An Editor's Dreams

My sense of time is utterly destroyed.

It keeps occurring to me in bright flashes, moments that leave me stunned and doubting and recounting the days: somewhere at the beginning of 2010, I completely lost my macro-scale concept of time. I can still count seconds; still feel hungry at the right times of the day; but when trying to recall how recently something happened, I find that my judgment of such matters is gone.

I just finished a night's writing, working on the manuscript for a short story, and when it came time to save the new version to my rough drafts, I was shocked to see that the story that had "languished far too long" had only been laying abandoned for seventeen days. Every few minutes I find myself having to remind myself that it's only been two weeks since I started at my new job; that I'm only two weeks gone from when I last saw my friends from out of town and only three weeks from my arrival for a vacation in Fort Bragg. This weekend feels like it was all at once four days long and only one day (perhaps helped by having slept very poorly on Friday night). I can't believe tomorrow is only the start of March, on basically any level: this year has had so much adventure already.

Speaking of adventure, I have had the first unpleasant experience with my new job as far as the ways it has leaked into my day-to-day life: I've begun to have copyediting dreams. Both Friday night and Saturday night I found myself dreaming of being at work, hunched over a gray-filtered doppelganger of my lovely and spacious desk, with a manuscript in a manila folder in front of me; and both nights I have found myself chanting and maundering to myself as I go hunting for errors, so desperate to find something wrong in the blurred mess of chimerical page proofs that I would swear dream-me was sweating. Both times I felt defeated, or panicked, like I was not able to find something wrong, but not because there was nothing wrong; and both times I woke up gasping in a way I haven't since the old and indomitable nightmares of attending a final for a class I never bothered to attend.

I like to rant about the lack of strong, challenging rites of passage in our modern world, but I think I may have found one. Maybe I'll get a tattoo to commemorate surviving it once I'm through to my ninety-day review; or just go all the way and get scarification on my face.

To make this germane to the blog again, I will say that the good news is that the new job has not impacted my writing (though I find myself uninterested in talking about the nuts and bolts of it). This year has actually been fantastically productive, and my slip-ups in scheduling have been unnoticeable, in the sense that I have not found myself kicking myself when they occur. The biggest snag I have struck is the technical limitation caused by Wednesday (the new laptop) being in some senses a large netbook—notably, thus, a machine that lacks a CD drive. This had made submissions to magazines difficult, as I cannot easily edit my writing files into tarted-up .doc files and get them sent out, and I in fact am behind on submissions for this very reason. I plan to attempt to fix this issue this week and address the backlog, because the truth is, without submission, this career is going nowhere; and the the longer I wait, the more awful and looming the world of rejection and judgment is going to seem when I do get stuff out the door.

And now, this post is long enough; and my attempts at further prose have been so purple I think they might be leaving the visible spectrum. Suffice to say that life is anxious, and busy, but good; and that this blog and all its trappings, Randall and company included, are firmly anchored as part of my life.

Whoa.

The first week at the new job is done, and the title is all I have to say: "Whoa."

The culture and ethic here is very, very different from my old job. I don't want to engage in bashing my old proofreading position, so I will say that it was what I needed when I was at it; but this new copy editing job is definitely the right next step up. This includes, as a mixed blessing, the fact that this new job is actually a serious, forty-hour-plus work week: I have spent my first four days embroiling myself in the style guide and various secondary sources dealing with the kinds of certification exams we produce material for*, without many more breaks than those mandated by law and the occasional need to take two minutes to reset my brain. It's challenging, it's new, and it's exciting; but this does mean that I am not able to take much time online during the day, which in turn has meant that I haven't had much time for blog updates.

