The Tangible, Textural Past

In promotional news, if you're in New York City, come see me and Toby at Quimby's on June 24. We still don't know what we're going to say to each other, but we always have a good time talking. He's smart as a whip and a tremendously elegant critic. 

And listen to the most recent episode of the Take-Up, a podcast of which I can now officially announce I'm a cohost. Someday I'll get that Rotten Tomatoes critic approval, dammit. 

This week my husband and I celebrated our 13th wedding anniversary. Thirteen is a lucky number for me, not an unlucky one, so I felt good about it; but this week has been emotionally cruddy for me and work-intense for him, so our celebration amounted to a couple glasses of prosecco and a medium-good noir. 

I don't know how the years compound into decades. That's the element I can't countenance about time passing. I understand how months slide up into years, how weeks collect into months, but in terms of time passing unexpectedly, too quickly, it's all about the mysteriousness of decades for me. I sent someone my From Me to You posts today and had to acknowledge that the first one was written a decade ago. That was impossible to believe. It's been 18 years since Matt and I moved in together. Equally impossible. I don't know what happened to 2014-2019 in particular. 

Enough of that. 

I've mentioned here that I'm working on two projects simultaneously: essays about Tom Paris and a novel about Jean Harlow's second husband. "Working on" is disingenuous, because all week I've gotten nothing done except reading. I haven't felt well in either body or mind, but I'm also pretty unmotivated right now. Ironing out certain issues with Wire Mothers has been draining, and the Tom Paris project has stalled. I know it's because it's a book I know how to write and that's not as exciting as a book I don't know how to write, and also it's essays, which are kind of naturally less exciting for me than fiction, because I'm arranging (landscaping) rather than inventing (growing). I wanted to Produce, just so I didn't get in the habit of not producing. I haven't. Maybe next week I will. 

The thing I want to do more than any work is lie on my back and think about Jean Harlow's second husband, about just how cynically Norma Shearer married Irving Thalberg, about whether John Gilbert could have beaten the bottle and remained a star - about all those circumstances and the ways I want to sketch and narrate them, and specifically about the tangible, textural existence of those days. I ordered some samples of the perfumes Jean supposedly preferred (lots of fiction and legend, unclear what's true), and those smells have proved so evocative that the actual work of writing, outlining, characterization is all less appealing than the thinking. I tried to go to Grauman's to look at and touch Jean's handprints (again), but the courtyard was closed that day so I'll have to go back. I've looked at their house, which is still standing, on Zillow. I bought a poster of the Hollywood sign as it existed then, with the -land attached, and put it up in my office. 

I want to daydream about these lives, consider them while I listen to scratchy jazz, mourn for them while I breathe in Mitsouko. Don't worry, I'm not Christopher Reeve in Somewhere in Time, pining to death for an age I'll never live in. But in starting to take steps toward telling a famous yet unresolved story, I feel a strong desire to psychologically inhabit a vanished time and place as fully as possible before I get going (rather than flatly researching it, as I did for Europe in the 1930s). 

Speaking of compounded decades. 

Hollywood changes constantly, in a technological and architectural way, but some things about it (danger, allure, fortune, dishonesty) haven't changed in a hundred years. It's the details I seek, pinning down the scents and sounds and objects so I can tell the story as freely and as instinctually as possible. 

On a related note, I got some feedback on the Casablanca book that I'm pretty sure is right but I can't figure out how to fix without knocking big holes in the timeline. And I really need another paper copy  of the manuscript to work with in order to solve these problems, which is (take my word for it) deeply annoying. Whine, whine. 

The other project on my plate is an hour-long talk about...myself as a writer? I think? that I've been asked to give to a group of older folks in late June. I'm looking forward to the event, but my first draft of the talk was not suitable, and time is running out to write another one. Another thing I couldn't motivate myself to do this week. 

Next week, instead. Somewhere between the thinking and the daydreaming and the whining, there will be work. 

Tuesdays, for Some Reason

When I was in high school and college I was a gigantic musichead. I read Rolling Stone cover to cover; I spent thousands of dollars on CDs; I connected dots between dozens of artists based on producers and studio musicians like Nellee Hooper and Justin Meldal-Johnsen. I knew that Calvin Johnson was the other guy on the cover of Beck's One Foot in the Grave. I could keep going.

It took at least a year for me to recognize patterns in the industry. For instance, that most indie records came out in the fall and that all records were released on Tuesdays. I still don't know why this is. My wild guess is that it's left over from obsolete logistics that meant physical shipments arrived on Mondays (or, if they were late, Tuesdays) and the staff needed time to unpack the boxes and stock the album. But maybe not, maybe it's related to statistics about when people buy things.

Picking up patterns in the book world has taken me a shorter time, but I am not distracted by as many things now as I was then. When books come out in the calendar year is often related to their subject matter; uplifting books come out in the summer and serious books come out in the winter. July is a total dead zone. And books, like albums, usually come out on Tuesdays.

Today is Tuesday. And a shocking number of highly anticipated books are coming out on this one day: Sarah Gailey's Magic for Liars, Kristen Arnett's Mostly Dead Things, Ocean Vuong's debut novel, the latest novels from Elizabeth Gilbert and Neal Stephenson, on and on and on. My Twitter feed is sparking and spitting fire. I don't know why the Big Five picked today to dump so many big-deal books. I'm guessing it's the same reason they barely release anything in July - this is the last week to get book dollaz before people start going on vacation and...stop...buying books?

I mean, they know their business (I think) but it seems like, if no one is dropping good stuff in July, maybe be the press that drops something good in July, and the book will do way better than if you put it out at the same time as four other debuts that have been hyped for the past two or six months. This is how March has gradually become a decent month to release films. It used to be a dumping ground for failed Oscar bids, but starting in the late 00s, studios started putting better-than-average summer releases out in March, and now there's plenty of good stuff to see during that month. It seems like the book business could do this too.

Maybe not; maybe they've tried that and it doesn't work. But for the remoras of the publishing industry, like me, a huge dump of buzzy books on one day and then nothing for two months is super unhelpful and frustrating. It means we fight to cover the most popular books in a timely way and then, for weeks, have nothing to do (or get paid for).

All this would be a lot easier if book coverage weren't obsessed with reviewing books at the moment they come out. But it is. I wish that would loosen, because reading a book is a different project than watching a film, and keeping up is so, so, so much harder. But boundaries between the theater market and the home video market have blurred in a way not really repeatable in the book world, so it might be hopeless.

My friend Jen Pastiloff's book also releases today. I haven't said much about it on social media & etc. because Jen does not need help from me; she has a street team, and celebrities like Pink and Patton Oswalt have been hyping her book. But she's a magical person, and her book is as loving and true as she is. It's, well, a great summer read.

