'sall good

A word about rejection—not Rejection with a capital “R,” but simple puny plain vanilla everyday mundane rejection. (Because that shift key does make a difference. Think about “right” vs. “Right,” for example. See?)

Okay, fine, for comparison’s sake let’s talk briefly about Rejection. Rejection of the capital variety--professional Rejection--is painful, but also expected and somewhat anonymous. Over time, you get used to agents scribbling “good luck with another agency,” or “not for us,” or, simply “NO!” (“Good God, no” is obviously implied) in the margins of your carefully crafted, blood-soaked and tear-stained queries. At some point (if you stick with it long enough), though you’re disappointed, you really do develop that duck’s back. The Rejections slide right off. I’m not saying you won’t harbor a vendetta against a particularly nasty agent or two, perhaps one who felt the need to say something akin to “how could I possibly sell this you stupid stupid fat smelly writer?” But I digress. Once you land an agent, you face publisher Rejections. These are the biggest and scariest of the big “Rs,” especially when you get the type of Rejection your agent labels the “kiss of death.” (As an aside, why is it a "kiss?" Bitch-slap seems more appropriate.) Which means the publisher “loves your writing style” but doesn’t know “how to sell the book.” In other words, “we dig the book you’ve forgone school plays and promotions and any hint of a normal sex life for, but not enough to go to bat for it.” And there’s nothing you can do to fix it, short of writing an entirely different book. Which is the opposite of awesome. But, again, though you may not like it, you can handle Rejection from these faceless powers that be who sit atop slush piles drinking Manhattans and mocking your font choice.

Lowercase rejection--that’s another animal altogether. It involves watching your mom’s face contort in pain as she reads your manuscript. It’s your friend asking how your “little project” is going before launching into details about her pug’s hemorrhoids. It’s posting your blog on Facebook and getting no love, while your drunken rant likening goldfish crackers to manna from heaven garners a host of thumbs-ups and a page of comments. It’s real and it’s painful and it plays into all your insecurities and fears and co-dependencies. And it sucks. Because I think we all can agree, rejection from someone you know is exponentially worse than a stranger’s rejection.

But I learned something this week. Somewhere along this crazy path to publication (or maybe to financial ruin and cirrhosis of the liver; the jury’s still out), rejection stopped slaying me. I have a friend--an uncommonly bright and talented friend--with whom I shared my work recently. I’d shared short stories and excerpts with her before but, I have to admit, only those I’d chosen carefully because I knew they fit her style—dark and gloomy and decidedly non-mainstream, bleeding into the margins of acceptable subject matter. I knew my current novel wasn’t her brand of artisanal whiskey. I knew that from the first time I told her about it over breakfast and she raised her eyebrows, impaled her pancake, and changed the subject to some new foreign film about excrement. But I sent her the first chapter anyway, just for shiggles. Because if you aren’t willing to put yourself out there, then what’s the point? Might as well keep your desk job.

I believe our subsequent conversation went something like this . . .

“Ummm . . . I read your chapter.”

“Yea?”

“Yea.”

Awkward pause.

“I’ll tell you what I did like about it. I liked the setting.”

“Uh-huh.”

Sniffle. Cough. Yawn.

“You write kind of flowery.”

“Yep.”

“Maybe if you, like, toned that down a bit . . . .”

“Mmm-hmmm.”

“Anyway, Lou and and I had an amazing time in Napa. We never left the bed, and let me tell you . . . .”

So, you know, essentially she hated it. I guess I should feel honored she said anything at all; she has a rule that if she can’t honestly heap praise, she keeps her mouth shut. (Clearly she’s not cut from the same “pleaser” cloth that I am.) Though I think she must have strained to find something nice to say. I mean, I appreciate the effort, but the setting? Really?

But here’s the upshot (to borrow one of Kris’s favorite phrases) . . . it didn’t bother me. I get it. It’s not her style or a subject matter that interests her. And I am a flowery writer. I lean toward the verbose and I never met a metaphor I didn’t want to whisk off to Vegas. I think it works for this book and the demographic I’m wooing. I’ve been writing long enough and had enough input over the years to feel secure in my vision. That doesn’t mean I won’t take another look at it with her comments in mind--criticism is always helpful. I may tone it down a bit, but I don’t anticipate a major overhaul. One person’s excrement is another person’s art and vice versa. It’s nice to finally live here, in a place where rejection doesn’t sour me on my work. In fact, I might even invite my friend over for pancakes when the book is published.

