Friday Filler! Plans for 2012!

Michelle and I have sort of been talking about our to-be-read lists, which aren't lists so much as stacks of books (physical books and ebooks) we have at home. I was thinking about what books I want to make sure I read in 2012, and what I'd read if I had the chance because I never am able to read as many books as I want. Anyway, here's my current list of books I really want to read in 2012, in no order at all:

The Narrative of Arthur Gorden Pym by Edgar Allen Poe
The Maias by Jose Maria del Eca de Queros
The Violent Bear it Away by Flannery O'Connor
Intruder in the Dust by William Faulkner
Complete Stories by Anton Chekhov (volumes 5-13)
Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie
My Antonia by Willa Cather
Orlando by Virginia Woolf
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
A Visit From The Goon Squad by Janet Egan

Plus: More Henry James! More Nabokov! More Hemingway! Shirley Jackson! Nate Hawthorne! Lovecraft! Ovid! Balzac! Aeschylus! New books by new authors I haven't even heard of yet!

Maybe I'll add some science fiction to that list. It's been a long time and I am curious about China Meiville lately. I figure I'll read a lot more books than I have listed, but I would like to make sure I read those above.

And you? Anything you hope to read? Anything coming out soon that you're chomping at the bit to have?

Also, this post wasn't supposed to go up until tomorrow, but whatevers, bloggerdotcom. Whatevers. Anyway, Happy New Years in case I don't speak to you all weekend, Mighty Writers!

The final days to enter

I hope everyone is enjoying the final days of the year. Don't forget there's still time to enter our Variations on a Theme contest. I've been spending the last few days working on my editor's contribution to the anthology, and I'm pretty happy with how things are progressing so far. I hope you are too! I'm looking forward to being impressed by everyone's entries!

Friday Filler! Happy Christmas!

I know that not everyone worships Santa* but it don't confront me none** when someone wishes me a Happy Hanukkah or a Joyous Kwanzaa or Merry Solstice or when I read about 19th-century St. Petersburg residents crying out "Christ is Risen!" and kissing each other on Easter. So Happy Christmas, is what I'm saying.





* Yes, that's a BTVS reference.
** Yes, that's a John Lee Hooker reference.

Why I Write These Days

In November, my literary agent and I parted company. She was the second agent I've worked with since 2009. Two of my novels have gone out on submission and neither of them managed to find a home. Granted, it's a tough market for literary fiction and God only knows what editors are buying these days. But I now find myself without an agent and without a book on submission. I have a new manuscript for a philosophical detective story that I'm querying with agents, but I query in a pokey, half-interested sort of way. I wrote that book mostly to amuse Mighty Reader and a few close friends. I think it's a good book, but I'm not really a mystery writer so I'm hesitant to really push forward in an attempt to get it published. What if a publisher wants more detective novels from me? I'm not writing detective novels now, and I didn't write detective novels before that one.

It used to be that I'd read publishing industry blogs voraciously. Every Monday I'd check Publishers Weekly to see who had a shiny new book deal. I could celebrate friends or people I vaguely know via the interweb, or also roll around in bitter troughs of envy if it was that sort of day. The last time I looked at Publishers Weekly I had the feeling that I was peeking into a madhouse, that the frenzy and stress of the industry was totally unnecessary and not something I want in my life, at least right now. "What the fuck?" is actually what I said.

My first real novel, which was the second novel I ever wrote, the novel that got me interest from the first agent, ended up being rewritten about ten times, once completely from scratch, in order to fit into that first agent's idea of a salable manuscript. I think the final version of the book is pretty good, but I spent years on revisions that had, in the end, not much to do with my original conception of the book. When I told that agent about my plans for my next novel, his opinion was that it wasn't marketable at all and I should only write it if I had to get it out of my system; I shouldn't count on anyone buying it. I wrote it anyway. It's a good book, a beautiful book, a great tragic story but possibly too dark for the current marketplace because my second agent couldn't find a home for it. I'm submitting it on my own now to a couple of very small publishers, just to see what will happen, but I really have little hope of it colliding with an editor who will fall in love with it enough to convince her boss to publish it. And I've got the philosophical detective story as well, but I don't quite know what to do with that.

