Unfinished Business

Cynthia Kraack Posted on by

If I were a carpenter my workshop would be crammed full of three legged tables and boxes without drawers and skeletons without shelves. Story fragments have been dragged from computer to computer over the decades, as useless as the matching belt of a coat long ago donated to charity held on to because of a teasing dream of possibility.

The pieces written by hand don’t bother me as much as the bits stored digitally. If a character profile is in a journal, that’s how it was intended to exist. If I open a blank screen and begin to work through a scene, a character, a piece of dialogue the named file says an unfulfilled commitment exists.

Trolling through this holding place of stunted writing, I want to know why I didn’t finish each one. Maybe someday I’ll understand how the stories about chairs connect. It is my intention the magic realism piece about children who never grow older than twelve will find an ending. I’ll find a way to merge pages about feminism and motherhood. A character that shows up in multiple false starts might take form and bring thousands of words together into a wonderful piece.

In the meantime, the pressure exists to create an inventory of quality short stories to market. All those possible gems are a frustrating pile of efforts. I don’t call it a junk pile, but they are like clothes stuffed in the back of the closet that don’t fit. I go back and pick through the best, play with accessorizing, and find the same disappointment that another new approach didn’t find the sweet spot.

 

Maybe if I collected the digital unfinished business and stamped a tidy order around their existence I wouldn’t feel so bad. Tucked into their old virtual file they might become as harmless to my creative time as the box of miscellaneous buttons stashed in my closet is to my wardrobe.

 

Easter Bunny Thoughts

Cynthia Kraack Posted on by

The Easter Bunny is making his first appearance at the Bay Park Mall in Green Bay. (Note the “he” and move on. Like a ‘she’ bunny couldn’t deliver candy.) If the Easter Bunny is working then why aren’t you? At least the guy in that bad furry costume is earning a few bucks while you stare out the window and think about whether a character should walk out of the room or sneeze.

Wait, isn’t that work?

If the character walks out the scene is over, and her relationship with a key employee is broken. If she sneezes it might indicate that she has caught the mysterious illness claiming members of her family. She might not be feeling well enough to deal with the employee relationship.

That is work. Your kind of work.

This decision is big progress in finishing the chapter and plugging a hole in the dramatic arc. On this sunny Saturday afternoon people are walking their dogs, filling their cars with gas, shopping for Easter candy. You could be out there having fun. Instead you’re sitting in a chair with fingers tapping at a laptop.

Correct that statement: “Instead, you’re sitting in a chair, working on your laptop.” You and the Bunny got something in common.

 

Pollen Art

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Wolfgang Laib’s largest pollen art installation is on display at the Museum of Modern Art. On an elevated surface, the artist spread 18 jars of hazelnut pollen across a space measuring approximately 18 x 21 feet. Laib’s work is visible from most levels of the museum.  Exit galleries displaying Renoir, Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Frank Lloyd Wright and you look down at a bright rectangle of yellow on a light grey concrete platform. People stand and stare at pollen that was spread with use of a sieve and a spoon. Laib’s work has been described as ‘challenging to classify’.

Shed Simove made publishing history by producing the first blank book to ever get into the top 50 on a bestseller chart.  His book, “What Every Man Thinks About Apart from Sex” received worldwide attention.  Big marks for a snappy title. For every writer who has agonized over reading multiple proofs of their work before publishing only to find a handful of typos in the first hundred pages, it doesn’t feel that Simove truly earned his stripes.

So what is art?  Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close pushed the creative envelope. There are many blank pages that stand as the memoir of an elderly woman who wrote on a typewriter without a ribbon. He creates dialogue between characters with an elderly man who doesn’t speak except to hold up his hands where “yes” and “no” have been tattooed. Late in the book, there are pages of drawings of a man falling from a building that are to be ruffled through quickly to create action. Many found the non-writing segments distracting in an intense book about a New York City child searching for his father after September 11.

Art is in the creative mind. The challenge is finding a receptive audience.  People do make their way to the atrium to see Laib’s work. Readers love and hate Foer’s experimentation because it feels right in a book that has a child protagonist and feels wrong in a book about a child protagonist obsessed with the horrific belief that his father did fall from one of the towers.  No need to comment on Simove.

