Bad News and Good News in that order.

So day before yesterday I heard back from the agent who had my manuscript and she said that she got about halfway through it and decided the setting wasn’t convincing and that the character of Iz was too static, i.e., he did not transform fast enough. One of the regular readers and cheerers-on of my other novels also gave the same critique. From a previous posting, you know that I was almost anticipating rejection and knowing that a rejection from this particular person would hurt more.

Some of her suggestions I can work with to improve the manuscript. I’m not sure about Iz, though, because I happen to know that there are some men who can be basically kind-hearted and heroic and know that their infidelities cause a lot of pain but still keep cheating on the women who love them. When I was walking yesterday in botanical gardens at UCLA while my friend was at a dental appt. I thought about a way I could bring transformed Iz from the future back into the place in the novel just before he has the affair with Zeinab/Dolores. But then I thought, am I doing that just to make people I like more ideologically comfortable? Does that “cheat” the transformation at the the end?

This is where I could really use a writing mentor. I asked for one on She Writes yesterday, and got some sympathetic responses, but no takers (because there really was no Marilynne Robinson or Chaim Potok among them.) Rebecca Forster, who writes legal thrillers noted that she bases her books on real cases but that sometimes she has step back and make sure she isn’t following them too closely because they become plodding if she does. I actually think my book doesn’t follow Hosea that closely. I’m sure Hebrew Bible scholars won’t think so! There’s as much if not more Amos in her climatic speech at the President Coulter campaign rally as there is Hosea. But anyway, I’m going to try inserting a section from future Iz today and hope for a mentor.

The good news is that I based on reading someone else’s experience on She Writes, I offered Because the Angels as a free download for five days, and the day after the rejection, I found out that it was the #1 top free download in the political fiction genre and #31 in literary fiction–and most of the ones in the literary fiction category were public domain novels like Moby Dick and Wuthering Heights. I spent most of the day sending out tweets and posting on Facebook pages. It slipped down to #3 yesterday, but was back up to # 1 today, and it was featured on the Progressive Christian Kindle. Now, that’s only 259 total downloads, I found out, but it will be interesting to see if something comes of it–reviews, for example.

The Shah, Savak, and the Pasdaran of Iran all suck

So I’m out here in Los Angeles, and I’ve actually been aware that I’ve been pushing my friend to talk to me about her past as we work on this memoir. She didn’t talk about it for many years, because losing the love of her life and so many of her friends after the Iranian revolution was so hard, and in many ways, her whole family has led a diminished life here in Los Angeles; if things had turned out differently, they would have been among the educated elite in Iran and they have all had to to live in enormous losses and start over from scratch here in the U.S.

I am aware of my own inadequacy when she tries to express certain concepts that she would be able to express them brilliantly in Farsi. She comes from a family that recited poetry and her father wrote several volumes of it himself.

Today, my friend told me I should consider the rest of my time here vacation, which is something of a blow. I haven’t said it in so many words; I have tried to gently suggest it, but I didn’t come all this way; I didn’t pay for a plane ticket just to hang out in Los Angeles. Truthfully, I’m not crazy about the sun and palm trees. I don’t mind the slush and snow back home. I’m here to work and there are certain things I can do only when she’s around.

Not sure what to do. Don’t want to be insensitive, but I’m not really here to be on vacation either. I have stuff I could be doing back home. Maybe I’ll give her a couple days to see if she’ll change her mind. I should really be blaming the violent men whose torturing and killing ways led to her being here.

Off to California

I was supposed to fly to Burbank today to spend 2 1/2 weeks with a friend getting a start on her memoir. The Rochester-JFK flight had mechanical problems, so I would have missed my connection, so I’m heading off tomorrow, instead.

My friend was active in the resistance against the regimes of both the Shah and the Islamic Republic, was widowed at 21 when her husband died in the mountains fight for the Kurdish resistance, ended up in an eight year international custody battle with her – for her son that crossed three continents and ended with her basically just stealing him. Since then she has lost a job as a health and safety inspector engineer because she was a whistleblower and has had some other struggles that we won’t go into here. She basically talked to no one about her rather adventurous life for twenty years until my husband Michael, who had known her in Israel (where she had fled to escape questioning by the Shah’s secret police) stopped into visit her because we were attending a convention in San Diego and took the train up to LA.

