For all that I did not enjoy the last book below, I loved The Time Traveler's Wife immensely. I had not heard about this book before I stumbled across it mentioned somewhere on some list of books. (I think it was Powells which had a short summary that intrigued me.) On a whim I ordered it, and when I started reading, I immediately knew that whatever the outcome, I could trust the author. The story and the language were delicious, the characters well-drawn and heartbreakingly rendered, and all of that wrapped beautifully and logically in a paradox of what it might mean to time travel and what effects that might have on someone left behind.
There will be minor spoilers from here on, so if you want to read the book, and I really hope that you do, you may want to skip or skim. And anyone who would dismiss a book this well done because it's "genre" deserves to miss the wonderful treat that it is.
This book is the story of Henry DeTamble who, through a misfortune in genetics, is one of the first people known to involuntarily time travel, and his wife, Clare Abshire, who lives her life linearly, always always waiting for Henry. It is the story of their love and their pain and the sequence of discovery of that love, and how strong and determined two people can be when forced to live without one another at times beyond their control, and how they manage. The story is both enchanting and heartbreaking, beautifully done and it haunts me still, even after having read it a few weeks ago.
The author, Audrey Niffenegger (a first time novelist, but a teacher in an M.F.A. program), alternates the narrative between Clare and Henry, where she lets Henry explain what it is that's happening to him and does it with such finesse, that this impossible idea feels grounded and real, mostly because with just a few words, she's already made Henry real for us. There is tension, immediately, because Henry's safety is always in jeopardy, and Clare worries for him for very good reasons; there is also tension there as to when they will really "meet" in "real time" (i.e., the age where they meet first and become a couple, which is a bit odd because Clare as a child has already met the older version of Henry several times, without learning that he was actually going to one day be her husband... when he was younger.) It's a fun twisting on the boy meets girl theme, and the way Niffenegger does it, even though you know they meet, there is still tension because it could all be messed up (Clare thinks) and destroyed by one false step. There is also a moment early on in the book when something terrible has happened and a young Clare is aware that it's something bad, and when she goes out to the scene, an older Henry waves her off, preventing her from seeing something, and the book builds and builds to this moment, this moment we've half-seen and yet haven't really understood, and we are in Clare's footsteps, waiting, holding our breaths, dreading that day that the scene will make sense.
What I found that made me enjoy this book even more is that Niffenegger assumes that her audience is smart. She jumps around in time, giving you just enough clues to keep up, to know what's going on, and assumes you're smart enough to get the concepts without hand feeding you. The logic is remarkably well done (and as someone who has written a story set in a type of time paradox, though not like this one, I can appreciate how difficult both those tasks are -- keep a complex idea logical and keep it clear enough to always allow the audience to understand where they are at that very moment. It doesn't mean you don't raise questions for them which will be answered later -- but you don't confuse them, either. A hard balancing act.)
Mostly, though, the language and the characters are so well done, Henry and Clare have kept on living for me, even after several other books have been read and discarded. The best compliment I can give is that they both feel real and a part of my life, as if I'd known this story from having been a witness, and while I could go on and on about how well that was done, I think it's enough to say that it was haunting and memorable, so go forth, read. You'll enjoy.
There are many spoilers here for Jane Austen's Book Club, so if you want to read this book, you probably want to skip this review. My overall opinion is not positive, however.
I picked up this book on the recommendation of a friend and I thought I would enjoy the concept -- the Austen like interaction of six people meeting for a monthly Austen book discussion. I've read enough of Austen to have a decent background, though that's not necessary for this book, and I was looking forward to watching a new author play with her characters in the same sort of ironic satisfaction that Austen has. Austen wrote multiple layered romances, where some couples (those who behaved properly) ended up marrying well and some (those who behaved poorly) were often doomed to marry badly or worse, be cut from all good society. (Which was about the worst fate Austen had for her villains.) With the promise of six characters -- five women and one man, who was both too old for most of the women and two young for the rest -- and a promise from the book's dust jacket that there would be an affair, a divorce, a couple formed, I expected the sort of wonderful dance of emotions, frustrations and flaunting of social mores that were staples of Austen's work. Since the point of the book was a sort of commentary on Austen (where the writer says each of us has a private Austen) a reflection or a distortion or a meta Austen-ish story while the characters were moving through the year, through the books and through their ever-intwining lives didn't seem to be too much to expect.
