Fixing a Scene

Today I'm working on fixing some kludgy places in chapter 16 of my novel. On the wall above my bed I have written out the logic of motivation reaction units (MRU). Every time something is clunky or not flowing properly, I try to re-write it using an MRU and most of the time, the scene starts to flow "naturally." If you're a writer, this is a killer craft tip. Read more at MRU online.

It's Official, I'm Crazy

I'm applying to a Ph.D. Program in Myth and Mythological Studies with an emphasis in Depth Psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute. If I am accepted, I have the privilege of spending three years taking classes and two years writing a dissertation. I already have two full times jobs so I ought to have my head examined.

I'm attempting this because I want to write stories that help humanity progress in a conscious way and that illuminate the great works done by all the heros I know that are saving the planet or teaching peace or feeding people or growing organic food. I'm lucky that way, I know a lot of heros.

The Novel - Round Seven

Today, I'm getting organized for the seventh draft of my novel, Falling From The Moon. Yes the one that was supposedly finished in June. Thanks to my friends, I received some wonderful feedback on the novel and this last round will incorporate most of the suggestions I received from friends and a couple of agents who read the first chapter and a synopsis at the La Jolla Writers Conference in November.

The main change is that the first chapters, which all happen in 1990, are now going to be in strict chronological order. I've spent the morning reworking my meta text and renumbering chapters. My goal is to finish this draft by year end meaning I have my work cut out for me. That's a chapter a day for the rest of the month. 75% of the work is incorporating the line edits and a few minor bloops into my electronic version. The remaining 25% is fixing transitions due to the chapter order being tossed upside down.

I have the best friends in the entire world. I know you all have very busy lives and I am honored you made the time to help me get to round seven. Thanks to Carletta, Cyndi, Jennifer, Karen, Debby, and Debby's neighbor who I've never met. You rock!

Graduate School Round Three

In 1999 I returned to college to finish my undergraduate degree so I could go to graduate school. Unfortunately, just before I started, my mom had a massive stroke and lost the ability to do much of anything. I decided to put off graduate school for a year or two to help her get back on her feet (literally and metaphorically). In 2006, I realized that waiting for her to get back on her feet, or die, or for me to win the lottery just wasn't going to happen, so I applied to graduate school and left practical thoughts like how to pay for it and where would I find the time to the wind.

Either I'm too old or too dumb or something as I was rejected by all the programs I applied to (a total of three). In the fall of 2007, I quit my job and entered into my own version of graduate school. I took classes in literature, writing, publishing and received a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation to finish my novel. I also attended a three day symposium on The Art of Writing at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Carpinteria, California.

My first introduction to depth psychology and creative writing and tending the soul of the world was like seeing my heart outside of my body. I've always known it was there, but seeing it made be want to learn more about it.

The desire for graduate school hasn't gone away either and I'm trying again. This time I'm expanding my horizons. In addition to MFA in Creative Writing programs at UC San Diego and UC Riverside, I'm going to apply to Pacifica. The only problems is there are two programs I'm interested in there: an MA in Engaged Humanities and a Ph.D. in Mythological Studies.

My heart wants to apply for the Ph.D., but my brain says the MA would be easier to fit into my life. Either way, there is knowledge and wisdom that I am lacking to help myself and my community in the twenty first century and I'm feeling that an advanced degree will help me shore up my skills a bit in the area of "changing the world" and writing about the amazing people that I admire from the depths of my heart.

Wish me luck.

I Finished the Novel - Now What?

I finished my novel, Falling From the Moon, in June and September is almost a memory. In June and July I gave copies of the book to a few trusted friends to read, hoping to get some feedback. I've been working on the novel for years and years and years and no one had read the entire book cover to cover and I definitely wanted to clean up the typos, grammar issues and matters of choreography before trying to show it to someone who might actually want to publish it.

Yes, that is the goal. As much as I was compelled to keep writing the book even when I was sick of it and wanted to escape from its clutch, I always knew that someday I would try to get it published.

So I'm waiting on my friends, hint hint, to return their copies with lots of pen marks on the page. I've registered for the La Jolla Writers Conference in November and my deadline to have my synopsis and first twelve pages in their post office box is October 1st - so I better get hustling.

I've been trapped in synopsis hell, learning how to be concise, cover the basic plots points and be a bit of a tease so I can leave prospective agents hungry for more. This conference asked for a one page synopsis and after slaving over it for days, I think I have a one page draft.

