More on Vertical

Now while Mike is a voracious reader; I am less so.  I get on kicks where I'll devour a book in two days, but I generally stick to short forms, like The Huffington Post or Regretsy.  TV is and always has been my favorite means of storytelling.

But I am reading Vertical, because Mike got it for me for my birthday and Mike is awesome.

First things first--I've forgotten how dark Pickett's work is.  The film plays Miles as a sort of sad, affable chump who occasionally drinks too much, but the Miles in Vertical, like the previous book, is a hardcore, dawn-til-dusk alcoholic who never draws a sober breath, even when he's driving cross-country.  Yes, driving.

A lot of the prose is very repetitive.  Yes, Miles, we know you're dropping your mom off in Wisconsin to live with her sister, you said that five pages ago, no need to repeat it for the hundredth time.  Yep, you're speaking at a wine festival.  Yep, you like Pinot Noir.  Got it.  Remembered it from the first book.

Pictured: NOT YOU

Male writers labor under the delusion that they are rock stars and sex gods.  Just because Clive Owen donned a bad mustache to play Hemingway does not make the average basement-dwelling Stonecoast graduate into a hot piece of British ass (sorry Piglander).  And sorry Pickett, but Miles is Paul Giamatti, and while I love him with all my heart and my soul, I do not want to have sex with him.  Yet, Miles goes around banging hot chicks simply because he is a writer and Pickett lives in a magical fantasy world where hot women want to spread their legs for a balding, pudgy, middle-aged alcoholic.  It would be funny and maybe kind of quirky if it wasn't happening every three pages.

Better Days

Side Rant: Men have always thought they deserved hotter wives than they do.  No matter how fat, greasy, jobless, sweaty or balding a guy is, he always thinks that Megan Fox's panties would melt right off if she saw him.  Women, of course, have the opposite problem, being told that we are ugly and fat and have muffin tops and smell weird in private areas.  However, a disturbing trend I've noticed is that women's magazines are toting tubster schlubs like Jonah Hill and Seth Rogan as hot.  We're supposed to look like Megan Fox, but guys get to look like Chris Farley right before he died.

No.  We deserve better.  And we also deserve to be treated with dignity as characters.  Stephanie, played by Sandra Oh in the film, is reduced to one line about becoming a crack addicted stripper after Jack breaks up with her in Sideways.  This is a woman who is clearly a higher-up a successful, award-winning winery, and because one douchebag breaks her heart, she falls to pieces and becomes a drug-addicted slut? (their emphasis, not mine).  I can buy the fact that Miles gets constant tail before I'll believe that bull.

Male authors do this because they think they're so awesome, and it's a way to get back at some cheerleader who hurt them back in high school.  Kevin Smith does this in Clerks, which is why I can never watch it again.  Clearly, making Caitlin Bree have sex with a dead guys is his way of getting back at a girl who hurt him.  Real mature.  It's a sign of weak writing, and it's all over Vertical.  I got news for you guys--I've been hurt by lots of douchebags, and I cried and I listened to the Smiths, but I never became a drug-addled skank.  I got over it.  We all do.  You are not that special.

Ultimately, Vertical drips with futility and self-indulgence.  It didn't need to be written.  I was not lying awake at night, wondering what became of Jack and Miles.  Clearly Rex Pickett wants us to think he's awesome and bangs hot chicks all the time just because he wrote a book, but he would have stayed more awesome, in my mind, if he'd left the whole thing alone.

The Laborious Art of Novel Writing

I am a horrifically impatient person.  I'm sure I always have been although I didn't acutely become aware of it until fairly recently.  And it's not just impatience about when the next disc of 30 Rock is going to show up in my mailbox or when the Huffington Post is going to update, (although those are trials in themselves) it's an impatience with myself when I realize I can't just magically jump from point A to point D without going past B and C first.  This is why I failed at karate, ballet, piano, French and most relationships.  I don't want to waste time with the baby steps. I just want to get to the part where I play Carnegie Hall in pointe shoes while smashing planks with my bare hands.

I realized this about myself last week, when I heard Lauren Groff speak about her new book Arcadia at The Green Toad.  It, as readings occasionally do, made me panic.  One, because Lauren is awesome and sweet and kind and a NYT Bestseller therefor, I am terrified she will find out that I am, by contrast, a blithering idiot. I feel the same way about Megan Abbott, to the point where I avoided her at a conference for three days even though she was asking other people about whether or not I was there.   God forbid I ever come within two states of Walton Goggins or Geena Davis; I would have no choice but to change my name and flee the country until they were safely gone.

Good thing I had Clive Owen and
Benicio Del Toro to Keep Me Company

When I interviewed her for the paper, Lauren said that the "natural life" of a novel is "about five years."  Five years.  I can't imagine writing something for five years.  I think about the person I was five years ago, the kind of work I was writing then and how much I've changed.  I was just starting what would be the series of stories known as Crimson City Blues, I was obsessed with Sin City, just starting to think about grad school and had never even heard of Walton Goggins.  Five years from now, I will be yet another different person, and if that's the case, I would never get the book finished possibly ever.

Lauren does a cool thing, because she is cool.  She writes a first draft by hand and throws it out.  Then she writes another draft and throws that one out.  Then she writes a third draft on the computer and the story begins to take it's current form.  How I wish I had that kind of patience!  I'm still in pop fiction grad school mode, where I write a novel in six months, spend another three polishing it and then spend another six months getting rejected by every agent and unsolicited manuscript accepting publishing house in NYC.  This has happened twice, each time with some astoundingly nasty rejection letters.

