She Taught Me Everything
Wrote it. Now for the next part.
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Some working perspective from inside the latest novel.  As a writer, I discover that I must reinvent the wheel with each book. Today's wheel: whose story IS it?! Skip this part if you know all about POV. When telling a story, there are a variety of points of view (POV) to pick to make the story do what you want. For instance, you can tell it in first person ("I woke with a freaky sensation"), second person ("So you wake up and you find things have changed.") or third person ("As Gregor Sampsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams."). Franz Kafka selected third person, and then, rather than going with an omniscient third-person, he uses a close third-person, mostly limiting the story to what Gregor sees and feels after his transformation into an insect (naturally you recognized this masterpiece as the opening to The Metamorphosis!). Had he picked omniscient third, the narrator of the story (who is, by the magic of story-telling, not quite the author) would have known everything about each character. But there's genius for you: Kafka picked a POV where Gregor Sampsa's slightly horrifying, surreal experience becomes more and more bizarre because we readers can only eavesdrop on Gregor himself.  All of which to sidle up to that wheel that needs reinventing.  As alert readers know, I've been working on novel #2 for a year. Maybe 18 months. Whatevs. "Which will be ready when it's ready," as Killick has been known to snarl. ANYway, part of the challenge for me has been that this novel, about true love and a curse, is set in a fairy-tale world, which would point toward an old-fashioned omniscient POV. (Think The Princess Bride.) But as it turns out, these characters seem to have complicated interior lives, and the novel's themes would seem to be better served by a close third-person narration.  One of my writing heroes, Kate Atkinson, does this thing with close third/stream of consciousness narrative that absolutely slays: she'll change the very close focus from one character to another WITHOUT losing the reader or making it weird. In general, she goes a chapter at a time with one character then another in a next chapter, which gives the reader time to adjust our bustle, as it were. Oh, Kate Atkinson, you rockstar. Her debut novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, was told in first-person, but with an unexpected and engaging omniscience. She won the Whitbread (now Booker) because of it, I think. Here's the opening line: "I exist! I am conceived to the chimes of midnight on the clock on the mantelpiece in the room across the hall."  But I digress. I am not a master at this. For She Taught Me Everything, I used a straightforward first-person POV so that readers are 100% with the main character as she tries to figure things out. WIth this current book, I wrestle with the focus. It's a story about two kids in love and it's also about their whole village. How can I be sure that the reader knows who's the focus? (Which presupposes that I myself get whose POV would be most useful at any given time. QED) In revision, where I am right now, I want to be sure everything points back to the best POV person to tell any particular part of the story. This means both large and tiny changes. For instance in this exchange between Auda and her father, I want to highlight Auda's viewpoint.  Instead of referring to "his shoulders," she notices "her father's shoulders." Not sure this tiny connection between them is earth-shaking, but I think it adds up.  And then, to make sure the reader understands the mix of feelings and impulses that Auda feels (affection and responsibility), I've expanded on her sense of guilt and presented some physical evidence of how she's managing her emotions.  All this attention for a wee bitty scene in a made-up story: one might ask, without irony, why? I know, believe me, I know. I ask myself this existential question on the regular. Why am I doing this? The short answer: because otherwise these people and their little troubles just rattle around in my beezer, firmly requesting my attention when I have a minute, please, hey you, how does it all turn out? I haven't the willpower, honestly, to ignore them. And besides, it might be fun for someone else to hear.  Thanks, readers, for sticking with me.
Wish the story luck, for it's going back to the editor this week!
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It's quite possible to use a pencil and a pack of cocktail napkins to write a novel. Allen Ginsberg famously used toilet paper when writing "Poem from Jail."
Bruce Chatwin is a Moleskine notebook fancier, while William Carlos Williams used the backs of envelopes. (Don't get me started on WCW and his poems. Not a fan.) Between interruptions, Jane Austen filled thin cream paper to the edges using a quill pen and oak-gall ink. Marilynne Robinson's first drafts are in ball-point in college-ruled spiral notebooks. Not putting myself into that elevated league, but I prefer the smooth slide of graphite across paper when emptying my bony cauldron of thoughts. 
When it comes time to organize these pencilings, I use my laptop and Scrivener, a word-processing/organizational software that has a bunch of helpful tricks not available to cocktail napkins.
With Scrivener, I can make chapters and then shuffle them around without the sort of cut-and-paste formatting consequence that can drive a person to drink. 
Scrivener gives me a list of chapters so I can navigate quickly—plus it builds in handy spots to stow research and background material. I'll pop an interesting phrase or scene into "Extra words," or take notes on a character in the section "Characters," or add a cool website to Notes.
