magistrate

Staring down the beginning of the Clarion West Write-a-thon, two things seem especially important.

First, that I just re-ran-into the Adrienne Rich quote which reads, "To know we are not alone, that our identity is not random but has a history and a meaning shared with others—that our existence has its own special kind of beauty—this is the great force of art to people moving against alienation."

And second, that I'm about to start a new job at the beginning of July, and that I am, even now, searching for a new apartment and preparing to turn my life upside-down again.

Second explanation first: my big barrier to completing my Write-a-thon goals in years past was that the WAT always corresponded with the end of the fiscal year at the University where I worked, and I happened to work in a financial department. Apparently the theme of my life getting really busy as soon as the WAT rears its formidable head is not going away with the passing of the job.

And the first explanation second: well, if there's a pie-in-the-sky idealistic goal, not just for my Write-a-thon writing but also for my writing in general, it's to wedge a few more ideas into the ever-evolving discussion that is fiction. Gender is one I keep coming back to; so are cultural estrangement, signification, relationships, power, the inability to communicate, the majesty of the known and unknown, and the existence of questions which have neither easy nor satisfying answers. I spend a lot of time circling around those high, idealistic goals, though how well I achieve them is another question entirely.

(And here I'm reminded of another quote, Michael Cunningham's: "You have, for months or years, been walking around with the idea of a novel in your mind, and in your mind it’s transcendent, it’s brilliantly comic and howlingly tragic, it contains everything you know, and everything you can imagine, about human life on the planet earth. It is vast and mysterious and awe-inspiring. It is a cathedral made of fire. But even if the book in question turns out fairly well, it’s never the book that you’d hoped to write. It’s smaller than the book you’d hoped to write. It is an object, a collection of sentences, and it does not remotely resemble a cathedral made of fire."

As I've said on my Write-a-thon page, I don't know what I'll write, or how much I'll write. But you can expect to see some of the above themes cropping up alongside the other, more magpie-minded projects.

Anyway, I hope the writing (and writing about writing) will be entertaining to those of you reading, and I hope you'll consider sponsoring me or any one of the many, many other fine writers in the Write-a-thon this year. There's a wealth of talent banding together to support a new crop of talent which, in turn, is being taught by a roster of extraordinary talent, and I, for one, am excited to get started.

Around the end of August, I finished the first draft of the first novel I've ever felt confident enough about to start shopping out. (The last original novel I finished before that was... in sixth grade. I probably still have the completed draft on my flash drive or harddrive somewhere, but it very much reads like something a sixth-grader wrote. And we won't get into fanworks.)

Throughout September, I let it sit and didn't even open the file, and I threw all my effort into writing the sequel while a bunch of incredibly wonderful beta readers went through my story and gave me feedback covering a wide range of topics – conventions expected by the target audience, questions left unanswered, plot snarls, places where the prose or plot was unclear, places where they were hooked or lost, strengths and weaknesses.

Now, I've compiled all those responses into a document – a sort of menu of things to fix – and I've been ticking off each issue, one by one. Except that now I'm stalling.

It's strange. I remember this sort of hand-wringing and avoidance (because a part of this is that I know once I'm done with revisions, I'll have to send out the novel to agents, and whatever I've done or failed to do will have to stand on its own merits, and that's scary, yo) – I remember it from when I started submitting short stories. Now, approaching my 80th short story submission (I just got a response – a rejection – on my 78th submission of all time), I'm used to that process, and while there's still a flutter of anticipation every time I send a short story out or get a response back, for the most part, it's routine.

But shopping out a novel is a completely different beast.

Sort of. From what I've researched of the process, there are a lot of similarities, and even some of the differences (synopses, partials) just seem like short-form submissions' big sibling. There's a bit more weight to the process, which is understandable given the heft of the work you're submitting.

But there are palpable differences. For one thing, generally a relationship with an agent is a long-term one; a relationship with an editor can evolve to the point where they'll drop you a line once in a while and ask if you've got anything new, but the expectation is that every story is a new deal. For another, an agent takes a lot of the responsibility off your back, and that means trusting them with something precious to you, if you value your writing at all. They take stewardship of your work in a very real way. Even before you internalize the prevailing wisdom that a bad first book can torpedo you as a novelist, there's a lot at stake.

