The journey begins

September 11

2011-09-08T10:35:00.000-07:00

2001 was a lousy year for me. I’d worked the first half of the year as a personal assistant to an unreasonable (and unreasonably wealthy) woman, and quit in desperation in June, thinking I’d get a new job quickly. Instead I spent the summer temping, or trying to. Going from agency to agency to take their tests, interview, answer the same questions, and not getting jobs.

In August I got to be a PA on a film, shot in SoHo. We had a production office in one of the Towers, on the 94th floor. I went to and from the home base on 23rd Street to the World Trade Center, each time showing ID, getting a little photo taken, and taking two sets of elevators to drop something off to Ingaborg, our production assistant. I never actually ran into Ingaborg, and I was always glad; everyone said she was cranky.

Each time I went into the office in the tower, I took a little time to look out the window, at the Statue of Liberty and Governor’s Island and the ocean beyond. It was beautiful, awe-inspiring; it made me feel small. I’d lean on the square desk to chat with the receptionist; I’d grab some hard candy from the purple dish on the square side table; I’d sit in the brown leather square chair, scuff my shoes on the light brown industrial-strength carpet.

The movie had wrapped by September 11, and I was asleep in bed when the attack happened. My roommate called and told me to turn on the TV; stupidly, I asked, “What channel?” After the first tower fell I called my mom and told her to do the same thing. When she asked, “What channel?” I said, “It doesn’t matter.” I told her what had happened, and said, “and one tower has fallen. There’s only one tower of the World Trade Center standing.” That’s when I felt some hysteria creep in, and said, “But I’ve been unemployed all summer, and I’m sitting here on my bed watching it on TV!” And for the first time in four months, I was glad to be unemployed.

After the second tower fell I walked to the Red Cross Center on Amsterdam; there was a line at least a hundred deep to donate blood. I’m O-Negative; surely they would need my blood! But they had no capacity for all the people who’d shown up. They showed us into an auditorium for a briefing on volunteering, and we all signed up. I never got a phone call.

After the briefing I started walking downtown, toward the smoke. It took a couple of days for the stench of burning metal and rubber and bodies—the fire that didn’t die until November—to make it to the Upper West Side, but I smelled it that day when I got to Franklin Street, which was the furthest point south civilians were allowed. I pictured, as I walked, the square desk, the chairs, the carpet of our production office. I pictured the candy dish, fixating on wondering if it was crushed or burned or just fell. I fixated on these little things in order not to picture the receptionist, whose name I never learned. Or Ingaborg.

At Franklin Street there was a large crowd gathered, gaping at the crystal blue sky, nothing remaining but a puff of light brown smoke. The wind kicked up a few times and blew rough little particles in our faces. “That’s asbestos, folks,” the policeman said. “You’re gonna want to get out of here.” When I hear of the Zadroga bill, the huge number of health problems suffered by the first responders, I think back to that policeman and I’m glad he shooed us away. I hope he isn’t one of the ones suffering.

By this time the subways were running again, and, exhausted from my five-mile walk downtown, I took it back home. The cars were silent, people staring blankly. I got above ground, and by now the signs were out: “pray for our nation,” “God bless America,” “Candlelight service tonight.” People were out walking, like it was a holiday, but through the streets too, mixing with the traffic. Everyone looked dazed. Some stores had a TV or radio set up out front, and people gathered in front of them. It was a community of strangers who suddenly needed each other.

The Missing signs came out the next day, pictures of people when they were alive and happy and living the lives that ended so abruptly. They stayed up until mid-November; eventually the weather took them down. Ingaborg was on one of those signs.

I got a job two months later basically across the street from what was by then Ground Zero. Every morning I walked past the church that served as a rest station and a memorial, with more signs fixed to the fence. These signs didn’t say “Missing,” though; they said “In Memory of.” The dust had been cleaned from some places, but not others; there was a bicycle chained to a street post, decorated with flowers; probably from a delivery man. The fires were still burning underground.

I don’t pretend to be affected any more than anyone else by this tragedy; I wasn’t down there when it happened, I didn’t dodge falling debris or run for my life. I lost someone I knew only by notes and other people’s comments. And yet every September 11 I feel it so very deeply. I look for the names I saw on those signs, I read survivors’ and families’ stories. And I cry.

POSITANO!

2011-03-28T14:43:00.001-07:00

Days one and two....

Sirenland, Day One…

Arrived in Rome yesterday at 8 a.m., which for me was sometime in the middle of the night. 3 a.m.? They hadn’t turned their clocks ahead yet (they did the very next day), so yes, 3 a.m. I’d slept about two hours total on the flight, and frankly was grateful for that much. So I went to the hotel and left my baggage and went out for some sightseeing. Rome is really easy to navigate, if you can follow the map. One street name changes abruptly into another, and one side street off an avenue has a different name than the one going off the other side. But I made it to the Trevi Fountain, the Spanish Steps, the Piazza Navona, the Pantheon, and St. Peter’s. I only sat down a couple of times because I knew that once I stopped I wouldn’t be able to start again. And I only had gelato once.

It was a gorgeous day—just beautiful, probably high fifties/low sixties. It was Saturday, so the crowds were amazing. I didn’t even try to get into St. Peter’s because the line was so long, and you had to go through metal detectors first. Had it been my first stop, I probably would have, but by then I was wiped out. I made it until 3 pm and went to the metro (I’d crossed Rome by then) and got back to my hotel, intending to sleep 3 hours and then go out again. Well, the alarm went off—I do remember hearing it—but I didn’t get up until 9. And then I was starving. So I went to a trattoria about 3 blocks away, ate too much dinner (but it was so good!) and went back, took a Tylenol PM to make sure I got to sleep on local time, and then went to bed and slept again. Nice. Today, day two, I don’t feel jet lagged at all—a first for a European trip.

This morning I went to Termini Station to get the train to Naples. I had ordered my ticket online, but the machine wouldn’t print one out, so I went to the ticket booth to get it printed. I showed the ticket to a woman at the counter and she stared and stared and stared. “This date,” she said. “Three-twenty-seven-eleven?” I freaked out a bit—was today not the 27th?—“We write the date different here in Italy. We write month first.” Okay. Right. I nodded, but she seemed mad. So she kept staring at the printout. “You pay in dollars?” she asked. I nod. That’s all I could do, because you know, it was online. She says, “You are in Italy. We use the euro.” I stared at her some more. In situations like this I find it best not to attempt a language I am less than fluent in, lest things get lost in translation on my end. She huffed out of her seat over to a supervisor, and I’m thinking, oh crap, did I waste $86 buying this online? She huffed back and handed me a ticket, which her supervisor helpfully printed out for her. The lady seemed quite mad at me, but she said, “Is okay.” And I got on.

I met with a fellow attendee, Ellen, and her husband Fred. We didn’t know quite where to go, so we got onto the first car and wondered if we had assigned seating, if we should put our bags above our heads, or what. A woman came onto the train to show us the baggage area to put the bags, and we said okay. Then a conductor rushed over and tried to speak with Fred, who doesn’t speak a word of Italian. I heard him try Italian and then Spanish, so I rushed over and said, “Yo hablo espanol!” Because, you know, that’s a language I am fluent in. He gestured at the woman who’d left and said, “Que miren sus maletas. Ella se les va a quitar. Es gitana.” HUH WHA? “Ella nos va a robar?” I said. He nodded. He said that once the train got moving it was safe to leave the bags there, but before it left she was counting on us going to our seats where we couldn’t see them, and then she’d take them. Nice to know. Fred sat right next to the door and watched the bags until we left.

And we got to Naples, where we were met by a driver and whisked to his Mercedes (we spent about 3 minutes total in Naples) and driven along some incredibly windy roads to Positano.

Positano is incredible. It’s a bit like Sorrento, except much steeper. It’s cut into the side of the mountain, which seems taller than the Rockies, at least those around our house, and it’s so steep that the roads have to be cut into the side in hairpin turns to go up and down. They warned us to take Dramamine. I didn’t, because I don’t often have that problem (and the resulting sleepiness isn’t worth it…maybe I would have felt differently had I thrown up. Actually, my car-mates would have felt differently had I thrown up.); I just got very sleepy toward the end.

So I got here and checked into my room, which is a junior suite, spacious, tiled with white and painted ceramic tile on the floor, a white bedspread and a Marie-Antoinette mini-canopy (just at the center of the head of the bed, with the curtain extending down from the ceiling) and a couch and chairs and a luxurious bathroom with jetted tub and, best of all, a little balcony facing the bay. I can see kids playing on the black-sand beaches (not going in the water; it’s too chilly) and the boats on the water and a big island off in the distance. Pretty incredible.

I took a walk down through the tourist center to get lunch (our first official event isn’t until 5, and that’s yoga; dinner isn’t until 8), got a fantastic sandwich at a hole-in-the-wall deli-type place. I wanted some fruit but the prices were abominable, like 2.40 euros per apple. So I left. At the following deli the prices were the same, and suddenly it dawned on me, the price was per kilo, not per piece. I asked the proprietor to be sure, and yep, that was the case. Happy to find that my Italian is actually not atrocious. It’s not great, but I’m communicating! Yay!

The vista from below is quite incredible, too. It’s one thing to look at these towns from pictures, looking at the buildings built into the side of a mountain; it’s another to look up at them from the beach, seeing rock jutting out from the sides of houses. Very, very cool. The mountains seem to be higher than Mt. Ogden, but that might just be because we’re in them, from the bottom up.

We had a dinner with everyone, in the dining room that has about two dozen chandeliers made up of tea light candles, all lit. It must take several workers to light them all. Seafood risotto as the primo, fish with a lemon-butter sauce and grilled tomatoes as the secondo, and crème brulee for the dessert (though mine was overcooked, darn it). There was no option for chicken or veal.

A postscript to day one: Ellen and Fred survived the gitana, but her wallet was stolen when she went to lunch and left her bag across the back of her chair. In her defense, they had just flown in from San Diego, gotten an hour of sleep, and gone straight to Naples and then to Positano, so they’d been traveling about 30 hours at that point. Unfortunately the thieves got her driver’s license, 4 credit cards and $1000 cash.

Day Two

The first day of the real workshopping. We had a free breakfast, which was spectacular: all kinds of fruits, fresh homemade ricotta, other cheeses, pastries, eggs if you want them, juices. And looking over the bay, wow oh wow. After breakfast we went into a salon room and started talking about the first short story. We started out awkwardly, because we don’t know each other and don’t know how everyone will react to workshopping etc., but quickly got comfortable. And Dani Shapiro, my teacher, is really incredible. She put into words a lot of things I have felt while writing but couldn’t quite put my finger on, and things I had felt while reading Ryan’s piece that again I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
Several of us went down to the seaside for lunch. I was good and had a salad. Well, a Caprese salad with mozzarella, so maybe that’s not that good, but I wasn’t hungry because of the large breakfast. I also forewent dessert, just to brag. (I’m going to go crazy enough in the days to come.) Then we had a group yoga/meditation session (heavier on meditation than yoga) and then I ran half an hour on the treadmill. Now we have free time before a group discussion at 6 pm. I have classical music going on the speakers and the doors open to hear the sea outside and the intermittent rain. Sigh.

I guess I need to go write something real now.

After dinner now.

Later in the afternoon, we had a discussion about publishing with the teachers of the conference and the Sirenland Fellow for 2011, Karen Thompson Walker, who just sold her first novel to Random House. Google her. You will be impressed. She is in my workshop group, and will be workshopping the first 25 pages of the novel, because it just sold and she’ll have to do some rewrites. I actually feel quite fortunate to be in her group and get a sneak peek!

Several of us then took a bus ride up to a rather famous restaurant, Il Ritrovo. You can take steps up, but I believe it would take 45 minutes at least, going vertically the whole way. The restaurant pays for the car service to and from—it’s in their best interest to do so—and unfortunately one of our group members got severely car sick (did NOT throw up, thank heaven, but didn’t eat a thing and left early) from the hairpin turns up and up and up. I kind of wish I had been there during the day, just for the view. Ah well. I had a fabulous pasta dish with a light cream sauce (sounds like an oxymoron, but it’s not!) and mushrooms and then nibbles from the guy who got the 4-course meal. The waiter was excited to find out we were Sirenlanders, because at least one group from Sirenland comes up every year. He kept loading us with extra food, too: Italian cookies, extra cake, extra pasta, extra wine. I guess he might have felt bad that Pete kept getting food from his courses and the rest of us only had pasta, and felt like we all had to eat all the time. Fun stuff. He also asked us to sign his guest book, and proudly pointed out the page signed by Bruce Springsteen. All right, that will do.

posting....

2011-02-05T13:42:00.000-08:00

Okay, time to check in again. Because something has happened.

I got some pretty great news in December. I applied to a writers’ conference called Sirenland, held at a gorgeous hotel (Le Sireneuse) in Positano, Italy (Amalfi Coast!) once a year, thrown by the editors of the short story magazine One Story. Prestigious writers teach workshops, and they open it to only 20 writers: 10 fiction, 10 nonfiction. I found out about this in October, shortly before their deadline, and decided to apply. I didn’t tell a lot of people about it, because again, they only accept 10 fiction writers...what were the odds? So I applied and then tried to put it out of my head. I was mostly successful. Sometimes it popped up, reminding me, You haven’t heard...you don’t know the status of your application...ten fiction writers...330 “likes” on Facebook.... And then I put it out of my head again. I’m not superstitious, most of the time, but it never hurts to knock on wood and throw salt over your shoulder and avoid black cats and do what you can not to jinx something. I am not superstitious. I promise. I subscribe to One Story, and in one of their issues they included a postcard with a great view of Positano. I gently set it aside—where I could see it, but where it wouldn’t taunt me. (website: http://www.sirenland.net/)
They said we’d hear by the end of December, so I decided not to think about it as soon as I went home for Christmas, the 18th. On the 21st I visited my grandpa in the nursing home (he has since returned to his own home, and he’s happy) and started singing along with the 93-year-old blind woman who was playing Christmas carols on the piano. My grandma said, “Would you put on a show here?” I said sure. Now, ordinarily, I’m pretty reticent about singing in front of people. (I’m insecure, living in New York where so many people have dedicated their lives to their voice lessons and singing, some making it and some not. I haven’t done that, have no intention of doing that, but I took about 10 years of voice lessons. But I don’t want to be compared to the professionals.) But...well, at a nursing home the residents are old and there’s not a lot to do. They’re not going to be sitting there judging me, if you know what I mean. And I knew it would make both Grandma and Grandpa very happy.

So Grandma calls the nursing home recreation director over and introduces me and says, “Kathy would like to put on a show for us!” (“would like to” was a little too strong, but I didn’t correct her.) The woman got this look on her face, and said, “I’ll be right back!” She zipped away, then zipped back. “Could you do it tonight? We’re having our Christmas party and the lady doing our show canceled.”
Again, if this had been in New York, it would have given me serious pause. For all you know, the residents of the nursing homes were professional singers themselves, and they could heckle you and shake their canes at your lack of breath control or incorrect vibrato technique. But I was in a small town in Utah. No guarantee of no professional singers in the audience, but I was more willing to take that chance. “Sure,” I said.
So my mom and I went home and pulled out a ton of Christmas music, ran through it on the piano (she played) and I wrote up a bit of a program. That night we went to the nursing home party. I dressed in my green sweater with a festive-if-slightly-crumbly red and gold ribbon tied around my waist. Kathleen, the coordinator, stood at the microphone and introduced me, and I walked up there, confident. Sparkly. My mom took her place at the piano. And right before I began, as my mom played the intro to “Silent Night,” Kathleen went to the corner and shouted, “Dessert is served!”

Walkers creaked, wheelchairs squeaked, and lots of people oohed over the desserts. They weren’t spectacular, but I imagine they were nicer than what they usually serve there in the nursing home, so I can’t be upset. It was interesting, though, trying to give a Christmas program when half of the room was paying attention and the other half was far more interested in examining and talking about their white cake with crushed candy cane frosting. Certainly no worries of heckling.

I did my program. There was something comforting in the fact that half of the room simply didn’t care. My grandma and grandpa cared enough for everyone. Even if Grandma was very annoyed that they'd served desserts at the same time, no one could have touched the smiles on their faces. And that made me happy. At the end of the program I sat back at their table, and my grandma hugged me and said, “They could have waited for the desserts!”

So I was feeling good about doing a nice thing for them when I got home. I went to look at email, with no expectations whatsoever, and saw one with the subject line: “Welcome to Sirenland.”
Could it be?? I mean, it sounded like an acceptance from that—but what if it’s a cruel joke, and you open it and the message says “...fandom!” (“You didn’t get in, but don’t worry, you can now be a fan, and you'll always have this connection...”)
But when I opened it, they meant it. “You’ve been accepted to Sirenland 2011. Competition was fierce.” Something like that. MY REWARD FOR BEING THE NURSING HOME CHRISTMAS PROGRAM! I shrieked and ran upstairs and told my mom. I hadn’t mentioned to her that I’d even applied (because too many times I’ve applied to something, talked about it for days, and then had to say, “No, I didn’t get it” when people follow up—really, people, shouldn’t my sudden silence tell you something?) so first I had to explain what it was, and then hop up and down for a while because I was excited. And my mom was so excited that it took about twenty seconds for her to ask how much it was going to cost me.

So I’m preparing for the conference. I got my flight over (with frequent flier miles!!) and a hotel in Rome for one night before and one night after. I’m finishing some writing to send in for the workshops. I’m practicing my yoga, because they’re bringing in a yoga teacher in the afternoons. (when I found out they were bringing in yoga, on top of everything else, I realized that when it's time to go home I will cry like a small child.) And I am thrilled about it.
So maybe saying “much has happened” is an exaggeration. But one big good thing happened, and in my world, that is the same thing. I got a new digital camera for Christmas so I can take better pictures! I’d better look at the manual.
If anyone is wondering: si, parlo italiano, ma ho bisogno di pratticarlo. Molto bisogno.

That’s all for this entry. Until next time.

A postscript: Does anyone else find Jane Seymour’s “open heart collection” from the Kay’s Jewelers commercial really unbearably ugly? Seriously, if a boyfriend or husband gave me that, I’d have to rethink some things.

A post! an actual post! Go Yankees...

2010-10-15T09:20:00.000-07:00

Hi all,

Well, a burst of creativity has hit me. It didn't hit me when I wrote that last post, but maybe early September. I was trying hard--in my head, at least--to finish my book by the end of the summer. And yet every time I pulled it up on the computer, I just couldn't...write...anything. It was very sad. And then by some crazy miracle, at the *end* of the summer, just to make sure I couldn't actually complete it in the summer, the creativity set in. I've been writing furiously since then and...the end is in sight. Another couple of small hurdles, I think, but...wow. Yay. (and for the question weighing heavily on EVERYONE'S mind: close third. Had to be.) And it's one of the reasons I haven't blogged: I really am abusing my wrists and some nights they scream, all my exercises notwithstanding.

So what to talk about? Chilean miners? Facebook movie? Screenwriting? None of the above?

I just read another blogger's post that said you shouldn't blog about (a) your writing or (b) yourself. No one wants to read it. Well, hmm. I don't live a crazy life of adventure, and the few developments with one of my screenplays (and there are some!) are best kept private for now. I don't want to jinx anything. So what can I post about? The Yankees?

I got limited season tickets for this year, and I got to go to 11 regular games (plus a few additional that I bought) and that

side note: why does my "autosave" keep failing?

Anyway. My season tickets were a fantastic investment. A great time. I have the drill down, which gate to enter, how to exit quickly and with a minimum of crowd-fighting, where to buy the hot dogs. Yes, reader, I eat them. I know it's appalling. So the regular season is over, but I also got first dibs on buying ALDS and ALCS tickets! And in half an hour, I can purchase (still-not-definite) World Series tickets! I have a timer set on my computer so that my limited attention span and short-term-memory will both be reined in. So I went to the first-home-game ALDS (good thing, since they only played one--a sweep!) and on Monday will go to first-home-game ALCS. I am nervous about Texas, I admit. They have Cliff Lee, and Cliff Lee seems to be the Yankees' daddy. (Pedro Martinez weeps)

Anyway. Let me spice this up a little bit with an amusing story (or so I thought, as did my friend Peggy) from the ALDS game.

I got tickets for the third tier. Exciting, as I've never sat that low before. (I'm poor!) But it turned out that we were in the *last* row of the third tier. Well, the seats were still fine. Off the third base line, which was a completely different perspective from my season seat. But after a little mental adjust, all was well. We also found ourselves right in a wind gust. The stadium is ventilated with large openings in the outer wall and one happened to be right behind and above us. I think my leather jacket and scarf would have been fine without the wind, but with the wind it was really chilly. Every time the wind actually came in, it was downright cold. Jeans are not great protection against wind, by the way. But the excitement carried us through. The wind, however, plays a part in this story.

We sat in front of two (separate) pairs of friends: two guys and two women. The women kicked the story off because they'd gotten garlic fries, which should really be renamed HOLY CRAP THEY'RE GARLICKY fries. They had a few each and quickly realized they couldn't handle any more. So, kickstarting a multi-row camaraderie, they offered them around. I had a few, had the aforementioned HOLY CRAP reaction; Peggy had a few, to the same; the guys had a few. Guy #1 then went to buy a soda and some peanuts, and since we'd broken the ice, he started offering us peanuts. Raw peanuts aren't my favorite, so I only took a couple. Peggy took a couple more. We ate peacefully (got nachos, too, which were disgusting...and yet we ate them. Happily we did not get sick.), enjoyed the game. Five innings pass, during which the Yankees play very well. Victory is in the air.

Then there's a commotion two rows down. There are 2 couples, one in their mid-twenties and the other in their mid-forties. The woman of the mid-twenties couple, attractive and very Bronx, is angry, standing and yelling at Peanut Guy. What's happened? Well, peanut detritus is all over her back. She's furious. I mean, furious. Peanut Guy apologizes profusely, but it's not good enough. She continues yelling. And then her Drunk Friend gets into the action. Drunk Friend also has some peanut detritus on her back and in her hair, and absolutely will not accept any apologies or explanation. Perhaps he wasnt' groveling enough? Drunk Friend stands, starts pointing her long, fake, Yankees-painted fingernails in Peanut Guy's face. Her repertoire of phrases consists mainly of two: "Grow up!" and "Be a man!" with the occasional "Asshole!" thrown in. After not too long, Peanut Guy is sick of this woman and her Yankee claws, and starts mocking her. She huffs up the stairs and leaves. For a moment. So Peggy and I are laughing hysterically, and I point out that we've gotten peanut detritus on Peanut Guy, too. She leans forward and mentions that to him--just as Yankee Claw Drunk Lady comes back down the stairs. "Oh no!" he screams. "I've got peanut shit on me, too! I'm going to die!" And just as YCDL seems to have a rather limited repertoire of phrases, he switches into that mode, too. He's *yelling* this, over and over, and writhing and pretending to cry. YCDL is more angry and huffs up the stairs. This time, her husband decides to go after her. As we're on the last row, I hear their conversation. (Why can no one go past two phrases in this story?) "We're going now." "Relax." "We're leaving." "Relax." "Let's go." "It's the sixth inning! Relax!"

Peanut Guy disappears for a while. YCDL goes back to her seat. And Peanut Guy returns with FOUR bags of peanuts, which he hands out--to me and Peggy, to the six-year-old boy and his dad next to us, to the Garlic Fries people, and he offers a bag to YCDL. And Peanut Guy encourages us to get peanut crap on him. The six-year-old naturally takes him up on this inviatation, crushing his peanut shells and blowing them onto Peanut Guy; setting peanuts on Peanut Guy's head; placing crushed peanuts in Peanut Guy's hoodie. Peanut Guy is having the best time of his life, I think, shouting about how he's melting and going to die because people got peanuts on him.

Final straw for YCDL, who picks up one-two-three-FOUR empty beer cups, takes her Young Bronx Friend with her, and the two depart...for the Mohegan Sun Sports Bar. Their husbands remain. Peanut Guy says to his friend, "Look at 'em. They've never been happier in their lives." And that might have been true. Peanut Guy hands them a bag of peanuts, which they gratefully accept. Husbands and Peanut Guy share phone numbers and a promise to go out for a beer some time.

After YCDL and YBF leave, no more drama. Phil Hughes pitches 7 shutout innings, Kerry Woods allows only one hit, and the Yankees sweep the division series.

May my ALCS ticket (Monday!) provide as much satisfaction!

okay....

2010-06-17T07:40:00.001-07:00

As part of my goal to finish this book by the end of the summer (still technically a possibility, but right now not looking too likely) I have been saving my writing energies for the book, rather than a blog. How do those daily bloggers DO IT? Some of them don't write anything else and therefore can pour all their energies into their blog, but some are prolific novelists, screenwriters, TV writers...it boggles the mind. I seem not to be too capable of multi-tasking. Which is interesting, because I have "multi-tasking" on my resume. (Everybody does! It's required!)

Okay, the thing that stimulated this post. I have noted with interest the proliferation of readers of the Stieg Larsson books: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo etc. I first read about these books about a year ago, with rave reviews. I have seen many, many people on the subway reading this book. (When multiple subway readers have the same book, you know it's a phenomenon. See: Harry Potter, Twilight.) It's now in magazines, newspapers, was made into a foreign language film and is being made into an English-language film (possibly with Brad Pitt. One word: miscasting.)

I picked up a copy of the first book about a year ago, right before heading on a trip. I had a B&N gift card, and wanted something really good. (I used to be a huge book buyer, but space and money constraints have made me more cautious of late. No more buying books... that aren't *really good*.)

Reader, I couldn't finish it.

I am not squeamish. I grew up in a doctor's household, and gross medical tales at the dinner table were the norm. Our family now has 2 dermatologists and a periodontist, so the gross tales have multiplied. And I love them. I don't mind gory TV, pictures of open, ulcerated, weeping sores...rashes and gashes...broken bones...surgery. The only kind of surgeries I can't watch on TV are surgeries I've actually had--I saw Little Shop of Horrors shortly after having my 12-year molars removed and couldn't do the Steve Martin dentist scene (my periodontist brother now dresses up as that dentist for Halloween); I saw Minority Report shortly after one of my many Lasiks and couldn't watch the eye surgery stuff. But gore doesn't bother me. (Little g- gore. Actually, Al Gore doesn't really bother me, either.)

Here's what bothered me: unmitigated sexual violence. It turns out that the original title of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo was Men Who Hate Women. I think the original title explains it perfectly. There are lots, lots, lots of men who hate women in this book, and all of them take it out on the women in the book. Lisbeth Salander is a powerful woman...after she is raped (conventionally and anally, sorry to be graphic) and tortured by a man in power over her. Really, Reader, after reading this scene, I pictured an author completely turned on by what he was writing, writing it for no purpose than to get himself off. It's titillating, it's graphic, it's violent, it's mysoginistic. Woo hoo! Wow, how deep and graphic and horrible can I go? How badly can I shock? How can I best turn myself on?

And then Lisbeth gets back at the rapist! Woo hoo! She Tazes the tormentor and gives him a giant body tattoo, something like "I am a misogynistic rapist pig." (I don't have the book with me, so this may be slightly wrong.) Now I picture the author saying, But Lisbeth won't take it! She's raped and gets back at him and is utterly unfazed! True, she recovers for a few days in her bed alone, but then she takes control and gets the pig (and for the rest of the book doesn't suffer any emotional repercussions). But...now Lisbeth is a true woman. She's a victim.

It just doesn't sit right with me. Why do we need such graphic sexual violence? Why is it the norm in his book? Disclosure: as I haven't read the whole book, I am not *sure* how it ends. But as I do occasionally like to read the endings of books when I've only gotten midway through (a good reason not to like e-books, as far as I'm concerned), I believe it ends with the missing woman discovered. (SPOILER!) Turns out, all these years she was a sex slave in the basement of one of her relatives. Wow, I'm so turned on right now! Captive women, subjected to the worst torment and torture, physical, sexual, emotional...just keep 'em right where we want 'em! That's all they are anyway...subservient vaginas that exist only for our pleasure!

No, I haven't read the next two. A friend did. She said the second one opens up with a young girl, naked and tied to the bed, having been used, yes, as a sex slave. And it's her twelfth birthday. How can I go even farther? What's more shocking than 20 years as a sex slave? Getting in while they're young! Seeing it from the start! Yeah! Let's get into her head and really feel how subjugated and humiliated and tortured she is...so the other women can feel it too! And the men...can feel how the man feels. Powerful.

Is this feelings-postulating I'm doing a stretch? Possibly. It's possible that Mr. Stieg Larsson, RIP, was a feminist and wanted to wake the world to the horrors and dangers that, unfortunately, do exist. (See Jaycee Duggard.) But they didn't come off that way to me.

Okay, you say, it's one author, it's one series. An incredibly popular (and becoming more so all the time) series, but just one series. Why the big deal?

Well, publishing tends to follow trends, much the same way Hollywood does. (Try selling a drama--or anything that's not bawdy comedy or sci-fi or involving the word "superhero"--in Hollywood right now to a big studio. I dare you.) What's the big trend in YA lit? Vampires, of course! Vampires sell! We have sparkly vampires, vampires that go vegetarian, vampires in Victorian England, vampires that are fat...YA vampires, literary vampires...the list goes on. Vampires have sold huge for Stephenie Meyer, so every YA author and his typing dog is writing either a vampire or a supernatural novel. And they continue to sell. The NY Times gave a great review to Justin Cronin's literary vampire novel, good enough that I reserved it at the library. (I promise, if and when my space and time restraints lessen, I will purchase unused books!) The vampire trend might be peaking soon, but it's still going strong. And this "trend" trend is what worries me about the Stieg Larsson popularity. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of wannabe authors are going to read these books about Men who Hate Women and write their own. Only now Stieg has crossed the first boundary, so we need to make them more shocking! What's more shocking than a 12-year-old girl getting raped on her birthday? ... Let's see...

I'm not even going to provide examples. I'm sure there are things more shocking, more depraved. The human mind has no limits, unfortunately, where those are concerned. More people will write them, getting darker and darker, more and more evil, turning themselves on as much as others. And agents will rep them, even if they find the books abhorrent; just look at how much Stieg Larsson sold! And editors will buy them, because look at how much Stieg Larsson sold! Everyone will be looking for the next Stieg Larsson. Advances will increase, which will fuel more people to write them; look at how much money I could make! The books will get worse and worse. And then, when does society follow suit?

Obviously hypersexualization of children (and women) has been going on for a while now. Little girls who idolize Britney Spears (because her life has turned out so well), dress like Sex and the City women, whose parents buy them sweatsuits with "Juicy" emblazoned on the butt. Noah Cyrus, 9 years old, coming out with a lingerie line. (She's gotta be able to compete with sister Miley, who's turning into a bit of a ...fill in the blank. And how best to compete? Pushing boundaries!)

Not a subject change (bear with me): I did stand-up comedy (on a very amateur level) for about a year, several years ago. I enjoyed performing, working on comedy and refining my material, thinking of new things to make my wry observations on. But I hated hated HATED listening to the other comics. Some of them were funny and smart. And about 90% of them were not. They were simply not smart enough to think of regular observations that would make people laugh, so they figured they would talk abuot SEX. If I can shock them, I'll make them laugh, and that's the same thing as real comedy, right? I noticed a trend: the stupider the performer, the more crass and disgusting his or her routine. And I, for one, didn't want to sit there and absorb the stupid people's (not funny!) observations.

I actually don't get offended that easily. Sometimes I wish I got offended more easily, actually. But the stupid would-be comics offended me on a regular basis, partly because of the blue routines and partly because THEY WERE SO STUPID.

So to take this little offshoot back to my main thesis, I just don't understand why sex is the go-to topic...for comedy, for drama, for shock value. It demeans us all, but most of the time it demeans women (more than 50% of the population!) more. Women have something to give, something to say. Something important. It's coming from our heads, our hearts, our souls. It's born of experience and perception. Not sex. And this marginalization comes NOT JUST FROM MEN. Women are doing it too.

There's an article in this month's Atlantic magazine called "How Women are Taking Control - Of Everything." It's all about social order, more women going to college, more women supporting their families, women adapting to the new job landscape and becoming more malleable, to their own advantage. Why does it feel like we have control of nothing? All you have to do is watch a rap video and see four bikini'd women rubbing their behinds against one fully-clothed man (brandishing money and gold teeth) to know...things are not equal. Or at least, there are a lot of people who don't want them to be.

Do you ever wonder about the women in those videos? The ones who stick out their big round bare butts for photos that end up on magazine covers? What are they thinking? Of the paycheck? Of their allure? Are they supporting families? Or drug habits? Who knows? I wonder why there are so many women willing to put themselves into that situation. Because one video/picture/book just fuels another. It doesn't seem to get better. You hear a lot of "I'm in control of my sexuality," but the moment you put that picture into the hands of another person, you are literally giving up that control.

I'm sure there are people who disagree with me. I'm sure there are people who see no harm in pushing limits, who think any kind of art is fantastic, who don't think there's any problem with sexualizing the world. I just don't happen to be one of them. I don't want to read about subjugation, because I don't want to imagine myself as anything less than a whole person. I am grateful that people are buying books and keeping that business alive; I really am. (Some indie bookstore people are calling the trilogy The Girl Who's Paying Our Salaries for the Next Few Months.) But I am a whole person, and women of all shapes and sizes and colors and creeds are whole people, with intellect and personality and all kinds of different facets, of which our gender is only one. I have talents, likes, dislikes. And I immensely dislike The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

VOICE

2010-05-17T11:03:00.001-07:00

Wow. I wrote a whole post (about 1800 words) and posted it, then went back to reread some old posts and realized I had written a post that was STRIKINGLY SIMILAR -- like WAY TOO SIMILAR TO POST a few weeks ago. Sigh. Back to the drawing board.

Yes, I went (deeply!) into Omniscient Third and Close Third and the pendulum and Anna Karenina again. How did I not remember even a tiny glimpse of that? Wow.

But I wanted to write that mostly because I've had a productive few days on the book and it's because I've decided where I want the pendulum to swing. It's closer to Close Third but there is a little narration involved. I don't want to explain more than that. I am a crazy overthinker and sometimes I think myself right out of whatever I'm doing. I am hopeful that I can shut down that part of my brain enough to keep going and finish a first draft. I am continually hovering around 60,000 words right now--I have been revising a great deal but I seem to delete as much as I put in--and am hoping to get to 100,000 (the final goal, at least for the first draft; taking my cue from the agents' and editors' blogs I frequent) by the end of the summer.

Ooh, I just put it out there! End of summer! Can I do it? Yikes.

more baking

2010-05-04T10:14:00.000-07:00

Yes, Mondays are a hard day to blog. Sigh. And last night I went to the Yankees game, so I’m operating on two cylinders. But blog I must.

