the dangers of working from home

I have now dragged my finger through the frosting of those ginormous, leftover from our Memorial Weekend BBQ, Costco cupcakes three times. I've microwaved the same cup of coffee a half dozen times. I'm still in my bathrobe. It's after 10 in the morning.

A leak in my NW Portland office, and the offending black mold smell that now wafts through it, is keeping me and my laptop at home today. It's not that I'm not productive at home, it's that I'm a different sort of productive. I've back-burnered client work and novel work in favor of, um, this post, and updating my suzyvitello.com website. Not to mention checking in with various online distractions that shall not be named.

But, I did manage to tap out a working synopsis for Secret to Love. I'll slap it up on a further post, after I have another fingerful of icing.

observing our city's bridges on foot

"The Broadway Bridge has the best Suicide Hotline sign. Very readable. Better than, say, the faded Sellwood Bridge sign. It's not as easy to convince yourself to stay alive when you're confronted with a faded pink, barely legible phone number."

Observation by my friend Max, who's been doing a lot of walking of late

eavesdrop of the day: category, chivalry is so dead.

Two young men walking along in NW PDX. One guy says to the other:
"So I go, 'Dude, why don't you come on over,' and she goes, 'Is it public transportational?' Shit man, like we live in the freakin' city, so I go, 'Yeah, we got a bus,' and she goes, 'Will you meet me at the bus stop?' and I'm like, 'fuck that.' "

once a soccer mom...

So yesterday afternoon, in 100 degree weather, I embarked on the 100 mile drive south to U of O to watch my oldest child kick a soccer ball. And, to upgrade his clunker with an older, higher mileage, but safer one. A safer clunker without, I must add, air conditioning.

I had the little guy with me as co-pilot, and after myriad sweaty stoppages in rush hour Friday afternoon I-5 traffic (made worse by the litter of broken down, burnt engine, smoking hood vehicle detritus along the side of the interstate), I arrived at the field in time for the second half of Sam's team's game.

Carson and I lugged the Gatorade-filled cooler to the field and cheered on the Thundercats (a name usurped from the glory days of high school--for a team that included many of the erstwhile team's members--a deeply satisfying terminal soccer mom moment). I missed Sam's first half goals (they won 4-1!), but got there in time to watch him suffer in the heat--squinting, sweating, red-in-the-face. Like many native, or nearly native, Oregonians, Sam's not a big fan of the sun.

We followed the game with a trip to a brew pub for dinner, where I found myself trying to get used to the fact that I have a kid old enough to say, boldly and legally, "I need a beer!"


Watching my two boys side-by-each in the darkened McMenamins tavern it's hard to miss the fraternal look. Both are blond, blue-eyed and fair-skinned. True to phenotype, they both have my half-closed eyes stoner look, but personality-wise they come from opposite poles. Carson ordered a kid's burger with fries (as opposed to tater tots). When his meal came with tots instead he ate half of them, then summoned the waiter, pointed to his plate and said, politely, but firmly, "I think I ordered fries." After which the server scurried off to deliver same.

His make-no-waves elder brother was visibly impressed. Not only would he never have pointed out a mistaken order, he frequently goes out of his way to avoid even the appearance of disappointment. "Dude!" he said to his little brother, and then pirated half the fries.

We finished our repast and then swapped titles, cars, glove box crap (including a pair of rear view mirror breasts), and then I got to fill the old Honda with gas, buy a quart of oil and embark on the 100 miles north. The check engine light went on pretty quick, directly on the heels of the unmistakably foul smell of burning oil. Oh yeah, and the belch of gray smoke coming from the tail pipe. So much for using the air-conditioning I was looking forward to.

I'm not good with stuff like this. I tend to exclaim that I'm freaking out, even though I have a nine-year-old beside me saying, in his best I-statement, "When you say you're freaking out, it makes me feel freaked out."

Visions of the earlier car fire we witnessed filled me with worst-case-scenario dread. I pulled over, bought more oil, and got some attendant guy to muscle off the oil tank cover that was welded on due to excessive heat.

Upon restarting the car there were more smells, more sounds, more plumes of smoke. But no check engine light. We made it back to Portland in tact, and just before midnight.

My fingers still smell like an oil refinery.

It's still really, really hot outside.

I'm so glad I have a brand new Element so when Carson and I go bike-riding and skateboarding and tennis playing later today, we can look forward to interludes of not being freaked out.

Fuckery Fridays

It's a particularly summer-like day in the Pacific Northwest. I suspect it will be hard to focus. I want to play. Laura and I have branded these Fridays "Fuckery Fridays," a sort of nod to Amy Winehouse and her "what kind of fuckery is this" song.

But what we mean by Fuckery Friday is somewhat different than in the done-her-wrong parlance of Ms. Winehouse referencing Her and Mr. Jones. It's not so much, You don't mean dick to me, but more, Let's take a break from the hamster wheel. An invitation to meander over to whatever calls us the loudest. Let's see. I should water the lettuces I planted. And the geraniums, and the hanging basket. And then I should clean the kitchen before it gets too hot. I should take a shower. I should do the crossword puzzle. Oh yeah, and probably, I should WORK!

the curse of context as compensatory device

I have this affliction called alternate extropia. (I have no idea how to spell it, and I'm loath to consult Wikipedia lest I find out stuff I don't want to know.) It boils down to this: I only look out of one eye at a time. Hence, I have zero depth perception. I parallel park by instinct. I have to guess, based on experience of velocity and angle, where the tennis ball is likely to come down.

I remember biology lab, looking at cells through one eye or the other. I never got that 3-D peek at life, up close. The thing that's right in front of me? I'm never sure what it really looks like and where it truly is. But I'm really, really apt at context. Ergo, if you'll take this leap with me, I have a wee bit of trouble staying in the moment. Everything is assessed for its potential for inclusion in the masterpiece, at the expense of its value in and of itself.

This come-to-Jesus weekend I had with Laura…it became clear that we both lament the speed of expectation, the feeling of never being caught up. That to survive, one must multi-task—not just a few things at a time, but everything. One must carry upon oneself, at any point in time, all the things of a given day. A masterpiece on our backs, laden with heavy frame and thick oil paint and the musty odor of the ages. That's the myth, anyway.

I feel as though I have to actively practice an antidote to this madness. Dismiss the intrusion of context. Practice multi-tasking with just two things, instead of seventeen. Sort of like weaning myself off of coffee by mixing in the decaf portion by portion. Like now. I'm writing, listening to Lucinda Williams. Two things. No checking e-mail, no lining up the client work, no mowing the lawn, starting the laundry, scrubbing last night's salsa from the kitchen floor.

Going back to the eye affliction. When I was eight years old, a scary eye doctor made me wear a patch over one eye and look through prisms in an attempt to cure me. He was trying to get my individual eyes to strengthen so they wouldn't take turns checking out when they were part of a team. Alas, it didn't work. But maybe I can revisit that experiment with other parts of me—see if the parts can be strengthened in and of themselves by detaching from context for a while.

mother's day

Yesterday, Mother's Day, marked the end of our retreat, and, as Laura pointed out at brunch, "The first day of what's left of the rest of our lives."

This sentiment was repeated later in the afternoon, at the 4^th Annual Mothers Need Cocktails Party at Sheri Blue's house. Mothers gathered around the pear vodka and organic herb-infused mixers lamenting inertia and job dissatisfaction. "A toast to who the fuck knows what!"

As daughters of Mothers who may or may not have been Joni Mitchell Ladies of the Canyon types, or Joan Crawford highball types or, even, Joan Fontaine exotically depressed types, a lot of us, gals ranging in age from late thirties to early fifties, are feeling discontented and confused.

Our world-weary intuitive powers have been churned to death. We're overly competent, but shy to take what we want—lest we be branded, ala Hillary, power-hungry she-men. We're sick of being teachers, administrative side-kicks and support professionals. Some of us just want to be there for our kids when they come home from school, and be taken care of, financially, by spouses. Spend our days creating that lovely oasis, or painting, or writing or plucking weeds from the flower bed. Truly be, as Laura put it, CEOs of our families.

