Sometimes writing is weird

I wish I kept a running list of the things I look up when I’m writing a novel. For instance, today I:

• Called my mom for help in figuring out where rich people would live in Chicago in the late 1800s (she suggested somewhere on Prairie Ave)
• Googled, in essence, “that bigger pole on the end of a staircase railing”. The Internet reminded me that a railing is actually called a banister (or, you know, a railing, whatevs), the thing I was actually looking for a word for is the “newel” (which, when you read it in this novel, if I ever publish it, will stand out as something I probably Googled because no real person knows what that thing is called), and the carved wooden embellishments on the tops of the newels are called “finials”. The more you know!

Writing is an excercise in me realizing how much I don’t know about what things are called or what places are like. What did people do before the Internet? Probably called their moms.

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Back to basics

Oh man. I swear to God, I really mean to update this thing like twice a week, and then here we are, weeks after my last post, and I’m just now getting around to it. Yikes. The thing is, I’m super busy and stressed out right now. This is one of the totally insane things about living in New York and having so many friends here and having a job and writing and all that. It’s always something. I never get a weekend to relax; it’s always, like, I’m traveling or so-and-so is in town, or it’s Halloween, or it’s someone’s birthday. All of those things are great and important and fun (Halloween this year was especially fun, given that I’m known to despise Halloween and try not to go out if I can help it), and I love my friends and everything, but MAN, it is EXHAUSTING. And my job is great, but stressful, and writing is important but difficult, and everything just doesn’t seem to be flowing the way I would like it to. And so, this blog suffers.

On the writing front, I’m trying to go back to basics. I finished a manuscript at the beginning of October and now it’s with my agent. I’m not working on revisions right now, and don’t know when I will be, so now is the perfect time to not write and just rest. Except I don’t really work like that. Already I feel like I’m behind working on my next thing, but my next thing is giving me some problems. Maybe it’s just that I’m thinking about it in too big of a way. I’m planning it out as a three book trilogy (yeah, yeah, I know, who isn’t writing a trilogy these days?), and maybe I’m just getting way ahead of myself with the plotting. I basically have the whole second book plotted out and have not finished writing the first one! Which seems dumb. Then again, I have no idea how anyone else does trilogies–maybe there are other people just as OCD as I am about this stuff?

The other thing I’ve been doing with my new book is, um, starting over like eight bazillion times. Right now I have about five documents open for the same project on my computer–and that’s just in Word! It doesn’t count the document I have open in Scrivener, which I finally downloaded the full version of last week. Speaking of Scrivener, I know it gets rave reviews from a lot of authors, but I feel myself being so resistant to it. Which isn’t really surprising, since the only reason I downloaded it is because I know it’s not for the kind of writer that I myself am. I like to write my books in a linear fashion–beginning to end, just as they’re read. The idea of writing things out of order and then stitching it all back together gives me hives, and I’m not joking. That’s really the kind of writer who will get the most out of Scrivener, though–the out-of-order writer, which, again, is emphatically not me. But my way isn’t really working for this book, for whatever reason, at least not right now. So I’m going to force myself to try writing out of order and see if that loosens me up a little. I feel so locked in to my ideas, even though I know they’re not all fitting together properly (though I’m getting there).

For instance, this book had, like, a huge cast of characters. 13 to be precise, and that’s just the human characters! Alex and I had a come-to-Jesus moment about it where she was like, “You need to cut some of these people.” And she’s totally right–a lot of them were serving only one superficial function, and I was able to pare down the human cast of characters to seven. Which is still a ton! But I do need them all. Seven is the compromise I made with myself.

I also had my own come-to-Jesus moment with myself. I often say that simple is always better. No need to have a complicated plot or event or explanation when a simple one will do just fine. The reason things sometimes feel contrived in novels is because they’re too complicated. I’m paraphrasing John Green when I joke that writing is just lying, except that’s not a joke. Lies are always better when they’re simple, and they need only one or two key details to be convincing. Lots of times, writers say things in three paragraphs that could have been said in three sentences, and they create elaborate plots that end up looking like Swiss cheese when you actually think about them, and that’s not because they’re bad writers! It’s just that they actually think too hard about things, create doubts and problems for themselves, and then overcompensate with disastrous results.

