Today We Say Farewell

Six years ago we started this blog as a way to share our writing journeys with others. Armed with humor, anguish and a lot of hope, we’ve posted numerous essays on craft and the publishing business, interviewed countless rock-star authors, and visited with editors and agents. Developing and thriving in this community has been so rewarding and we have each grown as writers and humans, developed life-long relationships amongst ourselves and with others we’ve met along the way.

We are not alone in finding the commitment of regular blogging as both a reward and hindrance to our real writing time. We are primarily novelists here – published and as-yet. And as with many time commitments, we had to weigh the joys of writing for this blog and (hopefully) helping others as we’ve been helped along the way. 

We’re sad to say goodbye to this page, but we are not saying goodbye to each other, our critiques, our community, definitely not our annual retreats.

We are ever grateful for your reading our words, for sharing your stories and comments, for traveling with us as we celebrated the joys of personal and professional milestones, comforted us in our rejections and tragedies.

Our posts will be there for you to peruse – a list of authors we’ve interviewed is on the right panel. And if you want to see what we’re up to, please visit us on our individual websites or pages. (links below)

Kim Bullock

Pamela Hammonds

Susan Ishmael

Julie Kibler

Elizabeth Lynd

Joan Mora

Farewell, all.

Three Boxes of Stories (originally posted July 5, 2010)

by Joan

This past weekend, I spent three days with family I haven't seen in years. We watched a slideshow of scanned photos, chatted about family trees and plucked our matriarch's memory for the family scoop. I haven't had time to reflect and write any of it down, so I found a previous post about my continued fascination with our ancestors.

Last week we spent a week in Maryland with my family. One of the highlights of the week was a whirlwind Sunday where we hosted a family brunch and then dinner for friends we don’t see often enough.

For the morning shift, I dug out three boxes of old family photographs. As we munched on bagels, quiche, and Costco granola (we swear it’s laced with crack), I sat next to one of my cousins, whose mind holds three generations of our family tree. With a pencil I jotted the names of great grandparents, aunts and uncles on the back of thick sepia photos, some so old the corners had disintegrated. Many remained unmarked as we debated to which side of the family the stern-faced, bustled ladies belonged.


Maybe one of the men is the artist of the Falmouth sailboat watercolor hanging above my desk and between the pages of The Cemetery Garden. Maybe the guy with the beard is Leo Tolstoy or Fyodor Dostoevsky. (Actually, he’s my paternal great-grandfather Zachary Levinson!)

In some faces we saw the shape of my face and eyes. In others we saw three generations of full lips and wavy hair. We’re fairly sure a few pictures were shot in Russia, before our relatives journeyed to Ellis Island. Others were taken in Brooklyn studios. Still others captured their daily life: three familiar faces posing proprietarily in front of a grocery/delicatessen, others in a confectionery, a young married couple standing tenuously side-by-side, my father (as a child) demurely atop a horse.

How will we ever identify those faces shamefully abandoned in the past, like elementary school friends who once pricked fingers and blended blood? Will our great-grandchildren forget us in the same way?

It got me thinking about the layers of our lives, how our ancestors’ actions and decisions affected not only our looks, but where and who we are now. Had they stayed in Russia, they might have lived in an isolated frozen community or been arrested and sent to Siberia. Maybe I wouldn’t be here now. Maybe I’d work in a government job and walk to work in knee-high boots and a parka. I wish my ancestors had written some of it down, like Kim’s great-grandmother. I have bags of WWII letters from my father, but nothing from the previous generation.

Is that why we write? So years from now, a descendant will find our words and understand us a little more clearly? When we write, we capture a mood or a setting in much the same way a photograph does. With just the right shading and lightening, cropping the boring parts. Posing our characters on a backdrop of plot.

Seeing these pictures also got my creative mind lassoing ideas for a future novel. Like Julie, I need to finish my WIP first, but I’m already excited about where these pictures will lead me. I’ve got about 500 more treasures to scan and, with that, a lifetime of stories to tell.

What about you? Have you found crumbling family photos? Do you know who they are?

Don't Jaywalk Your Query (repost from 2009!)

by Elizabeth

(This was first published back in 2009. Now that I'm querying again, and thus aware of what's going on out there, I'm struck by the fact that in six years, things are still the same. Wow, or not. As for me? Still following the rules.)

