eliza writes (marginalia)

for my break from school. Really, I did. I was going to write five pages a day and clean my basement and get a proper sleep schedule and and and…

Yes, well.

I can’t help myself.

I looooove watching food/cooking shows. P and I are Top Chef devotees, and now that it’s off the air we had to fill the time somehow. Food Network and BBC America stepped, ably, into the breach. I think I watched ten episodes of Chopped this weekend. I’m also smitten with one Gordon Ramsay and his nightmarish kitchen beat-downs. Imagine my delight when I realized that I could record the British version, too! How I’m entertained when I google a restaurant after it’s been on the show and see that it’s closed. How I’m reminded to cook at home when he sticks his hand into a box of rotten tomatoes and pulls them out, speared on his fingertips like olives. I love when he sneaks outside to bounce on his heels and predict that the restaurant will fall apart if the snotty executive chef doesn’t get his act together. Then, miraculously, everything turns out awesome. A restaurant in the American hinterlands has been taught the valuable lesson: people want to eat fresh food.

I like reality TV drama, maybe especially when it’s staged.

The thing is, though, I’d never eat ninety-five percent of what the contestants cooked. I have some food, shall we say… intolerances, true, but the heart of the matter is that I’m an incredibly picky eater. It’s easier to make a list of what I will eat than what I won’t. Last night, I ate the dinner of a four-year-old: chicken nuggets, cut-up bell pepper, slices of cava cava orange. I did this while watching people make dessert out of grits.

I have grits in my kitchen. They’re to kill fire ants.

P swears if a real chef ever cooked for him, he’d eat everything on his plate, and maybe that’s true. I wouldn’t know, because I’d be at home watching America’s Test Kitchen, eating a bowl of dry cereal. I don’t drink milk, either.

Last semester, in my Censorship class, we were talking about process. We do that a lot, actually, in the Story Workshop program, but this time my teacher asked us what we could do to actively change our process.

It sounds silly, I know, but I was kind of dumbfounded. You mean, I can just… change it? I don’t have to stumble upon the one true way for me to write, which incidentally only works for me so no one can give me any advice? Beyond butt in chair, I mean, which from what I understand is the only thing we all have in common. I don’t have to flap about and angst about it anymore? I have agency?

My process and I have been getting along a lot better lately. I’ve decided on a daily page goal and I’m drafting again, which feels really good. Like Keenan, I’m (hopefully) going to be done with the Fiction Writing program soon and all of my lovely weekly deadlines will be out the window. I have to figure out now a way to be productive so that I don’t lose all this momentum.

So have you ever actively changed your process? Have you added or thrown something out? What makes you productive?

I’ve never been a big fan of New Year’s Resolutions. My birthday is January first and I’m not keen on spending the day thinking about all the ways I’m an awful person and how to change immediately. I’d prefer my birthday to include opening presents, taking naps, and eating a lot of cake instead. That is also how I would describe Saturdays.

As I’ve mentioned here before, though, this year I’m turning thirty. Listen, I know I should stop whining about it. My older friends have done everything from tell me I’m being a jerk to threatening to squirt me with mustard if I didn’t stop squawking. The way I see it, though, I only have a few hours left. After that, I’ll be too busy being thirty to worry about it anymore.

I was going to do this decade round up thing, where I talked about how different I am since the day I turned twenty — Chicago, seriously? And married? Would not have guessed — and how I am trying to be a more proactive person rather than reactive and I think organizing my stuff might actually be fun! and blah blah boring blah. Instead, here are the things that I know, as an almost thirty-year-old.

Creativity is multiplicative. The more you work, the more you get out of it. You’re never going to run out of ideas.

Creative anxiety never goes away. The trick is learning to work around it, not giving in to it.

The internet was actually invented for the disbursement of cat pictures.

It’s never too late for a fresh start.

And finally, from my patron saint, Kurt Vonnegut: There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.