And to be honest, that’s kind of what my current project is suffering from right now. I’m so afraid of being criticized for being unrealistic and silly that I’m being unrealistic and silly. So, I’ve got to simplify. Those are my two goals for now; break the mold, and simplify. I need to diversify the ways in which I approach my work in order to jump start my creativity, and I need to start paring the story down to its essential elements or risk losing the whole point of the thing in the pursuit of the right flourishes.

To that end, I’m experimenting with writing tools, and I also think I’m going to do NaNo, but not with the project I’ve just been talking about. I wrote OoH last fall just for myself, and that’s why I think it was so fun and easy to write, relatively speaking. I’d like to have that experience again. I love my current project, and I’m really dedicated to it, and I’m not going to stop working on it right now, but I think I need to loosen up and just play around with words and characters and plot again, without all of my insane pressures, both internal and external.

So my NaNo project is going to be this little YA romance. The main character’s name is Collins, and she’s this brainy overachiever, kind of snarky and sharp. She lives in this small Midwestern town that’s only famous because five years ago a Hanson-esque band of three teenaged brothers shot to the top of the pop charts with their first album, but now after the failure of their second album they’re moving home. The youngest boy, Logan, who has previously only been home schooled, enrolls at the town high school for his senior year. Of course, Collins and Logan collide in some rather unfortunate ways at first, but then it’s just a romance between them. I like the idea of taking two different sorts of overachievers, one who is on the rise (in her own head at least) and one who is at a career low and forcing them to learn things from each other. Also, it gives me a chance to talk about creativity and pressure and saying what you need to say in the way you need to say it, all of which I LOVE to do. But who knows, I might literally write only twenty pages all November. Part of this is about not putting pressure on myself, so the deadlines fall into that category as well. My username is annakjarzab if you’d like to follow me or friend me or whatever it’s called on NaNo.

More soon! Also, remember that the comment tool requires me to approve all comments, so if yours doesn’t show up don’t worry, I got it.

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Done…for now

Last night (October 9), sometime around midnight, I wrote this on Twitter:

That link led to this picture:

That is my revised novel, The Opposite of Hallelujah (I was considering the title Impossible Objects, but ultimately rejected it, as people almost unanimously preferred the first title, which was also the “original” title, although the actual original title for this book, back when I conceived of it sometime during my senior year of college, was Do Geese See God?, a title I still like but can you imagine trying to sneak that past agents, editors, and sensible people the world over?). On Tuesday, I will be emailing it to my agent. It is, at final count, (I was wrong about this on Twitter, forgive me) 380 pages and 99,958 words long.

Hallelujah was pretty painless to write and revise, as these things go, which is why I am, of course, nervous now. Shouldn’t this be harder? It certainly has been for me in the past. What if there’s some huge problem with the novel that I’m just not seeing? And all kinds of angsty stuff like that. But for the most part, I’m saying, “It’s good, it’s clean, it’s ready to send into the world insofar as ‘the world’ means my agents,” and that’s that. Now I’m going to take a nap.

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Unfinished business

So there’s this thing that keeps happening. About twice a week, I’ll open up a new blog entry and start writing it, get almost to the end and, because I’m tired of talking by then, have no idea how to wrap it up, so I’ll save it for later and then it never gets posted. I just want to let you know, I intend to blog about two to three times more than I actually do blog, and there’s a whole graveyard full of abandoned blog posts just sitting in my drafts queue to prove it. Whoops!