RSVP Oui

You know when you first hear a word or phrase and then you hear it again and again in a matter of days? My latest iteration of this phenomenon, which really should have a name (yes, I know awareness is probably sufficient, but a quippy name would be so much better), is with the french term "mise en place". Credit goes to an episode of Top Chef, after which it showed up in varying contexts and situations. I've comandeered it as my own now, terrible accent and all. And while mise en place is a beautiful thing to say, not to mention a lovely concept for we type-A-the-Container-Store-might-be-my-heaven folks, the phenomenon I will call awareness (for lack of that quippy term) has recently spoken to me in a more profound way--not with a word or a phrase, but in an idea, a notion, a lesson, if you will.

The weeks leading up to the holidays included for me a book club meeting, a Mahjong game (if you don't know it, learn it, its fantastic, not to mention addictive and, in my house, always involves wine), and a fair amount of yoga. Out of each of these delightful endeavors came a consistent theme. At book club, we read Last Night in Montreal about a girl, Lilia, who, as a result of a vagabond childhood, couldn't stay in one place, emotionally or physically. She remained on what she called the surface of life, never diving in, never taking the risks, feeling the fear, experiencing the pain, or relishing the joy. At Mahjong, a dear friend discussed her fear of buying a dog for her kids, already anticipating the death of the animal they don't yet have but know they will love like a family member. All of this made me think about what is required of us, in the bigger sense. How invested must we become in our own existences? I found the answer at yoga - sweet, blessed yoga, where construct is meaningless and questions can be cast aside for their cosmic irrelevance. At the end of a practice, sweaty and splayed out on our mats, we were told to thank ourselves for showing up. Just showing up. Not for executing the best downward dog or flying into crow. But for being there, ready to take on whatever the body and the universe was offering up that day. Showing up. That is what is required of us.

For you fellow over-achievers, showing up might connote mediocrity, but to my mind, it is anything but mailing it in. Showing up is engaging, opening up, being vulnerable to all that life has to offer, the good and the bad. Because, to be sure, you can't have one without the other. That might mean bringing home that new fluffy puppy, or allowing yourself to finally fall in love, or continuing to write in the face of repeated rejection and failure, all of which bring both joy and pain. So this is me, showing up. I hope to see you here.

Out With The Old, In With The New

I’ve always considered New Year’s Eve an arbitrary holiday. Don’t get me wrong, I like having the day off work (yea, I have the day off…public sector employee, remember), and I’m a sucker for all things sparkly and bubbly and filled with shredded bits of colored paper . . . but dressing to the nines and drinking ‘til you drop merely because 365 (or 366) days have passed seems so random. Kind of like the publishing industry. (Seriously, people, what lands one girl-in-love-triangle-solving-work/identity/body-image-crisis-with-the-help-of-quirky-gay/bawdy-sex-addict-best-friend story on bookstore shelves while another languishes in manuscript limbo, mocking you every time you fire up the ol’ laptop?) Despite my existential misgivings (Because, yea, I go there…why even have a calendar year? Isn’t every day essentially the same? Why even have days? If a blog is posted and nobody reads it, was it ever written?), I kinda like the idea of a New Year. Of giving in to the illogical notion that the act of opening a fresh calendar has real meaning. That the slate is wiped clean come midnight. It’s a Jedi mind trick, to be sure, but one I’m embracing with gusto this year. Rather than dwell on my anemic daily word count and the fact that I’m still not published (and all the other personal failings I won’t bore you with…you should see the refrigerator still sitting in the middle of my kitchen after 6 months), I’m choosing to let it go. To exhale fully when the clock chimes 12. Because only then can I breathe in the fresh, creative, hopeful air of 2011. I’m guessing it smells like rainbows and unicorns. Wishing you a year filled with your own brand of awesome. Catch ya in the double-ones.

