Five Things I've Learned as a Poetry Editor

In May of last year I started working on the Mud Season Review, a new online (and soon coming out with our first print edition!) journal. The journal is an outgrowth of the Burlington Writer's Workshop, itself a fantastic community resource for writers here in my new homeland. The journal strives to bring some of the workshop's sense of writers supporting and in dialogue with each other into the literary journal format, and I'm super-proud of what we're doing.

I started out as one of two Assistant Poetry Editors, responsible for reviewing what's passed on by our readers, and then participating with the senior editors in their final decision process. Through various perambulations, I've now become a poetry Co-Editor. Having spent a lot of the past few years on the "submitting" side of the process, it's fascinating to now be on the other end, and I wanted to pass on a few key things I've learned to my fellow submitting poets out there:

1. It is such a high-volume business, rejections don't (necessarily) mean you're bad: I get discouraged by my literary rejections sometimes, for sure. And I knew, intellectually, what the numbers were like. But now, from the other side, I really appreciate it. In the six months since we started, we've had around 570 poetry submissions, usually of 3-5 poems each. And we've put out five online editions so far, with maybe 5 poems in each. Math tells me that (5*5)/(3*570)= 25/1,710= 1.47%. The numbers for Mud Season Review are not atypical-many journals publish more pieces, but they also get more submissions per issue. In other words, your poem could be in the top 2% of submissions an editor is receiving and still not make the cut-off of what they have room to publish.

2. You need to bring your best work-every detail matters: See above- given that you can be in the top 2% of what a journal receives and still miss the cutoff, what you submit needs to be your very, very best. Send your favorite poems, not your "maybe this will work". First (or even second or third) drafts probably won't get you there. That misspelling that you missed, or awkward line that you know doesn't quite work, but it probably doesn't matter? It might. Knowing this now has actually sharply re-focused me on the quality of submissions I send out.

3. Form is really important: By which I mean the physical form of the poem. Having read literally hundreds of poems every month, I've noticed that one of the primary things that can throw me off is the format of the poem. Even if I really like the poet's voice, and am intrigued by the content and appreciate the imagery, word choice, etc., a physically difficult format can keep me from connecting with it. Things like line breaks, regularity of structure (even if the structure itself is unorthodox, does it at least have internal consistency in how it's working?), and spacing or other devices to keep the flow of reading going make a big difference. Again, knowing this leaves me chastened about some of my submissions over the years, and has got me thinking about how I can improve.  

4. Your cover letter probably doesn't matter, so don't spend too much time on it: We use Submittable, which separates out the content (i.e. the poems) from the personal note or cover letter that accompanies them. So as not to prejudice my reading, I usually don't look at the letters until after I've read, ranked and made my comments for the team. Talking with the other editors, they generally do the same. This is not to say that I don't appreciate a good cover letter, but it's not going to influence my read, so it shouldn't be a major focus of your time and effort. Short and sincere will probably more than do.

5. There are a lot of really good poets out there: Since I wasn't a first-line Reader, I didn't read all of those 1,700 poems myself. But I did read a significant number of them, and it turns out there are a lot of really good poets out there. And they aren't necessarily the established poets. I won't name names, but I have often appreciated the work of new or lightly-published poets over people with impressive-looking credentials. Since it is such a numbers game (see #1 above), you may need to submit a lot to get your work out there. But don't give up- there are so many good poets whose work deserves to be read. You could be one of them!


  

My Year in Writing

Do you remember NASA's "faster, better. cheaper" venture in the 90s? It was based on the idea that by designing smaller missions that could launch more quickly, the agency might get more done, more efficiently, than if it pursued grand initiatives. Some of the missions fell down and went boom, but it did get NASA moving again after a decade of relative lethargy. Well, in that same spirit, I'm continuing on my mission of getting out at least a blog posting a week this year, even be they quick and dirty. And so on to this week's theme- my writing track record in 2014.

A few years ago, I settled on the goal of making a publishing submission per week. Short story, essay, poetry, whatever, just submit something to a journal, offline or online, once a week. That would, of course, be 52 for the year, which has never happened yet due to holidays, hectic work weeks, feeling under the weather, what not. My operating theory is that having the target probably gets me delivering more, even if I miss, then if there was no target. Turns out that 2014 was my most submittingest year ever, with 43 total submissions, as attested to by my tracking spreadsheet:

My tracking spreadsheet also informs me that I've had two acceptances so far from things I submitted in 2014. One should be coming out in the Spring, and since I have a superstitious peasant mind, I don't want to jinx by saying any more. The other was two poems that appeared in Misfit Magazine in October.

I also had several "near-misses", i.e. places that wrote back to me and said something wasn't quite right for them, and why, or that I was a semi-finalist but not a finalist. I actually find these to be nearly as motivating as acceptances. They're kind of proof-of-concept of being on-track, and provide a lot more feedback than the form "Dear [insert name here]" rejections one usually gets, or the even more unnerving whistling silence of places that never answer back in any form. 

In addition to the regular weekly submissions, I've also been submitting two larger works to presses and prizes: my unpublished poetry collection Pushing 40, and my unpublished novel Out in the Neon Night. I sent out the poetry collection ten times last year, and the novel seven. I'll keep you posted on further developments...

