What book are you?
I found this book quiz because I could not resist the name fairyhedgehog. So, this is where curiosity gets you. Now, tell me, what book are you? I am this, apparently.
You’re One Hundred Years of Solitude!
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Lonely and struggling, you’ve been around for a very long time.
Conflict has filled most of your life and torn apart nearly everyone you know. Yet there
is something majestic and even epic about your presence in the world. You love life all
the more for having seen its decimation. After all, it takes a village.
Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.
Where the blog goes on forever, and the neurosis never ends…
Thanks to angst encouraging nonsense like sitemeters and stat counters, I can see that some people have read the chapters that I so anxiously-optimistically-ridiculously posted.
First thought is something like, Oh wow. Someone’s reading it.
Second thought is like, Oh shit. Someone’s reading it.
Third thought is more like, Oh great someone’s reading it and not saying anything to me about it which means they think I’m an idiot and they’re asking what I was thinking and that I really should get a clue and become smart and, jesus, if I’m like this because someone is reading my blog what on earth am I going to be like if I ever get to be a published writer–who am I kidding–and what if, god forbid, what if someone in my own city is reading my book and I won’t know who they are and I’m going to be walking around with my insecurities on my sleeve–up and down both sleeves and down the front and back of my shirt and sitting on top of my head–and I’ll be looking around everywhere I go for that person, that one soul is who is reading my book–I can just see it now–I’ll walk into a coffee shop and there will be that, that, that stranger reading my book and I’ll scream. What am I talking about? Who is this person whose nerves just jumped out from her skin? Damn widgets.
The third thought is like the third rail. Keep away.
I’m exhausted.
Mom.
My mother drew caricatures of all her mother’s children, and the drawings were kept in grandmother’s living room for twenty years.
When grandmother died, she left everything to me, including the remaining portraits. One had gone missing, and one had been torn to pieces by my uncle in one of the rages he used to have before he was institutionalized. (He might have continued to have rages, but I certainly was never told.) So, I gave two of my aunts their portraits, even though it pained me to part with my mother’s work, and since I have no contact with my aunts any longer, I expect I shall never see those pictures again, and I kept the last two–the one of my other uncle, who died in a car accident before I was born, and the one of my mother.
In this drawing she did of herself, I’m at her feet along with our favorite dog, Jill. The blank canvas behind her eventually became, in real life, a painting inspired by Middle Earth. That’s what I believe anyway, though the painting no longer exists and I have no proof–although one of the books in the picture is by Tolkien and she had a thing for dragons.
If my mother were alive today, I think she would blog. She’d have a free one at first, and then she would quickly grow frustrated with its limitations and teach herself code. Maybe take a class if she had the money. She’d ask my permission before reading my blog, and probably even suggest that she shouldn’t read it at all so that I could feel free to write whatever I wanted. She tended to worry that she was cramping my style. When I was in high school, she’d offer to drop me off at school functions (I lived with my dad, but she still carted me around) several blocks away. I’d have to reassure her that I was so spectacularly uncool, that being seen with my mother would make no difference whatsoever.
My mother like hoop earrings, fuzzy bathrobes, and large cups of coffee. She kept all her art supplies on the stove, which worked out because she spent her tiny paycheck on paints, pencils, canvas and paper, but not food. In her fridge she kept carrots, apples, and lettuce. Sometimes grapes. In her cupboard she kept melba toast and coffee. If she actually wanted to eat she went to her mother’s house or Wendy’s.
She made me laugh by imitating Tattoo from Fantasy Island. She loved Miami Vice, though she suspected if she had to watch it on anything other than ten-inch, black & white television, she’d change her mind. Because of her mother’s complicated relationship with reality, my mother told the truth no matter what. I didn’t always appreciate this.
She walked out of a job once because the boss changed his mind about letting her leave early–she’d promised to come see me in a school play. Her vocabulary was immense, and she always beat me at Scrabble. At least I always beat her at Clue.
