Tag Archives: Writing steps

Knowledge Messes Up My Self

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I had something in me that was real. I remember it. I don’t just remember it. I was wholly in that, everything raw and wild. That was when I was a kid, and I didn’t think about it like that. I was a kid and the world was open to anything I could imagine. I want to get back to that.

My head is old now. Experiences have eroded my wiring, bashed it about with learning to kowtow, inebriation and pretending to know. The desire is the thing, on tippy toes, to keep getting up like that. And I cannot.

It reminds me of a realization of love, that thing as it was at the outset, pure, the excitement, that anticipation, all of that wonder in the eyes, then realizing it was not magic, but a drug we’re self-prescribed. And now I can’t think of it as anything else.

The light from a childhood window, the smells from the hall, sounds of people downstairs, someone approaching, a mother, maybe not, knowing that space, looking back, realizing you are there, no one to answer to, just for the moment, in that world as long as you can make it, without closing your eyes, for as long possible.

You Want Me to Care? Is That It?

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If I die, then I die. The loss to this world won’t be great. I run through the memory of my past in its entirety and can’t help asking myself: Why have I lived? For what purpose was I born? There probably was one once, and I probably did have a lofty calling because I feel a boundless strength in my soul. But I didn’t divine this calling I was carried away with the bits of passion, empty and unrewarding.

My love never brought anyone happiness. I loved for myself, for my personal pleasure. And maybe I will die tomorrow. And not one being on this earth will have understood me totally. Some thought of me as worse, some as better, than I actually am. Some will say “he was a good fellow”, others will say I was a swine. Both one and the other will be wrong. (From Mikhail Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time)

The Less You Know, The More You Aren’t

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I’ve never understood how people know exactly who they are – not only the presentation of themselves but lying in bed with that awareness. I realize it is mostly a farce created to help us through birth to death, but I remain dumbfounded by their remarkable certainity in all of it.

My heads remains much the same as it was at Mia Frumhartz’s birthday party – I think it was her eighth – at the bowling alley where I decided to help her off with her coat. I didn’t know why I did that, aside from the fact that I like to be in the good graces of the fairer sex. I thought I would begin to know more about who I was as life went on. I was wrong.

My only consistent behavior has been to seek solitutude. The results are pending as is the impetus. In other words, I’m still just a kid trying to get away with stuff. My immediate desire when I have free time is to do things I’m not supposed to – smoke, drink, read trashy books – and get away with that as long as possible.

I do other things too, read stuff like Sartre, re-watch Tarkovsky films and have fine thoughts about important things. And I write too, my latest book focuses on an identity crisis, a person who revels in not only not knowing who he is but condemns those who pretend otherwise. And he blogs about that.

Form of Rejection

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I have been sending out queries and writing samples to literary agents for many years and received the same form responses in a variety of phrasings: It’s not quite what I’m looking for at this time… I have to be particularly selective about which projects I represent…I can only responsibly take on a few new clients each year…I’m not the best fit for this project at this time… I’m not the best match…I’m not the right agent… I’m going to have to step aside…will be stepping back from consideration… I’ll be regretfully stepping aside.

Best wishes in your search for representation. Wishing you the very best of luck in your publishing endeavors. Please accept my very best wishes for your writing success. Best of luck with your future queries. I wish you the best of luck. I wish you all the best in your search for representation and in your writing career. We’re rooting for you! Until then, you have my…Very best.

Along with these snippets of clearly intended prose, the replies are sent from a “Do-Not-Reply-To-This-Email Address”. After 35 years, you’d think I’d get the message.

Advance Reviews for “The Vanishing Pill”

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Contrasting the dim of the city against the icy wilds of Greenland, The Vanishing Pill exposes the violent inner conflicts of our nature. As McPhedran’s liner notes state: “Dreams aren’t simple things; they’re the only fucking thing.”

The advanced reviews are unanimous…

Atlantic Tri-Monthly: “I ate it up like a rabid monkey. McPhedran stews his prose with a burning hot sauce that leaves you screaming for more.” 

USA Tomorrow: “You have not lived until you have read this intoxicating yarn of lust and joy.”

NY1 Off-line: “New Yorker McPhedran’s latest explosion of prose lights up the city with a tower of anguish and delight.”

Foxy News on-line: “It’s a good book, even with all the big words.”

My “Hail Mary” Complex

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I was genuinely excited to read Andy Weir’s highly-acclaimed Project Hail Mary, hoping for inspiration on improving the writing, structure and marketability of my own speculative work, The Cx Trilogy.

My positive outlook waned after a few pages. It wasn’t just the undeveloped writing nor the caricatured characters – much of which seem at first draft level – but more the lack of an engaging narrative. While the premise was compelling – why is the sun getting dimmer and how can this be stopped? – there was little development of the protagonist and his journey beyond a barrage of scientific details.

I’ll cite examples to mitigate your opinon of me as a bitter unpublished author. Below that is the room I woke up in. The one with my dead friends. I sniffle and wipe a tear away. Initially, I thought this was intended as sarcasm, but I soon realized that this was a genuine expression of Ryland Grace’s emotion.

