So I just finished the ninth chapter of my memoir, which is now at 20,279 words. The last few chapters have gone pretty quickly, since they hewed closely to my blog posts of that time in my life. We have arrived in San Francisco and fought the first skirmishes to find adequate -- if expensive -- housing and childcare. Although this memoir braids together my personal experiences and the broader economic events of 2007-2008, the last few chapters have been all me all the time. I did manage to tuck in some broader context, specifically addressing our landlord company's appalling business model and the challenges confronting San Francisco families. But basically the last few chapters have watched me ricochet from weird situation to weird situation, gibbering madly all the while. I swear, if this book ever gets published, my readers will probably throw this book across the room in disgust. I almost threw my computer across the room in disgust.
The scary thing was how deluded I was, how Mr. Killer Robot and I indulged in so much magical thinking. We just assumed we'd work things out, just boogie along until a perfect solution presented itself. We started July 2007 with a wretched apartment and no child care and ended August 2007 with a ridiculously expensive apartment and ridiculously expensive childcare. Apparently the only way to solve problems in San Francisco was to throw money at them, and if you didn't have any money, you just put it on the credit card. That's what much of the country was doing in 2007, and even if that made us more typical than we knew it didn't make our actions any less appalling. Much of the country was on some magical thinking train where home prices and credit limits always went up. The Dow hit 14,000 the week before we moved to San Francisco, then the stock market started to wig out a bit and the whole country started its inexorable slide to recession, which began December 2007.
It's very hard, I've found, to honestly lay out all the fateful and wrongheaded decisions Mr. Killer Robot and I made and not turn the whole thing into a pity party. Obviously the situation was kind of impossible, but nobody put us in that situation but ourselves.
Still, I'm kind of grateful to be out of that first week we arrived in San Francisco and I can take a broader look at things again. But a big financial blow awaits our family in August 2007 and I'm kind of dreading that. It's about a credit card bill and I can remember that day as if it were yesterday, sitting on a folding chair with the bills strewn on top of unpacked moving boxes.
But, thank heavens, I'm finished writing for today, so I'll think about that tomorrow.
Tuesday, December 11, 2012
Saturday, August 18, 2012
Dithering
I’ve been reading a blog called “Cup Runneth Over,” or something like that. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but a blog name is never just a blog name if the blogger is a literary author. With these guys, every damn thing in life must be delved or chewed or spun out ad infinitum. So there's a little box on the blog explaining the name, something about how reading and writing and loved ones fill the Cup of Life or something.
(Actually, the title and explanation are something different, but while I like to poke fun at literary authors, I do admire them and don't care to use their real blog title and mess up their fun.)
Anyway, this Cup Runneth Over blog has a neat feature that asks writers to detail how they spend a typical day. One day followed this short story writer who's published a book "to international acclaim." She helps get her daughter to school, then spends the day in her nightgown, typing on her laptop, which I think is cool. She admitted to spending a lot of time just messing around with her writing, puzzling out what to do next. She spoke of the process as a conversation between her and her story, back and forth, until both satisfied.
I like that, because I can get so impatient sometimes. (Who, me?) I start thinking that if I really knew what I was doing with a project, I wouldn’t have to change my mind every two seconds about what to do next. (Should I start the next chapter with the medieval legend, or a description of my new apartment's dirty floor? Maybe I should talk about the San Francisco commercial real estate market. Or the sounds of the city waking up, or a paragraph about eating a breakfast orange: "The sweet rind of my old life peeled away...)
Hmmm ... let's try to focus here.
Anyway, I liked how that writer described her process. It helps me give myself permission to dither. Dithering is important. This society doesn’t really support dithering: We’re supposed to be decisive, confident, able to make immediate, well-grounded decisions. I can do that if I have to, but if given the option, I'd rather dither.
The definition of dither is “to be uncertain or indecisive” in Britain and “to be in an agitated state” in the U.S. It kind of means both to me. The word actually comes from the 1640s, where it meant “to quake, tremble” and was a variant of the Middle English word didderen (late 14th-century). The vacillating, anxious connotation comes from the 1800s.
