Monthly Archives: July 2010

now it is my turn to say Squee

Posted on July 30, 2010 | Leave a comment

The headline above was the subject line of an e-mail I got from my editor this morning (I type “Squee” often when excited). Her e-mail read:

Because we just got galleys!! And they look GORGEOUS. There are a few images that printed a bit dark, so we’ll make notes and see what can be done to fix them for the final (may have to reshoot some of the coins, in particular).

There is also an unusual mistake – the spin printed with RA/LB logo, but no title or author. This is not great, obviously, but not the worst thing ever – we’ll sticker them before we send out any copies to reviewers, bloggers, etc.

I only got one early copy but the rest will be here in a day or so and we’ll send some your way.

My reply:

So this morning I had a writer’s wet dream. I wrote this truly inspired paragraph (I really wish I could remember what it was about, all I remember is that it featured apples in some way) and when I hit the final period I felt this gentle tap on my shoulder. I turned and there was JM Coetzee, who scooted me out of the chair and proceeded to write an extensive and very loving critique of said paragraph, which he signed “John Maxwell C.” Then I woke up and there were GALLEYS AT MY DOOR.

Seriously, if I smoked, I think I’d have to light one up.

EeeeEEEEEEEeeeeEEEEEeeeee.

See, he wrote “John Maxwell C” instead of “JM Coetzee” because he loves me and only me. My editor wrote back:

Ha! But wait – do you mean galleys really WERE at your door, or is that part of the dream thing?

At which point I completely lost in the ability to format or punctuate properly:

They’re really heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeere

And my editor exploded into capital letters and question marks:

OH!!! So – don’t they look AMAZING??? I mean, aside from the stuff you hate that we’re fixing?? I can’t stop admiring mine.

Then I passed out:

indeed forsooth yea and verily

what’s not in the book

Posted on July 22, 2010 | 5 comments

Today I received my class book for my upcoming ten-year Stanford reunion. The book is a compilation of pages alumni from my graduating class made about their lives since college. Since I am an absolute sucker for that kind of nostalgia, I tore it out of its envelope and spent the whole afternoon devouring its contents. Nom nom nom nostalgia, you are so tasty.

After absorbing a few hundred pages of my fellow alumni, I did start to feel a bit inadequate. After all, I had never dived the Great Barrier Reef, or built hospitals in Africa, or won an Olympic medal, or created my own start-up, or backpacked in Patagonia, or cut cancer out of grateful children. Then I realized I was being utterly absurd. Of course the pages would only feature the impressive achievements of seemingly well-adjusted people! For my own page, I didn’t very well write about the two and half years of harrowing pain that had me in & out of hospitals, the surgeries, the creditors calling about medical bills, the conviction that I was slowly dying, the loneliness, the terror. I mean, I didn’t want to be a bummer.

Once the book was closed I sat there wondering about all that was elided from those pages, about the people who didn’t send pages at all. Then I thought how grand it would be if all the pivotal moments from people’s lives had been included, even the tawdry and painful ones. Sentences like:

I destroyed my marriage when I slept with my boss. I got promoted though.
Last year I finally reached my weight loss goal. Cocaine is a hell of a drug.
…but after my second stint in San Quentin was when I really began to make some bad decisions.
This stifled suburban life makes me want to wedge a shotgun tightly under my chin and blow the back of my head off.
The condom broke. I am expecting twins in August.
The worm they removed from my large intestine was over three feet long.
When my divorce finally came through, I rewarded myself by having a prostitute do all the things my wife wouldn’t. But now that burning rash on my scrotum won’t go away no matter what I do.

But no no, I am being foolish. Such things never happen to Stanford graduates. We are all exemplary. Everyone of us as beautiful and serene as the flower-heavy night wind rustling the palms on the main quad.

People who went to the Ivies though, they are fucked up.

5 Comments

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged nostalgia, stanford

Dude, this is what the inside of my head looks like.

Posted on July 16, 2010 | 3 comments

While I was making the bed, Dragos Popescu, one of Andrei’s business associates, suddenly spoke to me. He is even more unbelievably tactless than Andrei is; those bastards won’t lie to me, even when I may want them to. Today Dragos came up behind me while I was noticing that some of the stains on the new sheets hadn’t come out in the wash, and snapped my garters (he is the kind of man who can snap your garters even when you’re not wearing any). “That’s nice, the pink underthings,” he said, “did Andrei suggest them?”

“Why are you here? You’re just a bit character.”

“You were asking why men like young women so much, I’m going to tell you.”

I don’t know where he got that from, I did no such thing. I was going about my housewifely business. But I let him go on anyway, it gave me something to do while I was trying to figure out which way the fitted sheet was supposed to go. “It not so much the smooth skin and the taut flesh, though that is nice too. What is so lovely about them is that they will take the shape of whatever you choose to put them in, like water. A woman who has been around, who may have pushed people out of herself, who may have realized that the world does not end when there is no man in the house, that woman with lines on her face and hip bones that have been pushed apart by growing life will not go breathless with need to give me what I want. The young ones are so good, my dear, because they will say: do you like me in this dress? Would you think me prettier blonde? Shall I put bags of silicone in my breasts? Shall I give you what little power I might have had? Would this please you? There is no limit to how much they will cut themselves to please you. How grateful I am to all their papas for not loving them.”

“Dragos, seriously? This is what the old come stains on the bed make you think of?”

