Editing again, more reading & Out To Lunch

I printed out the ms of the-novel-known-as-Ann and right away I’m editing again. Those damned sentences keep jumping out at me demanding a tweak. This time, though, I’m starting from the final chapter and working forward a chapter at a time. I figure the early chapters have had much more attention - apart from anything else they’ve been around longer - so this time I’m walking backwards for (not christmas, never!) - well, page 1 guess. It’s way beyond me to work backwards at a page level, so I’m starting at the first page of each chapter and working to the end of that chapter, then starting the first page of the previous chapter. Never done this before. I wouldn’t try it if I didn’t by now know the story really well. 

The reason I printed it was for reading by some Auckland friends we are visiting soon. These friends read the short story this novel/novella arose from, over a year ago. At 52,000 words it’s short for a novel and long for a novella, so I don’t know which to call it. What I do know is that it’s the right length for the story that it is, so will not be messing about with that.  I’m still thinking about the pieces of writing that might go with it I referred to in my last post and whether I can assemble a book from them plus Ann.

I read about Japanese writer Kenzaburo Oe somewhere and have forgotten where, but I got one of his many novels from the Wellington Public Library. It's title is Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! and it's about a writer and a son who was brain damaged at birth. The protagonist is also studying the poet William Blake and using Blake to interpret his world, although he, the protagonist, is not christian like Blake. The title is a quote from Blake.  I found it strangely fascinating. Lately I seem to be coming across a lot of books with a protagonist who is kind of the author and kind of not. For example, in the acknowledgements to The Shadow Catcher Marianne Wiggins thanks her sister for, “permission to decorate our shared history.” And there are whole books written about Marcel in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and The Narrator and Proust himself and how separate they are, or not.

We took A Cynthia Osick Reader to Australia last year and never got to read it. Stimulated by news of a new novel from her, Foreign Bodies, I have started it. Issues around being classified as “a Jewish writer” — and hence of interest only to Jewish readers and a standard-bearer for Jewish culture— are a feature of her career, and the editor of this collection from her writings, Elaine M Kauvar, says of this, “No imaginative writer, whether or not she is Jewish, sets out to write a novel to become a spokesperson for a group of people or to become responsible for its culture.” As a lesbian who writes fiction, often with lesbian characters, I heartily agree with this.

Out To Lunch, the book of writings by the writing group I am in, is being printed as I write. We’ve seen a proof copy and everyone in the group is happy with how it is. It’s a good project to be involved with. Here’s an extract from the introduction.

Our meetings are long chatty affairs where we workshop our writing. There's praise and encouragement and many helpful suggestions, and a shared lunch. Food brought to share reflects the bringer just as the writing offered reflects the writer.

Writing without the endpoint of publication becomes unsatisfying after a while. You need an audience, to complete the act of communication. At one of our meetings, we talked about publishing.

“It’s nice,” said Annabel, “to put something out there, not just write into a vacuum.”

“We can give lesbians something about themselves to read,” said Kate.

“It’s good to have things for women who haven’t come out,” Terry added.

Pat thought it would be good for everyone to be involved in a project doing the nuts and bolts of publishing. Judith agreed with all of this. Kate applied to the Armstrong Arthur Trust for some money on our behalf and we were successful.

Disappointed, flattered and assembling

Now that I have figured out, again, how to  post pictures to this blog, here is the cover of the book of Virginia Woolf’s essay On Being Ill that I couldn’t post last time.  Both the essay and the introduction by Hermione Lee were a disappointment. HL did little more than summarise the essay, with a bit of context, and the essay itself started off with a fantastic few pages and then rather dribbled along to an ending that HL made rather too much of. If anyone else has read this essay I’d love to know what you thought of it. Please note that my disappointment at this piece does not diminish my admiration of either Hermione Lee or Virginia Woolf overall. I do, also, have the lovely book.

The book this month for my book group is Marianne Wiggins’ Evidence of Things Unseen, which I haven’t yet managed to get a copy of. The library did however have The Shadow Catcher on the shelf so I’m reading that in the meantime. I had not previously heard of Marianne Wiggins, and am enjoying The Shadow Catcher a lot. It’s called a novel, the protagonist is called Marianne Wiggins and one of the major characters is a true historical figure, photographer Edward Curtis. The overblown blurb says that this book, “chases the silhouettes of our collective history into the bright light of the present.” Fortunately the book itself is not written in this ornate style.

Out to Lunch, the book of writings by members of my writing group is almost ready for printing. There’s always some anxiety at this time — what mistakes have we missed? Have we spelt everyone’s name right every time? Will we meet the deadline? Will anything bad show up in the proof copy? Will the printers meet their deadline?