I have continued with my baking, though not as often. I was in Utah for a quick trip to see the family and I decided to bake for them, so I brought my book with me (all 10 pounds of it) and made the apple and pear tarts, which were particular favorites of mine. I wanted to do éclairs, but I ran out of time, preferring to run, jump, blow bubbles, and watch “Cars” and bits of “Marley and Me” with the nephew instead.

My big baking project in Utah was a “Panamanian Roulade cake,” which I made for my dad’s birthday party. It was ambitious, it was grand, it was time-consuming, it was difficult. (It was delicious.) It was a chocolate cake that had layers, but they were vertical rather than horizontal.

I started this cake around 7 pm and turned on my laptop to watch the rerun of the earlier Yankees game. (I like a good distraction while I’m baking. Yes, it has proven dangerous at times.) I ground my own almonds to substitute for pricey almond flour, which isn’t readily available in Utah anyway (and realized that pricey almond flour is nothing besides finely ground almonds, so I don’t have to buy it again!). I baked the cake itself, a big flat layer in a jelly roll pan. It was very difficult to remove from the pan, so I had my dad help and thoroughly annoyed him with my barking directions. “No! Stop stop stop! Okay, go!” I made the frosting and tasted it and it was delicious, but there wasn’t nearly enough to make the cake with. I stared at the directions, hoping for divine guidance, and got it: the directions said to chill and whip the frosting if it wasn’t “fluffy enough.” My frosting wasn’t fluffy at all, so I did that. Lo and behold, fluffy frosting at double the volume! Whoa! I spread the frosting n the layer. I cut the layer into four strips, and then rolled the strips into one big roll that got set on its side. Now, these long strips were extremely fragile and hard to work with, so I had to cut them in half and oh-so-delicately place them against the roll. My fingers and hands were a gooey mess, which I actually hate. I know, it’s unavoidable in baking. But come on, I don’t want to turn on the faucet and get frosting on it because I’ll forget to wipe it down and then the next time I turn on the faucet, with relatively clean hands (even though I’m going to wash them) I’ll get frosting on them again! And forget to wipe it down again! Do you see my problem(s) here?

So seriously, they were bad and it was driving me a little nuts. I also hate having anything under my fingernails, which are long, and dealing with a fragile cake layer and frosting, you have to put the utensils aside and dig in, and you’re guaranteed to get all kinds of crap under your fingernails. I dealt, but it was gross.

Okay, cake rolled. Picture looking down from above at the plate and seeing what amounts to a spiral of cake, held together by frosting. This is what made the vertical layers. It was supremely fragile; the now-fluffy frosting was loaded with room-temperature butter, which we all know (or the dairy-tolerant among us, anyway) is not structurally sturdy. So I gently frosted the rest of the cake with the frosting, and then swirled the top into a lovely pattern. I filled in the dents with more frosting. Usually my cakes are delicious but ugly, but I actually made this one look nice. It was so fragile, but I knew once the butter frosting got into the fridge it would firm up and we would be fine.

So I picked up the plate and walked to the fridge. My parents have a new fridge these days, the two-door kind. But both doors are for the fridge itself; the freezer is the bottom drawer. So I was holding the plate and fragile cake in my left hand, opening both doors with my right. The fridge was packed. I don’t know if it is normally, but whenever I’m home we load up with fruit and restaurant leftovers, and there was an abundance of both. “Hmm,” I muttered, shifting things around. I didn’t want to grip onto the cake plate too hard, because that would smush it against me and get frosting all over my shirt (because who wants to wear an apron at one in the morning?), so I was navigating that angle. Strawberries go….over here. Styrofoam square containers…go over here, one, then the other. All right, the cantaloupe gets transferred over there, and then I’ll move the milk, and then we’ll have a space for the plate and my very fragile cake.

But oh, the errant cantaloupe.

I picked up the cantaloupe with my right hand. It was not whole, having been sliced into the day before, and so it was slippery, but I dug in there (aware of the frosting lingering under my fingernails and regretting the transfer of said frosting into cantaloupe flesh, but there you go) and got hold and put it on a higher shelf. As I was moving the milk, the cantaloupe decided it didn’t like its new spot and tumbled out…onto the cake, smashing the cake into the plate and bottom of the fridge in a big collapsed heap of frosting.

It was one o’clock in the morning. The televised Yankees game had gone nine innings and was over. I was tired and my back ached from standing. I was alone with a mound of chocolate that had to be cleaned up. And the cake…there was no denying it, the cake was ruined.

Reader, I cried.

I had never cried over a dessert before. I’ve made plenty, I’ve nearly ruined some, but I’ve always managed to save them. And this…I just had no idea what to do with this. So I stood over the sink and put my head in my hands and cried.

Now, there was a little more going on than just the cake. I was in Utah because my grandpa isn’t doing very well, health-wise, and he had taken a turn for the worse the week before. I was spending afternoons at my grandparents’ house and there was/is a very real thought that it might be the last time I see him; and if it’s not, he’s not going to be doing any better the next time. I know that end of life is hard for everybody, and I know that if someone passes away at the age of 89, it’s really not a tragedy, especially when that person has lived a full and successful life. But it’s still hard for those left behind, no two ways about it. And seeing this brilliant, strong man operating at about 25% is humbling and disturbing and profoundly sad, and I was shaken anyway. I hadn’t cried about that the entire time I had been visiting, until the cake.

I cleaned up the pound of frosting that was now nestled into the crevices of the fridge with a wet cloth, making repeat visits to the sink to wash it off and return and listening to the “smart” fridge beep at me to let me know it was open. (Thanks! Yes, I’ve got it now! Yep, you’re open! I know! Okay, thanks… okay… stop it STOP IT STOP IT NOW I‘M GOING INSANE SHUT UP STUPID FRIDGE JUST SHUT UP FOR THE LOVE OF GOD SHUT UP). It took me some time, but I got the frosting cleaned off all white areas of the kitchen. I washed off the troublesome cantaloupe, and then I had to tend to the plate.

What to do with a completely smashed cake?

I ended up scooping it into a springform pan. I knew it was still going to be delicious (and it was) but I was still freaking out. I put the springform pan into the fridge, planning to cover it with whipping cream the next day. (Sorry, lactose-intolerant family members! But there are pills for it.) And I went to bed.

I awoke the next day with a purpose. I was going to make that damn cake again. Springform pan-molded cake was not good enough for my dad’s birthday party; I wanted vertical layers! So at one o’clock (in the afternoon, this time) I started again. And what do you know, it was a lot easier the second time around. Took a lot less time.

So we ended up with two cakes. Sadly, the frosting and the cake were much the same color, so you could barely even make out the blessed vertical layers. And we had two cakes and didn’t even finish one.

But in the battle of Kathy vs the Cantaloupe, Kathy won. This time.

fooled you!

2010-04-20T13:19:00.001-07:00

Ah ha, I'm not a Bad Blogger after all -- I just decided to blog on Tuesday instead of Monday. Or so I tell myself. I got back to work from a small break that was not a vacation and had a lot to do. And I was exhausted, because my break was not a vacation and I did a lot of work (some of it fun, yes) and no writing and I have a big deadline this Friday and I did NOTHING to prepare for it...etc. But it's Tuesday, and here we are!

So I'm going to follow up a little on what I wrote last week. After finishing the spectacular book, The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, I was on a high. And I was terribly excited because I had brought three, count 'em, three other books with me on my break that was not a vacation and even though I was not on vacation I did get to read. And two of the books were very small and by noted author Ian McEwen and I was psyched. Psyched, I tell you, dear Reader.

Reader, I was disappointed. Oh, so disappointed. The first one, The Comfort of Strangers, had these great blurbs on the back. I quote: From The NY Times Book Review, "Convincing and clinging as a nightmare...[McEwan is] an alluringly gifted writer." From the Chicago Tribune, "An exquisite miniature gothic." This sounded good.

Plot: Mary and Colin are on vacation. They've grown tired of each other. They go out wandering (they may be in Venice, but McEwan never says) and meet a man named Robert, who takes them to his house. He's creepy, as is his wife, Caroline--so creepy that (a) colin and Mary wake up naked, and Caroline says, 'oh, I'm just washing your clothes, and no, you can't have them back until I say' and (b) they realize Robert has a FRAMED PHOTO OF COLIN on the balcony of the hotel and (c) at one point, unprovoked, Robert PUNCHES COLIN IN THE STOMACH and levels him. Colin and Mary leave, have a lot of sex at their hotel, go swimming, and then GO BACK TO ROBERT'S HOUSE where Caroline drugs Mary and Robert kills Colin. The end.

Oops. Spoiler.

Okay, now really: you didn't see that coming, Colin and Mary? Really?

Here's my beef. Well, there are many. Here's my first: The NY Times Book Review called it CONVINCING. Really? On what planet does someone return to that house? What, did Colin leave his wallet? Some lifesaving medication? No. Even then, if he had, wouldn't he say, "I'll cancel the credit cards and figure out the ID later" or "I'll phone my doctor and get a new prescription"--either way, "No way am I going back there" ??? Please. Second, people, this is Ian McEwen! The writing was fluid and smooth, and maybe I'd even go with the back jacket copy that calls it "masterly precision," but...this is the man who wrote Atonement! Yikes. Did not like the plot, did not believe the plot, did not feel anything in this story was "inevitable" or a tale of "erotic menace"...hmph. Having just finished The Book Thief, when I finished The Comfort of Strangers I threw it on the floor. Bleah.

and then I went to another Ian McEwan book, Enduring Love. Plot (with spoilers, yes): a man named Joe and his wife Clarissa are on a picnic and see a child about to be carried away in a hot air balloon, so he runs to save the kid. He arrives at the same time as several others and they all jump onto the basket, but a gust of wind takes it up and everybody drops off safely to the ground to save himself--all except one man, who holds on way past the time of safety and then falls to his death. Joe rushes to the body and arrives at the same time as Jed Parry, who instantly and insanely falls in love with him. Jed begins harassing Joe with letters and phone calls. Joe erases the messages and the handwriting looks like his, so no one believes him. His wife Clarissa instantly decides he's nuts and she is going to take some time away from him. They go to a restaurant and an anonymous man walks to another table and shoots a second anonymous man; Jed rushes to Assassin Anonymous Man and knocks the gun from his hand and runs away. Joe knows the assassin was meant to shoot him. Police and Clarissa don't believe him. Joe buys a gun (apparently a terribly illicit thing in refined England) and on his way back Clarissa phones and says Jed is holding her hostage. He returns to his flat and shoots Jed with his new gun. Jed is institutionalized and Clarisas leaves Joe. The end.

Again, this damn thing just doesn't make sense. Why is Clarissa so eager not to believe her husband? This is never explored. Nor is it explained why the police just don't care. At a certain point I really wanted this all to be in Joe's head; I wanted the unreliable narrator and a surprise at the end where we find out that he really does protest too much. I was excited that this might happen, especially since Publisher's Weekly called this story "Stunning..." and said it is "Graced with intelligent speculation and dramatic momentum." Sigh.

Now, please know that I am not saying I am superior or I write better stories or there's so much crap out there and I would do x, y, and z somuchbetterandwhyamInotpublished and blah blah blah. I'm not putting myself into a comparison at all. So what am I saying?

Am I saying that sometimes certain authors might get more favorable reviews based on their past work?

Am I saying that writers might become complacent based on their past work and not look too closely at their stories?

Am I saying that even masterful writers (and I do agree that I. McE is) need a writer's group?

I don't know. But I know that I read one tremendous book and followed it with two books for which I had high, high expectations...and I was disappointed. Sigh.

Bad blogger, part deux

2010-04-12T17:41:00.000-07:00

I am inching back toward my Bad Blogger ways. Last week I forgot to blog until about 4:30, and by that time I am usually in full-swing “I’m going home soon” mode and useless for anything besides something I’m already doing. I told myself I would blog on Tuesday, but let’s face it, once you’ve failed at something (my Monday blog promise) it’s quite easy to keep failing. Tuesday became Wednesday, and then I said, “I’ll just wait until next Monday.” So even though it is kind of late to be doing a Monday blog—my New York readers have probably left their desks by now—I am trying to be faithful where I can be faithful.

I am on vacation this week, officially. I am in Utah to help out the fam with various crises (I’m only being semi-blasé right now) but the crises don’t seem to be at any peak right now, so I have time to do other things. I am trying to download iTunes on my parents’ ancient laptop upstairs. I had downloaded version 8 about 15 months ago, but my mom bought herself a nano (planning on my setting it up for her—this blind faith may or may not be rewarded) and this new nano doesn’t work on 8, and requires 9. So I downloaded 9 (which took 45 minutes on previously mentioned Ancient Laptop) and then I had to hit “Install” which took another 45 minutes and didn’t work, so I hit Install again and that’s where we stand with that. Whew.

So the real purpose of today’s entry is to tell you to run, don’t walk, either to your local bookstore or library to read The Book Thief, a 2005 YA novel by Markus Zusak. I checked it out from the library last Thursday and finished it (500-plus pages) on Saturday. I could not put it down. It’s a fairly easy read, being YA, but the speed with which I got through it was more because of the author’s skill in drawing me in. I could not put it down. When I did put it down I was disappointed and found myself thinking about it and wanting to pick it up again. I spent all Thursday after work on the couch, reading it, and telling myself that I am actually doing work when I’m reading, because after all I’m a writer and you’ve got to research others’ styles/see what’s out there/fill your creative well, right?

And it was educational. The Book Thief has an omniscient narrator, which is something I’ve been struggling with. I am about halfway through a draft of a new novel, but I’m struggling. I have stopped the forward momentum in order to revise what I have, and one thing that I’m having a hard time figuring out is the voice. For a while I tried to write it in Close Third, because we have 5 different characters whose perspectives will be given. So when I write a passage with the 10-year-old girl, it should sound a lot different than the passages of the grizzled veteran detective who has seen it all, even though they’re not first-person narratives. The passages of the 10-year-old girl are more energetic, generally happy, because the narrator is kind of “sitting on her shoulder” and seeing what she sees. But I don’t want it to be exclusively Close Third. When you’re doing true Close Third, the voice always has to be that character’s voice; you can’t state anything the character wouldn’t know herself, which is really limiting. I decided for a while that I would write in Omniscient Third, and in a fit of learning frenzy I got Anna Karenina, a well-known Omnisicent Third book, to see how they handled it. As I suspected, the different passages tell us what everyone is thinking; there’s one voice throughout (the anonymous narrator). So I tried that, and it didn’t work; it came across as “head hopping,” which is annoying. In another learning frenzy, I ordered a bunch of How To Write books. They are surprisingly helpful. (They are also helpful for making yourself feel like you’re procrastinating when you’re really working—the best of both worlds!) One of the books (whose title escapes me and I can’t look it up, because I didn’t bring it with me) talked about the range of voices and suggested that you don’t have to fall heavily into one category. There’s Omnisicent, and First-Person (“I did this, I did that”) and Third Person (“She did this, she did that”) and Close Third Person (“She did this, she did that, darn it all to heck!” – a shout-out to my Utah peeps)…but there are also shades of gray, if you will. The authors of this book described it as a pendulum that swings between things. You can do Close Third Person and insert the occasional “Darn it all to heck” if that’s what your character would be thinking, but you don’t have to stay 100% there. You can swing out of it occasionally, back and forth; the key is consistency. If you’re going to swing back and forth, don’t just do it once; it has to happen with enough regularity that the reader won’t say, “Where did that come from?” Or so I have concluded.

So this is part of the reason that The Book Thief is so interesting to me: the writer has chosen Death as the narrator. The book is set in Germany in World War II, so Death was hovering over everyone, and saw everything. It’s only logical that Death would know what people were thinking, know their hearts, know what’s good and bad about them. (I have a short story with a different-and-yet-slightly-similar conceit, so this was even more interesting to me...and I'm thinking of making it into a book, so I may read this again just for "research.") Death is telling the story of a young girl named Liesel who is given up into foster care when she’s 10. Her younger brother dies on the trip to the foster family's town, and from then on she has nightmares. Her foster father, Hans, comforts her every night when she wakes up screaming from them, and when he realizes she’s almost illiterate, he teaches her to read. When they buried her brother, Liesel saw a book on the ground, The Grave Digger’s Handbook, and impulsively stole it, and that’s what Hans uses to teach her.

This is just the beginning…the book takes twists and turns and gets incredibly deep. I finished it on the plane, glad to be sitting in a window seat so I could turn away from prying faces as I literally cried at the end. I will occasionally tear up at the end of some books, but only very, very rarely do I break down. At the end of this book, I just wept. It was amazing. It was a great lesson in Omniscient storytelling and it was touching beyond belief. If you haven’t read this book—whether you want to learn or just read a good book—please, please, please read it. You won’t regret it.

Can't...stop...baking....

2010-03-29T11:21:00.001-07:00

So I was in a “fruity” mood for this next project. I didn’t want to spend quite as much time in the kitchen, so I looked for a couple of not-as-difficult/time consuming recipes. I settled on a lemon cake (simple) and a pear tart (because I already had half a crust recipe). One was amazing. The other was blah.

I’ve come across a couple of problems with this cookbook. Sometimes, um, it’s not edited so well. Pictures are there that are only tangentially related to the recipes. (I mentioned the multicolored/flavored maracons whose recipes aren’t provided.) Equipment gets put in the Ingredients column. Or ingredients…get left out.

I looked at some of the reviews people have left on Amazon. Someone mentioned, in her review, that in a recipe for a genoise cake, they omitted the flour entirely. I checked in the recipe. Yes, sure enough, there’s no flour mentioned in the ingredients column. Bizarre. Over on the next page, there’s a section at the end of the recipe that says, for a 6” cake, use x grams of flour; for a 9” cake, use y grams, etc. But…I don’t know, shouldn’t that be, maybe, AT THE TOP OF THE RECIPE? Or, if not at top, shouldn’t there be a directive that says, “Flour…for exact amount, see page z”? Hmm.

I ran into a similar problem with the lemon cake. It was a cake in a similar vein to a genoise, wherein you beat egg whites separately (not to stiff peaks, happily, given my last experience with that) and then fold the rest of the ingredients into that. It makes for a light and fluffy cake. I was excited. I did everything they said to do, until it said, “Fold dry ingredients—flour, sugar, baking soda—into the egg white mixture.” Um, problem: in the ingredients list, it mentions sugar only once, and then it says that this sugar is to be beaten into the egg whites. So I stared. Do I divide up the sugar? Do I add more? The body of the recipe says to add sugar twice, but it’s only listed once. What to do? I don’t want to risk a sickeningly sweet cake (one other problem with the macarons that I made was they were way too sweet)…hmm.

I ended up only putting in as much sugar as the ingredients list called for. I beat most of it in with the whites and some of it in with the dry ingredients. And then I baked the cake. And it was drab.

Now, the texture was amazing. It was fluffy as a cloud. I couldn’t have asked for a better texture. But a good texture doesn’t make a great cake, obvs. I made a lemon glaze whose recipe I stole from my roommate, and forked the cake and drizzled it over. Then the part of the cake that was glazed was very tasty. And the rest was a fluffy, boring cloud. I was eating a piece and I said, “You know, this would be a great base for something. Like berries and cream.” The roommate agreed. If I had had berries and cream in the house I would’ve gotten them out immediately. But I didn’t, and I never bothered to go buy them. Instead I brought the cake to work on Monday, where “drab” isn’t a big problem; the issue is “free food” and everyone is happy to eat free food, particularly when it’s homemade. I’ve sloughed off some pretty crappy dishes here. Ssssh.

Item number two: the pear tart. This recipe also did not say to use half a recipe of the pate sucree, but since I had half left over from the apple tart I only used half and it was perfect (and, dare I say it?, probably what was intended).

There was an almond filling that was easy to make: almond flour (again the pricey almond flour! Good thing I have that specialty baking shop), sugar, butter, an egg. Maybe something else, I can’t remember. But I mixed that up and then spread it in the crust. Easy.

I poached the pears in a mixture of white wine ($8.50 for the cheapest bottle! It’s a good thing I don’t drink. I can’t afford it.) and apple juice (to make up for the missing bottle of white wine; the recipe called for 2, but a quart of apple juice is only $4) with sugar, vanilla beans, and lemon juice. Boil that together then put in peeled pears and boil them for half an hour. Slice in half, scoop out the seeds and the fibrous center, and you have poached pears.

I then sliced up the pears into tiny crosswise slices and spread them out over the filling, and covered the exposed almond filling with sliced almonds and baked. In baking I experienced my first injury related to this project, as I let my finger touch the hot oven rack, darn it. And then—thanks, reflexes!—I dropped my picture-perfect raw tart on its side and ALMOST over on its top. Had it gone onto the top I would have cried, but as it was I merely let fly a couple of bad words; I just lost the extra almonds, which were easily cleaned up and replaced with fresh ones.

And the tart was wonderful. How could it not be? I got to eat half of one of the poached pears (there was only space for five of the halves) and by itself it was amazing. A poached pear; who would’ve thought? My friends, the ones with whom I’m sharing the excess bounty (I really want not to gain weight with this whole experiment, no matter how much fun I’m having), loved it. One of them said, “This is the best yet.” And I think I agree with him.

An awesome post...(not mine)

2010-03-26T07:56:00.001-07:00

For all writers out there, check this out.

http://www.hankstuever.com/blog/?p=1541

My stuff looks like that half the time (I also print out on hard copy and make edits with pen), and they're my own marks!

More baking trickery

2010-03-22T11:47:00.000-07:00

So the adventures in baking continue. For Week Two I decided to do an apple tart and a brioche loaf. Even though there was some consternation with the recipes themselves, the final product, to quote one obnoxious Food Network personality, was Yum-O.

So I did the brioche first. Brioche are usually baked as individual rolls, in this cute little scalloped muffin-sized cup. I chose not to buy the cute little muffin-sized cups because I’m already spending plenty on ingredients (and a kitchen scale, lest we forget) and there was a variation in the book where you could just roll them and put them in a loaf pan and bake that way. The dough itself was incredibly stiff and difficult to work with, and I was honestly worried about my Kitchen-Aid there for a while. It couldn’t mix the dough completely; it kept bumping up and down and making straining noises. I didn’t lock it, because I wanted it to be able to bump if it needed to bump, but it was still unnerving. My roommate came in and, knowing my concern for my kitchen items, kept saying, “Kathy? Kathy?” I didn’t answer—not because I was concentrating so hard on the brioche dough, but because I didn’t know how to answer. She told me I ought to stop and not break my Kitchen-Aid, but I soldiered on. And it didn’t break the Kitchen-Aid, thank heaven (I truly would have been heartbroken). And the brioche was goooooooood.

So it wasn’t complicated, it was just worrisome. I let the dough “proof” in the fridge for four hours, then rolled it into the rolls and let it rise for an hour, and then baked. I burned myself a couple of times getting the rolls out, because I was hungry and impatient and I am a big bread fan. I pulled apart the rolls and stuffed one in my mouth and I just can’t tell you how good it was. Transcendent, really…light and fluffy and buttery and had a wonderful melt-in-your-mouth crust…mmmm. I baked half of the recipe into one loaf, and I was glad because after they cooled down they were still nice, but really just dinner rolls. I rolled them out two or three at a time for the rest of the week to eat them hot. It worked for three days, and then the last day they were heavy and didn’t rise. Sigh. Good eating takes work.

I also did an apple tart, which was delish as well. And it made for a terrific breakfast the next day. I made the pate sucree dough, a whole recipe, just like the tart recipe said to do. It also said to use the whole recipe. The pate sucree recipe itself said it made enough for two 9-inch crusts, but one would think that the apple tart would say, “use half a recipe for pate sucree” rather than “make a recipe for pate sucree.” Ah well. I rolled out the whole recipe and tried to put it in the 9” tart pan and realized the whole recipe would take up the entire pan. Fortunately the pate sucree recipe did say that it freezes well for up to a week, so I cut it in half and stuck half in the freezer.

The apple tart itself was amazing. Very simple: an apple compote with diced apples on bottom, sliced apples on top. The apple compote had apples, water, sugar and vanilla bean and I just boiled them until the apples were soft; then sliced several apples into thin slices and decorated the top. Baked it, then brushed it with apricot jam. Easy. And wonderful.

The bigger concern this week was that my foot started giving me problems. I am assuming it was plantar fasciitis, which is an irritation of the bottom of the foot that makes standing and running painful. This is a problem because I am now consuming huge quantities of fatty desserts. If consuming huge quantities of fatty desserts, one must be able to exercise if one wants to continue to fit into one’s pants. And I do. So I bought an ankle brace that was a semi-torturous device that inflicted more pain, but it did calm the heel enough that I could do yoga on Friday and go running both Saturday and Sunday, when it was gorgeous outside. I hope the pain stays away so I can keep exercising and therefore eating huge quantities of fatty desserts. Because, oh yes, there’s more to come.

Mmmm...coooookies...

2010-03-15T13:50:00.000-07:00

My apologies, faithful readers, for missing last week. I wasn’t up to the task, the challenge, the desafío. I wasn’t up to the blog.

My reason has nothing to do with writing and everything to do with the kitchen. Strange, yes? Well, maybe not so much. I’m a pretty decent cook, and people have, at various times, given me the very impractical suggestions that I should be a caterer or a chef or open a bakery. [When my life and career were in a particularly noxious stall, my dad once suggested that he would buy a Krispy Kremes franchise in Utah (it would have been the first, back then) and I could run it. I never was able to say an outright “no,” because I felt I would be crushing his dreams, but…how shall I say it?... there was no way in bloody hell I was going to be running anybody’s Krispy Kreme store. I stonewalled and the idea went away (not that he ever pursued it) and for a while, I believe, he silently blamed me for not helping him bring his dream to fruition. Later he found out that in order to buy a franchise, according to official Krispy Kreme rules, you must *already* own and operate a food joint (negative) and demonstrate a net worth of two million dollars (double negative).] These suggestions are impractical for several reasons:

1) While I love baking and cooking, I love writing more.

2) Baking and cooking are an ANTIDOTE to writing. You have an immediate finished product, and people want it!

3) when you make a hobby into a wanna-be career, it’s really easy to leach the joy out of it. And

4) It is HARD WORK, y’all. Have you ever stood in a kitchen for several hours to make one big meal? Are you exhausted by the end of it? Imagine doing that all day, all night, all the next day too…all week…every day…this has got to be a hard-core passion, something where you don’t even notice your aching feet or the passing hours or the sweat running down your chin. Though maybe you should notice that last one, lest it drip in the food.

So. Last weekend I started a little cooking project, which I did continue this past weekend. I got a cookbook, the French Culinary Institute’s new gigantic manual to the pastry arts. !!! Holy cow. It’s immense, it’s got full-color pictures, it’s got how-to sections on everything from the definitions of autolyze and proofing and the difference between pâte sucrée and pâte brisée (and I now know them!) to kitchen first aid. Must say, I’m grateful for two years of college French.

So I wanted to test out my book. It seems to have everything from super-easy to super-hard (and when I say super-hard, I mean, this is going to take seven or eight hours and a lot of precision) recipes.

Now, first things first. The recipes are measured in ounces and grams. I looked at this and said, “Huh? Now what?” Well, now we get a digital kitchen scale. ($40). And it calls for ingredients like almond flour ($5 for 4 ounces) and pastry cream powder ($6 for about ¾ cup) and uses equipment like brioche cups and cake molds. Yikes. Well, in for a penny, in for a pound.

So last week’s first experiment was ginger snap cookies. I have a Williams Sonoma set of 11 glass bowls, the smallest being only a couple of tablespoons. I got it for Christmas about 10 years ago, and miraculously, all 11 bowls survive. And suddenly they’ve discovered their purpose! Each recipe begins, “Prepare your mise en place,” which means, “measure your ingredients because you can’t just scoop the flour out of the canister in the measuring cup.” So you get a one-cup-size bowl, weigh it, tare it, and pour the sugar (say 250 grams?) into it. Then the two-tablespoon bowl for the one egg yolk. Then the second-largest bowl for the three-plus (again, measured in grams) cups of flour. (It was a big recipe.) Etc. I also discovered that these recipes are incredibly precise (“Bake for 7 minutes” rather than “Bake 7-10 minutes” like the rest of my recipes say) and my oven is not. I preheated to 350. Who knows if it was actually 350? The thing is avocado-colored, meaning, old. I do know the 7 minutes didn’t cook my gingersnaps.

After the baking time was figured out, we sampled. These gingersnaps were divine. Soft, chewy, spicy…mmm. I miss them, now that they’re gone.

And then I attempted macarons. I’ve had macarons in Paris, and they’re amazing…a crisp meringue sandwich and thick frosting-like center. I tried to do chocolate. It didn’t work.

First I underbeat the egg whites. I know better. I know that when it says to beat them to stiff peaks, you have to beat them almost to a solid mass. But I didn’t; I figured, when I pulled out the beater the peak held its shape and that was good enough. Then I folded in the almond flour and the cocoa and put it into a piping bag, and realized right there it wasn’t going to work. I piped it into little circles and baked it anyway. Sigh. They wouldn’t come off the parchment paper. I pulled and scooped with my spatula, and they just tore or crumpled into tiny, sticky masses. I pulled the parchment paper off the cookie sheets and tossed the whole thing into the garbage.

But memories of Paris macarons haunted me. I really wanted to make some of my own. They didn’t sound that hard, and the pictures in the book looked exactly like the ones I love! All day I thought about this. I had another container of almond flour. I had more sugar and cocoa…I could do it.

This time I beat those whites, man, I beat them past peaks and basically into Styrofoam. And then I gently folded in the cocoa and flour…and watched it go poof, deflate. It was the exact same consistency as it had been before. Dammit! I kept going. This time I baked them longer than the 7 minute prescribed by the cookbook (just guessing that the temperature was nowhere near 350, or actually 177 C, as the cookbook said). And this time they came off the parchment paper, as long as I let them rest a minute or two out of the oven. So I had these little meringue cookies….that looked NOTHING like the macarons of Paris. Where real ones are smooth and dark, mine were pale and cracked. Double dammit. And the filling didn’t taste anything like the Parisian filling…and there were pictures of every conceivable flavor of macaron and NO OTHER RECIPES besides the chocolate and a vanilla one with a jam center. Triple, quadruple dammit!

So the macarons were a disappointment. (some of my friends liked them, but I still huffed for the rest of the day.) But the gingersnaps…oh my. I would happily eat some more of those right now. For dinner, a snack and breakfast tomorrow.

More on this experiment as it continues to unfold.

http://www.amazon.com/Fundamental-Techniques-Classic-Pastry-Arts/dp/1584798033/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top

new theme?

2010-03-01T13:34:00.001-08:00

Musings...

I've had three four-day weeks in a row, and I'm now officially spoiled. I have long been a proponent of four-day weeks, and now it's official. All jobs should change so that the workweek is Monday through Thursday. And no, not ten-hour days. Just regular 9-5 days, and then Friday you do your errands, Saturday you do some work and Sunday you can actually relax. Just my two cents. I wish I were governor.

This particular three-day weekend was unexpected, brought on by the Snowmageddon that actually did (kind of) materialize. I'm sure I could have gotten to work if I'd had to, given that subways are UNDERGROUND and were running, but the office announced they were closed and I was not going to question that. I wish the Mayor had announced it the night before, so I wouldn't have had to set my alarm. But I went right back to bed. And it was nice to watch the snow swirl outside my window. I enjoyed the day very much.

And I was productive, which is better. I finished two projects, two! One is a screenplay I started long, long ago--before the Madame Curie project--and hadn't been able to get to until now. Friday I got it out and started outlining the end, and Saturday I wrote it. About 40 pages -- not too shabby. And then I finished another project, one I had thought up about three weeks ago. When I work that quickly, and it actually comes and it's actually decent, I deem it Meant to Be. What exactly it is Meant to Be is still to-be-determined, but...I still feel pretty good.

And Spring Training season is now upon us. This past year was the first that I really, really got into baseball, and it was surprising how long the offseason felt. I yearn to buy season tickets this year. We will see.

Not much for a post today. I detailed all my awful day jobs already. I'll have to think of a new theme. Until next week....

Quatre

2010-02-22T09:58:00.000-08:00

All right, even though I’ve had many more day jobs than three, I’ve been spotlighting only those that deserved a spotlight. And by “deserved a spotlight,” I mean, “scarred me so badly that even now, all these years later, I feel a need to vent.” I also had some good jobs and good bosses; I’ve mentioned those before. But those make for boring blogs.

So, the worst of all my day jobs gets highlighted today.

It was short-lived. I only went out twice for this particular day job. It was during my time at NYU. I needed some income that I wouldn’t have to pay back; I was living off my loans. I had classes during the day and needed something flexible, at night, and hopefully something that wouldn’t keep me sitting any more than I already was, with classes and the writing. I decided to think out of the box, be creative, try something new and unusual and fun.

I went into catering.

I’m not sure what I thought this job would be; but it really did sound fun. I didn’t think of the practical side: carrying plates, glasses, serving people, cleaning up. I don’t know, I guess I just thought of parties and food.

I signed up with a temp agency that staffed catered affairs. They gave me instructions: call in when you’re available for work, it’ll be evening positions, and you have to buy a tuxedo.

Seriously. A tuxedo.

I went to the uniforms place to pick up my tuxedo. It was the kind of place that has an outfit for every occasion; great for Halloween. They had bellboy outfits, maid uniforms (none sexy, though), doorman uniforms. Tuxedos. For men and women.

It wasn’t expensive: the pants, jacket, bowtie (bowtie! I had to wear a bowtie! In anything other than a real tuxedo, worn for a formal occasion, they can be pulled off only by the most extraordinary man; women should not be subjected to them! A bowtie!!), and two shirts—one with fancy black buttons, one with regular white ones—cost about $60. I was promised I would pay for the tuxedo with one gig. I tried this thing on, looked in the mirror, and flushed red. I looked stupid. Oh, so stupid. I had fairly short hair at the time—not man-short, but collar-length—and somehow the whole combination just did not work. I looked so stupid. Have I mentioned, I looked stupid? And yet I thought this job might be fun, might be some good extra money, so I bought the tuxedo and took it home in a blue plastic bag, still feeling a faint tinge of embarrassment.

My first gig was at a Lehman Brothers (RIP) Christmas party. It was a gigantic open dining area that overlooked the Hudson, quite a nice space. We were instructed to wear the tux pants and shirt, but no jacket. Mercifully, at the venue, they gave us blue smocks to put over the dumb tux. I was relieved. I wore silver hoop earrings, which somehow made the ensemble a little nicer, and was told I had to remove them. “Earrings can’t extend below the earlobe.” Okay.

We were told not to speak to anyone unless spoken to. We were not to speak to each other, even if we were standing next to each other. Even if we were manning the same station, serving roast beef and chicken. Even if we were bussing the same tables. Unless we were speaking about portion sizes or cleanup, we were not to speak to each other. “You will be sent home immediately and not paid for your time,” they said. Somehow the image of two lowly catering personnel CHATTING ABOUT SOMETHING was so awful to them, so unprofessional—speaking about something other than food, while serving people!!—it was a firable offense. Okay. (Now, I do shop at Fairway, where the checkers are so busy chatting to each other in Spanish that they can’t even bother to tell the customer how much the total is. It is annoying to be ignored by someone who’s supposed to be attending to you because s/he is too busy having a personal conversation. But still: “We’ll fire you if we see you talking”? Really?)

