Lydia Netzer

Lost Saints of Tennessee by Amy Franklin-Willis

2012-03-03T10:33:00.001-08:00

Lost Saints of Tennessee is the story of Ezekiel Cooper, a man in his forties, driven to the brink of suicide by the death of his twin brother, ten years ago. It's a book that surprised me with its heart and its raw emotion. You must not miss the suicide scene that comes early in the book. I don't want to give too much away but it's in no way what you expect.

Amy Franklin-Willis has set herself the daunting task of drawing out a good old boy from Tennessee, divorced, working at a factory, taciturn, connected only to his old dog and his truck, into the lovable and believable narrator of his own story. It's a story of loss, betrayal, and bitterness in the past, despair in the present, and the possibility of a new chance at life in the future. She does it majestically -- portraying love without sentimentality, grief without mawkishness, hope without artifice. I can't remember when I have connected on such an emotional level to a male character written by a female author.

Maybe not since Water for Elephants has a male character been so moving. Lost Saints in Tennessee is authentic, deep, and true. A heartbreaking story of the realities of loneliness and the power of brotherly love.

I got the chance to ask Amy a few questions about the craft choices she made in her novel. I loved learning about how the novel came about -- some early narrators that dropped away and the process of opening up her main character in a way that would be true to his personality and still support narrating an entire novel. Here are her answers:

LN: You wrote from the point of view of a narrator who is not really a talker, by his own confession and as evidenced by his behavior in the novel. How did you go about finding a speaking/writing/narrating voice for this character who is so taciturn and so guarded?

AFW: Zeke's voice was a real challenge for me in the first year or two of writing the book. He is so shut down when the story begins that in writing his story, I really had to go back to his childhood and meet him then to get to know the man he became. Earlier versions of the story included a lot more of the "past storyline" which allowed me to see Zeke as a happy young boy, full of promise and connected to his twin brother, to understand the devastation he feels as an adult when Carter drowns.

For me, some of the best lines Zeke utters are the two times he uses the f-word in the novel. In both cases, he is at a break-point, a place where he must either stay in the Loserville he's been hanging out in for 10 years or DO something. Zeke's primary companion in the early sections of the book is the dog Tucker. He was not originally in the book but he provides much needed humor and connection for Zeke in the story. You can see the goodness in Zeke through how he interacts with Tucker. What people say can be so far from what they actually do or who they are. With Zeke, you almost only have his actions to take the measure of his character. But it took me years to find the right balance of insight into Zeke and action on the page because I'm not a big fan of books that are only in the character's head.

LN: One thing I really loved was how this prickly, locked-up character took a whole novel to warm up to telling us the question that haunts the novel from the beginning, and it takes another character's prodding to drag it out of him. So instead of feeling like you as the author were keeping a secret, it genuinely felt like the narrator was developing the ability to talk about it more as the book went on. Can you talk a bit about the decision to put that final reveal in dialogue?

AFW: In Lost Saints, I think one of the things I was trying to explore was the notion of how a person can be pulled back from the edge of disaster or despair by another person or being. The guilt Zeke's been toting around for ten years finally gets let loose through his confession of what he regards as his own unspeakable sin. But he has to tell someone, the secret has to be shared in order to lift the burden from his shoulders.

LN: The book is told in three sections -- the first and third from Ezekiel's point of view, and the second from his mother's. Did you always know that you would give Lillian her own voice in the novel? At what point did you decide to include a section where she could tell her story?

AFW: I originally wrote Lost Saints with three narrators--Zeke, Lillian & Moses Washington. After a draft or two, I realized Moses had to go as a narrator--though I think he's got enough in him for his own novel. The primary writing challenges I had with this book were structural. Once I narrowed the narrators down to Zeke and Lillian, I had to figure out how their voices should be heard.

I experimented with going back and forth between chapters, or having the time shift change from past to "current" in each chapter, and none of it felt right. I was aiming for this seamless world for the reader, where you stepped in on page one and none of the writing work showed--it was just a story told as compellingly as I could make it. With all the shifting around of voice and time, it felt choppy to me. And as a reader, I can get annoyed when I start feeling close to a character and then the author takes me into another character.I finally settled on the three-part structure for the book because it honestly seemed like the only way to tell the story. By putting Zeke's voice first, I felt like the reader was on a blind date with Zeke. You get introduced in Part One, you learn some of his history, you meet some of his family. Part Two is when things start getting serious. You meet his mother. You hear her side of Zeke's childhood story, which offers perspective Zeke can't give you. Part Three brings back Zeke's voice and now you know enough about him to understand some of the choices he's made and to be just a bit annoyed, perhaps, by his stubborn refusal to forgive his mother.

Lillian's voice was one of those "taking dictation from God" kind of characters for me. Some of the scenes in her chapters are almost as I wrote them in first draft form. And I certainly can't say that about the rest of the book. I'm not sure where her voice came from but as I moved through the book, I began to think about my maternal grandmother. She, like Lillian, got pregnant when she was 15, married at 15, and had seven children by her mid-twenties. My grandmother had her fair share of tragedy as well. Through writing Lillian's story, I gained some empathy for my grandmother, whom I recall as an odd and distant person. My mother, who turns 70 this year, told me recently that her mother never told her that she loved her. Not once. And she lived into her early 80's. Hard to fathom.

My recommendation: go get Lost Saints of Tennessee and see how it all comes together.

The Future of Publishing: A Meditation on the Purging of VHS Tapes

2012-02-20T07:21:00.000-08:00

Recently we moved.

Goodbye, friends. Imma download you.

Instead of wisely and slowly sifting through our possessions first, and taking only what we wanted to keep, we paid movers to pack everything into boxes and bring it here, to the new house, where we would dutifully sort as we unpacked. We moved in a hurry. Living in that old house after our new one was bought seemed like continuing to live with that guy you've broken up with already, just because you had a lease together. And moving things bit by bit in an orderly fashion to the new house was like surreptitiously trying to date someone new at the same time you're still living with that guy. Even though it's not really cheating, you still sneak. And because you're not Jennifer Aniston and he's not Vince Vaughn, you don't end up falling back in love, you just move out at the end of the lease, and it's not funny, it's just awkward. And you forget everything that was in the bathroom, and you don't go back for it.

Anyway, we moved.

In the mountain of stuff we no longer want that is now sitting grumpily in our new house, there are a mazillion VHS tapes. These are objects that should have been purged years ago. We haven't watched any of them since we moved the last time. We don't even have a VCR connected to our TV. If we did hook up a VCR, and managed to remember what the button "Rewind" does, I guarantee the tapes would look awful in 1080 resolution. It's at a point with these VHS tapes that I don't even think the Salvation Army wants them. I don't think anyone wants them. But every time we began to hustle them into bags to push them out the door, we got all oogly about it. Here's our copy of "The Long Kiss Goodnight," which we watched and rewound several times. Here's "Household Saints," one of the first movies I ever owned. "Welcome Home Roxy Carmichael." "Go." "Four Rooms." "Sweetie." Here's that copy of "City of Lost Children" that was almost impossible to get. "Evita." Shut up, I have the whole thing memorized. I have a romantic attachment to these objects -- they remind me of when we were younger, poorer, and dumber, when I was working at a 1/2 porn video store during graduate school, when our TV was small and given to fits of rage instead of large and austere and firmly in control of itself.

So I put them, all, ruthlessly in the trash. I kept the ultrasound videos from my kids. I kept a couple of other personal things. But anything that I can get on DVD or download, I tossed.

Then I had a horrifying thought. AM I DOING THAT THING THAT PEOPLE DO WHEN THEY ARE LIKE, "OH, WHATEVER, BOOKS ARE PASSE, I HAVE MY WHOLE LIBRARY RIGHT HERE IN THIS ELECTRONIC THINGER." Shudder.

This was not the cover.
But I wish it had been.
Because this cover's badass.

I have a romantic attachment to my books too. But I don't need to tell you that. You know I have the first paperback edition of Moby Dick I read in high school, with all my scrawled little teenaged marginal notes. You know I have the Candide I got in college, the used Italo Calvino I got in Milan, all my signed copies of friends' books, including stuff you can't hardly find ever like My Horse and Other Stories by Stacey Levine and You're a Bad Man Aren't You by Susannah Breslin. I like books. I have a lot. And I will never, ever, ever get rid of them. EVER.

But will my children? Will their children? Will publishing really change forever like everyone is saying it will, so that we'll all be walking around in future times with retinal projectors that allow us to store small libraries behind our ear drums and books will seem dumb like VCRs and twisty knobs on televisions, and jello molds? If I throw away these tapes, will I tomorrow throw away my Gormenghast novels? With the same reckless abandon? Will I?

Moment of panic. Moment of almost pulling those VHS tapes back out of the trash. Then, relief.

Here's what I realized. Books are not like VHS. They're not like DVDs or film canisters or analog recordings or vinyl. You can't say "Well, I can get my books on my Kindle" just like you can say "Well, I can get my songs on my iPod." They're not like that. Here's what they're really like: Theater. Live concerts. You can make them work just with your eyes. You can make all the parts function just by looking at them. It's not a product, it's an entertainment. It's not an object, it's an experience. An experience you can collect, and keep in pretty rows, and share, and and have again and again. And then I felt much better.

I felt better because not only did I NOT have to keep all those VHS tapes, and not only did I NOT have to get rid of all my books and start buying up eBooks on Google, but this: publishers are going to be okay. They really are. Call me Pollyanna or a crack addict or in denial or call me ignorant but here's what I'm saying: Books aren't going anywhere.

Things may change, in publishing. E-books rise. Paperbacks fall. Publishers will try fetishizing, and niche marketing, and different production models. Fine. But people will still go to the theater. People will still go to live music shows. And people are still going to have books, want books, read books, hoard books, dive into books, and love books. Believe it.

Some of my favorite books.

A Visit from Joshilyn Jackson

2012-02-19T05:39:00.000-08:00

My excellent friend and NYT bestselling author Joshilyn Jackson was in town this weekend for a visit and some book events promoting her awesome new book, A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty! We have been friends since graduate school, but since we normally go away together to hole up in the mountains and write, we have not seen each other's children in forever. It was very nice to have her here and witness my actual life when I'm not stuffing sticks into my hair and foaming at the mouth in the middle of novel production. The children loved her. The dog loved her. She saw my new house. She saw my old house. And there was rejoicing.

We started out in Richmond at The Woman's Club. Joshilyn did a talk and Q&A hosted by Fountain Bookstore. Here she is talking:

Here we are in the bathroom, wondering what's in that abandoned glass on the counter:

Here's Joshilyn with fantastic bookseller Kelly Justice from Fountain Bookstore:

And here we are afterward at the British pub around the corner, eating sausage rolles, Cornish pasties, and absolutely dreadful fish that was full of bones and fail:

Finally, here's Joshilyn at her reading at Prince Books in Norfolk. This morning she rolled out in her orange car to travel back to Atlanta. I miss her already!

Pure by Julianna Baggott

2012-02-07T21:35:00.000-08:00

Pure is brutal, layered, and new. Its world is bleak and strange, its characters are flawed, complicated, beautiful, and damned, every single one of them. This book is highly original, with a plot you could never predict and a climax you'll never see coming. You have not read a book like this -- you may think you have, but this is different.

Reviewers are comparing Pure to The Hunger Games. Alright, let's talk about that. I've read The Hunger Games. At the base of it, the idea is simple: People are cruel. War is hell. Power corrupts. Compelling engines, but not exactly ripping the lid off anything new. A spunky heroine takes on the cruel world. This is familiar.

Pure explodes more interesting questions. Where does humanity begin and end? What is absolute ruin, beyond which point you cannot be saved? and what does redemption look like, for people beyond that point? Where is the point of no return? What happens after that? These characters have no precedent -- they're not salvageable, they can't be cleaned up and put right or dressed properly and put in a parade, and that's what makes them so interesting. Meet Pressia, who has a doll head fused to her hand, so it is part of her. Meet Bradwell, who has living birds embedded in his back. Meet El Capitan, whose brother Helmud is permanently affixed to him in a life-and-death piggy-back ride. They cannot be extricated. Since it cannot end well for these characters, how will it end?

Baggott takes every question too far, and then asks it anyway. She's got her fist around a full throttle and she's burning every drop of gas in the tank. I have absolute respect for the scope of her vision, I'm totally obsessed with these fascinating characters, and I can't believe I have to wait so long to read the next book in the series.

***

I met Julianna Baggott in person at ABA Winter Institute. I had been a fan since my son decided her The Ever Breath was a stay-up-all-night must-read during a time he was only reading books about space. So after I finished reading Pure, I sent her an email with the one burning question I was dying to ask. Here's the question and her response.

Lydia: My favorite character was El Capitan. He is so original, so complicated. He had my full attention from the first time he came on the scene. Talk to me about the evolution of this guy. Did he emerge from your imagination as fused with his brother -- was that the beginning of the idea of his character? When did his backstory come to you? Did you always know that Helmud would be on some level separately sentient or did that happen during the writing? I'm so interested in how these layers evolved and how he came to be... anything you can share about your process in creating him, without giving too much away?

Julianna: I was a small child. Abnormally small and the youngest of four kids. And so I was always hoisted on shoulders, piggybacked. I complained to my mother that the other kids in kindergarten were always picking me up. I was the smallest in my school for years. I remember when I finally got ONTO the doctor's charts at all, as undersized. A real feat. My 16 year old daughter will now often walk up to me and instead of a hug, she'll pick me right up off the ground. I also grew up in the era of doubling people on the backs of bikes, on handle bars. There were packs of kids all over the place and we rode in packs on bikes and someone was always short a bike. I was the one on the back of the bike, never strong enough to peddle.

In other words, I was, in fact, Helmud, El Capitan's younger brother, the one who was fused to him when the Detonations hit, while he was doubling Helmud on the back of his motorbike. El Capitan is doomed to carry his brother for the rest of his life. I'm that brother. El Capitan loves his brother and is deeply burdened by him. This is how I was raised -- by my siblings at least -- sometimes cute sometimes a terrible burden.

I love El Capitan. He began for me as purely evil. He had no point of view. But as soon as he showed up eating a tin of chicken, his brother bobbing over his shoulder, I felt for him. Once he started having his own voice, I was in. No characters in the novel surprised me more than El Capitan.

Pressia with her doll-head fist came first to my mind, along with Our Good Mother, fused to her child. In fact, Our Good Mother may have come first. The fusings, in general, come in large part from having offspring -- oddly named, because in those early years, they don't spring off. They are Velcro-ed to the body, attached, fused. Partridge was next. Bradwell, too. He's Marquez-influenced. I had the concept of Beasts, Dusts, and Groupies wandering the scorched earth, and I wanted a groupie as an important set of characters. He' ain't heavy; he's my brother... Yeah, I know the song. Not well, but those lines are there in my head.

It felt like the quintessential story of brothers -- literally bound. I wanted to explore that relationship and then, of course, Helmud surprised me greatly, and, of course, El Capitan's response to his brother's surprise was completely and absolutely natural. (I think is what you meant by "without giving much away.")

The fact is that I can't write a character who's purely evil -- not if I get into their point of view. I don't know anyone who thinks they're the evil in the world. El Capitan is a strong character, a survivor, a protector, and as I got to know him, I learned how very, very tender he is.

I'm deep into book II edits, FUSE, and looking closely at this relationship. I love them both. But of the two, yes, I'm Helmud. No doubt about it.

***

Thank you, Julianna, for that window into your head. I recommend Pure for the kid that loved The Hunger Games and wants more, or for the adult that's ready for smart post-apocalyptic fiction with more of a purpose than just grossing you out.

Luminarium by Alex Shakar : A Master Class in Craft

2012-01-01T09:29:00.000-08:00

Alex Shakar's August 2011 release, Luminarium, is a wildly cerebral novel about two twins: George, in a coma, and Fred, in a mad quest to awaken his twin. The quest takes him to eastern religion, virtual worlds, Manhattan and Disney World, and through a series of encounters with a god helmet. Apart from being an interesting, engaging, and original book, Luminarium presents some good lessons in craft for writers.

Lesson #1: Where to Begin and Where to End

Every character's real story begins with his birth and ends with his death. Lots of stuff happens in between in this life -- ups and downs, conflicts, and tragedies -- all potential centerpieces for the plot of a novel about this character. The job of the writer is to determine where exactly to begin, and where to end. This is a huge, tricky, and monumentally important question, and Shakar navigates it perfectly in this book. Fred Brounian, the main character, is a man whose situation is already bad at the beginning of the book, and gets rapidly worse as the book progresses. But there were plenty of conflict-ridden, interesting, plot-filled bits that Shakar could have included, instead of starting it where he did. He could have started when Fred's twin got his cancer diagnosis, or when their virtual reality company was taken over by a military software company. He could have started when Fred's marriage went down the toilet, or he could have started before any of that happened, when life was good and Fred and George were on top of the world.

By choosing to frame the story with Fred's first experience in the clinical trial of a god helmet, and ending -- well, I won't tell you, but it'll make sense when you get there, Shakar puts a very logical box around a set of material that is basically an giant octopus on crack, in terms of scope and manageability. With material this weird and chaotic, there's no need to make the timeline strange. So by starting with session one, and using the recurring test sessions as a scaffolding, he's helping himself and the reader get a handle on it. Not only is this decision structurally sound, but it's thematically perfect, because the real nadir of Fred's experience is there, in the sessions, and what subsequently happens to his brain.

Lesson #2: It's Got To Bleed

Dear Male Writers of the World,

If you want me to love a book, you have to make me love a character. I think it's awesome that you have ideas and stuff, and that you are willing to put your characters through hell, but here's a clue: I don't care what you put your characters through if they're little machines created to illustrate your idea, and nothing more.

Love,
LYDIA

Luminarium is a complex, cerebral book that takes on eastern mysticism, neuropsychology, the ethos of virtual worlds, and the nature of the human self. However, true to form, in writing this brainy book of ideas, Alex Shakar has also managed to hit that most elusive target of all: a fresh and believable depiction of true love that is neither romantic or ironic. It's heartbreaking -- viscerally, not just conceptually. And it's palpable, the love that Fred has for George, the connection between them, the frustrations between them, and by extension the love/connection/frustration that Fred has with himself, with the city of New York.

This is what a reader wants: real beauty. Real horror. Real loss and real elation. Detachment and intellectual games are ultimately forgettable. Love is not.

Writing this way is risky for an author, but Shakar wins the gamble.

Maybe the secret to his compelling originality is that the love story is not between a boyfriend and girlfriend, or husband and wife, but between a man and his twin, therefore between a man and himself. The plot arc that begins with abject self-loathing ends in a place so simultaneously inevitable and also satisfyingly unpredictable, you have to read it (to the end) to understand. There are so many layers to this love story -- the love of an author for a wounded city, the love of a man for his brother, for a woman...

This book hits a lot of my buttons -- machine sentience, god in the grid, the split self, etc. So I was kind of wired, if you will, to enjoy it. However, I respect Shakar independently of his willingness to write books I want to read. He is not one of these male writers who thinks of an idea and then makes characters like paper dolls to march around illustrating it, so that at the end you've got the idea and maybe some truth, but no sense of real pain, or loss, or beauty. These books think, but they don't bleed. Ironically, Shakar's book about avatars and virtual worlds, imagined gods and projected love, is ultimately entirely human. It laughs, it bleeds, it delivers: emotion without sentimentality, ideas without dogma, tangible love.

Confession of a Writer Full of Sin

2011-12-06T04:27:00.000-08:00

I write because I believe I am a terrible person and I want to explain.

I know I am not all terrible. But I know I am terrible in a significant percentage. I love well but I am also bad. This is true.

I used to assume I was good throughout, because who doesn't think they're good? Even though I knew philosophically the usual things about yin and yang, about mind and body, about id and superego, as a young person I never really applied the concept to myself. When I looked in the mirror, I defaulted to that magical standard of secular humanism: basic goodness of humankind. When I looked at my friends I assumed the same thing. In frowning on the concept of original sin I unconsciously embraced the equally ridiculous concept of original piety. Ridiculous maybe, but true. Everyone says: "I'm a good person."

My badness is a truth of which I have only recently become aware, and I became aware of it through writing fiction.

When I began writing, as a young person with high ideals and a halo around my head, I created stories that were smart and funny, but ultimately, fluff. They contained violence, madness, and grief, but it was a detached and dissembled darkness, a darkness at arm's length. I dabbled and was desultory. I created characters only to serve an abstraction, and plots that had no real connection to my life. A cartoon version of what suffering would look like, a pencil sketch of reality, with absurd backgrounds and farcical props. What does a good person write about, after all? Nothing that bleeds real blood. Nothing that dies actual death.

Then things happened in my life: children happened, with the accompanying pain and devotion. I fell in love for real, with the accompanying fear. My mother died, with desolation. I began to find it impossible to continue to live this life without introspection, this hysterical cartoon life of reckless assumption and convenient farce. My friends and I always used to joke that we were perpetually navel-gazing, always starting sentences with "I feel--." This may have been true, but guess what? The truth doesn't actually live in your navel along with your feelings and your boyfriends and your pets. There's someplace else, someplace that I never gazed, because I'm not one to sit in the bathtub and stare at my knees, or meditate, or ever shut up.

As I began to really grow up, I was becoming aware of an inner awfulness, in spite of myself. It's like realizing that your body isn't just a balloon with air inside, but a construct of meat and organs and fluids. A knowledge you can go on for years without recognizing, but eventually have to accept. And while there was no way I was going to sit around thinking about it, or talking about it, or god forbid understanding it, I did start writing about it, and letting it through in the work. (Parenthetical note: Several years ago, I purposefully engaged in my first real bout of introspection, and the result of it was strangely this: I like chili. I really like it. It's my favorite food. Many times, I considered starting a blog post about this, but thought it was too silly.)

So, my novel is coming out next summer. In this book, I began to present myself in a new way. There is real darkness in it, along with real love. It is funny but sad, loving but cold. It has some death in it, but also some very happy sex, and some falling in love. It has disease and terrible loss, but it also has loving parents and a birth. While the book has a lot of comedy in it, it is the first thing I've ever written that has a serious side too. A book that is revelatory in an honest way, that exposes things about me that are real.

Here's an example: I took my adopted mother off life support in 2004 and she died. Although it was medically logical and recommended by the doctors, I still feel guilty and dark about doing that. In my novel, the main character at one point, standing in a neighborhood party, considers screeching, "I FEEL BAD! I FEEL BAD THAT I PULLED THE PLUG ON MY MOTHER! I KILLED HER AND I FEEL BAD!" She thinks it in all caps. This is true, and this is me.

I worry that I am not a good enough person to be a mother. That's me. I worry that I am a shitty wife. Again, me. I'm not looking in the mirror any more. I'm not looking at anything. Instead, in writing this book I have gone crawling down to a hole that is deep inside me, a black hole surrounded by claw marks and mold. Before, I did not know that it was there. But now, I have laid myself down next to it and plunged my arms into it. In dragging up whatever writhing awful thing came to my hand, and pulling it out, and examining it, I was publicly eviscerated myself. And it really did make things better. I don't feel bad about killing my mother any more. That is actually true.

I can recognize the demons on paper better than I can recognize them in my mind. I can find the black well through writing in a way that I could never find it in real life.

Fictionalizing my inner monster led me to an important fact: this is a fine reason to write fiction. Maybe the only reason. The stuff that matters comes out of that dark, dirty well. And maybe contextualizing that stuff, and explaining it, and putting it into a narrative that makes sense not just to readers but to myself, is a decent purpose. Maybe this is the way I govern my inner animal, now that I can look in the mirror and see it, and recognize that it's there.

So it's funny and dark. It's bright and sad. It bleeds and it laughs. It's me, and this is the only way I can explain it.

Minecraft Marketing for Shine Shine Shine

2011-12-02T04:39:00.000-08:00

My son made this billboard for my book in Minecraft. Don't know what Minecraft is? It's the unholy lovechild of Lego, the Sims, Dungeons and Dragons, and Windows Paint. If your preteen isn't already obsessed with it, just wait. They will be.

We Have a Cover

2011-11-11T11:19:00.001-08:00

I have official permission to share. So here's how the cover is. A black to blue gradient with shiny foil inset stars, constellation marks, hand-drawn letters. This picture is a mock-up, with a layer of paper over foil, with the shiny bits hand cut and showing through. It is like a sonogram for the book. You can almost see it waving.

My Minecraft Obsessed Children on Halloween Night

2011-10-31T17:37:00.001-07:00

On Writing and the Real Hoodie

2011-10-30T06:01:00.000-07:00

I had this hoodie, see? And it was the only thing that would let me really write. Buried in its terry fleece depths, chewing on its strings, pushing my thumbs through the holes in its ragged cuffs, I could really let myself go into my novel like I never intended to come out. If you are a writer, you know how it goes. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. The writing, that is.

If you are not a writer, you may not realize how superstitious we writers can be about what makes it work.

Some things help you write. A smell (eucalyptus, but never flowers) or food (chicken shawarma, and always chocolate) or maybe even a particular shirt. Or hoodie. You develop favorites, and you surround yourself with them and say to your brain: "Go." In fact, these objects can become so significant to your process that you can't function without them. When this happens, then that object becomes not only helpful, not only nice to have, but "real." Like a specific perfume becomes your real perfume (West Indian Lime, Crabtree and Evelyn), a particular article of clothing, a pair of socks, a hair clip becomes your real hair clip. This happened to a t-shirt of Joshilyn's, which originated as a t-shirt of mine, many years ago. It said ROAD PONIES on the front. It became her "real" t-shirt and no other t-shirt would suffice. This is also what happened with the real hoodie. Am I getting to crazy for you? It's really not all that difficult to grasp -- it's like a uniform. It makes you feel like doing your job.

