Bad Blogging and Space Object Re-entry

I have to scurry to get something on the blog so it won't be an entire week since I last wrote here.

It was a busy week. I interviewed for and wrote a story for The Ellsworth American and helped Rob pull together some stuff for a magazine that's going to display some of his work. Wrote a Filioli synopsis and some first-person Filioli commentary to interject between chapters. (I'm sure there's a formal word for "interjections between chapters" but I don't know it.) Cleaned up the first six chapters as much as I could--changing the main character's age at the last minute, because it's first person and I wanted less time to have elapsed between the events and the time of narration. Probably this'll turn into a major screw-up, because it was so last-minute, but I guess anything can be fixed at this stage.

Got the Filioli package to Kate the Superagent yesterday. So we'll see. A long time from now, probably, life being so busy at Harcourt in the wake of the Houghton-Mifflin merger.

Last night we went to see "The Gondoliers," put on by the Gilbert & Sullivan Society of Hancock County. Their past director and music director are back--yay, although last year's show was pretty good, too. Gorgeous music, singing and dancing, great costumes, nice set--only marred, as usual, but the fact that you couldn't understand a lot of the lyrics, especially when sung by the chorus or a neophyte soloist. You could tell what you were missing when one of old pros came on--every word as clear as if he were sitting next to you. But it was all fun--except for sitting next to Rob, who doesn't like "The Gondoliers" very much and was more annoyed than usual about the mysterious lyrics. This afternoon I'll write a review for the paper.

One highlight of our week was an email from FEMA telling Rob what to do if a satellite fell on his head. Some years ago, he agreed to be the Emergency Management Director for our little town. Before 9/11, this was an unpaid position with no responsibilities. In recent years, it is an unpaid pain in the butt. Rob and other firefighters had to be trained to combat Global Terrorism--Rob jokes about standing his ground when Al Qaeda frogmen march up from the harbor--and he's always having to do some little emergency-related chore.

This time, he got a memo warning him about the satellite's "uncontrolled decent." (Do you suppose they meant "decency"? Because I thought we had that well under control.) Then it said: "We will have six Federal Joint Interagency Task Forces located around the country ready to deploy the moment we know the impact area, responding to assist you in your role of immediate consequence management." It attached a nine-page "First Responder Guide for Space Object Re-Entry," which I plan to keep among my souvenirs. There's a novel in there somewhere, don't you think?

A Lovely, Ugly Day

For various reasons, this kind of day has been rare lately: entirely devoted to writing fiction, with just a dollop of skiing for starters. It's the best kind of day I know.

We're having Weather, so school was cancelled and with it my junior high writers workshop. Then the lady I was supposed to interview this morning turned out to have the flu (just as well--for me, not for her--since it's NASTY out there).

So, nothing to do but write.

First, I took advantage of the five-point-three seconds of decent snow out there and skied in the woods for an hour--my favorite kind of woods, too, lovely, dark, and deep. Snow coming down in a mist, sticking to the branches and sides of the trees. Silence. Tiny critter footprints, filling up with snow.

Got home about an hour before it all turned to rain. (Note to self: Remember, there are good things about living by the ocean. OK, snow may not be one of them. But try kayaking on a wheat field.)

And then I worked on the last chapter of The Filioli. I'm so close to finishing the first, rough-rough-rough draft that I can see the last sentence lying on the ground under that tree over there. Lots more to do after I get there--LOTS more to do, thanks to character work I did last week. (I write "journal" entries in the voices of various characters, and haul surprises out of their brainstems every time.) But still, it's progress.

Now the wind's coming up. If the power goes out we'll spend the evening staring at the fire instead of Jim Lehrer. Nothing against ol' Jim but...

Ship That Baby Out!

It's finished!

After two weeks of dithering, I just Fedexed my copy-edited manuscript to Harcourt in New York. That's it on the left there, 270 pages of it--the yellow post-it notes are the changes, mostly responses to style questions. I have style issues up the ying-yang because my setting is an island settled 300 years ago, whose inhabitants have renamed plants, animals, and themselves according to function. And modern Islanders still lapse into archaic English. That'll teach me.

So, should the Island name for rockweed be Cropfodder or cropfodder? Does the wood of the Sap Tree have to be Sap Tree Wood, or can we shorten it to Sapwood? Should unspoken quotations from The Book be italicized and in quotation marks, or just italicized? How about words-used-as-words (e.g. "The word of the hour is 'blabber.'")--should they be italic or just in quotes?

Oh, and would some Mainland trader have told an Islander about sweaters for the first time in 1900?

There were only a few content questions like that one (and the sailboat issue I mentioned in my last post). Some of the answers were in my head but some meant I got to revisit a few research sources--such as the Old Sturbridge Village site to find out exactly what the grist mill and sawmill should look like (for the map, I guess).

And just today the Oxford English Dictionary reminded me that "dost" is second-person singular and I twice had it first-person singular. And despite what you may hear on TV, the -eth ending on a verb ("he stinketh") is third person only.

I think I need to get out more.

I also got to check out a brand new library book, which the local librarian discovered and lusted after when I asked for help with the sweater question. It's No Idle Hands: The Social History of American Knitting and it shows pretty conclusively that Americans didn't know about sweaters until the late 1800s.

Ah, the writing life. Glamorous, ain't it?

Lisa Schoeder!

Over at the Class of 2k8 blog, it's Lisa Schroeder's week. She's on there now with an interview about her newly published verse novel, I Heart You, You Haunt Me. It's about a girl whose boyfriend dies but is reluctant to leave the world. So he haunts her! Early reports are that you need a tissue handy about halfway through.

The fact that the book is in verse makes it (surprisingly, to me) more accessible to reluctant teen readers, Lisa says. Simon & Schuster must have agreed, because their teen imprint, Simon Pulse, snapped it right up after her editor read it on his bus ride home.

