Ode to the Early Riser

(This poem might not rhyme):

How doth the little butterfly
Kiss me quite insane
In between the sheets
Where the dull brain that perplexes and retards---

Shoot, those are all lines from other poems. Begin again!*


When morning grabs your pinky toe
And yanks you out of bed at its inordinate hour,
You must be a wimp to not kick it back in its face and go to sleep.

Too verbose.

In China, kids are still sleeping.
This is a democratic society,
Not a communist one.
Still, you have to wonder,
If they have some things right.

Bingo!

This morning I cracked an egg with a double yolk. Aberrations in nature truly freak me out.

Speaking of aberrations, I put my cats on a diet (for their own good!) and they feel betrayed, traumatized, etc etc. They have not revolted and clawed me to death--yet. But Peter Pan, the feline of the more formidable girth, did spend half an hour this morning opening and shutting the cabinet door (where we keep the cat food). Open, shut, open, shut, pretty good for a creature without opposable thumbs! But it was at 7:20 am, and it surprised me, made me feel guilty, that I wasn't as tired as I thought I would be. In fact, I was a little groggy, but I probably could have risen (proper English?) at that hour. For about twenty minutes I debated getting up. Being one with the sun! Making breakfast in the cool blue silence of morning! A head start on the day! Not feeling rushed and panicked, like, I realized, i feel every morning when I wake up. An early riser: one who has time to take all possibilities into consideration! An exhilarating prospect.

I went back to sleep for another couple hours. Now, it's almost noon. And what have I accomplished? Zero, zil. An abnormal breakfast and so forth. I will pay someone to wake me up early.

Attached picture: this is what cats do when you put them on a diet for the sake of their own health and longevity. They cuddle up in your lap purring, refusing to let you do work, and also stealthily berating you for your own lack of drive, motivation, etc, in relation to the ample opportunity made to you, potential wasted and so forth. You can't tell from the photo, but he's really racking up the guilt in this moment.


*Bonus trivia: can you tell me what poems (and in one instance, a play) I appropriated and maligned those verses from?

Sickness

Yesterday, I was sick. Today, at first, I was sick. But I'm not sick any longer. I broke the sickness with the Feast of the Burrito.

Every sickness I have ever had was broken with the Feast of the Burrito. There was this one time, that I was love sick, and since I ate burritos with this boy I found it hard to recover from the heart sickness with the feast of the burrito. But I did it anyway.

While I was eating this burrito I thought of all the previous burritos I had eaten. I ate one burrito in the summer time, on the beach, when for some reason my face looked swollen and possessed, like a disfigured Mr. Potato. I was very sick, and found myself in the back of a car, and then, inexplicably, at a fair. I don't remember why I was there. But I wandered and decided to eat something, and got a gargantuan burrito. There is no way I will finish this, I thought to myself. But I ate it, all of it, and afterwards was very surprised at myself and my hunger. From that day on I was no longer sick. That was the first Feast of the Burrito.

The magic of the Feast of the Burrito is the ritual. The ritual causes you to think or realize things in a different manner than you would ever have thought or realized them before. The thoughts you have during the Feast of the Burrito are very significant. This feast, I thought of this one girl who I saw in the dining hall when I was an undergraduate, who was probably an anorexic. She was very very skinny. She never ate anything and she looked sad most of the time. I remember one time I was walking by her and she had in her tray a whole pizza. And she was smiling, the type of smile that threatens to levitate one if you're not careful. She looked beyond happy. After she left the dining hall she looked sad again, and I noticed she hadn't eaten her pizza. I thought about this as I ate my burrito, I don't know why. I will always remember the way that this girl smiled, and she probably will never remember it, not having seen herself with the smile, or even knowing who I was and that I saw her there every day, not eating and so sad because of it.

I can't remember what other thoughts I had during the Feast of the Burrito. While I was waiting there was a girl who was being very rude to the man making the burritos, and I wished that I could trip her without her knowing it was me. It was a ridiculous thought because I couldn't possibly defend myself against this girl if she found out that I had tripped her. She wasn't that much bigger than me but I couldn't ever get in a fight if I were the instigator, I know I would lose. I will probably never be in a fight, and I don't know how I feel about this. There are definitely days when I wish a good ass-kicking upon someone, and I imagine that I would be okay giving the ass kicking. But in reality fights are dirty and nasty, at least the ones that I've seen. I don't exercise or condone violence, but I don't think I'm a pacifist. I think most people who claim to be pacifists simply don't understand violence.

When you're in sickness you feel yourself wavering, in between two worlds. This is called, being on the threshold. The threshold is a special place you can only inhabit when you're sick. Since you're not there that often, you feel strange while on the threshold, and this strangeness could be the strangeness of the threshold, or the strangeness of you, or just the impossibility of what's to tell. It causes you and the threshold to be one, and all activities that transpire in the threshold are significant.


I've probably had at least five of those gargantuan burritos, and I have to say each one is revolutionary. It requires a lot of energy to digest, so I'm going to depart. I'll be back later with real news.

It's Been a While, or, What Happens When you Hatch a Plan too soon?

Outline for this post:
1)ego destruction,
2)a great sense of tiredness,
3) disgust and resignation caused by extreme ineptitude/non zen states of being.

December 1st. I remember a day, one fall ago, when I received a fateful email saying I would have to be in a novel writing workshop. I panicked. I danced around the room, shrieking obscenities and blocking the television, and then I sat down and wrote.

A few months later, I showed (and here, I want you to imagine a project done in haste and with little good will as a conglomerate blob of several types of clay, many instances of dried up play dough, a few bits of metal that were lying around, and those googly eyes used for sock puppets stapled on at irregular intervals), I showed this makeshift sculpture to my fellow work shoppers. It went over better than I thought; they gave the formation a name, spoke of it in coaxing words and with gentle syllables. I went home, cradling my monster. Perhaps it was something new, fresh, alive, and worth writing towards.

Fast forward another month. Not much time has passed, barely enough for me to meet with my professor and discuss the being that I slapped into life. I'm being workshopped again. Nothing big, something small, like a chapter describing the protagonist's relationship to her father. A moment of lucidity, in the madness, like what she eats for dinner. An inkling that, perhaps, out of this mass of clay I will wrest a living being, shivering and alive, drenched in the culpabilities and possibilities of all living things.

Two weeks later, I find myself again on the platform of judgment. The jury is weary: they have seen this all before, and they know now that the googly eyes are googly eyes. Their pens tap, and then jump out of their hands, splattering ink all over the floor. I don't turn away. I know what this all means.

KABLAM! KA-BLOOEY Loss! Pain! Remorse! A sense of complete and utter despair, coming home late at night and talking instead about things like the weather, trying to explain a joke you told in class but instead giving up, hands falling flat, dreaming of sentences that you forget to write down before you woke up, taking long walks where the characters shimmer and emerge in the reflection of the sidewalk, floating towards empty cigarette packs--thinking that maybe, somewhere on the other side of the veil, Miranda, Mike, the Mother and Father exist, that they beckon and wave towards freedom, and that you will make a collage for each of them, yellow and lace for the mother, orange and steel for Mike, red staircases for the father, and purple for Miranda, with kaleidoscope chips...all to hang above your workshop space, to keep inspiring, rejuvenating, and understanding who they are--

But the colors collapse into complete deflation. The sense that the world is a balloon and all the air has been let out, or stepped on by your brother. Words sputter and spin like the last bit of gasoline in a tank. Going nowhere. Getting out to push, wasting your strength. They eye you on the subway, they shouldn't be looking at you that way. Cradling the carcass in your clumsy hands. Alliteration--what folly. Metaphors--for the weak. All forgotten, now. All betrayed. I'll see the pages flying up to me, on the train tracks or in a dream.

The semester is almost over. I've been workshopped three times. I am completely spent. I refuse to show it to anybody else, to waste anybody else's time. A warning: never show people a project before it's ready. Your hoarding instinct, for once, is right. Showing a project to criticism and praise before the time is due--will destroy you.

I don't know how I describe it at this point. and don't think I will. 120 pages? How can I say that's accurate, when I will rewrite all of them? First person narrative? How can that be true, when I don't know if it's the voice of a 12 year old a 24 year old narrating the story?

For the sake of jest, I'll tell you what I have. It's a first person narrative. Miranda, a 12 year old girl. I wanted to name her Vicki, but the name came out differently, for some reason, and someone mentioned an illusion to Shakespeare's the Tempest, with the Miranda who is a dreamer. So be it. My Miranda, too, is insulated in her own world, with a lexicon derived from rock albums and the shadows on the walls. She is an only child, and lives in her own head, idling away the hours by drawing the shapes in her head in the shade of her bedroom.

