late bloomers

I've been at this writing thing since the age of eight. As a kid, I first learned the word prosaic, a term my mother ascribed to my first work of lyricism. I offer said poem herewith:

Spring

Spring is when the flowers bloom.

With snow gone, there's lots of room.

Birds chirping while building their nests.

When mother-bird takes her turn, father-bird rests.

The tip-tap of rainfalls,

the sound of mate calls,

is spring.

While my mother critiqued the piece, finding nothing poetic in it at all save for the onomatopoeic tip-tap, my third grade teacher, a square-shaped, red-headed battle axe of a woman named Mrs. Angle, held the effort up in front of the class, and read it out loud as though it were coated with honey. I enjoyed an entire week of popularity. Mrs. Angle, having scolded me for daydreaming on my report card, redeemed me by pronouncing me a Writer!

My mother, however, wanted me to try again. And, bless her heart, she was right. But I never did return to that poem, instead, I moved to prose, and never looked back until, in Freshman English at Syracuse, I was asked to write a paper on Eliot's Prufrock. That may have been my first real immersive experience with a body of work, and was cause for another teacher-fawning moment—which, I must admit, I live for.

Junior year, I got derailed from writing. Instead, I took up with science and home economics and became a nutritionist. But all the while, stories stewed inside me. All through my twenties, I scribbled things on scraps of paper, which I often destroyed, thinking that I might die in an accident, and they'd be found, and read! Once out of school, I was at a loss for audience. There were no teachers to embrace me, so what was the point?

At thirty, as a young widow with two babies and a small pile of cash, I moved to Portland and jumped into the deep end. Teachers or no, I learned how to write for an audience that included myself. I began to submit my stories to journals and to get them published. I won some awards. I went back to school for an MFA and won more awards. But I haven't been able to crack the "book" thing yet, and I've had to admit to myself that part of the problem is that, I'm still wanting to turn that Spring poem into something my mother would like. Which is ridiculous. She's read and liked much of my work. But still.

Last issue, The New Yorker had a brilliant piece by Malcolm Gladwell, Late Bloomers. If you haven't read it, you must. The article tosses around a lot of preconceptions about genius and talent and precocity. One of the most interesting points is based upon research done by an economist from the University of Chicago named David Galenson, who undertook the challenge to disprove assumptions about creativity and age, particularly the idea that poets and artists peak young. What he discovered was that prodigies don't tend to engage in open-ended exploration, and that they are typically concept-driven; they have an idea, and then go for it, rather than painstakingly researching the way many non-prodigies do. In the article, Galenson is quoted as saying, about late bloomers, "Their approach is experimental. Their goals are imprecise, so their procedure is tentative and incremental."

In other words, late bloomers are nerdy, and tend to follow a depth of inquiry ad nauseam. Ergo, they might have a manuscript or two in Rubbermaid tubs in their basements.

So… to all you Late Bloomers out there—never give up!

wall street realities dance with the muse

As a marketer, I can't tell you how many times in the last six months I've had to overtly acknowledge our "complicated economic times" in ad copy, press releases and newsletters. In all the years I've been a hired pen of one sort or another, I don't ever remember the economy of the time dictating content quite so aggressively.

So when I set out to sell my own writing, the market is top of mind. Which is too bad, really. It shouldn't be. The muse should not be reading the business section of the paper as prelude to inspiration.

Alas, as much as I'm determined to continue to chip away at the first draft of my novel, terms like "up-market" and "upscale commercial fiction" often assert themselves. There they are, sitting on the chair benext to me, reminding me not to stray too, too much from plot points in service to character development.

One way that market copywriting has informed my fiction, is that my prose has gotten pretty lean. If I indulge in backstory or rumination on behalf of characterization, I'm pretty stingy, and end up deleting more than I save. At Bread Loaf this summer, Lynn Freed kept harping on "trusting the reader," shrieking out "sink it!"when writers put too much exposition on the page. She was like the dressage instructors of my youth, the ones who made me ride with a long whip behind my elbows in service to posture and form. Or like my current Pilates teacher, Adrienne, Lord love her, correcting any crooked leanings or spinal curve. "Suck in your stomach," she warns. "Ribs in!"

In addition to inching ever further on "The Secret to Love," and the copywriting work that pays my mortgage, I've completed a book proposal for a nonfiction project on boomer relationships that I'm pretty jazzed about. Inspired by my own mid-life path through the murky waters of romance, and its happy ending at a sustained, loving encore marriage, as well as "stories from the minefield of boomer dating," I embarked on some research and uncovered a fascinating plethora of information. Attachment theory, long-term blended family studies, the stages of relationships as they heat up—the past thirty years has offered tremendous advances in unpacking the mysteries of romance and why so many relationships fail. Add to that the explosion of Internet dating sites, the idea of commodifying love and marriage and the expectations of a culture that refuses to age quietly, and there's a lot to write about. At least three books worth, I'm guessing. Or—banking on.

Yup, I'm working on a book with a sure market. So before you all cast me into the Faustian black hole, let me assure you, I've never had so much fun!

my heroes

Here's to all the men the women who spend at least part of their days in a state of creation.

Here's to the artists, who refuse to work the well-worn groove.

Here's to love, in its many guises, forms and constructs.

Here's to brushing the gravel out of your knees and getting back on the bike.

Here's to those who raise children to think for themselves, instead of blindly agree to a paradigm, even if it's a dearly held one.