Let me put it a different way. My literary turn-ons...

In 1996: Cigarettes. Martinis. Solitude. The city.

In 2011: My real hoodie. My fantasy pants. Vicks. Limes. Sonic ice.

Things have changed. I had two kids. I can't wait on tequila and solitude. I no longer live in a big city and I no longer smoke. I needed new signals for my brain, preferably signals that do not preclude me from parenting my children when needed.

So this hoodie. It is a simple garment. A black hoodie with athletic stripes down the sides of the arms. It's not soft fleece; it's terry on the inside. I don't know when I started seeing it as my writing uniform but it happened. And then it happened so much that the thing began to deteriorate. Holes formed. Threads frayed. It was washed a zillion times and it faded. In spots. But it was still so perfect and so wonderful... I could not let it go, even though I looked absolutely insane while wearing it outside the house. A small part of my brain could see that I looked like a crazy homeless person staggering around town in this vile scrap of hoodie, but most of my brain was saying, It's fine, it's fine, it's totally fine! You need this hoodie, or else your novel is never going to be finished.

I did finish my novel (thank you, hoodie). And I happened to be in France when I finished. Maybe it was the wine, or the Seine, or the bicycles, but some perverse imp took over my brain, and I thought to myself, "If I throw out this hoodie in France, I will never be able to take it back. I won't be able to fish through the garbage or wonder about getting it back. It will be final, and I know it's the right thing to do." So I threw away the real hoodie in France. Because in the giddy aftermath of having torn the last page out of my typewriter (not really) to holler, "DONE!" I had forgotten that I would actually have to write more things, after this. For which the hoodie might come in handy. And I knew that throwing out the hoodie was the right thing to do because it was really, really awful.

Upon our return to the states, my cheerful fog parted and I realized that 1. I had to revise my novel and even write more novels and 2. I could do neither without the real hoodie.

Panic ensued. No amount of West Indian Lime or ice from Sonic or handknit socks or fantasy pants could help. I needed a replacement hoodie immediately.

I went to the store and bought half a dozen potential hoodie replacements. I knew I could not hope to find an exact duplicate, so I veered into cardigans. Maybe, I thought, I could actually find something to attach myself to that wouldn't look like shit in a week, and that I might actually be able to wear out of the house without shame. Now wouldn't that be strange?

Out of my potential hoodies, one ended up having snaps under fake buttons. Dumb, and it was also too hot. One was a very large brown sweater with shaggy snarles of yarn hanging off it all over the place, and it really seemed likely that it could become real, but no. The sleeves were too long. Not even Joshilyn could make it real, though she tried too. Maybe it was too brown. There were other failures. Too stiff, too formal, too bright, or maybe sleeves too short.

Then I found it. The magical hoodie replacement for which I had been searching. It was a cardigan, no buttons or snaps, with a foldy collar, and long sleeves but not too long. It's a thin knit, warm but not hot, and so nondescript it disappears. here I am wearing it. Can you see the cardigan? I think not:

Now the story gets really strange. This next part might make you believe in unicorns or else the sweet sweet magic of fairies. Recently I was at our summer place in Pennsylvania, and I was digging around on a seldom-used coat rack, lifting away layer after layer of old scarves, strange hats, and jackets. At the bottom of the hook, I saw something absolutely astonishing. A black hoodie, with stripes down the side. I'm not claiming that this hoodie, clearly placed here in Biblical times, was my hoodie, somehow transported back from the garbage can where I hurled it in France. I know it's not my real hoodie -- it's got no holes in it and the strings aren't chewed. In fact, it was almost pristine. A brand new, pristine, powerful writing hoodie which I now own in addition to the powerful writing cardigan that I had been cheerfully calling a hoodie for months.

So now when I go running around the house, shrieking at Dan, "WHERE IS MY REAL HOODIE? I NEED IT!" I know it's not a hoodie I'm looking for. It's the power. The power is in lime fizzy drinks, it's in pear deodorant, in bullet-shaped ice, in clumpy fur slippers. It's Dumbo's little feather. It's Mina Murray's garlic necklace in fleece terry. It's the one ring, Excalibur, and Zeus' aegis in soft, battleship grey polyester. And it's not going anywhere.

What's your talisman? Is limeade "real" for you? How about your favorite handknit socks?

Another Dead Bird

2011-10-22T14:32:00.001-07:00

My children found a dying bird in the yard today, an elderly robin that looked like it had been attacked by a hawk. It just fell down out of the sky, inches from my daughter. Of course they picked it up and made a bed for it and tried to feed it and give it what they call "care." Which... is great. Nothing says "you're going to have a lovely evening full of cheer with hardly any morbid conversations about death and the hereafter" like a dying bird on the porch. Here's the burial site:

What I like about this is that the bird's lifespan is listed as 1:00-5:00. That would be PM, as in the amount of time the bird was in my kids' possession. What came before that was not important enough to note.

Dear Cleverbot

2011-10-22T09:06:00.001-07:00

Me: "How did you change, when you became a mother?"
Cleverbot: "A friend replaced my fake brain with a real one."

Chapter 28

2011-10-22T07:01:00.001-07:00

I am in Pennsylvania, writing my new novel. Also looking at leaves on the ground, burning up an enormous amount of wood in our fireplace, and freezing.

Yesterday, I took a deep breath, after writing chapter 10, and bled out an outline for the rest of the book. I have a problem now. I know that this is a silly problem, but it is still a problem: there are 27 chapters. Which is like... three too few. In my mind, there should be 30. Or 20. Or some other number divisible by 10. Now, I can pull the prologue back out into a prologue, and then there are 28, which is the same number as Shine Shine Shine. But Shine had two too few.

Ah, mental illness. THERE you are! I was wondering when you'd stop by this weekend, to mess up my happy drafting.

Cold in Pennsylvania

2011-10-21T05:15:00.001-07:00

Last night the children were tucked into bed with both the dogs, all under their new big electric blanket. When I went to bed they were slumbering away. Then starting at 2am, this happened: 1. Sadie wanted in with me (in my tiny bed). 2. Pork Chop realized Sadie was not there and began a house search, which she repeated, with clicking nails, until I got up and got her. 3. Sadie kicked her out of bed and I got up and got her. 4. Sadie kicked her out of bed and I got up and got her. 5. Sadie... you get the idea.

And that cat is currently trying to pound down the back door. It has already consumed two thingers of Meow Mix but it says it wants in.

Being here makes me feel immersed in my new novel, which is good but bad.

Word Cloud from Shine Shine Shine

2011-10-03T05:35:00.001-07:00

I Got New Glasses

2011-09-28T17:26:00.000-07:00

And Dan forced me to get an iPhone.

Don't You Want to Have a Body?

2011-08-30T17:57:00.001-07:00

This is the most perfect dialogue. Ever. Two robots talk.

Timoleon Vieta Come Home by Dan Rhodes

2011-08-07T14:30:00.000-07:00

I've just finished Timoleon Vieta Come Home, by Dan Rhodes, and I feel I've been very gently, gently shaken until my teeth rattled. Though it is humor, this is not a book for a merry gambol. It's going to mess you up; depend on it. Yet it has the tone and flavor of a gentle frolic, disguising its very black worldview in the sorts of details and stylistic points one might generally classify as "amusing."

I found myself loving this book, which follows tendrils of plot, as an abandoned dog makes his way back home to Umbria from Rome, touching the lives of various characters around Italy. Don't worry -- it's not touching in that droopy, learn-how-to-feel sort of way. One of the stories is about a sister of someone who once photographed the dog. It's that tangential. And yet the idea of the book is firm and strong throughout, though the plot seems to wander so randomly along every branch of Timoleon Vieta's ramble.

The book is about damage, and the short distance between being damaged just enough to be real, and being damaged too much, hopeless. The difference between what ruin is romantic, and strange, and lovable, and what is too far gone, too messed up, unredeemably horrific. In some ways, it's brutal, this book, but in its heart it's also powerfully true. The cradle hovers over the abyss, and the difference between love and loss is a step, a flaring match, a couple of chromosomes, or a misunderstood folktale.

Dan Rhodes is a funny character. Judging from his blog, he is both funny ha-ha and funny odd, but I like him. I particularly like his long and belligerent pouting about bad reviews which violates all advice to writers and includes this graph:

I like his dry wit. I would definitely pick up another book by him, even if I feel a bit wary of getting punched in the eye again.

Moby Dick Marathon: Live Stream

2011-07-31T09:06:00.000-07:00

Next year, I am totally going. Just so you know.

Live video from your Android device on Ustream

How Other People Edited My Novel

2011-07-26T21:04:00.000-07:00

I spent over ten years writing my novel. There was a lot of self-editing that happened during those ten years. From tweaking sentences to throwing out chapters and even whole drafts, I edited pretty constantly as I went along. I edited based on my own opinions, and based on suggestions from my critique group. I edited when Susannah told me on an early draft, "No, this isn't right. You haven't got it yet."

But in this post I'm going to talk about the editing that happened between the point that I slammed my hand down beside my laptop and shrieked "DONE" and the point that my editor at St. Martin's said, "Good job, we can move on to line edits." The major, conceptual edits that came from my agent, my editor, and my beta readers.

Lots of people have asked me how much influence my agent and editor had on my book, and if that bothered or upset me. The answer is that they had a lot of influence, and all of it was good in the end, and none of it ultimately bothered me. There were changes that made me hesitate, and some that I thought might be impossible. I had decided that I was not going to be some sort of annoying prima donna. I told myself that I was going to be a good girl and not argue, and that I would take every suggestion and try and make it work in the book. There was only one suggestion that I could not find a way to do. All the rest of them made the book better, I strongly feel. So when I look at the book I don't see my darling book underneath the mean changes and ugly edits forced on me by other people. I see a book that's so much better than it was a year ago, I hardly recognize it.

So what was the last year like, in edits? Here's how it went:

At the end of July, I finished my novel. I sent it to several friends, some of whom are writers. The friends who are writers had some feedback -- some suggestions for pretty deep structural changes. My novel was built in three big chunks, and they felt that the sections should be mixed up more. One friend passed it on to a friend who is an agent. The agent agreed with the structural changes and had some other suggestions too. We did not sign a contract, or get married to each other as author/agent, but I really like her and wanted to try these changes for her, especially since they were agreed on by the other writerish friend types. Thus began revision #1. I blew up the major sections of the book, and started shaking out the pieces.

Revision #1 ended on November 17 when I had made all the changes discussed. I sent the revised book off the the beautiful agent, hoping she would love me and want to marry me in a literary way.

Here is a real, true fact for you: Very little happens in publishing over the winter holidays. Very little happens in any industry.

On January 21, the beautiful agent told me she liked my revisions and on January 25, she sent me a contract and we were literarily entwined. By the first week of February, and the book appeared to be done, only six short months after I had proclaimed it done.

This piece of paper was stuck to my refrigerator during the months of February and March, and it shows the notes I made during phone calls with my agent -- scenes to be written or revised. I would march around my house during the calls, writing notes onto this paper. Some of the notes are in scrawled onto the paper in big scratchy CRAYON. This is proof that I am mentally unstable, or that I have a seven year old daughter and I had a crayon handy. If you click on it, it takes you to a bigger version.

Unfortunately at this point I had a major idea, an idea which sort of demanded that it be not only included in the book but included into almost every part of the book. This tiresome, obnoxious idea of mine endeared itself to the beautiful agent, and increasingly endeared itself to me, although I wrote several emails to various people shouting that it was impossible and ridiculous to even consider doing it. Email evidence shows that I resisted putting it in until March 22. Eventually, with the help of a mathematician (real) and a crowbar (metaphorical), I incorporated this idea. In doing so, I turned up a few more things that needed revisions. An additional scene here, a tweak there, a shift of emotional content over here, and it was done by April 2. Done, done, done, never to be edited again. Completely finished.

Beautiful agent wrote the pitch letter (It's like Eat, Pray, Love, but in SPACE!!!) and compiled a list of editors. On April 26, she started pitching it, and in a couple of weeks we had a deal. And an editor. You may notice that the word "edit" is prominently featured in the title "editor." Unsurprisingly, my adorable editor had a list of things she wanted tweaked and twirled in the book. One character was to have a much larger role. One subplot was to get a much more complete treatment. We talked about the edits on the phone, and I pondered and toiled over them in the manuscript. Here's a screen shot of the notes I took on our phone call. You can see a checklist I added later, when I had boiled down our conversation into discreet tasks.

The checklist helped, but it was not until we were sitting around a table at lunch in New York, that is adorable editor, beautiful agent and I were sitting around this table (the tallest people in the room, it is to be believed) that adorable editor came up with a very specific, tangible idea that really lit up the whole problem and got me excited to get into the manuscript and tear it up a bit.

I finished my revisions on July 9. A week or so later, adorable editor wrote back that she liked them. And that's where we are at this moment.

The next step is to get her line edits and start working on those. I'm hoping to get an astronaut to read the manuscript and give me some input on the space scenes. But I have the strong feeling that the book is in its final shape in terms of the scenes and characters, the plots and ideas. Many hands have touched it and changed it. I feel like every suggestion, whether to change something, to add something, or to take something out, was essentially the same message: This isn't working. Writers should never ignore a reader who is telling them "this isn't working." Even if I didn't know how to fix it, or how to implement the change, and even if I felt strongly that it shouldn't be changed, I really tried to address every single issue and respond to every suggestion. From my early readers in my critique group down to my editor at St. Martin's, I valued all the input I got.

No novel falls perfectly from a writer's head. Mine has maybe been through more changes and permutations than most. But when the cover goes on and the pages get numbered and the release date finally comes, there aren't going to be any more chances to fix it. This is my chance to make the book as perfect as possible, and I'm taking every opportunity I get.

Do Robots Make Better Astronauts?

2011-07-23T08:26:00.000-07:00

This article by Dr. Cynthia Phillips @ SETI asks whether robots are better suited for space travel, and whether humans are ready to handle the fact that these tireless explorers might take "our place" on Mars. Here's an excerpt:

"On a purely scientific level, there is very little in our current solar system exploration program that can't be done just as effectively by a robot as by an astronaut. Robots excel at the tedious work of taking similar pictures or analyzing similar rocks over and over and over again, without complaint (usually!) or a need for life support systems. Robots don't need food or water, they can withstand much more damaging radiation, and, perhaps most importantly, they don't need to come home at the end of the mission. Simply put, a one-way trip requires only half the fuel of a round trip voyage, and even though you'd likely get plenty of volunteer astronauts signing up for a one-way trip to Mars, it's unlikely that our current moral and ethical code would allow us to send such a mission."

Fascinating questions. What would Maxon say? Full article here: robots in space.

How I Got My Agent

2011-07-04T07:52:00.000-07:00

I do not have a good story. Or, rather, I do have a good story. It's in my novel. It's about a bald lady and her astronaut husband, and a meteor and a news anchorman and Burma and people dying alone in ravines and will power and robots. But I do not have a good agent-getting story. My agent story is probably going to be frustrating to read, if you're trying to get an agent. However, I do have a lesson at the end of it. One minor bit of advice that might help.

I spent ten years writing my novel. I threw out thousands and thousands of words. I started over two times. It was hard. In my mind, the novel became stranger and stranger, more and more itself. While I was writing for an audience, I did not firmly believe that it would find one. The book was more of a compulsion than a goal-oriented project. I did desperately want it to be published, but I did not think about that as much as I did getting to the end of the book, getting the characters through it, getting it all down and out of me.

During this time, while I was working away on my novel, I also became a mother and spent the decade also parenting and homeschooling two kids. Time was scarce. I did not have a lot of room to network, go to workshops, etc. I barely had time to drag myself to my critique group. However, I managed to do several things in this period of time that really helped me when I had a finished manuscript to sell.

1. Friends. I have friends who are writers. Not just writer friends, not just network friends, but mom friends, wine friends, holy crap this is awful friends, holy crap this is true elation friends, real friends. My two oldest friends are both writers. I try my very best not to feel competitive with them, and I worked very hard during the last ten years to not feel left behind by them, as they both achieved a lot of professional success and I did not. I had my moments of self loathing and doubt, but I always want my friends to succeed. It's a true fact that success often happens in clusters. When everyone around you seems to be "making it" and you are "failing utterly" you can comfort yourself by the fact that by planting yourself in a successful cluster, you're helping yourself.

Writers should not be afraid to be good friends with other writers. There are no angels of publishing sitting on high, looking down at your group of friends and deciding which lucky, golden, sparkly one to pick for success, leaving the others to sink into the mire of ruin. For every one of you that makes it, all of your chances improve. The other thing is that ultimately, they are the only ones that understand. They are the only ones that will tell you when you're fucking up, and will really genuinely be happy for you when you win.

2. Networking. Everyone tells you to network all the time. You're supposed to network your ass off. Just ask the internet. Google "The importance of networking" and you will find a lot of confirmations that it's highly important. The problem is how to network, especially if you're not already in the publishing industry or the writing world. You can make friends, yes, as I discussed up the page. And that counts. You can also send hopeful emails to people saying "Hello, I'd like to network with you." They might even send back an email that says "I would love to network with you. Let's network." However, the next step is tricky. You could easily get stuck looking at the person like, hey, do you like me? Check one: __yes __no.

The best way to network yourself into the writing world is to find a way to interact with writers, editors, agents, and other publishing types in some practical way. Before you're asking for help, before you have any need of help, you just happen to be around for some reason. You're a book designer. You're a reviewer. You're a manuscript consultant. You're a publicist. You're a party planner. You're a web site coder. You're a gadget scriptor. Something like that.

My dark plan to network while I was working on my novel was to create a writing contest for children. This project was an intersection of my homeschooling and my writing -- a happy coincidence. With a partner, another homeschooler, we set up many categories, found sponsors, and then began recruiting readers and judges from... the publishing industry. I emailed writers I have never met, agents I wouldn't have thought to pitch to, editors, illustrators, etc. Many of them ignored me, many said no thanks, but the crazy thing is that many said yes.

In the process of putting the contest together, I had a reason to talk to everyone I know, and ask them if they knew anyone in publishing. For the children, of course. Not to promote my own book, which didn't even exist at that point. It was no surprise: people knew people. I collected email addresses. I communicated, as charmingly as I could. There were exchanges back and forth. So, should you put together a writing contest for children? Maybe not. But if you can think of a way to interact with book people in a practical way that allows you to talk about, plan, and execute some arrangement that doesn't involve your novel, it will make it a lot easier, when your novel comes into the picture.

So what is my agent getting story? Here you go:

I wrote a book. I passed it to my friend, a writer. She passed it to her friend, an agent. I happened to have met this agent back when she was an editor (she was a friend's editor) and I also happened to have emailed back and forth with her as she was a judge for the children's writing contest. She liked the manuscript, and after some revision, we signed a contract.

In some ways my story can be reduced to, "It's who you know." In that way, it's a frustrating tale. However, even "It's who you know" ultimately comes down to "It's what you do." And there's always something that you can do about it. Eventually there's something you do in order to know who you know, and that's what you have to figure out.

We Are Poppies In the Wheat

2011-06-19T09:33:00.000-07:00

See? Here we are:

We Have a Book Deal

2011-05-22T03:24:00.000-07:00

Just a few short weeks after she began shopping it, my agent Caryn Karmatz-Rudy sold my novel to St. Martin's Press. On Tuesday, the deal was announced in Publisher's Lunch. I'm in Italy right now, and didn't get to properly drool over it, so she forwarded it to me. I have only read it out loud to Dan a few times, but in my head I have it memorized:

Lydia Netzer's SHINE, SHINE, SHINE, in which a young mother's "perfect" suburban existence unravels in unexpected ways as her astronaut husband's endangered mission to colonize the moon brings to light her dark childhood secrets, their strange and wondrous relationship and forces her to question the nature of motherhood, dying and what it means to be human, to Hilary Rubin Teeman at St. Martin's, in a very good deal, in a pre-empt, by Caryn Karmatz Rudy at DeFiore and Company (World).

I am so happy. Wondering and wondering.

The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch

2011-05-06T21:40:00.000-07:00

The Chronology of Water is Lidia Yuknavitch's sexy, dirty, wordy, wet memoir. Lidia is not that much older than I am. Is it time for us to write memoirs?

What everyone has already said about this book, which is absolutely true, is that it is very honest. From the fragmented structure to the chatty tone, there is nothing artificial about it: there is no artifice. Lidia came from a scary home, has led a wild life, and writes from a very complicated place. In her book, she tears the scab off, rips the scar open, maybe even peels back the skin, and shows us everything she can. Reading this book is kind of like sitting down with the cool, beautiful, crazy girl who's always been sort of fascinating but inaccessible, and having her flush, really flush all the stuff inside her head. And you can't believe your luck -- it's not the usual "no one understands me" stuff, but actual stuff worthy of dishing. Death. Pain. Birth. DUI. Wetting yourself. Getting the crap beaten out of you. Her portrayal of all these events is as straight as it can be imagined one can tell it. I was kind of blown away by that. If this isn't the most authentic, honest, attempt at a memoir from someone who's not protecting herself in the slightest, then Lidia has sold her soul to the devil. Again and again, I found myself thinking, "I can't believe she's actually telling me this." And there is no shallow end. It starts with gruesome, excrutiating pain, and goes on from there.

Now let me sell the book a little.

This is a book that is full of sex. And not just the discreet sex where a sex scene begins and then ends and you read through forty more pages and get to another sex scene. This sex leaks into everything, every expression of pleasure, every description, almost every scene to be honest. One of the most unusual aspects of the book is the inside out sexual plot arc. Where you normally expect a survivor's salvation memoir to run from sexual damage to sexual shut down through a reawakening to renewed health, etc. -- this book's sex doesn't quit. In defiance of expectation, the book sketches out a different geometry, not an arc at all but a tessellation, layering sex and death, sex and birth, sex and women, men, road work, writing, everything. It's so pervasive, you'll believe it's not there just to titillate. Maybe sex as an undercurrent to all things is a more authentic way to represent a life, more authentic than just packaging it into certain scenes, certain times. I don't know.

Let's return to the question of age and ask a brutal question. Let's ask, quietly, if a memoirist who is not yet 50 can really be trusted when it comes to the final chapters. Doesn't the current husband, the current job, the current life get filtered through the lens of the happy ending? You don't write a memoir if you haven't landed somewhere that feels permanent -- either jail or happiness -- so once you've decided you're happy, you're going to write your way there. This may be a cynical way to look at it. Is Lidia Yuknavitch really done? Has she written herself to the end of the story? Will there be another memoir in 20 years, one that erupts through this one, floods it with new revelations, the next bold geometry? I hope so, actually. And when I read that one, it won't make this one any less. This book, this art, is what she now believes. I believe that she believes it. And that makes the book, for me.

I Finished My Novel in Paris

2011-02-28T10:35:00.000-08:00

I started my novel in the year 1999. The first idea was to write a novel about a woman who was pregnant for the first time. I was also pregnant for the first time. This level of imagination was about all I could manage as a newly pregnant person. Before pregnancy, I was always a bit of a live wire. While my first two books are questionable in terms of lasting literary value, no one can say they weren't lively. While pregnant, I was reduced to simple declarative sentences. Most of them started with "I" and ended with "am nauseated" or variations on that theme. I wanted to write about a person making the transition from being a person into being a mother. Mostly all I could manage was to talk about puking. I remember that my character at one point climbed to the top of a ladder and then puked. And that was the conflict in the scene.

Then I had the baby and lost all ability to write about anything that didn't end well. Because I so earnestly wanted the baby to be safe and happy, I could only create fiction in a safe and happy world. Which was boring. And disastrous to the plot. Everyone felt fine, did nice things, and tried to blend in. Instead of writing vomit-related conflict, I wrote no conflict. Which may be therapeutic, but does not make a novel. I still wanted to write about motherhood, but had no ability to get beyond the level of "Motherhood is nice."

My second idea for tackling this material was to write about three sisters and a cul de sac. Babe, the oldest, was unmarried, a rover. Ronnie, the middle one, was married with two children. Kate, the youngest, was married and pregnant for the first time. They were mother, wife, girlfriend -- their characters illustrated the transition that I was trying to unpack, from single girl to mother. Ronnie had bought a house on the cul de sac when she was first married, and now Kate had bought the house next to her. There was one house left and they were trying to get Babe to settle down with her boyfriend and move into it. The novel was going to be called, brilliantly, Cul de Sac. I introduced some conflicts. Someone was sleeping with someone else's husband. I wrote quite a lot of this draft.

Then I got pregnant again. On purpose, even. Goodbye, brain.

My third idea, upon emerging from that second stupor, was that the three women would actually be one woman. My next idea was that the woman would be bald. Other ideas stacked with that one -- that she would have an astronaut husband (thanks Susannah), that she would already have one child (with autism), that her mother would be sick and dying. Everything came together from that point. I staggered, stalled, and sprinted, and when we left for France in summer of 2010, I was within a few thousand words of finishing. I had taken some days off of parenting, I had had help with the children, but mostly I had fought it out in spite of my job as a homeschooling mother -- stealing time between lessons, or usually at 1 am, with the children upstairs asleep.

When we reached Paris at the end of our month-long adventure, I was immediately inspired. I sat down and wrote a thousand words the first night. We were, after all, in Paris. I had read the relevant Hemingway. I had read in fact the guidebook that told me exactly where to go to follow the path that Hemingway took when he wheeled Joyce home in a wheelbarrow after a night out drinking. This is what I'd always had in my head -- a trip to Paris, a literary explosion, my hands on fire, my brain turned to molten ideas. My husband, beautifully compliant after a month of climbing Alps on his bicycle and following the Tour de France, agreed to take the children out in the city so I could work. And I did work. I worked with the floor-to-ceiling balcony windows open behind me on an antique table in a mirrored room. I worked with gritty coffee next to me, and then French wine, and then more coffee. I worked fueled by awesome cheese and some sort of internal engine. I worked so much that I was within one scene of the end of the book, and then I stopped.

