Me in the News??
Mood:  happy
Topic: Writing

The North Carolina Zoo sent out a press release yesterday about the Visiting Artists working in the kidZone.  I received nice placement in the release and was featured in the accompanying photo:

NC Zoo photo by Tom Gillespie 

Kristine Goad (standing left), one of six visiting artists at the North Carolina Zoo in July, engages children in her “The Whole Wide Wonderful World of Water” project. The project is part of a larger Visiting Artists Program at the zoo throughout July. Goad’s project is designed to engage children in poetry, movement, visual art and storytelling.

As far as photos go, it has some attractive elements (excluding me, of course!).  I like that it captures the size of the group, the tarp we used as the river and the ocean (such a lovely shade of blue!), and the Artist's Cove wall behind me.  I wish, however, that it was an active shot.  We are "rehearsing" sound effects here that we will use once Walter's Water Adventure actually begins.  (Walter is a water drop and the kids accompany him on an adventure through the water cycle.)  The kids look a little bored here, but I can assure you they weren't bored a few moments later when the real, 3-D story began!

You can read the full press release here.

I don't know that the story has been picked up anywhere yet aside from the blog of the Executive Director of the North Carolina Zoo Society, Russlings. 

Masahide
Mood:  sad
Topic: Writing

My horoscope for today said I was going to feel as though my world was spinning completely apart, but that I should take heart in knowing that amazing change would come from facing whatever hurtles I encountered.

My weekly horoscope from The Independent Weekly said I should be careful which words I allowed to enter my ears, lest I be impregnated with the wrong thoughts.

This morning I found two pennies, several miles and hours apart, both heads down.  I picked them both up and carried them in my pocket all day because when I was in Helena, Montana on June 26th, 1998 and there was a blizzard on MacDonald Pass that caused the Red Cross to come to the aid of hundreds of my fellow cross-country cyclists caught in the storm, I found two pennies, one heads up and one heads down, on the cement floor of a fairgrounds building.  I had seen dozens of such pairs from the first day I climbed on my bike and headed up Snoqualmie Pass in Washington, but at that moment, I realized this pair was telling me that I choose my own luck, that rejecting a heads down penny just because I didn't like its orientation meant I was rejecting a gift from the universe simply because I didn't like the way it was presented to me.

This morning I contacted the people (in Helena, Montana) making the decision about the major writing project in which I hoped to participate, and learned that I am no longer under consideration.  The person I spoke with said all the usual nice things about keeping my samples on file in case they were in need of a writer with my skills in the future--and I will make a point of following up with them over the next year--but I was apparently not sufficiently impressive this time around.  Two months of research, writing, reading and preparation went into my submission, two months of imagining myself already participating in the project, two months of thinking there was no one else I could imagine writing for.  As I said in my cover letter to them, their call for a researcher/writer opened a door that I immediately walked through and it closed behind me.  So here I am, alone on the other side of a closed door with no clear map of how I'm supposed to do the work I've determined I must do.

My lovely, lovely friend Heather from Earth Share wrote me a note of encouragement upon hearing the news.  She included a piece of wisdom she'd received from a friend, and so far I have only been able to establish that the quote is from a Japanese man named Masahide, circa 1668:

Barn burned down, now I can see the moon.

I haven't passed that along to my dad, yet, but he's been urging me to go it on my own for a long time now, and I'm sure he would approve.

My Own, Personal, Cyclic Universe
Mood:  lyrical
Topic: Writing

I need to learn how to create my own Emoticons.  There have been a couple of times now when I haven't been able to find exactly what I'm looking for in the list from which I get to choose.  Today's Emoticon would definitely be Dreamy.  I went to sleep last night anticipating a snow day today where I could work from home, writing for the tarot project from the couch with Kaija on my lap and a fire in the fireplace and Hurricane Chili (even though today's weather has been dubbed a "winter event," NOT a hurricane) bubbling in the crockpot while brownies baked in the oven....  I'm writing about Pele, goddess of fire, volcanos, lightning, and dance, and about how anger, like lava, if properly released, can be a creative force.  (For the purposes of the tarot project, I'm having to ignore the fact that Pele's anger and her seduction of her sister's husband led to her banishment from her native Tahiti and her eventual destruction in Hawaii, but those aspects are still working on me somehow.)  I've been thinking about her for a few weeks now, and I think I'm close to saying what I want to about her.  Part of me was really looking forward to spending today doing that deep, reflective kind of writing that approximates poetry.  I wanted to get my first, complete draft done and then spend the afternoon making each word earn its place on the page.  (Marc sent me his novel last week, and when I was preparing my comments on the synopsis and the first few chapters, I reread the beginning of Noah Lukeman's The First Five Pages and it made me want to test my skill with strong nouns and verbs.) 

