Took a wee break from everything this week, including blogging. I proudly announce that the only tasks I managed to complete were list-making and paper-chaos organizing.

Thoughts are piling up behind my laziness, however, so I’ll be back on Monday with a post. Meanwhile, off to a street fair with a friend and the dog. Putzing aimlessly in the sun? Priceless.

(Acknowledgments to another Lisa for this post, which sent me to the ultimate workspace-voyeur posting at Jezebel’s blog.)

Starting a new work-week with nothing concrete in mind since finishing the first draft. Today I was going to make a list…And how come I just wrote “was going to” instead of “am going to”? Talk about a summer-vacation mindset. Not yet 3:00 p.m., and I’m acting like the time for industrious activity has passed me by for the day.

I think I can manage to write a list after I go to dreaded CostCo, which I’ve been putting off for awhile now.

(Actually, the list in my head is already too long, and I know what I’m going to start on tomorrow, but for the sake of today, because I’m supposed to be on a break, I’m pretending I’m at loose ends.)

 

The number one item on the to-do list will be de-chaos-ifying my apartment, starting with my office as seen here. How many bits of paper do I need, and why aren’t I using the notebook I bought just for jotting random thoughts as they enter my head, so that they’re all in one spot, so that I head off paper chaos at the pass?

Looking forward to a late spring cleaning. Clear out my home, clear out my brain, that’s what I say.

How’s your workspace on these fine summer days?

Today makes four weeks since I adopted Luna. How’s it going? Has the dog adjusted? Better yet, have I? Was she a writing distraction?

All’s good, and the writing, no problema. I wrote about 75 pages in the past four weeks. I was eager to finish my first draft, true, but I’d also like to suggest a positive correlation between dog ownership and my writing output:

1. Boundaries: I suggest that having a canine boundary helps me manage my time and increase my efficiency. Luna forces my hand in the mornings, that’s for sure. Doesn’t matter that she goes back to sleep ten minutes later, she still jumps on the bed at a reasonably early (but not too early) hour.

2. Empty-brain time: My dog, she’s not sporty, not with her six-inch legs and lone eye. On walks, I slow way down and accept the trees and the sky and the screeing hawks as entertainment. In other words, I live in the moment. I suggest that this has helped my creativity.

And, last but not least:

3. Lessons in suspense: Luna and I play a game in which I tease her with my hands under a blanket. She goes after my hands with much growling (positively ferocious) and digging around and tail-wagging.

I suggest that the art of fictional suspense resembles the art of making a dog go wild with anticipation: judicious use of suspenseful pauses. In the blanket game, I freeze and Luna responds with paroxisms of spazziness. Remember being tickled as a child? It’s like that: When are the hands going to move? Where will they head? What the heck will happen next?

It struck me that novelistic suspense relies on the same type of tension. We see this all the time. Just when we’re getting somewhere, a scene ends, leaving us hanging while we move into the point of view of a different character. The old cliffhanger method as seen in many a thriller.

But not every novel is a thriller. Suspenseful pauses can function on subtle levels too. What I’m suggesting is that quiet moments can also add to overall suspense. Maybe these are character development scenes or set-up scenes for future action — these scenes must have a purpose, but not every scene must hurdle the reader around a loop-di-loop.

Quiet scenes can introduce complications, raise ancillary questions, spotlight inconsistencies in our characters, further subplots. They, in fact, can support the main story arc with underlying layers of unanswered questions, some to be answered sooner (will Biff call Buffy like he promised?), some to be answered later (why is Biff acting like such a jerk anyhow?). Unanswered questions raise suspense.

I suggest that what appears to be a cessation of suspenseful movement, isn’t (in the hands of an adept novelist). I’m no expert, of course, because I’m still learning how to handle suspense myself. I simply suggest that what I’ve pondered here, is indeed, worth pondering.

And, if Luna is any indication, anticipation never gets old.

There’s nothing like writing “THE END” (must be all caps, for me at least) on a first draft, and I wrote just that this morning! Yippee!

Of course, there’s still much to accomplish during revisions, but I have my story, verbose as it may be. I overwrite my first drafts — too much description, too much repetition, too much explanation of what I’ve effectively shown — but I don’t mind. I have tons of material with which to work: a comfort.

Some novelists underwrite their first drafts — so lean they gotta pig out on words during revisions to add complications and subplots and descriptions and character development.

Either way, right? As long as we have that first draft in hand!

