As a child, I exalted the library as a veritable heaven of the imagination. Golden light blazed through small round windows and shafted onto stories by Laura Ingalls Wilder and Beverly Clearly, Judy Blume and EB White. My mom would only take me once every two weeks, when the books were due, as it was a 30 minute drive into town, so I maxed out my limit every time, pulling books off the shelves like a hungry teen in a convenient store snack aisle.

My love affair with libraries has been on again/off again, but today I trepidaciously stepped inside our local version of the book lender to find some audio books as well as the Shreve novel I’ve been looking for.

The colors danced off the glossy covers as they lay supine on the angled shelves of new fiction. I spotted the Shreve book right away, the only one checked in out of eight–what luck! I grasped the slender volume, slick with its plastic cover, then my eyes spotted this:

Memoirs of a Muse

Black clouds should have gathered, lightening striking at startling intervals, and the sky should have gone dark.

But these things didn’t happen. Finding this book only mattered to me. Only my heart was pierced.

I sat in the car line to pick up the girls and read the first 15 pages–for of course I checked it out. As I waited the wind rattled through the treees like old bones.

I felt lukewarm about it. It unfolded slowly, a bit bitingly. According to Amazon, it came out five months ago, so it was written last year, well before I even conceived my almost identical story line.

I feel much like I did after completing First Lessons, my book about teaching, and realizing a wave had begun for a book called Dangerous Minds. By the time I landed an agent and we were submitting to actual publishers, the movie was coming, a TV series slated. My book seemed silly and flat compared to it. The agent believed in it, and the publishers liked the writing, but still, all no, no, no, no. Once a book has been shopped around, it is dead. You can’t submit it any more lest you annoy them to the point of wrecking your reputation.

My life has proven rather ill timed again, like I’m dancing with a peg leg, falling just behind every beat, sliding clumsily before the audience I long to charm.

Her book is getting good reviews. She’s been published in the New Yorker. Her previous short story collection is lauded as brilliant.

I don’t want to play any more.

I have good parking karma. When my mom was in town last weekend, still very sick and weak and unable to walk long distances, I got a front row spot, and I mean the very FRONT spot, at every single store we visited–four of them one afternoon.

Mom was aghast. “This is Austin,” she said, gesturing to the SUVs circling the lot with malicious carnality. “How did you manage all these good spots?” She was relieved, no doubt. The temperature was over 100 and she lost energy fast, as she has since eight rounds of chemo and twenty rounds of radiation.

I explained. “I never ever, not once, cut someone off for a parking spot. If I am alone in the car, I never take a front spot, even when it’s open. I leave it for someone who needs it–someone with little kids, or someone older, or just tired or in a hurry. I park near the back and walk.”

We entered the craft store to a rush of air conditioning. “And so this gets you good spots when you need it.”

“Almost always,” I said. “That’s why everyone else always makes me drive to Sixth Street!”

I wished this karma worked with more critical parts of my life. Since high school I have helped others with their writing–fixing term papers, editing newspaper stories. In college my friend Janel and I would escape to empty computer labs and pace the room, spouting lead sentences for our Daily Texan features to each other until they satisfied our critical ears.

In my novel group, I’ve critiqued endlessly, read entire newbie novels, rewritten query letters and reviewed synopses. Sometimes I’ve put in days or weeks of work to help someone else. The other day I did a bit of research to help a friend send a killer proposal to the very same agent I had also sent my book to. And her novel is superior to mine, a better fit even for the agency.

But the karma fails here. Others do read my stories and give me valid criticism when I ask, although I’ve found sometimes they feel they can’t help me figure out what dissatisfies me about a particular work. And I have had stories published, which I suppose is more than some ever manage, so I should be grateful.

But the big payoff, the super proud moment of some national publication, some prestigious lit mag, or the Holy Grail–a novel contract–eludes me despite this being the third time in my life I have devoted all my energy to it.

Maybe some small parts of our social network, like parking, work into the weave of the universe’s checks and balances easily, not unlike needlepoint on a tapestry, one long thread that helps create a larger more complex image.

But the big things–wealth, fame, approval, validation, reward–those are independent of how we act or live or help others. They are random, unprejudiced, rare. Not merit based or even considerate of need. Like the lottery. I know that in order to win, you have to buy the tickets. You have to get in the game. And I’ve done that, devoted years of creative energy and time, sometimes with great sacrifice, like spending all the grocery money on Quick Picks, just to take the chance. But fate isn’t Karmic when it comes to this.

I remain the one everyone says they owe. But fail myself. No debts. But no bonus either.

Instead I revel in my little glory. A rainy day. Two pouty kids. A desperate need for Kraft Easy Mac–right NOW! And a car slides out of a spot by the grocery store door. So I take it.

