Kyle Garret's Blog, page 13

Normal People

Are some of us Jonathon in the clock tower with the rifle and some of us Buffy telling him that everyone has problems?

"Earshot" is one of my favorite episodes of Buffy, but the climax rubbed me the wrong way.  The idea that Buffy Summers is comparing her lot in the life with Jonathon's felt completely off the mark.

Those of us who survived high school know that being attractive is a huge advantage (and not one that my tall, skinny rear end had).  If money is the big divider among elementary school kids, beauty becomes the divider from middle school on.  Unlike middle school, however, it is possible to make friends in high school regardless of what you look like.  That doesn't mean the torment ends; ask anyone who was over weight in high school and see what it was like for them.

So blonde, athletic Buffy telling short, nerdy Jonathan that her life was just as hard as his felt like a cop out to me.  It wasn't reflective of any high school experience that I knew of.

That doesn't mean that attractive people don't have problems, obviously.  And, let's face facts, plenty of people grow into themselves after graduation.

All of the above stemmed from my, perhaps erroneous, belief that there are "normal" people in the world.  It's something I've always thought.  There are people who have reasonable childhoods, go to college, start careers, meet someone, settle down, start a family, etc.  Their life is easily broken down into its component parts: career, family, house.  These are their three priorities and it's how their life is ordered.

It's great, really, because they have focus.  They can prioritize.  Being successful at work is fulfilling.  Having a nice lawn is fulfilling.  Putting family ahead of self is the basis for life.

That's what "normal" people are to me.

We have new neighbors.  They met in the military; he was in the marines, she was in the navy.  They both have good jobs.  They have two young boys.  I see them in our cul-de-sac, talking to our other neighbors, watching their kids play with the neighbors' kids.  There's a togetherness about them that has always alluded me.  I've always been kind of a spaz, if not a complete mess.

And I realize I'm judging, but it's not my intent to do so negatively (side bar: judging someone always has a
negative connotation, but what if you're judging them to be awesome? No one would have a problem with that).  I also realize I'm diminishing what the average person goes through in their lifetime, while also expose my own insecurities.

Because here's the thing: being "normal" appeals to me almost as much as it doesn't.  I would love to be happy with logging my 40+ hours each week and I would love to have the ability to be social at the drop of a hat.  I would love to be able to make decisions and not debate everything in my head to the point of inaction.  I would love to have focus.

Then again, perhaps there's no such thing as these mythical "normal" people; maybe they're all just on better drugs.

Rewatching Buffy: Season Two

I made a comment on Facebook the other day that people who say the best season of Buffy is season two must have stopped watching after season two.  Because, hey, it's much, much better than season one, but it's still being weighed down by a bunch of just horrible episodes.

Season two is known for its finale, and rightfully so.  Becoming parts 1 and 2 take the show to a new level.  It's scary the jump that the show makes for that two part finale.  It's as if, 32 episodes in, Joss Whedon and the writers realized the potential of Buffy.  It's is unquestionably a stunning change and worthy of all the praise that is heaped upon it.

But there were 20 episodes before it.

This season made the unfortunate mistake of doubling down on bad episodes.  Yes, a stinker here and there was understandable at this still relatively early stage, but during season two they seemed to come in pairs.  "Inca Mummy Girl" and "Reptile Boy" in back to back weeks is brutal.  "Ted" and "Bad Eggs" in back to back weeks is even worse.  I don't think I'd watched some of these episodes more than once before now, which is saying a lot.

The cast really starts to gel in this season.  Each character develops over the course of the season, although the continuation of Xander's infatuation with Buffy is pretty painful, particularly with regards to Angel.  The addition of Oz is great, both because of who he is and how he's introduced.  They do a really nice job of slowly working him into the show.

One of my favorite things about season two is the expansion on Giles' history.  We get a few glimpses into the life of the guy formerly know as Ripper and they add all sorts of depth to the character.  Giles' past also plays nicely off of the rest of the gang, particularly Buffy, who has been working under the assumption that Giles is a stuffy old man.  Giles clearly understands her better than she realizes.

The most glaring flaw in this season, aside from the horrible episodes scattered here and there, is the utter failure that is the curse on Angel.

