Right after yesterday's blog post about meeting the curator, inspired by my own determination, I called another curator I had been told about by the fabulous Zara Contractor. A little schedule juggling and I was able to meet them both in a slim two hour window in two different parts of town before they headed to their afternoon meetings.
Through sleet and snow I drove (I'm not being dramatic, people; I'm in Vancouver), just me and my little black rental Fiat. The first interview was so successful I nearly cancelled the second. Thank God for my aforementioned determination.
The first curator worked at the Emily Carr University Gallery on Granville Island, where some of the best local art gets made, exhibited, and sold. With her twenty-five years of experience in the Vancouver art world, she gave me an incredible overview of the art scene outside of the Vancouver Art Gallery which, being a plebeian, was all I had known before (and relied heavily on in my novel). A nice little coincidence was when I discovered she had been one of the founding members of Artspeak, which as you all know was my original destination today and where I headed next.
At Artspeak, I realized that persistence really pays. It was there, thanks to an incredibly helpful curator who spent nearly an hour answering my haphazard questions, (and, it must be said, her co-worker, the artist who helped me figure out how to use the voice recorder on the ipad I pilfered from my hubby) that I found the pulse of the Vancouver art scene.
Now, like any good writer, I have to stare into the distance as the sun presumably goes down behind a thicket of clouds and the rain continues to fog up the coffee shop windows and think about what it all means to me and to my book.
Friday, February 24, 2012
Thursday, February 23, 2012
Working Vacation
Avid readers recall from a previous blog entry my main character is breaking into the world of curating, a world I know squat about. You may also recall last year I happened upon a wonderful curator in the Bay Area who spent her lunch hour filling me in on my two page list of questions. It was a good start but I always knew I had to check the Canadian scene.
Last week, I scoured the Vancouver Art Gallery's website and left a message for the chief curator, hardly believing my own ballsiness as I did. She called me back within hours and with shaking hands (she was CHIEF curator), I made frantic notes as she graciously answered as many questions as I dared ask her. She spent eleven glorious minutes on the phone with me but she left me with about 150 more questions than I'd had before.
It's a tricky business, this: on one hand, I can't learn an entire profession in a month or two or six, on the other, I have to. I could look up a a university website for the curator program, but I don't care if Theory of Composition is a prerequisite for Theory of Space. I need inside knowledge, salacious tid bits, scandals, you know, the good stuff.
I'm in Vancouver this week, supposedly on vacation. My first afternoon here, I googled local galleries and started cold calling.
Tomorrow at noon, I have an interview at Artspeak in Gastown.
Last week, I scoured the Vancouver Art Gallery's website and left a message for the chief curator, hardly believing my own ballsiness as I did. She called me back within hours and with shaking hands (she was CHIEF curator), I made frantic notes as she graciously answered as many questions as I dared ask her. She spent eleven glorious minutes on the phone with me but she left me with about 150 more questions than I'd had before.
It's a tricky business, this: on one hand, I can't learn an entire profession in a month or two or six, on the other, I have to. I could look up a a university website for the curator program, but I don't care if Theory of Composition is a prerequisite for Theory of Space. I need inside knowledge, salacious tid bits, scandals, you know, the good stuff.
I'm in Vancouver this week, supposedly on vacation. My first afternoon here, I googled local galleries and started cold calling.
Tomorrow at noon, I have an interview at Artspeak in Gastown.
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
70 Solutions to Writing Mistakes: A great resource
Last night at Bombay Jam , I was talking to a regular and it turned out she writes too. It made me wonder how many other dabblers in writing there are out there. For those of you who are interested, here is an awesome resource I just came upon, which is so extensive, it will help no matter which stage of writing you may be in.
The link is: http://media2.fwpublications.com/WDG/Z5001_70_Solutions.pdf?et_mid=535038&rid=233465641
If it doesn't work, you can go to Chuck Sambuchino's Guide to Literary Agents blog and download it for free, it's the really big bar on the very top.
Have fun!
