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Today at lunch I successfully tied together the massively revised first chapter with the rest of the novel. I need to work on that last transitional passage, but really, the worst is over. I am very pleased by that. I thought I'd never get from the new opening pages to the stuff I was leaving alone, but I've finally managed to do just that.
Am I done now? No, not quite. I still need to add two new scenes (already written) and cut the end of one scene that doesn't work now that I've written one of the above-mentioned new scenes, and I still need to read through the whole thing and address one or two little things and make sure that I haven't introduced any continuity errors while rewriting the first part. I am pleased to have kept the glorious eel passages, now wriggling away at the end of Chapter Six, I believe.
The bigger accomplishment, bigger even than actually having revised the first 11,000+ words of the book, is that I have pretty much eliminated any need for backstory. There is now only the Story Present, the NOW of the tale, and anything that looked like backstory has been cut or transformed into details of setting or character. A few bits of the past remain, alas, but I've done a more-or-less complete job of deleting all of that. I may post something about this idea of There Is No Backstory, There Is Only Now on the Literary Lab one of these days.
Anyway, yay me; I think I may still manage to get this revision off to Agent Jeff by the end of this month. I'm a total rock star if that happens. We'll see.
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So, my meeting Thursday night resulted in Mister Superagent and I agreeing that he's going to represent my novel and see about selling it to a publisher. Like, yay! I would be more excited about this if his representation didn't come with a caveat: I now have to do another revision of the book, deepening the emotions of the characters and making the protagonist more accessible to the reader. Like, sure, whatever. I can probably do that by the end of May, which is the provisional deadline upon which Mister Superagent and I have agreed. I can do that. Sure, I can. I think.
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I've been not only busy, but also more-or-less frantic of late. I have a face-to-face meeting with a literary agent this Thursday to discuss my book. I may throw up. I've been in this state for nearly a week now.
Happy belated birthday to Katrimae! Here's to a year without significant flooding and good times with cats!
I filed my federal income taxes online (with HR Block, which cost me $15), and while I don't get the same thrill from that civic duty as I do from voting, I remain pleased to be participating in the machinery of my government. Also, I get a small refund! First round's on me!
The University laid off 60+ people yesterday. I am lucky to work in one of the few departments that gets almost no funding from the state, and we have no plans to reduce our staff. Which still won't stop them from firing me if I don't lay off LJ posting and actually get to work. So I'll do that now, shall I?
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One good thing today, aside from the agent letter, is that I've finally had The Big Idea for the next book which makes it possible for me to start writing in earnest. I'm setting the whole thing in Baltimore around 1900. What was missing from my original concept was machinery: the turning of immense iron gears, the clanking of man-sized pistons, chains dripping black oil, and the sounds of metal against metal like locomotive engines mating. Also, zombies! The subject line is the working title of the work-in-progress. I think it's Amazon-friendly.
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Last night, very late while I was waiting for my neighbor to get her clothes the hell out of the dryer so I could finish my load of darks, I sent off a query letter (and first five pages of the ms) to a literary agent. It's what I do: whenever I get a rejection from an agent, I find another one to annoy. Yesterday I got two form rejection emails, so I was a bit depressed.
On checking my hotmail account first thing this morning, I saw a reply from the agent I emailed last night. Oh, fucking hell, I thought. Don't reject me this quickly; I haven't even had my first cup of coffee. But imagine my surprise and delight when I opened the message and saw the words, "Thanks so much for thinking of me for this! Could you send along the first 100 pages..."
So, like, woo-hoo! I'll send him the partial ms after work, tell him he's got an exclusive (which means that I won't let any other agents read it while it's in his hands), and see if he wants to see the entire book.
In other news, last night I began making an outline of my next novel. I consider moving the story from contemporary times into the early 20th century, just before the Great War. We'll see.
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I read this morning on the Publishers Weekly website that Condoleeza Rice has just signed a three-book deal with a $2.5 million advance. The first book will be apologia about her years with GWB, mixed with hagiography of herself; the next two books, I think, will be Harry Potter slash or something. The article was, I admit, a bit unclear about that.
In news closer to home (my home, that is), this morning I received a very nice form rejection from a literary agent. Which is fine, as I didn't think she'd be interested in my book but, you know, it never hurts to try. I have queries out to four other agents right now. I will attempt to remain undejected until I've reached 20 rejections. At that point, I'll rewrite the book as Harry Potter slash or something.
One of the medical students I know is from Bombay, and I passed him in the hall a couple of hours ago. The first words out of his mouth were, "If you say anything about Slumdog Millionaire, I'll hit you. Just because I'm from India, that doesn't mean I automatically love the movie, you know. It makes the whole country look like a slum filled with criminals and filth." Some people are twitchy. It turns out that my Bombay friend hates Bollywood movies; he prefers Harry Potter slash or something.
