Tag Archives: The Divorce Girl

Final, Final, Final Edits On a Book I’ve Been Writing for 16 Years: Everyday Magic, Day 523

Posted on March 22, 2012 | 2 Comments

As I read the galleys of my forthcoming novel, The Divorce Girl,  I’m finding it hard to read very much at a time and yet rereading this book is what I want to do most. Knowing this is the last read-through before publication is daunting, and not just because there may be typos lurking (like chiggers in Kansas each summer) that no one will see until it’s too late.

The lure and pressure of the final, final, final edits run in overdrive for me because of how many years I’ve been writing this novel. I started when Forest was born. He’s going to turn 17 this May. I’ve rewritten the book so many times, cut and added, changed or honed every sentence so extensively that I truly have passages of the book memorized (which makes it hard to see what’s really there). Add to this the steroid-infused impulse to “get it right,” every nuance, gesture, image, phrase, and you can imagine why I carry this galley with me wherever I go.

Of course, the urge to judge what’s here flares up its little flames as I read my own words. Luckily, I have the words of Bruce Springsteen from his speech last week at SXSW:

“Rumble, young musicians, rumble. Open your ears and open your hearts. Don’t take yourself too seriously, and take yourself as seriously as death itself. Don’t worry. Worry your ass off. Have unclad confidence, but doubt. It keeps you awake and alert. Believe you are the baddest ass in town-and you suck! It keeps you honest. Be able to keep two completely contradictory ideals alive and well inside of your heart and head at all times. If it doesn’t drive you crazy, it will make you strong.”

So I’m off to rumble in the music of this novel, checking for final off-notes and then letting it go. Holding on one last time reminds me of how much I’ve learned about writing, healing, community and love through and while writing this book, and how indebted I am to the bravery and wisdom of my characters (in this book and in my life).

Special pre-publication deal: My publisher, Ice Cube Press, is selling advance copies of the book right now, free shipping! Check it out.

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Hunting for Blurbs: Everyday Magic, Day 479

Posted on January 10, 2012 | Comments Off

“Will you blurb my book?” Any writer will recognize the charge of those necessary words as we approach the famous and more-famous to ask for their help. Today I typed those words in multiple emails to novelists I admire with all my heart after months of considering who to ask to blurb my forthcoming novel, The Divorce Girl.

The process is tender and full of ethical hidey-holes whether you’re the blurber or blurbee. Having been on the other end plenty of times, I’ve developed my own criteria: I will blurb your book if I have a relationship with you (friend, student, teacher, colleague), I believe in your work, and my life is not so madcap out of tilt that I can barely find the time to take a long enough bath. This isn’t easy criteria, and I’ve hurt some people’s feelings when I was honest enough to say, “I wish you the best, but I don’t feel strongly enough about this work.”

For the people I’m asking, I understand they simply may be too busy or just might not connect with my writing which, in most cases, truly isn’t personal. I also understand I’m asking them to take the time to read a 300-page book and then write a thoughtful couple of sentences or paragraphs on it that would be printed on the book’s back cover. Some of these writers are surely inundated with such requests and worst (“I just finished a 5,000-page trilogy. Will you read it, edit it, and help me get it published?”). Any writer knows how important it is to protect time and space for writing.

I also wonder about the whole blurbing business, which is based on getting someone more famous than you to say what you’re doing is pretty darn good. On the other hand, I know, from receiving blurbs from writers over the years, how much their words mean to me — not just as a way to market my books, but as a lantern held in the darkness of trying to publish and thrive as a writer. I have a file of special things writers have told me that I keep because of how much their words inspire me.

Just now, I got a message back from the first one I wrote about how she would love to blurb my book. I blow kisses in her direction for her help and generosity. When the illusive blurber spreads her wings, she is as beautiful as she is kind.

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Sending the Book to the Publisher for Design: Everyday Magic, Day 446

Posted on November 23, 2011 | 5 Comments

I just hit the “send” button on the email to my publisher, releasing into the wilds between my novel after 16 years of writing and revising every speck and inch of this story. The Divorce Girl, the novel I’ve been writing in my head since I was about 15, is coming out this summer, thanks to Ice Cube Books.

It’s an astonishing and simple thing to give the work of a good part of a lifetime over to its ending as one kind of work and beginning as its own thing. The manuscript is finished being in-process at this moment and since I’ve lived over 36 years with it in-process in one way or another, I’m feeling a little sad, a lot happy, and eerily calm. Writing this book has been a life practice, a way of transforming the dysfunctions of my wacky childhood into material I could learn from, a meditation on where I came from, a love story about New Jersey and the girl I was (fictionalized into someone far taller and brighter than I was). Now the practice is on its way to becoming a thing, a vessel that will carry words and stories, images and rhythms, from the interior to the exterior.

