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• The Best Things in Life Are Free, But Everything Has A Price

  08Nov
  Categories: My Daily Struggle, writing Comments: 7

  

  Right. I’m being a terrible blogger and I know it. For those of you, friends and family and lookers-on that enjoy what I do here, I apologize for letting you down.

  Be warned: I’m probably going to continue to let you down.

  I have thought of closing this poor neglected site down altogether, but in the end I like the record I’m keeping here, no matter how sporadic it has become. It has to be this way because the work I’m doing elsewhere is more important to me, and something I absolutely must make the most of.

  My writing outside this blog is going really well. For the moment I’m productive and prolific and inspired. I intend to ride that for all it’s worth. Writing fiction is work that makes my heart sing, work that feels worth doing despite the fact that I’m courting financial ruin to pursue it. (Note to family: I promise not to let the children starve or go shoeless in winter.)

  So, today, following a conversation with my husband that was along the lines of: how much longer can we go on like this? I spent some time mapping out my writing goals. You should see the document I just wrote up. You won’t, because I won’t show it to you, but I promise it’d be good for a giggle at my expense. It includes such gems as “Get agent,” “Finish novel,” and “Land teaching position based on (currently nonexistent) publication history,” complete with target dates. It felt a little silly to write, which is part of why I’m making fun of it here, but also: it didn’t feel entirely silly. Some of it felt a little bit exciting, and I don’t mind saying that I’ve worked hard to get to a place where I can target a date for dreams like: “Finish novel,” and actually write those words down as if such a thing would actually happen.

  Yes, the work is going well, and the blog is not. It’s a price I’m willing to pay.

• Reading Nabokov

  14Oct
  Categories: Books, writing Comments: 1

  The last line from the story, “Spring in Fialta”:

  But the stone was as warm as flesh, and suddenly I understood something I had been seeing without understanding–why a piece of tinfoil had sparkled so on the pavement, why the gleam of a glass had trembled on a tablecloth, why the sea was ashimmer: somehow, by imperceptible degrees, the white sky above Fialta had got saturated with sunshine, and now it was sun-pervaded throughout, and this brimming white radiance grew broader and broader, all dissolved in it, all vanished, all passed, and I stood on the station platform of Mlech with a freshly bought newspaper, which told me that the yellow car I had seen under the plane trees had suffered a crash beyond Fialta, having run at full speed in to a truck of a traveling circus entering the town, a crash from which Ferdinand and his friend, those invulnerable rogues, those salamanders of fate, those basilisks of good fortune, had escaped with local and temporary injury to their scales, while Nina, in spite of her long-standing, faithful imitation of them, had turned out after all to be mortal.

  Sorry to be so lax with the posting, friends, but I am writing other things. But this, I wanted to share.

• Sad, Sad, Sad. David Foster Wallace Is Dead

  15Sep
  Categories: writing Comments: 2

  Celebrities die, I know. We all get the the news however we get it: on the internet, the TV, the radio, the paper. If it’s someone we knew, someone whose work we followed, we feel a momentary loss, a sadness that a little something beautiful has gone out of the world. Then we go on. We didn’t really know them, after all.

  But this, this was like a gut-punch for me. I gasped. I sat down. I whispered, “No, no, no,” to my computer screen as my eyes got hot and teary. Because a writer, more than an actor or a singer, you feel like you know. I didn’t know him, but I read his words, I was inspired by his ideas, his sense of humor, his astounding, amazing, mindblowing intellect.

  I tell people I write, and sometimes they ask me, “Who are your favorite authors?” or “Who do you like to read?” When they ask, D.F.W. is always on my list. A formalist fiction writer with realistic tendencies, a brilliant essayist, a poetic sensibility that has consistently made my heart swell with joy at the beauty of words and language. Consider this, one of those passages that has lodged in my mind because it renders so vividly my memories of summer days at the public pool, when I was younger and prettier, and when my own sexuality was as much a mystery to me as to the boys whose attention I hoped to capture. It’s taken from “Forever Overhead,” a coming-of-age story about a 13 year-old boy in Brief Interviews With Hideous Men:

  And girl-women, women, curved like instruments or fruit, skin burnished brown-bright, suit tops held by delicate knots of fragile colored string against the pull of mysterious weights, suit bottoms riding low over the gentle juts of hips totally unlike your own, immoderate swells and swivels that melt in light into a surrounding space that cups and accommodates the soft curves as things precious. You almost understand.