It’s a good word, and it has another connotation for me: I see dithering as a luxury, and you could even argue that it denotes status. After all, dithering takes time, and time is a resource increasingly rare these days. Only upper-class parents, for example, have time to dither over the best playdates, summer camps, tennis leagues or summer camps for their children. Only salaried professionals can dither over the best day to take off for a day trip or whether to visit the gym before or after work.
Hmmm, I’m starting to sound like one of those literary writers, taking a perfectly clear word and beating it half to death. But it’s okay to be little literary — I mean, isn’t the purpose here to write well? There are all kinds of ways to write well — sometimes you’re fast and careless and slapdash, and sometimes you dither and the next thing you know, you’re looking up medieval roots of words. It’s an occupational hazard.
Anyway, it’s time for this lady to end her typical day, and for me to end this post. So she put away the laptop and watched the Daily Show until she fell asleep. And now I'm thinking about how I’d like to spend my days, starting next week when my Robot Kid starts 3rd grade and I hope to begin writing in earnest.
But that’s for another post. I need time to dither.
(Actually, the title and explanation are something different, but while I like to poke fun at literary authors, I do admire them and don't care to use their real blog title and mess up their fun.)
Anyway, this Cup Runneth Over blog has a neat feature that asks writers to detail how they spend a typical day. One day followed this short story writer who's published a book "to international acclaim." She helps get her daughter to school, then spends the day in her nightgown, typing on her laptop, which I think is cool. She admitted to spending a lot of time just messing around with her writing, puzzling out what to do next. She spoke of the process as a conversation between her and her story, back and forth, until both satisfied.
I like that, because I can get so impatient sometimes. (Who, me?) I start thinking that if I really knew what I was doing with a project, I wouldn’t have to change my mind every two seconds about what to do next. (Should I start the next chapter with the medieval legend, or a description of my new apartment's dirty floor? Maybe I should talk about the San Francisco commercial real estate market. Or the sounds of the city waking up, or a paragraph about eating a breakfast orange: "The sweet rind of my old life peeled away...)
Hmmm ... let's try to focus here.
Anyway, I liked how that writer described her process. It helps me give myself permission to dither. Dithering is important. This society doesn’t really support dithering: We’re supposed to be decisive, confident, able to make immediate, well-grounded decisions. I can do that if I have to, but if given the option, I'd rather dither.
The definition of dither is “to be uncertain or indecisive” in Britain and “to be in an agitated state” in the U.S. It kind of means both to me. The word actually comes from the 1640s, where it meant “to quake, tremble” and was a variant of the Middle English word didderen (late 14th-century). The vacillating, anxious connotation comes from the 1800s.
It’s a good word, and it has another connotation for me: I see dithering as a luxury, and you could even argue that it denotes status. After all, dithering takes time, and time is a resource increasingly rare these days. Only upper-class parents, for example, have time to dither over the best playdates, summer camps, tennis leagues or summer camps for their children. Only salaried professionals can dither over the best day to take off for a day trip or whether to visit the gym before or after work.
Hmmm, I’m starting to sound like one of those literary writers, taking a perfectly clear word and beating it half to death. But it’s okay to be little literary — I mean, isn’t the purpose here to write well? There are all kinds of ways to write well — sometimes you’re fast and careless and slapdash, and sometimes you dither and the next thing you know, you’re looking up medieval roots of words. It’s an occupational hazard.
Anyway, it’s time for this lady to end her typical day, and for me to end this post. So she put away the laptop and watched the Daily Show until she fell asleep. And now I'm thinking about how I’d like to spend my days, starting next week when my Robot Kid starts 3rd grade and I hope to begin writing in earnest.
But that’s for another post. I need time to dither.
Friday, June 22, 2012
Reliving That Year
So when you write a memoir about one of the most difficult years of your life, you find yourself — and I can't be the first one to have noticed this — reliving that difficult year in your life. That means I'm reliving March 2007 to March 2008, and let me tell you, it's not doing much for my equilibrium.
Thankfully, of course, I'm writing a financial memoir. There's no childhood trauma, no wartime struggle, no drug use, only a smattering of alcohol use. I didn't live on the streets or sell my body or hike the Mojave ... gosh, now I'm starting to wonder ... will anyone even read this book?
