The WordSpider

When I was younger I often said that my hobby was being crossed in love.

Despite the flippant tone in which I always said this, it was no joke.  Every day, sometimes every hour of the day, I ached, I pined for my love; I wept rivers—no, whole oceans of salt tears; I brooded, I raged; I plotted strategies to put myself in his way, to charm him, to seduce him, to win him—the him of the moment.

Compulsively I cast the I Ching and laid out the Tarot cards, trying to determine the nature, or the depth, or the existence of his feelings for me, asking the same questions over and over when I didn’t like the answers.  I drew up charts comparing our natal horoscopes to prove that we were fated to be together.  I poured out my heart in journals and in letters sent or unsent, letters almost always better unsent.

For thirty years my life was defined not by the man I loved—even as a sentimental girl I was too much a feminist for that—but by my passion for him, a passion blind and selfish enough to rival any sexist pig’s objectification of a woman.

My first two husbands and the assorted lovers before, between and after them, were alike only in their inability or unwillingness to give me what I thought I needed from them, to be what I wanted them to be.  It seemed I chose them partly by accident, partly for their potential to feed my appetite for drama, which they did primarily by not fulfilling their assigned roles in my scenarios.

Truly, my perennial misery about some lover, or ex-lover, or wished-for lover was far more than a hobby:  it was an art form—one of the dramatic arts, of course.  At the peak of my virtuosity I could, and did, agonize deeply, sincerely, and simultaneously, over three separate relationships.

How did I fall into the habit of giving myself over to such devouring passions?  How did I come to define myself for so many decades as, before all else, a woman in love?  Did I spend too much time, at too impressionable an age, listening to Piaf and Bessie Smith and Judy Garland albums?  Did I read too much romantic poetry, too many love stories, too many fairy tales?  But fairy tales have happy endings, and I chose relationships pretty much guaranteed not to end well.

In my forties I got some much-needed counseling, and in the process I recovered the memory of my childhood anguish at losing my father.  He had come home from war in body but never in spirit, never again to be my beloved daddy.  He was silent and morose, walking wounded, walking dead:  a heart-broken, hard-drinking zombie, separated from me by a glass wall that shimmered at times with the heat of sudden rage.  Five years later when he abandoned us, I was convinced that I didn’t care.  By then I had erected my own glass wall against grief and fear, and taught myself to forget how we had once delighted in each other.

Recalling that delight and that grief so many years later, I understood at last that I had consistently gravitated to men who were emotionally unavailable for one reason or another, most of them addicted to alcohol or drugs, in a fruitless attempt to repair the part of my heart that broke when I was five, to revive by proxy the lost relationship with my father.

I would like to say that from that time forward I stopped compulsively falling in love with men who couldn’t or wouldn’t love me back, but seeing that a behavior is destructive and futile is never quite the same thing as actually giving it up.  Meeting my father after thirty-six years’ absence did help me accept that I had lost him long ago, but I still had to pursue a few more bad romances before I could quit my hobby.

One day, when I was almost fifty years old, I realized that I had given it up.  Imperceptibly, without effort or intention, I had simply grown busier with creative work, with earning a living, with friendships, with plans to travel and then with the travel itself, until I no longer had the time or the emotional energy—or rather, was no longer willing to spend so much of either—to support my past level of infatuation.  Instead of a love-life, I realized, I had acquired a life.

And so, naturally, within a few years, I had both.

No longer compelled to be in love for the sake of being in love, becoming accustomed to an emotional climate of sober sanity, at last I was capable of seeing a man as he was, and so of loving him for himself instead of for his potential to fulfill my hunger for trouble.

The men in my past were all remarkable in their different ways, and loving each of them was an adventure.  I learned from them much I needed to know about life—as well as much I could have happily gone the rest of my life without knowing.  Each of them in his own way did love me, at least a little, and I will never regret loving them.

But oh, the way I loved them:  you couldn’t pay me enough to go through all that again, and I expect the objects of my past affections feel much the same.  I owe those men my heartfelt apologies, and also my eternal thanks, for if any one of them had managed to keep me just barely happy enough to stay with him, I would not have gone stumbling away blinded by my tears, stumbling on into the future until at last I was ready to meet a man to join me in a truly happy marriage.

