Archive for November, 2007|Monthly archive page
Shots on Goal
Filed under: Children, Writing, losing, planning, sports, winning |
Comments(13) One thing I really like about children is how fundamentally decent they are, and how wise. When I told William a little while ago that I was feeling a little worried and a little bad about this literary prize my novel’s up for, he said, “You know mom, it doesn’t matter if you lose and it’s nice if you win.” And then, to buck me up, he shared one of his own writing submission stories: “I didn’t win that scary story contest at school, but I don’t care. I kind of suck at writing scary stories.” Well, I didn’t win that Fabri Prize, although I got a really lovely note from the people at Boaz Publishing saying some nice things about my book, which doesn’t actually suck, but maybe wasn’t just what they wanted.
This experience isn’t going to prevent me from writing stories and books and sending them out over and over again. It’s just one of many shots on goal. That’s something I learned from soccer, a game I do not play, but watch endlessly, and even, one night when I had absolutely nothing better to do, read an entire book about. In that book, I came across an astonishing and life-changing fact: for every goal that is scored, a player has to make ten shots on goal. I love that fact. If you keep kicking in the general direction of the goal, and pay attention to where your kicks go, and try to make them straighter, truer and stronger, you will eventually get the ball in the net. If you are a writer, you have to take hundreds of shots, but that is the only significant difference between you and David Beckham. Well, almost. And that, my friends, is the only sports metaphor you will probably ever hear from me.
Have a great weekend — and don’t forget to show me when and how you’re going to be planning your own shots on the goal.
Planning a Plan
Filed under: Blogging, December, Writing, holidays, organization, planning |
Comments(31) It’s come to this. I can’t put together a decent planning strategy for December unless I sit down for half an hour and make a plan for what a good plan should look like.
First, I am going to heed the many commenters who, in the last two days have talked about the difficulty — the sheer, hyperventilating, dizzy-making difficulty — of putting together and adhering to a plan to get yourself to the other side of anything. So this is my first planning principle: Whatever plan I end up making for December, it is not going to make me –or you — want to breathe slowly into a paper bag when you see it.
Second, I am going to go with something yogamum made me see — a plan has to be fun for it to be effective.
Third, I have to be clear about what I want to accomplish in December. And because this is paragraph three, and because three is such a good number (three princesses, three princes, three Billy Goats Gruff, three little pigs, three tenors, three flying dutchmen, three wise men, three sticks of butter, three cups of sugar) I’m going to stick to just three things I want to accomplish this month.
(1) I’d like to celebrate this holiday month in a sane, fun, book, music and outdoor oriented, non-self absorbed way. (Clearly, I’m going to have to refine point number one which I can see sinking under the weight of all those expectations.)
(2) I’d like to do something about getting my book and my stories out into the world.
(3) I would like to write a few pages every day or so.
These things have been on my mind, and I think getting them them accomplished through a plan of some kind is crucial. That is because all the other things I do, the things I calendar, like seeing my friends, and taking my children sixty zillion places, have been slipping through the chasm that is my current very distracted state, in which my goals have made my everyday busy life almost undoable. I have become a little like my computer — I can’t have more than one program open at a time and I am losing a lot of data. I have also been unreliable in my friendships and I will confess right now that one big impetus to getting these goals organized is so I can never, ever, ever again do what I did this Wednesday, which is stand up a lovely friend who was waiting for me to go and taste food (free food!) for a party we are organizing. How did this happen? A child got sick, I had to stay home from work, and I could only open that single program — the sick child/mom as doctor program — that day. So I dedicate my planning efforts to K, who may not forgive me, but who will be the catalyst behind my being a tad more reliable.
And I’m also going to make an un-list, which is a list of the things I won’t do, because they are not going to make me or anyone around me happy. Currently those include: cleaning obsessively, baking elaborate things, and spending a lot of time shopping.
In the shower, where I do all my planning (hence the fact that I have no actual paper plans, given the absence of waterproof notebooks and pens in my shower), it occurred to me that maybe a plan that only has something to do in each of these categories every three days (naturally) would be better than having every day full of stuff. I think my December plan — which I’ll post in a day or two — is going to have two blank days and one day with stuff on it. Because if there is anything I don’t want to have happen (besides getting the ‘flu, which is going around in a nasty form these days in Berkeley), it’s that I’ll feel like a loser on January 1 because I didn’t do my whole damned plan. Not good.
