Book Fatigue

I'm in the last 30 days of the book and I'm tired.  If the "art" of my book is depicting my grief, then I've read one too many fragmented emails to my daughter or to friends.  I don't know whether my fatigue matches the Reader's, and I should pay editorial attention to it.  Or is it just that I've been at these two rewrites for a year?

Since the clear conventional wisdom says I have too many words, when in doubt, cut.

I'll try the incremental approach--much like I do everything else. First I'll prune the bush. As close as I can to the trunk. What dies will eventually fall to the ground.  A strategy.  One that keeps me in it until The End.

In my session today, my therapist John, said he'd read my memoir as if it was a novel. Rick Rofihe, one my fiction workshop teachers, said I used "novelistic" techniques to tell my story. I guess my new agent query letter should reflect something of this. In one of the many ways this memoir is unconventional, the narrator (I) tells a story, with a protagonist and an antagonist, a beginning, middle and end covering a specific period of time, the year after Jack was killed.

Book Length

My word count is ~150,000. A quick survey of blog posts recommends 110,000 as the top end that I should shoot for. That seems consistent with guidelines from a couple of book contests I'm looking at--a maximum 400 pages. Check out Blue's indefeasible blog for example word counts, for example, on PEN/Faulkner Award winners.  Coincidentally, this 2008 post from Blue seems like her final post.

If I cut the epilogue, my word count is 148,292.

If I were to do some book-wide deletions, among areas to consider are:

• all email (Libby/lawyers ...)
• fugue ... no I think the sensual/physical companionship is important
• all excerpts from books (Damasio ...)
• dramatic cuts redundancy and chit chat from letters
• Sadoff visit
• long letters on the Dad's and on anger
• Lucent stuff ... Craig said interesting
• rework the "long" stuff ... when I read it it feels like a slog even to me
• Houston Law Review article
• bail argument
• Munchhausen

Here is one argument for self-publishing.  I can make a Director's cut.  I can rage war on my manuscript to submit it to contests, and then add content back in.  It won't be a complete waste of time. I'm sure that forcing myself to 70 pages would yield some very good ideas.

Distracted

Last Wednesday the Seattle Public Library and Smashwords offered a workshop on self-publishing: I Typed "The End." Now What? How to Turn Your Manuscript Into a Book. This was as disruptive to my revision process as Tony Hoagland's workshop where he insisted our journal writing should be in complete sentences.  Tony is not someone one can ignore.

One of the first things I had to do was go through my manuscript and delete the double spaces at the ends of sentences. And learn to compose new sentences without them.

This morning I've been trying to decide what size book I should publish: 5 1/4 x 8, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2, or 6 x 9.

Yesterday I activated the Kindle app on my phone and laptop. I downloaded calibre.

I can't stop pouring over the Joel Friedlander's The Book Designer blog.

I've barely noticed the S&P 500's decline (not true). Why am I doing these things instead of writing? I'm returning to Beth Jusino's self-publishing workshop Wednesday night in Ballard for Selling Your Self-Published Book: Getting Your E-Book in Front of Readers.  Will I see you there?

Finished the (this) rewrite

About two weeks ago I finished the rewrite.  Since then I've been going through the draft mostly to catch up to the way I handle tenses ... the present of 2006 & 2007.  The past in moments of reflection.  I've also cleaned up some formatting.

Now I'll read through it again and hopefully tidy up some stuff.  I have left lots of comments and highlighted sections in the manuscript that I know I have to return to.  I don't know how other writers do it.  Do they force themselves to stay on a page, in a paragraph until that get the revision perfect?  Or do they plow ahead and hope a light bulb will go on sometime and the revision will be obvious when they return?  That's my method.  But it may lead to endless rewrites.

I think it is also time to resume sending off query letters to agents.

I gone through all my comments, deleted about 100 which were taken care of in the last couple of revisions.  I have ~200 left to consider.

More of the Richard Ford branch I pruned

Thursday, June 21

In Ford’s book now, Frank is sitting at a bar browsing the pages of a free advertising rag, “The Buyer’s Guide,” and comes across a framed box entitled “Profiles in Real Estate Courage.”  The story celebrates Frank Frantal getting back in the saddle selling real estate, a year after his son had been killed by a drunken snowmobiler in eastern PA.

In this strange state I for this moment find myself, and for reasons both trivial and circumstantial (the bar, the booze, the day, even Frank Frantal), my son Ralph Bascombe, age twenty-nine (or for accuracy’s sake, age nine) comes seeking an audience.[1]

It may go without saying, but when you have a child die—as I did nineteen years ago—you carry him with you forever and ever after.

I was with Ford here.