Now I’m going to spend the day with P, eating delicious Middle Eastern food (another new thing I got this decade) and listening to The Postal Service, which is my favorite record of the last ten years. Later today, I have the promise of an adventure. Tomorrow I will have my traditional birthday dinner with my family — chicken fried steak, mashed potatoes, black eyed peas (for luck!) and the fried okra my mom is trying to track down.

There will be presents and cake and it isn’t even Saturday.

I am so blessed. Happy new year.

I’ve had trouble getting into the holiday spirit this year. I finished class a week ago and I’ve been more than a little melancholy about it. I’m always so relieved at the end of a semester, of course. But all of my classes, especially the workshops, turn into little ad hoc communities and it’s sad to know that I won’t work with those people, in that configuration, again. Add to that the fact that, when I came up for air, I’d done absolutely no shopping and that I was in the middle of reading that Columbine book (totally recommended but totally heartbreaking, by the way,) I was the least Christmassy person in any given room.

Oh, also, I’m turning thirty in a little over a week and while I’m actively NOT THINKING ABOUT IT, it’s always floating in the back of my mind.

But tonight’s different. The snow started in earnest just about the time P came to pick me up from work this afternoon. We were able to make a grocery run together, to pick up the ingredients for our Christmas morning dinner and for some other last minute things, dodging harried parents and other cranky shoppers in that crowded supermarket dance. I took a nap when I got home, falling asleep to the sound of ice clacking against my windows, snug and warm in my bed. Now we’re watching The Wizard of Oz, which I tivo’d a few months ago and saved for an occasion like this and which P has never seen. (I know!) I’m wrapping presents and they’ve just reached the poppy fields. My annual Chex Mix is in the oven. My yard has turned into an icy wonderland.

And I’m thinking maybe I could do this holiday spirit thing after all.

Hope you have a lovely time, whatever you celebrate.

So I’m trying (again!) to take a photo every day for a year. I’ve tried twice before, but managed to miss a day a couple of months in. (Oh hai I am a perfectionist.) I have a better system this time — shiny iPhone with camera and also handy alarm that says TAKE A PICTURE at 10.30 every night as a reminder — so I feel better about my chances of finishing.

Over the last month, I’ve had time to think about precisely WHY I’m doing this project. It’s not to be a better photographer, beyond incidental improvements. I take a decent enough snapshot but I’m not interested in fiddly technical bits, though if someone wanted to give me a digital SLR I’d be willing to learn. The iPhone camera has enough quality for me, even if I do pull out my point-and-shoot once in a while.

It comes down to two things, I think. First, I want to gain some creative discipline. I know that interesting things happen when I try to create something every single day — I think it’s some vestige of the Julia Cameron fangirl in me. Plus, I want to document this year. Starting in October. No, I don’t know why. Maybe that crazy back brain of mine knows something I don’t.

The pictures I’ve posted above are the ones I like best so far. Here’s the entire set. If you’re the feed reader type, here’s the RSS feed. Or you can follow me on Twitter, where an automagic tweet appears every time I post a picture.

I still haven’t heard back from Amazon after sending them this awesome letter last week. So boo on them.

However, while waiting, I decided to do a little sleuthing. I searched for the name of the press that put out the book in the first place. After a couple of missteps (“Did you put out an edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover last year?” “This is a doctor’s office.” “So that’s a no?”) I tracked down the publisher and sent him a message. He, in turn, read my blog post and got back to me as soon as possible to let me know that any omissions from the book were accidental and that he was going to print a new, corrected edition and would send me a copy when that was done. I’m quite happy with the result.

I’m not mentioning the publisher’s name because I honestly believe that it was a mistake and I’m not interested in making a further big deal out of what happened. Which means that whoever is ignoring my letter at Amazon dodged a bullet today. A mildly snarky bullet.

