I’ve been recommending this link to a number of my clients who are getting ready to go in search of an agent, and I thought I’d post it for the rest of you who might be heading that direction.

Jamie Ford, in case you haven’t heard of him (and apparently there are folks who haven’t heard of Kafka, so Jamie doesn’t need to feel bad and I’m sure he doesn’t) is a best-selling author. His first novel, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, has met with all kinds of success. Check it out.

Jamie is also a generous blogger, and one of the things he blogged about was his process of finding an agent. He even quotes his rejection letters (and no, he is neither spiteful or sassy, as he might be under the current circumstances; he’s just humble and professional). He approached the process very well, and he gives some good tips about it. Plus it makes for a good read–suspense and a happy ending.

You can probably troll his archives and find lots of great material. I’d recommend starting with his entry on the Query-Go-Round, and follow through, being sure to stop at I’ve Made Up My Mind, until you see his final announcement. Then of course, you can follow him as he becomes a best-selling novelist. All good fun.

Don’t forget to get back to your own writing, though. Because the number one way to get a great agent is to write an irresistible manuscript, oui?

http://www.jamieford.com/bittersweet-blog/2007/4/30/riding-the-query-go-round.html

http://www.jamieford.com/bittersweet-blog/2007/5/17/ive-made-up-my-mind.html

Sitting in our local green cafe the other day with author Dorothy Hearst. My brain and my storyteller were, as usual, wrestling for control over this novel revision. I was doing some fruitful planning and feeling the need to get my bearings with this new plot, new character arc, and so forth, but also worrying because I’d made this commitment to write 1000 words/ day on the novel.

“Writing about the novel counts toward the 1000 words,” Dorothy said. She’d been charting and process options for days and was ready, just that day, to return to the writing. But she’d never stopped. That was her point.

Perhaps I could have integrated my brain and my storyteller right then. I’d be unstoppable, really, if they could only work together better. But in fact, I did write about 500 words of scene, and produced something unexpected and exciting that actually taught me something about what I was up to, also. And then I did a bunch of exercises and wrote the rest of my words, and then some, about the novel.

Now I’m on vacation. I really wanted to keep the writing going throughout driving with the two toddlers (and Angie) to Santa Barbara, and though the family festivities. But instead, I am going to have to step it up, hard, when I get back. I am on deadline. That’s the second secret offered up in today’s blog.

Secrets to writing the second draft, summary:

1) Writing about the novel counts as writing. But only so much. Then you have to get back in there and see what happens.

2) Writing for a deadline that matters to you will make the wishy-washiness of your daily options give way to the force of that looming hard stop.

When was football integrated? By whom? Why don't we all know?

Gretchen Atwood is working on an amazing, really well-written and important book, and today a piece on the topic–the integration of pro-football in America–is published in the L.A. Weekly. Check it out. Even if you are not a football fan, this is about the racial justice history of the United States and matters to all of us. Plus it’s a great story. The stories we tell and how they get told really matter. That’s at the heart of the work I do. Keep your eye on Gretchen. Her book is going to explode onto the scene soon.

What makes a blog both exciting and dangerous is the immediacy of the format. Confessions, passions and urges are typed onto a little box on a screen, one rectangular button with the corners worn off is clicked with a tap of a key, and those confessions become public.

I’m a person with three novel manuscripts waiting perfection. I’m not impulsive about getting my work out before the public eye because I’ve been wounded by the public eye, been overly-sensitive to what others wrote about my work or thought about it. The blog format, therefore, is good for me. In many ways.

But it is still dangerous, and right now I’m aflame, in a quiet and deep way.

I just crawled out of bed after a long “nursey-nappy” with my family, a nap I spent finishing Po Bronson‘s excellent What Should I Do with My Life? The True Story of People Who Answered the Ultimate Question. He’s got quite a target market there: anyone who’s ever wondered, Is That All There Is?

But what made me LOVE this book was first, the excellent writing. It’s just so well-written. If you want to know what good writing is, read this book. It’s not flowery, pretentious, or even poetic. It’s honest, articulate, driven by a voice of intelligence and integrity.

If I knew Po Bronson better, which is to say if I’d ever met him or met his cousin or seen him do a live reading, say, I’d call him up right now instead of blogging, and I’d run my ideas past him. But you, dear reader, are being asked to stand in. Here’s what I’ll do to help you out. I’ll quote a few lines, and you see if you can take up the spirit of the voice of this book and answer me back, okay?

