Ooops. Life Flies

When life flies out of control, is it a good thing or a bad thing?

Too busy? Not busy enough?

So busy or possibly just so scattered I forget it’s my day to blog. Sorry.

Too many choices, like having to decide between leftovers: a slice of pizza or clam sauce spaghetti or chicken soup for lunch.

I had shoulder surgery a few weeks ago and it’s amazing how much of my work time is now taken up with visits to docs and physical therapists. I took a couple days off for recuperation and  have never caught up. My double yellow Beetle lies dead in the driveway, unstarted for months. Maybe today I’ll call AAA.  I have two full manuscripts and bits of others to critique, and  my busiest class starting again in a week. And an ebook scan of the first Jake Samson book sitting unproofed and therefore unsent to the publisher and therefore un-E-ed.

What’s a woman to do? We split the pizza and spaghetti, but the other stuff just doesn’t split like leftovers.

I’m not bad at prioritizing. I am, however, bad at working 24 hours a day. Or even 12. Turn down work? Sure. Have you seen the price of groceries? The price of the kind of help you need around the house when one of you has no knee and the other has no shoulder?

But there’s a huge bright side to all this. Even though I’m part of the 47 percent, my dependence on government goes no further than the social security I’ve paid into for decades.  And I’m still paying income taxes. That’s a thrill.

Even better, I’m not dependent on Sheldon Adelson.

The Great Unpublished

I’ve been teaching and consulting a long time now. More than 20 years. It’s been everything from delightful to irritating to way too often, heartbreaking.

Over those two decades I’ve gotten to know some brilliant writers. Brilliant is a big word. Unpublished is an even bigger one.

Yes, I have seen a number of my students go on to be published, some with enormous success. Which of course makes me proud beyond anything I deserve. But there are so many who are so good and just can’t break through that wall of wary agents and editors.

It seems as though  agents are treading water waiting for a blockbuster, probably nonfiction. They know that most novels aren’t going to make them enough money to stay in business. And the same with publishers. The big ones have made so many bad decisions they’re gun-shy. The small ones can’t afford to gamble. Bust that block, or die.

New kinds of markets have given us more chances, but I’m not seeing a general awareness that there are, for instance, e-book publishers who won’t charge them anything and will, in fact, pay royalties and do a little promotion, and smaller print publishers who might like what they’re writing and take a chance on it. 

Some of “my” writers have given up, I can only hope I’ll see them in a class again or asking for one-to-one help, giving it another try. Some of them  keep plugging away and patching their clothes with rejection letters. In the last few years, many have stopped spending their time and emotional capital writing unread or unappreciated query letters and synopses They’ve gone directly to self-publishing, where, without a lot of Joan-Rivers-like self-promotion, they watch  their wonderful books sink into the overpopulated swamp of  who-cares-if-I-don’t know-what-a comma-is. There are writers who make it work. More power to them. But it’s hard, and ego-scarring.

The good writers suffer, and so does literature.

 Here are four of the ones whose work I’ve seen. There are many more. Fictional names, but real talents.

Arlie. A literary writer in the Anne Tyler vein. Her characters are astonishingly vivid, her stories wide-ranging in geography, and in human emotion and frailties. Australia is a favorite setting for her books and the reader comes to know the place well. Arlie has been in my workshops many times over many years and has written three brilliant novels. When I’d see a chapter from her in the class email, I couldn’t wait to read it. She has tried and failed to get an agent or a publisher and is still unpublished.

Manny. A funny and creative writer and artist who is working on a third book. Dark humor with a sharp edge of zany. Crazy, scheming, wildly-alive characters careening through the streets of New York. Still looking for an agent.

Charlotte. Gorgeous writing, great characters, fascinating stories. She’s written several books in my classes, one a beautifully researched page turner of a historical novel, another a suspense-whodunit  that mixes a character’s eerie and disturbing prescience with murder. No agent, no publisher.