There'll be another Tuesday next week, another batch of books coming out from various presses and places. But I suspect most people will still be reading this week's stuff. How good can a book be if it's already forgotten by the time the next week's book comes out?

my to-read/review pile, mostly fall releases 

Interacting with the Material World

You might have seen it on social media, but KERNPUNKT revealed the cover art for my book. It looks like this:

Art by Mariana Magaña

It's so much prettier even than I imagined. I love it.

Managing the book release in early stages has reminded me a lot of wedding planning. A great deal can be done a long time in advance, but a lot of what must happen has to wait for the right moment to be planned. Calendaring and lists are essential. I was born to do that kind of work.

There's a bunch of other stuff going on, too. A long story I wrote, "After Gardens," known on this blog as "the hot springs story," is going up for sale at the Wild Rose Press as a standalone ebook in mid-June. This press has been supportive and helpful all throughout the process of turning "After Gardens" into a commercial ebook, and I'm very happy it found a home there. However, the way this ebook requires promotion is completely different than the way Ceremonials does. Different audience, different kind of press, different goals, different approach. It's like switching alphabets. For this reason, I've been dragging my feet on promoting "After Gardens," but I need to get going on it.

Less striking, but just right for the content 

It's being sold as women's fiction, which is about right. (For the record, it's hard to find markets for short stories that qualify as women's fiction. Both readers & publishers prefer that genre in book length.) I hope it does well for the press, of course, but I feel weirdly indifferent to this project. Submitting to TWRP was my last shot with this story before I trunked it permanently, so I'd nearly severed my investment in it when it was accepted. Of course I'm very happy they accepted it and are selling it, and I'll do my best to promote it, but it feels like someone else's work, and that makes it more of a chore and less of a pleasure to promote.

A few weeks ago I put together a schedule for writing the remaining hybrid film essays I have to write for the collection I'm assembling. I gave myself ample time to write them in order to be finished by the end of 2019. At the time, April still had some days left in it, so I set a goal to finish something else nagging at me that isn't part of this project, a partially written essay about abandoned places, before May began. I succeeded (and the process of writing it was fraught, so hooray, go me, I did something hard), sort of. I thought I had a three-strand braided essay, but what I actually had was one lyric two-strand essay and a separate, much more straightforward single essay. When I was finished with both, I knew the lyric one was missing something, but I submitted it to an urgent opportunity before figuring out the missing bit. (This is a rookie mistake and I'm ashamed of making it. Oh, well; I'll fix it and send it out elsewhere, when it's actually ready.) Mostly I'm pleased that I met the goal of finishing those two pieces, which have been dormant for over a year, waiting for me to put butt in chair and finish them.

There are three main threads in my creative work right now: a) books, b) hybrid film essays, and c) everything else. What I wrote at the end of April falls under c), but now that it's done, I have to return to b). The one I scheduled myself to write in May is a little obnoxious, as it relates to Jeanne Dielman, a static three-hour film mostly about a woman doing domestic chores, but I knew I needed to get it out of the way before I went wild writing about Mildred Pierce.

Earlier this spring, I bought a handmade creativity candle. I wanted, on the first day of May, to burn it and do a tarot reading to restart/redirect my creativity. I've written easily 100,000 words of book reviews in the past 18 months. That's great, but considering that volume of work, I think I need a genuine ritual to direct energy into the collection I want to finish, which requires more intuition and less brain than reviews.

I didn't succeed in that goal. May has come in strange. I feel like I need more time to think, and then I get bored and anxious inside my own head. I'm sleeping thickly, with upsetting, disruptive dreams. My emotions are labile, slippery. [private circumstance], in a way I haven't been since my early 20s, and I have no idea what that's about. Literally all of this could be stress, the unbearable stress of freelancing, built up over time, refusing to come to an actual head but bubbling ceaselessly under a thin and all-too-permeable layer of self-control.

I'm writing this here instead of somewhere private because it's all of a piece, the emotions and the creativity and the stress and the book(s) coming out and what I'm accomplishing and failing to accomplish. For me there's no separation between succeeding at writing that lyric essay - which I think is one of the more meaningful things I've written, if not really one of the best - and failing to do the laundry today. At the end of a given day, the measure of it is how much I have interacted with the material world instead of shutting it out. That's the only mark of success or failure I have to go on right now.

I worry that this sounds too bleak. I'm sorry. I feel weird right now. There's a big deadline coming up in about two weeks, so I could use that as an excuse, but of course there'll be more coming after that and after that; if it's an excuse, it's a permanent one. Seeing Avengers: Endgame yesterday overclocked my emotional state in a way I can't explain at all, since I don't have a lot invested in the MCU, and I'm still recovering from that, which is embarrassing to admit but absolutely true. Ceremonials being a real thing that's coming, all five of my desired blurbers agreeing to review the MS, people jumping in to offer their influence to help me and the book, is exhilarating, but also a brand-new experience that I don't seem to be integrating easily. I landed a fascinating opportunity this summer, but it'll drain my financial resources instead of adding to them, which is a very unkind cut at the moment. Etc. All the great stuff is as overwhelming and stressful as the less-great stuff, and often they seem to be entwined.

At least I cleaned the apartment over the weekend. Looking at the clutter was getting to me, and now it's a lot better.

An Honest Post

There's a lot going on in my writing world - perhaps too much for me to organize my thoughts into one place. I feel like I haven't written an honest post here in a really long time. As the number of people who pay attention to my work grows, I find I'm holding my tongue more and more. I didn't think I'd ever want to do that, but that's where I am. Here's some honesty, though not about everything I have to say.

Four Directions, No Rest

You guys, I am tired. I am really, really tired. Here is the career thing I'm wrestling with on this restless, overcast Monday: I am working in four different directions, and they require totally different kinds of engagement.

Direction 1. Growing my reach, meeting prestige goals. I think this is...professionalization? Trying to get my work into bigger, better-paying, more prestigious publications. Reaching outward for as many opportunities as possible. This is an exhausting direction, made up of hundreds of small moves: emails, check-in emails, calendaring follow-ups, research, networking, sending the same pitch to four or five places and then following up on them all, etc.

Direction 2. Pay. Placing my work in publications that pay money. There's a lot of overlap here with Direction 1. But it's additionally tiring to consider whether to keep pitching Publication X, even though I've never heard back from them and our artistic interests only align in a few places, simply because they pay so well.

Direction 3. Artistic and community fulfillment. Do I get to write what I want to write? Do I get to support a small press or a first-time author? This goal almost always contradicts Directions 1 and 2, though the degree of contrast varies.

Direction 4. Maintain links and relationships with pubs and people I've been working with happily. Keep saying yes to editors and publications with whom I work well, keep sending reviews to publications that will treat them right. It's more difficult than I ever imagined to do Direction 4 and Direction 1 at the same time.