He writes:

So finding your calling is not “the answer.” Callings are vehicles that help us let our real selves out; callings speed up the process. You can find your calling, or you can find your people, or you can find an environment that nurtures you–they all lead to the same place. Many people get there without ever finding their calling. Head in that direction. (p.390)

And then he writes:

A calling is not something you know, it’s something you grow into, through trials and mistakes. Work shouldn’t just be fun. Work should be like life–sometimes fun, sometimes moving, and defined by meaningful events. Attack your fears, rather than shy away from them. Bring what you do in alignment with who you are. (p.391)

And just one more:

You can get good at what you need to to serve what you believe in. . . . Nothing helps like knowing you are not alone. (p. 391)

Okay, go buy this book! And then come back here and listen to me confess.

I’ve mentioned that I’ve been studying marketing with Michael Port, and that I appreciate that he emphasizes love and integrity. In fact, our last class, in which he made good use of a book called Love is the Killer App, by Tim Sanders was mind-bogglingly wonderful. It focused on the idea that networking is the process of taking care of other people by sharing your intangibles.

What are your intangibles? Your network, your knowledge and your passion.

Meanwhile, I’m reading Po Bronson at night, surrounded by babies, with my little clip-on reading light fading mightily. I got to the end of Ch. 46 last night and it was late for someone with two little guys who wake up before the birds around here, and so I switched off my sputtering little clip-on light, but I couldn’t sleep for two more hours. I was thinking about what he wrote at the end of Ch. 46.

And I’m working out who and how I want to teach, who and how I want to edit. I love teaching and editing; I love being good at making connections, pushing people toward their strengths, teaching what doesn’t seem to be taught much–craft, for example, close attention to words; how to write the books you write best, better. And how to finish things . . . write a whole book and then rewrite it, and write another one. What if people left an M.F.A. program with two complete, book-length manuscripts?

So I’m thinking about how to build my teaching and coaching and editing business, how to serve the people I’m meant to serve. But at the same time, of course, there’s something else: I want to be a writer.

I’ve known this for a really long time and it keeps not changing. I don’t like growing in public or marketing my wares-cum-deepest creative efforts. But I keep pulling past those blocks, changing my mind, being willing to figure out a new way to be willing to grow in public and to see selling my wares in a different light.

Add to the mix that I’m raising two kids, and that I want to raise them. I want to be there for the rolling out of the new words, for the jokes they make and the dance moves they invent and the art they create that, frankly, blows my mind.

So that’s business, writing, kids, in no particular order, and not to mention my relationship, my friends, and my voracious appetite for reading . . .

And each of these items has a few sides to it.

Because besides the amazing sentences my boys utter and the laughs they earn and the hugs they give, there are also endless meals to cook, surfaces to wipe down (counters and bottoms and floors) and dishes to clean and toys to pick up off the floor–again–and laundry to do and baths to be given and hair to be washed and no one likes to brush teeth, it turns out . . .

And writing comes with building a platform and collecting rejection slips, which means addressing and stamping and mailing envelopes (or is anybody even doing that anymore?) and researching markets and proposing articles and books and then convincing other people to buy them . . .

And building a business comes with letting other people know about it and developing products and courses and trying methods of outreach that fail, and doing taxes, and keeping books and records and mailing lists and returning phone calls and emails . . .

Everybody else just woke up, and I was planning to drive the point home if I could, but then people needed dinner and a lot of attention.

So . . . where was I? Oh yes, all the pieces of a whole and the many wholes that compete for attention.

Here’s my immediate, not-yet-digested idea after finishing Po Bronson’s book: I am going to structure my courses and coaching to support my–and hence my clients’–writing life. Perhaps a first-thing-in-the-morning group check-in to rev us up and get us going? Followed by a three-hour writing block. A lunch hour course rotating between planning your book (Mondays?), writing your book (Wednesdays?), revising your book (Thursdays?).(Clients can move among them as needed.) The craft course to keep all of us in the best shape possible for writing great prose . . . And then afternoon coaching sessions for people who are ready to soar.

This is a work-in-progress, but at its heart is my belief that serving others can be done best when I am serving myself. And as I learn about building a platform using all of the exciting media options available, as I create tours and promote books, I will share this information. I want to help apprentice writers become professionals, and professional writers become stars. Myself included.

