I began the novel I’m currently working on in 2006.  No other piece of wtiting has taught me more about revision than this novel.  Each draft, and there have been about 7, changed the novel dramatically, new incarnations each time- not at all a matter of line-editing or polishing.  But rather, massive changes in plot, a tonal shift, moving the story an entire decade, a timeline spanning 25 years to spanning about 6 months with an epilogue two years later, structure overturned, characters obliterated, and a major historical event excised.  As always, I’ve had the input of my writing group- on multiple drafts.  My husband read it and gave extensive editorial notes on the two-draft ago version, and finally this past September, my agent read it and gave the latest revision’s major notes- excising historical event, among others. 

Since September I’ve been doing this final rewrite.  By the way, in the last 2 drafts, the novel lost a hundred pages.  I don’t miss even one of them.  But I’m ready for this to be the end of a six year lesson in revision.  I’m ready to see the finish line.  I’m ready to read the thing myself, like a reader.  And then, do that last “revision” that’s really a polish, a line-edit, deleting the last adverb standing.  And I’m ready to give it back to my agent in a new shining form.  Something like done.

A few months ago, I received news from my agent that The Sign for Drowning has had its first foreign sale.  It’s going to be published in Poland.  I beamed for weeks and told my close friends and family, and I translated the title for myself which I found via google to be Zarejestruj dla Drowning.  Although I won’t be surprised to see something else.

And I eagerly imagined sharing the news here, but decided to wait until I signed the contract.  Perhaps a bit of fear of the jinx in me.  Well, I’ve seen no contract.  My agent has assured me that these things just take time.  And my friends who have had foreign sales have assured me that these things take A LOT of time, even infinity in their experience.  So I guess I’ll share the thrilling news now and we can wait together for Poland.

As the end of the year creeps closer, I also realize how much I wanted to tell my accountant I had a sale this year.  Ah well, I’ll welcome good news in 2012 instead.

For the tenth anniversary of 9/11 the New Yorker has published an extensive The Talk of the Town section with fourteen contributors from David Remnick, the editor, to a diverse set of voices including Ian Frazier, Nick Paumgarten, Lorrie Moore, Jonathon Safran Foer, Zadie Smith, Ian Parker, Elif Batuman and several more- all reflections on 9/11.

Ian Parker’s piece is on oral histories taken by Columbia University’s Oral History Archive after 9/11.  Many archivists went to Union Square to take oral histories in the days after 9/11.  They were instructed that in the absence of a randomized system of selecting subjects, they should approach the person they felt least inclined to interview.  In subsequent years a theater piece, A City Reimagined” was written and is now being rehearsed in Soho, the text taken directly form these 9/11 oral histories.  Parker includes in his Talk of the Town piece three pointed testimonials.

I’ve mentioned before in this blog that I work at 90 Church Street, a federal office building next door, to the North, of the World Trade Center.  The state department I work for moved into 90 Church Street in 2005, when the building was finally repaired from a hole that had let the elements in for four years.  Moving our office into 90 Church was a symbol and an act of the state’s commitment to help revitalize lower Manhattan.  They installed double-paned windows on our floors, because they were aware that the air quality wasn’t what it should be, 5 years later.   

Ian Parker describes a Columbian-born blind food vendor who was interviewed after 9/11.  Before I see where the vendor worked, I wonder if this is my blind candy vendor.  The piece goes on to say that she was indeed a vendor in 90 Church Street and that her oral history describes people running and screaming past her stall in the lobby, no time to close her storeroom, and the dreams she had afterwards of losing her hands. 

Mary Marshall Clark, the Director of Columbia’s oral histoy department, contemplates this blind vedor’s dream while she listens to the rehearsal of “A City Reimagined.”  She imagines the vendor is experiencing a re-traumitization of her blindness.  Her hands are like her eyes, her dream is like becoming blind again.

