You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
As my wife and I started listing what’s keeping us busy these days, we were both surprised to find that one thing – one important thing – was missing.
What we both realized is that regular reading … as in books … had been pressed out of our schedules.
Instead, we’ve been doing bits and pieces of reading online. It’s just not the same as luxuriating in a deep volume.
How about you?
When several of our lifeguards were complaining about their high-school term papers and having to meet the length requirements, I decided to show them a couple pages of my novel in progress, the book that’s emerged as What’s Left.
They were blown away.
It wasn’t any different from what I’ll assume all serious writers do. Just look at the examples in the Paris Review’s acclaimed author interviews. I remember my own shock at the first few I saw – what, we don’t write flawlessly the first time? Oh, the folly of youth!
Well, nowadays we don’t always work from typescript or even printouts – what I showed the teens-to-whom-I-fully-trusted-my-life had now become the exception. I should have photographed some for posterity but instead trashed them during a purging of my studio under the rafters.
Few readers imagine how thoroughly a serious writer or editor will rework a text – major sentences, even paragraphs, are struck out, new words and notes are scribbled everywhere, even fresh pages of inserts are taped to one side or the other of the page.
Tell them this is from the fifth or seventh revision of the manuscript, they’re even more incredulous. The discarded material is a flood compared to the drop or two they struggle to compose.
As the saying goes, inspiration goes in the first draft, genius comes in the revisions.
As we might add, if one’s lucky.
My newest novel, Daffodil Uprising, is a thorough revision of the earlier Daffodil Sunrise. Nearly half of the original book has been excised and replaced by twice that amount of new material, for good reason.
Here are ten of the big differences.
For details, go to Smashwords.com.
Writers work in many different ways.
Some sit down and write two hours a day. When I read that in interviews, I used to think, “What slackers!” Only later, when I realized how much other work needs to be done to sustain that, did I revise my opinion. Research, reading, and correspondence are also crucial parts of the job. For many professional writers, you can add teaching to the list – it can be what really pays the bills.
Others charge up and then lock themselves away for an orgy of keyboarding. Say, two weeks to two months of doing nothing else. There are tales of some writers in the old days who would rent a hotel room for a week or so to do that – they must have had a very nice advance and known exactly what they were setting out to do, it seems too short a time for me these days.
When I was working full-time, my method was rather piecemeal. I’d plunge into writing heavily one day a week – it helped when my four-day workweek allowed me three days off in a row, though I paid for it with that double-shift each Saturday. The rest of the week I put in a couple of hours each day for keyboarding and the supporting labor.
That schedule, in fact, led me to concentrate on poetry much more than fiction, though the budding novels typically got their attention on my vacations and holidays. Looking back, it was a rather schizoid existence.
Since retiring, a major shift has happened, and I’m just now seeing its impact. I’ve been able to immerse myself in drafting and deeply revising a work, to live with it more thoroughly.
I’m going to blame Cassia, the voice of What’s Left. Working with her was unlike anything I’d attempted before. The focus shifted from her curiosity about her father’s past to a close examination of his photos and the family he discovered to, finally, Cassia herself and her siblings and close cousins – the Squad. The spotlight went from being on what happened to the individuals themselves. It was no longer action-driven but character-driven.
That, in turn, led to a similar reworking of my other novels, often with Cassia in effect sitting beside me. Again, unlike anything else I’d done before.
Doing this, though, has involved a lot of semi-seclusion. I’m definitely ready for a change.
Join with me in celebrating the publication today of my newest novel, Daffodil Uprising, at Smashwords.com.
A thorough reworking of my 2013 release, Daffodil Sunrise, it’s a tale of radical awakening in the 1960s now told from his daughter Cassia’s perspective a generation later. Her voice is snarkier than his, for starters, and she’s more willing to view the events with more grit than he had in the previous version. Oh, yes, the characters are definitely more colorful, vivid, and varied. Besides, there are now strands of Goth and the paranormal. What else?
You’ll have to see for yourself.
The ebook is available in the digital format of your choice at Smashwords and other independent digital retailers.
As Cassia took on her own voice in the later revisions of What’s Left, she seemed to be dictating her lines, leaving me with the task of taking dictation. There were many times I could barely keep up.
It was a weird sensation. Wasn’t I supposed to be in charge here? It was like I was channeling her from somewhere in the spirit world.
Weirder yet was my envy for her ability to speak as openly and directly as she does. As caustically, too.
Well, she does bear a resemblance to an older woman I know of in the next town, one fondly called simply as Auntie with an outrageous fearlessness in speaking that way.
In contrast, here I am usually censoring myself or at least editing my utterances.
Of course, I also envy Cassia her close-knit family with its well-defined purpose and supportive network. Her Squad, especially, and the way it, too, evolved in the revisions.
And I am grateful for the ways she’s helped me recast the earlier novels leading up to her appearance. That, too, has felt weird, having her sit beside me, in effect, while we thoroughly reworked them. She trashed a lot of material, I’ll admit, and then added a lot more new stuff of her own.
This time, I was all ears.
