365 days of being a writer: day 328

It was a let-down, settling back into a cube today. I had a great time in Austin, just laughing with friends and drinking beers. The workday was long on Tuesday, and it bled right into the evening. I could see how easy it would be to fall back into that routine. When I got home I just wanted to watch TV. Insidious!

This evening I poked around at my manuscript. I decided to include a fictionalized piece that I submitted to a journal with a specific theme. I haven't heard back yet, but I am curious to talk about the style of this one with our eminent writer. I go back and forth between being enamored with and feeling like a literary hipster for trying to pull off an abstract-y second person narrative.

I drafted an outline for a bus piece. It will be even more abstract-y and in second person imperative. It could be a big mistake, but now's the time to make them, right?

365 days of being a writer: day 324

The house is no longer empty, so I've had to get dressed and drag my computer back up to my room. It wasn't as fun as being alone in my own house, but it was quieter.

Today I finished two of the three essays I have as "pre-work" for my teaching intensive the week before classes start. I was (am?) worried about the level of my own reading comprehension--it's been so long since I had to be a critical reader (beyond book reviews). I am glad we get an intensive. I hope I make a good teacher.

I also started writing about science the old fashioned way: longhand. It seemed to come easier, if slower. My handwriting is atrocious. Raise your hand if your handwriting could pass for a doctor's. This is what typing does to us.

There remain some books on my reading list, so I took the last of my sacrificial lambs to trade in for shiny new-to-me editions. I didn't find any off the list, but one work, The Life of the Grasshopper by Jean-Henri Fabre got bumped in favor of a collection of his essays with some lovely watercolor illustrations. I'll admit to being a sucker for watercolored flowers. I also grabbed a comics-about-music collection and a Spanish beginning-to-intermediate reader. I am making slow but steady progress there. I can construct a few sentences--but I'm really low on verbs and am still only present tense.

I'm headed to try to get a few more words out about science and then bed. Hasta mañana, amigos.

365 days of being a writer: day 322

I finished (?) the birding essay. It isn't done but it has some kind of ending. And I started writing about the bus.

I seem to have some kind of knee-jerk hangup to writing memoir. Like, I can't just write about ME and the bus, that isn't enough (for me). I don't know if that's because I devalue my own experiences or because I feel that I should be reaching for a larger theme. Whatever it is, as soon as I start writing about "what happened to me" I start going into writerly rigor/malaise. I get hung up on Why does this matter? Who cares about the people on the bus? (No one, clearly. Have you SEEN the people on the bus? Talk about an invisible class.)

So then, an ode to the people on the bus. But then I think, who the hell am I to be an authority on bus people? What kind of privileged poser who CHOOSES to ride a bus could possibly say anything real about the people who are stuck there? Like Arbus and her freaks: the One Who Looks vs the Seen. But if I could write something as lovely as an Arbus folio, I'd fall over from gratitude. It seems like there is a way to do it so it isn't lame, and it's JUST on the tip of my fingers. A litany? Of passengers, maybe? I don't know.

Here are some things that have happened on the bus:

• When I was in the 5th grade, a man flashed me via a convenient hole in his jeans while I waited on the bus mall for the number #17 (formerly the #24, later the #10) to deep Southeast Portland. I didn't actually realize what I had seen until a few years later. In college a friend told me he watched a couple having sex at a bus stop in front of his house late one night. I was inexperienced at the time, and couldn't really picture how that would have worked: the bench too narrow to lie down on, the seat too shallow for two. I never thought of buses as sexy, but since then, I've made out at plenty of bus stops.
• My best friend and I would get scolded regularly in the sixth grade for being too loud on the #14 headed up Hawthorne. We would race to catch it, after cutting our last class of the day and getting $0.25 soft serve ice cream cones from a nearby McDonalds. We would cling to the poles in the articulated center, twirling around them, dancing, singing, getting shushed. The #14 was not quite a "fun" bus until a few years later, when Hawthorne blew up into a counter-culture haven.
• I rode a bus in New Orleans that cut through the Garden District before traveling down Broad Street (which stretched further northeast, on into the heart of the less famous Seventh Ward) toward Mid-City. Sometimes, I was the only white girl on the bus and the seat next to mine would be the last one filled. We passed three churches along the way, and at least one passenger would make the sign of the cross as we did. On Ash Wednesday the seats would be full of subdued smudged foreheads.
• In Rome my parents and I would take a bus from the guest room we were renting in the suburbs to the closest Metro station, and then take the subway into the city. We did this every day for over a week--out and back--but I don't remember a single bus ride. Only waiting at the stops at the beginning and end of each day. I remember the Metro, and the train ride to Florence, but I can't remember anything about sitting on the bus there at all.

