Happy New Year!

I have for you, Blogger-Mates, not a resolution for the new year, but a prediction for 2007.

Each of us will have our current novels out in the world, if not already accepted by some agent or publisher. Some of us will be futher along than others on that goal, but each will have made huge strides toward it--the quest of find a publisher that will serve us well.

It is going to happen. Mark my word.

Happy New Year, fellow wordcrofters.

Angela

The Unfurling

On Monday night we sat together for the first time as people, not just writers. Wine, soup, sweets. We are more than writers and that hit home around my table. I realized the surgeon also paints. The weaver is a Harvard MBA. We're sea captains AND ballerinas.

We've been together some months now and I find myself shyly sentimental about the unfurling intimacy among us. I like water as an image, so sometimes I close my eyes and listen to what breaks our surface--my first husband died, I was wearing corduroy, he was in Mayo after his accident, Dan and I used to watch The Simpsons, my ex-wife who's not my ex.

Yet how polite we are. The whale arises from a calm sea and shoots forth a geyser of truth and none of us stirs. No running for the harpoons and hoisting the mainsail to give chase. (I really should have finished Moby Dick to blog this properly.)

We're strangers really, sailing off on our own adventures, sharing the wide seas and every two weeks greeting each other with a volley of cannon fire, as if to say, "isn't this a jolly good life?!"

More revelations will slip sideways from us. And I am so grateful to a witness to it, to be in your company for those brief hours. ~ Victoria Tirrel

Waning Gibbous Moon

Writing a novel set in the past requires a certain level of historical accuracy. The novel may be fiction, but the author had better not mess around with the facts. The danger is, of course, for the writer to get too involved in the history/research, and forget about character development.

Guilty. I really enjoy research. Its like being in grade school and getting lost inside a dictionary when all you needed was the meaning of one word.

In a passage I wrote yesterday I wanted a rising full moon to cast a spell over a particular time and place. Dang. What if it wasn't so. This morning I sent a search for "phases of the moon" into the internet. Bingo.

Month, date, year, longitude, latitude, time zone, and within a moment of hitting enter I received a time chart full of sun and moon data for one day and ". . .waning gibbous with 94% of the Moon's visible disk illuminated." Couldn't get much closer than that.

Perfect. Were the skies overcast that evening, on that hillside, in the year of 1939? Don't need to know that one. As the author I can make that sky cloudless and clear, a black canvas for the brilliant waning gibbous moon.

As I wrestle with my characters who continue to lead me down unexpected paths, I will remember this moment of researach bliss, when all I want to say is "Yum."

Angela

Reading, Writing, Loving the Printed Word

At the risk of becoming one who reads reviews of books instead of the books, I need to discuss one of the reviews from yesterday's New York Times Book Review list of the 100 Notable Books of the Year.

The book, Reading Like a Writer, by Francine Prose, was reviewed by Emily Barton ("Brush Up Your Chekhov") in late August.

(An aside, here. I get the New York Times on-line. On line you can find the original reviews for the list of 100 books. Check out www.nytimes.com/books. In the "hard copy" only the list exists. At the end of my work day yesterday, I had to beg the clerk at Barnes and Noble to sell me the remaining copy, which was on the floor, in disarry, behind the counter. I needed to hold the newsprint in my hand--reading is also a tactile experience.)

Reading Like a Writer is now on my wish-list. Oh, hell. I'll probably just go out and buy it.
In it several authors' books on writing are listed--Eudora Welty's One Writer's Beginnings, Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird, and Stephen King's On Writing--as heartening, but so personal that "the advice to be gleaned from them is scattershot."

But isn't it the personal that we are all seeking. No matter how many workshops, or classes beginning--as yet unpublished--writers take, it all comes down to the personal.

It is King's On Writing that completely changed my approach to writing. Until I did his one exercise, which he reluctantly included because of the title he'd chosen, I thought I must follow my journalistic background--just the facts, nonfiction. First as a newspaper reporter, then as a medical editor for nearly 20 years (facts, facts, facts, research, research, research), I struggled with how to tell the stories I had grown up with. "Changing the names to protect the innocent" does not suffice when the subject matter includes a region no larger than 20 miles square. I would have to change my name, perhaps go into a witness-protection program.

King asks his reader to do a small exercise, two pages max. He sets the scene. If I remember, someone is creeping up on someone, through the door, down the stairs, something. After you've got an image in your head, he then asks you to switch the gender of the people you've begun to see. Wow. Yes. That worked. I ended up writing what was to me, a funny, grisly murder scene. I had no idea I could be so violent--the murder weapon was a piano wire!

I was on a new path. Thank you Mr. King.

Although several people die in my novel, and two of them are probably murdered, I will not be examing Mr. King's books to pick up clues about his style of writing.

My novel is in my style, and it is about family, the land, and righting past wrongs. While I am still writing I will continue to read books with rich character development. Oh, yes, and anything that has a little surprise at the end.

Angela

Riding a Homicidal High

Yesterday I turned back to my first book, ready to machete my way to a final draft. I've been telling folks who ask that the book, which I haven't looked at critically in 18 months, was "in the drawer, marinating." Now I think the more appropriate food metaphor is of a roasted red pepper--out of the oven, steaming in a bag so the skin peels oh-so-easily away from the moist meat.

What a chip was on my shoulder when I wrote this book! I had no trust in my readers or myself. Every sentence drips with lyricism--no journeymen here (subject verb object). Oh, the alliteration. God, how tedious!

I'm two short chapters in (just 12 pages) but I've sent 600 words back to God already. At that pace, the book will be 15,000 words shorter and hopefully something publishers will fight to print.

Excuse me while I don my gloves and apron--it's going to be a messy and glorious few weeks. ~ Victoria Tirrel