Unlikely Writings

Let's Talk About Love

2011-02-13T22:30:00.004-07:00

It's finally happened! As I alluded to all those (ok, two) months ago when I shut down this blog, I did it to help me keep my focus on another.

Miss me? Want to know what I'm up to?

Come check out Love 2.0, the home of my ambitious attempt to define what love really is, and what it looks like in the real world. It's launching tomorrow, Monday February 14th (when else?). The first post will be up at midnight if you're impatient and/or nocturnal.

Here's a taste of what I'm talking about, and why:

When love goes wrong there’s more to the damage than just (hah, “just”) a broken heart. If no one’s ever told us what real love is, we’re at the mercy of the first person in our lives who says they love us. We have no way of knowing if what they’re calling “love” is genuine affection or something else – often something twisted, controlling or destructive. I’ve seen too many friends, men and women, accept pain and neglect from a partner because “they love me.” I may not know what real love is, but I know that’s not it.

If you think I have a point there and you want to talk about it, come check out the blog. I have lots (really, lots) more to say.

The End Approacheth

2010-12-12T11:06:00.005-07:00

To Whom It May Concern

Unlikely Writings will be going dark as of January 1st, to make way for a new project. So will several other things I've started, neglected and forgotten about. Next year, I'm only going to be one place on the internet, but I hope everyone reading this will join me there.

Just as soon as I figure out where it is. I don't, uh, exactly have a domain name yet.

To Be Continued ... Kind Of

Skinny

2010-10-30T11:56:00.004-06:00

You know what I hate? I mean really, really HATE? People who have a schizophrenic, love-hate relationship with my body type that leads them to simultaneously idolize and revile it.

For example:

"Oh my god, you're so skinny! I'm so jealous. You must never eat."

"Men don't really like those skinny model types, they like women who have some curves."

"I like XYZ company because their models look like real women, not stick figures."

"You weigh what, 85/95/100 pounds? I could never sleep with you, I'd be afraid to break you in half."

"Is she anorexic?"

"Your body is perfect. I hate you."

I've heard all of these, word for word, and many more. For as long as I've been aware of my body, I've been aware of this weird double standard, and like every woman I know, I've internalized it. I don't feel sexy, because I'm "emaciated" and "a stick figure" that no man would want to hold. I'm self-conscious about the amount I eat, especially in restaurants, in case others think I have an eating disorder. I make a point of not knowing how much I weigh so that I can't answer when people ask. I used to long to gain weight so that complete strangers would stop commenting on my body, wrapping their hands around my wrist to demonstrate how small it was, and in extreme cases, physically picking me up to show that I was light.

People don't hesitate to make personal comments about my weight because in their minds it's a positive. Other women are often shocked if I mention having issues with my appearance, and some have acted as if I don't have a right to talk about it at all because I'm "perfect."

These people don't see what I see. They've never looked in the mirror at their bony elbows and small breasts and wondered why anyone would want to touch them. They've never thought and spoken of themselves in all seriousness as a genetic mutant. They've never felt that just by existing, just by living in a body that looks the way it happens to look, they are reinforcing negative cultural expectations and making other women feel bad about the way they look.

Let me say this, once and for all. My narrow bones and high metabolism do not exempt me from the body hatred that afflicts so many, many women in this culture. And I'm sick of it. I'm sick of hiding and I'm sick of shame and I'm sick of feeling like less of a woman because my body is small. So next time somebody asks, this is what I'm going to say:

My name is Heather. I'm five foot six and I weigh less than a hundred pounds, and there's nothing wrong with that. I'm strong and sexy and I can take more pain than men twice my size without a sound -- just ask my tattoo artist. My body is amazing. I don't care what you think of it privately, but when you talk about it to me, you will speak with respect. I'm not a little girl. I'm not a "skinny Minnie." I'm a full grown woman, and if you think your body can "make two of me" -- just go ahead and try.

Safe

2010-08-19T10:30:00.002-06:00

I've been thinking about this cultural mythology we have going. You know, the one that says, You Are Not Safe.

It mostly, though not entirely, applies to women. We're constantly bombarded with messages telling us that we aren't safe, we can't be, unless we stay inside all the time wearing a barbed-wire burka and holding a primed can of mace -- and maybe not even then. It tells us that by being female, we are victims waiting to be attacked.

We've all seen it on the news, or 60 Minutes, or Cold Case Files. We've gotten that deadly serious email forward for "all the women you know," with rape prevention tips. Every woman knows not to go out alone late at night, not to get in her car without checking the backseat, not to go anywhere with a strange man. We're expected to be like perpetual four-year-olds alert for "stranger danger," even though 78% of rape victims are attacked by someone they know. (And it says a lot about this mindset that I know that statistic by heart.)

The many stories in the media about violence against women (and there are many) add up to a message that there is no reliable way to avoid being victimized. I may dress in conservative clothes and lock my doors religiously, but if I make eye contact with a stranger on the light rail or share my notes with a male classmate, I might as well be walking down Colfax in a hot pink miniskirt. Can a sick mind twist any tiny bit of contact into a sexual come-on? Hell if I know, but TV says it can, and you can't be too careful.

Or can you?

Since I've been single, I've begun to notice how destructive the fear-based mindset really is. It can so easily be blown out of proportion, so that you start viewing every man you see with hostility, as a potential attacker. I'm afraid to go to a bar or club by myself, afraid to make eye contact with a stranger, and smiling or flirting is right out. As you might imagine, it's pretty hard to meet anyone while hiding in my house, and boy, does this barbed wire chafe.

I'm not saying that women shouldn't be educated about self defense and sexual assault prevention. What I am saying is that the culture of fear we live in, and the current obsession with violence against women in the media, is just as destructive to gender relations as the violence itself. It's hard to form a friendship with a guy when I'm treating him like an enemy. It's hard to enjoy a date when I'm wondering if it's safe to let him walk me to my car. It's really hard to relax enough to be intimate with someone when the main thing on my mind is whether he'll stop if I say no.

This distrust and suspicion wears away at the partnership that our society -- hell, our species -- is based on. Men and women need each other. We're supposed to like each other. But when I can flip channels on any given night and see three women getting raped, and I don't even have cable, liking men gets pretty difficult. That distrust contributes to the gender gap, the view of the opposite gender as 'other,' as 'different than us,' which is a major contributor to the prevalence of sexual assault in the first place. The phrase 'vicious cycle' doesn't even begin to cover it.

This whole thing bothers me. I don't like the cause and I don't like the effects, and what I would like is to be able to shop for groceries at 9 p.m. without being afraid. As a grown woman in a free country, I don't think that's a lot to ask.

The (Un)Death of Literature

2010-08-14T15:29:00.004-06:00

Lately (and by lately, I mean 'all my freaking life'), I've been hearing a lot about how literature is dead. It goes a little something like this:

"People don't read anymore, the novel is passe and soon only intellectuals will be buying books." Then, when gigantic cultural phenomena like Harry Potter and Twilight prove that people in fact do read, the tune changes to: "People only read bad books, good literature is passe and soon only intellectuals will be reading good books." There's often a supplemental rant, too, about how "our culture is intellectually void, the average person has been lobotomized by reality television and soon we'll all be drooling and scratching ourselves like chimps."

Oookay ...

I've never believed this. Partly it's that I'm an obsessive bookworm: I don't worry about the decline in book sales because if there's only one person left on the face of the Earth who buys books, it will be me. Partly it's that I assume that if I feel this way, many others do, too. Mostly, though, it's because the whole premise just makes no sense. In our culture, more than any other in human history, it is impossible to function unless you read. We are obsessed with text in all its forms: blogging, text messaging, even Twitter. The internet itself is a text-based medium, and the ability to navigate it is non-negotiable in today's world.

I will grant the nay-sayers this: great literature makes you think, and a lot of people will go to any lengths to avoid having to do so. But they'll still read Twilight, which is (technically) a novel, so to say that the novel as an art form is dead is like saying that a hibernating bear is dead. It may not seem to be moving, but poke it with a stick and you'll find out that it's still a fucking bear.

Stories are what move us forward, individually, as a culture, and as a species. I firmly believe that our patterns of behavior are both reflected and dictated by the stories we choose to absorb, and as much as I love and respect film as a medium, it's not sufficient for that purpose. In terms of programming your brain, two hours' total immersion can't compare to the days or weeks you spend with a book, not just reading it but thinking about it, identifying with characters, pondering themes and speculating on outcomes. Information is retained better and for longer periods of time when you engage with it rather than passively absorbing it, and movies and TV are all about passive absorption. Do they, and have they, shaped us as a culture? Of course. Have they shaped us as deeply as, say, the Odyssey? Or Romeo and Juliet? Or the Bible?

No, I don't think so either.

If you're still not convinced, check out the article that inspired me to write this post. Anis Shivani's glorious rant on the Huffington Post, about overrated literary writers, is the one of the top articles on the site and has, at current count, 43 pages of comments. But people don't care about books anymore. Really.

No matter what arguments I read or what prophecies of doom I hear uttered, I truly believe that (to paraphrase the great Tony P. from the movie "Mystery Men"): "Literature is NOT dead! Literature is life!"

Cracking the Dam

2010-08-13T01:01:00.005-06:00

If you're following me on Twitter (and if not, why not?), you'll know two things. One, I am active on the internet again, and two, crazy fate novel is going well. Almost suspiciously well. Thank you for asking.

It's a funny thing about the creative process. Sometimes you think you aren't creating -- in fact, you're absolutely sure that what you do all day couldn't be farther from it. By the time you get home from work, do a few chores and scrape together dinner, you're exhausted mentally and emotionally. You don't have the energy to take out the trash, much less sit down and write. Instead, you blank out your mind with TV until you go to sleep, then get up the next morning and do it again.

That was me for the last several months. My life was full of obligations that were not writing, and somehow it slipped to the bottom of my priority list. For the first time since I started my first novel at age eleven, I seriously questioned whether I was a writer. I've always believed that the only thing you have to do to be a writer is write, but that was the thing: I wasn't writing. Or so I thought.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who's been in this position. In fact, I think all of us have, at one time or another. You think Shakespeare never put down the quill? Please. His only saving grace was that TV wouldn't be invented for another 300 years. There are lots of things that can keep us from writing, whether it's the everyday pressures of jobs and kids or big disasters like losing that job, or your house, or your spouse.

Except the thing is, they can't keep us from it, not really. We all know it's true that writers write, but most of us haven't taken it to the logical conclusion.

"If you write, you are a writer." Hear that? Not "you might be a writer," or "you're acting like a writer." You ARE a writer. Writers write because that's our nature, like trees grow leaves and the Pope wears a funny hat. We can't stop, even if we truly believe we already have. All the little frustrations are just dams against the inexhaustible river of our words. Eventually, cracks appear: five minutes here, ten there, and no matter how many kids are around to stuff their fingers in them, sooner or later they miss one. And then the words flood everywhere.

If life is conspiring to keep you blocked, here's what I suggest: start cracking the dam. Give yourself a little time, even if it's just five minutes once a week. Sit down with no expectations, and see what flows. Wouldn't you like to see what you've been writing all this time?

(PS. If you're anything like me, you're afraid to try in case it turns out there's nothing there and you've been a fraud all the time. Trust me, I understand, but I also know that your fears are wrong. It doesn't matter how long it's been, the words will still be there. And they'll be worth the wait.)

The Great Summer Reading Project

2010-06-15T22:39:00.004-06:00

Through a set of not-very-interesting Twitter-related circumstances, I stumbled across pure genius: a periodic table of great female sci-fi and fantasy writers from 1933 to 2008. For some reason Blogger won't let me upload it, so here's the creator's website instead.

Some of these writers I know, others I don't. Since it's summer, and I don't have anything better to do (more time-consuming, energy-draining and financially renumerative, yes, but not better), I have decided to start a project. I'm going to read one, or more than one, book from each of these authors and post about it here. And, just so I don't play favorites, I'm going to do it in the order of the periodic table.

If I was an art student, I'd study great artists. If I wanted an MBA, I'd memorize the wisdom of Donald Trump. Since I'm a woman who wants to write fantasy, I'm going to connect myself with a lineage of women who've done it first. I may not like all of their work, but I respect them as writers. Plus, I'm out of things to read until the next Gail Carriger comes out in September.

Coming soon: some book or other by Andre Norton. Stay tuned!

Taking Care of Me

2010-06-08T20:59:00.004-06:00

Recently, one of my favorite websites, Owning Pink, suggested that readers engage in a 30-day "Radical Self-Care" program. I nodded appreciatively -- yep, some people don't take care of themselves -- and forgot about it. I had just finished my most stressful semester ever, and with the summer off from school, surely there could be nothing but sunny skies ahead.

Nope.

Once school ended, my work hours were increased to full-time. My job is secure and predictable, but it leaves me physically and emotionally drained. The early morning hours I work are difficult for me because I'm a night owl; I can't force my body to sleep early enough to get a full eight hours (and I do mean can't, as in "have never once managed it in over four months at this job"). These factors are taking a toll, and in the past month, I've begun to feel my health and happiness suffering. "Radical Self-Care" suddenly sounds less like something "some people" should do and more like something I desperately need.

One thing I've learned about myself is that when I plan a change, I tend to do so on a grandiose and ultimately impossible scale. So here's my compromise: I'm not saying I'm going to engage in a couple of months of self-care before the fall semester starts. I'm just saying, if I did, what would that look like?

Owning Pink lays out some guidelines for the program, most of which I agree with, some of which I don't think are right for me. Here's a modified list of what I would do, if I did it:

1. Improve my diet. The original post recommends green juice, which you couldn't pay me to drink every day, but I would like to have fruits and vegetables be a part of every meal and cook all but two, or at the most three, meals a week at home. Also, drink one cup of tea in the morning and have the rest of my drinks be water and juice, no soda.

2. Get 8-10 hours of sleep a night, every night. The original post says 7-9, but my body likes a little more sleep than most.

3. Go salsa dancing 2-3 times a week. There are so many salsa events in my area I could go five or six times a week if I wanted, but three is plenty.

4. Write every day. All writing counts: here on the blog, in a personal journal, or fiction.

5. Do some form of meditation every day, whether traditional meditation or inquiry. Use this time to connect to joy and to the Divine.

6. Spend at least 20 hours a week doing something I feel is useful: volunteering, working a job, working in a garden, etc. Anything that makes me look outside myself, take action and avoid the easy route counts. If I'm not feeling useful, I fall into apathy, and that's not a way to care for myself. However, not just any work will do. This has to be work that enriches me and makes me happy.

7. Turn on the TV less than three times a week or, preferably, never. I don't count movies in this category; they have a set running time, so you don't get sucked in for hours upon hours. This won't be hard for me, since I don't like TV that much, but persuading my boyfriend might be challenging.

8. Heal my social life. I've known for a while that I wanted to do this: I have too few close contacts and too many friends I rarely or never see. I enjoy being alone, but not every second.

9. Work on the close relationships I do have. Spend a week camping with my boyfriend, and another in my hometown with my mom. Visit more with my sister and niece, and my dad too.

10. Maintain the self-care patterns I have in place. These include my weekly girls' night, going to a movie every weekend and getting breakfast and a new book once a week at the bookstore near my house. They also include cleaning the house and doing laundry at least once a week; doesn't sound like self-care, but I notice I feel better in a clean house than a messy one.

11. Take care of some matters that have been needing it. Doctors' appointments, dentist appointments, getting the car serviced. Stuff like that.

Writing this list, I felt like it was my usual plan: full of sweeping and impossible changes. When I read it over, though, it doesn't seem like so much. I'm still not saying I'm going to do any of it ... but it deserves some thought.

The "House" Effect

2010-05-30T01:34:00.004-06:00

What is up with our society and eccentric, socially maladjusted men?

I'm not speaking in a literal sense, though I'm sure an argument could be made for that as well. I'm talking about cinematically. I think movies and TV shows say a lot about a culture and its preoccupations. The prevalence of violence against women on TV, often violence symbolically punishing us for ambition or sexual promiscuity, has been discussed to death elsewhere, but it does say a lot about the role -- and risks -- of being a woman in America.

It just occurred to me to wonder about this because I found a show called Lie to Me on Netflix. It's a good show -- very good, actually. Tim Robbins plays a behavioral psychologist who uses body language to solve cases for all sorts of black-suit-wearing government agencies. He's portrayed as an eccentric, distrusted by many for his unusual methods, which often go outside of social boundaries in the pursuit of justice.

Boy, he sure is cool and unusual, I thought. Always right, too. Where have I seen this before?

Well, everywhere. House, the drama about an arrogant and socially maladjusted doctor whose unorthodox diagnoses save dozens of lives every season. Castle, where a mystery writer joins forces with the police to solve cases using his plotting skills. The Mentalist, where the hero does ... well, I'm not sure what, because I haven't seen it, but I've seen enough promos to know that he's arrogant, brilliant and socially unpopular. Even Leverage, to a lesser extent -- an ex-insurance investigator using the knowledge he gained foiling fraud to commit fraud himself. These men all have teams or partners, but only to underline their brilliance and counteract their debilitating social flaws.

What is up with this trend? Do TV producers tend to be this kind of idiot savant? Or is there some trend in our culture that leads us to want to idolize these brilliant social misfits -- perhaps the rise of the geek as a cultural force?

I think maybe, just maybe, in a society that obsessively programs us to obey, it's necessary to have these figures of extreme independence for the public to idolize and live vicariously through. I might take orders from an arrogant jerk with half my IQ all day, but at night I can go home and pretend to be Greg House or Nate Ford, sticking it to the man without a thought for the consequences.

And if so, why are none of them women? Are we not supposed to want this kind of independence? Maybe programmers think we want to screw these characters, not be them, and so brilliant women aren't considered necessary. After all, men want to sleep with hot women, not smart ones, right?

I don't know the answers -- I haven't even thought about it very long. I just find these questions interesting.

Delicious Food Day

2010-05-18T22:14:00.003-06:00

It's not Thursday, but experience has shown that if I wait for Thursday I'll have forgotten what I wanted to post here, so we'll just take out the "Thurs" part. I've been cooking a lot lately, so it's possible we'll be having more than one "Delicious Food Day" per week. I think it's a good trend.

Today's recipe: Asian Coleslaw

This is a recipe of my own invention. I wasn't sure what to call it: shrimp and cabbage salad sounds so pedestrian. It's not really Asian, though, and it doesn't particularly resemble coleslaw. I suppose I could call it Untruthful Salad.

This is tangy and refreshing for a warm day, and would be even better as leftovers when the flavors have a chance to blend.

Asian Coleslaw (aka Untruthful Salad)

Dressing/Marinade

2 tsp extra virgin olive oil
4 tbsp white wine vinegar
1 tsp orange flower water (this is available at Mediterranean food stores. It adds a lot of fragrance and sweetness to what could otherwise be a slightly harsh dish.)
1 tsp sugar
4 tsp lemon juice
1-2 tbsp liquid from mandarin oranges (see below)
Hot sauce of your choice (Tabasco or something similar), to taste
Ground ginger, to taste (if you like measuring things, start with about a quarter teaspoon and see what you like)
1 large pinch garam masala (this Indian spice mix is available at most regular grocery stores. It's pretty strong, so be sparing with it -- it's not supposed to be the dominant flavor here)
Salt, to taste

About 1 1/2 cups cabbage, sliced into strips
1 cup raw shrimp, peeled and deveined
1 can mandarin orange slices
Extra olive oil, lemon juice, hot sauce, ginger and salt (for the cabbage)

Mix together all dressing ingredients. Set aside half for later and put the other half in a bowl with shrimp. Marinate in fridge for about an hour (or as long as your patience will allow).

Heat a couple of tablespoons of olive oil in a frying pan on medium heat. When hot, add the cabbage. Stir to coat, then drizzle with lemon juice, a little hot sauce, and salt and ginger to taste. Saute until slightly softened but still crunchy. Add shrimp and all of the marinade, making sure shrimp are touching the pan, and cover. Stir once or twice. Allow to cook until shrimp are pink all the way through, about 10 minutes. Remove from heat and let cool.

In a large bowl, place shrimp and cabbage. Add mandarin oranges and the remainder of the dressing, and toss to coat.

Serves 2.

Waking Up

2010-04-17T14:52:00.004-06:00

Ahhh, I'm back.

I seem to have fallen down a three-month rabbit hole. It took me that long to adjust to the sudden transition from no schedule to a full-time college and work schedule: 9 credit hours of class and 30 hours a week of work, starting at 6:30 a.m. This isn't an excuse, it's a description of my life the last few months: work, school, sleep, work, sleep, school. I've been a zombie, and I mean that in the nicest possible way.

Oh, wait -- there isn't a nice way to mean that.

At any rate, over the past week or so I seem to have finally woken up. I'm finding the time and, more important, the energy for things other than work, class and homework. If this trend continues, I'll be back blogging at least a couple of days a week, and I hope you'll all rejoin me. The next few months look like being an interesting ride.

Following My @#$%& Heart

2010-03-28T20:24:00.004-06:00

"Follow your heart" is the most misunderstood piece of advice I think I've ever been given. It sounds New Age-y and positive: "Follow your heart and live your dreams!!" Often, people say it out of a desire to encourage and empower the recipient. They even put it on Hallmark cards.

All I can say is, if you think following your heart is all flowers and rainbows, you've probably never had to do it. Telling someone to -- or even just standing back and letting them do it -- is tough love of the highest degree.

Following your heart really means no safety net, no proof that what you're doing is right, and no guarantees that it's going to work. It's doing what you have to do, for yourself and no one else. Plus, since no one else has a stake in it, no one can give you permission. Following your heart means believing in your own authority, your own ability to decide what's right for your life. It may even mean that what's right for you is going to upset or anger someone else, that you know that going in, and you still have to do it.

In the end, just as no one can give you permission, no one can tell you that you did it right. There are no rewards for truly following your heart. You don't get a million-dollar job, a medal, or even a slap on the back. At best, if it works, you might earn some peace or a little joy.

Still think following your heart is empowering and joyful? Well ... maybe. I'll let you know. In the meantime, trust me: it's no cakewalk.

Obedience and Revolution

2010-03-16T18:11:00.000-06:00

I've always hated early mornings. They make me depressed, irritable and misanthropic. Apparently, though, they also make me philosophical. Here's what I wrote on the 6:01 commuter train this morning (slightly edited for clarity):

[Public school] would damn sure have taught me to obey, and that isn't good for anyone's intelligence.