I'm a pretty law-abiding citizen. If you overlook my occasional indifference to speed limits on long stretches of open highway, you could really call me squeaky. I really don't understand disregard for the law, especially when the law simply codifies common sense and protects the vulnerable.

It drives me nuts seeing parents at my kids' school jaywalking their kids across the fairly busy street. (Worse in the rain. Trust me, don't get me started there.) I realize the parents are watching cars, waiting for tolerant drivers to stop in the flow of traffic to let them cross, rendering the practice more or less safe, but it still irks me. There are crosswalks at either end of the school, and sure, it would add two minutes to the twice-daily routine--but at what cost are they buying those 240 seconds? As I see it, those parents are teaching their kids that their time is more important than other people's; that the rules don't matter; and that taking a shortcut is okay if you don't get caught.

There are times to break the rules. I get that. Civil disobedience has its place; our country wouldn't exist without it. But I don't agree that a busy street with frazzled drivers, a situation in which a moment's inattention can transform those saved two minutes into a lifetime of regret, is the place to introduce the concept to a seven-year-old. Not that I think these parents consider they're teaching those kids anything. They're simply focused on getting them to school on time. Even so, the thing about breaking rules is that you have to know the rule and have followed it before it's meaningful to break it. (Or safe, for that matter--and in the case of the Founding Fathers, at least worth the considerable risk.)

For writers on the cusp, it's not time to break the rules, either. I'm equally amused and amazed reading accounts of queries stuffed with glitter, or packaged with trinkets, or accompanied by not-funny joke death threats. I'll admit that when I first learned about the system, my mind flickered to what pretty paper on which I'd print my queries. Luckily for me, information is plentiful to anyone who exerts themselves even mildly, and I'm pleased to report I never sent out a query on anything but plain white bond, SASE included.

The query system isn't perfect. We all know that. Laws aren't perfect. But both work pretty well almost all of the time, and if you follow both, chances are your sparkling manuscript will find representation, and you'll remain ticket-free (and un-maimed). Querying is not the time to flaunt the rules. That's not what gets noticed. Shining within the guidelines is the way to catch an agent's attention. And since your manuscript has one shot with that agent, play it safe. Play it smart. Cross your T's, dot your I's, stay inside the crosswalk. Allow your project to provide the glamour.

And teach your kids to follow the rules instead of how to get around them. They'll figure that out on their own when they're teenagers.

On Joan Didion

by Joan

Several years ago I read Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking, her raw and honest memoir covering the death of her husband and writing confidant, John Gregory Dunne, and the serious illness of their daughter, Quintana Roo (who recovered but later died).  

I always meant to read Didion’s earlier novels and essays, but never quite got around to it. Then about a month ago, I came across a fascinating 1978 Paris Review interview with Linda Kuehl, The Art of Fiction: 

When asked to clarify what she meant by: “Writing is a hostile act,” Didion replied, “It’s hostile in that you're trying to make somebody see something the way you see it, trying to impose your idea, your picture. It's hostile to try to wrench around someone else's mind that way. Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else's dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.”

In the interview, Didion said she began typing out Hemingway’s stories to learn how his sentences worked. “I mean they’re perfect sentences. Very direct sentences, smooth rivers, clear water over granite, no sinkholes.” Didion also noted Henry James as an influence. “He wrote perfect sentences, too, but very indirect, very complicated. Sentences with sinkholes. You could drown in them.”

After reading this article I decided I must search out more of her work. I started with Slouching Toward Bethlehem, a collection of essays published in the 60s. The audible version was performed by Diane Keaton, a perfect blend of narrator and author. Occasionally when listening to an audio book, I find myself rewinding to catch a sentence or scene I’ve missed. But while listening to these essays, I pushed rewind more often, not because my mind had wandered as sometimes happens, but because I wanted to hear the brilliance again.