Dear Amazon Customer Service,

First, just want to say, love you guys. I bought myself an Amazon Prime membership for my birthday this year and it’s probably the worst thing I’ve ever done for my wallet. I added the Amazon iPhone app and boom! It’s UPS delivery city over here. Not that I’m complaining, but I will say my husband has begun to look very concerned every time I bring another little something inside that eats up our precious bookshelf space.

Anyway, so I’m a student in the Fiction Writing department at Columbia College Chicago, and this semester I’m taking a class about censorship. (Remember this — it will be important later.) My list of required texts included Lady Chatterley’s Lover, by DH Lawrence. Makes sense, right? Lady Chatterley is a book that’s almost iconic for being censored. So I hopped online and ordered the book. Why should I bother walking all the way next door to the school bookstore when I had AMAZON PRIME? I made a pretty big order of books and waited the two long days it took for the books to arrive.

Then I waited for the day to read Lady Chatterley in class. (As part of the Fiction Writing program, we do a lot of in-class reading aloud.) Today was finally that day. Before class, my classmate and I bonded over having the same copy of the book — you can see the cover on the link here. Even our teacher pointed out that the girl on the cover looks a little young. Ha ha, we all said, that is a little creepy. Then we proceeded to read a chapter of the book.

I’m not going to lie — it was a pretty racy chapter. And at the end, there’s a little bit of an extended discourse using, well, the C word. (I’d type it out, but I don’t want to offend anyone. Turns out in a censorship class you use words like that a lot, and it doesn’t bother me to use it anymore, but I trust you know the word I’m talking about.) I didn’t quite remember that bit from when I read the book at home, but I figured that maybe I’d just forgotten, or skimmed over it. My classmate is smarter than I am, though — she looked back in her copy, identical to mine, and saw something horrible.

The discourse on the C word? Totally missing from our copies.

The book I ordered for censorship class has been, in fact, censored.

It’s really funny, in a way. It’s also unfortunate, because I have no idea what else might have been missing from my copy. I was going to be able to check Lady Chatterley off the list of Great Books I’ve read, but I can’t count it now! There might be entire subplots missing!

I checked the product page, wondering if I missed a note about it being an abridged version or something, but no. It’s just the first version of the book that comes up when searching.

So, I’d like to arrange a trade. I want a non-bowderlerized version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (for my CENSORSHIP class!) and in return you can have this one back. It’s not in perfect condition — I’ve read it, but I do take good care of my books. No writing or anything.

What can I do to make this happen?

Best,
Eliza Evans
Totally loyal customer

Last weekend, P and I went on a little trip to Madison, a belated anniversary celebration. The twist, though, (there’s always a twist!) was that I didn’t tell him where we were going. For two weeks, I made him guess what we were going to do.

Unfortunately for that big old corner of my soul that loves pranks, P could care less about anticipation. He figured we’d have a good time wherever we went, so he was pretty meh about guessing. “A cabin?” he offered. “A boat ride?” I’m pretty sure his next guess would have been “a three-ring circus?” So of course I spent the remainder of the two weeks asking him again and again where he thought we were going. After a while, he just stopped answering.

Since I spent the two weeks before our trip taunting my husband, I forgot to plan anything for us to actually do. I’d booked hotel rooms; we spent Friday night at Hotel Ruby Marie, a Victorian themed bed & breakfast and Saturday night at Arbor House, where the focus was on being eco-friendly. (Advantage, by the way, to Arbor House, and not just because they had a dual-flush toilet.) And thanks to Erica, I knew we were going to eat at the Eldorado Grill. But other than that? Nada.

Well, there was one thing I wanted to do. A few weeks ago, Christine Merrill posted about going to see dioramas of stuffed albino squirrels in the basement of a funeral home in Madison. I immediately became sick with jealousy. I wanted to see those squirrels and there they were, less than two hours away. So when we woke up on Saturday, I called the funeral home, since the squirrels are appointment only. Sometimes there’s an actual funeral, I guess, and they don’t want giggly, gawking tourists wandering through. So I called up at 8.30 Saturday morning and found out the terrible news.