Isn't it? Why do I think that?

It's because obedience rests on the assumption that someone else knows better than you do. That can be a very restful and seductive way of thinking -- "I don't have to take any responsibility or make any decisions. Others know better so I'll just do what they say." Perpetual obedience is a lack of self-determination, the way of the perpetual child.

And if others know better, why would you need to know anything at all? What's the point of having inferior knowledge when there's a source of superior knowledge -- teachers, the internet, society -- ready and willing to tell you what's best? And so intelligence rots.

Consider this assertion:

In a culture based on obedience, deciding for yourself is the only truly revolutionary act.

Later, after considering it, I added:
The assertion makes sense because any physical revolutionary act may simply be obedience to a different authority. Thinking for yourself, then, is the only true defiance. The physical action you take after that is irrelevant. The only revolution that matters is inside your head.

Thoughts?

Free Minds is Up!

2010-02-20T11:49:00.001-07:00

My new venture, Free Minds Zine, is up and running today. Give it a look and tell me what you think!

Throwing Jelly

2010-02-15T10:07:00.005-07:00

In my last post, I'm Not Exciting, I talked about the realization that I'm not doing much with my life, and how my reaction to that may well define who I become as an adult. I also talked about Chris Guillebeau's two most important questions in the universe: "What do I really want to get out of life?" and "What can I offer the world no one else can?"

After some thought, I've got a fairly good handle on the first question. The whole answer is quite long, but it boils down to wanting a creative, valuable life lived on my own schedule, not someone else's. I was homeschooled, or rather unschooled (there's a slight difference) from the age of eight, so I didn't build up the tolerance for arbitrary schedules people seem to get in public school. Having someone else tell me how to spend my time drives me absolutely nuts, and I think I should pay attention to that when building my adult life.

The second question, "What can I offer the world that no one else can?" wasn't so easy to answer. Yes, I'm a writer, but so is nearly everyone I know. Hands up all those out there who aren't writing a book or screenplay? Anyone? Yeah, that's what I thought.

My writing, my unique viewpoint, may be something of value I can offer the world, but right now I'm still developing it. I could use that as justification -- "I'll have something to offer to the world when my writing is ready" -- but the whole point of this and the previous post is that I'm not satisfied just killing time. Nor, as I've mentioned before in my post on not writing, do I think that art can reach its full potential in the absence of a full life to draw from. Art is life, reduced to its essence and arranged into coherent patterns. If your life is empty of meaning, there's nothing there to give meaning to your art.

The ultimate conclusion here is that I want to do something meaningful, but I don't know what. After some thought, I decided to just go for it, throw some jelly at the wall and see what sticks. I've got five new ventures to start within the next month. The ones that bring me joy and offer the world value, I'll keep and use as the basis for the next phase of my life. The ones that don't I'll drop with no regrets.

These five things are:

Start a creative writing club at my school, with meetings twice a month starting in March
Start a zine, a hybrid blog/real world newsletter talking about a topic that excites me -- creativity and alternative education. I'm already working on this: check out my newborn Free Minds Zine when it launches next week
Once a month, make food and pass it out, free, to a hundred people at my college campus (this may or may not get me in trouble with security -- stay tuned!)
Once a month, give away some of my best writing here on my blog.
Once a month, make dinner with my sister Robin. Cooking with family is one of the most meaningful things I've ever done, and if you ask me, adding value to the world starts at home.

So there it is. Tune in again soon to hear how these five ventures are going!

PS. Although I didn't count it in my five things because I don't want the extra pressure, I'm proud to say I'm back to work on my novel! Don't ask about the 12 stories challenge and we can all pretend my writing goals on track.

I'm Not Exciting

2010-02-13T11:03:00.005-07:00

And I'm going to have to come to terms with it.

I've spent my morning reading the archives on Chris Guillebeau's amazing Art of Non-Conformity blog, something that always gets me inspired. Today, though, it led me to one inescapable conclusion: I am not exciting, not special, not doing anything amazing with my life.

I'm serious here. I've always imagined myself as a world-changer, a future literary icon just minutes away from the book of the century, but let's look at the facts. I work a food service job and take classes at community college. On the weekends, I do housework and sleep. I'm not doing art, I'm not giving anything to the world -- I'm doing exactly what millions of other slightly directionless twenty-somethings do.

I think a key step in the maturity process is recognizing this. "Hey, guess what, Einstein," says the world, "you're not the center of the universe, and just thinking you should be special doesn't magically make you that way. What are you going to do about it?"

That question is the key to who you're going to become as an adult. If you're not the magical child prodigy you always thought you were, what are you going to do about it? Give up and continue on the path of ordinariness, or . . . ?

I don't know what I'm going to do about it. Chris says the two most important questions are "What do you really want to get out of life?" and "What can you offer the world that no one else can?" I'm going to think about that for a while, and I'll get back to you.

In the meantime, what are you going to do about it? Or, if you already did something, how's that working out for you?

Books I Read In January

2010-02-07T12:40:00.003-07:00

This is late, but I have good reasons: last week was the first week of my new job and the third week of school. I work about 30 hours and am taking a full course load -- this is after having done basically nothing for almost three months. When I say I nearly died, I am only exaggerating a little.

Anyway, here without further excuse are the books I read in January.

What the Lady Wants by Jennifer Crusie
I don't have much to say about Crusie that I haven't said before. I read her when I am depressed, and it makes me happy. The end.

Sunshine by Robin McKinley
McKinley's subtle, detailed, entirely masterful world-building never ceases to amaze me. I adore her books and Sunshine is almost my favorite (second only to her Damar series). I'm only sad that there's no sequel -- but then, according to her blog, so is she. She says to take it up with her muse.

Cotillion by Georgette Heyer
Heyer has no equal. That's a fact. When it comes to Regency romance, there's Jane Austen, then Georgette Heyer, and then a pack of indistinguishable pulp novels written since. No matter what you think of Regencies, I've rarely seen a writer in any genre who can equal Heyer's touch with subtle characterization under a veneer of zany comedy. Cotillion is sweet, funny, and deeply satisfying. Read it.

Tell Me Lies by Jennifer Crusie
As you can tell by the amount of Crusie I've been reading, the last couple of months have been tough. Hopefully things will start improving now that I'm back in school.

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden by Joanne Greenberg
This book fascinated me in its entirely convincing portrayal of schizophrenia. The heroine's madness wasn't so entirely different from sanity, and her conviction of the truth of her reality was exactly the same as mine. Could I be crazy? Yes, says the book, you quite easily could.

Spook Country by William Gibson
I love William Gibson -- his books are always about so much more than just the story they purport to be telling. This one follows three parallel characters dragged by forces beyond their control into the search for a certain mysterious shipping container. As in all his books, reality and virtual reality overlay each other, mingling until it's hard to tell which is what. Fantastic.

The Ladies of Missalonghi by Colleen McCullough
This is a sweet little book that completely failed to prepare me for The Thorn Birds (which I read back in, I think, August). It's all about outcasts and misfits winning out over the unpleasant and privileged in the search for love and status. Sweet, like I said, fun and ultimately triumphant.

Last Chance Saloon by Marian Keyes
This is one of those books that I've read enough times to know which parts I like and which to skim over. It's chick lit, but fairly good chick lit, and not as entirely predictable and forgettable as most.

Deja Dead and Death du Jour by Kathy Reichs
These are the first two books in the series that spawned the fabulous TV show "Bones." I fell in love with "Bones" first, then found out it was based on the books. Though they're strongly different from the show, I love them too. The tone is so different from most of the mysteries on the shelves today: scientific and calm, intelligent, almost dispassionate. In these early books, at least, Reichs makes no attempt at the hipness and sassy humor that's almost impossible to escape from in mysteries with female protagonists. I've read one of her more recent books, Bare Bones, and she seems to be losing this unique tone a bit, but I can't say for sure until I've read them all.

Side note: Kathy Reichs is one of my personal heroes. She herself, like her heroine, is a forensic anthropologist. While performing those duties, she wrote a best-selling mystery series and is now an executive producer on the hit show that spun off of that. I love strong, amazing women who succeed at what they do, and Reichs is definitely one of them.

Delicious Food Thursday: Ratatouille

2010-02-04T22:40:00.003-07:00

Woo hoo! Finally, I have a new recipe for you on an actual Thursday! (Excuse the exuberance. I've been doing customer service all week and the constant smiling gets into my brain.)

I'm very pleased with this dish. French food is generally considered the pinnacle of good cooking, so if I can make even a simple French dish, I must be a pretty good cook, right? (Just say yes.) I don't know why I decided to make this; it just seemed to happen. I wasn't even sure I liked eggplant until it was done -- luckily it turns out I do.

The other cool thing about this is it makes a great big pan and seems to keep well, so you can eat for days off of one batch. Use any vegetables you like/have in the fridge: ratatouille is specifically meant for using up extra veggies. What's below is just what I used.

Ratatouille

1 eggplant, cubed
1 medium-size yam, peeled and cubed
2 or 3 roma tomatoes, chopped
1 red bell pepper, cut into strips
1/2 onion, chopped
2 or 3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
Salt
Black pepper
Thyme
Lots of olive oil
1 smallish pile grated cheese (I used muenster, but again, it's whatever you've got)

Preheat oven to 350.

Put the bell pepper and tomatoes into a 9x13 cake pan, drizzle with olive oil and set aside.

In a frying pan, heat a generous dash of olive oil. Add onions and garlic, and saute until softened (about 5 minutes). Add a bit more oil, the eggplant, and some salt. Continue to saute until the eggplant is slightly soft and starting to darken. Put eggplant and aromatics in the cake pan with the peppers and tomatoes.

Place the yams in the saucepan, adding more oil if dry, and saute for 5 to 8 minutes or until you feel you've put in a good-faith effort to soften them. (To be honest, I don't know if this step is necessary or if the oven will cook the yams without sauteing. I'll try it next time and let you know.) Move to cake pan.

Drizzle all vegetables with olive oil and add salt, pepper and thyme to taste. Toss until vegetables and spices are all mixed together and coated with oil. Top with cheese. Cover pan with tinfoil and bake until yams and eggplants are soft all the way through. Remove foil and bake an extra 5-10 minutes until cheese is melted and slightly golden.

Serve with your choice of vaguely French side dishes: I recommend Brie on French bread and sliced apples. Leftovers are best reheated in the oven so that the veggies don't get soggy.

In Other News

2010-01-21T00:50:00.002-07:00

Did I tell you about the Armenian wedding in the hall? (I know I didn't and that you don't care; this is my pathetic attempt to avoid writing.)

Well, okay, so I'm not sure it was Armenian. It could have been Turkish or Bulgarian or Estonian, for all I know. Our neighbors speak some Eastern European language with a Cyrillic alphabet, but we don't know what and they can't or won't speak enough English to tell us.

But it doesn't matter. The point is, we -- the Boy, the cat and I -- live in an apartment building with a communal hallway. Our next-door and across the hall neighbors are apparently some kind of extended family. They occasionally throw loud parties, complete with packs of a dozen or so children screaming and running up and down the hall for many hours on end.

That's about as much fun as it sounds, or a bit less. If it gets too bad, we call building security, which for some reason is not located in the building or even, technically, in the same city. They leap efficiently into action by doing nothing, not even showing up. Meanwhile, the kids keep running. I may or may not have suggested on Twitter that I was going to put down bear traps for the little bastards ...

All of which is very annoying, but it's just setting the stage for what comes next. A few mornings ago, after a particularly bad night on which we placed several calls to security, who obligingly went out of their way to not show up multiple times, I was lying on the couch when I heard voices in the hall. Oh God, I thought. Not the kids again. Wait, what the -- is that an accordion?

It was. A live accordion player was blasting out Eastern European dance tunes about six feet from my door. After a moment, a drummer joined him. I considered the possibility that someone had spiked my Frosted Flakes with acid, but after a few minutes a woman in a white dress came out of the apartment next door, and all became clear.

It was a wedding procession. With a live band. In my hall.

There is absolutely no way to react to thirty Armenians in formal dress following an accordionist down your hallway to their white Hummer limousine, except to laugh hysterically. So that's what I did.

How was your week?

In Case You're Wondering How The Writing Is Going

2010-01-21T00:39:00.000-07:00

It isn't. I suck.

Questions?

Frankenfood

2010-01-09T23:59:00.006-07:00

In case my Delicious Food Thursday series had anyone thinking I never mess up in the kitchen ...

Oh, yeah. That's why you don't boil milk. (This was supposed to be a delicious chicken-and-spinach curry. And I was supposed to be an astronaut ...)

Rejection!

2010-01-09T00:32:00.008-07:00

I just had my first rejection of the year. I'm not sure it counts for the contest, since it's for a piece I submitted in October, but I'm trying to see it as a victory anyway.

When someone says "No thanks" to a thing you've created, that you were proud enough of to put out into the big bad world, it's never fun. It's been a while since I submitted anything, so I'd forgotten just how not-fun it is. Your first instinct is naturally to think, "What did I do wrong?"

I did think it, too -- for about five seconds. No longer. Then I realized that I didn't do anything wrong. I believe in that piece with all my heart. I think it's the best thing I've ever written, and even if it was one day hailed as the greatest story of our century, if it got bigger than Harry Potter and Twilight combined, I'd still be its biggest fan.* It deserves to be published, and if it wasn't right for the place I sent it, well, that's not its fault.

I think that attitude isn't just comforting, it's absolutely necessary. If I didn't believe in the story that firmly, if I had any doubts, I'd never survive the submission process. The first tiny breath of rejection would blow me away. That's why I refuse to submit any piece I believe in less than one hundred percent, even now when part of the 12-story challenge is to rack up rejections.

In theory, submitting work that isn't ready would give me an advantage in the contest, but that's not the point. To tell the truth, the idea didn't even occur to me until a friend suggested it, and then I was surprised. Winning the cupcake would be fun, but really it's just an excuse for me to get my work out there. Victory in this challenge, for me, will be racking up rejections like the one I just got, where I put my best and bravest out there and it doesn't click. Each of those rejections is a step toward acceptance, and that, not the cupcake, is the real prize.

There are lots of reasons why a story doesn't get accepted. This piece is on a tough subject, abortion, and it's written in first person, which may confuse people into thinking it's not fiction.** Both of those make it a tough sell, maybe more so than I thought before. That's okay. It's a good story and it'll find a home. Plus, from now on, every rejection I get on it gets me one step closer to that cupcake!

*As a 19,000 word short story, of course it won't. I'm just saying.
**I don't know whether to be proud the voice is so convincing or annoyed that it might be hindering publication. A little of both, I guess.

Contentment

2010-01-05T21:19:00.002-07:00

A few minutes ago, I posted this on Twitter:

In the meantime, I've got a humming computer, a purring cat, and a simmering pot of chili on the stove. The white noise of contentment.

I got up to stir my chili and thought, wait a minute. White noise. Contentment.

Because that's what contentment is, isn't it? It's white noise. It's the things that are okay right now, or even good -- the things you don't have to pay attention to. They aren't giving you immediate joy or pain, just humming along in the background. White noise.

Just a thought.

12 Months, 12 Stories: the 2010 Challenge

2010-01-01T19:15:00.001-07:00

As promised in my last post, here are the details about the writing challenge I'll be doing over the course of this year. The exact rules of the game were pioneered by my friend Amanda over at The Writer's Block Resolution. Check out her blog for a more detailed explanation, but I'll summarize here.

There are three of us participating right now: Amanda, Marilyn and I (together we also form a critique group called the Writers' Tribunal). Every month, each of us will write and edit one short story or essay into an acceptably finished form. There are only three rules:

It has to be a new idea, not a rewrite or an old concept we've been chewing over for years
The first draft has to be on paper, not typed
It has to be finished by the end of the month

Afterwards, we will submit these stories for publication and compete to see who can rack up the most rejections by the end of the year. Winner (the person with the most) gets a cupcake.

Competing for rejections might not seem to make a lot of sense, but it does when you realize that rejections = submissions, because you can't have a story rejected unless you submit it. Eventually, if you keep improving, the equation changes to submissions = acceptance, so by competing for rejections we're actually radically increasing our chances of having stories accepted in the future. Plus, rejections are an unavoidable part of being a writer, so you may as well turn them into something fun.

Amanda is posting her finished stories on her blog. I won't be doing that, because I'm leery about e-publication screwing up my first print rights. Some places don't mind, but others do, and I'd rather not narrow my options. I will, however, post a title, word count and summary for each story so that you know I did indeed write it. If a summary makes you unbearably curious, contact me -- I'll probably send you the text to read in exchange for a critique.

So there you have it. Twelve months, twelve stories, and as many rejections as the publishing industry can stuff in the mail. Are you excited yet? I am!

2009 Wrapup

2010-01-01T18:11:00.003-07:00

I meant to do this yesterday, but Murphy's Law kicked me where it hurts. That said, here is a quick little summary of 2009 and a bit about what to expect in 2010.

Blog Stats

Number of posts: 86

Number of hits: 826

Most popular post: Write What You Don't Know, October 10th

Top search term: "tarot vegetable," which of course leads to my post Tarot: Not Just an Orange Vegetable, July 14th. I don't know why people search for this since tarot is a divination system, not a vegetable at all.

Weirdest search term: I'm calling a tie between "eat food I cough" (don't even know how I came up on that one, or where it would lead) and "is it necessary for great suffering to produce great art in literature". I did in fact address that question in The Tortured Artist, October 11th, and it's a very valid one, but why you'd ask it of a search engine I'm not sure.

Personal Stats

Number of books I read: 59 (since I started counting in July)

Wordcount: I haven't been keeping track for long enough to have a good sample. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Stories published: None. I'm only including this as a category because I hope to have a different answer next year.

What to Expect in 2010

I have several changes in mind for 2010. First off, I want to set up and stick to a posting schedule. That's good for you, the reader, because then you know what to expect, and it also takes considerable pressure off of me. What exactly that schedule will be I haven't decided yet, but you'll know as soon as I do.

Secondly, I'll be continuing my "Books I've Read" and "[Current Month] Wordcount" widgets, and adding a couple of new ones: finished stories, submissions made, and rejections. That ties in with the biggest news of the new year: I'm participating in a writing challenge! See my next post for details about the challenge and why I'm so excited about it.

2009's been fun. Thanks for reading and I hope you all stick with me into the new decade!

Love,
Heather

Tradition

2009-12-13T14:23:00.004-07:00

I've been thinking about family traditions, about continuity. They're things that have always been easy for me to discount and forget. I'm a typical American Caucasian mutt: some Irish, some German, some who-knows-what. Both sides of my ancestry have moved around a lot, so there's no place I can stand and say "People in my family have stood here for X-hundred years." We have no language, no unified religious background, no cuisine ... since my father never knew his father, on that side at least we don't even have stories.

My immediate family is close -- I talk to one or the other of my parents almost every day and my sister every week or so. My extended family, though, isn't. I've never met anyone from my dad's side, and my mom's siblings are in their sixties (which puts my cousins in their forties or about twice my age), live scattered around the country and rarely gather. My maternal grandmother, once the only family member I saw regularly, has dementia now and doesn't always know who I am.

In this situation, it's easy to think that tradition isn't important. When I was a kid, maybe, the Friday night breakfast dinner or the ritual of opening Christmas stockings was the ballast that kept my world steady, but I'm older now. My life changes constantly, and I've learned to roll with it. Besides, this is America -- we're supposed to be young and restless and throw tradition out the window. It's practically our national identity.

Except it's not, and tradition is important. I don't mean that "traditional family values" crap, since I think we've established that my family doesn't have any of those. I mean a different kind: the passing down of knowledge and the sense that people in my family have been doing what I'm doing for much, much longer than I've been alive. A sense of connection to the past, even if it's a past I'll never really know. I don't know where my family's from or who all of them are, but I know that they lived. Somewhere, I have a heritage.

For right now, I'll settle for the thing that got me thinking about this: Christmas stockings. Each member of my immediate family has a personalized stocking knitted by my grandmother, except my niece. By the time she was born in 2002, Grandma's arthritis had gotten too bad for her to hold a knitting needle. No one else in the family wanted to knit, so Morgan (my niece) got a storebought stocking instead. I've always felt sad about that.

Then, this past year, I got into knitting. I thought for a while that it would be a passing interest, but it didn't pass and I don't think it's going to. Once I realized that, I also realized something else: I can carry on the tradition. I spoke to my mom, and she's going to find out if Grandma's still got the pattern she used for the stockings. If not, I'll chart it from the stockings themselves. It seems silly, but I find it very poignant that I'm going to be making the same stockings that women (well, woman, but it counts) in my family have been making for three generations.

Forget crests and genealogy -- that's a family tradition.

Wordcount

2009-12-12T18:32:00.006-07:00

Another quick note: I've added a monthly word count widget over on the right.

This is just the total number of words I've written this month, on anything. Just like the book list, I'll update it as necessary and then post it at the end of the month and start over. You may notice that right now it's pitiful -- I'm hoping the public exposure will shame me into writing more. A lot more.

Please feel free to mock my miniscule output in the comments. That is all.

ETA: Blog word count. Should I add it to the total or no? If you have an opinion, share it, otherwise I'll decide for myself.

Happiness

2009-12-12T14:45:00.004-07:00

A simple thought for the day.

Your happiness is your happiness alone. It belongs entirely to you, without reference to other people's opinions, feelings, or mental states. If you try to make someone else a part owner, it won't work. No matter how close they are to you, or how much sense it may seem to make to involve them in your fulfillment, it just doesn't. You'll be unhappy, in my experience at least, 100% of the time that way.

Trying to involve someone else in my emotions -- whether it's trying to make them be happy with me, or wanting something from them so that I can be happy -- makes me crazy. It makes me restless, irritable and never, ever gets me where I want to go. That's because my emotions have nothing to do with them.

Let them go, and it's all me. And I'm happy.

(Not) For the Money

2009-12-06T15:51:00.004-07:00

So here, as Terry Pratchett's Detritus the troll would say, is an interesting fing.

About a month ago, I lost my job. I am not sad about this -- to be truthful, I've lost my share of jobs and it's almost never a bad thing. Since then, I've been looking for a job -- specifically, one that does not suck. And I've been getting flack for that.

"In this economy, it's going to be hard enough to find a job," say the naysayers. "Don't get picky. It's the holiday season -- just go work retail for a couple of months."

