And The Winner is Debra and ME!

I wrote each name down on tiny pieces of paper, shook them up, and Scott made the blind selection. Debra of From Skilled Hands fame and Little Blue Santa renown, please email your mailing address to lisa dot eudaemonia at gmail dot com and I will have your copy of Orange Mint and Honey to you pronto! I know you're going to love this book.

I apologize to all for the delay in announcing the winner. Nobody wants to hear my whining, but I was sick and miserable all weekend. I should be reading, writing, visiting and spouting political nonsense again in short order. Thank you for your patience.

What goes around apparently does come around because I was the lucky winner of a copy of Matrimony, by Joshua Henkin last week and my book arrived yesterday from the author himself with a charming, personalized inscription.


This book and I were meant to find each other. Months ago, when the book was first published in hardcover, I read the reviews and I was tempted to buy it, but I resisted. Maybe it was the towering TBR stack and maybe it was my resistance to reading a novel written by an academic. The more I read about Matrimony and about Joshua Henkin, the more I wanted to read the book. Then, Joshua Henkin guest blogged at The Elegant Variation this summer. Not only did he guest blog -- he super-blogged. This series of 24 guest blog posts at TEV concludes here, but scroll backwards and read them all. What a great series of posts for writers.

I am sure I'll have much more to say about Matrimony when I post about books I've read in October. Like The Story of Edgar Sawtelle (which I read and LOVED in September), Matrimony was a book the author took many years to complete. I suspect I'll find the same qualities of fine prose in Matrimony that I did in Sawtelle. I won my copy of the book at Work-in-Progress, a blog in which author Leslie Pietrzyk explores the creative process and all things literary. Lots of great things here and now I'm of course anxious to read some of Leslie Pietrzyk's work.

Lots of water, hot herbal tea, cough syrup and tissues have been consumed in our germy house these last days and alas, the glorious rewriting I envisioned for myself over the weekend did not take place. Oy. What are you going to do?

Like millions of others, Scott and I have been focused on the election and on the economy. We thought the debate was pretty exciting and although we thought it felt like somewhat of a draw at the end, apparently America's undecideds were more decidedly pro-Obama by the end.

The $700B economic bill is giving me chilling deja vu about the decision to invade Iraq back in 2003. Totally different issues, but I feel a familiar tendency to frighten the American public into supporting something we don't quite understand and that I doubt Congress really understands either. Me personally? I hate the idea of pouring $700B our taxpayer money into private industry and I really don't understand how it all trickles down to hurt "Main Street" in the end. I'll keep my eyes and ears open and hope the politicians can help us to all understand.

Everybody have the calendars cleared for the Vice Presidential debate on Thursday? I sure do! The selections of Joe Biden and Sarah Palin speak volumes about Barack Obama and John McCain. Now let's see how these two do when speaking for themselves and their running mates.

Here's a little sanity check for Eudaemonia readers. Have you decided who you'll vote for yet? Has any event made you change your mind or confirmed your decision since the conventions and if so, what what it? Maybe because of my background in the military, foreign policy is always my biggest focus. That's because I believe that how we implement and fund foreign policy efforts directly drives how we tend to domestic programs. After the debate, I felt like I was watching an old world/Cold War view of the world pitted against a 21st century globalized view of the world and that you can't separate what happens to health care from when or if we leave Iraq. How about you? How much does foreign relations affect your view of the candidates?

DISCLAIMER: I think I'm still a little feverish, so if absolutely nothing I've said in this post makes any sense at all, then mea culpa.

Denver Loves Authors

There it is, Tethered by Amy MacKinnon, right up front on the big kids' table at the Borders at Park Meadows Mall! I haven't written my review up on Tethered yet, but I will soon -- frankly, I'm so worried I won't do it justice -- it's that good. For a taste, check out Larramie's fantastic review here. I met up with Carleen Brice and Karen Carter, just before we headed to Karen's book club party to talk about Orange Mint and Honey with Carleen (that's right, I was a tagalong!).

Karen did a beautiful job setting up a table full of gifts for the guest of honor.

