The Fictator

Revision (un)Ready

2012-03-04T07:26:00.000-08:00

Matt has now read the first draft of the horror novel, and he has helpfully told me about all sorts of lovely difficult revisions I need to make. Yay. In the meantime, I made an absolutely humiliating admission on Facebook, that I've never been high (from marijuana), and needed feedback about a sequence I wrote wherein my narrating character gets that way. Several people immediately jumped up to offer their expertise, kindly not making me feel stupid at all for not knowing whether I'd written it right or not. Matt says they were just happy to offer expertise about something they'd never thought they'd be able to offer expertise about. As usual, he's probably right.

I'm rounding third on Infinite Jest. It's approaching easy to read at this point. I told Matt the other night that part of what's keeping me going is that I really want to know if Wallace's going to create an actual whole out of the sum of this book's many, many, many parts. Thus far, when things get tossed together and a connection makes itself known, it's extremely satisfying; like Magnolia, if a little less visceral. It would be nice to know that everything's really going to hang together, that it's not just going to be a big tangle.

The book is also inspiring. Although I do not in the least want to write like Wallace, I am inspired by him to toss some rules out the window when composing. If on a reread what I've said isn't clear, I can backtrack, but there's no need to work through that clarity on the first pass. Often what comes out raw sets me to something better and clearer, if not quite formal.

I've just started and stopped two different approaches to filling out this post, and was happy with neither of them. This blog is about writing, right? So why am I going on and on (and on) about other stuff instead?

I think it's because the only things in front of me in my writing life right now are revision. Revision of the Greenland book (eventually...), revision of the horror book, revision of a difficult short story. Revision of my original idea for my next book - it's still going to be what I thought it was, at bottom, but I'm thinking of seriously reworking my main supporting character from what he's been for four years or so. I don't want to do any of this revision. I look ahead and I see this slog, this long and yucky process from which good results are not guaranteed and opportunity for despair abounds. Literally every task to which I've set myself when it comes to writing fiction has taken a shorter time than I have budgeted, and all revisions have ultimately been a good idea, so I don't know why I can't just get over it and do what I'm supposed to do. I believe I can sell this horror book, more credibly than I believe I can sell the Greenland book, and I'm all enthusiastic about query letters and synopses and whatnot. But first I have to revise it, I have to get it in shape for test readers, and I'm stuck there, at that idea.

What I'll do is, on Monday I'll sit in front of this very laptop and I'll just get to it. No whining; just action. But on this Sunday morning it feels better to wallow and worry.

My Life in the Sand

2012-03-02T11:18:00.001-08:00

Did you know my first declared major in college was politics? My husband didn't, either, until the other night. I was telling him how infuriated I was about various issues of the day, and told him that I was reminded of the sensation I had in college, which was the last time I actually paid attention to what was going on in the world.

I learned not long after Matt started being at home all the time that his habit was to watch the previous evening's broadcast of The Daily Show every day on the internet; presumably he did this at his job while on break, and now that he's at home, he does it at home. It mutated to DVRing it rather than watching it with obnoxiously repetitive commercials on the internet, and then I started watching with him. It's a show I've always liked, but I am not in the habit of watching first-run television at all.

I strongly believe that Stewart provides the least biased journalism in America. He makes jokes, no doubt, but he makes jokes about everybody. And I sincerely believe that he's not beholden to any other interests than his own. Of course we've been watching The Colbert Report after Stewart's finished, and I'm torn about which one is more effective. I think Stewart has the harder task, but I also believe Colbert has done more actual activism, more to attempt change.

Both of them attest to being comedians, not commentators. Even though they are more than aware of the environment effected by the 24-hour news cycle (because they would not be capable of their jobs without that environment and a high level of awareness about it), I think they are not quite cognizant of its extent. I trust no television journalists at all except Stewart (and dead ones like Cronkite and Murrow), and I think he would be surprised to hear that. The reason is simple: the "real" ones are more farcical than either of them, and appear too dead-eyed and well-coiffed for my taste. Col-bear may be a character that Col-birt is playing, but he is absolutely no more ridiculous than certain commentators.

Case in point: this. I find myself speechless at this story. Like, I can't even construct an argument in this space to talk about why this story makes me so angry that I'm dizzy and my heartbeat is irregular. I thought, well, surely Limbaugh isn't going to be taken seriously on this. And then I scrolled down and read the first dozen or two dozen comments, and my mouth got dry from hanging open. Who are these aliens, who fail to understand what paying for prescriptions entails? Who have no conception of hormonal medicine? Who...gaaaaaah.

This is just one of the stories bouncing around our national political scene in the last several months that has gotten me riled and furious about What's Going On, as Marvin Gaye had it. Women's reproductive health is obviously the biggie for me, but everywhere I look I seem to see corruption and greed, about which I feel horribly impotent. I can laugh, at Stewart and at Colbert, but laughing doesn't fix it.

This is how I feel about it:

And it was how I felt about it back in the early 2000s when I was in college. I was inspired by an incredible professor to become a politics major, but I lasted less than a year. I was depressed, horribly clinically depressed. Due to other factors as well, but partly due to the ugly discovery that the political cycle hadn't changed at all, across the world, throughout organized history, and that in all likelihood it never, ever would. Politicians would continue to be corrupt, the media would continue to be partly a freedom but mostly an accomplice and a palliative, and the system would churn forward with very little actual change.

During my sophomore year I took a 101-level class in film studies, and to my surprise I kept getting As on the papers without really trying (I have never been a natural A student). I discovered not only that I was really good at film studies, but that I really liked film studies; it was more interesting to me than pretty much any subject matter I'd ever studied, and it got me excited about learning in a way politics no longer did without my inspiring professor. So I switched majors, and I stopped paying attention to the news and to current events, and for many years my life was happy. I stayed absorbed in fictional media and left entirely alone the media related to politics.

And now Stewart and Colbert and their exceptional wit have brought me back to being angry and depressed 9 hours a day. Because once you start paying attention to the stuff that satirists draw your attention to, it's pretty hard to stop. You stumble across Monsanto, you read some of the egregious things that our government has passively endorsed, you see the balsa-wood structure behind it all. You start to really think about courageous bozos vs. well-intentioned cowards and who's likely to come out on top and whether it even matters and why the job of the politician, to represent us, has gotten pressed and reprinted as greenbacks and styled and gelled as TV-ready hair.

And you get really, severely depressed.

Matt was amazed I used to be a politics major. His exact words were "You were? Really?", and we agreed that it was for the best that I changed to film. I'm presently trying to decide whether I should bury my head back in the sand. The world didn't end in 2002 and it's likely not going to end in 2012, and it didn't hurt me to be politically ignorant for all that time. In its individual-level way, it helped me, in fact. The question of whether it's better to be willfully ignorant and happy with your little life, or to get informed and be fucking miserable, is one that I've been struggling with on and off since my sophomore year in college, but never at such a dramatic peak as I am right now.

And the thing is, Colbert is really really funny. He leaves me with a residue of joy, even when I'm angry. I was waiting for someone to make the perfect joke about the contraception flap, and he did it:

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But I don't know. My life in the sand was untroubled. Quiet. Filled with art and music. This way, I either channel my rage into a non-profit and never say die, or I sit in my house screaming at my clenched fist until I can move to Canada (if Canada ever gets warm enough for me to move to). Neither is a Middle Way as satisfying as ignoring it all.

Of course, following the Oscars isn't too satisfying, either.

He's a Metaphor for How Immature Your Personal Philosophy Is

2012-02-29T07:02:00.000-08:00

Jesus believes in second chances, and so do I:

As a caption to the photo:

In other news, I finished my horror novel on Monday. Yay! I edited about half of it yesterday and am doing the other half today. It's pretty damned exciting to me, reading it over; it's a good book and I'm very pleased with it. Much better in raw form than the Greenland book was. I even have a title: All the Available Time. Test readers, shout out if you want to help me see the forest in this one's trees. Maleesha, you're first; everyone else, roll up, there'll be plenty of copies to go around.

I'm mostly taking the day off from my copy-edit job, as I've done really well at it for the last couple of weeks, and it's a rainy Wednesday, which makes me want to curl up with a cup of tea and Infinite Jest, and what good is a weird work-at-home schedule if you can't do that on rainy days?

Everything's Really Wrapped Up Nicely

2012-02-27T12:16:00.000-08:00

So now, as I announced on Facebook the other day, I am finished with the climactic scene of my horror novel, my evil little girl has been defeated, I've written 82,000 words, and I'm ready to wind the book down and have my characters live sort of happily ever after. Except some of them are dead.

I think the death thing wound up all right in the end. I had originally thought that I'd kill a character I really, really liked and leave alive a character who was all mixed up and not the most likable person there, but I switched 'em up instead. In this way, my resourceful character lives, and the other one doesn't get the chance to un-mix herself, which is really a shame. It was a nice compromise for my emotions.

I think it'll only take me another few days to write the rest of the book. I think. Unless there's more there than I thought, to wrap up. This one I really would like to set aside for a couple of weeks before I start revising it to an open-door draft. I've got some short stories and other fragments that are straining at the bit to get written, so I'm thinking those will occupy me once I'm done with this book. But maybe not; maybe I'll get to outlining my next book, the Marilyn book. Or revise a short story that I think has potential but needs sustained effort. Or just take a breather.

Infinite Jest is taking a lot of my mental energy. I mentioned before that my ability to advance in it comes and goes. I'm in a phase where it's coming (heh), and am just about at page 600, after spending a million years between 450 and 500. I'm guessing that everybody finds different aspects of this book interesting, depending on the individual; I find this long conversation between two spies in Arizona, interspersed throughout all the other stories all braided together, to be deathly boring. But during one of the most recent segments of their conversation, I learned something that ties together two big aspects of the plot. I had never presumed it was a waste of time to read the segments about them, of course (if any author has a method to his madness, it's Wallace), but it was still nice to be rewarded conceptually for dragging through tens of thousands of words that are like stones dropping on my head.

In other news, I got the idea in my head a week or so ago to do the Warrior Dash. I think the only reason I want to do it is to say that I did it. I've been wanting to accomplish a 5K for a couple of years now, and just haven't settled on a time or place, or gotten around to training myself to be able to run that far in a sustained fashion. (I can run about a mile and a quarter before I've had enough. I know that's not very far - please don't make fun of me.) The Warrior Dash looks like a lot of fun and a genuine challenge for my soft-shell never-really-tested body, even if it does also seem kind of insane and really not a good idea for my soft-shell never-really-tested body. I keep waiting for a good bit of logic to talk me out of it, and I keep not running across anything, except for not really wanting to put in the effort to lift weights and run a few miles a few times a week to train. And that's no reason not to do anything, not wanting to put in the effort.

As you may have noticed, I've been trying to write consistently every other day here, after that embarrassing gap of a couple of weeks while I tried to get a grip on my schedule. The problem is not having as much to say about writing every two days as I do about other things. Since it's just us, here, I don't really mind that, as long as you don't.

Tasks for This Weekend

2012-02-25T12:38:00.001-08:00

1) Write big giant showdown scene, climax of horror novel, without further hemming, hawing, ado, equivocation, or otherwise wastage of the reader's time.

2) Do not knock wine off of desk and all over floor like last time.

3) Sweep & mop kitchen floor. (Later, if stuck.)

4) Stop checking Facebook every 10 minutes. You're too old for that shit.

5) Download Chrome update, which necessitates closing your permanently-open browser windows. This is what bookmarks are for, you dolt.

6) STOP WORRYING AND JUST WRITE ALREADY.

This Is How Wars Get Started

2012-02-23T13:32:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I was scheduled to teach at 8:30, and when I arrived, there was a parking place open in the smaller parking lot to the side of the facility, where thus far I have never parked. As I pulled in, I saw a car behind me with a bumper sticker reading "Who is John Galt?". I rolled my eyes and went on in and taught a really pretty not-so-bad class, if you ask me, and when I came back out, the car with the Shruggy bumper sticker was still there. So I thought I might take a picture of it and post it on Facebook with a snarky comment about what exactly this bumper sticker announces to me about you if I see you tooling down the road with it attached to your car.

But then, after I put my stuff in Matt's car (which I happened to be driving yesterday rather than my own), I saw that there was a simply colossal, very new, white Suburban idling at the entrance to the small lot, obviously waiting for my space. I grabbed my phone and made a hasty attempt to get a picture of the sticker, but technology was not cooperating. I was annoyed about feeling rushed by the stalker Suburban, so I thought I'd pull out of the space and let this person park and then take a moment of my own idling in the parking lot so I could get my picture.

I backed out, and because the lot is kind of narrow, I got rather close to the line of cars on the other side, many of which were parked nose-out. When I was clear enough of the space that the Suburban could get in, I put my own car in park and opened my door. I didn't realize until I opened the door that I was quite close to a dark-colored Acura sedan, and the edge of my door tapped the Acura's license plate lightly. I pulled the door in a little and started to get out.

A horn honked. Matt's car's horn is kind of sensitive and I have accidentally honked it on more than one occasion, so I looked around a bit to see if it was mine, and I saw that behind the wheel of the Acura was a woman holding a cell phone up to her ear. She was screaming. Balls-out, utterly bereft of human control, shrieking. At me.

I can only presume that she heard my door tap her license plate (I am not misusing the word "tap" here, I wish to emphasize) and thought that I must have actually hit her bumper, or scratched the paint, or something, when in fact it was just the license plate. Yet still - she seemed to have gone from zero to 180 mph in about half a second, because of what couldn't have amounted in the worst case to a mild scratch on her bumper.

I couldn't understand what words she was shouting at me, although I could clearly hear her voice through the protective barrier of her car. I lifted my eyebrows a little and got back into my own car, and then backed up a few yards (as far as I could without hitting a dumpster), ready to flee as soon as the Suburban was done parking.

Which it wasn't. The woman in the Suburban had decided to back her ridiculous Cunard White Star vehicle into this space, and I honestly don't think I've ever seen a parking maneuver that was proceeding more slowly. I sat there, waiting for her to get the fuck out of the way so I could just leave. The comedy of the situation was not escaping me, and I knew that a) no harm was done and b) the woman in the Acura was waaaaay overreacting, so I wasn't feeling guilty or upset or anything. But I really wanted to get out of there in case she perchance had a license to carry a handgun.

On the way home, I reviewed these events, kind of incredulous at the way it had all unfolded, and so quickly. All because I wanted to get a picture of a bumper sticker. The various chess pieces and their parts to play; the conjunction of time and space. One person with a hair-trigger temper, and another one who was late for her Pilates class, and a third who meant well but was driving a car she wasn't accustomed to. As I told Matt later, this is how wars get started.

Concerning Hobbit Drafts

2012-02-21T10:32:00.000-08:00

First: this. What a desperately needed shot of frustrated genius (and pathos). Happy birthday, DFW, and Godspeed.

Second: Today I've decided to put my Fictator hat on and just deal with these deaths that I don't want to write in my horror novel. Since I discovered a back door to one of the deaths I didn't enjoy writing, I've pondered taking that back door for some of the other deaths as well, making for sort of a death-free horror novel. Everybody gets a pass; readers' hearts need not break. But this is stupid and wussified and I know it, and I really have to just get on with it and kill (kill kill) instead of waffling like crazy such that no work at all gets done.

There. Bam.

Of course, since I haven't written in a few weeks at this point, I had to go back and refamiliarize myself with what I'd written before I buckled to waffling. I thought of the draft so far as a sort of Uruk-hai in utero, something that I'd need to scrape the mud off of and wince at, rather than the pleasing elf-creature that I ever hope for when I think of my writing. What I found was better than I thought. More like a hobbit.

Lucy was not behind her. She was not finished with Lucy. She didn’t know for sure that if the devil offered to bring Lucy back, if he sidled up in a red bodysuit and plastic tail and dickered with her for something (for anything, if she was honest), that she wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t consider the bargain.

It needs work, naturally. It will always need work. Hobbits are not elves, and unfortunately never shall be. But I don't feel so overwhelmed anymore. Uncertain, mournful, mad at myself, reluctant, all those things, you bet. But not like this thing is going to swallow me up. It only took Matt to remind me that I am, in fact, the boss of my characters, and a dead virtuoso to remind me that all writers get frustrated, to get me back in front of my real work.

Too much other work has been a distraction lately, dammit. I wish it was easier to remind myself that this is the work that matters.

The Kind of Marathon Where You Sit on Your Couch

2012-02-19T19:34:00.000-08:00

For the last week, I've been marathoning episodes of Monty Python's Flying Circus, between two and five a day. This is how I enjoy watching television: on DVD sets, in great vast gulps of hours and hours of the show at a time, galloping through the entire series in a matter of days or weeks. After Matt bought me the seven seasons of The Mary Tyler Moore Show as a gift, I watched all 168 episodes in less than 30 days. I am uncomfortable with public knowledge of this habit (which, YET AGAIN, is why I'm sharing it with the entire damn internet), because I know it seems a little crazy, because I kind of don't want to do anything else but eat and sleep and finish out the next disc while I'm in marathon mode. It's not pretty to witness.

But in every case I've done so far (Star Trek: The Next Generation, MTM, The Sopranos (years ago, didn't get past the 3rd season, that box set has been on my Amazon Wish List for about five years), Firefly, Dead Like Me, others), it is so superior to experience a whole berth of a show this way, without coming up for air. It means that the show hangs together thematically as an entire body of work, and the evolution of the show is crystal-clear in a way you just don't get from gradual consumption. The different moods of the seasons of MTM were fascinating to see. For instance, Mary's responsibilities at her fictional job changed very suddenly in about season 5, and that altered all sorts of things about the structure of the show and how the other characters interacted with her. Whether that was done because of the departure of her two best friends, or because of feminist motivations, I don't know, but it was a big shift. And I think it was only so noticeable because I was watching, on average, two and a half hours of the show per day.

Monty Python is an interesting experience, because sketch shows are by nature uneven. There doesn't seem to be a progression toward better or more interesting or even just different work as the seasons (in England, of course, they're series) move forward. But they refer back to earlier work in a sort of unique way, and watching it all together means I generally have the prior work still hanging around in my neurons, and can realize exactly how funny they're being by referring to it.

I haven't come to any conclusions about the show on the whole by watching them all this way, except that I see now they've got a limited stable of the types of sketches they do. I.e., this is an interview-show sketch; this is an Eric Idle sex-or-language sketch; this is a domestic-hilarity-ensues sketch; this is a sketch so far into the realm of absurdity that it's just Pythonesque and doesn't have a more specific type. Hence, I can generally get my arms around the intentions of the sketch type, if I can identify it. This is more analysis than I've ever been able to accomplish with comedy; I'm not really skilled at it. So that's sort of edifying. Maybe I'll have more to say about the shape of it all when I'm finished. I'm halfway through now.

Speaking of edification, I am over page 400 in Infinite Jest. My ability to advance in it seems to come and go. I've been hovering between 390 and 420 for the last couple of weeks, instead of getting on with a few dozen pages a night as I was doing. But I will finish it, I will. If for no other reason than I really want to get on and read this.

Along with Monty Python, I've worked a great deal in the past week. There's been a lot of work for my copy-edit job, and last week marked the final week of the crazy glut of subbed yoga classes in which I've been drowning since before Christmas. This upcoming week is the first normal one, teaching-wise, in ages. Also, I've had some wonderful readers get back to me about my book, and they were so helpful. That was more work (even if it was great work to do), as I had to get back to them in detail in the hope that they'd further get back to me. I'm still waiting to hear from at least two more folks, but after that I think I'll be ready to edit. I feel pretty confident that I know what I need to do. I'm very concerned about further growth in the word count, but there's really nothing for it. I hope I can slide by on the "fantasy" label, as fantasy novels are generally longer.

And a wholly separate reader got back to me about a new story that I wasn't sure about, so I owed her analysis on her own story and on her analysis of mine. There was further work I did that I didn't even mention, and work I should have done this week and didn't get around to. Plus, I was quite ill on Tuesday. It was a full week. I kind of want a vacation. Monty Python is comforting, but it's really compressing my time. Damned marathoning.

If I Write It Like This, and You Read It Like That...

2012-02-09T11:54:00.000-08:00

I don't know what to tell you. I still haven't written anything in over a week. So here's Just Some Stuff.

I am just under page 300 in Infinite Jest. Yay! I'm finding it easier to read than I did when I started. It's not much more compelling to me, per se, but reading this book is kind of like a hobby all on its own, beyond just the hobby of reading. Wallace writes so particularly, often being at once convivial and excessively intricate in his style, and now that I'm more accustomed to it I'm finding it enjoyable. Kind of la-dee-dah, even if you don't go anywhere with this, I'll still read it, it's fun to read. He also inspires me to break the rules.

Aspects of my work life were very yucky over this week.

I attempted to re-create in my kitchen one of the only restaurant items for which I get such a ridiculous craving that no number of days will stamp it out, and nothing else will do: southwest egg rolls from Chili's. This follows on my successful experiments with at-home hot & sour soup, pork fried rice, and barbecue chicken pizza. Matt noted that all the stuff I bought to make the southwest egg rolls at home probably meant that it cost just as much to make them here as it would have if I'd gone half a mile to Chili's and picked them up. So he didn't get to have any.

They came out all right. I tried both baking and deep-frying; the lack of a fan in our kitchen means that deep-frying is a rare occasion, because the whole house smells like cooked oil for days after a fry. The baked ones were passable and the deep-fried ones were excellent. The sauce didn't really work out at first, but was better the second day. The idea of made-from-scratch ranch sitting in my refrigerator is still pretty cool, even if it doesn't taste exactly right.

In the time I have between now and today's next required event, I really want to lie on the couch and zone out on a movie. I had an unpleasant medical appointment today and I want to eat pita chips and let some self-pity carom around in my head. What I should do is work a little more.

Celine Dion's "It's All Coming Back to Me Now" is like a low-level obsession of mine in the last couple of weeks. I haven't liked her since I was about 11 and owned the CD of hers with "If You Asked Me To" on it. I have never been so tired of a song as I was of "My Heart Will [Let You Drown]" (no, not even "Semi-Charmed Life"), I am bothered by her thinness, and I think she kind of overdoes it, in general, when singing. But one day a few weeks ago I just had to hear "It's All Coming Back to Me Now", and I YouTubed it, and yesterday I listened to it on repeat like 15 times while I worked. (So many reasons why I don't want to activate Spotify.) I have NO earthly idea where this came from. It's kind of worrying.

If I ever get back into my book, you'll be the first to know. And I hope things will ease up soon so I'll be able to. But, sigh, not this weekend.

The Tarnish of Time

2012-02-06T12:11:00.000-08:00

In 2010, I got an idea. I had started wearing makeup more regularly than in previous years (the reasons why are a lengthy footnote, not worthy of this post), and I discovered that virtually no makeup removers really worked well. They either required excessive swiping at my eyes with alcohol-based products, ow ow ow, or they were greasy, or they, like, didn't remove anything. I decided to try cold cream, that old standby of 1950's movie stars and today's theater stars. And it worked perfectly. And it made my skin happy. It was by far the best makeup remover I tried (although it was also the messiest), out of a dozen at least.

