Can the Monster Under the Bed Be Saved?

By “monster under the bed” I refer to a novel written many moons ago, with all the vim, verve and lack of finesse early novels can possess. I like the vim, love the verve, but could really lose the trite, overwrought and cliched prose my earlier self wrapped around the story.

Granted, I’m a sucker for the B-movie swashbucklers. That’s how I like ’em, so that’s how I write ’em. Give me pirates and kidnapped princesses, give me vamps and zombies, give me robots and planet-sized brains secretly running the galaxy, and I’m happy. Even a genre-hack must draw the line somewhere, however. B-movie quality is one thing; “SyFy Original” monster-movie-of-the-week is a whole new low. Even I won’t sink that far.

Exhibit A: Final showdown between villain and hero. The villain “looked down at his chest, muttered, ‘Oh damn!’ and died. He sounded quite annoyed.”

It was not meant to be humorous.

WTF was I thinking when I wrote that?! Oh yeah. I was seventeen. Not a mature seventeen like some of you teen geniuses out there (you make me sick, btw) but the kind of seventeen that thought the bad guy should say, “Oh damn!” and die. Sigh.

What do you think? Ever tried to revise an old novel?

I can’t stand letting it sit around in this state. I could die tomorrow (“Oh damn!”) and someone will find this mss, pity-publish it through Lulu (as it instructs in my will), and it will forever suck.

So here’s what I’ve decided. I’m going to hire a book-doctor to fix this mess. Since I have no money, I will hire the cheapest and closest book-doctor available: me.

You see, as it would be humiliating to admit I wrote this trash, I’m going to pretend it’s the mss of a stranger, who has hired me to fix it. A charity case. I will be cruel to be kind.

How about you? Have you ever dared look back at an early piece? Tried to edit/re-write/burn it? Was it worth it?

In Advance You Pay

“But the great choices, the long-term aims that mean high character, high intelligence, great service — the bills for all that come first. In advance you pay for that with devotion, concentration, self-discipline.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

Writers Who Can’t Read

Here’s an interesting addendum to the whole matter of writers who don’t read… a writer who can’t read.

Justify Your Purchasing Habits

the fish swim to me
my basket is always full
a river of books

(Or: Why I shop for books on Amazon.)

I read on about this on Kristin Nelson’s blog. A publishing house is asking writers who submit without an agent to show a receipt of a book they’ve recently purchased from a brick-and-mortar bookstore.

Writers who cannot afford to buy a book or cannot get to an actual bookstore are encouraged to explain why in haiku or one sentence (100 words or fewer). Tin House Books and Tin House magazine will consider the purchase of e-books as a substitute only if the writer explains: why he or she cannot go to his or her neighborhood bookstore, why he or she prefers digital reads, what device, and why. Writers are invited to videotape, film, paint, photograph, animate, twitter, or memorialize in any way (that is logical and/or decipherable) the process of stepping into a bookstore and buying a book to send along for our possible amusement and/or use on our Web site.”

I buy 99% of my books online. Usually, I still order a tree book; sometimes, I’ll order an e-book. (I have a Kindle.) Publishers should be glad. I buy less books when I go into a book store, because I have to carry them. The weight is an uncomfortable reminder about how much money I’m spending. When I shop online, it’s oh-so-dangerously easy to keep clicking away… I have about 400 items in my “Save For Later” Basket. It’s embarrassing to admit how much I spend on books. Let’s just say it’s actually more than I can afford. If “Confessions of a Shopoholic” had been about a book-buying addition, that would have described me.

I also occasionally order books directly from the publisher, especially academic books.

Honestly, if I could make enough money to pay for all the books by other authors I purchase, I would be satisfied. Unfortunately, most advances aren’t that high.

The picture is by the artist Mary McShane. Visit her gallery.

haiku drafts

a river of books
one click or in my basket
fish who swim to me

a river of books
my online basket is full
fish who swim to me

a river of books
my basket always full of
fish who swim to me

a river of books
my online basket is full
the fish swim to me

the fish swim to me
my basket is always full
a river of books

It depends on what a society values. Not everyone has the ability to master Algebra either, yet we expect all students to do so. I wish someone had just let me take a year of Novel Writing in high school instead of making me repeat Algebra three times. I’m a third generation writer. My grandfather and my father both wrote novels, never published. Those novels weren’t that good, and didn’t deserve to be published, but if they had been able to spend as much time on learning to write as they did on the jobs they took to feed their family, I suspect they would have become much, much better.

Everyone should write a novel and a memoir. At least once.

As a writer, I’m glad they don’t. I have enough friggin’ competition already. And I understand why agents don’t want to encourage more wannabes to submit than already do.

But if one values good literature in and of itself, I think everyone who possibly can or wants to should indeed write. Because I don’t think you find gold by discouraging dross. On the contrary, the more people who try to write, work at it, slave away at it, strive to bring their prose to professional standards, the more gems WILL unexpectedly emerge from the miner’s pan.

Yes, I’ve read slush, so painful, so trite, oy, and I understand the urge to say, “Do yourself a favor. Study accounting.”

But I’ve also read stories that touched me deeply, even though the grammar seemed to be borrowed from another language. I used to work in a shelter for homeless teens, and some of those kids wrote things that made me weep. Those stories would never be accepted by any publishing house. There might have been sixty pages in a row lacking capitalization, apostrophes or periods. Does that mean those stories didn’t speak to the human condition?

I often wonder how many stories we never see because they are lost through the filters of convention and profitability.

I’m not condemning agents and publishers for doing their job as gatekeepers against the tide of trash. I understand the need for that. But I think there’s a good reason for the caution to never assume you have the right to tell someone, “You can’t make art.” Art belongs to the soul.

Now, to tell someone, “You can’t make MONEY making art.” Well. That’s another story. All the idiots who think they are entitled to be rich and famous from knocking off a novel or two…. Let’s just be glad that writing isn’t real estate.

Everyone should write a novel and a memoir. At least once.

As a writer, I’m glad they don’t. I have enough friggin’ competition already. And I understand why agents don’t want to encourage more wannabes to submit than already do.

But if one values good literature in and of itself, I think everyone who possibly can or wants to should indeed write. Because I don’t think you find gold by discouraging dross. On the contrary, the more people who try to write, work at it, slave away at it, strive to bring their prose to professional standards, the more gems WILL unexpectedly emerge from the miner’s pan.

Yes, I’ve read slush, so painful, so trite, oy, and I understand the urge to say, “Do yourself a favor. Study accounting.”

But I’ve also read stories that touched me deeply, even though the grammar seemed to be borrowed from another language. I used to work in a shelter for homeless teens, and some of those kids wrote things that made me weep. Those stories would never be accepted by any publishing house. There might have been sixty pages in a row lacking capitalization, apostrophes or periods. Does that mean those stories didn’t speak to the human condition?

I often wonder how many stories we never see because they are lost through the filters of convention and profitability.

I’m not condemning agents and publishers for doing their job as gatekeepers against the tide of trash. I understand the need for that. But I think there’s a good reason for the caution to never assume you have the right to tell someone, “You can’t make art.” Art belongs to the soul.

Now, to tell someone, “You can’t make MONEY making art.” Well. That’s another story. All the idiots who think they are entitled to be rich and famous from knocking off a novel or two…. I do wish they would do the world a favor and go back to some harmless get-rich-quick profession like real estate or oil drilling.