Those Pesky Resolutions

One of my early blogging buddies, Columbia, at A Home in the City, posted a great video on his site apropos to the New Year.

Have a list of plans for 2008 but your worst enemy is procrastination? Does self-doubt prevent you from attempting your dreams? This guy can relate:



Our worst enemy is often best attribute, our brains. Other enemies include sheer laziness and the couch in front of the tv. It's easier to surf channels or the internet than to go to the gym, write next great American novel, clean the house or floss, (haha).

I've been wanting to sew, write and draw but I never get to these things because I'm busy browsing online. There are so many sites out there showing artists, writers, sewing patterns and fabrics. It's too easy and enjoyable to look at all these things I could be doing.

A big part of me doesn't want to go through making all the mistakes that come along with doing something I'm not familiar with. So it's easier to sit on the sidelines.

Thankfully, I don't have problems with taking pictures or blogging. The wonderful and warm feedback I get here and the enjoyment I get through writing has me hooked. The only difference between blogging and sewing for me are my skill level. If I didn't know how to write or if my English weren't so good, my desire to post wouldn't be so high. And if it took months to complete a post rather than a couple hours, I'd probably wouldn't blog either.

Blogging = instant gratification and easy
Sewing = many days, hard work and possible humiliation


For Christmas, Mark bought the best thing ever, a Playstation 3. The graphics and effects are amazing, and you can play online against other people. Mark has been duking it out with 12-year olds online on Motor Storm, which comes with the system. I'd post a video showing the game, but the ones I found don't capture the overall effects, which are brilliantly cinematic.

Like browsing online, Playstation will be another temptation to resist. I'll have to stop myself from driving big rigs through the mud and slamming into trucks driven by teenagers. So every time I have the urge to play, I'll have to envision myself already doing what I want to do and doing it well. For now, I won't worry about the inevitable growing pains that come with trying new things.

Anyway, that's the plan for 2008.


Photo by myself, in Union Square.

Read more...

Fame and Fortune

Yesterday I received a note from the managing editor of New York Press, congratulating me. Fear would be published in next week’s issue, in the New York Stories section. I wouldn’t be paid anything, but my words would be handed out at subway stations citywide, along with the morning news.

A few hours later, I went to a meeting of a writing group I belong to. I hadn’t been to a meeting in months, and of the twenty-some people, I knew only three or four. During introductions, I announced that an essay about my New York-induced paranoia would be published, and that the whole city would know how crazy I was.

That drew laughter and applause. It also got me thinking. Would I really want everyone to know that I can be a little nuts? Of course, everyone in New York is a little nuts. But would I really want to put that in writing? What would the neighbors think? What would happen to the property values in Park Slope?

Incidentally, Mark and I played Lotto last week, when the pot reached 300 million dollars. Besides deciding what I’d buy (an apartment in Paris, lots of shoes, Costa Rica), I tried figuring out how I could collect the money without anyone knowing. That’s the thing about publicity: good news or bad, once people know, it’s out of your hands. People could flock to your door or run away, and there wouldn’t be a thing you could do.

So I decided to publish under a pseudonym.

I didn’t have time to think of a name for my openly paranoid self. I chose ‘Nancy Boyd’, which Edna St. Vincent Millay called herself in the 1920's, when her stories were published in Vanity Fair. This was an homage to my friend Nancy, who chose her own nickname after Nancy Sinatra. The pseudo Nancy listens to a song sung by the real Nancy to deal with her horrible breakup.

So Nancy, the Nancy who is open about her nuttiness, will have her day in print next week. I’ll be happy for her.

Read more...

Confessions of a TV Junkie

Photo by Pvera.
--
Lately, the stress at work has driven me to eat vast quantities of chocolate during the day. Many nights, I find myself parked in front of the television. The lights are off, the sound cranked up. I’ve taken to watching emotionally charged shows, and my current drug of choice is 'Homicide'. I am officially addicted.

Sometimes I watch three episodes of Homicide in a row, fast forwarding through the commercial breaks. By the end, it is late, and I am wrung dry. The day is left behind. The stuff that’s due tomorrow has been replaced with crime, Baltimore, and the benign ring of the squad room telephone.

Watching tv is so much easier than writing. Instead of trying to figure out a subject, I am swept away by each episode. I am infatuated with the characters. The homicide detectives pursue Truth with passion and tenacity. Each is burdened with his or her personal turmoil. Each deals with death and danger every day at the job. It puts my life in perspective.