Her father is a beekeeper. He brings her along from time to time, and she marvels at the order. Nature, with its own algorithms. Her father enters the hives bare, but she wears a mask. Strange, for she understands everything about herself and little of him.

Her mother is pregnant. A 12 year age gap, a woman idle and depressed with the monotony of her life, and she finds she is with child. Rejoicing.The buying of quilts, bottles, and maternity clothes. The opening of windows; dusting of the shelves. A cleaning that becomes compulsive with time. Also, a fixation with her health. She goes to the doctor often, for reasons unexplained. The father is in the beehives, the mother in the house.

Fast forward. Miranda, in the hospital, at the same time as the mother. Like sisters, they share a physical pain. Miranda sees her brother for the first time, and notes that he has the blue eyes she had always wanted. The mother is exhilarated; the father is nowhere to be seen.

That's what I have so far. A sermon, a joint, a few instances of humor and a bunch of unresolved tensions.

I'm glad the semester is over, and sorry to all involved. I'll start posting again regularly, now, but right now I'm spent.

Outline for the next post:
1) Disorganization
2) Elevated heart rate, adrenaline release at the mention of the words "voice"
3) a strong and sudden dislike for anything written in a stranger's pen

PS PS PS PS:
For the record, for anyone (and those numbers are very few) who is familiar with my work this semester and this blog:

1) the matter of voice: people criticized the voice as fluctuating between a 12 year olds and a 30 year olds. True, true. It does fluctuate drastically. It should be more consistent. I am in the process of ironing it out, making it as smooth as a linen setting. But also, on a certain note, this is how my voice sounds. Caught somewhere between an adult and a snot nosed kid! I use big words! I call using big words, using big words! I sound like a 12 year old, in real life, a lot of the time! Am I fundamentally flawed, or what? Doubtful--I doubt that I'm fundamentally flawed. But, by the end of the semester I felt like an old man in a young person's bar, saying why, what? Does age matter?

2) The matter of truthfulness: in truth, I am not an only child. No, I have five brothers! I am almost the opposite of an only child, if such a thing exists. It is true, I grew up without sisters. And, I spent much of my time by myself, in my room, reading and yelling at my brothers to get out. So--I both could and could not understand what it would be like for Miranda to grow up an only child. Why did I make her that way? Beats me. I think I just didn't want to do the work of writing out five people's characters.

3) The matter of character: If only, if only, what everyone told me wasn't true. But it all was. The father--conflicted. The mother--not depicted. Miranda--a mess of thought. Next fall, this will all be fixed. But not a word more till then.

4) The matter of humor, or why its not funny: je suis fatiguee.

More to come, as I try to nap and fail.

Big Blog Post, With Real Updates

October 20, 2011: The day I workshopped my novel coincided with National Writers Day (or some holiday to that effect). Bloggers were encouraged to post on why they write. I had blogged before finding out about NWD, only to delete my post after considering it too melodramatic and pessimistic, even for me. At the time I deleted the post, I thought it depressing. Afterwards, I found my response framed in the context of answering the question of why i write to be rather humorous. Read below:

Doomsday
Doomsday. I'm sick at heart. I just emptied my wallet on ingredients for PB&J's and rice crispy treats (it's a cruel mandate that says the person being workshopped should bring snacks for the class). Who knew that cereal these days was so expensive?

I handed out my novel last week. As soon as I did I realized everything I wrote was melodramatic and overwritten (nonsense, says the reader. You're overreacting. See? I reply. That's exactly my point!) 

The week before handing it in I spent leisurely with family and friends. I didn't worry about my novel; didn't pull all nighters whipping it into some sort of shape. Up until now I felt frivolous for idling my time away, for thinking myself wise to not go into panic mode. Now I realize I was completely off my rocker. I should have panicked. I should have fought the good fight for the good fight's sake.

I need to make these rice crispy treats before too long. I'm going to Chicago tomorrow and so writing will be limited. But I think this blog will experience a revival, after the slaughter of my ego and the necessary rebirth, so stay posted!

Hmmm. My dark mood was unnecessary. The workshop went very well. It was greatly invigorating, and I left class with plenty of advice and ideas on how to progress.

A weekend in Chicago also helped to rejuvenate the juices. I've spent most of today getting small but important things done, like spending 20 minutes on hold to ask one small but very important question, standing in line for 45 min to get the last piece to my Halloween costume, etc.

I'm having a bit of trouble writing this blog post, as a matter of fact, so I think that I will just start to work on my novel. Maybe I can post again afterwards after I've attempted to get work done--

On Poetry and 2011

Ugh, is it 2012 yet? I've recently confirmed that my pattern holds true: that odd years are the worst for me, and now that I've admitted that to myself I essentially want to give up on 2011. I've lost all will to see this year through. 2011 has sucked. I'm ready to be done with it. I usually refrain from being so bad-mood and absolute, but if I'm going to have bad luck for three more months I might as well not waste time mincing words.

On a positive note I have my Halloween costume taken care of. This is of great comfort to me.

On a contemplative note I had to write a fictional short about an anti-hero. I think I was the only person in the class who didn't know what an anti-hero is. I conflated the term with antagonist. When the teacher asked if everyone was clear, I thought no, not really, and out loud said what's an anti-hero, like Iago? And she said Iago was a good example, and I thought uhhh don't know why I said that but I guess I get the gist, when I didn't. So I walked away with some very muddled notion of anti-hero. Later, my boyfriend led me to believe that anti-heroes are people like Woody Allen and Holden Caufield. Still unclear. So I wrote a piece in which every character is some personification of one of my notions of antihero. It's about a quasi-miserable college student who fancies herself as a poet. She is in love with her best friend who is dating someone else who is pretty full of herself. The quasi-miserable poet has an annoying poet rival and in the end the miserable poet's rival writes a pretty good villanelle about jealousy, which is supposed to be ironic because the poet is so miserable she can't even realize she's jealous of everything.

Of course the entire assignment is too damn long, with four different manifestations of anti-heroes, so I'm going to have to combine them all into one character. The villanelle's supposed to be good and I'm not going to pretend my poetry is excellent, so I won't use the villanelle in the story, but I'll copy it here for you.

I danced with Jealousy last night under a black tar moon.
Her sash bled red intention and her hands were yellowed lace.
She shushed me with her lips while humming our sad tune.

The singer was a wine bottle and the drummer a black balloon.
The guitarist wore a tablecloth and a coatrack played the bass.
I danced with Jealousy last night under a black tar moon.

I wore my best sombrero and a borrowed green festoon.
I forgot upon arrival how to leave her place.
She shushed me with her lips while humming our sad tune.

She put her finger down my throat and I coughed up a silver spoon.
She pulled the death card from my hand and replaced it with an ace.
I danced with Jealousy last night under a black tar moon.

She serenaded me sober and led me down the back staircase.
She twirled me twice around before I realized she had your face.
I danced with Jealousy lat night under a black tar moon.
She shushed my questions with her lips while humming our sad tune.


I like poetry alright. I used to write it a lot. I've tried a couple times to publish with no luck. For the most part I find writing poetry to be good for me and no one else. To be honest I don't get most poetry. No, I take that back—I could probably read a poem and give you a fairly intelligent evaluation of its significance. That last sentence was mostly my $45,000 a year education speaking. But I read poems in the New Yorker, and I'm just like what? Though to be fair I think the New Yorker's poetry...well, I know it's not my style, let's put it that way. Ugh.

Being 24 is hard. It never gets any easier. Except for in 2012.

To a brighter future!

Newsflash!

Dave made a grilled cheese out of Muenster cheese and Pepper jack cheese and it's DELICIOUS. See picture to activate taste buds above:

BIG Blog Post

I must admit I recently experienced a bout of lost faith. It's difficult to say if this doubting phase is over, but I'll continue and try to explain anyhow.

For one thing, I was tired of writing. I started to see writing as getting in the way of all these other things I had to do.

Besides that, everything I was writing seemed bad.

Lastly, I spent a lot of time talking, which translated on some level to meeting my word quota.

Now, I find myself in a strange position, that which necessitates me admitting I was wrong (I hate doing this and usually avoid t at all costs). Writing, in actuality, never gets in the way of things I "have to do." If I feel that writing is cumbersome my priorities are out of whack somewhere. My vision got skewed (Does that phrase evoke a picture of an eyeball with a skewer in it, or is it just me?). Writing actually, when done properly, organizes my life. Writing is the one thing that gives me a sense of order (which is kind of madness, since I never know what I'm actually doing when I write).