Here's to people who refuse to give up.

forestalling the retrograde of mercury

Odd, isn't it, that when you have a major life-changing event to plan, like, say, getting married, you still manage to fit it all in. Work, writing, kids' events. It all somehow gets done even though you only have half the usual amount of hours to devote. But in the interstices between major events, sometimes your whole life falls into an abyss. All the germs you held at bay, all the car trouble forestalled, the family members who seemed to do just fine without you, suddenly everything's broken, everyone's sick, and nothing you do comes out right.

I'm not having one of those weeks, by the way, but I just realized that I'm surprised that I'm not, because that's the usual pattern.

I think I may have forestalled the chaos (or what my new agey friends insist on calling Mercury in Retrograde), because I'm nearly done with a proposal for an ambitious idea that has been pinballing around in my head, and in various notebooks, for a few months. I'll have more concrete info on the project down the road, but for now, I have to say, my fingers have been flying on the keyboard, and inspiration has never been channeled so clearly.

Not that I'm putting STL on the back burner, it's simmering away up front, but this other thing—also related to love—is unstoppable. It's like some sort of tsunami. Or an aftershock of my life-changing event, maybe. I'm not sure where this energy is coming from, but I'm riding it out.

looking in the rearview mirror

More on backstory and its influence on pace, tension and potential to undermine forward momentum. And it's tendency to plummet the writer into the morass of back-to-scratch. Chutes and ladders. Sigh.

Often, backstory is an interruption. In a novel, you want to hurtle your reader to the next revelation, the next plot point. The vertical elements of story (i.e. the emotional motivations, the depth of character, the reasons behind the reasons and the endless capacity for "big voice" to steal the show), must be apportioned with a judicious hand and an ear for ruthless exclusion.

I say this as someone guilty of the overshare when it comes to my characters' ruminations. And also as a reader who loves knowing too much. Love it. It indulges the voyeur in me, the girl who longs to massage her insecurities and alignment with all that is broken. But, what I've discovered in the writing of some thousands of pages of unsellable fiction, is that more than wanting to relate to character, a reader wants to get on a rocket ship and not realize they've left earth until the new galaxy is in sight. The continual projection of earth in the rearview undermines this.

That said, backstory is essential for the writer. The writer MUST know where earth is in order to program the gps to the new galaxy. The craft comes in when deciding how much of it to put on the page. Right now, with STL, I'm having a backstory orgy. It's the water cooler gossip of my mind is what it is. Here's a little eruption that found its way to a third draft of a particular chapter 50 or so pages back from the leading edge of the project:

The plates gleamed back at me from the drying rack. I grew up washing dishes, cleaning the kitchen. It's one thing I do quite well. In medical school, I kept a tidy lab. I still do. But there was that small period, the year after Sheldon's first divorce, Tess's first seizure, Dottie's first nitrous overdose, Collin's first six figure income, Cherry's first suicide attempt, Morgan's first grow room bust and my father's first liver transplant, that I went a little crazy. That was the year I met my husband, Arthur Collier.

Who knew? And what good is all this? The question I have to ask myself, in deciding whether this is backstory for the reader or merely scaffolding, is: does any of this information help shape that new galaxy where we're headed? Does it inform what's happening in the "now" or the "soon to be" of the novel? Or, the hardest question: am I cheating? Am I weaving in titillating facts without offering a scene in order to buy shock value or slap the reader with a little "told ya this family is fucked up"?

If this stuff is for reader and not just for writer, then I'll have to unpack it at some point, probably fairly soon. At any rate, I'm happy I know this stuff. It makes me feel much closer to that control freak character of mine.

love love love

We interrupt The Secret to Love to cough up a real secret. And, btw, real love. Well, okay, it's not much of a secret anymore—but the love part is big and fat and real. Saturday October 4^th, the writer formerly known as Suzy Vitello got hitched to her love of one-year-and-ten-months: Kirk Soulé. Though not exactly "Page 6," this union is definitely on the short list of my Biggest Dreams Ever, and I'm abandoning my fictional persona for this particular blog post in favor of genuine, gushing, sappy and satisfying reportage.

The scoop, for those of you who may be somewhat interested in tmi, is:

I met Kirk in December of 2006, via match.com, after being divorced for 6 months. As cliché as internet dating sounds, for a person attracted by voice, the platform works—despite being fraught with heroic journey-sized pratfalls. Know that old adage about kissing a lot of frogs? Okay, okay, I didn't do all that much kissing. I did enough, though. Enough to know swoon-worthy lips when I meet 'em.

We courted, dated, danced and adventured our way into each other's worlds over the next year. For a high school science teacher who claims not to be a writer, Kirk has more natural ability with words and language than most people who hang wordsmithing shingles. He and I were together on the holiday that inspired STL, and it's he, more than anyone else who has encouraged me to keep chipping through the draft. He's the "devoted husband" you hear thanked by every woman who ever met with formal artistic success.

Kirk's the first keeper of my life, funny, sexy and bursting with humanity, passion and creativity. He's my best friend. Okay, yeah, I did have to (gulp) write the number "3" in the "what number marriage is this" section of the license, and that is a humbling thing to have to jot. But it's not like I'm Britney Spears.

So the wedding itself was perfect. The elopement, I mean. We decided a month and a half ago the where and when. Obviously not only was it too late to pull off a formal vows and rings ceremony with guests and floral representation and attendants in organza, but given that Kirk's son just married, it would be in bad taste to belly up to the altar this fall, not to mention expensive.