However, the only scents of cold cream I could find in the commercial market (and in a lot of searching, I could only find two brands of it) were flowery. They smelled like a grandmother. Which makes sense, you know, because young people don't really use cold cream. But if you ask me, they should, because it works so perfectly at taking off any makeup you have on, waterproof stuff, primer, lipstick, eyeliner, whatever. So I thought the thing to do would be to create and market a line of cold creams with hip young scents, like cucumber melon and lavender vanilla, and corner the makeup-removal market, and become rich and fabulous.

After talking to Matt's aunt, a very knowledgeable serial entrepreneur, I was faced with the problem of whether there was a "need" in the makeup market for my cold creams. I mulled over this for about a week, and finally decided that no, I guess there really isn't a need. There are tons of makeup removers on the market, and trying to wedge in another one was probably not a good idea without big corporate dollars behind it. A very small survey indicated that most women my age weren't as dissatisfied with their makeup removers as I had been. I was quite disappointed, because I had been really gung-ho about my idea (and frankly still think it's a pretty good one, and if I become rich and fabulous by some other method, I might spend a little of my wealth on creating this product anyway, just to see what happens), and it hurt a lot to chuck it on the pile of Unworkable Ideas.

The funny thing I noticed about my idea was that after a few months of kicking it around in my brain, it began to seem tarnished and unlikely. As time passed, it sounded more and more as if it was a stupid idea, far-fetched, and even if it could be pulled off by, say, Burt's Bees (maybe), it sure couldn't be pulled off by lil' me, with a negative amount of business experience and no assets and nothing but an idea to re-new-ify an old (ancient, really) and near-forgotten and still-awesome product.

As the weeks have passed between me and the finished first draft of my Greenland book, the same tarnishing effect has happened. I haven't gotten any detailed feedback except for the one friend, and everyone else has used the word "interesting", without specifics, which makes me think it is a PIECE of SHIT, and they're too nice to tell me so. And I look back at the draft and I think, what was I thinking? How did I even begin to believe that I'd written a coherent novel, when it was just a big jumble of genres and characterization and absolutely no plot momentum aside from And Then This Happened? I can put sentences together, sure, but this novel is the worst thing ever and no one will even tell me how to fix it because IT CAN'T BE FIXED.

I know that all writers go through ups and downs as to how they view their work. I believed in this book once, and I'll believe in it again, surely. This is just a rough patch, a moment of gaping black insecurity that I'll hop handily over and be on my way.

But I think it's affecting the current work, too. For the last week I've found all sorts of things to do other than work on the draft of the horror novel (yes, I have been legitimately busy and legitimately mildly ill with a cold), which is at 72,000 words, and I've got to write this final act, now, make real decisions about the structure of the fantasy elements and stick by them, decide who's going to die and who's going to stay dead, stand by those decisions. I am a big wimp, though, because two of the characters I intended from the very start to kill 4realz are so nice and lovely that I don't want them to stay dead. I've got to break the reader's heart, that's my job, but I don't even want to break my own.

And I look back and wonder if the structure of this thing, the whole conceit of the villain and her abilities, is just idiotic rather than cool. If I'm not just whistling merrily through a landfill. If I haven't actually made a real bungle of it all, and it doesn't hang together, and I am the worst writer in the history of the written word, all the way back to Ung the Caveman and his charcoal scribbles on the wall of his cave. Ung, at least, had a consistent vision for his scribbles, right? Me, I crib from my dreams and hang feathers on it and call it art.

Or, no! I'm worthy! I'm brave and true! I need to get down to business and finish the draft and believe in it strongly enough to move on to the next project. Go me! Jump over that gigantic ravine of insecurity and walk on down the path, where there be scary monsters and super creeps, but I can defeat them with my mighty pen.

Or, I'm already at the bottom of the ravine and weakly calling for help. And people are throwing books down at me, books with tomatoes on the covers. And they are big and leave bruises.

Or, I should just stop all this and get to work.

Fishing Tackle for Outliers

2012-02-02T13:24:00.000-08:00

I am momentarily out of ideas for things to write about from my own life, so instead I'll tell you a story I was thinking about the other day.

In 2009, I obtained a paralegal certificate from a nearby community college. It was some of the most pointless and least fun education I've ever received, and the less said about it the better. However, one of the classes I took was taught by a district court judge. District court is the "lowest" court, where they deal with misdemeanors and traffic offenses and stuff like that. They're very high-volume, and the work they do is essential, so I'm uncomfortable calling it "low"; however, a circuit court or a state court has jurisdiction over district court rulings, so technically it's a correct term.

The judge told us that she had witnessed, too many times for it to be a fluke, that many if not most cops have a sixth sense. They just know when there's hinky stuff going on. She used as an example an interesting case we read that I still remember, although I admit I don't remember it perfectly.

Maryland cop's driving behind a guy in a van who is going the speed limit, driving safely, ho-hum. Cop sees van guy cross over the solid white line at the edge of the highway once and then twice, and decides to pull him over on suspicion of...something. The guy's paperwork is a little weird; he has an out-of-state provisional license and the van is rented from yet a third state, as I remember, but there's really nothing about him or the setup that's beyond the realm of "a little unusual". I don't remember the subtext as to how the cop manages it, but he finds cause to look in the back of the van, and finds, as our teacher the judge described it, "the motherload." There are suitcases back there full of the wacky tobaccy, some enormous number of pounds of it, and wham-bam, dude goes off to jail.

My poor memory of the actual case notwithstanding, I love thinking about this situation, because to me it proves that sixth sense. The cop had no reason whatsoever to pull someone over for mildly crossing the white line. I cross that white line ALL THE TIME, when I'm doing such normal and law-abiding activities as sneezing or changing the volume on my radio. Yet somehow, this time, he found a giant score of law-breakage.

I thought about it the other day because I drove on 50 during the late morning on a weekday, and found two speed traps where I never, ever find speed traps during normal commuting times. It occurred to me that maybe they catch a lot of law-breakers this way, by setting up speed traps at times when no one at all would normally be going to work. That put me in mind of Mr. White Line and the instinct. Of course, maybe they just find it easier to pull over speeders during light-traffic times. Maybe it has nothing to do with catching the outliers at all.

Neither the First Nor the Last Lesson from South Park

2012-01-31T05:01:00.000-08:00

If you're reading this and you've also been sent a proof copy of my Greenland book, please see here. After some useful feedback, I created a few family trees, to help parse out all the different characters. A dramatis personae might not be out of place, but it's rather old-fashioned for this sort of book, so for the time being, I hope this helps. If you haven't read the book, the information at that link won't make any sense to you, but you're welcome to look; it doesn't give very much away.

I grew tired of my Nordic landscapes and started downloading fractal wallpapers. I now hunger for ever more of them. They are gorgeous, and I'm not yet tired of looking at them. I'm using Windows 7, with rotating wallpapers, and I finally figured out the easier way to get pictures into rotation, so I'm probably going to end up using all my disk space on the dang fractals. But they are so cool.

I've now written over 70,000 words on the horror novel. And somehow, I'm astonished to find, I'm in Act III: The Ticking Clock.

Excerpted from an e-mail I recently wrote:

A feature screenplay has two plot points, right? End of act I, end of act II. Each of the plot points spins the story in a whole new direction. I am not a literary expert, but I understand that books have numerous plot points, and that they’re diagnosed in a completely different way than in films. In films, there are two and only two, and other important things that happen are merely Things That Happen, not actual plot points. In American films, they are generally so obvious that you can’t not notice them once the concept has been pointed out to you.

In the feature film South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut, there's a point near the end where the Mole looks at his watch, and he sees this:

Ever since I started noticing that the third act virtually always involves a ticking clock in one way or another, thanks to this movie and specifically this frame of animation, I can't stop noticing it. Now, in my horror novel, my antagonist has given my protagonists 24 hours to decide something, and I still totally failed to notice I was in The Ticking Clock until one of my characters said "Clara wants our answer before noon tomorrow." I typed that, and then, after I read it over, I thought of the image above.

Ha. Wow, brain. That's some serious training a lifetime of American movies and almost ten years of cinema study has given you. Like, re-education, almost. It's also really ironic, because what's at stake in The Ticking Clock is time, which is kind of the whole point of my book.

Well, it's funny to me, anyway.

The Obscure Ability to Find What You're Looking For

2012-01-29T09:23:00.000-08:00

Two nights ago I had a dream that, when I woke up, stuck like caramel in my teeth. I was in my old house, the one on Maryleborn Road, where I lived in high school. Somehow the house was mine, I owned it with Matt. It had the old green carpet and the dark paneling, prior to the redo (to the benefit of all, believe me) my mom did. Our landlord's leather sofa was in the exact same place, but the living room seemed stretched, much larger than it had been in life. The house was absolutely piled with stuff, papers and folders and books and notes and objects, just piles and piles of things everywhere, and since there was so much space, the stacks were endless.

My father wanted me to go somewhere with him, and before we left, I had to find an array of items, perhaps ten of them. They were all things from the non-recent past, years-old items or notes or paperwork. I felt sort of triumphant that I knew I had these things, that I had done the right thing and saved them, but because the house was much larger than my memory of it and there were hundreds of piles, I couldn't find what he wanted me to find. He was reminding me in his gently-annoyed voice that it was time to leave, past time, and that I had told him I had these things, and why hadn't I found them so we could leave? I was assuring him that I just needed a few more minutes, because I knew I had the stuff, I had saved it all like I was supposed to, but there were just so many piles to look through. I had located probably two or three of the ten items I had to find when I woke up. There were other elements to this dream, but that was the gist of it.

It was crystal-clear to me what this dream was about, even at the moment I woke from it.

My household "filing system" involves piles like this, through which I sort every so often, weeding out the trash, and I try to put the keeper items in filing bins or other places where they belong. The piles include things like medical receipts, gift certificates or cards, the manual from the CPR class I took a few weeks ago, issues of Yoga Journal, catalogs from Williams Sonoma with recipes in them that I want to cut out and try, newspaper articles that caught my eye, holiday/birthday cards that I don't have the heart to throw away, car insurance renewal certificates, things like that. It's been a year or more since the last cleanout, though, so the pile on the dining room table and the pile under the bookshelf are getting kind of tottery. In our garage are boxes and boxes of things from the non-recent past, things that either I'm sentimentally attached to or that I think I'll use or need someday.

In 2008, I took it upon myself to seriously clean out the garage, and I did throw away or donate several boxes of stuff. Although I felt immensely better after the experience was over, it was every bit as hard as I thought it would be, not a pleasant or surprisingly happy experience in the least. I am not a hoarder, but I am a pack-rat, to the point where a book I read about hoarding (Stuff, by Frost and Steketee, a ridiculously fascinating read) had passages of explanation that were extremely familiar to my own feelings about my possessions.

For hoarders, getting rid of the stuff never feels good. Never. Your life is generally better after it's all gone, because that big elephant in the room isn't shitting you out of house and home, but the process of doing it is inescapably wrenching. There is still quite a lot of stuff in my garage, and it's past time for me to go through it a second time and get rid of what I can get rid of, but I haven't. It ripped me up the last time and I'm not brave enough yet to do it again.

The stuff in the piles in my house is necessary stuff; my CPR certification is in there, too. Along with documents that I need to use to deduct donations and expenses from my 2011 tax return. But it's mixed in with expired coupons and issues of Reader's Digest that I'll never have the time to read. (This phenomenon is discussed in Stuff, too.) So even though I've done the right thing to save all the stuff that I need, I've also done the wrong thing in saving everything else. I'll have what I need, sure, but I also have hundreds of things I don't need, and this will keep me from ever finding/enjoying the stuff that I really do need and want.

Some guy did an experiment in 2008, which he blogged into a book, where he whittled the objects he owned down to 100. He encouraged readers to do the same, to find a way to live in the modern world with 100 possessions only. When I read about it, I thought he was insane. Admirable, but insane. Much as I wanted to pare down to less than I have, and reject consumerism that wasn't making me happy, and whatnot, I couldn't possibly live with so few things. Could I? I mean, I would probably have 100 things just in my kitchen. I wouldn't have any clothes or shoes. Or books, God, the books.

[Sidebar: thinking about getting rid of some books spun me off onto a long thought tangent about detachment, ownership of art, and future technology. Another post for another day.]

I think the sameyness of only owning 100 things would get to me, but the simplicity of it certainly appeals. Part of what I love about staying in hotel rooms (and particularly in the yurt I stayed in during my yoga teacher training) is the limitedness of it, the fact that you only have your one suitcase of stuff, and the furniture that the hotel has already put in the room for you, and that's it. The bathroom with its tiny trash can. The clinically tidy bedside table. So different from my spilling-out-at-the-edges life here at home.

It's a rabbit-hole for me to abhor the pack-rattiness that makes me fill up my garage and the messiness that makes me create those tottering piles in my dining room. It's a total waste of time. I yam what I yam. But this dream reminded me that I couldn't hope to accomplish my New Year's resolution of paring down my ownership if I continued to think that everything needed to be kept. I'll never find what I need that way. I'll never leave for whatever destination awaits me outside the house where I grew up; I'll be stuck shuffling through piles and piles of needless things for ever.

This Post Is Made from 100% Procrastination

2012-01-25T13:02:00.000-08:00

For the first time I'm understanding the difference between wanting a vacation due to desiring a break from a job I don't like, and wanting a vacation due to a sort of tired burnout. Maybe this is naive of me, maybe people who like their jobs are saying DUH, but at this point I could really use a couple of days where I don't have to do any work. I enormously enjoy each category of the work I'm doing, all for different reasons, but I'd really love a breather. My body could use a respite from teaching, too. I've been subbing a lot in the last couple of weeks, and although more money is always good, I think I'm ready to drop back to my regular schedule of (now) 6 classes a week rather than, for example, this week's 8.

My first reader has gotten back to me about the Greenland book, and because he's very kind, he has allowed me to go back and forth with him at great length about the manuscript. Last night I composed the third in a series of e-mails to him in Microsoft Word before pasting it into the body of the reply; with his paragraphs and my responses it was about 5,300 words. I feel guilty asking him to talk about my work in such great detail, but he continues to insist that it's okay.

The actual substance of his feedback has been very surprising. He told me that I've written a bummer of a book, something which is okay with me but which I hadn't really connected the dots to realize. He said that it was actually interesting and not impossible to follow the language, and that he didn't find the setup too holey, issues I worried over endlessly. He noted that there are many more characters than a modern novel usually has, and I honestly hadn't really thought of that. I don't know if it's a flaw per se, but both he and Matt said they had a hard time following who was who, so I think a family tree in the back of the book is in order. Just, like, not a complete one, or some surprises will be lost.

While I'm pleased to see that I've still got enough of the book in my bones to talk to him about it in detail, I find that I have zero motivation to dive into re-editing it. I definitely need further perspectives - especially from women, especially from people who like reading novels more than this friend does - but there are even a few easy fixes my friend pointed out which I could implement easily enough now, and I haven't exactly jumped right on that. I could do it, it's not a confidence thing, but I'm totally not interested.

I think it's because I'm working on the horror book, and don't want to dilute my writing energy back to a book with such an enormously different group of characters. So perhaps, after all, it was a bad idea to jump right into the new book without being completely finished with the old book. Of course, at my current rate of work, I'll be finished with the horror book by my tentative deadline (April) and definitely by my drop-deadline (June), and will be able to take a break between the full closed-door draft and the first open-door draft to hunker down on the Greenland book. Plus, I won't know until June whether my Greenland book won grant money, and I can't really send it out for publisher approval until I find that out. So maybe it worked out better this way, rather than worse. I'm just worried that the feedback will kind of dim in its fresh usefulness in my mind, and I won't remember all the resolutions I had for making things better.

Last night I knitted myself a coaster for my desk, so I could get rid of an old coaster with bad memories (um...never mind) and I put on The Social Network to amuse me whilst working. I still stand in utter awe of that movie's script. It's like All About Eve; I could put it on a continuous loop for about 14 hours and listen to it and feel smarter and smarter all the time. Every time I see it, someone else's performance jumps out at me. This time, again, it was Andrew Garfield's. I wanted to steal his character out of that movie and run off with him to Mexico the first time I saw it, and I felt that way all over again this time.

This was the result, by the way:

Turned out a little lumpier than I expected, but I don't have any emotional turmoil attached to it, and it'll keep condensation from ruining my desk. Which is the point.

Workspace, v.4

2012-01-24T11:57:00.000-08:00

With Matt's and Ikea's help, I've got The Ultimate Workstation now:

Contrary to appearances, there wasn't actually a nuclear explosion happening inside my house when this picture was taken. The afternoon sun is kinda bright, is all.

I feel very silly having a monitor, a mouse, and a keyboard all hooked up to a laptop, because why didn't I just buy a damn PC, but this is just how it's worked out. Now my laptop is far enough away and high enough up that it isn't ergonomically bad for me to look at the screen, my fingers are happy about typing on this yummy new keyboard, and I'm not taking up half the space on the dining room table with my setup. We went to Ikea and bought what amounts to a slab of pine on top of some metal sawhorses, but it's exactly what I need, no more and no less. Plus, it's a lot warmer upstairs than it was in the dining room, so I'm very happy. Doubleplus, because the pine's unfinished, I can draw encouraging messages on it in Sharpie (or perhaps get someone more talented to do this for me). Like a desk version of a Trapper Keeper.

Well, then. Back to today's chores. I goofed around too much in the past week and now have a hundred things to do before I can do fun things like blog or work on the book. Maybe in a few days I'll have more to say.

If You Liked It Then You Shoulda Put a Vampire In It

2012-01-22T07:46:00.000-08:00

I took an online writing workshop through the magazine Barrelhouse this past fall, and one of the things I was hoping to get into with my instructors and fellow students was what genre amounts to in the writing market of today. My opinion was previously that since Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy, then building with Harry Potter and, later, Twilight and all the accompanying vampire television, fantasy fiction has become much more of a mainstream proposition, no longer restricted to social misfits and obese owners of comic book stores with stained shirts, but something you can read on the subway without people thinking badly of you. Then I stumbled on this page on Wikipedia, and learned that apparently everybody is reading fantasy on the subway, and has been for many years, and has maybe just been putting false book jackets for Philip Roth over that Ken Follett novel. Which made me wonder ever more why the literary community disdained genre fiction. I think it has something to do with the taint of money against the porcelain posterior of art, the idea that popularity means you haven't written something lasting and worthwhile. I tend to believe exactly the opposite, because I think it matters if people like it. Especially if gigantic numbers of people like it.

In any case, I had thought that genre writers were rather maligned among the literary community, and while I think this is still probably true for writers who are deep inside the boundaries of the genre (i.e. high fantasy, hard science fiction), genre bleeds over into literary fiction in ways I hadn't really guessed. I was told by one of the workshop leaders that agents had taken to suggesting, "Put a vampire in it!" for lit-fic that they didn't think was yet worth selling. Shudder. And once I started looking for genre fiction in the lit community, I found that Kurt Vonnegut and Margaret Atwood are sometimes considered more genre authors than straight literary authors, which enormously surprised me.

I'm much more familiar with Atwood, and yeah, she writes a good amount of speculative fiction. Probably her most famous work is The Handmaid's Tale, which stands immediately next to 1984, is Venus to Orwell's Mars. But she's also written a number of novels that aren't speculative at all, that are about women and friendships and woe in the present day, and there's no doubt to me that her work falls firmly into the category of literary fiction.

I have all sorts of questions about this sticky subject - whether genre fiction can only be acceptable to book snobs if it's in a literary-fiction shell, where the dividing line is between something that's Fantasy and something that's Literary With Fantastic Elements, why something that so plainly has worth is deemed worthless by so many in the literary community. Whether the derision has changed since LotR, or whether the shooing-in of genre elements is about dollar signs on the part of the agent rather than a concession about available quality. Why the community bothers to hold up Cormac McCarthy as an example of its broad-mindedness when it could just as well be reading Ursula LeGuin and calling it even. I could spend all day brooding over this.

But that was a really, really long way of saying that I'm struggling with the genre problem in my work. Right now, you see, I'm working on a horror novel. Or at least, I conceptualized it as a horror novel. In fact, I put in a bunch of silly horror tropes at the outset. My "monster" has residence under the stairs. I collected a group of young characters and put them in a lodge way out in the woods. The call is coming from inside the house. At some point I hope to have someone say she'll be right back. Etc. This tickled me pink when I started erecting the structure of it, because I LOVE horror fiction, especially when it's extremely well-done and is nevertheless idiotically gory. (Drag Me to Hell is a perfect example of this kind of thing, a wonderfully made movie that tosses buckets of gunk at the screen and wants you to laugh about it.) I wanted to write a really excellent horror book that had silly cliches snuck into it so that intelligent consumers of genre fiction would read my book and wink and say "I see what you did there." I hoped it would tickle them as much as it did me.

The problem is, my writing is getting better.

I'm stepping away from the self that worries about sounding arrogant to tell you this. My writing is getting better. Last night I wrote a few thousand words that, when I was finished, I read over and shivered; it was exactly what I wanted to say, beautiful sentences that didn't need editing.

The room inside was dustless, with fresh pink and white gerberas on the little table under the window. A faint clean-linen aroma emanated from the canopy bed, on which was arranged a panoply of stuffed animals, their friendly blank eyes and funny colors only grim in the context of this room. An enormous, elaborate dollhouse stood open on the right-side wall. A downsized dresser stood against another wall, a blue satin jewelry box the sole object on its surface. Elaine knew that a plastic ballerina crouched inside, en pointe on a spring. A nightlight glowed under the drapery of the bed.

I'm writing much more carefully now than in times past, working on a sentence-by-sentence basis rather than just writing a lot, sloppily, and coming back later to fix it during the editing process. I never wind up with more than a few really splendid sentences that way, and by writing with total intention now, I end up with whole paragraphs of fiction that makes me proud to read it instead of just baseline getting-my-point-across stuff. It is much, much harder, slower and more exasperating, but oh, is it ever better.

So I'm writing a really beautiful horror book. A book with emotional impact and difficult truths. But it's still a horror book, and of all genre fiction, I think horror is the least likely ever to be respectable, the way certain swaths of fantasy fiction have become respectable.

So. What am I writing here? I am not denying that horror fiction can be beautifully written, by any means. But I find myself asking what literary fiction actually means, and why I'm so convinced that I can't write it, because that level of quality is what I'm striving to write day after day. It just also has a monster under the stairs. If I was writing a literary novel about this subject, I would emphasize that the book is about time, and the fucked-up-ed-ness of time and those who can manipulate it. But then I'd be writing a whole different book, a philosophical sort of thing that was more primarily about how humans perceive time than about how this group of characters copes with an evil little girl who can alter it. I'll think about the big philosophical stuff, and I'll maybe encourage my readers to do so while reading, but topically I'm much more interested in writing about the evil little girl than about the big stuff.

