About exorcism

I think my writing career needs an exorcism.

I’m mostly joking.

But something seems to have infested it, giving me rejection after rejection and making me feel like I’m never going to make it.

When I read the above paragraph, I get a little disgusted with myself, because I don’t really believe a demon could prevent good things from happening in my career. It sounds like an externalization of something that could very well be a matter of me not writing well.

I doubt my career needs an exorcism, but maybe my attitude does. I’m convinced I’m not a good enough writer to be published. Every time I get a rejection, I think “Yeah, I would have rejected that too.” And then I feel down.

I’m told that negative attitudes affect reality. I don’t know if I believe that, because it sounds uncomfortably like blaming the victim — “Oh, you lost your job? It must be because you were thinking negative thoughts.” There’s also too many charlatans (I’m looking at you, Oprah) that have put forth the belief that you can attract love, success and riches from just thinking positive.

Yet I wonder if my negativity about my writing affects something — maybe the writing of my cover letters, maybe even how my work resounds in the universe. I don’t know.

How does one exorcise an attitude?

Eulogy for a Good Man

I guess it’s okay to writer about this now — the obituary is now up; it has been posted on social media.

My friend and mentor, Les Savage, died at 92 last Saturday.

Les looked like a garden gnome — short, with wild white hair, chubby cheeks, and a beard. He had twinkling blue eyes, and yes, at least one person I know called him Santa Claus. Like Santa Claus, he gave the most wonderful hugs.

He’d led a fuller life than most; his reminiscences were peppered with phrases like “when I had my pilot’s licence”, “when I was in the navy,” and “when I worked in a lab in Glasgow”. I didn’t learn until his obituary that he also could have included “when I consulted for the Apollo missions.” He was a combustion expert with a PhD in mechanical engineering who led a side business blowing up coal mines (in a controlled manner) to get rid of mine gases. He did carpentry in his basement and had wired up a house-wide stereo system long before Bluetooth made that easy. He appreciated good coffee, good wine, and good whiskey and taught me a little about each.

He also friended a motley crew of folks who needed a father figure and some emotional support. I was one of those folks, having a contentious relationship with my mother, undiagnosed bipolar disorder, and an unlucky love life that absolutely obsessed me. The group I hung out with Les called themselves Saturday Night Group because of their tendency to meet on that night to occasionally cook dinner, watch Star Trek: Next Generation, and talk. Membership rippled in an organic manner — new people showed up, some stayed, and we developed close bonds. I am still friends with many of those people, and I will see many of them at the wake.

He gave. This is what strikes me. He gave to his religious community as a communion bearer, he gave his support to the local LGBTQIA community, he gave to his “kidlings” as he called us. He did not judge us — we who were gay or pagan or atheist or struggling with mental illness or nonwhite or multiracial. If ever there was a good example of a Christian man, it was my friend Les.

I loved the man. I still do.

Coffee coffee coffee

This is a not-enough-coffee day.

I’m on my second cup of vacuum pot coffee. A vacuum pot is not a common way of making coffee in the US anymore, although in 1910-1970’s (probably) they were a known way of making good coffee, better than the automatic drip which supplanted them in US kitchens.

We have an electric vacuum pot because we’re a little lazy about trying to get the temperatures right, and right now we have fresh beans from the Board Game Cafe downtown. (Sometimes Richard roasts beans, and then we have really fresh coffee.)

We also have a Nespresso Vertuo for in-between coffee pots — for example, later in the afternoon. We prefer this to the ubiquitous Keurig brewer, which is impossible to clean properly and eventually yields a bitter coffee.

Sometimes we use a press pot, for good stout coffee, or a Chemex, for well-filtered coffee. Or a moka pot, for the closest you can get to real espresso without a machine.

We drink a lot of coffee here — I may drink over the daily limit of coffee. But if I quit drinking it, I would get the worst caffeine withdrawal — pounding headache and grogginess.

Besides, I like the taste. I like the coffeehouse culture and the fancy pot. I like espresso with a twist of lemon (or better, with a dash of sambuca). I like the coffee jokes.

Coffee, good or no, is a part of my life.

Adrift

I’m feeling adrift lately.

My developmental editor is taking a break from editing, so I have to find a new one or wait (I’m tempted to wait, because I like her).