What do you want? What is your driving passion? What should you do with your life?

For a long time, I disdained the people who focused on getting published. When I was in graduate school, great writers came to talk to us and teach us: Denis Johnson, Ethan Canin, Francine Prose, A. M. Holmes, Jamaica Kincaid, Lucille Clifton, to name a few. (Wow, name-dropping is fun!) Inevitably, the questions that came would be peppered with concern about publishing. I always wanted to know about craft and about sustaining the creative part of a writing life, and to be honest with you, I felt pretty good about myself for that attitude.

When FSG published my first novel, this seemed a validation of my focus on craft over career. Because my novel contained lesbian content, and FSG had not published a book with lesbian content before (except, funnily enough, in their YA division, where they’d published Nancy Garden), people at my readings often asked me, over and over, how I’d gotten my book published. I had no answer for them beyond the hard work I’d put into making it strong.

Pretty quickly, though, my naïveté about publishing and marketing caught up with me. I didn’t know that there was a three-month window after a book is published for it to “succeed” or “fail.” I had no idea what I might do to promote the book. In fact, in the months after my book was published, I was packing and moving across the country, leaving behind all the connections I had to local writers and bookstores.

The head agent at my agent’s office met me and told me that the only advice she could give me was to have fun. I understand why she said that–it was Zen good advice. But seriously, folks, if you are a novelist–and this is more true now than it was then–you are a small business owner or you have a hobby. Those are your choices. You might get published once or twice if you have a hobby of writing books, but you cannot sustain a viable career unless you make it your business not only to write books but also to sell them.

(As an aside, I would like to mention that if you are a writer or anyone who cares about textual storytelling, you’d do well to make it your business to buy books, too, and to promote other people’s books and the world of books in general. If you never buy a new, hard cover book, you are going to have a heck of a time believing other people should buy yours.)

It is still a pet peeve of mine when people who have not written one polished, lovely book are hyper focused on selling it. The truth is that while “bad” books are published all the time, the one best marketing tool you can have is an excellent book. That’s why my motto is: If your readers can’t put your book down, they’ll have to buy it. This implies that you’ve written an irresistible story.  You’ve worked on it until it’s powerfully strong.

But my motto also implies that you’ve then gotten your book into the hands of some readers. These are the two parts to our business, and they can feel antithetical to one another.

In the privacy of your office/ bedroom/ café table, you reach into the depths of your mind and scale the rocks and hard places of your soul/ high school experiences/ life, and you come back with a story. The cadences, whether borrowed, stolen or invented, are yours. The sentences and the images and the characters are all yours. Yours the way a baby you birth is yours. And then you have to put the squalling, fragile creature of your heart out into the world, and what’s more, you have to promote it.

Terrifying.

Absurd.

Reprehensible.

But true.

Here’s the good news: I’ve been studying marketing, marketing with integrity and heart, and . . . (drum roll) it can be fun. You want to get your voice out into the world. You have something to offer readers, and you know this because books have been your lifeline, your pleasure and pastime. Right?

So let’s start here, with your commitment to be what Michael Port calls fully self-expressed. And here, there’s more:

I am teaching an exciting new course called Technique. Set goals, write and master the craft.

GIVEAWAY ONE: TONIGHT, I am offering a FREE CLASS BY TELEPHONE. Email me for a space and information about how to call in.

GIVEAWAY TWO: Post a comment on this blog post this week to enter a random drawing to WIN FOUR WEEKS of the Technique Course (value: $150) Winners announced Monday. Please check back and include an email so I can contact you!

FINE PRINT: Class meets by conference call on Wednesdays, 6 – 7:10 p.m. PST. The only charge will be whatever your phone company charges for the call. (You can use a cell if you have free minutes.) If you enroll now to ensure a space or are already enrolled, you will win an extra four weeks after your paid course runs out.

The title of this blog is the title of a recent Guardian article to which I, chuckling and sighing send you. I work with writers, I am a writer, I come from writers and I am married to a writer. I have often said that being published is a lot like not being published. This puzzles people who, as I once did, wander into bookstores, picking up enticing books, reading the cover flap, gazing at the photograph of that mysterious creature, the author, and wondering what it is like to be in that elite group, the published.

