Sameness

This morning I dreamed that I had to unclog a drain. I pried the top off of a side-loading washing machine and used a plastic snake on the drain, which was around the diameter of my spread hand and covered with a flat white cap. Eventually I pulled out a clean, dry, thick lock of hair, tied together with a ribbon, about five inches long, which was the same color as mine. Then I discovered that the white cap was actually black, and it had been covered by a piece of bread and peanut butter, pressed PB-side-down on the top of the cap to further clog the drain. 

Once I had scraped and wiped this, I started scooping a bunch of junk out of the machine - it was white and curded, like cottage cheese, or melted Styrofoam. No smell. I noticed that the junk was yellower and more hardened toward the northeast corner of the machine, and realized I had to break up and remove that part first. I began to worry that the junk was actually part of the machine's workings (an insulator?), and that I was doing the wrong thing by removing it. Once that uncertainty had truly penetrated, I woke up. 

I've long wanted to write a blog post about all the good writing news of the past two months, but this dream was so specific - the textures, the emotions - that I had to get it down somewhere. I do not know what it means. I did watch The Stuff yesterday, so that's probably where the white junk comes from. (Don't give me Freud, please.) 

It feels weird not to do resolutions this year, but I don't know what I would resolve to do. Clean more, maybe. Stop complaining about the stuff I always complain about. Keep to my book schedule, so as to write all the things I mean to write by the end of the year. But I'll only fail myself if I fail those intentions, and I do enough of that, thanks. 

The days are all the same, and I thought I knew what that was like, since life in southern California moves like that, and I've worked at home for long periods before. But this kind of sameness has a hellish edge that reminds me of one of my favorite Twilight Zone episodes, where the petty criminal thinks he's gone to heaven because he always wins at the casino table and bangs as many pretty women as he wants, but in fact it's hell, because there's no challenge, he always wins, there's no danger or risk, and life without risk is...not heaven. 

I'm not saying that contentment and peace are bad. Just that I always had the option to get in my car and go somewhere if the sameness of my lovely life started to make me itch. I'd look for a workshop to take, sign up, and have something to look forward to, particularly if it was somewhere I could drive and I'd never been there before. (For other people, this practice is known as "vacation," but I never learned how to take vacations in my family of origin, so my version is workshops.) Minor adventures. I can't imagine how difficult this has been for people who thirst after major adventures, as giving up my minor ones is challenging enough. 

The days are all the same. When I lived in danger, I thought that sounded great. It is, for a while. Until it isn't anymore. 

I'm listening to two audiobooks right now: We Were Witches by Ariel Gore and The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. Both long overdue. The way each deals with witches and women directly contradicts the other, which is fun, because I know which side I'm on. 

Maybe I'll finally write that blog post with all the good news next week, or the week after. The days are all the same, so writing another blog post can pass for a big change in my routine. In the meantime, I'm running out of documentaries on cults to watch, especially since so many of them are padded and contain less information than the corresponding Wikipedia pages. But I'm getting so much cross-stitching done. I partially designed this piece and I'm disproportionately proud of it. 

In My Wildest Dreams

Over the weekend, my goal was to write three book reviews. I'm staring down a May 20 deadline for four separate reviews, one of which I've already filed, plus two soft deadlines for today (Monday). I really hate working close to deadline; I know it motivates some people, but it just makes me crazy, and I produce poor work. I wanted to get more than half of the five remaining reviews out of the way this weekend, rather than sweating next week. And I did: I wrote three reviews, meeting the soft deadlines and a second May 20 deadline, and I finished reading the third May 20 book. Which leaves me with six days to review that book and read and review the last one. Doable.

I was feeling good about blamming through these responsibilities--even though filing one review got me an assignment for another one, on a fairly short timeline--and I went into the living room to re-sort the book piles everywhere. There's a pile for no-deadline books, a pile for read-but-not-reviewed books, a pile for reviewed-and-waiting-for-edits books, and a few small piles of send-to-friends books. I neatened these, and an epiphany hit me like a train.