The squirrels weren’t available on the weekend.

I know, I was shocked too. Who closes their tourist attractions, especially one in such demand as albino stuffed squirrels, on the weekend? I wiped away my tears and grabbed my phone to find the nearest used bookstore, as used bookstores are guaranteed to cheer me up. We spent a pleasant couple of hours at Avol’s Books, got cupcakes (and failed at transporting them,) went to the SERRV store (fair trade heaven, and I got some more tiny bird sculptures,) had an indoor picnic, took a nap, and ate fried macaroni and cheese with BACON at Bluephies. It was a busy day!

The next morning, we were kind of at loose ends. We weren’t ready to head home, but it was cold that day, and I’m afraid of nature, so we skipped the ten-minute walk to the arboretum. Instead, we decided to go to The House on the Rock. Apparently this place is super well known throughout the Midwest, but I never heard about it before I read Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, where it’s the setting for a pivotal plot point.

Here’s the basic history of The House on the Rock, told in dramatic form:

dramatis personae
Frank Lloyd Wright, super famous architect and a member of the Prairie School design movement.
Alex Jordan, Senior, total nutbar.
Alex Jordan, Junior, son of total nutbar.

ALEX JORDAN SR: What’s up, Frank Lloyd Wright? Look at this awesome building I drew, that I traveled all the way to your summer home, Taliesin, to show you.
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT: I wouldn’t hire you to design a cheese crate or a chicken coop. You’re not capable.*
exeunt

Later:
ALEX JORDAN SR points at spire of rock.
ALEX JORDAN SR: I’ll show him! I’m going to build a house right there that he will have to look at forever.

Much later:
ALEX JORDAN JR: I will complete your spirit journey, father, and blast on that spire of rock, even though I don’t yet own it.
ALEX JORDAN SR: And to assist us, I will hire bums from Madison and pay them in bottles of whiskey and checks which I will later burn so it will seem like we did this blasting on our own.

*This line is, reportedly, actually true.
**I pieced this history together from the Wikipedia page. Any mistakes are the fault of that page’s authors.

So he built this house up on a rock. And, you know, from the outside it’s absolutely gorgeous, especially in fall.

And once I got inside, well…

It was completely terrifying.

There was this eerie, creepy music floating through this house, where the walls were made of rock and the carpet was red and looked original to the place. And it was a house — at least, there was a teensy kitchen and sunken living room and loft. But the music was from instruments — piano, violin, organs — that just played on their own; apparently these were one of Alex Jordan’s (many, many, many) obsessions. Throughout the tour there were lots of these automated music machines, some as big as ENTIRE ROOMS, that played on their own or started after putting in a token or two.

There were antiques everywhere! And lovely scrollwork and weird little nooks and let’s be honest here I got more than a little claustrophobic. Luckily we found a little open space in a place called THE INFINITY ROOM.

Here’s what I saw when we got to THE INFINITY ROOM:

Here is the picture on the wall we missed before going into The Infinity Room. Do you see something missing there? Yeah, I didn’t notice until we got out toward the end AND THE ROOM STARTED BOUNCING.

This is from the end of the room, where there’s a window IN THE FLOOR. Notice my Chuck Taylors — this is also the trip where I learned I’m too old to walk around for hours in shoes without appropriate insoles.

After we escaped, thankfully unharmed, from THE INFINITY ROOM (okay, I promise I’ll stop with the caps now,) we continued on with the tour of the house. There were lots of lovely antiques and books stuffed everywhere, which you know I approved of, and the walls were closing in on me so luckily, luckily we finished that leg of the tour and headed outside to end up right where we started, ready for leg number two.

Which I will get to next time.

To amuse you till then, here is the full set of photos I took.

