Novels are Best Because: They Tell a Story.

I think truly good stories are starting to become less and less appreciated, generally speaking. I mean, check out the box-office numbers now and then, and you'll soon find how true this is: top grossing movies need not have a compelling story to make money. 

And I am usually not one of those: "back in the day" kind of people. But this time I am, because I think it is  possible we are starting to believe the lie that stories are not all that important: escape is important, fantasies are important, explosions are important, flashes of light are important, but stories: not so much.

We tell stories every day, and they are important. That thing I said about cat vomit, and how it has become ubiquitous in my house as of late? Yeah, that was a story. Sorry. But it wasn't a very good one.

I pose this question to my students at the beginning of the semester: "Why would it be an outrage if a school decided not to teach its students how to read anymore and just focused on Math and Science? I mean, really, you don't need to read to survive, right? Humanity could get by without the written word, couldn't it?" Sometimes they can't wrap their minds around this possibility, because we exist in a literate world, and it is nearly impossible for them to imagine a world without the written word ("But.. how would you pay your bills?!")

And maybe that's the same point I'm trying to make about stories. It's kind of hard to imagine the world without stories, because I think they've existed much longer than the written word. And my friend Ed made a good point on my last blog: God communicates through stories. And if Christianity isn't your cup of tea, I think most religions have some form "story" surrounding them.

Novels just take those little stories and make them a little bit bigger, a little larger, and a little more full. They embellish. And if the author is a good one, he or she will use nice words and image to accompany these stories. A novel isn't just a story, after all.

And a story isn't just plot points, either. Man, that would totally suck:

Hamlet's dad got offed by his brother. Hamlet has an existential crisis. Hamlet kills uncle, but also dies. Oh, also: some people think he wanted to bang his mother. The end. 


It is a little funny to me when people get upset when someone gives away the ending to a novel, like that is what it's about. This isn't the Sixth Sense, people: your experience should not be dependent on information, but how information is relayed. I mean, in some of the greatest works ever written, nothing really happens, anyway. People mope around and think about things. But it's still a story.

Which brings me to my last point about stories. And yeah, it's the most cliched. I apologize in advance. We are all stories. Some of us are exciting stories. Some of us are lame-o stories. Some of us are gross stories. Some of us are inspiring stories. Some of us are tragedies, or comedies, whatever. But we all start the same: we're born. We end the same: we die.

One of my favorite novels is A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and part of that is because it is James Joyce's story. And while I relate to his story, it is different enough, and clever enough, and transcendent enough, that it makes for a good story. It has a beginning, right when Stephen Dedalus is a little boy, and it follows through to his going out to encounter the uncreated conscience of his race as a young man at the end.

What a great story. And it happens every single day.

Why I Think Novels are Best.

Philosophy will clip an angel's wings, Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine - Unweave a rainbow

Oh,  I heart you, Keats. 

For the past few years I've been lazy about reading. I suppose I'm not really one to go about extolling the virtues of novels and literature when I, myself, often hesitate the crack the covers of a book and just read. But I've decided to come to terms with the fact that my hesitance stems from grad-school trauma, and not from a rational place. Plus, I do read, just not as voraciously as I used to.

And so I think it's okay that I'm going to go on a little novels are awesome kick, despite my poor behavior in this area.

So I've decided to make a list and then write about each item a little bit every day.

Really great novels are awesome because:

1.) They tell a story.
2.) They describe human nature.
3.) They are self-contained.
4.) They end, but continue to exist.
5.) The ending stretches out forever.
6.) They are subjective.
7.) They try to make sense of things that don't make sense.

This list is not so exhaustive, but I feel like I need to remind myself of why I loved novels in the first place from time to time. You may read this and think: "How the hell can studying literature cause one hate literature?" Well, I can't really answer that question very easily, because I am me, and I am verbose, and I am my own person with an individual reason for it that probably doesn't account for others, but that was what happened to me.

Video games don't really help here either, let's be honest.

As a writer, though, this fear of novels is kind of a problem, too. At one point I used to think: Novels matter. My life wouldn't be worth living without them. And now I find that I can get through my week without finish some novel or another, and I do not have an overwhelming desire to read. Life goes on without literature.

Ergo: Why write?

For a while I used to say: I write because that's all I've got going for me. But that's kind of a poor excuse, too, and ridiculous. (I mean, hello? I can also boil water and chew gum at the same time). But after a while, like all band aids covering larger problems, this excuse stopped working.

And I stopped writing as much, because it also seemed kind of pointless.

But here's the good news: I'm coming around a little bit, starting off with a "fuck you" to the side of me that is 1.) Depressed. and 2.) Believes the overwhelmingly pragmatic vibe that exists in this sad, scientifically-obsessed age we live in, that reduces us all to genes and atoms and animals that just do things for physical satisfaction, because that stuff is soul-crushing.

(See: Keats, Fig. 1).

My sister went to art school in Boston, and the Christian fellowship there had this little motto that went something like: "We Create Because We Were Created." Perhaps that is part of my problem: I don't think of creativity, the act of creation, as something we humans were designed to do, mainly because that is something that is not often on people's wavelengths. It doesn't come up in conversation, most of the time. It can be easy to forget about what our soul needs, since Omega-3 fish oils won't help supplement that problem

And I shouldn't think of writing as something that serves my purposes, exactly. They serve a purpose outside of myself. As does all art, all literature, all music. At least, that is what it should do. Maybe that is the problem with Rock Stars, yes?

So novels may not seem to serve a purpose on the surface, but they do matter. They do fulfill a purpose. And my idea of what purpose this is may not be extensive or academic*, but oh well. And so I am going to explore the items in my list for the next few posts (and maybe finish that damn vampire story).

There you go.

...And, okay, full disclosure: having a "series" might help me be a little more disciplined in posting, too.

