Patriarchy: The Hands of Fate

My super-smart friend Ari and I have been going back and forth about the term "patriarchy," in terms of theoretical vs. literary device.  Ari is insanely well-read and versed on the subject, and I, having done two years at Bra-less MFA would, frankly, rather have something all be a dream in the end than even see the word patriarchy in a manuscript.

Patriarchy is a Big Bad.  It is predominantly used in memoir writing by rich white women complaining about why it sucks to be wealthy and white and privileged (see Eat. Pray. Love. Don't literally see it, because it's stupid, just click the link and read the Something Awful review of it).  I recently read a piece where a woman blamed the patriarchy in one paragraph and then got her panties all wet over her rich boyfriend's "manservant" (yes, she used "manservant" because I guess "Negro" was too polite) and how her rich boyfriend ordered dinner for her and how romantic the whole thing was.  I don't get too offended, but this made me so mad I was pacing around the room while I was trying to make notes and it took everything I had not to toss the whole thing in the fireplace and slap the woman who wrote it.

Memoir writers use The Patriarchy as a way to avoid blame or actual introspection on anything in their work.  It's much easier to blame the husband for the failure of your marriage than to admit that maybe you could have done some work too.  It's easier to blame some faceless white men for you not getting the keys to the Scrooge McDuck's vault than to say "Maybe I'm just a selfish bitch who thinks she's entitled to everything."  It's much easier to blame the chef than to say "Maybe I shouldn't have ordered that discount blowfish."

In my experience, the same writers who use The Patriarchy in this way generally are the first to strongly dictate how other women should behave.  Women who don't fit their narrow construct of feminism (wealthy, white, modest in dress albeit braless)  therefor fall into two categories:  In need of saving ("My Black Friend") or The Enemy.  I mean, thank goodness for Yale educated poets.  What would we do about our soul-crushing poverty without a bunch of women to teach us interpretive dance!  And of course, they deserve those $2K grants to teach us, after all, those dancing women work hard, and now that we all have the gift of interpretive dance, who needs food?

I tend to wear spike heels, short skirts, cut-up shirts and skinny jeans.  I think you can guess which category I fall into, despite the fact that I am economically disadvantaged and worked insanely hard to crawl my way up to where I am now.  But clearly, I'm not a feminist because I own thong underpants.

If we as writers want to something about The Patriarchy, which is back and badder than ever (trans-vaginal ultrasound, anyone?) we have to confront it head-on.  Name names.  Describe the men who've stood in your way.  Make them real, flesh and blood, make them accountable for their actions.  Simply lumping them together makes them little more than word too easily dismissed and lets them continue to get away with stripping us of our dignity and our hard-fought rights.

But more importantly, we, as women, need to solidify ourselves.  No more us vs. them.  No more feminists vs. sluts, working moms vs. stay-at-home.  It's too easy to divide ourselves, and divided, we will fall.

As someone who writes a lot of stories that take place in the south, I can no longer stay silent on the horror that is Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.  I've never watched the show or it's former monstrostity, Future Jon Benet Ramsey and Tiaras, because if I did, I surely would have consumed a nice strong cocktail of Allen's Coffee Brandy and Drain-O, neat.

For starters, her mother makes Divine look like Kate Moss.  She's a strawberry jello mold in a bridesmaid's dress.  She's a Hutt wearing lipstick.  She is the single most disgusting person I've ever seen, and I used to go to the Sunshine Fair, so I'm kind of an expert on ugly people.

It's not about the horrificness of TLC exploiting a family who really needs to have CPS called in.  It's not my smug, over-educated feminist outlook on beauty pageants.  It's the fact that this show continues to perpetuate the myth that the South is made up entirely of trailer parks and populated by rednecks who fornicate with gay pigs while gumming grits.  And I am so fucking sick of that version of the south because it's just not true anymore.

