USA USA!

Oh, I'm no jingoist type and this is not a post about Osama bin Laden (although, I'm not losing any sleep about people celebrating his death and reading blogposts from fellow liberals pearl clutching about those celebrations underscores my deepest dissatisfaction with my own people in that we have the most exhausting tendency to crawl up our own collective ass). Instead this is another post about writing and publishing a book and a solution that came to me to a problem I was having.

As I mentioned in my last post, I have two characters in my book, one named Fred and one named George. They are named for their predecessors in Middlemarch. The problem I was having is that it was hard to distinguish one character from another due to similarities in name and in character.

I was toying with ways to rewrite one or to re-engineer their dialog and was running into a wall when suddenly it hit me that the way around it was simple: George became Jorge. George doesn't have to change much to become Jorge. He's still a cute Midwestern American boy struggling with an unrequited crush. But he doesn't live in provincial 19th century England. He lives in gloriously multicultural America. And so he gets to have Mexican parents.

I'm always glad for American multiculturalism. I'm one that believes that the settling of different nationalities and cultures in this one place is a thing that is not just uniquely American, but one of the best parts of America. It adds richness and texture to American society and can do the same in my little world of The March.

Long before we went completely insane as a nation after 9/11 and xenophobia hit its apex (hopefully), I was bemused and frustrated by the tendency of some white people to freak the fuck out over the potential for our country to become less white. It's weird the way people seemed to feel like white, European roots were a requirement for being a real American. I remember one fellow bemoaning how Spanish would be the national language by 2010; newspapers and textbooks would be written exclusively in Spanish and all the good English speakers would be left in the dust. And this was around 1997! So paranoid. And stupid. Imagine thinking that newspapers would still be a cultural force in 2010.

Jorge will be about the same guy as George. But I get to do some stuff with him to not only distinguish him from Fred (whom I'm also really fond of), but also to open some doors to his character.

Writing is hard. But sometimes something hits you while you're writing and you think, "Of course!" And then it gets to be fun too.

A Question of Technique

One of the edits Jessica suggested was that I write the dialog for a couple of characters differently, as they spoke in a confusingly similar manner and each have sort of interchangeable British sounding names. They are, in fact, named the same as the Weasley twins. I didn't name them after the Weasley twins. They are named for the original Middlemarch characters on whom they are based. The only character from Middlemarch whose name I changed was Dorothea because, well, Dorothea.

I've been rewriting Fred and George a bit to make them less interchangeable, My Fred and George aren't equally impish, ginger twins.

That said, I've been toying with the idea of including a character sketch at the beginning of the book along with a family tree. What do you guys think of this? Like, at the start of a book you're met with a page that says:

Brooke Dotry: A recent college graduate who works at The March. She is very passionate about the environment.
Celia Dotry: Brooke's younger sister.
George Shaw: Their next door neighbor
Teddy Castings: A late middle-aged regular at The March. He has a relationship with Brooke
Etc.

I like these in a book because I think it's nice to be able to flip back in a book with a lot of characters and remind myself of who someone is when they haven't been in the book for a few chapters, or I've had to put the book down for a few days.

On the other hand, I'm afraid that I might be letting myself get away with something. My characters should be vivid enough that you don't forget who they are.

On the third hand, when I was watching The Wire, I found myself consulting the HBO character sketches kind of a lot, which had an unfortunately spoilery effect. It would have been nice to have a non-spoilery character sketch handy.

I'm on the fence. Does anyone have strong opinions on this kind of thing?

By the by, to any and all who've given me tips on getting published and forwarded names of editors, literary agents and publishers, thanks so much! I am compiling these and when I'm done with this next rewrite will be availing myself of all your kind help!

Cartoons

It was a joyful day in the Bon household when the littlest Bon discovered SpongeBob. I think responsible parents bemoan the advent of SpongeBob and all the commensurate gross out obnoxiousness. But I was thrilled to be, at long last, at the end of the screeching aural assault that was Dora the Explorer. I know we're supposed to love her and her sensible shorts, if only she hadn't YELLED EVERY FUCKING THING SHE SAID.

I've blogged elsewhere about my enthusiasm for SpongeBob, but the time came when my SpongeBob passion began to wane. Serendipitously, this was around the point that Laney discovered Phineas and Ferb which hit all my parenting pleasure centers. I loved the way it celebrated these two weird boys and their brains and creativity and odd implacability. And together we watched the genuinely hilarious Phineas and Ferb together until one day it started to tweak at me that the wonderfulness of these boys stands out in relief to their sister, Candace, who is shrill, easily freaked out, and passionate only about her boyfriend (who is also oddly implacable). Candace gets punished for her failure to be as wonderful as the boys to a degree that I started to feel uncomfortable with. Seriously, she takes a startling amount of abuse.

