Well, fearless leader of the writing seminar and published multiple times in multiple languages author, Jake Lamar, asked me if I was already published and was surprised when I said no. He had a few technical adjustment suggestions and corrections, which I have memorised. Other than that, very positive. The take home message is GO FOR IT.
There are two more sessions. I am thinking of trying to write a short story from one of my antique store photos for the next (last?) one. I’ll need to get started tomorrow with an outline because I will be at the hospital four days this week for a thyrogen scan process. It will be a good way to keep the worry about results at bay, but I know that I can’t write in a waiting room. I wish I could, but they’d interrupt me for the injections and scans and I’d just end up resenting them. Am hoping that the nausea from the injections won’t be too bad. If worse comes to worse, I’ll keep a barf bucket at my feet at home while I write.
I already have a plan for a project after the seminar, which is good because I was a little worried about what I’d do after June. It will probably be a book of short stories rather than a novel. Hope I can get one published somewhere!
Another great meeting of the writing seminar gang.
Theme for the next exercise is: Au milieu de la nuit. In the middle of the night.
I wrote it in less than two hours just after the session.
How? It’s pretty much autobiographical.
Do I feel like I’m cheating? Yes.
Do I have a colonoscopy this week? Yes.
At least I wrote it entirely in French. That way, I feel less like a cheater.
So there.
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Typing up my story, I started to feel very uncomfortable with how autobiographical it is, so I made the narrator a student surgeon. I’m not super pleased with this one. But again, I wrote it directly in French. So. At least there’s that.
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Meh. Way too autobiographical even with the narrator being a surgeon. Started writing something else more fictional. Feels much better.
Out of the basement and under a skylight! That was exciting. It was also exciting that there were only 16 people *including* Jake and the librarian who sometimes reads for shy writers. Good discussion and some great writing!
Our mission, which I’ve already accepted, is a dialogue or a focus on dialogue between two characters. It must begin with ‘Attends!’
Just sat down with no real clear idea in my head and have ended up with a talking Siamese cat who is making an unrepeatable offer to some schmo cutting through the Cour des Petites Ecuries.
I still have no idea what the offer is. I’ll sleep on it. Can’t make it too Master and Margarita after all. This cat does not work for Satan. Just so you know.
But this will be my second ever short story written directly in French! Super exciting! One more and I level up! w00t!
I hope I have distracted a few francophone people out there and only two days after hoping to fulfil such a purpose. Monday evening, on my return from the Sempé exhibit at the Paris Mayor’s Office, I found an e-mail from the Bobigny cultural centre asking my permission to post a PDF of the first short story I ever wrote directly in French, Maddie! I said, ‘Oui, tout à fait! Ce serait génial!’*
They chose it to represent the seminar I am in at the local library (led by Jake Lamar). It is up for all the francophone world to read here.
If any non-francophones want the English version, give me a sign!
This may not seem like a big deal, and it probably isn’t, but I’m pretty pleased to have been selected among all the stories written this season. And it *is* free exposure. I wouldn’t recommend working for free to journalists, but in the ‘OMG, who cares?’ world of fiction publishing, it could be a little boost. We shall see. Would have been better if I had my website up, but hey…one of the writers in the last seminar has a book published now and I don’t think she was Little Miss Self-Marketing during the seminar. You just never can tell!
*Yes, totally. That would be great!
Here we go again. Showing some serious symptoms of colon cancer, according to my doctor. My dad has had a brief (thankfully) battle with it. Given the paternal antecedent and the two times I have ingested iodine 131 to kill off the thyroid cancer, which one doctor thinks I got from the radiation used to treat the head/neck cancer I had as a teenager, the symptoms must be checked out.
It’s definitely not nothing. It’s something. There is very real, disgusting evidence of something. Just hoping the something is benign and easy to treat.
This could send me into a tailspin, but I have fiction — my own and other people’s — to get me through the storm.
I wrote something on Facebook recently about hoping that something I write may help someone work through the pain of this world. By this I meant to forget the crap for awhile in order to deal with it better later. Through my cancers, reading books has helped me leave the crap behind for awhile, stop any pity parties by thinking of (and worrying about) others, reduce dependence on pain killers and laugh (truly helpful medicine, the last one). Distraction has an important function. You can’t have focus without it. Sometimes you just need a break from life. I want to give people that break. Maybe I will be able to do so on a large scale, if I’m lucky.
I don’t think I could fight if I didn’t have books. And books have helped me through every truly low/scary point in my life. Even when my radiation treatment (the first external one at age 18) made me so tired I couldn’t stand for more than five minutes at a time and couldn’t hold a book for long without tiring, I had the memories of books I had read and been read. All the best stories leave us better off for having heard or read them. I may never write any ‘worthwhile’ Booker or Pulitzer winning fiction. I won’t ever teach anyone anything new about our condition as a writer. I probably won’t even ever get published. But I do hope that someone enjoys a story I’ve written enough to have been swept away by it a bit. That it gave them a quick break from the monotony and the various fears we all have. That it stays with them as a little thing they enjoyed to remember when they have a crappy day or a series of them. The way I think of Lamb by Christopher Moore or anything by Douglas Adams and laugh out loud in the waiting room, in a hospital bed, in my own bed so tired I can barely move. I hope I can do that for someone someday. I want to make distraction my trade.
