physician, heal thyself

I was never one of those people for whom Mondays were calamitously painful. Mondays were just another day in the week, usually bettered by the accomplishment of having gotten through them and rewarding yourself with a nice weeknight meal and some DVD action.

You'd think, unemployed, that Mondays would bring some sort of illicit joy. I don't have to go to work! Ha ha suckers, right? Wrong!

Never let it be said that I don't recognize patterns in my own life, albeit a little too slowly. The past three Mondays have been, in their own little domestic ways, squalls of unhappiness. I can't install something right, I can't get through my to-do list, I don't make it to the gym, dinner's wrong - any of these things or all of them set me off a-wailing.

I finally put my finger on it today when I burst into tears over another recruiter calling me for another cadre of jobs I'm not looking for. I also burst into tears because my wonderful parents called to talk and offer upbeat support and I was so morose and depressed that it was an effort to sound as cheerful and confident as I know I should be.

Mondays are bad lately because over the weekend, I can sort of pretend that I'm weekending just like everyone else is weekending. But I'm not like everyone else. School is over and it was a highly unsatisfying experience and year. I've gone wading back into the job market looking for that elusive part-time job I can do well enough and then leave when I walk through the office doors on my way home. Again, I feel like a penguin thrown from a plane and told to fly simply because she has wings. I don't FLY well!

Mondays are also bad because I haven't been doing the thing I'm supposed to be enduring all this humiliating unemployment and part-time work in order to DO: WRITE. Hi, Stuart, Mom, Dad, Luiz, Shana, all you denizens of goodwill and encouragement! My name is Krissa and I haven't written in over a month.

So I stopped crying eventually today, when I realized that perhaps Mondays are just always going to be hard and the only antidote is to stop, as my dad pointed out, finding palliatives for my angst like dishes and housework, and instead, get down to the business of writing and regular job-searching.

And don't forget to throw in a little faith. A lot of faith.

So belatedly, I did just that. I wrote for a solid hour, saying hello to my beloved pages again. And all you denizens of encouragement were right. Nothing else quite compares to the validation I get when I write. The balance that throws me off when pawing through endless pages on Monster can only be found in a quiet corner with my laptop and my story.

I think I can do that, keep the faith going. But if you've got any spare, Mondays are good days for sharing it.

operating system

Monday morning, I woke up in a mild stupor. I did nothing all morning. Sure, I did some administrative tasks, fiddled with chores around the house, made vague plans to write, plan the week's meals, go for a brisk walk.

I did none of those things. As a result, I had a terrible day. I was cranky with myself, disappointed with myself.

On Tuesday, I woke up at the same time, pattered about having breakfast and bonding with the Today Show, tidying dishes and books from the night before. I threw on sweats, my red fleece hoodie and sneakers, and took off for an hour around the neighborhood. I passed the pedestrian steps for the Triboro and on a whim, climbed up there. I ended up walking all the way to the second pillar of the bridge, above the Ward Island Park. Up in the center-most part of the suspension bridge, there's no chicken wire, and you're fifteen feet above the cars and four hundred feet above the East River. It's not exaggerating to say it's fucking brilliant up there.

I got the heart rate pumping, smiling like an idiot at the sun and wind and crisp city skyline to my left. I turned around and headed back, passing a couple of bikers who smiled back because we were sharing a day when so many other people were inside. I got home energized, downed a bottle or two of water, took a shower and made myself a yoghurt and tea mid-day snack, and settled down to the computer. And then I wrote nearly two thousand words in less than two hours.

I've been absorbing and processing the difference in days since then. The key to feeling better about this tenuous, self-reliant lifestyle is doing the things that make my days better, that give me a sense of satisfaction at the end of them. Tempting as laziness and procrastination are - and looking at September through December, they are astoundingly tempting - they don't make me feel better.

So far, 2007 marks the first time I followed the only real resolution I made - make the changes that you want, the changes that support this less beaten lifepath you're taking. It hasn't been perfect; there are glitches like Monday. I can't pinpoint why I only wrote 2000 of my projected 4000 weekly words a few weeks ago. But amazingly, astoundingly, it's working at maybe a 75% success rate. I'm actually doing the things I know I need to do to make my days better.

I guess what I'm saying is, I never quite grasped what a whole-life approach was. I thought that the only thing that would make it easier to write was just to WRITE. But it turns out, it helps to wake up early, get some exercise, know there's lunch in the fridge, do the chores when they demand doing, get eight hours of sleep, and enjoy your evenings and weekends. It turns out when I do other things right, the writing comes a lot easier.

Who knew, right? I must be growing up.

words, words, words

Fellow wordsmith and man-about-town Biscuit recently noted some of his favourite words and his IM asking me to chime in with mine didn't make it in time. Since then, great words have been zooming by me and my ears are more finely tuned than usual to pick them out, roll them around, and delightedly romp in the hay with them. Yes! Words are great. Here are some of the words I like to take out on a Friday night and call my baby, say hey waiter, bring on the bubbly, nothing's too good for these girls:

Reciprocity!
Chicanery!
Vitriolic!
Cacophonous!
Electorate!
Alacrity!
Flotsam!
Debauched!
Fecundity!
Esoteric!
Somnambulant!
Chimera!
Effluvia!

What wonderful words! What humdingers! And you know me, I rarely get crazy with the exclamation points. But damn, these words are charging guns ablaze through the swinging saloon doors and taking the entire sentence hostage with their sharp, shiny edges. These words, they're like the electric guitar in the polka hall of language.

