The wonderful Kate Elliott has written a great essay giving advice about the business of writing to first-time fantasy and sf novelists — including yours truly, since I was fortunate enough to meet her at WFC last year and asked her about this via email later.

I was on a panel at the Intellectual Property bookstore next to UT yesterday, talking about the experience of a first publication. (Insert grateful wave at Small Beer Press folks here!) This panel was organized by UT’s Undergraduate Writing Center, where I worked last year, and went pretty darn well — the other two people on the panel had more publication credits, but many of the current MFA/MA students in the audience were in about the same career stage as I am, so the difference in experience worked well. What I enjoyed most, though, was the chance to talk about writing for a while. Since I finished the novel and got my master’s, I haven’t had many chances to do so — other than with a few close friends, and T., and my parents, while I was working on The White Silk Tent this summer. I don’t have much time to read writing blogs during the school year, or even to read books not related to my dissertation topic.

Anyway, it was lovely to read Kate’s essay, for just those very reasons. It gave me, along with some excellent advice, another chance to think and talk about writing.

This will probably be a recurring feature, because… yes.

• The scuzzy salmon-pink Chucks Robert De Niro wore in Great Expectations.
• Knopf rejection sheets for works by Joyce Carol Oates, V.S. Naipaul, Italo Calvino, Salman Rushdie.
• David Mamet’s (extremely detailed) baby book, complete with report cards from pre-school–apparently he handled scissors very safely.
• Houdini’s collection of magic-related manuscript materials.
• Ms. for a minor Beckett work, which I needed to measure in order to answer a patron’s query.
• A rather accomplished landscape sketch by Charlotte Brontë, with a title written in by her mother.
• Publicity photographs of a famous blackface performer, in and out of costume and paint.
• Ink on paper self-portrait by Henry Miller. T. was disappointed to learn that the self-portrait was not at all pornographic.
• A small model concept car designed by Norman Bel Geddes that looks far more like a spaceship than like an automobile.

Not much to report otherwise; I’m studying French like a fiend, doing dissertation-related reading, and working up grant proposals for an exciting new digital humanities project in our department. More on that once we have a good demo up, I hope.

So, a little while ago, I said that I wanted to go paw through the Knopf rejection letters.

I went into work the next day and my boss asked me (and another intern) to — you guessed it — paw through the Knopf rejection letters. We’re putting together a mini-exhibit to highlight the NY Times article, which means that we’ve looked at the letters and records Oshinsky mentioned and picked the ones that’ll work best on display. The exhibit will probably be up by the end of the week.

Have I mentioned that I love my new job? I love my new job.

Not long before I began my new HRC job, I discovered (thanks to my father’s internet sleuthing) that the HRC held a query letter from my grandmother to the Alfred A. Knopf publishing company. She wrote to them in the mid-1950s to ask if they’d want to publish a novel based on her life — a kind of “female Tom Sawyer story,” as she put it. They didn’t. Twenty-five years later she wrote the memoir manuscript I’m currently adapting; twenty-five years after that, I got the HRC internship.

On our first day of orientation, I had just enough time to glance at the letter and to laugh a little at how Louise-ish it is, how her style hadn’t really changed much in twenty-five years. The rejection letters are filed in a different set of manuscript boxes and are uncataloged. There’s a binder in the reading room, I think, that lists their contents. I’m planning to look for their response to Louise soon, though if it was a form letter, it may not have been saved, I suppose.

This morning the NY Times Book Review ran a story (by a UT professor) about the rejection letters and reader reports in the Knopf collection. Now I just want to sit down and look through all of them.

I had good intentions this summer, I swear. I was going write regularly here and talk in some depth about the memoir project, maybe about my academic work. Instead I wrote three-plus chapters of the memoir and rewrote one conference paper into an article-length piece; I thought about my dissertation project; I read seven hundred pages of Clarissa and a fair number of other books both academic and non-; I picked raspberries and blueberries and strawberries in my family’s back garden; I washed a lot of dishes. Now the semester’s begun and tomorrow is my first full day of work at the HRC.

It’s strange not to be teaching, especially since my classmates are all preparing for their own classes. I feel a bit like I’m getting away with something, even though I’ll be working twenty hours a week at the HRC and four at the Undergraduate Writing Center. I hope I will have the chance to teach my planned class on the rhetoric of popular fiction some time, but I’ll have plenty to do this semester, between my dissertation reading and my exciting new French class. I’m a complete beginner with French, though it’s the fifth language I’ve studied. So far, I can say sophisticated things like “Look at the window” and “Susie is wearing a red blouse,” and I sound like an idiot when I try to make the guttural R, but I still love it (even the funny numbers). I do have to stop thinking “wo” when I mean “je,” though. Zhongwen =/= Français, though in a perfect world I’d be studying both right now.

