"Adventures in Tornado Alley: Photography by Eric Nguyen" at the Todd/Browning Gallery in Downtown Art Walk

The Todd/Browning Gallery, where the late Eric Nguyen's photos go on display next month, is part of the larger Downtown Art Walk, during which 40 galleries draw between 3000 and 4000 people every second Thursday of the month. Eric's show, "Adventures in Tornado Alley" coincides with the Art Walk opening on March 12. The gallery is planning a preview on the evening of March 11th also.

Isotope Magazine accepted my essay "The Sharpest Fall" for publication today. The piece describes an experiment some friends and I conducted to test the integrity of the pressure sensor which Eric Nguyen and I unwittingly drove into the Tulia, Texas tornado. Another friend was preparing a scientific paper on the Tulia data and we needed to test some failure modes for the instrumentation. The surprising results of our experiment are interwoven with the recollection of a strange radar vehicle we encountered a few years ago in the plains.

The essay should appear in the magazine's "planetary engineering" issue, but there's no release date as yet. I've been a fan of this journal for years so it's gratifying to land something here. It's a cool meeting place of science and literary writing. Check it out.

no dice

The famous agent passed on Remedy Wheel. I'm disappointed, no way around it. But the feedback was positive in several areas, and the primary objection to the plot is one I hadn't expected and which few early readers have felt was a problem or even mentioned. It's a fundamental premise of the story and one I think I can reinforce. I'm not sure it will be a common complaint, and that gives me reason for hope, if it was truly the fatal flaw for this particular agency.

We'll see. This is the beginning of the road.

Our job candidate on campus today talked about how he had queried several dozen literary agents before hooking one for his story collection. It was a testament to perseverance. So, onward.

Exhibit: Adventures in Tornado Alley, Photos by Eric Nguyen

The Todd/Browning Gallery in Los Angeles, California will exhibit a collection of Eric Nguyen's photography from March 12 through April 4. Eric was my close friend and chase partner and our experiences in 2007 were the subject of my essay "Put on the Petty" in The Missouri Review.

The Todd/Browning Gallery specializes in vintage and contemporary photography by both emerging and established artists from the USA, United Kingdom, Europe, Japan, Australia, and elsewhere. According to gallery director William Eiseman, this will be the first exhibition of storm photography ever in Los Angeles.

Much of Eric's family is from Newport Beach and they're looking forward to sharing his work with relatives who still live in California. We're all proud of him and gratified that he's receiving such well-deserved recognition.

sort of finished

In many ways I've finished Remedy Wheel, at least until such time as a beta-reader or agent or editor (I hope) describes the surely extensive revisions necessary to make it presentable. In the meantime, I feel okay about it. It beats the hell out of my MFA thesis, that's for sure, a document I intend to have found and destroyed by Republican ninjas.

What's next? Revising the synopsis, which I threw together literally overnight for the package that went to New York last month (still waiting). And, despite having a very kind client referral waiting in queue, otherwise known as plan B, it's probably wise to begin imagining a a query letter. In other words, the accouterments of schlepping a novel up and down the metaphorical mean streets of the city.

Good news. Remarkable news, actually. From today's NYT:

Fiction Reading Increases for Adults
By MOTOKO RICH

After years of bemoaning the decline of a literary culture in the United States, the National Endowment for the Arts says in a report that it now believes a quarter-century of precipitous decline in fiction reading has reversed.

The report, “Reading on the Rise: A New Chapter in American Literacy,” being released Monday, is based on data from “The Survey of Public Participation in the Arts” conducted by the United States Census Bureau in 2008. Among its chief findings is that for the first time since 1982, when the bureau began collecting such data, the proportion of adults 18 and older who said they had read at least one novel, short story, poem or play in the previous 12 months has risen.

no news is not news

I'm a bad blogger. I know this. I can't find anything compelling about the painstaking revision of a big novel. The process simply doesn't make for the stuff of story, in my mind. I made a few really positive changes today, but how would anyone reading here know that without having seen the material both before and after, without having read the entire manuscript to see how smoothly (I think) the new material fits into the image systems and schema [i don't know what that means but I have a feeling about it, like a color] of the story, or how certain deletions juxtaposed material so intuitively and "organically" that I instantly recognized their value? See? You can't.

But we have to blog apparently. We have to give good platform.

And the drama of my "partial" has really stretched about as far as tension can go without thinning into the sleepy funk of vigil. I'm still waiting to hear back from an agent who contacted me. I still hope he wants to see the rest of the book. I'm working as if he will, taking advantage of the winter break to revise revise revise. My beta-readers have saved my bacon.

