Love My Dog, Love My Protagonist

My daughter had just turned eight when we moved to England several years ago, and while she made a few good friends right away, she had difficulty penetrating the cliques that are a part of grade school. When I heard that she was spending lunchtimes not in the schoolyard playing with her classmates but inside with one of the teachers, I was indignant, probably more so than she. How could the other girls and boys not want to play with her? How could they not appreciate how fun she is, how funny, how athletic, how smart? 

I wasn’t filled with the anger that accompanied the one time she was taunted (a boy called her pancake face, which is apparently a disparaging term for an Asian; my daughter was the only non-Indian Asian—not to mention the only American and the only Jew—in the entire school; she and the boy eventually became, if not friends, friendly). Instead I ached with a quiet mournfulness.

Now that I’m submitting my latest manuscript to agents, I ache in the same way for my character Steve.

Steve is one of the two narrators of 100 Days, the novel I’m shopping around. He is also one of the two narrators of the novel I wrote before Beyond Billicombe (which, by the way, is available as a paperback and a Kindle ebook). That I wrote a second novel about Steve without managing to get representation for the first one shows how much I love the character. (Or it shows how absolutely pig-headed and impractical I am—your call.)

Steve is a young man from Devon who suffers from undifferentiated schizophrenia. The first book tells of his budding friendship with a visiting writer and his move to London. 100 Days picks up five years later, as he is hospitalized for a suicide attempt and a psychotic break following his first romantic relationship.

Of course, I don’t love Steve as fiercely as I do my daughter. But I think it’s fair to say that I adore him as much as I do my dog, a statement that may sound odd to those who don’t have a pet but one that surely makes sense to those who do. Just as I want everyone who meets my dog (that's him in the photo above) to acknowledge how cute, how sweet, how irresistible he is, I want everyone who reads about Steve to admire his self-deprecating wit, his gutsiness, his determination.

So it hurts me when agents read the first few pages of 100 Days and reply along the lines of, It’s well written, but it’s not for us; I just don’t love it enough to represent it.

How can you not love Steve?

So in keeping with the fiction writer’s mantra of “show, don’t tell,” I’m including the first chapter of 100 Days below. Would anyone like to read more? 

Chapter 1

Steve

This time I’m going to do it right. No half-arsed slicing and dicing with a butter knife in a public toilet. No overdose of pills that makes you wish you were dead without actually doing the trick. No noose around a clothes rack that’s too rickety to support the weight and comes crashing down before you even have the chance to kick the chair away.

            First, I lock the bedroom door. Next, barricade it with my nightstand. Then the pills, every one of them I have, except the ones for my high blood pressure and that. They wouldn’t be much good, would they? I wash them down, two and four at a time, with straight vodka. Like I said, I’m not taking any chances this time.

            It feels good to focus. To have something to focus on. For the past few weeks, since getting out of hospital, or even since landing back in hospital before then, everything’s been blurred. Like those paintings that look like a landscape when you’re standing a meter away but when you get up close are nothing but dots. Sometimes I can barely make out where I am, what’s surrounding me. What all the colors are supposed to be. What all the shadows are from. But now everything is clearer than it’s ever been. The lettering on some of my pills. The grain of the wood on the floor planks, each lazy curve. Each tiny point of the knife along its edge, winking at me. A friendly wink.

            By the fifth or seventh mouthful, I’m having a tough time forcing the pills down, even with the vodka easing the way. Last time I didn't take the pills in one fell swoop. Just shoveled down a few here and there when I remembered. Though last time I don’t think I was trying to kill myself. I didn’t have my shit together enough to have a goal, really, other than to shut up the mumbles and stop thinking. About Diandra, and everything else.

Harder and harder to swallow. Even though after all these years I’m a dab hand at pill-taking. Just about the only skill I have, isn’t it? Though as Cat would say, that and fifty cents will get you a cup of coffee—not even, she adds whenever she uses that expression.

            Woozy. Filmy. Hope to hell I don’t sick the pills up. Grit your teeth, hiss the mumbles. Swallow, you arsewipe, swallow. For fuck’s sake, surely you can do this right. I thought I’d drowned the mumbles once and for all back in December, during the bender that landed me in hospital and now here. But they’re back. Or maybe it’s their ghosts.

            Now, the steak knife. I swiped it from the kitchen. The knives are supposed to be in one of the locked drawers, so only the staff can get to them. But you know what care staff are like. You can’t blame them for getting sloppy. They’re paid, what, eight quid an hour? Besides, it’s been so quiet here in the house, at least in the weeks since I arrived. No real fights. Most everyone agreeing to take their meds when they’re supposed to, coming to group more or less on time, all but one or two showering regularly. Julia’s the most troublesome of us, and she’s half-catatonic five days out of seven, so the main issue with her is getting her to actually eat and to use the toilet instead of pissing and shitting herself.

            So I’ve got the steak knife, and I’m tying around my arm a scrap of an old T-shirt I’d ripped up last night. Tying it above the elbow. Like they do before taking blood, so that the veins on the inside of my left arm pop right up to the surface. Nurses have a hard time taking blood from me, seeing as I’ve got so much scarring on my wrists and arms. I don’t want to have a hard time cutting myself open. Especially not the way my fingers are growing thicker and harder to manipulate. That’s a good word, manipulate. Cat buys me these word-a-day calendars every year, which is where I picked up that one.