In the meantime filling blank pages is my daily work. If I didn’t have deadlines, what I wouldn’t give to be at MoMA when Laib’s installation is dismantled. Will that pollen be carefully swept back into bottles or will maintenance folks wear masks while vacuuming up the defunct artwork?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Drones and the Nervous Writer

Cynthia Kraack Posted on by

I write speculative fiction. Not the kind with aliens or wizards. I write about the near future. It’s not like I haven’t thought about drones being used against civilians to gather information, dispense stuff, even cause collateral losses (aka death of civilians). From spying to patrolling borders to targeted bomb strikes that kill,  the international debate about drones cannot be ignored.

Truth is I haven’t been ready to travel along the thought path where drones might exist in my neighborhood or yours. Red light cameras, London’s city street cameras, cameras built into cops’ clothing put me in a queasy intellectual and emotional clash about personal rights and public protection. Now put the capability of flying small drones along a busy city street or interstate route with the ability to build a database of who is traveling where and what they are carrying in their vehicle, or maybe used to cause disruption in the name of national security. Why wouldn’t drones be used against suspected terrorists or criminals within our borders? Is it a long path from using drones in other countries to justification within the United States?

Until now I’ve sidestepped writing about a government where leaders feel empowered to take almost any action in the name of national security. In March I’m heading into seclusion to revise the third Ashwood book. Drones, used for neutral reasons and for what might be seen as evil, are in the storyline. Like global warming, genetically modified agriculture, or multinational corporations, a futuristic book needs to deal with security hungry government.

My children and grandchildren will live with that reality. Spending a few weeks intellectually with powerful fictional players in a world with few private corners makes me nervous. I’m about half way to accepting that a whole lot of people can tell where I am writing through my use of technology. Think I’ll leave the cellphone on the table and enjoy a few walks in the woods before tiny drones flying through the trees might take note.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My father speaks

Cynthia Kraack Posted on by

My father is dying. The many physical failures of his eighty-five-year-old body have gained control in a way no medical intervention can defeat. He has a health directive in place so our family waits. In this holiday month a Christmas tree lights his apartment and seasonal music has become lullaby and comforter.

After the first assault of pictures, he will not watch the news from Connecticut. He said “We’ve seen this before” and asked the channel be changed.  After growing up in a family of hunters and serving in both World War II and the Korean conflict, he has never owned a gun and doesn’t believe people living in the United States need guns in their homes. While more lucid earlier this week we spoke about a two year old boy killed by a brother only twice that age with a gun found under their father’s pillow. My father was saddened by the event.

My tears yesterday and today come from the sadness my very small family is experiencing, and for the horrific grief families in Newtown will carry forward for so many decades.

How sad to think that as a nation we have nothing to offer these families. No hope that there won’t be another massacre. No government protection of innocent lives against weapons meant to kill many people with minimal effort.  We are not safe—not in movie theaters, shopping malls, colleges, churches, kindergarten classrooms. Powerful individuals with deep pockets of money have better friends in our government than young parents of beautiful children. If President Obama visits Newtown, I would have him bring every member of our Senate and ask each of them to sit for an hour with the family of a victim, to comfort a now childless mother or motherless child, and to carry that memory every day of their lives. To be simply human among real people.

When people ask what they can do for my family, I ask for their thoughts and prayers. That’s appropriate when losing our patriarch. When I ask what I can do for the families of Newtown, prayer seems like a less than satisfying offering.  But they are in my prayers.

Holiday Ghosts

Cynthia Kraack Posted on by

Writing about holidays is tricky. What do you really remember about childhood holidays? Was the Thanksgiving meal served at noon or maybe in the early evening? Did you realize that somebody had to be in the kitchen by about five in the morning to have a turkey ready to serve at noon? As a kid you didn’t have to think about that side of the holiday. If Grandma or Mom or Auntie Martha wasn’t as silly as the rest of the partying adults at the table, you just made sure to sit deep into the kids’ zone.

Before dishwashers became common, or when a hostess felt she had to use the good china that had to be hand washed, women returned to the kitchen while others watched football or snoozed. Leftovers got divided, little bits of food became nibbles instead of garbage, the last of the wine was poured into juice glasses. Conversation turned more intimate while hot water steamed the kitchen sink window. With female guests involved in the washing up, social pecking orders fell. Aprons appeared and the sounds of water running and women talking drowned football’s constant babble.

