Word Weaves

The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate is Jacqueline Kelly’s debut novel. It’s set in a small Texas town on the cusp of the twentieth century. During the summer of her eleventh year,  Callie Tate approaches her formidable grandfather in the rickety shed where he catalogs his scientific finds and attempts to distill pecans into liquer. Calpurnia shares his curiosity and becomes his dedicated assistant.

When Callie and her grandfather discover what he thinks is a new plant species, they travel to town to have it photographed and send their findings to the Smithsonian for verification. Throughout the year as they await news, Callie daydreams about what she will become…a teacher, a scientist, one of the first telephone operators. At no time does she think about housewifery, but her mother plans otherwise. She schedules practice sessions to improve Callie’s poor domestic skills, leaving Callie no time to spend with her grandfather.

Callie’s favorite brother and father encourage her mother’s course. Even her grandfather falters when Callie tells him she wants to go to university and be a scientist. Just before the old year passes, word comes from the Smithsonian. The plant is indeed a new species and will be named after the Tates. Callie and her grandfather are toasted for their discovery. Callie enters her tweflth year and the twentieth century with hope for her future.

Favorite passages:

Callie’s description of her grandfather before she approached him in the shed:

The old man had tufty eyebrows of his own, rather like a dragon’s, and he was altogether too imposing a figure to have clambered on as an infant.

Her grandfather’s tale of forming the National Geographic Society in 1888:

They had banded together to fill in the bare spots on the globe and to pull the country out of the morass of superstition and backward thinking in which it floundered after the War Between the States.

Edvard Munch’s painting,  The Scream, pretty much sums up how I’m feeling with thirty days to finish the rewrite on my manuscript. Meeting that September 4th submission deadline (clearly stated on the editors’ coupons from the SCBWI conference) may be an impossible dream. My book feels like an unfinished rag doll in bits and pieces, with stuffing pouring out of holes.

Dani, the new protaganist, is settling into her role. I feel I know her pretty well and she’s certainly added spice to the story. She’s also energized the secondary characters.  I can’t say I’m as fond of her as I was of Gilly, the original character.  And I’m having a hard time justifying Gilly’s exile to people who read my original manuscript. Dani was created under duress, sort of like a forced friendship, but I’ve grown to admire her.

Some of the newly integrated scenes feel raw and clumsy. I’ve been offering small chunks of my story as homework in the class I’m taking.  That’s a good thing except it’s slowed down the revision. Feedback is invaluable, but in the end, it all comes down to the writer and the pen. And my pen needs to fly.

Yesterday, I was having a REALLY bad day. Class lessons, manuscript deadline, and emails piled up; a local reporter needed a photo (preferrably with cows!) for an article she was writing about my Highlights’ win, and household tension mixed with a skull-cracking headache.

Around noon something soft bumped against my front door. A package! Inside was a note from my dearest aunt, a pair of deep blue pajamas covered in stars and moons, and a Flicka DVD. All my hard edges softened. In the card, my aunt related a story about my grandmother polishing her waitress shoes so they’d look good on the outside. Then Grandma stuck cardboard in the bottoms to cover the holes and headed off to work.

My grandmother’s flame burned bright. My aunt pointed out that I am that woman’s granddaughter. And my amazing aunt is her youngest daughter.  Grandma had ten children, nine that survived. She raised them during the depression on a diner waitress salary. Her husband, when he came home, was a violent alcoholic. My grandmother escaped him and remained single for many years until she met R.C., the man my cousins and I knew as our grandfather.

R.C. and Grandma settled in a house he built on his farm in Bushnell, Florida.  Tucked into an oak hammock behind their new home, was R.C.’s cracker homestead. My family lived in that old house for a year when I was twelve and that seeded the story that won me the Highlights’ contest.  Yes, I am my grandmother’s granddaughter. She inspires me still and so does her daughter.