This morning, as I entered the lobby of 90 Church Street, and saw the candy vendor in her booth, I remembered the piece I’d read last night.  It was quiet and she was alone under the glow of bright lights in her booth.  I came over and said good morning.  “I think you are written about in this week’s New Yorker.  Did you know that?”  She smiled with a pleasure that seemed a little knowing, but said no, she did not.  I said, “There’s a piece about people who were interviewed after 9/11 and I think you’re part of it.” 

 ”Would you read it to me?” she asked. 

It took me a few minutes to find Parker’s piece in the magazine still in my bag.  While I flipped the pages, she stocked chips and candy.  I said, “I think it’s you, are you Colombian?”  “Yes,” she was still smiling.  I said several times, “One minute, I’ll find it.”  I appreciated that she didn’t care that it was taking me time to find the piece.  She wasn’t concerned about that.  “It doesn’t say your name.  What is your name?”  “Maria”  “I’m Rachel,” I said , still turning pages.  While I located the exact paragraph that mentioned Maria, another woman came to buy something and said, “Hi, Maria,” reminding me how other people get friendly so much faster than I do.

When I was ready, I said to Maria, “It’s sad.”  because it all came back to me, what she says about losing her hands, and perhaps she hasn’t thought about this since 2001.  I began reading.  When I got to that part and read her own dream to her, I asked if she remebered that, having that dream, telling them.  She shook her head ambiguously.  But when I read on, that her hands were her eyes, and losing them was like becoming blind again.  Maria said, “Yes, yes!  My hands are my eyes.”

She thanked me for showing her, by pressing her hands together.  I said I’d come back later today with a copy of the article.  I’m wondering now, where Maria went after 9/11 when 90 Church Street was struck and damaged and closed for years.  And what did she do with her hands until she came back.  I’ll ask her tomorrow morning.  

I’m very much an urban dweller and probably always will be.  I love the city I live in and I love urban capitals in faraway lands.  I love learning about the cities of antiquity too.  Two years ago we visited what is touted to be the oldest city in civilization in Oaxaca.  If I rememebr correctly 100,000 people dwelled on this mountain-top spot, playing an early form of soccer and holding public trials and beheadings when laws were broken.  Like many of us though, I have rural fantasies.  For the near-twenty years I’ve lived in NYC, my sister has lived a rural life in Northern California.  The fact that she’s had chickens, goats, alternate high-maintenance power sources, and a cottage made for Snow White, has probably aided me in not succombing to my own rural fantasies.  But I’ve decided in advance, in case I go rural, that the animals I want to keep are one horse for riding, chickens for laying and a couple ducks for my nephew Kenji to love.  Honestly, I want goats too, but I think I know better.  Dogs go without saying.

So, last night I started reading a collection of Flannery O’ Connor prose writings- seems to be all non-fiction, and I was immediately all in.  If you love someone’s fiction, especially someone from the twentieth century, see if they’ve written some essays too.  Most likely they have, and it’s a whole other experience and incredibly personal to read their experiences and thoughts.  So it turns out, Flannery has raised chickens since she was 5.  And at around that age, she ordered her fist peafowl.  Now, I’m gonna admit, I never thought, said or read the word peafowl, and I never thought about the peahens, who naturally are not peacocks, nor had a thought for the chicks, who are delightfully called peabiddies.  I love all these words. 

I now know a lot about peafowl and am officially adding them to my rural fantasy menagerie.  They multiply fast and have a great survivial rate, they eat flowers, the more beautiful the better, and fruits and roost high in trees, they live to be 35 and in all that time will never show in any way they care about you.  And they are chickens.  Best of all though are Flannery’s descriptions of the emotional reactions they evoke in us humans.  She’s seen a lot of people from first grade to elderly awed silent.  Dizzy with appreciation is common too- I know I have been in that category.  I think I felt so attached to the sight, that I determined that the color and pattern of those feathers were in existentence together in my soul before I ever laid eyes on them.  People are often hypnotized by a strutting peacock.  And then she artfully described those that are “congenitally” unmoved by the sight.  And a pretty good variety of people can be angered by the display.  I hope to never meet them.