By the end of the prologue, (a bare five pages), I had started having serious doubts, but not as much because of the content of the prologue as the form. The writer starts off in what seems like third person, describing briefly each person who was in the group. Then after the descriptions, the POV shifts to second person, with sentences like, "The six of us..." and "Our first meeting..." which obviously implies one of the characters is narrating that, right? Only, when I counted the characters the narrator listed, all six were included (back to third person)... which meant either the narrator was referring to himself / herself in the third person when he/she listed who all was in the club, or the whole thing was bad form.
This is extremely annoying. It's not cute, it's not useful, it doesn't serve a purpose throughout the entire book. I was willing to forgive the prologue because I was willing to give the author the benefit of the doubt that maybe she (the author) was being vague about who was narrating because it was going to be a part of some important reveal later. It is within the realm of possibility that I missed it somewhere, but I doubt it. The book shifts between third and second person, and then in one long chapter, there's a first person account. It's not even consistent between chapters or within the chapter. It felt as if what the author wanted to do was an intimate third person type of story, alternating between the six characters to get close in on their view of the meeting, the stories, the discussion and the events, but instead, either didn't know how to do that or confused (or ignorantly chose) second person whenever she wanted to get into that point of view. Each individual section wasn't bad, and there's a lot of fine writing in this book. (By God there better be, given the blurbs from some pretty famous people on the cover, but I digress.) The whole, however, kept me off kilter, uneasy and unable to really enjoy the book because I kept wondering, who's telling this story? Who's using the pronouns "Our" and "We" here?
If that had been my only problem, I may have been able to dismiss it early on as a quirky style of the author, serving some purpose that had brought me enjoyment, but since the story was really mostly a string of excuses to tell a lot of characters' backstories, it wasn't working. Each chapter focuses on the person hosting that month's event and uses that as an excuse to go deeply into their backstory. I could have forgiven even this (which reminded me of six poor attempts to start a novel), if these stories had impacted the rest of the chapter, had then had a deep relevance to the actions / interactions that followed, but they did not. There were surface interactions, and histories given of past interactions, but not a whole lot happening at those meetings. In fact, once the backstories were done, the chapters were pretty much done. The potential for conflict, which was built up from the beginning, always either faded or slid past unattended, as if all the nasty stuff happened off screen and what we were left to witness was the polite version of the aftermath. Tepid reactions when tremendous conflicts are riding beneath the surface ruin books, and for me, it ruined the potential this book had.
What frustrates me more about seeing a book like this not only get published, but get raves from people who should know better -- famous authors -- is that these mistakes are essentially those of a first time novelist, though the author doesn't have that as an excuse. How on earth, I kept wondering, did this get published? There's very little actual story in the book, aside from the pieces of background on each character. We see very little (or no) change in most of the characters, almost no conflict, almost no reaction to the conflicts or questions that face each character. My biggest disappointment was in the story of Grigg and (major spoilers) Jocelyn. Austen was famous for having the "right" couple get together by the end of the book, in spite of whatever obstacle was standing in their way, and age and being oblivious was in the way for Jocelyn, who is older than Grigg. We have no sense of why he has fallen so hard for her, in spite of seeing the backstory when they first met. We have no sense of what she might see in him, since they don't seem to talk all that much, don't comment on one another to anyone else, don't interact much, and don't seem to be thinking about each other much, but he's supposedly in love with her and she's thinking of him for her about-to-be-divorced friend. When she does start looking at him as a possibility, she assesses him in the same sort of terminology she does for the dogs she breeds (okay, funny, but so dissatisfying at the same time, since the author doesn't go further). One of the things Austen did when her heroines finally realized they were in love with the hero of the book was to assess them, and typically, it was as the "finest man [they] knew" -- in all that meant -- integrity, honesty, socially, morally, and so on. Of course, dead sexy was generally expounded on somewhere along the way in more reticent Austenian terminology, and it's somewhat implied here, but not nearly with the same sort of satisfaction. Jocelyn fights the potential because Grigg is younger than she is (and hell, they've barely talked), and when she does finally give in, we never see how that makes her feel, what she thinks about the age difference, whether he thinks about it at all, or not. There's no real moment. In fact, for several of the characters, there are no real moments when there should have been -- when one leaves a lover, when she finds a new one (who seems great and exciting for her), and then inexplicably, has left that one and returned to the idiot she had been with in the beginning (with no explanation, no reason, no discussion / thoughts, anything, just that she'd done it and no one thought that would last). And so on, for each character.