What are some of your favourite words?

the written, mangled word

Let me make something very clear before I delve into this post. I don't really mind when people mis-speak, or mis-pronounce, their words. In fact, I don't even mind typos. Typos are like falling down on the ice. They're completely unintentional, there's usually very little you can do to stop them from happening, and sometimes they're hilarious. Try replacing "friend" with "fiend" in almost any context and the result is usually much more fun.

Furthermore, let me make clear that there are words that I mispronounce all the time. I went through a brief but humiliating period of being totally incapable of saying "exorbitant", because my tongue would get confused with "extortionate" on delivery and produce some sort of weird hybrid called "extorbitant". I've got a cream for that.

There was a whole class period in college where I was unable to express my opinion because I had no idea how to pronounce "hegemony". And "hierarchical" has baffled me more than once in a pinch.

No, this particular garbage stuck in my craw is of the written variety. If you'll permit me to put on the snobhat I keep at close quarters at all times, I cannot stand written mis-use of the English language. Let me indignantly present three examples.

1. "The Most Addicting Show On Television!"

No. NO NO NO. We have a word. Someone, somewhere, grappling with language in the darkest depths of, let's say, the Middle Ages or maybe the 1960's, came up with a perfectly suitable word. A perfectly lovely little adjective. ADDICTIVE. That little adjective, it jumped into the world ready to be used to describe the state of something to which one gets addicted! Like drugs! Or 24! Or your mother! I am ADDICTED to drugs. Drugs, they are ADDICTIVE. It's almost too easy.

When I ask my Oxford American Dictionary for "addicting", it reaches out from the computer and smacks me roundly about the face. Do you know WHY? Because the word doesn't exist, that's why. Don't let your dictionary smack you in the face, People Who Create Graphic Splashes For Popular TV Shows. It's never a good sign. Unless it's a sign of the impending linguistic apocalypse.

2. [at the end of a letter] "Respectively, ________"

Respective to what? The other people who didn't write the letter? I, so-and-so, and this other person who is not mentioned, RESPECTIVELY sign this letter. No. NO! It is not RESPECTFUL to mangle the English language in an attempt to sound pompous or professional. You sound neither. RESPECTFULLY! Krissa.

This little demon is particularly insidious because falling into the wrong hands, it's almost viral. It's close enough to the truth of the word that your eyes pick it up and deem it acceptable and people, it is so not acceptable to not use the correct word when the correct word is so ubiquitously simple! Respectfully - full of respect! Respectively - in the order already mentioned!

Stop! Think! Tylenol Then Write! Is my new motto.

3. "...waiting on baited breath"

Let me get this straight. Your breath, you attached some sort of worm, or shiny dangling object, to the end of it, in an attempt to lure fish or lousy politicians? How can one have baited breath?

And moreover, how can one wait ON it? Is your breath, with its shiny dangling object, some sort of magic carpet that you are RESPECTIVELY sitting on, waiting for something to come along?

No. NO! I will not tolerate this. Your breath, it isn't baited. You are not respectively signing a letter. And that television show is not ADDICTING.

And lord, help us, these are just three that come to mind. There are so many, many more. By people who should know better when they're creating something for publication. Did some very specific plague come along and kill all the proofreaders? Did all the dictionaries in the entire world suddenly and fantastically combust, leaving us all helpless in the gaping, snarling maw of terrible grammar and atrocious word usage?

Please feel free to leave your outrages and indignances in the comment box for me to RESPECTIVELY stew over. And you! Kids! Gettoffa my lawn.

tiny victories

It's not like I don't tell myself every week that this week is going to be a high-volume writing week.

And it's not like this week didn't have some justifiably huge, complicated necessities on the to-do list, of which I can divulge more later.

And it's not like only sitting down to finally fucking write on Thursday of said week is really championing my own brilliance.

But in the interest of self-esteem, and preservation of this fragile hold I have on my own goals, I did write this morning. For two hours. Without too much distraction and sticking marginally to the plot and characters that have been languishing desperate for attention in my documents folder for months now.

I don't know why it's so hard for me to do this, but it is, and conquering the hard and the fear and the angst is the only way to shut up the demons of self-loathing and doubt that plague my creative mind. At least, for today, I shut them up good and proper. And that deserves at least a bounce in my step.

spiesmorespies andevenmorespies!

Over at gothamist, William Boyd's Restless reviewed:

"But somehow, the urgency of the present – Sally’s paranoia that the mistakes and betrayals of the past have come to claim their victim – doesn’t hold a candle to the taut suspense of the past. Sally is afraid of flitting shadows, but Eva had real monsters around each dark corner, and the foggy uncertainty of sleepy Oxfordshire never quite rises to the knife-sharp drama of wartime."

Pop over here for the rest - and this is the second spy novel reviewed in a row! People, I am on a roll. Except I'm not. I wasn't here. You never saw me. Shhhh...

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Relatedly, I've updated the Books page for the first time in two months so it's a bit spotty - I'd say that's a fair 85% of what I've read this year but I know I'm missing some flotsam and jetsam.

Just in time to acquire more flotsam/jetsam, too. Pocketed at the Rochambeau Book Sale this weekend by Mr. Bridgett and myself:

Terry Pratchett's Equal Rites and Mort
Len Deighton's Mexico Set and London Match
Dorothy L. Sayers' Clouds of Witness and Gaudy Night
Ursula K. LeGuin's The Dispossessed
W. Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage
Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier
Kazuo Ishiguro's Remains of the Day
Washington Irving's Tales of the Alhambra
Connie Willis' Lincoln's Dreams

Let the building of the new bookshelf BEGIN.

blackout

Good advice is hard to come by. By way of Scott Westerfeld, this gem of Raymond Chandler's (from a letter to Alex Barris in 1949) has inspired me this week:

The important thing is that there should be a space of time, say four hours a day at least, when a professional writer doesn’t do anything else but write. He doesn’t have to write, and if he doesn’t feel like it, he shouldn’t try. He can look out of the window or stand on his head or writhe on the floor. But he is not to do any other positive thing, not read, write letters, glance at magazines, or write checks. Write or nothing. It’s the same principle as keeping order in a school. If you make the pupils behave, they will learn something just to keep from being bored. I find it works. Two very simple rules, a. you don’t have to write. B. you can’t do anything else. The rest comes of itself.

