Bitty! Soda?

Outclassed

2008-04-10T13:11:00.004-04:00

Last night, I recalled one of the main reasons I no longer update this blog.

It's because I don't think the world needs to hear from yet another person who wants to Be A Writer. I think I've talked before about the distinction between someone who writes and someone who just wants to Be A Writer, with visions in their head of their name on a book and a big party to celebrate the launch of their book, but no clear idea of what would be IN the book. I hate those people, and I hated that every time I posted in this blog I felt more like one.

Initially, when I was running a reading series and doing crazy stuff like reading at KGB, I thought I'd probably inspire myself to get some substantial work done if I knew I was accountable for it in a blog. All that really happened was the occasional "still not writing anything good" post, and the odd essay that five people a month stumbled upon while Googling for information about Bert McCracken's tattoos. (Two and a half years later, it's still my number one google hit. Clearly, I need to run into more celebrities.) So I went back to LiveJournal, where I felt like it was slightly more okay to blog three lines about what I had for breakfast since I didn't have any pretensions there that I was some sort of big-shot writer type who was actually writing for public eyes. (Which is very odd considering that LiveJournal is just as public a forum as anywhere else. You could probably find my LiveJournal page within ten minutes if you really wanted to.) And I shied away from any sort of insinuation that I was ever going to Be A Writer, which included not actually, well, writing.

I miss the process a little bit, though, and have been jonesing to at least start something big again. With that in mind, last night I attended two free sample classes sponsored by Gotham Writers' Workshop, on Sharon's invitation.

Honestly? It wasn't so bad. A bargain at twice the price, I'd say. The teachers were certainly better than the guy I had when I took novel-writing at the New School, and they did a couple of exercises that felt pretty good and made me want to work more.

But as is often the case with writing classes, an unreasonably high percentage of people in the class were of the "I want to Be A Writer" school. In fact, possibly the most egregious example of this that I've ever seen popped up during the Q&A for the Fiction Writing class.

"So if we take your class," he said in his best Brooklyn whisper, "at the end of it, does Gotham Writers' Workshop have agents with publishing house connections that will look at our stuff and help us get published?" His tone conveyed more than a little entitlement, and I got the sense that he wasn't going to bother with paying money for a class unless someone could guarantee that he would be handed a check for ten times that amount once he was done.

Sharon and I had to look straight ahead at the teacher and the blackboard, because if either of us turned to look at each other at that point, we both would have fallen out of our chairs with hysterical laughter, and we were trying to be nominally polite, or at least confine our snark of our fellow prospective students to written notes. The teacher, to her credit, was much nicer to this guy than either one of us would have been on our nicest day, telling him that no, Gotham Writers' Workshop is only about learning how to write, not how to become the next Dan Brown.

It happened again in the Screenwriting class. (Which, by the way, the teacher was excellent, but I'm pretty sure I never, ever want to write a screenplay.) The instructor mentioned Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody, and a hand shot up right away. "How did Diablo Cody get noticed by Hollywood?" the girl asked. "Was that before or after she published her memoir?"

Everyone wants to Be A Writer, kids. Everyone wants the book party and the Oscar and the write-up in Publishers Weekly and the soft-focus black and white photo on the dust jacket. Writing, on the very superficial surface, looks like the ultimate way to make your living. You can sit at home in your pajamas making up stories and sometimes you can go to Barnes and Noble and people will wait in line for your autograph. Sounds good to me, too! If I could take a class that would give me that life at the end of it, I'd sign up in a heartbeat.

I know, however, that such a class does not exist. Unfortunately, the majority of people who sign up for writing classes do not. Thus, most useful things you could learn in a writing class are superceded by all of the idiotic pipe dreams of would-be Tom Clancys who spend more time daydreaming about how they're going to spend the earnings from their bestseller than they do actually, you know, writing it.

It's taken me a while to realize this, but when it comes to writing, I don't think there's anything I don't know how to do that can be learned in a class. That's the main lesson I need to take away from the various classes I've tried. That and the fact that the only writing worth reading has come from people who were writing because they had something to say, and not because they wanted to Be Writers.

From now on, I'm going to try to find things to say in this blog. I will keep the talk of writing to a minimum until I have actually written something (that is, not a blog entry).

And if you are still thinking of taking a writing class somewhere in hopes that it will help you to Be A Writer, I suggest stopping by this website. It should have some good pointers for you.

I Have Lusted In My Heart For a Jimmy Carter Autograph

2007-10-08T20:07:00.001-04:00

I just got back from Barnes and Noble in Union Square, where former President Jimmy Carter was scheduled to sign books tonight. I was ushered into a short-seeming line among the fiction shelves, where I entertained myself by rereading Our Endangered Values, pulling out copies of books I've reviewed for Publishers' Weekly and seeing if anybody's quoted me on their dust jackets (none yet so far), and rehearsing what I'd say while President Carter signed my books (settling on some boring thing about being honored to meet him and stuff). Finally, after two and a half hours of waiting, my excitement at meeting one of my heroes not even close to waning... about half of the people who'd come to the signing, including me, were herded away from the line and told that President Carter was leaving, and had stopped signing.

I'm not sure I have ever been more disappointed in my life. I think I was less disappointed when my backstage pass connection failed to come through at the last minute at the last Elvis Costello show I went to. I was 30 feet from my favorite living ex-President, and all I could do was stay in line while irate Barnes and Noble employees repeatedly cautioned us to keep moving, down the escalator, and home empty-handed. I pondered waiting outside by his car with the scary political wingnuts to try and snap a paparazzi photo as President Carter left the store, but decided that was beneath me and took a brief constitutional through the park to calm my nerves before getting on the train to home.

I haven't stopped being bitterly disappointed, though, and I would love to know who's responsible. Clearly, somebody sucks. A lot.

Who exactly sucks? Well, I'm not entirely sure.

It's certainly not President Carter himself. The guy is not exactly young these days (though he's plenty spry), and all that signing does tend to wear one out. It's not his fault he's so awesome that hundreds of people showed up wanting to meet him.

Possibly it's President Carter's "people" - but it can't be easy to coordinate a circus like this one, what with the crowds of fans, the odd non-fan, the Secret Service guys, the police escort, and whatnot.

It's probably not even Matt and Maria, the event planners for the Union Square Barnes and Noble. I go to a lot of events there, some even more heavily attended than this one, and most of them have been pretty smooth, with everybody getting what they wanted. Nevertheless, I will be calling them tomorrow to let them know how disappointed I was. (The assistant manager on duty, whose name is, I believe, William - fortyish, slouchy, crazy-ass sideburns - gave me their number. He was extremely nice about the situation, and assured me that they'd be happy to receive my feedback.)

Barnes and Noble itself is a contender, but they suck for so many other reasons, it hardly seems fair to single them out for this one.

So I don't know. I do know what would have made the evening better, though, and I'm putting it here in this very public, google-indexed forum so that maybe the right person will see it and put it in their to-consider file.

This event, and other big-time signings, needs wristbands. Big time. You know how big record stores like Tower and Virgin have those in-store artist appearances? Everyone who buys the album gets a wristband. Perhaps you don't even need a wristband to attend the reading or the Q&A portion of the evening. But only the people with the wristband get the signature, thus virtually guaranteeing that everyone goes home happy.

And really, I'm not a person whom it is hard to send home happy. The Carter event was poorly publicized, and the B&N website didn't even say what would be happening other than "author event," and I went anyway, figuring it was a win-win, whether it was just a reading, a reading and signing, or just a signing. I would have been happy to stop in a few days prior and get a wristband. I would have even paid full cover price for the book to do it. (Instead of picking up the book for half-price at the Strand, which I'm not proud of, but I admit I've done a few times before - like a couple of weeks ago with Jeffrey Toobin's book.)

I know B&N is capable of distributing wristbands, because I know they had them for the Harry Potter release. They need to realize that Harry Potter is not the only book out there for whom there's a clamoring throng. In fact, they need to start considering that the more they do to encourage order among the clientele for any and all clamoring-throng-type books, the happier everybody will be. Situations vary with each individual author and their publicity team, but one would think that everyone goes home happy in this situation - the author can limit the number of books they have to sign, the fans are guaranteed an autograph, and the store employees are not stuck herding thousands of irate customers around a circuitous obstacle course where they may or may not get a reward at the end.

Seriously, Barnes and Noble. Wristbands. Think about it.

I'll slice you up like you's a cherry tree

2007-08-07T01:03:00.000-04:00

In this past Sunday's New York Times, there's a big article about nerdcore, the white-kid rap movement featuring songs about things like Star Wars and Dungeons and Dragons. And it's about time nerdcore got its due, really, because MC Chris is a frackin' GENIUS.

But I submit that there's something out there even more cutting-edge - even nerdier than nerdcore, if you will. The next great hip-hop movement? Historycore.

I've been skimming around the interwebs in search of (non-protest) songs about U.S. Presidents to make a themed mix CD, and I've run into this fantastic new trend in the process. Whether it's extra credit projects for some kids' social studies class or some really bored, really knowledgeable, really nerdy folks, there seems to be a preponderance of rap songs with history as their subject matter (to varying degrees of accuracy, of course).

I refer you to this (which is very funny but not work safe if your workplace frowns upon profanity):

I also saw this recently, if you'd like a historycore interpretation of the Reformation.
And yet more historycore here.

And, of course, the original historycore rap video that started it all: the brilliant "Washington" by Cox and Combes/Creased Comics.

Amazing, Amazing, Amazing

2007-05-07T14:00:00.000-04:00

It was in 1995 that I first became aware of what I maintain is the most astonishing thing about the Internet - its ability to connect people based on a pop-culture obsession. No matter where your interest lies, it's possible to find a community of people who are just as devoted to it as you are - and, often, about a billion times more devoted to it. Forget the wide-reaching implications of a lightning-quick global information-dissemination service - the best thing about the Internet is the way it finds you people who, like you, can share theories on anything from the symbolic meaning of the four-toed statue on last season's Lost finale to who makes a better couple, Kirk/Spock or Spock/McCoy.

Ever since discovering that you could meet people through the computer, I've benefited from this quality of the Internet in two ways. One, I've found real-world friends who share my love for things like literary fiction and Elvis Costello, and two, I've found places to enthuse about things my real-world friends just aren't into.

(Had I been on the Internet back when I was thirteen years old and fantasizing about marrying Christian Laettner, I assure you, I might have turned out a whole lot less healthy than I did.)

Either way, I came of age in surroundings where my favorite things were so esoteric and/or unpopular that it still, a dozen years later, never fails to astonish me when I come face to face with a whole cadre of folks who not only know about my pet interest du jour, but have loved it so much they have nuanced opinions and theories about it. I doubt it will ever fail to astonish me.

And, indeed, that's how I felt last night when I visited a bar in Midtown for TARcon to attend a gathering for fans of "The Amazing Race": astonished.

While I've enjoyed an episode or two from previous seasons, this season, the "All-Stars" edition, was the one that really hooked me. For weeks, I shared theories with fellow enthusiasts on various message boards in the absence of having any real-life friends who watched the show, but every Sunday night I watched the show itself alone, usually while doing laundry. (Sometimes I'd luck out and find someone else in the laundromat who was watching it, and we could share a few cheers or jeers at the appropriate teams, but usually I was flying solo.) I loved the show for its explorations of global culture; its frenetic pace; and the way different teams, with their different relationships, interacted under pressure. It's one that looks like it's a hell of a lot of fun, but I know I'd be terrible at it. Even as I fantasize about sky-jumping off of the Macau Tower, or learning how to throw a Maasai weapon at a target, I know that the stress of navigation and the pressure of the race would make me absolutely terrible at it. So I have that much more respect for the contestants on this show.

And last night, I actually got to tell several of them as much, which was in itself almost as cool as connecting with fellow fans. (I didn't take many photos, but up at the top of my entry is a camera-phone shot of second-place finishers Dustin and Kandice, which I nabbed while they were filming a segment for Fox Reality.) Watching the finale in the company of other people who cheered and laughed (and booed) in all the right parts made even what I considered a disappointing outcome seem like great entertainment.

When I felt like I'd performed my fair share of sycophantism, I made my exit and went home to collapse. It was an amazing end to an amazing day.

And TARcon wasn't even the most amazing thing I did all day. Stay tuned.

High pizza pie in the sky hopes

2007-03-23T12:37:00.000-04:00

There's a pizza place somewhere in Brooklyn that I've often thought about trying. It looks like it's been there awhile - always a good sign of a pizza place, especially a decently-sized one. Other than that, there's not much special about it. The fixtures are well-worn, but clean. It's your garden-variety slice-a-torium, with a high turnover on plain pies but some other options that look interesting. And it's always buzzing with a healthy amount of activity. As opposed to a DiFara-level amount of activity.

So recently, Kip and I gave it a shot. No, it wasn't bestowed upon us in a glow of heavenly light by a chorus of angels that all look like Dom DeMarco, but it was pretty damn good. The crust was nicely crispy, the sauce was neither too sweet nor too salty, and the toppings were all fresh and perfectly balanced.

His slice, one of those stacked-to-high-heaven pizza/pasta mutant hybrids:

Mine was a little less complicated, but it had all the things I love, including lots of fresh basil:

I'd have to try a plain slice to give you a final verdict on the place, of course (I haven't earned my pizza-nerd wings yet, though six years in New York has taught me that generally speaking you don't need to put lots of stuff on your pizza), but I think I've found a winner.

Where is this wondrous Brooklyn pizza haven, you ask? Well, I ain't telling. If years of living near DiFara has taught me anything at all, it's that you should keep your secret hole-in-the-wall pizza places to yourself, lest they turn into mob scenes full of pseudo-cognoscenti who believe that there is no good pizza without suffering. (Okay, that and "when the health inspector comes over, you should probably clean the 'visible evidence of rodent activity' off of your work station before he notices." Seriously. WORK STATION. Like, where the food is prepared. If my stomach wasn't already tired from the gymnastics it did when I realized I'd eaten at that Taco Bell by the West 4th Street subway, it would have done some more.)

But I promise you, if you're tired of long lines, cruel treatment, Chowhound snobs, and caving into hype, there is still good pizza to be had out there, if you're willing to look for it.

Besides, pizza is kind of like sex - even when it's bad, it's still better than most things.

On that note, I'm off to Patsy's with my coworkers. And after work, Crocodile Lounge.

Original Recipe Literature

2007-03-13T11:57:00.000-04:00

Over on the Television Without Pity boards, there's a topic in the TV Potluck forum called "New Rules for TV" where we decide what would never be allowed on television again if we ran the networks. (Example: sitcoms with fat, stupid, bumbling husbands and their smart, thin, beautiful wives would no longer be allowed if TWoP were allowed to be in charge of programming.)

So if I ran book publishing, this would be my new rule for novelists: no more passing off fan fiction as literature.

You hear that, Alexandra Ripley? You started it, you know.

Actually, I don't believe the onslaught of truly awful violations of classic literature began with Scarlett. I don't even hold Scarlett up as a prime example - it was what it was - a mass-market paperback with an embossed cover and a ridiculous premise, that made a decentish miniseries featuring Colm Meaney, and having Colm Meaney in your miniseries could make anything good. It didn't pretend to be anything it wasn't.

But when it comes to more egregious instances of pretending a book is on par with classic literature just because it's a takeoff on actual classic literature, Gone With the Wind was definitely involved.

I'm talking about one of the worst books I've ever read - The Wind Done Gone. Sure, it created a buzz when it was released, and the idea that Rhett was secretly in love with a former slave resurrected some great debates on the way the original handled race issues. But the problem with The Wind Done Gone was that it was bad. Bad bad bad. Everything Scarlett did, the protagonist, Cynara, did better. Cynara had Mary Sue written all over her. The internet is full of fan fiction that's basically a retelling of the original movie/book/TV episode with an all-new, all-awesome, all-gorgeous protagonist inserted into the middle of it. (While browsing fanfiction.net recently, I found some fan fiction for my favorite TV show, Lost, which basically rehashed old episodes but supposed that Ewan McGregor was stranded on the island with the regular cast. And it was miles better than The Wind Done Gone. MILES.)

So in the wake of this particular novel, it seems like there are all sorts of classic tales being retold from a different point of view, and sequels written by people other than the author (usually because the author is dead and therefore can't protest). Some are great, this much is true. John Gardner's Grendel is a particularly neat spin on this concept. I haven't read it, but I hear Wide Sargasso Sea is great. And with children's literature, in particular, there are some brilliant new takes on old tales, from authors like Gregory Maguire, Jane Yolen, and Jon Scieska. But most, to me, just come off like the author wishes he or she had written the original, and lacks the writing chops to come up with characters half as good on their own.

People, there is no reason we need new versions of Rebecca, or Pride and Prejudice, or Huckleberry Finn, or Little Women. (A trip to any Barnes and Noble will show you that need them or not, we have fan fiction novels, from major publishing houses, for ALL of these.) What the world does need are new universes full of well-developed, multifaceted, brilliantly flawed characters who make us love them, visualize their lives, and speculate for ourselves on what happens to them next.

Anything less, in my opinion, isn't too far above all those smutty stories involving Kirk, Spock, and extended shore leave.

It's no wonder J.K. Rowling keeps threatening to kill off Harry Potter.