So thanks, guys, for saving from myself by not getting between me and my mate, my true love, my lasting and at long last requited love.

And to you, Ian, my dear husband, Happy Valentine’s Day.

Recently a member of my critique group (which I won’t name, because it’s an unwieldy size already), raised the topic of using dreams in writing.  “I’ve heard a great deal about using dreams in your story,” she wrote to me, “all negative. I don’t get it. I like dreams, and my dreams are not dull.  Do you know why that is, dreams not being a good choice?”

“I don’t know why the bad rap,” I replied.  “Might be because some people try to stick too closely to their dream stories instead of using them as jumping-off points.  Sticking exactly to a dream scenario would produce the same stilted hybrid you get when you use a real-life incident as the basis for a story and insist on clinging to the facts, grudgingly ‘fictionalizing’ a few token details, instead of envisioning the incident as happening to characters with lives and personalities of their own.  Some writers just don’t get what true-to-life means; they get hung up on “well, that’s the way it really happened” instead of writing genuine fiction that embodies truths about real life.”

Next I invited the group to weigh in on this topic.  “Some say using a dream as the basis for a piece of fiction is never a good idea.  Why not?”

The responses made me realize there were two questions:  using your own dreams as story fodder and writing your character’s dreams into a story.   The group’s moderator replied first.  “Using a dream as the basis for a story, or using elements of the dream in your story, is fine.  As long as the story has all the elements a good story possesses, it is a good story, whatever the inspiration.”  Fidelity to the details, he agreed, is a mistake.  “It is a bad idea to try and put your dream down on paper as is, generally, for the same reasons that just because something really happened doesn’t automatically make it a good story.  It’s the reason people’s eyes glaze over when you tell them your dream, or about this thing that happened to you while you were shopping and the lady said blah blah blah.  Unless you establish a character we care about, and some tension, or take us on a journey that creates interest in the reader as to what is going to happen next, etc. it is not entertaining as fiction, no matter how interesting you found it when you dreamed it, or how accurate it is to something that really happened.”

Moving on to the subject of putting a character’s dreams in a story, he added, “It is also a bad idea to start a story or novel with a dream, because you haven’t yet established for the reader what reality is, so they do not know what parts of the dream are real or not, and further, the reader is wanting to get to know the character and the world, etc. and here you are starting with something that isn’t real, and then they’ll just have to start all over at square one trying to figure out who the character is and the world, etc.”

This is excellent advice, excellently explained.  I’d seen writers make this mistake before, without understanding why it annoyed or confused me.

“If you write a good story,” he concluded, “it doesn’t matter what inspired it.”  Other responses poured in.   Here’s a sampling, edited for brevity:

“Ideas for stories can come from any venue. If the writing holds the reader captive, I don’t see how the idea source is a problem.”

“I find dreams useful when I already have the general plot for a story. Not every dream I have is useful to the story, but some provide the kernel of a thought about events [or] scenery… usually not about emotions, thoughts or dialogue.”

“In my experience it’s difficult to write from dreams because they are intensely personal and emotionally impactful. It takes great skill to convert that combination into a piece of writing … If you can put a three-dimensional character in a predicament like the dream with good stakes and relevant tension you’ll have a winning combination of unique and compelling.”

“I think the most useful thing you can take from a dream is its fanciful imagery or environment.  Dreams are great for unbridled imagination.  But be wary when you borrow from your own dreams, because dreams tend to attach [personal] emotional significance to scenes… While in your own mind that imagery may be loaded with emotion, it may be meaningless to the reader.”    

After a lively wide-ranging discussion, the original instigator thanked us all.  “I have been trying to sort this out because I often find inspiration from dreams. I never write a story based solely on a dream but have had characters that are already introduced having dreams that may or may not intersect with their reality. So it sounds like the opinion is that it’s the quality of the story, as always, that really determines. That makes sense.  Sometimes as a new writer I become confused by “the rules”—which I have always had trouble with anyway.”

Her and me both!  Guidelines for good writing I can live with.  But … rules?  The only rule I acknowledge is this:  If it doesn’t work, either scrap it or revise the blinking $?@# out of it.

When I am tired, or sick, or depressed, or just want to relax for a while, I like to wrap myself up in a comforting book.  My husband shares that habit, and early in our life together we knew we were a good match because we both like to read at the dinner table. 