But even though that year's struggles might seem trivial to some, they certainly don't feel trivial to me. When I look back at that year, the strongest emotion I remember is the fear. I spent that year walking on a precipice, convinced that the smallest slip would cast us into financial failure. I choked on that emotion, walking around every day with my chest constricted. It was often an effort just to put a pleasant look on my face, since I often considered other people — even my own family — as unwelcome distractions from my single-minded focus on Getting Us Out of This.
Now, when I sit down at my laptop and fire up the next chapter (I just finished Chapter Five) I must drop myself into that cauldron of swirling feelings again. Every so often I have to come up for air, remind myself that we don't own a house anymore, we're not in debt anymore, we have money in the bank. Not the Suze Orman six-months-of-expenses money in the bank, but a tidy sum. Enough to help me sleep at night, when I'm not freaking out about our credit card APRs in July 2007. Actually, we don't even have any of those credit cards now. Nope, not even one. We had nine cards at the height of our debt in 2008 and now we have two. And neither one carries a balance.
I had to keep reminding myself of that when I wrote a difficult chapter, a chapter with a fight between Mr. Killer Robot and me about our biggest credit card. In July 2007 we went over-limit on that card — a card with a $25,000 balance. And $18,000 on the second-biggest card! It takes my breath away. Exceeding the limit on the bigger card triggered an APR hike from 9 percent to 29 percent. It nearly sunk us.
I hate writing about that month. I hate reliving those days. But I have to because, well, that's the whole point of the book, how we navigated a volatile economy and the consequences of our own choices. How our mistakes made us vulnerable, while the housing crisis and investment banking mess and December 2007 recession almost finished us off. I'm writing this book to try to make sense of what happened, to both my family and a country as a whole. And I can't do that unless I relive the summer of 2007 during the summer of 2012.
Thankfully, of course, I'm writing a financial memoir. There's no childhood trauma, no wartime struggle, no drug use, only a smattering of alcohol use. I didn't live on the streets or sell my body or hike the Mojave ... gosh, now I'm starting to wonder ... will anyone even read this book?
But even though that year's struggles might seem trivial to some, they certainly don't feel trivial to me. When I look back at that year, the strongest emotion I remember is the fear. I spent that year walking on a precipice, convinced that the smallest slip would cast us into financial failure. I choked on that emotion, walking around every day with my chest constricted. It was often an effort just to put a pleasant look on my face, since I often considered other people — even my own family — as unwelcome distractions from my single-minded focus on Getting Us Out of This.
Now, when I sit down at my laptop and fire up the next chapter (I just finished Chapter Five) I must drop myself into that cauldron of swirling feelings again. Every so often I have to come up for air, remind myself that we don't own a house anymore, we're not in debt anymore, we have money in the bank. Not the Suze Orman six-months-of-expenses money in the bank, but a tidy sum. Enough to help me sleep at night, when I'm not freaking out about our credit card APRs in July 2007. Actually, we don't even have any of those credit cards now. Nope, not even one. We had nine cards at the height of our debt in 2008 and now we have two. And neither one carries a balance.
I had to keep reminding myself of that when I wrote a difficult chapter, a chapter with a fight between Mr. Killer Robot and me about our biggest credit card. In July 2007 we went over-limit on that card — a card with a $25,000 balance. And $18,000 on the second-biggest card! It takes my breath away. Exceeding the limit on the bigger card triggered an APR hike from 9 percent to 29 percent. It nearly sunk us.
I hate writing about that month. I hate reliving those days. But I have to because, well, that's the whole point of the book, how we navigated a volatile economy and the consequences of our own choices. How our mistakes made us vulnerable, while the housing crisis and investment banking mess and December 2007 recession almost finished us off. I'm writing this book to try to make sense of what happened, to both my family and a country as a whole. And I can't do that unless I relive the summer of 2007 during the summer of 2012.
Sunday, June 10, 2012
Short Play Project
When I'm not working on my recession memoir and having tiny anxiety attacks about it, I'm pondering a submission to 3Girls Theatre here in the Bay Area. The theater is soliciting plays by Bay Area women about family dysfunction over the holidays. They'll pick one to be a part of their Holiday Showcase in December.
