Victory, thy name is Cloud!

So I just finished, for the first time ever, reading a book in Russian. Garri Potter i Uznik Azkabana. Five hundred and seven pages.

Oh. My. Gawd.

It took me a week, what in English would take two days. (Excuse me in advance if this blog is littered with idiomatically clumsy sentences—reading this much Russian has had a noticeable effect on my spoken English too.)

I haven’t read an English language book all week—a long time for me. Russian print is swirling around in my head; I can’t walk down the street without finding myself absent-mindedly repeating some word or another—sometimes without knowing for sure if it’s a real word or one I’ve just made up. It’s incredible and …*sigh*

The funny thing is that the achievement is made more amazing not only by the idioms and expressions and words I seem to have effortlessly picked up and integrated (erratically) into my speech—and Lord knows there’s bunches of words that bounced OFF my head too—but rather by this one tiny, almost ridiculous realization which has swooped me into euphoria.  Namely:

I know two words for cloud.

!!!

I know, it seems useless. After all, I am no meteorologist. I am no weather reporter. I am no sky-gazer.

But two words! This is victory indeed! Because it provides—flexibility. *sighs happily* Flexibility is power, I have decided. I can choose among words…or in this case, between words. I can be the master of my own nuances!

I am on cloud two, I tell you!

It occurs to me I also know now two words for werewolf. I typically discuss neither clouds nor werewolves at length, but I sense integration of both into my daily conversation for at least a while.

Russian: “Hello, Ruth. How are you?”
Ruth: “I am well. Is that a cloud (1)? I am a werewolf (1)”
Russian: “Uh, are you pointing at the pavement?”
Ruth: “Clouds (2) are different in America. Are you also a werewolf (2)?

Good times. Ah, and I now have five words for interrupt. Several ways to describe smirks, bitter smiles, glinting eyes, exploding with fury, exchanging glances, examining things… Precautions. Invisibility Cloaks. Wiping one’s tears/sweat. Aiming one’s wand… Yes, several ways of aiming weapons, assuming all weapons are wielded similarly to wands…

Life, fellow English speakers, is GRAND!    But now I must bid you adieu, for I have two clouds to gaze at.

My Russian: An Unrequited Love Affair

I love Russian. I love the sound of it and the feel of it. It’s a language more beautiful than tiramisu is delicious, and that is saying a lot.

My love for Russian, like many passionate affairs, is one-sided. Spoken by me, that language to melt your sins …stumbles.

Exhibit A: Visiting Moscow that first time, I fall desperately in love with peach juice.   At a kiosk, I request “the juice of the fruit of the orange paint.”

Yes, Russia enamored me; I sank into linguistic bliss. Back in the US, my professors signed me up for two intensive classes, and before long I was overwhelmed and had resorted to triaging words, studying “important words” and ignoring “irrelevant words I shall never use in my entire life.”

These last included those pertaining to the household, most particularly bed furnishing.

Foolish child. Thrice life would show me the error of my choice.

Russian Life Lesson One: Crime and Punishment

One particular week, when Russian Speech focused on “the apartment” Intermediate Russian was centered on crime. Jolly, I know.

We had just learned how to use the instrumental case to indicate the means by which a crime is committed (ie with a knife).  This was fascinating, and so I ignored my upcoming oral exam in the other class.

I did have a plan, though. I often have plans, and they are often genius. In this particular case, the plan was to duck low and cram as many words as I could while the others were tested first.

This genius, cutting-edge plan was destroyed by my professor’s unfortunate predilection for outsmarting me.

“Ruth,” he said as I ducked in and made like I was invisible, “you can start. Please describe your apartment and your roommate.”

I thought on my feet.  Which was quite something, considering I was sitting on an entirely different part of my body.

“My apartment,” I said in flawless Russian, “is beautiful.”

I looked at him with resolve and he nodded, doubtless waiting for me to describe my carpet, my duvet cover and my remodeled kitchen. But I had other plans. “But my roommate is a murderer!”

His pen stopped moving over his pad.

“She is a skinhead wanted by the police for theft, and she embezzles money, and I suspect that on Thursday she killed my cat.” Blessedly, I suddenly remembered a household word and whipped it out for my A+. “She killed it—by toothbrush!”

I was told to stay after class.

Russian Life Lesson Two: Meanwhile, In the Bedroom…

A week later, Intermediate Russian turned to “your house,” and my weekly quiz included the following unwelcome question: List four things found on your bed.

I thought hard.

I answered:

1. another bed
2. my husband
3. my lover
4. my chauffeur

I got half a point for my husband.

Russian Life Lesson Three: The Curious Case of the Mustard

A year later, I picked up a book by Ivan Bunin and tried to read it without a dictionary. Not far into the story, I noted an odd thing. Namely—talking mustard.

“D,” I asked a friend, “is Bunin supposed to be surreal?”

“Um, yeah, I think so,” D answered, and like a total dork, I didn’t check.

A month later, I’m in Moscow again for a wintery semester. The city isn’t exactly easy on strangers, so I welcome a weekend trip to Saint Petersburg, that gorgeous Venice of the East that Peter the Great built.

The train ride inevitably brings the weary traveler into the imperial city around 6 or 7am, and the first thing I did upon dropping my luggage in the room was to take a freezing cold shower (for lack of hot water, not a masochistic preference) and roam the city.

When I returned at night, I noticed a slight problem.  Gentle Reader, my bed had nothing on it. No other bed, no husband, no lover, no chauffeur, but also, and this was at least as regrettable: no sheets, no blankets and no pillows.

Have I mentioned it was winter? Have I mentioned that I have never—TO THIS DAY—bothered to learn these critical words?

I braced myself and went downstairs to ask for some bedding. Before I reached the rather strict matron in her office, I snuck up to the guard, hoping for an ally.

“Sir Guard?” He clearly was rarely addressed this way and hid a smile.  “What is it called in Russian, that small thing on the bed that is under your head?”

“Under your little ear.”

Um, well, if you want to go there. “Yes, under my little ear.”

“Under your little ear.”

I try to discern if he’s a pervert or just mad. “Yes, the thing under your little ear, what is it called.”

“It’s called under-your-little-ear,” he explains slowly.

“Oh God,” I say in English. “No wonder I never learnt that word.”

I thank him and tip-toe to the temperamental matron’s office. I knock. She’s not pleased to see me.

I smile hopefully. “Thank you again,” I say. ”I’m sorry for interrupting you, but I do not have an under-your-little-ear on my bed, or any of the other things.”

She’s irritated, very irritated. “Why didn’t you tell the mustard!?”

I gape. What is it with Russians and mustard?

“The mustard was on your floor today! Why didn’t you tell the mustard THEN?”

I’ve never considered telling mustard anything before. I don’t know where to begin answering this question. My stupefaction is only aggravating the situation immensely.  I try to have a rational conversation.  (Things always go wrong when I am forced to take this step.)

“I… I didn’t know that I should tell the mustard.”

“Oh? And who would you tell?”

Well, not the mustard.

“Now that the mustard isn’t here—now you want [insert immediately forgotten words for bedclothes]!”

“I can tell the mustard. Is the mustard in the kitchen?”

“The mustard WAS everywhere! In the kitchen, in the bathroom, everywhere!”

“And now? Is the mustard in fridge or in the cupboard?”

She’s really angry now.  “Why would the mustard be in the fridge?  The mustard has gone home!”

My brain, already exhausted from the long day, is beyond fried. It’s whizzing like a crazy deflated balloon. She begins to stomp out, grumbling loudly about my lack of consideration. I follow in a stupor. She grumbles along the corridor and past the friendly guard, who I barely see in my dizziness, and she grumbles up the stairs where I dazedly stop.

And then it occurs to me. I see a vision of a hot dog stand with a sign advertising ketchup and mustard. And the word for mustard is…different.

My Russian lessons brain began to scroll through short stories by Pushkin, Tolstoy and Chekhov, and then it arrives at the answer; and there at the bottom of the steps I grabbed the word (so similar!) by its beautiful font and shout it up at her.

Most unexpectedly she storms down to shake me in laughter and I am half-hugged, half-heaved up the stairs. 

I’d muddled the word.  What I’d thought meant mustard was actually another word I’d considered irrelevant and useless: “cleaning lady.” No wonder she thought me crazy (or rude) asking if the cleaning lady lives in the fridge.

Perhaps it is no wonder that my love affair with Russian is a one-sided affair. At least I have my bed, my husband, my lover and my chauffeur to keep me warm.

FYI: the two words were: gorchitsa (mustard) and gornichnaya (cleaning lady). Come on, they’re awful similar.

Menu in a Tbilisi Restaurant - no longer serving Putin

Shhhh! A secret…

So this is how my dear friend J began our conversation the other day.