Then there are those of us who are still not giving up on the "save the world" dream. As long as it can be done part time. The entrepreneurial spirit is illusive. The idea of creating a new business sounds exciting, but largely overwhelming. The concept of the "life coach" is spreading like cover crop, with middle-aged women hanging shingles announcing that they have the secret formula to help other middle-aged women change their lives. A sisterhood of experts in professional coffee klatching.

All of us at the cocktail party, we're starting to be old enough to see kids we used to teach in the working world—engaging in messy relationships, unwanted pregnancies and Svengali bosses. We don't want to welcome young people we knew as children to be our peers, but, hey, who else is going to explain to us what "tagging" a photo in Facebook is.

tip of the weekend

"You go down to Newport with your pots in August. Tear up a raw chicken. Put a little motor oil on it. The crabs can't resist it."

-from a waiter at the Lincoln City Mo's Chowder who doesn't condone this crabbing practice 'cause he's an environmental sorta guy.

monkey mind

blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah the sun was out today.

disaster as muse

I'm beginning to rely on narrative entropy to get The Secret to Love bouncing along the trail toward completion. As I ponder the verticality of my main character and her merry band of screwed up relatives, my natural tendency is to have her in that, as Steve Almond calls it, "man alone in a room," conundrum. I love delving into her motivations and ruminations as she bumbles along. Unpacking her deep scars with backstory.

But, alas, I'm having to trade some of that in. It's sort of like when I helped my ex-husband fix up and resell houses. I got into painting "effects". Sponge, rag, glaze. Stencils, sometimes. Sometimes checkerboard. Once, I painted with milk. The process of "treatment painting" fulfilled some sort of need for imposing design-graffiti on these houses that were so briefly mine. Okay, maybe with the stinky milk paint it was more akin to pissing on the fence posts.

At some point I realized that simply rolling out a room with whatever mistint was on sale at Miller was the more efficient way to go about preparing a house for the fast sell. And then, I lost the taste for ragged and sponged walls entirely. After that, each time I stepped into a room festooned with "treatment paint," the complexities and patterning and nuanced shapes embedded in the look became altogether too tedious to ponder.

And so it is with narrative.

Now, don't get me wrong, I will always be a fan of vertical characterization, to an extent. But, I've grown eager to see characters behave and react. Thus the onslaught of disaster in Secret to Love.

In part two of the book, there's an icy night on the eve of a major development. The next chapter (day), I was just going to get on with the forecasted event itself, when I realized I had set up an opportunity for a big messy situation—a tree cracking from ice and falling into the character's house. A lovely disaster, actually, near enough to Christmas and a big family gathering to set up more texture and torment and bad behavior amongst the characters.

I've left my day's writing mid-disaster, hoping that my puerile interest in messes re-ignites the muse tomorrow.

Farewell, Peter Christopher

"From the darkness, a bird's whistle rouses him."

That's the opening sentence of Flight, a lovely story by Peter Christopher, who died last Tuesday of cancer. I only met Pete on two occasions. Once, he was my teacher—the revered friend of my mentor, Tom Spanbauer. He and Tom team-taught a writing workshop at Haystack back in 1992 I think it was. Us Dangerous Writing disciples had heard all about Peter from Tom. He'd share letters from him at the Thursday night workshop nights, and all of us not-yet-published students were tickled, in a sort of star-fucker way, that we got to hear personal correspondence from the desks of these famous guys. Two real writers who had books in bookstores and inside jokes about Gordon Lish and Columbia and all sorts of literati scuttle-butt. So when Peter came out to teach a week with Tom, it was like the Stones and the Grateful Dead and we all had front row seats.

The second time I met Peter, he had just married one of the Dangerous Writing devotees, Carolyn Altman. There' some love triangle dish about Tom and Peter and Carolyn that I don't know the details about, but what I do know is, Carolyn and Peter took off for the East Coast, and stopped speaking with Tom and that there was a sadness whenever Peter's name came up.

I heard that Peter Christopher died when I attended Tom's 20th Anniversary of Faraway Places reading last week. It was, what Tom (and the French) would call, the sous-conversation of the evening. A whisper through the crowd. Tom addressed his friend's death at the reading, fresh as it was. He dedicated the reading to Peter, and sort of choked up, and it was a bit like those Thursday nights and the letters, but without the laughs and the starry-eyed envy.

Peter told me that first time I met him that he kept spitting out stories, writing at a fast and frenzied pace, because he suspected that he would die before he could get it all out on paper.

And, as if via objective correlative, the last line of Peter's story, Flight goes, "From that height, he sees the woman and the child walking together under the far trees, their slipping away from him as his own life has--and that is the moment he lets go, throwing himself higher, farther, into the light that will burn him clean."

God bless you, Peter Christopher.

prodigal daughter

Just completed a whirlwind trip home for my father's 70^th bday. I get back there (Warwick, NY—a smallish upstate town) every year or so, and with each passing visit I feel a diminished claim. There is, of course, the idyll. Warwick is beautiful in that pastoral, rolling hills way. But I feel no kindred connection to the populous. Aside from my family and an ever decreasing pool of friends there, the townsfolk seem displaced to me. As if they were newly minted plastic figures set out on my father's boyhood train set. The Brooklyn accents, the suburban mannerisms and pushiness—it all feels odd and wrong and not how I remember it.

I fielded the usual queries: will you always live in oray-GHAN? Do you think your kids will ever move back East? Don't you miss Warwick???

Steeped in the nostalgia brought on from a father's significant birthday, we rolled up to the high edge of the cemetery, where my grandfather is buried and where his wife's name and birthdate awaits the final inscription (she's nearly 96 and in a nursing home). I had not been to "the grave" in years, though I think of my Opa often. Much to my surprise, I noticed a flaw in the epitaph punctuation. Apparently nobody ever proofed the tombstone. I felt snotty and mean bringing up the mistake (an apostrophe in the possessive its), but I couldn't help myself. It sort of sealed the deal for me, this little thing. As if something like this could never happen in the much-hipper city in which I reside.

Warwick is a lovely town. Though provincial and quaint and full now of transplants, I couldn't have picked a better place to wander through adolescence. It's just that I realize now my ruby red slippers are appointed with moss, fern bits and mud instead of oak leaves and lightning bugs. I'm in the Newark airport Marriott at the moment, decompressing and about to suck down a vodka and cranberry from the bar. I'll toast to the East Coast, but I can't wait to see my snow-capped peaks, lie in my native Oregonian boyfriend's embrace, and wake up to the sound of rain plinking my gutters.

clearing the clutter of things and pages

This weekend I cleared a path. In feng shui terms, I invited my chi back in. I'm not exactly finished. If my chi were arriving via jet, it is somewhere between the Portland airport and here. For me, very few tasks invite this level of navel-gazing quite as enthusiastically as sorting through my terrestrial stock. I rifle, examine, sigh, move boxes around, lie on my bed, sometimes weep, sometimes laugh, sometimes entertain road-not-taken scenarios. It's emotional tedium that knows no parallel.

I started with my closet. I held a tattered vintage silk blouse in my grip for something like 18 minutes, imagining the possible blazers I could still wear it under without the rust stains or rips showing. I once took this blouse to a drycleaners hoping they could mend and de-filth it, and the normally poker-faced Asian woman bowled over in mirth. Eventually I gathered half my clothes and jettisoned them to the storage area. Another third got crammed into plastic Goodwill sacks. (Much to my delight, Turbo Tax has an index that allows you to write off thousands of dollars worth of donated clothing).

The Spring Cleaning dominoed itself throughout. My closet, Carson's closet, my "office," the front porch, Carson's room, etc… Before I knew it, my boyfriend was helping me move my crappy plywood desk into Carson's room and, voila, gone is my former "writing space." The little appendix of a room that bulges out from the main part of my bedroom is now all but vacant. I wrote my MFA manuscript in that space. I jammed all my stories and half-finished projects into files and boxes and folders and hard drives in that space. There is so much psychic detritus in that little rectangle I should cut down a sage brush and set it aflame like the Olympic Torch.

