wake up

i am trying to reintroduce my 5AM wake up time from last year.

for months i was really good. i woke up at 5 made myself a powdered 'cappucino' and wrote for an hour. mostly i used my typewriter but sometimes i used my computer. i would do three pages longhand free writing first (as dictated by the Artist's Way) and then would work on my novel thingama (2-3 versions ago).

today i was up by 6 and i did a page of free writing and then i just stared at the screen and my brain sort of locked up. maybe it was the lack of 'cappucino.' maybe it was the fact that i am torn between 2 stories and multiple versions of one of them

• 20 something college student finds out her favorite teacher is pedophile
• family deals with teen pregnancy
• 15 year old in small midwestern town copes with change (at least 3 different versions of this one alone)
• something else entirely

i know i need to choose one and just stick with it, but i always seem to get crippled by doubt right around page 50. maybe it's because they are all at least a little bit autobigraphical. not one is 100% but they've all got a kernal of my life in them and suddenly i seem to doubt the validity of my own stories.

or maybe it's the lack of 'cappucino.' yeah, it's got nothing to do with low self esteem and everything to do with powdered beverages.

oh america

my writers' group met last night. it was only my second time attending but i read about 7 pages from my 1st draft (which totals about 49 pages in all) i read the part where one character tells another (her boyfriend) that she is 7 months pregnant.
i finished reading and the husband of our host for the evening poked his head out of the kitchen and began to speak about america and first of all what he hates about america (the usual) and then followed it with but what i love about america and what there is a wealth of in america is this great wealth of music and film and writing that is so true, that doesn't sugarcoat everything (he said something about the english having their fingers up their bums and making everything all flowery and stupid as well) you just tell it like it is and that was brilliant, what you just read it was everything that's good about america.

and i'm gonna say, first of all, that i think this is an overstatement, truly i think there's alot about america that is way better than my 1st draft of a partially finished novel. but secondly, that was really fucking nice to hear. i've been in a huge creative slump and that bit of unsolicited praise from an eavesdropper was pretty awesome. i felt like i did after i turned in my first story in osvaldo sabino's creative writing workshop in 1997 at wayne state university when he told me it was good enough to be published. better maybe.

so thanks america, i'll keep trying to bring the good.


ETA 16:28 8th jan 2007

I hope this doesn't come across as being too smug and self satisfied. i mean, yes i was pleased to receive such a huge compliment from a stranger and i am still pleased, but i don't necassarily believe it. it just made me feel really warm and, well, talented again. my mom has this thing about harping on me about how i need to keep writing because it is my 'gift from god' and again, i don't really believe that either (given my complicated relationship with the judeo-christian god) and she hasn't said it in awhile because i asked her to back off, because seriously, how do recover from being sold as having a gift from god if you actually suck? like that fergie, from black eyed peas says her voice is a gift from god, a vengeful old testament god maybe.

i'm veering off topic here.

the point i'm trying to make is that i don't want to seem too pompous and all ooh i'm so freaking talented i'm the best writer ever, worship me america, worship me! i'm actually feeling really baffled and pleased at the same time. i think i'm chuffed as they say on this soggy island. but i don't want to seem like a beg headed jerk, y'know?

bullet points

• I'm reading The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O'Farrell and it made me miss my bus stop last night even though I was getting motion sickness from reading on the bus. I just couldn't stop reading, that's how much I like this book. It is about the title character, duh, who is institutionalized in Edinburgh for 60 years for such crimes as refusing to cut her hair and just being generally difficult in the 20's. It's also about her greatniece who is asked to take her in after the institution is shut down to be sold for property value. It's a fractured telling of what happened from the point of view of the niece, Esme and Esme's sister who is suffering from Alzheimer's.
• That's a really bland description, it doesn't do the book justice. Maggie O'Farrell is really talented at the whole disjointed narration, she uses it pretty successfully in all of her books (although to be honest it was abit off putting in My Lover's Lover, my least favorite of her books, still an engaging read though.) After You'd Gone, her debut novel, uses it to excellent effect.
• Oliver has begun a new plan of attack on my sanity by destroying a tea and coffee related items. Yesterday I came home to find the french press in pieces on the kitchen floor and the he woke me up by pushing our glass jar of cammomile tea off the highest shelf in the house at 2AM. I tell myself that he's just a kitten and he doesn't understand that he's being incredibly difficult, but honestly, I'm beginning to wonder if he isn't being a huge pain on purpose.
• Some writing done at lunch yesterday but little else. Tonight I have no plans at all and I will use the time productively. I will, I will, Iwill.
• We came in a disappointing 4th place at the pub quiz last night, I blame the flag for Kazakhstan, and therefore the Borat movie, alongwith the logo for Continental Airlines and the slogan for Panasonic. Ideas for life my ass!
• Only two more days until I get to leave town and go to Copenhagen for the weekend. I am looking forward to slightly fresher air, the canals, good coffee, open faced sandwiches, and sleeping in.

