writing

memoir / work / writing — Comments Off on Writing update
15
Apr 12

Writing update

Here are my latest publications and writerly activities:

The Nervous Breakdown

I’m back, baby! After an eight-month hiatus, I finally wrote something for TNB.

Work

Blog, blog, blog! Here’s the word-nerd stuff I’ve been blogging about:

Novel

Still working away. Right now I’m revising the present-day sections. I decided that the plot I had set up was too complicated, or at least too boring. At first I ignored the advice from the agent speed dating thing, but then as I was reading over what I’d written, I realized that the sections that occur in the past were much better than the present-day ones, and that the present-day parts were boring as fuck. In a nutshell, I got rid of the fiance and made the main character, Lucy, a quirky alone, someone who’d rather be alone than just date willy-nilly. However, a reason she doesn’t date is she’s afraid she’ll be hurt again, as she was when the love of her life left her.

Anyway, hopefully that’ll work.

Memoir

I have a big birthday this month – okay, this week – and to ease the pain celebrate, I’m giving away PDFs of my memoir. Just go to Lulu and download it. Should be easy but if you have any trouble, let me know.

On a side note, I just noticed today that the email address attached to my Contact page has been wrong all this time. GAH!!! I doubt anyone contacted me, but if you did, I apologize for never getting back to you.

what i've been watching / writing — Comments Off on Being Elmo: Unexpected Inspiration
11
Apr 12

Being Elmo: Unexpected Inspiration

I totally expected to enjoy Being Elmo (which I did). I expected it to be cute but not cloying, like Elmo himself. I even expected to cry a little, which I did when Elmo played with a Make-a-Wish child. But what I didn’t expect was to be so inspired.

What may be construed as spoilers follow.

Kevin Clash has always loved puppets. When he was a kid, he ripped out the lining from his father’s overcoat and made one. Only after the fact did it occur to him that he might be in trouble, but all his dad said was, “Next time just ask.”

From then on, Clash was all about puppets. He performed for the kids in his mother’s daycare, at the local hospital for the sick kids, and eventually ended up on local TV and then the Captain Kangaroo show.

Kevin Clash performing for local children in Baltimore in 1975.

Of course he worshipped Jim Henson. He saw a TV show about one of Henson’s puppet creators, Kermit Love (Kermit the Frog was apparently not named for him, by the way). He was so interested in what Love was doing, his mother got in touch with Love, and eventually he became Clash’s mentor. This led to a fateful meeting with Jim Henson, working on the puppets for Labyrinth, and the creation of Elmo.

What I found so inspiring was that Clash didn’t seem set out to succeed. He just loved puppetry, and was obsessed with learning all there was about it. From the time he was a kid, he put himself out there constantly. He performed in the backyard, at hospitals, on local TV. He reached out to people he admired, not to make connections, but because he wanted to learn from them. Plus of course he’s immensely talented, but talent means nothing if you sit at home and do nothing about it.

I started thinking about my writing. For the past few years, I’ve been so focused on getting published. Instead of primarily writing something I’m interested in, I tailor my writing for contests and magazines. I’m writing my novel as something people would want to read. Not that I don’t try my best with my writing, and try to create something artful, but writing simply from inspiration or a random idea is rare for me these days.

When I was a kid, I wrote for the pure joy of writing. Sure, it was also usually for a school assignment, but I enjoyed every one. I wrote crazy science-fiction stories, magical tales set in medieval times, and Sweet Valley High ripoffs. My junior year in college, I took a poetry class, and I remember staying up late at night, one meager desk lamp burning, scratching out poem after poem, and feeling both enthralled and peaceful. (I think part of what helped was taking a Chinese class, which made my brain think in a different way.)

Now it’s mostly a struggle. Of course I know that not every minute of writing can be joy. Sometimes it will be drudgery. But I miss that feeling of “I want to write because I love it, because I have to get down this story,” and I want to get that feeling back. I want to, yes, be Elmo.

The question is how? Usually when I think of an idea for a story or essay, I jot it down in my idea “parking lot” with the intention of tackling it later. “Later” inevitably becomes later and later as I write for work, work on my novel, and blog. Before this job and the novel, I think I did write a lot more short pieces. But now it’s harder.

I need to somehow find time to work on my parked ideas, to just start writing stories and essays when the ideas occur to me. I always worry that once I start on a short piece, my novel will suffer. But I always get back into it eventually, and now that I have a deal with MB that for every day I don’t work on my novel, I give him $10, I should feel even more encouraged to keep noveling.