Maybe it was because she hadn’t seen Michael in 25 years and seeing him again brought her back to that time in her life, when she was preparing to return to Iraq with her fiance and fight for a secular democratic republic to take the place of the Shah’s regime. Or maybe it was because she didn’t know me and I just wanted to hear her about her life, but she spent a couple days just pouring out this really remarkable story. Periodically, she would stop and say, “You know, I haven’t talked about this for twenty years.”

I encouraged her to write it down, and she said she wasn’t ready to. She also had realistic concerns for the security of friends and people in the resistance who still might be in Iran, but a couple years ago, she said she was ready, so I’m going out for a couple weeks to try to get a start on it.

Aside from being a worthwhile project in its own right, the memoir will help keep me from going insane over the fact I have an agent reading my Shea manuscript (the one loosely based on the Hosea-Gomer narrative with the gender roles reversed.) I tweaked a query letter for two weeks to an agency I have wanted to represent me since I knew about it, because of our shared political goals. From what I have learned from googling the agent, I can’t imagine a more sympatico fit. The odd thing is that I’m feeling a little depressed. A couple years ago, I would have spent the next month in delighted anticipation, thinking that this agent was really going to like my book once she read it. And now, there’s part of me that really does think that, because I think it’s a good book, and because with the exception of a couple readers (See my “Feedback” posting) my readers think so too. But then there’s this part of me that thinks, if she doesn’t like it, if the religious bits turn her off in the first couple pages, if [insert reason] what’s the point of going on, because there will never be another agent who will get me as much as this one does. I was mentioning this to a friend at church, and she said that there’s a spiritual term for it called “joyful foreboding.”

Anyway, that’s all by way of saying, the memoir will help keep me from going crazy.

Also found out today, since I had time on my hands because of the flight cancellation, that freeze-drying a human body and then pulverizing it would probably make it better fertilizer than burning it. And since the fascist regime in Shea happened to be doing that to its undesirable population, I was able to change that in the manuscript.

Feedback

I have a circle of readers I send the “first” draft of my manuscripts new, meaning a draft I’m not embarrassed to have other people see. One of the people whose opinion I value most is a fellow writer who has very different tastes in literature. He hates Jane Austen and loves William Faulkner. I am the opposite, and so we write different sorts of fiction and in a way, that makes him a bit more objective, I think. He has been more successful than I in the past. He has an agent, although he’s had a rather long drought in sales, so I definitely value his opinion on what’s “sellable.”

Which is why I came away from our standard, “I’ll feed you lunch and you give me a critique” encounter depressed yesterday. He had liked my first 100 pages, although he said they were hard to read, because of some personal shared life experiences I won’t go into here, and because, like me, it’s not hard for him to imagine the U.S. sliding into religious fascism. Yesterday, he told me he had to really forced himself to read the the rest of the book, for some of the same reasons mentioned above, and thought it had real problems with pacing, that there was too much exposition, that I had too many climatic points, that in general, the novel had problems that would require a pretty big rewrite.

I’ve been edited a lot, so I don’t generally have a knee-jerk negative response to suggestions I rewrite. But others who have read the manuscript said they found it hard to put down. On the other hand, they were fellow members of my organization, Christian Peacemaker Teams, who sort of share my worldview, while my friend is a professional writer, who was giving me a professional assessment from the outside. On the other hand, he was picking it up and putting it down over the course of a month and is in general too impatient to read Jane Austen. If a movie doesn’t interest him within the first five minutes, he will walk out. Some of the places he marked as too much exposition were only two paragraphs long and they covered a period of months.

He liked my second novel, and I realized something today: that novel and all of his novels take place in one location, over a period of a few months, with a few characters. Shea, my third novel, takes place over a period of thirty years, moves from the U.S., to Canada, to Chiapas, MX, to Scotland and England, and also ties in how global events are impacting the struggle to bring down the fascist Christian Republic regime in the U.S. Am I being too ambitious? My book is the fictional prison memoir of a political dissident who describes how he, his wife, Shea, and thousands of other ordinary people brought down the fascist regime of the Christian Republic in the United States. All of the great struggles to bring down fascist and oppressive regimes in recent history have had an international component to them, and my work with Christian Peacemaker Teams basically brings that international component to ordinary people who are struggling nonviolently to resist systemic oppression, so my gut says “no.”