My first station was standing as a greeter, holding a tray of glasses of white wine, with an inviting and welcoming smile. “Welcome to the party. White wine?” That was my line. So I stationed myself accordingly, held out the tray, and quickly realized THIS BLOODY TRAY IS INCREDIBLY HEAVY. And a moment later, IF I HAVE TO HOLD IT FOR MORE THAN FIVE MINUTES I’M GOING TO DROP IT. A moment after that, I HAVE MATCHSTICK ARMS AND OH MY GOODNESS THIS TRAY IS HEAVY. So bankers drifted in, happy to have gotten off work early, and I smiled pleasantly and said, “Care for some white wine?” or “Would you like a glass of white wine?” “Welcome to the party. White wine?”

People either acknowledged me or didn’t, and most of them walked past… without …taking … a glass of white wine. My pleasant smile grew strained and I shifted to try to balance it on my hip. It didn’t work, and I went back to holding it out in front of me. “White wine?” I said. JUST TAKE A GLASS OF THIS BLOODY WINE BECAUSE OMG IT’S HEAVY! “Welcome to the party. Care for a glass of white wine?” THROW IT OUT, DUMP IT IN THE PLANT, I DON’T CARE, JUST TAKE IT FROM ME! “Hello, happy holidays! Would you like a glass of white wine?” FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, PLEASE TAKE A F***ING GLASS OF WHITE WINE.

At last my tray was empty. I deposited it in the kitchen and went to my cleanup station. For a long time, as people got their food and ate, I just stood there. Fellow catering temps were friendly; they smiled and tried to chat. Remembering the firing threat, as soon as they asked what I did, why I had to have a day job, I smiled and fled.

After an hour of standing around, we had to start cleaning up. I was in the least crowded area, thankfully, and I took people’s glasses and plates right to the kitchen. I didn’t have to fight people to get through. More and more people finished dinner and then went to the dance floor (not in my station!) to shake it loose. Picture drunk bankers shaking it, I dare you. (and the poor saps stationed in that area, loading up trays full of very breakable glassware and trying to navigate through them to the kitchen.) I dutifully cleaned their glasses and plates and silverware, and then began cleaning up the tables with the food, skirting the friendly conversation of fellow catering temps.

This is all exhausting. You wouldn’t think it would be; you would think, hey, you’re just taking plates and glasses and silverware across the hall to the kitchen. But you would be wrong. All the standing, all the walking back and forth, all the transporting; within an hour, I was ready to go home. I didn’t want to, of course, because we got paid by the hour, but physically I was ready. I knew it for sure when I spilled a glass of beer. It was half full, and the banker said he didn’t want any more, so I had picked it up and set it on the tray, and then when I picked up the tray I didn’t do it fast or decisively enough, and my matchstick arms, already fatigued from holding a tray of white wine, tipped the tray forward. I dumped the beer. Into the banker’s lap.

Profuse apologies all around, of course. And he was drunk, so he didn’t seem to care. I escaped to the bathroom for a little while to shake. I knew, had someone dumped half a glass of beer into my lap, I’d be pretty darn pissed. I wouldn’t have blamed him if he’d yelled at me, but he hadn’t. But I was shaken. And very tired. And the evening was about half done.

Everyone finished shaking their booty things and drifted off into the night. I felt that emotional easing as the room emptied out, feeling (against logic) that it was time for me to go home, too. But no, it was time to clean up! I dropped two more glasses in the next hour. None into anyone’s lap, but both shattered.

I started to think maybe I wasn’t cut out for this catering thing.

I had paid for my tuxedo (and did I mention how utterly horrible and stupid I looked, wearing the tuxedo?) with my night’s job. But I needed at least one more. And oh, what a doozy that was.

I got a call to be at the Park Avenue Armory at seven p.m. This is quite late for a regular catering gig; usually you’re supposed to come in at three, because they’re, you know, dinner. But this one was special. We were told to wear our full tux outfits. I put mine on and stared at myself in the full-length mirror, wincing. Can I say it again? I LOOKED STUPID.

We arrived at seven and waited around until eight (this is where I learned that you ought to bring a book to catering gigs; several people had them). I was informed that I would be on coat check duty, and there were hundreds (I mean, hundreds) of coat hangers set up on racks. Hmm.

I began wandering around the place, waiting for the shift to begin. It was fascinating. The Park Avenue Armory is a big, empty floor that you can make into whatever you want to make it into. There was a lagoon set up in a corner, with a real waterfall and pool and tropical plants. Another one in the other corner. There was the food setup area. There were tables set up, though not many. And … there was a bar.

Plastered to the wall behind the bar there were at least a hundred Playboy centerfolds. In their full glory.

Huh.

I stared at this backdrop dispassionately for some time, pretty much reaffirming my heterosexual status. But I found it very, uh, interesting that it was up in the first place.

“What is this party?” I finally asked.

“It’s the Playboy anniversary party,” they said.

Huh.

People began arriving. Young women, mostly, all pretty nondescript. They took off their coats and gave them to us, and we handed them their little tag for eventual retrieval. We were right in front of the door, and it was December and pretty soon my toes were freezing. The young women went downstairs, and emerged half an hour later. Dressed exactly alike. Dressed like Playboy models.

Now, they didn’t’ have the regular bunny outfit on. No, I guess this was passé by that time. They wore:
A black shoulder-length wig with blunt bangs;
A black strapless shelf bra
Black tight boy shorts
Black fishnet stockings;
and
Black knee-length boots
Lots of pink makeup, too.
Wow. It was pretty impressive. I glanced down at my (STUPID, AWFUL, UGLY) tux and was nevertheless glad I was wearing it rather than what the waitresses were wearing.

Guests began arriving. I wondered who they were, exactly; who gets invitations to the Playboy birthday party? I couldn’t tell by looking at them. They were businessmen, women; young and old. Maybe more horny young men, though.

And I spent my night behind the counter at the coat check, greeting people in a stupid tux, taking their coats and exchanging them for a little tag. I watched Pamela Anderson come in (who could be a more appropriate guest?); she was going to jump out of the cake. I watched a young singer whose name escapes me (Ashanti? Maybe) and her enormous entourage; she was going to sing happy birthday to Hef. And I watched Hef come in, too, with five skank blondes. He’s about my height (five-five) and very thin. A small man, whose life has been the mother of all overcompensations. They had his voice on a loop, talking about the inception of Playboy, where he was saying he started it for guys to “have a little fun.” Sigh.

I took a bathroom break midway through. One of the (scantily) black-clad waitresses was sitting in the bathroom, in the corner, in a huff. “All of these men here keep looking at me!” she snitted.

Ya think?

She went on: “They don’t know, I’m not these clothes! I’d rather be at home in my sweats right now!”

Yeah, sweetheart, but you’re not.

Maybe I was in an overcompensation of my own, feeling so very dowdy to begin with, but even more so in this STUPID UGLY TUX next to this girl in a black shelf-bra and boy shorts with a taut stomach. She was very cute, and… I was not.

So the evening begins its windup. People begin claiming the coats we have stashed in the hundreds of hangers on the dozens of coat racks. They try to tip us, a couple of dollars or five. Or twenty. And the captain has us under strict instructions: we are NOT to accept a tip of any kind. We are to say, “Hef is taking care of us.”

The thing is, Hef was most definitely NOT taking care of us. Saying “Hef is taking care of us” implied, somehow, that there’s a big tip waiting at the end, and no, we were earning an hourly salary and that was all. There would be no pajamaed Hef coming around and pressing hundred dollar bills on us in a state of boozy generosity. I watched a parade of drunk people get out higher-denomination bills than sober people would, and I had to turn them down. I was not able to make myself say, “Hef is taking care of us,” so instead I said the next-best thing: “I’m not allowed to take tips.” This angered the captain, who repeated, “You’re not supposed to say that! You have to say, ‘Hef is taking care of us!’” The next man came with a $10 for me, and the captain eyed me as I said, “No, I’m not allowed.” She didn’t fire me, but she did get mad.

One drunk guy came with his friend. The friend was pretty sober, and the drunk guy had lost his coat tag. He was so drunk, he practically had bubbles coming out of his ears. He stood there, half asleep, with a little grin on his face (the centerfolds behind the bar? The waitresses?), swaying back and forth, as his friend begged us to find the guy’s coat. We had no idea what it was, and drunk guy was not coherent enough to tell us what it looked like, other than “It’s black.” Sigh. Semi-sober friend was dying to get him home, but they had to wait a good hour before there were few enough coats that drunk guy could pick his out.

So the party trickles out. It’s after midnight, and now we have to clean up. Cups on the floor, napkins in the oasis pool. Chairs get put away, dishes get done, coat racks get taken three flights down to storage. On and on. It’s now one-thirty, and I’m ready to drop. I caught a glimpse in a mirror, and my hair was flat, my makeup smeared, and I looked tired in addition to STUPID IN MY TUX.

I walked by a man who was probably in his fifties, very unattractive and with Michael Landon hair. He did a giant, over-obvious double-take and said, “You look HOT in that tux.”

I laughed my loudest cackle-laugh and kept going. Methinks someone saw too much of the centerfolds behind the bar, and wanted to go home with someone. And maybe he did. Just not with me.

The Playboy party was my last catering affair. I just hated it too much—and I would have even if I hadn’t staffed the Playboy party. I went back to assistant-type work, sitting at desks and working on computers. Yes, I get injuries from sitting (tendinitis! Stiff back! Bad shoulders! Sore legs!) but they’re better than venereal disease.

The tux hangs still in its blue plastic bag in my closet, a reminder of an earlier time.

Trois

2010-02-16T09:35:00.000-08:00

And the series continues! I’ve had a few of them, you see. Day jobs, I mean. Some of them have been great. I probably won’t write about those here.

After I quit working for Jane, I had a long, hard summer. I have always referred to it as the “Summer of Unemployment,” because I’m literal-minded like that. And it was…hard.

The weather was lovely. For anyone who has experienced a New York summer, you know what a crazy statement that is. What? No, New York summer is like walking through warm pudding! Summer in New York is humid and stinky, and no matter how freshly showered you are, the moment you walk out the door you begin to sweat. It’s that not-so-fresh feeling…everywhere, for three months on, men and women alike.

I get what you’re saying, I do. I’ve lived through a lot of them, which is where the above hypothetical comes from. But for bulk of the summer of 2001, the temperatures remained mild and the humidity relatively low. (This comes from an accustomed New Yorker; “relatively low” means anything under 70%. Contrast this to the Utah weather man who announces, with 30% humidity, “It…is…muggy!”) I do remember one solid, steamy week that August with temps in the low hundreds, but besides that, it was delightful. There were several nights that I would get off the subway and perk up at the fresh, beautiful night, and thank the powers that be for such a great summer. Weather-wise, I mean.

So I would walk outside during the day and marvel at what a lovely summer that was. And then marvel at what a crappy situation I was in. I had quit my job with Jane, and I hadn’t saved much money. Seems to me I did get a nice (for me) tax refund that year, so I had that in my account. But the account—and this happens, when you’re taking out and not putting back in—was rapidly draining.

I stayed in a lot. I ate a lot. I put on weight, I got depressed. I watched a lot of TV. I still had the “I want to write” idea in my head, but every time I tried to write something I marveled at my own lack of inspiration, lack of ideas, lack of talent. And I turned the computer off and went to do something incredibly uninspiring.

I had signed up with three temp agencies. None was calling me. This was the end of the dot-com boom, and companies were in one of their many belt-tightening periods. “Wait—money doesn’t just fall from the sky? We can’t put a Foozball table in the lunch room and have all-day tournaments in our pajamas and still make money? What’s that about?” A period of renewed seriousness. And when companies have realized that they’re not making money in their pajamas playing Foozball, they’re not going to be hiring temps. In fact, they might just get rid of the Foozball table.

This summer was such a time.

And we all know what happened at the end of that summer. One beautiful Tuesday morning I awoke to a phone call—I had hoped it was a temp agency—with my friend telling me to turn on the television. I did, and it looked like our world was ending. My thoughts about unemployment went out the window; I knew there would be no temping in the near future. As far as New York was concerned, there may not have been a near future at all.

Two months after that, I got a job.

It was set up by a friend of a friend. I was at dinner one night, sitting by the window, and heard a knock. It was an old roommate whom I hadn’t seen in about five years. I dashed outside and the two of us chatted and exchanged emails. The former roommate, whom I’ll call Robin (I’m not sure why) had started dealing with a self-help group called the Landmark Forum. The Landmark Forum, she said, was revolutionary and I needed to do it. And then she left. So we emailed a few times, and she told me that a fellow Landmark Forum friend was looking for an assistant, I got into contact with him, had an interview, and got the job.

The Landmark Forum works!

The boss…let’s call him Steve…was in his fifties and had experienced the Landmark Forum’s transformational three-part series in a way that absolutely changed his life. I am going to try not to denigrate here, because I’m sure it really did. But…it’s hard…not to be sarcastic. Steve, see, told me that when he was five, his cat ran away. His mother told him to pray for the cat to come back, and it did not. This taught him not to trust pets, God, or people, and he lived the next fifty years with that creed. Until the Landmark Forum came along…and now he has 8 cats and got married and had started this company that was going to be the next Standard Oil.

Okay, he really did have 8 cats. And his wife seemed lovely. The Standard Oil part…that’s where things got wonky.

Again, trying not to be too indiscreet. It was an energy company. An energy company with a revolutionary idea. A revolutionary idea involving something that could reduce the country’s dependence on oil…during the Bush administration. During Enron’s heyday. Since Steve’s real name was not Ken Lay, and he didn’t have any insider buddies, he didn’t really stand a chance.

Steve had received an enormous initial investment in his company. Well, “enormous” to a layperson. To an experienced businessperson, the initial investment was good but not substantial. Not enough to run a startup for more than a year, not with the international travel expenses they were incurring. Not with the high-priced consultants he hired with abandon.

Steve and his henchpeople needed to travel back and forth to Dallas quite often. Steve always wanted me to get the best price, but Steve didn’t realize that I didn’t have a magic in with the airlines. I would get my flights off Orbitz, sad to say. Sometimes I called travel agents, but they had their fee, and Steve would get upset that we were paying that for something I could do for free on the internet. So that’s what I did.

Once Steve decided he had to travel to Dallas with Henchman #2, “Max.” I went to Orbitz and got two tickets for $300ish each. Three weeks later, about two days before traveling to Dallas, Steve decided that Max should not go to Dallas with him; “Dan” should. Orbitz would not let me change the name on the ticket. The airline would not let me change the name on the ticket. I called the airline to get a new ticket, and they quoted me a price of $1800 for the ticket. Steve was furious that I would get such a crappy price—not with the airlines, with me. It was my laziness and refusal to dig deeper that caused him to have to pay this exorbitant fee. I apologized (that’s what sucks most about the assistanthood) and waited for him to make his decision. Ultimately he said, fine, we’ll pay the $1800. I called the airline, and they said that because we were paying such a high price for Dan, they’d put Dan in first. I asked if Steve could also be in first, and they said no. Now, here was my mistake: I mentioned this to Steve. Steve freaked out. He said it was because he and Dan needed to be able to work on the plane ride down; I suspect he was just pissed because he wasn’t the one in first. I again called the airline; they again refused. Steve said they absolutely had to sit together. I said we could downgrade Dan; he said no, he had to be upgraded. The airline said fine, if Steve wanted to pay another $1800 for his ticket and upgrade. Fury all round.

I went to lunch then, and lingered.

After lunch I got a call from Steve’s wife, who said, “What’s this about a three thousand dollar ticket?” I explained the whole situation, ending with “The problem is, Dan is in first class and Steve isn’t.”

“Well, SO WHAT?” the wife said.

“That was my question,” I responded.

She phoned her husband and told him off, and I wished I were allowed to do the same.

The real problem was, I simply didn’t like Steve. Where there were some likeable qualities to Jane, Steve just annoyed the hell out of me. He was brusque (he left notes like “Buy green pens NOW” and “Hang helicopter picture NOW”—the helicopter picture in question, a shot of him in an orange jumpsuit in front of a helicopter, somehow made him feel virile) and a slob. I’d try to tidy up his office, and by the end of the day it looked like someone had just stood in the center of the room with a box full of paper and blown it up and wouldn’t do anything. I needed to file an extension of his income taxes once, and he needed to sign it. I put it in his inbox and told him he had to sign it today. He didn’t. I asked him to sign it when I left, and he said he’d get to it later. I said, “No, it needs to go in the mail tomorrow. Tomorrow is April 15.” He said he’d get to it and promised to put it in the mail as soon as he signed it, which would be immediately. (There was a stamp on it already, because that would have been too much to ask of him.) I went home. And returned Monday the 18th, to find it signed but waiting for me on my desk. I didn’t know if there would be repercussions, but I knew I’d be the one facing them.

Again, there’s so much more to be said about this particular job. Not a lot of it is inventive or interesting or funny—it was dreary. I remember trudging up the subway stairs at the Wall Street stop, every morning, thinking “People do this for twenty, thirty YEARS.” Wondering how the hell I was going to survive.

It was a rough time for everyone, of course. The office was literally across the street from Ground Zero, and for months I had to walk past the stories-high wreckage. I walked past a church that had been decorated with pictures of the deceased, with flowers and stuffed animals and memories. I was grateful to have a job at all. And I hated it. But survive I did.

The job ended that June. I went on a trip with my family, and returned to a note from Steve telling me he only needed me one day that next week. I was getting paid by the hour, not a salary, so this was a problem. The following week, he also said he needed me only one hour. And then he said he had a proposition: I wouldn’t get paid in money, but in stock options. “They could be worthless,” he said. “Or they could make you rich.”

I bowed out of the stock options, figuring that it would make more financial sense to be paid in Monopoly money, since at least that’s good somewhere. Steve had a wife making money to pay his rent, but I didn’t. I started temping again and got a couple of nice jobs. I was relieved.

Steve occasionally emails me, still. He seems to want to know what I’m doing. It’s usually phrased in an order: “Report in.” I never reply; I haven’t told him about the book or any of my writing projects. (Especially not about the blog.) I haven’t heard word one about his company since I left, so I figure it’s good I didn’t take the stock options thing. I remain able to pay my rent.

Real post coming Tuesday

2010-02-14T20:03:00.001-08:00

I'm observing President's day by not typing.

In the meantime, I will say this: Do not invite someone in if you are not ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN everything in your apartment is clean.

Day Jobs: part Deux

2010-02-08T11:53:00.000-08:00

Ah, day jobs. I’ve gotten a few comments addressing my last one. Yes, Veronica, there is more to be said about this particular job. As I mentioned last week, I only endured this job for one year – maybe a month shy of a year, in fact. On my pathetically small part-time salary, I finally worked out a budget (my net was $317 a week, after taxes) and deducted out rent, groceries, pharmaceuticals (depressingly mild ones), etc., and realized that I had $60 a week left over for food, entertainment, and transportation. Now, we don’t need cars in New York, which was good; it was also good that I was able to walk to work. The office was across Central Park and 12 blocks down from my apartment, which meant that a brisk 25-minute walk got me door to door. The brisk walk was lovely when the weather was lovely; when it was freezing cold, not so much. And I was working afternoons, so when I finished at 5 pm in the dead of winter, it was dark and it’s just not the best idea to traipse through Central Park alone in the dark. The paths are well lit, but still. I solved this problem by walking in the street, pretty much. There are a few cross-streets that traverse the Park, and one of them has a sidewalk running along its side. Was this safe? Probably not. But with $60 a week for food, entertainment, and transportation, this “not so safe” was still safer than the going-through-the-dark Park “not so safe,” and the rest didn’t necessarily enter into my computations.

So. Jane.

I was young, just out of college, and pretty naïve about money. But this was nothing compared to Jane. She was incredibly extravagant and incredibly cheap at the same time. This was the woman who was withdrawing $1000 to $2000 in cash, daily, and making credit card charges on top; since she had sold her apartment, she was staying for weeks on end (six weeks was the longest) at a high-end hotel, for a bill of more than $15,000 at a shot; she was the woman who promised $35,000 to the Met Opera, on top of buying high-end seats for the season, for an additional $35,000. (She had a box, you see, and back then each seat in the eight-seat box was $250. And she was out of town most of the time! I got about $8000 of free opera seats that season, and it was terrific. The only actual perk of that job. Now when I go and have to sit in the nosebleed “Family Circle” I remember the box and sigh.) Am I getting too specific, and therefore indiscreet? I hope not. I’ll just sum up this part and say, I always had an image of someone standing on top of a building and throwing money into the air.

Once we helped hold a big charitable event—we cohosted it with her favorite charity. After it was over, the charity had to store things from the event in our office. Somehow we ended up with fistfuls of pens. Jane looked at these pens like they were gold. A rep of the charity came to our office to pick up the larger items, and Jane mouthed to me, “Hide the pens!” I didn’t—I wouldn’t even have stolen them for myself, on $317 a week—but the charity woman still left without them. Afterward Jane laughed: “I was so worried she was going to take the pens!”

Best guess as to the total cost of these pens: $3.

These “cheap” moments are actually pretty few and far between. I think it’s because she hadn’t figured out how actually to be cheap. I was pretty good at it then (and I’m an expert, now), so I would give the occasional tip. She got an enormous tax refund after I had been there a few months—enormous, as in twice my current gross salary—and needed to figure out what to do with it. She wanted to invest it in the stock market. “What stocks should I buy, Kathy?” I am not making that question up. I told her she needed to find a financial adviser. “Who should I call, Kathy?” (She also had a thing for saying first names in all sentences. Whereas if I were looking right at someone, I might not say their first name with every last exchange, she did.) Now, on $317 a week I wasn’t employing any financial advisers, so I didn’t know. I got my taxes done at H&R Block, for crying out loud. “So what should I do with this money, Kathy?”

I told her to pay off her credit cards. At that point, she had 4 and each one of them had a balance north of $13,000. “Look at the interest,” I said. I pointed out how much she was getting charged each month on each card, and she was shocked. (What was it, $400? $500? I don’t remember.) “How can they do that, Kathy?” she asked.

“It’s interest,” I responded. “There’s an agreement you sign, saying you’ll pay interest on outstanding balances.” She nodded. Maybe she even understood. (“SERIOUSLY?” you’re saying. “SHE DIDN’T KNOW WHAT INTEREST WAS?” And I think she actually did, but this was the first time she had seen it, had it affect her.) And she said that paying them off, now that she knew she was paying interest, was a great idea.

I took her tax refund check to the Private Banking building in Chase (there’s a separate room where you go make deposits; none of this ATM crap for the rich! Or, more specifically, their assistants), and three days later wrote out checks paying off all the balances. I actually felt relieved, as if part of the burden were mine.

Two weeks later she decided she had to buy another season in the box at the Met. $35,000, due by the end of the month. As I said in the last entry, she decided to divide that up among 3 cards, 2 payments per card. Except both payments went on all 3 cards in one month, so in a month she’d gone from zero to $35,000 all over again. And had no intentions of paying it off any time soon.

She went to her high-priced dentist shortly after that to get her teeth bleached. She paid $1000 for this—a full day’s cash withdrawal!—and was angry that she’d been taken to the non-teeth cleaners. She was in her mid-sixties, so her teeth were, you know, in their mid-fifties. I’m sure she had taken good care of them, but they didn’t look great. She came back from her bleaching session and was just angry: they were not white. “Come here and tell me if they look different to you,” she said. We went to the window and she made me study her teeth at close range. For way too long. It may have been a minute, it may have been thirty seconds—or ten—but it was way too long. Her teeth were gross. Any teeth are gross at close range (apologies to my periodontist brother. He sees something that I don’t, obviously. And makes more money doing it, or will as soon as his practice revs up, which it will do, shortly. Hi, Bill.) and the most I want to do is a quick, “No, you don’t have anything stuck.” But here we were at the window, me with a screwed-up face and Jane showing her teeth to me like a horse. Sigh. And for the record: still completely yellow.

So as I said, I made it nearly a year. Walking out of that place was one of the happiest feelings of my life, even though I didn’t have a job lined up, and obviously I didn’t have savings. But it was sweet freedom, at last.

A few weeks after I quit Jane’s establishment, I was waiting in line for an ATM at my local Chase. An older man was standing at one of the ATMs, cursing. “I can’t do this G—D—thing…” he grumbled. He turned around. “Anyone care to tell me how to figure this out?”

He really did look lost. So I walked up to him and showed him where to put the card. He was not grateful. “Now what?” he demanded.

“What’s your PIN?” I asked.

“What’s that?”
“It’s a special number that allows you to make withdrawals.”

“I don’t know anything about a G—D—PIN,” he said. “I just need my money.”

Suddenly I knew exactly the kind of person I was dealing with. He had money—somewhere!—but how to get it? Where was his assistant? Why wouldn’t this stupid girl here just HELP HIM? I smiled, knowing how angry he was.

“They won’t let you take out money without your PIN,” I said.

“I don’t have one!”

“Then you don’t get your money.” And I turned and walked out the door.

I saw his face as I turned, the frustration. Utter helplessness caused by years of dependence on everyone else. I saw Jane. And when I looked out the door, again I saw freedom.

Of course, I continued to be an assistant.....

Day Jobs!

2010-02-01T13:45:00.001-08:00

It is a truth universally acknowledged that any person with talent and proclivity for the arts must be in search of a day job.

Apologies to Jane Austen. But it’s true.

Arts, you see, most often don’t pay the bills—at least not when you’re starting out. The singer needs to take years and years of singing lessons before she’s ready even to start auditioning. The lessons cost *money*, yo, and if she’s gotten a degree (undergrad or graduate) from a big-name musical institution, she has student loan payments to pay off too. A singer’s voice doesn’t start fully maturing until he/she’s at least into her late 20s; more often 30s. What to do during those years of training? Then there are actors, going to auditions. Most actors go to dozens, hundreds of auditions, and get five or ten jobs. And I’m not referring to the breakout “Friends” role that’s going to pave their way to fame and fortune; they’re “Third Dead Hooker” roles that require disfiguring makeup and a talent for lying still. Meanwhile the rent is due and really, it’s good to be able to eat.

Writers are no exception. While writing doesn’t cost money, there’s a lot that goes into it. I like to study. I have a dozen-plus books on writing on my bookshelves, which I consult on and off; in fact, I just got into a frenzy and bought six more, which I’m making my way through as they come. (I am not an “intuitive” kind of person.) The books cost money. Getting a degree, as with singing, costs money. Not all writers decide to get writing degrees, but most of them have a Bachelor’s in something, and again, STUDENT LOANS rear their ugly heads. Writers’ groups don’t cost money—yay!—but there’s rent and heat and clothing and food, and all the caffeine you’ve gotta drink doesn’t drop out of the sky! And then there’s the small issue of health insurance, and trying to put money aside for retirement, to say nothing of the rainy days. Where does the money come from?

I’ve had a series of day jobs through the years. Some were better than others. I’ve mentioned that I temped, and usually the temp jobs were surprisingly good. But some of my other jobs were horrendous. This is a description of my first true “Day Job.” Day Job Number One.

I was a fresh graduate of Columbia University. Not as young as most fresh graduates, but still young enough to be naïve and optimistic. (Sigh.) A friend called me up, someone who knew I wanted to be a writer. She worked for one of the preeminent literary agents in New York. I shan’t give names, but anyone in the business would recognize this name. (Friend told me once that she had deposited her boss’s two-week paycheck, and it totaled more than my friend’s yearly income.) She said that her boss, the big agent, had a friend who ran a small publishing company and needed an editor/office manager; would I be interested? It was part time, so I‘d have time to write. Good Lord, I said, where do I sign up?

I interviewed for this position and I was very excited; it was a tiny publishing company that mainly focused on republishing out-of-print titles. The woman I would be working for—let’s call her Jane, just because of the quote at the top of the page—said, “I’ll be abroad a lot of the time. I expect there will be days that you can just sit on the couch and write.”

Two weeks later I had the job. Celebration. Part-time, so I could sleep in (a night owl needs that…or at least wants it), a lot of down time. Fantastic! As far as a part-time salary, well, I’d been living on the student loans for a while and hadn’t had to draw out an actual budget. I had no idea how much I was living on. Fresh and naïve, as I said.

And the first few weeks were great. Jane was in the final throes of putting out her latest book, which was an English translation of a French how-to bestseller. She usually did only nominal publicity for each of her books—they were out of print books, and, well, books often go out of print for a reason—and I got to copy-edit galleys and witness the production of a real book! Jane had high hopes for this one, too; it had been a bestseller SOMEWHERE, after all.

Some backstory on Jane and her publishing company: For years Jane had been married to a wealthy man. Extraordinarily wealthy. We’re talking, private jet wealthy. Oil money wealthy. She had been raised with money and then married more, so all her life she hadn’t had to worry about it…until now. She and the extraordinarily wealthy man were divorcing—or she was trying to, anyway. She had initiated the divorce four years earlier, and he was contesting, and New York has some archaic, ridiculous divorce laws, so it was dragging out. As far as I could tell, he had been an absolute bastard to her most of their married life, and since she’d left him he had ratcheted it up. Rich Bastard Husband also cut her off financially (until he was court-ordered to give her money) and told their grown children to choose sides. (They chose the one with the money.) Jane had started her publishing company while she and RBH were still married, so she didn’t worry about her titles making money or not; he put money in, she made books, she was happy. But now she had really high hopes that this French bestseller would become an American bestseller and she could thumb her nose at RBH and his bastardly, stingy ways. (one quick anecdote: the Concorde crashed while I was working there. As Jane often jetted back and forth to Paris, RBH’s assistant phoned to make sure she hadn’t been on the flight that crashed. I relayed that to Jane, and she said, “Ha, I can’t AFFORD to fly the CONCORDE!” with enough annoyance that I realized, this was quite an imposition for her.)

Well, it was a bad book. I read through it and was shocked at the awkward prose. I found out that Jane herself had done the English translation, and it was in final galley form, so it was too late to change. Jane hired a publicist (her first, since this was the first book she actually thought would sell) and really expected the publicist to make it Number One. For weeks, maybe years. This is an expectation publicists are accustomed to, but Jane really put on the pressure. Jane, after all, had spent the past fifty-plus years ordering people around and seeing every wish granted, and thought she could do the same with this book. She absolutely expected an Oprah appearance—for the book’s author and for herself (just to translate, bien sur!).

Our publicist did what she could. And it wasn’t enough, because nothing would have been enough, and the French bestseller became an American dead-in-the-water bookstop. And Jane was angry. Angry at the publicist, and angry at me: we hadn’t done enough. Things became tense. It was bad already because of the tension with RBH; I was frequently a relayer of messages between Jane and RBH (via his assistant, actually, a nice woman) and Jane would say, “Did you tell him I already did that?” Well, no, because you told me to tell him that you were going to do that. “You tell him I already did that!” I’m actually not on the phone anymore. That kind of thing.

Jane also had a drinking problem. I didn’t figure it out for a long time; during her stints abroad she would phone in the afternoon, perfectly lucid-sounding, and ask me questions about the dead-in-the-water book and sometimes about me. I’d answer them in detail. And then the next day she would ask me the exact same questions, in the exact same way (and tone of voice) and I would answer exactly as I had the day before. Confused. Sometimes she would remember that we’d already had that particular discussion, but usually not.

Well, as I mentioned, I had a lot of down time, and I spent several days cleaning out the office. Four years earlier, she and her husband had vacated their enormous Fifth Avenue apartment; she had taken a lot of the junk with her to the office. And by junk, I mean unopened mail—four-year-old unopened mail—and documents and things that didn’t matter a bit. No cool furniture or designer clothing or anything like that (that was in storage), just paper. So I spent days and days and days sorting through paper, throwing most of it out, making the office presentable. There was an enormous table in one corner, and literally, it was like a shelf in a sea of paper; there was paper jammed below it, from the floor to the table, and then from the table to the ceiling. There were cupboards stuffed with it. I was putting garbage bags full of paper into the recycling. I kept a few things, most of which were divorce-related documents. I put them in a small, fancy chest which I referred to (in my head) as the “divorce chest,” filed them chronologically. And read them.

A lot was made in these documents about Jane’s drinking problem. I thought this was interesting, because I hadn’t noticed one. Until she spent a few weeks in town, and returned from a lunch reeking of alcohol. She sounded lucid, but she began asking me the exact same questions she had asked me the day before, in exactly the same way, and didn’t react when I gave her the exact same answers.

Ah ha.

After the first book came out, there wasn’t any book-related stuff to do, so I was now just her personal assistant. She wanted me to keep track of expenses, which was fine, except that she spent like nobody’s business. She had hundreds of thousands of American Express points and mileage on different airlines (which she kept trying ineffectually to redeem; she’d pester me to try to pay for things with MILES. “What about my MILES, Kathy? Won’t they honor my MILES? Tell them how many MILES I have.” To this day, when I hear the word “miles” uttered that way I shudder. But she didn’t know what MILES actually did. Sad.). By the time I came along she was getting an unholy amount of alimony (or whatever it is when you’re not yet divorced)—I mean, she got per month what I now earn (gross!) per year. Tax-free, and no children to take care of. And she couldn’t live on it. I had to call the bank every day (this was before online banking) and see how much she had withdrawn the day before; it was often in excess of two thousand dollars. (I’d still love to know what she spent it on.) This was on top of credit card expenses; she had 4 credit cards (and applied for one more while I was there) on which she was floating maximum balances, around $15,000. I made her pay them off when she got an enormous tax refund, and within two months three of them were maxed out again. She asked me to get her a debit card and I refused; there was no way I was going to try to manage that one for her. In fact, she didn’t even seem to know how credit cards worked. She wanted to put a $35,000 charge on her cards, but each one had a $15k limit. She said, “Can we just put it on different cards? Two different payments on three different cards?” Unfortunately the $35k balance was due at the end of the month, so those two payments on three different cards all happened the SAME MONTH. Net effect: the same.

I was working part time and netting just over three hundred dollars per week, having figured out exactly what a budget was and realizing just how EXTREME my budgeting needed to be—once I went to Gracious Homes and bought a $2 orange peeler, and I can’t describe how naughty I felt, with that splurge— watching that money disappear into the ether. I was going crazy.

I also wasn’t writing. I had a lot of down time, yes, but I was in that state…that “I want to be a writer but I don’t have anything to write” state. It was awful. There were many days I sat at the computer, staring at the Microsoft Word screen. I tried. But I had nothing.