I think I also was thinking too much. (That previous sentence=case in point. Excessive parenthesis are also an indicator).

Thinking is dangerous. Not in the "we would all be revolutionaries if we just took time to think" kind of way, but in a "thinking is bad for you" kind of way.

I know a lot of people who think as a substitution for action. It's easy to feel you're simplifying things, when in actuality you're over thinking them. (A strange contradiction, right? you're creating all this brain static and somehow imagine that intangible mess is cleaning up real life problems.) I know a lot of people who think to make themselves feel good. It's like thinking releases endorphins in their brains that make them feel they've accomplished something. If you're a philosopher, that's great. You have all the reasoning in the world to think, and think, and think. But even the philosopher, eventually, sits down and writes. I'd be willing to hedge my bets that you aren't a philosopher until you sit down and write. Right? You could be the world's smartest person, with the most interesting and profound ideas, but until you actually do something about them, you're on the same plane as a 13 year old getting stoned by herself for the first time.

Enough about that. On a different note, I've recently been having a hard time reconciling my existence in NYC when my family is three thousand miles away. These bouts of homesickness or anxiety happen to many people I'm sure. I remember when I went away to college. I felt horrible, really horrible, for the first four months, though I couldn't put my finger on why. The girl across the hall, who was from Ohio, talked constantly about her homesickness. I didn't understand it. I thought talking made things better, and this girl just talked and talked without it ever improving anything. It probably didn't strike me until about two years later that during that time period I was homesick. "Ohhhhhh," was the voice my brain made. "There was a word for it." And I was really homesick. I lost my appetite completely and probably dropped twenty pounds. It makes sense that you would lose things when you're homesick. Right? Your sense of place has been misaligned, meaning you don't know where things go anymore. My weight got misplaced; my understanding of Ohio girl was in a different cabinet, far away. I didn't understand why she was talking, and had no sympathy for her words. I don't remember how I responded to her but I remember being acutely bothered. Doesn't she have other things to fixate on? might have been my train of thought.

Now I wonder if I was bothered because I was insanely jealous. I might have seen her as my exact opposite. She could talk and talk about her problems without them ever getting better. I never said a word because I wasn't even cognizant that something was wrong. What's more, she was from Ohio, and had a car. She could jump in her vehicle and be home in four hours. Between me and my family stood a taxi cab, a five hour plane ride, and a two hour drive to Las Vegas, amounting to about $400 that I didn't have. My sympathies for this girl were nil.

Even if I'd recognized that we were experiencing the same feeling, it wouldn't have been easier on either of us. The worst part of homesickness is how solitary an experience it is.

Looking through notebooks and drawings from that time period, I notice that my journal entries were more organized than ever and rarely mentioned that I didn't feel well. But my drawings were all of far away places I had never been, and they didn't have any sense of perspective. Only on the most unconscious level did my homesickness come out, although it affected me on all fronts.

I don't think it's possible for adults to experience homesickness the same way that I did when I went away to college. Homesickness is for people who have known one place their entire lives, a place where there was order, where returning to it would make everything ok. As an adult you learn that rarely are things in such a state that "everything is ok." You learn to make your own home, to be comfortable in your own skin. I'll never again have the indefinable queasiness, the painful self-absorption, and listless self-awareness that accompanies homesickness. But I do think there's something worse as we get older. I think, as an adult, that homesickness gets replaced with regret.

This is all to say that writing has replaced my notion of home. It's where I return to find order, to see if everything's okay, and to try to fix it when things have gone awry. Symbolically writing represents how growing up means learning to be responsible for your own happiness. To extend this metaphor between writing and home, regret and homesickness, I find that not writing turns into an almost profound regret. The type of regret you cannot experience as a child or teenager, seeing how time hasn't started in a sense for you during those years. Everything accelerates as a child and teenager; it's only as an adult that time starts to slow down, speed up, oscillate, and become the slippery mercurial creature that we recognize it as. The recognition that time is not a constant, it's irrational and irreversible, creates a sort of anxiety that parallels the anxiety of homesickness, and writing as a way of taming anxiety turns into a way of stoppering regret, or at least taming it, perhaps even making up for the mistakes you made.

This has gotten long and I'm going to end now.

Our Cats are the Best

Tueessday, my favorite day of the week. I don't have work or school which means that I sit at home and play with our cats and sell stuff on Craigslist. If you want to see a video starring me my friends and most importantly our CAT go to this link:

Cat by Design Video

Mmmm on that note the Highways album is out! I'll put up a link for downloading once I get the go-ahead.


I started my second short school assignment. We were discussing minor characters and their function in a narrative. Ford Maddox Ford says that “If you’re going to have a character appear in a story long enough to sell a newspaper, he’d better
be real enough that you can smell his breath.” With that in mind the function of a minor character is in a sense extremely important. If you can bring a minor character to life in a quick sentence or two, then you're really nailing two of the most important aspects of good writing: economy and vivid, unique detail. The minor character also has the ability, within those one or two sentences, to further the plot or create depth, otherwise not achieved, in our reading of the protagonist. Our assignment was to write a scene where the protagonist engages a minor character. Using the narration of the protagonist we're supposed to reveal the minor character to the reader.

I wrote about a little girl who thinks her dad is probably Santa Claus but he's actually probably a drug dealer. I know, that sounds terrible. But the idea of parents who provide for their children in disreputable ways was on my mind and for some reason, that was the storyline that jumped out at me. So I started writing a first person narrative, where the little girl isn't really telling a story but offering "evidence" for why her father is Santa Claus. She imagines presenting this evidence to Amanda, a loner fifth grader who sometimes hangs out with the third graders. It was really cool, actually: when I introduced this minor character the story suddenly became three dimensional. Through the narrator's parenthetical notes addressed to Amanda you understand the little girl in a way not possible when she's just spewing off her list of evidence. Hoorrayyy, learning to write.


I've got to go drink coffee.

Second Week of Class

It's raining in New York and I'm super caffeinated. I had two strong cups of coffee when I awoke, since I overslept and figured drinking two cups would compensate for lost time. In some sense it did--I scribbled out my first school assignment in about half an hour, cleaned, and then sat twiddling my thumbs until I realized I could leave the apartment in spite of the weather.

The internet's down, so I went in search of a coffee shop. I'm now sitting in a charming French cafe that smells of onion quiche and espresso. I even have the window seat. However I'm also on my third cup of coffee and so find myself rather out of my mind. Usually caffeine focuses me. But it also makes me more easily agitated. I made the mistake of looking at my bank account and it scared me so badly I haven't been able to focus since.

My first writing assignment outside of the novel was to imagine my reincarnation, or what I would be in the afterlife. I wrote about a character whose theology is derived mainly from sleepover parties and Woody Allen films, and for the most part considers herself a 'nihilist.' When she's confronted with the choice of what world she inhabits next she decides to be the worm on the devil's left ring finger. I wrote it, feeling inspired, and upon reviewing it thought it sounded more like an outtake from an Adam Sandler film then something suitable for intelligent professors written by an intelligent student. Oh well. We can't all be winners, all of the time.

School is going well. I workshop my novel on October 13th. This gives me over a month to revise and and add upon what I have so far. I wrote the bulk of the novel thus far in under a month. Five weeks sounds like real luxury, which means I probably won't work nearly as hard as I could.

I bought a ton of books. All of them are fiction. In the checkout line I felt like a joke. It looked like I was shopping for a personal vacation and not school. Too good to be true? Too soon to speak? Want to know my reading list?

"Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me" Javier Marias
"Room" Emma Donaghue
"Thousand Acres" Jane Smiley
"Madame Bovary" Gustave Flaubert
"Metamorphosis" Franz Kafka
Man Down"
"Pastoralia" George Saunders
"Kafka on the Shore" Haruki Murakami
"King Lear" William Shakespeare
"Disgrace" J.M. Coetzee
"Cruddy" Linda Barry
"Out Stealing Horses" Per Patterson

A bunch of articles by Charles Baxter, David Mamet, Joseph Campbell; a Chekhov play, and a sprinkling of short stories.

