exploiting the kernel of character

Last night, in anticipation of writing one of those complicated many-characters-in-a-room scenes, I decided to deconstruct the entire Messmeir clan. Frances has five siblings, and though I have a rough idea of who they are, I found I couldn't attribute language to them in a way that rendered them concrete, personality-wise. In other words, they all sounded like variations of the same note. A little bit sharper, a little bit flatter. The same note.

Occasionally I've built a character around a phrase. For instance, eavesdropping in a cafe recently, I came across this gem: "I always know when I've eaten too many carbs because all my knives are in the dishwasher." This from a woman who weighed 102 pounds soaking wet. I wrote that phrase down, and just came across it the other day. I decided to base Frances's sister Tess on that overheard tidbit, and loosely on the anorexic woman who uttered it.

The complexity grows when I can imagine how she'd interact with her stoner brother, Morgan (who is loosely based on my ex-husband. Okay, I said loosely--don't want to get sued here). Morgan and Tess are somewhat close in age (37 and 41, respectively), but represent the dyads of the Messmeir clan. Morgan's guile has been puffed out of him, and Tess has an agenda for every single action she commits.

They are an octave apart, these two, and I can't wait to get them in a room together!

the monkey house

Frances, as some of you know, is a research scientist in the field of infertility. She analyzes vaginal swabs taken from female rhesus macaques. Central to the irony here is that Frances:
1. had her tubes tied in her twenties
2. married a man with 3 teenagers (the novel takes place 10 years after that though)
3. has just been willed her cousin's troubled teenage daughter

Frances has, naturally, many issues around maternity. She and her mother have a difficult relationship. As the eldest of six children, she was stuck babysitting a lot. She likes dogs better than children. She likes monkeys way better than children. Yet she writes grants and does research in service to continuing the species. The human species.

One of Frances's sayings is: I much prefer the company of non-human primates.

Luckily for me, one of the most important primate centers in the world in regard to this work is a few miles from my house. Also luckily for me, I met the Director of the primate center when I went down to the Murdock Science Teachers shindig in San Diego last January, and also have a contact who works there full time.

On Friday I got to tour the facility--well, at least the multi-million dollar shelter housing units where the monkeys get it on, present their vaginas for swabbing and pop out little baby macaques that are cuter than anything on the planet.

The monkeys were so cool. I watched one teenage monkey try to snatch a baby from the mom, and get scolded for it (the speculation here was that the teenager was "alo-parenting," as opposed to out-and-out baby-stealing).

And there was plenty of grooming and humping to observe, too. And baby-frolicking, particularly in the two-acre open-air Japanese snow monkey corral. The monkeys had just been fed dry rotini noodles as a treat, and they'd scrambled up to the area where the macaroni was scattered like confetti, and all you could hear was this crunching sound, like crickets or cicadas on a humid night.

My goal here was to fall in love with them. To feel what Frances feels for them. To humanize them, perhaps. I had moments like that, actually, but what I felt wasn't quite love. It was more envy, I think. Like I wanted to be a monkey and live in that primate center and I'd even be okay with having my vagina swabbed from time to time in the name of science. I was especially envious when I found out that old world monkeys reabsorb their menstrual blood. How cool is that?

a vast and sickening place

Nothing screams economic downturn like terminal deferred maintenance. The Seaport Marina Hotel in Long Beach has seen better days. I wonder how the decrepit place fared during today's 5.4 rumbler…? What is so apparent in Long Beach, and still mostly hidden in Portland, is the stark residue of hard times. Anxiety and rage and despond and, at times, resignation. All very obvious in this part of SoCal.

You could see it in the signage. When all else fails, imperatives linger on. The no this, and no that, and the we reserve the right to refuse.

Years ago I wrote and rewrote a story, a long story, called Capturing Pedersen. It was, by and large, an unsuccessful story, but there was one clause in it that continues to bubble to the surface when I'm confronted with large, empty tracts of abandon: The supermarket was a vast and sickening place… a string of words that continues to issue disappointment in its resonance.

In light of the Long Beach scene— the weeds growing up in the cracks in the parking lot behind abandoned cars, the "spa" with no water, the broken ice machines, the sad little hooks in the popcorn ceiling that once held the cord of a swag light but now hold nothing, the three dollar clock radio bolted to the pressboard nightstand, all these sadnesses—I am reminded of the fragility of humanity, and that maybe one really big earthquake could reverse the misfortunes of that falling-down hotel, and from the ashes might come grace.

beach reading

We interrupt this Dragon Boat Festival to offer a glimpse at the diversity of reading materials amongst our traveling crew.

