Monthly Archives: July 2008

You Suck!

Posted on
26

That comment — or its functional equivalent — is the kind of thing I delete before it ever shows up on my blog. It’s been a long time since anyone’s left anything even remotely like it here. In fact, I don’t think I’ve used the comments moderation feature — the one that allows you to block comments from people who’ve never visited your blog before — for well over a year. There’s a post here about that last time.

But I wanted to mention today a comment I got a few days ago that was basically a “you suck” sort of missive. It came in response to the post I last wrote about the experience of not writing, and how I think my way through that problem. The comment started off innocuously — a little rambling, not making much sense, really, but then it wound up, sort of like a very small snake, and issued a little dribble of venon, directed at me, and women like me, to basically give up writing because our work is pointless and we should really just take care of our families and, presumably, leave the manly art of writing stories to, well… him.

I mean, honestly, does anyone think I’d stop writing because I’m a woman with a family? Sheesh. A woman who’s gone through labor with twins and then a single, enormous baby, isn’t going to let a little thing like having to drive her kids to school and maybe occasionally do some grocery shopping stop her from the thing she loves most (after the children and the husband, of course.) Still, it made me wonder — why would someone go to the trouble to say something like that to me, someone he doesn’t even know?

To unpack what might motivate someone to be so nasty, I’d begin by saying that anonymity does, in some cases, allow people free reign to express their darkest, bitterest selves, the self that sees anyone who’s even remotely interested in doing the thing they want to do as a competitor to mock and, hopefully, discourage. Anonymity seems to make some people feel as though they have license to ignore ordinary social norms — the ones, for example, that suggest a person like this guy should not give a person he doesn’t know (me) “advice” like that. Obviously, he shouldn’t give it to people he knows either, or he won’t know anyone for very long and he’ll have to stay in his tiny apartment and eat pizza out of a box for the rest of his life, while the people who know how to have real conversations about what it means to write well are all hanging out together somewhere that’s well lit, eating food that’s not cold and doesn’t come in a cardboard box. But that’s his problem, not mine. The thing is, though, this guy wasn’t anonymous — he left his e-mail address and it has a name attached to it.

And that is when I realized exactly what this was about: attention. It surprised me it took so long to understand that, given how often the children in my house do ill-advised things because some kind of attention is better than no attention at all. (It’s called negative attention. My children are growing out of it. Some adults never do.) Anyway, my theory is that this comment was intended to stir up a little controversy so this guy could vent in response to whatever people would naturally say to anyone who seems to feel that women with families shouldn’t waste their time writing.

It’s a little pathetic to see a grown man behave like that. The way for a writer to get attention is to write something interesting and beautiful, something true. The surest way to guarantee that you will have no audience is to be nasty. And that, dear, gentle, good-tempered, beautifully-mannered readers, is all I have to say about this guy, whose just desserts are that his name and his comment won’t ever show up here on bloglily.

On Not Writing

Posted on
21

I know my writing about writing is usually very upbeat, but some days I cannot write for reasons that are a complicated blend of fatigue and the usual difficulties (time, place, forgotten notes — that kind of thing), which dissolve into a single, strong sense that the whole enterprise is futile. On those days, and today is one such day, I think about how what matters are the people in my life, many of whom I become disconnected from when I’m writing something.  And so those are days when I don’t write, which is for the best. Because you probably don’t write well when you are exhausted by thoughts about how difficult it can be to get back into the story, and you know that many things are easier to do and that no one would really be upset if you stopped, and many people would, at some level, be relieved.

The way it works is that you are lucky if you find something you passionately love to do in your life, but you have no right to expect that this passion will be shared or nurtured or rewarded by anyone else. Now, no one in my life actively discourages my writing, and some people ( my husband being one ) are all about helping it along. Still, if it disappeared from our life, I don’t think anyone would experience any grief, which is only right, because the writing doesn’t belong to them. It happens to them, and it inconveniences them, and they deal with it because I love it and they love me. But it’s not theirs to lose. It’s mine and so the real loss would be to me.

Wondering how much of a loss it would be to stop doing something that is extraordinarily difficult sometimes, this morning, on my way in to work, I posed this question to my self: if you knew that you could have one of your heart’s desires, a heart’s desire that isn’t related to writing, would you agree to never write another word, so you could have that longed-for thing? It was hard to answer. I could not honestly say, as I often see people say, that I would die if I couldn’t write. Or I write because I HAVE TO.