*caveat: This is not to say that the academic study of literature is bad/useless/no good. On the contrary: I'm all for the promotion of English Departments, and the study of English Literature... You'll be fine as long as you do not wish to get a stable and well-paying job. Kidding, kidding: it is terrible that the humanities are dying. Seriously. We need them. If you don't agree: re-read post.

My Excuse for Buying Moleskine Notebooks Today.

So I am a horrible blog poster.

There's my self-flagellation for now.

I think I'm already over it.

Today, before going to my sister in law's bridal-dress-trying-on-thingy, I had a few extra minutes, so I swung by Barnes and Noble to buy myself a datebook, because I have things I need to do and go to, and yet I do not have a place filled with the months and days of 2011 in which to write these things down. As it turns out, neither does Barnes and Noble; they only have these things around Christmas, apparently.

What they do have, though, are a small selection of Moleskine notebooks, which, if you weren't aware of this already, are the thing that every hip, artsy writer-whatever type must have in his or her possession in order to be legit in the hip, artsy writer scene.

I already have some small, pocket-sized Moleskine notebooks that I write random information in every now and then. But I decided I should buy some larger ones to write actual real things in.

Because I realized something kind of recently:

I am not a good writer.

The reasons for this are many. But I don't necessarily want to go on and on about the personal things that make me not a good writer. We'll leave that to Anne Lamott. Her stories are way more interesting, anyway.

But one reason, though, has to do with the Internet. I used to only write longhand. I never wrote first drafts on the computer. I thought that was completely insane. It felt unnatural, somehow. But then graduate school happened, and I wrote first drafts on the computer, and then this carried over into my creaive writing life. It's unfortunate, but true.

Really, it's ridiculous. I mean: I go from writing a page of whatever, and then I check my email, and then I check to see if someone might have updated their status on facebook, or whatever. It's amazing I get anything done at all.

So it's all well and good to realize my faults (I'm pretty good at picking up on those... maybe a little too good...), but I realized I am out of practice. When I buy a random crappy notebook at CVS and get ready to write, I am a bit confounded as far as what I should do.

The written page feels a lot more permanent than typing on a computer. I can type faster than I speak, or at least, I can type the same speed at which I speak, which is much better than my writing. And when I type something I don't like, I can get rid of it without crossing stuff out. It just disappears. Forever.

But I don't know if that is a good thing, necessarily.

I decided something must be done about this. The CVS notebooks weren't cutting it. I needed something better. More Hip. Something Hemingway and Picasso wrote in. And they were drunk geniuses, so that means something. So I got the Moleskine notebooks, and I will try and write first drafts long hand first, again.

We'll see how it works.

Creative Nonfiction: WTF is that?

So I haven't finished my vampire story. I am working on it, but I want it to be good, so I am not about to just throw something together and then post it without it being decent.

But I will post something that might be considered "Creative Nonfiction." Which is, basically, blog posts. So it works, right?

The Vampire Story will come soon enough.

Haunted.

             

            When I was younger, I once saw the Invisible Man in a dream. He was standing in the kitchen, but he was only a pair of trousers and a buttoned-up denim shirt in the shape of a human being. He was just leaning over the sink. It terrified me, and I woke up. I kept my eyes open as long as I could, because the possibility that a body can disappear and leave its clothes behind, and then that person could remain an ethereal presence in a kitchen was horrifying.

            It was around this time my great grandfather died, and when I tried to get my sister to explain this concept to me, she said that it meant that your body stopped working. It just stopped. As far as I knew, a “body” was the trunk that your legs and arms and head attached to, and it was strange to think that if this part stopped, then your limbs and your sight and everything else did, too, like a car that blew an engine gasket.

Somewhere, tucked into that unconscious corner of my four-year-old brain, I already understood that death was unfair. And then I started to consider the possibility of ghosts. It was a love-hate obsession: they terrified me, but they seemed like the only way to make death a little more balanced.

It made a little more cosmic sense for our ancestors to come back as disembodied flaneurs, sitting on front porches in the empty chairs, or peeking out attic windows, watching the others that still had pulses and a sense of touch and taste carrying on without them, and because of them.

Someone once told me that people who claimed to be abducted by aliens might have actually been possessed by demons at the time, since a large proportion of them had dabbled in the occult at some point before said abduction took place. Whether this insight is correct or not, I used to apply this reasoning to ghosts as well. It was possible that ghosts were actually devils straight from Hell.

But then again, who’s to say that being a ghost couldn’t be kind of like heaven, anyway? The vague answers, that heaven is “above” and hell “below” never made a lot of sense to me anyway. This may sound awfully Eastern-religion of me, but maybe these two places exist together on earth, side by side.

At any rate, I’m well aware we’re not supposed to believe in ghosts, despite how scared they make us. But I do, anyway, mainly because I’m fairly certain I saw one last summer while on vacation.

I suppose I was lucky this was my first run-in, but it also makes sense. The house I grew up in wasn’t filled with these ghosts, like other people’s houses, because it was built in the 1980s, and its only inhabitants that have died were dogs, cats, and innumerous hamsters. I am fairly certain those don’t come back.  No people had died yet, and even if someone had, they probably wouldn’t have stuck around anyhow. There was no space or quietness for the spirits to hang about in anyway, with all the children running around the carpeted halls, past the empty, white walls.

The house that we stayed at for summer vacation, though, was a different story. The place stank of earlier generations.

It was built in the 1930s, by my mother’s grandfather. He had built another one before that, but it burned to the ground. It was unsettling that the arts-and-crafts reincarnation was just as much of a firetrap, but at least this one had some outdated fire-detectors, so that was a minor improvement. But it still had that half-finished quality. Nails from the roof stuck in through the walls in the upstairs bedrooms, crooked and menacing.