I had an idea. To finish my novel, I would go out into the proper neighborhood. I would walk from our swank apartment in the 8th arrondissement down to Pont Alma, Joyce's favorite bridge. There I would stand where he stood, dictating Finnegan's Wake, and I would think very important, excellent thoughts. Then I would take the Metro over to the Left Bank, and I would walk around down there, scuffing my shoes where Gertrude Stein walked, treading the path that Hemingway trod, and then I would wind up with my netbook at Les Deux Magots, where Fitzgerald and Joyce and the rest of them drank, and I would open the netbook and finish the novel, right there, in the midst of it.

It was a plan that did not happen. I could have done it. I was in the right place at the right time. My husband was going to take the children to a movie. However, when it came down to it, I had a breathtaking realization that this scenario would be all wrong. It would have been antithetical to the book I was writing to shed the trappings of my housewife life and try and inhabit some kind of imagined literary nirvana, deny the person I was in trying to emulate something that had nothing to do with me. I wrote my novel about becoming a mother, and I would write the ending as a mother would. It's the only thing that would work.

I did finish the novel in Paris. But I finished it at that dining room table, wearing my old brown shorts, with my hair twisted this way and that, my husband asleep in a room to the left, my children asleep in a room to the right, the window behind me open on the city -- not the city of Gertrude Stein, but the city I was living in right then. Kids, husband, reasonable sandals and all.

How to Query a Literary Magazine

2011-02-24T16:55:00.000-08:00

I have a client who writes very tight, literary short stories. He has not been able to place them yet with a literary magazine, however. I asked to see his cover letter so I could critique it for him. The cover letter he was using was so representative of many earnest unpublished authors and so full of typical well-meaning noob mistakes, I thought I would make my critique public. A lot of people struggle with content on a query when they have nothing to say about writing career, previous publications, seemingly nothing to say at all. This letter follows all the rules of writing a query, and yet it's squeaking with awkwardness. It screams "Ignore me; I'm new."

The first step to a successful pitch to a literary journal is to write the best short story or poem you can possibly write. Write, rest, rewrite, rest, edit, line edit, format sensibly, print clearly.

The second step is to do a hell of a lot of research. Wear out your Google searching your target markets. If you can afford it, buy and read the physical publications. You will know within ten pages if your work is a fit for their editorial vision. The best story in the universe will not make it past the front door of a magazine that just doesn't do that type of thing.

The third step is to write a bitchin' query letter, or cover letter, and stick it on top.

Here's the original letter he sent me:

February 1, 2011

Fiction Editor
The Georgia Review
The University of Georgia
Athens, GA 30602-9009

To Whom it May Concern,

Please consider my 1,200-word, previously unpublished manuscript, "[Title Redacted]" for publication at The Georgia Review. I am a previously unpublished writer, but I work with earnest on the craft. This piece is a part of a collection of stories that will one day comprise a novel.

This piece is being simultaneously submitted. I will notify you immediately upon an
acceptance.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Sincerely yours,

[Name Redacted]

And here are my critiques:

1. Dude, find out the name of the editor you're addressing. It's not hard to do this research, especially with the internet. Even if you end up addressing it to someone more senior than the person who actually reads their slush, that's okay. It's better than "To Whom it May Concern." That is the kiss of death. For example, look here: http://www.uga.edu/garev/contact.html Out of the staff listed I'd choose David Ingle to query.

2. Don't say you're previously unpublished. The fact that you're not mentioning pub credits tells them that, and you don't need to draw attention to it. You also REALLY don't need to say that this story specifically is previously unpublished. Now you just put the words "previously unpublished" twice in as many sentences. Did you want to add a neon sign over that? ;D

3. Put a little more color into it. Personal color and literary color. You don't have a publishing resume but you can say something about yourself that makes your query sound a little warmer, a little less robotic.

4. Not necessary to say you're simultaneously submitting -- just let them know if it gets accepted elsewhere. Paper and ink literary magazines do not move at a blinding speed -- it will be alright if something good happens somewhere else and you have to withdraw the submission for some reason.

5. It's good to thank the editor, but yours sounds very formal and therefore insincere.

Try this:

February 1, 2011

David Ingle
Assistant Editor
The Georgia Review
The University of Georgia
Athens, GA 30602-9009

Hi David,

Please consider my 1,200-word, story, "[Title Redacted]," for publication at The Georgia Review. It's a Texas story, sparsely told, about a death in the family and also a death out in the yard. I'm a writer living in Mississippi with my wife, dog, and antique car collection.

Thanks for all you do -- I appreciate the time it takes to look this over, and I look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely yours,

[Name Redacted]

I hope my client hits with this new query letter. His writing is great. However, his success in this will depend on his research skills, his ability to direct his work at the right market, and his willingness to exercise the same restraint in his pitch as he is able to pull off in his fiction. Play it cool, play it simple, play it warm but not hysterical, straight but not snippy.

Got any other advice for him? Should he leave out the bit about the antique cars? What's your go-to query line?

2011-02-09T10:03:00.000-08:00

Trickle Down Timeline by Cris Mazza

2010-05-22T11:13:00.000-07:00

In Trickle Down Timeline, Cris Mazza delivers another smart, abrasive collection of short stories you'll find yourself immersed in as if you were reading a novel. The collection is framed on the scaffolding of the 1980s, one story for each year of the decade. Between and throughout, facts and cultural references are sprinkled like commercials, reminders of other facets of a decade that has been boiled down to neon and gimmicks, excess and Ronald Reagan soundbytes. This is an alternative history, with tidbits like this: "Michael Jackson, who had purchased the entire Beatles music catalogue two years before, attempted to purchase the bones of the Elephant Man." Or this one: "A twelve-day-old baby, born with a cardiac malformation, lived for three weeks with a baboon heart." Anyone who lived through the decade with any level of consciousness will find themselves saying, "Oh, yeah, I remember that." And those who didn't experience it will see another side of a time period most people seem eager to reduce to its cheapest cultural icons. The Rubiks cube. The Delorean. Cheap stuff like that.

The stories are pulsing with Mazza's familiar in-your-face energy, that sort of gritty, at times unattractive realism that refuses to be ignored. This kind of reading is sometimes an intense joy but seldom what you'd call pleasant. It's like watching reality television, in the most grindingly mundane, and profoundly unelevated settings. But the cameras are never revealed, and the characters in all their flawed varieties just reveal themselves mercilessly, into the wide open space of Mazza's literary eye.

Is it voyeurism, that makes reading Cris Mazza so pleasurable? It feels like a guilty secret at times, like a VH1 show writ sublime, where there's beauty in the degradation, transcendence in the small moments of hopelessness, the banal details of everyday life for average characters transformed by the unflinching exactness of the description into something timeless. Until a woman trying to disgust her husband's friend by calling a meatball a bull's testicle becomes a statement on what it means to be female, and a dying dog becomes a symbol of a lifetime goal.

Brilliant, disturbing, disarming, Trickle-Down Timeline is an intimate collection with reverberations across a nation's zeitgeist.

Call Me Mario: What Video Games Teach Us About Writing Novels

2010-04-18T18:08:00.000-07:00

Imagine Mario Brothers with no bombs, no carnivorous plants, no death pits, no deadly turtles. Imagine Donkey Kong with no giant monkey at the top of the ladder, throwing down barrels to kill you. Picture a version of Tomb Raider where Lara Croft just walks around picking things up and saying "Ah, nice, another priceless artifact. Better put it in my pack. My, I'm getting hungry." Sounds stultifyingly boring, and yet people write books on this model all the time.

In my work as a book doctor, I frequently run into pretty manuscripts with likeable characters and believable settings but no discernable plot. These books describe one average day after another, or a reasonable sequence of events which unfold without a hitch. The authors weave elaborate emotional landscapes and carefully illustrate relationships, but there's no problem, no conflict, no obstacle. There's no villain.

In trying to explain this issue to my clients, I realized that a book without a problem is like a video game where you can't die. Not very interesting, and why? Because nothing is at stake. If there are no problems, you're just running your character from left to right, enjoying the backgrounds and the soundtrack. And nobody is going to want to do that, without the aid of chemical stimulants.

What else can video games teach us about writing novels? Here are four important lessons:

RISK: Ever since Mario the plumber jumped on and smashed his first magic mushroom, video games have followed a very predictable formula. It's not about emotions or ideas, either. It's not about illuminating a slice of life. Game after game follows the the same exact framework: Character solves a problem by overcoming obstacles. That's it. The character saves the princess, liberates itself from a dungeon, defeats an evil ruler, or finds the missing gem by destroying enemies, avoiding obstacles, and solving puzzles. And the penalty for failure is death. Here's the truth: If you can't die, there's no point. And if there's no villain in a novel, no threat of destruction from some source, whether internal or external, there's no point either.

From Sonic Hedgehog to God of War, there are a million ways to die in a video game. What would Pacman be without ghosts? Just a way to move a yellow disc around a screen in the four cardinal directions? Now, does the character in your literary novel need to be hovering on the brink of extinction every living second? No. But there must always be something at risk, something at stake, some goal that is being pursued and something valuable that can be lost if the goal is not reached. Put a ghost in the maze. Put a wolf in the cave. Otherwise it's just more geometry, more scenery, more background. And nobody's going to pay money to read that.

SCENE: Not only are there big obstacles in video games, big villains like Dr. Neo Cortex, or Eggman, but there are minor obstacles in every scene. Every single scene has a pit with spikes, or an attacking wolf, or a zombie horde, or something. What does this teach us about writing novels? Not only do we need obstacles, we need obstacles all the time. Never write a scene without tension -- real, tangible, physical tension, whether or not it's connected to the overarching plot. Does jumping on penguins relate directly to Crash Bandicoot's overarching plot to collect crystals and save the world? No. Neither does your conflict in every scene have to relate directly to your main plot arc. But it must be there.

Somebody's cold. There's a storm coming. Characters fight over where to sit at the movies. A lightbulb is burnt out. It's hard, rowing the boat. Time is running out. The soup is too salty. I challenge you to go through your novel right now, and look at every scene you've written, and think, "How could I improve this with a piranha plant? Or a pit of spikes? Or a rogue sniper?" It doesn't have to be Dahlia Gillespie in every scene. But it should be at least a storm trooper or two. There is never a scene in a video game where a character takes a walk in the woods and nothing memorable happens. There shouldn't be one in your novel either.

CHARACTER MOTIVATION: A character in a video game never wakes up in the morning wondering what to do. Characters in novels I have recently read indulge in peaceful reveries over morning coffees, wondering exactly what they should do, where they should go, what projects they should take on. This is not interesting to read. A character in a video game knows exactly what he has to do both long term and short term, including staying out of the way of that fire-breathing minotaur, unlocking that gate, and of course saving the world. Some games actually have a "Quest Log" or a blinking X on a map, or some other kind of visual/verbal reminder of exactly what the character is supposed to be accomplishing. Every one of these guys on the right has a numbered to-do list and none of the entries on the list are "Think about myself" or "Go about my usual activities." Accounts of people's usual activities are boring as dirt, my friend. Unless I am your grandmother or you are paying me to read it, I won't.

PACING: Most video games still follow the same plot structure the earliest ones did. You play a few levels fighting your way through minor bad guys, and then you play a boss (a major monster/bad guy). You play a few more levels fighting through bad guys who are a little bigger, and then you fight a bigger boss. Repeat until you get to the boss at the end of the game, who is the Mother Brain, or Diablo, or Sarah Kerrigan Hive Brain, or whatever. This same structure works in novels, and if you look at any "how to write" book you'll see something like this:

What video games teach us about this plot structure is that as the bosses get bigger the sword gets bigger, the spells get better, the armor gets more effective. As your character ascends the "rising action" toward the climax, he or she is changing shape, redefined by the course he has taken, affected by the scenes he has been through, the obstacles he has overcome. In many games (and novels), while the action intensifies, the situation seems to get worse and worse and worse as you approach that epicenter of awfulness, where the ultimate battle takes place between you and the ultimate bad guy. What video games show us overtly that novels also have to achieve is the transformation of the character that allows the climax to make sense, the fight to be won by that same character that was so feeble and feckless in scene one. The character has to change, from start to finish. in a video game, you can see it happening -- a +20 sword of smiting, a thousand power-ups, a flame thrower. In novels, it has to happen on the inside, but it's just as important.

Of course there are ways in which novels transcend the formulaic machinations of video games. But if you are looking for basics, they're all there, even in the very first Mario Brothers: an initiating incident, a problem, the fights, the obstacles, the villains, the rising action, the climax, and the denouement. Try it out: stand your novel up for comparison with your favorite video game, and see if your character needs a princess to rescue, a gorilla to fight, or maybe if more magic mushrooms are in order.

The Widow and the Tree by Sonny Brewer

2010-02-17T21:33:00.000-08:00

In a connected world, where every place is right next door to every other place via cell phones, airplanes, and the internet, it was really lovely to read a novel that was truly of a very certain place. The Widow and the Tree takes place in extremely rural Alabama, and the disconnected nature of the location separates the reader from any particular time, or any invasive modern influence. Without the ringing, buzzing, and informing, what's left is a quiet book that ends up booming, a small story that resonates.

A five hundred year old live oak is the central character, as it frames the lives of a few strange characters who also inhabit this swampy and wild backwater. If you told me before I cracked it open that I would be deeply engrossed in a novel which is essentially about a tree, and tangentially about a couple of hermits, I would have been skeptical. However, the scene that Sonny Brewer paints is compelling and surprising in its depth. Rather than limiting the book, the narrow scope propels the reader farther into the landscape, so it's possible to read a chapter about the noises a bird makes tapping on the branch of a tree and actually still stay engaged. It's possible to really be quietly present in this dangerous, haunting world of the Ghosthead Oak and start to know it, or at least to know how much you don't know about it.

The book is small, but it penetrates like a bullet. It's as specific as a fingerprint, and as unforgettable as a face. I'm impressed with Brewer's restraint, both in language and in characterization. There is nothing goopy and romantic about this widow, nothing drearily tragic about her hero either. The wilderness is hard, and the book is hard, but it's also beautiful in its simplicity.

The Widow and the Tree is a prime example of why MacAdam/Cage is great and would be sorely missed.

Water for Elephants: a Master Class in Craft

2010-02-13T14:14:00.000-08:00

Water for Elephants was a runaway bestseller, a breakout book for author Sara Gruen, and a book club darling. The comments you hear in reaction to this book range from "Loved it" to "It blew my mind, changed my life, and I chewed my own wrists open when it was over." Not everyone likes every book, but I have to say that this one has met with universal approval from readers of every stripe. Writers, take heed. Water for Elephants is more than a good story; it's a seminar in technique from which aspiring writers could definitely benefit.

Lesson #1: Milieu. Choose to write in a world that people want to read about. Gruen set her book in a traveling circus during the depression. I wanted to read it before I had any idea what the plot might be like just because of where it was. For this book, you could almost write the pitch just based on the setting: the time, the place, the freaks, the violence, the hidden world, the desperation... it is automatically interesting just because of where and when it is. Want to write another book about someone who lives in an apartment in a trendy neighborhood in a modern city? Good for you. Have fun tweaking that one. Sure, Gruen had to research the hell out of her book, but she wisely chose a deep deep deposit of fuel in which to sink her well.

Lesson #2: Pacing. Water for Elephants has no down time. There is no break in the plot, no difficult middle section, no long period of rising action and building complication. The story goes from peak to peak, escalating constantly from the day the main character sets foot on that train to the very end. Gruen provides relief from the action by switching from the main plot in the past to the framing story in the present, but she never gives us a slow chapter in the circus plot. Looking at the structure and pacing of WFE, you realize that the thing about writing a novel is, you really don't have time for those slow chapters. Are you sitting on a middle section that kinda drags, just because things are "developing"? Are you happy with a plateau in the center of your book? Don't be lazy. Ratchet up the slope of that line that takes you from low start to high finish. Steeper is better. Don't waste time on low energy chapters.

Lesson #3: Transparency. In this book, there are no distractions from the characters, the story, and the world that Gruen is revealing to us. Her prose is not glamorous; it's not fancy. It is effective because it disappears. It's the kind of book you forget you're reading. You think you're listening, and not listening to some pretentious twat rhapsodizing just to hear herself talk, but listening to a story urgently told, every detail important. Instead of witnessing the construction of a narrative, it's like we're seeing a curtain pulled back. The focus is only the story, only the work, and it's so clearly rendered it's like a pane of glass. Any imperfection and you know you're looking through a window. So when you're writing away and you're falling in love with a turn of the phrase, a bit of something you think will be called "lyrical" or whatever, think carefully about whether what you're adding in there is going to show up in that pane of glass, or whether it's going to work to make the view more clear.

Writers, if you're waiting to read Water for Elephants, don't wait any longer. There are more than a few ways to tell a story, but here is a very successful formula for you: 1. Write in an interesting world. 2. Write without pause, relentlessly, every scene amplified and alive. 3. Write transparently. You're not the focus, the words aren't the focus, but the story is the focus.

Ten Questions to Ask Your Friend Who Just Read Your Novel

2010-01-07T17:21:00.000-08:00

An aspiring author recently asked me to help him figure out what to say to his friends before he gave them his novel to read. He wants them to read critically, give him honest feedback, but he's afraid they'll just phone it in because they like him.

When you hand your friend a novel you've written, he or she knows you've slaved over it for months, maybe years, and how much it means to you, and how devastating it would be if he told you "Oops, it's terrible." He doesn't want to be critical, or hurt your feelings, which is why the most common response from a friend who critiques you is something along the lines of "It's good!" or "Good job!" Hearing "I liked it" presented as a critique is not helpful to you at all. But how can you get your friend to be honest when she only wants to make you feel good?

Here are ten questions to ask that will not put your friend in a tough spot, but will still give you some useful input on your novel:

1. At what point did you feel like “Ah, now the story has really begun!”
2. What were the points where you found yourself skimming?
3. Which setting in the book was clearest to you as you were reading it? Which do you remember the best?
4. Which character would you most like to meet and get to know?
5. What was the most suspenseful moment in the book?
6. If you had to pick one character to get rid of, who would you axe?
7. Was there a situation in the novel that reminded you of something in your own life?
8. Where did you stop reading, the first time you cracked open the manuscript? (Can show you where your first dull part is, and help you fix your pacing.)
9. What was the last book you read, before this? And what did you think of it? (This can put their comments in context in surprising ways, when you find out what their general interests are. It might surprise you.)
10. Finish this sentence: “I kept reading because…”

Your friend is probably still going to tell you, "It was good!" However, if you can ask any specific questions, and read between the lines, you can still get some helpful information out of even the most well-meaning reader.

Maybe Female Writers Just Aren't Relevant?

2009-12-31T17:10:00.000-08:00

It's the time of year when magazines and web sites are publishing their "best of" list. This year we not only have to hear about the "Best Books of 2009" but also "Best Books of the Decade" even though the decade doesn't officially end until next year. As December wanes, it's the traditional time for women everywhere to scan the names on the "Best Books" list, realize they are woefully underrepresented, and complain. In Publisher's Weekly's list, none of the top ten were written by women, and only 29 of the top 100 were. Hmm, what a shame.

As Juliana Baggott pointed out in her Washington Post OpEd yesterday, "Amazon recently announced its 100 best books of 2009 -- in the top 10, there are two women. Top 20? Four. Poets & Writers shared a list of 50 of the most inspiring writers in the world this month; women made up only 36 percent." It's an incontrovertible fact: Women writers aren't as celebrated as men.

While Baggott and others call out a sexist bias, Baggott goes a bit farther, asking why this imbalance in artistic recognition exists. Too often feminists and other axe-grinders reel around shaking their little fists and saying "This is bad! Bad list!" Then they totter away, ending the train of thought in comfortable outrage. But this isn't about morality, or whether something is right or wrong. This isn't church, and we don't get points for being right. It is what it is. The interesting question is "Why is it the way it is?"

Baggott suggests the lists favor men because they favor male themes: "war, boyhood, adventure." She says that she was discouraged, early in career, from writing about motherhood, a female theme, because "it would be perceived as weak." So, maybe the reason women aren't "Best of" is because they don't write about "Best of" things.

I have to agree with Baggott's theory. Women generally do not write about war and adventure. The female purview may be, as Baggott posits, emotion and motherhood, love and feelings. Faced with the undeniable evidence of the "Best of" phenomenon, we have to ask ourselves, how important is motherhood? How important is emotion? Let me ask you something. When have you ever heard motherhood immortalized in a historical date? Probably only when it coincided with the birth of... a man. And probably only if it was a man who participated in war and adventure. When has emotion left a mark on history? History is war, sex, and violence. The female issues do not make it onto the calendar.

The list is real. The numbers are what they are. As I see it there are three possible explanations:

1. The list is sexist, purposefully oppressing women. The solution in this case would be, I guess, to burn down the list. Make a new list. Get those bastards. This seems kind of weak and paranoid.

2. The list is false, reflecting a lame and lingering cultural bias that is on its way out. The solution is to wait. After all, we didn't count the black writers, or the South American writers. It will all come around, given more time. I guess this is what I would like to believe.

The third possibility is more alarming than the others, because it is the simplest explanation, and therefore the most viable:

3. The list is right. The things that women write about are neither culturally nor historically significant, and the books that women write are not the best books.

Baggott mentions the deification of Faulkner, Chekhov, Hemingway. I have to ask: In the last decade, what woman would you put up against these giants? Maybe there were moderns that could carry the torch -- Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, or others from the 20th century: Harper Lee, Willa Cather, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison. But now? Where is my Gertrude Stein? Who can stand up against Junot Diaz and Khaled Hosseini and Kazuo Ishiguro? Is it really supposed to be Alice McDermott?

The lesson of the list is that nobody's going to do us any favors. We're not going to get prizes just for showing up and writing our little books. Girl books are great; I like to read them and write them. But if we're writing girl books, we're not getting on "Best of" lists, and that is the reality. Do with it what you will.

I'm writing this as a woman who has spent the last ten years working on a novel that is about motherhood. Yes, it's also about death, space, humanity, and artificial intelligence, but mostly? It's about motherhood. And I have to say, as that woman, that I'm looking hard at the book I'm writing, at the things I'm saying, and wondering, "Is this going to make it onto the calendar?" Yeah, motherhood is important, we wouldn't be here without it. But we wouldn't be here without eating either, and I don't see a lot of cookbooks winning Pulitzers. Maybe it's not about writing about "man themes" but about human themes. Maybe it's not about pandering to the list, but evolving, as a gender, into people who address the important stuff, the big stuff: death, war, sex, adventure, as it pertains to women and men. Where is our Cold Mountain? Where is our Kite Runner? Seems like the greatest innovation in female writing in the last decade is the mainstreaming of Chick-Lit. And that is a little embarrassing.

Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls by Lucy Corin

2009-12-28T07:12:00.000-08:00

That's no catcher, and this is not rye.

Everyday Psycho Killers: A History for Girls

Lucy Corin's first novel, Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls, published by FC2, begins as a wild, unapologetic mess. The story of a young girl in southern Florida, Psychokillers reminded me initially of Lynda Barry's Cruddy, Kathy Acker's Blood and Guts in High School, or a number of other ragged, jagged narratives yanked out of confused teenaged women. It's messy in that way, in that essentially female way, and its zigs and zags are almost familiar to me, this unpredictable, non-linear tempo.

It's the kind of book that leads reviewers and jacket copy writers to create lists of disparate elements: a Ted Bundy reject, the God Osiris, a Caribbean slave turned pirate, a circus performer living in a box, broken horses, a Seminole chief in a swamp, and a murderous babysitter. And the book is good in this way; it's inventive, fresh, out of control. You spend most of the first half asking yourself, "Where is she going with this?"

But ultimately what's interesting about the book is not the way it's fragmented. The story is told in mad, intense chunks, increasingly so disconnected from the central narrative of the young girl. We go from a fairly chronological account of a home life, a school life, of this main character, into digressions that start as anecdotes or asides from the character herself and evolve into separate stories -- stories of death and killers, murders, fear. That aspect of it is great, and Corin pulls together a very bold collage.

The interesting thing, though, is how it isn't fragmented, how the book spirals back on itself, revisiting ideas, images, and even sentence structures, so that while in some ways time, characters, and realities are fractured, the idea of the book spirals inward to a point, and comes together where the book blows apart. There are six or seven absolutely tight and monstrous pages toward the end that clearly express the book's central theme. I realized, reading them, the path I had to take to get there, to be told I am a killer, and that I am being killed, and that both are me. That realization is at the center of the spiral.

Looking at it from the top, a spiral moving outward looks the same as a spiral moving inward. It's not immediately obvious how Corin's book functions in this way, but the destination is worth the journey, and the investment in the book, you will find, sneaks up on you. Along the way, you'll find chapters that work as short stories, you'll see a dazzling slideshow of images you definitely have not seen before, and you'll find yourself falling into suspense over this character. Yes, in the middle of a novel built of formal experimentation, you'll be worried about this girl, and the question central to her psycho psyche -- will she kill or be killed?

