Category Archives: Put the pen to the paper and see what develops

Tough call

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For future reference, if you’re out of town and get a request to send a partial submission to the agent you really, really, really hoped would read your debut novel, it will cost you $30 to print it at Office Depot and $176 to print it at FedExKinkosFedOfficeFedWhatever.

Tough call. But  I think since David Foster Wallace’s agent actually wants to peruse my novel, I’ll go with the $176. Because there *must* be a reason paper and ink cost six times at FedEx, right?  Like, they’ll use their special lasers to make my writing even better, right? Or print in in black and white gold, right?

By the way, did I just seem all casual about the fact that the agency that found DFW in the slush pile is at least potentially interested in my novel? Sorry. Didn’t mean to make it seem off-handed. There isn’t an emoticon for “wetting my pants right now in fear, as I sob in relief,” is there?

Writhing on the floor

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It’s a lot easier to send out a manuscript to an agent you don’t know than to people you admire.

So I”m curled up in the fetal position in a cafe, writing breathless emails to people I would never, in a million years, have read my book, asking them to uncap a red pen and let me have it. Really, really, let me have it.

No wonder most authors I admire were alcoholics. This shit is scary.

Not because they will  tell me the book can be better. For they will, and should. Not because they won’t like me if they hate my writing. You can’t write what other people want to hear; you can only write the voices in your head.

So I’m not sure what the scary part is.

Okay, yes, of course I know. You know what casting directors expect when audition music cues? We all know—feel—on both sides of the mike that it go one of three ways. Either the voice I hear in my head moves the audience; passes, forgettable, though the minds of the audience; or turns the stomachs of the audience, making them laugh at my ridiculous self delusion.

Well, this is the moment when that music is cued.

And it’s just nauseating.

Have I taught you people nothing?!

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This morning’s blog stats note that someone found Naptime Writing by Googling “crutches make me nauseous.”

People, people, people. Or, really, person, person, person. Nauseous means making others sick. The smell of vomit is nauseous. When you smell it, you are nauseated. Or it nauseates you. Saying crutches make you nauseous means that using crutches makes you look so disgusting that people retch when they see you.

Is that true? Damn, I thought I looked a bit schlumpy on crutches, but I didn’t worry that people were hurling the contents of their stomachs into trashcans and gutters just watching me crutch by. That’s some serious problem you’vt there, Google reader.

Also, please read all my other grammatical posts. I’m guessing you put apostrophes all over the f—ing place.And you need help.

You know you do.

(btw, don’t turn to Strunk or White. Those f—ers don’t know their that from their which…love this piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education by linguist Geoffrey Pullum.)

Blog meme

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Okay, Ink. This one’s for you…

Anyone who wants to play along, we welcome you. Give us a link in the comments and we’ll go read your less snarky replies.

  1. How did you come up with your blog title OR what does it mean?
    I began the blog on a dare from someone I adore, who told me that if i was so nervous my writing was crap, I should start a blog and see who came to read. I was trying to think up  a name when a squall erupted in the baby monitor. I realized I could only write at naptime, and that was part of the blog’s raison d’etre *and* neuroses.
  2. What are your general goals for blogging?
    Sanity. Connection with the other wackjobs who think the way I do. Exorcising demons about isolation and writerly worthlessness
  3. Do people “in your real life” know that you blog and do they comment on your blog OR is it largely anonymous?
    Everybody knows…I might need an anonymous shadow blog soon.
  4. How often do you post (x per week)?
    Usually 5x but I have no expectations for myself.  I just have an inability to shut up.
  5. How often do you read other blogs (x per week)?
    Once, maybe twice. Sorry blogobuds.
  6. How do you select blogs to read (do you prefer blogs that focus on certain topics or do you choose by tone or…?)
    I surf by tag and generally find favorites by pilfering blogrolls of my favorites.
  7. Do you have any plans to copy your blog entries in any other format, 0r do you think that one day, you’ll just delete it all?
    Copy into journal; steal some stuff for fiction writing
  8. What are the things you like best about blogging?
    Easier than bathroom walls; garners an audience, no matter how small, who likes to read my blatherings; makes me feel more sane because others share my insanity; makes me feel heard and for that reason unburdens Spouse; no editor, no deadline, no peer review, no mediation; found peeps I never would have otherwise, and really, genuinely appreciate what they’ve added to my life
  9. What are the things you don’t like about blogging?
    feels totally egomaniacal and vapid…don’t like to contribute to the noise because now I’m part of the problem.
  10. How do you handle comments?
    Accept all that aren’t offensive. Didn’t reply to comments in the beginning because it felt silly. Now use it as dialogue because commenters take the time so they deserve acknowledgment.  I rarely check back to the blogs on which I comment, though, because I am offering a thought that usually doesn’t need response.
  11. Optional: add your own topic here: any burning thoughts to share on blog etiquette? desired blog features? blog addiction?  blog vs. facebook?
    Are you kidding me? I have forty-two other things to be doing and you’re offering a fill-in-the-blank? To you I say bah. That’s right. BAH!

