With relief, enthusiasm, and sheepishness, I announce that more chapters are now on-line in my serialization of Was It A Rat I Saw, my psychological thriller involving real-life split brain research, animal rights, and a love quadrangle.
Baaa.
I’m making progress – a mere 70 hardcover pages left to re-type! – but am way behind my original self-imposed deadline to digitize this novel. Hence the sheepishness.
Do not be misled by the photo. There are no sheep in Was It a Rat I Saw although I do have great fondness for sheep. In fact, my daughter’s first word was “Baaa.” We were visiting a farm at the time.
Was It A Rat I Saw was previously published in hardcover by Bantam-Doubleday-Dell. For the first time, I’m publishing it electronically, first as a serial and then as an e-book.
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.
Okay, whose brilliant idea was it to set a deadline for my retyping* of ?Was It A Rat I Saw?, my psychological thriller involving real-life split brain research, animal rights, and a love quadrangle?
I had a plan is to publish each of the four sections of ?Rat?, chapter by chapter, to this blog during the four weeks in August.
Half empty: I am behind by an entire section.
Half full: I have finished Part II and am almost at the midpoint.
Two more chapters on line this week! If I had no self-imposed deadline to make me feel behind, I would be better able to enjoy that accomplishment.
I feel a Life Lesson coming on…
*?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.
When I originally wrote Was It A Rat I Saw, a psychological thriller involving real-life split brain research, animal rights, and a love quadrangle, it was published in hardcover by Bantam-Doubleday-Dell. Now I’m publishing it electronically, first as a serial and then as an e-book.
My plan is to publish each of the four sections of Rat, chapter by chapter, to this blog during the four weeks in August.
Here in la semana dos, I have (already?) fallen behind. I was supposed to add six chapters this week. So far I have added four.
My plan was perhaps a tad ambitious.
To publish Rat electronically, I must first type the whole book from one of the print copies. I could have had it scanned and digitized but I didn’t. I decided to retype. I had a good reason and another reason. I wanted to save a little money and I wanted to read it again. You get to decide which reason is which.
I might catch up to my plan because the sections get shorter as the book goes along. Or I might revise the plan. Tune in next week for the next installment of Just How Fast Can Sue Type?
Meantime, feel free to establish office pools or other wagers about how many chapters I will add in week three.
I hate knowing what happens next. I used to evaluate screenplays for movie studios, and at a rate of 10 per week, it got so that no plot twist could surprise me. That was a long time ago, but even now, gratitude wells up whenever a book or movie surprises me, even if I otherwise loathe the piece. One reason I loved the Harry Potter series was that in all those thousands of pages and hundreds of plot turns, there were only a scant few that I saw coming.
Curiously, although I prefer surprises and novelty, I have spent most of my life as a control freak. (Working on it! Working on it!) Perhaps as my aging memory worsens I will be able to have it all: exert control, forget I exerted control, enjoy surprise at the events I caused to unfold.
Am I kidding? Control freaks never unfold events. Control freaks have only an illusion of control.
The predictable bores me, and I detest being bored. Being bored. Saying it that way suggests that an outside force imposes the boredom. In fact, whether I get bored or not depends on me. To cop a phrase from a recent movie trailer, boredom is a choice. If I’m bored, I should be able to redirect my attention or reconstruct my attitude and eliminate the boredom.
Which all sounds fine in theory. Routine repetition is the deal-breaker.
Typically I avoid that kind of boredom by tuning out and looking inward. This has some good consequences. For example, I tune out the mind-numbing repetition of brushing my teeth – day after frigging day – and while brushing my teeth I have excellent writing ideas. Moral of that story: if your writing stalls out, brush your teeth.
I tune out while driving. I’ve lived and worked in the same places for several years so I long ago exhausted all the new ways to commute. But the space-out can be too complete. On my way to work and suddenly I come to and I don’t recognize where I am. The adrenaline jolt certainly fights boredom, but the backtracking and rewinding do not start my day well.
I still remember the first time I experienced boredom. I was a kid, it was the dregs of summer, my friends were elsewhere. I lay on the floor of my room, picking at the bedspread, overwhelmed by there being absolutely nothing I felt like doing. I don’t remember all that much about my childhood but that moment is indelible.
