The Novelist's Hubris

Future Attractions

Today feels like a flurry of future attractions. I'm sitting in the matinee, waiting for the movie, and I'm just watching previews instead. But I like previews. They put good scenes in previews. Also -- and this is embarrassing -- I'm soft-hearted as all get-out, so previews usually make me cry, if it's a tear-jerker.

Here are some of the things that are coming up in my life (and here):

I'm writing an editorial about something I care about (hint: it's in the triumvirate of what TNH is about) for a pretty sizable media outlet. And I'm worried that I'm going to screw it up, or that they won't take it in the end, or that no one will read it, or that putting my opinion out there for once in my life is going to land me in hot water; but I'm happy that I've gotten the chance to write it, and I'll let y'all know when it's out in the world. And there's the novel excerpt in Storychord on Monday. I've got heebie-jeebies about that. Stage fright.

Today I received full approval to go to the Vermont Studio Center in September. I'll be there for four weeks, and I haven't got a clue how far I'll have gotten in my first draft by then -- but I'm already plotting my schedule out, and trying to figure out how to maximize my time so that I can finish a solid draft by 2013 or 2014.

I quit my role in the fashion blog that I started in 2008 so that I could have more mental energy and time to work on cuddling, novel writing, this blog, etc.

There's a rad-as-hell interview with Jessalyn Wakefield going up next week with never-before-seen photographs and sizzling Q&A.

And I'm going on vacation this long weekend to the seashore, where I'm going to load up my camera, dip my toes in the freezing saltwater, and sleep in a room with a fireplace.

What are you looking forward to?

xo,

The Novelist Whinges, The Writer Whines

NOTE: Because I am a finely-attuned machine when it comes to my stats counter, I reckon that I've tripled my average hits in the last two days. I can attribute this to two sources. If you're new: thank you for coming, and I appreciate that you stopped by. I'm planning additional posts about mental illness and higher education, should you have come via the "Why I Left Yale" post; if you're here because of "Thirteen Times," there's plenty more where that came from. Try this welcome page, if you're new.

 

With the exception of a novel excerpt that's coming out in Storychord on Monday (yes, that's 4/25; mark it on your calendar and write it on your palm with a Sharpie), writing a novel feels like a long walk in the desert. There are mirages here and there, but they're just mirages. Once in a while: an oasis.

Walking in a desert is no fun. I'm thinking no-fun-like-the-protagonist-of-Mating-in-the-desert no fun. Your donkey runs off and you're left thinking you're going to die. Watch out for buzzards.

I put my draft into a Pages document to see how many pages I've racked up. So far, 360, which is around 114,000 words. When I left Michigan, I hadn't even hit 60,000 yet, so there's been some velocity there. A lot of that velocity was thanks to my residency at Gibraltar Point, a lot of it was due to my work with Dyana Valentine, and a lot of it was due to Hanna coming to visit for a month while I was recuperating from major surgery.

I decided to submit some excerpts to various hot-shot journals while I was recuperating. And the rejections just came/come rolling in. I received a nice letter from The Missouri Review, but then again, I've also received a nice letter from The New Yorker. (Yes, I'm bragging. I have the right because I've never been published. I am also infamously, terribly insecure.) The rejections! They kept coming! What a downer, right? It's so hard to keep up the morale when working on a novel, especially one that sprawls. In the meantime, I was accepted to another residency (September) and heard back from Storychord about "The Arrangement" (4/25, remember?).

"Hanna," I wrote in a chat, "I'm feeling really heartbroken over all of these rejections. I know my writing isn't ready. I know I'm not good enough. But I keep trying, because I want external validation. I want to know that I'm not just wasting my time. You know?"

"Tell me about it, honey," she said (or something like that).

I'm going to quote something she said, because she is wise.

"I think I understand what you mean about going so long, working so hard, and not having sort of midway senses of accomplishment that secure you in the feeling that you are going in the right direction, doing amazing work, etc. And I think maybe part of the cruelty of writing a novel is, well, a part might not be stellar until the whole is stellar."

So I'm trying to keep my whinging to a minimum, and remember to plug along. Because that's the joy and the sweat and the blood and everything else; it's in the work. And the acknowledgments and money and other things -- those are nice, but the thrill only lasts for so long. It's in the work. It's in the work.

xo,

The Long Road to No Monetization

Oatmeal, cooked raspberries, and whipped cream.