My other major writing focus over the last year was to get more regular and disciplined about writing time, always a challenge for me given full-time work, a full-time relationship, recovery, other interests (including serving as a Poetry Editor at Mud Season Review), etc. In other words, life. Shout-outs to Tarin Towers for telling me "shut up and do it" (it was phrased more elegantly than that, but just as firmly) and my talented and lovely wife for helping me brainstorm about the how/when. I targeted 6 hours a week. And came not even close!

Excel informs me I ended up with 65.76 hours of writing time, which works out to an average of an hour and a quarter a week. Again, though, I have to believe that aiming got me further than winging it would have, and resulted in less of a sense of anxiety and drift. So what does 65.76 hours get you? In my case:

• Completing the (hopefully) penultimate draft of my full-length screenplay
• Revising a short story to get it down to a word-limit that will work better for submissions
• Starting a new short story
• Writing a personal essay looking back on Generation-X as seen through the lyrics of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" which I'm quite pleased with and currently submitting hither and yon
• Completing a challenge to write 40 poems in 40 days
• Writing a sestina, because the idea intrigued me     

For 2015, I'm aiming for 5 hours a week, on the theory that if one wrote for an hour a day every weekday, that's what it would equal to. Because, math. We'll see how I do, but for this week I have one hour down, thanks to writing this post for you. So thank you! 

Ten Years Gone By...

I just has a birthday this past Friday, which always gets me in a "looking back" kind of mood. Since I was born in 1970, this particular birthday also has me hoping that I'm about to discover the secret to:

That's not what I'm here to discuss today, though. But I have, in fact, been thinking a lot about life. Being on the leeward side of 40 has made me wonder about the twists and turns my life has taken, what might have been, what might now be too late, etc. I don't necessarily recommend this crazy-making line of thought, but it does lend itself to looking for the narrative.

And as it happens, one of the biggest turning points in my life recently had its own birthday, and has everything to do with narrative. In April 2002, the uranium pile of my first marriage had finally hit critical after a two and a half-year meltdown. This was a crisis I bore no small measure of responsibility for, and I was already going through a process of wrenching change and self-examination in trying to address the issues that had brought it on. Between that and the general void the collapse of a twelve-year relationship leaves in its wake, I was struggling to rediscover who I was and what I wanted from life.

One of the things I had put on the shelf about ten years before that was a lifelong interest in writing. Even as a kid, I had written short stories and movie scripts. I started keeping a journal and writing poetry in my teens, and kept it up all through my early 20s. Then, as I was gearing up for graduate school and working life after that, I stopped. I can't even tell you why, exactly, but it went away, and was replaced by more "grown up" concerns. Not at all coincidentally, I think, addiction and darkness started ramping up at the same time.

Back to post-separation: alone, shaky, and rebuilding, in the summer of 2002 I decided to take an "Intro to Fiction"  course led by Junse Kim at the Bay Area's excellent Writing Salon. I'd already started keeping a journal again in the last year of the marriage and the workshop further re-awakened literary stirrings. By late August I had realized, "You know what? I think I'm supposed to be a writer!" I began work on a novel.

So here we are, ten years later. I'm still writing! It doesn't pay the bills, but it remains the core of how I think of myself: I'm a writer. Sometimes, though, I wonder if I have "enough" to show for it. The part of me that does this because it is my truest and deepest calling in the world gets mixed up with the part of me that wants it to have some kind of concrete outcome in terms of recognition and success. Well, for both those parts, I'd like to bear witness to what I have produced so far:

• First (and perhaps foremost?) I ended up doing 7 drafts of that novel that I began in 2002, Out in the Neon Night, before finishing it in 2006. I ended up sending out queries for it to 27 agents in 2007, 3 of whom requested a look. While none ended up coming through, I do from time to time consider doing another round of queries, or even e-publishing and promoting it myself. In the mean time, you can read a sample chapter.     

• My essays "Kissing Girls in the Dark" and "Watch the Skies!" appeared in the 2005 and 2006 issues of the late, great compendium of true tales of the unseemly Morbid Curiosity. I will always be grateful to Morbid's editor (and darkly wonderful writer) Loren Rhoads for publishing me for the first time.

• My confession of my mid-30s discovery of a love for heavy metal, "I Sold My Soul to Rock and Roll" appeared in the 11th issue of the sadly departed "Magazine For People Who Think Too Much" Kitchen Sink in 2005.

• While I was engaged in endless rewrites of Neon Night in 2005-2006, I started a much more lighthearted "new novel" to have something fun to work on in the midst of revisionitis. It eventually petered out at 20 chapters, and I set it aside in favor of other things. But I've been feeling some enthusiasm for resurrecting it recently... 

• I wrote several articles on arty (and boozy) aspects of San Francisco life for Metrowize.com in 2007. 

• In 2008 and 2009 I wrote for the online version of LEGENDmag. My first piece there was about not loving Radiohead, and one of my most popular was "Hipsters Are Everywhere, But Nobody Is a Hipster".       

• The Rumpus.net was briefly graced by my presence in early 2009 as well.

• SoMa Literary Review published my poems "untitled" and "Twelve Steps to the New Israel of the Beats" in 2009. Sadly, their online back-archive is currently in search of a host, but I can send you copies if you want to read them!   

• My ponderously titled but oh-so-interesting prose poem Post-separation alone at night listening to Patti Smith sing “Dancing Barefoot” while thinking of mistakes I made while living in Hong Kong blues was published on Lit Up Magazine's site in May 2009.  

