Typewritten Teacup

We Only Said Goodbye With Words

2011-07-27T20:43:00.001-04:00

So, amidst my vacation and LJ's general asshattery, I learned the rather sad news that Amy Winehouse, an artist I was exceedingly fond of, passed away at the alarmingly young age of 27. A lot of people have said a lot of things about her, and they're entitled to their opinion.

I first heard of her around the same time almost everyone I know did, when people started linking to her video of "Rehab" around the time Britney Spears had her bald-headed freakout and got shipped off for her first of many involuntary psychiatric holds. I liked the song immediately - it was sharp, it was funky, the lyrics were clever, and it had horns, which is a major musical weakness of mine. I love me some brass and woodwinds on a track.

New Orleans Girl had just started working with me around that time, and I asked if she'd heard of it. She's generally way ahead of the curve music-wise, and already had the album in her possession. We listened to it at work a lot, so much that I got my own copy as soon as I could. It's a fantastic, fantastic collection of songs, with Amy growling over a whirlwind of moaning horns, thumping bass and drums and dirty guitar. I can't lie - the songs "You Know I'm No Good" and "Back to Black" would send me back to the repeat button far more than some of the others, but I loved every bit of that album. And when New Orleans Girl introduced me to "Valerie", I went nuts. It was a perfect combination of vocal and instrumental, produced beautifully, and what I point to first when explaining why Mark Ronson is one of the best producers around today.

I tried not to pay too much attention to the train wreck that Amy's life started to become after awhile. I just wanted her butt back in the studio, writing and releasing new songs. (Preferably good ones). I discovered other, similar artists that I came to really enjoy as well - Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings, Adele, Kate Nash...but I still hoped that Amy was going to record another amazing record and blow everyone away.

Instead Adele did that (What, you haven't listened to 21 yet? GO. IMMEDIATELY.) and Amy died. :/

I realized today that despite New Orleans Girl's urging, I never listened to "Frank", Amy's debut. She'd said it was more "Erikah Badu-esque", and I kind of shrugged it off, as I much preferred the post-apocalyptic Ronnie Spector vibe she had on "Back to Black." But after learning that there would be no more albums, I finally cued it up on Spotify (a new toy I'm still learning how to use) and had a listen.

Now I am truly sad. The music is funky and jazzy - combining bebop swing with hip hop bounce seamlessly. And the lyrics are equally good - as sharp and funny as anything on Back to Black, if not better.

I wish she'd put more tracks down in the studio than tracks in her arm. I really do. It's a fucking waste that we lost someone with so much potential, and I feel that way someone young and promising meets and untimely end, especially when it's due to addiction. It's so unfair.

One song I heard on Frank just now sent chills up my spine. It's called "October Song," and looking back with 20-20 vision, let's just say it's a little prescient. Look that up, check it out. Check her out - she's more than a punchline, she's a great voice that we lost. And that's a fucking sad thing.

We're going to have so much fucking fun, we're going to need plastic surgery to remove our smiles!!

2011-07-26T19:22:00.002-04:00

The last few times I've taken time off of work, even with J, they've largely been staycations. Aside from some NYC-based activity (which is no slouch, really), we've largely stayed home, much to the derision and consternation of others (despite our own satisfaction with it). So, when J informed me that he had some days to take off coming up, wheels began to turn, and we decided that it was high time we Went Somewhere.

See, J's family owns a lovely three-bedroom, two bath 18th Century farmhouse in the Hudson Valley region. For the unfamiliar, that's nestled between the capitol region in Albany and my hometown of NYC. It's about 2.5 hours by car, also somewhat accessible via train, and full of green and scenic scenery. Naturally, the house has been well-decorated and appointed by J's folks, combining mid-century touches with many of the original details of the house, making for a really impressive mix. We asked if we could possibly have it for a long weekend in July, and his folks were happy to oblige. I made arrangements with a rental car, and we even invited some friends up for part of it. I was definitely excited - I love the area, and this was going to afford us some opportunity to spend time up there to both relax and go do things, in addition to maybe a tiny bit of wedding-related recon.

The rental car was retrieved from Enterprise on Thursday morning. I was excited, because I had an upgrade coupon and we got everything together to get on the road nice and early. After some mild Manhattan traffic, we made good time and got upstate around noon. That's when the fun really started.

We arrived, turned on the house's central a/c unit, and set about unpacking and settling in. It seemed to take awhile for the a/c to cool off the house, if only to me. Now, I grew up in what some might consider dubious conditions - my house had neither a dishwasher nor central air conditioning. Mind you, we had sponges and window a/c units, so we all muddled through somehow. Anyway, we headed out for some lunch at really amazing local place called The Wild Hive and to pick up some provisions at A&P and cash at our respective ATMs. When we got home a few hours later, it became patently obvious that something was amiss. The house was still not showing evidence that the a/c was working, despite the fact that it was on high. (And with the exceptionally hot weather last week, ac was kind of crucial). We called J's folks, who called their local HVAC people, who said they'd come by Friday morning to see what was up. We had a nice dinner at a local (and delicious) BBQ joint, then came home and crashed early.

Friday J woke up to do some watering in his mom's extensive garden. When he went downstairs to head outside, I heard cursing. Turns out, there was a grapefruit-sized bulge in the ceiling that was leaking water. We scrambled and found a water-catcher, and called his folks yet again to inform them. Luckily, the HVAC people are also all-purpose handy-people, so they would be able to deal with this). Eventually, the colorful locals who run the HVAC company informed us of the following:

- The central air unit was fine, it's just that the house was hot, the weather extreme, it's an old building... (Riiight. Yet my hotel in August in Las Vegas in stupidly hot temperatures managed to get the rooms down to a chilly 60 degrees with no problem. WTF.)

- The leak was caused by the pipe that led to the shower head in the master bathroom upstairs. So we couldn't use the big bathroom to shower, we could only use the small shower on the first floor. They'd be back Monday to fix it. Greaaat.

(I'm not saying they weren't super entertaining. We heard some great stories, and they were pretty damn funny. But still. #$@%@#%)

We showered and headed out to Kingston (about 40 minutes away) to investigate wedding hotels. I learned a lot and felt like I made some good decisions regarding hotels to block for the wedding. We also had extra time between dinner plans with my friend Rob and his awesome gf Wendy, so we even saw Harry Potter. (Which was amazeballs). While wandering around the area (full of every chain restaurant and big box store in the known universe), we got a call from J's mom saying that she'd gotten a call from the alarm company that the power went out at the house. Thankfully, we were far away at that moment and not returning home until later, so we weren't worried, and we heard a couple of hours later that the power was back on, so no big. Friday passed without major incident, only including us getting lost on the way to meet our friends for an awesome dinner, which freaked me out. See, I'm a city girl to the nth power. I like cities, I feel comfortable there. Put me in the middle of a rural-ish area that I don't know and utter the phrase "I'm not sure where we are"? Hello, panic attack. Still, we got there, and more importantly, home, with no problem. The house wasn't too warm when we got back, either. So we came home, did a few things, then went to sleep.

Saturday was the big day of the weekend, as we were expecting four of our friends up, *our* first guests at the farmhouse. I was a little concerned about the house being warm in the morning, but didn't really concern myself with it too much. We had a really nice day with everyone despite the oppressive heat, and then when J took two of them back to the train, I hung out and played a fun card game called Fluxx with the two friends of ours who were crashing in the 2nd bedroom for the night. To our dismay, the house was extremely warm when we returned, and after a few hours, it became plainly obvious that the a/c had shit the bed and we were going to have to go without. Somehow, we managed through the hot, miserable night to endure, but it was the opposite of fun. I do have to extend my thanks to our overnight guests for their grace and good humor in a really crappy situation.

J called his folks in the morning after our guests had left and it was decided that we would head down to their Westchester house for the night when it became plainly obvious that no one would be able to come to look at the a/c unit before Monday, and we couldn't deal with another hot night. So we packed and headed out, a full day earlier than planned, but that's life in the country, I guess. We got down to his folks', had an incredible dinner cooked by J's dad (seriously one of the best meals of the weekend) and were settling in for the evening when I'd realized I'd left a bag I needed in the car.

The battery of the car was dead. Awesome. Because experience has taught me to always get full coverage, I called the roadside assistance people for a jump, and that's when our adventure really began.

The roadside guy made all sorts of upset faces at the sounds our car was making, and after performing a few tests, declared to us that the car had no oil in the engine. Now, I'm not exactly a pep boy, but I know that oil is pretty fucking important to a car's engine. He said that the car was not safe to drive and that we should call Enterprise for a replacement in the morning.

Thus really began our odyssey.

Me: Uh, hi. The car you gave me? It's borked.

Call to Enterprise Brooklyn: "Oh, they're just telling you that to get more money out of you."

Me: [redacted rage]

Them: "Uh, okay, you can call the office in the next town for a replacement."

The guys in the next town were super-helpful, especially after J's dad called and dropped his name, considering they see lots of business from him. They just had to wait for a car that they could give us. And the tow truck to come and get the broken car. After that half a day went by, we were FINALLY on the damn way back home, in the pouring, torrential rain.

There were wrong turns, and we didn't even have time to stop home first to drop off our stuff if we wanted to get the car back in time.