Well, nobody is bleeding, so I guess it was a good day

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Spouse gave me a glorious day of writing as penance for the two trips he’s taken this month. I ate, I wrote I breathed with my eyes closed a few times. I got in and out of the car with ease, and managed not to have a meltdown over situations large or small. It was a good day. I hit 80,000 words, and not just schlock. Stuff I could put my name near, if not on.

I came home at 7:30, at which point in a regular day dinner is done, the house is tidied (by a three-year-old, so it ain’t spic-n-span, but still, toys are in their place), bath is done, jammies are donned, teeth are brushed, and stories are underway. Tonight, though, at 7:30, I walked in, and a mud and blueberry smeared boy greeted me, beaming, at the door. He was finishing his cereal, covered in marker tatoos and stamps. The house looked like a bomb filled with puzzle pieces, toy cars, bristle blocks, a miniature tea set, and cat vomit went off. The sheets, which I change every Sunday, were full of sand from a post-playground nap.

To be fair, the bath was already drawn, the kid had a burrito and banana before the cereal, and the cat vomit was all over my stuff, so it’s understandable that it got overlooked.

So I put my happy, smeared, tatooed boy to bed and thanked his father for the day of writing. ‘Cuz if we ever get a room of our own, we’re willing to tolerate an awful lot in the sandy, blueberried, markered, late for bed department.

At least I didn’t come home at 10, like I prefer to on my increasingly frequent days off. They might have been doing shots and playing poker.

And having a damned fine time.

Journal and publisher jitters

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I really need to send off this article so I can clear it out of my head and either begin another or finish my book. But as always, I’m much more confident in the process than in the result. I’ll spend weeks, unless I stop myself, editing and proofreading and editing and proofreading and editing and proof…(getting boring for you, too?)

Why is it I am willing to do 99% of the work, really throwing myself into something and doing my best, but when it comes to asking for approval and money, I stop short, more willing to keep a backlog of solid work than finishing by asking for recognition/publication?

My middle name…

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…should have been ultracrepidarian. I come from a long line of those to whom the adjective can and should be applied. And I am poster child for ultracrepidating, this month more so than I have been for years. In high school they called me Diane Chambers, and I was flattered they didn’t figure out I was Cliff Claven.

But seriously, until Dr. Goodword I didn’t know exactly how to best insult those members of my family who are even more ultracrepidarian than I am.

And you know who you are.

Speaking of good words, someone please take up this logophilic blog…if you don’t I will have to, and I have enough going on right now.

Writers’ deaths are the new nihilism

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It seems the steady cadence of writers’ bodies dropping into their coffins is the most recent lash strike with which layers of the modern world structures—the steady sense of self and reliability of at least a few things our culture used to believe in—are falling to a postmodern erosion, a whittling away in which there is no new path or understanding revealed.

Writers are leaving us, and there is no clear sense of what will be next, what will happen to our art, words, and lives. This is reality; this is postmodern nihilism. And this is what Cornel West calls the “lived experience of coping with a life of horrifying meaninglessness, hopelessness, and (most important) lovelessness.”

Goodbye, Vonnegut. Goodbye Updike. And, postmodern reality help us, goodbye David Foster Wallace.

