What Are You Doing New Year's Eve?

Happy New Year!

2011 Recap

My writing goal for 2011 was simple: finish this latest draft of my novel Believers.

Well, with two more days to go, it's safe to say I'm not going to make it.

I'm trying to not beat myself up about this. I'm trying to look at the positive.

This is the positive:

I've made a lot of progress on my novel in 2011, more than I have in the past 2-3 years. I feel engaged with the book, I feel like the changes I'm making have improved things immensely, and that I've been able to successfully integrate older material with newer material (I've been working on this book on and off for several years). This is probably the most challenging (and exhausting) thing I've ever done fiction-writing-wise, and it's possible that it's working out.

So yes, there's that.

There's also the fact that an excerpt from Believers was published in The Sun in July.

I was also lucky enough to be a featured writer at an event sponsored by the New Short Fiction Series and the Annenberg Foundation.

And I did a reading back in February.

And several short stories found a home.

Plus there was this nice interview.

Yes, the positive. That's what I'm focusing on.

My writing goal for 2012, then, will be the same as 2011: finish my novel. I've given myself three more months, even though it will probably be more like six.

And that's OK.

Because these things take time.

Revising, Rejections, Wilco

Those are just a few of the topics covered in this interview with yours truly, part of Fictionaut's weekly Fictionaut Five series.

Archaeologists and Artists

More random quotes from my six-year-old son Ethan...

"Why do women wear zucchinis to the beach?"

"I burped for ten hours."

"What the heck is a vagina?"

"You don't know what Justin Bieber is."

"Do you know what I'm going to be when I grow up? First I'm going to be an archaeologist and then I'm going to be an artist."

New Story "Precision" at BLIP

You can check it out here.

This one was inspired by Grace Paley's amazing story "Wants" -- one of those stories that I go back to frequently.

40 Times

That's how many times my story "Where You Live" was rejected before it was finally published earlier this month.

Usually I don't tally these things up, but I was curious, because this is an older story that I've been tinkering with and sending out for several years.

So yeah. Persistence pays off.

New Story "Where You Live" at the Good Men Project

The Good Men Project has been publishing some great fiction, thanks to fiction editor Matt Salesses.

So I'm very happy that my short story "Where You Live" has found a home there.

Here's how it starts:

"It was the director himself who called. His voice, serious and low, sounded trained for such occasions, the delivering of bad news to loved ones and relatives. And this was what he told me: my mother—68 years old, known for her marble sponge cake and Zen-like bridge skills, a rabid fan of movie musicals—was missing. Missing. Though he didn’t use that word. Euphemisms were employed instead. 'Temporarily unaccounted for' was one, 'currently unsupervised' another."

You can continue reading "Where You Live" here.

Fessing Up

Paris Review editor Lorin Stein recently fessed up about the famous books he’s never read.

OK, I’ll fess up too...

Books I've never read:

• War and Peace

• Paradise Lost

• Robinson Crusoe

• Winesburg, Ohio

• Catch-22

• Tristram Shandy

Books I've started but never finished:

• Moby-Dick

• Anna Karenina

• Blood Meridian

• Gravity’s Rainbow

Anyone else care to confess?

Coming Soon: Pank 6

The next print issue of Pank is due in January (yes, 2012 is just around the corner), and you can preorder it right now.

The list of contributors includes, well, me, along with Lindsay Hunter, Sara Lippmann, Lincoln Michel, Frank Hinton, John Warner, and (wait for it) Sherman Alexie.

The cover also looks fantastic:


Pank's print issues are always a thing of beauty, both inside and outside, and I'm very happy the editors gave a nod to my story "Close."

Kathy Fish's Dream Writing Day

Katrina Denza recently interviewed the amazing Kathy Fish.

Here's how Kathy describes her dream writing day:

"I always begin with notebook and pen. I don’t think I’ve ever started any writing at all on the computer. I need time to scribble. And it’s all over the page. If something feels like it might be good I circle it. After awhile something clicks and I know I’m ready for the keyboard. I’m very unstructured. I don’t give myself a time limit or word count goal. Coffee is always involved. I know the writing’s going well if the coffee gets cold.