“Okay, now my mom told me not to tell you, but–”

Egad!  That is a scary start.  I sat ramrod stiff and waiting for the scoop.  A little part of me wanted to squeak, “well, if she didn’t want you to…maybe you shouldn’t?” but most of me was already paralyzed with fear.

So since I was already in squeak mode, I did.  “What? What? Tell me!”

(Which you will note was not my original intention.)

“She wants to know if you’re going to finish this book before she dies.”

Ah.  “I trust she is in good health?” I ask.

“Just step on it,” J answers.  (I paraphrase.  Well, perhaps she was loads kinder and more understanding, and perhaps she also stressed that she and her mom are merely anticipatory and supportive.  But, hey, as the writer *cough*, I do get to fictionalize.  Right?)

Now, my dear friend J’s mom–who is dear in her own right, and a right comedienne and all-round smart and dear sort–is not the first person in recent days to basically wonder when I’m going to finish this book.

I think the time has come to set a deadline on myself.  At least for the completed first draft.  I’ve gotten a bit lazy; many evenings I have been reading rather than writing or taking notes.  I’ve gotten to the point where I have so many notes in my journal that aren’t yet in the book that just transferring the sketches/notes is a serious bigtime job.  And moreover, you know, the book’s long…not for a book, per se, but in comparison with anything else I’ve ever written before (I think my thesis was 60 pages, and that was over a decade ago) and I’m realizing how much editing will be in store once I finish the story.

My point is–there’s a lot of work left and a lot of imagination and creation before I finish my first draft.  And my approach has been “slow and steady” but I’m thinking it’s time to push. 

That’s my plan.  Shall I add a timeline?  A challenge to self? 

Very well.  I shall finish this draft —  wow, you don’t know this but I just took about 5 minutes of angst-filled staring and backward math — by December 15.

I know, I know!  I should say “this summer.”  I should.  How about I am to finish the draft by the end of summer, but we all realize I am lying through my teeth, which are, by the way, dropping out in fear.

No, no–second thoughts.  I should pick a meaningful date.  Hm. 

Deadline Goal shall be August 12, a date which makes me think of lions and basketball and growing up.

Deadline No-Matter-What shall be December 27, which of course means that on my birthday I will be done and can sleep the sleep of the damned.  I mean the exhausted.  Or I can be like the little piggy and scream all the way home.

  I think I’ve terrified myself to shreds.  I have to go, friends and cohorts.  I have a book to write. 

GAH!

Let's just say this photo was not taken on one of my smarter days.

Despite being taken on the 100% scariest day of my life (July 4, 2008, in case you’re wondering), this shot reminds me that what doesn’t kill me is photographed and perched atop my armoire to remind me how great life is.

Err, no.  What doesn’t kill me is, well, fortunate for that reason, at the very least.  

Was it Eleanor Roosevelt who said you should do one thing that scares you each day?  Well, count me among the terrified.  Gotta dash, grab little piggy and go write!

Beyond the Point of No Returns

There’s no two ways about it.  Writing is an insane activity.  Both when it’s working—and one walks along city streets in earnest, deep conversation with oneself, periodically stopping still to jot down notes—and when it’s not working (which involves more air-punching, sulking, frustration, etc, and yet one keeps getting up in the morning for it).

 The other day I was complaining to another writerly type, and giving vent to my less than decorous feelings about my key villain.  This villain still just isn’t working.  I’ve had this problem with the villain the entire time.  I’ve switched the villain’s goals, motivations, background—everything—precisely forty zillion and seventy three times.

 But for some reason, the precise rude bent of my rant suddenly opened my eyes to the true nature of my villain.  Oh—joys!  It would require…a HUGE revamping of the novel, but…this might be it.

Now, villains are the context of a hero’s actions—both protagonists and antagonists are affected by external as well as internal pressures—and so this change has pulled with non-genteel abandon at my frayed plot threads.  A new framework is rising, beam by beam, and it might even work.

This time I’m taking a different approach.  I’m taking notes.  I’m zoning into the plot and lingering in thought, pulling at the threads as they’re entwined with the beams, checking for weaknesses, checking for consistency.  I’m not writing.  I’m living with the options and recording them in my little notebook until I see it works.  Then—the writing.

In a sense, I’m not so much planning as I am letting the waters fill up and calm around me, taking stock as they clear, to make sure they’re right, healthy…and then I’ll sit down and pour them into the manuscript.