That first paragraph? With the six deadlines and the process of meeting them? That's my life now. It's what I do every day: read, review, pitch, write. I have a spreadsheet with all the ARCs I've requested, received, or been assigned, with slots for whether I've read it, pitched it, etc. When I file the review, I gray out the title, and when the review gets published, I delete the row and enter the book on the next sheet, where I have slots for social media promotion and informing the publisher and etc. This is how I stay sane, this spreadsheet, its tidiness keeping me from terror.

self-portrait with two left hands

The epiphany: this is the life I dreamed of when I was a little girl. Other kids dreamed of being astronauts or ballerinas, but I wanted to be a librarian. I wanted to be around books all day long, every day, forever. As an adult, I learned, to my enormous disappointment, that being a librarian is less about books than it is about customer service (thank you, Withdrawn). I decided to be a writer instead, making my life about books I create instead of books created by others.

At the moment, most of what I write about is books. When I look around my apartment, all I see is books. Yeah, it stresses me out and makes me sad that so many of them are going unread while I read assigned books I'm less excited about, but still: being surrounded by books, and thinking about books all day long, was my fantasy life as a child, and now it is my actual life.

(This life has come about through a series of unlikely and wholly unplanned events. I feel the need to point out and emphasize this, because more and more people are talking to me about my publications IRL and I'm flattered and pleased, but I don't know what to say to them. I feel like a hapless cheater: it just...happened.)

The point is, I haven't really looked around at my book-stuffed life with WhatDoesThisMean-O-Vision until yesterday. And I feel grateful, positively awash in gratitude. Yet I also feel overwhelmed. I don't want to stop writing about books, but I do want to slow down. A little insistent voice is telling me that this pace isn't sustainable. And of course I'm getting paid for less than half of what I'm writing. It's a better average than before, but I'd like to convert the work I'm doing with books into work that will pay well, and that will lead somewhere.

Because over the weekend, I got news that a meaningful boost I hoped I'd get as a reviewer is not coming to me. That boost had a trajectory that made sense, that looked like a natural next step. But no. At least for the next year, that boost isn't mine. So I'm floundering a little bit on my trajectory, unsure whether I'm actually sitting in a catapult or just a swingset, swooping back and forth in the same non-progressive arcs over the sand.

more positive self-portrait, except for the cat, because I'm allergic
(books and cats always seem to go together in culture, but I REMAIN ALLERGIC)

Out in the world:

I wrote about the new National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama for the Big Smoke. I wrote this, revised it a few times, and then held on to it, trying to sort out whether it wouldn't be better if I shut up and let non-white voices say everything possible about this museum. I also didn't really want to call out my family; there's complexity there. I talked it over with a few friends and my editor, and ultimately it went forward, and I've gotten some compliments on it (from white people, admittedly). No one has showed up at my literal or digital door to punch me and call me a racist, so I guess that means it wasn't a terrible move to publish it.

I reviewed a pile of interesting books recently.

• So Lucky, Nicola Griffith, for The Arts Fuse. I've never read a book this streamlined, this angry--a book that feels like a pistol shot between the eyes, no more, no less. Nevertheless, it's not white-heat writing; it's multilayered and meticulous. Get into it. Particularly if you have chronic illness, or have a loved one with same. 
• Trail of Lightning, Rebecca Roanhorse, and Deer Woman, an anthology, for ANMLY. I loved both of these books, but I particularly loved Trail of Lightning. It was so well-assembled, so full of heart and wit, and I fell stupidly in love with the main character. She reminded me of my own Berra Thorntree, so much so that I queried Roanhorse's agent. Didn't even get a request for a partial. Oh, well. 
• Belly Up, Rita Bullwinkel, for LARB. I greatly admired this book but didn't like it. (You might; I suspect it's going to be acclaimed elsewhere.) I will watch this writer with eagerness and interest, in the hope that I can write her an unalloyed positive review someday. 
• Stormwarning, Kristín Svava Tómasdóttir, for the Women's Review of Books. This is actually a profile more than a review, and I am owed approximately half of the credit for the final product. My editor was amazing. The book is amazing, too (say it with me: feminist Icelandic poetry); buy it here. Alas, this profile only appears in the magazine, but you can buy a PDF of the magazine at this link. 

Useful Tangents

Here are some things that are true.

1. I've been reading Kathy Acker over the past week. I was strongly encouraged to try her about three years ago, but when I read about her work, I was put off a little and worried it wouldn't be for me. I've chosen to read My Mother: Demonology, a novel from 1993, and although I'm not really sure whether I like it or not, it has given me two big gifts.