And my photos aren't the best, but I think these will give you an idea of the lovely group that Karen assembled, along with the wonderful dinner.


Denver is getting so literary! A signing and dinner last week with Tim Hallinan, a stop-off to see Amy MacKinnon's book on release date (our mini launch party) and then on to another elegant soiree with Carleen and Karen.

New York City literati, eat your hearts out!

The Curve

There are some things that I find it impossible to do if I think about the fact that I’m doing them.

Usually they’re things that involve some kind of muscle memory. When I was skiing all the time there were days where I felt transformed, like I was flying and I was completely present and in the moment, in that zone – unless I started to think about what I was physically doing.

Getting to the point where skiing was fun meant that I had to endure a few seasons where I was awkward, frequently frustrated and often terrified. I had to get past that learning curve so I could finally enjoy the sensation of that controlled fall through space.

Writing feels that way: reason #8,752 for writing often, even when the writing sucks.

A couple of things that flitted into my consciousness over the last couple of days scared me a little. I read some blog posts that focused on specific craft ideas. It wasn’t new information. It was the kind stuff I’ve read about many times and yet when I thought about how or if I was using these techniques, I came up blank.

I don’t know.

Yet?

The reason I was scared was because I realized that the snippets of work I might feel bold enough to think have the potential to be good are the snippets that come to me when I’m in the zone. As soon as I become conscious of using words to a certain effect, it becomes obvious and the work feels contrived.

When I revise, I become more aware of sharpening certain images or ideas to reinforce what I’m trying to convey. I know that when others critique my work, they sometimes point out the effectiveness (or not) of something I’ve done and I’ll realize they’re right even though I didn’t consciously include that word or that image or that description. Oh yeah, I meant to do that.

I have a theory that the reason that Scott’s new abstract work feels so powerful is because a good abstract painting requires that the painter have a mastery of all the skills needed to do a traditional, representational painting, only he has to intuit his way through the abstract. He knows if the color harmonies are correct and if the composition is balanced because he has an innate understanding of those concepts.

If we have an underlying appreciation of the visual arts, we know the painting works when we look at it, but we don’t know why.

Books on writing craft don’t talk much about the importance of years of experience in writing, but perhaps there’s a reason for that. We want things that give us results now and there’s no shortcut to practice and experience. Perhaps it would help us to set more realistic expectations and motivate us to write more and work harder to get good at what we do if we thought of writing as a long apprenticeship. Actually, that's helpful to me, but I know it's not the path for everyone.

There are plenty of people who can write well enough to get a book published, and if that’s the writer’s goal, there’s nothing wrong with that.

I’m talking about writing well. I’m talking about my vain wish to have a reader touched by my words or to have a reader thinking about my characters even when he’s not reading the book. I’m talking about a reader losing himself in the work and entering John Gardner’s fictive dream. I keep remembering a scene from the movie, Amadeus and a monologue that the Salieri character delivers:

“While my father prayed earnestly to God to protect commerce, I would offer up secretly the proudest prayer a boy could think of: Lord, make me a great composer. Let me celebrate Your glory through music and be celebrated myself. Make me famous through the world, dear God. Make me immortal. After I die, let people speak my name forever with love for what I wrote. In return, I will give You my chastity, my industry, my deepest humility, every hour of my life, Amen.”

My aspirations aren’t quite so grand, but I can confess to a fantasy where someone, somewhere writes a review of something I’ve written and confers some kind of literary approval on it.

When I attended Carleen Brice’s book launch party for her debut novel, Orange Mint and Honey she talked about writing the book over a period of six years and she talked about completely rewriting it multiple times. I was truly comforted to learn this. I had a secret fear that good books might come pouring out of other writers at a speed and a rate that I know myself quite incapable of.

While blogging has far more advantages than disadvantages in the form of creating community, the public nature of our efforts creates a small disadvantage.

