• write every day
• spend 2 hours or more every week marketing my work
• travel to Spain for research
• finish another print-worthy novel
• have something I wrote for sale (or bought) by November
• volunteer to judge or coordinate 3 writing contests
• continue to volunteer as WRW membership goddess
• buy a copy of all my friends’ debut books this year (3-D copies preferred)
• read 50 books
• keep a list of books I read this year (see right).

And you?

• spent more than 300 hours writing (not web-surfing or sitting, but writing)
• spent more than 120 hours doing volunteer work
• finished 1 print-worthy book (!)
• submitted my work to agents and editors, and got good critiques and notes
• wrote 1 good short story and started 2 others
• won NaNoWriMo!
• volunteered as a judge for 3 writing contests and coordinator for one
• volunteered as WRW membership goddess, including developing and implementing a new web-based registration method
• attended WRW’s retreat, the RT conference (first time), and RWA’s conference
• arranged to have my story edited by a really good editor
• read 54 books (see right) across many genres.

And you?

First: WOW. I’d been to quite a few lectures in the LoC before, but always come in the back entrance, so I’d never seen the entry hall. Gorgeous! Here’s Virginia in the hall shining a light on the two figures bookending an entry arch: A young reader and an old reader, showing that learning is a life-long pursuit.

The entry has staircases on two sides, and along the railings are putti dressed as different sorts of artisans. Here is one (left) dressed as an 18th century printer.

I was especially interested in the imagery of printing, as that’s a topic I write about in my stories. In the hall through the double-readers doorway are a series of paintings showing the progress of text, from stone through papyrus, and on to the printing press, below. Also in this small area are display cases for two Bibles: one hand-calligraphy and one printed by Gutenberg around the same time, marking the moment everything changed for book-readers.

The entry hall has a second-floor gallery, where the printer’s marks from various famous print-shops decorate the ornamental work between the stretched-canvas paintings. Along one wing of the gallery are images depicting the different forms of literature, including (top) romance and (bottom) erotica (“Love Poetry,” according to the catalog). Erotica!

We peeked into the reading room and heard how to request a book (fill out a form, wait between a half-hour and an entire day). Now I want to find something to request.
(LOC has clearer images of Romance and Erotica)

Plus, this one has tracks for readers as well as writers, booksellers, and librarians. For readers, there are lots of chances to see many favorite authors and meet new ones. For me as a writer, this is a great chance to hear what die-hard readers like and dislike and what they’d like to read more of — here’s hoping it’s long historical fiction with romantic elements!

I’ll ride the reader track for a day or two, but I’m also looking forward to two business panels, one of editors and one of agents, on what kinds of stories they’re looking for right now. There are a lot of seminars on how e-books are changing how we sell our stories, too. Plus the Mr. Romance contest!

You can follow the goings-on via Twitter, hashtag #RT11.

Manchester, 1819 — After a broken engagement and rushed marriage, Madeline Wetherby struggles to adapt to her new role as a merchant’s wife and to a new style of town, changing rapidly as machines displace skilled workers. As whispers of rebellion grow, a mill is set on fire, and Manchester starts to roil in the summer heat, she discovers her birth father is one of the weavers her husband is putting out of work—and a radical leader. Now she must decide whether the family she longs for can be made of the man of her heart or the people of her blood.

I see this as the sort of book chatty book clubs would enjoy. It’s not a “straight romance,” but it has more romance than a “straight historical.” It’s a cross-over, mashup, reading delight!

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Also, I had only the vaguest sense of time – they’re wearing jeans, and they jump trains, so sometime between 1930 and now. There doesn’t seem to be a social worker when the girls drop out of school, so sometime before 1980. Does it matter? It did to me. I actually went to Wikipedia later to discover that I was supposed to know that a novel one character was reading was published in 1954, so I would then know roughly when this story takes place.

And this narrator, who dropped out of school and doesn’t show evidence of mighty reading or checking a dictionary when she does, drops words like immiscible, fenestration, lucifactions, calyx, spillet, and parturition into her story. Hearing those words in her voice was jarring for me. Part of the story is about the reader’s discovering how Ruth’s interpretations of events (“finding” the rowboat, what flooding meant for the house’s foundation) doesn’t match our interpretation (stealing the rowboat, the foundation is unsafe). That her narration uses these words makes it also untrue, as if some smart person were trying to pass herself off as this dreamy, drifty woman. These sort of words are all through the book, and each time I passed each one and wrote them on the inside back cover to look up (me, with the master’s degree in English), my faith in the narrator weakened. By the end, I thought she was a big pretender and I’m not sure what she says happened in the end really happened.