Me? I sat there and imagined a heart’s desire, and laid it next to the way I feel when I write, and the stories I want to tell, and the uncertainty and difficulty of finding people to read what I write, and my fears about how good it is, and I wondered what life would be like if I just stopped in the middle of editing my novel, and never picked up the second one again and didn’t write any more stories, the ones about women who’re ridiculous, but so smart at the same time. I decided life would not be worth very much, although I’d have more time to spend with my family, and to sleep and hike, but it took me nearly an hour to come to that conclusion, and even then I wasn’t entirely sure I was right.

I say all this not because I need or want anyone’s reassurance – I have confidence enough for several writers and mostly I have good days, some even great, when I never think like this – but because on a day when I don’t have those things, I don’t write, and I think it’s important to note that writing well is not a simple thing, not in the least, and there are days when getting to the place where you can write what you want to write is not at all about finding the time, or the correct work space, or an agent, and that some days those things look remarkably easy compared to the difficulty of finding in yourself the necessary certainty that what you have to say matters at all, in comparison to how much it costs.

Author, Author: Ella Lesatele

Posted on
10
The Authors Desk

Ella Lesatele, the author and illustrator of The Absent Classic Series has been writing and drawing since she was a little kid. An art-school graduate, and mother of two small children, she’s also an expatriate who lives with her family in Dubai, where she will be for another year and a half. In addition to being a writer of talent and vision, Ella is good at many other things, such as playing badminton and making apple pie, and terrible at others, such as driving a car and having patience . Imagine this conversation taking place in the lovely room where Ella’s desk is located.

How’s your work coming along these days? What have you recently sent out into the world?

The last big project I finished was a book called Folk Tales of the Bezai – a 10,000 word novella I wrote, illustrated, and made into a handmade book. It’s the third installment of a larger project, called The Absent Classic, where I’m dabbling with the idea of books as a form of craft.

Why do you write and illustrate under pseudonyms?

I feel like using pseudonyms gives me a little room to stretch out and experiment with different styles and take the stories I work on in different directions from each other. I’m easily bored, and I have trouble sticking to one theme or voice – so speaking and drawing from different points of view is ideal for me.

Why do you call The Absent Classics “fake books”?

Because they’re not “real books”, in my mind. They’re not published, or mass-produced, and they haven’t survived any peer reviews or editing. My Absent Classics look like books, but I doubt they could compete with real books in a library or bookstore.

People who like my work sometimes try to push me towards writing real books, and maybe someday I’ll get my act together and write something worth mass-production, but for now I’m more interested in operating slightly outside that world.

What are your influences?

I’m kind of chronically distractible – I keep a scrapbook/ notebook of all the stuff I come across in print media that I think is worth exploring, and it’s a giant mess of newspaper articles, photos, letters to editors, book reviews, and other peoples’ illustrations. And I read a lot of books, and look at a lot of art, and those send me off in different directions as well. So my own work is also a little bit of a jumble – it tends to pick up flavors from a lot of the different things I come across.

In terms of writers, I’m always interested in writers who illustrate their own books. I’ve read everything by or about Edward Gorey I can find; I also like Edward Lear’s illustrated work, and PD Eastman’s picture books. There’s a kind of odd symbiosis between writing and illustrating, you know? When they both work together, they inform each other, and the whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts.


Can you describe the process of making a book?

Well, I start with an idea that I think is workable – usually it’s something bizarre and potentially funny like What kind of operas would a lovelorn circus strongman, circa 1900, write? And then I spend a couple weeks tracking down everything I can find about Edwardian circus strongmen and operas. Then I draft a foreword to the book, where I lay out the significance of the work, and a little bit about the writer, and how the manuscript came to the attention of The Absent Classic, and why the book is an indispensable addition to the sophisticated reader’s library.

I usually split the writing and illustrating into two halves and set a schedule of how many drawings or words I need per week. After four weeks, I have a rough draft. Then I spend the next month making changes (I usually scrap the whole foreword at that point and re-write it to fit the draft), fact-checking, and redoing or finishing illustrations. When I have a final draft, I make printing proofs. When the proofs are done I print a test copy and if the test comes out properly collated and justified I do my print run. Then it takes about two weeks to get those copies sewn, glued, and bound into covers; when they’re all dry and beautiful I bring the whole batch to the post office and mail them off to the subscribers. And then I have some chocolate cake and start thinking about grand new ideas.

How are your books marketed and distributed?

I wrestle with this all the time. The part of me that’s been unemployed for four years says I should sell books – lots of them! – and farm out the production part to a real press and turn a profit and buy my husband his own golf course.

