...ellipses...

please don't tell my dentist, but

2009-11-02T03:27:44Z

I'm eating a tootsie roll.

I'm nibbling it...mostly letting it dissolve on my tongue in tiny little bites, but omg the whole house is full of candy, and I can eat none of it? Recipe for ellipssa disaster.

so I got my wisdom teeth out on Tuesday and lost most of that day to a blur of whatever and stuff. that night Av gets super sick with fever and a terrifying cough, so no daycare for him. the two of us lay around and tried to set records for hours of stupid children's television programming watched. I'm almost certain I stayed awake most of the time, but it didn't really matter since he wasn't going anywhere.

on Friday my hopes for a kid-free anniversary weekend were dashed when El had to stay home from kindergarten with the same fever and lung-crud instead of hopping up north for the weekend to stay with my parents until Sunday...

I graded a ton of book reports, essays, random junk, and twenty horror stories, some of which were actually quite good.

my own horror story came in third in a halloween teenlit contest over at AW, which was kind of fun. I suck at shorts, and I've honestly *never* written something that was even vaguely complete at 500 words, so that was sort of an adventure and entertaining to actually place!

yesterday we participated in many halloween-related festivities, albeit at a sick-children-confined-to-the-house type level. then I finished grading EVERYTHING for the end of the quarter and was all done. until today when I realized I had to write sub plans for tomorrow because SURPRISE! the kids are still feverish and gross.

my pseudo-sister called me tonight, which is the first time I've talked to her since her mom died, and oh god, the poor girl, and wow, I forget how close we really are and how much I love her and WOW she has a donkey, and I heard him say hee-haw and I named him Benjamin and told her that donkeys live a long time.

I haven't written since last weekend maybe. everyone's doing NaNo, and I have lost all desire to even look at my dharma girls. actually I've lost interest in a lot of things in the past week, but Imma just blame it on the lortab and deal with the fallout later.

this ends the uninteresting saga of ellipssa's week. I am now sucking on a malted milk ball. :)

climax!

2009-08-07T16:22:10Z

So I wrote three of those nine scenes. You did the math? YES! That means six scenes left, at least the first three of which are CLIMAXING! WOO! (one from each POV)

Only trouble? Gawd, but it's hard.

So my goal is to write one of them today. Jonah, my secret favorite. This is probably the least climactic of the scenes, actually, since Jonah is just that cool. Plus his job (talking to the critters) isn't really crucial to the crisis, so to speak. Or at least, it isn't in my head. There are two main problems that are coming to a simultaneous head...one in the fantasy plot, and one in the realism plot. Obviously the two are tangled up tight as can be, but one is for Jacky to solve and one is for Sonny. Jonah, I hope, will wax poetic about being a fantasy book hero, and we will roll eyes at him.

This is so exciting. My fingers itch.

I hope the world will leave me alone until I get this done.

Oh, and I'm going to excerpt from last night's rough rough writing, but it will be f-locked to protect my precious, precious genius. Because there are at least two and a half people who read this journal, lol. :P

omg the end is in sight.

2009-08-06T16:25:04Z

So last night I wrote down each of the scenes I have left to write until I'm at the end of A Tangled Web, and I was amazed and startled to find how close I am to the end. I mean, really close!

I have nine scenes left:

1. Jonah: threatened in the wayside
2. Sonny: Dag hears a rumor
3. Jacky: mediation fails. Lyric makes a sympathy appearance
4. Jonah: panic at the disco. er, Dag goes ape shit on opening night.
5. Sonny: texts athena, goes to save her mom and Gran, but they are surrounded by rabid seagulls.
6. Jacky: unravels the knot. saves the Universes.
7. Jonah: sees Lyric escaping, is threatened by Gulliver, commands the owls, basks in hero-dom.
8. Sonny: Janae's Loom: snip, pluck, brain damage!
9. Jacky: coffee shop, all is well. thinks about Lyric. leaves door open to sequel.

This draft is rough, I mean *really* rough, but it has been, overwhelmingly, such a fun story to write, such a great romp through the imagination.

I've always worried that I didn't really have enough imagination to write magic...I that as soon as I strayed from the realistic contemporary, my brain would flail about in a blank white room of possibilities. Turns out I have at least one world in me, and although there is only a first draft of that world, it's got some fun and crazy shit in it (like breathing fishsong!), plus there's this whole contemporary realistic storyline going on at the same time, and the tie-in to my man Shakespeare is, of course, fantastically fun. Especially a play that's all about unrequited love polygons and madness. Though I have to admit, my plot is a tad darker and more violent than the play...

I was in the bath the other night and a new plot occurred to me, for a sequel...takes place in the Glensheen and alludes to the Congdon murders....

People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooks

2009-07-20T03:06:40Z

This book about Hanna Heath and her study of the rare Sarajevo haggadah by examining artifacts found within its pages was quite an interesting read. Hanna's story is a frame for the interconnecting stories of the people of the book--the souls who created it and who cared for it, saving the book time and again throughout history in a sequence of fascinating twists of fate.

One strength of this book is the way Brooks enters each of the stages of the haggadah's history by choosing for her point of view characters who are essentially peripheral to the story of the book, but whose actions and circumstances cause their lives to become entwined with the book. Brooks approaches each story almost in the same way as Hanna approaches each artifact, as a mystery traced backwards, clue by clue. Each of these characters are fully realized people, and their stories are complex and beautiful. I really appreciate Brooks' skill with narrating these stories in a way that is honest and painful without giving in to the sentimental. She gives the people of the book a dignity that they maintain even in the midst of their various tragedies.

