PAVING WITH GOOD INTENTIONS

This post originally appeared on Julie N. Ford's blog for Cordelia's Corner.

            Sometimes life doesn’t want to cooperate with my plans.  It’s been forever since I’ve been able to post anything.  My sincerest apologies to you marvelous readers.

            They say that confession is good for the soul.  I quite agree.  The reason I’m so dreadfully late updating?

            It’s all Mel’s fault.

            Now, before I am accused of throwing Mel under the bus, you need to know that this is the fourth essay I’ve written since my last posting.  The first three were too personal for Mel’s tastes.  Since it’s pretty much impossible to slip anything by her, I had to bow to her wishes.  Such is the life of an unpaid editorial assistant to an unemployed writer.

            Cue long-suffering sigh.

            As insistent as Mel was about not airing her dirty laundry for the world to see, she was sympathetic.  “I know you’ve worked hard,” she told me, “and when I’m ready, you can write more about my personal life, but…”

            “You do realize a lot of what you write comes from personal experience,” I interrupted.  “And before you start, I know you’re not a one-fourth vampire.”  The one about the girl in exile from another world might explain a lot, though I didn’t have the heart to tell her that.  “I reserve the right to discuss your writing style, its influences, and how you put yourself into every manuscript.”

            “Fine.  Later.”

            I couldn’t resist.  “Especially those sex scenes.  I promised my readers a few posts back that I’d let them know how you write them.  Or, how you try to write them.  You know, the embarrassing stuff.”

            Mel just rolled her eyes and told me to get back to work.  I resisted the temptation to tell her the same.

            Dear Mel understands my frustration at not being able to complete what I’d set out to do.  She has been busy with a lot of Real Life right now, just like every single person on the planet this summer.  However, she and I both believe she may be living about four peoples’ lives at the moment with everything going on.  In my last post, I mentioned that she would be done writing for the Curriculum Committee at her church by the end of June.  They just finished two days ago.  Next, Mel has been trying to finish the suggestions and edits I made while we were at the beach.  She kept going off on one of her famous tangents, but I did my best to rein her in.  Also, she is embarrassed that she asked her faithfully patient friends and family to be ready to read it months ago, and it’s still not quite ready.  It’s not as if it’s going to be a classic to torment schoolchildren for the next century.  I do so wish she wouldn’t put quite so much pressure on herself.

            In addition, she has been writing, rewriting, and submitting some pieces, hopefully for some cash.  She says she is tired of me whining about my lack of funds, especially since I got to go along for free on her vacation with the 18 others that make up her husband’s side of the family.  One humor piece has had quite a journey:  it has now gone through three massive rewrites.  A few years ago, it was just a 500 word essay about something funny about Mel’s attempts at motherhood.  Then the local magazine she was querying got rid of their freelance humor section. The piece was dragged out again when Mel was researching Christian magazines, and changed it accordingly, making it about 1,000 words, and in Mel’s opinion, better.  She queried, then almost simultaneously passed out and threw up when they wrote her back and said they wanted to see it.  She mailed it off with a cover letter, and waited.  And waited.  And waited some more.

            Two months past the time she was supposed to hear back, Mel wrote a polite note, with her SASE (self-addressed, stamped envelope), and got nothing.  Another couple of months, she wrote again, letting them know that she was making it a simultaneous submission.  Again, nothing.  Disappointed, she realized they just weren’t that interested.  Later on, out of curiosity, she looked them up online.  After she queried, she got a response that their magazine had closed, and for her to try another one of their magazines.  Funnily enough, Mel and I have seen that closed magazine in the store several times since.  Nothing ever came of the query she sent to the new magazine under the old umbrella.

            Mel was disheartened.  She was starting to question her writing efforts, especially after two other writing projects fell through around the same time.  She had friends who were published.  She also had extended family members who were published in different areas:  academic, memoir, coffee table art books, astrology, and adult fiction.  I gently (I can do gently!) suggested she put the humor piece away, and she did, even though she pulled it out every so often to tweak it a bit.

            Several months ago, she finally got the courage to try again.  I had done some research into Christian and secular magazines where her humor pieces might fit.  She had submitted to the Christian one, and got a polite rejection note.  I told her to suck it up, but she said she was busy with other projects.  Last month, I made her look into the secular market again.  She picked one that looked like a good fit, for one of the humor sections.  She just planned on tweaking it again since it was about the same length.  Then we got an unpleasant surprise:  the section she was planning on applying to had closed to submissions several months earlier for the year, and the only other one that accepted humor was one for 500 words.  I was sick.  Can you believe the amount of work I had to do?  Cutting an essay completely in half?  That Mel loved?  Ugh!  I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.  Except for my mortal enemy, and believe you me, I’d like to wish a few other things on her.

            Just so you know, Mel insists it’s that it’s beneath me to wish for bad things to happen to dreadful people, even though they are stupid faces.  I wanted to use stronger words, but again, Mel said no.  She did assure me that she would kill my mortal enemy off in fiction.  “A nasty ending?” I asked.  “Yes,” she said soothingly.  “I promise.” 

            Anyway, now that you’ve seen the dark underbelly of the way Mel and I think alike, back to our humor piece.  (There’s something wrong with that sentence, especially since it wasn’t a dark humor piece.  Oh well.)  After many hours, ink, and paper, it was finished.  Mel and I were emotionally and mentally wrung out.  I emailed it for her, and we just have to wait at least 60 days for their response.

            Distancing myself in order to make those drastic cuts was painful.  Mel and I work so closely together, it’s almost like we’re one person.  She writes this stuff, and as her first reader, I get used to seeing her vision for things, and try to help her polish it until it’s the best, as perfect to Mel, as it can be.

            I don’t believe it’s arrogance for writers to feel their work is kind of perfect, at least in their own eyes.  They know it’s really not, but…it’s more like you love what you’ve created.  You’re exhausted—you’ve poured soul and heart into your words, your characters, your universes, until you’re thoroughly sick of reading the same material with each additional revision.  You know that you’ve gotten it right, and yet a niggling thought in your head tells you that maybe it’s completely wrong.

            There is a balance that has to be achieved.  You have to love your work so completely to share it with others, to cry when you kill off beloved characters, to fight for what you believe when change is demanded.  At the same time, you also have to become detached enough to give in to necessary changes.  What are necessary changes?  Some are obvious; some are deemed necessary according to the individual requesting them.  Compromise is how your manuscript goes from your initial vision, to its final incarnation for the most important part of your work:  your readers.

            Mel and I continue to work on compromising.  She insists that if we work together, we can produce great things.

            Maybe she’s right.

            Until next time,

            Cordelia