Elegy for a Fabulous World by Alta Ifland

2009-12-24T06:40:00.000-08:00

Elegy for a Fabulous World by Alta Ifland

Publisher: Ninebark Press

For its second offering to the hungry world of literary fiction, Ninebark Press brings us Alta Ifland's short story collection, Elegy for a Fabulous World. From the very first story, Ifland had me in her grasp with merciless, darkly funny tales from her childhood in communist Ukraine. In bleak, unapologetic images, she shows us the gypsies that camped outside her town, the gravedigger the children all harrassed, the way the trash collectors failed, and the magic of one coveted bottle of Coca Cola. You can read the titular story online at AGNI Magazine. Not my favorite example, but the strange picture of what constitutes a seaside vacation for Soviets will give you an idea of what the rest of the book has to offer.

Ifland's gift is control. She shrugs at absurdity with the measured pace of a female Nabokov. Yet just as you're sinking into a mild rhythm of predictable slice-of-life revelations, she jerks the image just a bit, skews it enough to remind you: this is foreign. So, the mute adopted sister you're accustomed to seeing, with her iconic silence and her mild beauty, may not stop as a symbol of some unknowable aspect of childhood. She may suddenly go jetting off into space as the story takes a sudden flinch outside the deftly drawn limitations of the village, the family, the characters, the way of life. Ifland injects just enough of these blank surprises to elevate her work from competent memoir into the realm of contemporary craft.

The second half of the book delivers more typical contemporary short stories. Well crafted, interesting, satisfying, but lacking the depth and impact of the first section.

A few stories into the collection, when I was so enchanted with the voice, the landscape, the complex dark shadows of it, it occurred to me how impossible, how thin it would all seem if these same stories were set in modern times, in the loud, plastic American world. Is it possible for her, I wondered, to create this same kind of elegant starkness without the exterior starkness of village life, without cell phones or televisions or that brisk cacophony a more contemporary set of characters would be wading through. There's a timelessness to the childhood that Ifland renders that would be, maybe, fractured by the introduction of technology, information, something faster and less private. The second half of the book answered, to some extent, my question, as the stories that took place in office buildings and other less austere locations didn't have the same effect on me as those in the sort of anti-fairytale settings of the earlier pieces. So the mute sister could only fly away into space out of the house without wires attached to it, and the man crying in the graveyard could only be as profound if his life existed in rumor and legend, instead of a newspaper story.

The best thing about the book is the way the identities shift and change, particularly the mother and the main character herself. One can find these common characters in the earlier stories but not necessarily pin down a "she" throughout, or even an "I." A great example of this is a story where the main character takes her husband back to the old country to meet her parents, whose desire to feed him and nurture him and impress him with food nearly kills him. Her return to her homeland, accompanied by the uninitiated American, made me think of my experience reading the book, how hopeless it was for the husband to understand her family, or for her to show him to them properly. Ultimately, there is only the reality of what they are, and what he is, physically, to show for it. And this was what impressed me about Elegy for a Fabulous World. Ultimately, it is in surreal images and what facts and memories can be clearly delivered that this other, fabulous world exists. And if this old, communist life can only be understood in fragmentary, shifting narratives, looped through with the myths of the old country and the realities of the new, then Ifland's atttempt is a success.

For more information: Purchase Elegy for a Fabulous World, visit Alta Ifland's web site, read more about Ninebark Press.

What's on your Inspiration Shelf?

2009-09-19T21:52:00.000-07:00

If life is finite, your book stash must be too.

I think that hoarding books is a stand against mortality. If we've read them already, we might want to read them again. If we haven't read them yet, we might want to. Looking around at my shelves and boxes, I want to believe I will have time before I die to read them all, maybe again and again. Even if my current rate of reading means I'd need to live three lifetimes. To admit that I can't read all these would be to admit that at some point I'll stop reading. Difficult to imagine.

I recently some changes to my personal book hoard, and culled three boxes of books from the stacks. I decided to get rid of all the books I've read that I do not want to read again. That helped. But it also hurt to say goodbye to these objects. I'm tech-positive in so many ways, but like so many writers and readers, I am in love with the physical presence of books, and I have a hard time getting rid of them. A hard time embracing Kindle, and hard drives.

To make myself feel better, as I was sorting through the books I would let go, I decided to make another stack of books that I would never let go, that I would fetishize in the extreme. I made my inspiration shelf of books I've read that motivate me to write, a little shrine to their actual selves, a space for them to take up unapologetically in the world. If I must be mortal and my reading experience must be finite, then let's make it exquisitely finite, limit my great books to one shelf only. These are the books that are important to my life, at least, right now.

Here's my list, in no particular order. For some, it's the scope of the book. For some, it's the daring. The personal connection. The theme. The innovation. For a few it's just the time it was in my life, and how much it affected me. This is not a list of great books, or a list of personal favorites, but these are the books I can look at and feel something in me reaching. So, it varies:

Moby Dick by Herman Melville. The very copy I first read in high school. I have read it maybe 20 times, and in this copy I can see all my teenage notes.

House of Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

His Dark Materials Trilogy by Phillip Pullman.

Lord of the Rings Trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien.

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke

Penrod by Booth Tarkington. A book I read again and again when I was a child, before I understood the irony, before I understood racism at all.

My Horse and Other Stories by Stacey Levine

You're a Bad Man Aren't You by Susannah Breslin\

Between Georgia by Joshilyn Jackson

The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence

Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

Geek Love by Katherine Dunn

Observatory Mansions by Edward Carey

The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead

The Most of P.G. Wodehouse

We the Living by Ayn Rand

A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf

Dubliners by James Joyce

Candide by Voltaire

So, I've broken it down to these 20 volumes. If I add another, I think I should subtract one -- that's how the brain works best. My own two books are not on the shelf, but I hope my next one will be. It's what I aspire to: to write something that belongs in my brain with these.

Challenge: What's on your inspiration shelf? What one book would definitely have to be there? If you take a picture, I'd like to see.

How Twilight Killed "The Wasteland"

2009-09-02T21:37:00.000-07:00

Lev Grossman, book reviewer for Time Magazine, has bravely prophesied an end to modernism. In his Wall Street Journal article, Grossman posits that the modernist stranglehold on novel-writing is finally over. A new day has come! Nuts to you, Joyce, Eliot, Faulkner, and Kafka. You guys are history! No longer will readers suffer through beautiful language to get to an epiphany. Today's readers want plot, plot, and more plot. "Lyricism is on the wane," gloats Grossman, citing high sales of the Twilight series as proof that plot trumps beauty for these kids today.

Grossman, possibly unaware that Joyce and Eliot have been dead for fifty years, believes that these "modernists" have tricked us into thinking that a decent plot is indicative of a weak book. So, we're secretly reading mysteries and scifi, wishing literary writers would just take heed. "Should we still be writing difficult novels?" he asks, "Isn't it time we made our peace with plot?"

Grossman has graciously forgiven the moderns for blowing up the conventions of the Victorian novel. But he now feels that the time has come to embrace plot again. His evidence? The popularity of young adult novels, which never aspired to disregard plot in the first place. For Grossman, there have been no intervening literary movements. No novels of consequence that delivered any measure of plot with their lyricism, or any lyricism with their genre. The article has the intellectual weight of a strawberry tart, and yet the internet is upside down with panic over it. Is literary fiction over? Do we all have to start writing vampire novels?

Relax. Grossman's thinking is reductive, cowardly, but mostly just silly.

Consider these three major flaws:

1. It's weak on literary history. Did modernists shatter plot? Maybe. But look at the novels Grossman cites: Wharton, Hemingway, Lawrence, Fitzgerald. Really? These writers may be moderns, but in theme and ethos, not in formal experimentation. Pound, yes. Kafka, yeah. Joyce, okay. But Grossman's list of defiant modernist novels is full of plot. Sorry.

2. He uses the word "Pavlovianly."

3. His prognostications don't make sense. In proving his point that plot is back in style, Grossman uses Chabon, Lethem, Niffenegger, Gaiman, and Susanna Clarke as examples. These are the literary champions that are boldly bringing back the storylines we have all been silently, hopelessly craving for 80 years. However, these writers are all contemporaries of the Twilight juggernaut. The figures that Grossman so gloomily references (adult trade sales down 2.3% while Twilight author Stephanie Meyer sells 8 million books) would seem to reflect that while Chabon and Niffenegger may have been slinging Grossman-approved level of plot, the book-buying public wanted to buy Twilight books anyway.

I hope that writers of difficult books will not pause to listen to Grossman's confused ramblings about how literary movements from one hundred years ago are stultifying contemporary fiction. I hope writers will disregard all petulant whines about how "we the people" really want to read inglorious garbage like Twilight. I hope writers of difficult books will not take plot advice from a guy who lifted his own plot from Harry Potter. Yes, Twilight is selling. Yes, cheap fiction does move. It always has. But greatness is not easy, in reading or writing, and you weren't really writing for guys like Grossman anyway. Write for the smart people, the people that filled a football stadium to hear T.S. Eliot, the people who still celebrate Bloomsday. Write for me. I will still work for an epiphany.

To Hell with Publishing: Neither Irreverent nor Inventive

2009-08-16T21:33:00.000-07:00

The name promises much. The name inspires obstreperous agreement. Yeah, to hell with publishing, anyway! This is 2009. We're all about downloads, and Kindle, and Twittered novels, and free information, and Google books, and plots we can download via wires straight into our arteries, and plugging into authors via Friendfeed, and instant updates, and modules! To hell with publishing, to hell with journals, to hell with prizes, to hell with first novels. Yeah! Fist-pump!

From a group of projects so provocatively named, I now expect mind-blowing innovation. I expect earthshaking progress. I expect, at the very least, heaps of scorn for the old way of doing things, and arms flung wide open to the new, digital world. Please, make sense of fiction on Twitter for me. Please, package blogged novels. Please, help me to understand new media. I beg you! Unfortunately, what I'm finding here is same old, same old. Instead of revolution, "To Hell with Publishing" is pushing cardstock, ink, and contracts. Readings at a library under a dropped ceiling. Submission guidelines -- click here! And please include a cover letter.

"To Hell with Publishing" is just another small press. Like every other small press in the history of earth, they desire to "return vital writing, and in particularly, the best in contemporary fiction, to the main literary stage." Well bra-thumping-vo. They publish... books. Books made of paper and glue. And they publish journals. They have a prize for... unpublished manuscripts, but unagented manuscripts are not considered. Please submit paper copies in triplicate, because at "To Hell with Publishing" they are all about the snail mail.

That name followed by that business model is like the sound of a trumpet fanfare followed by the sound of a drunk falling downstairs. Where's the innovation? Where's the middle finger raised to the literary establishment? Listen: Here are the two ways that "To Hell with Publishing" bites its thumb at the mainstream presses.

1. They will only publish first novels. No second novels! Oh my god! Their plan is that other publishers will swoop in and take over their authors' careers after novel #1. Because yeah, mainstream publishers are so interested in picking up seconds after the author has been deflowered of his first novel. Do I really have to pursue that analogy?

2. Their journal (To Hell with Journals) will only have 26 issues. They have decided this... in advance. Only 26 and no more, even if thousands of screaming fans are lined up outside the bookshop, demanding just one more issue, tearing up their organs in despair that only 26 issues can possibly be produced. They will stand innovatively firm on this principle: THEY WILL FOLD AFTER TWO YEARS.

These two policies manage to be simultaneously defeatist and overly ambitious. Yeah, we MEANT that journal to go under, and we MEANT that author to never produce another book, because that's all part of the rakish, devil-may-care plan we have here at "To Hell with Publishing." Look, there are already small presses out there doing exactly what THWP desires to do, but without these weird stipulations that seem to undercut any kind of longevity or long term relationship between press, author, and reader. Obviously a few more domain names are needed: tohellwithlegitimacy.com, tohellwithauthorloyalty.com, and tohellwithrelevance.com. "To Hell with Publishing" is a profound disappointment, leaving this reader still looking for the next great thing. When it comes along, I have a feeling that "To Hell with Publishing" would be a really cool name for it. Unfortunately, that domain name is already taken.

For more info: I found out about To Hell With Publishing from the Book Ninja.

The Significant Objects Project

2009-07-01T21:25:00.000-07:00

How to create a significant object:

1. Find some tchotchke. Any tchotchke will do. The weirder the better.

2. Pretend in your brain that it is significant.

3. Write a story telling everyone about how significant it is.

4. Sell the object, and the story, on Ebay.

In other words, (from the web site of the Significant Objects project): A talented, creative writer invents a story about an object. Invested with new significance by this fiction, the object should — according to our hypothesis — acquire not merely subjective but objective value. How to test our theory? Via eBay!

In order for the significance to be created, the object must begin with no significance at all, before the story is written. The items in the project were collected at thrift stores and garage sales, obtained for very little coin. If an object of no actual value gets valuable via its place in a piece of fiction, then these garage sale finds (the web site categorizes them as talismans, totems, evidence, and fossils) should be commanding a higher price on Ebay than they did at the garage sale. According to the evidence, this is actually happening. Take for example Susannah Breslin's story about the button in the photo, the All American Official Necking Team button. The button is for sale on Ebay, along with the story, and the bidding is now over $35. It was listed at $0.50, which was the price it commanded at the thrift store. There are five days left -- who knows how high this piece could sell for?

The idea of making "real" the objects that appear in fictional work is not new. Here's one example: When author Joshilyn Jackson toured with her book The Girl Who Stopped Swimming, she took along a quilt that represented the quilt created by her artist main character. The actual quilt was made by collage artist Pamela Allen, and brought the quilt in the book to life in the smallest detail. Another example: last month a gallery in the UK showed a collection of books that exist only as titles in other books. The idea of an object from a piece of writing coming to life as a physical object you can hold in your hand is kind of magical, it creates the kind of fetish object that deserves the title "totem" or "talisman."

However, when I think of these pieces from SignificantObjects.com, I am less interested in the value created in the object via the fiction, and more interested in the value created in the fiction, via the object. How difficult would it be for an author to sell a short story on Ebay, without the object attached? Especially a story given in full, which a potential buyer could immediately read online or print out for him/herself? Pretty difficult. Yet here is a story, connected to an old button found at a thrift store, that's selling for the price of three paperbacks. Remember, we are in a time when even books are seen as archaic, where people download cheap digital versions of novels, and fiction is readily available all over the internet in a bazillion online magazines.

Maybe what this buyer is actually purchasing is a feeling of ownership that escapes the average reader of a Kindle download or a mass market paperback. This reader will possess the button, and therefore possess the story, in a way that no one else will or can. Like an illustrated text, before the printing press was invented, there is a real sense of exclusivity to this type of writing -- it can only truly be owned by one person.

For more info: For more significant objects to bid on, follow @significobs on Twitter.

Alice Hoffman Freaks Out, and Plus Her Book is Bad

2009-06-29T21:14:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, angry author Alice Hoffman used Twitter to publish a reviewer's phone number and (misspelled) email address. She encouraged her followers to "tell [the reviewer] off," after reviewer Roberta Silman published a lukewarm review of Hoffman's most recent book, The Story Sisters, in the Boston Globe. Instructing followers to "Tell her what u think of snarky critics," Hoffman caused eyebrows around the twitterverse to raise a few languid millimeters, as the book world vaguely pondered whether reviewers should really be punished for saying what they think.

Their conclusion: No, they should not. After receiving some flack for her tweet, Hoffman tried to turn this tantrum into a principled stance, saying, "Girls are taught to be gracious and keep their mouths shut. We don't have to. And we writers don't have to say nothing when someone tries to destroy us." Uh, yeah.

In an incredibly synchronous coincidence, I just yesterday finished reading Alice Hoffman's novel Here on Earth. Do I dare tell you exactly how I feel about this book? Will my phone number be posted on Twitter tomorrow, beside an impassioned call to action?

I did not like Here on Earth. I only picked it up because my brain somehow crossed wires and I thought I was picking up an Angela Carter book. Carter wrote The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffman. She is not, as I now know, related in any way to Alice Hoffman. I had never read Alice Hoffman before.

Here on Earth is a romance novel dressed up as literary chick-lit. Its central character is an unlikeable woman whose choices are dense and reprehensible, and whose family and friends are only slightly less loathsome. Switching through point-of-view characters with irritating frequency and loping along in an uncomfortable present tense, the book spirals outward away from an increasingly irrational and self-destructive heroine as if the plot is mirroring the reader's desire to get out of her unsavory story. Several times in the book, young characters are told that they just don't know anything about love. Maybe my failure to connect with this novel is a result of a similar misunderstanding.

Or maybe it's because of lines like this: "He can spend hours watching a wounded cedar beetle and weep over its rare beauty, as well as its agony." Or this: "He knows what can happen to any man who won't let go of his pain." These lines were written without sarcasm about two different male characters, and they're not even the ones we're *supposed* to hate! Maybe it's because of the close attention paid to sweaters and cookies. Ultimately, though, I didn't buy the violence, the pain, the delusions, or even the love.

The Boston Globe said about Here on Earth: "A sound addition to an impressive body of work." I wonder if that reviewer would have been called out on Twitter, had it been around back in 1997 when Here on Earth was published? Because all that reviewer really said was, "Alice Hoffman has written another of many books." And sometimes, if you're trying to be nice, that's all you can really say.

UPDATE: Alice Hoffman's twitter account is no longer. However, Gawker has screen caps.

Here's a list of the people I referenced in the article if you want to follow them on Twitter:

Alice Hoffman @alicehof (deleted? suspended? torn down in a fit of rage?)

Ron Charles, Washington Post Writer: @roncharles

Islinda, outraged fan: @darkonfire

Thanks to Maud Newton who retweeted it: @maudnewton

Thanks to Susannah Breslin who sent it to me: @reversecowpie

And this is me: @lostcheerio

Reading Wickett's Remedy in the Time of Swine Flu

2009-06-27T21:09:00.000-07:00

You think you've got it bad?

Myla Goldberg's novel, Wickett's Remedy, begins pleasantly enough, as a quaint period piece about a young girl in the early 20th century, escaping South Boston to experience big city life as a shop girl selling men's shirts. Lydia Kilkenny finds love, gets married to a medical student, and sets up house. The narrative is augmented by marginal notes in the point of view of ancillary characters, and newspaper articles and editorial letters from the time, and other snatches of dialogue.

Then the Spanish Influenza happens. The book stops being cute, derails itself from a nice little plot about a ghetto girl who conquers the world, and heads into dark and dangerous territory. Now the marginal notes, the newspaper articles, and disembodied dialogues and unexplained bits of correspondence become sinister, threatening, and the main character, who had seemed a little too sweet, too plucky, too dear, is now our only hope. The book was extremely moving, after things got dire. Once I got to the awful part, I could hardly put it down. The multiplicity of voices becomes part of the story itself, as if the only way the unfairness, the starkness, the confusion of the times could be portrayed is through this fragmentation of the narrative.

Goldberg illuminates a world of which I had absolutely no knowledge, no experience. One third of the world's population was infected with this flu. The mortality rate was 10%. That meant that more than 3% of the world's population died of this disease. Seventeen million in India. Six hundred thousand in the US. The most gruesome fact of the pandemic was that the disease killed strong young adults more effectively than the old or young, because the stronger your immune system the more violently the disease came on. Truly horrific. And the things that happened on the Navy ships. Goldberg hints at horrors, via snatches of dialogue and reports, that defy belief.

I highly recommend Wickett's Remedy to anyone who has been loudly panicking about the swine flu, has felt themselves put upon and afflicted by this outbreak, or has been walking around in a face mask. The things Goldberg will show you will make your life in 2009 seem like a paradise of health and vigor.

How to Compete for a Woman with Twilight's Edward Cullen

2009-06-25T21:03:00.000-07:00

The coat is key.

As we all know, Edward Cullen, dark and dangerous (but not too dangerous!) star of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight, has ruined women on regular guys for the next ten years. (Read this: Ten ways Twilight has ruined a generation of high school girlfriends.) Merciful creature that I am, I have some tips for the victims of this literary vampire, who has sucked away your chances for getting a prom date and left you feeling fleshy and inadequate.

1. Purchase a pea coat. After that, if you feel okay, get some pants that actually fit. Wear them together at the same time. If you have anything in your wardrobe in any shade of red, green, or yellow, push it to the back and don't touch it again.

2. Tell a girl you're bad, very very bad. Then never do anything even remotely bad.

3. Get your hair off your face. Purchase mud, shellac, cream, pomade, or wax but *not* hairspray. Squeeze your product into your hands, and then grab at your head as if it's causing you agonizing pain. Continue to clutch your skull until all your hair is pointing away from your forehead. For style reference, check out Brandon and Dylan from Beverly Hills, 90210 circa 1992. No more Disney Channel shag.

4. If you can't think of anything to say to a girl, just glare at her. Never explain anything. Say almost nothing at all. If she asks you what you're thinking, put your arm around her and look away.

5. Imagine the expression you'd have on your face if someone stabbed you with a pencil in the gallbladder, spleen, pancreas or pyloric valve (any other dark, secret, unlocatable place in your abdomen will do). This should now become your default expression.

6. Your excuse for not doing anything should be that you want to too much. As in, you couldn't call because you wanted to *too much.* You couldn't wait for her because you wanted to *too much.*

7. Refuse to do anything physical with your girl, and only relent when pressed to extremes. At each base, you must stop yourself and her from going farther at least three times (claiming, of course, to want her too much).

8. Don't hum, laugh, punch other guys, or behave in any way that could be perceived as happy, relaxed, or lively. Instead, hold a book in your hand and stare off into the distance, maybe about half a football field away.

9. Never think of or mention football again, except if you're using it as a reference point for your distracted, tortured staring. Do not participate in sports, no, not even baseball unless you are an actual vampire.

10. Lead with your forehead. You should always be able to see a little bit of your eyebrow hair as you are peering out from under your brow. This is particularly true if you're attempting a smile. And your smile should always say, "I'm full, but I could eat more" and never "I'm happy" or "That's funny" or "Do you like me?"

Now, there are some lengths to which you should not go to bag a Twilighter. DO NOT:

1. Attempt to run up a tree.

2. Take off your shirt.

3. Wear lipstick.

4. Pretend you can type blood by sight.

5. Jump off a building.

6. Engage in warfare with a rogue vampire.

7. Take her to meet your family.

8. Attempt to stop a speeding car with your body.

9. Drive like you're immortal.

10. Eat a raw deer.

Good luck! Happy hunting, regular guys!

Ten Ways Twilight Has Ruined a Generation of High School Girlfriends

2009-06-23T20:58:00.000-07:00

Your girlfriend is mine.

It used to be hard to get a date in high school. Now, thanks to Twilight, it's got to be damn near impossible. What Mr. Darcy did for husbands, Edward Cullen is doing for boyfriends, and another generation of women is losing interest in the happy jocks while musing over the dark-haired, troubled guy with all that anguish in his eyes.

Edward Cullen is the fictional teen vampire / Byronic anti-hero in Twilight that seduces awkward, brainy heroine Bella Swan. The characters in the book bump around school and rainy Washington, being moody and misunderstanding each other, as Bella and Edward fall in love. Then there are mean vampires, and then more love.

So what makes Edward the Vampire Fantasy Boyfriend such a PR problem for real life teens who just want to get a date to take to dinner and hang out with at the prom? What do the girls see in those black gold eyes?

10. The reason Edward rejects you initially is because he loves you *too much*.

9. Edward has super powers like running superfast and walking up trees, which he can perform while carrying you, making you feel very small and thin.

8. He's strong as an ox but physically effeminate and beautiful, looks great in a full face of makeup.

7. He can save you from speeding SUVs and vampires and thugs without sweating. If a real boy saved you from a thug he'd probably rehash the whole event in front of his friends forty times, but Edward just wanders off.

6. When he's being cryptic, and you push him to explain himself, it just makes him like you *even more.* Real boys tend to have to get off the phone when this happens.

5. When he's moody, it's because he wants to eat people, not because he's about to break up with you.

4. He can read everyone else's mind, but yours is a total mystery.

3. At the beach, his skin turns into diamonds. Real boys turn red and blotchy.

2. He's immortal. Real boys can be killed by almost anything.

And the number one reason that Edward Cullen has ruined things for average teenage boys:

1. He is overcome with deep, torturous lust for you, but he can never, never act on it, or you will die.

Edward Cullen is the safe boyfriend. He will never make you actually take your pants off, but he will constantly reassure you that he only wants to ravage you.

What does this mean? Teenage girls don't actually want to be ravaged. They want to be desired but not deflowered, that they want to be constantly, urgently threatened with intercourse, but never have to experience it. Edward will never, ever satisfy himself with Bella, because doing so would kill her. Let me make you a metaphor map: Loss of virginity = death. Edward = impotent. Therefore the perfect teen boyfriend.

So what's a regular guy to do, in the face of this kind of competition? Now that the movie's out, even the illiterate girls have Edward as a measuring stick for male perfection.

Next time, I'll give you ten ways that regular, average boys can compete with Edward Cullen, using sneaky tactics and clever ploys instead of actual vampirism.

From Susannah's "A Photo a Day," June 22, 2009

2009-06-23T19:15:00.000-07:00

A Photo a Day, June 22, 2009
Originally uploaded by Susannah Breslin

Shut up, Barbie.

Ten Words to Make You Sound Smart in a Book Discussion

2009-06-17T20:47:00.000-07:00

Try to impress Jacques Derrida.

Here are ten words to stock your conversational arsenal that will make you sound like you spent six years in a PhD program reading Derrida and Joyce and drinking absinthe. Warning: With the wrong audience, you might end up punched in the face or wearing your underwear outside your pants involuntarily. Use at your discretion.

1. Hegemony: This word describes a stronger group inflicting its self-serving ideas on a weaker group, while making the weaker group believe these ideas are awesome. Hegemony is pretty much a cuss word, for book nuts. Example: "This is a total hegemony, man!"