365 days of being a writer: day 320

If this were August instead of July I would have spent the morning packing up a moving truck and then I would have hit the road with an old friend, heading N.

ONE MONTH LEFT!

I am going to spend some of this month trying to compile a 30-50pp manuscript for the Fall writer-in-residence at UWyo: Colson Whitehead. He's agreed to read and consult with two nonfiction students. They drew names, and one was me! Fifty pages is daunting, so I'm shooting for 30, but right now I'm only at 19. Double spaced. I would like to get two drafts done this month. An experimental piece on science and a short piece on public transportation. Can I do it? I have to turn in what I've got on August 1st or sooner.

Already school is so motivating! And daunting! Did I already mention the daunting part? Oofa.

Also, my contributor's copy of Creative Nonfiction showed up today. It's in my imagination, but it feels more substantial than the one that came as part of my regular subscription.

365 days of being a writer: day 306

I can't seem to pick between writing about cats or writing about my girlhood of scientific embarrassments. So, today I researched big cats and women in science.

This part of my process needs work: I think and think and think and take notes or make lists and sometimes even outline--but I don't write until I have some direction. That can't be ideal. So far, for the cats I grabbed an article on the psychology of cat people (I am SO glad to have uni access to research papers already), I'm reading Matthieson's Snow Leopard and I ordered Alan Rabinowitz's Jaguar. I want to write about giving away my cat and how we coexist uneasily with them at times. Maybe.

In the sexy ladies of science department, I grabbed a piece on Title IX as it affects women in the STEM fields (I just learned that one today: Science, Tech, Engineering, and Maths), one on the glass ceiling for women in science, and a wild little booklet on a few lady scientists you've probably never heard of, including an ichthyologist and the women who discovered the first Ichthyosaurus. My mind is inexorably drawn to visions of fish on bicycles with these revelations. But what does that have to do with me looking at scabs under my microscope or holding a variety of creatures in grade school when others recoiled, including but not limited to: a tarantula, a fire-bellied salamander, and a python? Something, but I'm not sure what just yet.

This, this process of chewing vignettes and facts like a slurry of cud--this isn't a process, is it? It feels like something duct-taped into performance, rather than crafted. I wonder if I will be able to sit and write every single day, once I have the time and focus to do so. Or if it will be more of this read-amass-pupate (I like the visual of this, better than digest) produce. Maybe it could be a process if I were able to work on multiple things in a variety of stages. As it is, I feel like I only wrote one essay last year, the starlings, and so far only one this year, the hummingbirds. Coney Island was tweaked, the blackbirds have been picked at... And I did have to write two academic essays last year for my apps: the bees and the one about Diane Ackerman's science poetry.

I guess it boils down to my worrying about my ability to produce once I'm in school. Not just writing, but reading. And lesson plans. And Environmental homework. I need to write a book about something! Can I? And what in the world will it be about?

365 days of being a writer: day 304

I finally sent the hummingbirds off to a journal. It feels like a stronger essay, but after awhile it's hard to know if I am reading a stronger piece, or just seeing all the work I've put into it and hoping it's actually stronger.

