here we go!

I scored a sublet at the Writer's Grotto in SF. This means I get an office in which to write, for 3 weeks. My dogs won't be there to distract me, neither will a television, neither will a kitchen tempt me with its fatty, distracting snacks.

So my residency will be for 21 days. My boss has ok'd my going into work late for 3 weeks (or leaving early if I happen to have morning meetings).

Keeping my fingers crossed. I've decided to re-start my novel from the beginning, with a new structure in mind. Excited. Hoping to make great progress and share it here!

Hey blog pals, I'm cheating on you!

Sitting here (not presently writing) at my writing residency. Just to let you know I set up another blog. Check it out: www.orientalish.blogspot.com. Hope all is well....

Mac deodorant, please

My friend F gave me her old Mac laptop out of the kindness of her heart. But a problem's crept in . . . well, into my nose and into my house. At first I thought it was the couch that stunk, and I made a note to tell J not to lie down on it after coming back from the gym. Then I leaned closer to the keyboard and got a whiff of powerful body odor. Serious body odor. Undiluted, no-holds-barred body odor. Not-washing-for-a-month body odor. I pictured F carrying the laptop underneath her arm to cafes, to bookstores, to her office; I pictured her huddled on her bed with it; I remembered something she'd once said about having hyperactive sweat glands.

I called J to freak out.

me: F is sweet, but, ah, there's B.O. all over the laptop! She said she'd written her book on it---I understand pouring blood, sweat, and tears into a project, but come on. Should I bring it to Tekserve? I can't stand being near it.

J: I'll look up some information for you. [Ten minutes later.] Okay---do you want the good news or the bad news first?

me: The bad news, please.

J: The bad news is that there's no easy solution to this issue. You can place dryer sheets on the keyboard when you close it. You can also replace the keyboard itself, which will cost between $100 to $200 (keyboard plus installation). But apparently the smell, however muted, will always be there.

me: Oh. And the good news?

J: It's actually common for a certain series of iBooks to have this smell, something to do with the adhesive used in the keyboard---so it's not your friend who'd stunk it up!

mac

My sister's initials.

The makeup I use.

What I'm switching to, through the generosity of a kind friend. Hopefully, I'll be up and running in the next two weeks and I can start writing in cafes again. Fingers crossed.

novel progress report

Word count: 378

Location: Borders

Soundtrack: Apparat, Things to be Frickled

Writing Snacks: chai tea, rice krispie marshmallow square.

Incidents of note: The cafe worker gave me an odd look as he cleared the table of my "distraction" magazines--The Advocate, Fangoria, World Literature Today, The Uncanny X-Men.

re-start

I had an incredible workshop last week with a great novel writing mentor. He got me to really examine the structure of my novel and to probe more deeply. He said I have a fantastic story but I really should start over. After a month of rest.

So I'm starting over. I'm sooo excited.

novel progress report

Word count: 361

Location: Golden Castle Diner

Soundtrack: Daniel Agust, Swallowed a Star; Ms. John Soda, Notes and the Like

Writing Snacks: Pancakes, bacon, sausage, Pepsi.

Incidents of note: A middle-aged man sat at the bar, in front of the video arcade, and tapped his finger on the touch screen, playing games for what seemed like hours.

Retraining the brain

The last few days I've been waking up at six a.m. for the office. Yesterday it was five a.m. So many huge projects on my desk, and no time to get through them all. It doesn't help that I'm easily distracted by little things, especially by the Internets and all the clothing and shoe sales that are going on right now. But this month I plan to spend mornings on the writing, to focus again, and retrain this ADD-addled brain of mine into using words to good effect. This morning's inspiration: um . . . it was good, but I've lost it. What a brain.

*

Oh wait, I found it again! (The inspiration, not my brain.)

novel progress report

Words (for this section): 619

Location: Golden Castle Diner

Soundtrack: Electric Birds, Gradations; Isan, Plans Drawn in Pencil; Matthew Dear, Asa Breed

Writing snacks: open-face tuna melt on rye, coleslaw, Pepsi

Incidents of note: Four male New Castle County police officers came in. They all ordered Diet Cokes.

crossing the threshold

Seems like it took me over thirty days to actually post ... I was somehow leery of crossing the threshold into posting. Besides, every post I envisioned had me kvetching for far too long on the pitfalls of procreation (namely, the side effects -- children). Of course, the maternal part of me loves my child but the 'writer' in me finds him to be a serious hazard. Interesting about reworking the MFA thesis from a novel form to a collection of short stories ... my thesis advisors thought I should rework my collection into a novel.
The other day I was sort of jolted by a supercool 72 year old client, a sculptor and maker of tools for astrophysists, who recounted a sort of cliche story about an artist who came to speak to his students at Berkeley and said, "when you embark on your careers as waiters/waitresses, taxi drivers, social workers, just remember that you're always artists first -- the danger comes when you flip your identity around to taxi driver/artist".