So, there you go. Now I’m going to tag a lot of people to talk about how they get themselves from an idea of something they would like to accomplish to the fact of that accomplishment, while also keeping their heads above water in their everyday life. And tomorrow, I’m going to tag a whole slew more. And the next day, it being the third day, I’m going to tag some more. And then I will rest; I mean, I will begin to do — in a relaxed way — a few things on my plan. If you post a picture of a plan, I’ll send you some fruitcake. And if you don’t like fruitcake, I’ll send you a lovely pencil. If I tagged you wrong and am sending people to the Old Navy website instead of yours, let me know. And heavens, if I didn’t tag you by the third day, well, I MEANT TO. Email me and tell me so. (And if you try to hide because you don’t want to show us your plan, because it is that beautiful, well I’ll smoke you out and make you.)
So here you go, planners of the blogworld. I want to see your plans.
Polaris and Mandarine, science-minded people who will have, I am sure, a great take on this subject
lilian, sweet, kind, funny, very, very smart, and a hero — because she is a library goddess and what librarians don’t know about good planning and organization is probably not worth knowing
yogamum, busy running a house full of people, and engaged in a lovely and inspiring yoga practice, and who’s got a lot on her mind these days with a sick father — there’s a woman who needs an un-plan, not a plan — and needs other people to do a little cooking for her. No planning for you, Ms. yogamum! Put your feet up.
Emily, who sees a lot of projects in her work as an editor and is a writer of chillingly effective stories and who sometimes suggests she is not organized but actually given what she gets accomplished must have a method to get there
Courtney, who swears to god she is going to get a plan together for her writing, but who actually would never, ever stop writing because she is that good, and that devoted
Charlotte, who gets tons of things done and has been known to do it all while still wearing her pajamas and is now writing a bunch of short stories that I know are going to be wonderful
Ann who manages to cook beautiful things while still photograhing all of New York City
Diana who gets up at 5 a.m. (god, I think it might be even earlier than that), to help deliver newspapers
Kristen and Lucette, who seem to have a secret about how a group of women together can get a lot of writing done
Eoin, who so generously shares what he knows and thinks about the publishing world, and has said some of the kindest, most gracious things a commenter has ever said on this blog, particulary at a time when I really needed that to happen.
litlove who thinks she doesn’t get a lot done but actually is prolific, inspiring and amazing
Helen, who raises an adorable son and is editing not one but TWO books
Kate, who teaches law and blogs so consistently and then last year gave the world a wonderful book of short stories
Archie who is brilliant, just brilliant, when it comes to words, and whose images of his Australia have made me see that part of the world in a way I love
Ingrid whose passion for pirates, and Bill Neighy and his cafe and movie-making and being in London is inspiring and lovely
Nils, who is clever and always interesting and self-effacing and fabulous
Edwin, whose observations about the surreal and ridiculous, about food and gardens, delight me every time I go to his site
Cam, who thinks and writes about life in such a clear way, and who comes over here and leaves interesting and thought-provoking comments
Emily, whose box of books landed in my office nearly a year ago and whom I think of every day when I see those editions on my shelf
Mary, my writing friend, whose wild book about the exploits of a cleptomaniac San Francisco lawyer and her Indian former-client, inspires me and makes me laugh….
My god. I’ve just realized how lucky I am to know all of you, how much you inspire me and make my life richer. I had to stop and save the many other tagees because, well, my fingers are starting to ache. I can see that I want to know how every single person who comes to this blog plans the many wonderful things they are up to in the world.
Managing
Filed under: Little House on the Prairie month, Organizational strategies, Writing, plans |
Comments(19) A week or so ago, I made fruitcakes with my friend C who, because she is English, actually knows how to make a nice fruitcake. She’s also good with other brandy/dried fruit kinds of food, like mince pies. I would write more in praise of the fruitcake, but somehow I don’t think I’m going to find a lot of sympathetic ears. That is because Americans have mostly only seen — and played frisbee with — those leaden disks studded with scary, glowing green and red things that masquerade as fruitcake. A real fruitcake is an entirely different affair, essentially a very nice, spiced cake, full of dried cherries/apricots/raisins, topped off with a few artfully arranged almonds and then drenched in brandy. Really, how could anything drenched in alcohol be bad? (Okay, I can think of a few things — really large men drenched in alcohol sitting on your front porch: bad.) Anyway, I’m not here to prostletize about fruitcake, except to say that my husband loves it and it keeps C going for the entire time she is at the Modern Language Association meetings in December.