Add to that the fact that I had an idea for an aubade last night before I fell asleep, and all I want to do today is play with words.  (An aubade is a poem that in some way addresses the morning, sometimes welcoming it but more often wishing it away because the arrival of the morning sun usually means lovers must part.)  I have never been inspired to write an aubade before, so this is an exciting urge.  We'll see how long the excitement lasts once I start struggling with the actual writing, though!

So, of course, at 6:00 a.m. when I needed to call Sudie to find out whether she wanted me to drive in to work, there was not a snowflake to be found.  So long warm puppy.  So long cozy fire.  So long dreaming of red lava while I looked out the window on a world of white.  The snow started as soon as Kaija and I stepped outside for our morning walk, and then let loose as soon as I hit the freeway.  Now the snow has turned to the drizzle they promised, but it has not yet begun to freeze.  And the work of the day has been anything but creative--end of year inventory of books, following up on marketing projects, fighting STILL with BellSouth aka the New AT&T to get the voicemail system set up so that I have my own mailbox. 

It's the first day of February, which usually makes me really happy because that is the beginning of my birthday month when all the planets are all about me.  Like Lorelai Gilmore, I do require a week of festivities celebrating the date of my arrival in this life, but with Valentine's Day and our marriage (elopement) anniversary (our wedding anniversary is in July, just so I get a little attention mid-year!) all lined up in that week, I don't have to work very hard to make sure my birthday is properly acknowledged, leaving energy to find other days in the month that can be all about me.  (Yeah, right.)

This year, though, the first day of February means I'm a month into 2007 without having solid plans for this particular trip around the sun mapped out.  I haven't heard anything in a few weeks about that major writing assignment I am still hoping to land.  I realized this week that I created the biggest intention around that particular project that I have ever created, and it's hitting me now that my power to manifest possibilities in my life may still have limits.  I have been going through these phases of super optimism where my universe expands and phases of deflation where I simply can't maintain that same level of enthusiasm that I carried and fed steadily for more than two months.  Luckily, the deflation phase is replaced pretty quickly with another optimism phase, but at this point, I think my family and friends are pretty scared to ask me if I've heard anything.  I myself have been afraid to blog because I've been on such an emotional rollercoaster and completely focused on the outcome of this particular decision over which I feel less and less control. 

On days when I've had excess energy--when I wanted to do something more to improve my chances of joining that project, and there was nothing more that I could do--I have made some progress with my personal writing and goals.  One Friday night when I had hoped to hear something and hadn't, I went straight to my computer after my walk with Kaija and sent out a short story to Glimmer Train.  I had finished the story more than a year ago and made a plan for who I was going to submit it to and in what order, and then I never sent it out except to have some friends read it.  Now it is under consideration by someone who might actually be able to publish it.  On another night when I could not sleep, I spent several hours researching science writing, and found two national organizations to consider joining--including one that has a mentor program--as well as summer conferences, lists of Master's programs, and information on how to get started and salary expectations based on whether you are a freelancer, a science beat reporter for a newspaper or magazine, or a public information officer for a university.

On top of that, I went back to my Scanner Daybook that I started last summer when I read Barbara Sher's book Refuse to Choose: A Revolutionary Program for Doing Everything That You Love and, going with the Random Acts of Passion Model, I created my fifteen-month calendar and a list of fifteen mostly writing-related goals that I intend to achieve beginning this month and ending on April 30, 2008.  On that list of 15, I included reaching my goal weight, getting a passport, and planning my first International trip (somewhere other than Canada or Mexico!).  I also want to figure out once and for all what I'm doing with Your Mileage May Vary and have a first draft of my next book finished.  I have goals for science articles, for poems, for the number of queries I'll write, and for classes I might teach.  I figure these goals will be portable, achievable from any state in the country, and stable, regardless of whether I get to join the major writing project on which I've set my sights.  I am also going to make the goals public--handing off copies of my list to my parents and Chad and maybe even Marc if I decide to take him up on his offer to exchange work now that he's feeling confident in his own project--so that someone can always ask for an update and help keep me motivated.

