I want to be beautiful like you, I thought, as if Mandarin were listening.

I want apricot skin and Pocahontas hair and eyes the color of tea. I want to be confident and detached and effortlessly sensual, and if promiscuity is part of the package, I will gladly follow your lead. All I know is I’m so tired of being inside my body.

I would give anything to be like Mandarin.

It’s hard to find beauty in the badlands of Washokey, Wyoming. Fourteen-year-old Grace Carpenter knows it’s not her mother’s pageant obsessions, or the cowboy dances and pickup trucks adored by her small-town classmates. True beauty is wild girl Mandarin Ramey: seventeen, shameless and utterly carefree.

Grace would give ANYTHING to be like Mandarin.

When the misfits are united for a project, they embark on an unlikely, explosive friendship, packed with nights spent skinny-dipping in the canal, liberating the town’s animal-head trophies, and constantly searching for someplace magic. Grace even plays along when Mandarin suggests they make a pact to run away together. Blame it on the crazy-making wildwinds that plague their badlands town.

But all too soon, Grace discovers Mandarin’s unique beauty hides a girl who’s troubled, broken and even dangerous. And no matter how hard Grace fights to keep the magic, even the best friendships can’t withstand betrayal.

I love books about complicated female friendships, and I don’t think there are nearly enough of them. So, in short, I’m jazzed about this book and this author. Keep an eye out for her, okay?

I’m starting to think there may have been a reason that I’ve been letting my previous manuscripts fester stew. Editing, it seems, is hard work. I began editing what was then known as Convocation the day I finished it–November 30th. Then, it was just over fifty-thousand terse words long, in ten sprawling chapters.

Now–February 1st–it’s a different beast. Now, it’s The Stone Sorter. Chapters have been reordered, passages added. The beginning was massively rewritten. There’s now a new epilogue. It currently weighs in at 62,000 words, in twenty-three chapters plus an epilogue and prologue. Miranda’s motivations have been refined, her daily life clarified. I couldn’t have gotten this far without my three most-prompt beta readers: Pat, Tarah, and Michele. Their advice was all succinct, clear, and, amazingly, it largely agreed. The book was too short, they said. What didn’t work for one didn’t work for any of them. These are three very different readers; I wasn’t anticipating such a consensus. But I’m glad they agreed. It’s sure made my job easier.

Because it’s hard enough already. I’ve moved into line edits now, smoothing my rumpled, messy sentences, fixing typos (my favorite? “He turned crispy” for “He turned crisply.”), moving, I hope, from the functional to the artful. It’s slow, painful work, but necessary work. I’m not sure that I’ll leave any sentence as it was at its inception, untouched and unedited. This is a good thing. But it’s a difficult thing. It’s so much easier to let words tumble from you, especially once you know your characters. Because they write the book. I close my eyes, ask them what they’re up to, and they tell me. My job, I guess, is to make sense of it–to make it good. That’s not an easy task.

Since, I’ve found, setting deadlines here in the blog consistently lets me beat them, I’ll say right now: my goal is to start querying by the Ides of March. Any writerly types have any thoughts for agents? I have a couple in mind, a few I’m following on the internet, but I don’t want to leave any stone–pun intended, of course–unturned.

Then, today, stumbled across this comic on XKCD. Apparently, I’m not the only one.

I was eleven years old when I realized that my mother was a ghost. I can remember the exact moment of this realization, but I wish I could better explain how it came about. It was like I had all these broken pieces of the truth, like shards of a white bowl, and in one moment, the pieces flew together, reforming the bowl, like the instant of its shattering running in reverse.

Because it feels relevant, I’m pasting a review I wrote in 2007 of Coupland’s similar 2007 venture, his “Microserfs for the iPod generation”, JPod. Warning: it’s long.

