It Only Took One Week (Plus About 20 Years)

The view from The Barngalow.

This is for everyone who writes. Or paints. Or sings. Or cooks, or dances, or builds, or teaches, or searches for cures. Or catches flying objects while leaping in the air.

This is for everyone who has a dream. Or maybe you don't have a dream. Maybe you're just trying to get through a tough time. It's for you, too.

It's for everyone who feels like they can't quite get a break but they can't quite give up, either.

It's for everyone who cares deeply about what they do, who wants their work to somehow find its place in this world.

Keep going. Don't give up. Because the cliché really is true: You never know what might be right around the corner.

I have been writing for years. For decades, even. And last week my agent, the incredible Elisabeth Weed, sent my novel out into the world...

But wait, let me back up a bit. The week before that I sent my son Michael out into the world. He landed in Italy. This is how he looked to me right before we said our good-bye at the airport:

Ciao, Michael. (Appearing somewhat blurry through his mama's misty eyes.)

The next week Elisabeth sent my novel, The Underside of Joy, to her amazing foreign rights agent, Jenny Meyer. I felt a bit like this, getting out of the shower that morning:

On pins and needles. (Photo by Daniel Prince)

But Jenny said wonderful things about the novel. Both she and Elisabeth sent it out. And the first place it landed? The first country to make an offer? Italy. Italy!

God, I love that country.

It was my husband's birthday. I woke Stan up with the news. We had a good cry.

More offers came in from other countries, including the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, Brazil, Israel and Taiwan. There were several auctions. (Sometimes, I admit, I have to recheck my emails to make sure it's really happening.) And then, this past Wednesday, an auction in NYC.

I am thrilled and honored to tell you that my U.S. editor is Denise Roy, and that The Underside of Joy will be published by Dutton in January 2012!

And I am humbled, because I know so many gifted writers who have worked hard and long and still haven't heard the big Yes. I want you to know that I had received nothing but rejections on my other manuscripts. There were a few very close almosts and kind words of encouragement, yet they always preceded one or more of the following: But. Unfortunately. However. Nevertheless. In this difficult market. Didn't quite fall in love. Not for us.

I'll write more later about the long uphill-both-ways icy road that led to this miraculous week, and how Elisabeth became my agent. (It wasn't through contacts. I queried her. We met through the dreaded slush pile.)

But for now I want to tell you about one more crazy thing. The week before all this happened, I'd made reservations to go ziplining through the redwood canopy this past Sunday to surprise Stan for his birthday. We'd never ziplined before. I love the redwoods and they play an important role in my novel. So the day turned out to be a fitting celebration not only of his birthday, but of the whole wild ride we'd found ourselves on.

You want me to do what?

If you've never experienced ziplining, it goes something like this:

1.  Stand on a miniscule platform 300 feet or so from the ground. Try to look casual while gripping tree trunk.

2.  Allow a friendly young stranger to secure your harness, helmet, and shiny metal aparatus.

3.  Allow same stranger to hook you to a cable that extends 800 feet to another tree, still 300 feet from the ground, so you can travel 25 mph suspended from said cable.

4.  Hang on.

5.  Step off miniscule platform into vast sky.

6.  Keep hanging on.

7.  Say, Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

8.  Repeat 7 times.

Happy 50th, Stan!

Six-Word Stories

I've been revising a novel that runs about 80,000 words and writing web copy for a large site. So today's blog will be short on words. Which can be a good thing. No one could pare writing to the bone quite like Hemingway. He even created the six-word story:

For sale: Baby shoes. Never worn. -- Ernest Hemingway 

A six-word story packs conflict, movement, and resolution -- all into one quick fix. Perfect for today's readers' short attention spans. It's hard to believe that Hemingway came up with the idea long before twitter was even a tweet on anyone's screen. (Not that I would compare his writing with tweeting. Ever.)

But, really, brewing a cup of tea and curling up in front of the fire with a good six-word story doesn't quite do it for me. And who can get excited about slathering on the sunscreen, setting up the beach chair, and losing yourself in the summer's hottest six-word bestseller? Long live the novel.

Still, it's fun to see how much a few words can convey. Fun, but not necessarily easy. Concise writing takes time. As Blaise Pascal said, "If I had more time I would have written a shorter letter."

Do you have any six-word stories to share? Here are four of my attempts. Then back to slaving over the 80,000-word manuscript...which is probably 79,994 words too long for its own good.

Lost: Man

Found: Woman

Name: Tony(a)

Another moving day. I can’t. Move.

Forever,

Mrs. Leone Chao Schwartz Leone

The sun didn’t rise. The end.

