Talk about stepping in the same river twice.  I did, a few weeks ago, with regard to my Vermont College MFA reunion (it was great, by the way.  None of my worries came to pass.  I am kind of a nudnik.)  I stepped in another familiar river this week when I went back to an old-but-not-dead piece of writing to revise it for its appearance in the Sunday paper.

Yes, you read that right!  The Louisville Courier-Journal, which (who?) featured Nice and Mean when it first came out, invited me to provide their August Sunday serial, so over the next four weeks, my friends and neighbors and anyone with the internet can read the first few chapters of what I hope will be my next middle-grade novel, NOT THAT GIRL, potentially with groovy art.  (At least, I think there might be some art.  Might have to check on this.)

There was so much craziness involved revisiting the story, including the fact that the request came while I was travelling [no–traveling; I always misspell that], and I had to ask my partner to brave my Extremely Messy, Filled with Deep-Dark Secret Documents that are Likely to Fall On You Shelf and extract my notes from when I workshopped this piece last summer, along with one of about a bijillion Clairefontaine notebooks.  (Do you use these?  Are they not a superior piece of notebookture?)  A side-note on this challenge is that she succeeded the first time around!  Go, A!

The biggest source of craziness, though, was how ridiculous some of the writing was.  The prose was spiffy enough; the characters, distinct; there’s a passage of dialogue whose punchline is “Where’s your butt?” that I enjoyed again, as though I hadn’t written it.   But what was sorely lacking was something that Grad School Advisor Margaret calls Emotional Residue.

Case in point: Not that Girl starts out with Jackie and Mel being shocked when their friend Zoe, previously uninterested in boys, unexpectedly brings an older guy to the movies with them.  Then, in the next chapter, I had a guy–an adorable one, unfortunately nicknamed Nathaniel the Spaniel, crossing Jackie’s path and Zoe and Mel strategizing about how Jackie can pursue him.  I had this line to the effect of, “I’ve been feeling a little weird about Zoe since the movies the other night, but I’m willing to listen to her advice.”

Um, really?  Just “a little weird”? So glad I chose to make that event the focus of your first chapter, Jackie, because I can see that it brought a lot of emotional residue to your subsequent interactions.

Why aren’t Jackie and Mel more upset?  Why don’t they talk about this–instead of nothing relevant–in the scene before Nathaniel comes along? Jackie’s feeling of being caught between Mel and Zoe should drive the emotion in the strategy session, because it becomes the heart of the story.

Thankfully, I fixed these things.  I’m still kind of appalled that it took me so long to see them, and I await with dread the missteps I will find when I go back to The Novel Formerly Known as The Book of the Dead, which I will do tomorrow or so (today is maintenance day, as you can see.)  I guess I can just hope that even if I face-plant in the river, I will have plenty of chances to cross it again, because that seems to be what writers do.