At first I didn't care for Hanna's story, but throughout the book, the frame starts to pull together. The ending seemed a little incongruous, actually, as there were several unexpected twists that seemed out of place a little with the tone of the rest of the book, but possibly it's because I didn't really ever buy the romantic plotline that popped up again from the beginning.

Overall, though, I thought this book was very enjoyable and well-researched, and I will definitely read another book by Geraldine Brooks. (I read The Year of Wonders previously).

I'm adding to what I wrote in previous places to say that my two main problems with this book--the modern story of Hanna and the weird ending--are popping up in a lot of other reviews I read since posting my own. It's kind of affirming that I'm actually seeing the same thing as other people who read the book. Although there were also a lot of other people who found the tragedies in the historical parts to be too much, and one person said they were overly sentimental, which was sort of the opposite of my opinion. Also interesting. I stand by my original thoughts, though. I mean, there was a lot of death and sadness in the stories; really, the tragic nature of them is what emphasizes how amazing it was for the book to be saved. But I really didn't find my emotions feeling all manipulated, my heart-strings deliberately messed with, and I appreciate that. The sad scenes were often gruesome and always stark, but they didn't feel...I don't know how to say it. They didn't feel to me like she was killing someone off purely for the impact it would have on readers, and somehow that was enough for me.

Deadline by Chris Crutcher: not-a-...oh, hell, it's a review.

2009-07-14T05:34:19Z

(and it's the same one I posted on LibraryThing and on facebook, so sorry...I'm just copy/pasting around my virtual world...)

I first read Crutcher as a college student, a short story collection for my Lit. for Adolescents class. "Boys like his writing," the teacher said. And they do, but the nice thing is that Crutcher's books are enjoyable by anyone, even people as far from being a jock as I am.

Sure, there were parts of this book that I may have skimmed--the football game play-by-plays that went right over my head--but the majority of this book about a high school senior who discovers he has a terminal disease and decides to keep it to himself in order to live a normal life was very enjoyable. The voice of Ben "Little Wolf" is engaging and the first person present narration feels very immediate and keeps the action rolling along, even when the book is focusing on Ben's internal demons. The dialogue was snappy, and the characters seemed pretty believable.

Other things were not as believable--like the whole idea that the doctors and therapists would seriously allow an 18-year-old to make the decision to deny all treatment without any kind of real attempt to alert his family, or the strange "Hay-Soos" character that seems to be a nice device for the author to deliver some deep thoughts and morals to the story while entertaining the readers with that snappy dialogue I mentioned and of course some excellent humor. The author could have spent more time developing the characters of the parents as well, since Ben's mother's bipolar disorder was supposedly his main reason for not telling his family, but really she's just sort of absent for most of the book, and then of course her reaction to the news in the end is one of the least dramatic scenes in the book.

Overall, the book was a fun read, I enjoyed the story and the telling of it, and I connected emotionally to the characters--enough to need some tissues while reading the ending.

The plot thickens

2009-07-12T18:55:28Z

So I had a strange thing happen to me recently that I've never done while writing a novel before. I suddenly knew everything I needed to know to finish the book, and I quickly wrote it all down before I forgot. And it was awesome, and I was so happy with it! I have a few mixed feelings about it all now, but you know, I actually feel like it's a pretty manageable project right now. It's very different from anything I've ever written, and I know my focus of the second draft is going to have to be all about characterization because right now my three MC's are just sort of...all over the place. But I'm figuring them out, little by little, and now that I've got the world and the magic figured out PLUS the plot, it's going to give me a lot more ability to focus in on their personalities and changes and needs and motivations etc.

I'm not sure this novel is really a stretch for me, as a writing project, although it has been a learning experience to write in a world that isn't strictly realistic and once again firmly rooted in YA territory...no hallucinogens in this one, so far! And who knows, it could even be a good story that's also marketable. Who can say? Anyway, thought I'd show you the evolution of my plotting via my little dot matrix paper. If you could see farther down the banner, btw, you'd see some really awful drafts of poetry. For some reason I'm incapable of drafting poetry on the computer. I must have fancy pens, at the very least.

Original plotting chart...

And the plot thickens...

Look, there's even a coffee spill...it's like a true work of genius!

beginnings...

2009-07-03T17:49:08Z

(from the first sentence meme that cathellisen did)

I like beginnings. I really do. Ever since I started writing stories as a little kid, the beginnings have come to me almost like a little gift--a line or two arriving out of nowhere and spurring on a surge of creativity. And even though I'm not as good at them as I'd like, the climax/falling action/denouement usually comes to me pretty easily, too, at least the idea of it. It's the middle part (um, the plot) that trips me up, that bogs me down, and sometimes, that bores me. I didn't finish a single story until I was in college, and what I usually found is that the story would just stop being important to me right in the middle. I would pick up the story or open the file and find...hey, you know what? I don't really care about these characters anymore.

And I think I kind of decided at that point, Oh, this is who I am. I'm the girl who doesn't finish things. So I sort of pushed aside the idea of being a writer, which had always sort of been there in my mind as a possibility, though I never really aspired to it.