Kirk is reading the Ron Carlson. This is such a lovely grouping of stories, written by one of the nicest writers I've ever met (he was a guest speaker at Antioch when I went there). Full of humanity, warmth, surprises and long sentences (Kirk counted nearly 100 words in one, then springboarded into an excellent story about his favorite high school English teacher, a notorious one-name legend who once declared that the average American sentence was 25 words in length).

Kirk's son Brendan is responsible for Ellis's Psycho, and seems to be poring through it (can one pore through, or is "over" the only preposition paired with that verb?) at breakneck pace. I ripped it open and glanced at a random sentence, noting the qualifier "lasciviously" and dismissed the entire book because I'm an elitist when it comes to adverbial cop-outs. But, in Ellis's (and Brendan's) defense, it's no small feat to write a compelling first person, present tense romp and have it still hold up twenty years hence.

I, the writer of fiction, am reading the Pollan book. It's fascinating and smart and full of humor and subversive tidbits. I have another reason to be digesting this book. I'm working with some folks (in my hired pen day job) who are on a mission to change the entire California food system. Sustainability within one generation. It's a very cool, ambitious ideal, and I'm honored to be wordsmithing for the cause. More about that latah.

So… from the wobbly table of the crappy SeaPort Marina Hotel (this carpet in this room is covered in a patina of grime so gross my feet turned black from the bed to the tiny bathroom where the door clips the toilet upon closing), I am signing off before heading down the water to cheer on the boyz.

dragon boats and other fun stuff

Okay, sooooooooooooo. Monday I moved out of my office. Tuesday, I set up my new, temporary office in my house, Wednesday I caught up on work that got bottom-piled due to Monday and Tuesday. Thursday I worked, sorted, had meetings, worked, and got ready for tomorrow when I dash off to watch those fellows in the picture to the left paddle their hearts out at the Long Beach Dragonboat Festival, before they both board a plane bound for Malaysia for the World Championship Dragon Boat races. Wow, eh?

Next week--I'm gonna write 100 pages of my novel. Yes, yes I am. Hey, stop laughing. I so totally mean it!

heart of darkness

I first laid eyes on Portland 19 years ago and immediately knew I wanted to move here, but didn't exactly know why. Other than it was summer, Mount Hood was breathtaking, and I had a little pile of cash that wouldn't stretch too far in Southern California, where I was living with my two babies.

Over the years, though, I've formed more of a manifesto about why Portland is such a satisfying place to live, and many of the reasons are contradictory. For instance, Portland is a great size, but is constructed in a labyrinth puzzle throughout much of it. It took me five years to fully negotiate all the "can't get there from here," cul de sacs. Portland is an exquisite oxymoron, in so many ways. On the surface the city and its surrounding landscape looks and feels pastoral, easy-going and bucolic. Portland's brand is leftie, alternative, friendly. Polite. Residents are often perceived as flannel-shirted, Birkenstocked, weed-smoking and ungroomed. Life here is just a bowl of herbs and berries. We tend to sit atop high places and gaze out over the horizon. We like the rain. We like home brew. We don't pump our own gas and we ride our bikes everywhere.

But that is not the whole story.

There's a force here, a certain tension. We're younger than our countrymen out here. We churn, create, examine and experiment. And lots of it goes undetected. There are layers, so many layers. Living in Portland is a constant seduction. As earthy and wholesome and outdoorsy as it is, there is an underbelly as well as a desire to reach something higher. This place is so undeniably vertical, but in a smaller, less obvious way than, say, San Francisco or Seattle.

The other day I took a walk in Forest Park with Chelsea Cain and Ketzel Levine, for the purpose of chatting up Chelsea's thriller series, the second book of which, Sweetheart, is due out in a couple of months. Coincidentally, the first house I bought in Portland sits at the edge of the park, and as we walked up the ivy and fir-lined trail, walking past the house and all its familiarity, I tried to conjure the spirit of dark. Of murder and fear and mystery.

The NPR story came out today on Morning Edition, Searching For Bodies In Chelsea Cain's Portland : NPR, and I'm really pleased with the picture that got painted, albeit tongue-and-cheek, of my beloved adopted city. There's a city of disparate writers here. Smart, visceral, playful. Sometimes dark, sometimes lyrical.

I can't see living anywhere else.

eavesdrop of the day

On an elevator downtown, a mature woman of about 60, wearing silver glittered flip-flops, and her male companion.