            Fuck Cat, snarl the mumbles. The mumbles, so the doctors say, aren’t coming from anywhere but instead my head. Most times I agree with them, the doctors, I mean. But when the mumbles start chanting Fuck Cat, fuck the bitch, I have to doubt what the doctors say. Because while I may have a lot of crazy thoughts, I’d never think something like Fuck Cat. She’s pretty much all I’ve got.

Though I don’t really even have her.

            I press the serrated edge of the knife against my wrist. I can’t feel it. Can’t even feel the knife in the grip of my hands, my fingers curled around its handle. Not until I’ve been watching a gorgeous pure red, gleaming rivulet of blood trickle down my arm, in no hurry as it glides toward my elbow, do I realize I’ve actually cut through.

            It’s so wet, the blood, so bright. So clean. The way it pulses so slowly, it really is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

            And right now it’s pretty much all I can see. Everything around it has constricted. I’m not even sure if I’m still slicing away.

            I finally know what it’s like to be completely happy. No worries, nothing to fear. My eyelids close, but I can still see the blood. Nothing but blood. Not even my arm anymore. I’m floating on the blood, and it’s floating me away.

What I Learned from Publishing My Novel

In September, 43 years after writing my first short story (in second grade, about brother-and-sister detective team Tommy and Lisa Sue Vooleran, a surname that my mother criticized for being too unrealistic), a novel of mine finally made it into print.

When I was a kid dreaming of being a published author, I was sure that once my name was on the spine of a novel, my life would dramatically improve. I’d be the toast of the town! Hollywood would come rushing to make a film out of it! I’d be rich!

Of course, none of the above happened. I haven’t been invited to read in Brooklyn alongside John Wray or Gary Schteyngart. No producer has clamored to option Beyond Billicombe (though I can totally see James McAvoy as Richard, the male lead—James, call me sometime.) And I still haven’t even earned enough in royalties to cover the cost of having my friend Tim produce the fabulous cover for me.

But I have learned a few things:

1) Having people I know read the book is highly nerve-wracking. It’s akin to showing up for work in a low-cut, thigh-high, figure-hugging dress when you usually wear nothing but bulky sweaters and loose jeans. Although Beyond Billicombe is autobiographical only in its setting, any piece of fiction, I believe, exposes aspects of the writer. It’s in the choice of words, the choice of themes, the choice of details. Reading Wuthering Heights, for instance, makes it clear that Emily Brontë was probably pretty damn sarcastic when shooting the breeze with her sisters up in Haworth.

Then there’s the whole what-if-my-writing-sucks aspect. Being a writer is a huge part of my identity. Hell, I write for a living, albeit product copy and marketing articles. But by publishing a book, I’m allowing others to judge a massive aspect of how I define myself. What if they don’t see me in the same way? What if, after reading the book, they no longer have the same respect for me? I don’t care if people who read Beyond Billicombe now wonder just how much of my knowledge of junkies and 12-step meetings was first-hand, but I do care if they think I can’t put create a realistic character or set a vivid scene.

Fortunately all of the feedback has been positive so far. Then again, would someone tell me if he or she didn’t like the book?

And once people have seen you in a skin-tight dress cut up to there, when you show up for work the following day in your usual baggy clothes, they still have the image of your cleavage in their mind.

2) Negative feedback isn’t as tough to take as I’d feared. Granted, most of the reviews on Amazon and Goodreads have been positive so far. But two readers gave Beyond Billicombe only three stars. At first those reviews hit me in the chest like a baseball thrown by a Cy Young winner. But upon rereading (and rerereading), I understood the criticism, even agreed with some of it. And it spurred me to review 100 Days, the novel I'm working on now, with a keener eye.

Of course, if I receive a few scathing reviews down the line, the feedback may be harder to take in stride.

3) My instincts about my writing were correct. As I said, for the most part I agreed with the criticism I’ve received; it coincides with what I’d perceived as the book's shortcomings myself. But overall I was fairly certain that the writing itself was strong, the descriptions evocative, the emotions recognizable. From what I’ve been told, I’m correct. I’m a decent—dare I say, good—writer. And that’s encouraged me to finish whipping 100 Days into shape so that I can start submitting it to agents after New Year’s.

4) Writing about marketing is much easier than actually marketing one’s own product. I’ve covered various aspects of marketing, promotion, and sales for trade magazines for decades. I won awards for my coverage. I spoke at conferences and webinars. But I haven’t done a good job of marketing my book. I know what I should do, but I haven’t done much of it. 

Partly it’s been down to a lack of time—I have a living to earn, and a family that likes me to cook dinner for them and even spend the occasional evening or weekend with them. 

