My Week in Backstory

Hi, here's a post that's backstory on the things that went live this week. It's helping me procrastinate on two essays I'm scared to write. Yay! 

Queen Mob's Teahouse published an essay I assembled from the work of five different writers: me, Lucas Mann, David Shields, David Foster Wallace, and Kate Durbin. This piece started out as a book review of Mann's book, Captive Audience, a memoir on reality TV, but I got really, really carried away. I took angry notes in the margins of his book and when I started typing quotes from him into the Word doc I had set up for the review, I couldn't stop. Somewhere in there I realized I needed help if I was going to critique the book as thoroughly as I wanted to. So it became a collage. Shields, from whose 1996 book I took some of my material, also blurbed Mann's book positively. 

Although the book did make me angry, it also baffled me - so far was it from the values I live within that I sometimes had to stop and squint to make sense of what Mann had written. If he was putting on a more-filtered-than-usual writer's persona for the book, rather than telling the unvarnished truth, the whole thing would make more sense - but it didn't read that way to me. It read as honest, if bizarre. 

I don't feel perfectly good about taking aim at a fellow writer this way, but the book felt that irresponsible to me, was that infuriating. I still don't understand how an examined, educated life can reasonably include reality TV, which exploits and exposes and never enlightens, and I don't understand how Mann can reasonably write what strives to be a memoir of an examined life and not acknowledge the other side of what he's endorsing. 

Also this week, the Rumpus published an interview I conducted with Elissa Washuta in which I talked about some things I rarely talk about - why I never cry, for example - and some things I talk about constantly - women's glossies, for example. I emailed Washuta initially because I've been wanting to have a conversation with her since I read My Body Is a Book of Rules, which I didn't fully understand but which I knew was important. She mentioned on Twitter some months ago that she was looking for promotion for Starvation Mode when it came out in paperback. 

When I reached out to her, I had no idea where I was going to send the resulting interview. Once we were both working on the interview, I pitched a few places (pies in the sky, mostly), but they either ignored me or turned me down. Time grew short, so I reached out to the Rumpus, with whom I have kind of a flexible, friendly relationship. I didn't know that Elissa had previously been on staff at the Rumpus, so I wasn't exactly reaching new audiences with her words by placing it there, which makes me feel bad, that I couldn't put it someplace that would help her more (and stupid for not researching this). I cherish the Rumpus and what it does, of course - I owe a great deal of my current reputation and workload to what it and its editors have given me, and the chances they've taken on me, and I will never stop pointing that out - but it would have brought me (and Elissa too, I think) a new line on the CV to appear in BOMB instead. 

Anyway. All possible credit to Elissa and Monet P. Thomas, the new Rumpus interviews editor, for helping this interview to be something special. Which I think it is. 

Also also this week, Submittable put one of my reviews in its newsletter. I had no idea this would happen until I opened the newsletter, and I was shocked to find my own words there. 

I read this newsletter closely every week, and it gives me all kinds of great leads and information, so I am honored and very pleased. Here's the review they're referring to, of Night Moves, by Jessica Hopper. I loved the book, even if it put the song of the same name into my head intermittently for months. University of Texas Press is doing remarkable work, very little like the average scholarship-oriented university press, and I recommend keeping an eye on them as you would a regular indie press. 

In other news - and I'm kind of burying the lede, if you live in LA - I'm reading this Saturday at the Poetic Research Bureau, a terrific little place in Chinatown, with two artists who are much fancier than I am. Here's the Facebook event if you want to RSVP. I am genuinely thrilled and I hope to see you there. I'll bring chapbooks. I owe this good fortune to Kate Durbin and to this t-shirt made of V.C. Andrews book covers. No foolin'. 

Getting Underwater

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sigh.

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

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

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

What It Is I Know Not

This is a great song for those hours of the morning that just slip away while you catch up with what you missed on the internet the night before. You're welcome.