I’ve finished the latest edit of the-book-known-as-Ann. Except I have one more thought about the lead up to the ending. I don’t know what I want to do next about it. I’ve had helpful feedback from my partner, who is so far the only person to have read it all and from my writing group, who have read the first two chapters. More readers, I guess. I’ll just make this one addition, then I’ll print it out again and … watch this space.

Someone I know slightly who is trying to get a book published following the renegging of a publisher who had said they would, is reading this blog from the beginning and taking notes! It’s the self-publishing posts she’s interested in, I think. I am strangely flattered by her interest.

I’ve got all these short pieces of writing, many of them in several versions, so I’m going through the writing folder on my computer and taking the ones that I think have something in them and assembling them into one file. As I go I’m putting pieces together that seem to fit together. There’ll be sixty pieces in all, I think. Not short stories, exactly, although some are. Possibly a prequel, in the same volume, to Ann. There's whole lot of thinking going on.

why write? why not read?

Why write? It’s the ongoing question. Sometimes I bore myself thinking about it, so I try not to think about it and just do it. Today it popped out of hiding as I was thinking about writing a new blog entry. “Because I have to,” is a silly answer, though it often enough comes to mind. Maybe it’s really, “because I want to.” If I want to I must think I have something (worthwhile) to say. What could that be? A particular way of seeing the world, perhaps. Maybe I read books by writers who write about writing in search of a better answer.

The daily writing diary has been stop-start jumpy. Days when I forgot, others when I just didn’t do it. Being sick with a cold was a credible excuse for only a couple of those days. Still, rambling away to myself about what I am writing — and not — is something I will carry on for July. Along with a new spurt of editing the novel that keeps slipping into the background.
I found and bought a second-hand copy of Strunk & White’s Elements of Style which I mentioned in my earlier post. Its “do this” and “don’t do this” approach is an antidote to a lot of writing about writing on the web, which is kind of wishy-washy.

Novels made it back into my reading. Alison Wong’s When The Moon Turns Silver, Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy (three short novels from the eighties), Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs.



And a bit of new writing:

…the other side…
I try not to envy Maria. She’s my best friend, after all, and envy is such a corrosive emotion, not too many steps away from resentment, and you can’t be friends with someone you resent. Married to maybe, I’m sure many are, but not good friends with.

We’ve known each other for forty years, Maria and I, been through a lot together — my illness, her divorce, the horror of her son going into the army, the SAS, no less. Not to mention various financial crises, forced house sales, teenage children in various kinds of trouble. All history now. We talk sometimes about how things we lived through, like the ’81 Sprinbok tour and the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior, are the subjects of documentaries about the past. “That’s not history, that’s my life!” we want to say.

We haven’t always lived in the same city or even country, but it never stopped us keeping in touch. How old-fashioned writing and posting a letter with a stamp on it seems now.

It’s so easy to be romantic about something that isn’t and won’t be available to oneself, so easy to think “it must be wonderful to…” and it wouldn’t necessarily be, on a day to day basis,j so wonderful in its happening. But I do envy. Oh, I have my laptop, bless it, that takes me out and about in the world, but it’s not the same as living, as they say, in the bosom of your family.
“Here you go, Helen, here’s your call from Adelaide.” They’re very nice the staff here, mostly from the Pacific Islands, quietly spoken and pleasant

“Hello Helen, it’s so good to hear you.” Maria sounds tired. I can hear her grand-children in the background, arguing with their father by the sound of it. “That’s just started up. I’ll go into the other room and close the door.”

More writing, editing and reading

Story A Day May is finished. I posted 29 stories in 31 days. See one at the end of this blog entry.

Have finished the tense-edit of the current novel. One more chapter to write, this time with some of the early story of the mother, Shirley. I’m avoiding thinkng about what to do when it seems finished — apart from having Prue and some others read it. Publishing is an odd beast at the moment, with the big print-publishers looking for fashionable writers who’ll sell vast quantities of books and epublishers talking themselves up like mad and neither side really knowing anything about the future.

I just read an excellent book, Reading Like A Writer, by Francine Prose, a novelist with fourteen published novels, none of which I have heard of let alone read. It’s sub-title is, “a guide for people who love books and for those who want to write them.” She recommends Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style from way back and reading and analysing the best of writers, with lots of examples from Raymond Chandler to Chekhov. Katherine Mansfield is in there, and Gertrude Stein.

