Writing update, November

A pretty slow month for me, submissions wise, because I haven't finished any new stories this month. I dedicated my writerly energies in the last four weeks toward a much longer short story than I usually write (about 6,000 words, versus a typical length of 1,000-2,500 words). Usually, I'll compose three or four new stories in a month, but this one has really slowed me down.

I have three stories currently submitted to various markets. There are at least two other stories I need to re-submit, but haven't yet. I'm not quite sure whether I'll rewrite them before I do that, or whether I'll be lazy and re-submit them as they are.

In a previous post, I wrote:

Here are my submission statistics by month:

May: 3 submissions, 1 rejection (1 form)

June: 4 submissions, 3 rejections (2 form, 1 personal)

July: 4 submissions, 5 rejections (3 form, 2 personal)

August: 6 submissions, 3 rejections (1 form, 2 personal)

September: 5 submissions, 7 rejections (4 form, 3 personal)

October: 6 submissions, 4 rejections (3 form, 1 personal)

November: 3 submissions, 3 rejections (2 form, 1 personal).

I don't know if the story I'm finishing now is great, but it's a big step forward for me. Most of my stories are concerned with characters going through some period of emotional upheaval. But this one combines that emotional upheaval with a narrative arc in which stuff actually happens in the world of the story. In other words, it has a real plot.

George Orwell dispenses valuable advice, craps on politicians

Don't use the passive voice, dummy

From George Orwell's essay, "Politics and the English Language":

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?

He gives six rules for avoiding bad writing:

i. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

This is good advice, but Orwell's essay is really about politics and language (as the title states). He writes:

Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

This suggests that bad political writing is a deliberate act of malice rather than mere incompetence. Orwell wrote the essay in 1946 about British politics, but this point remains relevant for Americans in 2012. How much has been written about the "epistemic closure" of the republican party in the run up to the recent election? How much of that phenomenon was based on near-meaningless talk and writing from pundits and politicians?

For Orwell, clear writing is political activism.

Thanksgiving part 2

The Turducken cometh:

To be precise, it's a Cornish Turdoublucken: A cornish gamehen inside a chicken inside a chicken (not a typo, there were two chickens) inside a duck inside a turkey. 

It tasted good, but it precipitated a much larger food coma than I've ever experienced before.

Thanksgiving part 1

Thanksgiving weekend has begun. Yesterday I had dinner with Emily's family. Spinach and brie stuffing, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, green beans, biscuits, cranberry sauce, and:

Smoked turkey roulet, bursting at the seams with stuffing and meat.

Process:

1) Remove breast from turkey (with skin, of course)
2) Lay breast flat
3) Pound breast flatter
4) Add delicious stuffing to middle of breast
5) Roll up the breast, truss it.
6) Put in charcoal grill over coals covered with rosemary for ~2 hours.
7) Slice and serve

Like a turducken, one of the benefits of the turkey roulet is that there's no carving at the table--the meat has no bones in it. It was delicious. Very smoky, very tender (from all the pounding), and not dry.

pre-Thanksgiving pie post

Chocolate pudding pie, with a gluten free crust. Pudding via Smitten Kitchen.

More food to come. I'm gearing up for a Thanksgiving holiday of smoked turkey breast roulade and turducken.

More on "Lincoln"

An interesting article from Kate Masur, writing for the New York Times:

Even more unsettling is the brief cameo of Lydia Smith (played by S. Epatha Merkerson), housekeeper and supposed lover of the Pennsylvania congressman and Radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens, played by Tommy Lee Jones. Stevens’s relationship with his “mulatto” housekeeper is the subject of notoriously racist scenes in D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film “Birth of a Nation.” Though Mr. Spielberg’s film looks upon the pair with far more sympathy, the sudden revelation of their relationship — Stevens literally hands the official copy of the 13th Amendment to Smith, before the two head into bed together — reveals, once again, the film’s determination to see emancipation as a gift from white people to black people, not as a social transformation in which African-Americans themselves played a role.

Masur's argues that, beyond the film's beautiful opening scene, the African Americans in "Lincoln" do not have a material influence on the outcome of the film. She doesn't mean that the characters themselves are passive, because in several instances African American characters speak out about their experiences. She means that the film does not show African American characters having a direct influence on Lincoln's (or any other politicians') thinking about slavery or the 13th amendment.

I would quibble with this a little bit, because the opening scene, in which a black soldier confronts Lincoln about equal pay and equal rights, frames the rest of the film. But certainly "Lincoln" could have done better showing how escaped slaves worked and argued for their own freedom.

Some short stories I've read recently, and liked

"He Reminds Us" by Jennifer Linnea. A short piece about home, how people view other homes, exoticism, and otherness.

"Everything Must Go" by Brooke Wonders. Compellingly weird. A story of domestic abuse, strife, longing, and fear. A sentient house and its strange inhabitants: an invisible mother, a father made of glass, a son growing wings, and a daughter getting thinner and thinner.

"Cartographer's Ink" by Beth Cato. I found the central theme of leaders deciding the fate of the subjects from afar, without a lot of perspective or remorse, particularly compelling and relevant.

Three pretty different stories, but I liked them all!