On my evening walk, I passed a mom and her young daughter headed the opposite way.
“Mom, it’s oKAY!” The girl waves her arms and bounces as they walk.
“No, it was not okay that you did that.” The mom hunches forward, pushing an infant in a stroller.
“It was okay.” With no uncertainty.
“No, I really didn’t like it when you – did that.” Mom edits for my benefit. Her lips press together. She is not pleased.
“I wish,” the girl begins. By now they are past me and her voice carries back to where I have stopped walking, the better to eavesdrop. She continues slowly, as though choosing her words, “that I had a mom like you except somebody who didn’t care that I did that.”
I decided against openly stalking them, so missed the mom’s reply.
First, the cartwheels. I have just finished a very rough first draft of the first book in my fantasy detective series, Frames.Now I set it aside for a week, and remind myself to savor the sense of accomplishment. Then the real work begins, as I read through it, make notes, then revise.
This is my fourth novel.
Having completed this draft of Frames, I see some encouraging trends:
TIME NEEDED TO FINISH THE FIRST DRAFT:
Longest time: first novel – 7 years!! I had issues with writer’s block. Eventually forbid myself from rewriting or rereading the prior day’s work.
Shortest time: fourth novel – 8 months – aided by time in bed recovering from surgery, where I wrote the second half in 7 weeks.
LENGTH OF FIRST DRAFT MANUSCRIPT:
Longest first drafts: novels 1 and 2. Editing required deletions.
Shortest first drafts: novels 3 and 4. Editing required additions.
My novels, in reverse chronological order, are:
Frames, Book 1: Nica of Los Angeles. First book in a fantasy detective series that is a missing person case in this dimension, a battle between good and evil elsewhere. Available probably by the end of this year.
Scar Jewelry. A coming-of-age drama about a family with secrets, set in the present and in the 1970s punk scene in Los Angeles. Now available as an ebook and trade paperback.
?Was It A Rat I Saw?, a psychological thriller involving a series of murders, real-life split brain research, animal rights, and a love quadrangle. Now available as a serial, soon available as an ebook and trade paperback. A few hardcover copies from the first edition are still findable on-line but I hope you buy one of the new editions instead!
Headliners, a character study about rock fans who travel the country to follow the tour of a life-altering opening band. Coming next year as an ebook.
A Novella of Unknown Trends
I also wrote a detective novella, which I cannot add to these trends because I remember nothing about the writing of it, except that at the time I was the mother of toddler twins:
C.R.I.M.E. Science, Book 1: The Beginning follows a misfit group of scientists and techies who investigate the death of a volcanologist. Set in Eugene, Oregon circa 1999. Available as an ebook and trade paperback. Next book in the series will be in Los Angeles in 2014.
I continue to limp deeper into the retype* of ?Was It A Rat I Saw?, my psychological thriller involving real-life split brain research, animal rights, and a love quadrangle. I haven’t read the book in years and retyping also means rereading, which holds surprises for me:
I’m always my harshest critic but I like ?Rat? although I would do everything differently now. I have resisted the urge to rewrite – that way lies madness.
The real brain science still shocks, chills, excites me.
I don’t remember much of my own book and the retyping gets derailed when I read ahead to see what happens next.
I couldn’t write this book today. I am not the same person. This book captures a slice of my life, perspective, attitudes at a particular moment that is now long gone.
I had a plan to publish each of the four sections of ?Rat?, chapter by chapter, to this blog during the four weeks in August. There are several chapters in each section. This week, I published one chapter. Not one section. One chapter.
I call it a sign of psychological health that I no longer calculate how behind I am.
I believe the retype should now pick up speed. First, I have adapted to being back at my day job and getting All Else done in scattered shards of time. When I started the re-type, I was home lounging around after hip replacement surgery, with nothing but time. Second, I have just finished a first draft (yahoo!) of my latest novel, the fantasy detective series opener Frames. That is written in a different style than ?Rat? and I backed off from retyping when I realized it was influencing the style of the new book.
Good excuses for the slowdown, eh wot? No doubt next week I will have occasion to manufacture yet others.
*?Was It A Rat I Saw? was previously published in hardcover by Bantam-Doubleday-Dell. Now I’m publishing it electronically, first as a serial and then as an e-book.
I’m a writer and I love words. I savor the well-strung phrase wherever I find it – a book, stage patter, a movie, an ad, a blog. Song lyrics shape and define me. Early Springsteen’s meandering stage monologues could be my version of a religious experience.
Given all that, you’d think I’d be crazy for singer-songwriters, but I’m usually not. I typically prefer their songs when covered by others. As Noam Pikelny said, introducing a Gillian Welch cover at a Punch Brothers show, “We can’t play it better but we can play it faster.”
I knew Elliott Smith would be an exception. I knew I would love him but despite years of this awareness I still don’t really know his music. A couple people who serve as music gurus to me have long been Smith fanatics. They told me. I heard them but didn’t act. It can take me a long time to get around to what matters. And I confess I was intimidated by the manner of his suicide, ten years ago. He stabbed himself in the heart. Or anyway that was the way I heard the story.
