Writer's Corner: a close look at The Deep-Blue Goodbye, by John D. MacDonald

An inexcusably pulpy cover

John D. MacDonald was a very successful crime writer from the 1950's through the 1980's. He's best known now for the Travis McGee series, which starred an observant, cynical houseboat beach-bum in Lauderdale, Florida. MacDonald also wrote more hard-boiled fiction such as the novel The Executioners, which was twice filmed under the title Cape Fear. But Travis McGee, the blue-collar James Bond who took on cases where he can recover money and take half as the fee, was his most enduring creation.

His first McGee novel, The Deep Blue Goodbye, appeared in 1964, and while it seemed to ride on the coattails of James Bond's runaway success, there's a lot more to it than that. Strange as it seems, the McGee books were part of a thriving culture known as 'books for men,' in an age when men - mainstream, actual men - read books. Books on war, books about cowboys, books about private detectives. Pulp writers like Zane Grey pumped out western after western, and war titles were also numerous. Somewhere along the line, (I'd say about 1980) men stopped reading, and mysteries almost died out with them, until Sue Grafton and Sara Paretzky came along with female leads to save the genre. But that's another post.

Approaching the McGee novel's from a writer's perspective, there's an awful lot to learn from the success of one of America's great mid-list genre authors. So let's tear into one specific passage, looking at its key strengths and weaknesses, to answer the one question every author needs to ask: Why should my reader keep turning the page?

This passage occurs on the second page, after McGee introduces that he's on his boat, The Busted Flush, and the location is Lauderdale, Florida.

Chookie McCall was choreographing some fool thing. She had come over because I had the privacy and enough room. She had shoved the furniture out of the way, set up a couple of mirrors from the master stateroom, and set up her rackety little metronome. She wore a faded old rust-red leotard, mended with black thread in a couple of places. She had her black hair tied into a scarf.  

She was working hard. She would go over a sequence time and time again, changing it a little each time, and when she was satisfied, she would hurry over to the table and make the proper notations on her clip board. 

Dancers work as hard as coal miners used to work. She stomped and huffed and contorted her splendid and perfectly proportioned body. In spite of the air conditioning, she had filled the lounge with a faint sharp-sweet odor of large overheated girl. She was a pleasant distraction. In the lounge lights there was a highlighted gleam of perspiration on the long round legs and arms.

There's nothing fancy here, it's just clean simple prose, a bunch of facts with only a few moments of inspired writing. But for a moment, let's just soak in that first sentence: Chookie McCall was choreographing some fool thing. Here are my reactions to that sentence:

1. What kind of name is that? It's great, a mix of hard consonants ending with a soft l; it speaks of a mind tuned to whimsy and seriousness in equal measure.

2. We know Chookie's a dancer, but not just any dancer, she's one who does choreography. In 1964, most men would be happy to date a dancer, but Trav has met a woman who goes one better - she 'writes' dance.

3. From 'some fool thing' we know all sorts of things. First, we know Trav doesn't know or appreciate much about dance. Second, we know that even if he doesn't care about dance, he cares enough about Chookie to let her do her job on his houseboat.

That's pretty cool, that he can pack all that information into one short sentence.

Overall this scene is a great indication of the compassion Trav feels for women. As it turns out, Trav and Chookie aren't sleeping together. As the book develops, Trav's feelings for women separate into a strange mishmash of 60's paternal chauvinist condescension with a fig leaf of equality-of-sexes neo-enlightenment. This little bit here on the boat, where Trav is both patron and companion is a great bit of foreshadowing.

The paragraph continues with a bunch of things they tell you not to do in writing school, namely start four consecutive sentences with the pronoun She. There's a lot of descriptive tour-guiding with one stellar phrase (rackety little metronome), and I'm willing to let MacDonald break a workshop 101 rule because he's given me enough confidence from the opening of the book and his 'some fool thing' line that I move along the bridge of description till we get to the payoff: 'Dancers work as hard as coal miners used to work.' Here we get a sense of Trav's appreciation for Chookie and her career even if he knows nothing about it. He's a guy with some insights. In other words, he's a voice worth listening to.