Truth is, I haven't written in that space in years. The combination of wi-fi and Carson not needing to be closely supervised from a window has placed me and my work downstairs, at the edge of the dining room table that David Millstone left in my care when he high-tailed it to Houston.

Kirk and I are going to turn my former writing space into a haven. A place to stretch, nap, gaze, breathe, and, you know, whatever. I'm divesting my bedroom of the paper clutter and relieving it of its duty as repository for inert objects. But first, I have to revisit each and every piece of writing—which makes the tedium of sorting clothes look like unfettered frolic. In figuring what to keep, what to recycle, what to sequester, what to burn I spent a good part of today loading boxes, taking the boxes elsewhere to sort, then deciding to reorganize and reapportion said boxes, and then getting so frustrated I just gave up and lay back down on my bed. It's hard to admit that I'm like this. I have no respect for this type of unearned sentimentality. After all, if I really gave a shit about the bronze toad letter holder, why has it been in the bottom of the Turkish tin for six years? And what's up with holding onto every higher education id card I've had since 1979? And do I really need another wind chime? A cracked vase? The broken oval photo frame adorned in the motif of fox hunting? My freakin' dressage helmet? When's the last time I mounted a horse, anyway?

The analysis that goes into painstakingly deciding what to banish forever is halting. It takes time I don't have. But somehow, it feels necessary and luxurious. Like a gathering up of haunches before a big leap.

poetry month

Today I had the pleasure of receiving this e-mailed poem from a colleague (who is also the Director of Wordstock). Enjoy, and READ MORE POETRY this month.

DANCING WITH POETS

"The accident" is what he calls the time

he threw himself from a window four floors up,

breaking his back and both ankles, so that walking

became the direst labor for this man

who takes my hand, invites me to the empty strip of floor

that fronts the instruments, a length of polished wood

the shape of a grave. /Unsuited for this world/ --

his body bears the marks of it, his hand

is tense with effort and with shame, and I shy away

from any audience, but I love to dance, and soon

we find a way to move, drifting apart as each

effects a different ripple across the floor,

a plaid and a stripe to match the solid navy of the band.

And suddenly the band is getting better, so pleased

to have this pair of dancers, since we make evident

the music in the noise -- and the dull pulse

leaps with unexpected riffs and turns, we can hear

how good the keyboard really is, the bright cresting

of another major key as others join us: a strict

block of a man, a formidable cliff of mind, dancing

as if melted, as if unhinged; his partner a gift of brave

elegance to those who watch her dance; and at her elbow,

Berryman back from the bridge, and Frost, relieved

of grievances, Dickinson waltzing there with lavish Keats,

who coughs into a borrowed handkerchief -- all the poets of exile

and despair, unfit for this life, all those who cannot speak

but only sing, all those who cannot walk

who strut and spin until the waiting citizens at the bar,

aloof, judgmental, begin to sway or drum their straws

or hum, leave their seats to crowd the narrow floor

and now we are one body, sweating and foolish,

one body with its clear pathetic grace, not

lifted out of grief but dancing it, transforming

for one night this local bar, before we're turned back out

to our separate selves, to the dangerous streets and houses,

to the overwhelming drone of the living world.

-- Ellen Bryant Voigt

myers-briggs for character development

Whenever I share pages of The Secret to Love, typical feedback about my narrator is that she's removed—somewhat cynical. Ironic. This isn't the first time I've come across this sort of critique of my characters. I like writing from the POV of the ice queen. My mother is an ice queen. At times, I too can be one. It's my alter-ego.

In Myers-Briggs, though, I'm an INFP. That's a healer/idealist if you buy the Keirsey spin on it. Introverted, intuitive, feeling, perceiving. Romantic doormats. Women who love too much. Blah, blah, blah. But that's not who I write about. Who I write about are INTJs, it turns out. At least that's what this online test indicated.

Frances is the quintessential scientist. Rational, scientific, judgmental. And she's married to another INTJ. Why so many INTJs? What's the appeal?

Well, if the process of writing a novel involves following a depth of inquiry, then I must confess that the enigma behind INTJ looms large for me. I have often flirted with the idea of becoming a pragmatist (or as a college roommate once put it, having an interest in having an interest). And at various times of my life I've sought structure to the point of self-alienation—again, it was play-acting.

Following Frances down the garden path, trying to get inside of her, pry her open—it's intriguing. But, here I run into the danger of that old saw, imitative fallacy. Risking writing a "boring story about a boring man." My prose, through this POV, has a tendency to be pedantic and snarky if I'm not careful. It's a rhythm that gets going. Ponderous. Laborious. Sometimes I just want to slap.

The best thing about being an INFP though? We're the goddesses of the Myers-Briggs sectors. And as such, we can shape our characters however we see fit.

here’s a list

Open-heartedness

Clarity

Grace

Adventurousness

Passion

Integrity

Self-awareness

Perseverance

Intuition

Light-heartedness

 

on plot points

One of the ways in which we divvy up styles is by designating a given fiction either plot-driven or character-driven. The plot-driven piece follows a series of specific action points—places in which particular things happen to drive the story forward. The degree to which this aligns with an actual formula—say, rom-com, thriller, or heroic journey—varies.

When it comes to writing my own fiction, I've always taken my cues from the characters themselves. Though I've tried outlining plot, it pretty much falls by the wayside once the folks in my story start doing stuff. Events follow the interactions of my characters rather than the plot informing what the characters do.

What a writer gives up by writing a character-driven novel is the cruise control expectation many readers have grown accustomed to. Not all readers want to be drawn in to the ruminations, wrong turns and epiphanies experienced by characters—they'd rather see things happen to them without having to invest in the big voice—the unresolved issues—the pain. When literature explores the big questions, readers cannot blithely turn from their own knock-about concerns—instead, they have to stare them in the face. Not everyone wants to feel when they read. Mostly, they want to escape.

That's not to say that the character-driven novel shouldn't work towards climax, or have tension or include lots of action. The best novels I've read lately do both. Take Tom Perrotta's Little Children for instance. I can't think of a novel that handles multiple points of view, culmination of event and eerie tension better than that book. When the shit hits the fan the reader is absorbed, but also led to question his stance on morality, humanity and wrath.

I guess what I want from my own book is what I look for in the work of others: things that happen to characters I'm invested in, as well as an invitation to ponder the larger story, one that connects me to realities I would otherwise not embrace.

vacation

Here we are on yet another ski trip. Life is tough.

Rachel and her son Alex are actually the leap off characters of "The Secret," in that it was their Rhode Island summer home we visited when the kernel for the novel took form. I'm sitting here the day after the glorious day of skiing, in the woodsy vacation home Rachel rented, and it's snowing out the window. It's the type of day where everyone is curled up with an activity, and the occasional blanket fort gets built. A pan of brownies is cooling on the stove. The little terrier is lying under the coffee table. Kirk is helping the boys write backwards and every few minutes they leap up to check their efforts in the mirror.

I'm trying to gear up to write the next scene in my novel, which will be the opposite of this comfy idyll. Instead of hunkered down and phlegmatic, the scene needs to be energized and contentious. I'm almost loath to introduce the psychic energy of a family in maximum entropy. Couldn't I write a sex scene instead? There hasn't been a lot of sex in the book thus far, and if I ever want it to sell, that needs to be corrected. Certainly introducing THAT energy into the book wouldn't mess with the "chi" of my vacation…

asking for help

I've started the second act of The Secret of Love!

Aside from the excitement of that, I must report that I just had a brain-storming session with my wonderful boyfriend. Who, it turns out, is a great collaborator. What every writer should have in a partner is someone who asks questions, offers solutions, and doesn't get mad if you completely blow off their wonderful suggestions.

