January 28, 2016
Mitzi Bytes: An Outtake
The good news is that I handed in my edits today for Mitzi Bytes 4.0. The even better news is that it’s a much stronger manuscript than it was two weeks ago. The most substantial changes involved removing three blog posts (her blog posts, which are from her archives, come after each chapter of the main narrative, which is set in the present day). I liked these blog posts, but agreed that they didn’t serve to enhance the main story enough, so I wrote new ones that really do. Which left me with these outtakes, and thank goodness for the internet, which means they won’t have to go to waste. This particular post I read at the Draft Reading Series in November, and it went over pretty well, I think. It’s situated in the years before my protagonist meets her husband and settles down, during a time in which her tumultuous love life served as excellent blog fodder.
**
So it’s over. Good news for those of you who’ve been leaving comments haranguing me for being nauseatingly in love for the past seven weeks, for even counting the weeks. But come on, post-divorce, conducting a relationship for this length of time feels like an achievement. It’s an actual relationship. Seven weeks, at most times of the year, is a period long enough to include a statutory holiday and/or religious celebration. I met his mom. We had a pregnancy scare. This is the closest I’d come to forever since my marriage went down in sad and pitiful flames. And I see now how the whole thing was really just an experiment in intimacy, but in the midst of it, I thought I was writing the conclusion to the “Troubled” chapter of my life. That all my problems were solved.
But here we are right back where we started. And once again, the problem was me, and my compulsion to overlook other problems that are glaringly obvious. Once again, I really thought we’d find a way to make it work if I were just flexible and accommodating enough. Surely every relationship brings challenges and a couple is stronger for working through these. I really can’t believe there is a single bride who hasn’t lain awake on her wedding night beside a sleeping body and pondered whether she has possibly made a mistake.
Getting involved with D was never going to be a straightforward process—he was upfront about that from the start. He had strong ties to his mother and his sisters, and there was the matter of the son, G. G had been the result of a teenage fling, and he and his ex had worked hard to raise their son together, co-parenting and freeing him of any baggage that might come about from being someone who was conceived in the back of a pickup truck after a few too many drinks.
It helped too that the boy’s mother’s parents were loaded, ensuring that G. was well-looked after while his parents pursued their career goals, and from age six had been enrolled at one of the city’s most prestigious private schools. There would be no pick-up trucks for this upstanding young fellow whose achievements and admirable qualities his father was fond of reciting: the honour roll, valedictorian, vegetarian, peace activist, feminist, cycling advocate, chemistry whiz, philosophy buff, champion swimmer, hockey superstar and he packed boxes at the food bank at Christmas.
Obviously, he sounded insufferable, which was the first time since we’d met that I had a thought I couldn’t share with D, and that was awful. But in a way, I also feel sorry for the kid, because it must be hard to be talked-up like you’re a demi-god when you’re actually a thirteen-year-old boy, which is an awkward kind of person to have to be.
I finally met him last week. To be honest, I could have waited. I was completely okay with pretending this messianic child didn’t actually exist, even in spite of evidence to the contrary: his immaculate bedroom, some photos, a poster on the fridge from the march he’d organized in protest of the Iraq invasion. But none of these things made him real, which was fine with me, because a 13-year-old boy just didn’t seem like a thing my life was particularly missing.
But then one evening, there he was. He’d come down to D’s place after school, so he was wearing his school blazer whose crest was a mess of lions and swords. And even though he was as tall as I am, he was so clearly a child dressed up as a man that I was reminded of those old cereal commercials, the small boy dressed up in a big jacket at a big desk. But the boy took himself very seriously, firmly shaking my hand, sizing me up. “I’ve been hearing a lot about you,” he told me, as though he were the adult and I were the child. “Pleased to finally make your acquaintance.”
He had a moustache. I couldn’t stop looking at it. The most ridiculous thing on his pimply face. Dark and wispy, the moustache was no accident, it was cultivated, and I was reminded of lamb’s wool, of softness and down. Of a boy who’s trying to look like he’s not trying. The effort of being natural. Perhaps I should have identified.