I think this might actually work…

Writing is full of so many false-starts.  You never know if you’re on a wild goose chase.  All you can do is ride and learn.  Patience, fortitude and stick-to-it-ivness.  Because in some cases you reach a point of no returns—when no matter your effort, nothing’s working and even making one part better is really just procrastinating from the problems with the whole—and you just have to keep on keeping on.  Beyond the point of no returns.

No second wind, no strain, no patience, no flexibility, no learning –> no improvement.

Writing novels, I conclude, is a hell only for the stubborn.

At any rate, I’m thinking of printing the manuscript so I can see all the spots I need to rewrite… But at the same time I can imagine that 400 pages is rather unwieldy…but I guess that’s the only option.  When have you started effectively printing your work for similar reworking?

Developing Characters, or: What Doesn’t Kill You…

The other morning I had a guest over for brunch.  In other words, I had to tidy the apartment.  The problem was that my apartment was already tidy. 

This is because I’m writing a book, and writing a book requires time to think.  Most often, taking “time to think” results in my getting caught up retightening the legs of my chairs, vacuuming the couch, cleaning the stove, polishing the floor, and even cutting and filing pieces of wood to hold up tapestries.  With steak knives.  In other words, procrastination leads to a tidy house. 

(Of course, too much predictability is boring, so when my original mission is to do housework, I artfully procrastinate by reading.)

Please, don’t try this at home.  I am a master and cannot promise you’ll have the same results.

So there I was, looking at my altogether far too tidy living room and thinking: I need time to think.  And then I thought, why, I really should clean the coffee table.  A lady never entertains guests on a laptop-and-paper-strewn coffee table.

Now, my coffee table is a Moroccan brass tray table.  In other words, it carries heat.  I always place a large and slim volume between my table and my laptop.  As a lady never overheats her books, I have a constant rotation of books.  Hard-covers being preferable for lap-top writing, I use paperbacks usually for table-top writing.

And so it was that Frog and Toad was on the couch, and Writing the Breakout Novel: Workbook was on the table.  I squinted at it, not out of suspicion, mind you, but because I’d just switched on the lights.  Then I sat down and flipped it open listlessly.  (I was, as you’ll recall, currently tasked with tidying up, and it fell to my lot to procrastinate by reading.) 

The book fell open to the section on antagonists.  I read a few lines of the worksheet Maass, the author, wanted me to fill out.

Meh, I thought. My antagonists are just fine.  I yawned.  And then an idea began to niggle.  I slammed down the book, yanked Frog and Toad back from the shelf and slipped it under the laptop.  And began answering the worksheet.  Egad.  It was amazing.

And bizarre.  I would read a question and think, but I already know… and then I’d type the question anyway and suddenly the groove would kick in.  I’d write sometimes totally what I knew, what I expected…  And then he’d ask me to subvert it, to fight my character.  And suddenly…great stuff.

I’d think I was rehashing, but suddenly—D’s future opened up for me.  I realized what was in store for him—in detail.

I was thrilled and horrified.  I’d just broken thoroughly into Act III.  I knew, finally, what he didn’t.  I had an emotional moment.  I decided to put all my characters through the process—protagonist and antagonist alike. 

And then, of course, as that meant writing, I cleaned the stove instead.

Okay, fine, so I did keep on writing.  Time-to-think rules don’t apply when writers have actually caught hold of a wriggly little fairy of a genius insight, and indeed one must often crush the desire to “think” too much over the stove or under the furniture.  Writing requires that key ingredient my dad used to tell me about:  Glue in the ass.

Anyway, this breakthrough’s been amazing.  I’ve been racing with Act III scenes and have plot points written up for others.  My antagonists are ready for their face-offs, and my heroes are heading to the denouement.  I’m exhilarated to feel it take shape.  It’s a great nexus—my vision, which I’d felt impaired for a long time, is back; and with it my sense of patience is restored.  Emotional truth and structure are both in sight, and the plot’s sense of inevitability is back—although I hope not its predictability.  We’ll see. 

I am utterly realizing anew what they mean when they say that the first draft is the writer telling the story to themselves, and that the subsequent drafts are writing it for others.  The first draft is when I find out what happens, really.  Only then can I craft it into something that will be enjoyable to read.  Then finally is the time to exert power over the text, because I’m not floundering in my own sea of questions.  My spidey-senses tell me that that’ll be a whopper of an experience–rewriting and editing.    But we’re not there yet.  We’re finishing Act III, mehopes.