I normally wouldn't write such a rant about a book, but within the story, there really is quite fine writing. The author has a superb sense of dry humor and there were several times when something made me laugh out loud, a real feat when I was so very annoyed with so much else. This was one of those books which could have been so flat out amazing, it made you wonder why you bothered writing at all. (I read one like that recently and hope to put up a review, probably tomorrow.) Instead, it missed its own potential by a mile, which is a true shame, since the author seems to have had so much going for her and so many presumably knowledgeable people read it and not notice any of these things.
Or else, maybe it's all just me, and I am really cranky. (But I don't think that's it.)
I ended up shopping today for work-related things (meaning, definitely the un-fun variety) and doing one thing that I never expected to do, which was to buy 100 yards of burlap. Strangely enough, it was for a concrete pour we're doing tomorrow. The client wanted something unique for a finish for the patio we were pouring a week ago, but he didn't want a "stamped" design, nothing that specific. Just some texture in the concrete to keep it from being too slick, since this was for a patio adjacent to a pool area. Carl had the idea to overlay burlap on it -- you put it on there when the concrete is floated out, but still wet. You "float" out the burlap (i.e., you run a bullfloat over it and essentially press the burlap slightly down into the concrete), then wait a little while, then pull the burlap off before the concrete hardens so much that it won't come off. It turned out quite pretty, and it's going to be gorgeous when it's stained later. The client was so happy, he decided he wanted all of the other concrete (the area around the pool, a big walkway, and another patio area) all done the same. The pour is scheduled for in the morning, so I was buying 100 yards of the stuff today. The people at the material store weren't exactly sure I wasn't going out and smoking the stuff, given the expressions they gave me as I put bolt after bolt of burlap up on the table to be measured.
Next, I got to visit with ever-wonderful Otto as he was traveling through Baton Rouge this afternoon on his way to New Orleans. It's so terrific to see him -- it's been something like three years, I think. (Otto doesn't update often on that blog I just linked to, but his writing is stellar -- you should bookmark it and check it out.) We talked a lot about kids and locations / living expenses, and photos, because Otto is a terrific photographer, and before he left, he showed me his new digital SLR Canon, which I totally lusted after and tried not to drool too much, but wow, that made me want one. I know Tamar just got the Rebel too, and man, I want one a digital SLR with a fierceness. Unfortunately, they are not giving them away and I have other things I have to do before I splurge, but maybe by Christmas. (sigh, yearn yearn yearn)
(um, leave it to me to misspell uncoordinated. yeesh. I'm leaving it, since it's so apt.)
