Creative Non-Fiction (Both Auditory & Weekly): Metallica - Enter Sandman (Live With San Francisco Symphony Orchestra)

My consciousness crested on a wave of power chords, soaring violins, and icy air whipping by and throwing my hair against my face until it itched. Every inch of my skin felt alive—present. The heat was on full blast in the truck. My feet felt like I’d put them too close to a campfire, but the warmth reached a perfect blend with the night air right around my shoulders. Weeds, illuminated by silvery moonlight, blurred by my window as I smiled up at the constellations.

Brian turned down the music and looked over at me with a sly grin.

“Ready?” he asked.

“I—don’t know?”

His left hand drifted to a dial on the far side of the dash, turned it, and suddenly the headlights disappeared. For a moment, nothing else existed. The entirety of our future—school in the morning, college, marriage, our next fight—vaporized, leaving only that moment so full and heavy with moonlight, the growl of the old diesel engine, and the dim black-and-white view of Wormansville Road stretching out  in front of us as far as we could see. The burned-out shell of an abandoned farmhouse looked on at us from the side of the road. We couldn’t see lights in any direction—the big square headlights on the F-250 had been the only ones for miles.

Panic rose in my chest. I felt like I had just accelerated toward disaster.

“Amazing, huh?”

“No!” I gripped the upholstery, rooting the heels of my hands on the bench seat. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Aw, come on.” I couldn’t see his eyes. Part of me wished I had it in me to be more rebellious, more carefree, more of a risk-taker.

Before the turn onto Municipal he switched the headlights back on. Through my relief I could feel we were getting closer to home—a little farther away from being alone without a past or a future, just the two of us hurtling through the dark.

New Office!

People who know me well likely know how much I love the back room on the second floor of our house. The walls are a pleasing color, the south-facing windows let in an abundance of natural light, and I have managed to keep it more clutter-free than any other room in the house. I decorated it with an area rug and futon I love. I wrote the first draft of my manuscript at the tiny brown desk against the outside wall. It's a fantastic room. I even wrote about it during my 28 inspirations in February.



Well, today I destroyed it. I had originally planned to make this room my office once we remodeled the basement, but suddenly realized I could move it along more quickly by just switching the furniture in our upstairs rooms. After all, our ugly office in the middle room couldn't get much worse, right?



When we actually started moving furniture, though, it didn't seem like such a great idea anymore. I was about to ruin my sanctuary and change my favorite spot in the house forever. Also, look how much dust was under my Doug's desk. Gross!



However, I'm typing this sitting not in a windowless room with walls painted a blue-green I can't stand, but in the back room, looking out the window (yes, I do type and look out the window at the same time) and listening to nighttime bugs outside. My desk is amazingly clean. I feel like I'm sitting in an open space where I can do a lot of writing, not in a dark and stuffy clutter-cave that feels like a chore to be in.

I haven't forgotten that we worked really hard today and still didn't finish the job. The green room is such a disaster I had to close the door and pretend it doesn't exist. A few random items are still littering the floor in our new office. But I don't have classwork for a few weeks and Doug promised to keep working with me until we get it done. For now, small victories: look at this nice space! I'm really close to accomplishing one of my big goals for the year: creating a dedicated space for writing where I can be productive.

September Writing Goals

It's almost September! You might remember I recently decided to reevaluate my goals for the year and start setting small monthly goals that will (hopefully) keep me on track with what I want to accomplish in 2010.

September has its pros and cons in terms of making progress on my projects. On the plus side, I don't have class until September 27! This three-week break should help me get back in the groove with my writing, but I need to make sure I'm being mindful of all that freed-up time and using it wisely. However, we'll be traveling for two of my four school-less weekends. I need to make sure my goals are realistic given all the visiting we're in for.

That said, here's what I'm hoping for:

• 15 days of  20+ minutes of writing or editing.
  (As far as I can tell, I've done this for 8 days so far in August.)
• Work on editing my novel manuscript on at least 10 separate days.
• Set a date for a creative retreat weekend in late fall/winter.
• Finish the short story draft I started in August.
• Get my hands on some script-writing resources, or team up with someone who knows a thing or two about stage/screenwriting. Set a goal for starting a draft (and make sure it doesn't conflict with NaNoWriMo).
• See Five Women Wearing the Same Dress at Mobtown Theater.
• Register for NaNoWriMo 2010.
• Completely empty the portion of the basement I want to remodel, down to nothing but the bare floor and walls, and revise my budget/supply list for the project.
  (This will help get me closer to both a decluttered house and a better office/writing space.)
• Get out of the house for some cafe writing!