I'm not against the idea of Angel having a curse on him, but the specifics of it are painfully stupid and completely at odds with ideas the show has gone to great lengths to explain.

From the very first episode, we're told that the vampire and the person whose body they've stolen are two
very different people.  Once someone is turned, they're gone.  The curse on Angel actually underscores this, as the spell has to pull Angel's soul back from the ether to put it back into his body.

So Angel and Angelus are two separate people who just happen to share a body.  This is fact.  The gypsies clearly know this, too, given the spell.  They want to punish Angelus for killing their princess.  Okay, sounds good.  They trap him in Angel's body, unable to do anything but watch.  They basically stuck him in a human prison.  I'm on board so far.

Okay, so giving Angel all of Angelus' memories is a shitty thing to do to Angel, who had nothing to do with the things that Angelus did, but, hey, these gypsies are vengeful and they don't care about a little collateral damage.  And, hey, lucky for them, Angel decides he wants to do some good in the world, maybe in part to offset the bad that Angelus did.  So now not only is Angelus trapped, he has to watch as Angel does good deeds.  It's the perfect punishment for Angelus; he'll be tormented non-stop, particularly when Angel falls in love with a Slayer!

I am on board the gypsy curse train!  Aside from pissing all over Angel, this punishment they've created for Angelus seems like a winner.  You know what would be the ultimate torture for Angelus?  If Angel were happy!  That would be brutal.  Oh, it would be even worse if that happiness was because of the Slayer!  Just imagine how nuts Angelus must be going inside Angel.  It would kill him!

So, clearly, when this happens, he should be set free.

Wha-??

Angel having a moment of perfect happiness is the ultimate torture for Angelus, yet for some reason the curse sets him free when this happens.  It makes no sense, no sense at all.

But, not unlike a lot of concepts on this show, they clearly made it up on the fly, and as the show progressed they had to make due.

Speaking of concepts that changed on the fly, I can't talk about season two without mentioning Spike and Drusilla.  It's hard to believe that they were originally only supposed to appear in a single episode, let alone that they were actually supposed to be from the South of America, not British.  That would suggest to me that they weren't supposed to have a connection to Angel in the beginning, either.  Sure, they botch a later storyline by having Spike call Angel his sire (when it's later revealed to be Dru), but see above: making things up on the fly.

For all the nonsense that surrounds Spike and Dru (Dru can get drama student obnoxious at points, and Spike is in a wheel chair how?), their connection to Angel pays big dividends.  They serve to flesh out who Angelus was, which is useful, given we only see him in the present and we really need to know what he was like for 200 years.

Sadly, Spike becomes problematic in later seasons, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

In the end, season two is a bridge season for Buffy, a bridge that leads to the show realizing its true potential and becoming something special.

I've said too much.

If you will indulge me for just a minute, I am going to briefly mention something about the television show Gossip Girl, but you should be used to that from me by now.

I rather unabashedly watched Gossip Girl.  It had two things going for it from the start: it was produced by OC/Chuck creator Josh Schwartz, and the voice over (from the titular character) was being done by Kristen "Veronica Mars" Bell.  So I was on board right off the bat.

Now, it seems like I would have jumped ship pretty quickly, given the target demographic of the show was probably thirteen year old girls.  But a) I have a weird love of teen melodrama and b) my enjoyment of a show is generally determined by whether or not there is a character I can vicariously live through, see also: Chuck, Buffy, et al.  In the case of Gossip Girl, it was Dan Humphries, a teenager who fancies himself a writer.

All ridiculousness aside, there was an actual storyline about writing that struck a chord in me.  Long story short, Dan wrote a book that was fiction, but was very clearly about himself and his friends.  And he said a few not so flattering things about the people in his life.  He had to defend himself over and over again, generally going to the "I changed things for the story" argument which, I think, is a legitimate one, given how often I do that myself.

Anyway, it got me thinking about how much writers share about their own lives, and the self-imposed ceiling on such things.  I recently read Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis, and it's easy to see just how much of that is autobiographical, to the point that you wonder how people in Ellis' family reacted when it was published.

Here's the funny thing about writing: they say truth is stranger than fiction, but fiction is often more upsetting.  I wrote an entire book of non-fiction and, aside from a few spots here and there, none of the people in that book were upset with any part of it.  Yet had I taken artistic license with any of it, twisted it to serve my purposes and slapped a "fiction" label on it, I would bet fat stacks of cash that those same people would be incredibly upset.

