Author. Literary agent with Scott Treimel NY. Managing fiction editor at Armchair/Shotgun. Mostly harmless.
CHERRY MONEY BABY revision is due next week. Today I’m doing a final polish, checking a few facts. Here, by way of a teaser trailer for the novel, is What I Googled Today:
Is it Jennifer Wallace or Jennifer Walters?
One of my favorite scenes ever.
The Big Bang Burger Bar (because Milliways would be too obvious)
Mornings are for writing novels, afternoons for work, and evenings are for writing musicals.
Lately I’ve been blowing off steam working on the 2012 New York Melodrama, which is kinda sorta about the MTA, except set in the old west. Now that the song writing bit is winding down and the producing / casting / acting bit is winding up, my piano hours have been spent tinkering with a musical feature film. My concept is something like Reservoir Dogs, except a ten-year high school reunion… Anyway, the story is still coming together, and I’ve written two-and-a-half out of 12-or-so songs. It’s seriously undeveloped, but I wanted to share with y’all the first half of a song I’ve been tinkering with this week.
The Scene: Three female friends at their ten-year high school reunion find common ground in their frustrations over everyone they know getting married. They’re not jealous. Maybe two of them are already married. They’re just sick of other people’s weddings taking over their social lives (which, for those of you who are not yet twenty-seven, believe me, it feels that way sometimes). The girls exchange lines in the middle of the verse.
Everyone You Know is Getting Married:
Everyone you know is getting married,
…In the summer!
…In the spring!
…In time for Christmas!
Save the date and be so kind to R.S.V.P.
Every weekend for the next five years will be,
Cordially appropriated in the name of matrimony
Everyone you know is getting married,
…In Orlando!
…On the Vineyard!
…At my mother’s…
Book your rooms and don’t forget to book them early.
Doesn’t matter if you can’t afford the flight,
We don’t mind if you’re confined to Greyhounds over night.
Everyone you know is getting married,
It’s a matrimonial blight!
Everyone you know is having babies,
…In the autumn!
…Oh you’re glowing!
…I’m enormous…
Ladies get together and we’ll plan a shower.
We’re so glad you’re passing on your DNA!
We’ll expect the labor pictures up on Facebook any day now.
Everyone you know is getting married,
And some with a bun on the way!
Guys, I gotta let loose about this one. Forgive this back-slappy, slap-happy post…
The draft is finished. hallelujah.
Twelve weeks of non-stop madness. Five-hour writing shifts, seventeen-page type-a-thons followed by hours of paralysis and anxiety. Editing on the fly, no plot outlines, no plan. Three months. 57,051 words. 290 pages. Done. Written. Wrote.
Don’t get me wrong. I’ve got lots of work ahead of me. There are character arcs to modulate, themes to round out, spellings to check (lots of those). I would never, ever show anyone but my agent or my editor the smoldering, white hot thing I have before me. But you can’t fix a blank page, and though these pages need fixin, they ain’t blank, Baby.
Though this is a “first draft” in one sense, it was also a…I don’t know…twelve draft in another. I’ve been working on this y.a. project since August 2009, with the guidance, support, and aid of my patient, brilliant, and marvelous editor Deb, as well as my awesome agent. But as of last spring I knew I needed a fresh start. Things had become confused, over-cooked, muddled. My characters needed a completely blank, slightly damp chalkboard from which to tell their tale. And so, after two years of writing and editing, this September I threw out the old drafts and started rewriting the book from page one, word one.
It sucked. But it was worth it.
The resulting story is a far cry from where I started. The characters are distant relatives of the floral bits of tissue paper populating the previous drafts. To me, this new version, for all its rough edges, feels at once deeper, simpler, more complex, and truer. I was able to take what I learned in the last two years and apply it from the get go. I took the heart from the old book (blackened and raw but still beating) and built a new host body around it. New bones, new brain, new everything. What I’ve got looks like Frankenstein’s monster. But with one or two invasive procedures and a lot of cosmetic surgery, I think she’ll walk and talk again. Hell. I think she’s gonna dance.
To mix another metaphor, I feel like I’ve augered this puppy in with no landing gear and the engines on fire. In other words, I kinda feel like this guy:
And it feels good.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna sleep for a week.
Congratulations! You must feel great.
Sleep…and rest your hands after all that typing!
I’m a sucker for purple prose. I’m not proud of it, but alliteration makes me swoon, as does a prettily described sunset or milkmaid. (Some favorite examples appear in Proust’s Swann’s Way, a five-hundred-page book about a cookie). But my love of flowery language is, I think, just another symptom of English Major-itis: the desire to write and read Great Works of Art as opposed to Stories. And though they’re often fun to write, beautiful descriptions are best avoided, *especially* in young adult literature. Teens read for plot, not for prose. My 13-year-old sister and other teens I’ve spoken to skip the “boring parts,” which are almost always the descriptions. Descriptions are the icing, and if you’ve ever eaten a jar of icing on its own, you know it only feels good at first.
