The Primordial Blobbery

Since we moved out of the 1970s in terms of the fiction syllabus provided to me this semester, a lot more light at the end of the tunnel has become visible. In three weeks, I read John Haskell's I Am Not Jackson Pollock, Dubravka Ugresic's Lend Me Your Character, and Karen Russell's St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. I loved all of them, for totally different reasons, and the first two gifted me with a plethora of ideas, and such an open-ended horizon, for what I can/want to write in the future.

That horizon will have to wait, though. School is not finished killing me.

Thing is, all the ideas dislodging from the soil and floating up and moving around, they're all interesting but unformed. I've taken notes, asked myself questions, created little tadpole blobs of associated words. I have a blob about Kathy Ireland, a blob about a specific memory of laughter, and a long essay-blob about my brain. I've done justice to none of these ideas and honestly, I don't even know what one of them means. They're blobs. They're not even really things yet.

There's a more shapely blob I've had in my head for about two years about Roland Barthes. It's not fiction, it's scholarly, and I'm not in any position to be advancing a scholarly idea like it in the format it deserves. But it won't let go, and I am wise enough to beware of the blob. It creeps. It leaps. It glides and slides.

The point of all this is that it's good that school is not finished killing me. I need time for these ideas to gestate, time for them to sink out of the primordial blobbery and solidify. I'm impatient to return to writing rather than schooling, but all things in their own time, I think. That's what I'm being told. Time is being given to me in different ways than I want it, but we don't get to choose how time works on us.

And the other point is that this is what school is good for. The laughter idea is going to be a big deal if it comes together the way I suspect, and it never would've floated up from the muck if not for what Dr. Chatterjee said when I was sitting in class on Monday night. I never would've read John Haskell and thought you mean I could just do this and call it a short story? if not for Dr. Haake's unusual method of creating a syllabus. Education is no small help.

Other news. I meant, but failed, to post on Sunday that it was St. Crispin's Day, and the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt. I mentioned this in my Your Friday Yes video, which I also did not post timely in this space.

So there's the video, and here's the St. Crispin's Day speech from Henry V. My original idea for last Friday's Yes was to read the whole speech into the webcam, and I think we can all be glad I came up with a different idea.

There's more to say, but I'm out of time. Natch.

The Quality of Not-Knowing

At the beginning of the year, the band Foster the People put up a mural in downtown Los Angeles. People apparently liked it. According to ABC7, its location is in an "area with beige-colored warehouses and office buildings," so "local residents welcomed a spot of brightness." However, on July 11, it emerged that the city had told the band to remove the mural. The image they put up as a mural is exactly the same as the cover of their most recent album, Supermodel. Evidently there are city regulations about advertisements vs. murals that meant their permits were not appropriate, because the image could have been construed as an advertisement.

Pretty colors, to be sure

I don't really care about Foster the People, but this story caught my interest. The band claimed that they were just trying to add art to the daily routine of ordinary citizens, but I wonder. If that was their only purpose, couldn't they have chosen another image? Surely it occurred to somebody along the line that this was a good way to get jumbo-sized advertising without paying jumbo prices. If not, if that's a cynical way to look at this incident, let's go the other way: is it fair for the city not to take into account that the band was just trying to make art? Should they give the band the benefit of the doubt, and let the mural stay up? Well, but even if the whole thing was an innocent mistake and this was just an image that the band believed in enough to plaster it on everything, letting it stay might create a foot in the door for genuine advertisements that are cynically masquerading as murals.

I find both possibilities valid, the cynical one and the innocent one. And I love news stories that demonstrate the existence of this split in life, that an incident could easily be one way or the other and there's no way to know from reportage what the truth of the matter is. That middle ground is exactly where I want to write, what I want to explore through fiction: when all sides of the story are equally plausible, and only the participants really know what their motivations were, and no one external to those participants' skulls will ever know.

One of the longest (and best, IMHO) stories I've written in the past year is about this - "Carlotta Made Flesh," a.k.a. the journalist story, which I wrote after reading many articles about catfishing, but specifically this one. The wikibook also has this split at its heart, although I'm not any closer to writing that blasted thing, so I guess I should stop bringing it up here, because I need to just put my money where my mouth is. The point is, this often comes to mind when I sit down to the notebook, this we'll-never-really-know thing, and it always gives me a little jolt of inspiration when I see it in real life. Some of the news stories that bring me food for thought about this issue are very unpleasant, but here, it's only a mural, and the stakes and harm are nice and low.