"A typical writing day is spent messing around on the internet for longer than I ought to until I’m seized with guilt and shut it off. I stare out the window a lot. I take my dog for a walk. I pour another cup of coffee. Maybe after two hours I start to scribble in my notebook. I look out the window some more. My dream writing day is when I get past all of this and go into that beautiful trance, where I forget everything and look up, finally, two hours later and have before me something that feels real and right and pretty decent. A dream writing day is when it feels effortless."

Kathy's book "Wild Life" is a master class in the art of flash fiction. Highly, highly recommended.

Gift

This is something from an in-progress essay/story I've been writing about my father. He died seven years ago today...

Dodger stadium. A night game, mid-week. Sometime in the late 70s—the golden age of Garvey, Cey, Russell, Lopes, Yeager, Baker, Smith. Sitting in the exile of the left field bleachers. Peanut shells piled below us. The hum of people and baseball and memory. The announcer’s voice was the voice of God. I was keeping score.

Over the years my father and I had attended hundreds of Dodger (and Angels) games, and never, not once, had we ever caught a foul ball. I stopped bringing my mitt to games; instead I bought the game programs and religiously tracked the balls and strikes, the double plays and ground outs.

But that particular summer night, deep into the game—say, the seventh or eighth inning—it happened. The bat cracked and the ball rose and made its slow-then-fast descent nearby, landing with a smack and bouncing madly two rows in front of us. There was immediate mayhem. My father leapt over some empty chairs and then dove head first toward the skittering ball. I’d never seen him move like that. He was probably fifty-four or fifty-five at this point. An old dad, just like me.

And now, thinking of this, many years later, after asking my oldest son if he wanted to go to a baseball game (he sighed and said no thanks), I can still see my father’s lanky frame stretched out, reaching for the ball, fending off the other dads and scrambling combatants, the look of satisfaction on his face once he had it, the ball, secure in his hands, walking triumphantly toward me, climbing back over the chairs (yellow? I remember them as being yellow) and sitting down next to me, placing the ball in my hand as if it were a prize bestowed to a prince, and I’m inspecting the scuffed leather, the rough feel of the red stitching, rubbing my fingers over the fresh blemish from the impact of the concrete, and also there’s the sweat on my father’s brow, his breathing slowing, sipping his beer as a reward, and again I look at and rub the magical object, over and over, slumped in my yellow chair, unaware of the passage of time, the game continuing, finally having what had been coveted for so long, this gift being given from father to son, son to father, and back again.

What's It About?

Writing a novel involves (OK, big understatement coming up) many challenges.

Sure, there's the writing itself: wading your way through the dark, watery tunnel that is a long-ish piece of fiction. There's the doubt: wondering if you can do it, wondering if it all somehow ties together (probably not), wondering if you should just chuck this book and work on something else.

And, too, there's the myriad distractions from writing, some of which are important (the dishes need to be done, we just ran out of toilet paper) and some of which are not (Facebook, checking email; Facebook, checking email).

Then there's the non-writing stuff. Like answering the inevitable question about your novel: "What's it about?"

In general, I try to avoid the subject of my writing all together. When that tactic fails, I'm usually vague ("Oh, I'm scribbling away. Making progress. Slowly but surely.").

Sometimes, however, I get asked the question and I have to say something.

The next tactic is to then be flip: "It's about 438 pages."

And if that doesn't satisfy I start rambling: "It's about a family, there are multiple points of view, lots of characters, it takes place in Los Angeles, in 1999, the key thing about the family, though, is the daughter who..."

And I start to get down on myself. I should have my go-to elevator pitch description (you know, something like: It's a heart-warming story of a boy's coming of age in World War 2-era Kansas.). It should be brief. It should be compelling. But because my novel is 438 pages (the number goes up or down on a daily basis) it's hard to distill a coherent summation into a tiny, easily digestible sound bite.