(I wanted to be an equine vet, yanno, during that horse phase, and I wanted to be a teacher and a hairstylist and an astronomer and an art historian and okay fine I really wanted to be an artist or a writer but wouldn't let myself put such a risky thing out there...where other people might see me fail.)

I wrote mediocre poetry and wangsty journal entries still, of course, but very little fiction.

Then in college I took a fiction writing class from Barton Sutter, and I found that one of the requirements of the class was to write a ten page story (yes, we measured in pages, not word count, and I wrote it on a typewriter, one of the reasons I do not have a copy anymore, a fact that makes me very sad), and I wrote a literary masterpiece called "The Hunter." It was about this woman who was a tax collector, basically, and a stalker who kills her. It was creepy and awful, and I wish I could see it again. Sutter, btw, tore the story to shreds (I GOT A B-, OMG THE HORROR!), and I got angry and rewrote it. I'd show that bastard who dared to insult my wondrous (first draft) creation--I did improve the lame story and got an A in the end. I also wrote a character sketch that later became the opening of my first novel attempt, The Star Crossing.

This morning in the shower it occurs to me that my mother has a soul the color of a tan M&M.

In another class I wrote a very short story called "The Duel" about a man who has to duel the Devil for his soul and finds out that a lot of people don't even bother...they're perfectly happy without their souls. Or something like this. It was silly. First line, your typical "ordinary man" opening, lol:

William Jones was an ordinary man; his life was a straight and steady progression from his birth deathward—no surprises.

In Oregon, I finally finished a 10,000 word story that I was actually proud of, called "Shadows." It was about a schizophrenic man named Gerry, and it's not really as bad as that sounds. I hope. :) It's on my other computer, though, so yeah. No first line.

Then I wrote The Star Crossing, and when I finally finished it like 6-7 years later, I finally felt like I was no longer the girl who doesn't finish things. Yay, me! As I was writing it, I just kept thinking, "Hey, the characters still interest me! Wow, I still know what happens next!" It was such a good feeling.

The next novel flew out of me. It's YA and called Just Think. First line:

Stuffed into the back of the squad car, his legs folded up around his ears like a human accordion, it was easy for Max to see that taking Ms. Desmond’s new sports car for a joyride instead of taking his fourth period history final was a bad idea.

The Dharma Bum Business:

It would not be fair to say that the fire stole my faith, since in truth it has been slipping away from me all my life, flipping between my fingers like a shiny little minnow--such a far cry from the trophy salmon that dangled from my father’s fist.

A short story I wrote called "Birth Stones":

All her life she has been dying to run away.

And the current WIP, A Tangled Web:

Jacky stood in the alley at three a.m., listening.

So it looks like they are either very long or very short, and all the better if they include my favorite punctuation mark--the dash. :)

well, anyway, it's been fun.

2009-06-30T02:58:01Z

hee! that sounds like some kind of dramatic goodbye title, but really, I'm just talking about writing again.

like...I'm writing a fantasy book. it's blowing my mind a little bit. I mean, I've written little short stories that have magic in them, and there was that play I wrote with my bff in the fourth grade, but really, what the hell am I doing? I'm totally out of my league, and even though I feel like I have a pretty solid history of reading fantasy, like in my formative years, and even though I have read some YA and MG fantasy beyond Harry Potter, I still feel so completely out of my league with this genre--with the writing of it, especially.

and this book I have planned, well...it's mostly realistic, I think. Like there's a magical element and magic impacts the plot, but I think the majority of the time the actual setting will be on this planet (though in multiple universes...um, I think...gah!), and actually in my own city, which is kind of cool. I've never ever written any story that takes place here in Duluth, and I think it's really a fascinating city. A fascinating city that I suddenly feel like I know absolutely nothing about, but fascinating all the same.

I keep running into just the most basic of snags, things that make me wonder why I didn't play with one of the other, more realistic ideas rattling around in my brain instead of this one that has been knocking about for a long time, but...not actually going anywhere. I wonder if it will go anywhere this time?

anyway, it doesn't matter. my point in the title is that no matter what becomes of this book I'm working on right now, it's been fun so far to write. I love my dharma girls to pieces, but they are drama girls as well, and writing them has been exhausting. I got my first beta notes back from my second go at it, and they did find less wrong with the book than the first go around, which is good. But still plenty of issues to think about addressing. I'm going to sit back and wait for any notes that others may have for me, and then I just may let the whole novel simmer for another month or so on my back burner while I play with these new characters who have magic spilling into their otherwise ordinary lives...it might be nice to have a WIP that's light and cute and well, fun!

Storyteller by Edward Myers, not a review

2009-06-29T04:12:01Z

From the very beginning, this book grated on my nerves. Whether it was the incessant story-within-a-story device or the unrelenting allegory...or maybe it was the page and a half of explicated theme that ends the book, I felt like the whole time the author was telling me a story--winking at me about how clever he was in the telling of it. And I can see how a different reader might enjoy this type of storytelling, but I prefer more subtlety, I guess. I'm just glad I finally made it to The End.

(so I said I was doing this at LibraryThing and on facebook, and that these were going to be a lot shorter...)

(plus, I'm feeling like today was a waste of my life and maybe it's time to grow up and start paying attention to my life instead of all this stupid shit.)