All We Want For Christmas

When I was but a wee girl, my mom would bring home the big fat JCPenney catalog each year lo around early November. (Check out some sweet shots from the 1976 catalog. I was a fetus, of course.) I’d spend hours flipping through the pages while drinking fresh-pressed apple cider and eating homemade spice cake in front of the fire. Okay, so maybe I actually sprawled on our green shag carpet drinking store-bought egg nog and eating Vienna sausages from the can (don’t judge me–we all did it), but the catalog part is true. I’d make my Christmas wish list by marking items with one, two or three stars (depending on their desirability) in between sneaking peeks at the lingerie section when my mom wasn’t looking.

Like most adults, I stopped making a Christmas wish list at some point—probably around the time I realized my three star items included a washing machine I didn’t have to start with a screwdriver and a holiday without one of my kids on antibiotics. But I miss those days spent with the JCPenney catalog—when you couldn’t simply click a mouse and have anything delivered overnight, when a dickie was a perfectly viable clothing option, when the Carpenters ruled the Christmas airwaves and that offensive Christmas Shoes song didn’t exist. So, in honor of those times, we are making a Christmas wish list this year—a writer’s Christmas wish list. This is what Kris and I would like to find under the tree Christmas morning:

1. A sequel to One Day by David Nicholls titled The Next Day: J/K, It Wasn't Emma On The Bike; It Was Really That Asshat Dexter

2. Some sort of device that allows us to go to the bathroom without leaving the computer. A Stadium Pal for women, if you will. Because you always have to pee just about the time you finally get into a writing groove. It's a law of nature.

3. A computer program that reads our otherwise brilliant sentences and fills in the brackets.

4. You know the Deluminator? That thing that Dumbledore gave to Ron Weasley? It looks like a pen and when Ron clicks it, he can extinguish or create light? I want one of those. But for apostrophes. (I’m coming for you, first, Sacramento International Airport. What do you mean “Shuttle Drivers’ may not assist passengers with their bag’s?”)

5. A kit that takes all the words we write each day on blogs, Facebook, Twitter, IMs, and e-mails, and converts them to useful prose for our various novels. Can you imagine the boost in daily word count?

6. For the various Dictionary Powers-That-Be to stop (for the love of all that is good and beautiful in the world, stop) adding made-up words to the dictionary. Turducken?! Really?! And don't tell me to chillax.

7. Pat Conroy's South of Broad rewritten with a modicum of meangingful character development and without the sociopath father/serial killer/rapist/pedophile/foreboding nail polish-graffiti artist. (Yea, you read that right...nail polish-graffiti artist) Still love you Pat, but that was wrong.

8. A Mucinex-like pill for writer's block. Literally hacking up the block seems like a great solution.

9. Grammar Girl as my new next door neighbor. We'll drink wine, she'll mentor me, and under the dark cover of night we'll enact vigilante justice on rogue apostrophes everywhere. (And because, really, any girl who calls grammar tips "quick and dirty" is okay in my book!)

10. An audio recording of 6-8 Black Men by David Sedaris. If you know it, ‘nuff said. If you don’t, Merry Christmas. (It's in three parts, but TOTALLY WORTH YOUR TIME . . . though I can't vouch for the homemade video images)

Happy Holidays to you and yours!!

Art and Craft and Ass in Chair

Stephen King (or Oliver Stone, depending on your source) said writing equals ass-in-chair.

Its been months since my last post. Life has been working its insidious black magic, taking over with work and school and PTA, baseball and laundry and family crises, leaving little time or energy for writing. At long last, this morning, my hindquarters are planted firmly in a chair. And I'm learning, in a way I never have, that writing is not like riding. A bike, that is. Case in point: I just spent thirty minutes doing internet research for this post. Back in the heady days of weekly blog posts, Done Fell Out, and various short stories, I would grab a cup of tea, curl up on the couch, and wax at least somewhat poetic (humor me people) about some relatively engaging topic. And I did it with ease and in short order. I suppose, back then, I fancied myself a writer, an artist.