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To date, I have sent queries (all via a newfangled technology called "email" that I think will eventually catch on with the general public) to six literary agents. Thus far I have received two rejections, both in response to the first version of my query letter, which was admittedly a pretty awful piece of work. My new version, I like to think, is better. I've been looking for agents who'll allow writers to include the first chapter or so of the book with the query, targeting them in the hopes that the quality of the novel writing will outweigh the quality of the query letter. Yes, I know: that's the wrong attitude and I should really do more work on my pitch.
The problem with query letters and book pitches is that, while I quite like the novel I've written and I have great faith in it, I'm not comfortable boiling it down to six or seven sentences. Which is to say, I don't like that I need to focus on a single aspect of the book because such a narrow view will naturally exclude some of the aspects that I think make the book worth reading. Good art, I tell myself egotistically, is difficult to narrow down. Still, I keep playing this game where I try to see the story from different angles and try to imagine from which angle the thing will look most attractive to an overworked, distracted intern who's got 30 seconds to read each of 350 email queries in a day. It is difficult to remain positive at this stage.
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Last night, at about 11:05 PST, I finished the third round of revisions on the novel (current working title: So Honest A Man). Now I need to type all of my changes in the electronic version, type in all of ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) emmarytz's suggested edits, and that'll be that. This will free me to write a 2-page synopsis and work on my query letter. I was beginning to think I'd never see the last page of the manuscript, being instead forever caught somewhere in the middle of the penultimate chapter. This final round of revisions and line edits has been exhausting and took much longer than I'd originally planned, but I'm pretty sure the efforts will have been worthwhile. I finally worked in the bit about Muppets and the English ambassador, too.
Now I have to start gathering my notes for the next book, which notes are unfortunately written in at least three different notebooks, intermixed with notes for yet another book. I really need to find a better way of organizing my materials.
Other news: I still have no interest in the Twitter phenomenon. But I did buy a domain name yesterday. I'm just not sure what I'll do with it.
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"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals."
"...your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy. To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history..."
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1. I just re-read Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. It's an amazing novel. If you've not read it, do. This weekend emmarytz and I are going to watch the 7 1/2-hour Russian-language version I have on DVD. We're making borscht, too. I will faithfully report any actual sightings of mysterious black magicians.
2. I have begun reading Alan Bennett's The Uncommon Reader. It is, for lack of better words, absolutely charming. And very short, more novella than novel.
3. Three-day weekend! I know: I should spend Monday doing some sort of community service. But I won't: three-day weekend!
4. By the end of this month, I will (I swear by all that is holy) finish my third-draft of the novel. Which will let me get on with writing the synopsis (first week of February) and sending out queries to agents (second week of February until who knows when). Once the process of queries has begun, I can start on
5. The next novel, to be written between (one hopes) Valentine's Day and Christmas. Thanksgiving would be even better.
6. Pirastro Tonicas in their new formulation? Excellent.
7. It's damnably cold out there today. What's with this freezing mist?
8. Three-day weekend!
9. Capitol Music did not go out of business when they lost their lease downtown! I am pleased that there is still a place to buy sheet music in Seattle.
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They say that damp records the past
If that's true I've got the biggest library yet
Quoted from The Fall's excellent song No Bulbs, which is more about living in poverty and not being able to afford light bulbs when they burn out than it is about the increasing damp and wet of what has become a typical Seattle rainy winter. The rain was coming in almost horizontally on last night's high winds, and while I don't mind it raining during the day (because, after all, I work in a windowless office where it always seems to be five minutes past midnight so the weather doesn't matter much to me), I am becoming resentful of these nightly torrents because I'd like to go running. Because it's either go for a run or start watching what I eat or get a Wii workout thingie like Mr. Neil Gaiman. And that's not going to happen.
And just who the hell thought the name "Wii" was a good idea? Also: how far does rain fall?
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Currently reading (begun in December): Paradise Lost, by John Milton. To quote too many critics, "Satan is one of the most compelling protagonists in all of English literature."