Other stuff on my to-do list are:  two protagonists that need development and three secondary characters that need work—one of them I have decided is mostly invisible because she’s still the wrong person.  It took me several versions of M to find him fitting, and longer for him to start to move into himself, to develop his grays.  H isn’t there yet.  Maybe H has to go, and someone else take her place.  I wonder how M finally worked and how I can make my other protagonists stronger like him…

Welcome back, heady rush of story!  Welcome back euphoria!  Goodbye housekeeping!!! 

How’re you guys doing?

View from Central Park, New York City

Cold, cold ground…

I remember last winter very well.  I remember how the cold never died; how I never shed my layers, not even indoors.  How I wore all I could to bed.  How my water bottles froze by my bed.  The wind rushing into my room through the broken window.  How water froze in the pipes, and for three months it didn’t run.  How a trip into the capital came to mean “shower” to me.  How the word “bathe” became part of my vocabulary and how this came to mean using baby wipes.  The smell of burned wood in my clothes, in my hair, in my nostrils.  Choosing what to do and when based on heat.  Hovering over wood stoves and gas heaters when they were in a room.  Making Turkish coffee on heaters.  Burning my legs against them, so close did one have to be to feel the dissipating warmth in non-insulated rooms.  The outhouse smells changed.  My standards of cleanliness.  I remember that winter well.

I remember it now as I sit warm in my apartment.  As I marvel at my tank-top in December.  At how I shed layers.  How I shower.  Everything is different.  Everything.  I can’t complain of the heat in the building.  I can’t complain at all.

How we live is so different from how the world lives.  How ignorant we are of it.  How blissfully unaware.  Blind. 

I read books sometimes that are set in other periods.  Maybe Victorian England, for example.  And I can imagine the cold indoors.  I can imagine the closeness of space.  No… I can remember it.  Times have changed, and times have not…

So when people ask me now, two weeks away, what do I want for my birthday…how can I answer seriously?  What on earth do I want for?  Don’t I have it all?  Yes, yes, it can be snatched up in a moment and turned to cinder and less.  We’re more ephemeral than dust, for dust at least keeps its shape over time.  But that’s true of every living thing.  Every one of us wriggling in a moment, our own, special, significant and aware moment.

Yeah, I’ll appreciate the kindness of family and friends, but I can’t possibly use the words “I want” and speak of things, without feeling awfully blind to all I already have…

Besides, I just started working on a birthday present to myself.  And it’s a fine one. 

There’s something someone once said…and I paraphrase and lose part of its power, I’m sure.  But the gist of it is: “If you haven’t done something today that’s frightened you, that’s unknown and bigger than anything you’ve ever done before, then you haven’t lived today yet.” 

When I started writing, that was my new, frightening unknown.  But now, in the lead-up to my birthday, after getting all those “what do you want” questions…I’m doing something rather different, too.  More on that as it solidifies; I’ve signed up to do something that I think has worth, and that will require its weight in work, too.  But basically it has to do with “giving” rather than “getting” for my birthday.  Wish me luck!!

Happy Holidays, everyone!    Any good plans?

Greater Caucasus

The More Things Change… The More They SEEM the Same At First.

Two days ago a friend asked me if I enjoy writing.  I crossed the street before answering.  “I hate it passionately, and want to wring writing’s throat,” didn’t seem like the fully appropriate answer.

True, mind you, just not necessarily the whole story. 

The whole story…  *sigh* 

I feel like going Muse-hunting with a wicked elf blade.  I would of course only threaten it and then I would leap on the slimy bastard and shake it about.

I realize this sounds violent.  But it’s just comeuppance.  Oh heck, in reality it’s no Muse I seek to shake.  I don’t believe in muses.  I believe in myself, and it’s myself I want to shake.  And, I tell you, I have.  I have flung myself from one end of the couch to the other.  I have stormed from one end of the apartment to the other.  I have grumbled at myself and launched tirades at myself.  I have pulled my hair back and yanked it out.  I have gazed out my window at the Broadway pedestrians, at my neighbors and at the heavens, all the time trying to see into my story and into that skeleton that is craft.

But why this extra dash of frenetic anxiety?  Why the tense jaw?  (This last I can attest to, even if you can’t.)  I still write.  The story is moving forward.  I even noticed this week that my pace is more than acceptable.  From time to time the story even has the compelling feel of a pack of cards, dealt, loaded, and inevitably falling to play.

