Dispatches From the Desk

I got back a few weeks ago from the First Annual Stonecoast MFA Reunion, which was of surprising awesomeness.  I give all the credit to that to Erin Underwood, who is rad and who gets shit done, mostly because she has the perfect combination of being uncompromising and nice, whereas someone like me is heavy on the former and non-existent on the latter.

I sat on a panel with Lexa Hillyer, poet extraordinaire, co-founder of Paper Lantern Lit and fellow 30 Rock affectionato who stressed the need for a good web presence and a consistent blog.  Now I am pretty consistent about my great love of Walton Goggins and my deep hatred of, well, lots of stuff, but that has nothing to do with my writing (with an occasional exception). When I started this project, I was still trying to write pop-culture memoir, which sorta isn't my thing anymore.  I still like records, and I sure as hell still like me some Goggins (sad about him not getting an Emmy nod) but Lexa was right, and if I'm going to refocus my career on writing, then my web presence needs to be about writing and all things related to story and craft and the writing life.

So enjoy that last picture of my sweet Walton, because it might be the last one you see for awhile.

Observations from Re-Watching The Shield

I re-watched a couple episodes of The Shield last night after a considerable hiatus (and a dream that Dutch and I were at nightclub dancing to Kei$ha, probably prompted by the Kei$ha record--yes, vinyl--that Eeon quite randomly and charmingly sent me) and I have a few observations:

Much Better

1) Shane looks great in a tight grey tee-shirt, but the button-down worn open over it makes him look sloppy.  I much prefer when he starts wearing the cowboy shirts tucked into those skin-tight jeans around season 3.  Also, his hair is too short, making his forehead too big and emphasizing the fact that he has very small eyes.  Still hot as an Oklahoma August, though.

2) Vic Mackey does not hold up in second viewings.  His character is based entirely on unpredictability, so when you know what his next move is, it gets boring and you just .  He doesn't have much of an arc and he's just kind of an asshole to everyone.  I mean, really, why did he have to steal Dutch's Ding-Dongs?

That is the face of
a man with wicked
intentions

3) Dutch is the character to pay attention to.  His law-and-order b-story tends to get lost in the first viewing (after all, a plain old procedural isn't as exciting as a car chase or a beat down) but he's masterful to watch the second time around. Pure detective bliss. The fact that Jay Karnes is 6'3" and terrifyingly sexy doesn't hurt either.  He's got a great voice; I want him to read me a bedtime story.  He makes me shiver.  I want to see him play Phillip Marlowe and wear a belted trench coat and a fedora in a non-Brooklyn way.

If Justified knew what was good for them, they'd use Justin Towne Earle's "Mama Said" as an ending montage of Boyd Crowder doing stuff.  Anything, really.  Drinking bourbon, unbuttoning his shirt (seriously, he needs to stop buttoning that top button, it's driving me nuts), driving his truck, turning around, showering in slow motion . . . it's sort of all-purpose.  It's got a fitting melody, perfect lyrics and the exact right melody for a story that takes place in backwoods Kentucky. And the way he says, "I used to drink, boys, I used to cuss," sounds exactly like something Boyd Crowder would say and exactly how he'd say it.  He'd even do that little thing where he nods his head just slightly to the side, closes his eyes and smiles just a little.  God, I love it when he does that.



Of course, if Justified knew what was good for them, they would have reduced Raylan to almost nothing and put the focus on the crime families of Harlan, because the Bennett clan, Dickie Crow (such a great name that I wish I'd thought of it) and the Crowders are a hell of a lot more interesting than him and stupid boring Winonia could ever dream of being.

Tonight I made the Liz Lemon decision of all Liz Lemon decisions.  I had a choice between writing a story I'm almost finished with and extremely happy about, eating pizza and watching Justified . . .

 . . . and I chose pizza.

The Greatest Thing Ever Might Happen

Jeff Goldblum might be on Justified.


Yes, I know I complain all the time about the lazy writing, poor character development and general lack of Goggins nudity on Justified.  What can I say?  I hate the show.

But Goldblum, yes, sweet Goldblum!  It's as though my 13 year old self and my 28 year old self are giving each other a high-five . . . of course, the last time this happened, we got Cowboys and Aliens, but, as every season of Justified begins, I am filled with hope that maybe this time it will finally get good and stop being stupid.  Maybe they'll finally take my suggestion of getting rid of Raylan and just letting the criminals of Harlan County trick and manipulate and kill each other.


