I'm Procrastinating

More time to write...

2012-01-26T10:09:00.001-08:00

Well, I guess the good news is that I no longer will have to cram my writing time into the early mornings, but the bad news is that Husband is laid off again. I'm going to focus on the first half of that sentence. Of course, as I said to him, I am unwilling to cede much of my time with the girls -- though it's been horribly frustrating, trying to find time to get work done, it's also been glorious to be with them so much. Such is the back-and-forth pull of the working mom. Anywho. Look for a lot more bylines in the coming weeks.

The BIMI column is too, too much fun. The great thing about having an editor who loves me is that since I know what she likes, I have a great time hiding little bon mots that I know will make her snicker. Has to make it better for the reader, too. Hope so, anyway. Go there and comment so she knows she's not the only loller!

My new column!

2012-01-14T18:02:00.006-08:00

I'm a columnist! Watch for me every 2 weeks at Recipe.com, where I'll be doing a regular feature called "Buy It Or Make It." Too awesome. The first ten are set, and they're things I've already made. Woo!

I'm a blurber, too.

2011-12-10T23:05:00.001-08:00

Oh, this is cool. Back when I wrote for AOL/Lemondrop, I interviewed the author of Sex At Dawn, an amazing book about monogamy, fidelity, and bonobo apes that you really must read. And he blurbed me! Or I blurbed him. I'm in his blurbs. We're blurbing. Someone who works at CafeMom alerted me to this because she'd just finished the book and wanted to discuss it in depth. How cool! Also: I need a book group.

But mostly, I'm so flattered, and I so miss writing for AOL. Those were really fun stories. Well, that just means I should pitch some more. So off I go.

It's Saturday night, by the way. Husband and I are sitting with our laptops facing each other, both working. It's a huge relief to be catching up, but now I have to forge ahead. Yep, big night in for mommy and daddy.

I'm becoming a commenter!

2011-11-15T09:14:00.001-08:00

This isn't a byline, but I'm acting like it is -- I wrote a Letter to the Editor of the NYT Magazine, and it got printed! I sent it in via email and thought nothing of it, since I thought they called to confirm before printing anything, but a friend posted it on my Facebook wall on Saturday. I'm pleased as punch!

I'll admit that I almost said "kittens" instead of "marshmallow Peeps" as a nod to Zooey Deschanel, but thought I would be the only one who noticed.

In the olden days, I used to listen to my then-local daytime NPR shows (Brian Lehrer and Leonard Lopate) in lieu of chatting with office mates. It's an old freelancer trick. And when the loneliness (and need to procrastinate) got to be too much to bear, I would call in and lend them my thoughtful thinky thoughts on whatever they were talking about that day. I did this so often that my friend Cindy would tune in while dropping off her kids just to see if I was on that day. I'd call in, yap, then watch my email to see if she was listening. (Freelancing is very, very lonely, people.)

I've called in to the local shows here, too, but it's not as satisfying. But since my friend KJ has been writing for Motherlode at the NYT, I've been commenting like crazy on her posts. Lucky for you (and my pride) that i can't link directly to them. Go on over to Motherlode and read and comment for yourself, and see if you can spot me there.

Meanwhile, back to work. Actually, I'll have to work later -- I have an interview today with a really terrific kids' clothing company that needs a copywriter. If they pay me in pinafores, I'M IN!

Deeper Pitches

2011-11-12T10:07:00.001-08:00

This week was much improved. I've been hitting deadlines and getting promising responses to better-paying pitches, and had a terrific tryout for a new copywriting client. Oh, and another client -- a startup -- was just "acquired," and I'm being called in to discuss the new playing field (and pay scale) with the new owners.

But daily blogging v. reporting an article are two different skills. Back at home, I would bounce back and forth, every few years, between writing and editing, and it was always a relief no matter which way I went. Change is refreshing! It's harder now, though. I don't know if my brain has atrophied like my hamstrings, or if these two skills are farther apart, but it feels like more of a challenge to shift from "poop out this blog post NOW!" to "Do several layers of research, work up a deeper pitch, get approved, and then put the rest of the research you already did into the article. Then revise it."

Wait, it is more of a challenge. That's why it's better to read ... and why it pays more. RIGHT. News flash to Arianna Huffington: you get what you pay for.

Okay, off to do some actual research. Oy, my brain-hamstrings.

Adjusted expectations

2011-11-07T21:24:00.004-08:00

Phew. I have changed my schedule around a bit so that I can hit my deadlines, and it feels a lot better than, you know, not doing that. But I'm feeling a bit forlorn about two recent job prospects that didn't pan out.

Plus -- and this is weird -- someone in the internets got upset about an article I wrote in -- let me check. March of 2005. I interviewed I guy about some singles parties he was running and wrote a very brief article about the trend. Six years later, the online magazine was still using the content, and another guy who eventually bought the rights to these parties (this is a living?) started harassing me on LinkedIn and Twitter because he wanted me to change something in this six-year-old article.

First of all, seriously? Why do people think the writers with the byline have the least bit of control over what happens to this copy after we hand it in? In the olden days, if you had an embarrassingly bad story under your byline, meh, big deal. The issue would be gone in a month and nobody would remember. Now it's all trapped in amber and on view for all time, like Han Solo in the carbonite. Uch, it was just annoying to deal with this doofus complaining at me.

Meanwhile I'm pitching an old contact at a site I loved writing for -- gotta keep plugging away. Oh: the girls fell asleep an hour early because I haven't changed the clocks in my house. Everybody's happier this way, and I'm pitching and posting like a champ. For now.

Late night. Must work. Legos!

2011-10-27T10:37:00.000-07:00

I can't fucking flip a picture in blogger? For crap's sake. Fine. You get the idea. I ran out of time, Randy had to go to work, and here i am, trying to get at least one of my two posts done. arrrrhhghghgsflksjalfkfjla.

Where'd I put that?

2011-10-26T09:28:00.004-07:00

Where? Where did I put the image files for this story? I had them all collected. See. This is why people use Evernote and Scrivener. I would use those if I had the 30 minutes to sit and focus and do their tutorials. Maybe I put them in Pinterest! they're not there. oh for crap's sake. okay. I AM REALLY TIRED BY THE WAY. Like "the taste of coffee keeps me from closing my eyes" tired. agajagajagajaga. ok back to work. nice to see you all, by the way, you're looking well.

Job Interview

2011-10-18T09:54:00.005-07:00

GAAAAH I JUST INTERVIEWED FOR THE WORLD'S MOST PERFECT JOB!!!! argh. I hate when this happens. Mustn't get hopes up. Though even if it doesn't work out, I've GOT to get some great freelance work out of it.

I'm reminded of the sketch on Saturday Night Live where a bunch of girls adjust the song "Tell Him" to actual dating. On the first date, you tell him that you don't want kids, that you never want to get married, etc. But with jobs, you DO tell 'em that you're always gonna love them, tell 'em that you're never gonna leave them, and the rest. Argy blargy.

All right. As with dating, there's no point worrying right now -- better get back to work (for the next 20 minutes) because the more I work, the better I look. This entire metaphor has now crumbled to the ground like the tower of Babel. Thank you and good day.

Workin' on a Sunday

2011-10-16T12:06:00.000-07:00

a Sunday a Sunday cuz that's how this week weeeeeent. Okay, also planning birthday party, but hoping to catch up and get ahead anyway. Thing is, I need to talk to my editors and change my schedule and, instead, I'm just starting each day with the vain hope that this is the day I'll suddenly work 5 times faster than ever before. This is not just a problem in my work life; I am late 75% of the time to either pick up or drop off Penny, even when I'm working a shift at the co-op, and Randy says I have no concept of what time is or how long things take. He's right. And with that, off I go to write about OH SHIT the jack o'lantern post!!! i have to take one more photo. okay. bye.

Here's how yesterday went

2011-10-13T09:11:00.001-07:00

So you know how they say that being a working mom means you're always letting someone down? Yesterday I put that into action.

When I ran out of office time at 10:30, I had only gotten one post done. But I was really really close to having the second one done, too, and I knew if I could just grab a half hour of quiet time, I'd reach that day's minimum baseline goal. I know, wow, really reaching for the stars here.

Now, Penny was at preschool, and my afternoon shift at her co-op didn't start for a while, so I tried working with Abby at my feet, playing with blocks. She needed to snuggle, so I moved her onto my lap. Snuggling turned into napping, and I thought, "Bingo! I'm gonna get this sucker done."

This is where things get muddy. The alarm went off on my phone, playing the opening of "Camp Granada" and telling me to get going for my work shift. My mind then did a switcheroo: "I set that early, so I'd have time to get dressed after it went off, right? So I have a half hour?"

I looked at the clock. I was supposed to be at school at 12:20. But for the morning shift, I arrive at 8:50. So somehow my brain turned that into "I don't have to be there till 12:50, I can get this done!" I typed and posted feverishly, and got the damn thing in.

I was just pushing the "publish" button when my phone rang. It was Teacher Tom. "You're supposed to be here!" he said. And my brain suddenly sproinged back into the real world, and I realized what I had done. Amazing: I completely self-sabotaged in the interest of making a deadline.

I was so mortified, so absolutely embarrassed (this is only the most recent in a string of late-pickups, tardy-arrivals, and school-screwups), that I briefly considered not showing up at all, hiring someone to pick up Penny, and moving to another state, but I faced the music and worked the rest of my shift with appropriate humility.

I'd like to say I'm ditching the guilt to celebrate the deadline I made, and that I'll do the same in reverse (refuse to feel guilty about deadlines when I get to school on time), but come on. I think we all know that's as likely as my making today's deadlines.

Off I go, then. At least I get to make jack o' lanterns out of unconventional materials today! Colon close-parens!

Between a rock and a hard place

2011-10-12T08:58:00.000-07:00

The hard truth is, I don't even get my full 2 hours in the morning to work, and whatever I do have, it's not enough to get my work done right now. The only way around this is to hire childcare. But the only way to make enough $$ to hire childcare is to pack more work into the time I have.

I always think of how Stephen King would get up at 5am and jam himself into the boiler room of his family's trailer to write Carrie for 2 hours each morning before he went to work as a teacher, and I feel horribly lazy.

I'm sure there's a conclusion to be reached here, but I'm now down to an hour and a half and I gotta write about signing at daycare and I dunno what the heck else. And I haven't had coffee. So grumble grumble grumble.

Yep, I'm a bitch.

2011-10-05T10:44:00.002-07:00

One side-effect of this new schedule is that I get hyper-focused when I'm here at my desk, and plan my work down to the last minute -- sometimes it feels like to the last second. So when I think I have 10 more minutes, and then my husband comes in with the baby to have a last-minute chat about things before he leaves for work, I am liable to bite his head off.

This is to explain things if you happen to see a headless man walking to the BART this morning. He used to be 6'4", but I'm estimating he's about 5'11" without his noggin.

I feel like this is a common problem, and I'm sure it could be cleared up easily. For instance, maybe we can chat while he's at the BART station? Or maybe he needed something from me before he left. Well, I guess we'll find out.

Yesterday I was even more of a lunatic and I have determined that I have to stop trying to pack everything into each day. But when it comes to getting my work done, I still feel like there's hot wolf breath on the back of my neck until I've made my two deadlines per day, which I did manage today (though I missed one yesterday that I hoped to make up).

Anyway, I'm now exiting the workplace and will let you know if he was trying to tell me the kitchen was on fire.

Seriously people we need to get started earlier.

2011-10-04T10:05:00.002-07:00

I have 45 minutes to work today because we got to sleep so late last night / slept in today again. This is nuts in the butts. And with both girls I won't be able to use the Ergo to gain an extra little work time. arrrgh.

I did find a cache of pitched/approved ideas, so at least I can get rolling right away. The first one is, of course, a child-safety story, and those I really have to steel myself emotionally to deal with, but that's not time-consuming, it's just hard.

My friend emailed me the other day, my freelance role-model who got me started in this whole game, and asked "How can you stand to only work two hours a day?" I've been too embarrassed to admit it's nooooo problem. I wish I had more time to blog, but the issue isn't "oh! i want to work," it's "oh! we need the ducats." That'll change, I'm sure, as the weeks wear on and I realize this isn't just a temporary state of affairs.

ok then, safety story, 20 minutes to have it up and out.

This is me working today.

2011-10-03T12:39:00.000-07:00

She's watching Teletubbies on my browser in an unidentifiable language. Late wakeup + no nap = at least I made my 2 deadlines today.

Let's try that again

2011-10-02T11:46:00.003-07:00

So I would have to define my first week of being a mom-working, as opposed to working-mom, as an epic fail. As a mom, I ran the kids absolutely ragged and now they're both spending the weekend dazed and exhausted with runny noses. As a worker, I think I did 2 days' worth of posts? Or maybe 1 days' worth of work, spread out over 2 days?

On the other hand, it was Rosh Hashonah, and it was also my first week, so I'm not firing myself just yet. I'm grabbing 3 hours of work today, and was supposed to do the same yesterday but had to help out a friend instead. So let's see if I can do.... Rocker Lawsuits, Flame Retardants (maybe not that one, I'll look at the emails), and I'll Pray Later.

I'm bummed that I can't seem to make the startup blog happen. I just don't have the bandwidth to work for free for them, and they aren't answering my emails. I also want to post to my craft blog. So don't forget that.

Sheesh. Okay. One thing at a time! Bird by bird! Let's start again. Rocker lawsuits to start.

Ramping up (did I really just say that?)

2011-09-28T09:12:00.003-07:00

Okay. Okay. Yesterday I only did one story. Today, I should do three. Actually I should do five because technically I should not be working tomorrow, on Rosh Hashonah, but COME ON. And now it's past 9am and I only have an hour and a half minus eight minutes. arrrrrgh.

The morning is just effed seven ways to sunday. Randy wakes up and makes breakfast, and then somehow the girls end up on me. Meanwhile I should be bounding out of bed, grabbing coffee, and disappearing into the office, but somehow I end up pulling the covers over my head and just closing my eyes for five more blessed seconds. What's funny about this is that as good as it feels to feel my eyelids slip down over the burning orbs that cannot yet stand to see the day, I immediately think, "you lazy, lazy slattern, there isn't enough self-loathing in the world for you right now." But I just pile the self-loathing on top of the blanket and it makes me feel even warmer. Mmmmm. Loathy.

I really really need to pitch some relationship stories today! well, what can I do.

Oh! I did enable comments, though. So there's that. Huzzah!

Let's see if I can poop out two stories RIGHT NOW and then another one HA HA. Okay. Which one first? Gloria Vanderbilt! GO!

