Book almost done! ... Again ...

So my husband couldn't quite get as excited this time around when I'm jumping up and down telling me him I'm about done with the draft of the Persephone novel. Yep, because this is the FOURTH time, with a fresh new take on the old story, and my old versions. In this one, Perspehone lives in modern times and mythological drama ensues from there. But my husband won't be fooled again, because, yeah, the last ones went exactly... nowhere. I too have tempered my steam about finished product, locked and loaded and agent-hunt worthy. Because while with the last version I was all vim and vigor and misplaced surety, I look back now at it and think, hmm, yeah - it wasn't a bad story, but it wasn't like other things I read in the genre, and it definatly lacked voice, my catch-theme that I focused on with the latest version. Finally, it's first person, present time, teenage voice but not whiny. So I don't trust my own judgement, and don't quite know what to think of my novel, edging it's way towards completion.

But that never stopped me before! I think I should finish it in the next few days - it just has a few more scenes left, maybe 20 pages, and when I'm in go-mode, that gets pumped out. It will fall at a nice YA length, a little over 70,000 words. The rest is pretty polished, and I'll start querying agents again. I wouldn't call myself a glutton for punishment exactly - some of my bets have paid off like sending that random abstract for the conference and some of the short pieces I've published. Rejection doesn't drive me to despair, and, while you might want to punch me for my optimism, I feel like I've learned so much each time around and become such a better writer, I don't mind. And I do still have this vague indefatiguable confidence that I will get a book published eventually, if not this one, the next. Though I'm done with Persephone--if this version doesn't get picked up, I'll sow my seeds in a different story finally. Though who knows? Fourth time's a charm?

And here's a short story just published in Theaker's Quarterly Fiction. You can read it online, or order a print copy. My story, "Under the Blighted Tree" is kind of out there, but I wrote it after reading Goethe's Faust, and thinking about quest stories.

The Year in Retrospect

The cold weather has blown in (and I mean literally blown - the crazy hefts of wind have knocked over playscapes and a neighbors fence, not to mention stripping all the last of the stubborn fall leaves from the trees), and it makes me feel retrospective. Well, the whole Christmas season and upcoming New Year do, but the cold was like the last thing to click in place to remind me, wow, another year is finishing, and a new one starting. But January is the time to think about the newness - December is for remembering the old. Watching news shows recap 2009, I realize what a rough year it's been for our nation. Personally, it went from being horrible to being wonderful (last Jan I was working an office job and having health problems, by the end of the year I'm rockin' it and loving school).

It was definately a year that did NOT fly by, which is usually when things are new and exciting and one's world is opening up. That happened my first semester of undergrad - my first time out of the house, moved to Chicago, fell in love--those four months felt like a year. Likewise, my mind was stretched so much by the ideas I encountered in my first four months of grad school, I felt similarly like it couldn't have been just four months! And I've got the conference coming up, and waiting to hear back from a book anthology that is considering my essay proposal (the same Twilight paper as the conference), and then working on my own novel these past couple weeks since school has done - my world is opening up more and more and continuing to blossom. All the possibilities are thrilling, and I want to jump on every one of them, and wish I could be doing twenty things at once.

So thinking about the year in reflection is really amazing, because I had no clue I'd be at this place on the cusp of so much potentiality last December. And five years ago, I couldn't envision any future at all for myself, I was so horribly sick and incapacitated for months on end. At the time, I thought I'd be like that forever, that I'd never be able to hold a job or have any kind of professional career. I feel an awe and wonder about all the things I'm able to participate in now. And I don't mean to be cheesy or sound insincere when I say, and mean it, that I LOVE MY LIFE! Merry Christmas everybody, and a happy New Year.

Contemplating Theory is Turning Me Into an Insomniac Zombie...In A Good Way

I feel like completely vegetating all night and all weekend. Which I won't, because I've been like the intellectual energizer bunny lately - constantly working through these intese theoretical paradigms and working to apply them to my problem. I feel like I finally made some breakthroughs yesterday after struggling through this morass of psychoanalytic and semiotic critical texts so that I really have something innovative to say on paper that got accepted at an academic conference in Feb: The Hero in the Playground of the Id: An Inquiry into why Twilight is Popular.