And right as I started to get worried about Phineas and Ferb, Laney became fiercely into classic cartoons; largely, The Jetsons and Looney Toons. I loved it because I thought it would be super fun to revisit my childhood cartoons with my kid. But, you guys, The Jetsons is freaking me out. It's like a cartoon version of Don and Betty Draper, as seen from Don's P.O.V. Women are ridiculous and only have value by merit of their fuckability (sorry to be so crass when we're talking cartoons, but honestly...). I imagine that when the cartoon cameras move away from our exhausted, emaciated 33 year old mother of two (one of whom is meant to be 16 and so, you know, do the math), she's pounding gin straight from the bottle and pondering how many sleeping pills it would take to end the misery. Also, she's a shit driver. Because on The Jetsons, all women are shit drivers even though it's the men in their stupid flying cars who don't just fly ABOVE the fucking traffic jam. God.

On Loony Toons, sometimes women show up. Daffy Duck is married to an emasculating bitch. There's that pretty French cat that Pepe Le Pew gets all rapey at. There are the desperate, man hungry chickens aflutter over Foghorn Leghorn. They will turn into emasculating bitches as soon as they become wives. There's that green witch who eats children. The only likable female in Loony Toons is Bugs in drag.

Unless the Road Runner is a girl. Is she supposed to be a girl? I was never sure. And that might be on point.

All of this has made me wonder about the casual misogyny we ingested as children back in the old days when cartoons were on only one morning a week. And makes me want to turn a more critical eye to the stuff my daughter is watching. I'm honestly not sure if I ought to be concerned about the extreme punishment that Candace Flynn-Fletcher undergoes while her brothers blithely ignore it. I doubt that it's intended to be misogynist. But I also doubt that Daffy Duck's emasculating bitch of a wife was meant to be either. Misogyny is rarely something that's intended, it's just something that is.

The heart of feminism (just as the heart of all critical thought) is to question assumptions. This is sometimes hard since assumptions are things that, you know, you assume and so don't necessarily think to question. Once things have grown stale and dusty we find we can see the bullshit of the old days more easily. But I never thought about Pepe Le Pew's extremely rapey behavior when I was a kid. I thought that was just how men acted who really liked women.

And that, retroactively, freaks me out as a parent.

When Baby Steps Veer

In my day job, I work amongst the computers. Computers are dumb but they are sensible and only do the things that you tell them to do and in the order you tell them to do them in. This is very comforting and I would quite like my job if it weren't for the overly punctuated emails that I get eleventy million times a day (seriously, what's with the extra question marks? Is it more inquisitive?? forceful??? if you? include? LOTS!! of question marks????? Because, really, it just makes me kind of hate you for a few minutes.)

Life, alas, is less orderly than your dumb computer. Life is, instead, a process of just taking a fucking stab and hoping you land in the vicinity of some nebulous notion of what you meant to do. Since I am not Data (which I capitalize since I am referring to the awesome yellow-eyed character from Star Trek and not, you know, information), I grok this fully and will not freak out too much just because I find myself veering sloppily away from The Plan.

To wit:

I had a plan*. I wrote a book. I wrote a second draft and then I decided on some baby steps which would lead, inexorably, to getting the damn thing published. But, after some time away from the nuts and bolts of writing the thing, I'm pretty sure I laid those baby steps out all wrong. And, so I'm trying something different and if I'm wrong, well, I'll veer off sloppily once again and take another fucking stab.

So what happened?

Two things: First my friend, Jessica, who is smart and funny and pretty and kind and is only flawed in that she lives way too far away, read my book and gave me some really valuable feedback. She assuaged my worries about some things while providing some food for thought on where things didn't go quite like I meant them to. So I've decided a third draft is, in fact, in order. If I'm going to do this thing, I should do it right and if it means putting off the finished draft for a few more months, then so be it.

Second, I think it would serve me well to try and get my name out there in other ways. I had toyed with the idea of writing some stories and entering some contests, but, you know, I like to blog. I'm sticking with the blog and have an idea or three for some shameless self-promotion within the blogosphere.

So, my baby steps have slipped sideways. But that's OK. When I go into the office in the morning, I'll work on a user guide and take solace in its dull patterns.

* Nerd note: My plan was a lot like the Cylon's plan where I had a plan to have a plan that morphed into me hoping that no one would notice that I didn't really have a plan.