But the thing is, I realize as I start making plans for a wider range of increasingly strange future projects, I am no longer writing with any eye to what might be publishable. I'm back to the mindset I had when I was writing the first draft of my first real novel. I'm in no hurry and for the first time I find myself working on more than one project at a time. I've got the novel I'm writing now (Go Home, Miss America), I'm planning the next novel (Nowhere But North), I'm working on a story for the "Variations on a Theme" anthology (and oh, what larks it's being and it's nothing like anything I've written before), and yesterday I started what might be a novella-length piece based roughly on Moby-Dick. So I'm having a lot of fun writing, and I no longer think about agents or publishing, and I think I'm doing the best work I've ever done. I think I'm writing more bravely than ever. Here, for example, is the opening paragraph of the Moby-Dick piece I might write:

Damn the whale, the whale, the devil white whale. Whale hail hale hole whole hell. Damn him and his accursed jaws, his hated maw, his despised gullet down which he swallowed mine leg and me, your humble servant, very near after. Damn him, damn him to hell, consign him to the deeps never to sound nor surface nor swim nor blow again. Nothing lives in the whale, nay, nothing at all. He is a bleached sack of emptiness, a pale pit of despair, a white wurm in the surf devouring all that is good in thine holy eyes, lord. Make me thine instrument and I shall sink him forever, keeping neither bone nor flesh nor baleen nor oil nor ambergris for mine own profit, the beast's death to thine glory only, oh lord. Make me thine instrument of divine retribution, a cleansing hand, a burning brand, a scourge, a fire, a plague upon the pharoah of the fishes, I shall lead thy people unto the promised land, oh lord. Make me thine holy instrument. Damn the whale.

That's fun stuff. And that's really the point now. I know a lot of you are writing books and you're keeping in mind all the things you read on agent blogs, and all the things you've read in Donald Maass's books, and all the things you hear at conferences and conventions. That's all fine, and good luck. But I realize that three years ago I figured that because I can write pretty well, it was inevitable that I'd be published if an agent got my books in front of editors. Now I've had two books in front of editors and I don't have a book deal, and while I must admit that it was devastating for a while and I was miserable when my last agent took me off her client list, I also have to say that the idea that now I'm just writing to write, for the discovery of finding the piece out, for the joy of language, for the amusement of Mighty Reader and me and for no other reason, I feel a freedom I haven't felt in years. I feel very hopeful about the whole thing now, with faith that I'll really do some interesting things with my fiction. I have no idea if this feeling will go away when I finish the new novel and start querying agents who rep literary fiction. I am hoping that my lack of awe for the publishing industry will be a permanent thing. We'll see.

I don't have to whine anymore

I asked Michelle and Scott if I could reserve today for a blog post. I was hoping the timing would work out, because I wanted to make a little announcement.

And...the timing worked out.

My humble home has a new tenant.

His name is Peanut.




Peanut seems to be a Jack Russell / Labrador mix. He's about one year old, and I've been watching him in the shelter for over 4 weeks. Now he's home with me. He has to wear a cone because the shelter fixed him before releasing him. The only other thing I know about him so far is that he can jump over my couch, and he seems to prefer that to simply running around the couch. And I don't think he can read, but I'm working on that.

Happy Monday! Happy Celebrating!

You know, one of the best things about the holidays (whether you celebrate them or not) is the feeling that something is different all around us. People's attitudes shift. I think the best thing about that is the mood to celebrate something, whether that be the change in season, a specific holiday and its meaning, giving a gift to someone, etc. And one of the best things about celebrating is that it's HAPPY!

I've been thinking a lot lately about a term Davin always uses, and that's to "celebrate other writing." This is exactly what we try to do here on the Literary Lab with our anthologies we publish each year. They are all a chance for us to celebrate other writing. We love writing, and we love those who want to celebrate it with us. We hope we get enough entries this year to make our anthologies worth doing in future years, and so I ask myself why I like them so much. Why do I want to to celebrate writing? The answer is simple, and it's because I adore the creative process. Even when I read a piece of fiction that I feel is mediocre (and oftentimes, it's my own stuff, hah!), published or not, I still want to celebrate the fact that it was created. I may not like certain types of writing. I might think something is not as good as it could be, but it doesn't matter. The base emotion I always want when it comes to reading is appreciation for what is before me.