So, I finished O’ Connor’s essay, The King of Birds, on the subway this morning.  I had a seat and standing people pressed around me.  As I read, I grew to intuit that my book was surrounded by soft-focus peacock feathers.  It dawned slowy as the truth.  I lifted my eyes and inches from my face stood a big-sized woman with a flowing skirt with a peacock feathers pattern. 

I really should have told her how great her skirt was.

A few weeks ago I was reading a book review in the Times and the author mentioned that Italo Calvino was an influence.  Calvino is a very menaingful writer to me, in particular his novel, Baron In The Trees.  You know the feeling of having a deep and complex impressionistic memory, having incorporated something integral and being able to summon a tactile response to something, but not really remembering the concrete of it?  In this case, I mean the plot.  I’d say this sensation comes with art usually.  Writers should aim to leave you visceral memories.  Plot, characters, dates, sometimes locations, even language can all escape my memory, but the feeling a book gave me tends to cling forever when I love the book.  This is also true of places and people I’ve loved.  Well I read Baron of the Trees in my twenties and I’ve given it to numerous people.  Numerous men.  The baron of Rondi and his dog Ottimus Maximus, and his committment to living life solely in the trees and his life-long love of a fair-haired girl, and Calvino’s insistence that the reader learn how Cossimo defecated, made love, fought battles, built irrigation systems, corresponded with philosophers has often seemed like something important to know to various men in my life.  But I wondered for the first time a few weeks ago, if the book influenced my writing.  I’ve been having a rather hard time getting my hands on novels (my genre of choice) to read these days.  But I spotted Baron of the Trees on my very thinned out bookshelves and decided to find out.  It was a deep pleasure to re-read this book for craft.  Meaning, I read it like I was a literature student, and learn I did.  The very same afternoon that Cossimo enters the trees, to remain there for the rest of his life, he meets the taunting and irresistable Viola.  Now, if there’s one concrete thing I remembered about this novel it was Cossimo’s love for Viola.  But I never would have remembered that he met her within 15 minutes of entering the trees, and it is intonated that perhaps his professing to her, in all his childishness, that he will never come down, had something very large to do with the fact that he never comes down.  The lesson to this writer was have your Cossimos meet their Violas in the first 15 minutes.   In addiiton, I think Italo Calvino’s insertion of nature and animals and his poetic descriptions of such have had an influence on my writing.  I think I’ve admired and aspired to his langauge in my own.  And I had to laugh, when I got to the end and saw the book was 217 pages.  My own novel was 216.  It wasn’t just by one page that Calvino outdid me.  And it doesn’t hurt too badly to see clearly how much greater there is to become.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to drop in here and do some writing.  Life has been so hectic recently that all writing, my fiction, email, letters have shrunken considerably.  140 charcters would suit me fine, but the last thing on my mind is tweeting.  The only writing that has lengthened of late is grocery lists and to-do lists.  I’m back at my day job in public health, maximizing my evening hours with the baby, and then after he goes to bed, steaming and pureeing baby food, laundry, my dinner, occassionally talking to my husband, even more occassionally talking to someone else, and so on.  We’ve been a little more crazy lately because of my husband’s writing life, a new freelance script, a film festival, family visiting.  But yet, here I am, very much in the mood to write something and connect again to anyone who cares.  My second novel hasn’t fallen away from me as badly as this blog has.  I’ve been reading it.  A very important step that you writers out there will knowingly nod at.  Ah, she’s reading it.  It’s a sympathetic task, let me assure you.  I got to the end of my restructuring.  I implemented a lot of people’s notes.  I took a step away and went back to the beginning.  On the front page, I changed my name.  I’m now Rachel Stolzman Gullo, depending on which ID you ask.  I added a quote that helps explain the title.  I took a step back, and I started reading.  I’ve now read the first six chapters.  There were two chapters I broke into four from reading it.  That’s what reading can do.  Reading, by the way, means printing a clean copy and reading it on paper.  Hopefully it is pages you haven’t read in six months or more.  Hopefully, you don’t recognize the words, and have laser sharp criticism of your own work.  What’s wrong leaps out in all its stupidity.  What’s particularly weird and unexpected gives you a satisfied sense of pride.  You did that weird thing.  So, I’m reading.  A little too slowly, and getting through another degree of revision with each chapter.  It’s inching.

