4G 3G wtf?

If you're a modern-type, and by modern I mean you e-mail more than you fax, you probably have been scratching your head lately about the choices in communicating via phone, Internet, skype and VoIP. And for entertainment, should you continue with cable? Try dish or direct tv? Watch everything via your computer screen? Or should you just Netflix what you want, or download it via youtube or iTunes or whatever else comes out of the digital birth canal?

Ah, the choices. All this G stuff. iphones are 3G, wi-fi is 4G. It's all so confusing, eh? As are the consolidation/bundle/cancel options.

My husband and I are still in the throes of merge, and discussions on what to consolidate, what to keep separate, what to banish entirely fill the allotted pragmatic plate. A few weeks ago we pondered the latest "bundle" offer from Comcast. $114.95 for basic cable, land line and Internet. Since I was currently paying Comcast $120 for just Internet and tv, I thought that by eliminating Qwest and Sprint, we'd be saving $80, so I called for a disconnect and had my brand new husband call for installation under the new service price.

Of course, I knew it wouldn't be that simple.

So the installer shows up on appointed day (after a snafu which included an inadvertent cancellation of my cancellation, thus generating a new invoice, leading me to suspect that I'd be paying double for the next month) and right away, he pronounces amazement and surprise when I query him about the wireless component to the order. "Wireless," says he. "Ain't gat no order for wireless. Don't even have a modem with me in the truck."

"No problem, I have the modem and the router already."

"Oh, well, this here is a differnt type of hook-up. They'd charge you an additional $100 for the wireless hook up."

"What hook up?" I vehemently protested. "It's already hooked up. All you have to do is hook up the phone."

So, with the impatient installer standing in the doorway, I dialed up Comcast on my iphone (dialed isn't right with the iphone, I know. We need to invent some new phone-calling verbs. For now, let's say smeared. I smeared my fingers over the screen), and after the queue of mirrors, was told I was shit out of luck. I'd have to reschedule my hook up, and my installation would be $100 instead of $45, and then there was a sur-charge for this and a tax on that. I hung up the iphone. No, make that tapped END CALL, or whatever it says in that red rectangle.

Long story short, I decided, Who the hell needs a zillion sports channels and a landline that seems to serve only to usher forth phone calls from solicitors? All I really need is Internet. Fast, furious, Internet.

Luckily, Portland is a test market for a great new Wi-Max service (4G) called clear. They have mobile Internet, home Internet and phone services all compartmentalized with gradient pricing. After a little investigation, I found out that I could get exactly what I needed for $35 a month (and five of that is modem rental). The best part was, I simply took the modem out of the box, plugged it in, and voila!

If you live in the Portland area and you're sick of Qwest and/or Comcast and their big box bullshit, call my guy, Simon Benz: (503) 875-4709. Or email him at simonbenz@clear.net . He'll come to your house with the goods and determine whether your location is in the clear zone, and hook you up! Tell him Suzy Soule sent you :)

there is a season

I've reached the point in my novel where I have to very, very quiet in order to hear the heartbeats of my characters. Discern the strength of pulse, of intent, of sorrow and redemption.

Ideally, this is when I'd go hide out in a hole somewhere and banish all manner of monkey mind from my day.

Instead, I'm doing what I typically do on Monday mornings: making a list, attending to the queue of inbox tasks that I envision are starting to grow microscopic flora. Mondays are always "too much with me," and I think it has something to do with locating myself in the world.

This is a particularly onerous Monday because it is the Monday after Spring Holiday. Can you see the circles under my little boy's eyes? He spent the week with his father, sick and in bed. Came home with a rattly cough and diminished energy, but his usual strong will to go to school today (he can't stand the thought of being out of the loop--what a Type A!); and there's his older brother, Sam--my first baby. Spring break for a college boy is all about beer, video games, laundry and, in the case of my son, voicing all the things he's going to do when he wins the lottery.

Yesterday was quite fun though. Sam, Carson and I played miniature golf in one of those blacklight basement venues that are cropping up. Sam, who takes all games seriously, kept the scorecard, announcing at each hole how much over or under par he was. I loved how we matched pace-wise: we're efficient when it comes to putt-putt, taking our turns in the middle of each other's turn, leap-frogging over slower families. None of us cares to dilly-dally.

Next on the list was a trip to Home Depot for a dehumidifier for Sam's soggy basement apartment, and then a stock-up trip to the Japanese market for staples. Sam is an aficionado of Asian cuisine, and he trotted me around to the various shaker spices for sushi rice, a particular type of Nori that he likes, and a quest for fresh uni. We rounded out the chores with the acquisition of more duct tape to hold Sam's headlights in place.

In other news, my mother-in-law continues to fade. All the Soules were up for another good-bye session round the bedside. Dorothy is in her final furlong, offering gaspy witness to a collapsing temporal reality: her parents, her children, her childhood, her wishes for the near future. "I love you," she whispers. Then: "I want to go home."

We're entering the second month of hospice, and Kirk and his sister are taking turns spending the night with her in her assisted living apartment, the oxygen machine as metronome in the background, its bellows like the blow hole of a whale. It's peaceful, scary, large and human: all of those things and many more. Her imminent death greets us every morning, and each of her children must go through the dance of letting go anew. The exhaustion of that is taking its toll on some more than others. As she shrinks from us, both physically and psychically, we are reminded of the miracle of the body: the tenacity of will and spirit. Myself, I think she has another week in her. She'll hold on until the month of her birth, which is fitting.

So, today is Monday. The holiday week is over. The kids are back in school. My checklist is moderate, and my heart and mind are open to the next thing. I'm trying to purge the jangly sounds in order to hear the voices of my other family: the Messmeirs, and for that, I may need to walk in the woods.

self worth: the never-ending pursuit

Last night, after workshop, I came home to my sleeping husband and I was in the mood to share. Workshop had been full of emotion. With ten of us, it happens sometimes that there's a leak in the boat. Someone feels dissed, or insulted or threatened. I wanted to download all of this with Kirk, the way he does with me sometimes after basketball when a fight breaks out on the court amongst his long-time hoopster friends.

I yakked on about how much I love my writer friends, and what had transpired during the evening's session. I offered the anecdote that one member gave as a way to help the other member who felt shut down. I don't think I was very articulate. It was the red wine mush-brain syndrome. The, "I've been up since 5:30 a.m. and now it's 11, and we have to get up at 5:30 again" thing going on there in the bed. I was trying to convey the relationship between language and emotion, and it was late. Too late.

"That's nice, Honey," said my husband, whose sleep I had interrupted.

This morning though, at o'dark-thirty, as he bounded out of bed to grab his basketball knee guards the way you only do when it's the Friday launch pad day of spring break, he'd thought over the broohaha I had assumed he'd not absorbed.

"I guess I just don't understand the creative process," he said. "What writers go through. Seems there's a lot of suffering."

He wasn't being dismissive, he was just stating a fact: artistic angst just isn't in his frame of reference. He views writing as a pragmatic endeavor. "You have an idea, you outline it, you write it, the end," he said.

"Well, yeah, if you're writing for the intellect, I guess," I said. Then, I went into the whole Dangerous Writing paradigm. "When you go for the heart, you actually have to open yours," I told him. "You have to get vulnerable, and sometimes that's messy."

