Thank you for the wild rumpus.

R.I.P. Maurice Sendak

Small thoughts from #Muse2012

"I try to write a little bit every day."

This past weekend I attended the Grub Street Muse and the Marketplace writing conference.  I was delighted to catch up with old Grubbie friends, visiting professionals (some I'd spent time with earlier this year, some I hadn't seen in two years), and of course I took in some wonderful sessions covering both the craft of writing and the strategies of publishing.  Keynote speaker Julia Alvarez shared the above cartoon with us, as well as this quote...

She said she starts each day's work with the Mayan weaver’s prayer. She explained that Mayan weavers begin the day with whatever is on hand, whatever thread, whatever dye, and they know that each material may need to be handled differently in order for it to shine best within the final fabric, so there is no set design, nothing pre-planned about the arrangement of the weave when they sit down to the loom each day.  And so, before they begin work, they pray:

“Grant me the intelligence and the patience to find the true pattern.”

I'll share more from the Muse over the next several days, and may you find the true pattern of your writing when you next sit down to work.

One of those days. Several of those days.

Invocation for Beginnings

Define yourself for yourself.

For shame.

Doonesbury, censored. Strips from this week (click to enlarge):

If your local paper won't publish it, find it here: http://www.doonesbury.com/

*Headdesk*

Dear Prestigious Literary Market,

I want to sincerely apologize for sending you the same story twice. Does it help that this version has been revised and polished? I highly doubt it. Do I need to explain the details of how my supposedly-meticulous submissions-tracking system failed me? Surely not.

All I can do to improve matters at this point is NOT email with an apology, thereby adding to your already overflowing inbox.

Thank you for understanding,

Embarrassed Author

Note to self...

Next time you make a commitment to read at least a book a week for a year, maybe you shouldn't read so many books at the same time. And maybe also read shorter books.

Shown:

• The Very Picture of You, by Isabel Wolff (fiction, for my library book club)
• Under the Dome, by Stephen King (fiction, on sale for A DOLLAR, that's like 0.1 cents per page)
• If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This, by Robin Black (short stories, on loan from the Grub Street library)
• Sex at Dawn, by Christopher Ryan & Cacilda Jethá (non-fiction)
• Negotiating With the Dead: A Writer On Writing, by Margaret Atwood (non-fiction)
• John Dies at the End, by David Wong (fiction)
• My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me, edited by Kate Bernheimer (short stories)
• Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, by Susan Jeffers (self-help, and I'm only a little embarrassed to be reading it)

Not shown (reading on Kindle):

• Zone One, by Colson Whitehead (fiction)
• The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson (fiction)
• Super Sad True Love Story, by Gary Shteyngart (fiction)

So, what are you reading? I need more suggestions because obviously this just isn't enough.

Now I obsessively count the words.

These six-word memoirs found at Unmotherly Insights

I've talked about the six-word form before, focusing in particular on six-word plot summaries for novelists. (How's that for a quick elevator pitch?)

Then there's six-word blog post titles. Heh.

I've thought on previous occasions that my six-word memoir should be:

Married high-school boyfriend. Happily ever after.

(I'm thrilled to say that it still is.)

Now, I have two six-word stories on my fiction blog. And I'd be absolutely delighted if you shared a six-word memoir or fiction piece of your own (or a favorite of someone else's) in the comments of EITHER blog...

Fight your way through.

Poetry. Just because.

Hidden Rose by Emily J. Photography

Sometimes hidden from me

in daily custom and in trust,
so that I live by you unaware

as by the beating of my heart,

suddenly you flare in my sight,
a wild rose blooming at the edge

of the thicket, grace and light

where yesterday was only a shade,

and once more I am blessed, choosing

again what I chose before.

-- "The Wild Rose" by Wendell Berry

Younger than 5 years, more than 500 books

As a family, we may have a book problem.

Both my daughter and I have LibraryThing accounts. I've been updating mine lately with my recent reads and some old favorites, but it's not comprehensive... I don't have that kind of time, plus I can't always tell if a book is mine or my husband's (and I can't decide if that matters), plus we have probably a dozen (or more) banker's boxes of books in a storage unit that we try to rotate periodically through our house so I don't even know the full extent of what books we have, and there are overstuffed bookshelves and stacks of books like snowdrifts in every room of our house as it is.

For Serious Girl, though, I thought maybe I could keep track. I signed her up for a lifetime account shortly before her first birthday, and I figured I could input every book she's ever owned and read, and she'd be excited to see how many books that is when she gets older. Cool, right? And she doesn't have nearly as many books as my husband and I do, so it'll be easy to keep up.