I made it one year. Truthfully I think I made it that long because she spent so much time abroad. I started looking for a new job in March, but that was just when the dot-com bubble started bursting. Companies were retrenching, not looking for more help. After two months, I found a job on Monster.com, interviewed, got it, and gave notice. Now, the job looked sketchy. I won’t even tell you what it was because that will embarrass me; you would look at it and say, “Really? You fell for that?” (The fact that sixty people came for the interview at the same time—a group interview—and all of us were offered the position might indicate a little something.) I was too happy to look at any real issues.

The funny part is, I was not brave enough just to tell Jane the truth: I’d gotten a new job. I had a perfectly legitimate reason for looking, more than just “I don’t like you”—I could have said, “I’ve realized that I need benefits and a much higher salary.” Instead I made up a completely random, stupid lie and told her I needed to go to Utah for the summer to deal with family issues, and therefore needed to quit. (I have never done that since, I promise. Really.) I gave the two weeks’ notice. Unfortunately, by the time my final day rolled around I had already realized that my new job wasn’t quite real. (Long story…yes, I do take that into consideration sometimes.) I had no job lined up, and no job to go to anymore. No writing that I was doing, no real prospects. It was a long summer.

The following fall I realized I desperately wanted to take a playwriting class. I called the Columbia writing department head, Austin Flint, and asked him if I could possibly do this. I didn’t know how I’d pay for it, but practicality had taken a backseat. (it backfired on me with the job in May, but oh well.) He said yes, and then told me he would give me a fellowship designed for writing majors who wanted to return and take writing classes. I ended up taking the playwriting class for 3 semesters, and paying a total of $180 for all of them. (Back then they would have totaled $9000. More now, I’m sure.) I wrote a full-length play, submitted it to NYU, and got into their grad program.

What was the play about, you ask? Oh, a wealthy woman who’s trying to divorce her rich bastard husband, grappling with money issues for the first time in her life. Who has a drinking problem.

A non-Monday post

2010-01-28T09:26:00.000-08:00

In my last entry, I mentioned "The Rejectionist" as one of my faves. Today The Rejectionist (I'm not sure if it's he or she, since it is written in a mysterious "we") has an interview with Daniel Handler, aka Lemony Snicket. I'll let you read the whole interview here. But I will transcribe my two favorite questions (questions in quotes, his answers in italics, my responses in parentheses):

"Living as a broke fiction writer in New York: totally overrated, or deeply formative?"
Both, absolutely. I only survived those years by convincing myself that they would look glamorous and bohemian in retrospect. Sometimes they do but not often enough. (Definitely....not...often...enough...)

"Your first novel was rejected thirty-seven times, according to your Wikipedia entry (in retrospect, the idea that The Basic Eight is "too dark" seems almost quaint). We wouldn't have rejected it, because it's awesome. Anyway, what kept you going before your unexpected success as Lemony Snicket? Were you ever tempted to throw in the towel as a writer?"
I was sorely tempted but could not think up anything else to do. This is how it is for most writers I know - they soldiered on simply because there was no Plan B.
(how many times have I said to friends, "I just can't think of anything else I want to do"?? How many times????!! And I go to Craigslist or Monster or job search websites or headhunters--I have a Master's, for crying out loud--and think, but would I want to spend the rest of my life doing that? Is that better than writing? Would I like it? and inevitably, the answer...is NO. Sigh. It's commitment, baby, with a touch of narcissism and a soupcon of insanity. And it's good to know I'm not alone.)

Book blogs!

2010-01-25T11:27:00.000-08:00

A gray, rainy, windy day. I really prefer days like this to be Fridays; that way, it’s a depressing day but you can go home and take a nap and watch TV without that oppressive “school night” feeling—especially the “It’s a Monday and the whole week is ahead of me” school night feeling. Sigh.

I need to amend my earlier resolution, that about blogging every week. I will hereby state that I will blog every Monday except holidays. If I’m off, I’m not online. I have dial-up on my home computer for the specific purpose of keeping me off the internet when I should be writing. I figure, I have Ethernet at work, and that’s plenty. Of course, when I need to email my manuscripts to people, it’s annoying. But it keeps me off the internet. Therefore I can find my distraction with magazines, recipes, staring out the window, deciding that I have to find my old glowing pen right now, and all kinds of cleaning that won’t get done otherwise.
However, the internet has a whole lot of writing resources. I think today is going to be an ode to the best, the sites that I can’t live without, the sites that have taught me what it’s like to be a working writer and yet haven’t persuaded me to change my focus.

Query Shark: http://queryshark.blogspot.com/
This is first because, once you’ve written the book, the query is the first step. Janet Reid is a literary agent for Fine Print Literary Management, and she knows her stuff. She also has a non-query-oriented blog, http://jetreidliterary.blogspot.com/ in which she discusses conferences and some of her clients. Both are definitely worth checking out.

Nathan Bransford: http://blog.nathanbransford.com/
A San Francisco-based agent who also gives a lot of inside scoops on the state of the industry. He’s a writer himself, with a YA book, JACOB WONDERBAR AND THE COSMIC SPACE KAPOW, due out in 2011. Unfailingly encouraging, not snarky (though I do love me some snark; I wouldn’t like Query Shark if I couldn’t handle snark), and, judging from his picture, rather handsome.

Kristin Nelson: http://pubrants.blogspot.com/
She blogs from (and works in) Denver. She has been very educational lately, posting *successful* query letters (and why they worked) and good opening pages from queries. She talks about the ins and outs of contracts, tiny details you might not think you need to worry about. But worry you should. She’ll tell you why.

The Rejectionist: http://www.therejectionist.com/
My current favorite. Sarcastic? Sure. Hilarious? Always.

Editorial Anonymous: http://editorialanonymous.blogspot.com/

On the marketing side: Market My Words, at http://faeriality.blogspot.com/ -- a writer and marketing consultant combines her two fields and blogs about them for your benefit!
(even if she does give time and space to one of The Hills’ vacuous stars—I won’t say her name so she won’t get the Google Alert)

Pimp My Novel: http://pimpmynovel.blogspot.com/ The same theme as Market My Words, but a different style altogether. Has a handy weekly roundup thing on Fridays if you can manage to check only once a week.

These are my go-to sites; I check them early and often. It helps a lot to be well-versed not only in what publishing professionals like, but what they’re seeing, what they do. Reading blogs can be misinterpreted as a waste of time (fie! And that doesn’t apply to this one!) but, if you find your overly active conscience reprimanding you for that, try to internalize the idea that knowing about this industry is just as important as writing.

Not as important as writing/a definite waste of time (but oh-so-enjoyable): Crazy Days and Nights. Try it, get sucked in. My apologies.

Small victories

2010-01-11T13:17:00.000-08:00

This is not me. In case you were wondering.

It's a new year, as everyone knows. In fact, it's 11 days into the new year. What have you accomplished?? How many goals are you still adhering to?

I'm still in the process of deciding mine. As I mentioned before, I don't necessarily like setting firm goals; I'd rather just decide I'd like to do smoething and do it. I'd like more to decide that in the middle of the year, instead of on January 1 and becoming one of the masses. Let me set my goals on a random day in April and be unusual. Or at least, someone who thinks of herself as unusual.

January is not a good time at the gym. Every January since Ih ave been a member (10 years now!) January is inevitably SLAMMED. I don't like waiting for machines; I'm impatient by nature, I guess, and I don't want people waiting for me to get off and thus pressuring me to leave before I want to. Harrumph.

Gymgoing is a pretty necessary party of writing. Writing, as you may have guessed, is SEDENTARY. Sit at a desk, working your wrists hard, unfortunately does nothing for toned muscles or a slim waist. And if you're genetically predisposed to, uh, girth...this is something you ought to take seriously.

I joined my first gym in January 2000 (NOT as a New Year's resolution; I had awakened very late, like eleven, and wandered from my bed to the couch with a book, and I thought, "I'll be dead of inaction before I'm thirty" and marched to New York Sports Club and joined.) and, but for an eight-month period in 2005, have been a somewhat-regular goer since then. I am somewhat poor (I'm a writer!), and as a result of that, I'm cheap, and for me, paying a large sum of money to a gym every month, automatic withdrawal or not, pretty much ensures I will be at that gym, calculator in hand. New York gyms are expensive. when I joined NYSC, I think it was $67 a month, so I would say to myself, okay, if I go twice a week for four weeks, that makes it a little more than $8 each time I go. And I would picture handing over $8 every time I walked in that door. The idea was abhorrent. So, okay, if I go four times a week for four weeks, that's $4 each time I go. That was more palatable. Going five times a week was better, because that was $3. And yes, ladies and gentlemen, that was the the entirety of my motivation.

I kept going regularly until 2003, when I started grad school. Then I was faced with a dilemma: go to NYU's (free) gym or keep my gym membership? And quickly that dilemma was subsumed with reality: I had no time! Argh. My membership fee had gone up to about $77 a month, and I made it to NYSC once a week, thereby bringing my per-visit total to just under $20. Ridiculous. And yet I continued.

One of my prouder moments was wearing the same skirt to an end-of-program party that I wore to a beginning-of-program party. I will tell you why this is at all remarkable: I had only gone once a week, but that was once a week more than many of my classmates. I loved them, and I don't want to make fun, but...let's just say a lot of them were not wearing the same clothes at the end.

Okay, so the program ended and my dreams of graduating and landing a primo writing gig were not realized. I was quite sure that I would sell something right away, however, so I decided just to temp for a while. Temping is not great fun. When it works well, it's great (a salary but no commitment) but there are huge down sides: no benefits, no stability, occasional involuntary dry spells. And the salary is pretty low. NYSC kept raising its rates, and I kept getting more irritated at them, and in one involuntary dry spell I got annoyed to quit.

This was mid-summer, 2005. I didn't know if it would be forever, but I thought that might be a possibility. And I stayed out of the gym world until December. What prompted me to go back? Well, I had gone to Brazil with my family the previous summer, and my dad took pictures. He showed them to us at Christmas. There were some with all of us at the beach. Among them...was a picture of me, taken from the back... in a swimming suit.

Oh boy.

I joined Crunch the next week.

This was 2006. I lost a lot of weight going to Crunch, gained it back, have lost a lot of it again. Crunch promised me they would never, ever raise their prices, and that lasted for 2 years; now they raise them every January. I still pay less than I paid at the end of my NYSC run.

Why am I regaling you with this, dear reader? Why, for the simple reason that I have made a new resolution. It's been increasingly difficult to get to the gym at night; I return home from a day at work and I want to write and go to the gym, adn most nights I can't get in both. I always have the best of intentions, but if I'm writing well and on a roll, I don't want to break free; and if I decide to go to the gym, often it's a *process* that takes at least as much time convincing myself to go as it would take me at the gym. And then I decide, no, I'll go tomorrow. It won't be so cold tomorrow. I'll write tonight. No, I'll take it easy tonight. I'll read. No, I'll...I'll...something else.

It's been incredibly wasteful and frustrating, and the cheap side of me realizes that going twice a week makes it more than $10 every visit! Three times a week, it's still $8-plus! I need to go five times a week!

So I'm going at my lunch hour. I have a gym 3 blocks away from the office, so I just hustle over, change, run on the treadmill for 35 minutes, quickly stretch, quickly shower, and hustle back. It's been great so far. Then I get home and I have no excuse: I have to write. And I got a great laptop for Christmas, which is new enough and enough of a shiny toy that I actually want to!

Victory all 'round!

Blizzards and security breaches

2010-01-05T12:16:00.000-08:00

Okay, my bad blogger thing continues. Last week I was on vacation; yesterday I was in transit. I did start an entry last week, and it was irredeemably boring. Consider last week’s inaction a “save” from a boring post.

I am now back into the swing of things after my Christmas holiday. I always try to bank up my vacation days so that I can take a couple of weeks at the end of the year. Happily we have a fairly liberal vacation policy at the office, so that doesn’t mean I’m chained to my desk for the rest of the year; I can still take a few days off here and there. But the big trip is always at Christmas.

Travel karma totally went my way this year. I was scheduled to fly out on a 5 pm flight on December 19. Now, I normally don’t book pm flights in the wintertime; I always try for the first flight out. However, there simply wasn’t one available this year, so I reluctantly took the 5 pm. I wanted it to be that Saturday, rather than wait for Monday, because the closer you get to Christmas the worse the travel conditions become. So, 5 pm the 18th it was. And everything looked completely fine until the Wednesday before, when they started hinting around about snow. I still wasn’t worried. “We may get a flurry or two,” they said. “It depends on how closely it hews to the coast.” Thursday: “Well, we’re probably going to get a bit of a snowstorm.” Friday: “Buy food and blankets and batteries! We’re in for a Nor’Easter!”

I decided, at 1 am Saturday, to see if I could rebook. Delta had helpfully canceled my 5 pm flight and put me on a 1 pm. (though somehow the idea that SOMEHOW THEY SHOULD LET ME KNOW didn’t occur to them.) But the 1 pm went from Newark to Atlanta to Nashville to Salt Lake, which didn’t seem to be the most practical route. So I rebooked online to go, at 8 am, JFK to Chicago to Salt Lake, with a two-hour layover. It was the best we could do, and I was happy to take it. The thing is, by this time it was 2:30 am and I still had crap to do. And by “crap” I mean “pack.” (This does not mean I was procrastinating. Remember, I had thought I had until 5 pm. I was not procrastinating! I was doing other things! And by "other things" I mean "watching Mad Men.") I rushed around and finished everything by 3:30 and got to sleep around 4:15, with the alarm set for 6:00. Yah-hoo. I didn’t sleep much on the first flight (on which they booked me first class, for some reason) and I was just trashed in Chicago. (I expect that by this I join an illustrious list of people who have been trashed in Chicago.) There was a gate area they had cleared of seats, and a few people were flat on the floor there. I walked by a couple of times, staring longingly at prostrate (sleeping) people, and then said, “I have no pride” and joined them, and I slept for an hour and a half on the dirty floor of the Chicago airport. And I would do it again.

I came back yesterday and flew into Newark. My boss was scheduled to return from his vacation, flying into Newark, on Sunday, but they didn’t arrive until 3 am Monday because of the crazy security breach. I had almost scheduled my return flight for Sunday, but didn’t; I figured that Sunday might be one of those awful “everyone’s coming back at the same time” days and Monday might be better. Now, the Good Worker part of me (whether it’s a big or small part of me, I haven’t yet determined) said, Monday is the first day of the work week; I should be back on Monday! I should arrive at the office at 9 am, ready to retackle my job and my life! But I didn’t. On a whim, I decided to give myself that one extra day and fly back on Monday. Oh, how the whim paid off! Thank you, Travel Gods; and Good Worker, go sit in a corner and eat cherry pie with Early To Bed and Regular Gym Goer while I figure out what to do with you.

Of course, this could mean nothing. But I’m taking it as an auspicious sign…a good 2010. How often do Travel Gods rule in your favor? Almost never, I tell you. I should also play the lottery, play in the road and take up smoking, because at the moment odds are in my favor.

Writing Groups Part II (Two days late)

2009-12-23T11:29:00.000-08:00

Caught up in holiday madness. I knew I needed to post on Monday, to keep with my new goal, but I was occupied pretty much all day. I am home for the holidays (because I caught a flight early Saturday a.m. out of New York, thereby escaping the blizzard/travel insanity, thank heaven) but I spent Monday and Tuesday occupied with the nephew, who is almost two and can't be left alone for a second. Adorable, if exhausting. But, I owe you all a post this week, and a post you shall get.

I said in my earlier post that writing groups are a tremendously valuable part of the writing process, and I meant it. For my first book, Did I Expect Angels? I know I wouldn't have finished the book without the group. Around Christmas of 2001, I had a general idea and theme in my head, and over that Christmas break from work I sat down at the family computer and wrote about 15 pages. And then I left it. (This was my habit in those days: starting projects and never seeing them through, all the while thinking, "I want to be a writer." Of course, writers have to write--and more than that, they have to finish things. I knew this, but couldn't quite get over that hurdle.) So I had 15 pages and a vague sense of dissatisfaction with my life.

Fast forward to Memorial Day of 2002. I had lunch with a friend, who told me she was also working on some writing projects. We talked it over and agreed that we needed some extra help getting things done (in my case) and getting feedback (hers). So we each recruited a friend and set up an online writers' group. We set up a schedule where every Monday one of us would email the others a selection of pages, maybe 15 - 20 at a time, and the others would have a week to read and write a critique. We'd email our critiques to everyone the following Monday and the next person would email her pages.

Suddenly I had a deadline! I sent out my 15 pages the first week, and I had 3 weeks more to produce 15 pages. And I actually did. I got going and wrote pages! For the first time I had an actual direction and motivation to finish something, and it was wonderful. And I discovered that I was not a great writer. I remember being told that it read like a short story, because I *talked about* things happening, rather than putting the reader in the moment and showing what happened. "Everything just kind of zooms past," was what they said, as well as I can remember. This was a revelation. I had had writing classes in college, but we'd done short stories, where it's more acceptable to sum (some) things up just to conserve space; with a 4000k word limit in many magazines, you know, some summation is in order. But this doesn't apply nearly as much in novels, which I was trying to write.

Through this writers' group, I finished my book. I worked on it actively from that June through January of 2003. I am very grateful to this group.

I cannot say that we were free of drama. There was one member whom I inadvertently offended. Several times. Consistently, weeks on end, it turns out. I have no idea when it began, but apparently it grew and grew until we hit the boiling point, and she sent out comments about my latest installation that ... well, they weren't constructive, they weren't helpful; they were just angry. "I don't like this...I've already read this so many times I don't care..." (yes, she had, but part of the writing group experience is reading revisions) "... I don't agree with this sentiment and I don't care to read anything that says it" etc.

I was confused. My friend told me that this woman was incredibly angry with me because I hadn't begun my critiques with positive comments first. Apparently this is a rule of most writing groups; but I had no idea. And no one mentioned it to me after they noticed that I was ignoring/ignorant of the rule. Angry Woman had sent my friend a draft of an email that she wanted to send to me, telling me how rude I was and how I was affecting her mental health; she was agoraphobic and couldn't hold down a job and unhappy and I was making everything worse. My friend told her not to send the note, that I was just more blunt than other people. So she didn't send it; instead she got angrier and angrier every time I didn't start with the positives. Sigh.

Once I was aware this was a problem, I sent her a note. I apologized for having harmed her so grievously (though I didn't include the sarcasm, I promise I didn't), said I was unaware she'd been having these problems, and maybe she could let me know when I offended her, and we could just start again. Well, this made it worse. She emailed back a nasty note. I wish I remembered what it said! It would make this post a lot more amusing. But I don't remember, so I can only talk about it. (Writing lesson! Talking about things -- aka "telling" -- is not as interesting as showing them!) I do remember she said something like, "I was just being blunt. Maybe you can't handle bluntness." Angry Woman emailed us all and literally asked the other two to take sides, because she couldn't handle being in a group that tolerated my kind of behavior. Please let her know, she said, if we wanted her out of the group. She ended the note with, "I await your decision."

Of course my two other friends wouldn't kick her out. They told her the decision had to be hers, so she needed to let us know if she wanted to continue or not. Within a day there was an email labeled "resignation" in my inbox. (as I think about it, that's not terribly specific; she could have been announcing her resignation to the idea of remaining in the group that included such an ignorant boor as myself.) Consensus on the sane side was that she had some problems bigger than this, and had been looking for a reason/way to get out of the group.

We continued on for a while. It was a lot harder with only three members, however. Somehow, having two weeks in between submitting was quite a bit harder than having three. More than three would have been too long, but two was way too short. We soldiered on as best we could, but also found that only two outside opinions weren't as helpful as having three (even if one of them was angry).

A few months later we recruited another writer, who wrote restaurant reviews (my dream job!), and she was low-drama and low-key and gave helpful critiques. Unfortunately, soon after this, I started grad school. (Unfortunate for me being in the group; not unfortunate for me.) My writing in grad school was focused on stage and screen, and I simply didn't have time to continue writing prose. And if I sent the group my playwriting, by the time I got their comments back I had already submitted that piece of writing and gotten graded on it--the program moved fast. So I had to bow out, and I was sad to do it.

I have great memories of that group. We saw each other through some interesting times and crises and frustrations, buoyed each other through some things, and then I managed to ruin someone's life. I guess I still love them since it was not *my* life that was ruined.

writing groups!

2009-12-14T13:56:00.001-08:00

Ever had this happen?

You have a great idea, you’re on a tear, you’re particular inspired by a tear-jerking movie, you’re drunk (ahem) or just delirious because this is the third day you’ve gotten less than 4 hours sleep. You go to your computer and write something at breakneck speed, and you’re convinced this is the greatest thing you have ever produced. You finish the piece, sigh happily and hit Print, then go (back) to bed to revel in that feeling, that joy, that knowledge: You Are A Great Writer.

Oh, the pain of the mornings.

Now imagine a slightly different scenario. You’ve labored on something for days/weeks/months/YEARS and you know it’s the best thing you can do. You’ve gone through it dozens of times, found typos, found inconsistencies, realized that perhaps this line where Kaylee screams “I’ll find that rare stolen coin if it’s the last thing I do!” (a) reads like she’s a psycho or (b) is perhaps a tad on the melodramatic side or (c) is a placeholder you wrote because that is in fact what she’s looking for but you planned to come back later and make it a little less like an infodump/less freakishly awful. And then you forgot about it and on the seventh re-read you found it.

And suddenly you think, “What else have I left in there that I forgot about?” If you have a long piece, you just can’t remember all the places you do something like that.

What to do?

Beta readers. Readers are incredibly important. And make sure it’s someone who won’t smile and say, “I loved it!” Because as good as that little ego stroking may feel, ultimately it doesn’t help. I assure you, agents and editors will not smile and say “I loved it!” when they come upon someone shrieking, “I’ll find that rare stolen coin if it’s the last thing I do!”

Now, it’s also a big favor to ask, having someone read a completed 100,000-word manuscript. Friends will often do it for several reasons: they’ve heard you talk about this piece for days/weeks/months/YEARS and they’re curious. They’d like to write, but never have. They’re good readers. Or perhaps they have nothing else to do. But nine times out of ten, their feedback isn’t going to be that great. Why? Simply because they don’t do this very often.
A better option is to have people reading what you’re writing as you go. It’s less painful to read six pages, rather than two hundred fifty. The reader can also pay closer attention to little things. It’s hard for your readers to get the big picture (actually, nigh on impossible) but…because you have also read their submissions as the weeks go by, they wn’t be as offended when you ask them to read the whole thing in a big gulp.

I will talk more about the writing groups I’ve been part of…later.

My First Book

2009-12-07T13:48:00.000-08:00

Monday Blogging
Look at me! My goal is off to a good start.

I don’t quite remember what the impetus was to write my first book. My English class had been writing stories for a few weeks, and I really enjoyed it, so maybe it was that. But I do remember sitting down at our relatively new computer and saying to myself, “I’m going to write a book,” and starting to type. I was 14 years old.

The short story unit had been fun. We took a few weeks to talk about characters and plot, and I set about writing a murder mystery. I was very into Agatha Christie at the time (though I only read the Hercule Poirot mysteries, rather than the bland Miss Marple—or I thought she was bland at the time; maybe she’s not and I need to revisit?) and I was determined to do the same. I started with a catchy title—BIRTHDAY MURDER—and began writing.

I don’t remember the plot of Birthday Murder. I revised it a few times, and I don’t remember the first plot or the second or the third. I do remember the first ending, however, because I cribbed it directly from Ms. Christie. And this was not a generic ending, where one could think that I just arrived at that idea independently. No, it involved a murder happening in silence, several hours before it was discovered; false blood strewn about the room (an unnaturally bright shade of red, because a chemical had been added to keep it fresh); and a balloon with a stopper that got pulled from a cord stretched out the window, emitting an ear-splitting, animal-sounding scream to bring people running when the killer was among them, so they wouldn’t suspect. Very creative, Agatha! Me, using it again? Not so much.

At some point, I realized that it was a bad idea to plagiarize. Unfortunately, it was right before handing in the final draft. I needed an ending, one that I could just scribble down to turn in the next day. Hmm, how did I handle that? I don’t remember that either. I do remember that I changed the motive. Rather than a crazy, involved family secret being exposed (or some such nonsense) I changed it to the covers-all “For Kicks.” Yep. A semi-direct quote, as close as I can remember it: “She did it for fun. FOR FUN.”

Take a moment to let that wash over you. High drama.

And yet Mrs. Morris liked it enough to read my story aloud to the class. I’ve recounted this to people before, and every time I tell it I remember sitting at my desk, staring at the faux-wood surface, the heat of blood in my cheeks as I was embarrassed and thrilled at the same time. Mrs. Morris didn’t actually tell the class whose story she was reading, but they all knew (probably from my reaction) and they complimented me profusely after it was over. I was in love. I’m not sure with whom. Maybe with myself. More likely, with writing, given what I did next.

I think it was the next Friday night that I sat down to write a book. And that was my goal. No short story this time. I turned on the computer…and looked at a blank screen. (Black, back in those days. Although I was able to change both background and character colors, and I enjoyed messing with that a lot. Mint green on pink? Red on black, black on red? Orange on blue? Best part: my mom didn’t know how to fix it.)

My problem was plotting. Not actually ironing out what would happen when, but the very idea. It’s an age-old problem for writers of all sorts. It’s not quite writers’ block, but this general feeling of “I should be writing something!” but not knowing what that something would be. I’ve had that feeling since, but a few years ago I actually realized that I already have more ideas for books and screenplays than I could ever finish. The problem is not getting ideas; the problem is making ideas work. (Therefore, when someone says, “I have a proposal: I’ll give you ideas and you write them, and we’ll split the proceeds 50/50” you should RUN. First, the idea of “proceeds” is far-fetched in far too many cases; second, ideas are as easy to come by as urine [Really? Am I really going to use that?] and the ideas are not the work.)

So…at that point, where was an idea? This was easily solved. My sister gave it to me. She was 17 at the time and she said, rather offhandedly, “A guy’s wife gets kidnapped, and their baby dies, and he gets revenge and kills the people involved and then he’s prosecuted and he escapes to Nicaragua, fighting with the Contras.”

That is the plot I chose.

I’ll just let that sink in. More high drama. Higher.

Forget the fact that I didn’t know the first thing about Nicaragua, the Contras, kidnapping, marriage. Or that my idea of revenge involved putting toothpaste in inconvenient places. Forget that I didn’t do any research. I could do this!

It took a month or two, and I had written my book. Now, I was (am) a softie and I couldn’t have a sad ending. So the guy (Alan) couldn’t be banished to Nicaragua. In fact, he couldn’t be a bad guy. Therefore the person on whom he gets his revenge must be a total horror. I chose his mother-in-law—divorced from the father-in-law, because the father-in-law is rich and therefore a good guy—and yes, she was so awful that I had Alan’s wife, Jody, scream “You total bitch!” though I couldn’t make myself have an actual swear word in the dialogue, so I changed it to witch. Whoo.

It is also noteworthy that I didn’t think this would be a YA novel. I thought this would take the publishing world by storm when it went out and bio on the book jacket (which I had helpfully written out at the end of the manuscript) said, “Yes, folks, this lady’s fourteen.” Direct quote. Sigh.

Now, off to my readers! I gave it to my mom, and said, “I want your real feedback. What you really think.” She made a face that I have since made, that “I don’t want to hurt you but I don’t want to encourage you either” face, and said, “It’s…amateurish.” I nodded and thought about it. I gave it to a 14-year-old friend, who loved it. And I gave it to my 9th grade teacher, who also loved it and told me to publish it. (Whose opinions did I latch onto? Whose do you think?) She didn’t, however, tell me *how* to publish it. Problem.

A bigger problem: My little brother, who loved messing with the computer, then erased our hard drive. I was 14, so he must have been 11. He was very into computer games (specifically Digger, the only computer game I’ve ever gotten into, and “Bushido” which I don’t remember except that it involved samurai swords.) and decided one day to clean up the hard drive. The next day, I turned on the computer and when it didn’t take me to LeMenu, I called for my dad, who called for my mom, who called for Bill. Bill told us, so cavalierly, “I just erased an extra command.” (The words on screen said, I am not kidding, “Missing command.”)

My book was gone.

My mom’s eyes were saucers. I stared at the computer, that dark screen that was missing THE MOST IMPORTANT COMMAND (apparently no commands are “extra”), silent. My mom looked between me and Bill, worried about the possible carnage, and took me away and said, “If you don’t say anything to him, I’ll take you to Baskin Robbins.” (worth noting: she took him, too, in the same trip.) I turned around and went to my room and closed the door.

I was able to retrieve the printed manuscript from one of my friends. I spent many more hours retyping the same book into the computer, since Bill was now forbidden to mess with the programming. He kept on playing “Bushido,” though, and as revenge I hid the floppy disk (a five-incher!) which was more effective than toothpaste.

So I had gotten my book back, in a way, but by then the spirit was gone. Maybe Bill saved me from myself; the thing was dumb. I really cannot imagine what an agent’s response would have been, since a form rejection seems too nice. (Although I do have an agent friend. Maybe I’ll ask her.) No copy survives, only memories. It remains where it belongs: under the proverbial bed.

Bad blogger, bad!

2009-11-30T08:43:00.000-08:00

Why the Weeble? Why not?

I am a bad blogger. Okay, it's not every count, but I am a bad blogger. My flaunting of #2 and #4 is particularly flagrant and egregious. It's been partly just that I've been busy, yes, but...I admit, it's been mostly laziness. And so, dear reader (how many are left? Three? On a good day?) I am now making ... wait for it ... a goal. We'll get back to that in a moment.

I do not set many goals. Not firm, "I will do X by Y date" goals, anyway. I say, "Hmm. I would like to start running." And I start a running class and I do their assignments and soon I consider myself a runner, as I now do. I don't like setting concrete X-by-Y-date goals, for some reason, even though a lot of people say that's the way to get things done. I have a couple of friends who do that every year, make long lists of things to accomplish that year, and I am not exaggerating when I say NOT ONE OF THOSE GOALS gets met. I hope I would actually meet goals if I set them, but I have this bad example in front of me and I am therefore...disinclined, shall we say?, to set them.

But I am now setting a goal. Monday is blog day. Holy cow. It's official, because I just put it in my calendar! Not Monday morning, because mornings are not my friend, but Monday afternoons. I will keep this blog mainly writing-related, because it unnerves me to have personal things out there on the internet for anyone and his pervy neighbor to see, but there will be the occasional personal tidbit. If it's ever juicy or exciting, well -- let's just say, that means something (anything!) in my life will have changed.

I do have things to write about, I do. I have a terrific critique group that meets every Wednesday, since the end of May, and I could blog some stories about them/writing groups in general (I've been in a few). I could blog about the process of research I'm involved in. I could write some memories I have of writing--specifically, my first (TERRIBLE, AWFUL, HORRIBLE) book that I wrote when I was 14. Actually, thinking about it, I will definitely share that story. It's pretty funny. The book I started when I was 25 and never finished (and never will. It's also bad. Some portions are okay, but my, I did like my "said" adverbs--ie, "she said angrily," "he said briskly" [see all of Harry Potter 5 for a more extended example. No hate here; I love HP and JKR, but she loves her adverbs even more than I did at 25 and apparently her editor couldn't say no at that point], which was jarring to see since they are now a pet peeve.)

I am/we are finished, yes, FINISHED with the Madame Curie script. It has been a great experience, writing with Anil, and we are thinking of new future projects and collaborations. (no news I can report yet on results, though.) One may be a script I initially finished at NYU; I showed it to Anil, and he and I talked it through and discussed some things I could do to make it better/more market-friendly. There are some very good suggestions, some concrete suggestions, but no "just change this word here" suggestions, which are the easy ones to implement. So I have to figure out how, exactly, to make the changes. In the meantime, I have a first draft of another script, started long ago (BEFORE we began Mme Curie) that I'd like to finish so I can look it over and see the many places I went wrong, fix those, then take it to my writing group so they can point out even more places where I went wrong, help me fix them, and then perhaps have Anil look at that one, too, for more ideas.

Meanwhile I continue to write my second book. It's turning into a good thing, I think/hope/dare to dream. It is HARD to write, on many different levels. I had no idea how difficult it would be when I started. I am no longer cruising through with 1000+ words a day, my earlier pace, since I am revising the first half because I had taken a couple of wrong turns earlier. Right now the first half feels like (get ready for an extended simile) a dress I've sewn where I had one pattern established, and I finished only the skirt, and now I have to go pull apart the skirt and take out some sections and replace them with better sections, and I have to get a new pattern for the top so I have to change some other parts of the skirt so they will match the top.

Make sense? I do love my similes.

All right. I also plan to do an experiment. I will announce it soon. Maybe even before next Monday! Wow!

Hot and Humid

2009-08-20T08:37:00.000-07:00

After a rainy June and a delightful July, we're into a disgusting August. We've had many, many days of heat and humidity. I know New York has had worse summers--I've lived through them--but every time the real heat kicks in, it's just gross. I live in an old apartment building. It was built in 1905, give or take a year, and central AC was just not part of any building plan more than 100 years ago. (Happily, space was, which makes my spacious and cheap apartment a real rarity.) So we have window units that dehumidify rooms and make it comfortable. It's a blessing to have the window units, and we have them in all our bedrooms and the living room, so things could be worse. However, we do not have one in our kitchen and the setup of the place doesn't allow the kitchen to get cooled by any of the units we do have, so the kitchen is always sweltering. Bake something and it's a thousand times worse. So don't bake, you say. I know, but last Sunday I bought a few delicious peaches from the farmer's market and I desperately needed to make a peach crumble. So I didn't preheat the oven until the thing was almost ready to pop in, kept the kitchen doors closed (there are two), and once I stuck it in the oven I left and just let it combust in there. Last Sunday was a great writing day, too; I'd be working on my computer in my room, air conditioning going full blast. Walk down the hall, which is also cool due to the living room unit. Walk through the kitchen door to check on the crumble and melt. Oy, vey. Spoon a portion of peach crumble onto the plate, take it back into the cool bedroom and eat. Repeat.

They've been promising us rain for a few days to cool everything off. And we did have one impressive rainstorm two nights ago; I haven't seen rain that intense ever, and I lived for 18 months in Costa Rica. The thunder and lightning began when I was in the shower. I heard rumbling, but it was so sustained I thought there must be fireworks in Central Park. They'll do that on random occasions in the summer, and I didn't think much of it. But then I got out of the shower, and with the water no longer running I could tell what it was. And then lightning began. Rather than turn on the Yankees in my room (because while my room has windows, they look over an air shaft and you can't see much, and the configuration of the TV and air conditioner and bureau and bookshelf prohibit me from opening them) I went to the living room to write on the laptop and listen to the rain.