So we called upon an old friend of Kirk's, who happens to be a judge, and our wonderful neighbors-turned-witnesses, and at the last minute I broke down and hired a photographer because it's a wonderful thing to have an objective creative professional about at a time like this. Not to mention, I was counting on the possibility of a really good hair day and the rarity of that must be immortalized.

So we scurried up the mt. to Timberline Lodge where we spent the night in one of their charming castle-esque rooms replete with heavy paneling, massive hardware and outstanding views of Mt. Hood. Well, the view would have been outstanding had the visibility been more than three feet.

We got married in a downpour that a few hours later turned into the first sleet storm of the season. Our amenable judge, his gracious wife, our sporting neighbors and the graphic chronicler of our union joined us out in the rain, under various umbrellas, for the off-the-grid celebration of our life-long commitment. It was the most present, correctly scaled event of my entire life. (With the possible exception of the birth of my third child which occurred under the influence of god's best invention, the epidural.)

In the spirit of unbridaled (sp intentional) narcissism, feel free to view the nuptials for yourself. This guy totally captured the spirit of the day. (Once on the home page, select the client login and put this password in the user box: 100408wedding ).

We appropriated a small alcove in one of the more public parts of the lodge, employed a couple of small tables upon which to lay our cupcakes, plugged in the ipod, bought some champagne from the bar, and, et voila: we had ourselves an actual reception.

All in all, it was the best wedding I've ever had. And I'm looking forward to the marriage following suit.

I have to go be a newlywed now, but stay tuned for more secrets to love!

the conundrum of the present tense

I'm developing a rhythm with Part II of TSL of alternating present tense backstory with past tense ongoing narrative. It's the reverse of how I tensed the first part, and I've been logging thoughts on what tense buys and what it costs. Clearly, there is an unprocessed quality to present tense. A self-consciousness that is all too often flat sounding, particularly in first person. The I-verb sentence structure, for instance, can grate with its solipsistic whiney victim sound.

E.g: I pick my youngest brother up by his armpits. I take him to the bathroom sink.

Blah.

Not to mention the "I say," assignation, a personal pet peeve: i.e. "Yeah, right," I say.

There is this sense that a microscope is following the character/narrator around inspecting every activity. There's a tedium. A boringness. You are running the risk of putting your reader to sleep, as though you're an indulgent shut-in and it's visiting hour and you have decided to punish your relative who's there because he is obligated to make the rounds.

As the writer of a long present-tense, first person passage, I become the shut-in as well as the bored relative. It's an exercise in self-loathing. But enough about me. What do you think about me?

Blah.

I'm not throwing in the towel, however, because there are some big-picture benefits. First: present tense is good for amping up tension. It can be emotionally risky for the narrator, which is to say, engaging for the reader. The sense of doom is easier to pull off in present tense. Second: present tense is a great way to manipulate time—to stretch it out. And in the overall pacing of a book, a blend of present and past tense can provide temporal texture. Third: present tense tends to make your character seem more vulnerable, ergo, more likeable. Frances, in her past tense smart-assness, can be somewhat cocky and glib and sarcastic. It's part of her voice. The present tense passages help soften her some, thereby creating empathy.

So. I'm going to have to iron out some of the wrinkles (actually, create more wrinkles out of the too ironed sounding narrative) of the first draft. And I will. But before I do that, I need to finish.

a funny thing happened on the way to the wedding

Nice dress, right? And that guy benext to me, he's my fiancé, aka, the father of the groom. Guess who else was wearing my same dress at this wedding?

No, not the mother of the groom. Close. Yup, the mother of the bride. Big fat faux pas, eh?

Oh well. The wedding was terrific, and the bride and groom were adorable, elated and completely present during the whole shindig. I should take a page from their book. We all should, actually. How to be calm in the face of a life-altering event.

Aside from the look/feel/spirit of a particular nuptial celebration, every wedding has its own chemistry. You know what I'm talking about, right? There are the rancor and hard feelings weddings where you can taste bitterness in the air. Then there are the "let's get it on in the coat closet weddings" of lust and bad behavior. Not to be outdone by the "we're untouchable, keep your distance" society weddings where the bride and groom float about as if just sheared from the top of the cake itself, all consumed with the appearance of being the perfect newlyweds.

My favorite weddings are the ones that are clearly executed to reflect the choices of the couple itself. Where convention takes a back seat to personality, belief and a shared vision. Weddings that foretell the collaboration necessary in order to navigate a successful marriage. Brendan and Katie's wedding was one of those. From the bride's choice to forego a veil, but include a ceremony where their mothers bound them together with green ribbon, to the setting itself: a farm on the outskirts of Portland, under towering English oaks with the trickle of a creek as backdrop. There was no wedding march. Instead, a solo classical guitarist strummed a pleasant musical prelude. There were 12 bridesmaids and half as many groomsmen. Who says those numbers should line up, anyway?

As far as the reception, it took place in a fancied-up polebarn. Kirk provided homemade brew (which had been fermenting in my kitchen the last couple of weeks), the best man spun tunes from his computer (mostly 80's songs…go figger). We set up a slide show, too: highlights of the bride and groom as children as well as their nine-year romance (they met as young teens and have been together ever since, even during four years of college attendance in separate states).

