2020 in review

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Charles Yu's novel "Interior Chinatown" in front of Christmas treeMore than most years, 2020 has been hard to pin down. It seemed like several small epochs fit into the space of 12 months, as if 2020 were a kind of magical bag with limitless capacity, sort of like the sack Hermione has in one of the late Harry Potters, where she produces shelter, a radio, possibly cookware??? (if memory serves) from a small bag when the trio are on the run.

At the start I was still commuting to Redwood City and spending hours in the car listening to Civil War audiobooks. January and February I made my way through Eric Foner’s A Short History of Reconstruction, then The Second Founding, then W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America, pulling out of my driveway before 6 am and starting the day with another chapter of armed intimidation, violence, murder, double dealing, and struggle. I would annoy friends and family by sagely opining that everything we were going through was connected to the Civil War, everything in our society reflected a power structure designed around racial disenfranchisement – by violent means if it came to that. Months later came the summer, George Floyd, and reckoning. I felt both glad I’d made this paltry foundation of a reading list and ashamed at how much further I had to go.

Lunar new year and the virus – that was the first holy shit moment, reading about all the travel within China that was going to vector this thing everywhere. In conference rooms at work we remarked how it was surely much worse than the Chinese authorities were telling us. I was sure, with so much air travel across the Pacific, the Bay Area would be hard hit, a scene out Contagion. I’d gotten into the habit of calling my parents on my drive home, once I had made the merge from 101 onto 92 East, often a cluster that could take 40 minutes to complete, plenty of time to sit in traffic and catch up. I remember calling my mom and telling her it wouldn’t be long before it emerged in California. It will look apocalyptic, but we’ll be ok. We’re taking it seriously. Don’t go to church. Don’t go anywhere.

I still went places. My last indoor restaurant meal was in early March, it felt risky and foolish. That night I went to the ballet and sat in a theater, aware of every cough and breath around me. By my daughter’s birthday in mid March we were in lockdown and I worried about being able to get a cake.

Then it was Tiger King, one package of toilet paper per customer, Zoom. Nine months of blur punctuated by an election.

Everything turned out not so bad but also a lot worse. We’ve been working from home. My son had a virtual graduation and then started college a virtual freshman. My daughter’s been thriving in online school, but she’s like that – driven, and a pandemic won’t stop her. We’ve got tons of masks. We see friends on walks or outside on our deck. But more than 300,000 deaths? Full ICUs and refrigerated trucks to hold the bodies? WTAF. I was never particularly rah rah USA, but I never thought I’d see America totally humiliated on something we were set up to lead. Brought low by ignorance, sectarianism, and cynical self-interest. Everything goes back to the Civil War…

Writing

Slow. Pointless. A joke. Having learned enough about publishing now, I realize how quixotic it is to still pursue novel writing at this point in life. I look benignly on the shiny new debut novelists and wish them well in their journey through capitalism.

That said, I’m still diligently writing a novel of crime, memory, ghosts, my favorite Northern California coastal spots, oysters, redwoods, murder, teenage lust and betrayal. An “anti-romance” I think I described it to a friend. I’m pretty into it. Hopefully in 2021 I’ll start getting it out for beta readers and see if anyone else is into it too.

Listening

Maybe because I did less time in the car this year I feel like I listened to less new music. Some highlights:

  • Lana Del Rey, Norman Fucking Rockwell!
  • Fiona Apple, Fetch the Bolt Cutters, though it took me a few listens
  • Four Tet, especially “Baby”
  • Flo Milli – lol, Ho, why is you here? (the attitude more than anything, which is kind of how I felt about Rico Nasty – need to give a few more listens, though I’m sold on “OHFR”)
  • Noname, indispensable
  • Freddie Gibbs & The Alchemist, Alfredo (nice album cover…)
  • I grieved for Pop Smoke, play “Dior” and think about the career he should have had
  • Burna Boy, ready for him to be huge
  • Tons of BROCKHAMPTON earlier in the year
  • Oddly taken with “Cue Synthesizer” by Destroyer
  • Taylor Swift, maybe I should stop underestimating her
  • Roisin Murphy (I played “Incapable” A LOT)

I listened to a lot more oldies than I normally do. I’m working my way through a great playlist Matthew Perpetua created for the Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Albums 2020 Edition. There’s worse things than listening to Rush, “Tom Sawyer” again.

