…That Will Not Fit Up The Basement Steps
Ingredients:
(1) serrated steak knife
(1) pair of garden shears
(1) hand saw
(1) flat head screwdriver
(2) extremely motivated humans
Time: approximately one hour.
Temperature: increases throughout.
The weather has been uncharacteristically sunny and mild, lately. ”It’s a lie,” I tell visiting friends.
But really it’s a gift. I’m trying to remember to look and appreciate.
This isn’t what I thought my fall would look like. I had a plan, then the plan had to change. I’m not going where I thought I was going. I won’t be doing what I thought I’d be doing. If I manage to accrete significant words in my manuscript over the next few weeks, I’ll be surprised. Doubt I’ll be around here much either, except perhaps for more photo posts.
But things need doing when they need doing. The words will come. And right now, I’m glad that while I’m thinking about everything I need to do, I can look at the leaves.
I am in some very swell company in this anthology, which you can preorder the heck out of. My contribution is “Nineteen Panels About Me And Comics.” I can’t wait to read the rest of the book!
There was a whole ring of them. No fairies in evidence, alas.
Someone’s shed makes a sweet contrasting background.
I can’t read everything in her hair. I definitely see broke.
Really insistent directions require six fingers.
The phrase, the little heart, and the fact that it’s on repurposed law office stationery.
In case you had forgotten that I live in Portland.
Indeed.
A little bit yoga, a little bit Aladdin Sane.
Crustypunk kid or The Fool from the tarot deck? (Both/and is always an option.)
The “23″ reminds me of the 23 enigma.
The ex-television is, in fact, chained to a bike rack. (See above re: living in Portland.)
I liked this one because it incorporates the corner.
In case you were wondering what is better than a pug. Or two pugs.
It’d be useful at times, don’t you think?
They are trying to scratch him out but they haven’t quite managed it.
Sometimes reflections do exactly what I want them to.
Your pareidolia of the day.
I wonder in what entity the creator was intending to announce affiliation?
Originally posted at the Wordstock blog.
I have a Designated Writing Zone in my house. I’ve written many thousands of words in it, and I’ve even blogged about it. But sometimes I need other voices, other rooms. Fortunately Portland has many places where you can park yourself for extended periods of time to work on your manuscript. Here are four I recommend:
Backspace Cafe — This cafe is also an all-ages music venue, so if you arrive in the afternoon and stick around into the evening, expect to experience a shift in the atmosphere. Plus there’s a gaming section, so if you’ve made your wordcount goal and want to reward yourself with some time in World of Warcraft, you totally can.
Press Club — When a restaurant names its menu items after authors, you know they’re the sort of place you can linger with your laptop. The Press Club also has a fine selection of literary and arts magazines, so if inspiration lags, you can be inspired by the works of others.
Southeast Grind — This coffeeshop, which serves the ever-popular Voodoo Doughnuts among its other snack options, is open twenty-four hours. Need I say more?
Sterling Room for Writers, Multnomah County Library — You need to apply to use the Sterling Writers Room, but the application is short and you can fill it out online. You can write elsewhere inside the Central Library, too, of course — but it’s pretty cool to write in an official Writers Room, right?
I’d thought I’d lurk around Wordstock on Saturday, but I elected to write instead. But I did come for a substantial portion of Sunday, above and beyond the session I was moderating.
First I went to see Emily Warn and Ursula Le Guin, both reading poems. Warn read several, then Le Guin read one long magnificent one called “The Conference;” a conference, it turned out, of gods.
I loved Warn’s evocation of the mind as an off-kilter wobbly gyroscope with flimsy wiring and dull mirrors.
I asked a question during the Q & A, and I was vaguely taken aback by my own intensity as I asked it. Le Guin had spoken about discovering A.E. Housman at thirteen, which was, she said, a good time to discover him because “you got the big gloom that tasted so good at thirteen;” and Warn had talked about poets that she’d read in high school, without analyzing them, without any training in literary theory. I demanded to know how they read now without taking the work apart analytically. (I find it harder and harder to fall into books without trying to reverse-engineer or otherwise deconstruct them.)
Warn said that you had to find work you love, and also work that you can’t even try to imitate. Le Guin said that she’d never been trained to read critically, and that she’d studied Romance languages in college instead of majoring in English precisely because she wanted to avoid being told how to read.
Also, Le Guin’s mention of A.E. Housman made Warn recommend A.E. Stalling. Based on “A Lament For The Dead Pets Of Our Childhood,” I will definitely seek out more from her.
Also also: this short interview with Le Guin, about Portland literary culture among other things, is worth reading, too.
I was trying to hunt down the date for an upcoming event I’d managed not to get into my calendar, and searched my email for the name of the person organizing it. The results went back to 2005 — my first year using Gmail. (Before that it was Pine, because I am exactly that old-school.) I found myself drawn in for a while, rereading old messages.
There was a time when I made a practice of rereading my old email on a regular basis — when I got, and sent, significantly fewer messages. The exercise was not unlike rereading old journals, but instead of being a record of private fears, it was a way to examine how I presented myself to the rest of the world, or rather the subset thereof that I was emailing. I haven’t done it in a very long time.
Today as I reread, more than anything else I felt like I was getting a sense for how long it actually takes me to complete a book: researching, drafting, revising, the back-and-forth of editorial comments, copyediting, and, eventually, promoting the finished product.
It was both daunting and comforting.
Daunting because so far it’s always been a more drawn-out process than I wish it were.
Comforting because there’s clear evidence that it is a process which does, eventually, conclude. Though by the time it does, it’s already started again for the next book.
It also happens much farther below the waterline than it once did. And as I saw in my rereading, it takes place largely in emails rather than blog posts. Precisely because I can’t predict how long it will take me to go from idea to book, I no longer like to post a lot about the details of where I am on a project.
But every so often I feel compelled to assure the folks who read this (and remind myself? probably) that I am writing. And not just blog posts, either. Going to turn off the Internet and write some more now.
- Right now, you can read Orienteering, written by me, with art by Erika Moen, on this very Internet. Okay so technically that doesn’t count as me literally being somewhere, but. Go read. It is a short comic, but things happen in it.
- At 6 p.m. tonight, I’ll be at the Cedar Hills location of Powell’s for the Smart Chicks Kick It Tour 2.0. Why? Kelley Armstrong, Melissa Marr, Jennifer Lynn Barnes, Ally Condie, Beth Revis, Margaret Stohl, and Sara Zarr, that’s why.
- Next weekend, I’ll be at Wordstock. On Sunday at 2 PM, I’ll moderate a panel about contemporary YA fiction with Lisa Schroeder, Lindsay Leavitt, and John Corey Whaley. When not empaneled I plan to generally lurk around.
- And in a few short weeks, on Monday, October 17th, I’ll be at Multnomah County Library’s tenth annual Teen Author Lecture with Matt de la Peña. It is FREE. You’ll be there too, right?
