Inappropriate Splurts

Yesterday I took the second exam of three for my summer class, and I honestly do not know what possessed me, but I decided to treat three of the four essay questions as fun creative exercises instead of serious, grade-dependent essays. For two of the questions I imagined dialogues between the theorists, and for the other I wrote a letter from the theorists to the leaders of the society they're judging. (It would be prohibitively boring to explain this in more detail.) I endeavored to explain the theories with diligence through this creative filter; I didn't just screw around. But Mean Brain continues to tell me that I made a complete fool of myself and probably didn't even cover the whole theory in detail and WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO TURN YOUR MIND INTO A TUNA MELT DURING THAT TEST YESTERDAY.

I don't know. Except that I haven't written any fiction in something like two months (perhaps longer, because it's been Revision City around here since the spring), and I suspect that failing to use that release valve has caused creativity to splurt into totally inappropriate places.

Like, Shelley and Wordsworth, after drinking too much wine, came to blows about whether a poet should be solitary or social in one of my "essays." And Kant said "la-dee-dah" to Hume. Those are inappropriate splurts, I think.

Or this. This kind of splurt is what happens when you generally repress sexuality across a society.
It's a slippery slope from weird exam answers to anthropomorphic cigarette packages. 

Only one more week of this class and then I can write. Oh, except not really, because I signed up to take the GRE at the end of the month and I need to learn geometry. Thankfully, the end of July will mark the end of my summer chores; I get to play for all of August. And with luck I won't have to take the GRE, nor learn geometry, ever again.

With further luck, my professor will find my answers delightful instead of idiotic. God, what was I thinking?

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.

Re: 11/22/63 and a Certain Surprising Thumbs-Down

This post is spectacularly full of spoilers. 

I have been reading Stephen King since before I was 10 years old. I've read 45 of his books, which according to this problematic list is about half of his output. After finishing Ulysses, I must have decided that my taste for long books had not abated, so I set in on 11/22/63. I hit what was in essence the first plot point and did something that I know is a sin, something I never thought I'd admit to doing in a public place. I read ahead. After gathering intel on what happened in the middle and the end of the book, I decided provisionally to keep going. My bookmark is currently placed between pages 358 and 359, and now I'm thinking of doing something else I've never done before: give up on a King book before I'm finished.

State of the Bookstore

I had a very frustrating experience today.

As I mentioned a few posts ago, I'm taking a course with a fiction writer, Jim Gavin, starting in October. I decided to buy his book and read it, 1) for politeness 2) to see where he's coming from 3) possibly to have something from which to draw questions and examples. I remember reading something vague, ages ago, indicating that traditionally-published writers get more screwed on royalties on Amazon sales than they do on brick-and-mortar store sales, so I decided to go buy the book at my closest bookstore. Aside from used stores and surplus stores - neither of which would likely have the book, because it was just published in February - the closest is a Barnes & Noble 10 miles and 20 minutes away in Calabasas; the next closest is another B&N 20 miles and 30 minutes away in Thousand Oaks.

So we made a day of it, went to Thousand Oaks and ate at Umami Burger (and found out my favorite boutique, which had amazingly fun clothes at absurdly low prices, has closed) and went to the bookstore after.

They didn't have the book.

So because it was sort of on the way home, we went to the other B&N in Calabasas.

They didn't have it either.

Heckuva job, y'all. 

Now, because I often want books that aren't brand-new, nor are they bestsellers, I usually start at Amazon instead of going to the bookstore. Especially because the closest bookstore is a hassle* to get to. But I thought this would be a great example of an occasion where the bookstore was the right place to go: the book was just recently released (by Simon & Schuster!), and I wanted to maximize the author's royalties. And lo, I still couldn't get the book.

I know part of the problem is that I was at two B&Ns, instead of at an independent store where they'd be more likely to stock a book of short stories by a first-time author. But I can't find a single independent store in the Valley that isn't a used shop; the closest one as the crow flies appears to be in Malibu, which is 40 minutes away. I know I'm in a bit of a dead zone, but that isn't the point. Every time I've tried to do the right thing by books and not buy them on Amazon, I've ended up discouraged, having wasted time and gas in order to find out that I should've just ordered from Amazon in the first place.

