One More Victory

Tomorrow is my last day at work.  You have got to take the small victories where you can and certainly tomorrow will be a huge victory for me. I've toiled hard at the job for two years without much love. It is very strange to do something you are good at but not enjoy it very much.  I am sure that I am not the first person to have ever said that or uttered that sentiment.

Moving on.


If you read my post from earlier in the week, or have been following my progress in the Amazon/Createspace Breakthrough Novel Award Contest, you will have found out that I did not make the cut from the pool of 1,000 to the pool of 500.  I didn't make it last year either and that's alright. However, one of the benefits of entering the contest is that you get "professional" feedback from some published writers and literary agents.  You actually get two different sets of feedback.  So, without further ado, here is what the public is saying about the early version of From Here to the Last Mound of Dirt, that very novel that is chronicled on this space and which you painstakingly follow as though your life depended on it - because in reality, it does:

ABNA Expert Reviewer #1

What is the strongest aspect of this excerpt?

I like these stories where you have a sort of puzzle to solve--what's going on here, how do these people interact. It's very well handled in this piece.

Descriptions are lush and not intrusive--they aren't just plotzed in the middle of a conversation, slowing things down.

What aspect needs the most work?

Almost all of the voices sound the same. If you're going to do 1 person narrative for a host of characters, they need to SOUND different. I thought James using all those sentence fragments was a style thing to differentiate his voice but...they all do it!

What is your overall opinion of this excerpt?

I'm a little unsure as to where the story is going. Some interesting characters and potential for some really fascinating interactions and the prose is *beautiful*. This would be a good weekend read, but it's a bit slow for a big 'edge of your seat' best seller.

ABNA Expert Reviewer #2

What is the strongest aspect of this excerpt?

An old setup -- children returning home after the death of a parent -- is handled well enough that it is interesting. The lack of major conflict between the siblings or Ben and his children is refreshing.

What aspect needs the most work?

There are five narrators in this excerpt. Their voices are too similar. With the exception of Maggie, they all sound alike in their cadence and descriptions. They need to be differentiated by the style of their narration.

What is your overall opinion of this excerpt?

The funeral story, characters gathering after the death of a relative or loved one, is a popular motif. The specifics here: four children returning to their old home to see their father, prepare their mother's funeral, and help sell the old house. In tow is also the wife of the oldest son. Dad's drinking, kept in check for 30 years by his now dead wife, has resumed.

The excerpt avoids the usual cliches. The siblings all get along well enough. They all love their father and vice versa. No long standing resentments are unpacked, no bile unleashed, no verbal acid flung about in this Long Island story.

Each section of the story is narrated by either the father or a child. And therein lies the problem. The narration is pleasant enough. It's just not different enough. The voices are differentiated, except for Maggie the magazine writer, by little more than section headings.

There is an interesting element of mystery in why James, the doctor son, has not told his father or his wife that she's pregnant. Other things -- Liza's guilt at moving away and "killing" her mother, Maggie's annoyance that she is not thought the leader of the children even though she's the eldest -- are not so interesting.

 

 

What they actually review is about a 5,000 word excerpt of the novel that you submit along with a pitch as well as the complete manuscript. There are some extremely true words in each of these little reviews and there is a lot to take from it, namely that the voices need to distinguish themselves earlier on in the story. As I see it now, the beginning did suffer due to me writing out each of the voices and finding them as the manuscript went along. When we come to Part III on the blog, those of you who have followed the progress, will see how the voices are certainly more distinguishable.  All very helpful stuff in terms of revision, which can  and usually is the bulk of any creation.

 

So, job almost over.  Little comments from the outside world on my writing.  Something to build on moving forward.  It's like Todd Rundgren said in the song, "One More Victory,"  "we need just one victory and we'll be alright."  We've got a couple here, and the last time I checked, that song was probably the best song to listen to while watching college basketball on mute and drinking whiskey.  I'm just saying.