Incidentally, here, citizens petitioned in favor of the mural and Mayor Garcetti made an exception. The mural stays. And - maybe - some PR guy across town just put his feet on his desk and gave a satisfied sigh. Or maybe not.

Librariana

I keep wanting to write a post on how I feel about the holidays and stopping myself. My inner Grinch is on the rampage this year, and I don't necessarily want to expose her to friends and loved ones.

I finished Airships. Heavens above. I've really picked some incredible books of short stories to read this year! If you want to be amazed, read that thing. There was also an interesting treasure in the inside cover:

Space Library: 1999!

I took out Under the Volcano from the library to read next, but I am so tired of men's writing that I just couldn't take it. Nearly everything we've read for my UCLA class this semester has been by white men, as have most of the books I've read for fun over the same period. I'm used to this, of course, but the insistent feeling of standing outside the party has been a lot worse lately. Male writers often (unintentionally) (?) create worlds in which I stand apart, where all the characters who look like me are trophies or objects or barnyard animals. So I fled to the girliest unread book on my shelf: a Georgette Heyer. I gobbled it in less than 24 hours and I feel such relief. Yes, I do exist after all.

I'm also following two comic books right now: the Matt Fraction/Chip Zdarsky collaboration about which you will get the wrong impression (and I'll draw unfortunate searches) if I name, so I'll just direct you there; and the Kelly Sue DeConnick/Emma Rios book Pretty Deadly. I adored PD #1, but #2 was...largely confusing (and OMG learn to use commas, whoever letters these books). I still can't wait for the next one. The pleasure of following a comic book upon release, book by book over several months, is one I wasn't familiar with until now. And a pleasure it is, indeed.

Matt and I and a lovely friend spent Thanksgiving Day in Las Vegas this year. It was a very cool trip. On the drive back, Matt and I developed an idea about a Western that I am now committed to writing. The landscape inspired us. I've sketched out the idea, and I've already fallen in love with the main character. She's like a much more damaged version of the main character of Highbinder, one who believes in revenge instead of not. I really want to just write it, go go go, but I feel I need to at least read a couple of Westerns before I do; thus far all I've read are Elmore Leonard and Annie Proulx stories. Anybody know if Lonesome Dove is really that good?

Red-Lettering

I'm very excited and proud to say that I had an essay published in Role/Reboot on Monday about my experience as an only child. I hope to write more for the site in the future, because its content is always terrific, and I'm intimidated and grateful to add my name to its alumni.

If you're here from R/R yourself, welcome! I promise that first paragraph wasn't disingenuous brownnosing.

Along with this, I got some other good news on Sunday evening: an acceptance for the opera story from Deimos eZine. It'll appear in their December issue. I think I owe this acceptance entirely to my friend Maleesha, who read the story over the weekend and inserted a comment at the exact moment, a page and a half in, where she finally became interested in the story. I was sorry to cut most of what came before, but that was feedback too precise to ignore. And obviously she was right, because it was the shorter version that got a yes, after nine no thankses. I'd received a rejection for the earlier version of the story a day prior, the first personal rejection I've had in yonks, and that editor, too, said it took too long to get started. She also found the central thrust of the dystopia unrealistic, but there's really not much I can do about that.

I also owe thanks to Kathleen. As I explained here, I don't think I would have written the opera story at all without her little push.

Over the weekend I revised like crazy on the dissection story (which actually has nothing whatever to do with dissection; it's "the hot springs story" in my head, but dissection is how I identified it on this blog, so I guess I'm stuck with that), and I think I ended up with something better, but it's six damn hundred words longer. I had a particular market in mind for this story that has a hard upper limit of 8,000 words, and it's now out. I might submit a shorter version with the earlier ending to them instead, just to see.

This week I want to get to work on a short essay I've been putting off for too long and on a very, very old story idea that I'm hoping to resurrect. I made a real hash of it the first time, but I was something like ten years younger (I might even have tried to write this in high school; don't remember) and I put the wrong stylistic frame around it. A Mary Gaitskill story gave me a potential way in to the idea that doesn't suck. I'm worried I'm going to fuck it up again, but it seems like I won't have lost anything if I do, because I'd already discarded the idea as unworkable. So maybe that'll free me to do better stuff, to dare harder.

Thanks, Lynda. Sometimes I need reminding that these really are the only two questions that matter. 

On Saturday night, my brain dreamed for me the idea for Quantum Leap in a slightly different form and presented it as brand-new. It wasn't until I was scribbling sleepily in my notebook the idea for a series of flash fictions under the rubric of "surfacing" in new identities that my brain went "Hello? Scott Bakula and Dean Stockwell? Amazing early-90s hair? You have no new ideas."