Funny story. I got some shocking but useful feedback on Highbinder a few weeks ago, and one bit of information I couldn't reconcile was about me mentioning 1930s movie stars in the early chapters of the book. My reader said that he found this confusing and odd. I talked it through with Matt, and at length I realized that I was myopic about what these references meant. To me, movie stars are signposts, references that help me determine when and where I am. To others, that's not so at all. They might appear to be name-checking to no purpose, or deliberately confusing, rather than orienting the reader, which is what I intended.

I laughed about this for a long time, because that is what comes of being too obsessed with cinema for one's own good - feeling like, well, mentioning Garbo is helpful, because her American career was at its height in the 30s. How could that not be helpful? If, unlike me, the average person doesn't think about Garbo in any given week, it's not helpful. It's actually the opposite of helpful. Well, now I know.

This is Garbo. For me, the question is really how you can not think of her in any given week. 

--

Recent reads include Toni Morrison's Jazz, Sharon Olds' Stag's Leap, and Mary Gaitskill's Don't Cry.

Jazz: I don't know. I feel unqualified to talk about Morrison's books. I felt the same way after this as after Beloved: WTF was that? Did I like it? Am I supposed to feel white guilt? Am I supposed to feel rapture? I have no idea. It was Something, but what it was I know not.

Stag's Leap: Whoooooo. If you've ever been in a relationship that has ended (and duh, who hasn't?), these poems will bring up some stuff. What a gutsy, straightforward, marvelous collection. Even a little fun at times.

Don't Cry: Er...reply hazy. I don't think I got some of the stories, or perhaps I didn't like them. Others I liked a lot, even loved. She definitely has a grip on language that is entirely her own. Reminds me of George Saunders in a way - they don't write very much alike, but they do both write quite idiosyncratically. This made me want to read more of her work in the hope of understanding it better, which I guess is a positive reaction.

I also did a bit of reading of early Joan Didion from Slouching Towards Bethlehem. A very small bit, just a couple of essays, and I enjoyed them. I've read two? three? of her books and have not yet liked her work over the long haul, but I've put her collected essays on my Amazon wish list anyway in the hope that I will come to my senses.

Up next is A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan and a book of poetry by a fellow named Erik Campbell, whose poems (these poems, in fact) I read in Prairie Schooner and loved enough to buy his book, and then maybe I'll get back to some genre reading. I like switching back and forth between genre and literary, and it's growing easier to figure out when it's time to do so - I'm getting to know the signs of becoming exasperated with one set of characteristics or the other.

--

Last week was physically challenging for me, so I did a lot of lazing around and feeling impotent. I read (obviously) and I watched MST and I did crosswords, in between resting. Real work was actually impossible for a lot of that time and seemed impossible later on.

I'm putting together a short story in my head, about two women, but I haven't opened up my notebook just yet except to take notes. There's work I could probably be doing on the wikibook but I am not doing it. After a big 4,500-word release on that project, I haven't done anything else but notes and thinking, and I don't know if it's because I'm still in the Let's Fuck Around For A Few Months Before Getting Down To Business stage of the book or if I'm in the No, I've Gotten Started stage and I'm just completely denying that I need to do any work on it at all for the book to spring magically into existence.

In either circumstance, I need to work on it. Don't I end my blog posts with that imperative a lot?

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.

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.

Genuinely Weird and Totally Awesome

I'm about to hit 55,000 words on the horror novel, and while I'm pleased with its direction, and with some of the individual paragraphs and sentences and whatnot, I'm not sure whether it'll be an utter mess when I'm done with the first draft. I had a meandering talk with Matt yesterday about the spot where I was blocked (until I wrote through it, yay for me), and that brought me to the realization that there are a bunch of different ways I could make this universe work. He is the best devil ever to advocate, so I went down one leafy green path with him before discovering that it wasn't my original intention, and then went down another one while he listened and asked more questions, and then another. I think it might have made him a little nuts, but it was certainly helpful for me.