Here we are in this lodge up on Mt. Hood. It's the Mazama Lodge--shrine to mountain climbing expeditions and all things rugged and green. NOBODY IS HERE!!! It's sort of creepy, like The Shining--120 feet of snow, caretakers, and us: Kirk, Carson and me. And that goat with the scrotum growing under its chin. But I digress.

Nothing evokes failure of spirit like having to come up with yet another beginning. Act one is over, and I have to traipse across the country, introduce new characters, and evolve the plot line enough to get readers engaged, not lost, and intrigued. So I asked Kirk to help me set this all up. He sat with me on one of the seventeen couches in this expansive venue, and rapid fired several potential scenarios. One or two sounded plausibly, so I dug in while he took the 8-yr old down for a robust game of foosball (is there anything better than a boyfriend who will actually play with your kid while you write?)

Meanwhile, I plunked myself down with some general direction, and usurped some details from a feng shui gathering I recently attended, co-opted a possible scenario from the boyfriend chat, and plunged into part two.

Okay, all you novelists and first-timers: I'm here to invite you to seek assistance. Call on your significant other to get the wheels turning. Bend your boyfriend's ear. Get the conversation started and forge ahead.

The night is young.

show and tell

Last night before workshop I was giving the elevator speech on why I ended the first act with a denouement scene instead of an oh-my-god scene and the conversation ended up the way so many conversations about writing do—character development vs action. Being a chick, and given my predilection towards relationships, I'm drawn to scenes that offer glimpses into "THE BROKEN HEART."

I realize not everyone has that preference though.

"Give your character a piece of physical business." That's quite often the prime directive. If you want to engage, say my workshop cronies, don't just have a bunch of folks in the room sitting around the table navel-gazing and lamenting.

Interestingly enough, there's been a shift around OUR table lately. Several workshopees have been exploring graphic novels. One is writing/drawing one, one is using elements of cartoon in his work and another has been asked to write an introduction to a comic book. While the invitation in a graphic novel is to show stuff happening, more often than not characters are alone with their thought bubbles. But because of the visual medium, the audience is "shown" instead of "told" the state of a character. Facial expressions, physical business, activity—these are all implicit in the form. The image is supplied, and therefore does not have to be described.

In lieu of providing a sketch, writers need to impart physical activity without interrupting the tone of the story. It's one of those horizontal/vertical balance conundrums. You describe the activity and advance the plot (e.g. moving characters from a to b, setting up the scene), while deepening the character by moving her into (emotional) danger and creating, in the reader, a desire to give a shit.

The last scene of my first act is all about making a case for the reader to care about Fifi, at the expense, I suppose, of drawing the reader into a cliffhanging situation. I'm not sure it works, but I truly won't know until I get to the end of the first draft.

first act in the can

I finally finished a first draft on the first third of my novel. I think. 82 pages of set-up, drama and cliff-hanging.

My new solution to the problem of word count generation is to get up with Kirk. (insert a smacking palm to the forehead.) That's the guaranteed hour: 5:30 - 6:30. Before client e-mails and Carson's needs and even before the dog and cat have the right to demand to be fed.

Of course I'm going to be derailed immediately as next week is spring break and the occasion for slothful mornings and recreation-filled afternoons and over-indulging evenings full of whiskey and hot tubs. Oh yeah, and I'll still have to work. Why did God invent wi-fi, anyway?

Onward!

back in love with the secret to love

After a hiatus from The Secret to Love, in which I wrote three drafts of a short story for a local anthology, I'm back to Fifi and the gang. The respite freed me up, but also confounded me, in that I forgot some of the reasons why I'd started to love my narrator. Absence, when it comes to narrative development, does NOT make the heart grow fonder. It makes the heart indifferent. Sigh.

Anyway, at workshop I read a rewrite I'd rewritten over a month ago. Actually, two months ago. The good news is, I was distant enough from its creation that I was taking the pages in like a reader as I shared them. I was reading as one of the others at the table—and therefore much more available to the critique. In fact, the misgivings I felt upon reading the piece were similar to those voiced—but, since I still had the relationship of creator, I was able to see how something that didn't work COULD, in fact, work if I wove some stuff in earlier.

I'm peppering the broth with a new layer of "secret" and I'm hoping that will add some dimension to the girls' (Fifi and Ursula) relationship.

I'm committed to full reengagement with the project now. Which means daily attention. Watch the word count. It's gonna go up!

objective correlative

I've paused work on my novel in order to write a short story. (Does this sound like cheating? Interspersing marriage with an affair?) Whenever I indulge the need to dive into the snake pit of the idea-driven, differently-scoped world of short fiction, I am reminded of how challenging the form is. How one must be both ruthless and discriminating in the selection process. Words have to be fitter in the short story, more muscular, flexible and chiseled. The elements of plot, while not as front-and-center, exist in the backdrop as supporting perspective to the small turns in consciousness of the story's main character.

I am writing with objective correlative. I want to tell a certain story, so I'm telling a different story in order to reveal what I want to say. Place is a character. The history of a certain place. The tendencies of a culture in defining that place. So, in order to tell that story, I'm telling a love story. A dark love story, of course.

One of my favorite short stories is "Demonology" by Rick Moody. He is attempting to tell the story of the death of his sister, but he has to tell a different story to particularize the heartbreak of the event. He writes about his niece and nephew trick-or-treating the night his sister dies. Through chronicling some of the specifics of a childhood event, he sets up the emotional landscape of his love for his sister. There is event next to event. Back-story, scene, a bit of seemingly unrelated internal monologue, scene…like that. He builds up to an event through tiny moments set side-by-each. Momentum builds this way—sneakily.

This technique works so well in short fiction, but might overwhelm in a novel, where the striding of plot gives the reader a break from the density of poetics. It's the sprint versus marathon, to invoke yet another metaphor. So. Off to the races!

Imitative fallacy

The summer before last I went to Salt Lake City for the Writers at Work conference. In workshop with Steve Almond, I was introduced to the term "imitative fallacy." Until then, I'd always called the concept, "A boring story about a boring man." It was a Dangerous Writing caution: you must avoid falling into the trap of adopting the narrative tools of your narrator when telling a story—unless your narrator is a gifted story teller. It's up to the writer to craft a compelling story, even if your main character is an idiot. Or, in the case of The Secret to Love's Fifi, an emotionally disconnected scientist.

Part of the challenge I'm facing is because, like Fifi, I'm sort of a geek. I'm not as smart or as educated as Fifi, but I think I share with her the tendency to cause glazed eyes when I go off on one of my conceptual epiphanies. In workshop a few weeks ago, I shared a first draft of a critical scene at the end of the novel's first act. There's a lot going on in the scene, four people all doing something different, and the anticipation of an important family gathering. But something goes amiss, and in trying to unpack the tension leading up to that something, I'm trying to shine the light on an activity that serves as a metaphor for the whole first act. The activity is boiling live lobsters. But, remember, this is a laboratory scientist boiling these lobsters, so it's fitting to engage in some of the character's unique sensibilities while she's boiling these creatures alive.

Even though she's cool as a cucumber while reporting the killing of the lobsters, I need to show how her body betrays the coolness. I need to demonstrate that she's not heartless lest the reader be too turned off to care about her. I have to mitigate imitative fallacy by revealing, somehow, Fifi's broken heart—or at least her discomfort:

It's show time. Grandmother always set the egg timer, plunked the lobsters into the pot, placed the lid atop, and then promptly left the room until the ding sounded—not wanting to offend her genteel sensibilities with the futile scratching and scraping from inside the pot as the aquatic arthropods protested their being boiled alive.

There was a time that we children questioned this practice. During our fleeting vegetarianisms and outrage at various injustices. None of us had the nerve, of course, to confront the matriarch on her barbarism, but we complained loudly to our mothers. Loudly enough so that Grandmother interrupted the shooshing and sighing with her knowledge of the life sciences.

"My dears," she assured us, "They don't feel pain. They have no cerebral cortex, you see. Only an instinct to scuttle off to a certain density of liquid."