I thought I’d use this post to wrap up some loose ends from my various recently deceased but (I’m sure) incredibly interesting blog posts. Let’s get started:

• I saw The Social Network with my roommate last weekend. It was really good, especially the writing, which I guess is expected due to the Aaron Sorkin factor. I recommend that people see it, but I will say that I don’t think that these people are necessarily wrong when they say that the movie is A.) not an accurate representation of Mark Zuckerberg as a person, and B.) not a movie that’s overly concerned with exploring the import and impact of Facebook. They call Facebook a MacGuffin, and they’re right; the characters of Mark and Eduardo in The Social Network could really have created anything and the dramatic tensions and character arcs in The Social Network would have been the same. So if you’re looking to see a movie about Facebook, The Social Network is not it; if you’re looking to watch a well-written, well-acted movie about flawed characters betraying and retaliating against each other, by all means go see this one.
  • Eesha went in to the theater to grab us seats while I got popcorn and soda. I ordered two Diet Cokes, but after we’d been sitting down a while, we started to suspect that they were actually real Cokes. Eesha was like, “Well, we’re already drinking them…” and I said, “I just like to think of this sort of thing as God’s little hello.”
• I also cooked a really great chili last weekend. My mom bought me a slow cooker for Christmas last year, and so far all I’ve made in it are batches of chili, mostly turkey chili, in varying degrees of delicious. But this batch of turkey chili was especially delicious–probably the best I’ve made so far–and it fed me for four days, lunch and dinner! I’m the sort of person who can eat the same thing over and over again and not get sick of it, so the slow cooker is the single most wonderful gift I’ve gotten in my adult life.
• I’m sick now. My dad and sister were sick at the wedding last week and warned me, to which I said, “Oh, I never get sick.” And of course my immune system was like, O RLY? And now I’ve got a cold, too. The universe is a cruel, cruel prankster sometimes.
• Last Thursday, I left my duck umbrella at my friends’ house. I woke up on Friday and couldn’t find it anywhere, so I assumed I’d left it in the cab, but then I got this text on Sunday: Somebody misses you. It had this picture attached to it:

That would be my duck umbrella (her name is Quackityite–because she’s white) hanging out with Cambria’s creepy 3D kittens. You can’t tell that they’re 3D from the picture, but if you saw them in person you would realize that their heads are actually sticking out from the background. I actually bought them for Cambria, so I guess I’m just getting what I deserve here.

• I’m in the thick of revising my manuscript. Hopefully, this book will be my second book in my deal with Random House. I’m doing this new thing where I separated all the chapters out and stacked them, and am going through them one at a time, marking them up with red pen, then inputting the changes before moving on to the next chapter. It’s working out quite nicely so far; I’ve got 21 chapters completely finished, and I’ve marked up chapter 22 but haven’t inputted the changes yet, and I have eight chapters to go (if you’re a math whiz like me, you know that the book has 30 chapters). Right now, the book is at 375 pages and around 97,000 words, which surprises me every time I see those numbers. To me, it just doesn’t seem that long. That’s longer than AUT by a lot, and yet, it just seems to read very fast. I think that’s because so much of it is dialogue. Which I fear will be a problem for people, but I like it that way.

• Oh, and just a fun story for my boring life: on Tuesday, I went home sick from work around 1:30, and guess what I came home to? This:

That’s right! When I got home, we had no water. According to my roommate, we’d had no water since 10:00 AM, so what this “1:30-??” business is is anyone’s guess, really. The water didn’t come back on until 6:30 PM–I had to go to the bar to use the bathroom! It was very rude. Wah.

Anyway, that’s what’s going on in my universe. Oh, and also my friend Leila‘s book went on sale on Tuesday! It’s called Mostly Good Girls and it’s HILARIOUS! So, so clever and full of life. If you’re looking for a contemporary story about friendship and prep school, this is the ideal book to pick up. I got my copy last night at the Union Square B&N after dinner with Alex, and because I’m lucky and Leila lives here, it was signed! Although, she works down the hall from me, so probably I could have a signed copy if I wanted, anyway. But still.

Oh, and I read Alex’s new book, and it is awesome. I can’t wait for other people to read it SO I CAN TALK TO SOMEONE ABOUT IT FOR GOD’S SAKE!

