The Novelist’s Due – #2

First rejection of the Season

Friday the 13th, 2009

The day began with intimations of a sinus headache, which began as a tingling then turned into a full-fledged snaring of the sides and top of my head. It followed with the completion of finally getting the multitude of text edits entered into HUGO. For the time being we’ll ignore the chapter 11 rewrite that hasn’t been done yet.

After edits came a little bit of work work. Very little of it, as I had an early lunch with Richard V, down in Union Square, to talk work work. With both of us being budget-conscious yet hungry, we managed to stuff ourselves with moles, guacamole and salsas, a shared plate of carnitas, and more tortillas than either one of us should have eaten in one sitting. The tortillas are good at Colibri, so who can resist. (And who should, when the dollar doesn’t go far these days and there aren’t very many of them to be spent. Low-cost starch can fill the belly well.)

Carnitas from Colibri

Carnitas from Colibri ... (pic borrowed from their web site colibrimexicanbistro.com)

Dearth of Enthusiasm

After lunch, I took a brief walk to my PO box in the Financial District. Mixed in with the various bills, past due notices, and a much-needed check (from Richard V, no less), was a familiar looking SASE. Beneath the pre-printed return address on the envelope I’d scribbled the name of the agent to whom I’d inquired about representation. As I stared at the envelope, hesitant to open it, I realized it probably was foolish to have used a work envelope with logo and pre-printed address. But that was the only #9 I had available, so wtf…

The envelope clearly had made no impression, positive or negative, upon the high-profile agent. I thought we could be a good fit, my flawed choice of stationery notwithstanding. There were connections that I’d gleaned from reading about her that I thought we could make. Connections I’d feared I’d risked making by giving her what was essentially somebody else’s return envelope.

Evidently not. Clearly my query hadn’t moved her. From the tenor of her response I suspect I hadn’t even scarcely aroused her. To her credit, the rejection was fast and enthusiastic.

Divisadero St, SF

Divisadero St, SF

Back to the salt mines

Don Clark and I had our writers’ afternoon that afternoon. That’s where we get together and talk writing, provide each other feedback on our work, and generally provide solace and a safety zone for each other with regard to our common affliction: the written word. Don is a published author whose book Loving Someone Gay, published 30 years ago, is now in its 4th edition and possibly headed for a 5th. Before that he was a talented fiction writer whose career trajectory might have gone the fiction route, except he became ensconced in gay activism and had a family to raise.

I showed the rejection letter to Don. He tweaked his eyebrows, handed it back, and recited a private tale of an agency encounter. That’s one of the many reasons we love Don: for his carefully edited and sometimes deliciously biting retorts, delivered like unsympathetic condolences.

So back to the salt mines it is. Brush up the query writing skills. Emote that enthusiasm. Live it, drink it, let it spill forth onto the page.

The Novelist’s Due – #1

EPISODE 1: Let the games begin

It’s great. It sucks.
It’s great. It sucks.
It’s great. It sucks.
It’s great. It sucks.

This is the dreary madness that consumes your brain when the flow of words halts and the day’s writing session is done. This refrain alternates with the intermittent ponderance Why in the hell am I doing this?, which tends to intrude upon the stream of consciousness just after a comma throws up a roadblock in the middle of a strenuous compound sentence.

When you hit that magical milestone, however, which I did on February 15, the one in which you optimistically declare I’m finished!, you are allowed to take one breath. Two, if you were holding your breath during those last, countless revisions of your final sentence.

manuscript in edit mode

manuscript in edit mode

First Step: Feedback

One fantasizes one can simply toss a manuscript over the fence to an agent or publisher like a stray rock from somebody else’s yard. Perhaps if one is John Grisham. The more appropriate reality is that you have to get people to read your magnificent manuscript before you even begin thinking of heading down the publishing path.

That, at least, was the advice of a young red-headed agent I encountered at Litquake 2007: “Make sure you put the best possible manuscript in front of a publisher,” was her sage advice.

She suggested writing groups. I am pursuing friends.

Fortunately I have friends who are eager for me to send them the manuscript. Twelve pages into it, we’ll see if their enthusiasm wanes. We’ll see how many dinner invitations are rescinded, how many emails unanswered, how many uncomfortable phone calls endured.

I’m kidding of course. My friends are wonderful. The lingering worry is What if my manuscript is not? The ridiculous courage it takes to get from Page One to The End (please…don’t ever actually type that at the end of your manuscript) stands on shaky legs when the ream of printed paper is staring you in the face begging, Send me…Send me…

All in the name of fiction. What a madness.

A thankful foe arising

Give thanks.

New foes arise,
Threatening to bind our souls with secular chains.
—Milton

Considering those words are over 400 years old, it’s fascinating if somewhat alarming to observe how slowly attitudes change, no matter how rapidly the world seems to be changing around us.

There is a persistent notion these days among social and religious conservatives that is reminiscent of Milton’s fear: the notion that secular attitudes are damaging to Faith and destructive to the Being. Supposedly our moral society is being polluted and our long tradition of agonizing monotheistic beliefs are being threatened with being ground into sand.