Each of them kind of look like a beetle. Each beetle has a name up top: “John”, “Paul”, “George” and “Ringo”. I’m on a suicide mission. John, Paul, George and Ringo get to go home, but my long and winding road ends here. This sense of humor permeates the book.

My students didn’t swear at me. Their squabbles were usually resolved within a few minutes, either by a teacher-enforced handshake or detention. And somewhat selfish but here it is: They looked up to me. I missed that respect. Mr. Weir has clearly never spent a day as a teacher in his life.

I could go on, but why bury myself even deeper? Mr. Weir has achieved incredible commercial success and knows how to market his work, while I’m an unpublished failure who teaches high school…which is what makes this difficult to process.

I genuinely cannot understand what it is about Mr. Weir’s work that is compelling to such a large audience. And what it is about my own writing that seems destined to never get beyond the literary agent’s automatic reply: Unfortunately, your project does not sound like a fit for me at this time, and so I will have to pass. Boo hoo. Poor me.

Sisyphus: The Hour of Consciousness

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Sisyphus watches the stone rush down toward that lower world whence he will have to push it up again. It is during his return, that pause, that hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering; that is the hour of consciousness.

Greenlandic trail

The evidence is in the absurd divorce between the mind that desires and the world that disappoints, a nostalgia for unity; those are the contradictions that bind together. If the descent is sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy. One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness. Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth.

Grecian cave

Sisyphus’ silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing. “I conclude that all is well,” says Oedipus, and that remark is sacred.

(Extracts from Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus.)

Social Media: Et in Arcadia Ego

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I am averse to contemporary literature. I find it boring. Or trite. Or predictable. Or ridiculous. Or…what’s that word when people put on airs and pretend to be someone they’re not? Affected. No, pretentious. That’s it. I find contemporary work pretentious. And boring.

I tend toward older work, modern as they call it, like Evelyn Waugh, of which I had read some in the past – Scoop, Handful of Dust, The Sword of Honor Trilogy – but skipped the much ballyhooed Brideshead Revisited. I was unsure about reading it now, thinking I might find it predictable. I was wrong.

As irritatingly pompous (indeed affected) as the main players, Sebastian Flyte and Charles Ryder, might be and as predictable the narrative, the prose remains compelling, funny too. Beware of the Anglo-Catholics – they’re all sodomites with unpleasant accents. Or his descriptors for wine: “…shy like a gazelle…a flute by still water…a prophet in a cave.” Or more perhaps to the point, his understanding of the old English world expressed through literary allusions and Latin sayings Et in Arcadia Ego.

Death is found everywhere, even Arcadia, to say nothing of the marvelously sexy and exciting posts on social media. My point, because I always have a point, is that if Sebastian and/or Charles had a social media account, it would be like that, pretentious and dull. But Waugh wrote them in such a way as they were not.

The Sacred Whore, Version 3,5

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Shockingly, I met my goal for yesterday of completing a draft of The Sacred Whore. I had two major problems in completing this latest draft. First and foremost, I had to move the primary point of view away from a male perspective, which meant not only minimizing the pimp Jefferson’s role and switching the king-pin to a queen-pin, but also expanding the voice of a number of the sex workers.

The other challenge was updating the work to present day. And since I wrote the first draft in 1988, the inclusion of phones and other technologies was paramount. Once I figured out that Dorothy could be a vlogger, everything seemed to fall into place. I also edited out much of the speech at the end. Pontification is a not an effective device.

I’m going to take a swing at Wave That Flag today and try to give Davis a little more clarity in his arc. We’ll see. Today’s writing prompt: “My favorite teacher…”

Scared of Writing

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I waited outside of Mr. Carver’s class, thinking of how I could get an extension. The assignment – a 2,000-word creative self-reflection – was due that afternoon, and I hadn’t even started. I didn’t understand why I had to do it, because I had graduated long ago and was in fact now teaching at the school.

I gave up and beetled off to my classroom, the Dean of Students behind me, a row of exiting buses ahead. As I sprinted up the hill, I opened my eyes to find it was late into morning, another cloudy day. I was scared of getting back into my writing. That’s all it was.

There is a sprawl of projects to address. I have to fine tune three scripts: Ave and Dorothy need to be established as live-bloggers from the outset of The Sacred Whore. Davis’ motivation for going on tour with The Grateful Dead needs more focus in Wave That Flag. And the background stories need to be more relevant to Davis’ isolation in Just Weird.

The Vanishing Pill is a mess. Two years in, and this book remains cluttered with notes all over. I haven’t figured out the starting point or the crisis nor where or how it ends. And then there’s my teacher’s guidebook, Fuck Pedagogy. No idea how I’m going to focus that into anything relevant at all.

To paraphrase Matthew Zapruder in Why Poetry, I’m afraid of being exposed, of being seen as banal, derivative, uninteresting and stupid. That’s all it is. And so, “To bed!” I will arise at dawn and begin this battle anew! Or now. I’ll do it now. And start with my first prompt: “My favorite childhood vacation…” That was in Anna Maria Key in Florida where everything was magic, especially the gift shops.