I read this entry on Editorial Anonymous the other day, about whether unpublished writers should do things like create Twitter accounts for their characters as a pre-emptive publicity strike. The blog post and comments have varying opinions on that tactic, but what I found most curious were comments from people that said that unpublished writers shouldn’t blog at all! Because they should be writing instead! And also Twitter won’t be around in a year so why bother.

I have a few problems with that line of thought. First, I guess, is that I look at social networking as an honest attempt at building community. If you only blog or tweet or post on Facebook to try to sell books, you’re doing it wrong. I’ve been connecting with people online for fifteen years — I was very young when I first went online, okay? — but I am still in contact with some of the people I chatted with then. I kind of think of meeting people online like a snowball going downhill — the group of people you know just keeps getting bigger. Yes, I’ve lost touch with some people along the line, but my online social circle has only gotten bigger since 1995. I’ve met a LOT of those people in real life, too. I even met my husband online. I am a fan of online commnity.

Twitter has been an amazing tool for meeting other writers, none of whom, on my follow list at least, are there just to sell their books. Every day, I get a near-constant stream of articles and conversation about craft and about business. Twitter can be totally, totally overwhelming, though. I’ll get to that.

Why not blog, especially if you enjoy it? I subscribe to something I call the Apprenticeship Theory. I think of being a writer as, well, being an apprentice. Every word you write counts, even if it’s not for the all-important novel. Blogging is great writing practice — you learn how to organize ideas, what works and what doesn’t. And if you’re not communicating clearly, you get instant feedback, usually from a comment that says “What the hell are you talking about?”

I know, honestly, that social networking can be a great procrastination tool. It’s easy to log on, fall down the rabbit hole, and look up three hours later with that precious writing time gone and only a string of “Me too! That makes so much sense!” blog comments to show for it. But that doesn’t mean you have to give up completely so you can slave away in your unheated garret, only emerging to eat a mealy apple and stare through a plate-glass window at all your productive friends drinking champagne and laughing at you.

Some tips:

Write first. That makes sense, right? But maybe you’re like me and would never be able to do that. (I just had to be honest.) I write to a timer. 45 minutes writing, 10 minutes internerding. I started out with 7 minutes writing and 5 internet and moved up from there. My eventual goal is to write for an hour straight. Also, if you’re really moving, it’s okay to ignore the timer that says stop writing. Stopping internet time, though, is compulsory.

Too many Facebook emails? Turn them off. (Settings –> Account Settings –> Notifications.) You don’t need to know every single time someone comments on that picture of your college roommate dressed up as a sexy nurse four Halloweens ago that you accidentally clicked the like button on when she uploaded it last April. Besides, all that shows up when you log in to Facebook in the bottom right corner. It’s more exciting to have like ten of those when you load the page than one or two, anyway. The only Facebook emails I get are when someone contacts me directly by posting on my wall or commenting on something I’ve posted.

Loop emails clogging your inbox? Switch to digest mode. If something happens and you must monitor emails as they come in, just go to the group’s main page. Busy loops might have several digest emails a day, but it’s still fewer than you’re getting now.

While you’re at it, don’t check your email obsessively. My iPhone beeps at me every time I get an email, which, let’s be honest here, is a lot less often than I would actually check it if it didn’t let me know, oh frabjuous day, someone thought of me. Unless you’re waiting for something specific, it can wait the 45 minutes you’re writing on the timer.

Do you have too many blogs to check? Google Reader. Use it, love it. Just search for the name of the blogs you check regularly, add them to your subscription list, and boom. The blogs come to you when they’re updated, saving the time you’d normally use loading all of them, futilely, hoping that someone posted in the six minutes since you checked last. I used to use Livejournal’s syndication this way but frankly Google Reader is much easier. (You could always search for ‘elizawrites’ on there if you wanted to add this blog (hint hint.))