For a while, we all thought that this house was terrible: there wasn’t a television, the roof leaked on rainy days, we had to wear flip flops if we used the cramped shower, and you could feel the springs sticking into your backside when you sat on the dilapidated couches. But the lake that seemed to stretch out for eternity, or, at the least, to the coast of England, straight off the front porch, made up for it. And, as we all grew older, the space that allowed for a week without work, and without the outside world, which made up for it, too.

My Mom showed us the outhouse in the side of the garage, and she said that was the only toilet they had when she was little. And there was a cast-iron sink in the kitchen with a rusty water pump at the side, with a red rusty residue left along its spout, and a large, pot bellied stove dusted gray with fifty year old cinders that we’d put the cat’s dishes on, so the dog couldn’t get at it. The floor was hard, crusty linoleum, with faded flowers running along its edges.  It was peeling away along the edges. Like the rest of the house, it was a diminished version of what it once was, frozen in place, but slowly going back to whence it came. Like people, kitchen appliances and iron come from the earth, too, even if they last longer than we do.

The bedrooms on the second floor were never finished, and when you lie in bed, you just stare at the bare rafters right above your head, and listen to the other bodies around you shift on their creaky mattresses. The walls make for visual privacy, but otherwise, only exist to push an old bureau against, or nail an antique photo up.

Even the lake reminded us of a long-dead age. During the first half of the twentieth century, a paper mill would dump all of its leftovers into the water, and it would slowly creep into our little nook and bog, creating a dark, mushy mess, perfect for leeches. We’d wade out to the yellow, clean sandbar, feeling the decay squeeze between our toes, squinching up our faces in disgust. Later, I found out that the paper mill closed down over forty years ago, and yet more of that pulpy debris would come and stack up every year; it wasn’t until a couple years ago that it seemed to subside by degrees.

My mother never minded these kinds of things. For her, this was where life became complete and whole again.

Maybe it’s because she knew that it was the perfect place for ghosts, and her mother died when she was thirteen years old.

It really shouldn’t have come as a surprise. There were so many hiding places, dusty corners and cob-webbed ceilings. They didn’t even need an attic, or an empty front porch. They could sit on the empty rafters upstairs and stare down at their sleeping grandchildren, great grandchildren, in the antiquated beds below, two per mattress. They could mill around their familiar kitchen. The twenty-first century hadn’t crept in yet; they’d know how to pull the string hanging from the bare bulb, and use the stove, or pump some water, but they wouldn’t need to.

            The bathroom was on the first floor, so I knew I’d have to pass them all if I had to pee in the middle of the night. This is why new houses make sure there’s a bathroom on both floors, and why they had chamber pots before. It’s not because people didn’t want to go outside to the outhouse in the cold, or because they were lazy. It’s because they knew that night’s the best time for ghosts in their houses to come down and mill around.

            There were chamber pots still under the creaky old beds, but that didn’t mean I was about to start using them. 

And that’s when I saw her. I stumbled down the stairs, eager to finish what I had to get done, and safe back upstairs, but there she was, on the front porch steps.

            The front porch was where everyone spent most of their time, between the lake and the tame, screened indoors. When we weren’t swimming or eating, we were waiting around for something, playing board games, or reading books, or listening to music to pass the time. It’s strange that was the case. We were in limbo during vacation, and we wanted it that way.

            She was sitting there, ephemeral and pale, and yet very rooted to the spot. And she stared out at the lake, expressionless, empty, and yet not sad. You would think that ghosts are sad things, missing out on something that they never fully appreciated while they were alive, but I think that death does something to a person. It takes the sting out of things. 

            What made it worse was I recognized her, somehow. I could only see her back, and her head, and her shoulders, but the shape and posture were familiar. Perhaps it was from another dream, a familiar one that came back to me night after night. I couldn’t be sure. But that was what kept me from running. That was probably the problem; if you see a shadowy, faint figure of a person you recognize in a vague sense, you shouldn’t just stand there and stare.

            She wasn’t surprised to see me. Maybe she knew that I had been standing there, watching her, for several minutes.

I felt the goose bumps rise on my arms, and I stared out at the black night, and the occasional shimmer of light against the black lake water. I couldn’t help but consider the possibility that this was just as real as my eighteenth birthday, or my wedding day: days that would happen, possibilities that loomed ahead, very concrete and real, but a little hard to grasp for sure.

            This woman was not from our time. I could tell right away. People don’t look the same now as they did then. And they all probably said the same thing about their grandparents and their great-grandparents. My mother once showed me pictures of the woman I was named after, and she had her hair done up, held away from her face in a bun, pinned and neat. She wore a blouse that went halfway up her throat. A pin near her collarbone.

She was almost another type of human. The texture of her skin was different. Her eyes had a different kind of sheen to them, as though they were paler than our eyes. Her features weren’t like ours. They were rounder, softer, like many of the other people I’d seen in old photographs. The twenty-first century created different people than the twentieth, and the nineteenth. We kept evolving. We became harder, maybe.

            And this woman was from yet another, softer age. Her lips were dark, painted on. Her dress flared out from her hips, emphasizing her small waist, and her sandals were tall, and a little clunky, the straps secure around her ankles. The imaginary smoke from her cigarette curled up towards the porch rafters

            I crossed my arms. It was very cold outside, despite the heat during the day. I blew out my breath, wondering if it would come out in puffs of smoke, like hers. But it didn’t. And she didn’t have breath, anyway, I didn’t think. When she moved, the creaky floorboards of the porch remained silent.

            “Sometimes I think life lasts forever,” I said, confessing something that only teenagers think. “Sometimes, I think that tomorrow will always come, and I will always have a second chance.”

            And she disappeared.

            My mother once dreamt that my grandmother hadn’t really died when she was thirteen, and she had been waiting, underground, for over forty years, waiting for something to let her out. She was patient, and somehow, once the mistake had been realized and she was released from her prison, it turned out she hadn’t aged a day since her burial.