Perhaps that's what makes this a genre book rather than a literary book. Writing about the evil girl rather than writing about the concept. I do have an idea for a conceptual book, but it's in the future, after I've become a much better writer than I am now. At the moment I just want to know what Clara's going to do next.

Don't Be Steppin'

2012-01-20T09:00:00.000-08:00

So, I was originally going to try and write about this with the notion that as a writer, SOPA and PIPA matter to my interests--in the future, without fair use excerpts of my work in various places on the web, I won't see as much promotion as I'd like. That's a pretty threadbare connection, so I thought I just wouldn't write about it. But I realized that the reason SOPA and PIPA and their idiocy matter to me is that I'm a citizen of the internet. As are we all. SOPA and PIPA matter to anyone at all who uses the web on a regular basis. Which means that they matter to you as well.

I think what needs to be said about the wrongheadedness of these bills is easily Googleable, and what interests me about it was crystallized by an item I read this morning from The Escapist. It seems that the hacker group Anonymous is claiming to have hacked and broken some major websites overnight: the Department of Justice, the MPAA, the RIAA, and Universal Music Group. Not that I expect these sites to be invulnerable to a serious hacker collective, but I'm still rather impressed; this ain't small potatoes.

I had kind of hoped that the peaceful shutdown protests that took place on Wednesday would go even further than they did. I hoped that Google would shut down its search function for a day, keep people from being able to Google anything for just 24 hours. I hoped that Twitter would grind to a halt. I hoped that comments forums all over the internet on sites like the Washington Post and the New York Times would cease functioning, so that just for one day, you couldn't make your voice heard (no matter what you have to say). I thought if there was serious, major disruption to the sites that people use with impunity every day--even, perhaps, sites that senators themselves visit--they would see how goddamn stupid these bills were, how too-far their reach extends.

I don't want to see the world go down in flames of chaos. Nor do I really even want people to actually suffer for their stupidity. But I know that in order to make obtuse people see reason about something that matters past the ends of their noses, you have to hit them hard exactly where they live. That means different things to different people, of course. If, as a barista, you know that a certain senator just has to have his Starbucks in order to function, and whenever he comes to the counter you turn your back and refuse to serve him--and you could be sure that all Starbucks baristas everywhere would do the same--you would probably have his ear a little more easily than if as an employee of a McDonald's you intended to refuse him, when the senator hasn't visited McDonald's in twenty years.

One of the things that troubles me about these bills is the same thing that troubles me about a great deal of legislation passed in the last 15 years: it seems to have been drafted and pressed and fed through the rollers of Congress without any sort of input from the actual constituency that elected these congressmen. I'll grant you that I have a pretty self-selecting group of friends to choose from, but I don't know a single person who thinks this legislation is anything like a good idea. I'd love to see the numbers on how many ordinary folk contacted their representatives on Wednesday, after discovering what SOPA and PIPA were all about, and said, no, we do NOT want this to be law. I'm betting it was a lot of them. I'm betting it was enough to elect somebody completely new, in fact.

For Wednesday's protests to actually hit the congressmen where they live, though, it would have to be a more dramatic gesture than Wikipedia and Reddit and what-have-you. It would have to be Google and CNN.com and CNBC.com and the Cornell site that houses the U.S. Code and whatever other sites congressmen and their staff use to get through their workdays. YouTube, probably. It would have to matter more than just your constituency rising up against your actions, right? It would have to be your bank's website.

For Anonymous to take out these websites is--if not merely an act of revenge for Megaupload, which would be kind of lame and negate my whole point, and I can't believe it's a coincidence, with SOPA and PIPA so nearby--intentioned, I think, to send the message We Know the Internet and You Don't. Don't Be Steppin' in 'Hoods that Ain't Yourn. If this is their message, I think it's a completely proper one, if delivered in a terroristy sort of way. Of course, how the authorities will see such a message is a completely different matter. They'll smack down like parents on teenage rebellion: you little punks. How dare you fuck with us just because you can't break copyright law as easily as you could three days ago. It's meaningless defacement, taking down some websites, like spray-painting ASSHOLE on somebody's car.

This is the problem with terrorist messages, of course. They're never delivered properly. The destruction always seems to matter more than the message. Which is why the Gandhi/King-type protests of Wednesday did so much good: we're not going to wreck anything, we're just going to make your life a little harder for a day. Just to show you, and meanwhile show a lot of other people who didn't even know about it, that we think you're doing the wrong thing.

Yet I can't help having some admiration at the message, if only the message, of Anonymous in wrecking usdoj.gov. Rather than only showing you how heavy an anvil is by slackening the rope until the weight's pressing down on the top of your head, it's a razor slicing through the rope that holds the anvil up. Bang, you're dead.

Genuinely Weird and Totally Awesome

2012-01-17T08:56:00.000-08:00

I'm about to hit 55,000 words on the horror novel, and while I'm pleased with its direction, and with some of the individual paragraphs and sentences and whatnot, I'm not sure whether it'll be an utter mess when I'm done with the first draft. I had a meandering talk with Matt yesterday about the spot where I was blocked (until I wrote through it, yay for me), and that brought me to the realization that there are a bunch of different ways I could make this universe work. He is the best devil ever to advocate, so I went down one leafy green path with him before discovering that it wasn't my original intention, and then went down another one while he listened and asked more questions, and then another. I think it might have made him a little nuts, but it was certainly helpful for me.

I wrote a segment yesterday about a couple of my main characters getting high. (On the maryjane.) I am telling you the truth when I say that I have never been high. So even before I put together a complete draft, I'm going to need to beg indulgence from somebody so I can find out if I wrote these few paragraphs properly. It's not with zero knowledge that I cobbled this section together, but certainly it lacks personal experience. I feel a little stupid and extremely square that I have to ask someone else, "Is this more or less what it's like to be high?", but there it is. Someone will probably write to suggest that I just get high myself and find out, but I'm not really interested.

I'm reading Infinite Jest, I think I mentioned a few posts back. I woke up too early the other morning after unsettling, unremembered dreams and I went downstairs and read it for an hour or two. I am on page fifty-eight. I said this proudly to Matt when he came downstairs, and pointed out that I was already an eighteenth of the way through the book. (To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure how I'll get through it, or when.) I should have learned the lesson that it's not a good idea to get too heavily into a piece of fiction while you're working on a piece of your own, because the last few chapters of the Greenland book were a tad too Austen-y for their genre due to what I was doing during breaks in the work. But I figure that a little more David Foster Wallace in any given piece of fiction can't really hurt. And it's long past time for me to have read this book.

Today is a day that I'll get the chance to do all three of my jobs, along with my fourth, unpaid one: I taught yoga this morning, I've got a couple of copy-editing tasks to do and turn in, and I've got something to edit with my paralegal hat on. When I'm finished with that, I'm going to work on the novel some more. I wake up and go to bed feeling lucky every day, now, but I don't say to myself often enough how genuinely weird and totally awesome my life is in its new configuration.

Apropos of nothing:

It's from a series of eight which I love utterly. I want to contact the artist and ask him if he'll do mini-prints for me that I can frame, but I have no idea how much I'd pay him for something like that and therefore whether I can afford it, so it seems foolish to ask.

OKAY THAT'S ENOUGH PROCRASTINATING. I have to get to work. Ooh, it's almost time for lunch!

Today

2012-01-16T07:05:00.000-08:00

Fictional Facts (Fast and Fraudulent)

2012-01-13T18:56:00.000-08:00

I finally wrote a couple thousand words or so today. It's been a complicated week, with my jobs intruding on my writing time a lot (dang money, having to be made), and I haven't had the chance to write much. I told Matt a couple of days ago that I felt dissatisfied with the way the week was going, that I felt like it was slipping away from me. Now it's Friday night and I've only just gotten the chance to write what I really want to be writing.

I wrote a scene today that took place during the Civil War, and I had a great many details to look up to make sure I wasn't being too horribly disrespectful. A lot of them (what the weather was like in Buckingham County, Virginia on April 7th, 1865) I couldn't find; a lot of them (how many men were in a company and how many in a battalion; whether a corporal was an officer) I embarrassingly couldn't keep in my head long enough to close out the stupid window in my browser.

One of my favorite things about Stephen King's books of short stories is the bit at the end, where he tells you a little about each story's history - how it came to him, what he was thinking about when he wrote it, whether and where it was published (or not), etc. I find some of these commentaries to be more interesting than the actual stories, and one I well remember is for "Dolan's Cadillac", a revenge story about a man who (thpoilerth) buries the mobster who killed his wife inside his own Cadillac, six feet under. He does this by having the guy drive into a trap on a deserted highway and then using highway equipment to cover up the car. King explained in his bonus feature that he tried to fake the facts about how this would occur, how the man would dig the hole and get the car in it and so on. He found after a draft or two that he just couldn't manage it without more facts, so he called his polymath brother and asked him to explain how it would be done. His brother sent him a videotape of himself explaining it, with physics and miniature figures and a pile of dirt.

I'm tangenting a little, but the point emergeth: part of what I remember about this bonus feature (and a few others King has written about other stories) is that King says without shame that he's a very lazy writer when it comes to facts like this. That he generally only bothers to get it right in the very most shallow way possible, the way in which your average layman wouldn't know the difference. He's just not Michael Crichton, he says, and can't be buggered to get all of that crap perfectly correct.

I'm somewhere in the middle. I like things to be right, but I'm certainly not going to lose my mind if it's not - particularly if it's too obscure for anyone to know the difference. Certainly anyone who's ever lived in Greenland is going to contradict plenty of the stuff in my previous book, but come on, I'm supposed to cater to that subset of people? Sure, I'd love to have the thousands of dollars it would require for me to spend two weeks in Greenland fact-gathering, but I don't.

The Civil War is something else again. A lot of people are going to cry foul on a fudge, including some members of my own family. So I tried to get right as much as I could. But when I found myself looking up names of corporals who died on April 7th of 1865 to see if I could get a moderately correct reference in there...yeah, that was too much. It's a horror novel, folks, it ain't scholarship.

I'd love to know what others think about this. Do you think it all has to be perfect for it to be enjoyed? Or can fiction be safely loose and undependable when it comes to facts?

Snow Like Ash

2012-01-11T11:16:00.000-08:00

Note: I intended to post this on Tuesday but just didn't have the time.

Last night it snowed. It was my perfect snow. I wait all winter, sometimes fruitlessly, for a snow like this.

It was the kind with the big fat blobby flakes, the one that look like mistakes from the snowflake factory. As if a few got stuck together on the assembly line and are just getting thrown out anyway, tossed overboard from the special effects catwalk in the sky no matter if they look like gobs of cotton. And they were in no hurry as they fell, floating down steadily, in that way where if you look up at the dark-gray sky, you can freeze-frame a whole segment of the drifting wads, and then look past those and find another frameful, and then beyond that one. Like the 360-degree camera introduced so dramatically in The Matrix, suddenly to life in snow.

I loathe winter. I hate being cold with something of a pathology. I abhor the whole season with an intensity I'm told is rather unmatched. I always feel such joy when the time comes to stop lumbering around with my heavy coat and garments, to let my skin breathe the free air again, to taste the sun on my collarbones. And the opposite thing, when it's time to protect that skin from the knifing cold, oh. Each year the hopeless feeling builds on last year's, a modest skyscraper of negativity at this point.

But I don't mind snow. I read once about how snow is created, the conditions that have to be present in the atmosphere for snow to form and fall, and I was kind of astonished that it ever happened at all. Because of that, it feels a little like a miracle to me.

I sometimes wish that we could have snow without winter, that we could have cool dry snow that fell and evaporated on streets warmed by summer sun. Or snow like ash, built up and swept away into nothing. I had this thought as I was driving home through the three-dimensional weather, sweeping cotton from my windshield, and I remembered the Uglies series of teen novels by a writer named Scott Westerfeld. It's set in the not-too-distant future, where everybody living in the central cities is subject to an operation upon reaching age 16, which renders them beautiful to a very specific standard. The beauty standard was scientifically determined, as I recall, to be as attractive to human eyes as possible. These superhuman beauties ("pretties") don't look much like our standard of beauty now, but more like baby animals.

If you're surprised when I tell you there's a dark side to this operation, you have never read a science fiction book before. There are multiple thought-provoking things about the series, and one of them is the very simple idea, seemingly impossible for humans to grasp on a cosmic level, that you can't have everything. A procedure that appears to put everyone on a level playing field in terms of appearance is going to have some serious drawbacks. As Eloi, you can play all day, but you're going to get eaten at night. An iPhone is going to have an expensive monthly service charge. It's just the way of things.

If I want my perfect snow, I have to live with the cold. Even Calvin accepts that.

My delight with last night's snow meant that I could ignore the cold, a little bit. Living in Maryland, I have the luxury to see snow less as a harbinger of death and mayhem than as a landscape enhancement. And certainly last night that's what it was. It was a marvel. I drove home wondering at it, watching it.

When I woke up this morning, it was all gone. There were white edgings on some of the roofs, but the frosting on the trees, the blanket on the ground, the mufflement of traffic and the inimitable cool stillness in the air--nothing remained.

Mining Whilst Tipsy

2012-01-08T16:55:00.000-08:00

Matt is rather drunkily slaughtering orks in the computer room. I'm rather drunkily sitting in front of my computer out here. In theory I ought to be plunking down more words in the novel, but I'm not really feelin' it. I'm in a fainting-couch mood, instead. This is a mood where I go into the computer room, plunk down in the empty laundry basket, and give deep sighs until Matt asks me what's wrong. Then I draw a dramatic hand across my forehead, lean back, and tell him that writing is soooo hard. Then we both laugh.

I'm in a good place on the novel, really. Things are going well. I'm on track to be finished well before my deadline if I don't lose momentum. There are mechanical problems, but they're fixable. My writing is actually smoother and more creative in its smallities than on the previous project; I'm prouder of it on a sentence-by-sentence basis. I'm not positive it adds up to anything, but I think one day it will. I'm also grateful that I have the version of Microsoft Word which shows me, in the bottom bar, how many words are in my document. It's incredibly helpful to see that total and know I'm nowhere near the end of the story. But it also shows me that I'm nowhere near the end of the story. Gaaaah.

Sugar has this to say about writing:

Writing is hard for every last one of us... Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.

It's a quote I relied upon completely when I discovered it back in the fall, and I would not, not, not have completed the Greenland book without it. But the day-to-day experience of writing a novel is indeed not at all unlike mining. It's dirty and unpleasant and hard and from inside the mine, it doesn't look like you've made any kind of progress. For the moment, I just want to curl up in a ball and have someone pet me and say yes, dear, it surely is hard. Poor coal-mining baby.

No one is doing this for me right now, although the alcohol seeping into my brain cells (while it's removing some of them--woops, there goes what I knew about Kierkegaard) is certainly clawing away at the maudlin-ness. See, maybe there's the secret to coal mining. Get good and lubed up before you go down in the pit. Wait, no, that's a bad idea. I think I'm just about ready to get back to digging myself, seeing as how what I'm doing isn't actually life-threatening and I need to ride this buzz before it vanishes.

But first! In other news, I'm rereading Rebecca for the zillionth time. The most recent time I read it was in college, though, and at 30 it's quite a different experience. It turns out that I remember the mood, tone, events, and characters of the book far better than I remember the actual page-by-page experience of reading it. I've always said that it's the book I'd be if Fahrenheit 451 became reality. I still hold to that, as it's just essential reading, but I'm kind of turned off by how much more rhapsodically descriptive it is than I remembered, how much less it is about Big Things and how much more it is about small things. And how much more informed by patriarchy it is than I remembered. Thanks a lot, Mount Holyoke, now I'll permanently notice crap like that. Next on the list is David Foster Wallace, whom I've never read before aside from a short story or two which I didn't much enjoy. We'll see how Infinite Jest strikes me. I'm 1 for 2 on Thomas Pynchon.

Workspace Update

2012-01-06T12:47:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Matt, I'm now thoroughly equipped to stare at pretty pictures while I work.

Lil' Tom Servo and bobble-head Vault Boy are there to cheer me on. Matt points out that everyone needs a yes-man and a contrarian, and he's absolutely right. And now I have everything I could need. Except, at the moment, time to work.

The Vacant Stare Is How You Know I'm Working

2012-01-05T14:27:00.000-08:00

I downloaded a desktop theme called "Nordic Scenes" a few days ago. Before that, rotating NASA spacescapes graced my desktop (say that three times fast), and although they made me and my human life feel distinctly big and significant, I was ready for a change. I had previously thought about getting some glacier-themed stuff to look at while I was writing the Greenland book, but I am so allergic to cold and cold environs that I thought it would just make me unhappy, rather than making me more in tune with what I was writing. I'm really glad I caved; these pictures are gorgeous, and although ice or mountains are often a theme, they aren't always.

I just wish I knew where the heck they'd taken the pictures. I mean, duh, in Nordic areas, just--is this Iceland? Norway? Greenland itself? I have no idea.

About half the time that I'm writing, I'm actually staring off into space above my laptop, because I'm thinking as I'm putting words down, and thanks to seventh grade typing class, I don't need to look at my fingers. I kind of wish I could be looking at something other than either the closed blinds or the inside of our patio, where the weedy pots sit forlornly on the concrete, helpfully reminding me that no plant will ever, ever flourish under my care, ever, unless I give up and leave it to its own devices (this is how the rosemary on our front walk survives). Not so helpful to my confidence, as a writer, a member of the supposedly more nurturing gender, or a human being. I mean, really. Who can't grow zucchini?

Where was I? Oh, yes, my view. I told Matt what I really wanted was a large screen, monitor-sized, that had beautiful rotating pictures on it for me to gaze at blankly while I typed, or while I sat like a stump and waited to know what to type. Pictures rather like the pretty themes you can download for Windows 7, actually. I don't want to pay for one of those digital picture frames, because I'm not really a picture person. I just want a kind of meditation screen.

We have a small old monitor in our garage that I tried and failed to sell on Craiglist once, and I'm giving some thought to hooking that guy up and leaving my lovely rotating Nordic desktop on it to look at. But since I'm working at the dining room table now, if we ever decide to eat a meal on this table again there'll be a whole setup to clear away instead of just this laptop. I don't want to be a pain, nor do I want things to be unnecessarily complicated.

When I was working on the yoga memoir I now have in the metaphorical trunk, I wrote about how people often reject props because they see them as being for beginners, or for wimps. I wrote something about how if you think of yourself as a hardcore practitioner, your attitude is, sheeit, I can do yoga on a concrete floor in India, man, I don't need no stinkin' props. Well, okay, if you insist, but it's not necessary to do that to do "real" yoga. And it's more pleasant to use props if they're available, anyway. It's nicer to practice on a Manduka mat in non-chafey pants if you can, even if your practice is mobile and advanced enough to be anywhere and in anything. Using a block makes life easier in half-moon, and boy, does practicing in Lululemon feel like a million bucks.

I could probably write in a heatless, windowless garret if I had to. Longhand, God help me. But I like writing in a padded chair, on a speedy little laptop, and I like having something pretty to look at while I'm working. So I think I'm going to try out that monitor setup after all, no matter if it makes my writing rig seem unreasonably elaborate. It may not make my writing any better to have something to look at, but it'll make me feel better.

Even with the equipment I have now, I did get past my block this week. Thanks in part to the judicious and responsible application of alcohol, I got to work. I wrote several thousand words this week, and I have a good idea for where to go next. It's not a project that has a picture-ready theme like the Greenland book, so I think I'll stick with Nordic scenes for now, but we'll see. My stamina bar is filling up again, and I have confidence that I'll finish this project, if for no other reason than I really want to work on the next one. For that next one, I know exactly what kind of slideshow I'll use: pictures of Marilyn Monroe.

Stolen Because I Love It

2012-01-04T08:06:00.000-08:00

I read this on the Trenches webcomic website, and it's such a simple and excellent story that I just had to share it with you.

We used to have someone who would buy cans of Coke bulk and keep them in the fridge, selling them and donating the proceeds to charity. It relied on the honor system to leave money for them, but over time, the money wasn’t matching the missing cans…by a significant margin.

People started to get into heated arguments about it, with accusations flying left and right and emails questioning “What kind of people work here?!”

Finally, after much discussion, a webcam was set up to keep an eye on it. Many thought it signaled the end of our company culture and an absolute loss of faith in who we thought were our friends and coworkers.

The next day we fired the cleaners for stealing the money and drinking the Coke.

It's Great, Really, But How About an Honorable Cash Prize?

2012-01-03T04:52:00.000-08:00

Just before the New Year I got an e-mail from Writer's Digest, advising me that my work warranted an Honorable Mention in a recent horror contest. The May/June issue of WD will list my name as honorably mentioned in the contest, and I get a free copy of the 2012 Writer's Market. Which is nice, and the cost of the book means I'm ahead about $10 above my entry fee. Yay!

The story in question is "Gone to Earth", the title of which I blatantly stole from an early-20th-century book by a female author named Mary Webb. A sample (of my story, not hers):

The silence maddened her for the first week, but one day she shut her eyes and sat on the porch and listened, and she heard it finally: the whistling sounds of the trees, the industry of squirrels, the chittering of nesting birds, faraway burbling water. The clamor was deafening if you listened. The expectation of television, of booming car stereos, of next-door Smiths embroiled in domestic battle, had drowned out the real sounds that existed in this place. She was suddenly dizzy with the altitude.

Two weeks later, and she is knitting her fingers into the tiny garden’s wet dirt. A woodpecker is sporadic in keeping her company as she kneels in the damp earth. She hums Springsteen. A pale green tendril from a bush nearby snakes its way around her moving wrist.

She ceases and looks at it. It is still for a moment, and then it moves again, climbing its way up her arm to the crease of her elbow. She stands up at speed and the tendril slips away harmlessly, lying on the ground.

Shelly is shaking, her eyes wide, the tune in her throat forgotten. Her earthen hands dangle. The tendril does not move. It is another three days before she goes to the garden again, and by then the seeds and weeds alike have uncurled into life, the weeds twice as large and throttling the squash.

I wrote the story a few years ago, and although it really does belong in the stable of genre work, not literary, it was still (at the time) the closest I'd ever come to writing exactly what I had in mind. A piece of work I'm proud of. One day I want to place it in Weird Tales - it was rejected two years ago, but maybe with some more work it'll be worthy.

As I said a while back (while I was agonizedly editing "Gone to Earth" down for this very contest, in fact), I don't really know what's up with contests, how they work, but thus far this is the third one in which I have been granted an honorable mention. I'm pleased that I warrant mention, especially of the honorable sort, but I'm kind of starting to wonder what's up with this. (I'm an Honorable Mention winner from way back, all the way to science fair projects in elementary school and whatnot.) What do I do to break through from "yeah, we liked it" to "this is outstanding by any measure"? More characterization? Fewer adjectives? Thicker paper?