The couple departed in their Honda Element, festooned with the usual signage and imperatives to honk for love and so on. They are in Mexico now, on a honeymoon that I hope isn't being spoiled by bad weather. And the couple pictured above? They're gonna be tying the knot too. But don't tell anyone, it's a secret! (And when it happens, nobody within a hundred miles better be wearing my outfit!)

it’s not easy being green

First, let me admit that I'm not a biking activist. I haven't pored over the controversy or ingested the bike maps or written my congressperson about bike lanes for all. Like almost every motorist I know, I too get pissed off when I'm in a hurry and I have to go slow due to bikes riding three abreast down a major boulevard. But. I live in a city known for its progressive bike laws and bike culture. And—I have a great bike: one of those K2 women's bikes that let you ride more upright and so forth. Plus, it's been record-breaking wonderful weather all September, and I've moved into a new, spacious office on the fringe of the NW Industrial area which is proximal to all kinds of bikeable thoroughfares. And—the streets of NW Portland and downtown are a mess with construction and repair, so driving around down here and finding parking is more of a hassle than ever.

Today was the second time I ventured out midday for some exercise. My endpoint destination was my Pilates class, a studio nestled on the third floor of a building in the heart of downtown Portland. Typically, the drive takes 12 minutes. The Smart Park garage where I stow my vehicle for $2.50 is usually crammed full of cars at that hour, and finding a space takes another 6 minutes or so. Add to that another 6 minutes of walking, and you have a wheels up to gate time of 25 minutes, give or take. On my bike today it took 18. I saved money, gas and time. I got exercise and a pleasant ride through Portland in its finest season. But all was not roses in the city of the roses.

The first expletive launched my way came from a crazy person. An elderly pedestrian who admonished me from a street corner for not having a Vespa. "At least it's got a motor!" she howled. That made me feel bad. Like, maybe I was visibly huffing and puffing up the gentle slope of 18^th—one of the major bike friendly one-ways in Portland. I shrugged it off, and pedaled on.

At the intersection of NW 16^th and Everett, I got to experience the business end of one of Portland's clever new bike boxes, and, sure enough, the motorists all kept their legal distances until I was safely across the street. A block later, however, the generous bike lane abruptly ended, providing the usual amputation-inviting space between the parked cars and the lane. I took the sidewalk. And I didn't leave it for several blocks. Turns out that the Pearl district, with its all its green building and sushi establishments and zipcars and pedestrian friendly streetcar loving claims is a biker's nightmare. The Utopian who drafted this urban bailiwick was not a proponent of the two-wheeler. The streets are narrow—yet this does not deter the SUVs and trucks that stream along them. And then there's the streetcar tracks and stations that provide video game-like peril to bicyclists who must duck and dodge them lest their tires slip into the gaps that seem almost tailor-made to cause fatal injury.

watch the bike box video

The next insult hurled my way came from an individual who expressed vexation over my choice of public property in front of which I was clasping closed my helmet strap. It was a mailbox, and clearly, the posting of his letter couldn't wait ten seconds. His fists were clenched and he seethed, "Do you mind?" as though I'd chosen to sit on top of the mailbox and eat a sandwich.

Oddly, the cars with whom I shared the road were very courteous. They went out of their way to offer wide berth or, when we squeezed into shoulerless lanes, they kept their distance behind me. It was the pedestrians that time after time felt challenged and inconvenienced with sharing the commute. I suppose it boils down to the old pecking order, the transportation food chain: big rigs, small cars, bikes and feet.

appropriating the real world

Yesterday my pal (let's call him Bob) took me on a tour of OHSU. It was the second OHSU-related tour I've been on in service to research for STL. "Bob" works in media up there, so I've decided to obfuscate his identity lest he get in trouble for what I'm going to cull from the tour. My narrator's husband is modeled after the VP of finance up there on the hill, and I wanted a feel for what it's like to work in a job whose stresses include keeping a multi-million dollar government-connected medical facility in the black. I also wanted to know what his daily walking commute from triple diamond parking to his executive office in Baird Hall would be like.

I have six pages of notes—lots of minutiae that comes in handy when building the iceberg of authority. For instance, there's these vending machines peppered throughout the OHSU tunnels. They look like Coke machines, but what they dispense instead of soda are packets of things like Mammalian Cell Lysis Reagents and so forth. The hill has lots of cutting edge research going on. You've heard of Druker, right? The dude behind the leukemia pill gleevec? These guys are the golden boys of the hill. The research scientists and the neurosurgeons who bring in the big bucks. And my character, the fictive Arthur Collier, is charged with balancing the beans that come in from these hot shots with stuff like health insurance for the multitudes of support staff who keep the furnaces blasting.

I'm quite tickled at the prospect of orchestrating what will happen between Artie and Frances when he has to shut down her division of stem cell research at the primate center because damage control and PETA PR is costing the organization too much money. And when he does this, you better believe that he's going to get a big fat bonus.

more backwards writing

I've been marginally successful with my grand plan to work on STL before engaging in hired pen work. Or laundry. Or hanging bookshelves. Or watering the zucchini. Okay, maybe a little less than marginally successful. Would you believe less unsuccessful than typically?