Rather than fruitcake, I really want to talk about my friend C, who is a Victorianist, and has a great job as an English professor at one of the universities near where I live. I have known C almost my entire adult life, beginning when we were both in our early twenties and in English graduate school. That she went on to become a scholar, and I went on to join a profession full of argumentative monkeys, has not made any difference in our friendship. I love hearing about her job, and I love checking out the materials of her work.
While we were making the fruitcakes I noticed something sticking out of her (very chic leather) bag and she was nice enough to indulge my sort of weird interest in the nuts and bolts of her work. This thing sticking out of her bag was a plan for the academic year, but the page I saw was a plan for one of those extraordinarily busy months we all have. In C’s case, lots of writing, and teaching, and administrative jobs. I sink under months like that, stop writing in my blog, do not pick up crumbs that fall on the floor and forget to pick children up after school. C’s strategy is to make an utterly beautiful plan on a pad of paper and then proceed to tick off every one of the things she needs to do.
What I love about her busy month management strategy is that she obviously gets a lot of pleasure out of making the plan. In fact, when she is done she puts it in one of those cool plastic sheet protector things. She also saves all of these plans. This last thing is what makes me really, really hope that if for some reason I happen to outlive her (unlikely to happen, because she does a lot of yoga), I will get to be her literary executor and publish an entire book devoted to the many such meticulous, inspiring and beautiful plans she has made, plans that have gotten her fellowships, and books published, and articles written, and presents bought, and children raised and a few fruitcakes baked every now and then.
Here it is:
”
And here is a Little House on the Prairie Month Update:
The most useful part of this experience was learning that when you have to wait a little while to buy something, you occasional forget you ever wanted it. That was the fate of several pairs of shoes, some books and videos, a couple of games, and a tshirt with a rock band logo on it. There was a ton of complaining about the whole thing, but the boys were rigorous about making sure their parents kept to the “food only” requirement, which meant that we were a little short on soap, which was just as well as far as they were concerned. We also learned that food takes on a huge amount of importance when it is the only thing new thing coming into your house.
We officially ended LHPM the day after Thanksgiving, cutting it short by a few days because of all the griping we were having to put up with. And no, that timing had nothing to do with the many sales going on the day after Thanksgiving. We find crowds of people who’d kill you to get the xbox at 20% off really scary. But it was a happy day indeed for the Bloglily boy whose skateboard was stolen at school and who badly wanted to replace it, because otherwise his brother would get far ahead of him in doing tricks with the names of English schoolboys (”Ollie”) and fruit (”melon.”)
The boys are not wild about ever doing this again, probably because 2/3 of them are almost teenagers and their mom’s weird ideas must be resisted at all costs. I figure though that by next November they might have forgotten what it was like to actually have to wait before buying tennis shoes, and they might have outgrown that kind of resistance to authority.
Dear General
For those who need a translation, this great writing prompt, or hook to a fabulous first novel, reads “Dear General, I am mailing you five million dollars in this envelope.” It was composed by one of the BlogLily household’s resident young adult fiction writers, probably when he should have been taking the dog for a walk.
I found it the other day on the kitchen counter when I was cleaning up the house. Beyond admiring the way it used our recycling pile to great effect, I was struck by the many different ways one could go after writing this sentence. I can’t wait to read the rest.
I love writing the first sentences of things. I am not always so crazy about the next sentence. Here’s the one that came to me the other day when I was in the shower, “Their hearts broke at the same moment, on the same day, one hundred years apart.” Oh, if only I knew enough about what people ate and wore and spoke about in 1907, I might actually be able to write the kind of story I love to read, the one about the links between the people in the past and the people in the present.
For now, I’m going to have to stick to writing stories about women in 2007, something I actually do know about, as long as I keep my eyes and ears open.