When a generous teacher at a two-week writing workshop gave me his agent’s address and insisted that I send her my short stories–I was twenty-one–I returned to sit on the twin bed in the small dorm room where I’d been staying, typing on a manual, non-electric Underwood someone lent me, and I thought, This is it. I’ve been discovered. Life will never be the same again. I surveyed the people I knew. These would remain my true friends, the ones who’d loved me before fame and glory descended. These would be the ones I could trust.

Much as I’d once imagined Sting appearing at my junior high and walking with me through the grounds, thus revealing my essential worth to certain cruel or oblivious people, I now imagined the transformation to come. I went to the payphone in the hallway (just to offer some carbon-dating) and called my mother and then my boyfriend. They each wanted to know if this particular teacher wanted to sleep with me.

Since we were both leaving the state that day and had just said good-bye, I assured them that his mysterious beneficence was not driven by lust but by a genuine belief in my talent. I hung up discouraged by their lack of faith and tried to drift back to my fantasies of fame.

Needless to say, I still meet people everyday who are not only able to see the real me in the face of my fame and glory but who, even squinting and peering, cannot find a trace of the glitter I’d imagined trailing behind me wherever I went. Wanting to be published and being published have a lot in common . . .

What’s surprised me is that even writers I consider much more successful struggle with a sense of languishing in obscurity. I remember about fifteen years ago, Ethan Canin pointing out that the most famous writer in America–he suggested John Updike–could have a conversation on an airplane that began with full introductions, moved on to “What do you do?” and ended with, “Anything I’ve heard of?” Answer in the negative.

I can only hope that wherever John Updike is now, there are delighted readers all around . . .

This is not, however, a lament. Writers are the most generous, wonderful people I know. (Writers being a subset of that category of glorious beings known as readers.) And I intend to make it my business to bouy them up in rough seas. Here is the focus of my coaching and editing:

Momentum. Mastery. Marketing.

When you need one great reader and then thousands . . . .

This is my direction. In the meanwhile, referring back to the article in the Guardian and the title of this blog, let me suggest–as a writer, as an editor, as a parent–that many of the greatest aspects of life are both joy and chore.

Even junior high could be heavenly with Sting at your side. And even writing and even, yes, even marketing your writing, can be a thrill with the right kind of support and a solid plan.

(More to be revealed soon . . .)

Spoiler altert: I discuss the full plot of the book and film Rebecca in this blog, as well as the ending of Denis Johnson’s “Emergency.”

I first saw Daphne Du Marier’s  Rebecca as a film–Alfred Hitchcock’s amazing movie with Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier. I was just a kid; my babysitter, who was a writer, took me to a little theater that used to live by LaVal’s pizza in Berkeley. As the credits ran, I searched for the name of the actress who’d played the most captivating character of them all, the title role of Rebecca. But of course, she never shows up in the film. In the book, too, she is entirely a creation of the narrator and the people around her.

The narrator is the mousy and very young second wife of the drowned Rebecca’s husband Maxim de Winter. Everything we learn about Rebecca is filtered through her lens, and although we cringe at her meekness and long for her to stand up for herself and realize her own worth, we are as convinced as she is that Maxim is in love with Rebecca and probably always will be. His moodiness is easy to understand as an inability to adjust to this simple, plain wife after having been married to the charismatic and gorgeous Rebecca who stirred so many people’s passions.

The great turning point near the end of the book comes when our nameless narrator learns that Max did not love Rebecca. “I hated her,” he declares. In fact, he killed her, struck her because she was carrying another man’s baby and knew that he would be too ashamed to divorce her and call her bluff. Or so he believes. In the movie, the young protagonist can barely hear Maxim’s confession about hitting Rebecca, watching her fall, realizing she was dead and shunting her off in her sailboat. She just keeps repeating, “You didn’t love her.”

Here is where I am making my grand play for the POV is plot argument: The plot of Rebecca is dependent first on the narrator’s perspective. If we knew all along that Max hated Rebecca, we’d have a completely different story–almost no story at all. Once that tidbit is revealed, we are given a new set of facts that are taken as concrete–Max killed the pregnant Rebecca.

At Rebecca’s cousin-cum-lover’s insistence, the characters begin to follow clues left behind by Rebecca about her last days. It turns out that she’d gone to a doctor far away, up near London. The cousin, the crazy housekeeper who was Rebecca’s nursemaid, the inspector and Maxim’s loyal estate lawyer, Frank, all go, along with Max and his young wife, to find out why Rebecca went to the doctor. The narrator and Max know why, of course: she was pregnant. The suspense at this time, then, is how will these facts come out and how will this cast further suspicion on Max. They are really just stretching out the time before the inevitable discovery of Maxim’s crime–and they want, now, to spend that time together.