• Slouch Magazine published a short prose piece of mine, "relapse in 26 lines" in August 2009. 

• Two science-themed poems of mine, "Changing Viewpoints" and "A Truth Beyond All Truths" made it into the Fall 2009 issue of Umbrella Journal.

• My prose poem "Young Karl Marx" was featured on Opium Magazine's website in late 2009. 

• In 2010, my essay "Bachelors of Armageddon" appear in When I Was There, an anthology of tales of student life at UC Berkeley.

• From 2007-2011 I finally pursued a lifelong interest in film-making as a member of the Bay Area independent film co-op Scary Cow. During a four year-period I worked on 13 short films in a variety of capacities, including 6 that I wrote or co-wrote. You can get more of a description, and links to several of the films I helped write, produce or direct, here.    

• Even my bad adolescent poetry has had its day in the sun, being read on stage as part of the Mortified reading series in San Francisco and Boston multiple times from 2006 through 2012. 

• My Short Story "Ave Maria" was published in 2012 in the anthology Warpaint, available from Amazon on Kindle, and in several other electronic and print formats from the publisher, Zenfri. Meanwhile I have three more short stories making the rounds of submissions. They vacillate between despair at ever seeing the light of day and feeling terribly encouraged by Ave Maria's success.   

• Earlier this year I completed the first draft of my first full-length screenplay. I'll be revising and finishing it over the next year, and then confronting the intriguing sell/make decision... 

• I also just finished revising a collection of 40 poems (written between 2000 and 2010) which I am now starting to submit to publishers and prizes. 

So there you have it. Looking back, it doesn't seem like such a bad output for my first ten years (re)devoted to being a writer. That belief wavers a little whenever I hear about a 20something author's big debut. Then I remember that Raymond Chandler didn't publish his first story until he was 45, or his first novel until he was past 50. And the truth is, should success come sooner, later, in a form I can barely recognize, or even never, it doesn't really matter. I have to keep doing this. I'm a writer!

  

    

When do you call it quits?

One of the things I got for the Nook Color after getting that super-groovy present for Christmas (thanks everyone who pitched in!) was a subscription to Poets & Writers magazine:

It's a great thing to read on a Nook before turning in for the night. It's also helped focus my thinking on a question I've wrestled with repeatedly since turning 40: When do you call it quits?

Rest easy, dear readers. I'm not referring to cashing it in with strychnine, towering bridges, or anything so grim. But, since I started writing again in earnest in the wake of separation and divorce in 2002*, and then started trying to get that writing published a few years after that, I have wondered from time to time how long I should keep at it before deciding it's not working?

One answer, of course, is the one that Diego Rivera gives Frida Kahlo in Frida when she asks the same question: If you're a writer, you'll write until you die, no matter what anyone says, and that's that. (Okay, he said painter, but you get the point.) As far as writing itself goes, I think that's a perfectly good answer, and there's no reason it shouldn't be true. Year after year of this business of researching agents, publishers and contests, formatting submissions, paying entry and review fees, etc., however, can get a little tiring and discouraging. And so I've wondered during the the occasional sleepless night-when am I allowed to quit?

One answer that I've vaguely considered is: ten years. In other words, in August 2014, ten years from when I first submitted something for publication, if I haven't had any major success so far, it's time to quit. The part of my brain that thinks these kinds of things, of course, doesn't consider any of the things I have done so far (essays in two journals and an anthology, poems and short prose pieces published in several online venues, writing, producing and directing short films that have screened for audiences of several hundred) to be suitably major success.

I could name things that might be "good enough"- getting a short story in a print publication, having a novel published, or a screenplay bought and produced by a real live studio. But I know myself well enough to know that even if some (or all!) of these things happened, I would probably still find reasons why it didn't count and/or obsess on the next unachieved goal. After all, Buddhist psychology informs us that never being satisfied is one of the essential features of conditioned human existence, and as a person in recovery on top of it, my "enough" meter is inherently skewed. So, when I'm in my (mostly) right mind, I know this voice doesn't give reliable advice.

But when do I get to quit? The latest issue of Poets & Writers provided some perspective, in a section that featured profiles of twelve poets who have just had their first print collection come out. Being as I'm working on a poetry collection to submit for publication myself this year, and being as I'm a statistics geek, I did some number crunching based on the profiles. The twelve authors profiled took however long they took doing the writing (often ten years or more), and then, on average, they took three years of active submissions, and an average of seventeen submissions, to find a publisher for that collection. What does this tell me? Rest easy, little one. It takes a while.

In the same issue, there was also an article about the new poetry book series that San Francisco publisher McSweeny's is coming out with. One of the poets who has a volume coming out with them, Allan Peterson, has been writing since the 1960s, with very little recognition until the last few years. In the article, he said that he considered himself "an outsider to the literary world." This reminded me of my good (literary) friend Charles Bukowski, who himself toiled in relative anonymity for twenty years until finally entering his heyday in the late 60s. Here blooms into view a goal I can get behind: If I don't have any "suitable" "recognition" at the ten year mark- fuck them! I'll just declare myself a literary outsider at that point, and keep going as long as I damn well please.

Literary outsider. I like that. 

* I think it's worth noting in this context that, ten years after that separation, here I am today celebrating the first anniversary of my marriage to my heart's delight, Abbey LaMay-West. Some pretty blessed things can happen, if you just give them the time to unfold...
                   