Water for Elephants, by Sara Gruen (not a review)

2009-06-27T04:36:00Z

This is a strong book--an interesting story, a fascinating setting, and writing that doesn't call attention to itself. Running away with the circus! I liked the frame story because it was well-developed and actually had a purpose, and I loved the ending! I found the conflicts of the circus and the menagerie and such much more interesting than the love story with Marlena, but the plot tied together well. I couldn't quite get a real grasp of Marlena as a character, though, and maybe that's why that plotline wasn't as compelling to me. I also struggled a little bit in the beginning because there were about a million names of tiny little characters (some of which were later important, but others not) all introduced at once.

The light-hearted tone of the nursing home sections makes the ending sort of cute and sweet, which contrasted with the tone of the circus story. It was a little too perfect and happy, possibly, but since the ninety-three-year-old Mr. Jankowski is so endearing as a character, I ended up just being happy that life turned out so well for him.

epicenter

2009-05-05T02:20:13Z

got beta notes today...so many thanks to them. it's nice when the notes jive with what I know personally to be true about the manuscript, even if it's hard to admit. The major flaws pointed were things I already knew were problems and needed attention, but I guess I wanted to see if they were really that big of problems before ripping shit up.

so now it's like a renovation project, a little bit. it's going to get a helluva lot uglier before it's finished, but it will look so much better (and be of stronger construction, of course) when I'm done.

compiling lists right now...

asking questions...

eschewing capital letters...

...

pondering...

babble on

2009-05-02T15:58:32Z

Okay, so it's so funny how fickle my feelings can be about this book. Right now I am in that swing from loving it to hating it. It's okay, though, I know I'll swing back eventually.

So the ms. is with betas. People are reading it, people who don't love me (or want to get in my pants?) like D. does, lol. People who want to help me make it better, which often means tearing it apart. I'm nervous, and every time I start to read it now, I'm embarrassed of each flaw, and there are many.

Yesterday Av was sick, so I ended up home from work for the day, which is pretty much going to screw me up for all of next week, but which wasn't so bad yesterday. I spent a good chunk of the day reading--both finishing up Ink Exchange finally (I'll do a not-a-review post later when the kids are napping, maybe) and catching up on a lot of blogs and online articles I've been meaning to read.

So I was reading a blog entry about advice from agents (and like the lame blogger I am, I cannot even remember where or what I was reading, so I can't link...and I'm too lazy and multi-tasking to look them up again), and the biggest thing they said was that writers submit their stuff before it's ready. Which, I understand. I mean, lookit me all querying before I hear back from betas! It's exhilarating to finish something, and in the rush of that exhilaration, it's easy to believe that everyone is going to fall in love with your perfect little baby just like you are. Or at least, it's easy to fantasize that they will.

Anyway, one of the agents interviewed suggested that you give it to critique partners with the expressed purpose of giving ONLY NEGATIVE FEEDBACK. I mean, sure, that will get to the heart of what's wrong with your WIP. And cut that heart right out and devour it. I agree that hearing nothing but praise from a beta reader is not going to be helpful. But here I am, with my novel out there in the inboxes or up on the screens of readers--and the thought of getting back crits that are all negative? I think it would destroy me.

I want to know the problems. I need to know them, so that I can fix them. I want this book to be the best I can make it; it won't be flawless, but I want to make an effort toward greatness. But if someone only told me its flaws, that would be heartbreaking, I think. And I don't think it would be helpful at all, in the end, because the writer's defensiveness would crop up, and most of the feedback would be mentally dismissed as being insane. It's just a basic instinct, to protect your creation...assuming that people who thoroughly disagree with you are completely wrong in the head.

Um? I think I'm done rambling now. Time for some breakfast. Then I will open up TDBB again and see if there's anything there that doesn't embarrass me to think of others reading it.

Like I need this.

2009-04-30T02:13:48Z

In the giddiness following the completion of a novel, querying agents sounds exciting and hopeful. It takes a certain number of rejections before I get beaten down into a sensible bleak outlook on things.

And so the process begins. I'm still looking to hear from betas and make revisions, but I'm on the fourth read-through now, and I feel like I've cleaned up a chunk of the issues so far, so I started sending out a couple of queries. To agents I'm pretty sure will just automatically form reject me. Sure enough, I've received three form rejections, and already the edge of my delusional hope is blunted. Soon, I'll be ready to face my inbox with a grim cynicism. I hope. I mean, I'm giving up hope. I mean...sigh. This is hard.

the pictures?

2009-04-26T23:42:21Z

I hope this works...

writing spaces

2009-04-26T23:18:08Z

The office, which had been slowly accumulating ever-expanding amounts of photography and camping equipment and small business archives and craziness, and which basically amounted to 64 square feet of store-room, is now a writing space.

I still need to clean--sweep, mop, vacuum, dust, etc. But I finally got everything organized so that when our wifi gets all hooked up, I can spend my evenings writing in the office instead of perched on the old sagging couch.

I'm not really sure where I'll sit, since now I write perched on the couch or lying on the floor or whatever, but at least there is some desk space, and I can organize my supporting materials a lot better (instead of in the pile on the couch, which slowly gets overrun by small people and their toys and weaponry and such.

