the paranoid quadruple check

Feeling virtuous today for having finished a full edit. I hit ‘send’ on the manuscript. I’m full of curiosity to see what the publisher’s editor tells me to do, and my firm plan is to be obedient! We’ll see how well I keep to my fine intentions.

I don’t know how many of you writers have had to do this type of clean-up, but I went through every chapter for dates, since I wanted a simple chronological progression, and I found a couple of time transgression issues to fix. I ended up with sheets of paper scribbled with chapter numbers and dates. You’d think I would have done all this before and the truth is, I have. About three times, all the way through. But little gremlins were at play and I’m grateful now that I’ve tweaked the whole thing back into order. Gives me cold sweat to imagine how I would have felt if I hadn’t done this run-through and made sure. But then again, I'm a doorknob rattler, one of the folk who can't leave the house for a walk without verifying that the stove top is off, the microwave controls cleared, knobs on my oven turned to 'off' and 'Warm', the taps checked for drips and the refrigerator doors fully closed. There's this tale I heard about a cat named Cicero who got into the fridge and consumed five pounds of red snapper before being discovered. He slouched off to sit in the sun and warm up a bit afterwards, but it seemed to do him no harm. However, his people had to think out dinner all over from scratch. That was one cool cat.

I'm sure they will still find some typos.

Modern technology is splendid but just a keystroke makes all the difference. What was the bit in the news about the Lyndon Baines Johnson School of Public Affairs having a typo on the front of the Commencement Program proclaiming it the Lyndon Baines Johnson School of Pubic Affairs? A cautionary tale indeed!

Lemon Juice

I'm giving you another story, some years old but recently rewritten.

            At our house, we gloat over velvety chanterelles from California oak forests, we nurture artisan-style loaves with our hoarded sourdough culture, we brew our own hoppy ales, and we dissect the relative merits of rival lemon varieties in passionate terms at the dinner table. The farmer's market looms in our minds as an event, glowing with the orange and scarlet globes of tomatoes, redolent with basil, vibrant with dark strawberries. I mention these things to give you context for the conversation I had yesterday.

            My father called, and since I suspected that he might be lonely house-sitting for my sister Marie up in Oregon, I pulled the gray cat over my lap and settled in to talk.

            "What've you been doing while they're gone?" I said, stroking the cat's fuzzy chin.

            "Well," my father said, "I decided it would be nice if I made cookies, because neither your sister nor Cole seem to cook much and those commercial things they call cookies are full of fat and stabilizers and are terribly over-sweetened. But you know, Marie doesn't keep brown sugar in her house."

            What I remembered was my father holding forth on the pretensions of brown sugar, accusing it of merely being refined white with molasses added back in. Posturing, in his opinion. Worse, the refinery raised the price for this bit of masquerade. If Marie possessed brown sugar I bet she'd hid it somewhere in the back of her pantry before our father arrived.

            "I decided I'd add some molasses to the white sugar," he said, before I could respond. "But you see, Marie doesn't keep any molasses, either. So I thought I'd add lemon juice."

            "Lemon juice?" I had sent some lemons up to Oregon seven weeks ago.

            "For the acidity. You know baking soda won't work in cookies without something acidic, and if you don't have the acidity of the molasses in the brown sugar you need something else. I was lucky. I found your lemon here in the shipping box. She had exactly one left; it was a little soft. At first I thought she must be saving it but I realized I needed to use it up or it would go to waste."

            Waste was the ultimate sin where my father was raised in a fine Yankee community of farming New Hampshire.

            "It looked a little gray but I'm sure it was all right.  I squeezed some juice and put it in my bowl. Next I found out that we had one egg in the place and I needed two for this recipe. So I added extra milk. There wasn't any vanilla, but Marie does have cinnamon. What with one thing and another, the dough really came out rather runny."

            He sounded confident, but I was picturing 'runny'.

            "Then I couldn't find a single cookie sheet. I even looked in the basement and discovered that Marie and Cole haven't finished unpacking. But I could hardly open up all those boxes.... Fortunately I remembered Marie has a Teflon coated muffin pan."

            "Did you...?"

