Trans/plant/portation

My heart was on fire, or at least, it felt like it was on fire. I kept one hand over the middle of my chest to double check. A nurse noticed and came over to me.

“Inez, are you in pain again?”

I nodded. I still wasn’t any good at talking. Not on a consistent basis.

The nurse leaned in and squinted at the monitor behind me. “I can only give you one more increase,” she said, twisting something on my IV line. “The pain should start to subside soon.” She patted me gently on my shoulder and I resisted jerking away. I smiled at her in as small a fashion as possible, so I wouldn’t tear the corners of my mouth. Read More…

He handed the jar to me, a small glass container with a fluttery light inside it, some kind of hybrid between electricity, butterflies, and lightning bugs. The glass lid clattered a little as there was nothing sealing it to the jar itself.

For all of its importance Jayman pressed it into my hands without much care, not waiting to see if I had a firm grip on the thing before he headed back off toward his cubicle. I almost dropped it, and that would have been a disaster.

Read More…

A couple of weeks ago, Johanna Harness on her blog talked about literary rejection as not unlike the experience of learning to walk. We humans, we learn to stand, then take small steps while holding onto something sturdier than ourselves, and we fall down, a whole hell of a lot. Somehow when we’re toddlers, without all of this cumbersome self-reflection and analysis, we don’t really mind the hiccups that are part and parcel with the learning process. But sheesh, get a couple of “I’m just not the right agent” letters, decades later, and it can be an unraveling worse than seeing your favorite baby blanket in tatters.

Something happened in the meanwhile, Johanna posits, that changed how we feel regarding the negative side of the learning process. And it behooves people trying to write for a living to retain the totality of experiences related to getting work published. Read More…

This story is old. Old, old, old, like nearly two decades worth of mold growth old. But as I’m otherwise occupied today, with writing something new and inventive and much better than this, I thought I’d share. The story here today is not entirely based on a new story, but it certainly has elements of early 1990s Syracuse. Enjoy!

It’s about the size of a typical urban efficiency apartment, with a faded certificate of occupancy stuck on the wall by the front door, probably with some bouncer’s chewing gum, announcing it is fit to house 35 people legally. Thirty-five dyke pygmies, maybe, but not 35 wide-assed people. Smoke hangs next to the low ceiling, hovering around the light over the small and slanted pool table, a cheap but efficient way of adding a dramatic atmosphere to both the serious and poseur sharks who swim underneath it. Most of the patrons use pool-playing as a tried and true method of picking up dates, but this usually leads to them slamming the stick into the cue ball too hard, ricocheting the shot out of the hole and ending in a staccato set of swears as they express their “disappointment.”

My friends and I have just entered the place for the third time in five days because one of them has a new crush on a townie who usually hangs out here. Usually, however, being the relative term that it is, has not included any of these three nights, and has led directly to my frustration at winding up in this dump once again, cheap beer or no cheap beer. Read More…

He watched the activity around him: fruit salesman, old woman selling goat cheese, some loud man pulling people aside to show them silk scarves. Teddy was a little afraid of the scarves man.

Walking around seemed better than standing here waiting for Sophie to come back. The last he had noticed her, she’d been counting out change to give the woman from the dairy, two rows over.

“…Twenty-three, twenty-four, and twenty-five cents,” she’d said, standing up straight and running her hands down her skirt. She didn’t like touching money, she’d told Teddy. It was very dirty, probably the dirtiest thing a person would touch all day, except for live chickens. Read More…

This is a section of my memoir from chapter 28. It runs about 20 minutes long. If you like zombies and gross anatomy, this chapter is for you.

Here’s a little bit from my work-in-progress, SuperQueers, which I swear I’ll finish by this fall, even though I keep changing things up plot- and character-wise. I’m hoping to have it sit a little on the shorter end, somewhere around 70,000-75,000 words, so it’s a quick read. Without giving much away about the plot, let’s just say that an offhand wish this protagonist had has come true when she wakes up the next day. It’s not actually something she’s happy to have afflict her. Feel free to offer feedback on the writing, or not, but genuinely mean people’s comments won’t be admitted into the conversation (you know who you are).