Then he spends a few sentences of pure 'male gaze,' reducing Chookie to her body and its smells and the pleasure he gets from them. It's really kind of piggy, and justified only because she's a dancer, and dancers are a reduction of body to art, but it's still a male privilege thing, which, while offensive, plays to MacDonald's audience. Which is another measure of MacDonald's talent. You can reduce McGee to sexist pig, or you can try to rationalize it by saying MacDonald created actual empowered women - and he does have a lot of strong female characters - but - and this is not a small point - you still trust McGee as a narrator. McGee is self-aware, confident, and reliable. This goes a long way in securing the trust of a reader.

You may think MacDonald wasn't smart enough to think through all these issues of gender and patrician attitudes, but later passages, where McGee thinks of himself as a modern knight errant, saving damsels and feeling guilty for bedding the women he saves, would prove you wrong. These are exactly the kinds of things writers think about, and when he was on, MacDonald was in tune with everything he was doing, and with his core audience.

And so, let's reduce everything to one rule: Find your audience, and give them a reason to keep turning the pages. Everything after that is gravy.

Writing tip: Just, Scrivener, and me

I'm starting a new feature: Writing tips! Yes I hear you saying: Aren't there enough bad writing tips from under-published novelists out there? Why are you adding to the noise?

The answer it: I don't know. Except that I haven't seen this tip before, and I think it will help people.

But, before we get to our writing tip, let's start with a plug for Scrivener, the best app for writing novels I've ever used. Throw away MS Word, get yourself into Scrivener. It has tons of tools for the way writers build things - outlining, chapters, word targets, and ways to store research material on characters, settings, and locations. Plus when you're done you can export to dozens of formats including several varieties of e-Book. It's the best 40 bucks you'll ever spend.

Anyway, I was using Scrivener's word count feature, which is awesome. It's under Project -- Text Statistics. Here, you get a rundown of every word you used in your manuscript, and their frequency. I was wondering if there were any words I overused, and wow was I.

It turns out I have a nasty habit of over-using the word 'just.' It's my fault, absolutely. But just has so many meanings, I end up using it as shorthand for about ten different phrases. In all, I'd used just 180 times in a 90,000 word manuscript. (that's 0.2% of the words in my manuscript. Well over the legal limit.)

What's so weird about this is I almost never use the word in its most prominent definition: "based on or behaving according to what is morally right and fair." Just is, as you probably know, the root of the word justice. But not for me! I only go for the five or six below that, which break down to: exactly, recently, barely, simply, really, or positively. With so many meanings, I also apparently use it as filler, whenever I think a sentence needs a pause. And with all those meanings, the justs pile up fast:

"He was just fifteen when he met her. She was just on the edge of the dance floor. The last song had just ended and the light hit her face just right, and he was in love. Just like that. He walked to her, just because, like he had nothing better to do. But what did he want from her. Just to dance? He didn't think so."

So I've lost all trust in this word. It's a dull word that instead of carving meaning out, smears it around.

My penance was to do a find and replace on the entire manuscript, weeding out the unJUSTified justs.

What I found was that in many cases all I had to do was delete it. It was sitting there like a speedbump in the sentence. Which is obvious. When in all your writing classes did anyone say: "Put a just in there. I think this sentence would be stronger with a fudge word." Nope. You never heard that advice.

Here are sample sentences for the many meanings of just, and the replacements you might want to use

exactly:  He knew just what she meant.
precisely: The cat stopped at just the moment his feet hit the floor.
in the same way: I did it just how you told me to.
simply: They just wanted a cup of sugar.
only: There was just one minute to go.
might as well: So he figured he should just go to the movies
barely: There was just enough toothpaste for one brushing of the teeth.
nothing more than: It was just a passing fancy, not love at all.

Some are harder to replace, of course:
in the recent past: I was just there five minutes ago.
(colloquially for a certain way): He tucked in his feet just so.