Keeping track of all four of these and how they interact is so hard that, today, I'm thinking about temporarily ditching Directions 1 and 2, just like, never mind, fuck it, I'll keep writing $25 and $50 reviews for the sites that pay me and post my stuff promptly (even though they savage the hell out of my style) (in opposite ways), I'll keep writing for the two magazines that don't change a word I write even though the pieces rarely or never appear online, I'll stop pitching [redacted], fuck it fuck it fuck it it's too much. (And then, no fooling, [redacted] wrote me back this morning asking for more pitches.)

There's also the problem of all of this applying to book criticism AND to my other work, which, by the way, I still can't figure out how to get back to. I've had a bunch of rejections for my hybrid essays in the recent past, which means it's time to send out the work to the next round of pubs. I'm out of immediate ideas for pubs to submit to, so it's time for research. But research is the last thing I want to do right now. It's obnoxious to find pubs that want hybrid essays, particularly when they're as long as mine, and you guys, I am tired.

(Plus there's this weird little Jaws thing that I thought someone would snap up fairly easily but no luck yet and I have no idea who to submit it to next because no one seems to be getting what I'm doing there and I think it's hilarious and why does no one else think so?)

Pictured: me and my workload 

(And man, I'm really discouraged about a non-hybrid film essay I wrote, which has been given the curse of "I'm sure you'll have no trouble placing this elsewhere" - NEVER TRUE, y'all. If you're an editor, never, ever say that in a rejection, because the reason it's not right for you is the same reason it won't be right for anyone else. You all love it and say so, which is nice, but not one of you will publish it. This is the third or fourth time this exact thing has happened to my work. BOLLOCKS on "I'm sure you'll have no trouble placing this elsewhere.")

Point is, I am having this moment where I want to stop striving and just tread water for a bit. Here's a concrete example: I wrote an assigned review, but the finished product didn't work for the publication. The pub gave me leave to send the finished product elsewhere, no hard feelings. So I did that, but got a no on the first round, and I'm feeling like, oh, what's the point, do I really want to keep trying to place this review when the work I like best (writing) is now done and the work I like least (placement) is still before me? I know the review is quality, but I want to just trunk it because of the time and effort involved in placing it.

For just a few weeks, I want to stop pitching. I want to stop answering publicists' emails. I want to stop querying. I want to feel like I'm really absorbing the books I'm reading and reviewing, instead of reading them only just deeply enough. But Directions 1 and 2 are the work that keeps the pump primed; without it, I would dehydrate. Without it, momentum vanishes. I have April and May books that need placement, and it's not too early to start on June and July books. If I wait to pitch those, I won't place them, or at least I won't place them well.

AND YET I AM TIRED.

The usual disclaimer applies: I am not a coal miner. Writing is not, realistically, that hard. But working and/or thinking about work seven days a week is hard for a non-workaholic personality, no matter what kind of work it is.

Hobby Without a Horse

Even though the oppressiveness of a San Fernando Valley summer is nigh, I'm really happy it's June. May was terrific, full of good fortune and joy, but for whatever reason it felt LOOOONNNNGGG. June is exciting for at least two of the bylines that'll appear. One in particular.

Matt asked me the other day how often a piece gets published that I'm genuinely proud of. I told him it was something like one in 20, which feels like a really low estimate, but one in 10 isn't right either. I put a list of them on my website under "Favorites," but the reasons I am proud vary. Some have to do with me being able to write about something I am particularly passionate about, or something that I feel like I have knowledge of that few others do. The piece I wrote about Encircling, for instance; I don't know that a lot of people, no matter what kind of reader they are, have read all the multivolume books I've read, or would draw the same conclusions about them that I do. That makes the piece fairly uniquely mine. (It also makes its appeal pretty limited - how many people care about an obscure Norwegian literary trilogy? - but I can live with that.) The June byline I'm excited about regards one of my favorite hobby-horses, and it makes me burst with pride that other people are going to read about me riding it. Even if only a few others care.

hobby meets horse

Ideas are flowing but I'm feeling less excited about them, because it's starting to seem like I won't have time or interest enough to execute them all. During my freakout a while back I asked Lucas if he thought I should take a few days away somewhere (same place I went last April, I thought maybe) just to write, to wring all the ideas out of my head and then see which ones were viable. He said he didn't think so, in part because I have all day now alone in my apartment to write, and clearly the ideas aren't motivating me enough to put them down.

Here's the thing, though. The piece I'm so happy about coming out in mid-June - I sent twelve pitches on that piece, and no one wanted it. But I knew it was a good idea, so I wrote it. The accepting editor called the finished piece "epic." Certainly I think I'm at my best in full form instead of when pitching, but also, for some pieces, the execution is simply better than the idea. A handful of my pitches have gotten nibbles but nos, and I am just as sure as I am for this June piece that they're good ideas. I think I ought to just write them and see what happens. But getting a pile of rejections on the pitch is discouraging enough to kill a piece's appeal in my mind.

My review deadlines are pretty far out at this time, though. Maybe I should spend next week just writing, putting short essays down, one after another.

There's one essay that I really have to write, because it does have a deadline, but I don't remember if it's July or it was April, and maybe the kind person who set the deadline wasn't interested enough in my work to tell me when the deadline passed, and I'm too scared to look at the email to find out for sure. I wanted to finish it by the end of May but that didn't happen. (Hire me! I'm not paralyzed by deadlines at all!)

Otherwise, as hinted above, I'm slowing my pace a little bit on reviewing. The pile of books is getting further out, datewise, and shorter. I'm sneaking in books for my own pleasure instead of reading only for review. Last night I started reading Samuel Beckett's Molloy, and even though that sounds hard, I found it kind of soothing, the rhythm of it and the simplicity of the words. Between January 1 and May 31 I read 57 books. Counting them up helped me realize that it's okay to feel a little fried.

Pitches are landing fairly well, but I am 0/7 on residencies/fellowships/contests this year. And those are just the ones that've been announced. I alternate years for when I feel optimistic and when I feel fed up on residencies/fellowships/contests, so in 2019 I won't apply for flippin' anything because to hell with you and your application fees. And then in 2020 I'll be like "but maybe..." and Hedgebrook will get my money yet again.

Out in the world: 

I reviewed MEM, by Bethany C. Morrow, for Locus. I think this book is going to be part of school curricula in the future, so get in on it now. It's great. 

May's Books I Hate (and Also Some I Like) interview was with Sassafras Lowrey, a fascinating writer. 

An interview with me about my short story "C-a-l-l-a-s" went up at Luna Station Quarterly. 

Shortness of Breath

I enjoy smoking cigarettes. That's it. That's all there is to it. I love smoking, and I will never not want to smoke.

My Male Novelist author photo

Various factors contributed to me picking it up as a genuine habit again at the end of 2015 and in January of 2016. Usually I am a social smoker, in that I'll join in when others are smoking but am perfectly fine not doing it by myself. But I found myself smoking in the car at the start and the finish of every day, and not being able to stop myself. While running, my wind was beginning to decline. I noticed I was much more irritable than usual.