I'm honestly not sure if this sounds like too much or not enough to do in one month, mainly because I have a bad habit of setting (and not reaching) long-term goals and ignoring the need for short-term ones. I'll just have to see how I do this month and revise accordingly for October.

Separating Me

"He was expert in knowing the thoughts and actions of living beings"

– Vimalakirtinirdesha Sutra 2

"Jesus knew all people and needed no one to testify about anyone; for he himself knew what was in everyone."

– John 2:24-25

From Jesus and Buddha: the Parallel Sayings

I don't hang with organized religion too much, but I do believe that if we quit with our own fears, agendas, and wants, our greatest spiritual thinkers have a lot to teach us about life strategy.

Lately I've felt out of touch with myself. For a long time I thought it was because I wasn't writing on a regular enough schedule, but that's not quite it.

Talking to a friend today, I might have found a piece of the problem: I'm constantly reacting to the world. Rarely do I step back from a situation and just watch and listen. I'm always feeling something.

This isn't just about feeling like my life is a loosely controlled whirlwind of emotion. Writers are always writing, every second of every day. That means we're also always observing. And if I'm mostly reacting, mostly just seeing my own feelings and actions, then what does that say about the characters I write?

Creative Non-Fiction (Both Auditory & Weekly): Sweeney Todd - Not While I'm Around

And for this week, we take a little foray into the musical theatre. For context, I was imagining the song as performed by Helena Bonham Carter and Edward Sanders in the Tim Burton movie.

It's a little long(ish), so I'm sticking it behind the cut.

Being Found Out

I feel like I've talked a lot about this writing book I've been reading: Writing Alone, Writing Together: A Guide for Writers and Writing Groups. No matter, I feel like saying something more.

The author is unafraid to acknowledge—regularly, even—that creative people are insecure. I appreciate that. We are insecure. We deal with rejection all the time (if we're doing our jobs), we have on-again, off-again relationships with the work that sustains us. We bare our hearts to the world and hope they stand up to critique. That's why a passage like this really speaks to me:

Even as much as we want to be part of a writing group, many of us suffer anxiety about joining one. We're afraid of making the commitment, afraid that maybe we're not good enough. We don't want to look foolish or be found out (that we can't write, that we're fakes, that our writing is mediocre or worse).

Reading it in plain text makes it seem okay. Well, if other artists feel this way, even established, successful, and/or respected artists, then it must be acceptable for me to struggle once in a while, too.

How Much Do I Love Being Alone?

One of my goals for this year is to go on a creative retreat. I already have an ideal location all picked out. My family shares a little house on the Jersey Shore with (gasp) no cable TV, no internet access, no extras. Just a little bungalow with a three-block walk to the beach and a two-block walk to the bay. If you're really ambitious, you can plan a five-mile morning hike up to the northern point of the island to see some beach-y wilderness, shipwrecks, and plenty of shells and driftwood.

This sounds perfect for a weekend of solitude, the days quietly passed writing and taking photographs, right?

The only problem is, as antisocial as I can be sometimes, I don't really like being alone. I like being left alone, meaning my husband works on making a video game mod while I gnaw away at my manuscript (figuratively, of course).

But while I'm happy to engage in separate activities most of the time and meet in the middle for a movie or some two-player Little Big Planet, when my husband leaves for a significant period of time I tend to get the hell out of there. Guaranteed, when he starts up his four-hour night class this Fall, I'll be calling my best friend in the next neighborhood over to schedule weekly World of Warcraft and television dates.



So I'm torn. Half of me is in love with the zen-like quiet of the shore house in the Fall/Winter, the smell and feel of the beach, the removal from everyday life. But the other half is raising a cautionary finger and reminding me I'm most productive when I'm quietly engaged in parallel with someone else. That, and I ask my friends to babysit me when I'm faced with a long stretch of time in an empty house.

What's a girl to do? For now I'm going to pencil it in and think a little bit more about what I need and how I can give myself an amazing, productive, and (maybe semi-) detached weekend.

Side note: because I was traveling for a long weekend, the weekly creative non-fiction will be a little belated. Never fear, though, it will make its appearance tomorrow!

2010 Goals Update

Good morning, how are you?

