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?