Moving Inside the Story

Today at TweetSpeak Poetry, we’re discussing chapters 6 and 7 of Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity at TweetSpeak Poetry. The two chapters, “Recovering a Sense of Abundance” and “Recovering A Sense of Connection,” include issues and problems experienced by every writer, and presumably every painter, sculptor, musician, and every other creative arts person. In fact, I’d go so far to say that what Cameron describes in these chapters has been experienced by anyone who has done something creative, and not just us writerly and painterly types.

The problems?

The desire to suffer and be deprived. Perfectionism. Risk (actually, adversity to risk). Jealousy.

Of all the issues she raises, the most familiar to me is perfectionism. It took a long time for me to be convinced (or convince myself) to let go of a manuscript. I had never had that problem with speeches, press releases, term papers, backgrounders, and all kinds of documents for school and work – likely because they had deadlines.

My two novel manuscripts? A totally different story. I rewrote the first until I couldn’t stand it any more and put off someone who wanted to publish it for more than a year. The second was not as intense, but letting go of it was still difficult.

And I read something in The Artist’s Way that explained why. A quotation by Fernando Botero, the Colombian artist. He’s speaking of painting, but what he says applies equally to writing:

When you start a painting, it is somewhat outside you. At the conclusion, you seem to move inside the painting.

Letting go of those manuscripts was letting go of myself. The story I was writing had become part of me, and I had become part of the story. To put those manuscripts in the hands of someone else was to make myself open and vulnerable. Allowing others to read the manuscripts –  including my wife, who has not yet read the second one – was to stop playing it safe, to take a risk.

I’ve said before that my wife noted that I was all over the first manuscript, what became Dancing Priest. It’s about the same for the second, A Light Shining. If we make it to Numbers 3 and 4 (still a question for the publisher and for me), and especially Number 4, I’m going to be a basket case. There is a character in Number 4 whom I gradually came to understand as autobiographical. I can’t explain how it happened, or why it happened, but the events of the story necessitated a character like this one.

When I realized who this character was, and it took quite a while for that to happen, I was rather stunned. I still don’t understand it. But he plays a vital role in the story.

Had I deliberately planned to create a character I knew was largely like me, it wouldn’t have been this one. For one thing, he’s a lawyer.

Led by Lyla Lindquist, we’re discussing The Artist’s Way over at TweetSpeak Poetry, where you’ll find links to more posts on these two chapters.

Crepe Myrtles

Standing in a row, paralleling

the blacktop road (hot and

sticky for summer bare feet),

four of them screening

in pink and green, enticing

the child’s fingers to pinch

the buds to pop the flower

open. No one minded; she’d

watch from the window

remembering the five-year-old

girl walking home

from the cotton mill

and picking the crepe myrtle

buds to pop them open.

This poem is submitted for Open Link Night at dVerse Poets. The links will be live at 2 p.n. Central time today.

Thanks to Nancy Rosback at A Little Somethin’ for suggesting a series of poems on growing up in the South.

Making the O List

Some books make the A List, and some books make the O List.

In February, T.S. Poetry Press, known for poetry and memoirs, published its first novel, The Whipping Club by Deborah Henry. It is the story of a child placed for adoption, and years later, his birth parents learn that he wasn’t adopted as they had been told, but is in an orphanage – an institution that is more about child abuse than child care.

This week, O Magazine—O as in Oprah—published its list of the 29 hottest reads for the summer – and The Whipping Club is on the list.

It made the O List. O my goodness.

To continue reading – and get information on a 14-karat-gold giveaway, please see my post today at TweetSpeak Poetry.

A Light Shining

There it is. An official stake in the ground.

A Light Shining.

Yesterday, I finished what I’ve called “my editing” of the manuscript that is the sequel to Dancing Priest. I’ve been driving the publisher crazy, although he’s been very polite about it. “How’s the editing coming?” he asks. A lot. And I say, “It’s coming.”

Well, I can now say it came. What’s left is the formatting, and I’m deep into that. By Wednesday, A Light Shining will be in the hands of the editor and the publisher.

