Circles redux

At Bookslut, Colleen Mondor has some kind words about The Magic Circle in an end-of-year roundup.

(Alas, I remember saying to B. sometime last year something like "I think this novel might really be a big deal!" In fact it sank like a stone and was barely reviewed, though I got some very nice feedback from actual readers. The world is telling me to be a critic and essayist rather than a novelist, I think - and indeed it is my resolution for the coming year to write at least an essay or two after the manner of Hazlitt!)

Closing tabs

The reviewer from the Columbia Spectator was not at all keen on my novel; on a brighter note, the picture accompanying the article is very nice! We took it Wednesday morning on the steps of the gazebo in Sakura Park, as Grant's Tomb was closed off from visitors. Really my favorite days of all involve the production of quota on the order of 1500 words and 2-3 hours of fairly strenuous exercise, but I was thoroughly enjoying my week of minor limelight (i.e. photo shoot morning after book party!).

I'm in San Francisco - had a beautiful run this morning, did a spot of work on my taxes so that it wouldn't all await me when I get home Sunday evening and am heading out shortly to visit a friend and her baby. Will read tomorrow night at Writers With Drinks - come and say hello if you find yourself in the neighborhood.

Miscellaneous linkage:

Too much Twitter?

Gravy lakes of the world.

Fast and furious Jurassic life in the egg.

Best literary cat picture ever?

If you are in the neighborhood

come to Book Culture for my reading at 7 this evening....

Pre-drop

The Kirkus review is here. Official publication at twelve midnight, at which point you can get it here (for Kindle or for "real"). It probably won't be stocked in most bookstores, but your local store should be willing to order a copy for you if you prefer to get books that way, and here's a Powell's link for another option.

I am in Cayman till Thursday, and still haven't seen finished copies of the book (I think a box is waiting for me in New York), so it all seems slightly unreal. Will hope to see some of you at Book Culture a week from tomorrow. I've been writing bits and bobs for various guest blog posts and so forth, and I was looking back through old Light Reading posts (= external hard drive of the brain) for when I first read Julius Chambers' journalistic expose of abuses at the Bloomingdale Asylum.

That took me down the rabbit hole: I read back through all of the posts with the tag THE BACCHAE ON MORNINGSIDE HEIGHTS.

I started serious reading and research for the book in July 2010, which was a difficult month for other reasons; I started drafting it in December 2010; I had a full draft a couple months later (and also little cat Mickey, a happy addition to the Morningside Heights household), but I had to wait until the summer before I had enough time to pull it all together.

The provisionally final version I had in August 2011 (I accepted an offer from a publisher near the end of the calendar year) underwent significant subsequent revision right down to submission of the final version in July 2012, including a frenetic eleventh-hour rewrite of the final section from third-person to first-person voice. The story is basically one of regular bronchial ailments and brutal insomnia punctuated by the production of quota and a series of revisions that are always optimistically conceived and undertaken but that turn out not to have solved fundamental problems with the manuscript.

Writing a novel is not easy, I am happy with how this one came out but I think it will be wise if I don't write one again for quite a while!

(On the other hand, though, the intellectual excitement of the research and the thinking and the discovery of how things will really fit together properly is unbeatable, there's nothing else like it. I think that despite my resolution not to, I am pretty much stuck on writing another novel one of these days - but it will be good if it's a couple years before the next really compelling idea strikes, zombie apocalypse premise notwithstanding....)

Galleys!

Everything's coming up roses

Just a quick post to say that I started my first-person rewrite of BoMH part III on Monday night and I'm incredibly excited about it!  It's totally turned around how I feel about the book: there's always been a claustrophobic hothouse-type aspect to the story that I have disliked, and this opens things up in a funny and interesting way that I am very much enjoying.  Haven't been so interested and engaged by something I was writing since a day I stole in February to reimmerse myself in a piece I wrote a while ago about the 'minute particular' in life-writing and the novel.  (It's one of my projects for August to get that out as a real article.)

I was unusually frenzied in my work life from December through May, and then in the aftermath of that I was uncharacteristically grumpy from May pretty much right up until now.  I'm hoping this marks a real turning point. 