On the other hand, teens love blue (profane or vulgar) language. (So do I.) It’s fun, funny, taboo, and often the way teenagers speak to one another. Raised by a mother who talks like a trucker, I have to check myself, when I speak and when I write, to ensure I don’t curse a…well, a blue streak. But fiction, and especially dialog, must be believable, which ironically is not always the same thing as true-to-life. At times “realistic’ teen dialog is so vulgar as to be distracting. And that’s the real problem with extreme language of any kind: it steals focus. I don’t want my readers thinking about my protagonist’s foul mouth when they should be thinking about her broken heart.
Today I struggled to tamp both purple and blue. In the scene I was working on, my protagonist and her boyfriend slip into the bushes for some hanky-panky. My first impulse was to pan away and describe the slowly spinning wheel of boyfriend’s bike as it glints in the sun. Yawn. Turning focus back to the kids, I found myself using the same blue language the characters themselves would have used to describe their actions, but the result was too graphic. I settled for skipping the play-by-play entirely and used suggestive post-romp details instead. This was the result:
They made it as far as Sweet Creek before a private path through the trees enticed them off the road. They let the bike fall with a crunch, the upended front wheel spinning freely. Twenty minutes later Cherry was brushing a mud stain from her slacks, and Lucas searched for his sock in the bushes.
“You have leaves in your hair,” he said.
“I have leaves everywhere.” She felt like a wild woods girl, a sprite. She wanted to climb into the nearest oak and fall asleep. She stretched, felt an ache above her solar plexus and winced.
Awesome, the manuscript I rewrote (yes the one I had sent you which was awful now I am loving the revamp novel ) a weird thing happened the MC swears a few times, that’s how she sounds in my mind but my editor tells me when I get too out of hand, I never ever use the F bomb douche is a huge word I use I just love the way it sounds lol but another thong I do is describing the setting i.e the blue sky, forest …zzzzzzzzzz, your so right teens are not interested in that so I too have tried to make it realistic to target market but still keep in mind it can’t get too racy, or poetic. I like your excerpt it offers the same post romp for sure is this the second book after GIRL PARTS? *SQUEE* if it is.
For examples of tasteful but unblushing love scenes in y.a., check out Pat Hughes’s fabulous OPEN ICE.
And yep, this is from the follow-up 
LOL checking back on my comment I realized I said thong no it was thing yikes.
Today I’m chatting about young adult literature, Twilight, queer characters, and yes even adult entertainment w/ fellow Candlewick author Laura Goode at The New Inquiry. Check it out.
A friend forwarded me this terrific New York Books article about the young friendships of David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, Jeffery Eugenides, and Mary Karr.
Mary Karr was one of the first authors I latched onto in high school. My completely awesome rebel of an English teacher assigned her memoir Liar’s Club, after which I devoured her follow-up, Cherry (for which I named the eponymous girly in CHERRY MONEY BABY).
In college I picked up The Corrections and put it down twice on the advice of two readers I respected, who claimed they “just couldn’t get through it.” Finally I decided to ignore their advice, and was enthralled. Last June I gobbled up Freedom much the same.
In July I started Eugenides Middlesex, which someone had given to me as a gift, and which I’d avoided, thinking it was an “issues book.” Now Eugenides is one of my favorite authors, and I’m loving his latest, Marriage Plot.
I was amazed that three of my heroes, each of whom I’d come to separately, were close at the same age I am now, and in the same place (Eugenides lived in Prospect Heights, just a few blocks from my apartment). It was also heartening to discover these writers struggled in their late twenties, even those who’d published already. (Yes, I felt like a smarty-pants to find Karr and Franzen shared my opinions about Wallace’s early fiction.). I know, I know: it’s corny, not to mention narcissistic, to read an article like this and see parallels to one’s own life (friends and I have already had the obligatory You’re Jeff and I’m David. No dude, if any one’s David I’m David conversations), but it is heartening to remember that even the great ones experience self-doubt, set backs, and the same tribulations as the rest of us humans. And to remember there are other people who care so much about novels.
I’d like to think if I were trying to write in Brooklyn in the ’80′s, I’d have been pals with Jeff, traded barbs with Jonathan, and cried when Mary chose David over me.
Hi All,
The good folks at Figment (an online community for writers and readers) have set me up with a fabulous Author Page. I’ve just been updating it with some fun stuff (instead of working. shhh…don’t tell my boss).