So I'm developing a script for it. That sounds impressive, but what it really means is "I scribbled some ideas on the back of a hotel room receipt in Eugene, Ore." But I like writing 10-minute plays — it's a lot of fun — so I'll try to have something ready by the end of August.
So I'm developing a script for it. That sounds impressive, but what it really means is "I scribbled some ideas on the back of a hotel room receipt in Eugene, Ore." But I like writing 10-minute plays — it's a lot of fun — so I'll try to have something ready by the end of August.
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
Old Mortgage Company Declares Bankruptcy
I haven't gotten to the short sale part of my financial memoir yet, but I plan to detail the horrendous paperwork process with my mortgage company. While doing research, I discovered that AwayGo Financial (its nom de plume until I figure out what will get me sued and what won't) has declared bankruptcy. Ha! I'm surprised it took so long.
Actually, as traumatic as the short sale process was for me, it actually was a lot better than most experienced with AwayGo. I'm guessing it's because it was clear we couldn't keep the house, we were current on payments (despite pressure to default) and it was a relatively small amount.
This news is yet another reason to include an epilogue in this memoir detailing not only what happened to the Killer Robot Family, but to the the other characters and companies in this saga. It will take a page just to list the bankruptcies. I'm just grateful we weren't one of them.
Actually, as traumatic as the short sale process was for me, it actually was a lot better than most experienced with AwayGo. I'm guessing it's because it was clear we couldn't keep the house, we were current on payments (despite pressure to default) and it was a relatively small amount.
This news is yet another reason to include an epilogue in this memoir detailing not only what happened to the Killer Robot Family, but to the the other characters and companies in this saga. It will take a page just to list the bankruptcies. I'm just grateful we weren't one of them.
Tuesday, May 8, 2012
The Perils of Consumerist.com
So apparently I'll be unable to read any mortgage related posts on Consumerist.com while writing this memoir, because I'm sure that the site's take-no-prisoners community will make short work of this book if it ever gets published.
In this post, a young couple moved into their first house a few years ago. Then the husband lost his job and they couldn't make the mortgage payments. They asked their lender PNC Mortgage for help, and we all know how that goes.
They moved out of the house, sold their Pottery Barn and Crate&Barrel furniture, and moved into an apartment with some IKEA furniture. They still pay the HOA fees and are trying to negotiate a short sale. PNC is being awful and now calling their relatives about the missed payments. Now there's a short sale under review and the bank's locked them out.
It just seems like PNC has made a bad situation unnecessarily horrible. They're obviously doing their best, though, so why is the Consumerist community piling onto them and treating them like whiny ax murderers? The reasons are legion:
1. They had Pottery Barn furniture.
2. They had Crate and Barrel furniture
3. They signed a mortgage, so tough titties.
4. They didn't have enough savings -- obviously because of the Pottery Barn and Crate&Barrel furniture.
5. They bought IKEA furniture.
So I've decided not to read Consumerist posts about mortgages for a while because there's no way I can write this memoir with visions of the Consumerist hive screaming for my blood. But this does remind me to keep the "poor little me" attitude out of my writing. I must never forget that Mr. Killer Robot and I got ourselves into this situation. The recession just made it worse.
In this post, a young couple moved into their first house a few years ago. Then the husband lost his job and they couldn't make the mortgage payments. They asked their lender PNC Mortgage for help, and we all know how that goes.
They moved out of the house, sold their Pottery Barn and Crate&Barrel furniture, and moved into an apartment with some IKEA furniture. They still pay the HOA fees and are trying to negotiate a short sale. PNC is being awful and now calling their relatives about the missed payments. Now there's a short sale under review and the bank's locked them out.