That may sound anti-social, but hey, it’s late in the day, a day in which we may have had too many stressful interactions with others, and we are winding down.  We have plenty of conversation at other times, and indeed we often share interesting or humorous passages from our dinnertime reading.

Unless one of us is immersed in something absolutely unputdownable, we don’t usually choose intense or challenging reading matter to accompany a meal, or to take when curling up in an armchair or “sprawling” on the bed (as my husband likes to do) before sleep. At such times we go for comfort reading.

So what is comfort reading?  I define it as reading that transports me from present uncertainty, pain  or exhaustion into another realm.  No matter how much a piece of comfort reading may teach us about science or history or life itself, it’s a still a vacation from our own lives.   

For me such books are those that take me to a known and well-loved world, where bad things may happen but the rules are clear  and good triumphs in the end.  My old favorites include  the novels of Jane Austen, or her lesser—but far more prolific—sister-writer Georgette Heyer; romantic adventure tales popular in my youth, by Mary Stewart, Joan Aiken and her sister Jane Aiken Hodge—or Aiken’s works for younger readers, especially Midnight is a Place, Saddle the Sea, etc.  In fact, I’m still fond of a lot of so-called “juvenile fiction,” and well-written mysteries often bear rereading. 

For my husband, it’s far less cosy stuff:  thrillers by Tom Clancy or Robert Ludlum; Bill Bryson’s rambles through landscapes and/or language; Colleen McCullough’s novels of ancient Rome, with all their intrigues and treachery; and the Dune books.  He loves Frank Herbert’s books, mourns Herbert’s untimely passing, and he makes scathing remarks on the inferiority of the many sequels and prequels co-authored by son Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson—but he reads them anyway.  Call them methadone for Dune addicts! 

When I am most truly sick or sad or sorry, I often turn to Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea books, especially the first trilogy, for their spiritual beauty, their moral compass, their honesty about the cycles of life and death.

My grandsons, seven-and-a-half and nine-and-a-half, suffered a terrible bereavement last fall and are still mourning.  Both are impatient with cuddling or any form of “babying,” so there is no easy comfort for a grandmother to offer them, except to provide their favorite foods; they are determined, for the most part, to comfort themselves.  The elder was a Harry Potter addict early in life, demanding endless repeats of the first movie before he could read, and then learning to read the books at an early age.  He’s long since exhausted the Harry Potter books and moved on to other (often better-written) sagas of wizardry, making his way through heavy volumes at a speed that astounds even me—and I normally read hundreds of novels every year.

The younger boy is not such a reader himself, but his father reads aloud to him most evenings.  He used to enjoy hearing me read as well, but on the first night and the second night of a recent visit he refused my offers to read him a story; that seems to fall into the category of “babying” he’ll no longer tolerate.   But on the third and last night of their stay, he rummaged through my shelves and brought me a book he used to love:  The Color Kittens.  We’ve read it together so many times we know it by heart.  So we curled up on the couch with a blanket and half-read, half-recited:  “green as cats’ eyes, green as grass, by streams of water green as glass.” At the triumphant conclusion “all the colors in the world, and the Color Kittens had made them!” he hoisted his sleepy self off the couch, kissed me goodnight, and trundled upstairs to his father who was waiting to tuck him in. 

Comfort reading still rules!

And what is your favorite comfort reading?

 Well, I said I would post here every two weeks, and it’s been three.  Okay, so I lied.  Excuses:  family, arthritis, gardening, watching soccer (Allez Pumas!!! http://kitsapsoccerclub.com/), and being involved in a vehicle collision. 

Though shaken  and overdosing on adrenalin, I emerged unhurt, but my car did not, and I was reminded yet again of how many people these days are unemployed, homeless and broke by the fact that the driver of the elderly, and heavy, Ford truck that smooshed my poor little Corolla was all three, and thus uninsured.  Luckily we have good insurance.)

My final, painful admission—I can’t call it an excuse—is that sometimes I just love reading more than I love writing.  Scottish novelist Kate Atkinson writes brilliant thrillers, rich in humanity, intelligence, wry comedy, general wackiness and unexpected twists.  I’ll review them one day.  Georgette Heyer’s romantic comedies comfort me when I need soothing—as I did after the crash; ditto for Agatha Christie’s mystery novels, especially those from the 1950s and 60s, when she was at the top of her game.