When will you finish it? When will it be published? I sense from well meaning friends a certain impatience and maybe even disappointment that I don’t move more quickly. I think about The Foundling Wheel, my Dickens Challenge work in progress and I know that my goal is to finish it. For now, that’s my only goal. I don’t know if I’ll want to rewrite and revise and edit it once I come to the end. I don’t know if that’s its purpose. I know the project is teaching me a lot about writing, but I don’t know if it’s my first book.

When I say that my eventual goal is to publish a novel, I mean it. Eventually. I don't know when. I don’t know which novel that might be. I don’t know if it’s the one I’m working on, one of the two I’ve set aside or one I don’t know about yet. I just know I’ll know it when it comes to me. Maybe I’m too idealistic. Maybe this means I’m not a real writer, whatever that is.

Sometimes the lack of validation feeds the self-doubt that I and all of us have from time to time – but I also suspect that self-doubt never goes away no matter how much external validation we get about our writing. The blogging community gives me enormous validation about my emotions and about the process. For that reason, I keep coming back. I think that eventually, the only true validation about the worth of our own writing has to come from ourselves.

I once read an interview with Frank Conroy about the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The interviewer asked him if he could tell which of the writers would go on to be published and which would be successful. He said he couldn’t. Talent and potential have very little bearing on whether or not a writer can go on to finish and publish a successful book.

As time goes on, I am learning to trust myself. I feel a huge learning curve still ahead of me and I’m at peace with that. It’s my path and no one else’s. It doesn’t frustrate me. I’m in no hurry. I’ll write what I’m meant to write and learn as I’m meant to learn.

Does my lack of a sense of urgency reflect a lack of drive or of passion? I don’t think so. In the seventies, Paul Masson’s famous advertisement coined the phrase, “We’ll sell no wine before its time”.

I feel that way about my writing. It’s not time. I’ve often heard writers talk about how much bad fiction is published and how often they’ve read books and known they could write better. All true, but that’s not what drives me. I confess, I want to write something good and only time and more and still more writing will tell me if I can.

But that’s just me. Maybe I’m crazy. Maybe my expectations are too high.

For those of you both published and unpublished, how important is it to you that your work be perceived as good? Is it enough to provide your readers with escape and entertainment? Can you recognize your own shortcomings due to inexperience, or trace a path from inexperience to a gradual or sudden improvement?

Why are you writing that book?

Celebrate!

It’s Black History month and I feel a perfect storm brewing.

I’ve always had a strong feeling that it’s important to highlight the many achievements of black Americans, which for so long were excluded from the history books, but I have a growing longing for black history to become a seamless part of “our” history.

I believe I feel it happening. I’m an Obama supporter. He inspires me and makes me feel like “we” can be a great nation and feel good about ourselves as Americans again. When he says "we", I picture every last one of us. I haven't felt like I was part of a "we" for a long time.

This video was one of my favorites from the late 80’s. This was another. I’ll never forget the first time I actually saw it. I was stationed in Germany, so MTV wasn’t a part of my life then unless someone got a videotape in the mail. But I heard Living Colour on the radio and they rocked. When I saw the video and realized they were black, I almost fell over. It was one of the coolest things I’d ever seen and it wasn’t at all what I was expecting! It wasn't that they sounded especially white, it was that they were breaking into a sound I'd never heard from black musicians. Vernon Reid is listed as one of the top 100 guitar players of all time and Corey Glover has gone on to a successful musical and acting career. It was a very cool time in music with a lot of crossover between heavy metal, funk, punk and hip hop with bands like Living Colour, Jane’s Addiction, The Red Hot Chili Peppers and Faith No More -- all my faves from that period -- and gosh, I was years from 30 then!

Vernon Reid founded The Black Rock Coalition:

“The Black Rock Coalition was founded in 1985 by guitarist Vernon Reid, journalist Greg Tate and producer Konda Mason in reaction to the constrictions that the commercial music industry places on Black artists.

A collective of artists, writers, producers, publicists, activists and music fans assembled to maximize exposure and provide resources for Black artists who defy convention. To date, the BRC is the only national nonprofit organization dedicated to the complete creative freedom of Black artists.”

For me it was the start of something very cool in the music industry.