I started blogging as part of my effort to regain a writing career. (Warning to other writers: J.D. Salinger aside, not writing for two decades will not bolster your career.)
Like most of my important life decisions – including writing novels and having kids – this one sprang from an offhand suggestion. Fortunately, impulsive decisions can be excellent decisions.
My blog’s initial purpose was to let people know my writing exists. Here’s how it was supposed to work: you read a post, you like it, you say oh look she’s got novels too I think I’ll try one. Wordpress and Smashwords stats suggest that chain of thoughts does sometimes occur!
(In other hands my blog might attempt aggressive marketing but the reality is that that ain’t me. Fortunately, my books do seem to be gradually building momentum despite this.)
When I started my blog:
I had considerable wariness, surely shared by most fledgling bloggers. What if I run out of ideas? What if nobody ever visits my blog? What if writing a blog keeps me from writing my novels? Fortunately – like most fears – these caused needless angst.
I assumed I would blog about writing but I hardly ever do. I mention milestones for my novels (for example, today I launched a serialization of my psychological thriller ?Was It A Rat I Saw?) But I strictly write novels, so milestones don’t pop up that often. Sometimes I detail my writing techniques, but this blog will never provide advice on writing or editing. I’ve only got this advice for other writers:
To improve your writing do more writing.
I anticipated a single-topic blog but instead have many. I’ve got my preoccupations (animals, my kids, sunrises, the ocean, epitaphs, an addict among my loved ones, patterns that prompt impromptu Rorschach tests) but I do keep adding to them. I aspire to an omni-topic blog. Although that will play havoc with my tag cloud.
I didn’t expect to have so many people like my photographs.
I didn’t expect to be staggered and awestruck by the vast number of interesting, beautiful, thought-provoking, nurturing, and hilarious blogs I have happened upon! I love being part of this sprawling yet tight-knit community. I still feel peripheral but that’s who I am.
I didn’t know that responding to WordPress Photo Challenges, Writing Challenges, and Daily Prompts such as this one would be so much fun.
Tommy Dabrowski, a brain surgery patient and research subject of neuropsychologist Dr. Clare Austen, witnesses a murder with the right half of his brain, which no longer has access to language. Clare and Tommy race against time to figure out what he knows before the killer gets to them.
Was It A Rat I Saw is a psychological thriller involving real-life split brain research, animal rights, and a love quadrangle. It was originally published in hardcover by Bantam-Doubleday-Dell. I’ve got the rights back now, so am publishing it as an e-book.
To start that process, each Friday in August, 2013, I will post a section Was It A Rat I Saw to this blog page. Five sections, chapter by chapter, on five Fridays, beginning August 2.
If you read them by the end of September, you will receive an e-book version for free.
I am serializing Rat now because August is web serial writing month (WeSeWriMo). Me, I probably won’t ever write serial fiction – I do too much late-stage editing, – so posting an already-finished book may be as close as I ever get. But I admire the energy and sensibility of serial writers.
I am a casual collector of potential epitaphs. In the early days of my blog I posted each of the candidates separately. I’ve had a request to compile them, so here they all are.
This one happened by me during an email exchange at work. The original comment referred to a scientific paper. Way too good to waste there:
Not without a few errors, but provocative nonetheless.
I can see having this on my headstone (Except that I won’t have a headstone.):
Wait! I’m not done yet!
On my optimistic days, this is the epitaph I favor:
The adventure continues…
For the last word in petty revenge:
Not even the dog will miss him.
Yup, sounds familiar:
Lived at the corner of Skepticism and Rebellion.
Death comes to all of us and yet:
They told me to expect the unexpected but here I am.
No more fooling around:
Next time I come back as a cat.
This offhand comment from a biologist deserves immortality:
She wondered about genetic drift.
Or maybe the reverse is more meaningful:
He never wondered about genetic drift.
I know, right?:
Damn, just when I was getting the hang of it.
Although debate with the universe is not recommended:
Ouch. Description of a graveyard with headstones from William Faulkner’s only mystery novel, Intruder in the Dust:
…carved mottoless with simple names and dates as though there had been nothing even their mourners remembered of them than that they had lived and they had died…
Required Writing 