My sense of guilt is somewhat ameliorated the fact that I have recently finished a strong revision of my story Joy (I posted an early draft of the first part here a few months back) which in fact turned out to be a novelette.  At about 10,000 words, it’s substantially longer than most short stories but a bit underweight as a novella—in itself a rather difficult form to sell.

Sell it, however, I am trying to do, because I’m bloody proud of it!  The founder of my critique group, Randy Henderson (http://www.randy-henderson.com/) was kind enough, though a speculative fiction writer himself, to send me a list of likely magazines and/or contests for mid-length literary fiction, and I’ve put some time into researching some of them.  Here are the results, not definitive, certainly, but giving some hint as to where they’re at:

Alaska Quarterly Review (under 50 pages) – read unsolicited mss (paper, no email) Aug 15 – May 15

 A Public Space – (online, very odd)

 Carpe Articulum Novella Contest (up to 150 pages) – ($25 fee)

 The Collagist – open submissions; also chapbook contest

 Drue Heinz Literature Prize (up to 130 pages) requires having had novel published (print)

Failbetter - regular submissions  (also novella contest, May 15 deadline)

 Gettysburg Review

 Glimmer Train (short story award for unpublished writers; submit in May  - I did.  Fiction Open, up to 20,000 words, submit by email in June)

 McSweeney’s

 Miami University Press Novella Contest (18,000 – 40,000 words)

 Narrative - diff size MS, $22 fee, big money for winners

 Novella Project (25,000 – 35,000 words)

 Paris Review – rather prissy, paper subs only

 Quarterly West (not regular submissions — only for novella contest)

Quattro Books (Canadian, 15,000 – 42,000 words)

Seattle Review (40 – 90 pages)

Southern Humanities Review (up to 15,000 words) open email submissions – looks promising

Texas Review – paper only, submit Sept thru April

In a previous post on Joe Coomer’s work (http://pugetsoundblogs.com/wordspider/2011/10/10/book-review-beachcombing-for-a-shipwrecked-god/ ), I mentioned my desire to find his novel with the intriguing, irresistible title Apologizing to Dogs.  Unfortunately the Kitsap Regional Library does not possess a copy.  Last week my search ended, appropriately, in Serendipity, a used bookstore in Friday Harbor on San Juan Island, where I also obtained copies of The Loop and A Pocketful of Names, which I have read (from the KRL) but did not own.  What treasure!  

Somebody liked Coomer’s books enough to purchase several of them, but, to my good fortune, chose not to keep them.  I have two theories about how anyone could bear to give up such fine novels.   First, many of the San Juan Islands, including Waldron (where I recently spent several glorious days without internet access or indeed a computer—and without producing a blog post), have neither bookstores nor libraries.   On periodic shopping trips from such islands toFridayHarbor, dedicated or ravenous readers of limited means may trade in books they’ve read for credit toward purchasing books they haven’t.  Alternatively, as several of Coomer’s books, both fiction and non-fiction, feature boats and islands, a bibliophilic sailor might acquire a taste for his books and bring them onboard to the San Juans from elsewhere.  Storage aboard boats being sharply limited, such a sailor, no matter how wealthy, must occasionally unload some books to make room for more.

However this copy of Apologizing to Dogs arrived in Friday Harbor, I am now its happy owner and I read it immediately.  It’s a sweetly goofy thing, a frothy confection compared to the depth of Beachcombing for a Shipwrecked God or A Pocketful of Names (his most powerful and most painfully true work to date), but rich in Coomer’s trademark blend of insight, quirkiness and compassion.  

All the action takes place in a single day, but it’s a wild ride in and out of a dozen eccentric minds belonging to a group of antique dealers on a run-down but historic street inFort Worth,Texas.  All these folks are odd to some degree, a couple are flat out insane, and many are—perhaps unsurprisingly—living in the past.  For the elders, this is reasonable; for some younger characters, less so.  The revelations that take place during the course of the day, interspersed with childbirth, heart attacks and a tornado, kick the foundations out from under some cherished delusions, setting their holders free.  