A good thrust

What's all this blathering amounted to so far?

A collection of stories.

I have a real, cohesive collection in mind, thanks to some brainstorming with J about a single paragraph I'd slaved over for four hours at 71 Irving earlier in the evening.

I'm reworking my MFA thesis, only this time the narrative makes sense. Well, the thrust of it, at least. I'm sure that once I start writing, everything will fall apart like a house of cards, or a stack of cards?, or a house of straws? A house of hay?

Well, you know.

Whatever happens, fine---am still going to scribble down and bask in the thrust. It's a good one. I hope it sticks.

*

Random: So strange, and even sad, how breakthroughs big and small can light up one's life for such a brief shining moment.

Must stay realistic.

Television glutton

I love Charlie Chaplin, but Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd seem to have more depth. Somehow.

Right now I can't quite dissect what I'd watched last night (a tribute to Chaplin, then The General, Our Hospitality, and Now or Never), having gone to bed at five a.m. and gotten up late and cotton-headed for work . . . where I'm getting a brilliant memoir ready for the design department---or trying to, as I keep nodding off over the text, my eyeballs feeling like orbs of grime, and at the same time I'm trying to read and digest the words, though I don't have to read anything at this early point in the production process, just code the material (chapter number, chapter title, lists, lists, lists), but I can't help reading the words anyway because SS's lists are both illuminating and irritatingly childish.

("Must not be so judgmental. It is vain.")

I haven't stayed up this late in a while. During NaNoWriMo I went bed at the latest by two every night (I think). Tonight is going to be a late night as well, but I haven't done two back-to-back late nights in ages. Tomorrow morning promises to be similarly discombobulating.

Oh, and I didn't have time for coffee this morning. That might be part of it . . .

Sucked back in

My cable's back on. I forgot that I'd suspended it in the middle of March for the thirty days, not the end of March.

Now the Democratic debate is on in the background.

And after that is a retrospective of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton films, till six a.m.

Somebody help me.

City

The KGB bar was barely lit (as usual) tonight. The first reader opened one of the heavy curtains and I noticed the sky was misty but light. Spring…finally. Four readers read four quirky pieces for the Istanbul Literary Review, funny things were said. When I walked down Fourth Street, the mist made colors pop out everywhere and quieted things. In front of me, a beautiful blond couple spoke Spanish. She was dressed in red: red trench coat, red pants, red patent leather shoes. He was dressed completely in black except for a red purse slung over his shoulders, her purse I presumed. On Great Jones Street, I passed a dance studio where one of my favorite teachers made me leap across the room on a top floor. There is no way of knowing from the outside that the building is filled floor after floor of empty white rooms and sprung wood lined with ballet barres and mirrors. An open window spills high above me spills white light into the dense, wet air.

On Lafayette, restaurants filled with people spill energy onto the walk. I pass, hearing a rumble of talking but no words. Menus flash in hands. A man stepped out of the mist just before I got on the train, hitting me up for cash. I kept walking, feeling guilty. Another man dressed immaculately in white appeared, “Sallam aleykum,” he said, wearily. He lowered himself down, crouched in the corner, and waited for my reaction.

work versus novel

work versus novel

novel is the underdog. but this week--i played hooky. i took an additional day off (yes, i have one day a week off to write but i find i spend it running errands and recuperating more than writing). i just did it. i had allergies, the oaks are pollinating, i am outrageously allergic to oaks, there are a ton of oak trees in SF and Berkeley, the oak trees are a protected species with a considerable fine for those who cut them down (cursed me!), i was miserable and i was snotty, but i could have dragged myself in to work.

but i did not. i called in sick. i had a few work items. but i also spent a couple of hours writing. i didn't get a ton done, but i finally had a few hours of clarity, a few hours focused on writing.

ahhhhh. relief. how can i do this more often?