BUT - in a save worthy of Mariano Rivera, the super-apologetic Enterprise Brooklyn branch manager credited us a day on the rental and paid for our cab home. And he was wise to do so, as it prevented me from opening up the epic can of whoop ass I was prepared to launch at them. But after he explained that the employee who told me to drive the car anyway had been straightened out, and was extremely sorry for any inconvenience I was caused. Okay then. Eventually, we were home. And we'd survived.

I'm not saying there weren't highlights, there definitely were. But on the whole, this was a vacation worthy of the Griswold family. And as such, I leave you all with this song, which kept popping into my head over the course of the weekend as things just grew more and more ridiculous. As my dad said, "Times like that, you have to laugh. There's nothing else to do."

Back to work tomorrow. Hopefully that will be smoother than my time away from the office. :/

Have you seen your stapler?

2009-07-10T10:38:00.002-04:00

I inherited a few items from my Uncle Charlie. His 1930's vintage bedroom furniture (bought when it was new), some binoculars, many photographs, and a stapler. There's probably more than that, along with a large sheaf of memories, but right now, I'm only thinking about the stapler.

I know it sounds odd that the stapler is the thing I treasure most of all. It's a Swingline, probably from the late 1960's or early 1970's, procured when he was working in the mailroom/supply area of a company who shares the name with a seafaring adventurer from novels about the Napoleaonic wars. It hung around the house for ages before my parents told me I could keep it, I don't remember if it was before my uncle died or after.

I don't know what attracted me to it. It might have been the color (all other staplers I'd seen were black), the weight and heft of it (I might be able to use it as a weapon), or even the satisfyingly loud click it would make when I'd press down on the handle to staple something. It might have even been, back in my days as a fledgeling zinester, a brand name I'd internalized as being optimal in stapling. There were battles on the old yahoo zinesters list about what staplers were best; ask any zinester past or present about office supplies and be prepared to get comfortable - it won't be a short conversation. I learned more about office supplies and copy machines from talking to other zinesters than I ever did working in an office, but that's a topic unto itself.

I used that stapler to bind together pages for countless school reports. It even came with me to college, the first witness to any A's or B's I got. If I got homesick, I could look down at my uncle's name taped to the handle and feel a little closer to home. That stapler is probably why I insisted on a heavy, solid Swingline at work when the one I'd been given previously broke (no surprise there - staplers shouldn't be plastic). I always find them to be the best thing to hold pieces of paper together. Paper clips are a good temporary solution, but they tend to snag either on each other or pieces of paper that don't belong. Binder clips are find for things that are too big for a stapler, but for anything a stapler can hold together, I find them excessive. I still enjoy picking up the heavy stapler, pushing down on it to bind the pages, and hearing the click. My inner six-year-old beams with pride that I can now use one hand, instead of having to push down with all my might with both hands.

I know most people don't care about staplers as much as I do. Still, I'm always mystified when I get a pile of collated, but unstapled sheets of paper. Why collate, but not staple? Why just leave it all in one pile, without distinction? Seems like a waste to me. As much of a waste as writing several paragraphs about a stapler, I guess.

I, Geek

2007-09-17T09:15:00.000-04:00

Guess what, kids? I'm famous!

Back in July, the brain trust at Marie Claire, a publication I once considered to be of above-average intelligence for a fashion magazine, posted an article that I took considerable exception to. The gist of the essay was that there were women out there who were cold, calculating automatons who felt no need to be connected to other people - and what a fantastic step forward this was for women everywhere. I had some spare time on my hands since I was recovering from a minor medical procedure, so I composed and sent an angry letter to the editor:

This is what I sent:

Dear Ms. Coles:

I have been an avid reader (and paying subscriber) of Marie Claire since the magazine's redesign. I often recommend this title to friends, many of whom were looking for new reading material after the demise of Jane, lauding MC's ability to combine fashion & beauty with insightful articles.

However,I am inclined to retract my praise after Theresa O'Rourke's essay inthe August 2007 issue, "I, Fembot." While I share her distaste for hand-wringing and general over-sharing of emotion, I disagree with her assertion that being a caring, empathetic woman (or person) precludes being a strong, powerful, or successful one.

Moreover, I am astonished and appalled at the usually razor-sharp editors of Marie Claire for allowing this extremely ill-researched piece to be published without more careful review. It's obvious that no one on your staff had any idea what a fembot was before this piece went to press.

Fembots are possibly among some of the most unfeminist characters ever created. Though they were first seen in the farcical comedy Austin Powers, it does not change the darker reality of these characters. A fembot is an android created for either sexual gratification purposes or for use as an assassin. They are entirely controlled by men; brainless, as well as heartless, and not at all feminist. The remainder of your "proto-fembot" references are equally disturbing. The anonymous Vodka-ad robot, the ruthless,murderous machines of Terminator 3 and Metropolis and the servile Rosie are all unsettling ideals for any woman to be confronted with, but when combined with characters like the Bionic Woman and Seven of Nine, I have to object. First of all, the woman in the photograph is not Jamie Summers, but an entirely different character who appeared on a single episode of the show. Secondly, Jamie Summers merely received an enhanced ear, arm and legs, and endured no alterations to her personality whatsoever, as her inclusion with this grouping may suggest. Futher, as any regular viewer of Star Trek: Voyagercould tell you, Seven of Nine spent her seasons on the show endeavoring to distance herself from her cold, Borg programming and become a warmer, more connected human being.

Most of all, I find the very suggestion that the Stepford Wives are a step forward for women is a smack in the face. Anyone familiar with any version of Ira Levin's terrifying tale of suburban life and the suffication of self knows that a Stepford wife is something to fear and dread, and not to celebrate and emulate.

I sympathize with Ms. O'Rourke's struggle with dissociative impulses and what sounds very much like borderline personality disorder, but to suggest that this is a positive life choice for any human being (male or female) is irresponsible and completely wrongheaded. As any of the women in your photo spread would tell you (after recovering from the insult of being referred to as a "fembot") it is entirely possible to be both assertiveand caring – no batteries required.

All people need space, but one hardly needs to be a robotic, soulless icequeen in order to achieve this. For a magazine who constantly implores its readers to care more about the world around them (as well as their loved ones and selves), this seems to be a somewhat contradictory viewpoint. I doubt that O'Rourke's so-called fembot would give a second though to the plight of India's surrogate mothers, the crisis in Darfur, the war in the Middle East, or the environment, or anything but her own passing, superficial fancies. Am I to assume that such a self-absorbed individual is something to emulate? I certainly hope not.

I am deeply disappointed in your magazine for espousing these views. If you continue to do so, I might have to rethink my view of Marie Claire as a quality publication for intelligent, independent women.

Thank you for your time.

My friend Jessica imed me tonight to inform me that Marie Claire printed my letter in this issue! This is what they printed:

(big thanks to Jessica for the scan and huge thanks to the multitalented Ryan Eanes for his edit)

I can't say I'm surprised. I knew the minute I professed to know even the slightest bit about Star Trek that they were going to latch onto that and completely miss the point of the rest of the letter. I do take some comfort in the fact that I know that they got my letter, and I think they understood it enough to read it (although one can't be sure). Most of all, the fact that they chose to retaliate in such obviously childish fashion only illustrates that it must have made some kind of impact.

Worst of all, this proves that they really did like and support the Fembot article. m-w.com defines "geek" as:1 : a carnival performer often billed as a wild man whose act usually includes biting the head off a live chicken or snake
2 : a person often of an intellectual bent who is disliked
3 : an enthusiast or expert especially in a technological field or activity <computer geek>
While I have spent a couple of drunken nights I don't remember clearly, I'm pretty sure that the first definition does not apply to me. So, I'm simply going to address the second pair of definitions. I am, certainly and absolutely, to the editorial staff of MC, "a person of an intellectual bent who is disliked." In fact, I'm pretty sure that they dislike the fact that I took them to task in what I hope is an intellectual fashion, and made them feel "like, all dumb and stuff."

The third definition proves that I'm at total odds with their article. An enthusiast is not divorced from his or her emotions. How could he/she be, and still be "enthusiastic" about it? It's impossible. By proving I knew more than whoever laid that page out about the characters they were referencing (almost all sci-fi characters, mind you) I made it easy for them to make their snotty little joke. I dared to care about something that wasn't exactly what they were telling me to care about (such as a dress that costs the same as the monthly rent of my three-bedroom apartment). I'm not caring about what's cool, and therefore I must be smacked back into place so they can titter about what a loser I am (because I watch Star Trek and read weird books and stuff) and feel better about themselves. All too typical for the industry, I'm sad to say. The crux of the matter is that they got their facts wrong. Just because those facts had to do with genre shows and movies, they found it necessary to insult me. Would I have been considered "geeky" if I'd pointed out how they'd mis-identified a Supreme Court Justice or trio of supermodels? Would they have simply run a correction and nothing more?