Authors are advised to know their readers – their target audience – but this takes it one step further.
Any of you have a similar experience?
My plan for this year has gone far off course. How about yours?
No, I’m not talking about New Year’s resolutions. I gave up on those decades ago. I’m talking about real business.
My goal had been to spend much of my time pushing the visibility of my new novel, What’s Left, first as an Advanced Reading Copy (available for free) and then as the First Edition.
Days after posting the ARC, though, I was sidelined by a cardiac event. That led to down time during recovery and rounds of testing and seeing doctors, plus getting adjusted to the new meds and undergoing nearly three months of cardio-rehab exercises three days a week at the local hospital.
Oh, yes, let’s not overlook the Healthy Heart diet, a kind of perpetual Lent. My favorite fallback foods – cheese, eggs, and butter – are now essentially off-limits, except as stealth ingredients. (I’ll admit looking at that egg yolk in the book cover photo with a degree of longing. The whites just don’t carry any rich flavor. I really miss my cheese omelets.) Let’s say still trying to find a way to eat sufficiently is proving elusive.
I was already intending to do a light reworking of the four novels that formed the back story for What’s Left, but a Christmas-present biography of Richard Avedon fed into a sense that I needed to have a clearer sense of Cassia’s father as a photographer in those volumes. Even though I’d worked with some of the best photojournalists in the business, newspaper work is only one corner of the larger photography field.
As I set about what I thought would be a simple retouching of those works, Cassia, the central figure in What’s Left, took over. Quite simply, she had me examining the earlier works through her critical eyes and sarcastic perspectives. She can be bossy, and she insisted on major revisions that required far more hours than I’d expected. She really wanted them updated, and I’ve tried to comply.
As I began recasting him in line with her dictates, I had that sensation of pulling a loose thread or opening Pandora’s box or that notorious can of worms. The changes at hand required major surgery to form a better fit with the newest book.
I promise to relate just what happened in future posts, but the labor did plunge me into something resembling seclusion.
On top of that, though, some early reactions to the ARC led to another reworking of the new novel to make it easier to read. Sentences got shortened, contrary to my own love of long lines, and as much as I liked not having any quotation marks in the story, I yielded and inserted some for greater clarity. Again, time-consuming but hopefully worthwhile in the end.
Then it was back to drastically slashing and reworking the remaining earlier tales. In the end, the pruning led to substantial new growth. Can I confess to being very proud of the results? They’re much different and more substantial now.
And then, at this point, I briefly thought I was finally back on my intended track. I was wrong.
Temptation led me to pick up the draft of one secretive unpublished novel, and it nagged at me. Based on one of Cassia’s future father’s troubled girlfriends who appears in one of those older novels, it dealt with issues I need to understand more fully. That, in turn, prompted two months of obsessive work that still demands extensive tweaking, even if I never show the manuscript to anyone else. Let’s just say it’s personal, even embarrassing. For now, I’m hoping to put it aside so I can get down to where I wanted to be in February. Maybe now I can get back on mission?
Anyone else feeling way behind schedule?
I’d still like to hear how others manage their time. Any tips?
In my new novel, What’s Left, she’s retelling much she’s heard from others.
As Cassia might say, while describing the story she’s telling:
Look, if I’m telling you something, it’s happening now. I don’t care if the event took place a hundred years ago, when I evoke it, it’s all happening now, right in front of us. Anyone mind if it’s for the umpteenth time? Or if I’m quoting someone else in my own voice? It’s all coming through my mouth, so it’s me, too. Pay attention. OK? Now listen! Especially you, Baba.
~*~
As an author, I had to ask myself the question. Now it’s your turn for input.
Is it fair to put secondhand dialogue – even hearsay – in separate quotation marks? Or is it some other blending of voices?
~*~
Earlier this year, I updated the cover and tweaked the contents of my novel Hometown News.
I liked the new image, of a house on fire rather than one of a girl in autumn leaves. The story is, after all, about a community in crisis rather than the delights of living in idyllic repose.
The new image, however, challenged the use of placing the book title and author. The colors jump all over the place, and I just couldn’t figure out a way to drop the words in effectively. Well, you can see what I did. Still, I felt ambivalent about the results.
And then, a few weeks ago, I was looking at my revised lineup at Smashwords and sensed this one just didn’t quite match the style or tone of the others. Time for a few tweaks.
So here’s what we have now:
After this:
Which replaced this one:
The covers of my Smashwords editions originally paid homage to Richard Brautigan’s classic books of the ’60s, each of which had a portrait of a pretty young woman.
Any reactions?
Looking at my new lineup at Smashwords, I felt one cover just didn’t match.
The first round of my editions there had covers that were an homage to Richard Brautigan’s classic books of the ’60s, each of which had a portrait of a pretty young woman.
As I looked at the cover image, though, it felt dated. Looking closer, I realized it also didn’t reflect the edginess of the contents. I wanted something more compelling than a woman in quiet reflection.
So here’s what we have now:
Rather than this:
Whaddya think? For more, go to Blue Rock.
Jnana's Red Barn 