The problem, of course, is that it's hard to separate fact from fiction when the fiction hits so close to home.

This all got me thinking about how I censor myself.  There is a ceiling for my honestly, a ceiling on how directly I'm willing to address people I know.  I'm am very aware of who will end up reading my work, or at least who could end up reading my work.  I'm aware of how what I write might upset the people in my life.

I wonder if that is diminishing what I produce.  I know that there are aspects of my life that are worth writing about that I have never even considered putting down on paper for fear of the fall out.  There's a clear disconnect between what every day people consider polite conversation and what writers consider fodder for stories.  That is to say, writers consider everything fodder for stories.

There's an episode of Californication where Hank Moody finds out his dad died.  In the flashbacks, we see that he and his dad never got along, and that they eventually almost quit talking completely because his dad was so upset about the fictional father figures Hank wrote about.  He assumed (probably correctly) that every father figure in all of Hank's stories were based on him...even though all of Hank's stories were works of fiction.

People always do that.

I wrote a book about a decade ago and in that book is a married couple.  My parents assumed that the married couple were two particular friends of mine who were, at that time, the only friends in my life that were married.  Those characters weren't my friends; the thought never even crossed my mind.  But my parents filled in that blank for themselves.

The glamorous version of a writer is the one who is estranged from his or her family and who doesn't have any close friends that have been around for more than a few years, or at the very least not from before the writer became famous.  This is because the writer has cut all ties with his or her past, and is thus free to write about those people or analogs for those people when ever she or he wants.  Being an honest writer means being free from the influence of others.

But that's not really possible, is it?

Well, I suppose it's not really possible for me.

Years and years ago I shared some short stories with my parents.  I was living in Los Angeles at the time and they were (and are) back in Ohio, so the added distance made me feel okay with giving them some of my work.  Besides, I figured if my end goal was to get these things published, they'd end up reading them, anyway.

Months and months later my parents sent me a letter (an attachment to an e-mail, actually) where they expressed concern with some things I said in one of my stories.  They didn't mention it specifically, but I have no doubts they were referring to a story in which the main character has sex with his then girlfriend and certain things happen, certain things that seem kind of specific to both myself and another person who had been in my life.

I acknowledged their concerns, but I was a bit put off, not because they were worried about the content of one of my stories, but because months had gone by, which meant they didn't really think these stories were going to get out any time soon to reflect poorly on me or anyone else in my life.

Funny enough, that story has long since died on the vine.

My father tends to assume that 90% of what I write is true.  My mother seems to assume that at least 50% of it is true.  They're both overshooting.  Generally speaking, my writing takes a small grain of my life and grows it into a field.  Perhaps 10% of my fiction really happened.

Still, I do wonder if the fact that there's a limit to what I'll write about might be holding me back.  But I also wonder if any of the things I don't write about are actually worth the real impact it would have on my life.

We can claim that we write for ourselves all we want, but in the end that's never entirely true -- at least not for most of us.

The Suffering Artist

This is a blog post a long time coming, but that's par for the course; you should see how many posts I have sitting in my account, waiting to be written.  It's kind of sad, actually.  Poor, sad little titles, with no words to fill their hollow bodies.  It's literary child abandonment.

(Honestly, the folders full of partially written stories puts my blog to shame.)

Anyway, a while back (over a year ago!) a bunch of creative types that I know and/or follow online shared this here article:
Why I hate the myth of the suffering artist
I'm guessing many of you have already read it, but, if not, go give it the once over now.  Even if you have read it, you've probably forgotten it by now.

The more I saw this article passed around, the more I thought about it, the more I found that I actually disagreed with it.  And I suppose I'm okay with the sentiment, I just think it's a bit too general, a bit too knee jerk.  But I'll get to that in a second.

I would be remiss if I didn't first mention this particular gem:

To his way of thinking, comfort and success are poison, the Stones never did anything good after they'd got money, Van Gogh prospered because of mental distress, obscurity and ear mutilation and, actually …

The central conceit there is that the Stones were no longer suffering artists after they made a bunch of money.  In other words, money is the cure to suffering.  That boggles my mind.  It's such a stupid idea that it actually colored the way I read the rest of the article.

