Laurustina

I just came across this piece I wrote in 2005 which makes me desperately want to add another chapter to the manuscript. How can I have written 74,000 words and not told you about Ari? The last time I saw her was a couple of months before Ashlie (aka Alice) died. She came to Mo-town to visit and the three of us lunched together. There is much I could say, but perhaps it’s too late. In an effort to resist the urge to shove another story into an already over-crowded book, I am sharing the poem here. Let it not be said that I forget my friends. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been twiddling my thumbs this week, waiting for the beta-readers to finish their beta-reading so I can get back to the revisions on the book. In the meantime, a new story bloomed and I dove in head-first, hoping it would keep me from obsessively checking my e-mail, awaiting feedback. That said, here’s a sneak peak at the new project, tentatively titled “Dancing The Macarena With Jesus“. It is, of course, a super-rough draft so please keep that in mind as you go.

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It’s not that I haven’t been writing. I just haven’t been wriing for you. Instead, it’s been weeks of contract work and revisions on the manuscript. Head down and eye on the prize. Some of the new work has been challenging, other bits are too silly for words. But my clients are great and at the moment, I can’t complain.

I took some time off yesterday however to luch with three Twitter friends. They’re my first real-life Tweeps and like nearly every one of my experiences with Bloggy Peeps, I had a lovely time. Despite my rice-burning panic and the usual dog hysteria (mostly Iggy, of course) these women were chill and instantly comfortable to be around. As a sweet reminder, Megan (imagine Miss Bliss with an Aussie accent) left me with this delicate opal pendant.

In other news, I’ll be looking for a handful of Beta-Readers this next month. Basically I need speedy readers with a critical eye to help me hone in on the bits that aren’t necessary or don’t work. I need to slash approximately 20,000 words by the end of April. If you’re interested and think you’re up for the task, let me know.

That’s it for now, but I promise to be back around soon with something more interesting to say.

It is finished. Ok, so finished is probably the wrong word, because there is still much to be done: chunks to cut, bits to add, fleshing out in some parts and simplifying others. But with more than 80,000 words behind me, I’ve reached the end of the first draft of “The Complicated Geography Of Alice” and the end is somewhere I’ve never been before.

The popular school of thought on such things is to set the project aside and work on something else for a while. Weeks, maybe months. I haven’t touched the manuscript for six days and yet I can think of little else.

I’m distracting myself with two books, Stephen King’s “On Writing” and a friend’s unpublished novel which is thankfully engaging enough that I can get lost in it for an hour or two every day. Still, the story is nagging me …glaring errors that must be corrected, the lack of continuity from the 1st to 362nd page, the where and how of cutting out approximately 20,000 words … there is so much still to be done.

Other writers have recommended that I work on some new project while this one distills, but any other story I could imagine at this point wouldn’t feel important in the way that this one does. There’s a sense of urgency that I can’t shake. There is a world outside my door in which transgender children and their families are struggling to make their way through a society and a system which are not yet ready to fully support them and I cannot help but hope that in some small way, this story, our story could help.

Perhaps it is arrogant and self-important to believe that what I have to say will make a difference. So be it. I would rather finish what I’ve begun only to find out that I was wrong, than tuck the manuscript away and move on when I might have been right. 

The desire to write as honestly as possible is frequently hindered by an opposing desire to be gentle with those we love. I always work to find a balance and to that end, I am posting the following images. Ash adored her grandmother. And there is no question that my mother loved her back. The complications between them do not undo this fact.

Gabriel-Jordan and Grandma (2006)

Ashlie-Alice & Grandma (2008)