I have to say, since Costa Rica, rain evokes rather intense feelings for me. Countless days we were out in it, trudging through a downpour on our way to visit somebody, only to get stood up and be left wondering what to do with our newfound extra hour. We could knock on doors, but that was inefficient. We could visit somebody, but they usually lived quite a distance away. So we would do one or the other anyway, under umbrellas four feet in diameter (not exaggerating) and stil get drenched from mid-thigh down. We wore skirts and sandals, Tevas, so it didn't ruin our shoes, but so many times I just wanted dry feet. Countless days I longed to go home and change into sweats and slippers and read. And now, more than twelve years later, when it rains I experience that yearning to go home and change into sweats and slippers and read. And when it's at all possible, I do and I just revel in it. When I'm home to begin with, as I was the other night, I just sink into a couch or bed or chair and appreciate being dry.

I know it's strange. But remaining soggy for 9 months at a time will do that to a person. Even twelve years later.

But that rainstorm did not knock out the humidity. The humidity remains in a giant wet blanket enveloping the city. It was supposed to rain yesterday, and it didn't, and it's still as humid as ever. They're promising more storms today (more? how about "some"?) and tomorrow and a dry weekend and week ahead. Please, let it rain! (when I can go inside and change into sweats.)

So...in writing-related news...the new book continues apace. I've gotten some great feedback on it and I'm actually excited to keep going forward. I figure, if I keep what I've written (always a question), I'm about half done with the first draft. Yay! Of course, I've written out everything that I knew was going to happen. I now know the ending, but what lies in between...I don't know. I'm standing at the edge of a gaping black morass, wondering what on earth to write. Exciting stuff. I just arrived at that point two days ago. We'll see where I go from here.

Marie Curie continues apace. My screenwriters' group is reading it and we'll get together next week to discuss. Anil and I are going to talk this Friday and have a long phone conversation where we discuss my draft and his, and who is right and who wins. (this is not exactly what we discuss, and this is not what it feels like, but sometimes it's fun to make little 'notches' each time I win one and he wins one. All in good fun.) We figure that Hollywood is on vacation, and we're aiming for a new round of submissions in September. And September is when the movies in theatres turn serious, so hopefully some dramas will perform well and shake loose this "I will only produce a comedy, because comedy is the only thing in the world that sells! Drama is a dirty word!" attitude. Please, people, someone needs to break from the herd. And if that person broke with Marie (our version of Marie, not someone else's), that would be fantastic.

Also in writing-related news, I am developing carpal tunnel syndrome in my left hand/wrist. Exciting stuff! I went to an orthopedist a week ago for a sharp pain in my wrist, and he said it was tendinitis and to let it rest and leave it alone. Well, a few days later, I began developing a tingling sensation in my fingertips...which hasn't gone away. Classic carpal tunnel symptom. I don't have the tingling in my right hand, knock wood. So I've ordered a wrist brace from Doc Ortho (a real brand!) and have started doing carpal tunnel exercises and stretches. We'll see. All of my injuries come from sitting. Hmm.

Enjoy the last weeks of summer! I will, as soon as it rains again.

I Need an iPhone

2009-07-23T09:56:00.001-07:00

I'm running around a lot these days, for some strange reason. Things to do after work, things to do on the weekend...I take a magazine or book with me to while away the time, because I can't exactly write on my projects on the subway, but it feels a bit like wasting my time. If I had an iPhone, I could be blogging! best of all worlds! Or--hey--Tweeting. I actually did open a twitter account. Right now it's stupid. But if I got an iPhone...I could make witty, trenchant 140-character observations in the moment they happen. Like this morning. I was rounding a corner and I bumped into an older man. He looked at me, confused, and I smiled and apologized. He smiled back and we went on our ways. Twitter post: "People can be nice." Deep!

Or the moment I walked out the door. I have a pair of white sandals that I love but they HURT. I've had them a few years and I've thought numerous times that at some point, really, they'll get broken in. So I put them on and walked out the door and about halfway between the apartment building and the subway, I thought, "Still not broken in." Twitter post: "My shoes hurt! Cute but not practical." Give people a little light into my life.

And I had some odd dreams last night. I don't remember what they were, other than that I was trying to do the Charleston with someone. But we were adding in an extra beat and I kept saying, "No, it's in four." This not-remembering-my-dreams thing is happening a lot. If I had an iPhone, I could jump out of bed and Twitter about my dream: "Charleston in four, not five counts." See, that's practically a public service announcement, it's so helpful.

Oh, I know, I'm not the first person to ridicule Twitter. Lots and lots of pundits hate it, think it's stupid, write about how stupid it is. But get this: most of them have Twitter accounts! It's bizarre to read an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times by a respected journalist and have the article end saying, "Be my friend on Facebook! Follow me on Twitter!" Sigh.

I don't want to Twitter at every moment of the day, so I probably don't need the capacity to do so. The chief effect not having an iPhone has on my life is that I can't look up an address while I'm en route. That's all I've noticed, anyway.

But I still want one.

Still kicking

2009-07-08T10:29:00.001-07:00

Hi all,
just to let you know I'm still alive. Hi! You can all breathe a collective sigh of relief.

I have been busy, you see. I know, I've said that before, but I have. I'm leading what a friend called a "crazy double life," which sounds so much more exciting than it actually is. But I have a job that I work during the day and a second job that I work at night. It's just that I don't get paid for my night job. Yet! Yet, yet, yet.

Marie Curie is thisclose to being done. The lack of a space is not a typo; it is for additional emphasis, on top of the italics. We can see it, feel it, taste it. (Not literally, you understand. Literally, right now I can only taste the candy I'm eating. Peppermint patties. Must tide myself over until lunch, which I ordered from Chipotle but which, I was informed, wouldn't be ready for another half hour! What's that about?) We've sent it out to some rather reputable companies and people, and gotten really good responses. But they all have the same complaints: they're fascinated, but they're not MOVED. Anil and I are sure that MOVING the audience involves only a few tweaks, so I did a pass, adding some things, and he did a pass, adding some more, and when he sent it back to me I really got a sense of what they mean when they say "you can't see the forest for the trees." We're so set on individual scenes and tweaks etc, we're not sure how the entire script is coming together. So we decided to give it a month's rest and come back to it fresh. Another couple of weeks for that.

Book 2 is finally-actually-finally getting written. (I love talking about writing in the passive third person. "Getting written" makes it sound like it's just spontaneously happening and requires no work from me. Believe me, I wish that were the case.) I'm taking a class from the novelist Alison Pace and it's been very helpful, full of insightful critiques and insights into how to make this thing work. I'm reading others' pages and sharpening my own critiquing skills (always a good thing, because then you can turn your knives on your own work) and it's motivating me to work more on the book. The goal is 1000 words a day, which is sometimes easy and sometimes like trying to pull out my entire head of hair, one strand at a time. Painful, and not very efficient. A couple of weekends ago I was really tearing through pages, doing very well, and then tendinitis in my right arm came roaring back. Ah well.

On the drama side, Anil and I are thinking of new projects to get into. I have one script that is finished that perhaps we could try to sell. (It may be a little too small-scale, though. Not really commercial.) I have two other dramas that are in various draft stages, and I could bring one of those out. To sate the current appetite for all things comedy, I may get out an old comedy I wrote at NYU. We'll see.

Meanwhile, the sun is shining and New York is having a remarkably cool July. Time to go to Chipotle and take my Bol out to the park and enjoy!

All Tribeca'd Out

2009-05-08T08:51:00.000-07:00

Hello again.
I am officially Tribeca’d out. This is a good place to be, really, but it took almost a week to recover fully. I’m not even sure if I recovered fully. But here I am. Writing again!

Tribeca itself was very cool. Then again, I had the swine flu for the first week. I’m serious. Well, I don’t know for sure that it was swine flu, and it did happen the week BEFORE Mayor Bloomberg got on TV and said, “If you are feverish and coughing, STAY HOME” and therefore didn’t do me any good; due to a precarious situation at work, I came in five of the seven days I shouldn’t have. But it was the flu. And then I went to Tribeca events at night, again when I shouldn’t have. It was ridiculous for a couple of those days, because I literally couldn’t speak. And these events are not exactly conducive to speaking. Blaring music, tons of people screaming over the blaring music, and then having to scream even louder because of the combination of the blaring music and screaming people, and it just gets harder and harder. I’m not a good screamer in the best of times, and afflicted with swine flu, I am much worse. So the first night I tried—oh, how I tried—and ended up leaving early. It was funny. “What are you here for?” (The Tribeca equivalent of “What do you do?”—the standard good-to-meet-you New York question) “I wrote—cough cough—a script—cough cough—about Marie Curie and got a fellow—cough cough—fellowship.” Cough cough cough cough cough cough cough cough ad nauseum. I threw in the towel after 45 minutes. The next night, Anil had come into town and so I just smiled and mouthed, “I’m sick. I can’t talk.” And he talked. He’s a good talker, so it worked fine. I tried to interject from time to time, so I didn’t look like Hillary Clinton circa 1991 (anyone remember her nod-and-smile routine?), but was so relieved he was there and I didn’t have to speak. Wednesday night I stayed home and watched Wedding Crashers (really very funny) and slept. Nice. Thursday night there was a party at the Apple store in SoHo, which still had the loud music and crowds, but we got there early and avoided the worst of it. Friday night was the awards ceremony, the one for which I purchased The Dress. The event was nice enough (Robert DeNiro was there!), though after a while I just had to sit down and got hit on by a drunk guy from Long Island. Anil came by and gave me the “Do you want me to leave you alone?” look. I leaned forward and said, “I need you to get me out of this.” So we started talking, and by the time I turned around again, Drunk Long Island Guy had disappeared. Nice to have a guy around for that. Saturday we went to a brunch (very tasty food) that was nice but not really anything special; then we went and hung out in the Filmmakers’ Lounge and met one of the Tribeca funders, and had an interesting conversation with him and his buddy. They invited us to a happy hour at an expensive restaurant, and we went there and then walked around SoHo/Tribeca for a while* and got gelato. The next day, Sunday, there was a reading of scenes from some of the fellowship recipient screenplays. They were great. We didn’t get read, because we didn’t finish the screenplay in time, but given that we’d done a full reading in LA a few weeks prior, it was fine. And Jodie Foster was there! She seems nice. She’s directing the production of one of the screenplays. Exciting stuff.

The next week we had a lot more parties, more of the same. Thursday morning was very cool, though: a "Women in Film" brunch. It was at City Hall Restaurant, again in SoHo, and there were all kinds of lovely women who chatted and commiserated and congratulated each other. The parting gift: a jar of Chanel anti-aging cream. Very appropriate for women in film. I cracked up. (it's worth $375! I looked itup!) And then I asked my dermatologist sister if I should use it. Her verdict: sell it on eBay and use Renova instead, "something that actually works."

Friday night was the best, since it was a dinner for the Sloan recipients. It was more intimate, much quieter, and I sat by great people (though a lot of them rotated) and had great conversations about Marie Curie, the screenplay, my books (Did I Expect Angels? and the other one that I’m writing—or, more accurately, trying to write). You know how sometimes you have a night where you just don’t want to go home because you’re having such a great time? That was Friday. Anil had gone back to California already, so he missed it, and he shouldn’t have because it was by far the best event.

Anyway. In DIEA news—well, there’s not much. My website, My Unexpected Angel.com, is finished, so check it out and leave a story of someone who has helped you out. It’s all good.
********

*for non-New Yorkers, SoHo refers to “South of Houston,” meaning Houston Street, a stop on the 1 subway line. It’s a particular area, small, just on the border of TriBeCa, which means “Triangle Below Canal,” which is the next stop on the 1 line. And Houston is not pronounced like Houston, Texas; it’s HOW-ston.

Hello again

2009-04-17T15:50:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd shock anyone still out there and post again. A second post in ten days! How can that be?

Well, see, the script is just about finished. I can't believe it. We had a reading in Los Angeles and tweaked, sent it out to friends to have them read and tweaked some more. Today we sent it to our rep at the Tribeca Film Fest, and that's about it. We can still tweak, of course, but now our business turns to trying to sell the thing.

Oh, the humanity.

Selling a screenplay is a tricky business. There's the "option," which is essentially getting paid to sit on the script and not send it to anyone else, as the optioner considers what s/he would like to do with it. Often an option comes with an extension clause, where you have to sit on it for six months, and then the optioner decides whether or not s/he wants it for another six months. So you can spend a year just wondering if your optioner wants the script or not. Granted, it's not bad to get paid to do nothing, but you're not getting paid a lot. Certainly not enough to quit a day job or anything like that. Not enough to establish a career as a writer. And it's not as prestigious as actually selling a script, so you can't go around bragging to potential industry partners, "I optioned a script." They'll say, yeah, so what? My dog can option a script. (This is not true, by the way. Just thought I'd make that clear.)

The next step up is selling the script. This is good. If you sell it to a Writer's Guild signatory, you become a member of the Writer's Guild, which is also good. WGA membership means you get the WGA minimum for the script (a lot of money, a heck of a lot more than an option -- not retire-on-this money by any stretch, but a lot to me) and you now qualify for WGA-sponsored health insurance and you have a say in union negotiations (albeit a tiny one), a vote, etc. You also have the WGA behind you in your negotiations, and can call on them for help if need be. This is valuable.

And the step after that is actually getting the movie made. This does not automatically follow a sale, sadly. You have to find the right cast, the right director, additional producers. They will sometimes demand rewrites. One of my writing teachers at NYU said, "There's nothing so depressing as going into a meeting with your sixteenth draft--you've given your life to this thing, labored on it--and having the producer say, 'Well, the script is just a first draft.'" I can imagine this quite vivivdly, having worked on this for a while. And all kinds of things can go wrong. A friend of mine had a script optioned and a director and actress attached. They were set to begin filming in a few months. But the actress demanded a new ending. Not just any new ending, but one she dictated. The director said he'd walk if they rewrote to that ending. The actress said she'd walk if they didn't. Time went by, the director's window of availability closed, and the director quit. Then the actress quit. Then the option expired. The script remains in limbo.

That's only one of the many, many things that can go wrong. I won't go into all of them here, not wanting to jinx myself.

Now on to good news about my book. Yes, my book! Remember that? The thing I started this blog for?

I qualify for the Star program, in which they can place my book in bookstores, "regionally and perhaps nationally." It won't happen any time soon -- it takes at least six months, possibly a year -- and meanwhile I have to fill out some extensive forms talking about what kind of publicity plans I have. It's odd and difficult to shift focus back to Jennifer and Henry, my old friends. I may have to do some rewriting of the book, too. Interesting.

Meanwhile, a short story I wrote, "Secret Combinations and the 7-Eleven," got accepted for publication in a literary journal: Weber, the Contemporary West. Better than that, they are submitting it as their entry for a best-of compilation, called Best of the West. An acceptance for that would be incredibly cool. Don't count your chickens, I know. But it still would be cool.

Oh, the shame

2009-04-07T11:07:00.001-07:00

It's been almost six months since my last post. What have I been doing for six months, dear reader? Why, writing a screenplay. In my last post I had just won a screenplay development grant from the Sloan Foudnation, through the Tribeca Film Institute. Well, they wanted a rewrite (it's a screenplay development grant, after all) and so I wrote one. And another. And another. But FINALLY I can say...well, not that we're done, but we're literally a couple of weeks away from being done. Which is a good thing, since the Tribeca Film Festival is at the end of this month and they're having an awards ceremony and everything.

(I have the dress...I bought it even before I knew I'd gotten the award. I saw it in June at Lord and Taylor as I was shopping for a dress for my brother's wedding. It was beautiful...and way too expensive. So I watched it. It wasn't going anywhere; it was a dry summer for sales. I waited. I stalked the dress. I visited it weekly. Sometimes they changed location to try to sell more of the dresses and I would panic, thinking it was gone, and run through the floors to find it again. Always there, and never on sale. Until October, when it was about half off. I opened a Lord & Taylor account to get an additional 15% off (I know, such bad financial sense!) and got another 15% off because I told the saleslady my summerlong stalking story. So it was affordable. And two weeks later I got the news. It was as if the universe had said, "If you buy it, you will get the fellowship!" And now I need to lose 10 pounds. I've been telling myself this since February. Hmm. Maybe this will just be an opportunity to purchase Spanx.)

Anyway. Marie Curie has occupied me since then, just about exclusively. Every so often I get ideas for future stories--both screenplays and books--and say, okay, jot that down for later. When is "later"? After Marie Curie sells! Optimistically speaking, of course; one never knows what will happen. I remain optimistic, just because it's a darn good script (if I do say so myself) and we've gotten such great feedback from so many people.

I actually just got back from a trip to LA, where we had a reading. We got 8 professional theater actors to donate their time (we paid them in sandwiches, literally) and we had one rehearsal and one performance. A "reading" is different from a real performance, fyi: actors sit in chairs and don't actually walk around or do anything they're supposed to do; they just read the lines from the script (no memorization) and put the proper vocal inflection in. But if someone slaps Marie (as does happen...juicy science stories!), the actor doesn't actually get slapped; the narrator literally says, "Jeanne slaps Marie." So there's some imagination involved for the audience, but it's so great for the writers to hear their words aloud. See, it always works in the writer's head; the eternal question is, does it work for anyone else?

So. I apologize if anyone has checked this blog in the last six months and not gotten anything. I've been busy -- you know, writing.

Just read and highly recommend: THE STORY OF EDGAR SAWTELLE

long time ago...

2008-10-29T13:58:00.000-07:00

Okay, it's been long enough ago that I last posted that my address bar didn't recognize my blog address. Sad.

But you see, I've had to prevent myself from blogging. Actively. Because I had a bit of a secret, and I didn't know how to blog without telling the secret. But the secret is out now, so I can make it public.

I won something.

Not by myself. I'm working with a producer in LA, Anil Baral, to develop a screenplay on Marie Curie, called A Noble Affair. This is the "scientific story" I've alluded to many times over the past few months. He and I have been working on this project for a year now, and we submitted it to the TriBeCa Film Institute for consideration for a Sloan grant. (The Sloan Foundation encourages the depiction of science and scientists in film.) 130 entries, 5 prizes. And we got one.

Yow!

So I'm excited. I found out a couple of weeks ago but they said it shouldn't be made public until they made their announcement. Can you say, "Sitting on your hands"? I so wanted to tell everyone I saw. I did tell a lot of people, more than I should have, but I felt guilty. But they did announce it yesterday. So it's official now, and I can tell everyone. I can even tell people what the screenplay is about, since they're also publishing our logline. Well, they're only telling half the story (we do show her pursuit of the isolation of the element radium, but we also show her personal life), but that's okay.

I will provide some links below. Not cleverly embedded in sentences, just bald.

http://nyindieseen.blogspot.com/2008/10/tribeca-film-institute-announces-first.html

http://www.dvnetwork.net/blog/2008/10/29/call-for-entries-for-2009-tfi-sloan-filmmaker-fund/

http://www.ioncinema.com/news.php?nid=3225

http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117994835.html?categoryid=13&cs=1

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/news/e3ic75447be81df667c95e47db997a6b89e

I'm pretty darn excited to have my name in both Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. I did an internship at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival and manned the Hollywood Reporter booth at the Palais des Festivals and the (SOMETHING) Hotel--why can't I remember its name? Starts with an M--and have wanted to subscribe since then, though I was put off by its price tag.

The articles basically say the same thing, but I thought I'd include them all. And I'll keep you updated on the progress as it comes.

Trains of thought

2008-10-02T08:06:00.000-07:00

It looks like Stephanie Nielson's sister, Courtney Jane, is feeling a bit like I am, seeing the goodness of the world. Of course, she's directly involved in one of the cases that needs goodness, and much of it has been directed at her. Read her post expressing her gratitude here.

As of this posting, she has 91 comments. Wow. She gets a lot more traffic than I do. :)

guest post

2008-09-30T09:01:00.001-07:00

No, not someone guesting on my blog, but me guesting on someone else's. This is the end of the month that has seen my TLC Book Tour. In the coming days I am going to post links to my favorite posts of the month. Meanwhile I find this guest post that I did...well, I like it. I hope you will too.
**************
Much has been made of the death of Paul Newman over the weekend. Rightly so, I would say; the man was not only a film legend, a great actor, and a darn good-looking man, but he was also a class act off screen. He had a stable, loving, long-term marriage (elusive even outside Hollywood), he eschewed offscreen drama, and he oozed that aura that said, “This is one of the good guys.”

Now, all of these things in themselves are remarkable. But what made (makes!) Paul Newman truly remarkable is that he went above and beyond all these things and founded a mini-empire of various edibles, and that all of the profit went to charity. $175 million and counting, 25 years strong. Mr. Newman, with his strong sense of humor intact even when dealing with such an extraordinary deed, referred to the mission of Newman’s Own as “Shameless Exploitation in Pursuit of the Common Good.” (Look it up. It’s on their website.) But even with his tongue firmly in his cheek, Paul Newman’s good deeds affected thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people. Paul Newman, you might say, even while alive was a bit of an angel.

I don’t know if it’s just because I’m suddenly looking, but lately I’ve seen many, many people stepping into that kind of role in their everyday lives. They’re not movie stars, and the people they’re helping aren’t high-profile headliners, but they are decent, hardworking people making a difference in people’s lives. I am going to highlight three cases that I have been following for a while, to celebrate the goodness of people’s hearts and encourage you to contribute. If you can’t contribute money (and many of us can’t), contribute thoughts and prayers and deeds. If you can’t help these particular people (and yes, logistics get in the way) find someone else to help. Be an angel yourself.

The first person is a four-year-old boy with a rare kind of cancer, neuroblastoma. Read about this scary, deadly disease here. (http://www.acor.org/ped-onc/diseases/neuro.html –in case the link doesn’t work.) This cancer has a 30% survival rate. And then picture the terror of having your two-year-old child diagnosed with it. Picture being a child with it. Honestly, what do you remember about being four years old? I remember running and playing and learning to tie my shoes and read and starting kindergarten. Cancer had no place in my life, and shouldn’t have a place in any child’s life. Particularly for neuroblastoma, the survival rate is low; the treatments are excruciating. The blog I have followed is written by the parents of Liam Witt, found at: http://princeliamthebrave.blogspot.com . Liam is an active four-year-old who has been battling neuroblastoma for a year and a half, since before he turned three. He is brave, he is smart, and he knows a side of life no one ever should. Liam’s parents, Gretchen and Larry, write heartrending posts about the treatments, the crises, the ups and downs. They have formed a “Band of Parents” to try to get more money funneled into pediatric cancer (http://www.bandofparents.org), and they have begun a 501(c)3 of their own, Cookies for Kids Cancer, which has raised more than $400,000 for pediatric cancer research. You can find out how to get involved with that at https://www.cookiesforkidscancer.org.

Liam’s parents’ posts contain a lot of grim news, it is true. But they don’t hesitate to talk about the angels who have come into their own lives. Friends who occasionally bring dinner. The amazing nurses at the hospital, the local firemen who have befriended their son and sometimes stop in to cheer him up. Other parents in their same situation who offer invaluable support and friendship; other patients who buoy them, despite their own grim prognoses. It is inspiring to read about these people who have realized how important it is to play that role, the role of angel.

The second case is one that is out of immediate crisis, at least for the time being. A woman in Seattle named Carole Decker unexpectedly had a bout of sepsis in her 7th month of pregnancy and nearly died. They did a C-section and the baby is doing well, but Carole has been left with permanent damage: she lost both feet, her left hand, a finger on her right hand, and she is blind. Her husband Scott writes about this on his blog and gives updates on her physical condition. Now Carole needs prosthetics, rehab, and more time to heal. This story touches my heart for many reasons, and is personal because I had sepsis when I was two years old. I remember very little of the hospital stay (just memory flashes: my mom looking extremely tired and holding a Mr. Pibb; my dad walking into my room and holding up a little squeaky toy he’d brought for me; my sister running alongside my wheelchair when I was released) and for years didn’t understand the severity of what had happened. I am genuinely lucky (blessed) to be alive and whole. Another reason that this story affects me so deeply is that Scott has also written about the many angels who have stepped in to help him and his family. They have taken care of his children, and they have raised a great deal of money for the extra medical bills. A golf tournament was held that raised $18,000; a separate fundraiser netted them $60,000. A portrait photographer is going to donate 100% of her profits on November 1 to Carole’s medical bills. A silent auction fundraiser will be held at an art show. The list goes on. Amazing people are seeing a need and addressing it, saying, “My abilities are limited, but this is what I can do.” Angels, all of them.

The third case I originally heard about through the Today Show, of all places. A blogger named Stephanie Nielson was involved in a light-airplane crash with her husband and a flight instructor. The flight instructor was killed, and Stephanie and Christian were both severely wounded and hospitalized. Stephanie was burned over 80% of her body and has already undergone numerous skin graft surgeries, with many more to come. Both were in comas; Christian has come out of his, and his recovery is a little ahead of his wife’s. They are parents to four small children.

Stephanie too had a blog. She blogged about being a wife and mother to four rambunctious children and her daily joys. The big difference between this blog and other so-called “mommy blogs” is that she has celebrated the joys of her life. She focused exclusively on the positives of being a wife and mother. She actively tried to make life fun and wonderful and magical for her family and enjoyed doing it, and blogged about the results. She posted pictures of the little parties she held for her kids; of the dress-up games they all played together; of “acting crazy” for her daughter to take the shots. And her love for her life oozed through every word.

Stephanie got about a thousand hits a day when she was blogging. After the accident happened, and local media publicized it, the hits increased to about 20,000. Her sister Jane has taken Stephanie’s children home with her, to care for in addition to her own infant son. Jane has her own blog, in which she is now detailing how she has taken on angel duty for her sister, and others have also stepped in. On their fundraising site, www.nierecovery.com, Jane and others have listed various things people have been doing to raise money for Stephanie and Christian Nielson, whose hospital bills will exceed the lifetime maximum on their insurance, perhaps by a million dollars or more. You will see a dance night, auctions, a ski day, concerts, a race. Angels know what they can offer and are offering it, and making a difference in the lives of one family that stands in desperate need.

Perhaps angels have been on my mind lately because of my book. In Did I Expect Angels?, which I published a year ago, a young mother named Jennifer loses her husband and doesn’t deal very well. She has angels in her life, people willing to help her out, and she ignores them because all she can focus on is her own pain. On the night the book takes place, she has made a devastating decision and is en route to carrying it out, when a Costa Rican man, a passing acquaintance, named Henry decides that tonight is his night to help her—to be her angel. Henry tells Jennifer his life’s story, and the reader can contrast her inability to deal with Henry’s life, which has been a hundred times harder than Jennifer’s. But Henry has recognized his angels and his blessings and been grateful for them, and his intervention just might help Jennifer get to the same place.

I believe in angels, both literal and the kind I’ve been talking about with this entry. I’ve had my share, and they have helped me more than I can say—and certainly more than they know. I want to pay it forward, and to that end, I’ve decided to donate my own little bit to the Nielson fund, and am giving 40% of the profits of Did I Expect Angels? for the months of October and November to their hospital bills. I feel strongly that people need to give what they can, when they can, to whomever they sense might be in need. Now, my sales aren’t on the level of, say, Stephenie Meyer, but hopefully no one will begrudge me this widow’s mite. I find it interesting that in my book, my character absolutely doesn’t deal with her lot very well, not until it’s almost too late—and I’m donating the money from this book to people who have risen to their challenges and then some, and that the world is full of those people. I admire and respect them and hope to be more like them. In honor of the passing of a legend, Paul Newman, and in honor of these amazing everyday people, I hope you will be, too.

Science Fatigue

2008-09-24T16:44:00.000-07:00

I have mentioned my screenplay before (many, many times), and tonight I’m going to mention it again. This is what I have been working on for the last few weeks.

It’s a great experience. I’m working with a producer in LA and collaborating, which I’ve never done before. So far it has been absolutely great. Collaborations can be wonderful but they can also be a nightmare; get two conflicting personalities, or one partner who doesn’t want to work, or conflicting ideas and inflexible people, and it’s a recipe for disaster. So it is really lucky that we’ve done so well.

It’s not done, but we’re really getting close. We have another draft or two to go—polishes, really, more than major rewrites. It is getting exciting. We turned it in to two competitions for grants, leading to my current stress. (My bedroom is a disaster. I did laundry on Saturday and still it sits, unfolded, in the bag. On my floor.) I have never outright won a competition before, but I’ve gotten to be a quarterfinalist, semifinalist, and an actual finalist. Anil, my producer, has actually won grants. I am hoping some of his awards karma rubs off onto me.

Meanwhile, the book blog tour continues. It has been wonderful. I will list the links to the various reviews shortly (not tonight; tonight is going to be short) so you can see for yourself how I’ve been all over the internet. Pretty wild. And it’s all been pretty heartening. It is true that not everyone loves it, but…not everything can be loved by everyone. (I always go back to the slapping down that The Lovely Bones received by the New York Review of Books. Horrible, awful, mean review, of a book that spent about a year as #1 on the bestseller lists and redefined the way I wrote fiction.) And enough people have, in fact, loved it that I am feeling pretty good. It’s really amazing to meet people all around the country and have them say that you’ve touched their lives in a small way. This is the best part of the whole experience.

More to come. Soon.

chupacabras!

2008-09-05T09:45:00.000-07:00

Okay, it's a little bit squished (I have no idea why) but after all the fighting I've done to get this picture up at all, a little bit squished will have to do.

I was able to call a book group last night and discuss my book with them. There were 12 women from Herriman, Utah, who picked my book just off review sites etc and read it for this month's selection. I was super-excited to find out that they had picked it (thanks, Google Alerts!) and emailed the woman who'd blogged about it, Amanda Day (hi, Amanda!), to ask if I could participate by phone. (and how cool is it that my book cover occupies the same page as Stephenie Meyer's bestseller? Let's have some selling karma rub off onto me!) She said yes and last night I called and we had a *great* discussion. You always worry it's going to be a little weird, since you can't see faces and it's going to be a bit unnatural if you're just a phone presence, but it worked out really, really well. I was so happy to do it, and I think they hadn't had that experience before so it was great all around. (I did notice that I kept referring to September 11...a little too much. Maybe it's because of the anniversary coming up, and maybe because it really did have a strong impression on me and the writing of the book. Either way, I felt like Rudy Giuliani: a noun, a verb, and 9/11. Sorry!) I love getting insights that I hadn't thought of from readers; it's really a wonderful thing to gasp and say, "Yes, you're right!" And I had a couple of those moments last night. I think the best were when some of the women, mothers, told me that they wanted to hug their children a little more and appreciate their families more because of having read the book. That caused some serious warm-and-fuzzies. So thank you to all of you, especially Kristy Johnson (who hosted the group and emailed me--hi, Kristy!) and Amanda. Oh, and Rusti (I don't know your last name) who wrote an awesome blog entry today. Emily, who just left a comment on Rusti's blog, I'd love-love-love to call into your book group, too!!

They also asked to see a picture of chupacabras, so that's what's above. This is one that a young man from Costa Rica drew for me. His name is Edwin (the guy, not the chupacabra), and he was a lot of fun. At some point when I was in CR, in a little town called San Ramon, chupacabras started making headlines. I'm not sure exactly for what; I wasn't supposed to read or watch the news. All I knew was that suddenly a ton of little kids were asking me if I believed in chupacabras. The literal meaning of that word is "suck goat" -- they were supposed to be little noctural creatures that sucked the blood out of animals. "Do you believe in chupacabras?" Well, I'm sure I don't know. I asked Edwin what they were talking about, and he drew me the above picture (I've saved it all these years), which I describe as a mixture between an alien and a Tyrannosaurus Rex. I can definitively say I do not believe in THAT.

Anyone who reads my book from now on, this is NOT what I am picturing when Henry talks about making chupacabra toys. Please don't let me spoil that for you.

Much to talk about! I have started a monthlong Virtual Book Tour on 11 different blogs. We've had our first stops already: The Friendly Book Nook and Booking Mama. I followed up Booking Mama with a guest post the next day, about angels in my life, and I will do the same with TFBN tomorrow (no link yet because...well, I haven't written it. That's next.) Both of these blogs are terrific and I have bookmarked them for future reading. This book tour is being put together by TLC Book Tours, founded by the lovely Trish and Lisa. Info on my book tour is here. (look at me and my links today!)

So that's that. I'm sure there's more to talk about, but there are more days in which to do it. Until soon...

Sunday Salon - The Sister

2008-08-31T12:51:00.001-07:00

Time for another Sunday Salon! I'm feeling a bit more energetic and able to do thigns I've been meaning to do for a while, and that includes reviewing books. This is not one I have been reading for a month (I mentioned earlier that I'd been struggling to get through one, but it's one I decided not to review). I read this one in a week and am now going to write a review.

The Sister by Poppy Adams is a debut novel set in an eerie mansion in rural England. Ms. Adams does a great job of setting up a dark, creepy atmosphere for a story rife with mystery and puzzlement. Who is this woman, Virginia (the narrator)? Why has her sister Vivien not been home in fifty years? How did their parents die? Why is Ginny such a recluse? And what is going to happen as Vivi intrudes on Ginny's solitary existence, with her cheer and modern ways and little dog? Not one of these answers can be good.

I am fascinated by books with the "unreliable narrator." We as readers typically automatically trust the narrator unless things start happening to indicate we shouldn't. And they have to be pretty big things, really. I have tried to write "unreliable narrator" stories before, and often people don't get it if you're subtle. There have to be some grand signs.

Ginny gives a few signs, but a lot of them are stated. People avoid her. Kids in the town harass her occasionally because she's a hermit. She as an obsession with orderliness and clocks. But until Vivien starts telling her (and us) that there's something wrong with her, we aren't really going to get it. We do at the end, of course, when subtlety is thrown to the wind, but...somehow the ending seemed a little bit tacked on. It wasn't a crescendo or a climax; it was a novel building in one direction and then a very predictable-but-wanting-to-be-shocking ending.

There are some fascinating aspects to this book. I assume that Poppy Adams, a documentary filmmaker, has not studied lepidoptery (moths) but with the amount of detail in there, one would thinks she had a doctorate in it. In fact, there's a little too much. I kept thinking all the moths and details were going to be some kind of grand symbol, but it didn't work out that way. They were her obsession, but lots of people have obsessions. There are many people who actually obsess about bugs. I don't happen to like bugs, but the fact that they do doesn't make them crazy. So Ginny's entomology didn't really serve a bigger purpose. I know, I know, not everything in literature has to be a symbol or gateway to something deeper, but there was so much here about moths, I wanted it to do something.

I kept waiting for a big reveal about Ginny's condition. We get a big reveal about their parents, but while one of the central questions (why Vivien stayed away) is partly answered (unsatisfactorily, in my mind, since it didn't really involve Ginny, the protagonist), a bigger one (why she came back) remains forever a mystery.

There's a lot of good here. Ultimately, if you have spare time, I'd say read the book. Just don't break down any barriers to get to it.