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The last days of summer

So on Wednesday, it became September. And can I get an AMEN on that?! This summer could not come to a close any faster, in my personal opinion. Here are the things I like about summer:

1. Summer fridays
2. Avocados

Yup, that’s it. I tried to think of more things, but I couldn’t, because I don’t like summer at all. It’s my least favorite season. It’s been this way for a long time. I attribute this to my general Bad Attitude towards the sun. People always give me a hard time about this, because, like, who hates the sun? Its warmth makes life on this planet possible! It helps the body create Vitamin D, which is important for some reasons I don’t even know about because I’m not a doctor! Its harmful cell-damaging UV rays allow the cast of Jersey Shore to GTL all over Seaside! THESE ARE WONDERFUL THINGS. Yeah, I know. And I do like to be alive, and I’m sure Vitamin D is very important for my immune system and fighting cancer, and I would also cry tears of neverending sorrow if Paulie D and The Situation didn’t get look like traffic cones with hair. (No I wouldn’t, I don’t even watch that show; ALSO, I’m not lying about that.) But the sun makes me burn and makes it necessary to wear sunscreen, which I hate, and makes me hot and sweaty and I hate that. I like a nice fall day. Heaven for me is a nice fall day. If Heaven is a physical place, it will always be fall there. So, as you can probably imagine, I’m excited for fall.

So excited, in fact, that I’m getting out of here tomorrow and going to Long Island to visit my friend Kim. I like to think of Kim’s apartment as my summer home, where I escape like a Richie Rich “to the Hamptons” even though she doesn’t live in the Hamptons. But my summer home is more fun because Kim’s there and also she has a car and can drive us around so it’s almost like having a chauffeur. She’s reading this right now and writing me an email saying YOU’RE UNINVITED! Just kidding, she’s not. But she’s probably rolling her eyes.

Anyway, here’s the main problem with going to Long Island this weekend: Hurricane Earl. Or, it was the problem a few days ago–now, Kim assures me, it probably won’t hit LI at all (you’re welcome, New Englanders), and even if there’s some residual rain it’ll happen tonight and I’m not going until tomorrow. Which is great, because I just want to chillax this weekend. I finished my Book 2 manuscript on Monday night, and then started rereading it on Tuesday which is such bad mojo. I emailed Alex crazy things like, “IT’S SO TERRIBLE!” over and over again, until we had a come to Jesus moment where she was like, “WILL YOU PLEASE STOP WORKING ON THIS NOW? GIVE YOURSELF A BREAK.” So I’m taking a break. Since I’m signing off for the weekend, I want to leave you with this song that my friend Mardie just sent me; this song is so awesome I can’t even tell you.

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Thisclose

So this weekend I realized something–I’m almost done with the second zero draft of my next manuscript! I was in the middle of closing out (I like how I use bar terminology to talk about writing–tells you where I’ve been spending my time as of late; by “closing out” I guess I mean “resolving”, which is more writer-y and less Coors Lite) the relationship between my main character (Caro, short for Carolina, but more on that in later posts once, hopefully, it looks like this book might actually be going to print) and her love interest, when I realized if I didn’t leave my house I’d be late for brunch with Alex, but the other thing I realized is that I really only needed one more chapter. I need to properly close out Caro’s other relationships and bring all the narrative threads to a satisfactory conclusion, and I think I just need one more chapter for that.

I feel like I should be saying more about this project, but for some reason I’m feeling very superstitious about it, like if I tell anyone what it’s about it might affect whether or not my agents and editor actually like it. Which I’m sure is not the case, but whatever. I’m nervous, because nobody’s really seen it but me, and we all know how THAT worked out last time! I don’t even know if my editor knows what it’s about. Joanna saw the beginning of the first zero draft last year and was very encouraging, but hasn’t seen anything since. The good thing is, the beginning hasn’t changed, like, at all.

But I’m excited to show people. I feel way more confident about this book than the last one I sent, and I’m not dying for it to be over, either. I have my own sense of the manuscript’s weaknesses, and I’m eager to see if they’re confirmed by others, or if I’m just being super hard on myself (as always). And I’m also excited to step away for a few weeks while Alex reads and I work on something new (and by “new” I mean a manuscript I’ve been working on for a year that is currently at 200 pages–so, not new at all). This “new” thing is big and epic and exciting, even though I tried to explain it to my friend Nikki yesterday and made it sound like a total train wreck, and I CANNOT WAIT to have a finished manuscript of that one. It’s pretty different than AUT, and TOTALLY different than this new book 2 which I think in the past I’ve called OH? Or OoH? That title is so tentative, I don’t even want to talk about it.

