Author: Bekki

“Tell me on a Sunday”

On By BekkiIn Musings & Ramblings1 Comment

Another Sunday afternoon alone in the apartment.  I finished up the first draft of a new story, a short about the Wild Hunt, that I’m rather pleased with.  After spending the past five months on the same novel, it’s nice to be able to bang out a whole draft of something in a few hours.  My writing plan for the rest of the year is to focus on getting some good drafts of short fiction done, things I can polish up and start sending out to magazines after the new year.  There’s also a secret plan involving the new novel, but I don’t want to say anything for fear of jinxing it.

I’m also planning on entering a couple of year end pitch contests.  Pitches, by the way, are so not my thing.  I’ve had an inordinate amount of trouble trying to get the description of Pomegranate Seeds into something resembling pitch length.  Either it ends up sounding like a romance, which it is definitely NOT, or my antagonist comes off as a total douchebag (he’s NOT), or it sounds so generic as to be unreadable.

Back when I was still doing choir and theatre, one of my favorite teachers used to tell us that what mattered about an audition was the process, not the result.  My sixteen-year-old self thought that was the kind of bullshit teachers say to make kids feel better.  Now, after two contests, three major revisions of my query letter, and more rejections than I care to think about, I get it.

I’m viewing the pitch contests not as an end, but as a step along the way.  Here’s what I’m hoping to get out of them, in this order.  A good, solid pitch for Pomegranate seeds that I can use when people ask what my novel is about.  A few more writers to follow on Twitter and possibly connect with.  A few agents to query that I might not otherwise have considered.  And, possibly, maybe, if I’m really, really lucky, some interest in my manuscript.

“Welcome to the Jungle”

On By BekkiIn Musings & RamblingsLeave a comment

In case you’ve wondered where I’ve been for the past few months, the answer is that life has simply been chaos.  A and I are in the process of buying a house, which has got to be both the most terrifying and the most bewildering thing we have ever done.  So far, the process has contained a great number of “two steps forward, one step back” moments.  The broker and the lawyer don’t seem to think there’s anything extraordinary about the lack of progress.

Meanwhile, because our lease ended at the end of September, A and I have been moving from sublet to sublet.  We spent October in Ridgewood, which is this cute little neighborhood on the border of Brooklyn and Queens.  By the time I’d finally figured out how to direct taxi drivers to the place, the hurricane hit and the midtown tunnel closed.  By the time I figured out the directions for going over the Queensboro bridge, it was time to move.

We’re now up in Harlem, in a ground level apartment that A has taken to calling the “Love Palace” because the living room has five couches and pictures of naked people on the walls.  It’s steam heated, which means that when the heat is on, it is ON, at which point we call the apartment the “Love Jungle.”

No idea where we’ll be next month.

In other news, we’re planning to head back to the Bay for part of January.  Because nothing says “tropical vacation” like San Francisco in the rainy season.

“Doll Parts”

On By BekkiIn This is FeminismLeave a comment

A few months ago, Anne-Marie Slaughter wrote a great article titled “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.”  If you haven’t read it yet, you should.  Go ahead.  I’ll still be here when you’re done.

My reaction to the article was somewhere in between “of course” and “there’s no way that kind of systemic change will ever happen.”  Then I went on with my life.

I’m one of those women who has been told, from Day One, that I can have anything I want as long as I’m willing to work hard enough for it.  So I did.  Husband?  Check.  Career?  Check.  Kids?  Not yet, but on the horizon.  Lately, though, I’ve been feeling stretched over too many places, as if there’s not enough of me to go around.

I feel guilty that I don’t have enough time to spend with my husband, frustrated that I don’t speak another language (or another two or three) fluently enough to work in, stressed because it seems like there’s never time enough in the day to go to the gym or to yoga class.  The only time I feel peaceful is when I’m writing — but that means waking up at early o’clock to claw space out of my day.

I’m fairly sure I’m not the only one who feels this way.  For me, so far, the balance has been in learning what things I can let go.  Getting fluent in Spanish?  Forget it. Nightly workouts at the gym?  Not gonna happen.  Even so, it feels like there should be a way to move to a place, not where we can have it all, but where we don’t have to feel guilty about letting it go.

 

“(500 more)”

On By BekkiIn Musings & RamblingsLeave a comment

A wise man once said, the secret to being a great writer is to apply ass to chair.*  So far as wisdom goes, it seems to be accurate and, remarkable of remarkables, working.

In January, I started tracking my writing via spreadsheet.  Eight months later, I have a novel with an agent, a short story ready for submission (already rejected once, poor thing) and a new novel that’s already 1/3 of the way done.  Which is not bad at all.  But what I’ve really noticed, even more than how much I’ve written and how submission-ready it is, is the learning curve.

In 2005, I did NaNoWriMo for the first time.  I wrote a 50,000 word story about a girl who set off to rescue a kidnapped boy from her village and fell in with a group of amazon-type women along the way.  I don’t remember it having much of a plot. For that matter, I don’t think she even rescued the boy.  I haven’t looked at it since the end of that November.  I expect it’s rather terrible.

In 2006, I did NaNo again, after a year of not writing much of anything.  Again, I didn’t have much of a plot, and most of my writing was a frantic attempt to stay one step ahead of my daily word count.  This time, though, I submitted the opening pages to a writer’s workshop.

