“Do you want to go to AWP with me?” Michelle asked. “I need to know soon. Like by today.” 

That’s how I ended up going to the annual conference of the AWP, which I think but couldn’t guarantee stands for the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (but then why isn’t it AWWP?). Every year, a bunch of our writing friends go, while Michelle and I gawk at their happy pictures on Facebook, wondering, how did they get the time off work? How long are they staying? What do you even do at a creative writing conference? 

This year, an incredible confluence of events meant that my best writing friend Michelle had to go to AWP. For a change, it was scheduled during our spring break, across the state rather than across the country, and she just published a book she needed to market. 

I hate conferences. I might have mentioned this before. I was force-fed a horrible diet of yearly conferences as a graduate student. Now I feel about conferences the way a lot of people raised in the 70’s feel about carob. It didn’t taste good, and the people who said it was good for me were lying. 

But this was our BIG OPPORTUNITY to go to AWP without missing any classes (teachers hate missing classes), and anyway, I wanted to see Michelle do all her readings and panels and book signings. So we registered, booked a flight, reserved a hotel room in downtown Los Angeles. 

As spring break approached, I got nervous. I really wanted to spend spring break writing and catching up on my grading. If I wasn’t going to do that, I’d better make this conference worthwhile. I looked through the endless list of panels and activities. There were dozens of panels each day, fifteen at a time. Panels on writing, panels on publishing, panels on teaching. Panels on diversity and writing. Panels on parenting and writing. Panels in tribute to this and that author. Prose panels. Poetry panels. And of course, panels of advice from real literary agents, who probably would have the longest lines of people waiting to talk to them and hand them a business card and book proposal after the panel.

It reminded me of my least favorite conference, the one held annually by the Modern Language Association, which every English grad student needs to attend if they are looking for a job. A giant conference filled with useless panel sessions, grad students giving talks solely for the purpose of getting their departments to fund their trip, panels with audiences that were smaller than the panel itself. 

And then, that sense of desperation, of everyone’s needy ego, of desperate desire. These big conferences are like New York–you go there starry-eyed and full of big dreams, leave starved and deflated. 

It was to much to figure out ahead of time. I was going to wing it. But just in case, I rewrote the synopsis for my novel, printed out ten copies and stuck them in my suitcase. 

>Part 2

Imagine writing a short story. Perhaps it is twenty pages long. The story has a beginning, a middle, and end. It has characters, setting, conflicts, resolutions. It comments, implicitly, on a number of themes. 

For your short story, you can see all these elements–the plot, the characters, the themes–in one session of reading. You can sit down with your short story, read it from beginning to end, fix the parts that aren’t working. Then you could read the whole thing again, determine what still isn’t working, fix the parts you overcorrected–where there was no description and now there is too much, where action occurred too gradually but is now too sudden. And then you could read it yet again. You could literally read it dozens of times each day, making small corrections each time, until your story wasn’t even a story anymore but a perfect, polished jewel. 

Now imagine writing a novel. Maybe your novel is three hundred pages long. Each chapter is its own short story, and there are dozens of them, each one needing to properly balance and reflect all the others. It takes several days, at a minimum, just to read the whole thing, much less make any changes. 

How will you possibly revise this beast? 

For my last novel, The Divine Sharpness in the Heart of God, I wrote the whole thing through (on a  blog, as many of you will remember). After that, I had planned to start a revision back at the beginning. But I wasn’t happy with the ending, so I went back ten chapters and wrote a new ending. Then I started at the beginning and revised the entire thing, tightening up rambling sequences, adding more description where it was too spare, adding one new chapter in the middle. Then I reread the whole thing again checking for typos and wonky sentences. 

After that, I was pretty much done. There were some areas that I still thought could be strengthened. But to strengthen those areas, I would need to make changes that might disrupt other parts of the novel, leading to more and more revisions that could possibly unravel the entire structure of the novel. Every change you make in a novel is a giant commitment, because you can’t just spend an hour reading the entire text to make sure the change is working. The change might help the novel, or it might mess it up, and it’s often difficult to tell which.

So I stopped revising. I put out a self-published version for my friends and family and began sending the novel to agents and contests. I moved forward, wrote a few stories and articles. I planned my next book and began to write it. 

Then I got feedback from one of the agents I had sent The Divine Sharpness to. She loved the book but had a few issues with it. I agreed with everything she had to say. So I decided to table the new projects and go back to revising the old one. 

So here I go. I’m changing all kinds of things; the characterizations, a bit of the plot, the ending. It’s extra daunting to go in and start messing around with something that already had a finished-ness to it, but I know it has to be done. Part of me feels like: still this? I’ve been working on this novel for years…three years, it turns out (I had to go look it up). Well, it’s gonna be a few months more. I am predicting six months, and then, after that, I’m sure I’ll have to revise it again. 

That’s okay. I am good at long-term projects. I am a master of delayed gratification. When I first saw kids taking the marshmallow test (kids who can wait five minutes before eating a marshmallow earn a second marshmallow), I knew exactly how five-year-old-me would have reacted: I would have asked, if I can wait ten minutes, can I get two extra marshmallows? 

Someday, this novel will be finished. And I’ll look back on the days when I was writing it, and revising it, and revising it again, and I’ll think: wasn’t that the most fun I ever had? 

I am singing the “REVISION!” song to this tune (the traditional song of my ancestors, the New York Jews):

Yesterday I did something very, very out of character for me. I let someone put a bunch of makeup on me and then take pictures! I know, so crazy. 

First of all, I don’t like taking pictures. (If you have ever done jiu jitsu with me, you know this). Especially digital pictures (which are the only kind of pictures anyone takes of me). There is no worse self-consciousness than posing for a picture, trying not to make a weird face, then having the photographer check the picture and tell me to stop making that weird face. 

But as I get ready to do some presentations and readings, I realized that I need some decent publicity photos. The photo I usually use is one I took with my computer, sitting at a coffee shop grading essays. 

I like this picture because it really captures my essence. In case you ever wondered what my life is like (I know you can’t stop thinking about it), it’s basically like that picture. 

For the conference I just went to, Michelle and I wanted to include pictures with our email addresses at the end of our presentation. She had a lovely professional photo of herself smiling at a literary event, wearing her signature red lipstick and dark eyeshadow.

I had…the coffee-shop selfie. 

“You can’t put those two pictures next to each other,” Michelle said. “You’re not even smiling.” 

We found another photo where I was smiling, from her birthday party a few years ago. But compared to her photo, mine still looked faded and unprofessional. 

That brings up another issue: makeup. I am not a big makeup wearer. I use some tinted moisturizer and lip gloss; that’s about it. I think it is quite lovely on other people, but I just don’t need to look that pretty on a daily basis. But for my grown-up-professional-teacher/writer photos, I would need to wear, as my favorite song of 2015 puts it, “just a touch of makeup, some natural looking makeup.” 

Luckily, my friend and former student, Claire Nobles, is a badass makeup artist and amateur photographer. So I hired her to put actual makeup on me. This included such extremely bizarre substances as foundation, blush, MASCARA (aka eyelash tar). It actually all felt very good, except the mascara which I have officially decided is yucky (but looks good in pictures). The nicest part was the foundation, because Claire applies it with an airbrush, which feels like a cool fan blowing on your face. I liked how the blush looked, which I didn’t expect. She did it so it didn’t look like blush, but just like my cheeks were naturally a bit red. 

We took the photos in the Oakland Rose Garden, which is one of my favorite places in Oakland and the world. I’ll have the pictures in a week or so, after Claire processes them, but here is a sneak preview. 

Also I love this song so much: 

If you are looking for an amazing makeup artist, Claire Nobles can be found at her website and on instagram and twitter.  

I’m writing series of short stories, and I’ll be starting a blog to share them. Meanwhile, here’s a preview.

Feely the cat was dead.

Run over on the street in front of the apartment slash art studio. That’s where Yolanda found him, on Monday morning, when she was out looking for garbage with her big metal bowl. He was just lying there like maybe he was okay, but he wasn’t okay. His mouth had blood and other stuff coming out of it, stuff that looked like it belonged inside of him, and his eyes were all bugged out. And one of his little legs was sticking out a bad angle. Other than that, he looked really good for being dead. You could tell how soft and fluffy he was, and all his orange stripes and his white paws were there. He looked like he’d still feel really good if you petted him.

“Feely,” she said. It just came out of her mouth, like it meant something, like he could still turn his little head and give her a big, indifferent cat yawn. Still meander over all slow and pet himself on her outstretched hand.

She had to yell and wave her arms a lot to get the traffic to stop. All these cars were just flying down Foothill Boulevard, just honking and speeding and running right over Feely, because they just had to get to their fancy grownup jobs and the mall and wherever people went in a big rush at ten in the morning. Zipping right past her, even though she was waving her arms, yelling, “My cat! My cat!” And he was just getting more and more messed up: flatter, fur smashed into the pavement, leg maybe starting to fall off.

Finally this one guy in a little red car stopped. Yolanda ran into the street and put Feely into the metal bowl. His hips were totally flat like a pancake, with all the guts out. The leg was dangling by some tendons but it was still attached. His head was in pretty good shape, and his fur felt soft, like it looked. But his body was all stiff. She scooped up as much guts as she could with her fingers. She squatted low, got her face close to the street so she could look for small bits like whiskers or some fur or brains.

The people behind the red car were honking. They couldn’t go around because the cars in the other lane were zipping by really fast like usual. Yolanda yelled, “Go burn! Burn in a fire! I hope you get a disease!”

The guy in the red car started honking, too, and waving his arms, like what’s wrong with you, get out of the street. Like he’d never seen a person whose cat got killed before. Yolanda could have stayed there blocking them, could have sat on her butt right there. Pissing people off did not lose her one tiny baby wink of sleep. She thrived on pissing people off. Also it was necessary for people to learn the lesson of not rushing and that sometimes you are just going to be late, and even if you are missing your flight or something, it was not the worst thing that would ever happen to you. It was much worse to have your cat be dead right in front of you and have to pick up all his guts, even if you were kind of ambivalent in your feelings about death as a general thing.

Then she noticed the big puddle of blood that her foot was making. Reminding her she should have put on shoes, because there was always a bunch of glass in the street. So she raised her fist at the cars. She was still in her nightgown so they could probably see her boobs flopping around. And all her armpit hair. Go on, get a good look, television zombies. Brainwashed cartoons. She held the bowl up so they could see Feely. And she yelled, as loud she could with her raspy voice, “This is my cat!” And again, so they’d really know, “THIS is my CAT!”