What are we talking about? Practice?
That time of year when the sun gets to setting around 8pm or so, a little before. From the living room back home in CT, you get the really spectacular sunsets; even when the daytime sky is cloudless, the evening sky will full with cumuli to catch the red and gold thrown up by the golden semi-orb on its way down.
Here, in NYC, at least tonight, the thing is a bit more gradual, seamless, or perhaps less ostentatious. It happens around the same time, but without the visual flourish you'd get back in CT. The daytime heat, however, has been just as punishing. Strips the body of all impetus towards movement, makes one want nothing more than to not move, to find any posture that will magically pull cool moisture from the air, however unrealistic the proposition. Still, I was able to get things done, run the type of errands that don't demand leaving the apartment I moved into yesterday, so there's that. Earlier in life, I would joke with Mom about how little (room) I needed. Really just a bed and a desk and maybe a closet. And it seems my bluff has been called, if a bluff it ever was. The bedroom is a bit of a glorified study, sans desk for now, but it is enough. I daren't say it's more than enough, because it's not quite there (yet).
But I've already done a bit of address changes and tomorrow plan on completing my application for a New York Public Library card. The move and my attendant status as a resident of New York City will not be official until that is done.
This time last year, I was doing the same but in a different country and, largely, in a different language. It still knocks me over that it's been an entire year since I first set off for Paris. It seems simultaneously like yesterday and a previous lifetime.
Before I left, I 13.5k on the current WIP, 70 pages or thereabouts. I now need to do that 3-5 times and i think I'll have a book. Last week, I was hammering out story beats and it looked like this thing would be vastly underweight, especially because you'd be hard-pressed to find a science fiction novel published in the last 20 years or so that came in under 300 pages, 400 being the most comfortable cut-off. Assuming Goliath, aka The Hammer Book, doesn't get picked up and this one, when it's finished, somehow does, it would be a debut novel and an under-300 page count would be a severe mark against it. As far as debut novels go, I don't think there's much leeway in that regard.
I was talking (to myself) lately about post-apocalyptic fiction and the cross-pollination between "literary" and "genre" authors or, at least, fields of labor, how glass-half-full types might see it as the blessed destruction of ghettoizing walls and how the glass-half-empty types might see it as poaching or disrespect or appropriation (call The Road what it was: a science fiction novel!), and, of course, about Station Eleven, and about whether that book would've seen the light in that form as a debut novel. My opinion on the book is unpopular, and I wonder if that is the principal ingredient fueling my skepticism as to whether or not it would been a viable life-form had Mandel not already established her bona fides with Last Night in Montreal, The Singer's Gun, and The Lola Quartet. (Disclaimer: I haven't read any of the aforementioned.) Mandel herself has addressed her genre-anxiety in what looks to me like a microcosm of the Literary Moment's conflict.* That's, I guess, ancillary to the issue of debut-versus-established. Because this is ultimately about me, the worry is centered on the book currently being shopped around, Goliath. It is exactly the book I wanted (needed, in fact) to write; there isn't any anxiety as far as craft, it is merely an anxiety as to how to go about selling the thing. Too literary for specfic agents/editors, and too specfic for literary agents/editors. Which brings to mind Station Eleven and The Road and California, which is a fascinating amalgamation of so many of the things I've been concerned with.
But all I can do is send out query letters and samples and continue to write. Which brings me back to the current WIP and its potential thin-ness. There are a specific number of novels I want to write. Or rather, there are specific novels I want/need to write. I have them listed with extensive notes and whatnot in a document. Right now, the "urgent" pile includes maybe three or four. Then there's a cycle I hope to get to but will likely not happen in novel form for a long time yet. Funny enough, the current WIP was not in the "urgent" pile. In fact, it wasn't in any pile at all. Its genesis can be traced in part to having watched Mad Max: Fury Road earlier this summer. But as I write it, it has gobbled up themes and elements of a previous novel idea and I'm discovering that it is beginning to swallow up themes and elements of another novel, one that was in the "urgent" pile, solving the thin-ness problem with a promise to make this book perhaps much bigger than initially intentioned. I may at one point look back at that 400-page cutoff with why-didn't-I-enjoy-what-I-had-while-it-lasted. Getting older has forced me to look at and examine all the stuff I've written before that's been left on hard drives or in slush piles or never made it to print or webpage. There's a lot there and much of it can be (and already has been) repurposed. Efficiency is at work here where it wasn't before. Before, I could churn and churn and churn out story and pages.** Now, fatigue introduces black at the corners of my vision, slows my brain a little bit. So now the current WIP has decided to gobble up another planned novel. I am not complaining.