But no, because I was actually trying to avoid natural at all costs. That night, natural would have betrayed me. So I kept a neutral expression as we had our dinner and he explained the ethics of veganism, of how it connected to the pro-life movement, and how he could be both pro-life and feminist at once. He was reading us the world as though it were something that existed in a sacred book we’d never heard of, and you got the sense that he was accustomed to other people being in awe of him, hanging on every word he said. His father was no exception.
“Isn’t he terrific?” D kept asking me after we’d seen G down the elevator on his way back to his mother’s. “I told you, didn’t I? That’s no ordinary kid.”
I managed to keep my mouth shut until we were at his sister’s the following weekend. D’s sister M, I imagined, was a woman after my own heart, completely lacking in pretention. It had been her pick-up truck that G had been conceived in. She still had the truck, and drove it up and down dirt roads in a cloud of dust. She wasn’t afraid to call things as she saw them. She’d already told me she was wary of a fresh divorcee in her baby brother’s life, but I appreciated her honesty. I would have been wary too.
So my guard was down as we sat out together on her veranda at the end of a busy day. The whole extended family was up there celebrating the long weekend, and they’d roasted a pig on a spit. Her own children were now running around the lawn with sparklers. We were each at either end of the hanging swing, legs curled up beneath us, cold bottles of beer in our hands. I thought I was looking in a mirror.
“So I hear you met the kid,” she said. He hadn’t come up with us, electing instead to stay in the city for a hockey tournament. D’s sister took a sip of her beer. “The little shit,” she said.
I waited a minute before I responded. “He’s certainly accomplished,” I offered.
“So he told you, I’m sure,” she said.
“His dad’s pretty proud.”
“He’s hoping the pride will override the guilt about everything else. It’s a mess,” she said. “And there’s no discipline. It’s better now, but you should have seen him when he was little. He got away with everything. They think the sun shines out of that kid’s ass.”
She started telling me stories, and we were still talking when the sparklers were burnt out, the sun set, and our bottles were empty. And up until this point, I’d handled myself with the utmost decorum—an especially impressive performance from the likes of me.
But then it all went wrong. We were sharing our impressions of wispy-lipped, pimple-face G, with his pro-life justice and the burgeoning build of a hockey enforcer.
I leaned in close, my voice low. I was really more than a bit drunk, though it’s still no excuse because I was speaking the truth. “The kind of kid,” I said, “who you just know is going to grow up to be a rapist. It’s practically written right there on his greasy forehead.”
D’s sister was staring at me now with a strange expression. I said, “Right?”
“I mean, maybe it was the blazer, or his teeth—that kind of orthodontia is a huge investment.” I was feeling vicious. I hated that kid. He was awful. “Shiny hair, and he’s just so convinced of himself. He was talking about his school, and he said, ‘They’re teaching us to be the leaders of tomorrow.’ He thinks he’s entitled to the whole fucking world.” But this hadn’t clarified things. “A little rapist,” I delivered finally, futilely. This was going over like a tumbleweed, and any rapport between us on the swing had disintegrated. She stood up and went inside without another word, leaving me swinging there alone.
I should have just found my car and driven back to the city, but I really was drunk, far too drunk to have found my car, let alone drive it. So I stayed in the swing until D found me there, coming in from where collecting fireflies with his nieces. They came up to the porch carrying jam jars full of dying light, and he left his on the rail so he could gather me up into his arms, and carry me upstairs to the bed in his sister’s spare room where we made love beneath a patchwork quilt that had been stitched by his great grandmother.
His sister didn’t get up in the morning. “Too much party,” everybody was saying, and my own aching head was pounding in agreement. D and I left after breakfast in order to the beat the traffic, which we didn’t beat, and I was quite sure that it was over then, as we sat there on the highway. He still had his eyes on the horizon, but I knew that everything between us was about to rapidly run out of gas.
She must have called him that night. I was at home still nursing my hangover with a pan frozen home fries, a fried egg cracked on top of them.
He texted me. “Did you call G ‘a little rapist’?”
I texted him back. “I can explain.”
One more time: “I’m not sure you can,” he wrote me.
And that’s the last I ever heard from him.