I took down my shop two nights ago; I took down the links to purchasing prints and postcards. Presently, TNH is a place with no monetization, and no plans for monetization. (I actually lose money on TNH from paying TypePad fees.) With my down-to-the-half-hour schedule the way it is, I don't see myself offering copywriting services or e-courses anytime soon, either.

But why, you may be asking, would I ever think that I needed to make money off of my webspace? I come from a background of avid LiveJournaling, where diarist blogging meant that you got what you paid for, if you had a Paid Account -- a tightly knit community and people to listen to you when times were good, bad, and ugly. But in my attempt to find community in this weird wide web of the Internet now, I've somehow found myself in the entrepreunerial community. I'm more of a lurker than a participant, but I read White Hot Truth and Unicorns for Socialism; I listen to freelancing podcasts and read about why Freckle is the best thing on earth, and why blogging for money is the way to go, because who doesn't want more money? In fact, when the hot, sassy Kelly Diels and I had a Red Shoe Blogger session, we spent way more time talking about money than we needed to, because of the assumption that ducats were my mojo.

Well, let me tell you this. I like money, and I like feeling prosperous in more ways than one. But I don't think that I know how to make money here off of what I do. In the (admittedly short) period of time that I had photographs for sale here, I made twenty-two cents. Maybe my photos suck, but this is also true: the market is just glutted with people who know their way around a lens, and I'm one of those suckers who have gone to art school, have an eyeball that likes to look at things, and wants someone to pay for a print. But you know what? NO MORE. My strengths are fiction writing and lovin' folk. I am not going to make money on TNH by doing either. The strengths of TNH are me talking about my trifecta, as spiritual coach Ronna Detrick calls it: writing, mental illness/health, and compassion/care.

So I'm paring down. The top menu is different -- no more CV, store, or links to photography. Those simply aren't where my strengths are, or where TNH's strengths are. Instead, there are two empty pages of a Manifesto (which I'm looking forward to writing) and Resources (which I'm looking forward to collecting).

I'm still coming to terms with all of this. Listening to entrepreneurial podcasts and reading entrepreneurial blogs so much has my brain in a real wackadoo headspace. I'm still considering becoming an affiliate for some rad note cards that I genuinely love, and have been writing many letters on these days -- but other than that, I have no plans for becoming an affiliate, a place for ad space, or having revenue streams in general.

Therefore, I hope, freeing up TNH for what it's meant to be. And that meant-to-be-ness is fab stuff.

xo,

The Other Side

I've been fortunate in that, since approximately 2004 (1999-2004 was an abyss of poorly-managed medications), I've been a good responder to chemical adjustments. A little bit more of this. Watch for mania. A little bit more of this. Deal with the fatigue. Don't drink alcohol. Drink less coffee.

Last night I threw a party for my husband, and I loved him so much in that karaoke bar in Japantown with my hand on his. And I thought, I am so, so lucky, and I know this to be true.

xo,

On Both Sides of the Episode, You Are Okay

I bought these Cosabella bras recently, and I can't imagine wearing anything else. They look like soft animals to me when they're all crumpled up. Animals curled up onto themselves.

I am fortunate in that I have always been, generally, all right on either side of an episode. (I'm not counting breakthrough symptoms, here, such as peripheral hallucinations -- which are annoying, but have no bearing on my ability to function.) When I'm doing well, it's easy to forget the bad stuff, and vice versa. I spoke about this in my post about phase blindness, and it's true of me right now.

The last few weeks have been tough, and I won't deny it. I'm taking the day off of work -- so far, I've severely depleted my winter holiday store of time off due to The Many Illnesses of 2011 -- but I'm trying to be kind to myself, and not feel guilty or beat myself up for the downturns of my body and brain. Because, for the most part, I am honestly not able to help these things until they happen.

These are the things I am doing today: drinking water, reading The Pale King, journaling, talking to my psychiatrist, taking all of my medications, stretching, making sure to eat, making Wellness Tea.

