48 days, day 4: a crummy draft

{{ I am chronicling 48 days of writing before my July 31 travel. If you are chronicling your summer writing/days and would like to share, please link or comment so we can all cheer one another through. Strength to your sword arm! }}}

96 degrees in the shade at 5pm today. Gus is hanging out under the ferns.

How did I get so much done today? Remember this, sister, when you wail about the days when nothing seems to get done. Nothing is wasted. Remember that, too.

I have a really crummy, really awful, really unsellable draft of a story about Rachel Carson. I've been writing this book since 1999. I've had probably 20 drafts over the years, and maybe a dozen of them survive. Okay, a half-dozen.

If I truly believe that I'm writing even when everything is percolating, then I've been trying to get at this latest draft for about 16 years. I do believe that. Sometimes it takes TIME. And things change. You change. How you see the story changes. How picture books are written and sold changes. Editors move or age up or down or out or in -- whatever. There are so many variables. Yes?

Whatever the case, this morning I sat down and wrote from beginning to end, all of it, all over again. The story is so much a part of me by now, I knew my direction. And, after spending so much time with 4-year-old Abigail, reading so many books, and getting to know her sensibilities so very well, the way I approach a picture book reader/listener is different.

So my rhythm and tone and plot and language -- everything is different about this very same story.

At lunchtime, I read what I had to Jim, and I heard how clunky and awful it is. How many holes there are. (I actually write "DETAIL HERE" or "BLAH BLAH BLAH.") But I am just ebullient! I have a draft! A draft! I can do something with that. (Or not... I have a bunch more of these where that one came from... ha.)

I prefaced my reading by telling Jim about Rachel Carson -- setting up this particular scene/story. I felt my heart swell with such deep admiration for her, as I spoke... a sure sign that I am in the right place... you know? Write what you are passionate about, that's what I say. That's the only thing that works for me. And so... we will see.

I ordered my office a little. It's a warehouse right now. It's chock-full of all the traveling I've done since January, and that's a lot of travel. It's home to all the detritus of living out of my suitcase for six months, plus library hauls and bills to be paid and kid stuff and a dehydrator and honestly, I don't know how I do it. I plan to tackle it, a half-hour at a time this summer. It will take a while.

The rest of the day was full of watering and weed pulling and consulting with our water-management-yard-putter-back-togetherer Roger, ordering and taking possession of 13 cu. yds of hardwood mulch for the beds that are ready for it. It's so hot.

I got a shower outside. Now I'm sitting in the pink chair with my hair in a towel, drinking the last of the sweet tea (Ruby Lavender would be proud of me), and reading LEROY NINKER SADDLES UP by Kate DiCamillo. Abby and I loved MERCY WATSON so much, and this is where Mercy led me.

Dinner out with friends. Thank goodness. I'm letting that draft cool. It needs so much work. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe.

YOU?

48 days, days 2 and 3: grape-vining

{{ I am chronicling 48 days of writing before my July 31 travel. If you are chronicling your summer writing/days and would like to share, please link or comment so we can all cheer one another through. Strength to your sword arm! }}
 
Weekend.

Saturday felt like Friday, maybe because Roger, our genius water-land management guru, was here working, and so I worked all day. I made starts and stops on a picture book -- frustrating, trying to find the way in. So I left it to simmer.

I pretended I was writing a story set in 1969 for book three of the sixties trilogy, just to see if this is really going to grab my attention. I tried an alternate beginning, and liked it. It's very hippie-heavy. I slept on it Saturday night, and woke up Sunday morning (this morning) feeling like it was way to "old" for middle grade readers. Second thoughts.

Still, I researched 1969 Rock-and-Roll and R&B and Soul and listened to many of those songs on YouTube, trying to find an anchor song for 1969, should I go that direction. I listened to "I Heard It Through The Grapevine" (1968) by Marvin Gaye and got sad looking at pictures of Marvin and remembering about Marvin's tremendous talent and violent death, the death of the sixties, all the deaths... which is a hazard of writing about the sixties, or any time period you've lived through.

A song like "I Heard It Through The Grapevine" leads me to read about Marvin Gaye (The Prince of Soul) and Motown and Barry Gordy and get interested in telling that story. When I can pull myself away from that memory lane, I listen to Gladys Knight and the Pips singing "I Heard It Through The Grapevine" (1967). But I know the version I listened to most: "I Heard It Through The Grapevine" by CCR -- Creedance Clearwater Revival. I have to look it up. 1970.

I have to look up the song itself now, and I get lost in all the versions and the writers and the productions... an hour is gone. Back to my Billboard list. "Aquarius/Let The Sunshine In" by The Fifth Dimension.

         When the moon is in the 7th house
         And Jupiter aligns with Mars
         Then peace will guide the planets
         And love will steer the stars.

Is that a good anchor for 1969? Maybe. Especially if I'm going counter-culture heavy. I can imagine this song juxtaposed with Vietnam War stills.

I keep looking, lost in 1969. I find The Rooftop Concert by The Beatles, singing "Get Back." I love this! Love the lyrics for this project. And yet... I'm writing about the American 1960s. And I'll bet we can't afford Beatles lyrics. At. All. S'okay. Still, I pin the concert to my growing Pinterest board of pins about 1969.

Some of this is necessary work. It's how I will find the seven anchor songs for the seven scrapbook sections of book 3. Some of this is feeding my nostalgia. Some of this is what we used to call "pea-vining" in the South... taking one's time to meander along. I'll call it grape-vining and be done with it for today. I call this writing, even though the narrative isn't moving forward. Do you? Everything is percolating.