Anyway, I did a vigorous just-weeding. After half an hour, I'd reduced my justs from 180 down to an acceptable 80 or so (in the ballpark with 'make' and 'can't'. Because sometimes, frankly it's just the right word for the job!

Let's condense all this to the Writing Tip: Be careful about overusing words, especially in clusters. I sometimes go through first drafts and see six Justs sitting there in one paragraph. And it isn't always the word just, either. It could be any word: Gotta, or said, or a color - I once had two characters with a gravelly laugh within 5 pages of each other, for instance.

So, What words do you overuse? How do you weed them out? Comments are welcome.

PS: I'm not alone in overusing this word. Check out the Google chart on nGram. For the past fifty years, just has been taking over the English lexicon:



Here's a better link to that chart for all you stat-heads out there.

Tournament of Books 2014: my Pre-Tourny analysis

What is our obsession with competition in America about? There's scarcely an activity any more that doesn't have a governing body and associated national tournament. There are beard competitions, rock-paper-scissors tourneys, air-guitar battle royales. There's nothing you can do that someone else won't claim to do better and start a tournament to prove it. Even stacking cups has become a competitive sport. 

Which brings us, of course, to books. The shortlist has been announced for the 10th The Morning News Tournament of Books, my favorite of the single-elimination tournaments that spring up in March to capitalize and satirize the NCAA basketball tournament. Filled with capricious judges, aggrieved fans, authors who sometimes chime in to the comments section - you never know where the Rooster will take you. It's both a legitimate study of what makes a book good/better than another and a perfect example of why rating books against each other is a fruitless path which ends only in madness. Madness I tell you! 

To more accurately sum things up: The ToB is a single-elimination tournament with sixteen (well, okay, this year, seventeen) initial slots. Books are matched up against each other, and a celebrity judge reads both and decides which book they like better, and writes a summary article of their decision. That book advances to face the winner of the adjacent bracket, and so on, till there is uno champion del mundo! 

Winner gets a live Rooster, as the legends have it.

Without knowing the first-round matchups, and having read only four of the books (sad shamey-face) I can only give vague impressions on relative odds. 

First, it looks like the selectors have done more to get some diversity into the field this year. Last year's list, while full of wonderful books, was surprisingly beige. It's nice to see that every inhabited continent has contributed to this year's carnage. 

There were several notable snubs this year: George Saunders, Meg Wolitzer, Khaled Hosseini, and Rachel Kushner, for instance, all wrote fantastic books, but without expanding the field and taxing everyone's patience, these folk will just have to settle for massive sales and great critical acclaim to keep them warm at night.

Judges this year include and eclectic mix of authors, critics, a musician, and a guest chosen from the ranks of talented hangers-on and fankids. Among them are Young Adult hearthrob novelist (and last year's runner-up author) John Green, the amazingly funny and talented Roxane Gay, the legendary Geraldine Brooks. I'm expecting good things from all these people.

Overall, I think these are all good books and would love to read every page of them, but only one can survive.  I didn't link to anything because you're probably smart enough to highlight, right-click, and choose search on Google and also, I'm lazy.

* indicates books I've read

At Night We Walk in Circles by Daniel Alarcón - A relative unknown though critical darling, this looks at first glance like yet another dark South American farce, this one with a guerilla theater troupe, though to be fair, those are usually pretty good, and the people who like them really like them. I'm guessing there are weaker books in the field, but if matched up against a heavyweight it's a first-round adios.

The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton - One of the heavyweights, this book carries its Man Booker award pedigree and "Concept novel" gravitas into the ring. Like Roostarian winners Cloud Atlas and A Visit from the Goon Squad, concept novel isn't necessarily a bad thing. But one rap on The Luminaries is that it's a writer's book, not necessarily a mainstream reader's book, so which judge it gets will be critical. Gravitas gets it past the first round, then its a crapshoot. 

