2001-05-19
Well, turns out that my great panic about moving this site was a little overly dramatic--I had the sense that B wanted to pull the plug on the old service right away but as it is we're letting it overlap a little. Anyway...
There's this fiction writer named Carole Maso whom I've never really read much of. Her work is very critically aclaimed but a little too poetic/impressionistic/experimental for my tastes. Last night at the library on the new biography shelf, I saw that she's published a slim volume called The Room Lit By Roses, a Journal of Pregnancy and Birth. I picked it up and read a chunk of it last night.
She's clearly someone who experiences the world in a very vivid, sensual way. It's fascinating to read about someone going through many of the same events I've been going through and experiencing it all so differently. As one small illustration, consider this sentence: "Holding the wand in the early morning fog, I passed it through my urine--two strips and the child is found."
This kind of writing--this kind of thinking--has the potential to annoy me. I tend to think it's pretentious, but in the case of this woman I don't think that at all. She's not trying to impress anyone; this is how her mind works.
I guess what's interesting to me about my own mind, my experience of the world, is just how literal it is. How practical and tangible and grounded in the physical. That's not unusual, I suppose that's how most people (most Americans?) are. I guess it's weird because I'm a writer. I'm not a poet, and there are lots of writers who aren't the least bit poetic, so I don't know why any of this is striking me as contradictory. It just sort of does.
Update on agent front. To recap:
| 3/20/2001 | Email to her: Want to read revised version? | ||
| 3/21/2001 | Her reply: Yes! Send post haste. (I do.) | ||
| 3/30/2001 | Email to her: Just checking to make sure you received the ms. | ||
| 4/2/2001 | Her reply: Yes, will read it this weekend. | ||
| 4/17/2001 | Email to her: It's been a couple weeks. Read it yet? | ||
| 4/18/2001 | Her reply: Not yet, can't wait, this weekend! |
My agent is a hotshot. It's in my interest to have her working for me. But only if she is going to work for me. Otherwise, I'm better off with someone else.
I hate this waiting by the phone feeling, the helplessness, the waiting.
| 5/17/2001 | Email to her: It's been nearly two months. Much as I'd love for you to represent me, this delay has me considering other options. If I don't hear from you by Tuesday of next week, I'll conclude that it's time to move on. | ||
| 5/17/2001 | Her reply: I don't blame you for being impatient. I'll read it and call you Monday. |
It feels good, having given her the old tomato. And I do have another trick or two up my sleeve--a friend has offered to introduce me to the agent who just sold a non-fiction book for her, and another agent I queried a year or so back expressed interest just after I'd hooked up with this agent. Though sticking with this one--for now, anyway--is the easiest option. And she is a hotshot.
So much time has passed since I finished the rewrite, and I haven't been thinking about the book at all. Wrapping it up coincided nicely with learning about the pregnancy; I'm a little afraid of the prospect of having to return to it to do any additional work.
I don't feel anywhere near my customary sharpness, and I'm also not sure that any of it quite matters in the way that it has in the past. I mean, I think it still matters somewhat, but there's something about this first-trimester exhaustion that boils everything down the essentials, the immediate physical needs, and this whole novel business can seem very remote.
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