The Former Anne Spollen's Author Blog Is Being Retitled to "Notes from Living Upghetto": Spring is A-Sproinging

Thursday, March 25, 2010

Spring is A-Sproinging

Here in South Jersey, we are having middle school weather: very dramatic with sudden, terrible storms, freezing cold mornings and warm, sunny afternoons. I like the transition of seasons more than the actual seasons. Actual seasons are fairly predictable.

This is also the time of year that I make resolutions. I never feel like making resolutions when it's cold and gray outside. All I want to do then is read Russian novels and bake butterscotch brownies. Spring matches a sense of renewal. It's so much more hopeful than sleet.

Today, I'll make two resolutions since more than that overwhelms me.

My first resolution is to make our yard go from:

to:

My second is to actually COMPLETE a novel. I have three novels right now, yup, three, all of which need revision and endings. Annoying, those editors - they won't buy my stuff unless I have an ending.

I keep coming up with 75% of a novel...it's like a disorder. I can't wait to work on this new idea so I skip working on novel A to start novel B. I wonder if having a writing schedule would help. I could clear my throat and announce, "I'm going to write today from two to six." I would march off into my study.

Wait.

I don't have a study. And I never march. Scratch that.

Maybe I should take one of those focus supplements they sell at Rite Aid. They are supposed to help the over 40 folks like me who have the attention span of rabbits. What's weird is I can focus in all other areas of my life; I just want to work on new stuff.

Does this happen to other folks? It's like, "Ohhh, give me that bright and shiny new storyline, and I'll go back to the other one...eventually." Or do you see the current one through to the end?

12 comments:

Jemi Fraser said...: I was having such a hard time finishing my Steampunk novel. Finally realized I had to delete some of what I'd written because the ending would drag on forever if I didn't. I needed to reread the whole thing to figure that out, but it worked.

I'm not far enough along the learning curve to give you much help - but I'll send good wishes your way - and maybe some magic writing dust!! :); Thursday, 25 March, 2010
Hardygirl said...: Oooo. I just love the bright, shiny new story. It's like a new boyfriend--before he's introduced you to his foot odor and overbearing mother.

sf; Thursday, 25 March, 2010
Mary Witzl said...: This made me laugh, as did Hardygirl's comment.

I've been struggling with three WIPs myself for the past three months (a women's book, an MG I've been editing forever, and a YA), so I know all too well how this feels. So irritating the way everyone expects a perfect ending with all problems resolved and all loose bits carefully tied up. Sigh...; Friday, 26 March, 2010
storyqueen said...: I like to work on projects concurrently...so I allow myself to play with the shiny new things.

But finishing stuff.....it takes longer when you are working on so much stuff!

Shelley; Saturday, 27 March, 2010
Anonymous said...: I'm revising my debut novel and my wip, and I was so close to starting a brand new novel. I had to put the new one down. I can only concentrate on two projects, max.; Saturday, 27 March, 2010
Anne Spollen said...: Thanks for the writing dust, Jemi. Doesn't deleting sting? Like all those wonderful words, just gone. But it's necessary surgery.

That's it, sf! I want to avoid the foot odor and the overbearing mother, and also the felony in the bf's past. The bright and shiny new one is so much more promising...

I know, Mary. Wouldn't it be nice if editors could just buy our 75% stories? That way, we could finance time to work on our new ones.

Shelley, what you are saying is so logical. I don't know why I don't tape that sentence to my computer screen. I don't finish a story when I'm out on the town with a new one. No self discipline here, just indulgence.

I wish I could just focus on two projects at the same time, Medeia. That would be great; it would force me to complete things. Unfortunately, I have ADHD in the area of novel writing.; Saturday, 27 March, 2010
Doreen McGettigan said...: This always happens to me! I have a filing cabinet full of unfinished projects..I do set time to write everyday. Sometimes I just sit and blog and then write a few lines..other times I get so lost in writing hours go by. I am now trying to concentrate on 3 projects. Have vowed to do at least one bit of writing on all 3 every day..; Saturday, 27 March, 2010
Anita Felicelli said...: I just finished your novel The Shape of Water and since I thought it was incredibly beautiful, looked up your blog. Can't wait to read Light Beneath Ferns (and your other future work).; Sunday, 28 March, 2010
Stewart Sternberg (half of L.P. Styles) said...: Ah, the joy of ADD. You know, one of the things that happens is that people tend to get bored during the more tedious part of writing..you know, proofing, revision, proofing, revising again.etc. Drudgery. I find it relaxing actually.; Monday, 29 March, 2010
Marcia said...: Oh dear, is that what it is? Age? Or my second childhood? In my teens and early twenties, I kept starting new instead of finishing old. Then, came the years of one book at a time, all the way to the end. Now, I have three half-begun ones. But I'm totally going to finish the one I'm working on now, and then the other two. Resolved.; Monday, 29 March, 2010
Adrienne said...: I can't resist the shiny new project. I'm hoping the ones that have been sitting in drawers will someday seem new again...