As for the title, yes indeed, some human characters do apologize—in thought, if not aloud—to the canine characters, rendered genuinely as always by Coomer.

Reading aloud is the best way I know to find the clogged places in a story’s flow, or identify awkward bits of dialogue.  Writing teachers urge us to test our work thus, especially poetry, and I’ve always endorsed the idea.  I just never got around to doing it—until last fall.

 My favorite local café used to be Olympic Coffee.  It wasn’t the most comfortable of Bremerton’s cafes, nor did it have the best coffee, but it had a certain spirit, and it stayed open late.  It even hosted an open mic for a while.  Musicians dominated, but there were poets too, including my husband. 

The garage bands killed it.  Desperate for any venue, they packed the place with their friends, few of whom bought anything.  Their presence meant decreased, not increased, revenue for the struggling café, the mob in the doorway discouraging customers.  The owner sold up and moved away; subsequent owners cut back evening hours, and last year, to our sorrow, Olympic closed its doors forever.

By then we’d begun attending an open mic in Silverdale, where we heard virtuoso guitar, covers of Van Morrison and original work from the moody and poetic to earnest songs about Jesus.  There were no poets, but the audience seemed kindly, and my husband soon stepped up.  His Quark Sonnets were well received, as were readings from Poe, Yeats and Sylvia Plath.  Hearing him read every other week, I grew jealous.  Lately I’d been writing short stories, some within the ten-minute performance limit, and I too began to sign up and read.

Facing an audience presumably more critical than young children (my past auditors), and with my own work, was terrifying; at first I required a glass of wine to fortify me.  But I found my work improving, and in time performing became easier, and even fun.

Some audiences have small tolerance for readings, so we didn’t sign up in adjacent slots but sandwiched ourselves between musical acts.  The audience seemed to enjoy hearing us but, we gradually realized, one organizer-emcee did not.  It was little things at first: a word here, a grimace there, a suggestion that there wasn’t time for me to read, but still time for a singer—this when we’d rigorously kept our readings under ten minutes, often less than five.

One evening the emcees urged performers, rather pointedly, to “read the rules before you sign up,” and we discovered that while the musicians’ ten minute limit was unchanged, readers were now restricted to five minutes.  We got the message.

We’ve missed performing our work, and we’d like to hear other writers.  So we’re starting a new open mic—or, since there will be no sound system, “an open (no) mic” specifically for readings.  It begins May 16 and will run twice a month.  Please attend, whether to read or to listen, and please spread the word.

OPEN BOOK:  an open (no) mic for writers & readers

7:30 ~ 9:30 pm

 1^st & 3^rd Wednesday each month

 at the East Bremerton Starbucks

7034 Hway 303 & NE Bentley Road

Local writers of poetry and prose are invited to read aloud up to 10 minutes of their own and/or others’ work in an intimate & receptive setting.  We also welcome acoustic solo singer-songwriters.  No bands, please.  It’s a small space, with no sound system.

Please respect the mainstream family atmosphere of our host café by choosing works with an absence of:  strong profanity; explicit sexual content; sexism, racism or hate speech of any kind; religious or political proselytizing or attacks on other groups.

Confession:  I am a wimp when it comes to inflicting trouble and danger on the characters in my fiction.  I know well that I am far, far too gentle with them, and if my tales are to contain any tension, or any suspense—not to mention character arc—this really won’t do. 

 In spite of my fondness for a well-turned murder mystery, I usually avoid reading detailed accounts of acts of violence.  My visual imagination and, worse, my memory are too strong.  I got only a little way into Jeffrey Eugenides’ supposedly marvelous novel Middlesex before a graphic description of a family slaughtered by bayonet-wielding soldiers stopped me reading any further, and images from that passage still return, years later, to haunt me.  This is a testimony, perhaps, to the vividness of Eugenides’ writing, but I just can’t handle vivid writing on such topics. 

 Still, there’s a lot of territory between gruesome horrors and a tale so free of challenges to its protagonists that nothing whatsoever happens to them.  If I hope to attract any reader who prefers a seascape to a placid pond, this is a territory I must begin to explore, and to claim.

