Category: Blog!

Happy to say I’m feeling better. My health restored, my will to rewrite invigorated — however briefly. Not that it’s been easy. I’m on Word Document REWRITES.v3. But I’m sucking it up, plugging away without too much whining.

Hey, what happened here? I’m still not sure. I’m thinking that the sick bay gave me plenty of time to think, or prewrite, as I like to call my procrastination. That plus, a thousand thanks to the 77th birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr., I’ve had the luxury of three unvarnished days to sit with the piece. Which means, of course, that my social life is null and void. But my best buddies and I have been here before.

It also didn’t hurt that my friend and MFA advisor at USF, Karl Soehnlein, mentioned in an email that he prefers rewriting over the birthing process. Karl’s new novel, “You Can Say You Knew Me When,” came out late last year to wild acclaim. Buy it and see for yourself if it isn’t a great read, funny, lyrical, with the steamiest sex ever. After two published novels he should know from rewrites. But, oh, my sweet baby lord, enjoying it? What a concept.

Made me think, though, that maybe there are plenty of writers out there who actually look forward to reworking their books? I’m canvassing writers I know and inviting them to leave comments here. It could be very interesting what they have to say. But don’t hold your breath, now. Folks reading and responding to something in yet another blog? Not so much. (Please feel free to leave your comments here. I’m honestly very interested in your experience with rewriting.)

I’m also hoping they’ll help me with my sub-fears that after I’ve slashed and patched the novel, it will have a new set of weaknesses. That it’ll have continuity problems. That my strongest character will get degraded. That the new pieces will majorly suck. Like that.

In the meantime, my monkey brain has me up at 5 am. And, lo, I’m enjoying getting to the computer. It’s me, the tired moon, the thin, fresh, still morning darkness, the lowing of a fog horn. It’s magic, truly.
[tags] USF, Karl Soehnlein, rewrites[/tags]

This is how I procrastinated this week and didn’t start the rewrites on my new novel, “Grace Notes:”

Went to bed on Monday evening, perfectly fine. Kissed the Sweetie goodnight, turned over. From the dark comes an ugly, raging flu. Fever, snot, pounding headache, wimpy legs. Despite a prophylactic flu shot last November. I’ve just come back from Asia. Bird flu. We’re just going to pack that thought away.

Is this my admitted soma flaring? (Not for nothin’ psychosomatic has soma at its roots.) I have white-coat hypertension in every doctor’s/dentist’s office; if my sweet doctor’s stethoscope should linger on me for more than a beat, I’m sure I’m in for grim news. I ate apples successfully before the allergist casually tagged it on the end of my little list of allergens. Now apples (and every piece of stone fruit) has me hacking, sneezin’ and wheezin’. A touch of apple core to my skin sometimes welts me. It’s wild.

I’m just going to put it out there: I loathe re-writing. And now my body has joined me in postponing the inevitable. To me, rewriting is like having finished knitting the entire back portion of a sweater while watching a movie, say, and in casting off, found to my horror that I’ve dropped a number of stitches way down at the ribbing, in the middle, all over.

It’s not that I think every word comes out of me in pearls. Not by any, any long stretch. Even though I do agonize over every word, worry every image, work and rework dialogue. God knows sometimes one paragraph has taken me a whole week to polish, to squeeze double meanings from words. Words that, when all is said and done, only I care about. People are looking for a good story, mostly. Many times I’ll convince myself the sentences are too ripe, the skin sheen way too purple. I cut and save them anyway. Just in case.

This was my darkest secret for a while, not rewriting much, until Marilynne Robinson answered a question by revealing — OUT IN THE OPEN — that she doesn’t do much rewriting. Marilynne! My girl. Incidentally, you can hear my friend, Roseanne Pereira, interview her here.

But, yo, I’m no Marilynne Robinson. My novel has major holes, the end’s rushed and unbelievable. There are whole sections that need the brutal pollarding the city of San Francisco gives its London Plane trees. I know this.

But, I so CRAVE the new. I cannot bear to revisit a book, a movie, a country, a dead relationship, the sameness of breakfast. I’m bored with my own work. Sick of my style, as I imagine a singer might sometimes be of her voice. I have, what we call derisively in my household, “an insatiable need to know.” Which has me saving unread newspapers. Which has me secretly planning to watch junk shows like Cops on the Fox Saturday night TV lineup. What? Like John Updike and Nicholson Baker haven’t written about watching that show? I know; I couldn’t carry the water for either of those two guys. I’m just sayin’.

Yet. The damn rewrite is due. In the meantime, my body has taken over. I’ve been out of work sick four days. This never happens. I’m so unaccustomed to being sick that I often have to give myself the sick test. Do you still feel bad after a shower? Are you whimpering? Is the bed calling?

Yes, yes, and yes. The doctor said I could feel bad for another week or two. My cough may worsen, she says. Well, c’mon, let’s just pile that on the load of guilt I’m shouldering.

The novel is waiting. I’ll try again to read the stuff tomorrow. My fever will flare, my cheeks will burn, I’m guessing; my head will pound with my pulse just like it’s doing right this minute. But, um, look how easy for me to be at the computer. Of course, it’s easy. I’m writing something neeewwwwww!

[tags]Grace Notes, rewrites, John Updike, Nicholson Baker, Marilynne Robinson, Cops, pollarding, San Francisco trees, stone fruit allergies[/tags]

I’m on the verge of rewriting my novel, “Grace Notes.” I’m already swollen with it.