I’m trying to get something in the blogspot before the end of the day. I am still working away on the writing, not accomplishing what I’d hoped. With Nano, the set word counts and the blind, mad typing kept me going. A Zoo/Taxidermy story, the Alcatraz piece, Miranda, John Banville’s The Sea, and thirty student essays analyzing whether or not Hamlet loved Ophelia made up my writing time this week. And reading two rejection letters.

Revising....that's a huge subject.

What revision?

This month is supposed to be about revision for me. Revision plus a new story about a nipple. My butt's kicked into high gear. (Or something.)

The story I'm revising got workshopped again by my other small writing group, as some people weren't there or hadn't gotten the story the first time around.

I am now very confused; for some reason my brain is not wrapping around the idea of revising the piece. Every day for the past several years I've felt like I've been losing something of myself, and losing things I didn't even know I was losing. Lately life has been very full for me, in the sense that the things I'm gaining are actually staying with me---but today the "losing" feeling is back.

I am good at revising a story fragment. In fact, let me be so bold as to say that I am excellent at that. We all should be. For me, a story fragment is a quick plotting of a scene, and very little, if anything, should remain by the time one has expanded the scene into a full-blown story.

I expanded a theater scene into longer scenes, then expanded those scenes into an actual story, which is very different from that first scene, where a man's view of the stage is obstructed by a woman's large head of hair. But now that I've declared it to be a story, even though I know very well it's far from finished, I don't want to touch it. Not because it's so precious, but because I don't know what's the next step. Somebody in the writing group said, "What month is this story set?" and I added at the very beginning of the story "That May . . ." I'm looking at the problems in the story very literally, and that's not helpful at all.

Somebody else spouted something rather abstract---and I get it but I also don't get it. I don't know what to do with this material that has so much potential.

This is all very unnecessarily vague and loosely jointed. But I am, after all, an unnecessarily vague and loosely jointed entity.

Maybe I need to take a shower.

Forgive the ramble. It's 7:30 a.m., I'm anxious about this revision, I have to introduce a writer at a reading tonight who will be surprised (happily, I hope) by a musical performance by the other writer, and immediately afterward I have to ready the apartment for dear Viet's visit tomorrow. This doesn't sound like a lot, and it isn't, but I am feeling overwhelmed, so it actually is. Fingers crossed that I can gain some perspective at the office today, where work is light again (finally) and the twenty-two-year-old has somewhat backed off.

Distractions and laziness

I found myself increasingly unable to get my ass in gear this past weekend. The Philadelphia Film Festival was in town, and I got a sudden hankering to watch lots and lots of horror movies (let's call it research). Matthew was out of town at a conference, so this should have been the perfect time to hunker down -- alas, it was not to be. And now, looking at what I had written previously, I'm already getting the feeling of "Eh, I'm not sure this is going the way I want it to go." I know, I know, just keep going, don't look back -- but remember: my nerves are still jangling from some good (and not so good) horror movies, so looking back is the only way to survive in those things. You don't want to get caught unawares... otherwise you're mutant cannibal zombie chow.

Why Thirty Days

Everything's done on company time, don't you know? Napping included . . .

*

When JLS and I first talked about starting a blog together, we were thinking of the high we'd gotten from doing our first NaNoWriMo last November. No spliffs involved, just good old-fashioned bliss from thirty days of fast writing, of moving our work forward and out of the ruts they'd sat in for the last couple of years. Me, I rebooted my excruciatingly horrendous MFA thesis, and JLS drafted an entirely new work from scratch. By the end of November, we both hit the 50,000-word mark---me, barely---and I decided it was one of the best writing experiences I'd ever had. I'd suspended my cable and Internet service for that month, and conscientiously stayed up almost every night to clock in the daily 1,600+ words, and I even attended a couple of write-ins at a nearby Cosi cafe, where I was surrounded by mostly teens and twentysomethings writing about vampires and Manolos.

"What's your novel about?" one kid asked me.

"How a village survives the Three Gorges Dam."

"That's nice!"

My novel moved forward even as the writing was unpardonably redundant, cliche, and graceless. My characters forced themselves into new situations even as I found myself writing around similar themes from other stalled projects. I was ecstatic. Nice indeed.