I was also put off by the “promises” the story starts with that it doesn’t keep. For example, at the start of the story there is deep detail about the narrator’s grandfather, then his grandmother and all her daughters. They are so lovingly detailed I expected we would hear more about them, but we don’t—or not all of them. One became a missionary and disappears out of the story (not even a note, that I remember). I read this over a weekend, and remember waiting to hear something later about this missionary-daughter, who was so important she got a description at the start, but never did. Why is this daughter even in the story? To paraphrase Checkov on playwriting: Don’t have a gun on the wall in Act 1 if you’re not going to fire it in Act 2.

The one that led me to close the book for the night, though, comes later:

But we went there, leaving the house at dawn, joined at the road by a fat old bitch with a naked black belly and circles of white around her eyes. She was called Crip, because as a puppy she had favored one leg, and now that she was an elderly dog she favored three. She tottered after us briskly, a companionable gleam in her better eye. I describe her at such length because a mile or so from town she disappeared into the woods as if following a scent and never appeared again.
(HOUSEKEEPING, Picador 1980, p. 111)

Argh! I just spent time picturing this dog, making her history, guessing what part she would play in the story, and she’s not in the story ever again. This is the sound of a book hitting the wall.
This is why Crip is in the story:

She was a dog of no special consequence, and she passed from the world unlamented. Yet something of the somberness with which Lucille and I remembered this outing had to do with our last glimpse of her fat haunches and her palsied, upright tail as she clambered up the rocks and into the dusty dark of the woods. (p. 111)

Again, beautiful, beautiful writing. And again, unbelievable. I’m more inclined to think that the experience of being caught outside overnight with no shelter and trapped by dark dreams would be a better explanation for the “somberness.” If it wasn’t for book club, I would not have read on; I’m glad I did. But I’m not running out to pick up another of these books.

One of the many things that worked for me was the consistent imagery of water as dangerous, deadly, dark, mysterious. I know that is true—every time I step into Lake Michigan I think of all the dead mariners somewhere below—but I quickly shake off that image with my preferred view that water is life-giving, healthy, and good, and dive in. The cumulative images and descriptions in the text did a great job of persuading me to the other point of view, to a better balance.

I also liked being reminded that a person outside looking through a window at a cozy family inside is not always envious, not always wanting the same thing or anything like it.

Also, there are so many great lines: “Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the worlds true workings.” (p. 116) “They were both long and narrow women like me, and nerves like theirs walk my legs and gesture my hands.” (p. 131) “It is better to have nothing, for at last even our bones will fall. It is better to have nothing.” (p. 159)

Next book-club book: THE POISONWOOD BIBLE, by Barbara Kingsolver

But I have never thought that traits that are strong in childhood disappear; they may go underground or they may be transmuted into something else, but they do not vanish; very often they make a vigorous appearance after the meridian of life had been passed. It is this, and not senility, that is the real second childhood. … As we neared our sixties the cloaks we had wrapped about our essential selves were wearing thin.
(THE DEPTFORD TRILOGY, 1970, Penguin 1990, p. 233)

And Davies gets off so many great lines:

A boy is a man in miniature, and though he may sometimes exhibit notable virtue, as well as characteristics that seem to be charming because they are childlike, he is also schemer, self-seeker, traitor, Judas, crook, and villain—in short, a man. (p. 3)

But before Paul’s birth, he had loved her because she was the blood of his heart; now he seemed to love her on principle. (p. 38)

After the marathon reading, and a great discussion during book club, I find the lure of the next two books in the series, THE MANTICORE and WORLD OF WONDERS, nearly irresistable. Especially intriguing is the idea that the next book has a different narrator, so we readers will see old scenes (and the first narrator) in different lights. What luxury!

But my new year’s resolve has not yet slaked, and I know first I must finish the second half of NORTH AND SOUTH, by Elizabeth Gaskell. The story is set very close to the time I set my latest work-in-progress, and she uses the same great reportorial eye and style she did in MARY BARTON, which is set earlier. I’d gleaned great ideas and details and modes of speech from the first half of N&S, but somehow had stalled out on reading it. I blamed holiday travel and a fierce dive into first revisions (for story) on my WIP, but opening it again, I remember the real reason. She is just too good.

“You think it strange. Why?”
“I don’t know—I suppose because, on the very face of it, I see two classes dependent on each other in every possible way, yet each evidently regarding the interests of the other as opposed to their own: I never lived in a place before where there were two sets of people always running each other down.” (NORTH AND SOUTH, 1855, Norton Critical Edition 2005, p. 109)

Gaskell also shows raw emotions expressed through action, as in the so-painful scene where Margaret turns down Mr. Thornton’s offer of marriage (pp. 174-8). And, the part that makes my head spin, she’s writing contemporary, not historical, fiction.