Laura is an artist. I've always known this. In the way she crafts story, thinks about characters, examines the novel from seventeen scenes ahead. And now she's embarked on a solo writing venture that is original and exciting and brilliant, not only sentence by sentence, but also for its creativity, on both a macro and micro level. Not only does it make me wonder if (a.k.a. feel terrified) she's been carrying the laboring oar on all of our collaborative projects, it has started me thinking about art versus craft. Folks much smarter than I have opined on this subject at length. I just read an essay by Susan Sontag, purportedly examining this topic, but it made my eyes cross and cramped my brain. Suffice to say, I don't expect to add much to the marketplace of ideas on art versus craft, but I do know this: I can craft a sentence with the best of them. I can both persuade a federal court judge and bring you to tears with words that, strung together, sound like song. Sure, I can do that. But that doesn't make me an artist; it makes me - to my mind - a craftsman, craftswoman. And there's pride in that, certainly. But it's not art.

Did I ever have art in me? I tend to think I did. The question is whether there's any left and, if so, where it went. Did it disappear into the seventeen loads of laundry I did last week, did I lose it on my fifth business trip in four weeks, is it caught in the family crises that takes up so much space in my house? I don't know. I guess I'll just have to start by looking for it.

What's in a Name?

Seventh Grade was a good year. I was allowed to wear a little bit of make-up (iridescent blue eye-shadow, naturally), I graduated from a plaid jumper to a plaid skirt (yes, I’m a Catholic school girl), and I had my first kiss (in the school library . . . he tasted like mustard). I also had one of the best teachers ever—Mrs. Light. She wore bright red lipstick, had a dog named Liesl (named after the character in The Sound of Music), and used long, skinny chalk-holders that looked as if they’d been plucked from the manicured fingers of elegant smoking baronesses in black-and-white films. Mrs. Light taught me something about writing I remember to this day—the importance of finding just the right name for a character. Think about it. Would Severus Snape or Lucius Malfoy seem quite as sinister, at first blush, were they named Sanford Smith and Lucas Melfry? What if Mark Twain had switched Tom Sawyer’s and Huckleberry Finn’s names? Could you relate to Bridget Jones if she had an exotic name, like Alexandria DuPont?

Kris and I took this notion regarding the importance of names to its extreme in The Pecking Order, with character monikers like the Pecker and the Blowhard. But we also spent a great deal of time considering the real names in the book. Adam, for example, was chosen as Abby’s husband because we wanted an “everyman,” and what better name than that given the first man?

You only need to attend a little league baseball game to see the significant thought given to name choice in real life. A few of the more unique names from my son’s recent game: Jasten, Cooper, Chase, Atticus, P.J., Jackson, Carson, Colton, and Houston (that’s my son). I also have nephews aptly named Drake (the dragon) and Stryder (ranger, elf-lover, and future king). I believe mothers and fathers pick names they hope will “fit” their children . . . names that sound good rolling off your tongue, maybe have personal meaning, and present well in the world. If we take the time to pick a fitting name for a child whose actions we cannot control and whose destiny we cannot determine, shouldn’t we take care to find the right name for our characters, whose very existence we hold in the tips of our pens?

Nineteen Cents

A man sat next to me at church on Sunday. I’d had a hard week, and I begrudgingly made room for him, rearranging the emotional baggage I’d carried in. He had baggage, too: a worn, heavy coat smelling of asphalt and nicotine; a filthy backpack; a bedroll. His hands, clasped in his lap, were cracked and caked with dirt. Every line in his face etched a tale of heartbreak and bad luck. He needed a haircut, a shave, and a good scrub. When he reached into his pocket, the air shifted and I struggled not to wince or wrinkle my nose. He pulled out a coarse, brown napkin—the thin kind used at establishments specializing in fried potato products—and dabbed tears from his eyes while the choir sang. His hand plunged into that pocket again when the collection plate came around. He dropped a dime, a nickel, and four pennies into the golden dish before passing it to me. I tucked my check on the side, hoping to bury with it the mild resentment I’d felt when filling it out.

He fell asleep in the middle of the sermon. I watched his chin fall to his chest and his shoulders melt away from his ears; I prayed he felt safe and secure enough to rest well. When the service ended, we filed out and I lost sight of him. I have no canned conclusions for you, no literary tie-in or moral imperative. I simply wanted to share that a man sat next to me at church on Sunday.