Dissecting Gaia’s Hands and Learning Nothing Yet.

Maybe Gaia’s Hands wasn’t the best book to enter to Kindle Scout.

I’ve proofread it, demolished it, paired it with another book, trimmed that back so that I have two instead of four main characters, re- and re-proofed it, and still when I look at it I wonder if it’s a solid novel.

I’ve never known what to do with it. I love its plot lines — discovering one’s mystical abilities, a convincingly menacing pattern of harassment to one of the main characters, a taboo May-December romance (taboo because the woman is older than the man). I adore its characters — a talented botany professor, a precocious young poet, his best friend the surly engineer, the refined yet hangdog lab assistant Ernie, enigmatic waitress Annie, and even the smooth dean and hostile department chair Jeanne has to face.

But I’ve never known what to do with the book. The scenes almost come off as vignettes, with the connections between strands unapparent at first. The plot is subtle, not as action-packed. The characters carry it, but I always wonder if the book starts too slowly. I edit it again and feel something’s not quite there, I don’t know what the “something” is. With all the improvement I’ve done in writing for the past six years, there’s something in Gaia’s Hands too quirky for prime time.

Gaia’s Hands strikes me as a YA, except the male protagonist is too old at 20, the female protagonist is way too old at 50, and there’s not enough angst. (For all the harm Twilight did to women’s expectations of men — it’s okay to be a stalker? Really? — it did angst exceedingly well. And it sold.)

I look at Gaia’s Hands and feel like it’s missing something. Despite my greater level of experience, my writing skills, better knowledge of writing dynamics — my writing is missing something, and I can’t tell what. Maybe my style, my “voice” isn’t acceptable. I don’t know, but I wish I could figure it out.

Another Excerpt of Gaia’s Hands

Trigger warning — this excerpt deals with PTSD/rape. The description is not from a salacious point of view, but from traumatic memory.

This is an excerpt from Gaia’s Dance, which I don’t know if it should be in the book even though it survived three edits. But it mixes trauma, magical realism, and relationships, and may be a quintessential part of the plot, even though it’s a sideplot:

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On his way to Jeanne’s house, he rode past throngs of students drinking in costume or just drinking. He swerved around a pony keg that had rolled out into the street. Past downtown, he rode his bike under a tree full of birds flocking for migration south. Jeanne had called them starlings, but their frenzied voices mocked him. Josh imagined them as the tengu, bird kami, of Japanese folklore and hoped they would protect him.

Josh arrived in front of Jeanne’s bungalow, a cream-colored cottage with brown trim, the landscaping brown and desiccated by the frost. He remembered her saying that the trees in the back hosted islands of lush edible growth – vines, bushes, creeping greens, all dormant now. Her koi pond slept, dreaming of spring.

He rang the doorbell. Jeanne, pale and weary, let him in and shut the door behind them. He stood in an apricot living room with burgundy and gold accents. “Pick a seat”, she said tersely. He chose one on the wood-framed couch, leaving enough room for her if she wanted to sit. She stood.

“What’s wrong?” Josh breathed, his stomach clenching. “I’ve missed you.”

“Oh, Josh,” she fretted. “I’ve been really busy lately.”

“You have never been too busy for your friends. I worry about you.” And about me, he thought. And us, even if you don’t think there’s an ‘us’.

“There’s a lot going on –”

“Did I do something wrong? You act like you don’t trust me.” He remembered seeing her flinch that day in September when she shied away from talking about her past. He searched his memory to see if he had ever been aggressive, had ever overstepped his bounds.

“You don’t understand. It’s not you I don’t trust, it’s me.”

Around her, he saw snow fiercely blown by the wind. He stood up, faced her, close enough to touch but not touching her. “What do you mean, you don’t trust yourself? I trust you.” As she shook her head, he realized he had said the wrong thing. He took a deep breath and started over. “Could you tell me what you don’t trust yourself with?”

“I don’t trust my judgment. Not when it comes to getting close to people.” She shivered as the snow billowed around her in the warm room.

