Sunday, November 13, 2005

Women for '08 prez

I said I wasn't going to make this blog political; it was to be about my writing and the process of writing. Well, I can't help myself. Indulge me for a moment...

I think in the '08 election we'll see Condi Rice v Hilary Clinton. Oh, the choice of bad or worse (depending on your perspective). I want a female prez. I do. But these two? Oy.

First, Condi: smile once in a while. Yes, I'll resort to ad hominem attacks here. That woman frowns, scowls, smirks, and glowers more than her boss. Notice how the Bush admin is falling apart in scandal, but Rice seems to be the only one not implicated in any of this junk? I believe this is their plan: have one untouched soul who can run for prez, and then the throne stays in the family, so to speak. I'm not sure how the Christian right will handle a female prez, so maybe they'll just have her run as VP. We'll see.

Hilary shouldn't run. While I like her politics more than Rice's, she has too much of a love-her/hate-her reputation. She's slick like her husband. I didn't like that in Clinton; I don't like it in Rodham. And speaking of last names, she lost a lot in my book when she caved in to the religious right and took on her husband's name. Blech. Where are the scruples to stand up for what you believe? Oh wait, when you run for office, you morph your morals to appeal to the masses. My mistake.

Now back to writing...

I'm putting on the finishing touches for my story collection, Mortals. It's shaping up. I'd like to think that someday it will sit nicely (size wise and content wise) with the books that influenced me while writing it:

  • Cosmicomics Italo Calvino
  • What we talk about when we talk about love Ramond Carver
  • In our time Earnest Hemingway

    These three books are brilliant.

    I have two stories that need a few new scenes. The entire collection needs a read-through for minor errors and minor story edits. What do I look for? Continuity. I found an error the other day where I had a character remark about something that didn't happen until later in the story. Ooops. But these are the types of things that happen and any writer who says they don't make these mistakes is lying. I also look for ways to tighten the text. Don't judge my writing by my blog. I don't really read through the blog. This is where I am conversing with you and what comes out is what comes out. I might have a minor plan of what I'm going to say, but it's not like my stories. Perhaps I'll find a snippet to post here.

    On rejection letters

    I'm sending out the stories now. I feel ready for the rejections. When I was working on the first few stories, I was not ready, so I didn't send out the stories. That is, I didn't want to take the time to send out the stories and if I got a flood of rejections, I might not have continued the project. Why? Because I didn't understand the publishing process.

    First off, after working on Reed (a 50-yr old lit mag, see: www.sjsu.edu/reed), I can say that lit mags receive a lot of crap. There are people who can't write a sentence, don't know what a story is (beginning, middle, end, climax, resolution, etc), or don't know what words to use. For example, I read an entire story wherein the author used the word "bugger" instead of booger, as in "he flicked a bugger on me." Ugh. It's hard to read beyond errors like that.

    And then lit magazines receive a lot of good stuff. More than they can print. What happens to all those good stories? Rejected. Some magazines don't even read them. They read enough to get a good set of stories for their next publication, and then everything else that comes in is rejected without being read!

    At Reed we read everything. We had about twenty stories we wanted to publish. All of the fiction editors ranked the stories, and only the top ones were accepted, even though all of them deserved publication. So I know when I'm rejected that in some cases I wasn't even read. You have to realize even Hemingway was rejected repeatedly until Fitzgerald introduced him to Max Perkins. There is an element of luck involved.

    Noted non-fiction writer Simon Winchester (Krakatoa, The Crack in the Edge of the World) talks about how lucky he got. He finally got a review in the NY Times Magazine. Unfortunately, it was on Labor Day weekend, which meant most people would be on vacation and not reading the paper. Luckily for him, it rained that weekend and all people could do was stay inside and read the paper. That afternoon, his book became the top seller on Amazon.com.

    So, here's to luck. Now, back to writing...
  • Thursday, November 03, 2005

    Abandon all hope ye who enter here

    I believe my blog might attract the odd one or two people who have nothing better to do than peer into my neck of the multiverse. So be it. All I can do is write and leave the judging to someone else.

    Who am I? Right now, I'm a nobody instructor at a nobody university in a large city in California. I have a family, but I don't feel like broadcasting much about that here. Well, maybe once in a while. My main point of creating this space is to memorialize my writing process. Where am I now? Where might this take me?

    I am nearly done with a collection of stories called Mortals. I've just started sending them out for publication. We all know what that means: dozens of rejections and hundreds of dollars spent on postage. Sigh. Wish me luck.

    I can't promise regular postings. Don't be surprised if months go by without an update. We'll see how often I can get here and write, and I'll see if anyone notices what I'm doing. I certainly don't plan on advertising this. I'm doing this for me. That seems like the best reason of any.