Transgressive Portland Writing Group

Does anyone know what Chuck Palahniuk, Chelsea Cain, Lidia Yuknavitch and their writing group in Portland are known as? Do they have a name yet like the Beats, the Bloomsbury group, the Algonquin Round Table, Lake Poets, Stratford-on-Odeon? It is very cool to have such a great, dynamic group of writers so close in space and time. If I had to guess, I would bet they go by the Transgressives.

Pitch

I'm being boring and talking about my book too much, but you don't have to read it.

I think I finally got my pitch right. It took me a minute (or 25 queries) to really get what they need. Here it is, if anyone is (still) interested:

I wrote a 57,700-word adult literary fiction novel called Desolation Ghosts. It is set in North Cascades National Park and is about park rangers battling over how much effort should be spent to locate a missing traumatized and suicidal female veteran with alcohol and relationship addictions during the Covid-19 pandemic and the beginning of law enforcement reforms following the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.

This book will appeal to readers who are interested in national parks, outdoor recreation, the Pacific Northwest, and the controversial issue of how emergency services treat people with mental health challenges.

It includes exciting stories, based on real-life events, about using rock climbing and short-haul helicopter techniques to rescue a pack string mule who fell off a trail and a climber who fell off a mountain, a shoot-out and its impact on park rangers, a couple drownings, an aquatic body recovery and other sad outdoor tragedies, and funny and scary encounters with bears and other wildlife.

Desolation Ghosts is my first novel. My realism style has similarities to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pete Dexter, James Dickey, and Jack Kerouac, whose experiences in the North Cascades serve as a historical backdrop to the story. I have a bachelor’s degree in English and have published several newspaper articles and a short story. I wrote obituaries during the decline of newspapers, served as a cop in the U.S. Air Force, worked on a crisis response team, and dispatched at North Cascades National Park.

***

Somewhere the right agent is looking for this book. We just have to find each other ...

Agent

Stephen King

Contemporaries

 "It seemed strange and oddly romantic to Gloria that she and this woman [a civil war widow] had been contemporaries." - from The Beautiful and the Damned. Glad to read I'm not the only one who likes to look at who was alive at the same time. Just made a database of my artistic influences so I could look at them in chronology. Here's a small Gantt chart of some of the writers (and Picasso!) I like who have been or are alive during my lifetime. Lit-nerd! I know.

Beautiful and the Damned

Just burned through Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and the Damned. Who knew the battle of an alcoholic against fate to remain idle in the leisure class while his money runs out could be so suspenseful? May be my favorite ending ever. Now I get to reward myself for getting through his three harder novels by basking in Gatsby for the next day. Trying to cram in as much leisure pleasure as I can before MY idle time runs out (but still sending out query letters to agents to represent Desolation Ghosts). It's a true luxury to read a book all the way through in big chunks instead of small pieces.

Contemporaries

"It seemed strange and oddly romantic to Gloria that she and this woman [a civil war widow] had been contemporaries." - from The Beautiful and the Damned. Glad to read I'm not the only one who likes to look at who was alive at the same time. Just made a database of my artistic influences so I could look at them in chronology. Here's a small Gantt chart of some of the writers (and Picasso!) I like who have been or are alive during my lifetime. Lit-nerd! I know.

This Side of Paradise

Everyone knows The Great Gatsby is the prettiest and best book ever written, but it's the only one by Fitzgerald I had read until this week. I've been saving him up, and I just spent two more of his four completed novels. The elitism and social climbing were off-putting through Tender is the Night and on until the second half of This Side of Paradise, where the protagonist's evolution picked up and he ended, unexpectedly, as a dharma bum, speaking compellingly for the spirit of an entire generation, not just a privileged piece of it. I don't recall being so pleasantly surprised by a book. Glad I forced my way through it. Why Paris has been on my mind, and a lovely way to end the early "retirement" of looking for the right job before getting back to work!

Rejection

Got my first actual rejection from an agent query (usually they just ghost you). I'm not discouraged. I've heard how many rejections even famous writers have gotten. Trying to get an agent seems harder than writing the book. I've queried 21 but expect to query a couple hundred. Each one takes a surprising amount of time to find the right agency and agent within the agency and personalize the query letter. Each has different requirements, so I have different sized synopses, etc. I just changed my basic query letter because, as my friend, Mary, says, if an ad isn't working, pull it! If anyone feels like giving me feedback on my query letters or telling me which is better, it would be most welcome!

Autumn in Skagit County

Okay, Skagit County friends, here's your writing exercise if you want it: what makes Sedro-Woolley (or Clear Lake, Rockport, Concrete or Hamilton, etc.) such a fantastic late October town? Can you capture it with words?

Polidor

The last time I went to Paris, I reserved rooms via fax at an inexpensive hotel in Paris 6. We were excited to learn Rimbaud had stayed in our room at the Hotel Stella in the late 1800s. What the hotel proprietor and our Let's Go Paris 1998 didn't tell us (and I just learned from the internets) was that the restaurant (Le Polidor) in the bottom corner of the hotel had been popular not only with La Belle Epoque writers, but with Hemingway, and therefore all the Jazz Age ex-pat writers and artists we spent 8 days death-stalking through Paris, as well as the writers of the next generations (Miller, Kerouac, etc) who followed them there. Tragically, we did not eat there!

Duluc Detective

 Found out this detective agency I walked by every day when I was in Paris for a week one July opened in 1913. Looks like it closed recently, but it was run for over 50 years by a real-life Veronica Mars, who took the business over from her dad. Woody Allen used the agency in Midnight in Paris, which was hilarious the second time I watched it (tonight). Best line: "You may fool me, but you can't fool Hemingway."