“Why not?” He would not allow her to walk alone in the blizzard.

“I’ve let the wrong people into my life. Over and over, because I wanted attention,” Jeanne murmured.

“Don’t we all want attention? Love?”

“Not when people hurt you with it …” Her voice broke. Her eyes swam with tears. “Not you, Josh. Just …”

“Who was it, then?” Josh winced; he spoke too loud.

“Something really bad happened when I was young.” Jeanne’s voice was small, barely audible.

“Tell me. Please.” Josh took a deep breath against the churning of his stomach.

Jeanne responded in a soft monotone, “It was a sunny day in March. The phone rang at four in the afternoon. My sister Clarice was at Eastern, and my parents worked Saturdays. I thought the call was for one of them. Instead, it was for me.

“My neighbor Malvin ca
lled. He had two little girls, 4 and 6, with platinum blond hair and pretty blue eyes. I used to go over with my sister and help her babysit them, so the girls got to know me pretty well. He asked me to come over and do the girls’ hair so he could get them portraits at the mall in Champaign.

“I knocked on the door. I remember I felt this chill across my shoulders despite the nice weather. I didn’t understand why. There were people Mom didn’t let me visit, and she never let me have male babysitters growing up because she said she didn’t trust them not to hurt kids. But Mal and the kids — they weren’t strangers, they were neighbors.

“Mal let me in. He seemed nervous. His hair looked sweaty and greasy, and he smelled of beer, and something didn’t sound right about the way he talked — he sounded like he read off a script. He wouldn’t really look at me. He told me the kids were in the back room. By the time I realized that I didn’t hear the girls, he pushed the door open and shoved me in.

“I trusted Mal. I trusted him; heck, I helped him with the kids all the time. The kids weren’t there, they were with their mother, and he and his friend told me they had a different game in mind.

“I won’t tell you, not even you, all of it.

“When they had finished, they threw me out of the house and I ran home. I saw blood and slimy streaks in my underwear, bruises where fingers had dug into my arms. I felt pain, shrieking pain, where those two men had no business going. So much for being a virgin till marriage.

“Oh God, I didn’t do anything,” she cried. “Mal and his buddy said things to me: ‘Hey, fat girl, let me see your tits. Do fat girls put out? Are fat girls easy?’ I didn’t even know what they were talking about, never heard the words before. But they showed me, and it hurt. I tried to stop them, I tried, but I couldn’t.

“They laughed when I screamed. That hurt me the worst — my neighbor laughed when I screamed.

“I buried the clothes; I scrubbed away the evidence so my parents would never know.”

Josh felt weak, vaguely ill. He remembered the drunk woman at the house party, and how scared and ashamed he felt. Multiply that by a hundred, and maybe that was how Jeanne felt. Age thirteen, two men, no way to fight them off. Only powerlessness and pain. Too much darkness, too much, and he could do nothing to redress her past. He knew that he could only give comfort. He took a deep breath to center himself, then caught and held her gaze. “You didn’t cause it.” His hands rubbed up and down her upper arms to try to remove the chill that had nothing to do with ambient temperature.

“No I didn’t,” Jeanne breathed through tears, “I’ve come to believe that. It took a long time.”

“Not just the assault.” He couldn’t bring himself to say rape. He had to keep his composure for her.

“Don’t blame your judgment either.”

“I trusted Mal – “

“Your parents trusted Mal. You believed your parents. We believe our parents at that age. Your judgment told you to run when your mother’s guidance told you everything was ok.”

“Oh, God,” Jeanne paused, then broke out in sobs, “Oh, God, you’re right. I never trusted Mal. He looked like a rockstar, but I could feel something mean about him.“

Jeanne crept into his embrace and cried, and they walked through the blizzard together.

***************
Now, that you’re at the bottom, a question: would you like to read this book? It’s likely going to be something I self-publish on Kindle, but my readers deserve to get a free copy, which I can send to you.