Scrivener also composes a de facto outline of the story as it gets written, which can prove handy if—ahem—a person neither plans nor outlines her story ahead of time. Of course I could make a nested folder of Word files. 
I could also improvise finger-paint in the style of the Marquis de Sade.
But the lingua franca for the industry, and what my editor uses is Microsoft Word.
So the time comes when one must bid a fond adieu to clever and kindly Scrivener. Instead, I wince under the brutal overhead light of Word. A software that does count up my words on this project, along with offering the odd bone-headed grammar suggestion and—IRONY!—refusing to accept the existence of new words.
Sidebar: Even now, in 2024, editing and proofreading seem to come easier for me on paper: not for the use of a colorful pen and the elegant symbols of the copyeditor, there's science that suggests we slow down and read more carefully when it's on paper. Which tracks for me.
Science behind the paper v. screen rivalry
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7510370/ This study on the same topic has some flaws, and is focused on non-fiction and study, but it's interesting: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1747938X18300101?via%3Dihub 
And yes, for those of you dear readers following along: a morning spent on Pass-A-Grille—that generational home-beach— brought the name for this second book a little bit closer.
I circle it like a moth hoping to touch flame. That faint tang of singed Lepidoptera? Impending good news.
I'd been working on novel #2 for most of the summer, Irish-fading from regatta parties to get to my portable writing study, listening distractedly to friends while thinking about that story, welcoming rainy days for the chance to sidle past regret as I put my head down and set my fingertips to the keyboard.
Stealing time from real life.
The book is past Draft 1, which means I kinda know how the story starts, goes, finishes. I know the theme and the setting, and I've gotten to know the characters. It's all flexible: characters might get cut or split into two people, events might change order or get worse, and so on, but I have the general shape.
Draft 2 should be hugely better, with plot holes filled in, structure revised, themes bolstered, and characters grown rounder. I tend to underwrite sections as the plot takes me, and overwrite scenes that I have known for a while. But it's not always easy to get there. 
To a great extent, writing equals me daydreaming about my imaginary friends. So late this summer, I sat on station, butt in chair, hands poised over the keyboard, imagination flapping around the story when it occurred to me, obvious as a brick to the back of the head: the friendship between the two young women in my story was big and important, but it got very little screen time in the story as written.
Aha, I thought, how can I show the depth and importance of this connection? More scenes? More conversations! More! My characters—then called Annie and Lila—were already sitting together and chatting while sewing in chapter 5; I sat back and eveasdropped, knowing that they are best friends. Lila's nursing a crush on one of Annie's brothers. Annie's beloved has disappeared. The chatter goes back and forth, with Lila eventually crossing a boundary to ask a painful question of her old friend. I jotted down their conversation as I imagined it, not judging when they nattered on, knowing I—mighty queen of this universe—could take a nip and tuck at will later. Here's some of what I kept pressing them/myself to know: How to express the tenderness between best friends? How to show that they've been friends for ages? I knew what Lila was jonesing to ask Annie, but how to show Annie's feelings, the pressure she feels, and and how to present this all without sounding 21st Century-ish? As I wrote "Annie said," "Lila said." "Annie replied," and so forth, I realized two things: first, Annie is far too modern a name for my maiden hero and second, the names Annie and Lila are not nearly distinct enough from one another. These are my own dear creations, and I'm getting them confused? That cannot be good. 
It's quick work to do a global change, but to what? O high-speed internet on the farm, how we do thee entreat? Clicketty-clatter ensues.
A morning passed as I stopped by baby name sites, checked etymology, and consulted the mighty Goog. Annie has become Auda, a name with a Scandinavian twist, as befits the setting, and Lila has become Lilan, a name that appears in a variety of cultures and calls to (my) mind the flower. These names, I hope, make sense in the vaguely Northern, pre-Industrial, magic-exists, wool-processing, flax spinning, small village setting. I like to think these names give them a bit of depth and roundness. And to my shortcut-favoring brain at least, the names appear different enough on the page to keep me from confabulating the two. Victory is mine! One scene down, half a dozen more to go.
Have I been slacking at book promotion this summer? Yes, yes I have.
Is it because I'm lounging on the divan, popping bonbons into my gullet and binge-watching David Attenborough? No, not at all. First, I don't have an actual divan. Second, I can't eat dairy. Third, well, honestly, I do enjoy his lovely voice, but television is not my vice. Instead I have been listening to a playlist heavy on Anaïas Mitchell, Allison Kraus, Hozier, and Rhiannon Gibbons, working on the next thing.
The next thing.
If I were a younger writer, I might have put this next thing aside and focused instead on writing another novel like She Taught Me Everything. A contemporary family drama, say. It would be a smart career move, to focus on building a brand for my readers to more easily identify me. Excellent strategy long-term. But I am not a young writer. So rather than thinking about building a brand within a genre, I have passions. Ambitions. Wild horsey dreams.