             They went shopping, and they went to Portland, and that was when my mother realized that my grandmother’s skin had started to turn gray. And my mother said to her mother: “Don’t go yet. Stay with me. I can take care of you. You don’t have to go.”

            And that night I knew what she meant.

Because all I want to do is take care of everyone, and keep them stored up, safe, in the rafters of the camp, or around the stove in the old kitchen there, in the dusty, cobwebbed corners. There will always be room for more. We can layer them on top of each other, my grandmother, my grandfather, my great aunt, relatives I’ll never meet, people whose names I don’t even know; everyone can fit, and I can take care of them.

            Ghosts don’t take up any space at all. They’re light, and they don’t have to eat.

They aren’t empty, though. They’re full of things, of the past, and they matter, somehow. Because without them, I wouldn’t exist. The house wouldn’t exist. The house was built on that fragile foundation of past lives, stacked up and fading away.   

A Vampire Story, Part II.

So here is the next part of my untitled and unfinished vampire story. Soon, I am going to be completely out of already written material and will have to actually finish it... Oh dear.

Anyway, on to Part II:

            It had always been eerie and strange to her, the way public spaces changed at night, when all of the lights were off. During the day, there was nothing unnerving about the library. The fluorescent lights killed off flights of fancy and creepy shadows in its unflattering glare. At night, though, it was different.

            In a way, it was a little exciting.

            For this reason, the librarian kept the lights off for the time being. Everyone should be allowed some excitement in his or her life, however ill advised it might be. She also figured the young man could not have gotten far.

            This is insanity, she thought. But, she also reasoned, he cannot be a thief. If he was, he would’ve stolen something by now. He could have stolen the one hundred dollars in the register. He could have taken some of the library’s more valuable books. But this had not happened. Everything was always exactly as it had been the night before. At least, the daytime librarian had never said anything about it.

            It was silent and still inside, but she could make out the faint glow of a lamp toward the back of the store.

            All she had to do was go to the front desk, pick up the phone, and call the police. It was simple. And yet, instead of doing this simple task, the librarian made her way towards the light. It was unclear what drew her back there, if anything. In one sense, she had complete control over her faculties. However, she also felt an almost imperceptible pull, coaxing her forward, one foot in front of the other, until she stood in front of the man from the street.

            He was seated at a table, a book opened in front of him, his head in his hands as he stared down at the typescript pages. He didn’t know she was there, even after she cleared her throat. Finally, she stepped closer.

            “What are you doing in here?” she asked.

            He immediately lifted his head so his face was pointed in her direction. In his new surroundings, the man appeared a bit different. The yellow glow from the lamp gave his features a less gaunt and pale look. 

            “You aren’t supposed to be here,” she added, in case he wasn’t sure what she meant.

            “I know,” he said. His voice was low and gravelly, as though it wasn’t used to speaking.

            “You have to go,” she said.

            “This is the only time when I can come here,” he said.

            “I’m sorry,” she said, “But the library is closed. We might stay open later, if we can get the budget passed. Maybe that would work out better.”

            “That does not make a difference,” the man said. “I still could not come during opening hours. It is just not possible.”

            She crossed her arms. He wasn’t angry, but it was clear he was not happy either. She didn’t know what he was. If there was such a thing as an emotionless being, he was one. Even animals convey their emotions a little, the librarian thought. He, though, was blank. Not robotic, and not bland, but blank.

            “Do you not like people?” she asked. “Is that the problem?”

            “No. People do not like me,” he replied.

            The librarian looked him up and down, briefly. He was a handsome man, despite his coldness. He was thin, but well dressed, as though each piece of clothing was tailor-made for his body. That was unusual: she didn’t know when she ever saw each little seam lined up perfectly with each contour and edge. His jacket was made out of faded black material, not cotton exactly, and not canvas. She wasn’t sure what it was. His shirt was odd, too. It was a brown, collared shirt, but its collar was turned up. He even had a buttoned deep maroon vest layered underneath. An undone tie hung from his neck.

            How had she not noticed how meticulously dressed he had been? Perhaps it was the jacket; it was usually buttoned up. And he usually had a scarf wrapped around his thin neck.

            “I’m sorry,” she said again, “But we can’t just go and make accommodations just for you. Then we’d have to do it for everyone and stay open all night.”

            “I was not asking you to make any accommodations whatsoever,” he said, crisply.

            This was true. There wasn’t anything she could say to that. She shifted from one leg to the other. “I’ve seen you,” she said. “I noticed you hanging around here for a week.”

            The man watched her. He was very still. He was the most static person she had ever met. He was about as animated as the chair he was sitting in.

“And if you’ve been breaking into the library at night… well, you can’t do that. I noticed you doing that for a while, and you can’t do it anymore. This has to stop, right now,” she continued, wondering why any of this needed explanation.

            His black eyes glinted at her confrontation. “I noticed you as well,” he said, finally. The librarian caught her breath. But he lowered his gaze back to the book. “And I may do as I like,” he added.

            She had just about enough of their conversation and his haughtiness. “We’ll see about that,” she said, turning on her heel and walking towards the front desk. But before she could take another step, she felt something metal grip her arm and yank her back. At least, she had thought it was metal. When she looked down, she saw it was the man’s hand. It was cold and hard.

            “Have a seat, please,” he said.

            The librarian did not want to have a seat. She was startled by his strength and his speed; how had he managed to stop her that quickly? Her back had been turned to him, but he had managed to slip past her and grab her by the arm in a split second. Her throat had gone dry.

            This was a mistake.

            But she sat down, her body stiff and inflexible as she dropped into the wooden chair. The man took his seat again, across from her. He put one hand on the book, but he didn’t resume reading.