So I guess I came on here to tell you that I can’t tell you anything? Which is weird, I get that. Carry on.

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Eat, pray, sleep

Like every other lady in the United States (and abroad!), I read Eat, Pray, Love when it came out in trade paperback a couple of years ago. And I enjoyed it! I mean, okay. I recognize that it’s a problematic thing, the way in which scores of women admire Elizabeth Gilbert for taking her considerable book advance and her apparent infinite amount of free time to go “find herself” in Italy, India and Indonesia for a year when most people–hm, I would say almost all people–don’t have the luxury of time or money and therefore our breakdowns tend to be a bit less glamorous, to use my roommate’s word. But I understand (or at least I think I do) what it feels like to be at your wits end, to feel lost and separated from yourself and all of that great existential ahngst, and to need to run away. And I think Elizabeth Gilbert herself is a smart lady, and she’s got a fun, self-deprecating voice, which, if you are a self-deprecating person (as I am), you appreciate. And who doesn’t want to go to Italy and eat pizza?! Travel memoir + story about a woman having a nervous breakdown + humor = something I’d reasonably enjoy, and possibly recommend to somebody else.

You know what’s NOT something I would recommend to somebody else? The Eat, Pray, Love movie. I don’t care how many Florence + the Machine songs you play in the trailer, you are not getting my vote, Eat, Pray, Love movie! I’m mad enough that I paid $13 to see you, I would not inflict that on anybody else. First of all, Elizabeth Gilbert’s voice is completely gone, even though they use ACTUAL VOICE OVER with ACTUAL SENTENCES from the ACTUAL BOOK, all the magic of Gilbert’s personality is gone like dust on the wind. Maybe they picked the wrong lines, or maybe Julia Roberts isn’t funny enough, or maybe the movie takes itself way too seriously and therefore Julia Roberts was told not to be funny…I don’t know. They do a bad job of setting up the reasons for Liz’s breakdown (two men love me, waaaah–it’s more complicated than that, obviously, but not dealt with as such in the movie), and then the rest of it? Is just BORING.

Seriously. I was so bored. I was completely not entertained. The movie had no plot, which is fine for a memoir with a different narrative agenda, but not for a movie. It was just a bunch of disjointed vignettes clumped together in categories: Eat/Italy/Learn to be okay with getting fat; Pray/India/Get yelled at by a Texan guy who was way more interesting in the book; Love/Bali/Fall for a dude. Ugh, so boring. My friend Nikki actually fell asleep all through the India section.

I guess Javier Bardem was okay. I thought he was pretty funny, actually, the only genuinely amusing character/actor in the film (except his hot Australian son, who was also amusing and nice to look at). Except I kept thinking he was Jeffery Dean Morgan. Like, I really believed that, until we left the theater and I was like, “Wow, Jeffery Dean Morgan, who knew he could do that accent?” and my friends were like, “Uh…that’s Javier Bardem.” I even argued! That’s how sure I was that it was Jeffery Dean Morgan. Oh well.

But you know what? Read Eat, Pray, Love. Accept that it’s self-centered and narcissistic and envy Liz Gilbert the money and time that allowed her to really wallow in her own misfortune (so much of it self-inflicted!), when really that’s what all of us want to do. You think I don’t want to jet off to Italy right now? And if I didn’t have a job that I needed to, like, pay rent and shizz, I would TOTALLY DO IT. So I’m not going to begrudge her. I liked Eat, Pray, Love–THE BOOK. And I really loved this TED talk she gave about how being a writer, or any sort of creative person, is about showing up and doing the work and being stubborn and not throwing in the towel even though you want to. It’s pretty bomb.

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The Universe

First order of business: I’d like to thank everybody who posted encouraging comments on LJ and WordPress expressing sympathy, especially my author compatriots, all of whom seem to have been through this before and all of whom seem to have lived. Imagine. Living through a creative low point. Apparently, the world doesn’t end. But I do like the point my fellow Tenner Stephanie Burgis brought up when she said:

One of the best pieces of advice I ever read was in Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, when she said it is really, really important for us to grieve our artistic losses. The impulse is to act cool, to hold back the tears, to tell everybody that it’s no big deal…but that’s what stifles us and keeps us from being able to produce. We HAVE to admit and work through the grief of professional disappointments before we can let go and be creative again.