2. Proust: Proust is a fiction writer, and gay, and French, and dead. Those are the facts you need. His most famous work was over 3000 pages long. It's about the nature of memory and art, and no one except his mother has ever read it all. You can say it contains whatever character or plot twist you wish, and never be contradicted.

3. Deconstructionism: Contrary to popular use, "deconstruct" does not mean the opposite of construct. It actually means to reduce a written work to its most basic assumptions and then show how those assumptions are paradoxical and therefore meaningless. Instead of good vs. evil, it's neither. This is not a synonym for "analyze." Sorry, Sean Hannity.

Marcel Proust is scintillated by your discourse.

4. Hermeneutics: This word means the study of ways to find meaning in a text. There are a million ways to go about finding meaning, all predicated on the idea that it can be found. Believe it or not, there are people who believe that hermeneutics and meaning are stupid and boring. For serious rockstar points, publically discard hermaneutics and everything it implies.

5. Post-colonialism: At some point in the 20th century, the world decided that making colonies was bad, and that reading any native literature from a colonized country as "cute" and saying "It's neat how they keep writing things down!" was also bad. So we had to develop a new term for our new enlightened way of interacting with this type of discourse. Post-colonialism means "after the colonizers decided the colonized might actually have something to say."

6. Foucault: Foucault is a philosopher, and gay, and French, and dead. He wrote in a very smartypants manner about a bunch of stuff, including how there is no truth or meaning, no way to interpret discourse. He was super-against hermeneutics. In fact, if you want to disagree with something that ends in -ic or -ism, you can probably cite Foucault.

7. French Feminism: French feminists invented the idea of a female kind of writing, "ecriture feminine" which is super-sexy and completely different from phallocentric male discourse. French feminists believed women should write about women, and their bodies. If you use the phrase "writing the body" you will get knowing nods from male friends and phone numbers from the girls.

You fail to convince Heidegger.

8. Joycean: James Joyce's catalog is varied and deep, which means that "Joycean" can go in front of any noun you want, including "Joycean monologue" and "Joycean symbolism" and "Joycean analogy" and even "Joycean discourse."

9. Heterogeneous: Heterogeneity is good because diversity is good. Therefore the word "homogeneous" is bad, just like hegemony is bad. Note: None of these words can be properly applied to milk. Just political movements, world populations, ideas, and granola.

10. Discourse: Use this word in place of any synonym for language. Any chunk of words, spoken or written, can be discourse. Do not ever, under any circumstances, call words "words" or sentences "sentences." Try "heterogenous discursive units." For bonus points, find three places I've used the word "discourse" in this very article, just trying to sound smart!

So, have we learned anything today? Did you know all of this already? What's your favorite word to use in a book group?

For more info: There is a lot more info. But do you really want it?

Blogging is Dead. Long Live Blogging.

2009-06-16T07:30:00.000-07:00

Is it just me or does blogging these days seem tragically onerous? It's a little bit like living in a cabin in the woods, all by yourself. Your cabin may have been built with your own hands, and may be a cabin you're really very proud of, but ultimately it's a cabin that no one ever sees. It's just so far out in the woods, you know? No one sees the brick path you laid, the planters you filled with geraniums, the really neat pot hangers. No one sees your blog either.

It's lonely in the cabin. A person starts to feel like the only person in the woods. So we all come out to the lodge or the campfire, and we start chatting with the other mountain dwellers. Of course, when you're sitting around the campfire, you can't pontificate for hours on the state of your geranium planters. You have to keep it brief, keep it entertaining. That's Twitter. That's Facebook. That's Tumblr. Meet me at the campfire. I'll listen to what you have to say for thirty seconds at a time.

Here's the reality: I'm no longer visiting your blog. Well, that's not entirely true. I'm no longer visiting your blog just to visit. I will read your blog posts if one of these three conditions is met:

1. You tweet or Facebook a link to it that attracts my attention.
2. It appears in my reader, in which case I read it there, in my reader.
3. It turns up in a google search for something specific I want to know.

I don't care about your awesome page layout.
I don't care about your 18 inch blogroll.
I don't even care about your tag cloud.

No, not at all.

I do care, deeply, about your ability to write 140 words at a time in Twitter. I care about your ability to post funny or interesting Facebook updates. I care about your blog posts too, insofar as they fit into my reader, uniformly formatted with all the other posts by bloggers with which I've categorized you. I care about the words you write, but I no longer care about the context in which you write them. And really, I want to say to you, and to myself -- enough blogging. If you can say it in 140 words, you should. No more "What we did today." No more "Here's a funny anecdote." No more "Have you ever wondered about this question?" None of those things merit a blog post any more, and I'm not traipsing all the way out to your cabin to read that! Say it in 140 characters, right here at the campfire, or don't say it. Sorry!

It sounds extreme, and obviously, I'm not entirely done with blogging myself. So what kinds of things can I *not* say in 140 words? What topics do I actually feel justified blogging about, and what blog posts will I still trudge out to your blog to read?

1. Something that's long and funny.
2. Something that's long and useful.
3. Something that's long and contentious.

I might also blog something that's full of pictures, but it must also be either funny, useful, or contentious. Otherwise I can just Tweet or Facebook a link to the Flickr set.

That's really it.

Does this mean that we no longer have the attention span for blogs? Am I now supposed to say something wan and dire about the decay of this or that, or the disintegration of blah blah blah?

No. Because the writing isn't gone. The text isn't even really shorter. It's just that the internet has become more modular. Instead of the context of your layout, your blogroll, your About Me, your profile, your color scheme and the rest of it, you now exist in a larger context. You are now in the context of whatever feed that brings you to my screen. You are adjacent to everyone else. You are without context.

This isn't the decay of anything. It is a literary evolution. Now more than ever, content is king. The blog posts that people do write and pay attention to are less like journals, less like casual diaries, and more like articles -- meaty and complex. The blogs that survive Twitter and Tumblr and will be the ones with actual content that's accummulated into a body of work with merit. For the rest of the blogging population, Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Flickr, and Friendfeed will more than suffice. This is a good thing, people. While "Blogging" may be alive and well, "blogging" is dead. Face(book) it: It's just not worth posting the small stuff anymore.

Tweeting this post? Here's a short URL: http://bit.ly/ry1o8

The Conservatives Against Conservation Association takes on Earth Hour!

2009-03-28T18:16:00.000-07:00

1. Earth Hour is a global demonstration where people turn off their lights and appliances for an hour to raise awareness about global warming and plant the idea of energy conservation in people's heads.

2. Conservatives come back with Human Achievement Hour, in which people turn all their lights and appliances ON, to show how stupid liberals are.

3. Twitter channel #tcot becomes flooded with gleeful reports of "My block is lighted up like a Christmas tree!" and "I even have my car and motorcycle running in my driveway!"

4. I become aware of this, and start tweeting sassy tweets like "#earthhour #tcot Liberals are saving money tonight. Conservatives are spending money. Who's dumb?" and "Join us in bright lights! We're the Conservatives Against Conservation Association! #caca #earthhour #tcot"

5. Somebody RETWEETS my thing about Conservatives Against Conservation, as if it was a serious post.

6. People start actually using the hashtag #caca which was created by me to be funny and stupid.

Would You Friend Your Kids on Facebook?

2009-03-27T06:54:00.000-07:00

Some of us parents lead a double life. Not the exciting kind where you end up in Ankara with no recollection of how you got there or why you're wearing only one stiletto, but a double life of the mind. We make our mom faces, wear our mom clothes, and use our mom vocabulary. Even those of us who are "cool moms" create a mom persona -- it doesn't have to be all braided hair and cookie dough. My mom persona is constructed out of different parts: part is my own personality, part is what I think mothers should look and sound like, part is how my mother was, and another part is a new creation -- something that came out of me after my kids came along, that wasn't there before. I like being a mom.

However, I do have a separate piece of my brain that's entirely personal. This piece is a survivor from a time before my children; maybe part single girl, part newlywed, maybe even part teenager. I try to let it change and grow apart from my "mom" self, so that I don't just become the mom and abandon the real me. So that I don't look around when my kids leave for college and realize I have nothing to do but wait for grandchildren. Writing novels is part of that separate piece, and blogging is part of the separate piece (peace?) and recently Facebook, for me and a lot of moms I know, has become part of it.

Yes, we've always had our email lists and phone calls, but there's something about posting OMFG, I need them to be asleep. Must. have. quiet. as one of my friends did recently, that provides instant gratification. You wouldn't write an email to say "Why is it that my children think they need to physically help me open a pack of gum?" But if you Facebook it or Twitter it, you'll have five or six amusing answers within a few minutes, and nowadays really that's all you want. Email has become the new snail mail -- it feels cumbersome, antiquated, and formal, like you need a really good reason to do it, especially to a whole group. Facebook and Twitter is where you go for instant luv now. To shout out to your mom homies, and hear a "hellz yeah" back. Of course, you can't shout out to your mom homies with the children in the room.

But it's not just about complaining about your kids. As more people find and use Facebook, your friend list becomes a synthesis of your entire life. You have high school friends, college friends, ex-boyfriends, professional acquaintances, people who only knew you when you played in a rock band, people who only knew you when you were a cool writer chick, etc. Putting all these people in one place is perplexing enough, without introducing them en masse to your children, who may not know that Mommy wrote a kind of edgy experimental book back in the 90s, who may not see Mom as a rocker, who have no concept of any previous life that Mom may have led, or really anything that existed before they, the children, came into the world.

Which is why you get posts like this, from another friend: I need to post something funny but don't want any speshul snowflaks to see. To which I responded: Whisper it in groanupps langwadj. And another mom added: We must find a way around this... Well, don't we still have email? Don't we still have the telephone? Yeah, we do. But since we've tasted the sweet, sweet nectar of Facebook and Twitter, we can't go back to the old way of doing things. Anyone want to run out and register Mombook.com?

To recap, there are three reasons to NOT friend your kids on Facebook:

1. No more bitching about the kids or reporting the funny things they do/say.
2. Kids get to meet Ralph the pierced stoner and experience all his video posts, then ask me how I know this Ralph guy and what those people are doing with that garden hose.
3. Now I have to edit everything I say to make sure it's safe for the dinner table.

But some of us have kids old enough to have their own Facebook accounts. High schoolers, even. So, are there any reasons TO friend your kids?

1. Know what your kids are up to. This was actually the reason I joined Facebook in the first place, and my first two friends were my two teenaged stepchildren. See -- it works both ways. Maybe someplace on LiveJournal there's a post called "Would You Friend Your Mom on Facebook?"
2. If they ask you to friend them, and you don't friend them, then that feels mean. And it is mean. There's just no way around it. You don't want to say "I won't be your friend" to your child, even if you explain it in the kindest possible way.
3. Maybe, just maybe, it's a good thing for the kids to see their moms in this context.

For example: Yes, Mom has friends. Yes, Mom makes snarky comments about politics to people I've never met. No, I don't get all the inside jokes on her Flair corkboard. No, I didn't know she went to college in three different places. Seeing mom in the context of other adults, in the context of the great big world, and witnessing some interactions that have nothing to do with children, nothing to do with them, might just be good for our kids, especially the older ones. I have no solution to the privacy problem or our need for an "Adults Only" zone that's just as fun and immediate as Facebook, but until we figure it out, I am pretty sure that friending your kid is the only thing you can do.

What do you think?

Related post: Twitter, Tumblr, and Tags: You Are Still All Alone

Surviving The Quincunx by Charles Palliser

2009-03-21T12:15:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, watching CNN, I saw a feature piece about a man who has been feeding the homeless daily out of the back of his truck in a Queens neighborhood for ten years. I found myself astonished that such a man could exist, that such selfless charity could be going on. Surely he must have some hidden motive, some personal failing out of which this commitment has arisen. He can't be just a NICE GUY doing a NICE THING for people in NEED. Of course, he can. He does. Nice people do nice things all the time with no hope of personal gain, no secret, devious agenda. I just had a hard time believing it.

I blame Charles Palliser, and his novel, The Quincunx, which I have been reading for about a month. This 800 page behemoth of a Victorian novel (neo-Victorian? 1989) drags its readers and main character through every milieu of horror, every site of human want and degradation, through the most wretched poverty, the most abject misery the 19th century had to offer. And of course, the 19th century offers plenty. Feel like you've been there, done that? After all, you've read Dickens, right? Seriously, this is Dickens on crystal meth. Imagine the nightmares of Dickens, but without the comfortable distance of Dickens' hyperformal language. And imagine that everyone, everywhere, is purely selfish, purely wicked, and does nothing for any reason but blunt personal gain. The protagonist of this novel, who starts out a boy and ends up a much thinner, much more suspicious boy, lives through every possible awfulness of the time, from agricultural slavery to being a knife-and-boot boy, to various murder attempts, and many, many, many betrayals. Everyone who appears to be trustworthy is false. Everyone who offers love is immediately killed or destroyed.

It is BAD. It is bad in early 19th century England. Very very bad.

However, I am glad I read it for two reasons.

First, if I'm ever tempted to be one of these people who says, "How dare the government take my money to give it to poor people? Leave that to the churches and to my personal charity!" I have only to recall what the churches and individuals of the time were able to do for the working class when the industrial revolution was just beginning, when common lands were being fenced and sold, when there were no legal protections for children, no laws governing labor, no laws governing housing standards, etc. Individuals and churches I'm sure did a lot for a lot of people, but it wasn't enough, given the grinding, irresistable motivation of people to get more money, more power, more property. You could read this book and come away saying, "Wow, the poor in this country really have it made." And I say that's a good thing. I don't want to have to step over dying people and starving orphans. Paying taxes will be just fine, thanks. The thing is, and this is what became clearer to me while reading this book, that without public education, school lunch programs, health care, and other entitlements, there truly is a caste system from which there is no escape. Without money, you can't get money, and you are just trapped. Palliser is a scholar, and he researched the book for 14 years. He's truly captured the period, and seeing it played out before you in such lurid and exacting detail is so much more compelling than reading about it in facts and figures.

The other reason I'm glad I read it is that it was a great read! I was completely fascinated by the time I was ten pages in, and the story just grabbed me by the collar and railroaded me right through to the end. It was almost un-put-downable and I spent many sleepy mornings having stayed up way too late the night before. It is *not* a morality book, although I've spent time talking about that aspect of it. I haven't talked about the plot at all, but much has been made of the mystery in the extremely elaborate, very intelligently wrought story that drives the book. Go here if you've read it and want to ponder all its intricacies. It involves an inheritance, a murder, and a whole lot of family tree.

If you do decide to read The Quincunx, make sure you have some time set aside to cope with obsessive reading. And it might be good to take this one on in the summer months, when you can go outside periodically and remember that life is good, that people can love, and that redemption is possible.

Jack Pendarvis is One of Those Guys

2009-03-21T09:33:00.000-07:00

I just can't hang. I don't know what happened to me. I want to say that when I was 23 I could tolerate or even enjoy these books organized on the principle of "what the hell." These novels that challenge what it means to be a novel, characters who defy the idea of a character, whose authors seem to make decisions because they're the ones holding the pen, and tee-hee who's going to stop them?

I know I dated guys who wrote books like this when I was in my 20s. But I also remember putting down The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as a child, and only part of the reason was because I thought the sacrilege would send me to hell. I have a feeling that if the narrative truly compelled me, I would have dared to face the consequences.

The first book I read by Jack Pendarvis was Your Body is Changing, a collection of short stories. At first, I was really digging it. Yes, it tended a little toward the type of story collection that holds up one character after another saying, "Look at this idiot! Okay, now look at this idiot! Isn't he a tool? Now check out this guy -- what a tool!" But it was really imaginative and interesting. I particularly liked the story "Outsiders" about a woman who announces constantly that she's really someone who will "call you on your shit." Then I got to the title story, about an adolescent zealot who comes into age and cynicism in various har-har ways. And I started to wonder, is Jack Pendarvis one of those guys? One of those guys who produces desultory idylls revolving around randomness, irony, and a wry, intellectual detachment? One of those McSweeney's type guys? When the main character set off on a cross country journey in a goat cart, I had to face the truth: Jack Pendarvis is one of those guys.

Then I read his novel, Awesome, which is about a giant and his robot friend. Pendarvis' giant (named "Awesome") is as inaccessible as the prose itself, and unfortunately he tells his own story mixing low and high discourse like it's 1999. I couldn't finish Your Body is Changing, but I will admit I read to the end of Awesome, to see if penises are really like guns. You know the old plotting rule: If you show a gun in Act I, it has to go off in Act III, right? So, if you cut off your penis on a whim in Act I, does it have to return to you when you least expect it, in Act III? Answer: yes. Penises are just like guns in this respect.

Right after I had finished reading Awesome, a friend loaned me The Thirteen and a Half Lives of Captain Bluebear. It was through realizing the proximity of the latter to The Hitchhiker's Guide that I realized the proximity of Awesome to this iconic work, and so I have to admit: There may be people out there who will find this book to be gorgeous, revelatory, and profound. I am not one of them. However, I salute MacAdam Cage for publishing it, I salute Pendarvis for writing it, and I'm glad it's out there on the bookshelves, in all its weirdness, in all its belligerent quirkiness, because the world doesn't need another mild romance, and Jack Pendarvis ain't no Nicholas Sparks.

Twitter, Tumblr, Tags: You Are Still All Alone

2009-03-11T21:58:00.000-07:00

In spite of the flurry of social media that surrounds me, I am still all alone in the space between my ears. In the moment of any creative act, there is nothing outside my own brain that can help me, no synergy, no immediacy of connection can save me. All the networking in the world is a noise and a dissipation when it comes to my book and the words that I have to put together, to get the book done.

I was standing in my kitchen when it hit me. It was one o'clock in the morning, and I had been writing my novel. Frustration drove me away from the keyboard and into the other room. I stood there with one hand on the phone, but at 1am, I couldn't call anyone here in Virginia. My family was asleep. Even west coast friends would need a reason to pick up the phone this late. There was no noise in the house. I was truly completely alone with my book and a couple of really tough scenes. If I were going to phrase the problem as a Tweet... if I were going to tell my writing group about it... if I were telling someone in an email... but it didn't matter how I could phrase it or present it or package the problem. I was only having it, not reporting it at all.

Of course, there were lots of people I could have "called" online. With a Twitter search, I could find people writing novels just like me and talking about it at that very moment. I could find blogs, message boards, email lists. I could shoot out a Facebook status update and within minutes have people tell me how it would get better, how they had been there, how I could fix it. But I realized, standing there in my physical form in the middle of the night -- tired, cold, close to a breakthrough -- that it wouldn't help.

I couldn't get what I needed from the vast amorphous "them" out there, the support, the network, the like minds. I stood there gripping the counter, facing the idea that I might just have to give up on writing this difficult book, doing this difficult thing. And I realized, it's not that I don't have the right support, the right help and connections. It's that support cannot help. Connections cannot write this miserable book. I have to write it. Word by word, wrenched straight out of my own brain, going straight down into my book -- not offered for critique on a message board, or discussed in Twitter, or announced in a blog.

This is me. Just this physical form and the electricity in my head, all online appendages amputated, all connections severed. This is you, alone, thinking. Making something up in your brain. Directing it onto the page. This is the only thing that ultimately matters.

Connections are addictive. I live online. My Twitter feeds my Facebook. My YouTube feeds my Tumblr. There's a camera in my laptop lid, a camera in my phone, and then there's my actual camera and my Flickr. On web sites and blogs, with hashtags and Digg, I find people who are watching the same show I'm watching, eating the same food I'm eating, shopping for the same kitchen appliance, etc. etc. In the interest of full disclosure, I am linking out to all my social media, but this isn't all. There are forums, games, elists, and more. If I have a question, or need to say something, I can push it out to hundreds of people who are the same as I am in some way: writers, readers, homeschoolers, people from the neighborhood here, people from my hometown. I can find people who think the same, look the same, live the same, and I can access them immediately. I have their ears.

Maybe you can push your message out to thousands who are just like you in some way. But are they just like you in that one crucial way? I cannot find anyone who is writing the same book. No one can talk to me about that. And if they did? Sound and dissipation.

It's me. It's 1 AM. There's a book not getting written. For this I have to be all alone. And when it comes down to getting alone, I can see that in this way, for this purpose, I have been alone all the while, with bees buzzing around my head, and a radio playing in the background, and a train passing by outside, and a fan blowing, rasping away. And yes, I get the irony: I am telling you this in a blog. I have found the way in which we are exactly alike. But for this purpose, in this one instance, let's not talk about it at all.

Hamlet 2: Sometimes Even Catherine Keener Cannot Save You

2009-03-01T05:07:00.000-08:00

Okay, I didn't like "Dogma" either. It's not that I'm prudish or can't appreciate a good satire, but "Hamlet 2" bored me, literally to sleep. That's the same way I felt about "Dogma," I realize. Bored. Steve Coogan (he was the little tiny Roman guy in "Night at the Museum") plays a failed actor who is now a drama teacher. But, OH NO! The drama program is in trouble. It's going to be eliminated from the school! Just when a bunch more kids have signed up for drama class, as shop and computer classes have also been eliminated!

So what do we do in a movie, if the drama program is in trouble? That's right. We put on a show to save it! Do we all have to pull together, and overcome our differences, and in the process do we all learn a little bit about ourselves?

I don't know, because right at that point I turned to Dan and said, "I didn't know this was going to be a movie about saving the community center." And then I fell asleep. I also didn't know the movie was going to be about children, or rather 26-year-olds pretending to be children. I also didn't know that Catherine Keener was going to be given such slim material to work on, not that she can't work with less, but still. A little brutal.

Good points in the movie: Elizabeth Shue plays herself, having given up Hollywood to become a nurse. Catherine Keener counts as a good point. She is always hilarious and perfect. Steve Coogan manages to be likeable in spite of the overwrought situation.

To me, it played like a Monty Python skit writ American and writ about a hundred times too long. Coogan definitely seemed to be channeling Terry Gilliam at times, but the character couldn't bear the weight of the entire movie. But then, I didn't watch the whole thing. Maybe I'm letting my bias against movies in which the community center must be saved hold me back from watching a great comedy. What do you think. Should I watch the rest of it?

Wait by Frank Turner Hollon

2009-01-23T08:34:00.000-08:00

This is not a review. It's a reaction. There are spoilers. If you want a review, here it is: Wait is a worthwhile novel from an interesting mind, that will make you think about your soul, and the state of it, and the reasons why your soul may be in that state. It will make you look around your life with a new, healthy suspicion, and try to imagine your spouse with a gun in his hand, standing there blankly, ready to pull the trigger. So there's your review. Go get the book, and read it, and come back here and talk to me about it.

Frank Turner Hollon has written the life story of Early Winwood, a guy you might pass on the street without noticing, a character you might not think was worthy of having a novel written about him. A regular guy. The difference between Early and most regular guys is that right in the middle of the book, after living through a few dozen unremarkable years, Early does something very remarkable: he kills a man. Then, later, he kills another one.

This book is telling me one of two things. No, there are no other interpretations:

1. The narrator is unreliable. The book is psychological study that takes us deep under cover in the mind of a murderer, to show us how he, twisted and inhuman as he is, sees himself as normal, fitting snugly into the fabric of society. I have two bits of evidence for this interpretation. First, the ambiguity of his relationship to Kate Shepherd, and the fact that this drug user turned model citizen at one point tells the court he is a kidnapper and a stalker. The second is the way the murders really fail to haunt the guy, at least fail to haunt him to the extent that a murder would haunt me. Or maybe a murder wouldn't really haunt me that much, which brings me to possibility #2.

2. Early is a murderer, and Early is an average guy. Both. One does not preclude the other. Murder is closer to you than you think it is, reader, and only a thin hair of opportunity and impetus stands between you and the act itself. Looking back on the book, this explanation seems more elegant. It is as if the whole plot of this man's life was constructed to be a doughy, bland container for that one act of violence, so that the blandness leaks into the violence, and makes it ordinary, all part of the whole.

I don't know which one is the correct reading but I hope it's two. It's not that I agree with him, in fact I don't like the idea that we're all base, we're all murderers, we're all that low, as vile as the least of us is vile. I don't agree. But I think that makes the more perfect novel, and I've never read a book constructed like this, with so much fire-retardant wadding packed around a fuel cell on fire.

The book fails me in a couple of ways -- the second "murder" doesn't seem to fit either of my explanations, and it blurs the lines of what's a reasonable excuse to commit the crime. I was disappointed also a little bit in the lesser characters, in Early's fake son and fake daughter. I never knew what lens I was seeing them through, and Early's take on it seemed more suspect when he was describing these relationships than it did when he was talking about Kate.

Ultimately, a very interesting book and a book that worked my brain. I will have to try another by this author.

Sin in the Second City by Karen Abbott

2009-01-16T06:10:00.000-08:00

There are two fine lines that Abbott had to navigate when writing Sin in the Second City, a historical account of the Everleigh Club, the fanciest and most infamous brothel in Chicago at the turn of the century.

The first line is between two moral positions.

Abbott has two heroines here: Minna and Ada Everleigh, the jewel-encrusted madams who elevated their little corner of the vice district beyond the dirty dance hall and onto a level of elegance and sophistication that attracted millionaire visitors and international attention. Minna and Ada are characters that the author clearly loves. As we follow their story from a mysterious lowly past to their glorious position as quiet, powerful queens of vice in a vicious city, we are invited to fall in love with them as well. There are pimps and madams that we can scorn, lesser characters who live down the street from the Everleighs, who run shitty dives and beat their girls, drug their customers and stick to their own floors. But the Everleighs are a different breed: smart, ethical, pure.