"You know what I think," he said, "I think there may be too many girls in your writers' group." With that, my lover gave me a kiss and then bounded off in his basketball outfit to get in a little chipping, pushing, shoving and dunking in before work.

Power Play

The other day, after spending some time on my pages, the balance of power between my characters loomed large. Starting with the grandmother character, trickling down through my narrator, via her mother, and then onto my narrator’s niece. My novel is a study in matriarchy. The men in my novel are “shadowy extras on the set” which is the actual descriptor early on. This is a family where the men lope behind the women like pets. They are expendable and mostly badly behaved. This is exemplified in the opening scene, in which a male forebear commits a murder/suicide—a definitive statement from which the tale unfurls.

Dizzy with words and characters and plot points, off I went to the gym, headphones in pocket. On the elliptical machine, there in front of me on telly one, was Tony and gang. Commensurate with my state of mind, this was one of the quintessential power-shift episodes, the one where Little Anthony gets in trouble for being drunk in gym class and is consigned to the school counselor to rule out ADD.

The undercurrent is in backstory, where we learn the root of Tony’s ensuing existential crisis: his first awareness of the family “business.” This is juxtaposed with his own decision to reveal or not reveal the nature of his livelihood to his own kids, and the confession of his philandering ways to his shrink.

The one scene in Melfi’s office unveils, in my mind, the core of the success of this show. There is this stunning confrontation between Melfi and Tony, a standoff of psyches, on the heels of a session where Tony revealed his “love” read: transference, for his therapist. Tony’s need to balm his vulnerability with face-saving machismo is so wonderfully, classically, hyperbolically male. Melfi’s retreat into professional stance when she is clearly intrigued by her patient, is played on the edge. The chemistry between these two characters comes up against their sense of control and power and hunger for winning. It’s everything I want to explore in my work, and left me feeling drained and excited all at the same time.

lost in translation

This week, we have a lovely young girl from Toyamaken, Japan visiting our home. She's a 16-yr-old high school student here on an exchange through the high school where my husband works.

She speaks a bit of English. We here at our house speak zero Japanese. Hand gestures abound. I didn't know I could move my eyebrows up and down that energetically!

I haven't been a host to someone from another culture in a very long time, and this exercise is teaching me a lot about communication, presumption, non-verbal cues, etc... It's making me realize that a lot of my day--really, a lot--is about anticipating disaster and managing expectation. Having a non-English speaker in the house has magnified this. It has magnified my ineptitudes as well. For instance. I'm a really shitty folder. Sheets, towels, Origami, you name it, if the goal is to make something look like it just spent a week in the hamper, I'm a pro. Our house guest is an expert folder. She handed me her dirty laundry and it was presented in this beautiful shape, as though it were a bouquet she was offering. I'm going to labor over the folding of this laundry when I hand it back to her. Or maybe I won't actually hand it to her. Perhaps the best thing to do would be to stack it by her bedroom door. Maybe she'll think my nine-year-old did it that way and I can save face.

So, I'm a terrible folder, BUT, I'm good at flinging things. And the hip check? I have that down pat. Plus, I can scramble through a Safeway, get everything on my list and into my car in less time than it takes to, uh, fold a load of towels.

In order to give our guest an adventure, today we took her skiing. The mountain was more blizzardy than I've ever seen it. My ass was literally lifted off of the ski lift during one gust. Our Japanese girl was quite amazed, though certainly polite, as horizontal ice pelted the few exposed areas of her cheeks. She had enough after three runs down the bunny slope. And who could blame her? I tried to joke in that way that you do when you speak a different language than the person you're joking with.

"Bet you wish you were on a nice beach, eh? Well, we're tough here in Oregon. Very tough. This is what we do for fun!" I said, emphasizing the joke words by saying them way too loud, Trying out hyperbole with my cheek muscles, though, my voice was muffled and my jaw was enshrouded by the neck warmer I'd pulled up to my goggles.

She's off to slumber land now, our guest. The trepidation she carried in her body the last two days (she was very nervous about this impending ski trip, I think), has melted, if, indeed, the ice on the mountain has not. She's relieved and looking forward to the next few days, where she'll attend American high school with the other Japanese students, and as far as "home stay" activities--I think we'll take in a movie tomorrow night. I'm thinking Coraline.

David Foster Wallace

Interesting article on David Foster Wallace in this week's New Yorker. The newest issue isn't online yet, or I'd link to it. If you're a fan of Wallace, or even if you're not, it's an important read. Also in the issue is an excerpt of his soon-to-be posthumously published novel, THE PALE KING-- a book which seeks to argue for the transcendence that comes through abject boredom.

I never could sit still long enough to get through Wallace's verbal hyjinks in INFINITE JEST, but I admire the intensity and energy of Wallace's writing--his unapologetic wrestle with language. His ambitious and arrogant approach to the relationship between thought and word, image and concept, idea and paradigm.

And I say "arrogant" partly to stir the bee's nest, and partly to elevate the notion of arrogance, because, let's face it, writers are a study in chutzpah. Who else would deign to invent a human, give him language and hire him to carry out the stray thoughts and conundrums of wholesale invention other than a writer? Well, maybe George Double-ya, but he's old news.

Wallace suffered. Geniuses tend to suffer. Do you know any geniuses who don't suffer? The New Yorker piece digs into the pain of Wallace's inability to accept praise of his various efforts. He always fell short, in his opinion. Writing drove him mad. It was his salvation. And it drove him mad again.

When I was younger, I was afraid I might also be swept into madness exacerbated by creative endeavors. Fortunately, it was only youthful craziness in my case--being blessed by overall favorable bio-chemistry, my pendulum won't let me swing too far one side or the other. Nevertheless, I find the connection between madness and creativity both scary and fascinating. The piece on Wallace was a reminder of the fragility of the psyche. It left me feeling extremely sad. The despair and hopelessness that squeezes in on incredible artists, like Wallace, like Cobain, like Sexton--stemming their gifts to the generations who might have otherwise experienced transcendence from their art.

dining continental

Last night, at workshop, I brought in a piece where my characters were assembled at the grand family dining table, and I offered a tidbit on dining "Continental Style." Here's the passage I had:
Ursula and I drank goblets of Hawaiian Punch, careful to wipe any telltale stain from our top lips. Now, after a few bites of carefully cut, fussily delivered meat—Grandmother eschewed the trend toward American dining, so we had to put down the knife and transfer the fork to the knife hand after every painstaking Continental bite—it was time to begin the ritual Ursula and I longed for—the supper gossip.

Chuck told me that I had it wrong. That "Continental Style" necessitated keeping the fork and knife in hand at all times, and eating with the "tines down."

My information was incorrect? How could that be!? So I checked it out with the "expert," Ms. Brouwer, and found out that, et voila, Chuck's right and I'm wrong.

Check out this "expert" video below (you'll have to sit through a 15 second commercial on Swifter or something equally stimulating--but it's worth it just to watch Brouwer's etiquette lesson).

Proper Etiquette for Using a Knife Continental Style -- powered by ExpertVillage.com

Ms. Brouwer is the expert, I suppose, but I found this "comment" on the "expert village" website even more helpful to my story, as I believe it embodies my matriarch character's feeling on the matter:

The problem is that the Continental style of eating is rather barbaric, so talking about its "etiquette" is silly. The Continental style suggests that you have to gobble your food down so quickly that you cannot take a split-second to change hands. This lack of pause for switching hands also results in the tendency of the diner to bend over more and more until his head is nearly to the plate and he is just shoveling food into his mouth. In the United States, it's also an affectation --in essence announcing, "I've been to Europe." Therefore, although, as Ms. Brouwer says, it "is what you will find all over the world" (I guess like spitting or flatulence), it is generally not appropriate in the United States and it is offensive for her (from her accent, apparently a European ) to come here to advise us that we are eating improperly and that her way is what is done "all over" the world. In addition, it looks silly to hold the fork upside-down, especially when one must mash peas onto the fork to be able to pick them up, looking like a slob and destroying the fun of eating peas, which is to pop them between the teeth.

on becoming a writer

In October, I will be celebrating my 20th Anniversary of moving to Portland--and, my 20th Anniversary of defining myself as a writer.

Even though I've been writing stories since third grade, it's only after moving to a city where I did not know one person that I formalized this reinvention of myself as a writer. Until then I was a mom. A dietitian. A widow. A young lady. All vague designations that had much more to do with my reflection to the world than my self-concept.

The first Monday after I moved into my one-bedroom apt in NW Portland, two babies in tow, I rented an electric typewriter--a cumbersome machine that weighed about the same as the microwave ovens of the era. The Willy Loman-type salesman who delivered it stayed for an hour or two, while I made him tea, and my babies crawled around and climbed all over him like puppies. He asked me why I was renting this state-of-the-art typewriter, and, just like that, it came tumbling out of my mouth: "I'm a writer."

"Oh," he said. "I thought maybe you were a student."

It didn't take longer than a heartbeat in those days for me to question myself. "Well," I said, "I'll probably need to take a writing class..."

"So, are you published?" he said.

There it was--the need for proof that I was, indeed, a writer, and not a wanna be.

"Not yet," I said, peeling my one-year old daughter off of his pant's leg.

"So, what do you write?"

I had notebooks filled with the answer to that question. But all I did was shrug my shoulders.

A couple of days ago, I was reminded of that exchange when I spoke to a creative nonfiction class at PCC, where my friend Rodger Larson teaches. After I gave my spiel--chatting up the local magazines where I've penned several articles, offering publishing advice and plugging the lo-residency school where I got my MFA, it occured to me that maybe these students just wanted to learn how to write. So I asked them: Why this class?

The mostly 20-somethings in the room, it turned out, were not there to find out more about publishing their work--they were there to learn how to write. Or write better. They came alive during a discourse on electronic media and computer vs notebook. These students were a tribute to the anachronistic medium--they pretty much all were appalled at the demise of the "book" as the main conduit to narrative engagement. It was heartening. Young people who don't blog! I, who just invested in an iphone mostly due to peer pressure and the expectation of immediate response--after all I own a communications business--was humbled.

I passed out a sign-up sheet to snag the students' email addresses, and I had two sections: "I'm interested in workshops on the craft of writing," and "I'm interested in workshops on the business of writing." Business got only two interested parties, and both of those had also signed under craft.

That same lust that I had that first Monday after moving to Portland: to write! Was alive in that Community College group. And about what happens after that? Not so much.

Life. And death.

Much of the marketing copy I write these days includes a directive to find unique ways of saying: "In these tough economic times."

With AIG needing yet another bailout, the schools at risk of early closure, record-breaking unemployment, foundations and philanthropic organizations scrambling, "tough times," hardly covers it. I like the word "crisis" better, actually--but, like single-word sentences, "crisis" has also been used to death. To death? Is that what this is all about? Good old fear of mortality rising up around us like the stink off of a stiff?

All around us, tried and true economic fixes are failing. Zapping the economy with low interest, incentives, stimulus, recovery dollars--none of these infusions has positively impacted the stock market--which just today celebrated its lowest opening bell since the 70's. My husband, a schoolteacher with more than 20 years in the public school sector, was asked to fill out a survey over the weekend. The Beaverton school district stoked the survey with disclaimers, and basically, the query had the tenor of: We have no intention of doing this AT THIS TIME, but, would you leap at the chance to put enough dough in your pocket to buy health insurance for five years if we squeezed your ass out the door next year so we could hire newbies at less than half your salary? Oh, and, by the way, would you commit to being on the substitute teacher roll for X years as part of this deal?

Perhaps the district is worried about culling all the fresh-out-of-school teachers from the sub pool, and wants to cover their butts with the veterans. Hard to say. But one thing is certain, the air is full of people scrambling. Holding on. Not wanting to let go. Fear.

So long, Rocky Mountain News. Bye-bye rising GNP. Fresh out of college, needing to pay off staggering student loans? Hope you like yanking espresso machines. No, wait, Starbucks is closing stores! There goes the neighborhood.

I always get a pit in my gut when I pass by a newly shuttered store or restaurant. It hits me like the dissolution of long-time couples I always thought were still madly in love. Failure is so easily internalized. And yet, I can't seem to keep death out of my writing. Pretty much everything I write involves loss. Love and loss: my two great obsessions.

And now, in my real life, I am facing the imminent death of my mother-in-law, who is literally shrinking from our sight. Witnessing this human downsizing over the last three months has been a compressed version of solid companies collapsing and quickly placed "for lease" signs pasted on to merchant windows. It's a one-way ticket. There won't be anyone new occupying Dorothy's body. She's leaving us bit by bit, forever.

And meanwhile, daffodils poke up. All of the perennial hallmarks: greener grass, longer days, the occasional warm burst of air. Dorothy's children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren continue to live and grow and work and play and love.

Our infinite capacity to create and continue is our only salvation with so much death around us. We will find new ways to do business. To read the news. To ensure education for our next generation. To keep the dying safe and comfortable while we say good bye.

reconstructive surgery

A few weeks ago, as prelude to reading the pages I'd ponied up for workshop, I realized that I'd reached that point where the information I now have about my characters needs to be woven into the earlier chapters.

Typically, we wait until completing an entire first draft before attempting this, lest we act out of premature assumption. I get this, truly I do. But for me, it's like reaching a plateau on a climb up a steep mountain. You know all about false summits, but still, you stop and admire the landscape beneath and retool for the rest of the climb. Perspectives shift, periodically, and imho it's never a bad time to align oneself with this dynamic, shifting perspective.

Not everyone can or should honor this process, I understand, but I know enough about the peaks and valleys of my own creative sensibilities to listen to this whisper in my ear. I'm at the print-out and rewrite stage, and so my forward progress will come from the center, rather than the end for this next little while. As for the word count? It may shrink. But then again, maybe not.

leftovers, anyone?

Disgusting, right? Far more easier to tolerate when the noodles you throw at the wall haven't been steeped in sauce.

In the world of selling writing, strategizing a home for your pages, then following that up with cover letters and evidence and sparkling opening paragraphs is a bit more complex than hurling pasta against the wall, but the outcome is the same. If it's done, it sticks; if it's not, it slides to the floor.

But the "doneness," well, the criteria for that involves many more factors than the level of durum saturation. First and foremost is a keen sense of who your audience is...what they're reading, what they can't put down. You have to play to that. If everyone's on the South Beach Diet, your pasta's going to wind up in your basement, under your Rubbermaid tub of teenage diaries and art projects. Hypothetically speaking.

The market is fickle. More fickle than ever. Tastes have changed, but the impulse to get lost in story has not. The same themes that have always tantalize, continue to do so.

I wrote a novel several years ago. The character was wrestling with mortality, and the decision whether or not to bear a child. It was birth:death, death:birth, side-by-each, with other Maslow's hierarchy considerations sprinkled about for good measure.

The novel remains unpublished, but recently, whilst cleaning the funnel webs from my basement, there it was! A dampened, mildew-infested manuscript daring me to open it up and re-engage. Oddly, upon reading, I wasn't disgusted. It was relatively serviceable spaghetti, there on the page. Ingestible, even.

I've decided to throw it against a few more walls before tossing it into the dumpster entirely. As a timeless, nourishing read, it deserves at least that.

virally we roll along

A short and rather marginally informative piece appeared in publisher's weekly today about social networking and selling books. The article skimmed the relationship between sites like facebook with POD companies like lulu and Scribd.

The upshot? Book peddlers of the old school, beware! You want to create a buzz, you're going to have to embrace the new way of getting the word out. Whether by twitter, by writing on virtual "walls" or by befriending the entire state of Arkansas via a revved up Internet connection, reaching your audience involves more than just writing a damn good book.

the hospital

The other day, as dusk fell on an unexpectedly mild and sunny day in the Pacific Northwest, I felt eager to get back to work, to sink my teeth into something transformative. I wanted to find out what happened to Frances, and her sister, who I've just left in the ICU, in a coma. I was itching to return to Messmeier clan and all of their conundrums and escapades. Alas, I've been buried with work and a few real-life wrinkles, so Frances is frozen on my hard drive. Her poor sister, still in the coma.

As far as the nature of the aforementioned "wrinkles," in an odd art-and-life coincidence, this past week two people in my circle have been or are in the hospital. One good friend had a hip replacement, and now she's recovering at home, looking forward to increased mobility and lessening pain. The other real person in the hospital is my elderly mother-in-law. LOLFDGB is how irreverent doctors refer to her: Little Old Lady Fall Down Go Boom. Luckily, her children have been by her side every waking minute to advocate in her behalf.

Hospitals have largely become warehouses in situations like this. People, reduced to cruel acronyms and sporadic notes on charts. My mother-in-law's clinical profile has rendered her medication-dependent, and her meds have been given late or not at all. Her assessment by a physical therapist was delayed, and her food also delivered haphazardly.

My hip replacement friend had a similar experience. A candy striper answered her call to use the bathroom after 45 minutes, and then proceeded to assist her while conversing on her cell phone, and in the process ignored the fact that she was an orthopedic patient and swung my friend's leg off of the bed as though it was a door she was slamming.

The system, in a word, sucks. Nurses and doctors as individuals can be amazing, caring people, but the economics of our medical system are so grossly unbalanced and dictated by insurance companies, that "care" has been reduced to insurance codes, billing statements and pressure to free up beds for the next LOLFDGB.

Since TSTL has more than a few hospital scenes, and my main character is a med-student-turned-research-scientist who's husband is the senior cost analyst for a major teaching hospital, this ever-saddening reality of acute treatment is something I need to embrace, penetrate and make issue of within the novel.

It's heavy stuff, and universal. I am very eager to sink into the fictionalization of it all, for it is there, as it always is, that the undercurrent of humanity will begin to bubble up for me.

the Internet Sabbath

Amongst the modern, creative, super-busy folk of my acquaintance, the Sabbath has gone the way of fish on Fridays and cloth scapulars. The separation of life and work for a freelancer is particularly vexing. I turn on my machine, and, voila, my inbox cometh.

A week or so ago I made a decision to mitigate the constant flow of incoming by leaving my laptop off on Sundays. Not just turned off, but off of the dining room table, where it is normally stationed, back-to-back with my husband's laptop.

Today, Monday, I'm happy to report that I resisted the "on" button for the most part. I did sneak a peek at the details of a Super Bowl Party evite (I'd forgotten what we were supposed to bring), but turned the machine off right after that. Put the sucker back in its little black tote.

A few times during the day, and a bunch of times during the evening, I had occasion to be bowled over by the familiar craving: the Facebook posts, the blogs I follow, the fat and sassy inbox! But the day felt, well, saner. Much saner, actually. I've resisted the iPhone, BlackBerry thing for good reason. With my obsessive tendencies, I need built-in respite. Constantly communicating, posting, twittering without boundary, for me, is a ticket to psychic mayhem.

In the interest of reportage, here are the things I did instead of being online:
Wrote a thank you note (on old fashioned notepaper)
Sat with my son while he wrote thank you notes
Took a bath
Took my son to the skate park
Went to the book store
Went to a birthday party
Went to a wedding reception
Went to a Super Bowl party until half time and was mesmerized by Bruce's bouncy joints and energy
Came home for the second half and watched, in disappointment, as the underdogs lost in the last minute
Hung out with Kirk and Carson all evening
Read Carson a really cool book on the French Revolution
Ate a lot of food (too much, truth be told)
Snuggled on the couch with Kirk after Carson went to bed
Went to bed before 10 p.m.

In between, of course, I had to quell the pangs of my addiction, but, on the whole, my day was calmer and more centered than any other that week. I guess that's the point. I'll let you know after I answer or corral the eighty emails in my box.

do Web sites sell books?

Unlike many writers who lament the fact that their work-a-day lives steal time from their novel, poetry and short story writing, I love what I do. Extracting the essence of a person, a service, a product, and being part of a team that comes up with a Web presence for that entity is at least as fun as concocting fake people and perplexing conundrums. That is why I was thrilled to run across this New York Times article on Web sites for authors in my due-diligence perusal this afternoon.

(image is from "Sign Language for Infidels" from Sloan Crosley's Web site)
Seems that the verdict is still out on whether Web sites positively impact book sales, but, more and more, they're becoming a vehicle for setting the tone (or brand, if I may be so brash) that surrounds the gestalt of the book and/or the author. As Internet interactivity becomes increasingly a consumer expectation (and, I think we're just grazing the iceberg on this one), the original object associated with prose will need to evolve in order to compete.

Last week Time Magazine offered some food for thought on the digital age impact on books. It's not just about audience preference. As publishers fight to keep their doors open, they are considering revamping the age-old system of the "author advance," as well as the consignment arrangement publishers have with booksellers, where they finance shipping and overstock. Kindle is gaining traction, as more and more readers opt for immediacy, less bulk and greener ways to receive inspiration and entertainment.

Here's the most frightening (to this writer, anyway), development, the Time article points to ways that novels are being separated from the dollar, meaning, everyone's a novelist! Even if the medium is an iPhone, and even if the price is free. Yikes!

To sum up my thoughts on this, taking into consideration the following (from the Time article):"The novel won't stay the same: it has always been exquisitely sensitive to newness, hence the name," and understanding that if it's a choice between commodifying the novel (or short story, or poem etc...) via a stunning and creative Web interface, or just declaring the whole damn channel "open source," and, at the risk of sounding like I'm buttering both sides of my bread, I'm all for sexing up our marketing efforts to ensure that writers aren't forever relegated to the exit ramps of Interstates with their proverbial cardboard signs.

more! more! more!

Five more notable blogs. And, I must warn you, these blogs are included purely for their entertainment value rather than the gravity of their prose or elegance of design.

The criteria here being: voice, humor, originality and reprieve from the doldrums of winter.

In no particular order, five fun blogs:

Chelsea talks smack.

Misconnecting in the city.

Post Secret.

Smart Bitches, Trashy Books.

and my all-time favorite funny blogger, Jennifer Weiner (who, btw, has been blogging longer than almost anyone).

That's all for now!

10 blogs of note

Here are 10 blogs worth following, imho:

Seattle a la mode

Book Square

Ms. Zig Zag

Laila Lalami

Pub Rants

The Gospel According to Marc

cake wrecks

Blue Mouse Monkey

Powell's Blog

Sara Nelson (Publisher's Weekly)

I've been challenged to come up with 15 blogs, actually, but will, for now, leave it at these 10 that I read with relative frequency. I will accept the challenge to find an additional five worthy of note (and time), but for now, above are 10 that I find diverse, entertaining, instructive and full of personality! (And good writing.)

the 44th president takes office

In an hour and a half, we'll all be watching our new president take his oath of office and give his inaugural address. There is a feeling of being on the lip of something—like watching the lunar landing in the late '60's. I was a few years younger than my son, Carson, when we took "one giant step for mankind," but I absorbed the multitude of adult expectation and enthusiasm that filled the air around me, and it is with me still.

Kennedy's assassination and September 11^th were other occasions where the collective consciousness of a people permeated my sensibilities as an isolated figure. Well, maybe not Kennedy's killing, as I was an infant living in a foreign country—but certainly my frame of reference was influenced by that day.

What's different about this event today—than any event I can remember—is that unity has crossed the color barrier. As a six-year-old I joined my mother and younger sister, celebrating the life of a black man who had changed the lives of the people with whom we marched. The people in that marching mass were "colored," according to my father. He did not take part. Having just moved to this country from a very white, albeit internationally so, part of Europe, it was curious to me how people found their way in the pecking order of things. As a foreigner, complete with a Mary Poppins accent, I was keenly tuned to social stratification. Who was "better" than whom? Clearly, the demonstrators were "worse" than the onlookers.

"We shall overcome," we sang along with the colored people. Overcome what? I thought. My accent? My short hair? My smallness? (Having started school a year earlier than my American counterparts, my mother had enrolled me in the second grade, making my scrawniness all the more so.) The blackness of the marchers' skin unsettled me. They, like me, were "different," but I knew that I could lose my accent and grow my hair and get taller. All the things that made me "different" could and would change. I would overcome.

Today, millions of schoolchildren will be watching the Black Obamas as they move into the White House. I doubt that kids are going to feel a sense that the Obamas "overcame." If they feel anything, it'll be good old fashioned envy—like I had for the guy with the giant boots as he placed the American flag in a moon crater. "How cool," I thought—now that my rapid assimilation had allowed me that piece of slang. "How cool would it be to be that guy."

revolutionary road

Since my friend David left for Houston, I'd gotten out of the habit of sneaking off to opening day matinees. Probably a good idea, actually, because Friday is, after all, a WORK day. Well, with the opening of Mendes' version of Revolutionary Road, one of my all time favorite novels, I clocked myself out at lunch time and zoomed off to the downtown theater.

The opening scene was lovely. DiCaprio and Winslet finding each other in a crowded room and connecting deeply, immediately. Perhaps that was the best scene in the film. From there, the movie roared through passionate bursts of emotion and passivity in turn, as the actors wrinkled their foreheads, chain-smoked, drank and generally behaved badly for what was, to me, completely undeveloped and clichéd reasons. Thing was, when Yates wrote the novel in 1961 (the year of my birth btw), questioning the normative world was outré, not cliché. Yates, who suffered from depression and alcoholism, wrote first hand of abject discontent and illusive dreams. DiCaprio, though pretty and functional on the screen, really didn't embody Frank Wheeler the way I'd envisioned the character. And Winslet may have overplayed April, who as I recall, was a bit mousier in the novel.

As I sat there watching the arc play out, I grew anxious. I felt like smoking and sipping a martini and expressing my own angst—which is not where I want to be with my art. Not by a long shot. In the end, I left the theater before the final scene—something I never do. I could guess at the ending having read the book and all, and just talked myself out of enduring it just because I'd paid the $8+ (when did matinees lurch into near double-digits?), and I strode through the clearing, very cool air of January, wishing I could recapture that hour and twenty minutes.

David, when and if the film gets to Houston, give it a look-see and tell me what you think.

aim high

After a tumultuous couple of weather and holiday-challenged weeks, most of us gathered at my house for workshop last night. Because it was the January 1st, the proverbial day of best intentions, we set aside some time to discuss our “writing resolutions.”

Around the table we went, declaring our writing and publishing goals and imperatives for 2009.

Cheryl, Jim, Diana, Chuck, myself, Lidia, Chelsea and Monica all resolved to finish various projects. And, for the most part, sell ‘em.

After our brain dump, Chuck brought up something very important. It’s his opinion that if a resolution doesn’t scare or embarrass you to some degree, you haven’t aimed high enough. You have to open the door to, “Who the hell are you to deign to declare such a thing?”, if you really want to push the boundaries.

I’ve been in workshop with some of these folks for 15–16 years now. Chuck recalled the resolution that precipitated “Fight Club,” when we were sitting around the table at Tom Spanbauer’s house. He was still unpublished, having had “Invisible Monsters” rejected, and he was fueled, rather than discouraged, by a publishing world that declared him too “outre” for the common market. He’d resolved to write and sell a book by year’s end. He claims that his declaration was met by rolled eyes. But then, during the course of conversation, I remember the other thing he resolved all those years ago. It had to do with the meta world of publishing: readers and writers and the power of language.

“I will write something that will change the book industry. I’m going to re-invent language,” he stated. “I want to bring books to a population that isn’t reading.” In retrospect, I think THAT was the object of scoffs all around. The brave statement he made that flew in the face of humility.

But, we all know how that story came out, right? Not only did Fight Club get written and published, but in the year’s that followed, due in large part to Chuck’s hard work and prescience, and a Zeitgeist that formed around his ability to speak to a demographic of non-readers, he set in motion the energy that created a meteoric cult following, and the market for the umpteen books published since.

So. My resolutions: In 2009, I will finish The Secret to Love. I will finish Sustainable Romance. I will build my platform and establish myself as an indefatigable explorer of love on the page.

Happy New Year.

looking into the crackly fire

Ah, the crackle of the fire, the click of the keyboard, the shush of skis on a snowy glade, the fire of whiskey down the throat. It's all good.

Kirk and I have been holed up in Central Oregon, thanks to some very generous folks who loaned us their cabin. We've been skiing, walking, napping. We've made some fabulous meals, relaxed and played and worked a little too. (Where there's wi-fi, there's billable hours).

Last night I dreamt a little bit about my novel. Which is always a good sign, right? When your imagined world enters your nighttime fairy walk? There were vehicles involved, and I think they were driving off of cliffs. Or snow banks.

For years and years, I've wanted and resisted to throw a character into fatal peril via a Christmas tree truck. Seriously, way back in the early nineties, I had this scene all written out. It was near the end of a story, and I'd taken the Christmas holiday and twisted it up with a fatal collision. I deleted the scene, not wanting to tempt fate. After all, I'd foretold several disasters by writing about them: backed up septic systems, marital divide. I wasn't about to ring the dinner bell on a head-on collision with a Christmas tree truck.

But. I must write that very scene. My character who has seizures because of that scene needs her fifteen minutes in ICU. I know all the words, even: she'll have sustained a skull fracture with traumatic subarachnoid hemorrhages, which just so happens to be the cause of death listed on my first husband's death certificate.

My husband wasn't hit by a Christmas tree truck, btw. It was a teenager who'd fallen asleep at the wheel. Decades later, I've still not written a successful scene that captures the mood and the tone and emotion of extreme trauma. I want to do it with this novel. But at the same time, I'm chicken. I don't want the gods to punish me for looking into the fire, y'know? So far in this book there has been a suicide, cancer, stroke, marital infidelity, teenage pregnancy.. oh yeah, and homicide.

One tiny head trauma shouldn't be such a bump in the road with this clan, right? Well, in my novel, the last chapter I wrote ends with "that" phone call. Actually, the phone has merely rung. Nobody's picked up yet. Tomorrow's challenge: the news must be delivered, the siblings must react, the ICU must be visited.

I'll let you know how it goes.

time: quantity, quality and reality

STL update: I'm rounding the corner on 200 pages completed. Which means, I'm about half-done with the third revision of my first draft. (I daisy stitch when I write, always looping back and filling in).

I wish I were further than that, of course. I wish I had completed the third version of my first draft. Alas, it is not so. And tonight, with a prompt from my beloved, I see why. Adding up all the hours in a given week that are "givens": i.e. parenting, income-producing work, bare essential household tasks, all the hours between 6:45 a.m. and 8:30 p.m., Monday thru Friday, are taken up already. And this is without fun stuff or big projects added in. No going to the movies, hiking in the woods, cleaning out the basement.

Thanks to some very generous holiday benefactors, I'm enjoying a rare few days in a cabin. Just Kirk, me and my computer. The kids are elsewhere, and I've reduced my work load to a minimum for this traditional slow down Christmas through New Years, in hopes that I'll produce pages and pages and pages. So far, I've written six. But, the good news is that during the writing of those six pages, I had enough uninterrupted, no distractions time to uncover a big reveal which will tighten the book and meld the characters together in an unexpected and very welcome way. At least that's how it looks at the end of this very relaxed and productive day.

If your Christmas tree lights are on a timer and nobody's there to see them, are they really lit?

Christmas is a stone's throw away, temporally speaking, and we're holed up in Manzanita still, feeling pretty lucky but at the same time, off our pablum in that way that you get when you suddenly find yourself gutted of your routine.

I actually had plenty of time to work and write today, but it came in fits and starts. Most of the day I was being serenaded by my energetic nine-year-old and his friend: toy gun wars, inane sit-coms and action movies, the occasional squabble.

Then there's the food: breakfast, brunch, lunch, snack, snack, snack, dinner, snack. Clean-up around each. The origami attempt (who knew making an iris would be so hard?) The attempt to play Cranium with the youngsters: how could they not know how to make the anagram "Iron Curtain" out of "torn CIA ruin"? C'mon, don't they teach them anything in the 4th grade? (Cranium was the final straw for the husband, whose patience finally ran dry and he disappeared up into the ether of naps and Ann Rice books).

They've closed various highways between here and home. It's wet and cold here, at the coast, but icy, frigid and snow-slammed back in Portland. Our Christmas tree's timed lights are going on and off without us. Our neighbors are graciously filling our cat's food bowl. There's the weird feeling of unearned vacation. The scourge of the self-employed. And my novel not quite halfway done.

Kirk and I ventured into the night, which was actually somewhat starry and Wisemanish. We walked towards the beach, without the aid of the flashlights, which we stupidly left back at the house. Nobody else was out, of course. We stumbled about on the dark sand, narrowly missing the pools of ocean water. The slippery strands of kelp. But I loved the feeling of him right next to me while the enormity of the ocean roared and spit its waves our way. Nature's own timer: tide. Not bound by our work lives, or our prosaic response to the solstice, or the need to have every food group represented in order to call it a meal.

winter solstice treasure-hunting

I am in paradise. Kirk, Carson, a friend of his and myself are holed up at our good friend's beach house in Manzanita while 90 miles to the East ice and snow continue to torment the "so over it" city whence we hail. Even though we're above freezing out on the coast, it's a nasty, cold, wet winter day out here, so mostly, we're inside, nestled near the gas-powered fake fireplace. It's a sort of "I in my kerchief and mom in her hat," vacation. There are videos, puzzles, games and books in every nook and cranny. After dinner tonight we gathered up odd assorted objects and played a homemade version of "blockhead," trying to create precarious towers that wouldn't fall. Kirk and I played a "speed anagram" game called "My Word," which nearly resulted in fisticuffs!

There's lots of food here. And booze. We're set.

Our friends have appointed their house with many a book, and last night I pulled a random one out. A mystery type genre hardcover written by some well known author (well known enough to have her likeness encapsulate the entire back of the cover), and here's a sample of the language describing the main character's viewing of herself on the way to a party:

"As they descended to street level, she assessed her reflection in the metal elevator door and realized that her efforts hadn't been in vain."

It's not that that's a terrible sentence, it's just that it's not that interesting. If this person were in our workshop, we'd probably skewer her for a sentence like that. "Writerly language," we'd scribble on her pages. "Formal tropes."

But, hey, this gal has written, like, 60 books. Who am I to scold her for her received text? But, in my tragically elitist state, sentences like that can keep the lights on in bed for about 5 minutes, and then they begin to compete with other things I might be inclined to focus my attention on.

Ah, but all is not lost with regard to the literary possibilities therein, as we spent a bit of time today in what passes, in Manzanita, for a Goodwill. It's a place called Cart 'em, and it's a treasure hunting venue. Cart 'em is the receptacle for all things no longer desired; a place where locals dump their white elephants and the stuff that doesn't sell at their yard sales, and everything's organized in a 7,000 square foot pole barn. Treasures abound. Kirk gave each of the boys five bucks and turned them loose, giving them prompts to find Christmas gifts and art projects. They returned with armloads of stuff. As for me, I headed to the bookcases. Turns out there were two, count 'em, two copies of Irving's, "A Widow for One Year," a book I'd never read. I yanked it off the shelf, and it delightfully passed my opening sentence litmus test: "One night when she was four and sleeping in the bottom bunk of her bunk bed, Ruth Cole woke to the sound of lovemaking—it was coming from her parent's bedroom."

Provocative, right? Well, it gets better:

"It was a totally unfamiliar sound to her. Ruth had recently been ill with the stomach flu; when she first heard her mother making love, Ruth thought that her mother was throwing up."

Now, how could you not peel off fifty cents after reading that; how could you not buy the book from the junk shop?

Kirk's in bed benext to me with the "Outliers" I gave him as an early Christmas present, and I'm about to find out what awaits Ruth Cole, and I'm hoping that we're settling in for, as they say, a long winter's nap.

take that amazon

Betwixt and between the snow storms, I drove into work today hoping to tip a few windmills, make a little dough and find some time for my novel and/or my nonfiction book.

I did knock some things off my list for sure, but I was quite preoccupied by a situation in the other room. Chuck Palahniuk had arranged to meet the manager of the St. Helen’s Book Shop at the gallery where I work, since it was a half point between the shop and his home, and with icy roads, they split the distance.

Amid several stacks of books, Chuck stood at a cafe table with rubber stamps, ink pads, paint, paint brushes and pens—oh, and sheets of wax paper so it all wouldn’t all smear into oblivion, because when you’re Chuck Palahniuk, and you’re signing stock, and the stock are dozens of hardback Fight Clubs, Rants, Snuffs, Survivors, Chokes etc…you want to make sure that the end recipient knows that purchasing books via an independent bookseller is a good thing.

Chuck was standing at that table for hours, as the book shop manager delivered stack after stack from box after box of his books. 

Chuck is the most disciplined person I know, and his resolve to connect with his readers has paid off.  Go to any country in the world, randomly yank a 25 year-old person off of the street and ask him who Chuck Palahniuk is.  They’ll know, and it’s not just because after he writes a book he throws it off the bridge of the publishing world and waits around to collect his royalty checks.  This writer engages with his fans through his website, where he offers craft classes, and through his readings, where he puts on shows that rival Robin Williams in spirit and energy, and Cirque du Soleil in props.  He sends packages of gifts to fans who write him letters, and he navigates icy roads at Christmas time so his readers can get books that have been signed, sealed and delivered with his very own brand of love—via an independent bookseller in a tiny town northwest of Portland, Oregon.

Avoiding Jacob Marley’s Chain

Looks like the spirit of the season won out after all! Not only that, but we're having a COOKIE MAKING party this evening. God bless us, every one.

grinch mom

As you all know, the holiday season is upon us. This makes it a bit more challenging to follow through on daily word count goals, but I'm determined not to let the distractions of holly and cookies and parties deter me from my plan. Well, most days, anyway.

I'm working on two chapters simultaneously. Chronologically, they dovetail, but in the real life of the characters, the scenes are separated by twenty years. But, as in real, real life, the scenes both take place during the holiday season. The centerpiece of each scene has to do with procuring and setting up a Christmas tree.

Kirk and I agreed that we wouldn't get a tree this year. Well, not a cut one, anyway. I brought home one of those potted numbers they sell at Trader Joe's. The ones small enough to fit in the plastic shopping bags they sell. My nine-year-old looked as though I'd (and I'm borrowing this line from something I read recently) just gave him raisins for Halloween.

"When are we getting the real one?" he wanted to know.

"Um, honey, we're not getting a dead tree this year," I said. I was hoping the word "dead" would conjur up a "green" context and he'd get that this gesture falls into the "recycle," "turn off the water while brushing your teeth," "bike to school instead of taking the car," messages.

But no. He said, his eyes nearly leaking tears, "But we always get a tree."

Not only am I wanting to skip the whole tree thing, but I don't intend on fulfilling his Christmas list, either. For instance, he's not getting an i-touch, nor is he getting a PSP. At least not from moi. Since he confessed to knowing the real deal about Santa, I figure, it's time to interject a bit more home and hearth into the holidays. We'll make cookies, watch old movies, go to the coast and to the mountains. Do things together instead of purchase and fuss and wrap and hustle.

"Well, honey," I said to my son, "You know, there's a recession. That means that we have to be careful about the money we spend. We have to make choices."

"I choose a Christmas tree," he said. "A real one." And by real, he meant cut.

This morning, before he woke up, I was eyeing the corner of the room, weakening my stance. The little Trader Joe's tree does look a little like a potted plant, even with the blue and white lights that weave around it.

Maybe a table top sized tree. One that will go from coffee table to ceiling. In the big picture, what's one more nod to normative tradition?

I wonder how this will play out in my novel.

busy busy busy busy busy busy

If you dialed my number right now, it would go right to voice mail.

Over the past two weeks I've picked up 3 new clients, several more projects from legacy clients, and am still determined to make time each day for my own writing. And then there was the November holiday. And the upcoming December one(s).

Last night, it felt like I ate a bowling ball. Seriously, there was this ache that felt like it had formed around something lead in my upper abdomen. But it went away by this morning, thank God.

Thing is, I thrive on work. The little queue you carry around with you that's filled up the tasks? I love that. Always knowing that there's a new piece of work in line behind what you're attending to at the moment--that's my sweet spot. Right now, that thing is a shower. Alrighty then!

on getting it right

This past week I've had many opportunities to talk about what I do. In a way, I feel like I've been at a trade show, even though I never left Portland. I went to a speed networking event a week ago, then gave a presentation at my small business networking group, PDX Synergy, then met a couple of people at a magazine launch party last night, and today I was on a conference call being introduced as a, gulp, novelist.

My head is spinning with myself. Every time I open my mouth, I feel the urge to reinvent my career. Maybe reinvent is a little strong. Refine, maybe? Or perhaps adapt? Filtering the discussion of what I do with the tools of marketing, occasionally I come up with something new—an invention, you could call it, if you were spinning. Something that hadn't occurred to me before. "I'm the Walmart of words," sprang out of my mouth once. I wish I could press an "unsend" button when shit like that escapes.

But novelist, yes, I like that. What I most like about that is that someone actually sees me as that, even though there are no novels out there by Suzanne Freisinger, Suzy Vitello, or Suzy Soulé, or any of my other monikers. But there will be.

Last night, at workshop, we delved into one of those lamentations that we "novelists" suffer from time to time. One of our members is having, what Tom Spanbauer always referred to as, "failure of spirit." Having spent years on his project, this novelist (who has one published book) is losing heart with his book. The circumstances that propelled the book—the politics and emotions of the day—have changed considerably in the four years he's been writing it. He wants to quit. Not just the book, but writing.

This too shall pass, the group acknowledged. We've all been there. It goes with the territory. There exists for all of us a chasm between our intention and the product. The more time elapses between conception and outcome, the greater the challenge. Especially when we suffer from the effects of our own manic creative drive. Again, I have to reference that Gladwell piece on late bloomers in the New Yorker a few weeks ago. Process is elusive. Trust in our own sense of authority, however, should not be. What allows us to continue to write, to reinvent ourselves vis-à-vis new inspiration, and to fail a heck of a lot of times before getting it "right," is the thing that we must cultivate. This thing lives inside of all artists, and, let me tell you, it's a bit of a tease, and it's very vulnerable. But it has to be, because it's also the thing that will move us toward truth. If we let it.

my day in court

I was a good citizen yesterday. Well, actually, I was a fair citizen yesterday. I arrived at my post as prospective juror only five minutes late, and promptly handed my completed paperwork over at the sign-in desk. Of course, I hadn't read the fine print which mandated I send the paperwork to the court a week ahead of time so they could vet me for Grand Jury status.

Nevermind, they sent me along to the adjoining office where I was processed and given my very cool UPC coded juror badge, held in place by a plastic landyard. The jury pool room was filled up, but there were still some empty seats--and plenty of coffee and pastries. I pulled out my laptop and got to work while a judge addressed us all with the "you're so special" speech they pull out to stir the citizens into a froth of self-congratulation. I was distracted because I couldn't get online. But then the Master of Ceremonies announced the existence of the security code, and I became impatient for him to finish so I could push my way through the other good citizens and retrieve it.

