In a Locked Room

Well I just sent Murmurs to its first market. It's a tough one so I'm fully expecting the rejection slip in the next two days. The important thing is that the seal has been broken. And this time I'm sending this short story to at least seven markets. I think the most I've ever sent a story out is four times, which I know is crazy, but I'm getting better. (When I first started out I could only send a short story out once. Yes, I hate rejection, why do you ask?)

In other news, this weekend I did all the things and went to all the places. Wasn't high on the fun quotient, but I have this odd pleased feeling at accomplishing things. Plus I made tomorrow's dinner tonight so that I won't have to bother with cooking tomorrow. Now to survive Holy Week. Hope everything is going well for you!

I've finished reading The Years by Virginia Woolf and I find myself conflicted on what to say. On the one hand it is Woolf at her prime, crafting sentences that make me want to weep with how beautiful and true and right they are. And yet there is something unfinished about this work, a diffuse sensation that while I know is intended gives the sense of lingering, which makes it harder to draw conclusions.

I think what was interesting about reading this novel was how Woolf tried to do two completely opposite things at the same time. In Woolf's diaries she mentions how with The Years she wanted meld the granite and rainbow of fiction writing. Granite is a factual relaying of events, with all conclusions as to the interior and internal motivations left to the reader deduce. Rainbow is the vision writing, to explore the internal life and capture the way that events can become so much more, more intimate, more universal, more alive through this filter. These approaches are almost diametrically opposed, but in The Years Woolf tried to find the perfect balance between the two, and I think in some sense I think she succeeded.

The book is broken up into year increments, and inside those year sections are individual scenes with various members of the Pargiter family as the move through time from a Victorian society to a post WWI, modern British society. And the social commentary is so subtle as to be almost completely invisible unless you stop and think about what Woolf was saying about the role of people, of class, gender, and to a limited extent race, and how these roles changed over the years, what freedoms were gained, and what society left behind.

Woolf crafts these scenes so that they are almost always in media res and they end in media res without resolution. And it is in these unfinished scenes between the characters which echo out through time across the book that the true beauty of the novel is experienced. Because it's exactly what life is, these fragile conversations where two people try to connect, sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing, and the ever present past lingering over every word and action.

As someone who has a million thoughts in my mind and always wants to say them, I love how Woolf captures the interior monologue of people striving to connect to others. I also have to say that I want to be Eleanor when I'm 70, going to wonderful parties with loved ones and staying up till dawn with my face sunburnt from my trip to India. And the fact that she goes from the caretaker of the family to this grand adventurer somehow seems so much more progressive of an arc for a woman than most books even written today. Eleanor doesn't get shuffled off to the side just because she turns 40. In fact the most interesting part of her life doesn't really start until after she's 40.

I do have to say, though, that I didn't feel that this novel was as polished or accomplished as some of Woolf's other later novels. But I think this was due to her decision to shift her writing style. She was consciously trying to grow herself as a writer with this work, to move from tapping into the pure flow of vision and into the everyday experience of life. The bravery it must take to go back and retool a skill set so finely honed, I can't even imagine and I can only applaud her commitment to her craft.

And really, it's not like this is an inferior novel. She was successful to a large degree with the impossible task she had set out for herself, as seen by the popularity of the novel, her most popular work while she was alive. I think this was because people responded to the honesty in the text, the honesty of the experience of uncertainty and longing and beauty and hope Woolf was able to capture.

I love the ending and I think that it's right. The "what now" question of Eleanor, the desire to know what's next is life. There's always the next turn, the next day that follows with more, more happiness, sorrow, and life. And that's what I love Woolf, her willingness to embrace all that it offers the tremendous and the awful.

I'm just sad that this is one more book down. Next up is Between the Acts her last book.

Well, I guess you could call that a finish. I got to the end of Sonata last night, but the ending needs a lot of work. Actually it's everything before the ending that needs work so that my ending will work.

This is one of the most structurally complex short stories I've ever written and now that I'm finished, I can see all the places where I need to add or take away or just plain clean up. It's a weird feeling, this zero draft sensation. On the one hand, I'm damn proud to have written another story. On the other hand, I'm daunted by the thought of trying to unravel this puppy so that it will make sense to someone else. And since I'm a skiffy writer, on the third hand, I'm sorta excited to get back in there and fix it. I really enjoyed writing from Kepler's head space and the plot was pretty forward moving (which as most of you know, is not my normal state.)