Jess typically woke up four to six minutes before her alarm went off each morning. She was proud that her body was a regular, coordinated event, that it followed her wishes and bent to her will, even causing her to rise before the safety net of electronics kicked in.

Today, however, she slept through the alarm. She opened her eyes and saw that it had been buzzing for 20 minutes.

I’m so tired, she thought. She rolled over, groaning, wanting to go back to sleep. Ah, but it was Sunday, and she had a whole host of things to accomplish: clean the kitchen, dye her hair, reorganize the linen closet, and finish the literature review she’d begun last week. Maybe she could even get up the nerve to go to the office next week.

She sat up, slowly, because the room was tilted off to the left. Possibilities of why this was occurring flashed through her mind—she’d had an aneurism, a small stroke, or she was developing some kind of inner ear infection. If it didn’t go away in the next few minutes, she would have to call Dr. Rogers’ office, and he was convinced she was always coming up with psychosomatic illnesses. Jess knew she needed to find a new doctor who didn’t think she was crazy.

It was passing. Everything straightened out a bit. She moved her legs over to the floor and stood up carefully. Still fine. She should be okay for her shower.

She didn’t notice it at first—she was soapy with Antibacterial Dial liquid soap, which was the first phase of her showering routine—but as she was rinsing off, she couldn’t miss it. There were little bits of some sludge-like substance on her fingertips, the print side. She stared at her hands, the water running down her back. It couldn’t be dirt, not after washing as she did. What was it? She looked more closely at her left index finger. It was a viscous substance, shiny but sticky at the same time, and it seemed to be extruding out from between the ridges of her fingerprint. Jess didn’t want to, but she sniffed it. Almost instantly, she screamed and pushed her hand as far away as possible because launching it off her body like a missile wasn’t possible.

It smelled like shit. Actual shit. Bacteria-laden, disgusting, repulsive, stinky, canine excrement. And as she tried to wrap her brain around how such a thing would wind up on all of her fingertips, she was also wondering what it would take to clean herself of this, short of cutting of her own skin.

She scrubbed her hands with more antibacterial liquid, until her skin was absolutely raw. But each time she cleaned off, more oozed out of her skin like blood from an open scrape. It started slowly and almost imperceptibly gathered form. She couldn’t wash anymore. She sat down in the tub as the water gradually got cooler, sobbing over her predicament. And then she noticed that the substance stopped flowing, or whatever it had been doing. She let the water run over her hands and then she dared to look at herself one last time. Her fingers were bare of it.

And then the strangest thought entered her mind, seemingly from nowhere: I could control this, too.

*  *  *

Jess walked to and from her front door exactly 17 times. Prime numbers were strong, with few fissures that could be exploited to break them down. Seventeen was a good number. Seventeen was the number of the apartment she lived in, and it helped make her feel like the very door could withstand an assault, which of course, was necessary for someone who saw it as the boundary between her level of care and the disaster of the rest of the world.

This grand hope of hers had the unseen effect of creating animosity between the door, which had been fashioned in the mid-1930s along with the others for this building, and which was thus no more or less strong than any of the others, and the small brass numbers 1 and 7, which over the years of housing Jess, had come to believe in their own imperviousness. The door was embarrassed by their bravado, and knew that all of the other doors considered it ridiculous and more than a little pathetic for getting stuck with two obviously stupid brass numbers. But door 18 noted bitterly that it was the only one who actually was placed in view of door number 17, so it was the only one who had to put up with their incessant posturing.

But now things were different for Jess, although she wasn’t sure how or why. The very air smelled strange, as if the dog crap had infected the local atmosphere. It was cloying, as was the scent of the anti-bacterial soap. How had she used the stuff so constantly without noticing that it had infused itself everywhere, on everything? It seemed to her, this morning and not yesterday nor any of the other before it, that she had settled for a false cleanliness.

She looked at the door for she wasn’t sure how long. She reached out with one hand, which held an anti-bacterial tissue. The knob was cool, slippery under the cotton-paper fibers. She grabbed a strong hold of it, and turned. It didn’t pull forward because in her intense focus on opening the door, she’d forgotten to unbolt all of the locks, and there were several. One by one she twisted, pulled, unlatched, and slid the devices open, breathing deeply before taking hold of the doorknob again.