Reading

What did I even read this year? I have no idea. But I remember:

  • Alexander Chee on writer’s block in Medium
  • Have One on Me, Rumaan Alam in Esquire
  • Luster by Raven Leilani – the hype is real
  • Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu – kept thinking he’d fall off the highwire in this, but nope, stuck the landing
  • Blacktop Wasteland by S.A. Cosby, can’t wait to see what he does next
  • Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest
  • Jean-Patrick Manchette, discovering his wild “atrocity exhibition” type of marxist noir
  • Ross Macdonald, The Zebra Striped Hearse
  • Presidio by Randy Kennedy
  • Detective by Day series by Kellye Garrett

Watching

At the beginning of the lockdown, I watched a lot of this – incalculably soothing, ultra-British bridge instructional, “Join Us for Bridge with Shaw Taylor.” So good I may start watching it again, it’s the ultimate sleep aide, brain gym, portal into an alternate universe.

And I couldn’t have made it through the year without:

  • The Last Dance – an absolute gift
  • Call My Agent (Paris!)
  • The NBA finals
  • The Queen’s Gambit
  • Nathan Apodaca’s “Dreams” TikTok
  • And of course, Watchmen

I think the last movie we saw in theaters may have been Cats…?? That should have been a clue right there we were in for rough times.

Happy 2021 all. May the new year bring us more justice, more peace, more fun, and vaccines!

The latest news from revision land

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Photo of coffee brewing by Karl Fredrickson

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged lately, despite my best intentions. And suddenly it’s April. April is indeed the “cruellest month” to quote T.S. Eliot—but not for the reasons given in The Wasteland. It’s because, after I’ve spent months luxuriating in the newness, the beginningness of a fresh year, April comes as such a shock: holy crap, the year’s already one quarter over.

Where has the time gone?

First, I’ve been slowly but steadily plugging away on The Shadow Clock. Ari, my editor, sent me her notes at the end of November, and I spent December and January trying to strengthen the story and make everyone’s motivations clearer. The distressing problem with books set in a magical world where heists and thievery are prominent is that everything must also make logical sense. Go figure! At any rate, I’m writing a new draft now. But February and March are always impossible months for me—things like taxes or my daughter’s birthday can take whole weekends out of play, and then I’m left with the tiny scraps at night when I’m propping my eyelids open or the slug-brained times at 5 in the morning when I’m trying to jolt myself awake with coffee.

Maybe at some future point I’ll write more about how I’m approaching the revision. But the short version is—resist, panic, drag feet, then take a deep breath and crack it open. One of the biggest things I can do for a successful revision is not rail against my situation. Yes, I’m busy, and my job and home life mean I can’t spend as much time on it as I’d like. So what? My novel notes file is full of lectures to myself about how it doesn’t matter a bit how I feel. Stop paying attention to feelings about the work and simply do the work!

On the subject of being busy (and illustrating my incorrigible tendency to overcommit), I’ve been consulting for Write the World, a global student writing community. I first met the Write the World group back in November of last year when I was a judge for their novel writing competition. I was so impressed by the quality of the student entries, and so intrigued by their mission and community, I asked if there was a way I could continue to be involved. What I find so great about this site is the emphasis it places on getting constructive feedback and revising as part of the writing process. I can’t help but think if I had learned to embrace revision earlier, I might have had a much smoother journey. Write the World offers writing prompts and monthly competitions. If you have high school age kids or know teachers who would be interested in sharing this with their students, please check them out.