At the risk of sounding modernist, what comes next? I know Updike’s death today isn’t eschatological (I didn’t even like his books), but still…

(For tonight, I foresee a healthy dose of Counting Crows and Ben Folds. Morose, surreal, and evocative beauty soothes in just such a situation.)

Sorry, folks, the tape flags are here.

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Uh-oh. Office Depot just delivered a bunch of stuff, including the tape flags, the arrival of which cues the beginning of my whirlwind research for a February conference presentation.
I gotta go read, y’all, then write. So I have to swear off daily posts for a whil, or I’ll never get this paper done in time to present it. It’s been several years since I presented at a conference, confounded by that choice to stay at home with Peanut and actually raise him without the TV, phone, or computer on when he’s awake, so I have to pinch my spare minutes and read some critical theory at naptime.

Sayonara, mostly. We’ll play again when I’m done with the paper.

–me

It’s too easy to screw up contemporary English, so now you’re butchering Shakespearean English, too?

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Sign painted on outdoor shopping mall of upscale shops: Feel not shame for thou (sic) love of shoes.

Thou love? No, you dunderheaded idiots. (I know, I know. I taught critical thinking. If you insult the party to whom you’re talking, you generally have no point. But this is a collection of stores who would sell me (if I had that kind of money or cared what I looked like) a $150 sweater and $200 pair of shoes while befouling my sensibilities and dainty editor’s eyes. Shit like that makes our retinas BLEED, y’all.)

Who is hiring these writers, and who is hiring these advertisers?

Thou is a pronoun. It’s Elizabethan “you.”  Thy is a possessive pronoun. Sixteenth century “your.”

So your big marketing push this holiday season reads: “Do not be ashamed of you (sic)  love of shoes.” Take it from me: you meant “thy” love of shoes.

And you painted it on the wall. Like your nudge-nudge-wink-wink lame attempt at a joke is supposed to get me to swerve off the road and into your dank, dimly lit parking garage in the unholiest of all consumerist greed-fests: December. You think classing up being elbow-deep in polyester and perfume-reeking humanity makes shopping somehow more appealing? Well, you’re entitled to your opinion. But you’re not entitled to your own version of Elizabethan English. Use a dictionary when you’re writing. Or an editor. Or stop letting the boneheads in the strategy department write your advertising.

***

On an upbeat note, I’m pleased as always to congratulate Trader Joe’s for being one of the few stores in the nation to have a sign reading, “12 items or fewer.” Kudos. Your “unique grocery store” image remains credible to the educated but underpaid masses who traipse into your store for an affordable selection of organic, sugary, and obscure. Thank you for having hatch green chili bread, organic egg nog, and Jack Daniel’s all ready for me, btw, so that my trip down the twelve-or-fewer aisle is particularly sparkly this holiday season.

Please, hire an editor or proofreader.

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I cannot, can’t, will not, won’t go to a coffee chain whose napkins proclaim that their efforts will leave the world with “less napkins.” What, in the name of all that is holy, did David Foster Wallace not explain to us in his review of Bryan Garner’s A Dictionary of Modern American Usage but that structural linguistics, as descriptive yet still highly judgmental are a farce. Written and standard English need flexible but firm prescriptive rules. The descriptive tack is a ruse, allowing in errors in the name of colloquial usage, yet ignoring other, legitimate alternate usages based in judgment and priorities that hide nothing less than a political agenda.

In other words, just because some people say it incorrectly doesn’t make it correct. Or cute. Think differently.

Please, advertising companies, hire professional editors. You can’t say “less napkins” just because enough people don’t know the rule. It’s “fewer napkins.” You can count napkins. Therefore you can know just how many fewer napkins there are. Just because supermarkets get away with the egregious Ten Items or Less (sic) rather than opting for the correct Ten Items of Fewer; and just because advertising companies get away with the chalkboard-forkdragging of “Where Are You At?” rather than the simpler, more elegant, and freaking correct “Where Are You?” does not mean that you can claim frequent American usage and refuse to proofread your freaking napkins. Written language is standard as used by educated writers. And it’s fewer napkins. You can’t count sugar. So there you get to use “less sugar.” You can count cars. Fewer cars. You can’t count traffic. Less traffic. Fewer napkins, less sugar, fewer cars, less traffic. Less pollution, for that matter. And apparently, far, far fewer writers who actually know the language.