In the meantime, I'm reading the novel myself and scribbling all over the printed page so I guess my triumphant June post wasn't so climatic after all. But this last draft is mostly sentence changes and minor edits. I hope to be done with this verion by November 1st.

Wish me luck!

How Riding the Bus Saved Me from a Nervous Breakdown

Every morning when I wake up, I'm already behind on my to-do list and before I've even had breakfast, my stress level is through the roof. My brain knows that if I take a few minutes to sit quietly, I'll feel more relaxed, but once I'm loosing my sanity, it's hard for me to figure out how to sit still. Not to mention, trying to find a moment between trips to the potty, phone calls and the endless stream of work related messages to my crackberry, relaxation seems as out of reach as Jupiter.

Yet the moment the bus arrives at the bus stop and I climb on board, everything stops. I can pull out my book and read, watch the boats on the water as we zoom by on the freeway, edit my novel, or just eavesdrop on the conversations of excited teenagers wrapped up in what Bob said to Sally or other simple problems. My heart slows down and I can make notes on what I need to do or think or how I'm feeling. I can do nothing. Today I wished the trip was longer. Thirty minutes after climbing on board, I was off and speed walking through the streets to my office tower overlooking San Diego Harbor. Now I'm anticipating the journey home so I can get back to working on the synopsis of my novel I need to have done by Friday for the La Jolla Writers Conference in November.

Hail to the Number 30 Bus - my savior.

Me and UCLA

The UCLA Writers' Program offers an amazing banquet of writing classes through UCLA Extension. From October 2007 until March 2008, I took a great on-line course in advanced fiction that gave me the tools I needed to finish my novel.

When I was awarded the Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, my instructor told me to let the Writers' Program know and I would get some great publicity out of it. And she was right. Check it out, I'm famous for today anyway.

From UCLA Writers' Studio web site:

"Online Student Receives Fiction Writing Grant

Student Karin Zirk was awarded a grant for unpublished novels through the Elizabeth George Foundation. Karin has been using the grant to take Writers’ Program online courses to finish her novel, Falling from the Moon.

Karin says, "The grant provided time to write and funding for classes such as Novel V, where I studied under the incredible Caroline Leavitt. Not only is she a cheerleader extraordinaire, but her ability to share tools that helped me find the holes in my novel and fill them with the missing pieces of the story was incredible," Karin says. "In addition to the Novel V class, I had the privilege of taking Katharine Sand's Riveting Writing course, which has given me the tools I need to pitch this book to an agent."

We look forward to reading the finished manuscript, Karin! Congratulations."

It's Done! (sort of)

On Monday I finished my novel, the novel I started in 1995. Six to eight drafts later and six months of writing fifteen hours a week and it's done (sort of).

So what's the next step? Two close friends will read it while I'm gone to Wyoming for the Rainbow Gathering. Hopefully, when I come back, all I need to do is some line edits and then I can start looking for an agent.

It feels anti-climatic and scary. I'm not sure who I will be if I'm not the person working on the stories of Sapphire and Lauren. Can I let them go? Will I have empty nest syndrome? Only time will tell.

Thanks to everyone who has supported me along the way!

TC Boyle & Opening Sentences

I've been reworking the opening of my novel and trying to create an opening sentence that packs a wallop. Today I went to the library and read the opening paragraph to all the Boyle novels on the shelf. There were seven or eight. While the exercise was very useful for my opening sentence, (I hope), it left me feeling rather discouraged. I'm 47 years old and have yet to complete even one novel, let alone the cornucopia of ideas that Boyle has produced so far.

Of course the only option to not trying to finish anything is never finishing anything so I continue on. But just for giggles, take a quick comparison and you'll see what I mean.

Falling From the Moon's first sentence: "He vaporized fifteen years ago leaving faint traces of patchouli, the echo of an acoustic guitar in the hallway and festering lesions on her destiny."

Drop's City's first sentence: The morning was a fish in a net, glistening and wriggling at the dead black border of her consciousness, but she'd never caught a fish in a net or on a hook either, so she couldn't really say if or how or why.

The Path Less Traveled (Stuck in Traffic)

So one of my oldest and closest friends just was accepted into her dream MFA program at the University of New Mexico. I am thrilled for her. Thrilled that she took the risk and put herself out there. Thrilled that she was accepted. Thrilled that she'll be starting a new phase of her life this summer. One that will lead her down an exciting writing path and into a career as a writer and journalist on NPR. And above all, I'm so proud of her for opening up old wounds and trying to heal them.