In other news, I bought Florence + the Machine's new album (Lungs has been listened to a nub, or would have been, if it hadn't been listened to entirely in digital form), and have discovered that noise-canceling headphones are really the only way to listen to Florence + the Machine. I just want to lie down and let her voice soak into my body, maybe for a day or two straight.

Also, totally blocked from working on the horror novel, either through laziness or perfectionist fears or whatever else is making me chemically unable to put one word in front of the other. I think this evening I'll try lubing up with a cocktail and see where that gets me. Yeah, not a wise habit, but it worked nicely with the Greenland book, and I didn't wind up with an alcohol problem after it was all over, so I think I'm OK. Also also, someone with more talent in the tip of her nose than I have in my entire brain has just e-mailed me a WIP for me to read and chat with her about, so I am apparently being revenged for my impatience with my readers. I can't wait to dig in.

Resolute, 2011 Edition

2012-01-02T05:08:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year!

At my former, anonymous blog, I got into the tradition of posting last year's New Year's resolutions and their result, and then making new ones in the same post. It was a useful tool to gauge how my year went, so I see no reason to stop it. Here are last year's:

1. Don’t lose sight of my health. Although in practical terms I flossed a lot less than I should have, and December of 2011 will always be remembered by me as the Month of Neverending Desserts, I still think I succeeded at this in a way I couldn't have known about when I made the resolution. My digestive health was becoming rather seriously bad in the months before I quit full-time work, and now I'm healthy again for the most part.

2. Remember the Bikram lesson. This lesson is sort of a long story, but the short version is that there is just no quick fix for my life. It doesn’t benefit me to run full speed into a perceived solution, because generally that solution ends up feeling an awful lot like a wall. I think I succeeded at remembering this. Kind of. I still want a single solution to drop into my life - the lottery, a fat book advance, a penalty-free writedown of our mortgage, etc. I haven't gotten much better at not hoping for such things, even though I learned a lot this year about how patience and inching toward my goals really does benefit me.

3. Stop worrying about “normal”. ENTIRELY. A wise person explained to me in 2010 that as long as your behavior doesn’t do anyone any harm, there is no reason to compare it to others’ and feel bad that it’s not the same. I made a lot of progress in this direction this year, but I still worry that I'm not...I don't know...keeping up? In certain ways? My house isn't as clean as the neighbors', I don't have as strong and solid of a life plan as my classmates'. Stuff like that. Whether the way I behave is normal or not, I care a lot less about that now, so I guess that's success.

4. Reeeeeead mooooooore boooooooooooooks. Yeah, I did. A lot more. Yay me.

5. Be better about my budget. Success. I'm a good deal more circumspect than I was in 2010, and not artificially via guilt. Which is great.

6. Relax about turning 30. I failed at this in terms of a resolution, as I was not at all relaxed over the course of the year (or on the actual birthday) about turning 30. But I turned 30 and the world didn't end. It's much nicer to be 30 than it was to be 23, I'll say that much. But in terms of not being worried about aging, that's a big FAIL FAIL FAIL.

7. Find a direction. Success. I want to be a novelist. Time will tell if it's a direction that works.

This was a much better year for resolutions than most of them have been. [pats self on back] And this year's resolutions:

1. Slim down in terms of possessions. It's not necessary for me to own the equivalent of a video store, for example, or a whole stable of items that I might find a use for someday. I need to be still more ruthless about getting rid of things. I'm a recovering pack-rat (which is rather like being a recovering alcoholic - you're never really cured), and there is lots more to do.

2. With my newfound financial circumspection, toss more money into my debts. This is actually a specific thing I need to do, not just a "pay off debt" resolution. It's hard to explain practically, but it's a pretty simple financial-habits issue.

3. In terms of writing, put into practice all the things that have worked for me in 2011. Specifically: 1) Keep blogging. It helps me find my voice. 2) Just Do It. Put words on the page; it all comes from there. 3) Set a time-limit goal and stick to it. For example, my absolute deadline for the horror novel is June (failing some kind of insane life circumstance). I will be done with a first draft by June, or I'm fired.

4. Be fearless. Prior years' resolutions were about getting rid of guilt or embarrassment, or about decreasing fear to sustainable levels. This year I'm going for broke: fearlessness. About my writing, about my teaching, about being around other human beings, about going confidently in whatever direction my life wants to take me.

5. Detach. Stop fretting over the outcome and how it affects you and whether what happened reflects badly on you. Just live and do your best.

I think I had some more small ones floating around in my mind, but after 24 hours of trying to remember them, I can't. Maybe I'll update later, or maybe I'll just try to do these five as best I can.

I hope wherever and whoever you are, 2012 is your year.

Swimmingly

2011-12-29T06:19:00.000-08:00

So now that I'm fully engaged in the waiting game, I'm not too sure what to do with myself. "Work" for money is not really happening at this time aside from teaching, so I have a lot of time to fill during the day. I watched all of my Christmas present from Matt, all 19 blessed episodes of My So-Called Life, which was actually better than I thought it was at 13, for completely different reasons. (Although Jordan Catalano was no less attractive. God above, that boy.) I found myself surprised at the writing influence of that show; the first few episodes reminded me of the way The Sopranos is written, the sort of psychic circularity of certain concepts (remember the ducks? like that), and the extreme character delving that's done. The last several reminded me of Buffy, what little Buffy I've seen. But now that I've marathoned those 14 or so hours of TV in three days, I'm twiddling my thumbs a little bit. Matt's brother gave me the MST3K Gamera collection for Christmas, but believe me, a little Gamera goes a long way.

The obvious thing is to write. I do have this horror novel that I've been nursing for a few years, but as I mentioned the last time we were together, I'm very uncertain about its direction. I forced a few paragraphs out beyond what I had written the last time I left off, but when I think of it, I feel unsure that I can make it novel-length, that I can fix its major flaws (too much dialogue, not enough events, I like my main character less than my supporting ones), that I seem to have this really obvious pattern for how I write books that isn't necessarily a good way to write books and I'm doing it again and I'm not sure about it. Namely, this is the second book I've done serious work on that has a long section of another piece of media. In the Greenland book, it's a few thousand words of fictional history from the fourteenth century as told by one of my main characters, and in the horror book it's not quite ten thousand words (with no immediate end; I'm still writing it and don't know whether or when to end it) of a diary kept by the antagonist. I don't exactly know where I'm headed and can't gauge if where I've been is any good. Major revisions will be necessary. Whine whine uncertainty whine.

There are a lot of things I'm worried about with this project. This makes it no different, really, than the Greenland book, but for some reason my doubt is no less potent considering I already made it through this process with what I consider moderate success. I wasn't really sure I'd finish the Greenland book and I did; I felt the same "I have no PLOT" panic about that book and I came up with some. Why can't I ditch the insecurity?

Apart from all that, the main reason I haven't really gotten down to business on this horror book, not really, is that I feel like it's too soon to walk away from the Greenland book and head onto another project. I don't know what's giving me this feeling, because I'm not tired, or missing the urge to write, or blocked, or anything like that. It's like swimming; when you're a kid your parents yell and scream endlessly (or at least mine did) about not swimming at any time less than half an hour after you eat. When you grow up, you're better able to judge when you're too full to comfortably swim, or whether it's safe enough (supervised pool, etc.) to take the risk and swim anyway. But you still retain this little yelling voice inside that says no, no, no, don't swim, you'll get a cramp and diiiiiiie!

The conventional wisdom would seem to be that diving back into the waters of another novel so soon after finishing all the work it's possible to do at the moment on the just-done novel is simply a bad idea. Too much Greenland residue, my brain should be plumb wore out, if I get heavily into the horror novel I won't be able to revise Greenland effectively. Some such things. But I honestly don't know what else to do; I don't have any significant ideas for short stories, I have one for an essay but I don't think it's ready yet, I'm not interested in taking any continuing ed classes, and at the moment there are long stretches of every weekday that are unfilled. To plug the space with Netflix feels like I'm not doing my part for the household.

Until my readers get back to me with suggestions (and oh, will Matt be happy when they do - I've already asked him what he thinks they think of it about 400 times when I know that in all probability no one has cracked the spine yet, figuratively or literally), what I can do with my chosen profession during these days is, um, do it. Write. I just can't get rid of the little voice that calls it unwise.

What do you, the viewers at home, think?

Auditioning My [Un]talented Child

2011-12-21T06:02:00.000-08:00

Waiting for people to tell you what they think of your work is a special kind of hell, I think, and I can't imagine it's a whole lot more fun for the people who are reading the work. The last time I sent work out to friends was...gosh, two, three years ago? Neither friend ever finished reading what I sent (to my knowledge), after being so enthusiastic about it. One friend read about a third of the material and talked to me in wonderful detail about it, so helpful, and then it dropped off his radar and I never heard about it again. The other friend never got back to me at all.

I'll grant you I was pissed off at the time, but since then I've let go of it. (Oh, how generous of me.) I put myself in their shoes, and imagined having this obligation that I thought was going to be a pleasure, and embarrassing myself by being excited about it and then not getting around to it for days stretching into weeks, and knowing that my friend really, really cared about this thing that I was starting to consider a stone around my neck. What a very yucky feeling. Or, worse, maybe I had read it, and didn't like it, and didn't know what to say; maybe I'd presumed it was going to be a lot better than it was (or at least a lot more polished), and didn't know how to explain that I'd been disappointed.

On my side of the fence there's this beautiful albatross, this beloved child of my typing fingers, and I need to send her out for auditions, so we can find out from an unbiased source whether she has a shot of making it to the big time. To do this, and wait at home for my pretty child to return with a bevy of information about how to improve her weak voice and her droopy tits and then to hear nothing nothing nothing, is torment. But the people in whose hands is the work, it's not their fault. They have a lot of auditions to get through. My albatross is no more important (much less, in fact) than all the other items in their lives. She's my kid, but she's their burden.

If you ever find yourself in this position (I'm substituting myself for any author, here), please know that I want to hear about it if my kid sucks. If you're an early reader, it's not awkward for you to tell me, "Wow, I really thought this would be good, since you spent good years of your youth on it, but it stinks like yesterday's diapers, and here's why." Not awkward. Exactly what me and my kid need to hear, so we can get voice lessons and a boob job and move forward, marching on to Broadway.

(Did that [long-term] metaphor work? I feel like it did, but I'm not sure. See, this is why we need readers.)

The point is, we're both in shitty positions, the author and the readers, and I'm taking this opportunity to acknowledge that I know it. That for me to sit here and bite my nails bloody is no harder than for a reader to look at the manuscript sitting in the corner and know that she has to get back to it eventually. I know that. And what we both need to do is just let it be, calm down and do what's needed (even if what's needed is to walk away and never look back).

Whilst waiting for my dear, dear readers to ~~get with the program~~ finish their extremely difficult task, I've gone back to work on a horror novel I started two winters ago, and it's very slow going swimming back into it again. I don't know if the 30-some thousand words I already have on it are any good. At all. I don't know how to add another 40-some thousand (or more), when the story's pretty simple and I don't have a great deal more plot. Of course, that was my problem during the second half of the Greenland book, too, and now I have too many thousand words. If Matt will once more brainstorm with me and give me exactly the right book to read, I'm sure I'll be fine. Until then I'll flounder on.

In other parts of my life, I continue to cruise along in uncertainty. Christmas approaches. The thing I chose for my homemade gifts this year is by necessity a last-minute thing, so I'm planning to get to work on it tomorrow. There's this little panic critter in my head hollering that I'm running out of time and have nothing prepared and there are so few days left! and I'm having to remember over and over that it's a last-minute thing, I can't prepare any more than I already have. CHILLAX.

That's kind of the leit-motif of this month, actually. When I remember to take that advice, everything's awesome.

Unsightly

2011-12-18T18:56:00.000-08:00

It's Catalog Season in our mailbox, and the other day we received a Hammacher Schlemmer catalog - we probably purchased a single gift from them three years ago or something and are now on their holiday list ad eternium. As is the Schlemmer way, they had a lot of cool stuff in there, but something that particularly caught my eye was a home electrolysis...thing, a little machine about the size of a lady's electric razor that did permanent hair removal after numerous repetitions of swiping the thing over your unsightly body hair.

At first glance, I thought, YES, this is like a zillion times cheaper than salon electrolysis would be, and yes I'd probably have to swipe for several months in a row, but NO MORE SHAVING MY UNDERARMS, thank God, sign me up.

Then I thought about it some more. I thought about the idea of actually having no hair under my armpits. Ever. Again. Or on the tops of my toes; the little golden hairs that have grown there since I was in middle school are deeply humiliating to me (which is why I'm telling the whole internet about them). Or...well, no, those are the only two places that have hair I'd like to be permanently rid of. I'm kind of conservative that way.

The more I thought about it, the more I was bothered by the idea of forever removing that hair. I never let my underarm hair grow out for more than a day or two, in part because I don't like to show hairy pits to my students when I'm teaching and I teach a few times a week. But the idea of it gone forever was very disconcerting.

I think it's because I've never quite reached comfort about the amount of hair removal women are societally requested/required to do, and which I go on and do in order not to be frowned upon in femininity. Every time I see a woman with publicly fuzzy pits, I give her a little mental fist-bump: way to not conform, grrl. I wish I had your fuck-'em-all attitude. But I don't. It's not a step I feel comfortable taking, and that kind of bothers me, that I'm not gutsy enough to let my armpits be what they are and to hell with anyone who'll disdain me for it.

There's always the "I want to be as awesome as Patti Smith" defense.
Which, you know, is a thing.

I can't think of any occasion in the future where I'd want my armpit hair to grow, nor can I think of any kind of life situation I am likely to experience in my remaining years on this planet where I won't regularly "need" [want? have?] to remove it. But that hair is a part of me, the real me who sweats during exertion and gets crud under her toenails and relieves herself via urination and defecation. These are human things, and the way that our society paints over them with obsessive hygiene and creams and powders and soaps and unguents of every possible configuration, consistency, and aroma, is something that I'm often grateful for (on subways, etc.) but I'm also often kind of dubious about. It smacks of a lack of acceptance of our essential humanness, and it leaves us all with a shade of illusion over the bits we most genuinely have in common, for better or worse.

So although there's a big part of me that can only think of how awesome it would be not to have to scrape my armpits raw every day or every couple of days, there's another part that's warning me no. Don't ditch that unsightly hair. Our unsightly parts are the parts that keep us grounded and whole, the parts that prove that under the most expensive perfume and the most perfectly coiffed hairdo, we are still beautiful animals with feet of clay.

Or, as the kids say, everybody poops.

OH YOU MOTHERF***ING WRITER.

2011-12-16T06:24:00.000-08:00

I have a shelf in my bedroom, a "floating" shelf that's screwed into the wall, with room for only a few books. I've had it in some version of my bedroom for a long time, and in every incarnation it's had the same little group of books on it. Holes, Alias Grace, Rebecca, The Light of Evening, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (UK edition). Several others. They're the books that remain important to me year after year, that changed my life the first time I read them and minutely change my life again every time I reread them, that make me stay up too late to read them, that make me feel like the ocean has crashed gloriously on my head when I'm through. Right now I'm in the living room and there's a bookshelf to my left with books that have applied for admission: Travel Light, Fun Home, The Autograph Man, The Brief History of the Dead. But it's a very selective shelf, and I haven't felt right about adding anyone to it in many a moon.

One of the books on that shelf is Bag of Bones, by Stephen King. I was astonished when I was finished reading that book, because it's the only really literary book I think King has written (to date; I haven't read his JFK book), and it's still the book that I think is his best. (Aside from the Dark Tower, I've read all but his two or three most recent.) When I found out a few years ago that the movie rights for it had been sold, I was disappointed, but unsurprised; King properties are likely always going to be sold to Hollywood. But I hoped it would sit in development eternally. For various reasons, I was pretty sure Bag of Bones wouldn't translate to the screen.

Its rhythm is slow, and matched to grief in the way it turns back on itself over and over during the first third, which would just seem mistaken and boring in a film. It has intricate plotting, much more so than any other book of his I can think of, that is too subtle and word-based to move to a more fleeting visual medium. It has its own talismanic sort of language, lots of repetition like wards against evil, and that gets tiresome to listen to when it doesn't to read. It also has a very strong interiority, with the protagonist's thoughts and feelings and imaginings more central to the plot than any real activities he engages in (I think). It's hard to do that interiority in a movie and make it convincing, especially since the majority of adaptations of King's work have been so regrettable.

Yet A&E took it on, and made it into a miniseries (two episodes, three hours), and put it on the air last weekend, and I DVRed it and, last night, watched it. I stayed up too late to do so, and I really should've just put the remote down and gone to bed, because it stank. It was lazy and unsubtle and rushed and unfocused and bad. It made the writer's life look exactly as uninteresting as it is, only with bewildering yelling in the face of writer's block; it stuffed exposition into its cracks like mortar; it changed details that--I'm not saying this in a fanboy kind of way, just in a practical way, I swear--should not have been changed. I'm not laying blame on anybody except the screenwriter and the people who thought it would be a good idea to adapt this book to a motion picture. The cast acquitted themselves as well as could be expected and the direction was...not so terrible. But sheesh, you guys, some books shouldn't be movies. I say that as a better student of film than I ever was or ever will be a student of literature.

All it did was make me want to read the book again, to recapture that ocean-crash feeling and the intimacy I had felt with these characters and this situation, which the adaptation totally failed to replicate. So I went upstairs and I did just that, I took the book off my special shelf and I read all my favorite parts. When I was done, it was two in the morning, and I briefly entertained the idea of staying up all night to read the thing cover to cover. (It's that good of a book, y'all.) I didn't, but I was so relieved that the adaptation hadn't spoiled anything for me. I still heard Mike Noonan's voice the same way I always had (not through Pierce Brosnan), and I still found Sara Tidwell to be too much a phenomenon to really imagine what her voice sounded like. I still thought it was a spooky, wonderful ghost story, way more than a horror story, I still marveled at the literariness of the thing being tumbled through Stephen King's declaratory, up-front, it's-just-you-and-me,-babe style and at how well that combination worked, and I still felt a jolt of unfairness like electrocution at certain aspects of the ending. Like Casablanca, it can't end any other way, but like Casablanca, OH YOU MOTHERFUCKING WRITER. She can't get on the plane. Maybe this time around it'll end differently. Right? Right? Life can't be that unfair?...FUCK.

That's the stuff I'm looking for out of my books. That's what those books on my little shelf have in common. Whether it's FUCK YES or FUCK NO, it's that frisson that keeps me awake at night that I seek, the thing that makes me read the last sentence over again and say OH YOU MOTHERFUCKING WRITER. I can't believe you've made me feel what I just felt.

As a postscript, one of the most disappointing books I ever read was Lisey's Story. I haven't gone back and read it again since I read it originally, and I'm a serial rereader, especially of King. I expected Lisey to follow on where Bag of Bones left off, literarily at least, and instead it just seemed like a weird mess. I was less compelled, by a factor of about a thousand, by Lisey than I was by Mike Noonan (ironic, since I'm female), and it was one of his [many] books that I think could have used a more ruthless editor. I expected it to be as intimate and as complex as Bones, and I felt it was anything but--it just seemed to rattle on and on without any sense of structure. If I'd read Lisey with lower expectations, or before I'd read Bones, I might have liked it, and if I tried it again now I might like it. But I remember thinking "this is Stephen King's seventh wave?" Just shows that we all have myopia about our own work.

On that note, I wrote 5,000 words yesterday, those two chapters I was whining about, and after honing today I think I'm ready to create a proof of the whole thing. I've already got one reader, a person I trust greatly whose imminent jet lag is a gift to me and a curse to him. Maniacal laugh. Maniacal laugh.

The Broken Speedometer

2011-12-15T08:38:00.000-08:00

Matt finished his reading of my Greenland book this week. He's the first person to have read the majority of what's in there, and even the experience of hearing him say my characters' names was weird. It's been a private experience to write the thing until now - which has really not been a positive thing - and to suddenly have someone else know what I wrote has been both wonderful and kind of unsettling. He helped me with some minor problems and suggested solutions to some major ones, although so far I've been too lazy to take them. (That's my task for today. Thus far I've accomplished a lot of reading on Longform.org and this blog post. Well done me.)

On Tuesday into Wednesday I did another read-through and fixed small issues, eliminated a lot of dialogue tags that weren't necessary, and looked for the right place to incorporate the one new scene Matt suggested. He also advised me to rewrite the ending and gave me a context for a new one that is probably better than the one I have, but I'm very reluctant to do that because of how much fun I had writing the current one. When those changes are completed, I'm planning to wheedle help from some more friends. (Some of whom are likely reading this. You poor saps.) I think what I'm going to do is print the book as a private project on Lulu, order five or six paperback copies, and send them out that way. It'll be a lot easier for my unlucky friends to read than a honking great sheaf of paper, and while I don't think I'll actually save money on paper and toner cartridges (although I might), it'll be simpler and easier to ship.

Technology, man. Can you imagine when I would have had to type carbons? Egh. The very thought of it makes me queasy.

---

I told Matt yesterday that I think my anxiety-meter is broken. If you'd told me six months ago that my life would be situated the way it is, with so little security and so much chaos and every day bringing new uncertainties, I would have fainted dead away and had a panic attack upon awakening. But I've got this eerie new confidence, not only that things are going to be okay but that they're going to work out the way they ought to (whatever that way may be), that in the meantime we'll manage, and that all the things that appear to be obstacles are really just smoke and mirrors. I told him I thought my anxiety-meter, previously such a source of terror and heartache, was now like a broken speedometer; no matter how much I gun the ignition, how fast things may be hurtling by outside the windows, the needle rests patiently at zero. (Incidentally, in this metaphor, I'm driving a kickass Chevelle Super Sport.) I am imperturbable. It's kind of like the beginning of Office Space, when thanks to that shrink, Peter is just...chill...about his workplace all of a sudden.

Maybe I'm just mentally ill. Maybe someone's been feeding me Quaaludes. But I'll take it, you know, it's a zillion times better than the awful scratching anxiety, which makes the inside of my head sound exactly like this all the time. It means I can write, and sleep, and devote real energy to teaching my yoga classes. I don't really need to know exactly how fast I'm going.

(It Doesn't Have Anything to Do with Buddhism)

2011-12-12T05:25:00.000-08:00

The other night, I finished a book called Zazen, by Vanessa Veselka. I found it via The Rumpus, a site that, from this perspective, is so much immersed in the literary life in the San Francisco area that it's a little myopic. However, it's helped me to learn that there exists an underground literary scene here in this country, and I read Zazen in part to find out what that scene is like. (The book reviews on the site also led me to a book called The Postmortal, on which I gave up a third of the way through because I couldn't sleep after reading it. Like Feed, which gave me waking nightmares for months on end, only not as succinct.)