Meanwhile, the idea generation machine does not abate. I can be, have been, and am productive***, but part of me feels, as I've always felt, like I'm running out of time. The thing I want is to write the stories I have in my mind in at least one form or another. I'd like for that to happen in concert with my growth as a writer and my getting better at the craft. I know I'm writing better stories; the rejections on Goliath have indicated that much at least. But sometimes I look back at recent entries here and lament a fall in the quality of my prose. This space is many things to me, one of which is practice. I learn how to say things here, how to bridge the gap between what I'm saying and what I mean, what I want to say and what I'm actually saying. Technique, viewpoint, all that jazz. This may not necessarily be where the pyrotechnics happen, but enough work is done here that it has begun to show in my other venues (like my essays). And I know that time constricts my energy with regards to LJ entries more than it does with, say, essays or longform pieces of fiction. But sometimes I look back at entries written in brief, fiery blazes and smile, sometimes wondering but sometimes knowing completely what state of mind I was in to do that. Not incandescent brilliance or anything like that. Just, more like gliding. Nailing the crossover or netting fifteen jumpshots in a row. David Foster Wallace spends a lot of time (one might argue, too much) describing in minute and exact (and exacting) detail practice sequences at the tennis academy that serves as one of the two prime locales in the book. All the different exercises, the cardio workouts, how the students have to walk around to classes gripping a tennis ball and absentmindedly squeezing it all the while, all these little things done daily, hourly, to help mold the body and mind into the material for tennis prodigy. Some of that happens here, or is meant to. The posts about school, about politics, about politics at school. The book reviews, the discourse on movies. All of it, innocuous and self-centered, is meant in one way or another as practice. It's all of it practice. I even managed to corral some of my law school writing in the endeavor.****
Somedays, I spend the entire time in flow and can ace that serve all day. And somedays, I can't move across court without tripping over myself.
Somedays, I can muster the technique to braid together my anxiousness regarding my craft with the disquiet that attends moving back to this city and the suspense that encompasses me with my start at the Attorney General's Office exactly a week away and some commentary on how the sunsets here in NYC this time of year differ from the sunsets back home in some artful thematic Butterfly stitch. And somedays, it's just words it would take a titanic exercise in apophenia to turn into any sort of competent verbal/written architecture.
Sometimes, the jumble is enough. I mean, we are after all talking about practice.
* Another, more recent, shot across the bow popped up in The Guardian and Christopher Priest responded with the most artful of clap-backs.
** My time at NYU learning how to write movies and plays and tv scripts was very much turning point. I spent a lot of time generating new story, but one of the things I learned how to do (in a halfway autodidact kind of way) was how to adapt my own prose for the screen. Repurposing.
*** Purely subjective judgment
**** Producing, during the spring of my second year, a treatise on constitutional interpretation that enlisted the New Testament of the Bible and featured more than a few turns of phrase I still look upon with pride.
Here, in NYC, at least tonight, the thing is a bit more gradual, seamless, or perhaps less ostentatious. It happens around the same time, but without the visual flourish you'd get back in CT. The daytime heat, however, has been just as punishing. Strips the body of all impetus towards movement, makes one want nothing more than to not move, to find any posture that will magically pull cool moisture from the air, however unrealistic the proposition. Still, I was able to get things done, run the type of errands that don't demand leaving the apartment I moved into yesterday, so there's that. Earlier in life, I would joke with Mom about how little (room) I needed. Really just a bed and a desk and maybe a closet. And it seems my bluff has been called, if a bluff it ever was. The bedroom is a bit of a glorified study, sans desk for now, but it is enough. I daren't say it's more than enough, because it's not quite there (yet).
But I've already done a bit of address changes and tomorrow plan on completing my application for a New York Public Library card. The move and my attendant status as a resident of New York City will not be official until that is done.
This time last year, I was doing the same but in a different country and, largely, in a different language. It still knocks me over that it's been an entire year since I first set off for Paris. It seems simultaneously like yesterday and a previous lifetime.
Before I left, I 13.5k on the current WIP, 70 pages or thereabouts. I now need to do that 3-5 times and i think I'll have a book. Last week, I was hammering out story beats and it looked like this thing would be vastly underweight, especially because you'd be hard-pressed to find a science fiction novel published in the last 20 years or so that came in under 300 pages, 400 being the most comfortable cut-off. Assuming Goliath, aka The Hammer Book, doesn't get picked up and this one, when it's finished, somehow does, it would be a debut novel and an under-300 page count would be a severe mark against it. As far as debut novels go, I don't think there's much leeway in that regard.