Probably not, but at least it will give me extra hotness to look at.  

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.  

Proper Use of "Forthcoming"

Remember how I mentioned that I had a story "forthcoming."  Well, here it is.  It has come forth.

Now, about my "forthcoming" marriage to Walton Goggins . . . .

Kenny Johnson can be the "forthcoming" Best Man

Red Dirt and WTF

So I apologize for the last, oddly-cryptic post and the long delays between real posts.  It's been a weird couple of weeks here at Record of the Month, and normally I don't exorcise my demons publicly, but since the person who that was aimed at was posting cryptic messages on his Facebook account (which you've noticed I'm not on) I figured that if he googled me, he might find me here and maybe we could get a real conversation going.

If he did, well, he didn't respond.  Moving on.

Watched Red Dirt last night in my continuing quest to see Walton Goggins naked and, I have to say, it was worse than The Room.  At least The Room has a Rifftrax.  And while yes, Walton Goggins was exceptionally naked (was he wearing a merkin?) it didn't make up for the fact that there was not a single scene in the film that wasn't a giant pile of film school cliche.  There was rain on lily pads, claw-foot bathtubs, even a nice scene of two dogs walking along the railroad tracks that had nothing to do with anything.



Characters complained about not being able to get out of the small town of Pine Apple, talked about how no one understood them, parents were dead, aunt was insane, protagonists were frustrated, opera was played to heighten tension, people walked around barefoot.  Yawn.

The really disturbing part, in my mind, was Griffith, the protagonist.  He's having sex with his female cousin, displaying no homosexual tenancies until Manic Pixie Dream Goggins comes along.  They do Manic Pixie things, like wrestling in the water, offering to paint a house plaid, building a giant pin-cushion in a field and painting sex-cousin's phone number on her barn roof (your guess is as good as mine, because this is never explained) MPD-Goggins keeps talking about moving on and they become blood brothers, and then Griffith gets mad at MPD Goggins for being all homo-y towards him, and I guess at the end Griffith becomes gay and they kiss and run off together.  At least that's what Wikipedia said, because the minute Goggins said his tearful goodbye to the aunt who was suddenly magically cured of crippling depression by a few car rides, I turned it off and sealed it up in it's red envelope to be mailed back from whence it came.

The disturbing part is, of course, that the film implies that being gay is a choice.  Griffith was perfectly content to have sex with women, even if they were kinfolk, but it isn't until someone gay comes along that he even considers that he might like boys.  Being gay, from my understanding, isn't something you just decide to do--it's who you are from birth, no matter what troll-person Rick Santorum says.

For a piece of gay cinema, I think Red Dirt sends the wrong message . . . and is just an awful film in general.  Too bad, because we haven't seen Walton Goggins that nude since.

This will have to do.

We Need to Talk, Walton

It's about your ad, darling.  You are a strong southern man with a perfect ass and inky eyes and abs I could bounce a quarter off of.   You play sensitive, troubled, violent men with a charm and a grace usually relegated to the British. You have replaced Clive Owen as my primary brooding delivery system.

But Walton, dearest, real men don't say "ephemeral."

Justin Townes Earle at Foothills

For the last few weeks I've been obsessed with Justin Townes Earle's "Harlem River Blues," which is about as close to a come-to-Jesus moment as I've ever had with a song.  Not because of the lyrics, which are ultimately about suicide, but just in that it's so exubrant and whole and uplifting and spiritually fulfulling that I tremble whenever I hear it.  I want to put it on a mix tape and send it to Walton Goggins and tell him I think of Boyd Crowder whenever I hear it in hopes that he likes to too.  I have become a disciple of JTE.



. . . . despite the fact that he looks like an Irvine Welsh character



So he was performing at Foothills last night and for twenty bucks, I had to go. Thor went too, and we both sat in revered silence while he played.  I'm still new to his music, so I didn't know most of his songs, and although he played "Harlem River Blues" and my heart palpatated and I actually trembled, I was sad that he didn't play "Can't Hardly Wait," as he's been known to do.

But he officially won my heart when some drunk guy yelled "Play John Prine!" and he yelled back "Don't tell me what to do!"  I want to marry him. 

