Joseph Grammer's Blog - Posts Tagged "editing"

Cocoon Kids

Errors. I feel like I made millions of them in my book. My fingernails are still raw from chomping, and my eyes have suffered in hours of sapping laptop light. My mistakes are out there in the world ("the world" meaning the dozen or so humans who know my book exists) and I have to live with them. Which is cool.

I love failure. It's like coffee for me, although I also like coffee. Lattes, which I can get in my apartment for free (well, the cost of my rent, which is high). Failure makes me smile and reflect for a second or two on my long train to a shabby gravestone, whose last stop I can only hope is sometime past 2060.

My book is called "Cocoon Kids" (should I italicize this? who knows) and was totally unexpected to me. I've been writing a book set in Okinawa for the last 6 months, and then these short stories came to me out of nowhere. Or, more truthfully, I'd been whittling them in my spare time over the course of years, and then finally got around to clumping them together one day. Mostly due to the prodding of my girlfriend.

I was obsessed with making the stories perfect. Literary and worthy and memorable and all that jazz. But at some point I had to accept that I am an error-ful young human with a scatterbrained disposition. It will be many years before I am memorable, if I ever become so lucky.

So errors. I'm thankful for them, because they teach my brain useful stuff. Mistakes in plot, pacing, tone, character development, or (gasp) grammar abound in my collection, but that's part of what makes it sort of valuable to me. I'd much rather make a million mistakes in this collection than be writing a PhD dissertation right now (no disrespect to grad students, that is one hell of a hard job).

Anyway, I enjoy making mistakes, and you can too! Slogan.

P.S. Let me know how many mistakes are in this article.

Joe Grammer

My book is getting out of hand. I love the thing, but I wanted to end it months ago. I already wrote one version of the novel over the summer of 2013, finishing on my birthday (Sept 24). I racked up 75,000 words, then scrapped the entire project and redid it from scratch, with new characters and a new plot. Sounds like some fear of completion stuff if you ask me (Moby Dick: "God keep me from ever completing anything.").

Both versions are about Okinawa, but the first one was a lot more personal. It was also more magical realist in nature, since it involved things like ghosts and mythical demons (specifically, the tengu). The core of the novel dealt with suicide.

Then, after my latest birthday, I decided this story was crap and rehashed everything after watching Fargo for the first time. It's a cool movie.

I changed from first person to third-person omniscient, expanded my cast of characters, and took out anything supernatural. I also wrote an outline, which for me is like running eight consecutive marathons in uphill terrain, without any GU energy gel (they don't pay me to say this, I swear, it's just a funny name to me).

I love my new characters. They're broken, and weird, and groping for dumb slivers of knowledge. I love my old characters too, but they seem to belong to a different Joe. I'm worried about fucking up both books, although I only want to publish one.

In my new novel I'm up to 78,000 words. I'm afraid of finishing the story, but I'm more afraid of procrastinating forever. Writing a book for me has been like hugging a dog really, really tightly for a year straight--sometimes it's the absolute definition of joy, and sometimes you just want to take a shower and wash off all the drool and, well, talk to humans.

At some point I was terrified that I had wasted months of my life by investing in this new story, and that the old one was far superior. Reading over the early pages, I found passages I actually liked. At the time, I was sick of working on the new plot, and sure that I had bitten off more than I could chew. Should I go back to the first draft? I wondered.

In some ways the old novel is better than my current one. That was hard to understand and harder to accept. But too bad. I'm working on 2.0, and that's the way it's going to stay.

Of course, I could freak out at the very end and flip a coin to determine which version I should present to the world: magical realist roman a clef, or planned, post-modern adventure. But at this point I just have to keep going. Write, edit, drink coffee. Coins aren't going to do shit for me.

My body is full of germs. Usually I push through and ignore it, but in this weird netherworld called 2014 I am implementing new habits. Taking care of self: no, no, no.

I loaded up on vitamins and Nyquil, then added some coffee for good measure. A strange combination (it's making me listen to Arctic Monkeys, whom I've never listened to before in any conscious way...the song Mad Sounds reminds me of Lou Reed). I've been reading and editing and planning for a moderately lucrative future, although I really have no idea how to plan so I mostly just worry and watch Samurai Champloo.

I took an Amtrak home on March 27 for my dad's birthday, which is when the cold probably wormed its way into my cells. I gave my dad the only extant copy of my book Cocoon Kids, as well as some electronic stuff that is a lot more practical and cool. We ate enchiladas. At night I jammed with some Jersey friends, lifted with my brother (new gym, really purple, open round-the-clock), wrote with my friend Dan, and saw an old friend I hadn't seen since high school. Anthony, the said friend, became a convert to the Tullamore Dew school of whiskey, which I highly approve of -- because I made it happen.

On March 31 I NJ Transit-ed it up to NYC to see my friend David and eat vast quantities of food. At the KGB Bar on E 4th St I taught the Japanese bartender some Russian and discussed Putin's foreign policy, which we both disapproved of in our various languages. Hand gestures and eye movements usually get the point across just as well as a clear phrase.

David and I met up with Eldis, our human friend who can do anything and everything, and then with my brother Jim and his girlfriend. We got hammered and played darts; I hurt my foot. We yelled in Scottish accents about cyberbullying and confused most of the other bar patrons.