If the Everleighs are the heroes, then the villains must be the reformers, the demonstrators and politicians who were trying to eliminate the vice district and "save" the girls who had "fallen" there as prostitutes. Among the characters on this team are pastors and evangelists, pious ladies, and also city officials trying to look good and crack down on crime. The problem with villainizing this side of the fight is that they actually did have a point. The danger with making a madam your hero is that there actually was a lot of horrifying stuff going on in these houses, stuff you don't want to cheer for, and can't fall in love with.

So, as a writer, do you position yourself with the madams, and giggle and titter your way through the book, pretending it's all so naughty and wry, and those stuffy old reformers are just party poopers? Or do you position yourself with the reformers, and spend the book pushing out that really new and interesting concept that prostitution is bad? Maybe there's a third solution, to just report what happened, be historically accurate, and educate us all so we can make... oh, wait, I just fell asleep while suggesting that as an option. So, none of those are books that I would want to read.

Fortunately, Abbott is smart. Very smart. And her smart book can present all these possibilities simultaneously. This is not an expose of the horrors of segregated vice in turn of the century Chicago. Nor is this a blushing homage to all those fabulous madams and the sexual excesses of the times. No one is exempt from criticism here. Abbott tells the stories of those vainglorious preachers and the hypocritical politicians, but also shines an unforgiving fluorescent light into the depths of vice: the strip-and-whip fights where girls lashed each other bloody for an audience, the girl's palm rotting from syphilis while still performing its handjob, the lies, the greed, the corruption, and all of it.

No one is exempt, that is, except the Everleighs themselves. In understanding this, I began to understand where the moral compass of the book truly points. I believe that Abbott would say that the sins of the vice district were black enough -- the sins of the white slavers and the opium dealers and the lower madams operating their 50 cent dives. The Everleighs, however, weren't doing anything very wrong, and in shutting down their clean, sophisticated, elegant club, where the men were treated fairly and the girls lined up to get a job, where the health and well being of the harlots was a priority and the customers were treated like customers, not sinners, the authorities threw the baby out with the bathwater. That is, I think, the way the book gets out of its predicament.

This moral subtlety allows the book to transcend that "choice" between the whores and the reformers, and allows the story of the characters to flourish without the weight of a judgment or the tension of the absence of judgment.

The second line that Abbott dances down is a literary one. She is, of course, telling the true story of actual people, and the research that went into this book is amazing. One look at the bibliography and your jaw will drop. However, there are things that cannot be known from research. The biographer's job is to tell the story in an engaging way that will live on the page, without embellishing the facts too much, to navigate between too strict a focus on reality and too fanciful an elaboration. Abbott accomplishes this brilliantly. Everything in quotation marks, in the book, was actually said by the real Everleighs, or other characters, and recorded in court documents, journals, or letters. But Abbott's story goes beyond the bare facts and delivers a prose that reads like fiction. None of the "we can't possibly know" or "it's unclear" but loads of vibrant descriptions, delightful details, and a narrative sense that really brings the landscape of the levee to life.

Sin in the Second City exploded my expectations. You know I loves me some violated dichotomies, yo. By defying the obvious choices, and creating her own rules, Abbott pays the Everleigh sisters great honor by putting them in the context they deserve.

Two Messages on the Side of an Ice Cream Stand

2008-08-15T19:10:00.000-07:00

The Wonderful World of Music

2008-05-16T15:08:00.000-07:00

I could not bear to recap the final three. I have the results show TIVO-d and I plan to recap that. But, not tonight. I mean, can you bear it? Watching these two in the finals is going to be physically painful.

Here's something:

I found the Empire Records soundtrack under a CPU here in our office. The movie, "Empire Records" was based on that old standard plot: Let's put on a show to save the community center! Only in this case the community center was a record store. The reason the movie was iconic was because of the soundtrack which featured such early 90s bands as Toad the Wet Sprocket and The Gin Blossoms. I quite liked the soundtrack -- played it all the time the summer after grad school.

So, on this CD is Edwyn Collins' old song "A Girl Like You." Hearing it, I remembered that when the song was being played on the radio there was a lyric that I could never understand. Now that I have the internet, I decided to look it up. Here's what the lyrics site told me. Note the bolded lines:

I`ve never known a girl like you before
I`ll just like any song from days of you
He coming knocking out there on my door
Well I`ve never met a girl like you before

(Okay, so, the lyric is "days of yore" and that was beyond this interpreter. Furthermore, applying some common sense to line three we would probably come up with "Here you come knocking on my door," but basically that is the first section of the song. On we go.)

Give me just a taste so I want more
Now my hands are bleeding and my knees are raw
`Cause now you got me crawling, crawling on the floor
I`ve never known a girl like you before

Accurate.

Wave me a college
The devil in me
I hoped you got `em talking
At a fare aclee
Hope that I`m talking at a gare aclee
No time talking `bout the way I feel

Fare aclee? Gare aclee? Hey, wave me a college, would you? I heard "at a fare aclee" as "metaphorically" and "at a gare aclee" as "allegorically" but THAT IS JUST ME.

And I`ve never known a girl like you before
Never, never, never, never
Never known a girl like you before

And I've never known a word like "aclee" before.

This old time changed so much
Don`t see where I belong
Too many poor singers
Not enough put their thumbs and now

This was the line I was looking for: sounds like "Too many PUDDASS singers. Not enough PUDDASS songs." I never would have thought it was "not enough put their thumbs." And I still don't.

You`ve come along
Yes, you`ve come along
And I never met a girl like you before
It`s alright.

Here's a link to the real lyrics, if you care. Apparently it's "protest singers" and "protest songs."

How Terrible

2008-04-12T05:38:00.000-07:00

I just remembered that I used to know a boy in high school who peeled his hands. He was a tall, thick, quiet boy with straight hair like a wet cap. He peeled the skin off his hands to the point that he sat in class with a bloody kleenex wrapped around parts of his hands at all times. Or maybe he had some kind of hand peeling disease that made his hands peel without his intervention. The point is that I sat next to this boy with the bloody rag in his hands and made absolutely no sort of contact ever. His behavior was categorized by me as aberrant and I ignored it. And him.

I don't remember his name, but I'm not surprised about that. It does surprise me that I felt no kind of comradeship with this boy, in fact I had a habit of tearing up my cuticles, at stressful times to the point that my best friend throughout high school and college would sometimes be moved to say, "Look, your fingers are like little Christmas trees!" This is the best friend, best friend for ten years, who revealed in her 2004 memoir that our friendship was based on my being mean and her being self-abusive. Or did she say that she stayed friends with me because if I, vicious troll that I was, could be nice to her, then she must be "cool." I can't remember which explanation she settled on, after offering both, I must admit I read those bits quickly.

There Will Be Wide Expanses of Nothing

2008-04-11T05:55:00.000-07:00

We watched this movie on Eleanor's birthday. She selected it. In the afternoon, she called me on my mobile and said, "Can you make this happen? It's all I really want, just 'There Will Be Blood,' okay?" And I said, "Well, there will also be cake," because I wanted to assure her that we would truly be celebrating, not just the usual chinese food and art films. And she said, "Okay, I will be there after 7:30." At 7:00 I called home and said to Dan, "Oh, Dan, please go and trade in whatever girl movie I had on the cabinet for 'There Will Be Blood' because it's Eleanor's special birthday wish." And then he said, "Okay." And then I said, "Can you please also wrap the present that's sitting in the front room?" And he said, "Will there be anything else?" Or something else to show mild loving exasperation with all these tasks, and I said something like "Thank you so much for helping me," because I was really grateful, feeling sort of tired and rushed, and he warmly told me that I was welcome.

If you felt like maybe fast-forwarding through the last paragraph, to get to the pay-off, and you kind of let your eyes wander down the screen to find the point of it all, and then coming to the end of the paragraph you felt like I just nattered on about things that were possibly poignant to me but hardly poignant to anyone else, then you get a small sense of why we watched "There Will Be Blood" on 1.5 speed. You can still hear the talking, okay? It's just that on the long shots where someone is trudging across the badlands, he trudges a little faster. On the endless lingering shots when someone is peering into the distance, or the fire, or the dirt, having complex masculine emotions down deep inside, he peers a little quicker.

Is that a crime?

Well, what if I told you I was making it easy for you in paragraph one? For example, I told you how I was feeling twice, when I could have just described the motion of my eyebrows and expected you to intuit it. I also did not include the 30 minutes I spent listening to my four-year-old daughter's wandering narrative based on the pictures in Peter Rabbit. A time I spent silently listening. I didn't include the time it took to drive home, during which I was almost motionless, staring straight ahead, and the kids were listening to Geggy Tah.

After five minutes, we said, "Maybe this is a movie for men?"

After thirty minutes, we said, "It ain't no 'Boogie Nights'!"

After an hour, we went to 1.5 speed.

We went back to the regular speed for the "I ABANDONED MY CHILD. I ABANDONED MY BOY." part and it was totally not worth it.

In the end, we were unmoved. To be fair, the movie suffered in comparison to the brilliant, amazing, wrenching, hilarious, explosive "No Country for Old Men." Let's face it: Coen > Tarrantino. But Anderson 2008 < Anderson 1998.

Drama at the Disco

2008-03-22T21:14:00.000-07:00

Well, not the disco. But "Walgreen's" is neither alliterative nor sexy. Also, Walgreen's is not actually relevant. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I had errands to run today, and I ran them with vigor. By the end of the day though, my vigor was fading. One of my errands was to pick up some prints which I had ordered at Walgreen's online photo ordering joint this morning. I pulled into the drug store parking lot, left the kids in the van with the relative, and sauntered into the store. I noticed that Walgreen's had upgraded its photo center. I was mildly pleased, as anyone would be, when something gets upgraded that you neither cared passionately about nor felt dissatisfied with before the upgrade occurred.

It was, like, a counter, with like a guy behind it, and bins of photos and stuff.

Me: I'm here to pick up some photos for Lydia.
Guy: Linda?
Me (irritated): LI-DEE-YUH.
Guy (rooting around in the standard sized envelopes): Nothing here for you.
Me: Well, there were a couple of 8x10s. It would be in a larger envelope.
Guy: (rooting around in the larger bin): Nope. Nothing here for Lydia.
Me: Okay, I ordered them online.
Guy: Ohhh, you ordered them ON-LINE. Well, that all goes through Kodak. And they have to send them to us, and then we--
Me (interrupting rudely): Yeah, the web site said they would be done half an hour ago and I got an email saying they were ready. So.
Guy: Well, are you sure this is the right store? Because there's another store on--
Me (interrupting rudely, with gritted teeth, sarcastically raised eyebrows, and disingenuously widened eyes): Yes, I know. I ordered them sent to Walgreen's on 810 21st Street. I've ordered prints here many times. I'm sure about the address. Thanks.
Guy: But are you sure you're at Walgreen's?

And at this point Guy points to his bright blue vest and there on the lapel is the logo: Rite Aid. At first I thought, "Rite Aid ate Eckerd last month. Have they now burped, swivelled, and eaten Walgreen's???" And then I remembered pulling into the parking lot of... Rite Aid. With my van, and me driving it. The next realization I had was that I was a giant ass.

Guy was a cool-looking gay dude and up until now this had been kind of annoying me because I was in full mommy mode and he was coyly denying me my pictures. At this point, though, I was glad. Because Guy and I had a good laugh over it. But seriously, I am now in negative karma in a bad bad way. On the day before Easter, I practically assaulted a photo counter employee and then haughtily revealed that I had no idea WHERE I WAS.

The Easter Bunny is going to bring me a fried goat turd.

UPDATE: When I was looking for an image to illustrate this point, I google-image-searched "wallgreen's" and obviously I spelled it wrong. And result #11 was a picture of Joshilyn and Stephen Colbert. Investigating further, I find that she also spelled WALGREEN'S with two l's in her astute observation about where you can buy underpants. So, we both assed our spelling of Walgreen's, but she's the one that got to meet Colbert. IS THIS THE BEGINNING OF MY KARMA SMACKDOWN!?

Yes, Google, I did mean Walgreen's.

Across the Universe: Movie Review

2008-03-15T21:23:00.000-07:00

If you like the Beatles, you will like this movie. If you aren't a fan, there is absolutely no point in watching it. There are no interesting characters, and there is no plot. There are, however, really interesting covers of Beatles songs. So, that is attractive.

It's like "The Science of Sleep" but with really no characters and more music. It's like "Moulin Rouge" but with no very great acting. There are thirty Beatles songs in it. People sing a lot. The same people sing song after song. But he's not Jake Gyllenhaal, and she's not Chloe Sevigny.

Some of it was amazing -- puppets, masks, special effects, beautiful. Some of it was very very clever -- "I Want You" and "Happiness is a Warm Gun" in particular. Some of it was, okay, schlocky: "Dear Prudence" and "All You Need Is Love." Okay, listen, I told you no one is going to win a reward for writing this or acting in it. However, it is very engaging. And I do love the Beatles. If you look at it as a very very long music video with regrettable interludes of talking and historically romantic layers, your expectations will be correct.

Introspection on Spine and Death

2008-03-14T18:49:00.000-07:00

I have this herniated disk in my spine. I've had it for a long time, and at times it's better and at times worse. There's no way to make it go away, outside of surgery which presents its own set of problems. So here I am. I take Motrin when I remember, and Vicodin when it gets obnoxious, and I march onward. There are millions and millions of people who have way worse physical problems than I do.

Insignificance notwithstanding, occasionally I get feeling a little desperate about it. I have two small children and I would like to be able to bound around and frisk effortlessly like some sort of lovely gazelle, instead of creaking around at times with all the elegance and vivacity of a pile of firewood.

I am, I must tell you, a person who feels omnipotent. I was raised by people who told me I could do anything I wanted, not in a sparkly dreamy-eyed way, but in a factual, casual way. Like, of course. So having something physically wrong with me which prevents me from doing things like running is very irksome. Because it's incontrovertible. Karate is not something that I chose to abandon. That choice was not mine. Sometimes I have felt like life sort of stretches out with limited choices from this point, and I have to keep dragging on through it with this or that painkiller.

I don't think about it a lot, but when I do think about it, it's kind of depressing.

Which is why I was surprised the other night when a new thought presented itself. I was having my usual glancing and wincing relationship with this issue while I was getting dried off after a shower. I found myself thinking that I only have to put up with this irritation for a while longer, and then I will be dead, after all it is only a body, and I am only in it for a while. This thought was not distressing to me -- it was comforting, like realizing you're going to be trading in your car. I wouldn't have thought, five years ago, that I would ever approach mortality in this kind of shitty, oh-well manner. I mean I'm sure one girl's shitty-oh-well is another girl's wow-enlightened but for me, I'm a little disappointed in myself.

I'm not dead yet, after all. No need to be getting philosophical.

Academy Awards Recap: Oscars 2008: Wear Red, Even if You're Helen Mirren

2008-02-24T21:20:00.000-08:00

BEST WAGGLY WALK: First presenter is Jennifer Garner. She’s been backstage with her therapist going over that Gary Busey molestation thing. She looks blotchy. Possibly a little bit of punitive flagellation.

FIRST LAUGH FROM JOHN STEWART: “If we see a woman or black man being president on television, that usually means that an asteroid is about to hit the earth. If a woman or black man wins the election, how will we know it’s not the future!”

Helen Mirren came to the Oscars with Phillip Seymour Hoffman?

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE: Ratatouille. AMAZING! I thought that Important Iranian Film would surely win! Well hey.

BEST MUSICAL PERFORMANCE: Amy Adams sings "Happy Working Song" from "Enchanted." I love her, love this song, love "Enchanted." Here is a creature without irony. Examine her. Turn her over and over. Diagram her strange extremities.

I got a little glimpse of Francis McDormand. She looks awesome. She’s wearing birth control glasses.

MOST MAMMARY PRESENTER: Here comes a breathless, nervous, tongue-tied Jennifer Hudson. My husband speculates that she might have five or six boobs in there, considering my original estimate a little low.

MOST WORRYING CELEBRITY: Owen Wilson sounding out words from the teleprompter and peering at us through red eyes. His nose looks like it’s just been punched. Or, he is stoned.

NO! THEY CAN’T BE STILL PIMPING THIS BEE MOVIE!: It tanked, hello! Nobody watched it! It made children scream and run in the other direction! Seinfeld as bee presents the nominees for animated short film. Awful.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: TILDA SWINTON! Wearing a torn Hefty bag! One sparkly cuff her only adornment. No makeup, tousled orange hair, looking very evil queen. This woman admitted on the red carpet that she has never even watched the Oscars on TV. Now she immediately gives her trophy to her American agent, because his buttocks look similar. Oh yes, yes, there might have been some other reason. Not the expected choice.

BEST COEN BROTHER: Joel. They won for their screenplay. It was adapted.

MOST UNFAIR CASTING: Amy Adams had to sing her “Enchanted” song on an empty stage and Kristen Chenowith got to sing “How Do You Know” with a cast of thousands and get lifted off a bridge – totally unfair! Amy Adams *IS* Giselle for heaven’s sake.

BEST ACTRESS: Marion Cotillard. She wore a mermaid dress to the Oscars, and then she accidentally won Best Actress. She gurgles Frenchly for a while and then says, “Thank you life! Thank you love! It is true there are some angels in this city!” Surprising. She like everyone in the audience thought Ellen Page was going to win.

JACK NICHOLSON: In regular glasses! He says nice things about movies and introduces another montage. I saw a movie last night called “15 Minutes.” It was pretty good. If you like DeNiro and Ed Burns, you will like it. On the other hand, there was a whole lot of stuff in the middle about some Czech girl that Dan and I felt could have been edited more sternly.

BEST DRESS OF THE EVENING: Renee Zellwegger has absolutely got the best dress of the evening. It looks completely perfect. Love the short hair too, wow, does she look great.

WORST JEWELRY: Nicole Kidman is pregnant and wearing five thousand diamonds on her neck in the shape of those icicles people hang on their gutters and forget about until April. Sorry, she looks rotten. And there’s a hairpin sticking out of her giant bun. Love Nicole Kidman, but tonight is not so good on the visuals. She’s here to give an award to an old man in a scarf. When the old man in the scarf starts talking, you know it’s okay to go get a refill on the carbonated peach wine.

MOST VILE FASHION TREND: Penelope Cruz is also wearing a sleeveless dress with dead poultry stapled to the front of it. Okay it is a trend. A trend I hate.

LATEST REASON TO SHUN SUBTITLES: All the nominated foreign language films look incredibly depressing. Even the one they excerpted as just a child dancing – you know that child is about to be eaten by a giant crow, that symbolizes the darkness within us all. Remind me to watch more American films.

SCREW YOU, ARTY LITTLE MOVIE: Speaking of joy, why does everyone want a movie song to lift my heart? I like my heart right behind my sternum, thanks. Bring on the Austrian films. Of course, the Oscar for best song goes to some uplifting heart-rearranging piece of syrup from some “little” movie, and all the Enchanted songs get stiffed. Well, I’m going to buy TWO Enchanted DVDs to make up for that ridiculous slight. The pinkfaced sap that wrote it is crying. Bah.

SECOND MAJOR LAUGH OF THE NIGHT: After the unknown, gelatinous, happy pinkfaced chap who made the movie “Once” gets up and cries and grovels and says he’s not worthy, John Stewart comes back on and says, “Wow, that guy is so arrogant.”

Cameron Diaz is next. I’m in suspense: Has she put on makeup, jewelry, or combed her hair? No. But she has dusted her collarbones with something amazing. I can’t look away.

Heath Ledger got the coveted final slot in the “He or she died” montage. Rest in peace.

A bunch of other awards. Blah blah blah.

BEST SCREENPLAY: Diablo Cody wins Best Original Screenplay for Juno. I’m sure it’s all very wonderful. At the end she attempts to hug the award girl, snubs Harrison Ford, and rushes off the stage in a way her dress (leopard print mumu with sparkles!) was not meant to accommodate.

BEST ACTOR: Daniel Day Lewis. He is a cool guy, okay? Pirate hoop earrings and ill-fitting suit notwithstanding. He looks about fourteen. And charming. Just as I am about to forgive and forget the “Last of the Mohicans” line: “STAY ALIVE! I WILL FIND YOU!” Lewis demonstrates his need to be nominated for a cockpunch by waxing ridiculously lyrical in his acceptance speech. Maybe that’s just who he is. Fine, whatever. I am more judgmental after midnight, people.

Did we ever do best supporting actor? Did I miss it? Oh, it was Javier Bardem from the Coen brothers’ movie. He talked about his haircut. Now I remember.

BEST DIRECTOR: Coens. Their third. No Country for Old Directors. Now the other Coen gets to speak but really declines. Joel gets back on the horn and tells an anecdote.

BEST PICTURE: No Country For Old Men. Well done, Coens. You rule.

Liveblogging the Oscar Preshow on E! with Ryan Seacrest

2008-02-24T19:44:00.000-08:00

Ryan in a brown shawl collar.
Guilana in lavender with a sequined bandolier.
This picture is old:

Kimora Lee Simmons postulates that girls are having babies and eating and therefore gaining weight. Giuliana says, “I hope we see a lot of that tonight.”

Heidi Klum in bright red Galliano, made for her, which you can buy after the show. Ryan asks who she’s looking forward to seeing tonight, and she says, “No one.”

George Clooney says it’s fun this time because it’s a film they’re all really proud of. So, last time they thought it was a big turd?

Anne Hathaway in bright red with rosettes across the bodice and over the shoulder.
Patrick Dempsey’s arm candy in bright red.

Saiorse Ronan in emerald green.

Ryan Seacrest referencing Steve Carell’s wife’s tampons. Double plus ungood. Steve Carell looks irritated.

Amy Adams in dark green sweetheart sleeveless.

John Travolta’s arm candy in orange.

Miley Cyrus in bright red.

Jessica Alba is pregnant and a purple swan has died on her boobs.

Seth Rogen’s arm candy having savage tits.

Ryan Seacrest dangles Amy Adams’ mesh bag in front of his privates.

Daniel Day Lewis with hunted eyes, pirate hoop earrings, grey hair in a frazzled mom bob. His tuxedo has brown piping around the collar.

Cameron Diaz in a folded napkin and fuck-me bangs and a messy ponytail.

Jennifer Garner and Laura Linney both in sleeveless black dresses.

STOP! Gary Busey has attacked Ryan Seacrest! And then he tongued Jennifer Garner on the neck! He is accompanied by a girl in a lime green tank top. Look for it on YouTube, I’m sure it will be there. Letting Gary Busey out on live television is stoopid.

Keri Russell in a flesh-colored corset dress and great jewels.

Kristen Chenoweth in a Cameron Diaz wannabe contest and has back cleavage.

Marion Cotillard in a mermaid dress with real! scales!

Jessica Alba has beautiful hair but a pregnant woman should not be in a sleeveless dress.

Jennifer Hudson in a white empire waist drapey goddess dress with snakeskin trim. There is no doubt how many boobs she has. Two.

Tilda Swinton with bright red hair, wearing a torn Hefty bag, no jewelry, and looking like an angry young fetus.

Hillary Swank in an upsweep, black feathery dress, one strap, no those are flowers on the bodice.
Colin Farrell has been aggressively tanning.

George Clooney’s girlfriend is wearing my grandmother’s quilt as a corset.

Tilda Swinton has Emma Thompson eye skin and the whole “mumbling through a large mouthful of loose teeth” thing going on.

Diablo Cody who wrote Juno is in leopard and diamond. Lips like a monkey butt.

Ellen Page in a black flapper dress with spaghetti straps, long, long rope necklace.

Harrison Ford as the abominable snowman and Calista Flockhard as an emaciated Nely Galan.

Katherine Heigl in bright red.

Johnny Depp looking studious and devilish.

Viggo Mortensen looking like Kris Kristofferson in a thick multicolored beard.

Cate Blanchett looking like she’s out getting lettuce. Pregnant as a bumpkin and hasn’t combed her hair.

Renee Zellwegger wearing a living diamond, absolutely stunning amazing dress, short hair, she looks great. And I do not like her much. She should have had this haircut years ago. And she should always walk around wearing a crushed chandelier.

That is all. I may add pictures at a later date.

Egyptian Graffiti at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

2008-02-23T07:22:00.000-08:00

Last week, Joshilyn and I spent a few days stomping around New York City. One of our exciting adventures took us to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was completely a coincidence that we went to this museum the day after we watched the episode of Project Runway where the designers visit to get inspiration from the classical sculpture garden, the European paintings, and the Egyptian temple.

The fact that we did visit all of those exhibits means nothing. We were totally already going to see that Temple of Dendur. Aparently, the US paid Egypt $17 million at some point, to help them with some flooding or some other issue. In return we got to pick one of four temples to have. Have in its entirety -- just uproot and transplant. We picked this one, and he Metropolitan Museum won possession in a lottery with other museums.

Seeing it was wonderful. I always get choked up in the presence of antiquity. It's the same reason I cry at rocket launches. It moves me when our little crawling species attempts to do something fine -- whether it's sending a metal needle up into space, or developing a calendar, or making up a religion. That plaintive reaching, that earnest attempting -- gets me crying. So we were walking up to the temple, and I was having my little emotional moment, and then we got closer where we could look at the carvings and hieroglyphics and whatnot, and I saw this:

You know what that is? GRAFFITI! Graffiti from 1820! Some guy (from New York no less) had scraped his rancorous little name into this Egyptian temple from like 3000 years ago. Now, when we first saw it, we could hardly believe it, because we'd been running a little joke about finding fakes. Like, "Oh, this is a total fake! I see John the Baptist holding a cell phone on this medieval reliquary!" or whatever. However, when we asked the museum guy standing there, he said, yes, it is graffiti, and showed us lots of other places where the temple was marked up. Insane.