Here's the Thing About the Wire

I was watching Supernatural last night (shut up... I LOVE that show) and they introduced the angel Uriel, who is this angel (like angel of God angel, not like Joss Whedon's Angel, whom I also quite enjoyed) who just really enjoys killing people and refers to us as "mud monkeys" and I thought, "OMG, it's Bunny Colvin!" Because no matter how great of an actor Robert Wisdom is (and he really is) and no matter how much he brings to his scary angel character, he will always be Bunny Colvin because once you're on The Wire, I'll always think of you as that character.

Which is why Amy Ryan can be hilarious on The Office, but whenever I see her, I'll always think, "Who knew Beadie was so funny?"

And even if you look like this now:

I'll always think, "OMG, it's Wallace!" Even though Wallace looked like this:

Because that's how good The Wire was.

(I meant this for my other blog, but I'll leave it here and throw in a baby step note that I wish I could create characters as indelible as the ones David Simon made for The Wire)

Rejection

I got my very first rejection. It looked like this:

Dear Ms. Rehm,

Thank you for querying us about your book project.

We have evaluated your materials and regrettably, your project is not a right fit for our agency. We currently have a very full clientele and must be highly selective about the new projects we pursue.

Thank you again for thinking of us. Please know that we wish you much success in all of your future writing and publishing endeavors.

Kind regards

It's nice enough, I suppose. They were kind even if they spelled my name wrong and decided to not make all my dreams come true. I knew that handling rejection would be one of the baby steps I had to go through in order to get my book published. I still sat in my car and cried for a little bit.

To be fair: I was traveling for work this week and Don is still working 15 hour days, so all domestic responsibilities stay with me. What with the day job being overwhelming and the house job feeling onerous and the nagging sense that I should be doing more to get this book published, it all came crashing down after too little sleep and not enough healthy food, and so I had to cry a little. I met some friends for dinner, though, and we had a highly entertaining conversation over whether or not I should feel like I missed out in my youth for not having played Dungeons and Dragons. I maintain that I did miss out. That nerdy regret notwithstanding, I felt better.

I hope to send out 20 or so more queries this week, but I'm beginning to wonder if I should incorporate some more baby steps by trying to get some stuff published that isn't a book. What do you think? I got some other stuff I could write about. I'm toying with an essay about Laney's adoption that plays up the ridiculous and hilarious.

Second Queries

I'm no longer suffering from the neurotic fantasy of a sophisticated literary agent bitchily rejecting me. But before you congratulate me for conquering my fear of caustic mocking, you should know that I've merely replaced one neurotic fantasy for another. Hector Rejector is taking a whole different form now.

I just put together a submission for a literary agency that was quite specific about their requirements for submission. I appreciate their detail about how to submit.

So, why, with their kind specificity, have I decided that these literary agents are not thin and sophisticated? Oh, I don't know. They might be. But as part of this submission, I had to put my first three chapters behind my query letter which meant, of course, that I re-read my first three chapters and fiddled and teased what was there, which means, of course, I've decided it's just terrible.

This is what you do when you write. It's a universal thing, I'm pretty sure. Everything you wrote is shit. Sure, I imagine there's some writer somewhere who reads what they've written again and again and, every time, claps hands delightedly saying out loud "oh, that's good!" But that writer is probably George Will and I think he's a total asshole.

So, since what I've decided that what I submitted is shit, I no longer require a thin, sophisticated and spectacularly bitchy literary editor to reject me. Now, she can be maternal, kind and good-natured. This literary agent probably wears cardigans and has a dog and makes pleasant chit chat with check out people in grocery stores. She'll read my first three chapters and think, "Oh, well, bless her heart. She tried, the dear thing."

And then she'll reject me.

Remind me again, why do I want to be a writer?

First Queries

I submitted my first query letters tonight. I hacked and edited and wrote and rewrote. I agonized over whether or not I could use the word "background" twice in the same paragraph. I decided that OF COURSE I can't use the word "background" twice in the same paragraph. Then there was a fairly fraught 10 minutes where I worried over a semicolon. I decided to go for a comma instead, because while I tend to really like semicolons, I often suspect them of grammatical pretension. And then, I hit "send" at the first query letter and was immediately filled with a chilling sense of dread and inadequacy.

My problem is that I've watched far too many terrible movies marketed to women. So, as soon as I hit "send," I imagined some sleek, svelte, sophisticated woman (did I mention svelte?) sitting in an office that has, like, a charmingly worn Persian rug and a mahogany desk on which sits one of those new, super thin Mac laptops. Her $2000 Mac DINGS alerting her that there's an email. And then she reads it and audibly (but tastefully) scoffs.