The link is: http://media2.fwpublications.com/WDG/Z5001_70_Solutions.pdf?et_mid=535038&rid=233465641
If it doesn't work, you can go to Chuck Sambuchino's Guide to Literary Agents blog and download it for free, it's the really big bar on the very top.
Have fun!
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
The Woman I Love: An Accidental Muse
Across the table, over a glass of red, she said, "Let's go back to the room."
We changed quickly, throwing off our jeans and slipping into Something More Comfortable.
We pulled out our laptops and began to write.
The first time I heard her name, I was hiking with my husband. Dave, my high school best friend, was in town for a computer people conference and asked if he could bring his old university friend along to dinner. I turned her name around on my tongue: Radha. I gave her jet black hair parted down the middle, a saucer-sized bindi, and of course, an accent.*
As she rounded the corner of the Santa Clara Hilton, the first thing I saw were her boots. Stocky, chunky motorcycle boots. Directly above them, a knee length skirt which looked like the gold leaf pallu of a Benarasi sari. Her forehead was disappointingly bare. We ate at an Afghani Restaurant where among the tech talk (I was severely outnumbered in the company of a Googler, an IBMer, and an Oracler), I asked her questions, tried to get to know her. I emailed her that very night, asked her to dinner.
We had a lot in common: we were both immigrants several times over, we shared a love for SRK, and then she dropped the bomb and the reason I had been so attracted to her that first night became clear: she was a writer too.
Years later, she asked if I wanted to go on a writing retreat with her. I pictured wine soaked nights sharing our deepest thoughts, most personal secrets, and maybe some writing on the side. We arrived at a wind swept hostel perched on a cliff in Half Moon Bay. She took the top bunk, opened her laptop and began typing. I went to the bathroom, got some tea, put on wooly socks. From above I heard nothing but thunderous typing. Sighing, I began to write.
Over a divine dinner, I got my wine, some deep thoughts, some secrets. She paid for dinner with a wad of cash she had received at Google for showing up to the Christmas party. (Note: I, as a teacher, had received for Christmas, ants in my classroom from all the candy the kids had eaten behind my back.)
It did not register the first time she said that after dinner there would be more writing.
"Write on a Friday night?"
"It's a writing retreat."
"I hate you."
It was not the last time I said that to her that weekend. After breakfast the next day, we wrote. After lunch, we wrote. After dinner we wrote. I had snuck along a book and like a petulant child, I took reading breaks, Radha be damned. But every time I did, her typing rattled my conscience from the bunk above. I cursed her, put down my book, pulled out my laptop.
We did it again a few months later. Same hostel, same rules. But this time, it was a tiny bit easier to follow her oppressive schedule.
Our third retreat happened exactly two years ago: MLK Day long weekend. We holed up at the Fort Mason Hostel. More windswept scenery, but this time, we were surrounded by city folk and tourists having fun on their long weekend. She did not notice them. She did not hear the group of 30+ middle schooler stomping down the hall outside our room. She wrote and wrote. I copied her. We wondered why we were getting special treatment at the cozy candle lit restaurant where we dined. We realized it was Valentine's Day weekend. She allowed us a quick chuckle before marching us back to our room.
What happened next was a double edged sword: it was these writing retreats that she engineered that made me realize I could write all day everyday, not when the mood struck or the stars alligned just so. She inadvertently aided my decision to quit my job and write full time. Which in turn ended our writing retreats because I no longer wrote on the weekends. I think often to our waterfront hostels, the marathon writing sessions, a giggle here, a laugh there, well-deserved meals wolfed down between talk of writing, of life.
Last Friday, she accidentally pushed me again, brought the journey she had initiated full circle. I had asked her to read my almost complete manuscript. She texted that she would do it on the weekend. I had been having the hardest time finishing the last chapter, it had dragged on for weeks. Knowing someone was about to read it provided the kick in the pants I needed. I jumped off the comfy couch where I had been wallowing in self pity all morning, bought a fresh pot of black tea, and pounded the last two scenes in five hours straight.
