Back From the Deep

I haven’t posted in awhile, mostly b/c I’ve been incredibly busy writing an essay I was invited to contribute to an anthology called GIRLS WHO LIKE BOYS WHO LIKE BOYS, which is due out late this summer. What a bear! Who knew writing a personal essay was so hard? As one Writer Friend put it while I was complaining about how lost and muddled I felt, “It’s not that hard … it’s like writing an email.”

Yeah, right.

I knew what I wanted to write about pretty much the instant I was approached for the collection. Then I started writing, and it started falling apart.

I began working on the essay three months before it was due. The first draft was eight pages of false starts. Seriously. Many many first paragraphs, a couple stabs at an outline—and since I don’t like to outline at the outset, you can see how desperate I felt.

The second draft was longhand—I was so freaked out by my inability to move forward in type that I chained myself to a table at Starbucks with a pen and paper and didn’t let myself get up until I had something resembling an essay, complete with beginning, middle, end.

The third draft took its shape from the second draft, but then I kept moving things around until the fifth draft. At which point I showed it to Husband, and he moved more things around and made me pull some stuff from the first draft. Husband thought this draft six he’d helped create was pretty good.

I wasn’t convinced, but I also wasn’t able to see the forest for the fucking trees at that point, so I took the sixth draft to Group. And they HATED it. Really really hated it. Which, to be perfectly honest, is why I love my Group. They tore it apart, but they asked a lot of important and interesting questions that had me scribbling tons of notes for the new version. I went home convinced I had to start from scratch, and completely freaked out that I now had only thirty days in which to bring this thing to life.

I had six drafts worth of not the most useful material, but at least I’d vomited up a lot of information—so I went through those drafts, looking to see if any of the spit-up was of use. Some was, most wasn’t—and in fact, in most cases, what was least useful was the prose I loved the best. That’s usually the way, actually—really sparkling words on the page can be a total roadblock to creation. You fall in love with those sentences, and then you start carving everything else around them—everything else has to be twisted and pulled to service those fabulous words. What generally happens is you then have six great lines and everything else is a mangled mess. Which, honestly, is what I think had happened here. I’d fallen into my own trap.

So finally, writing an outline came in handy. Drawing on the questions Group had posed, I made a list of points that added up to something new, and started drafting new stuff from scratch. Then I hit another roadblock—for a bunch of personal reasons, I stopped being able to concentrate on my work for more that forty-five minutes to an hour each day. For a woman used to writing for four or five hours at a stretch, this was very disconcerting. How on earth was I going to finish this new draft, and revise it, and get it to Group, and revise it again, and polish it, when I could only work for an hour a day?

Answer: by working an hour a day. Baby steps are better than not trying to walk at all.

In six days, I had a seventh completely brand new draft. It even had a new title! Three days later, I had draft eight. Draft nine followed two days later, and went out to Husband and Group, having been retitled yet again (I think the total number of titles chosen and discarded over the course of this project has been somewhere around eight).

And Group liked it. They liked it! They really liked it!

Because I had to be sure no one would be offended by the use of their real names, I then sent it to the people I’d been writing about—and they liked it, too.

And you know what? I like it. Three months of hard, frightening, confusing, voice and talent-questioning work later, I kind of like this essay. I hated it for awhile, I really really did, I couldn’t bear to imagine what the editors of this book were going to think of it and me and I just wanted crawl under a rock and wait for the deadlines to pass. I wanted to go back in time and un-sign that honestly pretty well-paid contract (I’m a girl whose used to taking payment in free copies, if you know what I mean). But now I kind of like it.

Here’s hoping the editors do, too.

I Couldn't Have Said It Better Myself

As a Columbia MFA refugee, I wholeheartedly agree.

A House of My Own

I’ve been meaning to post an ode to my office for months now. I’ve wanted to share the sense of purpose I felt each day, driving to work in my own private space. I wanted to talk about the joy of having all of my books and papers and files around me, arranged exactly as I wanted them, never touched or moved by anybody else. Nobody bothered me because I didn’t have a landline, and I didn’t send or receive mail. At my office, I could be totally the WRITER ME, independent of anything else. Plus I was two blocks from Starbucks. It couldn’t get any better than that.

Then something unexpected happened: Husband took a full-time job at an office out by the airport, and I surprised myself by deciding almost immediately to give up my lease and move my working life back home.

I first bought this house because it was small and bright and tucked high enough into the hills it seemed appropriately cloistered for a writer’s purposes. The views of Hollywoodland and Griffith Park were hypnotic and inspiring. I thought I’d get a lot done here, and I did—this was where I finally finished the MFA thesis I’d been working on for four years.

Then Husband moved in, and like me, he was a work-at-home type. The problem was the work he did. He’s in advertising, which means he has to deal with clients—dealing with clients means a lot of time on the ringing AND speaker-enabled phone. Being in advertising takes a special sort of person, a person who works and speaks in ADD-style bursts appropriate to short, grabby headlines and tiny chunks of punchy, easily-digested text. Which means Husband takes a lot of breaks throughout his workday, checks out a lot of streaming, audio-heavy content on the internet, sings to the cats, watches a hell of a lot of CNN.