I was talking (to myself) lately about post-apocalyptic fiction and the cross-pollination between "literary" and "genre" authors or, at least, fields of labor, how glass-half-full types might see it as the blessed destruction of ghettoizing walls and how the glass-half-empty types might see it as poaching or disrespect or appropriation (call The Road what it was: a science fiction novel!), and, of course, about Station Eleven, and about whether that book would've seen the light in that form as a debut novel. My opinion on the book is unpopular, and I wonder if that is the principal ingredient fueling my skepticism as to whether or not it would been a viable life-form had Mandel not already established her bona fides with Last Night in Montreal, The Singer's Gun, and The Lola Quartet. (Disclaimer: I haven't read any of the aforementioned.) Mandel herself has addressed her genre-anxiety in what looks to me like a microcosm of the Literary Moment's conflict.* That's, I guess, ancillary to the issue of debut-versus-established. Because this is ultimately about me, the worry is centered on the book currently being shopped around, Goliath. It is exactly the book I wanted (needed, in fact) to write; there isn't any anxiety as far as craft, it is merely an anxiety as to how to go about selling the thing. Too literary for specfic agents/editors, and too specfic for literary agents/editors. Which brings to mind Station Eleven and The Road and California, which is a fascinating amalgamation of so many of the things I've been concerned with.
But all I can do is send out query letters and samples and continue to write. Which brings me back to the current WIP and its potential thin-ness. There are a specific number of novels I want to write. Or rather, there are specific novels I want/need to write. I have them listed with extensive notes and whatnot in a document. Right now, the "urgent" pile includes maybe three or four. Then there's a cycle I hope to get to but will likely not happen in novel form for a long time yet. Funny enough, the current WIP was not in the "urgent" pile. In fact, it wasn't in any pile at all. Its genesis can be traced in part to having watched Mad Max: Fury Road earlier this summer. But as I write it, it has gobbled up themes and elements of a previous novel idea and I'm discovering that it is beginning to swallow up themes and elements of another novel, one that was in the "urgent" pile, solving the thin-ness problem with a promise to make this book perhaps much bigger than initially intentioned. I may at one point look back at that 400-page cutoff with why-didn't-I-enjoy-what-I-had-while-it-lasted. Getting older has forced me to look at and examine all the stuff I've written before that's been left on hard drives or in slush piles or never made it to print or webpage. There's a lot there and much of it can be (and already has been) repurposed. Efficiency is at work here where it wasn't before. Before, I could churn and churn and churn out story and pages.** Now, fatigue introduces black at the corners of my vision, slows my brain a little bit. So now the current WIP has decided to gobble up another planned novel. I am not complaining.
Meanwhile, the idea generation machine does not abate. I can be, have been, and am productive***, but part of me feels, as I've always felt, like I'm running out of time. The thing I want is to write the stories I have in my mind in at least one form or another. I'd like for that to happen in concert with my growth as a writer and my getting better at the craft. I know I'm writing better stories; the rejections on Goliath have indicated that much at least. But sometimes I look back at recent entries here and lament a fall in the quality of my prose. This space is many things to me, one of which is practice. I learn how to say things here, how to bridge the gap between what I'm saying and what I mean, what I want to say and what I'm actually saying. Technique, viewpoint, all that jazz. This may not necessarily be where the pyrotechnics happen, but enough work is done here that it has begun to show in my other venues (like my essays). And I know that time constricts my energy with regards to LJ entries more than it does with, say, essays or longform pieces of fiction. But sometimes I look back at entries written in brief, fiery blazes and smile, sometimes wondering but sometimes knowing completely what state of mind I was in to do that. Not incandescent brilliance or anything like that. Just, more like gliding. Nailing the crossover or netting fifteen jumpshots in a row. David Foster Wallace spends a lot of time (one might argue, too much) describing in minute and exact (and exacting) detail practice sequences at the tennis academy that serves as one of the two prime locales in the book. All the different exercises, the cardio workouts, how the students have to walk around to classes gripping a tennis ball and absentmindedly squeezing it all the while, all these little things done daily, hourly, to help mold the body and mind into the material for tennis prodigy. Some of that happens here, or is meant to. The posts about school, about politics, about politics at school. The book reviews, the discourse on movies. All of it, innocuous and self-centered, is meant in one way or another as practice. It's all of it practice. I even managed to corral some of my law school writing in the endeavor.****
Somedays, I spend the entire time in flow and can ace that serve all day. And somedays, I can't move across court without tripping over myself.
Somedays, I can muster the technique to braid together my anxiousness regarding my craft with the disquiet that attends moving back to this city and the suspense that encompasses me with my start at the Attorney General's Office exactly a week away and some commentary on how the sunsets here in NYC this time of year differ from the sunsets back home in some artful thematic Butterfly stitch. And somedays, it's just words it would take a titanic exercise in apophenia to turn into any sort of competent verbal/written architecture.
Sometimes, the jumble is enough. I mean, we are after all talking about practice.
* Another, more recent, shot across the bow popped up in The Guardian and Christopher Priest responded with the most artful of clap-backs.
** My time at NYU learning how to write movies and plays and tv scripts was very much turning point. I spent a lot of time generating new story, but one of the things I learned how to do (in a halfway autodidact kind of way) was how to adapt my own prose for the screen. Repurposing.
*** Purely subjective judgment
**** Producing, during the spring of my second year, a treatise on constitutional interpretation that enlisted the New Testament of the Bible and featured more than a few turns of phrase I still look upon with pride.