The Bay Area, like any metropolitan city, brings people in and out of my life. Radha stomped into my life in her chunky black boots and threw my world wide open. She did it without fanfare, without expectations, just by being her fabulous self.
*The only time I heard an accent was when she was on the phone with family on one of our retreats. It was the thickest, most wildly exaggerated Indian accent I could have asked for, one I myself use when speaking to family. She hung up and blinked at me, unaware of the switch she had made. It made me love her that much more.
We changed quickly, throwing off our jeans and slipping into Something More Comfortable.
We pulled out our laptops and began to write.
The first time I heard her name, I was hiking with my husband. Dave, my high school best friend, was in town for a computer people conference and asked if he could bring his old university friend along to dinner. I turned her name around on my tongue: Radha. I gave her jet black hair parted down the middle, a saucer-sized bindi, and of course, an accent.*
As she rounded the corner of the Santa Clara Hilton, the first thing I saw were her boots. Stocky, chunky motorcycle boots. Directly above them, a knee length skirt which looked like the gold leaf pallu of a Benarasi sari. Her forehead was disappointingly bare. We ate at an Afghani Restaurant where among the tech talk (I was severely outnumbered in the company of a Googler, an IBMer, and an Oracler), I asked her questions, tried to get to know her. I emailed her that very night, asked her to dinner.
We had a lot in common: we were both immigrants several times over, we shared a love for SRK, and then she dropped the bomb and the reason I had been so attracted to her that first night became clear: she was a writer too.
Years later, she asked if I wanted to go on a writing retreat with her. I pictured wine soaked nights sharing our deepest thoughts, most personal secrets, and maybe some writing on the side. We arrived at a wind swept hostel perched on a cliff in Half Moon Bay. She took the top bunk, opened her laptop and began typing. I went to the bathroom, got some tea, put on wooly socks. From above I heard nothing but thunderous typing. Sighing, I began to write.
Over a divine dinner, I got my wine, some deep thoughts, some secrets. She paid for dinner with a wad of cash she had received at Google for showing up to the Christmas party. (Note: I, as a teacher, had received for Christmas, ants in my classroom from all the candy the kids had eaten behind my back.)
It did not register the first time she said that after dinner there would be more writing.
"Write on a Friday night?"
"It's a writing retreat."
"I hate you."
It was not the last time I said that to her that weekend. After breakfast the next day, we wrote. After lunch, we wrote. After dinner we wrote. I had snuck along a book and like a petulant child, I took reading breaks, Radha be damned. But every time I did, her typing rattled my conscience from the bunk above. I cursed her, put down my book, pulled out my laptop.
We did it again a few months later. Same hostel, same rules. But this time, it was a tiny bit easier to follow her oppressive schedule.
Our third retreat happened exactly two years ago: MLK Day long weekend. We holed up at the Fort Mason Hostel. More windswept scenery, but this time, we were surrounded by city folk and tourists having fun on their long weekend. She did not notice them. She did not hear the group of 30+ middle schooler stomping down the hall outside our room. She wrote and wrote. I copied her. We wondered why we were getting special treatment at the cozy candle lit restaurant where we dined. We realized it was Valentine's Day weekend. She allowed us a quick chuckle before marching us back to our room.
What happened next was a double edged sword: it was these writing retreats that she engineered that made me realize I could write all day everyday, not when the mood struck or the stars alligned just so. She inadvertently aided my decision to quit my job and write full time. Which in turn ended our writing retreats because I no longer wrote on the weekends. I think often to our waterfront hostels, the marathon writing sessions, a giggle here, a laugh there, well-deserved meals wolfed down between talk of writing, of life.
Last Friday, she accidentally pushed me again, brought the journey she had initiated full circle. I had asked her to read my almost complete manuscript. She texted that she would do it on the weekend. I had been having the hardest time finishing the last chapter, it had dragged on for weeks. Knowing someone was about to read it provided the kick in the pants I needed. I jumped off the comfy couch where I had been wallowing in self pity all morning, bought a fresh pot of black tea, and pounded the last two scenes in five hours straight.