He Was Delicious

2006-12-28T15:50:00.000-05:00

Sure, he had perpetually low approval ratings, there was that sketchy business with the Warren Commission, and he told NYC to drop dead. But as a lifelong Presidential trivia buff, I always thought Gerald Ford was an awesome dude, and not just for the schadenfreude value of watching him hit his head on Air Force One or seeing Betty attempt to give Barbara Walters a tour of the White House while totally wasted.

Mediocre president? Sure. Cool guy? Hell yes.

With that, I bring you...

Ten Cool Things About Gerald R. Ford

1. He was an Eagle Scout. The only President who was one, in fact. Note that this was when the Boy Scouts were all about camping and tying knots (and not so much the right-wing nutso Jesusy stuff). I think this was back in the days when they'd do things like leave you alone overnight on an island with nothing but a pocketknife, a dixie cup, some string, and a live chicken (which I'm pretty sure you're not allowed to do anymore). Do NOT fuck with Eagle Scouts. They are hardcore.

2. When he was younger, he was HOT. Granted, ever since Kennedy, being telegenic has been something every President needs to be, and with the exception of the Bushes and Nixon, I'd probably have hit every one of 'em at 22. But Ford was hot enough to actually make money from his hotness. How many other presidents were on the cover of Cosmo?

(If you want to see the cover in question, I found it here, although the blogger who posted it says that the Ford Museum and Library can neither confirm nor deny that this is actually him. I find it sort of suspicious that these photos are as hard to track down as they are. It makes me want to take a trip to the library and spend an afternoon in the periodical room. I spent so many happy hours of my childhood digging through old magazines looking up random shit. Maybe I was a librarian in a previous life.)

(Also, here is photographic proof of Ford's attractiveness circa 1933. Rawr.)

3. His smarts and work ethic, not fancy connections, got him where he was. And he wasn't afraid of work, either. In undergrad, he washed dishes at his frat house for pocket money. Dude turned down offers to play pro football in favor of law school. To pay for it, he worked as an assistant coach for the boxing and football teams. And of course, there's that modeling stuff. Contrast that with most every other recent high-profile political figure - think anybody in the Bush dynasty has ever washed a dish in his life? (I must say, Clinton's blue-collar roots went a long way toward endearing him to me as well.)

It doesn't escape my notice, though, that hardworking, down-to-earth everyman Ford wasn't really trying to be the President. He took the job because it was his duty, not because he'd spent his entire life propelling himself to this one office. His main objective in politics wasn't really to Be The President, it was to make the world around him a better place. And I guess I think that's cool, too. Lord knows we'll never elect a guy like that.

4. He survived two assassination attempts. In three weeks. And took no bullshit for it. Rivaling John "If I kill the President maybe Jodie Foster will go out with me" Hinckley in their utter bizarreness, Squeaky Fromme and Sara Jane Moore's attempts on Ford's life barely shook the guy. He continued to make public appearances in the aftermath.

(Oh yeah, and Mr. Hinckley? Even if that sort of stuff DID impress her, you're totally not Jodie's type, if you know what I mean.)

5. He remained friends with the guy who kicked his ass in the '76 elections. Whenever I used to hear about the Ex-Presidents' Club as a kid, I always had this mental picture of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter sitting around with tea (or scotch) and reminiscing. (And, of course, fighting crime together.) Jimmy Carter is awesome. Ford saw past partisan differences and even the fact that Carter stole his job and maintained a close friendship with him. Actually, in general Ford was a pretty easygoing guy, which was how he got appointed to the office of Vice-President in the first place - Nixon deliberately picked a guy with a clean record whom he knew everyone liked, so as to avoid further Agnew-esque ruckus.

6. He appointed John Paul Stevens to the Supreme Court. I heart John Paul Stevens. Ford said of Stevens, "He is serving his nation well, with dignity, intellect and without partisan political concerns." For those of you playing along at home, Ford's a Republican, and Stevens has become known as one of the most reliably liberal votes on the bench. In a world where it is fashionable among Republicans to refer to any left-leaning judge as "activist," it's refreshing to think that a President once appointed a judge on the basis of his potential objectivity and not whether he'd toe the party line.

7. Betty's willingness to admit a problem led to help for addicts everywhere. Betty Ford is arguably a bigger household name than her husband, thanks to the establishment of her eponymous clinic (which has become shorthand for drying out). Plus, Betty has been an outspoken advocate for women's rights (especially abortion rights), breast cancer research, and the arts. I realize this is her coolness at work here and not his, but I think being married to Betty makes Gerald cool by association.

8. He maintained a sense of humor. You just don't see Bush Sr. making jokes about vomiting on Japanese dignitaries, or Bush Jr. joking about falling off the Segway (yeah, remember that? that could have been a lot funnier!). But whether he was hitting people with golf balls or stumbling over his own feet, Ford was quick with the self-deprecating wit. "I know I am getting better at golf because I am hitting fewer spectators," he famously said of his golf game.

9. He was left-handed...but only when sitting down. He batted, golfed and wrote on chalkboards right-handed. (Hey, not only do I know all kinds of weird shit about presidents, I know all kinds of weird shit about left-handed people.) He was also quick to joke about his left-handedness, and seems to have been as weirdly fascinated by his handedness as I am with mine.

10. SNL was funnier making fun of Ford than any other president. And I'm not even talking about Chevy Chase's brilliant impression here, even though I maintain it's the best Presidential impersonation ever done on SNL. (And possibly the only one that influenced voters come re-election time.) No, I'm talking about this sketch. "Today you're not gay, you know.. but then one day you wake up, you like men, and Gerald Ford dies, and we're screwed. Everyone's hearing about it from Dan Rather!"

Only going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse.

2006-12-04T16:04:00.000-05:00

I suppose it's about time I update this again, though I don't actually have a big overarching thematic concept, which I rather like to do when I write in the writerblog. Then again, if I waited for that, you could never see another update again, and nobody wants that.

So here's what I've been up to lately:

1. Nerdin' ain't easy but it's necessary. I attended a Star Trek convention in New Jersey. In costume. As a character I played in an online RPG. And I am unapologetic.

The con was rather small and disappointing, but one thing that made the whole day worthwhile was getting to see William Shatner speak. I hope I look half as good when I hit my 70s.

Shatner was hilarious and rambly and as Shatnerian as I would have expected him to be. He took a bunch of questions from the audience, including one from a 7-year-old girl (Shatner says: "That's great! I have a 7 in my age too!"). Highlight:

Shatner: Do you like Star Trek?
Little Girl: Yes.
Shatner: Do you love it?
Little Girl: Yes.
Shatner: Do you love love LOVE it?
Little Girl: Not THAT much!

2. Gonna be a dental floss tycoon. Visited with my family in Montana for Thanksgiving. Family photos were taken, dinner was prepared and eaten, company was enjoyed.

In the airport when my plane landed, I spotted newly-elected awesome senator Jon Tester at baggage claim. I resisted the urge to hug him. Even though I really, really wanted to.

3. I refuse to stoop to any pun that makes use of "write" as a substitution for homonyms meaning "correct" or "not left" or even "the third baseman for the Mets". But yes. I am writing. I'm making good progress, too. I don't know if I'm creating anything that people will someday want to buy, but I'd rather focus on getting the story on paper (or computer screen, as it were) before I start worrying about whether I'll ever be published. Being a writer comes way before being an author. Let's not put the cart before the horse, shall we?

In addition to my novel, I've been reviewing books for money. I am a lucky girl. As the first few publication dates loom, I've been sort of stalking the books I've reviewed on Amazon and the authors' blogs to see if my feedback garnered any feedback of its own. I was gratified today to see a "hooray! I'm so excited to get a good review" post from a first-time author whose book I'd enjoyed.

I do fear that I'm being overly kind to the books I review on the basis of a) being so psyched to actually have the opportunity to review books and b) being awed by the fact that they got this far in the process whereas I've spent two years pounding away at my 50,000 pages of God-only-knows-what and I don't even know if I'll finish it much less sell it. But to make someone's day like that, even though I don't get bylined and they'll never know it was me - that still makes me happy.

Create Your Own Chick-Lit Novel!

2006-11-09T15:23:00.000-05:00

Using the principles of the Aristotle 8-point story arc and combining various tropes of the chick-lit genre, you, too, can build a plot outline for a pink-covered trade paperback in no time at all!

This could be an invaluable tool for those of you who got a late start on NaNoWriMo. Or, print out the ideas, cut 'em up, and draw them at random for a fun trash-writing exercise! Who knows, maybe you can be the next Helen Fielding, Jennifer Weiner, or Jane Green!

I. Stasis

Your protagonist works as a(n):

__ indeterminate "high-powered executive" of some sort
__ newspaper/magazine columnist
__ publishing/media drone
__ personal shopper
__ socialite

Your protagonist's looks could best be described as:

__ Average, but cute, with one flaw she hates
__ Gorgeous and perfect in every way
__ Doesn't think she's pretty until some guy tells her she is
__ A little on the heavy side (but don't worry, she'll lose the weight and be pretty by the end of the book)
__ Secretly pretty, but her true beauty is masked by her lack of style (i.e. bad shoes)

Your protagonist's personality could best be described as:

__ Spunky, plucky, irrepressible, and adorably neurotic
__ Book-smart and too serious for her own good
__ Fabulous, especially her shoes!