My eyes are still recovering, but I was able to drive today--in the sun and in the dark. There's quite a bit of haloing to get used to, and some prisms (those are a result of the first laser, and will abate more quickly than the halos). I went to the Botanical Garden. I played with the king snake at the snake exhibit and then saw a wild one in a tree, trying to swallow a bird it had killed.

I also saw a nighthawk. I actually saw it and wondered what it was, then overheard a description at one of the demo tables that matched. They literally fly into their insect prey with an open mouth. Their throats are coated in bristles to help trap flying ants, mosquitos, flies, and beetles. They dip and soar like swallows or bats and have two bright white spots on their wings. One echinopsis was blooming and the senitas were going nuts, little blossoms all over them by full dark. Still no queen of the nights. Now that the hummingbird paper is submitted, I can't really call these night trips to the garden research, but the mental health break is nice.

I was supposed to write a few Demand articles today, but I didn't have it in me. Tomorrow I will make sure that a couple get done.

365 days of being a writer: day 299

You guys, it is totally true about reading making us stronger writers. Well, I can't yet say stronger, but more focused. After analyzing the structure of several essays over the last few days, I came to understand better why the hummingbirds still felt unfinished. Essays culminate. Not always in any grand philosophical denoument, or universal theme, but they gather to a loud or quiet crescendo, and then they give you a money shot. (My hummingbirds would never be so vulgar, this is a metaphor.)

In this piece, through all the edits, the ending had always felt rather flaccid to me (yeah, I'm going to keep it up [heh]: keeps the hysteria at bay). It limped across the line when the experience behind it deserved better. Over the last two days I have been trying to figure out how the birds and the night flowers and my layoff  relate to each other, why they matter to each other. It felt like the crucial thing, but I seemed to just talk around it, instead of to it.

So, on the stuffy, drunkful lightrail, after some unpaid overtime and being too emotionally tired to self censor, I made some notes. Then I made some more notes, and some of the feelings from last year came back, when that hope I had for my applications was first snuffed out. I had kind of a breakdown on the drive home as the Fear bubbled up and out. But after the wave passed, I came upstairs and somehow wrote about endurance.

I'm not sure I can handle it if I have to have a breakdown each time to break through. I don't even know if it made the essay better or worse. But it's up and out now, and that feels better.

Journals on my list

Call it a writer's bucket list (in no particular order and subject to change without notice):

1. Orion
2. Creative Nonfiction
3. Flyway
4. Alimentum
5. The Sun
6. Bellingham Review
7. Outside
8. Audubon
9. Smithsonian
10. Poets & Writers

And the online journals I want to get into:

1. Brevity
2. World Hum
3. Terrain
4. Superstition Review
5. Slate

365 days of being a writer: day 294

The final edit of the hummingbird overhaul is done. I don't know if I've added enough of an arc to make the majority of readers follow along or not, or if I've added too much sentimentality.

I will wait a couple of days before doing my "read it out loud" final check, but I think it is ready to send to another round of magazines/contests.

It was an interesting process, trying to know when to use and when to discard reader comments. Some were easy. If they came from a clear unfamiliarity with naturalist writing in general, or stressed phrasing that conflicted with my voice, I tended to focus more on their spirit than their letter.Clarity, typos, and awkward phrases were quick fixes. Sometimes it really just take another set of eyes.

I'm so fried right now, I'm not yet sure the new piece is better (see also, "wait a couple of days"). I'm hoping it is. I feel like a few ideas were better fleshed out.

And in (FINALLY) finishing Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, I have also gained a greater appreciation for the work of a naturalist writer. I am thinking now about what I want my writing to do, as surely it must do more than just lie orderly on the page. Fiction writers are best when they are developing and investigating themes (vs just plots)--so too are essayists. I have an idea about some of mine, but it is a topic that needs more investigation.

365 days of being a writer: day 293

I gotta get to bed, stat.