But a lot of it is also due to my shyness: I haven’t been able to bring myself to pop in at the local bookshops to see if they’d be interested in hosting a reading, for instance. I haven’t sought out blogs for the express purpose of touting my wares. Which brings me to…

5) I’d much rather write than sell. Beyond Billicombe is published, and I really do want people to read it, because I’m proud of it, and I think the characters are worth knowing. I want to introduce people to the protagonists, Suzanne and Richard, and to the North Devon town of Billicombe, just as some people like to introduce their single friends to one another in hopes of setting them up in a long-term relationship.

But right now I’m more engrossed with Steve and Cat, the narrators of 100 Days. Any free time I have, I’d rather spend with them. Steve and Cat still need me; Suzanne and Richard don’t.

This blog post is my way of writing and selling—or at least, trying to sell. So check out Beyond Billicombe. I don’t think you’ll regret it, and if you do, let me know. (Of course, you can also let me know if you love it.)

In the meantime, it’s a sunny day out here at the park bench where I write my fiction. The weather’s warm enough that my fingers aren’t stiff and mottled. So I’m going to return to 100 Days, all the while hoping you’re reading Beyond Billicombe and maybe even looking forward to what I’m preparing for you next.

(Thanks to my friend Tina for the photo. See, Beyond Billicombe makes a great beach read!)

Quitting and Winning

“Quitters never win,” we’re told from the time we’re tots. By the same token, we’re also told that we should avoid “throwing good money after bad.” This seems to be the same sort of contradictory wisdom as “turn the other cheek” vs. “an eye for an eye” and “out of sight, out of mind” vs. “absence makes the heart grow fonder”—not very helpful.

So when it comes to writing, should one plod through a project to completion no matter how miserably it’s going, or should you sometimes accept that you’re better off abandoning a work?

The question came up recently in a Goodreads forum, and while I think it was directed to readers—do you force yourself to finish reading a book even if you’re not enjoying it?—it’s certainly pertinent for writers as well.

I would never have started, let alone completed, my novel Beyond Billicombe if I hadn’t abandoned another book I was writing. At the time my husband and daughter were out of the country for five weeks, giving me entire evenings and weekends to do nothing but write (and walk the dog, heat up frozen fish-and-chips dinners from Tesco, and watch James McAvoy movies on cable). For three weeks I beavered away on a novel, and while some of the writing was pretty good (if I do say so myself), the story as a whole wasn’t gelling. I reached the point where I almost dreaded sitting down to the keyboard (which is where my viewings of James McAvoy movies came in). By now I had only two solid weeks of solitude left, and here I was wasting them on a story that was giving me no satisfaction.

As it happens, during this time I was also reading Lowboy by John Wray during my bus rides to and from work. The story of a schizophrenic teen who escaped from a New York hospital and the frantic search for him, it combines brilliant, lyrical, impressionistic imagery with a very tight plot. At its heart it's the story of a quest, and that basic storyline is what makes the book, despite its sometimes difficult-to-follow marriage of perceptions and reality, such an accessible and gripping read.

And that led me to an epiphany about what was wrong with the story I’d been working on: There was no quest, no goal that the characters were striving for, no clear linearity. Granted, many books succeed without that element, but I knew I wasn’t capable of writing one.

I tried to work a quest into the story, but I couldn’t. And so, realizing what the work was lacking, and admitting that I couldn’t at that time provide it, I relegated the chapters I’d written to a folder on my hard drive.

But while brainstorming for a tidy plotline for that story, my mind had come up with another fictional quest—or rather, it had returned to a vague plot I’d conceived years earlier. That plot had involved a different set of characters and took place in Philadelphia in the early 1980s. But a day after calling it quits on the other novel, I'd transposed the storyline to Devon in the early 2000s, with a new cast of characters, and began work on what became Beyond Billicombe. I wrote most of the first draft in the two weeks before my family returned home.

In this case, I was right to stop throwing good writing after bad. Though that’s not to say I tossed the story and its characters completely. I’m now thinking of revisiting them.

And this spring I revisited another story that I’d abandoned a few years ago. Again my reason for quitting was an inability to create a tight-enough plot for the characters. The protagonist of the story, Steve, is one of the favorite characters I’ve ever developed; he’s one of the two narrators of a book I’d written prior to Beyond Billicombe, and I missed spending time with him. But one morning in April I woke up at 6 a.m. with Steve’s “quest” precisely detailed in my mind. I raced to the park (aka my office for writing fiction) to review the chapters I had previously completed. I salvaged some elements and began integrating them with the new, focused storyline. I’m hoping to have the manuscript ready to submit to agents by the beginning of the year.

Maybe this doesn’t count as an example of quitting, but rather of postponing. Or you could argue that it’s impossible to truly quit a piece of writing; it already exists, even if not in the form you envisioned. And whether it remains on your hard drive or in your imagination, it’s still with you. You may quit the story, but the story hasn’t quit you.

As for whether I ever quit reading books before finishing them, I do, even though I feel as if I failed the author almost every time. But there are so many other books out there worthy of being read, not to mention so many things we’re obliged to do that give us little if any satisfaction, that forging ahead with a book that’s more work than pleasure seems pointless. Life’s too short, and the fact that I can’t think of a contradictory maxim for that piece of wisdom suggests it’s an axiom worth following.