It was open to the hallway. There was no reason for this sudden turn of events—no deliveryman, no emergency, and no masculine policewoman inquiring about a strange break-in. She put one foot onto the obviously unclean hallway carpet, then the other. She turned and closed the door behind her, and slid her key into the lock, her hands shaking a little. Jess stared at the door from this other side, a side to which she hadn’t given much prior consideration. The counting started, an automatic reflex, but she stopped at six.

“You’re just a number,” she said to the brass markers, who immediately became overwhelmed with grief, and then, shame at having taken her at her word all these years that they had a secret strength.

Jess turned and walked slowly down the hall to the stairs, deaf to the sounds of the other doors, laughing as only doors can.

On the advice of some guy who makes a lot of money blogging and has sold books from podcasting, I made a podcast. This is chapter 1 from Bumbling into Body Hair: Tales of a Klutz’s Sex Change. If it’s something people like, I’ll make more. Otherwise, let’s just pretend this never happened.

Bumbling into Body Hair Chapter 1

I’m excited to say that I have a collection of flash fiction stories out on Amazon for the Kindle, at the bargain basement price of only $2.99! That’s not even bargain basement—that’s the basement’s downstairs level. There is even one bonus, never-before-scene story to round out the collection.

A husband making frantic choices to escape a collapsing planet. A boy, lost, too young to find his own way home. A vampire, longing for a decent bottle of wine, bored with having experienced too much. A woman on the edge, waiting for her spouse to return from war. A friend burdened with regret after committing murder. A mummy who pushes through pain and decades, anxious for revenge. Two robbers, carrying out a heist. These and other tales of desperation and emotions on a razor’s edge explore reality and the space just behind. Purchase your copy of Spinning Around a Sun: Stories today!

Finding an agent, so I keep reading, is like falling in love. If query letters to agents are like little love missives, the idea is that the agent will be spellbound, struck with wanting for more from the would-be author, desperate for that partial manuscript or book proposal. When their love connection is made, they can ride off into the sunset of the publication industry. Wait a minute. Something’s not right here.

I think this is a strange model for a business proposition. Of course I would want anyone interested in representing me to like my work. It couldn’t happen any other way. But there’s something about the rhetoric around finding representation that turns my stomach.

Maybe it’s that I’m really bad at dating. High school was a bizarre experience, with my school enforcing the “only guys ask girls out” code and me of the girl set who only got asked to make out behind the bleachers so nobody would know we’d “dated.” College didn’t make life any easier—half the guys I thought were interesting and attractive turned out to be gay. This apparently, by the way, is a common straight woman’s complaint. They make whole movies and books out of this stuff.

• There was the date in which I arrived on time and he was late by an hour, the time during which I got to have an interrogation, excuse me, a chat, with his mother.
• There was the guy who really did break out a calculator to see how much tip he should pay the waiter. Boy, you need to learn to do math in your head if you’re going to be a cheapskate.
• There was the one who asked me to build him a bed frame because he’d “always wanted to watch a butch do carpentry in my living room.” And yes, I built the frame.

So forgive me if I’m not a little trepidatious about doing anything on a “dating” model.

I sent out my first, second, and third round of query letters, starting way back last August. I figured it would be like entering a contest; I’d send out my hopeful scouts into the literary world and I would just sit on my hands and wait for the responses to come back. Do de do, I hummed, I’m sure they’ll just reply in no time. . . .

Plink! I got an email! With burning fingers I pounded the mouse button to open it. Someone had fallen in love with me! Me!

Thank you so much for your query. While your project certainly has merit, I’m just not the right agent for this material.  I wish you the very best in your search for representation.

Warm regards.

Oh. Oh, okay. Well, so that wasn’t the response I was looking for, but she said it had merit. But what did that mean, just not the right agent? I remembered some article or other that I’d read about how writers over-parse the responses from agents. Don’t over-parse, don’t over-parse. That was like being told to think about anything except little green monkeys.

Two days later, I got another response:

Thanks for your query. I’m afraid, however, that I don’t think I’m the best agent for your work.