And that's all I have to say for today, beloved readers. I might also mention that in March, The Novelist's Hubris experienced its first birthday -- which I didn't celebrate, but which I am looking forward to celebrating belatedly with you.

xo,

Sorrowful and Joyous: The Pale King and Capgras

I'm reading The Pale King, and with the arrival (which happened controversially early, due to Amazon/Hachette/Little, Brown gaffes, and the fact that I was one of those jerks who pre-ordered the book months ago) of this posthumous publication of DFW's ambitious, unfinished book about boredom and how to live have also come a slew of new articles about DFW. I don't want to read all of them, and probably I won't be able to, but so far I've read the generally positive Michiko Kakutani review, the interesting 7,000-word GQ article, a few middling blog posts in various places. There's also the Pietsch introduction at the beginning of The Pale King, which ends with the lines, "But an unfinished novel is what we have, and how can we not look? David, alas, isn't here to stop us from reading, or to forgive us for wanting to."

So yesterday I was feeling sorrowful. There were all kinds of stressors on my plate -- trailing physical problems, the slew of old and highly successful friends arriving from everywhere around the world for V's wedding, an everpresent concern for R, etc. But Hanna said, "I think a lot of what you're feeling today has to do with DFW and The Pale King." Strange how she hit that straight on, deadpan. She didn't say, Why are you feeling so much over the debut of a book, and is this the kind of behavior that would indicate you are part of the Cult of Wallace that sprang up, or was only noticed, after his death? She just said that I was feeling sorrowful over this book that had come out, which is not something that I've experienced before.

Completely related to this issue is the fact that yesterday at work I started to think about writing something about Capgras delusion. Capgras has been written about before, in plenty of places -- there's that Ramachadran pop neuroscience book (Phantoms in the Brain, which I read when I was much younger), and the National Book Award winner of 2006, The Echo Maker. But I haven't written about Capgras in any depth -- not here, and not in my novel.

So then -- what is Capgras delusion. Forgive me, haters-of-Wikipedia, but here: "The Capgras delusion theory (or Capgras syndrome) is a disorder in which a person holds a delusion that a friend, spouse, parent, or other close family member has been replaced by an identical-looking impostor." It's no wonder that Richard Powers chose to write an entire novel about the subject -- it reads like the juicy stuff of fiction, doesn't it? It's also the most prominent delusion that I experience when I'm moderately psychotic. Coming up in this blog is a fascinating interview and visual art series with a good friend of mine, Jessalyn Wakefield, a writer/artist/performer/bookmaker/etc. who has been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder; she describes, in the interview, psychosis as having the distinct marker of terror. Which I would agree with. The few times that I've had the Capgras delusion, I was always, always terrified beyond imagination.

And I want to write about it. So I've been thinking about that -- how I'm going to do it, and how I'm going to convey the feeling that everyone you look at has been replaced by a robot, or is in some other way a shell of him- or herself, having been replaced by something awful, something sickening, and something that leaves you utterly alone in the world.

xo,

Even This First Step

I was feeling lousy about my writing (a sort of general malaise, post-residency rejections, despite finally arriving at the halfway point of the first draft of my novel) -- when Hanna, whose birthday it is, and who was accepted into MacDowell's summer session this year (hurrah!), sent me this Cavafy poem:

The First Step                    

The young poet Evmenis
complained one day to Theocritos:
“I have been writing for two years now
and I have composed just one idyll.
It’s my only completed work.
I see, sadly, that the ladder of Poetry
is tall, extremely tall;
and from this first step I now stand on
I will never climb any higher.”
Theocritos replied: “Words like that
are improper, blasphemous.
Just to be on the first step
should make you happy and proud.
To have come this far is no small achievement:
what you have done is a glorious thing.
Even this first step
is a long way above the ordinary world.
To stand on this step
you must be in your own right
a member of the city of ideas.
And it is a hard, unusual thing
to be enrolled as a citizen of that city.
Its councils are full of Legislators
no charlatan can fool.
To have come this far is no small achievement:
what you have done already is a glorious thing.”

xo,

 

Unapproachable Things

People come over and they marvel at the assortment of prescription medications I have on my coffee table. The coffee table, which is "shabby chic" and "French country," was purchased online and delivered for less than twenty dollars to my living room.

I have swollen vertebrae and a rotated pelvis. How my pelvis became rotated is unclear. It could have happened on the operating table, when they moved me this way and that. Or it could have happened because I was completely inactive for a month and then went back to my daily life. Either way, one of my legs is now shorter than the other.

The painkillers that are prescribed to me have a side effect of creating mood swings. I don't like to take the painkillers for this reason, but when I don't, I feel like I'm being worn down.