I'm going to attempt to post some pictures. Please excuse the dust and the...randomness of it. ;)

Ack, the pictures aren't loading well. I'll see what I can do once we get the high speed internet. Soon. :)

Let's Do This

2009-04-03T03:50:58Z

I'm going to finish this book this week. And by this week, I sure wish I meant tonight, but things keep getting in my way (like D. being stuck to my side tonight until 10:45--wonder if he'll sleep through the alarm tomorrow?). But I have next week off, and I'm bringing the boys to daycare in the morning and I'll have all morning to write in a fit of caffeine and RM, so I think it will all be complete before too long. I am alternating between joy and despair, cycling about every four and a half minutes. But this is my horoscope from Rob Brezsny at http://freewillastrology.com/horoscopes/, and I know astrology is kind of a bunch of crap, but I've based life decisions on this man's words before and been pretty damn happy with them, so...

Your IQ has crept up beyond its usual level, and may ascend even higher in the coming days. I suspect you're poised to erupt with a host of sharp insights, and maybe some brilliant analyses or strokes of genius as well. Why? How? It may have to do with the way the planets are massaging your brain chemistry. Or perhaps it's because you smell freedom, and your libido is boosting your intelligence with the enhancements that only the onset of exhilaration can provide. I recommend that you milk this gift for all it's worth. Don't waste time on trivial conquests like polishing off crossword puzzles or acing online personality tests. Try to solve the mystery of the ages, or at least your two knottiest problems.

Sounds like a good time to write! (and no worries, donutgirl, you guys are not a trivial conquest...heh!)

sexy hair

2009-03-15T16:42:23Z

This is a pointless post, but I was watching Harry Potter last night and Sirius totally has D's old hair. And I missed D's old hair acutely while watching it. (D. currently has hair that is approximately 1/4 inch long all over his head, ew.) D. has always had really nice hair and has always spent way more time on it than I ever have. His hair is naturally curly (how I used to love those cute little pin curls around the nape of his neck and behind his ears...sigh!) and thick as can be. He would go in to his fabulous gay stylist and say, "Make it look like American Prayer era Jim Morrison," and oh, it was so lovely.

Even when he had his winter facial hair going, it was still nice. I'm sure he could have looked kind of mountain mannish at that point, but he'd wash it so carefully and put his pomade in and not let me touch it...ah, I miss that.

So here is my post mourning D's old hair. :P

Mmm, I'm not a fan of the mustache thing, but Gary Oldman is yum. And here's a really bad photograph of a really old photograph of D. and me back when we were childrens and his hair was so nice.

loose ends

2009-03-11T02:17:39Z

I've finished three books without writing a little something about each of them, so here goes...I'm doing pretty awesome so far at the part of my resolution where I vowed to write something about each book I have read, though maybe not so much really about being more intentional about what I'm reading. I'm still pretty much letting the universe bring me my reading material, but so far, it's been okay. :)

Book 1: The Writer's Book of Hope, by Ralph Keyes: Okay, it's unfair to say that the universe randomly brought this one to me when it was, in fact, carefully selected by a very lovely bit of the universe as a birthday present to a writer who was all doom and gloom and "damn it I quit this bullshit!" (thanks donutgirl !) Yeah, so this book arrived in that awful place in the middle of a first draft when you feel lost and discouraged, and on top of that I was so swamped with lifestuff I couldn't figure out wtf I was doing trying to write fiction on top of it all, especially when I feel like my chances of getting published are approximately equivalent to the chances of winning the lottery without buying a ticket. Anyway, donut advised keeping the book near my writing area to flip through in moments of angst, and yup. Here it is. I actually read it straight through, though it would be an easy book to page through at random. I read it in little snippets at my computer, whenever I was waiting for my super slow internet to process something, or when I had those moments when nothing, even the most banal of writing, would come out despite how many times I tapped my fingers anxiously against the keys. I love it. It made me much more hopeful without ever making me roll my eyes at some stupid cheesy business, without feeling like I was holding a vacuous, fake-smiling cheerleader in my hands. :D

Moving on, Book 2: The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac: And yeah, this was an intentional read as well, who am I trying to fool? This book is one that my own little dharma girls are reading on their pilgrimage, and I finished it last weekend while sitting in the parking lot of a cute little mercantile while Av snored in the backseat. It has these moments throughout that make me roll my eyes, and it's definitely not my favorite Kerouac by a long shot, but still there are these lovely moments where he forms an image in such an interesting and unique way that I find myself moved...my whole universe sort of shifts for a moment, and I think, Wow. Of course, the next ten pages I'm rolling my eyes through again, and I'm thinking, Oh, Jack, you poor repressed man, and feeling sorry for his pathetic little self, but then bam, he does it to me again. I love love love the ending where he is up on Desolation Peak, and the writing there, makes me so happy... "Down on the lake rosy reflections of celestial vapor appeared, and I said, 'God, I love you' and looked up to the sky and really meant it. 'I have fallen in love with you, God. Take care of us all, on way or another.'...as I was hiking down the mountain with my pack I turned and knelt on the trail and said, 'Thank you, shack.' Then I added 'Blah,' with a little grin, because I knew that shack and that mountain would understand what that meant, and turned and went on down the trail back to this world."

