It’s only been eight days since I finished the first draft of my current novel and already I’m second-guessing the method that got me to the end of the draft. I’m feeling anxious to dive in to revisions, though I’ll make myself wait the full month before I even look at it again. This is no different from the first two books. I always feel best when I’m working. What’s different this time is that I’m not entirely sure I need that full month away from the manuscript because my memory of it is hazy.

I wrote this draft in three months, rather than my usual year or more. I didn’t let myself edit as I went, no backtracking to tinker and tighten, no retracing my steps to undo a wrong choice. This moved me very quickly from beginning to end, but I’m afraid that speed might have kept me skimming along the surface too much. See…I don’t know the book like I knew the other two at this point. I can’t feel it the same way. Only eight days away and it’s a fever dream, already slipping away.

Maybe that habitual backtracking that I didn’t allow myself this time is my way of sinking into my characters and their stories. Maybe I was doing more than I realized as I poked around and rewrote and reconsidered. I’m not at all sure what I’m going to find when I pick it back up on March 20th.

It was an experiment, this attempt at speed. Whatever I’ve done can be undone or done more deeply in revisions. But still…my best work usually comes from my slow, blind first pass. What if I let the book this one had the potential to be slip away for the sake of an experiment? Probably not. And if so, I’ll live. But I’m nervous about it. I keep remembering something Michael Cunningham told me once, back in those golden MFA days. (Ah! Euphoric recall!) He said, “No good ever came of rushing.”

Godammit. I hope I don’t sit down to a horrific mess when I open that Scrivener file again.

It was a lean winter in the garden this year. A cold, wet end to summer meant the fall and winter vegetables didn’t get as big as I would have hoped before the days got short and all growth stopped (or rather, slowed down so much it may as well have stopped. Yes, by all means, let’s be precise about these things). In past winters we’ve been able to grow nearly all the vegetables we needed. For most of this winter we had only arugula and green onions from the garden. I planned ahead, I planted everything in time, and I still had to buy most of our vegetables–and we eat A LOT of vegetables. It burned my ass to pay for all those vegetables while the garden sat full of stunted kale, collards, and spinach; headless broccoli and cauliflower plants; cabbages that never…well…cabbaged. A sad, sad tale.

Once we made it through January things started growing again. The arugula and green onions are still going, but now we get spinach, lettuce, and kale, too. The carrots are small, but I pull a few at a time anyway. The cabbages don’t seem like they’ll ever form nice tight heads, so I’ve started harvesting the loose outer leaves.

Here’s what the harvest looked like last week. Not bad for late winter, but not even close to what I’d planned for:

That harvest got us through two days. Those containers are from the big 1lb tubs of prewashed spinach–evidence of all the greens we had to BUY this winter. Have I mentioned how much it pisses me off to have to buy vegetables when my own good soil has been tasked with the whole feeding-the-family business? Not to mention that I have a hard time forgetting that a nine-year-old died from drinking smoothies made with prewashed spinach when that e-coli spinach contamination debacle was going on. When I have to buy the stuff, I eat at least twice from each batch before I give it to the kids. (Hush now. I may be paranoid, but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong.)

But look! The carrots are in love. Awwwww!

(No, actually I just put off thinning them too long. That’s carrot neglect right there, folks. I hate thinning carrots, their wispy little fronds all tangled up together…)

I’ve got the spring garden planned and I’m hoping for better luck. We’ll have the usual peas, radishes, spinach, lettuces. Plus all the stuff that did jack shit over the winter is now perking up and starting to grow, so it looks like we’ll have a lot more to eat in early spring than usual. Fingers crossed the asparagus bed wakes up and does well. It’ll be in its fifth year, so I’m expecting a nice harvest. (And you know how well expectations go in the garden…) No arugula this spring, though. Not too many days have gone by this winter without some form of arugula in at least one meal. I think we’re all ready for a break from it.

Oh–and a useful thing from Pinterest that I not only pinned but actually did? This. It totally works. I planted this little cutie and it’s growing very nicely indeed.

That’s our insistent little arugula patch in the background (along with some weeds I’d just pulled. Please ignore the mess). That stuff survived very unPortlandlike freezes, snow, hail, rain… All of it without any cloche. It’s heroic, that patch. I’ll almost be sad to see it go. I’ll have to drown my sorrows in spring radishes. Many, many radishes.

How about you? How’s your garden doing? What are you planting for spring?