Maybe tonight I'll try my hand at the beginning of an aubade.  I do like to try new things....

Ask & Ye Shall Receive
Mood:  mischievious
Topic: Writing

Well, well, well.  I had only to post a request for my rejection to arrive in the mail and my request was answered in less than 24 hours!  Carolina Wren Press, http://www.carolinawrenpress.org/, did reject me, and, no, I was not one of the three finalists, and, no, there was no handwritten note of encouragement.  The most disappointing is that the award isn't even launching a career.  The woman who won, Jeanne M. Leiby, is the editor of The Florida Review, http://www.english.ucf.edu/~flreview/current3.html, and an associate professor of English/Creative Writing at the University of Central Florida.  She's a native Michigander and a fellow U of M alum, with an MA at Bread Loaf School of English/Middlebury College, and an MFA at the University of Alabama.  So she's already got creds and a career.  Sigh.  

That means the memoir has, if memory serves, officially been rejected 25 times: by 22 agents, several of whom asked to see more than the first chapter; by default by 2 agents who asked to see the entire manuscript then never responded to it before I moved to North Carolina; and now by a small press.  Only 75 more to go before I can completely give up on it!

All I can say is that it's good I'm writing again.  I have to believe that I will get better and that eventually good writing finds a home.

P.S.  If I sound bitter (which I really don't think I do), that's okay.  Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird gave me permission to be.

Feminist Rhetoric and Gender Fluidity and All Those Same Damn Insecurities
Mood:  caffeinated
Now Playing: "Run" by Snow Patrol
Topic: Writing
I started writing again.

Not magazine articles or queries, but something else.

I have been waiting ten months for Carolina Wren Press to reject the memoir manuscript I entered in their Doris Bakwin competition. The website said they'd announce the winner in August, 2006 so I went to the mailbox every day last month in anticipation of the SASE in my handwriting that would enclose the following letter:

Dear "Writer:"

Thank you for your entry in the Doris Bakwin Award competition. This year more than 325 women submitted manuscripts, and all of their manuscripts were better than yours. Of course, we waited ten months to tell you this in an attempt to spare your feelings. After all, having waited nearly a year for a manuscript to be chosen, you can't really hold out any hope that we would choose yours. Therefore, now that we are certain you have already imagined the worst and given up all emotional investment in the outcome of this competition, we are pleased to announce that Sheila Writesbetterthanyou has been chosen as the recipient of this year's award for her manuscript entitled The View Is Waaaaay Better From Here.

We wish you the best with your writing, even though we knew after reading only the first five pages of the crap you sent us that you'll probably never amount to anything. We hope to see more of your work in the future. Far, far in the future.
Sincerely,
The Weary-Yet-Jubilant Staff of Carolina Wren Press

The letter still hasn't come and the website is still announcing that the winning manuscript will be announced last month. I'm not upset about this because I really do understand the realities of being a small press (since I am the sole employee of one) and I can't imagine the stress of 325 book-length manuscripts demanding to be read and ranked and passed up the food chain. It's a miracle that competitions like these are ever finally decided and that one manuscript really is chosen and published and one career quietly launched....

But the fact that after ten months I am still going to the mailbox looking for that letter IS a problem. It means I haven't lost all emotional investment. (I have given up hope that mine will be chosen, but I'm still clinging to some small hope that I might get a nice, handwritten note on the above kiss-off letter saying I was a finalist, or that at least one of the readers really liked the manuscript but, sadly, had to let it go because it was just a little too "___" for this press.) It means I've put all my eggs in one basket. That I don't have enough irons in the fire or enough balls in play. That it is time to start lobbing other pieces of writing out into the world so they, too, can be rejected and returned to me so I can repackage them to some other editor with a form letter just waiting to be shoved into my hopeful SASE.

So I started writing again. It's a tentative writing, but I can honestly call it a writing practice. It has a set begin time and end time and I start by doing a timed writing warm-up in my Natalie Goldbergesque spiralbound notebook. It's all much more ritualized than I've ever worked before, but I needed a routine to get me started.