Last Book 3: A Virtuous Woman by Kay Gibbons: This book was a total universe offering, in a "FREE BOOKS" box at work that also brought me The Kite Runner and several others that I haven't read yet. I opened it during SSR at school because it looked thin and easy to half-concentrate on while keeping an eye on students and (pretending that I am) marking participation points while modeling reading. I was drawn into the voices and the non-traditional chronology. The story itself was supremely quiet--to the point of being dull, honestly--but there was some nice emotion in the spare prose that alternated between the voices of Blinking Jack and his dead wife Ruby. But the ending was just plain odd; suddenly there were all these italics, all these minor characters suddenly spewing their thoughts all over...this scene that was supposed to feel tragic and climactic and in the end just...didn't work for me. Until then, I was willing to hang out with these understated characters, just listening to their little story in plain, simple words and cozy dialogue, with a little humor thrown in, but the emotion of that last scene just didn't resonate for me. I will pass this one on to Mom without asking her to give it back.

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

2009-03-06T03:28:21Z

I finished The Kite Runner a week or two ago, and I've been meaning to write this not-a-review for a while now, but I can't quite wrap my head around what I thought of this book. Really, it's perfectly well-written and an interesting story. This morning some people were chatting about how they thought it was emotionally manipulative, the kind of reading experience where you can actually feel all those writerly devices that are meant to fuck with your feelings, and while I admit that it's a pretty bleak tale at times, I didn't feel particularly manipulated while reading it. Not like plenty of other books I've read, anyway (I'm looking at you, Time Traveler's Wife!)

It didn't make me cry at all, but then I was talking with a boy at work about it and he said he couldn't stop crying while reading, so then I wondered if maybe I'm heartless. It wasn't that I didn't have an emotional connection to the characters; I connected with Amir and Hassan just fine, and to a little lesser extent to the father and to the little boy, Sohrab. The fact that I knew certain tragic things were coming didn't really make me dread them, and it didn't really lessen their impact, either; in fact, I kind of appreciated the heads-up so I could prepare myself for it.

Anyway, things I liked about the book were its description of Afghanistan in both eras--this being a subject I really don't know much about at all--and the author's development of the relationships between the narrator and the other characters. I like the way our understanding of Amir's relationship with his father grows and changes, even beyond the life of his father, the way we as readers can see so many angles of the interplay between cause and effect and chance and manipulation and tragedy. Likewise, the relationship between Amir and Hassan (and Sohrab, by extension) continues to deepen throughout the book, long after the incident that drives them apart.

I think overall some parts of this book could use some tightening up; some scenes seemed a little redundant and not very critical for the story nor for the themes. The middle of the book was kind of blah overall, and I'm not sure I ever got a sense of what it was exactly that Soraya saw in Amir to love. Until the very end when he redeems himself, it's hard to find anything real lovable about him. But I guess somebody had to be working from the States to have that miracle move of a surprise temporary visa or else...? Or else the plot would have stalled out a little bit as they were trapped in Pakistan.

A nice book, though, that I have recommended to D. because he just finished reading a book about a soldier's experiences in Afghanistan and enjoyed it a lot.

bad wife

2009-03-05T04:00:11Z

D. called me at work tonight after school was out, all excited because he had read my ms. of The Dharma Bum Business and loved it...he was all choked-up and teary and full of praise, and then he was going on about how much he misses me and how he wants me and how sad he is about our lives and how thin we're stretched and how little we see each other. Essentially he was telling me how he feels, which he hardly ever does. He's like the most stoic person I know, always insisting that he's okay, that he can do more, taking the world on his shoulders.

Sometimes I get mad at him for this, yell at him for playing the martyr, but yelling at him doesn't work. It just reinforces his idea of me as the tempestuous redhead, the unreasonable one, whatever. He just stays calm and quiet as I rage. Which, you know, infuriates me.

Anyway, so here he was, actually telling me how sad he was. And I chatted a little and then headed home, feeling pretty damn good about my book and about us. Then, what did I do, cruel awful horrible woman that I am? I open the door and see him, and the first thing I do is make fun of his hair. I called him a dirty scoundrel for cutting it! And I was mostly joking (even though I really do not like his hair--I *hate* it when he cuts it like that just because he says he's boycotting the professional haircutters for charging too much money to cut his hair...so he just takes the trimmer thingy and shaves it all down to practically nothing!), but I guess I really hurt his feelings.

So now I feel bad. And I was tucking him into bed, and he had his hands over his hair, hiding it, and he was all, "You don't think I'm sexy anymore" and "I tried to keep it longer but I messed up and kept messing up, and I was scared you would be mad, but I couldn't really do it any differently." And it's true, he asked me to cut it for him and I told him I would, but I never see him practically, so it didn't get done...

And now I feel like a meanie. :(

no going back...

2009-02-13T05:59:19Z

This is me. Long ago and far away. This is also a poor digital snapshot of an old film photo, since I do not have a scanner, but I really wanted to post this photo as a reminder to myself about taking risks.

See, I'm terrified of heights. They make my hands and feet go numb. Ever since I was a little kid, I remember having a scary, scary nightmare about a suspension bridge, just like this one, stretched over a body of rushing water. I would wake up from my dream with a racing heart as the boards began disintegrating from one end of the bridge and the other end, leaving me stranded in the middle--forced to jump over huge gaps to get to safety.

You can't really tell from this picture, but that water was moving fast, and it was actually a fairly long way down. It was also pouring rain, and everything was very slippery. Also I was carrying a 45-pound backpack. Looking at this photo, remembering how frightened I was, helps remind me that there was a time in my life when I met my fears head on, confronted them, forced them into submission by staring them down. I'm still nervous about heights, but I haven't had that dream since I crossed this bridge.