The south has made huge strides in culture.  Great bands like REM and the B-52's came out of Atlanta, Georgia.  High-end restaurants in North Carolina are fusing Korean  cuisine with grits and pork belly.  The Oxford fucking American, people!  It's in the middle of a renaissance, and it's garbage like Here Comes Honey Boo Boo that continue holding it back.

I remember watching The Blue Collar Comedy Tour with my then-boyfriend, his brother and his brother's wife.  She, being from Queens, thought it was the funniest thing she'd ever seen.  She couldn't understand why the three of us, being from Cobleskill, weren't laughing.  It wasn't that the jokes weren't funny, it was that we knew those kind of people.  It wasn't anything new or shocking to us.  But to her, the thought that someone might have sex in a satellite dish was so far out of her imaginative grasp that we might as well have said "You might be a redneck if you've got three heads, all named Billy Bob."

There are hicks everywhere.  If you ever want to see white trash at it's absolute finest, visit beautiful Cobleskill, NY, fantastically far north of the Mason-Dixon.  They just held the Redneck Blank in parts of Maine that might as well be Canada.  Rural America exists beyond Alabama and Georgia.  It's in PA and WI and CA.

I couldn't even read William Gay's Provinces of Night because it took place in the 1950's despite being published in 2000.  It just seemed like such a cliche, and damn it, I LOVED the film version of "That Evening Son."

PLEASE, people, enough with the old South.  MOVE ON.  It's one of the reasons I love Ray McKinnon so much--in the "Making of" featurette on Randy and the Mob, he says that he wanted to write a story set in the south he knew--the modern south, where people drive Kias and work in offices and wear khakis and occasionally have mob dealings.

We need to start embracing the south as a real place with real people, not some deep-fried Brigadoon that exists solely so Northerners can laugh at while they cram another organic Chipotle burrito into their gaping maw.  Find some other poor people to write a story about from your grant-funded beach house.

Apparently, We Have a Guest Post from Eeon Smith

Hardee Har Har, Canned Laser.

Better Late Than Never

Bunny Goodjohn, who is an outstanding writer and who had no business being in the Stonecoast Alumni Writer's Workshop because her piece was so awesome and there was nothing anyone else can teach her (although we were so happy to have her!) was kind enough to give us a shout out on her blog.
So if you haven't read her blog, get on over there.  Bunny is funny, engaging, charming and unbelievably talented. And while you're at it, pick up a copy of her first novel, Sticklebacks and Snowglobes. And pray she finishes up the novel I got to see pieces of, like, sometime around now, because even as a one chapter rough draft, I can say it was fantastic.

Everything I Touch Turns to Flies

Or, more precisely, everything Matthew and I touch, we destroy (although I did notice Betsey Johnson went under pretty quickly after I got really into her accessories).  Our story "Convention if Exphrasis," which was written about the 2009 AWP Convention in Chicago, was picked up by an anthology, which folded weeks before it's release date.  "Convention" was ours again, and we pitched it to another magazine, which accepted it.

And folded six months later.

This morning, I woke up late and to an email announcing that The Writer, which published our essay "The 12 Conference Commandments" in the July 2012 issue, will be on hiatus after October until another publisher is found. All submissions before March 1, including our follow-up about Low-Residency programs, were to be considered rejected.

So, yes, fellow writers, blame us.  Our curse destroyed The Writer magazine, the single best trade publication (suck it, Ponces & Weenies!) in the writing life.  We accept our responsibility, and apologize for the inconvenience.

Now if only McSweeney's would take something of ours . . . 

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.

Over the years, I've started viewing writing less as a pleasure and more of a job.  I have to.  One, because it is my job and two, because I hate writers who romanticize the craft without ever actually doing any actual writing (shout-out to my poet-bro John, who wrote 30 poems in 30 days during National Poetry Month in April).