Read in 2008:
Hamlet: Poem Unlimited, Harold Bloom
Esterhazy the Rabbit Prince, Irene Disch
A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
On the Eve, Ivan Turgenev
The White Devil, John Webster
Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996, Seamus Heaney
Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
Reading in the Dark, Seamus Deane
Wittenberg: The town of Martin Luther
Wuthering Heights, Charlotte Bronte
A Shakespeare Glossary, C. T. Onions (Author), Robert D. Eagleson (Editor)
Renaissance Swordsmanship, John Clements
The Danish History, Saxo Grammaticus
The Elizabethan World Picture, E. M. W. Tillyard
Lysistrata, Aristophanes (illustrations by Picasso)
On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays, A.S. Byatt
The Economy of Later Renaissance Europe 1460-1600, Harry A. Miskimin
Othello, William Shakespeare
How I Came to Know Fish, Ota Pavel
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, Douglas Adams
A History of the Kingdom of Denmark, Palle Lauring
Reformation Europe: 1517-1559, by Geoffrey R. Elton
Hamlet, William Shakespeare
Purchased but as yet unread:
Sketches From a Hunter's Album, Ivan Turgenev
Hamlet Had an Uncle, James Branch Cabell
The Habsburg Monarchy, 1618-1815, Charl W. Ingrao
In the Company of Crows and Ravens, John M. Marzluff
Snow, Orhan Pamuk
Certainly these lists are both incomplete; I'm not counting any of the sheet music (French tangos!) or general music books (Baillot's Violin Playing) or reference books (Cassel's Latin Dictionary!) I've purchased, and God knows there are plenty of things on my "to be read" shelf.
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For reasons not importing Denmark's health, nor England's neither, I'm on my third reading of Hamlet in the last two months. "After studying your challenging astrological aspects, I decided to do a mid-winter ritual in your behalf." Word count: 21,000ish. So the Pulitzer Prize goes to a book I've never heard of. Halfway through Chapter Four: two scenes done, two more to go. Last night I finished Chapter Five. Last night I finally finished Chapter Six (yay!), which means I now have to write Chapter Seven (not-yay) and then take a month vacation from this horrible ersatz writer's life (yay!). emmarytz and I spent last week on the Oregon Coast, and it was fantastic in every way. Last night I spent a few hours working on rewrites, going through a lot of the notes I made during my initial read-through after letting the ms sit for a month. My original plan called for the revisions to be finished by...oh let's call it midnight last night. Go vote! I am currently reading A Tale of Two Cities before joining emmarytz in re-reading Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita.
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Has anyone else been following this story? On the one hand: yes, apparently this is, well, fraud on the part of the author. On the other hand: this is how, likely, myths and folktales start (You want to know what I did one time? I'll tell you what I did one time...). On the other, other hand: I just don't know what to think, but this fascinates. Someone needs to write a metastory around this event, about someone telling a pretty tale about the past and trying to pass it off as truth. All art is a lie, anyway. Or at least artifice.
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The state-funded university at which I work has announced that next year there will be a multimillion-dollar budget shortfall, and University employees are all expected to be better stewards of public funds. Belt-tightening, hiring freezes, etc. University President Emmert prolixed and beazled on about the coming austerity measures in a university-wide email sent out before Thanksgiving, which email urged us to be prepared to take our licks for the greater good. Which got me thinking. What if, I thought, I worked one day less each week? I could likely afford to give up 20% of my salary as long as I keep my benefits, and that would give me a day each week that I could devote to writing. That's 52 whole days a year. I have not approached my boss with this idea yet, as I'm still considering it. But the thought of having an official writing day each week appeals to me, as I've got a couple of novels and a long short story all waiting to be written. So, hmmm.
What gives me pause is that I've known people who have arranged their lives to create "writing days" and have ended up not using those days for writing. No, errands and housekeeping and life grab up those "free" hours and no creative work seems to get done. So, hmmm.
Anyway, I just wanted to use "prolixed and beazled on," and couldn't fit it into a work email.
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I am currently reading A Tale of Two Cities before joining emmarytz in re-reading Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. When I started the Dickens novel a week or so back, I was tempted to post here that what I needed was an English translation of this book, as his language was in a great many places impenetrable to me. This, yes, from a man who reads Shakespeare. I know. Anyway, I persevered and it's been ever so rewarding: Dickens knew how to mix his comedy with his tragedy, he knew how to point up with charm how ridiculous humankind is and he knew how to craft a good villain or three. So there I've been, rolling along with the tale until finishing a chapter at lunch just today, which chapter ends with some of Dickens' more baroque language--the culmination of an image he built up over the course of the chapter--and I am sitting here not knowing if I am to take him at his literal or his figurative meaning. Did someone just get murdered, or not? I really couldn't tell. You know what Humbert Humbert said about fancy prose styles.
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On the one hand, this is interesting and potentially useful. But on the other hand, isn't the practice of publishing cached (that is, copied) versions of other people's web sites (like the Google 'cached page' on their main search page) illegal? Doesn't that mean that the person doing the caching/redisplaying is in effect republishing copyrighted material? I'm unclear about this.
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