I don't know what, if anything, this means for The Future of Books. Maybe nothing. It's anecdotal, after all, and maybe doesn't line up with everyone's experience. Matt and I talked about it on the way home, and he said it would be nice to have an Espresso Book Machine sitting in the corner of any given B&N, so it could spit out the book you wanted even if it wasn't on the shelf. Shit, I said, if it was up to me, Espresso Book Machines would be on street corners like mailboxes. But I guess that's too much to ask.

*I know the stores aren't very far away in relative terms, i.e. for someone who lives in a suburb or a rural area. But I live in Coruscant Los Angeles. Ten miles? Come on. There's like four Trader Joe'ses within ten miles of me. 

Sundry Adventures with Salt-N-Pepa

I have something completely unrelated to writing to tell you about today.

In October of 1993, Salt-N-Pepa released Very Necessary and I turned 12. I had a friend named Karen Reed during my middle school years, and her mom was a bit more permissive than mine about the kind of music Karen was allowed to listen to. She had a cassette of the "Shoop" single, which included a bunch of remixes, the square and educational song "Let's Talk About AIDS" (as a companion to their hit "Let's Talk About Sex"), and the B-side "Emphatically No".

I borrowed the cassette from Karen and listened to it A. LOT. Because "Shoop" was an awesome song (and I dare you not to find it so even now) (the outfits are a little dated, but the model around the 2:30 mark makes it all worthwhile), and as it turned out, so was "Emphatically No". The title is kind of all you need to know; a dude propositions the sweet ladies of S-N-P and S-N-P turn him the hell down repeatedly. I have now had this song in my head on and off for nearly 20 years, and when I was 12 was the last time I had any access to it.

Some weeks ago I tried to find "Emphatically No" on the internet to see if it was as cool and funny and empowering as I remembered. All efforts in Google, BitTorrent, iTunes, Amazon, and even YouTube failed. Apparently this song was not available in 21st century media. Amazon did offer the CD single, though, so I thought, hey, I'll bet I'm not the only woman in her early 30s who heard this song as a tween and wonders what happened to it. I'll get the CD, rip it, put it on YouTube, and then I'll get a bunch of poorly spelled comments thanking me for my efforts.

So I ordered the CD. A week or so later, I got a message that the order was cancelled. When I wrote to ask what happened, I was told that due to a UPC scanning error, it turned out they never had the item to begin with.

Okay, no problem. Just order another one. There are a bunch of copies on Amazon. So I ordered another one, even though I was slightly embarrassed to have ordered two copies of a Salt-N-Pepa CD single from 1993.

A week or so later, I got a package in the mail, and when I opened it, I found a copy of the DVD of Identity (2003), starring John Cusack and Ray Liotta.

I wrote the seller and asked what happened, and evidently another UPC scanning error occurred, and that seller never had the single either. And now I had a free copy of Identity and no Salt-N-Pepa.

So I placed a THIRD order for the damn single. And all I could do was laugh. Like, uncontrollable belly-laughing. Because it was just so ridiculous! All for the love of a Salt-N-Pepa B-side.

My third order was cancelled.

(Incidentally, this episode is emblematic of how my March has gone. Nothing is easy and everything is scripted by Samuel Beckett.)

This third cancellation was for the third used copy I'd tried to buy. I prefer buying used items whenever possible, but at this point I'd just had it. I was still dogged in my determination to get the effing song, but I was honestly beginning to believe that every one of the 60+ copies purportedly for sale under the Used rubric was not an actual copy of the CD, but was listed due to an error. So I bought the last "new" copy that Amazon had on offer, via Newbury Comics, for $11.99.

$12 for a Salt-N-Pepa single from 1993.

A couple of days later, a package arrived. I opened it and found a sealed, brand-new copy of Identity (2003), starting John Cusack and Ray Liotta.

I hope you're finding this funny, because I sure as hell did.