So I urge everyone this season to gather within yourself a celebratory attitude for writing in general. You don't have to hate certain fiction, and if you read something that doesn't agree with you, remember in your feedback (if you give any, and especially if it's public), that respect for the medium should always be the root of your feedback. I think when that happens, it's easier to celebrate writing, even if some of it isn't our cup of tea. In fact, this past year as I've taken on this more celebratory attitude, thanks to Davin, I've learned to like more kinds of fiction than I used to. It has expanded my mind and my writing, as well.

So, happy celebrating! And get to writing. We want to see an entry from you so we can celebrate what you've done!

Friday! Filler! An Excerpt!

Is everyone working on their story for our contest? I am! To prove it, I offer the following snippet, which will give you a feel for the prose style, but not much else. Which is fine, I think. Anyway, all the usual caveats about this being a rough draft:

The air at M-- was soothing, clean and soft like washed linen. Antosha imagined the pure, clear atmosphere circulating through his chest, bathing his bronchial passages. He could smell the white blossoms of the chestnut trees along the stream over to his left. He could almost taste the powdery purple lilac scent and the tang of graygreen catkins that swayed beneath the twisting black limbs of an old willow at the crest of the hill behind him. Antosha visualized these perfect fragrances as medicinal compounds, cleaning any imperfections from his lungs. A mile or so ahead of him, Antosha knew, was a field of knee-high grass mixed with chamomile, the ubiquitous chamomile that grows everywhere in Russia. If he kept on in the same direction he'd push through a wall of silver birches and there he'd see an acre of dark yellow cones above thin white petals, like ten thousand boiled egg yolks perched atop porcelain saucers, trembling in the breeze. Chamomile had been used in folk remedies for centuries. Doctor Chekhonte often prescribed tea with chamomile to his own patients, in cases of insomnia or nervous blood.

I'm having fun with this story, and I think it will be something worth reading when I'm done. Even if it's not a great story, I got to use the word "catkins," which you have to agree is a cool word.

Incubating Ideas

I'm revising an early scenes from my WIP. Originally, I basically had only a placeholder. It reminded me that I needed to introduce a character. We'll call her Rebecca.

Now, as I change this scene, I've been thinking about how I can make it more memorable. I originally started out telling the reader where Rebecca went to school--she's a scientist--followed by a scene describing her meeting the protagonist, Hannah. They were at a restaurant having brunch.

To punch up the scene, I first gave Rebecca a stronger personality. I made Hannah wrongfully assume that Rebecca was rude when in actuality she's just more honest than everyone else. I'm making Rebecca's dialog more direct relative to Hannah. And, instead of placing the scene in a restaurant, I had the characters meet at an aquarium, in front of a sunfish exhibit, to bring up a theme of being an outsider or an alien.

I thought this was a good start.

I wanted to make the scene more emotional, so I thought about timing. Before, Rebecca and Hannah met on a relatively random day, weeks before the BIG EVENT. Now, I have them meeting the night before the BIG EVENT, so they're both under more stress, and they're both feeling a little more desperate as the event approaches.

As I wrote out this scene, the situation pushed the characters to do something that I would have never expected. They are both about to have surgery to remove a body part, and when the evening ends, they dare to undress in front of each other to see their "complete" naked bodies one last time before the operation.

For me, this revision was much better than what I started out with--the scene in the restaurant. To get to my new version of the scene, I had to sit quietly for two days and run through various options in my head. I think this was productive, but now I wonder if two days was long enough. How would my scene change if I took two weeks to mull over my different ideas? Is the time spent thinking and waiting worth the improvement to the scene?

I know one can't take forever to write every scene. We'd be dead. But I'm curious to know how long you sit with new ideas and if you think more time would equal even better ideas. How long do you take to come up with a scene?