This morning was a tense morning, as Carl had to get a huge list of things done in order to be some place later on in the afternoon, and he was practically vibrating with energy. He usually wakes up with the sun (not something that came naturally, but learned after years of being in construction), while I am firmly convinced that there really shouldn't be any acquaintence with the sun until noonish. At the earliest. So I wasn't the brightest bulb around early this morning as I stumbled after him in my attempt to help, or at least keep him company, while he did all of his errands. I am also not the world's most articulate person in the morning, unless you call grunting a discourse, and if so, I'm a scholar. So when he urged me to hurry up to get out of the car (he was trying to drop me off at the front door of a business and he sort of wanted me to hurry in there and beat the other customers who were lining up so we could get in and out quickly, and I say "sort of" because the man has been married to me for 22 years and hasn't completely gone mad in thinking I'm going to move fast in the morning for anything short of fire, and even that's iffy because I don't so much mind the heat)... well, anyway, when he got the car parked and got inside, he noticed I had a large brown stain developing just over my left breast where I had spilled diet Coke as I was trying to get out of the car. I was not exactly a happy camper about this, as the shirt was a very pale blue and the brown stain rather obvious and I looked like my breast had sprung a nasty leak. Which reminded him of the restaurant a couple of nights prior when I had tried to move a bowl of dipping sauce from one spot on the table to another, when it started to slip out of my hands and I don't exactly know what happened, I just sort of have this multiple-stepped-image in my head of that bowl doing acrobatics before it landed first on my breasts and then flipped onto the floor, neatly spattering patrons four tables away. He started to tease me that he couldn't take me anywhere and then, realizing it was quite a bit before noon and before I became actually human, he decided that hugging me would be a better option; hence, he lives still. About thirty minutes later, we were in a restaurant when I looked down and realized I had spilled part of my breakfast onto the other breast. Another nice brown stain, but somewhat smaller and for crying out loud, my boobs really aren't that big, I don't know what the problem is. I was hoping he hadn't noticed and I tried to act nonchalant and saw him trying to not notice, so we talked about other things. Wherein I promptly managed to drop a strawberry -- complete with juice and whipped cream -- in the center of my shirt. By this point, he was trying so hard not to laugh, that I just gave up and said, "Why don't I just grab it with both hands and mush it around on my chest just to get it over with." Which, of course, delighted him, and I got that wicked grin that I love. And I would have, too, but that would have been strawberry abuse, and even in the morning, I have a little sense.
I remember one time not so long ago when I had realized I had lost something of myself that I could never get back. I cannot explain what it was without telling other people's stories (and nothing anyone else did, just my own hell), but it hurt beyond what I thought I could comprehend, to the point that I found myself sitting on the floor of my closet, simply in pain, beyond tears. Sitting in the closet, lest anyone hear me and feel the need to ask what was wrong, sitting for hours, hiding, really just wanting to be dead and not quite knowing what to do next to move on, to put that one foot in front of another, to breathe in and then out again. I think one of the most difficult types of losses that a person has to deal with is when there is a loss of self-identity, of something that you identify as being you or a part of who you are in this world, and when that loss happens, it's like a sudden earthquake of the soul -- no warnings, no mercy, ripping tears in the soul, upheaval, despair, destruction. The landscape changes on the inside so completely, you keep looking in the mirror to see if the fissures are showing, and it's shocking that they aren't. I think it would be somehow easier for us if they did show, at least a little while, so that people walking along and having to deal with you could see you all zig-zagged, broken and stitched back together crazy sideways, sort of limping along and they would know to just be gentle, just be quiet, that's a broken person right there, don't move too fast or make loud noises because everything could shift again and do more harm. And just like after an earthquake, a 7.1 on the Richter scale, there's no way to put everything back just right again. Sometimes, the losses are too great for anything to be rebuilt, and sometimes, the rebuilding is slow and tedious and painful and eventually, maybe years later, you can look back over the area and be surprised not to still see rubble, and then sometime after that, you're suprised that when you look at it, you never really still think of the rubble and you catch yourself short in that moment and wonder if that means you've somehow healed. You're almost afraid to think you have, because will that mean you start taking it for granted, will that mean that you're not as alert, as ever ready for the little tremblings of when you may be fooling yourself, of when you may be about to discover another serious loss? It's a hard place to live, in that earthquake worn soul.
I made it through that time mostly due to friends who loved me through it. There was some talk, but mostly distraction, and lots of laughter, eventually. There were other things too, like finding funny people on the web who'd lived as hard as I had, maybe through other things, rarely through the same sort of things, and they spoke with a surety of who they still were, who they were becoming, of having survived and still managed to find the humor in the cracks. It took me a very long time, but I started to learn how to define myself, not by what I wasn't, but by what I was, although that sometimes works only on Tuesday, Thursdays, and occasionally, Saturday afternoons. When I read entries like this one from getupgrrl, it rips my heart to pieces for her. It's the kind of pain that you know you can't help or fix or advise or even distract from, and you can't shoulder it for someone else. But it makes me cry, it makes my chest hurt and my throat tighten and it bothers me that there's nothing I can do to show her how her writing has been a joy in my life, and how unfair all this sorrow is for someone so clearly good and funny and warm in her connection to the world. And as little as it is (and I know it is very little), I want to say to her thank you, because even though right now she's defining herself by what she's lost and what she isn't, which is only natural and necessary and breaks my heart that she's having to go through this, I hope she keeps in the back of her mind what she is and what she has and what she's given. She's made me laugh on way more occasions than I can count, which has rescued me on days that would have otherwise been too bleak for words. Maybe if we're all lucky, her reaching out to the world with her story will rescue her right back.