One thing I did realize, a lovely epiphany in the early morning sun of my front porch, is that I need to add another narrative element to the second part of my book. As with the first part, I need to alternate between backstory and present day, mostly because there is too much unexperienced inference between Frances and her siblings without it. I realized during the writing of the tree-cutting scene that there is no context for Frances's relationships with her various brothers and sisters, so the reader can't sink into the scene with a sense of alarm, nostalgia, pathos, etc… Also, with so many characters and not much previous purchase on their characterizations, it's easy to get lost in this raucous tree-cutting scene—easy to forget who's who.

Also, Frances's vulnerability is not quite on the page yet, and there's nothing like a few humiliating scenes from adolescence to sew that up.

I've decided to pepper this backstory stuff in, presenting small scenes that feature some significant interactions between Frances and Collin, Frances and Cherry, Frances and Tess, Frances and Morgan and Frances and the grand fuck up, Sheldon.

The Collin chapter is proving an invigorating engagement—there are some secrets being revealed—to me—as I write it.

happy back-to-page day

This is my 17^th year as a back-to-school mom. I've placed children in kindergarten seats, walked them up bus stairs, pushed them through the doors of elementary, middle and high schools, deposited them in dorm rooms and scary University area hovels. I've run through the rainbow of emotions, too. Everything from having to pull over to the side of the road for uncontrollable sobbing to executing the I've-kicked-the-habit heel clicking jig.

My youngest began 4^th grade today. He's sporting skater clothes and carefully plastered bangs. He spent 10 minutes brushing his teeth, and he was shivering with nervousness, like a Chihuahua, as we walked up to the bus stop. Last year's eager wave good-bye has turned into a self-conscious two-finger assignation. As for me, I just spent a half hour on my pages, got to the proverbial white space, and I'm reflecting on how lucky I am.

Having a school age brood is a milestone for any writer who has had to beg, trade and pay for childcare for her preschoolers. State-mandated public school is perhaps the single biggest perk of being a citizen of the United States of America. Ask any writer mom, during the summer months, what her daily average time with the page is. It'll hover between zero and five minutes. All that turns around on the Wednesday following Labor Day—which should be renamed I think. Given a Hallmark designate, even. National Back-to-Page Day. We parent-writers should be sending one another cards festooned with smiley faces. But then, that would just be another distraction, wouldn't it?

Okay, back to Dorothy's kitchen and the seven people therein.

dialog as connective tissue

Many a writing paradigm decrees that revealing plot via dialog is a cardinal sin. Nothing makes your characters sound more contrived than leading questions and answers obviously positioned to reveal stuff to the reader. And yet, you can't fill a book with characters speaking in a rhetorical fog. Something has to happen within discourse, right?

Yes and no.

Voice, personality, cadence, narrative texture: these are the take-aways when your characters chat it up on the page. It's about connective tissue. The substance that makes it possible for the reader to align with--to move with--the story.

Right now I've got seven characters in a kitchen. They have to talk, or not talk. They need to gesture, to fill the voids with physical business. The chasms between what they do and what they say can provide irony that moves the storyline forward. In these moments of irony, we can find out some things.

Dialog can be used the way emjambment is used in poetry: to subvert or heighten expectation, and thus create tension, or interest. You want to use dialog to open doors, rather than close them. You want the reader to glimpse a room she didn't know existed in the house she's exploring rather than providing the entire floorplan.

So. My seven odd characters are in a room, and within the course of this association, there needs to be a reveal. But it can't come from an answered question. Instead, it has to arrive via an unanswered question. That's today's challenge.

Moving forward vs looping back

I have not posted the updated word count to the margin of this blog because the little meter would be moving in the wrong direction. My progress has been in deleting unnecessary copy rather than generating new words. For the most part, anyway.

I was worried this would happen.

After Bread Loaf, I realized that my whole first section is replete with fat. Too many descriptors, too much explaining, too much boring backstory.

Shit.

I've axed the lion's share, and then gone back into it, like a surgeon replacing valves. I've had to rebuild the heart of this sucker. Set more pages in scene. Trust the reader, as Lynn Freed kept admonishing. Sink it!

So sink it, I have. Gone are three pages of Fifi's ruminations on art. Her long description of courting her husband. A page-and-a-half detailing the landscape of the Block Island Sound.

In their places are minimalist scenes and scant sections of dialogue. More action.

Finally, just today, I positioned my cursor at the bottom of page 128 and began to create new material. I'm in Dorothy Dick's kitchen, all her children and their significant others about, while she's stirring up some homemade eggnog. The kitchen is filthy, the scene, chaotic. I'm happy to be back in the mess of it all.

being a writer: new rules

Work on the novel each morning before engaging the Outlook. One hour, minimum. Do not visit this blog until that work is done.

Keep a notebook with me at all times.

Have at least 30 items in active submission at all times (I'm giving myself two weeks to ramp this up--currently, I have only 1).

Put any pressing duties onto a 3X5 card. If it fills up before noon, that means my life is too full of shit. Outsource or actively banish the items that spill over.

Exercise each afternoon. Create an interface after work and before home that involves sweat, and then take a half hour to edit the morning's writing.

Do not drink alcohol Sunday-Wednesday.

Drink more water, less coffee. French press instead Mr. Coffee.

Stop wasting time with too many transitions. See the whole picture of the day instead of the hour-by-hour of the day.

Don't forget my friends.

Don't forget my family.

Don't forget to be gracious.

Don't forget to tell my sweetheart I love him.

Don't dwell.

Do cut out the activities that feel like obligation.

Don't waste time on shitty people.

Keep piles at bay.