I knew before I read this book that I was not likely to be a part of this scene, not now or ever; I'm not an experimental writer, and my few attempts to imitate edgy po-po-mo fiction have resulted in work that's so disconnected from my instincts that I don't even know if it's any good. Now I'm certain: this scene is not for me, and this type of work is not really for me, either. I enjoyed reading Zazen enough to leave it on my Amazon wish list, because I'd like to refer back to it and maybe read it again in the future, but I didn't really understand the mechanisms of the fiction as I was reading it. It was an artifact from another land.

Veselka is a fascinating writer, with intelligence burning like a gas flame under every word, incredible metaphors, and gorgeous, hard-hitting sentence-by-sentence craft. The book was kind of like an octopus in my mind, tentacles worming their way in and clinging and dragging me in, so that my face was right up close to the book's bizarre world, and I had to take the time to get re-tendriled into that world if I took a break before reading on. It reminded me of two other books: Beloved, by Toni Morrison (in the way that time and space were not very well-described but I still had a solid sense of place), and more strongly The Open Curtain, by Brian Evenson, which is probably the most unnerving book I've ever read. Madness lurks in the basement of that book, and the experience of reading it is a little like going mad yourself; the world kept tilting, gradually, as I was reading until I'd look up from the book and it would take a moment for everything to right itself again. Zazen resembles but doesn't resemble the world I know now, so it was like diving into a different dimension every time I opened it again. The narrator is plainly not all there, or perhaps too much there, and seeing her world through her was uniquely effective and a little frightening.

Yet the book was so poorly copy-edited that I kept being un-immersed in frustration every chapter or so to try and figure out what the author meant through the errors. You always end up wondering, if there's poor copy-editing, what else might have been better served by more attention to the text - what else the author and editors missed in the proofs. And there was so much about the book that I found unclear. Some of the metaphors extending from chapter to chapter were too obtuse for my middling non-underground intelligence, and eventually I had to accept that I couldn't quite know the order of events - during the first third or so we kept skipping around in time (I think) without clear markers. I also found the politics of the book to be sort of screamy. There was a lot of ranting that I think the book endorsed rather than merely presenting. I'm quite a bad activist, because I like my art carefully partitioned from my politics, with only little leaks along the wall. Any relationship more intimate and you wind up sacrificing the quality of one or the other, I've found. Most political artists would disagree (naturally), but if I am opposed to the politics of the art, I have a harder time enjoying the art on its merits instead of dismissing it altogether, and that dismissal isn't fair. It's an unpleasant paradigm.

I think that people who write and read in this style of literature regularly would either accept these things or treat them as part of the art. Vagueness, in particular, seems to be a facet of edgy/literary fiction that is well-celebrated but that I personally never enjoy. And I think they find frustrating or opaque books to be that much more arty and interesting, finding the shining diamond edges more compelling than the mud which sometimes surrounds them. I always ask why the mud couldn't just be cleared away. And I think that's why experimental lit isn't for me.

Still. It was a good idea to stretch outside my usual fare, to see what's possible out there in west coast fiction. And like I said, I really enjoyed the experience of reading the book. I just know I don't want to restrict my reading to that kind of book (too cerebral, too much of a project), and I doubt I'll ever write a book like it.

Married to the Martyr

2011-12-09T13:05:00.000-08:00

A few weeks back, I went to a midnight screening of the fourth Twilight film with a friend of mine. I'm not much of a Twi-hard, because I think the books are pretty godawful and the universe is pretty problematic. (Not getting into that right now, Dracula-type fans, not going there.) But I find it an interesting cultural artifact, I enjoy some of the laughably terrible dialogue and presentation, and I'm a complete sucker for the appealing way [certain aspects of] sex and romance are presented in the movies.

Breaking Dawn: Part 1 troubled me in a way the rest of the movies didn't. When I got over my midnight-movie hangover, I wrote an essay explaining why. I sent it to Slate (for Double X) and to Salon, but neither one of them was interested, so instead the whole internet gets it for free. Enjoy.

Married to the Martyr

Twilight: Breaking Dawn’s portrayals of sex and babies are troublingly irresponsible.

When I was a teenager, My So-Called Life aired for one short season on ABC. This series is reasonably well-remembered, in no small part because a whole generation of women imprinted one Jordan Catalano (Jared Leto) into their teen fantasies. I was one of them. Even as a married woman over thirty, I will still moon over Jared Leto in just about anything, because I look into those swoony eyes of his and I see everything I wanted from a boy during those formative years of puberty.

This generation’s Jordan Catalano is inarguably Edward Cullen, of the Twilight series of novels and films, and the imprint he has made on the girls of the world is going to be equally long-lasting. Edward, like so many heartthrobs before him, is an empty, objective vessel for female fantasy (with the notable difference that he’s over a century old). The Twilight franchise has successfully turned female otherness inside out, has made men the eye-catching objects of fantasy, and has allowed Bella Swan, Edward’s one true love, to be one of those rare female subjects in cinema. Judge as ye may, for pop trash to accomplish this so deftly is no small achievement.

For the last three Twilight movies, I’ve acknowledged but shrugged off the many criticisms of the Edward-Bella entanglement as being obsessive and misogynistic. I accepted that, yeah, Edward is a wee bit controlling, and that, yeah, the franchise takes delight in setting up situations where Bella must be protected by various male figures. But I argued that Bella was still the mistress of her own destiny (whether or not her choices seemed foolish), and that belaboring – at great length – her very real sexual desire for Edward was actually a colossal step forward in portraying young women in popular culture.

But this one…wow. I went to see the first installment of Breaking Dawn at a midnight show on opening night, and I’m still pretty troubled by the irresponsibility of the filmmakers at virtually every turn in this movie.

For Twi-virgins (spoilers ahead): when last we left our heroes, Edward (Robert Pattinson) and Bella (Kristen Stewart) had decided to marry. (I will note for the record that Bella is eighteen, and little mention of college or a career is made.) During a honeymoon off the coast of South America, Bella discovers she is pregnant with the spawn of her vampire husband. Every last character is horrified about this except Bella herself, who is pleased, and decides to carry the child to term, despite its in utero tendencies to break her bones and cause her to crave human blood.

On no occasion whatsoever during the movie’s two-hour running time is there discussion of the responsibilities of raising a child.

In two instances, Edward’s vampire sister Rosalie angrily corrects other characters who use the term “fetus”, insisting that it’s a “baby”.

Bella never offers a single rational explanation as to why she is willing to die (and she is, and she does) to bear this child.

It’s perhaps too facile to point out that, in Stephenie Meyer’s vision, sex and love (even within safe and sanctioned marriage) lead irrevocably to devil babies and horrible, painful death. But the Freudian aspects of all this are not what bother me; those are fish to fry on another day. What bothers me is the fact that these filmmakers have the devoted ears and eyes of many millions of young women, women who are going to shape our world when they reach adulthood, and the messages they are obtaining from this film about sex and procreation are so desperate, so zealous, so violent.

I am 100% okay with Bella’s desire to get it on with Edward being central to this franchise. It will help girls to find their own desires legitimate and valuable. But for her to instantly settle into her role as suffering child-bearer, with only the tiniest sliver of sexual enjoyment to call her own in exchange; for her to find the potential of abortion horrifying and out of the question, for no obvious reason; and for the film to legitimize all this while whistling past the graveyard – these actions are troubling.

I think the point is to cast Bella as sacrificing not just for a child, but for Edward’s child. Yet again, her sublimation to her vampire boyfriend-cum-husband is cast as a matter of her choice rather than his innate male superiority. I have always kind of liked this tightrope act of Twilight’s, because it’s so easily teased out: Bella has to be protected because she’s a ridiculously clumsy human being in a den of graceful supernatural killers, not because she’s just a girl. Bella has to marry Edward at eighteen because it’s the only way she’ll finally bed her old-fashioned boyfriend and realize her dream of immortality, not because he wants to make her his property. It has the aroma of the current tide of feminism – as in, I choose to give up the life of a high-powered attorney to be a trophy wife and a stay-at-home mom. That’s what first-wave feminism granted us, that choice, to do as we liked rather than as they liked. But the series has lost its balance in saying that Bella chooses to die for Edward’s child because it’s her choice to do so, not because it’s the nature of women and mothers to suffer and die. I don’t buy it, and I can’t endorse it.

The other problem is that Bella as heroine, as subject, is making this choice. The safety of her child is paramount. She loves it more than her own life. How many teen girls are going to empathize with Bella, and be persuaded by her choice into carrying unplanned pregnancies to term, only to find that their children are decidedly not the perfect, immortal, supernatural child that Bella and Edward produce?

The girls imbibing Twilight now will grow up to make their own decisions, certainly, and I don’t think of them as incapable, the way that Edward tends to see his beloved Bella. But the power of the messages consumed during puberty should not be underestimated. Those messages inform our choices for many years to come, including critical years for forming relationships.

The appeal of the franchise is very precise, almost calculated. At times, it’s an advertisement for itself. Melodrama, despite the disdain that surrounds it, is a very powerful method of storytelling, one that tends to penetrate impressionable minds with greater depth than even its creators may have intended. It’s easy for me to dismiss the more outlandish romantic aspects of Twilight, because I’ve lived through failed romances and made adult decisions. But as a teenager, how can you look at Bella’s wedding in Breaking Dawn and not want one exactly like that? (As if we needed more wedding pornography foisted on female minds in this country.)

The nature of the sort of cultural junk food that the Twilight franchise typifies is to be disposable. Transformers: Dark of the Moon, and its message, ultimately does not matter to the sweep of history, and it would be absurd to demand moral responsibility from the creators of all such pop fare. But Twilight as zeitgeist is unique, and important, because its ways and means are going to be stamped into the consciousness of an enormous swath of the current generation of teen girls. For Stephenie Meyer’s anti-abortion agenda (however unintentional she may protest that she meant it to be) to be published and voraciously read is one thing. But for the cadre of people it takes to create and promote a studio film to endorse that agenda, without a thought to the message it will send to millions of girls who fervently wish they were Bella, is quite another.

Those girls, when women, are going to have to carry on where my generation’s feminists have left off. And if Angela Chase had insisted on carrying Jordan Catalano’s baby to term, despite mortal risk, for reasons of vague moral certitude, you could bet my own perspective on Roe v. Wade would be quite different.

At Long Last, a Labor of Love

2011-12-07T05:51:00.000-08:00

Enough, I say, I have called a halt. The polish draft (i.e. silver, not i.e. Warsaw) is completed, and I'm giving it to my husband to read.

I worked stupid hard to bring this about, ignoring most else that was supposed to be going on. Looking back on the last week, I'm reminded of the way it is to be around my mom when she's working - or used to be, when I was a kid. She'd say "just a few more minutes" and then get lost in whatever it was she was doing, so I'd end up waiting about twice as long as I expected to wait for her (usually it was something like 10 minutes instead of 5 minutes, so not criminal, but oh, bothersome). I totally did this to Matt a bunch of times in the last few days, telling him I just needed a few minutes to get through a chapter and then finding I had to go on to the next one to figure out whether it all hung together. So he'd wait a while and then just fix breakfast himself. And I felt guilty. But it's all over now, the draft is polished, that first closed-door draft is retooled and ready for a reader. Throughout all of it, I only lost a few paragraphs of work, and easily redid them. No computer disasters so far. (nok nok)

Many other things have happened in the last week. The job situation in our house is...weird. I've taken a part-time paralegal job, although I'm not positive it's going to move forward in exactly the way I expect. Everything has been changing from day to day around here lately, so tomorrow I could have some brand-new bit of news that means I won't need the job, or will need an even higher-paying job, or we're moving to Mars. (Dr. Manhattan might need an assistant?) My personal situation notwithstanding, I think I've finally figured out, for good and all, what I want my job to be. I want to be a writer.

Oh, golly, big news, Katharine. Shocking and surprising. Yeah, well, hear me out.

In the last several years I've been struggling with the word "career" and all it entails. I came to the conclusion after a lot of turmoil that one single career was not for me, and that I was destined to have a pile of jobs that interested me and an inner life that I was committed to. The normal thing in America is to commit to your career - even if you don't enjoy it, you still do it as your duty, and you're kind of expected to make yourself enjoy it, as far as I can tell - but I couldn't find anything about the workplaces I've experienced that I could really put my heart into. I am such a delicate and sensitive soul, God help me, that if I don't enjoy what I'm doing for the bulk of my week, I don't enjoy my life. I've spent too much energy despising myself for this quality, when what I really needed to do was learn to work with it instead of against it.

So, I figured, the thing I needed to do was keep moving, go from job to job and career to career at decent intervals, to keep myself always learning and occupied so I wouldn't be so unhappy with a life lacking passion for my career. This is a pretty good operational plan, although in practice it's somewhat hard. Job-hoppers are not kindly looked upon, and I sometimes have to fast-talk my way into my next job.

I usually enjoy the job for a while, six months to a year (the time has been lengthening as I get older; in my early twenties it was four months, tops, before I got bored), and then I'm ready for something else. The key to enjoying jobs for me, I've learned, is that it has to be a) always the same and b) always different. This was why I liked delivering pizza so much: the familiarity of the roadmap, and of the routine of going to door, getting money, giving food, going back to car and counting tip was something I enjoyed greatly. But anything at all could happen within these parameters. The woman could be so snobby and insulting that I would burst out laughing when I got back to my car. The guy could give me a $17 tip on a $23 order. I could be asked to return and party with the folks I was delivering to once I got off work. (All true stories.)

Legal work is much the same way. Every case is quite different, with different circumstances and approaches, but the law remains more or less the same, and the framework of problem-solving - one in which I flourish - is consistent. I think that's why I figured that it would be a decent career for me to have, because the money's pretty good and I could find reasonable enjoyment in the field. But not passion. It has never intrigued me so deeply that I've been able to look past its faults or work happily for 10 hours straight or put up with shitty people in order to do it.

For the last six weeks, I've been at home. I've worked at a job of sorts during that time, a telecommuting position, although the workload has been light and unpredictable. All while I was attempting to work as hard as I could at that job, I was also writing and then editing my book. Both windows were open at the same time, and I was refreshing the company page every few paragraphs to make sure there was still no paid work for me to do.

And in all of the writing and editing I've done during those six weeks - from here it feels like a sea voyage, like a furious white ocean tossing my toy boat like a splinter of wood, wee bosun's mates in striped shirts running about and shouting in panic while the sea monster roars and tightens its tentacles along the stern - I look back and I see Work. I see a body of effort that went on for hours and hours and hours, that was agonizing but that I never grew tired of, that felt like the rightest and most correct labor I've ever set my back to. Therein was the key for me. It felt right. It felt like this was the work I have always been supposed to do, the work that I can throw my whole heart into. The work that will help me set my little dilettante mind at ease, because yes, there is a career out there for which I was intended.

Thus far the only thing I've enjoyed for hours on end has been leisure. All the work I've ever done, I've watched the clock and conserved my efforts. But this work - writing - I will do until I drop, until my back is wrecked from sitting on the couch with my laptop all day, until I'm so hungry I'm shaking and don't even notice, until I look up and my husband has gone somewhere and the leaves are suddenly off the trees and is it actually still 2011?

The problem, of course, is that you have to get more stringent permission to write for a living than you do for...yeah, most of the other professions I can think of. I've already written about this, but even two weeks ago I still wasn't sure that writing was The Career for Me. More that it was the dream career that I'd try to do if all other circumstances fell into place. But now, after this week of tragedy and triumph, I am certain: this is the thing. Writing is what I have to do to live.

Pride and Prejudice and Benjamins

2011-12-04T05:11:00.000-08:00

This past week, I've been using the A&E version of Pride & Prejudice to reward myself, in half-hour increments, for my work editing the book, and this time around I noticed something very sly about it. My understanding is that part of the reason Austen's work is important is that she reimagined the rules and reasons for marriage; a love match was a lot less common than a money-match in those days, and for Lizzy to wish to marry someone for love, just because, was laughable in its presumption. Dowries and connection and heirs, that was where it was at, and if you loved your spouse as well, sheesh, did you ever luck out.

But here's the thing. Mr. Darcy pays in the neighborhood of £10,000, in 1813's pounds (see here and text-search 10,000 for an explanation of roughly what this meant), in order to discharge Mr. Wickham's debts and convince him to accept Lydia Ninnia for his bride. Had Mr. Bennet had that money, he would have been the proper person to give it over to Wickham. Darcy then marries Lizzy for virtually no dowry at all.

Due to the discretion of all involved, Mr. Bennet was insensible to the trade inherent here, but I'm not: Darcy paid that £10,000 for a bride. He skirted having Mr. Bennet's hands on the money at all, granted, and the money functioned as a way of showing Lizzy how decent he was rather than being an obvious payment for services rendered, but it's still money-for-wife at the bottom of it.

As I understand, the trade usually went the other way, with a father having to pay a stack of sterling to a gentleman to take his worthless daughter off his hands. But I can't believe that Austen didn't do this on purpose, having Lizzy desire (unconsciously?) to pay Darcy back with her hand for his help. Everything was set to rights that way.

Perhaps all would have been explained to me if I'd studied Austen above the high school level. But, alas, my degree functions to help me appreciate the positive qualities in the motion picture versions rather than the depth of the text. Oh, well. The pleasures of the A&E version are well worth it, and I suppose that's what master's degrees are for, in any case.

From Pebbles, a House

2011-12-02T06:56:00.000-08:00

I read in Slate this morning that there are no fewer than four first-time novelists on the New York Times Best Books of 2011. The article's thrust is the fact that Stephen King, he of the "penny dreadfuls" (oh, Harold Bloom, you wretched snob), was also on the list for the first time in his long career. But the thing that gave me food for thought during my shower was the first-time novelists. Why did 2011 spawn so many unusually good ones, according to the Times?

I have a theory. Publishing is a harder business than it used to be, on all sides of the desk. One of the elements that I think has grown more difficult is getting a publisher to look at diamonds in the rough from the slush pile, work that could be great and could allow a novelist to grow further in a second and third book, but is still a run-of-the-mill first novel as yet. I'd suggest that now, in order to sell that first novel, your work has to be perfect, polished and gleaming and flawless, before a publisher is going to take a chance on it. Not enough hours in the week for an average editor to spend time shaping the average first novel into something saleable. So, by that logic, any first novels that are published are bound to be in the top of the heap of novels written in general. And that's why those four made it onto the list.

Maybe not. Maybe the Times' book editors just took a few extra pinches of snuff this year.

Every now and then, when I'm reading along in a book, I'll come up short against something that takes me out of the book and makes me question myself as a reader. The text will mention some incident that I don't remember being a part of the book, and then I have to go back and look for it and be puzzled when I can't find it, or will repeat something about a character that I remembered quite well enough that I'm not sure why it bears repeating. Inconsistencies with the experience of reading, I guess you'd call them. These always bothered me - how could it be so hard to remember that you'd never explained that one thing?

In the process of editing my now-91,000-word manuscript (over halfway done in terms of pages, but a good bit more writing and shaping to do in the pages ahead), I finally begin to see how this could happen. I have to keep the whole thing in my head at once, including all the changes I've made, the things I put in and took out and moved around, and remember all the internal reactions that every character has ever had, along with knowing all their personalities well enough to know exactly what they would do or say, and determine whether I'm being too subtle or not subtle enough (which is highly subjective, if you're me), and how much is too much in terms of tone and censorable content, and where exposition crosses the line from necessary to TMI, and gaaaaaaah. It's enough to drive me bonkers. And if I take a day's breather (as I'm seriously considering doing today), I risk losing what familiarity I have with it all and may have to read skimmingly through the whole thing again before I can start where I was.

There are so many levels to editing a text this big, from word choice in any one of the ninety-one thousand to the grand arc of the plot. And everything in between: is this chapter too long? Am I telling enough of the story from Rose's point of view, or is it too focused on Jackson? Do I have too many sentences that begin the same way? Why did I invent these two conniving sisters and then have neither of them do anything?

Plus, I don't think I appreciated what I was getting into in terms of constructing a world that's totally isolated from modern society, with its own language and culture, but which is nevertheless derived from a real ancient culture that's extremely well-studied. The word I would use when I stand back from it is "ambitious", although I know that's an arrogant thing to say about something I wrote myself. From the first-person perspective it's just overwhelming.

There's a little bit of good news, though, about the text. Yesterday I was in the middle of the slog and I just--couldn't--take it--anymore--so I decided to do the first draft of the glossary. It was sort of a menial task compared with the rest of what I've been doing, so I no longer had to think about all the big stuff. This was a really good decision, because it perked me right up; in defining all the words, including breaking the verbs down to their roots from the conjugated versions, I saw that I had actually, like, invented a language.

It doesn't have a very large vocabulary, because I only invented the words I needed to and I didn't see the point of having characters talk on and on in Luquenora to the exclusion of the reader (a-HEM, Victorian writers who use French everywhere), but still - the conjugations do actually function, the pluralization rule is interesting and coincides with the add-a-bead structure of the nouns, and basically, I really actually made a language. All this time I'd been building it with little pebbles, as I was writing, a word here and there and a rule made up suddenly and applied backwards, and I looked up at it yesterday and voila, there was a house.

I still have a zillion questions about it - such as whether every word in Luquenora needs to be italicized (as I have it now), and if so, whether this applies to when people are referred to in Luquenora words as if they're proper names. For example, riahmn, which means father; should that be italicized when Eliza's saying, "Let's go into the house, Riahmn"? I think no, but I really have no idea. There's all kinds of stuff like that. It's so hard to know.

It's especially difficult to work through little things like this when I have the pressure of knowing this novel has to be a perfect shiny diamond in order to get any attention from an agent or a publisher when it's finally ready for those eyes. Otherwise, how will I ever end up on the New York Times Top Ten list?

(See, I brought it all full circle. Maybe I'm not so bad at the big picture, after all.)

Unpreserved

2011-11-30T04:25:00.000-08:00

I killed a darling yesterday. I worked all day long (with a few breaks, of course), from about 10:00 to about 9:00, reworking the first third of the novel. As I went through the paper draft a few days ago, I drew brackets to mark spots where the writing was sound, but would probably have to be integrated elsewhere. I managed to preserve many of these spots, but discarded several others upon reflection. When I had to delete pieces like this from the electronic draft in order to make sense of what I was writing, I kept the physical page (otherwise I've put the prior-draft physical pages in the recycle bin to cut down on the clutter), so as to retain what I thought was good, ill-fitting work.

One page stuck around through the whole day's work, with a few sentences on it that I really didn't want to let go of. It was a darling. The Fictator mindset has helped me be more merciless with my darlings throughout my writing process in the last months, but this one just didn't want to go. I read it again and again, this little passage, and genuinely could not find a place for it in the sixty pages or so I edited today. So, finally, when I was setting aside the manuscript for the day and hitting play on Pride & Prejudice (I have a book to read before it's due on Friday, but I just couldn't look at any more words), I read it one last time, and then chucked it into the recycle bin. Goodbye, darling dear, I had to murder you.