Plus this other chunk of words: what I've labeled on my computer as the "Woodkeep trio."
These are three (actually five now, but okay, it started as three) related stories clamoring to become as big as a Rubens, and which ask significant chunks of time from me. 
Saint George and the Dragon by Peter Paul Rubens ~1605.
The three (five) are very different from She Taught Me Everything --like set in a pre-Industrial magic fairy-tale world different.
If I've lost you at fairy tale, so be it. The folks clamoring in my imagination don't care about genre conventions. Who am I to argue with fictional characters and their demands? They have a story to tell, dammit! But enough excuse-making. They are who they are. 
Two Scottish ballads haunt me. One is Tam Lin, about Janet, a spunky noblewoman who will NOT be told what to do. Forbidden to go to Carter Hall, she hikes up skirts and skedaddles, "for young Tam Lin is there."
As night follows day, Janet finds herself pregnant, and thinks to end the pregnancy with some herbs at Carter Hall. Tam Lin confronts her and when she says that she will NOT be having a baby with some freaky-deeky fairy knight, he tells her that he's just a poor human, held prisoner by the Queen of Fairyland. And if Janet is willing, she can save Tam Lin from a fate worse than death this coming Halloween... 
The other ballad is Thomas True or Thomas the Rhymer, in which a guy is snatched up by the queen of fairies — that hussy! — and when he tells her that he wants to go home to the world of humans, she says fine, be that way, and she lets him go...giving him the gift of speaking only truth. Nice gift!
And that's partly what is inspiring me this summer. These two ballads, along with The Princess Bride, the concept of true love, and a cat. Not a real cat, because allergies, but a cat. I don't have a title yet (working on it!), but I do have a date with my editor. Which means, I must hustle back to the—oh, yeah, I am already at my computer. Ah, the feared and abhorred red ink. Yeah, no, not the accounting red ink. We are all pretty good at ignoring debt, I think. I refer instead to teacher ink. Correction ink. That big red check mark that screams:"WRONG!"  It's also those scarlet suggestions, notes, generalized messages that teachers and editors are prone to making. They often use red pencil, actually, which likewise does not erase from the page. When I am an editor working on someone's paper manuscript, I like to use green ink or purple, just to mix it up. Still, even if it's purple, it's red. And when you are a writer, red = love. Or in my world it is. Because when I have plunked down cash, it's nice to hear from my editor that they like a turn of phrase or the story is interesting. But far better is the attention, time, and—yes--love poured into a note that says something along the lines of, "I think this section could be tighter. Does this word convey the emotion you want? Why are we learning this right now?" The point of a critical editorial reading is to improve the work. In the immortal words of the original Soloflex ad, it's hard to make improvements.  So when the manuscript returns with lots and lots of red ink—and yes, the modern version is a Word or Google annotated file, which provides less emotional connection, as you aren't seeing the hasty checkmarks grooved deeply into the page —it's a joy.
Because it's gonna hurt, but it's gonna be better at the end. As soon as someone admits to me that they want to write, I point out that there one single action that writers do, and which nobody else does: they write. You want to write? Write! Like everybody offering unsolicited advice, I'm pretty awesome at suggesting solutions. As for following my own recommendation? Erm.  Why yes, I constructed that rather large ball from grapevines. I offer no reasons. If my house is clean, and there's a complicated meal in the oven, and I have reorganized the books or weeded all the gardens, let's just say as a writer, there's room for improvement. Since I'm working mostly for myself (and you, dear readers) these days, I go easy on my work shortcomings. Distractions are merely side-quests.  Yeah, no, I don't know what I'm going to do with the rather large, albeit decorative globe. In the novel that I'm trying to finish right now, (or is it a novella? It's a lot shorter than She Taught Me Everything but okay) one of the characters spins wool and linen. The story's set in a pre-Industrial world where there's magic, but she's often to be found spinning away. Do I know how to spin wool or linen? Do I need to know? Pffft! I make up shi—ooh! There's a CLASS! Just so happens I bought a plastic sack including some wool and a spindle last year at the thrift store. One human's trash is another person's back-up hobby supplies. Add in a pleasant day spent in the company of an enthusiastic teacher (thanks Julia at the Thousand Islands Arts Center!) I now, as have our ancestors for thousands of years, can use a drop-spindle to make wool yarn.  Spinning wheels are SO 17th Century...Copyright-free image from the British Museum. The process of making fiber behave is not unsimilar to making twine from nettles or willow. Missed that craze? here's my link: http://www.amysmithlinton.com/blog/paleo-crafts Spinning can be pretty lo-tech: a hank of wool, a stick, and within moments, you create a fluffy bit of innovation. Kind of like magic, really. Or like writing...  One of the funny things about publishing is that nearly everyone involved—from writers themselves, to editors, sales people, service providers, web designers, readers—has an interest in words. (I promise you, this statement is not reductive.) For example, I use an internet service that helps me keep track of where and when I send stories into the world. The service, duotrope.com, also tells me about sketchy markets to avoid, contests that might appeal to me, and publications that might match my story. It's a nifty tool, especially if you are submitting a lot of stories to a lot of publications. But to my wordy point: let me share this little gem from Duotrope:  This is a partial screen grab from a story submitted somewhere in 2020, and which I just recently updated as "Never Responded." This is a LOT less uncommon than you'd think. A roaming black hole in the publishing universe swallows many a hope, dream, and story.