I’ve discovered that other shows I love share similar traits. I went through an addiction to 'Top Chef', for instance. It was weeks into the Second Season, before I could emotionally detach myself from the contestants of the first. Chefs are like homicide detectives. They are intense. They live in the moment and obey their instincts. They have an inherent sense of right and wrong.

There are only 122 episodes of Homicide, after seven seasons on the air. At present, there is no end to Top Chef. It is inevitable, though, that I will exhaust these escape mechanisms. The writer part of me hopes this happens soon. I’m hoping that watching people pursue their passions will bore me, or awaken my own desire. Writing is nothing like murder, but under the right conditions, it can feel like life and death.

Read more...

The Endless Summer

Photo by Sixtyeightfeet.
--
Tonight I watched Charlie Rose interview Norman Mailer.

Mailer is eighty-something years old. He sat back in his chair wearing a half-smile, his ears sticking widely out from his head. He needed a haircut. He talked at length about writing and his life, emphasizing select phrases with a raised hand.

I wrote a paper on Mailer’s Executioner's Song for English class, back in high school. Much of my semester grade depended on the paper, and because of that, and because I was young, I chose to write about the longest book I could find. Then I kept putting it off and it wasn't until a week before it was due that I finally started reading the book.

Mailer’s novel is over a thousand pages long. It's about a man named Gary Gilmore and what was going on in his head during and after the murders he committed. The story just kept going on in painful detail about things I didn’t find interesting. Egad.

I was expecting to be mesmerized by the psychology of this killer, but the narrative wore my patience down to a nub. I skimmed through, trying to make the deadline, trying to get a general idea of what the book was about.

For several nights, I sat on the floor of my bedroom closet, wrapped in a blanket with the overhead light on. I took Sudafed to keep myself awake. I churned out a poorly written paper about how poorly I felt Mailer’s book was written. Fortunately, my English teacher was merciful.

Tonight I surprised myself by hanging onto every word Mailer had to say. Here was this man who was saying he might have another three years of good writing left. Here was this man plotting the three next years of his life, how he would spend them, and which story he would tell. It will probably be the last major story he will ever tell. I thought Mailer was brave to speak about such things. It was as if he were planning his own funeral, and it was going to be a gigantic party.

Why was I so interested in what this man had to say, when I so disliked what he’d written? I suppose because he’s been through a lot. He’s lived life. He’s written books. People spend money to buy his books, wanting to read what he has to say.

Mailer’s enthusiasm tonight was infectious. It’s hard to explain what I felt, listening to him. I was fixated. It was like being a kid and sitting up late, soaking up the stories the camp counselors had from past. The crazy car ride at night. The near escape. The overturned boat. The jubilant, ecstatic summer that no one thought would ever end.

Read more...

Pushing Myself Up

I emailed the January 18th entry, 'Next Stop Brooklyn', to a newspaper and received a response from the Managing Editor:

‘I would love to consider your piece, but we require them to be between 750 and 850 words. Yours is only around 325. If you wish us to still consider it, please add to it and resend. Thanks.’

I decided to write something different for my second attempt. Instead of doing as I usually do, (having a glimmer of an idea, jumping in and letting the thing take on a life of its own), I followed Mark’s suggestion. I created an outline beforehand.

I was armed with a plan and a direction, which is good. I wrote with more intellect than instinct, which is bad. What I wrote was boring. It sounded like a school essay. I thought about it again while soaking in the bath tonight and decided on a different angle. Tonight, I am starting yet again.

I tell myself that rewriting is not a loss. It’s normal. This is what writing is. What I’m going through is like doing push ups. At first, you struggle with your body. There is pain. The next time you do push ups, you’re a little better. The struggle is less terrible, the pain less.

You try and you try. Eventually you’re pushing up and pushing up, and before you know it, you’re putting one arm behind your back, easy as pie.

Read more...

Ms. Annie Proulx

I was messing around on the internet this afternoon and discovered that Annie Proulx, the woman who wrote both ‘The Shipping News’ and ‘Brokeback Mountain’, did not start writing fiction until the age of 50. That's five-zero. She won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for the former, and I remember reading the latter when it was first published in The New Yorker, as a short story in 1997.

It's pretty amazing that I can vividly recall that reading experience almost 10 years ago, when I can't remember the names of countries or the presidents of those countries or people I've met the day before. But that’s what reading a short story can be at times, a distinct experience with its own memory. And that's a fact both humbling and hopeful to a struggling writer of short stories.

Read more...