It seems to be a generally accepted truism that writers are a self-absorbed lot; like all artists, they are characterized as insular and reflective, looking inward rather than to the external world for stimulation and inspiration. Some writers refuse to acknowledge this caricature, taking for granted the way that their creative scrutiny affects their image of the world. Others, from James Joyce to Kurt Vonnegut, only tersely accede to the novelist’s clichéd vanity by presenting highly fictionalized, parodied, and renamed doppelgangers of themselves within their works. But two contemporary popular authors take this Joycean self-interest a step further in their most recent novels, making themselves central and integral characters. Douglas Coupland and Bret Easton Ellis are not, of course, the first writers to do this—Dante played a similar game in his Divine Comedies well before Patrick Bateman was a glimmer in Ellis’ great grand-daddy’s eye—but they are undoubtedly taking a greater risk in writing fiction about themselves than Alighieri ever did, as not only are their artistic visions at stake but also their statuses with their respective substantial and vocal fan bases, audiences weaned on their earlier, extremely idiosyncratic works.

But perhaps it is because of their long-standing and earned reputations, rather than in spite of them, that each author–Ellis in Lunar Park and Coupland in Jpod–is able to make this gamble, as both novels are as wholly dependent on the reader’s preconceived ideas about the writer himself as they are on style or storytelling. In their self-reference, both novelists seem to be reacting to the public perception of themselves and their writing, but with far differing effects—Coupland’s book reads as an eyebrow waggling parody of both his earlier works and his young-and-irreverent-at-heart audience, while Ellis’ novel, though flawed, is an engaging and possibly transcendent piece of literature about the effect a writer’s creations have on himself.

Both novels open with dialogue meant to warn us as to their subsequent self-referential nature. In Jpod, a character whines, “I feel like a refugee from a Douglas Coupland novel,” while in Lunar Park, Ellis’ fictional wife asserts that “You do an awfully good impression of yourself.” But the similarities quickly and neatly end there; Coupland has his Jpoders mull, aimlessly and seemingly purposelessly, on their shared hatred for their creator, while Ellis launches into an extended—and surprisingly relevant–examination of the openings of his other works, expressing an honest desire to get back to frank, effective writing, before returning to his frank, effective plot. Almost immediately it starts to feel as if Coupland is playing a joke on us—he’s sure he knows exactly what we think of him and intends to prove us right, if only to highlight our own frivolities and weaknesses. Meanwhile, Ellis is humbly undressing himself to his readers, showing himself to be human rather than the parody we assume. Like Coupland, he is acutely self-aware of his image, but he uses that image as a basis for self-reflection rather than self-indulgence.

Coupland, at least, is aware of how much of his novel is dependent on his earlier works and fame. Jpod’s stylistic, surface similarities to his pre-millennial writing are trumpeted on the jacket text and on the novel’s marketing website. It’s heralded as “Microserfs 2.0” and indeed, in form the two appear similar—both are supposedly the computer diaries of twenty-something men working for technology companies, both are peppered with au courant pop-culture references and avant-garde typesetting choices. But when it comes to plot, the two books are very, very different. Microserfs was a story about young people idling in unfulfilling jobs only initially; ultimately, the characters went on to form deeper, more meaningful relationships with one another as well as with their work. They were self-motivated despite their fascination with all things that seemed, at the time, hip, pop, and young (legos, individually wrapped kraft cheese slices, the internet). Meanwhile, Jpod’s cast idles and continues to idle until the deux ex machina—in the form of Coupland himself, of course–intervenes conveniently near the conclusion of the novel. These nuserfs are immensely concerned with nearly the same chatter and white noise as the older characters, but they use searching for a fake three-letter word on a list of all the three-letter words in Scrabble as a way to divert themselves not only from purposeful work, but greater purpose as well. When potentially emotional events happen within Jpod’s pages—the burial of someone killed by the narrator’s mother, drug use, the incipience of relationships—they’re all recounted in an almost tangential and certainly vacuous way and then immediately dismissed. It’s not that the Jpoders care about frivolous things, but that they care only about frivolous things; they’re wholly satisfied with lives composed of static, whereas the microserfs sought a clearer, more meaningful image in the face of overwhelming irrelevance.