I wrote the secret project (aka the Ceremonials project) largely inspired by Florence Welch and my own ideas, but in the back of my mind was this movie I saw some years ago about two French girls at a boarding school who had a sexual affair. The movie was made from a book that had, I remember reading on the internet, some of the most purple prose ever written or taken seriously as literature. That was absolutely all I remembered about the movie/book, so as much as I wanted to look it up and compare it to what I'd written in the secret project, I didn't know where to start. Well, Acker's book mentions the Radley Metzger film Thérèse and Isabelle and then uses it to go on useful tangents of her own, and I went THAT'S IT. That was the movie/book that I had slightly in my mind as I was writing the secret project.

As I look at YouTube videos of the film, I'm a little embarrassed that I took so much, mood-wise and setting-wise, from this film without actually remembering it by name. I was thinking of the school in the film when I created the Cartwright School, and I was thinking of the seriousness with which the affair between Thérèse and Isabelle is portrayed when I assembled Amelia's relationship with Corisande. I did a bunch of stuff that the movie doesn't do - supernatural stuff, obsession stuff, mythology stuff, closure stuff - but I'm still kind of pulling at my collar about the similarities. Perhaps, in acknowledging them, I can get off the hook a little.

Here's a link to the last twelve minutes of the film. There's nudity in it, and it's fairly ponderous, but if you've read the secret project, it might look slightly familiar. (I couldn't find a trailer of decent quality.)

The other gift is a series of photographic images that have been surfacing in my mind as I read, none of which have anything direct to do with the book, but which continued to appear as I continued reading. I am going to do everything in my power to make this a real, in-the-world photography sequence with myself as subject.

Lately (past six months or so) I've been feeling this odd instinct that I need to involve my body in my creative life. I didn't know what to do with that until Acker's book started giving me these pictures. I don't know when or in what final form the images will exist, but I don't want to forget their urgency. I took notes. I approached a collaborator. I'm hoping for the best.

2. I've 90% decided to teach a writing workshop in July. If you're local to Los Angeles and you want to come, please email me, kcoldiron at gmail, so I can gauge the interest of people I don't actually know. Just a li'l email, maybe that only says "me", after which you can continue to lurk and be shy.

3. I had a strange dream over the weekend that I think, ultimately, was about privacy. I wrote down a bunch of notes on it. I woke up with the sensation that, as a writing idea/project, it could be something big, but I realized in reading my notes that I Love Dick impacted me more than I thought and I don't want to just copy others' ideas. (See above.) I'm feeling the need for a big writing project, after setting down a plethora of little ones over the past year or so, but my waking thoughts about it might have been wrong. It would be absurd and philosophical and have to do with family and home as well as art and the body and privacy. I have a main character, which is the most important thing.

There's a small idea I want to work out on the page first. It has to do with a dog and a bicycle, movement in space and time, and - this only crashed into what I had put together over the past week - The Sound of Music. I wrote some pages on it over the weekend, but I don't know if they're any good and I'm worried that I don't have enough for a story-length story rather than a flash.

And I'm waiting for something to come to me so that I can write about male regret. That might happen in ten years, though, so I'm not waiting very avidly.

4. In fact, I counted: in the past year, I've written three short stories, three personal essays, and three weirdnesses that blur the lines between essay, fiction, memoir, and criticism. (More threes.) That doesn't sound like a lot, but it's enough wordage for a collection, and the ideas that came out in there were pretty intense.

5. I have no pictures to go with this post, so here's a photograph by Garry Winogrand that I like a lot. Click to embiggen. Catch you on the flip side.

I Guess I'm Mostly Surprised When It Works

There's one last thing to muse on from that Facebook Q&A: Things that surprise you while writing, things that worked that you didn't think would, or vice versa, etc...

This comment came from my husband, whose job is in a creative field very different from my own, but who offers me tremendous advice about how creative work works. He has lots of experience with what works and what doesn't, and how to deal with each possibility. I have less, and I am not remotely as mature as he is about ideas not working. Really, he should be the one writing this post.

Plus, I looked at this comment and I didn't know how to build an answer out of it. The only thing I could think about was writing a sci-fi novella years ago, one that didn't work out because I couldn't really write yet, and discovering after it was on the page that the climax of the book was a big shootout that killed four children. I did not know those kids, who were pivotal, would die at any point in writing the novella until after I'd made them dead. Total shock.