I've run my errands, checked on ongoing projects, and made sure both phones are on silent. And I've had my fill of blogs, obvs. I've got my cup of tea, my empty brain, and I'm about to pull the plug on my wireless router. It's three hours of writing or nothing. Here goes.

Don't do anything too exciting while I'm gone.

review

Jas is the heart of this story... Jas is the specimen Malkani throws into his spotlight, examining everything about him – his desires, his fears, who he was before his little gang picked him up and taught him how to speak like a text message. One of Malkani’s great successes is how he transitions us slowly from Jas’s toughguy front to his true center. There isn’t a moment when we’re not seeing the desi world, these questions of honor and these cultural clashes, from Jas’s eyes – even when he’s obscuring his own cognizance of it behind rudeboy language. It’s a remarkable maintenance of character in a first novel.

See the whole review of Gautam Malkani's Londonstani today over at Gothamist.

review

New review of Paulo Coelho's The Devil and Miss Prym up at gothamist.com:

Coelho (a devout Catholic) has something to say about the Capitalized Concepts in this world. His Chantals, Veronikas, and Pilars turn out to be simply us, asking for answers in a almost haphazardly fictional universe of Coelho's making. But here's where I divorce the simple fable of The Alchemist with these more complex books - here's where I inadvertently justify my teenaged devotion to Santiago's journey.

I'm not sure how well I did in the eyes of Mr. Updike, but it's my first slightly negative review in a while and it served to remind me how agonizing those are to write.

review and spoiler alert

My review of the talented Mr. Westerfeld's book is up at gothamist and be warned that it's the final in a trilogy - I've been accused too often of spoiling things for people. In fact, even this blurb from my review is a spoiler. Duly warned:

So when we find Tally again in Specials, she’s something completely different than the Ugly Tally or the Pretty Tally. Crossing the last threshold of manipulation, the feisty Tally is special - a specially manipulated government agent designed to curb revolt.

Are you still with me? You should be. Aside from all the wicked cool tricks and gadgets that Westerfeld creates (skateboard-like hoverboards, skintennas, a floating ice rink), the entire trilogy is infused with humanity. The delicious rebellion against authority in Uglies becomes the struggle to escape mindless oppression in Pretties. The cult of beauty, apathetic distractions as a solution for unhappiness, even war and domination – doesn’t this sound familiar? They’re all in there. Westerfeld’s trilogy has everything an epic journey should have.

I'll definitely be picking up Westerfeld's other novels in my own time.

words words words

Considering that the past few weeks have been concerned with questions like So What Do I Really Want To Do and Where Do I Want To Do It and also featuring When?, this comes as a particularly happy announcement - some of the words you've read here on this website will now also be here in this book. Sarah and Wendy have worked their manicured fingers to the bone making this book happen and I'm just glad to be a part of it, along with some freaking cool other bloggers.

Even though you can totally see those words for free right here on this website (I won't tell you which words, HA!) I'll go ahead and urge you to buy a copy and show it to your friends and keep it under your pillow and nominate it for the Man Booker and stuff. Considering all the Whats and Whens and Wherefores decisions I've been making lately, I'd totally take your support and enthusiasm as a tick in the Correctly Following My Dream, Continue On This Path column. But, you know, no pressure or anything.

an infinite number of infinite possibilities for error

Blame it on the fact that I'm reading Isaac Asimov at the moment, but I have a theory stuck in my head. Bear with me since I'm not a sciencebrain, but there was something in there about how you can either have one Universe or infinite Universes, but it doesn't make sense to have two. If you have two, there must be an infinite amount, because any other finite number is ridiculous.

Which is why I'm going insane. We're on deadline here at work and we've been catching stupid mistakes all week, exponentially more frequent the more stressed and tired we all are. So I started reading a circ (magazine-speak for a circulated copy of a story we're working on) and caught exactly one mistake - a missing "e" at the end of "the. Easy enough.

Then for a lark, I read it again, paying special attention to the captions on the product images. Then I caught another mistake, an "a" where one did not belong.

Then I read it standing UP, because I was convinced a change of venue would help. I caught another one - "deskop" instead of "desktop".

This is when Asimov's Universes occurred to me.

So I read it three more times, and caught two more mistakes.

According to Asimov, I could read it for infinity and catch an infinite amount of mistakes. With an infinite amount of monkeys. And eventually, the story on imaging essentials would turn into Hamlet.

So I handed the circ back to my boss and threw my hands up and let the chips (and the infinite mistakes and the monkeys flinging infinite amounts of poo around) fall where they may.

Asimov is great, but Dad and Stuart are speeding over the Queensboro, two shining knights to sweep me away from work, and they're going to take me for hamburgers and then to Rhode Island. So I'm throwing in the towel, giving up the ghost, and other expressions as well. Take THAT, Isaac.

it takes a village

I'm really disturbed by the scandal surrounding Kaavya Viswanathan, the Harvard novelist whose debut novel with passages plagiarized from Megan McCafferty's two novels.