This is not to say that a book is a stagnant thing. Having done readings far and near for some years, I love how, in the reading of a book, the story gains new dimensions, and I learn other things it has to say to me between its layers of words. But a published book is outrageously different than a book in process, kind of like going from land to sea, or earth to cosmos, or simply my little mind to readers’ minds.

So in sending the manuscript along, I’m letting that manuscript go, knowing it will return to me in another form, and also knowing that this particular chapter of my own story is finished, and I’m onto an empty and bright new page.

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Letting Go Of My (Divorce) Girl: Everyday Magic, Day 372

Posted on July 22, 2011 | 2 Comments

Me a few years before I began writing this book in my head

Today I finished my final revision on my novel, The Divorce Girl, which is going to my copy editor for several months before my publisher begins designing the book to be released next June. While it’ll be 10-11 months before I hold the book in my hands, that’s small potatoes compared to my journey with this novel: I began writing the book when Forest was a creepy-crawly baby, about 16 years ago. I recently found a pretty advanced revision from 2002. And to be honest, I’ve been writing this book in my head since about 1975, so it’s a shaky, scary and strange thing to be kinda sorta pretty much actually done. I’ve also been down the publishing wormhole, working with three agents and writing hundreds of query letters.

I’ve worked on this book for so long I actually have passages memorized. Even more so, the characters are as real to me as any real-life characters milling through my days. They may exist in a parallel universe, but so do I, and to be finishing the book means my relationship with that universe will change. I know from past publications that it’s not like I’ll lose my characters — after all, especially in the first year of doing every possible reading I can (probably even stopping people on the street to read them a passage if they’ll listen), I’ll be hanging out with Deborah, Liz, Mark, Hank, the rabbi, Boy and Big Boy and the others. On the other hand, I won’t be revealing in print more scenes with them, threading through what everyone is doing in the right balance for a particular chapter, or the other eternal work of revision when the manuscript is 325 pages long.

Mostly, what I want to say right now is that I love my characters. They’ve taught me so much about how we survive trauma and loss. They’ve brought me ecstatic humor and have made me cry many times (I know — nothing more pathetic than a writer crying over her computer as she writes because the writing is just so darn moving). They’ve been my friends and let me be their confidant. So as I let go of the control panel (as if it were my hands and not theirs all along on the buttons and dials), I just want to thank them for so many years and reassure myself that I’ll continue to learn from them, watching for what time reveals of who they are and what it says to me about how to live.

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The Novel is FINALLY Being Published!: Everyday Magic, Day 196

Posted on February 1, 2011 | 8 Comments

How many years have I been writing The Divorce Girl? On paper since Forest was a creeping critter (now he’s a giant), and in my head for about 37 years, give or take a few months. It’s the fictionalized version of the outrageous story I lived in my teens: a household divided in the middle of New Jersey, the 70s and an ethnic hodge-podge of eccentric characters. Basically, I took the outline of my own story, inserted all new characters, and saw what could happen.

How long have I been trying to publish it? I plead disappointment-induced amnesia on this front, but roughly for the last 5-10 years. There have been little mountains of hope and big crashes into the muddy or ice-covered earth repeatedly. I’ve worked with three agents along the way, all of whom loved the novel (at first, at least), asked me to revise some core element in it (all for the good!), and then eventually — because the crumbling publishing industry or simply losing interest — said, “No thanks.” I’ve mailed queries here and yonder. I’ve sat on bookstore floors, taking notes from various publishing guides to figure out what to do and then did it. And I did incantations, rituals, journal prayers and excessive deep wishing.

What kept me going is this: I knew it was a good story, and that it was written well (particularly after a decade of revisions). I also knew that beyond whatever little accolades there are to be had in getting it published, it is simply part of my life’s work to put this story out in the world. Not surprisingly, the novel mirrors my publishing journey: a girl has to find her place in the world against shifting odds and through the power of art and community.

So now I’m thrilled that the book and my main character — young Deborah (who is between 15-18, depending on what character you’re reading) — will be stepping out into the world in the summer of 2012, thanks to the superb publishing excellence and magic of Ice Cube Books. May Deborah and the other characters travel to wherever they can do some good and come back with new tales to tell.

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