I still have way too much to do today, considering that it’s the last day of a three-day weekend, so I’m off to work. (”Work” here includes studying French, thankfully.) But I will try to be better about writing here this semester.

It’s International Blog Against Racism Week. To see the many amazing contributions bloggers have been making (this year and last), visit the IBARW del.icio.us page. Within that collection of links, there are about 50 (so far) blog posts on writing and race. I want to highlight a few here that deal specifically with the question of authorial intent and reader interpretation, particularly within genre writing.

Kameron Hurley addresses why writing colorblind is writing white.

Kate Nepveu posts on reading through default assumptions.

Yoon Ha Lee makes the point that “Even if race is not an issue in the universe in which you are writing, it is an issue for the reader.”

And two posts by Pam Noles about racial representation, reader identification, and whitewashing disguised as colorblindness: “Shame”, and a follow-up post addressing responses to that essay.

Go, read, think. I will be, too.

A brief list.

1. The CHOP chemo regimen, which has put my father’s cancer in remission, at least temporarily.
2. Paprika — T. and I saw it twice when we were in Portland.
3. Strawberry freezer jam with chevre on a toasted English muffin.
4. GoodReads: still addictive.
5. Pigma Micron pens by Sakura, to which T. introduced me last year. They’re the best ever for marking up books.
6. The fact that Nabokov finished the ms. of Lolita only a few miles from my current location. That house is gone now, replaced with some truly ugly new construction, but there’s a plaque to mark the spot — along with a tiny Japanese maple. I’m not sure what kind of symbolic message that little tree is supposed to send.
7. The area between, say, Division and Belmont in eastern Portland. Even though the Side Street bar near Belmont got rid of its Galaga arcade machine since last summer. Tragedy!
8. The Defoe Review project (based on the HRC’s editions of the periodical).
9. Swagat’s chicken makhani.

Ruth Franklin, Slate, 8 May 2007, reviewing Michael Chabon’s newest book:

Michael Chabon has spent considerable energy trying to drag the decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow grave where writers of serious literature abandoned it.

An excerpt from Ursula Le Guin’s response in Ansible, July 2007:

God damn that Chabon, dragging it out of the grave where she and the other serious writers had buried it to save serious literature from its polluting touch, the horror of its blank, pustular face, the lifeless, meaningless glare of its decaying eyes! What did the fool think he was doing? Had he paid no attention at all to the endless rituals of the serious writers and their serious critics — the formal expulsion ceremonies, the repeated anathemata, the stakes driven over and over through the heart, the vitriolic sneers, the endless, solemn dances on the grave? Did he not want to preserve the virginity of Yaddo? Had he not even understand the importance of the distinction between sci fi and counterfactual fiction? Could he not see that Cormac McCarthy — although everything in his book (except the wonderfully blatant use of an egregiously obscure vocabulary) was remarkably similar to a great many earlier works of science fiction about men crossing the country after a holocaust — could never under any circumstances be said to be a sci fi writer, because Cormac McCarthy was a serious writer and so by definition incapable of lowering himself to commit genre? Could it be that that Chabon, just because some mad fools gave him a Pulitzer, had forgotten the sacred value of the word mainstream?

The sheer awesomeness of this requires a *\o/*! Do go read the whole thing — the whole Le Guin piece, that is. The snooty anti-genre rhetoric in Franklin’s review is a derivative waste of time.

Where I work
Originally uploaded by Katharine B.

I don’t always write on this deck — sometimes it’s too bright, and sometimes I need to stay inside with my father. When I do work here, though, I sit in one chair and put my feet on the other so I can balance my laptop comfortably. It’s usually quiet, a little dusty. Sometimes cars go by on the street to the right, or neighbors do, walking their dogs. I bring a mug of tea and my cell phone out with me, but I get a bad wireless signal, which is good for my productivity.

The day I took this picture, the first page of my outline got caught by a breeze and fluttered off the deck. I had to chase it down.

A whiplash-inducing reading experience: reading A Long Day’s Journey Into Night after a semester of reading Shakespeare. I haven’t bounced that hard off a text in a while.

I did finish the play, mostly because my grandmother mentions it several times in the course of her memoir. Her family life was nothing like the Tyrones’ in an emotional sense, but the superficial details of situation are similar: a mother with beautiful red-brown hair, a father who keeps throwing money into failed land purchases. She has a habit of making comparisons to works she must have read long ago — she also compares her mother to Isabel Archer at another point, and the only similarity there is that Isabel and her mother were both beautiful and stoic. I’m still tempted to use it as an excuse to re-read Portrait of a Lady, though.