But at the doctor’s we learn that Rebecca was not pregnant, as she’d told Max. She had cancer and was dying.  Point of view, again, sets us up and turns the story.

Plot is about what is revealed and what is hidden. What somebody knows that somebody else does not know. Therefore, in those moments when you wish you could follow some other characters to some other place and leave your chosen narrator behind, consider instead your plot options–what your narrator doesn’t know can hurt him, but that can’t hurt the plot!

Plot, in turn, will test your characters, which will reveal them the more fully, which will have an impact on their point of view.

A few more brief notes on some of the other ways point of view is interwoven into every aspect of the book: What your narrator sees and misses in a room or landscape will define your setting. The character’s mood will define, too, what s/he sees and how it looks. The voice, the language choices, that shape your narrative will come from the narrator, whether an embodied character or an omniscient point of view or one that moves among characters. The language will shape the page, the rhythms and feeling of the story.

What your narrator hears will influence dialog. Think of Denis Johnson’s wonderful use of dialog to end “Emergency.” (I am discussing this from memory, so forgive any slight errors.) He sets us up for the line a couple of pages ahead, telling us that it was saying this thing that showed the narrator what set his friend apart from him. Then we get the whole scene about picking up the guy who’s gone AWOL, and at the very end, the AWOL guy asks the friend, who is a drug-addled orderly, What do you do for a living? And the orderly answers, “I save lives.”

What is remarkable about the line is what it means to the narrator and how it is set up, rather than the sentiment itself. This whole story is about point of view, as when the narrator sees giant angel faces full of pity and it turns out to be the drive-in movie theater in the snow. Oh, he says, I thought it was something else. The splendor of that scene, and of the entire story, is wholly dependent on the misunderstandings fostered by the point of view.

Does this mean you should stress out more about your point of view choices? I don’t think so. I think it means that you should lean into the limits of the point of view. Use them for plot turns and thematic revelations, and as guides to language, setting and dialog. Trust the work that point of view does in your story and see where it can lead you.

[I am offering an online course in revision beginning January 15 for anyone with some rough manuscript, fiction or narrative non-fiction--including memoir. Send me an email to receive my once-a-month writing tip newsletter for sales and special offers. See you on the screen!]

First, I want to apologize if I’ve been . . . grumpy. Grumbly. Cranky. Throwing small tantrums. Complaining about being uninspired. Writing blogs about futility and a passive-aggressive Zen approach to life’s matters, large and small. It’s been a tough month.

But it has also been a GLORIOUS month. Ah, perspective. Ah, the joys of looking back on the mountain over which you’ve come. The sweat dries. The thirst is quenched. The sun settles behind a peak and the sky reflects brilliant pinks and greens and oranges. You have not yet turned to see the mountain that is ahead. For once in your life, you are totally in the moment. Well, the moment and the exhilarating past, more exhilarating with every passing moment.

Seriously, though, right after my last whiny blog, I turned a corner. Maybe it was seeing how close I was to finishing. (Who said the light at the end of the tunnel is that of the oncoming train?) Maybe it was the longevity and intensity of my commitment finally paying off. I started to love my little book, and what’s more, I started to enjoy it. My characters surprised me in that way that writers sometimes say that characters can do–and what that really means is keeping at it long and hard enough that you can surprise yourself, dig below what you know you have to say and turn up something you’ve never told yourself before.

Maybe the cause of my change of attitude was reading Where the Wild Things Are aloud to my sons a couple of nights before I completed my 50k words. Reader, do you remember this book by Maurice Sendak? Max, the protagonist in a wolf suit, is getting into mischief “of one kind and another,” until he tells his mother he’ll “eat [her] up,” and is sent to bed without any supper. Well, as happens, trees begin to grow in Max’s room that night, and jungle, “until . . . the walls became the world all around.” Max gets in a boat and sails “through night and day and in and out of weeks and almost over a year to where the wild things are.” They–the wild things–try to scare him by roar[ing] their terrible roars and gnash[ing] their terrible teeth and roll[ing] their terrible eyes and show[ing] their terrible claws,” but Max is able to tame them “with a magic trick of staring into all their yellow eyes without blinking once” so that “they were frightened and called him the most wild thing of all.” This is how Max becomes their king.