A Certain Slant of Light
Filed under: Autumn, Emily Dickinson, Poetry, Words, Writing |
Comments(10) At the end of my hall at work is a picture window and, beyond the window, a leafy tree (still leafy, even though it’s November). Larkin Street is just below this window. If you walk up Larkin, you’ll find porn theaters, guys selling watches and drugs, and good Vietnamese food. The superior court is just across Larkin from the picture window and most days you see lawyers in wrinkled suits going in and out. People hang around outside the court arguing with each other about child custody, child support, traffic tickets and their obligation to perform jury duty. It’s a sad street most days, desperate and tawdry. The light today doesn’t make it look anything other than what it is.
When I looked down the hall today, it struck me that the light is lower in the sky than it was just a week ago — it’s somehow become late in the year, and even this early in the afternoon (it’s 1:00 here), things seem to be ending .
And that is when I found myself thinking about Emily Dickinson, a woman who knew all about that kind of light.
There’s a certain slant of light,
On winter afternoons
That oppresses, like the weight
Of cathedral tunes.
Heavenly hurt it gives us;
We can find no scar,
But internal difference
Where the meanings, are.
None may teach it anything,
‘T is the seal, despair,
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the air.
When it comes, the landscape listens,
Shadows hold their breath;
When it goes, ‘t is like the distance
On the look of death.
The City of Industry
Filed under: Little House on the Prairie month, Travel, perfume |
Comments(5) I love the name of this place, even though I’ve yet to see signs of any industry at all, this being largely a residential area, except for the single hotel where my work conference is taking place. From my window I can see a golf course and the smog that obscures the San Gabriel Mountains. Hills, actually. Who would know what kind of land mass they are? You can’t see even their outline — it’s just all brown, all the time.
I’ve been holed up in my hotel, and when I’m not being industrious, I’ve been thinking about perfume and how much I loved trying to figure out what I wanted to wear. For some reason, when I happened on Guerlain, and realized what a history there was there, and how you can actually buy perfume that women wore before the First World War, maybe even in Proust’s time, I became very, very interested in the idea of scent as a connection with the past. Our physical connection to the past is almost entirely through things. It’s amazing to think about all the wedding rings, and vases, and mirrors, and fountain pens, that are still hanging around long after their owners have died. But it wasn’t until I smelled L’Heure Bleue that I realized I was smelling something a lot of women, now long dead, had worn. (I would add that I think they have tinkered with this scent, but it’s close enough to the original to count as a line to the past.) So now I spray it on and think about that golden time before the war. I don’t want to live then (although I wouldn’t mind going back to Paris soon), but I sure like smelling that time.
Little House on the Prairie Report: Travel for work doesn’t count, because most of it is paid for by them, except for gum and bottled water at the airport. I don’t know how they’re doing at home, but I’m guessing it’s going pretty well. W never has any money in his wallet, so that’ll keep them home on the prairie. I forgot and bought a newspaper.
Well Bead Me a Tiara!
Filed under: Food, Jewelry, Little House on the Prairie Report, Writing |
Comments(26) Here’s a piece of surprising news — I am one of the six finalists for the Fabri Prize. My guess was that was about as likely as my sons sitting down quietly in the living room one evening and beading me a necklace, bracelet and matching tiara for Christmas.
They’d better get started, don’t you think?
Little House on the Prairie Report: Oops. I bought some perfume to celebrate. In fact, I bought an incredibly beautiful Guerlain fragrance called L’Heure Bleue. The blue hour. That gorgeous, slightly melancholy time between day and night, when many things are still possible, even if many things have already occurred. Which is how I think of these years, the middle of my life.
Otherwise, it’s all food, all the time, including last night’s dinner which consisted of the loveliest lamb chops I’ve ever eaten. Along with cous-cous that came in a box, rather than the bulk bin, and had a very tasty little flavor packet with some parmesan in it. Everyone really, really liked that.
Now, we just have to get rid of the Halloween candy and move on.