But the thing about my books that I really love is how personal they are. They’re handmade and they have a lot of soul in them; even though they’re copies of the same book, each one is unique. For various reasons, I’m not comfortable selling them – there’s the issue of transferring money overseas, charging for shipping, refunding from overseas, export taxes, etc – so I decided to make a subscription list of customers, and barter instead of sell them.

And I have to say, this system is really working for me – I’ve been very, very lucky. I haven’t lost a book to Customs or Homeland Security yet, I’ve gotten some great books in exchange for my Absent Classics, and my subscribers are really generous with feedback and support, which eggs me on to create better books.

People love to hear how writers overcome difficulties– the long slog of getting from a brilliant idea to the end of a work, the strings of rejection so long they could circumnavigate the globe, the mean reviews, the weird reactions of loved ones to your work, the moment you see your book on the remainder pile. Can you talk about the dark nights of the soul and how you kept going, even though the lights seemed to be out?

Well, my dark nights are usually just when I send out my books out to subscribers and get bad or indifferent feedback – all the people who subscribe to the series are readers whose opinions I really respect. So when someone points out that I have a gaping hole in the narrative or a drawing that doesn’t fit, I usually realize they’re right, then sulk for a couple days. But since my stakes are pretty low (my overriding motivation for the project is self-entertainment) I tend to recover pretty quickly, after a few hot chocolates and a good moan.

Why do you suppose so many people want to know where you get your ideas?

Well, to be honest, nobody has ever asked me where I get my ideas. No, wait, when I sent a copy of A Compendium of Imaginary Saints, the first book I put together myself, to my parents, my mom asked, “What on earth gave you the idea to have a gold cover?” but I don’t think that’s the same thing.
If anyone ever did ask me Where do you get your ideas? I would say, “From inside my head, just like everyone else.” Then I would smile.

How do you balance the rest of your life with your writing life?

Poorly. I feel like I’m constantly struggling between what I need to do with what I want to do. It’s like there’s an angel sitting on one shoulder saying, “Your baby just barfed on her last clean shirt – maybe some clean laundry is in order? And, while you’re at it, the toddler might need a snack?” and a devil on the other shoulder saying, “It’s hot! The baby can go naked! Let’s go write an 800-word footnote on sea monsters!”

Talk about the books you’ve loved.
 My favorite books are nineteenth-century novels. I love most of the big Victorian writers, but I also have real fondness is for magazine and pulp writing of that period too – there’s a kind of delicious purple prose that only exists in the pages of Blackpool’s Ladies’ Companion, under titles like The Vengence of the Spanish Governess; or, The Sunlit Garden Lane and the Beaux That Waited There.


I had kind of an odd upbringing, bookwise. My mother has really good taste in fiction, and made sure I got all the classics when I was in high school and college – I remember borrowing her London Folio editions of the Bronte novels, but she also supplied me with paperbacks of Somerset Maugham and DH Lawrence and Austen novels. My father hates – I mean really, really loathes – the Victorians, but keeps a huge library of old National Geographics, and I grew up reading those too.


The books I love most of all are old (pre- 1960) Modern Library editions, the ones with the Rockwell Kent endpapers. They’re good reading books, but they also have a nice feel – they’re a good weight, and the dust jackets are usually gorgeous, and they smell good – they’re the perfect books. Every book I put together is a little homage to the Modern Library.

Do you think most writing is autobiographical?

No. I mean, mine isn’t. I don’t think it is, anyway. I mean, all of us share some common human experiences, and every writer draws on those, but I don’t write about my childhood or real people in my life.

What other jobs have you had, besides your job as a writer?

I spent a summer working as a gardener before my first year of college, and during college I was an art-store clerk, ESL tutor, hotel maid, lab monitor, and shoe salesgirl. After college I began a career as a temp – I worked for a tractor-trailer company, then a couple giant soulless corporations, then as a museum intern, then as an assistant seamstress for a dance company – until I moved overseas on a non-work visa. So now I hang out at home and take care of my son and daughter. The hours are awful, but I like the kids.
Incidentally, I think every writer owes it to themself to have a couple really terrible jobs. The material you can get from, say, selling ugly shoes for a few months, is far more valuable than whatever paycheck they give you.

What are you working on now? What will you be tackling in the future?

