Rachel Dacus's Blog, page 27

More Embarrassing Riches in Poetry Publishing

The end of 2016 was very lucky for my poetry publishing. In this second installment on an embarrassment of riches, I'm delighted to share my poem, "Bird Bones", which was recently published in the redoubtable Prairie Schooner.

Thanks, editors!

I also had work published in Eclectica's 20th anniversary anthology, Prairie Schooner, Atlanta Review, Panoply (who very kindly nominated my poem for a Pushcart Prize!) and Peacock Journal (where they put beauty first).

Prairie Schooner had published some of my poems before, but as it's a top literary magazine, it's always a thrill when they grab something. And I'm always surprised by what they accept, as I was with the very first set of two poems they took. It's a print-only journal. Here is a photo of the poem page:

 
The PS issue is full of stellar poets and writers, people I'm proud to be among. I really recommend getting a copy. And not just to read my poem (you just did that). I recommend reading in all these journals. Gorgeous, breathtaking, heartbreaking, soul-awakening work in every one of these magazines. You won't be sorry.









Visit http://RachelDacus.net for more information and writing by Rachel Dacus.

All My Imaginary Friends Have Superpowers

Because shouldn't we all have a little extra help? And also a friend you can always talk to, who understands everything the way you see it, or even if he doesn't, has wisdom gently offered? Yes, everyone should have this. 

In my completed novel, THE RENAISSANCE CLUB, (watch for announcement of its debut date), Renaissance genius sculptor and architect Bernini provides the magical wisdom and inspiration for young art historian May Gold, stuck in a going-nowhere teaching job, with a stick-in-the-mud boyfriend. As if Italy isn't magic enough on its own, she slips through a crack in time to come face to face with the tempestuous artist, staring straight into Bernini's eyes.

Well, what would you do if you could meet that one person in history who you've always admired-- maybe even studied and fantasized about? That's the way my tale unfolds. And the way May manages to make her not-so-imaginary but slipstream companion a reality in her life. I found the voice of Bernini urging me along as I wrote the story. It's a coming-of-artistic-age tale that rang deeply true for me. If you have to create, have courage and do it boldly. Think of the dynamic Bernini when you put your fingers on those keys, or the camera to your eye. 

My newest work in progress, THE ROMANTICS CLUB, also features an imaginary companion, in the person of a ghost. Two half-sisters clash over a bequest from their father, a cottage in Italy and its resident ghost, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, until an explosion forces one sister to learn the price of putting property ahead of family.
What I love about my imaginary companions with superpowers is the way they tend to support and encourage my main characters. No ill-disposed ghosts or phantoms here! If you want a dark fantasy read, look elsewhere. My ghosts are well-intentioned, creative, and want you to be too.They also want you to be vicariously in Italy as often as possible. That should be classified as a superpower.






Visit http://RachelDacus.net for more information and writing by Rachel Dacus.

An Embarrassment of Riches

My literary stocking overflowed this December. but I was so busy I didn't have time to mention it to anyone but those who saw the stack of magazines on my coffee table. I'm taking it as a sign of the new year, a flowering, perspicacious publication kind of 2017. I also found a late December rose, two blooms that opened up and held for a miraculous week. All good omens for a new year. No matter what November made me feel, I'm feeling optimistic now.

Thanks to Dan Veach, outgoing editor of  The Atlanta Review, for selecting my poem "Rain Dance with Redwood" for this new issue. Judging by California's rainy season, and the impending "monster storm," I think the dancing works. Here's the first of four big print publications I have work in this winter! I'm so jazzed and so hopeful. A good state for January. Happy shiny, new 2017!




Visit http://RachelDacus.net for more information and writing by Rachel Dacus.

Season of Light - This Is Our Family

This is our family every year in December. We're the Hanukkah-Christmas celebrators. My brother and his family are observant Jews, and we celebrate Solstice and Christmas. And we get together and meld our holidays in love.

This particular difficult year, it's nice that Hanukkah and Christmas Eve are one day. Someone in the interfaith community said this coinciding of the two sacred holidays should be taken as a sign that tolerance and brotherhood are what we most need right now.

To me the season of Light is meant to shine with hope. If we can find this sense of the sacredness of one another, we can resist any negative force from within or without, and endure for the symbolic eight nights of holding off the enemies of fear, greed, anger, and selfishness, until we prevail and endure. So I'm lighting candles in my soul for that Light of compassion to descend and cloak the earth. It's what will save the earth and its inhabitants, always. Burn bright with it. This is our family of humanity, its unity. Respect the whole of it. Blessings of the season to you and yours.


Visit http://RachelDacus.net for more information and writing by Rachel Dacus.

50,000 Words in 30 Days -- Surviving the NaNoWriMo Marathon

It was quite a thing, writing 50,000 words in 30 days. I signed up telling all my colleagues I wouldn't cross the finish line, that I had no intention of it. I wanted to write good words, not fast and plenty words. But guess what? I have a giant competitive streak in my nature. Every day when I checked my writing buddies' progress, a few pulled ahead, of me. It got under my skin. I started writing faster, upping my daily word count. I suddenly felt I COULD finish this marathon, and wouldn't that be a thing?

