Poetry called me, and I had to answer

I had a great time at Poetry Center San Jose this past week. I had a horrible poetry teacher in college who seemed bent on picking his favorites, then destroying all other students so they never wrote poetry again. I was destroyed. I hadn't written any poetry (save a funny rhyme for my daughter when she was three) since about 1970. Baby, that's a long time! But Poetry Center let me come back, like John Donne's compass, to the point where I began.

My critique group (yes, I am extolling their virtues again) includes a poet, and one day she brought a piece about a tiny place in Texas which led us all to reminisce about small towns in our past. Evelyn C. challenged us each to bring a poem about a small town for our next meeting. One week to produce a poem after 40 years! Holy iambic pentameter! But I don't write poetry,which I kept telling them, but they wouldn't let me off the hook. So I wrote something about a little town in Oregon that keeps a pretty low profile.

The next week, I informed them I still didn't write poetry, I write short paragraphs. I read my piece and was informed it was "narrative poetry," and they liked it. Shock! I was so emboldened that I took it to Poetry Center, where Nils Peterson was reading form his recently published book--and his stuff is a lot like mine (similar style, but better, of course). At the open mic part at the end of their meeting, I read my poem about Scio, Oregon. I liked the feedback I got from this very warm and encouraging group. So, I guess now I'm a poet. Who woulda guessed?

the reason to write

I have analyzed my struggle with the book. I began it rather naively--writing whatever scenes popped into my head after a brief outline. I'm sitting back now and re-planning the whole thing. I apparently need a strong outline, and my rather nebulous notes about what's coming in the book do not sustain my momentum. I know what makes my main character tick, for the most part, but I'm not sure why she cares about the secondary character, whose murder sets everything in motion.

And I am fragmented. I'm working on a quilt, keeping the homeschooling stuff going through summer and preparing for our classes in the fall, and we've had a death in the family this summer. That leaves a gap, and an emotional hole to dig out of to reach the surface again. Add travel plans to see my side of the family, keeping the household going, and arranging times for my daughter to hang out with friends. I'm a taxi service. So a lot of my notes are on little pieces of paper that I have to translate when I get home. Some of those notes require their own Rosetta Stone. I wish I had better handwriting.

What I have to do is to keep plugging away-and to remember that I'm telling a story because I want someone to read it, laugh, escape, and maybe pick up a couple of ideas of their own on coping with life.

To want, to need, to just do it

I have been coveting a Kindle. I, who have always lusted after the smell and feel of paper pages turning, leading me onward in knowledge, or suspense, or...whatever. But it has occurred to me that electronics have their downsides, too. Can you order a book, used, for a Kindle? And I would miss the particular feel of a book.... Anyway, it's all a moot point because I cannot afford a tricked-out Kindle, I don't need one, and so, my desire ebbs and flows. No necessity usually means, for me, no product. But I do hope my book ends up on one. :)

The book has been a huge struggle lately. I write and I toss out, I delete and switch paragraphs around like cards in a deck. I have a troublesome character who seems to be refusing to enter the pages. I recently noted to a friend that while sitting one's backside in the chair in front of the computer is a necessary discipline, writing from a sense of duty seems to be a losing effort. The drudgery of dutifulness seems to cause my creativity to dry up like water on a hot skillet.

While we write from a desire (indeed, a need) to write, we still have to exercise discipline to keep focus, and keep the page count rising. The difference between discipline and writing out of duty seems to be, for me, like the difference between guiding someone to a focused end versus chasing them there with a broom. Like wanting a Kindle, the desire to write is not enough to get there. On the other hand, how many of us like it when we are MADE to do something--shoved there by outside forces and held with our noses to the grindstones? But if we feel the need intrinsically, discipline is what keeps us moving when we become discouraged or distracted.

The Kindle, I can do without (for now)--but I can't really do without finishing the book. I think I'd regret that forever.

Have you been taken in?