I had one of those days yesterday where everything just seems to go right (clearly this follows in the psychological aftermath of  near-magical Monday-night and Tuesday-morning writing sessions).  I walked down a block I don't usually traverse and found myself in the amazing surrounds of the flower market, which is really like something out of a fairy story; I had an amazing lunch (best conversation ever!) with my editor at the hyper-palindromic Ilili (the space is beautiful and the food is very good; I recommend the prix fixe lunch - we shared grape leaves and hummus for appetizers, then I had the grilled chicken salad and the "Ilili candy bar" for dessert); I generally avoid crosstown buses, as they are often slower than walking, but heat changes the equation and the M23 - I had known this but somehow forgot it - actually goes all the way to Chelsea Piers; I had an enjoyable run workout on the indoor track at Chelsea Piers followed by a dip in the pool; then I took the M23 again to the first meeting of a mindfulness-based stress reduction class I found online and that seems exactly what I've been looking for.

Dream novels

I spent the morning gnashing my teeth over the fifty-millionth edit of the first two-thirds of my novel (I'm waiting on editorial comments for a final iteration due Friday, but wanted to do what I could on my own first): it was clear I was only doing minor verbal tweaking, and that really it's done, but I couldn't not go through it again before getting to the last third. 

(It was not time wasted, as I did notice a couple things more clearly than I have before that may help me write a new final page to supersede the current one, which still isn't working.) 

This afternoon's work session was more satisfactory: I did a lot of new writing last week in that final third, and I felt as I went through both that the new stuff had largely fixed remaining narrative problems and that my interest was more thoroughly and therefore much more happily engaged here by the need to do substantive clean-up and streamlining. 

All in all, a useful day's work that also primed me to be perfectly appreciative of the last few paragraphs of Michael Chabon's NYRB on what reading Finnegan's Wake over the course of a year taught him about novel-writing.  Here is a bit I especially liked:

The Wake’s failure to render up a true account of the experience of dreaming, of the unconscious passage of a human consciousness across an ordinary night, was only a figure for a greater failure, a more fundamental impossibility. All the while that I was reading Joyce’s night book, I was busy at my day job: my Wake year was also my last spent at work on a novel whose composition had occupied me, on and off, from conception to completion, since the late 1990s.

As I groped my way toward the point at which Joyce’s hoop snake sinks its fangs into its own tail, the book that I was writing came ever nearer to its final state, and inevitably, habitually, as I came down the home stretch I began to look back, to compare the book at hand, four-hundred-plus pages of English prose sentences, in Times 12, double-spaced, to the book as I had first glimpsed it: that lovely apparition, hovering and beautiful as a vision of the New Jerusalem, wordless, perfect. Set alongside my original vision—that dream novel—the book I’d managed to carry across the span of years and drafts was at best, as always, a mere approximation, an unruly neighborhood into which had crowded the ganse mishpoche of nouns, verbs, pronouns, and adjectives. The idea for a book, the beckoning fair prospect of it, is the dream; the writing of it is the breakfast-table recitation, groping, approximation, and ultimately, always, a failure. It was not like that at all.

Saturday update

I was grumpy this morning when my exercise plans were thwarted, but have just had a very productive hour and a half session of brainstorming (it is a ridiculous word, but descriptive) and writing bits of new draft at the library.  A lot of work to be done between now and Thursday, but I think it will work.

Miscellaneous light reading: Christa Faust's highly enjoyable Supernatural tie-in novel, Coyote's Kiss.  I wonder how much this sort of work pays?  Really I have no room for it in my life, but I would love to write a Fringe tie-in.  I guess that is why people write fanfic, for free...

In other television-related news, I continue to spend an inordinate number of hours watching House (currently near end of Season 7).  I am not sure why it's so addictive, but I'm reminded of how when I first read Master and Commander, I then couldn't rest until I had read all of Patrick O'Brian's novels about Aubrey and Maturin (I would walk in to Cross-Campus Library in New Haven and check out another four or five and race home to devour and return - I think I read all twenty over the course of about five days, which is slightly grotesque).  The Aubrey-Maturin friendship is built on the same sort of chassis as the House-Wilson relationship, even if the latter is more obviously Holmesian.