But part of the job is submitting, and that part sucks.  It sucks because it's all mostly rejection letters, and for every cute "please send us something else!" written in pink pen at the bottom of an Oxford American rejection slip, there are five form emails calling you "Dear Author."  I once got a breakup rejection email ("it's not you, it's us") from a magazine trying too fucking hard to be all cute and twee and hip.  Like the Stonecoast MFA program didn't do enough damage to my self-esteem, now magazines are breaking up with me.  Thanks, stupid magazine.

I worked at two different FYE stores for about three years total in my early 20's.  I did not like it, but it was better than The Gap, where I previously worked and had to quit when a my idiot co-worker snorted "Ugh, do you see what that baby is wearing?" and I responded "You're beautiful" and things got pretty cold.

Yay Moxie!

Some of my FYE co-workers were fun, and I was a much better salesgirl than they were paying me to be, and learned to like Shiny Toy Guns and the Kaiser Chiefs and Judas Priest, but I was not going to advance beyond part time.  FYE would not be my career, although I made more money there than I did teaching three classes at SUNY Cobleskill.  No joke.

Submitting is like that. You do it because it's expected and it's part of the job, but you know that it's not going to get you anywhere.  And just like working at FYE during Christmas puts a little extra cash in your pocket, occasionally a submission comes through with a YES and you have a Moxie and things feel good for a few minutes.  But then lunch break is over, and you go back to work, and it sucks.

I'm back in the submission process.  I have three new stories ready to go, and I think they're pretty rad, but every time I click submit, I get disheartened.  The rejection letters don't bother me, I don't really even notice them anymore except to cross them out on my submission list.  It just feels so rote, so mundane, like there's no spark anymore.  No hope that maybe this one will get through.  If it comes back rejected, I shrug and send another one out.  No big deal . . . and I think that's what bothers me the most.  I want to feel that spark again.  I want that hope.  I don't want this to just be another job that I don't like, because I've had plenty of those . . . and if I did need that (like, for research) I could easily go back to work at FYE and get my fill of quiet desperation.

But I can't live like that.

A Crisis of Voice

Back when I wrote crime, my voice came easily.  Starting with "Hero Cop," I just did my best Frank Miller impersonation.  Over time that evolved into the complicated dialect of Crimson City Blues, which even had it's own thesaurus that Dwight and I lovingly compiled over late-night trips to The Spot and bottles of red wine on the dirty grey couch of my basement apartment.  We had a dozen synonyms each for the two words that appeared most: drinking/drunk ("slung low" was my favorite; it appears in "Roderick and the Kid") and prostitute ("Pink Pants," "Lap Girl").  It was fun.

(Damn it, I miss Dwight.  That guy could write a sentence that could give you a hard-on.  He had this wonderfully cold style, like feeling breath on the back of your neck when you swear to Christ you're all alone.  It was a thing of brutal beauty and if his story "Bad Cop"--which absolutely killed me to take out of Crimson City Blues when we split--ever comes out as a book, I'll be first in line to buy a hardcover copy even though I doubt he'll sign it)

Point is, every phrase in that book was carved out of marble.  If you go back and read the whole series, you'll notice how precise every word is.  I read it now and I cannot believe I wrote some of that.

I can't do that anymore and it's giving me a complex.

I'm going to blame grad school.  I had some great mentors and workshop leaders who encouraged me to better develop my unique style, but a few of them attempted to homogenized my voice.  One objected to my snarky, bittersweet style, saying that all I did was "shit all over people" (hey, it worked for Tucker Max, who I hate but who made a lot of money with that style) another fussed over my use of the word "addiction" as though he alone owned and defined the word.  I haven't completed a piece of CNF (that wasn't a blog post) since.  And while both of them had valid points that I took to heart so much it crippled me, one has to wonder if it's a mentor's place to completely shut down a style they personally object to for the so-called "betterment" of the student.

It's tough to say what will sell and what won't, and I'm completely against the "cheerleader" style of mentoring--after all, I didn't pay $25 large to have someone smile at me and tell me I'm great.  I have a mother, thank you.  But I think a good mentor should be able to help you develop your voice, as it's on the page, without interjecting their personality into it.