Genre fans put up with a lot. We have to. Our shows get canceled just as they gain creative steam or they languish in terrible time slots, not to mention that they're rarely ever taken seriously. And don't even get me started on the cross-eyed looks we get for reading stuff that wasn't recommended by Oprah. This whole thing reminds me of an incident when I was interning at a PR firm up in Albany. Some of the women in the office were big Alias fans. I wasn't. One day at lunch they were all raving about how amazing the show was, because there was this "totally normal girl" who had to cope with this "crazy double life." Sound familiar? Replace the brunette double-agent with a blonde vampire slayer, and what do you have? Right. So when I mentioned that I didn't care for the show, but liked Buffy better, the woman speaking sniffed and said that she never watched Buffy, because she "wasn't into that weirdo magic devil stuff." Had she watched the show? Of course not. She just kind of knew what it was about and decided to make a reference, much like the editors and other magazine staff members did when they laid out the page, and they chose poorly, which I happily took them to task about. The fact that they found it necessary to fire back at me in public when they could have merely ignored my letter makes me happy. I'll say it loud - I'm geek and I'm proud. I care about more than shoes and handbags and eyeliner, and these things I care about give me depth. And no, I'm not talking about the guy from those pirate movies. It means like, deep and stuff. You can look it up.

They get one more issue, then I'm cancelling my subscription. The magazine honestly hasn't been as good as it was before, and I'm starting to run out of reasons to cancel it all together and put my money into a subscription to Bust instead. Glamour used to publish idiotic articles like this monthly, but lately they've been great, and Marie Claire has been like this.

Writing About Reading: Still Playing catch up

2007-03-05T11:17:00.000-05:00

My voraciousness has slowed enough for me to try and put together a few recaps on here. I'm going to post these in reverse order, as I have more to say about one than the others, and I'd like to give them their due before I inevitably get sidetracked.

This is New York by EB White

I'd been meaning to read this for years, and finally did a few weeks back. This slim little volume is only about 50 pages, and was originally an article in a travel magazine, so it's a fairly breezy read. Aside from being extremely quotable, it's also appealing as a historical artifact; a snapshot of New York in transition (which I suppose is a silly statement to make, New York is almost always in one sort of transition or another). In writing about the New York of that time (Post-WW II), White often longed for 20 years earlier, when he was a new arrival to the city, which just goes to show that the long-standing tradition of griping about how things have changed for the worse since the good old days has been around for longer than the Giuliani administration, and is in no danger of going anywhere. I really must own this book, and read more of White's essays. He's so much more than "that dude who wrote the book about the spider."

Something Borrowed by Emily Giffin
After enthusiastic recommendations from several friends I decided to read this book (it also helped that Jessica loaned it to me along with its sequel, Something Blue). I generally have found my forays into so-called "chick lit" to usually be boring and disappointing (and in the case of the Shopaholic book I read, enragingly insipid). There were things that I enjoyed (Meg Cabot's The Boy Next Door was clever and funny with just enough silliness mixed in - a light, frothy cocktail of a story that was a pleasure to read. But then again, I'm a total sucker for well-done epistolary), and things I have yet to read (Marian Keyes and Jennifer Weiner have both been suggested), but for the most part, I ignore the books. Not out of a personal prejudice, but just due to a general lack of enjoyment, and a lack of patience for the vapid characters and tissue-thin plots. Something Borrowed surprised me because it took some of the conventions of the Chick Lit novel and turned them on their ear while keeping the general romantic structure intact. Was it predictable? In places. Did I want to smack the main character? Not as many times as I thought I would. That said, I could not put the book down for the 4 days it took me to blast through it. Giffin has a wonderful writing style as well; light, witty, and very self aware, making the narrator's observations much more clear-eyed than the average heroine in that particular genre, and like any good narrator, I really wanted to hear her story.

Relic by Douglas Preston & Lincoln Childs

My parents are huge fans of this duo, and spent the majority of last summer reading their books (there are several). I was a bit leery when my father thrust a copy of this book (their first) into my hands last August and insisted I at least give it a few pages. It sat on my shelf for about six months when I decided I needed something completely different from what I'd been reading. Relic took a bit for me to get into, I suspect, for entirely that reason, but the moment I did get into it, I was completely hooked. It's a few things - a monster chase, a police procedural that would be at home with the CSI clones on tv these days, and a suspense/horror story. While I enjoyed the hell out of the book itself (particularly because of the character of Pendergast, who is a regular in Preston/Childs novels), I feel like I learned a lot from reading it, which is why it's getting the spotlight.

I discovered while I was writing Freelancer and some different fanfics that I have some difficulty writing action sequences. I found it difficult to figure out what points to highlight, and what would be necessary to make a reader's pulse quicken (to be absolutely pompous about it, I suppose). There are a few scenes later in the book (which I don't want to give away) that were exciting and vivid, and that I intend to refer back to next time I have trouble. Most of all, this book led me to a major epiphany, one that literally woke me up one Saturday morning and caused me to start writing.

I love my initial opening chapter of Freelancer - I think it establishes my main character well, aside from being funny (if I do say so myself). But it felt fairly removed from the rest of the action, and I might have scrapped it ages ago had I not loved it so dearly. I found the answer after getting about halfway through Relic - it wasn't a first chapter.

It was a prologue.

The prologue at the beginning of Relic feels like a throwaway scene, designed to establish place and the history of the story that's about to unfold. But as the mystery starts moving along, I started to realize just how necessary those 8 pages were, and found myself constantly referring back to them, thinking about them, and relishing how it tied a few plot points together towards the end. I'm not sure if my prologue will do that, but I hope that it will.

My new first chapter changed the tone and possibly even the direction of the story. Only slightly, but enough to, I hope, give it a little bit more weight and heft than it had before. After a fair bit of scribbling, I've also discovered some of my narrator's backstory as well as a side to him I hadn't known before, a side that makes him into more of what I wanted him to be. I think I've found his third dimension. Still, a bomb has fallen in the middle of my story, and I have to rebuild it. Luckily, there's not too much construction involved...at least I don't think. Only time (and some work) will tell.

Writing About Reading: Multi-book recap

2007-01-31T01:11:00.000-05:00

The worst thing about being sick is that it just zaps all of your energy, creative or otherwise. As a result, the most writing I've done lately has been lists: "tissues. robitussin. cough drops." When your hacking and sneezing becomes a topic of conversation at the office, you know you've been sick awhile. The last month has been miserable for that. Fortunately, I have been able to keep up with my reading. And there's been quite a bit of it, too.

Sex and the Single Girl by Helen Gurley Brown

The tagline on the hot pink cover says it all : Before there was Sex & the City, there was [this book]. My mother suggested I read it after a conversation we'd had about old New York and books that mentioned old telephone exchanges and prices for things. I decided to check it out, as I have a soft spot for such nostalgic things. I was not only surprised by how much I enjoyed it, but how much of it was still viable all of these years later. The sections on dieting, makeup, fashion and the office were amusingly out of date, her observations and advice about men and dating were largely as fresh as I imagine they were when the book was first released. I'm certain it was the Down with Love of its day. Moreover, I liked Brown's overall tone. She was very direct, didn't promise to have all the answers to everything or even that reading her book would be a magic bullet to transform your life. Her attitude was "this worked for me. It could work for you, too." That, combined with the insistence that if a person wants anything (a career, a man, a car, a fur coat) they can't sit back waiting for it and complain that they're not getting it. It was nice to read a self-help book that offered actual advice, and not trying to sell their "nine steps" to the world in order to make them rich and famous.

Little Children by Tom Perrotta

This is a book that will be in the running for my personal book of the year. There are varieties of storytelling that amaze me - one in a positive way, the other in a not-so-positive. When an author has a potentially fascinating story to tell - one filled with the promise of excitement, and it collapses into a dull mess like a flan in a cupboard, I'm amazed at how it all got away from whomever was creating it out of air. On the other hand, when I run across something like this book, which takes fairly ordinary events in a small suburban community and turns it into something so riveting it actually pained me to stop reading, I am pleasantly surprised. I'd read Election and enjoyed it more than I was expecting to, but it did not prepare me for this. Perrotta also was successful in creating rich inner lives for all of his characters while using the third person, something I sometimes have difficulty with. It's not a small cast of characters, either. Some of them are barely around for the length of a chapter, but you feel as though you have some intimate knowledge of them when its time to shift focus to the next scene. More than anything, though, it's truly his turns of phrase that I am in awe of. He must have been visited by the line fairy while he was writing this, because nearly every chapter has some really great ones folded into the story.

I have 3 more books to report as of today, but I'm going to pause this entry here and post it, as I want to break things up a bit (and get to sleep).
Coming up: Relic, Something Borrowed, and Here is New York

And now, for a brief political message

2007-01-23T10:06:00.000-05:00

Today is Blog for Choice day, as well as Oscar nominations day:

To those who know me, I've made my thoughts pretty clear on the matter in the past, but I shall reiterate: I believe religion has a place in a house of worship, not the House of Representatives (or Congress, etc). Though I am a rabid agnostic, I believe in everyone's right to believe, as everyone has the right to choose what course their life takes. Also, every truly religious person (and not just posturing lunatics) I've known has shared the viewpoint of live and let live, and that's what choice is all about. It goes beyond the ability to make reproductive choices, too, in my opinion - it's the ability to (for better or worse) write, say, think, vote, or eat what you desire. That choice is not a free ride, though, nor should it be - it's about owning these choices (even bad ones) and learning to make good ones. Protecting anyone from their choices or preventing a person or child from making any is not how an intelligent, responsible being is creative. Freedom of choice is just that - the freedom to make all choices. It's not shielding and blocking them from doing things that you think are immoral, imprudent or fattening, but educating them in the most objective manner possible and allowing them to find their own way.