On Editing
Filed under: Entertainment on the Cheap Schemes, Little House on the Prairie month, Writing |
Comments(7) I’ve been doing some editing, and have been thinking about how I’ve always done it this way — I go as fast as I can through a draft, slashing things everywhere (ouch), trying to replace weak noun/adjective combinations with better nouns, or find stronger verbs, scrawling in the margin things like “more details here,” “some business here” (which means the dialogue is too long), hoping when I input the changes I’ll find those details and that business. Today I realized I’ve used the same formulation for a person getting up and going someplace way, way too many times and began to think of new ways to do that. One way I know I’m doing what I should be doing is when I find things I loved writing, but know immediately they’re too flashy, and so I cut them out, thinking to myself that Hemingway thing about killing your babies, that being what good writers have to be willing to do. **In fact, it turns out that it was not, after all, Hemingway who said this, but Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, whose name must be made up, because it is so ridiculous. What he actually said was: ‘Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.’
As I considered my slash and burn style of editing, it became apparent that I actually have no idea why I edit the way I do. It is instinctive, a little bit like writing, but not blind — informed, rather, by the many great books I’ve read and the rules of grammer, which I actually pretty much know, not because I diagrammed sentences in the fifth grade, but because you internalize good grammar from wide reading. In fact, I think when you’ve read a lot of good writing, and you wait a little bit until your writing is not quite so close to you, your sense of when something’s going off a cliff is actually pretty good. Ditto when something sounds stiff, or weird or wrong. You just know. It’s as though you have little alarms under your skin, alarms that got there from reading a lot of Austen, and Dickens, and John LeCarre, and Dorothy Sayers, and Yeats and Woolf. Still, maybe it would not be a bad idea to read a little about editing. Who knows, maybe I’d actually learn something new!
Little House on the Prairie Report. Yikes. I forgot about Walgreens. Does shampoo count? We don’t actually eat shampoo, and it’s too late for me to be making it out of lye. And William is awfully dirty. Shampoo counts.
Going to the new Trader Joe’s is likely to be the biggest thrill of the day, followed up not by a trip to see Cate Blanchett in Elizabeth, as was my initial proposal, but a trip to the back yard to play ping pong, in a grand, competitive, parents vs. children tournament, mostly because I HATE losing to W, so it’s better to have him on my team. I’m okay losing to preadolescent boys and an eight year old. I can always pretend like I let them win. W knows better — he knows I don’t let anybody win. Ever. Apparently this is both a curse and one of my many charms.
Laying in Provisions for the Long Winter
Filed under: Children, Family, Food, Little House on the Prairie month, gastronomic schemes |
Comments(4) Around here, our favorite of all the Little House books is Farmer Boy simply because of the astonishing amount of food Laura’s husband to be, Almanzo, consumed every day. We read it out loud at night a couple of years ago and I found myself down in the kitchen every night after everyone was asleep, rooting around for provisions. Our cellar, alas, did not look like Almanzo’s, so I had to make do, most nights with left- over pudding cups and the occasional stash of pretzels at the back of the cupboard.
Here are the sorts of food descriptions that led directly to the consumption of pudding cups and pretzels:
“Almanzo ate the sweet, mellow baked beans. He ate the bit of salt pork that melted like cream in his mouth. He ate mealy-boiled potatoes, with brown ham-gravy. He ate the ham. He bit deep into velvety bread spread with sleek butter, and he ate the crisp, golden crust.”
and this:
“Mother was frying doughnuts. The place was full of their hot, brown smell, and the wheaty smell of new bread, the spicy smell of cakes, and the syrupy smell of pies.”
(With thanks to the Bookbag for those quotes.)
And that’s why the one thing we’ve decided to spend money on during Little House on the Prairie Month is food. The idea here is not to bring any more material goods into our house, thereby enriching our sense of plenty by sharpening our appreciation for material things. We can do that, as long as we can get somebody to make some of those spicy cakes and syrupy pies, and as long as we have some other pleasures stored up for the long winter that will be November.
Today’s Little House on the Prairie Month Report:
We went into San Francisco today, having long ago bought tickets to see Jack perform in a matinee of The Magic Flute at the San Francisco Opera. That was one thing we’d stored up for November. He was a sort of helper/spirit, with an awfully high voice. Good for him. I left everyone milling around the Opera trying to decide what to do next and came over to my office to work (blogging about it kind of counts as work), which is not only free, but actually brings money in. As far as I know they were going to go to Crissy Field, with skateboards and kite in tow. It’s a beautiful day here in San Francisco. Beautiful days are completely free. In a few hours, after they’ve tired themselves out, our plan is to …. EAT! I’m having the biscuits and gravy, please. And a big piece of apple pie.