Buy a shredding machine.

Bread Loaf: the big take-aways

First, let me just say that Lynn Freed's workshop was phenomenal. I could not have had a more productive experience, both in terms of message and delivery. She embodies, I believe, the notion that when the student is ready, the teacher comes. Each and every one of us needed to hear advice, and all took it with enthusiasm and grace.

The dictate to "Trust the Reader" rang clearest. We all had too much explaining and exposition in our manuscripts. Even though I've been schooled against overly descriptive language, redundancy and authorial voice, my pages still contained plenty. Having fresh, discerning eyes peruse the pages with hatchet in hand helped me more than I can say.

Get rid of the loudspeaker. Move characters into scene. Banish the subjunctive. As soon, said Lynn's pencil on my page, as you find yourself sinking into the subjunctive for more than a sentence, stop and consider sinking it below the water line.

Of greatest use was the affirmation that the voice of the novel is fetching, that the characters are compelling, and that the setting is well drawn.

As for the rest of the conference: I liked it well enough. Admittedly, I did not attend as many lectures or classes as I should have, and perhaps I didn't mingle as much as I could have. I tended to stick to a merry little band of like-minded souls, with whom I talked shop.

I did get to have an illuminating conversation with Charlie Baxter though. During his reading I had an epiphany about my novel. And like many of my epiphanies, it vanished because I failed to write it down. I wanted to bring back this aha moment, so I sought him out during yesterday's lawn cocktails. Now, you have to know first of all how difficult this was for me. Baxter is one of my heroes. I go foggy-headed just trying to think about how to approach a guy like that. (I made a total ass of myself with Toni Nelson earlier in the week, and I certainly didn't want to repeat that!)

Anyway, I blathered some introductory word salad at first, but managed to gather myself enough to sort out the basis for the conversation. I mentioned what I thought he was trying to do in his story, and then told him what I was trying to do in mine, and we had one of those cool narrative distance chats, and he delivered the suggestion that I look at a Auster's Invention of Solitude, which I immediately Amazoned. Spot on that it starts in a third person musing and by paragraph two, the narrator is on the page. How he pulled that book out of the air for me after just a thirty second description of my opening chapter is a huge reason why Bread Loaf is worth the price of admission.

Pleiades Lake

Fabulous Bread Loaf day in every way. Hiked up to a wonderful lake, took a quick plunge and felt like a college student. I guess this is one of the great take-aways—the return to coed days of yore. And this time, I got to go to one of those smallish private New England colleges instead of the large, urban University I went to so many years ago.

Aside from the extra-curriculars, this mini immersion in writers' nirvana will linger and spread—and hopefully good work has begun to germinate already—just by osmosis.

As I mentioned last post, four of us in my writing workshop have spent time in the obscure little seaside town, setting of my book. What are the chances?

Then there was the wedding ring thing that happened today. One of our party was glancing down at the lake from a perch on the slick rocks above it when he noticed a man's wedding ring slightly submerged, six inches or so, in the lake. I was nearby, so I scooped it up, and handed it to him. We speculated as to its story. Was it left on a rock? Did it fall off a finger? Was it thrown into the drink by a sad, separated husband? See what happens when you get a bunch of writers together?

The discoverer of the ring put it in his pocket, with the intention of handing it over to the Bread Loaf staff, putting a note up in the lodge, or the Crumb newsletter. A bit presumptuous maybe, given that this wasn't Lake Bread Loaf, after all. Other Vermonters occasionally swim here too. But, never the less, it seemed likely that the owner might have some association with the college.

Fast forward a few hours. I'm at the Gala cocktail party sucking down a Bloody Mary, and Canadian Ken (my name for him to distinguish him from Portland Ken), inquires about my day. "It was terrific," I told him, "I went to the lake."

"Oh," he said. And then, in an ironic tone he asked if I happened to see something round and shiny there.

"Oh. My. God."

"I went swimming and I lost my wedding ring."

What are the chances?

Now, that's one little coincidence, but an even bigger one is that the guy who found his ring is also the guy who answered the Bread Loaf trivia question posed on the first day: find the book and the page number of the following passage, trivia question. And he managed to find the answer to that trivia question while paging through Canadian Ken's book. So, as was pointed out, those guys will be forever cosmically connected.

It's just a magic place.

swine loaf

Today The Secret to Love was workshopped, and I got to read the opening chapter at the Blue Parlor Reading. I'm still filtering all the info from workshop--some of it resonated, some of it just was, as is the case at these things, writerly reactions--micro edits. On the whole, I think the chapters were well-received, and the votes seem to indicate that Ursula is more sympathetic than Fifi (good), and that Grandmother's the bomb. (Very good.) I got some terrific feedback on what to tweak in the opening few pages, and I tinkered with it before the reading.

After the reading, I got to partake in the devouring of that attractive creature under the cookie tray. Now, I know the idea of a roast pig is somewhat exotic and belies a certain fanciness, but the actual set up, gutting, roasting and slicing of poor little piggy is, well, barbaric. Luckily, Bread Loaf had plenty of garden burgers and beans as substitute. And the key lime pie was fabulous.

But, back to the reading. The theme for tonight was love, and there were ten or so readers. The room was packed with supportive Loafers, and the spirit, as usual, was on the high side. There was bad wine and Chex mix for all. It was fun to read chapter one in its latest form. It's one of those passages with shock value and humor. The double whammy of fail-safe reading.