The title has been a problem. Because of the way these books have developed, and how the equivalent of at least two, possibly three, books were born at the same time, some 150,000 words poured out of my head on to the typed pages of my computer screen. This happened from the fall of 2005 to the spring of 2006. And it was too much – the story actually went even beyond what’s now in the second manuscript.

So I divided the words, and then began an extended process of ruthless editing with what became Dancing Priest. All the while I was writing and rewriting, slashing and cutting and rewriting again. I shopped it with agents and publishers. They were smarter than I was and said no. But I kept writing, and the story grew. And it grew again. And then a publisher came along.

And the story is still growing, to the point where I have to almost fight it off. There are six manuscripts behind A Light Shining, and I know what the seventh will be, and possibly the eighth.

I should say here that the only thing I can say with (some degree of) certainty is that A Light Shining will go forward. That’s the extent of the commitment – the publisher’s and mine. I don’t know what will happen after that. The story of Michael Kent and Sarah Hughes can stop with the second book, or it may go on.

A lot is riding on what happens with the second book.

A Light Shining is a very different book from Dancing Priest. The characters are largely the same, with the exception that one minor character in the first one becomes a much more prominent character in the second. And it is still the story of Michael and Sarah. But their story, their love story, becomes a much bigger story.

It originally had a different title, but I had to change it – it gave the story away and actually would fit the third manuscript better. I toyed with keeping “dancing” in the title somehow; I actually worked at it for an extended period. But I gave it up. It would have been a forced fit, and the idea of dancing does not really fit this manuscript at all.

The story takes a turn. It is still a love story – the story of Michael and Sarah will always be a love story – but the world and outside events invade their love story, and threaten to destroy it. Both Michael and Sarah will be forced to confront darkness.

What prompted me in 2005 to let the story out of my head and on to the computer screen was Hurricane Katrina. Dancing Priest has nothing to do with hurricanes, but it was a hurricane that led me to begin the writing of it.

For A Light Shining, part of it was born in that general writing experience, and part of it was born with the events of July 7, 2005 in London. While the story was still in my head, what happened on July 7 had a profound effect on where I was going with it.

So there I am, and there it (the manuscript) is. If everything goes forward as planned, A Light Shining will be published in September.

Photograph: Daybreak, by Bobby Mikul via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The Poetry of Worship

Hearts: quiet

Choir: white-collared in gray robes,

            lined processionally

Pulpit cloth: sunburst cross

    J.S. Bach Fugue in G Minor

News note in the bulletin:

Mob violence in India threatens

children in orphans’ home

Welcome: warm hello, Max

Confess: pardon assured

Our Father who art

We sing

   There is the glory

   Risen conqu’ring Son

Offering: submission

We sing

   The Lord is My Light

Luke to Theophilus:

   wait for the gift,

   promised

Did St. Patrick sing?

Not sure but we do

   Be Thou My Vision

Finale: Trumpet

Glory

Photograph: Hope. Coffee and Melody by Barb Ver Sluis via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Saturday Good Reads

Celebrating an anniversary. A commentary on newspapers. The death of author Ray Bradbury. Watching a boy’s first date. A science fiction poem. The innocence of trees. A wonderful about coming down from the mountain. And a whole lot more.

Prose

“Writers: Another Peculiar People of Which I Am One” by Jerry Barrett at Gerald the Writer.

“Timing is Everything” by Amanda Hill at Hill + Pen.

“The Face of Love” by Jay Cookingham at Soulfari.

“Why I hate writing, Part 13: katdish, dream crusher” by Kathy Richards at Katdish.

“A Pendulum of Freedom and Responsibility” by Jon Mertz at Thin Difference.

“The Road of Excess Leads to the Palace of Wisdom” by Anita Mathias at Dreaming Beneath the Spires.

“Sippican’s Patented Go/No Go Intertunel Newspaper Reading Gauge” by Greg Sullivan at Sippican Cottage.

“Following Christ in a World of Distractions (Ray Bradbury RIP)” by Christopher Smith at Slow Church.

“Table for Two” by Billy Coffey at What I Learned Today.