A day late and a dollar short

2008-08-13T10:48:00.000-07:00

The title accurately sums up my mental state lately. Why? That's a good question. And I don't have much of an answer. I made it through another draft, but the ending is just not coming together yet. So I'm working, going to the gym (and I've started taking a running class, which I am enjoying), editing some articles freelance, and that's about it. And yet I feel like I can't get a handle on my life. Why? Is watching the Olympics really that taxing? Keeping my bedroom clean? Curious. I did get sick again this weekend, though I think I managed to stave off something much worse by taking Friday off work, sleeping nearly the entire day (literally 7 hours BETWEEN 8 am and 6 pm, after having gotten an okay-even-if-interrupted-by-a-sore-throat night's sleep) and much of Saturday and Sunday. I didn't feel 100% Monday but had to come in because I was the only assistant on the floor that day. But boy, that only took four days. Why has the rest of my time felt so harried?

There are a few publicity plans in the works for the book, but I haven't thrown myself into them fully yet. There is an upcoming blog tour (excitement!) in September and a few other things I'm planning. I mentioned before that this is a mountain to climb (the explanation for the picture) and I had decided to have a picnic at the bottom in the shade before starting the ascent; well, now I've taken two steps up and decided to rest. But I remain committed to scaling this mountain. It is probably the closest thing I will ever have to a real mountain climb. Freezing cold temperatures and oxygen tanks don't appeal to me.

I am now trying to import the cover of "Into Thin Air" by Jon Krakauer, the tale of an Everest expedition gone horribly wrong, culminating in frostbite, amputations, and death. Blogspot will only import into the top of this post, however, not right here, where I want it. So much for the rest of my metaphor.

Anyway. My solemn goals: 1) more running. That does seem to give me more energy. 2) More writing. At the very least, I need to do some writing ABOUT the screenplay ending...hopefully to wriggle and twist myself into some kind of good ending. 3) More editing to get more money for 4) more publicity efforts.

I'll let you know how I do.

a quick note...

2008-08-05T17:25:00.000-07:00

Wow, things are still kind of happening. August 24 is the first anniversary of my publication date. As I've mentioned, I was told that I have to keep pushing the book for at least a year after publication in order to make it do anything. I had planned to do just that, though my plan dictated that (a) if zero was happening, I would reassess, and at the one year mark, (b) if things were still happening, I would keep going. So the big oh-one is approaching, and small things continue to happen. Nothing has propelled DIEA to the best-seller list yet, obviously, but the little things that occur are enough to tell me to keep going. Hmm.

I checked my Amazon ranking again this evening. As you may recall, I'm slightly obsessed with this number; it's really the only way to see if I'm selling anything. And I can't tell how many I sell, just whether or not it sells at all. The pattern lately has been that the number floats up to about 700,000 and then someone buys a copy and I go back into the one hundred thousands. I've never been higher than 800,000, happily. (I have seen books at the 3 million mark.) So I check once or twice a day, and the number floats: 150,000, 200, 250, 300, 500, 700, back to 150. Every time it goes to 150 (or thereabouts) I am relieved, knowing it's still floating. yesterday I was in the five hundred thousands, so imagine my surprise when I checked this morning and it was 76,000. Hmm. This is more than one copy selling. Okay. Then I checked this evening, just for the heck of it (right after determining that the Yankees game is on, so I can go to the gym and watch it, since I'm too cheap for cable and the Yes Network--yes, dear reader, I'm missing it right now FOR YOU!) and had to do a double-take: 28,634. Crazy! Besides my brief stint under 10,000 (8,698 if I remember correctly) this is the lowest I've been. Woo-hoo!

I ask again (regular readers can repeat it with me): a one-time thing, or are we starting to catch on?

I'm going to be doing a blog tour in September, arranged by the lovely and wonderful Trish Browning Collins. Trish, as you may recall, was my terrifically enthusiastic blogger/reviewer, and she is starting a business called TLC Book Tours, which is an answer to my prayers. I had been looking for the right people to arrange a blog tour for me, and it only makes sense that it be Trish (and her friend Lisa), with whom I just feel a bond and for whom I have such great affection--and I've never even met her! (It just warms my heart to find readers who really like what I wrote. It's a very primal thing!) I will gush more and further as we get closer to the blog tour, but meanwhile I needed to mention it to my faithful (tiny) group of readers. Check out their website here.

I will go -- the Yankees beckon -- but I just wanted to check in. My screenplay is demanding a whole lot more of my time and energy, and I'm wrestling with the ending like I haven't had to do in a very long time. I'm tired and working hard (and haven't even finished the book I've been reading for, oh, a MONTH for Sunday Salon), but things are good. And more yet to come!

Monday Salon

2008-07-14T08:17:00.000-07:00

Now, in an effort not to be too terribly irresponsible (though I have copped to that trait, fully), I am hereby posting my first Sunday Salon review, a mere one day late. And might I say, yesterday was not a good day for doing much of anything. I failed to take my sleeping pill Saturday night and therefore woke after four hours of sleep, at five a.m. I decided to get up, rather than wait it out (because it usually takes two and a half hours to wait it out), and worked on my screenplay. I actually finished this draft, through to the end, although the end still needs to be fixed. (Just a dangling plot thread that I have to figure out how to weave in. I suspect I'm close.) And then it was ten a.m. and I was at that point where I knew, if I went back to bed, I would actually sleep for several hours. But it was also time to get ready for church. It wasn't an automatic decision, sadly, but I did decide to go to church. Then I got home at 3 p.m. and went straight to bed. I went to a farewell party for a friend at 6 p.m., and normally I would stay for a long time but I was exhausted. Even though I had brought gym clothes with me, I did not go to the gym; I went home and worked on my TiVo list. I wanted to do my Sunday Salon review then, but my roommate was home and on her computer, which has a much higher-speed connection than mine. (I don't bother upgrading because I have a great high-speed connection at work; also, having dial-up is great when I'm writing; I have no desire to flip over to the internet to surf. Instead I get up and wander around and eat.)

So anyway. Here is my Sunday/Monday Salon review for:

MUSIC FOR TORCHING by A.M. Homes.

A.M. Homes is an author I have only recently discovered. I had heard of her for years, because she's an alumna/sometimes teacher of my undergrad writing program. I remember when this book came out, and the fact that it got great reviews. I read her latest novel, THIS BOOK WILL SAVE YOUR LIFE, and loved it. So, on my way to Virginia to visit the nephew, I decided to pick up another.

Interesting.

I have a lot of mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, there is a lot of dark comedy. I do like dark comedy--I can even veer toward twisted--but I had a hard time getting on board with this. I absolutely hated the two main characters, Paul and Elaine. They are self-involved in the worst way; they are mean; they are hateful. Was their marriage ever a good one? Have they always been such lousy schmucks? No idea. But they are now. The book begins when, almost on a whim, they try to burn their house down with their outdoor grill. Funny: they can't even do that. They see a flame snaking up the outside wall of the house and gather their two boys into the car and go for a long dinner, effectively leaving others to clean up the mess.

In a way, there's a long thread of cleaning up messes, and leaving others to do it for you. Their house, while not burned down, is rendered uninhabitable by the fire. They go stay with a neighbor couple, who take care of them (in all sorts of *interesting* ways). They farm their children out to two other families, and those families take care of the children in even *more* interesting ways, one leading to the novel's devastating conclusion. Their marriage, their lives, their foundations are all falling down around their ears, and rather than fixing anything, Paul and Elaine embrace that and drive if all farther down.

I hated Paul and Elaine. And since they are the core of this book, I have to say, I hated the book. And yet...

It is brilliant.

I mentioned the devastating conclusion earlier. In a way, it comes out of left field. And in a way, we've seen hints of it coming all along. No one deserves this kind of ending, but if anyone comes close to it, Paul and Elaine do. And Elaine's final words, the last line of the book, sum it all up in every possible way.

If you're easily offended, don't read this book. If you like dark humor, there's plenty to enjoy. If you don't mind being unsettled, and perhaps having extreme negative feelings for characters, check it out.

Call me irresponsible...

2008-07-11T08:52:00.000-07:00

I'm adding a new item to my weekly "to-do" list: blogging for the Sunday Salon. Hopefully I will be able to do this with some kind of regularity, since I have become less and less responsible over the past year or so. However, I do love to read and several Sunday Salon bloggers have talked about my book, so it's a great community to join. They'd like you to review a book every Sunday, though they are flexible; they have enough members now that if you don't blog on a Sunday the world doesn't end. I doubt it ended before, but you know. I like to exaggerate.

So...the question is, where to start? I'm in the midst of a book now, but really I just started it and won't be done by Sunday, not if I want to get some writing done too. I've finished a couple of books over the past couple of weeks and I could blog about those. I have some favorites that I always enjoy talking about, so I could start with those. I also have a pile of to-be-read books surrounding my bed, some of which I've started and not yet gotten back to. This all is not a huge quandary, I know.

The Fourth of July was fun; I went to Virginia to see the baby nephew again. This child is precious. That's all I need to say, as much as I'd like to believe that he is unique and no other baby in the world is as wonderful as he is. Any of you with babies you love in your life, you know what I mean.

I've gotten the ball rolling with another publicity push. Well, a small ball. Bigger than a Superball, but not as big as a soccer ball. Maybe a soft ball. Many steps yet to go. You'll hear more about it in the coming days/weeks. Meanwhile I'm getting another ball rolling (this one perhaps the size of a big Playdoh ball, like three or four cans of it) with my new book. And the science screenplay is coming along quite nicely. That one I would classify as a snowball, because I hope it will quickly become bigger and bigger.

Yes, I can get obsessed with metaphors.

And it's a beautiful, non-humid summer day on which I get out of work early! Let's get THAT ball going, shall we??

Back from Nawlins

2008-06-18T12:38:00.000-07:00

I just took an impromptu trip to New Orleans, city of beautiful antebellum homes, lush greenery, amazing food, and lots of mosquitoes. I have 21 mosquito bites on my left leg. Only 3 on my right; my right must somehow taste different.

I went down for work, strangely enough. My foundation is heavily involved in New Orleans reconstruction, and there was a party to honor the woman who has been the key player/liaison. another key player was organizing it, and she needed help. My foundation sent me.

This is the first "work" trip I've ever taken, and it was a glorious feeling to charge my meals and know they would be reimbursed. Of course, you also have to submit an itemized receipt, and there is a limit on what you can spend each day, but still -- this was a nice thing.

Being a Maughan (anyone who knows my dad will know what I'm talking about) I have to describe the food. It was amazing. Each time I looked at a menu, my first impression was that there wasn't anything on there I would want. Each time I ordered something, however, I was impressed beyond belief. There were the beignets, squares of fried dough mounded with powdered sugar. (Be careful when you inhale.) There were the crab claws in garlic butter. The seafood remoulade. The crab salad. The gumbo. Ah, me.

There was also the private jet. Now, I should state that my company did not pay for me to fly down on a private jet; our consultant is working closely with a woman who owns a private jet. This woman was in New York and flying home to new Orleans that same day, so it made sense I should "catch a ride." When Juliet (the consultant) first used that term I had a fleeting image of being picked up in a car, and thought, "But wait, we're not driving to New Orleans." Then she used the term "wheels up at four," and I thought, "Holy crap, this is a jet we're talking about!"
(and I want to point out that I was using the term "holy crap" long before the late Peter Boyle on Everybody Loves Raymond. This is my reputation we're talking about, here.)

Private jets come highly recommended. I have to add my recommendation to those. One thing that it does for you, though, is confirm a long-suspected but rarely voiced sentiment: air travel DOES NOT HAVE TO SUCK.

We arrived at the small airport in good time. We used the clean, fresh-smelling and lovely bathroom. We went into the waiting area and snacked on apples and popcorn (free) and eyed the selection of coffees and teas. No ID presentation, no security line, no body searches, just a friendly greeting. Then they motioned that the plane was ready, and we boarded a tiny bus that shuttled us the, oh, two blocks distance to the plane. We ascended a small flight of stairs and took our seats, each one of which was approximately four feet from another, in any direction. We could have sat on the couch, or even gone into the back room and reclined on the bed, but we were not that tired. Save that for international flights. Our hostess, the owner of the jet, gave us bottles or water or cans of soda, and candy bars or crackers. She offered us as much as we wanted, and pushed more on us after we'd each taken some. (She was a true Southern lady.) And we chatted pleasantly across the length of the United States until we landed, three hours later. My bag--which had been taken by the chauffeur before we went to the airport--reappeared right next to me in front of our car. Amazing.

All right, that's a long paragraph devoted to the trip down, but I don't anticipate flying privately again any time soon. I had to immortalize it. I flew back Jet Blue with a four hour delay, which promptly brought me back to reality.

I got a "destruction tour" of the areas that flooded and are in the proces of rebuilding. It was eerie to watch the water line get higher and higher as we went further into Jefferson Parish and Gentilly. Many lots are empty, and since this place was densely populated you know that each empty spot is a house that has been torn down and cleared away. Many homes were still boarded up, some with spray paint as to when the rescuers arrived (up to two weeks later) and who they were (eg the California National Guard or another unit) and what they found (one said "Five dead cats in back.") Other homes are destroyed and there's a trailer in the driveway; the trailer is where they are living. And then there are some nice, brand-new homes there too, fresly rebuilt.

I did not see the Lower Ninth Ward; we didn't have time. Jefferson and Gentilly are where the canals flooded and people drowned in their attics. Lower Ninth was destroyed by a storm surge that exploded through the levees; survivors said it sounded like a bomb. It wiped everything right off its foundation. I don't know how much has been cleaned up.

The higher-lying areas look pretty good. My friends said that you could tell there was a hurricane; immediately after roofs had been affected and trees were down, but that is relatively easy to clean. I stayed in the French Quarter, and you would never guess there was anything there. I also saw the Superdome, site of so much disastrousness. (not a word, I know.) And I was told the story of Amtrak calling Ray Nagin, informing him ahead of the hurricane that they were removing all their trains, and should he like to load those trains with those people who didn't have another means of escape, he was welcome...and him not responding to any of their calls. "Buffoonery," was how someone described it. Sigh.

But the New Orleans experience was great. I plan to go back some time relatively soon. It might be the site of a new work-in-progress. We'll see. Meanwhile I'll just entertain my memories of beignets.
I'll try to attach some pictures later. I didn't take very many.

Observations

2008-06-06T08:39:00.001-07:00

There's a fine line between "low rise" and "falling off."

In praise of science

2008-06-04T09:35:00.000-07:00

It was a fantastic weekend. New York City hosted the World Science Festival, and though I wasn't able to attend most of the events I did go to a play and a reading at Columbia University, my alma mater.

Saturday night's offering was QED by Peter Parnell (who wrote Sorrows of Stephen) about Richard Feynman, a famous physicist who worked on the atom bomb and figured out why the Challenger exploded. It was almost a one-man show (one other character showed up a couple of times, with a fairly limited interaction) starring the legendary Alan Alda. I'll tell you, when someone as distinctive as Alan Alda is onstage almost alone for an hour and a half and you don't think even once of his iconic Hawkeye Pierce character, you know that's good acting. (I saw him in a wonderful play called Art many years ago, and it was the same experience.)

I went to see this play because of the new screenplay I'm working on. I don't want to give a lot of details, but it is based on a famous scientist and a certain time period in that scientist's life. (There will be no "creation of the person" story, even though the childhood merits its own movie!) So while this screenplay focuses mostly on the interpersonal trials of the scientist, it absolutely has to integrate a lot of science in it; we can't have them talk purely about 'their issues,' because science is such a basic part of their everyday lives. The question we're facing, then, is how to go about it? How often, and how much detail? Scientists talking to each other aren't going to dumb it down for the audience; they'll be speaking in terrific, deep scientific jargon that the average person doesn't understand. How long can we do that before we turn the audience off? How much is needed to give it a feel of veracity?

Watching QED Saturday night answered quite a few of these questions. The scientist character, Richard Feynman, talked about many angles of his life: how he learned Russian to be able to travel to a tiny area called Tuva; his bongo playing; his work on the Challenger explosion and how he refused to append a "nice job, NASA" at the end of their report; his work on the atom bomb; the death of his wife; his own battle against cancer. I've only touched the tip here, because this was an incredible man with diverse and fascinating interests and talents. The office set was interesting. He had a messy desk, a couple of chairs, a radio, shelves, and two blackboards, which were covered with equations. I stared at them blankly. In the Q&A period after the play was over, Alan Alda said, "I'm sure most of you recognize this as a Feynman diagram," and the audience (made up mostly of scientists) murmured their assent. I thought, "Holy cow. This is a case in point right here." I understood literally nothing of these equations, but I trusted them. They're over my head, and that's a good thing. The equations need to be correct for the scientists, but they just need to be *there* for the rest of us.

Earlier in my scriptwriting process, I wrote a scene where one of the scientists is teaching calculus to children. As I wrote it by myself, I wrote "Math math math" as a placeholder. "Math question?" "Math answer." Then I went home for a break, and one day grabbed my brother, who's been through several semesters of calculus. He brought in his elementary calculus book (the kind that would be taught to children...very smart children, that is) and we found an equation that could go on the board and figured out the exact questions and answers for the scene. I admit, even after Christopher had explained it all to me, I didn't really get it. (I felt my brain forming a hard, protective shell as he talked.) But reading through the scene after I realized how great it is to have those facts and figures. Ground it in reality!

Okay, so back to the Science Festival. The second night I went to a reading called "Dear Albert," put together by Alan Alda, which was a collection of Einstein's letters to and from his wives and a couple of their friends. He'd had to edit and select sections and tie them together to form the story of Einstein's life. Small factoids: In 1905, Einstein wrote *three* groundbreaking papers, so revolutionary that each spawned its own branch of physics. Max Planck, another legendary physicist, read one of them and said, "The world as we know it has changed." (That may not be an exact quote, but it's close.) Einstein plays only a peripheral role in my screenplay, but again I wanted to see what was done to make him accessible to today's audiences.

It was a terrific piece. He had an unhappy first marriage and an unhappy first wife; both came through loud and clear. And then some of his letters mentioned, in the most offhand way, his earth-shattering work that would change the scientific world. Wow.

After the play was over, people were milling about and Mr. Alda was talking with the audience members who approached him. I generally don't talk to celebrities, figuring they want to be left alone more than they want to talk to me, but he was being kind and talking with anyone who wanted to, so I got brave. I mentioned my screenplay to him, and who it was about, and he got really excited, saying he'd been looking into this same scientist and working on a project of his own. Wow! He asked me what my research plans were, and what sources I've been using, and I told him and he got more excited. At this point, the house managers were getting antsy and asked us all to leave, so Mr. Alda asked for my card. I only had my book card on me (which leads him to my km website, which could lead him to this blog! Hi, Mr. Alda!), and I gave it to him, and then walked out of there thinking, "Alan Alda asked for my card!"

I work at The Rockefeller Foundation, which helped sponsor the Sunday night reading of Dear Albert. Monday I approached Joan, the woman in charge of that department, and told her how thrilled I was that RF was part of that great evening. I told her about my meeting Alan Alda, and she said something I had already figured out: "He's such a wonderful man. So kind and gracious." Yay for good people.

A quick personal note only peripherally about Alan Alda: I am very close to my dad, and this is in a small way due to our nightly viewings of MASH after the ten o'clock news. He and I watched it together almost every night on channel 5. My mom and my siblings never joined us; it was just the two of us together. We watched the entire syndicated schedule, from the earliest Henry Blake episodes to the latest Colonel Potter-and-Charles (and BJ in a pink shirt) ones. It got to the point where we could look at each other within two minutes and say, "Oh, this is the one where Colonel Flagg calls himself 'the wind,'" and then turn back to the TV and keep watching. So I know I'm close to my dad for other reasons than MASH, but the two are very closely linked in my mind.

I am figuring out a few more book promotions, but nothing concrete yet. I'll keep you posted. In the meantime, vive la science!

Thrilling...

2008-05-30T09:53:00.000-07:00

Summer Fridays! My office lets us go on Fridays at 1 p.m. That makes life that much more manageable, you know what I mean? It makes me feel like a real person. Now if I could just use that time productively (writing!) rather than pacing my apartment wondering what to do....

New Post...

2008-05-23T07:44:00.000-07:00

Wow. I knew it had been a long time since I posted, but...two months? Holy cow. What can I say? Grand Theft Auto IV. (anyone who knows me is shaking his or her head right now)

The Utah tour was nice. I say, we ought to be able to take 3 weeks off our day jobs every two months. Five weeks on, three weeks off. It will do wonders for American workforce productivity.

So I did several events while in Utah: the Barnes & Noble signing, a signing at Wisebird Bookery in Ogden, a book club, an in-home reading, and two events at Weber State University--one a reading and one a visit with the creative writing majors. I spent a whole lot of time baking in preparation for my events, so it all was okay. The Barnes & Noble reading went well; they had set up about 20 chairs, and we had to get more, and that's a nicer feeling, certainly, than having four occupied chairs and sixteen empties. Almost everyone there knew me, and therefore already had the book, but that's okay; I can now say I have had a reading and signing at Barnes and Noble. That's not a small thing. They had a table for me to sit and sign copies, and a big sign announcing my name with the logo of my book. (I stole it and took it home.) I sat at the signing table, and mostly watched people eye me and the book and walk away, which was okay. One couple picked up the book and spoke to each other and then noticed the picture, and turned to me and said, "You look like her!" I said, "Well, the picture was taken less than a year ago." They realized what I meant and just lit up, and had me sign the copy and bought it on the spot. That was lovely.

Wisebird was more lovely. I had gotten smarter with this one, and sent invitations that said, "Signing between 12:00 - 3:00; reading at 2:00." With the B&N I hadn't been that specific, so a lot of people showed up after the reading was over. But I sent invites to everyone I could think of, and Wisebird is a lot closer to my parents' home and where I grew up, so a lot more people came. My fourth-grade teacher came with his wife; I instantly reverted to a 9-year-old and actually was excited to realize I am now as tall as he is. My junior-high-school principal came with his wife, too. I spoke with both him and my fourth-grade teacher and kept thanking them for coming. They kept thanking me for inviting them. I said I was thrilled to see them; they said they were thrilled to hear about it. Back and forth we went, with a little contest as to who was more grateful. It was wonderful. My first voice teacher came, and came to the dessert fest we had at home after. I hadn't seen her in at least ten years, and we caught up. (and she looks fabulous!) A lovely woman who has been a widow for 4 years now also came, and started telling stories about how awful it can be. My dad had given her my book a few months earlier (and when he told me that I said, "Really? Is that wise?" -- just because I thought it might be too raw for her), and she told me how much she related to the book. That was one of the best moments, right there, feeling like I had gotten it right.

My mother's book club came to a big gathering, too. They had all read it. I was told that their peak attendance is usually 5, but there were 21 women in our living room, all clutching the book and looking at me with wonder usually reserved for .... something exotic. It's just a lovely thing to sit there and listen to people talk about your book. So rewarding! They took my picture and had me sign their books and generally fawned. I did not complain. And they gave me chocolates! (Mrs Cavanaugh's milk chocolate nuts 'n' chews...nothing better! They had asked my mom what I liked, and Mom got it right.)

My friend Andrea also had a reading at her place, and that was wonderful. A few women I hadn't seen since high school were there, and another woman I hadn't ever met. I read a couple of passages (too fast, I was told; I am a fast reader, I know, and I need to slow down) and we talked about the whole process, beginning to end. One woman, Rhonda, wrote me later to tell me that the evening had made a difference for her in her writing of her own book. Andrea has been particularly supportive through this whole process, and I just can't tell her how much I have appreciated it. The best outcome of the evening, though, was that Andrea and Rhonda and I decided to form a new writing group. I am more than excited for this. I've been doing well with my screenwriting projects, but not so well with the fiction. Time to get back to the fiction.

Weber State was quite kind about the whole thing, too. I gave a reading in the special collections section of the library (attended by the President of the University AND the guy I took to the Sadie Hawkins dance my junior year of high school) and they did a whole article on the front page of their newspaper, the Signpost. The next morning I visited the creative writing majors and their very cool teacher, Vicki Ramirez, who will be publishing her own first novel soon. She took me for coffee/hot chocolate after and it was all very nice.

So that was my Utah publicity tour. Really not enough to justify three whole weeks, but oh, how glorious was that time. Now I'm planning to be there for four whole days at the end of June for my little brother's wedding. I wish I could have more time, but they weren't so eager to give me a lot of time off again. I won't see anybody except family, but family is always good.

Needs no headline...

2008-03-28T08:56:00.000-07:00

here it is!! On the table, at Barnes & Noble. I sent my younger brother out with his camera to give me proof that it's there. I'm on the same table as Lionel Shriver's The Post Birthday World, (the teal cover near the bottom left corner, might be unrecognizable except that I just read it) which I feel honored to share space with. AND I'm right next to a picture of Johnny Depp!!

Other news: this same Barnes and Noble (Gateway Mall) has scheduled a reading and signing for me! Saturday April 12 at 3 pm. I am now busy trying to contact local reporters etc to get the story in the paper to get people to attend. A signing where four people showed up would be very painful. Especially because all four people would already have the book. Even more so because they would have the book because my dad gave it to them. Because they'd all be relatives. And we'd sit in a circle and discuss my brother's baby rather than have a reading, because they've already read it, and the B&N personnel would feel sorry for us but not sorry enough not to boot us out to make room, and then we'd have to go to Hires and drown our misery in root beer.

No, this is what I'm preventing. Utah friends and family, make note...

Saturday, April 12, 3:00 p.m. at the Gateway Barnes & Noble.

Bring your friends! Bring your relatives! Bring strangers off the street! I'll see you there.

Raindrops on roses

2008-03-27T12:32:00.001-07:00

A few of my favorite things:

rain (when I am inside listening to it)
good hot chocolate while it's raining (or cold)
good chocolate, any time
baking, any time
good books, any time
AND...good reviews! All the time! Find another one here.

Armchair Interviews, another site I found, reviewed my book, and liked it. What a relief. They are a site that also puts reviews onto your Amazon page, so it's good that my pristine page will not be marred by someone who really hated the book. Whew. In fact, they will add a really positive one. Really positive. I am so happy when people get it. (This is not to imply that those who hate the book "don't get it," said with a derisive sneer, but they...well...don't get what I wanted to do. They're not on the same page as I was, I guess. Something like that.)

On that note: I welcome good reviews on my Amazon page! I only have 5 right now, so if any of you who haven't put up a review would consider doing so, I would be much obliged. To those of you who have one up, I am already much obliged. Thank you!

Still making progress with Utah things. I am contacting the local newspapers for stories (I'll let you know if that happens) and am possibly lining up a reading/signing at the Barnes & Noble where the book is stocked, at the Gateway Mall. This is a big deal for me, and for a self-published book. Tell your friends! I'll give details when I have them.

Meanwhile I have to prepare at work for this leave of absence. My boss is very kind, and has agreed to let me go, but he's got a lot of work to do while I'm gone and thus we have a lot of work to do before I go. So I'm off.

thanks everybody.....

Thank you!

2008-03-24T10:03:00.000-07:00

Exactly one thing has happened:

MY AMAZON RANKING WAS 8,698.

Now, this number is fluid and fluctuates a LOT, so by the time you read this it will not be at 8,698. The last time I got really excited about my Amazon number it was right around 33,000 (the day before Thanksgiving), and it remained there for about half an hour and then started climbing upward. The inexorable upward climb, I now call it. And the Amazon number isn’t that informative, because it refers to your position amongst the 4 million–plus other books selling, and doesn’t tell you numbers of copies sold. At Christmastime a low number means more than in March, because everyone is buying books to give away (How many of them get read?? And how many go right to the “garage sale I’ll have someday” pile?) and more books are being sold overall, so you’re fighting and clawing for a higher number. In other days, you can sell two copies and jump a hundred thousand spots. I don’t know what sales are like right around Easter, but I know that when I looked at Amazon this morning my ranking had skyrocketed. Last week it wasn’t selling at all, and on Saturday it was climbing into the 500,000 range.

Bam. 8,698.

So again I ask, is this a one-time thing, or is it starting to catch on?

I know that Trish Browning gave me a whole lot more exposure than I thought I would get (THANK YOU TRISH!!) thanks to her giveaway and having people post about the giveaway on their blogs. (THANK YOU POSTERS!!) My parents’ church group is reading it for their book group, which I will meet with in April, and word of mouth has begun spreading with that; initially my dad sold them six books, and he has since had to place two additional orders, as people have read it and spread the word (THANK YOU DAD!! THANK YOU CHURCH PEOPLE!!). I’ve gotten a date set to speak to the creative writing majors at Weber State University in April, and a date to do a reading there as well, and it’s going to be in their bookstore, and they’re going to hold a signing. (THANK YOU WEBER STATE!) The University of Utah is also putting it into their bookstore, and I think it’s already at Sam Weller’s. My publicists are going to arrange media interviews (or try to) in Utah for the second or third week of April. And it goes into the Gateway Barnes & Noble in SLC ...tomorrow.

Oh, my goodness.

I love the fact that it’s in bookstores, even a small number of them. My cover is attention-getting and beautiful and completely conveys exactly what I wanted it to convey. Susan Koski Zucker designed it, and I thank heaven for her. (I should do a whole entry on the cover. It is a story worth telling.) This is the kind of cover that actually makes people want to read the book, so when they see it on shelves they say, “Hey, look at that!” and pick it up. With Amazon, it’s harder, because you have to find it—and to find it you have to be looking for it. You don’t just look at shelves and notice something. Well, at least one person happened to find it (he left a review: Sir Stephen of Kingsley. THANK YOU SIR STEPHEN!) when not seeking it out, so it’s not impossible; it’s just not usual.

All right, I just looked at the Amazon number again, and it’s back on its inexorable climb. But that’s okay; I’m glad I got to see it at 8,698. Some things are beginning, and I am happy.

Chocolate bunnies and eggs and chicks...

2008-03-22T07:42:00.000-07:00

and a happy Easter to those who celebrate it.

I feel especially grateful today to Trish Browning, whose support has been immediate and unwavering. I haven't even met her! Thank you, Trish, and your readers for your enthusiasm and support. Read a litle more about it here

(Look at me! I did the "here" link! That's a step in the right direction.)

I went to a seminar the other night called "Be Your Own Book Publicist." It was taught by Christopher Lee Nutter, who wrote a self-help/spirituality book for gay men a couple of years ago, The Way Out. He managed to sell 8000 copies of this little book using newspapers, magazine reviews, etc. The dirty secret is that, even though he published through a traditional publishing house, his book publicist did almost nothing of this. He did it all himself.

We had a very interesting conversation that night, with Chris and 10 other authors who attended the seminar. Several of the authors--fiction and nonfiction writers alike--have contracts with conventional houses, and all said that the publicity departments had told them absolutely not to do their own publicity; it would "cheapen" them. Chris looked aggravated and said "But they won't do it! They don't have time! That's the problem!" He encouraged us to work with publicity departments, but really take the burden upon ourselves. He said that he had met an author a few weeks ago who was "just wrecked," walking around feeling awful because he'd been promised so much by the publicists and the publicists couldn't deliver. So this author had put in years of work and anguish (I relate!!) and the book debuted with a big flop.

Now, it's important to know that these publicists are not deliberately neglectful; they're just overwhelmed. They often have outdated media lists, and no time to do research to update them, and they send their books to general addresses at magazines, and at magazines 90% of these books end up on the "giveaway table": extra books that no one wants. They don't really do targeted, customized campaigns, because they don't have time. A women's fiction book like mine shouldn't be pitched to the same publications as Chris's gay men's spirituality book, really, but they don't have time to be discriminating so they blanket all their sources with all the same books.

It was an extremely enlightening 3 hours, and though I walked away feeling a bit overwhelmed, at least I have some more concrete ideas as to how to get my book out there. It's all a slow process, and continues to be slow, but I really believe that if I can just find my audience, it will all be worthwhile. Reading some people's comments about how the book affected them, or how they believe they need to read it at this time because it can help them (someone even wondered if it was a "sign from above") makes me keep on pushing.

Again, to my supporters, a really deep THANK YOU. You just can't know what feeling like my work is appreciated means to someone who's been wondering if her work would ever mean anything to anyone. Thank you, thank you.

Happy St. Patrick's Day to ye!

2008-03-17T12:15:00.000-07:00

Another blog entry, as I eat grapes that taste vaguely like pickles. Yuck. And still I keep eating them. They’re better for me than chocolate, or so I keep telling myself. Maybe it’s time to start on the banana. Or the Twizzlers.

So my March Meet the Mac trip was wonderful. (see the entry below.) Babies are wonderful. Family is wonderful. And then I came back. Sigh. I suspect that if this baby were mine I wouldn’t be seeing things with such rose-colored glasses; after all, every night there I got to go to a hotel at 8 pm and swim in a fantastic pool, as the baby’s parents dealt with his decision on whether or not to sleep. But as it was, I had a fabulous five days with the majority of my family and a beautiful, happy baby who was just learning to smile (it doesn’t get much more precious than that), and cooed at us and made funny noises, and was just starting to see that people were there, holding him, and making eye contact etc. He is a poopy boy (a fact more than acknowledged by his mother), but I didn’t mind changing diapers every fifteen minutes, especially given that, as I said, at eight o’clock I went swimming. For our one touristy thing, we went to the Edgar Allan Poe museum. One word: boring. (and I love Poe!) Oh, and my dad and I also had some terrific crab cakes at the local Hard Shell pub one night. Happy times.

So, for book news. I’ve gotten a new review, this one from Trish Browning’s blog:
http://http//trishsdiary.wordpress.com/2008/03/16/review-did-i-expect-angels-and-giveaway/#comments. (I’ve been doing a lot of book blog surfing, and this one looked like a good one.) I contacted her and asked her to read the book, and she very kindly agreed. Then she read it in one day! Trish loved the book so much that she is sponsoring a contest for a free copy. Thank heaven for kind and supportive people! And the comments that have been posted so far are just as encouraging. Now I have to say to these people: if you don’t win, you can still have the book. Amazon.com. A mere $13.95!!

I mentioned in another post that my magic number is 250. This is not quite the case. 250 is a milestone, but not the milestone. If I sell 250 (no more than 125 that I buy myself, so I can’t inflate my numbers too much) I qualify for “Reader’s Choice” designation, which is another symbol to get affixed to the back cover. On February 12, I achieved this designation. This is more exciting because as of February 12 I had purchased only 60 copies myself; 190 of them were purchased by you, dear readers! Thank you!

At this point, the only thing “Reader’s Choice” does for me is qualify me for their bimonthly marketing emails. I’m doing a whole lot of marketing on my own, so they aren’t that great. Well, I also get another graphic on my back cover.

The real magic number is 500. Again, 250 of them must be purchased commercially. So I could purchase 250 books myself and try to unload them at events and have those books count toward the 500 number, but I really don’t want to do that. I buy about 20 books at a time to send to blogs and reviewers and marketers and my publicists, but I don’t want to have a gigantic box or five under my desk at work. I certainly don’t have room for them at home. But once I sell 500 copies, I qualify for the “Star” program, which puts the book into “regional, and perhaps national” B&N placement. Yes, there’s a “perhaps” there, but...I’m counting on it. I have also been told that if you can sell 500 copies you might get the attention of a publisher. So...as of February 12, we were at 190. Let’s keep going!

