I don't like them.

Though, actually, I'm starting to get into it.  I worked on it several hours today, and I think it's starting to shape up.  I have to work on the mental block, though, that four hours's pondering and wrestling ekes out a sentence.  I waste a lot of that time thinking it shouldn't be this hard, then burp something up, and it's awful.  Then I get something that's sort of okay and then I can't make it jive with the rest.  

I keep viewing it like a resume.  Those I'm really good at writing.  I think I just care too much about the job, this time.  I have wanted a lot of jobs, but it didn't feel like my whole soul was on the line, and somehow this does.  It's a ridiculous image, but hard to shake.

Solace comes from order if you're me, so I've broken the thing up into sections.  

Section One: I called it "kissing the agent."  Overstated, but I needed something cute to make it less arghish.  Anyway, this is where I ostensibly say, "I heard about you in X because of Y in reference to Z."  Only prettier and with actual nouns.

Section Two; "Story enticement."  This is supposed to be the logline or the zippy "read my story because I so rock" stuff.  I think I might have this part.  Maybe.  I'm close.

Section Three; Story summary.  This part bites.  I keep stumbling over what to emphasize.  I can tell the plot, which makes it sound lame. The problem is, there's the plot, and then there's the REAL plot.  And then the plot under the plot.  If I could just insert a graph for this part, I'd be fine.

Section Four: Story theme/round off.  The last chance to sell it.  (Yes, I've turned my query letter into a five paragraph essay.  It's how I cope.)

Section five: Closing.  Here I briefly mention my credentials and then say thanks for reading best of luck pleasesignmybook butonlyifyou'recool.

Actually, I think I like the Five Section Plan, but I think I need to finish the synopsis.  The full, big, multipage summary.  And then I need several hours with the whiteboard and virtual cigarettes so I can make sense of it.

Tomorrow.

 I'm still drafting, with a lot of time to let the thing gel and rise, but I think I just stumbled onto something huge.  At any rate, it feels like the central point of what I'm trying to say.

The genre of “fantasy” is a backdrop I use to explore what I learned in a decade of reading and writing romance: the deep veins of wealth to be found in exploring relationships, romantic or otherwise.

Yeah.  I think "deep veins of wealth" is pretentious and clunky, but it's a start.  At any rate, this is what I have been struggling with.  I don't give a damn what a query is "supposed" to say.  It is going to say what I want to be heard about my story.

Next up: twenty minutes of synopsis followed by a half hour of NaNoWriMo.  Then shower and yard work.

For about two months now, I've been waiting for the sense of chaos to subside so I could find a rhythm in my life again. About a month ago I began to suspect I was going to have to work more actively to find the rhythm, and have been attempting to do so, but I have to tell you, I don't know that I've accomplished much. I feel like a kid trying to catch a merry-go-round spun too fast. You know, those metal ones that you barely see any more, out of the same era of those witch's hat things (WHY were they witch's hats? What witch ever had a hat with two dangling chains, and why on earth WOULD they do this?). The good old days when playground equipment had good odds of killing you, and if it didn't, you could still crack your head open on the cement it was grounded in.

I digress.

I think a lot of this is that I have become very good at head-down-write-novel, and even head-down-revise-novel, but this whole put-on-happy-face-and-shop-novel thing is not really my style. I feel like I've arrived at a dance at the school gym, and despite my hope that this time it really would feel like a cheesy 80s movie and Anthony Michael Hall would come ask me to dance and kiss me under a disco ball, once again it's just this badly lit, tacky, unfriendly place with bad music and no rat pack heroes to be found. So I'm spending a lot of my time prowling the perimeter, trying to figure out what the hell is going on, why, and what exactly I am to do with this strange beast, while also constantly reminding myself that yes, I want to do this.