So yeah, all of those things and more rolled up into a sigh and thank goodness.

Reading Virginia Woolf is such a balm for me. It's something in her authorial voice, so calm, so steady, so willing to see the world as it is but not deny it the moments of beauty. I find whenever I am wrung out from life nothing is better than a cup of tea and one of her books.

I am nearing the end of The Years, and as with all her books, I am both thrilled to see how the story resolves and dreading it being over. I wish her stories could go on forever with their keen observations of character and life and connections of every part of life that are realized at both a random and the most perfect time.

Most of all, I appreciate the hunger in her text to truly live life. To push beyond the surface interactions and find the source beneath the pleasant hellos and how are yous, and what have you been doing. I always feel reminded, gently, when I read her books to stop playing a part and act with intent to enjoy my life.

I'll write up a review once I'm done (only 60 pages left) but I just wanted to make this quick note before the candle burns itself out that tonight has been a lovely, dark, wide night and that is due in no small part to the words of Woolf. Thank you, wherever you are.

Another navel gazing post on my writing process. Standard disclaimer of boring applies, feel free to skip:)

I think one of the most valuable aspects of experience (the whole million words of crap concept) is being able to recognize the different phases of my story writing process. Being able to know when taking a break is either necessary to develop the story or when I am being lazy or am I afraid of writing what comes next. I find it's usually one of these three suspects stopping me from finishing a story when I move out of the very middle of the story and into the end middle section sliding into the final section.

Knowing, as they say, is half the battle. Because each one is handled differently. If I honestly don't know where I'm going no amount of abc (apply butt to chair) is going to help. In fact it can destroy a story. I need to step back, get perspective and let the subconscious pull it out. However, if it's just me being lazy then it's all about the discipline of abc, and fighting for each and every word. And finally courage, well I haven't really come up with a sound strategy for that except to close one eye while writing so I don't have to see everything, and just keep moving.

As I'm coming to the close of my new short story, Sonata, I'm finding myself with a bit of all three problems.

I am very close to the end. I know that I have three more scenes to write. Of the three, two have a very strong shape in my head in terms of what happens and what that means to the story. In chronological order, those two scenes are the first scene of the ending sequence and the last scene of the ending sequence. I'm missing the bridge scene that shows the change and allows for the final decision in the last scene.

So in reality I should just write the first scene (overcome the lazy), and hope that in doing so scene 2 will come around (figure out where the hell I want to go) and with scene 2 in hand have the courage to pull of the ending I need to write but am not sure I am good enough to accomplish (courage, if only the wizard would step out from behind the curtain and hand me a medal).

Funny enough, writing this all down has made it seem so much more manageable than it was before.

Of course, this is also the part in the process where my brain tosses out other fantastic ideas for stories, any idea but except for the story I'm trying to finish. There are three that I want to write right now. Like right now.

One is this 50s noir feel but from the perspective of a woman investigator and not so much on the grit as on the oil smooth slick feel, think less Street Car Named Desire and more To Catch a Thief. It deals with concept of a person and all the roles they assume in their lives to interact with others.

The other is this burning desire to do a 60s feel story with slight overtones of bossanova, again with a slickness to it, but also that earnestness and sincerity and melancholy that exists in the sound of that time, like the soundtrack version of Moon River. My brain even came up with a way to tie these two stories together, but I'm not sure I'm ready to start developing a fictional universe playground yet. Then again it would be awesome to try my hand at some overarching themes, and when I have three fully formed characters and each wants a turn in center ring, why should I say no? ;)

The third story is another brutally honest fantasy story about dragons that came to me while watching the Artist's Den Adele special (it's free on hulu.com and excellent). It wasn't so much directly inspired by any of the lyrics but just one of those moments where a couple thoughts lined up in my brain and produced something very true and very painful but also very cathartic. It's weird because dragons have never been my mythic creature, you know? I mean don't get me wrong I don't mind them in stories, but they've never had the same visceral attraction for me as ruselkas or witches or ents/treants/living trees. But this story might be the one that moves them into that category for me. If I'm good enough to pull it off, of course.