II. Trigger

Your protagonist gets dumped by the love of her life, who (check all that apply):

__ cheated on her with her best friend
__ cheated on her with her worst enemy
__ is actually gay
__ left her at the altar
__ was her boss
__ was obsessed with his high-powered job
__ was obsessed with his shiftless hobby that he pretended was a job
__ spent all her money
__ got caught trying on her shoes

III. Quest

In order to nurse her broken heart, Protagonist (check no more than three):

__ Moves to a new apartment or city
__ Returns to the flyover state of her origin, with hilarious results
__ Takes up a new hobby, with hilarious results
__ Attempts to find a new boyfriend using such means as personal ads, and goes on lots of dates with hilarious results
__ Drinks and parties copiously at clubs that were cool five years ago, with hilarious results
__ Works out and diets, with optionally hilarious (but noticeable) results
__ Gets a makeover, with optionally hilarious results
__ Meets and dates a guy she initially thinks is great
__ Meets a perfect guy who adores her, but for some reason she won't date him despite his persistent attempts to woo her
__ Buys a lot of designer shoes

Her primary sources of support along the way are (check no more than three):

__ Her cadre of best girlfriends
__ Her best gay boyfriend
__ Her best straight male friend who's secretly madly in love with her
__ Her coworkers and/or boss
__ Her eccentric-yet-lovable parents
__ Her cat, dog, or other pet which she treats like a human
__ Alcohol
__ Designer shoes

IV. Surprise

The following unexpected events occur, disrupting Protagonist's new life (check no more than three):

__ Protagonist is led to believe that the new guy she's been dating is a jerk.
__ Just as her resolve begins to wear down, the perfect guy that won't leave the Protagonist alone appears to be a jerk and/or appears to give up on her.
__ The old guy Protagonist was dating at the beginning of the story reappears and wants her back.
__ Constant shoe-shopping has caused Protagonist to amass large amounts of debt.
__ An absolutely gorgeous yet completely evil (and possibly also stupid) antagonist appears to threaten Protagonist's job, budding relationship, pets, and/or shoes
__ A primary source of support disappoints the Protagonist by dating someone she likes.
__ A primary source of support disappoints the Protagonist by disapproving of her behavior in some way, whether they are right or wrong in doing so.
__ A primary source of support disappoints the Protagonist by chewing on her designer shoes.

V. Critical Choice

Faced with surprises, the Protagonist must make a crucial decision or several:

__ Which guy, of multiple suitors, to choose?
__ To keep the old job or strike out on her own with newly discovered talent?
__ What kind of pink cocktail to order next?
__ Which pair of designer shoes to buy?

VI. Climax

As a result of the Protagonist's choice, one or more of the following happens:

__ Protagonist loses her job.
__ Protagonist loses the Perfect Guy.
__ Protagonist loses the friendship of a primary source of support.
__ Protagonist falls into wave of self-pity and junk food and balloons to a size 6.
__ Protagonist drinks herself into a Cosmopolitan stupor.
__ Protagonist ruins a very important pair of shoes.

VII. Reversal

Where she was happy in her job/relationship/friendship/shoes, Protagonist is now:

__ Unemployed
__ Single
__ Friendless
__ Fat(ter than before)
__ In need of a new drink
__ Barefoot

VIII. Resolution

After some serious moments of soul-searching, Protagonist comes back out on top. All antagonists are thwarted and personal demons confronted. She has now found her true professional calling as:

__ A pet groomer
__ A teacher
__ A small-business owner
__ A VIP at the rival company to the company she used to work for
__ A non-drone in publishing/media
__ A writer
__ The wife of somebody very wealthy
__ A shoe buyer

And, of course, perfect romance with:

__ The boyfriend she was with at the beginning of the story, who has now reformed.
__ Her best male friend, for whom she realized deep feelings just before it was too late
__ The perfect guy who's been chasing her all along, who isn't a jerk after all
__ The guy she initially thought was great, who isn't a jerk after all
__ A deus-ex-machina love interest who appears out of nowhere at the last minute
__ Her boss
__ A shoe salesman

(Disclaimer: Management has never actually written a chick-lit novel, management just reads a lot of them. Management assumes no responsibility for declines in productivity or quality of writing that may result from employing "Create Your Own Chick-Lit Novel".)

(Extra thanks to Sharon for her input and suggestions as I composed this fun little exercise.)

NaNoWayFools

2006-10-30T17:15:00.000-05:00

Yes, I have heard of National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo to you shorthanders).

No, I am not doing it.

I heard of this exercise about three years ago and I was interested for about half a second, and then I gave it some good thought and wrote it off as Not For Me.

This has not changed. This is not GOING to change. Therefore, stop asking.

A novelist called Jon Evans has written a fantastic screed about how not to become a successful novelist, and his skewering of this NaNoWriMo business is right on target as far as my own reasons for not doing it are concerned. In a nutshell: "Writing is like anything else: if you try and do too much of it when you’re already half-drained, the quality of what you produce goes way down."

The rest of this essay is fantastic as well; I highly recommend you give it a good read. Jon tells it like it is here. "Becoming a writer" is not something that can be accomplished with mere gumption - you must have both talent AND the willingness to work hard. And you must write. There are dozens and dozens of how-to writing books that attempt to make it more complicated than that. Most of these books are written by embittered failed novelists, I note. Is this what "those who can't do, teach" means? Truthfully, being a writer is simple, but not easy. Writers write. It's just hard damn work combined with natural ability and imagination. You can't just make it happen. There are no easy fixes. A writer's soul does not thrive on any sort of prepackaged chicken soup.

I realize that some people use NaNoWriMo very effectively as a jumping-off point for a more serious writing venture, and others do it because it's just fun, it's a way to blow off some steam, and they don't anticipate or intend that the finished product will ever see the light of day. But for what I'm attempting to do - that is, see my own novel through to completion and hopefully get it published - it's not going to work.

So no, I am not doing NaNoWriMo. But yes, I am working. I am working at my own pace. It is probably not as fast as I should be working, but I'm doing it, and I'm attempting to do it well. If I don't come up with 50,000 words by December, I'll be okay with that.

As a matter of fact, I had 30 pages of early chapters that I recently slashed-and-burned into about 10. This may look like the opposite of progress to some, but I feel great about it.

Thrills and Frills

2006-10-23T14:47:00.000-04:00

John Kricfalusi, of Ren and Stimpy fame, has written a blog post about how old toys have better form and aesthetic value than toys now. In some ways, this is totally true. The things that kids are given to play with absolutely suck compared to their counterparts from 40 or so years ago.

I had my own encounter with this phenomenon, not unlike the Chipmunk dolls John K talks about. When I was 9 or 10, I was obsessed with 1960s Barbie memorabilia. I'm the child of antique dealers, and in the days before ebay, my folks set up at half a dozen shows a year. I developed the interest in Barbie stuff to keep myself entertained amid all of the fragile grown-up things. But immediately I understood how much better these clothes and accessories were compared to what I'd grown up playing with. For one thing, the outfits had names: "Enchanted Evening," "Friday Night Date," "Orange Blossom," "Garden Party." Barbie clearly had a busy social calendar, and the perfect outfit for every activity. They had real metal YKK zippers and gorgeous detailing in the form of tiny buttonholes, appliques, lace, beading, and all that other fun stuff. I was taught from a very early age to handle antiques very carefully, though I'd be lying if I said I always resisted the urge to handle the outfits, and even dress and pose the Barbies.

Barbie's wardrobe today emphasizes quantity over quality - where you can now buy twenty times as many different outfits for your Barbie, they'll all be made of the same cheap polyester blend with a velcro closure, they all come in the same bland packaging with no name, and you're lucky if they come with shoes. The vintage outfits came immaculately accessorized, too, with handbags, hats, shoes (open-toed, pumps, wedges, sneakers, boots), and even gloves and jewelry.

How could you not fall in love with dresses like this? I had this one ("Sophisticated Lady," it's called), and it was my favorite. I believe I had the shoes, and maybe even the gloves, but unfortunately no tiara or pearls.

While I haven't carried my Barbie obsession into adulthood, I'm drawn to clothes that remind me of what I used to buy for my Barbies - full circle skirts, coordinating colors, intricate patterns and details. I'm even thrilled by metal YKK zippers in vintage dresses. I'd love to dress like 1960s Barbie every day of my life, if I could. I'd even name my clothes. (Most of my wardrobe, I'm sad to say, still looks like it should be called "Work Day in Very Casual Office Environment" and "Weekend of Indeterminate Hanging-Out". And most all of it would look like jeans and a long-sleeved t-shirt in a solid color.)