Day Two

2011-09-27T09:29:00.001-07:00

Okay. So yesterday I did a bunch of organizing and today I was supposed to write two posts, but I didn't sit down at my desk untilllll... um 9:24. For the record, I'm allegedly working from 8:30-10:30 Pacific time. (Tangent: Can we just say PT and ET and not make it PST or PDT, which I never remember which is which, and just let the computer make the necessary adjustments?)

Anyway, I like to complain that the girls have me up 2-3 times in the night, and all I want to do when they get up is grab a few more minutes' worth of sleep, but come on. I go to sleep earlier to compensate, so let's ovary up and get to work.

I got a subscription to a magazine now helmed by my beloved executive editor at Big Glossy Mag where I worked. I don't think she knows she was beloved unto me -- we only worked at the same place a few months, and she only edited one of my stories, but it was my first one, and it was really hard to research, and she praised it, for which she will be forever beloved. So. I'll be pitching them again soon, and should be pitching Match again today. Shoot. Maybe tomorrow. Argh!

Today I'm supposed to do: Rocker Lawsuits and Gloria Vanderbilt. I think I can do those two in an hour, because I did a bunch of prep-work yesterday. Let's see how I do. GO.

Game Changer

2011-09-26T09:00:00.003-07:00

Okay. As of today, I am a mostly stay-at-home-mom, as my husband has finally, after three years of searching, found an amazing full-time gig that tickles his funny bone and fills our bank account. Somewhat. I still have to keep working, but around his schedule, so I get 2 hours in the morning, and whatever I can cobble together during naps and after bedtime. It'll be a challenge, but I'm going to make it work.

Here's the thing: It's Day 1, and I'm already 1/2 hour into my work time with nothing to show for it but a bunch of dinnerware sets saved to Pinterest. So that's awesome. Nice to see some things never change.

I have to figure some things out. Do I stick with the low-pay but very-steady gig that I KNOW I always have, but that pays so little per hour that I'm always scrambling? Or do I ditch that gig in favor of higher-paid work that I have to fight for each month?

I think we all know I'm going to stick with the steady gig for now, but man. It's a real grind. Then, in the middle, there's the low-paying gig for a startup that may or may not pay off when they get funding. Ha ha, did you hear what I just said? But hope springs eternal, people. This is the land of Pixar and Google.

Okay. Off to work. See you on the morrow.

A Match Made In Heaven!

2011-05-23T11:50:00.003-07:00

I am SO glad to be writing for Match again! See my first new story for them over there on the left. They are all over the dating-parents thing, and I've been there and done that, so these stories are especially fun. I've connected with some great new experts, too, which is sometimes the best part of the job.

I've got another new client that I'll reveal soon -- for them, I attended a weekend-long workshop that was a total inspiration. That's also the best part of the job: getting assigned stories that kick my butt in a good way. I met amazing, talented writers, and who knows? Maybe I'll actually start doing comedy again.

Deadlines first, though. I'm off to write about cicadas for TheStir/CafeMom. Eeeeeyuw!

ptui, ptui, ptui -- things are looking up!

2011-04-22T17:46:00.003-07:00

I got two calls this week - from two old clients who need me to work for them again. That ROCKS for many reasons. I need the work. I love these clients. And most importantly, I didn't burn bridges by storming off in a huff when I unhitched from them in the first place! Who says you can't teach an old dog new tricks?

YAY WORK!

If Cee-Lo Green Were A Freelancer

2011-04-21T10:40:00.006-07:00

For crap's sake. Here's an article in the Times about a vegan website based here in San Francisco that was using free stock food photos and airbrushing out the meat (#awesome!). At first, the editor was unrepentant: free, bastardized photos were "necessary for budgetary reasons." After a smorgasbord of internet fury, he revised his statement, saying they'd stop using meat pictures, but that he "hoped the magazine’s readership would 'stand up and help us' in providing vegan photography."

Fuck you. Pay photographers. (H/T to Mike Monteiro)

And look! Here's a job listing that lists among its many, many requirements:

A BA in English
An MBA or equivalent
7 years copywriting experience

The online listing doesn't say this, but the posted rate for this job, according to the Media Alliance JobFile, is $10/hour. Minimum wage. You get paid more at Starbucks.

Fuck you! Pay marketing writers a living wage!

Progressive darling Arianna Huffington is defending her perfect right to get fat off of free content. Huffington and AOL are trying to upend the concept of the citizen journalist, which used to mean "getting information out of areas where journalists are under siege by any means necessary," and now means "undercutting professional journalists by expecting above-the-fold copy from unpaid or barely-paid interns." (News flash: they don't deliver.)

Just ... fuck you.

Over the past ten years I've become a more skilled reporter, a better interviewer, a more careful researcher, an all-around better writer. And my per-word and per-hour rates have dropped because the market could not bear what I was making. Which was the same per-word rate freelancers have been making since the seventies. What the heck is going on?!

Now that I've gotten that off my chest, I have to go finish a piece for one of the few clients that pays me what I deserve for articles they can be proud to publish. I'm missing no deadlines, and making no fuss: this is a relationship that must work out, or I'll perish along with the cattle featured in the ribs on the front page of VegNews.

(yeah, I know, that was a stretch. Hey, I'm writing for free here!)

I need a new yoga ball

2011-04-15T16:00:00.002-07:00

Man. Starting during my second pregnancy, I started sitting on a yoga ball while working. Not too long ago, the damn thing popped. (I know. They're supposed to be able to withstand... I mean, I was pregnant! ugh.) Anyway I've been sitting on a crappy kitchen chair since then and ow. When I stand up after working for a few hours, I walk like Marlon Brando when he was chasing that kid around with an orange peel in his mouth right before keeling over from a coronary. In The Godfather, obvie. You knew that. Anyway, this is apropos of nothing except that I'm sitting here working and my butt hurts. Do with that what you will.

When do I call it?

2011-04-11T13:28:00.002-07:00

Man. I pitched a story that an editor was kinda meh about, and I was all "oh no you will LOVE this great story!" and now I am so bored with it I want to gouge my eyes out. I should have listened to my editor! That's why she's an editor! Duh! Winning!

(Will it ever be possible to say "duh" without "winning" again? I hope not.)

Anyway, to save face I keep thinking I must produce this sparkly great story, and I've done interviews and whatnot.

On the other hand, maybe I'm blocked because it's a crappy idea.

On another hand (maybe I'm a octopus, you don't know, YOU DON'T KNOW ME!!), maybe I'm just blocked in general and incapable of ever writing again. It could happen.

Ha ha ha, just kidding, I don't really think that every five minutes of every work day and every ten minutes on the weekends.

Do you ever do that thing?

2011-04-07T11:56:00.002-07:00

Do you ever do that thing where you go to the Word file you're supposed to be working on, and then you stare at it, and then you go to Mail and hit "Get Mail" just to make sure nothing came in, and when you hear the "clunk" noise, you hit it five more times just in case?

No?

Oh.

Never mind, then.

2011-03-29T17:43:00.005-07:00

Yeah, not blogging for Babble anymore either. That was a frustrating experience, but onward and upward.

I wrote yet another personal essay for MyDaily because I just never learn that it's an embarrassing and uncomfortable experience to mine one's past humiliations for a buck. I've got so darn many of them! Anyway, the response was really wonderful. I got many supportive emails and comments. And then I got a call from a TV producer! He works for a news show and wanted to do a segment on my story.

Only trouble is, there's really no story unless one of the two bullies in the story (who apologized via Facebook) would appear on the show. I approached them both, but who would do that, seriously? I can't blame them both for being like "uh yeah hm howbout NO." I'm the one who wants to get flown to NYC.

Oh well. On the upside, it spurred me to get back in contact with my agent and suggest that this is a hot enough topic to maybe warrant a book proposal. Annnnnd on the downside, I still haven't heard back from her. Does this mean I call? Durr.

More Blog Business

2011-02-11T12:30:00.003-08:00

I'm not blogging for CafeMom anymore -- it was a good run, but they're only going to use staff writers going forward. Ah, well.

I am continuing to write for Babble every day (or as close to it as I can manage), and MyDaily at AOL whenever possible.

I've also started writing for Kveller.com, so you'll see that link soon.

Nothing much to say about all this -- it's really, really hard to juggle assignments with office management (right now I'm also making out health-insurance applications and am way behind deadline on preschool applications as well). Every day feels like a bit of a slog, though I really like the new work I'm doing.

But frantic? Yeah. We've got frantic here.

Where have I been?

2010-08-31T11:44:00.002-07:00

No time to procrastinate -- I'm writing 15 posts a week for CafeMom:

http://thestir.cafemom.com/blogger/23/amy_keyishian

Pitches in holding pattern!

2010-03-05T20:42:00.001-08:00

And a new post on Breakup Girl:

http://www.breakupgirl.net/?p=3528

Why it it so hard to pitch

2010-03-02T22:02:00.001-08:00

and so easy to read Huffington Post?

frustration, pitches, and more procrastination.

2010-02-15T11:35:00.002-08:00

News flash: I can't write copy for things if you don't get me the backup materials you promised me, person who hired me. this is frustrating.

Also frustrating is that I have no faith in myself lately. I had already sent a request for a contact to a particular magazine before I bothered to look at the masthead myself. It's got two people I worked with at My Favorite Job, plus an editor who I've written for at two other publications. Who asked me for pitches when she went to this job. In other words, I had excellent contacts already; why did I assume I didn't?

Anyway, helluva pitch, and now I'm off to write some copy without knowing what the hell I'm writing about, because it's due and I don't miss deadlines.

Happy Presidents' Day! Also known as National I'm Cranky Day! oh wait, that's every day. YAY.

Fun gigs a-poppin'

2010-01-08T20:47:00.002-08:00

Huh! Three good gigs crossing my in-box today. Two freelance, one staff. All three really fun and totes up my alley. Hope this is a sign of things to come.

I'll Send An SOS To The World

2010-01-04T16:13:00.002-08:00

Sigh. It was easy to pretend I was on vacation like everyone else for the past two weeks -- holiday season, entire family in town, and festivities galore. But here we are: it's Monday, and I'm sitting here pitching my little heart out.

I'm discouraged by two near-misses of really great contributing-editor gigs. Each time I came SO close -- down to just a few candidates, which should make me feel great. When I was an actress, it was so easy to say "wow, I really came close, yay me!" For some reason, as a writer, I have a harder time. Maybe because I knew I was a terrible actress, so getting anything was a bonus. But I'm actually a pretty good writer, so not getting anything feels like a blow.

Well, anyway, let's look forward. Hello, 2010! Lend me your gigs! Back to the pitchery!

Epic Flail

2009-11-27T18:05:00.002-08:00

Did I mention this yet? I got laid off from the web-copywriting job. At first, I thought this would spur me to new and greater freelance efforts, but I am feeling paralyzed. I actually have made some great strides, contacting people and trying out for various really cool-sounding gigs. On the other hand, when it comes to pitching specific articles, I find myself at a loss. How did I ever do this?

My posts are forced, right now, to be short and frantic. I just don't have the luxury of thinking deeply, and that panic is probably really bad for my actual writing. But time is at a premium, and so is energy and focus.

This is it. This is me making this work for real. I must find a baseline gig and pile individual assignments on top of it in the middle of the worst job market in the history of forever. See? I just paralyzed myself again, I AM SO BAD AT THIS!

Online Copywriters Suck, Part II

2009-11-04T12:06:00.003-08:00

In fact, it sucks so hard, I'm not all that upset to have been laid off from my day-job writing copy for an online shopping site. Okay, so my husband's also unemployed and we're looking down the barrel of a big, broke gun. What better way to kick my hiney back into freelance mode?

I've already submitted a personal essay, am doing a spec column, and am seeking out more information on a request for pitches. The last time I was laid off was August 2001, which turned out to be more than disastrous and I still ended up doing all right; let's see how I do this time around.

Stay tuned.

Online Copywriters Suck, Part I

2009-10-20T15:29:00.005-07:00

Holy Crap! This is why I hate my job. Because Sephora didn't hire me. Instead, they hired the person who did... THIS!

Here's poop in your eye!

Why Did I Ever Procrastinate Before?!

2009-07-09T14:24:00.003-07:00

Good god. Freelancing on top of a full-time job when you have a baby is insane. But I can't give up on the freelance -- it's the work that feels good, where I feel as if I'm using my skills rather than corporate-droning myself to death. Besides, I still hold out hope that I can go back to freelancing full-time.

Anyway, I'm amazed that I ever felt like I couldn't get anything done when I had all the time in the world. What was wrong with me?? Now! Now I need all the time I wasted then! Wouldn't it be awesome if it turned out that's what procrastination was? Banking free time for when you really needed it?

Here's hoping I get my latest story in by deadline, or close enough to it to keep my editor calling.

Ooh, I know -- I'm going to finish that spec personal essay for my pal at the women's magazine. Quick, before the baby wakes up... OOPS she's up.

I Love Being Tagged "Hilarious"

2009-04-23T12:24:00.002-07:00

Oops. It's been a while since I updated. I was freelancing quite a bit while out on maternity leave, but with such truncated work hours, I had to make hard choices. Blogging lost. That's not true: I blogged, but not about work.

I thought it was hard not to procrastinate before. Turns out: I had no idea. When a wailing, hungry child brackets your time into three-hour segments, you get a stark lesson in just how much time you screw around. Seriously? Just as I would wind down my "just-for-a-minute" web reading, my husband would wander into the room with my big-eyed schmoo, and I'd have to admit I'd squandered my precious time yet again.

It has taken some time, but I think I'm getting the hang of it now.

Anyway, check out my iPhone Oscars, which I squeaked in right under the wire before the real Oscars. Man, I love my iPhone, Dr. Horrible, and Oscars.

My Baby!

2008-10-29T11:00:00.000-07:00

My baby was born this week!

http://www.maclife.com/articles/feature

Oh, also, I gave birth. ;)

Praise!

2008-10-22T12:07:00.006-07:00

Oh! My gosh. The "ruining my life" story has been done for over a week, and i haven't stopped in to congratulate myself. Well, of course not-- no project, no need to procrastinate, right?

well, of course I do have my next project on deck -- it'll ruin my life again, for sure. abotu 1500 words/week for 8 weeks or so. but man, what a payday, and it's a fun project, so yay.

but back to the point: i got praise! props! big ups!

I just finished reading the [REDACTED] feature...OMG, if we can publish something this well-written, well-reported, and well-designed every month, we will eat [COMPETITION] for breakfast by end of 2010, no problem.

THANK YOU for your amazing work on this feature--I am so impressed and so proud of this story, and the Dec issue in general.

which prompted this:

And this is a good opportunity for me to thank [MADFOOT] for her great writing (her snark complements mine) and what must have been insanely frenetic (and nerve-wracking?) reporting/interviewing.

now, I did not work on this feature alone -- not by a longshot. i split the work with my editor, but I did almost all the reporting and worked my hiney off.

this post has been sitting here waiting to be published for almost an hour b/c i can't seem to say "I'm proud." but if I were capable of saying it, I would!

