Hallelujah!
Praise and glory be! THE DESIRE PROJECTS--the long-agonized-over literary thriller/chica lit novel that you just might have heard me kvetch about on here--has gone into the mail. Hurray! Thank you for all your support, suggestions, advice, and just general goodwill. By tomorrow afternoon (the U.S. Post Office willing), it will arrive on my agent's desk in Manhattan to await its fate.
Now that I have kissed the manuscript for luck and let it go, I have this bizarre urge to obsess over the quantifiable aspects of it. Why? I guess maybe because the qualitative parts are so nebulous. (Will my agent like it? Will an editor at a publishing house? Will readers?) So, for the record, & because I cannot help myself: THE DESIRE PROJECTS is 25 chapters, or 372 pages, or 98,469 words long.
Note to my hardworking writing students: You should know that when I started my most recent revision, the manuscript was about 106,000 words long, so you can see that I made substantive cuts. Over 7,000 words! Looking back now at my first draft, I can't believe how self-indulgent it was. (Sigh of embarrassment.) But that's what revision's for. And you don't outgrow it. And having to do a lot of it doesn't mean you suck.
Now I'm brainstorming ideas for a website for the novel. I envision lots of gorgeous photographs (already taken by yours truly) of the settings in the book, sound files of the songs that are mentioned (Does anyone out there like the Radiators? or Papa Grows Funk?), a map of the places where my cranky protagonist, Nola, goes during the book, recipes for the food and drinks she makes, links to the restaurants and clubs where she goes, and more. I'm kind of excited about it.
In other happy news, I'm working on my graduate course for this fall, ENGL 810, which focuses entirely on modernist women writers from both sides of the Atlantic: Gertrude Stein, Jean Rhys, Zora Neale Hurston, Katherine Mansfield, Nella Larsen, Margery Latimer, Virginia Woolf, and Meridel Le Sueur. Nice variety, right? Rhys is originally from Dominica, Mansfield's originally from New Zealand, Hurston and Larsen are usually grouped only with the Harlem Renaissance, and Latimer and Le Sueur were Midwestern labor activists as well as experimental writers. So it'll be a little eclectic--and fun.
It's the first time I've ever gotten to teach only women writers of the period--thanks, UNL! (Typical academic course configurations restrict their focus to either U.S. or British modernism, so I'm usually expected to cover the big guys of either: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, & Eliot, or Conrad, Joyce, Eliot, & Pound. Notice how Eliot gets double play?) So I'm interested in seeing what new questions emerge--especially from the interests and theoretical expertise of my grad students--when we read all these women's texts together, now that the field has so thoroughly absorbed the impact and implications of the 1990 Gender of Modernism moment.
We won't have to just keep repeating that these women writers are worthy of serious investigation; that battle, thank goodness, has been won. And we won't have to concentrate on issues of gender--though we can, if we're interested. We have the luxury of seeing what else is interesting about these books.
My goal is for every student to get one good conference paper and a related scholarly article out of the semester. We'll see.
I'm also currently lucky to be reading the stellar memoir pieces of UNL Ph.D. student Andy Nash, who's working on his creative dissertation, and Pine Manor MFA student Faye Rapoport DesPres, who's working on her MFA thesis. So far, both manuscripts are smart, honest, revealing works--and so well written, I'm envious. Hurray for good students everywhere! You make your teachers' days.
Now that I have kissed the manuscript for luck and let it go, I have this bizarre urge to obsess over the quantifiable aspects of it. Why? I guess maybe because the qualitative parts are so nebulous. (Will my agent like it? Will an editor at a publishing house? Will readers?) So, for the record, & because I cannot help myself: THE DESIRE PROJECTS is 25 chapters, or 372 pages, or 98,469 words long.
Note to my hardworking writing students: You should know that when I started my most recent revision, the manuscript was about 106,000 words long, so you can see that I made substantive cuts. Over 7,000 words! Looking back now at my first draft, I can't believe how self-indulgent it was. (Sigh of embarrassment.) But that's what revision's for. And you don't outgrow it. And having to do a lot of it doesn't mean you suck.
Now I'm brainstorming ideas for a website for the novel. I envision lots of gorgeous photographs (already taken by yours truly) of the settings in the book, sound files of the songs that are mentioned (Does anyone out there like the Radiators? or Papa Grows Funk?), a map of the places where my cranky protagonist, Nola, goes during the book, recipes for the food and drinks she makes, links to the restaurants and clubs where she goes, and more. I'm kind of excited about it.
In other happy news, I'm working on my graduate course for this fall, ENGL 810, which focuses entirely on modernist women writers from both sides of the Atlantic: Gertrude Stein, Jean Rhys, Zora Neale Hurston, Katherine Mansfield, Nella Larsen, Margery Latimer, Virginia Woolf, and Meridel Le Sueur. Nice variety, right? Rhys is originally from Dominica, Mansfield's originally from New Zealand, Hurston and Larsen are usually grouped only with the Harlem Renaissance, and Latimer and Le Sueur were Midwestern labor activists as well as experimental writers. So it'll be a little eclectic--and fun.
It's the first time I've ever gotten to teach only women writers of the period--thanks, UNL! (Typical academic course configurations restrict their focus to either U.S. or British modernism, so I'm usually expected to cover the big guys of either: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, & Eliot, or Conrad, Joyce, Eliot, & Pound. Notice how Eliot gets double play?) So I'm interested in seeing what new questions emerge--especially from the interests and theoretical expertise of my grad students--when we read all these women's texts together, now that the field has so thoroughly absorbed the impact and implications of the 1990 Gender of Modernism moment.
We won't have to just keep repeating that these women writers are worthy of serious investigation; that battle, thank goodness, has been won. And we won't have to concentrate on issues of gender--though we can, if we're interested. We have the luxury of seeing what else is interesting about these books.
My goal is for every student to get one good conference paper and a related scholarly article out of the semester. We'll see.
I'm also currently lucky to be reading the stellar memoir pieces of UNL Ph.D. student Andy Nash, who's working on his creative dissertation, and Pine Manor MFA student Faye Rapoport DesPres, who's working on her MFA thesis. So far, both manuscripts are smart, honest, revealing works--and so well written, I'm envious. Hurray for good students everywhere! You make your teachers' days.
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