Sign of the apocalypse.

Can’t stop laughing

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I’m really not okay with linking to another blog as my post, but I can’t help it. My abs hurt from laughing so hard, and the only mascara I’ve worn in two months is dripping onto my “hey, you’ve taken out your contacts, shouldn’t you be in bed” glasses.

http://thebloggess.com/

Have at it. Twisted, hilarious FREAK, she is.

Love it.

And on her other site:

whose god is nicer

I think that says it all.

Well, now, that explains a lot.

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Existential crises call for desperate measures. So do two major moves in two months. At naptime today, therefore, I pulled out the Feng Shui book (yay for reclaiming my books and yay for Ohmega Salvage’s awesome collection of recycled craftsman built-in bookcases and yay for sixteen boxes of books unpacked and out of my freaking way) to see if it could fix my life.

Now, I have no idea what I’m doing when it comes to Feng Shui. Can’t even pronounce it, though I try hard. And I don’t know if it works. But I know it feels, in a desperate “clinging to guns and religion” way, like I have control of the uncontrollable if I have tall rectangles in the east and round metal accents in the west. It’s one of those “can’t hurt, might help, just don’t tell anyone you know or they’ll laugh at you then have you taken off their ‘call when in need of rational and logical help with personal dilemmas’ list” kind of things.

So today’s discoveries put into perspective a few, um, issues in my life. First, we keep finding houses where our money and romance are figuratively in the toilet. This is the third residence in which our bathroom sits squarely in the west, the tiny corner of our universe in which our income and lovin’ ought flow. Instead, there’s a steady stream of waste, dirt, crayons, and nonsense flowing down the drain. Explains mucho about the continued ease with which we lose what little money we have.  [Thanks financial sector a–holes. Like being a stay-at-home mom wasn’t detrimental enough to my future retirement. In 2054 I’m finally gonna have to break our Wal-Mart boycott so I can get a job as a greeter and support myself in the squalor to which I’ve become accustomed.

So my money and my marriage are in the crapper. (Sorry, Spouse. But you saw it coming in the wedding ring fungus, didn’t you? It was nice while it lasted. But the feng shui book says our love’s being flushed down the drain, dude. And you know that if I read it in a book, it’s the law. So plan on having dwindling affection and interest soon…oh, the ring around my finger under the ring around my finger already did that? You’re creeped out by a little rash on my third finger? Well, It’s you’re fault it’s there. Yes it is. Yes, it is. Yes. It is. Are you hearing me? Yes it is. Don’t pull out your logic with me, Mister. Fine, it’s your fault our money and marriage sector is in the bathroom. No I didn’t. No, I didn’t. No. I didn’t. True, but that’s because…I’m done with this. No, the garage isn’t in our marriage sector. Oh, ha ha. Yeah, maybe if you’re in there things WILL get better. Bah.)

Just after that eight direction, nine ki number pronouncement that we’re poor and nasty to each other because of the sewer placement, I found this lovely tidbit:

“Maybe, for example, you find that you are edgy, irritable, and tense quite a lot of the time….It would be wise to avoid spending a great deal of time in [the north-east and south] of your home. If possible, position your bedroom in the west where chi energy is more settled and contented.”

Hmmm. So I should stay out of the living room, dining room, and bedroom, and sleep in the shower? Makes perfect sense. My irritability doesn’t stem from 32 months of interrupted sleep and full daylight hours focus on a wild, strange, and often irrational creature. I’m not cranky because I’m having trouble adjusting to a reality where my life is not my own, my time is not my own, and six of my greatest hopes and dreams are on hold for the honor of raising a loving and caring human being. Nope. It’s ‘cuz I live in a house where the dining room makes me “feel on edge”  and “impatient,” the entryway makes me “tired from lack of rest,” and the bedroom leads to “slow progress in career.”  So I need a house without a north-east, east, south-east, south-west, and west. I’ll bet I can get a good rate on renting a piece of paper, because it’s the only two-dimensional structure I know that will eliminate those issues.

