Misery Tour

We took what locals have begun referring to as a “Misery Tour”  on Sunday. Lately I’ve been encouraged when we go to Napoleon or Magazine Street in Uptown New Orleans. The streetlights on the entire route are now up and running, there are many FEMA trailers, lots of signs of rebuilding. I’d started feeling pretty good about the city’s future. Until Sunday.

We got off the Interstate at Elysian Fields. The streetlights were all working, although there were still many boarded up houses and closed businesses, their vacant front windows marked by a dirty water line. The telltale hatch marks of the rescue teams were still there, along with their tragic commentaries. (One dead black lab…) But still, here and there were houses with spiffy new coats of paint, new wicker chairs on their front porches. As we turned onto St. Claude and drove through the Bywater district, it got worse. Then we crossed the Industrial Canal into the Lower Ninth Ward.

Temporary stop signs still control traffic at major intersections. Electric poles lean at drunken angles, their wires dangling. Downed trees, their branches long dead and whitening under the fierce Louisiana sun, still half block some roads. Abandoned boats litter points of high ground. Most houses are still vacant, with no sign of life or reconstruction. The Ninth Ward is a largely African-American part of town, which has led some to portray Katrina as a mainly black tragedy. But if you drive through the Lower Ninth into St. Bernard parish, you’ll find yourself in Chalmette and Violet, a largely white area. And here the devastation is unimaginable.

Here are transformer stations standing empty. Cemeteries with their tombs knocked awry and split open. Mile after endless mile of shattered, empty homes. No blue tarps, no FEMA trailers, no people.

As we drove past these endless, silent testimonials to personal pain and loss on an epic scale, I found myself thinking of other devastated cities. Beirut. Baghdad. The ruined German cities I remember from my childhood in Europe in the Fifties.

In a week, it will have been a year since Katrina struck. I came home saddened, angry at a government that could cause this destruction by its mindless pandering to big oil and certain business interests, and then just walk away, and ashamed. Very, very ashamed.

Why Derivative Tops Original

A glimmer of good news: an editor is interested in my thriller, THE ARCHANGEL PROJECT.

This is obviously better than a rejection, but it’s only the first step. It’s far too early to get excited. There was a time, not so long ago, when editors had the power to buy the books they liked. No longer. Now book purchases must go through the dread Committee. Not only must all the editors at a house be excited by a book (and optimistic about its sales potential), but the marketing people are brought in, too. If the marketing people can’t “see” how they will market a book, they can kill its purchase. This obviously favors books that are imitative and can be pitched as the “new Da Vinci Code” or “Sex in the City meets Friends” over books that might be wonderful, but would require the marketing department to actually work hard and be original.

If you think I sound like I don’t like marketing departments, um.... A few years ago I wrote a book called Confessions of a Dead Romance Writer. It wasn’t a romance, it was sorta a suspense but not exactly, it wasn’t a mystery, it was…different. My agent loved it. Half a dozen editors loved it. So did their colleagues. But in one house after another, the book’s purchase was killed by the marketing department who said they wouldn’t know how to market it. That book is still in search of a buyer.

So I am only cautiously optimistic. My optimism is helped by the fact that two houses have already rejected THE ARCHANGEL PROJECT for being “too commercial.” Presumably that means it’s something the marketing people should find easy to sell. Yet I’ve heard it said that editors these days only manage to purchase one out of every five books they want to buy. Not the best odds.

Treading Water

It’s the ol’ One Step Forward, Two Steps Back routine. The week before last, I went up to the lake and wrote pages and pages of manuscript. All excited to type up the fruits of my labor and press on with my rough draft, I came home and…got sick. Spent the entire following week in bed, too groggy-headed even to write. I’m now on the road to recovery, but my sense of panic has crept back.

What I’m reading…
THE STORM, by Ivor van Heerden, deputy director of the LSU Hurricane Center, about what went wrong before and after Katrina, and why, and how it’s all going to happen again because the US Government is doing NOTHING to fix the lethal combination of problems they’ve created—degradation of the wetlands, loss of the barrier islands, the Funnel caused by the Intracoastal Waterway and the MR GO… Probably not the most comforting reading as we head into the danger zone of the hurricane season! A popular sign around town: Make Levees not War.

The Lake House Effect

I’m back from the lake and happy to report that my productivity far exceeded my wildest expectations. I’m not sure how many pages I wrote, since I was writing in long hand and I haven’t typed it up yet, but I’m now feeling much, much better about being able to meet my deadline.

I’m not entirely certain what aspect of the experience contributed to such a steady outflow of creativity. I can’t say it was the lack of distractions, since while I was up there I also managed to unpack, wash, and put away all the kitchen stuff (of which there is much; Steve had enough glasses and plates in storage to outfit half the restaurants in the French Quarter). Lack of the Internet undoubtedly helped. The calming inspiration of the beautiful lake contributed. Being able to write through the late afternoon and evening, late into the night—always my most productive time, but normally reserved for family—surely played an important part. Perhaps it simply all came together with a strong sense of obligation to focus that came from the knowledge I was taking time away from my family and the house.

Of course, the experience was not without hiccups. A house deep in the woods of the dark wilds of Louisiana can be a scary place late at night for those of us with overactive imaginations and memories of Deliverance. One night I came to the scene where someone sneaks into the house to try to kill my sleeping hero, and thought, umm, I’m skipping this chapter!

This week will be spent typing up my outpourings—and of course trying to bring calm to the chaos that is this half-rebuilt house we’re living in. But at least that sense of creeping panic is gone. This book WILL get done.

Writer Retreating

I’m off to spend the rest of the week up at the lake. It’s difficult to leave the house so soon after moving back in, especially with so much still to be done, boxes to be unpacked, things to be organized and put away. But my deadline is looming, and it will take several intensive, marathon sessions if I’m to have any hope of finishing The Beast (otherwise known as Why Mermaids Sing).

I’ve never done something like this—left my family for a week to concentrate on writing. It’s something I’ve fantasized about, especially when my deadline loomed and family interruptions and distractions were driving me crazy. Now we shall see if it really works.

See you next Monday!