Part of the problem is that this analogy is pretty apt for how I feel, and the problem is that at 35 years old, I'm not much in the mood for the game. I find myself in the hallway with a cigarette (these are metaphorical, too, so don't fear for my lungs) and a fifth of Irish whiskey, trying to figure out how to start my own party somewhere else. And, actually, in high school, this is almost what happened. I did go to the dances, but my best times were when I went off with the Bad Crowd, driving the back country roads and drinking beer in the back seat on school nights. Half the time I ended up somewhere bizarre and almost dangerous, with odd characters and no real grounding point--Anthony Michael Hall would have run screaming--but I was always oddly happy, because it was so beautifully strange.

This, actually, is most of my life, I'm realizing as I write this. I hate the banal, and I hate the safe, much as part of me laments that it's all too hard--I hate easy. My idea of hell is a tract house in the suburbs with a nice house and nice car with nice furniture and nice friends with nice yards and nice flowerbeds. We'd all have nice jobs and have nice barbeques and nice mortgages and retirement funds. Oh my god, I'd rather be a bag lady. Seriously.

But it's not just that I want weird, either. It's like there's this certain vein of odd that I crave--smart is good. Intelligent is excellent. Not pseudo-intellectual: that's just a spin-off of the Nice stuff, another club to belong to. What I love best, actually, are the odd pockets of intelligence in people. Personal favorite is when the intelligence comes with some garish flaw, like heinous spelling or a facial tic or an obsession of some sort. Passion is always good, but I almost like it best when it's a little skewed.

You know, it's no wonder I hate the high school dance. And it's a lot why I'm not enamored of this book-shopping gig. I have to figure out how to leave the dance where I feel so out of place and find the lanky chain-smoking bastard with an eyepatch who's about to flunk out and has a trunk full of booze. (I knew one of these in high school. His name was Bill. I never so much as kissed him, but my god, the crush.) Because I'm never going to enjoy myself at the dance. I don't want to be perky. I don't want to put on a frilly dress and paint my nails and be careful not to swear. Neither do I want to goth out and crash the thing. I plain and simply don't want to be there unless I can be myself--I want to be at a dance where it feels good and right just to be me, and if I can't find one, I'd rather just go drink with the bad boys until we find something interesting.

BUT.

At the same time, as I sit here I'm hard pressed to find a memory of a public dance of any kind where I felt truly relaxed and natural. I was always holding back, unless I was drunk, and usually those were the times I got myself right on the edge of very serious trouble. I keep running through the memory banks, trying to find something, but none of them are quite what I'm looking for. The best I can come up with was being mobbed by lesbians in London. That was pretty damn good. My birthday last year was good, too, but I still felt like I was in a weird pocket.

You know what it is--I hate crowds. I don't know how to work a crowd unless I'm in charge of it, in some sort of position of authority like teaching, or leading something. This idea that I'm just in one, enjoying the chaos, drives me crazy. Every memory I have of a public dance, I was chasing someone or something, or trying to hook up with someone or with a group of people. And if I was cutting loose, I was drunk.

Hmmmm.

So what I have here is a life-long history of wanting to dance, of going to dances and then not fully participating, of either trying to control the situation or freaking out because I couldn't, of not liking that I had to ride a wave to make it work, and usually getting out of the sea entirely to go hang out with delinquents. Perhaps in 35 years I haven't learned so much after all.

I'm still not doing anything unless I get to be myself. I hate conforming. It drives me insane. And I cannot bear to be a sheep in any shape or form. But I think this may be another instance where I am deliberately not trying, or not trying very hard or very long, so that I can just get the hell out of this crazy place and go party. Except I was never totally happy with the bad boys, either. Something was always missing.

This is all turning into a blog post about Pretty in Pink, isn't it. Except, how telling is it that I always liked Duckie best, and wanted Andie to just get a clue and end up with him?

And that, I think, is a good place to end. Except, of course, now we need a youtube clip.



God--this is it. This is IT.  I want Duckie.  Suddenly it's so easy.  I go to the dance, but I stop buying into the schlock that I need to look for Blane.  

Duckie, you are my man.  Come on, baby.  Let's dance.