Anyone who thinks that Bread Loaf is this elite haven for mfa's and wealthy wanna-be's doesn't have the true picture. Yeah, there's a bit of money up here (4, count 'em 4 of my workshop mates knew Watch Hill--the exclusive Rhode Island backdrop of my novel--intimately), and plenty of writers from academe, but I've been impressed, and more than a bit surprised by what happens when you put this many people together in a secluded setting when the only true common denominator is a passion for writing.

After the reading, the pig roast and the key lime pie, there was a fiddler and his son in the barn. This 13-year old boy was phenominal. Think Joshua Bell phenominal. He got a standing ovation (the first at this year's Bread Loaf). It made me wonder if these writers' conferences oughtent have more inter-disciplinary arts. My roommate thinks we should have a workshop where we make a collaborative play and then perform it.

Hey, after ten days of readings, our ears are sore and our heads are full. Things begin to blend. We begin to feel like that cookie sheet, wanting to cover something--preferrably any blowhard writer that reads over his alotted time.

In the end, though, the real litmus test is on the page. At writing camp, words and the particular way they're strung together are the grail objects. We want, when we wind down the mountain to our respective ports and cities, to feel that our words will reward us. Even if just with their song--that in rereading them we feel satisfied and propelled forward.

When it works, this writers' conference thing, a writer goes home feeling like she wants to continue writing. Even if she's told that her character's voice is inauthentic, or the dialogue is contrived, or that there are too many examples of summary in her narrative. If we get feedback that a scene has erupted in that wonderful personal way that causes a reader to fully enter the story, that's worth the price of admission.

the secret to love, part III

Sitting in another craft class this afternoon, I got out my tiny little notebook and figured out the last third of Secret to Love. Plot-wise, in any case.

The combination of steeping my consciousness in story vs plot (sequence vs sequence w/ causality), and having both Eve and an agent I chatted with ask me a couple of smart questions after hearing my spiel, simplified the whole explosion-change-end result maneuver I'd been churning around for some time.

Frances, my beleaguered heroine, has been operating under false guidance. Her grandmother set her on a quest with bad advice at the beginning of the book: find a husband who can stand up to you. Who can boss you. And at the end of the book, Frances finds herself in a similar wisdom-dispensing situation. Her advice, of course, will refute Grandmother's. It will be this little act, this realization that she has reached a position where she knows how to answer a fundamental query on the nature of meaning, of love, that causes the shift.

plotting

I attended a really great craft workshop today given by Margo Rabb. It was a workshop on plotting specifically tailored to novel writers. Though I didn't agree with every suggestion, some of the most helpful included:

1. When considering a new idea for a novel, write the first 30 to 50 pages without revising and then assess the material as worthy or not
   
2. Keep a character notebook
   
3. Write a two-page plot treatment, written in the style of telling someone what the book's about
   
4. Write a list of scenes connecting the beginning to the climax to the end
   
5. Be able to describe your novel in one sentence
   

Another idea presented was, in plotting the book, know the ending, and work backwards. Not sure that one will work for me. For one thing, though I don't have a good idea about what will happen exactly, I have a very clear picture of what I want to accomplish in service to the emotional triumph of the characters. I worry that if I impose a plot point on that triumph, it'll be contrived.

As far as a character notebook, I do have character 3X5s that I've long since misplaced. I think a small notebook that I keep on my person is a great idea, actually, and one I've resisted only because it's one more thing to remember. I have noticed many a fellow writer here at the camp extracting small notebooks for a variety of reasons. Maybe I'm just too arrogant, and I think that I'll remember my random thoughts and overheard dialogue. Many times I do, but just as many, when trying to recall something that got me all excited earlier in the day, I draw a blank.

In any case, I'm going to do a 2-page plot sketch, just for fun. Maybe I'll even come up with an ending.

the second deadly sin

I'm going to have a hard time remembering that in real life you don't get served three meals a day, there's no robust salad bar from which to heap your plate, and dessert should be the exception after breakfast, not the rule.

Seriously, I'm eating like a pig. Add the wine and cheese and bloody Mary receptions and I'm going to have to go into major gluttony detox.

bread loaf day ?

That bunch of logs back there? That's where Robert Frost spent many a miserable summer day, holed up with depression and his pen and his paper while the trees outside whistled and cracked.

I love Frost's poetry, even though I'm only familiar with a skim of his work. My grandfather, Helmut, used to read them to me from "Stopping by Woods…," the hardback with all the line sketches. It so happened that the very edition was on a shelf inside that cabin. I picked it up and got sucked into a quick hole of memory. I smelled the book, stroked its tattered cover.

Although surrounded by the very alive, vibrant Bread Loaf Conference-goers, I felt quiet and elegiac during this field trip. Sort of contemplative. Mostly dull. Earlier today I got an email inviting me to the memorial service of a man whose death came as a surprise to me. The very colorful Patrick McAuliffe, client and friend, a man who'd once hired me to help him write his memoir—the unsinkable, or so I thought, Patrick, was dead. Robert Frost, dead. My grandfather, Helmut, also dead.