Right now I’ve just broken ground on Volume 4 of The Absent Classic. It’s called A Guide to Lost Colors, and it’s about a Victorian art historian who’s obsessed with rare artists’ pigments and has a hobby of tracking them down in his area of expertise, the pre-Renaissance Dutch painters. As he collects lost colors over the course of his life, he also experiences the gradual loss of his eyesight, and when he dies in the 1930s it is revealed that he has been blind since the turn of the century, and has written his Guide relying entirely on memory and research. It’s very fluid at this point – I’m still wrestling with ideas for the illustrations (how can a blind person produce illustrations?) and researching pigments. But I think it’s going to be the best book yet.


In the future, after we move back to the States in 2009, I’d like to become a little more professional about bookmaking – there’s a lot about the craft I don’t understand. I would also like to graduate from working on the kitchen table to having a real studio, or at least my own desk. And then, ultimately, finding some way to make a living off my work; after all, I have two children to put through beauty school, and a golf course to build.

Ella lives and works in Dubai and can be reached at Box of Books.

The Lady With Excellent Etiquette

Posted on
12

I’d like to begin by saying that nobody — ever — in the history of the entire world — has referred to me as The Lady With Excellent Etiquette. So, when Ella, at Box of Books, wrote a thing about “Cozy Reading” and called out a number of people to do the same, only not using their real names when she did so, I definitely clicked on the link to the L.W.E.E. to find out who THAT was (or lwee, as we like to squeal around here when somebody gets a good tile when they’re playing Bananagrams, a game I will write about pretty soon, or next year, as things go around here.) Imagine my surprise. It was me. Anyway, I believe it is good manners to respond when you’re asked to respond (and I apologize to those bloggers — who know who they are — who’ve asked me to respond to memes in the past year, and although I have a list of them, I haven’t done it because, honestly, the best I can do is write about my work’s milk frother, but I PROMISE, I will do it… Soon.)

Okay. So, here’s the meme, and here are my answers.

What kind of a book are you most comfortable reading?

Well, if a book did something like open up and hand me a cold drink and some potato chips, I’d be very comfortable reading it, no matter what it was about. Otherwise, the books I am most comfortable reading are books I’ve read and loved before. You can’t really go wrong there, can you?

What kind of a book do you love to hate?

I sometimes say mean things about contemporary fiction — The Secret Life of Bees kind of thing. But, honestly, I’m pretty sure that’s because I’m jealous and not because I really hate books like that.

What was the last book you surprised yourself by liking?

Hmm. If I think I’m not going to like a book, I usually don’t read it, which is too bad, because then I don’t get surprised. I guess it would have to be Moby Dick, back in graduate school. I had a lot of time to read it, and I was amazed that it was so rich, and weird and vigorous. Oh, I also liked that Jose Saramango book about when the whole world goes blind, even though it had a lot of excrement in it, and honestly, I didn’t think that would work for me. But it did.

What was the last book you surprised yourself by disliking?

The Secret Life of Bees. No, just kidding. I can’t think of one.

What would be the worst book to be marooned on a desert island with?

None. I mean, if you’re marooned on a desert island with, say, The Secret Life of Bees (just for an example), it would be way better than no book at all. You could even, the way Ralph Feinnes did in The English Patient (a book I read and surprised myself by disliking, come to think of it), annotate the heck out of it and make your own wonderful book that you could read to yourself at night while you’re roasting coconuts.

What book would you take with you if you suspected you might be marooned in the near future?

Collected Shakespeare. Whole worlds in there.

What forces you to read outside your comfort zone?

My job. Man, you would not believe the stuff I read at work. I read a lot of transcripts from trials and the things people do, –stupid, avaricious, mean, and just plain boring — really boggles the mind.

I believe the memetiquette is to tag other people to answer these really interesting questions, so I am tagging anyone who’s not on my blogroll, but would like to be, and that way I will know to PUT you on my blogroll, so I can do a little housekeeping with your help and also find out what sort of cozy reading you do.

Oh, and also? I tag everyone ON my blogroll. So, basically, if you’ve read this post YOU should give this a try. Please. Thank you.

Dear Anonymous Co-Worker,

Posted on
13

I’d like to thank you for installing new batteries in the milk frother thing, apparently over the weekend, because I used that frother last Friday and it was its usual slothful self, which is to say the milk had no fear of it, not in the least. This morning, though, I stuck the frother into my milk and everyone in the kitchen jumped back, like they were afraid I might point the frother at them and suck them into its mighty wake. Now that’s how it’s REALLY supposed to be done. It was nice of you to sneak into the building over the weekend and juice up the Monday work experience. You rock, Lily

And that is all I have to say today. I’m busy crafting author interview questions. And making a list of authors to hit up. And considering whether the frother might be used as a hedge trimmer in a pinch. In fact, here are my preliminary author interview questions:

what car would you be, if you could be a car

"auto in disguise" does not mean: what car would you be, if you could be a car (in case you are wondering)

Summer Pleasures: Design Blogs and Iced Coffee

Posted on
14
(This photo comes from Infusion Cofee & Tea — a great Philadelphia cafe.)