I ran into JLS at one of these meet-ups. We hadn't seen each other in a year (or two?), and I don't think I'd ever been so happy and relieved to see a normal person. She doesn't write about normal things. But she's normal, you know? Then she kindly invited me to join her small writing group, and ever since, we've been talking about finishing up the damn novels we'd been working on from before we lost touch. She suggested we do our own version of NaNo every other month or so, and I suggested we blog about it to each other, and we agreed that these intense months should be considered our own writing residencies. And then I blabbed to a few of my friends whom I haven't seen in ages and who are brilliant writers, and invited them to participate, because the more the merrier, and the more diverse the better, and the hungrier the brillianter. And here we are.

*

I turned off my cable this month, as I'd done last November. I have to say, I'm feeling much more zen this time around without television. Last December, when the cable came back on, I watched an old episode of America's Next Top Model, and I was immediately hooked again. I hope to resist come May, and will count on Viet to fill me in on Tyra's shenanigans, but meanwhile, I've got three stories to finish for the rest of this month, and I already have projects lined up for our next two residencies. This year is turning out to be one of the good ones.

Rocky Balboa vs. God on the 2 Express

There were no cuties on the 2 express train this evening. Is it my imagination, or does NYC get really ugly right before the barometer drops? At 7 p.m., I was sandwiched between a toothless old man holding a suspicious sippy cup as he sang the Rocky theme (#1) at the top of his lungs and a man who turned very meekly to me and asked, "Excuse me, Miss. Would you mind telling me exactly where this train is heading? I don't know where I'm going anymore." He said the Rocky theme threw him off or maybe it was the woman who had started proselytizing in the middle of the aisle with her derriere in our faces.

Is this better or worse than enduring 22 year old conversation about stalking people on Facebook? I don't really know.

Then the rains came and washed the weirdos out while I was eating enormous meatballs at Carmines. Now, after midnight, I'm looking at Alcatraz again and hoping for one thousand words added on before I sleep off those meatball calories. They sleep off, right?

Office Work

At work, I've been procrastinating finishing a couple of tricky projects, plus a twenty-two-year-old has latched on to me for dating advice, and because tricky projects become the albatross around my poor desk's neck, and because twenty-two-year-olds will spout the running narrative of their lives to whomever they consider true kindred spirits, meaning to whomever will listen, I have begun to feel a little closed in at my office. Not too much, just a little. I am hoping that next week when the projects are off my desk and the twenty-two-year-old has had her fill of the latest boy, I can get some good revision done at work. All I have to do is spread out several pages before me as though I'm poring over a complex manuscript, and also have my hands hover over the keyboard as though I'm composing important, grammar-related queries to the author.

I know nada about dating, especially when frantic texting and Facebook spying are involved, so I just tell this twenty-two-year-old things I imagine she would want to hear. Then somebody else her age joins us in my office to offer her own advice, and suddenly the haven I've made for myself at work has become a haven for twenty-somethings to dissect their Facebook mishaps.

Tomorrow I will blurt out something about my nipple story, and then happily look forward to the very welcome weekend, plus Monday and Tuesday as vacation days, during which the most recent revision for my theater story will be finished and finally sent out to seek a home. Then I will write some nipple scenes, or work on the ending first, and try to get a draft of the story done by the seventeenth for my writing group. The revision for the library story will have to be done in the latter half of April, which was my original plan anyway, it's just this nipple thing has taken hold and needs to be poked around a bit.

Yet another problem

Still here at the cafe--I suppose I should rightfully call it a coffeeshop. Anyway, the CPC (cuties per capita) quotient is awfully low in this state. I'm two blocks from the University of Delaware. Surely there should be more hotties walking by. (Granted, it's spring break, and kind of gray and wet outside, but, come on, wet and cold cuties are still welcome.)

Plus, I've finally inched above 900 words.

Mired in the BS before I can FTBSITTTD.

Ah, these cafes in Delaware are nothing like the ones in NYC. First, people are working on actual schoolwork (except for the guy who's editing info about early 90s shows onto Wikipedia). I miss looking over people's shoulders and sniggering to myself about their so-called novel: You sad, sad bastard. It also helped that I didn't have my laptop with me so that they could exact retribution. Today, it's a different matter altogether.

At the very least, kudos to WMC for setting this up. As if reading the recaps for America's Next Top Model wasn't distracting enough!

I've been writing and re-writing the first 500 words of my story -- mostly putting in and then taking out paragraph breaks. It's finally time for me to move on, methinks. It's a fictionalized retelling of the group of Japanese fishermen who were caught in the fallout of the Bikini atomic tests. Except in my story, they mutate into horrible fish-like creatures. So far, I've already employed one cliche (cherry blossoms) and hope to incorporate all the other cliches (Mt. Fuji, samurais, wooden sandals, subservient women) very soon.