The Tuner of Silences by Mia Couto - This is another sleeper from Africa about an isolated tribe contacting the modern world. A wise and knowing insight into a foreign culture, this book will gain respect for being exotic, even if it may not have the pedigrees of other entrees. A true wild card, though probably not a contender.

The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert - Will the author of Eat, Pray, Love be able to overcome her backlash and find redemption in the the Rooster tourney? By all accounts this is about as far from EPL as a book can get. On the minues side, it's also a doorstoppy idea book. Maybe it has enough punch for the semi-finals, but I doubt it.

How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid - An old-school political book, a second-person novel about making money in Pakistan. Satires play well with some but not others, though with the right pairing, say against an acerbic domestic drama, Hamid could score a moderate run.

The Dinner by Herman Koch - A divisive book about European scandals and privilege that takes place over a dinner table in Amsterdam. Reviews were mixed, though marketing made it a sales success; The same way it hit bookstores with a storm of publicity then didn't sell or get decent reviews, Dinner will flame out of the the ToB in the first round when faced with more lively books. 

The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri - Another awards winner with the gravitas and popular appeal that will threaten to go deep. 

* Long Division by Kiese Laymon - A dark horse in a field of dark horses, this is another high-concept book about time travel, race, and viral YouTube meltdowns. I love the idea, and halfway through I'm finding it funny, endearing, baffling, and charming by turns. But in the ToB, high-concept only gets you so far; this feels like a first-round upset but not much further. 

* The Good Lord Bird by James McBride - Pulitzer Prize winner, a race-and history based romp, this is a strong contender for the final four. See my review on this site for more information.

Hill William by Scott McClanahan - Surprisingly, this has the highest Goodreads rating at 4.24, which bodes well (although it has only 369 readers; surely a wider readership would drop that total?).** This feels like the sleeper pick, much like The Sisters Brothers was a few years ago.  

The Son by Philipp Meyer - I read Meyer's debut novel, and if this is anything like that the density of his prose will render one judge comatose, booting him in the second round. 

* A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki - I actually read this book! It's a great book with great themes and characters. Ozeki is a dark horse with a chance to win the whole thing. Unfortunately, the final chapter employs a deus ex hand-wavy metaphysical meta-narrative which may sink her in the round of four, due to some judges insistence on literal believability in all things fiction. 

Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell - YA books are always a dark horse; they tend to hit hard emotionally but don't hold up on reflection, much like your own teenage years perhaps. Probably a first or second round exit, though it could return in the zombie round, as its Goodreads rating tops this field at 4.22. 

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt - The perfect combination of literary gravitas and popular appeal, The Goldfinch rode a tidal surf of buzz to best-seller status and squee-ing fan-boys and girls. The Goldfinch is my pre-tournament favorite, as even if it's bounced, it will probably be a zombie pick. It's only drawback is that it's really long and people get turned off by long.

The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara - I'm not sure how I feel about a book that features lost Micronesian tribes and magic turtle meat. Guess we'll find out. I feel this has very low odds of winning, but maybe there's more magic in that turtle meat than I think. 

[Winner of the Pre-Tournament Playoff Round]

Play-In:
For the past two years, the sixteenth spot has been fought over by a surplus of books. Last year three war novels fought their way through; this year I can't sense a theme, so I don't get it. It's two books by women authors, one a seasoned vet, the other a relative newcomer. 

* Life After Life by Kate Atkinson - Ambitious, funny, idea-packed, Life After Life is also a gimmick book, and some judges will be shut down by gimmicks. In a fair world, Life After Life would make a deep run. Although if it gets booted, it may just employ its own narrative trick and re-birth the whole bracket from the beginning until it does win. 

Woke Up Lonely by Fiona Maazel - The lowest rated book on Goodreads with a shockingly low 2.84, little is known of this upstart, who will face a stiff challenge from the compulsively readable Life after Life.

The Rooster crows in March!

Here's my compilation bookshelf on Goodreads.

** Goodreads ratings are a moving target. Two days later, Hill William had been added to 467 readers, and it's rating had dropped to 4.11. As of Jan 26, Eleanor and Park had the highest GoodReads rating at 4.22, and Hill William had dropped to third. 