Joe. Finishing one book and starting another in a series. An original take on a society exactly like ours except for one element that shifts everything and influences everything. An exciting thriller with a team of  investigators the reader actually cares about doing dangerous, brave, and—here it is: intelligent things. A terrific book and the second one looks like it’s going to be even better. He’s looking for an agent.

Like I said, four of many. The right agent, the right publisher, the right publicity, any of these people could be bestsellers, or at least should be. Perceived marketability trumps quality. Perceived, that is, by fallible people who seem to work with ever-shifting formulas.

Hard on the writers. Hard on the teacher who believes in them and works like crazy to help them. And hard on a body of literature shrinking like a cashmere sweater in a hot dryer. 

How Eddie Came To Our House

When my cat Prince AKA Pinky died, we thought we’d wait for another cat to find us. That was how I’d gotten Pinky. He lived two doors down and although he wasn’t abused he was living outside and pretty much ignored. He was 12 years old. He had a great deal to say about the inconvenience of rain and eventually, after a close encounter with a car, he came to live with me. For two good years.

When Polly, Lefty, Sophie, Pinky and I moved to our new house we learned there was a cat who was a regular visitor. The previous owner said she was a shy stray, and wouldn’t go to anyone but him. And then when he moved he couldn’t find her. He said he’d come and get her even though he didn’t really have a place for her.  Wait until you have a house, I said, and  I promised to leave food on the kitchen table—the dog and cat door is in the kitchen—and she came in pretty much every night to eat. We caught one quick glimpse of her in six months.

So when Pinky left us we hoped she’d decide that we’d paid our way and would agree to get to know us better. Didn’t happen.

Then friends living out on semi-rural Peterson Road, on the other side of Petaluma, told us they had a little visitor, too. He’d been sneaking in for the last few nights to eat. He was sweet and friendly but they couldn’t keep him. Please, they begged. Okay, so he hadn’t found us, but this was the next best thing, wasn’t it? They sent an irresistible cellphone video. Pathetic mewing. Beautiful gray and white coat.

I worried a little. Lefty the springer spaniel was very casual about cats but my cockapoo Sophie isn’t casual about anything.  I was afraid she’d harass him, chase him because she didn’t know him. And then there were all the usual cat worries. Terrible illnesses, huge vet bills, adopting someone who had to be quarantined for life.

Our friends begged and pressed—they loved him, couldn’t bear to cart him off to a rescue group.

Irrepressible memories of my sweet pit mix Annie, found starving on the street, taken in by two women who couldn’t keep her, hours way from being killed at the San Francisco shelter. She was my honey for 18 years.

So we went to see the cat they called Buddy.

He came bouncing into their house on gigantic white paws. A gorgeous long-legged youngster. Adolescent for sure.  A handsome narrow face with more hair than we really wanted puffing out from his cheeks and tail. His mewing was not pathetic. That was his sound

They fed us dinner and handed us a carrier.

In love but apprehensive, we took him home.

Hello cat, nice to meet you, Lefty said. Yawn.

Hi, cat! Sophie said, smiling.  Will you hurt me? Want to play? Gee you’re nice! Can I kiss you on the nose?

Okay, said Buddy.

About a week later, after  $500 in vet bills for blood and other tests, shots, and neutering, we know these things about him. He’s healthy, friendly, funny, smart, and somewhere between six months and a year old. The cat we think we’ve been feeding is coming around more,  so we’re guessing  he’s nice to other cats, too.

And he likes to follow me around the garden and help inspect the beans and tomatoes.

It’s so good to have a cat again.

Why A Little Fig Tree Is A Big Deal

 

We bought a small fig tree the other day. It’s about four feet tall, a beautiful shape, with three infant figs hidden along the stems.

Big deal, right?

Yes, it is.

I haven’t had a fig tree since 1991, when I left  my house in Oakland and moved to Fairfax, in Marin County. The Oakland place was my first house. A tiny thing with a couple of other hovels in the yard that eventually, scrounged dollar by scrounged dollar, became a cottage and an office. I bought it for a song—I think it was “Pennies from Heaven”—in 1978.