            "I simply poured the batter in. You realize I saved a lot of time. I'd already spent a while just assembling the ingredients so I really appreciated how much faster this went. Though I'm not sure what to call the result -- they don't look exactly like cookies. I was afraid they might stick to the pan, so I tried tipping it, and do you know, they fell right out. It's a pity-- because I'd taken them onto the porch to cool, so several fell on the porch. I didn't worry; since it was raining, the porch was perfectly clean. But I shouldn't have stacked them; the cookies didn't stick to the pan but they sure stuck to each other."

            "So are they like little cakes?" I said helpfully. The cat shook its head as if I rubbed its ears too hard.

            "Hmnn." He wasn't going to commit. "When I finally finished this up," he said, "I did something else. After all, the dishes needed to be washed and I figured why wash them twice? Might as well mix up something else first. You know, I haven't much chance to cook in recent years. Mother doesn't like it when I cook, though I find it quite enjoyable. I don't know why she feels this prejudice. I used to bake bread, and all types of things."

            "Yes, I remember. I baked a cake with you, back when I was in high school. We experimented."

            My father always approached life experiences such as cleaning, repairing, and cooking as he did the scientific research he used to conduct. You might call his investigative sense, if not his appetite, insatiable.

            "So I made an apple pie," he said. The cat pressed its face against my fingers, reminding me of its claims.

            I responded to the pride in his voice.            "You did? Great!"

            "Well," his voice took on an apologetic color, "I was taking a walk and I found apples. You know how some people never harvest their own fruit -- and it has snowed here, so I couldn't feel too guilty. The apples had fallen onto the sidewalk from branches overhanging a wall. Still, I guess a stickler could say I stole them. The apples had some rotten spots, quite a few, and they were pretty scabby....

            "I cut out all the bad spots and sliced those apples up. It was quite a job -- took much longer than I'd expected. I was afraid I hadn't quite enough apple bits when I had cleaned them, so I added some others. Marie forgot three on the windowsill and they'd gone cottony, or mushy, so I squeezed in more of that lemon juice.

            "Then I started on the crust. But Marie had no shortening in the house, only oleomargarine and butter. I wanted Crisco. I remembered that you can't use butter. My mother used to say butter made a tough crust."

            "You want unsalted butter," I piped up helpfully, "and you chill the crust before you roll it."

            "Oh yes, I remembered the chilling. That may have been what saved it," he said with satisfaction.

            "But what did you use for shortening?"

            "Well I looked through the refrigerator. I found some olive oil, but I didn't remember anyone using that for pie crust and it smelled like garlic. Do people ever flavor olive oil with garlic? Then I found the bacon. Marie cooked up a lot of bacon before they left; I'm sure it isn't good for Cole to eat so much;  and she'd kept the fat from it in a small bowl."

            I did not dare interrupt at this point. Surely he was pulling my leg. He'd always maintained that Henry and I cared too much about our food.

            "I carefully took off the top, the white part."

            "But you didn't...?"

            "Oh yes," he said. "It seemed by far the best solution and I thought it would help the flavor deficit. And I must say everything seemed to be working very well indeed as I collected the grease. Except that I made one big mistake."

            "What happened?" The cat decided I did not have my mind on my job and rose with decision, leaping down and stalking away, its tail held banner-wise.

            "You know I put lemon juice and cinnamon on the apples with the sugar, but no nutmeg because I really don't like nutmeg even though the recipes call for it, but then I did a completely absentminded thing and put all the flour for the crusts right in with the apples. When I realized what I'd done, I scooped up as much flour out of the apples as I could. But you know how apples emit juice when they have sugar on them? An awful quantity of the flour stuck. When I got to rolling out the dough, it was wet and glued itself to the counter. I had a dreadful time getting the crust loose. But then I did a truly smart thing."

            "What?"

            "I pre-baked the bottom crust. For a long time. Maybe eighteen minutes. Then I finished the pie off and put it into the oven. The bad part was that after all the apple trimming and the looking for things I only got that pie in the oven at half past midnight and I was exhausted -- but I had to stay up until the pie was cooked. In the end since I couldn't really tell if it was done yet, I just shut off the oven and left it in."

            "How does your pie taste?"