The part that I'm not thrilled about is being left behind. Everyone else keeps moving onto new phases of their life and here I sit, babysitting an 81 year old woman who is unable to function without assistance every fifteen minutes. I too am ready to take the leap into the unknown, create a new life, explore the world. But I'm living the life of an 81 year old disabled woman and have been since she was 72 and I was 38. I try to tell myself that I'm on the path less traveled. The run away from home at 17 and join a commune path. The travel around the country in a VW van path. The mosh pit, sweat and tattoos path. The path to adventure and great things. The path where redemption or wisdom or joy is going to come out of taking care of an old person: I've been waiting for nine years and still nothing seems to have materialize except the flab around my tummy and the etched wrinkles on my face.

Somehow I've been stuck here in one place for so many years I can't even remember what life was like before and I don't see any exit ramps. Sometimes people tell me about the twenty first century. I read about it on the web, catch snippets of it on the nightly news. But it's not my life, my world.

Saturday night, I'll drink champagne to celebrate my friend's success. Then I'll go home to my same life that never changes.

On Tea with Writers

Yesterday I spent a fantastic afternoon with my fellow UCLA Extension Novel V classmate, Sharon Steeber de Orozco, who is writing a fantastic novel of love across borders and finding our place (space) in the world. I was surprised to find out that Sharon is !GASP! a published author. Her novel, The Jews, was published in 1982 and was written in five months. The book is currently out of print, but seems to be floating around on the Internet used book circuit and hopefully a copy is headed my way as I type this.

I was way too talkative, but the opportunity to spend a few hours commiserating with another struggling writer is like indulging on dark chocolate. In fact, I was so amped when I came home that I stayed up way way past my bed time working on my novel's synopsis. And in one of those completely serendipitous events, her children went to Bonita Vista High School - the very high school where I took courses such as Rock Music Appreciation and learned to make milk carton bongs. Although rumor has it the smoking area disappeared along with the seventies.

Meeting people online is fun, but the satisfaction of spending face to face time with another human being who shares some of the same hopes and dreams is the difference between watching a snow storm on television and walking through it.

On Critiquing Other People's Novels

I had to come clean on a fellow classmate's novel. I find it tedious.

Now it's not because the person can't write. I've read a few chunks of his work where he writes in scenes and brings characters to life, but....

Most of what I've read isn't written this way. At first, I tried to make suggestions on improving it, then I tried to figure out what I was missing that other people seemed to get. But the fact was, if my goals weren’t to provide an aspiring novelist with honest feedback to help improve the book, I wouldn't have had the guts to say what I did.

His idea is that if someone reads the entire book, it will all make sense. Well, the bad news is I would never keep reading because the third paragraph on page five doesn't have any connection I can ascertain with the second paragraph on page six and so it goes.

Now I have to wait to see how our instructor and the author react. I hope I can sleep tonight. The only justification I have is that nothing I wrote was done from a point of malice - just this humble novelist wanna be's attempt at providing some thoughtful comment on omissions, fallacies and paragraphs guaranteed to put me to sleep.

On Successes and Failures

In 1995, I started work on a short story, which over the years grew into a novel that I am still working on. Due to the challenges of working full time and caring for my stroke disabled mother from 1999 to 2007, I was only able to work on my novel for a few hours every week.

Late in 2007, I quit my lucrative (hah!) job as a database administrator to focus on my novel. I'm still caring for my mom.

Earlier this month I was awarded a grant for unpublished writers from the Elizabeth George Foundation to help me complete my novel, Falling From The Moon. Not that the grant covers most of my living expenses but it's a base and I'm looking for consulting work to fill in the blanks and hope I can resist getting a job for a few more months.

Now all that's left is for me to finish this novel or fail to finish it. I've set a schedule with tasks and deadlines, am working with a great group of people and I want to throw up. No more excuses. Just me and the words on the page. Just me and my characters clamoring to be free, to run out into the world and be escape from my domination. Lauren, Garth and Bridgette are great people, even though they don't always make the right decisions. And Mole, well Mole is loveable and tragic.

So today I'm procrastinating. Doing odds and ends around the house like figuring out an easy way to get dust out of a wall mounted space heater and trying to figure out how to get trash cans along Rose Creek. So if anyone has any suggestions ...