Still Thinking of Endings

WMC: Thanks for the blog set up, etc. I hope it was done on company time.

I got distracted with revision today. I’m never really sure if revising is really procrastinating or not, but today it was procrastination because for our “thirty day residency,” I’m aiming for first drafts of new stories. I don’t know about yours but my first drafts are ugly and generally stupid. My goal is to hash out six in thirty days.

The Alcatraz story first. I do have the ending of this story very clearly in my mind (ref. Christine’s post). I think writing the ending first is personality oriented, but I often find that I have a visual image I am writing toward. The language or wording of that image, however, has to remain spontaneous, but the image remains...

Cannibalism

Hi, it's Christine (I wrote that because I'm not sure that blogger lets you see who wrote this post--last time I checked it said "Written (timestamp)" and doesn't say who wrote this.

...I guess I can't stay silent too long here! I've been wondering what to post/write here, but I guess this is a blog, and I can just write whatever. And you can always skip over to the next post if you don't want to read, or you can stay transfixed and mesmerized by my words here.

And so--add cannibalism to nipple play, proper writing posture, James Frey, and Alcatraz. Hey, it's like a word association game!

...

I get one day a week off from work to write. I know, this makes me very lucky. I'm not sure how long my boss will allow me to work just four days a week, but right now, I'm nostalgic for the days when I had two to three days a week off from work. I guess a few months from now, I'll be nostalgic for this one day a week.

I'm trying to get back into my novel--I started it a couple years ago, and then set it aside for over a year. So I'm hoping that I can make some headway and plow through most of the middle of the novel. My stretch goal is to finish a draft of the novel by the end of year. (woohooo!)

Doing something different. I heard John Irving speak at AWP this year, and he mentioned that he writes the endings of his novels first (!). So even though I'm well into the beginning and touching the middle of this novel, I'm experimenting by writing the end and seeing what pops up and what does not.

One thing I discovered in writing the ending...I got some insight into the voice of my character, and that of another character. I realized that the secondary character was more interesting than my main character. And so...

I cannibalized him.

Yes. My main character ate my other character. Not literally. But I've given my main character the sparkle that my secondary character had.

I hope that made sense.

btw, hello everyone.

Proper Posture for Proper Writing

Nothing like starting off a writing month with "proper posture for proper writing," nipples, and James Frey. So, while WMC is playing with her nipples, I'm beginning a first draft of an Alcatraz piece: two boys who, until they are sentenced in 1919, have never seen the sea. Already, it's sinking with good intentions.

Stealing Nipples

Last year I couldn't say "nipple" out loud without laughing. I couldn't get my mouth around it, so to speak. The story I tried to write was light and silly, and I'd hoped to use it at a reading. But the physicality of the word brought me down.

In grad school, I wrote a story about an itchy, bleeding nipple, a slightly amusing and very slight story.

I must conclude that I have a thing for nipples.

I already know I have a thing for cleavage, so I suppose this makes sense.

*

The other night, I told V about my idea for a nipple story.

He was quiet for a while, then finally said, "I feel so guilty sometimes."

"You, feeling guilty? That doesn't sound like you."

"It's just that when people tell me ideas for their stories, I want to steal them. That's not right."

"It's not right if you plagiarize. But ideas . . . Well, the story that's written becomes yours. Ideas are 'stolen' all the time, in that no idea is wholly original, is it? So: I absolve you of your guilt."

"Thank you!"

*

The next night Jen told me a nipple story, a personal one, and it was better and odder and more frightening than the story idea I'd just described to her.

When I say I want to write a "nipple story," I'm thinking of the lightning bolt of pain that had me doubled over when I had my nipple pierced a few years ago. I'm also thinking of self-mutilation among girls---and I think of the story that came to me in the shower late one night last week as I murmured aloud to myself to hear the idea echo off the tiles.

And now I think too of Jen's story. I don't mean I'll be taking a shred of her story, no---but it's given my idea a new, eerier dimension, and, as she and I had been discussing synchronicity in art that night, her revealing this memory is a sign to me that I should go ahead with writing the story.

I really think I have something here.

*

But I still can't say the word aloud without cracking up like a twelve-year-old.

Motto

In the undying acronym of James Frey:

FTBSITTTD!

Testing

One two three four, I declare a thumb war.