The Confabulator Cafe

Author: akordahl

  • Small Presses and Hope

    I submit to the proper authorities, which is to say, none of them. I submit ideas to my audience/friends and family on social networks and blogs.  But to this point, with the exception of a poetry.com incident and a couple of dreadful entries in my college literary magazine, I do not submit my work anywhere else for consideration of publishing.

    The main reason for this is that I haven’t yet produced anything that I consider publishable. Not much to say there.

    But I have started looking into small presses where I might submit work someday.  Presses and publishing houses are a subject of much more interest to me as a writer than me as a reader; now, at The Dusty Bookshelf, I glance down the row of books for publishers I trust, rather than a limited smattering of  authors and titles already in my acquaintance. I know that a book from Verso or Haymarket Press is probably worth my time.  Poetry from New Directions usually merits a glance, if not intensive study. For fiction, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux publishes several of the authors I enjoy.

    I don’t believe that the rise of e-books spells the end of traditional publishing, nor that the demise of traditional publishing would necessarily be disastrous for writers and readers.  But I do hope my favorite small presses can continue to do their important work of connecting niche markets with niche writers, and helping the writers and editors involved at least make enough to eat or to supplement a day job.

    When I do revise some of my work to a satisfactory level, I would probably submit to PM Press, an anarchist press that is more sympathetic to spirituality than most; Ice Cube Press, which is out of Iowa and focuses on Midwestern writing; or my church’s publishing house, depending on the nature of that work.  (I mean, I would submit to these guys first, then pray a lot, and bite my nails while the inevitable rejection letters rolled in and I tried to find other presses of possibility.)  In the meantime, I support the heck out of them with my book buying.  They need to stay in business a few more years!

    Otherwise, where will I submit?

  • Hobbies, Work, and Process

    On this week’s theme, I wouldn’t say that I seek out new hobbies through writing. Rather, writing informs my extracurriculars, and my extracurriculars inform my writing.  Side note:  Labeling any productive activity as a “hobby” is a  loaded observation.

    I consider hobbies to be the things we really care about that capitalism simultaneously tries to convince us are the reason we work so hard all day, and then also requires us to dismiss in favor of work that is productive to someone or something else. This frustrates me, but it also reminds me of important anarchist principles (I know, really? Something ELSE reminds me of important anarchist principles?). We don’t always work for pay. Sometimes we work, and we do hard, important, vital work for love.

    Could the whole world survive on work done for love and need, for work done without coercion, work done in the spirit with which most of us pursue productive hobbies? I invite you to contemplate the possibility.

    (more…)

  • Ice Cream in an Age of Entropy (Flash Fiction)

    “The world didn’t end in fire, didn’t end in ice,” grumbled Chef Wallace. “Either of those, I could have used to cook. But no, we are stuck in this awful entropy, this perpetual 80 to 100 degree wilting vegetable hell.”

    Darwin and Gwynn exchanged eye rolls.  The assistant cooks knew they were about to hear another lecture on “back when I was in school, it was all freeze this, set fire to that” extravagance.  Wallace shook with rage, and the assistant chefs backed up.  In this era of limited food, it was remarkable how the carbohydrates of yesteryear still padded his mighty flesh.”Back then, if our Humble Cooperative Leader would have asked for ice cream, I would have gone to the liquid nitrogen stock, and voila, deluxe ice cream, immediately. But what am I supposed to do for his birthday now? Ten years I have not had a refrigerator, let alone a freezer, let alone a proper ice cream maker.”

    (more…)

  • The Author is Omniscient: An Argument for Honesty

    I have flirted with multiple points of view. I love the second person for its exotic directness; the first person for its appearance of unmediated access; the limited third person for its ability to draw the reader into the environment of another. But for fiction writing, I remain an advocate of the omniscient third person, the overreaching narrator who knows and interprets all.

    This point of view has experienced a decline in literary fiction (a statement I base purely on my own reading of 20th century literary fiction and not on any sort of statistical study). Some have deemed it arrogant or presumptuous for the authorial voice to assume possession of more than one body in a tale; the first person seems more honest, acknowledges more fully that but a single voice can come from a consciousness, that we cannot fully know the reality of another.  Margaret Atwood’s excellent first-person female narrators (in Bluebeard’s Egg, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Blind Assassin, among others) participate in memoir-style novels. I love these books, but they also expose the dangers of solipsism in first person novels.  After all, one of the great strengths of the novel as opposed to poetry or short stories or numerous other fictional forms is the opportunity offered for many voices to participate in telling the story.

    Additionally, I struggle to distinguish my voice from the narrator when I write in first person. It is too easy to let a tale slip into memoir or a Mary Sue scenario.  Third person omniscient forces me to balance the concerns of characters that I might not identify with as fully with those whom I do draw more directly from my own experience.