Truth in advertising

2008-10-04T12:46:00.002-07:00

Right now, I'm truly procrastinating. It's 12:46 and I have the afternoon clear to bang out several chunks of the huge story that has been RUINING MY LIFE! for the past 2 weeks. Hokay. I have the transcribed interviews, I have (detailed) directions from my editor, and I know what to do... but I feel like ASS. I"m exhausted. My feet are balloons. My brain feels cloudy. And my reward, when all this is done, is that I'l be totally exhausted when my husband and stepkids get home and will be a cranky lump.

Okay! Enough bitching. I'm off to work now. But man, freelancing on top of a full-time job when you're pregnant: it is not for sissies.

"You love it."

2008-10-02T21:16:00.002-07:00

I'm working at a frantic pace. I spend my days at my day job, getting up early and skipping lunch when i have to interview a subject. I get home and pound out a couple 500-word tips before bed. I charm cranky interviewees and reassure intransigent ones. I'm exhausted. What does my husband have to say about all this?

"You love it."

Well, so what if he's right. Jerk.

Hating Your Sources, Part Deux

2008-09-23T23:53:00.004-07:00

Ya know, I'm seeing there's a pattern in my last few posts. A leitmotif, if you will. A theme. And that theme is crabbiness. I come here to crab about how annoying my stories are, and why is that?! I love what I do! I'm so grateful to be making inroads back to super-freelance status. What is my damage, Heather?

I guess part of it is -- since I have such a strict policy against (a) blogging about blogging, (b) blogging about not blogging, and (c) blogging about my blog, I only show up here when I have an axe to grind. I suppose it would be possible for me to blog about how unbelievably psyched I am about something. I am! I'm psyched about the cover story I'm writing, it's totally fun and today I got to call the PR company that inspired the name of the Beastie Boys album "Hello, Nasty." Kick ass! I'm psyched that I have a second chance at the big-money toddler tips. Yay!

But I'm bummed that I emailed a very specific request to a nutrition expert, and her reply was to lecture me about how the basic premise of my story was stupid, and try to give me a NEW angle to my story. Oh, expert! How could you? How many times, Expert, have I called you or your ilk to say, "Quick! I'm on deadline! Give me five tops for maintaining Zen in a crisis!" or "Help! I'm desperate! Name three top mood-making interior design tips!" -- only to be given the lecture that (a) the story idea I was assigned, over which I have no control, is stupid, and I SHOULD be writing about this other thing that you feel like talking about.

Expert, it just ain't right. It's not how magazines work. If you worked at one, you would know, but you don't, so on this topic, can I just be the expert? The expert says, if I need five energy-boosting food with spurious science to support each one, just give it to me. We can figure it out together, even! (I've done this before with your opposite, the Awesome Expert!) But don't try to change what story I'm doing so it fits your philosophy. In the long history of publishing -- back to the invention of the Gutenberg press, and possibly as far back as cave-painting -- there has never been a subject of a story, or an expert cited, who said "You ought to do it this way," and voila, wahoo, w00t, the article came out exactly like that. Nope.

If it worked that way, it'd be a blog. Your expert blog. God, wouldn't it be awesome if I googled my expert right now, and found a fresh blog entry bitching about stupid reporters and their dumbed-down requests? that was be so meta! our blogs could meet like matter and antimatter and destroy the internets and all its tubes!

In other bummer news, I didn't get the awesome part-time gig I was up for. Man! The awesome part-time work-from-home gig is right up there with the editor-at-large title -- mysterious, elusive, precious. Ah well. The timing wasn't so great anyway. If all goes well at their end, they'll have room for me in a few months, when my time will be either more my own or completely NOT my own. We'll see. I like them, and they gave me the nicest rejection ever ("No, YOU're great! No, YOU!"), so I'm choosing to believe they like me and will use me eventually.

"how can you stand to write that crap?"

2008-09-08T10:25:00.005-07:00

Since I've been pregnant, I notice that I've become public property. Everyone likes to touch my belly and ask when the baby's due and whether it's a boy or a girl and whether it's twins, because I'm so HUGE. Fortunately, i have no boundaries and am a middle child, so the attention is totally welcome.

Not so welcome is the attention I've gotten since the mid-'90s, when I went from writing little smart articles for little smart (poor) publications to more mainstream article for big fat (rich) publications. People seem entirely content to look at something I wrote and say whatever shitty and insulting thing comes to mind, and every single one of them is burned into my brain.

Just in case you don't believe me, here's a partial list:

"No offense, but your magazine's worse for women than Hustler." (nb: six months later, the same person was begging me to get her novel excerpted in that same magazine)
"I just can't believe you think it's OK to pump that crap out." (two weeks later, an email from this person asking how she could freelance for my magazine)
"Why not just write for Bust or Ms.?" (I was able to tell this person that, in fact, I was writing a feature for Bust that was paying me $150, while the Maxim feature she was bitching about had paid literally 20 times that)
"We don't want any more of these." (An agent, indicating the three-book arc I'd written about teens who become reality TV stars. My babies! We don't want any more of my babies?)
"Well, how about this... is that stupid enough for your article? (This from an expert who was getting free publicity for her stupid sex-advice book via my stupid article)
"You mean there's a difference between Glamour and Self? I thought they were all just 'ten ways to get a guy to hand over his wallet.'" (I reserve comment.)
"I can not believe you got paid money to write... that." (Full disclosure: the story I had pulled out was really silly. On the other hand, fuck you. What did you ever get paid to write? Actual answer: "A lot of money.")
"No seriously, I'm totally impressed that you wrote books! This just isn't the kind of thing I usually read." (I've had 2 husbands and 2 serious boyfriends since I started writing books, and 0% of them has managed to plow through my prose. Granted, they're essentially Gossip Girl with less sex and more smarts, but how hard could it be?)
"Good lord, can't you just write for the New Yorker?" (Yes, mom. I can, I just won't.)

Usually I take the criticism in stride. Yes, it's odd to me that, like lawyers and Catholics, I seem to be in a group that it's just considered OK to take pot-shots at. (at which it's OK to... oh, never mind.) Sometimes it rankles. What are you gonna do?

No seriously, is there something I can do?!

it's bad to hate your sources!

2008-09-07T16:24:00.002-07:00

Holy bananas! I'm doing a very simple article right now, the kind I've written hundreds of times before... simple premise, established bullet points, 3 experts. I had a short deadline, so I gathered a LOT of experts all at once, and wasn't terribly picky about them.

Well, I have to get pickier about one of them.

How often do you interview someone and end up feeling offended to the very core? I'm not Keith Olbermann -- I usually don't write about anything soul-stirring or morally important. I write low-expectation stories for a mass-market audience, and since freelance rates have dropped in the last few years (and stayed at the same rate for the previous, oh, twenty years), I write them quickly and with a minimum of fuss.

But when I'm confronted with an expert spouting what amounts to ignorant, sexist hate-speech, what are my options? I can:

Decide not to use her at all, which feels impolite, since she did give me her time and thoughtful answers (soul-curdling as they are);
Use her less-offensive answers, which feels gross, because I'm giving her free book publicity, pointers to her site, and implicit approval of her worldview.

And before you go telling me I shouldn't censor this poor beleaguered therapist, I just don't see how not using someone as an expert is censorship. Do I have to provide damaging advice based on shitty research to be p.c.?

Anyway, I feel dirty having even spoken to her. To hear ancient bromides like "women cheat because of emotional needs; men cheat because they need sex, and aren't capable of thinking or feeling more deeply about it" made me want a Karen Silkwood shower. I don't think I can use the interview; if she objects, I'll fall back on the old "blame my mean old editor" response. If she gets that enough times, maybe she'll stop being such a reductive hater.

Oh yes. I remember this.

2008-08-26T09:40:00.002-07:00

When I went from freelance to full-time at my Hearst job, I thought I'd be able to keep writing young-adult novels, no problem. I was used to doing a chapter a day and thought, with the amount of actual time I spent writing, that piling that on top of a full day's magazine writing and editing would be easy. There's a lot of what seems like wasted time in a writer's day -- and it seems wasted even to the writer wasting it.

What I learned then was that all that "wasted" time helped to gather stores of energy and focus for the actual writing, fingers on keyboard, eyes on monitor. You cannot do that half-assed. You cannot sandwich it between scheduled research and scheduled interviews. It takes its own time, and you have to allow the full amount of that time.

This is not to say that you have to wait for the Muse to strike, or that repeats of "Bonanza" are integral to the creative process. There is a sweet spot, a perfect amount of cushion before and after the actual writing; learning exactly what you need (as opposed to what you want, because in addition to being a hardworking writer, you are a big lazy bum) is about the most precious and helpful information you can put in your hopper.

All this is to say that I got a disheartening response from an editor this morning, saying that a rough draft was way off the mark. I've gotten these before, and written these before, and still ended up with a triumphant final draft, but it is always a blow to the ego. It reminded me of my editor-friend Roz's response to me ten years ago: "This isn't the Amy-writing we're used to!"

Back then, I could give up the freelance and commit fully into my equally satisfying day job. Now, I need to do both till I can transition to freelance full-time; I don't have the luxury of agreeing that this isn't the right project for me. I have to do better, which means working smarter, avoiding websites that suck the life out of my day, and allowing for the kind of rest that makes me work better, not worse.

Good to know! Of course, I knew it already, but... Good to re-know!

Back to freelance?

2008-08-24T19:43:00.002-07:00

It is conceivable that I could go back to full-time freelancing. I'm up for that Holy Grail of freelancing, the permanent part-time gig, which would give me a reliable base-salary equal to what I made in my worst year of freelancing. (About half what I make at my day job.)

I could pile work on top of that and approach a reasonable facsimile of my current income.

So why am I so petrified at this idea?

1. It seems irresponsible. The regular paycheck, the 401K, the absolute knowledge that the work is there: How can I give that up?

2. Fear of running out of work. True, my friends have been almost literally banging down my door to hook me up with amazing contacts, and the work has been coming in. And the only reason that I fell out of freelancing before was that personal crises of various sorts made me less than dependable. But how do I know that won't happen again?

3. It's shitloads harder. When I freelance, I have a keener sense that any wasted time is money I'm not making, and I don't have a good constitution for that; I am the worst, meanest boss I've ever had. I remember the extreme, amazing relief I felt when I graduated college and started my first job, and realized that at the end of the day, I was done. Done. No looming deadlines, no worrisome unfinished business, nothing stopping me from sleeping at night: Done. You cannot put a price tag on something so precious; I'm bad at compartmentalizing, letting things go.

As each of his daughters moved out, our dad's empire expanded. He likes to have a separate workspace for every project, and he now has desks, piles of books, and stacks of folders piled around the house. I get it: I'm envious, and I also get the shudder-horrors at the idea of reaching total saturation on one article, getting up to clear my head, and wandering into another room, only to be confronted with an alarming amount that needs to be done on another one. I think that's what the inside of my head is like.

Well, but that's what they call a tangent. The point is, I'm weighing my options. Right now, my job is fine, but as I've noted, they're none too fond of pregnant ladies or mommies there. And I don't know how I could explain to my baby that what took me away from her was... the holiday promotion. I'm going to be working essentially two full-time jobs in the runup to this baby-happening; what happens after the fact is anyone's guess. Eeeeeek!

McFly? Bueller?

2008-08-13T15:25:00.003-07:00

What do I do if an editor responded to a query, but never sent a contract or followed up on my follow-up questions? Eh, I'll probably just write it, because it's interesting to me either way, but I so hate when this happens.

I got a huge contract -- the per-word rate isn't so great, but the full amount is nice and hefty. This seems to happen every autumn -- I get a nice, fat project that allows me to pay my taxes for the year (hi, I'm disorganized) and keeps me on the "yes, I'm an active freelancer" map.

The trouble is, when I moved, I set up my office in a room that just isn't mine anymore. Don't ask, it's annoying and complicated -- but I have to create a new office somewhere else in the house. So far, I've identified (a) the kitchen and (b) the bedroom. Either way, I need this workspace to have enough room for files and research materials, AND to close up when I'm not using it. Because again, somehow, after the move, my computer ceased to be mine (along with my workspace), and I am feeling really territorial about it all.

Anyway, I've been in the market for hideaway desks. I'm a bit tormented, because the armoire style might be annoying with the big ol' doors... but the Ikea Alve secretary-with-add-on is twice as expensive, not so pretty, and - you know what? I should just get the cheap armoire and leave it at that.

It'll be a huge relief to have my own, private workspace, even if it is in the middle of chaos. Just to know my files will be where I need them, and my computer will have a safe spot away from the teeming masses... and I'll put a fricking lock on it if I have to!

Oh! And my iPhone story will be in the September MacLife. Man, that thing was fun to write, and the perfect excuse to get an iPhone. and yes, iLove tYping all pOstmodern like that. Next up: getting a Get.

Grandparents.com

2008-07-30T20:07:00.002-07:00

My debut on Grandparents.com is posted, over there on the left! It's a funny story about what grandparents should do if they are uncomfortable with their grandkids being blogged about. Oh, how I desperately would have loved to interview Neal Pollack for that article! Instead, I talked to Stephanie Klein and Ben McNeill and their respective parents, who were great. But you know: no fuss, no recriminations, no fun.

(Stephanie's having a tough time, by the way, so send her happy thoughts of her husband's recovery if you have any laying around.)

The article was fun, right up my alley. And I got to work with my old parlor-games pal, Gary Drevitch, who's easy as pie to work with and a terrific editor.

Now I'm off to revise the iPhone story. Watch for that soon!

Posted on 28 Jul 2008 at 05:23 UTC

2008-07-27T22:23:00.001-07:00

I'm posting this from cellspin. For a story! I'm so awfully tired and there is so much to write.

blank page

2008-07-24T20:52:00.002-07:00

I hate that feeling when you first start researching a story and think, "God. Oh God. I'm such a fraud. I will never understand any of this, and I should not be in charge of anything!"

The same thing happened in high school when I would buy a new album: "I only know two of these songs! And they're both on Side 1! How am I ever going to get the whole album under my belt? How long will it take for me to know all the songs? Augh! Why did I buy this album? I should have just bought the greatest hits, I can't DO this!"

Or, you know, when I start a new relationship: "Who is this person! In what way will he disappoint me? This can't really be as fun as I think it is! I must be co-dependent!"

It doesn't happen when I start a work of fiction. Those start in an orgy of joy over some amazing paragraph I just came up with, most likely in the shower. It's three pages later, like clockwork, when I say, "Oh! God! Come on! What the hell am I writing? I don't know how to structure this. How long is a chapter supposed to be? This isn't shaped right. It's boring. I can't. I just can't, stop it, don't make me!"