In January I made a list of writing goals for the year; one of them was to write and submit four short stories to literary journals (I am nothing if not crazy aggressive in my goals). Well, I have one written and submitted so far. This is a huge accomplishment for me. When I was in my MFA program, I struggled with short stories. I kept feeling like I was doing them wrong. I didn’t get them. And of course I was so thin-skinned about rejection, I gave up immediately if a piece didn’t get accepted. During the past few years, I’ve been so focused on novels, I’d kind of forgotten all about short stories. But there was something about this idea that I kept returning to. It was something I really wanted to write, and I knew it was a short story, and not some other form. So now it’s out there, hopefully finding a home. Be well and spread your wings, little short story!

Cover of Deep Singh Blue by Ranbir Singh SidhuSpeaking of my MFA program … one of the talented writers I met there was Ranbir Singh Sidhu, who’s just written a great novel called Deep Singh Blue. I had the chance to review Deep Singh Blue for the literary journal Your Impossible Voice. That review has just appeared, and Ranbir’s book has just come out. It really is a gorgeous, funny, tragic coming-of-age story. Plus, it has an only-in-California hot tub scene. Definitely worth checking out.

Here it is on IndieBound. And you can read more on Ranbir’s blog. Though be warned, he lives an utterly enviable lifestyle. If I chuck it all and move to Crete, you’ll know who to blame!

 

Awesome coffee photo by Karl Fredrickson from Unsplash.com.

The haunting of the gaps

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Photo of winter road by Jon Ottosson

Photo by Jon Ottosson

I was going through old notes for a story and found this piece I’d saved. I find it has an eerie resonance that keeps me thinking about it.

It’s from “The Couch” series in the New York Times. “A Tale of Two Twins,” by Galit Atlas, the story of Noah, who as a boy was obsessed with death and obituaries and who—it turns out—had a dead sibling with his same name born a few years before he was, whom his parents covered up.

We all have our phantoms. But as the psychoanalysts Maria Torok and Nicholas Abraham once wrote, ‘what haunts us are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others.’ They were referring to intergenerational secrets and unprocessed experiences that very often don’t have a voice or an image associated with them but loom in our minds nonetheless. We carry emotional material that belongs to our parents and grandparents, retaining losses of theirs that they never fully articulated. We feel these traumas even if we don’t consciously know them. Old family secrets live inside us.

This feels so true. A secret, even if it isn’t yours, takes up emotional space. It can be sensed and felt. As I write, I try to imagine the invisible secrets and gaps that haunt my characters.

November, NaNoWriMo, and feeding the imagination

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A still life by Willem Claeszoon Heda on TheSwedishParrot.com

Willem Claeszoon Heda – Nature morte à la tourte aux mûres

November’s almost over. Today I’m out in my chilly home office, trying to write a little bit, but not expecting to make a major surge in word count. And that’s okay.

I love NaNoWriMo. But the truth is, I’ve never succeeded in making it to 50,000 words in November. Partly, it’s just a really bad month for me at work. One of our clients has a huge event at the beginning of December, and somehow an extra couple hours here and there takes all my available writing time. In November, if I’m getting up at 4:45 am to work, it’s for the client, not for a story. It’s also a key time for soccer. We had games all over the place, including my daughter’s State Cup weekend in Ripon, California (out by Manteca, in case you’re wondering).

But even with everything else swirling around, I managed to make progress on a story I’ve wanted to work on forever. And that makes me very, very happy. So even though my NaNo always starts with a focus on a big word goal, I always end the month appreciating how much even small bits of writing can have a big impact.

There’s another reason, I never make it to 50,000 words. November always reminds me that rest is important in writing, just as much as activity. This time of year I always think my main duty is to lay in mulch for my imagination—feed it with sleep and walks and daydreams. If November and Day of the Dead is a time when the barrier between worlds thins, I try to take advantage of it.