"Aw, dang," I replied.

Over the weekend I finished up Gods Like Us, and I haven't enjoyed a nonfiction book so much in years. It was SO good. You don't even know. I've started assembling more thoughts about it which I'm saving for a whole other post.

School is fun, too. September is a red-letter month so far. I'm trying to enjoy it instead of worrying about when/whether it's all going to go south.

Dissection and Deep Hurting

Last week I managed to set down one of the stories I wanted to write in August, as well as a detailed outline for the other. The outline felt good, but the first pages of the story did not feel good at all. Things went better as the days went on, and ultimately I finished a first draft on Sunday, but I think the don't wanna instinct that keeps me from writing for long swaths of time is the muscle memory of those first few pages and how lousy they feel.

I did something with this story that I don't remember doing before: opening it, word by word; flaying it, like a coroner performing an autopsy. (This is kind of a gross metaphor, but honestly, it's so apt that I don't want to find another.) I wrote pages and pages and pages - the first draft is nearly 9,000 words - of excruciating detail about the observations and sensations of my main character, rather than saying only as much as I needed to and moving on. The latter method is the way the final draft is supposed to be, omitting needless words, but I suspect that peeling back the skin so gradually, and picking up and describing every last organ, is going to help me finish with a better product. I'll have more good stuff from which to pound out the final (hopefully far shorter) version.

It was a fascinating process, too. To expand on the gross metaphor (sorry), exploratory laporoscopy is the way I usually do it: make a quick incision, poke into these characters' world, take a few notes, and leave. But with the patient on the dissection table and all the time in the world, I can discover so much more. Subcutaneous layers. Pores and capillaries. Getting the writing done as fast as possible jibes nicely with my habits, but this story didn't go that way, and it was much more rewarding for that.

One of the good things about drafting in longhand is that I have no real idea how much I've written, so I don't start getting nervous about how long (or short) it's going. One longhand page is often about 250 words, but that varies so much in reality that I can't do a real estimate until I transcribe. The pressure's off that way. I don't really get anxious about going over 10,000 or whatever until the longhand part is over.

I'm experimenting with another way of writing that's pretty much exactly the opposite of the advice I got at Esalen. Pam told us that metaphors are generally wiser than we are, and that grouping seemingly unrelated ideas together often results in thematic coherence that we can't see until the work is finished. She and other writers (Faulkner? can't remember) say that if you set out to write about An Idea, what you'll come up with is the most boring, forced, creatively devoid work possible.

Yet all the work I've produced that I like best (and that readers have considered most coherent and finished) has started with me knowing exactly what I'm up to before I begin. An essay I wrote that connected the societal value of women's safety with a personal anecdote about my apartment complex, an essay I think is really quite good -- I didn't start drafting that until I had both ideas in my notebook, until I had connected them and taken some notes about them. Even while drafting, I kept my mind on that connection with every last word I wrote and tossed out the stuff that, while good, didn't fit.

When I focus hard on the Idea behind whatever it is I'm writing, I come up with coherent work, whereas if I just try to set shit down that seems okay, I come up with multiply threaded work that, when followed to its logical conclusions, just collapses. Writers I admire say to trust inspiration, to write on through to the other side and find coherence in the process of revising. I'm working on a story right now where I did that, and I've had to pitch the draft entirely and start over with an outline (perhaps as I should have done at the outset, eh?) rather than do something that resembles revising. It's made me miserable.

The trite conclusion here is that every writer works differently, and what makes your creation process go smooth might make somebody else's halt completely. Another possible conclusion is that next year I'll be in this space talking about how outlines don't work at all for me anymore and freewriting is the only way to go. Ah well. I just want to draw attention to the idea that no writing advice is perfect for everyone. Not even mine.

Forced to Make Space

I suffer from migraines every so often. These present with pressure, queasiness, mild pain, extreme light sensitivity, sometimes dizziness, crabbiness, and a general inability to function without heroic effort. Before I was diagnosed with them, I thought migraines always involved severe, debilitating pain, and I thought that the mild but doggedly persistent pain that characterized common headaches I had, pain which would last for days or weeks, was an indication of sinus headaches. On both counts I was quite wrong.

Whenever a migraine happens to me, I think about the word "scratch" as it's applied to horse racing. A guy in a gambling parlor reaching up to the blackboard and crossing through that particular horse with a great white X. Because if the migraine isn't that bad when it first hits, and I try to go about ordinary activities, it'll quickly become that bad, and the day is inevitably going to be shot. I can't function under the migraine. Whatever I had planned for that day goes out the window.