I think I'm writing the first in a series of short stories for which I have a great title, but I don't want to jinx myself by actually revealing that title. I'm not sure yet, though. It could turn out to be an essay. Since I believe a story finds its own form and wholeheartedly embrace Pam Houston's approach to writing - she says that 90% of her nonfiction is true, and 90% of her fiction is true; it's a matter of which 10% is false that determines whether she calls it fiction or non - I don't think I have to know yet. If it turns out to be a short story, it might actually also turn out to be the fourth story in the series, rather than the first, since I think I may have begun writing this particular collection of stories back in 1989 with a very bad short-short about having to pick out a wedding gift for an ex-boyfriend I was still in love with. (That story, and maybe the second one also, even though the second one has been published, would definitely need an overhaul. In fact, I don't think I still even have a copy of it, unless it's in one of the boxes of stuff I saved from USC....)

To get back in the flow, I began my practice by writing long-hand on looseleaf college-ruled paper with my favorite brand of pen, a blue medium PaperMate. This is how I started writing back in grade school and I wanted that reimmersion this time around. I wrote like this at the dining room table every night this week until tonight, when I decided I had a solid beginning for this story/essay and could step up to writing on the computer. I didn't begin writing on a computer until grad school - and I still refuse to write poetry on a computer. It took some getting used to, but now it's second nature.

Of course, working on a computer brings another layer of distraction, though.

The story is about me taking a questionnaire in college that said I was more gender identified as androgynous than as either female or male. So, I typed up what I had written by hand, went back over it a few times to get the rhythm right, and then decided that 1) I wanted to verify that I was using the word "rhetoric" appropriately (yes, I have a Master's degree and I still worry that I'm using specific terms incorrectly and have to check myself) and 2) that I wanted to see what a Google search on the term "androgynous" brought up.

Suddenly, writing becomes Googling and following links and before you know it, I've lost all the energy I had for the story and now I am all concerned that I have to find a way to specify that my sexual orientation was never in question, just my psychological connection with one gender or the other. (I have always been female, but I like spending time with males much more than I do females. This whole gender thing has become much less of a question as I've gotten older, though, because the more time I spend with men, the more I realize I have a truly feminine brain. I simply see things differently than they do, and I am convinced it's based on brain morphology and chemistry.) I took notes on terms like "androgyne" and "bigender" and "ambigender" and "gender fluid." None of these terms are likely to be useful in the short story I'm writing, and the fact that I suddenly know them makes me want to use them and that makes it more likely that the piece I'm writing will read like an essay, and even though I've said I don't care which I'm writing, I think I really do hope I'm writing a short story. Having the Internet so readily available when I was writing Your Mileage May Vary was awesome because I could easily look up facts about towns I was writing about without having to break focus for very long. If I truly am writing fiction, though, I may have to develop some kind of mechanism to keep myself from hopping over to Google in the middle of a writing session.

And now I've spent more time writing about my writing session than I did actively writing during the writing session.

Still Pitching
Mood:  energetic
Topic: Writing
I turned in drafts of my first three pitches for my query writing class at a little after midnight. They are still very much in the development stage, but I'm happy to still be playing along at the half-way point of the class. Trying to write a complete query a week is totally overwhelming right now, and I'm sure I'm not giving it as much time as it deserves. But, I've been up past midnight the last two nights, and I'm getting words down, and I'm thinking, and I'm slowly gaining confidence. All good things.

I really love my idea for my third pitch. I owe the idea to Gantry - although I haven't actually discussed it with him yet - who contacted me last week for the first time since high school as part of the 20th class reunion roundup. Reconnecting with him has been very cool - or maybe I should say connecting with him has been cool, since I can't really say I knew him in high school - and he got me thinking about quite a few things. He also gave me an email address for Scott, whom I have been wanting to check in with for some time, but who is currently ignoring the message I sent him. Maybe I sounded a little too excited to know where he is and freaked him out? There are more than 3,000 miles separating us - I can't be THAT scary! [Just to be safe, I probably shouldn't let him know that a single Google search brought him up at the company he works for. COO. Nice! Not a stalker, though. Really.]

I need to go to bed, but I'm still wired from the adrenaline of turning in class assignments. I have absolutely no idea what quality work I'm turning in. After I got depressed in the second week after reading everyone else's first query, I got a message from Christina that she thought my first query was ready to send out to the editor. (I haven't sent it yet because I'm waiting to do some interviews and because I changed my mind about the market I want to query.) I have no objectivity. I feel capable of writing every piece I'm pitching, but I have little confidence in my ability to convince an editor of my ability. It's time to get out of my own way....