Excellent point, Stephanie. I love the idea that it’s “important for us to grieve our artistic losses.” When you write books from a very personal place, as I do and as I suspect most writers do, it’s hard not to get very emotional when having to put a much-loved, much-labored-over project away, possibly never to pick it up again, and it’s good to hear that other people think we should take it seriously, too.

But enough about that! The truth is that I’m feeling very, very good about the book I’m working on now. I’m excited to get home to it at the end of the day (I even got a little itchy in Long Island this weekend, because as much as I love my friends–and I do–all I could think about was getting back to Caro, because she’s my homegirl), and I feel very confident about what I’m trying to do and say with this book. I can’t wait to post more details, but at the moment I’m keeping it close, because even though I try not to be superstitious, I totally am.

I will tell you one thing about this book, though, and it’s that it has a little to do with science and faith and how the two coincide. The main character, Caro, has a bit of a science-y nerd brain, and in the book she’s an AP Physics student (Neily was also an AP Physics student in AUT–can you tell physics was my favorite science class? Although, grades-wise, I did the best in my biology class freshman year, but biology is so Twilight I can’t even). One of my quasi-secrets is that I really, really love popular science books. Those are basically books written by smarty pants scientists for lame brains like myself. To be honest, I can read one and retain almost no information, because I’ve lost my ability to study after being out of school for three years, and also my mind is a sieve anyway. I forget everything. But I’m also an annotator, so I can usually go back to the books and find passages I underlined to jog my memory. If you’re looking for recommendations, I really love The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene and How the Universe Got Its Spots by Jana Levin. Curved space-time! Who’d have thought? (Einstein, that’s who.)

ANYWAY, did you nerds know that there’s an entire television show on the History Channel called The Universe that is ALL ABOUT THE UNIVERSE?! Of course you did, you are nerds (I have no idea who I’m talking to anymore). The Universe is a supergreat show. I found out about it from, duh, a commercial on the History Channel, which I don’t normally watch but which is on all the damn time in my parents’ house. They’re running these really hot commercials right now with pictures of planets and supernovas and nebulas and stuff, set to “The Flower Duet” from Lakme, which is a beautiful piece of music and really suited to showing off the wonders of our solar system.

My only problem with The Universe is that sometimes it can come off as a popular science version of, um, Unsolved Mysteries, which is the creepiest television show in the history of humans. I don’t know what it is about it. Maybe it’s because they’re always ending the segments on weird, quasi-ominous cliffhangers, and you’re like, “WILL THE SUN EXPLODE IN OUR LIFETIME? WILL IT? OMG IT WILL.” (Spoiler: it won’t.)

I spent most of last night watching a DVRed marathon of The Universe. Okay, I only got through two episodes. They are dense, and also I was trying to finish Apologize, Apologize! because it was so great. But I watched “Gravity” (which reminded me about curved space-time, which I’d forgotten about because, you know, mind=sieve, but which is a mind blowing concept) and “Nebulas”, which, GORGEOUS. Also, because I’m dorkalicious, when they started talking about The Eye of God, which is one of the closest nebulae to earth, I immediately thought The Eye of Jupiter, because they look exactly the same. Because I am a Battlestar freak, apparently.

I’m so hooked on this show. I love science. I love it so much I can’t believe I didn’t love it as a kid. I’m not very math/science/logic minded, so I was never very good at calculations or formulas, and I do have to struggle pretty hard to understand even basic principles, but I try because I think it’s so fascinating. On my TBR list are Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Death by Black Hole and Michio Kaku’s Physics of the Impossible, once I can convince myself that buying more books isn’t the worst idea ever (I have so many books, you guys, I am literally drowning in books, tripping over them when I stumble to the bathroom in the middle of the night, practically eating off them–it’s weird).