Fortunately, this is in part because I am spending large portions of my evenings writing. Book Three of Not Providence is as of now about a quarter of the way into its rough draft phase, and I have finished 1.9 short stories already this year, with a third about halfway done. I'm back in that place where I find myself getting jolted at random with bits of inspiration and new possible twists in my stories, which is honestly a lovely place to be. I'm trying to get the energy together today to deal with a magazine submission, but something—I suspect fear—is making it feel like a mountainous ting to surmount, so I may have to cleanse my brain with an episode of Lost before I do that. And yes, in a more mundane context, I am finally watching Lost; see earlier in my blog for why I'm allowed to be behind. (Please take that sentence in the spirit of good fun.)

Lest this whole post start with the letter "I", I (damn!) would also like to bring everyone's attention to a recent bit of entertainment and enlightenment—the Guardian's ten rules for writing fiction, in which a variety of authors give their ten rules for, well, being a writer. I reacted to being sent the link with a burst of skepticism, but the sender is someone I trust, so I clicked it, and was pleasantly surprised, even uplifted. Out of all the advice, the only one I disagreed with much at all was Elmore Leonard's Rule Three, and even that I don't take much issue with—I do think using a verb other than "said" can be a good thing, especially in terms of avoiding adverbs after "said" (in my eyes a much worse crime), but I agree that "said" is a much more transparent word than many writers will admit. I particularly love Margaret Atwood's and Neil Gaiman's lists of advice, but other particular gems of wisdom include:

Do keep a thesaurus, but in the shed at the back of the garden or behind the fridge, somewhere that demands travel or effort. Chances are the words that come into your head will do fine, eg "horse", "ran", "said". (Roddy Doyle)

Finish the day's writing when you still want to continue. (Helen Dunmore)

Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire. (Geoff Dyer)

Description is hard. Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand. (Anne Enright)

Fiction that isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money. (Jonathan Franzen)

And the one I most needed to hear:

Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn't matter how "real" your story is, or how "made up": what matters is its necessity. (Anne Enright)

All of it is that pithy, that insightful, and that valuable; if you're looking to write, this is an article to read. Though do have the courage to disagree with them sometimes; the only thing I think is an absolute for all writers, always, is the one piece of advice all of them seem to repeat endlessly, and the one that I found, in its Zen way, most enlightening:

The way to write a book is to actually write a book. (Anne Enright)

Write. (Neil Gaiman)

Don't just plan to write – write. It is only by writing, not dreaming about it, that we develop our own style. (PD James)

Write. No amount of self-inflicted misery, altered states, black pullovers or being publicly obnoxious will ever add up to your being a writer. Writers write. On you go. (AL Kennedy)

So, I'm going to go just that—write, in my own voice and as close as I can get to without fear—and try not to worry about how I'm coming up on the end of my projected break from Not Providence, or the fact that I'm getting on a train in a couple hours, or the possibility that all I'm going to do is receive face-stinging rejection letters for a good, solid while.

As soon as I eat some breakfast and finish an episode of Lost.

(And thus was the Great American Novel left to die...)

*For those not wholly in the know on this one, my new position a copy editing gig for a company that makes a variety of books, but mostly review and study guides for various licensing exams; I am choosing not to name them mostly because I do not want to even for a second seem like I speak for them as a company.

On Return and Disruption

I thought I was going to sit down and write a post about my last days at my proofreading job: the sensation of packing up my desk, the oddity of shaking hands and speaking words for the last or the nearly-last time.

Then I thought I was going to write an entry about being up in Fort Bragg again, and the joys of seeing my parents for a little while.

Then I thought I was going to write something about being home again around the time I actually got home.

Sorry, everybody. I've been busy.

As the above suggested, the day after my last day at the marketing company, I stuffed six days' worth of clothing and three books into a duffel bag, and rode the train up to my aunt's place up in San Francisco, where we had the first and largest celebration from my father's 60th birthday. From there, it was off to my vacation in Fort Bragg, and that is where I was until yesterday, when I rode down in the company of friends. Now I am in my house, and have done a little cleaning, and am about to go sit down with a movie and get some laundry folded, like the domestic creature I am.

