A review of my writing and plans for April. No kidding.

Even people who know me well believe I’m social. I was after all a teacher, working with high school students for most of my working life. I talked to people, dozens and sometimes hundreds of teenagers and adults, every day at work. I interacted—I must naturally be an extrovert, comfortable around people. But no. Not so much. I perform. As a substitute teacher, 1979-1990, I adjusted my performance to suit the teacher I was covering for. As a teacher of my own students, I became a helpful person presenting valuable skills. Performance. In my work I schooled myself as well as my students, and though I failed sometimes to do the job I hoped to do, I generally accomplished my goals. Students left my room with skills. Writing was key.

The 2023 Associated Writing Programs (AWP) annual conference was held in Seattle earlier this month. I worked a 4-hour shift on the Friday to pay for my registration. I spent an hour or more touring the basement booths, had lunch with a writer friend, and then worked two presentations, one about editing by pros* and the other about self-promotion in the [almost] post-covid world. The former was well-attended but not useful. The latter was useful but less well-attended. So the world goes.

[*If I were asked to edit a queer version of A Christmas Carol, I would certainly expect to reread that novella. The editor on stage said he would reread the novella if the author required him to, and he got the title wrong, so there’s that. The advice that you probably didn’t need an editor with historical knowledge to edit as historical novel… just wrong, imo.]

I did not attend parties, not even the ones I was specifically invited to attend at the AWP.

What I did instead was run in the Arboretum and shop the Pike Place Market. Both were close enough to what I recall from my college days to be purely fun. The canyons of new downtown towers were both unfamiliar and creepy. Distressing to discover the entrance to Eagles on a side street, overwhelmed by the monsters built around it. Gary was let into a concert by Janis Joplin; I saw Country Joe and the Fish there. What’s happened to that area is distressing. As if Seattle newcomers are too anxious to recreate other, uglier cities, they overlooked all that Seattle once offered, and blotted out water and mountain views—the very sky. A highlight for Gary, the only thing he loved downtown, was discovering a tiny photograph of Vi wearing the cedar bark dress on display in the Seattle Art Museum. There was much to admire in that place.

And then we came home to Portland and to the beach, which is also where I am this morning. Yesterday afternoon, just before we decided to hurry west in case the forecasted snow arrived, I set up a NaNo goal of 75k words “revised.” I have written those words; they were the result of the primary NaNo in November of 2021. I’d intended to take December off that year and begin revising in January of 2022. Didn’t happen.

Why not? Why didn’t I settle down to rework that novel that means so much to me? Not laziness so much as fear, I think. Or both. Fear of the work I knew would be required. Absolute certainty that most of what I had on the page was weak and ramble and would need research and hours and hours. Instead, last year, I went all the way back to the original story, or a draft of that original story and did what an MFA classmate urged. I cut it to five thousand words and sent it to a journal that had read and commented on my work over the years. That’s the podcast of “All the Daughters Sing” at Metaphorosis. I revised “The Promised Hour” (yet again) and it was accepted by CALYX. I wrote two book reviews and one was accepted. I am reworking a poem that received a very generous rejection.

Maybe success is what has given me the confidence to finally attack the novel. And another thing. One of the people I met at the AWP was encouraging. I’d wanted to buy a book from a publishing booth and the editor standing behind the display insisted “I know you!” She tried several events then looked again at my name tag and remembered my novella submission! That was the middle-length version of All the Daughters Sing.” It had been “on the short side for a novella” (less than 20k) and they’d wanted more about another character. That would be Tula. I have some 20k words of Tula’s unedited story. I am encouraged to send a novel manuscript when it is complete.

I will keep you posted. The goal is to rework 2500 words a day, each day, to the end of the month. The complication? I have so many drafts, random scenes, a chunk about the widow in the UK that i expanded last winter, and the revised novella from 2020 and the polished 2023 5k piece that cuts away from all the rest of it. The “Rest of It” is unknown country. It’s going to be messy. Yeah, it’s still scary.

TODAY, 1 April 2023, I began with fewer than 2500 words copied and pasted from the short story, and then revised, brought in a few cut paragraphs from another draft and ended with 3241 words.

Met my NaNo goal of revising 2500 words on the first day. I have moved another 2500 words to my working document to address tomorrow. For today, I think I’m done.

Warning to myself: This will get harder as I go along. The first 20k have been fiddled and fiddled again, read by friends and revised. There are still the other voices, raw and undeveloped… By the middle of the month I’m going to be overwhelmed.

I will update my progress in new posts every five days or at the end of each week.