Tuesdays with Story

Writer’s Mail for April 12, 2010
by Jen Wilcher

Since our note-taker for 1st & 3rd, Amber Boudreau was not at the last meeting and we completely forgot, the individuals who read for 4/5 have submitted what they remember of the critiques.

Grey Spry:
Clayton thought that maybe the A.I., Bob, should comment on Brooke’s guilt. A number of group members believed that I needed to make Brooke’s inward caring and outward callousness towards the 50,000 deaths clearer. Millie said she definitely shouldn’t smirk. Pat and Kim pointed out that Brooke tosses her helmet into the tech’s stomach and chest. Which is it? My use of the term pummeled in regards to the helmet was incorrect, since the word implies repeated action that isn’t happening. Kim suggested I get rid of the sentence beginning with “Recent events…” regarding Brooke’s stim (drug) use. Most people agreed that I needed to show Brooke reach for the wrench and explain how she gets it (people thought the old timer gave it to her, but she really just grabs it from him, in which case he’d probably resist). Everyone agreed nanite was the best term for microscopic machines. Pat, having been in the military, pointed out that Brooke should snap to attention right away when the general enters the room rather than saluting. Then she needs to stand that way the entire time and possibly twitch. The general should threaten her with a court martial as opposed to saying he should boot her out of the service. Finally, a handful of people thought that the “namesake” reference was to Brooke’s callsign, Angel, when in fact it referred to her type of fighter craft, [SF-522] Leviathan. Jen wanted to know if I planned on changing the name Leviathan to help the reader better visualize the spacecraft. I do intend to change it, but haven’t decided upon a replacement yet.

Millie Mader:
Most of my critiques were for more telling rather than showing. A couple of the guys didn’t like Erin “jumping” from one guy to another. I’m trying to show that she is very honest, and hasn’t led any of these “boyfriends” on in any way. I guess only girls will understand this. As for the others, I really can’t remember much.

Fifth Tuesday . . .
We will have another monied writing challenge, first-and-third group decided. The group also set the date – January 31.

A writer from a different genre – John Galligan is a mystery writer – will judge the submissions, and, just as with our most recent writing challenge, the writer of the best-of-the-best will receive a critique of the first 50 pages of her/his novel and dinner on the town with the judge.

But that’s nine months away. The focus now is on our next Fifth Tuesday, May 31. Second-and-fourth group hosts. Put it on your calendar.

Who’s up next . . .
April 12: Terry Hoffman (chapter, The Tome), Jack Freiburger (chapter, Path to Bray’s Head), Carol Hornung (scene, Sapphire Lodge), Holly Bonnicksen-Jones (chapter, Coming Up for Air), Leah Wilbur (chapter, Fog-gotten), and Kim Simmons, (chapter, City of Winter).

April 19: Pat Edwards (poems), Kime Heller-Neal (???), Judith McNeil (???), John Schneller (chapter, Final Stronghold), Kim Simmons (chapter 62, City of Summer), and Jerry Peterson (chapter 11, Thou Shalt Not Murder).

April 26: Randy Haselow (chapter, Hona and the Dragon).

May 3: Chris Maxwell (???), Randy Haselow (chapter, Hona and the Dragon), Amber Boudreau (chapter 20, young adult novel), Aaron Boehm (screenplay/part 7, Hell Cage), Leah Wilbur (chapter 2, Narian Noir), and Clayton Gill (chapter 17, Fishing Derby).

Piecing Together Wallace’s Posthumous Novel
By David Foster
In his office at Little Brown, where he is executive vice president and publisher, Michael Pietsch still has the tower of a manuscript and the handwritten journals and notebooks he carried out of David Foster Wallace’s studio, in a duffel and two Trader Joe’s bags, after Wallace killed himself in September 2008.

Over the course of two years, and with the help of an Excel spreadsheet program, this is the material he turned into the posthumous novel “The Pale King.”
Piled on Mr. Pietsch’s desk recently was that two foot-heap of typescript, as well as stacks of computer disks whose labels indicated the evolution of the novel’s title — from “SJF” (for “Sir John Feelgood”) to “Glitterer” to the current and somewhat mysterious “Pale King.”
Because the novel is set in a Midwestern office of the Internal Revenue Service, the book was supposed to come out on April 15, but interest in Wallace is so great that some booksellers jumped the gun and “The Pale King” has already been widely and very favorably reviewed.
Some readers have pointed out, however, that in addition to passages of breathtaking brilliance, the novel, like the tax code, also contains sections so eye-glazing they ought to come with a warning advising readers to wait a while before driving or operating heavy machinery.