Well, I refused. I did this because I think my time is worth something, and I think my happiness is worth even more. This is my life, and I'm not going to waste even a couple of months of it doing something I hate for minimum wage. My parents already pay for my rent, and they don't seem to mind tacking on a little extra for bills and groceries, which is basically all I buy. I am not a big spender and as far as I can tell the stress I put on their finances is fairly minor.

So that, give or take the occasional dust-up with the Boy over whether or not I am "trying," is that. I'm not taking a crappy job for the sole purpose of having a job, because that's not a reason that makes sense to me. Then, just a few minutes ago, I ran across this post on the blog of Dilbert author Scott Adams.

Whether you like his comic or not, Adams is a smart guy who knows a hell of a lot about business. His premise in this post, as I understand it, is that bad management in big companies is responsible for a lot of new entrepreneurs. Smart, talented people get sick of reporting to morons, take the skills they've learned at the big company and go out on their own. This makes sense to me.

What does it actually have to do with me, though? Well, it's like this. I have a ways to go before I'm a self-supporting writer (assuming I ever get there, which isn't guaranteed). As I said before, I'm very resistant to the idea of wasting my life doing something I hate, so a "typical career" is probably not in the cards for me. Self-directed entrepreneurship would be more my style, but I know as much about business as a cuttlefish does about tomatillos. I could study business for years and years while slowly growing to hate it, and pay for the privilege. Or ...

Could I take Adams' premise and run with it? Would it be worth my time to get what would otherwise be a worthless job with a big company in order to suck them dry of business knowledge? What's more, could I do that during what's left of the holiday season, leaving the rest of my life to pursue other things?

Like I said, I have no intention of getting a crappy job just to have one. This, on the other hand, strikes me as not just a valid reason to get one, but a really fascinating experiment. Can I actually get something good out of working for a big, soulless department store, and if so, what? It might just be worth it to find out.

Books I Read In November

2009-12-06T01:47:00.003-07:00

November was a sparse month for reading. I moved, lost my job, battled bedbugs, and satisfied my need for entertainment through a probably-unhealthy amount of knitting. Here are the few books I did manage to get through:

Gimme Shelter by Mary Elizabeth Williams
I picked this one up right after we found out our new place had bedbugs, loud neighbors and was generally, shall we say, not what we'd hoped. The book is about her experience house hunting, and I was hoping to get some tips on how to do it right. I didn't. She was looking to buy, and looking in New York at that. Mostly it was a nostalgic look back into the recent housing boom and a chilling lesson in how the economy got the way it is now.

Ghost Hunting by Jason Hawes, Grant Wilson and Michael Jan Friedman
I have to admit it: I love the SyFy show Ghost Hunters. Unlike the copy-cat "ghost shows" on other channels, TAPS actually uses valid scientific methods including (or especially) a healthy dose of skepticism. This is a discussion of their methods and a couple dozen of their cases, and I ate it up. And yes, in case you were wondering. I believe in ghosts. That doesn't mean I believe in ghost shows; the others I've seen are hilariously bad.

The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
This reminded me of two things: Anais Nin's Diaries, which I own the first volume of, and Shogun by James Clavell. Anyone who's read both those books will be very confused, because they could hardly be more different, but bear with me. The tone and content of The Golden Notebook strongly resembled Nin's diaries, perhaps because the bulk of the book is the diary of a fictional woman from roughly the same time period. As for Shogun, they resemble each other in no way at all except for page count, and that's the point. I did a post a while back about how gender relates to storytelling. I consider Shogun a quintessential male book, and The Golden Notebook in many ways a quintessential female one. Shogun is all action, no introspection. In The Golden Notebook, practically nothing happens but every detail shows exquisite emotional realism. (I know, that's sexist. See my original post for disclaimers and an explanation of the full theory.) Yet they are both, in their own way, epics.

PS. At the risk of letting down my gender, I'm just going to go ahead and say it. Shogun is a better story. Supposedly this is Lessing's masterpiece, and while I'll agree that it's really something, I'm not sure that's the word I'd use. My major impression at the end was confusion, which isn't a good sign.

Bet Me by Jennifer Crusie
After all the heavy emotion and introspection, I needed something light and fun. Bet Me was a perfect antidote. I tend to read at least one Crusie a month; you can go back to almost any previous month's book list and find out why. This is my favorite book of hers, though the competition's fierce.

To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis
I scored this at 2 Buck Books, my local used book store, and I couldn't be more thrilled. Not only has Connie Willis won more Hugo awards than I think any other writer (well, actually Neil Gaiman may have beat her by now, but it would be close), she's from Colorado! Her books are delightful, funny and incredibly smart. I love picking up random trivia from books I'm reading for fun, and hers are great for that. I'd only read this one once before, and I'd forgotten how good it is. (Very.)

Welcome to Temptation by Jennifer Crusie
I needed a lot of happy reading this month. Between the bedbugs, unsuccessful job hunting, a certain amount of poor health and the murder in the next building (oh, did I forget to mention that? Yeah, good times), a double dose of Crusie was just what the doctor ordered.

In fact, I may go read some more.

Knit With Your Heart

2009-12-02T12:24:00.005-07:00

Reason number, what are we at now, four why I love knitting. (I guess this is a series now. See Knit Kwan Do for reason number one and Knit, Purl, Chill for reasons two and three.)

Charitable knitting. I haven't done any, but the idea warms my cockles in no uncertain way. (I am not sure what a cockle is, but mine are sure warm ...) I know that to a non-knitter, charitable knitting may seem as impractical and la-di-da as charity embroidery or charity etiquette lessons, but that's not the case at all. For one thing, charitable knitting is practical. Knitted items are warm, they can be worn, and if they're made right they last forever.

"Yeah, yeah, but so do clothes from the store," says my theoretical skeptic. "Why not just give them the money to buy clothes they want?"

Good question. Of course, money is always useful; there's no reason you shouldn't give it, and plenty of reasons you should. Charitable donations are so widespread as to be commonplace in America, and that's great. But money is impersonal. It's not really much more than a concept, particularly now that paychecks are automatically deposited and most transactions are via credit card. Most people can go weeks without touching actual money. It's so remote that psychologically, sending a check to a charity is a gesture without concrete meaning. You're sending them stuff you've never seen and there won't be an empty space in your heart or bank account when it's gone.

Charitable knitting, on the other hand, is nothing if not intensely personal. I've heard it said that with a hand-knit object, what the recipient is getting more than anything else is your time: time that you chose to give your full attention to sitting down and making something for them. How much then does it matter to a homeless person, or a foster child headed to college with no support system, to get a handmade scarf? To know that a total stranger took the time to sit down and make it, every stitch, with them in mind? I'd think it made a big difference to know someone cared about me that much, even if I would never meet them.

Our humanity is defined by the extent to which we care for others when there's no advantage to ourselves. In this arena, I think, the smallest gestures are the biggest. They're the ones that it took an effort to make, things it would have been easier not to do but that you did anyway. A bright red scarf or a silly little pom-pom hat for a baby are small things, they're not going to save the world. But they're a gesture of love, and one by one, they might be saving our humanity.

As a fitting end to this post, here are a couple of knitting charities that I someday want to contribute to. If you don't knit, they'd be very happy to get money, too.

The Red Scarf Project provides hand knit scarves in care packages for foster children who are headed to college. As a college student myself this is close to my heart.

Afghans for Afghans provides blankets, hats, socks and other garments to people in need in Afghanistan. From over here, it's easy to forget there's a war going on there, but there is. It's also easy to forget that the Afghan civilians are on our side (or rather, we're supposed to be on theirs). They need all the help they can get.

Feel free to post your favorite charities in the comments! There can never be too many.

Knit, Purl, Chill

2009-12-01T18:53:00.006-07:00

Aside from purposes of self-defense, here's why I love knitting.

Number one, it's just freakin' knitting. Nobody cares if this sock (or scarf, or sweater) gets done. No one will be devastated if my fair isle is uneven. It says nothing about my character that my lace patterns sometimes gain an extra stitch.

Compared to other issues in my life, a knitting disaster is pretty damned relaxing. When everything else seems to be a HUGE DEAL THAT WILL RUIN MY LIFE IF I DON'T FIX IT RIGHT THIS SECOND, it's nice to just go, "Oops, I screwed that up. Oh well." Even Christmas knitting doesn't faze me: if I don't manage to finish someone's present, I can just go buy them something. Something knitted, even. It just doesn't matter.

The other thing is that I have -- as I'm sure everyone does -- people in my life who love to offer opinions about exactly what I'm doing wrong in every possible situation. I'm not trying hard enough here. I should be doing more of this, less of that, saving money for the future and never leaving home without my galoshes. Since I'm pretty critical of myself to begin with, these people's opinions (even when unsolicited, uninformed or just flat wrong) have a big effect on me. I brood over them. I get angry and depressed and even more self-critical. Nothing good comes of any of it.

These people don't have a damn thing to say about my knitting. No matter how skewed or poorly done it is, they're just in awe that I can do such a seemingly magical thing. I get yarn, I wiggle my hands around, and somehow it becomes fabric. No one has told me that I'm doing something wrong in my knitting (because even when I am, they can't tell), and right now, especially, that's like a breath of fresh air.

What I'm doing with my life right now, although it's nothing exciting, leaves me open to a lot of criticism -- apparently for that same reason. If anyone reading would like to tell me what I'm doing wrong, take a look at my knitting, remember how amazing I can be ... and please shut up.

Not Writing 2: The Revenge of Not Writing

2009-11-30T01:33:00.005-07:00

I haven't been writing lately. Not in the positive way I blogged about before, being a good human and gathering inspiration for later stories. No, I haven't been writing in the bad way, the blocked way, the shameful way. The "What ever made me think I could or should do this, nobody chooses the right career at 11 because if they did there'd be too many astronauts," way. The way where family and friends begin to very tactfully ask what you're planning do with your life, besides write.

Okay, maybe I'm being paranoid about the last one. It's just that two of my biggest supporters and cheerleaders recently brought up the subject within a week of each other. Both suggested I might find a different career and, quote, "write on the side."

The scary part is I thought about it.

In the ten years since I first put down the words "I'm going to be a writer" in my hot pink journal, I've never looked back. I've worried, been blocked, suffered crippling self-doubt and the fear that I'll never succeed, but I never once pictured a future where I was not a writer. And not "on the side," like salad dressing. Front and center.

Mind you, I'm a realist. I know I'll have to be very good and incredibly lucky to make my living as a writer. Only a tiny fraction of a percent of us do. Even so, I've always thought of myself as "a writer who does [something else] for money," rather than "a [something else] who writes." It seems like a small change, but it isn't. It's critical. This is America, where we're all defined by our work. "I'm a writer," means I'm an artist, a storyteller, a creator. "I'm a stockbroker?" Not the same thing at all, not even if I write in my spare time. What I do is a synonym for who I want to be, and a stockbroker (or real estate agent, manager of a Wal-Mart, etc.) is definitely not it.

I understand the view of the people who want to help me, protect me, or just give me other options. I can see myself the way they might see me: I'm keeping the house clean and knitting a lot, but otherwise I don't seem to be doing much. And they're right, I'm not. There's no reason why I shouldn't do something else with my life, since the writing doesn't seem to be happening.

There's only one possible reaction to this: I start writing again. If not the novel, then any old crap, it doesn't matter what. I'm not going to be an [anything else]. Just like I said when I was eleven, I'm going to be a writer. You'll be prying my dream from my cold dead fingers. And that's that.

Books I Read In October

2009-11-10T23:54:00.004-07:00

Yikes! I'm, shall we say, a bit late on this list. See the previous post for a few reasons why. As you can see, I didn't read much this month: too much else going on.

The Inimitable Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse.
This is one of my many old, old favorites. I was sick in bed at some point early in the month (by now I don't even remember when) so I took my chance to read this. I read a bit of the sequel, too, but I don't list books I didn't finish or the list would be a mile long. If you haven't read Wodehouse, do so at your earliest opportunity. And watch the Jeeves and Wooster TV show, too; I'll never completely see Hugh Laurie as House, because I saw him as Bertie Wooster first.

Piece of Work by Laura Zigman
Zigman wrote the book that my favorite stupid rom-com movie was based on (Animal Husbandry, which became the Ashley Judd-Hugh Jackman movie "Someone Like You"), so I'm loyal to her work . This one wasn't great, though.

Good in Bed by Jennifer Weiner
This book is the Hamlet of chick lit. Always 100% believable? No, but it's a classic. And unlike a lot of chick lit, it's memorable and avoids the easy cliche. This was the second time I've read it; the first time I hadn't read much in the genre and I thought it was kind of dumb. Compared to the rest, though, it's extremely decent.

Mason-Dixon Knitting by Ann Shayne and Kaye Gardiner
The original Mason-Dixon Knitting blog is what got me into knitting in a serious way. I don't even remember how I stumbled onto it, but I spent weeks reading the entire archives from 2002 to the present. Whenever I'm reading MDK, I automatically want to knit. It's Pavlovian, and I love it. The book's good, too. A fun read, which I get the feeling some knitting books ... aren't.

Tell Me Lies by Jennifer Crusie
I absolutely adore Jennifer Crusie. She is the best thing that's happened to the romance genre since Georgette Heyer died in the 1970s. Crusie's books are smart, funny, sexy and well plotted. I dare you to find another genre romance writer who can consistently pull that off. And if you do, tell me about them, because I've read everything Crusie's ever written at least twice and I could do with a new obsession.

Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett
This is Pratchett's first book since his Alzheimer's, an obscure form that acts like adult-onset dyslexia, progressed to where he could no longer read and write. As far as I can tell he wrote it by dictation. It's not my favorite of his works -- although like his last one, Nation, it may grow on me in subsequent readings -- but come on. Not bad for a dude with Alzheimer's.

Cooking Dirty by Jason Sheehan
A cool book if you like cooking and wonder what it's like to do it professionally. If I ever thought I'd survive in a restaurant kitchen, I don't after reading this book -- but I'm okay with that. The author is the local Denver food critic and a former chef. I get the feeling he's an okay chef and a great writer, and that he'll never stop wishing it was the other way around.

What I Am Doing

2009-11-10T23:25:00.003-07:00

If I'm not blogging lately (and I'm not) what have I been spending my time on? Inquiring minds probably couldn't care less; but I'm going to tell you anyway.

First, there was The Movening. It was nearly a week of nonstop lifting, hauling, stress and insufficient packing tape. My beloved boyfriend has no idea how close he was to death, or how many times. (We have seven kitchen knives, three pairs of scissors and two toy guns. Don't ask why I know this.)

Then, just as The Movening began to subside, there came the Bedbug Apocalypse. At least, I sure hope it was the Bedbug Apocalypse. If it wasn't, and any of those little bastards are still alive, I'll make it the apocalypse.

Ahem. Sorry. The itching sometimes drives me a little mad. I have about ten or fifteen bites, which believe it or not is a mild infestation. They like my boyfriend more, apparently because he's extremely allergic to them. Did I mention his welts look like hideous alien babies should pop out of them? Can I say it again anyway?

During and in between these momentous events, I have also been cooking and baking. It's much more fun now that I have someone else to cook for. Making a whole batch of cookies or two loaves of bread just for yourself is a lot of effort for so little reward. Watching the amazement on my boyfriend's face when he saw the first loaves of homemade bread ("What, actual bread? Like, that you can make sandwiches out of?") was totally worth it. I've found, modified and made up some awesome recipes this week -- just wait for Delicious Food Thursday!

A few other diversions include unpacking, reading, knitting (dishcloths dishcloths dishcloths dishcloths!) and ... well, let's observe McFadden's Rule on the rest. This is a family blog, after all, in the sense there's a non-zero chance my family will read it. But let's just say, apart from the bugs, living together is awesome!

Hideous Pests (and Bedbugs, Too)

2009-11-05T01:57:00.005-07:00

Well, the Move has been Made. I officially live with my boyfriend now. (He'll be delighted to hear that as he's always begging me to blog about him. I don't know why -- attention whore maybe?) I've been waiting for this for months, hoping we'd be happy, fearing that we wouldn't. I wish that it had only turned out as badly as I feared.

We ourselves, mind you, are fine. He works, I cook, we watch TV together and bicker. However, we haven't gotten a chance to enjoy the status quo. Our third day here, just as we were beginning to recover from the traumatic event that was the actual moving, we found out that our next door neighbors have bed bugs.

As you might well imagine, this means that we have bed bugs.

This is less than fair (though of course, life never is fair). For one thing, we just moved in, dammit. Some of the boxes still aren't unpacked. For another, we're clean people (almost obsessively so, in the BF's case). On our own, we don't attract bugs. Our loud biker neighbors with the possibly-illegal number of roommates, on the other hand ...

We haven't seen many, and none actually in the bed, which is good. We have been bitten, though, which is bad. Not so much for me, I only have bites in one place and they don't itch, but the BF is extremely allergic to them. He has multiple welts the size of quarters if quarters were lumpier. They look terrible -- like that guy's chest right before the alien comes out.

The exterminators are coming tomorrow, which translated means that in about seven hours I'll be trying to mainline caffeine while feverishly vacuuming. Supposedly the apartment has been sprayed every week while it was vacant, so the little rat-cock-sucking motherfuckers (excuse my French, German and Italian) are hopefully not too entrenched. The last thing I want is to move again, but if it's that or watch little mini alien babies pop out of my boyfriend's butt, I will ditch this place like it was a shallow trench filled with irrigation water.

Wish me luck. And remind me: next time I think an apartment building looks a little run-down, don't sign a twelve month lease.

PS. I made whole-wheat bread. I'm going to slather some with butter and eat it while it's still warm. If you're gonna be covered in bug bites, you can at least eat well.

More Passion

2009-10-30T01:25:00.005-06:00

Yesterday's post about passion in writing was disingenuous. I know exactly how important it is to be fanatically, madly in love with your own story. I was just interested to hear what people would say. As of this writing, only one person has commented, but she was right.

Of course passion is essential to writing. For one thing, if you don't love your work, who else will? For another, and this I've learned very well indeed, writing a novel is no cakewalk. It's hard work, even if you do it in a month during NaNoWriMo, even if it's just for fun and you don't care if it's published.

I submit that if you're not passionate about your novel, you simply will not finish. It's like hiking: anybody can go for a stroll around the block, but if you're gonna climb a mountain, you better like the walk. That's the beginning and the end of it.

What does this mean for me? It means that as much as I would like to write the novel I think editors want, I know that's a stupid choice in the long run. For one thing, it won't work, but even if by some miracle it did, it wouldn't make me the kind of writer I want to be or give me the career I want to have. The writers who are my heroes didn't let down their dreams by writing stories they weren't passionate about. I've never heard Connie Willis say she wrote Doomsday Book because it would sell. Terry Pratchett sells millions of copies but even if he didn't, I don't see him giving up Discworld to write cookbooks. Hell, the man loves his work so much he wrote his latest, Unseen Academicals, by dictation when the advance of Alzheimer's no longer allowed him to read and write.

I want to grin so hard it hurts when I think about my novel. I want to be so proud of my work that it feels immodest even to mention it. Even if the rest of the world hates it, I want to be its biggest fan. So of course, I'm not going to waste my time writing the marketable thing I don't care about. I can't. Life is too short and too uncertain.

However, I do have a super secret plan to help me not stress out over this project I adore. Tune in next time (probably Monday, since I'm moving over the weekend) to hear all about it!

Hint: It involves porcupines.

Passion in Writing

2009-10-29T18:30:00.004-06:00

Recently (since about four this morning), I've been wondering: how important is passion in writing? Is it really necessary to love your story more than certain of your vital organs, or can you get by with a milder affection like, say, the one you have for your toes?

But I don't have very much affection for my toes, you say. Yes, exactly. Can you get by with a story you just sort of like?

The reason I spent the small hours of the morning pondering this is because, as I said yesterday, I've been plotting a brand new story for NaNoWriMo. Now mind you, this story is perfectly fine. I think it makes sense, and I think it's very saleable -- it's a steampunk murder mystery, and I know of at least one editor that's gagging to see steampunk novels of any description. But I don't love it. I don't love the characters, the premise, or the world.

On the other hand, I have the first story, what I've been calling the "crazy fate novel." This is the story that began when I sat down to do two pages of writing practice about my drive home from school and ended up with twenty pages of a thriller set in post-apocalyptic Denver. This is the book for which I put aside six years of on-and-off work on another novel. I don't know if the story makes sense. No editors are gagging for it. But I would sacrifice a kidney for the right to write this novel.

So, you tell me, fellow writers. Do I spend my time working on something I could take or leave, but know will sell, or do I say 'the hell with it' and start filling the bathtub with ice?

NaNoWriMo and Other Concerns

2009-10-28T17:36:00.005-06:00

It's been snowing since this time yesterday and isn't likely to stop until this time tomorrow. I'm moving on Saturday and haven't put a single item in a single box, because I have no boxes. I was going to go to the liquor store and get some this morning, but not with a foot of snow on the ground.

In the meantime, I'm drinking raspberry tea, eating a caramel chocolate bar and trying to plot a novel -- my project for NaNoWriMo, once supposed to be just harmless fun and now a peg on which I'm hanging the hope of really getting somewhere this time.

Those who know me will not be surprised to find that this is not the crazy fate novel I wrote about on this blog a couple of months ago. I'm terrible at finishing novels; I'd say I've started nine, one for each year that I've been writing seriously. The fate one was barely started before I decided to put it aside and do NaNo with a completely different story. There's a reason for that, though -- not a good reason, mind you, but there is one.

The thing about fate, or even imagining that something is fate, is that it puts a lot of pressure on you to deliver. If you fail at something that's fated, you can only hold yourself responsible. You can't say, "Well, it wasn't meant to be," because it was but you fucked it up. I can't take the amount of blame I'll lay on myself if that happens.

Besides which, I really like that other story. I like it so much that I'm afraid to write it, if you see what I mean. It's like how, in high school, it was easy to flirt with boys you weren't attracted to but when the right boy came along, you got all tongue-tied and blushy. This story is the right boy, so to speak, and I'm tongue-tied. So, instead, I'm 'dating' another novel that I don't care about as much, because it doesn't scare me. I'm not as attached to how it turns out, and if I screw it up, it's not the end of the world.

This new story is a murder mystery, so I've got to plot it out before I write. I am not used to this. I know as much about plotting (not to mention the setting, Colorado in 1868, and the large amount of Victorian-age science which is crucial to the plot) as a donkey does about water-skiing. So that's fun.

Now back to the book.