  Oh, God, the words. I could weep over “fragile colored string”. The surge of joy I feel at, “You almost understand,” because, still, I almost do.

  I don’t know what else to say. I’m going to miss him. I wish he hadn’t been such a tortured, selfish genius.

  Tags: writers

• Overwhelmed

  19Aug
  Categories: Me, My Daily Struggle, Uncategorized, writing Comments: 7

  Seriously. I can’t seem to get it together. I have been daily making an effort to write, but I just can’t get a handle on the story I’m trying to revise. I’m just dicking around with it, and not getting anywhere. Can you tell it’s pissing me off?

  I think I’m still recovering from my vacation. Returned to cloudy England from sunny France and am having to force myself to leave the house. And the weather’s not even bad here–it’s just not warm.

  One good thing, actually a very exciting thing, is that Sugahill, a local cafe here in Sydenham, is displaying some of my work. I finally got it all up yesterday and thankfully, none of the photographs are embarrassing to me. I think I feared that once I blew them up they’d look terrible–all their flaws painfully visible in large format. I was actually afraid to open the package from the lab until the day I was supposed to hang them. I just didn’t want to know; I was afraid I’d lose my nerve. But, actually, they please me. We put them up on the walls and they all evoke a kind of mood. They go together, and I think they’re interesting enough to look at over a cup of coffee.

  But, my story is stuck and so I can’t even enjoy the moment.

  And I have so much to DO, and I’m not doing it, and so my blog is getting neglected. It’s the way it has to be for a little while. I have to get some good revisions done this semester. My time at WW is limited, and I will not waste it fucking around online, or even taking pictures. Don’t get me wrong, I’m going to take pictures–clearly I can’t help myself–but I have to prioritize. I have to, and I still haven’t told you anything about my vacation. Which was awesome. Maybe my best vacation ever. Maybe that’s why I can’t work. I can’t get over the best vacation I ever had.

• Photos From the Rez

  18Jul
  Categories: photography is amazing, writing Comments: 2

  

  Are up now. Spread the word.

• Headed Home Tomorrow

  12Jul
  Categories: Me, writing Comments: 4

  The last class is over, and all that remains is graduation: readings, dinner, the Sweatheart Ball (yes, ’sweat’, not ’sweet’). Tomorrow a long drive and a couple plane rides and I’ll have my sweet chickens back in my arms Monday morning. Not much more to say than that, really.

• Strangers 8 and 9: Trying to Be Interesting for Kevin

  02Jul
  Categories: 100 Strangers, writing Comments: 6

  I settled in for my flight across the pond with my packet of workshop stories and my journal, prepared to work and studiously ignore the person in the seat next to me. People don’t like to be bothered, and neither do I. After an hour or so of my seatmate typing diligently on his Mac, and me jotting in my journal, I went to the loo and left my books in my seat. When I returned, he said, “That’s a nice journal,” or words to that effect, and so I told him where it came from and we started talking. He was nice enough, and so I yammered on about my MFA, and about my program, and my writing, and when I finally stopped talking about myself and asked him what was working on, he mentioned that he was, you know, preparing for his interview on Fresh Air because his second book just came out. I squealed (politely), crawled into his lap, and asked if he would consider taking me to the studio with him and introducing me to Terry Gross. “I’m pretty sure she’d like to meet me,” I told him, “Because I’m planning to be a famous author some day, and she’d probably like to make my acquaintance, now, before my interview.”

  Okay, not really. But I did question him about everything from Kentucky stud horses to word processing for the rest of the flight. His name is Kevin Conley, and you can find his work in the pages of The New Yorker, Men’s Vogue, and GQ.