Isn't it fun to be a writer? Barrels of monkeys AND laughs. I'm telling you.

High Anxiety

2008-07-21T11:26:00.002-07:00

And so the cycle begins again. In the wake of the wedding, I got behind on two deadlines. Know what doesn't help keep me up-to-date on those deadlines? Waking up at 2:30 am and staring at the ceiling, silently berating myself for not having done the research required for either story. It's not like I can work when I'm all bleary and hysterical.

I'm annoyed with myself. And, of course, heading out to a lunch date with another potential client, because what makes a gal more inclined to make deadlines than more looming deadlines? Actually, I'm feeling really great about my freelance life these days -- things are really looking up, and I need to start saving up again, now that the wedding's over.

If I can just get a decent night's sleep, I'll really get rolling!

I said-a mony mo-mo-mo!

2008-07-17T14:21:00.003-07:00

Oh, this is a ridiculous and cool chain of events:

I have a website for my recent wedding. Apparently, the accounts-payable department of my books' publishing company has been looking for me, and this made it easier for them. (I thought this blog came up when you searched for me, but... eh, I had a big burrito for lunch and don't have the energy to self-Google.) So I got a comment thru my wedding site that they're looking for me. I drop them a line and lo and behold, my books have been translated into German (??!!) and I have "monies" coming to me. Any bets on how much it'll be? My guess: $350.

But I love monies, they're my favorites! So I'm happy for all of those monies to come my way.

I'd get a lot more of them if I'd just get my new iPhone and write the two (2) articles currently looming over my head.

Countdown to iPhone!

2008-07-09T16:49:00.001-07:00

I love it when my professional life enables my overspending habit. All I want is an iPhone, and lo and behold, an assignment lobs itself my way. Best of all, my mom can't give me crap about buying a silly phone because now (a) it's a tax deduction and (2) i'm getting paid enough to cover the cost for... a while.

Rock on, freelance life!

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Magazine quirks that make me crazy

2008-06-29T08:37:00.007-07:00

There's this particular pop-culture-technology magazine that's frankly notorious for being THIS CLOSE to being good. Since it's now one of the few local publications I could write for, I am trying, trying to work out a détente with my opinion of this magazine. My fiancé loves it. The information and reporting seem fine. But the execution has so many sloppy little errors and such sophomoric editing that I find it unreadable. I can't get to the good stuff because it's all covered in a fine veneer of errors.

We'll just ignore, for the moment, that their copy-editor left "shoe-in" in a dek for an otherwise interesting and engaging story about iRobot. That's the kind of thing that might have happened just before everything went to the printer.

But there's also a funny bit by Steve Carell, detailing how to get smarter. Cute. Very cute. Until I got to this:

Carrots are very good for the eyes, but they absoutely must be baby carrots so you don't chew too much. I don't think I have to explain crunchwaves to people who read TITLE REDACTED. They already know that when you chew something too hard, the vibrations fire up those crunchwaves, which shake the neurons in your brain. Do that too much and those brain cells shake loose and die. I usually gulp my food, and you should, too.

Joke Hitlers. They killed the joke. They looked at the joke, decided they knew comedy better than Steve fricking Carell, and murdered the joke in cold blood. Rule #1 of not being a hack: Do not spell it out. Do not. Spell. It out. Your audience will follow along if you let it. Spelling out jokes only encourages comedic flabbiness, and everyone's funnybones end up looking like the flabby pod people in Wall-E.

Take a note, comedy-challenged editors:

Carrots are very good for the eyes, but they absoutely must be baby carrots so you don't chew too much. I don't have to explain crunchwaves to people who read TITLE REDACTED. Whenever possible, I purée or gulp my food, and you should, too.

I'll spell it out for you. If you say you don't have to explain it, don't explain it. That's where the funny lies: in allowing the randomness to be random, and the reader's imagination to fill in. This is one case when fewer words equal bigger funny.

Wow. I feel better now that I've gotten that off my chest. And ensured that that magazine will never hire me now. But since they haven't returned my calls for going on two years now, I'm not going to mourn that loss too hard.

Kick-started!

2008-06-25T23:42:00.003-07:00

Phew! Something about getting my most recent story out of my inbox has awakened some long-dormant part of my brain. Now I've pulled out my assignments spreadsheet and updated it. Maybe I'll even get paid for those stories I did for Chow two years ago... oh, let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Anyway, it seems like more stories and contacts and other opportunities are starting to trickle across my transom. It's a huge relief. I mean, it's a fine thing to sit here and complain that writing breathlessly about book clubs doesn't thrill my reporter's soul. It's quite another to dust off my skills and, y'know, come through with some interviews, meet some deadlines, and actually do some critical thinking. It feels pretty great.

Next up: writing about my divorce for a Jewish newspaper of note. It's going to be a great clip. Nobody outside New York will care, but since when has that bugged me? I mean, there's an outside of New York?

Sentimental Journey

2008-06-23T11:30:00.003-07:00

My last freelance assignment before leaving New York a couple years ago? An article for Good Housekeeping about guilt. It just turned up on MSN. (I put it over there, on the left -- take a looksee.)

Now, don't get me wrong: I love it when my stories pop up again. It makes me look super-productive, as people drop me emails to say they saw my byline, and especially since I run with so many non-journalists these days, it's also impressive and ups my Google Fight chances. But it's not like I get an extra check for this.

Used to be, when my stories would run in Hearst magazines (even when I was on staff at a Hearst magazine), being published elsewhere meant a surprise! bonus! check! Okay, so it was generally for phone-bill money, but it was a happy fun-time bonus nonetheless. I know that in the wake of the writers' strike it's passé to complain about not being compensated for your published work being repurposed as online content, but... come on! srsly? I already write for the web for free, it's called MY BLOG! Pony up, suckers!

Early-morning interviews

2008-06-18T21:25:00.002-07:00

If I don't get up and do these interviews before work tomorrow, I'm sunk. It's bad enough I had to admit to my editor today that I wasn't going to make the deadline -- again. My job is busy, my health is ... not bad, but I'm having a few interesting issues, and my wedding is careening off into disaster territory. I have to get this done.

uch no

2008-06-17T15:19:00.000-07:00

it's really bad. i can't get this story finished. uch.

sorry. brain not working.

2008-06-16T22:10:00.002-07:00

I said "a post per day for thirty days," so here's your post. But after a day in the salt mine, followed by therapy, followed by grocery shopping, followed by rug unpacking, I'm spent. My words are all sleeping.

Advice to a young intern

2008-06-15T21:29:00.002-07:00

Someone asked me if I had any advice for his sister, who was up for an internship at my old magazine. I had a funny little sentimental journey through the veils of my nostalgia as I told her who was a dumbshit, how to imitate the structure of old heds and deks to write new one, and not to try anything too innovative. It also made me feel pretty oogy. I loved that job and would love to be writing for that title, and the masthead is full of people I know. But I burned too many bridges.

I don't know what else to say about that. I feel like a bit of a stooge, but I know I can't do anything about it. Seems a bit unfair, considering my stupid ex, who behaved way worse than I did, is still in the industry, in a great job, while I'm out here on the wrong coast pouting on my blog. Ech.

All right, tomorrow I get my expert lined up, interview one more blogger and his mom, and then I write the thing tomorrow night. The end's in sight, and then I can start the next one. Moving forward.

interviewing is like bungee jumping

2008-06-14T18:03:00.003-07:00

right before I make the call, I panic. Then it goes fine, and I become irritated that I didn't do it earlier. I am entirely too old to still have this problem.

of course, i don't bungee jump, so I could be wrong.

New Contacts

2008-06-13T16:34:00.002-07:00

I'm so astounded when people make new contacts. I was chatting with an old pal today, complaining about the many contacts who faded away during my "lost years." She is so polar-opposite from me. "The great thing about editors is, there's a new crop every couple of years!"

This threw me for a loop! That's the great thing about editors? I thought that was the horrible thing about editors! Just when you get one to trust you and worm your way into her rolodex, boom, she moves somewhere else (maybe taking you, maybe not) or quits to start an alpaca farm. (Or to stay home with her kids. But alpaca farm sounds so much better.)

My friend sent me a bunch of contacts, saying "there's plenty of work to go around," and that's why I love writers. Especially since I had just written a lengthy email detailing the inside scoop on my old magazine to an aspiring intern. Today, what went around, came around.

Of course, having a contact is just the beginning. I have to then send the right clips, make the right pitches, and meet the right deadlines. But I feel ten percent closer to being back in my freelance saddle right now. Sure, it's a saddle that can slide out from beneath me at any time, that carries no health benefits, and that makes me treat houseplants like coworkers, but dammit, it's my saddle, and I love that dang saddle.

Cruelty to Characters

2008-06-12T18:06:00.001-07:00

I’m thinking about my reaction to the Annie Proulx story. I took a class (well, several) with Mary Gordon in college, and I remember her scolding us: “Stop trying to think you have to tie up your stories with a pretty, pink bow. You can’t. You have to allow things to happen, even if they’re bad, even if they break your heart. You have to be honest about what happens to your characters. You can’t protect them.”

That is just so unfair.

I mean, you can’t protect your children – sure. They have to grow up and live in a world that’s going to push them around, and you have to get them ready for that. But your characters don’t have to do any such thing! They’re going to live in a goddamn book! What’s the point of putting them through such hell?

The answer, of course, is that those books are just going to sit unread if all I do is make nice-nice stories about pretty-pretty funtimes. So, you know. I get it. I do have to be honest.

But I’m still not really on board for this idea that there is a story out there, and I just have to be true to my characters and it’ll unearth itself like one of those worms in Tremors. I knew a woman in a writing class who said she hated her main character: “She just won’t stand up for herself. I had her beaten, raped, I made her have a baby – she just won’t stop whining and crying.” Buh. WRITE IT FOR HER. I mean, there has to be a middle ground between “I control my characters to the detriment of everyone’s entertainment” and “I’ve substituted fictional characters for the flies I used to pull the wings off of, isn’t that a step up?”

I struggle with boredom when I work from an outline, but the project I’m working on now is stalled because I don’t know what happens next, and I’m scared I’m going off in a wholly wrong direction. I hate feeling so at sea, but this is part of being brave and finding out what my characters want to do. And then telling them that’s really nice, but we’re only going to show about one-tenth of that. And teaching them to deal with their disappointment.

I can’t tie it up with a pretty pink bow, but there’s no way I’m going to let my characters tumble tits-up into a ditch. Unless the New Yorker says I have to. Hey, we all have a price.

The Notebook

2008-06-11T21:42:00.002-07:00

I have something like four notebooks in my pocketbook and I write in exactly none of them. One's for my therapist: an emoooootion diary. In an effort to rid myself of distorted thinking, I am supposed to write down every time I say "God damn, I'm an idiot!" and then track back to see what the triggering event was, and what emotion I felt when I talked down to myself.

I think I kept that for a week. It has a windmill on it.

Another one is a checkbook-sized book where I'm supposed to track my outgoing cash. Ha.

A third one -- this one's actually funny: the first page says "The things that I don't know could fill a book," and on each page there's something else I didn't know, that I learned sometime after moving here in 2006. For instance:

"I do not know the way to San Jose. There are signs all over the place, but I'd really have to check Google Maps."

"I have no idea what an ESTUARY is. 'A small estuary?' I don't even know what a big one is."

"I didn't know people still used hot water bottles!"

"I had no idea how sad an object a cold hot water bottle is."

"Grits? Polenta? Same shit!"

It peters out after that. I started putting rehearsal notes from a show I was in on the next few pages. I also have a shopping list, but that doesn't really count.

The point is, when I was doing standup, I had a notebook with me constantly. All the time. And anything that struck me as funny went in that notebook, and every day or so I'd go through it and spin some of that straw into pure comedy gold. I've had so many sweet little moments that could go into my fiction, and sometimes I have the impulse to run to the computer and jot them down... but usually I just think "eh, I'll remember it" and -- blort. It's gone.

Even when I DO jot it down, it goes into a file that somehow migrates away from my desktop so that, probably, my hard drive is littered with documents with a single line like "girl who's so anxious not to fall that she stares too hard at the ground an walks off a cliff" or "character has the odor of panic attack."

hm. i did say comedy gold, didn't I? I suppose there's comedy bronze and silver as well... and a little lead...

anyway maybe i should jot stuff down more often, is my point.

What's the Haps?

2008-06-10T17:52:00.000-07:00

I was talking to Mr. Cutiepants the other day about how hard it is for me to make friends. I don’t think it’s the old saw about not wanting to join a club that would have me as a member – I think it’s more about my not believing the club actually wants me as a member. The club is just being nice, and I don’t want to impose by taking the club up on its offer.

Anyway, he said he’s got the same problem, except for when he’s in therapy. And I was like, OHRLY. Because honestly, for me, therapy is what keeps my wooden head barely above water. Actually having a positive improvement? I dunno – maybe I get that, but I’m not aware of it.

So I ran to my awesome therapist (who I love and recommend, and who has just added a day to her private-patients roster) and was all “I want concrete, positive results!” And she was all “What would be a concrete, positive result?” and I was like “Writing more. Being productive. Not procrastinating. Getting my agent back. Mostly writing more.”

For the past while – more than the past year, which I could chalk up to my day job – even assigned articles have been a challenge. I used to run to them like beloved amours. Lately I dodge them like embarrassing party-makeouts. Is it a failure of nerve? Was I burned out? Is it because I’m not doing it for the money anymore? The last theory holds no water at all – by all rights, I should be working on my fiction if I’m not doing it for the ducats.

Anyway, the very idea of writing about my therapy on my blog makes me want to just get it over with and actually take up residence in my navel. But I’m really starting to kickstart something here, and if acknowledging my extreme neurotic resistance to said kickstartage might help, well, I’ve got to give it a try.

Oh, and Annie Proulx seriously let me down. She did NOT have to do that. I’m shitcanning the rest of this week’s New Yorker, as my mom advised.

2008-06-09T16:56:00.004-07:00

I finished reading Haruki Murakami’s New Yorker essay on being a runner and a novelist, and all I have to say is: Fuhuuuuuck youhoooooou, Haruki Murakami.

Here’s my summary of his essay:

I flunked out of college and decided, on a whim, to start a jazz club. It really took off! Then I woke up one morning and thought, Huh. Novelist. I ditched my successful business because I don’t like doing more than one thing at a time. It really took off! Then I started running. What does this have to do with writing? Not a fucking thing. But like my novels, this essay is pointless and leads you in several different directions before dropping you, flailing, into a tar pit of irritated confusion. And my running? It really took off!