A Rich Life
Filed under: Children, Family, Little House on the Prairie month, prelapsarian schemes |
Comments(7) 
Very young children live in an edenic, prelapsarian world (I’ve always wanted to use that word — prelapsarian — in a sentence on my blog. It’s a good day when I can work that in right away, even if all it means is “before the fall”)
I used to think that if my children didn’t have a word for certain unpleasant concepts like “war,” and “race” (not racial race but foot race, with all the horrible winning and losing issues that come with it), and “hitting-your-brother-with-your-boxer shorts-and-then-throwing-a-battery-at-him-for good-measure” we’d eke out our tenancy in the Eden that is childhood for a little longer.
We all know that’s terribly deluded, because all of us are pretty much hardwired to want to kick the pants of everyone we’re running close to, if we do ever actually get up to that speed, and we are all dying to hit our relatives with our underwear.
Nevertheless, one effort at making language fit the world I want to live in revolves around the word “rich,” a word I think needs to be much, much more broadly defined than the oodles of money, Richie Rich use of that word. Rich, I announced, when a definition was requested, means having a lot of something that matters to you. I have taken a poll (which means I asked Jack) to discover what we are currently rich in and here it is, as of November 2, 2007:
- love
- books
- scars and bruises (oops, that’s not exactly where I was headed)
- shoes — okay, we’re veering in a bad direction here, I being the person with the shoe problem
- stationery items (ditto)
- great food, both parents being pretty fabulous cooks
Okay, now that you know how we’re doing rich-wise, here’s our Little House on the Prairie accounting:
It’s not even noon and I’ve already handed a child $20 to go ice skating, there being no school for him today and that being the activity his friend is taking him to do. W said that if we truly lived on the prairie we’d just have to wait a few weeks, and then it would snow, and the river (or lake) would freeze and the boys could ice skate on that. I never ever thought I’d see the day when the prairie would win out over the bay area as a place to live.
I considered, and then abandoned, the idea of having William go to Parent’s Night Out at his school so W and I could go out. (And do what? Movies are not in the plan here. We could go for a nice walk! No, no, we could RACE each other around the neighborhood.) Parent’s Night Out costs $20 and therefore is out of the question.
Child who was cruising overstock.com and noticed that Chuck Taylor All-Stars are $9.99 a pair (you might want to check that out, all of you who are spending the month blogging daily or writing a novel) was told sternly that he’d have to wait until December to buy them, if he still wanted them. “But I had no choice in this whole prairie thing,” he wailed. Neither did Laura and Mary, dude.
Little House on the Prairie Month
Filed under: Excess-Reduction Projects, Family, Little House on the Prairie month, Money |
Comments(8) I am aware that diligent others are busy writing novels this month, or hitting the “publish” buttons on their blogs every day, but here in the BlogLily household, we are doing something different this November.
It all began with the observation that we have too damn much stuff, an observation I make every time I walk through my house. Awash in it as we are, none of us seems to spend much time actually using all that stuff. And when Christmas comes around, there’s a kind of overload that seems to occur about ten minutes into present opening. We used to joke about how Laura and Mary were so thrilled by the orange in the toe of their stockings, and the corn cob doll, and wouldn’t it be nice if we were like that, but the joke began to feel bitter, resentful and a little hopeless — as though we’d never get a grip on the excess around here.
When THAT happens, it’s time to do something, which is how Little House on the Prairie Month emerged. It’s not very complicated really. We’re just not going to buy anything this month except for food. That way, except for crap people give you for free, no new stuff comes into our house.
Here’s my LHPM report for today, November 1, 2007:
Got to work and realized I’d already blown it — told child he could buy a book or go to the library today. Oops. Maybe we should have had some kind of big, big kickoff thing so everyone would be jazzed. Perhaps I should post some rules.
Did not buy latte at latte place. No big deal. There’s coffee at work. Anyway, I don’t even really like coffee that much. I just use buying it as an excuse (I’ll admit it now!) to prolong the amount of time I spend not working. Thought about whether paying for parking is included. And how about the thing I bought on ebay in October, but had to pay for today? What about money that’s just lying around the house? Can we use that? We’re going to need a guy in an eyeshade to help on some of these issues.