my time alone or thinking about a family that is not mine but is, but isn't

i am not making the most of this week, sure it's only tuesday but i can already feel myself giving in to the slack. i had fried chicken for dinner last night, for goodness sakes! not good fried chicken either, fast food fried chicken that i will not give name to because i will lose the last shreds of respect anyone in the world ever had for me in the first place.

then america's next top model was the highlights show, damnit, and i didn't even turn off the tv and use that gifted hour to write, no, i found a repeat of SVU (with henry winkler as a bad man!) and watched that. but i barely even knitted and i still have two and a half scarves to go before my chrismukkah knitting is complete. dismal.

tonight is the pub quiz, but i have an hour and a half of solitude beforehand and i must not waste it. i did make up for things a little bit by writing on the bus today, but not enough, so tonight there must be more. if i'm not going to sleep well anyhow, then why bother trying at all. especially when i have the lives of the Atwood and Bernard families to sort out.

speaking of, the Atwood family, i don't think i want to keep that name? any suggestions? the family first names are Steven and Theresa (parents) and Charlie and Amelia (kids, 18 and 15 respectively) really it's the name Amelia Atwood that i like the least, so i need to either give them all a new last name or her a new first name. not sure which yet.

steven is still eluding me as a character. i can't figure out how his personality should be. sharlie remains sort of bland, i need to give him some fire and even some anger. theresa, jess and amelia are going well, but i think that's because i was working on them before. the bernard parents are coming along but i need to really fight against making them caricatures, in my head i see them in an old style english editorial cartoon with the title "The Bad Parents" on a banner above their heads. i don't like them but i need to make them real. i need to figure out how they got to this point. they must have been happy and in love with each other once, they must have been excited about their child at one time, how did they get to this moment when they can barely look at each other or her? what brought them to it. i need to boil it down.

a good thing though, writing in third person has been easier than i imagined it would be. i always always always write in first person and i am sort of pleased with myself for taking this on in third person. i kind of want to give the narrator more of a voice but i'm holding back right now, that's a stylistic choice i can make later, right now i would probably get bogged down.

employment

my employment is changing. i am being TUPE'd. TUPE is pronounced two-pee, and it means that because the company i work for lost their contract with the company where i am located i am being transferred to this new company. i imagine this is how professional athletes feel when they are transferred to a new team, except they get loads more money and they get to be on tv and they probably don't have to worry about whether or not their temps will lose their positions and then the retraining of the temps, so really it's probably not anything like that.

this weekend i went to the writers' group and a couple people asked me what i do. my response, something boring. the meeting was interesting and i got along really well with one of the guys. he lived in ann arbor for awhile and knew someone from detroit who claimed to have been raised by feral drag queens.
one guy is writing some neat sci fi with an interesting twist on the way spirits are able to move around and communicate, another is writing sort of bleurghy stream of consciousness stuff and his partner is writing a sci fi book about the near future and a quarrantined UK, there are two memoirs happening, one based in the tarot deck and another about a year spent trying to start making wine, and then the woman wo organisies is working on the 5th book in a series, of which two are published already that are sort of humourous takes on co-op living and the ideas of chosen family and i think prostitution sort of factors in as well.
i gave a really brief description of what i'm doing, and then felt really slackerly because i haven't been doing as much as i would like on it lately, and because i'm feeling sort of stuck. i keep getting caught up in the boring minutiae.
right now i just want to read crappy romance novels and eat bon bons and get so fat that a hole has to be cut into the wall of my flat to get me out of the house for my gastric bypass. or i want to get through this and actually write this lousy book and tell this lousy story, i just have to keep pressing on.