Artichokes and Anger

2009-10-21T17:53:00.003-06:00

I am too tired to write or speak or even think. Sometimes I decide I'm going to make something happen that is not under my control and when I can't, I become very angry. Afterwards I'm exhausted and unhappy. That's me right now. More on what happened, probably, later.

In the meantime, watch this and tell me it doesn't make you smile. I love contraptions.

Arthur Ganson Kinetic Sculpture

Not Writing

2009-10-17T13:30:00.005-06:00

As the second in my ongoing series about the basic rules of writing, I want to talk about writing every day. Specifically, I want to talk about not writing every day. I know in the past I've advocated for this rule, and I still think that it's a good idea for beginners and anyone who wants or needs intense practice in their craft. However, there's another side to it that I want to discuss.

Much has been said on the subject of writer's block. Some people believe in it, others feel it's just an excuse for laziness. Some surrender to their block while others power through it. However, little has been said about another aspect of writing that, at first glance, bears a strong resemblance to writer's block. I call it "not writing."

Objectively, there is no difference between a blocked writer and one who is simply not writing. Either way, no words are coming out. For the writer, though, the difference is simple. When you're blocked, ideas won't come, words are clunky and uncooperative, and you feel like you're trying to burrow through granite with your teeth. When you're just not writing, it's not like that. You could write -- you have ideas, you feel the creative spark -- but you aren't. Sometimes there are good reasons for that, and sometimes there are none at all.

Not writing is the shadow side of writing. We rarely talk about it, and when we do it's in terms of shame and censure. The accepted wisdom is simple and absolute: "If you write, you are a writer." The unspoken corollary is that if you don't write, you are not a writer. Many of us, me included, find that idea terrifying. If I am not a writer, what am I?

I'm a person who sleeps. Who does the dishes. Who knits and watches TV and fools around with my boyfriend. I'm a driver and a cook and a lover and a friend and a daughter. I am all of these things whether or not I am a writer.

That's why not writing is critical: it provides space in which to strike a balance between the artist and the person. I cannot live with my entire identity tied up in one of the many actions that make up my day-to-day life. There's an old saying about putting all your eggs in one basket, and it's especially true if the eggs in question are your whole life. Writing is hard, it's competitive, and a lot of people don't make it. I've accepted that. If I never make it as a writer, I want to at least be able to say that I made it as a human being.

If you write every day, you are a writer. But I've found that if you don't write every day, you're still a writer. Not writing is when you live the stories -- writing is when you tell them. You can't have one without the other. When you get right down to it, not writing is writing.

So I guess I still think you should write every day. One way or the other.

Delicious Food Thursday-ish #7

2009-10-16T15:54:00.009-06:00

I got caught up in speculation (and knitting) yesterday and forgot to do a post about food. This cannot and will not stand. Everybody just pretend the last 24 hours didn't happen.

This week's topic: Chili.

Chili is the perfect autumn food: warm, hearty, full of protein, just a little spice to warm you up, and goes great with another good autumn food, cornbread. Both my parents make amazing chili, and have since I can remember. My dad makes a several dozen ingredient mega-chili with elk-burger and tequila. It takes all day to make and all night in the Crock Pot to achieve full flavor. My mom, on the other hand, makes a quicker version that's good for when it's 5:30 pm and you want to eat before bedtime.

That's the version I made as my very first pot of chili, which was simmering even as I typed up last Thursday's entry on Mother Hubbarding it. I modified it, of course, but just a little.

Mom's Chili

11 can chili beans (I prefer organic, if they're affordable)
1 can regular pintos
1 small can tomato sauce
1 lb hamburger (elk burger would be even better, or turkey if you don't eat red meat)
1 onion
Several cloves garlic (I used five but it depends on how much you like garlic)
1 large fresh chili (jalapeno's the standard but as usual, get whatever you like)
Canola or olive oil
Water

Preheat the oven to 400.

Peel the garlic cloves. (The easiest way to do this is to place a knife flat on the clove and give it a few sharp whacks. The skin will split and be easy to peel.) Place them and the chili on a baking pan and put in the oven to roast. Keep an eye on them.

Heat some oil in a large saucepan. Chop about half of the onion finely (see my post on Indian yogurt chicken for onion-chopping techniques) and fry in oil until it softens and starts to caramelize.

Meanwhile, put beans and tomato sauce in a large pot with 1/2 cup or so of water. Add onions when cooked. Stir and let simmer.

Rinse out the frying pan and brown hamburger. When it's done, drain and put in the pan with the beans and onion.

By this time, the garlic and chili should be done. Garlic is done when it's soft and brown at the edges, and it may cook faster so don't hesitate to take it out first. Chop it finely and add to the pot. Pepper is done when the skin is blackened and blistered. Take it out and put immediately into a bag -- I used a regular Ziploc -- for several minutes. The trapped steam will separate the skin and make it easier to remove. After a few minutes, remove skin and seeds, chop and add to the pot.

(Tips for cooking with hot peppers: first, don't touch it with your bare hands unless you have to. If you do, wash your hands immediately and don't touch your mouth, eyes or personal area -- or anyone else's -- for at least a few hours. Capsacin, the compound that makes the chili hot, will stick to your skin, and it hurts. Second, you may want to cut the pepper up into larger pieces so that innocent eaters can avoid biting directly into it.)

Once all ingredients are in the pot, simmer as long as possible to let the flavors mesh. Cover or add water as necessary to keep it from drying up and sticking to the bottom. If you like a lot of broth in your chili, keep that going right up until dinner time. If you like it a little chunky, taper off the water in the hour or so before you eat and cook uncovered to let the extra moisture evaporate.

Top with sour cream, cheddar cheese and/or Fritos as desired. Cornbread optional but delicious. Serves 4.

The Future of Reading

2009-10-15T16:09:00.005-06:00

I was just reading this great post about the future of publishing on the Writer's Digest blog There Are No Rules. I don't know much about publishing; I've never worked in it except as a two bit (or less, maybe a one-and-a-half-bit) self-publisher whose product has yet to go anywhere much. (The Faerie Alphabet Coloring Book, in case you were wondering. Text by me, art by my sister Robin.) It got me thinking, though, about the future of literacy, which some people say is also in jeopardy.

I'm blase about the future of reading in our society. Some might argue that blase is my natural attitude towards things, whether or not they're in jeopardy, but in this case I have solid logical reasons.

For one thing, now more than ever, people are not going to stop reading. In fact, I predict that illiteracy rates will drop in the next few decades. At first that might sound counterintuitive, or even dumb -- after all, isn't my generation lazy and prone to being spoon-fed our entertainment by the mass media? Well, maybe. But here's the thing: thirty years ago, or even twenty, you could get your entertainment spoon-fed to you without having to read, primarily through TV and movies. Since the advent of the internet, that has ceased to be true, not just for entertainment but for education and everyday communication.

Think about it: people my age don't talk on the phone anymore. They email, text message and Twitter -- all text-based communication. Want to do research? You don't go to the library and look at the pictures in the encyclopedia; and while you can still look at the pictures on Google, you have to be able to type in a search term to find them. No librarian to direct you to the right place in the virtual stacks. The internet is simply a text-based medium, and as our lives are increasingly lived on the World Wide Web, they will be increasingly lived as readers and writers -- however grammar impaired and prone to text-speak.

Finally, but just as importantly, reading is not going to disappear because people like to communicate. We want to communicate. We chatter to strangers on the bus and go on humiliating daytime talk shows just to be heard. Reading a book is communication as direct as a conversation, but without the risk of face-to-face social rejection. If an author wrote a book, they want to talk to you. If you pick it up, you want to listen. Nobody's too awkward, or shy, or unpopular to read. Trust me.

As for the future of publishing, as a writer I'm very much interested in what happens. But also, as a writer, I'm not too worried. Whether we do it in print, on an e-reader, or even in 140-character bursts on Twitter, people will never stop reading. And as long as they do, I will never stop writing.

Wednesday Appreciation

2009-10-14T23:29:00.004-06:00

The numbers suggest that you guys, my wonderful audience, prefer it when I post frequently and about writing. I fully intend to do more of that, but today I'm way too tired to say anything insightful about writing, or about anything at all. Instead, I want to acknowledge the people who have made this week suck less than it otherwise might.

The friendly guy at the post office who complimented me on my strength as I heaved a thirty-pound box of books onto the scale. I'm not used to having a good experience at the post office, but it was nice that you noticed my strength first, not my size. Very few people do that.

Likewise, the friendly girl at Blockbuster who talked to me about Fringe, and the guy at the Boulder Apple store today who had been a personal assistant himself. Justin, if that's your name: thank you for not getting angry at my woeful lack of any idea what kind of appointment I was showing up to or what you could and could not fix for me.

Also, everyone who's commented, retweeted and otherwise supported my writing this blog, not just this past week but ever. I'm trying to do something here that's important to me. I'm not doing it very well, or every day like I promised myself I would, but I really am trying and I appreciate every single person who reads this blog very much. I hope it entertains you.

Tomorrow is Delicious Food Thursday, and after that I will make a regular schedule so we can return to it. Good night!

The Tortured Artist

2009-10-11T13:27:00.003-06:00

Building off of yesterday's post on writing what you feel, I want to tackle another vexed question in writing -- or in any other art form, for that matter. It's about the image of the tortured artist.

In case you've been living under a rock for the last couple of millenia, the 'tortured artist' cliche is the idea that in order to produce great art (including literature), the artist must endure great suffering which will ultimately destroy him or her. The logical extrapolation is that if you aren't suffering, your work will never be more than mediocre.

That image sets up a paradox for young people, like myself, who want to become writers and artists. We're given an impossible choice: do we deliberately seek suffering for the sake of a chance at great art, or do we try to live happy lives and condemn our work to mediocrity?

When laid out like that, the choice sounds pretty ridiculous and artificial, but it's a real consideration for a new writer trying to find their best voice. I know I have sat back from my writing more than once and thought, "Life's pretty good right now; am I not suffering enough? Should I put this aside until I'm unhappy?" I bet I'm not the only one, either.

After some thought, my take on the issue is that everyone is tortured; you can't go through life without pain. The key to artistry is in your ability to express that pain, and in how deeply you feel it. It comes back to writing what you know. If you don't truly know all of your emotions -- anger, joy, loneliness, love -- if you don't feel them to the fullest, you'll never be able to make your readers do so when it comes time to put them on the page. Contrary to what we've all been thinking, artists aren't the ones who have the most continuous pain, but the ones who feel it most deeply.

The good news there is that in my experience, those who feel pain most deeply are also the ones with the deepest capacity for joy. The "joyful artist" isn't an image that gets a lot of press, but it's just as accurate and just as necessary to creativity. Great writing expresses all of life, not just one aspect, whether it's joy or sorrow. Besides which, everyone I've ever known who wrote, did so because it gave them joy -- not pain. If writing was torture, we wouldn't all love it so much or pursue it against such astronomical odds.

Do you have to feel pain to be an artist? Probably. But pain won't make you an artist -- it's joy that does that, the joy of making something new out of nothing but your own heart and mind.

Write What You Don't Know

2009-10-10T15:04:00.010-06:00

In preparation for November and NaNoWriMo, I want to take some time to look at What I Know About Writing -- or more accurately, What I Think I Might Sort Of Know About Writing, In Normal Circumstances. ('Cause really, who knows anything about writing?) I'll go over the major rules, as well as some lesser-known ones that I've figured out over the past eight or so years.

The "major rules" I refer to are the simple ones that are taught in every creative writing class, workshop and on every remedial writing website on Earth. But in case somehow you've managed to miss all of those, they are:

Show, Don't Tell
Learn Good Grammar
Read A Lot
Write What You Know
Write Every Day

There's not a lot to say about most of these, because they're true. If you want to write, you had better learn good grammar and you had better read a lot. Writing every day is a good theory that rarely ends up happening (at least for me). I might do a post later about showing rather than telling, but today I want to talk about rule #4: Write What You Know.

"Write what you know" is a tricky piece of advice to give. A lot of beginners will take it to mean that they should write about people just like them, who do only the things that they do. Shockingly, this doesn't usually make for interesting stories. At worst, you get a blatantly autobiographical piece of "fiction." At best, you get ... well, The Bell Jar. But unless you're absolutely sure you're the next Sylvia Plath, I don't recommend this. Actually, I don't recommend it, period -- especially if you're sure you're the next Sylvia Plath.

McFadden's Lesser-Known Writing Rule #1: Whatever you're absolutely sure about is definitely not true. The more you write, the less you're sure about anything -- at least, in my experience. Then again, I could be wrong.

If "Write What You Know" was an absolute, meant to be taken literally, men couldn't write about women, young people about old people, or people of one culture about people of another -- and they do, all the time. What's more, they do it well. Here's why I think that works:

There are more ways to know things than through direct experience. The way that gets the least press, but that I think is most vital for writing, is what you might call "knowing through emotion." In fact, if I had made the rules, it wouldn't be "Write What You Know" at all, it would be "Write What You Feel." Genuine emotion is the absolute key to a genuine story, whether you're writing about something you've experienced or something you've only imagined.

Can an old white man know what it's like to be a young girl in imperial China? No. Can he imagine how it feels when that young girl is unhappy? Yes. And that (and some good fact-checking) is why the story works. If you can feel what your character feels, it doesn't matter if you've never done what they do. And if you can't, it doesn't matter if they're living your exact life on paper. Emotion is like those old Coca-Cola ads: it brings good things to life.

In fact, I'm going to go ahead and say it:

McFadden's Lesser-Known Writing Rule #2: Don't write what you know. Write what you feel. (And then check your facts.)

The Return of Delicious Food Thursday

2009-10-08T14:32:00.005-06:00

I will admit it -- I strayed. Lapsed, even. For weeks upon weeks now there has been no talk of delicious food. But all that has changed! I bring you:

The Triumphant Return of Delicious Food Thursday! This week's topic: Mother-Hubbarding It.

I trust that the term I have just coined is intelligible to everyone who knows their nursery rhymes. "Mother-Hubbarding It" is the art of creating a meal from a cupboard that is bare.

I've been lax in my grocery-buying lately due to dividing my time between an apartment in Boulder and another one in Denver. I never know where I'll be or for how long, so if I buy too much food for any one place, it goes bad. If I don't buy enough, which is usually the case, I end up staring at an empty refrigerator and mumbling "What the heck am I going to eat?"

Here's a menu from one such occasion, including a recipe for a Mother Hubbard classic: shortbread. Shortbread is an awesome dessert to make in this situation. It's only got three basic ingredients: butter, sugar and flour. All three are staples that can probably be found in even the emptiest cupboard. Plus, it's delicious. Got guests coming over and nothing in the house? Wow them with homemade shortbread.

Mother Hubbard Dinner for One

Refrigerator Contents: Milk, very old eggs, butter, bread, apple sauce, small sample container of hummus, half an onion
Cupboard Contents: 6 million kinds of tea, hot cocoa mix, oatmeal, sugar, 2 kinds of flour, jelly, canned pears, canned tomato soup, stale Doritos, spices

Entree: Tomato Soup a la Hubbard

1 can Campbell's tomato soup
1 can water (or milk, if you're one of those people)
Garlic salt
Cayenne pepper

Mix canned soup with equal amount water or milk. Add spices to taste. Heat until very hot. The high level of heat is important as it enhances the spicy flavor and makes soup more warming and filling.

Serve with two slices of toast with butter and hummus.

Dessert: Shortbread

1 1/4 cups flour
1/3 cup sugar
1 1/4 sticks butter (I made it with just 1 stick but it was pretty dry and crumbly; use your best judgement here)
1/2 tsp vanilla (optional)
1 tsp cinnamon (optional)

Preheat oven to 325

Mix flour and sugar together in a bowl. Add cinnamon and vanilla. Add butter in small chunks and squish together with a fork or hands until it is evenly mixed in. Mixture will look like large crumbs, similar to pie crust.

Press crumbs into a sheet about 1/2 inch thick on an ungreased cookie sheet or baking pan. Bake 30 minutes or until lightly browned. Slice while warm.

Serve with tea or hot cocoa

Femininity Rocks, Part 2: Knit Kwan Do

2009-10-08T13:50:00.006-06:00

This doesn't have all that much to do with femininity as a concept, but it does connect to my previous post about how being girly is actually pretty bad ass.

I think that knitting should be the leading hobby among young, urban women. Why? Just a few words: eight-inch metal spike.

That's basically what a knitting needle is, when you look at it objectively. It's a six- to eight-inch spike with a point at one end. Sure, Grandma used to use them to make sweaters, but Grandma used to cook in a frying pan, too, and we've all seen what those can do to people. Plus, when you're knitting you use not one but two needles. Now, what young woman wouldn't feel safer at night knowing that she has a pair of eight-inch spikes in her purse?

Granted, knitting needles aren't all that sharp, but they're plenty sharp enough to puncture skin with a little force. I saw my mom step on one once, with the same effect as a good sharp stab to the foot (I've never heard her cuss that much before or since -- but that's another story).

I will also grant that there are some problems with this theory. If you do get attacked, your assailant probably won't be scared if you just show him the needle, so you will have to actually stab him. If he has a gun or a knife, you're probably screwed -- sorry, poor word choice. You're probably not going to be able to get away; but then, if he has either of those you weren't going to get away no matter what. I submit, though, that there are many cases of attackers not having a weapon, but rather relying on their superior strength to get the woman's purse, car, or body. In that situation, a knitter could simply whip out a needle and stab them (samurai war cries a plus) until they run away.

Will this work? I have not, thankfully, had to try it -- but I think it will. Safety experts say that the best thing you can do if attacked is to fight back and make noise; most assailants, especially rapists, are looking for an easy mark and will give up if you look likely to make trouble. Not much says "likely to make trouble" more effectively than a poke in the eye with an eight-inch spike.

Plus, how many self-defense methods can also be used to make sweaters?

Image is "Skull and Knitting Needles" button from Zazzle.com, design by assloaf. Click the image to go to vendor page and buy you some!

An Autumn Story

2009-10-07T23:02:00.010-06:00

In her mind, it was fall again. Always fall. The night air always smelled of smoke and fallen leaves, gasoline and wool and oncoming cold. They kept her warm and the blankets soft, but in her heart there was the squeak of new boots and the touch of cold air on her face.

If she would speak to them, they said, only speak a few little words, she could go.

Speak. A beautiful book. A book she envied. Such simplicity, and a dark heart covered in clear slick words like a fallen leaf in the year's first ice. A heart like that was worth a king's ransom. She had not been able to find one -- a bare, spare, screaming truth for her stories -- and so in the end it seemed better to tell none at all.

None. At all. Not even the story of why she was here, or why the always-autumn in her heart. Perhaps the green-eyed monster had eaten her tongue. Perhaps the brilliant always went mad. She thought of Sylvia Plath sticking her head into her own oven. In her mind it was fall there too. Virginia Woolf walked into the river, and dead leaves floated on the chill water as she passed.

And they would live forever, and she would not. She had not lit with their holy fire, but only burned with jealousy and want. For her, no spark of genius. Some said that you would know you had it because you could not stop writing, but she had tried it and found that she could. No more stories, just a long slow dying time of autumn in her heart.

When at last she closed her eyes forever and forever, she prayed each night that she might dream of spring.

Art is "Questing" by Robin McFadden

Books I Read In September

2009-10-01T00:09:00.004-06:00

This has been a chaotic month for me: househunting, illness, two different jobs, and then there was that time the weasels ate my mother ... (just kidding. She's alive and well). But one thing I can proudly say: I didn't fall behind on my reading. Here, in more or less chronological order, is what I read in September and what I thought.

Dave Barry Talks Back by Dave Barry
Not much to say about this. I've read it a million times. It's Barry, so you know it's good.

My Miserable, Lonely Lesbian Pregnancy by Andrea Askowitz
Reads exactly like it sounds. Pretty funny, but didn't leave a lasting impression on me. Definitely didn't make me want to get pregnant. Descriptions of pregnancy and the birth process are more effective birth control than a tanker truck full of condoms.

The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough
I don't know what I was expecting from this book, exactly. I love McCullough's The Ladies of Missalonghi, a light little book that weighs in at about one-fifth of the pages and one-thirtieth of the story time spanned. The Thorn Birds was different and yet not: touching and deep, with the simplicity and attention to detail that I loved in the shorter book. It didn't hit me with the force of Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible, a comparable family epic, but I can certainly see what makes The Thorn Birds a classic.

Spin Cycle by Sue Margolis
I check out chick lit novels for their fun, sprightly storytelling. A month later, I can barely tell one from another. I know this one was about an upper-middle-class career girl who fell in love with someone unlikely after many adventures, because they all are. I think it was the best friend in this one. Or maybe I'm thinking of a different one. But it wasn't bad! I would have remembered that.

Monster Island by David Wellington
Crazy, crazy zombie novel. I didn't know people wrote zombie novels, but apparently they do. Not very many, though -- and maybe from reading this I know why. It's not so much that it was bad, although I wouldn't recommend it to a friend. It was more just weird. There was a sentient zombie with the power to control the minds of other zombies. Also, when they ate a lot of people, they mysteriously got taller. There are two more books in the series, and if anyone here ever reads them, let me know how they are. Because I won't.

Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs
Everyone knows this book is about his childhood living with the family of his mother's crazy shrink. When I started reading, it was to a scary deja vu: I've known families almost this insane. Then, with a slowly dawning horror, I realized that to some people, my family could have been this family. In no way were we this dysfunctional, but we were home schoolers and pagans and ate organic food instead of Kraft Dinner, and in my tiny little hometown that was basically the same thing.

Asta in the Wings by Jan Elizabeth Watson
I read this immediately after I finished Running With Scissors -- like, the same day -- and the impression I came away with is that writers today sure do like their crazy mom stories. This is about a little girl whose mother didn't allow her or her brother to leave their house for five years. It was well written, but not well constructed. The ending felt arbitrary and unsatisfying, it resolved nothing, and the rest felt less like a story and more like things happening one after another. Not highly recommended, but I'd read it again if it was this or Twilight.

Our Life in Gardens by Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd
This is one of the sweetest, most soothing books I've ever read, and I'm not even a gardener. The book consists of twenty or so essays about plants these two grow in their thirty-year-old garden in southern Vermont, as well as other aspects of gardening. They rarely talk about themselves separately from the garden, but it nonetheless feels intensely personal. Made me want to grow plants in pots on the windowsill just to get a chunk of that peace.