Part of it, too, I know, is not wanting to talk about my novel until it's done. I'm superstitious that way.

So maybe, hopefully, when it's done, I'll have a little distance and be able to better summarize what my novel is about. I won't ramble on so much.

Hopefully. Maybe.

Literary Death Match, San Diego, Episode 3

On Tuesday night, Literary Death Match, courtesy of Todd Zuniga/Opium Magazine and So Say We All, made its third San Diego appearance.

Congrats to the most excellent and radiant Heather Fowler, who emerged victorious. Well done, Heather.

The superb and stylish Jim Ruland was also a judge. It’s worth noting that at last year's LDM in SD, Jim resoundingly kicked my ass (and by that I mean we both read and he won the round, eventually going on to become the night’s winner).

It was great to see some familiar faces as well as meet some new writers (yes, I don't get out enough).

And I think I’ll have to stop saying there isn't much of a writing scene/community in San Diego. Because, actually, there is.

He Realized, Suddenly, That He Could Write a Novel

From this weekend's New York Times Magazine profile of Haruki Murakami:

"His career as a writer began in classic Murakami style: out of nowhere, in the most ordinary possible setting, a mystical truth suddenly descended upon him and changed his life forever. Murakami, age 29, was sitting in the outfield at his local baseball stadium, drinking a beer, when a batter — an American transplant named Dave Hilton — hit a double. It was a normal-­enough play, but as the ball flew through the air, an epiphany struck Murakami. He realized, suddenly, that he could write a novel. He had never felt a serious desire to do so before, but now it was overwhelming. And so he did: after the game, he went to a bookstore, bought a pen and some paper and over the next couple of months produced Hear the Wind Sing, a slim, elliptical tale of a nameless 21-year-old narrator, his friend called the Rat and a four-fingered woman. Nothing much happens, but the Murakami voice is there from the start: a strange broth of ennui and exoticism."

Note to Myself About the Novel Chapter I'm Currently Working On

More energy. Ha!

More voice.

More happening in the moment.

Not so much exposition and essay-ish stuff.

Something happening now.

Something with neighbors?

Sounds?

Someone knocks?

The Emotional and Psychological Stuff That You Can't Shake Off

The last paragraph of Jeffrey Eugenides' "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Write 'The Marriage Plot'":

"That’s the intellectual background of The Marriage Plot. But you don’t write a novel from an idea, or at least I don’t. You write a novel out of the emotional and psychological stuff that you can’t shake off, or don’t want to. For me, this had to do with memories with being young, bookish, concupiscent, and confused. Safely in my 40s, married and a father, I could look back on the terrifying ecstasy of college love, and try to re-live it, at a safe distance. It was deep winter in Chicago when all this happened. Every day I looked out my office window at snow swirling over Lake Michigan. After separating the two books, I put one in a drawer and kept the other on my desk. I ran off with The Marriage Plot and didn’t look back. I changed completely, became a different person, a different writer; I started a new life with a new love, and all without ever leaving home."

(Looking forward to reading Eugenides' latest novel, which is currently on its way to my house.)

The Quotable DeLillo

"It's tougher to be a young writer today than when I was a young writer. I don't think my first novel would have been published today as I submitted it. I don't think an editor would have read 50 pages of it. It was very overdone and shaggy, but two young editors saw something that seemed worth pursuing and eventually we all did some work on the book and it was published. I don't think publishers have that kind of tolerance these days, and I guess possibly as a result, more writers go to writing class now than then. I think first, fiction, and second, novels, are much more refined in terms of language, but they may tend to be too well behaved, almost in response to the narrower market."

Wall Street Journal interview, January 29, 2010

Will He Run?

Henry's Story

Henry: "Can I tell you a story, Daddy?"

Me: "Sure."

Henry: "Three little pigs."

(Pause.)

Me: "Is that the story?"

Henry: "Yes. The end."

Take a Wilco Break

(Instrumental outtake from Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.)

Losing Your Work

Yesterday I did something stupid.