I was rejected from two residencies.

A friend tells me good-bye.

A Post About Pain

Pain, especially long-term pain, can make people misanthropic, angry, and bitter. Even normally very nice people. I've been thinking about this over the last few months.

 

I went back to work on Monday after feeling much better for a few days. Remember that I'd been convalescing for over a month. Then, hours later: pain. Really bad pain.

By the time I went to the clinic for the billionth time yesterday, I had a new diagnosis: back strain. It seems that my back muscles had atrophied when I was recovering, and I pulled a muscle or otherwise injured my back while attempting to get back to everyday life. The back strain was also the culprit behind my pelvic, leg, and abdominal pain, due to the network of nerves originating from the lower back.

The doctor, who wasn't my ordinary doctor, told me to take Motrin and sit on hard chairs. This was after I told her that I was experiencing pain from a 7 to 8 on the pain scale. (Which was true.) I asked her how I was supposed to function with this kind of pain. She said that I would be better in two days, but that it would take a month to fully recover.

I was already near tears by then, but I waited until she left the room to sit on the floor and sob. I cried all the way to the elevators. I cried in the lab where I was getting yet another round of tests done. I cried in the Member Services office, where I tried to get my rejected Short Term Disability forms filled out. I was also hating everyone around me. Even the people who were trying to help. 

I thought of everyone I know who is angry and bitter, and in pain.

I took two melatonin at 9 PM and fell asleep after reading a bit of Mating (Rush). I woke up with pain. I am very tired.

 

4 Life Things I Learned During (Surgical) Recovery

My first real outing after being laid up on the couch for a month was to go to a flower arranging class with Francesca, which is where these pictures are from -- at Prairie Collective's Studio Choo, a gorgeous little co-operative shop full of beautiful things.

The following are four things that I learned during the recovery process, post-surgery, and I share them here because I think that they're helpful in more general ways as well.

1. Drink water. Really. It's not only hydrating and good for the body, as your loved ones, health magazines, and doctors will tell you, but drinking water is also truly excellent for the spirit. Dyana Valentine, instigator extraordinaire, is the one who tipped me off to this one. I started drinking big glasses of cold water as "restart" mechanisms: after long and difficult conversations, after writing a painful or challenging passage in my novel, or if I was feeling stressed out and worn out. I took to drinking large glasses of cold water, and it served me well. Try it. 

2. Be gentle with yourself. Sometimes, that looks like giving yourself time. I gained weight because abdominal/pelvic surgery does not allow for much post-surgical movement. I wanted to go for walks and do yoga. After a week or two, I started hankering for the gym. I still can't go to the gym yet, and I'm writing this from home because I went back to work today for the first time in over a month; halfway through the day I started having terrible pain. 

I'd almost gone back to work one or two weeks after the surgery. I felt guilty about staying at home -- really, really guilty. I kept saying I would come back "soon" or "hopefully on _____" -- until Dr. K wrote me a letter saying that I needed three more weeks to recover (which turned into four, due to an internal infection resulting from the surgery). Dr. K's letter gave me permission to take time to heal. I learned to be okay with not pouring my own milk out of a gallon jug or letting the laundry sit for weeks. I started ordering grocery delivery online, which actually turned out to be significantly cheaper than schlepping to the expensive specialty market nearby. People came and cleaned the house. 

I'm not saying that you need to do any of those things, but what I am saying is that sometimes your brain and body need tenderness, and you need to be the one to give it. Which is connected to 3.) --

3. Let your loved ones help you when you need help. In the final week of my recovery, Chris had to leave for a business trip. A dear friend flew out and stayed with me, and I'm ever so grateful for her help and love during that time. 

While I was recovering, people made me meals, took out the garbage for me, brought me my packages from work, helped me navigate the California Short-Term Disability system, and so much more. And I'm really, really grateful for that.

4. Productivity doesn't always look like "productivity." Sometimes taking a nap is productivity when you're tired.

 

My MacBook is at the shop right now; I feel like I sent it away to summer camp for the first time, and I'm a nervous mom. Because all of my photo editing software is on that laptop, I can't guarantee that I'll post everyday -- but we'll see. I'd like to.

And, finally, thank you to everyone who wished me well. It was truly kind of y'all, and I'm sure that it helped me.