But I’ve spent more time lately in other genres.  What are they?  One is called Lotus Notes.  That’s the New York State’s Department of Health email system.  I’m on it from 9am to 5pm, and respond to most emails in real time.  I’m instant messaging with the agencies around the city who are conducting HIV prevention and care with women and with my DOH colleagues in Albany and New York City.  We received an email recently about appropriate emailing.  It reminded us not to be overly casual and familiar in our outgoing emails.  That our emails are not from us per se, but represent the state.  Wow.  But I kind of liked being reminded of that.  It made me notice how often I told someone, “This is crazy- how can I ask you to do this- it’s insane- please forgive me!  I need a new budget mod.”  I’ve known half the people I now manage for ten plus years- why wouldn’t I get casual and familiar.  But I’ve been dialing it back.  I pretend the new Commissioner of Health is reading all my emails.  Which he can, our emails are not in any way private of course.  I tell people the simple news.  Here’s the situation, what I need, what they can and can’t do, how I can help.  And you know something, they like it just fine.  And you know something else, my fiction would benefit from this too.  And there’s always the phone when you want to say, “What the fuck!”

The other genre I recently wrote was a birth story.  I’m a doula and when I support a family with their birth, part of the job is writitng their birth story.  Well, I’ve been doula-ing and writing birth stories since 2005.  And what do you know, but I’m changing the way I write those too.  In 2005, and 6, and 7 and 8….I thought it was only proper to write a clinical, factual, primarily medical account of a birth I attended.  It would be wrong to leave out unpleasant memories, low points, hostile providers, negligent husbands, bodily fluids.  Was I insane?  Please forgive me!  How can I ask you to read this!  I’ve grown up, I’ve learned.  No mother or father needs to know exactly what time their membranes were stripped, the third resident gave a painful vaginal exam, or what words they spoke when they felt most defeated.  Or how many hours exactly they kept their doula in the hosptial, how many damned nurses changed shifts.  I recently supported a beautiful birth, for a family I worked for four years ago too.  I wrote this recent birth story to their newborn daughter directly.  I told her how awesome her mother was- which was utterly true.  I told her how her personality showed from even before her birth and how her tiny hand shot out like a rebel warrior during her own birth.  I told her how her parents loved and supported each other for the whole labor.  And you know what?, it was as true and precise as any birth story I ever wrote, and it didn’t mention a single time of day or night.

I’m gonna go work on the song I’m writing now on my ukelele.  Because there’s still plenty of time to be new again.

Next week ends my six month maternity leave.  Maternity leave must be a concept that most first- time moms don’t really get.  First off, I thought my 8 year old yellow lab would love it.  I’d be home everyday, practically all day.  We’d take long walks in Prsopect Park with the baby, everyday- before 9:00 am, when dogs are allowed off- leash everywhere.  Then I thought I’d finish the final draft of the novel I’m working on and submit it to my agent, only to have her fall in love, think it’s publication ready, and start sending it to publishers.  Then I thought I’d fly to the west coast a couple times to introduce the baby to friends and family.  Then I thought Bill, Enrico and I would have a honeymoon- since we got married at 7.5 months pregnant, going somewhere special and far away- Italy was one thought.  I thought 6 months was a really long time.  I’m almost too depressed to finish this blog entry.

The dog, Caleb, didn’t love my leave.  Afterall, there was a newborn babyat home everyday, practically all day.  And the voice I used to use to speak to Caleb, began to be used for Enrico.  I never took Caleb to the park before 9.  Well maybe 5 times in six months.  In fact, I had a cesarean birth, and couldn’t walk Caleb for 6 weeks at all!  (He’s 100 pounds and a puller.)  If you’ve ever read my blog before you know where my current novel is at.  It’s not horrific.  But it certainly isn’t going to my agent again any time soon and she’s not showing it to publishers anytime soon.  Travel?  Well we did just come back from Portland and that was a great vacation, and we went to DC and upstate and to KY too.  But I was sort of thinking bigger. 

