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Guest blog on Word for Words, and the winners of the giveaway.

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Alas, Spy Week has come to a close, but what a close! Today I did a guest post on Word for Words, the blog of fellow Fairfield University MFAer Adele Annesi. It touches on the worries I had about my first published book being genre fiction, especially right after my graduation from an MFA program which teaches the art of writing literary fiction.

Head on over and check it out, and then stick around to check out Adele’s blog. Also, take a peek at her short story “Last Kiss Before Customs,” recently published in Midway Journal. Adele writes quiet, poignant fiction, and it’s always satisfying for me to read what she writes.

Now – onto the winners of the giveway. Here’s the deal. I am off two copies of Beware the Hawk to people who told me yesterday about the most ridiculous thing they’ve had to do for work. I did the drawing this afternoon, throwing the names of the four entrants into the only hat I own that resembles a fedora. And here are the winners:Beware the Hawk giveaway winners.

That’s right! Dreampeddler, whose name is Jodie, and who once cleaned hotel rooms for a year and a half at an establishment where the other maids called her Katie (and the management made her clean the bathrooms with only the dirty towels) wins, as does Discourse in C Sharp Minor who spent her first day on the job filming a lecture on “nitrogen-pooping nematodes.” I love how excrement is a part of both the winners’ stories.

Our other two contestants were Cheese-borrowing Erin and Schnauzer-beard blow-drying Elizabeth.

Winners, please shoot me your emails and I will send you your prizes. And if one of you already has a copy and would like to cede your prize and give it to a contestant who doesn’t have the e-book, please let me know.

Thanks for playing!

 

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Ending Spy Week with a bang. And by “bang” I mean “giveaway.”

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Beware The Hawk novellaOr more in keeping with my character’s dilemma, I’m ending Spy Week with a crunch.

Remember when I said I was having a hard time telling people what my book is about?  I’ve had to summarize my novella a lot of different ways since then, but if you get right down to it, it’s basically about a girl who is having a really bad day at work. A bad couple of days, actually.

So here’s the deal. If you’d like a copy of Beware the Hawk, leave a comment telling me about the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever had to do for work. And then ‘like’ my Facebook page, because I’m needy.

This contest will be active all Friday. Then I will put all your names into a fedora and pick two at random. I will send those winners copies of my e-book.

And if you’re not into all that? Click here to watch another spy with issues.

Also, I’m still hanging on for more beard submissions, folks. But I do have some awesome beard pictures that were sent in to me, so I will be posting about that later today.

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Writerly goals and personal battles for the new year.

On New Year’s Eve, I posted about a minor resolution dilemma. I was torn between posting a list of New Year’s resolutions and checking in monthly on this blog to report progress or using 2012 to work on some major inner conflicts.

Since I’m the sort of person who likes to have her cake and eat it too, I’ve decided to do a little of both. My resolutions are mostly writing-related. I’ll check in on the first of each month with my progress on these.

My conflict resolutions are personal, but I plan to treat them as if they were a project for grad school. I’m going to do more than search my soul for the answers to my questions, because I need a little more assistance than my soul is capable of providing. So I will pair navel-gazing with research and examine as many sides of each issue as I can. By year’s end, I plan to have written a long essay about at least one of the conflicts I worked on, and I will try to publish it. (I’m going to try to submit the essay to a magazine or journal, but if all else fails, I will publish it here.)

The ground rules are set. Here are my resolutions and conflicts: Read more

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In which I bite the bullet and say what my upcoming book is about.

I often deliberately forget that I am having a novella published (in e-book form) in January.

The book is called “Beware the Hawk,” and it’s being published by Vagabondage Press and I really am very excited, but you’d never know it because over the Christmas holiday, I didn’t talk about it unless someone else brought it up. (Publishers, if you’re reading this, I am aware that this is not a viable marketing strategy.)

I think part of the reason that I push the book from my mind is this: people ask me what it’s about and – like Eminem in the opening scenes of 8 Mile – I choke.

I stammer something like “It’s about a girl, and spies. It’s funny. Well, I think it’s funny.” This is hardly the enthused, informative pitch I was taught in grad school to make. “What is it about” is a perfectly reasonable question; I’m the author and ought to know. But the question trips me up, maybe because I rarely think of a piece of my fiction as something that other people will read. For the most part, I doubt that the figments of my imagination will actually leave my hard drive and move out into the world.