First of all, I'm disturbed that she has consistently explained the plagiarism - which, exampled here, are extensive - as "unintentional", and a result of her "photographic memory" and the profound impact that McCafferty's novels had on her. Even Katie Couric, the queen of (at least well-played, if insincere) Nice, couldn't help taking a dig at that last week, by asking if she really expected anyone to believe the "unintentional" excuse. I certainly don't. I see that explanation as a "that's my story and I'm sticking to it" response. When I was little, I used to lie under duress about something, like a broken toy or a forgotten homework assignment by bending my own role in the situation. No, I didn't ignore my homework! I forgot it! That toy fell off the shelf, I didn't drop it!

It was an instinctively protective reaction and I've seen tons of children do it - give a little truth (the toy did break under my supervision, I knew I had homework) and bend it to make the outcome more favorable (it wasn't my fault, I just forgot). It's a compromise-lie.

And that's what I suspect Ms. Viswanathan of doing. She compromise-lied. It fit with her original reaction to The Crimson, which was "I don't know what you're talking about". It has nice words and explanations, like "internalizing" and "profound effect". I just don't think it's true. It probably doesn't matter, since her publishers have pulled the book from the shelves, ostensibly for the offending passages to be rewritten but I suspect LB would like nothing more than to forget the book completely. But it matters to me, because I can't get this compromise-lie out from under my irritated skin.

Admit it, I want to say. Admit that you remembered the successful use of those passages, characters, plot concepts from McCafferty's book and under the pressure of being 17 years old with a book-packaging company and an agent, you took them because you panicked. Because this is what bothers me the most about this story - how it happened.

Ms. Viswanathan was pushing to get into Harvard, and her family hired a consultant at IvyWise to help achieve that. The consultant saw her writing and put her in touch with an agent. The agent saw her writing and dropped her off with Alloy Entertainment, a book-packaging company that helped "shape" her "novel". And then, instead of the darker, more complex book she'd originally imagined, she created a somewhat fluffy-but-relevant coming-of-age book about - you guessed it - an overachieving Indian-American girl trying to get into Harvard. And then, surprise, Little, Brown bought it.

And we're surprised that she lifted from another novel? We're surprised that the pressure and convenience of all aspects of Ms. Viswanathan's chosen path led her to accomplish her goal at whatever cost?

This is what bothers me the most - well, almost as much as her compromise-lie. She was given an enormous amount of pressure and responsibility with very little of the attendant maturity and experience, so she did something profoundly stupid. She's to blame - but who else is?

What about her editors, the team of whom admitted to a great role in "shaping" the novel? What about the agent who saw the potential in a very young client, and sent her to a book-packaging company instead of spending the time and effort to cultivate her as a client for two or even five years, to see what else she created? What about Little, Brown, who may have been extra-super interested in the debut novel from an intelligent minority? What about her parents?

Ultimately, it's her fault. She put her fingers to those keys and typed out those words and whether she had McCafferty's books physically in front of her keyboard or not, there's no way she didn't know exactly what she was lifting. And she should and will feel the consequences. But aren't other people responsible, too? Normally, I hate playing the blame-distribution game, but I feel like it's merited here. Even now, who is advising Ms. Viswanathan to continue the ridiculous "unintentional" explanation? This seems to me an even sadder and more complicated tale that simply an author abusing the ethical code of originality. Ms. Viswanathan's failings are hers, but are they really hers alone?

confession

I love Pride and Prejudice and I liked Bridget Jones so I really have no excuse for what I'm about to admit:

Only in my current re-reading of P&P did I finally realize that although all of Bridget Jones isn't an homage, Fielding did pay tribute to the love/betrayal triangle between the Heroine and the Charming Cad/Boorish Good Man. To put it geekily, Bridget : Carver/Darcy :: Elizabeth : Wickham/Darcy. Really, Fielding couldn't have made it any plainer to me. AT ALL. And yet I never made the connection until yesterday, even though I knew all the other elements of homage that she included (because, um, who could miss them).

I'd like to attribute this to the fact that whilst I've read P&P very seriously and studiously and with admiration, I read Fielding's book the way I read all other chick lit: on the beach or on a plane and without much attention to detail. Even when it's good chick lit, which Bridget Jones was, I didn't pay that much attention to it.

But still. Seriously. I have never felt so bad about myself and my usually-stellar comprehension and retention of literature before in my LIFE.

The more I think about it, the worse I feel about myself.

because I'm good at it

This is what Flannery O'Connor answered when she was asked, late in her life, why she wrote. Some people might think it was glib of her, but I think it's the simplest, most direct answer I've ever heard about writing. Because you're good at it. Isn't that why Albert Einstein became a scientist, or Picasso a painter, or Churchill a politician? We are encouraged from a young age to find something we're good at, that we enjoy doing, and do it.

This is by way of making the hard admission that the final letter came last night, and that I will not be starting an MFA program in the fall. But I will be writing, because I am good at it. In the interest of honesty, I know that I have never had the discipline to do it regularly and with determination, but I will be teaching myself that. I will create my own twelve-step program to cure myself of lethargy and inertia, by just writing already. I don't know how it will be received, but that will also come at its own time. All I know is that I enjoy doing it, and that I'm good at it.

I want to thank you all, because I blogged about something that was (and still is) difficult for me to discuss, to reveal. Rejection is difficult, and I won't be caving to the temptation to play sour grapes with the goal I was reaching for. I still want a master's degree, and I will still be working towards getting one in the next few years. I will simply have to work harder at my own work, something I haven't done enough of. It's going to be a lot of change, and I hope you'll be here for me to share the successes and difficulties as they come along.