And now I'm going to argue that all artists are, in fact, suffering, and I know how that sounds.  I have a hard enough time describing myself as a writer, let alone an artist.  But for the sake of this debate, I suppose the two terms will have to be interchangeable.

People create because they want something to exist that doesn't already exist, and they feel like this thing has to exist, that the world needs this thing to exist.  Take that away from an artist and there's nothing left.  Take away their desire to create and they're no longer artists.  Imagine wanting to create something and not being able to -- that would be my definition of suffering.

In other words, it's not that all artists are suffering, it's that they create to avoid suffering, or at least to minimize it.  It's not unlike removing an arrow from your leg so the hole can be stitched up; it hurts like hell
and you would never choose to do it, but the arrow is there and it has to come out.

We have to firmly believe that what we're creating needs to exist for some, often times undefinable, reason.  If you create for yourself, then you're making something you need in your life, and if you don't have it, then your life will be all the poorer.  Sure, we're not talking about insanity or cutting off your ear and that degree of suffering, but it's suffering nonetheless.  The need to create stems from wanting to fill a void.

To a certain extent, we're talking about meaning.  Everyone wants their actions to have some kind of meaning.  If we truly believed that the things we did served no purpose, would we really keep doing them?  There's no way.  The fight for meaning is where depression comes from.  The fight for meaning is what keeps so many of us from accomplishing our goals; it's what keeps us from being great.

The belief that what you do has meaning isn't an end in and of itself, it's a way of keeping those negative thoughts at bay.  Believing what you do has a purpose is the door between you and meaninglessness.  It's the last defense against the void, and it's a hard defense to maintain.  It's often more difficult than creation itself.

Then there's the simple fact that the overwhelming majority of artists in this world have to fit their art in whenever they can.  Their art is marginalized because they need to do things like making money and have a family.  Which, of course, is something that the article in question misses...because the author is getting paid to write.

Those of us who lead double lives as productive members of society and artists of some type know the kind of sacrifices we have to make.  It's not easy.  There are much, much worse things, yes, but it's still not easy.  Not a day goes by when I don't wonder about how much happier I'd be if I didn't have the need to create, if I could be content with the 9 to 5 and a house in the suburbs.  I look out my office window and I see my neighbors outside talking to each other, watching their kids play, and I wish to god I could have that kind of clarity.

But I don't.

We don't cut off our ears anymore (not most of us, at least), but we still suffer, and we very much suffer for our art.  We just do it in less flashy ways these days.

Rewatching Buffy: Season One

Do I need to give a spoiler warning for a show this old?  I suppose this is it.

Anyway, I've started watching Buffy again from the beginning.  I don't know why.  It's the summertime and I'm feeling nostalgic, what do you want from me?

I've been randomly updating my Facebook page with comments about certain episodes because some of them just need public commenting.  Fortunately for me, most of my friends are also big fans of the show, so my comments are not falling on deaf ears.

A little background: I didn't discover Buffy until half way through season 3.  The first episode I ever watched "live" was "The Wish."  I have some dim recollection of seeing a repeat of "The Pack," but Buffy wasn't required viewing for me until "The Wish."

After that, I went to the local video store and discovered the 3 tapes that had been released with earlier episodes -- which you can actually still buy.  The tapes contained 2 episodes each, so half of season one.  Thankfully, the WB was good about showing reruns during the summer, so I was able to fill in the blanks the summer after season three (at that point, I was taping every episode).

Looking back, it's kind of surprising that those 3 VHS tapes didn't kill any interest I had in the show.  While they're made up of arguably the better half of the first season (although, being a big Xander fan, I would have preferred "The Pack" over "Angel," but it's easy to see why it was included), they're still of questionable quality.  As I said upon re-watching them, there's a certain Sci-Fi original movie quality to them and the acting is just not particularly good.

There are, in fact, two actors who stand out from the rest of the cast from the very start.  One is fairly
They were so young.obvious -- Anthony Stewart Head was always going to overshadow the teenagers, at least to begin with.  He is Giles from the very first moment he comes on screen.  While the rest of the actors are still struggling to get past that kind of high school drama club performance, Head does exactly what you'd expected a seasoned professional to do.  The supernatural aspect of the show was always going to be harder to sell than the teen aspect and having ASH as the focal point was essential.