I wish you the best of luck in your publishing endeavors.

Afraid? That was strange. But okay, I got the point. Nobody was falling in love with my query letter. I went back to the drawing board, tried not to think about wallflowers at high school dances, and rewrote it. And I changed the title of my memoir.

Batch after batch of query letters came back with mostly nice but regretfully not in love responses. I did still more research online, akin but not akin to figuring out how to meet Mr. Right or the Next Hot Momma. I tried to improve my query some more, changing it from 3rd person to my own point of view. Condense, shorten, personalize each query with the name of a book I’d read that said agent had worked on. Thank goodness I’m an avid reader.

I discovered agent blogs. Now, not every agent has a blog, but a lot of them do, so instead of continuing to shoot arrows into the dark I’d stick with agents who revealed something about themselves online, and I’d try not feel like a stalker while doing it.

I had become something of a fisherman with an elaborate bait box. Heeeeere, agent agent agent, try my juicy strip of squid! You’ll like it! You’ll fall in love.

At some point my insanity level decreased, to the delight and relief of my friends and family. I went back to writing and took a break from querying, and in the process, wrote and revised three short stories—two in the speculative fiction/sci fi genre, and one straight literary. One story made the rounds of sci fi journals, rejected every time, with a bit more terseness than I’d received from my memoir query letters, but with enough positive feedback that I’ll probably try it at a few more at some point.

I’d learned, it seemed, to be patient. Or at least more patient. At a few points an agent would write back asking for a full manuscript, or my book proposal. So I learned to write a book proposal. I would become excited with possibility, only to be disappointed when they’d write back again saying they just weren’t the right agent for me. Now I understood that this phrase was code.

One agent only took submissions through a Web form, and I was aghast that I was only allowed to fit 400 characters into the submission. Four hundred characters? My first paragraph of this post is more than that. I snipped, no, I chopped out whole sections of my query. My beautiful words, falling to the floor, and the final result resembled nothing of my careful prose. I pressed send, figuring I’d never hear from her again.

In the meantime, I submitted my memoir to my regional writer’s association literary contest, and registered for their annual conference in July. I knew I just needed to meet other writers, talk to some agents informally, see what I could do to make myself more appealing. I had heard a lot about having an online presence, and I already—as an unemployed person in the middle of nowhere—had an active Twitter account, Facebook account, and this blog. I started dreaming up things I could write about, like local restaurant owners in Walla Walla, that could get me more visitors to my Web site. In the spring I hooked up with a couple of writers I’ve known online for years who were starting a blog on pop culture. And social commentary via pop culture analysis started humming out of my keyboard on a near-daily basis. I really was working on an audience, even though at the time I just was excited to have some fun writing this stuff and reading others’ work.

And then I got a one-line response from the agent with the very limiting submission form: Please send me the first three chapters of your memoir.

Ho-hum, I thought, now the pessimist. I’m sure she’ll write back in three weeks and tell me she doesn’t feel the love. But okay, here are the first three chapters. Have at it, Ms. Agent.

She wrote back again. She really likes it! What? Please send my book proposal. I took a brief look at it, punched it up a little and updated it (because I really never stop revising something once I’ve written it, and if that’s wrong, well, I kind of can’t help myself) and sent it on. I was reservedly hopeful.

A few days later I heard back from her again. This time she had questions for me. Questions! That’s kind of exciting—it felt like I was sending text messages to Orion and back. The twinkling heavens have questions for me. How could I not answer the twinkling heavens?

I received word from the literary association that my memoir was a finalist in the literary contest. I passed this happy news onto the agent. She thanked me for sending it, and she had some things she wanted me to change to my book proposal. It was the first specific feedback or insight I’d gotten from an agent in this whole process, and I was thrilled to receive it. Even if she later decided not to represent me, I at least had this great experience and knew that I wasn’t just a crazy person with word processing software.

In the middle of last month, she asked for my full manuscript. I went to Kinko’s while on vacation in DC and mailed it out to her. I haven’t heard back from her yet, but I feel like I’ll hear something, and I’m happy she’s going to this same conference in a couple of weeks.

I still get uncomfortable with the romance model of finding an agent, but at least I understand now why people are using it.