Barbie nowadays just looks cheap, unless you're talking about those collector-edition toys that aren't for kids and aren't meant to be removed from their boxes. (Which brings up a whole other rant inspired by JohnK's blog post - yes, there ARE toys as fascinatingly intricate and well-made as toys used to be. These toys are hardly ever marketed to children, though. Most people who buy them don't even take them out of the box, much less touch them or play with them.)

I think my ten-year-old self, upon viewing her adult counterpart, would probably be most disappointed by the lack of a human-sized counterpart to "Sophisticated Lady" in my closet, to say nothing for the dearth of excuses to wear such a thing.

Chicks in the Mix

2006-10-09T18:16:00.000-04:00

Just one short mention of this MJ Rose entry on Huffington Post about the relentless chick-lit versus literary debate. (Credit where credit's due: I found the link via Ms. Addled Writer.) It's good reading, and makes a couple of points with which I vigorously agree.

A couple of things I feel like expanding on, though:

1) I disagree with what she says about The DaVinci Code. That book's success had not so much to do with the "book climate" and very much to do with its publishers, and the fact that they funneled a ginormous chunk of their marketing budget into this one idiotic volume. It sold like wildfire because it was marketed all to hell, and the public wasn't being told to buy any other books. (And that part, I'll grant, IS the book climate. It'd be great if there were more people willing to go digging for good books, but there's no book, no matter how awesome, that'll be a bestseller on its own merits these days. You HAVE to market. Which I guess is kind of her main point.)

2) Chick lit takes away from romance? Honey, chick lit these days IS romance. Maybe it didn't start out that way, but that's what it is now. What's all over the book store these days? Shiny pink trade paperbacks bearing pictures of shoes and be-suited cartoonified women carrying shopping bags. What's it displacing? Mass-market paperbacks with embossed covers, depicting flowing-haired hunks with bulging pecs and creamy-bosomed women spilling out of their period garb. But what's the protagonist's main objective in either? Twoo Wuv. The headstrong heroine meets her match. She probably hates him at first, but once they have several pages' worth of steamy sex, they love each other forever. The setting has changed, the physical appearance of the book has changed, but they are the same beast, make no mistake. Harlequin owns Red Dress Ink. Need I say more?

(I should add a disclaimer here that there has been at least one very excellent Red Dress Ink book which I read and enjoyed, and which did not follow this formula, and whose author will probably read this and disagree with my blanket dismissal of latter-day chick lit, but I want her to know that her first novel was awesome in ANY flavor she chooses to categorize it, but I didn't feel like it WAS chick lit. So there.)

Cue LeVar Burton

2006-10-06T14:31:00.000-04:00

A couple of years back, I was a devotee of a semiregular writing group I found on Craigslist. It was, for the most part, a group of pretty cool people, some of whom were Seriously Into Writing, some of whom were just keeping journals. I finally had to stop going, though - in part because real life demands got in the way, in part because (okay, I'll admit it) I'd briefly dated someone in the group and wanted to avoid awkwardness, but mostly because of the attitude of some of those who claimed to be Seriously Into Writing. I keep running into people like this, and it completely blows my mind - there are folks out there who exhibit an unfortunate and annoying tendency that I can't quite get past - namely, they don't read books. And there's not just one or two. These folks are legion.

This concept is so far from my sphere of philosophy that I just can't come up with any logical explanation for it. I can't conjure any plane of reality that meshes with mine wherein someone with a genuine interest in being a writer that anybody else would want to read would not also have a genuine interest in reading others' work.

These people want to be writers - usually, fiction writers. They claim to love the written word. But they don't consume any, and it's not that they really love books but can't find time to read, it's that they've just never gotten excited about them. (Believe me, if you love the written word enough, you make time to read. I read on my commute - okay, I read on my commute about half the time, when I'm not watching Star Trek reruns on my ipod - and for 45 minutes or so before I go to sleep.)

I find it difficult to understand people in general who categorically don't read books, although I can certainly condone it if words just don't do it for them. Fine. Lots of things don't do it for me - the NFL, orgies, knitting, and political canvassing, to name a few - and I lead a pretty full life anyway. I even know some people who want to be newspaper reporters who don't read books, but read the Times and half a dozen other papers every day.

But to want to write stories and not spend every possible second (that is, every possible second not spent producing) devouring all the books you can get your hands on? It's like wanting to be a chef but only eating peanut butter sandwiches. It's like wanting to be a fashion designer but shopping at the Gap. It would be like me trying out to be a sportscaster even though I can't make myself sit through a full NFL game. I can't think of a single argument that could possibly begin defend this point of view.

I think I have something to learn from anybody who's ever been published, because already they're a step ahead of me. I pay attention to the rhythm of the words, the devices that drive the plot forward, what I think works and doesn't work, what I would have done differently. Every book I read - even the ones I don't like - lends that much more to my understanding of what goes into good prose. I think I get a little bit better every time I pick up a new book.

Sometimes, someone in my old writing group would share something and one of us would say, "what you're working on kind of reminds me of a book I read by X." A reader, or someone who is at least not averse to the concept of reading, will either have read the book (or one by the author), or ask about the book and write down the title. The ones who don't read will shrug it off. They're usually also the ones who get argumentative if they're at all criticized. These things go together for some reason - I think it's that they honestly feel their writing can't be improved by outside forces, which strikes me as unbelievably arrogant.

For that matter, if you don't want to learn from others, why on earth would you want to join a writing group? So everyone else can prostrate themselves at the feet of your clearly pristine and untaintable skills?

Also, if you're not interested in improving yourself, if you really think you're doing the very best you or anybody else can do, then why are you still doing what you're doing?

It bodes well that so far, in my writing class, most people have been furiously taking notes whenever an author is mentioned. Most of us do the reading assignments and we're not afraid to talk about them. Most of us are not afraid to learn something from the writers we read, or even from each other.

Honestly, in the big picture? I kinda suck. Someday I'd like to suck less. Someday after that I'd like to not suck. Someday after that I'd like to be good enough to produce books that people buy.

I'm always growing. I'm always learning. Therefore, I am always reading.

Namaste, Jealousy

2006-09-28T14:36:00.000-04:00

I know you're supposed to clear your mind while you're doing yoga, but yesterday in my yoga class, I got to thinking about competition. It's something I've posted about before, but it's certainly not something that hit the back burner once I regurgitated a few thoughts into my blog. The competitive instinct is ever-present in most writers (especially those of us who haven't yet "made it", or indeed, written much of anything).

This came up in yoga because I arrived a little early to secure a good floor spot and do a little decompressing. At most gyms near my office, the yoga class will in fact fill to capacity if it's in a central location at a central time. Even the 8 a.m. class I sometimes attend fills up. So I wasn't the only one who arrived a little early. There were a few other people there, also decompressing and warming up, only their decompression process was a little different from mine. Their warm-ups were about three or four notches past anything I can do, yoga-wise. I felt neither impressed nor threatened by their mad yoga skillz. I didn't even feel threatened when we started the class and we got to poses I couldn't hold. I was totally cool hanging out in Child's Pose or Downward Dog once we got to Crane Pose, and I didn't feel like I didn't belong, or like the showoffs who could spend five minutes in a headstand were out to show me up because I can't balance my entire body weight on my fingertips or something like that.

And it made me wonder why it is that when I'm around other writers, I often feel my hackles go up, but I never feel threatened when I'm in a class at my gym - any class. I've been boxing and kickboxing for three years and I never feel threatened by all the guys in my boxing classes who look like video game characters, either. Aren't sports supposed to be competitive? At my level of writerhood, there are way more visible milestones that someone has a certain level of expertise at a sport than there are at writing. Either you have the balance to stand solidly in Warrior III or you don't. Either your roundhouse will knock someone out or it won't. Your goals are pretty clear at the gym - get strong enough to stand on one leg while bending forward, do an unassisted dip, run an 8-minute mile, lose 10 pounds.

Maybe that's it. Maybe it's the fact that you really can't quantify writing skills or writing success. One would think that if we're all in the same writing boat, the lot of us aspiring writers would be willing to send encouraging words, talk shop, support each other's efforts, the whole nine yards. But by and large, writers are not social, supportive creatures. We treat the Writing Boat like it's the subway in rush hour, and there are only a certain number of seats, and we have to scramble to sit down before someone else takes what's rightfully ours.

Despite the fact that I parrot the "if you're good you can't hide it forever" mantra, I still feel the scramble sometimes. I don't even send good vibes to my close friends as much as I should. I've actively sabotaged friendships with fellow aspiring writers, in fact, which I think partially originated from this same competitive impulse. We were perfectly lovely to each other until we started talking about our shared ambition to eventually write for a living, and then we both sort of ...shut down.

