Re-writes & Wrestling with commas

The novel-known-as-Ann has been revised/rewritten over and over. Most people reading it wouldn’t notice much of a difference between versions because the revisions are usually at the sentence level - this word here, that one there, out with that phrase - so the story itself hasn’t changed except in a few places and then not the major plot.

I’m trying for a tone, a point of view, a development in the character that is inherent in the story, not stated. Who knows whether I am succeeding, but I have certainly worked more on this novel than earlier ones. Part of the rewriting involves close attention to punctuation, including commas. (The New Zealand Style Book has a good section on commas.)

Whose hands? Not mine.

When my partner and first reader read my most recently published novel  we had some brisk conversations about commas. Since then, I’ve given commas more attention and now I use them more — and I hope more consistently — while not as much as she would (probably, how do you know what someone else would do?). I like dashes instead sometimes. 

(Last published  novel, Take It Easy, 2008. Email me at pat dot rosier at xtra dot co cot nz if you'd like a copy.)

Today, I am resolved to finish this rewrite of the final chapter, which involves adding a small amount of new material. So, onwards!

The book, launched; others read, friend visited

Yesterday the book launch for Out To Lunch happened, in the local Paekakariki Hall. Fifty or so friends and a few relations came, many bought books. Jobs had been shared around, so it wasn’t a big preparation-stress for anyone, I think. 

We each read from our own selection for a couple of minutes, with the partner of, our member who died last year, reading for her. People ate the food, 

prepared by the same partner — her wish — with help from one of us writers and drank the punch and wine, overseen by the partner of another writer, and milled about talking to each other and bought books and had us all sign them. It was a lovely sunny afternoon and the new side doors of the hall were open, looking out to a bank of flowers and the freshly-painted white church, and it was all lovely.

The whole group project, from critiquing each others’ work, to the publication process, to the launch itself has been great. Next year we will meet in late January and continue to critique each others’ writing. As the costs of producing the book were covered, we are banking the money from sales and in a couple of years will think about another project. If anyone is keen to buy a copy of the book (178 pages, $20.00) email me at pat dot rosier at xtra dot co dot nz.

Reading Cynthia Ozick has its challenges. 

She prefers “classic feminism” to what she calls “new feminism.” She’s writing in the 1970s when she says this. If I’m reading her correctly, she endorses feminism as women gaining “access to the great world of thinking, being and doing.” She does NOT go along with any idea of “’male’ and ‘female’ states of intellect and feeling.” She doesn’t, in what I have read so far, address the “how to” of women getting the access she refers to, or being taken seriously and judged fairly when they do. I have a 1993 collection of her essays from the library and am interested to find out what else she has to say about feminism. I’ll look out for her 2010 novel Foreign Bodies, which is a reinvention of a Henry James novel. (Oh dear, do I have to read Henry James?)

Other reading includes Marianne Wiggins’ Evidence of Things Unseen. 

As this is current reading for my book group, I won’t talk about it in detail, just say that I love the science in it and the detail of time and place. I am learning about the Tennessee Valley Authority, which is fascinating.

My friend in Auckland liked the-story-known-as-Ann and gave me some excellent feedback on it. I’m still unsatisfied with the end of this novel and her comments about it losing emotional drive in the last couple of chapters have given me an idea to strengthen it in a way I like. It will be another week before I get to actually work seriously on this.

The friend I visit who has Altzheimers has read a couple of my short stories and given me wonderful feedback on them. She has read them several times, she told me, and they get better every time. Do I have more? A collection? When am I publishing them? She had made a few notes on the printouts, perceptive and useful comments. We had a great conversation about these stories for more than ten minutes. As I was leaving an hour later, she picked up the pages and said, “Did we talk about these?” My appreciation of her appreciation of my stories was undiminished, but it was all I could do not to cry, as I said something like, “Yes, we did and I’m so pleased that you like them,” and she looked confused and put down the papers. She wanted to read more of my stories, so today I posted two to her address at the rest home where she lives and talks often of getting back to her home and garden, in the country, several kilometres from the nearest town.  What she misses most, she says, is being able to practise her "domestic arts" — her phrase — which include growing flowers and picking and arranging them in her house, cooking, entertaining, spinning and weaving. The one she can do, and does constantly in the rest home, is knitting. She says it is soothing.