Beware the decline

Worst of all, these secular chains are multiplying and growing stronger: witness the desire of same-sex individuals to marry. Witness the enforcement of this country’s foundational doctrines of separation of church and state; the pursuit of liberty; freedom of religion; the pursuit of happiness. All these affronts to moral decency…

Love (brought to you by the LGBT Community) and Hatred (sponsored by the Westboro Baptist...CHURCH !?)

Love (brought to you by the LGBT Community) and Hatred (sponsored by the Westboro Baptist…CHURCH !?)

The more extreme the opinion, and regardless which side you’re on (Hypersecular or Asecular), there is an unspoken dictum that states that as long as your opinion toes the party line you are an acceptable individual, not a morally decrepit one. But the fulcrum swings in both directions: as much as the ultra conservatives rail on the immorality of the hyperseculars, the liberal left probably dreams of staking up some of the Christians for the lions to feast upon. (Not that they would ever put it on placards.)

Ah the horrors. The incivility of it all….If not readily visible on your neighborhood streets, then one need only turn on the embarrassing spectacle that is cable “News” to witness the intellectual carnage.

If we survive ourselves, massively fallible race that we are, it may become obvious that paying fair attention to the mysteries of the secular will liberate us in ways that have traditionally been reserved for non-secular dogma; for non-secular celebration and traditions; for presumably divine passages from antiquated texts.

If we succeed in not blowing ourselves to bits, or in not poisoning our bodies into extinction, then perhaps we will learn to be collectively thankful and come to realize that the secular, even though it is far from unblemished, is nevertheless a manifestation of the divine.

Food for the brain to chew on

Change is the great demon foe of commonfolk. It is the most non-obvious and under-appreciated blessing of all. While we tend to think of change as secular—the rites of human passage, for instance—we’re learning more and more (or reminding ourselves better these days) that life and history are built upon change.

God is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens

On the secular front I’m thankful for a thought-provoking and expansive quartet from my relatively recent reading list: Lee Smolin’s Three Roads to Quantum Gravity, Christoper Hitchens’ God is not Great, Karen Armstrong’s A History of God, and Elaine Pagels’ The Gnostic Gospels.

Three Roads to Quantum Gravity
Lee Smolin explains that the processes that underscore the life of the universe itself are change-based. Time is not the accumulation of memories; it is a measure of changes in state and position. Even this planet we think of as static is actually in flight. We don’t simply exist on a flat surface on the edge of a gently turning globe; we are sucked onto the face of a spinning orb that is hurling through space at 483,000 miles an hour.

God is Not Great
Christopher Hitchens argues that any reasonable interrogation of organized religion yields a rejection of the many foundations of those creeds, and, by extension, should encourage individuals to dissociate themselves from the organizations. Talk about a change: “If one must have faith in order to believe something, or believe in something, then the likelihood of that something having any truth or value is considerably diminished” (p. 71). It’s an exquisite collection of arguments, filled with rich opinions that have a grotesquely beautiful, almost inspirational and revelatory quality to them. The book itself is an anti-cathedral of the most opulent sort.

A History of God
Karen Armstrong has a different affiliation with God. In a radio broadcast on NPR (maybe at the Commonwealth Club in SF?…I was cooking dinner), she stated that Hitchens’ atheistic doctrine is as much a pedagoguery as the religions he opposes. Her A History of God charts the 4,000 year history of subtle change that underscores adherence to Judaism, Christianity and Islam, while at the same time illuminating how very similar the three religions are. This former nun is probably one of the most important and balanced religious scholars working today.

The Gnostic Gospels
Elaine Pagels makes a close examination of specific, measured changes, as well as the chance-laden landscape of history, that underscored the Catholic Church’s suppression of the more humanistic Gospel of Saint Thomas in favor of the much more non-secular, divinity-focused Gospel of Saint John. The latter of these gospels (St John’s) became the official creed of the new Church—it is the most-recited gospel during Easter—whereas Thomas’ manuscript landed in the reject pile. The book is a fantastic observation of how change, intentional and specific, can be used to manage faith, as well as thought.

For all such things I am grateful

We should all be thankful for all things in life, good and bad. Yes yes, it’s easy to be grateful for the obvious: family and friends. They help us weather ill health, rape and genocide in Africa, the scourge of human history, ideoextremists who wish us death—all the heinous things we do to one another and to ourselves in the name of greed and religion.

Friends and family help us weather a 40% drop in the value of our retirement accounts and the litany of sour news pouring forth as our senior American generation is heard remarking that they’d never thought they would have to live through another Depression.

Friends and family make the beautiful things in life more beautiful—a crisp sunny Virginia morning, a piano concerto played against the background scent of mulling spice, the scintillating lines of a well-crafted book tickling the brain, the soft leaves of its cover like warm bread between the hands.

Beyond this, I am extremely grateful for the uncommon things: secular opinions, the failings of the human race, my own foibles and tenuousness, the hard rocks and gases of outer space.