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
I picked up this book early in the month, when I was stuck in a bad job but not sure how to get out of it. It spoke to me strongly, because the girl in the book had gotten exactly what she wanted -- like me, with my job -- only to find out it wasn't right for her. It's a classic, of course, so my compliments are pretty redundant, but it is very good.

I Am Legend by Richard Matheson
I love vampires, and this is one of the all-time classics of vampire literature. I've been wanting to read it since before the movie came out (which is a good thing, since I hear the movie sucked). On finally reading it, though, it wasn't all I'd hoped. It's a novella, with other unconnected short stories rounding out the page count. Matheson's story content and writing style remind me of Ray Bradbury, but without Bradbury's razor-sharp, gorgeous writing and unerring sense of the macabre. Not that Matheson's bad -- he's just not as good. It was like watching a 3-D movie without glasses: the images were the same, but a little bit blurry and unsatisfying.

Witches Abroad by Terry Pratchett
Old, old, old, old favorite. This copy has been in my family since I was seven; I stole it when I moved out on my own. The cover's completely gone and the spine is in shreds, but I still read it on a regular basis. If you don't know Pratchett, his Discworld series is the best fantasy satire ever written. Really. This is the second book in the 'witches of Lancre' plot arc: I recommend starting with the first, Wyrd Sisters. If you haven't already read them, do it. Do it now.

Happy Blasphemy Day!

2009-09-30T15:51:00.005-06:00

This is the part where I either lose what few readers I have or gain a bunch more, and I won't know until it's too late. See, I found out on Twitter that September 30th is Blasphemy Day, and I intend to observe it with vigor.

What is this special day, you ask? Well, to quote from the Blasphemy Day website,

"The objective of International Blasphemy Day is to open up all religious beliefs to the same level of free inquiry, discussion and criticism to which all other areas of academic interest are subjected."

That's probably a very noble and worthwhile mission and you should go to the website to read more about it. Me, I'm just usin' the holiday as an excuse to say things like "May zombie Jesus eat your brains with love."

Seriously, though, opening up religion to inquiry is indeed generally considered blasphemy and is also, I think, important. As the official website says, the debate is not -- or at least, doesn't have to be -- the existence or non-existence of God. Nor is it about asking anyone to prove anything. Faith exists in the absence of proof -- that's what makes it faith. Nobody wants to turn religion into science (especially since, in my opinion, science is just another belief system with no more claim on the ultimate truth than any other).

On the other hand, fundamentalists of any religion have this nasty habit of framing any kind of inquiry or discussion of their beliefs as "lack of faith." I've always had a problem with this. Correct me if I'm wrong, but if your faith is so shaky that it can't stand up to a few searching questions, maybe the questions aren't the problem.

So I'm in favor of discussion and inquiry into religion. Wouldn't it be nice if the flaming walls of taboo were lowered so that people of different religions could talk to each other freely about their beliefs? Assuming it didn't cause global nuclear war, of course. I really want to be optimistic and say that free discussion would inevitably lead to world peace -- and it might -- but really you can't overestimate the likelihood of people being dumbasses. Nonetheless, I think it's worth a try.

At this very moment, my extremely pagan sister is having her weekly discussion on religion with her Mormon missionary friends. I only wish I could be there with her -- because people of different faiths getting together for an open discussion is the true meaning of Blasphemy Day.

May zombie Jesus eat your brains with love.

Artwork is The Final Brunch by Robin Mcfadden. The original is much larger, but in case you can't tell, those present are (left to right): Buddha, Isis, Zeus, Pele, Thor, Lao Tzu, YOU (a mirror), Quetzlcoatl, Krishna, Venus, Satan, Jesus and Moses.

Home Again (Jiggety Jig)

2009-09-30T01:44:00.013-06:00

I'm still thinking about the concept of home, and what makes a place more than just a place.

I think, partly, it may just be time. I heard somewhere that when you move to a new city, it takes about ten months to get settled in: learn your way around, find a job, make friends and so on. How much longer until it becomes home? Until you feel good as soon as your tires hit that familiar pavement and you can't help but smile at the rush of memories every time you pass a favorite hangout?

That, I think, depends on other circumstances. People, for one. If your family's nearby (and you like them), that helps speed the process. Close friends, new or old, and especially a romantic partner, are as good a video game cheat codes. And then, of course, there's you. If you're determined to love the new place, it'll feel like home as soon as you drop the last box on the carpet. If you're determined to hate it, you can live there twenty years and it never will.

For me, it seems to take about two years. Boulder was starting to feel like home just about the time I moved away, leaving me with a painful nostalgia that lasted until the day I moved back. Denver was the same, only I didn't realize how deeply attached I am to it -- particularly to this small area on the border between ritzy Cherry Creek and sketchy Aurora -- until I left. Like the cheesiest of romantic comedies, I was too busy complaining about it to notice I was falling in love.

I knew I regretted moving back to Boulder, but only today did I really figure out why. The years I spent there before were wonderful, and I moved back because I thought it would be like that again. It isn't. It's like this: when I was a kid, my dad had this book called You Can't Go Home Again (by Thomas Wolfe). I never read it because I hated the title. I didn't want to believe it, then or for a long time, but it's true. Home is like a soap bubble that pops when you leave. Even if you go back to the place where it was, the home you remember and love is already gone. You can't go back: instead, you have to go forward and make yourself a new home someplace else.

The truth is, that's still scary. If there's a manual for how to find home, nobody gave it to me -- and if they had, it would probably say I should be looking in nice safe subdivisions, not in a busy, messy, sometimes ugly neighborhood like this one. Funny thing, though: the harder I search for a place to call home, the more I find it in places I would never have considered.

The diner where I got breakfast before packing up my first apartment. The cupcake shop on Colfax where a friend took me the day after a bad breakup. The park where I took a long pre-dawn walk that stands as one of the most joyous and beautiful experiences of my life. The Noodles & Co. where my boyfriend and I had our first date. Or how about the library where I first checked out a book by Byron Katie, or the corner stop sign that mysteriously disappeared, only to turn up months later in a friend's closet?

Maybe I'm overthinking this issue. Maybe all along it hasn't been that I needed to find home, but that I needed to see that home is wherever I find it.

Art is Sunrise by Robin McFadden. Contact me for more information or to buy prints. Photo is the sign on the door of my childhood home. This may or may not explain a lot about me.

Random Late-Night Giggles

2009-09-26T23:11:00.002-06:00

Reading the archives of the fabulous Something Positive. (Warning: not for the easily offended. Or even the fairly difficult to offend.) I just came across this quote:

"People need to realize when a romantic partner proclaims they're undeserving, it's not flattery. It's a warning shot."

It's funny because it's true! No, really. Those of you who are laughing right now, and/or cringing, know what I mean.

You Can't Help Anyone

2009-09-26T18:38:00.009-06:00

Believe it or not, that is my actual philosophy of human relationships -- not just romantic ones, but friendships and family too. You can't help anyone.

I'm speaking emotionally here, not physically -- if a person is starving, duh, you can feed them. But if a person is miserable, you cannot make them happy. Not by loving them. Not by being nice to them. Not by giving them inspiring, after school special-type pep talks. Not in a box, not with a fox. You get the idea.

"But, Heather," some of you might say, "I really want to make this person better. They're so sad, and I know if I just [lend them money, cast a happiness spell, give them a blowjob] they'll feel better."

No. They won't. If they're a nice person (and if you care that much about them, I hope they are), they'll appreciate the gesture, but that's all. You can't really help them and, despite what you may have been taught, it isn't your moral and ethical duty to try. Their feelings are their responsibility, period.

That may sound harsh, but it really has nothing to do with compassion. Since I adopted this philosophy, I actually feel more compassionate towards people I know who are suffering. That's because I no longer go into "fix-it mode" when I know they're sad, then get frustrated when they won't let me "fix" them. Instead, I listen -- with love, but also with the knowledge that I can't do anything about the way they're feeling or how they're going to choose to deal with it. Strangely, this seems to calm them down more often than not.

But, you might ask, why do I take it as such unassailable truth that I can't do anything about the way they're feeling? Let me answer that as someone who has spent a lot of time being sad for no particular reason.

The thing, in my experience, is this. People who are habitually sad, angry, lonely, jealous and so on actually like it. Probably not consciously -- and most would certainly deny it -- but the truth is, their own experience has taught them that this negative emotion, whatever it is, serves them in some way. Maybe habitual anger keeps them from feeling pain, or habitual loneliness keeps them from having to reach out to others and potentially be rejected. For me, the sadness I felt as a teenager kept me from having to take responsibility for myself. Somewhere along the way I learned that being sad gave me the carte blanche to do whatever I wanted and never feel bad about it, because I was 'just trying to feel better.'

I'm not speaking here about clinical disorders like depression and bipolar disorder. Those are physical problems caused by malfunctioning within the brain, and I wouldn't for a moment suggest that people have those disorders because they like them. I'm talking about people, like me, whose brains function normally but who still constantly, or almost constantly, experience negative emotions.

"So," some other people might say snidely, "if you can't help anyone, then how come I did such-and-such for my depressed friend Jim-Bob and he's been happy ever since?" The answer is, Because he wanted to be. Jim-Bob had already decided to be happy, and your kind action was his excuse. That's the other side to this coin, you see: just as you can't make a sad person be happy, if a person wants to be happy, you can't ever really force them to be sad. You can put them down for a little while, maybe, but not for long.

So, how do you get yourself to want to be happy? How is it that a person goes from enjoying sadness to being joyful? Well, I sort of know how I did it, but I can't help you. If you don't understand why, go back and read the post again. I'm not saying I wouldn't if I could, but I can't, so what does that matter? Good luck, Sam I Am. I'm rooting for you.

I'm going to wrap this post up with a couple of quick acronyms. BOCTAOE, Scott Adams' brilliant acronym for "but of course there are obvious exceptions," and YMMV, "your mileage may vary." If this topic offends you, please feel free to mentally insert them throughout the post as an alternative to leaving happy clown heads in my bed.

Art is "Long Night" by my fantastic artist sister Robin McFadden. She is too broke to maintain a website but does sell prints, so contact me if you want one!

This Is Your Brain On Fiction

2009-09-25T19:13:00.004-06:00

I know, I said I wouldn't be back until I was well -- and I'm not, either well or back, except that I ran across this great article about mirror neurons and reading fiction that backs up scientifically what I said about my extreme identification with the fiction I read in my post about authors' worldviews.

Though their findings aren't in exactly the same area as my post, they make sense to me in terms of what I feel when immersed in extremely violent or otherwise negative fictions like the recent Tarantino movie Inglourious Basterds. If, as this article says, watching or reading about a character's actions activates the parts of our brains that relate to performing those actions ourselves, no wonder I didn't enjoy the movie! Neurologically speaking, I was scalping people right along with Brad Pitt.

Okay, I may have taken that to lengths beyond what the science proves. Or did I? Read the article and see for yourselves!

Horrific Illness Thursday

2009-09-24T23:06:00.003-06:00

I am ill today, and yesterday, and probably tomorrow.

Good lord -- I sound like a Robert Frost poem. Seriously though, I am; but not too seriously, if you see what I mean. I have something that might be swine flu or then again, might not be, and I have enough self-awareness left under the fever to know that if I'm not sure, it probably isn't.

I'm not one of those people who powers through illness, working and running errands as if they weren't suffering joint aches and intermittent stomach cramps. In fact, I could not resemble those people less. At the first sign of a sniffle, I take to bed and it takes an Act of God to get me up again before I feel 100%. Maybe, if I'm comfortable and have a steady supply of soup, tea and Advil, 110%.

Some of it is because I enjoy the chance to be waited on -- but not as much as you'd think. Red lipstick and heels will get me the same service at most restaurants. No, there are other, far more significant reasons. For one thing, I almost never get sick unless I'm under a lot of stress. I'm not the World Champion Stress Handler, either, so I'm more than happy to tell all of those pressing obligations "Fuck off, I'm sick and there's nothing you can do about it."

For another, I am tiny. I'm only 5'6" and as far as I know (and I rarely admit this, so feel special) I've never topped 100 pounds. It's not deliberate --I don't diet or even exercise, much less do that horrible stuff with the finger. It's just genetics. But anyway, my point is that there's not enough room in my body for huge reserves of energy and strength. I have so little subcutaneous fat ... I can't think of a good way to describe it (though I have a feeling it would mention whales), but suffice to say, I have very very little. When I get sick and my immune system reaches for the reserves those human powerhouses have so much of, the rest of my bodily systems more or less have to go "bye-bye" to provide them. That includes my brain.

What people who can function while sick will probably never understand (at least, judging by the ones I know) is that when I fall into bed and refuse to get up, it isn't because I don't want to (though I might not). It's because, physically, I can't. You strong people might not believe it, either, but it's true. Can you imagine being trapped in bed for three days because of a cold? Then welcome to my world. It's nice here -- there are blankets, and sometimes people bring us soup.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go shut down my brain for a while. I'll be back when I'm well.

PS. Female readers, I love you. But, please don't leave admiring comments about my weight. It's like calling to congratulate me on having such nice weather lately. "Uhh, thanks, but I don't control it ... and really, from here, it's not that great."

Picture Time!

2009-09-22T18:46:00.005-06:00

A heartwarming moment from the archives here at Unlikely Writing.

This is me at age 17 and my niece Morgan, age 4. The picture was taken by the amazing Jessica Lehrman; check the 'Friends and Family' portion of her website for a picture that shows Morgan's face. You won't regret it: she's adorable.

Work Ethic

2009-09-21T02:36:00.010-06:00

It's come to my attention that some scurrilous persons believe that I lack work ethic. I don't know why they think this: perhaps it's because I list 'sleep' among my favorite hobbies, or because of my belief that men are put on this Earth to carry heavy things for me. Nonetheless, this rumor is both untrue and damaging, and I want to clear it up.

First off, about this 'work ethic' thing. Both the Protestant work ethic and the nine-to-five workday were established, not by God, natural selection or superintelligent space aliens (or whatever else you think is responsible for our existence), but by wealthy landowners in the late eighteenth century.

Seriously. I'm not talking about a conspiracy here, I'm talking about the Industrial Revolution. It's history, man, it's on Wikipedia.

In the late 1700's, factories were becoming the order of the day. There was only one problem: nobody wanted to work there. The typical artisan workday of the time was only a few hours long, and since most were self-employed, if they didn't feel like working, they just didn't. For people to give that up in favor of an 18-hour-a-day, 6-day-a-week schedule was going to take more than a "pretty please." Money certainly wasn't going to do it: for one thing, factory work paid very little (as it does today in most places), and for another, the capitalist demand for "More, more, more!" hadn't been invented.

In order to make the Industrial Revolution a reality, then, its engineers needed a new social and emotional paradigm that would make hard work 'virtuous' and those who worked less 'lazy' and 'worthless.' If it tied in with religion, so much the better -- that would give it the ring of divine truth. And so the Protestant work ethic was born.*

I have this thing about doing things just because some dead white guys told me to. For that matter, I have a thing about doing things just because living white guys tell me to. The aforementioned scurrilous persons have been known to call this a "problem with authority."(Personally, I say that it's not a problem with authority unless I believe that the people with whom I have a problem have some authority. But that's another story.) Am I against work? Absolutely not. What I'm against is the concept of work as a moral imperative; of time spent doing other things as "wasted;" and of the decision to work less than normal, or not at all, as a moral failing.

I'm not only against this, I don't really understand it. What's supposed to be so great about working so much that you never have time to spend napping, daydreaming, cultivating your hobbies or spending time with your friends and family? How does that make you a better person? Even more, how does it "build character?" Speaking as a writer, if all my characters did was sit at desks all day, my stories would never get off the ground.

Again, all of this doesn't mean that I'm against work. I've had at least my share of jobs -- more than some of my peers. I've liked most of them, if not for themselves, for the good feeling it gives me to pay for my needs with money I've earned through my own labor. I even consider this post I'm writing to be work, as it's part of a process leading towards what I hope will eventually be an income (more on that later).

It's simply that I don't worship work for its own sake. I work to get money, and I use money to buy stuff. I don't base my identity or my sense of security on any of the three: work, money or stuff. And if that means I lack work ethic, so be it.

ETA:
*I'm getting my info about the Industrial Revolution from a wonderful book called How To Be Idle by Tom Hodgkinson. He goes into much more detail and puts it better than I could. (Forgot this footnote the first time around, sorry.)

Our First Order of Business

2009-09-21T02:27:00.006-06:00

Behold the pinnacle of human invention. The triumph of human ingenuity. The ultimate machine for surviving the zombie apocalypse. I give you:

Waffle Bike!

The guy who made this is a genius. I would seriously consider having his children.

Rhymes With Schmeditation*

2009-09-19T16:32:00.005-06:00

I meditate almost every day (key word: almost). I've wanted to write about it for a long time, but I haven't quite known what to say.

I still don't. Meditation, for me, isn't an abstract experience. It isn't something I can analyze, or do a how-to post on, or make a list of. The only way I can think of to talk about it is to write down, as nearly as possible, how it felt; and not even how it feels all the time, but how it felt to me today. Yesterday was different, and tomorrow will be too.

The other reason this has been a tough subject for me is because some of what I do in meditation is energy work. I know a lot of people don't believe in that, and I was afraid of sounding crazy. Well, maybe I am -- and so what? If you've been reading this blog regularly, you already knew that. If you're new, welcome to my world! If you can handle a little crazy, we're going to have a great time together.

***

Today's Meditation

I sit down on the grass near a tree. I'm right beside the sidewalk that's the main route into my apartment building, but this doesn't bother me. Meditation isn't like sex: it's perfectly polite to do it in public.

I close my eyes and breathe deeply a few times, tuning in to the energy around me. I don't exactly feel it, and I certainly don't see it, since my eyes are closed. I suppose you could say I imagine it: the big wavelike currents that flow by in the sky, my own little unruly blob, the sun beating down, the glow of the tree next to me. Trees are especially beautiful viewed this way and for a moment I feel hectically in love with it.

I turn so that the sun isn't directly on my face and settle in to ground myself. First I sink a bronzey-gold 'taproot' of energy out of my spine. I push any negative energy I feel in myself through that root and into the earth to be cleansed, then I pull in new 'clean' energy to replace it. The sun gives this a new dimension, and I try drawing in some energy from it, but feel too 'firey' and unbalanced, so I let that energy too flow into the earth. I feel full to the brim of bright green light, bursting with life and joy. Some people walk by and I wonder if they sense this as they pass, or if I just look like a crazy girl sitting around with my eyes closed.

Having done the energy, or what I think of as the 'pagan,' portion of my meditation, I move on to the mental or 'Buddhist' portion. I breathe deeply and try to clear my mind, not attaching to thoughts and feelings that come up but simply watching them rise and pass. I strive to be present, fully in the moment, but without thought. It takes a long time, first with my eyes closed, then with them open. More people walk by and I get distracted by their talk. I'm staring at someone's sliding patio door, and I wonder if they mind. Bees are buzzing around the tree.

Finally, something shifts. I feel present, joy and love and belief welling up in me in a pale blue beam as simple and beautiful and purposeful as a blade, but without violence. My eyes are open, moving around a little, but it doesn't distract me. I feel I could sit here forever; I am completely content.

After a while -- I don't know how long, maybe five minutes? -- I lower myself out of this euphoria into a more 'normal' state of mind. Uncurling my crossed legs, I find that the right one has fallen asleep. At first it's limp and numb, as if it too had discovered the joys of non-being. Then I flex my foot and it twitches and tingles all the way to the hip. The whole leg feels tight and spasmed. There's no way it will hold my weight.

Normally this tight, tingly almost-pain would freak me out. I'd panic, flexing and massaging it frantically. Fresh out of meditation, I see it differently. From a calm point of view, the feeling really just tickles. I lie on my back and laugh.

When I stand up a moment later, still tingling, the leg supports me just fine.

*I know, that's a lame rhyme, but I'm pretty sure nothing actually rhymes with meditation.

Hey Baby, What's Your Song?

2009-09-18T21:10:00.005-06:00

Theme songs. We've all got 'em, right? Something comes on the jukebox, the radio, the loudspeaker at the club, and we crank the volume till the knob creaks, squealing (or grunting, I guess, if you're a man), "Ohmigod, this is my song!" In the soundtrack of our lives, they're the ones that come up over and over, swelling in our minds at our moments of triumph or shame.

Why does a particular song have such an effect on us?

Well, I can't speak for any 'us' (not yet, anyway: let's not rule out crippling mental problems), but for me, there are a few keys to what makes a regular song my theme song for the day, the week, or even -- rarely -- the year.

First off, of course, it has to be good. Definitions of 'good' vary, but roughly, it has to be a song I like, with enough complexity that it doesn't get old quickly. It also has to be reasonably fast-paced. I like slow music just as much, but slow songs, no matter how good, just aren't catchy. I may like them, even love them, but I won't pull out my dorkiest white-girl dance moves when they come on the loudspeaker at the mall.

Then, of course, it has to address some aspect of what I'm going through at that time. If I've just gone through a breakup, I may channel my inner drag queen and play Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive" six times in a row. (Really. I've done it.) If I'm feeling invincibly sexy, on the other hand, I'll bump MGMT's "Electric Feel." And so on.

Finally, a niggling point that's nevertheless important. No matter how good the song is, or how perfect for my mood and situation, it can't -- absolutely can not -- be one of the top singles for that week. I do a lot of driving, which means I listen to a lot of radio. I can only hear a song multiple times a day for maybe three days before I hate its guts, the musician's guts, and the guts of everyone who helped create it.

Lately there's been no danger of that, as my theme songs have been geared towards indie and electronica. I mentioned MGMT's brilliant "Electric Feel." There's also "Dollface" by Astra Moveo, a local Denver band, and The Dresden Dolls' darkly fantastic "Mandy Goes to Med School." Most recently, I love Jay-Z's new song "Run This Town." It comes perilously close to breaking the 'no hit singles' rule, but it's worth it for one little snippet that puts my dream for the future far better than I ever could:

Who's gonna run this town tonight?
We are, yeah I said it, WE are.

What are your theme songs? Why do they mean what they do to you?

Home Is Where The ... ?

2009-09-15T00:09:00.007-06:00

I applied for a lease on a new apartment today. My boyfriend and I are going to be moving in together for the first time (if anyone wants to comment on this, I will accept either 'congratulations' or 'uh-oh' as reflecting the most likely outcomes).