The darkness of January descends: I can’t match this historical accuracy, this raw emotion, I shouldn’t even try. I should write about my own time; after all, the themes I’m working are resonant now. But my attempts at contemporary have been clumsy, and I’m so slow that neither of the two contemporary manuscripts I’ve finished works for plot now: In one, the woman is a reporter in a style that was true when I was a reporter, all of five years ago, but isn’t true now; in the other, written four years ago, the protagonist invents a new app on the computer that somebody real invented two years ago. But if I want to say anything “real,” and be believed, I should do it in my own time.

I know the counter-arguments, and I have good reasons for writing historical (like I do want to write about Peterloo), but in the darkest days of the year, these arguments feel ephemeral. And there’s a snowstorm, so I have to shovel. And N&S sits unread.

And then my company announces it is closing its only office in town and laying off nearly all of us. So I flee.

I land in the last Kurt Wallander book by Henning Mankell I haven’t read, BEFORE THE FROST. This too, is an alternate-view story: Wallander as seen and felt from his daughter Linda’s point of view. She describes his hair-trigger anger, and we see it reflected in her own expressions of anger. I especially enjoyed how she resolves her childhood impressions of him with how she sees him working as a detective, and how she tries to resolve her choice to become a police officer with what has come before. Other father-daughter relationships in the book trace other trajectories. As always, I wonder how much I miss because this is translated.

Done with that, and still skirting N&S (which continues to travel back and forth to work in the messenger-bag), I glom onto AMERICAN GODS by Neil Gaiman. He’s been in the news, and in love, and I remember he does that hyper-real detail thing even in the stories that carry a lot of fantasy, as well as solid storytelling, and the book has been on my shelf forever and is recommended by the spouse (who says read ANANSI BOYS right away after). And, like Davies, this story wonders at why people want marvels, how they create their own marvels, and how people who feed them their marvels fare. Fun read, watching the stories told and re-told, and seeing how a longer form can carry a lot of short-story structure (like history passages that don’t slow the main narrative drive), you just have to remember to wrap it up better at the end.

So I’m cruising along and bam—on p. 99—he uses the word “manticore,” which is, you’ll remember, book 2 of the Deptford trilogy. It’s a Sign, so I seek out our copy of the trilogy, but spouse is deep into it and won’t give it up and aren’t I supposed to be reading N&S? Fine. I return to AG, and enjoy the “that’s my life!” references to the northern midwest (pasties, yoopers, those sports-team signs) as well as references to the potential that “It’s a Wonderful Life” could be a depressant and – hello – references to brain science:

She chewed a hangnail. “I read some book about brains,” she said. “My roommate had it and she kept waving it around. It was like, how five thousand years ago the lobes of the brain fused and before that people thought that when the right lobe of the brain said anything it was the voice of some god telling them what to do. It’s just brains.”
…
“I bet it’s like the space aliens,” she said. “These days, people see space aliens. Back then they saw gods. Maybe the space aliens come from the right side of the brain.”
“I don’t think the gods ever gave rectal probes,” said Shadow.
(AMERICAN GODS, Harper 2001, p. 133)

Soon enough, I’m through the book and dashed if it isn’t another snowpocalypse outside, saving me the trouble of immediately deciding which follow-up book to read (N&S is now under a pillow on the living room couch). This morning, no newspaper delivery so we’re reading books at breakfast, and the spouse shouts and chortles several times as he finishes WORLD OF WONDERS. “You must read this now,” he says, “so I can talk about it.”

But first, just one little chapter of N&S.

After I clear some more snow.

How the writing is going: Stuck in pre-revision molasses, but better to slowly look at everything now than rush like last time and discover my “fixes” messed up the plot. Ran through all the pages looking for plot points that don’t pay off, then noting characters that have too much or too little weight. This week I look at locations and setting.

Next book-club book: HOUSEKEEPING, by Marilynne Robinson

It gave me so much to chew on (the story of modern India, travel, what it means to be family, what superpower I would want, whether if I dropped to part-time to concentrate on fiction writing I could produce something even remotely like this about my country), that I haven’t read any fiction in more than a week. I keep picking up novels and reading the first few paragraphs at most, then setting them down, not quite ready to start. (OK, that’s published fiction. I did read my NaNo novel through twice already, as part of revising it, but that’s editing, not travel and adventure and escape.)

I didn’t like but did enjoy the narrator, telling his own story as if it were the center of the Indian universe, which, in perhaps less-extreme form, we all think of our own stories.

