Month: June 2009

Being Mindful

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I notice the way my mind works has changed over time.

Is that odd? And no, it’s not a dementia thing, as some snarky individuals have suggested. I notice it mostly with writing and I suspect it’s a product of the last two years of concentrated fiction writing. Not just fiction but the fantastic kind. (As in fantasy, though I hope it’s also excellent.)

What I notice is I have homonym issues more lately. I type “no” instead of “know.” I recently did “knight” instead of “night.” Bizarre replacements where I know perfectly well what the word is, but something in my head replaces it as I type. This always happens when I’m creating, typing in a blur of speed to get the scene on the page.

There’s an amazing book that my mother discovered and gave to me. (There, that makes up for saying I only planted St. Joseph to shut you up!) It’s called My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor and is about a brain scientist’s experience with a devastating left hemisphere stroke. The book is easily the best I’ve ever read for a firsthand account of the difference between left and right brain thinking. I’m a brain scientist myself, in my winding educational/career path, and Taylor made me understand all the rules I knew about division of labor in the brain.

What the book affirmed for me, is that creativity comes out of the dreamy right brain. That side is timeless, non-linear, unconcerned with rules and boundaries. The left brain is the one that tracks how long it takes to cook a hamburger and reminds me of my lists of things to do, and what order they should be in.

I was discussing the revision process with two writing friends lately. The essayist proposed that revision is simply like refining a grocery list, such as moving items in similar parts of the store into the same group. The fiction writer agreed somewhat, but emailed me a picture of her dining room table arrayed with notecards for her current novel: her book in spatial form.

I stymied all further discussion by trying to describe how it felt to me these days. Lately my novel feels like a glass globe I hold in my head. I tweak the colors inside, moving the shapes and swirls around.

Very right brain, I suspect.

Thus, the homonym thing. My right brain doesn’t care for the letters, only the sounds and shapes. My essayist’s left brain writing gets engaged more now in revision. Even then I find myself sinking into the globe’s spell. I’m supposed to be reading out loud, to hear the voices. Sometimes pages go by and I realize I’m altering in silence, absorbed in the colors.

Dreaming.

A Place for Our Stuff

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We began packing it all in this weekend.

As instructed. It seems there’s a minor denotative difference between packing up and packing it in, but the sense of retreat seems the same to me. And it does make a difference to begin packing ourselves up. The move seems really real now. After more than a year of planning, of applying to schools, of applying for visas, of buying houses even: filling the cardboard boxes with my stuff really brings it home.

I’ve lived in Laramie now longer than I’ve lived anywhere. Certainly longer than I’d planned to. I’ll just hit 21 years by the time we load the moving van. Long enough for anywhere, really. It’s a bigger stretch for David who’s never lived outside of Wyoming in his whole entire life. For those at home keeping score, that’s 50 years. He’ll be the first among five siblings to move out of state, too.

My moves before seemed so much simpler, first dictated by the waxing and waning of the academic cycle. Then it seemed I packed up and moved from one grad student dig to another. There was a simplicity to my life then, when I could load pretty much all of my possessions into a Honda Accord hatchback.

Moving excites the desire to return to that. As I contemplate moving each item, its relative value gets weighed against the space it takes up, the gasoline cost to transport it, the theoretical space it might occupy in the future. Right now, a lot of it seems not all that valuable.

I’ve been posting to Freecycle a lot. What a wonderful thing it is! Within an hour it’s gone. To someone who will actually use it, too. A blessing, truly.

The houses in Victoria have no storage to speak of. Our new house has a five-foot high storage space on the lowest level. I hesitate to call it a basement. Less than a basement, more than a crawl space. Our realtor enthusiastically pointed it out as a place to keep our Christmas decorations. I didn’t add, “and all the other stuff I’ve been dragging from place to place since college.”

When people ask us why the houses in Victoria don’t have basements, we waffle. David says, “because the island is a huge hunk of granite.” I repeat what our realtor said, “they just don’t.”

Maybe, really, it’s because they don’t have so much stuff.

Men’s Men

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I’m coming out of the closet and declaring to the world: I really don’t like Football Guys.

This is not to say that some of the men in my life haven’t played football, on official school teams, even. But I feel safe to say that they were not Football Guys (Hominus footballis).