It is awfully tempting to end this post with some little bite-sized hunk of triteness, ala, "in yoga we are taught the word 'namaste' which means 'I worship the divine in you and all of us.' Perhaps we can apply this concept to our writing lives, and celebrate the talents and successes of our peers." But I won't. I posted my previous thoughts on competition and jealousy over a year ago and I don't think I've evolved much since then. It's not a mature or healthy thing to do, and it doesn't help me or them. But still I do it. Still many people do it. And I don't know the answer to what sort of processes it will take to get us all to stop cutting each other down and start building each other up.

Besides, I'm not all that good at yoga yet. Maybe I can speak with authority on namaste when I can hold that stupid Warrior III pose for longer than half a second.

A Very Special Blog Entry

2006-09-22T14:05:00.000-04:00

Ninth-grade gym class was the bane of my existence. Throughout my middle-school and high-school experience, I was told over and over that my natural atheticism (or complete and utter lack thereof) didn't matter - grading was based on enthusiasm and sportsmanship. But gym had been okay in 7th and 8th grades because I felt like this was how it actually worked. Mrs. S. and I had our differences, and I certainly wasn't always the paragon of enthusiasm and sportsmanship, but if I tried, I was rewarded, and she understood that it took a lot more effort for me to pretend I was having a good time when I served the volleyball five feet short of the net for the tenth consecutive time than it would elsewhere in school - say, in the spelling bee.

My 9th grade gym teacher, though, was different. Mrs P. spouted the same party line that all the others had - good attitude counted more than being good at sports - but she sure didn't practice it, as far as I could tell. Day after day, I painted the grin on my face, cheered for my teammates, bounced through the folk-dancing steps with all the energy I could muster, crammed my head full of court dimensions and rules to ace the written tests...and I was still pulling in a solid B. If I didn't suddenly morph into Wonder Woman for the badminton unit, I'd be camped out in 3.8 land for the quarter.

I was optimistic, though, because we were playing a mixed-doubles tournament, which Mrs. P. thought would give a good introduction to seeding and tournament structure. She would pair us off and attempt to balance our ability levels to make the playing field a little more even. Obviously, this meant I'd be paired with a boy who could actually hit the birdie from time to time, and maybe he could make up for the fact that I hopelessly lacked hand-eye coordination. Maybe we'd win some games and place in the tournament. The top three were getting bonus points on their grades, I knew that much.

On the first day of the tournament, Mrs. P. sat us all down and read off the pairings. Sure enough, the stronger girls were being paired with the weaker boys, and vice versa. My name kept not getting called. I started to get worried as all of the better athletes were paired with people other than me. I didn't hear my name until she called out the very last pair on the list.

Jessica and...Laura?

Wait, wasn't this mixed doubles?

I looked around and noted that there were two more girls than boys. Okay, so that made some sense that one pair would be all female. But Laura? That made no sense at all.

Laura was in special education. I don't think anybody ever knew what exactly was wrong with her - there was nothing obvious beyond a vague simplicity to her language and a stocky, lumbering body - but she was different enough that we noticed something was not quite there. Despite a pretty good showing at the Special Olympics every year, Laura still couldn't compete with the rest of the class, athletically speaking, and, well, I wasn't much better. (In fact, I might have been worse.)

But I had no problems with Laura. We were going to get shut out on every single game, this much was evident, but at least she was nice.

Sure enough, our first day on the court, we were 0-3, although at least one of the games wasn't a total shut-out. Our losing streak continued for the next several days, until finally, convinced it was part of Mrs. P.'s secret conspiracy to wreck my GPA, I confronted her.

"You know I'm not very good at sports," I said. "I thought you wanted to make the teams evenly balanced. So why did you put me with Laura? We haven't won a single game yet. We're lucky to have scored points."

"It's not about you," Mrs. P. said. "It's more about Laura. You're one of the only people in the class who's ever nice to her. I wanted to make sure she was paired with someone who wouldn't get upset if she didn't play well."

It was flattering enough to shut me up - did I really come off as that nice? I had never been best friends with Laura, but I'd tried to avoid making fun of her. It made me a little sad to think that not going out of my way to mock her constituted being one of the nicer kids in the class. I think, looking back, that Mrs. P. might have been blowing a minimal amount of smoke up my ass on that one, but it did have the desired effect. I liked the idea that I was seen as nice, and I resolved to live up to it.

So I got back out on the court, and, armed with the knowledge that this really was an exercise in sportsmanship and attitude, I actually relaxed and had fun. Laura and I both started getting better at the game. We even had a couple of very close matches. When she was absent one day and I had to play with Billy B., whose partner was also absent, I found that I wasn't a huge embarrassment - I actually outscored Billy.

I'm pretty sure we placed last in the tournament, but it was a hell of a lot more fun than playing with any of the athletic boys would have been. Laura, being a generally sweet-tempered girl, never once commented on my playing except to tell me I shouldn't get angry at myself for missing a shot. And while I probably started out patronizing her a little bit, near the end, we were genuinely excited to root for each other whenever one of us scored a point.

Lest you think I'm getting totally glurgey and rose-colored-glasses-y, I will point out that I did ultimately wind up in last place with no bonus points in the tournament, a B for the semester, and renewed disgust for public school physical education and its GPA-wrecking message of brawn over brains, but for about three weeks, I felt like P.E. actually taught me something important. I'm giving half the credit to Mrs. P. on this one and the rest to Laura.

Orbiting the Literary Planet

2006-09-19T16:22:00.000-04:00

New stuff is afoot.

My new change in appearance: I took the plunge and got the rest of my hair chopped short, ala Jean Seberg in Breathless. I've never had enough cheekbones (i.e. been thin enough) to pull this off before. So far, I love it. I don't even have to comb my hair when I get out of the shower. I just sort of mess it up a little and it looks more professional than ever.

But you didn't come here for vanity updates. You probably came to find out if I dropped off the face of the literary planet entirely after I stopped doing Barbes.

Well, sort of. Not entirely.

My new project of late: I'm taking a writing class.

I'm itching to blog about the details of the class, the types of people in it, what we've done so far, what the teacher is like...but I know all too well that the first time someone in the class decides to google their classmates, I'd be in big trouble of Harriet the Spy proportions. Even if I said nice things, I'd be afraid of this happening. Hell, I'm already afraid that merely by having a website where I pretend to be a writer, I'm asking for trouble.

But I will tell you that so far, it's going okay. I've even volunteered to have my current project workshopped in the next couple of weeks, and I'm looking forward to getting feedback. Hopefully I will not be damned with faint praise. (One of the most crushing moments of my adult writing life happened after my first reading at Barbes. When I met the relatively well-known author who'd "headlined" the reading, she shook my hand and said to me, in a tone that could not be any more disinterested, "you're a good writer." I'm sure she meant to be gracious and polite, but I never wanted to throw in the towel, and never write another word, more than when I received the lamest, blandest compliment possible. Maybe this is why Salinger doesn't write anymore. Perhaps, like, Truman Capote or Nabokov or someone told him his books were "nice.")

My other new project of late: I'm doing some freelance book reviewing.

That's right. A rather large and high-profile publication is actually sending me books in the mail, which I'm to read and write a small review, after which point they'll publish my review in their publication and then they will send me money. It's not enough to quit my day job yet, obviously, but someone is paying me to read books. I'm ridiculously excited about this. My first book arrived yesterday. I have already finished reading it. I'm like a little kid who's just started a new grade in school (and hasn't yet been jaded by the concept of school in general). Did I mention I get to keep the books when I'm done? Whose idea was this? It's like being paid to ride roller coasters and eat ice cream.

All of this reading and writing at the behest of others makes me deeply regret not having taken more English classes when I was in school. Hell, I wish I'd double-majored. But English, at the time, seemed like such a pedestrian thing to study in college, and I didn't want to put any actual, serious stock in the notion that I could actually do something fiction-writey for a living. (Honestly, I didn't think much about the "real world" in general when I was in college. That's liberal arts for you.)

Partially, I think I was afraid of becoming one of those space cadets with an MFA who's capable of doing nothing but churning out directionless, flowery prose and nattering on about their "art" in a smug, superior tone to anybody who'll listen (fellow guests at cocktail parties, bored relatives, perhaps the captive audience of a community college class if I got really lucky). (Forgetting all the while, of course, that I may occasionally be directionless, but rarely am I flowery.) I needed real world experience and real life events and skills. Mostly, though, I was scared. Scared and lazy.

Truth is, I'm not actually all that bad when I put my mind to writing and my fingers to keyboard, and I know this. And the only way to improve on "not actually all that bad" is to keep doing it, whether freelancing or working for a class.

