What Are You Working On?

I've been asking myself this question since starting this blog series on August 6th. Maybe before. It's taken me a week since I returned from vacation in California to get back into writing mode, but that's not to say I haven't been working. It's all in the definition of work.

A writer's work involves a whole lot of staring out the window at the trees dancing in the wind and the gray rain falling over Seattle. Writing memoir involves revisiting the past, retracing old paths, remembering what is forgotten. It includes lying in the guest bedroom of a friend's home in California remembering the handful of years in the mid-1970s when I was a UCSC student after a day of wandering Santa Cruz and the campus. My mind was also at work while breakfasting with friends I last saw 36 years and 6 months earlier in Mexico City.

On October 17, 1989 the 6.9 Loma Prieta Earthquake rocked California at 5:04 p.m. The news coverage focused on the devastating damage in San Francisco, but I wasn't acutely aware of the destruction in Santa Cruz until last week when I went in search of my favorite two haunts from the 1970s: Cooper House and Bookshop Santa Cruz. The first no longer exists. The second is in a new location. From George at the new Bookshop Santa Cruz I learned that downtown Santa Cruz was leveled and it took almost ten years to rebuild. Only a deep hole remains where the Bookshop Santa Cruz I knew and loved once stood.

Now back in Seattle with my journals, I'm struggling to read the scribbles of a young woman in her mid-20s, thoughts expressed sometimes in English, others in Spanish, sometimes a mix. I'm typing what I might choose to include in this memoir-in-progress, as I piece together fragments of memory in hopes of creating a whole. The memoir is there. It demands to be told. I just have to work my way through the dust of memory: work is not done at the computer.

The series continues this Wednesday with a guest post from Elizabeth Moore. Don't want to miss it? Subscribe by entering your email address in the box in the upper right column.

To read the prior posts, go to the posts listing in the left side bar. If titles are no longer visible, just click on "August" to select.

The Book Adventures of Emily: Review: Walking Home by Arleen Williams

The Book Adventures of Emily: Review: Walking Home by Arleen Williams: Walking Home By Arleen Williams Genre: Contemporary Women’s Fiction Book Description: Walking Home is a compelling glimpse into...

What Are You Working On ... K. Williams?

After a brief hiatus while I enjoyed the coastal beauty of central California, this blog series continues. Today I pleased to invite K. Williams to share her story.

Born in Saratoga Springs, New York, K. Williams has enjoyed a now twenty year career in writing. K attended the State University of New York at Morrisville, majoring in the Biological Sciences, and then continued with English and Historical studies at the University at Albany (home of the New York State Writer’s Institute) gaining her Bachelor’s Degree. While attending UA, K interned with the 13th Moon Feminist Literary Magazine, bridging her interests in social movements and art.

In 2014, K completed the MALS program for Film Studies and Screenwriting at Empire State College (SUNY), and is the 2013-2014 recipient of the Foner Fellowship in Arts and Social Justice. K continues to write and is working on the novels of the Trailokya Trilogy, a work that deals with topics in Domestic Violence and crosses the controversial waters of organized religion and secularism. A sequel to OP-DEC is in the research phase, while the adaptation is being shopped to interested film companies.

Connect with K on Facebook, Goodreads, Tumblr, Twitter, and on her photography and writing DeviantArt profiles.

*****

What are you working on now is a loaded question. An author’s job is never done. I remember a continuing thread in college around discussions of editing and how the greats handled the process. Nuances of the same can be found in memes. Looking back, I don't know many writers who weren’t simmering several pots, completing concoctions, and presenting goods—all at once.

This fall, I turn from reading to research. I’m not certain I will use any of my findings, but I need to start somewhere. My focus is the economic struggles during the period of the East India Company’s (EIC) operation. As usual, the work is social justice focused, social stratification and all that happens to those caught in the mill.

This spring, I finished the sequel to OP-DEC. There are two scenes to smooth out yet. Letting the work sit while I move on ensures fresh eyes. Then, there is the matter of further Trailokya books, my fantasy/scifi series. Readers won’t see the sequel until 2018 and EIC will arrive even later. Why so long? Development, editing and other work will take months. Tack on design and marketing, and we're at mid-2017. I haven’t written anything for EIC, so you see it coming in 2019.