I’m cleaning up the first three chapters of the zillionth revision of my MG fantasy to run by critquers before I submit them. This rewrite coincided with Kate Coombs MG/YA class. The class exercises are punching the story back and forth, up and down, mixing and mashing. Some days my head spins with it.

Last week ended with a lesson on description and those sneaky adjectives and adverbs. Adverbs, I can live without, but my descriptive passages  start out loaded with adjectives.  Second drafts eliminate some. Then, I bite on something hard to extract the excess. Kate offered this quote from poet Mary Oliver’s Blue Pastures: “Look for verbs of muscle; adjectives of exactitude.”

Some of the early critique groups I participated in reject adverbs and adjectives altogether and although I don’t feel that strongly, learning by abstinance has its merits. I feel queasy when nouns are unnecessarily embellished. Drat! Did you see those adverbs creep in here?

I’m nearing the end of week two of my MG/YA class. It’s distracted me from pressing concerns (husband’s job loss) and art.  The art that will help pay our bills. I’ve created art since my chubby toddler fingers would hold a crayon. For almost twenty years, it was my career. Why now, when I need it most, does my mind refuse it?

I know the answer. Writing kidnapped my brain. All those years, the scribe in me waited patiently for art and horses to move aside. Then it opened like a magnolia and  pollenated my mind with enough story ideas to keep me scribbling for the rest of my days. It’s so so hard to force that blossom into a corner.

I’ve tried. Last weekend, I sanded and drilled sixteen wood plaques to make decorative leash holders for local shops. I collected photos for sample portraits. Monday morning, I read my email, checked in with my class, and typed my blog post. That afternoon I made an incredible mess painting a base coat on the plaques. Tuesday started badly and I sought solace in my class lesson. The art, piled on the dining room table, sits there still.

Last night, I created a rigid schedule for the days to come in hopes I’ll stick to it. But next weekend, I’m attending a positive training class for kittens as fodder for non fiction.  From opposite corners of my brain, a flower and a paintbrush glare at each other, their boxing gloves primed.

The discussion in the MG/YA class I’m taking turned this weekend to books that drag. Twilight was tossed back and forth between defenders and critics. I picked it up as one of those must read books for YA writers and barely made it through the first half of Book One.

As a prepublished author and a fairly new writer, I’ve tried to find reputable sources to learn from and I feel I’ve gathered sage advice – write what you know; write your book without outside interference; believe in your story. Then you find good critique partners and fine tune your manuscript until at last it’s deemed ready for the publishing world.

And there lies the problem. Because what you learn from the publishing world is: your book idea needs to make bored agents and editors spit out their morning coffee, it’s that dazzling.  Create a literary masterpiece if you must, but make it commercial. Which leaves you sputtering over the four volumes of fantasy that ruled seven years of your life and practically ruined your marriage and most of your friendships. Now agents inform you high fantasy is taboo.

What do you do? You write a good story. I’m in the middle of revamping my first book, AGAIN, still hoping it has merit. This rewrite is done with agents and editors  in mind. How will they see it? Is it fresh? Will they turn every page with eyes wide? Will they miss my characters when the last word is read? And guess what… it’s a much better book! So, my advice to new writers is this: write your story and consider it a work-in-progress until your book has a cover.

Today is a hodgepodge. Monday, I started Kate Coombs online class, Creating Strong MG and YA Fiction, taught through Writers U.  The homework has already stirred story plots and provided a long list of must reads. I’ll report in full on the class when it finishes in four weeks.

On the down side of this week, three months ago my husband lost his job of twenty years. There’s been no job offers yet. Like so many others, we’re facing hard decisions.  I’m returning to portraiture (animals only this time) and selling my art. My stomach churns at the thought. I’ve loved every minute of the last two years, writing and studying the craft.  I worry I won’t have the time or energy to finish my books. I’m afraid I’ll lose touch with the writers I’ve met and my dream to be a successful novelist will dribble down a hole.