Also, I got Harlem River Blues on vinyl, and he signed it.  It's the only signed record in my collection.

Happy Birthday!

Happy 40th to Walton Goggins . . . and here is a present for all of you.  I already took the liberty of unwrapping it:

Oh Well.

Congrats to Peter Dinklage on his Best Supporting Actor Emmy

In Dreams

When I'm not lying awake and panicking or having wake-up-screaming nightmares, I tend to dream very cinematically and, if I'm lucky, can remember the dreams when I wake up.  I've gotten some of what I consider my best work out of dreams, and I credit this to three of them starring Walton Goggins.  It's like getting to watch my favorite TV shows while I'm asleep, and sleeping is something I love even more than watching TV.

Nice of you to invite me into
your dreams

The third, which I wrote over the weekend while trying to avoid writing an article about the devestating flood that washed away Middleburg and Schoharie, (I grew up in Schoharie County, two towns over) was inspired by the one dream I didn't have about flooding.  No, in this dream, I got shot while during an interview and wound up in Purgatory, with Walton Goggins and Jay Karnes playing my roommates (but not as themselves or any of their characters) 

I wrote it in a very different way than I've written any of my other dreams.  The narrative is very short and the whole thing comes to 912 words and is written with minimal description and dialogue much like "Hotel Jesus".  It made me rethink how stories are written.

Traditionally, fiction is taught in that Raymond Carver school--long, plenty of dialogue and description, a slow build to a climax, a short story as we all picture a short story.  But in flash fiction, there isn't room for that.  And I suppose I could have written "Purgatory Blues" the same way I wrote "Keyton's Keys" (which also came from a dream and also starred Walton Goggins")  which clocked in at just over 6K.  I could have described Purgatory in full detail, but for whatever reason (laziness, I imagine) it called out for a more compact format.

So I began to wonder--do we choose the story's format, or does it write itself?  I have a friend who refuses to write anything under 15K.   He just doesn't think he can.  Never mind that most places won't pay for and publish that length of work anymore, and although plenty of online lit mags (like Tin House) will publish longer work, he wants to get paid.  It's fair, I suppose, but do all stories need to be told in long form?  Is more description, scenery and dialogue required in order to tell a proper story?

I didn't set out to write a flash fiction piece.  If anything, on "Hotel Jesus," I actively tried to avoid it for fear of becoming a malcontented douche.  But after what seemed like a hundred false starts, I settled into the form of "movements" and short scenes that became the Pank-published piece it is today.  All without becoming a malcontented douche.  Let's hope the same works on "Purgatory Blues"

All I'm going to say about Cowboys and Aliens is that it didn't have enough Walton Goggins.  Although, to be fair, a movie could be nothing but him standing there nude for two hours and I would have the same complaint.

ACTING!!!!

(If you want the full review, just click that link up there and it will take you to Liz Ellis' The Insatiable Critic.)

But let's talk trailers.  For starters, I reiterate my previous hatred of James Franco.  He makes this face, and I can't do it because I'm on a blog and you're all out there (but come to my house and I'll do it for you) that I can only describe as his "Look Ma, I'm acting" face.

Secondly, I kept hoping Battleship was a joke, like Don't! or Werewolf Women of the SS.  But it's real.  It's real and it exists and it is so horribly stupid that I felt my brain leaking out of my ears and all over my refashioned western-style shirt.

I watched Breakfast on Pluto last week, driven by the fact that I love Cillian Murphy because he looks exactly like my dear friend/former boyfriend Geza . . . but I couldn't stop staring at Liam Neeson.  Man, he's sexy . . . but Battleship?  Really?  Look, I can forgive The Phantom Menace (we all make mistakes) but he conciously made the choice to star in a movie based on a toy no one I know has ever played.  I don't understand why he would do this.  It hurts me to think of all the sad reasons why. 

And that's what sort of bugged me about Walton Goggins part in Cowboys & Aliens.  He may not be a household name, but he's well-regarded by critics, has a small but insanely rabid fanbase (me) he got nominated for an Emmy (some say one show too late) and he has a damn Oscar . . . and the part he played seemed beneath him, like it was something he would have played in his early 20's, when he'd just arrived in Hollywood and would take any part they threw at him.  It seemed a little too dumb, a little too hick-like, for someone who consistantly tries to show his native South as anything but a hornets nest of poverty, ignorance and toothlessness. Even his role in Predators had more meat on it

I won't post the Battleship trailer.  Here's Werewolf Women of the SS instread.

