I'm Getting Published!

Merry day!  Fire up the blog again at long last!  What?  It's Ash Wednesday?  Well, okay, we can keep the bacchanalia a bit more solemn and austere, if that'll help.

I just found out yesterday that my short story, "ROSEBANK NNL," got accepted as part of a collection that's tentatively being titled Boroughs of the Dead, Volume II.  It's a bunch of NYC-set ghost stories, and the theme inspired me to take a mental visit back to Staten Island.  It was the first story I ever submitted for publication, so I fully expect to get a big head and start lording it over all my friends now (except for the ones who have already been published, including my wife).

Seriously though, this is certainly some great fuel for inspiring me to write more often again.  I've already started on another story for a different anthology.  It may be too weird to ever go anywhere, but at the very least I can use the practice.  I've also still been plugging away at Suckers, my way-too-long-in-gestation vampire novel, although it's been hard to get my momentum back since NaNoWriMo.  I think it may help to give my latest draft a complete read-through, to get me firmly back in the world of the story.

There's still a ways to go before I'm actually, literally (ha ha) published.  The folks behind the anthology are going to send me a line edited version of the story, which I'll then have to approve and sign the contract for.  Then there's the wait until the thing actually goes to print, and possibly another wait until I actually get paid and get a copy of the book.  I remember how long that took in my wife's case, so I'm expecting there to be at least a few months until I can fully consider myself the barest definition of an author.  Nevertheless, I'm excited to see how all of these steps play out.  More news to come as everything progresses!

Thoughts on an Impending NaNoWriMo

NaNoWriMo keeps getting closer, and I still haven't decided on a story.  I know it's going to be slow going if I just start writing off the top of my head without planning scenes ahead of time, so I'd better decide which story I'm going to go with over this weekend.  It's not that I have to have all my scenes planned out, but I need enough to at least get me through the current day's writing, so that I can take a breather and plan further scenes after it.  I think my issue is that I haven't particularly latched on to any of the characters I've been thinking of for my stories yet, so there isn't a particular story that jumps out at me.  Every so often I'll be seized by the notion to jump off and write something completely different---a prospect both dangerous and exciting.  I'm less worried about getting to 50,000 words this year than I ever have been before, but I have to be careful not to get cocky and just take it for granted that I'll finish on time.  I think in my fourth year I ended up going about ten thousand words over (and was still only about two-thirds of the way through the story, which I STILL haven't finished), but all the other years it came pretty close to the wire, and the story started to run out just as the 50,000 word mark became tantalizingly close.

Let me go over again what I've got so far: there's my coming of age story of a New York kid transplanted to Iowa, my fictional dystopian city anthology, my one about the struggles about an oddball Staten Island family, and (running a distant fourth) the tale of the world's last moviegoer, whose largesse supports the entire remaining industry.  They're all premises that I feel I could write at least a few chapters of at this point, but I don't know whether they'll peter out after that or inspire me to keep going.  I guess I could always start with one and switch to another if the situation becomes truly dire, but finding the momentum to start up an entirely different plot after the first one fails can be difficult given how fraught with discouragement that predicament is.

At the very least I'll have the opportunity to write with my friends again, and I'm looking forward to that in and of itself.  There's so much more creative energy in a room full of other writers than there is when I'm just alone with the blank page.  Granted the blank page doesn't terrify me like it used to, but other people's determination working towards the same goal is like a drug that there's just no substitute for.  Even after five years of NaNoWriMo I hardly ever write new work outside of November.  If I can find the time for my marathon training I'm sure I could find the time for writing, but then there's that question of momentum again...

At least I've been doing my daily writing pretty consistently (even if I only rarely work up the nerve to post it to the public).  I can write 750 words in 20 minutes pretty consistently now, which is something I never thought I'd be able to do before.  I'm sure it'd take me considerably longer if I was writing this all down longhand.  My penmanship was never the greatest, and I fear it's gone downhill significantly since the days I used to regularly practice it while taking notes in college.  I think I still have those notebooks somewhere in my parents' house, but lord knows what I'd ever do with them...  I just hope that I can keep this kind of speed (or anything resembling it) when I switch over from fact to fiction next week.

Two Staten Island Lives

I spent this afternoon in Staten Island, visiting women who straddled both ends of the spectrum of life.

The first was my cousin, who just turned 11 days old today.  No matter how many babies I see, I still can't get over how tiny everything is about them.  Tiny nose, tiny mouth, tiny hands with tiny fingers that have little itty bitty fingernails at the ends of them.  She was sleeping for most of the time that I, my wife, and my parents were there, but every so often her eyes would blink open in a flash of brilliant blue, or her arms would stretch wide as her mouth opened into a wide, toothless yawn.

I won't lie: even though I'm fully aware of how much precious sleep and time and money it would cost me, I would love to have a baby in my life.  My wife isn't ready yet, and I completely understand: we've just gotten married and we'd like to spend some time alone together before starting a family.  Plus, for reasons financial and otherwise, we really should have more stability in our lives before introducing a child into the picture.

Looking at that baby today, I wondered what type of person she'd turn into as she grew older.  What dreams will she have?  What type of music will she listen to?  How will she get along with her parents?  Her life is still wide open, filled with endless possible permutations to come.  My parents were telling her parents stories of when I was very young.  Some of it I remembered (my memories go back to about when I was 2 1/2) and some of it I didn't.  They also talked about my younger brother, and I can remember him all the way back to the hospital nursery, where I saw him for the first time through the glass.  Now he's taller than me, and living his own life all the way out in California.  That's something my four-year-old self probably never could've fathomed while staring at the little sleeping creature in the blue hat all those years ago.

After we left my cousin's place, we headed next to a rehab center not too far away, where my 87-year-old aunt is in the process of recovering from a stroke.  We found her propped up in bed, resting her eyes at first but awakening at the approach of company.  She looked better than the last time I saw her, but still nowhere near where she had been before the stroke.  She hasn't regained the power of speech yet, although she tries to form words with her lips and vocal cords---words that are mostly undone by the fact that she still doesn't have much control over her tongue.  Even without words, she's still surprisingly alert.  I could see in her eyes the recognition of who we were and at least some of what we were saying, and also the frustration at her own inability to communicate.

I've known my aunt all my life, and spent many a day as a toddler running around her house while my mom and dad were out working.  Every Christmas Eve we went to her house for an endless stream of seafood, followed by opening presents no earlier than midnight, and getting home in the wee, blurry hours of the morning.  (There were times as a kid when I wondered whether Santa had already come while we were out)  When I got out of grad school and started my first job, I became her tenant, living in the second story of her house for a couple of years---the same rooms where my grandparents had once lived, and where my mother grew up.  She was always quick to offer her opinion, and she had a great store of wisdom to share from her life that led from her childhood as the daughter of immigrants to her acquiring her C.P.A. and eventually becoming a dean at the nearby college.  She was a local celebrity, and knew a veritable Who's Who of Staten Island's movers and shakers.  She was still threatening to take me down to the barber's to have my long hair shorn off a few weeks ago, before everything changed...

I looked at her lying there, white hair beginning to show as the results of her last salon visit grew out.  I wondered what my life would be like at her age (or my parents' life, for that matter).  I've had multiple members of my family tell me, "Don't get old," over the years, but I've never been thrilled by the prospect of the alternative, either.  There will still be generations to come, though, and we all need to make room for them sooner or later.  I only hope that I can live on in their memories...and that those memories, on the whole, are pleasant.