I had one of those days at work, one of those awful days where something someone promised to do gets completely reversed on a whim and that person does their level best (which is pretty damned good, unfortunately) to screw up something critical. It was one of those rare moments when I put my head down on my desk and just wanted to disappear. Usually, I am the trouble-shooter for this sort of thing and I couldn't figure out a really good answer, and then Carl came in and we talked about the problem and he thought he'd take a stab at it. I was worried that he'd be angry on my behalf or just plain angry for the person doing what they were doing and then tick them off and the problem would grow even worse, but he talked calmly (he usually does, I was just worrying) to them... and talked... and talked... and an hour later, emerged successful. I honestly do not know how or what he said because I left the room, but it worked. And who says there aren't heroes now?
One of the funny things about kids is that they'll give you perspective. Before Jake was driving much, I'd hear the loud hip hop jamming base through my skin from a car two lanes over and I'd wonder what on earth that kid was thinking with all that base... so much base, he couldn't possibly hear the music. People around here would get all up in arms over the lyrics, and I'd think hmph, what difference does it make, they never hear the lyrics anyway. Then Jake worked through the summer and a little over Christmas and saved and saved and finally had enough money to buy some big speakers. Then he worked and worked and worked more and traded in those speakers for a really huge single speaker, the kind which will blow your veins clean out your body without even bothering to ask permission. You've got blockage? Sit in Jake's truck. It will shake it loose.
It was a complete mystery to me why on earth a child thought he had to have speakers like that, but then the more I saw of him take pride in how he had designed his set up, how he excelled at something (and design / arrangement of the speakers in the car have a lot to do with the quality and quantity of sound)... I started understanding. Here was a kid who was transferred from a not-so-racially mixed school into one where it was heavily mixed, and he had a way of fitting in, of excelling that gained a lot of respect from eveyone around. I always wanted the kids to grow up having a lot of friends of whatever color happened to be around, and we picked the neighborhood where we live in great part to the racial diversity, but his school (the one he attended when we first lived here) wasn't all that mixed. I worried about that, but at the same time, that school was (supposedly) one with higher academic scores. We hit a point with that school where the stick up their collective asses grew to be more than I could stand or subject Jake to, and the school we transferred him into was heavily racially mixed and I suddenly wondered, would my kid be scared? Be intimidated? Be left out all of his senior year? Not make friends?
I asked him one day after he'd been there a little while just how he was doing... did he have anyone at all to hang with. He laughed. Turns out, he was having a great time. The kids were "cool" he said, they were into hip hop and music and many of them competed (two groups from that school have actually cut records that are getting play here). They didn't let the junkies hang out with them, and they all had each others' backs. They also liked Jake a lot. He had this ability to dog down anyone as good as he got -- they'd sit around trading smart-ass insults and Jake always got laughs. He knew the dances they did (and was one of the only white kids who did).
Well, Thursday night there was a speaker contest at a local car detailing type of business (where even the owner, an old white guy, was competing against the kids). Jake hadn't planned on going, but one of his friends was there and called him up, insisting he get there fast. He did and he said a lot of the guys who saw him pull up just hung their heads. He ended up winning and several of them did the "I bow before your greatness" wave to him as he was leaving. In between, they all hung out (with the owner) and cut up and had fun. (There were enough adults there for supervision.) On another occasion, he was competing and someone got really angry because Jake was beating him, and apparently came up to Jake and threatened him. One of Jake's new black friends stepped up and the other guy said, "What? You gonna stop me from kicking his ass?" And the friend looked around the group, where there were about ten black guys and five white guys and he started counting them all. He got to fifteen, counting himself, turned to the guy and said, "Well, you touch Jake, you got to deal with the rest of us." The guy left. (Jake found out later, he'd had a gun.)