Little girls played under the kitchen table and wondered if a child’s gallbladder could go bad or how a mortgage fit into Christmas plans or what carrying low meant. Unfortunately if the discussion was about to get really adult, the under table zone might be relocated to the football room or a hallway.

There are stories that grew into legends—the no-bake pumpkin pie that tasted like jarred baby food, a turkey that slid off its baking rack and melted the kitchen carpet as it hit the floor, the year everyone was ordered out of the house to march around the arboretum for some unknown reason, counting chicken pox spots on an older kid who should have been long past this first grader scourge, the time an adult discovered an empty fudge dish minutes before a little boy threw up.

The holiday ghosts play havoc in creating a fictional family gathering. The oldest daughter isn’t anything like your sibling, but it’s hard to break a tradition of who opens the first gift. Social drinking has different limits in this world than in the celebration you remember. Members of your family never raised an open palm to a child or fellow adult. A baby might fall asleep at the table, but not an adult.

What’s over the top and what’s ho-hum depends on your memory and your readers’ experience. Everyone dances with the ghosts of holidays past. Only the music is different.

 

About Book Festivals

Cynthia Kraack Posted on by

Remember when the Scholastic Book Fair was set up in the hallways at your school? With clean order forms and a pencil in hand, you and your class got to walk through the stacks and pick out books that birthday money or your parents might buy. Then there were the cool stickers and trinkets that could only be bought during the event. It was hard to stretch your dollars during this once a year delight.

Zoom through a few decades to attending a regional book festival as an author. You do a short reading to a small audience then stand at your publisher’s booth to help sell books.  That’s called a signing, but is really a selling. It’s a heady experience to wear an author nametag and be a part of something so vibrant. There are hundreds, make that thousands, of new titles displayed across the publisher and book store booths. It’s hard to not be intimidated as lines of buyers snake around stanchions to wait for one of the national authors to sign his book. People pick up books to save for Christmas gifting. The book festival is the closest equivalent for an adult Scholastic Book Fair.

Zoom ahead a handful of years to the same book festival. National authors present on the hour in rooms around the display floor. There are a few panel presentations on publicity and regional writing for authors. Writers from other publishers wander while waiting for their scheduled signing time. In fact most of the people who stop by the booth are more interested in talking about how you found a publisher. They’re not buying books or magazines. Many are middle-age with hopes to publish a story they have always wanted to write about growing up on a farm or raising a special child or angels leading people out of an apocalyptic event. Everyone’s talking, but people are walking out with little more than business cards and book marks. Publishers hope there will be a bump in electronic sales.

Change comes slowly or plows through like an uncontrollable circular wind. Maybe regional book festivals will go virtual in the future with authors doing Skype readings and publications offering reading samples and who knows what else. Cool idea, but I’ll miss the excitement of meeting authors and touching so many, many books.

 

Sex Scenes

Cynthia Kraack Posted on by

I just finished writing a four paragraph sex scene in a new work. The scene is in a male point of view. Breasts are prominent along with one or two other features this character appreciates.

When writing sex scenes, I tend to go for a more minimal approach laced with a heavy dose of sensual information. Mechanics are important, but a couple of heady details about the scents, the tactile sensations, the sights tap into more of my characters’ experience. My characters are regular people complete with a few wrinkles, maybe a paunch, good hair and, usually, long limbs. If one of those traits turns on their fellow characters, wonderful. But does the reader need to feel or see the baby pooch one character knows the other character hides under sweaters?  Probably not.

So I’m not trying to recreate Shades of Grey. My characters don’t need a room built for sex or closets filled with tools or a sinister philosophy to make the earth move when partially naked. (It is trying to write this without sinking into at least one could double entendre, so if one appears please enjoy it.) Some stories demand sex, others are fine with everyone keeping their clothes on for the duration. Not that keeping clothes on denies having sex (regardless of the position President Bill Clinton tried taking).

Writing unwelcome, violent or abusive sex scenes is a a somewhat different situation I’ve not tried often. We’ve all read plenty of good fictional sex and almost an equal amount of uninteresting activities. Sometimes lack of context turns good sex writing into an unnecessary surprise. Just like in real life, sex in writing is tricky and timing can mean everything.

