Month: May 2009

Backyard Process

Update on the Little Lolo revisions. It seems as though the process of revision is going very slowly and I don’t seem to have any new ideas for short pieces. I am up to Ch 30 of Little Lolo just trying to get it all into present tense which is much more of an endeavor than I had at first thought. Once that is all in present tense I still need to go back through and clear up scene/summary issues. I’m still not creating enough of an immersive experience. Not quite enough detail and tension–uncertainty to draw the reader in. And I know I have drafted this fairly quickly but I am bored quickly.

Perhaps that is why last night I had a dream that I had enlisted the help of Harry Crumb to make Little Lolo Stories into a graphic novel–together we continually tried to draw little Lolo’s face and also Mitedio’s face. I know my sister has soe pictures of the real life Mitedio so perhaps I can get some insight from that. Maybe I can interview my cousin Frankie since Mitedio was practically his father. At any rate in the dream I wanted to get those faces down.

On another note–I am typing this in a back yard in Colorado. My sister and I used to joke that we grew up in back yards and most of my fiction has to do with basements and backyards–places without windows and places without shelter. And I do miss my window just right off my desk. Now I have an internet card and can go online in any backyard I want–to write about backyards.

I am planning on visiting some bookstores arond here to get some pictures and perhaps some video–also I want to get some video at a great coffee shop here and in Walsenburg I like to visit from time to time so maybe I will be posting that soon.

Lorca and Failure

Last week D and I shot a brief interview of John R. Paul at Prairie Archives Booksellers and after I picked up an interesting bio of Lorca. I’ve been reading selectively and found an interesting portion on Lorca’s first writing success–but oddly the passage is themed towards failure. The writer Leslie Stainton describes Lorca’s attitude concerning his first book of poems in the following: “He expected to fail.”

That first book was titled Impressions and Landscapes and Stainton writes that Lorca retrieved all the unsold copies of the book from Granada bookshops and piled them in his family’s attic and she reveals that in his essays and lectures he later claimed to have burned those copies.

“There is within me an ideal so lofty that I will never achieve it.”

I’m thinking of Lorca and his first self-proclaimed failure especially since so much of my revision work for the summer is becoming larger and larger. I am beyond the genesis of the story and now I am going line by line and crafting sentences which is my biggest weakness and the thing I am least interested in. In short, I must become ambitious with my sentences as well as the arcs of stories.