Book reviews: Glasshouse, The Writers Journey

Glasshouse (Charles Stross, Ace, 2006, 352 pp.) 
Yes, that's right, you're getting two reviews for the price of one today. Having finished both books in the past week, I thought it would be nice to combine and expedite. Glasshouse was actually the final book of my Sci-Fi book club in San Francisco before I moved eastward. I don't think they ever formally met to review it, but heck, I'll give my review now:

Great! Disquieting in a good way. A little rushed at the end.

Without sacrificing my strong anti-spoiler stand, I can tell you that most of the book involves a character from a post-human future participating in a re-created simulation of late 20th/early 21st century life. This results in multiple opportunities to see our society from the outside, and appreciate how strange and even absurd some everyday things that we take for granted are. I think this is one of the highest functions sci-fi can serve. An additional layer of disquiet is provided by the fact that our narrator is someone who has undergone extensive self-induced memory restructuring (a kind of brain engineering not uncommon in this future). The result is that throughout, they can't be quite sure who they were before the experiment, just what they're doing there, and even which of their memories are real versus manufactured. This creates a feeling of being trapped inside a feeling of being trapped that is used to good dramatic purpose throughout.

About my only criticism is that the denouement feels very rushed. Things happen in 10 pages that easily could (and should) have been developed over 30-50 pages. I can't hold a grudge though. As a writer, I can testify that endings are hard, and this book remains well worth the time of anyone who enjoys contemplating just what "self" is and how we use memory to construct it.          

The Writers Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers (Christopher Vogler, Michael Wiese Productions, 3rd. Edition, 2007, 407 pp.)

Speaking of being a writer, this is a GREAT book on writing and story structure. It's written specifically with reference to film, Vogler being a professional story consultant for the movie industry, but the principles that he covers are applicable to stories of all kinds. Inherently so, since what he's done is drawn upon the stages of the Hero's Journey as originally written about by student of Carl Jung and mythologist extraordinaire Joseph Campbell.

Vogler uses the character archetypes and structures of myth repeatedly found worldwide, and shows how they're employed in film as a way of teaching what makes a story work. Hence the use of a monster in the photo above to highlight the mythic aspects of the book.  

The Writers Journey was recommended to me by my friend Robert Evans of my former San Francisco writing group. Just as he promised, it proved very helpful with the screenplay that I'm currently working on. Besides which, it was delightful fun seeing examples of how universals of story structure and character development can be found in films ranging from The Wizard of Oz and The Lion King through Ordinary People and Pulp Fiction. Along the way, I gained a grudging admiration for Titanic, a strong desire to see more John Wayne movies, and even an interest in re-watching Beverly Hills Cop. Giving birth to that last wish is surely a feat that only a great writer could have accomplished!       

1,000,000 words

During a recent session of my bi-weekly writing group, while commiserating about what a long, rejection-laden road getting published can be, one of our members mentioned the notion that it’s not until you’ve written a million words that you’re even starting to get good.

While that sounded rather daunting, it reminded me of something I’d read in various Kerouac biographies. When Jack Kerouac first met William S. Burroughs in 1944, he apparently told Burroughs that he’d already written a million words. That always caught my imagination, impressing me with the relentless incandescence of his output, the drive to just get it out, out, out, at all costs. It also always made me feel like a big, fat failure, and a lethargic one to boot, since he would have only been 22 at the time.

I wondered if anybody else had an opinion about this “million words” idea. I found several people citing a quote from Henry Miller’s “On Writing” to the effect that it takes writing a million words to find your voice. Crime writer Elmore Leonard, who certainly ought to know a thing or two about good strong writing attributes it to the widely-revered John D. McDonald and says:

John D. McDonald said that you had to write a million words before you really knew what you were doing. A million words is ten years. By that time you should have a definite idea of what you want your writing to sound like. That’s the main thing. I don’t think many writers today begin with that goal: to write a certain way that has a definite sound to it.

Science-fiction writer Jerry Pournelle, in an essay about how to get his job, helpfully notes that being an author is a really easy job. Unfortunately, nobody pays you to be an author until you first become a writer, which turns out to take work and time. In fact the work is mostly time, according to him:

I am sure it has been done with less, but you should be prepared to write and throw away a million words of finished material.

Pushcart prize-winning poet and novelist Ward Kelley had this intriguing wrinkle to contribute:

There’s that old saw about becoming a writer–if you want to be one, you first have to write a million words. While it’s an old saw, I believe it to be true. However, you seldom hear mentioned what should be tagged to the end of it. The axiom should include the reason for the million words: all these practice words put a writer in position to use the best literary advice I ever discovered. That advice is "don’t think."

Okay. Fine.

Where, I wondered, was I against this benchmark? I started to tally up the various things I’ve written since I recommitted to my childhood dream of writing following my divorce in 2002. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that, between the manuscript of my novel, a not-yet completed new novel, print and online essays and articles, my short film screenplays, poetry, as-yet unpublished short stories, blog postings, and journals, I am closing in on 800,000 words. At this pace, in another two to three years I’ll reach 1 million and actually be starting to produce something worthwhile. Hooray!