This morning there was a pack of them at the Starbucks counter. Wearing their Cowboy football outfits, hulking shoulders straining the shirts, coach-type guys in civilian clothes yukking it up with them. They surveyed the world with macho good spirits, believing they are the gods of their doman. Oblivious to the irony of the caramel macciatos (macciatoes?) cradled in their large hands.

I can’t really explain why they irritate me.

Maybe it goes back to those formative years of high school. The Football Guys were my antipode: the popular brawn to my outcast brain. They lumbered through the halls with witless, charming smiles, sure of their place in the world. A place won through size and aggression.

Both of my men who once played football didn’t stick with it and bailed before the later years of high school, which I think demonstrates their enormous good sense. David quit because of the physical damage. And because basketball was more fun. He still has neck problems from ramming himself into those tackling dummies. Kev will probably argue with me about this post, but he bailed for theater in the end, which was infinitely sexier to me.

I know there are the gals who go for the Football Guys. But I was never one. I wasn’t much of a cheerleader, either, and bailed on that after my twelve-year-old go at it. Chanting and doing the hokey-pokey while the boys played just didn’t seem like that much fun. Especially when the angry male coaches yelled at us for being in the way.

I suppose the Football Guy epitomizes to me everything that is unattractive in the male. Where men vilify the extreme female: the vanity, the irrationality, the emotional manipulation, I dislike the brutality, the extreme competitiveness, the machismo-fueled ego. I know football players can be smart men, but I think that’s not a part of themselves they’ve chosen to develop. Truly, not all football players become Football Guys.

It’s interesting to me that American football hasn’t really caught on with the rest of the world. It remains a sport that is uniquely ours. One wonders why that would be. Why we’re the only culture that thinks it’s neat.

Why are we the ones stuck with the Football Guys?

Letting Go

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No, we haven’t sold our house yet.

Amazing how many people ask us that. On an astonishingly regular basis. I’m getting to the point where I want to say, BELIEVE ME, I will announce it to the world when we get an offer! I really feel for those women whose family and friends ask “Are you pregnant, yet?” We know you love us, support us, want only the best for us. But really, you are not helping.

At some point you’re doing everything you can and you just have to wait.

Here we are: waiting.

Today we stopped by our real estate agent’s office though. Dropped in on her after lunch. She’s so fabulous that she doesn’t care. She’s the best in town. I implicity trust in everything she’s doing.

“We just came to nag,” I tell her. “So you can tell us not to worry.”

And Donna hesitates at this point. I’m sure she’s going to tell us to worry. That she’s lost confidence. Maybe stopping in to see her wasn’t such a good idea.

“I don’t want you to think this is freaky,” she says, and hesitates.

Okay, “freaky” isn’t “you’ll never sell your house in this market.” I’m betting she’s going to suggest we bury the St. Joseph upside down in the back yard and I’m opening my mouth to tell her we already did, if only to shut my mother up.

“But there is no reason your house isn’t selling,” she says. “The gardens are gorgeous right now. When we show the house, it just shines. Everything is perfect. You should have an offer by now.”

She takes a breath.

“What I want you to do is think about letting go.”

She goes on to tell us a few stories: the woman whose house wouldn’t sell in the hottest market ever, until her dog died and she confessed relief, because she’d been sure the dog would never survive the move; another woman whose completely updated house could not be sold and who emailed or called Donna every day telling her how no one would want it and it would never sell.

“I can’t explain it,” she says, “but I’ve seen it happen, over and over.”

Donna, freaky theory or no, is likely right on. When we first put the house on the market, I wrote a blog about how much I hated it. We have loved this house. Loved, loved, loved it. (Note my dutiful use of past tense.) We knew it was our ideal house the first time we saw it. We loved every minute of living here. We wouldn’t sell it, if we weren’t moving away.

But we ARE moving away. Away to Canada, to British Columbia, to Victoria. To a beautiful new house that we’ll love living in. It’s time to let this one go. It belongs to someone else now — we just don’t know who yet.

To prove it, this weekend we’ll start seriously packing. We’ll take our favorite stuff down off the walls and box it up. I’m depersonalizing. Withdrawing myself from the lathe and plaster, from the original wood trim and leaded glass. The reflecting pond we made, with its carefully balanace ecosystem, will delight someone else. I’m trading it all in for our new life. My pound of flesh. It’s a price I’m willing to pay, a sacrifice I’m willing to make.

My life lately is all about cutting, have you noticed? Not my forte at all.

But I’m getting good at it. Let it all go. What remains is the best part.

Where the Deer and the Antelope Waddle

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Lots of whining lately about all the rain.

Understandable. It gets old. Those of us in the sunny West rely upon our average of 330 sunny days each year. The last two weeks of nearly unceasing rain has people making grumbling remarks about Seattle. They also make absurd statements like “Since when did Denver get a monsoon season?” This from people I went to high school with. Who have lived in Denver for 40+ years. They should know better.

Before the drought, our Junes were always cool and rainy. They’ve forgotten.

Memories are short. And subjective experience seems to be the shortest. We’ve been in a drought for ten years now. An entire decade. Did you remember it had been that long. I didn’t — I’d been saying eight years. Now I’m wondering which two years I lost… At any rate, this decade-long drought in the western states has exceeded the infamous Dust Bowl.

Nobody seems to know this.

Of course, we don’t have the icons of that drought. The enormous dust clouds. The ragged people fleeing the farms to wander the cites with their belongings on carts. Technology allows us to irrigate, to control the flows of the rivers, to truck in water. Instead of losing livelihoods, our urban lives are impacted by hot, sunny days, perfect for recreation.

Now people are saying they miss the drought. They’re right — there isn’t much of one at the moment. (That link updates weekly, so if you’re reading this later, the map might be different. But what it shows as of June 9, 2009, is small patches of abnormally dry soil in the West and huge swathes of soil with normal moisture — it’s a miracle, really.)

It was like this, in the before time. I remember the summer I turned 16. I babysat for two kids and we would ride our bikes in the chilly rain to their golf and tennis lessons. When I was young, I used to write in my books the date I finished them. (No, I don’t know why.) I finished Little House in the Big Woods on June 8, 1974 and I noted that it was snowing. With an exclamation point. Cold and rainy, yes — even then snow in Denver on June 8 was remarkable.

Of course we’re all tired of the rain. We want to sit on our patios. We want to play in the mountains and soak up the western sunshine. We’ve had enough of cold and want summer already.

But in all the wanting for the warmth, let’s take a moment to give thanks for the rain.

One In a Dozen, Maybe?

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Facebook has all these silly quizzes. Some sillier than others. All great for wasting time in amusing ways. Terrific displacement activity.

So, this morning, while I was “deciding what to blog about,” which translates as sucking on Starbucks and screwing around on the ‘net, I took a quiz on how common my name is.

There are approximately 171,636 people with the last name Kennedy. This Surname ranks the 130 most common in the United States. There are an estimated 87,363 Females with the last name “Kennedy”. However, the first name Jeffe was not found in our database meaning that you are pretty unique. It is estimated that there are less than 5 people with your exact name in the United States.

Heh. “Pretty unique.” As opposed to “very unique” or “more or less unique.” The thing is, my friend Marin Untiedt got a definitive three women with her name.

No, I didn’t try plugging in Jennifer Kennedy. I don’t want to know. Which is part of the reason I never use Jennifer.

It feels like a constant battle though, trying to use “Jeffe.” People get confused, which they don’t like. I used to introduce myself as Jennifer first and then convert people to Jeffe, but many refuse the converstion and then I don’t know who they’re talking to. So I’ve gone to just introducing myself as Jeffe and forging through the first difficult exchange, which consists of repeating my name back and forth.

[Me] – Hi, I’m Jeffe
[Them] – Confused look
[Me] – Jeffe Kennedy
[Them] – Jeff?
[Me] – Jeff-E. Like Jeff, with an eeee on the end
[Them] – variety of responses at this point:
Like on Family Circus?
Like the peanut butter?
Isn’t that a man’s name?
Jackie Kennedy?
Jessie?
Is that short for something else?

Inevitably if I ‘fess up to that last question that Jeffe is short for Jennifer, they’ll gratefully run for the familiar and use Jennifer. It’s almost pathological. Interestingly, people not from the US are much more flexible about it and will assimilate “Jeffe” without a blink. So I know it’s not that hard.

The other thing I’ve learned is to give people a reason for it. If I explain that my dad made up the nickname and that he died when I was three, that I feel like this is a piece of him that I can carry around with me, they soften and agree. If I say there are ten million Jennifers out there, they act like I’m uppity, trying for a different call signal.

When I was in high school, this group of girls who didn’t like me decided to call one of their own Jennifers by my nickname. I’m not sure how long it lasted and I don’t think that Jennifer liked it very much. Or maybe she was just mortified by the strange and competitive maneuver. But I remember my shock when these girls, who never spoke to me, called out “Jeffe!” and turned out to be calling to this other girl. The cluster of them turned to see my reaction, avidly watching for my humiliation? Horror? Tears, perhaps? Instead I learned that they thought I had some power in my name. They wanted to show me they could take it away.

I suppose we all want our names, like ourselves, to be “pretty unique.” We’re willing to concede that absolutely unique may be asking for too much, but we all want to be that individual, beautiful snowflake.

But really, that kind of thing comes from inside. Which no one can take away.

Steal It Back!

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Today is Tuesday — you know what that means? We’re gonna have a special guest!!

Okay, not really. Though I will have a special guest later this month: author Candace Havens is doing a blog tour to promote her new release Dragons Prefer Blondes. I’ve told her she has to adhere to the themes of love, power, fairytale endings and being generally careful of what you wish for, since I, myself, am so scrupulous about it.

Actually, today is the 9th of the month, which means I cross-post with Sole Struck Fashions. Yes, that’s right: they have NO criteria for deciding fashionista eligibility.

In keeping with my new Sole Struck role — last month I extolled the many virtues of second-hand and vintage clothes — I have a new shopping tip today.

Check out a Police Auction!

No, it’s not just for stolen bicycles anymore.

Have you ever wondered, say, what became of Imelda Marcos’ 1,220 pairs of shoes? (Well, actually they made a museum of them — no, really. Though maybe it’s gone now, because the link they give for the museum itself doesn’t work. However, you can salve your shoe-museum craving here and here.) But what about all those other ill-gotten gains? Naturally there’s a website to auction them off, once they’ve served their time as evidence.



So, okay, these are cops, so the descriptions tend to say stuff like “Womens Shoes, 2 shoes.” It’s always a great find, when you can get two shoes at once. But they have pics, which you can enlarge to play detective like the little “Steal It Back!” guy — which you have to admit adds a bit to the thrill — and see that, yes! these are Ann Marinos.

The inventory changes rapidly, of course, with auctions finishing all the time.



But that Dolce & Gabbana leopard print jacket you just had to have and couldn’t afford? Yes, still available! Only just under eight hours left on this baby, at the time of posting. High bid is $82. A small price to pay to channel Marisa Tomei in Cousin Vinny.

For the entrepeneurs: no visit to the Property Room is complete without a thorough perusal of the bulk lots. These are the “fell off the back of the truck” stories. Current bid on 20 pairs of Aeropostale jeans valued at $960? $99! 50+ pieces of womens underwear going right now for $180! More Aeropostale jeans! And Aeropostale shirts! Actually a LOT of Aeropostale stuff. One begins to imagine the late-night highjacking of the Aeropostale tractor-trailer. A driving rain, a dark night… Is that a car broken down in the middle of the road? Oh no, it’s a trap! Take everything, just don’t kill us! But wait… the cops are here! Bright lights flashing. Except they take everything, too. Evidence, doncha know.

Actually, this is the site disclaimer, provided by the Office of Inappropriate Capitalizations:

Our company receives hundreds of packages from many sources every day. These Packages arrive From: Store Closures, Insurance Claims, Misguided & Unclaimed Freight, Post Office Undeliverable Packages, and Unclaimed Merchandise. In Many Cases we do not know the Origin of these goods. Where we do Know the Origin of the product we will Describe it in the Auction. All products are Vintage, Pre-owned or Antique.

Okay, “antique” may be stretching it, but the savvy shopper can find many great deals here. And make up the stories to go along with them.

Look, you can even get the pants to match!


Outtakes

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Sometimes I think saving stuff is just a way to soothe ourselves.

