Prepared for Assyrian Chariot Attack

Finally starting to crawl out from my research-mode cave. I averaged 7 hours a day in Young Library, as I researched everything from Hebrew undergarments, circa 600 C BCE to Assyrian battle tactics. I am now prepared to face down any Assyrians who aim for my village walls. They won't approach head on, but at an angle. Each chariot will hold at least three soldiers--the driver, the bowman, and a third soldier who carries a large shield to protect all of them.

Amazing the number of essential issues I intuited while I wrote the early drafts. Members of a writers' group I attended for a while tore into me because Judith is friends with her maidservant Abra. I'll fix it later, I told myself. This is just so I can get rolling with and complete the draft.

Guess what? Turns out the Hebrews were the only people who considered slaves members of the family in most ways except inheritance. Who knew? Not me. Not until last Wednesday at a sunny table in the Young Library reference section. Every day offered me at least one similar miracle, the joy of research combined with the benefits of sitting down and really listening to my characters before I started each new chapter over the last year or so.

I love research, not for its own sake but for what it confirms in the realm of intuition, and for how it brings the past alive, not just on the page . . . but for me.

Did I write this?

As I work through the draft of Judith in preparation for my research trip to Lexington, I'm stunned to read passages that, while familiar, also feel as if someone else wrote them. Judith, perhaps? I always sit down and meditation before I write a new scene. I visualize myself in a location where Judith (or whichever character I'm working with) can approach me.

It's not unusual for me to have a feeling of "Wow, where did this come from?" as I read something I wrote a while ago. Never as strongly as with this manuscript, though. It feels so real.

Can't wait to get to the library and help make Judith's world even more solid, sensual and alive.

Submmission

So many of my posts here relate to works already well along the creation pipeline--Love is the Thread, on its way to becoming galleys. Judith, ready for serious research and then (ha!) one last revision. The Fairy Gate, inching its way toward completion. Yet I haven't really touched on the nerve-wrenching and often painful subject of submission.

I just sent a manuscript to a new publisher. A client and good friend just received a rejection. She waited several weeks, a relatively brief time, before she heard back from the publisher. I have at least eight weeks to wait, at least according to the publisher's response and website.

When my client and friend grieved over her rejection, I told her that I used to save all my rejection letters (or print outs of emailed replies) all together in a big manila envelope. Every once in a while I would take them out and read them, usually late at night when my soul was at low ebb.

Then one night after reading them, I realized I was as close to suicide as I'd ever been. I'd once imagined papering a small room or a large wall with the rejections. Now I asked myself why I was holding on it all? (As I once told my sister and fellow writer, Nancy, "I don't need men. I get rejected in writing!"

At that point, at three in the morning with the rejections scattered around me, the joke didn't seem so funny. So I made a list of which publisher had rejected which manuscripts, then tossed all that rejection away. I've also learned to submit a manuscript--and then forget about it until I hear back. If it does fly home again, I decide, "Ah, I must have misaddressed the envelope. I meant to send the manuscript to the best home for it."

Then I readdress and submit the manuscript again. We'll see how that works out this time.

Changing Times

Recently a friend sent me an email about 2012. In essence, the message relayed how several expert astrologers compared the Mayan and Gregorian calendars, with special attention to all the changes that have put the Gregorian calendar out of sync. The result of the astrologers' cogitations? It seems the pivot point of the Mayan predictions may have already happened on the Winter Solstice, 2010.

Remember, calendars are how we measure time, they're not time itself.

As a writer I have often set deadlines for myself, as well as dealt with deadlines set by editors and publishers. For example, I write for two different magazines on a regular basis. And in my forty years of writing, I have made so many goals for myself: to have an agent by thus and such age, or have a book published by the year Whatever. Goals are good. They keep us motivated. If we don't become more involved with the goal or date than we are with our work (or life) they keep us involved and focused.

On the other hand, I've received a lot of guidance lately that sounds something like this: "Leslie, you need to take the long view--and stay present in this moment." That is, keep my eye on the long range unfolding of my time, my personal goals as a writer and a human being, while savoring where I am in this instant. I struggled with how to take that long view and stay present for quite a while, just as many people have struggled with, feared or looked forward to the big moment of dramatic change scheduled to take place in 2012.

When I heard the theory that 2012 had already happened in 2010, the challenge of taking both the long view and staying present snapped into focus for me. Big changes are and have been already happening here on earth--big weather in Australia, in Chicago and the Mid-West and elsewhere. Yet here we are, still living our lives. With one eye on the long range unfolding of events within time--shifts in weather and cultural changes, or a book in the pipeline, for instance--and the other on the task for the present: cuddling a baby; giving a toddler her lunch; writing or reading a blog.

Re-re-re (Not a reference to Aretha Franklin)

In the midst of a reread, re-see, revise of a novel I started more than a dozen years ago. The story has gone through four major overhauls, the most recent eighteen months ago. A publisher is interested, so I'm fine tuning, and finding a few places where that deep revision cut out some connections between or within scenes. A character on her feet in one paragraph, then in a rocking chair the next. Not too many frightful continuity skips, but enough to make me pay attention.

It's interesting revisiting the story, though. I really love these characters. And for the most part, it really feels done at last.

Time Off

One of my favorite chapters in Lawrence Block's Telling Lies for Fun and Profit--an excellent writer's guide, older but not outdated by any means--traces Block's protracted "time off" from writing. He owned and worked in an art gallery, and at once point took a hiatus from writing that lasted a number of months.

I rarely let a day pass without putting fingers to the keyboard and/or pen to paper. Today is one of those days. I've done a good bit of revision lately, my own and for/with other writers. Time for a recharge from all that revision. There's a big difference between an intentional break and writer's block. But for now I'm not going to describe the difference except to say the first provides rest and the second stresses.

I'll let you know what written fruit the day bears next time.

Additions and Issues

Now that Love is the Thread is on my publisher's desk, ready to start the transition from manuscript to galleys, I've been re-reading Selkie Song, my YA novel, with a mind and heart open to growing some new scenes.

Selkie was in the hands of a literary agent for nearly a year. He suggested edits and revisions that tightened and improved the manuscript. The narrative has a smoother, more powerful flow now. Even though the agency ultimately decided not to represent me, I'll always be grateful for the suggestions. But as I read the story afresh, I am seeing possibilities for a few new scenes, ones that link the story in a fuller way, as well as some additions to several existing scenes.

Though I am not altering the novel's core, just listening to the needs of the characters and the logic of narrative, I do not think I would have recognized these openings without the agent's criticism first. (Another author suggested some of them about four years ago; I couldn't glimpse even the possibility back then! So I'd better thank her now, too.)

I'm also in the prep stages for the next issue of Memory Stick, my zine. Although the stories for each issue are new, the format--the framework--remains the same. Cover, Table of Contents; a book review, a brief, amusing anecdote for the back cover. And a theme for the particular issue, from romance to embarrassment. Today I'm recognizing parallels between the ways that a book manuscript becomes galleys becomes a first edition of a book, all the same story and yet subtly (or not so subtly) different from each other, and the ways a zine changes from issue to issue and yet still remains the same. Selkie Song has always been the story of how a magical creature changes an ordinary boy's life, and vice versa. Memory Stick is always a way to share family, personal and ancestral narratives. A transient publication like a zine, and the longer, slower process of a book--both go through additions and editions. It's all a matter of finding the strongest framework and the clearest story flow.