At the beginning of the year, I posted my New Years resolutions. Now that almost a month has passed, I thought it might be fun to see how many I’ve abandoned already.
I will spend less time on Twitter: Hahaha, yeah, right.
I will stop drinking Diet Coke: On the contrary, the slippery slope is gettin’ ever slipperier. I’m buying six-packs by the six-pack. I’m guzzling the stuff like it’s going out of style. It’s only a matter of time before I’m toothless.
I will stop buying books: As a matter of fact, I’ve only bought one book this year, and I read it right away. I bought it for a book group, and I was leading the discussion. So, all things considered, I’m doing shockingly well with this resolution that I had no intention of keeping. Huh. Whodathunkit.
I will finish my second novel: A little over 30,000 words so far.
I will refrain from talking about politics with anyone to whom I am related by blood: Golden! But on the other hand, I haven’t actually had the opportunity to break this particular resolution.
I will use my evenings more productively, by reading more and diddling around less on my iPhone: Technically: success! I’ve barely been looking at my iPhone in the evening. And I have read one of the books from my reading list. But on the other hand, I’ve probably been working Netflix’s “watch instantly” feature a little too hard, which brings me to…
I will manage my Netflix queue better: Well. I guess one might say, given the previous item, I am at least getting my money’s worth. But Starting Over has been sitting on top of the DVD player for a while now.
I will get my ample behind back into the gym: I’m tired! Don’t wanna!
I will quit smoking: Huzzah!
Not gonna get into hair-splitting resolution math here or anything, but it looks like I’m, rather surprisingly, mostly on track with about half of these. Granted, I have to count the nonsensical items in order to get there–but as I said, I’m not splitting hairs.
Strange thing: it doesn’t bother me a bit to write song lyrics, but the second the word “poetry” enters my mind, I seize up like a rusty hinge.
Nevertheless, I live in hope. Some years back, at the Nebraska Summer Writers Conference, I enrolled in a weekend poetry workshop with Stan Sanvel Rubin. I’d hoped it might help me oil that frozen hinge, but it was very nearly a complete disaster. All through the first day I lived in an agony of frustration. During the in-class exercises, I wrote short rants and tiny narratives, indistinguishable from prose–except that I threw in some line breaks here and there. Each time I finished reading one of these “poems” to my classmates, I wanted to huddle under my chair or–better yet–crawl under the wall-to-wall carpeting.
In the final version of The River In Winter, in chapter 13, Jonah travels to San Francisco to visit his mother, Barbara.
In an earlier draft, the San Francisco trip extended into a second chapter, but after a few pages I discovered that I’d fallen down the proverbial rabbit hole. I’d introduced a subplot that could easily have consumed 50 or 100 pages. I had no idea where it was going–or, for that matter, where it had come from or why I needed it. I had to cut it.
One of the many principles I learned from Carol Bly is a certain economy with characters. Of course, there are always bit players, walk-ons, spear carriers, but I try to keep their numbers small. In general, I like to feel that every character has some clear purpose.
And that’s why, as much as I enjoyed writing Bryce, I had to let him go.
I know it’s way, way too early for this, but I’ve already started playing around with cover designs for my novel-in-progress. Here’s what I’ve got so far (click for a high-res PDF):
It’s a study in white space, this cover. The great expanses of emptiness signify the loneliness, the futility, of daily existence. The key–islanded as it is within those ample tracts of nothingness–symbolizes our conviction that we know what we think we know, that we are what we think, that the unknowable is, in fact, knowable. The title and the author’s name are motion-blurred–smudged a smidgen–betokening the unfathomable speed of life’s passing. Years melt away into the void, faster than we care to admit, and all along the way we convince ourselves that we hold the key to understanding.
Actually, that’s all pretty much BS. I just pushed some pixels around until I found something I liked.
This could get a little meta: I’m going to post a link here, from my site, to Goodreads, where my author page includes an automatic feed of all my posts. But whatever.