The bigger problem? The placement of my son’s room apparently makes me “overly controlling of others.” Oh, yeah, that‘s the problem. ‘Cuz I’ve existed on that plane since, well, since…oh, yeah. 1972. I don’t think there’s a crystal or mirror remedy for that one, feng shui friends. It would seem that I exist in a vortex where there is only northwest. Mmm. Maybe it’s good we didn’t pick Portland. I might have exploded from the vortex created between my need to control and my relative powerlessness. Or I would have had 17 cats. ‘Cuz they listen, right?

Tell you what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna embrace my inner incomplete task, my perpetual on edge, my tiredness from lack of rest (I’m sorry, how is that not a cause and effect clause all unto itself? Do you really need a room in the wrong quadrant of the compass to be tired from lack of rest? Is there anyone who is revived from lack of rest? If so, will they take over nights at our house, with nightmare-y kid and attachment parenting central, and cats who yowl for people to come to them instead of seeking heat and food themselves? And, while you’re at it and up at 3am anyway, for all the other perfectly normal children in the world who don’t sleep well until they are three or four? ‘Cuz there are a bunch of them, and that one bastard who’s thriving on lack of rest really owes the rest of us.)

So call me, rested person. We need to put you in my bedroom while I sleep off my marital fungus and controlling irritability in the bathroom.

In the midst of flipping through the book to find cheap solutions to increase tree energy and decrease me energy throughout the house, I found a lovely little gem: the chart of prevailing influences for the year and position of my nine ki number. And with a little math I realized that this year’s existential crisis is not due to an inbalance in my needs, nor an extended, yet normal transition mothers experience in which they new and different priorities smash violently into old happiness and self-actualization. No, no. I’m having a tumultuous year because it’s part of a universal cycle. Like the Fourth Turning, only on a personal level. So this is like another Strauss and Howe Crisis season and ancient Chinese centre year. Yeah. See, for people born Feb 5ish through the following Feb 4ish of 1918, 1927, 1936, 1945, 1954, 1963, 1972, 1981, 1990, and 1999, this is a uncomfortablly flux-y year. Like your chi has gas. One of those “put off decisions ‘cuz you’re in for a whirlwind of changes and nothing will be the same next year” kind of years. Oooooh. Yes. I see.

Next year is a year to plan and organize. No point in that now. 2010 is for romance (fungus gone, maybe?). 2011 is for ambition. 2012 is for passion. 2013 is for studying. 2014 is for progress. 2015 is for starting something new. 2016 is for more progress. See? in eight years I’ll be making some progress. Gee. That’s all I needed. To be reassured that it’ll only take a decade. Ah. All better.

Except that I’ll have a teenager in my house. Not sure that bodes well for progress, but we’ll see.

Thanks feng shui. For the new sleeping place and the new outlook. I’ll have several books published, a PhD, a new job, and some sex by 2016. All I needed was a plan mass-produced with absolutely no knowledge of my life other than my birthday. How wonderful to know that, like, 10% of us are having a crappy-ass year but have nine years to go before it happens again. Yay. Feng shui, you’re the best. Remind me to get a crystal to hang over my calendar. ‘Cuz we have another couple of months of Indecision 2008.

Get off thy ass and get to work

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You know, I could continue to waste naptime blogging, reading other people’s blogs, and unpacking the eight-freaking-thousand boxes walling me into this new place. But I blog schlock read by an average of 50 people a day; I read awesome blogs that make me regret not doing more academic work, not writing, and not getting my life in perspective; and unpacking boxes just makes me mad that we have so much crap (for the normal triumvirate of wasteful capitalism, depleted savings, and un-zen clutter).

So I’m off to work on one paragraph of a novel, and to find the list of academic articles that showed enough promise to warrant someone to scrawl “work on this and have it published” in the margins.

See you when I have something decent to show for my life.

[are you f@ck*ng kidding me? I was spellchecking and The Tiny Tyrant awoke. So all I have to show for today’s naptime is a clean sink and a resolution to do something productive tomorrow. Godd@mn it.]