 

Now, the next installment of the riveting and distinguished voice of Section 2 of Part II of From Here to the Last Mound of Dirt:

 

Mr Kosciuzko looked out of his window as he slowed the limo through the school crossing in front of the Setauket School.  He nodded his head at the statues of Benjamin Tallmadge and Abraham Woodhull at the peaks of the two wings of the school – those honorable American revolutionary spies.  He sighed and felt his heart grow heavy, too, as he drove past the Emma S. Clark library with its beautiful latticed windows, lush landscaping, and wood structure that seemed to be something out of a fairy tale.  Peter checked the time on the library’s small clock tower, which faced the road; it was the same as the time in the limo.  His heart was heavy, because he wished that he could tell a story too.  He wanted to write a story about the town, about all of its landmarks because he found it fascinating and thought that there was some similarity in this town and its history that anyone could relate to.  His grandfather had told him that there was a recluse who used to live in a  barn behind the library.  When his grandfather was a teenager they would spy on the recluse – they named him Hank.  Peter’s grandfather told him that whenever they spied on the recluse they would only see him sitting in the far corner by his candlelamp reading a book, they imagined that it was the Bible.  However, one time his grandfather had gone alone to look at the recluse.  He went at the same time of night he and his friends had always gone at.  However, this specific time when he looked in the window he had seen the recluse masturbating.  His grandfather had been shocked and slipped on the pale and crate he used to peer in the window.  When he looked up from his fall he saw the recluse’s eyes in the small window, the candlelight glowing around and behind them.  The eyes both frightened and full of rage.  His grandfather had been so scared that he didn’t even wipe the mud off his hands as he ran down Old Main Street.  When he was far enough away, he had caught his breath in the street underneath one of the streetlamps and wiped the mud off his hands on the grass.  He noticed a decent gash in the space between his thumb and pointer finger.  When he got home he didn’t try to sneak into the house as he usually did, he simply went in the front door.  His parents asked him where he had been and he told them.  He didn’t tell them what he had seen.  His father gave him the belt that night and, his grandfather said, he didn’t blame him that time.

 
“You know, Petey,” Mr Kosciuzko’s grandfather had said. “There are times in your life when something happens, could be big or could be small but you realize inside of yourself that you are learning something profound. Maybe you can’t define it then or maybe even ever, but you can feel it.  I think that night, I realized what growing up was.”

Peter took deep breaths as he stopped at the three way stop sign next to the reconstructed Setauket Post Office and the Mill Pond Bridge. There were swans out on the pond and he saw leaves falling off trees. He thought of his grandfather and the vanilla tobacco he smoked with his suspenders and his slicked back hair, always parted to the left.  Peter wished his grandfather’s story of the recluse could have been his.  Why was it that he had nothing in him to tell?  He turned right and continued on Old Main Street.  Maybe it wasn’t that he had nothing to tell, but that he did not know how to tell it.  He believed that every monument had a story – even the Mill Pond with its swans and ice hockey in the winter had a story to it.  However, he probably could not tell the story correctly and after seeing men who could tell a good story, he had to retreat to his driver’s seat.  All of the changes that were seen through his driver’s side window would remain in the repose of his chaffeur’s mind.

Mr. Kosciuzko turned the car left up Ridgeway and along the perimeter of Detmer’s Farm.  He remembered picking pumpkins with his children while the sky grey dark grey over the dirt.  On the left, they passed St. James Church.  Rose O’Donnell had been a fixture at the church.  Peter’s wife, Ellen, hadn’t really been friendly with her, and neither had Peter himself.  But they saw her each time they went to mass, which wasn’t so often, though they weren’t negligent parishioners.  Everyone knew that Rose would be a mass every Sunday and the kids would be there with her, all lined up and dressed neatly – the boys with wet hair.  Mr. Kosciuzko could not ever remember seeing Ben with the whole family at church.  Although, it was more like the Irish to dissent from the Catholic Church than it was for the Italians. Peter could not remember where his identification of Rose O’Donnell as Italian came from, but something told him it was true.  She did have the red hair, but stranger things had happened than an Italian with long red hair.