She gave unorthodox advice–compared to the other mothers I knew anyway. She told me that men don’t confuse love and sex and neither should I. She said that the problem with waiting until marriage to have sex was that you could easily and stupidly confuse lust with love.
I wish I could’ve taken her to see Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings. Orlando she would’ve ignored. Viggo, on the the other hand…
Happy Mother’s Day.
Sharing, Sort of…
Sherri got me with this tag that tries to get us to learn more about each other. Usually sharing more about my life seems a tedious exercise because I don’t do much beyond stay in my own head and I worry that blogging encourages way too much self-obsession as it is, but I’m game to be tagged, and if anyone’s interested, they can read on.
Link one must be about family: my father who prefers not to know I write
Link two must be about friends: my poor neglected and used as material friends
Link three must be about yourself: seven random things
Link four must be about something you love: because I still love NaNo and my novel
Link five can be about anything you choose: and I chose this because very few days go by when my height is not pointed out to me
I really can’t bring myself to tag anyone, but I’m always happy to get to know others better out here in cyberspace. Please introduce yourself with this tag if you like.
A Perfect Moment
This evening I was sitting on a stool in the kitchen. On the counter was a The Writer magazine, a picture I was working on, and a glass of wine. The shouts and laughter of my son and husband bounced in from the other room. I coated the picture with finish, took a sip of wine, and read a few paragraphs on writing. Another coat, another sip, a little more reading.
Moments like that and the hectic day that awaits doesn’t even matter.
But now I’ve got to look at the novel. More wine may be needed.
your judgment is a little off
Whining writers are not interesting. Nobody wants to hear somebody who spends inordinate amounts of time alone making up stuff complaining how hard it is….blah, blah, blah…I get tired of myself sometimes. This is why I write fiction–I can pretend to be listening to somebody else.
Now, while it certainly is said that worrying about something that hasn’t happened yet or may never happen or won’t happen for a while in the future is a drain on a person’s energy and a huge waste of time, it is also true that worrying about the future helps pay the bills and puts food on the table. We’ve all heard the story of the grasshopper and the ants. Of course, perhaps the ants weren’t worrying about the future as much as doing something about it, but there had to be some concern before there was action.
Anyway, I worry that I simply can’t continue to function in a healthy way by losing so much sleep for my writing. I worry that when my son’s schedule changes, I will lose my afternoon time too. No. What I really worry about is that I will lose my writing time. My art time. My sanity time. Now, this is not a mom-blog. I read lots of good mom-blogs, but I don’t write one (except by default–I’m a mom and I blog) because I don’t write to become a better mother (though maybe I should). I’m selfish. I write to become a better writer. After all, if I fall into a black hole tomorrow, I’ll still be a mom, but if there are no pens and no notebooks, I won’t be a writer.
Don’t say I’ll be a writer because I’m one in my soul or wherever or anything of the kind. You’re not a mom unless there’s a kid; you’re not a writer unless there are words on the page. Feeling like you ought to be either of these things is not enough. My son will still exist if I’m crushed inside that black hole. My words won’t. If I’m a writer, I have to write, and to write, I shall have to make time. Ha! I can’t wait to pull that trick off–make time. What exactly does one need to do that? Hammer and nails or measuring cups and a mixing bowl?
When people ask me why I don’t want another child, I have a list of acceptable and truthful answers (although for some folks, there are no acceptable answers to this question). But the real, in-my-heart reason? I want to be a writer. I don’t want to lose more time to midnight feedings and diaper changes. I want to be a mom and to be a writer and the best way to do that–as Alice Walker once said–is to have one. Yes, I know many wonderful writers have more than one and they write–but you know it is just that much more difficult and I don’t want more difficult.
A fortune cookie recently told me, “Your judgment is a little off.” When was the last time you got a negative fortune? I couldn’t believe it, but now I can’t shake it. I stare at my novel and think–it is all a little off. I’m a little off. And the recent cover of The New Yorker doesn’t help. Okay, so people don’t want to listen to a writer whine, but hey, this is my blog and if I can’t whine here…what does a whine sound like in a black hole anyway?
