Something to think about

Perhaps it's the switch to daylight savings time but I've been feeling a joy-of-spring feeling lately, a feeling of energy and internal happiness. I'm back in love with writing and the fact that I have a crazy amount of real-world work just makes me laugh. Also, for the past week I've been re-reading Virginia Woolf's diaries, something I do every couple of years or when I lack inspiration. It's fascinating to follow the up and down progress as she finds her form and then is halted by everyday interruptions (including having T.S. Eliot as a houseguest -- which would intimidate anyone!)

So I found this one little nugget which I mean to remember when I can't write:

"The way to rock oneself back into writing is this. First gentle exercise in the air. Second the reading of good literature. It is a mistake to think that literature can be produced from the raw. One must get out of life...one must become externalized, very, very concentrated..."

OK, long walks. I can do that. (Even though I don't have a country house.)
"The reading of..." well, something to get the mind moving. (I have a feeling my reading is far trashier than Virginia Woolf's "good literature.")
Finally, get out of life. Not out into life...out of life, away from interruptions and demands. Give yourself space to think.
Fortunately right now I don't need this advice. I'm off to make hay while the sun shines.

Hark, hark

I believe that there was an episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show which had writer Murray Slaughter beginning his long-planned novel with the words, "Somewhere, a dog was barking." I guess every writer has what are for them evocative sounds -- voices in another room, a train whistle, the lapping of water. With me, for reasons that remain obscure, one of those sounds is dogs barking. I've been sitting here in the spring evening -- there's daylight after dinner now -- when my thoughts were interrupted by barking in the distance. A block away, a mile away, who knows? It struck me as the sound of life, somewhere out there -- the opposite of isolation -- a sound of striving, of longing, of a need to talk to someone. It reminded me of the book 101 Dalmatians, where the dogs of England exchange news at the "Twilight Barking" every evening. I always loved that idea -- of a vast communication over distance and space, dogs with their own world of gossip to share. Well, who knows why dogs bark? As the light goes I think I could lie here and listen to them, and all the other noises of the world, a long, long time.

The last word

From the New York Times obituary section for March 8, 2010:
1. Ruth Kligman. Sole survivor of the car accident which killed Jackson Pollock and muse to numerous artists of the 50s and 60s. Lived in Ibiza late in life. Married a couple of times, no children. "Art is my life, that's my motto."
2. Henri Salmide. Nazi officer who was ordered to blow up the port of Bordeaux, France in 1944. Didn't do it, saving the lives of at least 3,500 people. Considered a traitor in Germany after the war, married a Frenchwoman and lived in complete obscurity, partly because the Resistance tried to take credit for his actions.
3. Patricia Travers. Child prodigy violinist of the 1930s. Hailed as having a great future, instead gave up violin entirely. Never married. Managed a condo in NJ. In later years occasionally played violin for her mother.
4. Mark Linkous. Alternative/country musician who led (0r was known as) Sparklehorse. In spite of recent career progress, went into an alley in Knoxville over the weekend and shot himself in the heart.
Four great stories (almost novels in themselves) and four great characters. I am always amazed by how beautiful, mysterious and ironic individual lives are.

Bare hands

One of the things that goes unrealized by people who come to Las Vegas from back East is that if you want stuff to live, you have to plant it before April. If you don't, it won't have a strong enough root system to stand the summer. So while the rest of country is still covered in snow, I generally spend the last week of February outside, digging in the dirt, planting, fertilizing, replacing mulch and gravel and pulling up weeds left by the winter rains.* This year I've planted two new species of penstemons, along with scrophularia and Jupiter's beard -- all low-water native plants that like the sun.
I used to plan my flowerbed. One year I put lavender with artemesia, thinking that the purple flowers and gray-green leaves would look nice together. The lavender didn't thrive and the artemesia did -- in fact, the artemesia took over the bed and I've never had the energy to root it up. (I like to think that now I can make my own absinthe, should I choose.) So, what with unusual seeds that just happened to thrive and impulse buys at the nursery, my flowerbed is the same every year -- a total work in progress, never done, never perfect. I always have a new plant that I think is going to cover all my bare spots. Last year it was globe mallow, another low-water plant, which ran wild and then expired, leaving a weedy skeleton to loom over the bed most of the summer. Just today I discovered a guest -- I don't think it's something I planted but it's not a weed and where it came from I can't tell. I'll just have to wait and see.
I'd hate to have a garden that was so perfect I didn't need to work in it.