But I finished the majority of the (hopefully) last changes to this draft of the hummingbirds. Now it's in the hands of an editor. I'm hoping she is able to root out my chronic hypercommalia.

And, as though heralding the rebirth to be, Sonora Review turned down the last draft of this essay, completely impersonally. Not even a "we liked parts of this, but." I really hope it is worth saving.

365 days of being a writer: day 291

My goal for the weekend was to get a new edit of the hummingbirds finished. I think I did. It needs to decant for a day or two before I'm sure.

Here's the thing: I never know how much to explain to the reader. In my relationships, I am a big fan of "you should know what I'm thinking"--this is awful and unfair, I know, but it's a paradigm I can't seem to let all the way go. And I think I do that in my writing, but even MORE unintentionally than I do with my love interests.

Part of me feels like I shouldn't have to spell it all out. Hemingway doesn't spell it out in Hills Like White Elephants. (Though Faulkner does in A Rose for Emily.) It's not that I think the reader is dumb, it's that I feel stupid explaining basics, or I don't know how to without condescending or being clunky. For example, I always forget to describe how people look--since they are real people, how they look is so clear in my mind I forget that the reader needs to know this sort of thing.

Not like there's any mystery in my essay, but one of the reviewers said that I should explain more clearly and earlier on where I am and why. I agree that it shouldn't be a mystery to the reader, and if it is, I should paint a clearer picture. But how? And how much?

I think this is the sort of question that could be answered (in part) from the reading I am doing. Annie Dillard spells a lot out, but she doesn't talk down to the reader. In what will hopefully be the last week that I spend reading Pilgrim, I will be trying to better see the structure and what she shows vs lets me figure out. No idea if it will work, but it can't hurt.

365 days of being a writer: day 290

I kind of want to sing "61 Days to Leave The Summer" (to the tune of "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover").

Today was my first Saturday at the 'rents. It started slowly, as Saturdays should. But I did get some research, writing, knitting, and Spanish done. I even made it to the botanical garden (that's what I'm calling research). I fell in love with at least three of the docents--they were so excited about their scorpions and agave fibers and cardon cacti! So I'll give the day a gold star.

I am waffling about the hummingbirds. If it isn't in a new, tighter form in time for the Orion submissions window, my heart will probably break. But if it isn't ready and they turn it down, my heart will definitely break. I need an afternoon of peace to find the small kinks that need straightening, but I am not sure how to get it. Maybe headphones at the library? I wish I could head north for a weekend between now and then... Perhaps the 18th, if I am still freaked out.

My to-do list suddenly seems really long! But I don't need my medals up in this temporary shelter to know that I am the queen of getting shit done on a deadline. Here's to the next 61 days in town.

365 days of being a writer: day 285

I worked on what I hope is my final re-write of the hummingbird essay. As I was going through, I focused on making the connections between the separate sections a little less vague. I spelled a few things out, because I forget to do that often. I also sent a follow-up question to one of my sources, here's hoping she responds in time for me to submit this thing one last time before summer.

The following interlude has almost nothing to do with "being a writer": Since it still counted as birthday weekend, I took in what was left of my to-sell-books and a pile of to-sell-CDs and DVDs to a local record/bookstore. They gave me an incredible deal and I picked up two more books from my reading list, a couple that weren't (Short Cuts, Dubliners, and The Road) and several movies (Short Cuts, Blade Runner, Run, Lola, Run, Ghost Dog, Life Aquatic and The Squid and The Whale). Who wants to come over and talk about short stories and watch movies?

Even though today was technically a holiday, I still got in a walk, did a Spanish lesson, and worked on my writing to-do list for at least 45 minutes. Let's call that WINNING.

365 days of being a writer: day 277

Feedback.

I have this hummingbird piece that I feel is almost there. And I want it to be there before I send it off to Orion. I don't have a workshop yet, so I have asked a few writers to look it over. Some have responded in detail, some less so.