Somebody (possibly Theresa Meyers –  http://www.theresameyers.com/) once said in a presentation at a Peninsula Romance Writers meeting, “Think of the very worst thing that could happen to your heroine—and then make it three times worse!”  At the time I knew it was good advice, but I am still struggling to implement it.  I don’t want to be cruel to my characters; I’m too fond of them.

Luckily for me, my characters, like my children and grandchildren, seem to have strong wills of their own.  I might do my timid smother-mother best to keep them sheltered and safe, but wouldn’t you know, they still insist on wandering out into dangerous territory—of the heart as much as of the body—and they learn, and they grow, and they survive.

There’s a famous old New Yorker cartoon of a writer surrounded by dogs eating, sleeping, scratching themselves, etc. while he types away in one corner.  In the doorway stands a woman—his wife? his slatternly muse?—saying forcefully, “Write about dogs!”

How does this apply to my current project, The Vanth?  Well, I know something about love and sex, about fantasy and yearning.  I know something about being a young woman (been there!), something about artists and professors.  I know a little about traveling in Italy, about buying and cooking the local food, about Tarquinia and its painted tombs …  About Etruscan warriors: not so much, but a little.

Thanks to my husband and his degrees in Classics, I know a bit about the art, culture and history of the Etruscans, the people who ruled much ofItalybefore the rise ofRome.  Unlike most of the audience I hope to find for this romance, I know what a Vanth is—but prior knowledge is not necessary, I hope, to enjoying the book.

Emotion recollected in tranquility

As a young woman I spent far too much of my life agonizing about whether I was loved; how much I was loved; how to make him (the “him” of the moment) love me, or love me more, or love me the way I wanted to be loved; and if or when I would ever be truly loved.  This is something I definitely know.  I know a lot about how people can make things difficult for themselves by compulsively second-guessing themselves and their lovers.  Luckily I am now very happily married, and so I can recollect all this seething emotion in the recommended tranquility.

Never mind the exotic locale, lovely as it may be; never mind time travel and all the paranormal elements; never mind even the sex scenes, both sweet and steamy:   in a romance, tension is what it’s all about.  Will the lovers find each other?  And then, having found each other, will they be able to get past all the static in their brains, all the fears and doubts, both real and manufactured, that keep them from trusting each other?  In a romance, no matter how steamy or dramatic, the answer is always finally YES.   Sometimes it happens that way in real life, too.

Two weeks ago I wrote here that my topics for upcoming posts would arise from my current project:  undertaking a major revision of my paranormal romance The Vanth.  This post has nothing to do with The Vanth itself (herself?) but much to do with the process of revision.  I doubt that I would have become a novelist without learning to use a computer, and thus acquiring the ability to move large blocks of text around without having to literally cut and paste and then retype it all. 

This is not to say that I don’t write by hand.  I do.  I filled a dozen or more blank books during my travel year, and I have stacks of labeled boxes of old journals in a funny little attic next to my office.  Some go back 50 years or more. 

Many writers, especially poets, prefer to write only by hand.   Some claim their creativity flows most directly that way to the paper, and this may be even more true of left-handed writers.  Lefties as a group may or may not be more creative or intuitive than the rest of us, but the left hand is linked to the non-linear, instinctive, not to say illogical right side of the brain.  Certainly some of the greatest poetry can be called illogical, and I think all poetry is, at some level, best processed in a non-linear way.  But I am not a poet.

Back in the days when people with cell phones were a minority, back when hardly anyone even took photos on their phones, let alone surfing the web, reading or even, by now, more than likely writing books on them, back when more and more people had personal computers while some still settled for modern technology in a simpler form, back in the 1980s, the poet Jesse Bernstein would sometimes ask guests, “Hey, wanna see my word processor?”  

When they said yes, he’d grin, dig into his pocket and produce a stub of pencil.  That was more joke than truth, though, because in fact Jesse did most of his work on typewriters.  He loved them with a passion that went far beyond his extraordinarily well-developed office supply fetish.  (I’ve never known anyone who owned more paper clips, more staples—or more staplers—than Jesse.)  Though he (unlike me) stopped short of naming his machines, they were individuals to him, with distinct personalities.

He generally had at least two, and often three typewriters, but his dearest possession was a sturdy pale green portable Hermes 3000.  That model, he used to say, was famed as a war correspondent’s typewriter—and Jesse did consider himself a war correspondent. 