            “You gave me no other choice,” he said. “Hasty actions lead to trouble, you know. It is better to take pause, reflect upon what consequences your actions may have, and then act.” She stared at him, dumbfounded, but he didn’t seem to notice. He just kept talking. “This may surprise you, but I am somewhat observant. I’ve noticed how people these days seem to think that decisions must be made quickly. Everything is so very hurried. Automobiles move so alarmingly fast, and yet bystanders are still dismayed by the wreckage of a collision. The human body was not meant to move in that fashion, at such speeds. But everyone moves so quickly, and everyone tends to make foolish decisions, without for a moment considering what the outcome might be. But the latter is not particular to today. Mankind has always had a hard time grasping consequence and mortality.”

            This sudden monologue startled the librarian almost as much as his forcefulness. She wasn’t sure what to think. One minute, he was using his strength to stop her from doing what she legally had a right to do, the next he was lecturing her on the downfalls of civilization.

            “Let me go,” she said.

            “I cannot allow you to leave,” he said. “I already told you: this is not my fault, and this is not how I wanted my night to begin, but you gave me no alternative.”

            “You are breaking the law,” she said. She had started to shiver, but she wasn’t cold. She was afraid. She wasn’t sure if that had ever happened to her before in her life. Perhaps he was right: she had never truly grasped her own mortality until that moment.

            “No I am not,” he said.

            “You broke into the library,” she said.

            “I did not,” he said, looking back down at his book.

            “What do you call this, then? You’re in here,” she said.

            “I did not unlock any doors,” he replied.

            “Yeah, that’s right. How did you do that anyway?” she asked. She wasn’t shivering anymore; her courage had come back with her curiosity.

            He didn’t answer, though. He held his head again as he continued reading. 

(More to come...)

A Vampire Story.

So, a few years ago when my husband told me I should start a blog, he said I could use it as a vehicle for putting out my fiction. I kind of balk at that possibility, especially when it comes to my long novel.  But on the other hand, this might work a little, especially on shorter pieces I need to finish up.

My friends know how I feel about Twilight. At least, most of them do. Without going into the long diatribe I usually go into whenever this popular series is brought up, let's just say I'm not a huge fan.

I also think Vampires are a little overrated these days. At least, they are in Twilight, since there are no drawbacks to being a Vampire. Being a Vampire in Twilight is basically the best thing that could ever happen to you. The only downside is your skin sparkles in the sun. But really, who says that's a bad thing? It's interesting, anyway. Not a curse.

Anyhow, I've recently read a lot of different vampire stories and books, because they're ubiquitous. And pretty much all of those novels or stories sucked. (But I also saw one good Vampire Movie!) I have to say, I agree with Neil Gaiman: Vampires work best when the story is not all about being a vampire, or is at least subtle about vampires (for example, Silas in the Graveyard Book).

And yet, on a kind of lark, I decided to write my own Vampire Story.

I have to apologize to some of my friends in advance: it is, unfortunately, not an Amish Vampire Novel.

And this is only a portion of the story. It's not finished, first of all, and second, it's too long to fit into one blog post. Hopefully this will motivate me to finish.

Here goes:

            The librarian began to notice him after daylight savings. She wasn’t sure if he even existed before then. It was possible he was a strange, uncommon plant that sprouted out of the sidewalk overnight once the frost set in. This classification didn’t come out of nowhere; she had a hard time determining whether he was animal or vegetable, since he hardly moved from his spot near the streetlight while she unlocked her car door. He just waited, immobile, and aura of impatient stillness surrounding him.

            She knew he was watching her.

            She was the assistant librarian, and so she was the one who had to close up every night, while the more established, important librarian went home to her family, cats, and nighttime drama television shows.

But she couldn’t come up with a reason why this closing shift was so terrible. It was relatively early in the evening, nine o’clock, and would she, if given the opportunity, even go out for an evening of raucous fun? With which friends? She wasn’t even certain whether or not she had friends. Friends were people you actually saw once and a while, and spent time with, weren’t they? And she hardly spent time with anyone besides the library patrons.

In fact, she got the sense that the only person in the world who really noticed her at all was the man under the street lamp.

His eyes were shadowed, and appeared to be black holes sunk deep under his heavy brow. His shoulders hunched forward, perhaps against the cold, or perhaps due to years of improper posture. His clothing was also dark and shadowy, his hands sunk deep into the pockets of a black wool jacket, his heavy feet contained in worn leather boots. He didn’t even blink.

The first night she noticed him, the librarian didn’t think twice about it. She briefly observed a gaunt, solitary young man beneath the lamp across the street, and then got into her car and drove home. The second night, she did think twice about it, since she remembered him. The third night, she became a little more nervous. After four nights, she was terrified.

But once a week had passed, she was merely curious.

If he had wanted to hassle her or stalk her, he could have easily followed her home. But it didn’t seem he had a car. Besides, he hadn’t spoken two words to her. He kept his distance, and he waited, but he did nothing else. He wasn’t there for her.

The librarian knew this made sense: she was, after all, a forty-three year old bespectacled single woman who bought her clothes from online catalogs and went to bed around ten o’clock at night at the latest. She was short, and had noticed lately that her form was expanding in a strange, imperceptible way. She found a single white hair in her comb the other morning. And clothes that had once been loose were now becoming a little uncomfortable, a little tighter around her arms and legs and waist than they used to. She hadn’t changed any of her habits, though, so when she looked in the mirror she realized it was simply a side effect of the ailment that affects all: age.

Still, before she did her final walk through the shelves, she slipped into the bathroom, applied a light layer of lipstick, and ran her hands through her short, cropped hair. It was only while she was halfway through this ritual that she paused and realized that she was doing it for the skulking figure under the street lamp.

This night, she decided, she would change her routine. She wouldn’t go home at all. She would get into her car, drive away, but then loop around the block, and pull around to watch what he did once she was gone.

The librarian drove slowly down the side street near the streetlamp, and switched her headlights off. The man still hadn’t moved from his place, although he had straightened. His movements were slow and painful, as though his limbs and joints were frozen stiff. He pulled his hands out of his pockets and she saw he didn’t even have gloves on. It was strange, how underdressed he was when it was only twenty degrees outside. And he was cold, that much was clear.