I began with a head start: a detailed outline and character profiles drawn from working with Lisa Cron's Story Genius book on the craft of fiction. I knew the WHY for my characters, not just the WHAT. I knew what the two sisters each needed to achieve by the book's end and what that was supposed to make the reader feel.

Armed with all that, plus a pre-existing 10,000+ words, I leaped in on November 1. My life, it should be said, was in no way ready for such a venture, and that's why I had to do it. My beloved brother had just died less than a month earlier. I had new family responsibilities as a result. I had a play I'd written in rehearsal, and a novel I'd completed to get an agent or publisher for. I was behind on my client work, swamped with chores and errands left unattended when we plunged into caring for my dying brother, and I was in deep mourning.

And #NaNoWriMo2016 was the best thing that could have happened to me at that time. The daily exercise of writing sharpened my mind and my skills. It focused me in a world - La Spezia in Liguria, Italy -- beyond anywhere familiar, except that I have once been there on the happiest vacation I've ever taken. And it gave me a reachable goal. I'm very goal-oriented, so that was a happy space for, reaching for a new goal.

As it turned out, I got my 50,000 words done by the skin of my teeth, and by dumping raw research into the body of the book, rewriting it, and then deciding to organize chapters later. And now I have two-thirds of THE ROMANTICS CLUB, a novel, roughly drafted. Some of the opening chapters have been polished to a high gloss. I did some editing while I wrote -- can't refrain from wordsmithing, as it's my poetic pleasure to do it -- and I did some organizing and LOTS OF RESEARCH.

In short, I recommend this for all you goal-oriented writers who are wondering how to tackle the next book. You don't have to wait for November. Name your own novel-writing month and try to hit a 1,667-word-a-day pace. Or if you did NaNo, you can use January and February to do some goal-oriented editing, with resources from NaNoWriMo.
National Novel Writing Monthhttp://nanowrimo.org
Whatever you do, know you can do more writing than you think you can. That's the message of NaNoWriMo. Go to the website and donate to support this wonderful program that empowers lots of writers -- young and old!Visit http://RachelDacus.net for more information and writing by Rachel Dacus.

Holidays Are for Writing and Reading As Well as Socializing

In the spirit of the holidays now upon us, I'd like to offer some fodder for those quiet times you find amid the activities and social life. Reading for me leads to writing, so I often start my writing day by either progressing in a novel or reading several poems. Sometimes digging into a craft book. So here are some recommendations for feeding your head.

Story Genius by Lisa Cron. This is the one fiction craft book you have to have! She's the story whisperer, the one who can help you dig into that beautiful plot and set of characters you have brewing in your brain, but which keeps stirring around in confusing ways. I following the "pantsing" way of writing my first novel, resulting in what Anne Lamott calls "shitty first drafts" -- many of them. I know Anne recommends you give yourself permission to draft without editing, but as someone who spent years writing one book, I'd prefer a more sure-footed approach next time. Here's one of my current favorite quotes from the book: "Don't keep secrets secret from the reader." 

Emily Bleeker's When I'm Gone is an engaging love story from a wonderful writer. It touches deeply on themes of loss, love, and emotional reconnection. While I undergo my own grieving process, I found this novel healing and uplifting. The portrayal of a marriage through the process of grieving its loss is poignant and beautifully portrayed. Bleeker is an author to watch and this novel is one that will keep you turning pages.

I'm in the middle of reading and reviewing The Uneaten Carrots of Atonement by Diane Lockward, poet and author of another craft book I love, The Crafty Poet. The color red sears the collection, the seethe of articulate anger and outrage over an undefended childhood and life’s assaults and unfairness. Whether she takes as her subject nine renegade monkeys escaped from a testing lab or the red dress (re-dress) of a child dreaming of freedom from abuse, the poet takes “quick, sharp steps like flint against steel” in every poem. Yet there is beauty in her boldness and defiance, poetry in the grieving and acceptance. 

Hopefully something here will spark your creative juices and give you islands of quiet enjoyment through the hectic social season. Happy and Merry days ahead. 



Visit http://RachelDacus.net for more information and writing by Rachel Dacus.

Day 18 of National Novel Writing Month - Not Yet Halfway

It's a marathon: 50,000 words of prose, the majority of words for an 80,000-word standard mainstream novel. I'm at a little over 24,000 words this morning.

Why am I doing this? Because writing is bliss and marketing a book is hell. Undergoing the process of trying to get a literary agent, who then tries to get your book a publisher, who then takes more than a year to publish it -- that's anyone's definition of hell. It would fit Hieronymous Bosch's picture of hell. And I've been in it for more than two years with a completed novel I'm marketing. It involves extravagant amounts of waiting, laced with copious rejection. It takes persistence and faith beyond what you think you have.

