Crystal reflects on the New York subways (Click on the images below for the video experience): You know when you’re on the subway, and there’s another one there, another train in the tunnel right beside you, another one full of people, the light of the car and all the people and the pillars in between, everyone watching. 
You know, at 33rd on the 4 or 5, and the 6 right there, everyone in that bright car, everyone going with you, going the same way, standing there in the light just like you are for them. Someone looks back. 
And you look the same way to her, and it’s like it will stay forever, those pillars, just standing there, staring back. That’s what New York can be. That’s what it’s supposed to be. (Excerpted from my bad side.)
Tag Archives: my bad side
Short film, “Dee”
Mike DeMinico has just finished a rough cut of his film, Dee. 
The 5-minute film is an adaptation of the opening scene from the novel, my bad side. 
Click here to watch. And let us know what you think.
Deirdre’s voice for The Ark
I’m making slow headway on my novel, The Ark, and I’ve decided to stay with voice of my bad side, Deirdre Sinclair:
I liked how it was tedious, feeding a few pages at a time, watching them chewed, coiling up into strips of nothing, but I had to empty the bucket every ten minutes. It was supposed to eat staples, but it didn’t. They jammed and I had to pry them out. And then I had to wait until it wasn’t over-heated. The stacks bent into each other, investments and secrets, numbers, names, letters from my lawyer and Nani. 
The file on Crystal had been sent to me, but I had never looked. I was scared of seeing the bills, the intimacies of her lost life. She had spent so little. She had made money on everything, even the apartment, just by staying in it. She had paid for the rehab on her own and didn’t even know it. I thought I should cry, thinking of her, but there was nothing. I missed her. That was it. I needed a bigger shredder.
Querying the Pitch
Literary agents can be very specific in how they think a query letter should be pitched. 
Send a query letter of no more than two pages, which includes your credentials, an explanation of what makes your book unique and special, and a synopsis.
Rather than leading with the plot, lay out the case for your book in a crisp, tidy four-paragraph format that begins: 1) Here is a (describe type of book), 2) It’s the story of (give only a three-sentence summation), 3) Here’s how the book came to be written and what people think of it, 4) Here are my credentials.
I prefer a short, clear letter rather than one that is overwritten or opaque. By which I mean, get to it: Know how to talk about your work succinctly.
Others aren’t as encouraging: No unsolicited queries accepted.
I will try to get my bad side query right.
Dream within a Dream
Writing about dreams is a hazard to be avoided. As grand and pure as the moments may seem, they are probably too much that and thus not decipherable for others. 
And yet…and yet…I really did have an interesting dream last night. I was attending a seminar on how to submit work to agents. I was on my computer, editing my cover letter for my bad side when I received an email titled we will take you. Yes, it was from an agent. I held myself still, not wanting to shatter the moment. 
Someone ran past and I leaned forward to hide the computer screen. And then I clicked. We are pleased to advise you of our interest in your work. I scrolled down quickly, too quickly, and found an email exchange between two of the agents regarding my work, one extolling the vitality of my prose, the other in complete agreement…and then a note near the bottom about editing out the dream imagery. I didn’t care. I had an agent!
Names: Short and Long Form
Rarely do characters have just the one name. For example, in All In, the main character is called Michael by most, but also Mikey by a colleague and Mike by a niece. Why the difference? What makes him more of a Michael than a Mike? Is it the formality? Is he more of a two-syllable guy? What makes him a ‘Michael’?
This is a key issue in my bad side. Everyone – family, friends and colleagues – call the main character “Dee”, until she arrives in Newfoundland, where all the people she meets call her “Deirdre”. She actually tries to correct them, but they won’t listen. It is a moment of transference that she has no control over. 
Many of the characters in The Life and Home of Gerbi Norberg are Ojibwa and therefore have names which are hard for the Western ear: Bezhinee, Pamequonaishcung, Zawanimkee and Asawasanay. It is nonsensical to shorten the names to Bez, Pam, Zaw and Ass. As much as that may help the reader move through the text, the lyrical nature – and hence integrity – of the characters is gone.
Naming names: Three Ways to Name a Character
Whatever the genesis, naming a character can be a challenge. Here are three common methods:
1. The name is symbolic of an attribute. Jason Quati (from The Sacred Whore) is a derivation of the word quat, meaning small pustule. (Yes, he’s a bad person.) The Adamantine sisters (from Sister Prometheus) get their surname from the hardest of substances, the rock to which Prometheus was affixed according to Greek mythology. 
2. The name is a random discovery. I found a picture of a man named “Gerbi” (from The Life and Home of Gerbi Norberg) in my father’s old files, who was a banker with whom my father worked in the 1950s. 
3. The name evolves as the book is written. The main character in my bad side was originally named Sunshine (ugh) and then Francesca, Elle, Ellen, and finally Dee which actually changed ro Deirdre halfway through the book…because that was her name.
Snowballs in New York City
Excerpt from My Bad Side: Everything was brittle and cracking. I beat my arms across my body, kicking my legs to get warm, and then lay there, as cold as before, worse, breathing fog. I closed my eyes. It was the same, awful and cold.
I was cold and dark in my head. My cheeks hurt. My breath was stuck. My sleeping bag was twisted and stunk of industrial plastic. I couldn’t move my fingers. I felt for my
heart and couldn’t feel that and then it wasn’t right, half beating and then
too many in a row and then none at all.
Subway Chronicle III: “My Bad Side”
Subway scenes from My Bad Side:
I half followed him across Union Square and took the 4 Train. I found an empty car. There was a homeless woman sleeping at the end, her head cushioned on a blanket against the window. I wondered if she was really asleep. I wondered if she ever slept. I sat and stared and missed my stop. I was going to get off, but I didn’t. I went to the end of the line instead.
“You ever think about throwing yourself in front of the train? I mean more like rolling along the front of it like a dance move or Cirque de Soleil thing. You spin up kind of, hands out like a spinning top, you know, with that old thick wire. And then it gets bad. You hit the wall. Not even that. You just fall down and the train cuts off your legs or something like that.”
Subway Chronicle I: Disappointment
Disappointment is a simple word. It is a big word too. It is the signpost marking so many turns.
Mostly I am disappointed in me, but I find it too much in others as well, those I know, pass in the streets, in the news and everywhere else. Today, I was on the 6 train northbound, and a young woman sat down, crazily smiling. I thought she had just remembered something funny, seen somebody, something like that, but her smile went on and on. She kept smiling crazily as she put on her chapstick.
A homeless man got on the train at Bleecker Street and made his appeal. “Anything you can spare, even a penny, whatever you can give helps us provide those in need with a sandwich or a bowl of soup.” He held up a laminated badge. Most everyone ignored him except the crazily smiling woman, who gave him a dollar. He bowed to her for that. “God bless you. I hope you get safely to your destination.” He made the rounds. No one else contributed. He bowed to the crazily smiling woman again. “God bless you. I hope you get safely to your destination.” I was disappointed in him making such a point of her dollar, weirdly damning the rest of us for not coughing up the money. (I doubted the soup story.) And I was disappointed in her for encouraging him to do it again – and take his “god-bless-your-trip” smiling still. 
But in the end, when they both had gone and it was just me and all the other silent, staring people, I was disappointed in myself. I had done nothing and, worse, had stood stupidly in judgment of a smiling woman giving a dollar to a homeless guy. Ugh.