The Bay Area, like any metropolitan city, brings people in and out of my life. Radha stomped into my life in her chunky black boots and threw my world wide open. She did it without fanfare, without expectations, just by being her fabulous self.
*The only time I heard an accent was when she was on the phone with family on one of our retreats. It was the thickest, most wildly exaggerated Indian accent I could have asked for, one I myself use when speaking to family. She hung up and blinked at me, unaware of the switch she had made. It made me love her that much more.
Thursday, January 5, 2012
Phid Back
My last post may have been a little different from the rest but man did it make for some interesting comments and discussions. For the record, it took me over a month to write it for the very reason many of you reacted so strongly to it: it was so serious and I'm usually upbeat on this blog. But as the great Meera Syal titled her 2005 BBC mini series, Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee. Shit happens. As the Americans say, it is what it is.
In writing this novel, the line between fiction and myself is blurry at the best of times. It works both ways. I use so much of my own experiences in the writing: vivid childhood memories, the aesthetics that I experienced last year in Karachi, some of my own neuroses (those are particularly fun to evoke and splatter onto the page). But on the flip side, some of the scenes I've created have come alive to me. I feel like they've really happened- like in the real world. When I go to Vancouver, I can tell you where Katya and her mother had a huge fight, the exact spot at Kits Beach where she ...oops, that was close. You'll see.
Similarly, the line between fiction and reality in that last blog was a wavering one. Everything was essentially true: it's been a rough ride. But I will confess that as I wrote that last image of me and my frost bitten hand, etc, I was sitting in my backyard among my fully bloomed roses with the California sun beating down on me. Sometimes, it's fun to be a drama queen.
Then there's the feed back I've received (sorry about the title, but ever since a certain someone called me Phinomenal, my name has been too much fun to play with). The comments within the blog, the personal emails assuring me everything will be okay. I've even heard from third parties about what some of you said. Even though a writer is supposed to write only for herself, for her art, not for fame or accolades, it feels good knowing there are so many of you out there with me on this roller coaster.
I took a week off over the holidays, packing away all evidence of my writing life. The most strenuous thing I did was tackle a new knitting pattern. That blog was actually very cathartic; it felt good to get it all out and leave it all behind.
Yes, it's only been three working days of 2012 but I feel recharged and rearing to finish this mother- this novel (you're all so sensitive, I don't know if you can handle a potty mouthed Phi).
In writing this novel, the line between fiction and myself is blurry at the best of times. It works both ways. I use so much of my own experiences in the writing: vivid childhood memories, the aesthetics that I experienced last year in Karachi, some of my own neuroses (those are particularly fun to evoke and splatter onto the page). But on the flip side, some of the scenes I've created have come alive to me. I feel like they've really happened- like in the real world. When I go to Vancouver, I can tell you where Katya and her mother had a huge fight, the exact spot at Kits Beach where she ...oops, that was close. You'll see.
Similarly, the line between fiction and reality in that last blog was a wavering one. Everything was essentially true: it's been a rough ride. But I will confess that as I wrote that last image of me and my frost bitten hand, etc, I was sitting in my backyard among my fully bloomed roses with the California sun beating down on me. Sometimes, it's fun to be a drama queen.
Then there's the feed back I've received (sorry about the title, but ever since a certain someone called me Phinomenal, my name has been too much fun to play with). The comments within the blog, the personal emails assuring me everything will be okay. I've even heard from third parties about what some of you said. Even though a writer is supposed to write only for herself, for her art, not for fame or accolades, it feels good knowing there are so many of you out there with me on this roller coaster.
I took a week off over the holidays, packing away all evidence of my writing life. The most strenuous thing I did was tackle a new knitting pattern. That blog was actually very cathartic; it felt good to get it all out and leave it all behind.
Yes, it's only been three working days of 2012 but I feel recharged and rearing to finish this mother- this novel (you're all so sensitive, I don't know if you can handle a potty mouthed Phi).