That honestly doesn’t seem so bad now that I’ve come this far. And if I’ll be almost twenty years older at that point than Kerouac was when he reached one million, maybe my remaining creative (not to mention physical) lifespan will at least match the 25 years that lay ahead of him at 22. Not too bad, not too bad…

First chapter of my novel, "Out in the Neon Night"

Still all jazzed from the San Francisco Writing Conference, I thought it might be fun to post a sample chapter of my novel that I'm currently seeking an agent for, "Out in the Neon night" here. To give you the quick lowdown:

The novel is set in California, Japan and Hong Kong during a fifteen year period from the late 80s through the early 2000s and tells the story of Carl, a young man who descends into a life of romantic and sexual obsession in his teens and twenties, and then has a painful spiritual emergence from it in his thirties. It's made up of five story arcs that take place at discrete points during the fifteen year period, and interweave with each other as they unfold. It's also surprisingly funny in places despite the subject matter, and informed throughout by the rock music of the era.

This is the first chapter, in which Carl is just starting out on the downward spiral...


***********************************************************************************
1. Shot Right Through With a Bolt of Blue

Coming to the Welcome Dance was a mistake.

Carl felt sure of that even before the guy knocked over the table behind him and hit him in the back.

To begin with, wasn’t it a mistake to come out at all? Out into the night where the air waited like a hungry ghost to suck out his breath and suspend it in an icy cloud before him. A cloud that pointed out into the bright and hollow sky, under which he searched, yearned, churned, for…

What? Carl didn’t know. When had the search ever worked for him? What made him think it would work tonight? What explosion would finally happen at the end of the fuse lit by this night if it didn’t fizzle out?

He ran a hand through his long blonde hair, pulled it together behind his head, and surveyed the dance. Nothing but a fizzle seemed likely here in this big box of a room. What could happen among the guys with short haircuts in sweats and shirts bearing names of sports teams, and lean and blonde girls likely straight out of Southern California? He stood there among them in a torn punk-rock t-shirt, baggy pants, and black leather shoes with buckles and shiny steel tips.

This was just as bad as the minimum-security prison masquerading as a high school that he came from. My God, the room even looked like a gym converted into the site of a high school dance! Berkeley should not be like this. Here in the land of the Free Speech Movement, People’s Park and the Third World Strike there should be freedom from the syndicate of jocks, politburo of the popular and oligarchy of rich kids who bought all the right clothes.

Carl shifted his weight from foot to foot. He found it hard to stand up straight so long with no support. But maybe he didn’t look manly enough with his hip out to one side. He shifted, back and forth, back and forth. Should he try to talk to people? Ask someone to dance despite the awful boom-boom-boom of the vapid dance music? All ew baby baby without a single real feeling in any of the songs. Without a person in the whole room who loved the rainyday music of English moors and pale windswept Northumberland towns. Or at least knew the words to a few Depeche Mode songs. Come on already!

If only there were people here he could relate to, then he could move out into the room. Instead he backed away from the crowd and further into the stricture inside his chest. His thoughts twisted tighter and tighter, wrapping him away from the world. A wallflower indeed and he would actually be up against the wall in a moment, with just another step or two backwards—

Which is when the small square brown table tumbled over and hit his back with a glancing blow.

“Fuck this shit!”

As shock staggered Carl forward, the guy who’d knocked over the table continued to curse and wave his arms around in inarticulate rage.

It was hard to see in the dim light, but the guy didn’t look that big. It was a lean frame that poked through his sweatshirt. He was intimidating nonetheless, as he shook his head and seethed disapproval of something. Carl stood rooted to the spot. Maybe he should get out of there; the guy could still be dangerous. Two friends tried to drag the irate table-tosser back, but he jerked his shoulders around and threw them off.

One friend stood in front of him and talked softly with a hand on his chest. Seeing the whole group was black, the thought flashed through Carl’s mind— did the guy throw the table at him because he was white? The group succeeded at last in calming their friend down enough that they could lead him away toward the glow of the exit sign.

Carl stood there for some time afterward. An image of himself flashed through his mind— long hair, dressed funny, and standing with his hip out to one side. Did the guy think he was gay because of the long hair? His bruised back throbbed in time to the music. Boom-boom-boom. Why did this shit always happen to him? Same old high school bully crap— he tried to be okay around people and what did he get for it? Whacked in the back with a table. Fuck this shit indeed.

He wandered back out into the main body of the dance, away from the table-flipping corner of danger. Some movement in the corner of his field of vision caught his eye. A girl.

Not just any girl.

She dressed differently now. A thin white blouse highlighted with green, yellow and orange flowers. A shiny black short skirt. Combat boots. A ghostly gossamer scarf around her neck. Her hair in a bob, buzzed short in the back and long in front, angled downwards to a point on each side of her face. But the round cherubic face framed by her rich dark hair was the same.

Gina Onizuka. Gina, who Carl had a crush on since freshman year of high school. Gina, who, resplendent in long braided pigtails and thick horn-rimmed glasses, sat in the seat in front of him for the duration of the English honor students’ bus trip to the Ashland Shakespeare festival. Fueled by the Vivarin he took in high school to be able speak to people without freezing up, he talked with her non-stop for 17 hours on the way to Oregon. Gina had— that’s right, she had! — come to Berkeley for college. And she was here now, a few feet away. It was perfect, because—

Crap! No, it was not perfect. At least he didn’t think Keisha, the girlfriend mired in junior year of high school back in his hometown at this very moment, would think it was perfect. Keisha, dumbshit, remember? The one he wrote the eighteen-page letter to earlier today? The one he was going to call tomorrow, as soon as the phone was hooked up. Probably before he even called his parents. No, definitely before he called his parents.