I wrote to Amazon asking them for a return and notifying them of this remarkably consistent error. Then I looked down the list of used copies of the single, seeking the first description that a) mentioned the item as a CD and b) appeared to have been written by a human looking at an item, rather than basic filler text inserted by a large-volume independent seller. I e-mailed that seller, requesting confirmation that the item actually existed due to my being burned FOUR GODDAMN TIMES.

He said he was pretty sure he had what I was looking for, and I ordered it in three seconds flat.

And today...

Twenty minutes or so later:

So. Now you can tell me for yourself whether all that absurdity was worth it. Of course, without the absurdity, you'd never know, would you? Because I wouldn't have been able to put the fucking thing on YouTube at all.

By the way, does anyone want a copy of Identity?

1K Per Day

I wrote a long post about a journalism controversy that peaked at the beginning of this week, but it's...long, and I have this sneaking feeling that it's not especially interesting. So I think I'll save it for Friday or Saturday.

In the meantime, I am dealing with...just...bullshit. Life bullshit. From so many corners. Most of it's meaningless drama bullshit that'll be over in a few weeks, which makes it easier to step back but harder to withstand. You know? 

Despite this, I made a mini-resolution to try and write something every day. Most of my story ideas do not appeal right now, or I'm intimidated by the idea of writing them, so until I'm ready to write something for the outside world I'm writing stuff for the sake of it. It's a great lesson for me, to write with no real likelihood of the work seeing daylight. Something I've needed to do for a long time. 

Yesterday I did a writing exercise from a prompt book I've had for years but never yet used. I wrote 1,000 words about a guy doing an open mike, a guy who was extremely terrible at music but deluded about his terribleness. I rarely do humor and I know I'm not especially good at it, but it was still fun to write. (I was inspired a little by Silver Linings Playbook, which I saw over the weekend and truly loved. Flawed and deluded male characters, generally those played by Marky Mark, have been some of my favorites to know.) 

Two days ago I wrote a flash piece for a real live idea that I've been kicking around for a couple of months. I wrote it basically as a straight-up tell, a "this is what happened" from start to 75% through, and such a blatant violation of the rules means that it might not go anywhere (or that it sucks). I'm letting that one sit and might ask for readers on it in a couple of weeks. 

I marked many more exercises in the prompt book, and I hope to do those every day until the juices are flowing enough for me to write something significant. Matt floated the idea of posting them here, for your amusement and subsequent tearing-apart, but I shy away from that idea. Why would you be interested in my unpolished, ungood writing exercises? 

That's all I have today without lapsing into talking about music. Oh, except I'm reading an incredible book about the Beatles, Revolution in the Head. Such amazing insights into the 1960s and into the band, and I've only read the prefaces and half the introduction so far. In that spirit:

When I Get a Little Money

The total weight for our move was about 6,000 pounds. That was the amount of stuff we had to move from Maryland to California. I would guess about 1,200 pounds of that, conservatively, was books. And we got rid of about a third of our books before the move. 

We put the vast majority of these books into storage, because there wasn't going to be room for all of our bookshelves, much less all the books we had which were now homeless due to leaving built-in bookshelves in our old house. We only brought three small shelves to the apartment. Two of them are pretty full, but the third is half-empty. 

That is, it was half-empty. In the last week or so, the following books have come through our door (just for me; Matt's books are a much smaller pile): 

Okay, so the bottom half of those are library books. And a couple of them of them were bought because the titles made me laugh. BUT STILL. I am ridiculous, with the books. Honestly just absurd. And on Monday I'm going to add a few more still to my library, dammit. And I have a list of authors I have to look into at the library in the near future. 

Have I talked about my despair that I can't read all the books in the world? Oh, wait, I guess I have. 

That Lack of Ink

I have this thing about self-sabotage.

After I was settled in here, and my desk was set up, I set myself a daily goal of how much money I would make so I could get back on track. I decided to meet that goal seven days a week until I felt comfortable (or, preferably, overwhelmed) (ha) with the amount of money in my bank account. I also decided that if I couldn't meet the goal on any given day, I'd make up for it by working more on another day.