But really, this is a philosophical inquiry that I've been working through over the past few years regarding my love for young adult literature - I feel like I'm finally tracing some of the threads of that attraction, and also, my own personal philosophy of the place of storytelling in one's personal and public life. Thinking and working through it all is LITERALLY keeping me up at night - I've had the worst insomnia because the idea-mill refuses to stop churning.

I went and saw New Moon this afternoon - luckily bought my tickets ahead of time because the ENTIRE day's shows were already sold out by 3pm. So I watched that, then feel like I have this overload of new data to incorperate with all that I've already been thinking about.
And I want to submit an alternate version of the paper to a book of academic essays about Twilight, so I've been trying to finalize that abstract. And I have a presentation due in another class this coming up Tuesday about three other theoretical frameworks - analyzing critical articles, identifying underlying theoretical base, and applying it to a Hemingway short story.

And what I really want to do is curl up and vegetate. Soak in, without contemplating. Just. Be. Without thinking about being, you know?

But then, what I really want is more time and energy because all of this is lighting my ass on fire to get cracking at my own YA novel (left in the dust now for a month) and enrich it with all this new shit I've been learning and feeling. The thing is - I LOVE everything that I'm doing - all the new things that I'm learning - I feel like it's been an explosion of contemplative exposure - my courses in literature have turned into courses about life, and seeing the world, and I'm completely fucking awed by it.

It's already that time in the semester...

when I start feeling bogged down and tired and I don't want to do it anymore! And it's not even halfway through. This is probably my pms and burgeoning cold talking, but still! I feel just after I finish reading the hours of reading for one week (literally, six hours of reading for one class last week), the week is over and it's time to start all over again! And this month is when I have two papers due and three presentations. And then at least November is calm again. But I don't want to be researching for papers - I want to be writing! I get so jealous for time to write, but this week, being so exhausted I've just been managing to keep up with school. Bleh.

Plus thinking about next year is getting intimidating. I have to take school full time in order to be a TA, so that's 9 hours (3 of which are thesis hours, but still!), being a TA, and writing my thesis! Coupled with my health problems, I'll barely be getting by, not to mention abandoning my extra-curricular writing all year. Which makes me want to finish the book THIS year. And who are we kidding - I'm Heather - I want to finish the book next week. Or yesterday. Which means finding time and energy to WRITE!

Whin-y whine, I know. I've got life good and easy, and when I don't have a cold anymore and the pms cramps are gone, I'll probably remember that.

Philosophy as Fiction: Is Life Meaningless?

Literature has the power of philosophy made plain, tied to human emotions and given a body. I’m reading the 6th in Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth series, and I am continually moved by it’s lengthy examination of the question: is life meaningless?

This is where Goodkind shows his true genius – not in his writing skills per se, but in examining and pushing the limits of human psyche in various fictive scenarios. With the last book, I was about to give up on the series – I don’t really care about movement of troops and battles. But this book, Faith of the Fallen, he has stepped back into the intimate of the human. Why do we do what we do? What is the point of continuing on? His answer, I think, is moving toward something I’ve thought similarly – meaning is found in relationships and the experience of loving and being loved.

This sounds like a trite answer on the face of it. It is, when it’s the knee-jerk response. Love is the reason for living and for hope – a common fictional tool – It’s the thing that saved Harry Potter and is otherwise commonly depicted as the only thing can ultimately overcome the greatest evil and power. It is so common we cannot see underneath the statement – the never-ending complexity of this answer.

The more I think on love, and experience it, the more I think of it as something magical, and by that I mean, it’s Other. Not grasped by reason, or even words adequately – the experience of it, like other physical sensations I can feel, but never describe, or have described to me in any way close to the actual experience of it. I’m not even talking about understanding it from biological and anthropological standpoints – the emotion of love as a series of chemical responses and electrical brain activity that maybe one day will be charted by computers. That won’t make it less real, because it is Other. It is a language that reason cannot understand. It simply IS.

Maybe one could try to explain in terms of evolution – that these feelings of attachment evolved as a way of keeping a family unit stable, of bonding a mother to care for her infant so as to promote the survival of the species. I’ve tried for a long time to understand why love is. But at the end of the day, I can only call it magic. Other. Something I experience in different ways at different times, and whatever makes love what it is, it's the reason for living.