Yes, he remembered.

But. But the letter to Keisha was comfortable homesickness. Keisha herself represented pent up pages of love built up over years of never having a girl like him as more than a friend. It had to go to somebody, anybody, and Keisha was the anybody who finally said yes. His feelings for her had grown, by and by, into the hearts and flowers of wholesome first love and awkward innocent sex.

Gina, though, was last year’s Homecoming Dance. He went to every high school dance, just in case the thing that was supposed to happen finally happened that night. She went for reasons unknown to him, perhaps simply because freshman in college are supposed to go back to their high school Homecoming Dance.

Carl remembered the shock when she asked him to dance. This college woman, a whole year older than him, asked him to dance. She, the angel all dressed in black, the very essence of antidote to the obvious unattainable cheerful blondes he didn’t even dare to yearn for. She was not a sweet training-wheel girlfriend like Keisha. No, she was the real thing.

At the end of their dance he grabbed her hand, her perfectly soft hand, impelled by what, he didn’t even know, and squeezed it.

As the throb in his back returned him to the current dance, he could almost feel the warmth of her hand from a year ago. He glanced around the room and saw Gina headed for the exit. Dwarfed against the aircraft hanger ceilings, she was a tiny figure, almost at the door and moving fast. Too fast for him to take time with thoughts of Keisha, shyness or pain from recent airborne table injury. Too fast for anything but the electric impulse that launched him across the room after her.

He dodged near collisions with legions of bright young revelers on the way to the door and out into the dark, cold clarity of night. He found her leaning on the metal railing and staring out in the direction of the elephantine marble pillars of Sproul Hall. With a stealth borne of years of escaping the notice of bullies, he stood beside her without her even realizing.

“Excuse me, miss?”

She turned, her face set with a hard plastic ‘Who is this jerk?’ preparation for dismissal. Then her demeanor shifted and her girlish cheeks dimpled into a smile. She threw herself on him for a hug. As they parted, the softness of her nicely rounded body and the flower-sweet yet sweat-sharp tang of her scent clung to him in cottony ribbons.

“Carl! Hey! You’re at Berkeley now too?”

“I am! I’m glad I ran into you. I heard you were going here.”

“Yeah! Were you at the dance just now?”

“Yeah. Pretty lame music, huh?”

“Yeah.” Her nose wrinkled up and her full coral lips narrowed. He’d seen the same face once on a cat that had eaten a moth.

“So what are you up to?” He stared at her as he asked. Even the breath that shimmered into cold white clouds in front of her seemed beautiful.

“Oh, I don’t know. Hanging out, waiting for classes to start. Going to a lot of shows. Hey, have you been to Gilman Street?”

“Uh, no, I don’t think so.” What the hell was Gilman Street?

“It’s this club; all these local punk bands play there. I’ve gone a lot this summer.”

“Oh cool. Hey, do you still read comics?” That should bring him onto firmer ground. Their common love of comics had animated the discussion on the Oregon bus trip, after all.

“Yeah I do, but not so much Marvel stuff anymore. I tried to keep reading New Mutants, but it sucks dick now. I’m really into Love and Rockets. How about you?”

Man, Love and Rockets. That was one of those alternative, underground comics, wasn’t it? He felt off-balance, even more so because it was the first time he had ever heard a girl use the phrase “sucks dick”. On top of that, here he still read the X-Men and Spider-man. Kids stuff. It took him a second to compose his answer, and he thought it still sounded far too lame.

“Oh, you know, different things, I read different things.”

From inside the dance, an orchestral flourish followed by a regular mechanical computer simulation of an empty tin can beat signaled the start of New Order’s Bizarre Love Triangle.

“They’re finally playing something decent!”

“Yeah. Hey, want to dance?” He flashed back to high school as she looked at him for his answer, and then nodded.

Back through the double doors they found a space in the midst of the dance floor. Which wasn’t too hard, the music had sent much of the crowd off to the sidelines. This was no song for bland perfect people. This was a song that Top 40 radio would never play. This was their song.

Every time I think of you
I feel shot right through with a bolt of blue

Shot he was. He let the sway into his body, unsure of how to catch the dit-de-duh-dit-duh-duh-dit of the beat. Utterly unlike Gina, a perfection of motion to the music, with none of the sweet young shallow sexuality that Keisha wore like an old pair of leggings. Gina’s curved hips and small round breasts, snug in her floral print blouse, rolled and flowed like water. This shocked first awareness of sinuous womanhood that seemed to course with the very power of the Universe stuck in Carl’s mind for years to come.

The lights of the dance swirled across her face. It seemed set and impassive now, a formal beauty made even more insistent and present by its distance. The stillness in her face seemed to hint at a whole world of feeling underneath, a direct electric connection to the tragedy of life. His tragedy, and she knew it too. She must know it too. But he felt a faint tickle of unease.

I’m not sure what this could mean
I don’t think you’re what you seem
I do admit to myself
That if I hurt someone else
Then I’ll never see just what we’re meant to be

Carl mouthed the words, but missed the point entirely.

As the Buddhists that he had just begun to read said, by your thoughts you make the world. That night he forged the first link in a chain of co-dependent origination. The wheel of dharma began to spin.

