| The Sunlight on the Garden |
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The sunlight on the garden Hardens and grows cold, We cannot cage the minute Within its nets of gold; When all is told We cannot beg for pardon. Our freedom as free lances Advances towards its end; The earth compels, upon it Sonnets and birds descend; And soon, my friend, We shall have no time for dances. The sky was good for flying Defying the church bells And every evil iron Siren and what it tells: The earth compels, We are dying, Egypt, dying And not expecting pardon, Hardened in heart anew, But glad to have sat under Thunder and rain with you, And grateful too For sunlight on the garden. Louis Macneice |
International Sonnet-Writing Month, that is.
I'm going to write a sonnet per week in the month of December. Wanna join me? Will post the results here. If you have a blog, do the same. If not, post yours in the comments on mine. Come on, you know you want to! Who's in?
Cole reports this conversation between little boy, E, and his mom:
E's Mom: who do you play with at school?
E: (names off three or four boys)
E's Mom: why do you only play with boys?
E: Because Nat and J (Nat's BFF, a girl) only play with each other!
I love it that my kid is the obvious go-to gender line crosser in this kid's head. We love E, by the way. He does play with Nat sometimes, but it must be admitted that nothing comes between Nat and her J (or J and her Nat--it's a mutual adoration fest with those two).
A couple of weeks ago before I got hit with the Pig, I was in a bit of an Una Troubridge mood. Una, it seems, while more or less a femme--or a "false invert" in Radclyffe Hall's terms (which she basically took straight-up out of Havelock Ellis's Sexual Inversion) dressed in various gender-troubling ways on and off throughout her life/relationship with Hall (aka "John"), but basically was dressing like a girl most of the time toward the end of Hall's life. Then, when Hall died, she had all of her (John's) suits tailored to fit her (Una) and wore them until she died.
So Cole had gone to work for the week and I was missing her, and I decided to don a shirt of hers and a tie I recently got her and cut down to make it skinny--the way she likes ties--and put a vest over it (a vest I bought long ago in the boy's department at Nordstrom's) and some trousers (girl trousers, but still) and was off to my cafe writing appointment when Nat spied me and said, "Mama Shannon! What are you wearing?"
So I turned it back on her and asked, "what am I wearing, Nat?" to which Nat responded promptly, "You're wearing Cole-Mom! That's silly, Mama Shannon! You can't wear Cole-Mom!"
Now, what to make of this? Nat gets the gender in our household and feels its rules must be followed as much as any kid of hetero-parents might? I want to crawl into her tiny little genius brain and figure out what she sees when she sees gender. Does she see more than two genders? She must, because she knows there are boys and there are girls. There are moms and there are dads. And she knows she has two moms who are both (loosely) girls. And yet, she has developed rules for each of those moms that are at least sartorial--though then again, maybe not gender to her mind at all, I suppose.
I'd love to see what she'd say to Cole wearing a dress of mine. Cole would love to see it too, but not nearly enough to actually put on a dress!
I've been forcing myself to use Twitter (yes, Tweetdeck has helped a lot, thank you). I won't say I love it, but I'm coming to terms with it.
So follow me (lilysea). And tell me who you are so I can follow you, okay?
I now have five outstanding agency queries.
I have about 150 pages of a sequel.
I have so completely revised the first section of the first book that it's practically unrecognizable (in a good way) from the earlier drafts.
I have contracted whatever the rest of the family has--but so far in a much milder form (knock wood!). Thank you, flu shot.
Finally, I just really, really need to share this paragraph with you, because I wrote it two weeks ago and it still plays over and over in my head because I am just so delighted with it:
Sophia Abington had always known she would never marry. She knew it in the same way she knew the birthmark on her left ankle would never wash off in the bath. It was neither a sad nor a happy thing. It was simply an indelible fact of Sophia.
See? Isn't that lovely?
I still didn't say anything about process below, did I?
But that's the thing that's got me kind of intrigued with Book #2.
