Week On

I'm gradually learning that I do best at this freelancing thing when I work week-on, week-off. Like, last week I wrote one or two reviews every day, knocking out a massive pile of assigned galleys. But this week I can't bring myself to write anything, and I'm reading, sleeping, and tending to other responsibilities instead. This schedule seems unworkable in a field where deadlines don't happen on a biweekly basis, but my brain gets quite mulish if I push it. And there are professions that run week-on, week-off, so it's not unheard of.

It would be nice if my brain was more cooperative. I'm reminded of when I started teaching yoga, and I figured out that a profession which relies almost entirely upon the consistency and strength of one's body, which is a changeable, inconsistent actor even when one is young, is a taxing, stressful profession. It's a different thing than a profession which requires your body to be present; you can come to work at an office job with a twingey knee and virtually nothing will be different. As a yoga teacher with a twingey knee, everything is different. This goes for athletes, too, and dancers, and people who otherwise employ their bodies for 90-100% of the work of their profession. You live in your primary workplace all the time, and the livelihood that your body represents gives you a strange relationship with the flesh you inhabit.

Now that I'm in a profession that uses my brain as entirely as teaching yoga used my body - a profession where I can't go to work and pretend to be interested for half the day but am really just marking time, where I have to truly think for every minute of the time I'm doing my job - I feel similarly stressed and taxed, and hadn't acknowledged it until, well, right now.

I think that's why a schedule is shaking out, almost involuntarily, where I'm doing that 90-100% thinking work only half the time I'm alive. Otherwise, I might collapse. Perhaps saying that my brain is uncooperative is wrong; its resistance could be keeping me from becoming a pile of unthinking goo.

All that said, this has been a pretty interesting week for me as a writer. Two reviews on which I worked unusually hard went live, along with a few other less labor-intensive pieces. An article I previously wrote as a blog post was featured on Medium, and the soil it turned over had all kinds of horrible creatures living in it. If you're not a member of Medium, I think you may not be able to see the comments left on the piece by members? Or something? Trust me, though - it isn't fun. (For a sample, see the comment on my previous blog post.) The negative feedback characterizes me as everything from "misandrist" to "borderline psychotic." One guy tried to convince me that I needed to see my own teenage experience in terms of the feelings of the boy I was with. Mmhmm. The positive feedback was nice to hear, though.

As for the hard-work reviews:

I wrote a review of Tana French's latest novel, The Witch Elm. I used the review as an occasion to write about a cultural/feminist theory I named the Lucky Loop. I made three charts to accompany the article. The Mantle ran two of them, and this is the third:

French's novel illuminates all the issues I pulled out in this piece, so it's not so much me coming up with these ideas as packaging them, but I'm proud of doing that, anyway. The charts were surprisingly fun to make.

I'm a Tana French superfan, so the argument exists that I might have spent the entire last year working insanely hard to build a portfolio as a book reviewer just so I could get her book earlier than its release date, for free. I can neither confirm nor deny this argument.

I also wrote a detailed review of Shelley Jackson's first novel in years, Riddance, the subtitle of which is The Sybil Joines Vocational School for Ghost Speakers and Hearing-Mouth Children. The rest of the book is as elaborate as the subtitle. Opinions have varied widely on it; Publishers Weekly starred it, while Kirkus called it tedious. I loved the book, but I predict a lot of people will buy it because it sounds cool and then will never finish it.

Otherwise out in the world:

I reviewed a remarkable anthology, So Many Islands, for sinkhole. I doubt I ever would have read a sentence of writing from most of these people if not for this anthology, and some of the island nations from which the writers hail I'd never heard of. If you're a traveler and/or you like anthologies, pick this one up; it's good.

I did a kind of book profile, including some quotes from the author, of Barbara Barrow's The Quelling for an interesting website called the Inquisitive Mind, or In-Mind, run by a very nice pair of PhDs. I found it via Googling magazines similar to Psychology Today (PT did not respond to my pitch). I thought that profiling the book for an audience interested in psychology would do better for the book than a regular review. It was an extremely readable book with wild conflicts, and I'm watching the author with interest.