She knitted me a scarf. "With love," she said.

We are having this run of sunny, calm weather which is a delight. (Last summer I remember constant wind.) So our decision to spend the summer at home — after all, we do live at the beach — feels like a good one. Any day soon I may even scrub up the barbecue that sat out on our wind-exposed deck all last summer and never got lit once. 


I notice that today is 28 November. It is my sister's birthday. She killed herself at age 56. Today she would have been 73. I am remembering you, Ngaire.

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.

More reading than writing

There's more reading than writing going on here just now. I'm still editing the novel-known-as Ann and did some research in the library the other day, which involved reading Dennis Glover poems in the New Zealand section. He sure wrote some odd poems as well as some terrific ones. I think he had a talent for making unlikely rhymes work. It reminded me what fun doing the research for writing can be when you get off the internet. (Not that the internet isn’t most useful for research.)

My recent reading has involved some heavyweights as well as catching up with New Yorkers and copies of the London Review of Books from when I was away. (Interesting issue about plurals here, which I avoided. I suppose it would be London Reviews of Books. Or not. Or LRBs to cop out.)

The Books
On Being Ill by Virginia Woolf, reprinted by with an introduction by Hermione Lee. A small book, but perfectly formed, with a facsimile of the original cover by Vanessa Bell. (I was going to add a photo of the cover but blogger has changed something and what was really simple is now impossible unless you have files on picasa, which I don't. Grrr.)
Room by Emma Donohue. Shortlisted for, but not the winner of, the Man Booker. A compelling read of a book that is my book group choice so I can’t say more until after we have talked about it.
Freedom by Janathan Franzen. This book is being much-discussed on a number of the erudite blogs I read and was reviewed in LRB. I think it’s a dish with too many ingredients, used too cleverly by half; kind of up itself. It has many characters, much plot, and a large bunch of issues. The theme about wanting to be a good person was one of the most interesting, and ‘goodness’ or lack of it was a big deal for the three main characters, Walter, Patty and Richard, who were all in love with each other one way and another. Another theme is that of title - what does freedom mean, if anything, in America today? It’s clever and very contemporary and has some very quotable sentences, such as: “When you think about it, for a mature organism, growth is basically a cancer, right?” So why didn’t I like it more? As the LRB reviewer pointed out, there’s a lot of sobbing
Self by Yann Martel. He wrote this way before The Life of Pi, which I loved. It’s a self-indulgent, memoirish, sort of travel book and I didn’t finish it. That hardly ever happens.
The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobsen. This is the one that did win this year’s Man Booker, against the odds, literally (the UK bookmakers stopped taking bets on another book). I’m only a little way into it, and it’s challenging and takes concentration and even then I think I am missing a lot of allusions. And yes, it is funny. And it is shaping up to be well worth the effort.

Out To Lunch the book of writings by my writing group
We meet on Sunday and will plan the launch in late November. There’s varying degrees of excitement and nervousness among group members. I’m enjoying working with the group on the project.

Nanowrimo (write a first draft of a 50,000 word or more book in the month of November) is about to start. I’m not taking part this year. Doing it last year was how I turned a short story into the-book-known-as-Ann. There are thousands signed up worldwide and over a hundred from New Zealand. Online forums and various encouragements are on the website all the way through the month. Here’s the link if you want to find out more: http://www.nanowrimo.org

Holiday reading & ongoing writing

It was a good holiday in Queensland and Melbourne. Saw some new places - Glass House Mountains, for example - and some important people, such as my son and my friends Judi and Margot.

A Glasshouse Mountain







The kookaburra that appeared in our back yard at Dicky Beach








My holiday reading ranged widely:
Solar, Ian McEwen (for my book group). Like it a lot, laughed out loud a few times, enjoyed the “science.” Such an unattractive protagonist, yet still a great stimulating read.
The Thousand Autumns of Joseph de Zoet, David Mitchell. Love DM’s writing. Learnt a lot about 15th century Japan and Holland from this novel, set in the Dutch-run Island in Nagasaki Harbour that was the only centre for European trade with Japan at the time. Also a love story.
The Danger Game by Kalinda Ashton. Australian novel, family tragedy, interesting relationship between adult sisters.
The Periodic Table by Primo Levi What can I say about this inspiring man and his writings? In this book he uses his knowledge of chemistry to talk about some of his life experiences.
The Glass Room, Simon Mawer. Learnt about Czechoslovakia in the 1930s. A story of a family and their friends over several decades. And a spectacular house that over the years is taken over by Nazis and Soviets and the Czechoslovak State.
Isak Dinesen, Judith Thurman. I am such a fan of Judith Thurman’s writing. She has said herself if she was writing this biography now it would be shorter. There sure is a lot of detail. ID had a fascinating and troubled life.