The actual, the ideal, and the "ought" self

Yesterday in class, I taught about self-discrepancy theory as a form of motivation. In this theory, we have ourselves — our current selves — and two states we aspire to, our ideal self and our “ought” self. Our ideal self is what we aspire to be, while our “ought” self is who we feel we have to be.

Our “ought” self is all about obligation and sense of duty — go to work, save money, pay parking tickets, don’t scream in the middle of a train station. Think of the “ought self” as “I am the person who shows up to work on time, doesn’t litter, and pays my taxes.” I can envision ought selves that are bloated with rules that are not so much obligation and sense of duty but fitting in as well — I talked with a friend yesterday and we both grew up with the command “Don’t act smart — boys don’t like that.” That’s a pretty useless ought unless women are obligated to undermine their own rights, and that’s not right.

Our ideal self is about accomplishment. I would distinguish here between experiential activities — “I would like to go to Disney World” and true accomplishment activities — “I would like to walk a half-marathon.” The accomplishments we choose to define us go into building our ideal self. A map of ideal vs ought selves might look like this:

Ideal Ought
Engages in deep conversation Votes
Performs skilled volunteer work Practices compassion
Takes 10-mile hikes Gets enough sleep
Writes novels and poetry Yada yada yada
Publishes books

Those are actually part of my ideal vs ought selves. (Ought selves are not as interesting.) Ideal selves help us to set growth goals, whereas ought selves help us to set maintenance goals.

Note the last item on my Ideal list. This could explain my fixation with getting published. My ideal self is a published author. It’s not just my desire to be read and to reach people — it’s that I like the image. My ideal self gains some cachet by being a published author. Society expects accomplished (i.e. published) authors to be eccentric; eccentricity without a credential is perceived as weird.

It’s going to be a struggle, because of my history of rejections. I have to see an alternative ideal version of me that’s creative even though nobody’s watching (I got zero nominations on my book in Kindle Scout yesterday). That’s hard, because my ideal self is someone that others would look up to — not fawn over, not idealize nor idolize, maybe not even admire, but respect.

I’ll keep writing for myself, but I’m going to have to find something else that takes the place of getting published, something creative that can gain me respect and some visibility. And as I am very bad with my hands (I cannot knit, crochet, sew, weave, color within the lines, or walk a straight line), crafts are out. I’d love to do carpentry, but I’d also love to have all ten fingers. So this brings me back to writing.

How do I parlay writing into something that’s not just for me, but has an audience, has usefulness, and fulfills my ideal self?

The Valley of Love and Delight

I can’t give up writing.

I hone my words (although sometimes I miss spelling errors) to share my visions of the Peaceable Kingdom, where we have quieted our lives enough to discover the biggest secret in life — each other.

Perhaps what I write is what I seek — less distraction from material things, less status-seeking and dressing for success and hero worship. A place where discussions beyond “How are you?” are possible, and we choose connection over possession. Where people aren’t rejected for being different.

Of course, the utopia in my books is far from perfect. People who pride themselves on being open-minded shut their hearts toward those they view as “other”. Factions stash guns and explosives on the grounds of a pacifist collective, and one of the pacifists delights in slugging the antagonists. The Seven Deadly Sins still exist, even among the good guys. But the Peaceable Kingdom is an ideal, not something to be shunned for power and fame.

Because of their perpendicular shift from dominant culture, my books have a gentle tone to them that is decidedly “girly”. More My Little Pony than GI Joe. My characters have mostly holed themselves up in a safe place, but are under siege from inside and out. The emotional wars trump the explosion of hand grenades. My characters come to realize, however, that they have failed the world in hiding their light under a bushel, as Jesus would put it. If I had to describe my writing in terms of the snarky one-liners that pass for elevator pitches, I would say, “The Friendly Persuasion with otherworldly complications”.

I’m still trying to figure out how much more time I want to spend bashing my head against the outside world to get published. I know I’d rather live in the world I write about, where our hearts strive to “find ourselves in the place just right,” as the song Simple Gifts would put it.