Quacks in the Digital Veneer

2006-09-12T12:30:00.000-04:00

(ed. note - yes, this is a re-post...but I liked it. Not quite a "greatest hit" per se, but it's not a bad idea to save in here the more interesting things that come out of other places I've been known to blog, especially when I have phases of extensive trouble coming up with blog topics in either forum...but original content SHOULD be coming to Bitty Soda soon, I think.)

A few weeks back, I was introduced to the wondrous wonderfulness that is Jacqueline Mackie Paisley Passey by Something Awful, via friends on LiveJournal. JMPP is ever so wonderful - she's slim and young and gorgeous and well-traveled and owns her own business and men everywhere want to date her! Just ask her and she'll tell you all about it. She claims to be an Objectivist, but for a Randroid, she seems a little excessively caught up in how favorably she compares to the rest of the world, and how much better she is than your average girl.

But annoying conceited people are everywhere. That's not an Internet-unique phenomenon. The Internet-unique phenomenon is the "exteriorally reformed geek." By geek here, I don't mean savvy, technically adept, Elvis Costello-listening, Wired-reading chicness. I mean geek in the other sense. No, not the chicken-head-biting sense either. The OTHER other sense. The sense of the social outcast with the shyness problem and the awkwardness problem and perhaps a touch of the hygiene problem.

A lot of us girls grew up smarter-than-average and chubby and picked-on. We had a harder time making friends and settling into a rung on the high-school pecking order. Our arch-nemeses, either real or imagined, were the flocks of catty popular girls who were pretty and thin and got all the boyfriends. In the usual progression of things, we'd grow older, grow into our bodies (or at least grow comfortable with them), leave the catty popular girls behind, and generally live our lives having evolved past the ugly duckling phase. Not everyone sheds the weight and gets a makeover, and not everyone loses that insecurity (in fact, nobody ever loses it completely)...but one way or another the awkward phase lifts and adulthood settles in. We let go of the desire to compete in those arenas. We learn more easily that the kind of validation those girls got isn't the only currency in the world. The transition is rough, but swanhood awaits.

But people my age hit adolescence around the same time something else hit the world - the ability to talk to strangers without meeting them face-to-face. With that ability also came the ability to connect to smaller and smaller subsets of people based on a common interest or similar intelligence level. It also heralded the ability to find romance, or at least suitors, with a few IM sessions and the swapping of your most flattering photo.

You would think, given all that, that the Internet makes it easier to get out of Ugly Duckling mode. It doesn't. If anything, it's harder. You never have to seek validation from within if you can get it from 50-100 sad men writing to your personal ad or posting comments in your blog. Awkward teen girls the world over have found, in the Internet, a land where there is a reasonable facsimile of popularity to those who want it. And so they have learned to crave the same attention online that their more popular peers received in real life.

And that's when you get your Jacqueline Mackie Paisley Passeys - the catty, attention-whoring, hypercompetitive hybrids that incorporate all the insecurities of the ugly-duckling geeky teen girls and all of the cattiness of the beautiful popular teen girls that got all the boyfriends...and virtually nothing of a mature adult.

The insecurities that she carries over from her "overweight and ugly" phase still come through loud and clear. She may be comparing herself favorably to all of humanity in this blog post, but she's really comparing herself favorably to the pretty popular girls who got all the boyfriends when she was 16. She's still stuck in THAT comparison, and she is very anxious to prove to everyone that she grew up and became much better than they will ever hope to be. As Sharon put it, "she wants to be the most popular girl in school so she can reject all the boys that rejected her."

And so do most of her readers. Note that of her comments, about two-thirds of them are women trying to one-up her - "I'm thinner than you, my IQ is higher than yours, I get 1000 responses to my personal ad, I would have done X where you did Y, I have a boyfriend and you don't, and I don't need to go trumpeting about it in my blog in front of God and everyone." If they're not saying that literally, then they're implying it with their weak attempts to psychoanalyze her (much like my own weak attempt here). And the final third is made up generally of men who think they've found a reformed-geek kindred spirit and hit on her, thus further fueling her posts about how men unworthy of her won't leave her alone.

Sure, the Internet has helped a lot of people. I would venture to say that this same desire for validation coaxed yours truly out of her shell somewhat. I'm not even saying I'm immune to the disease that Ms. Passey has. Hell, look at me - I'm subtly trying to come off as more evolved here. Okay, it's not subtle at all. And I don't actually even think I am more evolved. But I don't need you all to pat me on the back for being more attractive than I was in college and occasionally being attractive to men. I figure this was something I was supposed to do - self-betterment and all.

You can learn one of two things from being an ugly duckling. You can learn how to grow up to be a swan, or you can make yourself into a pretty duck. I'm seeing many fewer swans out there in internets land, and many more pretty ducks, with much louder voices. And the worst types are the pretty ducks who think they're swans.

Where Everybody's About to Forget Your Name

2006-08-07T00:00:00.000-04:00

I have some rather sad news to impart this evening. The Barbes Reading Series is no more. This, I am sure, will come as a bit of a shock to some of you, and I'm sure it will make me far less relevant or interesting to others, but as for me, I'm okay. The management at Barbes had some good reasons for deciding to do away with the series this year - mainly, over the past several years, the series has simply had trouble finding a regular audience, despite good press and a steady stream of high- and medium-profile names. I may curate another reading series in a few years, and my pals at Barbes have said I shouldn't rule out the possibility of hosting a few one-off events, but as far as every other Sunday goes - well, we're done for now.

But it was a pretty awesome run, I have to say. I met some amazing writers, earned some valuable experience, took on new responsibilities. And hey, it gave me something interesting to talk about on Jeopardy!.

I'm aware, as I said, that most of my relevance in the literary world is tied up with this series. I haven't published anything in two years, and there's not a lot I'd be proud to share with the world that I've been working on in the interim. So I guess that's the thing I need to concentrate on - doing worthwhile things. Barbes was my worthwhile contribution, but maybe now it's time to work on actually bringing some writing of my own into the world.

So what's next in the life of Jess? Obviously, writing, writing, and writing some more. This fall, I'll be taking my first formal writing class in nearly a decade. I'm hoping it winds up reaping some good benefits. I have read the teacher's first novel, and it was excellent (at the very least, it's clear that we like the same authors). But even if he winds up being less than helpful (which, for six hundred bucks, he'd better not be!), it's always been my feeling that in a roomful of authors and author-wannabes, there will always be someone who can teach you something.

Also, I'm taking up yoga. Lord knows I need something to help me de-stress, and I get the impression that hard liquor is only going to take me so far.

Pizza Mind

2006-07-31T14:06:00.000-04:00

Back in the Dark Ages, when I first moved to New York (okay, five years ago), there was this little pizza place a few blocks from my apartment, where the same guy was always there, all day every day, and he'd make you a fantastic pie with fresh ingredients and a hand-tossed crust, and you could take your friends there on your way back from Coney Island and wow them.

You know the pizza place I'm talking about if you care at all about pizza. Slice accepts it as a foregone conclusion that you already know all about DiFara, and about Dom DeMarco, its grizzled Italian Energizer bunny of an owner. You also know that when you go there, you can be assured that the service is going to suck, the tables are going to be dirty, and you must be patient. All this is understood, and most people know that the pizza is worth a bit of an extra wait.

But no pizza is worth what happened to us on Saturday. DiFara in the middle of the summer is a hellhole, and even that I knew going in. What I wasn't prepared for was for the oven to be spewing noxious smoke all over the restaurant, causing the air to be unbreatheable in addition to hot and stuffy. My friends all waited inside with me for the first half-hour or so, but eventually had to go outside for the second half-hour-plus. I think, by the time I got the pie, Dom's son thought I was crying about my pizza order. (I nearly was. And if that got it into my hands any sooner, then I'm okay with that.) For most of Saturday night and Sunday, I had a pretty nasty cough.

I remember the hot. I remember the stuffy. I even remember the pack of ...oh, I hate the word, so I won't say it, but it starts with an h and we have a lot of them in Brooklyn... thinking they are now part of the cognoscenti because they called Mr. DeMarco by his first name when they placed their order, and the pack of Midwood/Ditmas locals who are pissed that the pack of ...h-words have taken over their local pizza joint and who may actually be even more annoying than the h-words with their patronizing list of DiFara survival tips. (I'm not sure who I'd want to slap more - the next person who leans over the counter and says "hey, Dom, we need some more parmesan" or the next person who rolls their eyes at people in line and tells them "this is nothing. You don't know what waiting at DiFara is. Let me tell you about this one time...") But I didn't remember the smoke. And the smoke, my friends, was the straw that broke the camel's back.

The pizza? Delicious, of course. But many things are delicious. I am content to enjoy every other delicious thing in the world for the next five years or so, until every publication in the world moves on to the next great pizzeria, and then I might chance going back. I'm pretty sure it will get worse before it gets better.

In which your heroine is a nice person

2006-07-28T15:17:00.000-04:00

I saw that a couple of people found my site today because I mentioned both bicycles and "Good Day New York." I think they were looking for this. Which is both hilarious and true. I've never been happier to own a Kryptonite lock that cost me twice as much as my bike did.