My failure was epic. Meeting my daily goal seemed impossible, and in fact I found myself working less capably than I had before the move (i.e. making less money per day), and dreading it and procrastinating against it more. My makeup goals became more and more laughable until, finally, I gave up.

It was a humbling experience. Trying to meet difficult daily goals didn't feel like a challenge; it felt like a wall someone had asked me to climb. All I could do was stare at it and be annoyed that someone had asked me to climb it. I felt lazy and undutiful and sucky.

So at the beginning of last week I set, instead, a goal that I knew I could reach, that seemed easy. All last week, I was easily able to meet and break and then double that goal. I worked effortlessly and cheerfully and, at one point, reached the "impossible" goal I'd set without even breaking a sweat. Mentally, the goal is still the small amount, because then if I'm having a hard or brainless day or if I have other things to do, I can always just work the minimum and walk away.

I also took the whole weekend off this past weekend, which I pretty much never did before the move. I still feel a bit guilty about it, but I'm looking at my tallies and I've worked every day since June 8th, so I don't think a whole weekend was a bad idea at this point. I was tuckered out. So I visited Fred Astaire's resting place and went to Matt's company picnic, and felt better, fresher for Monday.

I'm explaining all this because the same thing happens to me before I begin a writing project. It's the thing that's happening for my KUFC project. I'm getting that itchy feeling under the skin of my brain that means it's time to read over my notes and open a fresh new .doc and put my fingers to the keys. The song embedded above matches my character's state of mind in what's likely going to be a prologue, and I can't get that song out of my mental space. I know what I want to say in that prologue, and I want to write it.

But there's always a good reason not to. More to do for the apartment, more administrative junk involved in moving states (going to the DMV tomorrow morning, WOOOOOOOO), more paid work to catch up on, more correspondence to catch up on, more meals to cook or shopping to do. I went clothes shopping yesterday morning for two hours (frustrating the HELL out of myself in the process), even though I really can't afford it right now (although I genuinely do need clothes), because I knew if I worked as efficiently as I did last week, I'd be done by early afternoon with nothing to do and I'd have no reason not to write.

I'm so intimidated. I'm so worried I won't meet my goals for the project. I'm looking back at my last two books, and although I'm proud of my accomplishments with them, I fear that neither of them came out in a way that will appeal to a broad audience. Which means they're unsellable. I want to have learned from my mistakes and to write a terrific piece of work this time, one that only needs two or three drafts, not ten. I want to keep it light, action-y, kickass, and not get so into emotional and thoughtful shit like I did with the time book or so into character development (ultimately inadequate character development, to boot) like I did with the Greenland book.

Then I get to thinking about the kind of book I really want to write, and no, I want my books to be deep and thoughtful and stylistically particular. Even if it takes me ten more years to find an agent or a publisher or an audience. I admire transparent writers, but I'm not one of them, and I would flounder and sink if I tried to write that way.

Getting all knotted up in this stuff means that nothing is getting written. I thought I had moved somewhat beyond the ugly, inefficient, emotionally crippling perfectionism that defined my teens and the first half of my twenties, but here it is again, rearing up in a different way. Whether in paid work or the important work, if I set big giant goals, I can't even get started. Which was why, much as I wanted to participate in this (that gal is a very cool writer I found randomly), I knew I would just screw the pooch and maybe the book, too, if I tried.

It helps to forgive myself for my weaknesses. When, on Saturday morning, I said to myself "You can take the weekend off, Kat, it's okay", my brain sighed in relief. When every night I go to bed without writing that prologue, and I say sincerely "it's all right, you can try again tomorrow", it helps to keep self-hatred at bay.

But still nothing gets written. No words go on the page. And no amount of contentment is worth that lack of ink.

Flat as a Fairy Tale

Torn between two ideas: sci-fi idea derived from Star Wars that I'm not really sure I can write well, and old old literary idea that I love and which I'm pretty sure I'm going to fuck up if I try to write it. So, yesterday, I wrote neither, which I'll grant was a pretty stupid way to avoid the problem. Plus there's outlining the Marilyn book, which GAH-BLAH.