As for my fiction, I feel like it's all just a bunch of words on a page.  Phrases feel like I've written them a million times, and when I read Raymond Chandler or Tom Perrotta or Lauren Groff I cannot, for the life of me, figure out how the hell they do it.  How do they craft these phrases, like glass birds?  (Lovingly and over five years, I imagine).  Even when I get work back from my writing partner, I can look at his work and say, "yep, that's his."  It's as though he invented the sentence for his own personal use.  Mine just sort of lay there, like dead fish.

Ugh.

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.

Star Wars is Officially Stupid

I've been engaged in an ongoing battle with my Star Wars fandom for the better part of a year, and before that, when Harry Plinkett helped me figure out why The Phantom Menace was so, so terrible.

(Quick side story--my friend Dave, whose wife Rachel was in The Odd Couple with me and who are two of our favorite people to hang out with because they laugh easily, explained Plinkett's review to his eight year old daughter by saying she could watch it when "she (is) older and George Lucas was dead.")

And while I recently decided that Back to the Future is the superior trilogy, I still get a little wistful for my Star Wars geekdom.  I want to make an Endor terrarium or Wookie Cookies.

Not anymore.

Not with the release of the Star Wars game for Kinect.  Especially not the part where Han Solo Dances.  You see, the last time I checked, Han Solo wasn't on Dancing With The C-List Actors You Hate. (I don't mean David Arquette when I say this--everyone knows he's a triple Z-list actor who was a has-been by Arizona's definition of when life begins). And worse,  they rewrote awful pop songs so that they had Star Wars lyrics.  My sister Hilary did that when she was eight. Her rendition of "Obi Wan Kenobi" (to the tune of Merle Haggard's "Okie from Muskogee") still makes me laugh when I think about it, but you don't see me putting it up as a dance remix.

A lot of people my age are prequel defenders.  They sit there and they try to tell me that George Lucas would never do anything to hurt them.  They insist that he wrote them as one big mythology and that he knows what he's doing.  And yet here we all are, dancing like goons in front of our TV to "Hologram Girl" (sung to Gwen Steffani's abomination "Hollaback Girl").  And because we are perpetual children fed fat on irony and quirk, believing that our helicopter parents will take care of everything while outwardly voicing that we don't trust the government or our teachers or anyone else.  Lucas is just another extension of the helicopter parent, assuring us that all is well, goodnight.  It would never occur to us to believe that the childhood he created for us was made solely out of greed.  The mean nasty black president is out to take our guns and force us to have partial  abortions performed by Muslim doctors, but George Lucas selling us out?  Never.

New flash: George Lucas is a dick.  If this doesn't prove that he is money-grubbing clown shoes, I don't know what will.  Look, I don't take Star Wars as some sort of great generational mythology.  It was a good space movie, and Han Solo was my first love . . . but I take it with the seriousness I take any story--I expect it to be told in an even tone.  There is nothing in Han Solo's character than indicates he would bust a move.  Lando, maybe, but not Han freakin' solo.  Leave the dance routine to Oola.

So Star Wars is sort of dead to me now.  I can't be that fan who thinks that this is cool and will happily eat whatever shit George Lucas shoves into my face. At least the Back to the Future game stayed within the relative realm of the story.

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

All fiction writers lie.  It’s part of the job.  Most of us have never swung a mighty broadsword, yet we wield the words describing the blade’s silver arc as though we have.  Getting to live a life or be someone you're not is one of the most enjoyable parts of the craft.

Lying about publication, however, is a different story.

Pictured: Publication

It’s a disturbing trend I’ve noticed recently, especially among writers just coming out of writing programs.  These programs are notoriously competitive, so publishing is a way for students to separate themselves from the rest and secure mentors who want to work with them instead of the other way around.  It’s a good way to network, and it also sets you up to take the flaming dog poopie of rejection, as well as the bags of candy of acceptance when you're away from the teat of your mentor.

