Flap Copy, A Clarinet, and a Spy: Or, How My Friday Went



I woke up feeling exactly how I'd felt waking up every morning this week: clogged and scratchy and swollen and grouchy. I like to say my husband's a baby when he's sick, but really, it's me. I'm the baby.

And moms don't get sick days (wah, wah). So, I lay a cold washcloth on my face--my eyes are bloodshot and swollen, as if I've been on a bender--slapped on some makeup, herded the kids into the car, and took off for Black Mountain. It's Tin Whistle and Clarinet Day.

Also, today, my editor has sent the flap copy, which neither she nor my agent is happy with, and so, after tinkering with the bio just a little, it seems the summary needs a pretty big overhaul. So, after music classes, I put the kids back in the car to drive back down the mountain, and my little boy asks me if my agent is the same thing as a spy and I say, yes! Exactly the same thing! And my daughter, who is 9 and just started clarinet in the fall, wants to jump, in two short weeks, into the big time: Concert Band! And, could I please work with her this afternoon to come up with a practice schedule? And my agent, the spy, calls twice--hates my revised flapcopy--and my little boy wants to do nothing but play Legos Star Wars on the computer all afternoon, and my eyes are still so puffy, my nose so snotty, all I want is Nyquil...

But, finally, I pay my daughter to play Go Fish with my son (it's babysitting, right??), and I close the door to my office, drink my diet pepsi and finally hammer out something my agent and my editor and my editor's assistant and my husband and I are--with a few minor adjustments--pleased with.

When Percy Harding, Goliath’s most important citizen, is discovered dead by the railroad tracks outside town one perfect autumn afternoon, no one can quite believe it’s really happened. Percy, the president of the town’s world-renowned furniture company, had seemed invincible. Only Rosamond Rogers, Percy’s secretary, may have had a glimpse of how and why this great man has fallen, and that glimpse tugs at her, urges her to find out more.

Percy isn’t the first person to leave Rosamond: everybody seems to, from her husband, Hatley, who walked out on her years ago; to her complicated daughter Agnes, whose girlhood bedroom was papered with maps of the places she wanted to escape to. The town itself is Rosamond’s anchor, but it is beginning to quiver with the possibility of change. The high school girls are writing suicide poetry. The town’s young, lumbering sidewalk preacher is courting Rosamond’s daughter. A troubled teenaged boy plans to burn Main Street to the ground. And the furniture factory itself—the very soul of Goliath—threatens to close.
In the wake of the town’s undoing, Rosamond seeks to reunite the grief-shaken community. GOLIATH, a story of loss and love, of forgiveness and letting go, is a lyrical swoon of a novel by an exceptionally talented newcomer.

And then, of course, I'm off to Food Lion. I cook dinner. Collapse.

PS. I didn't write the last part, about how great I am and how great the novel is. My editor calls me an exceptionally talented newcomer (love her!!) and I'm not sure who wrote that it's a lyrical swoon of a novel, but I'm pretty sure it was somebody who writes a lot of jacket copy...


Know Thyself: Dress Accordingly

The first time I joined a somewhat formal writerly community, in January of 2002, I wore an ugly green pantsuit and smiled entirely too brightly. I was ten weeks pregnant with my first child, and I had just quit my middle school teaching job because the instructor at a community college creative writing class—the only such class I’d taken—had said I should. And, so, here I was, at the semester’s opening reception of the Queens University MFA Program, ready to begin.

And now, ten years later, all I can do is hope that I make sounder fashion choices these days. As with so many other things in life—and in writing—I knew the pant suit (with an elastic waist, no less) was all wrong when I did it, but I did it anyway.

I can say there was something I liked about that horrible suit. I think I liked the jacket—tweedy gold-threaded muted piney-mustard green (okay, so that sounds unforgivably terrible, actually). I liked that it was an ensemble—three distinct pieces of clothing that went together (I haven’t mentioned the matching scarf because I really am trying to forget it; shudder). I liked that it was dressier than anything I usually wore. That I had heels to wear with it. That the length of the pants had fit me (though the jacket pretty much swallowed me whole). I liked the idea of the suit, but not the suit itself.

Like that once-upon-a-time-on-a-shopping-trip-with-my-mother-pantsuit, so many things I’ve tried to pull off in the world of fiction-writing have been better in theory than in actual execution. Once, I tried to write a story about a woman infected with tiny, white, flesh-eating insects. She also happened to be trudging along in a bad marriage; the woman was literally bugged to death. (Get it? Get it?) I’ve written stories with too many characters, stories with too few. I’ve written failed ghost stories and over-written allegories and saccharin poems about the long-ago passing of my grandfather and an essay about a girl (myself) who turned into a stone (my not-so-funny struggle with motherhood and out-of-whack hormones and the realization that, hey, I’m not a girl anymore).

I’ve used contrivances that were hugely self-conscious and ultimately false in life, in fashion, and in writing.

It’s another way of looking at killing your darlings. Throw out the ugly green suit. Know thyself: dress accordingly. Be bold in your writing. Write the terrible story about the tiny white bugs—because you have to write such crap; you really, really do—but push through it. Come out the other side. Take a deep breath. Start again. Now, say what you really want to say.