Yesterday at Carleen’s Brice’s site – Don’t forget to buy your copy of her fabulous debut novel, Orange Mint and Honey – available at fine booksellers everywhere and your local Target store – and found a fabulous new blog, Ringshout:

"RingShout was founded following Martha Southgate's essay "Writers Like Me" in the New York Times Book Review in July of 2007. The response in the blogosphere and in the literary world was enormous. So Martha wanted to harness this energy. She contacted Cornelius Eady and Alison Meyers of Cave Canem , a group she greatly admired, for insight into how they had formed their organization. The next step was contacting several writers, editors and a bookseller (Sarah McNally of McNally Robinson Books who participated in our first couple of meetings) who she knew and respected. The five got together over a period of six months and brainstormed until they had come up with a way to form a book list and a tool kit that would help carry out the group's mission. We kicked off with a party to drum up support and volunteers on February 1, 2008. At the present time, we remain an all-volunteer effort that is unaffiliated with any larger organization."

Writers (black, white, Latino, Asian, Indian, everybody!) please check it out. The most recent post is about a desire for "our books to be for everyone--Barack style."

This new blog has brought to the forefront a conversation that many of us have been having on and off for a long time. A fine book is a fine book and needn’t be separated into an ethnic category and I’m delighted to have discovered some new voices in American literature.

“We’ve” got some cool things happening.

Nuts or Normal?

Before I share my existential angst for the day, I need to categorically state: I am not fishing for reassurance or sympathy. If I get that in response to this post it will be confirmation that I’m unable to express ideas through the use the written language and I will go out into the back yard in my purple pajamas, dig a deep hole and pull the dirt in on top of myself.

It’s a niggling, hollow, anxious feeling of self doubt I’m having today. Just when the rhythm of writing, the study of craft, the balance of creativity and process seemed to be coming together, a chasm of uncertainty opened up beneath my feet.

Does this happen? Is this normal? Do “real” writers ever get part way through a draft and suddenly wonder if it’s all a big pile of crap?

I wonder if it’s like that phenomenon that used to happen back in the seventies, when experimentation with mind altering substances was a great way to spend a Saturday night. We’d stay up all hours of the night, chain smoking Marlboros, getting all excited about our radical new ideas and philosophies and by morning, the genius had all left the room and we found ourselves wondering what the hell we could have been thinking?

Is it because I turned in the first excerpt to my workshop instructor last night for critique and all the way home I couldn’t help but pick my own work apart? That before even getting the feedback, I know some of the problems already?

Is it that I’m thinking maybe this whole time, without getting any authoritative feedback on what I’m doing, I’ve been living in that shadow world of 1977 in that ratty apartment in a New England mill town, incense burning, pupils dilated until the irises are disappeared, cross legged on the floor with two or three other psilocybin deluded nutcases under the spell of imaginary promise?

Or is it just the opposite?

Would it be more deluded to press on with confidence, never experiencing moments of gripping self doubt? Typing and editing away without a doubt in the world that the end result will be a fine read? Or that maybe it will be good and published and people might like it? Do we need to build up the illusion of confidence in order to keep doing what we do, knowing that we can't stop, but that the reality is the vast majority of us will fail?

I know this will pass, probably by the end of the day, but it was a surprise that it hit so hard and so unexpectedly.

Do you ever have moments of intense self doubt? When? Why? What triggers it?

Post Script: In case you doubt the veracity of my comment about jumping into a hole wearing purple pajamas, go here to see my first online photo debut. I am a contest winner and will receive a signed copy of Carleen Brice's new novel , Orange Mint and Honey which will be released by Ballantine in February -- same time as Therese Fowler's US debut for Souvenir. Carleen has also written three non-fiction books and the one I think I need most right now, Age ain't Nothing but a Number is on it's way to my house right now. Carleen is the original Pajama Gardener! It is a testament to serendipity that although Carleen and I both live in the Metro Denver area and Carleen has been a long time member of my new home away from home, Lighthouse Writers Workshop that we met through Olufunke at her delightful blog about writing, iyan and egusi soup.