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It sucked and I cried*

I often wonder what they teach you in MFA programs. I’ve said before that I don’t really believe in them, and I stand by that for my various reasons, although there are lots of people who got a ton out of their MFA programs and heartily recommend them, which sounds like just as defensible position as any. But sometimes I wonder what they teach you. I’ve taken a few creative writing classes in my day, and most of them went like this: we would all write something, and take turns allowing our peers to read it, and then they would weigh in with criticism of one kind or another.

I don’t remember ever honestly talking about what it means to be a writer, what the day-to-day life of a writer is like. All of my professors were also writers, some highly lauded, but I don’t think they ever lectured–and we never asked–what it means to be a real writer. And by “real” I don’t mean published; I just mean someone who is dedicated to writing, for whom it is not just a hobby, but a real life choice, a professional career of whatever degree. Do people talk about that in MFA programs? Because I’m starting to think that there should be support groups for writers–not critique groups or writing groups, but like group therapy sessions where a psychologist comes in and counsels us all, a safe space where we can make the baldest of confessions and bawl our eyes out if we have to.

Last week I decided to abandon a manuscript I’ve spent several years writing. You’ve heard me talk about it here, calling it alternately MB (for Murder Burger) and Book 2. In my contract with Random House, it’s named as my second book, but it won’t be. It can’t be. It’s broken, and I can’t fix it. I hate having to say that, but it’s so true. I spent five months earlier this year trying to fix it, blindly searching for some magic formula to make it something people would want to read, and I just couldn’t do it. Then I sent it to my agents, and waited impatiently for their feedback, knowing, of course, that it would probably need to be ripped apart.

When I got Joanna’s email that she and Danielle wanted to talk to me on the phone, I knew what was coming. People kept trying to convince me I was just doing my usual worst case scenario thing, but I knew. Over the course of that conversation, during which I can honestly say, with chagrin, that I cried ceaselessly, it became clear that it wasn’t the right manuscript–not for now, and maybe not for ever, although you never know, one day I could wake up and have the key to making it all work. I didn’t want to write it anymore–I hadn’t wanted to write it for months and months and months–and it would have required the world’s greatest overhaul. And even if J and D had handed me a litany of things to fix, and I had fixed them all, the book had become a hated object to me. I resented it. I treated it in my mind like a horrible, deformed thing, something I wanted to get rid of. You don’t want to put your name on something like that.

Still, letting go of the book was hard to do. I started it while living in my grandmother’s basement; I finished it a year later, during a time when I was really happy. I care about the characters, and I miss them. I’m sad to let it go. It’s like putting your dog to sleep, you know? Necessary, but painful. And terribly undignified, at least in my case. I really tried to hold it in, the tears and the gulping near-panic, but I couldn’t. Apparently, I’m still not mature enough to compartmentalize this sort of disappointment; maybe I never will be. Maybe it’s too personal for me, I just don’t think I’ll ever be able to see it as JUST a job. Abandoning a book that I’ve worked on for years, that people have seen, that I’ve talked about a lot in public, that I thought was going to be published, is always going to feel like a breakup, or a death. Hopefully it won’t have to happen very often (or ever again), but if it does, it’s going to hurt.

And if there is a next time, I’m going to try not to be such a big baby about it, but no promises. I struggled for a while about how to talk about this on the blog, because I’m definitely not proud of the way I dealt with it (i.e. with tears), but there’s no shame in having to let this book go and start on something new. I really wanted to say that to all the writers out there, because I feel like, when I read author blogs, there doesn’t seem to be a ton of real honesty about the things that scare us or hurt us or annoy us. Everybody’s too concerned with not upsetting anybody or betraying any sort of self-doubt, career mistakes, jealousy or hard decisions, although I’m sure–I KNOW–we all go through it, even the biggest bestsellers and the most petted debut authors. I respect everybody’s personal choice to talk about what they want to talk about, but I personally, as someone who’s pretty new to this whole thing, wish other authors talked about the hard stuff more. It’s easier when you go through whatever rough times, creatively or professionally, to know you’re not alone and that where you are going, many have also gone, and come back. We all have those moments where things just aren’t going our way, and we don’t know how we got there, and we don’t know how to stop it or get back to the safe, happy place. It’s part of the dillio (sorry, but we’ve got to lighten this thing up somehow–with outdated early 2000s slang!).