On April 2 I took another Amtrak up to Boston, then a commuter rail over to Worcester to see my buddy Phil, who just received a fellowship for an exercise physiology Ph.D at the University of Florida. Meals included: filet mignon and kielbasa. That's it. It's everything I need. Thanks to Carl's in Oxford and Phil's parents.

I flew home for free from Boston on April 3, using up some air miles that were about to expire, and ended my journey with a smile in my head and a vague, fuzzy feeling of fatigue in every other organ.

Then I got sick. It's all good, because seeing my family and friends was absolutely worth it, but now I have to cough up the consequences. At least I edited my book and sent it out to some people to read. And I can watch more Samurai Champloo.

I love all the words in my book. I know no one else will forge the same relationship with those squiggly syllables, and that no one else will care as deeply, but it's still hard to push the text out of the nest. I.e., publish.

I have the story in my head. It's cinematic, full of neon lights and guns and tearful subversions, but on paper it looks like a deformed pancake.

I'm okay with this half the time. The other half, I'm sweating like Rents in Trainspotting, resolving to either burn my book (it's in a computer file, do I burn the computer?) or run away to Siberia, where, according to the documentary Happy People, life is rugged and simple and full of minks.

I have a list of literary agents I'm going to contact, but I haven't sent any emails. I teeter on the edge of connection, biting my nails, losing myself in Wikipedia holes and emerging in the middle of the night, naked and gnawing on unsalted almonds.

I'm in the stage of wondering if I'll find the "perfect" (shut up, fool) agent to sell my book and make up all the rent I haven't been able to pay myself. Good luck, me.

The Beach Boys' "Please Let me Wonder": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kc4jR...

So my girlfriend Anna challenged me to look at the last year of my life and see how I have evolved in my "business," which, for better or worse, is writing. At first my amygdala freaked out and electrified me with stress, but sitting at my desk now, with a bunch of baby saguaro cactus beside me (they never complain), I feel grateful for the opportunity.

A year ago today was October 7, 2013. During that time I was frantically writing Cocoon Kids, my self-published book of short stories, and assuming my life depended on its objective quality. I was an idiot. I am an idiot now, but back then, I am happy to say, I was a much feebler one.

Every word on the page terrified me, because it was a word someone else would read (ha) and judge to be lacking in some major category. My plots would be predictable, my characters flat, my dialogue the worst kind of daytime-TV cliche ("Pass the ham, Sally," Grant Shadow said. "Oh never mind, I love you like a farmer loves mowing hay in the crisp fall."). In short, I was a prisoner of stupid, meaningless fear: great job!

I could look back at that younger Joe (nice biceps) and scorn him for his naivete, but I won't, too much. He had his good points. He cared a lot about his stories, and he did his best to bring out the love and pain and inherent human grossness in each person. Most of the time he failed, but once in a while a sentence came through and achieved something moderately engaging.

My favorite story, and what seems to be readers' (thank you for existing, you few worthy humans) favorite story, is "A Squid for Mr. Calaway," which concerns the eponymous hero as he leaves his therapist's office in downtown Manhattan and proceeds to buy a package of squid for dinner. Only he loves the squid. In fact, it is the only thing he truly cares about. When he meets his acquaintance Barry on the street, the two trade insults and random hypotheticals until Calaway gets embarrassed and leaves. The ending is the strangest part, and I give infinite thanks to Anna for helping me tone it down from its original, more unpleasant tone.

My favorite sentence from this story (wow I am a self-indulgent bastard): "Into the dusk with my mollusks."

There we are. Now I can properly trash myself. The rest of the book is a hit-or-miss collection that is vaguely linked by the themes of isolation and connection. A common response from people who read it was, "It was hard to tell who was speaking." Another: "I had to read it two or three times to understand what happened" (thank you for even reading it once, you fucking rad cherubim). I agree with these concerns, especially when I revisit the stories and puzzle over the dense conversations. What was I trying to accomplish?

Nothing special, really; I was just bad at writing.

And now?

Now, I can safely say, I am better, but so far away from "good" it is not yet taking my calls.

However, in the space between 10/7/13 and now, I have befriended other writers, attended an Iowa Summer Festival Writing Conference, finished my novel, sent it to agents (to be rejected), and, most importantly, I have written a ton of shitty stories. Most of them are dead in a folder somewhere, but a few hang around, waiting for me to hurl them at magazines or people (magazines are people, too, I'm not judging). I have also read up on publishing contracts, practiced and failed at marketing campaigns, and sold a few books online. I no longer feel terrible about calling my writing a "business"; it just happens to be a failing one right now.

So. The two things I have done well, in my opinion, are these: 1.) writing every day and 2.) showing my work to other people for critique.

Of the things I have not done well, I present only a small selection: 1.) watching movies all day, 2.) stressing out over query letters so much I don't send them for months, 3.) over-editing my book because I'm afraid of letting it go, 4.) getting angry when people ask me what my book is "about" because I haven't done the work to distill a good pitch for it, 5.) not telling people I'm a "writer" when they ask what I do, 6.) avoiding human interaction entirely.

Well, if you've made it this far, thank you. I hope my self-review was marginally entertaining; but if not, I leave you with the inimitable and uplifting Sly and the Family Stone.