All he knew is that this was surely it, the moment he had waited for through years of being unloved, unlovable. All to be recouped in one fell stroke by Gina, who was punk rock, cool comics, a dangerous roll and tumble of curves. She could inhabit the space inside, the empty space that had been there for as long as he knew. She could fill it.

As the song reached its crescendo through the peaks and troughs of synthesizer waves, he wondered, doubted, felt sure:

She was the reason he came out into the night.

I’m in Decompression from the San Francisco Writer’s Conference!

I just spent two and a half days at the San Francisco Writer’s Conference, at the Mark Hopkins Hotel perilously high atop California Street. For those of you not familiar, it’s an annual event started by local literary agents Michael Larsen and Elizabeth Pomada to allow writers, often as-yet unpublished, to meet and hear from agents, editors and publishers. This is the first time I’ve been, and it was huge! While currently exhausted and in a bit of postpartum withdrawal, I found it to be really inspiring. I have tons of leads about various journals and contests and editorias and publishers to follow up on, I met some really cool writers from all around the country, and I’ve become encouraged about continuing to pitch my novel and working more on my new novel. Most of all it’s just really nice to be around so many people excited about writing, and to hear that publishing remains alive and well and will continue to look for good new authors despite much dire industry news of late. Carry on writing!

May Writing News

Hello friends!

It’s been a few months since I last sent out an update, because; A) There was a lot going on in my life and I was distracted; and, B) There wasn’t a lot going on with my writing, so I figured I had nothing to report. Now I’m thinking that it’s the other way around. Maybe there wasn’t as much going on because I wasn’t reporting it. In the name of reverse-causation magical thinking, I hereby resume monthly updates on my creative endeavors.

Film- I’ve continued with local filmmaking collective Scary Cow (http://www.scarycow.com/), working on Echo’s Wonder, which will screen at the Victoria Theater at 16th & Mission on June 1st along with other films from this four-month round. I’m not as involved writing-wise as I was on Carson Larson, but this film is written and directed by one of that film’s co-writers, Alex Winter, and I believe it will be highly worth seeing. In the afterglow of his brilliance you can appreciate my work as script consultant, production assistant, dialogue-free extra, and (this is the one I’m really excited about) Best Boy! I’ve been waiting 37 years to have a film credit like that. Yes, since birth. Seriously.

Poetry- Red Pulp Underground has put out a print anthology entitled Zygote Extract that includes my poem “Young Karl Marx” which they published last year in their online journal. You don’t have to buy a copy. Really. I’ll read the poem to you, for free, on-demand at any time. But if you truly feel inspired to, you can buy it here: http://www.rpwriters.com/Affliiates.html

Novel- Several publishers are at least vaguely considering my novel, tentatively titled Out In The Neon Night, based on my agent’s queries over the last few months. Thus have I heard. The kinds of things can take quite a while, but then again, when things happen they can happen quickly. I’ll let you know more as the story develops.

Blog- Throughout 2005 I worked on San Francisco Daze, a (nearly) daily reflection on life in San Francisco in prose and poetry form. Since the beginning of the year I’ve been releasing it in monthly installations on my blog, and I’m excited to finally have a venue to publish it in. People kept telling me I should put it online. Thank goodness they didn’t keep telling to me I should jump off of a bridge… In any case, you can find the continuing installments of San Francisco Daze, and all my latest blog activity, at any of the following three locations: http://chris-west.blogspot.com/, http://chrisw-insf.livejournal.com/, http://www.myspace.com/chriswest_writerinsf

That’s it for now- back in June with all-new updates!

February Writing News

Hello friends,

I went on a retreat over New Year's and part of it was a New Year's Eve ritual where we put our intentions for the year out in front of the group. One of mine was to get me creativity out in public more in 2008. Only early February now, but some of this has already come to pass- watch out when you put an intention out there to the universe in front of everybody!

Exhibit I: On January 27th, Carson Larson Gets the Picture, a film that I was a writer on (and did production work on and even briefly acted in) screened at the Victoria Theatre. And won the audience vote for best picture in our round, which means our team gets funding for our next production! And won best writing, which especially warmed my heart. If you want to check it out, you can see it here, it's the one for Team 12 and runs about 14 minutes: http://www.scarycow.com/videos/round0004/round004.html

Exhibit II: Red Pulp Underground, an online journal that published a poem of mine last fall, is putting out an anthology. Like a real live, in-print anthology. And including my poem in it! It's coming out in May, and if you buy a copy I promise I'll sign it. You can read some more about it here: http://www.rpwriters.com/competition.html

There is no Exhibit III regarding my novel (yet), but my agent has inquiries out to eight publishers, and is preparing them for several more. So let's keep our fingers crossed…

And you can always catch up with my blog on MySpace, Blogspot or Live Journal:

http://chris-west.blogspot.com/
http://chrisw-insf.livejournal.com/
http://www.myspace.com/chriswest_writerinsf

Hope you all are well, and I'll see you in March.

January Writing News

Happy New Year!

January Writing news is fairly quiet. Now that the holiday season has been safely disposed of, though, perhaps things will pick up.

One thing that will definitely pick up in January is that the short film I’m a writer (and assistant producer and, very briefly, actor) on will be screening at the Victoria Theatre in San Francisco at Scary Cow’s fourth screening party. Assuming we finish it in time, but it looks pretty good. It will be showing Sunday January 27th from 3:00-6:00. Information isn’t up on the Victoria’s website, but should be soon: http://www.victoriatheatre.org/ It would be great to see you there!