I've started Javier Marias' book. We're supposed to read it, critique it, and workshop it as practice. Of course it's near perfect, in its own right, and so I find this a disconcerting assignment. "This is why you don't choose good books!" the voice inside my head says, in the same intonation as that of "This is why we can't have nice things!" What's more, it's not the type of book I want to read in a week. Anyone read it? It's something to be read slowly. The pacing is slow. To read it in a week is like scarfing an e'clair. What's more, I would prefer a tostada to an eclair, metaphorically speaking. If I have to scarf my food it better be cheap and easy on the stomach. Ahhh, fail. Too much coffee talking heads gotta stop. Start over.

Ahh, school. I'm a big fan of high brow meets low brow. So i have a very love/hate relationship with academia (does a creative writing MFA count as academia? I should probably know...) I should also probably go. By now the caffeine has completely taken over, and I have little option but stop now or ramble indefinitely in failed attempts to redeem myself. More to come soon, hopefully.

First Day Tomorrow.

I have a bunch of homework.

BacktoSchool

Music about Volcanoes

Is called "Bach-lava," in case you were wondering.

Start school tomorrow. Time to get my game face on. I'm terribly hung over. I'll return when I'm in better shape.

Hurricane Lockdown

Hurricane lockdown. One roommate is in Greece (hi Joe!). The other roommate (hi Dave!) is housesitting and won't be around either. This means that (hi Elisia!) will be braving the storm with a bottle of wine, a thousand piece puzzle, two cats, and possibly the lead singer of Dave's band (Scott I'm not going to pretend you read this blog. But I'll tell you in person I mentioned you.)

People in grocery stores are losing it (I wanted to say "going ape-shit"--keeping it clean for you Mom!) All the D batteries are sold out. Flashlights flood the aisles of hardware stores. I lugged a big box of 20 water bottles onto the subway today. The subways are shutting down, for the first time in New York City's history. I was surprised to find out they don't have large, metal, guillotine style doors that will slide down and block the entrance. I wanted to hear the swish-bang of steel doors all across the city. It would feel really epic and I would stand on my rooftop feeling like Batman at Helm's Deep (this is, after all, my blog. I can say whatever I want).

As it happens I have the bulk of my novel completed. Or, at least, I've finished all that I wish to workshop this semester. Woo hoo! So this means that I'm going to start doing a ton of re-writing in the mean time.*

Now my brain is free to think creatively in other directions. I have this great story about three roommates, in different places, when a hurricane comes...just kidding. I wonder how many people will include a hurricane in their first short story/novel excerpt ever workshopped in graduate school. I wonder if they'll substitute "tornado" or something else so it's not as obvious. I wonder if I'm the only one that corny.

I would love to be one of two extremes during the hurricane. The first option is to be frantically busy. Maybe gathering all my magazines, tearing out random pictures, then throwing said pages up in the air for hours once the storm hits. Once we're in the eye of the storm, I'll sit on the floor in the middle of the magazines and meditate. Once the storm starts up again I'll start taping the pages onto the wall in a mural of the universal truth I discovered while centering myself. The piece will be called: _______ (to be fulfilled).

The other option is to meditate throughout the entire process. Let the storm pass through me and achieve some grand ultimate catharsis.

Neither of these options will happen. I'll watch tv until the electricity goes out, maybe play some Beethoven during the most intense parts of the storm (on our grand piano bwa ha ha), and drink wine while doing a thousand piece M.C. Escher puzzle.

But as I was saying before, people are going crazy. A woman nearly ran me down while I was in the cross walk this afternoon. She was evacuating the city! No time to stop for the less fortunate mortals on foot! Another woman talked to me quite openly in the CVS line about the thrills and woes about being carded when you're clearly of age and your health is failing. Did she know I'm only 24?

Apparently the third best selling items, behind water bottles and flashlights, are water proof cameras. For the lightning, I suppose. Otherwise people will have 24 pictures of gray rain. "Here's the storm at oh-three hundred hours," they'll tell their grandkids, although they were never in the military. "Here it is at sixteen hundred." The kids will peer closely at the fuzzy gray snapshots, curious as to when they will be old enough gain the wisdom that their grandparents have, the wisdom that discerns something meaningful in the fuzzy photographs.

Everything, in hurricane weather, can be said ominously. My definition of ominously is: a) any statement which is impossible to either support or refute. b) anything said in a whisper.

Ex: "There's an electricity in the air."
"The animals are acting strange."
"I feel the tingle...do you feel it? Oh Marianne."

Listening to Leonard Cohen.

Overall, storms are exciting. I hope everyone is safe. I hope everyone had time to prepare. I think the hype in the media (for New York, at least), is perhaps a tad overblown, but that's an okay thing. If that's what it takes for people to pay attention, then play on, ye soft pipes, play on.

Can you imagine if the telecaster's 'news at nine' voice was her everyday speaking voice?

(at home with her husband): Tonight the McCarren residence will have chicken for dinner.
"Marjorie, you don't have to talk like that. This is not being broadcast to any audience."
"On the freeway home from work this afternoon, a car dramatically cut another car off. The passengers are safe, although officials recommend staying tuned for updates."
"Marjorie for Christ's sake put the round wire brush back in the bathroom drawer. You have real microphones at work."

A long time ago I started a short story about a weather man named Don who is going crazy. I'll cut and paste the beginning for you here:

The sky was hot, too hot, and as Mac O’Donnell brushed his teeth in front of the mirror, he wondered how badly his toupee would be seared today. By noon, the heat would bristle and scorch like a toothbrush against the tongue—the plastic fingers scrubbing against a filmy, pasty sky. Milky residue over a pink stratosphere.
O’Donnell switched toothbrush from hand to hand, admired his profile from first the left, then the right side. From the left, the twitch in his cheek remained invisible. If he swayed right, he exposed the burn from last week’s accident. O’Donnell knew its relative insignificance. O’Donnell knew this burn, and every other injury on the planet, was the scratch of an impending gash.
As he transitioned from toothbrush to razor, he unconsciously sucked in his gut. He had lost weight again—the innermost corners of his rib cage stuck out like door handles. Don’t open me. Stay away. He had made the mistake of muttering these words in front of Sally, News at Nine’s secretary. “What?” she had asked, her ponytail’s shape mimicking the question. “What?” O’Donnell mimicked her now. He wished she had more substance to her than one word. That she had answers behind that question mark.
“Nothing,” he had answered, and turned back to the water cooler, dampening his leathery tongue. What a lost cause. Nothing, nothing could satiate his worries now, his constant anxiety that trickled through the crevices of his mind. What about when the rain began to sear off people’s skin? When the lightning started spelling out answers in the sky? When that fucking comet blasted through the atmosphere? And he wasn’t around to tell people, watch the fuck out? What? What then?
O’Donnell finished up his grooming routine and walked through his vaulted ceiling, skylight filled apartment. The walls shot up at a staggering 20 feet height. Ridiculous? His ex-girlfriend had suggested to him, and ridiculous? He had leered back. What’s ridiculous? That I’m the most successful weatherman in the tri-state area? That this has earned me a future? That I predict the future? What’s fucking ridiculous about that? (This was two weeks before she left him for a gamer who spent his days underground, just of age, pizza skin and thriving greasy hair. Irony, said O'Donnell bitterly to himself, knows no limits.)
Now, O’Donnell luxuriated in the freedom of disconnection. Like an outdated jagged graph, his routine lacked consistency. After all, as a weatherman, his job only required him to be conscious and loquacious for 2 hours a day, from 8 to 10. After a few jokes, pinches, and howdy do’s, he could free wheel his way through the other 22. O’Donnell became used to sleeping till 3 AM, then going golfing in the dark; making origami out of take out napkins; watching re-runs of Matlock while slouched on the sofa, eating bags of potato chips, shirt unbuttoned so the crumbs didn’t stain his work t-shirts, only tangled in his chest hair—there had been a time when his work cautioned him against gaining weight. And there had been a time when Mac had cared. But now, with the very walls yelling at him you are not safe! And when he found himself whimpering in the sheets at 5 AM, terrorized by the suggestions of a cockroach, hiding in the bathtub because all cotton smelled of sulfur—
Now Mac did not care about his appearance, though not too long ago women would approach him in the grocery store, asking for an autograph. He had been the hot weatherman, and relished in the savory pun. But now, his recent fear had pulled out all his hair, cinched his belt in two notches, and slackened his jowls. He paused in front of the key bowl, catching his reflection in the entryway mirror. “Stealth. Control. Fire.” He whispered to himself. Recipe for success. “Stealth. Control. Fire.” And opened the front door.
Outside, O’Donnell braced himself for the heat that would hit him like a frying pan. He reeled, until he saw the neighborhood girl riding her tricycle, ponytail bobbing and sweater clasping around her ankles. Her cheeks rosy with the cold.Whatever catastrophic change O'Donnell read in his graphs before work, clearly would not happen today.
Stepping into his silver sedan, O'Donnell backed out of the driveway with radical precision. It was O'Donnell's ability to always be right, 100% right, about things that nobody else cared about, that had landed him the job as weatherman at channel 5's station. In the same way that he now drove down the freeway with exactly 1.5 feet on each side between the next lane and his car, O'Donnell knew what cloud patterns would dictate what side of the veranda to sit on for the month of June; knew what parks would receive the most rain, thereby driving nannies and mothers to the best parks for puddle splashing; knew the layout of the city so meticulously that a gentleman, should he wish to impress his date, or a lady, for that matter, wished to be unimpressed, would always know to read O'Donnell's weather report before departing, for O'Donnell would know if Portofinos, Bella Vista's number one first date spot, would actually be drafty that night or not.
Yes, in a sense O'Donnell was Bella Vista's most prized possession. His unnatural dedication to weather patterns, coupled with his scrupulous knowledge of the town's layout, made him a sort of legendary clairvoyant in the tales of Bella Vista's housewives, who gossiped about him while swirling their Long Islands clasped by orange nail polished hands. There was even, at one point, talk of creating a billboard with O'Donnell's face superimposed upon a blue sky, next to his motto: “Weather for Every Pleasure” (O'Donnell lost the spot to an anti-tornado campaign).
All devolved, thought O'Donnell as he swung his sedan into the studios' 3rd best parking spot. All decayed. He strode into the studio, wiping the corners of his mouth of the sweat-paste that was nowadays in constant formation.
“O'Donnell, you're late,” Larry the sound technician half whispered, half hissed at him. No matter.
O'Donnell walked over to his platform, green screen spread out behind him, and began that day’s weather report. “Winds in from due East,” he muttered, hardly paying attention to what he was saying, “We expect this to collapse the major bridges and send automobiles careening into the water, paper airplanes lacking a propeller, warning all swimmers to tread the fuck away from two ton projectiles—“ Mac became vaguely conscious of a frozen feeling in the room, like the ice chest before you shut the lid—“this is not to say that you should avoid exercise, or that all hope is lost. It’s only February, people. Those New Years' resolutions are near enough in the recent past to bite you in the ass if you don’t lose it, har har. Rather, we recommend heading towards the coast, away from the winds, and--
O'Donnell was cut short by a foreign whirring sound. Looking around, he realized that the green screen behind him had gone black, the camera's red lights disappeared, and all 48 of News at Nine's employees staring blankly at him.