If I hadn’t wanted to be a hero, Mr. Zagallo would never have pulled out my hair. If my hair had remained intact, Glandy Keith and Fat Perce wouldn’t have taunted me; Masha Miovic wouldn’t have goaded me into losing my finger. And from my finger flowed blood which was neither-Alpha-nor-Omega, and sent me into exile; and in exile I was filled with the lust for revenge which led to the murder of Homi Catrack; and if Homi hadn’t died, perhaps my uncle would not have strolled off a roof into the sea-breezes; and then my grandfather would not have gone to Kashmir and been broken by the effort of climbing the Sankara Acharya hill. And my grandfather was the founder of my family, and my fate was linked by my birthday to that of the nation, and the father of that nation was Nehru. Nehru’s death: can I avoid the conclusion that that, too, was all my fault?
(from MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN, (1981) 2006 Random House trade paperback edition, p. 319)

(I like how when I typed that in, Word said, “run-on sentence. Change?” Actually, no.)

My favorite story-parts included the grandfather’s courting his bride (and the various iterations of a sheet throughout the story), the sister’s childhood strength and her mutation to Jamila Singer, and the crazy-ghost Sundarbans jungle scenes. I didn’t enjoy the “present day” parts, where Saleem is writing and annoying his girlfriend Padma, but even that thread brings a fun part right at the end, as she giddily recognizes herself in the narrative.

Saleem’s final wrap-up metaphor sees his years, and India’s, as a series of flavors of pickles, “special blends, in which, thanks to the powers of my drained nasal passages, I am able to include memories, dreams, ideas, so that once they enter mass-production all who consume them will know what pepperpots achieved in Pakistan, or how it felt to be in the Sundarbans . . . believe don’t believe but it’s true. Thirty jars stand upon a shelf, waiting to be unleashed upon the amnesiac nation.” (p. 530) (Rushdie’s ellipses, my bolding–I’m adopting this as my new retort!)

As a victim of too many writing seminars, I also loved this line: “From ayah to Widow, I’ve been the sort of person to whom things have been done; but Saleem Sinai, perennial victime, persists in seeing himself as the protagonist.” (p. 272, italics Rushdie’s). Saleem could not be the hero of a series romance; they are required to act, and usually act heroically. He reacts, and often even his reaction is passive, yet he believes he and his fellow children, born in the first hour of India’s political rebirth, are “the gods you never had” (p. 504).

While the book doesn’t end on a happy note, and one of its themes is that optimism is a disease, still there is the promise of the new generation of gods, including the baby Sinai, who should be grown to young adults by now. Do you see them?

Next up for bookclub: FIFTH BUSINESS, by Robertson Davies

“I was startled. I did not know that you cared for me in that way. I have always thought of you as a friend; and, please, I would rather go on thinking of you so. I don’t like to be spoken to as you have been doing. I cannot answer as you want me to do, and yet I should feel so sorry if I vexed you.”
(From NORTH AND SOUTH (1855) Norton critical edition 2005, p. 58)

She is just as direct about what she as a southern stranger sees in the northern town of Manchester, as the city girds for a factory-workers’ strike:

“You think it [Manchester society] strange. Why?”

“I don’t know—I suppose becaue, on the very face of it, I see two classes dependent on each other in every possible way, yet each evidently regarding the interests of the other as opposed to their own; I never lived in a place before where there were two sets of people always running each other down.”
(NORTH AND SOUTH, p. 109)

While “vexed” may date the first extract, there’s nothing in the wording that would make you think it was written more than 150 years ago. And it’s just as true now, feels just as impossible, and just as sad.
This story wasn’t deep history to Gaskell; hers is a “contemporary novel.” Reading it challenges me to see if I can write such a clear commentary on my own times. After my first couple of manuscripts came out so flat, I decided I couldn’t, and my next ones and this new NaNo one I’ve planned are set as historicals. They still treat common themes (meaning of family, definition of home, roles of women, one’s place and duty to one’s society) that are relevant in my times, but at a safe distance.

Maybe it’s time to try for currency as well as relevance again. Or maybe this is just cold-feet-just-as-the-writing-project-starts pondering; a familiar refrain. We’ll see how I feel on the backside of a month of novelwriting frenzy.

p.s. Our bookclub read this month was BREATH, EYES, MEMORY by Edwidge Danticat. Lovely but slight, it read to me like a lyrical series of short stories with not much sinew between. A great voice, and another story of generations of women struggling and surviving, as in our previous reads, HOUSE OF SPIRITS and BRIEF, WONDEROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO.

Next month (Dec.): MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN by Salman Rushdie.