I've got a novel now that I'm working on.  It's a longer version of a short story I wrote that has yet to be picked up, about an ex-con who promises his brother that he'll look after his wife and her two kids when he's released on parole, but after he arrives, it's clear she doesn't want him there and the two of them have to find a way to work into each other's lives.  It's a sad, beautiful story about family and love and grace that Matthew admits just about made him weep.  When I'm done with a story, the characters sort of vanish, their stories told but I couldn't get these characters off my mind, so I started turning it into a novel.

And it keeps coming.  I wrote half a draft and realized that it was just a series of scenes and that would never work.  So I started again, and characters came and went, locations changed, POVs shifted.

Clearly, this was going to take more than six months.

And this terrifies me.

The failed dance/karate/piano lessons can be chalked up to youthful exuberance, but my 20's have been fraught with poverty.  If I hit my snooze button, I missed my bus to work.  If I didn't get to the reception early, the food was all gone when I got there.  I had deadlines to meet, multiple jobs to juggle.  Patience was for people whose lives didn't depend on bus schedules and free spinach triangles.  My life was carefully organized and stacked, and in the world I knew, taking time to write a book was a luxury afforded to beautiful people with grant money and tenure.  I wrote partially because I loved it and partially because I saw it as the only way I knew how to bust myself out of low-wage jobs and crippling poverty.  If I could sell a story to Glimmer Train, that would pay my rent and phone for a month.  A book deal would pay off my student loans.  Heck, even a $25 sale to an internet magazine could pay for two weeks of halfway-decent groceries.

So I wrote and I wrote and I wrote.  No one can ever say all I did was daydream.  I wrote "The Weather Girl" in 3 days, "The PI's Wife" in a hour,  "Purgatory Blues" and "Pussy" in 30 minutes each.  And not first drafts either--finished, final drafts ready for submission.  I put my impatience to work.

Then Crimson City Blues didn't land me an agent.  Neither did Six Bullets, which I worked on for a year and a half, part of that time with a high profile agent who, after six months of rewrites, suddenly rejected it and told me I didn't know how to write a novel.  I got rejection after rejection from Glimmer Train, The Missouri Review, Electric Literature.

But what I did get was a good job that I love, and now I have the arduous task of retraining my brain to enjoy the process and the labor of the story.  From "The Carpoool" to "Goodnight Lily" Crimson City Blues took about four years.  But I loved every minute of it, from the first scribbling of "Hero Cop" on a scrap of paper at the Brooklyn Library to drawing city maps on the placemats at the Spot with Dwight to adding the "take the rape"* sequence in "Until Proven Guilty" to getting that first acceptance letter from Hardboiled for "Big Night Out."

I don't think I'll ever spend eight years on a book, as Mike keeps reminding me his mentor did.  But what I will do is pace myself to enjoy the process, as laborious and difficult as it can be.  Because I look back on Crimson City Blues and think "That was the happiest I ever was when I was writing."  I want to be a happy writer.  If I'm going to spend hours at my desk, I want them to be happy ones.





*A romance writer I went to grad school with actually said this phrase to me in workshop.  She looked me in the eye--someone she didn't know, quite possibly one of the 213,000 women who are sexually assaulted each year--and said, "I really feel like Lily should just take the rape."  I was so appalled that I reacted the only way I knew how--working it into the story as a line of advice from another prisoner.  

I recently had this weird craving to watch Children Of Men.  I have only three things to say on that film:

1) Watching a dystopian war-ridden nightmare before bed was not the brightest idea I've ever had
2) Clive Owen is amazingly hot and we don't see enough of him
3) That movie is still awesome

When I was lying half-concious from food poisoning in my hotel bed in DC back in Feb, I was flipping channels and came across Sin City, formally My Favorite Movie of All Time.  I saw it twice in one weekend--the only other movie I've ever done that with was Predators, and that's only because I lived above a $2 movie theater and had, literally, nothing better to do. 

So I watched "The Big Fat Kill" section, and man, he is so hot and that movie is still great.  Mostly because of Clive Owen (and Mickey Rourke, of course, but he's not hot like Clive Owen).

I sort of let my obsession with Clive Owen fall by the wayside because he reminded me a lot of my ex-best-friend, but it's been a few years and I'm ready to love again.  Now if only he would start showing up in movies again . . . .



I left my knife at home, so I'm just going to smash the glass and eat my beer with my hands

I like Clive Owen because he is a man.  Manliness drips out of every pore.  This is not a guy who plays World of Warcraft, he goes to the horse races.  Clive Owen does not keep Smirnoff Ice in his mini fridge, he drinks pints of beer so thick you have carve them with a steak knife before you can drink them.  Clive Owen does not wear skinny jeans or white belts or ironic teeshirts.  He's so damn manly that I'm surprised he doesn't chafe himself on his rawness.

When he comes on screen, you know Clive Owen means business.  He has a monotone and a grizzled face and a crooked nose and when he grins he looks like he wants to eat you.  But he also has a stage presence unlike anyone else (except maybe Mickey Rourke) and he commands a screen.  He's the kind of men women want and men want to be.  In an era of pretty boys with names like Channing and Shia, a dark, dour British man is a much-needed breath of fresh air .  . and yet, he was gone almost before we really got to know him.  He was a big thing for a hot minute, and then . . .nothing.  There's Trust, which I didn't get a chance to see, and The Boys Are Back, which Ian refused to see with me, but otherwise, he is gone.  If I really wanted to get melancholy, I could point out how much this mimics my ill-fated relationship with Dwight, but I'm not that silly.

The other thing I like about Clive Owen is that he is devoted to his kids and his very . . . ah . . . British-looking wife.  I love married men, and better still, I love a devoted married man.  I can't explain it--preachers, professors and married men.  Those are my kinks. 

Ewan McGregor is charming.  Jeff Goldblum is coy.  Walton Goggins is clever.  But Clive Owen is manly.  And can't a girl have one of each?

HAPPY

BIRTHDAY

ME!