And I wrote a regular review of Donald Quist's first story collection, For Other Ghosts, for the Arts Fuse. This is the third-to-last story collection I plan to review for quite a while. It was very good! I'm just not the right reviewer for short stories.

How Did It Go?

Last Saturday, July 9, I taught my first writing workshop. By popular demand, this post will break down that experience.

In brief, it went well. I had four attendees, and all of them were friends of mine, although only two were friends of each other. My agenda ended up shorter than the allotted time, but I added something on the fly that I think was actually more popular and useful than the planned activities. Funnily enough, the only pre-anxiety I allowed in about the workshop was "what if I have too much time and not enough activities?" In reply to that anxiety, I said, well, I'll make something up and do better next time. Et voila, that is what happened. Way to knock out that anxiety, me.

At first I was disappointed that the attendees were all friends, that I had no friends-of-friends or total strangers who wanted to learn from me, but I realize that my name is not Elizabeth Gilbert. And if the publishing butter-churn has taught me nothing else, it's taught me that you have to build a platform in order to find success in these kinds of ancillary writerly activities. Ultimately it was probably better that everyone in the room walked in expecting to support me and have a good time rather than expecting to be impressed by me. (This cool thing happened, too: my friends found each other interesting. I watched it happen. I was so pleased by this, so personally gratified. It makes me look forward to big parties with a bunch of friends who don't know each other rather than dreading them.)

So many people gave me encouragement ahead of time. I felt like I had a little cheerleading squad. I'm not saying that to show off, but instead to express amazement and gratitude. I had no idea when I announced the workshop that so many people across the country would remember when and that I was doing it, and would drop me an email or a Facebook post to say good luck and woot woot. It was pretty fantastic.

In completely unrelated trivia, I own this movie. It's terrible and awesome. 

And a similar number of people have been asking me how it went. The most useful conversation I had about how it went was with my mother, who teaches when she's not revitalizing scholarship on early print technologies. She asked me how this workshop varied from teaching yoga. I told her that teaching yoga tired me out, because I felt like I was giving myself away, whereas this gave me energy because the attendees were offering me their ideas and effort. I felt like we were sharing in each other's creativity, and I was just guiding. Part of this might be influenced by the radically new-to-me pedagogy I saw in action last semester in Dr. Higgs's class, but hey, so much the better.

I felt like we were doing a group project, but I was in charge, telling everyone which way we were going and calling out the purpose of each exercise. Which, for me and my ego, is pretty much the ideal situation: we're all making something together, but I'm the boss. (It would be dishonest to ignore this unpalatable insight about myself.)

The other thing I told Mom was that it was a lot easier to tell when the attendees didn't like what I was doing with them than it was in a yoga class. In yoga, you have to read body language and interpret breathing sounds in order to determine if the students want to murder you for including standing split or asking for another vinyasa. In this situation, the tale is told by people's faces, or whether/how they are putting pen to paper, or how they greet your request to hear what they wrote. It was much more obvious how my ideas were greeted. Reading the general energy of the room was harder than with yoga, or my intuition on that is really rusty.

Seems legit

Mom asked me about the different levels of mastery in the room and how that made a difference when teaching either thing. I said that in a writing workshop I was able to direct a broader conversation about too-hard or too-simple or irrelevant concepts, while in an all-levels yoga class I'd go over to a beginning student and give individual help or direction. The different levels and approaches in the room were a little challenging for me to cope with in the writing workshop, but in a yoga class they can be physically dangerous to the student. Navigating the problem in these two contexts just seemed different rather than one being preferable.

In the end, two of the attendees cried, so I'd call that a successful writing workshop. I'm only sort of joking. Writing cuts deep. It's supposed to. I had so much fun that I want to do it again as soon as possible, but I don't know where I'm going to scrounge up more friends to come, so I think I'll wait until the fall. Anyone interested?