I do have a couple of projects that are my golden children. If any of my work is published, I tell myself, it will be these privileged novels. I groom and prep them for publication. I submit them to my writers’ groups. I prepare myself to let them go.

“Beware the Hawk” was not one of these. I began writing “Beware the Hawk” when I was 23, worked on it with my very first writers’ group, and then – five pages from the end – abandoned the project when I was 25. I left it unfinished until this year. I was caught off guard by its acceptance this fall. To bring it back to the children metaphor: I expected it to grow up to be a drug dealer, but it’s surprised me by going to med school on scholarship.

Also there’s this – the characters and plot have been marinating in my brain for a decade. I’ve unconsciously built unmentioned back stories for each character. Like my houseplants, I neglected them, and they grew. The idea of summing up all of these thoughts and associations is daunting.

But not is not the time for such timidity. Now I must plot-summarize as if the devil himself were at my heels. The publishers tell me that the book will be out in the next three to four weeks, either on the 17th or on the 24th, and if I’m going to market it at all, I should learn how to describe it. The publishers have categorized it as a spy-satire, but I’ll need to be armed with a summary as I do the virtual book tour. With that in mind, I’ve come up with a list of ways to describe the contents of my novella.

“Beware the Hawk” is about:

i. …a young pink-haired Brooklynite who is a courier for a secret anti-government group, called the Resistance. She’s sent up to Boston to pick something up one night in winter, and everything goes wrong from the moment she steps off the Fung-Wah bus.

ii. …a young woman who desires to live outside society and its rules and who learns that this is not possible (particularly if one is fond of life in the city.)

iii. …making choices young and having to live with them.

iv. …failure.

v. …50 (virtual) pages long.

vi. …a girl, her iPhone, an inept co-worker, a hot mechanic and a leg injury.

Put all those together and that’s what it’s about, although I feel like a lot is still left out. Which is funny, since the book is only a 50ish page novella. No wonder J.K. Rowling unveiled her Pottermore website this year. Seven books and eight films and she still feels like she hasn’t adequately described the contents of her Harry Potter universe to us. Not that I’m going to be unveiling any “Beware the Hawk” web portals anytime soon.

I will however, be sharing the cover art with you. I got a peek at it tonight and I’m excited. The publishers will be sending the image to me just as soon as it’s finalized.

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Weekly worsts – National Novel Writing Month

I think I might have mentioned in my last post that National Novel Writing Month is not about quality; it’s about quantity.

A group of friends and I celebrate this, by exchanging our best and worst sentences at the end of each day of National Novel Writing Month. We started this years ago, when most of us worked in the same office and after we sent the best-worst email, you could hear the others laughing at their desks. I am aware that it’s Saturday, and not many people check blogs on the weekend because they’re away from their computers and out living their lives, but I thought I’d extend part of the tradition to the this blog.

In the spirit of NaNoWriMo, here’s a sample of some of the worst writing this week has produced. Of the 7192 words I’ve produced so far, these are the most unfortunate, and that’s saying a lot.  Normally, I don’t like to share my creative writing online, but since all of this is really bad, none of it is likely to make it into the finished manuscript and I don’t feel the need to keep any of it a professional secret. Some of these sentences are lame. Some are bizarre. Some are just stupid.

Nov. 1 – Amazing how a person can be so afraid of something one minute and so fascinated by it the next.

Nov. 2 – “Steve, what about the kids? No one’s going to want to come here if you’re killing their favorite dinosaurs.”

Nov. 3 –  She removes her purse from between her arm and ribs and gestures toward the window with it. (The logistics of this one boggle the mind.)

Nov. 4  – “I don’t do primates.” (Good. Wait a minute. What?)

A little anti-climactic, I know. But we’ve only been noveling for four days. I’ll try to write really horrifying ones in the next week. I promise  to get back to you all with a full seven days of lame sentences next Saturday.

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What my MFA program gave me.

This is where our residencies are held.

On Saturday, I graduated from my MFA program in Mystic, Connecticut. We had one more day at the residency, and now, I’m settling down to eat some lunch and do some laundry at home. I want to reflect on the program in a post, but because I’m still a little fried from 10 days of workshops, seminars, heavy drinking and various other writing-related activities, a proper blog post is beyond my abilities.

Luckily, yesterday I took a seminar, given by Porochista Khakpour, on experimental writing, and now I don’t feel the need to adhere to traditional forms.