It's not a popular line of thinking - the masses become so difficult to control when they're thinking for themselves and all, but I just wish there was a movement to encourage people to do just that - think for themselves. It's bigger than choosing to abort or not to abort, at least to me. It's about being guaranteed the freedom to always think for yourself. Which is why I'm proud to be pro-choice.

Live from New York

2007-01-17T12:04:00.000-05:00

I did something crazy last night. Maybe not that crazy, but it's definitely exciting.

I joined my first blog network.

I heard about Metaxu when its first birthday party was mentioned on Galleycat during the paralyzingly slow week between Christmas and New Year's. Since I had the time to do more than my usual scroll & scan, I poked around to see just what it was, and since then I've been happily reading all sorts of things whenever I have a free moment and have already visited all of my other usual stops along the internets. I have no idea if this means more people will read this or not (one can only hope), but it will certainly encourage me to write in here more, at least for the time being.

And speaking of writing more, I'm wondering if perhaps giving myself short-term assignments will help me increase my output. For example: I have three short stories I'm working on, two of which are fanfiction. I'd like to finish them sometime soon, but my brain hasn't been terribly cooperative lately. I used to bristle at the idea of making myself write a certain thing at a certain time, but the last few attempts to focus on one plot/storyline while I was on the train or had a limited amount of time to work on something really were positive, so it may be time to try to impliment this change on a regular basis. I've managed to incorporate 3-4 hours of exercise into my life each week, so perhaps utilizing this same discipline will allow me to work in 3-4 (or more!) hours of writing. I hope.

Writing about Reading

2007-01-11T13:42:00.000-05:00

One of my goals for this year (notice how I'm avoiding the "r" word) is to read more. Between 3-4 books a month, at least. All across genres, and maybe some more nonfiction, if I can find things that appeal to me. (Please leave any recommendations for consideration in the comments). Since I was starting this big initiative where I'd even keep track of what I was reading in some place somewhere (like here).

In terms of reading, 2006 was a great year. I ran across some things that I consider to be classics, and aside from those, there were some things I just really, really loved. Reading Like A Writer (one of the best writing-related books I've ever, ever read.). Motherless Brooklyn. To Kill a Mockingbird. Strangers in Paradise (I finished Pocket Book #3 right after New Year's, and am running out of excuses as to why I shouldn't run out RIGHT RIGHT NOW and get #4). Those were simply the best of the best - I know there were quite a few others that were up there as well, and several that I didn't think much of, and therefore will not mention. And it ended well, too - the last book I finished in 2006 was The Ghost at the Table, which I recommend to all and sundry - it was a really compelling narrative, and even though I wasn't completely thrilled with the ending, I admired the way that the author got me there, and how all of the minutiae of the days leading up into this Thanksgiving dinner and all of the tension that was riding just beneath the surface was so engrossing.

I wanted the first read of 2007 to grab me as much. I had a few titles up for consideration, all of which will get read soon. I decided to go about what to read democratically - I'd sample a portion of each, and whichever held more of my attention would be the winner. To be honest, I completely expected this winner to have been More Home Cooking by Laurie Colwin (more on her in a minute). I'd read Home Cooking a few years ago and loved it (it's a terrific collection of recipes and essays about food). Instead, More Home Cooking came in a fairly distant second to a book that Abby, my friend and YA Librarian Extraordinaire thrust into my hands before Christmas and practically demanded I read immediately: Just Listen by Sarah Dessen.

I was a bit dubious. Although I frequently read and enjoy many YA titles, many of the ones I'd read recently were disappointing. The description of the heroine and the things she was to encounter sounded like the writer aimed for Season 1 Veronica Mars (minus the whodunit murder plot), but missed and landed in a big pile of after school special. Oh, how wrong I was. 10 pages in, I was intrigued. 20 pages in, I was interested. Since I got to spend a week on my parents' couch whilst down with NYC's latest virus, I sped through this one fairly quickly. It was enjoyable enough, I suppose. I was honestly disappointed by a few things , mainly how they'd spent all this time building up certain characters as important only to have her fade out in the end. I also grow weary of protagonists (particularly female ones) that either dissolve into tears or run away at the first sign of any kind of a confrontation, and Annabel, our narrator, sadly fell into the latter category. I could sympathize with her plight, I just found myself constantly longing for her to grow a pair, and perhaps TALK instead of, ahem, just listen and/or internalize everything. There were a few other plot elements I found kind of cheesy and cloying, but since it was YA, I let it slide. On the whole it was a good read, and were I a few years younger, I might have enjoyed it a bit more. I didn't want to stop reading it at any point, though, which I consider to be a positive thing. I've been told that Dessen has written better, and I believe it. There were many elements that she got right by not overdoing it, and I thought she had a really nice flair for description that is usually absent from many YA novels.

I moved on to More Home Cooking next, eager to see what Colwin had in store for her sequel, published posthumously (she died in 1992, I believe from a heart attack). I found it to be very different from Home Cooking, but I'm not sure if it's because her style changed, or because I did. I read the first volume around Christmas of 1999, when I was just beginning to get into food writing. Amanda Hesser was publishing her weekly "Food Diary" in The New York Times Magazine, which I read faithfully every week, and I hadn't yet discovered things like Chowhound or Real Simple or any of the other many food-related things I read and enjoy now. I'd have to revisit Home Cooking to be positively certain, but it felt to me that she spent as much time complaining about how things have changed in the way people eat as she did sharing experiences and recipes. I can understand her umbrage at people who don't/won't bake their own bread or make their own chicken stock, but after awhile, it was hard to not roll my eyes when she started in about that again. I've also been spending a great deal of time watching what and how I eat, and a large quantity of the recipes in More Home Cooking involve adding an ENTIRE stick of butter (after, of course, Colwin had spent a few lines denigrating those who dared to put their health or waistline before what might taste better and moaning about how It Just Wasn't This Way Years Ago.) After awhile, it grew as tiresome as her first book was exciting to me.

Up next I have Helen Gurley Brown's immortal Sex & the Single Girl, recommended to me by my mother during a conversation about my love of old New York nostalgia. It's cute so far, and it's always fun to see where things might have been so completely shocking when a book was released (as I did when I read Jacqueline Suzanne's Valley of the Dolls). I also have some cookbooks, a rather embarrassing book I'd rather not talk about, and EB White's Here is New York out from the library.

Now I'm off to solve that immortal dilemma; it's sunday: writing, reading, or chores? We'll see how it goes.

Mightier than the sword and the gigabite.

2006-12-27T09:12:00.000-05:00

My first computer failed on me when I was 15. I'd had it for about a year when the motherboard died on me out of nowhere. A tech came to the house, but proceeded to only make things worse instead of better. When we were told to ship it out to be repaired or replace, my father asked me when my last data backup was. My reply was a blank stare and a stammer. Backups had been a foreign concept to me up until that point. Luckily, they were able to retrieve my drive data and place it in a new machine, but when that new machine arrived I received a stern lecture from my father about the importance of backups. Since then, I've been very good at making sure I had them.

This came in handy at 19, when my second computer was struck by lightning. True story! I had been doing something or other online on a rainy summer evening. Hearing that the rain had turned to thunder, I signed off and went to shut my machine down, but a split second before I could do so, a bolt hit the telephone pole outside of my window, and the surge traveled in through my modem. I'd had backups of my writing but not my music, having discovered the wonders of Napster on my school's 0C3 network that year. Most of the music was recovered, though. I was lucky. (Plus, this had been a cheapie built by the school's computer store, and I was honestly happy to be rid of it. It had a habit of suddenly restarting or freezing out of nowhere.)

A year and a new computer later, I suffered not one, but TWO motherboard failures in under three months (right around spring midterms, no less). Say what you will about pre-Compaq-merger HPs, but I had no luck with this one. After the second replacement, though, it got me through the rest of school and a year after, until I decided to invest in computer #4, a Dell.

As per my usual computing luck, Computer #4 was a model machine until I'd owned it for about 2 years. Despite surviving a virus six months prior, the hard drive died a slow death, forcing me to back everything up onto a combination of cds, and after the burner was no longer recognized by the hard drive, 3.25 floppies. The warranty provided a new drive and installation, and it ran perfectly until the monday after Thanksgiving.

When my hard drive had begun to die, I invested in a 512mb flash drive, thinking it would be a great way to keep a backup that I could use in case my computer was ever non-functional. I was able to put just about everything on it, and I considered it to be a terrific investment for just that reason. After a failed attempt involving replacing the motherboard, I wasn't worried about the fact that something had gone wrong with the hard drive as well - I had backups, after all.

Despite it being mere weeks away from the most costly holiday of the year, I listened to my family and finally bought a laptop like I'd wanted for so very long, also a dell. After it arrived, I spent some time playing with it, and finally set about to install my saved files.

Only they weren't there.

I discovered that I'd accidentally saved the shortcuts, not the actual folders. I fell apart. My sister's boyfriend, a talented computer magician, immediately began researching ways to get my data off the drive and back into my hands. That's still in progress. I've had a few miracles, though. Several generous souls have offered their help, and I found a year-old backup, filled with pictures and writing that I feared lost forever. Even a complete version of my in-progress novel had been saved in gmail, as I had sent it to my parents and a few friends to critique.