January 20, 2016
Editing Mitzi
I’m pretty well-acquainted with literary disappointment in all its forms, so don’t think that I’m delusional, but working on this book has never once been less than extraordinarily fun. Which is rare, I think, and I know I’m lucky, and lucky too to be working on something that people are waiting for, that I’m contractually obliged to produce—I can’t quite believe it. And during the mornings that Iris is at school for this week and next, it’s what I’m doing, putting together the latest (the final?) draft of Mitzi Bytes, the pressure on, not much time, and I’m loving it. That the thing in the world I most want to do is the thing in the world I most have to do—how often does that happen?
And it’s a pleasure too being edited—I love it. It occurred to me a few years ago while having an essay edited that having a great editor look at your work is like suddenly realizing that your house has entire wings you never even knew were there. My editor has made suggestions for this latest draft, and they seem so obvious to me now—of course that has to happen. It was always always meant to. I’d clearly intended it, all the scaffolding there, but just needed someone else to show me the way. The collaborative nature of it is so fantastic, and suggests how much of a book exists in its own right way outside of the mind of its writer—though if you’re a reader you already know that, that you are a creator too in this process. The whole thing is kind of a miracle. And it’s an amazing privilege to be creating right here on the front lines.
I finished my first draft just over a year ago (and have written two more since) and it’s exciting to consider how much has happened in that time. And even more exciting to think that in another year, this book will practically be an actual book. By then I’ll know what the cover looks like—seems impossible to behold.
December 11, 2015
The Places I’ve Been
The best news is that I’m finally getting better, and I’ve even been to a place lately that isn’t my bed—last night I ventured out to Harriet’s holiday concert to hear her sing in the Primary Choir. This weekend, we’re planning to hang up the Christmas bunting, and the plan is that by mid-next week, I might be up and about in the world again. But until then, and even after, we’ll be taking it slow. The nice thing about the Christmas holiday is that it’s a perfect time to have that happen.
But other things have been happening as well, perhaps sustaining the illusion that I’ve been more active lately than I actually have been. First, the Winter 2016 issue of U of T Magazine is being mailed out soon, and it includes a short piece I wrote about the curious trajectory of my life in blogging. I wrote about how I started blogging at a point when blogs were poised to take over the world, which never quite happened, but for me (and for many others) blogging has played an enormous role in my career and evolution as a writer and a person, even. Blogging has sustained me during periods of high and lows, and through the throes of literary disappointment, and it’s now integral to my process—so much so that my forthcoming novel is about the secret life of a blogger. I was really grateful for the opportunity to write this article, and you can read it online here.
For Understorey Magazine, I got to be part of a conversation with Ali Bryan, Alice Burdick, Lorri Neilsen Glenn, Natalie Corbett Sampson, Natalie Meisner, Shalan Joudry, and Sylvia D. Hamilton about whether it’s possible to be both a mother and a writer at once. (Spoiler: I say YES). There’s lots of great advice, stories and wisdom from women who’ve been there, and I love the effect of so many voices together. I love this line from Sampson: “Shutting the world and your experience out in a ‘no diversion’ and ‘no intrusion’ approach leaves you open to missing things that can be shaped into stories. ” Naturally, I encourage women to let their children watch Annie all summer long in order to get that novel written, which worked for me. Read the whole thing here.
And finally, I took part in a very fun conversation with Corey Redekop about what happens when a wonderful writer turns out to be a terrible human being. Examining my own bookshelves, I really couldn’t find a single horrible human being among them. My authors are mainly crotchety old women, which many people construe with horrible human beinghood, but crotchetiness is these writers’ entitlement, I think. I love them better for it. Anyway, we talked about whether being an asshole was a male writer thing, I refer to Barbara Pym’s Nazi sympathies, we discuss what red lines are for us as readers (not Nazi sympathies, apparently…) and what if Rush Limbaugh was authoring the next The Phantom Tollbooth. You can read it all here.
See? I have been busy.