Perhaps the cruelest aspect of how migraines present for me is that I can't read with them, but I can watch TV. Sometimes I have to aim my eyes just to the side of the television, but I can still manage. MST3K is usually my go-to. Reading I can't do at all. It's too painful. For me to be "sick" and not able to read is fucking O. Henrian.

On Saturday morning I woke up fully in the grip of a migraine with intense vertigo. It was horrible to continue lying down, so I went to my computer, but reading from the screen made it worse. I sat in my red chair, trying not to close my eyes for longer than a few seconds, until Matt got up and I told him he'd have to do my errands without me. The rest of the day I spent watching MST, staring into space, and sleeping a little bit once the vertigo eased enough for me to recline on the couch. (Sleep is the only cure for a migraine that I know of.) It backed off by millimeters over the course of the day, enough for me to be able to keep my mind on a conversation by the evening, but yeah, the day was scratched. A lost day. No reading, no writing, no Facebook, no work.

That night I was lying in bed, waiting for sleep, when an idea bloomed in my mind. To be specific, it was the central plot line for the second Highbinder book. Not fully formed, but so perfect, so laden with conflict and adorned with puzzle-piece edges that will fit into other plot machinations, that I wanted to yank out my brain and give it a sloppy kiss. I got up and took a page of notes, and then went back to bed with my mind racing, adding all kinds of detail onto the chassis. Eventually I had to take some valerian to go to sleep.

I've been entertaining a passel of little ideas for the sequels since January, when I finished Highbinder, but none of them has stuck very well. This is the first Big Idea I've had, and I'm ridiculously grateful for it.

I couldn't help but think that the reason the idea finally came to me was that I made space for it. I spent an hour just looking at the ceiling on Saturday, waiting for the pressure to loosen. I didn't consume anything that wasn't already familiar - no internet essays, no books. Just MST, so comforting in its same-but-different-ness.

I don't think it's possible to read too many books, but I do think I've been generally consuming too much lately. I read a factoid sometime last year that the average American takes in more information in an average day than the average person would consume in a lifetime two centuries ago. I don't know how much truth there is to that (or how you'd begin to determine it, or even if I've got it wrong), but it all does seem overwhelming from time to time. I had hoped that reading widely and ravenously from places like Slate and the New York Times and all the blogs I follow would grant me a more diverse mind, dig me a deeper well of ideas. But I think lately I've just been overfilling my head. Lesson learned: sometimes you need an unasked-for day of space for the well-water to stay fresh.

Incidences

For nearly all of my stories and for some of my books, I've conceived and executed the whole thing. Characters, story, descriptions, themes, etc etc, up to and including putting words on the page and then (of course) revising them. But other books I've talked over with Matt until we're both hoarse. In some of these cases, he's given me central ideas, ideas without which the project would not exist. I've told him repeatedly that I feel guilty taking these ideas and putting my name only on the book, but he tells me that he can't write the damn thing, and what good are his ideas without the writer who does all the work?

My guilt persists. This weekend we talked for over an hour on the wikibook (as it shall now be known), because I was brainstorming and wanted to know if certain technology ideas I had were feasible. The information and ideas he gave me in the course of this conversation may (or may not) end up being pivots on which the plot turns. Like, they're his ideas, his plot. Doesn't he deserve some credit for that other than a thank-you in acknowledgements that no one reads?

What do you think? Where does authorship start and end?

On Sunday night I watched L.A. Confidential for the 1800th time, and man, it just never is anything but brilliant in every gesture, every moment. The reason I loved it most this time was how character-driven it is. One of the most recent times I watched it, it dawned on me how hard it is to create three main characters who are superficially alike but thoroughly different underneath without turning them into broad sketches. It's a difficult balance and I'm always impressed by it. This time around it was inspiring to see just how much character drove the plot - how intertwined character and motivation were, and how characteristics slotted in to make plot developments fresh (if not surprising per se), moving, and easy to comprehend.

That's how I want to write. It's harder on character Z that X event happens because he has characteristic Y, and the reader knows it in an instant because Z has been developed so well. I attempted that in Highbinder, but I think it was a little rudimentary, and I had a lot fewer moving pieces there than L.A. Confidential does. (A GM assembly line has fewer moving pieces than L.A. Confidential does.)

Incidentally, while watching I found myself thinking of The Black Dahlia and realizing that part of the reason it failed so spectacularly at being a good movie was that it was trying to be the next L.A. Confidential. Which was a dumb thing to do. Also incidentally, I just saw Guy Pearce in Iron Man 3 last weekend, and he looks not a molecule different now than he did 15 years ago. Whatever he's using, I want some.