Fiction and Natural History

One thing I'm noticing a lot more often these days is when a writer is able to convey a real sense of being in nature. Thomas Mann, for example, knew how to write about nature. His short story A Man and His Dog is a long ramble through a riverside park and when you're reading it, you are there, at the park, because Mann's images and details are concrete, specific and vibrant. He doesn't just say "the dog ran through the trees;" Mann knows the names of the trees, he says which have skinny trunks and grow in thickets like canes or which tower and lean and have black, wet bark and which have thick surface roots covered with pads of green moss like cut turf. Mann knows the birds in the forest, and their calls, and the colors of their tail feathers. He knows how the forest smells in each season, the color and thickness of the mud.

All of this can be easily enough observed by an observant writer. You can just walk around outside and see what's there, right? But how do you know how to write about it? How do you get a feel for a way to translate the overwhelming reality that is the natural world into words on a page that evoke those details of nature that bring the world to life for the reader?

Well, as I've said, there's observing nature first hand and writing about it. But in order to write about it, you have to know what you're looking at. Which means that you have to educate yourself about nature. A couple of years ago, I could recognize and name maybe ten species of birds. But because Mighty Reader has a strong interest in birds and we have a shelf of birding books, I have managed to increase my knowledge about birds a little bit and I can look at a passing flock and say if they're robins or starlings or bushtits or juncos or whatever. I can tell you that towhees wander low in the forests and have a boring, repetitive call. I've also read up on trees, which continue to vex me by mostly all looking alike, but I know that a hemlock is slim and bright green and not as tall as a cedar, which has a rough red trunk frequently shredded where squirrels pull bark off in long strips and is not as tall as a spruce, which is bluegreen with limbs whose tips point upward and is not as tall as a Douglas fir, which is a plainer green than the hemlock and has dense, dark wood et cetera. I know a bit about flowers, and which grow in forests and which don't, and in what season they blossom. I also have reference books, of course, because I have a crappy memory for all of these facts.

The use of details regarding nature are many. Primarily, it adds life and variety to a scene. Instead of "She walked into the dark of the forest," you can say "She walked into the dark beneath the firs" and depending on the time of year she can kick at dropped cones and needles or see chickadees flittering in the limbs above her, hanging upside down from the cones, etc. Or she can hear the rustling of squirrels overhead, or hear the call of a barred owl, or whatever. She can climb the tree and because you'll know if the bark is rough or smooth and if the branches are well-spaced and easily climbed or sprouting like a thicket and presenting a challenge to the climber, you'll be able to tell that to the reader. "She climbed the tree" is boring, so know about the tree. If you don't know from trees, go look at some and read about them.

You can also use specific details about nature as symbols in your stories. Since symbols aren't universal (take that, CG Jung), I won't make a list here, but delicate white flowers growing out of a mound of rotting weeds could be a good symbol. Species of flowers are often associated with personality types or emotions or events; go look up "the language of flowers." The associations change with location and period, of course.

When I began writing this post, I was going to talk about how valuable it is to read the writings of naturalists like Muir or Emerson or Thoreau or Carson. I was then going to add that it's valuable to read poetry about nature, from Emily Dickenson to Seamus Heaney to whomever you like, because poetry tends to deal in the sort of specific details I'm rambling about today. Alas, that's not the post I wrote. There turns out to be too much to say about all of this. So I'll sum up: read poetry for image and detail; read natural history for facts and read nature writing for images and style; read non-fiction to broaden your knowledge and increase your range and add depth to your stories; create a detailed world, but make those details sensory and meaningful, etc. Add texture to your world. Show don't tell, and so forth.

Your Best Character

Happy Monday, everyone!

I'm not exactly sure what it is, but my current WIP, Cyberlama, is somehow giving me more opportunity to develop strong characters than my past projects have done. I think, before, my story structures were so complicated and dependent on the details that my characters ended up being slaves to the story. They had to be a certain way for things to logically hold together. With Cyberlama I have more freedom because the plot is simpler; there aren't as many moving pieces.

As a result, I've gotten to spend the last few days really shaping my book's villain, and I've been having a lot of fun.

So I'm wondering which of your characters is your favorite and how did you develop them? What makes them a strong character, in your opinion?