Weekly Round-up

I'm trying a new feature here to get myself re-interested in this blog. It's a weekly roundup of things I find interesting on the web. I'll try to keep it focused on books, stories, and publishing, though I may throw in the occasional movie trailer or cat video, just to drive my links up. Enjoy!

Stories:
Nobody's Stranger
Maud Newton has a story in two parts on medium.com. It's described as 'Miami noir love story.' It starts out like the kind of story that would be dismissed critically as a male fantasy of easy sex with a gorgeous woman if a man had written it. And parts seemed designed to act as a discussion starter of inverted gender roles in po-mo fiction rather than as an actual story. But some part of me really liked this story, and it stuck with me, so I'm going to say you should read it as well.

The Impossible Man
On another end of the gender spectrum, in the Paris Review, J Robert Lennon writes about a guy's guy, in trouble with his girlfriend, who takes a walk and loses his memory. When it comes back, he forgets all the parts of himself that weren't very nice. Things go downhill from there.

You Invent this Incredible Invention
From Pank magazine, an incredible story with a great voice that illustrates an amazing worldview. You could call it the tale of a geek and the woman who loves him, but it's more than that. Molly O'Brien, stand up and take a bow!

Books:
It's compilation season for the year's best short stories. The Best American Short Stories 2013 is out. After a brief glance, it looks like once again The New Yorker, Tin House, and Granta are still in charge of American short fiction. The O Henry Prize Stories collection is also out, and they do a slightly better job of looking beyond the big names but not much. For more obscure stories by lesser known but no less talented authors, The Pushcart Prize is your best bet.

Dumb movie trailer of the week:
The Desolation of Smaug: The Hobbit Part II (or, The Lord of the Rings -2)
This movie has it all. Dragons! Giant Dwarf-knuckle walkways! Suspenseful droning music! Hot he-dwarves. Hot she-elves! Untippable barrel racing with whitewater ninja-fights! Eyebrows of all shapes and sizes! Gold-pile luge racing! Me wants it, precious!




No, but seriously, I need to see the physics behind those barrels. And the eyebrows.


Cats!

The MZD now available. Sample included.

Wow it's been a busy few days.

The MZD: A novella of undead horror, is now available for purchase on Amazon . That's the cover, over there, on the right. I made it myself, and it's an okay cover, though I'm open to fan art for future editions. I had a surprise release party at Moe's bar, in Mokpo, South Korea, and I'm still a bit under the hangover. Thanks for coming, everybody!

So it's out now, ready for you, gentle reader. Please read and enjoy the book. If there are problems, like typos, or names that seem weird, or crazy breaks, please let me know. I proofed it, but these things slip through. I'll save up all the corrections and send everyone who sent them in a corrected edition when I make that happen, or a free copy of my next book, or a beer at Moe's, if you're in town. Plus, if this is well accepted, I promise to pay a copy editor for my next work, which will either be a saga of alternate realities, or a sensitive coming of age tale set in the golden glow of the early sixties, or maybe something with teenage dragon tamers who fall in love with mermaids and fight space commies. Yeee-hah!

Here's a sample of what you're getting in the MZD:

Joe's story:

Joe worked in one of the after-school academies called Hogwans. Koreans sent their kids to Hogwans after school for extra study. Some sent their kids to get ahead of the other kids, the rest sent them only so they could keep up. It was a vicious circle of achievement and keeping-up-withs that no one seemed interested in breaking, and it had earned for Korea one of the largest, richest economies in the world. To hear Joe tell it, he worked for one of the best Hogwans in Mokpo; one where the students were uniformly excellent and the owner was a vicious perfectionist; luckily Joe was one of the best teachers he knew, and the best compensated. Whether it was true or not no one knew - no one had seen Joe teach. What it meant for Joe was he went to work at three in the afternoon, and got out at ten at night, when he went straight to the bar, usually Capp’s, for a few drinks, maybe poker on Wednesdays, before heading home to bed. It was a cycle he was happy to repeat as often as necessary until he’d built up a nice nest egg for whatever came next. 