Before I even moved in I knocked down a wall between the two front rooms, bringing the total number down to three and a skinny built-in porch.   I hand-carried two-by-fours from a demolition site on the corner and used them to build a fence across the front to keep my two dogs and two cats safe.

There was an over-pruned fig in the yard and a couple of healthier ones hanging over the side fence from a neighbor’s yard.

My standard poodle, Pepper, used to sit on the little front porch and listen for the figs to hit the ground. He loved them. He loved fruit and vegetables and, it turned out, pate.  Pepper and I lived there happily with his adopted brother, a miniature named Smokey, and my two cats, Yossarian and Sapphie, a brother-sister team I’d brought from Chicago, along with Pepper, in a rented van that crashed outside of Santa Rosa New Mexico. I wasn’t driving.

All four of them got old in that house and are buried in the yard. Pepper at 16, blind Smokey at the same age a few months after Pepper, who was his father, brother, and guide dog, and the cats—she at age 20, he at 16.

I wrote my first book in the office hovel, after using the last of the two-by-fours to give it an actual floor.

My cousin, a brother to me really, came to live there, fleeing Minneapolis and the wife who had drawn him into her Colombian drug trade, fleeing his shame and embarrassment over his time in  Leavenworth.

I gave him the office hovel and moved my writing to the built in porch.  It took him years to kill himself with drugs and alcohol. Some time after I’d cut him loose.

I was living in that house when Dan White killed Mayor Moscone and Harvey Milk, and the young president of the board of supervisors, now the senior senator, made the announcement, choking on her tears.

We had the World Series earthquake. My mother died. I got and survived breast cancer twice.  I pined for the woman I’d left behind in Chicago, who is here with me now.

I wrote several more books.

My then partner wanted a child and we found a beautiful baby girl who is a grown woman now.

I ate homemade fig jam. I grew vegetables in the big garden. I hung the wash on a line in the backyard. I worked at various things. I wrote.

I listened to the figs fall to the ground.

And so yes, having a fig tree is a very big deal.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Agent, Whisper Thy Name

Why is it I’m reluctant to talk about agents?

Those of us who are long in the tooth—I look in the mirror; am I? Are they longer than they used to be?—remember a time when there were a lot of things people didn’t talk about or talked about only in whispers. No one just said the word cancer, for instance. It could only be whispered. I remember my mother telling me the son of a friend was “a little bit <whisper>queer.” Which is like a little bit pregnant. Which was yet another word that was often whispered. Yes, I digress.

When someone whispered the word “cancer” the mention was usually accompanied by a shake of the head, a sigh, a quiet “oy.”

That’s how I feel about agents. I don’t currently have one. See? I just couldn’t say it without the “currently.” When someone asks if I have one I often say simply “The best one I ever had died.” It’s true. And then I got another one and like a love affair that should never have happened, it just didn’t work out.  I had written a scifi book instead of another mystery and when I went looking for an agent I didn’t have the who-you-know edge. Finally I just sold it myself.

I don’t think I’m the only one in this leaky boat. Mention “agent” to a lot of writers these days and you get the sideways glance, the twitch, the mumbled evasion.

Now I’m wrapping up The Pepsi Cola Ninth Street Grocery  and starting another Jake Samson mystery. As terrified and confused as the agent population seems to be, I think there are a couple of people I’d like to talk to about these very different books and I might just do that but I won’t tell anyone.

It’s too embarrassing and depressing when you get letters that say things like “I love this book but I don’t think I  can represent it but then again I’d like to but I won’t. But I could be wrong. I hope I’m not wrong. Oh, well, Who knows?”

 

The books we keep for memory’s sake

Books are like songs and smells. They evoke memories of rooms, faces, voices, quick visions of little scenes in our own lives.

I’m not talking about the books we write, but the ones we’ve read. The ones we hold onto. The ones that pile up, collect dust, slip out of mind for years at a time.

And then we move, or–God forbid—clean, or wonder what should go in the yard sale, and wham! There it is. An old love found again.

