So Many Books…Only Two Eyes Saturday, Dec 20 2008 

Books and reading and writing , , thewritingspider 12:16 pm

     Most of my friends have a stack of books somewhere, unread, full of interesting things, waiting to be cracked. I am notorious for this now that I have discovered a half price bookstore mere minutes from my home. Everything’s half off! Or used! Why not spend $15 and get five books?

     The problem is…I read kind of slowly. Well, comparitively slowly. Husband is a superspeed reader with a crazy photographic memory. I get distracted – with the use of language, with imagining some subplot, with weather the cover art was really appropriate. But I am a confirmed bookworm, word nerd, reader and bibliophile.

     What’s on my bookshelf right now? Let’s see…

     I’m 1/8 of the way through David Foster Wallace’s The Broom of the System

     The Best American Non-Required Reading of 2008, a recent gift from Husband and one of my fave series

     Garlic and Sapphires, by Ruth Reichl, because she’s been recommended to me and also I like food writing

     Little Flowers of Francis of Assisi, a collection of tales from the life of St. Francis of Assisi

     Interworld, by (cue angel choir) Neil Gaiman because it was $5 in hardback and I’ve never read it

     Postcards from the Edge, by Carrie Fisher – this was a $1 and I’ve never read her before

    Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, by Barbara Kingsolver, which I haven’t read because I read Omnivore’s Dilemma and needed some time to digest it (no pun intended)

     The Four Agreements, recommended by my sister

     The last couple Dresden Files books are floating around here, having been devoured by Husband already

         That’s a big stack. Better get to it.

 

Writing Update Tuesday, Nov 4 2008 

short stories and writing and writing groups , , , , thewritingspider 11:45 am

     The Writing Spider hasn’t written much of late, has she?

     I have been sickish/busy/burned out from my job/apathetic/finishing reading a great book mostly the last few weeks. I started to write a post about my 10 year college reunion a few weeks ago and I still have the draft rolling around. Plus I started work on a new short story and I’m kind of at the point where it’s getting difficult.

     I am a character-driven writer. I love coming up with cool people to spend time with in the world of the story. This may be why I enjoy creative nonfiction so much but that’s another post entirely. So I came up with this character and started writing this piece around that character. Remember your junior high English classes when you had to figure out the structure of a story? Characters, setting, conflict, action, resolution, end. I love the first two but I can do without the rest.  I’m terrible at making up a conflict. I know it doesn’t have to be something huge – Kurt Vonnegut said every character must want something, even if its a glass of water and conflict comes from putting an obstacle in the way of getting the water. Maybe I should write a story where everybody wants a glass of water.

     My point is, I’ve created the characters and the setting and now comes the difficult work of making you care about them at all. This is usually the point at which I just give up but I actually really love the concept of the story and feel that if I can do it well, I will be very happy with it.

     I made a little plan about writing. I am forever making plans and sometimes they work. Part of my plan was to write more. Part was to get proactive on the rest – find a writing group, read more about writing, etc. Incidentally, part of this alleviates the boredom and frustration I often feel at my day job and thus helps to take care of my Day Job Problem.

     I would be a famous writer by now if it wasn’t for my Day Job Problem. Or sleeping. Or television. Bah.

     In another bid to motivate myself, I am continuing to listen to Mur Lafferty’s podcast, I Should Be Writing, and reading any author blogs I can see at work. Another part of the Day Job Problem is that I can’t see blogs because I work for a bunch of Fascists who won’t let you see anything remotely fun. Thank goodness for iPhone, but I digress.

     Neil Gaiman’s website is available to me at work which is a good resource but also makes me feel sort of like if I talked to Neil about writing he would laugh at me for thinking I’m a writer at all. No, he wouldn’t, he’s not that kind of guy, but he’d be able to spot my problem. I’m not writing stuff, finishing stuff, and sending it out. I’m just sticking my toe in the baby pool of writerhood. I used to be doing backflips off the high dive and now I’ve got on the inflated swimmies and a nose clip and a flower patterned swim cap.

     I emailed a professor from grad school who directed my thesis and to whom I am still grateful for going to bat for the creative writers in a school where creative writing is the red-headed stepchild of the English department DESPITE the fact that the school includes on its faculty some of the finest authors in the country and I’m not just saying that.  I asked him if he knew of anybody who was looking for writing group members or a group to join. This is also how I found the Evil Dictator’s writing group, but surely my professor won’t send me astray again?

     On another note, today is election day in the US. Part of why I’ve been so distracted is the massive amounts of political talk I’ve been exposed to the last few weeks. I’m on overload! So I will say that I am going to vote today and I encourage you to do so if you have not already.

 

Baaad English Major Thursday, Oct 16 2008 

English literature and writing , , , , thewritingspider 11:23 pm

   Everybody knows that English major type who can quote famous authors verbatim. At the end of the night your buddy, who has been drunkenly hitting on all the women at the party and bragging about his novel that’s about to be published, turns to the crowd and charmingly slurs, “If we shadows have offended, think but this, and all is mended”* and everybody laughs and forgets he’s kind of a dork. Or your girlfriend says coyly, “Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky”** and she sounds kind of sexy.
   I can’t do this. The only literature or quote I have memorized is “The Jabberwoky” from Lewis Carroll and that’s only because a summer theater program I was in when I was 12 performed it.