Making Art Without "The Mood"

I was reminded again today that doing art is most often about working and practicing when the mood or inspiration isn't striking. It's about the day to day, as oft-quoted Jane Yolen put it, of "Butt In Chair". Writing and painting when you DON'T feel like it, practicing a craft to become great is just like atheletes working out for hours a day. Oh god, did I just use a sports metaphor? I hate sports metaphors, but you get the idea. Other people work hard hours practicing to become good at what they do, I don't know why we think art becomes "stiff" or "formalized" if you do it when not in the mood because there's a presupposition that it should be this magical process of some muse taking over our body and producing Art. Maybe it's just a lot of hard work. Maybe we use the tired phrase of needing "inspiration" as and excuse for procrastination. If I only wrote when a thunderstorm struck and I had the perfect cup of coffee while listening to the perfect piece of music for that shining moment when I was really "in it", I'd write maybe ten pages a year.

I'm trying to get into the discipline of writing a 1,000 words a day, or about 4-5 pages, but then again, I'm in the kick-it first draft writing phase right now, so it's the get-words-into-the-blank-pages kind of writing and play around to mold it later. Pages produced, in the right 'voice' (voice being the new Big Idea affecting my writing lately). I'd say that's my primary focus right now.

Oh, and you know, grad school. Which is starting to really rock my socks off, as far as the things I'm learning. The classes themselves are still not uber-great, but all the reading I'm doing is really awesome - pushing the boundaries on my thinking kind of stuff. Both classes are challenging me with new ways to see the world and humanity. I could go off on all this stuff, and maybe I will soon. But today I mainly just wanted to express the thought: making art has to be a discipline just like everything else. The discipline should certainly be mixed in with some love and ethos, but nothing will ever get done without Butt In Chair.

The Utopia That Was Not

So. Grad School. Let's just say that it's not what I thought it would be. Because the discussions that are had are not any more intelligent than undergrad... and, how do I put this delicately? the standard for academic excellence isn't set very high. Why, in grad school, am I still only required to write five-seven page papers? In both my classes. Aren't much longer papers supposed to be the standard - like 10-20 pages? Which would be hard, but that's the point - it's supposed to be a lot harder therefore making you push yourself to new levels. Because, you know, we should have a lot more to say about topics, more research, more analysis, I mean, freakin' A! I guess I just imagined grad school like this academic utopia where every one is really smart and dedicated, and not only DOES the reading, but tries to UNDERSTAND and analyze the reading in a meaningful way that promotes intelligent discussion. Isn't that the point? Where we are learning how to participate in the larger academic community of quality scholarship??? The answer is, maybe not at Texas State University. Time will tell.

In other news, I'm re-writing the novel I had been querying agents for. Really learning the ins and outs of how the market works, especially as regards to children's publishing, has been invaluable, and something i think only could have been done the hard way - i.e. writing a book, trying to sell it, understanding why its not selling, and not just being like - fucking publishers! don't realize GENIUS when they come across it! So. There are some problems with the book. The main one of which is "voice". I kept seeing this all over agent requirements - they don't care what the material is but only if it has strong voice. One agent put it simply, "Voice, voice, voice!" And me sitting there constantly seeing the phrase and idea pop up, was like, what the fuck is voice????? That was always one of those words I'd heard bandied around, and vaguely had an idea of meaning, but not specifically, and not enough to put my novel and my writing under the litmus test to discover if it had this elusive entity of "voice".

I'm finally kind of getting it. It's like tone, which is also hard for me to define, other than just saying - you know, how it feels, the vibe you get from reading it. But where the rubber meets the road - how the hell do you CREATE that feeling or tone? I've been writing seriously for four years now, written two and a half novels (two of which were about Persephone, trying different angles, but all completely different...and all shitty) and I still don't know exactly how to manipulate language to create the tone I want - though I'm finally learning. I've written thirty pages on the new novel, writing it as Persephone in the 21st century as a teenager - and I'm writing first person, plopped directly in her head, so that what is on the page are her thoughts and personality. And I think it's getting a vibe.

Also, it should be a much better sell when I start querying for it because it actually FITS. Unlike straight high fantasy, which the one I've had is. Urban fantasy, or at least starting from a relatable protagonist who is just like us, and then taking her to crazy places, is not going out of style anytime soon. It's kind of timeless - that starting in our world and then bringing in fantasy or surreal elements. Just ask Alice. And I'm writing with attention to voice for the first time, which is this wild paradigm shift that I've really needed to move forward with my writing. I'll still be querying and honing the old version in case I do catch interest somewhere, but I have a feeling it'll be the new version that starts that chapter in my life.