Friday, December 23, 2011
"If you want to make God laugh, tell her your plans."
I've had this quote up on my wall for a while now because it's cheeky and applies to other people. Only the other day, at my last Bollywood Cardio class of the year, someone said, 2011 has been an amazing year for me, and I realized I couldn't quite say the same. I did have... not plans so much as notions. And I don't know who's in charge of it all, but they're sure getting a laugh out of me.
My plan was simple: it fit neatly in the little space below my name on this very blog: quit job, write book, the end. At first, things seemed to be on track. Exactly a year ago, on my last working day before Christmas holidays, I "finished" the "final" draft of my novel, saved in a folder called September 2010, and jetted off to the Cayman Islands to hang out with family. I reeled off my plans to all who asked: January I would research, February through May would be editing and by August, I'd be ready for the Squaw Valley Writing Conference where I would wow agents and editors with my complete novel, then sit back while they clawed each other's eyes and hair out to get their hands on exclusive rights.
A month of researching Pakistan from a coffee shop in Mountain View and I was the one tearing my hair out. Seeing Wikipedia would only take me so far, I decided to go to Karachi myself, not as the foreign return I'd been the first time around (which had led to much of the inspiration for this novel) but as a writer. I spent three weeks eating, shopping, laughing, oh and researching. The only night I didn't have my notepad in my back pocket was at a wedding I crashed because my cousin begged me to leave it behind (and because there were no pockets in my sari). Upon returning to California, I knew my novel had to change based on what I'd experienced in Karachi. So I tweaked and rewrote, starting a folder called April 2011.
Suddenly it was August. I had no novel; what I had was eight chapters of mediocre lukewarm porridge. But it was time for Squaw Valley Writing Conference. As preparation, I wrote an elevator pitch, boiling my novel down to 60 seconds of succinct intrigue that would induce the clawing of eyes, etc. I harangued countless friends, wrote 29 drafts of this thing and spent the four hour drive up to Lake Tahoe reciting my pitch in an engaging, natural fashion (side bar: also not part of the plan was the $360 speeding ticket I earned but that's another story). The first agent I approached listened to the first line before walking away to talk to someone higher on the food chain. The next two people to hear it -the last two- were other wannabe writers. And then I came home.
I couldn't get over it, the dashed hopes, all the hair and eyes that remained in tact, not a claw drawn the whole week I'd been gone, and on my desk, the folder stuffed with the 29 drafts of my pitch, mocking me and my well-laid plans. Plus, I was now on my second year of unemployment and funds were dwindling.
So I did the one thing I know how to do, the very thing that had got me into this mess in the first place: I read. Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. It healed me. It rubbed balm on my tattered ego, reminded me why I was doing this exercise in sadomasochism in the first place and gently propped me up at my laptop once more.
September 2011 is the folder I'm on now. Chapter Nine was printed this morning and added to the shoebox I began a few months ago. Yes, I'm single-handedly killing several forests, but printing out complete chapters and putting them in my orange shoebox is all I have in the world so I do it (on 99 % recycled paper, I promise).
It's been a year and a half, it's been four drafts and counting, and I have no idea what the plan is anymore. I do know the honeymoon is over; I am no longer the happy sparkly kid I was last year, Ms. Look at Me On My Writing Adventure. I know I am an unemployed vagrant who skulks around coffee shops no longer sure of what the hell she's doing while all around her people work, pop out babies, cook dinner every night and get regular haircuts.
One of the irritating side effects of being a writer is this hyper-self-awareness, so I also recognize I'm in the thick of it right now. I'm in this deep, dark mineshaft and I'm too far in not to keep going till I hit gold. Or till my hands fall off from frostbite, my blue fingers still clamped around the shovel.
I have no idea what 2012 will bring. This is not said to fish for compliments but as a fact. I could be picked up by a small independent press and earn $ 500 for my efforts. I could be drowning my sorrows in cheap whiskey while warming my hands at a bonfire made out of a heap of rejection letters.
None of that matters. From where I am, inside this tunnel, I can't see above or below. And that's probably for the best.