During the day, I’d worked on my novel for about two hours. Not a huge amount of work was done, but I made a fair amount of changes and revisions, which I felt halfway OK about.

Then, at night, tired and bleary-eyed from a long week and weekend, I accidently saved the file from my hard drive to my flash drive instead of the other way around.

So: all that work was gone. And it was especially frustrating because I hadn't worked on my novel for about a week, and so on the one day I do, I erased everything. Nice.

I posted something about this on Facebook, and someone responded he once lost two to three months of work due to a save mishap. He took the Zen approach and said it was a sign to start working on something else.

Losing two to three months of work would give me a seizure. I don't think I'd take the Zen approach. I've lost stuff before, but never that much. (Last night I stayed up late troubleshooting and trying to reconstruct my changes while everything was still fresh in mind.)

There are famous stories of writers losing work: Hemingway's first wife losing a suitcase that contained everything he'd written so far, Maxine Hong Kingston losing a manuscript in a fire, etc.

These kinds of things always make me wince, one of my greatest fears realized.

Any horror stories to share about lost work?

Scrolling Headlines and What They Us About Us

Find out here (it's a new story of mine that's in A-Minor Magazine, and it's one of those he/she stories that I seem to be so fond of).

Growing into Novelhood

"I was a semiconscious writer in the beginning. Just sat and wrote something, or read the newspaper, or went to the movies. Over time I began to understand, one, that I was lucky to be doing this work, and, two, that the only way I'd get better at it was to be more serious, to understand the rigors of novel-writing and to make it central to my life, not a variation on some related career choice, like sportswriting or playwriting. The novel is different. . . . We die indoors, and alone, and I don't mean to sound overdramatic but you know what I'm talking about. Anyway, all of this happened over time, until eventually discipline no longer seemed something outside me that urged the reluctant body into the room. At this point discipline is inseparable from what I do. It's not even definable as discipline. It has no name. I never think about it. But there's no trick of meditation or self-mastery that brought it about. I got older, that's all. I was not a born novelist (if anyone is). I had to grow into novelhood."

-- Don DeLillo in a 1995 letter to David Foster Wallace

The Mental Illness of Persistence

From an article about New Yorker editor David Remnick (by Nicholson Baker):

"Remnick is modest about these writing successes, which he attributes chiefly to 'sitzfleisch' – the capacity to sit in a chair until the work is done. 'A lot of what I do is just the mental illness of persistence,' he told me."

I need to work on my sitzfleisch.

Pear Noir! Number Six

Today I received my contributor copies of the latest issue of Pear Noir!

It looks purty. Lots of good folks in this issue, including Amelia Gray, Jessica Anthony, Mark Strand, Ryan Ridge, Salvatore Pane and many others.

Also included is my story "Look," which begins like so:

"Neighbors kept calling, one after another, a steady stream of complaint. They wanted to know what her husband was doing lying down in the middle of the street. It was getting dark now and he was still out there, Dave, her husband, sprawled like a corpse or a drunk, oblivious."

The issue is sold out, but a second print run is imminent...

Don't Write What You Know

That's advice from Bret Anthony Johnston in the Atlantic's annual fiction issue.

I guess this issue has been on my mind lately (see posts below).

Here's a quote from the Johnston's article:

"I don't know the origin of the 'write what you know' logic. A lot of folks attribute it to Hemingway, but what I find is his having said this: 'From all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive.' If this is the logic’s origin, then maybe what’s happened is akin to that old game called Telephone... A similar transmission problem undermines the logic of writing what you know and, ironically, Hemingway may have been arguing against it all along. The very act of committing an experience to the page is necessarily an act of reduction, and regardless of craft or skill, vision or voice, the result is a story beholden to and inevitably eclipsed by source material."

The novel I'm working on is not autobiographical. But the place where it's set is where I'm from. Sort of...