Though what has happened is that my life’s become alloyed with loss.  Ralph, and then Ralph being dead, long ago embedded in all my doings and behaviors.  And not like a disease you carry, that never gets better, but more the way being left-handed is ever your companion, or that you don’t like parsnips and never eat them, or that once there was a girl you loved for the very first time and you can’t help thinking of her—nonspecifically—every single day.  And while this may seem profane or untrue to say, the life it’s made has been and goes on being a much more than merely livable life.  It’s made a good life, this loss, one I don’t at all regret.  (The Frantals could not be expected to believe this, but maybe can in time.)

I was with the Frantals here, furious at the presumptuous words.

---

[1] Ibid., pg 344.

I had these excerpts in my memoir draft, because they were in my journal from 2007.  It was part of my unfolding life.  I was reading psychology and neurology books, that year, looking for an explanation.  I also read poems and novels.  Richard Ford wrote about losing a son; it resonated.  Richard Powers, The Echo Maker, resonated--a loved one gone crazy.

So why delete it?  This part is in June, towards the end of the book, and while it may depict my grief to the reader, I've already done quite a bit of that by now.  The reader will be looking for climax and denouement.  And I didn't have one ... Frank, his dead son Ralph, the Frantals didn't lead me to one ... and the reader might feel a bit jerked around if this late in my story I include these excerpts and then don't come back to them for any resolution whatsoever.

Now years later, I might write that alloyed with loss is an excellent way to describe my life after Jack was killed.  And perhaps after a full nineteen years I could echo Frank and say it's made a good life.

Deleted one stranded branch of my tree

Excerpts, now deleted, from my memoir.  (I do agree with Ford that some times simple words like surprised are the best we have.)

Sunday, June 11

After 200 pages I’m starting to relax into Richard Ford’s The Lay of the Land.  I’m gradually lowering my guard.  I have a ton of respect for Ford.  I’ve read all his books.  He was the first author whose hardcover first editions I bought—at list price—wanting him to have the just proceeds of his work.  But I’m not willing yet to trust his judgment on the death of your child.

There are similarities between Frank’s life, Ford’s narrator, and my own.  Frank has lost a child.  Frank has had a marriage dissolve.  Frank has a daughter.  Frank lives in New Jersey.

Frank rejects the “ethical-cultural-response that catastrophe’s ‘a good thing for everybody,’ because “it dramatizes life’s great mystery and reveals how much all is artifice-connected response to things is just made-up stuff anyway.[1]”

I couldn’t agree with Frank more.

The catastrophe in this case is that Frank’s second wife Sally has just come home from a weekend at her former in-laws, where she faced the surprising reappearance of her ex-husband, lost and presumed dead for thirty five years.  When Sally sat Frank down on the couch and gave him this news, Frank was as surprised as Sally that her long-lost first husband had appeared in her in-laws foyer.  “Sometimes simple words,” Franks reflects, like surprised, “are the best.”

In Sally’s behalf, Frank narrates, she was dazed.  She’d gone to Illinois and seen a ghost.  It’s the kind of shock that make you realize that life only happens to you, and to you alone, and that any concept of togetherness, intimacy, and union, abiding this and abiding that is a hoot and a holler into darkness.[2]

I was willing to trust Ford enough to see what happened next.

---

[1] Ford, Richard, The Lay of the Land, pg 222.

[2] Ibid., pg 227.

Finished May rewrite

It took me a long time to finish revising the month of April.  May went faster.  Now I start June.  The book will end in the middle of July with my "culminating" letter to Denise and a visit with Dr. Sadoff.

Certain things are wrapping up now (in May).

• The court case.
• The unsent letters--the conversation with the memory of Denise--the present, thankfully, crowding out the past.
• Libby's school year.
• My dreams seem to be building to a climax
• Reclaiming my complete self

Is that enough denouement to satisfy The Reader?

Certain things are taking over.

• Alcatel Lucent -- implicitly.  My job too boring to be too explicit.
• loneliness
• what I label it my fugue life--indulging in a fantasy search for a new woman/ mate/ partner/ companion

Does my loneliness and fugue state give the lie to "reclaiming my complete self?"  Particularly that word "complete?"  Or does it make it true?

Other things will start soon--the divorce and ultimately selling the house and moving.  These won't be in the book.

Each day when I approach the draft I have to nourish my mood.  My mood (motivation, energy) can collapse various ways:

• I start believing all my writing is shitty
• The content (anger at Denise, grieving Jack)
• And my own sense accomplishment, contribution.  Like Maria Popova writes of Flannery O'Connor, I am afflicted with time.
• And then the just utter bullshit things like:  is the stock market up or down?  how is USA or Holland or CONCACAF doing in the World Cup?