My Garden

Hands in soil, coaxing life from dust,

I hold a secret, just one secret —

the way the light hits reminds me

of a summer evening —

hands, large hands, holding mine

for the briefest moment,

and my imagination spinning into flowers —

wild pinwheels

and concealing vines with scarlet funnels.

I couldn’t make him see the flowers,

and that’s how I could tell I was different.

Sacred things we have lost

Music used to be a sacred thing, a living thing. In Bali, the instruments of the gamelan, imbued with the spirit of the Gamelan which lived in the big gong, were treated with respect. The gamelan performed concerts in the village square, on street corners, with no divide between the musicians and audience. Connection between audience and performers was immediate and unmistakeable.

Storytelling used to be a sacred thing, with the shaman or the shanachie telling mystical stories and tales of their people while sitting surrounded by listeners. The oral tradition lent itself to changes in the way the story was told, tailoring it to the news of the day, the needs of the listeners. Respect flowed from teller to listener and back.

Dance used to be a sacred thing, with a select group of the villagers, and sometimes the whole village, dancing in a communication to the gods, dancing in joy, dancing in sorrow.

These forms once were people’s entertainment, their TVs and MP3s and concerts. The difference was that the experience of earlier peoples wasn’t that of consuming entertainment passively and choosing with a flick of the fingers which was worthy. The audience celebrated skill, true, but they didn’t depend on the curators to know what to choose — the bestseller list, the popular vote, the movie of the week. They didn’t need to — they were part of the performance, and that was more exhilarating than the large venue concert.

We try to meet our curated heroes today, with backstage passes and autograph sessions and photographs, in a way of trying to make ourselves sacred or at least special. It is not the same, because they are on the stage high above us. We are not part of the creative process. We don’t become something bigger than ourselves, even for a moment.

*******
I grew up in the world of small performance. All the local Girl Scouts and their petty, squabbling leaders gathered yearly for four weekends of Singspiration, where we learned folk music from Blondie and Comanche, despite the attempts of the petty leaders to shut down the annual event because the leaders were presumed a gay couple.

I wrote poetry for my teachers to read and gained a loyal following of three classmates in high school. I later wrote a song about the frighteningly intense jock John Elliott, who died in a car crash right after high school:

John told me he would marry me/right in the middle of Civics class/I guess I never believed it/you had to know how I was/a girl who lived inside her coat/startled at shadows, wrote poetry/that Marsha and Tammy read to him/but I never wrote a poem for John …

I knew several talented storytellers, most of them in my family. My father’s side, a jumble of Welsh, Ojibwe, German, and French, told hunting stories with decidedly Celtic humor twists and one story I’ve been told was a Native American teaching tale updated to 1940’s Wisconsin. My mother’s family told stories that almost invariably featured 1) bad puns and 2) my grandmother as the vaudevillian “straight man”.

I grew up to write poetry, songs, short stories, and essays. I would occasionally put the poems and short stories on PLATO, which was an early predecessor to the Internet. PLATO was much more interactive than today’s Net, and we PLATOites made it a point to meet each other in person. I won 6 bottles of lovely dark ginger beer for one of my stories, which also caused a good chunk of the male readers to say “(*gulp*) I better check myself.” People noted what I wrote in that small world. I’ve also had poetry published locally and one essay in a liberal religious journal.

My first novel (the early draft of Gaia’s Hands) happened not because I wanted to write a novel, but because I kept writing short stories to explore the meaning of a dream I had (which, if you need to know, was about a sexual encounter initiated by a much younger male stranger.) Then, when I found I could get through the NaNo prescribed 50k words, I got innundated by inspiration — more tales flowing from Gaia’s Hands. I wrote what I knew — academia, emotional beauty, the banal evil of greed, green things, semi-communal living arrangements, Gaia, Buddhism, Shinto — in other words, a world within this world where the misfits live.

My novels don’t sell within what is called “the marketplace of ideas” — that is, the mass production of the arts. In fact, I am not a “seller” — I am a storyteller. I want to reach people and make them laugh, make them think, assure them that they’re not alone. I don’t believe this will happen in the selling of Big Entertainment.