On the up side, late last week, I found a box on my doorstep. I opened it up to find another box, this one crisp white with the words Rothrock’s, Honesdale, Pa. written on it. Inside, a card sat atop mounds of tissue paper. It read: Susan, From all of us at Highlights, congratulations. We look forward to publishing your winning story soon! Sincerely, Christine Clark, Editor in Chief. I peeled back the tissue paper and a small pewter bowl gleamed up at me. Engraved on the outside was Highlights for Children, Fiction Contest 2012.  Isn’t it wonderful that just when you need it most, confirmation comes?

The fireworks have passed, thank you thank you thank you. Sitting through Independence Day celebrations with two noise-sensitive dogs is no picnic. We snuffed most of the din with amped TV volume. But at nine last night the big guns came out. Boom! Bam! Flash! Sizzle, sizzle. I gritted my teeth until the last explosive popped around eleven-thirty. Ella and Hobbit settled down and I turned off the lights.

As my head hit the pillow, my annoyance ebbed and I thought about the privileges I shared with fellow Americans, including the freedom to read and write whatever moved me. It’s hard not to take that for granted and even harder to imagine the restrictions others suffer that we don’t.  I fell asleep feeling blessed.

In the MG workshop at this months’s SCBWI conference in Orlando, Kathleen Duey suggested interviewing our characters. Kathleen sits down with hers for brief chats and long discourses, depending on their mood. Sometimes they’re eager to dish out favorites and deep dark secrets and sometimes they’re not. Like the one that told her to ( fill in the blank) off!

One sleepless night, I called my protaganist to my head and asked what she was up to. She didn’t have anything to say. She didn’t even offer a  bedtime story or lullaby. Last week, author and social networking whiz, Lia Keyes, started a micro blog for Rowena, a character in her YA fantasy A Warning To The Curious.  I was enchanted by Rowena from the start. Lia enhances the journal with delicious images of gadgets and dresses and European hotspots from Rowena’s time-traveling adventures.

Commenters on Lia’s personal blog  praised her new venture. I love the idea of giving my characters a forum. But I approach it with caution. Some weeks I barely eke out two posts for this blog. Cobwebs cover my Facebook and Twitter.  Can I handle another writing commitment, even one so alluring?

 I confess. I’m a baby boomer swayed by nostalgia. I associate writers with images of old typewriters even though I never used one. Like Florida author, Michael Gannon, I scribble my novels in notebooks. Interviewed recently in the St.Petersburg Times,  Gannon said about writing on paper: ”I can feel the words going from my mind to the page better. I can feel the rhythms of the words and the pacing of the sentences I can’t feel when tapping on keys.” I relate to that. Notebooks, like sketchbooks,  have been a part of my life since early childhood. They don’t need recharging and they don’t feed on batteries that become toxic waste.

This month at the SCBWI conference in Orlando, the buzz at the lunch table surrounded a Florida high school’s intent to replace textbooks with E-Readers.  Most middle-aged writers I know accept the inevitability of cyber publication and marketing with knuckle-biting resignation. I don’t own an electronic reader and shudder to think printed versions of books may become relics. Will there be a funeral to honor their passing? Will libraries become dusty museums with snoring docents at the door?

Garrison Keillor’s recent article in the New York Times mourns the end of a publishing era. He fears the market will be flooded with self-published electronic books, making it hard for readers to find the needles in the haystack … books by reputable authors. Many in the publishing industry dispute that, claiming readers will sift through the chaff. Editors and agents have every right to defend the electronic trend. They’re fighting to remain relevant.

This may seem like a new discussion but an introduction to Italo Calvino’s 1979 book, If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler, claims the book is ” its author’s triumphant response to the question of whether the art of fiction could survive the vast changes taking place in the communications technology of our world.”  Was Calvino seeing the end of print books forty years ago?

Did you hear that? Was it the sound of the last pages turning?