This'll be the third time I've moved in the last thirteen months, which I find a bit extreme even for a person of college age such as myself. Particularly since I don't and never have lived in dorms: when I say 'moved' I don't mean a semiannual jaunt back to Mom and Dad's. I mean full on, house hunting, lease signing, four trillion boxes and several items of furniture moving. As I look down the long chute that leads to doing it again, I find myself feeling nostalgic for other places I've lived. Let's run down the list, and I'll try to keep it interesting.

The first place I can remember living was an old converted duplex in Colorado Springs: on the West Side, which seemed important at the time. I was pretty sure, around age five, that West Side Story was about us. We had two front doors, one of which was nailed shut, and people were always knocking on the wrong one.

When I was eight we moved to the house in Paonia. It strongly resembles a shoebox, but a very nice one. It's surrounded by a white picket fence that my dad built by hand for my mom, just because she'd always wanted one. For a while we had five people sharing the three bedrooms and one bathroom: me, my parents, my older sister and then-two-year-old niece. Though my primary memory is of utter chaos, I think it'll be one of the times I remember fondly on my deathbed. Or not.

At seventeen, we moved to Boulder and lived in a) a rented condo for five months, b) a large house in south Boulder for nine months, and c) a small house in North Boulder for three months. Then I started going to college in Aurora (for reasons which seemed good enough at the time), and it was time to look for my First Grown-Up Apartment.

About my first apartment: it was a studio smaller than my childhood bedroom. It was in a building that once had a buzzer system -- you could see the keypad outside the door -- but had decided to let it stop working and just pry the locks out of the exterior doors instead. There was a gang sign scratched in the glass just above the missing lock. Several times during my eight-month tenancy, I came home to find police, fire trucks, or ambulances -- or all three -- in the parking lot. I slept on an air mattress and used cardboard boxes for furniture for the first three months that I lived there. The month after I moved out, there was a double homicide across the street. But the rent was cheap!

From there, I moved to a much superior apartment. It was a one-bedroom instead of a studio, and I actually put some time and effort into furnishing and decorating it. I'm not going to say very much about that place, because I still miss it. It was nice.

Then, tired of the humdrum routine of terror and sketchiness that is Aurora, I decided I'd go back to Boulder. I found a very nice roommate on Craigslist, who already had an apartment. Unfortunately, I didn't notice before I moved in that the place faces north and gets no sunlight. Not a single ray, ever -- and not just direct sunlight, we don't even get a faint, reflected glow. If I wanted to live in a cave, I would be a grizzly bear. Note how I am not currently disemboweling any hikers. What's that tell you?

That leads me both to my new apartment -- looks nice, but you never know for sure until you move in -- and to the point of this long ramble we've just been on. I've lived in, let's see, eight places that I can remember, and six of those have been in the last three years. After that many moves, the places you live start to feel a bit interchangeable: they're all just locations, and in a few months you'll be moving on to another one.

In the midst of all that, the question I have to ask myself is, where is home? What makes it home instead of just another place? And if I don't know where home is -- how can I find it?

So tell me, dear readers. If your heart is in your chest and you can hang your hat anywhere, how do you define 'home?'

Chivalry: Dead or Just Resting?

2009-09-03T22:11:00.006-06:00

I've been thinking about gender roles again. In my recent post about femininity, I talked about feeling that girls my age were expected to be tomboys, that it was 'weird' to be too girly.

In the same way, I think we were raised to be independent -- which of course is good -- and not to expect or want chivalry from men. Our male peers don't doff their hats to us, they don't pull out our chairs or stand when we enter the room. That kind of thing is outdated and condescending, right?

Um ... kinda. Some of it. Heck, most of my guy friends don't even wear hats, and if they do they wouldn't have the first idea how to doff them. On the other hand, there are some chivalrous habits that not only haven't gone out of style, but that even a trendy, third-millenium woman like myself still expects. I didn't think I did, mind you -- until they didn't happen.

The first time I noticed this was a couple of days ago, on my way out of my local coffee shop (Vic's Espresso in Boulder, if you're curious). As I approached the door from the inside, a guy about my age approached from the outside. He reached it a little ahead of me. This is where my expectations kicked in. I assumed that he would open the door for me, or at least pause after entering and hold it so I could exit.

Sexist? Maybe. Then again, maybe it's just common courtesy: I open doors for people all the time. Either way, this guy not only didn't let me go first, he didn't hold the door open afterwards either. It was as if I wasn't standing there. I was surprised and a little bit offended, and I was halfway across the parking lot before I wondered why. Men don't have to open doors for women anymore, I know that. We're equals, and I certainly believe in equality. I just think, all things being equal, it's polite to hold the door if there's someone obviously standing right there.

The second incident was yesterday at work. I try not to blog about work, because that's just asking for trouble (I go by McFadden's Rule, Assume That Everything You Say On The Internet Is Being Read By Everyone You Know) -- but this doesn't have anything to do with my actual job. Which, for the record, I love.

Anyhow, what happened was that a male co-worker and I were bringing in the milk delivery for the week. I work at a fairly busy coffee shop, so it's a lot: 36 gallons in crates that hold four gallons each. I can just about manage to lift one crate at a time, and even then my arms hurt the next day. Meanwhile, I noticed that my co-worker was carrying two at a time. The hauling went fairly quickly, and when I came out for the last load there were only two crates left. I went right over and picked one up, to show my independence and willingness to do my share of the work. Once again, this is where my expectations led me astray.

I expected that the guy, who I knew could carry two of these things, would insist on carrying both the remaining ones -- even to the point of taking one out of my hands. That I know is sexist, but it's not unfounded: I know lots of men who would do so. This man, however, wasn't one of them. He carried his crate, and I (hauled, lugged, struggled with) carried mine.

Again, I was miffed at the time and surprised at myself later. After all, it was fair. He wasn't getting paid any more than I was to carry in the milk, so there was no reason why he should do more of the work. I'm certainly not saying that I should have an easier time of it, just because I'm a girl.

Okay -- yes I am. I've been relying on men to carry heavy objects for me ever since I was old enough to bat my eyelids (i.e., since birth). I totally respect the right of men not to do that, just as I respect their right not to hold doors. Feminism has triumphed and chivalry is dead.

But I still think they're assholes.

Shiny New Mix

2009-09-02T00:25:00.004-06:00

In case anyone was madly curious about the mix that inspired my little how-to, here's the playlist. Song titles in italics on the left, artists on the right.

If this mix sounds like one that would appeal to you, feel free to recreate it. Just remember, don't pirate any of the songs. You download one song illegally, and the next thing you know you're boosting cars and sleeping with unattractive strangers for meth. Lower the murder rate: stop illegal downloading!

Hahahahahasnort.

Seriously though, do pay the artists for their music if you can. Especially Jason Webley -- I've met him and he's a way cool guy who makes a living with his music.

Shiny New Mix CD

Parade - Garbage
Of Moons, Birds and Monsters - MGMT
Apparition #13 - Thea Gilmore
More News From Nowhere - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
Finer Feelings - Spoon
Un Brin de Fierte - Prototypes
Last Living Souls - Gorillaz
Mandy Goes to Med School - The Dresden Dolls
Carmina Burana remix (I don't know who did this, so just find one you like. YMMV.)
Why Don't You Do Right - Rasputina
Little Motel - Modest Mouse
Lollipop - Mika
Golden Years - David Bowie
Raspberry Swirl - Tori Amos
Now You Love Me - The Dandy Warhols
Still - Jason Webley
Sugar Daddy - Hedwig and the Angry Inch (from the soundtrack)

Mixin' It Up

2009-09-01T23:18:00.003-06:00

Mix CDs. Do you like them?

Some people don't. They feel that you can only understand the true flavor of a song, the context, if you listen to the whole album. These also tend to be people who can tell you far more information about a band than I ever bother to find out. Like: what's the bassist's name? How long have they been together? Are they touring this summer? You could ask me these questions about any of my top 5 favorite bands, and I wouldn't be able to tell you. I can't tell you the starting lineup for the Rockies, either, although I consider myself a fan -- it's the same basic principle.

But anyway -- mixes. I've loved mixes ever since high school. I volunteered at a public radio station for almost three years, as a DJ and a talk radio producer. I didn't learn much about radio, other than that I never wanted to be involved with it ever again, but I did learn to appreciate a good transition.

Mixes are all about good transition. A true mix CD isn't just a random bunch of tunes thrown together in no particular order. It's a bunch of tunes thrown together, not quite at random, in an extremely specific order. Get the order right and the whole mix comes together, has a theme, a mood and a conclusion as satisfying as any novel. Get it wrong and you might as well have had a chimp pick the songs by throwing darts at a jukebox.

I can't explain the difference between a good transition and a bad one. I know it when I hear it, the way the Supreme Court does porn. The trick with a mix is to find the good transitions hidden in the most outwardly dissimilar music. I still remember the swell of pride I felt the day I juxtaposed the scherzo from Beethoven's 9th Symphony* and Modest Mouse's "Cold Part." It just works; try it if you can get your hands on the two of them, and you'll see what I mean.

As I write this, I'm constructing a mix for my new job. It's a coffee shop, and I listen to mostly indie music, so almost all of my music is perfectly suited for the atmosphere. The problem wasn't finding songs I wanted to bring in, it was cutting them down to a number that would fit onto a CD. Since I have a while before I'm done arranging them, I think I'll do a quick step-by-step.

How to Make a Mix CD (Heather's Way)

Take a second to think about the purpose of the mix. Is it for a friend? For work? To listen to when you're driving? The purpose makes a difference to the songs you pick -- for example, if it's for a friend you might pick songs they haven't heard, but that you think are their style, whereas a driving mix might just be the loudest, bumpin'-est tunes you can find.
Go through your library and pick the songs you want to play. Transfer them into a playlist.
This is the fun part. Start arranging the songs in the order you think they'll sound best. I try to both start and end my mixes on an up note -- most CDs end on with a sad song, which leaves me depressed. I don't like to be depressed, so I do it differently.
Now listen to your mix. If you're in a hurry, or don't want to listen to the songs a bunch of times, you can just fast-forward to the transitions, but it helps to listen to it in full at least once. Listen to how the songs go together. Do they flow smoothly, or do they jar? Do they flow too smoothly, so that you start to get bored? What else might sound better? This part takes some practice before you develop a feeling for what sounds good, but keep at it.
Rearrange the songs, removing old ones and adding new if necessary.
When you're happy with the order of the songs, burn it to a CD, give it a clever name, and you're done!

*Don't be too impressed with my sophistication. It's a 1-minute sample that came with my music player.

Books I Read in August

2009-08-31T23:05:00.003-06:00

This month I'm not only going to list the books I read but do some quick comments on them all as well. Just 'cause. I'm also going to reverse the order they're listed in so that you experience them in the same order as I did.

Sunshine by Robin McKinley
Amazing vampire novel. I know, everybody's sick of vampires, but this ain't Twilight, people. This is Robin "The Hero and the Crown" McKinley. (If you don't know what that means, you must read her "Blue Sword" duology NOW.) McKinley is a master world builder, which is in the top three Most Important Skills for a fantasy writer. She also presents a view of vampires that is far more scary, convincing, and sympathetic than Edward "Sparkles" Cullen.

High Tide in Tucson by Barbara Kingsolver
Barbara Kingsolver is one of my favorite authors. This book of her essays isn't my favorite work of hers, but nonetheless it's very good. For a taste of her at her best, check out this essay she wrote for, of all people, AARP.

Manhunting by Jennifer Crusie
An old favorite. Jennifer Crusie is the queen of fun, zany romance novels. You can buzz through them in a night, but they're well written, plotted and characterized -- a rarity among "fluffy" romance. A great choice if you want a sweet, light read without the sour aftertaste of cliche.

Refuge by Terry Tempest Williams
I tried to start Refuge several years ago, after meeting Terry in person, but I was about fourteen and not ready for the book at all. Some books are like that: you have to be at a point in your life where you're ready to hear what they have to say. Refuge, the simultaneous story of the flooding of the Great Salt Lake and her mother's battle with cancer, was one of those -- but well worth the wait.

Stick to Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain by Scott Adams
Scott Adams is the guy who does Dilbert, and this collection of his essays is one of my all-time favorite books. A lot of times when I say that, people go "Dilbert, eww, I hate that comic." I'm not a huge fan either, but it doesn't matter. The book isn't about it, and Scott Adams is a smart and funny guy whether you happen to like his comic or not.

The Sense of Being Stared At by Rupert Sheldrake
A fascinating discussion of the scientific evidence for parapsychological phenomena (how many points do I get for using that in a sentence?) like telepathy, precognition and, as the title says, the sense of being stared at. Sheldrake himself is a biologist, and he approaches the subject that way. He does not get mystical. He doesn't say anything about souls, God, 2012, Atlantis, or life after death. All he's interested in is whether or not these phenomena exist (he thinks they do), and if so, how they might be explained scientifically. He believes such an explanation will involve a restructuring of scientific beliefs about the nature of the mind. Like I said, it's fascinating. Read it.

Morning by W.D. Wetherell
This sounds weird, since I picked it out at the library myself, but I wasn't expecting to like this book. I was expecting it to be one of those ones that sound good in theory, but are poorly executed in practice. It wasn't -- it was beautifully executed. Morning is the story of a fictional 1950's TV star, told partly through the 'unfinished' draft of his biography and partly from the viewpoint of the biographer himself. That device could very easily have gotten old, but didn't. This is not my kind of novel at all, but I couldn't put it down.

Family Values and Booze, Broads and Bullets by Frank Miller
Sin City books. What else do I have to say?

The Sacred Book of the Werewolf by Victor Pelevin
Still not quite sure what I think of this one. The book is totally different from Sergei Lukyanenko's Day Watch, which I read in July, but just as quintessentially Russian. It's the story of a 2,000 year old shapeshifting Chinese fox demon who falls in love with a Russian werewolf. Together, they search for the secret of the 'super-werewolf,' a prophesied shapeshifters' messiah. There's also freaky werewolf sex and a heavy dose of Eastern philosophy. Like I said, still working through it -- but I'd definitely recommend the book to anyone who's willing to think a little.

Straight Talk by Jane Green
Chick lit. She gets together with the best friend in the end. I don't consider that a spoiler because if you've ever read any chick lit, or seen a romantic comedy, you know it from page 5 anyway. Decently written but not a standout. Unlike The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, I will forget I ever read this book within days.

The Better Mousetrap by Tom Holt
Tom Holt is one of the great, semi-unheralded comedic geniuses of our time. If you've never read his take on Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung, Expecting Someone Taller, go out and track it down right now. I'm not sure how easy that'll be, because it may be out of print, but do it anyway. Also, read The Better Mousetrap. It is hilarious, engaging, and smart. Not your average fantasy, not your average comedy -- just not average anything.

So those are the books I read this month. Actually, to be completely accurate, those are the books I finished. I started a few others, but they sucked, so I stopped reading. If you ever come across a book called The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse, for the love of God don't bother. It was the worst book I've tried to read all year.

The Advantages of Being Girly

2009-08-21T13:43:00.007-06:00

or, June Cleaver 1 - Zombies 0

I've spent years hedging about it, covering for it, and if necessary, flat out lying about it. Okay, so I love to cook and like my house to be clean. So I know how to sew and embroider, and I've been known to weave and even spin on (rare) occasion. So I like to knit.

(note: not my tattoo)

That doesn't make me, you know, girly.

Society's pressure on girls to be feminine creates a strange sort of reverse pressure, if you're a contrary smartass like me, to reject all feminine traits. That's me, my body language says as I hunker down to play catcher on my softball team, just your average 21st-century tomboy.

The problem? I'm not a tomboy. My one foray into sportiness -- slow-pitch softball -- is counterbalanced by a mountain of undeniably girly hobbies like the ones I listed above. For a long time, I vehemently denied that there was anything particularly girly about them or me. Recently, however, I found a new perspective on the matter.

The other day I was knitting (I'm working on a badass scarf, originally for my boyfriend, which he will probably never see except around my neck), and I began thinking about a comic I've been reading recently, Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead.

The series (recently optioned for TV by AMC, so stay tuned for that) is the story of a small group of survivors after the zombie apocalypse. It's more soap opera than horror, full of personal dynamics, makeups, breakups, and people gettin' eaten by zombies. The survivors have to relearn a number of basic skills just to survive in their new world. I thought about that. I looked at my knitting.

In a post-zombie or any other kind of post-apocalyptic world, the girl you want with you isn't an ultra-cool sporty tomboy who can only cook in a microwave. It's me: the girl who can not only cook whatever food you can find (over a campfire, no less) but who can take apart clothes and use the fabric and thread to make other clothes. Or improvise a spindle to make new thread. Or stab a zombie to death with a knitting needle.

From now on, I'm owning my girly skills loud and proud. They don't make me a June-Cleaver-in-waiting: they make me a key element of survival in case the world ever ends!

Femininity Rawks!

Unplugging

2009-08-14T01:58:00.003-06:00

I started this blog with grandiose intentions. I planned to write at least one post every day, Twitter like crazy, Facebook and Myspace likewise and end up ruling the internet with my amazing writing skills ahahahaHAHAHAHA!

I'm doing pretty good. I've done something like 45 posts in less than a month, which is well above one a day on average. But I've also discovered something: I can't do this 24/7 for the rest of eternity.

The interwubs is everywhere these days -- obviously. If there's not a computer handy, an increasing number of people have web capability on their cell phones. Even if they don't have a 3G Blackberry or iPhone or other electro-gadget tangentially involving fruit, people are texting, Twittering, and posting on Facebook from their cellphones. Almost everyone I know checks their email at least once a day and FB/Myspace/Twitter two or more times. Everyone's connected to everyone else, all the time.

All that connection can be good. It's efficient, it's fun, it's a fantastic marketing tool especially for a product as nebulous as the one I'm pushing (i.e. a condensed version of my psyche). Sometimes, though, you just need to unplug. I can't describe how relaxing it is not to check my email, not to chat on Twitter -- in short, to look at the computer and go, "You know what, I'm not opening that today. The world won't end."

Solitude is a rare commodity these days, and a valuable one, even if it isn't in high demand. If I don't get on the net for a day or two, I have time to actually think my thoughts, instead of rushing to blog or Twitter them so fast that I barely have time to register what they are. That kind of hasty self-expression is a great way to end up saying dumb things that I later have to recant: it hasn't happened yet, but if I don't give myself down time, it will. I guarantee it.

The point is this: there will be days when I'm not immediately available. I might not answer emails, be mysteriously absent from Twitter, and take a couple of days' vacation from the blog. Unplugging so completely is, for me, almost a mental vacation. I highly recommend it. No matter how relaxing it is, though, I promise I'll always be back.

The Dreaded Character Worksheet

2009-08-12T16:40:00.003-06:00

Everybody works differently. It has to do with who you are, your personal history, and generally how your brain works. Some people like to write detailed outlines for their stories; others like to fly by the seat of their pants (despite the danger of a wedgie). Some edit every line until it's perfect before moving on to the next; others hurtle through a first draft as fast as they can and save the editing for later. Some people like to make detailed spreadsheets of facts about each character in their novels; others don't.

I hate character worksheets. Always have. I know dozens of writers who swear by them, but the process of answering a series of stock questions (Hair: Brown, Eyes: Blue, Height: 5'6") always made me feel like a clerk at the DMV. I prefer to throw my characters in with the sharks rather than sitting down first to figure out if they can swim.

And then, there was this book. The book that grew out of accident and epiphany, from a writing practice that ran away with me and a strange mystical experience in the fantasy section of Barnes & Noble. The book that has so far refused to follow any of the rules I so painfully worked out for my own writing process over the course of the last seven years.

The book that is now refusing to progress until I know more about the main character. And that means -- you guessed it -- a character worksheet. I'm making up my own -- with a little help from this character-building post on Writers Community -- so at least it won't look like application for some screwy dating show.

Even so, I can't believe I'm doing this. Why, Crazy Fate Novel? Why?

Somebody Agrees With Me!

2009-08-12T14:41:00.004-06:00

I just stumbled across this post on when to let a manuscript go on editor Lynn Price's blog. The novel she describes as "dead" sounds just like the one I pulled the plug on last week. She says the same thing I did: Not every project is meant to be finished. Even -- maybe especially -- the projects you don't finish can help you grow as a writer.

I knew that letting mine go was the right decision, but I didn't know that other writers have done the same thing. Again, it's nice to feel like I'm on the right track, even if that track does seem to be leading me right back to the beginning. As long as I don't have to actually be fourteen again, that's fine.

Delicious Food Tuesday

2009-08-11T17:42:00.003-06:00

Hey, I was busy on Thursday. Whatchawannfrome?

This week's topic: Eggs.

I'm not a big egg person. I never have been. I don't know why, exactly -- I just don't like 'em very much. Not the taste, the texture, nada. I don't hate them, either, but given the choice I eat other things.

Unfortunately, I am a protein person. My body doesn't function well on a steady diet of carbs. I get depressed, feel tired, lose motivation to do anything. If it goes on for too long I even get dizzy, headachy and nauseous. I absolutely have to have my protein every day and eggs are one of the most efficient ways for me to get it. If I'm pressed for time or energy, I bite the bullet and eat them.

This recipe is pretty simple, but good. Even I liked it, which is a good thing, since I made it up.

Eggs a la Me

2 eggs
Splash milk
Red pepper, minced
Onion, minced
Splash olive oil
Garlic salt
Dill
Cayenne pepper

When I'm cooking freehand I almost never measure, which is why this recipe has no amounts. Cut up as much red pepper and onion as you want to have mixed in with your eggs. (See my post about Indian yogurt chicken for a great onion-chopping trick.) Put them into a skillet with the olive oil and saute over medium heat until about half-cooked. Onion will be partially translucent, but not brown. Red pepper, well, it's hard to tell. Go by the onion.

Meanwhile, mix eggs in a small bowl with milk and spices. When vegetables are half-cooked, pour egg mixture on top and scramble all together with a fork. Serve hot because cold scrambled eggs are gross.

Serves one.

Things I Learned From My First Novel

2009-08-10T19:17:00.007-06:00

I recently abandoned six years' worth of work on one novel in order to concentrate on a different story that I felt drawn to write(see my post yesterday for that long weird story). I called my mom, a writer with much more experience than me, to tell her what had happened. I knew that the change was the right thing to do, but wasn't quite sure how to proceed. She suggested that I make a list of what I had learned from my old novel in order to apply it to my new one.