The reason it was so interesting (I think) is that 1820 is now antiquity. The day that this guy stood there scraping away with his pocketknife, thinking himself very modern and fresh, is now 200 years ago. Some guy named Biltmore had marked up several different parts of the temple. Biltmore is now dead. His record is now antiquity as well. The graffiti of those early explorers is now part of the historical record. And I, standing there, all shocked and appalled by Biltmore and his buddies, and their defilement, am looking at a temple that has been ripped up out of the earth and transplanted to the middle of Manhattan for dorks like me to get misty over. Layers, my friend. Layers.

New York was fun. We also saw this:

Picasso's portrait of Gertrude Stein. Having finished it, he was unhappy with the face, so he scraped it off and painted another one on later, more overtly mannish and coarse. Interesting. But no one has Sharpied their name into it yet, so it didn't merit its own blog post.

Tom Wolfe: A Man in Full

2008-02-22T18:05:00.000-08:00

Since I have been writing about American Idol for two days, I feel the need to elevate the tone of this blog a little. Of course John Irving called this book "entertainment" as opposed to "literature." I'm not going to get into it with John Irving on the merits of various books. John Irving and I have never had a problem before, in all the many times we've exchanged thoughts on art and pop culture.

I very much like entertainment. However, it took me six weeks to read A Man in Full. It is very long. If you had told me on the first of the year that I would spend six weeks of my young, vibrant, fascinating life reading a book about Atlanta politics, real estate developers, bank management, and Stoic philosophy, I would have said, No. However, Wolfe's true subject was one that held me in its thrall from the first chapter, and kept me coming back eagerly, through all 750 pages, during ballet class and through late nights, until the paperback was falling apart from being crammed into my bag. His subject is men. What is it to be a man at the end of the 20th century? What is it to be a man at all? The book follows four men through a twisted plot that would take me several pages to summarize. I'd rather talk about the way the book is written.

Wolfe goes back. Way back. And he goes in. Way in. There are two main characters who meet at the very end of the book, and in a sense the book truly begins when they meet. However, the book begins months in advance of that meeting, and the ostensible impetus for the book is only actually tangentially related to them. There is an alleged crime, if you must know. Which has also got a tangential relation to the real theme (what is a man). The books starts after 700 pages, when the main characters meet for the first time. Using the fake impetus allows Wolfe to begin at the true beginning, when these characters are at a stable place. Then Wolfe can put them in the butter churn and start beating them into butter.

The other thing that I found interesting about the construction of this novel was the episodic nature of the chapters. At the beginning of the book, the chapters focus exclusively on one character or another, and some of them are so brilliantly episodic that they would be amazing short stories, with no context at all. After one of the early chapters about Conrad, the youngest and possibly most sympathetic of the four central men, I shut the book and put it down, because I felt I had just read such a great scene, I had to stop.

Let's talk about the whole concept of sympathetic characters, for a moment. With the exception of Conrad, every one of the men has significant flaws. Even Conrad, if you think about it, is deeply flawed. It's hard to see the flaws of these male characters, however, because they are presented so sympathetically. Well, not sympathetically. The narrative is not sympathetic, but it is exhaustively detailed, claustrophobically close to the characters' consciousnesses, minute. We feel that we know them so well, understand them so well, perceive their contexts and histories so well, it is hard to pull back enough to remember that they are doing things that are pretty reprehensible. It's part of what makes this book so interesting -- the moral ambiguity that's available to the reader, as we are allowed to put on all of these different identities, and really inhabit them without judgment, without even reflecting on right and wrong.

How does Wolfe do this? How does he simultaneously show us all of these slimy lowlifes, and give us permission to cheer for them, to wish them luck, to hope things work out somehow. I am not even sure.

After I recover from the effort, I will read another book by Tom Wolfe. Maybe I Am Charlotte Simmons. Want to trade your copy of that for my copy of this? Wolfe takes a long time to write his novels. I like that about him. A Man In Full was just wonderful. I highly recommend.

The Analogy of the Farting Horse

2008-01-28T06:20:00.000-08:00

Just when you think you're being insulted, it turns out you're being enlightened.

So I'm working on the book proposal. My friend Susannah recently read a rough draft of the overview. She said, and I'm paraphrasing, "Look, it's a mess, but you're just rusty. It's like you were a horse that was cooped up in his stall all winter, and then he gets let out in the paddock, and he's bucking and farting and bucking and farting, you know?" And after I had finished reeling, and staggering, and after I'd said, "Wow, I've heard rough drafts compared to vomit, and excrement, and saliva, but never a horse fart," she explained, "Hey, it's not a criticism. No one stands there watching that horse thinking he's stupid because he's bucking and farting. He just has to get that out of his system."

So, I think I'm going to embrace the farting horse analogy, actually. There's something joyful and mad about a farting horse. If you've never experienced it, I can't explain it. I'm not going to say it's sublime or anything, but it makes you smile. And bucking, farting horses are certainly not concerned with how their moves are going over in the press.

My Future Shelf

2008-01-21T12:00:00.000-08:00

This is the shelf where my non-fiction book will be sold in the future.

Sweeney Todd and Cloned Beef

2008-01-17T05:46:00.000-08:00

I am a big fan of Tim Burton. I am a big fan of musicals. I abjectly love Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter. And I really like steak. My prediction was that watching Sweeney Todd was going to be the pinnacle of my existence thus far, and that eating cloned beef was going to be pretty much unnoticeable and unexciting. Unfortunately, the movie failed to deliver the kind of rapture I was anticipating. I was ready to revise my top ten list, people! I was ready to make space next to Evita and The City of Lost Children and The Nightmare Before Christmas! We even imposed on our only local relative so we could go and see it in an actual theater. But Sweeney Todd failed to transcend.

The whole thing was a little claustrophobic. The shots too tight. The storyline too controlled. The surfaces too grimy. Where were the sweeping shots, the dazzling landscape, the bitter contrast between in and out, Halloweentown and Christmastown, the woods and the hearth, the suburbs and the castle? In one number only, Burton emerged: during Mrs. Lovett's "By the Sea" song, we saw everything his movies can be: it was like Big Fish and Corpse Bride all in one song.

But that was all, really. The rest was very tight, very close, very monotonous. Johnny Depp looking haunted next to this window, Johnny Depp looking haunted next to that window, and Helena BC rushing up and down the stairs. Did I love it? Well, yes. Of course. Johnny Depp and Alan Rickman sang a duet, using their own voices. Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen made me laugh. The two little birds he cast to play the young lovers were swell. But it just didn't go there, for me. It wasn't beautiful. It wasn't grand. Dark is great, terrible is great, but I need a more expansive scope, a broader arc, a higher swell. Dan says my expectations were too high.

But never fear. A light is dawning on the horizon. Surely cloned beef will satisfy my intestines, where Sweeney Todd has failed to thrill my soul. Or, at least, it will go through my digestive system completely unnoticed, a perfect simulation of regular meat that came about via the original reproductive process. People are cranks. They say it's unnatural, weird, creepy; some even say "abominable." Ever the optimist, I approach my cloned beef consumption with a bright spirit. No, it won't be labelled. No, I won't have any idea when the cloned beef is about to pass my lips. But I have faith that when I spoon up that next bite of chili, so full of such a technological wonder, that I, like those poor souls in Mrs. Lovett's shop, will eat hungrily, happily, without concern. Forget the barber upstairs, people, and enjoy your damned meat pie.

The 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalists

2008-01-13T09:34:00.000-08:00

Joyce Carol Oates is nominated by the National Book Critics Circle in two categories: Fiction and Autobiography. Her autobiography is called The Journals of Joyce Carol Oates, 1973–1982. Well, that's one way to do it. I don't know about you but I'm totally pissing my pants with anticipation -- how will I put in the long lonely months before The Journals of Joyce Carol Oates, 1983–1992 comes out?

Her fiction is called The Gravedigger's Daughter, in the glittering tradition of naming things The X's Daughter, where X is something dark and unsavory. Hey it worked for Loretta Lynn and Amy Tan.

Other notable nominations: A biography of Thomas Hardy. A book called American Transcendentalism (How long are people going to waste their time promoting the myth of Emerson?) And finally, the poetry nominees rip their wigs off and light up the night with their awesome titles: Elegy, Modern Life, Sleeping and Waking, The Ballad of Jamie Allan, and New Poems. Next to the stage: Storage, Breathing In and Out in a Steady Predictable Rhythm, and Sand.

CRITICAL MASS: The 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalists

Renee Zellwegger is Two Girls, Fat and Thin

2008-01-10T10:46:00.000-08:00

Before Chick-lit, there was Mary Gaitskill's novel Two Girls, Fat and Thin. My graduate school conspiritors/comrades and I always held this book up contemptuously as one of those books where women sit in the bathtub (no bubbles) and contemplate their thighs (the shape) and feel dreary. That may or may not have actually happened in the text. I may or may not be unfairly remembering this novel as one characterized by half-drawn curtains. I do think that this book is what Chick-lit was, before Chick-lit realized it would be better if books about women didn't make readers want to drink poison. That maybe comedy would occasionally be nice. Anyway, the title of this book has stuck in my mind, across the long merry years, and it's what I was thinking of this week as I watched Renee Zellwegger first in Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, and then in Miss Potter.

Bridget Jones was a screaming nightmare from start to finish. Not funny, nonsensical, and hard to watch. Everyone played their characters so firmly and purposefully and dutifully that we ended up with a Bridget too ruddy, too shiny, too stiff, a Colin Firth with too giant a brick up his too pearly ass, and a Hugh Grant aping across the screen as such an unredeemable playboy, my arms fell off. Nothing good. Particularly nothing good about Renee Zellwegger's complexion. It'll put your eye out. If you're seeking a really exhaustive collection of unflattering necklines, this movie is a must-see. Otherwise, skip. If you haven't already. Which I had. Until now.

Miss Potter, on the other hand, was a mild delight. Ewan MacGregor was freshfaced and bouncy. Renee Zellwegger wore those long heavy skirts like in Cold Mountain. And Emily Watson, who I have relentlessly loathed, ever since she spent all of Breaking the Waves running around in Scotland crying, "JAN, JAN" and biting her lower lip, was actually fantastic. I almost forgive her all that Scottish snivelling. Yeah maybe it wasn't Scotland. Whatever. In this movie, she was kind of horse-boned and likeable. The movie was nearly great -- of course I did *want* to like it, so I may be feeling generous in my response to it, but I really feel like at times it was piercingly beautiful, and really fell through a thousand meanings at once. Not the whole time. But some of the time.

A New Experience

2008-01-07T14:55:00.000-08:00

Today I did something I haven't done in ten years. I cold-queried agents. Bolstered by the support and advice of my friends and husband, energized by a new idea for a non-fiction project, I googled and spreadsheeted and perused, and then I sent off my seven little queries.

Just doing that made me feel pretty happy. Every time I clicked "Send" I got a little sicker and a little more interested. I had this idea for the book two weeks ago, and I wrote the chapter list this weekend. Today I worked on the query letter, incorporating significant wisdom and womance from Susannah, and sent it off. So far I've had two positive responses. The next step is to write the book proposal and send that.

This afternoon when I went upstairs, the light coming in the window in the bedroom looked kind of different. We are having a weird kind of indian summer here in Virginia. Or it's because I put my foot on a different kind of pedal than I have put my foot on before. This is not the strange, amorphous pedal of clove smoke and brain waves that is literary fiction. Sometimes pressing on that pedal gives you a sore throat, or a poodle, or a trip to Paraguay. This is a firmer, brighter, more substantial pedal that you can actually see and feel, and if you exert pressure on it, it actually moves according to the Newtonian laws of motion.

At least, that's the impression I have today.

I Have Discovered A Meaning

2008-01-04T18:28:00.000-08:00

Sometimes you realize the true meaning of a familiar story suddenly. As if a curtain has been lifted on the face of an old friend, and you suddenly realize that the friend looks like Alf. Or, something more sublime than that.

This hardly *ever* happens to me because I fancy myself so mercilessly perceptive. I block off all possible meanings that I don't immediately perceive. Like, if I didn't get it already, it ain't there to be got.

Tonight, however, I had one of those epiphanies like other people get, you know, people who don't pierce through literature to its underlying message with the scathing accuracy of a whisper-thin rapier.

I figured out what Beauty and the Beast is *really about.*

There is a Chinese fairy tale called "Sing Sun and the Tartar," which has a lot of parallel elements to Beauty and the Beast. Three daughters, one really pretty and smart. The father goes off on a journey, promising to bring each girl a present. The sisters ask for expensive, frivolous things, and Sing Sun asks for a piece of the great wall. While he's hacking off a piece of the wall, the father lets a Tartar through (A tartar is like a hun but more hairy). The Tartar immediately imprisons the father, but promises to let the father go if Sing Sun will marry him. Sing Sun decides to comply, so she goes to live in his nasty tent on the other side of the wall. She rots there, lonely and bored, until he cries over the fact that she'll never love him. At this pivotal moment, she takes pity on him, kisses him, and BAM -- the world is full of butterflies and he's a handsome prince! I left out the part about a goldfish telling her, "You have to be kind to the Tartar, or you will never marry the prince." Everyone is happy forever and Sing Sun has her prince to marry. Excellent.

I realized, reading this version of the story, that the point of the story isn't that appearances are deceiving, that sometimes princes don't always look like princes, etc. The point of the story is that LOVE TRANSFORMS. So, you could say that the beast was a prince all along, or you could say that the PRINCE IS STILL A BEAST. Are you totally feeling me? In the Chinese version, there is no fairy, no enchantment, no last petal of the rose to drop. The Tartar is the Prince is the Tartar. The beast is the man is the beast. What changes is not the man, but the woman.

Never Admit Defeat

2008-01-02T10:47:00.000-08:00

I guess it may turn out to be that I am the last person in the universe to conclude that I am incapable of writing books for children.

My two closest friends, both successful writers, have expressed deep concern over the state of this manuscript. One has said, repeatedly, "It is the worst thing you have ever written." The other said that you need to be 50 years old to read it. In other words, not accessible to the 8-12 year old market for which I am aiming.

My two closest family members loved it. Beyond measure. Well, bully for me. I managed to convince my husband and one parent. I must be a freakin' genius. Kristen likes it. That makes one person who's not related to me. One.

The thing is, I do not believe the negative criticism. At all. I think it is a great book. It may not be finished, but it is great. More importantly, it is what I want. I want to write this book, perfect this book, publish this book, and read this book in public. None of my other projects, more sophisticated and literary in nature, make me feel pride. They all seem like, well, okay, I wrote this knobby thing. It may divert you.

I have concluded that the book needs something major, something sweeping, something to change the entire thing. Something holistic. Something never seen before under the sun. When it has that, the diction won't matter.

For now, I am going to keep working through it, revising and embellishing it. It's like decorating a lamp with buttons and beads. If you really love the lamp and every bead makes you love it more. Liking the work this much, how can I be completely wrong about it?

In the process of doing this, I will have a big idea that will change the whole book. I have them for other people. Why shouldn't I have one for me?

Happy New Year

2007-12-31T21:07:00.000-08:00

I've been trying to watch the movie "Miss Potter" for months. It's one of those movies that I have to bring into the house at the proper time, to prevent marital unrest. It seemed like tonight was the night: husband is mildly ill, swamped with work, and looking forward to playing Age of Empires for a couple hours before falling into a Nyquil fog.

Me: Hi. Will you watch Miss Potter with me tonight?
Him: Miss Potter. What's that about?
Me: Love in the 19th century. And Aunt Jemima Puddleduck.

I would say it has Renee Zellwegger but that is not a selling point. He likes to see the whole pupil, if you know what I mean.

Him: Um, yes. Whatever. I'm probably going to die in a few minutes anyway.
Me: YES! I promise, you don't even have to watch it. You can pretend to watch while you play the game. And I won't bring any more chick movies into the house this year.
Him: Urg.

AND AFTER ALL THAT. THE DISK WAS CRACKED. CURSED BLOCKBUSTER ONLINE. CRACKED.

So we watched "Trust the Man" on HBO On Demand instead. It was actually pretty great. Applause, David Duchovny. Applause to you.

1408 is Great

2007-11-27T16:30:00.000-08:00

When I first saw this poster, browsing Blockbuster Online, I thought maybe John Cusack and Samuel Jackson had been teamed up in a historical drama about the year 1408. Maybe John Cusack would put on a corset, and Samuel L. Jackson would stare into middle distance and contemplate oppression. As it turns out, not.

I sometimes feel hesitant about movies based on Steven King stories. After all, Lawnmowerman. You know? But I have never been disappointed in either John Cusack or Samuel L. Jackson, so I trusted these actors. And 1408 was fantastic.

Here's the premise: John Cusack is a writer who goes around debunking hauntings. He publishes books about the "Most Haunted Country Houses" and "Most Haunted Mansions" etc. but he does not believe in ghosts, he has only eye-rolling for wide-eyed proprietors and their warnings of locking your door against spooks. In the first scene we see him investigating a bed and breakfast that's supposed to be haunted but turns out to be about as spooky as a mushroom omelet. Then he gets an anonymous tip: Don't stay in room 1408 of the Dolphin Hotel in NYC.

When he arrives in New York to stay in room 1408, after having to sue the hotel for the right to do so, hotel manager Samuel L. Jackson gives him dire warnings against it, as well as a whole dossier of pictures and case files from suicides in that room. Many, many suicides, usually after less than an hour in the room. John Cusack rolls his eyes and marches upstairs, enters the room, and closes the door.

After this point, all the other actors and actresses in the movie fade into the background, and it's John Cusack's stage. Whenever I see a great performance like this, I think, "Who else could have pulled this off? Nobody!" This may or may not be true, but Cusack's natural sneer, his indifferent posture, and his cool factor really made this character work. Totally, totally amazing. It was so creepy, so ghastly, so horrifying that I almost crawled into my husband's armpit for safety.

There was no gore. No decapitation. No severed leg flying through the air. This was not Saw or Hostel or Grindhouse or any of those bloodbaths. This was pure, tight, excrutiating psychological thrill, and it was perfectly, perfectly executed. Okay, well, the ending was a little loose, but... I'm glad of that. I needed a little breathing room by the end of the movie.

I wholeheartedly recommend this. It's the best kind of horror movie. No disgusting tearing apart of flesh, nobody burned alive, no goofy monsters, and you can go to bed and sleep well, because the situation is so specific (just in room 1408!) that you don't have to worry subconsciously that the horror is going to get into your house.

Five pumped fists for 1408.

Nanowrimo Day 21: A New Goal

2007-11-21T15:36:00.000-08:00

Categorize this under "Excuses, Excuses, Whatever."

I made a few changes this year which hurt my output:

1. Going to Disney World in the middle of November. Not only did this throw off my writing during the trip, but it also threw off my children's schedules, which made them more needy after the trip, and my husband's work schedule, which made him less available to help me all month. It's critical to Nano-ing that he take the children away out of the house for hours at a time during the weekend, and while this happened multiple times last year, it did not happen at all this year.

2. I did not ask for help. Last year and the year before, Ahno took the children during the week at least one afternoon per week so I could be alone in the house and pound out some words. I didn't ask her to do that this year.

3. I decided to write literary fiction instead of a children's book or genre piece. I knew it would be harder to get volume on a piece of writing that I actually care about and want to be perfect. I should have known I was in trouble when I threw out so much of the first chapter and started over. This was in week 1, before Disney World, before whatever else happened.

For these reasons, and more importantly my belligerent unwillingness to just overcome everything and write anyway, I am not going to reach 50K this year. I am, however, going to set myself a new goal of 25K and see if I can do that. I have already written the hardest part of the book, and I have also edited as I go along so that I'm very happy with what I have. If I can end the month with 25K that I'm proud of, I will call that a personal victory.

Writing About Death

2007-11-20T16:15:00.000-08:00

It's hard to write about death. I didn't realize how hard it was until I tried to really do it myself. There was a professor at my college who did it well: Richard Messer. When I had him as a writing teacher, I was 19 and 20, and writing saucy, trouble-making things. He responded positively to something about my writing, which gave me confidence to keep doing it. Here is an excerpt from his book Murder in the Family.

*****

I kept her old leather coat--but she had that brand new beautiful yellow one,
why was she wearing this, her father's castoff, shabby and too big? I put it
on and feel the hairs on my neck rise. Something has fallen out of the
sleeve and under the table, then under the bed, as if it were alive. Down on
my knees, I feel into the darkness under the box springs. The soft whorls of
lint dust. It is at this moment I know again that someone else is in the
room. At the table by the window in the other room. Someone who sits writing
down everything I do with a black pen on white paper. And if the leaden pen
stops its slow-motion scrawl, the wall of language will dissolve, and there
will be nothing between me and the writer, between the writer and the
terror.

Together we watch a name appear on the white surface: Bruno.

The one on his knees rears up as though struck. And so he has been
struck--by the thought of his children dying. Where are they? They have to go to
school, tell curious playmates what has happened. They don't want to stay home.

He explains this to himself and it is to Bruno he speaks, the one who sits
like a bear, the one who records, the one who listens. All week he has only
been going through the motions; he knows it now. People around
him try to act as though nothing has happened; so does he. But Bruno knows
better. From the moment he recoiled in the hospital morgue after seeing her
body, he has been split in two. The part of his life he lived through her
began to recede into the past, calling out to the rest of him like someone
buried alive. That it will always be this way is what he fears most. That he
will never feel wholly involved, wholly there in the world again. That,
diminished, preoccupied, he will drift on in the prison of an unreal
present-past, always reaching back inside himself, trying to save her.

*****

At the time I knew him, I thought, wow, what a dark, kind of melancholy person, what a grey and haunted person. He was kind of scary and cool. Now that I'm older and I'm trying, myself, to write about death, I respect the writing he was doing. Death is really physical and low, and the awfulness is grinding and slow. The part right after the death is so breathless, how mundane, but your legs keep moving forward. I am not entirely sure what made me dig out this book and look at his work, but I'm glad I did.

Another one of his line that I have never forgotten is about how he wondered if he had spent his life trying to wake up, or trying to go to sleep. And in another, he says the dawn came through the window searching for survivors. Pretty amazing stuff, and it sticks with me after lo these long fifteen years.

Nanowrimo Day 19: The Sentence that Could Not Be Written

2007-11-19T16:56:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I did it.

Maybe it was Marta's comment that pushed me over the block. She said, and I paraphrase, that if there seems to be a chapter that cannot be written, then maybe there is really just a sentence that cannot be written, and if I could identify that sentence that could not be written, then I could get over myself and just write it. After all, *identifying* the sentence is practically writing it. I would have to write it in my head in order to identify it.

So I thought of the sentence that could not be written, and by thinking of it, I wrote it. And then I wrote the whole rest of the chapter. It was nightmarish to write. At one point I leaned over to Dan and said, "I can't write any more of this chapter. It's too awful. You have to help" And Dan's response was, "Would you like to hear some dead baby jokes?"

I did punch him. But I also put it in the novel. Hehehe. I have now accomplished what I really needed to accomplish with Nanowrimo, which was to force myself to write that chapter/scene/sentence, which has been hovering over me for years. I feel better.

Thank you, Marta! For your inspired comment, you will receive one Bookbeast. You may choose which one you like, and tell me, and I will mail it to you, with my effusive thanks.

Best Car Game Ever: In and Out

2007-11-18T23:40:00.000-08:00

This game will keep you awake when it's two o'clock in the morning, and you've already been across four state lines, and another latte will make you vomit, and another mile will see you in the ditch, because you've been hitting those wake-up strips, and you can smell death. It is a good game that can last for 100 miles or maybe even all the way home. You do need a partner to play. A living partner who is also awake.

Here's how you do it.

The first person says a book title or song title or something... like:

Hard Day's Night

Then the next person takes one of those words and says another title with that word in it, like:

The Night We Never Met

Then the next person takes one of *those* words and says *another* title with that word in it, like:

I Met You

The next person says:

Crazy for You

Like that. Sounds easy, but it gets hard. There are certain titles that seem like a dead end, but there are of course really very few. If there's a way in, there's a way out. You may find yourself cycling past "Baby Love" by the Supremes or "One" by U2 a couple more times than you'd think.

There are three levels of play:

Level 1: Competitive. Limit your play to only movie titles, or only book titles, or only song titles, or some other tight category. Try to stick your opponent with a hard one, like "Layla" or something. Try to win by putting them in a spot they can't think their way out of. Another way to make it harder is to decide that you can't play out on the word you played in on. Like you can't follow "She Loves You" with "All you Need is Love" and then "Love Actually." You have to go to "All of Me" or "Need you Tonight" or whatever. A super-hard way to play is to go for two word titles, play in on the first word, play out on the second word.

Level 2: Casual. Song titles and movie titles and book titles and even tv shows. Still try to win, but don't be as vicious.

Level 3: Ridiculous. Song titles, movie titles, book titles, tv shows, idiomatic phrases, stuff you heard on the radio an hour ago, etc. The point of playing at this level is not to win, but to keep the volley going as long as possible. More collaborative than competitive.

The next time you're going from one end of the country to the other and you need a way to make the miles fly by, turn off the show tunes and try "In and Out."

This game was invented over a decade a go by me and Joshilyn Jackson while we were on a car trip from Chicago to Atlanta. I feel compelled to disclose that other games we invented on that trip included impersonating NPR nuns, and turning Madonna songs into FAQs.

Take the Books to Disney World: The Transformative Power of Spinning Teacups

2007-11-17T21:00:00.000-08:00

Today, We the Living by Ayn Rand and A Room of One's Own by Virgnia Woolf were escorted through the Magic Kingdom by me, and also by Anxious Pleasures by Lance Olsen.