Woman: (looking out the elevator window) You'd think she'd take better care of her dog. It's so hot and the dog needs water.

Man: she'll give him water, don't worry.

Woman: George, I'm sorry, but she won't. She's homeless, and homeless people don't care about animals. (looking out the window again) George, don't be sad when I die. I'll be happy because I won't have to witness the stupidity and filth of mankind anymore.

Man: Now, dear.

Woman: I'll be in heaven. And once I'm there, I'll be with God and animals that are well taken care of.

writing about fucking without it sucking

Last night I attended a reading called Return of the Booty Call emceed by Kevin Sampsell. It was Portland at its weirdest in a hipster joint where rap music thumped and blared out speakers the size of washing machines. When it was time for the actual reading, Kevin, standing before the crowd sporting unzipped jeans, welcomed all present with the query: Are you ready for some sucking and fucking?

There were lots of stories about sucking and fucking. And fucking and sucking. Sometimes just fucking or sucking. The readers performed and/or read scenes with a variety of sex acts, encounters, anecdotes. In between the readers there were giveaways and booty grind contests and groins rubbing up against the mic.

I guess you had to be there.

Fucking and sucking aside, writing sex is hard (no pun intended). What's most hard about it is delineated aptly by Elizabeth Benedict in her book, The Joy of Writing Sex, where she posits, "When we sit down to write a sex scene, our circuits can jam, our self-consciousness surge, and we might as well be beginning students of English as a second language."

For me, though, it's less about the self-consciousness of untoward content, and more the fear that I'll write something boring or cliché. I mean, in a culture packed with sex, literally with sex dripping off billboards, magazines, television and packaging, is there any new territory here? In workshop, we call the output of well-worn language recycling received text. Received text requires no penetration (no pun intended). This sort of language just slides into a groove, a zeitgeist, a trope with easy familiarity, and satisfies the audience without spectacle. It's like eating a Whopper. You think: Whopper, and your taste buds have already filled in the flame broiled flavoring, the texture of soft bun, wet lettuce and cooked beef patty. No surprise, no disappointment.

I don't want my novel to serve up Whoppers. Especially not in the bedroom. Take Frances and Arthur, my quirky characters, for example. I've been wrestling them into bed for nearly a month. The problem is that it still reads flat. Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce flat. I'm trying to particularize drawing from a limited imagination. And why is this? Simply, because I haven't been sure enough on how Frances feels about her erstwhile husband to make this sex scene lift off the bun (bad pun intended). If, as Benedict would have me do, Frances must enter this scene from an emotionally dangerous place, I have to go back and establish why, exactly, going to bed with Arthur puts her in peril. I've wanted to make this case within this particular chapter (125 pages into the book), and I keep coming up short. When I workshopped this chapter last week, the feedback was all about that—show more ambivalence, more reluctance, more difficulty in the surrender. Bump up the emotion by lingering on a couple of observations I'd blown through quickly while the act was taking place. And by act I mean fucking.

This morning though, something clicked. I realized that the scene was set up to take advantage of something I'd glossed over in the first part of the book, which had to do with a parallel relationship between Ursula and Brandt, two other characters. I went back to the earlier chapter and made that scene more of a reveal to my main character, Frances. By revisiting that earlier scene within the Frances-and-Arthur-having-sex scene I got closer to nailing the heartbreak.

As far as the Return of the Booty Call, I liked it well enough. What's not to like about a hot summer night of scintillating prose? Especially when there's whiskey involved. At the end of the day though, I have a confession to make. I think it's sort of like the act itself. I like writing sex myself more than hearing sex read aloud.

 

tomorrowland is so yesterday

The post-Disneyland votes are in. After FastPasses aplenty, the thrills, chills, spills and breakdowns that are the Disney experience, my nine-year-old's favorite ride was Autopia. You know the one, right? The diesel-stench track at the edge of Tomorrowland where you can pretend to drive an actual car?

How it works is this. Stand in the queue 45 minutes. Receive a card that invites you to drive one of several named cars. "Drive" the car.

My card entitled me to drive Suzy. No shit. A car with my very own name. My sister, nephew, son and I took our places on deck as the attendant ordered the drivers who had just returned to surrender their vehicles to us. I was at the rear, and with an admonishment to "not bump the car ahead of me," I stepped on the gas pedal. With both feet. Seems the Autopia of the future is geared for drivers with quads of steel. I thought my Suzy was broken. Especially when I had trouble catching up to my nine-year-old.

