The first draft of the novel is done, and I’m afraid to look at it. It weighs in at 90,270 words and one has to wonder, how many of them are utter shit?
I know that some of these words are definitely going to be deleted in the second draft. This is not just playing the odds, which would be fair enough, but it's also a matter of knowing how I write. Example sentence: “She threw a bright shower of red [red spring flowers] at him, and rushed back into the field without a pause.” When I wrote that, I had an image in mind, but I didn’t want to say that the character throws red geraniums at him, or red tulips at him, or red begonias at him until I had done a bit of research and found what red flowers would be growing in southern Ohio in the Spring which would have a nice, satisfying petally showery quality to them. If I were more of a gardener (I actually worked for two summers as a gardener in southern Ohio after high school graduation, but that was long ago), or I lived where my novel is set, and it was that time of year, I might’ve immediately known what to write there. Since I don’t, and it would really trip up the flow of writing the scene, my habit is to throw in a couple of brackets to communicate with my second-draft-writing future self, and move on. Otherwise, the temptation of losing myself in endless google research into the flora of vernal southern Ohio would be too great.
I know some of these brackets are really lazy. I’ve bracketed character’s last names, not sure if I’ve given them already and unwilling to do a search, and addresses, and even – if memory serves me right – one part where I just knew I had to describe something in a flowery, poetic way and I didn’t have time that night.
What I am less looking forward to is marrying some pretty different tones and styles, and deciding what’s best for the novel as a whole. I’ve talked to some writer friends of mine who have taken years to write their books, and I have to imagine my problem is not all that bad since I’ve only had my couple dozen different moods, and levels of energy, and alcohol consumption, and distraction of 2008 to try to reconcile into one reasonably coherent whole.
But I’m excited. I’m thrilled actually, which is about ten times over excited. I realize I need to say that, since I like to sound ambivalent. Like my previous post about the adoption process. My folks didn’t want to reply right away with a “Hoy! That’s great!” or “Jeez! That’s terrible!” because they couldn’t tell what I was thinking about it.
And I am thrilled about that too. I mean, I'm buying a new car, since my current two-seater bachelor roadster won't do. I'm getting a fence built around the pool. I'm over the moon, actually, which is ten times over thrilled.
I guess that’s something really basic that writers and dads need to be able to do: communicate.
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Sunday, July 13, 2008
Another Chapter One
I’m still not smoking. Four weeks, three days, and some hours according to the little thing I put in Facebook to track it. And I hit 80,000 words tonight, though I’m not quite finished with the first draft of the novel.
I have started on another project which has been interesting. I’m looking into becoming a father.
On Thursday, my partner Ian and I went to the Southern California Foster Family & Adoption Agency, at a complex in east Los Angeles called St. Anne’s, which is a hundred year old maternity home for teenaged girls. Since we missed the orientation last Thursday, we met with Robyn, one of the directors of the program before hand. Basically what they do is concurrent foster/adopt to solve the old chicken-or-the-egg dilemma where California only likes to place children in foster homes which want to adopt, and it’s next to impossible to adopt (unless you go private) unless you’ve already got a foster kid. So at the end of the eight week course, we’re going to be certified as both foster and adoptive parents to get the system running.
The meeting consisted of us, two other same-sex male couples, one other same-sex female couple, five opposite-sex couples, two single men, and one single woman. One of the first things that was discussed was how a child gets put into foster care to begin with, and it’s always an accusation of some kind of abuse, from abandonment to sexual abuse to physical abuse. As a result, very few of the kids are without some kind of issues, and the agency has begun offering therapy, since according to Robyn, “All the kids need it.”
Not surprisingly, older kids are the hardest ones to place. Over 50% of the kids are Hispanic or “mixed” Hispanic (as George said on Seinfeld, “I don’t think that’s the word we’re supposed to use.”), about 20% are black or “mixed,” and the rest are white, Asian, American Indian, or some other group. Pretty evenly divided boys and girls.
We talked through the flowchart of what follows what, and a couple things struck me as being particularly peculiar about foster/adopt, beginning with the first phone call saying a baby is available. We basically have 24 hours or less to say yes or no. So, that’s pretty alarming to imagine 24 hours before a baby comes into the house, whether you have a crib or not, whether you’re in the middle of crunch time at work, or are about to leave on a trip, whether you’ve done any research into day care or nannies … You just have to say yes and accept the lightning strike, I guess.
