SermonsMarilynne Robinson

Twitter timesuck, Agent-cycle, Gilead and Writing that pays

 

I made a decision today to close my Twitter and HooteSuite tabs (I use both, because I use both 300% magnification for an eye disability so I skim HootSuite  to look at writing-related tweets and then read everything else on Twitter.)  I have found it basically impossible NOT to check it 10x a day.  I haven’t listed anything on Ebay for more than a week, which is my usual downtime activity.  But now that I have a May 1 deadline for some Bible curriculum lessons—writing that I actually get paid for,  I need to strap in.  I’m going to check the feeds just twice a day.

So far, I’ve sent out five agent queries and gotten three rejections.  I’ve also just heard from the Dana Awards that my manuscript didn’t make even the honorable mentions.  So the honeymoon is over.  Not everyone sees how exquisite Shea is.  I’m back to “if you’re going to be a writer you have to be able to take rejection and x received 60 thousand rejections before it was finally published blah blah blah” mode.  I am being a bit more careful about my querying though.  Even though I have a template, I’m not sending out the query e-mails on the same day I write them.  I’m let them sit and tweaking at them until I feel good about them.

The first draft of  my query today—meaning first draft of my final paragraph, “Why I am sending this query to you, Ms. Agent”—was about our shared enthusiasm for Mariindexlynne Robinson’s 2005 novel Gilead. That novel made me feel really hopeful when I read it (or listened to it, since I can’t read normal size fonts anymore.) It made me realize there is a place, post-Tolstoy, for novels about people of faith.  Great novels.  It’s sad really, that the term “Christian fiction” immediately brings to mind a genre that is formulaic and trite, when faith should be deep, and awesome and profound.  Which, of course, Gilead is.

With this agent, I’ve shared a little more personal information than I usually do—like that I’ve not used the link to the Kirkus Review of Because the Angels with some other agents because it has “an interesting approach to Christianity” in the title.  I’ll let the letter sit a couple days and see whether I think it’s still a good idea.  Wouldn’t someone who loves Gilead be interested in that?  But does she get fifty queries a day from people claiming a Gilead kinship? Aaargh!

The downside of the shared enthusiasm is that you become more emotionally invested.  Even though I never met this woman, it means more when someone who loves a book you’ve loved rejects you.

But of course, I have a lot to occupy my time.  Six weeks until my sabbatical is over, and I have these thirteen lessons about Jesus’ use of the Hebrew Bible to get done, as well as a bunch of boxes in the hall that I said I was going to go through and get out of the hall before my sabbatical was over.

Passionate Christian Characters, sex, the F-word and Maundy Thursday

I spent this week reading through my novel manuscript carefully, since I had added a big chunk of manuscript—a diary of a teenage character I wrote about in a previous posting— and   wanted to make sure that the rest of the novel was in sync with it.  Often, when I am at this state this stage of the editing process I enter a state of what I call “Tweaking madness.”  I see clunky sentences or awkward paragraphs and I think “How could I have written this? This is so awful!  How could I have ever thought this novel was any good?”  And usually that’s the time to put it aside until I can look at it with fresh eyes.  Because the clunky parts are usually very isolated, and most readers simply breeze past them.

This time, I did catch some awkward phrasing and did some revision, but overall didn’t escalate into “Tweaking Madness.”  What I did find as I read through Ralph’s diary, interspersed with the letters and other writings of Shea, my Hosea figure, was a growing sense of unease regarding how Christian the novel was.

I’ve been spending a lot of time learning how to use social media effectively to promote my writing–definitely not there yet–but part of it involves following on Twitter, Facebook, etc. the work of writers and artists whose work you admire.  And most of these are secular, for me.  Chaim Potok is dead and Marilynne Robinson doesn’t have a Twitter account.  I was wondering if Joss Whedon or Margaret Atwood (or more likely fellow Whedon and Atwood enthusiasts) ever stumbled onto Ralph and Shea’s letters, whether they would just zone out immediately, because of their overtly Christian perspective on the world–even if Ralph and Shea were using that perspective to bring down a fascist regime ruling the the United States.