Soon, the m.c. read a list of 35 potential Grand Jurors. They were cleaved from our ranks and, happily, there was now a spot open on the long table where the outlets were. Good thing, because my battery was about to die and I still had a couple of hours of client work to do. I sat next to a guy who was in a similar situation, only he had the balls to be on a conference call! (He was whispering into his cell phone trying not to bring attention to himself and the other members of his call were screaming at him to "speak up").

Another merry band of citizens was soon culled. Then another, and another. Every digit I had was crossed so I wouldn't have to go up and maybe be selected. The last time I was a juror, it was for a rape case, and it was nasty. I kept thinking of catch phrases that would definitely be cause for immediate dismissal during the lawyer q and a, while not being so overtly offensive as to cause the other citizens to look at me askance.

We were dismissed to lunch so off I went, into the beautiful blue sky, me and my rolling briefcase of work. I played downtown "zig zag" all the way to the library to avoid the Green Peace workers on the various corners. Some people congratulated me on my walk, because I still had the juror tag around my neck. I read a few issues of Publisher's Weekly at the library and then bought a salad at a nearby shop and ate it with a plastic fork--which I hate.

That afternoon, they promised more juries would be assembled. I continued working, talked on the phone, went to the rest room, got more free coffee. There were only a dozen or so of us left in the room.

At 3:15, the m.c. got up and announced that due to our diligence (more p.r.) all the afternoon cases had been negotiated out of court. I was trying to make the connection to diligence and settling out of court, but, no matter. We were free to go!

Moral of the story: show up for jury duty late, and with unprocessed paperwork. Enjoy the wi-fi, coffee and donuts.

650 words a day

That's what I need to write in order to finish STL by January 31st. Okay, one day down, 76 to go.

prose therapy

I don't know any writer who gets to just sit in her ivory tower and pursues her art. Do you? Fiction writers, poets, playwrights, we all have other jobs.

Most of my colleagues write reviews or essays or journalism pieces (I do all three). Many of my cohorts are teachers (I am only a teacher as "cameo appearance").

Then there are the ones who, like me, write copy for the lion's share of their day jobs. I invent copy, edit copy, brainstorm copy and fix copy. I wrestle with words for hours in behalf of my clients who are C-level corporate dudes, small business owners, artists, performers, nonprofits and entrepreneurs. At times, this job has proven stressful and tedious, particular when committees are involved, and the individuals who make up those committees can't agree on tone, style and message. But, fortunately, my typical client is a unilateral decision maker with a passion for a product or service.

I love working with people like that. I love it because I get to channel their styles, their personalities and their dreams, and come up with a story. My business partner, Laura, once called me a "prose therapist." What a great title, eh? Aligning words with the essence of a particular business or service?

These days, when the phone isn't exactly ringing off the hook, and clients are making very careful spending decisions, I feel myself increasingly reflective about the best way to finesse copy in service to helping clients grow, or sustain, their businesses. And reflection, at the end of the day, is a healthy response to the chaotic tumble of a catawumpus economy.

Keith Olbermann's thoughts on passage of prop 8

This guy says it very well:

give it up for love!

Hey all you fans of love out there, let's talk about writing...and love...and writing about love.

Here's where I'm going with all of this. I'm writing a narrative nonfiction--a tell some, let's call it--about the way we (and by "we," I mean people over 35) look for, find, screw up, keep looking, and eventually, hopefully, find lasting love.

Now, in 2008, the vehicles have changed but the grail object hasn't. I have my own circuitous story to tell about my hunt-and-gather, and I've been interviewing others about theirs. This book I'm writing has the working title: But Where Will We Put the Tipi? A boomer's guide to romantic sustainability.

With the help of research and a marriage counselor friend, I'm attempting to weave a bit of "expert advice" into the mix, but mainly, my project is a story-driven one, and in service to that, I'd love for interested subjects to share their tales, tips and successes with me!

For this purpose, I have yet-another blog: http://www.sustainableromance.com/ that breaks it down a little more succinctly.

At the end of the day, though, what I really want to do with this book is to light the path for those newly or unsuccessfully on the frontlines of the dating world, particularly those who are intimidated by online dating sites, social networking and meeting potential romantic partners in the myriad new ways that exist.

hail to the chief

I'm wanting to savor today, relish in the optimism that comes from good news, a long-awaited change, and a deep-felt feeling that the people of this country are thinkers, hopers and doers.

I'm not a black-white person, by nature. I don't think in terms of evil and good, right and wrong, or any absolutes, really. Instead, I'm a believer in balance. In Thermodynamic Law. In the innate ability of critical mass to seek survival as opposed to death. Therefore, I'm not surprised Obama won. It was inevitable, because if he didn't, we'd be looking at the spiral towards extinction, and I don't think we're ready for that yet. We're still too young, and we haven't moved into wisdom yet. We haven't accepted, as a species, mortality. And until we do, we're not ready to be obliterated from the planet.

The sum-total of Bush's past two administrations has been the ultimate cautionary tale. From them, we've wiggled out a dark horse, the closest thing our culture has produced as a political prophet since Kennedy. But Obama is no Kennedy. JFK, despite his visionary tendencies and articulateness, was reckless, emotionally immature the victim of an Uber-eager family. I don't see any of that in our President-elect. I did worry, for a time, that he was too green, and that his readiness would best be leveraged four years from now--but given the McCain--Palin debacle, I see that I was being ridiculous.

Our new president will be a thoughtful, careful leader. A role model the likes of which we've NEVER had in office, not in my lifetime (except for Jimmy Carter, maybe, but he was charismatically challenged).

I am exhaling and watching and hoping and happy.

Good job, fellow countrymen!

the all soulé's weekend festivities of love

What a weekend! In deference to fun and frolic, I interrupt "Let's Talk About Writing" to post this collage o' people in attendance at our nuptial confab(s) this weekend.

More after I recover.

Okay, I've recovered. See all the pink? Not an accident. I thought it would be fun to demand that our guests wear pink in honor of our "pink cloud" metaphor--which basically means, we're refusing to trudge down the bleak path of normative muck. Why not extend the fairytale into the golden years? Why not wear the color associated with new and fresh and pageantry? Besides, this was "turn the clock back" weekend, which causes suns to set a half-hour or so after lunch. Plus, the rains have returned.

But, who cares? I'm in love!

production

A few of my writing colleagues are experiencing the faucet syndrome. The days grow cooler, kids have more predictable, structured schedules, and, voila, word counts go up. Every fall, it's the same thing, a manic energy visits the muse and at workshop, all of the sudden, everyone has pages. It's pretty terrific, actually. But, in looking at my own efforts during a manic writing phase, I'm led to question how much of the output is keepable. For me, a sudden outburst of writing often has that throwing spaghetti to the wall feeling. Somewhat experimental and unchecked. The results of such a period often leads to new places and projects, but the writing itself is raw and untenable. I'm often shocked with how many grammatical faux pas and spelling errors are in pages I've slapped out in a hurry. Usually, though, there's the kernel of something worth exploring further—but it's almost as if someone other than me put it there. As though a little faerie visited my hard drive and waved her little stick.

That's where the long dark days of winter come in.

mouth of babes comment of the week

My 9-yr-old son has been noticing a new discernment in my consumerism lately. At the gas station the other day, after the attendant asked if I wanted a receipt, he queried:

"What would you do with a receipt? If you changed your mind, would they take the gas out of the car?"

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.