As I pressed my way around the track in a car that more closely resembled a golf cart of old rather than the futuristic, solar-powered vehicle it should have been, I began a litany of critique. It helped my bitch session that it was nearly 9:00 pm, and after a dozen hours in the park, I'd had about four forkfuls of crappy pasta, a hard boiled egg and a dried out baby-sized turkey sandwich, and I was cold because I'd under-dressed, and now a wind had cropped up (disappointing all who had camped out in Main Street for the "Believe" fireworks that were about to be cancelled). The Autopia experience itself was quite similar to the recent rush hour squeeze on the LA freeway we fell into on the way down here. Without the road rage I guess, because, as we'd been reminded by signage, Disneyland is the happiest place on earth.

The Disneyland employees, however, didn't get that memo. From the parking garage attendant who scolded me for not reading his mind to the talkative docent on the Nemo Submarine who felt compelled to reveal the tmi details of his work schedule as we descended the spiral staircase, I found a dearth of happiness. Except, of course, on my little boy's face. Truly, I think he had the absolute best day of his life—and that, my friends, was totally worth our $120 admission.

Oh, and btw, I finally finished that sex scene.

notes from vacation

Day two of our trip to SoCal.

I'm in the passenger seat of my Element and my sister is driving us over the Grapevine. Pretty soon we'll be dropped, as if by miracle, into Los Angeles and its sprawling burbs. Santa Clarita. Glendale. The dreaded City of Angels and its snarl of cars.

I've spent the past hour writing the very first graphic sex scene in my novel whilst passing trucks and the vast expanse of the Diablo Range. Frances and Arthur, doing it, after a prolonged hiatus. It's one of those types of sex scenes that's supposed to evoke the emotional complexity of their relationship, establish empathy for the somewhat unlikeable Arthur, and mitigate my narrator's usual cynical amor.

At the last rest stop a flock of flies entered the car, and between the annoying tickle of these insects and thwack sound of Carson trying to hit them with a ruler, it's been a little hard to, um, concentrate.

Anyway, I've had a few sessions with "The Secret to Love" when my sister takes the wheel, and it's really interesting writing a family narrative while being in a family narrative. My sister and I haven't spent much time together as adults, and certainly not since we've had kids. This long road trip we're on—to visit our mother in San Diego—is unprecedented. Our two little boys are in the backseat, chewing Skittles and reading Bone Books and C.S. Lewis and inquiring, every few miles, about the next stop for provisions.

Patti and I keep each other entertained with random memories of our childhood games which typically involved pretending we were grown ups with little kids.

Last night we stopped in Stockton, ate at a sub-mediocre chain restaurant and then settled at a La Quinta, where our room was a few steps from the pool. At the pool we happened upon a teenage girl with some sort of social disorder. She was robust in her over-sharing and presumptuous in her assumptions that our boys would like her to give them swimming lessons. When she began tickling Carson, and pulling Matthew around the pool with her t-shirt, they sensed the social contract had been violated and managed quite successfully to keep their distance. Patti found the girl to be extremely troubling, and marveled at her parents lack of supervisory presence. She invented end-result scenarios where the girl would stalk us all the way to San Diego to prey on our offspring. Since I'm a writer, of course I was just looking for the takeaway. Which I got. In her quest to offer information on every topic that would set her up as an expert in all things, she informed us that when we get to Disneyland, we shouldn't get our hearts set on It's a Small World. "They're remodeling it," she said. "They have to rebuild the boats because people have gotten too fat to fit in them."

So, we're about to leave the hills of the Grapevine and enter the land of many chains. Maybe we'll eat in one of those beef places where you can get onions deep fried in batter and dip them in sauce. We'll take two. And bring on the beef platters of angus. Don't forget the side of pork. It's a Fat World After All!

show me where it says that

I've had my current Samsung cell phone for nearly 6 months, so naturally, it's broken. Or nearly, anyway. Actually, it's in great shape if I don't want whoever's on the other end to hear what I'm saying. So I did what I always do when one of my family plan cell phones break. I played upgrade leapfrog on my $225 a month AT&T plan which includes my phone number as well as Sam's and Maggie's.

I wanted a BlackBerry. That was my first mistake. Well, no, actually, going to Radio Shack would have been mistake numero uno. "I want to upgrade to a BlackBerry Pearl," I told the customer service man at the RadioShack. Chelsea Cain has a BlackBerry Pearl, and she'd shown me the features and explained how easy the user interface is, and because I have a bit of the dreaded late adopter stupidness going on, easy user interfaces are crucial.