In January 2007 I workshopped my Persephone story with a mystery writer named Laura Lippman, who gave me enough encouragement that I thought it was worth doing a rewrite.  That spring, I took myself and my new laptop to the Oakland rose garden or to Lake Merritt or anywhere else that was bright and sunny and wrote.  When it was done, I had a passable second draft that still needed a lot of work.

In August 2007, I started law school.  It took me until last summer to drag my novel out of the box it had been hiding in, brush it off, realize it wasn’t half bad, and start revising with a vengeance. That project finished up around March, and of it went into the world.

Around April of this year, I started the new book.This time, instead of writing from scene to scene, I outlined.  I deliberated.  I thought about the choices the character would have to make.  I thought about who she might run into along the way.  Then I started writing, almost every day, with the understanding that if I went to bed at a reasonable hour I would make myself get up and write, but if I had one of those days where I didn’t get home from work until after midnight I wouldn’t beat myself up for sleeping in.

More than anything else, it has made me a better writer. I think about what I’m doing with the story and what I need to be doing constantly, not just while I’m in the chair. Because the muse may come when and where she chooses, but if I’m in my chair in the morning, she’ll always know where to find me.

*  http://samjmiller.com/2012/08/14/clarion-2012-every-brilliant-piece-of-writing-advice/

“A Lack of Color”

On By BekkiIn Musings & RamblingsLeave a comment

Yesterday, the city closed Park Avenue to traffic and opened it up to everyone else: bikers, runners, walkers, roller-bladers, guys in duck suits. My husband and rode our bikes all the way down to Foley Square, stopping briefly at REI so that I could buy a neon pink sports bra to replace the much too hot T-shirt I was wearing, and decided to go over the Brooklyn Bridge.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked me.

“Why not?”

Because the pedestrian walkway over the bridge was a knotted, tangled mess of bicycles and people spread out four abreast. Even so, I’d rather dodge people than taxis any day, and as we got closer to the top the walkers and bikers sorted themselves out to (mostly) the correct sides of the path. Even so, when we got to the bottom, we decided to go back via the Williamsburg or Manhattan bridges. We made a left at the foot of the bridge, rode north until we saw another bridge, and turned towards it.

That’s where things got interesting. My husband rode up onto the sidewalk toward the bridge (so as to not be crossing the Manhattan bridge in the same lanes as the cars). I stayed on the street, because it looked like the sidewalk made a dead end a few hundred feet up. As I got closer and realized the sidewalk turned rather than ending, it seemed like a good idea to get on it. I didn’t quite turn my wheel parallel enough to the lip of the sidewalk, though, so instead of going up onto the sidewalk the front wheel of my bike slid along it for a moment before the bike went over, sending me bouncing along the pavement.

I threw out an arm to brace myself, and slammed into a dark green plywood wall, taking a bit of skin off my ankle along the way but otherwise unhurt. Then I stood up, shook myself off, and realized that my shoulder hurt. A lot. I did the visual — no bones sticking out, no bleeding — concluded I may have pulled a muscle but hadn’t broken anything, and leaned against my bike to catch my breath. At about this point, my husband came back to make sure I was okay.

“I’m okay,” I told him. “Just give me a minute.” A really weird thing started to happen. First my ears started to feel like I’d stuffed cotton in them, and everything sounded kind of far away. Then things started to get brighter. It was pretty sunny and bright out already, but the leaves on the trees started to look less green and more white, and the pavement was so bright it almost hurt to look at. I closed my eyes a few times, thinking that would make it go away. It didn’t.

“Everything’s getting brighter,” I told my husband. “I’m having trouble seeing.”

“Did you hit your head?” he asked.

I’m pretty sure I didn’t, but it happened really fast – one minute I was riding toward the sidewalk, the next minute my shoulder was slamming into the plywood.

“You’re okay,” he told me, and he decided we were going to go across the street to where it was shady. The walk across the street took forever. It was one of those big two-way streets, with an island in the middle. It took us an entire light to make it to the island. I could barely see anything – the whole world looked like one of those “turn to sketch” photoshop filters, where everything is black and white and drawn in crisp, bold outlines. Nothing that I was seeing made sense.

My husband made me wait for what seemed like an eternity on the traffic island, even though I didn’t see any cars going by, and other pedestrians were walking by us. I wanted to get off the street and somewhere I could sit down so much that I forced myself to focus. Colors started to appear again: the brilliant orange of the “don’t walk” sign, the green leaves of the trees in the shady area in front of us.

By the time we crossed the street and I sat down on a ledge, I could see again: the gray granite of the ledge, the faded brown of the benches, the orangey-brown of the wood chips around the bushes. It had probably been about five minutes from the time I fell off my bike, maybe ten. I can’t remember a scarier ten minutes in my life.

We sat for a little longer. I pulled a wipe out of the bag and cleaned the dirt and bike grease off my legs. It was enough to make me feel fully human again. Then we got back on the bikes, and rode back onto the sidewalk and over the Manhattan bridge. I rode so slowly on the way up that even the rollerbladers passed me, but I didn’t care. My ankle was still stinging, and my shoulder hurt, but that was nothing compared to the total terror I had felt a few minutes before.

On the way down the bridge, I smoked those rollerbladers.