So why, why, why, is this the most anxious period for me?

I have concluded (temporarily, as all conclusions should footnote themselves) that it’s the place in the novel that seems to invest each moment with pressure to attain perfect allignment.

Before, I told the story.  I didn’t worry about deadlines.  Didn’t think “where in the arch am I?”  When I wrote 2 pages, when I wrote 10 pages…I felt good.  I felt I had done a good job.  I kept moving forward.  And when I jotted notes in my little notebook and then realized them in the manuscript, I felt a sense of fruition.  I kept moving forward, one step or ten at a time.

But in recent weeks, whether I write 2 pages or write 12, or delete 4 and write 10, I’m constantly feeling the tension of the future in each scene.  I’ll do the same thing–jot down notes and transfer them to the manuscript, but I’ll feel there’s more, more, more to write.  More than I’ve done, better than I’ve done, and it must work.   I’ll even have a flash of inspiration that I know betters the book, and even as I feel good making the change–my mind’s already on the whole, which I’m not yet grasping in my searching embrace.

So here I’ve been stressing that I’ve not found a balance of writing to research, or that I’m procrastinating or editing when I ought be writing, or that I’m researching when I ought be planning, doodling and thinking–but I’ve been doing all of that all along.  That is, every step of the way, I’ve been battling the same unknown, forging my technique on that exacting and unforgiving smithy that is experience.

What’s different now isn’t that I’m doing anything intrinsically worse..or less.  What’s different is that I’m feeling the ghost of the future pulling at me.  Like I see that figure through the mirror, darkly, but know I’m rushing to what I don’t know and I want to get there right. 

It’s not “the end in sight” as much as it is a murky sense of sight where before I was swimming in the dark and enjoying the sensation.  Now I see a shady image and am drawn to it, constantly finding it beyond my immediate grasp, and sensing the miles yet to go.  I’m exhausted not by what I’ve done, but by what is yet to be accomplished, yet to be tranversed.

So instead of inexplicably saying to my friend that I hate writing with the passion of a thousand misbegotten suns (and yet cut my sleep short by three hours each day to invest in it),  I held my silence till I crossed the street, and then I answered.  I said, “I love it.”

I walked into my dark apartment, and stood there in its shadows, hand on the light switch.  I imagined for a moment what if I stopped?  What if I stopped writing right now?  And my eyes stopped adjusting to the dark; they saw black and anathema gripped me.  Stop?  Stop and leave my characters forever fixed in their terrible predicaments?  No.  No way.  I owe it to A, and S, and M, and even D and D…  They have to get out, or at least rest in peace.  On the printed page.  Where every character born deserves to live, their struggles and goodness visible like the tombstone that is the book’s covers.

My.  As I write that I realize.  I’m afraid of burying my characters.  I’m afraid of the end, even as I feel the rush pull me there, and as I stress to craft it right… I’m heading where I can no longer rescue my characters.  Where, at least, I must put them away.

What does fiction owe reality, or what ought it adhere to, if anything?

A friend was asking me how many pages of my book my seemingly endless research will take up.  It won’t take up too much.  Maybe ten to fifteen pages total.  But I need them to be accurate.  I have a bone with BS in books.  I get we’re working with fiction here, but there’s no reason to insult reality or the reader while we’re at it.

I just read a fun book set in medieval England.  The author clearly knew the period rather well.  My quibbles with details were less about the facts, than about the choices. 

A)  The author chose to paint the Church with a wide, unforgiving brush.  No room was given at all to honest clerics–to their very possibility.  None.

B)  The author chose to depict a Jew burnt at the stake in punishment for bringing about the plague–a terrible and terrifying reality for entire communities of Jews in medieval Europe, despite their innocence–but then made the oddest decision about how to depict the victim.  The Jew was depicted as–get this–a Christian.

WTF?  This Jew was basically a Jew for Jesus, without the title.  Why?  I can’t think why.  Or rather, I can’t think that it’s accurate to the Jews of this period.  So the author made another choice.  Who knows what the reason was. 

Does the author doubt the reader will sympathize with a Jew, an “other”?  Did the author simply struggle for a way to include a subplot featuring a Jew as well as a subplot allowing her to reveal that reading (Christian) scripture was forbidden to layfolk during this period, and so she meshed both stories into one?  If the former, it’s an insult to readership and diminishes the value of the historical accuracy the book otherwise edges toward.  If the latter, uh, that’s just wrong.  It’s two separate issues affecting different peoples.

