Creative Constipation

Yesterday I began a new painting. What should have been a pleasant afternoon lost in brush strokes and classical music in my sun-drenched living room was instead a nail-biting, inner-lip-chewing sweating-behind-the-knees afternoon spent sketching and measuring and colour-coordinating till I was sick to my stomach. All I had to show at the end of two hours was a 2x2 (that's inches) royal purple diamond . 

I've done the same thing with this blog as well. I wondered what witty, snappy entry I could entertain you with and before I knew it, months had gone by. 

What is this thing I do, this strife for perfection which leads instead to a kind of creative constipation? Why can't I just grab a canvas and splatter it with paint like I once did? Why can't I just write whatever comes to my head like I once did? Those were the good old days. If  growing up means getting anal, then no thank you. 

So in the interest of going back to to the way things once were, I shall attempt to write this simple straightforward blog entry whose simple goal shall be to update you on the progress of my novel.

I "finished" my novel in February. That means I got it out of my head and onto the page. Then I sent it off to a few select suckers, angelic souls who were writers or avid readers or both, whose daunting task was to a) get through it and b) tell me their thoughts (which is hard for some people to do as they don't want to hurt my feelings). And these people, these poor schmucks who never dreamed when they offered to help that I'd promptly send them 400+ pages of mush, stepped up. Not only did they read all 432 pages, but they let me pick their brains after. For hours. And hours. More on them later.

The good news was the feedback was consistent: melodramatic in places but overall passable (my words not theirs). After a couple of days of stroking and mending my bruised ego (hey, it happens no matter how sweetly and politically correctly you're told your weaknesses), I got back on the proverbial horse.

Since I'm learning and doing at the same time, it took me a while to figure out the next step: how to incorporate friends' feedback and my own, how to cut out the extraneous and deepen the good stuff, and how to do it all while maintaining the spontaneity and initial integrity of the work. So basically how to change everything and nothing all at once. 

Easy peasy.

After several days- or was it weeks or maybe months- of chewing my nails to the quick, staring dejectedly into my latte (while contemplating how I really couldn't afford it as I approached my third year of unemployment) and eyeing several alternate vocations (barista, pizza dough flipper, grocery bagger at Wolfe India Bazaar where I could enjoy delightful Telegu/Hindi melodies and the soft scent of samosas that arises every time someone opens the door), I came up with a plan, a system, a way of maintaining the spontaneity of the piece but in a planned and precise manner. I made...a graphic organizer. Hey, if it helped my 6th grade students plan their stories, why couldn't it help me?

That's what I've been up to for the past days- or weeks or months. I've taken all the aspects I want to include, maintain, highlight, lowlight and made a handy dandy chart. The chart (which is freaking ingenious if I do say so myself) has allowed me to work on the novel with a birds eye view without getting caught up in the  minutiae of the text.

Filling it in has been akin to having a colonoscopy while getting a root canal but, having resorted to charts in the past, I know that the next step, the writing/fixing/whatever you want to call it, will be smooth(ish) because everything is now accounted for.

There. My own personal hell in 500 words or less.

Not Now, SRK, I'm Married

I first fell in love with Shah Rukh Khan as he- and his hair- bounced around the Swiss Alps falling in love with Kajol. His devotion to her as he followed her all the way to India, miraculously finding her in an undisclosed marigold field, his attempt to win over this man 

I'm sure he's a big softie underneath

 

by spending morning after morning caw-cawing to the pigeons alongside the bug-eyed, deep-voiced patriarch, which 16 year old wouldn't fall in love, I ask you?

I loved the King of Bollywood through his kitschy early years filled with neon colored Gap hoodies, his dramatic years playing a steady stream of NRIs, and his melodramatic years which some say includes everything he's ever done but of course they're just jealous.

Like this clip, (begin at 1.07), pure, understated drama, subtle as a Vancouver rainfall:

My love for him caused many a domestic dispute in my personal life. My then boyfriend was not a fan of my phone's screensaver, a picture of King Khan I had begged my sister to take at a London tube station. The night before my wedding, I got an email from the Mona Khan Dance Company saying they would be dancing with SR in San Jose the next night. Fortunately, we were wed in Vancouver; it might not have made for an auspicious beginning to my marriage to be found missing at my own wedding reception.

Sadly, my undying love wavered after one too many single-syllable action movies.

But like the 30 minute conclusion of Devdas, it's a slow death, not quite there, just hovering at the haveli door, crying, dying.

And now, in a plot twist even more surprising than when his reincarnated character crosses paths with a carbon copy of the woman he loved a lifetime ago, ladies and gentlemen, Shah Rukh Khan is chasing me. Like when you're five and the boy you love doesn't love you back till you stop paying attention and then he chases you around the playground incessantly, SR is everywhere. Begging me to come back.

How else do you explain me being mid-agent-hunt, on the website of a hard core New York agent and seeing she represents this book:

You see what he's trying to do, don't you? He obviously wants me back. He's arranging it so that we'll both be represented by the same agency and then meet in Bombay or New York or his next video shoot in front of the Golden Gate Bridge or the pyramids or the Swiss Alps.

Well, Bollywood Ki Jaan, I'm married now. So the answer is obviously an unequivocal, resounding 'we'll see'.

Progress: Slow but Sweet

Perusing the daily email I get from Publisher's Market Place over my morning coffee, I noticed something.

Like Henry Higgins and Colonel Pickering when Eliza finally masters her vowels, I sat up, observing carefully to make sure it was real. I read some more of the newsletter. It was. It was real.

I was understanding what I was reading.