Otherwise, I'd been doing most of my writing in notebooks the past few months. As technologically inclined as I've been my entire life, I really can't sing the praises of paper enough. Paper doesn't crash. Paper doesn't suffer compatibility problems. Paper doesn't need to be charged. Paper doesn't get corrupted by viruses (unless, I suppose, someone sneezes on it). Paper is portable, easy to use, and always user friendly. Before I acquired my laptop, I would take garden-variety spiral-bound notebooks to local coffee shops in my area and write in them with my favorite pen (Pilot EasyTouch, in case you were wondering. I've used fancier ones, but this is the best I've ever used. Ever.).

As a writer, I feel like paper allows me a certain freedom - I can get my ideas down, scribbling and crossing out as I see fit. Once it's in some primitive form, I can type it back into my computer, editing as I go (frequently adding back what I'd originally crossed out). It's nearly impossible to do this in word processing software, although I'm sure there's a way. It's nice to now have the option of taking my computer with me on a weekend afternoon if I want to go off somewhere and write, but after my latest lesson? I don't think I'll be retiring the good old pad and pen anytime soon.

Burned all my notebooks - what good are notebooks? They won't help me survive!
--Talking Heads, "Life During Wartime"

A brief election day message

2006-11-07T12:37:00.000-05:00

Did you? If not, get to it!! (Need the info? Check out vote-usa.org!)

I told my sister that I always vote before work. Since we managed to get out of the house by 7:15, she had plenty of time to come and vote with me. I went to my local Slopeside polling place, signed in, and headed into the booth.

The voting machines available are ones that I've been familiar with for a long time. My parents vote in every election (primary or main, doesn't matter), and for many years, they took my sister and me along with them as they did this (every so often into the booth, too, so I could see what was going on). There's a big red lever you pull in one direction to activate your ballot. Then you vote by flipping little switches, then you pull the lever in the other direction. I'm an experienced lever puller, it used to be my "job" when I was accompanying a parent as a little girl. So imagine my surprise this morning, as I went to move the lever into the "I'm done!" position and found it to be stuck.

So I pulled. And pulled again. And pulled yet again, with even more force. I was so focused on this stubborn lever that I barely noticed the booth around me doing a little dance (or more accurately, rolling all over the place as I fought with the thing.) Eventually, one of the volunteers came in and got the blasted lever to move, and my votes were counted. Still, it was entirely my pleasure to bring those in charge of Brooklyn's District 16 voting machine a good hearty laugh at my expense this morning, as I made the machine dance. I laughed plenty myself, and hey, I always love it when I know for a fact that I'll be a character in some stranger's "Remember that time when...?" story.

So, in summation, if a spaz like me can make the tiniest corner of the world a better, happier, nicer place just by voting, SO CAN YOU!

We now return you to our regularly scheduled writherly blatherings.

Great Moments in Journalism

2006-10-17T09:52:00.000-04:00

Back in yonder days when I was a wide-eyed student of journalism, convinced I could become the next Jancee Dunn or Joan Didion, I spent hours trying to perfect my turn of phrase. It didn't matter if I were writing for a journalism class or the ASP, I still wanted my writing to be good enough to capture the attention of my reader. I wanted to make them laugh, or cry, or hell, even pay attention (it was a college paper I was writing for, after all).

Eventually, I decided that I wasn't cut out for the Fourth Estate, a decision I've practically never regretted. While there is much that I don't miss, there are a few things that I get nostalgic for, particularly the 2000-2001 editorial staff of the Albany Student Press, helmed by Jeremy Morissey, and edited by a wide variety of nuts, myself included. I don't miss chasing down writers, worrying about deadlines, figuring out stories to assign, and having do this with a 12-15 credit course load (which also involved a large bit of reading and writing, too).

There are things that I miss that are lost to the ages - flopping on the old, lumpy, stained couch in a dusty room that smelled of old coffee, chewing on pizza from Paesan's, and listening to a rock radio station that I almost don't remember the call letters for, talking to people I still wonder about at times. More than anything, I miss one special part of the camraderie of being in that newsroom: the special blend of sarcasm, gallows humor, and most of all - making fun of our competitors.

Like any good budding journalists, we always had newspapers around. We read the Times Union and whatever that weekly alternative paper was called (I want to say it was The Metro) as well as the NY Times (you have to read the Times, of course). Usually it was for ideas, and to see what they were covering and how, but every so often, someone would yell out to the group to stop what they were doing, turn down the radio, and pay attention, because they'd found something we all needed to hear. This piece of an article was seldom singled out because it was good. In fact, I don't think we ever shared anything that was good, truth be told. Mostly, we found something that was so fantastically bad, so wonderfully awful, that we had to share it with the rest of the class. I'm only mildly ashamed to admit that our own writers weren't immune to this, either. The shame is only mild because we'd usually catch stuff like this before it went to press, hopefully eliminating all traces of the inappropriate humor that would cause us editors to choke on our pizza and wind up with soda up our nose.

Recently, I discovered that I was not the only one who missed such behavior. Gawker (everyone's favorite snarky kids in the back of the class) have started a new regular feature they call Great Moments in Journalism where they select (and invite others to enter their discoveries) of the worst of the worst. I didn't follow it so much at the beginning, but now, I'm a loyal fan. Through the years, the internet has reunited me with many things I thought were long gone - friends, cartoons, cheesy themesongs, and other memories I'd thought lost forever, and it's now done it again. I may not be able to get back to that specific place and time in my life (and thank God for that), but at least I get to revist the most deliciously snarky part.

Links and a report

2006-09-22T13:50:00.000-04:00

I haven't really written all that much lately. While I have the major elements of Freelancer plotted and planned out, getting the next chapter going has been something I haven't had the mind for lately - either due to a lack of time or a lack of ideas, I'm not sure.

I have been keeping myself busy, though.

I've found some new blogs to entertain myself with:

Red Stapler, similar to this blog, and is written by my fantastically creative friend Jill.

Media Bistro's Galleycat, a blog devoted to all things publishing. It's not as clever or sharp as it thinks it is (this whole arch nemesis thing is stupid, at best), but they do an excellent job reporting on a number of topics related to publishing, and it's a compelling read.

And last, but not least, my new absolute favorite: Grumpy Old Bookman, blog of publishing veteran Michael Allen, is both hilarious and informative. I adore the way he writes, and I've found his advice to be at least considering, so far. I need to read his long-form essay on getting published one of these days. I just have it bookmarked at the moment.

I have also just recently gotten my hands on a lovely little book by Francine Prose called Reading Like a Writer. It's been well-reviewed so far, but after my decision to wait on taking a formal class at the moment, I'm at least trying to learn whatever I can, either by doing or by reading. It's what Jess has been doing in her class so far, in addition to reading and critiquing the writing of others. I've gotten to do a little bit of that through fanfiction, though, which is nice.

That's another post for another time, sadly. Lunchtime is almost up, and I have to get back to the salt mine.

A touch of class.

2006-07-29T23:51:00.000-04:00

I don't give a damn about my bad reputation, apparently.

Both Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein have been connected to a quote that states that the very definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. This quote, in addition to being funny, pretty much summed up my experience in writing classes up until this point. I'd go in wide-eyed and hopeful that perhaps this would be the time that I would connect with someone who could help me hone my craft, create better pieces, and I don't know, learn something. I'd leave annoyed, bitter, and convinced that my time would have been better spent at home with a blank WordPerfect page, a cup of tea, and my copy of The Elements of Style by Shrunk & White (or even a good game of computer solitaire, in some cases). My experience has been dismal, so I'm largely self-taught. I can name about 5 writing teachers, since the time I was first able to put a story together, who I can say have had a positive impact on my craft, whom I genuinely respect to this day, and whom I am entirely grateful to.

The rest? Well, you know that old saying about how those who can't do, teach? They're talking about you.

I've gotten some shitty advice from the so-called experts. One told me that I couldn't possibly have my own voice already, and that I had to imitate other authors to find mine. This led to an argument that nearly left the both of us in tears of frustration. This instructor was a green-as-grass grad student (and not much older than me) who really had no clue how to instruct. In one class she set up what were basically arts & crafts stations that we had to run between on a timer. To this day, I have no idea how this was supposed to help me develop as a writer. Still, I suppose it sounded good on the lesson plan.

Another tormenter (who was a hippie burnout straight out of central casting) told my class that if we could picture the universe in our minds, and draw a teacup without lifting our pen from the paper, we were in the correct "philosophical place" to begin to contemplate how to begin writing. That was a loooong semester, let me tell you. Had I not just finished reading Michael Chabon's marvelous Wonder Boys the semester prior to that one, I wouldn't have been able to find a sliver of humor in the situation at all.

Those were some of the worst, of course. There were the couldn't-give-a-damns that would shove group work down your throat for days on end (Um, hello? I'm not going to learn a damn thing from my peers - they're in this class to learn, same as me. Get off your overpaid, lazy ass and TEACH us something. You're the one with the degree! thanks), and the ones that might have been good at what they did once upon a yonder, but were now way past their expiration dates.