*"Mean time" is a very funny phrase. Taken out of context? In context? "Time is mean."" 'mean' in the stingy sense. Time is mean in the cruel sense. Mean in the 'average of' sense. In the meaningful sense. Is it okay with everyone if I use single quotes? I really dislike double quotation marks. They're thick. Just my feelings on the matter.

My Orientation is Tonight

Tonight is orientation. It just so happens that my boyfriend scored tickets for a recording for SNL of comedian John Mulvaney tonight. When I was a freshman in undergrad I slept through half my orientation. I sorely regretted waking up for the other half. The only important thing, really, was the part where they showed you how to hook your computer up to the campus internet. Everything else was just embarrassing. I already knew that I wasn't going to be dating anyone, hated team sports, community, and talking to strangers. I put myself and those team leaders through equal parts misery by showing up to....did they REALLY make us alternate boy-girl seating in the dining hall and force us to talk about our food? Memory overwrite.

Anyway, I'm not sure if I'm going tonight. I met with a professor a couple days ago and mentioned the orientation. He mumbled something about it not being important. Off the hook! John Mulvaney, here I come!

It was a good meeting, though I think we were missing each other's points at certain parts of the conversation. I'll start from the beginning.

When I was in undergrad I thrived off writing experimental fiction. "Chronological" was not something I did or did well.* Time and space were divided and placed wherever I felt like it. It was liberating to work with such an "I'll do whatever the hell I want" attitude. It gave me a lot of confidence and I had a lot of fun messing with the convention that stories must be told sequentially. And, I did it fairly well, so I got away with a lot. However, I think that because this style was so easy for me, I could slide into these edgy structures and alienate the reader in the process. I think ambiguity, stylized structure, and pretty much all unconventional stylistic choices can be justified if there is a deeper underlying meaning behind them. If you're being ambiguous just to be ambiguous,* however, than that's stupid. You have to have control of the craft; you have to know what's up with what. Obviously sometimes a writer is taken over by the muse, and may write deep, complex, highly ambiguous passages. That's a different situation, in which genius meets high inspiration. Obviously, a beginning writer can rarely lay stake to that scenario. So until then, I think it very important, more important than usual, in my case, for me to learn more conventional standards of writing, and then go back to fucking with the structure.

So when I was meeting with my professor, we started talking about the writing process. I explained that I had a basic chronological plot structure laid out. However, I work on different parts each day. One day I'll work on the third chapter, when she is ten and in the hospital. The next day, being in a different mood or frame of mind, I'll write the penultimate chapter, which takes place when she's twenty. He started talking to me about how things didn't have to be chronological, and that I should trust the organic process.

I think he was under the impression that I was afraid of experimentation, or I had taken hook and bait the artist's maxim that you need to learn the rules before you break them. That just is not, was not the case for me at all. I allowed my flair for non-chronological writing to become an excuse for not focusing on the crux of the story: character development, the raison-d'etre for certain actions, etc.

In the end I think we both saw the other's point of view. He brought up a good, refreshing point: who really says, in the end, I ever have to write chronologically, at all? Creative advice is, in the end, just that: advice. If you take it to be the end all be all of truth then you're probably going to stunt your artistic growth.

So this morning I woke up thinking about a specific scene when she's about sixteen. She's sitting on a bed with a friend, and they're doing drugs while discussing their lives prior to this moment (or rather,the friend is: the narrator is just kind of high and listening).

It's a long scene, which takes place at a pivotal point, about two-thirds the way through the novel. I was thinking of introducing the novel with that scene, then going back and forth between that scene and the narrator's experiences leading up to it. We will see. It could be wasted time, but fortunately I don't have work today. And it's raining. And I'm going to a comedy show tonight! This post is very long.


* My thesis director put it most poignantly: "I don't know if you're incapable of writing a structured thesis, or if you just refuse." The sad truth is that it's kind of both. I try writing normal papers to no avail. And, I'm obnoxiously stubborn in my ineptitude.

**You think it's cool, or use the excuse "it's an existential work,'" "I'm a nihilist," "negative capability," or "I'm only Humean."

My List of Writerly Things

1) Writers like writing about themselves: it's true. Writing about writers and their tendencies is some sort of fun meta game for writers, which they shamelessly partake in, maybe the way that guitarists like to shred.

2) Writers, whether they like it or not, often interrupt: in my experience, true. Maybe this only happens when I, specifically, talk to writers. Maybe it's a writers-talking-to-writers thing, and writers don't interrupt other non-writers. But many of the writers I've met interrupt. Maybe they're so used to observing that the prospect of using words in the real world overtakes them. Maybe this is just a fluke in my experience. It is counter-intuitive, since you'd think in order to be a good writer you'd be a good listener. Maybe I'm a bad speaker myself, and they spare me the agony of misused words. I'm only saying what I've experienced.

3) Writers are not all like Ernest Hemingway: it's true. I used to go to parties for accepted students expecting to be in good drinking company. I was already pretty loaded by the time I realized no one else was fond of getting drunk and telling outrageous stories. No, most people were sipping their beer and talking politely about course work. Maybe writers these days drink mostly at the keyboard or in private or not at all. I've also realized that many writers I've met are on the reserved side and that maybe musicians are the ones that get loaded and tell outrageous stories. God, probably none of this is true and it just applies to me and my group of friends.

4) Writers aren't as funny as I'd like them to be: also true. I think comedy is a seriously important mode of expression, that comedy has the ability to reveal cultural and universal truths in a way unparalleled by other methods of communication. So it makes me sad when I go to a party where no one is laughing and everyone is very serious and you ask everyone what they write about and they say something about death and war and failing relationships and the like. This is obviously a very personal preference, and I don't mean to undermine death and violence and other unpleasant human truths and tendencies. Oh wait, yes I do.