I can't even express how useful the Fictator-hat has been in the course of all this. For the majority of my life I've been a reactionary, not wanting to let go of things that are past, whether old books, old pictures pulled out of magazines that used to be pasted on my wall, old knowledge and ways of life (it's why I learned how to can preserves), old slang. I value the past and its quirks and turns, and I believe we can always benefit from its existence, even if it's just learning something like the fact that teen-pop groups have been assembled by heartless record executives at least as far back as the sixties. At any rate, the same reactionary attitude always went for my writing - if it wasn't preserved exactly as it was first concocted, with changes only for grammar and awkwardness, its value was diminished.

Of course in writing this is foolishness. It's the way of editing to throw out reams of work and start all over, to tinker and alter until maybe what you have barely resembles what you started with. I had so much trouble with this until I began approaching my work as if it was mine, not something that had already been conjured up by the Muses in the Creativity Dimension and transmitted to me for transcription. Until I started thinking of myself as the Fictator, the person who has all the rights and powers to decide what will stay and what will go, I felt hampered and hostile about the editing process.

Now I'm much freer, and less afraid. Words are cheap, is the thing. A good paragraph is easy. There are a hundred ways I can write any given conversation. There's no guarantee that what I've thrown out won't end up being better than the newly-written stuff, but the old stuff doesn't have inherent value just because it was my first idea. This isn't the SATs; the first answer isn't always (likely) the right one. Besides, I save versions. Nothing is really lost.

"I knew I wanted to be a novelist"

2011-11-28T05:27:00.000-08:00

Got a rejection from The Sun over the weekend. Not terribly surprising; it's a very difficult market. I really believed in this essay, but hey, I'll just try again somewhere else. Que sera, sera.

I'm hard at work on the first edit of my book, and it's slow going. Every word is accompanied by uncertainty. And often there are cascading changes that have to happen - if I change one thing, fourteen other things have to change on down the line. But I have a vision of everything hanging together, of it all making sense, and oh, it's beautiful.

In my day-to-day life, it's rough. I still haven't started paid work for the company that hired me nearly four weeks ago, and if things don't change in the next 48 hours I'm going to have to give up the dream and do something else. Having been at home for a month, I am so loath to go back to the outside world - it's so nice in here, with all my stuff, all the safety and happiness of home and sweatpants. But I am feeling 200 pounds of guilt on my shoulders, moving around with it every moment, that I'm not contributing my part of the income to make our household run. We can't live without me making an income, and I can't live with the guilt of that for longer than a few days more, even if circumstances keep appearing that they're going to change any day now.

I admit to being sort of captivated by the vision of this, writing, being my job. Plenty will scoff and say that what I've been up to isn't hard work, and I'll grant you that I haven't had my nose to a grindstone, exactly (or I would have opened up my working draft and gotten to it by now this morning) but what I figured out here still holds, that when I do put in a workday on the fiction, it's hard. Not to be sniffed at.

A few weeks ago I read an interview with Jeffrey Eugenides, whose epic book Middlesex I was alone in not enjoying, but whose earlier book The Virgin Suicides I liked a great deal. The interviewer asked him if he had a lack of direction during the years after college, and he said he had direction "because I knew I wanted to be a novelist". He went on, but I got stuck on this phrase, I knew I wanted to be a novelist. As if "novelist" was a professional career you could just decide to do, get enough training and experience and have that be your job. Like being a lawyer, or an electrician.

There seemed to be such naivete wrapped in this phrase of his. Like he wouldn't be hampered by people who didn't like his work enough, or have to pay any bills while he was writing the first novel that sold. Like the capacity to be a novelist doesn't depend on anything except your decision to do it. I see the field of writing fiction as one from which only fools and angels attempt to make a living; if you can't get into the gate, if no publisher likes what you've done, you don't have a living. You have nothing. Nothing but work that's not good enough, a dream that won't come true, and bills.

But the thing is: he became a novelist. He found success. I don't know the story of it; maybe he worked really hard and was good enough, maybe he had a friend who had a friend who had an agent, maybe he made a deal with the devil. The point is, he wasn't naive. He was correct. Novelist is his career.

I've been using the word "writer" when thinking of the career I want to build. I already am a writer; I've had things published in print media and been paid for my work with the written word. It's not what I do on a full-time basis, but I think that calling myself that isn't trespassing. But to me the word "novelist" implies vocation, professionalism. And striving for that, calling my desired career "novelist" - without all the equivocations involved in "writer", since textbook authors and short story authors and people who create content for spam blogs can all fairly be termed "writer" - seems like a firmer choice, one that feels more accurate to what I want to do. I don't think I'm a particularly good writer of short stories, but I think the longer stuff I've written is better, so it's a more comfortable fit anyway.

But I'm not a novelist yet. I may be a writer, by hook or by crook, but novelist isn't something you can be until you've been paid for work that's bound and sold at a store. At least, that's the way I see it. I don't know what Eugenides would say.

Phew

2011-11-22T08:25:00.000-08:00

For the last couple of weeks, I've been waiting to start an at-home job, one which I hoped would solve several of our problems at once. But my start date was delayed, and then delayed again, and then delayed a third and fourth time. So I started to worry, like crazy, that in fact it wasn't going to work out, that I would have to return to the outside world and legal work. But I got some solid data about it yesterday: yes, I was actually hired; yes, the work does exist (even if it doesn't really exist this week). There is a big IT transition going on, which is the reason for all the delays, and that means that there might not be much to be paid for in the first couple of weeks. But it seems real enough, the job and my ability to do it. I think - I hope - that it's going to work out all right. There are things about it that aren't as...solution-oriented as I thought they would be, but I'm going to hope for the best. This is the third time this year that things have turned around at my blackest point of despair, and each time was accompanied by a spate of new ideas and greater hope for the future.

In other phew-related news, I did a complete read-through and first skinning of the novel. (It took me about seven hours, all told, which is not encouraging moving forward.) Oh, my dear Lord, what work I have to do. I have to rewrite and rework the whole opening, two or three chapters, and I suspect I'm going to end up adding another quarter of its length to the danged thing in new scenes and greater depth. But inconsistencies were helpfully apparent on this read, and I wrote them all down in the margins with my red pen, making notes on the backs of pages. Now it's on to write a detailed timeline and adjustment of ages, events, and spacing as needed. I also have to come up with a few more names and vocabulary, and start writing a sensible Luquenora glossary. I had suspected that I'd need to put an actual glossary in the back of the book, and yeah, on this read I determined that I do. Feels kind of like a failure, that I didn't make the language clear enough. Oh, well.

Yesterday I finished up editing a story I'd written and submitted it to a publication that's probably way over its head. (I made up my mind to reach for better publications in the future, to just grip writerly arrogance by the neck and continually presume I'm better than I am, so that eventually I'll become better. ...I think I'll write a whole post on this conflict another time.) The story was inspired by something in yoga class, as I mentioned a while back, but what's interesting to me is that the story in its finished form has no reference at all to its inspiration.

I was lying in savasana and the teacher came to give me a little thai-massage head-rub, and I used my neck muscles to "help him" lift my head. This is not helpful to the masseuse, as he needs you to be untense to give you a decent massage, and he whispered "Relax."

This gave me the idea for a story about a woman in this exact position whose reception of "Relax" was to remember a date-rapist whispering this to her as he did the deed. (Am I the cheeriest writer you know, or what?) After I thought through the story a few times, it became a man with this memory, and then I added some other elements and had a pretty good setup and conflict, I thought. I still had the yoga class in there as a framing device for the first few drafts, but when I came back to the story a few days later, it didn't fit. At all. Just cluttered up the raw experience of this poor character. I wanted to add more about him and his situation, but I wasn't writing a novel, just a little story, so all the fat got excised.

It's still really interesting to me that all elements relating to the inspiration for the story got tossed. I'm pleased with my results, but where it came from would be really convoluted, were I asked to explain.

I've been listening to Joanna Newsom almost exclusively for the last 24 hours, while I read and edited and worried over my new job. She has this strange ability to make you forget that there are other kinds of music than her own. Her music is so indubitably odd that you wouldn't think she'd have this quality. But it all seems so normal after a few spins, the harp, the voice, the symphonic construction, the appallingly poetic lyrics. What would you even need an electric guitar for?

And Opera for All

2011-11-20T07:09:00.000-08:00

On Monday last I went to Lucia di Lammermoor at the Kennedy Center. I hadn't seen the opera before, and although it turned out I'd heard more than one of the arias, thanks to movies, I didn't really know what it was about. I like to enter plays/movies/books/whatevers this way, without knowledge, because it means I wind up being surprised by their pleasures, and rare is the piece that requires foreknowledge. (Some movies in recent years have obviously been written as if the audience member already knows certain things about it, or has seen the trailer, and I find this weak art.)

In this case I'm especially glad. Had I known that "the mad scene" in the opera (act III, scene 2), was so famous, or had meant so many different things to so many singers and critics and stage directors, I would have been waiting for it the whole time. As it was, I enjoyed the rest of the opera just as much. The staging was ooky and fascinating: the sets were chilly and rundown, like a Victorian orphanage; Enrico was played as a balls-out sadistic psycho creeper, whose interest in his sister was...not so brotherly; and Lucia herself was girlish and easily sympathized with.

And the opera was so beautiful. The theme of my life right now is melodrama, it's coming at me from all corners and I'm forced to think critically about it, and this was another example. Thus far every opera I've seen has been melodramatic, with emotions and situations blown all out of proportion, stretched and lengthened and belabored for two or three hours. So I suspect it's kind of a tendency of opera in general, melodrama. I find it easy to understand why opera is disliked by so many, because the way characters waffle back and forth between really silly emotions, singing on and on about them with such verve and concentration when the spectators are already so over it, is a particular set of demands on an audience that not everyone can set aside for the sake of the enjoyment to be had.

But I can. I kind of love how intensely every emotion is felt, even if it's ~~kind of~~ really overbaked. It's like entering a world where life doesn't seem so small, and emotions aren't the things you process and put away in order to go about your business. Everything is about the emotions. It's overblown, but it certainly validates the feelings that the music stirs in your own heart.

And the soprano who portrayed Lucia, Lyubov Petrova, was well and truly capable of stirring up astonishing feelings. She was so glorious that I very much wanted to go back again for another three hours at shocking expense to see her sing again. She was strong even at the very highest notes, and she was always singing, never screaming. She gave me chills. And her face was as expressive as her voice. After the mad scene, Lucia wound up standing on a chair with her arms raised in a "Touchdown!" posture, laughing through her madness, and poor Lyubov had to stand there for probably six or seven minutes through the clamor of applause that would not stop. She transfixed me, utterly.

(Here she is in Romeo and Juliet. It gives you a good idea of her voice, although her shocking range isn't fully in evidence there.)

The performance also featured a glass harmonica during the mad scene. My understanding is that Donizetti originally intended the aria to be accompanied by this instrument, but was talked out of it, and I'm here to tell you that although the flute arrangement is likely easier to perform, it does not compare to the eerie, unworldly effect of the glass harmonica. Recordings of it are simply not the same. I really felt like there was something wrong with the sound when I was hearing it, and it seemed to be floating from nowhere - I couldn't at all tell where in the room it was being played. (Supposedly, players of and listeners to the instrument have gone crazy due to its weird sound, and I'm surprised to find that there's actually a reason for the effects I noticed.)

I have tried to listen to recordings of opera to enjoy it. It's unlikely that every opera I want to see is going to be performed convenient to my location during my lifetime, and so I really should be able to accept opera on CD as the best thing I can manage. But I didn't enjoy it at all. I was bored. Something about seeing the people on stage utterly changes the way I consume opera, makes me totally mesmerized. I know it's partially because I'm seeing humans, in the flesh, do something extraordinary, reaching heights of beauty and ability that belong in the space capsule to represent our species to the rest of the universe. I can see and hear them breathe before they let go of that extraordinary note, and while it may seem obvious that they have to breathe, it's still kind of a miracle to me to witness it. They're alive, standing right there, reaching out to me through their talent.

Something else like this happens during the curtain call. The mask of the character is set aside, and the incredible evil of Enrico vanishes to leave this very nice-looking opera singer smiling and bowing at our applause. That's a relief, and a pleasure. It's so satisfying to applaud that man for his good work, and to see that he's just a man, after all, even if he has a capacity to sing that I'll never have. It's not something I get to do for a recording, and it's a shame, because I feel so much more distant from the music.

I chatted with the guy sitting next to me before the show started, and I mentioned I'd seen Figaro done by the Annapolis Opera. He asked me if it was any good, and I told him I thought it was great, but I really couldn't tell him if it was actually great. "I'm not a critic," I said. "I just like it." Since I can't help but keep my critic hat on for the area of my life where I consume the most media (film), and it hampers me from blind enjoyment a lot of the time, I'm really happy not knowing a damn thing about opera. Except that I like it. I love it.

A Long, Long Exhale

2011-11-17T08:54:00.000-08:00

At 84,719 words, I have called a halt: I am finished with my Greenland novel.

Any writers reading this are probably snorting back laughter. Well, no, it isn't finished. It will take me probably half a year of editing and rewriting, resting and attacking again, before I can consider the book finished. And of course my inner philosophy major is asking whether a creative work can ever really be finished when the potential for different character arcs and repaired comma splices will always exist.

But I have written the last paragraph. I have wrapped up all the ends. It's over.

I don't actually remember when I first had the idea for this book. It might even have been before I moved back to Maryland in 2005. But I wrote the first 25,000 words or so in 2007. That was four years ago. The amount of time I've actually spent putting words on the page probably amounts to less than six months all told (a great deal less, probably), but I'm greatly accustomed to thinking of this book as an albatross - as something I don't know how to finish, and which has sat unfinished for so long that I despair of it. But now it's done. It's really done. I can't wrap my mind around it.

It looks at this time like I won't have anything to do with my day, so I'm trying to figure out what I should do. There's a story that I wrote enough days ago (and with enough Greenland words between then and now) that it might be ripe for revision. There's laundry, and e-mails, and administrative junk that I could do. Or I could go back to what I wrote in Greenland for the last week or so, while it's still malleable, and reshape it. I think I have to come at the big stuff fresh - did I really need all sixteen of those subplots in the last forty pages? - but the little stuff, the way things are worded and the Luquenora words I need to invent, I could get on that.

Conversely, I'm also tempted to do absolutely nothing relating to words (...after I'm finished writing this post) at all today. Maybe watch TV instead. I've put down about 20,000 words in the last week, not counting the blog or my non-creative endeavors. I could, maybe, take a break. Step awaaaay from the laptop.

But that's not really me. I'm not a compulsive writer, certainly, but I couldn't even wait until lunchtime to open up this window and plunk down my thoughts about the insane amount of writing I did yesterday.

I think I'll take the middle way, and just read. I'm in the middle of a terrific book by Joan Aiken. And if I happen to doze off, so much the better; I'm going to a midnight show tonight of...uh...a Bergman film (certainly not this, I don't know what you're talking about), and I would like to not be insanely tired tomorrow.

Champagne and expensive cheeseburgers on Friday. To celebrate. When I finally believe that I'm finished, I'll be so relieved that I won't even want to start my next book.

Yay me!

Exhaustive Creativity

2011-11-16T06:23:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I worked, doggedly, on the Greenland novel, stopping only for food, Freecell, and Facebook breaks (and, yeah, obsessively checking the comments on my Escapist article), and I wrote about 7,000 words. I had hoped to get in 10,000, to get up over 80,000 words total, but I was utterly pooped by 10:00, so I just went to bed.

This morning I woke up wondering what, exactly, made me so tired. Why did 7,000 words of fiction coming out of my brain, into my fingers, and onto the page exhaust me? I can write a blog post about a third that length without batting an eye, usually just with the effect of feeling refreshed that all that information is set forth and no longer rattling about in my head. I felt a little whiny and foolish that I was so tired after sitting on the couch with my laptop all day, but really, I was. I felt hollowed out. This led me into wondering whether you can measure the work of creative endeavor, whether comparing the sleep depth of dock workers and fiction writers would yield any interesting results, whether the complaints of those who invent for a living can be taken seriously against those of, say, maids.

I, for one, didn't sleep particularly well. When I woke up, little snatches of the plot I'd written yesterday were floating in my mind like algae, nothing ordered or helpful, just flotsam. They kept re-cycling through my thoughts in an annoying way - yes, I've already thought about you, can't we just lie here and enjoy the soft bed?

For the last week, there's been a weird multi-phasic quality to my life: feeling as if I'm either living totally by rote, or standing outside and watching myself live, or feeling like the people I meet are just an extension of the dream I'm having and aren't external to me at all, or actually existing in the moment so vividly that I feel Sartrean. It's like being edited, like going from camera angle to camera angle.

I'm pretty sure this freakiness is because I'm daily immersing myself into a thoroughly fictional world. I think the overwhelming opera I went to on Monday night, the surreal fact of being in The Escapist and having people I don't know actually read and remark upon what I have to say, and the fact that at the moment I'm not going to work and coming home every day as I have been accustomed to do for such a long spate of years, contribute to the effect.

But I wanted this post to be about the work of creative endeavor, and whether squeezing too much fiction out of your brain means that you wind up with an empty tube, without two wits to knock together. Is it fair to call it exhausting? Is it on the same level as manual labor, just entailing a different kind of tired at the end of the day? Do different kinds of creative work have different effects? I often feel not exactly tired, but satisfied, after I work on nonfiction; I'm ready to quit putting words on the page for a while, but I don't feel - as I felt last night - that even composing a sentence to say aloud to Matt is just too damn hard.

I'd love to know what people who do other creative work all day think. Advertising writers, art directors, etc. Doing activity of any kind for a day's work can be tiring, I don't care what you do, but feeling as empty as I did last night - is that normal?

Open Up the Spumante

2011-11-15T07:36:00.000-08:00

Two big big pieces of writing news today. And I thought today I was going to get to write a leisurely post about the opera I saw last night. HA.

First: I cracked 70,000 words on the Greenland novel this morning. I'll give you a moment as you stagger back from your monitor with your hand clutching your heart.

In all seriousness, this is a book that I've never been sure I'd finish, the idea was so ambitious and weird, and now I'm rounding third on it. There's an obstacle course, with tires and a chain-link ladder and a mean drill sergeant and everything, between me and home plate, but now I know, as I've never really known before, that I'm going to get there.

Second, and MORE IMPORTANTLY: The big news I couldn't talk about last week is, well, this. My essay on Sleep No More was accepted, and now has been published, in The Escapist. Ordinarily I would downplay my excitement about being published in an internet magazine, but as far as gaming magazines go, they don't get a whole lot better than The Escapist. They were a good enough source for the Washington Post to quote them the other day about Skyrim.

I am excessively pleased. And I think the essay came out really damn well, too, one of the few that I consider has said exactly what I wanted it to say. I had a good editor who narrowed my field a bit, which I chafed at, but ultimately she was quite right.

Come back soon for that post on opera, y'all. I promise I'll write it. Aren't you lucky?

Bread and the Old Wine and Dine

2011-11-11T09:24:00.000-08:00

Last Sunday, I had an interesting experience.

I have been a spiritual person since teenagehood, choosing to believe that God has a place and a hand in my life, but I have never been a religious person. I can count the number of times I've been to church in my life without using my toes. I believe religions tend to twist God to their ends, or restrict God to the limits of their own worldview - even the well-meaning ones do this last, I believe - and I don't understand why people are content to hear about God through others, rather than experiencing God for themselves. A few years ago I met some devout and lovely Presbyterians who explained that church is a community built around God, rather than a channel for communing with God. The community aspects of church in their lives are just as important as the God aspects (I think, if I'm not putting words in their mouths). This certainly helped me understand church, but I still didn't think I could get beyond the ritualistic and the God's what I say he is and nothing else aspects of any given church in order to worship somewhere outside my head. (I often think of a Sunday School scene in the Simpsons, when the teacher, who has asked them to draw pictures, pauses by Ralph's desk and says "Ralph, Jesus did not have wheels." I say Jesus could have wheels if you wanted him to. He's Jesus, he's everything to everyone, right?)

I have read, all over the place, that church for people who don't like church is embodied in the Unitarian Universalist church, which is open to people of all faiths and not very traditionally churchy. I have been recommended to this church in the past, but I resisted it because I didn't see the point. I am happy with my faith in God as it stands, and I don't really want to add another to-do to my weekend. Especially not if it means dressing up in church clothes and listening to someone I don't know and don't necessarily trust talk about faith, which to me is a highly personal topic.

In the past couple of months, I have experienced big emotional upheaval. I have done a lot of thinking and a decent amount of what I guess you could call praying. (I don't really think of it that way, as it's not on my knees and it's not to Jesus.) I have been unsure of what the universe wants from me and for me, and I've felt shaken, uncertain that life has the order and logic that I had thought it had. Maybe it's all just chaos, and we're trying to make sense out of it because that's what human brains do, they try to find patterns in places where there really is no pattern.

I started thinking that maybe the way to feel solid ground under me again was to go to church, to see if something would happen, if a thunderclap would help me figure out what I was supposed to do or if there was just something in the sermon that would speak to me. Maybe there were seeds to be planted. Maybe there were people who could help. Who knew? I was reaching, deeply in need, and I figured that people who reach have found help in religion for many centuries; it might work for me, too.

There's a Unitarian Universalist church in Bowie, with a small congregation, and when I went online to read about it, I almost wept at the fineness of the seven UU principles. They believe in:

The inherent worth and dignity of every person.
Justice, equality and compassion in human relations.
Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations.
A free and responsible search for truth and meaning.
The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process in our congregations and society at large.
The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice.
Respect for the interdependent web of all existence, of which we are a part.

A lot of this is what I believe, too. A church that puts the inherent worth and dignity of every person at the top of the list, instead of the integrity of the church or the mystery of God, was an organization I wanted to check out, especially as worthless as I was feeling.

At the rocky bottom of this worthlessness, a few weeks ago, I had something of an epiphany. Things turned around. I was humble and grateful for the turn of events, and I thought I really should go to church after all this happened; I owed at least one Sunday morning to my faith, I figured, because it had come through for me in the clutch. Atonement through church attendance is not a new idea, either.

So, last Sunday, I went. The people were so exceptionally friendly that I was scared into being even more shy. The service was more or less a church service, with songs, standing up and sitting down (this is my least favorite part of church; I always feel like I'm missing my cues), a "sermon", announcements, etc. The minister is a former Methodist, and she gave a talk about identity, through race and other markers, that I found very interesting indeed. She came up to me after service was over and asked me what had brought me there, and I thought, gosh, I could take all day telling you that - the crisis, the long-term belief in God but not religion, the atonement. So I said it was a very long story, complimented her on what she had to say, and escaped, despite congregants trying to entice me with coffee to stay and chat.

I was unnerved by how social the setting was. I don't know how to explain this better, because I know that none of these people meant me harm and were probably just happy to see new blood, happy to share their faith and their Sunday with me, but the strong and tightly knit community sense had the opposite of the intended effect. I wanted to flee.