The majority of them are going to college in the fall, some at LSU, some at BRCC (the local community college, very nice) and others in states far away. I'm glad he's got his friends to hang with this summer (in his off hours from work), and has a chance to do those testosterone boy things they all have to do at that age. I'm also keeping my fingers crossed that the "not drinking, no drugs" culture hangs tough as more and more people around them will succumb. I'm pretty vigilant about that, and so far, so good.
There's this moment when you realize that your kid has got that something that you'd always hoped for -- friends who are cool and who'll have his back, and a great diversity so that he fits in wherever he is. So now, whenever I hear that pressurized boom boom boom coming from another car, I think about that kid just trying to prove himself, just trying to find a way to fit into his culture and make a little mark on the world. Maybe he wasn't a straight-A student... maybe he had a hard time. But he's not necessarily trying to drive everyone around him buggy... he's just trying to be.
Lucy and I emailed after her comments below on my new neighbors and she figured out that I was thinking of ancient Persia, not Prussia. Ahem. There's that South Louisiana edjekashun for you. (Seriously, people, we did not have to take geography. Ever. If it didn't have crawfish, it didn't count. Texas barely made our awareness.)
I absolutely love Leya's paintings, shown here in a recent gallery showing. It's unusual for me to feel so strongly about abstract art because I work more in grounding the imagery in reality whenever I've painted. But each of her works feel like a story, or maybe an entire symphonic movement, they have such a presence, a power of motion and emotion caught in time. Beautifully done, Leya, truly.
Where have I been? I am not entirely sure. The days seem to have blurred. Yesterday turned out to be a strange day of good things intermixed with bad things and my brain sort of collapsed in on itself, and strangely, not one person actually noticed a difference, and I am not taking that as a good sign.
I met my new neighbors yesterday, which was good (except that I didn't realize our old neighbor had finally sold his house and MOVED OUT, all with me sitting right here in an office in the front of the house and you'd think I'd notice a little thing like a MOVING VAN carting off an entire house's contents, but no, I did not. Yeah, theives could have taken the entire thing and I might as well have wandered over there with an offer of cookies, as much good as I was for the whole Neighborhood Watch thing.) So I introduced myself to my new neighbor, who said she was from Egypt, which was cool and I can honestly say I've never met anyone from Egypt. She was friendly and sweet and so happy that someone had introduced themselves... she said where they used to live, not a soul was ever friendly or introduced themselves. Her husband wasn't there, and about the time we were talking about her being from Egypt, she said he was from Prussia. I'm almost positive she said "Prussia" and not Russian (and where the hell is that? Does it exist now? I thought it was a word for an old area of Europe / Mediterranean / Iraq, Iran area). He teaches at LSU, and they sound very interesting and friendly and I am happy with that. We have a small block here on our section of the street and everyone looks out for everyone (well, you know, except if theives want to back a moving van up to the door, and then apparently, I am in a coma), and I love the ethnic diversity here - there are some really cool people in this neighborhood, despite it being both southern and suburban-ish.
The New York Times has announced plans to serialize The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald this summer, along with others. It's being sponsored by commercial interest and they think the venture will end up being profitable, which is rather interesting to me in this day of declining audiences for books. (Well, percentage-wise, there is something like 10% fewer people purchasing books now than they did ten years ago... though don't hold me to that, I can't find the site which had had that listed recently.) As the article points out, a lot of famous writers got their start via serialization, and many of those books went on to become classics, so it's going to be interesting to see if there is an audience for a book already so widely available (like Gatsby). I wonder if the whole project wouldn't be more successful if they serialized something more contemporary or (or should that be "and") with mass appeal.
One of the things I did when I purged through this office over the last month, during all the office-y projects, was to box up things I didn't think I'd be needing any longer and put them up in storage. Labled, of course, but out-of-the-way. The business plan for the romantic comedy film was one of those things because I've gotten tired of pushing that project up the hill, only to have it stall and roll back down. I, Sisyphus, and the damned business plan.