My first in-depth response suggested a pretty substantial re-write: to include myself more, and less "unusual" nature terminology. The reader felt that the mystery of nature isn't enough to keep another reader engaged--or at least it doesn't seem to be within my power to make it interesting on its own. This is a fear that I have about every piece of nature-based writing that I undertake.

I was bummed out, but as it was the only feedback I had to go on, I started trying to figure out how to make an essay that was supposed to be about pollination into an essay about me. Trying doesn't hurt anything. And this reader put a great deal of effort into their comments. I was hugely appreciative of the attention, and wanted to make the most of it.

And then I got notes from a second reviewer. This reviewer felt I was in the essay just enough, that there was a theme of "assumptions about nature in peril" and great details. However this reader felt that my arc was too diffuse. Reader number 2 suggested bringing more focus to themes that are already in the piece. This is often a problem in my essays.

So, what do I do? Two opposite views. I'd like some formula or rule of thumb that will allow me to take the "easier to swallow" feedback or know that if it's easier to take it's the wrong feedback. How do you know when to take comments and when to leave them? Is it some kind of esoteric "feeling"? (I hope not.)

To Do

• Take one more edit pass at the Hummingbirds before sending them to Orion
• Finish the birding essay (it's in a draft! just write the ending then make it better!)
• Write an essay about taking the bus--this doesn't have to be long, you can do it
• Figure out an angle for writing something about the desert before I have left it
• Expand a couple of CNFtweets into microprose pieces
• Write about those Iberian lynxes and PJ
• Put those "science at an early age" notes together into a draft of some kind
• Get another review together for Xenith

365 days of being a writer: day 266

I have spent the last 45 minutes trying to get an Internet connection when I am supposedly communicating very freely with a "very good" connection.

I'm fairly certain that this post won't make it up, and the coffeeshop is about to close. So much for being productive. I could cry.

Anyway, wonderful news today. My Coney Island piece is now up at Used Furniture Review!

Late Arrival: Coney Island, 2008

If you feel so moved as to leave feedback on the site, well that would be fantastic. That's all I can handle today.

365 days of being a writer: day 228

Today begins the last week of wondering. I am tired of not having a decision!

My prediction is that no one will turn down Wyoming. How could they? And on Friday, I will choose between Texas Tech and Kansas State. But there are miles to go before then. The longest week ever.

I got some work done on my birding essay. It has more focus, and a braided now/then structure. I am still thinking through how I want it to end--how I want to close up the arc. And today wasn't the best day for birds at the botanical garden (though I did see an unidentified raptor, possibly a Cooper's Hawk) but it was still a good day. 

 Dakota Verbena with Perry Penstemons

 Eastern Fence Lizard

Buckeye

I have been wondering about the workload for the MA. I wish someone could quantify it for me against a 40 hour a week cubicle job, or grocery store gig. Most of the students who talk about always being in a crunch have never had to work 8 to 5 all week. Not that I am assuming a lighter workload at all, just that there is little objective comparison out there. I will be in class for 9 hours a week, I will have office hours/grading for some amount of time, and then have around 25-30 hours a week for studying/school writing. Then, just like now, I will try to get some writing done outside of class. (Though, probably not quite as much.) Does that leave time to workout and knit and have a beer with the cohort every now and then?

365 days of being a writer: day 227

It still looks like CNFer numero dos is going to keep her Wyoming spot. Do I check every hour, to see if she's changed her mind? No! Of course not! That would be Crazy.

I couldn't quite get out of bed this morning. It's good if Wyoming doesn't happen, I can't help but believe, but man I miss the mountains so much. But, if the universe feels that I need an MA, then I will abide the universe's not-so-subtle recommendation. Because, see? I am LEARNING, universe.

So the morning was spent doing about an hour of Spanish homework (my first past tense! fue ¿Qué día fue ayer? Viernes!) and definitely not staring at my iPhone.