When he’d showed up at work today, everything had seemed normal. His boss’s car, a black Samsung, was parked squarely in his reserved spot, and kids were milling about on the sidewalk. But his boss wasn’t in the office, nor was he in the classroom. This was strange, because the boss was a workaholic who’d lived in Boston for eight years, which not only left him with a strange accent when he spoke English (How’s da weada? for instance), but an undying love for the Red Sox. He still took five shifts of teaching a day himself, hadn’t missed a day of work in the entire eighteen months Joe had been there. He was a machine for teaching, and a prickly stickler for details: he’d had a running argument with the janitor over where to store cleaning material, and how often the bathroom should be cleaned. Joe had more than once seen them standing toe-to-toe, red-faced and spitting, gesturing wildly at bottles of cleanser stacked on the shelves next to the supply closet tucked under the stairs behind the lobby. 

Lots of foreigners came and went, they couldn’t stand the boss. But Joe was an Army man, and his time there had been vast, and merciless; the Army wanted you attuned to detail, and  unquestioning in your execution. He’d done a tour in Iraq - an even more vast and merciless place than basic training. There in the sun, sitting and waiting for combat that never arrived, the will to serve in the Army was sapped right out of him, and when it came time to get out, he got out. Compared to the Army, Korea and the Principal’s whims were like a kiss on the cheek from your dotty old aunt. Condescending, but a degradation nowhere near real hardship.

But even with the boss gone, the kids were there. So Joe settled in to teach. The kids, mostly cut from the sheep-mold of middle school kids caught in the grind of the Korean achievement machine, showed up and sat down, and Joe ran them through the basics: the rules of how to make the present progressive, a game of pass the ball for amusement, then a few more drills. The second class had two missing students, the next was half full, and for the seven o’clock class he waited ten minutes past the starting time, but no students arrived.

Joe, without a Principal, didn’t quite know what to do. He supposed he should just wait, but after four straight hours, he also had to pee, so with the thinking that his pissing would give the kids a few more minutes to show, he went downstairs to the lavatory. He walked into the bathroom and pulled at a door handle for one of the squat toilets. All of the bathrooms here were squatting toilets, small porcelain troughs set flush with the ceramic tiles. He pulled at the door, but it didn’t open, which was strange, as the latches only worked from the inside, and it seemed dark and empty in there. He didn’t know how it would be locked from the inside and still be empty. Curious, he gave it another pull. He went down to one knee and peered underneath, but it was dark, he could see nothing. Not that he wanted, or needed, the squatter. So whatever. He turned to use the urinal, had a hand on his fly, when he heard a shuffling sound from behind the closed door. A definite rustling sound. The sound of air escaping lungs. Joe stopped, but he didn’t hear it again. Then, the door rattled. It rattled, and he heard a grunt like air escaping, and the door shook again. 

He didn’t ask who it was - he didn’t know the Korean, wouldn’t have understood the response, and the idea of language seemed completely absent anyway; he was suddenly terrified. He looked at the gap below the door and saw the toes of one slippered foot and another in a single stocking, and then he looked up to the top of the door and saw a hand curling over its edge, its fingers stained purple and bleeding from the cuticles and grasping to giving the door a great horrific shake, and then he left.

He ran down the hall to the stairs and around to the main hall where he saw the janitor moving away from him and dragging something that looked very heavy. It looked to be something largish, something trailing liquid, something wearing shoes.

“Hey,” said Joe, but the janitor didn’t turn around. He went into the supply closet, pulling the thing in with him. Surprisingly, it was dark: Joe hadn’t even noticed the sun going down. It was dark and the floor was wet, but Joe needed to let the janitor know someone was trapped in the bathroom. He needed to find out what he could, because Joe, the good teacher, the former Army communications expert, didn’t like loose ends. He was Army: he wanted to pass the buck up the ranks and go home. So he walked down the hall, being careful not to slip on the water. Then he looked into the supply closet and turned on the light. 