He took a tentative step towards the street, and then stepped down from the sidewalk. He was frail, and moved like an elderly man, although he couldn’t have been more than twenty six or twenty seven years old. Perhaps he was ill; people with cancer often looked decades older than they really were. For a brief moment, the librarian felt a pang of sympathy for him.

This sympathy, though, dissipated when she saw him swiftly walk across the street and up the front steps of the library. He became graceful and smooth, as though his joints became lubricated after the initial jolt of movement. He gained some momentum. And then he disappeared into the shadows around the front steps.

The librarian moved forward and squinted into the dark. Then she flicked the headlights of the car on. Fully illuminated, the steps were empty.

“What?” she asked.

She wasn’t given to talking to herself often. She was too levelheaded for such a thing; speaking out loud when there was nobody to hear was pointless. Yet she couldn’t stop it this time.

            It was her responsibility to find out what was going on. She grabbed her cell phone out of her bag and flipped it open. The battery was dead. Of course she had forgotten to charge it. She sighed and set it aside. Then again, whom would she have called anyway?

            She walked up the steps and took the heavy, brass door handle in her hand. She tugged, but the door remained firmly shut. For a minute, she just stared at the door, unsure if she was imagining things. She had seen that man walk across the street, walk up the steps, go to the door, and then disappear. It was only logical he had entered, somehow. She knew she had locked it, but some people could pick locks. She didn’t know they could pick them that quickly, but she knew it was a skill some people possessed. Maybe, she thought, he walked down the street without going inside, and I didn’t see him slip away.

A dim light flickered in the window, and she knew there was someone inside. She sighed as she took the key to the front door out of her pocket.

To be continued...

Inspiration vs. Foolish Consistency.

Everyone knows Platypuses are the most inconsistent and wise creatures out there. 

So I think I should write a blog post because of that lame resolution I came up with a couple months ago, not because I really want to do it.

Is this okay?

I hate writing when I have to do it, or if I am not feeling inspired, and it shows. The writing itself is terrible, and uninspired. But if everyone only wrote when they were inspired, a whole lot of trees would be saved because they wouldn't be used up by being turned into paper to hold a bunch of crappy, useless, uninspired words...

Oh wait. Shoot.

Should my resolution/revolution really clutter up the already way too cluttered interwebs? I mean, really. It's like it actually matters what I have to say on such and such thing, and what I had for breakfast yesterday, or what I think about certain political or cultural bric-a-brac. But we all know that isn't really true.

Since all men are like grass, and their glory is like flowers of the field that wither and disappear.

And if that's about men, then this little bloggy-blog is doomed, right?

The sad thing is: sometimes I think I do have something to write, and I sit down and get started, and I've got all these ideas and possibilities in my head, and something happens. I don't know what the hell it is, but it's not good. Maybe it's life. It just gets in my head and makes my head all cluttered up. And instead of focusing on what I need to do, I know in the back of my head I've got student worksheets to grade, carpets to vacuum, clothes to fold, groceries to buy, people to call, statuses to check, and on the larger scale there's worse things, like the horrible sense that there are jobs to get, babies to have, goals to reach, and I'm just tossing them all aside for this one constant in my life: sitting at a desk and writing stories.

So I want to write because I need to, but then life makes me not want to write, even though I must write to live. Wow. How very sucky.

But I guess I should keep on with this foolish consistency, even if it starts to acquaint me with hobgoblins in my little mind.

My Love/Hate Relationship: Organization and Structure and Creativity.

When I was a little kid, I used to thrive off of structure. My parents ran a tight ship, and I was a little OCD. It all evened out. If things deviated from the usual structure, all hell would break loose. Jeff thinks this is a little funny. He laughs about the story where I had a conniption because my jean cuffs weren't the same size. (What's funnier is that I called "jean cuffs" "rainbows," but that's another story for another day...)

Needless to say, I've grown out of that way of living. I think the real break came when I went to college, and I could do whatever the hell I wanted whenever the hell I wanted. No, I didn't cut loose and get drunk every night. I slept in, I did homework at the last minute, I stayed up late. I wasn't a total rebel.

But I kind of liked being the master of my own schedule. I still had a Joe-Job, so that came with some restrictions. But at least I could eat dinner whenever I wanted.

And now I am married and have my own house, and a non-Joe-Job. And I've become the opposite of my 5 year-old self. I have almost no structure at all.

When you are an adjunct instructor, your schedule is kind of all over the place. You have classes that meet twice a week for a couple hours. This makes prep time pretty loose. It's still got to happen, and you've still got to grade, but you can determine where and when and how this gets done.

This also allows for a certain amount of free time, which is great for me. If I am busy all day, I am not going to write. I just cannot get into that frame of mind when I've got other things to worry about. And I am a big believer in decompression time. And writing, while it is a lot of fun and my passion, is still work.

But a lack of structure is not good either, because I don't actually get much done. As in, I don't get anything done.

I am a little averse to the words "structure" and "rules" and "schedule." These things make me roll my eyes. These things make me want to play video games.  I admit this pretty freely to my students, along with my hatred of words like "math." (I probably shouldn't do this, but it just slips out).

This past fall, the pastor of our church asked if I would write these monologue-thingies for the Easter service, which I was all over... but didn't actually do right away. And I even had deadlines. I had several. First it was December 1st. Then is was January 1st. Now we're meeting February 14th with the group.

And I got it done!

But only after I said one morning: Okay, Monologue #1 is getting done today, no excuses.
And then only after I said another morning: Okay, Monologue # 2 is getting done today. Maybe a couple excuses...

I think part of the issue is the fact that I don't see writing as a "serious" thing. It's not "real work." This is bullshit, actually, but because I don't get paid to do it, and because it doesn't really "matter" in a real sense, it's easy for me to just shrug it off and put it on the back burner, even when I have obligations. And when life gets really hectic and sad and crazy, I am even less likely to get work finished.