This works well since I was wearing cargo pants and my hair is kind of dirty and my desk is shamefully cluttered and my laptop is a PC that's kind of old (but to which I am, nonetheless, very attached). Also, there is nothing more intimidating to me than thinness. If I ever met Victoria Beckham I'd be summarily rendered into an idiotic stupor. I'd probably drool or fart or something. Victoria Beckham, by the way, is who I picture the literary agent who read my first query letter looks like.

But it's Saturday night. No one will be scoffing until Monday afternoon at the very earliest.

I say Monday afternoons, because I'm quite sure that literary agents (who are all sophisticated and svelte) have posh Monday morning meetings where they talk about the parties they went to where they chatted with Arthur Miller and Judi Dench (yes, I know Arthur Miller is dead and I don't know why Judi Dench is hanging out at smug parties in Chicago, but this is a figment of my neurotic fantasy, so just go with it). And I bet the one that got my email pulls it out at her posh Monday morning meeting (where no one ever eats the bagels because they are all very svelte) and says, "Listen to this, darlings, some bloggity nerd who probably EATS the bagels at Monday morning meetings thinks she can re-do Eliot. Have you ever?" And then they laugh and laugh.

This is what it's like to live in my world.

Then I sent a couple of more queries.

Rules

I had an interesting student/teacher conference yesterday and spent most of last night agonizing over what to do about Laney's ongoing education. I won't go too much into it; suffice it to say that I'm on the horns or a rather luxurious dilemma. I got a smart kid who goes to a good public school that we didn't have to work too hard to get her into. But the question has come up if she should, perhaps, think of another school with programs designed for kids like her.

Laney, as the two or three of you reading this already know, was adopted. She sprang whole from the loins of another woman. As such, I often feel like she's a walking, talking, giggling, goofy four foot tall piece of anecdotal evidence supporting the primacy of nurture over nature. She is much like me: good and bad. For example, the kid hates to write. I don't mean the act of thinking stuff up - I mean the physical operation of writing. Me too. I hate to use a pen. I have terrible handwriting (as does Laney) and making things legible means sloooowwwwiiiinnnngggg it down so much. Laney's the same way and it drives both me and her teachers crazy to see her writing assignments with such meager detail and wanting depth. She's a good little critical thinker, and creative in her interpretation of text. I'm eager to get her onto a keyboard to see what happens when she's no longer responsible for making sure the person can make out the words she's trying to express.

Also, she's hard to get to focus. It took me a long time to finally come to grips with the fact that it doesn't matter how smart you are, if you're not willing to do the work. I often talk to her about that famous Barack Obama story where his mother woke him up two hours before school to do extra work. He'd complain and she'd say "You think I'm having a barrel of laughs here, kid?" She's a fan of Barack Obama (don't know where she got that), and so I often pull that story out when I'm pushing her to sit down and do her homework.

But back to the point of this blog: when I was working on my book, I'd get distracted so often. I had to turn the wireless off my laptop, hide the remote, let the battery run down on my phone, keep the cork in the wine bottle. But I made it through. I did the work.

But now comes the even more boring part - googling for literary agents and publishers and taking strict notes about how, exactly, they expect to be queried. I can't photocopy 50 copies of the baseline query letter I wrote Tuesday, stick them in the mail and wait for fame and fortune to come following. Instead, I have to be painstaking and tedious, which are not things that come naturally to me. But I'll do the work.

I hope I can teach Laney the value of doing the work so that it doesn't take her into her 40's before she settles down and just fucking does it. It's difficult though, because there are Harry Potter novels to be read. And re-read.

Seriously - she's SO much like me! I've read them all at least four times each.

Baby Step One - Writing the Query Letter

I wrote my first draft of a query letter and sent it to my mother. She's pretty good at that kind of thing and will give me some good tips. I also spent a good chunk of time scouring the internet for advice about how to write a good query editor.

My pal, neighbor and fellow writertype person, Michael, sent me to a blog that was just chockablock with valuable advice. It's kept by a literary agent with scads of experience in the field. She has a bit of a mantra: "write well and query widely." This seems very sensible. She also seems to view any kind of attention-getting cuteness as anathema. "Follow the rules," she exhorts.

And so I did. I did not get cute. I did not give into my urge for funny digressions. I did, as is expected, one page, three paragraphs. Almost.

