AOL Welcome Screen Headline of the Week

Just thought that this one had a nice ring to it:

Clooney's New Red Carpet Arm Candy

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Once again, WALDEN

Henry David Thoreau's Walden is one of those books that seems almost magical: every time I pick it up, I find something different in it... and, more than that, whenever I pick it up and open it to what seems like a randomly selected page, I always find exactly what I need at that particular moment.

Right now, I'm working through a string of days without a break: when Labor Day comes, I will have worked 24 straight days without a whole day off at either job. But then from September 2 through 8, I'll be off. Call it "earning my vacation."

I haven't had a great deal of spare time and energy lately, and unfortunately sometimes I don't use the time and energy I have in the best ways I could... which just makes me feel MORE tired and stressed and annoyed with myself.

This, plus an email from a friend in which she vented about her work ("i like to say [the economy] doesn't get to me but i see it has affected sales, my job is harder, more frustrating... on this beautiful day i just need/would love to tidy the house and be mindless but deadlines press in on me") got me running to Walden, so to speak, to find a pithy, appropos Thoreau quote. I was looking for his quote on how to make "making a living poetic," because if it is not poetic, then it is not a LIVING we make. Etc etc.

So I opened up my old Modern Library edition of Walden to the section "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For," and this is the passage that jumped out at me:

"We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us even in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few items beautiful; but it is far more glorious to be able to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour."

Just what I needed to read, when I needed to read it. I also sent it to my friend.

So, from two of us, once again: thanks, Henry!

AOL Welcome Screen Headline of the Week

Starlet Reveals Desire to Be Naked

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Wonderful you

At the beginning of the summer, as I wrote in a previous blog entry, I really identified the song "Workin' On A Groovy Thing" with a woman I had my eye, heart and spirit set on. Now the summer is almost gone; I've gotten to know her better; and while I still sense the possibility of what I wrote about and felt three months ago, more than anything, Van Dyke Parks' lyrics to Brian Wilson's song "Wonderful" sum up the way I feel for Her-With-A-Capital-H.

Lots more I could write, but I'll let Van Dyke and Brian say it for me:

She belongs there left with her liberty
Never known as a non-believer
She laughs and stays in the one-one-one-wonderful

She knew how to gather the forest when
God reached softly and moved her body
One golden locket quite young
And loving her mother and father

Farther down the path was a mystery
Through the recess the chalk and numbers
A boy bumped into her one-one-one-wonderful

All fall down and lost in the mystery
Lost it all to a non-believer
And all that's left is a girl
Who's loved by her mother and father

She'll return in love with her liberty
Just away from the non-believer
She'll sigh and thank God for one-one-one- wonderful

("Wonderful" by Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks; copyright 1966)

O.K.... maybe add in two more lyric snippets: the first, a question from another Wilson-Parks SMILE lyric-- "When is the wonderful me? Wonderful you?"-- and the second, an answer from an old Pretenders' song:

"Maybe tomorrow... Maybe someday..."

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Customer of the week

This afternoon at work, a woman with three kids came to the outdoor smoothie bar at the market and asked for two small smoothies, and a small lemonade with extra sugar, "for my youngest, who's visiting her father tonight."

Fixing leaks while still in port

I started writing the book that became YOU DON'T THINK SHE IS (the novel I'm submitting to agents) seven summers ago. It took so long to refine it and revise it because I really didn't know what I was doing as a writer. I learned from writing all of those pages, vignettes, stories, chapters, drafts... learned what worked and what didn't; learned what the story was; learned who the characters were.

Seven years is a long time, so of course, when I finally finished the 370-page NOVEL that I'd distilled from that stack of writing, I was psyched to get it out there. I researched agents, made a list of what looked like Good Matches, and told myself I'd get queries into 15 agents' hands by the end of June.

Then... I found out I had to move. Somehow, the threat of a pending move threw off all my equilibrium, and, in spite of my efforts, I simply couldn't get any of my work out there. The one time I tried submitting the book recently, I couldn't. The online submission wizard at the agent's website came back with a message: FAILURE.

Nice.

Now it's August, and even though I'm a month past my self-imposed deadline, I'm happy, in a way, that I didn't start submitting before the move. Those 5-6 weeks that I was totally preoccupied-schizzed about moving FORCED me to set the book aside and not look at it...

...and, now that I've picked it back up and looked at it, I realize that, before I submit it, there's one last step I need to take. It's the same thing I did before I submitted my final product in the MFA program at Goddard: go through the manuscript with a finetooth comb as a COPY EDITOR and PROOFREADER. Clean up awkward sentences and clunky clanky passages... scan for typos and (unintentional) misspellings... remove repetitive words and phrases... eliminate cliches... fix punctuation.

Clean it up.

As I stated in a previous post on this blog, I'm all for the Jimmy Buffett school of novel writing. But best to fix small leaks while still in port. I feel good about doing this because I'm finally happy with the book as a NOVEL and a STORY. To use a metaphor, the barber's done with the haircut... he's just brushing around and dusting on the talc and splashing on the tonic before he snaps the bib off and lets you out of the chair.

Anyway... yesterday I did the first 19 pages and wrote down 10 pages of changes. Most of them minor; a couple of them sentence or paragraph rewrites. Lots of places where punctuation (or font: italics) could be tweaked to make the meaning more clear... lots of misplaced modifiers (that's the problem with trying to write in a voice that approximates SPOKEN word)... a few places where I used a key word twice within a couple sentences of each other, and thought it best to eliminate the multiples. Lots of changing passive voice to active voice.

It's an arduous, time-consuming task... the writing equivalent of what Julia Child was talking about when she said "Every job has its share of slicing onions." But now that the important stuff is done (story, structure, character, subplot), cleaning up the technical glitches is a piece of cake. Even if it DOES make my eyes water occasionally.

Better watery eyes than a leaky boat.