It just seems like PNC has made a bad situation unnecessarily horrible. They're obviously doing their best, though, so why is the Consumerist community piling onto them and treating them like whiny ax murderers? The reasons are legion:
1. They had Pottery Barn furniture.
2. They had Crate and Barrel furniture
3. They signed a mortgage, so tough titties.
4. They didn't have enough savings -- obviously because of the Pottery Barn and Crate&Barrel furniture.
5. They bought IKEA furniture.
So I've decided not to read Consumerist posts about mortgages for a while because there's no way I can write this memoir with visions of the Consumerist hive screaming for my blood. But this does remind me to keep the "poor little me" attitude out of my writing. I must never forget that Mr. Killer Robot and I got ourselves into this situation. The recession just made it worse.
Hold the Irony
From First World Problems:
"This screenplay I wrote is so far past post-ironic that it's actually approaching ironic again from the other direction."
April 21, 2012
Monday, May 7, 2012
The Stink of Failure
Writing prompt: Describe a smell that evokes a particular place.
Burned Popcorn
Whenever I smell burned popcorn I think of the first hair salon I visited after moving to Ann Arbor, Mich. Seeking a new hairstylist is always a traumatic experience and after moving from Detroit to Kalamazoo to Prague to San Francisco and now to Ann Arbor, you'd think I'd have a better grip on the process.
I'd read all the magazine tips for finding the perfect stylist — not that I needed the perfect stylist, I just wanted someone who could play up my hair's natural blonde as opposed to its natural gray. The gray had established a beachhead at the crown a few years before and now threatened total conquest and I needed a stylist who could help me fight the good fight.
So I read the magazine tips and they were predictable: ask your friends, ask women on the street with good hair, interview candidates. I found such suggestions ridiculous; I had exactly one friend in Ann Arbor at this point and she had terrible hair.
As for the second suggestion, well, that created a fascinating social experiment. Seriously, I think UC Berkeley researchers should take this up. I found the most friendly-looking women, those most likely to cheerfully respond to my request, had the worst-looking hair, while the beautifully coiffed ladies strolling down State Street looked ready to smack anyone foolish enough to address them.
So I adopted the time-honored tactic of walking down Main Street and picking the salon with the nicest sign. They brought me in and introduced me to Stephanie, a cheerful, heavyset stylist with a nose ring and a henna rinse. All was well until the faint odor of burned popcorn entered the room. Stephanie froze.
"What's that?" she asked.
"I think it's burned popcorn," I piped up, ever the helpful one, although it was obvious what the odor was.
"The new girl did it," whispered the neighboring stylist.
"The eyebrow girl?" Stephanie asked. A quick, grim nod.
"I don't understand that," Stephanie said, dabbing some potion on a lock of my hair. "You have to stand by the microwave while it pops."
"Everybody knows that," said the other stylist.
The smell grew stronger and the culprit, a young Asian girl, scampered out to apologize, but the stylists were having none of it. "You have to stand by the microwave," Stephanie said. The eyebrow girl looked ready to cry.
And that's why, although Stephanie created the perfect soft buttermilk highlights for my hair, I never returned to that salon.
Burned PopcornWhenever I smell burned popcorn I think of the first hair salon I visited after moving to Ann Arbor, Mich. Seeking a new hairstylist is always a traumatic experience and after moving from Detroit to Kalamazoo to Prague to San Francisco and now to Ann Arbor, you'd think I'd have a better grip on the process.
I'd read all the magazine tips for finding the perfect stylist — not that I needed the perfect stylist, I just wanted someone who could play up my hair's natural blonde as opposed to its natural gray. The gray had established a beachhead at the crown a few years before and now threatened total conquest and I needed a stylist who could help me fight the good fight.
So I read the magazine tips and they were predictable: ask your friends, ask women on the street with good hair, interview candidates. I found such suggestions ridiculous; I had exactly one friend in Ann Arbor at this point and she had terrible hair.
As for the second suggestion, well, that created a fascinating social experiment. Seriously, I think UC Berkeley researchers should take this up. I found the most friendly-looking women, those most likely to cheerfully respond to my request, had the worst-looking hair, while the beautifully coiffed ladies strolling down State Street looked ready to smack anyone foolish enough to address them.
So I adopted the time-honored tactic of walking down Main Street and picking the salon with the nicest sign. They brought me in and introduced me to Stephanie, a cheerful, heavyset stylist with a nose ring and a henna rinse. All was well until the faint odor of burned popcorn entered the room. Stephanie froze.