Also, is anyone else watching The Next Iron Chef? It is so stressful!

Two Weeks to Enter!

Happy Friday, everyone! Just a reminder that there are only a couple of weeks left to enter our Variations on a Theme contest! We're giving out prizes of $100 or $200, and we plan to publish around 20 stories. Give it a shot and have some fun! Or have some fun and give it a chance!

Branching Out With What You Write

So Scott said something interesting in the comments yesterday on his post. He said that if I hadn't written Monarch, he wouldn't have been brave enough to write a detective novel (which I've read, and it's aWesOme). Anyway, where I'm going with this is that if you haven't noticed before, I write in different genres. Thriller (Monarch), YA contemporary (The Breakaway), fantasy (Bonded), straight literary short stories and poetry (True Colors), my next planned novel is YA historical kind-of-paranormal (yes, you heard that right). You name it, I'll write it. My little saying has always been that "I write stories, not genres." I stick by that in defense of me branching out all over the place, and I'm really blessed to have a publisher who will publish different genres from me because, honestly, a writer can be seriously doomed in publishing for not sticking in one genre if they don't have a bit of luck finding publishers and agents willing to walk with them through all those genres.

As a writer constantly trying to push myself harder with my writing, I've always felt it's important to feel somewhat uncomfortable with what I'm working on. It means I'm growing and trying new and important things (I hope that's true!). In college, I gave myself permission to write crap, and I wrote a lot of it. I also wrote a lot of experimental pieces, which ended up working, and in turn helped open a door for me to see the wide spaces that lay beyond a room with walls. I hate feeling trapped, and I suppose that's one of the reasons I don't stay in one genre in my career so far.

So when Scott said that he was brave enough to write a detective novel because I wrote Monarch, a lot of emotions went through me. First, I thought that is way, way cool! And I'm flattered because his book is really good. Then I let my big head shrink down and I thought, well, I wasn't necessarily brave in writing Monarch. I didn't write it to branch out in my writing and try something new. I just wrote it because it was a story bottled up inside me and it happened to come out as a sort of quasi-drama-thriller thing. So I'm not sure bravery has anything to do with it, but it got me thinking about what other writers do, and it got me thinking about maybe how I should branch out more and write something really beyond what I've tried before. Not genre, really, since I already write in different genres, but something bigger in my storytelling.

So my question today is do you intentionally branch out in your writing? Or do you just write what stories come to you? Do you plan this stuff? Because I think Scott does, and a part of me is insanely jealous of him because he seems to reach different planes in his writing that I haven't reached yet.

Kicking the Modernist Habit is Killing Me

I've been wondering lately if, while writing every book I've written before my work-in-progress, I've been sort of hiding behind certain writerly tricks. What I mean is that in all of my novels so far I've put in a lot of things that were essentially jokes and games and commentary on other books and the like. You know, Shakespeare references, sly bits about the nature of fiction, allusions to classic novels and ancient myths, etc. Then there were formal games where I played with the structure of the narrative itself, sometimes as a way to comment on the story or themes but often just as an end to itself, as a way to do something different with the narrative.

My latest project, which is coming along slowly and painfully, has none of that. It's pretty bare bones, actually. There is very little in the way of double-meaning, there's nothing of the author being clever in a "we know this is a work of fiction so let's see what we can get away with" sort of way. There's just me and the characters and their actions and reactions. It's sort of naked, this narrative. I'm not doing anything with the story except telling it in the most direct way I can. Certainly I'm trying to make my prose beautiful and effective and startling, and certainly I'm trying to avoid every cliche that rears its ugly head, but I'm not working with the form of the narrative, the idea of how to tell a story.

As I say, it's been slow and painful. I'm not claiming that my metafictional or postmodern or High Modernist games have been a crutch, not at all. But I think that there's been some sort of shift in what I'm doing. For a few years I have been, I think, working with the Novel Itself as an artform, and now I'm just working with the Story Itself. I claim neither perspective as superior. Certainly I love the works of Nabokov and Kafka and Borges and Auster and Joyce and Woolf and Grass and a host of other writers who can't leave the narrative-as-object alone. Certainly I made no conscious decision to turn my back on my beloved Modernism. It just seems that this particular story will be best told in a straighforward way, and that's what I'm trying to do and it is, I find, not comfortable. I'm not even conscious while writing the damned thing that I'm doing anything different; it's just working out that way. Really, I can't quite say what's going on. A great deal of discomfort, that I know.