I talked with Matt about this and thought about it some more, and I think that my spirituality is just not compatible with community. That seems really bad, when I give it thought, because it's just another area of my life where I'm shutting people out instead of networking like I'm supposed to, but the thing I like to do when I think of God is talk to God myself, write about God in my personal journal, read about God, think about God. As of yet I don't like to congregate with others around God, in part because I feel that they're likely to find me a heathen, but in part because my relationship with God is sacred to me, hard to explain and important and personal, and if I'm going to talk about it with you, you'd better set aside a few hours, because we're going to talk. It's not something I can chat about over coffee.

I feel frustrated that this avenue, too (I have tried others) strikes me on first impression as a dead end. I wanted to find a community that I trusted, and the only thing I found was, again, that my faith is singular and difficult to share. And that I'm an avoidant personality when other humans are perfectly lovely to me. Ultimately, I figured, this was a failed experiment, but it was well worth the time to see how UUs worship, and to know that there's always a welcome and nonjudgmental place for me and my lonely faith there.

But that is not where the story ends.

On Wednesday, I came home from teaching and found that a member of the UU congregation had left a loaf of homemade bread in a gift bag hanging from my doorknob, with a note saying that she hoped to see me again. Yesterday, I got a letter in the mail from the minister saying she had been glad I'd stopped by, and she'd handwritten a note on the printed letter saying that she wanted to hear my long story sometime.

I feel horribly guilty about these acts of kindness. I feel like I was a fearful, chilly jerk to those friendly people and they have given me kind gifts and attention in return. That woman made a loaf of bread and drove to my house to bring it to me. After Sunday, I wasn't sure if I was going to go back again - if I did, I thought, it'd be intermittent - but I almost feel like I have to now, and should give more to the collection baskets when I do.

Matt says no. He says they want me to come back, of course, because all churches want their congregations to grow, for both ulterior and good-hearted motives. He also says that it's like a date: just because a guy buys you dinner doesn't mean that you have to go on a second date with him. It's not an exchange of food for the promise of future companionship. You can choose to kiss him goodnight and go in your house and never see him again, and it's not unfair that he's paid for your dinner that one time. A date is a date, not a bargain.

I agree, but I also would always feel a tiny bit of guilt for letting him buy me dinner and giving him nothing in return. I don't feel the need to string someone along for the price of a steak, it's my time and my company and I can do what I want with it, but I would feel better about it if we could have split the cost of dinner. At least until I figure out if I want a second date, or I find out that he makes four times as much as me. That is impossible in this case; you don't split church. And that woman made a loaf of bread for me.

"They're just trying to get in your pants," Matt told me.

I think he's right. But I still feel guilt for my free dinner. Should I go back, even if I'm not sure I'll get anything out of it? Should I email the minister and tell her my long story? Should I send them a check to assuage my conscience?

God is mute on the subject. I'm stuck with my own reckoning.

Things Are Happening

2011-11-09T07:17:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I started work on a story at about 1:00, and although I took time off in between to eat, watch pieces of Office Space, go to yoga class, and fuck around on the internet, I was still working at about 9:30. I'm not very happy that it took me so many hours to produce 4,000 words in draft form, but I guess it's better than producing nothing at all. I'm kind of beating my fists against the ending, and wondering whether the framing device will or should hold up, and I feel like there's something else I have to say in the story, on the tip of my tongue, and can't quite get it out. I think I need a few days or weeks to let it rest before cutting it open again.

I have been given the gift of a week to do nothing but write, and although I'm nervous about the source of the gift, it's still overwhelmingly a good thing. Today is the day I need to get down to business at it, so as not to waste the gift, and I've already procrastinated away two hours on Jon Stewart and Slate and, now, this blog. I have something to do at 1:00 that will take an indeterminate amount of time, and I'm pretty sure I'm just going to take a book with me instead of my laptop - that would be really pretentious, right? - but if I can't get the machine clanking away between now and then, I might compromise and take a notebook. There are always more characters and storylines to be brainstormed, always more Luquenora words to be conjured up.

I've mentioned before that it bothers me how I tend to get excited about certain things in my life, effuse about them to others, and then have to downplay that excitement when my life takes a turn in another direction. In the last few months I've made a concerted effort to change this. Because there's no changing the dilettantish aspect, I've just started to shut my damn mouth about things, tried hard not to blurt out everything going on for me to everyone who asks. This isn't particularly hard, but I think it adds to the general theme of standoffishness that colors much of my interaction with the world of late. I'm in a position of not having to consider this standoffishness a problem for the immediate future - a blessing - but for a long time now it has been one.

In the last couple of weeks a lot of things have happened that, on my old anonymous blog, I would have burst forth about in great geysers of melodramatic prose. But the situation is still enough in flux that I'm embarrassed to say anything, really, only to have to retract it in a few days when I have more information. I don't think anyone would blame me for the uncertainty or the change-and-change-again aspect of this information, because it's all external, not me being flaky. But I'd rather just say nothing until I know more.

At this point I feel like I'm being deliberately cryptic, but I think that's a jerky thing to do on blogs, so I assure you I'm not. I'd rather tell you that I feel muzzled than write short posts that don't hint anything is happening at all. THINGS ARE HAPPENING. They're just not happening with consistency or speed or transparency.

Transparency would be nice, actually. In a couple of weeks, when all of this uncertainty passes, that's going to be my keyword for this blog.

Something I want to tell everybody but I'm afraid to, because they'll judge me for taking such an action when I am not actually working at a paying job: I bought a new laptop. I am still mourning about it a little because I needed a new one and just plain couldn't afford a Mac. So I bought an HP with Windows 7 for, including the cost of Office software and after rebates et al, just under $500. Less than half as much as a comparable Mac.

And I really like this one. It's got everything I need and some extra bells and whistles besides. I'm sorry, Apple Gods! I wanted to buy my third Mac laptop. I just couldn't manage it right now. And for various (legitimate!) reasons, I needed a new laptop.

Plus, it's shiny.

OKAY that's enough procrastination. Off I go into the wild.

Writing from the Brain Stem

2011-11-08T03:26:00.000-08:00

I had some really good news yesterday as regards writing, but its specifics are going to have to wait. It hurts me more than it hurts you.

Today I have the following plans: take car in for oil change and ~~painful gouging~~ alignment/brakes fixing, possibly get haircut, and write short story. I mentioned that I came up with an idea last week at yoga class, and seeing as it's been marinating a week with only a couple of paragraphs actually put on the page, I think it's time for me to stop procrastinating and write the damn thing. I'm intimidated by it, though, because it feels like the successor to my most successful story to date, and I don't want to fuck it up. Worrying about that before it's on the page is bound to do nothing but paralyze, but there it is.

I also really must go back to Greenland. My cousin-in-law is doing NaNoWriMo, and as I watch her page count climb via Facebook, I start to feel ashamed that I've stalled at 59,000 words for my own novel. I'm just a couple of scenes away from the end of the middle third of the book, and I'm incredibly uncertain that the third third should go the way that I've intended it to go for the last five years of having the book in mind. I feel like that last third could go a number of other ways, and I feel...scrambly, like I'm running out of time and should be putting together an outline or just a plan of some kind, hurry quick before it's too late. (This is a total fallacy, because as I sit here and don't write it only becomes less urgent for me to come up with the ending.)

But the best ending I think I've ever devised, for the science fiction novella I wrote a couple of years ago, was a complete and utter surprise right up to the fateful sentences. I had no idea that was how the book ended until I wrote it. So I'm trying to kind of stay loose with the ending of this one, to write through it and just see what happens. Maybe not the smartest solution, but my anxiety about it isn't going to magic a plot out of thin air.

Maybe brainstorming would be of use. Jot some possible endings (or all possible endings I can think of), just to put them in my mind, so my writing-brain can draw on them on the point of writing it all.

The writing-brain. That's a useful concept. I believe both that stories come from somewhere, from an interdimensional muse, and come from the hard work of kneading through one word at a time. A lot of the time I'm writing through the Fictator, through the me that plunks down one word at a time, painfully, Frank Conroy-style. But some of the time I'm writing in that zone of nowhere, through the me that composes sentences and paragraphs without even consulting the Fictator and has no anxiety or procrastination in her heart at all.

A Kinder, Gentler Overdose

2011-11-06T05:03:00.000-08:00

When I first hear a song that I really love, I tend to over-listen to it. I listen to it in the car both to and from work, I listen to it at home on repeat, I pound it into my brain for a week or more before I've had enough of it. All manner of songs have been subject to this treatment, from Paul Simon to Lady Gaga. A couple of years ago, that song was "Come to Me" by Wah!, a kirtan artist of great repute and popularity.

The world of kirtan reminds me a lot of the world of Christian music; it's a whole subculture of people buying and selling and sharing music and attending concerts that goes on more or less entirely under the radar of people who aren't aware of it. I believe there's probably good music and unfortunate excess in both genres. There certainly is in kirtan. At its worst it's repetitive and kind of self-indulgent, with no value to a wide audience unused to its negatives. Ganga White said to us at teacher training that there's something funny to him about chanting to excess - Hare Krishna Hare Krishna Hare Krishna over and over and over, every hour of every day, gets worn into your brain such that your brain maybe can't develop new patterns. As long as your dominant pattern is Hare Krishna, you may not wind up growing very much in your spiritual journey. I'm paraphrasing very badly, but what he said made good sense to me, that chanting in great extremes leads to a failure of imagination.

That said, part of what I love most about "Come to Me" is about six and a half minutes in, when she switches to Sanskrit. The Amrita chant she does is so lovely, and so understated, that it always makes me feel consoled. (Appropriate for a song that's about Amma.)

On Tuesday, I attended the yoga class at Whole Yoga that I enjoyed so much three weeks ago and subbed for last week. I hope I can go to it regularly. One of the songs on the mix for class was a re-do of "Come to Me" that Wah! released on a more recent album - it's slower and shorter than the nine-minute version I love so much from Hidden in the Name. But it reminded me that I hadn't listened to the song in probably over a year. I had over-listened to it on my old iPod, and had never put the song on my new iPod when I bought it in 2009. Hearing her lyrics on Tuesday night made me feel old, loved, held, tired, mournful and rejuvenated all at once.

Come to me
I will take away your sorrow, come to me
I will open your tomorrow, come to me
I will open up your heart, come to me
We will never be apart

Not, perhaps, the most creative lyrics on planet Earth - kirtan lyrics rarely are - but her melody is simple, convincing, full of free-floating love. I couldn't find the long version on YouTube, but this website will play it for you via MySpace.

The following morning, I paid $0.99 to download the song to my iPhone so I could listen to it on the way to work. I sang along. I over-listened to it for most of last week. Then, on Friday, when I was full of jitters and loose ends and terror about my last day of work and what it held for me, I just kept the song in a little pocket in my mind, murmuring "Remove all fear, come from where you are to here," when I felt sad or anxious. It helped so immensely - it's a great debt I have to this song, now, for its soothing powers during the past week.

Even so, I think the song helps to demonstrate what Ganga said, because when she makes jai ma into the chorus toward the end of the song (jai ma is perhaps the most basic and widespread of all chants, and the one most likely to be irrevocably patterned into Wah!'s brain), it feels like a bit of a creative failure. I'll still sing along, but it seems like overkill that she put the Sanskrit in there at all. She could have just repeated the earlier lyrics. But instead, she's got to work jai ma in there somewhere, because everything comes back to jai ma, jai ma, jai jai ma.

I still haven't managed to insert this song into any of my class mixes. It's too soft for the majority of the music I use in vinyasa classes (which is stuff like Thievery Corporation and Cafe Del Mar), and it's too bouncy for restorative or yin classes. I'll figure out a chill mix to put it in, because others deserve the gift this song gave me, but it'll have to be next week, when I have time enough at last to pick through my music as I've been wanting to for months. I'm thinking of putting together a mix called Inevitably Makes Me Feel Better (or something rather more catchy), with "Rocket Man" and "When I Come Around" and "Enter Sandman" and "Come to Me" and others on there, songs that never, ever fail to fix whatever ails me for four or five minutes.

Unedited

2011-11-04T16:29:00.000-07:00

For three years, I blogged anonymously, elsewhere, and I let it ALL hang out. There were virtually no subjects that I didn't tell the truth about, even when no one asked. I talked about my relationships, wrote at great length about what was in my head, griped about work, let loose my perspective about all kinds of issues. Anonymity was a privilege, and I respected and enjoyed it enormously.

Now that I'm using my real name, I feel a great deal more limited. This evening, I was putting together a post in my head about something that I was feeling and experiencing that was benign and harmless and mostly about me, and I realized that in order to say what I wanted to say, I'd have to give my opinion about an aspect of the yoga world (kirtan, specifically), and that I might offend a small portion of the population in doing so - or at least let them know, in definite terms, what that opinion was. If we've learned little else from the last five years in America, it's that opinions can be dangerous, can pigeonhole people in damaging ways. Even if this particular opinion isn't going to get me arrested, it's a block about me that people can check off in their heads: that yoga teacher feels that way about kirtan, so I'll never go to one of her classes. So I'm hesitant to let my opinions out for air, here, because I'm trying to make this blog as public as it can be, and I don't want to offend or turn anyone away. That is the very last thing I ever want to do as I go about my life.

The problem is, that leaves me with only the most generic personal things to say. My worry about pigeonholing and rejection extends to just about every subject imaginable, and that means that this blog doesn't have any teeth, any personal edge that might keep you reading even if you disagree with me.

I'm going to try to open up in the future, starting with this kirtan thing - I'm going to write the post as I wanted to write it (maybe tomorrow, maybe next week, but it's coming!), and when the world doesn't explode, I'll try to write some more. I'm just gun-shy, concerned that now, because I don't have the protective awning of anonymity over my head, I'm going to be subject to kangaroo courts and the judgment of strangers, all of whom know who I really am. I recognize that I am not exactly a prominent defendant in the court of public opinion, so perhaps I'm worrying over nothing. But as Aaron Sorkin reminded us so eloquently in The Social Network, the internet isn't written in pencil. It's written in ink. And who knows what the future will bring to me?

Vice Versus Om

2011-11-02T07:46:00.000-07:00

Over the last several months, alcohol consumption gradually became a nightly thing for me rather than a few-times-weekly-if-at-all thing. Every night I was so frustrated by what had happened during the day that the mental and emotional smear resulting from a glass of wine or a bottle of Leinenkugel became something of a crutch. I never went beyond two drinks in an evening, and didn't frequently go beyond one. (It also helped me get over my fear of the empty page so I could ease into nightly writing.)

This worried me, as I watched it happening. I knew that I wasn't exactly in wino territory (and that it might be a little absurd to worry about one drink per evening), but growing dependent on that mild smear was troubling, nevertheless. When things changed again a few weeks ago, I stopped drinking altogether - didn't have the time - and I was glad to find that the crutch wasn't actually a dependency.

What I did do a few weeks ago was smoke a single clove cigarette. I had had a few left in a pack that I kept in my glove compartment "for emergencies" for the five years that I haven't been a smoker, and one night when I really desperately wanted one, I smoked one. I wrote a very good essay about it and quashed my guilt as best I could. Matt and a friend have insisted that it's all right for me to let loose some stress by smoking once in a very great while, and I'm choosing to believe them. Unfortunately, clove cigarettes were outlawed during the five years I wasn't smoking them, and now you can't get them in this country. You can get clove cigarillos, which I'm guessing are virtually the same product, and yesterday I went to a tobacco shop in downtown Annapolis and bought a pack. (Of 12. For $8. Gaaaah.)

Last night there was a yoga class I had planned to attend, but all I could think about as I was leaving work was the pack of cigarillos in my purse and the lone Leinie's in my fridge at home. That was what I wanted to do with my evening. I'm 90% over the cold that's been dogging me for over a week, and I wanted to smoke a clove on the way home and then make dinner and drink a beer and get going again on the Greenland book. I didn't want to go to yoga and purify; I wanted to consume chemicals and toxify.

I went to yoga. Despite traffic, despite hunger, despite the crowded room, I went back to the mat. I knew it was the right thing to do.

It was a good class. I really like this teacher. He's not obsessed with strength, he has a good presence and a good voice, and his adjustments are great. I might have even gotten a story idea out of class; time and drafting will tell.

This evening, though, nothing is going to keep me from my vices. I really want to know what these cigarillos are like, and that one beer in the fridge has to be lonely. I'll happily end its suffering.

Opera(ting) Alone

2011-11-01T07:06:00.000-07:00

I just bought meself a ticket to see Lucia di Lammermoor at the Kennedy Center in two weeks. I really do like opera - not universally, not to the point where I forgive its many shortcomings or can say that I "love" opera - but to the point where I don't want to miss a world-class performance of an opera I've never seen if it's reasonably convenient for me to go. The last time I went to an opera (The Marriage of Figaro, and I loved it deeply) I felt like I'd run a marathon when it was over, so if I'm not exactly excited, I'm pleased and looking forward to it. I got a (shitty) orchestra seat, and I like being able to see the faces, so yay.

I only bought one ticket. Matt's father is sometimes my opera buddy (his wife and my husband are not so much fans of it, so this often works out), but I thought it would be just too much trouble to coordinate both of us going, and I wanted to go ahead and get a ticket before they were gone.

I don't mind going to things alone. The first time I did this was when The Little Mermaid came back to theaters in 1997. I was a teenager. At the time, Pixar had not yet made animation cool, and I was so embarrassed by my desire to see it on the big screen (hadn't seen it on its original release when I was seven) that I didn't even ask any of my friends if they wanted to go with me. I just went alone. And I had the most marvelous time. I wasn't the least bit ashamed of going by myself because I'd enjoyed myself so much.

I've been to lots of movies by myself since: Y Tu Mama Tambien, The Royal Tenenbaums (I walked out of that one, and if I'd been with somebody I probably would have suffered through it instead), This Is It, Bridesmaids. I went to The Lion King rerelease a few weeks ago by myself; Matt wasn't interested. I'm explaining this at length because it seems like the normal thing in America is for movies to be a social event, and I don't always see it that way. If I go by myself, I can enjoy the movie without self-consciousness, and I can leave if I don't like it, and I can sit wherever I want to. For me, the only negative, honestly, is that I can't go to the bathroom because I have nobody to tell me what happened while I was gone. But I think it's pretty awful to go to the bathroom during the movies anyway, since you're drawn out of the experience - which is virtually the only advantage the cinema has these days.

Anyway, I have no real problem going to the Kennedy Center by myself in two weeks. I had Matt with me the last time I went there, a few months ago for a strange dance concert, and I'll miss his company during intermission, but I don't want to subject him to Lucia di Lammermoor when it's not really his thing.

I didn't write last night. It's over a week now since I worked on the Greenland book, which makes me feel guilty and anxious, but my life kind of collapsed on itself in the last two weeks, and I'm having to pick through the rubble and do things like laundry and grocery shopping that didn't get done while I was imploding. I'm coming out of it with a new Thursday night yoga class, which is good, and a lot more optimism about what's ahead. But there's a good deal more rebuilding to do.

Melodramatic

2011-10-28T11:15:00.000-07:00

If I had been able to get it together enough to laugh about my situation, yesterday would have been the day that I looked up at the sky and said "REALLY? REALLY NOW?" But instead, Morphine intervened and turned things around for me.

And then, later, a company that publishes science stuff intervened again and turned things around further. And there was yoga involved. My head is still stuffy as hell, but I'm not dying on my feet anymore, and things could be so much worse than they are.

I've taken the week off from writing so far. I feel like a jerk about it, but there's an awful lot going on, both actually and emotionally, and hey, I've got a cold. I'm spending a lot of time collapsed on the couch. I've got to get back to it - I've especially been skimping on the workshop I'm in - but I think it'll have to be over the weekend that I do so.

Last night I watched Imitation of Life, and although it was a bit more obvious in places than Mildred Pierce, I really liked it. Melodrama is appealing to me; I think it's because the story is all interior, all a battle between people in living rooms, but the stakes are so inflated that you can't stop watching. I simultaneously take it seriously and can't take it seriously, which means it's fun to watch - I'm invested, but I'm not weeping when something goes wrong.

TGIF, man. Srsly. This has been one of the hardest weeks of the last two years.

Test Swatches

2011-10-25T11:13:00.000-07:00

I am, um, not having a good week. If I had a dog, it would get run over tomorrow.

A phrase in Stephen King's On Writing that I've been thinking about lot lately is "shoveling shit from a sitting position". In full context, he tells us to keep writing, because your perceptions of your work can be wrong, and you can be doing good work even if it feels like you're shoveling shit from a sitting position. When I sit at my laptop and work on my Greenland novel, that is exactly, precisely what it feels like I'm doing. As if I'm just moving manure around with weakening arms, unable to get up out of the muck. But I felt the same way about the last work I did on my horror novel, until finally work on it just sort of...petered out, because I was tired of the perceived smell. But when I went back and read it months later, like magic, it had turned into something not-so-bad. So the thing to do, just as Steve tells us, is to keep going.

I've also been thinking about knitting and writing. One of the things you must do when you sit down to knit a new project is knit a test swatch. It's a little square piece of knitting meant to test how many stitches per inch you knit with these needles and this yarn. Everybody knits a little differently, with a tension that is greater or lesser - tighter stitches or looser ones - and you may have to change needle sizes or even yarn to make sure that your project comes out all right per the pattern. If you don't knit a test swatch, you can't be sure that the number of stitches in the pattern will come out to the same yardage on your finished product, and you might wind up with a garment that's too big, too small, or simply won't come together at all.

The thing is, when you cast on to knit a test swatch, you walk into it feeling as if the time you spend knitting these stitches is going to be wasted. You know that these stitches are going to be unraveled. The swatch is only for testing your gauge, it doesn't go into the finished product, so when you're finished with enough stitches to give you a decent area for measurement, rrrrrrrrip go the stitches and you have to wind the yarn up and cast on all over again, this time for the actual project. Or you start over with yet another swatch, if you've changed needles, or you have to abandon the project altogether because the yarn or the available needles just won't work.

To me, test swatches are tragic, and I hate doing them. I don't, if I can avoid it - if the project isn't tricky or I can find the same yarn with which the pattern was designed. I know at least one knitter who loves them. She thinks of them like mini-projects, and she even keeps some test swatches and labels them so she knows what her gauge was with those needles on that yarn. But I just can't help seeing them as anything but wasted effort.

There's a lot about writing that can be viewed from this perspective. Ira Glass reminds us that in order to get through the gap we just have to do a lot of work, knit a lot of test swatches that never end up making it into the finished product. It's frustrating as all hell, to have done all of this work and gotten theoretically no usable work out of it, but the thing is -

If you don't knit your test swatches, your "real work" can't happen at all. (That insight deserved a new paragraph.) Without knowing what your tension actually is, what knitting on those needles on this day looks like, you will never know whether the finished product is going to work. All of the words that you write and cut, slicing valiantly through them with your Fictator sword, were there for a reason; they were there to reveal the jewel of writing that existed underneath, all along. The mountain still has to produce a giant block of marble in order for Michelangelo to carve a beautiful sculpture out of it. Was the mountain's effort wasted?