I look around my office at the shelves.

The Far Lands by James Norman Hall—Suddenly I’m propped on my bed pillows on James Avenue in Minneapolis, algebra homework pushed aside. A historical fiction of the first migrations from Asia to the Hawaiian islands. Someone had left it at the high school lost and found. I read it twice that year alone.

I’ve been carrying around  Leigh Brackett’s The Long Tomorrow since I lived in that walkup around the corner from the el in Chicago. It’s one of the few old scifi books I’ve read more than once and when I pulled it out of the moving box a month ago, a paperback brown with age,  I promised myself I’d read it again. When you Google Leigh Brackett you get a long list of the movies she worked on as well as the books. She was versatile, brilliant, great.

Ginger Man. Catch-22. same apartment with its tiny back porch bedroom. The apartment where I lost my heart and my virginity to two different people.

The Doomsters by Ross Macdonald. One of those writers who, along with Christie, drew me into the genre. I’m sitting on that awful brown couch in my furnished rental near Lincoln Park, thinking I would like to write something like that someday.

Journey to A Woman, by Ann Bannon. The Well of Loneliness. Same place. A pair of black kittens climbing the drapes.

I pick up an Anne Tyler book and I’m sitting on my deck in Fairfax, California. I look up from the book and I see Mount Tamalpais.

Elmore Leonard brings back the little house in Oakland. My living room. A philodendron plant hanging a foot from my head that banged into the wall when a small earthquake hit. The same room, hit by a much bigger quake, and the yortzite  candle I had just brought home from my mother’s funeral, a month before, flew off the top of the Franklin stove and shattered.

Maybe someone just picked up one of my books and remembers a warm day at the beach, a date that ended in love, a house where she felt safe, a day when she was happy. And yes, I’m writing this on Valentine’s day.

The Case of the Flaming Fiat

When I write another Jake Samson book, I think I’ll give him a 1976 Fiat Spider Roadster.

I’m hoping it won’t be in memoriam.

I don’t know what I’ll do about his ’64 Ford Falcon. When I got tired of his ’53 Bel Air I had some fool steal it and wreck it. Jake is probably tired of his Falcon by now. Not much power or style.

Maybe I’ll have him find his Fiat like I found mine, on Craigslist. For sale very cheap by a group of Fiat enthusiasts operating out of a barn in Petaluma. A beautiful little convertible.  With a new top and tires and two new used front seats. And spare used door panel upholstery.  I’d been on my usual quest for a ’53 Studebaker Starlight Coupe. I had one in college and loved it. It once started after two winters in an unheated garage in Minnesota and carried me safely through a 400-mile blizzard all the way to Chicago. But reality kept getting in the way of that quest. I can no longer afford the wonderful car I paid $200 for in the Sixties.

And there was the Fiat. $1700. Of course it would need work. Thousands  of dollars later, it ran perfectly and was gorgeous on the inside. The outside, not so much. Badly in need of paint. I reupholstered the door panels myself, doing probably permanent damage to my too-damned-old-for-this right shoulder. I ignored the taunts of the fools who said Fiat stood for Fix It Again Tony.  I named her Fifi.

During the months in Bodega Bay I hardly drove it. Too cold out there most of the time for a convertible. And something went awry with its carburetor or possibly its accelerator. So I was eager to get it back to Petaluma. Get it fixed, get it painted, and drive around like I lived in Santa Barbara.

Then there was the move. Which despite the admittedly amateur mover’s estimate, took two days. Pure hell. And on the second day, he delivered the Fiat from Bodega Bay. I saw it coming down the street. Something looked odd.

He screeched to a stop in front of the house and leaped out screaming, “It’s on fire!”

Of course the garden hose hadn’t been unloaded yet. The movers threw open the trunk and  ran back and forth with pans of water until a neighbor showed up with a fire extinguisher. They filled the trunk with foam, and in their panic, dropped the keys in the trunk and closed it. I couldn’t find my spares. But that’s what locksmiths are for, right?