Autobiographical Fiction or Fictional Autobiography

This relates to my post yesterday…

Here’s what Jeffrey Eugenides had to say about the whole fiction/autobiography conundrum in a recent New Yorker Q&A (he has a story called “Asleep in the Lord” in the summer fiction issue):

“I’m ashamed to say that ‘Asleep in the Lord’ is the most autobiographical thing I’ve ever written. Ashamed because I don’t especially prize autobiographical writing (why write fiction if you want to talk about yourself?) and also because it took me so long to figure out how to do it. The difficulty of writing autobiographical fiction, for me, at least, is that you feel compelled to be faithful to your memory, and so you end up putting in characters and scenes that you don’t need. Almost everything I’ve ever written, and especially “Middlesex,” is made up. Here, it was different. I began trying to write about these events at the time I was experiencing them, way back in 1982. I tried again many times over the years. The Talk of the Town piece, in 1997, represented another small attempt.

“I could never get it right, though. In trying to be true to my experience, I ended up replicating the inartfulness of real life rather than creating a narrative with its own coherence and patterning. Finally, after thirty years (!), I managed to get enough distance on the events to able to chuck out a lot of ‘what really happened’ and write the story. So, while ‘Asleep in the Lord’ remains autobiographical in nature, it’s no longer burdened by too great a fidelity to the actual.”

New Story at Metazen: "A Brief Survey"

You can make the argument that all fiction is autobiographical -- that is, a fiction writer puts his or her own thoughts, feelings, emotions, etc., into the characters and situations he or she creates on the page.

But I've never considered myself an autobiographical writer. Sure, things pop up that can be traced to my life (character names, certain events), but I've always steered clear of basing my fiction on what has happened in my life. I'm more of a "I like to make stuff up" writer vs. a "write what you know" writer.

Anyways.

My story "A Brief Survey" (published by Metazen) is the most autobiographical story I've ever written. In fact, it might not even be called fiction.

The narrator is me; the scenes and emotions are straight from the past few years, during which it's seemed as if someone was sick or dying or being diagnosed with an illness every other month; and the part from the notebook is an almost verbatim of what I wrote right before and after my father died.

I'm not sure how it feels yet, to have something so "me" out in the world. But it seemed like a story that needed to be told. I only hope that I told it well...

New Look

I spent some time last night tinkering with the look of this blog. Still not sure what I think.

I'm also thinking about switching over to WordPress (instead of using Blogger).

Updates/posts have been pretty minimal, I know.

I've been trying to stay focused on finishing my novel Believers. Sometimes that feels close, sometimes far away. Today it feels... somewhere in between.

My Head Is for Looking

More random quotes from my six-year-old son Ethan...

"The mall is so cool. The mall is everything."

"Oh stop it you chicken tender."

"Your head is for banging nails. My head is for looking."

"Han Solo is a loser."

"What if my whole name was Ethan Commander Roe?"

"Don't put it on Facebook."

"I love Star Wars bigger than this house."

"You don't memorize. I memorize."

"Star Wars is freaking me out."

"Put it on Facebook."

"Accident" in The Sun

My story "Accident" (which is an excerpt from my novel-in-progress Believers) is in this month's issue of The Sun.

You can read the first part of the story here.

I'm so honored and thrilled to have a story in The Sun. Still pinching myself. Pinch, pinch.

And tonight I'm headed up to L.A. for the New Short Fiction Series/Annenberg Foundation event featuring my story "My Status." A good day!

Preorder Pear Noir! #6

You can do that here.

The issue features my story "Look," as well as work from Amelia Gray, Mark Strand, William Fitzsimmons, Jamie Iredell, Salvatore Pane and more.

Happy Father's Day

"My Daddy" by Ethan Roe

My dad is as handsome as me. He weighs 34 pounds and is 50 feet tall. Dad looks funny when he plays jokes on me. Every day I would like him to play with me. I wouldn’t trade my Daddy for my toys. He likes to play with me and his favorite food is granola bars. Dad likes to go to the park. He is really good at cooking. If Daddy had one wish he would wish for a toy Superman.