It’s also the month of gratitude. I’ve written before about how I try to visualize my muse, Bell, and ask her for help. But I also try to repay the favor, maybe especially in November when I ask so much of her. As much as I love to receive the surprising things she brings me, I also try to make lists of what I want to give her. Here’s one from my notebook:

Things I would give to Bell as thanks for working in my subconscious: midnight suppers like Dutch natures mortes: oysters, silver, crystal goblets, lemons, figs dusted with sugar, cheese stinking under thin crusts of rind. Tapestries on the wall, chairs of old and bloodied lineage. A room full of air plants and curling orchids suspended from glass centerpieces. The smell of the dark room, the mysterious photographer. Vampires with good manners. Vampires with bad manners. French gardens for masqued balls and English gardens for kissing the wrong person in. Modernist homes of California. Sea cliffs. Vineyards in autumn, leaves like golden flames traced over the hills. Even the trip to Ripon, the silvery bleached color of trees in the Central Valley in winter, all the shades of brown and gray.

Happy end of November, all!

Why I write – National Day on Writing 2015

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Today is National Day on Writing, and all over the country people are talking about #WhyIWrite.

I’m a member of the National Writing Project’s Writers Council, and I recently did an interview with NWP on Blog Talk Radio with the lovely host, Tanya Baker. (I hope you check out the segment, because Tanya also interviews two other phenomenal children’s book writers, Benjamin Gorman and Renee Watson.)

So, why do I write? Well, there are a ton of reasons. Of course I want to sweep people away with my stories. I want to give all these experiences to readers—experiences I’ve had in books and absolutely treasure, like finding solace, friendship, awe, love, audacity, and moral courage.

There’s another reason (and you’ll hear it if you listen to the interview). I’ve surmounted so many challenges and self-doubt simply through sticking with writing and never giving up, that writing has become my ideal personal trainer. Think I can’t do this revision? I’ve learned I can. Afraid of rejection? I just have to face that fear and grow. Worried I can’t speak in public? There’s no cure except to get up on stage.

I realize that even if I had zero readers, I’d still write, just for the never-ending challenge of it.

The high-school girl theory of being in the world

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In a recent issue of Poets & Writers magazine, a group of literary agents was asked, “What are some common mistakes that beginning writers can avoid?”

Melissa Flashman, an agent at Trident Media Group, answered:

Some writers undercommunicate, and I call this a “high-school-girl” theory of being in the world—you want everyone to come to you and recognize how great you are. But you have to be out there with other writers and communicating with your agent. If you publish a piece in the New York Times, I really want to know about it and tell your editor and tell my foreign-rights people. For those people, I would say be less of a “high-school girl.” Be like a “high-school boy” who wants all these girls to know who you are. I don’t mean that in a sexist way.

I had an unpleasant shock of recognition as I read this. Because, it now becomes clear, I’ve been operating in the world as a high-school girl.

For a while now I’ve had intimations that something was wrong with my ability to self-promote that didn’t stem from shyness—I’m not especially shy. It’s more an excess of manners, an unwillingness to disturb someone else by asking for something, a misplaced self-reliance. And, ultimately, a deep-seated feeling that I have to earn the attention of others by proving myself through work of such quality that everything else falls magically into place.

Which is ridiculous, because people like to be asked for help (within reason), and generally like to feel that they’re magnanimous. Not to mention, as a writer you really, really, really need to get the word out—no matter how good the work is.

Can I blame someone else? I’ll blame the books I read when I was an actual high-school girl. These were, for the most part, novels about the English upper classes for whom the most tasteless behavior was an appearance of trying and striving. E.F. Benson, Henry James, P.G. Wodehouse, etc. Even the fantasy novels I read contributed, and I was struck at an impressionable age by Tolkien’s “All that is gold does not glitter.”

What a terrible lesson.

Is it possible to stop being like this? (And no, I don’t think I want to morph myself into a high-school boy—it really is a weird analogy.)

Well, I can communicate more. And in the past I’ve set myself little exercises like, “Ask for something each week.” (That’s a good one.) As I learned from Cross-fit, it’s important to do things you don’t like or don’t think you can do.