Haruki Murakami makes me feel stupid. I suppose this means I should like him, and that my failure to do so means I am, actually, too stupid to accept a mental challenge. I don’t care! My mom gave me “Kafka on the Shore” to read when we were on our family-reunion-vacation two years ago. I got sucked in, entranced by the characters, and read like a demon… only to be expelled from the story, unceremoniously and without warning, when the book ran out of pages. What uh… what happened? How come the teacher passed out and had that heavy period? Were the cats real? Who was the old guy? And the answer came back: Sorry, stupid reader. If you actually read books hoping for resolution of plot-points, you are too lowbrow for the Murakami.

My mom, of course, loves him. This is because she has no attention span anyway, so not having a resolution to a plot-point is not a problem for her. Oh! Oh, I’m going to hell. But it’s true: having a conversation with my mom is like hanging on to the caboose of a runaway train. Hang on tight, and maybe you’ll recognize the landscape when the story’s over.

I don’t know why I’m so irritated by this essay. I guess because to me, it reads like a disingenuous gee-whillickers, aw-shucks screed. Not for a moment do I believe that anyone would mail off a handwritten first draft to a writing contest, without keeping a copy for himself, and win. On UrbanBaby, we used to call that a VBA – a veiled brag alert.

To whit:

Oh, my child is already more fluent than his French tutor, does anyone have a recommendation?
VBA
But it’s true, he’s 4 and reads French at a 5^th-grade level!

Or:

8 weeks pp and I still have 2 pounds to go! How can I lose them?
VBA
But didn’t you hear me? I still have 2 pounds to lose!

You get the idea. Ersatz complaining about things that are neither complainworthy nor relatable: just a fancy way to say to everyone reading, “Jettison the last of your self-esteem, because you are not the shit. That job has gone to me. My shit has eaten your shit’s milkshake.”

Sorry about that. I mean about mentioning shit and milkshakes in the same paragraph. But once again, the idea is gotten by you: as far as I can see, Murakami’s just being a showoff. And a liar. And boring! Writing a novel isn’t something you just decide to do and then do. It’s hard to stick to, and even if you write something amazing, getting it published is not a given. That he claims to have had such an easy ride makes us all look stupid.

And that he’s apparently never had a moment’s self-doubt, difficult time, bout of existential angst – I can’t just chalk that up to cultural differences. Murakami is like the guy who had a great time in high school, and can’t wait to get back to the 20^th reunion to see all his boffo old pals! Come on, Ha-shmucki: Not a moment’s doubt? You go running every morning, and never get sick? And the best thing about becoming a novelist is… waking up early? Not receiving copies of your book in the mail, not getting letters from your readers, not hearing yourself quoted on NPR… it’s getting up with the sun?!

You bobbleheaded little twit.

I’m so annoyed. Fortunately, I spy an Annie Proulx short story mere pages later, so the New Yorker shall be redeemed (and I know it is panting with relief to hear that).

Oh crap, I just spoke to my mom on the phone, and she says this issue of the New Yorker is the most depressing she’s ever read. So much for the Annie Proulx story; I was pulling for the main character. MOM!

Freelancer Envy

2007-04-26T12:06:00.000-07:00

The time-line of a freelancer is different from the rest of the world's. I know that messes with the laws of physics, but I'm sure there's an episode of Star Trek that supports my theory. Freelancing is the ultimate "yeah, but what have you done lately?" gig. As cool and pride-provoking as some of my earlier work has been, I'm only as good as what I've done in the last year -- because I'm only as busy as my current roster of editors will allow.

Let's face it: my last two-plus years were extremely rough. I was suffering through a personal crisis and had no energy to devote to properly pitching, writing, and nurturing professional relationships. I was given several opportunities that I simply couldn't follow through on, and I blew several good assignments. Blow an assignment when you're on-staff and you get an intervention from HR. Blow an assignment as a freelancer and you're deleted from the address book. There's just too many good writers out here for anyone to be patient with me. Thanks to three or four really loyal, amazing friend-itors, who leaned on me to get things in and threw softball assignments my way, I was able to stay afloat professionally.

Try as I might to re-form those relationships, it's slow going and horribly hard. I know I'm great at this, I know I can do the work, but as good as my clips and resume are, it's still a very long and uphill climb. I'm making progress, but slowly.

Contrast this to my fellow freelancers. Apparently, they're all, effortlessly, getting generous assignments from the glossiest of magazines. In my online freelancer forums, I see their victories -- hard-won as they are! -- and just feel defeated. It's such an awful attitude, and I feel ashamed of it. But this is a blog, and what's a blog without a little embarrassing self-revelation once in a while?

My fellow freelancers fall into two categories:
• People I hate, and therefore begrudge their success.
• People I love, and still feel envious of, even as I applaud their success.
It's driving me up a frickin' wall, around the frickin' bend, and [preposition] the frickin' [noun]. Book projects! Plum assignments about my favorite TV shows! Successful networking! I tell ya, it's enough to make a gal's superior attitude feel downright hollow.

I also hear the same freelancers complaining about projects they screwed up, opportunities they didn't go for, ambitions they are afraid to have, and overloaded situations they are sure they can't handle. I know we all feel this way sometimes. I just feel like I'm the only one who really deserves to.

Except for those people I hate. They deserve to and never do -- of that, I'm sure. Which only makes me want to be like them even more. Oh, the self-loathing, so much more interesting than the deadline I must meet today!

The Personal Essay, She Kicks My Butt

2007-04-19T13:55:00.000-07:00

Hoo boy. The Holy Grail of magazine writing is the personal essay, sometimes referred to as a first-person-reported piece. The idea is this: you get to expound upon your life, Joan Didion-style, and use that as a jumping-off point for a helpy service piece, quoting experts that support your experience and actions and, Godwilling, coming to some sort of uplifting conclusion. Sometimes you don't have experts -- it's just about a moment in your life that's bound to touch others, like on the last page of the New York Times Magazine. But those are even rarer creatures, like baby squirrels or flattering Uggs.

My favorite recent personal essay is by the marvelous Wendy Shanker. It's beautifully written, details her struggle with a health issue, and despite a lack of a neat-and-tidy ending, manages to leave the reader feeling like there's hope. One of the annoying things about magazines is a trend, in recent years, to take the attitude, "Everything's GREAT! Here's how to make it GREATER!" That chirpy, unrealistic approach seems limiting to me. I get that magazines go with what sells on the newsstand, but I've never been convinced that a complete denial of negative experience is really what gets magazines in hands. So when I read this, I subscribed to Self so they'd understand that I supported this fresh view.

Of course they'll get right on that because I'm their A#1 priority. But ya do what ya can, right?

Anyway, I finally got assigned to write not one, but three personal essays for Happenmag.com. I write for them a lot (cast your eyes to the left if you don't believe me), and I have the world's most nurturing relationship with my editor there, so I was totally pleased -- and totally terrified. Writing about yourself seems fun till you realize that it's only interesting if there's something at stake. And when there's something at stake, well, you have to be vulnerable. You have to let the reader in. You can't just put up your sassy-brassy shields, and lob kicky bits of advice over your Wall of Comfort-Level. You have to level that wall, within reason, and admit to actual foibles, embarrassing ones, and confront not just how they make you feel, but how you can get past them and improve.

It's like taping a therapy session, having it transcribed, and handing it out to your nearest and dearest for their perusal. Look, I'm as shameless at the next GenX-er, totally willing to profit from my own embarrassment, but as I get older, and the embarrassing situations become less kicky and charming and more heart-wrenching and permanently damaging, the process of writing about them becomes more difficult.

I guess that's what makes them good and readable. But damn, it takes a lot more time, energy, and self-discovery than the usual three-point FOB service piece. Ha-doy.

Banned Vocabulary Words!

2007-03-13T16:21:00.000-07:00

Before Matt Groening was the Simpsons guy, he did a cartoon called Life in Hell which I read in the Village Voice. (Religiously. It was on the same page as my also-beloved Ernie Pook's Comeek.) Plots of the strips usually centered around Akbar and Jeff, two fellas in Charlie Brown shirts and fezzes, or a passel of maladjusted bunnies – but sometimes Groening would just talk directly to us, the readers.

Ferinstance, about once a year he'd print a list of words and phrases that had quickly become hot, then overused -- and were therefore verboten in the upcoming year. I don't know if these are collected in any of the books, so I'm working from memory here: He'd object to the over use of "uber-", say, or "ersatz," when hipster publications got too zanily reliant on these fangled terms. (He'd probably have banned "ferinstance," "verboten," and "fangled" at some point.) (And let's just not mention "zanily.")

I once had a tryout at a weekly metro events-listing magazine, and they had an extensive bible with several single-spaced pages of overused hipster lingo of the same sort.

So, without further ado, here are the terms I'm banning from my own writing, simply because I'm hearing them so much, they're becoming not just cliché, but lazy-butt go-tos. I've been relying on them too much. You might be, too.

"That's just disturbing." Please tell me what you really mean, because this is just vague.
"If by TK you mean OPPOSITE TK." I'm guilty of using this endlessly, and it's losing its flavor quicker than a stick of fruit-striped gum.
"I hate TK with a white-hot flame." Is that exactly how much? Can you think of no better analogy? God, Ihate this one… with uh… with… I just hate it a lot.
"throw up in my mouth." A moment in the word processor, a lifetime in every snarkster's vocabulary. Was funny exactly once, when Marcia Brady Stiller said it.

Add yours, please!

Writing With A Partner

2007-03-11T15:19:00.000-07:00

I enjoyed The Nanny Diaries, which was authored by two gals who share equal billing. I also love Em&Lo, another two-headed monster who helmed an advice column on Nerve and now write books together. But separate from my enjoying their work, I always wondered: how on earthdo they do that? How does it work? Does one write a version and the other revise? Did they sit together and talk about what they were about to put on the page? Which one types? Who wins they really both thought they had le mot juste? Is once-twice-three-shoot involved, or is agreement achieved through discussion and synthesis? I read an article in the New Yorker about a couple who study the brain together and, after years of this, they barely know who comes up with what. That's either deeply cool or deeply weird. Or both.

When I had The Best Job Ever (a.k.a.TBJE), we'd sometimes do these 30-relaxing-rituals or 40-snappy-pickup-line-comebacks or 50-sexy-whisperables articles. Rather than toiling in isolation, we all soon learned that the best way to get one of these babies done was to run down to Duane Reade, pick up a couple bags of fun-sized Twix, and throw an idea-party. It was oodles more fun to have a writer's room, Sid Caesar-style, with ideas popping off like fireworks over our heads. Writing by committee: I yearn for it daily, even as I churn out freelance artciles in my wee home-based office.

But while toiling away for The Man might be possible on my own, writing comedy is more of a group effort. It has to be. I don't know, maybe Dane Cook sits by himself while writing his jokes…. Aaah, who am I kidding, Dane Cook doesn't write his own jokes. Anyway, I just find that sketch writing, joke writing, gag writing – that all works best if I have a buddy.

This is all on my mind (MY mind! MINE!) because I've been writing with a partner lately, and I love it sooo much. I wish he could write everything with me. Seriously. Instead of feeling stuck, and going on the Google to get unstuck, and ending up reading "Go Fug Yourself" for an hour while nothing got done, I just said, "Wait, what goes here?" and he made suggestions till he hit something we both liked, or till he fired off something in my head that made me say the right thing. It was like living in a TV show about a couple writing sketches: "No, play to the top of your intelligence," he said – seriously! He said that! – and suddenly the sketch pulled together in a neat little bundle, like a comedic tamale.

Weirdly, though, it's been hard letting him into bigger projects. Sketches are one thing, but we're working on a Big Secret Thing at the moment, and it's become really important to me that I get a rough draft on paper before I bring him in for consultation. It's weird, because I've been stuck for days on the first section – oh, who am I kidding, the first paragraph – and have had ample opportunity to ask him to pace around making suggestions while I hunch overy my keyboard and type. Do I feel like I have to own the process? Is this me asserting control, or demanding a neurotic amount of it? Is this feminist empowerment or just plain selfishness? I dunno, but it's nice to have something feel new again. Me and writing were in a rut for a while. I feel like we're coming back together again, like any long-standing couple.

My job. I think I'll keep it.

Oh, Oscar. Oscar, Oscar, Oscar.

2007-03-02T14:27:00.000-08:00

I'm not afraid to admit I loves me a good Oscar montage. A fond look back at swashbucklers? Yes, please. A tribute to film noir? Mmm, tasty. Dead people? I see them --gladly. But this year's montage dedicated to writers, captured onscreen during their process, left me chilly.

I already have issues with writers at the Oscars. Tanned actors and leathery directors alternately swan and stride about, looking handsome and tough and heroic. Picture-perfect. Then they make the "best screenplay" announcement and out trot Paul Haggis and Bobby Moresco. GAAH! The only people who look more pale, doughy and blink-blinky in the bright lights are the film editors, and at least the directors listen to them!

(I realize this is not an absolute rule. Paul Giamatti and Philip Seymour Hoffman are lucky they don't get corralled into the inky-finger ghetto right after they step off the red carpet. Andwhen my handsome old classmate Danny Futterman decides he's going to write, too, well – what can you do? But the general rule still applies: actors, ready for their closeup. Writers, more ready for a healthy dollop of Vaseline on the lens.)

Let's face it: ours is not an industry that lends itself to physical well-being. I sit all day. Then I go to yoga, and my body freaks out and says "I'm going to make you pass out and throw up NOW if you don't cut it out with this frickin triangle pose." Then I take a hike with my willowy sisters and start crying halfway through. Then I go out for a bike ride and turn around and go home when faced with my first San Francisco hill. If they made an elliptical trainer with a laptop-holder, I'd either be golden, or I would figure out how to disassemble the elliptical part and install a loveseat.

I heard Amy Palladino, creator of Gilmore Girls, say something about how she had to rope her husband in right after she got that deal, before she started working in earnest and her buttbecame "chair-shaped." I hear ya, sista.

The fact is, the better I'm writing, the more awful I look. When things get really intense on the page, I hunch over like a homonculus. When something absolutely AMAZING flows out of my fingertips, my eyes might bug out slightly. Really, the only thing worth watching is when I'm doing dialogue, and I start babbling out loud to see how it would really sound. At that point, I most resemble an extra in the background of Girl, Interrupted. Scratch that. More like Cuckoo's Nest. At the moment, I am wearing a camoflage cotton nightie, Uggs, and a black sweater -robe. My hair hasn't seen shampoo since the last time I colored it. (It's red! Red fades!!) My tongue? Carpeted. This does not lend itself to caught-on-film photogenesis.

