On The Bee Sting, Deadlines, and Other Thoughts

Help me choose an author photo!

One of the many new author pictures by Carly Rae Brunault, taken at the Montague Book Mill

Dear Writers,

I’m in the Nields-Duffy Inferno, a little-known circle of Dante’s midlife-crisis epic, in which the month of May produces more birthdays, anniversaries, minor holidays and––this year––Big Life Moments (like graduations) than any other month in the calendar year. May, in our family, makes December appear to be…August. Or…March? Wait, which month is quiet and boring? Oh, right—NONE OF THEM.

Anyway, my particular Cup Overfloweth situation du jour has to do with my eldest child about to graduate plus a deadline of a novel draft coinciding on pretty much the same date. Add to that two kids on varsity teams, end-of-year literary events in Writing It Up in the Garden, Nields Band gigs, and you begin to see why I haven’t written to you as much of late.

It’s not that I’m not thinking of you. I think of you all the time. So many things I want to tell you. Like that you really should make the time to see Poor Things, while I wouldn’t bother with The Zone of Interest. Like how the poem “Siri As Mother” by Hala Alyan is friggin’ perfect. Like that orchids are surprisingly easy to keep alive (one-two ice cubes per stalk once a week). Like that I finally, after two years, got author photos done. (Actually, can you help me choose? Read on if you’re willing.)

I read The Bee Sting, Paul Murray’s most recent novel set in post-crash Ireland. It’s a 643 page family dramady told in alternating sections by the four members of a nuclear family named Barnes (nuclear being the pertinent term). I loved this novel so much that when I finished, I just turned back to page one and started re-reading it and have now almost completed my second pass. It’s even better the second time. If I weren’t facing my own novel draft deadline, I would write an essay on how Murray positions the concepts of “Nature” versus “natural” in the narrative, and not just because there’d a lot of “Ns” in that title. Perhaps I’ll do that in June. But for now, what I’m taking from the experience of reading a book so similar (in some ways) to what I myself have been trying to write (family saga, past/present timeline, multi-voiced) is that I would not want ONE WORD removed from this novel. Every sentence, every word, feels precious to me.

Yet every agent and publisher will tell debut novelists to keep their word count to 90K. At most, and only for certain genres, 100K.

The novel draft that’s due on May 26 is already 126K (424 pages) and I can tell it will only get longer. My poor poor editor!!! And I’m sure I will recant this statement in some future newsletter, but for today, my thinking is that I’d rather write the book I want to write (albeit with economical and elegant sentences, unless the character’s particular way of speaking demands the kind of stream of consciousness, loose silliness that they occasionally need) than adhere to a publisher’s desire to cut paper printing costs. If my book exists only as an ebook or audio book, or if I have to pay for the printing myself, I owe it to my characters and their story to tell as much of it as the reader cares to hear.

But only if it’s interesting. The great thing about Writing It Up in the Garden groups is that by reading aloud parts of my work, I can tell almost instantly (yes, even on Zoom) where the story sparks and where it slags. I promise you. I won’t let my book slag.

On my bedside to read or reading:

And, finally, here are some of the many amazing author photos Carly Rae Brunault took of me in April at the Montague Book Mill. If you have thoughts about which one I should use as my Official Author Photo, please let me know!

Just some of the pictures the amazing Carly Rae Brunault took