Another snowpacalypse. The little one is sick, but has managed to find part of the Super Why game on the iPad she hasn’t seen before, so that should occupy her for another eight or nine minutes. Only seven more hours until someone else can take over.
Last month, with the return of Community, Bitch wrote a piece discussing the ridiculousness of will they/won’t they hookup storylines. I read it, agreeing with every single point.
Then I started watching Parks and Recreation on Netflix and got really emotionally invested in April and Andy’s relationship.
Then I got even more emotionally invested in Leslie and Ben’s relationship.
Now I’m watching The IT Crowd and all I can think is Ooooooh, I hope Roy and Jen get together (sorry Moss). Seriously? It doesn’t even make sense why they would. How am I so brainwashed that I expect romantic story arcs in shows in which there is not need for a romantic story arc? My only guess is that I have never written a story where people end up together so it’s like this perverse voyeurism for me to see people happily ever after. I am actually sitting here trying to think if I have ever written a story where people are happy together at the end. I guess Merry Fucking Christmas no one breaks up or cheats on their partner or has awkward sex with someone who doesn’t really care about them. That’s sadly the best I can do.
Oh and best wedding I’ve ever been to: Jim and Pam’s on The Office. Something may be seriously wrong in my brain.
The book I have out from the library now having finally finished yesterday‘s, smells like sun screen and beaches. It must have had a more interesting winter prior to now than me.
I never know what to do when I am reading a book that is, for all the ways you can think of “good” meaning, is good (good characterization, realistic dialogue, great pacing, intelligent story), but that I don’t like. Currently, I am reading Above All Things and while every word I read reinforces that this should be a great book, I am not enjoying reading it. I can say books are like people and sometimes you meet people and you’re just not friends, not matter how hard you try, but I want to enjoy books that are well written with engaging story lines, not feel like I have to slog through it before the library return date.
Con with Above All Things: It reminds me of my longer story, but my longer story is on my brain so everything reminds me of my longer story.
Pro: This quote
None of it seemed appealing, the parties where I’d stand off to the side, the dinners talking about how wonderfully proud I must feel.
As a wife of an academic of whom not one other academic at his new job has asked me what I do, I know how this feels. Although, if they did ask me what I did and I told them about letting my PhD to collect dust so I can be a writer with six stories published online, yeah, I doubt they’d think much more of me with that.
Should I quit? Should I keep going? If it’s a good book, maybe I’ll learn something even if it doesn’t feel like there’s any spark between us. Or maybe I should cut my losses and go re-read a book I know I love again to perk myself up.
It’s fun to enunciate the p. Slop-P-P-P-P-P.
An issue with writing stories in longhand is the fact that longhand doesn’t magically translate itself into typed without effort. But today, after much effort and only finishing twelve days after I’d hoped (February was too full of sickness and February despair to stay on target), I finished typing up my longest piece so far (see title for nice, round word-count).
Is my longer piece good? It could be better, of course. This is really only draft one.point.five. Could it be longer? Probably needs to be. The ending scenes with Peter are rushed because I was more focused on finishing than goodeding.
Even if this piece never amounts to anything, I should feel happy I got to the end of draft one.point.five at least. Now I will put it in a drawer and ignore it for a month. Writing it and typing it is nothing compared with the massive amount of editing, fixing, rewriting, junking, and starting over that has yet to occur.
There are the occasional times when I wish I had a degree in English so that I could articulate what makes a book good (although maybe being a book reviewer rather than an English major would be more appropriate for the task). So I put Sarah’s Key and Those Who Save Us, both big-name bestsellers, on one side of the good books about Nazism and The Kindly Ones and HHhH on the other side.
Hint: the bestsellers are on the wrong side of being good.
How to explain why the bestsellers aren’t good: They are simplistic. They are facile. They don’t challenge anything. People are evil. People are good. People are complacent. There’s an unending string of three or four word sentences that can be applied to them. They’re about making you feel good at the end.