Then there’s the whole legal aspect of it. The schizophrenic part of foster/adopt is that the baby is put with you because you want to adopt it, but the state’s interest is in trying to get the birth parents to step up and show they can handle it. So there’s court hearing after court hearing, and visit after visit from social workers as well as court-sanctioned visits from the birth mother and/or her family. So you bring into your house these people who basically abused the baby you’re taking care of, and you’re being all chummy with them to facilitate them taking the baby away from you. It’s vitally important we treat them with respect, for the good of the kid. It sounds tough.
Now, it sounds like a fair amount of negatives, but Robyn said that as awkward as the system is, it’s so much better than the old one, definitely for the kids and also for us. It goes from foster-to-adopt being a many year process to being potentially less than a year. Oh, and we have a couple fifty page applications to fill out, asking such loaded questions as whether our childhood was happy and how we would raise a child of a different race “respecting and teaching them about their culture.”
Overall, it’s such a strange dramatic mixture between the inspirational and the depressing. We decided it’s a good thing that our home life is utterly, utterly devoid of high drama.
The novel, however, is just reaching the moment of high drama, which is why I have to sign off.
More to come …
I have started on another project which has been interesting. I’m looking into becoming a father.
On Thursday, my partner Ian and I went to the Southern California Foster Family & Adoption Agency, at a complex in east Los Angeles called St. Anne’s, which is a hundred year old maternity home for teenaged girls. Since we missed the orientation last Thursday, we met with Robyn, one of the directors of the program before hand. Basically what they do is concurrent foster/adopt to solve the old chicken-or-the-egg dilemma where California only likes to place children in foster homes which want to adopt, and it’s next to impossible to adopt (unless you go private) unless you’ve already got a foster kid. So at the end of the eight week course, we’re going to be certified as both foster and adoptive parents to get the system running.
The meeting consisted of us, two other same-sex male couples, one other same-sex female couple, five opposite-sex couples, two single men, and one single woman. One of the first things that was discussed was how a child gets put into foster care to begin with, and it’s always an accusation of some kind of abuse, from abandonment to sexual abuse to physical abuse. As a result, very few of the kids are without some kind of issues, and the agency has begun offering therapy, since according to Robyn, “All the kids need it.”
Not surprisingly, older kids are the hardest ones to place. Over 50% of the kids are Hispanic or “mixed” Hispanic (as George said on Seinfeld, “I don’t think that’s the word we’re supposed to use.”), about 20% are black or “mixed,” and the rest are white, Asian, American Indian, or some other group. Pretty evenly divided boys and girls.
We talked through the flowchart of what follows what, and a couple things struck me as being particularly peculiar about foster/adopt, beginning with the first phone call saying a baby is available. We basically have 24 hours or less to say yes or no. So, that’s pretty alarming to imagine 24 hours before a baby comes into the house, whether you have a crib or not, whether you’re in the middle of crunch time at work, or are about to leave on a trip, whether you’ve done any research into day care or nannies … You just have to say yes and accept the lightning strike, I guess.
Then there’s the whole legal aspect of it. The schizophrenic part of foster/adopt is that the baby is put with you because you want to adopt it, but the state’s interest is in trying to get the birth parents to step up and show they can handle it. So there’s court hearing after court hearing, and visit after visit from social workers as well as court-sanctioned visits from the birth mother and/or her family. So you bring into your house these people who basically abused the baby you’re taking care of, and you’re being all chummy with them to facilitate them taking the baby away from you. It’s vitally important we treat them with respect, for the good of the kid. It sounds tough.
Now, it sounds like a fair amount of negatives, but Robyn said that as awkward as the system is, it’s so much better than the old one, definitely for the kids and also for us. It goes from foster-to-adopt being a many year process to being potentially less than a year. Oh, and we have a couple fifty page applications to fill out, asking such loaded questions as whether our childhood was happy and how we would raise a child of a different race “respecting and teaching them about their culture.”
Overall, it’s such a strange dramatic mixture between the inspirational and the depressing. We decided it’s a good thing that our home life is utterly, utterly devoid of high drama.
The novel, however, is just reaching the moment of high drama, which is why I have to sign off.
More to come …
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