Peter checked his rearview mirror as they turned back onto Main Street. There was a GMC SUV following him.  He saw the older O’Donnell daughter, Maggie, moving her lips through the divider.  She had the same red hair that Rose O’Donnell had, although not as uniquely beautiful as Rose had been – graceful might have been the better word.  Mr. Kosciuzko’s son, Chris, was about the same age as Maggie.  Peter wondered if Maggie had any children.  They would most likely be riding in the limo.  But Ellen had showed him that notice in the paper a year or two ago that said Maggie O’Donnell’s wedding had been cancelled.  Kids were waiting longer and longer to get married and have children these days. Especially a girl like Maggie O’Donnell who was supposed to be quite the successful photographer.  If you were a woman and successful or even a man and successful at an art or a career, why stop to go through the pain’s of childbirth or father hood?  Peter could understand that point of view.  There was more ambition in the world – he could see that from TV and the internet.  However, there were certain lines he couldn’t draw.  He wasn’t sure if he was losing touch or if he was right.  Too often it seemed to him that there was an abundance of ambition, but also indecision and inaction in equal doses.

A Volvo stopped in front of Mr. Kosciuzko and he stamped on the break. There was a light ahead.  He checked his rearview mirror again.  He saw Maggie O’Donnell’s lips moving still.  What was she talking about? What were they all talking about?  He respected the families that kept the sound divider up during the rides, although it always raised his curiousity – a trait he hated about himself.  Maggie reminded him so much of his own daughter Sonya.  It wasn’t Maggie’s appearance that reminded Mr. Kosciuzko of his daughter, it was her reputation.  Peter hadn’t spoken to Sonya in five years – it would be six in the upcoming November.  He knew that Ellen still spoke to her.  The last Ellen had told him, Sonya was teaching to deaf children in Washington D.C.  Before that it was working for some small town newspaper outside of Iowa City.  

The traffic resumed and Peter felt the smooth purr of the engine pick up.  She had run off with Lee when she graduated college. He was from San Francisco and that’s where they moved.  Mr Kosciuzko remembered when she told them.  It rained on her graduation day and they stood under the green awning of the restaurant they were going to eat dinner at.  Peter saw the polished gold and bronze of the bar railings through the tinted window.

“Lee and I have a flight tomorrow. We’re going to San Fran.  I’m sorry this is such short notice. But we’re in love. This is what you’re supposed to do right? Just go?”

Peter had bought her a gilded volume of Aquinas.  He had it wrapped in thin navy wrapping paper with a red ribbon around it.  He held it behind his back as he told her.  Later, as they ate dessert and drank coffee, he pushed it across the white tablecloth, past a wine stain.  He wanted her to keep her mind active after she graduated – to never forget the glow of being a student, of having a wandering and active mind.

“Here, honey,” he’d said.

She smiled at him and the way her eyes glistened, he felt like the child. She teased the ribbon until it fell off and onto her lap. Then she tore the wrapping paper so that it almost evaporated, leaving only the book – the gild of the pages shining in the restaurant ambiance.

“Thank you, dad. Its beautiful.  I’ll always keep it by my bed.”

Sonya held the book to her chest and Lee put his arm around her, pushing his long brown hair to the side with his other hand.  He was unremarkable with his scruff of a beard and glasses, but she seemed to love him. 
  

 

Some Progress

So the screen capture above is from the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award PDF of the list of manuscript entrants who passed on to the second round.  The second round consists of a field of 1,000.00 candidates for a potential publishing contract with Penguin and a $15,000.00 advance.  Know, by putting this up, I know I may have jinxed myself already.  Although, I entered this contest last year with The Journey Forward and apparently I made it at least this far or further because the guidelines say that you will receive reviewer feedback in the quarterfinals.  And if you look at this old post from April 2009, I seem to have made it to that level.