However, lying about your credits won't get you anywhere.

For instance, a woman I knew told everyone that she’d just sold her romance novel to a “major publisher” and “was asked by her agent” not to disclose her advance (not that anyone was asking; that’s rude).  A little research revealed that her “major publisher” was an e-book vanity press and her “agent” was, in all likelihood, a webpage she put her up herself.  When word got out, it damaged her reputation among other writers in her field, but it didn’t stop her from lying again about another manuscript with another major press that, you guessed it, turned out to be less than she’d bragged about.  She was a joke, and everyone knew it.

It’s worse when professional writers do this.  Let’s call this one writer Dominick.  Dominick had a moderately successful collection in the mid 2000’s.  He hasn’t published much since.  Yet he continues to tell people that he has a novel coming out “next fall.”  It’s been “next fall” for four years, with no novel in sight.  

And here's a fun tip--if you've never been to prison, don't base your entire platform on the story that you have.  There's this thing called "the internet," maybe you've heard of it, and you don't have to be a P.I. to run a criminal background check.  All you need is about five bucks and a few minutes.  Things like child abuse and drug addictions are a little harder to prove wrong, but your lie will eventually unravel and then Oprah will yell at you.  And no one wants that.

The absolute worst lie is the “forthcoming” novel when there’s no agent, no publisher and no release date.  All of us have a “forthcoming” novel, on our laptops, in notebooks or in our heads—but most of us don’t utter a peep about it until we’ve got a contract in our hands and a galley copy to show our friends.    

Here's how to use "forthcoming" properly: My story "Purgatory Blues" is forthcoming in The Citron Review. It should be up sometime next week.  It's real.  It's happening.  It's forthcoming.

Save the fiction for your book.  If you’ve accomplished something, whether it’s a 3-book deal or flash fiction in an e-zine, share it for what it is.  Be proud of what you accomplish no matter how small it may seem.  Writing isn’t easy, and publishing is even harder—but lying just makes you look like a jerk.

Anne Perry is O.G.

Original Gangsta

I watched Heavenly Creatures last week and it really freaked me out.  Screaming, bloody people do that to me. Watching it before bed was probably not the smartest thing I've ever done.

But one of the things I learned about this is that Edgar-winning mystery writer Anne Perry is, in face, Juliet Hulme, who, other than being played by Kate Winslet was, in 1954, convicted of beating her best friend's mother's head in with a brick wrapped in a stocking.

She writes crime novels now.

Poser

Let's just say, hypothetically, that I had a professor who, if rumors are true, did hard time.  Let's call him "The Grimace" because, well, that's what he looks like.  And let's also say that this professor published a book of crime stories.  But he, unlike Perry, won't talk about it.  Absolutely refuses.  And I suppose I can see why--although it's a great platform for a mystery writer and being a wuss about it only proves my point that Anne Perry is O.G.  Sure, she doesn't go around bragging about bludgeoning a woman to death, but it's there on her wikipedia page for the world to see.  No sense hiding from what someone can track down.

She knows murder because she's murdered someone.  Her novels have an admitted raw intensity because she knows what it's like to take a human life.  It's not what I would recommend as a course of action for a mystery writer, but damn if it doesn't--in some weird way--make me admire her just a little bit more.  Maybe because she's not such a weenie about admitting it.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I am grateful this Thanksgiving for, besides my readers, finally having enough sense to say to hell with National Novel Writing Month and writing my book on my own damn time.  For finally figuring out that Chris Baty is just a dope with a website who doesn't determine my writing career, and that this book will get done when it gets done and no sooner.

Morrissey once sang, "There's more to life than books, you know," and I'm starting to realize that.  For so long, I defined myself by my work.  I had to work harder, stronger and more than everyone else because I had to prove that I could, that I wasn't just another lazy slob like everyone thought I was.  It was routinely suggested by both friends and family that I not even bother applying to most colleges, because I wasn't good enough to get in.  What that instilled in me was a merciless drive to succeed, to prove them wrong, often at the cost of my health or employers taking advantage of that ethic as a means of paying me less for more work . . . but this past year has shown me that none of that really matters.  What matters is the friends that I love, my fluffy kitten and my boyfriend.

