Summer Break

Guys, I'm going to put BookChoy on hiatus for the summer. I'm home with my boys this summer, which is awesome—really, I think I've found my calling—but there just isn't going to be any time for blogging. I'm writing this now as they search for their overdue library books, which I reeeaaallly hope they haven't lost.

Gotta go. Hope to see you at Indy Underground. Otherwise, I'll talk to you in August!

*oh, in the meantime, your best source for lit life around Indy will be J.L. Kato's blog.

Got a collection of poetry or short stories? Sitting on a novella? Four Way Books wants to see it. Submissions sent in June will be read by their editorial board, not an outside judge.

If you're interested, see the submission guidelines for their June reading period here.

Six in the morning, and I am writing in my garage. It’s just me and the birds out here this morning. All kinds of birds. Some sing, some make noises like machines. Writing in the garage in the morning is like standing in an alley between an orchestra hall and a tool & die shop.

Though I have to say that when I first came out here I didn’t really notice the birds. It wasn’t until I took a moment to concentrate on what I was seeing and hearing. When I first came out here, I thought, it’s a quiet morning. A car went steaming down the street, and I noticed that, of course. It was loud, I thought, though it wasn’t really louder than all the birds put together. It’s remarkable how much noise the birds can make, and we’ll still say it’s quiet. It’s like, if we’re not the ones making the noise, the noises don’t count.

When I was a boy, we had a little blue plastic bird that you could fill halfway with water, then blow into its tail. The tail was like the stem of a pipe, and when you blew into it, the bird would trill and warble. It sounded beautiful—like a real bird! I thought—and the vibration would buzz all through my lips. The bird was blue like a jewel. Blue like the cartoon bluebird of happiness in Song of the South, but not as blue as a real bluebird. I’m not talking about a bluejay, which are regular birds and come in regular blue. I’m talking about a real bluebird, which are rare to see around here, and look like they’re filled with electricity. How else can anything be that blue?

On summer mornings when I was a boy, I liked to fill up the plastic bird with water and go out to the back deck. Barefoot, shirtless, I blew into the chewed-up tail of the plastic bird. I thought I was trying to call bluebirds, trying to conjure them up, but that’s not, I don’t think, what I was really doing. I think I just wanted to get in on the morning conversation.

Joining that morning song, was that a prayer? Who heard, and did it count?

Just wanted to let y'all know, Booth will be running all through the summer. A new poem/list/essay/interview/ode/story will appear every Friday. Just like a clock, I tick and I tock.

Up today is a fantastic, inventive piece by BookChoy pal Sarah Layden. Click and bask.

Change in Line-up for Butler's Visiting Writers' Series

Atwood, out. Evidently, Ms. Atwood was just given a contract to write another novel a little sooner than she had anticipated. She needs to start her research right away, and her research apparently does not include looking at our ugly mugs.

In her place will be . . . well, I can't say yet. It's not official. But know that this writer is big, and, um, very different from Atwood.

More news soon. Hopefully.

The Examiner takes a look at some famous authors' rejections. Here are some cuts:


1. Stephen King

Mr. King received dozens of rejections for his first novel, Carrie; he kept them tidily nailed to a spike under a timber in his bedroom.

One of the publishers sent Mr. King's rejection with these words:

We are not interested in science fiction which deals with negative utopias. They do not sell.

5. Joseph Heller

In an act of almost unparalled stupidity, one publisher wrote of Mr. Heller's Catch-22:

I haven’t the foggiest idea about what the man is trying to say…Apparently the author intends it to be funny – possibly even satire – but it is really not funny on any intellectual level.

6. J.K. Rowling

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s (later Sorceror’s) Stone was rejected by a dozen publishers, including biggies like Penguin and HarperCollins. Bloomsbury, a small London publisher, only took it on at the behest of the CEO’s eight-year old daughter, who begged her father to print the book. God bless you, sweetheart.

Think of these the next time you get a rejection. Take the punch, then keep swinging. That's what these writers did.

Some cuts from a post in the National Post:

Steven Heighton is the author of twelve books, including two this spring - the novel Every Lost Country (May 2010) and the poetry collection Patient Frame (April 2010). With this post, Heighton concludes his week long guest editorship of The Afterword. Read his posts here.

This sequence follows up on a series of a few “memos to myself” that The New Quarterly recently asked writers to produce—memos the writer would relay back through time to his or her younger self, starting out in the craft. These new ones are to be wormholed back to a writer—myself, or anyone else who’s interested—a decade deep in the work.

1 Could anyone else have written this thing? If Yes, start again.

2 Novelty is nothing more than a fresh combining.

3 If nothing is new under the sun, nothing is old either. Time cycles back. The ode, the epithalamion, the epistolary novel—all can be made fresh again in the right hands.

4 In the long run, curiosity and stamina trump talent.

5 What makes a period of intense creativity a joy: the way it integrates an adult’s productive power with the playful oblivion of a child.

6 Don’t feel discouraged when you find yourself falling out with your earlier work. Dissatisfaction is the price of improvement.

7 Improvement is not just a matter of amassing technique. Coming through a hard time, transcending a grief or an addiction—these can clarify and deepen your vision, while also improving your prose style by teaching you to focus on the significant and to exclude mere filigree.

10 Complicate it, complicate it. Truth is in the nuances.

11 Then simplify in the later drafts to drive the complexity underground, like a textual subconscious.

12 Because you want your work to have a teeming subconscious. In your early drafts, write everything that occurs to you, then cut ferociously. The material you cut—the rich or jagged silences you create—are the textual subconscious.

13 Or think of those editorial gaps as synapses that the good reader bridges with sparks of insight, helping to turn a now-collaborative work into a brightly firing circuit of experience and understanding.

16 The problem with poeticized novels is that they aim for beauty without truth—the reek of the real—and beauty without truth is kitsch.

17 Solemn, earnest overwriting feels like overwriting. Overwriting leavened by humour (think Lolita) and textual synapses (see 13, above) is a delight.

18 Good writing, to paraphrase Sir Ralph Richardson, is overwriting and getting away with it.

19 Good writing is underwriting and getting away with it.

22 Don’t confuse story and plot. Story is narrative impelled by character. Thus it emerges from inside the material of your fiction. Plot is a dramatic contrivance deployed to entertain or to illustrate a theme. Plot is imposed on the material from the outside, and everything else in the work—character, detail, language, etc.—is subordinated to it.

23 If fiction writers gamble when they create main characters who are difficult to like, then they cheat when they concoct characters who, unlike you and me, are wholly sympathetic.

24 The writing life, like life in general, has a sacramental and a secretarial side. As years pass and duties accrue, the secretarial, clerical mode can grow like a lymphoma and start to squeeze life from the sacramental.

25 So learn to be irresponsible when necessary—without guilt. Let bills breed in unmarked drawers, let the inbox throng and fester. Lend yourself wholly to the momentum when inspiration insists; take care of marginal things in their own time.

30 There comes a point when an hour of sketching objects from life or learning to play an instrument will make you a better writer than another hour of writing or reading will.

31 Cast a spell and the small flaws don’t matter.