In any event, I put this up to encourage you, my millions of fans, to keep reading this blog as one day your attention to whatever it is I am doing when I press buttons that put these symbols that are in black up on a white background will pay off and you can say, "Yeah, I remember him before, he was better then. He used to write about basketball and beer and that was more entertaining than a book about a damn family funeral that Ron Howard made into a movie that is garnering serious Oscar buzz before the 2012 Academy Awards. And if it wins he won't get to enjoy it all because 2012 will all be happening in December anyway so what do we even have to buy Christmas presents?"

See, keep reading here and that could be you. So keep getting it while its free.

Now, the next installment of From Here to the Last Mound of Dirt. This is an extra long one to tide you through the weekend. Feel free to analyze, overanalyze, etc.:




Maggie stood and approached the casket.  She remained standing and regarded the roundness of her mother’s face.  Her mother looked round and smooth.  It appeared as though she were one with the coffinbed, that they both existed as a single shape.  Maggie marked her mother out, she separated the lines of her face from that of the pillow and the wooden finish of the casket.  Her eyes felt strained, as if she’d been in the dark room for too many hours or had drank too many cups of bad coffee.  She knelt onto the cushion.  It was so important to separate her mother from those other parts of the casket.  She couldn’t let them all become one – her mother’s  body would not be assimilated into the fabric of the bed, the cushion of the pillow, just like in some way it would never be a part of the earth. 

    The cushion stuck to her exposed knee and Maggie recalled the first time she gleaned the importance of keeping an object separate.  To her, the idea had at first seemed silly to even dwell on.  A person first knew themselves as a separate object, or knew how to separate objects from other objects when they were an infant – breast from mouth, hand from foot, head from table.  So when she sat in her photography class, her brow furrowed, feeling very much sixteen and misunderstood, the goosebumps that rose up her shoulders in waves that could almost have been palpable, were not be to taken seriously.

    “Maggie?” The teacher had said. “Is something wrong?  Do you understand.”

    “Yes,” she’d said curtly, the only tone she knew. “Why?

    “Oh, you just had a funny look on your face.  Like you didn’t understand.”

    Maggie had shaken her head at the teacher, Mrs. Teller.

    Mrs. Teller continued. “Which is why I emphasize, that when you want to take a picture, you do not need to see a whole scene.  It would be foolish to concentrate first on the complete scope that is in your lens. Focus on one object and see how it stands out.  Focus on those lines, what sets it out.  What makes it what it is.”

    The goosebumps slithered in more waves and then felt as though they emnated off of her body out into the art room with the olive paint and the grey corked stools.  Mrs. Teller was the fifth best teacher she’d had in her life.  However, those lessons were – at their core – elementary, not just in theory, but in relation to photography, as Maggie saw and felt it.  It would be foolish, it seemed to her then, looking at the white paper scraps on the dull peach floor, and still did now as a photographer looking at her dead mother, to not take advantage of the complete scope of a lens.  To see the space provided for its full area, to the edge of its boundaries.  However, the logic then would reverse itself.  For a panorama, a shot of mountains on purple orange sky, the vision of a noontime Turkish marketplace taken from its from its most removed perspective, still would separate itself from what was not marketplace, what was not mountain and maroon sky.  The fault being, that you couldn’t just decide to focus on one object – that would be amateur.  You had to learn to negotiate both. Like a child, who at first thinks itself one with the world, one with each object it encounters and only later knows the pain of bumping the crown of its head on the edge of a glass table, so too did photography have to be learned.  It was only later in life and in taking pictures that you could separate what is what from what is not what.  And cognition in many ways is easier than art, than photography.

    Without realizing it, Maggie was in the dark.  She opened her eyes again and the casket was still there.  Her mother’s nose, the flowers backing up the wood – these separate entities were all there.  Each one with an inner light  begging to be rendered.  If I took a photograph of my dead mother, is that maudlin or is that beauty?

        Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,
         They called Maggie O’Donnell
        A fire-crotched…

    She had learned the term “inner light” in college.  It was in an aesthetics class and it was in relation to Cezanne.  The professor was a large man with a well kept goatee, his hair was thinning and stuck out around his ears in strands.  She had forgotten his name, which was not to say that he was a bad teacher, but like most college students she had been too full of herself to remember many names.  It’d been a Cezanne still life.

    “Look at the way he paints the table.  Three legs seem to be in harmony.  Three legs of this table are something you would buy in a store.”

    “This dude know about Ikea?” a student in the back asked.

    The professor laughed, took off his glasses and cleaned them. “No,” he paused and put his glasses back on. “In any case,” the class laughed as he continued. “Then we have the fourth leg, the leg in the foreground, it is shorter than the rest and if you follow the edgeline of the table, it is uneven, keeping true to the form.  Now follow the table’s top to the fruit bowl.  The bowl is off-balance, the fruit looks like it is about to tip.”

    “So he could draw a crappy table, what is so impressive about that?  We could all do that,” the same student in the back said.

    “Yeah,” Maggie spoke. “We could all say that in response to art, 'I could do that.'”

    The professor laughed.

    “Very true, Maggie.  If you look at the shapes you will see how true to life Cezanne keeps them.  In many ways it is only important because he was coming out of an era of the French academic painters.  But it was also important because he was coming out of the impressionist era and bring the importance back to the objects themselves, the imperfections, not just the imperfection of seeing them.  He knew that objects were imperfect, but that their inner light lets us see them as imperfect and as beautiful.”

    The way the professor had described the theory struck Maggie as wrong.

    “That is some real sixties bullshit,” she’d said.

    The professor shrugged.

    Later, Maggie walked through the snowflakes across campus.  She felt furious at the idea of letting something just be imperfect for the sake of being imperfect.  There was no point she felt, with her short uneven hair, her knit woolen gloves and scarf, and used maroon rain boots, to give yourself up to that thinking, whether it was in life or in art.  She looked at students skipping to class smoking cigarettes, wearing expensive winter hats and boots.  That idea had led her generation for too long.  She turned her face down the brick path and watched as snowflakes melted on the cracks where little bits of grass still stood even in the cold.  And she felt like she could cry from her great anger, and the beauty she felt in herself and in the sight of a snowflake melting on red brick.

    Maggie’s lids were squeezed tight and she felt the moisture right on the edge of her lashes.  She opened them once more.  She had no sense of time and immediately felt a pull on her heart as she looked upon her mother.  It seemed as though there were no way Maggie could ever understand how she had come from that tortured academic youth to the position she was in now, a woman over thirty, with pictures and postcards from all over the world and now a mother who no longer existed.  Why had she never called her mother on the phone in college and talked to her about aesthetics?  Maggie knew that she was interested in those things.  The image of her mother sitting on the wicker rocking chair in her room, the corner lamp on – the worn book of Thomas Aquinas open and, even though it was made of cardboard and coffee colored thread, the old cover seemed to shine onto the unlit portion of the room.

    “Mom, I’m going out.”

    The dull pain persisted in Maggie.  How could one hope to see their life as something complete and understandable?  You could never see the point to point creation that put you into whatever position you currently saw the world from.  Maggie knew this all too well as the image of her apartment appeared again and she saw the one clean pan sitting next to the sink.  She thought of Jake, as one who, in a state of emotional flux, will think of the person who they have loved more than anyone or anything else in their life.  She saw him by the sink in his grey sweatshirt - the one he had worn since he was a junior in high school - cleaning the dishes.  She saw and thought of him and felt a terrible earnestness, because for the first time she could feel the word “mistake” come to the very front of her mind and to her lips.