The Escape
The Badger–The Escape Edition
A little late but finally here to badger you!
How is the writing? Exciting scenes and clever dialogue? Of course there are–because you wouldn’t be ignoring me, now would you?
Are you half way done? Looking at the finish line? Stuck? Keep writing anyway. If you keep writing you’ll get unstuck, you’ll reach the end, you’ll get to where you want to go. But you got to keep writing.
Write the good and the bad. Write the easy and the hard. Write. That’s what you’re here for. If you’re anything like me (and I think many of us writers have this in common) you didn’t fit in as a kid, you didn’t belong, or you sort of belonged, but suspected you ought to be somewhere else, and books were your ticket to other worlds, better places, more interesting lives. You loved being transported so much, you wanted to make your own transportation, your own story that make have the same power for someone else. Maybe? That sound anywhere close to right?
Well, now is your chance. Build it. Word by word and line by line, build the escape that you would’ve wanted (and still want) to read. I’m not going to say that if you build it, they will come. Maybe they will and maybe they won’t. I don’t know. But build it for you because you’ll be there, and that’s what counts.
Go write!
Like to Get to Know You Well
MPJ sent this tag my way, and so here it goes.
The Rules:
Post links to five of your previous posts. There should be one post for each of the following words–family, friends, yourself, your love, and anything you like. Tag five folks to do the same, and at least two of those folks you shouldn’t know well. The idea is to get to know others better and for them to know you.
I’ve been blogging for a short time (since the end of May 2007) and I don’t write that much about my personal life, but I came up with these old posts from when almost no one was reading anything here.
About keeping up with my friends.
About my family. Sort of.
About my love.
About myself.
And about anything I like…well, anything to go back to Neil–here’s the last.
The thing is, I actually liked being tagged (hey, it makes up for all those times I was never picked for the team), but I feel weird tagging others (like the pesky kid bothering the cool kids). So, if you’ve been reading here and would like me to read something from your past, please grab the tag and run with it.
Wanted: One Crazy, Abused, Suicidal, Drunk, Promiscuous Writer
All good novelists have bad memories.
–Robert Olen Butler paraphrasing Graham Greene (so you go on and paraphrase this somewhere else and it’ll be a game of telephone–who knows how the quote will end up many clicks away in cyberspace!)
This idea appears in many places–the notion that great artists are miserable or were miserable or suicidal or tormented by a dark side. I even read an interview with an agent who actually said a miserable childhood was a requirement for a good writer. Well, all you parents out there who want creative children. Forget Baby Mozart. Start abusing your children!
Okay, I jest. But is it true? I asked my students once what they thought of writers (and I did this when they didn’t know about this “secret” life of mine). Or more accurately, I asked them how they thought writers were different from other people if they were different at all. The students used adjectives like this–wild, free, independent, unhappy, and unstable. At the word “unstable” all the students nodded and said, “Oh, yes” or ” that’s right.” Several mentioned that writers had bad parents, drank too much, and had many affairs. Well, am I behind the curve. All this time and not one affair or addiction! (Except for coffee–does that count?)
I’ll take independent. And I’ll admit to something of a crazy childhood, but wild? Unstable? Do I have to be? If I stay my uptight, homebody self, can I be a great writer?
At this point, if I’m not a great writer, I don’t think my staid lifestyle has much to do with it. Hey, I love Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton and Virginia Woolf and Ernest Hemingway as much as anybody (hmmm…okay, not love, but I like them, I really do like them), but I’d like to lose this suicidal, depressive stereotype. Nobody writes much passed out on the floor or laid out in the morgue.
But then again, I look at the stories I write, and I think–maybe I am crazy…
When is prolific prolific?
I heard an interview with Joyce Carol Oates and she said something along the lines of how she didn’t see herself as prolific. She really didn’t think she wrote that much. I wanted to reach through my headphones and shake her. She must think the rest of us are lazy bums. Just goes to show you that know matter what you do, it is never enough.