So, two weeks ago, I stopped again. It was really only two months, tops, that it was a habit this time - not a matter of years, as in the past - but I am not having an easy time with it. I miss cigarettes desperately. With my body, yes, thanks to the nicotine that dug its claws into my back again, but with my spirit much more so. The sensation of the smoke going in and coming out. The having something to do with my hands. The actual nostalgia that smoking brings me, of old times, of smoking partners long gone.

Girl, cry me a river. Smoking is a pox on our society and you're better off without it. 

Eh. I suppose. The very real health effects matter a lot less to me when I'm actually engaging in the activity. And missing it is making me maudlin. I'm sorry if that seems silly, but you try giving up a habit that brought you comfort through all your teenage and early-20s years.

What are you actually talking about here?

[Hands up] You got me. I'm talking about something other than smoking. I'm talking about Facebook, too. I know I've talked a bunch about Facebook, and about giving it up, and I can only imagine how I sound when I'm doing so and then you see me on there again two weeks later. But really this time, really now, Facebook is exhausting me.

My tolerance for political discussion and engagement is the lowest limbo bar you can imagine. Because the pace of the election talk and share and yell at each other has not let up even a little bit, I'm now at the point where I have to choose between Facebook and one of the classes I'm taking this semester, lest Matt come home one day and find me doing whatever the protagonist was doing at the end of "The Yellow Wallpaper." The class is skidding so deeply into political territory that I'm starting to get quiet and depressed instead of happy and engaged. I can't quit the class, so I think I'm going to quit the site. For a while.

Are you equating Facebook and smoking?

Yes. And I've done the same thing with the former that I've done with the latter: sorta quit and then cheat a lot, or quit for a while and come crawling back. I always end up with shortness of breath. I always end up distracted and wasteful and isolated.

I finally quit smoking when I was 25. It stopped being a just-me habit that year. I would maybe smoke on my birthday, or bum one from a friend outside a bar while keeping him company. But not until December 2015 was it again a thing I did without company, without occasion. It was like I'd never stopped, except that I was lonelier than before, older than before, had more to lose than before.

Maybe it's not a perfect metaphor. Anyway, I'm trying to work out the Facebook thing, because the cons column of staying and fighting on is groaning under its own weight, while the pros column has a mere few, exceptionally strong, entries. a) My stats on this blog dropped by half when I didn't post links on Facebook. b) It's the only way to keep up with certain friends. c) It allows me to offer support to friends who would never ask for it over email, or to keep up on rapidly changing circumstances. d) And sometimes I find things worth reading or seeing, worth saving.

But that's it. And my spirit is struggling to maintain buoyancy in the avalanche of Everything Else.

Geez, it's only Facebook. Chill out. Maybe smoke a cigarette or something.

Hmm. I suppose I could.

Excavation

I'm writing this (on Sunday) after three or four hours of working on this story I've been trying to write all fall.

It's excruciating.

The thing I'm doing is excavating, layer by layer, some things that shaped me from middle and elementary school. I'm smashing them all together for the sake of the story, rather than setting them years apart as they happened, but even fictionalizing them is emotionally exhausting.

As I was writing I remembered the construction of the tables at which I sat in the cafeteria of my middle school - how some of the tables didn't unfold right, and that meant the stool-seats wouldn't touch the ground, so we bounced up and down on them and the whole table shook on its casters. I remembered that the caf shared space with the school's stage - the place where I, as a member of the band, performed on concert nights. It was weird to eat with the stage right there, I think now. It was up, like a normal stage, elevated four or five feet from the cafeteria floor. And most of the time the curtains were open and the stage was empty, a black curtain hung over its cinderblock back wall. I don't remember a theater program of any kind existing at that school, so I don't think the stage was used that often.

It was the same room where we had dances. The same room where I got up the courage to gently poke fun at [name changed] before I asked him out. (That, my friends, was a good love, the one I had with [name changed].) The same room where I grew to goddamn hate early-90s soft R&B hits like "I Will Always Love You" and "End of the Road". Because they were so long and it was always so awkward to "dance" to them, such as dancing was in seventh grade.

cringe

Remembering the caf this well is a big deal, because I have forgotten almost all of the day-to-day texture of my childhood. I remember the general shape of things, I remember critical incidents, and I remember people, but, for instance, I don't know at all what the inside of the apartment I lived in from 1992 to 1995 looked like. I'm pretty sure that [name changed 2]'s backyard butted against the hiking trails with trees spray-painted bright fluorescent colors for the old folks' home nearby, but it's possible those hiking trails were next to a neighborhood I lived in during high school.

And there's so much I can't resolve. My friend Delilah lived in a trailer, but she lived on the street I walked across to get to the bus stop, which makes no sense, because it was houses on that road. What kind of bike did I have in those years? I know I had one, but I don't remember it. Was it the gray ten-speed? Could I have been tall enough for that bike when I was 12? I know I was best friends with Jaison, but how was I also best friends with [name changed 3] before she dumped my ass for the popular girls? Jaison and [3] didn't have a thing to do with each other, socially.

It's baffling, memory work, for someone with a terrible memory.

It Was in the Bleak December

The word I learned (evidently not well) in Dr. Haake's class that I tried and failed to remember in order to use it for this blog post was "crots". I knew it would be a good pun to title the post "Blood Crots" but I could not remember the word in order to form the pun. Neither could a classmate. Now I will never forget it.

It means teeny little fragments of prose, like the ones in that post. Or this post, the one that follows this crot.

--

From the story I was working on this week: "She sobs as if sobbing is screaming."

--

I stopped spending approximately half of my free time on Facebook shortly after Thanksgiving. This time was equal parts socializing, reading interesting articles friends had linked, and pointless noodling. Now I look at Facebook ~once a day, not scrolling much, not clicking on much. I miss the socializing, badly, but here are the reasons I quit:

• Politicians' faces, when even the people posting don't like the politician promoted
• Vitriol 
• Sarcasm 
• Constant observation of war 
• Constant observation of violent death 
• Advertisement-laden new-agey bullshit standing in for sincere assistance
• Opinionatedness when, honestly, it does not matter, because you will not change anyone's mind, and you're going to change your own mind anyway when a new research study comes out next year 

And every time I check in, on those once-a-day-or-so occasions, I see all these things before I've even spent five minutes. I feel more uneasy about Facebook and what I hope to get out of it than I ever have. Surely I can't just take off from it until the election is over? Or until ISIS is wiped out? Or until school shootings stop? Because those are all hamster wheels that do not stop turning when their inducements end. There is always more to chase.

I want to promote my writing and my thoughts on social media, but my observation of the pattern of the Internet is that all of its spaces eventually become weird and feculent flea markets rather than orderly, janitored malls. Facebook is full of what I perceive to be junk, and cutting through it is so taxing.

