The New Year's Post (Including a Publication Alert for River River)

Mysterious teaser photo, for ending announcement.

Morning, all. And happy 2018.

My first order of business is to give you all a long overdue publication update. Back in December, my short story "Work Day" appeared in Issue 6 of the Hudson Valley-based journal River River. (Bonus: it's perfectly paired with a moody urban scene by Sharon M. Paster.) Written during my undergrad years, "Work Day" was for many years my favorite fiction project and is probably my most-submitted work to date (or most-rejected, technically), so the fact that it's finally found a home at a place like River River means a lot to me. You only need to read the issue's introduction to see how passionate the staff is about storytelling, and their activeness in promoting local artists makes them a valuable resource for the writing community. It's an honor to be included in their publication, and I hope you'll take a look at all the great things they're doing.

You can read my story "Work Day" here.

Second order of business, a brief summary of life in the South. Besides the adjustment to the climate (actually, not a hard adjustment -- Christmas in New England was -5 degrees, so I've quickly come to embrace the relative warmth), I'm adjusting to the ups and downs of novel-writing, especially where there's a thesis deadline concerned. It's messy, it's hectic, and there are plenty of times when it sucks to the point that it's the LAST thing I'd rather do -- but it's a good learning experience, too. Since my fiction-writing before this consisted exclusively of short stories, the transition to a novel has taught me how differently the drafting process looks. It's not just extending short story drafting into a larger project -- it's an entirely different way of envisioning a story. It's working with a bigger timeline; it's building a larger network of multiple conflicts and subplots; it demands more development of and then more resolution from the characters. And all those things requires more discovery on the writer's part.

When I write a short story, the smaller format means I can usually picture the plot and the characters pretty fully in my head before I start. Yes, there's discovery involved (what comes out on paper is almost never exactly what I originally envisioned), but for the most part I know my protagonists and the basic structure well enough to feel fairly confident where they'll end up. Novel-writing (for me at least) isn't like that. The mere size of the story means there are countless more directions a plot or character could go, and the image of a protagonist that I start with turns out to be barely a skeleton for the flesh-and-bone person they need to be to remain sustainable. So, there's a lot of blindness in novel-writing. That's where the messiness comes in. Discovery happens through experimenting, and in drafting that means pages upon pages of exercises, monologues, shaky chapters, half-formed sections -- making my characters walk around, trying to see what they'll do and where they'll go.

And what happens to a lot of those pages?

They turn out to be unusable, and end up in the trash.

For a perfectionist like me, this has been the most painful part of the novel-writing process. To write anything takes an inordinate amount of time and energy for me, so to go through all those hours and all that effort to write something that I can't use -- utter agony! It felt like such a horrific waste, and in the beginning, I wondered if I was doing something wrong. But I'm fortunate to be working with an insightful advisor, and to have had enough reflective down-time during the project, to figure out that as awful as this looks, it's okay. It's necessary, even. Writers explore their writing through writing, so what looks like countless pages of wasted material is actually the necessary labor of world-building -- or, more appropriately, behind-the-scenes building. If I write a chapter I can't use, the best case scenario is that the chapter helped me understand my characters more so that I can write them better in other chapters; worst case scenario, I've crossed off one more direction my plot cannot go. Even if a lot of drafted material remains "unseen" by the end, they have hopefully served as a reference or building block for what I do want seen in the finished product. That's the beginner's optimism, anyway.

Item 3 on today's post: I kicked off the New Year by starting a new position in a public library, and I'm LOVING it with every fiber of my being. I've been attracted to the library profession for years, but while I have done internships at libraries in the past, doing "the Real Thing" is better than I could've ever dreamed. It feels amazing to be busy in an environment that I'm passionate about -- helping provide an educational, enriching, and safe space for patrons and families free of charge. (Plus, I'm surrounded by books all day, so there's that.) I feel absolutely at home in this line of work, and hope to be in it for a long time.

For those in doubt of what public libraries do, I present this brilliant meme.

More another time. Hope you all enjoyed the holidays.

Grace and peace to you.