The writing style I use means a lot of revision and rework during the process of writing. After that, I did a first-pass revision. Then I got crits on it and I'm doing a second revision now. Once those edits are in place, I'm going to do a final readthrough to make sure I haven't introduced new problems or errors. When I send this out it's going to be polished, and even after that, I'm fairly sure my (eventual, hopeful) agent and/or editor will come back with yet more crits. Everything is going to be done to give my book the best chance it can have. I'm just dragging my feet because even the steps to move forward are scary.

Still. This is about how I felt when I started submitting short stories too, and that turned out all right. I'll just keep telling myself that, then taking a deep breath, and addressing the next challenge on the list.

In true Clarion West Alum style, I am diving into this week slightly belatedly and with no clue what I'm doing! Join me for the ride.

THE CHARACTER: An Owomoyela, your narrator, a graduate of the 2008 class of the Clarion West Writers Workshop, author of various and sundry things.

THE CONFLICT: Your intrepid narrator has agreed to work on a different writing project every week for six weeks and blog about the results, in the hopes that you, O Readers, will sponsor hir and hir cause. In return for your money, your encouragement, or simply your occasional attention, you'll receive ramblings, blatherings and excerpts from a variety of different thingbobs!

THE FIRST CHAPTER: An will be – and hang on, se's just deciding this now – working on (drum roll, please)...

Slivers, (or) The Child Born With Fangs
A xenofictive fantasy YA novel concerning gender and the nature of humanity.

Slivers begins with a child named Rankiryo, a name meaning "Child of the Old Ways." He's a lyncis by species, and I'll provide a link to a visual aid for what lyncis folk look like. So, yes, I'm writing a fairly shameless catperson novel, but that's alright, 'cause I'm an author, and I can do what I want.

( Continue reading on the subject of lynxes... )

( Or perhaps you'd like an excerpt? )

Check out the new blog post on an_owomoyela for excerpts from and neepery about my second Write-a-Thon story, Redacted. It's the one with the oddly friendly church, and also memory loss and crime and disability and how to communicate stories. Sorta.

Check out the new blog post on an_owomoyela for excerpts from and neepery about my first Write-a-Thon story!

I spent most of last week feeling like crap either physically or emotionally. (Or both. It was sometimes both.) Along with a persistent low-grade fever, I got hit with a case of I'm not doing anything with my life, I'm not going anywhere with my life, I will never amount to anything and I'm never going to mean more than I mean right now. Which is silly, and which I know is silly, because for where I am in my life I'm doing just fine – I've got a college degree, I've got a few publications, I've got a salaried job, and these are not small accomplishments. Which prompted some introspection on my part, and while this was originally going to be a much longer post rambling my way through that thought process, I don't have the focus to write it all out right now, so I'll just hit the highlights:

* I keep thinking that if I just do this or do that, I'll feel a lot better about myself, which isn't, so far as I can tell, true. I mean, when I was 19 I thought that being a Published Author!! would grant me some sort of inner sense of validity, which isn't really true; now that I've got fiction appearing here and there in magazines, what I'm really wondering is why it's not appearing in more. And why all of it is short-form. Honestly, I don't think that finishing a novel or sending it out or seeing it on bookshelves is going to be anything revelatory, either, if I manage it; there's still Ways Up to go.

* Phrased another way, the above can be succinctly summarized as if I just HAVE MORE accolades, I bet I'll be a happier person! I think this is about as useful as buying a new sportscar. ...perhaps moderately more useful. It still won't get me what I'm looking for.

* Honestly, I think some of it is that I keep looking for objective measurements that I'm doing well, and it's a big ol' thorny subjective world out there, and there are six billion different and usually contradictory rubrics available to grade myself against.

* * For example, I am an absolutely wretched conservative Christian.

* * But I like to think I'm at least a competent speculative fiction author.

* So, if I have to discard the HAVING THINGS/ACCOMPLISHMENTS model of Feeling Good About Myself, that leaves me at the common-sense stage of "...maybe instead of focusing on the XBox Acheivements (real life edition) of concepts of self-worth, I actually have to learn to like myself on my own terms, and for my own self (rather than Because It Can Be Demonstrated That I Am Doing Well), which is something I'm still learning how to do.

* * But I'm making some progress, I think.