A friend told me, in the course of all this, that he thought my blog was possibly hampering my writing. That, perhaps, by writing the blog I was releasing a desire to write without directing it to a more worthy goal - my fiction. He suggested that perhaps if I were to stop blogging, my drive to write could more fully be realized in the realm of fiction. Because I take his opinion seriously, I thought about it, but I've come to disagree with him. I blog because it's communication, and I am a sucker for communication. I blog here for two reasons. The first is simple - I appreciate you, I like your feedback, and I like meshing my life with your lives. The second is reminiscent of something Faulkner said about never knowing what he thought of something until he'd seen what he'd written on the subject. I blog because it helps me solidify my reactions and opinions, it reminds me to be watchful and attentive to the world around me because of how I might later craft those thoughts into words. It's communication.

Writing fiction, on the other hand, is creation. I don't have one valve for the two desires - if I shut off blogging, fiction won't leap forth unbound from my mind. They're different processes, which is why I ultimately (but respectfully) disagree that blogging gets in the way of writing. I make time to blog, yes, as I will now be making time to write. Which, really, is what I need to do before revving up any other element of my complex Plan B. I need to face the blank page and conquer it, on a schedule and with determination. Last night, Stuart made the incredibly apt analogy that what I am facing is the building of a fire - right now, all I have is kindling and building the fire seems daunting and difficult, but once I actually start building it, start feeding the flame, it will get easier. I'll have a fire, and I'll start to learn how to nourish and maintain it. I don't have a fire now. But I'm going to build it.

So I'll still be blogging, and I appreciate that you'll still be there while I try to do what will undoubtedly be the hardest thing I've ever done - train myself to start thinking, and acting, like the writer I want to be. Thank you for everything you've said, encouraging me and telling me your own stories of the graduate process, which made me feel like I was very much NOT alone in this struggle. You are all, in a word, inspiring. So I'll be keeping you posted.

And because I suspect the only way to salve the wound is to focus on what I can do about it, building the fire starts now. Tomorrow morning I'm going to do what I keep telling myself to do - I'm going to get up, make a cup of strong coffee, and sit down to write.

so not over

I'm still missing one answer but every place else has been pretty much a bust, so you can imagine all manner of brave faces and awesome Plans B I've been making. And for the most part, perhaps, I was thoroughly convinced that should the last answer be similarly a bust, I'd be okay. I still am thoroughly convinced of that. Except someone forgot to tell my subconscious.

I woke up this morning in a cold, heart-pounding sweat because I'd just had this wonderful dream. I dreamt that I was walking though some plaza here in Midtown when I realized I held in my arms a bundle of mail. So I stopped at one of those ubiquitous corporate planters and sorted through it, only to find an envelope the size of my torso with NYU written across it. I tore it open and I was crying from joy before I even read the letter confirming my acceptance. I stood there at this planter, crying my eyes out from relief and exhiliration and I was too stunned and happy to even find my cell phone and call Stuart, my parents, everyone else I know in some phone tree of jubilation. I was in! I had a plan! I'd had faith and it worked! I stood there crying and flipping through sheafs of paper, and crying even more.

And then I woke up mid-dream-sob. And it hit me with hurricane force that it'd been a dream, and also that the NyQuil I took last night hadn't worn off. I've never been more disconsolate or exhausted by the sheer concept of getting out of bed. I showered in a daze. I dressed in a daze. I'm still in a daze, feeling like both hands briefly grabbed an electric current and the thunder thump of shock is still in my chest, reverberating around my ribcage. What a wonderful, terrible dream.

So I guess we can stop pretending, and by we, I mean me. I obviously still want this. Everyone I love and adore (and that includes most of you) has been thoughful and positive enough to point out that I don't really need this to write. And you're right, and you're wrong. I may not need it - all I need is the perseverance and persistence. But I wanted it, because it takes about 10% off the hard edge of the road. It makes the process 10% easier, and I will admit to being weak and human and wanting that 10% break very much. The dream knocked aside all my coatings of courage and resolve and reminded me just how incredibly happy an acceptance letter would make me.

In short, today is going to be another long day.

and another gone, another one gone

For those of you following along at home, yesterday's mail brought another letter, with more of the same. I could say I'm upset, and I continue to be disappointed it's true, but at least it gives me a good excuse to listen to this piece of genius and laugh bitterly. Bitterly I say!

dream-kenya

Every few nights for the past month, I've dreamt about Kenya. It's always a similar landscape and plot - I'm in the neighborhood of my home and school, in that suburban northwest corner of Nairobi's sprawling slopes. In most of them, I find that I'm returning to ISK for a few more classes, ten years on, and I'm both shocked and surprised at this turn of events. In one, I'm getting into a bus just down the street from our house, right where Lower Kabete Road turned into Kyuna, and trying to navigate the friendly driver into stopping by my house before school so that I can put some decent clothes on for my first day. The streets are soaked in color, the red dirt kicking up along the side of the road, the blue sky draped above the trees. I keep getting very close but not quite making it to our home, but I'm not fussed, so distracted by the wonder of the familiarity of it all.

In another, I'm with Marnix and Seigfried, my inseparable sidekicks for the best months of my life there. I'm thrilled, so thrilled to be around them again without any of the venom and animosity that marked the decline of our little triumvirate. I keep patting their heads delightedly and surprising them with hugs as we amble along Marnix's street - Kitisuru Road, which I also know in the dream.

In yet another, I'm back on campus, in the sun-drenched fields of my high school, chatting animatedly with the still-teenagered students that surround me, asking when I attended, what I'm doing back. In many of these dreams, I'm eagerly introducing Stuart around, or I know he'll join me soon and I'm soaking up memories to tell him about. I always know where I am in relation to the town, which is the mark of an important dream. I'm never hazy on the details, events follow a certain logic, I don't get frustratingly transported from one spot to another. These aren't nightmares or anxiety dreams, and they're not scattered absurd dreams. They're not even nostalgic fantasies, per se. I'm not getting a do-over, a chance to right any wrongs or reenact tough moments to make myself come out better. The message is very clear - I am in Nairobi as an adult and for good reason, it is bringing me joy. Also, I still know all the street names and how to get from here to there.