I tried not to let his style bother me, but the fact was I couldn’t concentrate. I couldn’t get still enough to hear myself, and there was never any forgetting he was there. And the more present he seemed, the more difficult it was me to consider myself independent of him. When Husband is there, I am very much a wife. So I fell into wifely stuff—cooking, cleaning, organizing our lives.

I realized pretty quickly I need space where I was independent of him in order to write.

He wouldn’t rent space, so I did. I found a tiny little room near my gym. That was pretty much all that was good about it. It had a vent in the ceiling through which I could smell everybody’s lunch, and the guy upstairs was a sound engineer for the moves, who listened to every bit of music with the volume up high. Plus I shared the suite with two other people, one of whom insisted on constantly visiting with me, another who brought in people to help her handle big projects, groups of design students who laughed and smoked all day just down the hall.

I was almost relieved when I lost my lease. My new place was bigger, brighter, more private. It also cost twice as much, but I loved it enough to get there everyday and I really focused. I wrote several stories, two essays, two-hundred-plus pages of a new novel, and launched my editing business in a year.

But it wasn’t all perfect. First of all, I didn’t like paying the rent, which seemed incredibly inflated for a tiny space in an illegally subdivided house on a crappy street. I didn’t like that walking from my car to the door to my office required crossing a lawn covered in dog-shit and bordered with wildly overgrown aloes that obscured the perimeter path. I shared a bathroom with another apartment, and the doors locked from the outside. Plus the walls were paper-thin. First there was the single mom who left her kid with the grandmother for several weeks—all three generations were loud and mad. Then there was the woman with the vocal cat. Finally, recently, a girl’s moved in whose got a very very energetic boyfriend. They go at it top volume at least three mornings a week.

None of this was enough to make me want to give up my office. Despite the drawbacks, it was still, first and foremost and most importantly, MY SPACE. But then, last weekend, while trying to navigate the filthy lawn in a pair of Italian heels, I fell into one of the aloes and cut open my forehead.

When the landscaping attacks you, you stop thinking of anywhere as YOUR PLACE.

So I’m coming home again. Sure, I have worries about becoming distracted by the stuff of my day-to-day, and I’m not thrilled at being here for the UPS guy, or dealing with the ringing phone (which rings a lot, I’ve discovered—mostly telemarketers, especially a firm called SD&A which calls at least three times a day). But I’m also excited about coming back to a space where I have snacks in the cupboard, and my very own bath. And since Husband is away all day, the WHOLE HOUSE, at least from nine-to-five, is a room of my own.

Another one of those days & a new rule

I'm having another one of those days ... spent the morning waiting around at home for a package that UPS had refused to deliver to our empty house twice in a row. The last 2 days, they showed up at 11 or so ... so I stayed home, did laundry, sorted over 1000 (yep, 1000) Kenya & Tanzania pictures into the appropriate digital files, and waited for the truck ... which didn't show until 1.

So I didn't get work done this morning. Arrived at the office after lunch, meaning to dive right into the EdMoi essay, but of course I killed two hours surfing workarounds for Blogger categories ... for some reason, I really want categories.

I've killed a lot of time this week, working on things like that, so that the mid-week review of this week's projects looks like this:

Draft EdMoi 1.0: In process. Have the first couple of lines, and a working structure. Still, that's a hell of a long way from a complete draft 1.0.

Move sklevy.com to dreamhost: Complete. Took the better part of a week, but as of today it's all up and happy.

Integrate blog to sklevy.com: Complete. Hence the new simplified layout and color scheme.

Integrate services page to blog and sklevy.com: Complete.

Four out of five by Thursday afternoon is nothing to sneeze at. That said, the pattern here is one I struggle with a lot: using housekeeping to avoid the much harder, far more important act of creating. This is particularly annoying to me because for several months now I've been convinced that I have this issue under control ... I've been working working working like crazy at the office, at the expense of keeping things up at home, and as much as it kills me to come home to the mess each night, I've been patting myself on the back for not cleaning the mess at the expense of sitting down and doing my real work.

And it's been working. Since the last post about my progress, I've written both those letters I'd mentioned, and received replies; I've finished a workshoppable draft of "Seven" 4.0, overcoming the structure issue by working working working through it; and I've completed a workshoppable draft of "JD" 2.0, a feat I'm particularly proud of because it involved my cutting the story from 12000+ words to just over 9000 (go me). So it's not like I'm slacking on the work front.

But that's no excuse for what happened this week. When I put all those site and blog tasks on this week's project list, I told myself that was "business development." Which, I suppose, it is. But it shows a bit of priority snafu-ness that I let myself put so much time into developing a "business" that is still damned short of work I consider strong enough to sell. So let's not sugar-coat it. This week's focus on my web presence wasn't so much biz dev as it was housekeeping of the virtual variety.