On a larger level, I realize I still need to see myself as a writer. Even though I’ve published one book and have more in the works I think of how much more I could do to commit. Am I leaving myself an out? I can always blame my busy life of work and kids’ soccer practices and whatever else.

Or I can add this to my to-do list: “Change my way of being in the world.”

A recent obsession with scent

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Sometime during the two weeks I took off work to finish my draft of THE SHADOW CLOCK, I found myself using (wasting!) my precious writing time to read wildly on the Internet about perfume.

A short explanation of how this happened. I ran out of some completely serviceable, everyday perfume my mother-in-law had brought back for me from a trip to France. I was fine with it, I wore it unthinkingly. A uniform.

But, trying to buy a replacement online, I encountered an entire subculture and community of perfume obsessives who wrote endlessly about perfumes and what they meant (viz. Basenotes).

I was floored. Discovering these sites brought up memories of a time when I took perfume seriously. In high school, a friend who we looked up to as a tastemaker wore her mother’s perfume. I remember her sniffing a handful of her shirt and announcing “I reek of Chanel No. 5.” It was hard to follow that, but I tried. I remember dutifully applying myself to the sampler bottles at the perfume counter in the local department store, trying to convince myself that Chanel No. 5 was great, although it remains one scent I can never bring myself to like: cold and ill-suited to me.

When I lived in Paris during college, perfume became something without which you felt under-dressed. I was not (still am not) a very polished person. But perfume offered welcome help in presenting oneself as an adult. And it was impossible to walk through Paris without encountering parfumeries—stores dark and steeped in feminine glamor, that sold only perfume.

I was surprised to discover that perfume threaded together so many different memories and times. I did not think perfume had importance in my life, but I was wrong. The bottle of Opium, for instance, always on my mother’s dresser, became shorthand for years of my childhood. Then there was the pretty bottle of some Annick Goutal scent that I bought on a trip to New York after reading about her in a fashion magazine (a memory that forced me to realize, yes, I used to read those!). Too goopy and flowery in the end.

I had also forgotten perfume’s power to unsettle and suggest. In high school French, reading Baudelaire’s “Correspondances,” I felt somehow scandalized by his list of scents, which start with those that that smell like babies’ skin, and ends with those that are “corrupt, rich and triumphant.”

All these moments, recollected through a memory of scent, of course made me recall the famous madeleine scene in In Search of Lost Time. There, it is the taste of the cookie crumbled into the lime blossom tea that opens a magical pathway to the past:

But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.

And there it is, the paradox. The ability of scent—which is insubstantial—to carry surprising weight is what makes it worthy of obsession. I found this lovely meditation on the power of perfume on Barbara Herman’s blog in an entry about the strange suggestiveness of Chanel No. 19:

“[P]erfume is, among other things, the most portable form of intelligence.” — Luca Turin, Perfumes: The Guide.

I feel this is the place to address this arresting quote from Luca Turin (written in a review of Issey Miyake’s Le Feu D’Issey). Chanel No. 19 was a similar fragrance for me, astounding me with its suggestiveness, its intelligence, its moods, its significations. I pondered this perfume as deeply as a film, book or song that moved me. It’s been one of the many revelations for me in discovering perfume in this sensual/cerebral manner that there is, in fact, a limbic intelligence that we don’t cultivate enough. Perfume is the perfect vehicle for exercising this intelligence and articulating what it has to tell us.

The market in rare and vintage perfumes—how they’re sold on eBay or other sites in the original packaging or with notes about the condition of the box—did end up giving me an idea for some of the magic trading that happens in THE SHADOW CLOCK. (It may not stay in, we will see.) So it wasn’t wasted time. But I only realized that later—after I was frustrated and angry with myself for following this thread, for avoiding work and word count. Which brings me to another realization, perfume has meaning because it exists outside of practicalities.

I was glad to rediscover it.

On keeping a writing diary

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I recently came across this interview with Sarah Waters in The Guardian, about her experience writing The Paying Guests.