    But why third person omniscient as opposed to third person limited, which restricts focus to the viewpoint of a single character? Well, the author really does create the whole thing,and it seems to me more honest to acknowledge this fact and open up the narrative to the possibility of dramatic irony.  Again drawing on Tess of the d’Urbervilles (which in the course of participating in this blog has shown itself to be my favorite book of all time, a fact I did not know before I was a Confabulator), would the reader be nearly as devastated when she is suffering as a milkmaid in the northern country, away from her family, shunned by Angel, if we did not ALSO know that her love is suffering in Brazil and missing her something fierce? Without our omniscient narrator, we are limited to personal tragedy, closing off the possibilities of societal tragedy and shared suffering.

  • Math and iPads and other web tricks

    When it comes to the Internet, I admit it.  I’m a Wikipedia whore. Yup.  Ever since that monumental study came out revealing that Wikipedia was no more error-prone than Encyclopedia Britannica, with far more detailed information about every single season of Star Trek, I have used the great crowd sourcing marvel for everything from quick questions (who did invent phrenology, after all?) to finding the majoritarian impression of Salvador Allende’s death: suicide or assassination? (Suicide is the more common interpretation.  Not if you are at a museum dedicated to his memory, though.)

    I also find the plethora of open-source journals available online to be a huge boon to detail-specific research.  When I was researching my great-grandparents for a novel and wanted to find out what their lives as Norwegian immigrants would have been like, the Norweigan American studies journal was invaluable.  If you have a good library supplying your internet (I.e., you are a good KU student or employee), Jstor is the source of all scholarly goodness.
    My day job as math teacher also must enlighten you at this time.  If you are mathematically minded, you should check out Wolfram Alpha, which is a sort of search engine for data that has a computer algebra system built in.  It compiles numerical and other data from all over the place and responds to searches with graphs and tables and is an incredibly powerful engine.  The literary minded compare it to the computer in Star Trek or the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and the struggling math student compares it to a magic machine that does all basic math calculations and a whole lot more.  But it is a great research tool that gives an alternate perspective to all kinds of queries.  The iPad app is also great.*

    And finally, I have to put a plug in there for Information is Beautiful, which highlights a magnificent blend of writing, data, and art.  (You could never guess that all my recent writing centers around curriculum for statistics could you.) I find the site to be the future of graphical creation.  It inspires my writing and also asks me how the web will lead graphic organizations of our future literary efforts.  

    *I have been writing on my iPad a lot recently, but I am not sure the definitive programs for writers using iPads have been written yet. Scrivener promises to be available soon, someday, and that would be a boon, but I do think you might want to stick with the laptop for a while yet.  Other writers, please inform and disagree with me!

  • Experiments in Composition

    I felt really awful about my last NaNoWriMo novel—its plot too outlandish, its protagonist not quite snarky enough, the rises and falls of action uneven and poorly planned. I thought it so dreadful that I preferred to forget it entirely until I realized that it was my first extended narrative that followed a single character and a single story line.

    The realization that it was a new task, that I had pushed my boundaries and expanded my skill set, made me feel better about the work. Nothing about the work itself changed, just my perspective.  Overall, I feel good about my writing when I accomplish something new. I have been proud of particularly concise blog posts. (I tend to wordiness). I felt good about attempting to draw the paranormal into a story. At various times, I’ve experimented with rhyming poetry and with free verse, and whenever anything remotely adequate has surfaced in those experiments, they have satisfied me.

    Pushing my boundaries makes me satisfied in my work. Overall, I’d say my fiction benefits from my “know-it-all” quiz-bowl-champ side. Maybe my readers disagree, but I enjoy the Neal Stephenson, “push as much extraneous information as  possible into fiction” approach in both my reading and writing. I try to keep my sentences varied. My diction precise.  My villains not quite villainous, my heroines not quite nice.

    I have been told that I portray women’s friendships well, which certainly is one of the goals of my writing. Feminism informs a lot of my work, and the more that I can celebrate that tradition and work its ideas in, the prouder of it I am.

    So as long as I write about friendships between women in new experiences, where all those new experiences and the characters involved include a lot of background information that is actually connected to the world, I can be quite happy about my writing.

  • The Redwood Retreat

    Once upon a time, in the fabled woods of the writing life, a quaint cottage nestled in the trunk of a giant redwood.  A magic garden provided food for its inhabitant(s) with just the tiniest bit of foraging; a fresh stream ran through the kitchen.  Inside the cottage stood a desk and many shelves of books, lovely novels that teased the imagination into ever-expanding realms. Endless stacks of paper remained perfectly aligned there by an array of fountain pens with all possible colors of ink and the smoothest tips.  Only the music of birds disturbed the air in that writer’s paradise, and the bold weaver of worlds woke up well-rested each morning, wrote several thousand words of brilliance before noon, and polished the previous day’s already-sparkling prose to greater clarity, humor, and communicative power in the afternoon.

    Ah, to live there.  Ah, to have no obstacles to writing–no time management problems, no distractions, no depression or cynicism, no other job, no basic human urges to satisfy, no human relationships tempting us away from the paper and pencil, no headache-inducing stress that makes you watch television mindlessly for hours rather than writing.