This is a story I tell a lot. In fact, it is my primary, just shallowly below my consciousness reason for almost all that I do. In fourth grade, my teacher came in all upset and started telling us, what I later found out, was the big choice in Sophie’s Choice. My guess is that the movie had been on the night before. So my teacher is at the front of the classroom, visibly upset, proceeding to tell us that everyone of us in the class would have fought against the Nazis. She was convinced that every single one of us would have joined the resistance and fought to the bitter end.
Would we have? No. History suggests no. Even as a ten year old, I could see that this wouldn’t have been true. I think about this scene from my life more than is necessary. I think about how sure I was in the knowledge that my teacher was wrong, that we weren’t all great people, that most of us weren’t even good people. The bestsellers are my teacher telling us what we want to believe, that we are all kind and decent people. The bestsellers are fantasy. They aren’t about truth.
Are the others about truth? Not really. As Binet, author of HHhH says, we can dismiss The Kindly Ones as “Houellebecq does Nazism”, which is the most apt description of The Kindly Ones I have ever read and the second those words floated past my vision, I put down the iPad (reading on the kobo app) and cried “Yes!” aloud. Is HHhH any better, with it’s constant digressions and discussions on whether and how and whither the truth can be represented? Not really either. But are on the awkwardness of being just outside the truth. Both are unsettling. Both are unsatisfying but in the way that if they were to satisfy with a nice ribbon tied up in a bow on top, then they would be back to making me feel good at the end. Back to lying. Back to being popular and best sellers and maybe what we want to have happened, but what didn’t happen at all.
My story Come From Away. Congratulations me.
I submitted a story to a big name Canadian literary journal. I’d previously submitted this piece to another big name Canadian literary journal. The previous submission received no response (it was for a contest and I think it said only winners would be contacted, but that’s still sort of lazy on their part. That’s what list-servers and mass-emails are for). Then, the next time I tried, I got the rejection above, which is a polite rejection I suppose. Having merit is better than Waste of time or Worst. Story. Ever., but better than Having merit is We would like to include your piece in the next issue of our magazine, which is clearly not what I got. Also, suggestions where it might be suitable for publication would have been helpful, but considering that I even got a rejection letter, I should rejoice. I’m tired of how few rejections I get, instead finding out my stuff wasn’t chosen when the next issue of whatever magazine comes out.
The only pieces I get published tend to be the ones I have no emotional attachment to. This unpublished piece, which now I think has been rejected by ten or eleven journals, from paper to online, from established to starting out, from big fish to minnow, I am too emotionally attached to. Some of my pieces get rejected or accepted and neither fazes me. But this one, each time it is rejected, it feels like a personal insult.
It isn’t an easy piece. It takes place in a country most people have never been to. It has foreign words in it. It’s based on child-logic. It moves forwards in strange little bursts. I wrote it for a creative writing course with Aritha van Herk, who, while she praised it, also tempered the praise with words like experimental and difficult. I understand that the route to publication for this piece will not be easy. I also understand that after almost three years, maybe this piece should simply retire. But, at the same time, I’ve linked this piece in my head to being a writer, i.e. if this story gets published, then I will be a real writer.
I don’t want to consign my writing to the It’s never going to happen pile, but I also don’t know how to break the emotional grip it has on me to do whatever it is I need to do to make this story accessible to anyone other than me.
Here it is: [link removed, see this post], my white whale of story-telling.
There is only one medically interesting thing about me and that is that I had precipitous labor, which was unpleasant. Nothing like going from fine to insanely massive amounts of pain in thirty minutes.
So few fiction books talk about labor honestly. The first book I read where it wasn’t He paced the hall, listening to his wife’s cries and unable to come to her aid. Then the nurse opened the door and there was his baby. was The Breakwater House by Pascale Quiviger. I understand somewhat why books don’t go to the labor place: men don’t want that, child-free women don’t want that. Still, the longer piece I’m working on talks about birth. Let’s narrow the prospective readership even further!