For my April Utah push, I’m slowly getting activities set up. I am going to speak with the creative writing majors at Weber State University (which I attended for a year) one day and hold a reading there, either later that same day or the next week. I am going to have a reading at my parents’ home, and my friend Andrea has offered one at hers as well. A dear friend in Rexburg, Idaho, is seeing if her book group wants to read it for April, and I have offered to make the drive up and attend the group, if they do. (You don’t get that same offer with Hemingway!) My mother also got her church book group to read it, again with the tantalizing author’s visit as the reward. The Salt Lake library has decided to stock a few copies, and I spoke with the people at Sam Weller’s, who will also stock it there. (They may hold an event, but not in April. Perhaps when I'm back for my brother's wedding in May or June. They still haven't decided.) The University of Utah bookstore is considering stocking it, as well. I’ll see if we can arrange some more events, also, to make a 3-week visit more worthwhile. I’m taking a leave of absence from work, for heaven’s sake; need to cram as much in as possible.

So that’s all for now. Happy St. Patrick’s day, everyone, and may the luck of the Irish be with us all!

I Met the Mac!

2008-03-17T12:05:00.000-07:00

He sleeps a lot, and is happy just to look around a lot too.

And as you can see, he is beautiful ....

Progress...

2008-02-26T08:28:00.000-08:00

A new post! Woo hoo! And a new picture of the Mac, at two weeks. He’s one month old today! How long can I keep myself from calling him Big Mac?

I have been meaning to talk about someone for a few weeks now, an author by the name of Therese Fowler. I mentioned her quickly in one of my other posts, but I have meant to do more and just haven’t. So here is my effort to make up for that. I met Therese briefly at the American Library Association conference in Philadelphia back in January. She signed an advance copy of her book, Souvenir, and I gave her my card. Then she contacted me the next week and we have corresponded a bit since. She is kind and generous and Souvenir has been chosen as a Target Breakout Book, which is wonderful. I read it in two nights, and would have done it in one, except I have this day job for which I have to be attentive and all that. But I have passed on the recommendation to friends, and now pass it on to you. (I would pass on the book, but really, you all should buy it. Come on, people!) Read the book! It’s got a very touching story (without being saccharine; previously noted, I don’t like saccharine) about choices and their consequences, whatever your intentions. Souvenir, by Therese Fowler. Pick it up.

It’s another gray February New York day (this year we’ve been stuck in perpetual November). We did have a great snowstorm last week, but that was wasted; they might have called it a snow day, but the schools were closed already for winter break. I eagerly looked at my work email when I woke up, hoping for a notice of a closed office. Instead they postponed the breakfast meeting by half an hour. What a gift!

Things have been going well. My dear friend Colleen had me come to Massachusetts for President’s Day weekend to talk with her book group, which had read the book. It was a wonderful experience. There were nine women in the room holding my book, who had read it, who had liked it. They really got it, it seemed, and what more can you ask for? We talked about Jennifer, the main character, and her troubles and her personality. I was concerned about this; in the past I had to work, actively, to make her more likeable, less cold. See, it has been important to me that this book mean something, but that it not be cheesy and saccharine, a trap that many “meaningful” books fall into. As a result, sometimes I pulled too far the other way, particularly with my main character. And since it’s a character-driven book, if you hate the main character, what will motivate you to keep reading? So I worked really hard to give her moments of vulnerability, some more self-deprecation, and moments of connection with other people. And the book group generally liked her, and they weren’t turned off by her depression after her husband died because they liked her enough before. Whew.

The women from the group asked a lot about my process, what I was thinking when, and what motivated certain parts. That was a lot of fun to recount. Some of it is on my website, but I can’t go into quite that much detail writing it out, and certainly not about lots of specific parts. It was great fun to answer questions about people, incidents, etc.

I’ve gotten another review that makes me happy, this one from OurGaggleofGirls.com Here’s the link: http://ourgaggleofgirls.com/books/2008/02/19/did-i-expect-angels/. I continue requesting reviews and interviews at various sites, and getting some responses more quickly than others. These sites are deluged with requests, it seems to me, and it’s very nice that they take their time to do it at all. Thank heaven for people who encourage reading.

I finally have a date for my in-store promotion: March 25, at the Barnes and Noble in the Gateway Mall in Salt Lake City. I need now to contact my publicists again to arrange for Utah publicity efforts. I will be doing a lecture/class of some sort at Weber State University in Ogden in mid-April, and hopefully some Sam Weller events and possibly readings in libraries and/or friends’ homes. I am making my parents host at least one (I’ll make the food), and perhaps I can do something at Wisebird, which also stocks the book. We shall see.

Sickness lingers....

2008-02-05T14:07:00.000-08:00

Okay, I’m sick again. This time I cannot blame stale plane air. This time I blame the subway, because no one I know has been sick and, well, hurtling down tunnels crammed into this little nasty little tube with thousands of people at a time, there are bound to be some germs.

The big step forward is that I'm admitting it. I belong to the “I’m really not sick” denial club. The first couple of days I say, “This isn’t bad at all. I can do everything I want to do. I mean, it’s a cold, but it’s not that awful pressure-in-your-ears-and-face kind of thing, it’s just annoying.” I don't believe in echinacea, but I have started placing my faith in Zyrtec—no, Zantac—no, Xanax—no, wait, Zycam. It’s made chiefly of zinc, which made my mother crow triumphantly, since, when I bought it (over Christmas) she had suggested I just take zinc, and I insisted, “No, the commercials say 'clinically proven to shorten a cold'! I must have this Z medication!” So for the past few days I’ve been taking it every 3 hours, as directed, and it’s this nasty don’t-chew tablet that tastes, well, of zinc mixed with cherry. “I’ll really be fine,” I insist, over and over. I keep going to work. I continue going to the gym. (I eat too much junk not to.) I still write when I get home.

And then...day three or four, I crash. This day occurred on a Sunday, last time, and mainly I lay on the couch of my parents’ basement and stared at a television. A television that wasn’t even on, for heaven’s sake. I haven’t reached that point yet. In fact, this morning I awoke and thought, “Oh, this cold is going to be a snap. It’s almost gone.” And as the day has gone by I have felt heavier and heavier, and going up and down in the elevator (I work on floor 21) seems, if anything, to have exacerbated it. Annoying. I went and got a peanut butter-chocolate sandwich cookie to make myself feel better. Sigh.

The practical effect of this cold, since I have not taken a day off work, has just been that I can’t go meet my friend’s brand-new baby. We are in a new baby boom, if you haven’t noticed, so in addition to the Mac who was born a week ago, I have a new Audrey to meet. I can’t very well go my friend’s house with a cold and sneeze on her newborn. Bad form. They sent out a video for people to watch, and I faced the inevitable technical difficulties and...did not overcome them.

This has been a running theme lately. I subscribed to an “increase your website’s traffic!” service, called Traffic Geyser, about two months ago. It seems perfect for me, because it’s advertising your website through video! Since my Unexpected Angel site is video, I thought...what serendipity! It has taken two months to convince myself I can actually try to tackle this thing. I began the process over MLK holiday. Slow, baby steps. I did well through the step of actually downloading your video. I talked myself into writing a script for one, and then I talked my roommate into being the spokesperson. (She did commercials, long ago, and she is a natural.) I filmed it, managed to get decent light and sound, and then tried to upload it.

Ha ha!

I cannot adequately describe the frustration; I will only say it involved a lot of bad words. I went to the Tech Support page and logged in and it rejected me. I got more and more worked up and finally wrote an email to their tech support with the subject line being “I HATE TRAFFIC GEYSER.” Happily they wrote me back and are willing to help me, if possible, but the guy noted that my video is in ASF format and will likely be rejected by most of the sites. It has to be in mp4 video, or mov format, etc.

How the hell do you do that?

That particular email question is still outstanding. I cannot address it, emotionally, because I am at work and need to reserve all my frustration for the consultant who is paid specifically for X number of days and cannot possibly remember the number of days he has actually worked, since 2004, so can I just go find that for him?

I will try to conquer the video thing tonight. Or maybe I’ll just go to the gym, come home, and read. That sounds easier. Actually, not going to the gym sounds even easier than that. I am sick, after all. Getting sicker as I write. Hmm.

On a happy note, this afternoon I called an independent bookstore in Salt Lake City, called Sam Weller’s, to ask about stocking the book. They told me to send one over, and the events coordinator said she’d consider an event, as well. Utah has nice people.

The real post for today

2008-01-30T10:57:00.000-08:00

Ah, blogging. So much fun, so easy, so therapeutic—so easy to neglect. It’s not as if nothing has happened, either; as you may gather from the snapshot, my nephew arrived on January 26, making him, today, four days old. I assume he still resembles the picture.

Hi, Mac! I will meet you in March.

He is the first grandchild on both sides, and his parents live far from home base of Utah. So as you can imagine, many, many packages have made their way east. Even I have a package waiting to be sent. One item in the package is an adorable bib, which has been in my closet since September. I’m sending that this weekend, even though that means I don’t get to witness the reactions, which I am assuming will be just like mine, too goopy and shmoopy to describe on a blog. I also bought a tiny Beany Baby stuffed zebra, which I will save until my March Meet the Mac trip, because he’ll be almost 2 months old by then and maybe acknowledge it? I don’t know. Doesn’t matter. I am snookered.

Anyway. Back to book blogging. On January 12, I attended the American Library Association’s Midwinter Conference, held in Philadelphia. Specifically, I attended one day of the Midwinter Conference, since the conference itself lasted, like, five or six. Enough to make your head spin. My book was featured in the Combined Book Exhibit because it was chosen as a Publisher’s Choice book, and at my sister’s suggestion I went down to the conference to try to flog it to librarians.

At the conference I met a man named Peter Birch, who was one of the people in charge of the combined exhibit. He was exceptionally kind and helpful and gave me all kinds of tips as to how I could best take advantage of this trip I’d made (a lovely hour and a half on Amtrak. The train is a nice way to travel). He recommended I go to the independent booksellers’ booths to get tips from them on how to sell books; after all, they’re almost in the same situation as I am. They’ve put out books which they feel are quality titles, but don’t have the power of the big houses to back them up. So some of the small publishers weren’t all that friendly, but one in particular was—I wish I remembered the name, but they publish kids’ history books. He suggested all kinds of review sources I could use, mostly for publications that go to libraries. It took a full week after the conference was over for me to follow up on all of these suggestions, getting their addresses and their submission requirements and writing the letters and sending off the books. I did this over Martin Luther King weekend—hooray for holidays!

I also met a lovely writer named Therese Fowler, whose awesome debut novel, Souvenir, comes out February 12. I will blog a bit more about her and her book closer to that time. For right now I will say that she kindly signed an Advanced Reader’s Edition of her book and then, even more kindly, reached out and emailed me the next week, since I had given her my card. Her website is http://www.theresefowler.com/. More later.

The other thing I finished, which I am proud of finishing, is writing up my official marketing plan and sending that to iUniverse so we can get it into a brick-and-mortar Barnes & Noble store! The one I requested was at the Gateway in Salt Lake City, to coincide with a Salt Lake City media tour (we hope—this could be at the whims and mercy of the local media officials). It should be on the New Release table for eight weeks, and I will take a trip out there to try to hold readings both in homes and at libraries. Dear Readers Based in Utah, if you would like to (or if not “like to,” will “consent to”) hold a reading at your home, I will bring a lot of good food! That’s my solemn promise!

Hey—that applies to any and all New York-based readers, as well. Just a little FYI.

I’ve also been scheduled for my first book group, in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. It’s a bit of a hike but my dear friend Colleen got her group to read my book and promised an author’s visit, so an author’s visit they are going to get. I love visiting Colleen, with her spacious New England house and foliage-filled yard (space and yards have become delicacies to me, the New Yorker) and her and her husband’s kindness, and getting to talk with a group is icing on the cake. If anyone else has a book group, I’m more than happy to come speak or talk on the phone; either way is great with me.

Meanwhile, in New York, I got stocked at the Penn Station bookstore! Yay!

I will stop now. There’s more to say, but more entries in which to say it. Until then...

annoying...

2008-01-30T10:54:00.001-08:00

Although I know how to publish graphics on my blog (see the attached)--I don't know how to place them where I want to place them. I've done this about six times now. So rather than put the bibs up top in the last blog, I'm putting them in a separate entry. Here they are. The one I bought is blue, and the baby is obviously not the boy in the picture, but besides that you can get an idea of what I sent. (I got them from Kip's Kids, easily found on the internet at http://www.kipkids.com. Lots of cute, cute stuff.)

Most Definitely "in"

2008-01-10T13:07:00.000-08:00

So, apparently I’m “in.”

All right, that’s a gross personalization (as opposed to generalization) of a trend, but I’m applying it to myself.

I am an avid reader of Entertainment Weekly. I subscribe to two magazines, the other being Newsweek, in order to feel connected with my world and surroundings. My job also has a nice program where they order magazines and circulate them through interested personnel; through this, I am “subscribed” to Time, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, but with a bizarre irregularity. (I often get 3 copies of each at the same time and am not able to read any of any of them. Therefore I read the short stories in The New Yorker, look through Time for anything interesting, and completely disregard The Atlantic and send them all on to their other waiting readers.) I say this so that, even though I do love my Entertainment Weekly, you will know I am not just a pop-culture moron whose only worldly concern is whether Britney has yet gone the way of Anna Nicole. I will take this down if she does.

So Entertainment Weekly, for those not in the know, has a feature called The Shaw Report which labels trends In, Five Minutes Ago, and Out. One of her recent trend successions goes: “In, Widow Lit; Five Minutes Ago, Mommy Lit; Out, Chick Lit.”

My book definitely falls into the category of Widow Lit. Hooray! I’m “in”!

I have never been “in” in my life.

When I was a teenager I decided to buy those incredibly trendy Minute glasses, with the oversized round frames. Unfortunately the pictures I had seen of those very cute Minute glasses had very thin lenses in them. My lenses were...not thin. In fact, for anyone in the know, my prescription in high school went from -7 to -9. this is not on the 20/20 or 20/whatever scale, because it’s a comparison of what people can see at 20 feet; I saw zero at 20 feet. I literally could not see one foot (my own, or distance) or more than three inches. (This is not legally blind, because the definition of legally blind is that you can’t see 20/20, or anything close to it, even with correction. With correction, I had 20/20 vision, at least until I changed another whole diopter, which happened with frightening regularity.) So those adorable Minute frames were the diameter of Coke bottle bottoms, lending an awful literalness to the term “Coke bottle glasses.” My head and eyes were distorted and shrunken, and the lenses (Featherweights!) stuck out of those cute Minute frames by about half an inch. In my next pair of glasses, we decided “smaller is better,” especially since, by then, my prescription had gone to -11, topping out at -12.

I had Lasik surgery at age 23, which was before it was officially “in.” Maybe this made me avant garde, but I was not “in.” My prescription has edged up a little since the Lasik, and now I own a pair of trendy Tina Fey glasses (or as my brother calls them, “smart girl glasses,”) but I don’t wear them because most of my day is spent at a computer screen and I only need them for long distance. I wear them to drive, which I do about twice a year. I’m not “in.”

I don’t like diets, so I refuse to try anything that’s “in,” like Atkins or Zone or Marilu Henner’s plan. I won’t do Jenny Craig. So not in. (Then again, the celebs who pitch Jenny Craig are even farther from “in” than I am...because they were “in” at one time, and I wasn’t, so while I’m still just “not in,” they’re “out.” Hmm.)

I don’t buy trendy clothes, because quality trendy clothes are expensive, and if I sucked it up and bought the quality trendy clothes they’d be out within a year and I’d have to revamp my entire wardrobe once again. I could shop at H&M, but the few items I’ve bought from them (bordering dangerously on “in”) start unraveling on the second wearing.

I don’t have trendy hair. In fact, after my last haircut, I looked into the mirror and thought, “My goodness. My hair is now ‘The Rachel.’” “The Rachel” was in...in 1995. Then again, when it dries naturally, it goes into “The Hillary.” This will never, ever be “in.” (I am temporarily solving this problem with copious amounts of gel.)

I don’t wear trendy makeup. Makeup tends to go in fads, like sparkly one year and matte the next...but all in various shades of pink. I can’t wear pink; I look like an old lady who buys Wet ‘n’ Wild on sale.

(So maybe I’m not “in”...but I did just get an email that said I have won the European lottery! I’m not in but I’m rich! Yee-haw...you don’t need to enter contests to win them, do you?)

All of these reasons why I am not “in.” But...I am the author of the book that, for whatever it’s worth, has been classified by Entertainment Weekly, as “in.” Line up! Get ‘em while they’re hot! Because in five minutes, they’ll be “five minutes ago.”

Goodbye 2007

2007-12-31T15:10:00.000-08:00

I just saw “National Treasure” with my parents for the first half of our Goodbye-’07 Blowout Celebration, to be completed with a dinner—at 4:30!!—at the local favorite “Ye Lion’s Den.” I particularly love Ye Lion’s Den. It has waiters dressed in “olde English” costumes, a merry Jokester who comes by at completely the wrong time to do card tricks, and a medley of the same Simon & Garfunkel songs (without words) playing over and over, day in and day out. The best part is that the restaurant is downstairs, so you must go through a building entrance to get to the restaurant, and when you open the door a little animatronic person (dressed as a knight, with a bow and arrow he aims at you) says, “Halt! Who goes there? Be ye friend or foe?” Every, every, every time.

I will put up with a lot of nonsense for good food. If they didn’t have good food, no amount of being able to mock something would make up for it.

So “National Treasure” was fun. There was some pretty crappy dialogue, laden with clichés and tired phrases, but hey, it’s an adventure movie, and a sequel, at that. One senses there was nobody going over the script with a fine-tooth comb. (“Fine-tooth comb”: cliché, or tired phrase? Hmm. I’ll go to Dictionary.com. One of its definitions: a trite, stereotyped expression; a sentence or phrase, usually expressing a popular or common thought or idea, that has lost originality, ingenuity, and impact by long overuse, as sadder but wiser, or strong as an ox. [Ah ha, "cliché " and "tired phrase" are the same thing. I knew that, didn't I?] So I guess that “fine-tooth comb” isn’t so much a cliché, because it’s not a phrase, it's an object [and what a pleasant object, at that: a comb one uses to remove lice]. Just a boring, overused metaphor. [I do love parentheticals in my blogs. {Parentheticals within parentheticals are even better, though.} Please forgive the overabundance.]) So, back to my point: no one read through the script and said, “Perhaps you can find another way to express that point.” I don’t have the script in front of me, but the thought hit me several times that I would write those phrases in a first draft of a script as “placeholder dialogue,” what I write down because I know that’s the point I need to make, the structure I need to have in place, in order to get to the next point; but it’s not particularly clever or original and I need to go back to change it to make it clever or original, or at least not so placeholder-y. “National Treasure” was laden with placeholder dialogue.

It’s getting time to leave for our 4:30 dinner reservation. I should note that we as a family are not QUITE that boring; we wanted a reservation for 6:30 but were told we could have 4:30 or 9:00. Even I don’t want to go to dinner at 9:00. So my parents and I will have a raucous New Year’s Eve celebration that lasts until, oh, 6:00 and then return home and make it like any other night. I’ll write on my screenplay and probably do some exercise in front of the TV and maybe even give myself permission to end early and read. Whoo! Somebody will call the cops.

Nearing the end...of the year. That's boring.

2007-12-30T22:40:00.000-08:00

Hee hee, I've figured out how to add images.

I might point out, to those who would consider me less than brilliant, I was following the same procedure when trying to upload my vacation photos. I wasn't doing anything wrong. It just didn't work.

Perhaps a more productive use of my time would be writing the screenplay I determined to finish on my too-short break from work. (I return to New York on Saturday, the 5th.) I’m on page 80 (and can probably stand to cut that by 10), and aiming for a completed screenplay of 120 pages. But I feel compelled to write just a little something.…

I have sent out numerous copies of my book to reviewers across the internet. The exact list is at work, on my Outlook with its zillions of folders (I know, Gmail, you’re superior because you don’t need folders...but guess what, I like them) marked “personal” and “book” and “marketing” and “publicity” and “review requests,” and I don’t have access here. But I found some things. Trying to write the screenplay, of course, means trying to find ways not to write the screenplay. First on my ever-expanding list of ways to waste time (which includes “watch TV,” “mess with my bad haircut,” “pluck my eyebrows,” and “make toast”) is Google. I Googled myself yesterday and found two reviews that I had requested. It was interesting. One review absolutely loved the book. I mean, loved. She gave a summary of the plot and then, I kid you not, said “I couldn’t put it down,” and “the character development is superb” and, this is the best, “Kathryn Maughan is a master storyteller.” Now, maybe she went a bit too far, but I was excited to read that. Who doesn’t want to stumble upon effusive praise of something you’ve worked on for five years? (Off and on, I remind you, off and on.) This review can be found on MyShelf.com, under “recent reviews.”

Now, the second review was not so pleased with me. My book, I should say; they’ve never met me. (A bit too difficult to separate the work from the individual, at least in the individual’s mind.) The second reviewer did enjoy the Jennifer part of the story, and mentioned that he/she was really sucked into her grief and depression, but didn’t agree with my style with the Henry part. He/she…was it a she?...said that Henry’s story was fascinating, but the way I/he told it was not. Henry, for those who haven’t read the book, sits Jennifer down to tell her the story of his life, and the way I wrote it was as if he were actually telling it. He sums up a lot. I did put in a lot of dialogue and tried to liven it up by making it more action-oriented, but underneath it all, he’s just telling a story. Hmm.

The reviewer also took issue with Henry’s grammar. I have wondered if anyone would, but this reviewer didn’t like it for a reason I had never thought of. The reviewer said his/her father is an immigrant and has been successful in business, and an excellent command of English is mandatory in the US for that to happen. Henry’s English, since he is completely self-taught (and not that educated to begin with), is… not excellent. I worked very hard on his grammar, and ended up using mostly Spanish grammar imposed on English sentences (e.g. phrases like “more big” rather than “bigger”). I didn’t want people to get offended that Henry couldn’t speak perfectly, but I also wanted to be true to the character. The reviewer felt he would never have become successful speaking like that.

Now, for a bit of history: in 2002, when I was just getting to the “Henry part,” (for the first time, anyway) I met a successful businessman, who had immigrated from Cuba about 40 years ago, whose English was exactly like that. Indirectly, I based Henry on him—a couple of events of Henry’s life, and all of Henry’s grammar and occasional Spanish interjections. This man, in all of our conversations, never once used the word “but.” Each and every time he wanted to say “but,” he would say “pero.” Since I understand Spanish, I got that he was just mixing the two languages. I assumed that, with context, readers too would understand the interjections, especially in very similar words, such as imagínese. Do people not look at that word and see “imagine” in there? But the reviewer said that a little glossary of terms would have been helpful. I suppose it would have. Hmm.

So it was an interesting day on Google. It brings up some larger questions: was I in too much of a hurry to finish? Should I have taken another year to do really extra-thorough research and written Henry’s story differently, maybe even in third person, to have the reader “live” through it like Jennifer’s? Did I not get enough outside opinions? Will most people agree with the MyShelf reviewer, or the other reviewer, or somewhere in between?

All right, I’ll tell you: the less-than-positive review is on CurledUpWithAGoodBook. I think the exact address is curledup.com. I prefer you go to MyShelf, of course, but…trying to be open and forthcoming etc.

No one loves everything, and nothing is loved by everyone. Of course I know that. (Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, one of my favorite books ever, received a total smackdown review, well after it had (1) gotten numerous raves and (2) become a smash success.) You have to believe in your work, believe there’s an audience, believe you’ve done your best and, not only that, but your best is enough. I have gotten a lot of positive feedback, feedback from people I know and trust, and I try to dwell more on that. I know this book has an audience, and I believe I will find it, or my book will find it for me. I know the hard work and tears (literal tears) that went into it, and … hopefully it is enough.

A long time coming

2007-12-24T16:28:00.000-08:00

It’s time to update my blog. It’s past time. It’s way, long over time. I almost feel an explanation is necessary. To sum up: I got tired. I had to sleep. I started working in earnest on a new script. Then I had a Christmas party for which I had to make a ton of candy, a holiday tradition that takes a good week and a half of my time—worth it, because I get to keep the leftovers. Worth it even though I burned myself making the fudge.

There is a little bit to report. My grandma loved my book (natch), and started telling people about it. She gave it to a friend to read it, and the friend happens to work at a bookstore called Wisebird Bookery in Ogden, Utah. The friend recommended it to her manager, who asked to meet me. I went there on Friday (oh, yeah, I also flew home and got sick--it was the stale plane air, I’m sure of it--and am recovering from that) and spoke with Jennifer and she now stocks my books at Wisebird. So if you’re a Utahn or, more specifically, an Ogdenite, it is available there under the “Local Author” section. Another local author was in the store promoting her book and offered to trade one of mine for one of hers. The catch: it’s a children’s book. I have no children, I have no nephews or nieces (though this will change in January, this is not soon enough to buy a book without wooden pages), and I didn’t want it. So I didn’t say no, I just turned back to my business with the manager.

I had an interview on the radio the morning after I flew in. I did not want to do it. Not that I didn't want to have an interview, but I was TIRED. Now, we all know that flying has become a uniquely miserable experience for those of us not rich enough to drop $5000 for a cross-country trip. New York to Utah is a particularly child-friendly route, and perhaps someday I will appreciate this, but when you leave at 6:50 am (and the car picked you up at 5:00 am, which means you got up at 4:30 am and still just barely made it through the ONE OPEN LINE in Security) and just want to sleep, you really don’t. Add to this the fact that Delta has installed touch screens on the back of each seat, and no one realizes you can just TOUCH the TOUCH SCREEN in order to get the command through, so you live through this bap bap bap on the back of your head for five hours, and I was not pleased. I had an appointment at 3 pm that afternoon, too, so I didn’t take a nap. At 8 pm I picked up the phone to call my grandma about the Wisebird Bookery appointment, and realized my parents’ phone line was riddled with static. Seriously, there was some big problem somewhere. Mom said, “Oh, that’s been like that for weeks,” and there was nothing they could do. I freaked out. We ended up calling Grandma and I stayed the night there. I awoke at 5:10 am to do the phone interview (scheduled at 5:30) and did some vocalizing in order not to sound like I’d awakened at 5:10 and then snuck downstairs into Grandpa’s office to make the call. I dialed the number—Philadelphia—and got a message that this line does not make long distance calls. Holy crap. I hadn’t thought to ask Grandma if they had long distance, because seriously, who doesn’t have long distance? I tried it again and got the same result. I ran upstairs and grabbed my wallet and tried to make a call on my credit card, but Qwest said they were a local carrier and didn’t even have long distance lines. By this time it was 5:30, the time of my interview. More panic. I’m thinking, do I awaken my 85-year-old grandmother at 5:30 in the morning for this? Argh. I phoned my parents’ home, on the off chance one of them was awake, to see if I could get a calling card number. No answer. I tried desperately to remember the number of the calling card I have lost somewhere—it’s got to be in my bedroom in New York, but I haven’t been able to find it for more than a month—and couldn’t. I am one of the last people in New York over the age of 8 without a cell phone, so I couldn’t go to that. Then the door opened and Grandma stuck her head in, miracle! I said, “Grandma, do you have long distance?” and she got out a printout that was the equivalent of a phone card and I made the call. It was 5:35 by that time, but happily the interview was taped and so it didn’t ruin everything.

So it’s Christmas Eve and the rest of the family is in the other room watching a Brazilian movie for the benefit of my brother’s Brazilian girlfriend. I am pretending to work on my script, which I would like finished (well, the first draft, anyway) by the end of my break. I have just under two weeks. Since we’ve finished the treatment, this should be doable….but only if I actually do it. They have promised me that our next movie will be Jaws, so I had better get to work.

Amazon

2007-11-27T11:56:00.001-08:00

I did ask my friend Glen if he’d made his purchases, and he hadn’t. Hmm. I still don’t know if my roommate did her Christmas shopping on Wednesday. She comes from a family of 11, so it may have been all her doing. But other than that...I don’t know. As of today (or right now, anyway) I’m back up, to 60,000. How long I last at 60,000, I don’t know, but I’m grateful to be there now.

Another “push” is underway—this one involving emails to everyone who has a large email list. For the past year or so, every time I got a mass email, I noted whether or not the person was sending it to a ton of people. (“A ton” is hereby defined as “more than twenty.”) For a while I was actually recording all of those addresses, with the thought that I would send out a notification to all of them, but then I realized the line between advertising to friends of friends and spam is very thin indeed, unless I happen to say “I’m also a friend of Andrea’s,” in which case they will write angry notes to Andrea and say, “Why are you giving out my email address to spammers?” (Yes, this is a shout-out to Andrea, my first official fan; by “official” I mean “actually subscribed to my blog!”) So I’m sending requests to these friends and asking them to spam their own friends. Spamming your friends isn’t considered spam, unless you’re sending out a “Send this to 12 people and your entire life will change!” note. That is definitely spam, regardless of the sender.

So I’ve been not-spamming my friends and asking them to not-spam their friends, and one of my alumni lists sent out a notice also. And lo and behold, this might actually be working.

So...thanks to the people who have put me in the five digits! Now let’s shoot for four....

Happy Two Days After Thanksgiving

2007-11-24T10:44:00.000-08:00

That happy eating holiday, Thanksgiving, has passed. I had a nice meal at the apartment of some friends with about ten adults and one two-year-old girl, who loudly proclaimed that she liked “THE ROLLS!” (which I brought) best. These are from a recipe passed down from Great Grandma Gammell, and they’re easy and everyone always loves them. Happy to win over the two-year-old too. I also brought an apple pie with a sugary crumb topping, which was fabulous. I have to say, it was better than the store-bought pumpkin pies served with Cool Whip, but there were some traditionalists there who insisted on pumpkin pie (Cool Whip notwithstanding) and they ate that instead. That meant I had a third of an apple pie to take home. I ate it yesterday.

It was sixty degrees in New York that day, which is almost unheard of. I walked to my friends’ apartment with a jacket on, my early-fall jacket, thinking, “I don’t need to be wearing this.” But the temperature dropped that afternoon, and by the time I walked home that evening I wished I had more on. Yesterday was freezing. I expect today is, too, but I have no plans to go outside unless I manage to convince myself to go to the gym.

Book news: none. I’ve done six interviews thus far (and recorded three, so at some point in the not-too-distant future I’ll decide to figure out how to download those recordings and make them available) and the video website is finally up, though it’s not really what I wanted. I wanted a customized site, but as the programmer quit, we don’t get a customized site. Sigh. I’ve been recording friends’ tributes to their angels, but none of this is as easy as I’d like it to be. I’ve been sending out my news to various friends, asking them to send it to all their friends—also all the list serves I’m on for school, etc—and nothing really has impacted sales. On Wednesday my Amazon sales rating skyrocketed, from about 600,000 to 33,000, the very highest it’s ever been. I got excited. First I called my dad, to see if he’d bought books that day; that’s always my immediate question. But he hadn’t, and I thought, “Is it the interviews finally kicking in?” but since Wednesday the ranking has steadily fallen, so I think it was a one-time Christmas gift purchase by one of my friends. I’ll see him tomorrow and ask. Not that I mind, of course; but I’d rather it be strangers deciding to buy it because of the large amount of money I’ve spent on a publicist.

It’s been a productive weekend, so far. I have done all the small, easy things on my to-do list, which seems logical but there are often weekends in which I don’t even get those done. Now it remains to be seen if I’ll actually tackle the new book at all. I want to devote one day just to working on it. Unfortunately, I haven’t yet figured out the trajectory of the new book. I have an inciting incident, and I have characters, and I have a vague idea of what is going to happen. But I don’t know the purpose, and that is bothering me. I don’t know the character arc of the main character, and what happens to her as a consequence of her actions in the first 20 pages. I imagine the consequence is large. But I don’t know…. The good thing about my new book is, I don’t have any happy marriages in it. I had to write a happy marriage in my Angels book, and that stressed me out. I am not even a dater; what do I know about happy marriages? I literally had to sit down with a married friend and ask questions like, “What do you think they would talk about here?” or “What kind of thing would happen when they’re doing x and y?” None of that now. I have had plenty of bad marriage examples flit through my life, so I am writing that this time instead.

So this Thanksgiving, I am thankful for marital unhappiness. A big Happy Thanksgiving to you.

thank heaven for actual "usable form"

2007-11-20T20:11:00.000-08:00

I still don't really know if there is any meaning to this phrase other than the logical first-glance meaning. I assume it means just what we think it means. Which means that my website, myUnexpectedAngel.com, is now in usable form!! We went with the service, and while there are still some things to work out/figure out (specifically, whether or not we can have people write up their stories and post them, which the shy might want to do), but at least I was able to announce, "The site is up and running!" I had my two interviews this morning (and have another tomorrow at noon, on an internet-based show with Judyth Piazza), which I did record. (Let's just see how long it takes me to get them onto my site. Starting now.) They went well. The first one contained a milestone for me: we went to a commercial break and continued on after. Pretty cool. The host seemed at least to have looked at the book. I can't say whether or not he read it, but he did have some information gleaned from something other than a press release. The second host stuck to very basic questions, but that's okay.

The real upshot of this website being up is that I can now start emailing all my friends and family about the book. Please look at the website, upload your videos, get some buzz going, send it to your friends! And maybe even buy some books in the meantime...

No more "Usable Form"

2007-11-15T08:54:00.000-08:00

Well, to add a special touch to this experience, yesterday the MyUnexpectedAngels programmer, Justin—who has worked, as far as I know, at least two months on this project—just quit. And he didn’t even call; he sent a text to the designer and said he wasn’t going to do it anymore. That’s it.

The designer is devastated; he feels worse about it than I do. And he is determined to make it right, which ups him in my esteem. (Let me never meet Justin.) He has been looking around for solutions, and quick ones, since I have another two interviews scheduled for next Tuesday. (These I will do from home, so these I will record and post onto the site. Hopefully I won’t be a stammering fool.) He seems to have found something, which might even be a better option than having someone do all that programming and cross-referencing and platforming (I got lost after “programming”). I don’t know the technicalities, but it involves the videos being posted onto my site but hosted on YouTube, even though the user can’t really tell he or she is using YouTube. The only reason I know this is a good thing is that someone at my work, the guy with a master’s in computer science, had told me back in August that we ought to host the videos on YouTube. Hmm. I would have brought that up to Justin, and even fought for it, maybe, if I’d just known what it meant. I still don’t, but the words are the same. I assume that makes it the same thing.

Interestingly, with this new method we’re going with, the site will likely be up in 48 hours. I have no idea how far Justin was from completion, but we are, at this point, 2 months overdue...and now you’re telling me we could have just whipped it together two months ago and had it finished in 48 hours?? Sigh. I am making this the silver lining. We don’t know yet if we’ll be able to have written stories, but...hopefully the videos will catch on. YouTube highlighted the fact that about every third American has a camera phone, right? Its popularity didn’t come out of nowhere.

