, US authors were allowed to compete.  As we know, the Australian won, but it’s 2015 now and no doubt there will be some excellent US-authored books entered this time around.  What a [nerdy] watershed moment it will be when my country takes the prize.

 

Back to The Luminaries, this book I’m currently devouring, carefully.  The author takes 360 pages just to set up the turn of events that sets the book in motion, just to introduce the main characters (of whom there are many), and really, just to explain what happens at one, single meeting!  And I still love it?  Yes!  She helps her readers along, repeating things that are important and even summing up what she spent 350 pages laying out – that way no one gets too lost.  But the getting lost is seriously half the fun.  What is going to happen?  One person is dead, one almost died, one another vanished, and another appeared out of seemingly nowhere.  Thirteen men are trying to figure out why the events seem so interrelated.  There are astrological charts at the beginning of each section and I have no idea what they mean.  I just can’t wait to figure it all out!  (I am salivating right now.)

 

I may never be an Eleanor Catton, but I can surely allow her to be my muse for a while.

The Rewrite is Still Slow

Rewriting a novel is painful, folks. It is an absolute slog, a war between the limits of time, talents, and perfection. Today, I am three weeks into my rewrite and I’ve managed to produce just thirty-five typewritten pages of material, which I suppose isn’t terrible once I account for seven lost days during the course of the holidays. If I whittle it down to two weeks of work, though, it amounts to a bit more than seventeen pages per week – less than three pages daily. Should I keep such a pace, I won’t be done with the rewrite until early April at best, and frankly, I’m not sure I have the energy make it that long.

 

What takes so much time, you might ask? Why is the rewrite so different from the first draft? I’m not just checking the material for typos and grammatical errors, but rather rewriting the book in a very literal sense. Using the first draft merely as a guide and somewhat as an organizer, I am rewriting, restructuring, reordering, adding to, and subtracting from every single paragraph in the document. Every scene has to have meaning and has to gel with the whole, justify the ending, add to the story or out the window it goes, no matter how much I enjoyed the scene on its own merits. This makes sense when a person is writing fiction; I’m working with mostly non-fiction, however, and so my challenge is to balance this fierce drive for unification with the need for authenticity – the story has to remain largely intact whether it makes sense or not.

 

Add to my challenge the rewarding but difficult task of trying to envision what a generally closed, long dead character might have been thinking seventy years ago. My book is not a war book, though it happens during a war and because of it. My book is a story of character and hopes and dreams and realities – a story I am hardly capable of fully imagining given the limits of my own personal experience and depth. And so, I have to rely on the ever-elusive will of the Universe – the muse that guides artists of all kinds. And she happens to be fairly fickle.

 

Progress may be slow but it’s steady, at least. Once in a while, I even produce something I don’t hate. Check this out:

This wasn’t the first time I felt cheated by life, and it wouldn’t be the last. Perhaps a sense of unjust deprivation is inherited, as a gene, from father to son or mother to daughter, marking a family in the way that a nose does, or a forehead, for Dad certainly endured no shortage of such trials. Even as a child, I bore witness to multiple occasions on which opportunities, advantages, and luck gave out on him before his will was fully spent.

After we lost the White House, Dad moved us to the Jacob Place and then twice more before giving up on Declo forever. The beginning of the Great Depression lurked everywhere but no one could see it, least of all a man like my father. He would attribute our hard times to luck, curse his lack of it, and swear that it would change sooner or later. It had to. If luck can run out, he reasoned, so could unluck. And his was poised to expire any old day.

Looking Back, and What's Next

This year has long been hailed as the one that would bring an end to the Recession, and while at first, I feared we’d been promised yet another false recovery, by now, I think the predictions were right.  Hiring seems to be up, at least here in Seattle, and spending too – if spending can be judged by a Costco, I’ll confess that the traffic jam in its parking lot today scared me out of shopping at all.  And gas prices?  Need I say gas prices?

 

Anyway, I am no economist nor should I pretend to be.  Here’s what I know about 2014 – for a lot of people, it signaled change.  Many of my friends, including my husband and I, bought homes this year.  Some bought cars.  Even more changed jobs, got promotions, or saw a raise or a bonus for the first time in a while (some can even check “all of the above!”).  A few had babies, got married, retired, and most traveled, though maybe not as far as before.  As the economy picked up speed, it brought opportunities for movement, and those poised to jump took their chances.

 

As lucky as I was to avoid the Recession – never since the crash in 2008 finding myself without a job for more than six weeks, and managing to increase my savings, travel, and buy a house in the meantime – I began to fear this summer that the economy was finally catching up to me.  I interviewed at half a dozen jobs and landed zero job offers.  “This is normal,” people told me, except that 2014 wasn’t supposed to be like this.  But at the back of my mind, something bigger brewed, something that had simmered for decades:  the desire to write a book.

