Category: Blog

Deadlines and Lifelines

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So she was considering in her own mind (as well as she could, for the hot day made her feel very sleepy and stupid), whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies, when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her.

There was nothing so very remarkable in that; nor did Alice think it so very much out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself, `Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late!’ (when she thought it over afterwards, it occurred to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural); but when the Rabbit actually took a watch out of its waistcoat-pocket, and looked at it, and then hurried on, Alice started to her feet, for it flashed across her mind that she had never before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to take out of it, and burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it, and fortunately was just in time to see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge.

Of course you all know that’s from the opening of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. It’s a great set-up. Alice, the human, is feeling sleepy, stupid and lazy. The bucolic wildlife is racing around with important appointments.

It’s clearly unnatural, a rabbit with a watch, running late. That’s how we know the world is turning upside-down. If the rabbit was chewing on daisies and Alice running late, that’s perfectly natural.

Or is it?

Allison posted an interesting blog the other day about the struggling writer and spousal support. Not necessarily financial support, though that’s part of it. More the whole “does he support your writing” question.

And, yes, this is going to be totally about women writers and their male companions.

One thing Allison mentioned is the spousal deadline. This is surprisingly common. I can think of five women offhand whose men have “allowed” them to try the writing thing for a given amount of time, after which, if they haven’t succeeded, they must stop.

No, not all of these women are writing instead of working, though some are.

No, not all of these women are unpublished; they just aren’t necessarily raking in the money.

I suspect this comes from a number of things. Our culture and the male members of it, in particular, are heavily fixed on goals and deadlines. It’s possible these guys think they are being supportive, by helping to create an outside deadline, a framework for measuring success. I think there’s also an element of the husbands feeling like they need to curb the frivolous activities of their wives. Don’t tell me that’s not true: I’ve heard men say it.

We do it to ourselves, of course, too. One gal I know gave herself a year to become a successful writer. Yes, that’s from typing her first word. When she didn’t make her goal, in a fit of despondency she asked me how long I’d given myself.

As long as it takes,” I told her.

As I’ve mentioned, everyone right now is about NaNoWriMo. A writing friend asked me if I was participating and I told her I don’t need more pressure in my life. She said she does — she needs the motivation. She is also one who’s published with an epress, has two young children and whose husband has asked her to stop. A big craze right now is a program called Write or Die. It’s a program that monitors how fast you’re typing and buzzes you if you slow down. If you stop, it will actually start deleting your text.

It all comes down to the eternal question of how you measure success, I suppose.

It was funny to me, the friend who asked how long I’d given myself, because I’ve already acheived some writing success by several measures. Not ones that she thought were relevant, but ones that are important to me.

I live my life by deadlines. As most Americans do. My work deadlines are the kind that, if I don’t make them, I can jeopardize a $24 million contract. For me, writing is a different world from that. I can see a day when, if I’m making approximately my salary by delivering a book on time, then that deadline will matter.

Until then, I’m a fan of write and live.

Paint by Numbers

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Someone called me a fashion plate last week.

Of course, I’ve also been called a trophy wife, which is even farther from the truth.

An actual “fashion plate” was the illustration placed in catalogs, newspapers or magazines, from the days when pictures were carved into metal plates and the image transferred with ink to paper. These then were the ads for clothing — the example of how something could look.

It’s easiest, when you first start trying to dress nicely, or more stylishly, to simply copy the images. Look at how the pros assemble an outfit and show your sincere admiration by imitating away. This can be daunting, however, unless you have an unlimited budget. That’s when you have to get creative. Not necessarily Molly Ringwald, I-can-sew-a-gorgeous-prom-dress-out-of-this-cheap-nasty-one-and-that-vintage-one creative, but being willing to play with clothes.

It’s really about being willing to try stuff out, being willing to take a risk. Combine separates and accessories in way that comes from your own head and not from a picture. And the thing about taking risks is that sometimes other people won’t approve. Much like being perceived as a trophy wife.

It was an older woman who called me that — in her late 50s/early 60s and frumpy with it. I mentioned that David is older than I am (by seven years) and that my stepchildren are now grown and I skipped the having babies part (but I helped raise them since they were five and seven years old). She looked at me — and I was dressed up for the conference, with my eye-catching dress and black wide-brimmed hat — and declared: “You are a trophy wife!”

Arm candy. Oh yeah.

The thing is, people are going to apply their labels regardless. For all that, maybe “fashion plate” is a decent one to get.

Twixt Thee and Me

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It’s always interesting to me which posts get people’s attention.

Or their responses, at least. Which I tend to assume is the same thing and that may not be necessarily so.

But my last post stimulated quite a few reactions. Several people commented. More sent me IM or email notes. The general consensus among my support network is that I was grumpy and had been on the road too long. Reading back over it, I suspect it was my tone that came across grumpy more than the content.

Be that as it may.

It was funny to me yesterday, as I took my three plane flights home, wending my way back west, that the messages and comments on my blog post (including one from my mom showing that Barbara Kingsolver took seven years to write her latest) were comingled with a discussion thread on one of my writers’ loops regarding this article which trashes Dan Brown’s new book. And someone else contributed the Wikipedia link to Literary Criticism of The Da Vinci Code that trashes Dan Brown in general. And an address by Stephen King where he implies that Dan Brown is the intellectual equivalent of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese.

Stephen King has been cutting a bit of a wide swath lately, as I’ve mentioned before. It’s ironic to me that he feels comfortable making pronouncements on who writes well and who doesn’t, when I’ve often heard King’s success held up as the perverted triumph of genre over literature.

I know you’ll be shocked, but I don’t have much of an opinion there.

I’ve read a bit of King and didn’t love it, but then, I don’t really read much horror. I have never read Dan Brown, but I liked the movie fine. I liked Meyer’s Twilight books — I thought she did interesting things with the stories and she kept me hooked.

What I see happening is the “win by putting others down” trend. Also known as, for those of us who labored under grading curves, “it’s not so much that you succeed, but that others fail.” We’ve all known people like this. People who attempt to pump themselves up by putting others down. If King can sneer at Dan Brown and Stephenie Meyer, then he’s clearly not part of their club. I remember a while back when Anne Rice was big on letting people know that her books were being taught in schools, as a way of legitimizing them.

Keena commented on my last post that it’s the genre writers who become literary giants in later generations and she has a point there. Think Jane Austen, Tolkein and Arthur Conan Doyle.

And we’re witnessing a battle now: the literary writers facing precipitously declining sales, fighting to assert that THEY are the true writers, and the genre writers, fighting amongst themselves for the best seat at the mad tea party, all the while pretending they don’t care what the literary types think, yet secretly wishing to have that level of validation.

In the end, I don’t think it matters if you take one month or ten years to write a book. Your process is your process. What matters is what you’re trying to do. If you want to bring in the money, ten years is a stretch unless you’re living on decent royalties. If you’re going for art, maybe you don’t believe a few months is enough for that to occur.

But I’m pretty sure you won’t sell more books by trashing other writers. Just sayin’.

NaNoNoMo

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Three things.

Mary Karr, who used to be one of my writing heroes, until I wrote to her, sent her MY memoir/essay collection shortly to be published, and asked her for a blurb, and she didn’t bother to answer. Of ALL the people I asked for blurbs, she was the only one to totally blow me off.

Not that I’m bitter.

At any rate, I felt special because I loved “Cherry” as much as “The Liar’s Club” — and I think I’m about the only person on the planet who did. But did Mary care?

No no no.

So, here I am, five days longer than I wanted to be in a Hampton Inn under renovation in Lansing, Michigan, where I get a USA Today that I don’t want, every day outside my door. And here’s an article on Mary, and her new book “Lit.” Where she says, and I quote: “There are too many books. Most writing is mediocre. Most memoirs are mediocre. Quality is rare.”

Wow.

Thanks Professor Karr. Way to attempt to perpetuate the rule of academia. I won’t mention how EVERYONE ELSE thought “Cherry” fell short of mediocre. Perhaps that was yet another book too many.

(I could point out here that her last book was pubbed ten years ago, in 2000, but that might be petty, so I won’t.)

So, I read that this morning. And thought about it off an on all day.

Not that I’m brooding.

Then, this evening, one of my old friends posts on Facebook “Howcum I just lost interest in my own book? O. Could it be because I’ve been writing it for EIGHT years?” Old literary-type friend. From my writing group of many moons ago.

Meanwhile…

All of my genre-writing-buddies, both pubbed and unpubbed, are heavy into NaNoWriMo — National Novel Writing Month. The idea is to take the month of November and write 50,000 words. Which is really novella length, but who’s counting?

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been asked if I’m participating. There are buddies. And groups of buddies. Word count scales, twittering and lashing one another on. The genre writers welcome the opportunity to churn out another manuscript in a month’s time or so.

I’ve said no.

Mainly, because I tried it last year and, while I got 36,000 words that I mostly like, I don’t need the additional pressure. And I’ve been telling them that I like my process.

Which is the truth. I do like my process. Which I’ve spent the better part of a decade refining. For better or worse.

As usual: I fall somewhere in the middle.

I wish to spend neither eight years nor one month writing a novel.

Sometimes I feel like a pariah from both sides of the camp, neither of which acknowledge the other. I think Mary Karr is pretentious and full of shit for saying such a thing. I also don’t believe the fast-draft process, novel in one month thing, works very well.

And someone save me from spending eight years on one book. Or worse, ten, and being snooty about it.

Coincidences and Concatenations

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Two things.

We have these big windows that reflect the sky. I’ve thought about putting those silhouette dealies on the glass, so birds won’t run into the glass. But so far, only a couple of birds have hit a window and then only glancingly.

One little sparrow decided to battle his image for part of an afternoon, but I figure he has his own issues.

But Halloween morning, I was sitting at my desk behind one of these big windows, when a bird flew straight at my face and slammed into the glass. I yelped at the shock, then sat stunned as the Cooper’s hawk that had clearly been on the bird’s tail drew up and landed on the bird feeder with a few hops to adjust. He assessed the situation, then flew off. Below me, the little bird twitched. I hoped it might recover, but the arrow of liquid where it’s bowels had released pointed to a different ending.

It had broken its neck instantly, panicked to escape the hawk.

The irony to me is that it died anyway. And the hawk didn’t get its meal either.

When we picked up our rental car in California, the week before last, I commented to my colleague that, since our car was in slot B-17, that now the song would be stuck in my head.

She, of course, had no idea what I was talking about.

So I had to sing it for her. “Please, Mr., please… don’t play B-17, it was our song, it was his song, now it’s oohhhhhh-ver.” She’d never heard it. I had no idea when I’d heard it last.

Then, tonight, on my third week of business travel in a row, I’m in the grocery store at 10 o’clock at night for a pit stop with my other colleague (okay, we were buying wine) in our journey from the Lansing airport to the Hampton Inn that will be our home for the week. Guess what song comes on the background music. And I knew what it was from the opening measures.

“I don’t ehhhh-vah want to hear that song again….”

It was just too bizarre.

What does it all mean? Nothing, no doubt. We flee one thing, only to crash into another. We remember an old song and it chases us to another place and finds us again.

So be it.

Blessed All Saints Day

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No trick-or-treaters for us last night. Nary a one.

Which was as we predicted, actually.

And surprisingly, it didn’t make me sad at all. Now, I’m the girl who has dreams about missing Halloween. That suddenly it’s upon us and I’ve failed to decorate. Or that it happened and I missed the event entirely. Of course, I also dream about missing Christmas and forgetting to buy presents, etc. I’ve already told you about my dreams of leaving cats to starve and die of neglect in hotel rooms. It’s easy to see where I live.

Regardless, I love the whole trick-or-treating gig.

But the new house is in the countryside where there are no streetlights. It’s dark and a bit wild, with the houses spaced far apart. I didn’t really expect any costumed visitors and wasn’t surprised when they didn’t show.

We did go hiking in the afternoon, though. A gorgeous sunny day. The pic above is of our valley. You could even spot our house, if you knew where to look. What a fabulous treat to go on a short hike up a hill, a fifteen-minute walk from our home, on Halloween.

It makes up for the year I had to wear a parka over my hula girl costume. It truly does.

Not So Zen

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I suspect that I’m frivolous.

Or shallow, at the very least.

Easily swayed by immediate gratification.

There’s this whole idea that if you enjoy the gratification of doing something well, then that’s ego and dangerous to continue.

So, for example, knife-throwing. I know! Exactly what you were thinking, too, right? If you’re truly Zen, or one with the Tao, or enlightened or what have you, then you enjoy the moments that you miss the target just as much as when you hit the bulls-eye. The thrill of a perfect throw means nothing, if you’re truly throwing the knife from a pure heart. The act of throwing is everything. The end result nothing.

Clearly I’m not so enlightened.

I confess to loving the gratification. And I find myself gravitating towards whatever’s giving me the most gratification at any given time.

Right now, it’s work. I’m workin on a project that I helped to create. That I set out years ago to help envision, hire the personnel for, plant the seeds in peoples’ ears — kind of a gross mixed-metaphor there — and coax into life. And people treat me like I’m insightful and they want my expertise.

I know I shouldn’t want it.

But I do.

A couple of areas of my life feel less gratifying right now. One I’ve labored at and some people are unhappy and others are happy for things to go smoothly. Which isn’t a recipe for feeling appreciated. You get flak from the one group and nothing from the other.

And we all know that writing is one of those things where you labor unnoticed for 99% of the time and are showered with admiration for the other 1%. Starving in a garrett and all that. Much more drama than anything else.

There’s supposed to be a pleasure in knife-throwing that exceeds the desire for a perfect result. Peace in the moment. Joy in the attempt.

But, oh my, I just love it when I hit the bulls-eye.

Curse of the Interwebs

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I’ve been at 97% for nearly two weeks now.

Twelve days, to be precise, including today. Yeah, it’s one of those so-close-and-yet-so-far things.

I’ve edited, redrafted, rewritten and composed 302 pages of a projected 310. I know — I should be able to finish this in one day of solid work.

Alas.

It’s been a long day for me. Long enough that it’s nigh on midnight on the clock where I am, later by the clocks back at home. And long enough that I started this blog post this morning on the airplane, then decided I should be working on that last three percent instead.

Now I’m at 98%. Which feels pretty damn great.

And my heroine passed the big test in an unexpected way. (No, neither of us had any idea how she was going to solve the current riddle.)

1% on on a three-hour crowded flight to Seattle. Worth the price of admission.

When I landed, happy with my progress, somewhere around 200 email messages had filled my Blackberry. I loop I’m on had blown up with one unhappy person saying wild things — “flaming,” by the current lingo. I ended up in baggage claim with my laptop perched on my lap, my Blackberry in hand, trying to do several things at once on each.

My mom keeps asking me, if the airlines get internet, will I use it?

I’m thinking, over a thousand words written, another 1% closer. Coincidence?

No no no…

Oral Surgery

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This is actually a setting October crescent moon. Held by an unstable hand. Turned out kind of cool, actually. I took this after our first party in the new house, at which I drank a fair amount of wine. Hence the unsteady hand.

The serendipity of over-indulgence.

Yesterday was all about getting ready for the party. Which made a good break for me. No working on the book. No working on work. No blog post, even. No, yesterday was packed with buying food and booze and getting the house clean.

Which, apparently I hadn’t really cleaned since we moved in.

That doesn’t seem like such a big deal, except we’ve been here two months now. And that’s a little long to go. We needed some rebound time from having our house on the market for six months, show-ready all that time. But, that was plenty long enough.

So the mundane tasks demanded my attention and that was okay.

Except for the kitty medical emergency.

I was vaccuming away, only ten minutes behind my intended in-the-shower deadline, when David came in carrying Isabel. I thought he’d captured her before the party, so I nodded and smiled when he said something to me.

“She’s got a cholla burr in her mouth!” He said louder.

Oh. OH!

I turned off the vaccum cleanerand went over to him. Sure enough, there was a big cholla burr hanging off her lip. She was frothing and salivating and I quickly yanked it off.

These things are nasty – big and spiky. Every one of us has stepped on one now. They hurt like hell, but they come out fairly easily. Even Zip, who’s not that bright, has learned to yank them out of his paws with his front teeth and spit them out again.

But, though, the cholla burr came off Isabel’s lip quickly enough, she jumped out of David’s arms, still licking and frothing, and raced for the sanctuary of the bedroom.

“She’s got one inside her mouth, still.” David said.

So, we dug her out from under the bed. I held Isabel on her back on my lap, as I sat on the floor, back against the bed. From my angle, I could see the burr embedded in the roof of her mouth. David held her paws and I tried to grab the thing, but couldn’t get a grip. White fur was flying everywhere.

Meanwhile the guests are arriving in 45 minutes, I haven’t finished the vaccuming and I’m filthy from house-cleaning.

While David fetches the tweezers, I’m thinking about how we could put a note on the door while we take her to the vet, which may or may not be still open this late on a Friday afternoon. Isabel is alternately hissing and pitifully meowing.

I got closer to a grip with the tweezers, but everytime I touched it, Isabel would yank away in pain. So David got a beach towel — the big one we bought in Culebra with the multi-colored giant polka-dots on it. We wrapped her up in it, so only her little white furry face poked out.

This time when I pried open her mouth, we could hold the mummy-cat steady. I yanked that burr right out.

Isabel went to the closet to recover her composure, then slept the rest of the afternoon and evening.

I finished the vaccuming — including a redo of the bedroom — managed to clean-up and cute-up before the first guest arrived.

Fortuntately, no one was right on time.