We never challenged this. Never looked it up officially. Grandmother was notoriously and perfectly final in her proclamations.

Eventually, in a marine science class, I discovered that Grandmother's guilt-alleviating speech was typical, but inaccurate. While it's true that lobsters don't have cerebral cortexes, that piece of neuro-anatomy is merely responsible for translating pain as an emotional experience, not registering pain in and of itself. A lobster, I found out, can indeed receive stimuli—it can feel things through its carapace. Lobsters have nociceptors and prostaglandins and neurotransmitters—rudimentary versions of our own equipment. They have all the hardware needed to register pain, in other words, but maybe not to experience pain.

These lobsters will take fifteen minutes in the boiling water before their antennae pull out with ease—the old Watch Hill litmus test. But they remain alive in that boiling pot for the first of those minutes. And that's why I do what I do.

In the lab, we call this the Kevorkian Rapid Unconsciousness Method. K-Rum. Disable the frontal ganglion. Ice pick to the forehead.

I reach into the rubbery pail and grasp the first victim. A slimy handful, this big boy. His eyestalks wag like Egon's tail. I look away as I set him on the cutting board and reach for the large brass nail and hammer. I am horrible. A monster. But. My dying cousin wants a lobster dinner tonight, so that's what she shall have. Lou-the-Lobster is wriggling his ten little legs. His experience of the air must be like being drowned. A person's horror at being held underwater against her will. A maneuver like this requires a little anesthetic. The Beefeaters bottle—a Watch Hill kitchen counter staple—glistens in the spill of sun through the transom. A half dozen highball glasses still remain in the cupboard and offer themselves up, I like to think, eagerly.

the latest news from chuck and choke

Chuck Palahniuk just came back from Sundance with great news. His book Choke, adapted to screen by Clark Gregg, has just been picked up by Fox Searchlight ($5 million, if you haven't heard). Unlike many authors whose books get made into films that miss the mark or otherwise piss off the originator, Chuck has only praise and respect for Gregg and the entire cast and crew responsible for Choke--the movie. Myself, I'm fascinated by the whole odyssey. Having been lucky enough to see the entire process of Choke's genesis--from draft to revision to final edited manuscript, the dessert will be its ultimate form after Fox Searchlight puts it into post-post-production. I'm not alone in my awe at "Once" and "Juno." Hm... Chuck's not the only artist sticking to one-name titles!

planet of the apes?

This weekend I attended a science teacher's conference with Kirk. The purpose of this confab was to provide a venue for high school science teachers to reveal the findings and results of research they'd conducted the previous summer, to practice sharing this research with other science professionals, and to gain some insight and mastery at getting kids fired up about engaging in science—not just teaching it, but doing it. There was lots of food, booze and swag, too.

Aside from getting treated to a wonderful winter interlude in San Diego's warm and sunny climate, and spending uninterrupted time with the man I love, I had an unexpected windfall—a happy accident, you might say. Turns out there's a primate research center in these parts, and I made a few contacts over the weekend, including the Director of a lot of the research. Someone who might just serve as a model, work-wise, for Frances.

Spending more time around the monkey people, I started getting that excited feeling—the way you do when you think the stars are aligning to help you write your book. It's always wonderful when your life and writing collude to make you think what you do is a real thing, and can borrow from the real world. The danger, I suppose, is in forgetting that you are weaving a fiction, and don't have to stay true to every detail the world presents. Remembering to be judicious and discerning when it comes to what you're going to take can be hard—because writers sometimes feel they owe the truth a story, instead of the other way round.

mouth of babes

There was a dry spell at work today, so I did a rain dance. Went to a matinee and saw Juno. It worked, came back to the office and hydroplaned through client emails. Luckily, I’d already done my writing for the day, so all those word chunks dislodged while in the darkened theater will have to compost overnight.

The movie was very good, but I must admit, it took me a while to suspend disbelief and go with the farcical dialogue. No sixteen year old sounds like that, has that sort of dry wit and acid-tongued machine-gun-fire retortability. At first, I thought the script too pleased with itself. Too clever. But the girl (played by the very talented Ellen Page) won me over in the end. Once the story got to climax the character showed, at last, the sort of vulnerability I was hoping for—not sentimentality, vulnerability.

I was once a child, and I’m 70% done raising my brood of three. Look, there’s my littlest. He’s 8 and still innocently goofy, but getting hipper by the day. The hat. The skater hair. The drum sticks.

In art, I’m a fan of the adultified, precocious kid ala Peanuts, but as a real parent, I’m decidedly not. My two older kids I tossed into the Waldorf School to assuage the effects of premature sophistication, the media-inspired onslaught and the tendency of public education to thwart critical thinking. Turned out the Steiner disciples my children got were not exactly free-thinkers who encouraged questioning minds. True, my kids were spared the uninterrupted barrage of commercialized drivel during the Waldorf years, but they were subjected to a different shade of fascism: cultish adherence to the tenets of a man who was born a century before neuro-scientists got a really good peek at the brain. Dyslexia, for instance, was explained as a stage afflicted children would transcend once the long bones matured. Okay, maybe it wasn’t that simplistic, but the shrugged shoulders and head nodding still irks me when I remember the way parents with learning disabled kids were dismissed.

So, when it comes to romanticizing childhood, I guess I’m selectively cynical. I don’t buy that childhood is only pure if a kid is dressed in woolens and brings a hand woven basket of homemade bread to school each day—aesthetically it’s a nice thought, but, some days I’m really glad that God invented juice boxes and Ziploc storage bags.

On the other hand, if teenagers really were sophisticated enough to expound, convincingly, on the nuances of punk rock that was produced a decade before their birth, I’d be scared.

on being codependent in behalf of one's character

So today I wrote a chapter in which a beloved character kills herself. I was going to hold off on it for awhile, play out a few more "getting to know you" scenes, but as I tried to weave those together, I realized that the tempo was right for this to happen now--not three chapters from now.

A curious side effect of this was that I decided to hang on to my protagonist's inability to face the impending death of the suicide character (who was slated to die of cancer) by letting her play out the scene she (I) would have rather experienced. One in which all family wounds are healed over a big family dinner. A ridiculously sentimental conceit that not only would not have worked in and of itself, but would have pulled the whole manuscript into flatness.

In my "solution," I allow my narrator to envision an over-the-top, lovely dinner party, providing, I hope, respite from the dark, painful actual event, as well as an overlay of sympathy for this rube of a woman, who must then go on and continue on her heroic journey through the nether-regions. Here's a snippet of the stalling tactic she employs as she ascends the staircase where tragedy awaits:

The trickling water through the wall suddenly stops. It is quiet with the loudness of dread. No stomp, stomp, stomp. Just the beat of the engine under my apronned chest. My legs, suddenly without muscle or bone, begin to bend and move and then climb up the back stairway. Ghost legs. Phantom limbs. Somebody’s voice, not mine, but somebody’s, asks if everything’s okay. It has a slightly British sound, this voice of inquiry. Grandmother, but not Grandmother. Maybe someone screams out. Maybe it’s Annika. Maybe it’s Cherry. Maybe it’s the UPS guy slipping a disc picking up the box with the andirons. Boiling lobster smells compete with burning endive. My hand is wrapped around a high ball glass of mostly ice and tonic. How many times have the women of Watch Hill ascended this staircase accompanied by a glass of gin?

Ah, where would we be, us novelists, without booze and prodigality.

modern brokenness

In yesterday’s recast of Terry Gross interviewing Mark Ruffalo she got to that inevitable question, “What does acting mean to you now?” I love his simple, truthful answer: “It’s…my way to be fully realized as a human being. It’s my relationship to the world…”

When artists succumb to whatever medium invites their relationship to the world—be it acting, painting, playing music, writing—they often slip into the place where they feel the human experience in a way they can’t otherwise. It’s instantaneously cohering and alienating, which adds to a sense of the delicious complexity that makes us feel alive.