But none of these will be written until Sonata is done. *Puts on serious face* It's go time, wish me luck.

I just finished reading my first Joan Didion book last night. Yes, I know, it’s taken me a while to get to one of our modern geniuses’ in American literature. But I made it and the book lived up to the hype.

The Last Thing He Wanted is a devastating book. Devastating in the exact way art should be devastating: true, deep, encompassing, open, and overwhelming you with emotion from your own life. And ironically this is done not with what is on the page but where the story leads you. It is as if Didion took fraught real human lives and let just the raw facts hang there, making the reader connect the dots and pull the emotion out of the text. Or that the emotion exploded once the connection was made.

Didion is beyond a talent. The one thing I kept thinking as reading this book was the concept Delaney lays out in the The Jewel Hinged Jaw (so need to finish that book).To paraphrase, a novel is actually one word that is then modified by the 69,999 words that follow it. I literally felt my perception about the story change with each sentence, sometimes each word. I love that feeling.

I won’t lie, most of the time I read fast. And by fast I mean I don’t register every word, especially if the work doesn’t demand it. Sometimes I can skip entire pages and miss out nothing because the story goes exactly where I thought it was going and no new information was conveyed.

(Aside: this frustrates me and my tolerance for it is going down like a Sugar Ray punch. Really writer, why would you waste an entire page with being exactly predictable and just going through the motions? I mean I understand that not everyone is capable of crafting intriguing text on the sentence level, and sometimes a paragraph is needed for a transition. But a whole page? You couldn’t work in a least one other aspect of story besides the point you have been banging about now for the whole chapter? Really?)

But Didion was able to hold me to every page, every paragraph, every sentence, because they all linked into each other so tightly that they could not be separated without losing the integrity of the story. Genius.

I did, however, have one issue with the novel. Actually, it’s an issue that I’ve been having now for a while and not unique to Didion. But I think it’s because everything else was so perfect for me in this novel, that this one issue leapt out. Simply put, why does everything have to be so fucking depressing? Why?

I mean seriously, I get it. Life is full of suffering, and we are imperfect creatures living in a imperfect world, and all these imperfections can rub up against each other and produce pain. But, and this is such a huge but, there are also moments of grace and beauty and happiness in this life. Why do these experiences get marked as not as real or deep, not as universal as broken people breaking even more?

Yes, I agree that treacle is awful. But you want to know what else is awful? Hopelessness. Change is possible, change is always happening and while things are lost, things are also gained, and there is always the possibility that things could get better.

Taking it down another level, I want a work that speaks to the truth of the injury. I don’t want to read something that denies that injuries happen, or if they do that they are just scratches that can be brushed off with a few right words. But I also don’t want stories that teach you that you carry the wounds forever in stasis, like a fly trapped in amber.

I want a story that teaches me how to heal, how to take the misfortunes in my life and through hard, persistent work pull out of them something transfigured and beautiful. I want to know that just because my life isn’t perfect, doesn’t mean that it isn’t worth living and that I can find some measure of happiness. I need to know that people die, but that people live, and its in that balance that real stories occur.

I need to read that it, I need to breathe that, and I need to write that. It’s the underlying hope that the world is not unremitting darkness. First I have to figure out how to find it.

The last two weeks have not been with the fun. And no, it wasn't some overwhelming event this time. Just a series of small horrible things that kept sucking the air out of my lungs. A lot of boils down to uncertainty. I have a lot of question marks in my life in substantial areas, and generally I do a pretty good job with keeping them locked away. But this month, even things I took for granted were thrown against the wall, leading to even more question marks. Which of course led to a general meltdown and me keeping one foot following after the other.

Luckily a long weekend of doing absolutely nothing (no seriously, I don't think I left pajamas for like two of the three days, it was glorious) my brain finally decided to check back in.

I've slowly started to pull it back together again this week. I've gone to bed before one for two nights in a row! And today I finally started the process to switch banks which I have been putting on hold for like 7 years (oh the joys of job-hopping and personal finance). I've just taken a "fuck-it" attitude. All these things can hang over my head like swords of damocles if they want. If I'm going to go, I'll go dancing.