"V is the Velocipede"

Back at home and on the grid, after detours to Cambridge and Philadelphia.  Finally sent out the long-overdue Austen essay yesterday evening: a considerable relief.

(I seem to have been operating at about 30% of usual horsepower, due to some combination of residual fatigue and other distractions.  It is ridiculous that I let that piece take up so much time....)

Next up: final revision of The Magic Circle!  I have a hard deadline of Thursday, June 28 for getting it to my editor; he'll then go through one more time and I'll do quick turnaround on any further suggestions around the 4th of July holiday.  The quality of his comments is really exceptional, and I have already said here that I feel he almost deserves a co-author credit, given how many good ideas he's given me.  So: ten days of work, counting today.  What I did first today at the library was to go through all of his pages of notes along with the manuscript itself, fixing the 80% of stuff that's minor and marking remaining points that will require more attention.  This evening, I will do some pondering.  Tomorrow I'll get started again properly at the beginning, with bulk of energy devoted to really significantly revamping the final section, which still isn't quite working.

Saw As You Like It at Shakespeare in the Park; it was quite good, with a Western stockade-and-country-music theme that reminded me of Frontierland at Disney.  Other highlights of the weekend: the Butterfly Garden in the Academy of Natural Sciences and my first time on board my brother and sister-in-law's first boat at Fox Grove Marina.

Light reading around the edges: N. K. Jemisin's The Killing Moon and The Shadowed Sun; and Gideon Lewis-Kraus's A Sense of Direction: Pilgrimage for the Restless and the Hopeful, which must be one of the most unflattering self-portraits in the history of memoir-writing but which is nonetheless an extremely worthwhile and interesting book.

Bonus links:

My last academic book got a good review.

This made me think of some of the games in my novel (it would also make a good basis for some sort of TV episode); link courtesy of Bill Anders.

A nineteenth-century alphabet at the Beinecke.

24 hours behind schedule

Par for the course with this sort of thing.  Visitors over the weekend complicated work schedule.  Can't work such long stints as I used to in the old days, when I would toil maniacally from 8am to 4pm, nap for a couple of hours then work again from 8pm to 3am: it was exactly that sort of work habit that led over many years to huge amounts of insomnia and anxiety, and I've been trying recently not to work after about eight at night unless absolutely unavoidable.  Next three nights it will be unavoidable, I think, though I will have to see how it goes.

• Still have six little slips of paper that need writing/amplifying as real inserts or passages because they were too complicated for me to write easily (an imitation New Yorker Talk of the Town piece about the BoMH game; a cryptic conversation between two characters, overheard by a third; notes that just say "present is a game and game play precipitates an argument that moves forward rel. of Ruth and Anna" and "lipstick/bullet returns in pt. 3" respectively; "old and new signs in Morningside Park," which I remember seeing and which was also noted for me by E. but which I now can't precisely locate in my memory, so that I need to walk back over there and remind myself where they are; one note even more inchoate that I am not sure I will act upon)
• Haven't yet started typing revisions
• But have written up all other new 'bits' from my notecards

Today I will basically be knocked out of action for book work from 10:30am till 7pm (last Clarissa seminar, hasty commenting on assignments I'm hoping to give back in lecture, Austen lecture, office hours, allergy shots at Columbus Circle plus quick meetup with catsitter to hand over keys).  But I have to have a second work session this evening; if I don't get a good chunk of these edits typed in before I go to bed tonight, I'm not going to be happy!

Tomorrow has annoying bits and bobs scheduled (wish it were a complete blank): 8am doctor's appointment to get prescription refills on asthma stuff; noon department meeting; 2-5pm blocked out for meeting on college honors, though I think it won't take that long; 5pm meeting with a student.  I don't teach on Wednesday till 2:40, and it's a shorter day for me than Monday, so I should be able to keep working well into the evening so long as I get my packing done as well.  (Need to bring books for two different pieces I'll be working on while I'm at B.'s, a short piece for Bookforum that will require 4-5 tomes and the Blackwell Companion essay on Austen that means I probably will bring my complete set of Austen World's Classics volumes.) 

