The sun is still too cold here for true laziness.
Another piece rejected, but this time with a nice, personalized rejection letter stating that my story made it through to the final round of editorial deliberations, but didn’t win the prize. This is better than two weeks ago’s generic rejection, but rejection still.
So, for April two yeses, and so far for May, two nos. In fiction land, batting 0% is actually a very positive score, but you know what would be far more awesome than 0%, that’s right, 100%. A girl’s got to dream.
And now I return to proof-reading.
I have wondered lately if I am living in a very quiet Scandinavian, possibly north German, film with very little dialogue and very little noise. In my backyard, I can listen for wind on grass and here each blade bend as it rushes through. Like an art-house movie walking from empty room to empty room, trailing my fingers behind on the wall as I go. I read a book on the back porch in the sunshine with no one around.
Lately, everything has been quieter.
In high school, I took a Writer’s Craft course in Grade Eleven. For each assignment, we had to submit massive amounts of pre-work, like detailed planning of plot points, character charts, at least three prior drafts, etc. The teacher maintained that one could not write a good story without doing all these things. Dutifully, because if there is one thing I am good at, it is following mindless rules, I did all her pre-work. A friend in the course did none. Said friend did better on every single assignment than me, even though that should have been impossible under the teacher’s rules.
So yes, high school is dumb.
But also, I jumped through all these hoops about How To Write A Story that felt unnatural to me and didn’t do well. I vowed not to do it again.
I mean, character sheets? That is not how I work. I usually only know as much about a character as is necessary and do not know things like what their favourite song was in high school, how many movies they watch a month, what colour socks they wear, unless it is somehow relevant. Planning out plot points? Here is how I write a story. I get an idea. Sometimes it is a large thought-out idea (the novella was the initial thought of comparing the International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War to the Muhajideen of the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan, plus pregnancy, yeah, don’t ask, and trust me, it isn’t working out so well), sometimes it is a few words (I really love the words Happy Valley-Goose Bay, and later found some things that fit into a story that I could call that). Then I write some scenes, usually dialogue, in my head when I can’t sleep. Then maybe a week or two later, I sit down and write start to finish in a notebook over a few days/weeks/months depending on the length. How I write from start to finish having not planned much out, I do not know. It just happens.
Last week, I found out I didn’t place in a writing contest. So, I never place in writing contests, so I should at least be used to it. But for this writing contest, there were all these helpful How To Write A Story hoops to jump through and I jumped through them and now I’m annoyed because I clearly did not learn my lesson the high school time and did it all again for no reward. So, yes, Einstein (literally), Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, this is me.
It would be nice to win a contest though.
So I have a lot of anger lately at a lot of people. Basically, that Killer’s song when they say don’t you put me on the backburner, that’s the anger I have. People not replying to emails, probably for valid reasons, but when I get an email from someone in which she complains about how much she hates it when no one replies to her emails, yet hasn’t replied in two weeks to the email I sent her, these are aspects of life that make me angry.
In my head, unable to sleep last night/this morning, I started writing about this. Of course, I’ll consolidate a bunch of people and make a lot of things up, but the story is worthless. What a passive-aggressive way to deal with being sad – I’ll write a nasty story about people I know to make myself feel better. I can’t do anything with a story like that. I’ll probably still write it though.
I read the following books:
- A Far Off Place by Laurens van der Post: There was so much rah-rah colonialism that I readily accepted for the prequel, A Story Like The Wind, I don’t know why I couldn’t get past it this time. Anytime that Francis is by himself, the book runs dull and slow. The first third, before they get to the Kalahari, is so minutely detailed in things I couldn’t care less about. Kalahari-time is much better, but still, I didn’t attach to the story in the same way I did the grossly changed Disney movie I watched a thousand times as a kid.
- Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
- The Fear by Peter Godwin: Unlike Godwin’s earlier two books on Zimbabwe (ici et ici), this didn’t draw me in, probably because this book is more reportage and less memoir. Facts and I are disagreeing lately.
- Beautiful Ruins by Jesse Walter: It starts out shlock. Actually, come to think of it, it ends shlock too, but by then you’ve kind of grown attached with a warm fuzzy feeling inside so you’re willing to forgive the shlockiness.
Best book: Life After Life: I wasn’t keen at first – a Kate Atkinson, non-mystery novel that isn’t Behind The Scenes At The Museum, with a bizarro meandering time setup. The first few iterations, I kept an eyebrow raised and my mouth shut. Then, like a champagne cork popping, everything worked. I lent the book out and now I want it back to re-read again, to get Geoff to read it so we can discuss, all of that.
This month was a slow reading month. I’m still ponderously going through Swann’s Way, and I started Far From The Tree, another huge book, even though Andrew Solomon’s blurb on When A Crocodile Eats The Sun made me rageful a few months ago. I haven’t felt like reading. When I should read, instead I watch Mad Men in a reduced browser and play Solitaire alongside.