    She looked behind her and saw her family still sitting in the front row.  Maggie turned quickly back to the rail in front of the kneeler.  A flush came to her cheeks.  She felt foolish and incredibly angry at herself to look back, to hope that he was standing there or sitting in the room. How could she possibly think of going back?  How could she possibly be thinking of her love that went wrong while her mother was dead and gone and now laying with a bed of flowers around her, but not in the way that any poet would’ve written it or any folk song would have sung it? She was dead and now she was just another object to be taken in with the rest of them.  Maggie felt sick at Siberia, the Turkish evenings she’d seen, the Morocco she would be flying to in a month.  She wished that her camera were there so she could smash it right on the edge of her mother’s casket, right where the glare from the lights reflected on the wood making it seem white.

    Her mother’s face was round and waxy. The plastic quality of her skin and the whiteness of the glare made Maggie remember a full moon.   The night she remembered was dry and cool she could see her breath, but it was a night that is usually unique to December in that there was a mild quality to its edges – you could feel comfortable taking off your coat for a while to soak in the winter darkness.  The night was the night before Christmas Eve.  The white lights were draped along the front gutter and, with the strength of the moon, it made the bare flowerbeds glow; even the old mulch seemed distinct and profound.  She stood out on the front porch, running her shoes along the mortar that filled in the spaces between the stones.  The door opened and Jake stepped out with a glass of whiskey in his hand.  Maggie looked at the perspiration collected on the sides of the glass.  Jake blew smoke as he stepped out, shutting the door and rubbing the curled collar of his black sweater simultaneously.  He asked her what was wrong, knowing well that she was anxious and uncomfortable having him this close to her family. To her, having him this close, having him look at ornaments of her sitting on Santa’s lap, made their intimacy all too real – which forced her further away from the two of them together as a couple, as finacees as, perhaps, soul mates.  She told him nothing was wrong, she could just use a cigarette.

    He curled his glass towards his left armpit and poked his hand into his right pocket.  She could freeze him there carelessly rummaging his pocket, handsome like a movie star entering the  frame.  He kept moving and pulled out a pack of cigarettes.  She hated him for doing that.  She hated that he could know her and buy things for her.

    A cigarette hung from his fingers – one solid cylinder. She took the cigarette and let him light it.  She smoked and he kissed her cheek.  Her anger faded again with the comfort of the night and the way branches and stones were lit; even the grass as one whole uneven shape.  Jake could, at that time, feel the strain in Maggie.  He knew that for all her talking and articulation, that she could still not articulate herself.  He wrapped his arm along her waist and pulled the corners of their hips together so that they locked in the strange way that bodies familiar with each other have a habit of doing.  He looked out into the edge of the lawn where the light turned abruptly to black and wondered what more there was.

    The front door opened, the handle clicked and Maggie saw her mother.  The sound of Django Reinhardt’s music drifted out.  She quickly flicked her cigarette.  A trail of smoke rose from the bush where it landed.  Rose smiled.  She told the two of them to come in for coffee when they wanted.  Jake put his whiskey down on the arm of the bench.  He grabbed Rose by the right arm and swayed drunkenly with her as the guitars strummed in an ignorant and timeless bliss.  Maggie watched Jake spin her mother in the door and state that she was too good a dancer for someone as clumsy as himself.  He looked to her with his hands on his hips, his chest broad, sticking out in his sweater.  He smiled and his well defined jawline followed.   Maggie felt herself grow restless then as he stood there with her in the comfortable cold.  But with him dancing with her mother, nothing was comfortable.  The white lights and the shadowy tree limbs, which had seemed familiar and enchanted, now mader her nauseous.  Her cheeks itched.

    And as Maggie pulled her kneees up from the kneeler, she inhaled the flowers.  They smelled sour.  Love is not charming someone’s mother.  Maggie’s eyes fell upon her mother’s waxy cheeks once more.  She turned her head back.  He wasn’t there, the flowers stunk and Maggie felt weak.  She could feel her ears and feet itch.  But she walked back to her seat, unable to itch either place.  She knew that it was her problem, not her dead mother’s, and certainly not Jake’s.