Compare and contrast to the Oscar montage. Jack Nicholson looks young and okay… till he axe-murders his family. Then things really get ugly. Nicole Kidman sports a fake nose and gazes. I uh… what is Diane Keaton doing? I mean she's at her keyboard and she's yelling? And we return several times to Sally Field in some sort of attic, with a ten-foot-long cigarette hanging out of her mouth. What? How? Why? She flails her arms. She stands, then sits. She paces. She howls! She throws the typewriter out the window. I love the Sally, I truly do, and I'm sure it wasn't meant to be accurate. But it's not even funny. Even the cigarette looked embarrassed.

I mean, this is a kobayashi maru if ever I saw one (Sorry. A no-win situation.) Show what really happens, and snoozery ensues. Play with the truth and risk the wrath of some lady in San Francisco complaining on her blog. Neither option is really safe or desirable. I really feel for you, Hollywood.

"Thoughts Expressed While Sitting Alone at the Keyboard"

2007-03-01T14:50:00.000-08:00

As opposed to...?!

Ha ha, just kidding. I am actually aware that there are other ways to express thought than sitting alone at the keyboard. On the phone, ferinstance, or (shudder) in a face-to-face conversation. In fact, talking by writing has its limitations, as many have discussed ad nauseum, most recently in this New York Times article.

I'm guilty. Sometimes I need to blow off steam, and it's less embarrassing to do so in print, where nobody can see that vein pop out on my forehead. I try not to do it directly, like in an email to someone who can save it, print it, and post it on her bulletin board so she can have a chuckle whenever she's feeling low. (I'm not saying I've done this. I'm also not saying I haven't. There is a hobag of my acquaintance who replied to a friend's mass-mailing with a flame of such venom, such unbalanced meds, such outsized outrage, that we passed it back and forth for weeks in the mid-nineties. When this person recently posted in a forum about how she'd fallen off a step-stool, konked her head, almost passed out, and feared she'd die alone, I saved it to my desktop in a file named "aahahahhaaa." I am a Bad Person.)

But some days you just need to pick at an online scab. Let's say I was on forum for people on a certain eating plan. Let's say it was a newbie forum -- labeled as such -- and someone kept posting complaints about stupid newbie questions. Would it not be understandable for me to craft witty, sassy responses designed to show her the error of her ways? Would it not be understandable for me to then return to the forum throughout the day to convince others that defending her is wrong? Are you really saying I should not have hacked into the online forum, gotten her information, and driven 800 miles in a Depends so I could leave a printout of my original post on her front door? Affixed there with a hunting knife?

Um. Okay, I didn't do that last thing. But in fact, I wanted to, and it's taken all I have not to return to that forum today. I hereby solemnly swear to procrastinate here, not amongst other unbalanced people. And to use wide-open writing time to craft sassy, witty posts for you all to enjoy, not for other nerfarious reasons. And to Be a Better Person.

Okay, again. Not that last thing. Hi there! I'm back!

Hrant Dink

2007-01-23T14:45:00.000-08:00

I joke about the ups and downs of writing for a living, but I have nothing at stake. Living where I do, writing about what I do, there's nothing in my day-to-day life that would result in anything more serious than a flame war. Here's a post of relative silence in honor of those who write, edit and publish in circumstances far more fraught than mine.

Finding My Voice, Mark II

2006-12-21T11:58:00.000-08:00

I've been trying to put my finger on exactly what my writerly problem is, and I think I had a moment of clarity. Sort of.

When I started taking writing seriously, in my mid-twenties, I was doing a lot of work that required me to mimic -- something that seems to be innate. I have a natural ear for voice (augh! and a natural gift for mixing metaphors!). This came in handy when I was ghostwriting middle-grade fiction for three different series, and helped a lot when I was freelancing or trying to get on staff at far-flung magazines. But when the time came to write for myself, I didn't know where to start. What was my voice? How did I write, when nobody was telling me they wanted x, y, and z, in that order?

It was so hard and awful to give birth to my on-page self, but eventually, out of the mess of journals and personal essays and weird unpaid web-postings, I found that snarkyself: Sassy-inflected, standoffish ironic commentary gently peppered with real feeling. Frankly, I sounded like a lot of my cohorts, but that's because we were all sort of alike under the skin anyway. We weren't being derivative, we were just infected by the same zeitgeist, and that was OK. And I did have my own pool of light. It was pink!

Little did I know that voice had a shelf-life. I'm (nnnduh) not the same person I was when I was 25. The past couple years saw me sort of vanishing, reformatting, growing, changing. The same old snark does not satisfy anymore, and the stories I told then are old news to me now.

Plus, I've got so much more life under my ever-expanding belt. I mean -- I can not buh-LIEVE the things I thought were tragic in my twenties. Had I known then what I'd endure, I'd have actually had reason to crawl under my covers, smoke unfiltered Camels and weep into my Wild Turkey. My skin is thicker now, I'm more tolerant and kinder, free of the tyrannic overcommitment of the insecure, and -- I actually know what I'm talking about some of the time.

Which means the old ways don't fit, the old phrases and words sound tinny in my ears. I have to do it again: write and "journal" (oh god, that does not work as a verb) and blog and dig up pals who curate readings so I can find out how I write -- and what I write about -- again.

It's not bad. It's what separates the Billy Joels from the Bowies. And it explains why I haven't just sat down and written in the past few months. Or so I hope.

Insanely Juggling Alternate Activities

2006-12-11T09:58:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I missed my groovy improv workshop because I had to hunker down and do 5 hours of boring edit-y stuff that I didn't do on Friday.

Now I have to do a couple more hours of this editing, which is why I just took the time to post (over there, on the left. your left. YOUR LEFT. down. scroll down. there ya go) my two-years-ago appearance on an NPR quiz show in which I couldn't remember whether Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney had just gone to Iraq; hear my desperate vamping, be amused.

Stay tuned; I have two super seekrit video projects that will surely take the place of any other productive work this week. I've bought out almost all of eBay, people. Oh yeah. It's a big week for procrastination.

gah

2006-12-04T11:52:00.000-08:00

holy hypee that was way too long. sorry.

Ego

2006-12-01T11:44:00.000-08:00

I like to say that I don't have an ego about my writing, and that's mostly true. For one kind of writing. My articles that I'm hired to write and send off to editors who are asking for them? Totally no problem. I send, they say "Change this!" or "I changed this!" or, well, they just change it, and pretty soon it hits the stands.

I barely look at the finished product until I put it in my clip file. I've compared my poor, abandoned/finished articles as discarded lovers to my Casanova: adoringly attended to, researched, fussed over, then forgotten as the next assignment looms into view. Once safely ensconced in my clip file, they can complain about me and find solidarity, I suppose.

When I give one of my articles a look-see, like when I'm about to post it here, I scan it for any sign of something I might have written – one phrase? A couple sentences? Whatever I find beyond my solid reporting is a bonus, and if that cute lede stayed in there, I'm over the moon. But there's no equivalent feeling of loss for all the phrases that didn't make it in. If there's something unbearably adorable that I feel must be seen, I'll send it to friends in an email or post it online here.

I do feel bad when I see a paragraph full of facts I didn't gather, guiltily imagining my editor Googling up some hard numbers after hours. And I never – NEVER – complain to an editor about something I think should have stayed. If an editor is kind enough to show me, pre-publication, what she's done with my work, I'm not going to crap on her by raising a stink over my now-lost agonized-over metaphor. Again, I know what it's like to have higher-up editors making their changes on top of yours, and I know how impossible it is to go back to them and say "The writer REALLY wants to keep XYZ." What? Are you kidding me? Tell that writer to take a fricking hike. Next time hire a kindergartener. Fuck no, thank you kindly!

But when we switch to the subject of my fiction, all bets are off. Probably because nobody's paying much for my fiction, even the writer-for-hire variety that paid my bills for so many years. (Books in which my name never appeared, which I was contracted to write according to storylines generated by committee.) Since I'm not taking orders in the first place, my feelings become much more involved, like veins through organs. Like veins through organs when you're about to get your period. LIKE LOTS OF VEINS IN ALL YOUR ORGANS. Okay, like testicles.

Wait, what?

Why would anyone have to edit me, anyway?!

Anyway: Here is a sad tale of my ego and my fiction. A gal I worked with, and had a sort of girly-crush on, began shining her attention-lamp on me. She said, "You write fiction? I want to see what Amy fiction is like. What is it like? I must know. You have to send it to me. Send me your fiction! I MUST SEE YOUR FICTION!"

I got, like, an email every two hours on this subject. "Have you sent it yet? There's nothing in my inbox. I want to see it. Please? Don't print it out, I've got a printer. I'll print it, just send it!" I didn't want to send it! I told her: It's not quite done. It's not really ready. It's a work in progress. It's crap! But she wouldn't hear of it: "Oh for god's sake, just send it already! I don't care, I just want to see it!" So I attached it and hit "send."

And then, silence.

Days, weeks, a couple months of silence. Finally, swooping out of the clear blue sky, she called to say she'd been invited on a press trip, she needed a pal, she knew I needed cheering up, I had to accompany her. (She can be quite the demanding gal, can't she?) I went on the trip and on one particularly chummy (read: drunken) night, we were out with some other journalists, and she made some sideways comment about the fact that I write fiction, and I teased her about never writing after she read my book, and she rolled her eyes and said, "When I asked to read it, I didn't realize it was going to be a young adult novel."

Italics hers, and dripping with disdain.

I am ashamed to say I was absolutely devastated. I didn't think of that novelette as YA! And what's wrong with YA? And what the HECK?

I've had people call my articles stupid, silly, fluff, sexist, and a raft of other insults. I've been the subject of a months-long thrash on the Ms.com bulletin boards regarding an article I wrote in Maxim. (Or Stuff, I forget which.) I am usually spoiling for a fight when it comes to that sort of thing, and happily wave my paycheck in the face of all who mock me. But any word about my fiction makes me pout like a second-string cheerleader. It's so weird and stupid! But it may explain why my fiction's been on the back burner. Why stick my neck out when I have so much else to do?

Oh, but that back burner is bubbling and boiling, the more I try to ignore it. I can't avoid this forever. Shweee.

Writing Is A Responsibility!

2006-09-26T15:36:00.000-07:00

Seriously. I was at the Apple store yesterday, waiting for my Genius, when a cute boy sat down next to me. I was giving him the subtle eyeball-scan when I noticed a tattoo on his inner wrist. Owie, on the most sensitive skin. It was words. I looked closer. It said "Hold On." As in, the refrain James Frey repeated throughout "A Million Little Pieces." I knew guys had had this tattooed on themselves b/c I saw one on Oprah. But this was the first actual person with that tat that I had seen.

So: this dude read the book when he thought it was a memoir, and was so inspired by Frey's tale of kicking addiction that he branded himself with the words Frey howled out of the very depth of his despair.

Never mind that it's not so bright in the first place to get a phrase tattooed on yourself, but I just really wondered how this guy felt now that Frey's been roundly disgraced. Did he tell himself, "Well -- the story still inspired me, even if it turned out to be fiction?" Does he wish he had the cash for some laser treatments? If he saw James Frey walking down Broadway, would he run up and punch him smack on the right temple till he fell down bleeding for real this time?

And how does Frey feel about all this? The first time he saw a "hold on" tattoo, did his heart plummet into his stomach? Did he feel guilty, or did he think, "oh man. I am the biggest rock star. Nobody's ever going to bust me, either."

Side note: I have to say I feel awful for Frey in all of this. He was just trying to illustrate for his readers just how hard it was for him to kick drugs. If you say "I had to kick coke, and it was so hard I thought I would die," people go, "Well, I'm not a drug addict, so I guess it was hard for you but I can't empathize." But if you say "I had to quit coke, and it felt as painful as a root canal without painkillers, as heartbreaking as having a girl you love hang herself, as wonderful as having a mobster who looks like Gene Hackman decide to be your extra father," people go, "Wow, that is really painful, heartbreaking, and wonderful! I get you, writer-man!" Given that, maybe the guy is still OK with his tat.

Or maybe he has no frickin idea Frey has been debunked at all. A month ago I was in a bookstore and A Million Little Pieces was in the "staff picks" section with a rhapsodic description, including the terms "brave" and "memoir." Lacking in self-filtering skills as I am, I ripped the description off the shelf, brought it to the front clerk, and said "You have to not look this stupid. You can't recommend debunked memoirs without at least acknowledging the huge controversy that surrounded them." The front clerk, who bore a striking resemblance to Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons, put his hands up and said, "Every memoir has some untruth." I think I sputtered something about TheSmokingGun.com and stalked out, in flabbergastment. There are people in total denial about the nature of memoir and the facts of this particular case. Maybe this guy's tattoo was fresher than I thought because he just didn't give a hoot about the veracity of the story, only the emotional truth of the moment; I know I just said that was okay, but it's not something to get a tattoo about.

All's I know is, if someone gets a tattoo of anything I write, I'm going to feel really weird about it. From now on, I'm going to write every word as if it could possibly be inked onto some cute young person's epidermis. Um... not really. If I did that I'd never be able to click "publish post." Cuz there's no "edit post" button on a tattoo.

Loving My Editors, Part I

2006-09-22T17:42:00.000-07:00

I've been working my sizeable tuchus off for the past few weeks, to the point where I can't even post, for reals now. I finally finished a few days ago and now I just have to catch up with the other deadlines I missed while working on One Big Project. Yay. Dull roar of work rather than shrieking gale.

But that's not the point. The point is, my editor at one magazine just sent me this:

BTW ... our founder and EIC commented specifically on your
stories and said you were really good and funny. She never does that.

I love me. Yay yay for me. Starting the new year off with a bang. Woo!

contents of my head: tumbleweeds, void.

2006-09-09T14:53:00.000-07:00

okay! so. how many days have I pined for a gig where my job is to funny-up somebody else's writing? let's make that years. I haven't had a gig like that since my beloved mag staff-job. and. now I have it again. only. I'VE GOT NOTHING. there's no funny in my head. In fact, I can't remember ever being funny. I don't even know what the word "funny" means. I don't even know how to spell it. I don't know how that last sentence even happened. I'm forgetting how to type even. wfsfaf80e fado0IOJGAijoasdfg98342. OSIDFOIEW!!!! 002q34wsadfjaggggggg...

everyfunny hurts. sometimes. everyfunny cries.

See, This Is What I'm Talking About

2006-09-06T16:29:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I feel guilty about being a writer. Like, what I do is not supposed to be a job, and why do I (and other artists) feel entitled to be able to just do this thing and not have to also do other stuff? (Don't hate on me yet, people; I'm going somewhere with this.)

This article was just in the paper. It's about a highly educated novelist born of highly educated immigrants. He's writing novels that get great reviews, AND he is going to med school. This seems to be what practical people do: "I want to write, but I'm not going to ask for a GRANT for chrissakes. I'll write at 5:30 in the morning for two hours before I start work." This is the Stephen King thing I was ranting about a few months ago, this weird Protestant work ethic thing where I am wracked with guilt if I only write the things that make me feel happy and complete and good and like I'm actually expressing myself through the written word.