I think another part of the issue is this idea that Creativity and Structure do not mesh. To a degree I think this is true: You cannot force creativity or writing, because then it can just kind of suck. But that doesn't mean you should just sit and watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer and eat Doritos until the Muse descends.

Something that my students and I often talk about is this feeling we get when someone tells us we have to do something. When a teacher tells a student he or she has to write a paper, the instant reaction is: "Damn it!" That's my reaction, a little. Maybe less PG. I have this sense that I cannot write something unless I came up with it, or unless I just have this sense that I need to do it.

Part of this, admittedly, is an attitude problem. I don't like doing work that I don't feel passionate about. And I won't pretend to be passionate about something (books, music, movies, food, etc.) just to impress people or get along with them. I can do what I want, and it doesn't matter what other people like. The world's not going to end.

There is some comfort in structure though. Habits can be a good thing, too. That's why children like structure: it reassures them everything is okay, that one thing will follow the other, life is predictable.

(Isn't it lovely how we lie to children for their own good?)

When you write, this is not the case. It is unpredictable. One thing does not always follow the other. Especially when you write pro bono.

Starting this blog was supposed to help introduce some more structure into my writing habits, and it has done something to get me writing in some sense at least a few times a week. But still, most of the time spent working on my novel(s) is going through and tweaking things I've already written.

Maybe this is writer's block.
Or maybe I'm not making writing a "job."
(The pay is terrible, but for me it's a job.)
(And I am not treating it like one.)
I don't treat it like one, because writing is more than a job.
It gives me something to think about, mull over, read, do.

Part of this issue with writing is something that has always come naturally to me. I've been "writing" stories since before I could write; I would draw pictures. Writing, or being a writer is not this thing I aspire to do. It's just something that I am, that's part of who I am in the same way I have a big nose. I can't really separate it from myself.

What really needs to happen is this: I need to acknowledge that I write for the sake of writing, but this is still something that needs to be taken seriously. It is something I need to make time for. And I need to get to the point where I will go OCD-crazy if I don't take that time to write.

I need to set a schedule or a goal. I need to organize my time to fit writing in, not just as an afterthought, but as an appointment that must be kept.

My five-year-old self would be so proud of me. Or else busy fixing the cuffs on her jeans.

A Strange Overlap: Music and Words.

Sometimes I find myself listening to music and typing a story or some thoughts or whatever, and I start to get this weird desire to write something that might somehow match the music I'm listening to in order to connect the two mediums and make my experience complete.

I've never been able to fully separate music from words. One feeds into the other.

When I was younger, maybe in second or third grade or so and couldn't really write all that much, I would draw pictures of stories and listen to music on tape cassette to accompany it. I can write without listening to music, and I can definitely listen to music without writing, but when I'm really on a roll, and in the zone, the two are synched up, and I find one song on a loop as I type page upon page upon page. 

I listen to music while I'm reading too, and then whatever it is I was listening to while I was reading that book becomes forever associated with it. When I was a junior in high school, we read In Cold Blood, and I was listening to Soul Junk's 1956 at the time, and now I will forever connect the two. Same thing more recently:  The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and All Delighted People. In both of these examples, the music does not really reflect the tone or subject matter of either novel. At all.

But, then again, I associate all music I listen to with certain periods in my life. And it isn't some vague, nostalgic feeling. It is a distinct, specific event or time. My husband thinks this might be one of my special little eccentricities. Virtually every single album I listen to has a connection to something else.  It doesn't just exist on its own, as its own separate entity. Like most things in life, it gets all tangled up with something else.

I'm fortunate to live in a day and age where music is so readily available, because otherwise I don't know what I would do with myself. I'd probably have to seriously take up an instrument. But it seems kind of difficult to play a sonata on the piano and write a novel simultaneously.

(On a side note: this may not be so difficult if it was playing a sonata and a video game simultaneously).

Sometimes the two activities manage to flow together well. But right before I began writing this post, I felt that horrible disjunction between the two. And I'm starting to think that this disjunction indicates something a bit more important: Whatever it was I was writing was getting BORING. So music has also become a bit of a litmus test. If the music I'm listening to can't get the job going, then I'm screwed, right?

Music makes everything better: chores, long commutes, movies, sex, food, books... life. Probably death too. 

I've heard some people argue about how this overload of music and ipods and things are actually bad for us. It's cluttering up our life, etc., and we should be engaging in Socratic dialogues somewhere instead, and so on. As a college instructor, there may be some truth to this, since it seems many people are becoming crippled by their inability to connect with others, and ipods can certainly make it easy to shut the outside world out.

But I think really great music makes for better connection.

I mean, the reason why concerts are such wonderful experiences is due to that sense of communal enjoyment. And this often happens among complete strangers. One can just bask in the sounds and the feeling of the music.

Although it's not an airtight argument, I think music proves God's existence. And it makes my writing work better. It feeds it and helps it grow. It's a little strange, and it maybe marks me as a Gen-Xer, but it's like the music goes from the machine, up the wire, into the headphones, into my ears, down my neck, shoulders, through my arms, and back into my fingertips, and so, onto the page (typing or writing, whatever). It's a cyclical pattern that obeys natural law: nothing is lost. It's all self-contained.

Now, if only I could figure out how music can help me write something I'm not all that inspired to write...

Writing Obscenity, and Listening to Jonsi. (Neither of which are actually related to each other...)

Before we begin: 

I've been a bit lax in my blog posting. I'm a little worried about what theme I should pick for it, since it appears most blogs have some sort of subject. I don't really want to pick a specific thing to focus on, though. Maybe that's a bit lazy of me to do, but it's been that kind of a year. Or two. I've been lazy, or at least, I've been rethinking ambitions and what place they should have in my life, which makes one seem  lazy. And this whole blog-business was supposed to be about discipline, and making sure I wrote something at least five days a week or so. So here is this random post about a couple things I've been thinking about. 