But yesterday, an acquaintance of mine (Hi, Jeanne) told me she really enjoyed reading my campaign for Gaia’s Hands. This felt more gratifying than I was prepared for, because she spoke my language — in the aesthetic of small performance, we connected.

More to think about.

In the last 24 hours, I got one nomination in my Kindle Scout campaign. It’s not your fault, friends; there are only 40-some of you.

Like my lack of response from agents, this is not proof that I’m a bad writer; just that I don’t interest readers.

I can’t write to the public. I feel that fiction has too many sexy couples, military maneuvers, dudebro heroes, near-invisible women, and irresistible vampires. I want to see male characters run the gamut from delicate to nerdy to comical, and not always powerful, Rich, or ruggedly handsome. I want my female characters to be strong, competent, professional, essential to the plot, and not necessarily beautiful or sexy. I want my backgrounds to be unfamiliar yet familiar scapes — college towns, ecocollectives, vast darkness. I want pacifism against war to be my battle in a world where war vs war is the default.

The cost of this is that people in dominant culture will not be able to insert themselves into the story, and the background contains little familiarity. The status quo will not be supported. I want to open hearts, not offer up Same Shit, Differenr Day.

This gives me more to think about — am I an author if nobody reads me? If it worth the time I spend? Do I like my fantasy worlds enough to live in then without giving tours?

And what happens to this blog?

I have a lot to think about on this plane trip home, and it’s all about writing. I’ve been warned not to make decisions when either manic nor udepressed, so I’m not giving up writing yet. I’ve made two decisions thus far:

I’m going to publish Gaia’s Hands on Kindle regardless of whether it makes it through the Scout campaign or not.
I’m not querying agents for a while; I’ll let the rest of the queries out there get rejected.
(Did I say only 2)) I might put another book, Voyageurs, through the Kindle Scout process.

What decisions does that leave? Whether or not I can keep writing when I have no audience who reads my work. (I know about 40 of you read this, but for Lanetta and Lynn, I don’t know if the rest of you like my writing, follow because you know me, or visit to keep up with the dumpster fire that is bipolar disorder.)

I can write for myself, but creativity is not meant to be hoarded. It’s meant to entertain, to make people think, to foment revolutions of the hears. To do that, it needs to be shared with people. When I wrote and performed folk music a lifetime ago, I reached very few people, but the words mattered to them.

’

What do I want when I write? I want to feel, as NaNo proclaims, that the world needs my novel.

The Curse

Atlantic Hope has wrapped up, and although doing moulage again was satisfying, med problems and stress have put me back into depression. Here’s a poem:

I am a mote of dust in a sunbeam,
a whisper lost in a hurricane gale,
a child fallen down a well in the woods,
an old woman freezing to death at a bus stop.
I am the scene on the cutting room floor,
the news that doesn’t fit the narrative,
the character edited out of the story.
I am a mote of dust in a sunbeam.

voiceless

To be a childhood abuse survivor is to exist without a voice.

Nobody hears when you tell them to stop. Nobody hears when you tell them why you’re crying.

The pain of being voiceless gets better, but the desire to be heard never goes away. It permeates one’s being like a curse that has settled into one’s DNA — “Until you get people to listen to you, you will never be whole.”

Sometimes you get people to listen to you, but it doesn’t break the spell. It never will, because it cannot erase the memory of adults saying, “Are you sure?” and shrugging off your story because you are a child and they are trusted more than you.

This is what mixes up with my feelings about getting published, and it has complicated my decisions about publishing. I want to be heard but I want to be true to my experience and ideals as well. The data from Kindle Scout doesn’t bode well for me. The last two days I’ve gotten less than 20 nominations a day; my writing doesn’t grab people. I have to accept this and go on.

My next step will be to self-publish this first work (despite the fact no one will likely not read it in the swamp of Kindle) and I’m probably going to quit querying. I then have to consider whether I will continue writing just for myself. Writing takes lots of time and I don’t have a muse to energize my soul right now, so my writing is up in the air.

So I hope you’ll stick with me and keep supporting me: