I can sit, I’m very good at sitting

My Greenland book is being dedicated to my husband, but the way things are going, I’m starting to wonder if he should get a co-author credit.

Last night I whined a lot (kind of a yucky spectacle now that I think about it) about not knowing what to do with some characters I’ve invented, and BF listened patiently and made suggestions. He gave me ideas that I’m probably going to use. This often happens when I talk through my writing with him, and I feel so guilty every time, because I feel like his help means I’m not writing the book myself from top to bottom (which is what my name on the cover implies I did). Sometimes it takes a village to write a book, I suppose, but the guilt remains. BF himself thinks the guilt is silly. He’s happy that I can use things that he says. He’s not going to use them, he points out, and besides, I’m the one who has to put all the words into sentences and so forth.

He advised me to read the first book of R.A. Salvatore’s Dark Elf trilogy, Homeland, because he said it might give me some insight on how to fill the vast middle of the book with, you know, plot. So I’m reading it. It’s an interesting experience; I pretty much never read pure fantasy and this is my first outing with Salvatore, and I find it addictive, thin, and not ultimately that enjoyable – like Baked Lay’s potato chips. But I can’t stop reading it. It’s also a world that I find really useful, what with the underground cavern, the high-intensity world-building (that aspect, at least, is done very skillfully), and the political intrigue. These are all elements I need to bring to my book.

***

I read a little about Jim Henson the other day, because it occurred to me after watching The Great Muppet Caper for the 80th time (and bursting out in song without intending to for the 77th time) that his vision would have been a difficult one to sell to anyone with the capacity to buy it. “I want to do a prime-time variety show with these goofy puppets. We’ll spin off feature films. They’re not for children, exactly, but they’re really funny and…” Yeah. Get outta my office. But still, he did succeed, spectacularly. And from reading about him it seems like it just took a lot of work, a lot of years of effort, one after another after another, until he did succeed. He was forty before The Muppet Show went on the air.

So even though I feel like 30 is awfully old to have not yet figured this thing out, a routine of life that I can manage and keep at and enjoy for long periods (longer than 4-6 months, anyway), I know that ultimately I’m wrong. It’s all living, even this haphazard thing I’ve done for almost a decade out here in the world; it’s all building something, even if it’s something that shelters only me.

I’m reminded of a scene in Magnolia when Robards’ character is talking about life and regret. He says, in agony, “Life is long. Life isn’t short, life is long!”. I think of that a lot. It seems short, with the bigger sweep of time and history that we know about, but it’s not. It’s long.

From the example of Jim Henson I take with me: always keep plugging, don’t give up, and maybe you’ll realize your dream after all, no matter how insane it seems. (And for God’s sake, if you have an infection that hangs on and gets worse for a couple of weeks, go to the damn hospital. Everyone will miss you terribly if the worst happens.)

improved since my teen years, I hope

There is no more room
in her head. The seeking words
of Sartre and Weil share holding space with
phantom tollbooths
and dark elves and spacemen and
busty maidens.

There is no more room.

Areas for restarts annexed,
quarters for new skills occupied,
places for trying once more (with feeling) let out.

[The overturned tray on the cheap cold floor.
That night of a drunken pass, a later lie.
A failed evening in a bathroom, small and hot.
These things and others pay dutiful rent.]

She dreams of a contraption
to allocate these resources to those with greatest need;
New Leaves and Fresh Starts on welfare
with their crying children tugged behind.

on Rockwell

As I mentioned, I went to the dentist yesterday morning. Something I like about my dentist is that he’s put pictures on the ceiling so that you have something to look at when you’re lying there being picked at. He has chosen Norman Rockwell pictures, which I suppose is smart because they’re thoroughly unobjectionable, but since most Americans are well and truly familiar with Norman Rockwell’s work, they’re not exactly the most interesting pictures in the world to look at whilst dentistry is thrust upon you.

One of the pictures up there was this one:

At first I didn’t look at it very carefully, because it was below a picture of a boy riding a mallard and a girl with a black eye sitting outside the principal’s office. The boy in the white suit is so cheesy that the picture didn’t draw my attention more than the others.

At first. And then I looked at it more closely, and noticed the detail on the older man, the folds of his chambray shirt and the worn lines of his forehead. And the melancholy of the dog. And the old car they sat on. And I started to wonder what exactly this picture was saying.

It was on the ceiling (and the edges were cropped a bit), so I couldn’t see it carefully enough to figure it out. From that distance, I thought that the boy and the man were both waiting for something (both are clearly in postures of waiting, just two very different ones), like a bus, but that they weren’t related. It seemed that Rockwell was trying to point out their differences as obviously as possible, because even the art style is a little bit different between the two. The boy is Saturday Evening Post all the way, where the man is more Grapes of Wrath. The boy looks like a mistake, as if he’s in the wrong picture, although his bright white suit makes him the focal point of the picture, so clearly the contrast is on purpose. It was comical, maybe, that contrast. Almost to the point of ironic. Or maybe Rockwell was trying to show life as it’s fresh and new and full of promise vs. life as it’s old and weak and tired and fading. Both lives are waiting for a bus. You can meet anybody when you’re waiting for a bus in America. Diversity at the bus stop. I don’t know, it wasn’t clear to me what the picture could have meant and I was just guessing.

I Googled the picture, discovered its title, “Breaking Home Ties,” looked at it much more closely, and read an essay about it. Both men are waiting for a train, but they are father and son, and the train they’re waiting for is going to take the boy away to school. The man is holding the boy’s hat as well as his own, and they share a father-son resemblance. The boy is looking forward while the man is looking back.

I find this picture so sad that I can’t even put words to it. The more I look at it, the more sad I think it is, and the more perplexing I find its sadness, because I don’t know where a picture like this belongs. Who wants to see a picture like this on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post? (But that’s just where it went, on September 25, 1954.) The boy’s happiness is misplaced in the emotional context of the rest of the picture, and I just see a fool when I look at him.

Maybe I’m projecting. But God, that poor dog. He looks like he’s going to curl up and die without the boy. The last mystery is what the boy’s cradling in his hands; I can’t quite tell. Maybe it meant something to Rockwell, about the future, or about the past.

I’m as surprised as you

Bad news all morning.

First, it was off to the dentist. I have cavities. By the end of October, I will have paid this office $700 out of pocket, with dubious prospects for reimbursement. Yeah, I totally have that to spare.

Next, it was off to the Circuit Court in the county where I live to pick up my notary commission. Since my name changed, I had to get my name changed on my notary commission; I applied for the name change before my new Social Security card came, and I was not allowed to pick up the commission when my driver’s license still had my maiden name. It took many weeks longer than I expected to get the correct Social Security card, and the frustration I experienced with this process over the summer is something I would have written a great deal about if I had been blogging at the time, thus boring the internet to tears.

In any case, I asked the court to hold my commission until I got my Social Security card and then my new license, which they are really not allowed to do for much longer than 30 days, and they said they would make an exception. Today, I went to pick up the commission, and they had sent it back to the Secretary of State, which means I probably have to reapply and likely pay another fee. I am not mad at them; they couldn’t hold the commission for me indefinitely, and it had been about two months. But it was a sincere annoyance that I couldn’t take care of it today, because it means I’ll have to take another hour off in the morning sometime in the next month or so to take care of it.

So, finally, off to work. Learning about bureaucratic hassle and dental work in my future before it was even 9:30 on a Monday did not make me enthusiastic to get to this job, which I dreaded all weekend.

But, strangely, I’m in a pretty good mood. I was feeling conflicted and depressed all morning, and I was deeply unhappy on my way to work, but now that I’m here and settled a little, and the stuff that I missed doing this morning isn’t really piled up or so terrible, and my perfectionist attorney was actually very friendly to me on the phone, life just doesn’t seem so bad, right now. Home is only 6 hours away.

Of course, in 20 minutes something will probably happen to change my mood again.

Think I’ll drink me a cup of tea to stave it off.

what Rose saw

Oh, I did it. I DID it. IdiditIdiditIdidit.

For 4+ years, my book about Greenland has sat on my hard drive with this dangling sentence at the end of 26,000 really decent words: “Rose saw”. I came to that point and I realized that I did not know what she saw. I was thoroughly blocked from whatever was going to happen next, stuck there, mired, how many synonyms can I come up with for this? The story was immovable.

I’ve worked on other projects since then, written some of a horror novel, experimented with copying Edgy Literary Fiction, etc., but that unfinished sentence has haunted me. I’ve tried to force the images to come to my mind so that I can describe them, I’ve tried to outline the plot of what comes next, I’ve tried a lot of vague and equivocating things to try and release the block and none of it has worked.

Last night I reread this (and yes, it’s the third time in a few weeks I’ve linked to that. It’s REALLY GOOD):

Writing is hard for every last one of us. Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.

So I dug. I sat in front of my laptop and I went one word, one shovelful, at a time. First she saw the road, laid with stone, then she saw the small houses with their peaked roofs, and then the curving road again, leading through the merchant district and around to the back of the cavern where the king’s house sat. Over there to the west was the lake country, and beyond that there’s another cavern (but she didn’t see it just yet). And then I thought up people for her to see, women who’d recognize Rose’s mother, and then they began walking down the road toward the king’s house, and there it was – the rest of the chapter. It took me three hours, but I blasted through the block and I wrote to the end of what Rose saw that day in the cavern.

When I closed the laptop to get to bed, I felt pride on a level that I’ve rarely felt about my own writing. I deserved to feel proud, I thought. There was no doubt creeping in about whether I was being arrogant or overblown. This was an accomplishment, writing through that block after four damn years of the dangling sentence. Maybe no one but me and BF will think it’s much of a big deal, but I know it’s a big deal.

I don’t want to venture that the hard part’s over, because I know that block is not the hardest part about writing this book. (Revision will be. It always is.) But I have really returned to this book, gone back to the laptop, and I will not let the inertia of my weirdening life keep me from finishing [a draft of] this book. Before December. I can do it. I will do it.

see the light

I’ve been listening to Green Day almost nonstop for a couple of weeks now. I discovered them with Dookie in 1994, when I was thirteen, and there has not been a moment since when a little piece of my heart hasn’t belonged to them. My listening to them comes and goes, but when I do listen it’s generally exclusive – one record for a few weeks on end. This time around it was American Idiot at first, because some of those songs I just can’t get tired of, and then it was Dookie for a while (it still sounds fresh and terrific to me), and then 21st Century Breakdown, and then just “See the Light” over and over and over and over and over. I can’t find a video of that one that has even remotely decent sound, but something inexplicable about that song was making me feel better. The lyrics are so general as to be meaningless, so I don’t know what it was about the song and its melody that helped me, but it did.

As a footnote to this paragraph, unrelated to anything else in this post, I have to share with you that my insane crush on Billie Joe Armstrong has not really abated since I was 13. BF introduced to me the idea that Billie Joe looks like a serial killer, which is flatly untrue. I mean, look at this face.

How can you not love this face? So not a serial killer.

Last night I was feeling a little too fragile for Green Day. I was nervous about meeting with the circus performer and I didn’t like that I was going into Baltimore. I skipped through a few songs on my iPod and then, as I was driving into town, I put on “Sinnerman”. Minor-key songs have always made me feel better when I’m sad. I found the studio and pulled up to a stoplight next to it, looking around for parking. There was a guy sitting in a parked pickup truck with the door open, talking on a cell phone. He was opposite my window, which was about half down. I caught his eyes once, and looked away, still enjoying the clapping solo, and then the piano solo, and then Nina’s voice again. The stoplight stayed red, and stayed red, and stayed red. It was about four minutes of sitting there, I kid you not. A weirdly long stoplight. I got the feeling – and I couldn’t have told you how I got this feeling, where it came from – that the dude in the truck was listening to “Sinnerman” with me, from my window, and enjoying it. I felt like we were sharing a moment, this fellow human and me. I looked around the intersection and caught his eyes a second time, looking away again.

The stoplight changed, and I pressed on the accelerator; the guy closed the door of his truck and walked away, down the street. I don’t know who he was, and I don’t know if I was mistaken, but it was a quiet street, and I think he could have been listening.

So I met the circus performer, who was really friendly (she shared with me the little nugget that “circus people are all around you, scouting, all the time”), and we agreed that I’d teach two classes for her: Monday nights and Saturday mornings. It’s a nice neighborhood and I think (I hope) that she’s going to do okay.

Upon driving home, though, my mood changed. I had met another person who was making it work, the blowin’-in-the-wind lifestyle, and I desperately wanted to know how she got her mind and her heart (and her budget) together enough to do it. She was proof that it could be done. I was not jealous of her, but I wanted to know what separated us.

I was starting to feel sick at the thought of any creative endeavor. Seeing and hearing things that had been successfully created around me was making me upset, because I was feeling as if I wasn’t good enough to create successfully myself. The normal thing when you hear a good song on the radio is to feel happiness, because you’re enjoying something that someone created more or less for you, and yay for them and yay for you, but I was feeling a mix of jealousy and uncertainty and yuckiness, such that I couldn’t even listen to Green Day.

Part of the reason I’ve been listening to Green Day so much lately is that I know that this band started from three kids in poverty, scraping by, dumpster-diving, chugging cough medicine, all that Scene stuff that happened in the early 90′s. They grew and developed into one of the most successful bands in the world. They’ve continued to do good creative work, and (like it or not) their sound has evolved. They are artists, and they work hard. I know that their arc is from poor circumstances to success, and that’s inspiring.

But I’ve become so confused lately about success, about creativity, about jealousy and artistic endeavor. I’ve been thinking about two Sugar aphorisms on the subject: the idea that you are good enough, and you have to write like a motherfucker, and – conversely? – the idea that being jealous of someone is an inherently entitled attitude, because what makes you so sure that you’re good enough to deserve that person’s success?

Do these go in the same universe?

This has really gotten me spun up, and the recent problem of the story in my writer’s workshop that was, in my view, just terrible, and that everyone else liked, made me further confused. How could I be so wrong about it? What is wrong with my taste, that I can’t see what they are seeing? Am I actually completely stupid and incapable of being a critical reader?

Last night that all came to a head as I was driving home. I called BF and ranted and raved; requested that he read the bad story and dared him to tell me I was wrong; went to bed and couldn’t sleep and woke up too early and just couldn’t find rest anywhere inside my head. I am still feeling this way, a little, although the soporific of work is helping me settle a little. A little.

This morning I woke up with a rotten feeling that I had made a serious mistake in agreeing to teach two classes for the circus performer. It was consuming me. It was making me pace around while BF slumbered. I still do not know where this feeling came from, and it is not a rational one; I can’t see anything about this situation that will end up being bad for me in an unfixable way, unless it’s a wrong-place-wrong-time issue that I can’t foresee. I can’t figure out if it’s just jitters, just the emotional difficulty that I’m feeling (strongly) in attempting a transition from one way of making a living into another, weirder, more challenging way, or if my instincts are telling me something major. I’m going to sleep on it for another night and then examine it again, and if it seems to be instinct telling me a big red NO, I’m going to call her and say I can’t do it. I am not going to ignore my instincts, I don’t care how meaningless it seems.

In the meantime, I’m going to try extremely hard to set aside all of this emotional bullshit and get back to the laptop. There is writing that must be done. I want to write the Greenland book; I’m tired of fucking around with it and feeling inadequate about it and I want a draft done before 2011 is over. I’m just delegating this item to myself: you will write the rest of this book this year, girl. You will do it or you’re fired.

Of course I’ll probably change my mind again and discover that I can’t, that I suck, that I fail. I really feel like I’m back at 17 again, so insecure I can barely breathe, with no idea how to move around in the world.

wonderful

Ohhh, this is not a good day. Starting out with having to print a box and a half of documents (took me three hours) after misinterpreting (again!) something one of my bosses said was…just starting out. Now I’m trying not to cry at my desk.

I’m racking my brain for things to say here, because I just don’t have it in me to talk about how shitty I feel inside and out. And it seems like I’ve said quite enough about that, anyway.

This is just a hard time, right now. And I need to be more supportive to my husband, because he’s having a hard time too. Or at least an uncertain time. And so I fail at that, too.

Let’s think about something else. I recently saw L.A. Story for the first time, and although I was already a longtime admirer of Martin’s, this was another piece of work that just made me happy to watch him work. In his bones he’s deeply romantic, and it’s so splendid to see that and his cynicism side by side. The line that I keep thinking about:

“All I could think was wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful, and yet again, wonderful.”

I know that sounds kind of stupid in the printed word, but in context it just brings sunshine to my life.

Of course it was a funny movie, too, because that’s how Martin rolls. Apparently Sarah Jessica Parker’s role was pretty memorable for a lot of people. I couldn’t manage to uncover who it was she was thinking about (and Roland was also thinking about) in her think-bubble after the sex scene. I think it was Troy Donahue, but the picture was way too small to be sure and Google didn’t turn up the answer.

Well, that was an okay distraction. Feel a little better.

Related to my writer’s workshop, I just have to ask: did everybody but me read a different story?? I really thought that thing stank, and everyone else seemed to like it! (I know you can’t know what I’m talking about, but I just have to say it somewhere.) As more responses pour in, I feel more and more like I’ve lost my mind. And that feeling doesn’t help me keep forging and believing that I do have good taste and good talent and can do this. Argh.

Last night I taught a class at a new studio, one which I hope is going to pick me up for more classes. I had an incredibly vague conversation with the studio ?manager? after it was over, and it’s not clear to me whether she enjoyed the class or not. I was so nervous before class that I could barely see straight. I don’t really know why – it was just a sub gig, not necessarily going to lead to anything else.

Tonight I’m going to meet with a dancer/circus performer (yep) who’s opening rather a novel movement studio in Baltimore in about a month. Hoping I can do some work for her too. BF pointed out that even if nothing happens in the job department, at least I can say that I was interviewed by a circus performer. This was not exactly on my bucket list, but y’know, whatever.

I guess that’ll do. I have filing to get to.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH.

God, how I wish I could do that out of a window.

It’s a quiet kind of madness, what’s gripping me. And it’s one that I think most writers are familiar with, and which is ultimately really damn boring to read about. Like teen angst. Which is greeted with “yeah, yeah” by everybody (even yourself, years later) but is no less real when you’re in the grip of it. Knowing of this feeling’s universality and ultimately its uselessness doesn’t make me desire any less to scream it out a window, though.

It’s seesawing between feeling like I am the worst writer who was ever born, and because of that I am doomed to rejection and ignominious/obscure death, and feeling like I know I’m going to succeed because my writing is actually that good, for your information, and I will have galleys and do readings and see my book on a shelf one day. The feeling of “fuck ME, I will never learn everything I need to know and never iron out the stupid problems in my writing and never hear a ‘yes’ from a decent print magazine” colliding with the feeling of “yay me, I already write better than some of these people and who the fuck needs an MFA anyway and maybe her writing’s published but wow is it ever weird and pretentious and it doesn’t touch my soul at all and I LIKED that draft, goddamn it, and I don’t care if no one else does because I know it’s good enough.” It’s also: “the publishing world is gigantic and stuffed full of books by everybody you can imagine, thousands of writers” which leads either to “Surely I can find a place in that big ocean” or “It’s already full to bursting with no room for the likes of me”.

The gulf between knowing that I can be good enough and actually having a story snapped up for publication. The gap between what I’ve written already and what I have to write in the future. The distance between written and finalized – between written, and written as well as it can possibly be written by me. It’s seriously making me crazy. I’m trying to believe in myself but I have no idea how to find the equilibrium that surely must exist for successful writers – ones who are good enough to be published, and secure enough to trust that their work is good, but who still have to keep going back to the table and working harder because it’s not good enough yet. Where the heck is that place?

Have I mentioned that I’m doing an online writer’s workshop for the next several weeks? Because yeah, that’s mostly why this is on my mind. It’s also because I have to get off my ass and act like a writer if it’s what I want to do with my life. And I’m spurred to do that, more genuinely than I have been in years. But I’m struggling oh so hard with all of that boring angsty mess above every time I turn my mind back to any one of the three major projects I’m thinking about setting my fingers to. I can’t even get to outlining, I’m so torn up by Whether.

Tell you what. How about a poll? That’ll help. And it’ll break up the tedium of this post, which seemingly the fourteen-year-old me is guest-posting from a decade and a half ago.

hisssss

Ohhhh, self-publishing and self-punishing are similar in more than just letters.

I was so much at loose ends all weekend: wanting to be by myself and then wanting to hug BF until he melted; wanting to be productive and wanting to sit on the couch all day – and when he asked me what was wrong, I couldn’t really explain what it was. It’s the general feeling that I’ve somehow done things wrong, that I was supposed to follow a specific set of steps and because I didn’t, everything is irrevocably fucked up.

Also the feeling that things have to change, but they’re not changing fast enough, and it’s somehow my failure that this is the case, and this great overwhelming terror that I’m wagering wrong and everything I do to try and be free is going to suck. It doesn’t help that I’m waiting to hear from about 8 different people about opportunities/classes/advertising space, and for some of them I can’t come up with a reason why they wouldn’t have gotten back to me unless it’s because I suck. Or because my new e-mail address is going into spam folders, which is also fairly disastrous and I have a lot less control over it. I’m hoping it’s just a bad week, and replies will start filtering in, and confidence will return, but right now the feeling is a kind of constant nervous stomach mixed with thundery depression.

I tried posting a message about my book on the V.C. Andrews fan page, which has 114,000 likes. I thought at least a few people would be interested. Apparently no one took the bait, because my numbers show the same three pity-buyers supportive-friend-buyers as before.

I also hope to post on some fan forums, and I’m going to buy ad space on a couple of blogs, but aside from those things I don’t know what I can (realistically) do to promote this book beyond friend-buyers. There are other things that are done by self-published writers – going to book fairs and handing out copies, going to local fairs and setting up stalls – but they are things I know I can’t do, whether due to budget or personality conflicts.

I had the thought that getting it reviewed at book blogs would help, but (unsurprisingly, when I think about it) few review blogs accept self-published books.

See why I’m starting to feel like I made a mistake? I can’t get traction.

Also, I think that my therapist and I are going to have to part ways. I really like her, and I appreciate some of her qualities, but I don’t think she’s really making change in me; she’s offering me practical help but very little big-picture help. She is off for about six weeks starting this week, so I’m going to use that time to think through what she’s offered me and whether I want to start all over again with someone else or just hang it up or what. It’s my hope that my circumstances will have changed by the time I’m supposed to meet with her again.

So I feel turmoil. I feel enormously uncertain and I feel badly uncomfortable in my own skin. None of this is emergency stuff but it is making me stalk through my days with all my fur standing on end, and that doesn’t feel good.

cubicle wars

A million years ago when I lived in New England, I interviewed for a job I eventually got for a newspaper distributor. I don’t remember the job title, but it was in an office that had been converted from a home and I was alone most of the day. My job was to manage the delivery of newspapers by our delivery-people, and although many of the jobs I’ve held have led to impotent rage and frustration beyond the pale, this one was by far the worst. There was literally nothing I could do with my own hands to make the situation better for a lot of our customers; I was there to listen, to attempt contact with the delivery-person to find out where the paper was and how it could be delivered more timely or accurately (or at all), to talk to the distribution manager (the guy who was actually at the warehouse where cars full of newspapers departed for their destinations) about what might have gone wrong, and to accept lambasting for the failures of these other people. I lasted only a few months before I gave up and quit. In my mind I’m conflating the face of my supervisor with the face of the man to whom I lost my virginity in college; I do remember them looking alike but I don’t remember how they looked different from each other.

Anyway, the thing I wanted to talk about was the interview. Instead of interviewing candidates one by one, my future supervisor decided it was a good idea to interview everyone all at once. It was a collaborative interview, going around the circle of people with answers and information about oneself, kind of like you do in a workshop, but the thing at stake was not how well we’d get to know each other but whether one of us would walk away employed.

The thing I remember best about it was this one woman who was plainly desperate for a job, and how she kept interjecting comments about how quickly she could start and how eager she was to work. She made me very uncomfortable. My future supervisor was probably uncomfortable too; he talked a good game but he couldn’t make eye contact with her.

In hindsight, I can’t believe what a staggeringly bad idea this was. “Here is the face of your competition. Introduce yourself to it. Be better than the person opposite you.” You couldn’t help being curious about who among the group was going to be offered the job and how that would change your fate (or their fate). Still, it was useful information to have – the face of my competition at that particular time in that particular geographic location for that particular job.

Now whenever I go on interviews and I hear about “other candidates”, they are murky figures, anonymous Others, of an unknown number as well as unknown identities, instead of measurable pairs of real eyes looking back at me. Can I expect to know anything about them, about whether I would beat them in a gladiatorial round-table interview? Nope, I just have to wait to see if I was the best one.