It took forever, but I eventually made it to the library. I gutted a third of the blackbird essay and then added at least as much new material as I had cut. The goal had been to double what I had, but I am trying not to cling too hard to my failure to meet it.

When I got home, I tried to fix my fucked up printer. It's a huge bastard, and suddenly acquired a chronic and evil jam. I figured out the cause of the jam in about 2 minutes, fixed it and was feeling like such a badass. My prideful boasting was short lived however, as the repeated crumpled up and jammed pages seem to have tripped some untrippable error with the print head. This is why I hate these crazy complex machines. This is why I want an old portable typewriter. Now I have to throw out a thirty pound piece of equipment that should work just fine. And now I need to buy a new printer. 

Mostly I am just frustrated at my inability to fix something. Here's where I can take it to the next level of crazy, though: I'm signing up for the next 2-8 years being years where a printer or a new head gasket or a root canal might may not be possible no matter how necessary.

How the hell does my brain do that? And how do I stop it? In better news, I bought Tallest Man on Earth with my last ten dollars and I don't even regret it (yet).

365 days of being a writer: day 225

Sad day. The mail came, and it included my self-addressed stamped envelope from The Night contest. They only use those for the diminutive yet crushing slips of paper that say, "you will not even be mentioned, honorably or otherwise."

I mean, CAMON. I tell myself to be reasonable. There must have been hundreds of entries. Thousands! Let's say thousands. But the fact is: I had hope and now it is gone.

Because you have to have hope, right? I mean. I have to believe that my work can win all of the awards all of time. I have to put everything I have into it, or it's pointless. Leave it all on the race route, my running coaches always said. (God I wish I could go for a run right now, but it is dark and my neighborhood is not built for that.) So, I got attached. I thought for sure, that at least... a runner up? So many accolades for my "old writing," last year's stuff from the admissions committees--surely this year's better stuff had a chance?

I don't have children (and I can't even stand my cat most days), all I have are these words to send out into the world, and hope that they change it for the better, make me proud. Now the failure of this essay is on me, the hapless parent, who failed to adequately prepare--or did not give enough attention to--my progeny. This prodigal child, come back to me via a stupid little sliver of paper: not even worth a whole sheet! they tell me.  And I haven't just failed these ten double spaced pages. The hummingbirds and bees that I loved so hard! have gone down with the ship as well.

This happens. This is what writing is about, what I want to be my future forever. Papercuts from the online journals who pay nothing, stabbings from the magazines I love so much, and an axe to the forehead from a contest that I felt I had sent my best. If I want to get through the rest of my life, I just have to learn to grit my teeth and lean into the blows.

I know rejection happens, which is why I turned around and sent it in to another competition before I'd even eaten dinner. And I packaged up another submission, that I'll send after I get paid next week. (Incidentally, these $20 fees really add up when one is trying to live on $100 a week. Can I really spend the rest of my life like this: page to page, stamp by stamp?)

So there it is. I'm going to bed early, after maybe crying for a little bit. It's been a long week, and I deserve it.

365 days of being a writer: day 220

This morning I got my newest Indispensable package. I can't wait to dive into Townie, but not til I get some stuff done.

I spent the afternoon at the library, and then at a couple of coffeeshops gathering and then reading through some books about famous birders. Once home, I watched a PBS special on birds of paradise and one on hummingbirds. I hope all this counts as research. Other than to order my coffees, I spoke out loud to no one. (I just now realized that!)

Emails were exchanged, and texts, tweets, and posts... But no talking. It was actually really nice. I'm taking my notebook and camera to the botanical garden really early in the morning for a bit more research. My membership lets me in an hour before everyone else, and I am hoping that's good news for looking at birds. This last essay might have to be the last bird-related piece for a bit. I'm starting to thing about too much of the same stuff. Perhaps time to resurrect the glacier piece?

And just like that, it's late. The early birder gets the grosbeak, so I'm off like the light.