Take this morning, for instance. I’ve got my son’s skis and ski poles in one arm, and a plastic bag in the other. I’m following the pug around in the sodden side yard as he looks for that all-important dumping ground. A very human situation—one to which most multi-tasking suburbanites can relate. But the particular clumsiness that followed—the capturing of the steamy logs in a glove-sized plastic bag while the skis and poles tip and tumble, the inevitable buzzing of the cell phone in the zippered pocket, the complete lack of grace as the shit squeezes back out the bag and onto a shoe and the ski pole spears the blind dog—redemption only comes from imagining a scene in which a character finds herself in such a predicament, only then can the artist transcend the defect of her own humanity and forgive herself her unique brand of compromise and clutziness.

The ways in which we find ourselves abjectly human are small ways indeed. Small, clumsy and full of, what Ruffalo referred to as, modern brokenness.

Okay, Rachel, you asked for it!

One of my favorite characterization exercises starts: there are two kinds of people… It’s a way to investigate polarities. You know, heroes and antagonists. The writer will automatically align with one type, while the other becomes less sympathetic. But all good writers are anthropologists, and at some point, you must turn off your subjective engine, thereby creating whole, fully-vested characters.

In real life, no such filtering mechanism exists. Our humanity prevents it. As we slip along our individual continuums where utmost confidence is at one end and abject cowardice at the other, we are our own heroes and antagonists.

Yesterday I interviewed a client to tease out the approach, tone and message that would become the voice of the website we’re building her. Like many entrepreneurial women in my demographic, she was experienced, enthusiastic, talented and driven—her main obstacle: she felt that nobody would take her seriously. She feared giving off the energy of a groupie instead of a leader. At times of lucidity and inspiration she envisions the work she’d like to do, is capable of doing and would do well, but ultimately, she allows herself to be consumed with doubt.

There are two types of people: those who embody the luxury of confidence and those who stand on the sidelines second-guessing themselves. But, they are often the same person. On the same day even.

The other thing I did yesterday was ski. I ventured up the snowy mountain in a bus full of teenagers, my boyfriend, two good friends, my sons and their friends. I haven’t snapped on a pair of skis in over a decade. Man, have they ever shrunk. They’re lighter and easier, even if the mountains, wind and chairlifts are not. When we arrived for our night-skiing adventure we were greeted with pin-prickly ice delivered via a flesh-searing gale. Lifts of consequence were closed. Only two were open, the easiest two.

Which, after my ten year hiatus, was just fine with me.

Down the Buttercup green trail I snowplowed, and even turned without incident. After the third or fourth run down the baby slope I felt plenty confident. Even when the chair lift chair hip-checked me—I was still a hero. 18 months of Pilates have produced strongish quads and decent flexibility, so I didn’t puddle into rubber legs or back ache. Until.

Yes, there’s always an until.

“Let’s go up the Daisy lift,” says the boyfriend. “We’ll get a longer run.”

My eight-year old needed some convincing. He’s a new skier, and on the ten minute lift ride above the tree tops and through hurricane blizzard horizontal snow, he kept asking the questions that set you up for failure. The what-ifs of doom. “Suppose I don’t get off the lift at the top,” he says. “Is there any way to stop it?” And, “Has anyone ever fallen off?”

At the top, he was stiff with trepidation, and had his poles in a spearlike grip, pointing at me. By the time I had him arranged correctly and shoved off the chair, the chair was, indeed, lifting and turning, causing me to bail late, leaping into the black blizzard in the general direction of the ramp.

It was a rather unpretty moment, one ski off, tumbling down, my scarf (yes, a scarf—who wears a scarf skiing?) unfurled and whipping in front of me, obscuring what little vision I had. It was the sort of wind up there typically reserved for films with titles like “Stranded at Base Camp.” You know, the ones that feature crashed planes and eventual cannibalism.

It doesn’t take much to collapse the confidence of a human being. A little wind, a ski you try to put on backwards for five minutes before you figure it out. Sometimes all it takes is the fleeting perception that you’ve just invited the scenario for a broken bone.

Nothing like that happened, and we skied down just fine, but the arc of the adventure offered the polarities that I embody every day. I’m great. I suck. And as I push along on this, the shortest day of 2007, I want to keep it close, this notion of two kinds of people, and use it to fuel the work that awaits on the page.

the art of seduction part II

I apologize for the incoherent and incomplete post of yesterday.

What I meant to address was, the benefits of withholding for both plot advancement and reader investment. The way this works is the same way enjambment works in poetry. In a poem, when a poet ends a line in such a way that the audience overwhelmingly anticipates the word or idea on the next line, but then is surprised by a subversion of that assumption, the poet has succeeded in a glorious manipulation that actually results in buy in.

Enjambment literally means "to straddle." It's an incomplete thought that continues after the reader has aligned herself with the pause and has made some assumptions about its trajectory.

Take for example this passage from Milton's Paradise Lost:
… now conscience wakes despair
That slumbered, wakes the bitter memory
Of what he was, what is, and what must be
Worse; of worse deeds worse sufferings must ensue.

Between lines three and four is the sort of enjambment that wakes up a reader. It's the unresolved becoming the surprise, full of gravity and emotion. It's about subverting expectation and producing the lift we call art.

the art of seduction, part I

In workshop we talk a lot about delaying gratification as a way to heighten tension and keep the pages turning. The unresolved circumstance not only intrigues the reader, but, in a weird way, seduces the reader by extending the invitation of ownership.

This is where genre and literary fiction meet, I think. That crazy little thing called plot. Formulaic, received text does not do this, however. When you withhold information while tap-dancing and pointing in the other direction (which is what happens when writers rely on adjective-laden description and exposition), you do not engage the reader as much as lull him.

Good fiction does not lull, it engages. It creates and inspires and confounds. It demands that the reader sit in the driver’s seat of your story.

We sometimes use dialogue to pull this off. Dialogue that and presents and reroutes, but doesn’t result in immediate answers. Avoiding didactic resolution is key here. I want to go on, but, crap, I must now go off to work and leave this meditation mid-thought…

the q vs q question

My new strategy is to not worry about 1200 words. Not to resign to failure necessarily, but not to see word count as the goal.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve set myself up for the same results. I get ambitious, get motivated, perform, and then retreat. This has happened so many times in my writing career that it galls me that I don’t learn from it.

The way I best serve my project is through continual engagement, meaning, giving myself to it every day—even if only for a half hour.

Strangely, I had a similar epiphany at my son’s parent-teacher conference the other day. The teacher was showing me sloppily executed work. The math pages were 75% wrong. The writing was crooked scrawl. We both know he can do better, so I asked the teacher to describe what was going on during these assignments. He hemmed and hawed and had no idea. So I presented a likely scenario, one informed by an ongoing discussion I’ve had with my son about the expectations in his classroom.

Carson did not take to reading quickly. He’s one of those reluctant readers: distracted, active, much more eager to actually do things rather than receive information passively. A normative third grade teacher’s nightmare, in other words. Carson has an IEP to help give him the extra attention needed to get him up to speed, and goes to a reading teacher four days a week. Consequently, he misses the directions for whatever work is being done in class. When he comes back a half hour later, he is told by his harried teacher to just “see what the other kids are doing and do that.” He is then expected to catch up and do all the work, and if the work isn’t done, he has to sit out recess until it is.

“It occurs to me,” I told the teacher, “that our goal is for Carson to do quality work with attention and focus. Is it really necessary that he fill out an entire math sheet, or write out a three-page journal? Are the numbers the important thing here, or can we alter the expectations to help motivate Carson to produce his best work?”

The teacher agreed to modify his expectations—we’ll see if he follows through. But recently I realized that those same guidelines might apply to me. Now I know that the whole “boot camp” idea is to realign priorities and get a work in progress to the finish line, but somehow the whip is missing the mark. I don’t just want to produce any old finished manuscript. I want to write a book I’m in love with. I want to care so much about my characters that I’m codependent on their behalf—just like in real relationships!