On days when I work on paying projects, I feel like, "Okay, good, I'm worth something today." On days when I work on possible-future-projects, or spec fiction, or anything that qualifies as art, I just HATE myself, even if what I wrote is really really good.

This is terrible!

On the other hand, I'm so awe-inspired at people who can do BOTH.

But I mean -- I don't know if I can do both! Unless I take a month at a time to ONLY do one or the other -- make a shitload of money and then coast (moneywise) for a solid month where I only do fiction. I have done that before, now that I think about it. It'd be better if I could divide my days up, but maybe I have to divide my years up instead, and just accept that that's how I work best. And then -- who's to say if I still have my fiction mojo? Maybe I'm killing myself working as hard as I do on the (relatively) lucrative journalism because I fear defeat. ouch, I don't like to think about THAT.

I have no answers, I just was struck by the article and consumed with envy.

Self-Googling PAYDIRT!

2006-09-05T23:46:00.000-07:00

Check it out, my bitches! I'm somebody's literary high point!

bar nar nar, nar nar nar, nar nar. Bar nar nar nar. doo doo doo, doo doo doo.
(dancing like snoopy)

I have a whole thing I meant to write but I've been doing WORK instead, and then I misplaced the clip I was going to write about. so sorry. so very, very sorry.

That's not writing, it's ... patchwork.

2006-08-31T15:45:00.000-07:00

My last couple of articles feel like I'm not really writing them so much as compiling them. It's an interesting difference. If I'm writing something, I'm searching for le mot juste, I'm coming up with analogies, I'm quietly spending time with an idea and seeing where it brings me emotionally. I'm connecting dots, sorta. Connecting dots of EMOTION.

The stories I've been doing lately have been more reporting, ya know, so I'm taking stuff I learned -- by interviewing -- and fitting it together so it makes a cohesive whole. It's not bad, not at all; it's actually pretty satisfying when it's done and I see the tight little seams and pull on them and say "yep, okay, I can send this in."

I guess it's not fair to say that's not writing. They're both writing, they just feel like they use different parts of my brain.

All this is to say I was supposed to go through my notes on my "born-again virgin" piece this morning, and form it into a whole, and it's 3:44 and I still haven't cracked it. I know how I want to structure it now, so why don't I just put it all together? I think I'm worried it won't work with the interviews I've done and I'll have to do MORE. Which I can't stand to do for a sex story. Somehow I'm more mortifiable these days. But at this moment, it's really either do the story or pay bills. Which would YOU rather do?

(If the answer to that question is "I'd rather pay your bills," you should go ahead and do that! yeah thanks wow!

Satire For Fun And ... Well, Just Fun

2006-08-18T13:43:00.000-07:00

Okay. So I realized I'm awash in deadlines, particularly for this crazy tequila story that's currently yanking my chain. But I saw an article in the Times today that reminded me of the most annoying thing I ever read, and that inspired me to (1) learn google pages and (2) use that knowledge to create a magnificent work of satire.

At the bottom of the page are the two articles that I mashed up to create my masterwork. Once you read the two links, the whole thing will become clear, I think... I hope so, anyway.

So you have to go offsite to read my brilliance today. But it is so worth it! Honest!

Deadlines A-Poppin'

2006-08-15T16:42:00.000-07:00

Ha ha. Remember a few posts ago when I said I was going to get everything in early? That was funny. I completely forgot to enter a couple little deadlines into my iCal, which means I'm notified of missed deadlines by a worried-sounding email from an editor.

Also: sometimes when you tape things, the tape fades out after ten minutes and you have to reconstruct a 90-minute interview from memory.

On the upside, I've gotten assignments galore. If I can just keep getting crap done (after PUTTING SAID CRAP IN MY iCAL), I'll be in really good shape at the end of the month. But I'm juggling. Naked terror is keeping the balls in the air. So far, so good...

What Killed Nathaniel Hawthorne?

2006-08-08T22:19:00.000-07:00

So it turns out no less an American luminary of letters than Nathaniel Hawthorne not only had writer's block, he died of it. Seriously. In last week's New Yorker, John Updike reports that in 1864, Hawthorne wrote in a letter (re: a book he had started):

I shall never finish it… I cannot finish it unless a great change comes over me; and if I make too great an effort to do so, it will be to my death.

And then? Twelve weeks later? HE DIED. Maria Callas died of heartbreak, Nathaniel Hawthorn died of writer's block. So don't push me, people: I'm in a delicate condition.

Actually, I wrote a personal essay two days ago. I took a big long hike and while I was wondering if I was going to die of the hike (I'm sure I could), I thought of a solid hook, and ran home and wrote the thing. It's about my long-lost Cartier Tank wristwatch but, as with most personal essays, it's really about life. Yep. I'm that deep.

Then I felt horribly guilty because I didn't have an assignment to write it, I just wrote it, which means I was not working on the things which have been assigned to me and which are horribly overdue. Then I thought, "What the hell am I doing, writing personal essays? Nobody publishes these. I'll send it in to the Times 'Modern Love' column and I'll hear bupkiss and that'll be that." After that came a lot of whirling thoughts that had to do mostly with what to have for lunch and howcome moldy cheese is okay but moldy bread is not.

Anyway, though, I wrote it and I love it, so the "Modern Love" column can bite me. OW. Hey, "Modern Love" column! I didn't mean that literally! Jerk.

Is writing fun?

2006-07-23T01:05:00.000-07:00

Ever? I mean do people have fun doing this? I'll admit to there being times when, ferinstance, I'll be in the shower and all of a sudden the perfect dialogue for a scene will bud in my head, and I stand there under the hot water zoning out till it seems to be, ya know, in full flower ... water dribbling down through my hair, fading the dye, pounding on my skull like it could actually knock the ideas loose. And twenty minutes later I'm wrapped in a robe with my hair sopping on my shoulders feeling like the computer should burst forth with booming chords of congratulations, because yes, hooray, I have done it, I have written The Perfect Scene and it pops and snaps with reality and familiarity and passion, and it's real, it's what I meant to say.

But then I back off from that, because "waiting for the muse" -- I mean, what else have I described? -- and waiting to be struck by the muse has nothing to do with my definition of being a writer, which is that writing is a job, it is a profession, and writers write, and even if it sucks and you feel like every word is being slowly hauled out of your guts on squeaky coal-mine train tracks, you are still Doing Your Job, following the next point in your outline, and unbeknownst to you, it may turn out that this plodding scene, on re-reading, is actually really good.

Here's why I create this snobbish distinction: Because I can't stand it when people act irresponsibly and then blame their artistic natures, as if good manners and great art are mutually exclusive. Pollack cheated on his wife and drank himself around a tree. Oh, but he made great canvases that ached with passion, so it's all right. It's not all right! You can't hurt people! You can ache with passion and still keep it in your fucking pants! When I've acted irresponsibly, it was because I was irresponsible, not because I'm a fucking writer. Those "guys who work in finance" are pricks too, and they don't make canvases that ache with anything, they make money. So? What's their excuse?

Here's what set me off tonight. I read my friend's new book, and it crackled with excitement. I could feel how much she loved writing it. She didn't have to tease out extra scenes to make it longer; hell, I had the feeling it was much longer, and she had to cut stuff. She inhabited her world in a way that I used to do and have not done in such a long time. My, that's a bit of truth-telling. It's a fact. I can barely remember what it felt like to write the best parts of my books, and even then, I had to be shoved back into my desk-chair by the encouraging words of my then-editor, who practically held my hand (a third hand, some invisible non-typing hand) the entire time.

What's wrong with me? Why do I fight writing on a good day, and utterly lose the ability to on a bad one? When I interviewed Eric Boghosian (do I sound likke Dick Cavett yet?), he said he had to "hate the book into existence." I knew exactly what he meant! And he's a good writer! So but... what is up with THAT?!

The easy answer is that like with any job, writing has good days and bad days. Ah, but I prefer to just assume I'm awful. That way I can keep myself away from the keyboard for one... more... day.

2006-07-19T22:14:00.000-07:00

Vader Sessions

This is apropos of nothing, except that I have watched it about seven times, which means I've lost an hour of work time. But I truly think it is time well spent.

"Will there be snacks?"

2006-07-17T13:23:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I heard A.M. Homes on the radio, talking about what it was like to accept a job working on The L Word rather than working from home, as she's done for even longer than I have. "I loved it," she said, "but I worried before I started there: Can I do a job? I have no skills. Will there be snacks? What if I get tired, will they let me lie down?"

My favorite job, the one I moon over endlessly with an ardor I don't even reserve for lost humans, did have snacks. And couches -- well-used ones. And the edge it had over freelance was that when I left, I was done -- no lying in bed, trying to ignore the siren call of my closed-but-blinking laptop.

Oh, for the halcyon days of Hearst. Oh, for a job like that now! The nineties are over. What will it be like if I get a job now? Is there an L Word for me? (Oh god, don't answer that -- I can think of all too many.)

Is this the secret to successful freelancing? I'LL JUST BET IT IS!

2006-07-07T14:52:00.001-07:00

An editor who SRN (Shall Remain Nameless) was dishing to me about another freelancer. "She's not that good, but she gets tons of work, and I finally figured out why." Nu? "It's because she hands everything in three days early. Everything. Early."

Holy mother of mercy. Of course that's the secret. My entire career, I think I've stuck to, like, half a deadline. When I see the pink notation on my iCal that something is due today, that is my cue to start looking for experts. I see my deadlines as suggestions, silly ones. I've left more exasperated editors in my wake than James Frey. I've caused more tummyaches than green apples. I'm exaggerating, of course... a little.

Being early! I know bad writers who flourish because they're great self-marketers, but it never occurred to make myself the earlybird! That is effing genius!

In an effort to make my first deadline after this revelation, I included the due date in my article's filename. Where it stared me in the face the whole time I was working. SPLA-DAM. = I just handed it in on time. So. We'll see if that continues to work. If it does, I am going to be a LOT LESS POSTY in the very near future.

Sports writers have all the fun

2006-07-07T14:52:00.000-07:00

God! Seriously! Whenever I read the sports pages or the official Mets web site, I think, "Jeez, I would love to be doing that, but I don't know a pick-and-roll from a hail-mary."

The Oscar Madisons of this world describe emotions, atmosphere, personalities. They rail against injustices. They develop themes that pop up throughout their articles, ending with a neat callback to the first graf. God! Sports writers do some fun writing.

I don't know, maybe the secret is to work for a daily paper where there just isn't time to scrutinize every word, or for hand-wringing over "hitting the right tone" or "voicing to our audience." You can't edit things to death when they're already halfway out the door -- or maybe this is just a romantic notion. I really have no idea, I've only worked in magazines.

I just would love to write like a sports writer, but about other stuff. Imagine? UCCCH, apparently I can't, as I just tried and the results are not, as they say, fit to print.

Hey, are you people as annoyed by I am by the popularity and endless emailability of that fricking Shamu story? What? Wasn't there a book about using dog-training principles in your relationships, like five years ago? Now she's going to get a book deal. I'm seven shades of green.

The not-nice part: "That's why I use it, too!"

2006-07-07T13:44:00.000-07:00

Not so awesome was this one woman in the class who really sort of disproved all the encouraging stories I've been telling for the last few days. I know everyone has a good side or whatever, but this chick was just awful.

First of all, not that this matters, but she was morbidly obese. Her bulk was like a wall between her and the rest of the class; she would sit pushed back from the table, her notebooks and manuscripts fanned out around her, her face a mask of detached judgement, as if she was just waiting for the rest of us to say something that pissed her off.

Second, she was obsessed, I mean obsessed, with Irish culture. She was fully American and did not even have Irish heritage, but like a '70s-era hippie claiming to be emotionally half-Cherokee, she claimed Gaelic culture as her true heart's home. The thing was, she wasn't into, like, U2 and James Joyce and Dylan Thomas -- she was enamored with the kind of Irish trinkets you see going on sale at Hallmark stores in the week after St. Patrick's Day. She peppered her speech with references to "the blarney stone" and "Guinness." She named her cat Shamrock. Not Ceallach, not Meadhbh, not any other mysterious-sounding traditional Irish name -- SHAMROCK. Ach, begorrah, always after me lucky charms!

Third, and this is where it gets germane, her writing was Irish-themed, Dublin-based, yet weirdly absent of any actual Irish influence. The main character was a gal who worked in a factory and had lots of bad things happen to her. And lots of sexy things with long descriptions of slippery-this and firm-as-a-hurley-that. Worse, there were pages-long fantasies about delicate faeries, howling banshees, and fucking LEPRECHAUNS for god's sake. There was an Irish guy in the class -- by heritage, not by birth -- and he was all, "Have you ever been to Ireland?" and she was all "I took a tour once" and he was all "Cuz leprechauns don't really act that way in Irish folklore, that's kind of a Hollywood thing," and her face shut down even tighter.

Another night, she told us about her first unpublished novel, a searching, heartbreaking story about a poor boy's childhood of woeful misery that "got totally ruined when Frank McCourt's book came out and ripped off my whole story." "Uh ... wasn't his true, though?" the soap-opera writer asked. "Well, yeah," Shamrock allowed, and her face shut down again.

She hated criticism. When a classmate suggested she cut down the background detail of a minor character, she said, "But I put that in because someone in another class said I needed more background for him. Why did I bother?" The unexamined revision: plopping in prose because "I was just following orders"... good in a magazine article when your editor demands it, bad in fiction when your supreme editor should be your self.

Worst of all, though, for me anyway, was how much she hated her main character. "God, I keep rewriting this and making things happen to her, and she just won't stand up for herself," she complained. "I had someone beat her. I had someone rape her. I threw everything I had at her, and I could never get her to get angry and retaliate. She was such a wuss." WTF? How do you do that to a character? Just write her different! My god! It was like writing happens to the writer.

Writing is a JOB. You get the job done. You tell the story, it doesn't tell you. For God's sake, I thought, get a grip on your story!

So this is the thing: would Allan Ginsberg have encouraged Shamrock if she had approached him the way I did? Would it denigrate his encouragement of me if I found out he had? Are there people who should not be encouraged, or does Shamrock deserve the same ego-stroking as me? Is encouragement just one tool in the writer's toolbox?

Because I'm really awful. I don't want Shamrock to torture her characters or her classmates or her teachers. I don't want her doing what I do. I want her to stop. I want her to take up knitting. It stresses me out to think of all those words pouring out onto pages somewhere, piling up, half-cooked plots rubber-banded together in a box on a shelf surrounded by other boxes on a green-painted bookshelf in a rent-controlled one-bedroom in Gramercy Park. I want to scream at her, "YOU ARE NOT A WRITER! PLEASE STOP! YOU ARE USING UP ALL THE WORDS! AND FOR FUCK'S SAKE, CUT BACK ON THE CORNED-BEEF-AND-CABBAGE DINTY-MOORE STEW!!!"