It’s very hot here in San Francisco today. I mean, relatively hot, if you really think about it, because it is obviously much hotter most places right now than it will ever get here. We are weather wimps in the Bay Area. Still, it is almost 100 degrees out there, or it will be soon and we are not in any way, shape, or form prepared for that. I have a big work project and am feeling such malaise — it’s the price of gas, I’m pretty sure that makes me feel very Ford and Carter-era today.

Back then, though, there were no design blogs, just a wild combination of orange and avocado and Nixon’s resignation to keep you from sinking into despair as the lines at the gas pump got longer and longer. (I know, I know — those things did not happen at exactly the same time. But I was a kid, and they all seemed to blur into each other.) Anyway, the answer to a little mid-summer malaise is, obviously, a summer pleasure, which I think of as something that doesn’t ask a lot of you, but does inject some life into your too-hot-to-move-very-fast day. Today’s summer pleasure is the design blog. These are blogs without a lot of words. There’s something beautifully orderly about these blogs — they don’t take on big things, but every once in a while, a photograph of a bunch of handkerchiefs somebody found on ebay makes everything in my life work just fine.

Here they are, in case you’re looking for that kind of thing. But really, come to think of it, all you really need is a couple of links — the first being one of my favorites. I like this blog because every once in a while this woman does something I love (in this case, it’s the recipe for iced coffee). Go over to the orange blog, and then just poke around in her blog roll. I mean, if you’re into pictures of fabric, and iced coffee and ebay coffee pots.

And an update on the author, author interviews: I’m putting together my first of these, which I think is best done in the form of a questionnaire, because then the writer gets a chance to think things over. Actually, how else would you do this? I guess I could try podcasting it, but man, that is so out of my league, tech-wise.

Now, go check out: How about Orange and then, while you’re at it, a little Design * Sponge

And here’s another, thanks to litlove:  tasting rhubarb.  Lovely images, fine writing.

And oh, oh, oh, how could I have not put this up too:  It’s Jana (of Jana’s Sketchbook) new blog:  A Postcard a Day. 

Tomorrow (or, you know, a few days) there will be more summer pleasures.

Author Interviews

Posted on
32

I love reading author interviews.  I particularly like to know whether a writer uses a pen or pencil and what kind of notebook she writes in.  So, it occurred to me the other day when an author I like sent me a copy of her new book that I should do some author interviews.  There are tons of writers who come over to BlogLily — I should hit them up, don’t you think?  It could be fun.  You don’t even have to have published something.  Writers in progress are fair game too! 

The thing is, though, that beyond nosy questions about what kinds of writing utensils a writer employs, I’d have to think of some other questions — more literate questions.  So, I did what we all do when we have no idea what we’re doing, which is I googled “author interview questions.” 

Wow.  I found some very bad stuff (not bad, really, but not that interesting), and then the Paris Review’s author interviews which pretty much scared me because they were so smart, and then some other interviews which I loved because writers would draw stuff to illustrate their answers, or at least give the answers in their own handwriting, which I like, because I enjoy seeing how people write.  Literally.

Anyway, I realized that you can do two kinds of interviews (obviously you can do many more than this, but I’m going to just keep it to two because — right! — this is a blog.  We don’t have to be complicated.)  The first kind is more like a questionnaire — you ask everybody the same thing.  (And no, I will not be asking things like if you were a color, what color would you be?  although, in case you are wondering, the answer is orange.)  And then there is the second kind of interview in which the interviewer reads the book and asks questions that are quite book-specific, like “why did you give Harry a scar on his forehead?  Do you have any interesting scars you’d like to tell us about?  Also, what on earth are you doing with all that money?  Are you giving a lot of it away?”  That kind of thing. 

Okay, so say I decide to exploit the people I know who’re writers and force them to answer questions — what kinds of things would you like to hear them talk about?   Another way to ask that question is “when you read author interviews, what are your favorite questions?” 

See?  I’m interviewing you, dear readers.  You’re my warm up to a summer of impersonating Terry Gross.