Flight Thursday requires departure from home by 5:45am, so though I should be in Cayman by lunchtime, it pretty much knocks that out as a workday given near absence of sleep.  I will prefer to email the final manuscript to my editor before I leave for the airport, but I can do my final pass through the manuscript on Friday if I need to and still be able to get it out before the end of the business day.

Pictures from an institution

I finished the initial big edit this morning.  It will sound overly intricate if I try and explain my method in words - to me it seemed the simplest way of handling a complex revision situation!  But: I went through the manuscript from start to finish, doing quite a bit of copy-editing and some story streamlining, editing where I could but marking anything that was too complicated or demanding for me to figure out on the spot on an external card or piece of paper, coded by color depending on what strand of the story it belonged to:

Green (4): Ruth's game "Trapped in the Asylum."
Blue (12): Anna's game "Places of Power."
Red (2): "The Bacchae on Morningside Heights." 
Yellow (12): posts for Anna's blog, titled Anna's Aphorisms. 
White (9): general story stuff. 

That means I now have 37 little 'bits' to write, some just a couple sentences of what E. calls 'counter-history' for a neighborhood spot and others more complex in terms of needing to establish something about a relationship or a plot development or even serve as an entire new scene (only a couple of these I hope).  About to go out and tromp round the neighborhood for a few final physical details; will probably be writing these 'bits' over the next three days.

The novel falls into three parts, so once I've finished with the new 'bits' for part I, I'll go ahead and start typing in those revisions (the goal is to have written precise enough inserts so that it really is merely transcription, with only occasional need for an extra sentence or two of transition or alteration to reconcile contradictions).  I work best when I am away from the internet, which is why I prefer to keep things in the realm of pen and hard copy for as high a proportion of my work time as possible.  I will pick off the 'easy' bits first rather than doing them either by category or in order from start to finish; once they get written, they will get clipped or stapled to the relevant page of the manuscript.

So: Try and finish all new writing by Sunday morning, type the remaining edits on Sunday and Monday, print out the full new version Monday night, perform fiendishly intense copy-edit on Tuesday, type revisions and do a final proof before sending to E. on Wednesday afternoon.  This schedule may be impossibly compressed; if I have to, I'll take the manuscript with me to Cayman on Thursday and finish up with proofreading and corrections on Friday during the day.  I would prefer to be done by Wednesday evening but Friday end of day will certainly do.

I am teaching the final tenth or so of Clarissa on Monday and need to reread those pages this weekend (roughly 100K words); also have to give two lectures this coming week on Austen's Persuasion (I've taught the course before, so I don't need to write them fresh, but 'reinhabiting' old lecture notes is its own obligation, and I prefer to reread even very familiar novels before class).  A morning doctor's appointment and an afternoon with a good many meetings scheduled on Tuesday, so work time will be unfortunately curtailed; I also need to get allergy shots on Monday and Wednesday as I will be out of town the whole subsequent week.  Slightly overdid it on exercise on Wednesday and Thursday, so am taking today as wholly devoted to novel revision; it gave me a pang to skip midday boot camp downtown, and midday spin class, but there is something sore at the back of my left knee, it needed the rest....

Closing tabs

No Pulitzer for fiction this year.  It wasn't a suitable shortlist, I think: only one 'real' novel, the other two of the three were a reprinted novella from almost ten years ago and a posthumously cobbled-together book.  It is an oddity of group decision-making that this sort of situation can easily lead to a deadlock, especially when two different groups are responsible for the shortlist and the final determination.

Pitching a 33 1/3 book. (Via.) I've long had a yen to write one of these, but I have too many other projects lined up already, I think.

One of the 'places of power' for my novel rewrite: I will have to see what I can do with this.

I want this book!  (Phenomenon of really useful out-of-print books = prohibitive pricing; I will get it from the library....)

Last but not least: Japanese penguin goes shopping!

Update

Slogging away at novel revisions in short frequent sittings.  Think I am still on track to finish for the 25th.  Ready for semester to be over!