To keep trying to be Elmo.

 [Photos: from Being Elmo]

writing — 1 Comment
26
Mar 12

Speed Agenting: Pitching My Novel

This weekend I attended this meet-the-agent event, in which we got to spend five minutes pitching our books to an agent, before a gong sounded and we had to move on to the next one.

Although my novel isn’t finished, I took a chance and pitched it anyway, to varying degrees of success. I spoke with a total of five agents and one editor. I pitched my “Chinese novel” to four agents and my corporate murder mystery to one. From the editor I got some feedback about my Chinese novel.

Everyone seemed to like my ideas and asked to see chapters when I was finished with the manuscript, although a couple seemed confused about the possible complexity of my Chinese novel. Here’s my pitch in case you’re curious:

Lucy Wang puts her mother’s approval before everything else. When her fiance dumps her as a result, she runs off to the house her deceased grandmother has inexplicably willed to her, only to find a house full of mysteries. A creepy tenant who won’t leave, her grandmother’s secret dumpling business, her grandmother’s recipe books she’s been hiding from the family for years. Through these, Lucy discovers her own strength, learns to stand up to her mother, and more importantly, to forgive.

My pitch to the agents actually wasn’t exactly like that. This is a more polished pitch as a result of the all the feedback I got and spent all weekend processing (and being a little depressed about, I have to admit). I also spent hours (at least it felt like it) talking/arguing/brainstorming with MB about it.

Now I think I have an idea of where my novel might need improvement, but not before I spent all weekend on my first chaper, changing, unchanging, changing again, and changing back with smaller changes. I literally had a headache by the time I stopped Sunday night. In the end, I barely changed anything, and only added a more solid motivation behind Lucy’s mother’s immoral action.

As for the coroporate murder mystery, my pitch was much simpler and less detailed, and in a way easier to digest. Basically, it’s a murder mystery set in the corporate world and focused on secretaries. The main character, Flora, is a former investigative journalist who’s recovering from a nervous breakdown and has taken an “easy” job as a temporary secretary. She befriends another temp, Velma, who is very close – too close, some would say – with her married boss. Then Velma turns up dead, and it’s up to Flora to find out what happened.

I’ve done real speed dating before, once right after my divorce and once several months later. Agent speed dating was less stressful but just as exhausting.

 

writing — Comments Off on Writing update
18
Mar 12

Writing update

Here’s the latest in what I’ve been doing in terms of writerly stuff.

Wisdom Has a Voice

I guest posted at the Wisdom Has a Voice blog, writing about sharing, or not sharing, my writing with my mother. I wrote my essay (which is about my grandmother who passed away in 2010) for the anthology specifically with the idea that my mother could read it. I’d only write about “good things,” and not air my dirty laundry. Yet air my dirty laundry I did.

For a long time, I put off sending my mother a copy of the book, but I finally did last month. And guess what? She loved my essay. “It made me cry again,” she said, and asked for 10 more copies of the book.

The Books They Gave Me

You may have heard of this awesome site, a collection of stories about the books people have been given by lovers and loved ones. Well, in early 2013, there will be the book, The Books They Gave Me, which includes a little something from me (more details to come after the book is published). They’re still accepting submissions so get a move on!

Work

As always, I’ve been blogging for work. Here’s what I wrote about:

12 Months, 60 Rejections

I just realized I’m nine months into this project and have only done 22 submissions (have nine rejections so far, most of the rest are waiting to hear). Ulp! I’d better get a move on.

family / writing — Comments Off on Researching my novel: War in China and escape
16
Mar 12

Researching my novel: War in China and escape

My novel-in-progress is based a lot on my family’s history. There are two voices, one in present day (the adult granddaughter) and the other in the past (the grandmother as a young woman). I’ve heard my grandmother’s stories so many times, I thought it would be easy to put them in fiction form. Not so much.

When I was attempting to write on my train trip, I realized I didn’t know enough about China in the 1930-40s, especially the Sino-Japanese War. I knew a few events but hadn’t gotten straight how important dates in the war lined up with important dates in the grandmother’s life. I was going along, writing about the grandmother, the children she had, the traditional holidays the family celebrated, and her personal tragedies, when suddenly I remembered, Oh shit the war!