And the purpose of Coupland’s presence in Jpod’s narrative seems to be to vocalize these flaws in the lives of our supposed protagonists. Some reviews have characterized the fictional Coupland as “evil” or “mean-spirited,” but while he’s openly critical about the Jpoders it’s not as if anything he says about them is untrue. He does openly admit that they’re fun people, but also correctly accuses them of leading extremely vacant and emotionally empty lives. While reading Coupland’s monologue, I couldn’t help but think that he was addressing both members of my own generation, generally, and more specifically those twenty-something readers attracted to the quirky and idiosyncratic format of Generation X and Microserfs. Undoubtedly, the modern, post-college crowd largely lives lives devoid of meaning and often engages in conversations and tasks designed to distract ourselves from this lack of deeper purpose. While many of us may have been drawn to Coupland’s older books for their cool, weird trappings, we may have missed the deeper and more important themes the author was trying to express (and, in fact, we probably didn’t even bother reading his later, more conventional novels—returning to Coupland only when his books bore the words “Microserfs for the Google generation!” on the cover). Fictional Douglas seems to be present to critique us for this superficiality. And though this message was effectively communicated, and while reading Jpod was, occasionally, a “fun” experience, it left me feeling ultimately emptier than before. Beyond serving as a lecture to his young readership, it was as vacuous an experience as the lives of the Jpoders themselves, and I couldn’t help but wonder if the true punch line to Coupland’s joke was that he managed to fool unsuspecting fans into buying the novel through comparisons to his older, much deeper work.

Perhaps it is telling, then, that Lunar Park divorces itself from Ellis’ previous novels in its presentation and marketing. Before starting the novel, I was unaware of the connection between it and Ellis’ older body of work; it is marketed instead as a horror story and a reflection on the relationship between fathers and sons. Yet its connection to Ellis’ previous novels—as well as everything he’s ever written since childhood—is both deep and paramount. While it doesn’t assume that the reader has read American Psycho or Less than Zero, the fact that Ellis wrote these works are key plo
t points and integral to the development of “Bret” as a character.

In Lunar Park, Ellis himself narrates the story of his life after his rampant and rapid rise to fame. After a prolonged adolescence spent on heavy drug use, celebrity, and casual sex, he tries to force himself to settle down in a domestic world with the mother of his (once) illegitimate son, Robby. Though initially it is Ellis himself who threatens his home life through the infidelity and intoxication that both he and his books are infamous for, eventually—and surreally—his rather terrible literary creations manifest themselves in the actual world, forcing him into the role of protector and father that he had so long avoided. Ellis makes some interesting and not-always effective choices within the novel—for example, he portrays himself as a writer who doesn’t really know how to write, and passages describing a little girl looking like a “parody of a child” feel weirdly contrasted with the better written and more naturalistic sections of the book—but the end result of his self-reference is effective, both strong and strongly felt. Whereas Coupland’s presence in Jpod served to lecture his readers on their own faults, Ellis’ intention in including himself as a narrator seems infinitely more humble. Rather than attempting to correct the assumptions of his readers, he capitalizes on those assumptions in order to both build an effective story as well as to explore some rather interesting, and fairly universal themes. While his characterization of himself is exaggerated and fictionalized (and, in fact, the nuclear family that the novel revolves around is entirely fictional), it enables him to examine the impact of living a playboy’s life on the family unit, to explore the grief of a child after the loss of a parent, as well as to ultimately reveal the paternal relationship that a writer has with his or her creations.

In the case of both Jpod and Lunar Park, the presence of the writer within the story is absolutely necessary for the story to exist. Yet while I have no doubt that Ellis’ story ultimately should exist, I feel far more skeptical when examining the worth of Coupland’s Jpod. Unlike Lunar Park, which is both a dynamic story and a deeper exploration of human emotions, Jpod merely felt like an exercise in self-indulgence, its author bent on schooling the audience on their own foibles which he presumes himself absent of. While I do not deny that many writers cannot help but writing in a way that is self-reflective, I can’t help but wonder if Douglas Coupland would have been better off had he avoiding being self-referential.