I can breathe a little bit schedule-wise for the next few days, so I'll try to be better at answering email!

Love!!

Will I Ever Learn???
Topic: Writing
I've done it to myself again. In deciding what I wanted to write about over the six weeks of my pitching class, I chose marriage. It makes sense to me that any time I set out to write about a topic, I should choose one that I could write four or more articles on. It means that researching four articles takes essentially the same amount of time and work as writing one, and I don't have to go back to my sources for quotes repeatedly if I have all my angles and slants figured out in advance and can just ask everything in one sitting. I chose marriage because, if you've been following along, it's been on my mind lately. Plus, UTNE just did an interesting three piece feature on that topic in this month's issue.

For the first query, I pitched an article that leans heavily on my personal experience but includes quotes from leading marriage counselors on ways any reader can bolster her own marriage, regardless of its current state, and offered 2 sidebars.

In writing that one, I realized that was of interest to me, but that there is an even deeper question, which is, should you fight for an ailing marriage, and, if so, why and in what circumstances? Last night I had gone to bed slightly deflated after reading the other queries turned in by the other women in my class - all more experienced in magazine writing than I am, and all very qualified to write whatever piece they were pitching. Before I could fall asleep, however, the first line of my next query came to me and before I knew it, I was out of bed and writing a two paragraph introduction to my topic. So tonight I decided to do my "no more than one hour of research" - that is the time-limit mandated by my instructor, and, yes, you guessed it, the time-limit I way overshot - and realized that I am in way over my head. I tried googling the title I was going to propose for the piece and found that it is such a great title, it's already been used dozens of times.... The search yielded a TON of information, all of it useful, including the names of some social scientists that I will want to talk with - even one here in Durham at Duke. (This activity of scrolling through the faculty list of Duke's sociologists was depressing, too - so many of these people are my age or only slightly older and way more "Accomplished.") [Author's Note to James (if you're still reading) and any one else who cares about my self-esteem: Yes, last night and again tonight I subjected myself to comparisons between me and the other writers and me and professors, and, no, the comparisons were not positive. BUT, on both occasions, I quickly reminded myself that I am on my own crazy path and social comparisons do not matter. I am fine.]

The problem is that I am in information overload. So many people are writing on this topic, and all of them seem so confident in what they have to say. I want to pitch the piece to an alternative paper or magazine, and I read a Salon.com piece tonight that showed me how much edge and opinion a story could have and made me worry that I don't have enough attitude to write for an alternative outlet. Plus, the controversy over what the social research means (are married people healthier, wealthier, and happier than single people, and if so, is there a causal relationship or merely a correlation?) that I know I am going to want to go to the source material and read the published papers before interviewing any of the scientists or even attempting to say which way my story might lean. Essentially, what I'm proposing to write is the equivalent of a term paper for a Soc or Psych class, and there's no way I'm going to be prepared with even a draft query of it by Monday night. So, my dilemma is, do I write up as much as I can of this query and turn it in, knowing that it will need much work over the next four weeks? or, do I try to come up with a simpler, 1,000 word article idea that I can write up without a great deal of research? (Yeah, right. Like that's gonna' happen!)

So I guess my answer is write up a crappy first draft of the long piece and get as far as I can in laying out all the sides.... I can honor my feminine impulse by not offering an opinion until I've carefully analyzed all the available data - and who knows when that will be!

Dichotomy or Parallel Tracks?
Mood:  on fire
Now Playing: Better Days by the Goo Goo Dolls
Topic: Writing
My work life has been rockin' lately! The dual language children's book we published in August is starting to get some press attention now that we are introducing it into second grade classrooms as part of a pilot program to test its effectiveness in teaching Spanish. We've received coverage by two local papers and are talking with a local t.v. news station about covering one of Sudie's school programs later this month. Plus, we're bringing the book to three new schools in the next two weeks and have been contacted by a bilingual book program at one of the nearby libraries and have received an invitation to do a reading at a local independent bookstore. On top of that, I've been helping Sudie think about ways to expand her workshop offerings so now she's even considering participating in the Artists in the Schools program in Wake County. We're doing lots of new things, which means I'm learning some new things - like how to independently publish a book in two languages when I only speak one - but mostly I'm learning that I can do this. I'm using my teaching experience to help Sudie figure out ways to use the book as part of a curriculum and to write outlines for the programs she gives. I'm using my writing and marketing skills as her press agent. I'm getting better at what I do, she's getting better at what she does, and we're on a really great roll. It's nice to see actual results for my work, and lately I've been leaving every afternoon feeling that I've been effective. "Effective" is a very good feeling!