Surprisingly enough, the other actor who stands out is Charisma Carpenter.  She is Cordelia.  Everything she says sounds natural, as opposed to the other actors who sound like they're acting.  Now, part of that is the fact that the rest of the characters have yet to be fleshed out at all, so the actors are clearly struggling to figure out who they are.  That's just not a problem for Carpenter or Cordelia.

As much as I enjoyed the Xander-centric "The Pack," it's still not a great episode.  In fact, the vast majority of season one can be considered average, if that.  The Buffy/Angel pairing is as hamfisted as ever, the characters are more archetypes than characters, and the monsters aren't particularly scary.

The first glimpse of what the show can be comes with the 9th episode, "The Puppet Show."  The addition of Principal Snyder to the show is welcome one, giving the core cast a day in and day out foil that has (we assume) nothing to do with the supernatural.  Snyder grounds the show.

The characters have bonded by this point, too.  There's a clear dynamic among Buffy, Willow, Xander, and Giles, and the scenes are becoming more and more natural.

The upside to "The Puppet Show" is that we get a nice plot twist on top of some of the best character work we've seen from the show.  They fall into a wonderful dynamic in this episode where Willow does research on the computer, Giles hits the books, Buffy investigates the crime scene, and Xander interviews other students.  It plays wonderfully to their strengths.  This episode almost makes up for episodes like "I,
I used to get that look a lot.Robot...You, Jane" and "Out of Mind, Sight."  Almost.

The show is dragged down by the ongoing crush that Xander has on Buffy.  It's always painful and they drag it on much, much longer than necessary (although one episode was probably too long).  I appreciate that Buffy is the new girl and she's a Slayer and all that, but the events of "The Pack" would have been a perfect way for Xander to move on.

Honestly, I'm surprised that Buffy had the following it did after the first season.  But I suppose teen shows were still a thing back then, and adding a supernatural element to it made it different.  The fact that most of the cast were easy on the eyes probably helped, too.

Endings

I'm not going to go into a diatribe about the difficulty of writing really good endings.  I will say that perhaps the first great ending of a story I ever really noticed was Ann Beattie's "The Burning House."  Go track it down, if you've never read it.

My current obsession with endings has manifested itself in two ways: a bizarre new fascination with things that have finished and a desire to use the few good endings I've ever written for new stories.

The most recent example of the former is all the time I've spent re-watching the recently ended Gossip Girl television show (I will spare you from going into further details on that).  But it started before that.  I've been going through this period of reading complete comic book story arcs, things as ridiculous as the Spider-man Clone Saga and Batman: Knightfall.  I really the enjoy the idea of being able to read a complete work and form an opinion based upon the whole.  I also like to think about the important moments where the story went wrong, or the moments where it went very right, and what it all meant by the end.

To my mind, I've probably written less than half a dozen good endings.  I think the vast majority of them are okay.  I think the entire final chapter of "I Pray Hardest When I'm Being Shot At" is some of the best writing I've ever produced.  I like the end of "Unrequited," but it's been so long since I read it, I'm not sure if the writing still holds up.  The ending of "Gateway Drug" is probably too cute for its own good and the ending of "Weight," in hindsight, is ordinary.

I currently have two endings that I think are right up there with the best work I've ever done.  I actually got
complimented on one of them, when it was attached to a short story that really wasn't good enough to have such a solid ending.  I've mostly left it alone over the years, instead trying to salvage the other one, which is attached to a short story that at least has the potential to be worthy of its ending.

I've come to realize that the latter one might actually work on its own as a short short.  I've never really written a short short before, so I find this pretty exciting, and isn't that what we want from our writing?  It also alleviates the pressure of having to improve the story that comes before it so that it's even remotely close to the quality of the ending.

The former one is the less problematic of the two, if only because it's a fairly universal ending.  It's a romantic ending, about a man realizing that the woman he's been sleeping with is actually more than that.  Basically, it lent itself to a story about girls and denial and that kind of thing, which is right in my wheelhouse.