What now for daily writing? A writing diary I think, which may include bits of writing. A sort of keeping tabs on myself, not something to show people or put online. I’ll try that for a month and see where, if anywhere, it goes.
And it’s definitely time to read a novel.

Here’s the story:

June
June had been born in July and was grateful to have been named for her maternal grandmother and not the month of her birth. When she had suggested to her Uncle August that he could use his second name, the harmless John, he’d told her that his father had called him August and that was good enough for him, thank you. June was accustomed to her helpful suggestions being taken the wrong way. It was only the other day at work when Nigel had complained, yet again, about how put upon he was and how Keith and Shona took it for granted that he would clear away all their coffee mugs and she had said, ‘Leaving them there is a good alternative to being a martyr,’ and he hasn’t spoken to her since.

She doesn’t see much of her siblings these days. Not since their parents died. She had suggested, quietly and calmly, that they take turns at choosing something they wanted from their parents’ house until they didn’t want any more and Graham had said okay, he’d go first as the oldest and take everything in the china cabinet and Doris had screamed at him that alphabetical would be fairer and the whole cabinet-full was more than one thing and they had both turned and blamed her for the idea. ‘You always come up with a solution and it’s always a bad one,’ Doris had said and that really hurt her feelings and she ended up not even putting her dibs in for the piano, which was now gathering dust in Graham’s oldest’s spare room and she would definitely have started piano lessons.

Still, she had her pleasures. She liked to think of her small back garden as her courtyard. She had it just as she liked it, from the two metre long raised bed where she grew silver beet and lettuces and tomatoes and the occasional capsicum bush and a crop of broad beans over the winter, to the wisteria along the side fence. All her life she had wanted a garden with a wisteria and a flowering kowhai tree and this year the dwarf kowhai she’d found a space for in the corner had flowered at last. Two magnificent yellow blooms; she had learnt to use the macro setting on her new digital camera specially and now had them as a screen-saver that gave her a small thrill every time she woke up her computer.

The clothes line had been a challenge; there was something particularly domestic about a Hills Hoist that would have ruined the atmosphere of the whole area. It took a while, and she even considered the wickedness of using the dryer for everything and not having a clothes line at all, but in the end she came up with a solution. There was just room along the side of the house next to the driveway to the garage for a non-revolving foldaway that she didn’t actually have to fold away, she could get the car past it easily. The electrician who backed the corner of his van into it and made a significant dent just wasn’t paying enough attention.

No-one could look in to her courtyard. It was private. Occasionally she could hear a neighbour in their garden, but she liked that, as long as it was a background noise and not loud and intrusive. She got on well enough with her neighbours, it paid to, in case of a civil defence emergency or even an accident or heart attack or something. Not that she worried, if she had a heart attack or a stroke she hoped it would be a big one and take her out. She rather liked the idea of coping with the aftermath of an earthquake but not anything that lost her her independence.

The people who had just moved in next door were a bit noisier than she liked. There were a couple of young teens and a toddler and two parents, one man one woman, who both seemed to go out to work all day. It was no doubt a child-care baby; June had no opinion about whether that was a good or a bad thing, she’d never had children. A hysterectomy in her thirties had seen to that, and she never minded. She’d been with Gloria at the time.

So here she was, on her own and as happy as she had ever been. She sank into her chair and opened the Sunday paper.

Going somewhere, maybe

At the beginning of April I started taking a 250 word piece from March and adding 250 words to it. (The prospect of having 365 beginnings after a year was just too much.) That was okay. Unexciting, but okay. Some of the pieces I had written I didn’t remember at all. Then I decided I wanted to add a chapter to the Ann novel, so started doing that a bit a day, and I have got a chapter, though not one I am happy with yet. Still, it’s some of the way there, so I’ve put it into my novel ms. Then I moved into editing the next chapter, now chapter 4, and I’m really not happy with the whole novel. Not the story, I like the story a lot, it’s about the writing. I guess. I'm looking for a variation of my usual style, I think, but can't articulate it. I’ll keep gnawing away until something happens. The thing to not do, I tell myself, is stop trying, it's always easy to go on to other things, but I think the 250 words a day thing is showing me the benefits of keeping at it.

On the reading front, I am two-thirds of the way through Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. A very unusual book in five parts and over 800 pages. I struggled in the middle to maintain interest, but Part 4 got me hooked back in. Strange, because Part 4 consists, not entirely, but mainly, of a detailed list of women who were raped and killed. No voyeurism, just facts, and names of policemen and a few other bits. A bit like a wordier Eliot Weinberger list (a lot wordier) it kind of builds up.

