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.

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.