I’m giving away five copies of The River in Winter. Lots of people have entered so far, but there’s no rush. It’s open for a month, and the winners are selected randomly by magic mojo on the Goodreads side.
If I’d known so many people were going to enter, I would have selected a much shorter time span. When I set it up, I thought it might take a whole month just to get five people!
Our planet is home to six billion people. Of that number, almost one billion people–one in eight of us–don’t have access to safe, clean drinking water.
Here in the US, we take water entirely for granted. You turn a knob, you bump a lever with your wrist, the water comes, hot or cold, clean and clear. We use about 150 gallons of water every day. In a developing country, a person may struggle to find five gallons of water. The time spent collecting water is time that could naturally be spent in school or earning a living. Lacking a source of clean water, a community faces the risk of life-threatening water-borne illnesses. Forty-five hundred children die every day from water-related diseases.
charity:water aims to bring clean, safe water to developing nations. They use 100% of the money they raise to provide water to communities in need. They work in 16 countries on three continents–Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Honduras, Haiti, Cote D’Ivoire, and many more. They do much with little; $20 can provide a person in Africa with clean, safe water for 20 years. One dollar per year per person.
This is, to put it mildly, a Very Good Cause. I’m adding a banner at the bottom of this page. Click on it, won’t you, to learn more about charity:water. (The blog is especially nifty.) It would be absolutely brilliant if a billion more people gained the luxury of taking water for granted.
As I’m working through a draft, I often write a scene that’s too tangential or that veers off in the wrong direction entirely. But I try not to delete anything outright; instead when I make cuts I move the text to a separate file, in case I’m able to use them after all. I thought it might be fun to sift through the material I cut from The River in Winter and see if there’s anything worth sharing.
Among other things, I found this flashback scene, describing how Jonah met his partner, Tom:
I’d first seen Tom in the crowded gymnasium, at a freshman orientation event, a kind of expo where the school’s sports teams and clubs tried to lure first-years with brochures, posters, and instant rapport. I’d volunteered for an early shift at the rowing club’s table. My first glimpse of Tom had been from behind. Long black hair halfway down his back. A black tank top and skimpy blue running shorts showing off bronzed legs and arms.
He’d stopped at the table across the aisle from ours, had chatted for some minutes with a perky member of the French Club. Beneath the table her feet were demurely crossed in penny loafers and short white socks. She smoothed the folds of her plaid skirt over her knees. As she spoke, she looked up at Tom, her head tilted to one side. She twirled a hank of hair around her fingers.
As he turned away, he glanced in my direction. His eyes met mine, then slid immediately away. He stood for a moment, reading the poster behind me?-“Partridge Lake Rowing Club” was all it said. And then he shook his head, tucked his hair behind his ear, and walked away. Well, of course. He wasn’t built like a rower. A runner, perhaps. Tall, lean, wiry.
Outside, after my shift, I saw him standing with a couple of seniors from the Native American Student Union. As I passed, I felt him watching me, but when I turned back, he and the seniors were walking three abreast toward the Campus Center.
Weeks later, some friends from the rowing club dragged me to the homecoming dance. One of the coxswains, Carl, lent me a shirt and a pair of shoes; I didn’t own anything with buttons, in the former case, or without reflective stripes, in the latter.
The Great Hall glittered with pink and gold light. Streamers waved against the old rippled glass of the tall windows. The disc jockey seemed to favor the thrashing guitar-driven music I hated. I stood near the door, craving Rodgers and Hammerstein, or at least the Thompson Twins.
Tom sidled through the crowd, a beer in each hand. How, as a freshman, with an enormous Magic Marker “X” on the back of each hand, had he managed to get not one, but two, beers? Resourceful, this one.
He wore a slouchy black T shirt and acid-washed jeans. A big square hole in the denim revealed his bony left knee. The tongues of his black high-top sneakers flapped against his shins. He walked with a stiff-legged, wide-stepping gait. Maybe it was the looseness of his shoes. Maybe he was already drunk.