As I read to Charlie and Leo, the parallels to what I had been spending my evenings at the computer doing became evident and exciting. Yes, I had set off on a long journey without my supper, and yes, my little manuscript had tried to frighten me in a myriad of effective ways, but I had persisted, staring into the yellow eyes of my book without blinking once (okay, well maybe I blinked a few times, but I kept returning to stare), and eventually, I tamed my story. Well . . . in the way that Max tamed his wild things, which is to say, he commanded the wild rumpus to begin.

The next few pages of this marvelous children’s book are devoted exclusively to pictures. Of the wild things rumpusing. During our story-reading ritual, we spend these pages chanting, “Rumpus, rumpus, rumpus. Rumpus, rumpus, rumpus.” There is one monster who has more or less a bull’s head, and the boys point to him and say “Moooo.” (Or really “Mmmmm,” which is actually a more authentically bovine lowing sound, which they know because Berkely has a little farm up in Tilden Park. Farms? In Berkeley? Mmmmmm. But I digress. Which is the great joy of blogging but not, perhaps, of consuming said blog.)

And so I rumpused with the monsters of my fears and the monsters of my dreaded imagination and the monsters of the stories I have to tell that I long to tell and the monsters of the stories I have to tell which I do not even know I know, and 50,000 words later . . .

I was having fun. Feeling inspired. Writing my monstrous menagerie. Which goes to show that you can’t wait to rumpus until you feel inspired. You have to rumpus to keep the monsters moving, rumpus like your life is leaning into that stomping frenzy and hanging from the tree.

I want to quote the next two pages (or six lines) in full, and hope that this does not violate any copyright law (which for those of you who grew up in the age of the internet was an old idea people had about protecting the uses of their texts). I think it’s okay because this book is one you need to buy and own, for the pictures, for the story and for the underlying lesson I’m about to careen home.

I also want to say that during a most rocky horonal time of my post-pregnancy year, I read these pages to myself and they made me cry, they carried so much resonance about the human condition.

“Now stop!” Max said and sent the wild things off to bed

without their supper. And Max the king of all wild things was lonely

and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all.

Then all around from far away across the world

he smelled good things to eat

so he gave up being king of where the wild things are.

I think this perfectly sums up the writer’s dilemma, the artist’s conundrum, the pull between the vital, scratchy world of rumpusing with monsters and being their king, and the declawed, yummy place where someone loves us best of all. Marge Piercy in her poem “For the Young Who Want To” says of writing, “You have to like it better than being loved.” I know exactly what she means: you can’t write to be loved, to gain love, you certainly can’t write for the love of your critics or your rivals or your mother. On the other hand, that’s a tall order, to like it better than being loved. Perhaps she had not snuggled with a one-and-a-half year old lately when she wrote that line . . .

But there’s one way to redeem ourselves, we who may not like writing better than being loved . . . who may not like anything better than being loved. If you write and write and write and write, if you write like you were married to writing and didn’t believe in divorce, if you write like writing is the way you get your oxygen and expell your carbon monoxide (remember that I dropped out of high school and forgive me if I have this equation slightly wrong . . .), if you write even when you are angry and lonely and even when you are tempted by a late-night bowl of cereal and an episode of Californication, something strange will happen. You will eventually and painstakingly and unconsciously learn to love yourself. To love the recesses of your imagination that can make you laugh or shock you (as if they themselves were one-and-a-half year olds). If you keep at the writing like it was your kid and you could not make another choice but to get up with it and sit up with it and feed it and rock it and sing to it and wipe its bottom and ask it if it wants to use the potty and mop up the urine off the floor and read it books and take it to the park and swing it as high as it can go in the swing and agree with it that, yes, that is an airplane . . . you will come to love it and it will love you and you won’t have to choose between writing and being loved.

And when you get back to your bedroom, your supper will be waiting for you. And it will still be hot.

To be honest, I had barely read a blog before I got ready to start blogging myself. I was perhaps a bit suspicious of the medium. It’s true that ever since I was a child, with my first Hello, Kitty journal, I could not keep a diary without imagining a future reader. In fairness to the vanity of my young self, the diaries I was most familiar with were those that had been published–Anne Frank, for example. In any case, the blog circumvents the necessity of pretending you are writing for reasons of personal growth, even as you become most aware of your desire to grow, personally.