Miscellaneous light reading around the edges: Tobias Buckell's Arctic Rising; Garth Nix's Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz; and an exceptionally charming self-published novel by a talented newcomer whose book I came across because I fell for his wife's triathlon training blog last year when she and I were both training for Ironman Coeur d'Alene.  (She successfully completed the race; alas, I didn't make it to the start due to a particularly bad bout of bronchitis.)  So, strongly recommended: M. H. Van Keuren's Rhubarb.  I think comparisons of a book in this sort of vein (aliens, paranormal radio, pie!) will inevitably be first of all to Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker books; there's a little bit of the feel of the appealing TV series Supernatural; but really it's a very fresh and appealing novel in a mode I especially enjoy.

Bonus link:  crab computing!  (And more here.)

An update

Six days in a row of chipping away at the thing have been beneficial.  I've finished a line edit all the way through, and the manuscript is now bristling with post-its in places where I need to draw out or amplify or weave together different threads.

Today I made this chart (click for a fuller view!), with color-coding for the three main games the characters develop and play: Trapped in the Asylum, Places of Power and The Bacchae on Morningside Heights.  (The yellow pen I used for the fourth element, a blog called Anna's Aphorisms, has not reproduced very vividly.)  The colors show very clearly the extent to which I pick up a game and then let it drop; I need it all to be much more thoroughly interspersed, including some new material that still needs to be written.  One afternoon very soon, too, I will go and wander around Morningside Park again and pin down locations for the reconceived final showdown.

I have what seems to me a fairly natural and in that sense 'hard' deadline of April 25 to send the book back to my editor; that's the last day I'm teaching, too, so it's not exactly intuitive, but I'm going to B.'s the day after for a week (if I don't go right when I finish teaching, I then can't get away until after graduation, so it's better to seize the moment), and I also have a book review due on the 30th and an academic essay due May 15 that I think I will need to clear before it makes sense to come back to the novel.  So, two weeks of intensive revision: I've bought a lot of pens and post-its and other supplies and am ready to dig in. . . .

Over the hump of the week?

Radio silence here largely due to the fact that I've been so frazzled that sharing was contraindicated!  Really I have just been disastrously busy from mid-February to late March, and I always pay the price in terms of insomnia and stress.  However I had a very useful day yesterday knocking things off a school-y to-do list; today's still busy with school stuff, but I then have four days completely clear of all obligations (Thursday-Sunday) and a lighter load than usual for next Monday, so I think I am finally going to be able to dig back in on the wretched novel, which has been fruitlessly calling for my attention in the face of an extremely demanding work schedule!

(Absolute priority once I clear this next bunch of deadlines and finish the teaching semester: lower stress levels!)

Miscellaneous light reading: Jonathan Mahler's Kindle Single Death Comes to Happy Valley: Penn State and the Tragic Legacy of Joe Paterno (a bit luridly written as well as titled, and not reported from interviews but more like a synopsis of published sources, but informative and worthwhile); Barry Graham's The Book of Man; Lewis Shiner's Dark Tangos. 

Have also burned through most of the first two seasons of The Good Wife on the theory that it might be good if I spent evenings not just reading books so compulsively, but really good TV episodes are at least as addictive as light reading, so I am not sure that this is any kind of a solution.  Stayed up late last night reading the first half of Tim Parks's odd but compelling Teach Us to Sit Still: A Skeptic's Guide to Health and Healing, recommended to me recently by a colleague to whom I was lamenting my lack of work-life balance.  (Afterwards, though, I realized that it's not really the right term: I don't want work-life balance, I just want to be able to work a lot and be calm and quiet the rest of the time!)

Bonus link: Lee Child's lessons for success.

Update

OK, that's good, I have now finished the three-hour work session that I really should have had before I put that messy marked-up tea-stained manuscript away for some weeks.  All old revisions are typed up, and I'm printing out the full draft so that I can work on the hard copy rather than on-screen (no internet distractions, and gives me a better sense of proportion about how parts relate to whole, pacing, etc.).  I have a good new set of comments from Ed on the rewritten first half, too, so I think I'll start with that/those.

This revision will happen, come hell, high water or histamines....