Here's the weird thing: I attached the ending to a new short story that takes place during the same time in which I wrote the aforementioned ending.  Okay, I know that sounds like post-modernism run amok, but, trust me, it makes sense.  But I wrote this story now, and it's basically a story of "me" being with some girl who isn't my wife (although she's not technically anyone at all, since it's a complete work of fiction).  That's a little weird.  I don't think I've ever given her anything to read before that involved a love interest that wasn't, on some level, her.

It's also bizarre because I'm going back to a certain time of my life and writing about it from the future, when the ending I'm building this story around was written at that time.  The question now is whether my obvious hindsight will be obvious to the reader.

Great endings are hard to come by, so I have to take advantage of them when they come along.

Live! Music!

The first concert I ever attended was at Kent State University. It was a double bill, with Tesla and Great White. Some band called Badlands opened. Shut up. It was the 80's.

I remember that I didn't wear my glasses because I thought I might lose them and probably because I thought they were severely uncool, which I would have been right about. The venue at Kent State was big, but it was all the bigger for an 8th grader who can't see very well. The bands were blurry little shapes on a supposed stage down below.

It might be hard to believe, but this was not when the live music bug bit me.

No, that would happen a few years later, when I started listening to a band called The Afghan Whigs. An awful lot of components went into that show to make it great. It was, if I'm not mistaken, the summer after my senior year of high school. In fact, I just found the actual concert info: Friday, June 24th, 1994, at the Odeon in Cleveland, Ohio. The Ass Ponies opened up. I drove to Cleveland with my best friends in the whole world to see a band that we all really liked and who happened to actually be from Ohio. Someone in the back threw a beer at the stage and it covered my friend, Tony, who then had to drive us home smelling like beer, which would have been fine, had we not gotten pulled over about two minutes from my house.

I didn't actually own any music by the Afghan Whigs. At that point, I think I'd been listening to a tape I dubbed from someone else, which was, I would imagine, of questionable quality. Before leaving for college, I went to a record store and decided I needed a Whigs CD. I bought the single for "What Jail Is Like" because it featured two live tracks.

A year later, those same friends and I went to see the Afghan Whigs in Cleveland again, this time at Peabody's in Cleveland. Eddie Murray hit his 3,000th hit that night (June 30th, 1995) and Greg Dulli, the lead singer for the Whigs and half the reason why their live shows are so amazing, actually stopped to say something about it.

Live music played a big part of my life after that first Afghan Whigs show. Four or five hour drives were nothing for me if a band I liked was playing. I saw my favorite bands multiple times, sometimes over just a few days. It became something of an obsession with me. I collected ticket stubs. I made lists of the songs I saw live, in the order they were performed.  It got to the point that I could predict what song a band was about to play based upon which guitars they were using.

Los Angeles was great for live music.  The Troubadour is the best music venue I've ever been to and I went
The Afghan Whigsto my fair share of shows there.  And, of course, everyone came through Los Angeles.  No matter how big or small the band, they all played a show somewhere in Los Angeles when they were on tour.

I went to Coachella in 2005.  I was done with festivals after that.  I'd already given up on really big shows, and while the side stages at Coachella were nice, there were just too many damn people.

That should have been the first sign.

I started getting old.  Standing through opening bands, the main band, and an encore was becoming harder and harder for my already fragile frame.  My feet hurt.  My lower back hurt.  I just wanted a nice, comfy couch.

A few weeks after Nicole and I moved to the Bay area, we sent to a show in the city.  I think it was my effort to ease the pain of leaving a city and moving to the suburbs.  The show was on a week night.  We got home late and got up early for work.  I was still young, dammit.  I was still going to shows.

As far as I can remember, that's the last show we went to.  That was almost two years ago.  A part of that is because we don't live in the city, so we'd have to drive a good ways to get to shows.  That could be the thing I miss most about living in Los Angeles: everything was conveniently located.

Then there's the simple fact that my priorities have changed.  Owning a home means my free time is taken up with projects around the house.  Add to that time for writing and time for trying to get in shape, and suddenly spending 5 hours driving to a show, seeing the show, and driving home sounds like a waste.

It seems to me that the older I get, the more I streamline my life.  Live music didn't make the most recent cut.  At the very least, my feet are thankful for that.

The Business of Writing

Well, it's that time of the year again.  It's time for me to do more with my writing than simply getting drunk in front of my computer.