I no longer have a plan, I just have a goal.
My plan was simple: it fit neatly in the little space below my name on this very blog: quit job, write book, the end. At first, things seemed to be on track. Exactly a year ago, on my last working day before Christmas holidays, I "finished" the "final" draft of my novel, saved in a folder called September 2010, and jetted off to the Cayman Islands to hang out with family. I reeled off my plans to all who asked: January I would research, February through May would be editing and by August, I'd be ready for the Squaw Valley Writing Conference where I would wow agents and editors with my complete novel, then sit back while they clawed each other's eyes and hair out to get their hands on exclusive rights.
A month of researching Pakistan from a coffee shop in Mountain View and I was the one tearing my hair out. Seeing Wikipedia would only take me so far, I decided to go to Karachi myself, not as the foreign return I'd been the first time around (which had led to much of the inspiration for this novel) but as a writer. I spent three weeks eating, shopping, laughing, oh and researching. The only night I didn't have my notepad in my back pocket was at a wedding I crashed because my cousin begged me to leave it behind (and because there were no pockets in my sari). Upon returning to California, I knew my novel had to change based on what I'd experienced in Karachi. So I tweaked and rewrote, starting a folder called April 2011.
Suddenly it was August. I had no novel; what I had was eight chapters of mediocre lukewarm porridge. But it was time for Squaw Valley Writing Conference. As preparation, I wrote an elevator pitch, boiling my novel down to 60 seconds of succinct intrigue that would induce the clawing of eyes, etc. I harangued countless friends, wrote 29 drafts of this thing and spent the four hour drive up to Lake Tahoe reciting my pitch in an engaging, natural fashion (side bar: also not part of the plan was the $360 speeding ticket I earned but that's another story). The first agent I approached listened to the first line before walking away to talk to someone higher on the food chain. The next two people to hear it -the last two- were other wannabe writers. And then I came home.
I couldn't get over it, the dashed hopes, all the hair and eyes that remained in tact, not a claw drawn the whole week I'd been gone, and on my desk, the folder stuffed with the 29 drafts of my pitch, mocking me and my well-laid plans. Plus, I was now on my second year of unemployment and funds were dwindling.
So I did the one thing I know how to do, the very thing that had got me into this mess in the first place: I read. Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. It healed me. It rubbed balm on my tattered ego, reminded me why I was doing this exercise in sadomasochism in the first place and gently propped me up at my laptop once more.
September 2011 is the folder I'm on now. Chapter Nine was printed this morning and added to the shoebox I began a few months ago. Yes, I'm single-handedly killing several forests, but printing out complete chapters and putting them in my orange shoebox is all I have in the world so I do it (on 99 % recycled paper, I promise).
It's been a year and a half, it's been four drafts and counting, and I have no idea what the plan is anymore. I do know the honeymoon is over; I am no longer the happy sparkly kid I was last year, Ms. Look at Me On My Writing Adventure. I know I am an unemployed vagrant who skulks around coffee shops no longer sure of what the hell she's doing while all around her people work, pop out babies, cook dinner every night and get regular haircuts.
One of the irritating side effects of being a writer is this hyper-self-awareness, so I also recognize I'm in the thick of it right now. I'm in this deep, dark mineshaft and I'm too far in not to keep going till I hit gold. Or till my hands fall off from frostbite, my blue fingers still clamped around the shovel.
I have no idea what 2012 will bring. This is not said to fish for compliments but as a fact. I could be picked up by a small independent press and earn $ 500 for my efforts. I could be drowning my sorrows in cheap whiskey while warming my hands at a bonfire made out of a heap of rejection letters.
None of that matters. From where I am, inside this tunnel, I can't see above or below. And that's probably for the best.
I no longer have a plan, I just have a goal.
