ALL THE DAUGHTERS SING

March 1, 2023March 5, 2025 / janpriddyoregon / 22 Comments

At least five years ago, I typed out the first draft of a story in which nearly all moveable life on earth had died. It was too long and when I tried to cut it back to below five thousand words… it got longer. Then it became a novella with over twenty thousand words. I managed to shave a couple of thousand words. The next draft, completed during National Novel Writing Month in November 2021 (whoops, during 2018!), was a full length novel. (NaNo requires 50k but I wrote over 75k.)

Terrible things are happening. I am not unaware, but today, only the wonderful-in-a-good-way news. I have reasons to feel amazed at my good fortune.

***We both looked at this sky and felt amazed—it was more impressive in person, of course, but that plume of cloud over Castle Rock!***

Continue reading →

TO BE SURE

March 24, 2019March 24, 2019 / janpriddyoregon / 5 Comments

The Los Angles Review of Books blog has a grammatical error.

“Unlike Nancy, who’s mother died when she was three, I had a mom, and my mom had read Nancy Drew when she was my age.”

The contraction “who’s” stands for “who is.” The writer wanted the possessive form of “who” (whose) and failed to find it. No one caught the mistake before the article went to print, or in this case was posted online.

I am not a grammatical wizard (anyone who reads my blog will have caught typos), merely a well read person who is a naturally bad speller, ignorant of rules, and not afraid to admit it, and one willing to look up what I do not know. Usually, I know when I am unsure, but sometimes I am mistaken even about that.

One thing I do know, when I find writing in a journal as eminent as the BLARB, I expect someone will proofread the copy. I hope someone might.

That would assume that there was someone on staff to do the work of editing. Years ago, every publisher had fact-checkers and line editors. We are none of us perfect, and most writers are blind to their own errors, which is why working with a really good editor is such a treat. That doesn’t happen often, and most writers today are left entirely to their own devices as far as editing goes.

Today, there are merely readers who are supposed to weed out the genuinely bad writing and narrow the list of submissions to a readable number. The actual editors come in late to winnow the list to the pieces that might see print. Among writers this is the process, largely invisible, of submission. I send a piece of writing to a journal, a reader (usually an undergraduate volunteer at literary journals produced on college campuses) gives it a yes or no, and it passes on to the next reader. Some journals use multiple readers and incorporate multiple rounds of reading, and many include the Editor in Chief in the final round that decides what will be printed. On the masthead will be listed names of the Editor in Chief as well as Editors for fiction and poetry and nonfiction. The layout artist and covers designer might show up. There are often Assistant Editors, and at the bottom of the pages, sometimes, a list of the Readers.

The only time I have seen a Proofreader listed in the masthead of a literary journal was nearly twenty years ago when I found a typo in Tin House. She did not thank me for pointing it out.

No one wants to hear about their mistakes once they have gone to print.

A California executive secretary applied for a job with the Oregon high school where I worked. The Head Secretary whose job she was applying for was so incensed by the applicant’s notations about typos that she threw the letter out. Imagine if someone who actually understood perfect grammar and spelling had been hired! I, for one, would have stood in line at her desk asking for an edit.

“The Case of the Perfect Girl Detective’ is well worth the read. The error is trivial, no worse than you might find here in every post. I was not confused as to the author’s meaning. I might have found the error reassuring, in fact.

DONE/NOT DONE

April 7, 2018April 14, 2018 / janpriddyoregon / Leave a comment

Eight hours, then six hours the next afternoon, then a day off, then another seven hours revising my 2016 novel after working my paying job. I have queried it more times than I am willing to admit and under four different titles. (The husband of a friend suggested the title last week that I think has stuck.) I have written eleven drafts of this novel. It has drifted up and down between 75 and 82 thousand words. Two agencies are interested. I just queried another agent, and I have sent out 22 story submissions this year. In March, because clearly I have too much time on my hands, I committed to writing a 40-page novelette and a new poem each day in the month of April.

Ask me how that’s going.

I have a few lousy poem drafts and 21 pages of a science fiction short story that is already too long and does not want to be novelette. (We’ll call it the “pigeon” story, because it does actually have a pigeon in it for about a page.) I really do want to put the pigeon story aside because it gets more strange and complicated every time I think about it. And anyway, it’s done. Isn’t it? Sixty-five hundred words is long enough and I should stop. Shouldn’t I? Or maybe it’s only that I do not want to give it another 20 pages. It’s a lot more work for a story that is strange without being actually horrifying, and which no one will like, right? Maybe I am even afraid of what will happen if I do write more? That is entirely possible. I am not sure if there is a market for stories this long, and the story itself is creeping me out more than a little bit.