In the meantime, here’s a short ramble about feedback I just posted on said Author Page:
–
Feedback is the Death By Chocolate of writing. You crave it, you MUST have it, you eagerly anticipate its arrival after the long, Good For You meal of writing. When this rich dessert finally comes you gobble it down without thinking, you’re so excited. Then it’s gone, and the queasiness sets in. The Feedback sits in your stomach like led, and you wonder if you’ve written something horrible.
I received two rounds of edits this week, one on an upcoming short story to appear at yareview.net, and another on the latest draft of my new book CHERRY MONEY BABY, which will be released by Candlewick in 2012. The first time I received criticism (years ago) I panicked. Here I had completed this work of Effortless Genius and now I had to CHANGE it? But…it was perfect!
Now that I’ve recieved countless edit letters from my awesome agent and fabulous editor, I’m incredibly grateful. Working at an agency (the same that represents me, in fact) I’ve learned that even widely-published, award-winning authors have to revise and revise and revise. Nabokov famously said “There is no such thing as reading, only rereading.” I’m probably not the first to modify his sentiment: “There is no writing, only rewriting.”
So now my platter is full of Things to Change, Things to Improve, Things to Tweak. I’m fortunate to have brilliant and thoughtful folks reviewing my work. I can’t wait to dive in, but I’m glad to consider each morsel carefully, and savor.
Coming back to a project after a three-month hiatus has been a real head trip. With that much time away from CHERRY MONEY BABY, I feel like I’m reading with fresh eyes.
Having just finished Fat Vampire, I’m marvelling at how author Adam Rex keeps a dozen plot-lines vibrating at once, without ever getting tangled. A flaw I noticed in this draft of CHERRY is what I call front loading: essentially, starting every major and minor plot line, and introducing every character, in the first ten pages. The result is like a band where everyone’s playing at top volume. After all, in a novel some story elements are Lead Guitar while others are Backup Vocals or, say, Cowbell. A novel needs to be mixed down so everyone can be heard in consort. I needed a good sound guy.
So I’m editing like crazy, while simultaneous working on something Super Secret as regards Girl Parts. More on that one soon.
Oh and hey. If like me you’re a big fan of Ron Charles’ Totally Hip Video Book Reviews, you should check out Armchair/Shotgun’s exclusive interview today. It, too, is Totally Hip:
A/S: According to your Wikipedia page, you’ve been with the Washington Post since 2005. Can you describe what developments in the literary world / your daily horoscope inspired you to augment your written criticism with the Totally Hip Video Reviews?
Ron Charles: As any viewer of the Totally Hip Video Book Review can tell, I developed this web series for the kickbacks, the cranberry juice, and the women.
When waiting on edits I like to tinker with an adult project, a “novel for the drawer” that allows me to try out different ideas, styles, and techniques. Stone Piano, so far, is about a young woman moving to New York and transforming herself to fit her ideal image of a Manhattan Girl. Here’s an excerpt I wrote this morning:
A crane shot. In the first gasp of fall, the city wrapped in amber felt and orange wool, Donna, clad in fitted tweed jacket with popped collar, crosses Cooper Square, hands in pockets, pony-tail swinging, boot buckle flashing— the speediest, sleekest girl to cut a path through the rarified streets. The camera follows her down a narrow lane lined with trembling leaves, her palm (in new leather glove) pushes against a glass door, releasing a double twinkle: flash from the gold handle, gleam from black sunglasses. Now cut to an interior. The viewer spies the high-haired, bare necked, black-legged girl drumming eight black fingers on the counter. She cocks her head, bites her lip, and points out (with a tap-tap on a plastic case) that one, please, with the orange and green sprinkles. Plastic tongs, the crackle of paper, a black company card extracted from a small red clutch, a smile, a thank you, and out again to Greene Street, to reappear in Camera One’s viewfinder, (it’s still watching from above, anticipating a repeat flicker of light). But a bus thunders by, and according to cinematic convention, when it passes so has all evidence of our star, save for a wadded paper bag on the lip of an overflowing trashcan, and a certain hollowness in the air where she stood.
Donna often imagined such storyboards, self-cast as the love interest. It was easy to picture herself in the third person. The city was full of mirrors, tinted windshields and tinted lenses. She sometimes caught herself admiring a distorted Donna in the shades of another girl, only to realize the other girl was admiring herself in Donna’s circular D&Gs. Along one block of Lexington ran a wall of especially reflective windows, where passersby looked askance, as if at something scandalous. She permitted herself one glance, lasting no more than a second, each time she passed. The goal was to catch oneself in profile, as a stranger might, in a natural pose. But the moment the peripherals caught the self-image, the body-language shifted. It was impossible to see yourself and be yourself at the same time.
Lucy Boyd are discussing. 
Keisha and 
This is hilarious. I would totally pay to see that show! It reminds me of “Always a Bridesmaid Never a Bride” from “I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change”
By the end of the song she’s actually grateful she’s never been married.