5) Writers are secretly intensely competitive: I'm going off a vibe more than actual evidence for this one. But anyone who possesses the persistence and self-awareness that it takes to be a writer probably also has, somewhere not too deep down, a somewhat unseemly competitive streak. I know I do. It crows victorious when I hear other writers let it slide that they may have an inkling of competitiveness in them. “Weakling!” the streak says. “I would never admit to that.” and then I take a sip of my beer and nod and smile, saying yes yes so and so is very good I wonder about this and this?

6) Writers have a hard time believing that they're writers, even after success: I think, with the exception of writers like Joyce Carol Oates or Stephen King,* you probably feel like a fraud at some point if you're calling yourself a writer. I don't know why this is. I certainly feel fraudulous and self-important if I label myself "writer." I prefer "student," or "American," or even "twenty-something," most days of the week. I feel like calling yourself a writer is akin to calling yourself a Jedi when you've only had a couple of lessons with Yoda or maybe even just gotten really good at shooting sand creatures on Alderaan. Who knows. Maybe writers give themselves too much and not enough credit, and that's why we're so off balance.

Writers like Beethoven: I'm bullshitting now I don't know I've got to go to work but I love Beethoven and am going to listen to him now.

*Because both of them churn out amazing quantities of work, both living off their work at a relatively early age.

Freakout!

For the past month or so I haven't yet freaked out about the whole process. Now I find myself freaking out. This is the largest body of work I've done so far where I've not received some sort of feedback. I think much of it is bad. I'm .45% done. The school year is frighteningly close. I guess there's nothing I can do but suck it up and continue writing.

John Gardner's "On Becoming a Novelist" is a bit scary. I found the first half to be concrete and helpful in terms of describing the writer's aptitudes. As soon as I got to the section on finances I started to grow nervous. Writers are poor, I know. The chances of success are slim, I know. I've been poor and hardworking since I arrived in New York. I'm taking out loans and counting pennies and splurging for me means buying a $4 falafel sandwich rather than cooking at home. Authority figures like police officers and landlords scare me, not because I'm doing anything illegal (per se), but because they have the power to take my money from me. So if nothing else I've got the starving artist lifestyle downpat. If I had read this book before now I wouldn't have changed anything about my current course. But for some reason it's unnerving to hear a professional writer talk about the relentless process. Living the life with eyes set forward is actually somewhat easy. A simple lifestyle with simple needs is easier and fun when you surround yourself with people of similar orientations. I have a clear focus and I live with people who have the same goals. So to be honest I'm not sure why hearing it from the horse's mouth sent me into a sort of panic this afternoon. Maybe it's just nerves over the impending school year, and maybe after I meet my quota tonight I'll settle down.

Blogging before writing acts as a sort of centering act for me, so I realize this post is more immediately about me than writing. But it is a fact that writing is demanding not just in its intellectual ground but what type of lifestyle it necessitates.

Gardner also has some entertaining passages on the personality traits of the writer. I'll transcribe one here for you:

"Like other kinds of intelligence, the storyteller's is partly natural, partly trained. It is composed of several qualities, most of which, in normal people, are signs of either immaturity or incivility: wit (a tendency to make irreverent connections); obstinacy and a tendency toward churlishness (a refusal to believe what all sensible people know is true); childishness (an apparent lack of mental focus and serious life purpose, a fondness for daydreaming and telling pointless lies, a lack of proper respect, mischievousness, an unseemly propensity for crying over nothing); a marked tendency toward oral or anal fixation or both (the oral manifested by excessive eating, drinking, smoking, and chattering; the anal by nervous cleanliness and neatness coupled with a weird fascination with dirty jokes); remarkable powers of eidetic recall, or visual memory (a usual feature of early adolescence and mental retardation); a strange admixture of shameless playfulness and embarrassing earnestness, the latter often heightened by irrationally intense for feelings for or against religion; patience like a cat's; a criminal streak of cunning; psychological instability; recklessness, impulsiveness, and improvidence; and finally, an inexplicable and incurable addiction to stories, written or oral, bad or good."

-John Gardner, "On Becoming a Novelist," W.W. Norton & Company, 1983, pg. 34.

Still Working!

It's raining in New York right now, as it has been all week. Fall seems more audacious than usual this year, not tip toeing around summer like it usually does but rather brazenly showing its face in full daylight. I can't believe that summer's nearing its end, although when I think about these past few months it's no surprise. Me and everyone I know unconsciously become frantically busy during the summertime. I often translate Belle and Sebastian's song "Summer Wasting" to "Summer Wasted."
"I spent the summer wasted/the time was passed so easily...Seven years of river walkways/seven weeks of staying up all night...." seems aptly suited for drinking as well as pleasantly idling away the hours.

I've been thinking lately of the image of the alcoholic writer. Personally, I find alcohol inhibits my writing process. I usually can't write if I've had a sip of alcohol. To me having a drink initiates relaxation and stimulates conversation, taking my words from paper into the auditory realm. What's more, I find it difficult to write without an absolutely clear state of mind. I can't be tired, or hungover. I have a variety of rituals to prepare myself for writing: most involve either a cup of coffee, or a nap. I often take my computer with me to bed, nap, and write upon awakening. Something about the lingering of the submergence into the unconscious makes writing upon waking more vivid and cogent than otherwise.

Alcoholism seems to be the occupational hazard of being a writer. A myriad of reasons as to why present themselves. Personality type coinciding with career choice, the image of the failing writer drinking away his or her worries, the thirst for life. The idea of destroying to create. More on this later.

One other thing I've been thinking about is how, while I enjoy the ritual and discipline of working steadily on one project, I miss the creative randomness of stream of consciousness, for-no-one-in-particular, writing. Yesterday my boyfriend and I drew a picture together, where I would draw a line or shape, then he would. As we drew a story unfolded, which I more or less transcribed and will copy and paste here for your boredom or reading pleasure:

The birthday candle went off in his brain. “I”m sad,” was the idea that it had.
"Why are you sad?" The man, or possibly somebody else, asked him.
"I'm sad because I want to go swimming," he replied.
He had a backpack. He had a zipper on the backpack that allowed him to retrieve his belongings. He had two flippers, and one snorkel. He had a reptile-tie. A Reptie. He had a baby alligator eating a book in the tears the sad man cried from not being able to go swimming. Not crocodile tears, sad man tears. That the alligator swam in. The alligator, not the crocodile. A boat sailed in the tear water. A sailor looked on while a smiling man swam in the waves and basked in the flames of the thoughts. And above it all stood a sparkling crooked jewel.
The man had a great deal on his mind. He had a scale, in fact, perched on top of his head. Half the scale was his nose. The other half held the backpack and fins. “Follow Your Nose,” was the name of the scale. The game was to Be Responsible For Your Own Happiness.
"We can't make him happy," the man, or possibly somebody else, said to him.
The paradox was that he wanted to go swimming but couldn't until he was sad that he couldn't go swimming and cried enough tears to go swimming in.
The birthday candle was obvious, because he was born before the time of lightbulbs and so had to have a birthday candle go off. It was also obvious that it was his birthday, because he was just created, and nobody had bought him presents even though he had all this nice stuff. What's more, we had eaten his cake.
A snake asked him why he was sad and the forked tongue looked like the mouth on the pyramid. If only the man knew his backpack was on the other side of the pyramid. If only he could speak Pyramid.
Meanwhile, the man swam and the other happy man looked on. The baby alligator from the dreams ate the book. It was all highly symbolic.

Right now I'm reading "On Becoming a Novelist," by John Gardner, per the suggestion of my professor.

PS

I've never seen the musical, "Joseph and the Techni-Colored Dreamcoat."

No Title

Today I'm some combination of tired and sick my writing is subsequently lagging. I did pick up a copy of "The Lover" by Marguerite Duras from the sidewalk and finished it in a couple of hours. I love French literature. Is that too broad a statement? Let's say this: I've never read a French author I didn't like. I find it profoundly indulgent and effortless. It's so French that it makes me laugh at its Frenchness and also feel slightly inferior for not being French. I could read Anais Nin all day. Read Nin and smoke cigarettes exhaling hearts all day, but not in America because if you do that here you get lung cancer and die rather than a nice meal and a lover who shares your enjoyment of the post-coital cig and cognac.

Camus. Camus is great. Someone recently told me he addicted to speed. Anything that follows that sentence is not a conversation i'm trying to have here so I'll just move on. I'll read Madame Bovary for a craft of fiction class this fall. I read it when I was 16 or so and again in undergrad. The auctioning scene--I'm whining--bored me both times.