At a panel at AWP last month, the writer Ha Jin said something I found very interesting. He said there are three kinds of stories, private, social, and political, and that American students are very good at writing private stories while non-American students mostly write political stories. His words rang true as I was writing: I was focusing on the private and social, and almost completely ignoring the political.

So I stopped writing and went into research mode, which is where I’ve been for the past 10 days. I researched Chinese history before, during, and after the Sino-Japanese War. I learned that China and Germany were actually allies before and in the beginning of the war, and that in the end Hitler sided with Japan because of China’s no-aggression pact with the Soviet Union. I learned about John Rabe, sort of the Schindler of Nanjing. I was highly disturbed by details about the Nanjing Massacre. I learned that Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists seemed to be partly to blame for the Nanjing Massacre, that while officials and the military could leave, citizens were blocked from living due to the “scorched earth” strategy of causing floods and other natural blockades in order to deter the Japanese troops. I learned that Chiang and his men often high-tailed it out of cities right before Japanese attacks, leaving ill-trained troops and citizens to fend for themselves.

I learned about the Japanese Three Alls Policy in the early 1940s, Kill All, Burn All, Destroy All, which involved:

burning down villages, confiscating grain and mobilizing peasants to construct collective hamlets. It also centered on the digging of vast trench lines and the building of thousands of miles of containment walls and moats, watchtowers and roads. These operations targeted for destruction “enemies pretending to be local people” and “all males between the ages of fifteen and sixty whom we suspect to be enemies.”

I guessed it was around this time that my grandfather was imprisoned by the Japanese. As I started writing about that, I kept wondering why he wasn’t killed. The Japanese were so brutal during the war – why was he spared?

I asked my mother, but unfortunately she couldn’t really tell me why. “Puo-puo went to the prison every day,” she said, which I already knew. “She begged and she cried.”

“But was that why he wasn’t killed?” I asked.

My mother didn’t know.

I was telling MB about this, and he thought maybe my grandfather’s family bribed the Japanese. This could very well be. His family was the richest in Weihai, my grandmother always said, and owned half the town. Bribing seems the most plausible explanation for why Gong-gong was suddenly released after just a few months when so many others were killed.

I also kept getting mixed up about when all my aunts and uncles were born. Mom straightened that out for me, as well as reminding me that my grandmother actually had three sons who died, not two like I kept thinking. Two before my mother was born, and one after. The first two died shortly after birth, but the third lived to be over a year.

“I remember Puo-puo cried a lot,” my mother said. “She always talked about how cute he was.”

Mom also told me more about my grandfather’s escape during the Communist Revolution, that he snuck off in the night and, along with some other escapees, hired a boat to row them across the Yellow Sea to Qingdao, where his older sister lived. What would have taken a few days took a week because of a hurricane. For three days, they hid in a cave, waiting the hurricane out. In the meantime, they had lost their food and their shoes, and barefoot and nearly starving, they reached Qingdao.

I already knew about the week-long wagon ride my grandmother took with three kids in tow, my elder aunt, my mother, and my elder uncle who was about one at the time; the year they hid out in Qingdao (during which my younger aunt was born); and the terrible, month-long boat ride to Taiwan. But I didn’t know that they first lived with my grandmother’s brother who had moved to Taiwan a couple of years earlier, around 1946, for business. I didn’t know the house was Japanese-style, and they’d move twice, first to Taipei, then Jing Long.

In my research on the Chinese civil war between the KMT and the Communists, and the subsequent experiences of the Mainlanders who fled to Taiwan, I stumbled on this New York Times article, which lead to me this excellent lecture from Lung Ying-tai, “a Taiwanese essayist and cultural critic.” (I wanted to get her book, Big River Big Sea—Untold Stories of 1949, but unfortunately it’s not available in English.) In the lecture she talks about growing up as on “out-province” child, a foreigner and refugee among the Taiwanese. She didn’t speak the language. The other kids had ancestors and huge family networks while those from the Mainland had nothing.

This isn’t to say “aw the poor Mainlanders.” I also learned about the 228 Incident:

an anti-government uprising in Taiwan that began on February 27, 1947, and was violently suppressed by the Kuomintang (KMT) government. Estimates of the number of deaths vary from 10,000 to 30,000 or more.

Lung also talks about the Chinese civil war in her lecture, specifically the Siege of Changchun, in which “large numbers of civilians starved,” estimating between 150,000 to 330,000 (about 250,000 to 300,000 people were killed in the Nanjing Massacre).