I typed “The End” on the first draft of Cold Black Stars a little after two a.m. last night. Today was my (completely arbitrary, self-imposed) deadline to finish it. It’s pure luck or coincidence that I finished on deadline. The end of a novel is such a hazy target when you don’t write with an outline. Even so, it’s especially satisfying to have finished on the date I picked. (My half birthday! There must be some luck in that, yes?)

My brain’s already worrying around the manuscript’s edges. All the things that I know missed the mark, the false steps, things that could be tighter, stronger, better, truer. There’s a character who needs to be cut. I need to dig deeper into everyone who remains.

But for now, I let it rest. I step away from it for a month at least, so I can see it with somewhat distanced eyes when I reread it and start to revise. In the meantime, there’s a short story that’s been nagging at me, so I’ll poke at that. And reading. Lots and lots of reading. I need to fill the well back up.

I used to be seriously, obnoxiously opposed to ebooks. I said things about needing the smell of paper, about not being willing to give up the fetish of turning the page. I was so, so sure I wanted nothing to do with them. Then we were expecting our second baby in 2010, and Billy remembered far better than I did just how much time I spent lying around nursing Kiddo when he was a baby. He remembered how sore my wrist and fingers would get from straining to hold a book open to read with one hand for an hour or more at a time. He bought me a Kindle. I was…less than grateful. Then the girlchild arrived and I devoured three books via Kindle a week while lying around nursing her, with no wrist pain. Bonus: she never once got bonked on the head by a hardcover slipping out of my hand. The only thing I really didn’t like about the Kindle was that I could only feed it through Amazon. I hated being bound to them like that.

Last year we got an iPod Touch and I switched to reading books on that with the Kindle app. There was still the Amazon issue, but it was even easier to hold, since I can cradle it in the palm of one hand, and with the backlit screen I don’t need to constantly adjust a booklight to be sure I’m not shining it directly in the sleeping kid’s face. I don’t read while the girl is awake and nursing–that just seems rude–but there is so much time at naptime and bedtime when she’s nursing and dozing, asleep but not yet ready to let go of that latch. I’m now back to reading most books in the regular paper version, but I keep one ebook on the go at all times for that nursing and dozing.

I’d hoped to switch from Amazon and the Kindle app to using Overdrive to read ebooks borrowed from the library, but frankly the selection is pretty slim. Mostly bestsellers of the sort I have no interest in. So now I’m an ebook convert, but still resenting having to support the great gobbling mouth that is Amazon. What’s an independent-bookstore-loving reader to do?

Good news! The crops are saved! Well, maybe not, but…hey! Look! A much, much better option is now available. Indiebound! (I heard about it from Rachael.) We can now buy ebooks from our local independent booksellers and read them on our various e-devices! Here’s the selection at my local bookstore.

Right now I’m reading These Dreams of You on the iPod, purchased from Amazon because I didn’t yet know about this Indiebound business. My next ebook, though? It’s coming straight from Powell’s. Pretty damn sweet.

(Amanda Palmer, “In My Mind”)

Bah.

I’m so sick of myself tonight.

I’ve still got the crash proofreading job on my plate–I need to ship it back to my client on Friday morning–so I haven’t touched Cold Black Stars in days. Working on the new book is what helps me keep my shit mostly together while Revolution makes the rounds with publishers. I’ve been here before, when Gail was shopping Drowning Practice around. It was easier then, because I didn’t yet know that good books go unpublished all the time. Or, I knew it on some level but didn’t believe for a second that my book would be one of them. This time, I go in without the protective layers of my obnoxious MFA ego. This time I go in with hope, but also the knowledge that it very well might not happen for this book either.

I spent too much energy today thinking about other writers, writers who are having the career I thought was my due when I barreled out of my MFA program in 2005. I graduated with a finished first novel, a top-tier agent, a much-sought-after residency at an artists’ colony… Followed by my first lit mag publication, my first Pushcart Prize nomination… I was on my way, you know? And from that point in 2005, when everything seemed to be opening up for me, the possibilities in fact started to narrow, little by little while I watched other people get their books published, get nominated for prizes, give readings… They get these things by their hard work, but damnit I’ve done the work too. I continue to do the work.

Maybe there are just as many possibilities as ever. Maybe they just aren’t the specific possibilities I’d thought I deserved. I don’t know.

Here I am, Drowning Practice in the drawer since 2008 but, hey, that’s okay because I took everything I learned from writing that novel and poured it into Revolution and I am so in love with that book. I truly am. But I no longer believe that means a damn thing in the marketplace. This book belongs with a small independent press, and luckily you don’t need an agent to approach these presses, because as I mentioned a few posts ago, Gail and I parted ways. I’m on my own now. That scares me. I didn’t realize how much comfort I’d drawn from having representation until I no longer had it. My first book might not have sold, but I had this powerful person in my corner who believed in me. And as her client I was among the chosen and obviously in a better position than the rest of the struggling writers out there who didn’t have an agent and…yeah… It got ugly around here for a while. I had a lot of reconsidering to do. That played a big part in my blog silence.