We were supposed to read Montaigne in school. I never did. I was either psychotically bored or depressed at the time and genius didn't seem to help the situation. So I never read Montaigne.

A well known French woman writer with a brilliant short story collection--some long title loaded with ennui and tough-mindedness--not very helpful hints. But every story was brilliant. The one that stuck out to me was about a woman veterinarian who is duped and raped in her own home. So she drugged the attackers with horse pills and grafted their balls to their throats. Then called the cops and sat calmly on her front porch waiting for them to take her away. It was one of the most kick ass stories I've ever read.

On that note, my boyfriend and I have recently been getting back into the Greek tragedies. The stories of Clytemnestra & Medea especially....my roommate is in Greece right now actually and all this is mostly rambling except to say that all these facts could tenuously make a game of connect the dots.

My list is over for now. I've got to get some writing done. It's raining which helps considerably.

Reviewing this post it's clear to me that I have indeed recently indulged in French literature.

Tuesday Two Posts Tuesday

If people are going to ask me a question about this whole process the question will probably be: "what is the novel about?"

If I'm talking to someone who will never take the time to read the novel, or whom I wish to impress (just being honest), I tell them it is a re-telling of the story of Joseph the dreamer, told from the viewpoint of one of his brothers.

Both the Bible and the Qur'an have beautiful renditions of this story. I find the story to be immensely powerful, imaginative, and interesting. I would love to write something that shares any sort of parallel with the story of Joseph. But the truth is that I'm using this novel as an exercise to discover my own strengths and weaknesses, my ability to build something action based rather than idea based.* And so in this process I've started a story where the plot is less of a straight shooting arrow than a heat seeking missile. It kind of meanders all over the place following the temperatures of my mood or the day. The motives are still unclear because I'm still unclear. The characters are underdeveloped because I'm still finding myself as a writer. I have a loose idea of what the novel is actually about, but really I'm just doing my best to keep my head above water. As counter-intuitive as it may sound, I think at this point I would find it extremely difficult to try to model my story after a blueprint of somebody else's story rather than finding my own way. One day I would really like to retell the Joseph story, but for now the comparisons are few and far between.

I can tell you what elements of the Joseph story attracted me to it, and how I'm trying to make these elements appear in my own work. I'm strongly compelled by the idea of redemption that plays out in the psyches of the characters. Society tells Joseph that he needs to be redeemed for a sin that he didn't commit. He is imprisoned to repent for his actions. But Joseph's heart is pure. He dreams dreams sweet and full of promise and hope. His dreams are both his spiritual testimony (he is connected with God) and his physical salvation (the dreams get him out of prison). So although he is imprisoned he is impervious to the pain this might bring. His dreams bring him hope that allows inner freedom. In short, he stands outside the law by merit of his virtue. (this is radical!)

His brothers, on the other hand, are laden with guilt. They will spend much of their lives bypassing and waylaying the guilt that physically manifests itself and plagues them: famines, poverty, etc. Spiritually they are sick, while Joseph lies in his prison cell and dreams. And not just dreams, but prophecies! He inhabits the traditional role of a poet in the purest sense of the word. Pharaohs come to respect and rely upon him. Joseph becomes the most respected member of Egyptian courts. He rules alongside Pharaoh. By sentencing one man to death, Joseph's brothers inadvertently brought a rich spiritual life to all of Egypt.

I could go on and on. In the Bible the story is 8 chapters. The Qur'an's version is perhaps a bit longer, 111 verses. If you happen to visit this story I would love to talk to you about it. Ahh, so good!

So some elements I've tried to bring into my own work are those connected to the idea of the societal damned being the spiritually enlightened, the spiritual reality of dreaming playing out in the day to day world, and the redemptive qualities of the story that I've already touched upon.

Alright, to work!



*Which is a weak point for me. I'll want to write a story based off a philosophical idea and think, wow! That wil be great! Shortly afterwards I find myself struggling to bring the idea into reality: to find concrete actions that represent abstract ideals. This is a bit of a tangent, but I believe that in good writing every action, ideally, is in a sense a metaphor for some higher spiritual reasoning.

Sunday Lazy Sunday

Yesterday I wrote the first 1000 words that I'm proud of out of this entire process. This is what it is. I've approached this whole undertaking with the understanding that it's a learning experience, in discipline and creation (the two going hand in hand), and so am trying not to be discouraged when I look at my work and am disappointed that it's not my best writing.

I don't have much else to say today. Moosewood cookbook is the best.

On My First School Assignment, Thoughts From Outer Space, & The Idea That All Writers Rise at 4 AM and Hit the Keys

It's pretty early and a giant woodpecker is outside our window, tapping out nature's stamp of perseverance and necessity. Just kidding! It's 1:30 and a jackhammer is drilling away in the brick factory that is our backyard, just like every other weekend. This is mostly irrelevant except for offering a Time and a Place, and to say that I've tried to wake up early to write and never do, and yes we have a brick factory in our backyard and also a railroad track which the LIRR comes through about three times a day to pick up bricks and turn around. It's fairly Wild West in this sector of Brooklyn.

A bunch of writers I've talked to say that the wee hours are when they get their writing done. I just don't--I can't--wake up early. I hate paper and pen and everything but my bed. When I was growing up my parent's favorite phrase was "the early bird gets the worm." To prove it, my mom, on weekends, would sometimes wake me up, then take me out to breakfast very early before any of my brothers were awake. This ended up backfiring, because I would be in my parent's room at 5 AM with shoes on and teeth brushed asking when we could go eat.

Besides this being an awesome (and heartwarming) tradition (thanks Mom!), I'm now realizing that I associated these morning breakfasts with hot cocoa, and how I now associate worms with hot cocoa. Brains are strange. Tangent.

I got my first school assignment. It was an essay entitled "Dysfunctional Narratives" by Charles Baxter. He starts off with an anecdote about Richard Nixon's testimony during the Watergate Scandal. He then goes on to say that the way in which Nixon passively places the blame for the scandal upon a variety of other variables sets the tone from which most American fiction springs. He says that Nixon's refusal to accept or place blame creates a political climate where ambiguity is the norm and responsibility is given to no one. Story telling, therefore, by merit of its ability to imitate truth, is severely limited--for there is no truth in such a climate. No moral truth, no personal truth. No convictions of the universe or the individual to use as guidelines for telling the story. The narrative cannot see clearly through to the root of people's actions. The plot revolves around displaced aggression. Characters are not held accountable for their actions. Protagonists don't make mistakes; they are the victim of various circumstances. Concrete antagonists or villains have disappeared off the radar, to be replaced with obscure, untraceable social and personal circumstances. It's a Bermuda Triangle of cause and effect.*

I'll stop here, for the article says many interesting things and I feel I'm not doing it justice by offering a hasty summary. But I will say that Baxter raised a couple of points that tie directly to what I'm working on right now. First of all, I unconsciously have been trying to preserve the innocence of my narrator while exposing her to morally complex situations. This just isn't going to work! The need to allow your protagonist to make mistakes is masked by the urge to keep her "safe." The timing for reading the article was opportune because I'm about to start working on the part of the novel where the protagonist has to make some concrete decisions of who and what lies on what side of the dividing line between good and bad.

Other than that I'm excited to spend an entire Saturday writing. Woo hoo!

*I'm not sure what this sentence means but I like it for now and am leaving it.**

**It's impulses like these that made me a bad paper writer in college.

Non-Novel Related News Flash!

Heads of the Bed are DEAD and Recent is Safe!

That's right. Heads of the Bed were shot dead this morning by Kimmy B. and Johnny Z. We have scant information on the event but from what our sources tell us Heads of the Bed were shot DEAD and it is implied that they were killed in order to protect the most recent partial, Recent. While some may mourn the passing of Heads of the Bed I know that at least a few non-brushed mouths out there will be happy to hear it is safe to return to the land of sleep again.

Obituary forthcoming.

I personally will miss Heads of the Bed but then again I maybe won't. Go away, Herself.

A Few Obvious Observations

Fairly frequently I forget that this is my book, and I can do whatever I want with it! I can write about what I'm interested in! This may sound obvious, but the truth is that while you're pounding out some scene that you don't, as of yet, have a particular investment in, it's very easy to forget that this is something you're supposed to enjoy, and not something you face with a grimace, like clipping your grandmother's toenails. I'm learning that if I don't enjoy writing a scene, or if the writing feels forced, that chances are I don't know enough about it yet. I haven't explored well enough the psyche of the character that I'm writing about, or the reason behind the unfolding action. The feeling is akin to trying to bluff your way through a test in a foreign language that you don't know well. Thinking your knowledge of cognates will be enough to get you through (My Spanish teachers must have had a blast grading my papers). False cognates. They are not true!