Now, I’ll enjoy a summer vacation (woo hoo) – for a few weeks at least — if I can possibly stand the hiatus. I’m going to…what am I going to do with myself while my first draft cools off?

Oh my, oodles of open-endedness. My mind just went blank…

I’ve been working on this thing for a year. I’m so relieved I feel like melting. I am melting. I am, in fact, already melted. Melted feels delicious.

A so-called starving artist, that is. As seen this morning on my way to a cafe with my deluxe laptop — sporting cute sandals, smelling fresh from a shower, already tasting the gourmet coffee. I need to remember this man the next time I gripe about my restricted budget, which is restricted because I chose to quit my day-job for awhile.

Some people would relish the opportunity to decide whether or not they want to afford an overpriced latte.

Popped in on Struggling Writer just now, and he’s on the same roll as I am today: more weekend, please!

Days like today I wonder if the various religious doctrines had it right when they called for a “day of rest” (which was meant to be a day of devotion, but…you know…). Days like today, I’m resting in response to an excellent writing week followed by a people-oriented, party-oriented weekend.

Maybe a little too social a weekend after too good a writing week for this introvert? As if there’s such a thing as “too” good a writing week, but other writers may understand the special brand of brain-tired that results from a week of great output. Basically, it comes down to this: I didn’t have time to refresh (or “reboot” as BigD likes to say) my brain after last week’s wordsmithing.

Honestly, I need my downtime in a big way. And, blasphemy of blasphemies: I didn’t have time to read! That’s the most telling fact of all about my weekend.

I need one day in which I don’t go to the computer immediately, in which I sip my first java at midday, in which I fool around with no set agenda, in which I nap if that should so happen while I’m reading. In other words, a mental-health day.

Not that I don’t feel a smidgen guilty as I write this instead of start the next chapter. However, I know that I can make up today’s imagined pages over the rest of the week.

What have I accomplished today? Leisurely dog-walk, decent breakfast, a little blog-browsing and commenting…uhm…this post…uhm…

What makes for your ideal day of rest?

(What is this? A combination of two Friday memes: the literate kitten’s invitation to ‘fess up to our crimes and misdemeanors against our writing efforts and a “friday five,” in which we list five random things about our week…)

1. ‘Fessing up: I’ve got my 25 pages. Character arcs are circling around from the beginning of the novel, which is great. It’s happening naturally, with no undue pressure from me. Also, this morning, I choked myself up! This doesn’t happen often, but when it does, I feel excited and foolish at the same time. My stoic character is falling in love! (Though he doesn’t realize it in so many words, and I’m not going to delve into it deeply because it wasn’t the purpose of scene, but its subtext.)

2. Case in point for writing what we’d like to read: On July 8th, Joelle commented: Write what you want to read. Her comment spurred a memory:

Awhile back Deanna Raybourn toured with her debut novel. She’d spent years writing romances of the Harlequin variety that, one after another, went unsold. Her agent finally told her to take a break, read for a year. At the end of that year, Raybourn realized that she most enjoyed reading historicals, more mysterious than romantic. Low and behold, she wrote in that vein, and the novel sold! (And now there’s movie talk, too.)

3. This morning I received an email from a writer friend here in Portland. She’s a literary novelist who’s trucking along on the same bumpy road toward publication as I am. She’s read my stuff, so her support is a true feel-good balm. Here’s an excerpt; she’s the best.

As for your writing, you know you can write, you know your stuff is worth publishing. I think this phase is just another jump through fire to see if you’re sincere, if you have the grit to be a writer, and deserve being published as much as your writing does. So there.

4. Why do I keep buying nonfiction? This week I bought The Island of Lost Maps, A True Story of Cartographic Crime. Here’s approximately what went through my head: Cool, maps; man, I’ve loved maps since I was a girl trying to memorize the world capitols; how nerdy was I?; and very cool, a mystery too; maybe there’s fodder here; maybe I can write a novel that somehow includes maps; maybe antique maps; maybe rare, antique maps; maybe I ought to buy this book.

Hope I read it soon. That’s the plan anyhow.

5. Photo of the week: Vancouver, B.C. Just another sunset shot, this one with a tragically declining horizon line. Seems like I have to snap a sunset at each new destination. What is it about a beautiful sunset? I never tire of them; my reaction must be primordial: I’ve survived another day and can now retreat to the safety of my cave.

If it really does come back to the writing, how come it took me so long to realize it?

There I was, mid-20s, working and carousing in Brazil. In the midst of manipulating numbers as a financial analyst, I was also manipulating words on the side. It never occured to me that I might be onto something with the side activity.