I need more moments like this in my life right now.

ellipssa @ 2009-02-10T19:12:00

2009-02-11T01:38:12Z

Bleh. Today I feel...two-dimensional. Wafer thin, haha. Like someone took a super hot steam iron and just gave me the once-over, hissssss. I know it's just because yesterday was such an amazingly prolific day for me, with all these words bursting out all over the page, but it took me until like 2:00 to open my document today and then I haven't added one word. (In fact I subtracted one, which was a good choice, but still, it's been five hours.)

I slept like crap last night, I think mostly because I was worried about the ice storm and wondering if I was going to have to go to school, and then my alarm went off just as I finally had fallen into a sleep and a crazy weird dream that had me belly dancing and playing my guitar and doing all these inspired and creative things--only to jolt awake and start readying myself for the daily grind. Then D. called to say that school was actually canceled, and I would have gone back to sleep except that I already had my hair washed and makeup on and contacts in. And the boys were waking.

I love my children, and I like my house a lot. But I honestly cannot imagine how people can get through the day when their house and children are the only things to focus attention on. I feel booooored, and it's not so much because of not being at my job (it's soooo not about that), and it's not because I don't have enough to do (there is *plenty* here that needs doing!), but it's because I don't care one bit about sweeping or folding clothes or even sitting on the floor and playing with Little People or whatever. The kids just bore the shit out of me, okay? I said it. And I could probably make that better, like if I felt like searching up ideas for fun activities we could do--enrichment that would probably help them learn skills or become better people--but you know what? I don't want to. So there, bad fucking mama.

Ugh, I'm as annoying to myself as Emma Bovary, unsatisfied with everything in my life--always. Whiny whine whine.

Good news: I found like a zillion words to cut out of The Star Crossing, words that were not necessarily bad but kind of have no business in the middle of my novel. I think I need to cut like 20k and then add back 10k of stuff that needs more development.

More good news: I'm pretty sure I just have cramps and not a kidney stone. Holy shit, if I had another kidney stone that would suck so bad...financially and otherwise.

Really good news: Even though today I feel flat and empty of words, yesterday's writing got me to 42k, and I feel like finally the threads of this weird-ass story are starting to form something of an actual pattern. I hope there's a point beyond all the pretty words, but whatever. I just want to be finished with it, get a draft done. I'm sick of fighting with the empty page.

News: I read about half of The Writer's Book of Hope by Ralph Keyes today. Thanks, donut. I'm not sure I have any more hope (that might be the second half), but I sure can identify with a lot of these situations that cause me to lose hope.

Now I need to plan lessons for the rest of this bizarre week, but without having any of my stuff to make plans with (files from work computer, lesson plan book, etc.). I'm not really sure what to do. Also I think I have three hours or more of video footage to edit for the Rite of Passage Reality TV show project. Joy of joys. Have I mentioned I don't actually *know* how to edit video? heh. Well, I love learning new things, it's true. Also, I can usually learn just about anything on a computer, so it'll probably be okay. As long as I can get the correct cord this time since I've established that files do not transfer from my old mac iMovie to my new laptop.

And, back to the chorus:
Bleh.

walking thoughts

2009-02-07T20:38:47Z

I love to read aloud, love reading as a performance, really. I like finding the perfect cadence for an author’s style, the perfect intonation for each character’s voice--I don’t really have different voices necessarily for the dialogue, but each character speaks a little differently, and I like the way my voice can convey those differences to my audience. My audience, by the way, is usually a group of attention-deficit disordered students or my own children. Some books, such as Neil Gaiman’s Stardust, are dear to me simply because of the memory reading it aloud to D. in our tent somewhere in the mountains of Montana, finishing it curled up around the roots of alpine trees while pausing in between paragraphs to bang sticks together to keep the grizzlies from sneaking up on us.

Being the listener is harder for me; my mind wanders when I don’t have the text in front of me, and even when I do, I can get impatient with the rate or manner of the reader. Still, I’ve been looking for motivation to exercise, and I get dizzy when I try to read while working out, so I’ve been listening to my iPod while I ride my bike or walk around the neighborhood, and what better to listen to than all those wonderful books I wish I had the time to read? Also I kind of look at it as brain exercise too--forcing myself to focus on the spoken words, to absorb them and visualize them and really *listen* to them.

So I downloaded Madame Bovary and I’ve been listening to it, and it’s so nice! Or at least, it was, for the first seven chapters. I got the audio from librivox, which is a free site where volunteers read works in the public domain. Two lovely readers who are either fluent French speakers or who at least seem to be able to speak French in a way that sounds natural to me--a person who speaks no French whatsoever, haha--read the first seven chapters. The woman who read 4-7 especially was wonderful to listen to; her care with the immaculate sentences made it almost easy to pay attention to all those amazing details. I just fell in love with those tiny details that build up to form the basis of Emma’s marital discontent, from the images of Emma's ideal honeymoon scenarios to the quiver of the lips as mother-in-law and daughter-in-law spoke to each other to the description of Charles' clunky shoes or her frustration with his inability to explain a term about horseback riding to her…