Today I'm very excited, because I managed to nail down a key part of one of the character's psyches. I'm using sleep as a sort of motif/linking trait for all the characters in order to demonstrate their relationship to beauty. Each of the characters have peculiar sleeping habits that speak to how they understand beauty's relationship to their lives. The protagonist is prone to night terrors, for example. The mother stays up feeding a baby and chain smoking all night. And so on and so on.

It's fascinating though, because while I knew that I wanted sleep to be important, and while much of the writing thus far deals with elements of sleep (alcohol abuse, morphine drips, dreams, even crying babies), there was still a gap between intuition and knowledge. Intuition is what placed those scenes in the book. Knowledge is what wrote them out. The gut understanding of the material, however, was still missing. I'm now looking forward to revisiting those scenes and re-writing them with my newfound understanding of their weight and significance.

Yesterday I posted a video of babies laughing and said you should watch all of it. Why? First of all because it's adorable! A ray of sunshine in your day! Second of all because laughter is infectious! If you weren't laughing at the beginning I bet you were laughing towards the end. Laughter is the only disease that's good for you! (I'm mildly obsessed with laughter, a story for another time). Also, my job is to babysit infants and toddlers. My job is to make children happy. How great is that?

Off to work!

August 10th. T Minus 16 Days Before the First Day of Classes

I think. My college is rather disorganized and I can't seem to find out when the school year starts (meaning I can't and neither can my fellow students. So 16 days-ish).

Yesterday I brought my protagonist out of the hospital (she's healed!). This was a big deal, considering that at the outset, I never knew she would be in the hospital. But it turned out to be a handy plot device. Symbolically, hospitals are important. What happened to her in the hospital was also important in terms of character development.

People use all sorts of approaches to writing. Some outline, some mix and match and copy and paste like a collage or patchwork quilt. I do a bit of both. Ultimately, what I think will happen is I'll write the entire story, then go back chapter by chapter and rewrite each one. I think if I tried to do an excellent job on every sentence I would get bogged down and never make progress, no matter how much time I had.

The scariest part of this approach is how often you go into auto-pilot mode with your writing and snap back into it to realize how much backtracking you'll have to do. I mentioned this before, but want to reiterate seeing how this fear is a direct result of my writing approach.

Anyhow, I have two hours before work and a big task ahead of me.Today I've got to introduce her into the world, a world she used to know and which to me is brand new. When you're ten years old how big is your world?

My world was cursive and sketching mountains and learning I didn't care much for math. At that time I lamented the fact that I didn't live in an English forest and that my only viable skill was knowing how to spell well. This was before I relished my opposition to mathematics. Life became much easier, in some ways, once I had a concrete foe.

(Recall the anecdote of Joker in the Arkham Asylum. Joker was locked up bat shit crazy, pun intended, but as soon as Batman went into retirement Joker became completely placid and serene and just sat watching television all day. Villains and their foes, in a twisted way, need each other and even depend upon the other).

My protagonist as of yet does not have a concrete villain. She has plenty of opportunities for opposition set up before her. I feel that at ten years old, feeling hate for what is unknown and against you is a natural and maybe healthy reaction. When you're ten and you don't understand something hate is a handy self defense mechanism. If you didn't hate it you would turn it inward and end up hating yourself. Maybe hate is a strong word, I don't know. This suddenly feels heavier than I realized and so am going to stop and share. Check this out! (be sure to watch the whole thing! Next post I'll explain why).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzHM8JnJkdM&feature=player_embedded

Observations Thus Far

Observations I've made Thus Far:

First of all, it's very hard. As the title of this blog suggests. Not because I'm one of those writers who sits for two hours, chewing her pen, and then puts it to the paper and liquid gold flows out. It's more like I write a bunch and meet my quota and realize that it's macaroni noodles glued to construction paper with tooth paste, and no one will eat my mosaic because it looks bad. This is not me being self-deprecating. It's just a fact. I once read the first book in the Twilight series. I read it in a day but that's beside the point. The point is I didn't find it to be very good writing. I feel throughout this entire process that I write sentences like Stephanie Myers' and my inner child cries a little.

Second thing I've noticed is that it's very good to have a Regular Schedule. This is something that writers talk about. You have a time, you sit down, and you write. I guess I do that. Recently a slew of visitors came through town (New York, New York!) and I didn't work for about one and a half weeks. Cue caffeine abuse and Philip Glass on repeat.

Third thing I've noticed is that you have to make decisions. This is difficult! I'm sitting at my desk writing about pretty clouds and yellow daisies and realize I haven't accomplished a fig newton in terms of plot or character development. I've taken my Crayola water colors and spilled them all over my smock instead of the nice canvas in front of me. Things have to happen in a novel. Like, what is the protagonist's deal? Is she walking down the street? Does she go into a coma where she can hear but not see? (man I wish I thought of that before). It's hard to catalyze action in a novel because you won't be sure why you wrote what you did until after the fact. Which is, despite meeting word quota and all that, why writing is hard. You'll be on a roll and regular schedule and then realize your last 2000 words were headed in the wrong direction, and you weren't actually writing what you thought you should write. The novel is going in a direction that you're not. It's a belligerent Pinnochio.

(I joke with people that I feel like a puppet master when I write. Power! bwa ha ha. Not true. Things happen and I obey the whims of these small people running around and thumbing their nose at me in between the pages).

Every now and then I think I hit a stride. I've heard writers talk about these as well. From what I understand about writing all these paragraphs I find beautiful will all go out in the first draft. ("Kill your darlings," says Faulkner. "They're already dead," is my reply).

Because I know by now there will be several drafts. I've got about two years' worth of work before I finally complete a book that is 50 rungs below Stephanie Myers (she may be the wrong example to cite, considering that objectively she is extremely successful as a writer. I choose her as a subjective personal canon because once again, I didn't find her writing to be very good and I find my own work falling short of that. Just to clarify that I don't mean to offend or make controversy over this example).

But let's move onto the positive aspects. The positive aspects are this is what I'm supposed to be doing. I've got to suck it up and just write. It's a very good lesson in discipline. No more undergraduate, staying up all night before and wiping the night sweat off the title page as you hand it to the professor, type of writing. Also, I tend to be one of those head in the clouds people who wakes up banking on the royalties from a screenplay she is going to write from a dream she had the night before, and then brushes her teeth and forgets what the idea was in the first place. So the discipline is good because it is exactly what it sounds like: discipline.

Also I'm just writing more in general. I respond to emails faster. When I respond to my mother's emails about her border collie I feel like a cross country runner doing sprints.

I half apologize for anyone reading this who finds it boring. Although I always say, as a reader I reserve my right to skim read. Which is probably why I always know everything about the romance portion of a novel and little about the politics (hello War and Peace).

Next post: the very mundane technical details of writing a novel! (I'm trying to aid you in your skim reading!)

Hello, Dear Reader!

And by dear reader I don't mean the general, anonymous audience of several different types of eyeballs perusing this page, but you specifically. If you are reading this, you are probably the only person on earth to read this blog. Congratulations. You, like this blog, are unique.

I'm going to pretend you're not one of my very bored friends who already knows the raison-d'etre for this blog. I'll start from square one.

So square one: I'm going to graduate school for creative writing this fall. Yes, I'm very excited about it.

(Before square one, so square negative one): i don't really do blogs. A stupid statement since I'm obviously doing one right now. But I figure that blogging about my novel on a daily basis will help keep me on track with writing, and maybe even help me untwist some of the knots that this impossible task is. A Gordion knot (do you know the story of Alexander and the Gordion knot? off topic--)


So really, I hope you Mr. or Ms or Mrs X, don't take offense when I say that this blog is primarily a way of thinking out loud.

It is, also, obviously, a way to procrastinate.

And also, I kind of procrastinated horribly with writing this novel and so have to do an outrageous amount in order to have enough material once the school year begins. How long did I procrastinate? Let's say about two years, more or less. I had two years to write this novel and I started about a month before the school year begins.

So now...we're at square the square root of 23 over the average of thoughts per second (4.12932038098 about sorry I'm bad at math)...here at square 4. whatever rounded down or up. I hope you understand the situation. I'm writing a novel, a lot of words per day, very quickly, and I'm starting a blog to track my progress and help me through this mess. To follow in the next post: observations I have about writing a novel so far!! Stay 'posted!' (get it?)