It's one of those projects that I had spent way too much time and energy on to give up completely, and yet, spending more time on it means taking away writing time. Besides, I want to focus on the book. So the phone call today from my friend in New Orleans (Melissa, who works for a production company there) was a surprise... someone there wants to read the script and is fired up over the things I (still) have attached to the project. They wanted to see the script, and the business plan.
I am too far past cynical to be excited any longer. I've had too many people almost have the money or really have the money only for it to disappear again or think they have the money but they really didn't and oops, sorry to get your hopes up, or have the money and things fall apart through no fault of theirs, and really, I'm tired. I know what it takes to get projects off the ground -- it's hard enough in the construction business when you're bidding on work and you've got to pull it off for that bid, but having to create the financing to finance that work on top of bidding it... it's a lot of effort. And in film, you can't promise investors anything more than a completed film and maybe that it'll catch on. There just aren't guarantees. At least in construction, when the project is finished, there's something tangible there they can use -- a building, a scale, a parking lot. I long ago realized I would have been able to do much better in pushing the project had it been written by someone else. It just seems the height of ego to tout my own project and try to get lots of money from people who don't owe me for a kidney, ya know? I get embarrassed, even though I have already gotten a lot of stuff attached. And that self-consciousness has kept me from pushing this project as far as it probably could have gone just on the attachments alone.
So, it's sort of a weird feeling to send out that script and business plan. I know the reader's boss... the one she's trying to find a script for, and he likes to make thrillers. This is so clearly a romantic comedy, I couldn't really understand why she was requesting it, but she wants to try to convince him to make it. (He already definitely has the money.) In most things in life, I am pragmatic, but I always have hope. I try to look for the positive and live in that sort of mindset, but with this... this is hard to keep having hope, after so much. I don't really want to have hope for it, because it just sets you up.
But there's this little bitty tiny "what if?" voice down inside that keeps piping up and wishing, no matter how much I try to squash it back down. I'll let y'all know if anything comes of it, but don't expect anything.
On the book side of things, I looked up the big NY agent that Eloise has (see the post below on the 5th). Turns out he very much loves loves loves s/f / fantasy. And my book is so... not. I doubt I'll be a good fit for him, even with Eloise's referral, but I'm going to give it my best shot anyway and see what happens. I found myself freezing up, knowing that there was interest. You'd think that knowing this would encourage me and get me busy, but it's so much clearer how big I can fail, that I started feeling like everything sucked. I'm getting past that. For one thing, Eloise and I e-mailed several times and I realized she was going to help in several critical ways, one being that she'll read for notes and understanding that it may take several passes before we both feel like it's ready to be shown. I mean, it's within the realm of mathematical possibility that she'd love it the first time out, but I doubt that, and it's nice to know she's not expecting that, so the pressure's reduced. I also found myself procrastinating today with a couple of computer games, and in a sort of stream-of-consciousness way, realized I was thinking that if I don't get the book finished right now, I can't "fail" right now. Which just isn't rational, I know, and so I closed the game and got back to work.
Which I will do now.
Well, there are no photos yet. There are, but they are on the computer, and I cannot get my copy of Photoshop to install on the new computer. (I have lost the original disc, which I didn't realize until I needed to move it over. Extremely frustrating.) As soon as I resolve that snafu, I can edit the photos for size so that I can get them up here.
In other small news, four tiny baby birds (I think they're wrens) hatched a little over a week ago in Carl's workshop. I got photos of them as wee things with their beaks open and then later, much bigger and now they are big enough to sort of fly around. The mother bird keeps trying to coax them to get out of the workshop, and they do just long enough to go find food (we saw one bringing something back in), but they are determined to stay in the workshop. I can't say I blame them -- it's not as hot as outside, there's all that expansive protection from the rain. Two are flying pretty well. The third is just so-so, and he keeps smacking into things and falling. The last one we've dubbed as little "Hop-a-long" because he hasn't flown anywhere yet. Even his hopping is kinda spastic. I mean, the bird tripped over his own feet. There is not much hope for that one (though I put out birdseed for him.) The first day they were learning to fly, I didn't realize what was going on and I walked into the workshop, thoroughly frustrating the mother (who fled) and scattering all the baby birds. Two headed for the pottery shelves and one of those just kept scooting around on the floor, but one of them landed on the bottom shelf and kept trying to fly straight up... smacking its little head into the shelf above it, falling with a splat onto the lower shelf and then kept doing the same over and over again. All of the other birds were chirping hysterically at that point and I can't decide if they were laughing at him or trying to encourage him to turn around and fly away from the shelf. It's annoying not to speak bird. They are really very cute, though, and they look like they're very comfortable just hanging out in the shop... and they're already accustomed to us walking in there and getting near them. I think we now have pet birds.