I'm not sure what to make of all this. The returning to school is quite plain - I'm thinking about school a lot these days. The sheer exhiliration of returning to Kenya itself is also obvious - it was one of the most beautiful places I've ever lived, and there were so many firsts. I was 16. Everything that happens when you're 16 becomes larger than life, exposed with glaring vibrancy on some photographic plate that never fades in richness, only gets more hazy around the edges.

And to differentiate this pattern from my norm, I rarely give more than a moment's thought to dreams. I wake up, relay snippets of them to Stuart, and basically forget them. I identify what they're relating to in my daily life, or I laugh at their absurdity. Dreams aren't always pertinent - I often think of them as my imagination exercising itself. But this is getting to the point that I'm noticing. If I don't subconciously desire to return, literally, to my youth (and I don't), what is all this about?

So for some reason, things occur to me on my walk to the subway. Perhaps because it's just a dull boring walk, one of the ugliest sides of Astoria that I only use in the morning because it's the quickest. So I don't look around much, I am still half-awake and susceptible to the whims of my scattered mind. So this morning, I was thinking about this dream-fixation with Kenya that's only cropped up in the past month. And I plucked something else about Kenya out of a musty drawer - I never write fiction about Africa. Ever.

I have what I thought was a good reason for this - it would seem like a sell-out, like an obvious violation of my attempts to truly create fiction, not simply rest on the undeserved laurels of having lived in exotic places. I've never considered writing fiction around my own experiences - in the few times I've tried, it's seemed forced and uninteresting.

But perhaps I need to revisit this point of view and see if it should be tweaked. Perhaps there's a reason that Kenya is on my mind in the weeks that my immediate future is being decided? Is it some agent provocateur in my subconscious, trying to tell me that perhaps I never write around my own experience because I'm afraid it won't be good enough? Or that I'm aspiring to an ideal I don't need, because buckets of great writers have shamelessly drawn on their own life and the only trick they needed was talent at making it relevant to everyone else?

And as quickly as I thought about my own firm justifications, a story started brewing, mostly fiction but with enough sense of place that I knew the story revolved around my non-fiction memories. What does that mean, that I was able to see an interesting story in the fabric of something I've long refused to even bring into the shop, so to speak?

It's hard to make clear to you, the feeling these dreams are giving me. It makes me wish, when I wake up, that I could really show you the dream, as if it were a home movie. This delight in a place that I once loved, it casts this neon glow over the images of the dreams. Walking down Kitisuru, I remember looking up into the canopy of trees and gasping in awe at the leaves, that looked like fern fronds in a million different shades. When looking along the back roads of Kyuna for my house, the kombi broke down, and I jumped out and dipped my bare feet in a stream, not caring that the red dust settled between my toes as I walked back to the van. When I was with the boys, I kept playing with their hair, playing with the german shepherds that walked alongside us, everything feeling very pleasingly tactile, like some esctasy trip. I loved being there, and when I woke up, all I wanted to do was write it all down to capture those feelings of good will.

What does that mean? Far be it from me to psycho-analyze my dreams, so perhaps they are simply just feel-good dreams that my imagination is indulging in to combat the stress of the past few weeks. But what good's a subconscious if it's not helping me sort out what I want from my life and by extension, my writing? Why these dreams now, when I'm thinking so much about the future of this ball of unformed talent I hope I have? If the dreams themselves are linking up with other thoughts about Africa and imagination, maybe I should start listening?

Reading over this, there are an unusually high number of question marks in this post.

no-go

I just got another rejection from one of the lesser-competitive options, leaving me the three big scaries on my list. Blah blah blah faith self-confidence trust in myself keep on keepin' on etc etc blah blah.

Anyone got any funny jokes? Greg? I'm looking at you.

on the edge of my seat, by the seat of my pants

It's official. I'm obsessed. What's frustrating is, I'm obsessed with something I'm not ready to talk about here, but I'm a blogger, so it's my natural instinct to want to talk about it here. I'm obsessed with the applications I've eluded to, and the responses I'm NOT getting, the Mail that is NOT arriving, the worst case scenarios I am trying to be prepared for, and the best case scenarios that I'm trying not to want too badly.

Two months ago, I was healthy about this. I was confident and as laid-back as I'm capable of being. I had faith. Two weeks ago, I was anxious but ready. Two hours ago, I was in total denial of my escalating panic and worry. Two minutes ago, I realized I was sitting on the very edge of my chair, with my face three inches from the glass of my iMac, staring at some college student's livejournal page where she mentioned letters she's received from places whose letters I haven't received yet.

Two minutes ago, I entered into obsessed.

It's been bad enough coming home from the subway every evening. I've turned the corner onto my street, realized the Mail was waiting for me in the lobby of our apartment, and suddenly wished for a full flask of vodka strapped to my leg to help me cope with the rising nausea and anxiety. It's like the Oscars, all this mail-waiting. I'd much prefer to get phone calls out of the blue - phone calls are a sudden-onset sort of anxiety, brought about when the phone rings. They don't have the constant ritualistic guarantee that for seven minutes while walking up your own street, you will be terrified of your OWN MAIL.

If my first response (which I mentioned last week) had either been 1. positive or 2. from someplace I wasn't sort of expecting a positive reply, then I wouldn't be as bad off this week as I am. As it is, I've never wished so hard to be drunk all the time, just as a coping strategy.