One of the best decisions I ever made as an author was to keep a writing diary, a record of each day’s advances, along with plans, thoughts and queries about my current novel-in-progress. Surveying this at the end of a project provides a fascinating vision of the evolution of a book – though I invariably find that it’s a catalogue of complaints (“horrible day”, “appalling day”, “realised that most of what I wrote last week was rubbish”), relieved only rarely by moments of insight and sweaty euphoria: “Think I’m getting there at last, thank Christ!”

These journals are always substantial, but at more than 170,000 words my Paying Guests diary is only slightly shorter than the book itself

Although I can hardly put myself in the same company as Sarah Waters (whose amazing Fingersmith blew me away), I found a lot to relate to here. For everything I work on I start a “Notes” file, and this doc becomes my confidant during the course of the project.

It’s usually a lot of griping or the place where I unload my emotions. I don’t keep a journal, so the book diary becomes a record of all my thoughts along with what’s going on in the day-to-day.

For my Shadow Clock draft, I kept track of word count each day (because I wrote the book in one big Word file), how I was feeling (usually awful—reading back on Notes, I come off as a raging depressive). The Notes file is also my “what if” place—if I can’t bear to work in the official file, I sketch scenes in Notes.

And then like a movie cast and crew who disband at the final wrap, once the book is done, the diary is done. It’s interesting to me, the Notes file is often about the same length as the manuscript, as if they’re twins, somehow growing in parallel.

I’ve sometimes thought maybe I should just keep one big Notes file about the whole of writing life. But I like looking in on each idea to see where it’s stopped in time. So now while I’m waiting to see what my editor thinks of what I’ve turned in, I check in on another Notes file—it’s like visiting another person in another world: full of excitement about an idea that’s just been waiting in suspended animation.

Writing at night

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I am nearly done with my Shadow Clock draft, but getting to this point has required a tremendous push and a lot of night writing.

It’s often very hard for me to get started when I write at night. I usually spend an hour doing preliminaries – desperately searching for blog posts (only no one blogs anymore). I go to Amazon and “Look Inside” books reading first chapters. I read things in the New York Times. “We are, at least from the standpoint of DNA, more microbial than human,” is something I just learned.

I must slowly overcome my hatred of the text.

Opening the file and seeing the words I’ve written, I experience a violent recoil. How can anything be that bad?

So I must approach the manuscript as if it is a wild pony. Sideways but with determination and an overall sense of my goal. Not straight at it, but piece by piece. It’s a war of inches and defeat lurks at every turn, because each inch contains the potential of an hour lost to procrastination. I cycle through these activities, flipping back to my open draft.
Reading various writing-related sites online.
Eating chocolate.
Drinking mineral water
Eating something salty
Eating almonds
Drinking wine (the right amount)
Deciding on the music I will listen to
Applying evocative perfume
Remembering how when I write in the morning before work I am always so annoyed that I can’t continue but must stop. So how can I turn my back on hours at night!
I remind myself that even if it is bad work and bad writing I produce it is still necessary work that must get done and it brings me that much closer to my goal. Tonight, I don’t want to write, but I’m still up. As long as I’m sitting here I might as well write, right?
All I have to do is get in.
Once I am in, I will work
But the text is like bitterly cold water – I turn my head away. I don’t want to.

James Salter on finding the best word possible

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James Salter, who died last week at 90, was known for his wonderfully precise prose style.

Here is a memorable quote from a Paris Review interview with him:

I’m a frotteur, someone who likes to rub words in his hand, to turn them around and feel them, to wonder if that really is the best word possible. Does that word in this sentence have any electric potential? Does it do anything? Too much electricity will make your reader’s hair frizzy. There’s a question of pacing. You want short sentences and long sentences—well, every writer knows that. You have to develop a certain ease of delivery and make your writing agreeable to read.

You can read the rest of the interview here at the Paris Review. My only warning is that it is full of elegant, thoughtful expression, and glimpses into an entirely enviable writing life. After encountering it, I took several hours to go back to my work, which I felt was entirely frizzy-haired and unagreeable. Such are the hazards of reading author interviews!