And really, the question marks can only last so long. I just have to hold on, and when the answers finally come, there should be a life waiting there for them. Wow that got a bit heavy. Srsly though, I'm good.

In other news, I have fallen in love with fun.'s new album, "Some Nights". Its crazy musical theatre/Queen/hip-hop vibe is sweet music candy to my ears. Also progress has been made on the new short story. I am almost out of the beginning hell, which is made of excitement and joy. I can't wait to dive into the middle and really write about competent adult people. Ahh competence, how I wish I saw you more.

I leave you with this song by Sondheim from one of my favorite musicals:

Oh beginnings, how I loathe you. The start of any story is always the hardest part for me. I love middles, and by the time I reach the ending I'm ready to close the story down. But beginnings, beginnings drag on and on forever, waiting for me to find the right set of elements that will unlock the story.

I think it's because of the way I write. I need to have the feel of the story right before I can do anything else. Feel is the emotional heft, the internal landscape of the characters, the external landscape of the world in which the story is taking place, as well as the resonances in the plot that will make the story fulfilling for the reader. And all of this must be embedded in the first ten sentences of the story. It drives me bonkers.

Right now I have written two paragraphs of my new short story, let's just call it Sonata. The first paragraph works for me. It took five tries but I got it to the point that it feels right. The second, however, is a shapeless blob. Worse than that, it's sucking the life out of the story. It's trying to do all the work I've described above but without that underlying focus that makes stories thrilling to a reader. And it's so hard to bring all the disparate parts together at the beginning, to give the reader the necessary understanding so that they can form the rest of the story in their head as they read it while still entertaining them. (Really eat the brussel sprouts, they are soooo yummy! Trust me there is chocolate cake later but right now eat your vegetables)

Unfortunately, the only way out is through. So tonight, I will once more descend into the word mines and try to find that beginning ore. And to think, there are people out there who love beginnings. Inconceivable;)

Just found this cover of one of Elton John's greatest hits. It felt so right with the weather this morning. Outside is soft, grey, and an endless expanse of luminary clouds:

This year, the year of fun, I have decided to dive head first into the arcane world of loose leaf tea. I have been a tea drinker forever, armed with my bags of Stash, Twinings, Bigelow, and herbals from Celestial Seasonings. But I have been afraid of the loose leaf world. There were so many teas, so many varieties, so many different sources.

Well no more. With Upton tea, you can order samples for a fraction of the cost, some samples as cheap as $1 (each sample makes at least 5 cups of tea). Also I found this great device from Ingenuitea which makes brewing a cup of loose leaf tea a snap: http://www.amazon.com/Adagio-Teas-16-Ounce-Ingenuitea-Teapot/dp/B000FPN8TK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1327281162&sr=8-1

So since Christmas I've been a brewing fiend. To help me keep track of it all I'm starting this log of teas tried and my impressions:

1) Chung Gao Jasmine Green Tea: A solid Jasmine green tea but lacks both the depth of green tea that I like and the sweetness in the smell of jasmine. Not bad but not really great either.

2) Sweet Almond Green Tea: At first I didn't think I was going to like this one. The scent was very sweet, almost sickly sweet. But it brewed up lovely and the taste is a rich green which I always enjoy.

3) Vanilla Green Tea: The smell on this tea is absolutely fantastic but unfortunately the taste is very bland. I was really disappointed with this tea.

4) Mango Indica Black Tea: The tea is one of my favorites so far. It has a great scent, brews up to a magnificent red gold glow and tastes fantastic. Every person who I have brewed this tea for has loved it. Just an all around excellent tea.

5) Rose Congou Black Tea: Another excellent tea. The rose scent just hangs over everything and makes me feel so refined when I drink this tea. The taste isn't the strongest but it is a solid black tea.

6) Guangdong Dragon Phoenix Jasmine Green Pearl Tea: A very sophisticated green tea with a lot of different notes. The first time I brewed it too weak and the second time too strong so I don't feel like I can pass judgment on this yet, but I've enjoyed it and I can see why this is the favorite jasmine green tea on Upton.