I wrote a segment yesterday about a couple of my main characters getting high. (On the maryjane.) I am telling you the truth when I say that I have never been high. So even before I put together a complete draft, I'm going to need to beg indulgence from somebody so I can find out if I wrote these few paragraphs properly. It's not with zero knowledge that I cobbled this section together, but certainly it lacks personal experience. I feel a little stupid and extremely square that I have to ask someone else, "Is this more or less what it's like to be high?", but there it is. Someone will probably write to suggest that I just get high myself and find out, but I'm not really interested.

I'm reading Infinite Jest, I think I mentioned a few posts back. I woke up too early the other morning after unsettling, unremembered dreams and I went downstairs and read it for an hour or two. I am on page fifty-eight. I said this proudly to Matt when he came downstairs, and pointed out that I was already an eighteenth of the way through the book. (To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure how I'll get through it, or when.) I should have learned the lesson that it's not a good idea to get too heavily into a piece of fiction while you're working on a piece of your own, because the last few chapters of the Greenland book were a tad too Austen-y for their genre due to what I was doing during breaks in the work. But I figure that a little more David Foster Wallace in any given piece of fiction can't really hurt. And it's long past time for me to have read this book.

Today is a day that I'll get the chance to do all three of my jobs, along with my fourth, unpaid one: I taught yoga this morning, I've got a couple of copy-editing tasks to do and turn in, and I've got something to edit with my paralegal hat on. When I'm finished with that, I'm going to work on the novel some more. I wake up and go to bed feeling lucky every day, now, but I don't say to myself often enough how genuinely weird and totally awesome my life is in its new configuration.

Apropos of nothing:

It's from a series of eight which I love utterly. I want to contact the artist and ask him if he'll do mini-prints for me that I can frame, but I have no idea how much I'd pay him for something like that and therefore whether I can afford it, so it seems foolish to ask.

OKAY THAT'S ENOUGH PROCRASTINATING. I have to get to work. Ooh, it's almost time for lunch!

Writing from the Brain Stem

I had some really good news yesterday as regards writing, but its specifics are going to have to wait. It hurts me more than it hurts you.

Today I have the following plans: take car in for oil change and painful gouging alignment/brakes fixing, possibly get haircut, and write short story. I mentioned that I came up with an idea last week at yoga class, and seeing as it's been marinating a week with only a couple of paragraphs actually put on the page, I think it's time for me to stop procrastinating and write the damn thing. I'm intimidated by it, though, because it feels like the successor to my most successful story to date, and I don't want to fuck it up. Worrying about that before it's on the page is bound to do nothing but paralyze, but there it is.

I also really must go back to Greenland. My cousin-in-law is doing NaNoWriMo, and as I watch her page count climb via Facebook, I start to feel ashamed that I've stalled at 59,000 words for my own novel. I'm just a couple of scenes away from the end of the middle third of the book, and I'm incredibly uncertain that the third third should go the way that I've intended it to go for the last five years of having the book in mind. I feel like that last third could go a number of other ways, and I feel...scrambly, like I'm running out of time and should be putting together an outline or just a plan of some kind, hurry quick before it's too late. (This is a total fallacy, because as I sit here and don't write it only becomes less urgent for me to come up with the ending.)

But the best ending I think I've ever devised, for the science fiction novella I wrote a couple of years ago, was a complete and utter surprise right up to the fateful sentences. I had no idea that was how the book ended until I wrote it. So I'm trying to kind of stay loose with the ending of this one, to write through it and just see what happens. Maybe not the smartest solution, but my anxiety about it isn't going to magic a plot out of thin air.

Maybe brainstorming would be of use. Jot some possible endings (or all possible endings I can think of), just to put them in my mind, so my writing-brain can draw on them on the point of writing it all.

The writing-brain. That's a useful concept. I believe both that stories come from somewhere, from an interdimensional muse, and come from the hard work of kneading through one word at a time. A lot of the time I'm writing through the Fictator, through the me that plunks down one word at a time, painfully, Frank Conroy-style. But some of the time I'm writing in that zone of nowhere, through the me that composes sentences and paragraphs without even consulting the Fictator and has no anxiety or procrastination in her heart at all.