Status Report

Dark Saturday. The Coast teases with days when it is the most beautiful place on earth, and then some, like today, when only a slight change from black to grey and the calls of birds announce morning. I turn on lamps and light candles.

Idling between projects feels odd to me. The Shinny's Girls Trilogy will soon be back from copy editing, ISBN's applied for, a general plan, with Steve, who will soon supply the cover art. Still aiming to have it available on-line by June 21. Print on demand too? Hmm. The Trilogy amounts to 210, 000 words, which may work out to 600 plus pages. According to Lulu's calculator, I would have to charge about 35.00 retail for the book, to cover costs and fees. Worth it? I do love paper books, flipping pages, the feel of various textures, the look of various print-styles. The sense of progression.
      Meantime, David Zieroth is reading Presto! while travelling in Europe. He downloaded my latest draft to his e-reader. First reports positive, enthusiastic. He called from Grosz to say,  "I am quite enjoying it!" But he has not finished it yet, and on the e-reader he doesn't know how far he has to go. Not like reading a paper book when there would be more pages on the left than on the right,  making it hard to read at lunch because of the imbalance, looking around for something - maybe a salt shaker - to anchor the right side while you hold your sandwich.
     Idling between projects, the rain is light enough I can go for a walk.

Thinking about Dos Passos

Re-reading the USA Trilogy again. The copy I have is one I gave to my brother Tim in 1968, back when we were fighting about the Vietnam War. The cover price for this two-inch thick illustrated softback, its cloth cover losing threads by now, is $2.85. I remember buying it in a bookstore in either San Francisco or Santa Rosa. Probably the former.
     Dos Passos had a grand vision for content and style. In my view, he wanted to present the sweep of events and characters that would create the U.S.A. of the 20th century. A big theme, and one that influenced me in the 60's, is the tension between labor and capital. He began pre-WWI in the first book of the trilogy, The 49th Parallel, and continued through the war until a few years after it. The result is a mosaic of news events, popular songs, short biographies of characters who shaped the times, like Eugene Debs, Robert Follett, Thomas Edison, a continuing stream of consciousness autobiography, and the developing stories of various characters, working men and women, businessmen, politicians, journalists.
     The period he writes about is the same in which my new novel Presto!

is set. The difference is that while DP's canvas is huge and crammed with content that gives a thorough sense of the times, I have restricted myself to the point of view of a single character and events that occur through a single ten day stretch. Yet I see that my character is affected by the many of the same events and the consciousness of the time DP so thoroughly depicts. I am inspired by his use of different styles of narrative, including the newspaper headlines. To think that even before radio, the many newspapers with their many daily editions were able to keep people, if not instantly informed, like now, at least current! As I work on either the last or next to last draft of Presto, I am thinking too of graphics within novels. How they can open and enhance the text.

Presto rests

Another plateau. What fascinates me about the process of writing a novel - one of the things - is how an idea seems to come when I acknowledge the need for one, as if it has been waiting for an invitation. I felt something was missing, that the first person voice focussed the story but perhaps in too narrow a fashion. Now I have an idea that not only widens the focus but also helps me firm allusions to Dos Passos. By letting the new melange rest for about a month, until I am back in B.C. and working on my usual computer and have access to research materials I collected, I should be prepared to complete a final, so-called, draft, because the process of revision never ends, only stops from time to time.

Thinking of time in Presto

The laws of physics don’t explain why time always points to the future. All the laws—whether Newton’s, Einstein’s, or the quirky quantum rules—would work equally well if time ran backward. As far as we can tell, though, time is a one-way process; it never reverses, even though no laws restrict it.

She lives in the present but is consumed by a past in which she cannot imagine the future. Another voice does that for her. The voice of God? The author-narrator? Not there yet.

Presto steps out

Something I have seldom done, read from a work in progress. But an invitation to join the monthly cultural soirée at the U. S, Consulate in Québec gave me an opportunity to try out the voice of my character, my first attempt at a novel-length first person voice and my first historical novel. The tenor of the room indicated that people were paying attention, and comments afterwards assured me that I achieved what I am trying to do, ie create the authentic voice of a young Irish immigrant woman adrift in Chicago in 1919. The rhythm worked, and her quirks of narrative -- mixing tenses, for example. I don't think it was confusing. The next time I do something like this I want to do a better job of setting up the period. Also, it is clear that my idea of paying stylistic homage to Dos Passos needs boosting. Also clear, how important the newspapers are to me, to my character, to my idea for the novel.

Presto

Back to the novel I began... could it be ten years ago? No, but it was almost seven years ago when I was leafing through materials at the beautiful Newberry Library in Chicago, viewing microfilm of newspapers from 1919, and  happened upon the week I soon after decided to use as the basis of an historical novel I am now calling Presto. I talked a bit about this on artchat podcast, 11/12/12 The title could change. With so much having happened that week, I would need a long story, I thought, but in the process of discovering and writing my first historical novel, I came to the simple and not so simple story of a young woman who happens to be living in Chicago during a week when catastrophe after catastrophe filled the pages of the many newspapers published in the city. Ah the old days. Newspapers! Part of what amazes me is what must have been so absolutely memorable to the people who lived through that week, in the same sense that we who lived through Kennedy's assassination or the  attack on the World Trade Center towers ask...what were you doing then? .. are virtually unremembered now. Until I read the front pages of the  Daily News and the Trib, I had no idea what a dramatic week began July 21, 1919.

A commission to write a play, Imperfect, interrupted my progress and gave me time to reflect. Now I am back for the finish.