Aside from the John Wayne article in which he’s very much alive, and perhaps the title story covering the Haight-Ashbury druggie scene, the essays were surprisingly relevant and immediate to now. Whether California and its dichotomous personality and landscape, or New York in the author’s twenties, the essays are individual yet universal, abundant with literary inspiration. In “On Keeping a Notebook” Didion shares her thoughts on why a notebook is not a journal. She jots down snippets of conversations, places and times of random incidents, not as self-reflection, but as a chance to document how we create our own memories.

One cannot read Didion without wanting to capture some of her more profound statements, to quote and revisit.

“The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle.” 

“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be…”

I particularly liked her essay, “On Self-respect.” It seems an appropriate message for writers who live so close to rejection, but also for recent graduates who are struggling with what to make of themselves and where they will land in this world.

“People with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called ‘character,’ a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to the other, more instantly negotiable virtues.... character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.” 

“To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.” 

It turns out, Didion’s style has the flair of both Hemingway and James: clear and direct, a smooth river with an occasional sinkhole to drown in. For more on Didion, listen to fascinating podcasts of her NYPL interview or talk with David L. Ulin as part of Aloud, at the Los Angeles Public Library.

A Review of Meg Rosoff's How I Live Now

By Kim

I first heard of Meg Rosoff through Writer Unboxed, where she is a contributor, and had the privilege of taking one of her classes at the UnConference in Salem this past November. I am now kicking myself that I did not have How I Live Now with me at the time, so I could have had it signed. I don’t read a lot of YA, and so perhaps I can be forgiven for having missed this gem, published back in 2004 and since made into a movie of the same name.

Synopsis of How I Live Now (from the book jacket)

Fifteen-year-old New Yorker Daisy is sent to live in the English countryside with cousins she’s never even met. When England is attacked and occupied by an unnamed enemy, the cousins find themselves on their own. Power fails, systems fail. As they grow more isolated, the farm becomes a kind of Eden, with no rules. Until the war arrives in their midst.

Daisy’s is a war story, a survival story, a love story—all told in the voice of a subversive and witty teenager. This book crackles with anxiety and with lust. It’s a stunning and unforgettable first novel that captures the essence of the age of terrorism: how we live now.

About Meg Rosoff:

Meg Rosoff is an American writer based in London. How I Live Now, her first novel, won the Guardian Prize, the Printz Award, and the Branford Boase Award. The novel was made into a motion picture, which released in 2013 starring Saoirse Ronan, Subsequent novels include Just in Case, What I Was, The Bride’s Farewell and Picture Me Gone.

My Review:

It is pretty much impossible to categorize this novel.

It’s part utopian and part dystopian.

It’s a war story that takes place on the fringes of the war, at least until the scene that left me as shell-shocked as poor Daisy and Piper. This was soon followed by something exponentially worse.

The love story should be disturbing or, at the very least, off-putting, yet it somehow isn't. Not in that context. Not in that world.

How I Live Now is only 194 pages yet it felt much meatier because Daisy’s voice forced a slow read with no skimming allowed. It is one of the most original stories I've read in years, and also one of the most timely and unsettling. I wouldn't hand it to my thirteen-year-old, but when she’s fifteen I may well be shoving it at her.

It made me examine how vulnerable MY world is, how easily it could crumble into chaos. How many novels can do that?

Highly recommended.

Post-Deadline Relief

By Pamela

The past several weeks have been a bit of a bitch. Freelance assignments (for which I'm soooo grateful) piled on and left me feeling very work-weary. And then I took on another magazine assignment that qualified as being the longest one I think I'd ever written for publication. I wrapped it up last night, emailed it to my niece for her expert opinion and printed it out (which I never do), so I could read it on the page. My son, home for spring break, graciously read it, too. I let it marinate overnight and read it with fresh eyes this morning. After a couple tweaks, I sent it off.

Now, I face a couple more writing assignments that need my attention but not my immediate attention. So, this afternoon I'll make a quick run to the tile warehouse and carpet supplier to choose some products my contractor is waiting on. But what I really want to do is write. Write for me. Write on my novel, which I hesitate to admit aloud because I feel every one around me is tired of hearing about it. It shouldn't take so long to finish a book, should it?

The morning Texas sky

But sometimes it does. Sometimes work and kids and obligations become priorities and not excuses. And my life right now is about taking advantage of writing that pays in lieu of writing that might pay. I also feel I need to balance time away from the computer, connecting with people and getting away. So my calendar has a lunch with a friend planned for next Monday, a media weekend away (but I can take my girl) starting next Friday and a media tour to California wine country (just me!) the day after we return.