I watched:
- Game of Thrones: Am I the only one who hates Daenerys? I hate her so much. All that white-saviour-privilege-I want I want I want tantruming. My blood pressure rises whenever she comes on screen and ruins the rest. Actually, maybe the constant unnecessary nudity ruins everything. Or Aiden Gillen‘s unstable accent (go back to running Baltimore Carcetti!). Or maybe I’m just missing something. Game of Thrones is good, but it isn’t The Wire good. It isn’t even Mad Men good. I watch to see if the characters I dislike will die soon. That will make me happy.
- Mad Men: So I hate Daenerys, but I don’t hate Betty Draper. Maybe only in Season Three I haven’t got to her being awful, but I don’t understand the hatred of Betty in contrast to the acceptance of Don. Don is a shit. He’s trapped, but he’s a shit. Betty’s trapped too, but people hate her for it? I don’t know. I’m still not fully enthralled with Mad Men either. There’s all this privilege for white men, so I can see why a white male might think about what a great time he missed out on, but me, there’s nothing there.
- The Wire: It’s over. I watched it all. I might start watching from the beginning again. I miss The Wire already.
- The Office (UK): I’d forgotten, or maybe I never noticed the first time I watched it ten years ago, how mean-spirited a show this is. I suppose that makes sense as every time I see Ricky Gervais now, like when he hosted the Golden Globes, he acted like a dick. The show is mean.
- Waltz With Bashir
- The Boat That Rocked: Perfectly fine British movie ruined by putting in a Hollywood ending. My month’s first foray with Chris O’Dowd.
- The IT Crowd: My month’s second foray with Chris O’Dowd.
- Parks and Recreation
- The Infidel: Another British movie with a nonsense Hollywood ending.
- Cropsey
- Community: Joel McHale is on twitter everyone! I now follow Joel McHale on twitter!
- Friends With Kids: My month’s third foray with Chris O’Dowd.
I wrote: Come From Away proof-reading extravanganza. Shoot me now.
Having been once a mathematician, there are so many words whose meanings have split for me into two separate meanings: real world and math world. Ring, group, category, function. My mind jumps straight to the mathematical meaning for most of those. I don’t know if I want that anymore as I leave more and more math behind.
Induction is another one of those math words. Mathematical Induction has a sweet spot in my life because my OAC Algebra/Geometry teacher told the class that it was a completely useless thing of mathematics. Of course, mathematical induction is the only piece of high school mathematics that I used day-to-day for my PhD thesis, so I appreciate the irony.
But maybe my math vocabulary is fading. We bought an induction stove last week and only today did I realize that I hadn’t connected induction stove to mathematical induction. You lose words in any language you don’t use. I guess this is the start of my math loss.
That’s right, I’ve started reading Proust. One quarter of the way through Swann’s Way. I have a copy on my iPad and there are typos and for awhile, reading it without being able to connect wifi-ingly anywhere, I wondered, maybe this isn’t actually Proust. Maybe someone just uploaded eir (yes Spivak pronouns. He wrote my Calculus textbook, so I owe him.) story to Project Gutenberg and said it was Proust. I mean, who reads Proust? Who would know? Like the day I had in high school Calculus (see, Calculus comes up again) when I couldn’t shake the feeling that my teacher was making shit up and that when I started my real life, I’d be sitting in some university Calculus class and realise that everything I learned in high school was a lie.
Later I determined that everything I did learn in high school was essentially a lie, French Grammar and Calculus excepted, unless there’s a vast international conspiracy that’s still pretending about the Calculus I’ve learned and that really, I’ve learned it wrong! The horror! What if all these years of taking derivatives, they’ve all meant to be something else? What should I have been doing instead?
It’s strange sometimes the books that Tesfa attaches herself to. There are the obvious ones, the Robert Munsch’s and the Dr. Seuss’s and the Margaret and H.A. Rey’s, but then there are the lesser known books. One of Tesfa’s all-time favourite books is Doggie in the Window, which is a book I randomly picked up at an Ottawa Public Library used book sale. It goes in and out of favour a bit, but if ever stumped for what to read Tesfa, I can pick this one off the shelf and she never objects.
There were three lesser known books I remember vividly from my childhood: Henri and the Loup Garou, Fabulous Animal Facts That Hardly Anyone Knows, and Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb, the last of which is the only one still in print. We have copies of all three. Henri and the Loup Garou I bought from alibris when Tesfa was small, Fabulous Animal Facts I still have my copy from when I was little, and Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb my mother bought for Tesfa when Tesfa was a few weeks old. Of the three, Tesfa has really only taken to Fabulous Animal Facts.
Why some books and not others? I wish I knew. I think if I could figure out what about these books stuck with me, it would tell me something about my brain. I’m always interested in memory, the malleability of it, the fallibility of it. I’m reading Proust right now. Maybe that will help.
It was Tamil New Year (Chithirai Tiru-naal) this past Sunday. I went to a wedding on Sunday where the bride’s family was originally from south India and so there was some celebration of Tamil New Year at the wedding as well. Along with Belgian waffles to honour the groom’s heritage. Weddings with waffles and clips from Bollywood movies from the sixties and seventies projected onto a screen during the dancing are very good weddings, much better than my wedding, which involved a lot of crying and some unpleasantness.
So a belated Puthandu Vazthukal, as wikipedia tells me I should say.