            "I don't know yet. But I have to say it smells delicious. I'll save it for Cole's birthday party when he and Marie get home tomorrow. We still aren't sure how many people are coming so I think I better bake a cake. After all, I still have the last of that lemon juice to go."

marketing a novel

Here I am procrastinating. Not from writing novels but from finishing my 'Author's Questionnaire' for the publisher. They want to ask me a batch of questions about how I can help market my book and how much time and effort I'm willing to put in. Obvious answer is 'a lot' because after all this is a novel I began in 1976 and just brought to its real conclusion in 2012. No, I am not that ocd a writer – this book spent ages on the shelf just ripening. That sounds like it should smell, doesn't it, and I sure hope not. Or maybe let's think 'cheese'. No cheese is should be served before its time.

I think it's fair to say that the novel I started and the one I finished have only two things in common and that's where the story happens, in Nigeria, and the fact that it is still a story of strong women.

Where I come up short and start scratching my head is when they ask for a detailed marketing plan. I've written down a batch of ideas but I'm still at it. I have a lot more sympathy now for marketing folk and all their planning. Interesting things emerge – I find myself thinking what fun it would be to offer to talk with local reading groups. I imagine giving them all sorts of smaller stories that never made it into the novel, trying to give them a sense of what it is like to live what T.E. Lawrence once called 'a Yahoo life', and he didn't mean 'dot com'. Indeed Lawrence's is a frightening attitude, yet it always pops up into my brain when I think about expatriates in the 'White Man's Graveyard.'

I knew a lot of them, and unlike what many of us may think, in Nigeria they were Indian and Pakistani, Russains and Poles, Scotsmen and Irish, Dutch and Danes, the Egyptian couple with whom my mother enjoyed sharing recipies.

So here I am with a recipie for marketing. All you writers out there, start thinking. When your turn comes to do this I hope you will have more and better ideas than I do. I'm hoping to see if I can at least share some parts of this experience so that we can all look forward to more and more great books that are easier to find with every piece of outreach we conceive and bring to term.

agents and editors

I am copying this over from my  Robin Winter Wordpress site since it received some interested readers there. I assume this is kosher since it's not quite the same as submitting the same paper to two different courses... oh, are you telling me this really IS for a grade?

       I’ve had the rewarding experience of working with two editors, Aviva Layton and Toni Lopopolo. My first experience  was with Aviva Layton some years ago and that was the customary situation where I hired her to read and critique, (not line edit) two different manuscripts. One of them she read twice. She gave me more than I paid for. I was looking for an overview from a sophisticated reader who could tell me where my plot flagged, where my characters mystified, where I talked too much when I should have let my characters show. I killed a couple of characters under her advice, and man, was it satisfying. An editor will see things you never did, ask questions even the best writers group doesn’t, and ruthlessly guide you to a cleaner clearer story arc. After all, that is the point — to tell a good story.

      You might find it odd that I mention Toni, who is also my agent, but you know what? I got lucky. I ended up with an agent who does it all — she has over this past year helped me rewrite my novel about Nigeria from beginning to end something like ten or eleven times… I think we’ve both lost count. Did I pay her? No; when Toni signed me it was in accordance with all the rules you see on Writers Beware and other such sites. She did it on the speculation that I’d make something saleable and worth this tremendous investment of her time and energy and patience.

       I tried very hard to be good because I knew the work was flawed. The novel Toni fell in love with was my tale of four women in Nigeria who are caught up in the Nigerian Civil War. I wrote it starting in 1976, when I was in college at Wellesley. Fellow students got accustomed to seeing me hunched over my old electric typewriter in the commonroom picking at the keys. Never learned to touch type, and even though I write a lot, I use four fingers on my right hand and four on my right. It’s a wonder my pinkies haven’t atrophied, but maybe they keep exercised by waving about in the air cheering the others on.

     I digress. The problem with this particluar novel was that it had morphed over the decades. It was in purely awful shape. It had swelled at times to something over 600 pages, shrunk down to 200 and swelled again. I’d never even shown this manuscript to Aviva — I knew it wasn’t ready. It was pure chance or my father’s ghost that made me take a couple of excerpts to the writers workshop where Toni heard a section and fell for it. So when Toni told me it was a mess, what could I do but nod? The miracle was that she didn’t give up. We waded through issues of point of view, adverbs and masses of beautiful description that stopped the story in its tracks, too many people– and started the process by killing of some characters. Sound familiar? Is that my trope that I tend to pack too many people in?