I wrote Book #1 according to an outline: Part One, Part Two Part Three. Beginning, Middle, End. But Book #2 hasn't been like that. I did write a beginning. Then I sort of mapped out the rest of it (not an outline, more a big, narrative mess, but in order of events).
But I found that the scenes that were popping up for me to write on any given day were not popping up in order. Its been happening in this rather random, weird way. I know the plot will go, ABCDEFG, but exactly what F looks like will appear in my head and persist until I've written it out, long before C has taken shape, for example.
This bothered me at first. I felt like I was cheating. Seriously. I thought I was breaking some rule. I would never write nonfiction this way, though I know some people do. On the other hand, it's exactly how I write nonfiction--thesis up front, right? Because in a traditionally plotted novel, (beginning at the beginning, middle in the middle, end at the end), the end is sort of the thesis.
What I've found is that I have to know where the people are going to end up and who they are going to become before I've written where they've been and who they began as. Which is what was wrong with the first part of Book #1. I had no idea who those people were. They were like stock characters in a melodrama until I wrote their stories out and got to know them and found out who they were under duress and how they acted when challenged, etc.
Now I've had to go back and rewrite them in the beginning to reflect who I found out they were, having written their fates.
And maybe that's why Book #2 is easier. Even though I'm writing it sort of backwards--or really, from the middle, spreading out in either direction--I feel that I already know much more about the central character at least, than I did about anybody in the beginning of Book #1. Because in Book #2, the central character is a grown child featured in Book #1. I kind of know her.
All the same, I've written more about where she ends up than about where she began at this point. Rather than separate the waters from the waters with a dome and fill the thing with light, I'm more setting little islands of sense in the dark, whirling waters of chaos, and slowly filling in the dark chaos until it all makes sense.
I wonder if Book #3 will be like this, or something entirely different that I learn from Book #2?
Never thought I'd be one to write about writing.
I have written nonfiction for so long that I don't much think about it in terms of process anymore. I have a strong and opinionated internal editor that is fairly ruthless and confident. Whether I'm editing my own writing or someone else's I always just feel certain that I am making it right.
(Poor blog reader, you may not see evidence of this--especially since life got so busy here--I have been publishing a lot of stream-of-consciousness in recent months. Otherwise, the blog would just die away. I trust you prefer it not to, though maybe it's time to let it go. But I digress. As stream-of-consciousness allows.)
But the most fascinating thing happened when I started writing novel number one (fascinating to me, anyway). I had no idea whether I could write fiction. In fact, I suspect I thought, deep-down, that I couldn't. So I set my sights very low and shot from the hip through about the first third of the book. The goal was to get this story from my head to paper, send it off, unagented to some small, obscure lesbian press, dust myself off and move on with real life.
But somewhere in there my fiction muscle began to get sore and then get stronger and then I found my balance and started getting picky and now my nonfiction internal editor has a baby sibling of the fiction ilk.
In other words, I learned to write fiction in the process of writing the novel, and while I think the story is marvelous fun, the first third of the book needed major work, when I went back and read it in light of the last third. (Here I really MUST commend a new writing friend I made recently who has given me immensely helpful feedback on what's wrong with that first section of the first book and direction for making it better.)
So I've been doing a lot of work on that, and had put querying further agents on hold. But I think I'm going to get back to the querying next week.
Meanwhile, the second book is over 30,000 words--or about 100 pages according the words-per-page rules of thumb I've seen out there (none agree, so I'm averaging). And I feel it's about three times as good on the first drafting than was the first book's first third on the 10th drafting.
And I've told you this before, but I'll say it again. I just feel in my bones that this is what I'm supposed to be doing. No, Doing. It should be What I Do. I have not felt this way since I came out. It feels like I've become myself. Or rather, as I sometimes say, that I am getting closer to the person God had in mind when She decided to make me. It's epiphanic. Still. I still can't eat when I'm in the middle of a big chunk of work, because I'm giddy and in love with what I'm doing.
But that's enough florid nonsense for now. I'll save it for the fictional love letters between 20-something romantic friends in Book #2!