I do want to ask my mother more about growing up in Taiwan, if she felt like an outsider, and how she experienced martial law. I’ll save that for our next conversation.

travel / writing — Comments Off on The Zephyr back again: Chicago to SF
12
Mar 12

The Zephyr back again: Chicago to SF

Our return trip was that Sunday after AWP, but for some reason I kept thinking it was on Monday and that we had a whole day in Chicago to tool around. But around Friday the words of the guy who checked us in started ringing in my ears, “Four nights,” and I started calculating, “Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday,” and thought, Wait, that’s four! and had a heart attack. But then I checked our train tickets and the dates matched up. Phew!

Our train wasn’t till 2 PM so we had a leisurely morning. I wanted to leave around one, although it’s just a five minute cab ride, to be safe, but then MB got caught up working on something, and we didn’t leave till 1:30, which made me very nervous (though I didn’t nag, yay!), but that actually turned out to be perfect because people were already lining up to board by the time we got there, which meant no sitting around a crowded station.

While our train out was perfectly lovely, this one seemed nicer somehow. Our roomette was slightly roomier, and we had a skinny closet, which made a huge difference. The bathroom was also bigger, with a real faucet instead of one of those deals where you have to keep pushing the lever to make water come out. And there were more deluxe sleeper cars, one grade up from our roomette. The lounge car, however, was much smaller, but if that means a bigger roomette and bathroom, that’s fine by me.

I barely even tried to write on our trip back. More daydreaming! Cool things I saw, in addition to the fantastic scenery: enormous wind turbines, eerie and alien-like; a huge bald eagle flying right by our window (MB missed it); horses rolling around in the dirt, their spindly legs up in the air; a lone doe standing on the snowy mountainside.

Those nights on our trip back, I was able to sleep. I got smart and put in ear plugs, which made all the difference in the world. Why I didn’t do it sooner, I’m not sure.

Our train was hauling ass and by our last day on the train, we were about an hour ahead of schedule. That is till we got right outside Martinez and were held up by a bridge that was apparently letting every boat in the world pass.

While I was ecstatic to be back in California and just an hour from home, I was already missing the spectacular views and those little towns. Of course I couldn’t spend forever on the train, but by the time we pulled into Emeryville, I thought I could, in the near future, definitely get back on.

I did miss my bed though.

AWP / writing — 1 Comment
10
Mar 12

The madness that was AWP: Days 2 & 3

Here’s AWP Day 1 and my train ride from SF. Oh yeah, and AWP stands for Association of Writers and Writing Programs.

Day 2

On my second morning I got smart: I skipped Starbuck’s and went next door to the Corner Bakery, where there was a very short line. Plus the coffee was about a billion times better.

During the different sessions, I thought a lot about my own writing. There’s one novel I worked on for 10 years. Set in the late ’60s, it’s about a tough Asian American girl who drops out of high school to run off and look for her long-lost grandfather. Much of the novel is her driving alone through the desert, meeting kooky characters. I could never get the novel done, at least not to my satisfaction. Once she got to her destination, it got totally messed up.

Anyway, I was sitting in a session and all of a sudden thought, What if there were zombies? What if, while this character was going through her own shit, the world was going to shit. People were getting sick and turning into zombies, and while on the road, she has to fight them?

That got me interested in attending a morning reading, Apocalyptic Literature. It was very good, especially Pinckney Benedict, who read from a short story about an apocalypse that involved people turning into dogs, and vice versa. I totally want to buy his book of short stories now.

That afternoon, I hit the book fair again. I realized that a couple of my workplace’s Twitter friends (Poetry Foundation and Electric Lit) had tables, and I wanted to be more social, so I introduced myself and gave away notebooks.

Then it was time for a tour of the Roosevelt University historical buildings – woot! – free for AWP attendees. It had nothing to do with writing, but it was my one of my favorite parts of the conference. Especially cool was going into the auditorium where Margaret Atwood gave her keynote, and standing on the stage.

Then I skipped all the afternoon sessions and worked out again.

That night The Nervous Breakdown was sponsoring a reading at Beauty Bar. To tell you the truth, I almost didn’t go. It was fucking cold, raining off and on, and like a dummy, I hadn’t brought my winter coat. But MB encouraged me to go.