(One obstacle to single-minded focus, aside from question of regular teaching and other academic responsibilities, is that I need to go to San Antonio for four nights next weekend for ASECS, which will be demanding: I am giving a short paper and am also on a roundtable, but it's more the travel and the socializing that knock you out!)

Will shortly go out for a run - it is if possible an even nicer day today than yesterday!

Head back in the game

I was very glum yesterday: I had had such visions of productivity in the way of pages and exercise for my spring break, and in the event it is fully halfway over and I have essentially done no pages and no exercise!  Debilitating insomnia on Saturday and Sunday nights, and then on Monday morning it came clear to me that really I wasn't just having the stomach-ache and slight queasiness of insufficient sleep, but really a minor stomach ailment that led to me spending the day in bed.  Didn't even feel well enough to read a book, which is saying something.  Stomach-ache has finally lifted this morning, fortunately, and I think I will run for an hour later on.

In short: I guess I've just been working too hard, and that my plans for the break (it's only one week) were unrealistic.  Just now I am finally about to dig in on the dreaded novel revisions.  Need to get my head back in that game!  This, unfortunately, is quite literally (only it was on the chair visible in the background - I have just transferred the stack to newly cleared desk) the state in which I left it: I put it aside a month ago when pressures of work became too great.  Today will be devoted to figuring out where the hell I left off and trying to reduce the pile of papers I actually need to attend to.  It will be good, really....


Some tabs to close:

Access all areas?

Tradecraft for the aspirational publishing reporter.

The virtues of writing a textbook or synthesis at mid-career.

Last but not least, a strong list of finalists for the Young Lions Fiction Award at the New York Public Library!

More tabs

Fiendishly busy through the end of next week, and a little worried about snowballing March commitments also - but it's only two and a half weeks from now until spring break, at which point I will dig my head down hard into novel revisions...

A great profile of Vanessa Veselka.

A feast of sounds at the British Library.

Dave Lull kindly forwarded Tom Shippey's amusing 1982 review of Martin Amis and others on videogames.

On Friday night (I'm giving a talk in Boston on Thursday) I am going to stay with a dear old friend and see this production of one of my favorite plays!

Have hardly even had any time to read a novel, too much other work and other reading, though I did reread Diana Wynne Jones's Enchanted Glass on Friday night as most soothing available option and also, on the subway, Charlie Williams's appealing latest installment of bouncer noir, Graven Image.

Going underwater

Sheila Heti interviews Joan Didion for the Believer. (And I hesitate to link to it, since I think much of it is preposterous, but I did find that Caitlin Flanagan's piece on Didion in the Atlantic held my attention....)

The Flatt Prize will award $1000 to the winner of its short-story competition.

I have a minor but unpleasant cold; hoping to make a bit of headway this afternoon with the second half of the novel revisions (I sent a new version of the first half to my editor on Tuesday, which was good).  February is going to be a demanding month, and so is March, and April always is because of structural things about the shape of the school year, so I am endeavoring to push hard but also to pace myself for what is essentially an ongoing challenge that runs through the middle of May!

Commitment strategies

I'm now full of regret that I didn't push harder on novel revisions over the winter break, as it is indeed very difficult to get work done steadily once the semester starts and with the additional commitment to a demanding fitness regimen!  I am trying to remember that I was working as hard as I could manage through a spell of rather low spirits and the accumulated tiredness of the fall semester, but still - this is now exactly the sort of work overload situation that I am trying to avoid in order not to find myself so wiped out in the first place!...

I think I have to be done with this revision before the week of Feb. 13 (that week I've got a book review due, a guest lecture at the New School and a dissertation defense, and I'm giving a talk out of town the following week, so it's pretty much a guarantee of no mental or practical space for my own writing for the whole middle stretch of the month).  I want to be able to get one more round of editorial feedback and also let the new draft sit and gel for a few weeks before I come back to it for a good final round of revision over my spring break in March.  If I say here that I intend this, it will help make it happen....

I've got a few interesting books to read for additional fillips of research and thinking.  Ken Wark kindly sent me a copy of his book Gamer Theory, and I plucked the classic Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational from a shelf in Butler the other evening (it was nearly adjacent to this volume which I could not resist checking out as well, though I am not sure when I'll get around to reading it).