After letting it marinate for a couple of days, I sat down yesterday to make the list. I thought it would be a lot of specific techniques: plot tricks, adjectives to avoid, how to name characters and so on. Instead, what came out onto the page was this.

Things I Learned From My First Novel

Tell the story only you can tell.

Don't get carried away by what it "could be." Let it be what it is.

Don't stop. Don't edit.

Don't expose the story to criticism or outside readers until the second draft.

Believe it.

Take it forward even when it doesn't want to go.

Trust the story, trust the process, trust yourself.

Roll with the punches. Also the kicks, slaps, and curveballs.

There will be all of the above. Writing a novel is hard. Whether it's worth it is debatable.

There is no reason good enough for giving up. If there was, there'd be no reason to start.

Love it with all your heart -- otherwise what would be the point?

Avoid deep dark wells and/or abysses of pain. In characters, I mean. Well, in real life too, but that kind of goes without saying.

Trust it. I say it twice because it's very important. Trust it.

Take it easy. Relax. Chill out. It's just a book -- we're not saving puppies from a chemical fire. Bad guys are not going to blow up the world if I turn a phrase badly. If they were, the world would be toast by now.

So there it is: my road map for writing a novel. Not rules, exactly, just pointers as to what I can expect along the way.

As writers, we often aren't taught to value marks of achievement less tangible than six-figure royalties, a movie deal, or a spot on the NYT bestseller list. Yet every project is a valuable tool for learning -- even the ones that don't get finished, much less published. Writers: take some time to think about what you learned from projects that didn't go all the way. What are your landmarks? Do they look like mine?

Old Novel, New Novel

2009-08-10T18:43:00.003-06:00

Something strange happened to me a few weeks ago. At first glance, it doesn't seem too strange: I stopped work on one novel-in-progress so that I could concentrate on a different one. The whole story, however, is a bit more odd.

I was six years and 25,000 words into my first novel, Blood Lines, a contemporary urban fantasy with vampires. Actually, if I include every word I've written and subsequently discarded for the book, the true count would be somewhere in the 200,000s, but I had 25 G's that I was willing to show the world. The current draft looked little to nothing like the first draft I did back at age 14, but it was a form that I thought could work. I was going strong, and the story was cooperating as well as stories ever do -- not very, but just enough. So why did I stop?

Good question.

The other day I was in Denver waiting for rush hour to subside so I could drive back to Boulder. I wandered into 2 Buck Books, one of my favorite stores ever. The second I walked in, though, I felt what almost amounted to an aversion. I kept having this feeling, like a gentle push on my brain: this isn't where I'm supposed to be. This isn't where I'm supposed to be. I pushed myself to keep looking, wandering through the racks, but I didn't find anything I felt inspired to buy.

Having been raised pagan, I'm a little more open to inexplicable feelings than most people I know. I followed the impulse to Barnes and Noble, despite the fact that I can't really afford to buy new books. That didn't matter -- it was where I was supposed to be.

I went, as usual, straight to the fantasy section. Also as usual, I took a glance around, casing "the competition:" contemporary urban vampire novels. If you've been in a book store lately you'll appreciate the size of that job. That didn't scare me -- I've seen it before and I firmly believed that my book was at least twice as good as some of the others. (I'm looking at you, Sherrilyn Kenyon!)

Then something happened. I looked at all the trendy mass-market urban fantasy paperbacks and something inside me said, Your first book isn't going to look like that. It's going to be something quite different.

This wasn't a passing thought. It didn't even feel like it came from me. It felt like the universe telling me what was going to happen, and once I'd been told, I knew it was true. Even now, writing this, I know it's true. And even though it blew away six years of work like dandelion seeds, along with a lot of assumptions about myself as a writer, it feels like a gift I've been given. Now I know. I don't have to be afraid because I know the path is already laid out for me. All I have to do is follow it.

As it so happens, I had 'something quite different' in my back pocket, so to speak. That's what I'm working on now, and even though I'm not sure I'm ready to tell that story, things seem to be aligning in unexpected ways to make me ready. I expect you'll all be hearing lots more about it as I go along. With a start like that, how can the process be anything but gloriously weird?

FOUND IT!

2009-08-08T01:10:00.002-06:00

FOUND IT!

I found the suitcase with my writing on the other side of the hall closet from where I remembered putting it, underneath a rolled-up carpet. My roommate must have moved it when she cleaned. Whew! Now I can breathe again.

Tomorrow I start work on the new novel, and if I have time I'll do a post about that whole long, strange story. Not the story of the actual novel, but the story of how I come to be working on it.

Hope everyone out there sleeps as well as I will!

Being A Writer Is Not Negotiable

2009-08-07T21:57:00.003-06:00

No. You know what, just no. I still haven't found my notebooks, and I'm still freaked out. But:

My identity as a writer is not negotiable. If it could be damaged or destroyed just by losing some pieces of paper, I wouldn't be much of a writer, would I? In fact, if something so important to me could be damaged by losing any object, I wouldn't be much of a person.

If I don't find them, I'll still be upset and sad. But I won't be any less of a writer. I'll never lose that no matter what else goes away. Notebooks, computer files, even eyesight. I could write blind if I had to, and if I ever have to, I will. That's what makes me a writer -- not a suitcase full of words from years ago.

Living A Writer's Worst Nightmare

2009-08-07T15:26:00.003-06:00

I'm having a nervous breakdown. Really. I think my head might explode.

I've been writing in a serious way since I was thirteen. That's when I started my first writing notebook, my first daily practice and my first (still unfinished) novel. Since then I've written every day for years at a time, always longhand in the cheapest spiral notebooks I could find, and when a notebook was full I put it away in a suitcase. The suitcase itself is full now and weighs a ton, but I've carted it with me through six moves in the last three years.

These notebooks hold exercises, drafts of stories, and most saliently at the moment, the opening for a novel that I want to begin serious work on. So, this morning, I went in search of the suitcase to find the notebook with the opening in it.

I can't find it. It's gone. Seven years of writing are nowhere to be found, not in closets, not in the car, not anywhere. This isn't a small item. I couldn't overlook it. It's gone. And I am losing my shit.

I've often thought that if my computer crashed and I lost the writing that was on my hard drive, I'd freak out. And I probably would, but I've only had this computer for three years and at least 50% of what's here is backed up somewhere else. It never for a second occurred to me that I might lose my notebooks. They're not backed up -- they can't be. You can't email a notebook to yourself. Quite literally my entire writing history is in that suitcase, and if the suitcase is gone my entire identity as a writer is suddenly shaky and based on hearsay. Talk about putting all your eggs in one basket.

Part of me thinks that this is a spectacular lesson about not getting attached to material things. I had no idea how much of my identity I had bound up in that paper until it got lost. And I know, for sure, that if my notebooks are meant to be gone for good, there's nothing I can do about it. However, I also know for sure that when it comes to my creation, seven years' worth of the contents of my mind, non-attachment isn't an option right now. It's like not attaching to your own survival. Yeah, great theory, but I'm still not going out in traffic.

If my notebooks are gone, I'm going to be hysterical and depressed for the foreseeable future -- possibly the rest of my life. This is worse than having my heart broken -- it's losing my heart. And my heartbreak. And all my experiences, and what I thought about them, and what I learned, and the stories I wanted to tell.

On the other hand, they may turn up again. If so, you can bet that I'm never taking my history for granted ever, ever again.

Original Writing 1.1: "Tumbling After"

2009-08-02T19:27:00.003-06:00

This is the opening to a story I've been trying to write for ages but couldn't quite get a handle on. I think I finally have it with this. It's a first draft so if you want to critique, please do so gently.

The 1.1 in the title stands for Week 1, Writing 1, so I can keep track and make sure I'm living up to my quota.

I dreamed I was walking up a long hill. Slowly, foot after foot, up a stone path that wound and twisted in the dust of the dead forest around me. I dreamed a strange dream. I dreamed of redemption.

I dreamed of Jack.

In my dream the hill was dead, brown, featureless and around and below was nothing but fog and the smell of burning metal. Someone was hammering fast and smoothly below the fog: rat-a-tat-tat, rat-a-tat.

I hadn’t dreamed of Jack in almost a year.

He was at the top of the hill when I got there, standing in the middle next to a dead olive tree and a well with no water. His clothes were brown as the dust and there was a rag over his face. You’re here, he said without speaking.

I’m here, I said. Is this where you’ve been?

He shrugged and gazed out past me. The hill was on some kind of turntable, turning slowly round and round so he could survey the fog. The hammering stopped, then started again. Rat-a-tat. Jack flinched. Then he looked at me again.

I missed you.

We hugged. I tried to feel his arms around me, but I couldn’t. I missed you, too, I said. Mom misses you.

I know. He looked out at the fog again. I have to go, Jilly. Take care of Mom for me, okay?

The hill disappeared. We were falling. Who’s going to take care of me? I screamed at his brown figure below me. He didn’t look up. We passed through the fog and I could see the brown ground below us. Jack was falling faster now. A puff of dust flew up and stung my eyes when he hit the ground.

Jessica, My Amazing Volunteering Friend

2009-08-01T13:48:00.009-06:00

Are you reading my dear friend Jessica's blog over at Happy Neon Faces?

If not, you're missing something amazing. Jessica, a student at Purchase in New York and aspiring photojournalist, is in India right now volunteering at an orphanage. She plays with the kids, helps with their homework and if the teacher doesn't show up (which she says is more often than not) she teaches second grade.

This is a girl who grew up in the same tiny, sheltered, white-as-sour-cream town I did (see picture on right). Whose family moved to Venice Beach after she left high school. Who goes to art school in New York. She's living in a totally foreign culture teaching kids who don't always even speak her language, and loving it.

In short, this is an amazing girl. Read her blog. Read it!

Pictures courtesy of Happy Neon Faces and Jessica Lehrman. Pictures are not of India (in case you couldn't tell).

Books I Read In July

2009-08-01T02:19:00.004-06:00

As promised, I'm archiving my list of Books I've Read This Month and starting over in August. By "archiving" of course I mean "sticking it in a post and forgetting about it."

Books I Read In July

Fatherland by Robert Harris
Bare Bones by Kathy Reichs
Smilla's Sense of Snow by Peter Hoeg
Bookmark Now: Writing in the Age of Information Overload edited by Kevin Smokler
Day Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko
Gold by Dan Rhodes
Pounding the Pavement by Jennifer van der Kwast*
The Winds of Marble Arch by Connie Willis
The Unfortunate Miss Fortunes by Crusie, Dreyer, Stuart
Strange Bedfellows by Jennifer Crusie
The Groucho Letters by Groucho Marx
Money for Nothing by P.G. Wodehouse
Dharma Punx by Noah Levine
Dating Big Bird by Laura Zigman
The Reading Group by Elizabeth Noble
Sick Puppy by Carl Hiaasen
Shogun by James Clavell
Doomsday Book by Connie Willis

The Amazing True Story of the Six-Armed Chef's House of Yum

2009-07-31T23:49:00.005-06:00

Once upon a time in 2005, my sister Robin and I decided to learn to cook. Our family have always been pretty good cooks in general -- my mom bakes bread and cans her own jam, my dad makes killer awesome pancakes and German chocolate cake. Robin and I, however -- aged at that time 24 (her) and 16 (me) -- had never done much cooking.

As I mentioned in my post on Indian yogurt chicken, someone had given my mom a copy of Julie Sahni's Classic Indian Cooking. Acting with more enthusiasm than good sense -- as usual -- we decided to start learning to cook with Indian food. For the story of how that turned out, see the yogurt chicken post.

Eventually, though, we did more or less master Indian. We then bragged to our good friend Kit about what hot-shot cooks we were. She said, "Oh! Can I cook with you?" We said, "Why yes!"

Kit and Robin and I have known each other a long time, and we know each other well. Cooking together came very naturally to us. In fact, we were so synchronized in the kitchen that friends and family soon started referring to us as the Six-Armed Chef. Then one day, while we were cooking, the phone rang. Robin picked it up and, without missing a beat, caroled, "Six-Armed Chef's House of Yum, how may I help you?"

And so a legend was born.

Every week for the next six months, the three of us chose a country at random and cooked a dinner from that country, usually a main dish, two side dishes, bread and dessert. We did India, Japan, Russia, Ethiopia (there was some discussion as to whether we should just put out empty plates that week), Peru, and many more. We also did the chocolate dinner I mentioned in my post about chocolate bread, a tea party, and finger food for my high school graduation party that May.

Each week, after planning our menu, we'd make a guest list to figure out how many people were coming. Sounds like a simple task, right? Not so much. To understand why, you have to take into account two factors.

We lived in Paonia, a very small town (pop. 1500) with a laid-back attitude towards things like appointments and punctuality.
My sister is an extremely friendly person. If the Antichrist arrived on Earth, I would not be the least bit surprised to see him at Denny's having coffee with Robin. She would be calling him 'sweetie.'

This meant that a) Robin was always inviting random people to dinner, and b) we never knew if they'd show up. Making any kind of estimate as to how many people were coming was like trying to tell a llama from a goat with your eyes closed. You never know for sure until it spits in your face.

Okay ... it wasn't much like that at all. But it was very difficult. We usually cooked for fifteen, expected twenty and had twelve. With the three of us, our families and 'regular' guests, we never had fewer than ten people eating. We'd gather extra chairs around my parents' dining room table and stuff ourselves. There was talking. There was laughing. But most of all, there was eating.

If you live alone, or you do a lot of eating in fast food joints or college cafeterias, it's pretty easy to forget that meals were originally about community bonding as much as about food. I thought I knew that before I started cooking, but once I was part of the Six-Armed Chef I saw it in a whole new way. Taking time to cook and eat with friends and family makes food more than food, and the satisfaction afterward so much more than just a full stomach.

I'd say it's a full heart -- but that would be cheesy.

Delicious Food Thursday #5

2009-07-30T17:24:00.004-06:00

I love bread. Well, you all know that, you've heard me talking about toast. But it's not just toast: I love sandwiches, bagels, and bread products of all descriptions. It runs in my family. My eldest sister, at age four, solemnly informed my mom that she was a "starchatarian."

Normal bread, particularly homemade, is awesome (more on homemade bread at another time). The only thing I'd rather eat than bread, most of the time, is chocolate. I love bread but I LOVE chocolate. This also runs in my family, to the point where we used to go on full-family red alerts if there was no chocolate in the house.

Thus, it stands to reason that one of my top five dishes, and today's recipe, is: Chocolate Bread.

This recipe is one that I helped make for the famous Six-Armed Chef's* chocolate dinner, a three-course dinner for ten in which every dish, drink and dessert contained chocolate. Even the salad dressing had cocoa powder. It was awesome. We drifted around in a fog of endorphins for days. Of all the delicious chocolate we consumed that day, however -- turkey con mole, salad with cocoa powder, and more -- this recipe from Mabel Hoffman's Chocolate Cookery was the surprise standout. The book is out of print and very hard to find, so if you want the recipe, get it here!

Chocolate Spice Bread

2 oz. semi-sweet chocolate
1 1/2 c flour
1/2 c sugar (the original used 1 cup, but we wanted a savory bread, not a sweet one. Plus, a half cup is plenty -- trust me.)
1 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/3 c butter
2 eggs
1/2 c applesauce
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp cinnamon

Preheat oven to 350 and grease a loaf pan (typical loaf pan size is 9 x 5).

Melt chocolate in a double boiler and set aside.

While chocolate is melting, put all other ingredients into a bowl and beat for 3 minutes with an electric mixer. Stir in melted chocolate. Pour into pan and bake for 50 - 55 min, until a toothpick in the middle comes out clean.

Serves: fewer than you'd think.

*More on the Six-Armed Chef soon, I promise. Maybe even later today.

Writing Every Day: Yes, It Does Work

2009-07-29T18:11:00.000-06:00

I just ran across this article on writing every day to help learn technique. The author posits that a ten- or fifteen-minute session per day is the perfect routine for learning a technique, and also that concentrating on one new subject a week is about right. That's exactly what I've been doing!

I'm thrilled to have an exercise that I came up with by myself validated by someone else. The bottom line with writing is, of course, to do what works for you, but it's still nice to feel like I'm on the right track.

Of course, if you look at the dates on my description exercises from last week, you'll see that 'daily' is a somewhat flexible concept. Some days I'm not feeling good, or I'm busy, or I just don't get around to it. I think it's healthier to give myself a little leeway than to be up at 3 a.m. barking at myself in a German accent:

"You must write zee two hundret vords or ve give you zee electricity again, ja?"

Nein. It's better to write, if not every day, at least five or six out of seven. Does that mean I always do that? Nein again. But I'm trying to walk my talk, so let's you and me make a deal. I'll post four pieces of original writing, at least 200 words long, on this blog per week. Four is enough to give me solid practice while not boring everyone with endless reams of fiction. You, in return, will try not to eat pickles while you read them; pickle juice is bad for your computer.

Ja?

"Fatherland" and the Politics of Acceptance

2009-07-28T23:34:00.000-06:00

Remember when I posted about Fatherland by Robert Harris? Well, I've been sick in bed today for reasons too stupid to mention (no, really. What, you thought these parentheses were gonna explain? Nice try), and I finally started reading it.

As I mentioned before, it's a murder mystery set in an alternate world where Germany won WWII. In this world, it's 1964 and all of Europe is now the German Reich. The book is well written, well plotted and characterized -- and depressing as hell. Not because of anything in the plot or even the author's worldview as I also previously discussed. No, the reason it depresses me is because I've never had reason to consider what would have happened if the Nazis actually had won.

The way we see Nazis today -- as absolute evil, basically -- is based in large part on the age-old principle that the winners write the history books. I'm not saying they weren't evil, because they utterly and definitely were. But when you read Fatherland, you start to see them as being not particularly more evil or genocidal than thousands of other regimes before, since, and right now. Ones tolerated and even encouraged by the U.S.

Americans love the image of bold G.I.s going over and saving the world for democracy. For some, including me, WWII is the only war in the past century that we feel justified in having fought. We were the Good Guys and Germans were the Bad Guys.

They were definitely Bad. But, how Good are we when we allow other Guys just as Bad to continue doing what they're doing unchecked? We're not going to war to stop genocide in Darfur. We didn't do it in Bosnia or in Rwanda, either. How are those places different from the concentration camps? How are those people less worthy of saving than the Jews and other cultural and ethnic groups murdered by the Nazis?

What I really see in Fatherland is a chilling account of what horrors Americans will countenance as long as they don't challenge our supremacy on the international stage.

No, wait -- you know what? I take that back. It's easy to spout off and accuse America of false pride and immorality and blah, blah, blah. What's hard for Americans -- again, including me -- is to acknowledge when something isn't about us. And in this case, it isn't. What it's really about is how much humans in general will tolerate as long as it's the status quo. If Germany had won the war, Hitler's worldview would have been an accepted part of international politics not just in America, but everywhere. That it isn't, and that the world isn't like that now, feels to me as I'm reading this book like sheer, dumb luck.

That other dictators just as bad are accepted? That feels like sheer luck too -- but the bad kind.

Description #7: The Park by Night

2009-07-28T01:48:00.000-06:00

This is the follow up to my first description exercise, The Park by Day. I got the idea from one of the prompts on this post by Mots Justes.

By night, the park is something very different. Quiet, so quiet deep inside the trees that you’d never know there was a city outside at all. No sirens, no music. No screams. When it rains, the drops tap on the stone sides of the dead fountain like ghosts typing their life stories in the dark. When the wind blows, the decorative windmill in the yard across the street creaks as it turns, a thin, complaining noise.

It’s always and never dark in the park at night. There are lights along the access road, bright white ones instead of the orangey sodium lights that illuminate ordinary streets. They come on at sunset – and yet, in between the trees there are shadows that stretch along the grass and lay their dark hands on the seeds that never grow.

At the edge, the water in the concrete ditch murmurs editing tips to the ghosts tap-tap-tapping at their memoirs in the ruined fountain. The miner watches from atop his pedestal, looking not so benevolent with the shadows from the trees half across his face. From outside, the windmill squeakily wishes that the wind would, just for a moment, stop blowing.

How to Write a Great Email Cover Letter

2009-07-27T20:10:00.000-06:00

I'm job-hunting right now. I think I've already mentioned that a time or two, but I could be wrong. Now, I take a bit of pride in being an online job-hunting ninja. Over the past two or three years, I've applied to what feels like several hundred jobs (more likely about a hundred) on Craigslist. My success rate is about 10:1 on getting interviews and 40:1 on getting the job. That doesn't sound so great, but when you consider the average response to a Craigslist job posting (I'm in the Denver/Boulder area, so I'm guessing 100 replies at least), plus the tough job market, it's pretty darn good.

Now, it goes without saying that to get a job, you have to have a good resume, good references, and relevant experience. At least, it better go without saying. If it doesn't, you may need to do some remedial research. But all of that being equal, what's going to set you apart is your cover letter.

An online cover letter has more leeway in terms of style, format and tone than a paper one because the conventions haven't had time to be set. The purpose, though, is the same: to give your availability, drop names and mention qualifications that don't fit in your resume (things like punctuality, motivation, relevant but non-professional interests, and so on). A great cover letter won't get you the job if your resume sucks, but it can help tip a so-so resume over into the 'call for an interview' pile. So what makes a great cover letter? Here are my tips, judging from the letters that have helped me get a call back.

Be professional and calm. Don't start your letter with "Hi!" or "Hey there," or "Yo, what up?" Unless I have a specific contact name, I don't use a salutation at all. Don't use exclamation points or emoticons. Avoid textspeak like it was AIDS, and I don't mean by using a condom. Run spell check before you send it and proofread for grammar.
State the position you're interested in and when and where they posted it. You know what ad you're referring to, but they might have several on different websites and/or for different positions. Confusion is not a good first impression because it's likely to be the last impression.
Toot your own horn, but quietly. A long list of adjectives with no examples will tell your prospective employer nothing. They probably won't read each one and even if they do, they have no reason to believe you. Instead of saying you're "motivated, professional, punctual, reliable, great with people, have x-ray vision and wrote the original version of The Da Vinci Code," keep it to one or two of the most relevant. I usually do motivated and reliable. Along the same lines:
Be specific. Why should they hire you? "I'm well suited for this job because I have nearly a year's experience in the field, take pride in my work and enjoy working with people." Better yet, tell them how your qualifications will help them. "I'm well suited for this job because my experience in this field will make it easier for me to help customers find the right product for their needs." (Subtext: "I'll sell a ton of stuff.")
Stick to the point. Shorter is better. If you're a student, mention it, but there's no need to tell them your school or major. Don't mention any qualifications that aren't relevant to the job (e.g., parent, Ph.D. in Literature, First Place at the annual pie-eating contest). Don't tell them your hopes and dreams. No, not even if this job is your hope and dream. Don't list off your job history -- that's what your resume is for.
Give your availability. Most people ask for this -- but mention it even if they don't. When can you start? How many days a week can you work?
Thank them for their time. Always, always, always. I've typed the words, "Attached is my resume. Thank you for your time and attention," so many times I could probably do it even if my frontal lobe was destroyed in a disastrous ice-machine accident.
Sign your name and attach your resume. Obvious, yet strangely easy to forget. Also very embarrassing to correct. Oh -- and if you have an automatic signature on your email, don't forget turn it off before you send, especially if you can't remember what it is. Your prospective employer doesn't need to hear exactly what you think of former President Bush, with diagrams. Not that I *cough* ever did that ...