This is a more judgmental statement than I generally like to make on this blog. But Facebook is making me tired, when once it used to make me happy. I don't know what has changed, and I wonder if it's me, if I'm just...like...getting too old for this shit.

Oh, and the result? I feel calmer, more open, less stuffed. (Stuffed like a taxidermied animal, like an overfull diner, like the British slang.) I don't want to stop quitting Facebook. I miss it, but I miss this calm, satisfied, reflective self more. And I think I need her more than I need Facebook.

--

It's been three weeks now since I made a Yes video. For that I am sorry. What's holding me up has been: noticeable background noise outside my apartment (hammering, leafblowers), lighting problems, a lack of interest in putting on makeup on my days off, and too little mental space to think positively enough to speak positively into my webcam. All but one of these are insignificant problems, but they've held me up anyway, probably because of the last one on the list.

I know exactly what I'm going to say in my next video, but I didn't make it this week, either. Soon.

--

Latest art project: redecorating my right hand.

I mentioned the wing ring previously, but the other one is this odd hunk of iolite which appears to be a different color and clarity of purple every time I look at it. It's a fascinating gem. The story of me acquiring it might actually be a good one, but it's not crot-length.

--

I looked over my New Year's resolutions from last year. Virtually none of them were successes. This is not a mark of me sucking, but a mark of how different this year has been from the norm. After the summer I lowered my expectations significantly and turned my attention inward, which has been valuable but not as outwardly productive as meeting my resolutions would have been. I suspect 2016's resolutions will reflect the lowered bar, but I haven't really thought much about them yet.

--

As a follow-up to the last post, I BEEN READIN. READING IS SUPER AWESOME. SO IS THE LIBRARY. GO CHECK OUT A BOOK AND READ IT RIGHT NOW.

Things I Plan to Do Starting Today

My semester is effectively over as of last night. So, a list.

1. Clean. Up. The. Apartment.
2. Subsequently, invite at least two pairs of friends over.
3. Make the greatest white chili ever.
4. Empty the bathroom closet of expired medicines and tubes of hardened unguents and bath salts never to be used.
5. Doze off on the couch while Matt plays video games.
6. Make Yes videos.
7. Start working on my New Year's resolutions.
8. Write letters by hand.
9. Revise some work I did this semester. Write out a theory of contemporary American fiction I thought of.
10. Read the following books:
           a. Big Magic - Elizabeth Gilbert
           b. Hopscotch - Julio Cortazar
           c. The Argonauts - Maggie Nelson
           d. The latest Tana French
           e. The Marlon James book that won the Booker
           f. At least one David Shields, maybe two
           g. An Elena Ferrante
           h. A book of poetry. Grace Paley?
           i. Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov (but I might put it off for yet another season)
           j. Cities of the Plain - Marcel Proust

Oh, it's going to be a terrific couple of months. Until I find out whether there will be school in February. I don't promise that I will do all ten things and read all ten books. But I honestly feel like now that this class is over, I'll have time to do anything, up to and including climbing Kilimanjaro.

Your Friday Yes: It's Just a Ride

I got pretty frustrated recording Your Friday Yes this week. I did a take I really liked, but it was 7.5 minutes long, was unkind about Jem and too revealing about work, and had weird color problems. I did another take that was ruined because a plant-killing squirrel kept dancing around on my balcony, taunting me, and I was so angry at the thing that I couldn't be appropriately lighthearted in the video. I did more takes that I screwed up for other reasons. I ended up with this one, which I like less than the 7.5-minute one, but which will do, and anyway by the time I was finished with it I was out of time to do any more.

Say yes to imperfect yes videos.

Another story to be workshopped is due in six days. I have about 200 words of it. My mental image of myself is of a Hanna Barbera cartoon character in deep trouble.

This is not to say that I've done no writing in the recent past. I wrote an essay last week that was serious business, something I'm quite proud of, but it's too short and probably way too personal to be workshopped. The story I have in mind shouldn't be a serious trial to write, but, natch, finding the time is going to be a challenge.

But hey, it's just a ride.

Let's Call It a Vacation for Now

In two weeks, a flash fiction piece of mine is slated to be published. If it goes forward as planned (you never know), on that day I'll post a meditation on what I wrote. In the meantime, and potentially for a while after that post, there will be nothing. 

I don't want to get personal - that is not the point of this space - but this blog is one of a handful of things that aren't working for me right now. Things that are subtracting instead of adding. 

I hope to be back later in the year with enthusiastic and worthwhile things to say about writing. I read this a few days ago and it gave me comfort, but not enough to find something to write about here. 

Don't worry! This post looks naked and scary, and I don't mean it to be that way. I'm having trouble, but it's not dire, nor is it interesting, nor is it new. I don't want to bore you or myself. 

So...smell you later. 

Precision v. Grace, Classical v. Jazz (or The Great Oz Has Spoken)

Last week I sort of unintentionally reread some feedback a professor gave me about a year ago.

While this piece feels done, it’s felt done from the beginning, and done in a way that, as impressive as the writing is, feels like there’s a cap on, holding everything together deliberately and tightly. I know this is what most writers aspire to, at least for a while. And then there’s the next stage, which involves letting go of all that tight control to dig deeper, to burrow, to be surprised. I think I already said this, and if not, shame on me. But really, if you can write this well, Katharine, imagine how well you might write if you were really writing. And by that I mean working the language intransitively, not acting upon but acting – not writing about (the self), but writing (the self). You clearly have all the craft skills you need to stop thinking so clearly in meaning. 

This feedback confused me. Even after I achieved some distance and met with the professor, the way forward did not come clearer. (I still didn't understand it particularly well in rereading last week.) But I set it up in the back of my mind, kind of like a canvas backdrop, while I went on and wrote to the best of my ability.

I blogged last fall about how much despair ensued when another professor unknowingly echoed what the first one had said. The backdrop rippled a little, starting to appear more realistic and less like scenery, but I still didn't know what to do with it.

This blog post does not tidily conclude with me figuring it out.

Getting Underwater

This is the truth: I'm not really enjoying the single class I'm taking this semester.

I've tried on several different explanations for size and have settled on two unrelated reasons. 1) The material is not engaging me really at all, in ways that are not the professor's or anyone else's fault. I liked studying Ulysses closely - the sensation was a series of reliefs (relieves?), an experience I might unpack in a later post - but it didn't really light up my brain. Our most recent read, To the Lighthouse, I found impenetrable (probably my own duncery there) and thus I did not enjoy studying it. It was like I'd come to class having read a completely different book than the one the professor discussed. Although I loved the first book we read, The Good Soldier, we really used it as an example for wider literary issues rather than reading deeply into the book itself, which disappointed me.