I think I’ve made progress with the ending of the novel still known as “Ann.” I just might be on the final draft. File name: Ann 15. Here’s my list of abandoned titles:
Ann
Ann Goes Into Art
The (he)Art of the Matter
Present Tense
Present Perfect
Perfect Present.
I find titles hard. My favourite title of any of the books I have been associated with is the title for the writing group book, and I didn’t think of that. (Yay, Annabel!) I have to come up with a title for “Ann” myself, but so far it eludes me.

"Ann" has a lot of quotes from a lot of different writers in it and the whole business of permissions to quote will have to be faced up to at the point when I am making decisions about publishing it. As I found with wanting to use a line from Emily Dickinson in Take It Easy, long-dead authors can be tricky. A university holds the copyright on ED and wanted me to pay fifty USD to use that line. I used something else, something I didn’t like as much. All the living authors I contacted were fine for me to quote them at no cost, just with the usual acknowledgment. However, I suspect it will be an even bigger issue with the Ann story, because I have included many more quotes and they are essential to the story. Watch this space.

Out To Lunch is well on the way into production. We are reading final proofs, the fabulous cover is nearing its final version, we have an ISBN number. (There’s nothing like an ISBN number to make a book seem real). A launch is planned for 4pm Saturday 27 November, St Peter’s Hall, Paekakariki, New Zealand.

When I think I have a final version of the Ann story, I’ll go back and look at some of the many short pieces I have. Maybe some of them would fit with the Ann story to make a book. Or not, still thinking about that.

This month has a number of friends’ birthdays in it, so my calligraphy efforts are directed at making individual birthday cards, which is a lot of fun. Thinking about them is a big part of the fun. And talking with my partner, Prue, about possibilities - she had a great idea the other day.

Publishing Merry-go-round

Prior to heading off on a three-week holiday in Queensland and Melbourne I have competed yet another rewrite/ edit of my fourth novel and printed it out to take with me and have my partner read. Previously I have shown only the first five chapters to anyone.

This is the novel that began its life as a short story and I morphed into a novel during Write A Novel in a Month last November, and wrote about in earlier blogs. I’ve been experimenting with writing in the present tense, and with other aspects of my writing. I’m still not satisfied with the ending to this novel, but the rest of the story is probably done — which doesn’t exclude more rewriting, just means that I think the story elements are there. There is a lot more plot than in the short story, but the key idea of the short story is central to the novel.

It’s around fifty thousand words, which is short for a novel, long for a novella, but that seems to be the size it is. There could be one more chapter, but I’m not convinced about that. The novel doesn’t have a title yet. I call the files of various drafts ‘Ann’ because that’s the name of the protagonist, but I don’t think that will be the title of the book. The current file is Ann15.

I don’t know yet what I’ll do about publishing it. The whole publishing business is in a state of flux. Fewer and fewer big publishing houses control more and more of what one might call ‘mainstream’ publishing, the smaller presses can afford less editing/ marketing support, and so on and on. Self-publishing is less denigrated than it was, ebooks are a potential; options, maybe, certainly a tangled web for writers.

The writing group I am part of is in the process of self-publishing a book of our writings, to be called Out To Lunch. The title relates to group members being lesbians, the fact that we meet on Sundays with a shared lunch, and us all liking the idea of being a bit crazy. We have some funding from a local trust and from one of our members who sadly died last year and help from friends and relations with cover design and typesetting. It will be published at the end of November.

I’m enjoying working with a group on this project. And, I suspect — hope —that when we have Out To Lunch out there I will have decided what to do with my novel.

In my last post I quoted a couple of lines of my poetry in the short story I added. Just for fun, here is a version of the same quote using my slowly-developing calligraphy skills.