To the Left, to the Left

Sometime during my yoga apprenticeship I was seized with the notion that the left side of my body was the creative side. I must have combined the (true? false? inconclusive?) idea that left-handed people are more creative with that thing about the thought processes of left-brained people vs. right-brained people, only I think I mixed it up and it's the right-brained people who are more creative. It might actually have been in some book I read about chakras or meridians or something. In any event, I haven't been able to clear out the belief that my left side is related to my creative life.

I previously interpreted this to mean that things which happen to the left side of my body are sending me cosmic messages about how I need to behave toward my creativity. As one example: when over-aggressive yoga created a mild injury in my back and caused me radiating pain along my left leg, I presumed it meant I wasn't listening to my creative side enough and needed to nurture it more. The pain was meant as a telegram of Pay Attention to Me.

Over the last year, I've set aside many of the ideas I picked up during my four-year assignation with yoga, but this one, silly as it is, won't quite let go. Rather than existential cause and effect, I've tried to believe in more practical versions. When I get that radiating pain, it means I've been sitting too much or have otherwise strained the injured disk, not that I have failed to sound my barbaric yawp for the week. But last week's medical issues have made me wonder if there is some kind of cosmic, woo-woo aspect to left and right and what I'm doing with my body vs. what I'm doing with my head.

A Suspiciously Fragile Camel

Today's blog day, and I've been racking my brain all day long for something to write about here. Nothing coherent is coming to mind, so I'll do bits and pieces instead.

I've consumed a lot of great media lately, but it's been, like, YouTube videos of artists I know I love, or movies that everybody else in the dang world has also seen and loved, or whatever. Nothing new to say there.

A lot of stupid homeowner crap is going on. I'm trying to get the house clean for guests I'm having on Sunday and I am so miserable at cleaning. I have a fancy new washing machine, and that's good, but it cost a lot and I suspect it contains potassium benzoate, and that's bad.

I ran just over 2.5 miles yesterday and it about killed me. Completely square one compared to the 3 miles I ran last week. The Warrior Dash, which has been the whole point of these stupid shin splints and sore arms and hassle and whatnot, is in a week and a half so it's hardly relevant for much longer, but lesson learned: do NOT wait a week between runnings unless I want to lose serious ground. 3 days, max.

I'm twiddling my thumbs over the sci-fi story until it's time to tear through it for the open-door revision, which will happen around Monday. Can't wait. I'm thinking about starting something else, but I'm so stressed and spun up about personal shit that I think writing on a new project would be adding a big bale of hay to the back of a grumpy-ass and suspiciously fragile camel.

I taught my last class this morning at a location where I've been teaching since January, and I am enormously relieved. It might have been a bad move strategically to stop teaching there, but MAN it feels good to be free of that place.

Facebook has become sort of a problem for me lately. I've been keeping it open all day long and watching it like a hawk for interesting or respondable stuff, and it's, uh...really not good for me to do this. In the last couple of days I've gotten involved in some interesting conversations on Facebook with film people, which has really redeemed the whole enterprise in my mind, but I know I need to stop. I need to put it down and back away. And not care what's happening on Facebook every damn minute of the day.

I developed this theory about why we're so obsessed with our devices. I think it's because these devices promise intimacy and human connection, and then they don't quite deliver the way we hope they will, and so we click them off disappointedly and then come back 15 seconds later hoping that this time there will be more to the interaction.

That's part of the draw Facebook has for me - that and all the downright interesting stuff that flows through my feed. Neat links and funny pictures and just clever minds at work. But I need to click it off and concentrate on my own stuff. Easily said, hard to do. Especially because Facebook has made it so that it's very difficult to be sure and certain that you haven't missed anything. Which is kind of a thing for me.

I've been reading this writer's chapter-by-chapter smackdown critique of 50 Shades of Grey, and I am SO glad she's relieving me of the burden of reading this book. Omigoodness. She's extremely funny, which doesn't hurt, but she's also clearheaded and smart, which is by far the best part. Here's chapter one and you can go from there, if you so choose. Right now she's running a contest to name the, in romance parlance, member of a main character, and the entries made me snort and nearly fall out of my chair.

That's all for now, sports fans. Although, if you are sports fans, I don't know why you're here; I don't like sports.

The Vacant Stare Is How You Know I'm Working

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.