But I've told this story to myself and others so many times that it's threadbare. I've lost the particular memories of it, the sense of what I thought the story was going to do before I sat down to write that day. I remember feeling horrified that I'd written such a thing, and I remember the knowledge that the event was precisely in place in the novella. Little else remains.

That story connects to Matt's first clause, things that surprise me while writing, but other than "let your work surprise you as it twists and turns and takes its own directions," which isn't universally sound advice at all, I don't know what to take away from it. Maybe nothing. Maybe it was just a thing that happened when I was an inexperienced writer and I hadn't yet learned how to listen to the book that was inside me and take notes about it before I sat down to draft.

What worked and didn't work...well, usually it's in the particulars that such things go on. I take a lot of ideas from dreams (two of the four novels I've written, a couple of the not-very-many short stories I've published), and that feeling of OMIGOD I have to write down that dream it was AMAZING, and then finding the next afternoon that the dream was absurd or go-nowhere, is not exclusive to me, or to writers.

But the boy-and-mom crisis story, yeah, that one didn't work, and it was a surprise. It was the first story I wrote after I finished Highbinder, and I think the writer-dial was still mostly tuned to action/genre, because half the story was literary and the other half was written like a comic book. The two halves interleaved to tell the story of how this kid and his (single) mom cope with the kid having had an affair with the mom's best friend, a married woman who lives next door. I thought the idea was solid, and I thought the execution went okay. The actiony parts of the story were much more lively and interesting to read than the literary parts, but again, I'd just finished a book that has a lot of action in it, so I had a good bit of that energy left over.

I workshopped the story at my UCLA class, and my instructor told me exactly what to do with my ending - which was definitely the least-working part of the story - but I've set it aside without revising it, because the thing just doesn't hang together. I continue to be surprised every time I think about it, because it really should have worked. I got three decent characters, triangulated in a good conflict; I got an unusual, surprising structure; I got some pretty okay writing in there. But it just doesn't have that certain thing that makes reading worthwhile. It's limp and dull, like hair without Pantene Pro-V. Oh, well.

One thing that always surprises me is how insignificant to readers are the problems that have obsessed you while drafting. The Girl Scout story is written practically as a dyad, in two parts that are almost their own flash pieces, and I worried like crazy after revising that the story didn't have an overall arc and felt like two separate stories smashed together. No one mentioned this, not my initial readers nor any of the 15 people who read it for my workshop class. I even asked two readers about it and they were both like, shrug, no. This happens pretty much every time, that I worry about some element of a story and no one notices it, and instead they notice shit that I never would've thought of.

In writing Highbinder, I worked really hard to give someone a certain set of characteristics without saying flat-out that her nature was not altogether human. I put in bits and pieces of this nature pretty much every time she was mentioned. No one noticed. Three people have read that book and given me detailed feedback on it, and I said something to the effect of "You didn't notice anything in particular about Character?" and they were all like, shrug, no. Gaaaah.

So I've stopped asking those questions, the stuff I worry over that no one mentions. In my workshop class, the workshoppees' questions often seem to be of that strain - they ask them, and I'm like, why on earth are you worried about that when X issue is the elephant in the room? And the answer is probably that the writer notices stuff that the reader doesn't, and vice versa, eternally.

There's a lot that surprises me while I'm actually putting words on the page. Largely the same thing, over and over, that I marveled at during my years of copy editing: that English is contortionist in its flexibility, in the multiple ways it's possible to say what you want to say. But other stuff, too, stuff that's kind of overly self-complimentary, so, sorry.

Like, that I'm at a point now where I can confidently cross something out with the knowledge that I'll write something better instead. Or that I can write a sentence that doesn't sound quite right and just make a note to come back to it later, because it's not a disaster, I can find another way to say it that doesn't suck. That I can make up things to say, one sentence after another. These things amaze me every time. I feel like the same writer I was in high school, the one who was content to write 1,500 words of sheer description of thinly disguised Fitzgerald characters and not want to change a single word despite it being undeniably stupid. I'm not that writer, at all, even if I sometimes behave like her. But I feel like her, and I'm amazed when what comes out of my pen is nothing like what she'd write. 

Dreaming My Way to Work

Most of my big ideas come from dreams. The central ideas for both the Greenland book and the time book came from lengthy, specific dreams that I wrote down and fleshed out. Other dreams have been used either as a starting point for something that wandered far afield from its source material, or as filler for a central idea that I attained elsewhere.