An unfinished novel is like an interrupted dream.
I come to the end of this journey designated specifically for completing a second draft of Helena the Muse and see so much more work than I could have imagined in any waking state. I am still groggy, half asleep, and feel unsated, the vision incomplete, as though I had only begun the hard leg of my travels, with many bug stings and limb lashes and hard ground to sleep on still to go.

I regret, perhaps, traveling so far. I stayed primarily in the Ozarks, near Eureka Springs, revisiting my adolescent trip there and camping next to lakes and rivers. But the drive time was long and took up much time. Still, listening to Hawking was edifying if not distracting, Missouri can count me as a visitor thanks to my inability to navigate while learning about singularity in black holes. And on the long road back to Texas I listened to Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, which had an overstory punctuated by flashbacks like mine. I pulled over in the Ouachita National Forest to scratch out a diagram of her story structure, seeing its efficiency and lamenting the complexity of mine.

So I drove back to my old home town and parked myself at the public library, making outline after outline until I had a better handle on my overstory and the subplots within them. I think it is more streamlined now and hopefully works better.

And yet, still so much new writing to do, so much clean up.

My main goal now is to get the first 50 pages, the most an agent might ask for at the conference, as perfect as possible. This is a huge task, as each time I write a new version of the opening scenes, I hate them more. I want it to move; I must get background in. It’s frustrating and taxing and twice yesterday I wanted to hurl my laptop across the room but instead sat in a little study room, hiding on the floor behind the table and just cried instead.

It will get done. One way or another. It’s just a longer and harder road than I thought it would be. And as for dreaming, sleep is a luxury I can ill afford. Prepare yourself for the dark circle eyed Deanna, the pale wan version, until July.

If only a novel were like an uninterrupted dream, comfortable, languorous, and eternal.

The third campsite required 10 miles of driving down a dirt road to locate. And caretaker “Bob” was a flirt (despite grandfatherly age) so I spent a lot of time nodding at his endless stories and looking on longingly as my laptop battery slowly ebbed. He took the picture.

The book has undergone the re-org and now I work frantically to write new scenes and fix a kajillion consistency errors. I don’t think I’ll be done before I head back Wednesday. I mainly just try to keep going past lethargy, sick-of-the-bookness, and jolts of weird frenetic anxiety.

So, I think I’m going to escape the world and work on this book! Ha! Between driving, being chased by scary jaws-looking trucks (check out my side mirror–this guy drove beside me for 100 miles!), finding a campsite and surviving frightening nights alone in the dark, who has freaking time to write? I’m better off with a studio and two rugrats! I swear EVERYONE wants to talk to me. Do I look that friendly? Can I pass myself off as stuck up for a while?

I spent about four hours copying every plot point onto notecards last night and this morning. I can’t quite get a handle on what to do. I just keep working, letting the small problems occur to me–dropped characters, missing exposition, too-brief dialogue–and hope the big picture comes through eventually.

Yesterday I made friends with a squirrel (although if he ever confesses to being the scary little rodent who hurled himself between my rainfly and my inner tent wall last night, our affair is OVER) and this morning he hung out as I scribbled cards, often shaking his tail at me if I was not paying attention, as if to say, “Throw me a bone here, woman, I’m cute!” I took a hike along a trail that bordered the shore of the lake where I camped, and when I returned, there he was again. He seemed a bit sad when I packed up my tent, but alas, I had to get to the library, where I could have wireless and more distractions (like blogging) to keep me from figuring out what is wrong with my book.

Maybe I’ll just declare it healthy and go sightseeing.

Hope everyone back home is doing well. I’m in state #4, although #3 was visited solely due to navigational error. Big navigational error. Blame the scary truck. Oh, and Stephen Hawkings. I do not appear to have the brain power to listen to lectures on quantum mechanics and drive simultaneously (especially since I am texting Kurt every five minutes too.) And negotiating turns in the … mountains …

Hey. I know what’s missing. Red wine and coke. Surely that’s to be had somewhere around here.

It’s pushing midnight on the first night I have deserted everyone and everything in order to try to get a hold on this novel–reorganize it and form it and cut away anything non-essential.

It ain’t working.

Maybe it’s the traffic droning by in an unrelenting stream on the interstate. It makes me think of the Doppler Effect, and the bending of light into curved space, and the origin of the universe. I have been listening to Hawking in the car during drive time where I do not need to concentrate on directions (might account for how I got lost for two hours). I thought he might infuse my subconscious, stir up the connections, and assist me in some brilliant yet indefinable way.