Unfortunately, I'm lagging behind in my personal creativity. I'm bursting with ideas, and thankfully, I've started keeping an idea journal that travels with me everywhere I go so the ideas aren't being lost. On several occasions in the last two weeks I've sat in my car for a few minutes after driving home because I've had an idea that I just had to get down and I was worried I'd lose it if I waited to write it until I got inside the house. And I had a really great conversation last week with the publisher of a local healthy living magazine, although she didn't immediately grasp my point that if I can write articles and fundraising scripts about sensitive environmental topics for a diverse audience without alienating conservatives then I can probably also write articles about healthy living - i.e. holistics - without alienating conservatives. The problem is that I haven't followed that conversation up yet with any clips - I don't have anything that's going to scream "perfect candidate," even though I'm only looking for editing work from her and not writing assignments. I'll probably end up sending her work about air cargo since that magazine was a monthly and my name appears as an editor on the masthead. So, some forward movement but not necessarily great follow-up.

I've also started collecting assignments for myself, deadlines for competitions or themed journal editions, with the idea that I'd like to have six viable assignments at any given time. The writer in me doesn't have to complete those assignments, but the business manager in me has to generate them. The hope is that if the assignments are there, the writer will be inspired to follow through.

I have been mentally writing one of the essay assignments in my head all week. Tonight I sat down to actually begin typing it up, but before I did, I went to the website for the journal that had put out the call for submissions - a theme issue on Travel & Enlightenment. Perfect for me, right? I had read an advertisement for the call in the last two issues of my favorite writers magazine and I had committed the deadline to memory. It turns out, however, that the deadline I've been carrying in my head is not the deadline that's posted on the journal's website, and, you guessed it, the deadline was last week and not next week.

Bummer, bummer, bummer. My first response was to get angry at myself for procrastinating about the piece in the first place, and then to get angry at myself for not double-checking the ad against the journal's website as soon as I decided I wanted to write this essay. But then I decided I can either let it go and not write the essay since my target market won't read it now, or I can write the damn thing anyway because it turns out it's a pivotal piece that fits perfectly in with the idea for my next book and is material that I will need to process in one form or another sooner or later. So I'm going to finish writing it now and figure out where to send it when it's done. (And, I'm going to write to the editor of the journal to see if they know about the misprinting of the deadline in the writers' mag and if there is any possibility of a deadline extension....)

The cool thing is that my home office has really come together this week to the point where I felt I could take tonight off from organizing and the ongoing filing project. As I was driving home from work I was saying to myself, "I get to write tonight!" Writing actually felt like a reward! Way cool, because a lot of times, writing feels like exercise. Once I'm moving, I'm in the zone and probably loving it, even if it's torture. But getting started is difficult every single time.

I think what I need to keep in mind is that I have made a commitment to myself to have a creative life and that I might be off to a slower start than I imagined - so what else is new? - but that I am moving forward. My therapist from last summer wanted me to learn to see my life as a continuation of events, rather than as the series of starts and stops I presented it as. So this is an exercise in visualizing the river as continually flowing, even if it dives underground in places

The Monster's In the Mail
Mood:  celebratory
Topic: Writing
I can't believe it, but somehow I did make it through a complete line edit of the manuscript in time to meet the December 1 postmark deadline. I ended up pulling an all-nighter on Wednesday to make it--and I'm still trying to recover from that--but mostly I am just really, really happy. The new draft has to be better than what I started with, although I have something of a Picasso Cubist view of the manuscript right now. Some pieces stand out and jut up in my brain against each other in weird combinations. I didn't have an opportunity to read the whole manuscript again once I'd made the changes, so I really have no idea what I submitted. This is especially true of the acknowledgments page! I hadn't written this page before, thinking that would come last, once I had an actual publisher and knew the manuscript was going to materialize as a book. So the acknowledgments were written while I was trying to get dressed and out the door for work on Thursday morning, and I don't know what I said, only that it took me a page and a half to say it and I hope that's okay because the guidelines called for an "acknowledgments page." I know at one point I was using ________s to hold places for people's last names that I couldn't remember and needed to look up, and all I can hope is that I removed or filled in all of those blanks before I submitted it! I ended up having to take June from Maine off entirely because I couldn't find her name on the list of riders I had, and I listed the three main people at the American Lung Association of Washington by their first names only because Paul's was the only last name I could remember and Carolyn and Kathryn no longer work there, so I couldn't find them on the online directory.