I've been reflecting on my goals for 2010, and while some still seem admirable and totally attainable, I have learned a bit from setting full-year goals. For starters, they're tough to accomplish. I set a goal to finish editing my NaNoWriMo 2009 novel manuscript by the end of the year, but then the summer got unreasonably busy, I started grad school, etc., and work slowed down. Now I'm left to wonder if accomplishing that by year's end would really be a good thing, or if it would just mean I had rewarded myself with a rushed, shoddy manuscript.

That brings me to another point. Life happens. It's impossible to know at the outset what any given year will hold, and it's important to reevaluate goals and make midcourse corrections that make sense.

So how am I doing?

1. Finish editing my NaNoWriMo 2009 manuscript and send it out into the world.
   Not sure how I feel about this. Like I said, it might get revised.
2. De-clutter my house.  The whole thing.  Seriously.
   This is still an absolute must-do priority. the Salvation Army truck is coming on September 8, and I've been working a little bit every week to purge out the stuff I don't need.
3. Begin writing a stage or screen play, preferably as a collaborative project.
   Still admirable, attainable, and a big, big want.
4. Win NaNoWriMo again.
   Once we get to October, I'll have to decide if I think this is a good idea. Although, I'd like to try a collection of short stories.
5. Begin pursuing a graduate degree.
6. Compose an original song.
7. Learn to play a song fluently on the piano, including singing.
8. Audition for something.
9. See a Single Carrot Theatre performance.
10. See a Broadway musical.
11. Write a poem and share it, even if it isn't very good.
12. Write a short story.
    Working on it now!
13. Fill three notebooks.
14. Starting in May, get out of the house to write at least once per month (and document it).
    This might be its own post. Let's leave it at that.
15. Create a writing space in the house (with desk and comfortable chair) where I feel productive.
    Chair: done. Otherwise, see #2.
16. Starting in May, write for at least 15 minutes every day (or at least 90% of the time...). Set (and meet) realistic writing goals every month.
    I'm going to try this for September.
17. Take a creative retreat weekend (and document it).
    This is likely its own post, too. We'll talk later.

How about you? Any big goals for the year? What have you been surprised to accomplish, and what has fallen by the wayside?

Creative Non-Fiction (Both Auditory & Weekly): The Mountain Goats - Sax Rohmer #1

This one is a little more rough-draft-y than some others (especially my piece about the Atlantic City boardwalk). It more closely resembles the raw writing in my notebook in style/sentence structure, which is sometimes useful to share. In any case, enjoy!

Few people understand why I love getting to the office early, at least an hour before nearly anyone else. Maybe precious few love waking up early, stepping off the bus while the sunlight still has its morning colors, sitting surrounded by empty desks, but that just leaves it pristine for the rest of us.

In the middle of all this emptiness, though, still missing the morning coffee I’ve temporarily abandoned to kick a caffeine habit, the space starts to absorb my productivity. Minutes pass as if falling through a sieve. If I don’t fill the air with something substantial it will create a vacuum that carries me all the way until 9:00.

Luckily, no one is there to form opinions on my music selection.

John Darnielle’s voice, anything but universally likable, sends an electric charge through my chest straight down to my bellybutton. I find myself mouthing the lyrics, drumming on my desk, dying to feel his words vibrating in my throat but settling for triggering a chain reaction in my synapses. Somehow his words just cover me in the English language, make me delight in my native tongue, just the same as staring out the bathroom window early in the morning in my old college apartment made me amazed at my own ability to perceive color. Rusting tin roofs, red painted wood on the side of a garage, green Victorian house next door, everything peeling and faded under the big open sky.

When I close my eyes, tilt my head back, open my mouth just a little during the chorus I realize how much I should listen for the door, for footsteps out in the lobby that might signal prying eyes. Because soon, very soon, this will end. The door will slam one, two, three times, and the workday will begin in earnest, human energy flowing all around me.

Out of My Element

I've been avoiding drafting out a short film idea, presumably because I've never written a script before and I'm not sure how to start. The feel of it in my head has me enamored, though, so today I set to work writing it as a short story.

I found myself out of my element again when I realized that half the subject matter required me to break out of the old write what you know comfort zone. I was writing an intense narrative about an experience I only knew peripherally.

When I'm evaluating an artist, versatility is one of the first qualities that comes to mind. When I watch American Idol or So You Think You Can Dance (no spoilers! I haven't watched the SYTYCD finale yet), contestants can really only impress me one of two ways: make the hair on my right arm stand up or give an amazing performance outside of their style. I love Chuck Palahniuk, but I'm often disappointed that his style and plot structure remain so constant across his body of work. The worst thing an artist can do is fail to evolve, grow, test new boundaries.