Substitute for Description #6: She's Trouble

2009-07-27T02:19:00.000-06:00

No description exercise tonight. I did write one, from a prompt I found on the awesome Mots Justes's blog, but it was deeply unsatisfactory. It was about a person, and those are by far the hardest for me. I couldn't bring myself to post it because I can do better.

But, since I did sort-of promise to put up some original writing every day this week, here's this instead. It's not straight description, but it's the closest I've got.

The day she first walked into my life, I knew I was in trouble.

I didn't see her at first because my manager was yelling at me. I’d done something stupid. I don’t remember what. It seems like everything I’ve done is stupid, looking back: an endless chain of avoidable mistakes. So I knew I was in trouble. What I didn’t know was that she was going to be worse than all my other mistakes put together.

I looked up and suddenly all I could see was the cherry tattoo on her lower back. Her head was tilted up, looking at the overhead racks, but I knew she was listening to us. Her shirt was red, and it matched her tattoo. She turned around, and her mouth was red too.

My manager was done, I think. I didn’t hear him from the moment I saw her, so who knows? I should have known then exactly what kind of trouble she was.

“Hey, how much is this album?” she said. Her crimson mouth shaped the words. I could watch it go all day.

“Uh, the vinyl?” I floundered.

“Yeah. The vinyl.” She looked from the 78 she was holding to me. Usually this is the point where women walk away.

“Seventeen dollars,” I said. The prices were on the wall, but she hadn’t bothered to read them and I didn’t care.

“Oh, damn …” It was like bubble gum, her mouth. Big Red. Soft, but spicy enough to make your lips tingle. I didn’t even look at the bills she held out. “I’ve only got fifteen.”

“Fine.” I didn’t move to take the money. “Freshman?”

She smiled. Her teeth were white against that red mouth. Candy apple. “Sophomore. Get a lot of students in here?”

“A lot,” I agreed. I knew about girls like her. They were the ones that joined a sorority, and ran in packs with others who dressed alike. They drank too much, ate too little, failed classes and got date raped by jocks in smelly dorm rooms. There was not one thing unique about her –

– except for that little tattoo.

Judging a Book by Its Cover

2009-07-27T00:50:00.000-06:00

Today I went to my local indie used bookstore, because I'm socially conscious like that. Actually, I went there because it's called 2 Buck Books and -- you guessed it -- all the books are $2 each. If you live in Denver and want to check it out, it's on Quebec and Leetsdale in the Safeway shopping center and it is awesome! They even have a 'buy one get one free' deal on popular authors like Danielle Steel. I'd have taken advantage of it, but then I'd have had two Danielle Steel books, and so far I've lived an exceptionally happy life without reading even one.

Anyway. What I did buy there was Fatherland by Robert Harris. I've been on the lookout for the book ever since I read a posting about it by the glorious, and sadly retired, Miss Snark. (Read what she says about it here.) It seems to be some kind of mystery (not sure what yet), set in an alternate history where Germany won WWII. That's a very important point for the story that follows.

The book's a little hard to find, so I was excited to get it. I set off to meet a friend at Village Inn with every intention of reading it while I waited for her. I even tried to start it at a stoplight, but that was a poor choice. Do not try that at home, kids -- or rather, try it at home, not in the car.

I pulled up to the restaurant and started to put the book in my purse, and then I noticed something. This was a paperback edition of Fatherland. It had a red cover with the title in large gold print, and of course the author's name. The only other thing on the cover was an enormous gold swastika. I looked at the book. I looked at Village Inn. I realized that I did not want to be a person sitting alone at the Village Inn reading a book with a swastika on the front. It did not seem wise.

Is this a situation where I can judge a book -- or rather, where it's a good idea to read the book -- by its cover? It's not just Village Inn, I don't think I want to read the book anywhere in public. Or am I just being paranoid? Do you form opinions of people based on what you see them reading, or even just what it looks like?

Description #5: Living Dead in Denver

2009-07-25T18:07:00.000-06:00

It’s raining on Denver today but it hasn’t cooled it down any. The city smells like a big armpit and the air sits clammily on the backs of silent cars. The clouds are an odd pinky-gray, like cotton candy long gone foul. On the horizon they are darker, and bulge like blisters ready to burst and shower the mountains with infection.

The Qwest tower’s sign shines out over the rain, but its mirrored windows are broken to five stories above the ground, leaving the bottom layers gaping like a toothless mouth. All around, other towers tilt and open their own gaping mouths to the littered streets. The city is a game of Jenga, discarded halfway through by careless children who ran off to play in underground bunkers where the sun never comes.

A few did, anyway. The rest are still here. In the broken towers, the silent cars, slowly bloating and bleaching on rooftops under the warm rain. Some are spilled and shattered across quite a long distance. A whole street might hold just one.

Others – the unlucky ones – are not here nor there. They sit in the alleyways or stumble their way through the deadlocked streets. Once in a great while, they moan.

Description #4: Everyone Hates Larry

2009-07-25T00:13:00.000-06:00

They’d painted the halls that color of beige that looks like oatmeal somebody left in the sink for a few days. It even had the same green spots, where the beige had worn off to show green paint underneath. The paint showed every bit of dirt. All the lockers had smudged greasy handprints on their edges and the walls had scuff marks where hundreds of kids kicked them every day.

Locker number one-five-seven-oh-one had an especially large greasy patch and a lock that didn’t work very well. The combination was printed above it in permanent ink, in case the temporary owner had any ideas about privacy. Most of them weren’t like that, but this locker was for special cases. Any kid walking by could pop it open, and sometimes did.

There wasn’t much inside. A picture of a man and two kids on the door, too boring for anyone to steal although someone had drawn a mustache on all three. A chemistry textbook with twenty names on the list inside the front cover, sitting in a years-thick layer of dust. An empty Snickers wrapper. A dime bag of pot jammed into a plastic bag and taped to the ceiling; so far no one had found it, but it wouldn’t be long.

Also jammed inside was a short, skinny kid with a bad haircut. His name was Larry. No one had found him yet, either, but he hoped it wouldn’t be long. He needed to pee.

KC Clyburn Talks About Literary Whitewashing

2009-07-24T23:18:00.001-06:00

Today's description exercise is going to be late. While you're waiting (*coughifyou'rewaitingcough*) let me share a link to a new, yet awesome blog by a fellow young writer.

KC Clyburn's Blog of Wonderfullness

It is indeed a blog of full of wonder and ness. His latest post, about literary 'whitewashing,' really made me think. I never noticed it before because I am, in the words of the great Weird Al, "whiter than sour cream," but segregation in the bookstore definitely happens. It's dumb to put black or "Urban" fiction in a separate area from other fiction, not only from a social standpoint but from the (much more persuasive to bigwigs) standpoint of profits. The net result of such separation, in my personal experience, is that people of other races will be inclined to think that the stories in the "Urban Fiction" section aren't written for them. Then, of course, they don't buy those books; the bookstore doesn't get the money, the writer doesn't get paid and the reader misses out on a story they might have loved.

I've decided to track down that section in my local Barnes & Noble -- I think they call it something else, but I know it's there -- and read my way through it. Life is too short to miss good stories just because bookstores are stupid.

Delicious Food cough Thursday #4

2009-07-24T18:21:00.000-06:00

I had a very busy day yesterday and didn't have time to even think about delicious food, much less -- unfortunately -- eat any. I did have some chili cheese fries, but that was about it.

That being the case, let me take you back ... back nearly twenty-four hours to a time when it was Thursday. Great beasts roamed the earth and primordial man had not yet begun to murmur the fateful sounds "Tee jee eye eff," which some consider to be the basis of all language. They are insane -- but nonetheless.

This week's topic: Simple Food.

I love cooking. When I have the time and energy, there's nothing I like better than to spend a whole afternoon baking scones or mixing up a complicated Indian dish. But what about when it's 8:30 pm and I'm starving, but far too broke to go out to dinner? That's when it helps to know a few simple combinations that are just as tasty as 22-ingredient Megadishes. The important thing there is freshness -- microwave pizza has its place in the great web of life, but if you want to eat well, that place is not in your stomach.

Here's what I had for dinner on Tuesday, a great and super-fast combination. I'd post a picture, but I ate it too fast for the camera to catch.

Pasta alla Glendale

1 package fresh pasta (refrigerated, not frozen. I'm a protein vampire, so I used sausage tortellini, but any kind of pasta would work)
Extra virgin olive oil (make sure to get good quality, or it won't taste good. I used King Soopers house brand, which I heartily don't recommend.)
Fresh basil
Tomato (again, better quality makes the difference. I used a yellow one for a milder taste.)
Garlic salt (optional)

Boil water. Add pasta and cook. If you're cooking spaghetti or other long noodles, that trick with throwing it against the wall really does work. If you're cooking ravioli or other filled pasta, it doesn't. You'll just make a mess.

When pasta is done, drain it and leave to cool a little while you slice the tomato. Slice it thinly lengthwise as you would a (very squishy) apple. Take out the seeds if you want.

Drizzle pasta with olive oil. Tear or chop one basil leaf per bowl into small pieces. Top with tomato and, if desired, a sprinkle of garlic salt.

Serves about 2.

Five Books That Shaped A Heather

2009-07-23T13:54:00.001-06:00

I'm in the middle of reading an essay about lists of Top Ten Books and how much this author hates trying to decide on them. He mentioned Oprah Magazine's 'five books that have affected your life' feature and I got side-tracked by listing mine.

I'm going to narrow the field down to fiction, otherwise I'll never be able to choose just five.

1. Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I was an incredibly huge fan of the Little House books as a child. I never saw the TV show and I never want to. It wouldn't live up to my memories. I identified with Laura to a somewhat embarrassing extent.

2. Wyrd Sisters by Terry Pratchett. This is the book that, at age seven, when I'd never read Macbeth and didn't get 90% of the jokes, nevertheless introduced me to a lifetime favorite author and borderline obsession. A lot of my worldview and (I hope) writing style can be traced back to Pratchett.

3. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. This may have been the first 'classic' I ever read. It certainly was a book that opened my eyes. I never knew you could do the kind of things that Huxley does with prose.

4. Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver. Kingsolver is one of my favorite authors in general, but especially this book. She interweaves the three personal narratives with differing perspectives on their environment so beautifully.

5. Skellig by David Almond. This is one of my favorite books of all time. It's only about 200 pages long, but it has everything: death, alienation, bitterness, friendship, love, redemption. Some books just open your whole head up -- Skellig is one.

Those are my five. What are yours?

Description # 3: Where's Laura?

2009-07-22T22:04:00.000-06:00

The suitcase lay open and unattended on the table in the customs shed. Once it might have been carefully packed: the remains of neat stacks could barely be made out, like fossil traces in the calcified strata of a thorough search. Most of the contents, however, were scattered to either side in increasingly untidy layers.

Still inside the suitcase, a new peacock-blue men’s Speedo, size large, was neatly rolled in a corner next to a tube of sunblock. That the tube had come open and leaked a viscous white substance onto a disturbing area of the Speedo was surely no one’s fault. Beside the two items, a slim green book titled “Kama Sutra for Idiots” also showed traces of the leak.

On the table to the right of the suitcase were a number of shirts, once neatly folded, whose labels bore the name of a Mr. Tommy Bahama. They were all printed with large designs in primary colors that clashed both with each other and with the neon shorts on the suitcase’s right.

On top of the shorts sat a variety pack of 36 condoms, a tube of Mace, and a wedding ring. On top of the stack of shorts was a love letter addressed to a woman named Teresa and a box of .22 bullets. The bullets themselves had been tossed out on the table and separated roughly into stacks of ten. There were six missing.

The suitcase contained no gun. At the very bottom, scattered as if hastily dropped, were several pre-addressed postcards. “Hello from Argentina!” they read. “Having a great 20th anniversary. Don’t expect us back anytime soon! Love, Fred and Laura.”

Auto Love

2009-07-22T20:22:00.001-06:00

Has anybody else ever noticed that when scientists and other global-climate-change-type people say "Americans love our cars" (and they always say it at some point), they do it in this tone that implies that we're just a bunch of overgrown Linuses clinging to our security blankets? As if, were we just a bit more mature, a bit more self-aware, we'd drop our cars like four-wheeled hot potatoes. There's a faint condescending note to their voices, a touch of indulgence, and a generous pinch of condemnation.

Now I am as crunchy-granola as one can be and still know the difference between patchouli and deodorant. I'm concerned about global warming and I sincerely want to reduce my carbon footprint ... but I love my car. I mean I really love my car.

I realized that about an hour ago, as I was executing a tricky turn into a parking space. My little Toyota Echo, which I've nicknamed The Bunny, turned in on what I'm pretty sure was literally a dime, and I was suddenly overwhelmed by a rush of love for it. It's small, and funny-looking, and nobody can see it for the first time without mentioning the Prius (or as we Boulderites call it, the Smugmobile), a car I don't love. But underneath its geeky exterior is a badass waiting to emerge when you crank the wheel. It's the Luke Skywalker of discontinued Toyota sedans.

Why do I love it? Other than because it's awesome to drive, and gets 45 mpg, I love my little Echo for the same reason anyone loves their car.

A car is freedom. Every sixteen-year-old knows that, and any adult driver who thinks about it for a minute does too. All other things being equal -- gas money, time and so on -- you can get in your car and go anywhere, anytime, and no one can stop you. You don't have to rely on others to operate it, like a plane, or have to be physically fit, like a bike. Just turn the key, and the horizon is your bitch.

That's why we're so attached to them. Americans love our freedoms, and our cars are the most immediate, most solid representation of those freedoms. Nowadays, most of us Pursue our Happiness from behind the wheel of a Toyota, Subaru or Chevy.

This all sounds like patriotic crap, but my point wasn't to hype America. (I am not, frankly, particularly patriotic, especially not about history. Let's be honest -- the Founding Fathers raped slaves and pooped in the backyard. Glorious? Not so much.) My point was just that there are solid reasons why Americans love our cars. They're not toys or penis extensions (except for that shiny Hummer H2 with the chrome rims -- that is a penis extention), and they're definitely not security blankets.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have an appointment at the car wash.

Description #2: Dangerous Ice Cream

2009-07-21T19:54:00.000-06:00

From the floor, the boxes of frozen treats looked lurid and dangerous, their labels spattered with contrasting neon shrapnel. Slogans printed in round, fat fonts proclaimed the REAL FRUIT LOW FAT FLAVOR SWIRLED contents. Friendly bears, smiling kids, piles of fruit topped with mint leaves all jostled for place on their cardboard pedestals. The glass of the freezer doors was dirty, smeared at children’s nose level and fogged down by the floor. Hot air blew out from beneath the freezers’ chrome miniskirts.

In front of the greasily beckoning Popsicles and Dove Bars, the floor opened out into a lake of white formica flooring. Blue squares down the middle of the aisle marked a trail of stepping-stones for children to hop from the Isle of Ice Cream to the Frozen Pizza archipelago. Cart tracks made almost imperceptible ripples in the waxy finish. Where Popsicles gave way to pints of fudge ripple, a long scuff blackened a streak of flooring.

Looking up from below, the tiers of icy sweetness seemed poised to topple. Florescent light sliced a narrow gleam off the front of the glass freezer doors and dropped it into the now-smeared puddle of water marking the place where the scuff began.

Super Special Extra Video Post!

2009-07-21T19:23:00.001-06:00

I found this fantastic video on Mots Justes's blog and had to pass it along.

The The Impotence of Proofreading

In Which I Am Not Epic

2009-07-21T17:45:00.000-06:00

I sprained my ankle last night. See, I was saving these orphaned puppies from a burning animal shelter, and ...

Actually I was in the ice cream aisle at Safeway. It was raining and I slipped on somebody's wet footprint while debating whether or not to buy popsicles. (I didn't.) Three people so far have told me that I should sue Safeway, but I don't think I should or would want to. They might give me some money, yes, but how is it their fault that it was raining and I wasn't watching my step? How is it their fault that my shoes have no tread? At some point you have to take responsibility for your own body.

But that's not the point I wanted to make. The point is that as I lay here today with my foot up on a pillow, able to walk but very much preferring not to, I started thinking. Why is it I always hurt myself in the dumbest, most everyday ways? In the last six months, apart from the ankle, I've:

Strained my shoulder performing dangerous cleaning maneuvers in my old apartment
Gotten a second-degree burn when I took a daring initiative to spill hot tea on myself
Thrown my back out by heroically sitting on the couch watching Bones on DVD

These aren't stories you can happily tell when people ask you what happened. "Well, I was sitting on the couch, and then I stood up ... and then I didn't walk for three days." Could I possibly sound like more of a loser?

So now, what I want to know is this. Does anyone hurt themselves in actual interesting ways? If so, how did you manage it and can you teach me? Otherwise, I worry that my next trick will involve a flight of stairs, a roller skate, a hampster named Jenny, and death.

Actually, that would be a pretty good story.

Description #1: The Park by Day

2009-07-20T19:24:00.000-06:00

By day, the park was a comfortable quilt-square of green cut almost in half by the dead-end access road. The concrete seam of an irrigation ditch connected it to the main road on one side, and every morning children balanced their way to school along the water’s edge. On the other side, two narrow spaces opened in the high chain-link fence that separated it from the church next door, and the grass between the metal posts was beaten down into bare dirt by mid-May.

The trees there were huge, as old as the town or older. They were too widely spaced to feel like a forest and too well-trimmed to be menacing or mysterious. Most of them were maples, punctuated by an occasional flowering tree whose species no one could remember but whose leaves were wide and round as umbrellas. In the spring, their flowers smelled like butter gone slightly bad in the sun, and in the fall they dropped long brown bean pods that splintered at a touch and stabbed the feet of careless children. Perhaps they weren’t pollinated, or perhaps it was the liberal doses of herbicide that kept the grass smooth and green, but whatever the reason, the seeds from those pods never grew.

At the corner by the ditch, the tiny strip of concrete that was the park’s only path dead-ended in a statue of a coal-miner. He stood staring out over the town, standing guard over the park on a pedestal engraved with the names of all the men who had died in the mines since 1916. Next to him, a stone fountain dedicated at the same time sat dry and still as the dead-end path, its graceful bowl overgrown and fouled with green algae.

Talking in the Dark

2009-07-20T14:31:00.000-06:00

What's your writing strength?

Everybody's got one, right? That one aspect of the work that comes easily to you, that makes your work feel comfortable and alive. The words flow smoothly in their hundreds, the sun shines, birds sing outside the window, and after you've thrown your coffee cup at the f*&ing birds and closed the blinds, you drop right back into it with ease.

For some people, it's description. Rich, evocative, dense as a good chocolate cake. Others like action, or internal monologue. For me, it's dialogue. My characters chatter away for pages at a time. I'm pretty proud of my dialogue, and I thought that it made my book more dynamic and fast-paced. Then I went to my first critique group.

The phrase used by one of my crit partners -- now a good friend -- was one I'll never forget. "Um ..." she said, "this kind of reads like people talking in the dark."

"This scene is people talking in the dark," I pointed out.

But she was right. Good dialogue is great and all that, but nobody wants to read a story where the characters talk so much that they never look around to see where they are. That's description, and that's not my strong suit. When I read, I'm a skimmer, and the first thing is skim is description, so I never got a sense of the proper balance of description to dialogue. I'm trying to work on that, and when I read through my work now, the first thing I ask myself is "Does this sound like people talking in the dark?" An embarrassing amount of the time, it does.

To remedy that, I've decided to impose an exercise on myself. For the next week, every day I'm going to write 200 words of pure description. No dialogue, no action. The week after, I'm going to do the same thing with internal monologue, because I could stand to work on that too. And, because I figure I might as well, I'm going to post those exercises here. If anyone wants to critique them, feel free. I will appreciate the feedback and never argue or pout about it (another thing I learned in critique group). The first one will be up sometime tonight. Stay tuned!

Yet More About Authors

2009-07-20T00:22:00.000-06:00

Earlier today, I had a fascinating conversation with my mom, children's author Grian McFadden, about female vs. male authors and the differences in the stories they tell. I realize that this topic is a great way to get into stereotypes and generalizations, but as Dave Barry says, "... my feeling is that if we can't have absurd generalizations, we might as well not even bother to write books."

My take on the subject comes from the fact that I read James Clavell's Shogun earlier this month. Now, nobody's going to argue that this is an extremely good book, and a classic. But: is it a book a woman would have written? I think not. In fact, I thought that even before I read it, just judging by the size and nature of the book. Huge historical epics, with an emphasis on duty, honor, violent death and a focus on many characters over a single hero, tend to be strictly a boys' thing.

So on the men's side, we've got Clavell and his ilk (Michener, Tolkien, Jordan and Dickens, to name a few). On the women's side, we have what I consider to be more character-driven fiction, with an emphasis on emotion over social duty, on relationships over politics, and most especially on the individual over the collective. Jane Austen is the poster girl for this kind of fiction, but there are many more. Virginia Woolf did it. Ursula LeGuin, Jane Yolen and Barbara Kingsolver all did or still do it.

I'm by no means saying that this is all men or all women; just that I think men are more likely to want to tell a certain type of story, and women a different one. I don't think that men's stories lack compelling characters or believable emotions and relationships; it's just not the focus. Nor am I saying that women's stories are shallow; their emphasis is on the personal, emotions and relationships, but the underlying themes are 100% as serious and universal as men's stories. Often, in fact, the themes are the same -- just approached in a different way.

Once again, let's hear from some readers! Do you think I'm right? What else might distinguish male and female authors? Who illustrates the rule and who breaks it, and do they do it well?