Merrily we roll along into The Waste Land, which I've read, and I liked the actual poem but found myself bored by what seems to be the point, which is all the allusions and notes and etc. And the latter is, I'm sure, what we're going to focus on in class.

I think we can all agree this is beautiful, but pretty weird

2), just as crucially, I'm itchy to write and I want to be doing that instead. Between work and recovering from work and school and recovering from school and doing so many social things lately and keeping us in groceries and clean laundry, though, I'm having a hard time finding space for it. It's making me disgruntled and that's bleeding over into my experience of school.

I need to do better at elephant-eating. A hundred words a day, or something. But when I think about working that way, I think about my mom, and virtual reality.

When my mom is working, there's this effect of a satellite delay between when you speak to her and when she responds. "Hey, Mom?" [one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, four Mississippi, five Mississippi, six Mississippi] "Yes, honey?" She doesn't even necessarily look at you or stop typing when she responds; it just takes her that amount of time to come out of the fifteenth century and back into the present moment to recognize that someone has spoken and she's bound to reply. She's explained to me - although it didn't really need to be explained, because I've watched it happen - that she has to go through a definite process of disengaging to answer whatever it is that you need from her, and then it takes time to re-engage with the work before she's back where she was. Even an interruption like "Where's the extra soap?" or "Want another cup of coffee?" will lose many precious minutes for her.

She says it's like being underwater, like scuba-diving: all above the surface is dull and far away, and she'll get the bends if she comes up too fast. My own metaphor for this phenomenon is like The Matrix, or some cybermovie from the 1990s where people have to plug into the New-Fangled Information Superhighway with a complex set of gear - something over your eyes, fingers into stable gloves that don't move, ears and nose plugged, something down your throat, etc. Body horror machinery that you need an assistant to get into and out of. Not just a little plug in the back of your neck, and not quite as immersive as that gross red goo with a jillion wires where you live until Morpheus wakes you up: something in between. Disengagement takes time, and re-engagement takes time. It's a process, an effort, an upsetting bother.

Pictured: my mom's metaphor mixed with mine. A.k.a. the cyber-dolphin from Johnny Mnemonic.

When I'm really, totally inside my fiction writing, my immersion is as intense as my mother's. But it takes much more time than a satellite delay to get me inside that zone - over half an hour, easy. The process of plugging in is often so laborious that I buck at the idea of doing it just to write a few hundred words before I have to stop and meet an outside responsibility. Especially for the secret project, which is such a different kind of writing than what I've done before that I need 110% of my concentration to even do it.

I must learn how to overcome this, though, and write a little at a time. I must. That's how my life looks right now, that all I have is dribs and drabs of time, not chunks of it, and I need to be using them.

Sigh.

In book news, I read Middlemarch over the last four weeks. I totally loved it. It was a pleasure. Beneath its old-fashioned exterior is a pen of such strength and wit and insight that it blew my mind.

Middlemarch was also my Big Book for 2015, so that's out of the way. I'm thinking of one of those huge Russian novels for 2016, Anna Karenina or War and Peace or some such book. I've heard all good things about those novels and I even read about a third of Karenina at one time, but I just don't have a lot of interest or motivation regarding them as of yet. Meanwhile, it's shaping up that I'm going to read the other two volumes of Remembrance of Things Past over the next two summers. Three years of Proust! I wish I could have read it all at once, but this is an acceptable compromise.

Wish me luck at getting underwater in April. My self-imposed deadline is starting to look unrealistic. :(

Control Ain't Just a Janet Jackson Song

The Girl Scout story got workshopped yesterday. It was a confusing, difficult workshop. There was no consensus; everyone had something different to say about what they wanted it to do and be. Usually when that happens, it means the story needs pitching, not rewriting, but I'm certain that is not the case here. So I don't really know where to go with it, aside from just trusting in what I wrote, which is an extremely arrogant thing to do. I think I'll submit it a few places and then look at it again in six months or thereabouts.

The most worrisome comment was from the professor, who told me that I needed to "let go of intent" to give my work "a more organic feel". This is more or less the same thing that my workshop professor from last semester told me. She gave me feedback that has haunted me insanely since I got it: that my control over the writing was too tight, that the story was constructed too meticulously and that I needed to let go and write with more freedom. I have no idea what this means or how to improve it (particularly with the story I workshopped that led to this feedback, which required strong control, dammit), but hearing an echo of it in another professor, who has no idea what the prior one said, makes me want to wail and rend my garments.

Organic?...

(She also said the Girl Scout story was "nearly flawless" in its surface aspects. Which is a nice adjective, one I'm happy to take away with me.)

Aside from that, something else happened since last we spoke. Over the weekend, I had a fit that is seemingly becoming a part of my ritual for beginning a big project. I drew you a highly professional diagram for this process.

So this weekend I kicked and screamed and yelled and whined about the wikibook, because no fooling, you guys, I am genuinely scared out of my skull about writing this thing. But I can't keep pretending that I can put it off until next year, or next century. I have to begin. So I had the tantrum, and now I can buckle down.

I have no idea how this project is going to go. Not a clue. Generally it takes me something like a quarter of a year to write a novel (which, please, writers who are reading: don't use that as an example for your own work or a way to shame me about the shoddiness of my effort), but the nature of this book means I could be working on it for much longer. Years, maybe. I hope I won't be, but I'm not eliminating it as a possibility.

Matt advised me to set a deadline for review on it. That is, he said I should work for a certain number of months and then make a mandatory stop to reevaluate the project, see if I should keep going or stop or set other deadlines or what. I thought this was fucking amazing advice, and I plan to implement it.

I don't know how to organize my work on it around my other responsibilities, which have changed dramatically since the last time I worked on a novel. But I hope to get going before the end of October. Now that I've punched pillows and moaned sufficiently, work can really start.

It's work that needs tight control, so I guess my professor's feedback is well-timed. Either that or I'm not ready to write this book at all and it's going to be a big disaster. I guess, in the coming months, we'll see.

It's the Law, Except When It's Not

Is this a From Me to You post? I don't really know.

I asked for some feedback on what to blog about on Facebook last Friday. Responses ranged from helpful to scatological:

The only thing (aside from poop) that came up more than once is time, so let's go with that for now.

I've heard of writers who get up at 4 AM to write for an hour every day before they fix their kids' breakfasts, functioning on six hours of sleep for years on end. I've heard of writers who compose novels with their thumbs, on BlackBerries, while they sit at security-guard jobs. I've heard of writers who do a couple hundred words at a time on their lunch breaks.

I do not write this way. I admire the dedication of those writers, but OMG no.

This past spring I went to a reading by Aimee Bender, whose novel The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake I adored. Someone asked her during the Q&A how she found time for writing, and she gave an answer that, while not personally helpful to me, I pass on whenever I'm asked a question about finding time to write. She said that for most of her writing life, she got up every morning and wrote for an hour. This was not a new suggestion to me, but the way she phrased it was novel: she told herself this is the law. You have to write for an hour, no matter what; it's the law. Something about that phrasing worked extremely well for her, and I can see how it would be helpful for other writers.