Today I went to the L.A. County Museum of Art to see the Kubrick exhibit. I also took a quick walk around the modern art gallery and saw all kinds of wonderful stuff. They have a Rothko, which I sat and looked at for a little while. I had a freaky transcendental experience in the Rothko gallery at the Tate Modern about ten years ago, and ever since then I've been a fan.

This is the one I saw, White Center, 1957. 

Incidentally (again!), if you choose to go to LACMA - and you should, it's a wonderful museum - set aside a considerable period of time to get there and back. I've been down into the city a handful of times for various things since we moved here (exhibits, a concert, To the Wonder), and this was by far the worst experience I've had with it. Nevertheless, I had such a wonderful time looking at Hollywood (the district) outside my car windows. There's so much to see on every block. I'd want to live there if it didn't have such a vacant, sad, dangerous feeling in the air.

KUFC (New, with Parkour Action!)

On Wednesday, I wrote this:

I guess I pictured that those ubiquitous kickass book-cover chicks would be parkouring all over a sooty Gotham with explosively powerful crossbows. In fact, yes, that's exactly what I pictured when I thought of "urban fantasy". 

After reading my post, Matt messaged me and said "You should just write this book." I joked back that I totally should. And then I thought about it for another day and the joke part sort of faded.

This is concept art from Diablo III (and has some of the problems of fantasy figures of women) (PUT HER DAMN HAIR BACK), but this is sort of what I picture. Only...steampunk. Oh yes: steampunk crossbow parkour chick. I'm giddy with the awesomeness, and 95% committed to writing this book.

I toyed with several central ideas, but over the course of the weekend I finally settled on one that I like, not involving demons or vampires or werewolves as the main enemy, and giving my chick a backstory that makes the skin crawl. I also went to Barnes & Noble and picked up a dozen books with kickass urban fantasy chicks (KUFCs) on the covers, reading the backs, putting them down again. I very much doubt that they were all the same on the inside, I give published writers more credit than that, but they all seemed the same from the back covers. I bought the first Anita Blake book, because I think you could make the case that that's where all this came from, and a book called Under Wraps about a demon hunter in San Francisco, and Plague Town, which really doesn't have much to do with all this but which Steve Saffel talked up a lot at the PPWC. A day later, when I settled on steampunk, I went back and bought Ganymede.

See, because I haven't actually read that much of this stuff. Particularly steampunk - I've read one steampunk short story to date, and it stank so much that I figured it was just an art that I'd enjoy visually from here on out. (It was that bad.) And although I've read all the Sookie books, I haven't read any KUFC books, or any real urban fantasy in the new wave - I've read Neverwhere and nearly all of the anthology I mentioned the other day and short stories in Weird Tales and the like, but no novels in the zeitgeist, and not much that resembles what I want to write.

Recent events, though, have made me debate internally whether this is a bad thing. Most of my grounding as a writer comes from non-commercial fiction. I haven't read many of the books that establish the rules of engagement for writing stories about fairies and elves and robots, so I tend to break them without realizing it. I have always believed (through significant insecurity, of course) that this makes for better work, because when you don't feel compelled to play by a certain set of rules, you wind up with more original ideas. Ask any entrepreneur. If you can't find what you want to use or own or read, do it yourself, and someone will probably like it the way it is.

I thought that this potential originality made up a little bit for the confusion faced by readers who are expecting some particular thing and instead get something else with different rules. But recently I've gone back and forth about that. I still don't want my work to be formulaic, but I do want it to get sold. And there's no way around the basic problem of not knowing my market.

My conclusion for right now is to sketch out the fundaments of my KUFC idea before reading all the books I bought the other day, and then read them to see how the details are done. This was the same thing I did with my Greenland book - I wrote a lot of it, and complained to Matt about how hard it is to build a world underground, and he told me to read Homeland, and I did, and it helped with the detail and with addressing the illogical aspects of living underground. I was really glad I didn't read it first, though, because it would have skewed and influenced stuff that it shouldn't've, and made the work less my own.

Anyway. Matt points out that the Marilyn book will take a lot longer than this KUFC one, so I should write this one first. I'm happy to take that advice. Anything that delays the Marilyn book. I also have a couple of short stories on the brain: one literary based on a nightmare I had, one slipstream that will help me clear some emotional chaff out of my life. Or so I hope. And we have to pack all of our stuff THIS WEEK and get ready to live in a completely empty house for another week. Yippee. At least that'll be a week to get a lot of reading done whilst sitting on the cold hard floor.

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.

The Tarnish of Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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