I recently read A Room of One's Own for the first time. Oh, I "read" it as an undergraduate, but I didn't really pay any attention. I was not interested in reading about feminism because I was too busy rolling by eyes at it. What I found, when I finally got to it, was that the book was surprisingly funny, and not just some stuffy crank about how rough women have it. In fact, even way back then, Virginia Woolf was telling women to get on with life -- make something, do something, say something, discover something -- and quit howling about men and how awful everything is.

The Magic Kingdom is all about girls having rooms of their own. Minnie Mouse even has an entire house of her own:

Ariel has that nice grotto:

And we all know who lives here:

A Room of One's Own had no trouble getting into the party spirit. We the Living, however, which is about the Russian Revolution, and, you know, the human spirit and stuff, had more difficulty relaxing.

She didn't see the point of riding a flying elephant.

She didn't think it was, after all, a small world. Then there was the part where she almost got into a duel with Woody the Dancing Cowboy.

The Country Bear Jamboree is just pap for the masses.

Not even cool chillin' in a rocking chair by Tom Sawyer's Island worked.

When a book is so deeply into nobly self-sacrificing itself strictly for its own individual gain, sometimes you just have to ditch it by the turkey leg stand and run off. So, Anxious Pleasures and A Room of One's Own snuck off on their own to the Haunted Mansion.

Here's Anxious Pleasures on Goofy's Barnstormer:

The front row seat was taken by someone's crazy little children:

Trying on Christmas headgear:

How about a horse of one's own?

I'm not surprised that Ayn Rand's book was able to resist the seduction of the Magic Kingdom. She's a grim sort, and determined. If spinning teacups won't change your mind, then nothing will. Still, can you not imagine Kira and Leo on the teacups, spinning the winter away? Instead of dying in the snow, so close to the border, so close. At least they had their day at Disney, with no tuberculosis in sight, no snow, and a small world after all.

That's it for this trip. I appreciate those who have linked to this project. Tomorrow we are on our way back to Virginia.

See ya real soon!

Take the Books to Disney World: Even Kierkegaard Gets the Muppets

2007-11-16T19:29:00.000-08:00

Today three books accompanied me to Disney MGM Studios: The House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus, Fear and Trembling by Soren Kierkegaard, and As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner.

There are two "thrill rides" at Disney MGM Studios: Tower of Terror, where an elevator car gets yanked up and down, and up and down, and up and down again, causing the contents (book and human) to freefall periodically, and the Rock and Roll Roller Coaster, where you get shot around in the dark, including upside down. The House of Sand and Fog rode both these rides, even the freefalling one, even though I was actually crying at one point, crying for my life to return to me.

Here's The House of Sand and Fog blending into the decor inside the Hollywood Tower Hotel (where the aforementioned elevator is located):

Here he's posing with a fellow fan of freefall:

This guy said, "What's the book about?"
And I said, "Well, it's pretty depressing. So I brought it to Disney World to cheer it up."
And the guy said, "Fair enough."
Brits don't demand too much explanation when it comes to odd projects.

The House of Sand and Fog and As I Lay Dying both really loved the Beauty and the Beast live show. Here they are watching a foggy scene, and the scene where the beast lies dying:

They further bonded over some pin trading:

And at the "Honey I Shrunk The Kids" playground. Here's The House of Sand and Fog playing hide and seek:

Look on the rocks behind the giant tub of Play-doh, As I Lay Dying! I think that's where he's hiding!

Oh, wait, it's only Fear and Trembling, having another pout.

Don't get pizza sauce on your Oprah's Book Club badge, The House of Sand and Fog. And sit up straight in your high chair.

It wasn't until we got to the Muppets in 3D Movie that Fear and Trembling began to appreciate the outing. Kierkegaard said he liked the muppet community because each member maintained his own uniqueness and character, and there was no assimilation or group mentality. He also said it was difficult to understand, and therefore inspiring. It may have been made more difficult by his refusal to wear the 3D glasses, but... I didn't want to press him. He kept leaping into a fake props box marked "2D Fruities."

One final literal interpretation. The House of Sand and Fog in Tattoine:

Tomorrow is our last adventure in the Magic Kingdom. A Room of One's Own has been clamoring for a seat on the tour bus. We the Living too. So it'll be girls' day out, with Anxious Pleasures to chaperone, naturally.

Nanowrimo Day 15: It's Good to be Stalled?

2007-11-15T23:35:00.000-08:00

I have not been writing, at Disney World. I had lunatic visions of me coming home from riding roller coasters with the kids all day to sit here on the intensely floral sofa and tippy-tap my way into full fat word count quotas. That has not been the case. I'm too tired, not just physically, but inside my skull. I'm self-aware enough to know that the "I'm really tired" thing may be a cover for the unwillingness I feel to write that chapter I can't write.

I am not, however, sad. My fingers are not typing but my brain is working. My book is growing in the dark. I have only got 10,000 words, which is fairly disastrous, considering I have exactly two weeks to get done, and I'm not home yet. I may not finish Nanowrimo this year. I'm going to keep writing, to get as far as I can. If I get to 25,000 then I still wrote about a third of a novel. I think I will keep writing after Nano is over. I don't think this book is tied to this month.

If I can get over that chapter that must not be written, and just write it, then I think this book will launch into the book I have been trying to write for almost eight years now, since the day I put the last sentence onto my first novel, and conceived my first child. And if it takes me until Spring to finish it, well hey, I think I can find something to be happy about there.

I just have to write that chapter.

Take the Books to Disney World: Moby and the Magazine

2007-11-14T20:20:00.000-08:00

Moby Dick and One Dimensional Man have been having arguments. Apparently Herbert Marcuse had a grammar school literature teacher who told him that Moby Dick was all about good vs. evil. And you know we can't tolerate good vs. evil here in Dialectia. I have found I can't leave them alone together. Moby Dick came with us to Epcot this morning, but he was only allowed out of the bag for one exhibit: The Living Seas.

He fidgeted through the Nemo ride, but enjoyed the aquariums:

Here he is touching the real shark skin. Reminding himself that it's not good vs. evil, it's shark vs. shark. The whale is the man is the whale. He can relate to the story of Finding Nemo. The plot about "fish are friends, not food" could have been lifted from the text of Moby Dick, when the cook talks about sharks governing themselves. I can't be bothered to look it up right now. I don't even know if my legs still work, after all the walking we did today. But whatever. It is eerily similar.

Here, Moby Dick watches Turtle Talk with Crush. A whale makes a joke appearance. Moby Dick is stonily silent.

After the show, he goes straight for the sauce:

I love this book. This is the actual copy that I first read, at 15, when I first fell in love with it. It still has my purple underlining in it, kind of faded on the page. Maybe taking the book out in public was a bad idea, but in spite of all its stumbling bravado, in spite of all its raucous and embarrassing energy, I'm glad I showed it a good time.

For the rest of the day, my new friend Zyzzyva (The San Francisco Literary Magazine)was the guest of honor.

Zyzzyva wanted to ride Mission: Space and Test Track. I somehow sublimated my motion sickness and loathing of confined spaces to indulge this cute desire.

In the cockpit of Mission: Space, Zyzzyva was in the "engineer" slot, which means he was responsible for pushing the button to put the crew into hypersleep. There was one other button he was supposed to push that I can't remember, but let's not strain ourselves. After all, he is a magazine, not an engineer. As my seven-year-old says, "Oh mother, don't be crazy. It is all pretend." Here's Z in the cockpit:

Here's Zyzzyva waiting in line for Test Track:

After the ride, Zyzzyva displayed a perfunctory interest in the ethanol fuel display, but then I caught him getting information on "the most enormous SUV's made anywhere on earth" from the guy at the GM booth.

Later, Zyzzyva rode "Soarin'" which is all about handgliding over his native California. He did not exhibit much emotion, but I'm sure he was moved.

Here's Zyzzyva at "Innoventions" learning how to make paper. Very relevant information, for a book:

And here he is learning to make a robot. A cast member is teaching him. Moments before, the cast member said, "I don't know how to teach a book anything." Yet below, he is posing with his finished product. Plastics are the future, did you know?

Literary magazines are not the future, though. Nope, still not.

Tomorrow, The House of Sand and Fog attends "Mickey's Very Merry Christmas Party" and poops a candy cane, then disputes ownership of that candy cane, then kills itself spectacularly in Mickey's Country Cottage.

Take the Books to Disney World: An Interruption

2007-11-13T20:40:00.000-08:00

I regret leaving my mobile phone on the counter this morning, when I should have packed it into my bag. There are no pictures to post. You cannot see Moby Dick having a rage episode on an unsuspeting tourist. You cannot see him getting thown out by security. You cannot see Anxious Pleasures (a Kafka rewrite) posing with the movie poster for the "A Bug's Life" show. These are pictures I will have to get off my other camera when I am back in Virginia. I will post them here, on this post, after I do that.

Tomorrow it's Epcot. I will pack my phone.

Take the Books to Disney World: On the Way to the Magic Kingdom

2007-11-12T19:16:00.000-08:00

We're going to the Magic Kingdom, and Heidegger is wearing mouse ears.

On the Way to Language is on the way to Space Mountain. So, Martin Heidegger, what is your relationship to the words, "Space" and "Mountain"? Have you ever considered your relationship to these words before? Do they touch the innermost nexus of your existence? Or what?

Heidegger:

To undergo an experience with something -- be it a thing, a person, or a god [or a mechanical roller coaster all in the dark with whooshing and screaming] -- means that this something befalls us, strikes us, comes over us, overwhelms us, and transforms us.

I don't have any good pictures of me helping Heidegger ride Space Mountain, because it is dark in there. I do hereby swear on my own becoming that I held him up high, and he was probably really transformed.

Here is One-Dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse, watching the comedy show "The Laughing Floor," based on the movie, "Monsters Inc." If you're not familiar with Marcuse's classic critique of moden society, here's the gist: we're all a bunch of happy, fat, complacent conformists, who just accept everything comfortable and normal, because individuality and freedom is too hard for our enormous middle-class asses. He also believes that waste and destruction are bad. This book was big in the 60's, yes? Are we together now?

He thought the monsters were really two-dimensional and that the jokes were repressive.

He didn't feel right about the dualism of Buzz Lightyear's battle with the Evil Emperor Zurg, either. Good vs. Evil. So reductive. So farcical.

Marcuse went on to say:

"In the most advanced areas of this civilization, the social controls have been introjected to the point where even individual protest is affected at its roots. The intellectual and emotional refusal to 'go along' appears neurotic and impotent. [Curse you, Star Command!!!]"

It's just what I've always privately felt about Disney: Not dialectical enough. They should work on that.

Here's Marcuse glowering at the guy who sings in the Carnival of Progress:

Great big beautiful tomorrow, forsooth!

At the Swiss Family Robinson's Tree House, he yearned for a return to simpler times, when people rebelled against the hulls of their ships, got themselves properly shipwrecked, and then lived in trees. When revolution was really possible. And simple machines could change your whole plumbing situation.

On the Way to Language was down with the treehouse life, but I have to say it was a real drag how he wanted to read, read, read every single sign in the whole park. Enough with the words, buddy. We get it.

After one last attempt to cheer up One-Dimensional Man, we stowed him in the stroller and let Dr. Zhivago join the party. Here's Marcuse on Aladdin's Magic Carpet, griping about how pretending to be a prince just plays into the existing imperialist norms. Whatever. Go get spit on by a camel.

Does anyone need to go look up dialectic? No? Alright.

The good Dr. Zhivago was a bundle of energy, right out of the book bag. He fell in love with Cinderella at first sight during the afternoon parade. Then, at Splash Mountain, he had to be pulled down off the roof of The Laughing Place. Here's the angry parent of a child he was taunting, revoking his playtime privileges. Time out, Dr. Zhivago, if you're going to act the fool at Disney World.

Here's Dr. Z on the Thunder Mountain Railroad. Not the five o'clock express through the steppes by any stretch of the imagination, but of course, he still wanted to sit in the front. I can't totally grasp the significance of railroads to the Russian Revolution, but that's probably because at that point in the text I was so beset by eight syllable surnames that I was crying on my sleeve.

Tomorrow, it's a trip to Animal Kingdom for Moby Dick and Anxious Pleasures. Rowr!

Take the Books to Disney World: Kennedy Space Center

2007-11-11T22:42:00.000-08:00

After our night of rocketry on Cocoa Beach, we were enthusiastic about going to Kennedy Space Center today. Except, that is, for that dismal damned Kierkegaard book, who stayed home to pout. He said he doesn't like being taken out of context. Well.

At Kennedy Space Center, a non-NASA company has been contracted to make the visitor complex into an amusement-park-like experience. When Benny said, "This is just like Disney World!" I knew that either they had succeeded, or else Benny is getting his nerd on very young.

At first We the Living was a little giddy on all the iconography:

But she took a seat with a friend:

To watch The House of the Seven Gables ride the Space Shuttle simulator:

Speaking of our quiet, colonial friend, The House of the Seven Gables was shy around the living astronauts:

But was chillingly comfortable with astronauts of the past:

So I said, "Let go of that suffocating history, The House of the Seven Gables. You can be free." Free in a Mercury rocket crew capsule. C'mon, everyone climb aboard!

As I Lay Dying kept sidling up to the robots. This one quipped, "How about As I Lay Rusting?" Ha ha!

All three of the books enjoyed the IMAX 3D movies:

However, We the Living just had to point out that the lock on the bathroom stall was very ineffeciently put together, the screw holes skewed, the whole mechanism crooked. Well, NASA? Is this your idea of the pinnacle of man's technological achievement? His hand reaching like a rocket into the void? This crappy bathroom stall lock? Sickeningly unRoarkian. Tsk tsk.

So full of eye-rolling and scorn was she after her trip to the potty that she wouldn't even join the other books on the lunar rover.

I think my guests all learned something, and they definitely all made friends. When even a musty and tremulous book like The House of the Seven Gables can get its spine around an astronaut, certainly Faulkner would have no trouble charming my kids:

Take the Books to Disney World: Fear and Trembling at Cocoa Beach

2007-11-10T20:37:00.000-08:00

We are still on our way to Disney World. No one should panic.

Tonight we went to see the Delta IV Rocket launch from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral. We stood on the edge of the ocean at Cocoa Beach to watch it go up. I took along Fear and Trembling by Soren Kierkegaard, and We the Living by Ayn Rand. I thought that Fear and Trembling would really appreciate the way the rocket was subverting the universal for the individual, and of course, the trembling beach beneath us. I knew that We the Living would deeply respect the simultaneous frailty and power of that rocket climbing into space, an expression of human achievement, and another mad swipe at the firmament.

(terrible video uploaded from mobile phone!)

Unfortunately I got excited watching the rocket, and forgot to take either book out of my bag so that they could experience the sublime rumbling, the flash of orange that lit up the ocean, and the cries of fellow rocket nerds: "Happy Birthday, NASA!"

There was a bit of grumbling and a "What's that, a piece of apple core?"

To make up to the books for my gross neglect of their entertainment, I took them instead to the world famous "Ron Jon Surf Shop." It was on our way back to the car, and I thought they might enjoy it?

Here are the books:

And again:

See how the blonde loves literature? We the Living is the short one. Fear and Trembling is taller.

About this surf shop experience, Kierkegaard had the following to say:

"It goes without saying that the tragic hero, like any other man who is not
bereft of speech, can say a few words in his culminating moment, perhaps a few
appropriate words, but the question is how appropriate is it for him to say
them. If the meaning of his life is in an external act, then he has nothing to
say, then everything he says is essentially chatter, by which he only diminishes
his impact, whereas the tragic conventions enjoin him to complete his task in
silence, whether it consists in action or suffering."

I chose that quote for him because I see that as an undergraduate I wrote the word, "HAH!" next to that paragraph in the margin. I must have been anticipating the culminating moment of this particular book, outside the Ron Jon Surf Shop, and Kierkegaard suffering in knightly silence.

Take the Books to Disney World: On the Road without Jack Kerouac

2007-11-10T17:11:00.000-08:00

The books had to be up early. We left at 6:30.

Here is The House of the Seven Gables sticking his head out the window, getting some air, letting his jowls go flapping:

It's been years since he felt the wind ruffling his pages.

Here are Anxious Pleasures and The House of Sand and Fog checking out the space coast, from our hotel room in Cocoa Beach:

Zzyzzyva made itself useful making coffee. Bustling around, all purposeful:

All in all the books behaved well on the trip. The Heidegger kept its comments to itself, for now, and Moby Dick gave Hawthorne his space. Now we're going to watch the Delta IV rocket launch. Taking a few books with me. Hope they like it.

Nanowrimo Day 10: Nano on the Road

2007-11-10T17:07:00.000-08:00

Look, I wrote something!

In the laptop, in the car, with the laptop plugged into the little converted thingy, and the headphones firmly on.

I managed to generate two new chapters, and for those of you keeping track, these were two chapters of completely separate material, not connected at all to the Scene That Must Not Be Written. So, the Scene That Must Not Be Written has to be written NEXT. There is no other detour to be taken. It's just next and that's it.

I'm going to try and hit 10,000 by the end of tonight, after we go see this rocket launch that NASA has cooked up solely for our family entertainment. Nice of them. I am not goign to write that scene tonight though. I'm going to go back and beef up what I wrote today. Because, obviously, that scene must not be written so how can I write it?

Take the Books to Disney World: Disney Eve!

2007-11-09T19:44:00.000-08:00

Some time ago, I decided to take some books to Disney World. I asked for help in narrowing down my guest list, and now I've made my final selections. I've narrowed it down to twelve, and here they are:

1. A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf (Wanted specially to go, to see Cinderella's castle.)
2. Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak (Look! Already wearing mouse ears!)
3. Anxious Pleasures by Lance Olsen (To make up for not reviewing it sooner.)
4. Fear and Trembling by Soren Kierkegaard (Because he deserves it.)
5. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (Must see Flying Dumbos.)
6. We the Living by Ayn Rand (A smile means friendship for everyone!)
7. Zzyzzyva (This is a literary magazine, sent to me by the publisher, to thank me, or scold me, or inform me after I wrote my screech about how literary magazines are dead.)
8. House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus (A reader suggestion, thank you.)
9. One Dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse (For help in staging protests at gift shops.)
10. On the Way to Language by Martin Heidegger (For interpreting words like "Imagineers.")
11. Moby Dick by Herman Melville (Because it is my favorite book ever.)
12. House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne (Because Moby Dick wanted him along.)

If you aren't on the list and you expected to be, it was because I didn't have a paperback copy of your book (Joshilyn Jackson, looking at you) or because I couldn't find my copy of your book (Sylvia Plath, hello). There you are. Tomorrow we start our trip. May we all have a damn good time. If you can't wait to see where we are and what we're doing, you can follow us on our mobile blog. I will try to write while I am away, but if the internet doesn't smile on our timeshare, I will see you when I get back.

Nanowrimo Day 8: An Important List

2007-11-08T19:02:00.000-08:00

1. NBC's Thursday night comedy treatment of the green theme has been very, very satisfying. Self-referential, flippant, morbid, and delightful. Applause. It is also totally funny that the PSAs are paid for by Walmart.

2. Tonight I am going to write the next chapter of my novel.

3. Tomorrow I am packing my gay little bag with ten lucky books to accompany me and my family to Disney World. There's still time to get yours in the bag! Well, really no. Not really. I will announce lucky travellers tomorrow.

4. I have a very strong feeling that I am going to get to 10,000 words tonight. You heard me. Tonight.

5. There are really lots of things to do tomorrow. Apparently I need to pack more things than just books I plan to photograph in surprising locations. Like ears, different shoes for my children, my phone charger, and peanuts.

6. This is the time to write that difficult chapter. Right before a big long trip. Because after I write that difficult chapter, I'm going go bangass on the laptop in the car on Saturday.

7. Last year on the way to Disney World I knit a whole sweater. It was an ill-fitting sweater for a two-year-old who hates sweaters, and while it looked white-and-blue on the skein it actually looked urine-and-blue on the garment. But.

8. I am going to give away my first Bookbeast soon. Scroll down for Bookbeasts.

9. And yet, my children are not yet asleep. It is after 10:00. What can they possibly be doing.

10. I appreciate NBC trying to change my mind, but I am happy to report that I'm able to resist it. And drive a minivan a zillion miles to prove it.

Nanowrimo Day 7: Let's Work on a Completely Unrelated Novel!

2007-11-07T18:26:00.000-08:00

Today my writing group met and discussed my Nanonovel from 2005. It has been revised somewhat, and it now has an ending, but mostly it's the same as it was when I banged through it two Novembers ago. The meeting was helpful. I got a lot of feedback as to what needed beefing up, what was unclear, what scenes were working as I had hoped.

I had a massive plot hole, just a giant gaping chasm of a plot hole, which they did identify, and I was able to work out what to do, to fix it, right there in the meeting. Someone made a suggestion, someone else added a thought, and I had an idea, and then the problem was solved. This was amazing. I'm so relieved.

Am I supposed to be writing some sort of other novel, right now? Or something?

Nanowrimo Day 6: I Did Not Vote for Steve Heretick

2007-11-06T17:23:00.000-08:00

This bus was driving around Norfolk when I took the kids to dance class this afternoon. It was empty. There were STEVE HERETICK! signs taped all over it. And after all of this bus marketing, he lost the election anyway. I'm glad I didn't vote for Steve Heretick today. It's not that I begrudge him that vote, or revel in the possibility that my one small vote could have been the one vote to put Steve Heretick into the state senate (or whatever). It's just this: voting for a man named Steve Heretick and then having him lose the pissant little invisible election anyway would just too deeply epitomize my general feelings of despair and absurdity today. At least I can say I did not vote for Steve Heretick. There is always that one brittle rod to which my failing fingers can cling.

Nanowrimo Day 5: New Glasses Will Definitely Help

2007-11-05T19:36:00.000-08:00

I got new glasses today. I'm going to not write until I get them tomorrow. I am pretty sure that all of my difficulties are located in these old glasses:

I tried on some new glasses with my seven-year-old son helping me:

At the moment that picture was taken, he was helping me by quietly playing Crash Bandicoot on his Nintendo DS. I decided I am over the black plastic. Like totally done. So, bronze or silver?

When I put the silver on, Benny said, "Mother! You look like an angel! Well, you look like you just got done being an angel and you still have your glasses on!"

I got the bronze. As soon as I pick them up from the glasses store, I will recommence writing the novel. I don't think an angel who forgot to take off her glasses could possibly grapple with my ugly crank of a novel. So. Tomorrow I totally promise to bring you more self-indulgent pictures to go along with my self-indulgent skylarking on my novel. All self-portraits! All the time! The new Harpoonist is sensitive to her own angles.

Nanowrimo Day 4: Who's a Hateful Cynic? Who? Who?

2007-11-04T14:53:00.000-08:00

I took my children to the park yesterday so they could, as my blind great grandmother used to say, "Blow the stink off," and also so I could get away from the computer for a while and think. I took my gay little notebook with me so I could write down all my gay little thoughts. Yes, it's possible to stop two children from dying on the monkeybars while having a completely unrelated idea playing out in your own head. I have learned this by necessity. Main character, take a hint.

There was a couple there with a two-year-old girl, and the man was clearly not her father. Among other clues, she and her mother were calling him "Jim." Jim was carrying on like nobody's business -- climbing trees, playing hide-and-seek, in general being that awesome guy that really cares about the child that's not his, really tries to be a good simulation of an actual father, cavorts and gambols and capers to please that cute little girl. The mother was a tall drink of water in a tight hippie cardigan and skinny jeans. Buckle boots. You know what I mean. Not entirely sleazy but standing right across the street from it.

So, I am there thinking about my miserable train wreck nightmare horrorshow of a novel, and these people are tittering and clapping and distracting me, and the only thought in my head is that that disingenuous asstard is making so nice with that kid just because he wants to get into the pants of that grinning mother. And then I think, "WHAT KIND OF MONSTER AM I?" Maybe he's just trying hard, maybe he really likes the kid, maybe he is perfectly excellent person with not a plotting thought in his virtuous mind.

I realized I am still a hateful cynic. In spite of all the ways I have tried to revise my view of the world to reflect the fact that I've brought two children here to live in it and it better not be as bad as I think it is, I still think it is bad. As much as I try to locate all of my negative thoughts about people in Dan's brain, thereby making him the misanthrope and me the good person, it is still me assuming the worst and judging, judging, judging.

In the spirit of this new/old cynicism, I will now predict that I will not finish Nanowrimo this year. Last year I finished, the year before I finished, but this year I will not finish. I am already chokingly behind. What's to be done? I'm at 5000 words. I may as well give up now and just play Civilization IV like I want to. Because you know that guy was just trying to land himself a date. You know he was.

Nanowrimo Day 3: AHA!

2007-11-03T19:00:00.000-07:00

Today I had my first big AHA moment. AHA moments are so juicy, so ecstatic, so indescribably satisfying -- they may be the only reason writing is at all pleasurable for some of us. Today a neighbor character, who was to be just a generic manly-man, appearing in only one scene to act bemused and shocked and then go away forever, turned out to be a local newscaster with a very interesting backstory, including the fact that he sleeps upside down.

Last year, Dan and I put a bid in on a house that we thought we'd like to renovate, owned by a local newscaster. What Susannah and I saw when we walked through the house was so shocking, so paralytically fictional, that we just knew that it had to be used in a novel. And now it will be. Because when Carl the neighbor turned up at the scene of the accident, it was actually Carl the anchorman. That was a big deal, today, especially when the words are coming so slowly, and I keep having to rip out paragraph after paragraph because it just doesn't work.

Good for me.