Wallace’s following verges on the cultlike, and some of his admirers will doubtless argue that such passages are deliberate, an attempt to evoke one of the novel’s main themes, which is the nature of boredom itself. Others may wonder whether the author, a renowned perfectionist, would have revised the text had he lived, and even whether, in its unfinished state, “The Pale King” should have been published at all. Wallace, the maximalist author of “Infinite Jest” and lover of the extended footnote, was such a fusser that when it came to the mechanics of editing, a suggestion to add or delete a comma could turn into a debate over the history of punctuation itself.
“He would never have wanted it to be published in an imperfect form if he had lived to finish it, but he was not alive to finish it,” Mr. Pietsch said. He added that Wallace, normally a ruthless tosser of notes, correspondence and drafts that he didn’t want, had not only preserved the “Pale King” manuscript, but left an apparently finished 250-page section in the center of his desk. “To me, the fact that he left those pages on his work table is proof he wanted the book published,” Mr. Pietsch said.
Bonnie Nadell, Wallace’s longtime agent said, “If there had been a spotlight on those pages it could not have been more obvious,” and added: “I felt in my heart and so did Karen Green, David’s widow, that he wanted people to see it, and ultimately the reasons to publish outweighed the reasons not to. You can go back to Kafka, when the friend ignored his instructions to burn everything, and to Lord Byron, when they did destroy his manuscripts. Unfortunately, when you’re dead, people make decisions for you.”
For Mr. Pietsch, making those decisions meant diving into folders and spiral-bound notebooks, including one with a Rugrats character on the cover and another called “Cuddly Cuties,” with a photograph of kittens. Inside were pages and pages of notes and drafts in Wallace’s tiny, spidery handwriting. A ledger contained some pasted-in notebook pages, several of them decorated with small smiley-face stickers, little signs of encouragement that the author had apparently awarded himself, impersonating a grammar-school teacher.
In a cardboard box were the byproducts of Wallace’s obsessive research for the novel: a heavily annotated accounting textbook; copies of “West’s Federal Taxation” (1985) and the fifth edition of “Federal Taxation Practice and Procedure”; and several self-published pamphlets including a couple on how to cheat on your taxes and one instructing the reader how to bypass a burglar alarm.
“This is stuff one never gets to see from a living writer,” Mr. Pietsch said. “I was shocked. It’s like being allowed inside someone’s bedroom. You don’t go there — it’s private.”
Mr. Pietsch originally hoped that the 250 pages might be a stand-alone excerpt, but they proved to be a bundle of unconnected chapters, now scattered throughout the book that he ultimately assembled. His only previous experience with posthumous editing was a bullfighting book by Hemingway, “The Dangerous Summer,” which he whittled down from a 100,000-word unpublished manuscript in 1985, but in that instance the rules he set were simple and straightforward. “You don’t change a word,” he said. “You either take something out or leave it in.”
“The Pale King” was more complicated, because it wasn’t even clear in what order the chapters should appear. The novel has only a hint of a plot and consists mostly of extended set pieces — among others, one about a boy who sweats excessively, another about an irritating do-gooder, a lengthy civics discussion in a stopped elevator, a couple of ostensibly autobiographical chapters about I.R.S. training in the voice of Wallace — interspersed with shorter, sometimes comic sections, including one on which I.R.S. agents simply turn pages.
Mr. Pietsch’s first task was to make a spreadsheet indicating which sections had to follow others chronologically, and the others he inserted according to his own instincts. Wherever possible he relied on typescript, but roughly 20 percent of the novel is drawn from handwritten material that introduced new themes or developed others more fully. Almost compulsively, Wallace kept changing the characters’ names — the margins of some of the notebook pages are filled with suggestions — and so another editorial chore was just straightening them out and keeping them and their government pay scale ranks consistent.
In a few instances Mr. Pietsch even ventured to trim a little, to get rid of repetitious material or just to speed up a section that seemed to ramble even by Wallace standards.
“It’s my version of the novel,” he admitted, adding that he talked to Little Brown’s e-book staff about creating a version that would enable the reader to arrange the chapters in any order, but was told that was technically unfeasible. Eventually all the manuscript materials will go to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, he pointed out, and “scholars will have a field day. I’m sure they’re already sharpening their teeth.”
What would he have said if Wallace had turned in this version of the novel? Mr. Pietsch asked himself. “I would have said, ‘This is gorgeous and harrowing and brilliant. I think it’s the most daring donnée a novel has ever taken on, which is to make a novel that’s exciting about boredom. I think you’ve done that. You’ve accomplished your vision. But, David, come on — this needs a lot more work yet.’ ”
He laughed and added: “I would have asked him the same thing I asked about ‘Infinite Jest’: ‘Are you sure you’ve given the reader enough satisfaction about the plot you’ve set under way?’ With ‘Infinite Jest’ the answer was yes, and that might have been the answer here. And I would have asked him, ‘Would you agree to revisit that scene in the elevator and help us understand who those people are and why they’re there, and, for God’s sake, cut some of the civics? There’s a reason people didn’t enjoy civics class in high school.’ ”

Word-Spy:
Wi-Fi squatter
n. A person who lingers in a public location because of its Wi-Fi internet connection, or who uses such a connection without authorization.
—Wi-Fi squatting pp.
Example Citations:
Cafe owners have tried a variety of tactics to foil Wi-Fi squatters. They put out signs that ask laptop users to share tables or point them to nearby Wi-Fi hot spots such as public libraries.
—Jessica Guynn, “Coffee shops are taking Wi-Fi off the menu,” Los Angeles Times, August 8, 2010

Two men have been arrested on suspicion of “wi-fi squatting” after allegedly logging on to another person’s internet connection illegally.
—Ben Guy, “Arrested over ‘web squatting’,” The Journal, February 23, 2008

Earliest Citation:
Unauthorized access to the Internet: Even if you firewall your intranet away from your WLAN, what stands between Wi-Fi squatters and your Internet uplink? If your answer is “nothing,” unauthorized stations can compete with legitimate users for WAN bandwidth, and your enterprise could be liable for misdeeds launched from your WLAN.
—Lisa Phifer, “Understanding wireless LAN vulnerabilities,” Business Communications Review, September 1, 2002

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