Interestingly, it took two particular numbers to veer me away from finance altogether. While in Brazil, I was deluded enough to think that international business might be just the ticket, so I took the business school entrance exam (GMAT). I studied the quantitive portions like a fiend — practice problems upon practice problems until the math leaked out my ears. I glanced over the qualitative sections.

After all that studying, I only managed an 89th percentile for the math sections. Yet, without trying, a 99th percentile for the language sections.

Hellloooooooo, wake-up call. I ask you, how come I hadn’t taken stock of my proclivities before then? Seemed so obvious when I stared at the GMAT results.

Upon returning to the States, I promptly signed up for my first fiction workshop at U.C. Berkeley Extension and applied to and got into NYU’s Summer Publishing Institute. Six months later, I was living in lower Manhatten, the West Village to be exact. Three months after that, I landed a cool job at Warner Books (heaven after finance; books at every turn!) and registered for my second fiction workshop, at NYU.

And that was that, though I didn’t call myself a writer until years later. By then, I’d returned to the West Coast and switched to technical writing as my day-job. When my dot-com employer folded, I decided to live on the dole for awhile.

Here was my challenge: Could I sit down each day (ye old bum glue) and complete a novel before the money ran out? Did I have the right temperament for the work? The willpower? The imagination? A true desire?

Behold, I did. With that, I started calling myself a writer.

Just off the phone with my mom and will return to my daily five pages in a moment. This is too funny. My mother, bless her, was trying to help when she said, “Have you ever thought of writing a potboiler? A little bit of sex, a little bit of humor, a little bit of mystery…you can’t go wrong.”

My mom is the most obessive reader I know, and her tastes epitomize the Average Reading Public that commercial publishers target. Could it be that what she said was wise rather than naive? Now I ask myself: Could I write what my mom called “an easy read for people”? Just to get my foot in the publishing door? Could I?

I’m not saying I couldn’t, but it comes down to loving the story I’m telling. So far, my love hasn’t veered me toward potboiler-dom. If I come up with a story idea that grooves me in that direction, well, okay then, but I don’t see myself saying, Okay, now I’m going to write a potboiler that fits the publishers’ favored formulas of the moment…

My brain filters life and story in certain patterns that probably don’t lend themselves to potboiler-dom. I’m not saying I’m high-falutin’ literary. I’m not, not at all. I consider my stuff more commercial than literary, but maybe it’s not as commercial as I think it is? Still a little too complex? A little too character-driven?

Frankly, I have no idea.

All I can say is that once upon a time I wrote a sex scene, and even then, the sex in the scene was a bit surreal and beside the point anyhow. The sex meant something else — which is what I’m saying here: I don’t have an “easy” mind, so how can I write an easy read for people?

I guess we’ll see where the stories take me. You never know. I leave myself open to anything my brain conjures up…

Last week after delivering bad news, my agent said something that reeled me back to my early 20s as a recent grad living the old adage that you can’t get a job without experience, but how do you get experience without that first job?

I face a similarly vicious cycle many moons later. Publishing houses are uncomfortable with first-time novelists, but how to get beyond the first time without a debut novel? It’s a conundrum, all right.

Surprisingly, I’m not obsessing about that side of the biz for the moment. The conundrum lingers on the other side of the writing. After all, I did land that first job, which led to the second, and the third…

I’ve always returned to writing as my primary solace. Whatever else occured in my life, I always had a journal, binder paper, scratch paper, anything-paper close at hand.

I remember my first career job, when I didn’t know I’d be anything but a business-type. I was a financial analyst in Ecuador, working for I.B.M. when I.B.M. was king of the conglomerate heap. What I remember most about that job was writing my first scenic vignettes, hoping all the while that no one would catch words rather than numbers marching across the monitor. I hunched over my trembling experiments in selfish fashion. I was secretive, and I lost large swaths of time to the words.

These were my first fictional reveries. I’d always been a journaler, a letter writer, a diarist, a bad poet. Expressing myself in fictional form was a revelation. The vignettes didn’t have beginnings or middles or ends. I was simply reimagining my ex-pat life in fictional form, taking my experiences out of myself, giving them a shinier life.

I moved to Brazil for another exciting finance job. I wrote a longer vignette, almost a novella, about a crazy Brazilian woman who bore a remarkable resemblance to my crazy Brazilian roommate.

Did I think of myself as a writer? Nah. But, by then, I’d discovered my creative calling, and I was an addict.