It was one year ago today that the saga of infertility and my failed efforts at childbirth came to its climactic end. Happy Birthday to my baby girl, little angel, light of my life.
Please, for the love of God, may that latest tooth come in, and we can go back to sleeping through the night.
Check out my new story, Pieta, appearing in this summer's Mississippi Review Prize Issue, where it was a finalist in this year's fiction contest, judged by Frederick Barthelme. (NOTE: Link does not take you to the story, which is not available online yet, but to the contest announcement.)
Someone wrote me today asking what I meant in the post from a few days ago when I said that writing a second novel is a lot different than writing a first novel. I've been thinking about that a lot too, and how the situation I find myself in is incredibly similar, and also wonderfully different, than the last time.
First, the similarities. Both of my books were sold on a partial. With Icebergs, I had 150 pages written when my agent sent it out; with the Countess, it was 100. Both editors also asked for really tight 6-month deadlines for finishing the mss. (The Countess sold at the beginning of March, so if you're doing the math, that puts my deadline at the beginning of September. Yikes!) Both times I also had a full-time teaching position that sucked away a good chunk of my precious writing time.
Now for the differences.
The big difference, of course, is that this time I have a baby to take care of in addition to writing a novel and holding down a full-time teaching job. (Thank God for good babysitters and coffee!) Honestly, though, I look at this addition as a positive. I have to get home by 2 in the afternoon every day to let the babysitter off, so I have less time to fiddle on the internet researching Hungarian wedding dress styles from the 16th century if I'm going to get my pages done.
But the most important difference, the one that really matters, is experience.
From experience, I know that, having committed to some major plot points at certain moments in the story, I need to write toward those plot points in the first draft and not worry at the moment whether those are the right plot points. That's what a second draft is for. If I end up throwing out a lot of work later, that's OK. There's no way I can know if my plot points are the right ones until I've finished the whole draft, so worrying about it at this juncture is pointless.
From experience, I know that I will be happier meeting my deadline and having an imperfect first draft than missing it for the sake of a perfect one. What is a perfect first draft of a novel, after all? There are cliches, inconsistencies, and general cheez in the novel at the moment, and that's OK. That's what an editor is for.
From experience, I know that a weekend off with my family, or a week at the beach without my computer, will be as valuable to my book as working 7 days a week, 365 days a year, no matter how tight my deadline is.
The two books couldn't be more different. The first was a family epic with a complicated time structure and multiple narrators. The second is a single-narrator confessional, kind of a cross between Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All and The Silence of the Lambs.
Writing Icebergs taught me how to write Icebergs. Writing The Countess is teaching me how to write The Countess. Each novel is a very different experience. And yet one builds on the other, in both craft and process.
Thank God. Because no one should have to write a first novel twice.
So maybe we weren't related, but I'd like to take a moment to remember another Johns, Stephen Tyrone, who lost his life yesterday to a racist whackjob at the National Holocaust Museum. It seems he died trying to protect museum patrons from getting in the line of fire.
Brando has known me to complain when sports announcers throw the word "hero" around--it's a word that they use too easily, but doesn't belong to them.
It belongs to him.
Cor, has it really been five months since I posted here? I suppose I could blame it on the busy winter semester (partly true) and baby duty (also partly true) but the whole truth is, I have a new book in the works, and when there's a new book and a baby and a busy semester something had to go, and what went was this blog.
But the contracts arrived today from Random House, so I think I can safely announce that The Countess, my new book about the life of Erzsebet Bathory, is heavily in the works at the moment and if all continues to go as planned, will come out sometime in 2010 or early 2011 under the Crown imprint. I am crazy excited about it, not only because it's such a different book from Icebergs (first-person, single narrator, linear [for the most part] narrative) but because it's such a different experience writing a second novel than a first one.
I suppose the most important difference is how much more I trust myself and the process, to know how much I really need to accomplish and when. And even though I'm on a crazy deadline, it's going pretty well.
Wish me luck, and check back here more often, because I'll be back. That's official.
I've been dying to read my friend Yiyun Li's new book, The Vagrants, for years. Now it's finally out. Here's what Janet Maslin had to say about it. Now you should go get it too.
If you love Pride and Prejudice (admit it: you know you do) then you have to check out this. I love love love it. Someone else has too much time on her hands, but she's using it for good rather than evil.
(Courtesy of comments over at Oakland Dilettante. Thanks, Righteous Bubba! That made my day.)
I continually amaze myself at the way in which my work ethic evolves and the bizarre mental machinations that I go through in order to be A Writer.
For the past several years I had tons of time to write if I wanted to. The first year after Icebergs was finished I took the whole year off, lazily spending afternoons at the coffee house over-polishing the hell out of the beginning of a book that wouldn't seem to get off the ground and obsessing over my Amazon numbers. I rewrote the endings to a couple of short stories that I'd been working on before Icebergs, but they died, too, and I ended up cutting most of that work. Eventually, last winter, I finished something I liked and sent it out, but by now I've decided I don't like it either and most of the last five pages needs to go.
I have no time to write anymore. I have a full-time job and nearly full-time baby duty with a five-month-old who's teething and getting up three times a night. I have babysitting only fifteen hours a week. And yet I've done more writing in the past three months than I have in years.
Now that I have almost no time whatsoever to write, having to either pay for babysitters or abuse my husband's desire for Libby Time on the weekends, I have the beginnings of THREE full novels, a screenplay, and a book of short stories, not to mention the Big, Massive Book Doctoring Project my agent set me up with.
And you want to know the really crazy part? I'm actually getting stuff done. I've finished two stories this fall, wrote thirty pages for the Big, Massive Book Doctoring Project, and have the first chapters done of two of the three novels and most of the research reading done for the third.
Apparently I'm one of those nut jobs who is only productive when I have no time to waste. (Paula, I'm looking at you!) I look back on those months and years of free time with something akin to lust. All those days I could spend researching in the library! All those days spent surfing the 'net or Googling my friends! The truth is, it was always too easy to say I didn't have to get my work done, that there would be plenty of time tomorrow. So I didn't get anything of substance done.
There is no tomorrow any more. There's only now, and the page in front of me. Guess that's what I needed after all.
I took Libby with me to vote today. It was a beautiful, unusually warm day today in the Upper Peninsula--70 degrees, blue skies--an utter Global Warming moment in an area of the country where we usually have snow this time of year.
Afterward we went for a walk and enjoyed the nice weather, because it will probably be the last of it. Here she is, wearing the hat that Cristina Henriquez gave Libs on her recent trip to the UP:
Democracy takes a lot out of a girl.
Okay, this is too cute to keep to myself. Happy belated Halloween!