Unfortunately, I feel a great deal of things about this past week, but I don't know how to codify them. A trip home to Fort Bragg is all at once revitalizing and melancholy; like I love my time there, but know that I can't stay there and be consistently happy in perpetuity. It's a place I might love to come back to once I'm older and more established; it has an energy like nowhere else I've ever been, except possibly Santa Cruz—though the shared factor there may just be a nostalgia for a time in my life when I had less rigid scheduling and less non-academic responsibility. (Here's hoping the copy editing for the new company will give me a bit more satisfaction on that front.)

I am happy to have been able to spend my dad's sixtieth birthday with him and my mother, there in the home he helped build for us; and I'm happy I got to be home for a bit and just focus on relaxing, with a side business in studying the Chicago Manual of Style a little for new job purposes; and I'm happy to have come home to friends who missed me and were missed in return, with a feeling of having pushed my reset button before a major and somewhat intimidating venture.

That is all I can say for certain; anything further would risk turning into that turgid stuff that happens when I push my muse too far. So for now I'm going to go have a glass of champagne, and watch the final leg of a movie; and be grateful for the sense of a home in two places, and for having so many friends and loved ones in both. I promise tomorrow I'll put the smarm back in full effect.

Maybe I'll even blog about it.

Ups and Downs

I feel like I've used that title before. Maybe because it's incredibly jejune.

Anyway, I am having a very busy week, but I felt that updating was the right move, as it's been, only two days in, a week full of ups and downs (fortunately, almost all my direct and personal experiences have been ups); I have about ten minutes, so pardon as this becomes a bulleted list full of link salad.

• Personal Up: This week is my last week at my current job. I'll be moving to a new position a little closer to home, more money, smaller company, etc. etc. It's a weird feeling to be on my last week somewhere—the last time this happened, the store was closing, so we were all on our last legs. My mood is one of completion and celebration, but also a little bit of loss—loss of the people and the familiarity and those all-important rituals—but I still have to jump through the usual hoops. It's like a really lame Irish wake.


• Book World Down: Amazon's little war with MacMillan. I am less than impressed with Amazon's behavior on this front. While books may get marked up a lot, books get marked up for a reason, and you are, as John Scalzi said it, "unload[ing] a shotgun into a crowd of writers" when you pull this kind of action against a publisher. According to the New York Times, Amazon has relented; but according to John Scalzi, some books from MacMillan imprints are still not available on Amazon, so I suspect either Amazon is badly managed or they are trying to stab at their foes even as they fall. Mr. Scalzi's thoughts on how to deal with this are all at once obvious and brilliant; if you want to help an author catch a break, listen to him.


• Speaking of corporate entities I am less than pleased with at the moment, a personal corporate Down: Google. Google has decided, as of today, to discontinue the FTP service that allows me to broadcast this blog here on my website, for good business reasons that nonetheless make my life complicated. The workaround they are offering is not as robust nor is it truly a replacement; as such, I think it's time I look into WordPress, so stay tuned for a possible format shift. You'll be kept updated, I assure you.


• Creative Up (no pun intended): Up has been nominated for both Best Picture and Best Animated Picture. This is stupendous news; Up well-and-truly does deserve the Best Picture, and just being nominated goes a long way toward pulling animation out of its current ghetto of separation. I dream of the day that variations on a medium will all be judged equally (animation vs. live-action film, sequential art vs. novels, my favorite topic of genre fiction vs. fiction), and we just came a tiny step closer. My only worry is that splitting its nomination between two categories could also split its votes, but, a man can still dream.


• And finally, here at the bottom, a Political Up (liberal politics to follow, you have been warned): My country is getting the wheels moving on repealing "Don't Ask, Don't Tell". I think that letting anyone who is fit to serve do so is the right decision in all matters, and seeing things start to shift pleases me. I recognize it will take time (unlike a lot of America, it seems), but I'm glad that the government is starting the move.

That's all the news that's fit to type on my lunch break; now, please pardon me as I go lift weights and eat hummus. It's an exciting life I lead.