Hasn’t even been written yet, but I have a setting. Hamilton Hall at Liverpool Street Station. Something good is bound to come out of that.
My reading at the seminar went well. I didn’t stumble too much with the French, which is good since the words are mine and were written directly in French. Glad I didn’t block up. All positive feedback. I was hoping for some negative because, as long as it isn’t spiteful, it’s helpful. When comments started going, everyone was talking at once, people were trying to figure out the main character. Why did she do this? What made her this way? I got a comparison to Hitchcock, to Rosemary’s Baby. Pretty damn pleased, I have to say. When it came time for negative comments, our seminar clown made a word play joke. So not even really negative. I wasn’t allowed to say anything so I mimed hitting a baDOOM-TCHiiii on a drum kit. It was pretty wild to share my fiction with 30 near-strangers and not have any negative feedback, though. A first for me. Of course, since I am F.I.N.E., it won’t go to my head.
Yes, I just made an Aerosmith reference. I will probably never win a Booker or a Pulitzer just because of that. That is, if I ever get published.
A month to the next session. No theme. Thinking I’ll try something based in London since I’ll be there next week. Knowing me, I’ll have an idea for something Booker Prize-ish and end up writing about the ghosts of British rock stars.
So in the end, exercise 3 was NOT the Le Guin/Roddenberry thing I was thinking of. Instead, it’s a revenge story with a slight nod to the community theme. Excerpt:
I volunteered for the watch because my livingroom window faced the bank on the corner. The lighting was better outside the bank and we wanted to be sure to catch her in the act. For years our neighbourhood has suffered from her generosity. The legend was that a woman who lived in the neighbourhood had some issues with the mayor of the 10th arrondissement. Some said it was over taxes. Others heard that a former mayor left her for another woman decades before and she had decided to punish every mayor since then. Whatever the problem was, her mode of revenge was unusual.
Tomorrow I read my first short story written directly in French out loud to a bunch of people I barely know. Nervous!
Writing fiction is still helping me deal with some frightening stuff like a brain scan (it was clean — except for all that brain matter). I really am not sure what I would do without the writing. Or my brain.
I had my doubts about returning. I did. But this afternoon there were fewer people. 18 rather than 28. The discussion was a little more lively on a writing fiction level and less on an ideological level. The woman who almost threw down about another attendee disagreeing with her over something totally subjective was absent. That was not bad. The painfully pretentious kid with the noncommittal moustache skipped out, too. The die-hards remain. It’s good.
A couple of people had an argument about how long it takes for a human corpse to stink after death. I am calling them Les Experts now, which is the title for CSI over here. This was after we read ‘A Rose for Emily’ by Faulkner. They don’t know Mississippi or Faulkner (when? what? who’s talking?) and this is one of his that is easier to parse. Jake wants me to read my second exercise, ‘Maddie’, to the group in two weeks. Going to work on the presentation. It will be my first reading in French of my first short story written directly in French. One of the older women, an Austrian, told me that she was excited about getting to read my stuff. That gave me warm fuzzies, though I fully expect to be ripped to shreds by some if not all because I’m a neurotic freak.
Next assignment: The Community. This makes sense with all the first person plural in the Faulkner story. I think I’m going to try my hand at a Le Guin/Roddenberry sci-fi thing. Have never written sci-fi in my life. Not sure that I can tackle a genre and writing directly in French at the same time. Besides, I cannot write in my voice when I write directly in French. It’s a different voice. One that I might get to know better one day if I make an effort, but it’s not me. It’s still me when I get translated, with a few bits and bobs lost, but writing directly in French? It’s not me. It’s another me. Maybe I should write a short story about a community made up of all the different versions of me. Nah. This one is about a community of scientists studying a community of beings who speak a dying language.
Unless it isn’t.
There were 28 people in the session today, but it was fun, so I’m staying in. It is too many people, but quite a few aren’t bothering to participate at all, either by writing or giving feedback. I guess they’re there for the cookies. If enough people phone it in, one my stories may get read aloud after all.
I realised today that this is less about feedback for me than it is a challenge. My next exercise will be written directly in French with proofreading by my husband. If I can get feedback, ok. It may not happen given the number of attendees. Rather than reject the session because it wasn’t what I expected, I’m rolling with it.
So the next exercise is to start a story with ‘Salut, ma vie.’ Or ‘Hello, my life.’ Based on a super short story by Grace Paley. I have a vague idea of what to do. Will get going with it tomorrow.