It was amazing immersing myself in the manuscript again. There were things I couldn't believe I did--or didn't do--for instance, why didn't I just ask Richard if he knew anything about why Cynthia was missing from the Ride? Why did I feel the need to stay that far away from him? And I suddenly had insights into the feelings and actions of other riders that I hadn't had at the time or while writing the book the first time around. In places, I really seem to have regressed to an earlier time in my life, almost like high school. The only defense I have for some of my decisions is that the Ride brought emotions to the surface and made them more accessible, more immediate, much more intense than usual--much like being a teenager. I was swimming in hormones and endorphins and living in a world I was making up moment to moment.

The reimmersion also made me miss so many people. I would really like to see Janine, the Crisis Manager from Pallotta. She helped me when I was in the emergency room at the hospital in Idaho, and she helped me when Cynthia was missing, and I would really like to thank her again. There are a lot of people I would like to thank, and people I'd like to ride with. Maybe someday....

The other interesting thing is that between the line edits and the conversion from Microsoft Word (from my old Apple) to RTF (thanks to John) to Appleworks (because my new Apple with OS X doesn't have Word because I'm too cheap to buy it again), the manuscript went from 427 pages to 332, which sounds much less daunting, and much less like the sprawling work of a novice writer who can't manage her material!

Who Needs Positive Self-Esteem?
Mood:  rushed
Topic: Writing
Reading the manuscript that took three years to write three years ago has been an emotional roller coaster. A lot of the language feels forced and I use too many words, and I, the narrator, come off really bad--whiney, wimpy, naive, lazy, mean (really mean!). I wanted the manuscript to be honest, and I don't care how that makes me look, except if I'm too awful, no one's going to want to keep reading (provided anyone actually wants to start). So I not only get to berate myself for my poor writing, I also get to berate myself for all the bad choices and the bad character I displayed on the Ride itself. Woo hoo, a two-fer!

At first, I thought the whole thing sucked--like, as in the worst thing written, ever. (Hans, much to my surprise, insists it's not THAT bad.) But somewhere around page 100, I start to get the hang of the whole long distance cycling thing and things start to get interesting. (But, then, all the really interesting things were cut in the second draft to preserve other riders' privacy.) Then somewhere around page 300 it starts to get annoying. I get really annoying.

I was kidding myself when I said I would read the copy I have already printed from three years ago and then mail it off without changes. It needs a line by line edit, but it also needs a major overhaul.

With any luck, it will get the line by line edit--I'm taking half a day off from work tomorrow and have been operating on only about four hours sleep per night--in time for me to meet the December 1 postmark deadline. The overhaul will have to come after I submit it. (I'm not sure exactly why I'm submitting it, except that I said I was going to and having said that is giving me motivation to dig into the manuscript. Some small part of me is hoping for some kind of feedback as a result of submitting, but I know that is absolutely not going to happen. I'll be lucky if the first ten pages get read before all 427 pages meet the recycling bin.)

The one good thing is that, even though I still know the darn thing almost by heart--to the point that I know what has already been cut, and when I'm reading I automatically insert those things before realizing they're gone and remembering why they're gone--I do have some perspective. What I realized today is that with all of the drafts I have done, none of them really attacked the structure of the whole manuscript. I was so worried about recreating my experience accurately that I was scared to delete, rearrange, amplify. I knew that what I wrote would be how I ultimately would remember things, and I wanted to remember them honestly. What I have written is a very accurate account of the events of my life over the course of 48 days in the summer of 1998. That doesn't make it a memoir, just a really, really, long journal. There are some luminous moments, when I seem to just be starting to get at the poetry of it, but they don't happen often enough.

Once the line edit is done, I need to really shape the material. I have a structure in mind for that, one that builds on what's there already, but I will need to largely rewrite the last third of the book to really do the experience justice. To get to its meaning. To make other people understand why I'm still hung up on this thing that I didn't even do that well seven years ago. I need to find a good teacher who will work with me, or a good editor, but who can afford that?

Catch ya' on Thursday when the monster's in the mail....