You'll note that I managed to fill four nervous paragraphs with anxiety and hang-wringing without ONCE giving you all the satisfaction of really explaining what I'm talking about because my domino-conga-line of superstition won't let me talk too much, too openly, until I know whether or not I'm getting what I want. On a certain level, I've already said too much. But I don't think Stuart's willing to scrape the exploded carcass of my balled-up energy off the walls of our apartment, so I guess I've said just enough to get myself through another Walk to the Front Door.

Two minutes ago, I forgot all the good advice I got about how freaking myself out to the point of blanching isn't actually going to have any affect on the outcome of this process, nor will it make me feel any better if I get bad news to have known that I was freaking out for a good reason, that YES, I am the Cassandra of my own disappointment. I'm currently grappling through the crashing waves to find that lifevest of calm again, yes, I am.

So before you very justifiably tell me how I'm working myself up for nothing, I just want to let you know that I KNOW that if you were sitting across from me at the bar, friends, here's the moment where I notice how hard I'm squeezing that nice comforting hand you'd extended across the table to stroke my arm, the stroking you thought would coax me into an altogether lower plane of tension (without resorting to marijuana). I'm self-aware enough to know what my own panicked face looks like. Wow, look! I've drained the blood from your fingers. You okay? Me? I'm FINE. I'll be FINE. YEAH. No, totally fine.

Don't I look fine?

the elusive end of the rainbow

I'm home today to deal with some domestic household issues (read: everything's a mess) and I got some middling-to-poor news about my MFA plans from one of the places I felt confident about. I realized, in the past hour of moping about it (oh, waitlisting, why do you feel like a consolation prize) that perhaps this is what blogs are for sometimes - to dump some negative mojo into the ether and let it go.

So I'm letting it go here, feeling a little gloomy, and knowing all the care bear stares of love that you guys send my way all the time will perk me up. So will Belinda and Abe's disco wedding CD, which is totally on right now for me to tidy the house by. Because how can you be down and gloomy when you're positively being FORCED to do the hustle, right?

I guess my luck of the Irish didn't come through for me today, but maybe it got lost in the post on its way from Ireland, and it'll come through for me like the drunk lazy leprechaun that it is, right?

I'm off to do the hustle. And possibly get down just a little bit, in funkytown.

what I think about James Frey and the memoir that didn't

I just talked to my mother, to ask her if she was going to watch Oprah's smackdown of memoirist-turned-liar James Frey. She said she was, and offered to tape it for me, so I can see it myself next weekend.

It's taken me a while to wrap my brain around why the Frey thing disgusted me so much. I shirked my duties at gothamist.com, as literary contributor, because I didn't post about the controversy at all. I think it's because of two things:

1. I got the book for Christmas from my brother, having put it on my wishlist as something that seemed interesting

2. I have issues with the memoir genre that are made worse by the Frey controversy.

As for #1, I don't think I'm going to read the book. I'm tempted to take it back to B&N*, where I know my brother bought it, but I'm not sure they'd take it back without a receipt. Perhaps I'll just keep it around as an oddity, or take a pen to every time the word "truth" appears in the book and change it to "lie" with a nice red pen.

#2 is what really troubles me. I don't really like memoirs. It may be elitist and unfair of me to assume that ordinary lives don't have that much to enlighten me with, but I only read memoirs by people that have accomplished something extaordinary that I find interesting, or have survived an ordeal that needs telling to the world. It may be ironic that I'm a blogger casting aspersions on the "ordinary person perspective", but I'm not charging you to read this blog, it's not my career. If you want to read about my ordinary life, I'm grateful for your participation. If I write a novel, it will be born of my imagination, wit, and creativity. My life, on the other hand, was born out of a zygote. Not that fascinating.

But Frey would have fallen into my exception. He would have survived a life less ordinary, learned something about himself and destruction and addiction that would have been worth sharing with the world. I would have been willing to grant him the right, in my own mind, to write a worthy memoir, something beneficial to the world and his readers.

On the other hand, I would also have been impressed if he'd written a novel dealing with destruction and addiction, if it was well-written. I would have granted him the liberty of fiction, and taken his writing at its own face-value, not how likely it was that any of it was autobiographical. I don't care about Frey if he's a novelist - I care about his writing.

Which is the crux of my problem with the memoir genre, and the crux of my problem with Frey. As a memoirist, I will consider you worthy if your life story is important to me. As a novelist, I will consider you worthy if your story-telling is important to me. James Frey, you cannot HAVE it both ways with me. Or anyone else, for that matter. You cannot demand to stand up and have your life heard, because it's such a popular genre and subject to less critical scrutiny than fiction ("It really happened!" equates not needing creativity), and then decide you're actually a novelist masquerading your story-telling as truth.

You cannot fool people like me, who ordinarily make it a habit to politely ignore the memoir genre, into thinking your fiction is truth. Stand by your extraordinary fiction or stick to your ordinary truth. Don't lie your way into people's opinion.

This is what I think about the Frey controversy. I am disgusted and disappointed and hope that he isn't secretly glad his book exploded, because the destruction his little prank has wreaked is not yet over. The consequences to writers on both sides of the literary fence - memoirists or novelists - will be devastating and unfair, and it's all because James Frey wanted to have it both ways.

That's what I think.

UPDATE: Shana passed me this great link, where another memoirist gives a fair assessment of the process of writing a memoir and where Frey might have turned down the wrong road - here's John Falk's opinion. Very well said.

* I love my mother. She emailed me this: "Can you get a refund for Frey's book? If every person who bought it would do that, the publisher would get the message and Frey's bank account could shrink...maybe? They need a lesson for their deceitfulness!" That's my mom, y'all. Always ready to stick it to the Man. Go mom!