The customer service man was friendly enough. Especially while engrossed in a nonstop conversation with his colleagues who all seemed to be experiencing a lull in their need to provide service. Halfway through his servicing of me, he slid out the most noxious SBD ever. That really grossed me out, especially because at the time I was leaning over the counter to correct the zipcode error he'd affixed to my address.

After 45 minutes or so, my free BlackBerry was ordered, and supposedly I would receive it in one business day. All I had to do was pay a $25 activation fee and sign up for another 2 years with AT&T. I mean Cingular. No, wait, make that AT&T.

A queue of emails awaited me once back at my computer:

1. Congratulations, your new BlackBerry is on its way!
   
2. Here's the tracking info on trackmyphone.com where information on your BlackBerry awaits!
   
3. Aw, too bad, your phone number is not eligible for an upgrade. You get shit.
   

So I studied the paperwork with the guy's sign-in information and noticed that the young man with the horrible gas had pushed the wrong button at the end of our time together and disallowed my eligibility. Perhaps due to my carbon monoxide/methane poisoned state, I hadn't noticed. My next mistake was to try and fix this myself, online. Which I thought I did, because the Congratulations! emails began anew and two days later a FedEx truck pulled up with my brand new BlackBerry inside.

I unpacked the phone, I put in my chip, and, voila, everything worked. I was quite happy. Until I got the $170 bill for my NEW phone service from AT&T. So I called AT&T and asked them who authorized this new service with a 333 prefix sitting benext to the part that said I needed to pay 170 extra dollars, above and beyond my usual family plan of $225. A clusterfuck ensued. It involved a long conversation and a subsequent phone call to the third party "equipment" people at somethingorotherwire.com. That didn't go well either. I felt a tad racist asking the offshore Customer Service guy to repeat his name and the name of his company five times. And even more racist when I asked him to slow down and enunciate.

My friend Laura coined these halls-and-mirrors phone calls "Show me where it says that" calls, after one particular testy bill dispute call with AT&T in which she was asking them to reveal where in the contract it says "only to other AT&T" customers after the "unlimited texting" option she checked off when adding her teenaged son to the plan.

The upshot is this: I have a BlackBerry phone. I have the chip from my regular plan's phone number. I have a plan--my original plan, not stretched into another two years of crappy service. But AT&T is now telling me that I must somehow return the BlackBerry in its original packaging to the third party vendor who was unable, when I called him, to reveal the address to which I was to send said "equipment." I must return the 3^rd party BlackBerry so I can then buy a new BlackBerry from AT&T for $25 (which, they tell me, is a special deal), re-sign up for an extended term on my plan, and then they can set me up with the inflated BlackBerry service on my original plan.

I don't think so. I think I'll keep the phone, and the chip, and the regular already inflated service I have with them. Who needs a phone that issues email, anyway. I really just wanted the cool little tracking ball and a better phone camera. Which I now have. Let them call me if they want something. I'll leave a greeting that says, "If you want to speak to Suzy, please press…" and then not give them the call to action number. Maybe I'll even ask them to take part in a customer service survey after they speak with me, for quality assurance purposes.

sugar high

Okay, I admit it…I'm a closet sweetened condensed milk eater. I'm not so sure I'd call it comfort food. It's more like neurosis food. When I'm super busy and preoccupied and don't breathe right or stay in the moment or inhabit my body as I'm flying through my day, I get a powerful sweet tooth. That fancy cow with the necklace of daisies on the little tin can. That's all I want.

Here's a kickass treat:

Take the leftover coffee from your morning carafe, heat a tablespoon of condensed milk in the microwave for 12 seconds, and then stir it into the coffee. Add three ice cubes—or, better yet, add a heaping scoop (or three) of Sharon's All Natural Coconut Sorbet.

So, so good. Yum!

Can you tell my boyfriend's out of town?

Okay. So tonight I'm going to write the chapter about the rhesus macaques and their mating rituals and somehow metaphorically tie it into Frances's relationship with her philandering feng shui practitioner husband. Or maybe I'll finish that short story that I'm supposed to have sent to Kevin Sampsell already for the Portland Noir anthology.

Maybe I'll pull an all-nighter, like back in my college days.

I need more coffee and condensed milk!

could I be any busier?