So, new rule:

WEEKLY "HOUSEKEEPING" TASKS (read: any task that doesn't involve THE ACT OF WRITING) are to be COMPLETELY IGNORED until WEEKLY WRITING TASKS are complete.

And with that, I seem to have worked up enough energy to dive into EdMoi. Onward!

Please bear with ...

In an effort to integrate all the pieces of my online presence, I'm moving my site to Dreamhost.com, and this may lead to some funkiness for the next few days. I hope to back soon, bigger and better -- fingers crossed!

Last week / this week

Last week's "top 3" progress report:

1. Revise "Seven" to a workshop-able draft
Spent 9 hours getting "Seven" to draft 4.0. Not workshop-able by a longshot, but at least I got the structure wrestled out.
2. Write and send letter to Friend re. her new, wonderful book
Nope.
3. Write and send letter to Writer Whom I Admire and would like to befriend
Nope.

Which means we're at it again, this week -- with deadlines!

1. Revise "Seven" FOR workshop (Weds Mar. 1)
Biggest hurdle: fix the ending. It loses steam in the last quarter, and of course, with all stories, the last quarter is really the whole point. That gives me another hour or so this afternoon, then all day tomorrow, and the morning of Weds to fix it ... and Weds afternoon to close my eyes and xerox it for critique (for better/worse).
2. Write to Friend
A good Thursday activity, as hopefully I'll be feeling productive enough in the wake of Wednesday's deadline to reach out and chat about the biz with this Friend who hasn't heard from me in a year or so.
3. Write to Writer I Admire
A good Friday activity, since the following week I'm going to New York and can hand this letter to my good friend, who is also the wife of Writer I Admire's best friend ...

Full stop? Or not?

Argh. Killed TWO WHOLE HOURS surfing the web today. Husband gave the best pep talk he's really ever given me, and I still didn't pull it together. This is so depressing to type about that hopefully it will kick my butt into gear now ...

In fact:

One of the main tenets of Neil Fiore's THE NOW HABIT is that you must never end blocked or down -- you must always manage a half hour of real work before giving up. So that's what I'm going to go do now.

The other night, a Friend pointed out that this blog seems to be a good way for me to work through my process, to get my head around my work. I'd thought of it, until then, as pure reportage--"here's what I'm working on, and how." But he's right--today, just venting about how un-focused I feel has me feeling a little less unmoored than I felt before I posted this note.

Weekly Progress Report

A very successful week -- 104 points, despite the (fabulous Valentine's day) interruption of the work week.

Status report:

Revise "Seven" to Draft 3.0 -- complete!
I finished the third draft of "Seven" yesterday. Unfortunately, it STILL doesn't work, so I launched right into draft 4.0, trying a completely different direction. Complete "Seven" Draft 4.0 is item #1 for next week ...

Draft critique of mss for friend -- complete!
I finished my notes for friend on Wednesday. Nearly 400 pp mss took me about a week to read and three more days to assemble written notes for, which is encouraging, considering I've decided to go pro.

Launch editing business with email blast -- complete!
Sent the email announcement yesterday, and created the site for my new venture today.

Anyway, I'm feeling pleased with myself, especially since next week looks fairly clear on the project-level, so I should have the entire week to try to wrestle "Seven" 4.0 into some semblance of workshoppable shape. "Seven" has been a real struggle -- I wrote a first draft over two years ago, and then last week I wrote an ENTIRELY different second draft, and this week, a COMPLETELY new third. Still, something's misising. It's ringing really empty still.

Hopefully a weekend spent away from the story will bring some sort of clarity or epiphany to my work next week -- it's rare that I have so much difficulty getting the bones of a story down the way that I want. It may be that this is just too close to the vest -- one of the things that I've found to be a failure with it is the tone (I tend to get breezy when I'm writing about things that touch me too closely).

It could be I just need to sit down with a pen and paper and write it longhand, try to get out of my head that way. Hmmph. Who knows. Frustrating to kick something around for so many years and still find myself stymied. I've tried as an exercise boiling down what I'm trying to say in a single sentence, but no matter how I frame the sentence, I'm having trouble figuring out how to dramatize it. Probably that means my focus isn't specific enough. Which means before I keep writing I probably have to go back to the brainstorming board, and boil down the question I'm attempting to answer here ...

I'm hanging up my editor's shingle!

As most of you know, I’ve spent a good amount of time over the years reading, critiquing, and editing the work of my friends. Happily, lots of these people have gone on to great success with work that I’ve been lucky enough to help shape. I really enjoy doing this—my brain likes playing with logic and structure—and I believe what I’ve learned helping my friends has gone a long way to sharpening my own work.

Now I've decided to take what all my brilliant friends have been teaching me, and pass it on to the paying public.

I've posted a description of my services here:

EDITING SERVICES