Back to work is a strange saying too.  Maternity leave is full of work.  I play a little game at night where I leave on a light in an area that needs cleaning, tidying, poop removal, spackling, power scrubbing.  Then when the whole apartment is lit up like a Chritsmas tree, I fall asleep before washing my face.  This hasn’t been a vacation.  And yet, I want it to go on and on.  And on and on.  I really hoped I’d be a little tired of being at home with the baby when it was time to return to work.  I’m not at all tired of it.  And I know time will rocket ahead once I’m back.  But alas, some good things will come of it.  I will wear leather shoes again.  I can wear pull-over shirts that don’t open in the front.  I will go to Manhattan four days a week!!  I will eat lunch by myself without it being like a speed eating contest everyday.  Soon enough, I’ll eat that lunch outside, in the sun.  I will get a paycheck.  My husband can actually have more time with Enrico and be a bigger caregiver.  I will walk Caleb every morning before 9.  Maybe I’ll get back in the habit of blogging too.

I have an accelerated new pace with finishing this draft of my novel.  My goal this go-around is restructuring, as I’ve said before, and the work is rather mid-range in terms of mental effort.  I’ve re-outlined, losing the chronological order and placing historical scenes in the context of the front story.  So my task at-hand is cutting and pasting and smoothing in, and there are at least two plotlines I’m dramatically changing.  So when those arcs appear, I do some mental heavy-lifting too.  It’s been good work, an enjoyable process and I’m pretty sure I’m seeing positive results.  Honestly, a much better draft.  The process also naturally helped me to cull less engaging sections from the characters’ histories.  There will be yet another comb-through after this, but that thought can wait.  

This draft has been taking quite awhile in and of itself.  I squeeze the work in during baby’s naptimes.  And once a week, I leave him with his dad and go to the library to get a real work session.  I recently had my mom and then sister visit and they both gave me baby-sitting time to go get some work done.  And then in their absence and my looming return to work, something miraculous happened.  Enrico offered to help me finish the job at a faster pace.  I’d been looking forward to utlizing our beuatiful library together, the main Brooklyn branch at Grand Army Plaza, and I had even made a big deal about our first visit there.  I tried to get our librarian friend to join us, but in the end took him alone, and relished reading him his first picture book in the children’s wing.  

But what I’m talking about here is different.  Enrico has agreed to coming along, not to the children’s wing, but to the long tables where mom likes to work and can plug in, and has offered to sleep or quietly read to himself (in his daydreams) so I can write virtually everyday.

And therefore this week alone, I went from 85 pages til the end, to 50, to 30, to 15.  Thank you Library Assistant!  We’ll get the job done together. 