  He was so terribly interesting, and honestly, how often is it that you get to corner someone truly interesting and talk to them for oh, say, 7 hours? He showed me a picture of himself on fire on his laptop. That particular picture graces the book jacket of his latest book, The Full Burn, so you should probably go run out to your local independent bookstore right this minute and buy it. Kevin also promised he would visit my blog, and my feeling about this is, when a guy that’s lit himself on fire comes to call, you have to make an effort.

  So, in my limited computer time, here’s a couple more strangers, for Kevin:

  Robert

  
  Hear him school me in London geography: [audio http://texasgurl1.fileave.com/11-robert.mp3]

  And also Paul, who looks a bit suspicious of me.

  
  [audio http://texasgurl1.fileave.com/9-paul.mp3]

• Countdown to the Rez

  30Jun
  Categories: Me, writing Comments: 4

  

  Get ready; here I go, dropping of the face of the earth for a bit. See you on the other side.

• Okay, I’ll Play

  17Jun
  Categories: writing Comments: 4

  For SanDiegoMomma’s Prompt Tuesday, write something inspired by this poem:

  Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock

  by Wallace Stevens

  The houses are haunted

  By white night-gowns.

  None are green,

  Or purple with green rings,

  Or green with yellow rings,

  Or yellow with blue rings.

  None of them are strange,

  With socks of lace

  And beaded ceintures.

  People are not going

  To dream of baboons and periwinkles.

  Only, here and there, an old sailor,

  Drunk and asleep in his boots,

  Catches Tigers

  In red weather.

  Here goes:

  Sailor told her parents straight out that she intended to join the circus. Her mother rolled her eyes; her father said “Like hell you are,” but when that lanky boy with the blue-black hair took the center ring she might as well have been gone already. She was gone to another world, a world that unfolded before her that night as she sat in the dusty bleachers, watching the boy return to the rings in front of her again and again: this time juggling fire, that time riding backwards in a ring of thundering horses, and again twirling the long ends of a pearly cloth threaded high through an iron loop, spinning a leggy acrobat until her beaded costume fractured the light like fireworks. She would be his acrobat, she thought, and when they brought out the tiger she wasn’t surprised to see that he was also the one who entered the cage with a whip. The tiger snarled at the boy; the boy flashed his teeth: at the tiger, at the crowd. She imagined him after the show, rubbing the fur behind the tiger’s ears, placing his palms under its great chin, feeling the vibration of its purr quivering beneath his skin.

  That night, in her room, she left her nightgown in a puddle of moonlight on the floor, slipped on her jeans and her red boots, and shimmied down the drainpipe outside her window. She’d seen the trailers glowing like lanterns behind the circus tent, heard the crickets’ song calling her to him. He was expecting her, she knew. Soon enough, she would be there.

• I’m Not Dead

  16May
  Categories: Me, My Daily Struggle, writing Comments: 7

  I’ve just been totally snowed under with with work. Not paid work, of course, but writing stories, because, you know, it’s so lucrative. Happily, though, I completed my semester project last week, and I must say it has been a productive four months. I got along well with my advisor and I racked up four new stories, all in different stages of development. So, although I haven’t been around here, I have been writing, and it has consumed me.

  I was so absorbed that I wasn’t photographing much for awhile either, and those of you who know how obsessed I am with my camera will get that that’s a big deal. I picked it up again, though, and I’m doing some stuff for a friend that’s getting married, and carrying it around with me now that spring is here and I am feeling like there are so many pictures to take. The light here is really crazy, too, because in the summer it stays light until 9 or 10 o’clock at night, and the twilight is long.

  In other news, Boyish’s accent is out. of. control. I’ll add a sound file this week because where before he faded in an out of London talk, and seemed to be acquiring it more gradually, he has all of the sudden begun to sound properly and wholly English. Girlish still speaks English at school and American at home, and Baybish–who barely talks at all–has an accent, too. You should hear her say “Uh-oh.” It’s like: “Uh-ah-oooh,” and when she walks down the street she says “Hiyaaaaaa,” to everyone we pahss.

  I’m tired, people, but I decided I would not let this go another day. I’m going to try doing some shorter posts. I’m going to make myself post shorter so that it won’t seem like such a big deal to check in here. I love doing this, but I get so focused when I’m writing that I can’t do much else. My obsessive personality is a blessing and a curse, I swear.