This isn't to say that I've given up on writing or that I'm taking a step back.  Not at all.  I still have that drive to succeed, but it's going to be on my terms.  I'm not going to kill myself for another book that won't sell.  I'm not going to beg for acceptance anymore.  And it is that peace, that faith that something larger than myself will sustain me, that I am most grateful for this year.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone. 

F*** You, NaNoWriMo

I had a major breakthrough with NaNoWriMo this week--it can go to hell.

It's not that I'm giving up.  I planned to write 60K in 30 days.  It's a doable goal, and I intend to finish it . . . but if for whatever reason, I don't, my life is not over because some twerp in California decided 30 days makes or doesn't make me a novelist.

NaNoWriMo plays on a culture of selfishness--it encourages people, good, normal people, to abandon their families, their pets, their pleasures in life to indulge in a pathetic attempt to create meaning.  These are not real novelists.  A quick glance at the Published page reveals very, very few legitimate authors (and if you've ever read The Night Circus, you can tell it was written in 30 days--maybe less) at legitimate presses--a lot of POD and micro presses. 

No, these are housewives and teenagers, helping themselves to a chunk of time at the beginning of the ultra-busy holiday season to demand This is MY time!!!  I'm a NOVELIST!



Let's face it, Jesse Pinkman
is just a teenage Shane Vendrell



I had two choices the other night after working 2 of my 5 jobs--write 2K in a book I honestly couldn't care less about, or watch Breaking Bad with my darling boyfriend, who I hadn't seen all day, and snuggle my kitten.  I chose Breaking Bad, and not just because Aaron Paul is the flavor of the week.

So I graded some papers and watched Breaking Bad.  Aaron Paul is a hottie.  And Ian was sweet, and Bosco was cuddly, and when I am on my deathbed, I doubt I'll be saying "I wish I'd spent more time in my office working."

It's admirable that NaNoWriMo people want to write.  I'm glad it's helping me get back in the daily routine.  Maybe it will remind me to update this blog a little more.  But in the end, you have to ask yourself why you're really doing it.  Is it to feel special, to accomplish something, to escape your miserable life?

Writing can be enjoyable.  It doesn't have to be a coffee-swilling, hair-pulling, cat-ignoring frenzy.  But a story needs more than 30 days to unfold.  I have an outline and I'm still discovering new things about my characters (like that the mother in this book is the same Virginia Davenport that protagonist Oren Barry fantasizes about in the other novel).  The "No Plot, No Problem!" slogan is a recipe for frustration and disaster.

Why only be a novelist in November?  Instead of chaining yourself to the desk while you could be eating cranberry sauce with your kids, why not write 1K a day over two months?  Or give yourself Sundays off and take a walk.  Don't give Chris Baty another moment of your precious time. 

NanoWriMo Week 1

I'm three days in and at 4K . . . I'm doing 2000 words a night in about an hour and a half, and I haven't done Day 3 yet.  The novel is breezing along, thanks to the outline I meticulously constructed the week before.  That's the secret to NaNoWriMo.  Outlines.  Plan it down to the bone marrow and you'll never lack for something to write.

I'm almost enjoying it, actually.  Seeing my word count on the little graph each night, type-typing away, finally feeling good about writing again.  (Finally writing again, frankly.)  2K isn't an unattainable amount by any stretch of the imagination, it just requires some patience and the ability to say no to TV, no to kitten, no to friends dropping by for a few hours each day. It's only for a month, after all, and only for a few hours.  And besides, TV is mostly wasting time anyways.  Even if it's The Shield.