I understood that the first section was talking about book deals made the previous week, I understood their various breakdowns into foreign rights, film rights, etc. 

More exciting, I recognized the names of the big shots making these deals. Mostly from my research but also because I've been hobnobbing with some of them at the Squaw Valley Writer's Conference I've attended the last couple of years.

I found myself chuckling like an old timer:  Donald Maass scored a deal, he's on my list of agents to approach. Al Zuckerman is retiring from Writers House? But he's the founder; that's huge. Reagan Arthur scored another deal? She's so powerful; I wish I'd have known that when she drove me to the conference hall last summer at Squaw Valley. I would have talked about something much more enlightened than the quality of the Chunky Monkey smoothies at the Mountain Market in the main village.

I am now off to do a celebratory dance much like minute two below:

Ole.

On the Prowl

For the past thirteen days, I've had an exquisite headache that moves around from the space between my eyes to the space behind my earlobes. I can't fall asleep at night and I have even more road rage than usual (close family shudder at the thought here). All this is due to the new phase in my writing life: the hunt for an agent.

I read some wonderful books on how the heck to find an agent (my faves were The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published, which was actually laugh out loud funny, and Noah Lukeman's How to Find- and Keep- A Literary Agent which kept me from jumping off any bridges with a clearly defined plan of action).

I'm starting with agents of writers I love, as per the advice in the above books. As with every other step along this journey, it's a roller coaster.

Yesterday, I found Sandra Dijkstra, who represented not one but two of my all time favorite authors, Amy Tan and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (whose name makes mine sound like Sandy Smith). After an hour of gleefully cross referencing her across various sites, reading her interviews in literary journals, and imagining our instant bond based on difficult to pronounce names, I came upon the sentence that I didn't read so much as cover my ears as it jumped off the page and shrieked: Ms. Dijkstra will no longer be accepting unsolicited queries after March 16, 2012. Yesterday was March 13.

By dinnertime, I came up with about five plans to get over this obstacle but you can imagine the toll on my nerves.

Today has been just plain bad.

I spent an hour this morning researching an agent who no longer represents one of my role models, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

                                         Chimimanda Adichie's inspiring TED Talk


This afternoon, I hit more walls as I discovered that many of the set-in-India books I love have authors who are British. Which of course means so are their agents.

The first book I ever read that was set in Karachi. It did for me exactly what the above TED talk is about. 

Some books I've enjoyed are by one time authors whose agents happened to choose them but the rest of their roster is completely different.

Such as the agency I just read/disqualified whose current releases page featured those bodice-ripping covers you see tucked into the back of drugstores, the ones you, as a lofty literary, walk right by with a mental scoff.

I've been doing this long enough now to know that every step along the way is a learning curve. I'll get there, I know.

In the meantime, the extra large bottle of Tylenol is moving from the medicine cabinet to my bedside.

Ann Patchett Gives Stephen Colbert Smack Down

This is hilarious. Two of my favorite people go head to head as author Ann Patchett tells Stephen Colbert why independent bookstores are making a come back. And for once, Stephen is stumped.

Watch the interview here.

Or go to: http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/408775/february-20-2012/ann-patchett

So Phi, when's your book coming out?

This is the question on everyone's minds. Possibly because, contrary to Parsi superstition that people's najar (evil eye) will annihilate any hope that I had, I did some chicken counting before any hatching took place and announced on Facebook that my book was "done".

What that meant was that the book was out of my head and onto the page. Its fate now rests in the hands of some dear friends who have bravely agreed to critique it.

So what's next?

1. Write a query letter where I describe my 350 page book  in 150 words, conveying clearly that my idea is original yet universal and doing so in a manner so succinct (yet expansive) that in the 30-60 seconds that any run-off-her-feet agent (whose inbox is crammed with at least one hundred of these letters a day) will devote to me, my letter will make her drop her venti latte and call me right up.

2. Find the right agent for me through careful cross-checking across various publishing websites, agency websites, Amazon, etc, weed through the scammers, and settle on one who is new enough to take on a first timer like me yet established enough to know the right people though not so big a name as not to be taking on new clients.

3. Send out flurries of query letters and in the interim, which could last one to 365 days, while away my time biting the skin around the beds where my finger nails once lay and wash it down with the dredges of whiskey remaining in the liquor cabinet.

And that is when the book is coming out.

Phi MIB Romer

This is what I do these days:



Replace the guns with peering at people's book spines and identifying alien life with scoping out potential future readers at every coffee shop/train station/bus stop and it comes down to the same thing.

As you know, writing has made me shameless. Shamefully shameless, mind you; I do feel genuinely bad about my newfound callousness. For at least two-four seconds. Over the last year, at weddings and funerals, in line for the bathroom and at the dentist's office, I've been brazenly self promoting.

But what happened today is a gray area; I'm not sure if I had ulterior motives or was being a nice human being for a change. You tell me.

On the big comfy couch at Barefoot Coffee this morning, I saw that the woman beside me was reading HUNGER GAMES, a book my sister has been recommending to me for years. Asking her about it led to a twenty minute conversation. It was delightful, she was actually incredibly helpful and gave me amazing ideas on how to market the book (it was her MBA training, she said, in the breaths between listing ideas).

All I said was that it's hard for me to read books these days, what with writing my own. And I had to tell her about my blog; she started talking about marketing yourself, etc. And yes, I happened to have my business card within arm's reach but that's because I happened to be using it as a bookmark today. I did not hand it to her till she asked.

Did I scope her out? Did I just want a quick break from my 450 page tome on publishing? I truly don't know.

I like to look at it as a win-win: she got access to my blog and I have a future contact in case I ever pursue that MBA story line.