Previously read Hicksville, the graphic novel by Dylan Horrocks that has just been reissued by VUP. I read the original version from the Wellington Public Library. A comic about comics, at least in part. Also about New Zealand, and fitting in, or not, and a bunch of other things. There’s an art to ‘reading’ the visual part of graphic novels, which I don’t think I have quite got the hang of. Maybe I didn’t read enough comics as a child.

I have accumulated a great list of writers' blog, which I dip into now and then. Mostly they are interesting and well-written but they can become too much of a good thing. I get sick of them after a while. The best book blog I have found so far, because it is extremely varied (eg, includes notable pictures of books) and has really good writers is the New Yorker's book bench. Find it at:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/?xrai It will also lead you to the book club blog, where a noted author chooses a book to read and it gets talked about on the blog. This month it's Lorrie Moore's choice, which is David Vann's Legend of a Suicide, which I haven't read, but will.

Reading, Mostly

I am reading a book about blogging. That’s factual, not an ironic statement. I still learn much of what I know about computers from printed books. The rest comes from, firstly, Miraz's mactips, which I recommend accessing via her blog, http://knowit.co.nz/ which is about technology, science and wordpress, and well worth reading. Find mactips by scrolling down the sidebar on the left. My other source of information etc is welmac, the Wellington mac user's group. Check it out at http://www.welmac.org.nz. If you use a mac and live in the Wellington area it's worth the membership fee.

I understand the business of writing a blog, but not how one can ‘distribute’ it, if that is what one wants to do. Part of my problem with learning how to do this is no doubt my lack of conviction that I want to do that. I guess my question is still ‘What’s it for?’

I recently had a birthday and, as is usual, my partner gave me a great pile of books. Yum. I read Eleanor Catton’s The Rehearsal first because that’s the book our book group is reading this month. Then Kamila Shamsi’s Burnt Shadows, because she is coming to Writers and Readers week in Wellington next month. What a hard, and believable, ending this book has. I recommend it. Now I’m halfway through Audrey Niffenegger’s Her Fearful Symmetry, which I am liking more than I liked The Time Traveller’s Wife.

I also read the Millenium trilogy over a week. (One of them was in the birthday pile.) They are written by Steig Larsson, the first is called The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and they are best-sellers, in bookshops everywhere. Three long books! Gripping. The Swedish setting helped hold my interest, as did the two complex main characters, and the social context of the stories. The politics gets more depth as the stories develop and by the third questions like ‘What is democracy, and how much secrecy - for example in countering terrorism - is possible without undermining the whole ethos of democrary?’ are part of a series of thrillers. I didn’t like the movie, I thought it skated across the top of all the big ideas in the books and flattened out the two main characters.

And yes, I am still editing my novel. In between other things. I am beginning to wonder whether I should have a writing/editing schedule, like writing between the hours of x and y, but have never done this and am resistant to it. Most of my writing/editing gets done in the afternoons, a reversal of what many writers do. Does this matter, I wonder?

Second drafting

Less than two weeks after finishing the first draft of a possible novel during Nanowrimo (www.nanowrimo.org) I am wanting to start editing and researching it into a second draft.

There are some plot details to sort out, such as does my protagonist, Ann, have the right job at the beginning of the story? Having decided not, I have re-decided she does, as a lecturer in Romantic Literature. That gives some background for things that happen later in the story.

There is some research to do, in all those places where I wrote [CHECK] as I ploughed on, one word after another (which is what writing is!) chasing the 50,000 word count. I made it a couple of days early, with 50064 words. For some people, being unable to work right up to a deadline is a character flaw, for me it is the way I am and I live with it.

Then there is some awful writing, from those times when I was squeezing out words, even when I couldn’t think of anything to say. Not to mention changing my mind a couple of times about the time the story takes place. It started off having a beginning in mid 2009, then I pushed that back a year because the story was getting ahead of the real time I was writing in, now I have put it back to 2009, because by the time the story finishes, about the end of Jan 2010, that will be the actual time I am writing revisions in. As Ann spends Dec 2009 in London, I am drawing on friends who live there and buying the Guardian Weekly. There are a couple of useful weather websites, too.

On the reading front i am well into Orhan Pamuk’s latest, The Museum of Innocence, which was not liked by the reviewer on National Radio (NZ) whose name I forget. I think the reviewer missed the point of the book, which is an extended metaphor about Turkey trying to be both modern and traditional, which is what most of Pamuk’s books are about, one way or another. I love his books, but I think they may not be to everyone’s taste. His protagonists tend to be self-referential, somewhat neurotic, middle class, well-off men.