Jesse also loved the narrow, spiral-bound notepads used by reporters—it was mostly on them that he wore his pencils down—and once persuaded Regina Hackett, arts reporter for the old Post-Intelligencer, to get him a stack of them imprinted with the P-I’s logo on the covers.

Why did Jesse call himself a war correspondent?  As a child and youth he had been forced to live in the filthy and dangerous underside of our society, its streets, its institutions.  The unimaginable abuse he suffered there had left a legacy of nightmares and PTSD that meant he never truly left that war zone; it was no wonder he identified withViet Nam vets and Holocaust survivors.  He often said it was his duty as a survivor to speak for those who had not survived or who had no voice.  So he spent hours in his office clacking away on his Hermes, sending out dispatches, in the form of poems, from the battlefront of despair and madness.

Me, I’ve never suffered that much.  I do entertainment, and sometimes a lighter form of journalism, telling small but true stories of writers I’ve known.

A year and a half ago, I began attending the monthly meetings of the Kitsap Peninsula chapter of the Romance Writers of America ( http://penrwa.org/index.html)  at the suggestion of Jennifer Conner, a romance novelist and an e-book publisher (http://www.bookstogonow.com ).  She also runs an online column featuring more local writers.( http://www.examiner.com/writing-careers-in-seattle/jennifer-conner ) 

 The group was congenial and supportive, the meetings stimulating, and I soon found myself trying my hand at a steamy paranormal romance.  The Vanth—a tale of a young American tattoo artist, an Etruscan warrior hurled forward in time, and a lovely but implacable female demon who pursues him—seemed to write itself, so quickly did it progress, and I had a complete first draft in less than two months!  That was last February.

Although I made a few tentative approaches to agents, the instant rejections neither surprised nor dismayed me.  I knew the novel was not truly ready to be read by an agent or editor.  It had major weaknesses and I couldn’t figure out what to do about them.  I’d heard some great presentations in the PENRWA meetings, I’d been to workshops, I’d read books on how to structure a successful novel, and it wasn’t hard to come up with ideas about how to fix my story’s problems.  But all those possible solutions felt too contrived, gimmick-y.  The characters by then had become real people to me, and I just couldn’t move them around like puppets to suit the demands of a formulaic plot.  Then new projects arose, and my life distracted me from a tight focus on my writing, as life will sometimes do, and I forgot about the book.

Last week I picked it up and saw instantly how I could ratchet up both the suspense and the sexual tension, in ways that grow naturally out of the story and the characters, and are not the least bit gimmick-y. 

How can this be so easy now when it was so hard a year ago?

One reason, of course, is that my writing keeps improving as long as I keep writing (almost every day – let’s be real here).  I have a better eye for structure and balance and tension in the plot than I used to have, and I’m still learning new plotting techniques, as opposed to gimmicks: not the same thing at all!

But another reason, probably the most important, is that I let it wait.  In those two months when the story erupted from my brain, I stayed up too late writing, night after night, and rushed back to the computer as soon as I woke up, 500 words before breakfast.  Even when I was not writing, I lived in the middle of the story:  I walked again in memory in the Italian hill town ofTarquinia, where the action takes place; I saw, smelled and tasted the wonderful food; I dreamed of the characters; I was a shadow third in their lovemaking.  Getting some distance on all that was like trying to see the thematic patterns in my own life as an historian might:  an overview was simply not possible. 

Now it is.  And now making changes, large and small, to the plot does not feel like interfering with the characters’ lives: it feels like correcting the mistakes I made in my understanding of their story, first time around.

 This is certainly not new advice, to let a book wait and come back to it with fresh insights.  I always thought it made perfect sense; it was advice I had just never happened to take.  This is only my third novel, after all.  I spent seven long years working and reworking the second, the “serious” novel; then I wrote this one; and since then I’ve been writing and editing short stories.  Now I know it’s more than just good advice:  it’s a rush!  It’s a thrill.  It’s fun.

 So now I am revising The Vanth, probably not at the same feverish pace as the first draft, but still as an absorbing occupation.  For the next several months I will be posting every other week on this blog, rather than every week, and my posts may largely concern specific challenges I meet in the course of revision:  whatever I can learn from others about the process, and what I learn for myself by doing it.