What's ironic is that I think I chose to write this one because it looked like it was going to be a lot easier to write than the book I had planned to write. That one has a sort of looping-back, nesting and sliced-up chronology that almost tells the story in reverse but doesn't, quite. I remember thinking I didn't have the energy for that but now I'm just being beaten down by this current damned story which is fairly clear. I look forward to finishing this one and starting on the one with the funky-ass shape (that's a technical term). I don't have any conclusions; I just have some observations, and maybe what I'm observing is not what I think I'm observing.

Anyway, this book I'm writing seems like it's radically different from anything I've written before, and that radical difference seems to be that it's more traditional than anything I've done before, and that seems to be harder to do that what I've done before, which makes you think, if you're me.

True Colors Release!

So why don't I post here much anymore? This is why - busy writing! And putting things together! Craziness, I tell you. Pure craziness!

I am excited to announce that my short story collection, True Colors is now for sale. This collection is really, really super duper special to me. Why? Because it's LITERARY. Yes! My novels have a lot of literary elements, but all my short fiction - it's what we call literary over here on our Literary Lab. This, my friends, is where my writing ability seems to make me the most happy, so that's why this collection feels so special.

In this short story collection, Michelle Davidson Argyle shares sixteen of her literary pieces written during 1999 - 2011. In the title story, "True Colors," the main character fights her vibrant personality against the true darkness lurking within her. The story builds until a row of six dead birds stop her in her tracks. In the opening story, "Thread," (also published in the 2011 collection, Stories for Sendai), a married couple's reaction to the Sendai earthquake and tsunami on March 11th, 2011 reveals their own earth-shattering issues and what must be done to solve them. The lizard on the cover represents the story, "The Threshold," about a young boy with an intense physical attraction to a girl he's not supposed to touch. True Colors is a collection of quiet stories exploring the hidden, but often overlooked colors we try to hide every day. Sometimes they shouldn't be hidden at all.

Also included are several poems and one prose poem picked as the staff choice award in New Mexico's Literary journal, Scribendi (2002).

Purchase links**
Kindle US $0.99 | Kindle UK $0.99 | Print Amazon $5.50 | Author Signed Print $8.00 (US) $12.00 (International) | Nook $0.99 | Smashwords $0.99 | Add to Your Goodreads Shelf

**$0.99 prices are temporary from now through January

Praise for True Colors

"Astoundingly beautiful and refreshingly open and honest, without ever degenerating into darkness or negativity. A beautiful, beautiful read." - Amy Lomas, editor

"As a former private chef, I would use food to create my art. Pairing flavor with texture, color and aroma, my canvas was a testimony to my love of gastronomic delight. Michelle Davidson Argyle’s TRUE COLORS short story collection borrows from my kitchen. Her mastery of the English language is like indulging in the finest seven-course meal. The subtle word play, combined with deliberate description, made me long for a nice glass of wine to accompany every page. Every story adds a new flavor, a new dimension to taste, which compliment each other beautifully. There are no mistakes in this menu, and after reading each selection, you want to sit back and savor everything you’ve read before cleansing your palette and beginning the next course. Tart, tangy, sweet, savory, TRUE COLORS is a testimony of her love for the written word." - Anne Gallagher, author of The Lady's Fate

Thank Your Valuable Author Friends Today

About two years ago, Davin wrote this post about thanking people. I have been lazy about thanking writers whose work I admire, but I began turning the tide of my laziness this morning. I wrote a short email to an author whose debut novel I really enjoyed, just to thank her for writing the book and to say I hope she writes more and that her career goes well for her. Possibly it's a geeky, weird thing to do, but possibly not. I have no idea.

Anyway, you (yes, you) should take ten minutes and write an email (or a real letter on paper, which would be far less lazy than an email) to a living writer whose books have meant something to you. Just to say thanks. Saying thanks is cool.