In the surreal, dream-like weeks right after I had a baby this past September, I was contacted by someone interested in making The Sign for Drowning into a movie.  Novelists dream of this, and its the only way a novelist can get anywhere near making a living as a writer.  Or to put it another way, I wouldn’t be opposed to my book being made into a film.  Not at all.  So, this dialogue began in some pretty uncertain terms.  For one, I thought the woman getting in touch with me was a television producer looking for material for her network and interested in buying the rights to “Sign.”  Or to put it another way, I thought I met my perfect match.  Well, I was sort of right.  She is a producer of sorts, but that’s not what she was interested in.  You never know where opportunity will come from; I’m sure you’ll all agree, and I was more than happy to consider various ways a total stranger might help adapt my only novel into a screenplay and have it actually made into a movie.  But this proposal was hard to get a grasp on.  For one thing, I had a brand new baby, and only slept 2-3 hours at a stretch, for another the woman pursuing our collaboration was deaf and we started off by exchanging rather cryptic emails, which finally gave way to slightly clearer phone calls (she turned out to be hard of hearing and a good phone communicator.)  But the problem lay in our differing goals.  She wanted me to write the screenplay with her.  Oh, no problem, I thought, I just have to inform her I’m not a screenwriter.  No such easy exit.  She didn’t care, neither was she.  But still, she thought the two of us were the right team for the job.  The Sign for Drowning is about a girl, Anna, who embraces sign language as away to coomuniacte with her younger sister who drowned.  As an adult, Anna teaches deaf children and adopts a deaf little girl- helping her heal from the loss of her sister.  So my potential collaborator’s thinking was that a lifelong hearing aide wearer (she) and the author of  this novel were the most likely team to make a go of this project–even without the necessary experience.  To be fair, my husband, who is a screenwriter, thought she could be right.  He urged me not rule out the possibility of spending a year or so writing my first screenplay with someone I didn’t know, who had less experience than myself even.  Well in retrospect the way I handled the whole situation was a lot more post partum than I realized at the time.  I was communicating with this potential collaborator before I’d even left the house from bringing home our new baby, and in those first weeks, I got out maybe twice a week.  Everything outside the apartment, including wearing shoes, taking a subway, walking my dog, going out for a pint of beer seemed otherwordly.  So you can imagine how otherwordly I found this unknown woman dropping me notes about potential scenes, extended metaphors, and a mysterious financer seemed.  But what really tipped me off that I was operating from an altered state was that I very outrightly told her I’d be persuaded by money.  I found myself talking like some totally unknown Hollywood player, suggesting that we should both be paid at least $10,000 to even touch the thing.  My own book.  She seemed to like my new sundance kid way of thinking, and we made a clandestine plan to meet at Grand Central Station.  We picked a Starbucks, then a H&M, then another Starbucks.  She said if I couldn’t find her to just keep calling her cell phone, reminding me she was deaf and didn’t always hear it.  We met.  It was maybe the third time I’d left the baby.  We talked about him, and her children, and both our professional backgrounds.  We got along just fine.  If it were a sanity check- which was partially on my mind- we both passed.  We talked about meeting on her next trip to New York- Thanksgiving time.  We talked about working together for a year, every weekend, on Skype, or travelling together to a retreat to outline and write this screenplay.  “The reason she was on the planet,” she said on one phone call, my book as an example- not the literal reason.  We both said we needed to decide if we would take the plunge or not.  Would we go against the odds of our lack of proven ability, of our not knowing each other, of our limited time.  My own desire to finish my second novel while on maternity-leave weighed in heavily.  And then there was the fact that all I’m really doing with great commitment these days is caring for my boy.  Well, the decision went unmade.  We never spoke again.  Perhaps it was another 2010 dream, in a year full of unthinkable and dreamlike happenings.

In July I came to the end of my second novel.  As, I mentioned in another blog entry, Life and Writing Are Different, I had a marathon writing session when my baby was a few days late, where I created a new outline for this novel.  The scoop is the novel spanned from 1976 to 2003, and it’s not titled The Godfather.  One of my writing group friends made an astute comment that sealed the deal for me that I would change the structure.  She said books that span the charcter’s childhood, youth and adulthood are coming-of-age novels.  That seems to pretty much hold up as a rule, and this book is not.  I feel I just needed to write it that way, chronologically and capturing the essence of the main charcters’ backstory and childhoods.  But as any of you could tell me, ‘just cause you had to write it that way, doesn’t mean we have to read it that way.’  So, since Enrico’s been a few weeks old, I’ve been chipping away at reconstructing the book with a different timeline.  It will start in 2001, and valuable backstory will appear as flashback.  There’s a writing expression, “Kill your darlings.”  It means every writer has some material that they adore that doesn’t serve the story- get rid of it.  I did kill some darlings.  And in the light of- dear god please let me get somewhere with this novel while my darling boy naps, kicks on his activity mat, hangs out with his Pa, gradually grows up…those literary darlings that weren’t working didn’t seem so darling.