I have admired writers who are willing to grow in public. Michelle Tea is a wonderful example. She is prolific and talented and has written with a work ethic I envy and then gotten her work out to a growing public (via spoken word tours–the infamous Sister Spit–and publication) since she (and I) was quite young. This means that she’s gotten better, and broader, in front of that public.

Yesterday in the car, Angie played a part of a podcast for me in which the speaker made an important distinction between the natural, healthy dissatisfaction a writer or creator feels towards the work he or she has done and contempt for that work. There is slippage between the two, and contempt does no good, since it casts doubt on the worthiness of everything you do or might do. Dissatisfaction, on the other hand, will push you to stretch, to grow. To try something different. (Although the boys were not interested in (their or my) listening to the entire podcast, Angie tells me that it was from Accidental Creative, which seems like a great group.)

I considered publishing my daily writing of this NaNoWriMo novel that I’ve been working on for the past twelve days (not including today, yet) and which I will be writing for at least the next eighteen days. My idea was to post a sort of blog-style rough draft of this fictional story in installments, much as Dickens published Great Expectations and other of his novels. Then I remembered that I am not Dickens. Actually, I just thought that the pressure of writing a novel in thirty days might not withstand the additional pressure that the novel be readable.

Another part of me, though, longed for the tension, excitement and sheer storytelling demand an audience would create. Shahrazad had no time to erase her efforts and throw up her pages in despair. Shakespeare purportedly scribbled lines on some Elizabethan index cards and handed them to his actors. The ur-storyteller caveman had to create some serious questions in his listeners or risk being tossed out of the cave. And not just Plato’s cave.

In general, I have been guilty of revising for too long, if there is such a thing. I have let dissatisfaction slip into contempt. The problem is, of course, that with each new book (or draft), one learns more, one grows as a writer, and so that book inevitably becomes the product of a younger, less experienced (if also less despairing) writer. I think I made the same mistakes with having children–I waited nearly until the deadline had passed, wanting to get it right instead of merely to get it done. But with writing and children, I have learned that there is much to be said for getting it done as a path to getting it right.

Then, too, watching little people grow in public, it becomes clear to me that nothing can eclipse the brilliance of embracing wherever you are in the moment. I think of Charlie clapping his little hands together in self-approval when he shoots a basket or puts away a toy. I think of Leo’s pleasure in learning to say the “O” in E I E I ____. We delight in them when they can hold their heads up and then when they can play peek-a-boo and then when they can feed themselves a bite and then when they can walk and then when they can say an animal sound and then when they can make a joke and then when they can read a book . . . and they learn to delight in themselves, too. At one-and-a-half (or -quarter), no one is looking back and saying, “Hmmm, I didn’t used to be able to walk. What a loser. I should have stayed in until I knew more.”

Whatever its flaws, reality writing has a lot going for it over its fellows in television. I used to worry that people would stop leaving the kinds of informal, intimate written records that our parents and grandparents left–letters and diaries. Blogs are not the same, of course. But this is what I started out to say: I have become a convert. I read blogs now. At the end of the night, for instance, I check in on the progress of the cutest, bravest little guy and his amazing moms at Simon Lev, and I always read Amy Wilensky’s amazing entry at Seven Hundred Fifty Words. I am learning about organization and Serenity for the Self-Employed from Heather Boerner, about How Not to Write from Jamie Grove, and on and on . . . Words have always been my medium, and it is a great pleasure to find this living stream of them at this time when I am most house-bound.

I would love to know: what blogs do you read?

This morning, Angie went down to our local freeway overpass to hold NO ON 8 signs, alongside the imported yes on 8ers. The boys and I started to clean the house, and then we got a call from Angie that the yessers had huge signs strung all along the fencing, and she was there with only one other person.

So I called someone and she called someone and then I called my mom. Then I changed diapers and went off to drop the boys at a park with my mom and join Angie. By the time I got there, there were just two yes guys and their one big yellow sign, and several older women (my mom’s age) had shown up and were pressing a no on 8 sign against the fence, with the wind pushing back at them. I held a big tarp sign with a woman who teaches at Los Positas Community College. She told me that many of her students were voting for the first time today.