 

And so, with the support of some amazing friends and family members, I leapt into the wide open abyss of joblessness and dug into that desire, producing a first draft earlier this month and now fermenting it into a second.  Most of me is still surprised I did it, I actually did it.  And the process is shining new light on what to do next.

 

Next, I say?  2015?  That year that begins in just a few hours?

 

Next will include more reading:  I will commute to my next job by bus, if I can, and use that time to keep reading.  My husband gave me six Man Booker Prize books for Christmas and my Birthday, and all demand my attention in the new year.

 

Next will include more writing:  even if I can’t do it full time, or even part time as my savings account dries up, I can work it into my day in little slices.  I know how to do this now.  And I know it works.  But I also know if I stop for too long, I might never pick it up again, and so I must keep writing.

 

Next will include less news:  for someone as politically active and current-event-righteous as I’ve been for the past several years, I’m embarrassed to say I’ve followed the news only lightly since leaving my job this fall.  I miss having well-informed opinions, but not as much as I relish the peace I draw from not giving the news too much of my attention.  So next year, I will work to strike a balance between keeping up with the world and keeping up my spirits.

 

Next will include less divisiveness:  I remember when I first entered politics, I found partisanship to be hokey and nauseating, like a self-important form of religion.  Over time, though, I drank the Kool-Aid too, and now I recognize in me much of the same brittleness that I thought ridiculous then.  How to soften, I’m not sure, but I imagine distance is helping.

 

Next will include more adventures:  bring ‘em on 2015!

Step-Parenting in a Time of Christmas

As if this Christmas season couldn’t feel any more weird, I’ve been fighting feelings that Christmas is already over, even as last week I fought feelings that it had snuck up too fast.  Here it is Christmas Eve and, even in spite of a quick walk through the South Center Mall, filled with Christmas lights and carols, I could have sworn it was already Boxing Day.  Why the confusion?  Well, because we celebrated a big chunk of Christmas on Sunday.

 

Most of you probably know that I inherited not only a husband but a daughter when I married last year.  She is a whirlwind of fun, going on seven years old, and we have a surprising amount in common.  As with other split families around the world, we divide the holidays with her mother, alternating Thanksgivings and Christmases year after year.  This can be fun – every other holiday, we have the option of skipping festivities and traveling instead, free of familial obligations.  But it can also be strange, even sad.  For even though my husband and I reserved the bulk of our presents to each other to be opened on Christmas, anyone who has spent any amount of time around children knows that the true meaning of Christmas is the delight of a child.  And we spent our delight with her on Sunday.

 

What a delight it was!  Full of my mother’s genes, I awoke before six o’clock on “Christmas” and snuck downstairs to plug in all the lights.  The house glistened.  I turned on some soft Christmas tunes, made some tea, then snuck upstairs to wake my step-daughter and put her to work pouncing on her father.  Then, converging on the Christmasy scene downstairs, we opened gifts, allowing her to open most of them since we were preserving ours until later.  And by the time it was over, she busied herself constructing a Barbie landscape under the Christmas tree while my husband and I cooked a big pancake breakfast.

 

The lights stayed on all day and so did the music.  We even Facetimed and Skyped our parents.  Celebrating an awesome Seahawks win, we went to bed that night with every sensation that Christmas had come and gone. 

 

Then we woke up to the 22^nd.  And the 23^rd.  We watched Christmas Vacation, and it helped a bit with the Christmas spirit, but everything still felt somehow spent.  I’d write it all off as a strange and sad quirk of step-parenting but you know what?  By tonight, I think I’ll be back in the full Christmas swing, and that can only mean one thing:  TWO CHRISTMASES.

 

There are perks to step-parenting after all.

 

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Spoiler #1

Unsure what to write about today, maybe it is time to reveal some of my book.  I swore my first draft to secrecy, thereby freeing myself of the types of criticism that might kill my momentum, but now that I’m at work on the rewrite, I suppose it is time to build up a tolerance for sharing it publicly.  Gulp*.

 

Here is a paragraph I wrote last week.  In it, my Grandpa’s family had just moved from a moderate-sized house on several acres of land into a small house on Main Street.  Throughout Grandpa’s childhood, his father would fall victim to plummeting commodity prices due to oversupply in the agricultural sector, causing him to lose leases on multiple homes even before the stock market crash of 1929.  Their situation was in no way unique.