Thing #1: Vulgarity and Obscenity in my own Writing. 

I've been feeling more and more paranoid about this. I don't think of myself as all that vulgar or obscene, but it would seem that I maybe give off that impression, somehow. A friend recently observed: "You're like the Skinny Bitch writer, because you swear all the time!" True? Not sure. I don't mince words, anyway, and I don't really avoid talking about topics that might be considered "inappropriate." Plus, I think adolescent-boy humor is amazing. 

So, when I am writing, I do use somewhat colorful language at times, usually in character dialogue. It has to make sense, and it shouldn't detract from my writing, but it often feels necessary. Although a lot of the stuff I write is not "realistic" or realism, I think in order for a reader to suspend belief, they have to really believe in all the surrounding elements of the story. If everything is complete nonsense, then the book becomes nonsense. 

For example: In a film or a television show about gladiators, we can expect a certain amount of blood, dismemberment, foul language, lewd everything, sex, and other stuff. But in the show Spartacus, the level to which all of these things are taken is so extreme it becomes a joke. The writers probably had conversations like this: 

"Hm. We have not seen a single bare breast in this scene in over five minutes." 

"But this scene takes place at a Chuck-E-Cheese..."

"Yeah... but there has to be some way we can make this sexy and/or violent." 

"I know! We'll have a woman with gigantic implants start stripping and gyrating against the play-place before she openly breast feeds her eighteen year old son!"

"Yes!"

"Brilliant."

"And then, Chuck-E comes in with a sword through his stomach, spurting blood everywhere!"

"Yeah! Great!"

 (All right. Slight exaggeration. We all know there aren't any play-places at Chuck-E-Cheese.)

I do understand that this over-the-top extremism is a fantasy. People don't watch Spatacus to get a history lesson. It's a guilty-pleasure kind of show. I've never been into guilty pleasures. It's probably the wet-blanket New Englander in me. 

But it is equally nonsensical, (to draw an example from my own writing), to have a working-class, abrasive, alcoholic talk like Pollyanna. 

The trouble is: some people do not like this. My older sister is my first go-to editor/critic. I take her advice and suggestions about my writing very seriously. But she just cannot take "the f-bombs" as she puts it. She thinks it is ridiculous. But she mainly thinks it is ridiculous because she would never, ever drop an f-bomb. In fact, I'm pretty sure she has never uttered the word in her entire life. (Although she did try to use a much worse expletive in a particularly desperate move in Bananagrams). And I am about to join another writer's group made up of Christian writers, and I am a little worried. One is a friend of mine, and I don't think the others are judgmental or legalistic types, but still: there's no way my book (if it were to ever get published...) would ever be put in the Christian/Inspirational section at Barnes and Noble... 

I don't think this is something that can be neatly tied up and set aside. Everyone has his or her idea on how much or how little one should censor oneself. I guess it's just something that every writer has to decide to deal with in some sense. When it comes down to it, I think one should just do whatever it takes to tell the story in the best way possible. If this can't be done without a decapitation or characters making whoopie, whatever. You've got to do what you've got to do. I guess it comes down to a personal judgment call. Safe stories aren't always good stories, are they? And shocking, crazy-brutal stories don't guarantee quality either... 

Thing #2: Jonsi. 

I don't have that much to say about him. I just love him, and find his music wonderful. 

Write Through It.

Today is a terrible day. I'm starting to think this might have been a bad time to start a blog.

I am not going to go into details right now about why today is a terrible day; I'll write on it in a future post.

Instead, to avoid having too many sad posts in a row, today I will write about writing.

I'm not a particular fan of using writing as therapy, at least, not in my own life. Whenever I'd start a journal, for instance, I'd fall into this pattern of only writing whenever I was feeling unhappy. This was not good, especially when I considered the possibility of future generations finding my journal and deciding great-grandma was a super-bitchy and miserable human being.

And when I write, I usually use the activity to escape or avoid whatever might be bothering me at that moment. For instance, when I got rejected from PhD programs a few years ago, I managed to completely revamp and rewrite a novel I had been working on for almost three years. And it wasn't a short one. I think I pumped out something like two-hundred pages in a couple months. But when it came to what I should have been writing (as in, final seminar papers), I could barely eke out fifteen pages, let alone several dozen.

However, there have been a few occasions where I have "written through it," so to speak.

Most recently (and probably most pathetically), this past summer I wrote a sprawling-drunken rant in a tiny Moleskine notebook on my fears about the future. I haven't actually gone back to read it; maybe I should since it will remind me why I should never drink-and-write again. But in that instance, words just came out in ink form without any effort (or thought...) whatsoever.

Less pathetic: I also wrote a few words for my grandfather's funeral. I didn't particularly want to, mainly because I was so saddened by his death, and didn't think I could pull a coherent sentence together, but my mother suggested that I write something, so I did. I cried the entire time I was typing, and I couldn't finish reading it aloud at the funeral, but I wrote.

I've read a lot of stuff by writers who bemoan the writing process as being painful. They're usually writing about things like getting a draft finished, or coming up with ideas, or meeting deadlines or something. And they're right. That stuff is tough, for sure. But I find writing about life pretty fucking difficult. I'd rather put on the television and not do or feel anything at all.

The thing is, I don't think that being a writer is a particularly comfortable job. If you are a good writer, you can't "move on" the way other people do because you have to write about it first. You have to think about why you are thinking those thoughts, and why you are feeling those emotions. You have to consider how these things affect who you are as a person. You have to dwell on the past. You have to remember the painful memories, as well as the good memories that sometimes become painful in retrospect.

So even though today is a terrible day, I chose to write anyway. And even though tomorrow will be just as sad, I'll choose to write through it again.