Not a stellar week for me in terms of output. I only worked through 20 pages of WHEN THE FALLEN ANGELS FLY since last Wednesday, but I was off the mark when I said that this is a re-read and light edit. It’s practically a re-write. The 2/3rds finished manuscript started at 45K words and now it’s up to 47.5K. So I’m adding to it as I go along, sort of three steps forward, two steps back. Mostly I’ve been fine-tuning Richard Carroll’s motivation. He’s almost halfway through his journey to become an angel and still coming across as a whiner. But I had a little breakthrough last night. Right now, Richard, rematerialized as a middle-aged Manhattan psychotherapist, is teaching himself the trade so that he can help the witness to his murder who’s a heroin addict and self-injurer. I’ve got about 50 pages to go until I reach where I left off with this manuscript five weeks ago.
The most exciting news is that I got some really encouraging feedback from a reader of THE REGISTRATION. It totally made my week. Enough to reconsider going through the manuscript one more time and sending it out to agents and small houses again. This is my goal for early 2010.
So other than that, I set up profile on GLBT Bookshelf and skulked around a few writers on-line communities. I’ve got some vacation coming up from work when I can dedicate big chunks of time to writing. I can’t wait!
I’m trying to find a “home” for several of my short stories. Most of them are gay-themed — IN A WINE PHASE, CROTCHWATCHERS, MIKE’S POND. Some of them are not — THE TROUBLE WITH FINKLESTEINS. My standby resource is Duotrope Digest, which is a free, searchable database of literary publications. A search of journals that are interested in ‘GLBT’ themes gets me a list of 43 pubs, but over half are lesbian-oriented, the remaining half are about 50% adult/erotica, and the rest are mainly genre-specific (sci fi, fantasy, or romance) . One journal I want to check out is Chroma, a queer pub based in the UK and listed as open to a variety of genres.
I’m also trying to identify the mainstream journals that have occasionally published gay-themed stories; there are so damn many to go through it could be a full-time job. The publishing business has changed, as it has for the broader entertainment industry. The number of gay-identified prints is shrinking while the mainstream media increasingly incorporates LGBT voices. I’m not sure how I feel about it. It’s nice that there’s greater access to literary LGBT portrayals and storylines just as you can find more LGBT characters on network television and wide-release movies. But I find there’s still a lack of depth to LGBT characters in commercialized projects . It’s the difference between watching Modern Family on ABC versus an independent film on Here! TV (I especially enjoy Here’s Donald Strachey series, Paradise Falls and Dante’s Cove).
So this isn’t exactly a rant. In my limited research of the short story market, I’ve discovered many journals that publish LGBT-themed lit. Ploughshares, for example, had a great memoir about working with LGBT youth in foster care by Ryan Berg in its Fall 2008 issue. But I still think there’s something special about a cozy queer publication that you can read through cover to cover and get lost in an LGBT-centered world.
I never feel like I have enough time to write, and I never feel like I have enough time to read. The two things go hand in hand, I think, whether I’m doing research for a project, checking out markets, or just looking to activate my imagination. Sadly, my relationship with books followed a typical trajectory. I read constantly through school and college then sloughed into literary semi-detachment. Polls show that readership in America is declining. One quarter of adult Americans don’t read books at all. Men seem to be especially lazy in this regard. They only account for 20 percent of fiction readers. E gads.
I purposefully set forth to read more when I started taking my writing seriously. Now I’m always reading something and have three or four books in my reading queue. In the past two months, I finished two great books: Gregory Maguire’s Lost (I’ve now officially read everything by him) and Jeffrey Eugenides Middlesex (yeah, I’m playing catch-up on the modern classics). I’m now reading Scott Heim’s Mysterious Skin. Holy cow. The book is frickin’ dynamite! I’m simultaneously reading a novel manuscript by a member of my writers group. Next up will be Eric Mays’ Naked Metamorphosis, which just arrived at my door from Amazon. Then, I’m looking out for two books: Scott Heim’s We Disappear and Gregory Maguire’s Matchless (just released).
I decided that Wednesdays are the best day to write a weekly progress report. It’ll keep me focused on my writing goals at a time when work and personal life demands are compounding, hold me accountable, and create a mechanism for charting my progress. Plus these progress posts are pretty easy to write even in the midst of “everything.”
So I’m a little less than halfway through a third read and “light” edit of WHEN THE FALLEN ANGELS FLY. This is what I do: write a big novel chunk then pore over it until I can live with moving on with the story. I wrote 45,000 words of the novel from July to September, and I figure I’m about two-thirds to the end. Right now, I’m re-reading the part where my protagonist Richard Carroll confronts a second assignment in his training to become an angel. The re-read/edit is pretty tedious. I’m hoping to get to the end of my draft in two weeks. Then, it’ll be a lot more fun writing the last third of Richard’s story.
Quixotic publishing news and non-updates: Believe it or not, The Paris Review rejected my short story THE TROUBLE WITH FINKLESTEINS. So maybe submitting there was a little unrealistic, but I couldn’t help myself. Now I go to Duotrope Digest and find a better publishing match. Two of my pieces are out on submission: CROTCHWATCHERS at Nighttrain and MIKE’S POND at Crazyhorse. I should get verdicts in about a month.
I just sent THE REGISTRATION to the wonderful author Eric Mays. We connected through the Facebook group LGBTI Writers and Allies and struck up a correspondence. It’s been really great talking to someone with experience in the biz. I haven’t tinkered with THE REGISTRATION or had it read for about six months so it’ll be nice to get a new perspective.
Last, I added a link in the spirit of my on-going OPERATION: OPTIMIZE. GayWisdom.org maintains a gay history archive, and you can subscribe to their free listserv and receive a daily e-mail telling you about significant events, biographies and quotes from gays past and present. I’m thinking this will be an awesome source of inspiration for my writing.