A Saturday's Work

This is what happened today, when Stuart went in to work (o, weekend work! how we loathe you!). With my portfolio/manuscript/scrapheap of talent due on Thursday, my agentish and friend came over and we consumed yummy things and talked our way through thirty odd pages of writing. Click on the picture to take you through to Flickr, then hover over the notes for details.

this post endeavors to be prosaic, quotidian, and other adjectives as well

What? Hello? Hi.

I've been reading a lot for gothamist (book a week! geez! what a good idea!), writing a lot for a deadline coming up in two weeks, eating a lot of soup, and oh my god, preparing a lot of forms and applications and things. Wait, did I mention the GREs? On Thursday? And then the Bahamas? For five days after that? Not that there's any way to complain about going to the Bahamas (and not that I've tried), but whatever genius (me) looked at the December 15th deadline at NYU and then said, "hey, let's smack a five day trip right in the middle of that!" was on stupid pills (me again).

I haven't even checked on my blog in, like, three days. I feel pretty guilty about this, but then again, the pile of menacing recommendation letters that have been waiting to be mailed, and the pile of books waiting to be read, and oh, did I mention the manuscript waiting to be written? And you're sure I mentioned the GREs? They make me feel a lot guiltier. Trust me here. The guilt-o-meter, she's off the charts.

Did you know the word inimical? It means damaging. And trenchant means vigorous or incisive. And refulgent, surprisingly, means radiant or shiny. I know this because Stuart was quizzing me on them while I lay half-asleep on the couch last night. I probably knew it before then, but damnit if I don't really know it NOW.

Rufulgent: Beauty :: Psychotic breakdown : Standardized tests! See that there? Practical applications, ahoy. Oh, and in case you're wandering around with a drastic and itchy case of 8x +10 = 21 + (7x - 4x), I can probably fix that for you*.

Not that I've spent more than three? maybe four? hours studying for this test on Thursday, or anything, because I point-blank refuse to drive myself around the bend for a formality, and trust me when I say I know it is a formality. Tonight, I'm going to not study by writing, and tomorrow night, I'll probably not studying by getting drunk and watching Law & Order! That's my big study plan. Refulgent, isn't it?

Thanksgiving was full of turkey, this week is full of vocab words and swearing (which is also vocab!), and next week will be full of sand and hammocks. I tell ya, I can't complain. I'll try, but I can't.

* x = 2.2 where:

1. 8x + 10 = 21 + 3x
2. 5x + 10 = 21
3. 5x = 11
4. 11/5 = 2.2
5. thus, x = 2.2
6. Yes, Stuart, I figured that one out all by myself and a red pen. Did I get it right?

tricks of the trade

I was just hashing out schedules with Shana, for a manuscript I'm working on, and saying how my own goal was to get another ten to fifteen pages written in the next two weeks (single-spaced, I can't write properly in double). And then I had a brainflash and said, "lots of dialogue! ha ha!"

Do other writers think that too? How evil is that? For some reason though, it made me giggle nonstop for about five minutes.

chasing the muse

I spent today chasing my writing, somewhat literally. I took the day off from work because we've all been a little frantic with a late closing on our most recent issue, and since our editor in chief took the week off somewhat unexpectedly, everyone decided to take a day or two here and there. I took mine here (today) and there (Tuesday, to go battle bureaucracy). But what I really needed to do today was write, so that was my goal.

I wrote for about an hour in the morning and by all counts, I should probably have stayed there. But I'm the sort of person that needs a perfect house around me, everything neat and in order, to be able to focus, and since ours .. well, isn't ... I packed up the iBook and headed to the New York Public Library for some inspiration and soaring ceilings. Of course, it's Veteran's Day. So the Library was closed. Strike one at 11:45AM.

But I caught about twenty minutes of the parade, in time to see the WWII veterans go by and get a little tearful because my grandfather, who was awarded a Purple Heart for his injuries on D-Day at Normandy, passed away this year. He came home from war sixty years ago, back to Texas and my grandma and they started a family and later came into my life, and I was lucky to have him, lucky he survived the war with his customary braveness and grace. I was pretty sad, standing there, watching the WWII vets surrounded by their families and little granddaughters.

I went to Bryant Park to try and write in the deceptively sunny park, but after about 20 minutes of typing I couldn't feel my fingers. Strike two. Then I decided to nip across the road to the Starbucks. No tables. Strike three. Since I had a late-afternoon hot cocoa date with Chris in SoHo, I figured I'd go find a Starbucks down there and work until 4PM.

I got down to the Spring/Crosby Starbucks a little frazzled and starving, found a table and got a sandwich and a coffee. After an hour writing there, my nerves couldn't take the crowds and the terrible piped-in music and the crowds, oh my god. I'm not someone who can work with headphones on, but I don't mind ambient music. I can't stand chatter, though. Hence, the original library idea. Strike four. So I IM'ed Chris and asked if I could just go to his otherwise-empty office, borrow some Advil, and finish my work. Thank god, I'd found a port in the storm.

The next two hours were spent quietly writing, eating cookies, curing my headache, drinking tea, and trading gossip with Chris. I couldn't have asked for a better spot to pin down a few more pages of the project I'm working on. Too bad I didn't think of that from the beginning.

Speaking of writing (and tucked here at the bottom of the entry), I've got a new gig! As of this weekend, I'll be the literature contributor for the esteemed and adored Gothamist. Twice-weekly or so, look for my roundups and updates about the goings-on in the New York publishing and literary world, along with little snippets of reviews and profiles of authors. Tips and leads and ideas, for those who know about these things, are always welcome.