To be fair, it's not an annual thing, this whole trying to do something with the work I've created.  It's an ongoing process, particularly with regards to my short stories.  But I'm not just dealing with short stories right now, I'm dealing with my YA book, "Master of the House."

I've talked about MotH a decent amount on this blog.  I wrote the original draft a little over 3 years ago.  About six months ago I sent a query letter out to a few agents and got a few nibbles, but nothing worked out.  I realized that was in part because the book wasn't ready.  Specifically, the first few chapters weren't ready (actually, the first few chapters weren't the first few chapters, as the real first few chapters hadn't been written yet).

I spent a lot of time adding chapters, cleaning up the book, even getting professional editing done.  I think MotH is ready.

I even updated my query letter based upon yet another professional critique.  And I finished the painful process of writing a one page synopsis.

I spent most of the last two days researching agents.  I remember back in the day when I would make a list of agents that consisted of anyone who was still accepting unsolicited query letters.  Over the years I've learned that it makes more sense to target specific agents for specific reasons.  I mean, I'm sending a query letter to an agent who says in her bio that she's looking for YA books about haunted mansions.  That's pretty money right there (please see the description for "Master of the House" for why).

The whole process is ultimately a crap shoot.  I would imagine the average agent receives dozens of query letters every day, and the whole point of a query letter is to make it easier to disregard a writer and his or her work.  It's not meant to be mean, of course, just realistic.  I can't imagine what it must be like to be buried under piles of aspiring writers.

The process has become simpler as more agents and literary journals take advantage of the internet.  But even then, I find myself asking ridiculous questions, like "which day of the week is the best day to send this?"  People are generally grumpy on Mondays, right?  So is a Tuesday better?  Are Thursday and Friday too late
in the week, meaning my query/short story will sit in their inbox, getting buried by e-mails until the following Friday?  It never ends.

I just have to hope that my single page of information gets through to one of them.

It's actually worse for short stories.  There's no buffer for literary journals.  The person reading your short story is the same person who will decide to publish it.  With agents, at least, there's a step in between.  Even if an agent decides to take on your project, he or she will then need to sell it to a publisher.  An agent is probably less quick to dismiss your work.

But here I go, once more unto the breach.  Here I go, putting my fragile ego out there for destruction.  It's a tedious process that usually ends in heart break, but those few successes make it worth it.

Fortunately, I'm buoyed by the fact that I've done this before.  I bypassed the agent and went directly to a publisher for "I Pray Hardest When I'm Being Shot At."  My short story, "Young Zombies in Love" made the short list for Best New Writing's Eric Hoffer Award.

I have momentum.

Time Killing Time

A writer's greatest ally is also his/her worst enemy: time.

About six weeks ago, I "finished" drafts of 3 different short stories.  I was on that high that only comes with such a moment.  I was eager to give these stories to my in-house editor, Nicole.  I was positive that she'd love them and praise me as the greatest writer in the history of the world, or at least one who's good enough to keep giving away his time to this insane endeavor.

But Nicole is busy.  She works long hours.  And I had more essential things I needed her to read, like the query letter and synopsis for "Master of the House."  Sometimes the "business" end of writing is the priority.

And thank god.

Over the last few days, I've gone back and read those 3 stories and they are not in a good way.  They're not bad -- far from it.  But they are definitely not ready for human consumption.  The problems were glaring, as were the solutions.  I am thrilled that I never gave them to Nicole because I want her to see the best possible versions.  By next week (hopefully), she will.

Had you told me any of that six weeks ago, I would have gotten defensive.  It's a cliche, but the "hurry up and wait" aspect of writing is infuriating.  We put so much time and effort into our creations that we want some kind of pay off.  I want to be able to sit down at my computer and think to myself "a month from now this story will be done," but that's not possible.

Like it or not, we are slaves to the story, and it will do with us what it wants.  It drives me absolutely insane.

But the other side of that coin is the fact that, when given space and time, our stories take on new forms.

The frustrating part for me is that I want to send my stories out into the world.  I've made the mistake of sending them out before they were ready and it's disheartening.  I sent out my YA book before it was ready and I really regret doing that, particularly given how much better the new version is.