NaNoWriMo: The Nathan Rabin of Book Writing

The last time I did National Novel Writing Month was my senior year of college--and after about a week, I got bored and moved on to something more interesting.  I "won" (completed 50K) in 2003 and 2002 (yipee) but decided that I was finally past the realm of part-time writer and onto bigger and better things.

Well, the other night I had a cool dream, and I plotted that dream out to novel-length--YA novel length, to be exact.  And with a million other things going on, I realized that NaNoWriMo might be a good way to partition out some time to focus solely on finishing this book.  YA novels generally clock in around 60K, which is only 2K a day, 500 over the usual NaNoWriMo haul.  I'm a workaholic, so the only way I can allow myself to do anything I'm interested in is if I lable it work.  I need goals and limitations, otherwise I use what little idle time I have watching MST3K.  By structuring myself into to 30-day limitations, I have to go hard or go home.  But while persusing around the website, I noticed two things:

1) Like most people who post on forums, the NaNoWriMo forum goons take themselves WAY too seriously.  Heaven forbid you write down a note that you might use later (and possibly word for word!  oh my!) in your novel.  I get it, we're supposed to write a whole novel just in that one month, but that brings me to my next point

2) NaNoWriMo hates working writers.  Camp NaNoWriMo boasts as one of their objectives, "To be able to mock real novelists who dawdle on and on, taking far longer than 30 days to produce their work."


Fuck you, NaNoWriMo.
 
I apologize on behalf of all those asshole "writers" out there who dare labor over their work, polishing it to perfection and submitting it, often times to multiple rejections and, if they're lucky, to rewrites by editors and agents towards publication, because you're better than them.  You wrote a novel.  You jacked off 50K of bad spelling, plot holes, over-wrought prose, cliches and tripe over a 30 day period and that makes you special.  I apologize to all the "auto mechanics, out-of-work-actors and middle school English teachers"  who are so offended by the works between hard and paper covers in their libraries and bookstores.  I apologize on behalf of Raymond Chandler, John Steinbeck, Dorothy Allison, Jane Austin, Mary Shelley, Alexander Dumas, Lewis Carroll, L. Frank Baum. Roald Dahl, George Orwell, Flannery O'Conner, Michael J. Nelson, Jim Kelly, Mike Kimball, and all those other jerks who dared to waste time on their craft.
 
When did sub-par become admirable?  I get it, the goal of NaNoWriMo is to practice writing without tearing down, but sneering at and spitting upon working writers who struggled to get recognition is a dick move.  It manifests that continued theory among artists that if you have to work for something, you're not a genius, as though some magical fairy exists solely to dig through people's desk drawers and pull out manuscripts deemed worthy of admiration.  It's Rabin-esq, and it's wrong on all fronts.
 
I'm kind of sorry I signed up for it, honestly.  As one of those criminal professional writers who takes herself and her career seriously, I don't know if I want to be lumped in with a bunch of bitter housewives and teen girls in Twilight tee-shirts.  I don't want to comiserate about what a hardship it is because I live that hardship every day.  Writers block blows, but I don't get the luxury of logging onto a forum and bitching--I have until 3pm on Tuesday to get a story done, and if I don't, there's a big gaping hole in the Hometown Oneonta where it would go.  I labor over essays short stories that get rejected time and time again.  But I love it, and that's why I keep doing it.  And I will keep doing it long past November.  I was doing it long before November. 
 
Writers stock our bookshelves.  They make our TV shows interesting.  They fill our newspapers and our magazines with more than just ads.  How about giving them a little credit, NaNoWriMo, instead of ripping them to shreds?

YOU ARE TEARING ME APART, NANOWRIMO!

The Library Book Project

For those of you who weren't helping me haul boxes on Sunday (thanks Eeon, Mike and Tim!), I moved (again) to a little two-bedroom rental house on a private road with a yard that you could film an episode of Justified on.  And for those of you who haven't known me very long, I have a rich and sordid history of moving.  Since I was eighteen, I have packed and unpacked sixteen times, making this most recent move my seventeenth.  On average, I stay in a place for about nine months, the longest stay being three years on Chestnut Street . . . and in all likelyhood, we'll be packing up and moving out of this place in the spring, with the intentions of buying a house.