A couple of things left out of the opening sentence include the characters involved are in their sixties and one is six months into remission following chemotherapy treatment for leukemia. Someone reading this might be thinking they can do without that scene and someone else is wondering how everything worked for the couple. Let me add that they are dairy farmers (can this get any further from your urban coffee shop reading site) who are in a hurry as they hear the herd moving toward the milking parlor. Writing from the male point of view gave me access to a set of data that drive the action. So to speak.

 

 

Does Gender Make a Difference?

Cynthia Kraack Posted on by

A Room of Her Own Foundation is dedicated to helping women artists achieve the privacy and financial support necessary to pursue their art. For a handful of very fortunate women AHOHO’s 6th Gift of Freedom Award has provided $50,000 to make that possible. Recently they asked me to complete a survey about my life as a woman writer. Their goal is to collect 50,000 completed surveys and gain insights into how creative women think about their work, opportunities and obstacles.

At the end of the survey, a participant is asked if any questions were irritating and which question was the most provocative. I decided the most irritating and provocative question was the same: “In what way do you see your gender affecting reception of your work in the marketplace?”

The whole concept of how gender impacts my success as a writer is a topic I try to ignore. Looking at the bestselling authors of 2011, eight men and five women are at the top. Genre literature trumps the group.  The fifteen top selling writers of all times list has almost the same break down with nine males and six females. William Shakespeare and Agatha Christie share top honors followed by Barbara Cartland. Again, writers of genre literature dominate.

What role does gender play in the marketplace? Research by Bowker describes the typical book buyer in the United States as a 42 year old woman. Women make 64% of all book purchases. The numbers look fairly consistent across e-books.  Shouldn’t the domination of female buyers give female writers a break?

VIDA’s 2011 reporting on women in literature paints a dreary answer to that question. Across the elite publications reviewing books and writing about literature, men outnumber women on editorial boards, as book reviewers and as authors of books reviewed. The numbers are not insignificant. Usually the ratio is at least three to one. So women may be writing damn fine books, but it appears that the main voices in the marketplace are making other decisions about what should be reviewed and read.  In Mother Jones, celebrated poet Erin Beleiu of VIDA said, “A friend of mine defines this kind of intellectual segregation as the “tits and nether bits” ghetto, a place in which women only speak to other women. Meantime, men are allowed and encouraged to speak to whomever they want.”

I don’t really want to end this train of thought on Beleiu’s quote, but at the moment I can’t think of one thing to write in response.  As I work diligently on submissions to smaller publications than VIDA studied, AROHO diverted my attention to a bigger subject. Now I wonder why they are asking women in the emerging phase of their careers if their gender has affected reception of their work in the marketplace. Isn’t the answer documented?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Delete 785 Words

Cynthia Kraack Posted on by

For the first time I sent a short story to a professional editor before submitting it to a short list of publications during open submission. He did a good job and had nice words about the story’s potential. With two weeks until a major submission deadline I realized that one publication had a 5,000 word limit. My professionally edited story owns a 5,784 word count. Wham. Crisis.

Two days later, after avoiding the problem by writing other new material and re-arranging my submission files, I returned to the story that was supposed to be the core of this fall’s entry plan. So many carefully layered images of Americans in Paris, of Parisian culture, of the fears of a global pandemic were built through multiple revisions. This story was carefully managed. Each sentence holds a place of value. This story might help build readership and reputation, but not at 5,784 words. So how do I start deleting 785 words from a final version?

The opening two words began the sacrificial deletion followed by twenty-five words in the fourth paragraph. Three sentences fell off the second page for thirty-seven words. By the third page, small descriptions disappeared. Does the reader need to know the bed has starched sheets and pillowcases? In search another fifty such words are easily removed.

In this mind frame some sentences now appear extraneous. If a couple is forced to sleep in a church with hundreds of strangers during a cold Paris winter, the reader will probably understand they are in a seriously dangerous situation.  In twenty-one pages at least a half-dozen similar structures jump into the trash. Two paragraphs of nice description volunteer eighty-nine words.

When I processed the edits more small changes became obvious. With three pages remaining the word count dropped to 4,980. Continuing to the end, more phrases and sentences disappeared. Like trees cleared of dead branches, the story while losing pages of stuff stood more perfectly formed. This tighter version is a better story, the version that will be submitted regardless of word count requirement. Wham. Wow.

Note to self: when the story feels complete, delete five percent.