So yeah, just put Judge Dredd over your desk and you'll write up a storm

Pretty much the only rule of writing that I've heard repeated everywhere, that does not change from site to site and teacher to teacher, is that you have to write every day. And I don't do it. I don't like to advertise this, because it makes me feel like I'm doing something wrong, but I just can't write every day. It would become rote and unfun and impossible if I had to do it every day, and how could I build a fulfilling life out of that?

But I suspect few people are as stymied by routine as I am, so "write every day" is probably a good rule for the majority of writers. It means you get in the habit of constant writing, whether you feel like it or not, whether what comes out is good or not. It means you do a lot of work, and that's how you get better. Besides, in truth, I don't recommend my method to anybody. I'm a binge personality (I don't recommend that, either), and bingeing is how I write: for hours and hours on end, for hours every day for perhaps weeks at a time, setting aside food and sleep and husband until the project is done and I go back to my life. My whole focus is on the project and I'm sleepwalking through everything else, and when I try to imagine focusing on the project for a little bit of time every day for months or years of days in a row, it sounds like hell.

Literally the only other writer I've ever heard of who works/worked like this is Faulkner, who, I understand, wrote his books in a matter of months each and then went on alcoholic benders until it was time to write again. It's nice to be in that company (if not that lifestyle), but again, I don't recommend it.

(awkward pulling at collar)

The best way I've ever heard of to write every day when you don't have time to write every day is what my friend Katie does. She has no time to write, and she has a quota of 200 words per day. (Keeping your goal low is crucial for this writing-every-day thing, because 200 words a day, piddling as it sounds, is still 70,000+ words per year.) If she can't meet the quota one day, it's not something for which she berates herself, which is crucial. Even better, she's not allowed to write more than 200 words per day to get ahead on future days, but she is allowed to write more per day to make up for past days. This is such a kind and forgiving, yet steely, method of making writing happen, and I admire it so much. It means that she can feel better about making up for her whole week on a Friday night when she's on fire, but she can't get cocky and give herself days off the next week.

(By the way, check out Katie's new website and, thereby, her essays and fiction. She's the best.)

The heart of this question, for me, is not how to make time for writing in your day, but how to make time for writing in your life. For most people, carving out a bit of time every day is how to do it, but for me, it means non-actual-writing stuff on a regular basis and actual writing only every so often. That is, constant people-watching and eavesdropping is how I build the foundation for a story or a book (sorry, world, but I'm always observing you), and then a big release every so often is how the story or book happens.

Over the past two years, I've pretty much stopped agonizing about dry spells. I'm not sure if I accept or reject the idea of writer's block, but I sometimes fail to write for six or eight months at a clip. I used to fret and complain about this a lot, but now I just shut up and wait. I accept that dry spells are an unavoidable aspect of a binge personality, and that the machine will start up again. (There's proof on this very blog that it will.)

And I will not run out of ideas. I have three book-sized ideas sitting in my notebook, waiting for me to be ready to write them. One of them has a few more years at least (it's about God, so...I could be forty or older before that one comes together), one of them I've tried twice and it's just not ripe yet, I guess, and the third is gonna go, most likely, in the next few months. Plus there's the sequel to Highbinder, which I'm readyish to write, but I don't think it's a good idea to start yet, and a western that I'm not in the least ready to write. That's plenty of work for a while, along with short story ideas that'll crop up along the way and old work that I could retool now that I know more.

So that's how I make time for writing. I spread out my arms and settle into a cross-legged position and wait. It's the attitude of making room in my head for it. When I'm ready, the writing happens, kind of like bowel movements happen - whether you have time for them now or not. I go through the motions of resisting or procrastinating, but every cell in me knows, when it's time, what I have to do: butt in chair, fingers wrapped around pen, concentration on page, until the work is done. When it's time to binge on writing, it's time, and everything else in my life has to move aside for it.

If you don't feel the same get-to-the-bathroom-now urgency that I do when it's time for you to write, then you should probably try to write 200 words every day. If you can't manage that, try first making room in your head for writing to happen, and eventually, hopefully, you'll find room in your life for some small quota per day. I wish I had more reliable and less mysterious methods I could share for how I do it, but I hope I've shared some helpful methods of others, instead.

Also, I managed to write about poop. So there.

Bore-Us Lessing and Other Lore from Last Week

After this weekend, I need to write a postscript to this post about reading. I need to make a correction: sometimes I do read in order to conquer. Because I'm 400 pages into The Golden Notebook and I'm determined to finish it - not because I'm enjoying it, but because it will not defeat me.

It's boring. It's astoundingly boring. It is this boring:

It combines endless self-dissection of a dull and pretty pathetic woman with political philosophy that has all the maturity of Objectivism with bold pronouncements about how women in general feel about orgasms and menstruation that bear little resemblance to how I (a woman, last time I checked) feel about orgasms and menstruation with UNFATHOMABLE BORINGNESS.

The edition I'm reading is 666 pages long (not a typo). For the first 150 pages I kept going because I was waiting for it to get somewhere, and for another 100 pages I kept going because I couldn't believe it really wasn't going anywhere, and then for another 50 I kept going because I marveled at how the book was almost halfway done and it was still as boring as counting rocks, and for the last 50 pages I've been fueled by vengeance. I insist upon finishing it now. It shall not triumph.

On Sunday I picked up This is the Story of a Happy Marriage, which is a book of shortish essays, just to read a few as a break. I laughed, and nearly cried, hysterical with relief at Patchett's fluid, pleasant prose, her wit, her utter lack of clunkiness and her ears not made of tin.

How did The Golden Notebook ever win such a respectable place in 20th century literature? The more pages I stack up behind my bookmark, the more I find that Lessing really doesn't write well. The structure of the book is postmodern and interesting, but the content sucks. Her word repetition is not a style (like Saunders or Wallace) but just poor editing; her prose is flat and lifeless; her head-hopping and interminable psychological speculation betray an inability to convey character information in subtler ways, not an Auster-like multilevel approach to human behavior.

Well. Now that I've complained at length about an experience I could theoretically stop having at any time, here's what else is up.

Last week felt like a big writing week. I wrote about 5,000 words, which is not actually much when I hold it up next to productive weeks of times past, but it felt like an awful lot. On Thursday morning I set out to do this week's writing exercise for my workshop class, because I had volunteered to share the exercise with the whole class on Monday and I wanted a decent amount of time to get it out. I wrote 1,000 words, but in writing I abandoned caution about how close to my own life I hewed, and I realized in revising that I could not possibly read this 1,000 words aloud to 15 people who do not know me.