Then again, I'm no Alan Ginsberg.

Turns out I'm not so nice (part 1)

2006-07-07T12:30:00.000-07:00

Oh jeez. Meanwhile, after all these nice encouraging memories, I'm going to backslide into cynicism. I took a writing class a few years ago, a "finish-your-novel" workshop that I hoped would force me to do just that (and it did). The teacher told me to take something out of the novel, a major character thingee; she said it was a cheap gimmick and that I had enough meat in the story without it. "You used it to get you into the relationship between the girls, and now you can get rid of it in a revision."

It was a fine note, but I disagreed with it, as did the rest of the class -- seriously, they rounded me up after class to have drinks with them and demanded that I leave that little characterization in. It was so sweet. This one woman, who had written for soap operas for years and had also worked as a customer-service rep for a hair-color company with the lead singer for Living Colour -- told me a story about a boy who was a violin prodigy. He went to play in front of a maestro, who told him "you don't have it. You don't have the fire to be a professional violinist." The prodigy realized he would never be great and gave up violin and became a successful something-or-other and lived a mild but happy life.

Years later he came across the maestro again and asked, "How did you know I didn't have the fire?" The maestro said, "I didn't. I said that to everyone, figuring that if they really did have the fire, they'd take my criticism as a challenge to prove me wrong. By giving up, you proved me right."

Jeez! Okay! Anyway, the woman's point was, don't get sidelined by criticism. Take what you think you can work with and if something does not feel right, ignore it and do what your heart tells you. (My heart pretty much always tells me I suck, though, so I'm not sure that's the best advice for moi.) I remember her eyes widening as she told me to keep writing the way I wrote, that it was great, that it spoke to her, and that it was real. So that was pretty awesome.

The un-awesome part is getting too long, and I hate long blog posts, so stay tuned.

More on this age-factor thing

2006-07-04T15:13:00.000-07:00

Literally the nicest writer I ever met was Allan Ginsberg. He wins the Madfoot Award for Greatest Kindness by a Total Stranger with a Literary Pedigree. I was working a gross "special sales!" job at Houghton-Mifflin. It was an awful secretarial gig, and the atmosphere was utterly high-school. My boss was the worst combination of thinks-she's-cool and is-an-anal-retentive-nerd. In fact, she bore a certain resemblance to a certain Steve Carell character... but that's another histoire. Let's just say it was awful and soul-killing and I was young and lost and mourning the death of Kurt Cobain.

So I trudged out for lunch one day (I had to eat at 2 so I could cover the phones while the cool kids had their lunch) and plopped myself down at the counter of Zen Palate in Union Square. My eye was caught by a beautiful light-skinned black man dressed all in white fluttering around someone next to me at the counter, who turned out to be Allan Ginsberg. Right next to me! At the counter!! I sat there for as long as I could (I can be very blase when I need to be, NYC is bursting at the seams with celebrities of every stripe) but finally had to say something.

The gist was this: "I know you were considered awfully scary in the fifties, but to me you're more of a beloved uncle, because my parents have taken me to see you read since I was in diapers." Then I told him that when I was at Columbia, we read an account he wrote about being on LSD on the South Lawn and seeing a giant hand coming out of the sky to grab him, and then we used to lie on that lawn and try to invoke the hand (though I, for one, was too chicken to drop LSD). He got a huge kick out of that, laughed and said "You're kidding!" and I smiled and turned back to my fried wheat-gluten stew when he asked, "But what about you, my dear? What do you do?"

"Ach!" I waved my hand. "Nothing interesting." "No, no!" he insisted, bending forward slightly, not letting me turn away. "Tell me what you are up to." This was how my parents' friends would talk to me, the ones who'd known me forever and were genuinely interested in how I'd turn out. Was Ginsberg just acting the part of an interested party because it fulfilled some inner need for attention? Did he just love acolytes? Who cared! He made me feel like I had a voice again.

I blurted out that I had tried to be an actress and standuppy-person, that it was too hard, that I'd given up and taken desk jobs, that I hated the desk jobs, that I couldn't fit in, that I didn't know what I was going to do, that I was writing kids' books and thought I could do that but wasn't sure... He took my hand in between his two and shook his head and clucked his tongue and patted my hand (patted my hand!!) and said "My dear, do you know that I worked in advertising all through my twenties? I hated it! Do you know how old i was when Howl was published? Thirty! There's time. Relax, you'll find your way."

At that moment I would have laid down my life for that man. Honestly. You know how people talk about meeting Bill Clinton and feeling the charisma roll off of him like heat off a jet engine? It was like that, only I honestly think he got joy out of making me (and my ilk) feel encouraged. It is such a generous way to be. It is so easy to be snooty and derisive, but makes the world a much more loving place to be interested, open, and kind.

I know that sounds completely retarded coming out of my cynical mouth, but it's entirely possible I have a soft side.

I know this isn't exactly a revolutionary statement, but...

2006-07-03T10:38:00.000-07:00

Frank McCourt is a really good writer. And the thing is, he didn't start his first book till he was like 100. That is such a fricking important lesson for writers who are being bullied by non-writers or asshole-writers for not publishing anything of note before the age of 18 or 24 or 30 or whatever the cutoff age might be at that moment. In college I was working on a piece of short fiction for my Mary Gordon class when a lanky crew cockswain peeked her head in the door to ask what I was doing. "Why are you wasting your time?" she asked, oblivious to the very existence of Emily Post or her ilk. "Every story's been written. You're just part of the endless rehash."

That was just irritating, but it was downright damaging when a guy who somehow wormed his way into boyfriend territory interrupted my description of a really good fiction writer with a question along the lines of "what have you written lately, anyway?" Actually, his statement was a lot meaner and a lot quieter, and I'm not going to bother mulling it over here, but the utter inanity of it is what interests me. Unlike sitcom acting, unlike being a shortstop, unlike teaching, unlike childbirth, unlike lead guitar, unlike almost any other job or vocation or art or creative activity, writing is something you can legitimately hope to excel at even as your skin grows liver spots.

I'm not sure if I'm allowed to quote at length in a blog -- I'll try to keep it to below 250 words, like they do at magazines -- but like McCourt's students at Stuyvesant, I have trouble keeping compositions to a minimum:

In the world of books I am a late bloomer, a johnny-come-lately, new kid on the block. M first book, Angela's Ashes, was published in 1996 when I was sixty-six, the second, 'Tis, in 1999 when I was sixty-nine. At that age it's a wonder I was able to lift the pen at all.

Oh, that wasn't so hard after all. McCourt makes everything easy: reading, quoting. Such a nice guy. Of course, every aged accountant with a Dell isn't going to have an Angela's Ashes in his soul, but it literally doesn't hurt anyone for him to hope he might.

In my case (wtf? it's MY blog! Let McCourt start his own frickin blog!), I've written a crapload of books, three of them even in my name. Despite the dismissive attitude of the William Morris agent who briefly inherited me when the one who'd signed me left to breed, I like my little paperbacks. I think they are better than that Traveling Pants book he held in such high regard. (I'm not even going to dignify that title by italicising it. I am rebellious and eloquent.) Two of these books are even dedicated to the asshole from 2 paragraphs ago (he didn't like how I phrased the first one). So I have no worries that I'll hunker down and type out some brilliance relatively soon.

Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But shoon, and for the resht of my life.

Let's speak about the unspeakable. (Yay! Let's!)

2006-06-17T14:52:00.000-07:00

There's a thing that writers won't talk about because the very mention of it might bring it on. We're a superstitious bunch. Like baseball players, but without a tan.

I'd never heard anyone admit to having writer's block until I was in college, when I was waiting for office hours with my favorite professor and the woman before me, whom I could hear through an open door, was explaining that she couldn't do her paper on time because she was "suffering from terrible writer's block." I can't remember what Professor Tayler said in response -- he was never insulting, unfailingly polite -- but I remember thinking, "You asshole. Do the effing work. Writer's block, my ass." Which is undoubtedly what Tayler was also thinking, but he didn't get to be Mr. Super Favorite Professor of Everybody by nakedly speaking his mind. A skill I could stand to learn. But I digress.

I remember hearing someone -- maybe Toni Morrison -- but definitely on WNYC -- who was asked about writer's block, and she said, "I disavow that term." Oh, I loved that, and I used it. Her point was that even when you feel blocked, your brain is working, and it'll all come out in a big blob at some point, sort of like when you plateau on Weight Watchers for like three weeks and then all of a sudden, kaboom, you lose like 6 pounds all at once. It was a nice notion, but I've never actually experienced the -- what. The diarrhea of prose? The torrent of backed-up verbiage? I never got a spurt of creative payoff after a dry spell.

I've had few dry spells, knock wood. But the one I'm in is a doozy. I've owed book proposals to my agent for over a year at this point, and I can't make myself do them because then I'll have to write them. In addition, a very nice woman with a very cool project has asked me to write a series proposal for her (yes, for pay). When we were discussing it, I knew exactly what she wanted, and I got really excited about it... but I've been cravenly dodging her calls for weeks. Why?

I tell myself because I wouldn't have ownership of the series, and I know in my heart I don't want to be a writer-for-hire anymore. But that's not true, and I know it. The fact is I just can't face the prospect of sitting down, inhabiting these characters, and writing them. It feels like death to me. Death! Writing! How could this be?

So given that knowledge, I should call her and say "I can't do this project because I need to work on my own series proposal." But guess what? That feels like even more death!! It's the weirdest thing: I crave working on these books, yet there's something in me that equally, or more powerfully, is repulsed by the idea of them. When I think of South Jersey, I feel a pull to go there and immerse myself in research, and a simultaneous soul-level core of knowledge that I can not, will not do that. It feels like an illness. It feels like something bigger than me, that I can't understand, is working in mysterious ways. It feels horrible.

This is why people invented the idea of muses, capricious creatures who strike or don't strike, and thereby explain days when you can't produce. This is why people blame writer's block when the culprit is surely a more complex cocktail of depression, fear, and irritation. This is why people invented the Internet: so they'd have a reason not to throw their laptops out the window when they can't write.

Muse! Oh, Mu-use! If you're out there, could you slap me? Soon? Thanks.

Oh for shit's sake.

2006-06-15T06:27:00.000-07:00

Here's a quote from the New Yorker magazine, May 22, 2006 (yes, I'm way behind in reading as well as writing):

Soyinka ... reveals that, after winning the Nobel Prize, he came down with writer's bock, "overwhelmed by the futility of everything I had ever done."

That's Wole Soyinka, people, the Nigerian playwright and activist. After he won his Nobel prize, he felt too futile to write. What the... WHAT IS WRONG WITH WRITERS? Do we ALL hate ourselves? And if he feels futile, what the eff am I doing with my fingers on a keyboard?

GAH!!!

So far today I'm on track.

2006-06-12T10:04:00.000-07:00

If only I could manage this every day. I got up this morning, put in about an hour of house-organization, and sat down to pitch. Excitingly, I did something I have NEVER done before: pitched a story cold, to an editor I do not already know. It was for a magazine that I've never worked for, but would LOVE to (not the least because I would fiiinally not be trying to relate to sex-obsessed 23-year-olds). So I'm reeeally hoping to hear back, but -- eh. Trying not to hope TOO much, as my Friday pitches are so far unanswered.

It just feels like so much wheel-spinning, because I don't get paid to pitch.

Another editor asked me to fill out a pitch I had made to her, and I've been doing that -- chasing down leads and getting some preliminary interviews -- but it also feels hollow, because this same editor asked me to do some research for a story for her last issue (she comes out quarterly), and I literally put in days at the New York Public Library poring over an archive that sounded interesting to her. I made the classic freelancer error: convinced there was a story in it, I did a ton of work for free, and when, in the end, she decided there wasn't enough for a story, I just ended up feeling resentful and awful.

Now, again, she asked me for story ideas and picked one to be fleshed out; as I interview people and chase down leads, I wonder if this is more enforced-volunteer work. I really have no patience for this crap. Having worked on a masthead, I know from experience that the best story ideas, the ones that fit into the lineup, are the ones generated in-house and assigned. Just give me the effing assignment, that's all. Don't take weeks of my life and drain them of earning potential. If I had that kind of time, I'd be spending it writing my novel, not asking searching questions about loft parties in Bushwick.

Ah yes, the novel. I had a revelation this weekend: I could do a three- or even five-book arc with the story that's been cooking on my back burner. In fact, I think it would work loads better if I spent more time on various aspects of my heroine's life that were glossed over in the original version. To write it well, I need to take a couple field trips down to South Jersey and really commit four hours a day to teasing out the storyline. For that, I need a genius grant...

Ugh! I don't mean to sound like a writing-pussy. You know: those people who say things like "I have a hell of a book in me if I could just find the time." To those people, I usually point out that Stephen King wrote Carrie on a manual typewriter that he balanced on his knees in a closet of the trailer he shared with his wife and small children, in the two hours of the morning (5-7) before he went to his job as an elementary school teacher. The old pull-yourself-up-by-your-typewriter-ribbon story, the Great American Novelist's dream. Oh, but it's hard to follow through on when it's you in that closet with the Underwood balanced on your kneecaps (figuratively, natch -- I have an ibook named Blanche). The myth inherent in this parable is that if you're a writer, you write, because you must; but in fact, sometimes you really need to clear your mind and have (emotional) room of your own before you can get the good stuff onto the page.

I'm so full of shit. If I just stopped blogging and started writing, I'd have a coupld chapters banged out by the 4th of July. I hate myself.

Anyway, the point is, today I got up, did work, did Yoga, and made myself lunch, which is how it's supposed to be. And yet I'm still filled with self-loathing. Good lord, what is the point, and why did I not go to law school?!

Hey! Maybe I have a brain disorder!

2006-06-09T05:35:00.000-07:00

So thanks to Anna David's excellent writing blog, yesterday, I learned that "working in the highly competitive, glitzy and sexually charged atmosphere of a celebrity-driven fashion periodical" pushed super crazy-o Peter Braunstein over the edge.

The hell you say! Maybe that's why I'm so unsatisfied with my freelance career. Maybe I became addicted to the glitz and sexual charges when I was working at a women's magazine, where my main responsibility was finding new and innovative ways to make fun of celeb paparazzi shots. I have a brain disorder! I won't be right in the head till I'm back on staff and referring to Tom Cruise as "Sir Hunky Nutcase."

Based on this self-diagnosis, I'm going to hire a lawyer and sue People Magazine for a spot on their editorial team. Watch me!