It was fun to meet a couple of TNBers in person, namely Gina Frangello and Jonathan Evison (and I introduced myself to someone who looked like Nick Berlades but was not), but unfortunately we didn’t stay too long for the reading. The reading before it ran over so we got a late start, and then these people in the back wouldn’t shut up. They just kept talking talking talking while people were reading, even when others kept shushing them and yelling, “Be quiet!” Even after Jonathan went up and told them multiple times to shut the fuck up. It was so annoying we had to leave after that.

The downside of having a reading in a bar.

Day 3

The last day of the conference! Again no nine or ten AM sessions for me, just a strong cup of Corner Bakery coffee and some work. Then MB and I got breakfast at this diner on the way to the other hotel.

The first session I went to was called Ethos, Logos, and Pathos: Or, Who’s the Speaker Here? I had no idea what it was going to be about and took a chance. It was somewhat interesting though a bit academic. The speakers analyzed a couple of poems in terms of the speaker. But it ended up being too academic for me so I left early and popped into the end of Making Room for the Graphic Narrative, ie, comics and graphic novels. It was actually pretty interesting. I came in during question and answer, which I normally hate, but people asked real questions, even if with overly long pontificaty intros. Also, I haven’t seen so much plaid in one place since the ’90s.

My next session was The Poetics of the Essay, my favorite of the whole conference (it was also packed to the gills). The speakers talked about the art of the essay, and each analyzed a particular one. My favorite was the one about Joy Williams and her essay/rant, “The Case Against Babies” (by the way, the first Google hit for “joy williams case against babies” is the Church of Euthanasia – weird!). The essay was first published in Granta back in the ’90s which means I probably read it, but I can’t remember and want to dig it up again. The speaker talked about that while personal essays are supposed to be, well personal, many of Williams’ aren’t, defiantly so.

Speaking of rants, here’s one about the place where I grabbed a mid-afternoon snack:

After The Poetics of the Essay session, I was hungry so I went outside looking for food. Big mistake. It was freezing, windy, and snowing, and me without my winter coat. Finally, I found a place, Tamarind Sushi, that looked pretty good.

And it was. I had the spicy beef noodle soup, and while it wasn’t spicy at all, it was still delicious and only eight bucks. After I finished my meal, I was in a great mood.

Then the bitchy waitress ruined it for me.

The restaurant was crowded and service was a little slow, so when I got my check, I just left the tip on the table and went to pay at the register. Apparently, this was “wrong.” The guy kept saying, “I can’t ring you up here,” which really confused me because there was a register right there. “You have to pay your wait staff.”

“Oh,” I said, thinking I had to weave my way back to the table and sit there and wait for who knew how long although I was standing there with my money.

“I can give you change,” he said, and I thought he meant he was going to process my payment but instead he gave me four fives for my twenty. Um, how does this help me?

Meanwhile, the waitress (who looked like a Chinese transvestite) was standing there looking pissed off. She picked up the tip, I gave her some money, and she gave me a dollar, which was correct change but I was still just confused by the whole situation.

“Do you want a dime?” she asked sarcastically. My bill was $8.90. “You want a dime?”

Finally, I understood, said no, tweeted about the experience, then left.

I’ll say it again: the bitchy waitress at Taramind Sushi in Chicago ruined what otherwise would have been a lovely dining experience. I recommend that you NOT go there, unless you don’t mind a total bitch of a waitress.

Anyway.

The last session of the conference was Literature and Evil. I really wanted to like this session, but it was boring. I heard a couple of somewhat interesting things, but it wasn’t like the Poetics of the Essay session, or even Apocalyptic Literature. I left early.

For our last night in Chicago, we went to an Italian place, picked mostly because it was nearby. I think it was a good choice. The food was a little expensive but very good, and the service was excellent (unlike at Tamarind Sushi).

Then we were total hermits and hung out in our room for the rest of the night.

To sum up

Overall the conference was fun and interesting, but I don’t think I’ll go again unless for work or to participate on a panel. I think by now I’ve gained experience that I’ve crossed over from neophyte to (kind of) expert.

But it was a good experience. It was the first time I traveled for a writing conference. The only writing conferences I’ve been to were in New York while I lived in New York. It’s a very different feeling to be in a hotel. In New York, I could go home whenever I wanted.

It was also, obviously, very different from conferences and meetings from my previous jobs. Those sucked. They were stressful and boring and I always had to be on. If you got caught in your workout clothes while sessions were going on, you got dirty looks. I felt like I was always sneaking off and playing hooky. This in comparison was fun and relaxing. It was a vacation.