Friday, September 30, 2011
Foray into the Normal
The morning of my 30th birthday, I arose and announced that I was buying myself a guitar. That afternoon, after five rounds of "Time of Your Life", which my sister had taught me a few months before, I decided to teach myself a new song. I settled on "American Pie". Of the ten or so chords it involved, I was familiar with three. I did not balk at this calculation. Not normal. But really, it was a simple matter of check chord chart, arrange fingers, strum and sing, check chord chart, arrange fingers, strum and sing and bada-bing-bada-boom, twenty minutes later, I had sung my way through the first verse. I felt like a rock star. A folk rock star. A geriatric folk rock star, but a rock star nonetheless. But see, then I put the guitar away and went back to my day job.
Not so with another whim I once had, one that has turned my life upside down, inside out, and half-way right side up again.
One day, while looking for a painting class in the Adult Ed catalog I came upon Intro to Fiction. I need to take a moment to ponder what would have happened if the catalog hadn't been arranged alphabetically. Meh. So, three weeks into the class, we did a timed writing exercise: ten minutes on X subject, go. A scene came to me that I couldn't stop thinking about, or writing about. Nine months later, I had a novel. Three years later, I quit my job to write the novel full time. Not normal.
The problem is, that's all I have. This one novel.
Recently, I've been freaking out because other writers seem to have short stories, poems, essays to their names. The other problem, the real one, is I don't care. I really really wanted to learn "American Pie", and I did. I can now play verse one in twelve minutes, eight if I forsake exact chords for a good foot-stomping beat. And I really want to write this novel.
My new plan for it, one that I think may help me reach the end (not The End- that's been reached several times with varying degrees of Bollywood Kitsch/Melodrama/Passable but not Perfect- but completion). It's what Anne Lamott says in her book, Bird by Bird: when you're feeling overwhelmed, look through a one inch frame. Write what you see there. It's been working like a dream. Well, a nightmarish dream, since it means working brilliantly but sloooowly, section by painstaking section, completion pushed somewhere beyond 2020. Still don't care.
In a further attempt at normalcy, I've decided to apply this plan to this blog. Because like everything else in my life, I was complicating it. Yes, Phiroozeh Romer can complicate blogging, which by definition is quick and easy, a mind spill, really. So no more two hour entries, no more faux poetic blurbs, from now on, I'm going to be normal. I'm going to write, in a few lines, something about my writing. Like my (newly published) friend, Annam Manthiram.
Here's to being normal like everyone else.
Not so with another whim I once had, one that has turned my life upside down, inside out, and half-way right side up again.
One day, while looking for a painting class in the Adult Ed catalog I came upon Intro to Fiction. I need to take a moment to ponder what would have happened if the catalog hadn't been arranged alphabetically. Meh. So, three weeks into the class, we did a timed writing exercise: ten minutes on X subject, go. A scene came to me that I couldn't stop thinking about, or writing about. Nine months later, I had a novel. Three years later, I quit my job to write the novel full time. Not normal.
The problem is, that's all I have. This one novel.
Recently, I've been freaking out because other writers seem to have short stories, poems, essays to their names. The other problem, the real one, is I don't care. I really really wanted to learn "American Pie", and I did. I can now play verse one in twelve minutes, eight if I forsake exact chords for a good foot-stomping beat. And I really want to write this novel.
My new plan for it, one that I think may help me reach the end (not The End- that's been reached several times with varying degrees of Bollywood Kitsch/Melodrama/Passable but not Perfect- but completion). It's what Anne Lamott says in her book, Bird by Bird: when you're feeling overwhelmed, look through a one inch frame. Write what you see there. It's been working like a dream. Well, a nightmarish dream, since it means working brilliantly but sloooowly, section by painstaking section, completion pushed somewhere beyond 2020. Still don't care.
In a further attempt at normalcy, I've decided to apply this plan to this blog. Because like everything else in my life, I was complicating it. Yes, Phiroozeh Romer can complicate blogging, which by definition is quick and easy, a mind spill, really. So no more two hour entries, no more faux poetic blurbs, from now on, I'm going to be normal. I'm going to write, in a few lines, something about my writing. Like my (newly published) friend, Annam Manthiram.
Here's to being normal like everyone else.
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