Couple weeks ago, I went to one of four U.S. concerts, organized by his sister and many musicians who knew and loved him. The concerts were in Portland, Los Angeles, Austin, and Manhattan. I attended the show in LA on August 6. It would have been his 44th birthday. The show occurred at my favorite ever venue, the Largo at the Coronet. Smith was a regular performer at an earlier incarnation of the Largo (which I completely missed: I was not in LA and anyway not going out to hear music at that dark time in my life).
The four No Name Celebration shows have already sprouted lots of YouTube clips. Each show had maybe a dozen performers who each sang a couple of Smith’s songs. There were anecdotes about Smith, lots of laughs. It was an intensely emotional night. I like intense emotions, so that was okay for me. And I didn’t even know the songs. I went to learn some Smith. Most of the people in the room knew every song on the first chord. For my son, a Smith fanatic, hearing the songs in that setting was one of those life-altering events that only live music can give us.
Turns out the shows were called No Name #1 because the organizers hope to make this a recurring event, and because Elliott Smith used to name his songs like that. In fact, the first Smith song to become permanently stuck in my head is called No Name #1. To publicize the Austin show, David Garza performed the song at a radio station. It breaks my heart. Amazing how great music can do that and still be uplifting.
If you want to check out Smith performing this instead of Garza, there is an audio-only clip on YouTube, just released by the Largo owner right after this show. It’s from one of Elliott’s old Largo performances.
Garza performed at the LA show also. He was one of the highlights for me. Another standout was Aaron Espinoza, who turns out to be in a band called Earlimart which cites Elliott Smith as one of its major influences. Most of the LA performers were Largo regulars, including Jon Brion and Sean Watkins. (Over the last couple years I have come to love those guys by attending Largo shows. Most Largo shows feature Largo regulars. It’s a place where certain musicians hang out.)
There are beaucoup Elliott Smith clips on YouTube. Here is an oddball one, his performance at the Academy Awards the year Miss Misery was nominated from “Good Will Hunting”. (Director Gus van Sant was the emcee of the Portland No Name Celebration.) We live in a peculiar world where competitions try to compare Elliott Smith with Celine Dion, whose song from “Titanic” won the Oscar that year.
At the Largo No Name Celebration, initially I thought Jack Black (with his partner in Tenacious D) was out of place when he closed the show. But my kids explained it to me. His goofiness returned us to the world in just the right mood.
On the one hand, I wish you all could have been there; on the other hand that would have made it frigging impossible to get tickets.
Written with insight, grace, and truth, this evocative novel does a wonderful job capturing the workings of this family, its time and place (Northern Ireland, deep in the midst of “The Troubles”, 1960s-later), and the past that haunts them. The change of pace at the end was unnecessarily dragging, in my opinion, and some of the secrets did not entirely convince me. But this is a fine and well-crafted book; well worth a read. I am happy I received this book free in exchange for review.
Recommended.
I got this book for free in exchange for an honest review.
One of my least favorite traits: when I get overloaded and face an upcoming crazy day at work, sometimes I can’t sleep.
So here I am, 2:42 a.m., alarm set for 7.
Full moon tonight on a warm and bright night. These photos are shadows of tree leaves, cast by moonlight on my car hood. Reflection of the moon also appears.
I tweaked the B&W contrast in Photoshop, with a bigger tweak in the second photo (hence my car hood looks like a poorly paved road).
And now, to bed. Perchance to sleep.
P.S. While we’re at it – impromptu Rorschach test! What do you see in these images? I see a cave painting of a chicken in the bottom photo.
If I had not received a free copy in exchange for a LibraryThing review, I would not have finished this book, which frustrated and ultimately bored me. Kushner has the chops to be a spectacular writer and does much stylistic muscle-flexing but all the disparate components of this book remained just that. Maybe I’m old-fashioned. I wanted a fusion of pieces that would make the whole hang together. Instead, every time that story momentum started to build, or I started to get into a character or relationship, I got thrown out and had to slog through exposition for its own sake, and too many pontificating characters.
So much of the treatment is superficial. Kushner conveys the pompous narcissism of the Manhattan art scene, but not the charisma that draws us to the artists despite that. Her descriptions are very detailed – from motorcycle racing to student rebellions – but she never got me to care about any of it. I kept falling out of the narrative to wonder Why is she telling me all this now? Or at all?
Perhaps my negative reaction would have been less pronounced if the cover quote had not proclaimed her “one of the most brilliant writers of the new century.” That quote raised expectations that this book never remotely came close to meeting.
I’ve always loved school, as I recently posted. My college days were a fantastic, ne’er-dupulicated experience: I got exposed to new ideas, unimagined worlds; I had tons of fun and many of my college friendships have persisted for decades. I ended up with a double major and two minors but I remember so few of my classes. What mattered was Everything Else.
I wanted my kids to have a similar experience. But their generation has a different mindset. To them, college is an early bullet point in your career plan. You narrow your career choices and then choose a major accordingly. You get in, you get out, you move on.
Gak.
Ironic, isn’t it. They’ve got a parent who wouldn’t freak if they kept switching majors, waffling and wandering their way through college. (Might have to pull the plug financially, but that’s a separate issue.) They’ll apparently never enjoy that asset.
Readers of this blog with good memories know that I love pelicans. At the beach this weekend (San Clemente, CA – can’t you tell from the photo?) I managed to snap a fast-moving squadron as they passed overhead.
Required Writing 