There's also this old story, a fairy tale, that I workshopped with the Barrelhouse group during the fall. They told me that my main character wasn't interesting enough and quibbled annoyingly with my first line. I made my main character an everygirl on purpose, because that's how you do it in fairy tales, right? Snow White is not exactly the most three-dimensional character ever to strut around a Disney landscape. Oh. Pun. Ack.

Point is, this week I've been thinking over whether I want to rewrite this story with this idea in mind. It was this post at Errantry that put me in mind of it. My main character sings (which becomes an important aspect of the story at the end of it), and that is her Only Thing, like the love of honey of the tale Kathleen illustrates. To the workshoppers, this was not enough, and she was really flat and boring. I tried to argue that I'd constructed her like a normal, flat fairy tale heroine, the kind you can project your own characteristics on because she has none of her own (ahem*BELLA*ahem), but they didn't care. The more I think about it, the more I become concerned (not quite convinced) that they're right. I think I'd end up adding a hell of a lot more words if I made the character more interesting, which I guess is okay with me, except that I was happy with a 4,000-word story and don't really want it to be a 7,000er. If it makes the story better, well of course, but it won't necessarily be more saleable if it's better and too long. But that spins me up into asking what the point is, whether I want to write a good story or a saleable story, when the answer is really both. I guess write more, and then try to cut back elsewhere?

I unintentionally created part of a universe in this story that I want to explore elsewhere, so I don't think it would be a bad thing if I were to work a little harder at this first foray into it. It's too short to get much into the universe, so that would be part of expanding the word count, expanding the world. The conflict admittedly appears a little late, but I thought the language made up for it, a bit. I could break it down and start all over, from the top down, with the universe in mind, rather than sneaking into it with just my main character in mind the way I wrote it originally. But that sounds like an awful lot of work, she whined.

Like I said above, I'm still not convinced that flat heroines are entirely wrong for fairy tales written in the present day. (Not set in modern times, just written right now.) Just as I think many readers like predictability to a certain extent, I think many readers like characters they can live through more personally due to having few specific characteristics. Vibrant heroines who are thoroughly foreign to the average reader, but who still possess some universal traits, are one kind of way to draw in readers (cf Scarlett O'Hara), but I think the opposite way is not invalid. Children's books and YA are rife with these sorts of folks, after all.

Y'know, having thought through how not-fun it will be to rewrite this story, I'm suddenly far more interested in working on the SF story. Unexpected bonus. Maybe I'll get down to it today.

Better Than Nothing

I've been meaning to write this post since Thursday, just to keep that insecure mess from being the first thing you see on this page, and to keep on writing every other day as I had been. But I've also been meaning to answer e-mails to three or four people and write e-mails to at least two more. I'm having difficulty doing anything much except what I have to do, i.e. work and make meals and run on the treadmill (literal and figurative) and teach yoga and keep going. I don't know how it happened, but there don't seem to be enough hours in the day, anymore, again. I think I'm going to have to knock off my copy-editing job one day this week to catch up on e-mails and get a damn grip.

On one of the last two evenings, I don't know which one, I opened up this New Post window to type in a note about what I would absolutely for-sure write about the next day, to motivate me to say something, for sure and certain. This is what I typed:

i'm a fraud, not a grownup 

I don't actually know how I was going to turn that into a coherent post that had something to do with writing, and wouldn't just be a sad admission before bedtime. So now it's kind of a curiosity. I remember thinking something about there being strength in this admission while I was typing it, not weakness, but I really have no idea what subject matter I was kneading at the time.

I still haven't started revising the horror novel! That deserves an exclamation point because I can't believe I haven't done it yet. It now has a deadline for revisions, because Maleesha somehow snake-oiled me into going to the Pikes Peak Writers Conference (WHERE ARE THE APOSTROPHES, YOU'RE WRITERS, GAAAH), and I set up a pitch meeting there, and the finished book that's closer to ready for a pitch meeting is the horror book, and I really really need to get 'er ready. Really. It's only just over a month away. Why haven't I started?

The decision that I made to go to the writers' conference should be a post in itself. Which I think I'll save for my next post (tomorrow? if I knock off work?), because right now I have to go and teach. Where did my hours go?