If a Tree Falls in the Forest...

As I’ve mentioned, we recently moved, and are now living surrounded by redwoods. I am in love with the redwoods. One of my favorite things to do these days is to walk my lab, Stuart, up the steep road that zigzags through the trees.

The air smells delicious. Along with the redwoods, the fir, oak, and bay trees all mingle with a little wood smoke, sometimes a tinge of salty seaweed if there’s fog heading in from the Pacific. Walking through the dappled light, I get why fairy tales take place in forests, why the word enchanted often precedes the word forest. There’s magic in the air, sometimes even the feeling I’m stepping on sacred ground.

About ten years ago, a landslide ravaged the lot next to us. I’ve been told that redwoods fell like a line of dominos, one knocking down the other, pounding the earth below into muddy oblivion. A road collapsed. An old empty cabin and a couple of storage sheds ended up at different addresses altogether.

This, apparently, was not the result of an act of nature, but of some type of malfunction concerning a water tank cap. Despite the big screw up, the hill has healed, sans redwoods, into a stretch of sun-drenched acreage, full of brush too dense to walk through – mostly blackberry bushes, ferns, cattails, and young bays.

But hanging on, literally, for dear life, stood – or leaned is more accurate – a circle of seven redwoods at the edge, nearest the road. The landslide had moved them, but it hadn’t brought them down.

The writer in me saw them as a metaphor: a redwood family that had gone through some hard times when the earth got pulled out from under them ten years ago, but had hung on and managed to thrive, albeit at a somewhat disconcerting angle. An against-all-odds bravado type of lean. I could almost hear them say, "Yo Adrian. We did it!"

Recently, the road above their root system began buckling. When we sat out on our sunny deck, the trees creaked and swayed and leaned – a bit more, it seemed, every day.

Someone called the county. Men came out with their hardhats and clipboards and assessed the situation: Those trees had become as loose as a six-year-old’s front teeth. They had to come down. By the next morning I heard trucks. I heard saws. I heard a helluva lot of swearing.

Cutting down towering redwoods is not, evidently, a walk in the park.

A man knocked on my door. He told they would be cutting down the trees.

“That’s too bad,” I said.

He nodded. “Yeah. But they gotta come down. A storm. Wind. Someone could get killed.”

Craning my neck, I asked, “Which way will they fall?”

“The same way they’re leaning. Up the hill that-a-way.”

“Not this way?”

“No.”

It was a still, foggy summer morning. “So,” I said. “If something goes wrong, say, a storm suddenly kicks in and the wind blows this way, you’ll, you know, yell ‘timber’?”

He smiled patiently. “Yeah. But don’t worry. Those trees aren’t coming anywhere near this place unless there’s a hurricane.”

I stood at the window and took pictures. There was no wind, but still, I worried. I worried about the birds that might be nesting in the branches. I worried about the deer and raccoons that might have dens on the hill. And I worried that I was trusting a complete stranger that the trees would not fall down on our roof. A complete stranger, who could have, for all I knew, just that morning begun his career in tree-cutting.

One guy went up and up and up in a cherry-picker basket, as far as the crane would go. The redwood still loomed high above him. Cherry trees barely graze a redwood’s knees. He took his buzzing saw to the tree. Leaning way out of the basket, he cut a wedge into the trunk. Then he sawed a bit more on the other side, and jumped back. There was a lot more yelling from below. The tree fell straight over, just like the man told me it would. Our whole house shook. Stuart barked and ran in from the other room and sat on my feet.

One by one, the trees came down while I watched. I understood that cutting them down was a safety measure, that even I would feel more comfortable sitting on our deck without their creaking and swaying that could one day give way to a huge SNAP. But I felt melancholy. Those redwoods had been a symbol of resilience for me. Of never, never, never, never giving up, as my friend Ellen has taught me. It has been one of those times in life when I can use those kinds of reminders. I know that a lot of us can these days.

But what was I supposed to make of this? Never, never, never, never give up? Withstand life’s landslides? Live and learn and learn how to lean? But don’t be surprised if someone comes along after all that and cuts you off at the knees?

See what I mean? Depressing stuff. So I decided that this was one of those times when, as a writer, I was simply here to bear witness. I didn’t need to apply a bunch of metaphors about tenacity. I didn’t need to interpret or plant my own symbols into this story. I just needed to tell it:

A tree fell in the forest. And I was there. I saw it. I heard it. Then six more fell. They did not go quietly. Each and every one made a thunderous sound.

End of story.

Until the other day, when Stuart and I were on our walk, and I saw something in the concrete. Now I'm letting this redwood have the last word: