Another morning in the garden. See how it grows. Ducks in the slough. Birds in the trees. Happy people.  

The World's 2nd Best Query Letter Tanks

O.K., the first rejection arrived for the query for the new new book. All quiet for the new book. I think a bunch of queries from Dec. and Jan. arrived at the dead letter office or were trashed with the holiday cards. It is 'way too depressing to think about finding the email addresses for said agents and asking politely, "what the response time is," and getting no answer in return. This whole business is 'way too depressing, but I do like to write.

The cows: the new calf is the cutest, sweetest ever. Sunday when I made my weekly visit with the plastic bag or fruit and veg scraps, I climbed out of the car and whistled. The two adults and old baby were way down in the shade. Didn't see my "new" baby. Ye gods! They came galloping toward me, a veritable thundering herd. The baby woke up,and joined the race. It is so nice when a fellow creature is truly happy to see you. I thought they would plow down the fence and slobber on my face, but they stopped and I tossed the contents of my bag around to make sure everybody got some goodies. Man, those orange peels are popular. The home grown carnations were NOT a big hit. Lettuce is always welcome, as are the tops of green onions. Cilantro stems remain popular. The poor things, even the young one, are full of flies already. I want to bring a can of "Off" but probably won't.

My garden: prettier every day. The poppies have big buds. Love the flowers. What a great year in the garden.

The ride to work: Vietnam Vets in the little park in Stoughton. How do I know? I just do.

Corporate America: Sucks more every day.

Burning Man: Wish I was going this year.

Spare ribs: worth dying early for.

Aloha,

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Hummingbirds feast, wind chimes carole and the sun climbs over my garden on an early morning in June. Ah Summer!  

More Literary Ramblings

On Sunday, I sat down and wrote a query for Promiscuous Mode, and a one page (single space present tense) synopsis. Then I found five likely agents and shipped off the envelopes. It takes a long time to do this. First you have to find and research the agents which you think (think being the operative word here) might be interested, then double and triple check addresses (I got burned badly by this of late) and find out what the submission requirements are. I keep this stuff along with date sent, etc. in a spread sheet so I can move it from the submit to the reject sheet in an instant, which is about how long much time anyone spends on the query. Then you have to personalize and print the letters, not forgetting the SASE and the stamp and return label and the whole bloody business.

Maybe if I had secretarial skills rather than geek skills, this would go faster, but it seems to take forever to do half a dozen of these queries. I have basically given up writing a personal letter to each agent, because they got no better response (an unsigned card stuck into the SASE) than the impersonal ones, which only have name and address and no chitchat about why "you are the agent for me." Too demoralizing to spend all that time and not even have someone sign her/her name on the reply.

We'll see what happens. I need to do five more so I have some serious feelers out there, but again, it's like work. And I still have a job, and, ostensibly, a life.

Actually I do have a life. Yesterday we made the trek into Boston again, and had a lovely lunch under the trees and on the sidewalk at Stephanie's of Newbury Street. Seriously good food (I give the lobster roll 4 claws) and seriously good people watching. A fantastic day, one of the few we've had all year. Many citizens out and about. Walked through Kendall Square and was amazed at the changes since I stopped working down there. The old fire station is a boutique hotel. Legal Seafood, where I used to sit at the bar for stuffed clams and wine has been remodeled. There are new restaurants in the food court. The Blue Room, formerly the Woven Hose, where the world's best fresh peach pie was served for one summer only, is still there. Yesterday was almost a perfect day.

So life is good until the rejections start coming in again. Rejoice in summer.

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Last Tango in Taunton

I took a four day weekend which became a frenzy of cooking, trips to the city, gardening, shopping, visiting new calf, workouts--you name it, I squeezed it into those four days. Oh yeah, and lots of wine, too, maybe even a few roses. And writing tasks!

On Saturday night, all duded up, we made an appearance at the Boston Tango Festival, which was held in the new Harvard Square space for the "small" ART theatre. A brisk walk up Mass Ave to Zero Arrow Street. We experienced an evening of Tango, both amatuer and professional, and it was fantastic. This being Boston, there was a medley of races and ages and dress codes that cut across every possible situation. There were also scads of very pretty girls with beautiful legs and they were all doing the Argentine Tango. For the serious tango aficionado, there were tango lessons at Boston Ballet and other venues over the weekend, and a cruise on Friday and a last blast tango evening on Sunday.

I like to step out of my everyday experiences and let something new and artistic sweep over me. Ignites the creative juices. The meat empanadas were delicous, too., igniting the appetite and the digestive juices. I loved the tango shoes and the variety of dresses. This was a really cool evening. Very Argentine. I understand that on certain summer nights, one of the bridges across the Charles becomes a tango locale and people come and dance. Doesn't that convey the most romantic of situations? Sigh.

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A brand new Scottish Highland Calf joined the little herd this week. Loves to gambol and his (?) tail wags constantly. Full of glad animal spirits.  

Literary Ramblings

I have a nice query done for Promiscuous Mode , aka the "Wisconsin Book." I'm breaking (or at least bending) a few rules, one of which is the "keep it to one page" rule and the second is using a little different than the standard form. The thing is, the world's best query letter has got me nowhere, zip, zilch, sucking the very hindest teat, so this will be a high energy letter than describes the book, why I wrote it and me. I'm going to start with the biggest agents in the country and work my way down to the "midlist" agents, careful not to send to anyone I've queried with the East German book, not that they would give a rat's ass or even remember. I look at the $6 parcel that came back with addressee unknown and addressee didn't answer the email asking "where are you?" and all the other unanswered emails, and the unanswered letters with my 37 cent stamp languishing in somebody's pile of unanswered since Christmas mail and I wonder why I don't say, "f*** it!" and write a cookbook or an expose of corporate America's imbecility or some hard-edged non-fiction, but the thing is, I love fiction, reading it and writing it and so, guess what? Time once and again to suck it up.

Isn't my garden cool? We have baby ducks in the slough behind the house and a hummingbird is now a regular visitor with the finches and the house wren. Scads of robins this year and the wild orchids across the street (lady slippers) are blooming. Summer is a comin' in and let us sing "hooray!"

How does your garden grow?  

Jeb Bush's Brain

has shrunk to the size of Terry Schiavo's. Except Jeb has no excuse. Enuff said.

The Little Cacus that Could and Did

About a year ago, they laid half our department off. The layoffs were due to a change in technology and were supposed to save money, but the people supporting the new technology are as numerous as those who supported the old. Nonethless, a lot of nice folks were gone. It was sad and many of the departed still don't have jobs. Hell, the people who left a year before they did don't either. Technology is not a fun place to be and I'm glad I put in my time in the years when it was.

This is a long way of saying that when one of my friends left, she gave me her cactus. This was a Charlie Brown cactus, which lurched drunkenly at a 45 degree angle toward her door. Pencils stuck strategically in the dirt propped it up. Not the kind of plant you would take to the fair. God, no. But it had a cute pot, and I am genetically programmed for plant care, and if the plant if useless and ugly,I still tend and nuture.

Due to seniority and being in the right place once, and also the fact that I used to work my tail off, I have an office with a window and not a place in the cube farm. My happiest days were in the cube farm, but that's another story. So the pathetic Charlie Brown cactus went onto the window sill with a few other orphans that I've adopted over the years and the geraniums that winter over in my office.

Not much happened. I gave the cactus more water than Carol had, and it received abundant sun, and maybe a drip or two of plant food when the other plants were being babied. A few months ago, a humongous shoot sprang out of the still-listing to starboard center of the cactus. Tiny blossoms emerged(again, nothing to drag to the state fair). As the wee blossoms died up and fell off, I planted them in the dirt around the cactus. Then at the very tip of the blossom end, a new little cactus grew on the stem. Cutest little thing you ever did see. Well, maybe not, but a mother's love is blind. Then on the cactus proper, new green growth appeared--little cacti growing on Mom. A third showed up today, as did another shoot growing out of the center.

My haphazrd care has been rewarded many times over. Now if all the love and work and effort and angst that goes into my writing were rewarded thusly, I would be in a different place. Last week, one more rejection. No more emails from agents except one 'no, not for me.'

Slogging on. Oh yeah, and still with the ever-present need to suck it up. And I glance toward the window sill at the little cactus that could. Now I have to find pumice to grow the cuttings in. Where do you find pumice in New England? Arrrgh. Surf the web and pay a premium to ship pumice out here. At least it's light. Nothing is too good for the Charlie Brown cactus.

By the Side of the Road

I work on a busy exurban commercial street, which means there are businesses strung out along it at odd intervals, some cheek-by-jowl and others standing apart. It's an ugly street in an ugly area and has nothing but a paycheck to recommend it. On 2nd thought, there's one cool Italian restaurant. Lots of chains and fast food and places to get your windshield replaced. Cracked parking lots with weeds sprouting out of the cracks, little after-work bars. The area never recovered from the dot bomb, actually. Yesterday, it was hotter than old Billy be-danged (and how hot is that?) and I had sneaked out a little early, at 5:10 instead of 5:30, and was tooling along the ugly highway and wondering how long it would be before the AC would kick in some cool air.

Along the side of the road I saw an undershirt, undershorts, a shirt, a pair of jeans all lying odd distances apart as if they'd been tossed out of a car window. Somebody really did this. Don't you wonder about the story behind the clothes? I am intrigued.

Help me think of a likely or even unlikely scenario.

Two Funerals and No Weddings

My garden basks in the sun, planted, weeded, watered, and growing. Annuals, perennials, tomatoes and herbs vie for their own place in the summer light. And that’s all the good news.

On the writing front, I’ve had a fallow spell, and query packages have been returned with addressee unknown. Found contradictory information on the web, and emailed agent about correct address. No response. Sent out a lot of queries around Christmas—remember Christmas, 2004?—and have as yet no response. But hey, I’ve got my list and my own place in the sun at Boston City Hall with my poem on the wall or somewhere. So there’s beaucoup more sucking up to do. And on with the queries. I am going to start sending out feelers for the “Wisconsin Book.” I suppose with no synopsis and all the rest of the “reallys” and “justs” still to delete from the manuscript, someone will want the whole thing with a nice synopsis real fast. I will tempt fate.

The Scottish Highland Cattle have a new electric fence which gave me a shock last week. I was used to the old fence that required touching two wires. This new one does not. Even though the grass is high and luxuriant, the cows still come to the fence for orange peels and other good stuff. The broccoli stems are greener on the other side of the fence.

An old friend of ours died last week. Not unexpected, but still wrenching. He was in many ways the last of the Old School: didn’t like it when women swore, and insisted on certain niceties of dress and comportment; not a stick in the mud but a gentleman with rigorous standards. Can’t be many more of those. The summer home in East Hampton with its serene patio and lap pool will go on the market, and this summer the kitchen won’t be invaded by my friend and I who cooked for the house parties. We cook out of passion and love and not duty. We poked fun at the utensils, the haphazard arrangement of the cabinets and the beat up old tinfoil trays in the toaster oven. I’m sorry for not being more forgiving of other’s faults, because my own are no doubt even more annoying. No more shopping at Citarella and the Farmer’s Markets, no more wait for the Shelter Island Ferries, no more 4th of July fireworks on the beach, no more listening to the host grind coffee beans in the a.m. for our endless pots of high test. No more, no more.

Yesterday, when I was gearing up to write a “big” airplane scene in the current book, I went on line to look up some details about the BRS parachute. For whatever reason I clicked on another favorite site and discovered that a young man we met at last year’s Burning Man Festival had been killed this winter in a plane crash. Brilliant, handsome, cool, a golden boy now gone. Twenty-seven years old. Jesus, what a waste. I couldn’t sleep all night. Sure as hell couldn’t write. I had given him a copy of my book. Indirectly, he had inspired part of the current book. Now gone, and though I knew him only slightly, I am devasted.

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