 

As it happened, the neighbor with whom we shared a fence had endured similar financial struggles, landing his family of teenaged boys in town after a decade living on a farm south of town.  Like us, their family hadn’t yet grown accustomed to the cramped lifestyle of a neighborhood which is why, I suppose, they found it perfectly sensible to build a large slash pile in their backyard, shaped into a heaping bulk over the course of the winter.  Perhaps this rural mindset is also why they expected no trouble when they decided one April afternoon, the first warm day of the year, to set that slash pile on fire right there, in the middle of town.

 

You can imagine what might happen next.

 

So tell me:  how is the writing?  Is it simple enough but also descriptive enough?  Is it arrogant (I hate arrogant authors)?  Would you sit through 300 pages of this stuff?

 

Here's hoping.

'Tis the Season

Christmastime is different when working from home.  I find it ridiculous that it’s only a week away, Christmas, and a week after that, 2015.  Usually this time of year is full of parties and well wishes at work, every gathering, meeting, or conference infused with the reds and greens of holiday cheer.  Instead, my writing is nearly the same, though slower (due to the rewrite) and more interrupted (due to the holidays).  I made sure to overdo the decorations here at home – no one can suggest I would feel more Christmasy if I put up some lights because I’ve put up no less than eighteen strands of them inside and out.  And still, it feels strange, like a half-Christmas, a false end to the year with more 2014 just concealed behind it.

 

Time passes even though my days seem very much like each other, one after the next, pacing myself through my book project.  This works fine in months like November and January, where a race through the calendar makes sense, but not at Christmas.  No, I should be painfully feeling each and every minute, longing for the break at the end of the long work slog, relishing in each meeting’s opening by asking, “what are you doing for the holidays this year?” and dashing to the post office at the very last second because there are no seconds left even though I didn’t procrastinate at all.  Instead, my Christmas shopping is done early, my gifts to other states are in the mail, I even shared some food with a homeless man down the street, but it doesn’t feel like Christmas, not even with carols blasting from the stereo by my kitchen.

 

And so it is that my new life is a bit like Christmas every single day, for what would I want to do with a week off work for the holidays if not read novel after novel and write stories on the side?  In that case, I would take this little bit of Christmas everyday and sacrifice the blood-pumping rush of the season over feeling plenty of Christmas spirit during the holidays but a hollow desperation afterward.

 

My writing days can’t last forever but I am still managing to love each and every one of them.

The Rewrite

Here I am at Day Two of the rewrite and I must say:  the process is totally different from how I wrote the first draft.  It feels slower, much more laborious, and I’m taking the time to read and re-read what I’ve written as I go to get it as close to perfect as I can.  My energy depletes more quickly.  I’m beginning to think I will need to work in multiple small bursts throughout the day, rather than one 90-minute segment in the morning and another 60-minute one in the afternoon.  But I will need to tinker with my schedule a bit to figure out how to make it work.

 

My writing has improved significantly since I started in October.  I am beginning to understand what authors mean when they say, “the rewrite is the real-write.”  My first draft already feels more like a journaling exercise than a literary work even though I did very little of it in chronological order.  When I told people the rewrite needed to “add magic,” I meant it – the first draft lacks it almost entirely.  But already, the magic is happening.  Now that I know how the story ends, it’s easier to figure out what it’s about, and now that I’m getting an idea of what it’s about, I can infuse every paragraph with an extra level of meaning and/or coherence.

 

What do I mean?  Isn’t my book about my Grandpa’s World War II experiences?  Yes, yes it is.  But I’m not writing just an adventure book.  I want to offer readers more than planes being shot down, but it hasn’t been easy deciding what else to say.  Since finishing the draft Thursday, though, I’ve had three distinct insights on what it will be about, and while you’ll just have to read the book to find out what those are, for now I can tell you that the story is about the will to go on. The Will to Go On.

 

What the heck is that?

 

Well, I’m not entirely sure yet, and I dare say that I am an expert in neither “will” nor “going on,” being constantly tempted to give up when I get frustrated.  But that’s the “magic” I keep talking about:  reaching down deep and pulling out lessons that startle me as much as they might startle anyone else.  Writing is awesome.

Finished!

Today is my Grandfather’s birthday.  Had he not passed on to the other side of the life-death fence more than thirteen years ago, he’d turn 96 today.  Amazing, then, that I would finish writing my first draft of his story on this very day.

 

Fourteen chapters; 243 Word Doc pages; 117,000 words; 498,000 characters.  All that’s left now are eight or nine [not insignificant] research gaps, details needed, and a rewrite before I decide whether it’s worth anything.  Today, though, I can celebrate because as often as I’ve tried to finish a book (this is my third honest attempt), I’ve never actually managed to do so until today.  I wasn’t sure I had it in me.  I’m a quitter, some say, I don’t follow through, others say.  To them, I can now point to a thumb drive and answer, “You might be wrong.”