So I started over. I had a handful of ideas that stuck to the exercise's parameters, and for two hours none of them worked. I wrote and crossed out, wrote and crossed out. I did finally eke out 1,000 words by thieving part of a friend's stressful job situation to write about. (She was fine with it.) It turned out funny and largely okay; I don't think I'll be submitting it anywhere, but it was competent and it did not embarrass me to read it to the class, which is all an exercise really has to do.

The class liked it. They thought it was funny and they said I read it well. Now I have only to wait and fill my stomach with adrenaline for two weeks more.

See, I signed up for the first workshop slot in mid-October - that is, my story will be one of the first two longer pieces we'll be workshopping in class. (I usually volunteer to go first in a workshop class not because I want to, but to cut down on awkward silence. In my experience no one ever wants to go first.) The story is to be 2,000-2,500 words, and I've had an idea kicking around for several months that I thought would be good for around that length. I intended to write it last week so I'd have two weeks to let it ferment before revising and bringing it in to class.

I set to work on it on Friday and managed 500 words before I ran out of gas. After a long break, I worked for several hours on Friday night, and it was hard, harder than writing has been for many months. I finished a draft (too long, of course), in enough time that I can give it two weeks before I revise, so technically the session was a success. But it was a terrible time. My desperation to walk away and do something else, anything else, was at DEFCON 2. Still, I sat and did it. Because that's the only way it gets done.

I think it's okay, this story. I planned it partly as an opportunity to revisit first-person plural, which I used for this brief story and which I just love. It's limiting and generous in such unique ways, and it's so rewarding to find the right situation for it. I got really interested in the characters as I was writing, and I think that means I'm on the right track.

Is there a situation that can't be covered by a gif from Easy A?
Because if there is, I don't want to know about it. 

In non-writing news, I got a new job, which I start today. I've been working at home for almost three years and I'm frightened about going into an office again. I loved being a copy editor, but the work has dried up as dramatically as California has, and a girl's gotta live. Wish me luck.

The Thinnest of Air

I'm out of town today, back east to celebrate some milestones, but I thought that was no reason not to entertain you.

I revised the journalist story a bit on Wednesday and sent it out on Thursday. Scary. But I was at the point where I no longer knew if what I was doing was making it worse or better, so out it went.

I'm reading Moby-Dick. Reading one Big Book about every year seems to work well for me - Infinite Jest in 2012, Ulysses in 2013, now the great white whale in 2014. (Middlemarch in 2015?) I'm about 200 pages in, and I have to say, it's a completely different reading experience than I thought it would be. Mid-19th century American literature feels hopelessly quaint to me in style (sorry), but aside from that, and the feeling that a good half of this could really be trimmed down by a determined editor, it's...delightful. The voice is so merry. The text is crazy quotable. Even the stuff that seems excessive adds to the sense that this is an entertainment rather than a chore. I've tried three times now to read The Woman in White and I never got past the first two chapters because I was bored silly by the sentences. I expected to force my way into Moby-Dick just like that, but no. My thoughts meander back to it, and whether I can get in a couple of chapters, when I have other things I should be doing.

Of course, I'm writing this before my plane flight on Thursday, during which I probably read a good deal more of it, so by now maybe I've given up in frustration after all (or, depending on whether we were delayed, finished the danged thing). I also brought, on my Nook, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (DFW), Tenth of December (Saunders), Veronica (Gaitskill), and Blood Meridian (McCarthy). I'm telling you this less to show off and more so you can laugh at the hubris and ambition I display whilst shoved into a sardine can going 500 miles an hour, smelling the unfortunate emissions of my fellow sardines, burning, burning, burning to get out and take a fresh breath.

I hate to fly.

Anyhow, Moby-Dick. Thumbs, so far, up. If you have the time and space to set aside for the book - because the style is old-fashioned, and I find it somewhat hard to pay attention to if something else is going on - I recommend it. As long as you remember that the racial attitudes suit the time and we didn't know then that we'd run out of whales. Here's a quote.

Yes, there is death in this business of whaling--a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. 

Avoiding the Challenge I Can Do

After school was over last week I gulped four books, one after another, in the space of five days. Like a seal eating herring. As if that was my only responsibility, to read until my head hurt. Golly, did it make me happy. And now the apartment is a total mess and there's no food in the fridge. C'est la vie [du livre].

I learned piles of good stuff this semester. My two classes were so different but equally useful and fascinating. The experimental lit class, for which we read a book per week in the first half of the semester, was technically a workshop class, and among its many virtues, it helped to prepare me directly for one of the major projects on my plate in the next two years. One of the things our professor repeated again and again was that we had to write the thing we didn't know how to write. I know that sounds either contradictory or like one of those semi-platitudes that writers and pop Buddhists tend to spread around (i.e. "To move forward, you must take the first step" - they're pretty easy to invent, actually, you just phrase tautologies so they sound metaphorical and profound).

But this one's actually true. If you write the thing you don't know how to write - the thing you're not sure you can write - you develop your skills as you're writing it, and this means that you grow far faster. If you just do donuts writing the stuff you already know how to write, it's like paying a prostitute. It's a sure thing, and it doesn't satisfy, and it doesn't have any meaning.

I don't know, but I suspect, that this is part of the reason I've been balking like an unbroke horse at writing the next short story I have to write. For a while I was all blocked up with how to build the characters and the climax and whatnot, but now I've got that sorted out thanks to a very helpful friend, and there's no reason not to get started. But I haven't. I have no excuses. Except possibly that it feels like it might be less of a challenge than the last two stories I finished. Like Lisa Simpson, I prefer challenges I can do, but I'm concerned that since it doesn't look like much of a challenge, it's not going to be much of a story, either.

Well, crap

There are more significant writing challenges on my list, but I want to get this particular story out of my head. After that I think I'll finally be ready to do Highbinder revisions. Gack.

In other news, I got tired of fucking around with the bread story and sent it out to a scary, intimidating market. I'm planning to do the same thing with the journalist story (different market, same scary/intimidation level), hopefully this week, after some more revisions and if I can think up a frigging title for it. A market that accepted a story of mine last fall, with a promised pub date of December '13, has gone pretty much AWOL, so I think I'm going to withdraw that story come June 1st and look for a new market for it. Actually, that happened with two of my acceptances last year, but the other piece is short, and isn't really of use in any other way, so I might record it and put it on my SoundCloud.

And I bought a ukulele from eBay. I haven't played an instrument since I was like 14, and that was for school rather than for the joy of it, so I thought this might be fun. If you have ukulele tips, please send them along.

Title II: Electric Boogaloo

Friday again. Nothing again.

Read this instead. My good opinion of Writer's Digest is gradually disintegrating, but this list is excellent; it's 15 things a writer should never do, and the majority of them are lessons I learned the hard way. (Except #5. There's just no percentage in being dishonest or rude to people whose help you might need one day.)

Take heed. And hold a good thought for me having something to say in May.