So, without further adieu, I'm shifting my focus to quality over quantity. I’m going to keep my word meter up on this blog, however. I like adding, turtle-like, the smear of daily paragraphs to its measure. And---I’m cautioning myself to avoid slipping into a “precious” feeling about my work. It doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be my best.

picking a fight

One of the unexpected pleasures in playing God is when you discover two of your characters hate each other. It’s particularly satisfying when both characters are strong, articulate and quirky. My Grandmother character picks fights with one of her son-in-laws—a dentist. Their mutual animosity will have to culminate in something, or shift to alliance, or something, but for now, I’m having a blast engaging in snappy, cutting dialogue.

A peaceful troublemaker’s got to get her jollies somewhere, after all.

Excuse # 375: why I haven't written crap in five days

One of the best and worst things about having a full life is the quality of interruption. The hours spent mired in character, plot, research, tension and the world of fiction can be just as blissful as they are frustrating. For anything of note to happen on the page, sustained concentration is not only prescriptive, it’s imperative. But it’s hard. And one of the difficult elements has to do with emotional investment.

I was trying to explain this in the post-Thanksgiving drive home yesterday—the tendency to become invested in character to the degree that a writer, rather than being elated at the end of a manuscript, might actually become depressed. The same way a person might lament the end of a romance or other significant relationship, ending a journey with a character can be a let down.

On the drive home, my boyfriend referenced the main character in Stephen King’s “Misery” as an example of a writer who celebrates the completion of a manuscript with ritual, champagne and satisfaction.

I think the intention of the reference was to offer some sort of a carrot because I have been remiss in my daily word count. You know, the, “When you finish you can celebrate…won’t that be great,” sort of cheering squad encouragement. Bless his sweet little heart.

And because I’m such a bad girlfriend I didn’t take the bait (offered up as it was with such loving encouragement). No, I played the dark artist card. The, “What makes you think it’s a happy moment, finishing a book?” sour grapes retort.

Was I being defensive or honest? Hm.

No doubt, sinking into the heartbreak of invented characters costs. You examine the particular nature of pain, you’re looking into your own dark place. That’s what makes, IMHO, a satisfying read. An honest, accessible, real portrayal of the human condition.

“Do you think every character has to have a broken heart?” asked my boyfriend. “Do you think Dirk Gently had a broken heart?”

Nothing gets me snottier than evoking the success of genre fiction.

But back to the question at hand. The defensive versus honest one, I mean. Give me a corner of a room, my computer and the absence of distraction and then offer the counter to that: friends, family, alcohol, my boyfriend and a hot tub, a Scrabble board and a ball game booming in the background, the typical expansive Thanksgiving weekend. Which one looks more attractive?

Fuck the broken heart. Right?

stepping into dark

Nothing slows me down like research. The trick with embedding information when you, as the writer, are not the source of the information, is all about how you assert your authority. How you appropriate what you just learned, making it sound as though you've known it a long time.

I backed myself into a situation where my narrator feels responsible for her little sister's childhood accident which happened on her watch. A fishhook snagged her sister in the eye, leaving her cornea lacerated and rendering her blind in that eye. This pivotal situation informs a lot of subsequent choices, including her decision not to have children. The narrator ultimately becomes a scientist, obsessing over cause-and-effect, studying eye trauma as she reinvents possible outcomes. On the page this looks like expertise (or, I hope it does):

There are four conventional ways to remove a fishhook. Of those there are two that typically result in minimal tissue damage. In the first, the retrograde method, the remover applies downward pressure to the shank of the hook, then backs it out along the point of entry. Not the best choice for eye penetration and a hysterical child, as it turns out. The second popular and less invasive method is called the string-yank technique. Picture it; you’ll be correct.

Method number three involves tools. In the needle cover technique a skilled practitioner presses an 18-gauge needle into the site, and then extracts both the fishhook and the needle. Option four was the one used to extract the fishhook from Cherry’s eye. But first they had to get her to stop grabbing at the shank and filleting her ocular tissue.

The section goes on to describe what happened immediately following the accident, and then visits the clinical particulars that ensue. It's all pretty scary to me, because I feel sometimes that I'm inviting mayhem into my subconscious. Once I wrote about a septic tank going awry, and the very next week my septic tank tanked. With an overly active little boy in my house, I hesitate to detail childhood trauma and give any energy to the trickster, who, in my superstitious mind, is just waiting for a chance to get his claws around the fates.

Yep, part of me is scolding me right now for being so dashboard Jesus about this, but the other part of me wants to fog out my computer with burning sage. The dark place, the scary place---keep it the hell away!

Chelsea. Take Chelsea Cain. She spends an awful lot of time writing about a serial killer. Chuck Palahniuk, he regularly visits the minds of terrorists, rapists and vengeful pugilists. All the good writers of my acquaintance dally in the "what if" of the dark side. I just finished Tom Perrotta's "Little Children." A marvelous romp through suburban decadence, deftly written with pathos, humor and grisly detail.

Even though it's important from a characterization perspective, the eye scene is really an aside--what I'm writing to avoid the scarier scene which involves the narrator's beloved cousin dying a cancer death. The swimming upstream part of this book is beginning. I doubt I'll be able to swim at a rate of 1200 words per day against that current.

Woman in Blue

I'm working on getting down the tone of longing and regret in this backstory section of chapter seven. The narrator's broken heart and downtrodden spirit. Her unique brand of ennui--without having it sound whiny.

I'm trying to dredge up some of the late October melancholy I felt in Paris, and leverage it to this end. My narrator, Frances, is a devotee of the masters. She likes herself a good da Vinci now and again. The occasional Raphael. Loves, loves, loves Camille Corot, especially the Woman in Blue posted above.

The hard, but extremely rewarding, aspect of research is trying to figure out a way in, once you've discovered something that resonates. Blending resonance with metaphor in a way that isn't contrived.

It takes concentration and faith, and a lot of time in the zone.

The French

Since coming back from Paris I haven't had much time to write my 1200 words a day. Work piled up in my absence and I'm lucky if I save enough time for a proper inhale. I have been working on The Secret to Love tho. Really, I have. And, best, is that I've developed a whole new set of characteristics for Fifi (Frances), my narrator.

She's into art, all-of-a-sudden. What a surprise!

Another weird thing since returning state-side. I can't seem to get out of the French blogger template! I am now tapping underneath directives like Créer and Titre and Publier le Message.

More soon. I hope.

those crazy modern artists

I've been in Paris all week, writing a bit, but mainly soaking it up.Suffice it to say, I'll have much to report when once again stateside. Meanwhile, enjoy the Kudinski!

slogging along

I've been at it for 9 days, which means I should have almost 11K new words. Well, I don't. I do have one-and-a-half new chapters though. And a pretty good line of flight.

Briefly, what I know now about my characters (and didn't know a week-and-half ago), is a good deal of their backstory and heartbreak. Totally worth the price of admission.

I'm getting that old marathon writing stride, which vacillates between manic and dismal. You get inspired, you get bored, you arrive at an epiphany, you become disgusted by your lack of creativity. It's a wild ride, this novel-writing.

I've had myriad real-world interruptions this week, legitimate ones, and I'm fighting for time this afternoon to sink back in, but I'm not hopeful that I'll get a real 1200 word day until Saturday. Which, hopefully, will prove prolific as I'll be on a plane for a bunch of hours.

stairway of love

I'm sweating. And, I'm behind. Already.

Actually, yesterday I wrote only 480 words, so I got up early today, and I refused to check email (read: work) until I made up the deficit. And I did. Wrote my 1200. Whew. Now, I just have to make time for today's word count, but first, I need to catch up on work, darn it!

It's 8:45 in the morning and I've given a character a terminal illness, given another character a horrendous backstory detail, and looked up so many items on ebay (research), I feel like a professional shopper.

The image above, L'escalier de L'amour, a painting by the grandson of Henri Matisse (which I stumbled upon on my ebay research), has become a central object. A "horse" in Dangerous Writing parlance.