But working on a new story is heaven. It makes hope, inspiration, and excitement surge. Every act of storytelling is a new adventure. It unfolds one day at a time, in the company of people I'm gradually getting to feel are boon companions, my characters. Like the Fellowship of the Ring, we have a purpose. We have a story to tell. We must sustain hope above all. It's exhilarating, like climbing to an impossibly high peak and standing there to survey all the lands of the earth.

Also, running my marathon has been a way to write myself through the dark woods of grief over my brother's death a little more than a month ago. I would adapt the cliché and say that when things get tough, the tough writer gets writing. I know so many poets and writers who write their way forward, especially in difficulty. It's how we learned to cope with our fatal flaws and the curveballs life throws, such as death, poverty, illness, divorce. I'm telling a new story involving all those.

Here's an excerpt from my spirit guide, Lisa Cron's book Story Genius :

"Only by knowing your protagonist's defining misbelief can you craft a story that will test it to the max, opening his eyes along the way." Those are the best stories, the inward adventures that may be occasioned by outward ones, but always lead to new levels of understanding yourself, other people, and the world. Visit http://RachelDacus.net for more information and writing by Rachel Dacus.

Finding Peace in Uncertain Times: Poetry Reaches Deep

As a woman in a time when the recently elected leader of our country has expressed such raw misogyny, I definitely feel as uncertain of my future as Matisse's "Woman with Hat" looks. So I was honored to have my poem "Wings Clipped" featured by WordPress Discover in an article about poetry in uncertain times: Chaos, Control: Four Poems for Uncertain Times. Four good poems you will want to read.

And speaking of the woman with hat, I'm delighted to announce that my book Femme au Chapeau is now on Kindle for $2.99 --- complete with a Look Inside the Book!

Another of my books, Gods of Water and Air , is on a Goodreads Giveaway. Click that link to enter and possibly win one of five print copies I'm giving away by December 12. "Poems to unravel love, grief, and joy" -- my Amazon subtitle seems right, right now. I think many of us have experienced these feelings in the last couple of weeks, going through the most intense election I've ever experienced.

Added to that intensity was one far more powerful to me personally: the death of my brother on October 10. It put a lot of things in perspective, a very large one being that I am mortal too. Life is incredibly short -- shorter for some than it might be -- and much longer than had been imagined for others, like my 93-year-old mother. These poems and essays -- and even a short play on the imagined afterlife of dogs -- speak to mortality too, and how important it is to cherish all the love, grief, and joy we're given in a life.

As I think about giving thanks in a couple weeks at a family feast where there will be one empty chair, I'm thankful for it all. Here's an excerpt from one of the poems in Gods, "Accept the Invitation":
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Gaining Momentum in Novel Writing Month - Wheeeee!

Update on my #NaNoWriMo2016 -- today I wrote over 3,000 words. It helps to be doing a lot of scene-setting in an exotic location, which for my book is the picturesque Ligurian coast of Northern Italy. It also helps that I love writing descriptions of scenery and towns. I love researching places I've been or been near. I spent time in Santa Margherita and Portofino, and the little town where I'm setting my book is just down the coast. So it feels familliar, and from the pictures, looks much like the Portofino coastline, where steep green-clad cliffs drop to a sparkling blue and aquamarine sea. Many coves ruffle this coastline, as if someone with a giant spoon scalloped it. Tiny communities adorn many of these bays. The roads go up and down the hills, and the ocean breeze is everpresent.

There, I just wrote more words and I might use them. The key for me is that 1) I have a detailed plot outline and character profiles, and 2) I love Italy! Writing about it brings out the poet in me. So if I have a clear day, as I did today, I can crank out a lot of words, and not just padding words, but good words, words advancing the plot and fleshing out characters and the kinds of things they say.

A good writing day. I'm halfway to the 50,000 words mark, but I didn't plan on really counting. Yet I find the marathon stimulating. It wouldn't hurt to make that goal by November 30. While I wait for agents to contact me about The Renaissance Club, I'm still playing in Italy and lining up the next book. They all say it can't hurt in marketing the first. Plus, it's increasingly a lot of fun.Visit http://RachelDacus.net for more information and writing by Rachel Dacus.

Day Ten of National Novel Writing Month

We've been doing it since before Jane Austen. Girls writing fiction. So in the 2016 National Novel Writing Month, I'm going to guess that a majority of the more than 400,000 participants this year are women. And many will go on to publish their books. Some NYT bestsellers by women that began as NaNoWriMo exercises: Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen, published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill[32] The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, published by Doubleday[33] Persistence of Memory by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes, published by Delacorte Press[32] Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell, published by St. Martin's Press[34][35] Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins, published by Dutton Juvenile[34][36] Cinder by Marissa Meyer, published by Square Fish[34] My work-in-progress, The Romantics Club, is a third of the way, if you estimate it by words count. I'm now more than 20,000 words (and 85 pages) drafted on an 85,000-word (goal) novel of roughly 335 pages. That's about the count for my completed novel (available to an interested publisher), The Renaissance Club. And I didn't do it with a quill and ink. Thank goodness for the digital age!


Visit http://RachelDacus.net for more information and writing by Rachel Dacus.