In a few weeks I start teaching four classes at the University of North Texas, one of which is a senior level literature class. Preparation for these courses will consume much of next week, so I have to get what I can out of the next five days. I'm a good multi-tasker, however, and my own writing has never been neglected.

In other news, I noticed Matt Drudge was all crazy that Ann Coulter got bumped from an NBC program. Good for NBC. I was thinking of her just the other day, after watching the German film "Downfall," which called my attention to how much like Joseph Goebbels Coulter is, both in her constant spewing of hate, and how that hate is not directed outward but inward toward other Americans, seventy million Americans, to be precise, who voted for Barack Obama. The hated liberals, about whom a whole coterie of half-assed political hacks have a made a career describing various means to loathe them. Goebbels hated Jews. He wrote about this extensively, articulated it in fine detail (he had a PhD in literature), offering a ready made "intellectual" basis for the most violent crimes of the most violent century. He didn't care if they were German or not. It didn't make any difference to him if they'd been decorated officers or upstanding citizens. In this way he was as anti-German as Coulter is anti-American, hating more Americans in terms of aggregate numbers than probably any leader in the world besides Osama Bin-Laden. Bin-Laden purportedly hates 303 million Americans; Coulter comes in with a respectable 70 million. Not bad!

Houston, your pages have landed

By post I received a card confirming receipt of my pages in the Big Apple, with a promise of response "within four weeks." My FedEx paranoia is resolved.

I'm finding every extra minute will come in handy. There's still much to improve throughout the manuscript, some chapters more than others, some characters especially, like the protagonist hold-over (re-named and re-cast) from the last version, who seems to have dragged all that book's flaws with him to the new story. I think within a week I'll feel marginally comfortable with the draft.

It didn't help reading James Woods' great re-review of Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road in The New Yorker, where he writes of Yates' always-masterful dialogue:

...the same richly restrained prose, luxuriously lined but plain to the touch; the same anxious comedy; the same very cold, appraising eye; and the same superb ear for the foolish histrionics of speech. Out of the apparently diplomatic conformity of mid-twentieth-century American realism—the sort of style that made short stories commercially salable—bursts the monstrous ego of Yates’s male characters, smashing all the eggshell niceties. These men are vulnerable, easily provoked by female competition or resistance, and their theatrical, role-playing speech haplessly shrouds and reveals their anxieties, in clouds of unknowing.

Of course I thought, 'Oh shit, my dialogue isn't doing that!' I definitely should learn to shroud and reveal anxiety in clouds of unknowing before the next project.

Oh, and thanks to cool-mo Hoosier Poetess Micah Ling, whose first poetry collection, Thoughts on Myself, about the flyer Amelia Earhart, is now available for preorder from finishinglinepress.com. Micah helped me realize that the female pilot landing a seaplane at the fairground "amphibian airport" in Remedy Wheel not only could have been Earhart, but should have been. And so now she is.

working and waiting

I'm working and waiting nervously. This morning I checked the FedEx website and discovered my partial was delivered on time, but left "at the door" instead of with a signature confirmation. Normally I'd be fine with that, but in this case I embarked on a paranoid mind-trip about wrong buildings and sneaky saboteurs pilfering partial manuscripts from random doors on 19th Avenue. :-) I composed an email to the "info@" address for the agency, but my friend Jeff talked me down before I sent it.

To add more hopeful vibes to the affair, I secured the remedywheel.com domain name. Nothing there yet, and I won't post anything until there's reason. Okay, back to work.

working as if

I sent the partial yesterday. Odds are the agent will pass on the novel. That's not false modesty or some lack of confidence in my story or my own ability to execute it; it's just reality in the literary fiction game, especially in today's publishing environment. But I'm accustomed to making big investments on long odds in May and June and this is no different. I'm working on the rest of the manuscript now as if the agent will request the "full." The only difference is that I'm sleeping eight hours a night now. If I get good news from New York, I'll cut that to three hours a night until I'm done. Like the stormchasers say, I can sleep when I'm dead.

The revision process is good, but I'm not cutting enough words. Hopefully I'll have time for another pass through. In the process of readying the partial I cut 1000 words, and discovered this when I merged those pages back into the main file. That was a happy surprise. I like the ratio, 1000 words cut every fifty pages. It would bring the project down to the number I need. Okay, more later.

Wish me luck! I need it.