“What’s up?” he said. He offered me one of the beers.
I shrugged. “Not much.”
He looked at me. He stared for so long that I thought I might have said something unwittingly cruel, or something surpassingly insightful. He grinned and raised his glass, as if in a toast. I raised mine.
We stood side by side, watching the pastel lights play across the slow-moving bodies of the dancers. He leaned against me, shoulder to shoulder. The insufferable rock music seemed to vanish, and it was as if I could hear only my own slow pulse. It was as if our breathing and our heartbeats had fallen into the same rhythm, as if our bodies, though barely touching, had become intertwined, interdependent.
One of my friends, a talented writer and avid reader, has started a meme on Facebook: we’re selecting books to read in 2010, with an emphasis on titles we’ve been putting off for a while. Given that my house is full of books I’ve bought for one reason or another, and haven’t yet gotten around to reading, it was a trivial matter to make a list. Here it is, in no particular order:
I don’t usually make New Years resolutions, and for good reason–I never keep them for more than a week or so. But this year I thought, eh, what the hell?
Ergo, to wit, henceforth and forthwith, here are my resolutions for (some small portion of) 2010:
I will spend less time on Twitter. (Already it’s not looking good. I just paused in the middle of typing the previous sentence in order to check my timeline.)
I will stop drinking Diet Coke. Again. (I was off the stuff for two or three years. Somehow it crept back in. They put heroin in it, you know, to make it addictive.)
I will stop buying books until I read the ones I already–. Hahahaha. Nooooo, hahahaha. I can’t even finish typing that one.
I will be more methodical about marketing The River in Winter. (So far? Enthusiastic, but a little scattershot.)
I will finish my second novel, in hopes of getting it to press in fewer than 12 years.
I will refrain from talking about politics with anyone to whom I am related by blood. (Should any such personage ask me about politics, I shall say “Mmmmph, mm-mm-mmph” around my fist, which I will have by then stuffed into my mouth.)
I will never understand anything that Jim DeMint says or does. (Actually, that’s not so much a resolution. More a sad prediction.)
I will use my evenings more productively, by reading more and diddling around less on my iPhone.
I will manage my Netflix queue better, so that I don’t have a pair of unwatched DVDs lying around the house for months at a time. (Somewhere around here I have Serpico and In the Year of the Pig. I don’t remember why I picked them, and I don’t remember where I put them. Oy vey iz mir.)
I will get my ample behind back into the gym and resume indoor cycling classes. (This one can wait a couple of weeks. Let everyone else make and break the same resolution first.)
I will quit smoking. (I know I already did that, almost two years ago. But I thought it’d be good to have a safe bet on the list.)
There you have it. My ambitious program of self-improvement for 2010. Or, at any rate, for the first two weeks of 2010. After that, all bets are off.
this year, and I read it right away. I bought it for a book group, and I was leading the discussion. So, all things considered, I’m doing shockingly well with this resolution that I had no intention of keeping. Huh. Whodathunkit.
Not so bad. I did this and this, after all.
I’d hoped it might help me oil that frozen hinge, but it was very nearly a complete disaster. All through the first day I lived in an agony of frustration. During the in-class exercises, I wrote short rants and tiny narratives, indistinguishable from prose–except that I threw in some line breaks here and there. Each time I finished reading one of these “poems” to my classmates, I wanted to huddle under my chair or–better yet–crawl under the wall-to-wall carpeting.
Michael Ondaatje
Annie Dillard
Günter Grass (a new translation by Breon Mitchell)
Charles Dickens
Zadie Smith
Arnošt Lustig
David Leavitt
Wallace Stegner
E.M. Forster
Ann Patchett
, Philip Roth
Ford Madox Ford
Hermann Hesse
Haruki Murakami
Ron Cooper