That said, write what you know is such ubiquitous advice it's become cliché. It's how I wrote 50,000 words in one month last November.

But it's important to remember, Annie Proulx wrote Brokeback Mountain as a 60-something-year-old woman who had spent all but a few years of her life in the northeast United States. She won an O. Henry award for the story, and the movie adaptation won a slew of prestigious film awards. That's pretty amazing, and it reminded me how important it is to stretch my artistic muscles.

The Ebb and Flow of My Desk

You honor your writing and your writing self when you create a special place for your work. Bring to it all that supports and enhances your writing. Keep it clean and free from clutter. You know the old saying, that a cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind. With all that mess, how can thoughts emerge without their edges catching on whatever is left lying around?

– Judy Reeves, Writing Alone, Writing Together: A Guide for Writers and Writing Groups

If a cluttered desk means a cluttered mind, then my desk is a perfect representation: always maintaining a calm, clear, productive, inviting space, but the clutter around the edges always threatens to tip the scales into claustrophobic panic.

Creative Non-Fiction (Both Auditory & Weekly): Street Musicians, Video Games, and Wandering Thoughts

This week's creative non-fiction is really meta-writing, a window into a sleepy morning trying to write but continually getting distracted.

Writing Together, But Alone First

I recently got a book from the library called Writing Alone, Writing Together: A Guide for Writers and Writing Groups. I have some ideas floating around my head for an urban writers' circle, but I want to do it right. I don't have a particularly vast amount of time to waste on something that's never going to get off the ground.

So far, though, the first portion of the book discusses writing practice for working alone—not unlike Writing Down the Bones, my perennial favorite writing book.

The author, Judy Reeves, points out what many of us know already: the key to become a real and true writer (and one who writes, no less) isn't getting published or writing something great, it's making time to write several times a week. This passage, which draws from prominent psychologists/researchers, gave me a lot to chew on:

The most important talent may be the talent for practice itself...the most important role that innate factors play may be in a person's willingness to engage in sustained training.

 Such a simple concept, but it gives any kind of artist a lot to think about.

Creative Non-Fiction (Both Auditory & Weekly): Jay Sean - Down

Despite quitting caffeine this week, I still managed to write!  While survival without my morning coffee has been painful at best, I'm hoping this little detox will do well for my health.  Anyway, without further ado, the song of the week:

I’m trying to write about the Atlantic City boardwalk , with its air hung low and heavy and thick. My body slows under its salty residue, vaporized pieces of the sea adhere to my pores. Fish and garbage and funnel cake battle for airspace overhead and the smell falls on me like someone just threw a blanket over my head in a hot attic.

Throngs of people push past one another, most of them drunk or high and just young enough to be lost in their own sea of miniskirts and stilettos. Pop music struggles to be heard, struggles for relevance in the cacophony, ends up sounding caricatured like that person in the group who just never feels heard. Except no one quite expects Jay Sean to struggle for the floor, creating a backdrop that gets lonelier and lonelier against the din, the carnival lights, the ambulance that has pushed past the revelers to collect a man who has overdosed beneath a dark and decaying pavilion.

I’m trying to write this in my head like the one person in the corner actually listening to Jay Sean, ready to nod and say “oh yeah, I got you, ‘baby don’t worry / you are my only / even if the sky is falling down.’ I was listening.” I’m writing this in my head because I’m waiting in line for the bumper cars, half-listening to my friends and everyone else’s, such a flood of conversation.

Dropped in the middle of all this humanity—the humidity, the thin and hopeful pop music, the flashing lights and bells and carnies trying to sell a seat on a barstool with a water gun—yes, this crush of humanity, I wonder how it’s escaped everyone. I want to open my eyes wide because maybe this is the end of the world. This place seems like the last sad, bombastic, completely bizarre outpost of humanity, as if beyond the light pollution orb of this noisy pier is just nothing—everything ending.

Yet everyone is going on like this is just another fun party, no impending apocalypse except maybe for that drunk girl writhing on the ground. Suddenly the haze feels too heavy, like I can’t stand, and I feel desperately lonely for a quiet night inside, far away from this carnival where everyone comes to overdose, to pay another human being to push them in a cart, to take a group picture with the casino lights smiling in the background.

Everyone still keeps talking, eagerly awaiting our turn to hand over those paper tickets for a ride, haphazardly crashing into one another as the floor and ceiling throw off sparks out of time with the music—another party.