It’s amazing how much goes into a book! But, there won’t be a lull between works. I planned these delays. Why go through that? Planning a couple lulls gives needed space to put out new content, and still have time to live and craft effectively.

That said, these things take a life of their own. The best planning must carry soft dates. Any step on the track can fall apart: missing research, writer’s block, no editor, or rejection by the publisher. Whatever happens, a delay is fine as it gives time to improve. Embrace that time positively: work on the next thing. I’m never planning just my next book.

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To read the prior posts, go to the posts listing in the left side bar. If titles are no longer visible, just click on "August" to select.

What Are You Working On ... Pamela Hobart Carter?

It is with great pleasure that I welcome writing partner and friend, Pamela Hobart Carter, to share her thoughts today.

Pamela Hobart Carter and Arleen Williams founded No Talking Dogs Press which features short books in easy English for adults. With Lynne Wiley Grant, she wrote Brace Yourself, a survival guide for adults undergoing orthodontia. For thirty years she taught science and preschool and a few other things. She lives in Seattle.

My Tangled Place of Figuring Out

 by Pamela Hobart Carter

I am working on a snarl of a novel.

Many years ago I wrote a story featuring Marcella and Rook. The year after, I wrote another with the same characters. A couple of years after that, I wrote a 10-minute play, Rook and Marcella Test the Waters (read at LiveGirls! Theater). When I quit teaching, it was for the larger chunks of time in which to focus on longer works, so I strung together these, and other Marcella pieces, as the basis for a novel. I wrote links and extensions. I wrote and wrote and wrote. Now I’m ensnared in a weed-choked, 300+-page-long marsh of Marcella.

How do I exit the marsh? This is my tangled place of figuring out.

 

Ever since learning about timed writing practice, as described by Natalie Goldberg in Writing Down the Bones, I have used the method to generate material. I can generate new stuff like nobody’s business.

But it’s the old stuff that’s an issue. It’s the unfamiliar larger scale that’s an issue. It’s the big thinking required that’s an issue.

Natalie reminds me to keep my pen moving because timed writing practice also helps meta-writing: I write to figure out my writing. Writing clarifies thought. (Ta-Nehisi Coates has a wonderful description of this in Between the World and Me. His mother made him write essays when she saw he needed to think something through.)

Natalie Goldberg and her timed writing practice are wonders, but so too are other folks and their practices. I am working on learning which resonate most for me and Marcella.

Don't want to miss a single post in this series? Subscribe via email by entering your email in the box in the upper right column.

To read the prior posts, go to the posts listing in the left side bar. If titles are no longer visible, just click on "August" to select.

If you'd like to participate by sharing your own guest post, please contact Arleen at aw@arleenwilliams.com.

And finally, comments, likes, and shares are, of course, always welcome. Thanks for reading!

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What Are You Working On ... Terry Persun?

Today I'm happy to share the first guest post in my new What Are You Working On ... ? blog series, a collection of thoughts from authors on their latest works-in-progress. First up is Terry Persun.

Terry Persun is an award winning, bestselling writer. He writes fiction in many genres, and has won numerous awards including two ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Finalist Awards, two POW Book of the Year Awards, a Star of Washington Award, and an Independent Publishers' Silver IPPY Award. He has worked as an engineer, an electronics technician, and an airborne navigation specialist. Using his extensive technical knowledge, Terry writes and publishes articles about the latest technologies. Site: www.TerryPersun.com. 

Always Creating 

by Terry Persun 

 

I’m always working on something, whether that means new fences for our horses, an addition to the chicken coop, or another poem, novel, short story, essay, tech article… I think you get it. I write a lot, so I’ve always got a few things going at once. I used to tell people that when I’m working on a novel, that’s it! But I lied, not because I wanted to. I basically lied out of ignorance. I get so focused on new novels that I can hardly remember anything else that I’m doing.