Of course, there were the good ones, the great ones - the ones that encouraged me, that gave me constructive criticism that I could actually USE to better myself as an artist, and who genuinely cared about what we were learning and how. They, as previously mentioned, were painfully few and far between their unsatisfactory breathren, and usually too nice to say anything against them. Well, there was ONE snarky individual who would, but I'm keeping that individual's identity protected, as this is a person who should be teaching writing often, and to large groups, and I don't want ANYTHING interfering with that.

Most of the time, I wasn't sitting in the back of the room, quietly seething. Generally, I was fighting these piss-poor instructors tooth and nail, challenging their gassbag rhetoric out of sheer frustration. Writing was something I knew instinctively - I didn't need lectures on voice or endless examinations of process - I needed to know how to make my characters three-dimensional and compelling. I needed to know how to build a story arc that wouldn't collapse, and create a plot with minimal holes in it. I needed tools; I got toolboxes instead.

Since I graduated and happily hightailed it out of academia, I've kept up my writing, and have been pretty happy with what I've been pumping out (sometimes in fits and starts, but it's still something). Still, with literally everyone, their mother, and their step-uncle-twice removed who've decided to take to writing as partially a paint-by-numbers hobby and get-rich-quick scheme, a novel is no longer enough. You have to build some sort of a following, and get noticed in some other way. Granted, it's not so easy to do any more, but if you can get a few publication credits under your belt (in an academic quarterly, for example), it doesn't hurt.

And therein lies my achillies heel: I suck at short stories. They're either overpacked or flimsy. I've never once had a genuine handle on the structure - I've written a few in my time, but I never thought they were terribly good. So, when my friend Jessica mentioned that she might be taking a writing course in the fall, it got some wheels turning in my head, and I did some research.

There's a short story class being offered at one of the learning institutions that my friends are studying with. Actually, there are two, but one was eliminated after the course description alone made me want to run screaming into the night. The class I was drawn to seemed to offer what I was looking for. I googled the instructor and read some of his work, and I liked it. I'm just trying to decide if it's worth it.

Some questions in my mind:
1. Would it be better to put the cost of the course towards a new laptop?

2. Is it going to be worth missing Veronica Mars every week? I'm not being totally facetious here - the class is from 8pm-9:50pm on Tuesdays. In the world of Sharon, that's pretty frigging late. I'm not even sure that this will work for me, as I have to get up for work around 6:30 or so every day, and am a person who needs rest. Even my parents suggested that this period of time is not my best - and I may not get the most out of something that starts so late, and will then require at least a 30-35 minute commute home.

3. My history with writing professors, as explained above.

4. The fact that Freelancer is going places again, and any coursework that would be required for a writing course would potentially interfere with this.

I have a little while to figure this out, and will probably attend the open house they're holding this week to help my decision. It's tempting to wait until the Spring semester, but it's equally tempting to go ahead with this, too.

a little, quiet corner.

2006-07-22T19:30:00.000-04:00

One of the great things about living here in Park Slope is the plethora of places that one can go to for the sole purpose of creativity. I just spent most of this afternoon dividing my time between two such establishments, working on my novel. Which has started to get going again, in a major way. I have some more plot arcs to work on. I can see places where I'll have to develop more on the first revision. But I'm very excited at the prospect of actually being able to FINISH this thing by the end of the year. That's the goal. But, I digress.

I was always dubious of the whole "sitting in a coffee shop/diner working on my book" thing, until I tried it. I armed myself with my notebooks and headed out in search of food, tea, and a place to work. My first choice had been unavailable (totally packed) and I had completely forgotten about another place I'd wanted to try, I wound up at a little diner on a corner of 7th avenue that I happen to like (and know isn't crazy busy).

I settled into a booth, ordered, and set about working. All was grand until some mother brought her three whining, shrieking brats in. They weren't the ONLY children in the place, just the most disruptive, ill-behaved ones. There was another family with two adorable, well-behaved children that I barely noticed until the hellions arrived, but it became clear that despite a previously peaceful half an hour, I was going to have to get the hell out of dodge. I paid and left.

I tried the 7th Avenue Tea Lounge next, but uncomfortable couches and lots of conversation gave it only a slight edge over the diner. That, and a large, caffienated tea made a walk necessary.

I'm debating starting a list of places in the immediate area for this purpose. Secret, of course - I don't want to turn this into some kind of "Find Sharon" scavenger hunt, and I *do* have to get some work done, but I'm still hopeful I can find something that I can go to fairly regularly to get what I need.

What I need is somewhere close, and relatively quiet. I know that if I wanted near-total silence I could go to the library, but I would prefer a place where I could have food and a drink if I wanted one, and a comfortable level of noise - perhaps the sound of clicking laptops and the hum of quiet conversation. Tables (and a lack of toddlers) are a definite plus.

Stay tuned for the results of further research.

It's nice to know you're not alone in your feelings

2006-04-08T21:45:00.000-04:00

"I seem to have lost all sense of style and yet I am haunted by the necessity of style. And that story I can't write weaves itself into all I see, into all I speak, into all I think, into the lines of every book I try to read. I feel my brain. I am distinctly conscious of the contents of my head. My story is there in a fluid—in an evading shape. I can't get hold of it. It is all there—to bursting, yet I can't get hold of it any more than you can grasp a handful of water.

I never mean to be slow. The stuff comes out at its own rate. I am always ready to put it down... the trouble is that too often, alas, I've to wait for the sentence, for the word. The worst is that while I'm thus powerless to produce, my imagination is extremely active; whole paragraphs, whole pages, whole chapters pass through my mind. Everything is there: descriptions, dialogue, reflection, everything, everything but the belief, the conviction, the only thing needed to make me put pen to paper. I've thought out a volume a day till I felt sick of mind and heart and gone to bed completely done up, without having written a line. The effort I put out should give birth to Masterpieces as big as mountains, and it brings forth a ridiculous mouse now and then."

-- Joseph Conrad

"Writing is easy: all you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead."

- Gene Fowler -

This is where I've been lately. I've been busting my ass on a poem I'm to read at the wedding of two dear friends and trying like hell to get Freelancer moving. The Fowler quote really applies. Writing is easy - writing well is sometimes impossible.

Admiration Society

2006-03-10T14:39:00.000-05:00

In a rather delightful turn, two blogs have posted marvelous essays this week that I'd like to note here.

Nick Mamatas, a writer whom I know through Jessica, in his posted this bit of Swift-ian brilliance this week and I nearly pulled a muscle laughing. While the essay in and of itself is completely on-point and hillarious, I am extremely grateful to him for this paragraph, which I'm tempted to turn into a wall-hanging and keep it near my computer:

Recent discussions about writing and being a writer and "success" highlight the widely-held belief that writing itself imparts a level of privilege that the world, in its nasty little way, tries to deny. This is all rather silly, I think. We see very few people stewing about their "bad decisions" to become a Wal-Mart employee or a Mexican coal miner or a conscript in a revolutionary people's army or a whore for German sex-tourists in Bangkok.

Marvelous. He certainly wins my admiration for the week for this post.

I also must highlight this entry from David Cross's blog as one of the best online street fights since Joss Whedon and Warren Ellis got into a comment war some weeks back. In this entry, David meets Larry the Cable Guy at the bleachers (no principals, no student teachers) to prove that he ain't no holla back girl. Or something. It's worth reading, at any rate.

Attention divides, perfection stalls.

2006-03-08T10:12:00.000-05:00

I've been trying to write deeply felt pieces of great importance in the notebook again. So I haven't been posting. Which is another ridiculous example of me getting so caught up in perfection that I don't actually do what I need to. It's a bad habit I wish I could break myself of. A really bad habit.

My reading went very well, gracious thanks to Jessica for inviting me to share the stage with such talented people. But I can't lie. I was NERVOUS. Great big gobs of nervous. So nervous that I was paralyzed for days, writing-wise. The closer it got to the reading, the less I could do. I ended up trying to force myself to write a new chapter of Freelancer to read on Saturday, which didn't wind up going to well. I got a good start before I succumbed to more panic and frustration. That, and the Muse just getting pissed off about being put on the spot like that and just leaving.

After a few frantic conversations with my parents, I decided to go with the first chapter of Freelancer for the reading, despite my suspicions that maybe I need to take a friend's advice and switch exactly how it starts around. I'll have to play with that some. Either way, I'm really loving where Ryan (my protagonist) has been taking me, and how he's been talking to me lately. I really and truly believe that if I really work on this, if I really focus, I can finish it this year. Well, the first draft, anyway. I'll probably need to go back and do some research and a whole pile of editing and have some people I trust to be honest to look it over to help me see if I'm missing anything.

Best and Brightest (my other novel) has stalled at the moment, partly because I've been in such a Freelancer place right now and partly because that one requires a lot more architecture than I realized when I started working on it. But that's the bonus of having two things going, you can go back and forth as you see fit. I still haven't typed up the pages I wrote for Best during my unofficial writer's retreat to Wellfleet last October. Which is bad. I know essentially where I need to go with this, I suppose I should finish sketching the rest of it out before I worry about the details. I'll see how that goes with Freelancer , as that one is on a smaller scale.