My dreams – streaming and colorful – have become even more Technicolor. My eyes have taken on that keenness I get when I’m in the throes of making stuff up. I’ve begun again to be acute, to note all things: the stops and starts of a woman newly arrived at a noon Christmas party, her body tightly coiled, her harnessed desire for a cocktail over food making her conversation unfocused. I see, and can almost taste, the fat moon over the bay at Sausalito.

Words are again beginning to haunt me again. The pretty ones, like gamboge, a color the yellow of amber. Funky ones appear, too, from ether. Ooo, my brain coos, ooo; I get to use bumf. A word that has two meanings: toilet paper, or throwaway paper like junk mail. You just know I’m itching to use that one. And probably won’t, scared away by the ghost of an editor’s hectoring pen. (See? The catastrophizing has also begun!)

I know already that on the good days when the work sings, I will ask myself, how is it that I didn’t know I could write till freshman English at the University of Cincinnati? If it weren’t for the kindly, dying teacher who told me after class that I had a flair for writing, would the desire to sling words out? Doubt it. At age 12, I’d convinced myself that I’d lifted something from a novel. My British second form teacher had cocked her head and asked if my line, “a riot of bougainvillea blood flowers” was original. And, how did I explain away the early poems? C’mon now, which teenager doesn’t scribble heartbreak verse? To this day, poems are my stepchildren.

I also know already that when the writing’s not going well, I will slap my broad black desk hard. Tears will stand in my eyes. I will swear long and cruel in vivid, living colors. If you know me, kiss me.

On the San Francisco Muni bus, younger women get up to give me their seats; they give me their benevolent smiles.

It’s the hair.

I ask for a monthly Muni pass at Safeway, and the check-out guy, says, “Sure, would that be a Senior Pass?” My husband cannot stop laughing.

It’s the gray hair.

A very disheveled black man, reeking of the chemical sweetness of crystal meth, sits beside me on the bus, leans his head on my shoulder and tells me he likes old women. Not older. Old.

It’s the materfrickin’ gray-tweed hair!

Maybe I should just quit riding the bus altogether is what I’m thinking. I mean, does this happen to pretty-boy Anderson Cooper on CNN? Oh, I don’t think so.

Of course, I’ve agonized about dyeing my hair to its original black gloss. My two older sisters, for example, have not a whit of white hair – except perhaps if you go nitpicking. One of them was carded in a department store when she asked for the discount for the 55 and older crowd.

It has also passed through my mind a time or three that my friends and co-workers might just wish I’d go ahead and reach for the dye dispenser. The way you want the guy with the very crooked bottom teeth to go get them fixed, the way you want that pretty plump girl in Accounting to lose some weight, Aaron Neville to get his huge Milk Dud of a mole taken care of.

It’s also a worry that potential publishers will reject me out of hair, hand because I’m not the rockin’ young author, you know? Last week at my friend Abeer’s reading, the moderator plugged and plugged a writing contest eligible for writers 35 and younger. Well. That leaves me the hell out. It’s bad enough that an agent confided to me that my first book couldn’t get through “marketing,” and that an editor at a major publishing house told me nobody wants to read about Jamaica – they want to read about Europe. I’m already at a disadvantage.

You will never know how I agonized about the photo on the About Jennifer page which, in the end, I left un-Photoshopped. Only because when we did it, it looked a touch artificial, the hair. Very same reason I don’t color it. This is the same hair I always seem to be writing about, the same hair that black women gush over at the hair salon. They tell me it looks good with my skin color, which is coffee without a single trace of cream. They tell me how beautiful it is. They lie, I think.

All it does is suggest to folks that they get up from their seats and let me sit down; they hang back to let me board the bus first; they call me old to my face.

If I’m old, how is it that I have this on my mp3 player? As well as this. All right, so I also have this,and this can make me weepy. Maybe I am old?

1. Kanye West/Jamie Foxx-Golddigger; 2. Damian Marley-Welcome To Jamrock; 3. Ron Isley-Burt Bacharach-Anyone Who Had a Heart; 4. George Frideric Handel- Xerxes-Largo

Okay, raise your hands if your name is also Jennifer Coke. Yeow. Can you believe how many of us there are, truly?

Hello, my googlegängers! I guess I feel fortunate to have snagged the domain name before the Jen doing real estate in MO, or the cool middle school teacher in TX, the rehab guru in NC, the Jen volunteering in community radio in AZ, or that nice Jen who adopted the Chilean Flamingo at the San Francisco Zoo. And I feel infinitely more lucky than Jennifer Coke from Redwood City who died at age 29. Car crash. If seeing your name in the obituaries ain’t freaky.

Plain truth is I’m not now nor have I ever been a Jen. It has always been the whole rhythmic name, my middle name, my mother trying to balance the meter by giving me a short and punchy first name that she never intended to use. Yes, shhhh – I’m a G. Jennifer Coke.

But never a Jen or Jenny, which I don’t so much like. I’ve been a Jennifer way before it was the nom du jour, you know? In fact, I’ve been one so long, I get the double blink when I show up in person. People look past me when they call my name in reception areas. A man in Spain, asks me in Russian-accented English, if I had changed my name. No-no, I tell him. I was named after Jennifer Jones, the actress. He nods his head but his face is blank; it’s clear he doesn’t know that name from Adam.

Speaking of actresses. How disappointing it is that this Jennifer Coke who’s listed in various French websites as one of the leads in the movie, Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives isn’t one of us at all. She really is Jennifer Cooke.

Course, I’ve been called that a hundred times, too. But that’s a whole nother story.