July 5 Event: Writings on Independence

Here's some info about an event that will feature my short story "My Status."

Very excited about this. If you live in Southern California, it would be great to see you there!

Note: Despite the event's title and date, I will not be wearing a powdered wig.

And here's more info.

The Other Woman

My story "The Other Woman" is part of the new issue of Wrong Tree Review.

The issue also includes work by Molly Gaudry, Brandi Wells, J. Bradley and many other fine folks.

Maybe I Want a Pep-Talk: David Foster Wallace and Don DeLillo

I've always been interested in the correspondence between David Foster Wallace and Don DeLillo -- two of my all-time favorite writers.

The two wrote each other for years. From what I understand, there's a father-son/mentor-student-type component to the letters and their relationship.

Wallace and DeLillo's letters are now part of the Wallace archive at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas. (DeLillo's archive is there as well.)

Max Ross recently paid a visit and wrote about it.

Ross focuses quite a bit on the Wallace-DeLillo letters:

"In editing his sentences, Wallace edited his thoughts; and in editing his thoughts, he edited himself. Nowhere is this struggle more transparent, and more devastating, than in his correspondence with Don DeLillo. There’s one letter in particular that seems to pit Wallace the Writer vs. Wallace the Compassionate Guy He Wants to Be. The Wallace that emerges from that particular fight is a devastatingly confused guy.

"Many of his letters to DeLillo were advice-seeking, favor-seeking, and comically respectful, full of apologies and thank-yous. There’s something childish – boyish – filial – in all Wallace’s letters to DeLillo, and in certain missives he wondered explicitly if he were looking for approval (10/10/95: “Maybe I want a pep-talk”). For today’s literary voyeurs, a big part of what gives the letters their intimacy is that both writers copyedit them, and so the pages are messy with handwritten insertions. Wallace and DeLillo weren’t afraid to show each other their mistakes, and there’s something powerful in that..."

There are two places in the world I'd really like to go to. One is Machu Picchu. The other is The Ransom Center.

Writing Advice from Max Perkins

"Generalizations are no use -- give one specific thing and let the action say it...

"When you have people talking, you have a scene. You must interrupt with explanatory paragraphs but shorten them as much as you can. Dialogue is action...

"You tend to explain too much. You must explain, but your tendency is to distrust your own narrative and dialogue...

"You need only to intensify throughout what actually is there -- and I think you would naturally do this in revision, anyhow. It is largely a matter of compression, and not so much of that really...

"You can't know a book until you come to the end of it, and then all the rest must be modified to fit that..."

This advice came from Perkins' letter to Marcia Davenport, as quoted in A. Scott Berg's Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, which I finished reading last night (overall I thought the book was a bit uneven, but it made for fascinating reading, especially the parts about Thomas Wolfe, who I knew next to nothing about).

Stuck

I'm stuck.

I've been working on -- that is, wrestling with -- a chapter from my novel for far too long. Spinning, I guess you could say. I was away from the novel for a while, then I was sick for a couple of weeks, and now I'm having some trouble getting reacquainted with the book.

I keep going over the opening paragraph of this particular chapter. You'd think it would be perfect by now. It is not.

I'm also looking at other chapters I've written from this character's point of view (about 80 or so pages) and trying to determine what, if anything, is salvageable. (Is is all shit? Should it all go? Maybe. Maybe I'm wasting my time by sifting through old pages and drafts, when I should be forging ahead with completely new material. And yet, looking at the older material, there's some pretty decent stuff there. Also some pretty lousy stuff.)

This particular chapter comes about two-thirds of the way into part 1 of the novel. It's the last chapter to be finished for the current draft of part 1 that I'm working on. So maybe part of it is being afraid to finish this chapter, because next I need to make some major surgical revisions once this draft is finished. I know what needs to be fixed, which is good; but the task ahead also seems daunting.

On a more positive and less neurotic note:

A while back I mentioned that The Sun accepted an excerpt from this novel. I recently found out that the piece will be appearing in the July issue.

July. That's pretty soon.