Good luck with that garden, too!; Friday, 02 April, 2010
Anne Spollen said...: Hey Doreen - welcome! Three at once, I know. I pick the one I am most in the mood for and go for it. Problem is, very little gets FINISHED...but nice to know I am not alone in my bright shininess.

Hi Anita, and welcome also! I'm glad you liked Shape of Water. LBF is for a younger reader, so I hope you like that also. Thanks so much for stopping by to tell me that; it's those kind of comments I go back and reread when I feel like, "Why am I sitting here when there's dust and laundry waiting?"
Because people write sentences to me like that, that's why -

Revision,Stewart, is like marking bad papers from college students who write in text language. "So anyway, watz the diff between Whitman and Dickinson?" I get that I need to leave sense. Only the papers I have to finish; my own stuff I can escape. Relaxing? Wow, you are a rare bird.

Yes, Marcia, they say it IS age. The older we get, the less we can focus. My theory is my kids did it to me. I had to keep track of so many things at once that I'm a fish out of water if I can focus on one thing.

The garden doesn't look like it's more than old pine needles and thistle at this point, Adrienne. How I wish those projects in the drawer could seem new, bright and shiny again. I have an embarrassing amount of first chapters. Maybe they could be reduced, reused and recycled into short stories? Someday...; Friday, 02 April, 2010

Books

Light Beneath Ferns

"I have this strange sense that my silence is preparing me for something I can't name . ."

Elizah Rayne is nothing like other fourteen-year-old girls. More interested in bird bones than people, she wraps herself in silence. Trying to escape the shadow of her gambler father, Elizah and her mother move into an old house that borders a cemetery. All her mother wants is for them to have "normal" lives. But that becomes impossible for Elizah when she finds a human jawbone by the river and meets Nathaniel, a strangely hypnotic boy who draws Elizah into his dreamlike and mysterious world.

Only by forgetting everything she knows can Elizah understand the truth about Nathaniel—and discover an unimaginable secret.

Teen made trailer for Light Beneath Ferns.

Order Light Beneath Ferns here.

Foreword Magazine's Review of Light Beneath Ferns

Excerpt from THE SHAPE OF WATER

CHAPTER ONE
I discovered windows one afternoon and after that, nothing was ever the same. They had always been there, of course, glass panes shimmering in the color of rain, but that spring for the first time, I was able to open the windows in my room. For years, the locks had been painted stuck, and during the winter, heat from the radiator beneath my windows finally steamed off enough paint off the metal wings of the locks could be twirled open. Knowing that I could open the windows attracted me to them, and I began sitting under the windows, staring through the glass at the sky. From that position, on a chair in my room, the sky did not seem real; it seemed a place I was making up, so I watched it.
The white wood of the window panes acted as frames so the sky came to me slowly, and the huge openness of its space did not touch me. All the window glass in our old house had wavers and bubbles inside it, so at times the clouds moved like water, melting and blurring until they passed outside of the warp. After a few afternoons of sitting, the heavens seemed too quiet to keep watching so I began watching a small patch of woods next to our yard that housed little more than trees and a scatter of bony, mean-looking rabbits.
I started gazing at the sky and the woods in March when the branches were still wet and it was then, with nothing outside my window but trees and rain, that I noticed a shine inside darkness, I noticed colors glimmering within the darkness of the wood. I watched birds come and go, I watched rain nipple down from buds to the grass. The water dripping from branch edges and leaves created optical tricks; I could see that as I watched leaves melt.
Then one day I ventured into the space outside. I did not think about doing this much beforehand. I simply opened the window and dropped to the ground below, uncertain as to why this should be such a more satisfying exit than simply using the door; my father worked until seven o’clock and I could do whatever I wanted until then. But I liked the solid sound my legs made when I landed. Leaving via a five foot drop seemed so much more a decision than just using a door. The sense of escape made my heart pound, though all I escaped was the soundless spread of moss-colored light inside my house and the silence.
I had come to know silence well during those months after my mother died. When you sit in silence long enough, you learn that silence has a motion. It glides over you without shape or form, but with weight, exactly like water. Its color is silver. And silence has a sound you hear only after hours of wading inside it. The sound is soft, flute notes rising up like the words of glass speaking. There comes a point when you must shatter the silence, when you must shatter the blindness of its words, the blindness of its light. I did this by going into the yard. Once I stood there, in the grass next to the trees I had been watching, I found silence outside as well. But I was happier outside than I had been in the house, so I stayed for a bit. I stood beneath my bedroom window for a few minutes, looking up at the branches and the crooked pieces of sky colliding between the branches. I believed I could identify the scent of the sky as I stood there, a blue menthol fragrance similar to the scent of seawater that sprayed into my face when I first dove into the ocean. That initial scent smelled much more subtle than the ocean’s heavy, fishy aroma, a whiff of salt and mint that warned a more powerful scent would enter my nose just as I approached the water on a dive. It was the scent I dreamed in. And it was the scent of that spring sky as I stood in my yard.

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