Wow, it's been awhile. Here's what I'm up to:

1. Researching the sexual idiosyncrasies of rhesus macaques
   
2. Resisting the next scene in my novel (which will include specs from the above)
   
3. Working in my yard (Chuck reminded me that I've always considered yardwork as 'writing time')
   
4. Fixing up my website (check out the services section of suzy vitello dot com )
   

On the day job front, I'm writing text for a telecom company, an IT company, a salad toppings company, a Friends of the Library org, an environmental trust, a yoga studio, a Pilates studio, as well as occasional editing jobs that have been trickling my way.

Tasks big and small: have a ginormous French drain trench in my back yard with plans to make flagstone-paths over it, tomorrow is the "laurel hedge trim," an annual event with the neighbors that involves shaving three feet off of our zealously fecund dividing bush, Kirk goes to bio camp on the McKenzie tomorrow for two five-day stints, my daughters stolen-recovered car has been fixed and sterilized, my son's oil-burner still sits at the shop unable to start, I have to mow the lawn.

On the physical location front, an extremely cool thing happened yesterday (besides that it happened to be my SO's birthday AND the summer solstice): long-time writing pal and gallery owner Erin Leonard is going to rent me an office in her new gallery in NW Portland! I couldn't have lucked out more, given that Laura is moving out-of-state. We'll be able to continue to base our business in Portland, and I will have access to a very affordable work space and a conference room right down the street from where I currently hang a shingle!

In other news—getting geared up for Bread Loaf in August (okay, okay, shouldn't that mean I'm pumping out pages???), Carson comes back from the desert tomorrow, my sister is coming to visit at the end of the week, we're doing a sibling road trip down to mom's in San Diego (complete with Sea World and Disneyland stops), and Kirk and his son are in the final month of training for the World Championship Dragon Boat races in Malaysia.

Oh, and btw, I just got a BlackBerry and I'm drowning in its learning curve. I thought these phones were supposed to be smart! Is it time for bed yet?

the suicide squeeze of motherhood

This last week has been murder. The best way to describe it is in baseball terms. Kirk explained to me last night what a suicide squeeze is—when a player on third base has to count on his legs, and the perfection of his teammate's sacrifice bunt to get him home. Apparently the Mariners did something like this yesterday in the 10^th inning and it paid off. The thing about a successful suicide squeeze is that is depends largely on factors beyond one's control.

Right now, I feel very much like someone on third base with high stakes and lots riding on my potential sprint towards home. All I want to do is go back to my dugout with a big smile on my face, but there's a lot of screaming and yelling and people counting on me executing my next move flawlessly. Or so I project.

This week both of my kids' cars were involved in some sort of crisis and/or brokenness. My son's car blew a seal inviting oil to coat his engine, while my daughter's car got stolen, inviting a merry band of drug addicts to use it as an ashtray. My phone cuts out for no reason. I think I have a fever. I have a pile of bills a mile high. My business partner is moving away. I think I may have gotten salmonella from the bad tomatoes that found their way to the produce shelves. My little boy has had hiccups all afternoon. Is that something I should be concerned about?

I'm down to one working light bulb in a light fixture I hate. I need a new blade on my lawn mower. My car picked up a screw and a weird light went on on my dash (thank God for Les Schwab). I've been popping ibuprofen all day. Isn't that bad for my liver? I'm supposed to pose in a tank top tomorrow for a summer catalog and it's barely 56 degrees out. My cat is drooling on me. My little boy is playing an annoying game on his DS next to me here in bed. Today was his last day of school. What are the symptoms of salmonella poisoning? I had to take gross junkie paraphernalia out of my daughter's car because she was freaking out. I paid the impound lot $175 to get the stolen, dented, stinky car back. I'm pretty sure I have a fever.

I took my son's car to the guy who fixed it last time, he charged me $257 and then it wouldn't start, so I took my daughter's stinky car with shards of broken cd all around the floorboards back to my home, and then to the other fixit shop this morning, and then I took the bus home. Which was good. Reducing my carbon footprint and all that. I took my son and his friend to the skatepark after school today to celebrate their last day of school. It actually didn't rain until we were done. Another good thing. My daughter came over (on the bus) to forage through some art supplies to try and recreate a project that was stolen along with her car (a list of items that includes her $400 glasses, her team's rugby uniforms and her asthma meds, etc). My little son still has the hiccups. My big son got kicked in the head last weekend in a soccer game and was dizzy for 48 hours. His car is still broken and at the first fixit shop. I'm exhausted.

But. I just sent my manuscript excerpt to Bread Loaf. I'm going to Bread Loaf in August! I hope I'm over my salmonella poisoning by then.

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.