Then the track opened for Chapter 8, and suddenly there was this loose-mouthed American reader who had some kind of waterfall in the background that made it sound like he was reading in his shower. He labored over the French so much that even I was cringing, and every time he said the name “Charles” with that coarse, careless /r/ sound, I kind of hated him. I tolerated him through to the end of the chapter, and then my walk was over, thank god. I couldn’t bear to listen to the beginning of Chapter 9 in case it was him again reading. If it is, I may need to find another recording, seriously. I feel like he massacred several thousand words, and that during what feels like it could have been a very remarkable chapter--Emma’s introduction to the fine, romantic world she is so desperate to fit into.

shout out to my man D. and Zoom-Zip

2009-02-03T03:14:41Z

So this weekend we went to my in-laws' house and D. fixed our car. Like, the man took the hood off of our car, took out all the headlights and signal lights and whatnot off the crushed front end, pounded on shit with a hammer and a sledgehammer and other things pretty incomprehensible to me, even hooked up a tow cable to his mom's truck and pulled the front of the frame out so that the hood would fit again. Then he smoothed it all out and reassembled it and hooked up all kinds of little brackets and wires, and then took them all apart again when they didn't work, and then created new brackets and wires out of shit that was lying around in the garage and/or toolbox, and put it all back together again.

In the end, you can barely tell that the car took out Bambi last week. And I think of all the stuff like that he has done over the last nine years or however long we've had that car, and I'm just amazed, you know? He just jumps in and rips shit apart, mostly having no idea if he will ever be able to make it fit together again.

I couldn't do that. I would wrap the bungee cord a few times to make mostly certain that the hood wasn't going to fly up in my face the first time I cleared 50 mph and just crossed my fingers when I drove at night that I wouldn't get a ticket for only having one dim, sad little headlight. But of course that's all beside the point because I wouldn't even have the car anymore. It would be languishing in some junkyard or fed to the crusher long ago without D.'s courageous ministrations of creative repairs.

Zoom-Zip. That's the car's name. Named after a Soul Coughing song, I guess, after he made it all the way from Oregon to Minnesota and back for my friend's wedding. That was a long weekend--drove 36 hours straight and arrived just in time for the bachelor/bachelorette parties. I was so drunk so fast that night. Two more days/nights of wedding parties and then we had to head right back. I remember driving through these mountain passes with my whole head out the window simply because I was afraid that if I didn't have the wind and rain smacking me in the face, I would fall dead asleep and careen off into the chasm.

We bought Zoom-Zip for $500, which was about $200 less than the cost of round trip airfare. We didn't have the money, but somehow we had both promised to be in this wedding, and well...we had to get there and back fast. We figured if the car made it there and back, we'd call it good. And that was nine years ago. Thanks to D, Z-Z is still on the road and going strong, even in his twentieth year. YAY, D!

Lucia, Lucia, by Adriana Trigiani

2009-01-24T16:52:13Z

So this is the book that just showed up randomly in this wonderful little box of Halloween party from the aunt of mine who is an amazing bit of randomness and love and mystery.

And since I have already established that my reading habits tend toward the random, "oh, the universe brought me another book" method, I decided to read it. It has a very pretty cover, bright and orange-ish (which makes me wonder if that's why it got included in the Halloween box, to be honest) with an elegant-looking woman in profile.

Immediately, I *hated* the frame story. The opening character, Kit, is a struggling playwright living in Greenwich Village who ventures up to the apartment of the aged but elegant "Aunt Lu" and has tea while listening to her story, which is the basis of the book. My dislike of the frame only got worse when it finally reappeared (after no mention of it throughout Lucia's story) at the end of the book. The characters, including the old Lucia, are flat and there is very little to connect them to the rest of the story.

Lucia's story, told in first person, at first engaged me quite a bit. I know very little about fashion, New York City, the 1950s, and the life of Italian immigrant families, yet I found myself interested in all of these. I was enthusiastic when Lucia breaks off her engagement and her role as a traditional Italian girl--choosing instead to continue her career as a seamstress working for an up-and-coming designer in the customs department of a swanky department store. I thought, hey, cool, it's about a girl who is going to be ahead of her time, who fashions herself after her own pattern rather than the rigid expectations of tradition and culture.

Unfortunately, not so. Even though she sometimes flirts with the idea of striking out and becoming an independent woman throughout the rest of the book, every choice she makes--falling in love with a suave man who eventually cons her out of her heart and life savings, assuming the role of dutiful daughter when the family needs her, and submitting to the will of her traditional brothers--dashes my hopes for her character. In addition, each event and emotion is laid out in such a way as to be completely transparent--no subtlety to speak of.

The book had a couple of good lines, such as my favorite spoken by Lucia's mother: "In my mind, the most dangerous people in the world are insecure women. They can do more damage in a day than an army." Overall, though, the writing was...well, plain. It was writing that got the job done, but it didn't evoke any impressive images in my mind or any real emotion for Trigiani's characters. I know I'm not emotionally invested in the characters or the writing when I find myself skimming paragraphs toward the end. And the ending, ugh. The author goes back to the ugly frame story and slaps on the most sentimental ending ever, with the final act of the book going back and essentially undoing Lucia's original admirable decision at the beginning of her story.

It's not fair, perhaps, to judge a character of the 1950s because she doesn't eschew her family and society's expectations of her in a way that I expect her to, in a different era. Still, the author could have done a better job of helping me to understand her, to sympathize with her plight instead of making me skim over it.