Twitter threatening to crush you? It’s super easy to get overwhelmed, especially if you have even a modest number of followers. Leah Jones, social media consultant, came to speak to my RWA chapter about social networking a few months ago, and said something that stuck with me: you don’t have to read every single tweet. You can jump in and jump out when you have a few spare minutes. It’s okay to miss part of the conversation. (This is very difficult for me, by the way.) If there’s something you really must see, the person posting will @msg you. Using something other than just the plain web interface can help, too. Lots of people rave about Tweet Deck but frankly I found it frightening and hid when I opened it up. I use Brizzly on my computer and Tweetie 2 on my phone.

I have not yet discovered a cure for watching three dozen music videos on Youtube or reading six month old flame wars.

I’ve been fighting the internet’s procrastination siren song for a long time, but I’m sure there are many other tips out there to keep focused. Do you have any?

In the fiction writing program I attend, there’s an assignment in Advanced Fiction classes called the Steeplechase. The Steeplechase is dangled over students as something terrifying, a rite of passage that only the strong will survive.* In fact, the Steeplechase is a twelve step writing exercise, that, as it turns out, is excellent for building novel backstory.

One of the steps is called Overall Storyteller, which is meant to focus on the narrator’s voice. I’ve been working on commercial fiction for the last five years, though, so I’m much more accustomed to writing a really close third person POV. Which means that I pretty much dreaded writing that bit. We’d done some similar in-class writing that I really struggled with, fighting against my conceptions of head-hopping the entire time, so I really wasn’t looking forward to writing that short section.

But I soldiered on, and wrote a couple of pages about the town where my novel’s set. At the beginning of the story, my heroine returns (after a twelve-year absence) to the small Midwestern town where she grew up. I thought it would be a good idea if I could get an idea of the town’s history. I started in 1897 and wrote up to the present day.

Frankly, I hated it.

That’s okay, though. I turned it in anyway because I’d fulfilled the assignment and also because I don’t have to love everything I write. I got a bit of good backstory out of it and that was enough.

The other night in class, though, it was my turn to have some of my work read. Including, of course, that section I hated. As I read aloud, I worked very hard to keep my pace slow — I have a tendency to read faster when I think the writing’s not working, trying to get to the parts I think are better, I guess.

Afterwards, the class participated in a bit of Recall. Recall is another thing we do multiple times every classroom meeting. It’s simply retelling what we remember from a story, whether we read it the week before (typically at the beginning of class) or just heard it. It’s a quick way to get feedback on what’s working. It’s a very positive environment; there’s not a lot of criticism. The Story Workshop method is 180 degrees from the typical environment in creative writing classes, where the student presents a story and it’s torn to shreds by classmates. Personally, I think there are times for both approaches — Story Workshop when a piece is in the draft phase, the other (which I call Iowa method, after the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I had a Vague Idea that’s where this system developed, but the internet doesn’t seem to agree with me.) when you’re getting ready to send the work out for publication. But at any rate, my classmates did a little Recall about my work.

Imagine my surprise when almost all of the Recall came from the two pages (out of about six) that I hated the most. There was a comment about how, by writing about people leaving and returning to this little town, I was echoing the theme of the rest of the story.

I was? Oh, I totally meant that. Well, at least my back brain did.

Jenny Crusie calls her back brain The Girls in the Basement. I’ve heard it called the mud, among other things. It’s the subconscious, doing its own little thing back there, writing the story while our ego up front flails around, writing and deleting the same scene or avoiding writing altogether by searching Etsy for tiny bird sculptures.***

We know the stories we’re trying to tell. The novels and short stories and poems are all there, just waiting to be dug out. I once wrote about how my process felt like floating around on the bottom of the ocean, in the dark, scrabbling with my hands and hoping that I’d find a treasure chest. That much, at least, hasn’t changed in the last ten years. But I am learning to trust the back brain to sit up there on deck and steer me.

*Possibly exaggerated for dramatic effect.**
**New blog title, y/y?
***That last bit might be just me.