A Cinematic Memory Of Things

I really wanted to have handled the stress of huge taxes well.  I didn't want to spend my whole day concentrating on not hyperventilating.  The meds have helped with the panic attacks so much that I haven't hyperventilated in years.  Damn.  That's some serious not handling my stress well!  I vented my spleen and am much better.  I'm not going to say lots of energetic positive stuff I don't feel about my life or my situation.  All I can say is that a little distraction goes a long way.

After the night got properly settled in and the kid was asleep I continued to re-read the book I wrote this summer.  Decided to post the first two bits.  Most of a first chapter.  The laundromat scene has been rewritten the most times of any in the book (some other parts haven't been rewritten at all yet) and it becomes sharply obvious to me why many rewrites are necessary.  It was painful at first because it's so different from doing non-fiction rewrites.  You aren't bound by fact or expectation so much, you are freer but it's also an art to get the tone, the action, and the language to move gracefully forward together. 

Reading through quite a few pages last night and a few today I am surprised to discover that describing city life as I experienced it and writing violence comes much more naturally to me than writing relationships.  I discovered that one of my main male characters is very flat because I wasn't focused on him and didn't want the book to be about his flaws but it turns out that even if you aren't particularly focused on one character as much as another, if they are going to interact with any kind of depth and believability, you have to make them both rich.  It also becomes plain to me that I am exquisitely squeamish about writing romantic relationships.  Blood, guts, whores, trash, sounds, grit, daily life; all these things merely require me to see through my cinematic memory of things.  But writing convincing and good relationships is really difficult.  I admit that  I felt almost no squeamishness writing my gay couple- I am so comfortable with them and their connection and their deal...yet writing my main character's unfolding relationship with her love interest feels like pulling out all my baby teeth with pliers to access the wisdom and maturity underneath it. 

Part of the problem is that I'm not inherently a romantic person at all.  Not one iota.  And that is really funny because I love books with good romantic connections in them.  I dislike it when authors write love in overtly sexual terms (Diana Gabaldon, for example, exhausted my patience with all the sex in the grass crap which was a bummer because I otherwise really loved her series.  I never read past part of the second book because it was just too annoying for the story to stop every 20 pages so the two main characters could rip their clothes off somewhere new and it got to be way too much of a burden to try skipping past all the heavy breathing), I prefer to fill in the blanks myself.  I also dislike it when sap is liberally smeared between two people. Makes me want to hurl.  Finding the proper balance where you invest yourself in a pair, where you are rooting for them and love them and want them together...and aren't made to feel grimy from all the fluttering and whatnot- have any of you tried to write romantically involved characters? 

Some people I imagine would find it as simple an exercise as I find it to write violence.  Writing the violence forced me to access dark shit I never thought I'd need to dig up.  And digging it up was so much more intense than I expected it would be.  None of the specific violence in the book has personally happened to me.  I've had my own experiences and I'm not giving them away.  But once I got to that place and opened it all up, my writing voice took off. 

But the romantic involvement?

DUDES!

Needs a ton of work.  But this whole process is so amazing, so engaging, and exactly what I was meant to be doing (as much as anyone is "meant" to do anything*) so there is much satisfaction and excitement in this for me.  While I'm reading the first book I'm puzzling through how to get it right- I'm taking copious notes in my head like "Whoa!  That's an embarrassing little conversation that I never want to be responsible for being in print!" and "Right, no one talks to ANYONE that way!" and "If a guy said that to me I'd smack him.  Why isn't Jane smacking him?  Is she a moron?"  Like so.

I'm still not sure if I should be working on the rewrite right now.  I was planning to hunker down to start the series in a week or two after some more sewing and some better house cleaning and organizing allows me to relax into the work.  I don't think I can work on both at the same time.  But I am definitely itchy to rewrite the part that directly follows what I've already posted.  If anyone is interested in reading the next bit, be sure to let me know.  I may drift off from it, but if you want to know what happens next then I'll be sure not to keep you in wretched suspense.  What I published yesterday and today are both the tone I want to maintain for the whole story. 

If no one is particularly anxious to read more right now I know that this whole story can sit for a long time for me.  Breathing.  Getting away from it was important because only now can I see where things fall apart and where I need to do major work.  I was too close to it to actually go any further when I got to 108,000 words.  It's really funny to me that I'm so embarrassed by so much of it and at the same time I'm reading parts thinking "Oh my god- I wrote that?  That's fantastic!" and some parts I've read where I'm getting chills because it hit me right where I intended it to. 

Thank god something is funny around here.

I really love all my main characters but they need to be slapped around a lot to get off their lazy asses and perform like I want them to.***  I think I may need to secretly run the relationship stuff by Aimee who I know likes romantic reads.  She can tell me if I still need to make Jane stand up straight and stop being quiet and mooney.  This is not teen fiction.

But that reminds me that I am almost ready to start reading the Twilight books.  My blog friend Mary sent me her whole set a while back and I've been staring at them wondering when I would be ready to approach them with the right frame of mind. 

I can't wait to finish this project so I can ask you all who you think Isaac is physically (roughly) modeled after.  I'm actually pretty sure no one will guess correctly.  And there are only about 2 people I'm still in contact with who MIGHT possibly have the slightest idea who I modeled Jane's best friend Tim after.  But I don't think they know they might know which means they probably wouldn't be able to guess. 

It is time for me to wind down.  I had a wonderful Kung Fu class tonight and there is no beer drinking tonight.  Just decaf black tea with milk and a little sugar.  I hope you all are having a good day and haven't been brought down by taxes as we were.

Take cover with good friends, good food, and good books.






*I obviously don't believe in divine "purpose".  I think the only true purpose for living is to live until we die.  We're animals, after all.  Sophisticated in many ways, but we're born because our parents had sex that resulted in an egg and sperm getting together.**  That simple.  But I do believe that as we grow we discover who we are and what our gifts are and if we're using them in the best possible way then we feel as though we are doing what we're "meant" to do.  This is how we arrive at a satisfying rich vocation.  That's all I'm saying.


**I really hope this isn't new information to anyone.

***Which obviously means I really have to slap myself around since I'm the puppeteer.  I shouldn't have said that, I'm really anti-puppet.  I'm as anti-puppet as I am anti-balloons and anti-clown.  I know I can do this.  That's what makes me happy.  Writing a  book is really labor intensive but I am completely capable of making every bit of it as strong as the strongest parts already are.  And when I accomplish that I will have something to be truly deeply proud of.  Why do I love footnotes so much.  Anyone else notice how sometimes I get a little lost in them?