AWP / writing — 1 Comment
09
Mar 12

The madness that was AWP: Day 1

In case you didn’t know, AWP stands for Association of Writers and Writing Programs, and their conference is one of the biggest in the U.S. This year they had their highest attendance ever with 10,000 people. Overwhelming? Oh yeah.

Day 1

How did I spend my first morning of AWP? Sleeping in. Which meant sleeping till 7:30 with no intention of making the nine AM sessions. There was a Starbuck’s in the basement of the hotel so that was where I headed when I rolled out of bed (MB was still asleep). But what did I find but a HUGE line. All the AWP attendees were arriving then and getting their caffeine fix. I didn’t know where else to go so I stood in line too.

It actually moved pretty fast. I got a grande coffee and coffee cake. Expecting the coffee to be bitter and strong, I added half and half and sugar, which I never do. Guess what: the coffee was neither bitter nor strong. It was basically like coffee-flavored water that I had added half and half and sugar to. It was disgusting. Still, desperate for caffeine, I drank it.

Around 10, we headed over to the other hotel. So many people! We got registered, sat for a while in the very crowded hotel cafe, and headed to our first session, Women in Jeopardy: Crime Fiction.

The session was interesting in that I know little about that genre. I loved hearing about the cozy, crime fiction with a domestic hook like knitting, cooking, or the like. The murder mystery I worked on years ago is basically a cozy, with the “female” hook being the secretarial life. (I’m really want to rewrite the novel using the Anatomy of a Story method, but first I have to finish this current novel I’m working on.)

The one thing we both thought was weird about the session was how anti self-publishing some of the panelists were. Like if you do it wrong, you can ruin your career. I really don’t think this is true. Even if you do a shitty job, you can just take your book down. Because you don’t go and print 1000 copies, it’s not really “out there” once you take it off Lulu or whatever. Of course you should make an effort to produce the best work you can when you self-publish, but I don’t think it’s a career ruiner if it’s not great.

After that session we were hungry and had the lunch buffet at the hotel restaurant. For $16 it was pretty mediocre. But that’s what you get for convenience.

MB and I went our separate ways at this point. I went to a Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Reading, during which I realized I’d probably get more out of the readings and being inspired by good writing. Not that I’m some sort of big expert, but I now generally find the “how to” sessions of writing conferences to be too beginner for me. The sessions that weren’t readings or how to were too writing program related or academic.

Anyway, of the Houghton Mifflin readers, I particularly enjoyed Peter Mountford‘s essay on how he used to work in a fancy furniture store in L.A. and would wait on celebrities. I would totally read his memoir.

After that, I really felt the need to exercise. After sitting for two and half days on the train, then half a day in session, I needed to move my butt. So I walked back to my hotel (not a bad walk, less than a mile) and hit the fitness center. I ran just three miles but it made a difference.

Later MB and I attended a 4:30 session together, Cross-Country Collaboration: How Tin House and the Normal School Make Real Publications in Virtual Offices. It was interesting to hear the ins and outs of both working via virtual offices (which reminded me of my own workplace) and the submission/editorial process. It seems a lot of journals use Submittable, formerly known as Submishmash.

After that we chilled in our room for a while, then headed out to dinner. I had wanted to go to Wow Bao, but it was a little far away, and we needed to get to the Roosevelt University Auditorium in time to hear Margaret Atwood (squee!) give the keynote. So we ended up going to this Asian place, Hot Woks, Cool Sushi, right around the corner. The food was good enough though not amazing. I had a chicken in peanut sauce though the sauce was more like peanut butter. Still, you couldn’t beat the price at less than $10 an entree.

The RU Auditorium is conveniently located between the two hotels. It was packed. By the time we got there, we had to go up, up, up, which I didn’t mind, though my legs did feel a little jell-o-y as we sat there.

Needless to say, I loved Atwood’s keynote. Ever since I read an excerpt of Cat’s Eye in Seventeen magazine – and have reread the novel a zillion times since then – she’s been my favorite author. I love that she walked on stage with her giant purse. I love that she said hi to all of her Twitter pals. (She retweeted one of my tweets a while back; I almost died.) I love that she kept cracking herself as she gave her talk. I love that in the middle of her talk, she gave several gold nuggets (paraphrasing from memory).

Blockage is a problem of voice or structure.
If it’s voice, try changing the tense or who’s speaking.
If it’s structure, try changing the first scene.
If neither of those work, go to the movies.