September 7, 2015
Cake and Back to School
Back to school tomorrow! Which means that we spent much of today at the CNE, which was excellent, and the prize-winning celery was as wonderful as I’d hoped for. (It’s basically the reason I go.) And we are so very hot, the weekend spent dripping with sweat and entertaining people in high humidity. Last night our best friends from kindergarten came for dinner, one of our now-regular togethers that involves too much wine and so much cake. Meeting these families was one of the best parts of last year, and I will miss them as our children move onto new classes and schools and our daily lives are no longer as connected. Although friendships can and do endure, as evidenced by tonight when my friends and former roommates Kate and Erin (and Kate’s husband Paul) came over last minute for pizza. The last-minute thing remarkable because Kate and Paul live in Vancouver, and we’ve not seen them in three years. But here they were tonight, with a cake even. And what a cake? If my book ends up looking half as excellent as this one, I will be satisfied. (Apparently the image was inspired by my Mitzi Bytes pinterest board, because there is indeed such a thing.) I have the most terrific friends. Anyway, the convenient thing about all of this is that Harriet’s first day of school lunch is leftover pizza and cake, so her year is off to an excellent start. Wish us luck tomorrow as all the madness and fun begins!
September 3, 2015
Meet Mitzi Bytes
Oh, it has been so hard for me to keep this secret for more than two months now, that my novel, Mitzi Bytes, has found a home and will be published by Harpercollins Canada in Spring 2017. I have spent the summer working on revisions that have made a book I love even better, and I’m just so thrilled in general.
The news went out today: “Canadian rights to Kerry Clare’s debut novel MITZI BYTES, a grown-up Harriet the Spy for the digital age—a novel about the perils and pleasures of living a secret life online and the risk to friendships and family when that life is revealed—to Editorial Director Jennifer Lambert of HarperCollins Canada for early 2017 by Samantha Haywood at Transatlantic Agency.”
The timing is particularly meaningful to me. Ten years ago, I started the Creative Writing Masters program at the University of Toronto with the intention of writing (and publishing?) a novel. And while I did write a novel (and learn some things, and make some excellent friends that were worth the price of tuition), the novel was not a triumph. After getting some feelers from the universe, I determined that said novel was boring and plotless. So I decided to give up on it, which is the same as “moving on,” and it was the best decision that I ever made. Because the book really wasn’t good enough, and I’d rather publish no book than a crappy one. And while there was some frustration and sadness about this (and I felt a bit left behind by colleagues who went on to publish first and second books), there is plenty else in life (and in literature!) with which one can occupy oneself. So I did. I also wrote another novel and (guess what!) that one wasn’t good enough either. And I wasn’t sure fiction writing was ever going to be my scene.
And then last summer, this idea that had been rattling around in my brain (inspired by a point in previous abandoned novel even!) finally took hold. One evening at the end of last June, I was talking about the idea with my family over dinner and there was just something to it. (That something might well have been, wait for it, PLOT. Who knew?). And then I got out of washing-up duty and sat down to start writing. In hindsight, and in foresight even, it was a terrible time to start writing a book: Harriet was home for the summer, I had other stuff on the go. But when is ever not a terrible time to start writing a book?
Around the same time, I started jogging. “Just keep going. Just keep going,” was my mantra for both. And thankfully, jogging was the thing I eventually gave up on (moved on from?), after the day I burst into tears in Queen’s Park because I hated it so much. The story, on the other hand, kept going and growing. I met my goal of writing 1000 words a day. I hit a brick wall at the end of the summer, 70,000 words but I didn’t know how to tie it all up. I am not great at writing endings. So the book was put on hold throughout autumn as I was busy with teaching and other things, and then one day in December as I was walking down the street (of course!) it occurred to me how the story could end. And then it was done. It was done, and I loved it. This, THIS, is the novel I’ve been waiting for, the book that I was meant to write, and if you’d told me a decade ago that it would take so long, I would have been devastated. But from where I stand now, it couldn’t have been more perfect.
After expert feedback from awesome readers, I worked on my second draft throughout February and March—Sunday afternoons at Robarts Library as the campus outside turned into spring. And feedback from my editor, Jennifer Lambert, showed me the way toward draft three, which I am so ridiculously pleased with and got done because I had childcare one morning a week all summer long and made the most of it. (What a pleasure to be working on fiction for which one is contractually obliged to produce. That fiction writing is top priority—this was a new one for me.) And so here we are, and there will be lots of more work ahead, but I am so excited and pleased and feel very very lucky.
I can’t wait for you to read it!