A local Frost scholar, Jay Parini, gave a talk on the history of the cabin and the lower house, which make up what's known in these parts as the Homer Noble Farm. As a Pofessor of English at Middlebury College, Parini gives this docent lecture a lot. But he was anything but rote in his delivery. He made Frost a real man as he described his struggles, background and allegiance to the earth. Of particular color was a recent punishment he, Parini, was asked to carry out. Seems a group of high school kids broke into the lower house and wrought havoc over the winter, downing huge quantities of beer while trashing the historic home. In lieu of jail, the kids were sentenced to Frost seminars taught by Parini, where they had an object lesson in what "The Road Not Taken" might mean.

This is the lie-low day at Bread Loaf. Catch up on rest, reading and writing. For me, it's a sad day. I'm homesick. I miss my sweetheart and my children. And I will miss the occasional enthusiastic, unintelligible phone call from my good friend Pat.

respite

I understand it's 100 degrees at home. Here, in the foothills of Vermont's Green Mountains, it's a pleasant 72.

I feel as if I've been transported to a parallel planet. Meatloaf (as my boyfriend jokingly referred to this place in an email) is almost surreal in its setting. Rolling green hills and moose sightings aside, there is just enough of the remote to subvert the paradigm. Cell phones don't work here, so no need to take up the first minute of each meeting with an admonition to turn them off. Showers must be staggered, because the ratio of residents to stall is several to one. As though we suddenly belong to a family of ten, we must relearn to share, take our turns, be patient.

The only elbowing and vying and, dare I say, aggressive behavior is at the bulletin board near the Victorian blue parlour where one can sign up to read on a ten-slot list. I'm on the waiting list for tomorrow, aced out of yesterday and today by being incidental in my meanderings rather than deliberate.

The agent and editor meetings take place on wide porches at civilized hours, and everyone seems so happy to be here instead of in their regular lives, that one almost forgets the point of the meetings. Grace seems to be the frontrunner here, purpose only slipping in around the edges. I'm feeling a lot of suspended will, forgotten agenda and subverted bravado around me. Or maybe I'm just projecting. Cheryl Strayed aptly described Bread Loaf as summer camp for writers, and now I know what she meant by that. The usual intensity of writing conferences is mitigated by space, anachronism and the lack of strong coffee.

Everyone could do with a little meatloaf in their lives, I think. Served up at room temperature.

 

walking through dirt on a sunny morning

Lynn Freed gave us an assignment yesterday. We have to write an opening sentence. Nothing scuttles the cobwebs occluding creativity as much as a sweaty hike through foreign soil, so, armed with my state-of-the-art 3.2 mega pixel camera and a head full of cotton, off I went into moose country.

Three-quarter miles down the road this line occurred to me:

We used to sit beside one another, the lot of us, and compare our knees for tanness: Corey, Deborah, Inga, me, and a little fag named Joe.

Okay then. Nice sound, rhythm, all of that, but inserting "fag" as a blackout, well, immediately I began the argument with myself. Can I say fag? And if so, what promise have I made the reader upon which I now must deliver?

So I amended the sentence:

We used to sit beside one another, the lot of us, and compare our knees for tanness: Corey, Deborah, Inga, me, and a little tramp named Jo.

It so happens that I just shared a lunch table with a poet and I spoke of this dilemma. I think he thinks I copped out. "the fag line tells the reader a lot more," he said, shaking his head.

Damn it!

hardscrabble

"The mosquito is the new state bird," said the Middlebury transit driver who negotiated us around the various washed out roads and bridges between Burlington and Bread Loaf. "It's rained 40 days straight."

After 24 hours here, I've concluded that Vermonters are exceptionally precise. The careful way they speak is only matched by the considered way that they listen. Most remarkable is that they don't seem to mind that the rest of the world does it differently. I was sitting up front with the driver and the other 7 passengers were in an ebullient huddle behind us, chatting quickly and with hyperbolic animation and the driver seemed genuinely pleased to be in the midst of our cacophony.

We passed a road called Hardscrabble, and I chuckled. The driver said, "You'll find that things are generally named for what they are around here." When we turned onto a road called "Burpee" I said, "So, is that named after the seed company or the tendency to produce gas."

"Well," he said, after a Vermont sized pause, "seeing as there's a sewer pipe industry here, I'd say the latter."

Burlington

The airport in Burlington, VT is in the middle of a neighborhood. Weird. Like PDX, but smaller, quainter. I'm at the Holiday Inn for the evening after a day of uneventful air travel. Uneventful except for the last few minutes of flight over Vermont when turbulence sucked the plane down freakishly causing many a traveler to scream. They were the short sort of screams, the type muttered without thought and quickly rescinded. The turbo prop carrier in which we bounced immediately corrected itself after all, and, plus, the plane wasn't about to go down full as it was with forthright New Englanders.

Best was I caught up on all my New Yorkers which had been brimming the bill basket since April. I read a great TC Boyle story and an even better essay by Saunders. I'm priming the pump. Yes I am.

Now I'll pop into the hotel restaurant for a bite with a brand new colleague and friend, Ken, another writer-ambassador from Portland. We have to set up a game plan for west coast solidarity in the face of all the greatness that awaits.

Oh, and good news: neither the bottle of Tanqueray nor my French press broke en route!

Bread Loaf 2008

I'm off to Bread Loaf tomorrow, and I have 130 pages of my novel to pore over en route. I know I've changed a few characters' names here and there, and I'm sure to step over many first draft inconsistencies. With a goal of feeling completely saturated by The Secret to Love by the time I'm installed in my Vermont hideaway, pen in hand, here I go.

Wi-fi permitting, I shall report from "the road."

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.