And as if I didn't have enough to do, lightning struck me this morning. My muse has an annoying habit of bad timing. It used to hit me late at night, causing me to stay up until all hours. Now, I get ideas on the way to work in the morning. Luckily it's just a short story that I'd mentioned to Jess a while back, part of a chain of loosely connected ones I was thinking about writing, which is how Best & Brightest was originally conceived. But I like what I have so far, and I'm going to make sure that this one stays a short story. I think it might be good for me to have a palate cleanser of some kind for when I'm frustrated with everything I'm writing.

But I scribbled a good start on the train on my way in, and was frustrated that I had to go into the office and do what I get pay and benefits for instead of what I love. My lifestyle doesn't allow me to quit and just write. (I'm not independently wealthy.) Plus, having somewhere to go every day gets my ass out of bed and onto the train, which is possibly the best place for creative thought that I have. Still, it would be nice to be able to call into work creative. Or even stumble in an hour or two late, and have your boss accept that it's because you were so immersed in the story you were writing on the train that you found yourself at the end of the subway line. Not likely in this lifetime.

I keep a notebook and pen on me at all times. Sometimes I lug them around for weeks before inspiration strikes. Which is another reason that not working would not work for me - I need something to keep me busy in the interim, and to remind me that I can only do one thing at a time. I have two novels and a short story in progress, and at least 5 more ideas for novels in the works:
1. an odd romantic comedy
2. something that falls in line with whatever genre they're classifying Neil Gaiman these days
3. a very Hitchcock-ian story of obsession that I think will be more of a novella
4. a novel about baseball and murder that I'll be collaborating with my dad on
and
5. a possible sequel to Freelancer). (never mind that I haven't even finished Freelancer yet!!)

And two blogs. And a poem I'm trying to compose for a friends' wedding. I haven't written a poem since college, but I'm trying (more on that anxiety later.)

Still, life intervenes, as it always does. I have to run to a meeting now.

Bohemian Like You

2006-02-15T09:32:00.000-05:00

I've been working on a heartbreaking post of staggering genius for about a week now, and while I hope to finish it soon, I hate neglecting this thing with some of the shorter ideas I've been having. I've abandoned a couple of topics (why all networks should explore the shows-on-demand option, and how disappointed I was that I didn't like Brokeback Mountain, even though I was so excited about the idea of it) because I felt like I didn't have enough of quality to say, or that after the moment was gone I wasn't fired up enough to pour the requisite amount of passion into the essay to make it interesting. Throw that mix into the general busy-ness of life, and you wind up neglecting things.

I'm also worried I'm in slightly blocked due to the nervousness tied to my upcoming reading, March 5 at Barbes. Whenever I'm about to put my work on display like that, I'm always filled with the looming dread that THIS will truly be the moment I discover that I'm really not all that good. Paranoia strikes deep, I suppose.

And the only way to combat it is by writing, even about things of minor importance. I pass by a branch of the upscale stationary store Papyrus whenever I exit the subway, and I noticed this morning that they had a display for their new "Bohemian Collection." By this, they were not referring to the region of what is now the Czech Republic, but the hazy idea of, as dictionary.com defined it, "A person with artistic or literary interests who disregards conventional standards of behavior." Now, what a person who disregards conventional standards of behavior would be doing in a stationary store is beyond me, but perhaps their rejection of what makes a bohemian a bohemian to others is what truly makes them a bohemian (if one wanted to be rather Gertrude Stein about it, anyway). The woman in their advert was dressed in a peasant top,paisley head scarf and a lot of jewelry, representing their idea of what sort of Bohemian would want to buy their wrapping paper (attention: Urban Outfitters shoppers!). Even though I liked the patterns and bright colors they used, I couldn't help but roll my eyes at this.

When I was in Albany, I was lucky enough to take a great class (Eng 350 if you're playing the home game) with Steve North (one of my 4 favorite professors at U of A, a lauded group that includes William Rainbolt, Judy Barlow and of course, the incomprable Jill Hanifan) in which we studied the nature of the writer in the world. I know it sounds rather navel-gazing, but it was actually interesting to pay attention to how various types of media come together to create this representation of what most people consider to be an 'average' writer, however truthful it may or may not be. I found it utterly fascinating, but since then I've gotten rather itchy about certain generalizations having to do with us creative types. We're not all bouncing about in billowing shirts with pan flutes and drums, some of us have normal jobs, eat meat and like watching tv.

Somewhere along the way it became an accepted belief to view a writer as hermit with a cat who wears baggy sweaters and does nothing but write (or complain about how they can't write) all day. I wish I could spend my days writing, but as I have no trust fund or other source of independent wealth, and need to work. I love cats (but am allergic), and I have a rather active social life. And what kills me, is that ouside of Emily Dickenson, most writers throughout history have as well. In the 1920s, writers (especially poets) were like rock stars - partying, drinking, smoking, sleeping around (ah, those were the days!) I'm not sure how it went from Jazz Age glamour to the modern frump, but I'd prefer the former if I can get it.

What I object to the most is the idea of being a creative, free spirit is being packaged and marketed, particularly to those fascinated by the idea of being an artistic person but have no real ability to do so. Sure, there's nothing wrong with being creative, but at some point you have to have a converstaion with yourself about how far you think this is going to go - and how much of what you produce should be shared with (or inflicted upon) others. If you have a story to tell, or a painting to paint, or picture to take, go for it, I'm not telling people that they shouldn't express themselves. What bothers me is when the bored take up my passion as a hobby or a means to get-rich-quick (because clearly every big publisher in the world is standing on 5th avenue handing out 6-figure book deals.) It cheapens what I and others do because we're passionate about it, and have that fire inside of us that really is only tamed by writing something, even if it is just a blog entry.

My friend Tracey (an unpublished novelist in her own right, and a good one) helped me put my finger on this recently. The rather unique personal style that she took such care and pride in crafting had become trendy, and while she was partially excited to see her look in fashion, she was annoyed at how all these Janey-come-latelys could walk into a Forever 21 and put together an outfit in ten minutes similar to ones that it had taken her years to build. I know some of you don't give a rat's ass about clothing, but I got how she felt. She'd busted her ass to create something out of the air, something that represented who she was, only to be copied by a brain dead mallrat following whatever Seventeen told her to do that week. All of her creative efforts were lost to the trend, albeit temporarily. Still, she found a silver lining - it was easy for Tracey to find all of her favorite things once the trendies had moved on, and her look went on sale, and happily back to obscurity.

I know marketing is seldom about truth, but it feels like they're not even trying anymore. Everything is so referential it's as though we as a creative society are not trying to come up with new ideas and words to describe things. And as someone who values words above everything, that's bothersome.

The thing that amuses me the most about both this stationary collection and my little tirade is that I may actually be a Bohemian. My paternal grandmother's family is from the Czech Republic. We're not exactly sure where the village was, but it could have very well been in the Bohemia range. I wonder if that means I get a discount?

Such a Lonely Word

2006-02-01T12:19:00.000-05:00

A Million Little Pieces, the formerly Oprah-endorsed bestseller and literary scandal du jour, seems to have divided the interested parties into two camps: those who are shouting for James Frey’s head on a platter and those who are making excuses for him. I realize that this subject has been beaten to death by now, and while the brouhaha was cresting I mostly buried my head into the wonderful book of intentional fiction that I was reading at the time and pretty much ignored things (save a snarky, schadenfreudic snippet on Gawker). I almost pitied Frey, the way you pity anyone caught in a major lie and was now watching their carefully constructed world crash down around their ears. It’s similar to the cringe of watching someone mouth off and then get kicked in the face for it – while we acknowledge that the kick had to hurt, the loudmouth did kind of ask for it.

Frey has been getting kicked in the face a lot lately, as has his editor at Random House, Nan Talese. Everyone is looking to pass the blame off on someone else. Fingers are being shaken at the decision to publish the book as a memoir rather than fiction; hands are being wrung over the lies (the lies!) that were told; and everyone agrees that something is very wrong indeed (even though that no one can quite decide what).

As I said before, I haven’t read A Million Little Pieces. After hearing a brief summation of its general plotline I discovered I really wasn’t all that interested. I had a long backlog of books I was more excited about reading, and never saw fit to pick that one up. I don’t feel annoyed that my time was wasted by Frey, who was trying to tell his story and get people to pay attention to it, same as any writer wants to do. He’s not the first to claim a book or story that he wrote as truth and then have others reveal it to be otherwise, and I sincerely doubt that he’ll be the last. What’s bothering me more than the fact that Frey made up significant parts of his supposedly true-life story is the fact that there are those who are standing behind him and saying that it’s all completely okay, most notably in this editorial by Publisher’s Weekly’s Sara Nelson. I don’t think it is. Ms. Nelson takes the position that what Frey has done falls under the umbrella of creative nonfiction, and that it was necessary for him to fudge a few details in order to make the book more exciting. She wonders if those duped by Frey would have bought an “earnest, footnoted academic treatise on alcoholism,” and doubts that it should really matter to anyone who was moved or helped by Frey’s supposedly true story whether the author had been incarcerated for three months or three years – he was still in jail, right? She writes: “[Frey] didn't write front-page newspaper profiles of people he'd never talked to—and he never claimed that Pieces was supposed to be All the Presidents' Men.” In other words, Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair should be blamed for claiming false things to be the truth, but not James Frey. I suppose that in Ms. Nelson’s eyes, nonfiction books have a lower integrity threshold than newspaper articles, or that simply adding the caveat that his memoir (which is defined as an account of the experiences of the author) was merely based on a true story, rather than actually being a true story would make everything just fine. Doesn’t that defeat the whole purpose of a personal account? Sure, I could understand saying you saw one movie when you’d really gone to see another, or remembering someone as wearing red when they were really in blue – that’s not the issue here. The issue is whether or not Frey should be held accountable for trying to pass this off as total truth, and I believe that he should be.

I was in the Journalism program at my college. I loved it. There’s very little about journalistic writing that can’t be applied to fictional writing; the five W’s and the H will get you far if you apply them correctly to what you’re doing. Further, the other classes I took about more in-depth writing helped me to develop a narrative style and find ways to build interviews and research into a something someone would want to read. I took what I did seriously, and enjoyed myself. Junior year, however, I had a class in this so-called ‘Creative Nonfiction’ that left me at best bothered. I consistently locked horns with my professor (who was an adjunct who also worked at a local paper). The professor told us that while we shouldn’t really make things up, it was okay to fudge certain details to make things more interesting. I was appalled. Life doesn’t need fudging, in my opinion. There’s plenty of detail in every situation that can be used, you just have to be attentive to it. Even if you use a tape recorder, it’s possible to jot down scenery and clothing on a notepad. The emphasis was not on getting it right, but making it interesting. I was never under the impression that the two had to be mutually exclusive, but it did color my opinion of so-called creative nonfiction.

This instructor was fond of group work, and making us critique one another. I always saw these peer-led groups as laziness. As students, we’re there to learn from the one with so-called experience, not others as inexperienced as ourselves, but I digress. One of my classmates in this group had written a story of a friend from his hometown of Staten Island. It was about a girl, once a hair-twirling, club hopping mall rat, who chucked away most of her possessions and became a globe-trotting hippie. The story talked about how she slept in airports, met people from far-off lands with strange names, and could contain all of her worldly possessions in a single backpack. He had quotes from her friends, who expressed confusion over her change. Her parents were equally confused and dismayed by her action, but the girl in his story couldn’t have been happier or more content. I was enthralled. I had a million questions for him about her, when he saw her to do the interview, how well he knew her, where she was traveling that week, and so on. He regarded me sheepishly for a moment before finally laughing and telling me he had made it all up. I was angry for two reasons. Firstly, because I had actually gone through the trouble of finding someone to interview and busting my ass to get this profile finished on time. Mostly, though, the story changed when it was no longer true.

I’ve long suspected that the reason non-fiction allegedly sells better than fiction is because of the connection we make to true stories. Fiction is entirely the property of its author – the characters live in the Author’s head and that Author is their God. Whatever happens to them, we praise or curse the Author for it. Non-fiction is different. If a story is true, if it wasn’t simply the fancy of the storyteller, it somehow gains a certain kind of legitimacy, and our viewpoint shifts knowing that this is a person walking the Earth rather than someone who could be. Replacing possibility with certainty opens us up to a different, and possibly even a more intense variety of wonder. And if you connect deeply enough, the wonder becomes whether or not what this person is experiencing could happen to you. The discovery that what we connected to was false causes a more emotional reaction as a result.

PT Barnum once claimed that a sucker is born every minute, but I’m pretty sure that no one enjoys being cast among these newborns. I sympathized with those who felt enraged and betrayed. They connected and invested themselves into the work a certain way because it was presented to them a certain way, and were denied the ability to frame the story in the appropriate light. I also understand the more legitimate memoirist and non-fiction writers out there who feel as though their credibility has been damaged by Frey’s decision to play fast and loose with facts that were easy enough to correct when it came time to publish the book. What did Frey have to lose by being honest from the start? Perhaps he wouldn’t have had the runaway success that he’s had, but at least he’d have his integrity. Whatever it was, it's certainly would not have been as much as he's lost presently. It doesn’t matter how many pages out of the 300 or so he wrote were inaccurate, even 1 intentionally inaccurate paragraph was too many. The issue wasn’t that he had gotten things wrong because of his ‘messed up’ state, the issue is that he willfully and knowingly decided to alter the truth to make things more interesting. And by doing so, he’s done a disservice to writers of all kinds, particularly memoirists. As Koren Zalickas, author of the similarly-themed memoir Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood said in a recent Gothamist interview, “Three million readers bought A Million Little Pieces. That’s three million people who probably never knew what a memoir was before Oprah selected the book for her book club. That’s three million people who could have been a new audience for the genre. But now, they’re not only not going to fully understand the genre, they’re not going to trust it.”

Tell me a story.

2006-01-18T23:40:00.000-05:00

I've had an online journal of some variety for close to five or six years now. Although my first baby steps into the electronic journaling world have since passed into the ether of the internet, my desire to express myself has continued on with undiminished ardor. Although after five years of faffing about on livejournal I'm not sure if it's really self-expression or self indulgence at this point. I prefer to think of it as the former, but the realities of the latter are never far from my mind.

It's all been one long devolution, as much as it pains me to say. The online journal that once existed in diaryland space was initially an ink-and-photocopy paper zine; written over the course of several months and lovingly decorated with collages composed of pictures clipped from glossier publications. My time in the zine world was brief but intense. I never was much for the political or subject-oriented ones, but I had a passionate love of the so-called Perzines (or personal zines), that were largely about the lives of their authors. Most of them were either in high school or college (like me) and spun tales of their exploits in the towns that they were from. Nothing particular about these exploits were cut from the cloth of excitement. Some could even be called mundane. But I felt like there was something truly glorious in those xeroxed pages that I adored reading. I wasn't very serious about it, and found the whole constant mailing and letter writing aspect to be daunting, and was getting tired of having to defend my unwillingness to shop exclusively at thrift stores and spend my evenings dumpster diving. I did my best for quite awhile, though, before I eventually succumed to the world of the online journal.

They were sexier than zines, at least to me. I was hooked on the immediacy of it all - zines could take months to produce and distribute, but the turnaround on a journal was instantaneous. And best of all, most of the journals I encountered weren't overly radical: they were full of the day-to-day lives and thoughts of regular people from all walks of life. I was hooked. I kept a diaryland journal for awhile before I was at last introduced to livejournal. After a slow and somewhat awkward courtship (I shudder at the memory of all the quizzes I did in lieu of actual entries back then), LJ and I were like peas and carrots. I wrote long posts and short posts. I joined communities. I made LJ friends that led to other LJ friends that led to flesh & blood, real-life friendships that I treasure as much as I do the friends I've made through more conventional means. That should be where the orchestra swells and "The End" flashes across the screen, but it's not.

I'd really only intended Livejournal to be a scratchpad for my daily natterings, and not something deeper. Granted, I've always loved the complex labrynth of filters and privacy screens that their interface affords, and have used them to some modicum of success over the years. Livejournal is a bulletin board, a community squawk box and a way to make plans. It's a slam book and lovefest all rolled up into one neat little ball. But it's not always something I want to share with the rest of the class.

I started to get more serious about my writing in 2005. I'm currently at work on two novels, one entitled Best and Brightest, the other entitled Freelancer. With the help of my intrepid Write Club (more on them another time)I've committed to doing this writing thing for real. 2006 will be the year that I try my damndest to get my work noticed and my name out there.

Now, I'm not going to do anything asinine like quit my job and spend all of my days on the Great American Novel. I have a great pay-the-bills job that affords me a comfortable existence and a great apartment, but it's just that: a job. It's not my passion. Storytelling always has been, and probably always will be. I make the distinction between 'writing' and 'storytelling' because writing is something you do in a notebook tucked away in some corner and may never show to anyone. Storytelling you can do with words on a page on your own or over a cup of tea with a group of friends. The tales can be true or made up, it doesn't really matter (although I do think you should indicate which side of the fiction line you're on, at least before you and your story wind up on Oprah.)

Writing is a flat word. You can write a check, a grocery list or a thank-you note, but that kind of work attracts a fairly limited audience. Storytelling, however, is an entirely creative enterprise. Something that, I feel, one can easily do while holding down a full-time job and interacting with other human beings. It doesn't require sitting in a garret and doing stupid writing exercises all day long just to produce, produce, produce. There's not artistry, no craft, and no fun, I feel, in that assembly-line set up. If I can't enjoy writing, then I'm left with nothing. I never want this to feel like a job, or a chore. It's my passion, after all. So, I am a storyteller. Whether I do so on paper or verbally varies, but this isn't something I "work" on. It's something I love to do, and will be doing as long as I have the ability to string words together.

So, I decided to create a proper forum for it. I'm not getting rid of the squawk box anytime soon, but this is a place for me to keep my better stories; stories about my life and the lives of others. This is a place I can keep them and show them to others without being concerned about the other things in my scratch pad. Hopefully this will be a successful endeavor. Right now I'm not setting the bar too high - I plan on posting at least once a week and see how I do from there. Most of the time I'll have topics and probably will have spent some time really working on what I do here. Not all of it will be as off the cuff as this one, but I'm not ruling that out completely.

After all, sometimes the best way to tell a story is to make it up as you go along.