The Billboard Top 100 list of number one songs for 1969, in chronological order for the year, is here.

Here's another Billboard list, longer, and actually 100 songs, at Wikipedia. I don't know if they are ranked by sales, or what, but the order is different. This is indicative of the trouble I run into with research (and, sometimes, with Wikipedia). I consider Wikipedia a good jumping-off place, though, and use it extensively to figure out where I want to go next. Everything must be verified, and that includes sources outside of Wikipedia as well.

Sunday is a day off. I'm playing with playlists. I'm going to read over everything I did last week as a way to prime my pump for a long work day on Monday. I need to pay my second quarter taxes. I need to water the garden -- it's 95 degrees here today and brilliantly, relentlessly sunny. Jim and I are going on a driving-around-ATL date, something we do from time to time -- get lost in this big city and see what we can see. I need to make plane reservations for my Los Angeles trip. I need to do some administrivia.

I need to take a nap.

Too hot to sit here today. 95 degrees. Grapevining at my desk instead.

48 days, day 1

{{ I am chronicling 48 days of writing before my July 31 travel. If you are chronicling your summer writing/days and would like to share, please link or comment so we can all cheer one another through. Strength to your sword arm! }}

I have 48 days until I step on a plane to attend the SCBWI Summer Conference in Los Angeles, where I will gratefully accept the Golden Kite Award for REVOLUTION! So stoked about that. I'm also teaching a workshop (here is the whole conference schedule): "Structuring Your Novel: Providing a Scaffold For Your Plot." Y'all come!

In the meantime, in this Year of Exploration, I have 48 days to write and I'm going to use them. I want to catalog them here, so I can see, as I step onto that plane on July 31, just what I have accomplished. Last year (and right up to June 1 this year) was so jam-packed with REVOLUTION travel as well as work in schools and at conferences and with family and more... so much travel. All good. But not much time to write.

And, as you may have surmised through the recent Picture Book Intensive I participated in, I want to write picture books. And, as you may know if you're a reader here or have read COUNTDOWN and REVOLUTION, I have a third book in the sixties trilogy to deliver. I have given myself a year to get the draft of book three to David at Scholastic. I had better get hopping.

So let me chronicle the next 48 days (day 1, yesterday, is below), and let's see if I can jump-start my fall writing (I'm home more this fall than I have been in years), by declaring a writing retreat of sorts, at home, with the great wash of family and friends and garden and summer that flows through days at home, loving that and yet finding a way -- I hope -- to work well here, and see what happens.

One thing to note: After the PB Intensive, I finished a draft of the Robert Kennedy book I have sold to Scholastic. They kept it a while (um... years) and made some suggestions for revision which didn't resonate for me. I kept it a while (um... years), trying to figure out another way in that would satisfy us both. The power of writers reading their work to one another is what broke open my thinking and got me past seventeen drafts that Did Not Work. Thank you, Laurel Snyder, for the suggestion you made during the PB Intensive that broke the revision dam for me and got me back to the page.

Handing in a revision is so exciting! Let's see what Scholastic says about it. I hope to hear soon.

Day 1: Friday, June 12, 2015

My childrens' dad died on May 11. The funeral was postponed so we could all go to Colorado for son Zach's graduation from the University of Colorado at Denver. We were there from May 15-19, living together in the same rented house, where we started the process of healing from that wound... a process I'll document at some point. We are doing well, I think, and are pointed forward now. Zach flew home on Monday, June 8, and Abby came for annual summer camp at Grandma and Grandpa's on Tuesday, June 9.

Abby left yesterday after spending three days here for summer camp. We went to the library. We read So Many Books (my discoveries, here). So today was for organizing for the next 48 days. I gathered manuscripts I want to work on -- picture books. Some of them I read to Janie when she was here for the PB Intensive Work-Along we did together last month. Some of them I tossed! I began working on a story about Rachel Carson. The other mss are dotting the floor around my chair. How many can I get to in 48 days? I have a draft of Rachel dated 1999. I have many other drafts, none of which work. I know the story I want to tell. Armed with what I learned in the Intensive, I'm going to move forward.

I've weeded some of the older mss in my stash, and I've kept some... the ones that I love, the ones that went to committee at different publishers years ago. Some have partial drafts and lots of research. Some are biographies. Some are just ideas.

I also researched Book 3 of the Sixties Trilogy. I have a draft started that I do not like (nothing new). I am being pulled to move the story from 1968 to 1969, which will open a can of worms for me, especially if I move it from San Francisco to Los Angeles. I just cannot get excited about SF for some reason. I also am having trouble with 1968 because that year covers So Much Ground. Assassinations, riots, war, the breadth of rock-and-roll (finally)... not that I'm averse to all that, but I'm having trouble grounding the reader in one place. So there's that to wrestle as well.

I've been saying, "two pages a day on book three, and I'll have a draft in a year." I'm not sure I can be that prescriptive.

I made green smoothies. A homemade meal in the middle of the day. Spinach salad with blueberries, baked potatoes (white and sweet). Popcorn. Steamed broccoli. I watered the new yard we're putting in, took progress photos of the front and back yard coming together. Most photos of the days I keep are currently on Instagram.

So lots is swirling. I also caught up with social media. Stayed up late researching and reading.

Let's see how day 2 goes.

YOU?