Paragraph One - A hook. Think of the thing you read on the back of a dust cover.
Paragraph Two - A summary. That was a bitch. man. Have you ever tried to summarize 80,000 words? I have. It is not for the faint of heart - especially when you feel like every plot point is Entirely Vital To the Comprehension of A WORK OF STAGGERING GENUIS! (you know, I didn't much care for the book I just riffed on there, but, honestly, best title ever)
Paragraph Three - Who are you. Well, what with that National Book Award I won in my own imagination and the time that a blogpost I wrote got more than 20 hits? I decided to make this paragraph about how I bartended and studied English lit at the same time and finally figured out how those two things gelled.

Here's where I broke the rules - I sneaked a paragraph in between two and three about how I revisioned Middlemarch. I fancy this is pertinent and I kept it onto one page.

Mom will tell me if it's any good.

In the meantime, I'm left wondering if people (and by that I mean literary agents and/or publishers) just fucking hate the word "revisioning"? It was totally trendy back in the dark ages when I was getting a Masters and still wanted to put quotes around the word "email." But now I wonder if it makes people's ears bleed like "meta" and "fierce."

I used "reimagining" too. Which might also make the people to whom I am appealing want to barf.

Well, I've kicked off my first baby step and plan on giving myself a week to polish and finesse my query letter (do you think using the word "finesse" as a verb is also barfalicious?). Baby step after that will be finding people to send it to. Baby step three will be bracing for the rejection.

On another topic, you know what word I really hate? Utilize. I really hate that word. I don't believe that there are such things as synonyms in English. Every word means something different (you don't, for example, say "nice" when you mean to say "goodhearted"). You know what the difference between "utilize" and "use" is? That the person speaking wants to sound smart but instead sounds like he's intentionally trying to put space between his idea and the action that follows from it. It's uselessly fancypants.

On the other hand, I prefer "utilization" to "usage." Ah, the vagaries of English and my senselessly strong opinions about it.

Post the First

I wrote a book. I think it's pretty good... I think it's terrible... I think it's really great... Eh, it's all right... I can't decide. So much depends on the time of day and how much wine I've had to drink. But I wrote a book and have spent every free moment over the past 20 months either working on it or feeling guilty that I wasn't working on it and now suddenly it's done and it's time to do the next thing.

It occurs to me that there's a fairly large area between writing a book and getting anyone to read it. And that's just when I'm talking about my friends - who are mostly people who seem to like me and would do stuff like help me move or loan me money. I'm not sure any of them want to read a book I wrote. If I start thinking about getting it published by someone who is (a) not me and (b) willing to give me money for it, well there's a damn ocean between that and writing it, no matter how much fucking work the writing of it was.

But I don't care, because I wrote a book and I decided that the very least I could do was try to publish it.

But how?

Long ago, when I was still palavering away behind the bar at Streeter's Tavern (greatest bar below earth) and trying to find a way to stop palavering behind the bar, I was doled out a piece of advice that I've long felt was the best advice I've ever gotten: baby steps. In other words, don't think of the long game, think of the thing that you have to do next. And then do that thing. This is solid advice and you can have it for free.

Prior to that, the best piece of advice I'd ever gotten was from my mother who told me that "you're never too poor to afford a good moisturizer." I thought this was good advice but it turns out that sometimes you are too poor to afford a good moisturizer and besides, the cheap offbrand shit you buy at CVS works just as well. If I were going to dole out advice in this arena, I'd tell you to wear a hat in the sun and wash your face every night prior to moisturizing it with the stuff that comes in the $4 jar at CVS. Besides, just between you and me, my mother's been moisturizing with Vaseline which is even cheaper than the $4 shit you can get at CVS and her skin looks great - but that's off topic. I'm stalling. I'm kind of scared of the whole process and skin care comedy is my whistling in the dark.

Onwards!

A few weeks ago, I was sitting at the A&T Cafe in Rogers Park with a grilled cheese, a diet coke and my laptop and I was plugging away at The March (which is the name of my brainchild and sometime nemesis) and I felt so happy to be doing that. The idea of a future where I could sit by myself in a public place and play with words and pick things out my own brain seemed so tantalizing and so wonderful and so impossible.
But I remembered that advice from oft in my 20s and instead of thinking of that impossible, tantalizing goal, I decided to think of the next thing to do.

First, I've started this blog wherein I shall document the process of trying to get a book published (consider the skin care advice a happy bonus). This, I thought, might prove instrumental to other young(ish... who am I kidding, knocking at middle-age with extreme prejudice) writers trying to get a start in this business. But more importantly, I thought it would remind me to do these baby steps, to engage in the process and try. At least: try. To remember to think of the next thing to do instead of the whole thing to be done.

And the next thing now?

Write a letter that describes what this book of mine is about. Join me in that pursuit, won't you?

If anyone out there in the blogosphere has some ideas about what my baby steps should be, please let me know. I'm making this up as I go along.