Ephemeral Stuff

2006-07-26T16:17:00.000-04:00

While I dream up things to write about, I thought I'd throw you a few random links:

Interactive Art Installation Kills People

The Onion's funniest article in ages: "Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years of American Independence"

Ken Jennings suggests ways to improve Jeopardy!

People are sick of The DaVinci Code! Not me. It is just too much fun to hate.

Also, I am constantly terrified by the tiny animations that keep getting slipped into the online version of For Better or For Worse. I keep forgetting they've added the little blinks and such, and I start thinking the characters are coming to life to kill me.

(Greatest Hits) Oh Yeah!

2006-07-24T18:04:00.000-04:00

(ed. note: Occasionally, to keep this blog fresh, I've decided that every so often, I'm going to repost things I've written ages ago and possibly reposted elsewhere, maybe re-tooling them a bit to stay current. This is just so you'll have something constructive to do while I don't have time to generate new and entertaining things. Besides, you know what they say - if you haven't read it yet, it's new to you.)

The other night, at the supermarket, I had a nigh-Proustian flashback while standing in the check-out line. I spotted a metal rack haphazardly jammed with little paper envelopes in bold reds and purples, and it cried out to me. Kool-Aid. Immediately, I was compelled to step out of line and dig through the rack in search of my favorite flavors. It's summertime, after all. It might be raining, but July is still definitely a Kool-Aid month. I spent every summer of my childhood up to high school drinking more Kool-Aid than was probably advisable or healthy. We sucked it down like water, every summer all summer.

There were a few summers in there where we saved the points and traded them in for plastic cups shaped like the Kool-Aid Man, or entered contests to try to win t-shirts or other assorted Kool-Aid-Man swag (which we never actually won). Oh yeah! Sure, my mom only made it with half the requisite amount of sugar, but I imagine one need only look to Kool-Aid, and the unflouridated Montana tap water, to understand why 90% of my top teeth and 60% of my bottom teeth are filled.

These days, technological advances have enabled me to substitute Splenda instead of sugar, which may not help my teeth, but it will at least help my waistline. To my credit, I still follow my mom's lead and make it with half a cup of sugar instead of a full cup, and it tastes just fine. Almost too sweet, in fact, leading me to wonder if maybe the sugar in her Kool-Aid isn't halved but thirded, or something like that. Once I made a pitcher of Kool-Aid and accidentally totally forgot the sugar. I don't recommend that.

Lately, I've had some trouble locating a few key flavors, particularly Tropical Punch (it's always been my favorite), but to my great relief there's usually Cherry in there among the bizarre, trendy new flavors. They did the trendy flavors when I was a kid, too (remember Purplesaurus Rex? Or Great Bluedini?), but I've always been a traditional kind of girl. Cherry, Raspberry, Tropical Punch. Not so much with the scary Kiwi-Peach-Guava-whatever. And Kool-Aid Lemonade is some nasty shit. If you want lemonade, I can't advocate any other method than fresh, or, in a pinch, the frozen cans that require 4 1/3 cans of water to one can of lemonade.

(Aside: when I was 16, I dyed my hair pink with Raspberry Kool-Aid. It lasted for about three days and smelled great. I tried this again recently. The pink streak stayed in my hair for over six months, until I finally cut it out entirely.)

Anyway, Kool-Aid is a notable substance in my world because Kool-Aid is exactly as good as I remember it. So few things are, you see. Most Disney movies come off as plodding and trite to me these days. Micky Dolenz (complete with ginormous white-boy Afro) is somehow not as cute to me as he was when I was 8. (I switched to Mike sometime during my teens.) Debbie Gibson, once the height of musical excellence for me, makes my teeth hurt. Pizza Hut pizza is just a big flavorless doughy mass to me anymore. Those plastic barrettes with animals on them damage my hair when I try to wear them now. And when I go to the pool nowadays I just swim laps, and that's fun enough, but I don't even remember what kinds of things my stepsiblings and I did at the pool that seemed to make the summer afternoons fly by. Was there really a point where I could amuse myself for three hours playing Marco Polo?

Some of this stuff is the kind of stuff that might not have been that good to begin with, and was only good when experienced as a child. Other stuff is probably not as good anymore because my tastes have expanded and matured and I've (possibly) become more sophisticated. But many things make me wonder if the defect is not in the experience itself, but in me. Maybe I've lost my capacity to enjoy certain things in the process of abandoning other childish conceits, and maybe it's not a good thing. So it's a relief to know that I can still derive the same simple enjoyment from a few of the things that I loved as a kid. And that's where the Kool-Aid comes in.

So what are yours? What's still as good now as it was when you were a kid? What's a disappointment?

(By the way, the best paean to summer nostalgia that I've ever read is Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury. I need to drag that out and give it a re-read.)

There's No Intelligent Life Down Here

2006-07-17T22:22:00.000-04:00

Long posts are in the works, most notably bashing Sex and the City sycophants, rhapsodizing about Cuban sammiches, and once again sticking up for my imaginary literary boyfriend Chuck Klosterman, but for now, I merely have this to offer you. I am awash in nerdy glee, as a fan of both Monty Python and any incarnation of Star Trek. The "pram-a-lot" line is the best part.

That's right, I said it. I love Star Trek. There are few things I love more. The only thing that has stopped me from going to a convention - in costume, even - thus far has been lack of opportunity. This is all changing in November. My sewing machine is fired up and ready for action. And you'd better frickin' believe I'm paying $60 for a photo with Shatner.

Pow! Wham! Zot!

2006-07-12T16:52:00.000-04:00

It's no big secret that comic books are not exactly my favorite genre of literature. Sure, the Spider-Man movies didn't suck, I rather enjoyed The Sandman graphic novels, and I do think The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay was one of the best novels of the last ten years, but by and large, I don't get excited about sequential art, its universes, its characters, or anything that comes out of the comic book universe. Certainly not the way a good number of my friends do.

But when I found out that one of the mainstays of my childhood was getting the graphic-novelization treatment, I had to check it out. From fourth grade through seventh grade, I lived, breathed, ate, and slept Baby-Sitters' Club. I'm sure if you were born between roughly 1978 and 1985, you did too.

All told, I probably read at least the first 50, and all of the Super Specials. New books used to come out at a rate of one per month, and while I was waiting patiently for the next one to be released, I would re-read my favorites. I used to write out my own BSC-style middle-school-minidrama fiction in five-subject spiral notebooks, using four-color pens. I've never loved an author quite as obsessively as I loved Ann M. Martin (and it broke my heart, years later, to realize that all but one or two of these books were ghost-written...well, I was either heart-broken or painfully jealous of these mystery people who got paid to write Baby-Sitters' Club books, one of the two - I'd still write pre-fabbed YA fiction novels for a living if someone offered me the job - AND I'd be awesome at it - hear that, book packagers? Call me!).

So when I learned that Scholastic was re-releasing the novels as graphic novels, I was intrigued enough to track down a copy of the first installment, Kristy's Great Idea. It is, bar none, the cutest thing I've read in ages. Raina Telgemeier's artwork is whimsical and adorable, but she also does a fantastic job of conveying emotions and packing pages full of information into one scene.

A good fifteen years after I last read it, I remembered a frightening number of random, tiny little details that appeared in Kristy's Great Idea (now you know what resides in my head instead of a full list of the British monarchs - perhaps this is the precise bit of information that cost me $13,000 on Jeopardy!), and I have to say, the graphic novel is a painstakingly accurate adaptation of the original. It makes me wish I had cousins or nieces the right age, so I could pass this on to them.

As it stands right now, I was poised to pass it on to Sharon this evening, who is my age and not strictly in the Baby-Sitters' Club demographic either. But I was worried it would get rained on, and being that I don't yet love comics enough to have any of those special plastic baggies, I figured it was better off staying in my apartment.

I Wish I Was a Writer so I Could Get Chicks

2006-06-23T12:20:00.002-04:00

So evidently the number-one bar where pretending to be a writer can get you laid, according to The L Magazine, is none other than MINE. Well, okay, I don't own it, obviously (I'm not an awesome French guy named Olivier), but I'm allegedly responsible for the reading series there.

I say "allegedly" because I've decided to put Barbes on hold until the fall. It's not generating as much interest over the summer as it did this spring, and a couple of months off to hammer down a schedule for the fall and work on some publicity will do the series a world of good. If you have ideas for people you'd like to see at the series, or if you yourself are interested, please let me know!

The plan now is for the series to resume on September 17th, but I'll let you know if that changes.

And for the record, pretending to be a writer has never gotten me laid at Barbes, nor have I ever witnessed anybody else picking up dudes or chicks as a result of their literary poserhood. But I suppose stranger things have happened!