I just finished a massive update of Serious Girl's LibraryThing last night. I haven't included all her books, because (like her parents) they are spread out all over the house, but I think I've gotten the majority of them, especially the ones that live in her room, the playroom, and the kitchen (but definitely not the ones in the office/study).

My daughter has over 500 books in the apartment right now. She doesn't turn 5 until April.

I think this might be awesome. But it also might be a sign that we're all going to die in a tremendous paperback avalanche when one of us knocks over the wrong book pile late one night. Or worse.

Maybe I should get my daughter one of those emergency help-line call-button necklaces now...

School's in.

As some of you may already know, I'm now an instructor at Grub Street, Boston's best literary gang. This winter I'm teaching a Teen Writing Camp section called "Generating New Writing" and there are SIX SPACES LEFT in the class! Tell all the Boston teens you know...

You can register for my class at the Grub Street website, and at the top of my blog you'll now see a "current writing courses" page that I will keep updated with course descriptions and appropriate links.

No apples needed. Just bring paper and pen.

Blackout.

Say NO to SOPA and PIPA.

See Cranial Soup for blackout code & FAQs on the SOPA & Protect IP laws.

http://sopastrike.com/#how-to-strike

http://protestsopa.org/

Permission to write: Thou Mayest

Image found at Archaeolibris

My good friend and ruthless crit partner Bernice Buresh just sent me an email from California that I feel compelled to share here:

We stopped at the John Steinbeck museum in Salinas... Glad we did. In one display, there was a carved wooden box and a copy of East of Eden. This is what the description said:

When Steinbeck was writing East of Eden, he began each day's work by writing a letter to his editor Pascal Covicí. He made a box with the Hebrew word Timshel carved on it. It means Thou Mayest. When Steinbeck finished the book he sent the manuscript in the box to Covicí.

This is how I interpret this. Steinbeck needed a daily check-in, so he created one. Steinbeck needed permission to do this project. Since the story was about Cain and Abel he found an old testament word that he could use as a talisman to give him permission.

Conclusion: Steinbeck needed the same things we do to do his work.

An excerpt from those letters to Steinbeck's editor (which filled a journal over the better part of 1951) confirms Bernice's hunch:

I must get into the book again at least try to even though my mind is badly cut up in all directions. Very hard to concentrate today. But I must try for my own safety.Take things in stride and particularly don't anticipate trouble before it happens. One of my very worst habits is the anticipation of difficulties and vicariously to go through them in advance. Then, if they do happen I have to do it twice, and if they don't happen I have done them unnecessarily. I know this is my habit... but not to do it requires constant watchfulness on my part. I have the recurring tendency. I guess I am what is called a worrier.

In my first blog post of the new year, blood on the page, I wrote that you don't need permission from ANYONE to write, and that in seeking permission, approval, or encouragement from outside sources, you may be giving away power you should keep for yourself. Great writers aren't immune to self-doubt, fear, or writerly obsessions -- I read somewhere that Hemingway's manuscripts were found with numbers written in the margins that turned out to be tallies of his daily word count -- but perhaps these writers were able to give themselves the permissions and structures they needed to defeat those doubts long enough to get the damn work done.

Timshel. Thou mayest. If you choose, go write. No one else can move those mountains for you.

How do you give yourself permission to write?

Resolved.

They say that people who make official New Year's Resolutions are ten times more likely to keep them than people who plan to change but don't "resolve" to do so. I've got a few that I'm not willing to share for fear of jinxing them -- in particular, I believe it was Mur Lafferty who pointed out how many defunct blogs end with a post promising to blog more.

Yeah. Don't want to go there.

But I do have one small resolution that I decided to make public: like Natalie Whipple, I'll be reading a minimum of one book a week in 2012. I've posted the link to my 2012-tagged books in the sidebar (ah, LibraryThing, how I love you) because I want to not only read these books, but track them properly. I have no idea how many books I read on average each year because I never keep track. I'm a very fast reader, and I used to read voraciously. I was about to say that I stopped making reading a priority after I had my daughter and started actively pursuing publication, but that's not exactly true. I never made reading a priority BECAUSE I'm a fast and voracious reader by nature, so I never HAD to make it a priority. It came easily.

And then I read less and less in the last few years because I was researching publishing and reading writing-craft books (my planned book-a-week will only include fiction & narrative non-fiction... and poetry if the mood strikes me) and blogging and reading a billion children's books aloud (and there was that period of time when The Serious Girl got actively agitated when I tried to read a book without reading it TO her) and Twittering and...

Not reading.

So, this year I'm making it a priority. Let's see how much I can take in.

How about you? What are your plans for the new year?