So, life is full. Life should be full and finding the time to make connections away from the computer are essential for me and hopefully my writing. Who would want to read a novel about a woman who sat all day in her jammies, tapping away at the keyboard? Not I! It's time to get out.

Stuff

by Elizabeth

My watch's battery has been dead for a couple of weeks. I have some pans and coasters I need to return to the store. My bathroom grout needs a dose of vinegar and baking soda, and my cat's nails could use a trim.

This is the stuff that plagues me today.

I have a beta-reading project I really need to get to. My WIP is demanding attention. I have to figure out what I'm going to feed my family for dinner tonight.

Stuff.

There's an unfortunate build-up of stuff on the counter in my breakfast room. The dog needs a walk. I have a pile of library books due in a couple of days.

Since I write contemporary women's fiction, it's tempting to use my life as fodder for my characters. I'll never forget hearing Amy Tan explain how she tried to justify her Chinese restaurant lunches as research for tax purposes (and getting shot down by her accountant husband). I wonder what Lou would say if I wanted to write off yoga teacher training? It's in my query letter.

I'm reading A Spool of Blue Thread right now, Anne Tyler's newest novel, and once again loving the little bits of life she peppers into her stories. She is truly the master of the tiny detail, seemingly insignificant tidbits of information that I never tire of reading. Here's an example:

It took a total of five vehicles to carry them all to the beach. They could have managed with fewer, but Red insisted, as usual, on driving his pickup. How else could they bring everything they needed, he always asked--the rafts and boogie boards, the sand toys for the children, the kites and paddle-ball racquets and the giant canvas shade canopy with its collapsible metal frame? (In the old days, before computers, he used to include the entire Encyclopaedia Brittanica.) So he and Abby made the three-hour trip in the pickup, while Denny drove Abby's car with Susan in the passenger seat and the food hampers in the rear. Stem and Nora and the three little boys came in Nora's car, and Jeannie and Jeannie's Hugh started out separately from their own house with their two children, though not with Hugh's mother, who always spent the beach week visiting Hugh's sister in California.

In the book, that takes up about a third of a page, and really, there's nothing in there driving the action of the story, or anything particularly revealing about any of the characters (we already know Red well enough by page 133 to figure he'd be that kind of stubborn)--but it's a pleasure to read and its own kind of funny. (Tyler specializes in quirky characters.)

Hooray! That means I get to write about my character driving to the mall to the watch repair place and maybe gobbling down lunch at a Thai place and then dropping by the store for pita bread to have with dinner.

Except. Another book I read late last month included little details, too. Lots and lots and lots of them, and while this was the work of a celebrated novelist as well, I found myself wondering why it mattered where the old pajamas had been purchased, impatient with reading through a character picking up and putting down a phone repeatedly to show her ambivalence about making a call, nearly rolling my eyes when having to read about a character plugging the computer into an outlet to get a specific number of emails that have nothing to do with anything. This is a novel I enjoyed and finished, but one that probably had a good fifty pages worth of detail that could have been deleted. Had they been, I would have liked it much more.

My WIP was begun as a NaNoWriMo book five years ago, and when I picked it back up earlier this year and realized it was a project I wanted to finish and felt ready to work on again, it did indeed have the requisite 50 thousand words to its credit. To my credit, I rapidly acknowledged that probably 35 thousand of those would be biting the dust, most sooner rather than later. Repetition, fine details, and while there's the nugget of the story there, and some good detail even well written, much of it would make a reader's eyes roll even faster than it did mine.

Over and over as writers we hear the advice to make every word count. Every chapter, paragraph, sentence, word, must add to the story or be sacrificed. I've bristled at this idea at times, but reading my early partial draft, I'm ready to shout Hallelujah and sign on. With books like the one I read last month that will always have an asterisk in my mind, I've got the pen in my hand. But then I pick up Anne Tyler, and the pajamas she mentions are seersucker, and too light for the season, really, but the only option, and I know I could read paragraph after paragraph about them and know the time was well spent.