So anyway, that’s my story. What it basically boils down to–I had to give up on a manuscript because it wasn’t working–doesn’t sound so bad, but it wasn’t fun and it wasn’t easy. But neither was continuing to write the book, so…you pick your battles. You try to do what’s best for yourself, and for your career. You try to be kind to yourself, because you’re the one who has to live it. I probably deserve to be writing something I want to write, instead of something I feel like I have to write, when I have the option of one or the other (I know that sometimes you don’t, if you’re locked in for a specific book or whatever, but this is not one of those cases). I feel guilty for abandoning these characters I’ve lived with in my head for years, and in one case just really started to get to know, but I wasn’t capable of doing them justice this time around anyway. Maybe next time. But I also feel profoundly relieved.

Luckily for me, I wrote a another book last fall, just for fun. Because I wrote it just for fun, though, without any idea when or if it would ever be published, it needs some editing and rewriting. But the difference in working on this book versus the other one is that even the challenges are exciting to tackle. It’s sort of like writing AUT again! Which is an experience I’ve been searching for longer than I even realized until very recently.

*I blatantly stole this title from Heather Armstrong of Dooce. It’s an homage.

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• Tagged: Anna's boring life, Book 2, writing
  
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Pincers

I want you to know that I have about fifteen saved, unpublished posts living in WordPress right now. I can’t seem to bring myself to finish any of them. I blame a lifetime of English teachers for drilling the INTRO – SUPPORT – CONCLUSION five-paragraph essay into my brain. I’ve got the intro and support down fine, it’s just the conclusion I struggle with, and then I lose interest, and those posts languish in the queue until they don’t even make any sense anymore.

I’m still in a holding pattern where book 2 is concerned, but I’m happy to report that I’m hard at work on book 3–I talk about it here sometimes, it’s the supernatural thriller? It’s coming along pretty nicely. I wrote almost sixty pages of it this weekend, which is quite a lot. It’s almost 14,000 words. The book is creeping up upon 50,000 words, and I think it’ll be twice that, probably somewhere around 400 pages. Of course, I thought book 2 would come in at around 300 pages, like AUT did (here I’m talking about manuscript pages; book page counts tend to be slightly higher), but it came in at around 400 (108,000 words approx.), so you never really know.

I spent yesterday on my couch (which is, not surprisingly, where the only air conditioning unit in my apartment is located), writing. I was there for so long that my back was so cramped later. Sitting with a hot computer on your lap for eight plus hours is not a great idea in near-100 degree heat (I know! It’s so gross! Shut up with your heat wave New York!), but the productivity makes me feel good about myself. Although, it’s always a little depressing because I’m zero-drafting, which means that all the prose is really bad. Zero-drafting, for me, is about laying down the tracks, assembling the spine of the plot. It involves a lot of pushing myself to put words on the page, which is something I hate doing–pushing myself, I mean, not putting words on the page. But the thing is, I’m so excited about this book and where it’s going that I can’t wait to write all the good parts, and since I can’t write a book piecemeal, I have to race through the other stuff to get to the Big Reveal or the Action Sequence or the Romantic Moment. So I’m pushing. Which is okay. I’ll go back and layer in the description and the pretty phrases later. For now, I’m all about plot and dialogue. I just need to let go and let God on that front, I think. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Etc.

In other news, I’m rereading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows because I saw the trailer when I saw Eclipse on Friday (oh, we’re going there) and I got SO! PUMPED! Then I realized I’ve almost completely forgotten all but the most obvious details of that book, so I’m going back to it, even though book 7 isn’t my favorite. I rewatched Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and found myself less offended by the cuts than I was when I originally saw it (the fact that the film is called Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and yet that plot line was given only the most cursory of treatments was a major failing of the film, in my opinion) and more appreciative of the cinematography, acting, directing, and, of course, the series of scenes where Harry is high on drugs Felix Felicis.

Pincers

• Filed under: Books, movies, writing
• Tagged: Book 2, book 3, Books, Harry Potter, movies, writing
  
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