So I'm trying, really hard, to write backstory that might never see the light of day, exposition that I will keep in my laptop for my own reference and no one else's eyes, chapters that I know, even while writing them, really are manure and will inevitably be cut. It's all of a piece; it's all work that helps me to write a finished product. Even if, at the time, it feels like a total waste, it all adds up to something.

Chaos and New York

2011-10-24T10:39:00.000-07:00

Back when I was at yoga teacher training, I was told twice about the Saturn return. I turned 28 while I was at teacher training, and some of the people I met there thought I was headed for the Saturn return the following year, based on what I told them about how I wanted to change my life.

Well, it didn't happen then, to my knowledge, but I think it's happening now. Although I learn quickly, I've always been slow to get a clue, in the cosmic sense. So the tumult and noise and misery and dreaming and transition are a leetle overdue.

---

The good news is, over the weekend Matt and I went to New York and saw Sleep No More, a show (sort of) that is part dance, part theater, part David Lynch, part steampunk, part BioShock, part Macbeth...it was some crazy shit. I had thought I would be writing an essay about it, and although I was wrong about what I'd be writing about, I did write an essay on the train back home. I worked hard and I'm happy with the result. (Matt helped.) I've already queried it.

I'm having a difficult time concentrating today, or I'd tell you all about the experience of Sleep No More. Perhaps another time. If the essay gets picked up, heck, you can read about it then.

I will tell you that Matt and I tried to go to the 9/11 memorial, and it turns out that you have to reserve tickets ahead of time if you want to go there. The only exception is for first responders. We walked down there, and there were no lines to get in or anything, just the information guides milling around, but we still couldn't go in because we hadn't reserved tickets.

I don't want to be a jerk, but I feel like this kind of contradicts the whole point of a public memorial. (I'm not sure if this contradiction has anything to do with the substance of the memorial, just...public memorials in general are supposed to be public, right?) I think part of the reason is that there's so much construction going on in those two or three city blocks, and it could be a little dangerous for a lot of visitors to pile up in there. But still. What could go wrong with limited-number on-site ticketing, with a waiver form?

We passed by some Occupy Wall Street protesters on our way there. They were mostly still asleep. (The early protester doesn't necessarily get the worm, I guess.) I've been enjoying the OWS movement - or pictures of it, anyway - because it's the first time I've seen protesters that kind of look like me: ordinary, no particular age group, not homogeneously rabid or vegan or filthy or dreadlocked or anything else that indicates to me that this is a group of people with different values than mine. But I have to say that the group we saw down there kind of did look like dirty hippies. Sorry, guys. I still think you're fighting the good fight.

I'm On Mah Wey

2011-10-22T13:46:00.000-07:00

...from misery tuh happiness tuh-dey. That was in Shrek, remember?

In this case, I'm on mah wey from my home in beautiful Maryland to an exciting (if short) adventure in New York City (which, every time I say that, my brain can't help but repeat "New York City?" in shocked cowpoke tones, a la the Pace Picante salsa commercials from the yore days of my childhood). I love love love riding on trains, and I'm very happy to have done so today, but I'm definitely ready to be off the train and in New York, meeting a terrific online friend IRL and fitting in some breathless experiences before heading home tomorrow afternoon.

Pat Sajak, and three very snooty-looking young people who are likely his children, happen to be on the same train. Of course, he's in the first class compartment. But when I saw him walk past our bench while we were sitting on the platform, I murmured "oh my gosh," because I recognized him instantly. (I knew long ago that he lived in the area. He owned a house in the same neighborhood as a boy I dated in high school.) He is my first in-person celebrity sighting (aside from those I knew I would see, like at concerts, etc). Not the most exciting celeb sighting for my first time, perhaps, but hey, you know, still. Not every day you see Pat Sajak not on TV.

The train has paused in the Meadowlands and I can see the construction of the Freedom Tower over this dirt hill to the right. I still haven't decided entirely how I feel about the Freedom Tower; it's not really my issue to take a stand on, I have no significant connection to New York, so I don't feel right arguing about it. If I have the time this weekend I'm going to go and see the memorial.

I worked hard during this train ride on the story I wrote at the beginning of the week. I tweaked it, no significant rewriting. I think I'm going to give it another day or two and then format it and send it off to a contest. I'd give it another month normally, but the contest deadline is the 31st. I'll only be out $10 if it turns out the story needs more work.

Train is 8 minutes from its destination, so I'm going to pack up. Thanks for letting me stop by on mah wey. Uh huh.

If you cut my story, does it not bleed words?

2011-10-21T06:34:00.000-07:00

I don't know anything about writing contests. I have been a finalist in two of them, but I really don't know what distinguishes contests from the usual query for publication/get rejected dance, except that there's payment involved. I'm talking about quality. What is it about these stories that makes them good enough to deserve a prize, rather than just the prize of publication?

I also don't know what kinds of writers win these contests, and what they do with the money and prestige that they win (if any). I don't know how many writers I'm going up against, whether a few dozen or a few thousand. I don't know if there's some kind of a scheme to winning them, or whether they matter more or less than regular-style publication. I just don't know that much about them.

But I've dived back into writing during the fullest swing of the fall contest season, and I'm damn well going to take advantage of it. Two nights ago I decided to enter a short story into a genre writer's contest at Writer's Digest. The short story in question was 4,800 words, and the word limit for the contest was 4,000. I am pretty happy with this story the way it is; it squeaks going around corners maybe once or twice, but I don't think it needs shortening, unless it's the Crisco kind of shortening. But I was sure it was a good idea to enter this story in this competition, so I put on my Fictator hat and I sat down to chop until I could chop no more.

It was a nightmare. It was two hours of work to lose those 800 words. I must've read through it seven or eight times, lopping a word here and a sentence there. When my progress was too slow, I held my breath and cut 400 words of really fine character development. I do not think this made for a better story, really I don't, but I had 800 words to lose and, in the end, I lost 804.

And I paid my $20 and entered the contest. Lord knows if the story even belongs in the horror category, or if it's up against stories by much more seasoned and worthwhile writers, or if the contest will decide to go belly-up and they'll keep my money (it's happened before), or - what is most likely - I won't win and won't know why.

Once I entered a contest where your entry fee paid for a copy of a book with all the winners published in it, and when I was sent the book (so many months after the contest ended that I'd mostly forgotten about it), that was my first notice that I hadn't won anything. When I read the stories, I didn't really understand what they had that my story didn't; sometimes I understand why I got rejected from a publication when I read a copy of the publication, and sometimes I don't, and this was one where I didn't.

So, that's that. Fictator success; contest entered. Everything is super.

I am exhausted this morning. For the third time I am the victim of temporary insanity leading me to agree to substitute for a sunrise yoga class, and I had to get up at 4:30 to make it there in time. And all night I woke up every hour because my brain was worried I would oversleep. And no one even came to the class. Fool me thrice, shame on me.

In the Writing Cycle

2011-10-18T08:56:00.000-07:00

Last night, for two hours, I wrote at white heat. It was a short story about being trapped, in a very literal sense. What I came up with was some of the best work I think I've done, but that might have been first-blush delirium. It's the first fiction I remember writing in years where I had the capacity to get across exactly what I wanted to get across from beginning to end, not just in fits and spurts. I was making myself heard. I am itching to read it again and see if I was wrong about this. But I know, I know, wait a few days. Make it foreign.

This is the second quality thing I've written in a few weeks that has not been my novel. (I am giving myself a pass for nightly work on the novel when I do other writing work during the designated time. It's all going into the same ocean, I figure.) I admit I'm wondering a little if my brain is clawing out for other things to accomplish rather than working word by word on this albatross of mine. I'll work and slave and write a Pushcart-winning short story rather than one more sentence on THIS MONSTROSITY. It's not really a monstrosity, but it's taking on the form of a minotaur in my mind, something mutated and wretched but strong and cunning.

It's not that working on the novel is no fun (although it's not much fun), it's just that it takes me such a goddamn long time to oil the machine. By the time it's done clanking and wheezing and making expensive noises, and I'm clicking along with I-think-I-can, and actually having fun, it's time for bed. And as the draft gets longer, I feel like it gets more and more out of my control. I'm up over 57,000 words, which is cause for celebration, but I keep thinking of elements that I failed to put in two chapters ago that I will need to refer to now, and putting another pin on the mental bulletin board: that, too, will have to happen in the first revision. The first revision is looking to be as much work as the first draft, at this point.

The last several weekends I have tried to use to their best advantage in front of the laptop. It was only a couple of months ago that Matt and I sat down and hashed out a plan for keeping the house cleaner than we had been keeping it, and now all of that has gone to hell as I obsess over the book. I feel like a jerk. Matt doesn't care at all, bless him, but it leads me back to the old despair about balancing my life: I'll never have a clean house, a reasonably enjoyable job, a rich and rewarding inner life, and enough education, all at the same time.

...Does anybody have all those things at the same time, actually? Maybe my standards are just unrealistic.

Anyway. The lack of balance has its place here, too; I am excited that I'm finally keeping a non-anonymous blog, and although the name of this blog indicates what its main subject is supposed to be, I am still planning to write a lot about my life as well as my writing. But I'm in a phase of writing right now - it's all I want to think about, all I want to talk about. This goes back to that thing I dislike, and attempt on a regular basis to accept, about myself - the cyclic nature of my interests, heaving up and down like the tides. When I'm in a movies phase, I can't shut up about movies, and it's the only way I spend my time. When it's cooking, that's all I think about, getting home to cook. It's embarrassing to be so effusive about something that is then in the rear seat of my life until the next cycle, it leads to questions from well-meaning friends that I don't know how to answer, and I can see it happening every night now as Matt listens to me with infinite patience about today's work on the book. Or the thing I just read in The Fire in Fiction (a book which is changing for the better the whole way I approach my work). Or the magazine I found that I want to submit to.

He tells me that he loves my enthusiasm and likes learning about the new things that I learn with every phase. My self-doubt stamps this claim out like a rhino with a fire. Surely no one is so interested in a dilettante like me.

In the Pudding

2011-10-15T14:13:00.000-07:00

This morning I went to the library to look for a book about writing. I have been struggling a little lately with the idea of conflict, and how big or small it can be, and whether it is the engine driving the story or just another structural element. I thought surely someone had written a book about conflict in fiction writing and that I could find it at the Bowie library.

There were quite a few shelves of books about writing, but no books devoted to conflict. I did find and take home a few books that looked worthy, including a book called The Fire in Fiction by Donald Maass, a prominent literary agent. I read the introduction this afternoon while procrastinating, and I found this:

The more I see, the more I feel that novelists fall into two broad categories: those whose desire is to be published, and those whose passion is to spin stories. I think of these as status seekers and storytellers.

Three pages follow that elaborate on this concept, and I started to feel smaller and smaller as I read on. I wish I could quote it all.

Storytellers look not to publishers to make them successful, but to themselves. ...Which type of fiction writer are you? Really? I believe you, but the proof is in your passion and whether or not it gets on the page.

This leads me to some uncomfortable thoughts. I had always thought that the reason I was obsessed with getting published was so I could write in comfort; once I proved myself, once I made enough of a profit on my words to be able to devote myself to words full-time, I figured, I would be able to do writing that I loved without worry that it wouldn't be published. Yet so many writers advise that being published isn't the satisfactory conclusion that you think it'll be. They say that you then worry about sales, about promotion, about reviews. That you feel just as precarious as before, if not more so, because whether or not you can even write, much less sell, your next book is now the overriding concern.

So now I wonder if perhaps you never write in comfort (unless you're Stephen King). If instead you continue to work and suffer and get rejected and stumble into the unknown room, sentence by sentence, and you have to just keep working and worrying and stumbling. If you do, if that's your fate as a writer, then why obsess so hard over publishing, as if it's the answer? Why am I doing that?

My mother tried to tell me a few weeks ago that I should write because I love it, instead of writing with an end in mind. I thought that it was easy for her to say, because a) she is quite brilliant and successful at her brand of writing and b) if I don't publish, I can't do this thing for a living. Doing this thing for a living is my goal, and I thought perhaps she doesn't realize that and was telling me to write for the love of it because that was all I could expect to get out of it.

But Donald Maass, who is writing to the audience wanting to do this thing for a living, is advising essentially the same thing: be a storyteller. If you tell stories you love, you will find success; if you build it, they will come. It is so hard for me to buy this, because there's so much about publishing that seems left to wild chance, so much that seems to require you to game the system even while you're putting expert and deeply felt words onto the page. It's a world that seems both authentic - just send us good writing, we really don't care about anything else - and highly suspect - but if you know somebody who's somebody's uncle, eh, we'll put your crummy book in print, whatever. Where's the truth of it?

I want to tell good stories, stories from my deepest self, that I know will be successful. Does that make me a status-seeker, a storyteller, or some hybrid of both? I believe in the book I'm writing now, I'm tickled by the premise and I like working with the characters. But when it's finished I intend to shop it to genre markets because I think that's the area with greatest potential for profit for this book. Am I a mercenary? I also want to publish, slightly, for the "I'll show 'em all" reason, all the people who rejected me or bullied me or did damage to my psyche over the years. I know this is a petty and stupid reason, but I won't deny it; nor do I believe it really influences the way I'm telling the stories I'm telling. Does this nevertheless put me in the status seeker column?

I guess worrying too much about my motivations keeps me from putting words on the page, which is really the most important thing. I just can't figure out where the limit of this problem might be, if that's the reason that I haven't gotten a foothold yet, or if it's just the gap:

The difference between the quality of my work the last time I was writing regularly, and the quality of my work now, is so staggering that I'm pretty sure it's the gap. I'm pretty sure that I need to keep writing and keep submitting and that the years lived in between will not have been wasted effort. All the silly blogging and all the dreaming and all the finding out I've done, all these things will show in the work on the page. But I can't help feeling it's all for nothing if I can't find success that enables me to do more writing, and Maass's perspective has given me serious pause.

"I took the blows..."

2011-10-13T11:15:00.000-07:00

In my adult life, I've tended to believe that your birthday is the one day when everything is supposed to go your way. This has been a week (a month) where very little has gone the way I'd hoped, and it's a milestone birthday that I've been dreading for quite a lot of years now, so I didn't think much would be good about today. My real birthday can be some other time, when things are going my way, when good news abounds.

This morning, Matt gave me a lovely gift:

I told him ages ago that I wanted them, and then joked a lot with him about getting me an ironing board cover (Simpsons joke). But he bought them for me. And the matching necklace, too.

Then I got in the car to go to work, and although I was in no particularly good mood, the Traffic Light Gods saw fit to let me pass through two lights where I'm usually held up. I turned on the radio and heard a semi-interesting story about an assault and a car chase in Gambrills, and as no one was badly hurt and a crazy guy got locked up, it was the kind of story I like to hear. After that, the radio played "In Your Eyes", which is a song that even after all this time and all these repetitions I can't help feeling sloppy and romantic about. And then came the Doobies telling me to whoa-ooh-WHAAAH, listen to the music, and I sang along. And then there was a commercial, so I turned to WRNR and caught the last half of "Ain't No Rest for the Wicked". All in all, you see, the radio was playing just for me.

In my inbox and on my Facebook page were a dozen well-wishes (including the usual goofy birthday e-mail from Matt's brother, which always cheers me), and my in-laws sent me gorgeous flowers. An attorney I barely interact with, who always has a friendly smile for me, wished me a quiet happy birthday by the copier, totally making my morning.

So the little things are apparently going my way today. The big things are not, but the little things...well, life's in the little things, right?

At least I'll get through the rest of today without having to do this.

---

Nothing about writing today. Sorry.

The Tension is Aging Me

2011-10-11T06:16:00.000-07:00

This morning, someone took a picture of the back of my car. It was at least the second time this has happened. Both times, I haven't been terribly sure whether the picture was intended to be of my license plate, which is "L33T", or of all the bumper decorations: Kill Your Television, Flying Spaghetti Monster, a yoga sticker, and an MST3K sticker. I can't help being curious about what the focus was, the thing she wanted to capture. In any case, the blurry ass end of my car is surely on Facebook somewhere.

I was whining to my mom recently about how hard it is to make up words and names in a different language while I'm writing, and she asked me why I didn't just put placeholders in and come back to make up the words later. I told her that when I do that I start to get lazy, and just put placeholders in when I can't think up a good metaphor, or a good bit of dialogue that says what I want it to say. Before long I'm writing Swiss cheese. I could already see that starting to happen; I had forgotten to invent a female housekeeper character earlier on, so when I needed her at this point in the draft I just put in "female servant" in red so I could give her a name and a personality later. Shortly after, I put "[dessert]" instead of creating a name for a dessert, because <whine> it was almost 10, I've got work in the morning</whine>. When I came back to the draft last night, the [dessert] omission really bothered me, and I couldn't write well until I had invented a word for the damned dessert. I still don't know what the dessert actually IS, or what it tastes like (how can you get sugar underground?), but, you know, baby steps.

So, last night's work was reasonably good. I've cracked 50,000 words. I have that same confidence problem I had when I was writing the horror novel most recently; my characters are doing things, talking to each other, and I kind of can't believe that it's actually interesting. I feel like I could just cut all of this stuff, that there must be an exciting or meaningful scene up ahead that I should be getting to, and no one wants to read this character-building, world-building stuff. So writing about it seems contradictory, unnecessary.

This feeling is amplified because I'm reading a book right now that's all about conversations and emotions between characters (at the moment), and is really not very interesting. The author writes pretty well, but the situations between characters just kind of go on and on and I'm wondering when they're going to get to the point, and what the point may be. There just isn't any tension; it plods. I'm not really sure if you can tell whether lack of tension is happening to your own work, so I'm worried that all this writing and effort might be wasted, because I won't be able to tell on my own if my characters are boring their audience. (Because, of course, my own words are endlessly fascinating to me. And yes, I do sometimes go by Miss Piggy.)

My birthday's in two days. I feel conflicted. I know 30 isn't very old; I know my 30s will be much better than my 20s; I know that no one's going to shove me into Carrousel and blow me up. At the same time, I feel like something big and amorphous is coming to an end, and I will only be able to look back to know what it is. I also feel the same old insecurity about how I haven't set the world on fire yet. As far as that goes, I keep running across examples of people I admire who didn't really get going until they were a good deal older than I am.

Still. 30. Maybe the world just isn't flammable.

The Fictator is me.

2011-10-07T12:50:00.000-07:00

You can’t read all the books in the world. It took me years and years and years to learn this, to actually absorb it to the point where it was useful knowledge. (For the longest time it was just a personal tragedy.) With this knowledge, I no longer feel the need to keep reading books I don’t like, or to read all the books in a series if I liked the first one okay, or whatever. I still haven’t read The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest because although I very much want to know what happens to Lisbeth, I was not crazy about the experience of reading the first book and liked the second even less. Plus it’s not in paperback yet.

And I’ve never read The Red Tent, or The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, and I gave up halfway through my second Joyce Carol Oates book because you know what? I don’t cotton to her. I no longer feel the need to try and keep up with the frantic pace of books released in this country. It’s faddish, like everything else, and I was very surprised when I learned this, because books have always seemed permanent to me, more lasting, but it just isn’t so. The book everyone’s talking about will be forgotten in five years. I have never enjoyed an Oprah book. If a book crosses my path that looks good, I’ll read it, but I don’t have a To Be Read pile anymore because there are just too many books. Every book in the world would be in that pile if I was honest, so I’m not going to keep a pile, I’m just going to let books come into my life as they will.

I refuse to feel bad about this. Most of the time. But I'm in a writers' workshop right now, and a lot of folks are talking about books they've read and books they recommend, and I haven’t read a good many of them because I don’t keep up with contemporary lit this way. I feel ashamed. I’ve spent a lot of time re-reading Skeleton Crew, I am reminded. I could have used that time to be up on my market.

But you can’t read them all. You just can’t. And maybe if I was in a graduate program or didn’t have a day job I would have the time and inclination to feel bad about this, but aside from flashes of “haven’t I read anything?” when I read these comments from my co-workshoppers, I don’t.

(If you want to know how I learned this lesson, it was from Ha Jin’s Waiting, which, halfway through, was boring me so desperately that I gave up and read the end to find out what happened. It was a thoroughly disappointing ending. The critics loved that book, it won a National Book Award, and I haven’t the faintest idea why. When I returned it to the library I looked around and saw the skazillions of other books on the shelves, not all of which were likely to be as disappointing as this one had been. So after that experience, I was determined no longer to let the books boss me around. I can decide how I want my time to be spent, and no author/critic/talk show host will decide it for me.)

Over the weekend, this idea has mated with another idea in my head and they’ve produced an interesting notion about my own writing. I told my husband the other night that recently when I sit at my laptop, I have begun feeling not, as always, helpless before the grind of events, as my characters tell me what’s going to happen (or sit there and refuse to do anything), but more muhua-ha-ha-ha, more like the dictator of my own little empire, drunk with power over my little fictional people. Dance, puppets! You’ll do what I tell you to do! I am your creator! I am the WRITER!

It doesn’t mean I have an easier time cranking the words onto the page, but it does mean I am far more capable of thinking outside the box than I was. Just because I’ve never read a book where a character had X quality doesn’t mean I can’t create a character that does. Just because Y usually takes place in tandem with Z in many books I’ve read doesn’t mean I have to write the two together as well. I can do whatever I want. It’s all coming out of my own head.

This may seem obvious, but to me it wasn’t. I guess I believed that stories come from somewhere, some other dimension where they are fully formed by the fiction gods and transmitted here, and that they can’t really be written any way but the way they appear in my head (or Kevin Brockmeier’s head, or wherever). Having to invent plot for my Greenland novel when absolutely nothing was springing from my mind like Athena from Zeus has been an interesting lesson learned. I’m just…makin’ shit up. It can go this way, or maybe it can go another way; if I look back and see that it didn’t work, I can just write it over again a different way. It’s my book. I wrote it. I can change it to be whatever I want it to.

So. Fictator + Can’t read all of the innumerable books in the world = …I don’t have to be attached to anything I write. There are limitless metaphors out there, endless permutations of the two plots. No matter how fragile and spectacular a unit of writing seems to be, there is always a way to make it better (or to make it worse, for that matter). No sentence will be exactly like this sentence, true, but there are other sentences, other words, even made-up words and obsolete words. Maybe it won’t be perfect, but nothing ever is, and being attached to paragraphs I write will only hold me back from better paragraphs. Just like being intent on reading all six Dune books meant that I missed out on reading other books I might have liked better.

I feel about 80,000 times better, and far more energetic about writing in the future, after this epiphany.

And hey, if you thought this was interesting, you should read what I’ll have to say soon about how knitting test swatches is like rewriting. If you didn’t think this was interesting, go be your own fictator. It’s my blog.