My old mentor/surrogate family from my grad school years has died, and my brain circles around about who I was back then (bipolar but not medicated — think “getting obsessed about guys and crying a lot”). Yet, it was the richest part of my life, and I wonder how to find that again.

Days like this I feel detached from my writing. Should I continue to write? (Probably). Do I need to find a new dev editor? (Yes). What should I do about getting published? (Wait to see if I’m accepted by Pitch Wars before I take on another possibility).

I don’t sound so adrift, but my mind keeps wandering to reanalyze the past in terms of who I was and who I’ve become.

Updates on Gaia

The latest on Gaia’s Hands stuff — I changed the timeline as I said I would, and I’m adding some of the relationship stuff in that I massacred in a previous edit. This time, though, I’m writing it in terms of what I understand their budding relationship to be — at times frustrating and confusing but usually a matter of joy.

I also did move Jeanne’s age back to 45. I don’t know why that five years makes a lot of difference, but it does. At age 45, I honestly believed I could keep up with a twenty-year-old. (In actuality, I suspect they couldn’t keep up with me. Take that how you will.) Fifty, though? That’s a milestone birthday, and one with superstitious portent of old age.

I’m still far from finished, though. And I’m not sure the novel will clear 60k. (Can I publish an omnibus edition? Or be an outlier with fewer pages and get published? I just don’t know.)

This story is killing me.

I’m doing a major editorial change on Gaia’s Hands again. This story is the bane of my existence and I should just burn it, but I’m compelled to make something of it.

The time table is too compressed, it seems. There’s not enough time to develop Jeanne and Josh with the current setup, because it only runs from March to May 31.

Too little time, I think.

So I’m moving the start date back to October (which is important, because Josh needs to be riding his bike) and keeping the ending at Memorial Day (because there’s a big planting of a food forest to be done, and a horticulturalist wouldn’t plant much later than that.)

I will have to add in stuff.

I still wonder if I can make this story into something.

Struggling with Jeanne and Josh

Weiting Jeanne and Josh negotiating a relationship in Gaia’s Hands is harder than I thought. I’m getting hung up on the age difference, although it intrigued me years ago when I was in the middle of a hypomanic episode.

May-December marriages happen all the time when the man is older than the woman. Although a minority thinks it’s unnatural, society in general accepts it. If the woman is younger, has less education, is just getting settled in life, we have some questions but leave well-enough alone if they look happily married.

Older women/younger men pairings, especially when there’s that much distance between the two (30 years) tend to be dismissed as “gross”. Sociobiologists say this is only natural because men look for older women because of their fertility and women look for protectors — just look at chimps with their harems. The problem is that the primate closest to us, bonobos (miniature chimps) tend to have sex with pretty much everyone and don’t make a big deal of age. Sociobiology has its limits, which is that most practitioners are men and select for what they (as men) want to see that establishes the status quo.

And what if we’re evolving from that exchange of babies for protection? In the US, most women work in the marketplace. Childbearing is held off to later ages, and many choose not to have children. Jeanne is 50 years old and has a steady job and income — Why would he need to be a breadwinner immediately? Why couldn’t she help him through grad school?

But oh my God, what about sex? How could he possibly find her saggy body sexy? Art studios have enlisted the bodies of saggy women for ages, because they’re more interesting to draw. And Josh finds her fascinating because he’s had visions of her in a garden that looks like the Garden of Eden. And Josh, with his slender build and shorter stature, hardly looks like Hollywood material himself.

I have to find the realism and paint them as outsiders at the same time, and this is — well, difficult.

Wish me luck.

Cooling down

Hello cold snap.

It’s 36 degrees out and I’m wearing my Chicago Bubs sweater (see below):

which commemorates my favorite Internet-famous cat, Lil Bub.

I want to stay in all day basking by my fake woodstove and writing. But it’s a school day, and I have to teach.

Oh well.

Rebel Rebel

I’ve decided to be a rebel for NaNoWriMo.

What that means is that the participant does anything but write a novel in those 30 days*. I have two books I’m editing, the problem child Gaia’s Hands (which may be a novella by the time I’m done with it) and Whose Hearts are Mountains when I get it back from my dev editor.