Here’s the truth: if I’m not working on several things at once, then something’s wrong. At the moment, I’ve got tech articles to finish writing or editing, a few poems I’ve written that need an overhaul, short stories that, while they’re going out are also being touched up every time I reread them. And then there is the novel I’m editing through, the poetry collection I’m trying to pull together (slowly, I might add), maybe a chapter of a nonfiction book (they tend to come to me a little at a time for some reason), and, of course, my latest novel (or novella or novelette, who knows until it’s done).

Since I write cross-genres, it’s not easy for an outsider to even guess what I’m working on. At the moment, I’m writing and researching for my second novella in my T.E.N. series. That’s what I call it. T.E.N. is actually the main character’s name—Tempest Eugene Nesbit—but everyone calls him Ten. The first in the series “The Killing Machine” was a techno-thriller. This one is too, but a bit different.

Enough about that. The issue is that I work on several projects, but the novel/novella always takes precedence over anything else. That’s what I get up to write in the morning, every morning, until it’s completed. I do skip a day every here and there, but seldom. And when I do skip a day it’s to do additional research for the book.

I like changing things up for myself. I write literary (or more serious) novels, but also like to have a little fun, go out on a limb, try new things. The T.E.N. novels are pulp novels, where I am light on character development, but big on concept. It’s fun to get out of my own box and write something that isn’t so character-heavy. I like that. I also enjoy writing experimental pieces where the main character isn’t really the main character, where situations are framed in a unique way.

It hardly matters to me what I’m writing, the best part of my day is during that writing time. That’s when I’m in the flow, as they say, when I’m doing what I feel I’m meant to do with my life. What I think God wants me to do—whatever your concept of God might be. So, the question, What Are You Working On, takes on a variety of meanings for me, some specific, some broad, but always fun.

What Are You Working On?

It's been a dozen years since I entered the world of writing, seven since my first book, a memoir, was published. Now, three novels later, I'm re-entering the memoir world, re-learning the techniques I've used and taught in multiple classes and workshops.

It's one thing to teach students to list Memoir Moments as a tool for retrieving lost memories and shaping a story. It's a different thing to stare at a blank page with an equally blank mind and try to pull up stubborn memories buried deep in the gray mass of my brain. It's not like I'm writing about my childhood. My work-in-progress deals with my Mexico years. It's a story of friendship. Three women - a Brit, a Bahamian, and an American - meet in Mexico City. They each marry and later divorce Mexican men. Three decades later they reunite in London and joke about writing a book together about their adventure: The Ex-Mexican Wives Club.

I was twenty-five when I moved to Mexico City. I lived there for three years before meeting and marrying my ex-husband. The memories should be there, clear and easy to access. Instead they are hidden behind a veil of thick fog I struggle to navigate through. Who was that confused young woman and why did she make so many self-destructive decisions? Or were they decisions at all? I seemed to float rudderless through my twenties and early thirties, and today I'm left with no compass to find my way back to that younger me.

 How do I retrieve those memories? I do what I tell my students to do. I list memoir moments - those moments that pop into my head, usually as visual images, sometimes triggered by smells or music, often triggered by the simple act of writing. So I spend time writing against the clock, listing memories as they surface, one following another. Just a list to begin with. Later I'll turn those moments into startlines to use each time I practice timed writing.

I also go back to the LPs stashed away under the basement stairs, the boxes of photographs from the 1970s and 1980s, and the box of old journals at the bottom of a closet, in hopes of excavating memories and finding details of the times.

In the postscript to Slow Motion, Dani Shapiro also mentions pulling out old journals to try to piece together memories of her 20-something self as she began writing her memoir. But then she chose not to read her own words. Too many years, too many tragedies and joys, too many changes have filled the intervening decades for me to rely on memory alone. I only hope my journals and photos will jog memories of the young woman I once was, the friends I once had, and the world I once knew. That world existed long before the War on Drugs and 9/11 when crossing the border between the U.S. and Mexico in either direction was as simple for a young white American woman as crossing the Washington/Oregon border. That world is gone now, as is the young, naive ex-pat who was convinced she'd found her home in Mexico.