It was freezing on the overpass, and while we got a lot of thumbs up and honking from the west-to-east side, the folks going the other direction–who had the yellow yes sign to react to as well–seemed a lot more conservative.

I found myself feeling so angry. I wanted to turn to those yes on 8 men and say, “What does it feel like to be on the wrong side of history, the wrong side of family and the wrong side of Christianity??” They seemed more jovial than I–sort of that “we’re all in this together” feeling that you can get when everyone is pressing signs against the wind, and streams of traffic are gushing under your feet, shaking the cement structure on which you stand. I did not share their joviality, perhaps because this is my family and my marriage we are voting on.

This could be the most momentous, historic occasion of my entire life, past and future, if things go my way. If things go really, really wrong, I’m going to feel like getting out of here, though some folks on Talk of the Nation today suggested that this was an unsportsman-like attitude. In general, my slogan is that of Mother Jones: “Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.”  But I do want to keep my loved ones on one side of that line for as long as possible.

Meanwhile, I’ve pounded out 6017 words on my novel in the past three days. (I will start chugging on my next 1667-2000  words when I finish this blog.)  I always say that it is easier to write than to think about writing, but of course it’s easiest of all to do neither. At the same time, I get irritable and draggy when I stop writing for long enough. My father used to say, “If only coffee tasted the way it smells . . . ” (Angie says that it does, but then she is on a slippery coffee slope.) I wish that writing felt like reading feels.

The closest I get to that is when I just keep writing, past the extreme judgments of my inner editor (how come my inner editor is in there with my inner child and she still has time and brain power to be so harsh and detailed? Shouldn’t she be changing diapers or something?), past the hiccups and the slow, uphill inclines, past the raging uncertainty . . . and did I mention the judgments?

I think critics, inner and otherwise, are a little like yes on 8ers. They are angry and negative about something that really had nothing to do with them. There are, for example, a certain number of people who are really angry about NaNoWriMo. They say that it brings thousands of crappy manuscripts into a world overrun with manuscripts and makes thousands of people believe that they are writers when they are not. And the people opposed to gay marriage seem to feel that marriage is unravelling if all these extra people get to get married, as if we are producing shoddy relationships in a world overrun with relationships . . . Okay, I might be working too hard or not hard enough at this metaphor. I am sugar-filled and caffine-walloped and sleep-deprived, so I hope you can bear with me.

What I am trying to say is that people writing crappy manuscripts and people creating unorthodox relationships are NOT A THREAT to the establishment. People who write crappy manuscripts are more likely to buy published books and to read them well. People who are getting up together each day to figure out how to make breakfast, get everyone dressed and out the door, keep the house clean and the laundry done, make a living and have quality time with the children and each other are not ripping at the fabric of traditional marriage.

One literary-political note. In plots, when things are looking really good for the hero and you’re fifteen, twenty minutes from the end of the movie or, say, a quarter of the way to an eighth of the way to the end of the book, what are you thinking?

You’re thinking, in the immortal words of my sons, Uh oh. We know the rhythms of plot so well when we are consuming it (creating it is a different story for some of us). It does not bode well for our guy when things are looking up too far out from the end. And it’s been going well for Obama for a while now. Better and better. I hope that real life will do as it often does and rebutt our understanding of plot and just soar right on to victory.

Because it felt incredible to walk around Whole Foods today, grocery shopping, and look at all the people who populate my world and think, “We just might be electing an African-American man president today.” I want my boys to come to consciousness with a man of color in the White house. I want them to think that if it was ever another way, that was a long time ago, back in the last century . . . Besides which, our Cobra insurance coverage runs out next year, and it would be great to have an alternative to Kaiser . . .

I have yet one more undeveloped thought. As you know, we’ve never made any kind of reparations to the many Americans whose ancestors were enslaved in this country. I know that Obama may not be one of these, except possibly on his mother’s side, since we are all quite a lot more mixed up than we pretend. But it occurs to me that all this fear of “redistribution of the wealth” taps into a national knowledge that the original distribution of the wealth was acquired by theft and murder, and that a Black president might look at reparations in an entirely different way. I think the fear of redistribution of the wealth is a fear of honest reparations being raised as a real issue–some seriously messed up mortages coming due with a big balloon payment.

But walking around today, I felt excited. I felt like we might be able to do something far beyond reparations, and move right on over to fairness and representation and something that actually looks like democracy.