It feels odd not writing a new novel, but it’s not the best use of my time. I need to get this backlog dealt with and ready for possibilities. When these are done, I will have five completed novels (or four and a novella): Whose Hearts are Mountains, Apocalypse, Voyageurs, Prodigies, Gaia’s Hands. (There’s one more novel, Reclaiming the Balance, but I despair over that particular one, and there’s Gods’ Seeds, the one I’m not finishing for NaNo.

It’s time for me to edit. It’s time for me to write shorter items and try to get those published (I have one short story and one flash item published so far, Flourish and Becky Home-Ecky.) It’s time for me to try something else for NaNo.

*******
* The way one counts progress when editing in NaNo is 1 hour = 1000 words. Which is about right, except when I get really stuck.

Writing from the Dark Side, Part 2

Yesterday, I interrogated the scenario my dark side put forth (which involved moonlight and walking in on someone disrobing) and found out it was not about me at all, but was inside the psyche of Jeanne Beaumont, the heroine of Gaia’s Hands. Jeanne felt disturbed by the dream because — oh, hell, let me just show you the passage:

A silver beam from the moonrise sliced through the darkness of her room. In shadows bled of color, Josh stood, the light falling across his face. He tugged his t-shirt off, the beam illuminating a slender chest and burying itself in his dark hair.

“Why are you here?” Jeanne asked, feeling her voice shake.

He met her gaze, his youthful face serious. “For you.”

Jeanne muttered. “I don’t need you,” and turned toward the door to flee.

“You misunderstand.” A smile flitted across his face; the light showing a dimple incongruous to the moment. “It’s my need.”

“No,” Jeanne shook her head, grasping for the door frame to steady herself. “If you haven’t noticed, I’m old enough to be your mother. If I’d started late. This is impossible.”

“If it’s happening, it’s not impossible.” Josh held a hand out —

Jeanne bolted upright from her bed, squinting at her clock’s luminous numbers in the dark. 3:00 AM, the perfect time to have a haunting dream. Josh? She took a panicked breath. And her?

If it’s happening, it’s not impossible, she recalled from the dream.

If it’s happening …

What the hell was happening to her that she began to dream about Josh, that quirky young man she had become friends with?

She knew. He had become more than that quirky young man to her.

He had become compelling to her, and she tried to deny it. “I don’t need you,” she had told him.

But perhaps she did, and he would reject her instead.

********

My subconscious informed me that, in editing Gaia’s hands, I had lost an important aspect of it, the tension (in part sexual, in part fear of rejection) between Jeanne and Josh.

Let’s see Josh’s point of view:

Josh wanted. It seemed a perpetual state for him, so much so that he wondered whether he wanted to be Jeanne’s friend or to bed her. Or both. Or everything. He leaned close to his notepad and wrote automatically, ignoring the lock of hair that habitually fell out of place.

I want to be reckless; he wrote. I want to kiss her with everybody watching in the middle of the cafe. I want to take her clothes off in a room where there are thoughts of only us. I want to know her twenty-five years down the road, even though she’ll be seventy-five to my 47 years.

I should care about the age difference, but it doesn’t bother me. It probably bothers her. I would be her child’s age, if she’d chosen to have children. She’s never married. Maybe she didn’t want to get married.

In my most intimate fantasies, she waits for me. In reality, she holds me at arm’s length, and I don’t know if it’s for now or forever.

I want a guarantee where there are no guarantees.

The vision came to him, the garden in its fullness, and Jeanne standing within, naked. All bountiful curves and sags like an ancient goddess. Does one dare to approach a goddess? He walked toward Jeanne in the garden, slowly and deliberately, each footstep pounding in his ears. He reached out –

The vision drifted out of his grasp.

*****

Why does this come from my dark side? It’s a reflection of how I struggle with my age and face the invisibility that women “of a certain age” (I hate that phrase!) experience. The book is, in part, a biological fantasy about outliers — Jeanne, despite her age, represents a fertility goddess with her preternaturally prolific gardens, and Josh, despite his youth, makes a convincing god of the hunt with the inevitability of his pursuit. That’s in addition to the fantasy elements of Josh’s visions and Jeanne’s preternaturally prolific gardens.

I have to edit this book, bring back to it the tension between the two protagonists, add it to the other tensions and menaces. This is my job, to make these fantasies real and complex.