Add to this bundle the fact that the heroine is also an accomplished markswoman, rider and swimmer, and the story veers just off the set, stumbling off stage as I reel, making up my mind whether the pages are turning fast enough for me to stick with the ride.  That’s not what one wants:  disrupting internal credibility such that the reader breaks to make a conscious choice–not to believe, but to enjoy despite not believing at all.  To enjoy while seeing tricks played before their eyes.

I did choose to ride on, as it happened.  But the set had crumbled.  Maybe that’s the issue.  The center did not hold.  Things fell apart as the centripetal force crumbled.  Credibility was lost in the malaise.

There’s fiction, and then there’s license.  The twain are not the same.  A book ought not to purport history to be its set when it’s only its gloss.

Used to be, I avoided all historical fiction.  I didn’t want to absorb a sense of a time, how things went down, etc, from a novel, and then in my ignorance, assume it accurate.  Now I try read quality fiction almost regardless of genre, and only read historical fiction when it’s fearlessly self-described as fantasy.  Sometimes I wonder at myself, choosing to write a book which touches on history, when I have that strong bias.

Fiction is one thing, but glaring misdirection or toying with facts–nope.  Toy with mysteries, with the unknown.  Ponder the significance of known and unknown occurences–sure.  Make up stories that could fit, or alternate realities that you call by their honest names–yes.  But to place a novel in a period or in a location and then to violate its truths– that’s just not cool.   It’s a lazy choice, even if the book is still an enjoyable read.

What are your thoughts about the same, in books you’ve read or even are writing?

Ishakpasha Palace, overlooking eastern Turkey

They told me I’d be asked. Told me to have an answer ready

But I was otherwise engaged, and besides, I didn’t know how to answer.  And they were right; people do ask.

“So, what was Peace Corps like?”

Some expect a two-line answer.  Others want to really get into it, to imagine it vicariously through you, sometimes to think on doing it themselves.

Peace Corps… I loved it; even the worst of times was worth it.  The insight gained from those times lingers with me still, a million miles away from those moments.

They say Peace Corps is the toughest job you’ll ever love.

They say Peace Corps is different for everyone.

They’re right; which of course means they’re wrong.  :)  If it’s different for everyone, it stands to reason that for some it’s not the toughest job they’ll ever love.

I never regretted joining Peace Corps.  Not for an instant.  And it was true for me: it was the toughest job I’ve ever loved, and I credit it with so much, personally.

There were times I wept with frustration.  There was even one time when I locked myself into an outhouse to cry, so you can imagine… (!!!)  But there were also times I cried with happiness.

Are my tear ducts too willing to gush, you wonder?

Nay, I say.  They’re about average.

I remember the winter when I cried in the outhouse.  (How could I forget?)  I texted my site-mate to ask if it was safe out; if I could escape unseen.  (A site-mate is a fellow volunteer placed in the same village/town/city.)

“Yes,” he texted back.

Together we ran from the building down the only main street in town.  Well, I exaggerate.  We walked.  But swiftly.  Stumbling, for the ground was cracked and slippery with ice.

My bedroom also, by the way, had ice in it.  I look back now and realize that for the first time I was experiencing seasonal stress, which only seemed to be eclipsed by the frustrations of culture shock.

“I’ve had it,” I said.

“With Peace Corps?” Sig asked.

I laughed. “No, I love Peace Corps,” I said, and then a few more frozen tears eked out.

Again he probably wondered why he’d been paired with me.  With nowhere to go, we followed our feet down the road, eventually reaching my other workplace there.  I was working directly with four NGOs (non-governmental organizations) at the time.  With a sigh, I stumbled into the building.  He followed me.  This place was the only one which had heat…  And in that cold, brutal winter, heat was something precious and not to be turned down when available.  (Have I mentioned the ice in my bedroom?)

We walked into my large shared office.

There was a spread laid out on the table.  Delicious Georgian foods and wine.  I looked at my colleague sitting there.

“It’s been forty days since my relative died,” she explained in Russian.

Ah.  My face grew hot.  That meant it had been 39 days since I’d misunderstood the word “passed away” in Georgian and had told her that her relative would be fine the next day.  This is why she was now reminding me in Russian, my stronger language.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

She sighed deeply and nodded at the chairs next to her. “Sit down.  We must toast her and commemorate her with this meal.”