But note, if you will, how the designer of the page labels that date when I say the publication "Never Responded." It's not the date Accepted or Rejected. It's the Capitulation date. I have capitulated, which means "to cease resisting" or "to give in." Someone behind the scenes at Duotrope is absolutely slaying it. How about a proper introduction to this novel?  Here's the pitch:
She Taught Me Everything When 26-year-old Nicola Jones gets that phone call in the middle of the night––the one she's been dreading her whole life––she doesn't stop to ask questions. What else does she need to know? Her charismatic older sister Viv has been in a car crash. She packs a bag and races to her sister's hospital bedside. Until then, she would have said she and Viv were as close as––well, as close as sisters. Once in Nashville, however, Nicola discovers that Viv has been concealing one terrible secret after another. With her own life on hold as she waits for Viv to wake, Nicola must delve into the mystery of their shared past and decide what their future will be. She Taught Me Everything is a story about sisters and secrets, and about the choices we make that shape a family.  Like a rose smelling just as sweet, that quality that keeps people chasing their dreams in the face of rejection... Call it what you will. I like temerity. And sauce. Also mulishness. I have my very first rejection letter (from Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine!), which was a formulaic "Thanks, but this is not for us," along with a list of multiple-choice adjectives. Some anonymous, hard-working reader at the magazine had circled the word "opaque" before sending it back at me in my self-addressed stamped envelope. Being in the eighth grade, I had to look the word up, and even then, re-reading my feverish and (it still gives me a pang of shame) incoherent story, I had to agree. Nevertheless, I continued to shoot submissions into the literary stratosphere. Nobody claims it's easy; luckier yet, I had no concept that I might be resistible. Srsly. Getting that first acceptance letter (from a tiny 'zine produced in someone's mom's basement) was nice. I should have celebrated it more vigorously, but my myopic high-school eyes were straining toward the next thing. Later, when I'd amassed a portfolio of newspaper and national magazine stories and what-not, publication didn't seem like all that and a side of fries. I've said that I lucked into journalism (thanks Diane Roback of Publisher's Weekly! Thank you Jon Wilson of the St. Petersburg Times!). Heartfelt gracias, Kevin Walker of the former Tampa Tribune!  I do appreciate every door journalism has opened for me. Go on –– walk right up to anyone, armed with a pencil stub and a cub-reporter notepad, I dare you! But that wasn't my dearest ambition.
A published novel, that's what I wanted. Yeah, baby –– and not just one. Do I have any advice for aspiring writers? Yes: Polish them brass balls, puff out your metaphorical chest with self-esteem, cling to your belief in yourself, and take joy in every little victory. When victories are not forthcoming, change the battlefield. I wrote a novel a while back. It's a thing. I'm writing an additional two more, though I've been feeling a sense of a cork in the bottleneck...  But having written the living bejeebers out of that first novel, and hooking up with a dang high-powered literary agent (in Manhattan! Squee!), and the agent not working out for me (in super slo-mo! actual years passed!), and fully exploring the advice of so many writers before me (Keep trying! Never surrender!), 2023 seems like the time to take a different route.  Independent publishing. AKA self-publishing. These days, publishing my own dang book means I need to relearn the business of publishing and more or less form my own publishing house. And my own public relations strategy. Et cetera. So after waiting waiting waiting, I am angling my toes into the the starting blocks and getting ready to get ready to go. But first, a timeline. Chicken, meet a dozen eggs.  Here are some of the administrative bits and bobs I have to put in order and execute:
 And heeeer we go, she said, with an uneasy giggle.
Those of you sweet readers who are still with me, thanks! I can't tell you how cheering it is to know you're out there interested in my stacks of words. Hope to brag some good news soon. I'm thinking late summer/autumn 2023 to bring this novel to market. If you have advice, don't hesitate to drop me a line. There's so much to learn about all this... |