Like so much of what I write, this one, the pigeon story, starts with a story about birds. I have another creepy bird story that already wants work. It has crows. Maybe I can set this 21-page pigeon story aside and work on the crow story for a few days. The owl story is going to be published. I am afraid to look at it again. Heaven help me, I know I would begin to revise.

My husband and I went on our first actual vacation in fifteen years last month—all the way to Victoria in Canada. Both of us are familiar with Vancouver Island and Victoria from our youth. Gary had Unitarian friends there when he was a teenager and I used to show dogs and stay with friends on the Island.

We did not take a device capable of accessing the internet with us to Canada. For three nights and four days, we were out of touch. Even the flip phone did not work since we were out of the country.

I had been busy sending out work before we left and several pieces were being held—short-listed for further review. I did not think about them. We napped, walked, ate, looked in shops, talked, admired views, and napped some more. I finished reading two books, but I did not even write in my journal or take photographs. It was a lovely time, and I fell asleep in the car while my husband drove most of the way home.

As we neared home, I took over driving because the bridge over the Columbia River is four miles long and he Gary hates driving across. I confessed to him that if I did not have some sort of positive response to my writing when we got home, I was going to be sad. He replied with suitable gravity that he expected that.

While I was reviewing two hundred unread emails, I found the good news I hoped for. And while responding to acceptances of the owl story and the crow essay (not the crow story, which is something else), a request for a full manuscript of my novel arrived from an agent I have queried in the past.

Yes, a very good day. I was happy and I congratulated myself and my husband and I drank a full bottle of sparkling wine. Yes. Yes, we did.

And without in any way dismissing the glory of this good news, these three successes, I do not believe I “have turned a corner” in my writing life. Everything will not go well from now on. It may immediately go back to mostly unsuccessful. For example, no journal will choose to take the story that three journals are currently considering—even though each has held it twice as long as they usually hold work. (The longer they have it, the better—it means that a first reader liked it well enough to pass it on, and the second reader too.) It’s likely that all three of the editors thinking about liking my story will decide they do not like it enough to publish it. That happens all the time, often enough that a website online tracks not just the text of form rejections, but also the text of “higher tier” rejections. I mostly submit to journals and magazines with an acceptance rate somewhat below 1%. I am submitting to journals which show hundreds of submissions but no acceptances at all in the stats at Duotrope where I track my submissions. Yes, I could make it easier by sending work to smaller journals, but if I wanted easy, there are other things I could be doing rather than writing stories with birds in them.

Nothing is changed because I have recently had a story and an essay accepted. My mother always warned me about getting my hopes up. I have been up there before.

There was the year I won a Literary Arts grant, was accepted into an MFA program, and had a story published by Calyx. This was followed by hard work on my MFA and then . . . nothing. My mother died. I could not write at all but dwelt on one story day after day without making any progress. Three years passed.

There is no corner a writer can come around and find everything easy and neat. Writing is not like we might have hoped, like maybe the man in the White House thought everything would go his way, once he won the electoral college.

Real life, even if you get away with telling lies or you write fiction, is messy and out of control. If you told the truth or wrote nonfiction, it would still be messy. Poetry? Messy, messy, messy. Right up to the moment the poem sings.

This is what I know about success:

success does not last, but good writing does
acceptance is glorious—celebrate when it comes
nothing good can last, but neither will the bad
count rejections because they will come anyway (I already have 33 this year and my goal is to have 100 for 2018)
sometimes the “dream market” is the only one with readers smart enough to appreciate your best (A prize-winning story of mine was rejected by tiny journals before finding publication with a better one. This happened twice.)
failure was at the beginning and so it shall be at the end

Almost 400 years ago, Hobbes claimed life is “nasty, brutish, and short.” Writing should not be like that. But the struggle is long and exhausting. Reward seldom comes when we need it most. People misunderstand, but I know for certain that I am never certain about what I am doing. The writing is messy and personal and haunts me awake and asleep.

In case it’s hard to tell, I am enjoying myself quite a bit just now.