This morning, in my e-mail were two critiques from readers outside of Christian Peacemaker Teams who told me that they found the pacing to be brisk. They are not writers, but they are readers. I probably won’t feel completely easy, though, until I have a professional assessment from an editor or agent about how Shea needs to be revised.

To Do list

I’ve been running a low-grade fever the last couple days and have had accompanying canker sores that took over half my mouth and restricted to me to a liquid or very soft food diet. I was kind of stressing out over my To-Do list, but then I thought that my To-Do list, unlike my pre-sabbatical lists, was a real writer’s To-do list:

Sketch out an outline of questions for the friend whose memoir I will be working on with her in Los Angeles from February 25-March 13, to get her thinking
Get my column for Mennonite World Review done before then (Writing on the Idle No More movement currently sweeping across Canada, and implications for White settler Mennonites.)
Get the first 50 pages and an outline of my novel ready for the James Jones novel contest before then
Get the query letter for the agency I really want to represent my third novel polished and ready to go
Get a more generic query letter for agencies ready to go
Check out some Samurai Champloo and Joss Whedon sites for Because the Angels promotion.

When I go back to work for Christian Peacemaker Teams in June, it will be nice to look back on this list, and remember there was a time when I really spent most of my creative energy on writing.

It gets better

Well, I finally threw in the towel after foaming at the mouth too long over not being able to remove a permalink on the front page that directed people to my first novel instead of Because the Angels, the novel I’m currently trying to promote on Kindle. Many thanks to Aldo Argaman, my husband Michael’s oldest son for creating a much more manageable site.

I do want to learn how to use social media, but I’d much rather write stories full of humor and pathos that transform the world. Haven’t done that yet either—at least not the second part, but I’m just saying it would be more rewarding than figuring out permalinks.

I find that I’m in an interesting space literarily. I’ve basically been playing with the plot and characters of my current novel (see previous posting), since 2009. And now that it’s out to readers, I still have a lot to do—revisions based on readers’ comments, research on literary agents, submissions to novel contests, but in my downtimes, when I have insomnia, when I’m sitting through something boring, I no longer have a novel in my head to work on.

Maybe I’ll use that time for some spiritual development. I’m going out to Los Angeles in a couple weeks to help an Iranian Jewish friend who was a dissident under the regimes of both the Shah and the Islamic Republic write her memoirs and that might give my brain some downtime mental yo-yo work to do. But I suspect I should probably just embrace the space.

My First Webpage, or, someone else could have done in minutes what I have just spent days doing

Kathleen Kern Author, human rights advocate,

In the past year I have been participating in She Writes.com, and the thing that has been impressed upon me most is that every author, especially ones who are trying to sell self-published novels, must have her own website. The great thing about She Writes is that there are people who could point me in the direction of how I could go about getting my own site (KathleenKern.com was already taken–it redirects to Mutual Managed Health Solutions Inc.). But I have been putting it together with a lot of trial and error and a lot of calls to the good people at Startlogic.com. Props also to Rebecca Forster who showed me what I could aim for at www.rebeccaforster.com, the surnameless Karma, and Petrea Burchard for help they have given me on She Writes in recent months.

As you can tell by my front page, I am promoting my novel Because the Angels, now available on Kindle. If you liked Samurai Champloo, Blood+ or anything by pre-Avengers Joss Whedon, you’ll probably like Because the Angels. If you liked the Avengers, you might like it too, but his previous work had a little more of the delicate blend of pathos and humor that I strive for in my writing.

I have also just gotten out my third novel “Shea” to my most loyal first line readers, and you will be reading more about it here in the coming months. For those of you who are biblically literate, it is a retelling of the Hosea-Gomer narrative, with the gender roles reversed, taking place against a background of Christian-Fascist religious syncretism instead of Israelite-Canaanite religious syncretism.

If your eyes just glazed over, here’s the synopsis:
About 100 years from now, serial philanderer Islam Goldberg-Jones is writing his memoir from prison, recounting how he, his wife Hoshea Weber, and hundreds of other people in various resistance movements helped bring down the Christian Republic that ruled the United States between 2049-86.

If you’d like to see some of my other books check out my Amazon author’s page.