Instead, I listen to the whine of automobiles, wheels on a wet road, the frequency of the pitch starting low, going high, then dropping low again, like the red-shifting of the color spectrum of stars as they endlessly move away from our eyes peering through telescopes. Nothing is static, Hawking insists, although this is a fundamental controversy in physics and astronomy, not even those fixed stars that seem constant, unchanging, certain enough to navigate by. Since the Big Bang, that finite point at which everything began, all that exists has done nothing but infinitely grow and spread.

I followed my book outline with tenacity until the very end, when the point of the book lit up like a neutron star. Now that the central premise of the book is finalized, where should the journey start? Where should this novel begin?

This is my essential question. It could be a travel flashback–Dinesen, Schubert, Botticelli, Sappho. Or one of Helena’s personal background segments–the naked closet, the guitar player, the sculptor. Or a dramatic mental ward scene–Paul and the cutting bit, or the Japanese bondage, or her time in solitary.

Nothing is clear. I just need to think. If only traffic would die down…

Okay. So the day began with mom’s doctor visit going poorly and long. Actually, scratch that, the day began with putting in my contacts, one of which hurt awfully and upon inspection, had somehow become square-ish, so was no longer usable. I had to toss it and get a new one.

Then a shower proved I had brought a travel bottle of hand lotion, not hair conditioner, which I fortunately figured out BEFORE I put in in my hair, but I had to yank tangles out without the benefit of lube–NO FUN.

The “check engine” light is now permanently on in my car although everyone assures me it is just an emissions thing and not to worry about it.

And, despite it being glowing and sunny and blue sky for the first few hours of my drive, now it is storming and lightning. So I am not at a campsite, which received some 10 inches of rain today, but at a hotel, proving everyone right (especially dad, who told me today in the waiting room at mom’s doc that I was “nuts” and mom agreed, saying they remembered what kind of girl I was since I arrived kicking and screaming onto this planet and apparently asking for a down pillow and Evian. )

OOHHHHH!

At any rate, I found a hotel that was, inexplicably, almost the same price as the campsite and has free wireless internet. So I write here and look at the picture I took earlier in the day and think: boy I better work my tail off since I have a connection and a room and am NOT roughing it in any way (although, ICK, the room is, yes, a bit rough.)

Sigh.

I’ll post in the morning on my progress. The good news is that the weekend at my destination says 70s, and less than 10% chance of rain. Should be able to camp tomorrow night. I’ll be at a good place for that anyway. Wherever that is.

First I found this bit from The Gay Science, an aphorism that would change how I saw myself and others I admired:

Whoever knows he is deep, strives for clarity; whoever would like to appear deep to the crowd, strives for obscurity. For the crowd considers anything deep if only it cannot see to the bottom: the crowd is so timid and afraid of going into the water. (173)

GUILTY, I think, and am thus chastised. I vow to mend my ways.

But then as I absorb more, skipping around his books, jotting down my favorite quotes, I find this, from Mixed Opinions and Maxims (1879):

The worse readers are those who proceed like plundering soldiers: they pick up a few things they can use, soil and confuse the rest, and blaspheme the whole. (137)

BUSTED! Oh, that man. The funny thing about 137 is that it serves to explain anyone who might being Nietzsche down. The all-purpose excuse, “Well, they misquoted me! They didn’t read the whole thing!”

I felt the same, in my primitive and sophomoric way, when I got the judging results to my novel Helena the Muse. The critique said, “If the entire manuscript is told from Helena’s POV, I think it will become hard to want to stay with the story.” And, “Helena is about as well-developed as she can be, considering her circumstances.”

The judge had ten pages and a synopsis. I thought most people could make the leap from the summary that Helena was not going to be drugged the whole book, but the judging comments make it seem as though that is the impression.

FOUL! I want to cry. She’s not drugged much at all in the book! But the first few pages, well, they do sort of involve her shift from incoherence to lucidity.

And so I change it. I listen. And adjust.

I owe you one, Nietzsche, my dear Friedrich, my love. I’ll try not to muck you up too badly, but I am, unfortunately Human, All to Human.

Time to support the locals.

My friend Jane Parsons, a photographer on the artsy end of the scale, got a rather unusual photograph published in Farfelu, a newish Austin literary magazine.

If you’re an artist, photographer, poet, or writer, you should submit to them. They are off to a good start and the ‘zine is run by two very fun chicks.

Oh, and yeah, there’s a short story in there I wrote (Issue 2, Spring 2006). Just remember, people, should you pick up a copy at Book People and take a peek–FICTION! That means the story is MADE UP!

I had a wonderful weekend, complete with a hike near Lake Travis, a magnificent lunch at Iguana Grill, a successful reunion shoot, and many other delights–including going to a party with girlfriends where there was a cake shaped like a (dang, this is a family blog.) Well, a part of the male anatomy.

The novel is going well. I’m in a good space.