    (more…)

  • A splash of reality

    In L.M. Montgomery’s semi-autobiographical Emily Climbs, the title Emily publishes a novel after years of pursuing a career in writing.  She recounts to a friend that half her family is offended because they are sure they appear in the novel, and the other half is equally offended that they do not appear!

    Emily’s experience has been instructive to me; while I would not ban my daily reality from my writing, I don’t seek to adapt experiences or characters directly from it, either.  Part of this is an ethical decision.  Most of my daily experiences now are in the classroom, and I believe it’s unethical and a little exploitative for me to write too directly about specific students or classroom situations.  Of course, my own experiences there and the understandings that I’ve developed from them influence my writing a lot, but all specifics from my school world must be invented, composite, or otherwise disguised.

    I am a little more comfortable mining my family history for skeletons.  My father is an inveterate story-teller, and stories of his grandparents, my grandparents, and generations of uncles and cousins undergird my entire storytelling vocabulary.  I still try to avoid adapting characters directly from the family, although some of the larger-than-life figures became myths so long ago that I figure they wouldn’t even recognize themselves and are fair game.

    But mostly, my life isn’t that exciting.  Were I to write it down, it would make for very boring books. Indeed, when I was in college I did try to write down stories from my student life, but as it turns out the angst filled coming-of-age of mostly middle class, mostly white, mostly Midwestern college students does not make for riveting prose.  Now I know people from many more diverse walks of life, and their stories are probably pretty interesting–but they are not my stories, and I try not to steal others’ stories.

    One place that I see reality splashing in is when I learn new skills or knowledge sets; my last novel had a lot more specifics of plant life than my first two, since I started gardening between those novels!  Now I’ve started sewing and trying to make more of my own garments–and lo and behold, my characters suddenly have a lot more ideas about the specifics of clothing manufacture.  Certainly, living informs writing, but for me it doesn’t take it over. Reality is overrated, anyway–if the text doesn’t splash me into a reality more vivid, or more gritty, or more refined, or more something than my own reality, then why would I read it?  Why would I write it?

  • When does the work, work?

    When I read a book or article that really works, I try to sit down and analyze what made it effective.  Sometimes it’s a matter of style.  I discovered that my favorite writer, Richard Powers, achieves his effectiveness in descriptive passages by layering lengthening clauses, one tucked inside the next, unfolding to a final expression of expansive impact.  Another writer I admire, Jeff Sharlet, wrote a couple of terribly effective non-fiction works by correlating a lot of previously unconnected information.  Another book did not manage to make the new connections explicit, and it was not as effective.

    A couple of times, when I find a sentence that encapsulates its theme particularly well, I tear it apart to learn from it.  I don’t diagram it formally, but I do analyze its grammatical content.  I try to write another sentence using identical structure, to see where it takes me. I examine its relationship to the preceding sentence, and to the following sentence.  This practice sometimes is rewarding with my favorite writers, but it can be equally rewarding for sentences and paragraphs by hack writers, in blogs, in random acts of literacy.

  • Editing Is Polite

     

    Throughout most of my writing life, I have been a very rude writer, with a belief that my prose deserved to be read in its full early flowering. My twelve grade college composition class was probably the last time I edited with an particular fervor.  There I did learn to interrogate all writing that I do, as I do it.
    As a result of this, in college I submitted a lot of first drafts for final copies.  The unfortunate truth is that my first drafts were still better than most finals, and I was able to earn A’s and B’s without putting much effort into the editing process.  To this day, I maintain that the easiest way to become a fluid, competent writer (if not a great artist or sculptor of the written word) is to read a lot of good writers and practice thinking in complete, complex sentences.
    Still, this means that my editing secret used to involve no editing at all.  Part of this really is from a crazy, Jackson Pollack impulse that first thoughts are most intense, that writing is the process of recording thoughts upon the page, spilled out in a gorgeous mixed metaphor of color on the page or screen.
    After teaching college English, though, I had more than my fill of reading the work of students who chose the same chaotic  process, with somewhat more dreadful results than my choppy but readable unedited prose.  So, I knew that I had to learn how to edit.  Since that revelation, I have tried a few things, but haven’t hit on a routine yet.  When editing my second NaNo novel, I tried editing sentence by sentence first. I soon realized that I hadn’t taken care of blazing plot holes, so all time spent on sentence-level edits was wasted until I did a major restructuring.
    On my personal blog, I occasionally review books and discuss ideas by people who are currently incarcerated.  So I have had to start doing legal edits there–leaving my writing for a day or two and then rewriting it to make sure that I haven’t gotten carried away with rhetoric and accidentally advocated for something illegal. Usually, these edits force me to focus what I was really trying to say, as well, a side benefit of dabbling in the ideological fringes.
    Right now, I am resisting my urge to ramble and learning how to delete my beloved tangents. Even in this entry I have taken out a couple of paragraphs of related stories that I found terribly interesting but which were undeniably off point.  I am coming to an understanding of how rude it is to force readers to find their way through my thicket of tales, that the polite writer must get to the point and direct each paragraph to the topic at hand.