I might write about cars tomorrow–a life history in four and six cylinders, what it means to be mobile. But right now, I’m pleased with my writing, and I wanted to share this:

“Nestor,” I said. He didn’t look up, so I repeated the name, louder this time. He flashed his gaze up at me. For a second, an image sparkled in my mind: sunset on Andromeda Prime, deep red light burnishing to brown. Then it was gone.

“Yes?” he answered softly. Too softly. It was like he had no back bone at all. I sighed.

“We’re bringing you with us,” I said. “Away from here. Some place safe and not so . . . morbid.”

“Yeah!” Eb interrupted suddenly, brightly. “We’ll take you to my planet. Andromeda Prime. It’s a beautiful place. Very green. Not quite so fluorescent as this, but there are many plants, and much blue-green water. What’s the color called? Turquoise? And the sky is a sort of purple. It’s very warm there now. Nearly high summer. We can take you on a barge.”

I turned to Eb, narrowing my gaze, staring. His eyes were huge and black—his pupils almost seemed to spill over to the whites. It was an expression I’d seen before, plenty of times—one I’d heard matched to his eager babbling often enough, too. But never to anyone else. That sort of excitement had always, before then, been directed at me, and only me.

But Eb didn’t even notice how I stared at him. He was too busy watching Nestor rub his hand slowly against the back of his neck.

Dee notices Eb noticing Nestor. I love awkward love triangles, teenaged jealousies. I want to write honestly about those things, even when the parties involved are aliens.

Hi Phoebe

It was a really hard decision to send this piece back to you as I
thoroughly enjoyed reading it. Unfortunately I don’t have room for it
in my issue. A lovely retelling, though.

Best of luck with this piece in other markets.

Sincerely,

Debbie Moorhouse

Sweet, right? I’ll be shipping the same story off to Strange Horizons, I think, as soon as I get home.

When I first started sending out work, I didn’t really appreciate the importance of nice rejections. Mostly, I just felt burned. Now, though, particularly as I’ve been sending out work to “bigger” (i.e. paying) markets, nice rejections are a little rarer. Generally, I’m starting to appreciate certain things about publishers. Namely, the type of consideration they seem to give your work, how easy (or difficult) they make it to submit to them, an absence of border-line insulting form letters. Form letters, I understand, are a necessity. But the ones with the little jabs–I’m looking at you, Ploughshares (“We regret that the manuscript you submitted does not fit our current editorial needs.” Yeah, I regret it too.)–just really get to me. They don’t strike me as particularly respectful.

I’ve talked about this before, but I generally don’t send out mail submissions. There is really no reason for this other than laziness. It’s work to do so, and the sort of work that is easily put off. That’s simply not true of places that accept online submissions. I’m not saying that the work of sending writing out isn’t necessarily worth it, only that it’s easy to procrastinate on when there are more attractive alternatives (namely, believe it or not, writing) available, or when there are easier submission systems available. I can’t tell you how many times in the last year I’ve meant to submit to some place that only takes mailed submissions only to find an equally high-quality and reputable market that takes online submissions.

And I appreciate that the editors in question want to make it easy for me to contact them. Like considerately written form rejections, it makes me feel valued. In fact, I’ve often heard editors cite one common argument against online submission systems: that they cause too many people to submit. Somehow, I fail to see that as a problem–and I’ve read slush before! More submissions mean more crap, sure, but undoubtedly it also means that more quality writers will be approaching markets they wouldn’t otherwise consider. That, to me, is a good thing.

And it could be naive of me, but I have trouble seeing how it could possibly be a bad thing for an editor. I assume that editors are in it, in part, to discover new and exciting writing–not to hold the golden gates of publication closed from the slush-stained masses. I assume that editors value their writers’ time and contributions, even when that expenditure of time–on either side–doesn’t result in a sale.

I assume, I assume, I assume.

(Current novel-in-progress)

(Modern retelling of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter)

(Unedited novel)

From this, one can draw the following conclusion: I talk about eyes a lot.