I’m submitting The Revolution of Every Day to small presses on my own. I don’t know what’s going to happen with it. I don’t know if those of you who’ve been so kind to me over the years here, who keep saying how you hope one day to read one of my published novels, will ever get to read it. And it’s that awfully self-centered doubt that’s got me so fucking sick of myself tonight. I’m one of hundreds of thousands of writers laboring in obscurity (how fucking grandiose). Some of them are better writers than me. Some of them are worse. It’s exhausting, this jealousy, this wondering if it will ever happen for me.

That’s it… I don’t have any solutions… No charges to myself to remember that it’s the work that matters, that publishing is something entirely separate, that it shouldn’t be important. It is important. And I want it So. Damn. Hard.

I kept this all to myself for so long. I was so ashamed to come here and tell you that I no longer had an agent. That I’m–GASP!–without representation.

Fuck it. I AM AN UNAGENTED WRITER! THE NOVEL I LABORED OVER FOR SIX YEARS IS NOW BEING SENT TO SLUSH PILES!

There. I said it.

1. Yeah…kind of a crappy day. I’ve got a crash freelance job on my desk, which somehow cued the girlchild to wake up every fifteen minutes last night as I was trying to work. That meant I really needed to get a lot done during her nap time today, so of course she skipped her nap. I nursed her for an hour, walked her in the stroller for forty minutes, nursed her for another twenty minutes… Nothing. At that point it was too late to try the big guns–driving her down in the car–because we had to leave to pick Kiddo up at school in a half hour. Second time in twenty-two months she’s skipped a nap and she does it when I’m on deadline. Tell me not to take it personally. Go ahead.

The upside is that she crashed at 6:30 tonight and has only woken up twice briefly (pooh pooh pooh) and I’m getting enough work done to justify this brief sanity/blogging break. (Because complaining to you is therapeutic, you see.)

2. So today, less than awesome. But this! This is awesome: Vanessa Veselka and Lidia Yuknavitch talk about writing violent female characters. And it’s a three-parter, so there’s more goodness to look forward to.

3. And then there’s always Lyle Lovett. You need more Lyle in your life. You really do.

What I’m reading now:

What’s at the top of the to-be-read pile:

What I’m waiting impatiently for:

See that? That’s what you get when you piss off a five-year-old. Those are drawings of me “with poop all over your clothes, Mama.” He hung them up and I said, “Ah, so there’s poop on your wall now,” which he thought was hilarious. At that point I was forgiven, and allowed to help him spell “wall.”

Hi. Yeah. It’s me. I guess I’m back. At least, I mean to be back. I’ve missed you. Does that count for something? Surely it must. (Though, dear ones, I’m on Twitter pretty much every day because it’s so much easier to find a few moments to talk to folks in 140-character bites while chasing after two kids. So if you’ve REALLY missed me you can always find me there.)

Meta Pole. Random photo because it pleases me. Though it pleased me so much more in person.

What’s finally gotten me off my ass to talk to you again? I wanted to say something on Twitter today and just couldn’t do it without spreading it out across ten tweets or more. At which point I realized that…Oh yeah. That’s what I used to use the blog for, right? To talk to people for more than 140 characters at a time? And I recalled that I liked it. I liked it quite a bit. And here I am. Are you still here?

What I wanted to talk about: process and the new novel. As you may recall from about three posts and three months ago, I had put the new novel (aka Novel Numbah Three, aka Cold Black Stars) on the back burner to finish revisions on The Revolution of Every Day and was finally able to pick it up again at the end of October. At that point it had been sitting for so long, and with only one thin little chapter to it, that the only way to pick it back up was to begin again. So at the end of October I did just that.