I wasn’t supposed to drink at work, you know.  Peace Corps rules.  But I felt this superseded the rules.  I opened a spot at the table with a shift of a chair, and sat down heavily.

I think I needed to commemorate life and death that day.  And I think I needed a drink.

I toasted loquaciously and many, many times.  In the Republic of Georgia, that’s the only way to drink.  Actually, that’s literally the case. Whereas in the US you sip your wine throughout your meal, in Georgia that is VERY bad form, and no-one would lift a glass without toasting first.  A long toast.  Fortunately, I happen to love toasting, and my Georgian friends loved that about me.  I knew how to honor a glass of wine and the people around the table (and away from it, and passed on, and future generations,–and everyone that one tends to toast at Georgian parties).

So I toasted and toasted and toasted, and soon we were all toasted.

Which was precisely when Sig’s cell rang.  He looked up suddenly.

“Peace Corps is here,” he said.

I lowered my glass. “Huh?”  (See what I mean by eloquence?)

“Right outside the building.  They’re here to inspect my new place before letting me move.”

I sat up. “Sig, they can’t come in!  I’m wearing jeans!”

He looked me flat in the eyes then let his glance travel to my glass.  I lowered it slightly.

“Go on, meet them outside, come on!” I pleaded.

“It’s cold outside,” he grumbled, but he dashed out.

And I toasted him next.  :)

Yeah.  Peace Corps isn’t what you expect.  Good times, bad times, hard times…  Okay, no easy times.  But my God, if you put your all into it, and if you’re lucky and get great colleagues…  It’s all worth it.  One hundred times over.  More.

You know the US Army slogan– “Be All You Can Be”?

That’s EXACTLY what Peace Corps is to me.  A two year increment of your life where you put yourself to the test and you make sure you pass.  Sure, you can do it at home.  But many of us don’t.  We forget to live life to the full, back home.  But make it the whole point of a period of your life, and you can achieve so much.  You can begin to achieve being yourself, the way you want to be.

Just not a particularly well-scrubbed self.

Gori Apartment, Republic of Georgia

Wrestling with First Draft Anxiety. Beating It to a Pulp :)

I’ve been at a crossroads the past week.  No–a busy roundabout.  Standing, without a vehicle.  Peering up and trying to make out the signs all around me, but the sun’s glare and the impossible rain is making it impossible to figure out which way is right for me.  Cars zip by, skimming so close to me I can feel mortality chase around me like slipstream.  Pamphlets litter the sky, thrown out by fast drivers.  I can’t make out their license plates.  I don’t know if I even ought to.  There’s the rub…

And standing there with my nerves knotting, I don’t know which way to go.  I’ve never been this way before.

I look down.  I’m grasping my notebooks.  I look back around me, at the malaise.

Which way to go?

I’ve decided now.  Can you guess?

I feel I’m at the hardest point of my first draft, but what do I know.  Writing for the first time is learning to write.  It doesn’t come naturally.  No matter how many books I’ve read, they’ve come to me fully formed.  I never asked myself how an author made me feel one way or another.  I just felt.  And if I didn’t, I didn’t ask myself what hadn’t happened right.  I threw the book aside (gently) and felt shortchanged.

God, how harsh I was on the poor author!  :)

I’m at 62.5K words now.  295 pages.

Recently, facing the last third of the manuscript–or is it the last quarter?–I’ve been telling myself I need to outline to help me draw everything to a close.  But I’ve hijacked my every free second to do something else, anything else.

And it’s time I face the truth.  Writing is frightening.

E.L. Doctorow had it right:

Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

I know now which way I’m going.  And I know how I’m going there.

I’m going headlong, and headfirst.  I’m going to close my eyes and walk through the traffic.  And I’m going to go straight into the free-fall.  Let it take me where it will.  I’m going to run and jump into my draft, and I’m going to shadowbox the waves all the way through to the end.

And when it’s done, dammit, I’m going to emerge, spluttering, yes–and breathing.  And I’m going to grab my soggy draft close to me, and I’m going to wade to shore.  And I’m going to make it right, no matter how hard I have to work at it.

And until I get to the end of this draft, this first soggy bedraggled draft, I’m not going to stress about how I ought to do it right.  At the end, I’ll just start from the beginning again.  This time, learning how to write a second draft.  (Joys!)

That’s my plan.

My Death Trap, Before I Knew It