     The best I can do is say something like, “Didn’t Thoreau say something about a pond and how it’s like a long life and then…oh, I forget how it goes.”

     The English majors I know are always pulling out perfect quotes and themes and concepts from our long work as English majors. They got something out of those years with their noses in books – or at least they remember more of it than I do.

     When I read a book, it goes into the category of LIKED and DIDN’T LIKE. *** I remember the major plot points. Sometimes I remember something funny or a funny scene. I have read exactly one Thomas Pynchon book, The Crying of Lot 49, and I remember this: they’re playing strip Botticelli in the bathroom and the hairspray can is flying around the room.

     Other people have a maddening capacity for recollection. Husband, for example, remembers everything he reads and he reads really fast. I read slowly, and I barely remember what I read two pages ago. Other people remember who said what - Woolf and Dostoevsky, Dunne and Yeats, Dickens, Dickinson, Shelley, Kerouac, and O’Connor. I can’t remember what happens in The Faerie Queen or why I should remember it. I’ve read The Canterbury Tales three times for school and…well…there was a mooning scene, right?

    What the heck was I doing with my English major? And what was I reading? I think of all the books in the English major’s literary arsenal, I come up short on the side of ones I’ve read. I don’t think the Dresden Files are going to make it into college classrooms anytime soon.  It all makes me feel like a bad English major. Like I should remember more about the great literature I studied for so long.

     There’s just so bloody much to read!  

 

*I had to look this quote up to get the words right.

**10 points to you if you can finish the simile.

***My apologies to all my grad school professors who said that it no longer mattered if you like the book, we’re not reading for plot, and can you please just give me a Marxist critique of this novel?

 

Dear Power Lines Guys… Tuesday, Sep 23 2008 

electricity and writing , , , , , thewritingspider 12:31 am

    Nobody could have foreseen it and it couldn’t have been stopped. This is what happened in the week after, to me:

  Over the last week, I have consumed seventeen fast food meals, six sit-down-dinner meals, and several trips to Starbucks for coffee, tea and carbs. That is more fast food in one week than I had consumed in the year or so prior. 

     I have spent at least 15 hours reading in bookstores – I have read 187 pages of the first Twilightbook (eww…baaaaad….Meyers, you need to learn to use the word ‘myriad’ properly), started a Dresden Filesbook, and purchased several more. I’ve spent 15 hours reading in my bed by the light of nine tealights and an Itty Bitty Book Light thingy. I’ve finished at least one book and started 2 more.

     My iPhone has been my link to my e-world. I have checked my email 29 times. I have checked and/or changed my Facebook status ten times and 90% of them dealt with the fact that we had no power. I charged it up at work. I used it for an alarm clock during the week.

     I have tended six ferrets in the dark for eight days.

     I did not kill any of my neighbors nor inflict bodily harm on them as they: hooked up a roaring generator in the parking lot at 11:30 pm on a weeknight, rolled into the parking lot at 2, 4 and 5 a.m. blaring some sort of thug-thumping crap that woke me from a dead sleep, and held an impromptu party by the mailboxes at 12 midnight, complete with shrieking, lobbing beer bottles into the dumpster, and repeatedly screaming ASSHOLE at each other.

     I learned that Husband needs caffeine in the form of Starbucks and electricity in the form of the Internet and various PC games in order to feel whole and unbored. I learned that “atmosphere” in the form of encroaching darkness a la the film The Othersis only a good idea if Nicole Kidman and ghosts are involved. 

   I have discovered a previously untapped talent – I am the best drummer in RockBand on PS2 in the world. As long as it’s on EASY and I sort of know the song. I look like Animal from The Muppet Show but damn that game is fun.

    It is apparently perfectly acceptable to answer the question, “Can I help you find something?” with “No, I’m just enjoying your electricity…”

     I missed Project Runway, America’s Next Top Model, Coupling, and Ghost Hunters. I don’t mind. I got a bunch of books I can’t wait to read.

    We threw out perhaps $250 worth of food. We had just gone to Costco and I grocery shop every Saturday. I did mind. But it’s gone now and at least the fridge is clean.

     The dense quiet, wading into the black corners of my house, and the ability to hear the wind rush through the windows without straining over the fan, the electronic equipment, and someone’s AC were truly pristine moments. I can live without electricity and get by with a little help from my friends. I didn’t lose anything except my electricity. I have my house, my car, my family, my ferrets.

   Thank you LG&E, thank you KU, and Duke Energy. Thank you linemen who rushed back from Texas to lend a hand to the darkness back home. Thank you to the friends and neighbors who reached out, offered a place to stay, a couch to crash upon, or an invitation just to watch a cable TV movie.