And then there’s the converse problem, Shea is not really “Christian fiction” in the way that the contemporary publishing world Day-for-the-F-Word-web-236x180defines Christian fiction.It is written from the viewpoint of a philandering husband, and while the sex is not graphically described, it is plentiful and the F-word appears throughout the novel (It’s really odd, my characters can say the F-word, but writing as myself, I say “F-word instead “F—“)

Here is the climactic scene, in which Islam Goldberg-Jones is on trial for providing weapons to the guerrillas trying to bring down the Christian Republic (but the real object of the trial is to defame his wife, Shea.)  It’s kind of appropriate actually, for Easter weekend:

  “Tell me Mr. Islam Goldberg-Jones.  Are you Muslim or Jewish?” the prosecutor began.

“My mother was brought up in a conservative Jewish family, but both of my parents considered themselves atheists.  They taught me that God did not exist.”

I heard gasps from the courtroom.  They had vetted the audience.

“And did Hoshea Weber know you were an atheist when she married you?”

“Yes.”

“And did she try to convert you?”

I paused and then said, “Not in the way that you mean.”

The military judge said, “Answer his question, Mr. Jones.”

“Goldberg-Jones,” I corrected him.

The bailiff punched the left side of my head, and I heard a consistent high hum in that ear for the rest of the proceedings.

The lawyer rephrased his question.  “Did she try to convince you that God exists and that Jesus was the Son of God?  Do you believe that Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and buried, rose again and will come to judge the living and the dead?

Shea ascribed what happened next to the Holy Spirit.  I will say only this—a quick succession of holos appeared before me, superimposing themselves over the audience in courtroom: Ralph saying—earnest brown eyes wide at having met his first atheist—“But it’s like love, Uncle Iz, you can’t see or hear or touch love, but love still exists”; Ralph clinging to me and sobbing at the border of Akwesasne before he turned back with Hank because Gladys and Edna needed him; Shea smiling at me as we walked and talked in Rock Creek Park and when we lay naked under the ancient Weber family quilt;   Leah leaning against the fence at the farm on Thanksgiving day thirteen years ago.  Al calling me “son.”  My own parents reading Dr. Seuss to me.  L’Merci running across the yard at Al and Deborah’s house with Gladys and Edna.  All the Webers and I laughing ourselves sick over an only moderately amusing story, because we loved each other.  Bernie calling my name, “Ih-ihz.”

“I don’t know whether God is real,” I said.  “But I can tell you right now that he’s a hell of a lot more real than you guys and your god are to me.  It’s the god you speak of that presides over your tortures and murders and atrocities that doesn’t exist.  As for Jesus rising from the dead, today, and today only, I choose to believe in the resurrection because that was Jesus saying ‘Fuck you’ to the Empire who crucified him.  And yeah today I believe he will come again to judge us and you all should be really, really afraid.”

I saw the bailiff descending on me with his baton and then everything went black.

So you see my dilemma.

Anyway, I went to the Maundy Thursday service at my church last night and in thinking about Jesus’ sacrifice, it kind of hit me that it’s really not much of a sacrifice for me to be true to who my characters are.  They are entitled to be devout Christians, and if a secular public has a problem with that, well, may I not be ashamed of the Gospel of Christ.  And if a religious public has a problem with Iz, well, he probably agrees with their assessment of his character.  And if their problem with him is that he uses the F-word,  that really is their problem, not Iz’s.

When I got home, I found a letter from the Posen Foundation saying I was not among the five finalists in their fiction prize, but that they thought my writing sample had been impressive and they encouraged me to submit again next year.  Not sure if that was something they said to everyone, but it sounded like more than boilerplate.  The timing after the Maundy Thursday service seemed apropos, since the Foundation is designed to promote secular Jewish culture.  I actually knew that Shea would be a longshot for the fellowship, but reasoned that since Iz is a very secular Jewish character, and Hosea was a Jewish prophet, and secular Judaism does have some connection to the Jewish prophetic tradition, it was worth the application.  But I also knew that since I applied for the Posen Fellowship, the novel had gotten progressively more Christian.  I had kind of thought I might be able to up the Jewish content, if I got the Fellowship, but that just wasn’t happening, so there was a small measure of relief, too.  Kind of like dating someone you know you’re ill-suited for, and then being glad that s/he later finds a good match.

 

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.