It becomes an intermediary step between the immediate decision and the final decision. Should I get rid of this dress? This dress that I’ve loved, that I wore to Suzie’s wedding and first kissed Harry in? I’ll put it in this trunk, with other old clothes and use it in a quilt someday.

Now what’s happening is, I’m faced with moving bags and boxes and trunks full of old clothes I’ve been saving. Sure, I sometimes use them in quilts, which is nice. But I never have made picnic blankets from all those old jeans. Never touched most of those beautiful fabrics I couldn’t resist buying. If civilization collapses, however, I can make blankets for all of you.

I give David a hard time (part of my job description) about his not-dirty, not-clean clothes. He has several intermediate stations for them. The chest by the bed is for clothes clean enough to be worn again, but too dirty to hang up. The bathroom floor clothes pile is for another level of dirtiness, though not quite to the point of being committed to the laundry room.

That’s part of it — the unwillingness to commit to the final choice. To be without the thing.

When I started the great Ruthless Revision, I also created an outtakes file. Which I hadn’t done in a number of years. As a young writer, I kept an ongoing outtakes file. Any time I cut even the smallest phrase, I attentively pasted it into this document that I saved. Kind of a living morgue. A museum of brilliant prose that could work somewhere, someday. But really it was just to soothe the pain of deletion. Much easier to cut, paste and save, than send it into oblivion. When you’re a young writer, it’s tempting to think that these wonderful words you weave together can somehow be lost forever. That you’ll never recover them.

This is, of course, utter nonsense.

Which is something I learned, when I discovered that I revisited my outtakes file about as often as I dig into my trunks of quilt fabrics. I admit it: often if I make a new quilt, I just go buy exactly the color and pattern I need. And often it’s easier just to compose something new than fidget with some old fragments, to finagle them to fit.

But, I created an outtakes file for the Ruthless Revision, because I was feeling that pained about it. It’s especially redundant because I’m saving the entire original draft. Enshrined, as it were. That first morning, though, it made me feel better to save the HUGE CHUNKS I was cutting out. After a while, I wanted to check for a bit of information from a section I’d cut. I discovered my outtakes document wasn’t even open. Not only that, I’d failed to paste that bit into it. I hadn’t pasted cuts in for pages and pages. It was easy enough to go look it up in the museum draft.

Apparently I didn’t need my little crutch anymore. I’d just been deleting away.

This ruthless mode can be liberating. Cathartic, even. I’m planning to sell my sewing machine and I’m moving no fabric to British Columbia.

Someone else can make the quilts when civilization collapses. I’ll be busy writing. And deleting.

Edumacation

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A writer friend of mine who won a scholarship to Breadloaf, reported on her return that she’d turned down the critique from the famous author that was part of prize. My friend’s novel had won a contest and the famous author was to read it and give her feedback at the conference.

“But I told her I felt I was beyond that now, that I didn’t need more critique. So we just talked in general, about life and the business.”

I think it startled us all a bit at the time — her writers group — because it seemed, well, arrogant. Our friend felt the other author wasn’t any better than she was. Our friend wanted to be one of the pantheon, not one of the supplicants.

Don’t we all.

It’s a good question: when do you stop taking classes? When have you “made” it and no longer need anyone else’s input?

Faith Hunter, whose books I really enjoy, posted on Facebook this morning that she has published “20 books and I feel like [Skinwalker] is the first.” She’s living Madonna’s “Like a Virgin,” she says, because she feels this one might be IT.

One thing I’ve noticed over time is that the published authors agonize as much as the trying-to-get-published ones. That’s how life is. The ancient Greeks said you couldn’t “rest on your laurels,” referring to the crown of laurels awarded in athletic competitions. You only are what you’re doing right now. Credit for past accomplishments depreciates rapidly over time. Before you know it, you’re in a “What Happened to…” feature. Presuming you were ever interesting enough to rate that much.

Continuing to grow and learn is part of this.

There’s also an idea that an artist can be contaminated by classes or writing workshops. That the originality of her work can be damaged forever. I do believe this can happen, like the phenomenon of the MFA workshopping, which tends to produce writing of a particular literary style, to the point that you can recognize writers from a particular MFA program by the “sound” of their work.

I’m currently taking an online class on plotting. This is in line with my recent efforts to see how I can change my writing style at will. As a writer, I never plot things out ahead of time. I have a general idea of where the story is going, but how I get there is always a surprise.

But I’m not liking this class at all.

And I’m torn: is it because I’m resisting changing my approach or is it because the class really is functioning at a level below my skills? One gal I know already quit the class for this reason. I’m still wondering if I should at least complete the lessons, basic as they may seem, for the exercise of it. But every time one of my classmates exclaims “oh THIS is why I could never finish a book!” I wonder.

It’s a constant choice, when to be confident and when to accept that you can improve. Maybe we need our own little mantra for this, praying for the wisdom to know the difference.

The Rest of the Story

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So, I’ve found myself explaining to various wonderfully supportive friends and family types how the whole “refining my craft vs. selling out” crisis is going, over IM and email.

I figure I’ll write out the update here, then I can tell people just to go read my blog, which saves me typing the same stuff over and over, and has the bonus of irritating people, because I’ve found most people really hate being told to read my blog. It’s the techno version of “come over and see my slide show of my vacation and I’ll tell you about it then.” Beware of expressing idle interest in someone else’s obsession — you’ll regret it sooner or later.

For those listeners at home who may just be tuning in, I’ve been working this last week on trying to discern where the two different voices are in my novel, that this agent identified as conflicting with each other, to the detriment of the book. One is a more commercial voice and one more literary. Guess which has to go?

David, the love of my life, offered to have me read it aloud to him. This is a big favor, because he doesn’t really read fiction. I did once read the entire Ender/Speaker for the Dead series to him over a summer of road trips. Now that we have more comfortable incomes we usually fly places and have very few road trips.

So, I printed out the first couple of chapters, read them to him and he stopped me anytime he lost the thread of the story or thought it got vague. Which ended up being a lot. It’s a good thing he loves me because at one point when he stopped me, I snapped “What? I don’t get ANY description?!?”

But I marked all those sections and our relationship survived and was fully repaired over cocktail hour. It’s funny, because the agent told me that if I could make the fixes, she’d love to see it again, but that she also understood that this was the “hardest and most emotionally frustrating part of the process.” And she wished me luck. Turns out I needed it.

The next morning, I sat down to revise. And decided pretty quickly that David was an idiot who had no idea what he was talking about. All the stuff he picked out was really good stuff.

Just then, an email arrived from a contest I failed to final in, with comments from the judges. Now, I’ve pretty much stopped reading judge’s comments. I enter the contests for the opportunity to put my novel in front of editors and agents if I final. If I don’t final, most of the time it’s because at least one judge REALLY HATED my book. Like giving me a 50% score hated. Usually the other judge will give me a nearly perfect score. So between the two, I don’t get super-useful feedback. Just the love/hate thing.

But I decided to look at these comments, to see if any of theirs coincided with what David identified. These scores turned out to be unusual because all three judges ranked me highly, with just enough points taken off to keep me from finalling. And they ALL picked on the exact thing the agent pointed out. And their comments? Yes: exactly the sections David thought slowed the story.

Another writer friend told me she read her novel to her tattoo-artist boyfriend, who was not a reader, but spends his days talking to people. She says “I’d want to kick him when he’d stop me and say ‘what? wait? what?’ But he was invariably right.'”

There’s been discussion lately on the FFP loop, about finding someone to critique your work who understands your particular sub-genre. Several people have chimed in that their best critiquers don’t write anything remotely the same, but they know a good story.

I lost a page and a half in the revision of Chapter 1. I read it again to David and he didn’t stop me once. He was surprised when I stopped at the end of the chapter, he was so caught up in the story.

So, yes, it’s painful. But I see that I can do it now. One of the judges clearly also writes in first person and she warned me to watch out for “I wondered,” “I thought,” “I saw,” “I heard” and “I noticed,” as constructions that yank the reader out of deep POV (point of view). She means that it brings in the narrative voice and the reader loses the sense of being in the character’s head. She’s dead right. I’ve been searching for those phrases and they cluster in the “slow” sections. Alas.

I suppose it’s part of life, that you never stop discovering new flaws. As you get things polished and handled, new problems are revealed.

Guess I won’t run out of stuff to do!