Each time I've moved, I've gotten rid of more stuff.  This time, I got rid of a ton of clothes and books.  All my lit mags were handed off to Mike, a hefty chunk of pulp novels went to Amber in exchange for bagfuls of awesome sweaters and dresses (and sweater-dresses, including a blue-green hooded one I've craved ever since I first saw her wear it at the Green Earth).  Records and DVDs went to both the Oneonta Teen Center (including the first entry in "Teenage Wasteland," Empire Records) and The Vault in exchange for a few bucks.  Clothes that weren't traded went to the consignment shop, and clothes that they wouldn't take went to Salvation Army.  Some books went to a used book store, others were given away . . . and those that I couldn't bear to part with were packed up and stored.

I've decided that, for the length of time that I'm here, I'm going to rely on the library and books handed off to me by friends.  I realized that I rarely read a book twice (with the exception of The Long Goodbye, which I read yearly) and that having a ton of books on hand did little but take up space.  I realized that simply having The Handmaiden's Tale on my bookshelf did not mean that I was ever going to read it.

Also, I recently discovered the pleasures of going to the library.  Unlike bookstores, which seem very very daunting to me, a library has a sense of quiet order to it.  There's the sense that, because you're reading on borrowed time, that the reading takes priority.  If I take out The Handmaiden's Tale, I'd better read it in 14 days or cough up a quarter for each day I delay.  The best part is that the library is free, and there's no clutter or anything to pack up at the end.  If I don't like a book, I can take it back, no questions asked.

This isn't to say I don't support the Green Toad, my local bookstore.  I love small bookstores much more than any big-box mega-store on the planet.  And this doesn't mean I'll be getting an e-reader anytime soon either.  I like the feel of a book in my hand, and I like to give books as gifts. 

But I consider this an opportunity and a challenge--if this was a stunt blog, I'd make careful notes about my library experience as a way of preserving libraries or other such silliness.  Heaven knows I'm not so great about keeping up with the blog and the last thing I need is another column to write.  If anything, this new undertaking is a way of clearing out the clutter of my life and of getting back out in the community.  Ordering a book for a penny on Amazon doesn't force me to interact with anyone (not even the mailman, because our mailbox is located at the absolute top of our driveway).  Having to go to the library will force me to engage with others. . . and I don't think that will be a bad thing.

Kurt Sutter IS Nathan Rabin in PEOPLE LIBBY HATES

Despite writing, acting on and executive producing The Shield, Kurt Sutter still manages to be a tremendous douchebag.  Not only did he throw a pissy little bitch fit because the lame Sons of Anarchy didn't get nominated for an Emmy, but now he's saying that, not only is TV written for men, but "I've learned that men write shows about the struggles of men better than women. . . men can write male characters more accurately."

Pictured: Kurt Sutter's Emmy

Fuck you, Kurt Sutter.

Never mind that Shawn Ryan said that there is no reason why women, who make up the majority of the TV watching audience, shouldn't be in the writer's room.

And never mind that FX, on both which Sons of Anarchy and The Shield ran, is pretty much the ass network.  There are naked male backsides galore.  You can't tell me that isn't there for the ladies to enjoy . . . your arguement doesn't wash, Sutter, so shut your stupid mouth.
I am a broad and my male characters kick ass.  Check out the Jay in "The Weather Girl" or Johnny in "Johnny Strikes Up The Band".  Don't you sit there and tell me that because of gender I don't understand how to write the other.  It's this kind of bullshit sexism that makes middle-age women blame the patriarchy for why they can't masturbate and then I have to listen to them read lurid descriptions of "self-discovery" at open mics and other such literary events.
You're ruining it for everybody, Sutter.  Just because you behave like little girl who didn't get a Bratz doll for her 6th birthday doesn't mean the rest of us have to.