I think one of the things about down-time like the recently self-inflicted painting projects is that it's my way of re-charging by being forced to do other stuff. Granted, it's productive stuff, and much needed and I'm am already LOVING the doors and the whole closing-out-the-world concept, but during all of these projects, I didn't have time to work on the book. If I sat down at the computer this last month, it was either to frantically catch up on business stuff or, somewhere around midnight, to check e-mail and check in on other bloggers. The two brain cells which weren't burnt out already for the day were snoring and refused to be roused for anything remotely creative that didn't mean the immediate acquisition of chocolate.
However, my perverse little brain can't stay away from writing all that long, and as the projects grew and grew and GREW, the story kept popping into my head, with details I hadn't thought of before, with complications for the characters which delighted me or made me laugh, and with odd bits and pieces of dialog which illuminated something critical I had been pondering just a month ago. It always gets to the point in these projects where I am absolutely certain I am going to DIE if I have to keep painting, if I have to paint even one more inch of anything, even if it's something I have wanted for years and years and stood like a little kid on Christmas morning when it was being installed and said, "Oh, YES, I'll be GLAD to paint it," with the same genuine sincerity that a ten-year-old has when they're promising that yes, they will be the ones to feed the puppy FOREVER and WALK it, even in the rain or heat or Saturday mornings in the middle of cartoons. It never lasts.
I reached that "I'm going to die" point about mid-way through yesterday, when there were still two baseboards which needed a third coat mocking my vigilance. They will get it later. The doors are up and finished, all of the molding is done in this office and in the adjacent foyer, and everything is cleaned and put back to order. (We have to install the knobs on the French doors, still, and then there will be photos.) But right now, I am itching to get back to the novel and sink back into the luxury of creating a world where I can describe it without having to paint it. I think I'm re-charged.
Because it really wasn't quite enough to worry about with the offer in the entry below to show something to an agent by a complete stranger, a friend who had made the offer last year (before the year of work hell and tax audit and various things that made me insane) (okay, more insane than normal) (hush), that friend, I'll call her Eloise, wrote last night re-newing the offer. My name had come up with a mutual friend, the one who'd introduced us in the first place and Eloise asked her why I hadn't shown her chapters last year, so the mutual friend explained what my life had been like and that I had assumed that since it had been so long, Eloise would think I was a flake and wouldn't want to follow through on the original offer. So she wrote me directly to make it clear she was still as fired up as ever, planning to hand my chapters to her NY agent and if he passes, to another NY agent that she thinks would also be great.
So with all of that very good stuff on the horizon, what do you think I did? Do you think I ran straight to the chapters and opened them and in my cold, professional eye, realized that I had really GREAT stuff in there and that just by continuing, I would be able to finish out those chapters... because after all, I'm adapting it from a script, I already know the story, how hard could this be? If that's what you think, then you, dear reader, need to have your head examined because I am a WRITER and writers NEVER EVER think they are okay or that what they've written is any good and it all SUCKS and I am never ever ever going to write another decent sentence as long as I live because I have zero talent and I might as well just give up and do accounting...
I am fortunate in that the thought of actually having to do accounting for all of my life without the saving grace of writing is enough to drive me back to the keyboard and overcome the fear and the bastard editor devil on my shoulder and get back to work. The other saving grace is that this particular character I'm writing is about as kick-ass as they come, no holds barred, going to grab onto life the way she wants to, or at least die trying, in spite of all of the trouble and disasters that brings on.
So, back to work.