More important than achieving word count, I'm lit up with the pain and suffering of my narrator. I think I may actually care about her! And now, I need to decide what she looks like.

1243

Don't ask me how, but I cranked out my promised 1200 today. Well, ok, go ahead and ask anyway. Because it's an interesting experiment. I put on the 'phones and ituned my way through. Funny thing about blasting music into your head...you can't hear the phone! You can't hear the intrusive email see-saw sound indicating that work has found its way to your inbox.

Hm. Guess that's why god invented voice mail.

So. Springsteen, Brandi Carlisle, Richard Thompson and a bunch of free Starbux downloads carried me through a scene in which my characters eavesdrop on their mother's drunken rants and arguments. It's heavy on the dialogue, which is always faster to write, for me, than physical description. Seems easier to write what people are saying than what they're doing when Colbie Callait is the other voice in your head, I guess.

it's only words

Officially, I don't start this 70 Days of Sweat thing until Monday, but I want to generate some new pages before Monday, for workshop, so I'm going to jump the gun. Look over there, to the right, and you'll see the nifty widget from zokutou. Such a terrific idea, concretizing the process so it speaks to those of us who require external motivation to slog forward.

I have to admit, I don't like to think of myself in those terms: one who needs to join a group in order to fulfill writing goals. My self-concept is firmly GDI. "I'll do it myself if it kills me."

The other day, at the full-service-everything-from-pork-and-beans-to-pvc-pipe grocery store, Fred Meyer, I had an epiphany. I was looking for a particular type of printer cartridge, and I wasn't finding it. I looked for 15 minutes, gazing over the same pegs, shelves, aisle. I realized that I didn't want to ask a sales associate if they carried that type of cartridge because the disappointment seemed less all-encompassing (and less absolute) if I came up empty without being told by an authority that the product was not to be found.

The epiphany was about how my epistemology is rooted in "anything is possible" and depends upon it not being confirmed otherwise. Ergo: I am a rock, I am an island.

It's quite a paradigm shift for me to acknowledge that I'm secretly needy and, worse, that I resent and fear those who are publicly needy. To throw myself into the ring with other writers you have failed on their own confirms that, on my own, I'm a loser. I know this is harsh, and might result in immediate hate mail, but I stand by my self-diagnosis. And, I realize that I need to get over it--the myth, the resentment, the 'tude. I need to strap on my nail bag and write--and encourage others to do the same.

a new challenge

Okay, enough whining already. I'm going to stop with the let's talk about why I'm not writing posts and become a production slut. Anybody hear of 70 Days of Sweat? No, it's not another mountain or marathon. This is about keeping my butt in the seat.

It's a public challenge, sorta like Weight Watchers or AA, only instead of chairs in a church basement, it's virtual accountability. The way I understand it, each participant has to own up on whether they've hit their word count by posting it on a blog. I think there's icons and crap involved--so look forward to that!

There are a couple of things about this opportunity that intrigue me right off the bat:
1. When I only write three pages a week, and only one or two days a week, I lose the authority of voice and purpose. I have to re-establish voice, re-remember characters and re-initiate my enthusiasm for the project.
2. I miss the whipping post that grad school was. I graduated from Antioch LA's Low Res MFA program and I got a lot of daily writing done. Of course, I wasn't working full time then (I'm already launching my excuses...stop it, Suzy!)
3. My current WIP (that's Work in Progress, for you uninitiates) is just too good an idea to throw into the tank of false starts and slacker manuscripts that never get done.

So. I'm signing up. Today. Right now. I am.

going the distance...sort of

"People think I’m disciplined. It is not discipline. It is devotion. There is a great difference.”
--Luciano Pavarotti, opera singer, (1935-2007)

My hip joints hurt. My brain isn't quite working right. I have a couple quarter-sized blisters on the balls of my feet. After 26 miles and change, with inadequate training on pavement, I'm humbled. Blue-haired ladies with fanny packs stretched across their broad bottoms passed me nonchalantly. With a chip time just barely under 8 hours, I felt like a short-bus, Special Olympics kid as tenacious well-wishers cheered on my tired, gimpy ass, and bored teenagers doing community service held paper cups of Gatorade out to me those last few miles.

Kirk and I have added "walked the marathon" to our web of togetherness activities. However abashed I feel, Kirk feels more so, given that the bystander applause for the stragglers was accompanied with shouts of "You go girls!" According to the stats, he finished 345th out of 347th in his sex/age category.

I'm not minimizing the accomplishment, though. The fact is, us mt-climbing hikers were simply underprepared to walk 26.2 city miles. Training schedules are typically 5 months of gradually increased distance walks culminating with two 20-mile training walks. Our longest road training walk was 10 miles, and our longest walk in the woods was 15 miles. Our decision to join the masses of appropriately trained athletes amounts to one word: Chutzpah!

Our casual approach to marathon weekend extended beyond not really training for it. For instance, we went to a dinner party the night before and helped ourselves to substantial servings of "unfamiliar foods" (red meat), and swilled our share of alcoholic beverages, followed by a night in my daughter's downtown apt, where we may have slept three hours or so in a pull-out drawer made for a midget, not to mention a couple unmentionable and embarrassing physical maladies that befell us a few days before. (All I'll say about that is, thank God for witch-hazel.)

But, through it all: the non-training walks, the logistical scramble, the slightly late start we got on race day, all of it, we had a blast. We laughed, we christened every single stand of porta-potties, we grabbed all the free Red Bull and Gummi Bears they offered, and even considered hopping off course for a quick bagel--which we didn't do, but we did slip off to Kirk's "Shagwagen" parked a half-block off the 13 mile mark in order to change socks and apply Tiger Balm.

Other fun long-distance walking distractions included arguing about the form and function of sliding glass doors (that one got us through the ugliest wind-in-the-face section of the NW Industrial area), and planning our upcoming winter activities. We chatted the 7 hours and 49 minutes away as though we were on an extended date.

Our whole "let's do the marathon this year" plan was built on whimsy and courtship. We were devoted to the idea of it, if not the discipline required to do it right. And, let's face it, in middle age, we have to fight seriousness whenever we can. Not to say that we lacked intention--it's just that our intention was simply to do it, without thinking too much about micromanaging the preparation for it.

Kirk and I are both fairly competitive, so it was an interesting choice to sign up for a race knowing we'd end up near the bottom of the pack. But, we also share a history of allergy to "groups." Signing up for a training camp where our schedule, routes, footwear and diet would be dictated by an association left both of us cold. So we set out on our own, devising a half-assed regimen that included shit we like to do--and nothing more. Oh, the arrogance. Oh the aching legs, ass, feet and hips! But, in three days we'll be over it and on to the next thing. Or not. In the big picture, the fact that we imprinted a lasting memory while taking a long-ass walk through the bowels of Portland amid the cheering, enthusiastic masses was worth more than a stellar chip time. And, guess what? This gig is an annual event, so if we ever decide to explore the disciplined version of our little experiment, we gots another chance.

I'll work for your love, Bruce

Excited to indulge the Jersey Girl in me, off I trotted to Music Millennium to purchase Bruce Springsteen's Magic, which came out today.

I wanted the actual physical cd. I wanted the liner notes, the photos of Clarence Clemens and the other E Street hooligans mixing it up behind Da Boss. This was an album worthy of such a quest, even though I then would need to spend time synching the cd to my online/ipod devices.

Alas, Music Millennium no longer exists (even if its website still does). The default for all music is the overwhelmingly popular itunes or some other digital interface. No more browsing through the bins, shelves and racks in a darkly lit, hip, funky venue appointed with Sharpie-penned signs and vintage candy. I find it odd that Walmart has usurped the role of the local music hukster. Magic was on sale today at the corporate behemoth for $9.72, which is 27 cents less than what I spent at itunes for the download. I may be somewhat of a Jersey Girl, and definitely a fan of "everyman" themes in literature and lyrics, but I refuse to go to Walmart for my music.

As physical venues for art disappear like rain forest species, I'm led to ponder this scary question: Will bookstores become extinct too?