BOO-YAH

Finally, Walton Goggins NOMINATED FOR AN EMMY!!!  About freakin' time!

Because I Love You All

You're welcome

Happy Sunday!

Why the hell not? 

HAPPY

BIRTHDAY

ME!



You Know You Want It

 My friend Eeon, who is one half of Canned Laser and is perhaps the funniest person alive, recently turned me onto the comic Preacher, seeing as how one of my failed novels (but several stories) were about a vigilante preacher who I'm just going to come out say is about a million times sexier (in my head) than the Rev. Jesse Custer


Unless Jesse was played by Walton Goggins.

Preacher isn't exactly my cup of tea--it's a little on the Frank Miller side, lots of random swearing and violence for the sake of swearing and violence (although I will defend The Hard Goodbye as one of the finest pieces of short crime fiction written in recent history--other than "The PI's Wife," of course)  But with rumors recently flying about a possible film adaptation, I would like to nominate our own Boyd Crowder for the coveted role.  He's got the voice, he looks good in a suit and even better with a Bible in his hands, and he's got that sexy hair (okay, so it's a little sparse, but Jesse's rockin' that early 80's Jeff Goldblum in The Fly pseudo-mullet an no one wants to see that.

Seriously, though, he'd be perfect.  I can't imagine an actor who'd be better for the part.  But you just know that if they ever get around to making the movie (they won't) they'll cast some ponce like Shia Le Pouf or James Franco.  And Jessica Alba as Tulip.  Chance Crawford or some other weird shirtless dude faking a bad Irish accent as Cassidy.  Gross Gross Gross. 

So the point is, Hollywood, if you're not going to do something right, don't bother doing it at all.

As I mentioned earlier, I gave up swearing for Lent.  More on this here, but in addition to giving up cursing, I also gave up celeb gossip.  I had already given up TMZ (for the most part) as part of my New Years Resolution, but I was sitting there on Ash Wendsday, reading The Superficial and wondering how long I would last before I dropped my first f-bomb (6 hours) and I realized that here I was, ingesting something that was fundementally bad for me and a waste of my time.  Because really, what does it matter in my life what Lindsey Lohan had for lunch?

So I clicked out of the page, and haven't read any since.

Negativity breeds negativity.  When I was living in NYC, I was surrounded by newsstands and glossy gossip rags screaming about Nick and Jessica's divorce.  It actually depressed me--I got anxious just walking past a rack of magazines, the bold headlines of their impending marital doom made me really, really sad.  Not because I gave or ever have given a fig about Jessica Simpson.  I'm not even sure what a Nick Lachey is.  But the public airing of their dirty laundry made me sad for humanity, and I had to make a deliberate effort to look the other way.  And you know what?  It worked.

I'm doing this, partially, for Charlie Sheen.  And again, I don't care one way or another about Charlie Sheen; I've seen exactly one of his movies (The Three Musketeers) and watch Two and a Half Men only when I'm staying in NYC, it's 1AM, I can't sleep and it's either that or the Times Square traffic cam.  And as his spiral started downwards, I, like everyone else in America, watched in horrified fascination. 

But then I realized that I was a major part of his problem.  I had become one of the people who clicked on every news item, thus giving him the audience he sought.  I realized that I couldn't actively participate in a man's public suicide--it was sick and it was wrong and I'm glad to be rid of it.

I no longer read gossip headlines at the grocery store--instead, I look up recipes or *gasp* talk to my boyfriend.  The time I was wasting catching up on Heidi Montag is now spent writing or listening to records or writing letters to my friends.  My productivity has increased and I don't feel so bogged down with the ugliness of the world--because gossip is never nice, it's always judgemental and this world is too beautiful for the feuds on Teen Mom to fill it with poison.

This isn't to say I've given up celebs--but rather, I've switched my focus.  I look up old interviews with Walton Goggins because the way he creates his characters inspires me in my writing.  I read about Geena Davis' work at the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media because I think she's a rare breed of woman.  I try to find people who inspire me, not waste my time with their petty garbage.