“Yes, how soft they are, how much you can hurt them, those sweet girls. You simply cannot hurt an older woman like that. And yes, my dear, you ought to get a stain remover for those.”

3 Comments

Posted in sex, writing

Tagged In the Red, sex, writing

whence dude comes

Posted on July 14, 2010 | Leave a comment

I think we should re-institute the word whence. Isn’t I don’t know whence this comes so much more elegant than I don’t know where this comes from? Actually, let’s go whole hog: isn’t I know not whence this comes much nicer than I don’t know where this comes from? When did English decide that stating something in the negative requires the addition of the verb to do?

Spoken like someone who reads a lot of old stuff. I also think we should bring back shall. What other word has a meaning so delicately poised between should and will?

Should I do this? Shall I do this? Will I do this?

Not to mention, I freaking love shan’t.

Okay, okay, since so much of what I write on this blog makes me sound like I was born during the Jackson administration, I will also share some of the movements I like in modern American English. I love the word dude. For my first dozen or so years in California, I manfully resisted this word. I had the same moral objection to it as to the unchecked proliferation of the word like (which I still, like, don’t like, but like, live with). Then one day I completely surrendered to dude, because it can be so expressive, and has so many applications. For instance, witness this clip:

Isn’t dude awesome? (NB at some point I also surrendered to the word awesome.)

I also like when offensive words with nasty histories are re-appropriated. Bitch used to mean “recalcitrant woman,” but now it rather means “whiny person.” It’s being de-gendered, and I think that’s a good thing. It always gives me a little subversive thrill to say that a man is being a bitch. I also approve of what’s by and large happened to the word nigger, that it’s used as a form of address within the black community. I’m a little puzzled by white people who complain they can’t use it–I mean, why would they want to? Coming from a white person, this is a word of exclusion. The whole point of its re-appropriation is turning it into a word of inclusion; that’s why it’s supposed to stay within the black community. Of course, inclusion implies exclusion of someone else–I suppose that’s why it being a black word bothers some whites (this is the nicer interpretation, the less nice interpretation being that it signifies the lessening of their power as the privileged race). But shit, when we live in a society where no one is being systematically oppressed because of how much melanin they have in their skin, then we can open up the use of that word. Then we would see that that word, in a truly all-inclusive society, would be of no interest to anyone. It would be as obsolete as the word reprobate in the Calvinist sense. Would it turn into something like what reprobate means now?

No, I think it would do what is best. I think it would simply and quietly disappear.

Je suis derrière la porte.

Posted on July 11, 2010 | 6 comments

My big achievement for today was hiding a picture of myself behind the door on my “about me” page. Trust me, considering my technological ineptitude, this is indeed an achievement. I also made a little icon of my book cover for my sidebar that links directly to my novel’s Amazon page. If I were truly virtuous, it would link to a page that read “be good and buy me from a struggling independent bookstore!” But, I am not that virtuous.

Oh–I almost forgot: I also added my twitter feed to my sidebar. Yes, I signed up for twitter. My editor told me to, and because I am a befuddled virgin author, I acquiesced. 140 characters is bloody short. It’s an interesting exercise in editing though. So far I’ve managed to avoid using “2” for “to” or other internety abbreviations that raise my old, obsolete hackles. I’ve also managed to avoid steering the horseless carriage as it frightens me and I do not enjoy it. (Dude, I’m totally serious. I don’t drive. I’m sure at some point I will have to remedy this situation. At some point. But I am very gifted at procrastination.)

I continue on with my new novel, In the Red. Although it appears that for every page I produce, I must delete two. I have a plot, but I do not have a structure. I also have a taciturn protagonist, who is a rather stark contrast from my dear, voluble Trevor. It appears she will not disclose anything unless I ask her directly. So, progress is slow.

I am also in the thick of reviewing typeset pages for 13 rue Thérèse. They look really pretty, although in a lot of places the typesetter misunderstood my instructions so extravagantly that it makes me want to lie down and whimper softly to myself. Sigh. The galleys will contain the errors as there will not be enough time to correct them before they are printed. Double sigh.

Typeset pages are a much different animal than manuscript pages. For one thing, I must limit my editing as much as I can in order to make as little extra work as possible for the typesetter. I’ve only changed one word here or there; the time for extensive edits is over. I’m having a lot of conversations with myself that look like this:

“Oh that paragraph is terrible! We must delete it immediately.”

“Ssssshh calm yourself. Maybe no one will notice.”

“Well, I hope to God nobody quotes it in a review.”

A typeset text is literally set. It’s like lava that’s solidified into rock. If you want to change it you have to whip out a chisel, because the stage of flux has ended. It’s hard to describe the transformation. It’s not my manuscript anymore; it’s now part of the collective record. Everything that went into the text is subsumed within it. The people who inspired the characters are now gone from inside them; only the characters remain. The sources are immortalized; the sources are expunged. The text is dead; long live the text.

Sweep away the ash and lay your hand on rock that was once liquid and hot enough to burn you away into the barest wisp of nothing. From red to black, the flow froze into these furrows and whorls you can follow with your finger. Yes, if you like you can follow them up all the way to the dark gash whence they came. If you like you can make yourself dizzy looking down into the fathomless deep, but be careful. If the earth starts to tremble, you won’t have much time.

6 Comments

Posted in palimpsest, publishing, writing

Tagged horseless carriages, palimpsest, publishing, twitter, volcanic eruptions, writing