I love that her talk wasn’t too long. And I love that afterward, she took the ASL interpreter’s hand and made her bow with her like they were on Broadway.

We were out by about 9:15 and had a leisurely though chilly walk back to our hotel. I grabbed some tea along the way, and back in our room, we loaded up on Hulu.

Whew! That was just day one.

travel / writing — 1 Comment
25
Feb 12

Riding on a train

Next week I’ll be heading out to Chicago to attend the annual conference of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, or AWP.

I’ve attended many writing conferences – the New York Roundtable Writers’ conference twice, Book Expo America (BEA) twice, and AWP once, the time it was in New York – and to tell you the truth, they all start to blend together. What makes BEA special is that the give away lots of books. If you attend the right sessions, you can walk away with a dozen advance copies. But otherwise the sessions are kind of the same thing over and over again.

So why am I even going? Because MB is going too. He’s spoken at and attended a zillion conferences for his industry, but he’s never gone to a writing one, nor have we attended once together. Our first conference – how romantic!

Even more exciting is how we’re getting there. That’s right, we’re taking a two day, two night train ride from San Francisco to Chicago – and back! So if we have a terrible time on our way out, we’re shit out of luck.

To prepare myself, I searched for images of what our “roomette” will look like. I was picturing something out the Hogwarts Express, but it’s more like Hogwarts Express divided by two:

Pretty cozy! MB has already claimed the top bunk, thank goodness, though we could always switch on the second night. The roomette will probably be too cramped for both of us to hang out in there for too long. Luckily there’s a dining car where, I’m assuming, we can work in between meals. And I imagine our hotel room will seem enormous in comparison.

Another reason I’m looking forward to the conference is the chance to network, or at least to practice my (terrible) networking skills. At previous conferences, I was only interested in the sessions and acted anti-social. This time I hope to talk to at least one new person each day, and to be all social at two events I’ve been invited to.

Finally, I can’t wait to ditch the last day and tool around the city with MB, even if it’s freezing. I’m hoping it won’t be though.

writing — Comments Off on Writing update
04
Feb 12

Writing update

It’s been quite a while since I’ve done one of these!

Work

Again, most of my recently published writing has been for work. For our Word Soup column (think The Soup but focused on words), we did a few special installments: the lexicon of the TV show Glee, science fiction TV, and Super Bowl commercials. For Letter Writing Week back in early January, I wrote a post about different types of letters and notes. For Burns Night on January 25 (which celebrates the Scottish poet, Robert Burns), I wrote about Scottish food words.

The Beautiful Anthology

This spring an anthology I’ve contributed to will be released! I’m keeping company with a whole slew of wonderful writers. Here’s our first blurb:

“Subverting time-worn clichés about beauty and self-acceptance, The Beautiful Anthology delivers a fresh exploration of everything from body art, freckles, and big noses to the misfortunes of musical “perfection,” misguided parenting, birth, and death. It’s a stunning, unforgettable collection.”–Diana Spechler, author the novels Who By Fire (Harper Perennial, 2008) and Skinny (Harper Perennial, 2011).

By the way, I loved Diana’s novel Skinny. In fact, it was one of my favorite books from all of 2011.

Go like the The Beautiful Anthology‘s Facebook page to get all the latest news and updates.

The Novel

I’m still working on it steadily though I admit I totally slacked this past week. If I remember correctly, my goal for January was to work on my novel first thing every day, which I did! Well, except for this past Monday and Tuesday. Over the weekend I finished up a big section (I’m at about 25,000 words) and then got distracted by work and writing a guest blog post (to be published later this month). This weekend – back to the novel grind!

12 Months, 60 Rejections

Last summer I started my 12 Months, 60 Rejections project. Since then I’ve made 20 submissions, and have had three acceptances and six rejections. Two were personal rejections saying, “While we really enjoyed this piece, it’s not right for us.” Okay, I’m choosing to interpret those as personal.

I missed a contest deadline on Friday (duh!) but have a bunch coming up at the end of the month. Plus I have at least one online magazine I want to submit a short piece to.

AWP Chicago

Who’s going to AWP this year? I am! In fact, MB and I are taking the train there, all the way from San Francisco to Chicago. It’s a two day ride, and I’m both excited and nervous. For instance, are there showers on the train? (I just checked: no showers. May have to try out that dry shampoo.) I’ll be live blogging and tweeting the whole experience so you won’t miss out.

If you’re going to the conference, let me know. I’d love to meet up.

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