The problem was the muffler, breathing fire up poor Fifi’s back end.  With any luck, a new muffler and a scouring will take care of it. I’m proud of her for not exploding.

I think it she would be a perfect car for Jake.

What, me? Teach?

Make a living as a writer? Oy.

A crazy idea. I would starve to death in an attic somewhere.

Be a teacher, they told me. It’s good, steady work, respectable, safe—hah!—and, my mother said, “you can write in the summer.”

I was a teenager when we had that conversation, and I knew everything. So even though I had loved many of my teachers, enjoyed talking in front of a class, in fact suspected that I might indeed like teaching, I decided I would never do it. Never. I didn’t want to be safe. I was going to wear a black beret and black tights and a black turtleneck and puff my Pall Malls through a long black cigarette holder. I wasn’t afraid of risk. My writer’s life would be full of danger and excitement.

I wasn’t wrong about that, anyway.

I wanted to write fiction but necessity demanded I do all kinds of writing to support the habit. Journalism. That didn’t work out. Advertising. Lies of all kinds. Hated that.

I finally got published by a major house. And discovered, at various panels and signings, I liked talking about the art of fiction, especially to aspiring novelists. Although I didn’t know much about writing or being a writer, I could help people who knew even less. And they were grateful! When had a vice president in charge of marketing, advertising and pyramid schemes ever said Thank You?

I felt the pull of people who had books in their head. Who oozed creativity and passion, had something to say and were overwhelmed by the need to say it. They had so much to give me. Could I really give something valuable to them? How satisfying it would be.

Hm, I thought. Damned if that doesn’t sound like teaching. Maybe I should give it a try. At first, live classes. Then manuscript consulting. Then the web. Online classes. I love it. I love my students. I write and I teach and so many parts of me are satisfied.

I wish my mother had lived to say I told you so.

Now I Can Make Something Up

When I was 12 years old, riding endlessly around the block on my Roadmaster bike, I decided that I would be a writer when I grew up. The catalyst for that promise to myself: the corner grocery store my family had lived above for three years. Our store. The Ninth Street Grocery, in a poor South Minneapolis neighborhood.

And what an adventure life was there. We were no longer tucked away in our safe North Side ghetto, in a private house. We were public figures in a strange exposed way. The store people. “The Jews.” We were trying to make it into the middle class. A lot of the people in that neighborhood never would. Mostly because of demon rum. Well, more like 3.2 beer. Which we sold. By the case on Sundays when the blue laws quit at noon.

Once I got past the early name-calling and half-hearted punches on the arm, I had a wonderful time and a lot of great, adventurous friends. I started out working at the candy counter and by 12, I was trusted to use the big meat slicer and even be in the store nearly by myself, with Daddy napping in the back room.

That store was my first real exposure to the lives of people I hadn’t met before. Some of our customers were working class like much of my own family but there were also the abjectly poor and hopeless and even illiterate. A range of “other” that got me thinking, circling that long block on my bike and promising myself that I would write a book about the store before I died. To explain my new neighbors to my old ones. To tell the stories that hid behind those falling-down houses.

So I made myself a promise.

Then I blinked. And the next thing I knew, I’d been a working writer for forty years, had produced thirteen other books, and still hadn’t made good. The damned promise haunted me. Life was flashing by. I could die! I had to do it.

That was five years ago.

I’d saved notes. Lots of them. Bits and pieces I started writing in the Sixties when the memories were still relatively fresh. A big messy pile of history. And as I read through it, trying to create order out of terrifying chaos, I remembered even more. And then it started becoming a book.

Hard to believe, but it looks like I might finish this year.

I feel a great sense of triumph. I like this book. I’ve polished every word. I did it.  I kept my promise.

At the same time, what a relief! That 12-year-old girl can relax. To my surprise I did not die during or because of the writing, and now I’m free. Now I can make something up. Go back to the fantasies that created six Jake Samson books.

I can’t wait to write mysteries again.