It took a year to write the first draft of my first novel, Drowning Practice (may it sleep comfortably in my former agent’s drawer. Yes, I said former agent. Yes, there’s a story behind that. Today is not the day for that story. Suffice it to say I still love her and she still loves me and we have parted on the most amicable of terms possible). I wrote that one while I was getting my MFA and the poor thing got workshopped nearly to death. In fact, I think it might not have been relegated to the drawer had it not been dragged through workshops before I even knew what it was really about and what it wanted to be. (Maybe someday I’ll pick it back up and try to find those shards worth keeping but it feels like something a stranger wrote, some thirty-year-old girl in Brooklyn with pink hair and no kids and a drafty old crumbling house.) I learned a lot about my revision process from writing that book, but perhaps not so much about my first-draft process, because of those workshops. I did, however, learn an invaluable lesson–one of the most important things I drew from that MFA experience: I never, ever, ever show a single word of anything to anyone when it’s in first draft. Maybe I’ll show second draft to my most trusted draft readers. Usually, though, I keep it to myself until third draft. It’s just too dangerous for me to have someone else’s ideas on a book or story before I truly understand where it’s going myself. I’m highly suggestible, I suppose. Because I was workshopping that novel as I wrote it, large parts of it got worked over and rewritten and reimagined several times before the book even had an end. I don’t recommend that, at least I don’t recommend it to myself anymore.

Everything was different with The Revolution of Every Day. I started it on the first day of a month-long residency at Ragdale in the fall of 2005 (oh the luxury of being a childless writer! I won’t see the inside of an artists’ colony for another ten years or so because I’m not the sort who likes to be away from her kids). I kept it to myself and worked steadily for that month and several months after, but by then I was working with my agent and there were more revisions to be done on Drowning Practice before it went out to publishers. I was pregnant with the kiddo and it was important to get the revisions nailed down before he was born because she and I both knew not much work would get done after his birth for a good long time. Revolution was set aside.

(By the way, if you can ever arrange to be pregnant at an artists’ colony, do so. Naps whenever you want them and someone else cooking your dinners.)

And then Kiddo was born. I didn’t write a word of fiction until he was about eighteen months old. Yes, that hurt. It hurt a lot. He’s worth it.

I have no idea how long it would have taken me to write that first draft of Revolution if Kiddo’s arrival hadn’t been a factor. It took six years to write eight drafts, but I don’t remember exactly when I finished that first draft. I know it was more than a year. And I know that I didn’t write it straight through from beginning to end. I did a lot of backtracking as I went. I reached the hundred-page point and went back and did a major rewrite of that whole first third. I did that a few more times as I worked my way toward the end. Only the final third fell out all in one piece, but that’s how the endings tend to come if you’ve taken the right path to get there.

Rachael and I talk craft a lot, and I find her process fascinating because it’s so different from what I’d done with the first two books and with my short fiction. She writes her first drafts incredibly quickly. She’s a firm believer in the Shitty First Draft. Now, I write a loose first draft, too, and I always write blind–I’m not an outliner by any means–but there’s always been that backtracking and tinkering. I’ve never started at the beginning and plowed straight on to the end, giving myself permission to write badly along the way, with the understanding that that’s what revisions are for.

Mind you, Rachael hates writing first drafts and loves to revise. I love first drafts and only tolerate revising because it’s necessary. I think she writes her first drafts that way because she’d rather get it over with as quickly as possible. But you know what? She gets results. She gets those first drafts done, and then digs in and gets her revisions done and has some damn fine books to show for it. (Especially one that hasn’t been published yet that is going to fucking blow you away when it comes out. No, it’s not a romance. Yes, it’s fiction. It’s… It’s amazing. Just you wait.)

With this third book, I decided I wanted to try something new. This was going to be the Do What Rachael Does novel. I decided I would write the first draft in three months. I would not backtrack. I would write fast and loose and let things fall where they fell and just trust that if I could just get it down I can fix and tweak and reshape in subsequent drafts. Because what the hell? I’m only thirty-eight. This is only my third novel. I’m too young and too new at this to be claiming a process set in stone–especially when the experiences of the first two books were determined by grad school and new motherhood.

I was dubious. I was afraid I was going to waste my time and spend all the juice of this story on a clumsy cluttered nonsensical mess of a draft that would be too far gone to revise into anything worth keeping. But I did it anyway. You know what? It’s been amazing. Working that fast all kinds of wonderful surprises are cropping up, all kinds of connections clicking into place as I go. It’s been so much easier to get out of my own way moving this quickly. I’m 70k words into the first draft, and it feels like its only got another 10 or 20k left in it. I’m aiming for a finished draft on my arbitrary deadline of February 20th, my half birthday. Yes, that will be a somewhat short manuscript, but I do seem to be consistent so far in writing very short first drafts and then expanding and layering in revisions.

And with this little girl getting older and more independent all the time, it won’t take me six years to get to a final draft on this book.

I’m hoping I’ll have a draft ready to send to readers by summer. We’ll see, though. It’s all new territory. But a first draft in three months! So fucking exciting.