I got a good review on Amazon yesterday, from a retired work acquaintance who read the book and loved it. She completely made my day that day; she phoned at 1:30 in the afternoon and said she had just finished it, and hadn’t been able to do anything all day long except read the book. She then said, “This is one of the best books I’ve ever read.” I related this to my boss, who knows her. My boss said, “You know who your competition is? Carol reads Dickens and Dostoevsky and Melville! You’re up there with the classics!” I was flattered. (Carol emailed me at 6:30 that night and said she couldn’t stop thinking about the book and she almost felt like she was in a trance. I am not making this up.) The practical application to this is that she’s telling a lot of people it’s a great book and now people at work are actually starting to buy it. Yay! (One or two have asked if they could just borrow one of my copies. I have stood firm.) Carol is now emailing me telling me to write more books. I have started one, but I’m not sure where it’s going so it’s not clipping along at any brisk pace. My boss said, “If Carol were here, she’d be giving you deadlines.” Maybe I need her.

I’m also working on another screenplay. I should emphasize this is not scabbing, for anyone following the WGA strike. We are not under contract with any studio; no one is waiting for this to be done. We started in September, long before the strike began. It will not be pitched to anyone until after the strike is over. It will not be finished until long after the strike is over. It’s very interesting and fun to write, but it deals with scientists. I anticipate writing some drafts where the dialogue says, literally, “SCIENCE SCIENCE SCIENCE” until I can actually speak with a scientist who can write that part for me. Science is not the focus of the story—relationships are—but world-renowned physicists and mathematicians aren’t talking about tea parties, you know?

What is "usable form"?

2007-11-13T12:59:00.000-08:00

I had my second radio interview yesterday. It was at a station in Iowa called KGLO AM, with Mark Dorenkamp. He was perfectly pleasant, reasonable, and, best of all, interested. This is not to say that other interviewers aren’t...but there is sometimes the sense that they’d, uh, rather be doing other things. But Mark asked about the book, why I wrote the book, what the process was like, and talked a lot about angels and people who have helped his friends and family. Seems there is a lot of car trouble in this country.
We also discussed the website, and he asked me when it would be up. Parroting what I have been told by my designer, I said, “A few days.” Now, the dirty secret is, I’ve been told “a few days” oh so many times...first it was “two weeks,” then “another ten days,” then “in a few days.” I just got an email from my designer that indicates that it’s going to be many, many more days, not a few. I am not techno-savvy enough to know exactly what is going on, but it seems the programmer is a lot more interested in security and “cross referencing” than in, say, getting the site into a “usable form.” It is currently nowhere near a “usable form” and he just can’t figure out how long it will take to put it into “usable form,” at least not any more specifically than “a few days.”
ARGH.
They’re working on it. I know they’re working on it. But I also know that I started this project (the website) back in MAY and I’m wondering why only now in November are we thinking about putting it into “usable form”? I am doing radio interviews. (Barbara’s aired last Friday.) I am telling show hosts, “The website will be up in just a couple of days! Just a few days!” because that is what I have been told. Meanwhile I have no way to gauge if anyone has even visited the site because IT IS NOT IN USABLE FORM. I don’t know if this whole “radio tour” was a stupid, bad idea and colossal waste of money. I don’t know if the website itself was a stupid, bad idea and colossal waste of money, because no one can get to it so I don’t know if anyone has tried to get to it because...say it with me...it is not in usable form.
Meanwhile my stats on Amazon are slipping, slipping, slipping. A week ago I was at 500,000...today I’m at 700,000...and a book called “Fur Trappers” dealing with the mountain men of the 1800s is at roughly the same spot. Sigh. I know my dad hasn’t done his Christmas shopping yet, so that’s one positive, but...sigh.
Thanksgiving is rapidly approaching, and it seems as if the Utah tour will not accompany it. This is fine. I will get some peace and solitude and, if all goes well, some writing done. I have several projects I can work on—just pick one! But it’s getting increasingly difficult to write. I think it’s a phase (I’ve been in them before) and it will pass, but it’s frustrating when it’s happening. The good thing is, at work we get Friday off, too, so I will have a glorious long weekend. I am thrilled. Even if I don’t write, I will sleep...I know it, because I don't have to get up in the morning, and late morning is when I know I can sleep.
Hopefully I will not dream of anything in “unusable form.”

What are you thankful for?

2007-11-01T13:23:00.001-07:00

Yes, it's the day after Halloween, and no, this post isn't going to talk about Halloween. I have no children and don't like to dress up myself (for a Halloween party on Saturday, I wrote "CAT" on a piece of paper and pinned that to my sweater), so Halloween is a non-event for me.

A real event: I had my first radio interview today. (The “first” was scheduled for November 20, as I mentioned in my previous post, but we scheduled a couple of others in the interim. ) If you missed it, fear not! It wasn’t live; it’ll be broadcast on Friday, November 9. In Athens, Georgia. Something tells me all my New York and Utah friends will miss it.

It was an interesting experience. I had drawn up a list of questions I thought she might ask, and equally drawn up what I might say. As I have mentioned before, I am not a part of the world where people can come up with snappy, articulate responses right in the moment they need them. I come up with the responses about 10 minutes later. Great for writing, not so good for a radio interview. “Wait, can I go back to that first question? I just thought of a funnier answer.” The spirit of the stairs. So, happily, I had anticipated most of these questions and had some decent answers. The hostess, Barbara Dooley, was perfectly nice and inquisitive and positive. A good first experience. The interview lasted 10 minutes. I hope they don’t cut it up, because it’s not that long to begin with.

I now have two interviews currently scheduled for November 20 and one on December 3. I believe I will have a few more in the interim, just not presently scheduled. I will have a running list on the “Media” section of my kathrynmaughan.com website. (At some point I hope to upload the actual interviews so people can listen to them. We’ll see if the technologically-challenged author actually can figure out how to do that.) I am also floating the idea of a Salt Lake City-based set of interviews, both on radio and television. Ideally this would happen right around Thanksgiving, so I could do a two-in-one trip: get in some local press coverage, and eat turkey with the family for the first time in years.

Thanksgiving is not my favorite holiday. I like to eat, of course I do. But think about it: hours and hours of preparation in order to sit down and eat one meal. Maybe, if your host/grandmother is traditional, you’ll all have to say what you’re thankful for first, but really, people, it’s...just...a...meal. Flying five hours, fighting crowds and traffic and getting bumped, to have dinner? Stay two nights on your old bed and then fly another five hours, fighting crowds and traffic and getting bumped?

My mother did not understand the first time I decided not to come home for Thanksgiving. She was hurt, even. I tried to explain my logic to her, and I figured, hey, she’s a practical woman (to a fault)—she’ll understand. She’ll be grateful she doesn’t have to fight the traffic and airport crowds. I was wrong. That year I chose to go to Paris instead of home, and I celebrated Thanksgiving in the Louvre eating quiche Lorraine. (That was a meal for which I was willing to fly hours and hours.) She told me it was stupid. I think she was referring to the expense, but still. Didn’t make me go to Utah the next year. I went my first year of grad school, and had three major projects hanging over my head and instead of the mattress they’ve had since I was 8 I decided to sleep on their “deluxe” bed in the guest room and probably slept a total of 15 hours over 4 nights. I have not gone home for Thanksgiving since. At Christmas, I sleep on the old bed.

If I lived closer to home, I would be willing to go home for it. If I didn’t have to fly, say, or the flight were one or two hours, that would be a different story. But New York to Utah for a piece of turkey no longer computes. On the other hand, New York to Utah for a few interviews and a piece of turkey...that’s another ballgame. That could potentially involve financial gain, and financial gain is something I would not mind at all.

Let's be Zen about it all

2007-10-25T14:07:00.000-07:00

So we’ve had a bit of movement on the book front. I met with my publicist this week, and she’s great. She works for an excellent company that has excellent references, and we are embarking on a nationwide “radio tour” that will begin in November, with a first interview scheduled for November 20. It’s on a station called WQQQ in Hartford, Connecticut, from 8:10 – 8:30 a.m., live.

I am excited enough about this that I will actually wake up and be on time for it. (This is about the time that I should wake up for work every morning. Unfortunately, as a nighttime insomniac, I have had to begin drugging myself thoroughly to override both my night-owl tendencies and my seeming inability to sleep more than four hours at a time. Then I have to break through the drug haze when my alarm goes off in the morning, which is increasingly difficult.) In fact, I will likely wake up seven or eight times during the night to check and see what time it is, and make sure I haven’t yet slept through it. I will have a dream that I missed it entirely, and be awake from about 5 – 6 am worrying about that. Then I will drift into a deep sleep but jump out of bed the moment the alarm rings. It will be a long and tired day at work, and at three-thirty I will get a headache that feels as if long pins are being stuck into the base of my skull. I will be tired but push through it and go to the gym that evening, and then decide I am going to sleep at ten-thirty, no joke; but ten-thirty will come and I won’t be tired, so I’ll procrastinate and do a few extra things and then look at the clock and say, “Twelve-thirty? Again? Wasn’t I tired today?” And I will thoroughly drug myself and have to pry myself out of bed the next morning at eight-something.

Predictable, I am.

It will be worth it, though, because I will happily end up tired if it's for an interview. A good cause. A book cause. (It is not worth it when I’m tired because I’ve been guilted into attending a very boring dinner that lasts until eleven p.m. and I get home at midnight and am unable to sleep for a good two hours after that. Or something likeunto that.)

But...anyway...that’s the big development on the book front. One non-development: my marketing website, MyUnexpectedAngel.com (the placeholder site explains it) is not going to be done for another ten days. We started this project back in May. I’m not entirely sure where the fault lies and not too eager to find out, because I’ll just get mad and I can’t really do anything about it, and I don’t want to put up a buggy site, but...argh.

I also finally heard back from iUniverse and their Publishers’ Choice program, and I am no farther along than I was before (having waited about 10 weeks to hear anything at all). They want a ‘detailed marketing plan,’ which I don’t yet have, and when they receive it they will put my book into a Barnes and Noble in four to six weeks. This means I will miss Christmas entirely. Ah well. Again, nothing I can do. Let’s be Zen.

Visual Interest

2007-10-19T10:04:00.000-07:00

I am trying my hardest to upload some old vacation photos onto this blog, simply to vary things a little. I am not having success. This is not my fault. I am doing everything the directions say to do, and it's not working. Hmm.

Okay, another post about "Dirty Sexy Money." I watched on Wednesday and was dismayed--nay, aghast--at a plot twist of theirs. It is exactly the same plot twist as I had in my own moneyed-world script. In a panic, I sent an email to my screenwriters' group and asked if I should change the twist, if I ever indeed get back to rewriting that script. (I will. Just not in the coming few months.) Unanimous consensus: No. Plot similarities are the only rule of the writing universe: if you have an idea, odds are good that someone else has that idea too. I learned this the hard way: in my undergraduate years, I took a screenwriting class and took way too long developing an idea into a script. I hadn't quite figured out where the whole plot would go before I started writing, and 'round about page 60, it started going way wrong. I turned it in, because I had to, and abandoned it.

Two years later, "Duplex" comes out. The plot wasn't exactly like mine, but pretty darn close.

Now, I did not say, "They stole my idea!" Odds are good they'd never heard of me or my idea, and with the movie time frame, they were probably already in some stage of production (ie, the script was already written) two years earlier, when I was writing mine. The lesson I took from that was, If I don't write it, someone else will.

I could say the same thing with my Daughters of Fortune script and Dirty Sexy Money. I originally finished the thing in 2002. I sat on it. Fast-forward five years, and I resurrect it...right in time for Dirty Sexy Money to go on the air. Say I rewrite the thing in six months, finish in two, and start shopping it around. Eight months from now, people won't say, "Hey, that's a plot twist that happened with the Darling Family!" And say, through some divine stroke of luck, it gets purchased and, with even more luck, made. The process will take about two years; even more likely that no one will make the connection. So I will keep it as is. The world is full of rich people and their stories, and as the rich get richer, their stories get more entertaining.

Michael Clayton and writing, writing, writing

2007-10-17T08:11:00.000-07:00

Hi again.

Nearly two weeks since my last post. I started a blog about two years ago detailing the pathetic state of my life--I won't provide the link--and wrote six or seven posts before quitting. I told exactly one person about it, and she read faithfully and even wrote me to request more posts after I stopped. I explained that writing a blog felt like actually writing (you know, real writing) and it was too easy to blog and not do any real work. I stopped. The blog is probably still out there, but I haven't seen it since my last posting. I lost interest, mainly.

I seem to have slipped into the same pattern. Not that I've lost interest, just...I have other things to do. But that won't stop me this time.

I saw "Michael Clayton" over the weekend. It was a Friday night, but I was still surprised at how full the theater was--I hadn't been expecting that many people. (I really was not expecting someone to come in about 3/4 through the movie and ask to take the seat next to me. I lied, saying "My friend is coming right back." Truthfully, I had laid all my stuff neatly on the seat next to me and didn't want to pull it all into my lap. Courtesy would dictate that I give up the coatholder to the ticket-bearing patron...but I can't imagine this man had bought a ticket.)

"Michael Clayton" is a really good movie. Go see it. This post will be full of spoilers, so if you plan to see it, stop reading now, go to the theater, and come back here when you're ready.

I'll wait.

Now then. The opening scenes quickly and efficiently show us that Michael is not doing very well. He's gambling, he's lost his shirt (and all shirts to come, he's so in debt) to a bad business investment, and there's a certain look in his eyes and on his face that says, "Not tonight. Do not mess with me tonight." He gets called to "fix" a situation in Westchester involving a wealthy man and a hit-and-run, and gives the man the same kind of advice I'd give him: find an attorney, plead guilty. Huh, we think. That's not pulling any strings; that's not fancy. I was expecting movie magic. Then he drives away (and the wealthy man is super-mad).

Meanwhile, there are negotiations going on through the night at his law firm. There's a woman about to melt down in a bathroom stall. Interesting.

Michael stops driving when he sees some horses on a hill, parks his car, and walks up to them. He's staring deep into their eyes ad communing, and as he's having his man-and-nature moment, BAM! his car explodes. Huh.

Supertitle: "Four days earlier."

It's a contrivance. It's a gimmick. But it works. The rest of the movie, we're thinking, "How does he get to this point?"

Forgive me for a little indulgence, but...I did the same thing in my book. I have a "Prologue" where my main character, Jennifer, is haggard and bitter and wandering through a big discount store (not Wal-Mart, whose labor practices I abhor, but a generic big-lot kind of store) looking for pills to kill herself. She sees a man, follows him, and runs into Henry, who will change her life. Cut to chapter one, and Henry starts to tell his story. We're still kind of in present tense, and Jennifer doesn't want to hear his story; she wants to get back to the discount place and get her pills. But he won't let her go and so she start to relive her own story, starting almost seven years ago.

Not quite the same as Michael Clayton, but close. It's a contrivance. It's a gimmick. I want people to say, "How does she get to this point?"

Does it work?

I will let you, dear reader, decide. (The book is available now on Amazon. Did I mention that?)

Meanwhile, I have been reading many different blogs on writing. There are hundreds, I think, maybe thousands; everyone from big-time successful television writers to the "I'm struggling and detailing the process for you" people have been writing blogs. (I fall more into the latter category, so far.) They're fascinating, they're often funny, they're educational.

For my fiction-writing folk, I am posting a link to a list of "amateur manuscript" no-nos. It's a blog by someone named E.E. Knight of the "Vampire Earth" book series. I hope you find it as enlightening as I did. It's interesting to progress as a writer...as I read his list I remembered moments when I figured out what he's written down, saw it in my own writing, saw it in others', actually called it out. And one or two made me very nervous. But ah well.

http://eeknight.livejournal.com/283350.html

More later--soon.

I'm also posting these random photos, taken by me on various vacations. Just to liven up my text-heavy blog.

Money, money, money

2007-10-04T11:03:00.000-07:00

I watched “Dirty Sexy Money” again last night, and enjoyed it just as much as I did the week before. I think this one has staying power. (for the record, though general TV is not the subject of this post, I also really liked “Pushing Daisies”—the aunt’s line, “I can hold my breath for a long time” was classic—and I just can’t get into “Private Practice,” despite being a diehard “Grey’s” fan. Addison without the company I know and love is an Addison I don’t care to follow.) And, to stay a bit more on the general subject of the blog (writing! You probably couldn’t have guessed that, so far), I am learning from it.

You see, long ago I wrote a play about a woman who had the same kind of filthy-rich lifestyle exemplified on this show. The kind of money where helicopter pilots are at your disposal if “traffic is ghastly,” or your staff consists of fifty people who are mostly unseen and unheard, doing all their work in the kitchen or garden. The play I wrote, called “Daughters of Fortune” (I have a problem with titles) centered around a woman who had married into this family, gotten well accustomed to the lifestyle, and was now trying desperately to remake her life—but still had to pay the bills. And when I say “the bills,” I do not refer to Time Warner Cable. I mean taking the Concorde (as I said, “long ago,”) to and from Paris twice a month, staying in hotels ($500-a-night hotels) for two-month stretches because your apartment is being remodeled, and making sure that those hotel rooms are filled—filled—with $300-a-vase floral arrangements. The kind of expenses that require you to take $1000 out of your checking account DAILY, sometimes more than once a day, and still max out your five credit cards each month. I could go on.

Now, this play is on my mind because I recently resurrected it with the intent of turning it into a screenplay. The differences between stage plays and screenplays are many. Stage plays almost always have small casts, budgets being what they are; they are often centered in one physical location, like a living room or a restaurant or an attic, again for practical/budget reasons; and the playwright is allowed to luxuriate in dialogue. (This is a big reason that television is turning into something worth watching again: playwrights are being recruited in droves, and playwrights--an oversimplification, fine, but I'll say it anyway--write killer dialogue.) None of this “The camera pans to her face, which reveals her true feelings of love”—instead you can write what she might say, in a perfect world where people are not tongue-tied, able to speak in beautiful or witty or snappy prose. (I do not inhabit this world. My thoughts come at the speed of my typing, which works great when I am typing and not so great when I’m sputtering out loud.)

So anyway, I am converting my small-cast, one-indoor-location, dialogue-heavy play into a screenplay. I have this family that lives a “Dirty Sexy Money” lifestyle and a character who is trying to get out of it.

The main problem: these people are wretches. Obnoxious, clueless, loathsome people, at least to the average Joe who actually has to work for a living.

So why are we, average Joes ourselves, interested?

In DSM, so far, it’s because our main character is not. Nick is an outsider, a friend of the family but not a member, who (a) has a happy family, (b) is an attorney for poor folk on the side, (c) has a reason to try to be close to the family and their money (trying to figure out how his father died) and, importantly, (d) is taking not only a salary but $10 million a year to give to charity. If that’s not a Way to Ingratiate Your Character To the Audience, I don’t know what is. How can you hate a man who is giving $1m to a nun-founded playground for orphans? How over-the-top this is, I will let you decide.

It is through Nick’s eyes that we watch the Darling family and their excesses—even when Nick is nowhere to be found. We can laugh at them and their self-centeredness and come back, because the show acknowledges how awful these people are. The show laughs at them.

When I showed my DOF script to my writers’ group, they all said the same thing: “These people are all so awful!” One member even suggested I do a send-up of the rich. Hmm. With the advent of DSM, that’s not in the cards; they’re doing it already, and well. But I do have to find a way in. I have to make at least one character sympathetic. Who that will be, and how, I am not yet sure. But...I do have an idea. Good.

Un poquitico en español

2007-10-03T09:13:00.000-07:00

I watched "Cane" again last night. I am not like the networks, who pull the plug on disappointing shows after one or two airings. I, on the other hand, just watch them until I get bored.

I heard something interesting to me as they were speaking their difficult-for-me Spanish: a word ending I thought unique to Costa Rica. This is worth mentioning on this blog because one of my two main characters is from Costa Rica, and he liberally sprinkles his English with Costa Rican Spanish. ("Costa Rican" Spanish differs from other countries' Spanish the way British English differs from U.S. English. For example, the word "toalla" is the one taught in Spanish class to mean "towel." But in Costa Rica, you say "paño" for towel, because "toalla" means "maxi pad." Most of us found these out the hard way.)

Now, in Spanish, if you want to emphasize something you can put an ending on a word. An example: "Poco" means "little." If I want to say "Really little," I can say "muy poco," but almost no one says that. Instead they say, "Poquito." If I want to say really, REALLY little, I say "Poquitito." In Costa Rica, they change that -ito ending to -ico--e.g. "Poquitico," and because of that, they are known as Ticos. (Formally they are known as Costarricenses; really, they are called Ticos.) Henry, my 2nd narrator, is a Tico and he occasionally will say "poquitico," and I don't explain it in the book because I don't think that even Henry would take the time to mention this when he is telling the story of his life.

So back to "Cane" -- the (impossibly hot) new head of the family business, Jimmy Smits, was talking with a man who was trying to blackmail him. Jimmy said, "Our family does not pay blackmail. Ni un poquitico." Even with his very accurate consonant-eating accent, I caught "poquitico," which means the -ico ending is not unique to Costa Rica. Does this mean that Ticos are improperly claiming a title that isn't actually theirs? Are there other countries out there that also use -ico, thereby making this ending ho-hum and common? Is this little bit of specialness ... just a fraud? ay ay ay.

Ah me. I shouldn't be watching television anyway; I have three, count 'em, three projects I should work on instead. Only one of them has a due date attached, though (an indirect way of saying, "They're all on spec," or, more plainly, "I'm working for free") so it is very easy to flip on the television and/or just go to the gym and watch a Yankees game while on the elliptical machine, thinking, "I'll write tomorrow. Or maybe Thursday. Actually, this weekend is good." And then be surprised nothing is actually done.

But I am watching "Dirty Sexy Money" tonight. I'll keep my script in my lap while I watch and make it feel like I'm multitasking. Because self-delusion keeps us sane.

Spoke too soon

2007-09-30T19:24:00.000-07:00

As predicted/feared/expected, I spoke *way* too soon about the 75,000 mark. As of right now, I am at 305,000. That is a spectacular leap...in the wrong direction. But I can't complain, at this point; I have done absolutely zero publicity, and my Angels site isn't even up yet. Complaining about slipping on Amazon, with what we've actually *done* so far, is akin to eating pizza for a month and wandering on a treadmill for 10 minutes and wondering why you're not losing weight. (Yes, I speak from experience.)

So I will try to hold off on looking at my Amazon ranking for a while, at least until we've done some radio shows. I do not know when this will be. I do not know when I will be in my local Barnes and Noble. I do not know when I am headed to Salt Lake for regional publicity. I do not know...most things.

But I do like some of the new fall shows, for an abrupt and random change of subject. "Dirty Sexy Money" is just good trashy fun. "Desperate Housewives," despite the fact that it long ago got tiresome, is still my Sunday-night staple, preferably watched while eating delivered sushi. (Missed that part tonight. Drat.) "Grey's Anatomy" looks like it's going to pull the plug on the cringe-inducingly awkward George-Callie relationship, which is a step in the right direction....but hooking up with Izzie is one step too far. "Cane" looks like it's taking on a little too much to handle--drugs! betrayal! military serving sons! late-in-life pregnancy! mysterious Cuban gang members (whom we are to infer are *the most deadly people alive*)! terminal illness! and a man who married his stepsister and engendered permanent jealousy and hatred from his stepbrother!--I'm not making any of this up), and taking itself a bit too seriously. Come on, dudes, throw someone into the pool or something. Maybe drinks thrown into faces? They make rum, for heaven's sake. (I do like listening to the Cuban-accented Spanish, though, all vowels and no consonants. "What did she just say? 'Quehao'? What does that mean? Oh, wait, it's two words and she's missing a g" ) "Brothers and Sisters" also appears to be taking itself too seriously. It's on in the background right now, and that's about as much attention as I can pay to it. Ah, wise Uncle Saul, tell us what to do.

Really, I should work on my other projects. But an English major can only read so much in a day about chemistry and physics. I am not kidding.

Facts and figures

2007-09-29T13:20:00.000-07:00

I’ve broken the 100,000 mark.

I shouldn’t phrase it that way, because that makes it sound like I have sold 100,000 copies. This would be phenomenal.

This is not the case.

Instead, I am saying “broken the 100,000 mark” in that I am now *under* 100,000...on Amazon.com. It may change by the time I post this entry, but the last time I checked (yesterday, Friday) I was at 75,000 on Amazon. Not so great, you might say, but considering that I have been hovering around 110,000 (and once when I checked, I was at 299,000) 75,000 does not sound bad at all. This is going in the right direction. Maybe it was the lovely woman at work yesterday who put me over the edge? I was totally hard-nosed about it, making her order online. At this point I far prefer getting the number (and the, oh, $2 profit) than getting $14 in cash. It doesn’t seem terribly logical...except that I need numbers!

books and blogs

2007-09-28T11:49:00.000-07:00

I am trying to sign up for a service that will direct more traffic to my blog. Unfortunately, I seem to be incapable of doing this. For a few minutes I blamed myself--a natural response to a Luddite attempting something technically oriented--but I am happy to figure out (I think) it is not my fault. They are having technical difficulties, and it's not that I can't figure out what code I'm supposed to paste where, it's that they haven't provided me with the code. Happy day.

No news about the book, but that's all right. A woman at work asked me if she could buy a copy. She seemed to know all about the content. Since it's a woman I almost never talk to or even see, this is a positive sign. I do not have books on me, however; I referred her to Amazon. This helps my numbers anyway.

There is a janitor at work who's become friendly with me; he likes finding people to speak Spanish with. He speaks English almost perfectly, which is why I felt bad when he said, "Did you write a book? Oh, my condolences."

Now, if this were a previously published author offering a knowing joke, I would say, "Yeah, it's tough" and we would hit each others' shoulders and give that fake "you can do it/we're trying" smile. But the janitor, so far as I know, had no tough stories and publishing weariness to base his condolences on. So was he just feeling sad for someone so deluded she would try to self-publish her own book? I gave him a foggy look, and he said, "Your husband died, right?" Ah ha. I smiled and said, "No, it's fiction," and he said he was relieved. He said, "I saw the picture on the cover and I thought, 'that's the lady who works on 21! Oh, I didn't know whe was a widow!'" So he did read the back of the book enough to know the protagonist is a widow, but not enough to know that her name is not Kathryn. But it was nice to be recognized, even if just at work.

I spoke too soon about not getting my sandal-shod feet stomped. Yesterday as I was getting on the bus, a woman in sneakers stepped backward and right on to the edges of my toes. She did apologize, but she wasn't exactly, I don't know, distraught about it. Ah well. Today *I* am wearing the sneakers.

Sunshine and sensations

2007-09-25T12:28:00.000-07:00

It is a beautiful day in New York City. This is another cause for celebration, because New York City is allotted, oh, five beautiful days a year. (One of them is usually a random 70-degree day in December.) Our winters are brutishly cold. You see these poor saps walking in long down coats, scarves, gloves, boots, and immense, usually not-very-stylish hats, desperately unfashionable in the fashion capital of the world. (or is it about myself that I’m speaking?) Winter begins with a vengeance at the end of October and lasts usually through the end of April. We’ll get one or two nice days in April, where people emerge from tall office buildings and hesitantly remove their coats and say, “A foreign yellow object in the sky from which heat radiates...could that be the sun, about which I have heard so much?” And then two days later summer slams into us, with 90-degree days and 90-percent humidity. I come from Utah, where a 90-degree summer day is the norm, but there is a giant difference between dry heat and humid heat. One is, it gets cool at night. Another is, in Utah, you get into your air-conditioned car and your biggest discomfort is the hot steering wheel that you have to grip through a random fast-food napkin you didn’t remember to clean out of your car. But in New York, going out the door in summer is like walking into warm pudding. And it’s pudding weather until we get two and a half nice autumn days and then it’s officially freezing again.

This blog is officially about my book. Perhaps I should dwell on that.

There hasn’t been much to report, so far. I have the copies at my desk at work, and I am officially listed on Amazon. Several very kind friends have bought it already, without me begging, which is nice. (Some even kinder friends have bought multiple copies.) I see people at church on Sunday and tell them about it, and on Sunday my Amazon ranking hovers around 100,000. Over the course of the week I drift to about 300,000, then back to 100,000 on Sunday again. At this level, I think the difference between the two levels is about 8 sales. Sigh.

I spoke with my publicist yesterday, and we agreed on a plan of action. I sent her copies of the book and she is going to send them to various radio stations to do a “tour”— interviews on 15-20 (knock wood) radio shows. The good thing about radio is that you get to do it by phone, so there’s no lengthy travel or dealing with airlines/delays/people/screaming babies. We’re then going to focus on a local market, Salt Lake City. I have family in Utah, so it made sense to make it a home base of sorts. The rationale on focusing on one smaller market (smaller than NYC, that is) is that it’s easier to break out and become some kind of “sensation” there, and becoming a “sensation” in one market often leads to other markets paying attention, thus increasing your odds of becoming a “sensation” there, too. So here’s to a “sensational” few months....

Cause for celebration

2007-09-18T14:07:00.000-07:00

This is a momentous occasion, a cause for parties and revelry and all kinds of bacchanal.

It is now fall, and I have gotten through a whole summer without getting my feet stomped on the subway. Summer is sandal weather, after all, and each and every summer for, oh, ten years now, at some point, just when I thought I was safe, I got stomped. Bare toes against a stiletto heel or stuffy businessman’s shoe...bare toes lose. I’ve never had any toes broken, but there’s always that distinct possibility. And yet I continue to wear sandals on the subway. That’s what I call living wild.

One small thing --

2007-09-14T16:56:00.000-07:00

My websites are up!!

Visit: kathrynmaughan dot com. (Do not put in the www. It doesn't seem to work.)

Many thanks to John Hawkins Gordon, my fabulous designer. And, soon, his programmer Justin, who is busily working the kinks out of the companion website. Explanation provided on the km.com page.

Visit! Read! Enjoy! And...tell *everyone you know.*

Did I mention I will miss Kitchenette?

2007-09-14T16:52:00.001-07:00

My roommate brought home free cake given out by the lovely ladies of Kitchenette; it's Friday, it's closing time, they liked my blog, and they're being evicted by the greedy landlord. One slice of lemon, one of chocolate. This just will not work with knitted creations. Even if they were free, I would not be delighted.

Actual details about, you know, the book

2007-09-14T11:48:00.000-07:00

So since this blog is directly connected with my new book, I suppose I should actually write about the book. It’s official, it’s real, it’s done. I got my free copies from the publisher last week, and I thought that would make it real, but what actually DID make it real, incontrovertible, hard-and-fast, was finding it on Amazon two days ago. I typed in my last name and started wading through a long list. Somerset Maugham’s works came up first, despite my having typed “Maughan”—and I assumed I wasn’t on yet. Yet as I scrolled, up I came. Interesting that Amazon would choose a typo over my actual name.

Apparently there are several Maughan authors. Undoubtedly they are distant relatives of mine. Check them out if you are interested in health and fitness. As you can see from my previous post, I’m...not so much. That’s another post.

The book is called Did I Expect Angels?—hence the name of the blog. All the information about the book will be found on my website. More on that ... now.

My website will be up in two days—the personal one, anyway. Kathrynmaughan dot com. I’ve been thinking of things to put on there to (a) make it interesting and (b) maximize its Googlability. Hopefully I’ve done both. The site that has infinitely more potential is my companion site, myunexpectedangel dot com. (Not to infer that kathrynmaughan—the site—doesn’t have potential [what about the individual? Ooh, don’t go there] but that myunexpectedangel could go far and wide.

Myunexpectedangel is my video sharing site where people can upload video (or written) tribute to people who have popped into their lives and helped them out at unexpected times. I already have two different tributes I’m going to do. I even have a digital video camera. I just have to figure out how to use it. (I’ve had it since Christmas.) I revel in my Luddite-ness. But one tribute will be to a woman I barely knew who invited me to dinner on my first Sunday in New York—not knowing quite how freaked out I was. She just invited me anyway, and even if she doesn’t remember it, it meant a lot. The second tribute is to three people who, not even knowing each other or what the others were doing, acted in complementary ways (no, that’s not a misspelling) to help me turn my life around. That’s not an exaggeration. I’ll wait to tell the details on the site.

Meanwhile I am trying to figure out how best (and when) to get word out. Almost everything is in place: it’s available online on iUniverse.com and Amazon’ I have “pass-along cards” for people to advertise; I have secured a publicist; I am emailing blogs and chat rooms and the occasional bookstore; and all I am waiting for is the launch of the sites. Yikes.

All for now. It’s a bad day at work.

An auspicious beginning

2007-09-13T10:14:00.000-07:00

I thought about beginning the blog with a big post about the "journey" that the publishing of my book has been...but, bleah. Instead I will begin with a note that will be of interest to the smallest of groups: a subset of Manhattanites, the Upper West Siders. I am informed that "Homemade by Kitchenette," an amazing bakery, is closing because the landlord wants to rent out the store space to his relatives. The other store belonging to his relatives, next door, houses exquisitely ugly knitted creations. I imagine the new store, which will occupy space previously housing chocolate/vanilla-cream-filled cupcakes, lemon meringue pielets, chocolate mousses, and gigantic cakes of carrot or red velvet or German chocolate and all other manner of baked goodness, will now showcase something like your great-aunt makes, something at which you smile and say, "oh, my, look at that" because you can't think of anything kind.

I have a thing for sugar. Forgive me.

Unfortunately this knitted-awfulness store follows a trend that is growing on the Upper West Side: Food places being replaced by Stores Selling Uselessness. Now, I have nothing against the occasional nail salon, cell phone store, or niche "we sell only hats and umbrellas!" places. But I resent having to walk ten blocks to pick up an emergency frozen pizza, when I used to walk two, and have to walk beside these windows advertising Nothing We Need.

Rents are high in Manhattan. I get that. Landlords want to capitalize on this and get as much as they can. New business owners, flush with the dream of no longer working for The Man [thus becoming The Man themselves--well, plural, The Men...making it politically correct, and all-inclusive, The (Wo)Men] are eager to shell out whatever they have to in order to make dreams into reality. They're still covered by the small business loan, so it'll be fine! No, people. This is what got us into the subprime mortgage mess. It needs to stop. We need stores that sell things we need. Food. Maybe more laundromats. No more cell phone stores, no more "it looks homemade but really it's mass produced so your necklace will be the exact same as your coworker's" jewelry stores, no more sky-high-price clothing stores whose clothes are really not that cute or well-made, certainly not enough to justify a $200 tag on a blouse I could make at home on a borrowed sewing machine with skills learned in 7th grade Home Ec. (actually, maybe I couldn't. Seems to me I had to have a friend help me on all my projects... and when I say "help," I mean "do it for me." Thanks, Gayle!)

I digress. A long post to mourn the closing of a small store. Kitchenette, we will miss you.