“When You Wonder if Love is Worth the Risk” by Jennifer Dukes-Lee at Getting Down with Jesus.

Poetry

“Celtic Chase” by Kathleen Overby at Almost Paradisical.

“Pour me, another,” “SpecialK” and “unCHARTED” by Brian Miller at Way Station One.

“Edith Sitwell” by D.S. Martin at Kingdom Poets.

“The Thorn” by B.K. McKenzie at Signed…BKM.

“The Innocence of Trees” by Maureen Doallas at Writing Without Paper.

“14” by Nancy Rosback at A Little Somethin’.

“In That Place” by Louise Gallagher at Recover Your Joy.

Paintings and Photographs

“Watching” and “Pretty in Pink” by Susan Etole at Just…A Moment.

“Overcast Yellowstone,” oil on canvas by Randall David Tipton at A Painter’s Process.

Songs

“Come Down from Your Mountains” by Chris Yokel.

Videos

“All Alone in the Night.”

Photograph:  Bicycles in Amsterdam by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Pleasantly Disturbed Friday

It’s time for another edition of random musings, idle thoughts, unrelated occurrences – in other words, it’s Pleasantly Disturbed Friday.

I’m currently reading Johnson’s Life of London: The People Who Made the City That Made the World by Boris Johnson, and it’s delightful. Johnson, the mayor of London, provides (relatively) short vignettes on 17 people (and one hotel) who had a major impact directly on London and more broadly on the world. You’ve heard of Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare, but what about John Wilkes, Robert Hooke and W.T. Stead? The book is history and biography and it’s full of insights on the city and its people. And yes, the title is a take-off of Boswell’s Life of (Samuel) Johnson – and Johnson is one of the 17 profiled. Review is coming Monday.

Yesterday, I had a telephone conversation with a good friend about the publishing business. We talked about publishers, genres, marketing of books, lack of marketing of books, expectations publishers have of authors and expectations authors have of publishers. We both agreed it was one crazy industry. But if you’re a writer and are published or want to publish, it’s what you have to work with.

Magazines sitting on my desk waiting to be read: two issues of Poetry (I’m behind); American Poet; Englewood Review; Oxford American; Writer’s Digest; Ravi Zacharias’s Just Thinking; and the 2012 fall planting guide from Dutch Gardens (summer hasn’t officially started and I’m already having to consider bulbs for the fall).

I biked Grant’s Trail in suburban St. Louis Wednesday after work. It was a beautiful evening. I’ve been gradually building up distance and speed (making sure my ruptured disk stays healed), and I’ve ridden the same 20-mile roundtrip a dozen times or more so far. The trail crosses two or three major streets, a couple of parks, Grant’s Farm (the Clydesdales!), several wooded areas and suburban subdivisions. It can make for an interesting ride – locally sponsored group rides where everyone is afraid of being left behind and so they run the rest of us off the trail; the professionals practicing for races who ignore red lights and trail etiquette; what look like small sticks or branches suddenly wiggling across the paved trail; beavers; suicidal rabbits; families of wild turkeys; and swarms of gnats at certain times of the day.

I forgot to mention that I love biking Grant’s Trail.

On Tuesday I was in downtown St. Louis at the London Tea Room (actually, outside the Team Room on the sidewalk) for our local observance of Queen Elizabeth's Jubilee. There was a raffle to raise funds for a children's disease research association, and one of the raffle items was that fine novel Dancing Priest.

Last week was a significant birthday for my wife; she turned at least 21 (that’s all I’m allowed to say on the subject). Good friends from New Orleans flew in and stayed with us for a few days, and we did a restaurant atop an old, former warehouse with a good view of the Arch and downtown St. Louis, the Lantern Festival at the Missouri Botanical Gardens (and it was COLD), the St. Louis Art Museum, an art fair, an art gallery or two (including Brother Mel’s); and a stroll around downtown Kirkwood, our little St. Louis suburb, during which two of us had an ice cream cone from Jeremiah’s Custard Stand (names withheld to protect the guilty) (but the vanilla was delicious) (from what I understand, of course). We had a great time.