myabe i can get TUPE'd into the life of a successful novelist, like the chabon or atwood corporation could take over my contract, and i would just switch over with my benefits and salary in tact and possibly improved. that would be okay

back in the saddle again

these are the things i have recently accomplished

1. i am up to page 38 in the great semi-autobigraphical novel
2. i defended my decision to write something based on my life and the lives of me family and i stand by that decision because it isn't really about them. it's drawn from an incident that really happened but the people it's happening to are not the same as my family they are very very different.
3. i bought 2 turtle necks, one grew neck sweater, a shower curtain, 2 pairs of navy tights and a purse for the low low price of £24
4. i called the estate agent and made an offer on a house in nunhead. jeremy made the second higher offer and we'll know today if it was accepted. this house has a name rather than a number. you can't get more english than that!
5. i went to a really crowded and boisterous party on saturday night without having a panic attack, although i did leave early, but that's more about knowing my limits than mental illness.
6. i talked to my parents and remain in denial about the seriousness of my father's current condition. they are being very bright and waspy about the whole deal so i'm going to stay the same.
7. i made a scarf for jeremy's dad. it has cables!
8. i actually woke up and made it out the door and onto the bus and into work today. this is possibly the greatest and most amazing acheivment of all.

writing

there's a writers' group in my neighbourhood! the woman who is in charge has a couple published novels. dark humour s&m type stuff. she replied to my email right away and has added me to their mailing list and even though she used the word gentle in the description of the group i'm still going to go.

an aside: when i was in therapy dr. mary (i never called her this to her face, only in my head, in fact i never called her anything i would just begin talking about things totally unrelated to the issues i was having) would always tell me to be gentle with myself and i always thought this sounded like a load of hooey. i am already much too gentle with myself, i let myself slack off all the time. people have been gentle with me far too much over the course of my life, and i am pretty sure it is part of the reason why i never tried harder. constantly being rewarded for just doing enough is no way to motivate. wait except my dad was miserable. he could make me feel like shit for getting a regular a instead of an a+. once, when i was at college he left the most miserable guilt trip on my answering machine because of a poor spanish grade, so maybe this shoots my whole theory to hell?

the writing group though, i'm looking forward to it. a couple people are published and a few are not, i think that will be a good balance. they meet on saturday evenings but i'm okay with that. especially if the chemistry of the group works for me.

finding a good chemistry with other writers is tricky. i was very lucky when i was at wayne state to have a good group of friends who, like me, were sort of jerks. our manner of critique was 100% honest and true and you could absolutely trust what they were saying to you. if craig told me my story was a debacle then he was telling me that for my own good and it would be smart of me to listen. we all listened to each other. we weren't competitive because we were all very different writers. ted wrote his boozy beat inspired buddy tales, dave wrote his postmodern point driven pieces involving time travel and prometheus, craig wrote about his brutal military inspred tales, jessica wrote her wonky florida inspired stories filled with coccaine and antelopes and i wrote my first person narratives about coming of age among other things (except of course, for the debacle about the iron man triathalon, best not to think of it now). we all complemented each other perfectly.

of course, i lost touch with all of them. occasionally i hear from ted, usually when he's drunk. craig and i emailed a little bit when i found his info back in 2003 but he was in an MFA program and i was moving away so there wasn't a lot of time. dave and jessica i haven't heard from since 1999 and no amount of googling has brought them back to me.

i've tried to find that same balance but it never quite works out, i imagine it's because there's no alcoholic professor forcing us together anymore. graduation sent us off into different worlds.

i miss them all like crazy though, i miss the nights we closed down three bars and only barely stumbled home. i miss laying on the english dept floor peering under our professor's door to see if he really is in there like his office hours say (he had a sofa and was known to nap) and then finally saying fuck it and going to the bar to find him with another student ready to buy us a beer for our troubles.

so i will go next saturday and i will meet these people and i will do my best to remember that they will be different and that's okay. maybe at this point in my life i need something different.