My book continues at a snail's pace. I'm in a section I really can't rush because I'm introducing together the villain of the piece to the reader, but my heroine sees him only as her long-time mentor. So the description and dialog here need to imply a lot to the reader without making them think the heroine is excruciatingly dumb because she doesn't notice his evil, manipulative nature.

This struggle of course leads me to self-analysis--which is where nearly all my struggles, whether real or fictional, seem to lead me. I began thinking about people who've pulled the stocking cap down over my mascara and I have to admit there are too many. Well, one is really too many, because we'd all like to be wise students of human nature and spot the bad pennies. But we don't. In a way I think it testifies to basic goodness. Those who are pretty decent folks tend to expect the same of others, so they occasionally get surprised by the dastardly.

I'm asking you, and I'd really like to know, if you've been manipulated by anyone, how, and how did you "escape" their influence?

Larceny and violence in the writer's soul.

I'd forgotten how long it had been since I posted, until I got an email from Peggy from high school saying she'd been reading this blog. I figured I'd better get on with it so there's something new here to read.

April was an amazing, filled-full month, complete with a writers conference up in the Santa Cruz Mountains. I was part of an intermediate fiction mentoring group, and they were very helpful with their critique of my first 20 pages. That's all they got to see. They missed the good parts with the body in the warehouse, another body in the heroine's car (unless I change that), and blood dripping from the ceiling. Fun, huh?

Actually, going to the Mount Hermon Christian Writers Conference is always wonderful. Lots of big trees, woodpeckers, squirrels, mountain air--and Christians, which I like. But because I'm not writing for Christians, there were times when I felt like a back slider. People talked about their projects, such as devotionals, Christian novels, etc. Then they'd ask, "What do YOU write."

"Right now, a murder mystery for the secular market. The heroine is a recovering alcoholic attorney whose clients keep getting killed off." But the folks at my tables during meals had lots of great encouragement for me. We quiet Christians--we understand larceny and violence. The sin nature is a great source for novels.

There are deep pools of hatred and murder, envy and irritability, and tons of sloth in me. Lots of good material to work with.

Hello, dark world

I have been lost in the throes of my manuscript world. It's a darker and dirtier place than I'm used to, so I've been doing a bit of research to flesh it out, since I don't tend to hang out on the mean streets. I've been researching permit laws for carrying concealed weapons, Alcoholics Anonymous (lovely people there), some courtroom procedures, and I am about to visit my first pawn shop . I've learned enough that when a friend sent out an email about old ads we'd never see nowadays, I emailed him back and told him that a Colt .45 cost ten times as much now as it did in that ad.

I am a rather easily overlooked type of person. Nothing extravagant or amazing about me on the surface. A small, domestic looking person, in fact, with my gray hair and baby face. So when I start talking about concealed carries and the cost of a nice little matte black Colt, it doesn't quite fit. And that's one of the things that makes research so darned much fun.

manuscripts are like children

I've concluded (nearly just this second) that working on a manuscript is much like parenting. You love the kid, you laugh a lot, you cry here and there, and you'll be dang glad when they are safely out there. I know I always like sending something off to an editor (articles at this point). It's unsure if they'll buy it, but it's so nice to get it out the door, or in the usual case, into the email. I recently got a very nice, personal rejection on a piece. The editor took a brief moment to tell me why the piece didn't quite fit them, although they liked it.

(For those of you who haven't been sending things to editors, the fact is, most editors don't bother to respond at all. So it's truly lovely when someone gives you a personal word.)

To stick with the parenting metaphor, it was sort of like sending your child to camp and getting them back after a week. You aren't done yet and you need to send them out again and again as they grow. And after a while, they only come back to say hello, with a smile (and, in the case of the manuscripts, with checks in hand).

My book is a perennial teenager--causing much angst, as well as fun. It's a lot of work and frustration, it is energizing and at times depressing. And I will be SO glad when it's finally out there, in print, where somebody can buy it.