      Now I have a contract with an independent publisher, and I’m setting up the nitty gritty of publicity. We are, fingers crossed, looking at this September. My father, who took us all to Nigeria in the first place, would be pleased.

       What I wanted to say in this post is that if you are a writer, use your resources. Run the novel or the story through your writers groups (and yes, I put that in the plural form.) Make yourself go to writers’ conferences and force yourself to your quaking feet to read aloud. Don’t just read the first chapter over and over again. Most chapters should have their own arc, and with the briefest of descriptions of the set-up, you should be good to go. Remember that if your book makes it to a bookshelf in a bookstore, you may be picked up by a potential reader who follows my evil habit of opening to the middle to see what the fat looks like.

      If you are told by two or more people to change something, you need to think it over real hard. If you hear it from three, just do it. Do it in your own way, but do it.

      When it comes to editors, I’d say wait until you’ve done the groups and the conferences. Take your shining clean typo-free copy and pay an expert to tell you what isn’t working. The neater your copy the less your editor will be distracted by the detritus. When you finally corner that agent who signs you, she or he may not be as old fashioned as mine, so don’t be surprised, but make sure that your manuscript is as ready as you can make it. I think I’d even recommend springing for another editorial run-through. Your writing is an investment, not only of the time in your life you’ve spent making love to a keyboard, but of your funds, in the sensible use of professionals.

nutmeg finches in the bamboo

            Fountain running, nutmeg finches in the bamboo squeaking in their busy-ness as they catch their insects and squabble over who gets the best branch.

            How often have I wanted to fold into the bamboo, become little, feathered, with the immediacy of thinking and excitement and fear that a bird must have to live? Always the same answer comes, because of this long chain of evolutionary triage, that's not who I can be, and unless I lose what we call my personal humanity, I'm not going back.

            Not going back. What an old theme for all of us, whether it's evolution we speak or some other language.

            Humans have gifts of recollection, all mammals share the trait, all warm bloods, even over to those small immediate birds in the bamboo. So I must be wrong, those envied nutmeg finches must have all their memories crowding upon them too, and none of us are free. I don't know how far it goes but I know I can watch a cat dream or a dog jerk his legs in a phantom of running. A parrot can learn and deploy language, so there must be the ability to relive the past in feathered heads too. Anticipation and recollection are both given, gifts and curses in one package; seems we can't have one without the other.

            So I taste the warm whole wheat bread of a childhood day in New Hampshire, old shades of dread returning over me even as butter melts on my tongue. I stand again upon a promontory with the black rocks and frothing surf thundering at my feet, with a Maine coast wind trying to wipe out the darkness of twisted human relations in my heart. For everything is mixed, the human terrors with the bright of day, and never for more than a fragment of time do I leave it all behind. There's no time off unless your brain will release you too. No sweet surrender without a basic acceptance of the idea that I am not responsible for everything. I think that's where faith comes in. If you have none, then you will always hold the bag.

            I do have faith, but even so, sometimes it's so hard to drop that bag.

spring night

The first edge of moonlight runs across the lima beans raising their leaves against shadows of bananas. It's an oxymoron in black and white. I lived years in Nigeria and somehow this picture feels photoshopped. Something alerts me and I look to see the flitting black on black of a nighthawk against the sky.

The night has an edge of cold, though this is May in southern California. I can almost sense through my soles the pulse of green things growing, despite the chill of this strange year. They will prevail, vine and leaf and the soft persistent blossoms of the trees.

I hope for fat apricots and round peaches, the run of juice, the way velvet fruit skin breaks in my mouth. I can't believe the reality can compete with what I now imagine, looking at the promise of fruit against a night sky in spring.

I think I get it

Tonight I am abruptly aware that I am going to have a novel published. Right now, at this moment, it seems real, intoxicating, as if I have this chance I didn't digest before, of taking all these friends I don't yet know on a ride of story, with people they haven't met before I share them, of events I have buried myself in and now can share, of worlds rich in event and scent and danger. Oh we can have such fun in time to come!
Yes, I am a bit overtired tonight, but just you wait. We have worlds, and disasters, and such wonderful events and places, so many people to become!