*You all can quit envying me in May, when it's too hot to go outside.

Take Two

Yesterday I sat down and discovered 1) a set of revisions that I thought had been saved last week hadn't been saved at all, and 2) moving from a thumb drive to one of my home computers I had copied an unrevised section back over a revised section, so that was gone as well. Neither section was very long, and I could remember some of the changes I had made, but I had done those revisions in a sort of concentrated fury which I knew I couldn't recapture.

So I didn't get much done yesterday. Mostly I just berated myself. I've never lost anything I've written before. I now feel completely disconnected from the manuscript.

I couldn't even enjoy the ice dancing last night. (Though after the Russian "Aborigines" the night before I think I need to question my interest in this so-called sport.)

Well, life marches on. And I've just remembered an incident from a bio of Peggy Lee I read recently. When they were recording "Is That All There Is?' she went through something like 30 takes, trying to get it right. And on the very last take, when she finally nailed it, it turned out the sound engineer hadn't been recording. So they had to do it one more time. And that was the take that got released.

Whoops! blogfest

Thanks to Laurel for sponsoring the Whoops! blogfest. Go to her blog to read the others!

Please keep a couple of things in mind.
1) This is a real WIP, very new.
2) It part of the opening scene, so it may change or go away altogether.
3) This happened to me all the time in school...although never with Rosemary's Baby.


Of course Guy doesn’t believe Rosemary when she tells him there’s a coven of witches next door. He’s one of them! Rosemary’s such an idiot.
This reflection is interrupted by an awareness of a kind of silence around me. A waiting silence. Rosemary’s Baby is ripped from my hand, without Mrs. Tate even breaking stride. Then her desk drawer is open and the black cover of the book is disappearing inside.
“Mrs. Tate!”
The class is laughing hysterically.
“Mrs. Tate!”
“If you want it back, Joanie, you can ask at the end of the semester.”
“But it’s a library book!”
“That is your problem. My problem is to instruct you peons in the multiplication of decimals. If I accomplish nothing else in my brief time on this planet…”
And so on. Mrs. Tate really should have been a drama teacher.
In front of me Dan Smiley has fallen halfway out his seat with the effort of laughing at me. He sits up and, pushing his fingers up under his glasses, wipes his eyes.
“Man, that was priceless,” he says. “Priceless.”

Questions...

I need some advice.
I've spent the past six weeks waiting while an agent who requested "exclusivity" looked at pages from How to See the Elephant. Last week, that agent rejected it, so I'm going to start sending it out again. Here's the thing, though. I've recently revised one section of it, cutting about 3,000 words and streamlining the narrative. It was not an overall revision of the ms, just one focused on that particular section, based on feedback I had gotten about it. Now, back in October another agent told me that she would be interested in seeing HTSE again if I ever did any revisions of it. So the question is -- does it make more sense to send a revised HTSE to the previous agent, since she showed interest in it? Or should I start afresh, with agents I haven't sent it to? Or can I do both?
Second question. Another recent rejection said they would be interested in any other projects I might have. Usually I don't take this very seriously but as it happens I do have my former WIP, The Poison Hill, complete. I really hadn't intended to start submitting it, however. I think How to See the Elephant is much more "sellable" -- the basic concept is simpler ("girl runs away and becomes a nurse in the Civil War") and it fits into a familiar genre. And I really don't want to end up with two agents interested in two different projects (ha -- I should be so lucky!) because that would be a personal nightmare. Decision making is NOT my strong suit. I'd prefer to just push HTSE. But am I losing an opportunity here? Should I just be sending everything out, at the first sign of interest?
I've been going around and around with this for the past couple of days. Any advice?