So here, in no particular order, is a list of some of  of the things I’ve gained from Fairfield University’s Master of Fine Arts program on Enders Island in Mystic:

 

An MFA in Creative Writing, with a concentration in creative fiction

Five pounds

At least 100 Facebook friends

At least 10 really close friends

The pleasure of working with four talented published authors, who mentored me and read my work

The pleasure of having workshops with nine other published professors, and of taking seminars from many more

The honor of drinking a lot of Crane Lake table wine with almost every professor in the program, whether I worked with them or not

The company of poets

Several short stories that I might be able to publish

Two that I did/will publish

A trio of ill-conceived poems, inspired by Crane Lake table wine, sleepless nights and the company of poets

An article

Writing groups

Hundreds of bug bites

Dark circles under my eyes

A deep aversion to salads

The knowledge that my liver can still take abuse

A rudimentary understanding of LinkedIn

A first draft of a novel

The understanding that there is a big difference between the first draft of a novel and something that is good enough to show to an agent/publisher/my mother

The knowledge that I have to interview at least six drag queens in order for my novel to work

A funny-looking cap and gown and hood

Resilience during workshops

The ability to at least be quiet during workshop if I can’t be resilient

A love of strong verbs

An almost Pavlovian response to seeing bottles of Crane Lake table wine

50 other ideas for other novels that I can’t pursue until I hand this piece to an agent/publisher/my mother

Student loans that will come due any second now

A few connections

Some pointers on living my life after the MFA

A suspicion that life post-MFA will be a lot like life during the MFA, only without monthly packets and with student loans

The chance to see Wally Lamb, Sue Silverman, Mary Karr, Charles Simic, Philip Schultz and Rick Moody as they read from their work.

The haunting phrase, “Go get the eggs, you dwarf,” courtesy of Rick Moody’s reading in 2009.

An aversion to adverbs

A very, very long list of books I want to read

A long list of books that I have read

The knowledge that I may die at a very old age without having been able to read every book mentioned by every person I met at the program

The experience of being a fiction reader for Mason’s Road journal

The experience of being a T.A.

Two years of predetermined plans on New Year’s Eve

An ability to follow my bliss

Thank you, Fairfield University. This was exactly what I needed.

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Thoughts about poetry

On my first day of my grad school residency, about two weeks ago, one of my colleagues flagged me down.

“Why,” he asked, “do you write novels?”

This is a good question, and something I hadn’t really thought about.

Our grad school program is divided into three sections, or genres: Fiction, Non-fiction and Poetry. I think that sometimes we tend to get hung up on these labels. At our cores, we are all writers, and many of us – even if we don’t officially study cross-genre within our program – do write in other genres. You have only to attend a student reading to see fiction writers reading essays and non-fiction people reading poetry. I have yet to see a poet read fiction, but it’s sure to happen. We are all creative writers, and it would be silly to expect us to stick to one form.

So when my friend asked why I was writing fiction, and the novel in particular, I had to take a minute. My response was this: I write novels because I enjoy reading them, and because that’s what I read, I believe that the novel is the highest form the written word can take.

After a week and a half, I’m not quite satisfied with that answer.

My first love was poetry. I remember writing a poem at the age of seven. My mother tells me I was writing poetry earlier. I bought books of poetry in the fourth grade. I played with rhyme and meter all through high school and college. I’m a card-carrying member of the I-wrote-moody-poetry-in-high-school club. I was also a poetry slam groupie in high school. I fell deeply and indecently in love with Taylor Mali. (I got over that.) I wrote a collection of angsty poems in college. My first creative publication, in the now-defunct Citizen Culture Magazine, was a poem. I framed it. It hangs above my desk. Then, somehow, poetry took a backseat to fiction.

I don’t know why. I wrote fiction and poetry at the same time through high school in college. Like a kid who starts out left-handed, learns to use his right hand, becomes ambidextrous as a teenager and then grows into a right-handed adult, I switched to fiction. No reason. It just happened.

Except now, after the last residency, I’m considering a return to poetry. I took two poetry seminars, and went to a poetry graduate reading and it strikes me that I’m missing out on something I enjoy. I have no idea what the vocabulary of poetry is – I couldn’t identify a sonnet, for example. And I’m intimidated by the distilled emotion presented in poetry. I think I will have a go at it anyhow. I’m not planning to forsake fiction. It is possible that the novel is, for me, the highest form the written word can take. But that doesn’t mean that I have to neglect poetry.

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