What with all the holiday hoopla, I haven’t written anything for Metrowize in the past month. I hope to get more active in January.

No specific plans to be reading on stage this month so far, but you never know. But I did recently exorcise my teen angst onstage in Mortified again on December 14th & 15th. I won a competition as worst teen poet. How should one feel about that? Regardless, it was really cool and I had fun hanging out with my beautiful, creative co-angsters.

As for my novel, my agent is working on synopsis materials and hopes to come up with a list of publishers to target this month. Please cross your collective fingers…

And there is always the blog. The latest postings are appearing in three places simultaneously. MySpace deletes older posts after a while, but you can find the whole history at Blogspot and Live Journal:

http://chris-west.blogspot.com/
http://chrisw-insf.livejournal.com/
http://www.myspace.com/chriswest_writerinsf

That’s it for now. I look forward to sharing the writing life with you in 2008!

Three new(ish) poems

Here are three poems that came out of a writing retreat I went on in September. So far the only poems I've done this year, which is a lot less than last year, but I guess the Muse has had other plans for me this year. Far be it from me to argue with Her, you never win that one.

All three emerged from writing exercises that use words and phrases to jumpstart your creativity. The first two are pretty much flights of fancy that I've left as they originally came out. The third had something more that it wanted to say, so I kept working with it and revised it a few times.

(untitled)

Ted from the Bureau of Assholes

knows nothing

about the geology of the wolf.

Thus nobody can absolve

that nappy-headed bastard cuttlefish

who masturbates to thoughts of Buchenwald

as if his acid copper parody

of an unblinking vigil of

chameleon maiden trollops

could unlock

the pristine entrails

of stellar divinities.

Better he had met

the hogweed accordion of the abortionist

or his mother had used a diaphragm

of marigolds and tapers

to arbitrate the okra omen

of his father's

sparrow song seed husks.

That was when I knew I had to write this

If you wander far enough

you will come to it:

Celestia

the great city

at the edge of forever.

(Standing up to get a hot dog

someone spills mustard all over me.

Dammit!

I was just on the edge,

the way it always happens.

Now my hand hurts

and the opportunity is fled.)

Gone into the land beyond sleep

the land in which the only light

comes from Celestia.

The Great,

city on the edge of forever,

her ruins marked only by

a wild exultation

brought down into stony fragments

of dream and myth.

(It must be very hard to understand.

Don't worry.

Just start with the telephone

and a meal in silence.

You will know that when love calls

you do, in fact, have to go.)

That was when I knew

I had to write this last will and testament

to you.

I Think It Came In Through the Window

The egress through which I let it in

Seemed small,

Too small

To do any real harm:

Just a scotch on the windowsill

Gleaming gold in ice-cube plastic glass,

Volumes of poetry scattered on the comforter,

Their words a swarm of mosquitoes

That congealed

Into a nodding acquaintance

With darkness.

In the darkness I ordered another.

And another.

And another.

Until,

One shaky morning,

I found I had ordered

A box of maladies

That daily unpacked thirsty demands,

Slaughtered the mosquitoes,

And left the comforter

Littered

With dead words

And soaked

In stale sweat.

The Song of My Soul

This is ported over my MySpace blog from mid-October. But I figure, if we all still have souls, it remains relevant. If some of us have become soulless since then, perhaps even more so!

*********************************************

I was talking to one of my new roommates the other night and he mentioned finding the song of your soul. You know, that moment where, in the midst of the shambles of ill-made choices and fears and doubts and life in general, you stumble across that thing that you really groove to. The light breaks through the darkness, however briefly, bringing you back to who you really are and what you really want.

The song of his soul was awakened in this case by an episode of a prison drama narrated with show tunes, but that's beside the point. I knew instantly knew what he meant. This weekend I was lucky enough to have a moment where I stumbled across the song of my soul.

On Saturday I went to Lit Crawl, the closing event of the annual Litquake festival. The basic idea is that over the course of three hours, readings occur in thirty-five venues across an eight-block strip of the Mission District. You drift from one to another, like a pub-crawl except that you imbibe words along the way. I found myself having an attack of the heebie-jeebies while drifting. Not reading anywhere myself brought up fears of being a literary failure. A friend who was supposed to go with me had flaked at the last minute, and going around by myself brought up feelings of being a lonesome loser (it really may be time to start dating again soon). Being jostled in sweaty, crowded bars made me feel like I was being jostled in sweaty, crowded bars.

In the midst of this charming bouquet of emotions, I squeezed myself into a corner near the stage in Amnesia for "The Beat on the Page", a reading by local music writers. As Katy St. Clair read her tale on being propositioned by 81 year-old country/bluegrass legend Charlie Louvin (it's on her MySpace blog, I recommend checking it out), my cares began to fall away. By the time Wendy Farina (excellent musician and writer and also an eminently MySpacable personage) took the stage to perform her piece about a fifty-year-old woman who has just joined a punk band as a drummer and acquired Jimi Hendrix as a dream music spirit guide, my soul was positively humming.

These were my people. This is what makes my muse beat her little wings and wake me up at inconvenient hours to start writing. This is the song of my soul. And when I hear it I don't want to be anyone else, anywhere else than me, right here, right now.

I know you know what I mean, because you have a song too. And so, my tens of readers, I invite you to write in and tell me about the song of your soul…