Waiting takes on an entirely different set of problems with regards to short stories.  I've talked about it before, but short stories lend themselves to infinite revision.  It's entirely possible for me to keep reworking the same short story for months, but it's not unlike trying to revive someone who's died: if it doesn't happen within a certain amount of time, it's probably not going to happen at all.

Funny enough, this is the kind of thing that used to drive me nuts when I was in a band.  I felt like revisiting songs was pointless when we could just write new ones.  But writing songs was always much easier for me than writing stories, mostly because the songs I wrote were always pretty simple.  My stories are, by default, much more complicated, so they usually require more time, and in turn become that much more personal.

Anyway, I've got 3 short stories in the editing phase now and I feel pretty good about all of them being "done" in the next few weeks.  We'll see how I feel about them a few months from now.

Reliquary aka My First Novel

I recently had a short story accepted for publication in a really cool literary journal.  I'll give more information on that closer to when it will be released.

Anyway, the editor who selected my short story told me that she also works for a publishing house who are looking for novels, and that if I had one I should send it their way.  The publisher she works for generally publishes literary fiction, with a smattering of what I would call intellectual non-fiction.  To the point, I could rule out "Master of the House," as it's a YA book.

I do have a literary fiction book, though.  It's called "Reliquary."  I wrote the first draft ten years ago.

"Reliquary" has gotten polishes from me here and there throughout the years.  In fact, the last set of edits I did to it I never bothered to actually make, they just remained as marks on the pages, never making it to the computer.  At one point I changed the title, until I mentioned it to someone and they proclaimed my original title to be wonderfully unique, so I changed it back (truth be told, I never really wanted to change it, but felt that I had to for whatever reason).

When I found out that the aforementioned publishing house was looking for novels, I pulled out "Reliquary."  I knew that, aside from making those edits that had gone unchanged, I would need to read through the whole thing again, because it had been a few years since I'd read through it.  A few weeks ago, I started in on the 284 page manuscript...

...it was awful.  Well, the first sixty pages or so were awful.  It's gotten progressively less awful (I'm only 150 pages in as of this writing), but that doesn't say much.

It's melodramatic.  It's self-important.  On a line level, the writing is often very bad.  It absolutely destroyed me to read it.

"Reliquary" was written in the first person and it's very much a reflection of who I was ten years ago.  It's far more fiction than non, but there are strong elements of real life at play.  The problem is that I'm not that person anymore.  I'm not sad and angry.  I'm actually pretty damn happy.

But the story in "Reliquary" is solid.  I've often struggled with plots and this book has one that is in great shape.  Nothing at all about the point A to point B business needs to be changed.  I stand by the events in the book and the order in which they happen.

The bones are good.  The meat and muscle need a lot of work.

I resigned myself to more or less rewriting it using the current version as a framework.  Last night I took it a step further.  Last night I decided that the entire thing should be written in the 3rd person.

At first, I thought switching from 1st person to 3rd would be relatively easy.  I was already planning on rewriting most of the book, so switching POV wasn't a big deal.  But, of course, as I started writing it I realized that the new narrative required changes in structure.  You can deliver an awful lot of exposition in subtle ways when you're writing in the 1st person because it doesn't come across as exposition, at least not if you're careful.  You can give details of your life in a single paragraph in the 1st person, but if you try the same thing in the 3rd person, it comes off as tedious exposition.

The appeal of switching POVs is that 1st person lends itself to melodrama.  I figured telling the same story from a subjective 3rd person would allow me to keep the story and lose the melodrama, leaving me with exactly what I wanted.  But the main character spends an awful lot of time by himself, and those scenes are going to become really, really tedious if he's not narrating them.

But damn if melodrama isn't my biggest concern.  I feel like first person accounts of love and relationships, blah blah blah, etc. are the kiss of death.  I feel like they're almost immediately disposable.  Hey, this guy wants to be Holden Caufield and this writer wants to be JD Salinger!

At it's core, though, "Reliquary" is a love story.  And maybe it's the whiskey talking, but I think I have my answer.  I know it's possible to write in the 1st person and not be melodramatic.  I'd like to think I've done that in a few short stories recently.  They're certainly much less melodramatic than this book.

"Reliquary" is uniquely me at a specific point in my life and I think there's value in that.

First person it is.