Dreams are bizarre; everyone knows that. I write them down, and then look at them a week later and go whaaaat? Dreams that are insanely engaging as I experience them might turn out to be useless either from a story perspective or a symbolic, figuring-out-my-life perspective. But the notion that a dream by which I am still fascinated months later is too bizarre to shape into a story...I finally decided this week that I can't truck with that. Some of the stuff I'm proudest of writing in the past year has seemed too odd for public consumption at the outset, and I've written it anyway, winding up with the opposite of regret.

I keep returning to Jim Henson at moments like this. (I feel like I've written about this before, but I can't find it on a blog search, so at the risk of repeating myself...) The idea of a prime-time variety show for adults starring felt puppets must have been, to understate the case, extremely hard to sell. But he worked really fucking hard, and he did it. And he created something unforgettable. It inspires me that he did this (and it especially inspires me that his success didn't really get going until he was 40), because his ideas were just weird, but it turned out that a lot of people loved them anyway.

Yesterday I wrote the first draft of a story about a boy who lives on a garbage scow. In the big picture, the story is supposed to be about the cruel limits of charity, but ever since I had the dream that inspired the story, I've shied away from developing or writing it. I kept rereading that set of notes and thinking "boy who lives on garbage scow...nah, too weird, no one will believe it" and turning the page. Yet I'm growing tired of doing throwaway work I'm not especially proud of, and I decided to try writing it anyway. Maybe I can frame it as a fairy tale, I thought, and make it more of a genre story.

It didn't come out that way. It came out in a first-person roughneck pidgin, set vaguely in the Victorian era, veering into a narrative structure which I think I'll have to pitch and rewrite. But it felt good in the doing. It didn't feel like a waste of time. It felt like something new, something weird but inspired. We'll see, after it's done resting, if it goes in the drawer or out into the world.

I also wrote a poem yesterday. I virtually never write poetry, because I don't understand it well and I doubt I've grown at all as a poet since I wrote angsty teenage junk. But I feel quite good about this one - good enough to seek feedback and maybe even publication, once it's been redrafted a couple of times. I was inspired by reading three issues of The Sun nearly back to back over the past two weeks; the magazine publishes poetry that agrees with me in small doses. Although I find it pretty unfair and unrealistic, there's something to magazines' insistence that you read a few issues before you submit work to them. I only just feel like I have an idea of The Sun's mood and intention now that I've held a subscription for six months.

On Tuesday, I sent a query package for KUFC to an agent. Please cross your fingers for me.

Enough Gas

On Sunday I went to the beach for the first time since I've been in California.

Specifically, this beach. 

I've been feeling increasingly yucky over the last few weeks, more anxious and mired in pettiness. I miss the calm humble feeling that being in Montana gave me. Granted, I basically had one primary goal during my time there, and here in my regular life things are much more diffuse. I have a lot more to make me feel insecure and off-track and incapable.

Lately I've been having vivid dreams. Some of them have been downright cold-sweat nightmares, even if the monsters in them are usually me and not external toothy beasts. Most of them have felt uneasy, dubious, as if I'm making fatal mistakes but won't find out the consequences for months or years. One of these involved a good friend who splits his time between England and Minnesota who's asked me in the past to come and visit him during the times of year he's in the U.S. I've never met him in person and am very eager to. When I woke up from the dream about him, I had the craziest itch to get to Minnesota, like, that week, to sit in his quiet house and stare out at the land he owns.

It occurred to me that maybe the big reason I'd been feeling yucky was that I was mostly looking at a screen of some kind all day every day, or potentially taking a break from such screens to look at the building across the courtyard from my own building. There's a decent amount of nature in my daily view, trees and hummingbirds and whatnot, but 90% of my day-to-day is human-made. My Montana trip reinforced to me more strongly than ever that nature matters to me, that I need to be around the earth and sky - both bigger than me - to be ultimately happy.

Well, the ocean is bigger than me. And it's a lot closer than Minnesota. And I haven't seen the Pacific since...God, 2001? Has it been that long? So I put on some sunscreen and drove down to Malibu, which is the closest piece of coastline to where I live in L.A.

The Obscure Ability to Find What You're Looking For

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.