I, meanwhile, am still slogging through my copy-edited manuscript. Should quotations from The Book be italic and quotes or just italic? What should be capped and what shouldn't? My characters use archaic language sometimes, which adds to the fun. Did you know that thou is first person singular, and ye is the first person plural? Try and keep track of that while figuring out about whether Sap Tree should have initial caps.

My best friend from high school, Shelly Perron, is a copy editor by profession and insisted on reading the manuscript. I couldn't imagine why, until I saw the results. Nothing against Harcourt's copy editor, who's amazing, but Shelly filled in some important gaps. For instance, at some point during my many revisions, I took out an exchange in which the Goatman told the main character, Medford Ruyuin, that he had arrived on Island by sailboat. And yet, in the existing manuscript, Medford still tells his friend Prudy how the Goatman got there.

Oh yeah? Shelly said. And how does Medford know that, hmmmm?

Heaven bless copy editors, that's all I can say.

Editing Terror

I got my copy-edited manuscript today, along with a letter from Harcourt’s managing editor gently reminding me how expensive and risky it will be to change anything beyond this stage.

I started writing this novel in November 2003. I’ve revised it five times, three times since Harcourt bought it almost two years ago. That’s four years of waking up at 2 a.m., grabbing a pen, and writing something like “would they know about prunes?” on the pad of paper beside my pillow.

Now the former Medford and the Goatman is called The Unnameables and is in the Harcourt fall catalogue. Once I finish going over this manuscript, that’s it. If I wake up at 2 a.m. and realize that Medford could not possibly know about prunes, that thought is arriving too damn late.

He would know about prunes. His language is basically the English of 1705. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Shakespeare wrote about prunes in “Measure for Measure” in 1603. The word showed up in household accounts in the late 1400s. I know this. I looked it up twice.

At 2 a.m., though, who believes the Oxford English Dictionary?
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A Freelance Ne'er-do-well

It's never too late.

I’ve been a paid writer for 33 years. But I'm on my third attempt at becoming a novelist. It might be working this time.

When you’re the child of Depression-era New Englanders, willfully leaving the paid workforce is the eighth deadly sin. I feel even uneasier about this because of how hard it was to land my first writing job in 1974, the early feminist era. (For example, an advertising executive told me in a job interview back then that the best way to become a copywriter was to start as a secretary. “Yeah,” said Idiot Girl. “I noticed all the male secretaries on my way in.” End of interview.)

That’s why, every time I quit a perfectly good writing job for no good reason, I always tell everyone I’m “going freelance.” This sounds much more dashing and grown-up than the truth: “I’m going to sit and stare at a keyboard, and after an hour or two of that I’m going to eat cookies. Then I’ll take a nap. After several months, I’ll panic and look for paying work.”

The two times before this one, when I was in my 30s, I panicked almost immediately. Both times I actually did end up freelancing. But instead of fantasy freelancing — writing for impressive national magazines while turning out fiction on the side—the first time I wrote employee newsletters for corporations (by my low standards, fairly lucrative) and the second time I wrote for tiny local newspapers in Maine (not lucrative by anyone’s standards, but a real hoot).

The second attempt involved moving to Downeast Maine just when hippies and yippies (my generation) had been replaced in the popular imagination by “young urban professionals,” known as yuppies. My partner, Rob, and I decided we were orfans—“older, rural freelance ne’er-do-wells.” One of my new friends in Maine made us T-shirts saying that, so we felt like a trend.

In 1984, just after Rob and I moved to Maine and just before I panicked, I managed to write a dreadful, 60-page kids' fantasy called Medford and the Goatman. Thrilled to have actually finished something, I “copyrighted” it by mailing it to myself—the local postmaster cheerfully stamping the date all over the envelope—then stuck it in a desk drawer and forgot about it.

(Sociology note: The postmaster was a woman. There’s no such thing as a postmistress, at least not in Maine. They’re called postmasters, male or female. Same with selectmen. One time, a rogue typesetter at my tiny local newspaper took it upon himself to change “selectman” to “selectwoman” where applicable, ignoring the stated preferences of the town officials themselves. The community thought we were idiots—well, they already knew that, but this confirmed it. The typesetter got fired.)

I ended up working full time as managing editor for one of the tiny local newspapers, and later as arts editor for the much larger county weekly. I was perfectly content, without even a nudge of a thought about that envelope in the desk drawer. Then, out of the blue, in the spring of 2003 I decided to take a dialogue workshop offered by Cynthia Thayer, a novelist who lives in the same county I do. I had a great time, and was shocked to find that I wasn’t as rusty as I’d expected to be.

Two months later, with no cooperation from my brain, I heard my mouth giving the county newspaper three months’ notice. I was going freelance, I told everyone. And I would write a kids’ book.

Imagine my surprise when I actually did write a book, with characters and a plot and everything. It was a brand new version of Medford and the Goatman, four times as long and at least twice as readable.

Even more shocking, local summer residents Genie and Bill Henderson liked the book (he’s the founder of the Pushcart Prize and they’re both published authors) and sent it to Kate Schafer, a colleague of Bill’s agent at Janklow & Nesbit. Kate took me on, and eventually sold Medford and the Goatman to the patient and inspired Kathy Dawson at Harcourt.

Three re-writes later, Medford is called The Unnameables and scheduled for publication October 1, targeted for ages 10 and older. I’ve written another, smaller book for younger kids, which is seasoning in a drawer at the moment, and am about a chapter away from finishing the rough draft of a third book for the same age group as The Unnameables.

I can’t believe I keep finishing books. I can’t believe one of them is getting published. No T-shirt could capture this experience.

I never felt younger. In fact, I have a zit forming.