***

He didn’t want to say any more, there in Capp’s. “I think now I must be remembering it wrong,” he said. “You know how memories play tricks on you. But no. I’m pretty sure it really was... But I don’t really know what it was. All I known is what I saw. And I didn’t like it.” 

Finally Felix said, “What did it look like, Joe?” 

He paused, a sick smile that wasn’t of amusement on his face, then he said, “It wasn’t even water on the floor. It was red; it was blood everywhere. And it looked like the janitor was eating the Principal.”


________

The MZD: enjoy it today!

Submitting again

Last weekend I got the whim to send my novel, HempAmerika.com, out to agents again. I'd found one who seemed nice enough, was listed as accepting submissions, and had a clean, tasteful website. She wanted a cover letter and a sample chapter. So I pulled up the novel and took a look at the opening paragraph and said to myself, "Is this the best I can do? Really?" It was sluggish and torpid, and I could see why no one wanted to represent me. It was really kind of depressing, but you can't just be depressed and give up, because then where would you be?

So I thought I'd polish it up and send it back out. I'd gather all the skills and life experience I'd gained in the eighteen months since I'd last worked on my novel. Shouldn't take long. I'd just concentrate for a few minutes, come up with a few genius phrases, and make a sparkling jewel of that opening, something to rival The Great Gatsby, or, heck, Moby Dick, for opening paragraphs. Something that would be quoted for decades to come...

Three days later, I'd gotten something acceptable together. I'd added sentences and taken them out. I'd paged through thesauruses, had a few stiff drinks, neglected the dog. Then, finally, with something different anyway, I gave up again. Is it better? Oh, sure, why not.

I repeated this process with the cover letter. I took the two cover letters I'd used before. I decided to take the strongest parts of each and fuse them together, like you do with two bars of soap. I melded and sculpted, made verbs agree with subject, and parallelized dependent clauses. I split hairs over word meanings, and compared adjectives and if it was a close call, I flipped a mental quarter. If I was a genius, then the two choices were equally brilliant. If I were an idiot, same deal, so no need to stress. Finally, when all I was doing was fiddling with commas, I figured I was done.

I composed the email Tuesday morning, made a pdf of the opening chapter, and sent it off to the agent, then remembered I have a day job. So I fed the dog, boxed my lunch, put on a coat and headed out to the bus stop. I checked my Blackberry, and there it was: a rejection from the agent. Four days of work, and fifteen minutes to reject. I do not take it personally. I have since sent it to two other agents, who will most likely not even have the courtesy to send a rejection. Again, nothing personal.

Just for fun, here are the paragraphs:

Paragraph A:
It was in 1998, six months after I moved back to Minneapolis, that Great Uncle Nick passed away. His memorial service was held at a funeral parlor not far from my Uptown apartment, in a section of city encased in a fast-melting shell of ice, the glittering aftermath of a late-season storm. My parents insisted on driving me home, and then on coming up for a visit. They sat silently on their own discarded furniture as I handed them herbal tea from a supply they’d brought over themselves a few weeks earlier, and when I leaned against the kitchen door the silence continued.


Paragraph 1:
In the Spring of 1998, six months after I moved back to Minneapolis, Great Uncle Nick passed away. The night before his memorial service, a late-season storm encased the city in a shell of ice that by morning had transformed my neighborhood into a glimmering imitation of itself. Great gnarled oaks had been smoothed into enlarged approximations of oak trees, and entire buildings wore facades of ice that shimmered in the morning sun, blinding me as I slipped over the frozen sidewalks of Uptown to the funeral parlor where Nick was to be sent off to his final rest. Conditions were still treacherous when the service ended, so my parents insisted on driving me home, and then on coming up for a visit. They sat silently on my sofa, which had been in their basement a few months earlier, as I boiled up and handed out some herbal tea from a supply they’d brought over themselves as a housewarming gift, and when I leaned against the kitchen door the silence continued.