"What's that?" she asked.
"I think it's burned popcorn," I piped up, ever the helpful one, although it was obvious what the odor was.
"The new girl did it," whispered the neighboring stylist.
"The eyebrow girl?" Stephanie asked. A quick, grim nod.
"I don't understand that," Stephanie said, dabbing some potion on a lock of my hair. "You have to stand by the microwave while it pops."
"Everybody knows that," said the other stylist.
The smell grew stronger and the culprit, a young Asian girl, scampered out to apologize, but the stylists were having none of it. "You have to stand by the microwave," Stephanie said. The eyebrow girl looked ready to cry.
And that's why, although Stephanie created the perfect soft buttermilk highlights for my hair, I never returned to that salon.
Doofus Analyst
Don't you love it when your opinion is validated by an unexpected source?
I've spent the last two days writing down key economic events from March 2007 to March 2008 in a little notebook, including expert quotes. Some of the best quotes came from Mark Zandi, who said:
July 2007: (Market at all-time high, nudging toward 14,000 mark) Zandi says fundamentals are OK. "What's driven the marked in the last few days, couple weeks, is the relief that the economy is going to be able to digest the housing downturn and the mortgage-market mess without falling into recession. I think there was a lot of concern about that."
Well, thank heavens ... what a relief!
Of course, Zandi works for Moody's, which said in August 2007 that a "limited contraction" of the economy could be beneficial because it could moderate consumer spending and keep a lid on inflation.
Zandi also loved Bush's lame little effort to help the situation in December 2007, freezing rates for 10-15 percent of the ARMs (adjustable rate mortgages) set to reset to a higher interest rate.
So I googled Zandi to see if he'd been fired yet, and no, he's still the go-to pundit for journalists covering the economy. But I did get some small validation from an article at RealClearMarkets, a site that aggregates market news. In June 2011, they posted this article titled "Mark Zandi: Always Quoted, Often Wrong, Never in Doubt."
Ha!
I've spent the last two days writing down key economic events from March 2007 to March 2008 in a little notebook, including expert quotes. Some of the best quotes came from Mark Zandi, who said:
July 2007: (Market at all-time high, nudging toward 14,000 mark) Zandi says fundamentals are OK. "What's driven the marked in the last few days, couple weeks, is the relief that the economy is going to be able to digest the housing downturn and the mortgage-market mess without falling into recession. I think there was a lot of concern about that."
Well, thank heavens ... what a relief!
Of course, Zandi works for Moody's, which said in August 2007 that a "limited contraction" of the economy could be beneficial because it could moderate consumer spending and keep a lid on inflation.
Zandi also loved Bush's lame little effort to help the situation in December 2007, freezing rates for 10-15 percent of the ARMs (adjustable rate mortgages) set to reset to a higher interest rate.
So I googled Zandi to see if he'd been fired yet, and no, he's still the go-to pundit for journalists covering the economy. But I did get some small validation from an article at RealClearMarkets, a site that aggregates market news. In June 2011, they posted this article titled "Mark Zandi: Always Quoted, Often Wrong, Never in Doubt."
Ha!
Tuesday, May 1, 2012
Making Lemons
Here's another writing prompt, a rare example of me writing in the present tense.
The prompt: Write some dialogue of two characters arguing about something trivial, but they're really arguing about something unspoken.
First Day
"Ooh, is that candy?" I ask Tessie as I pass her desk.
"No, scorpions," she says shortly, not looking up from her computer.
"May I have some?" I ask.
Tessie nods slightly as she attacks her keyboard.
"Do you always set out candy?" I ask. It's my first day, after all, and a candy dish can say a lot about a company's culture.
I'm having a hard time understanding Marden Inc.'s culture: People seem silent and standoffish, yet there was a Happy Hour every Thursday and an office lunch the third Tuesday of the month. Do they save all their chit-chat for those times?
Apparently so, since Tessie has not yet answered my question about the candy. Should I ask it again? Should I take a piece and slink away? Should I take the smallest piece? As the newest employee maybe I should take the smallest piece. Oh wait, they're all the same size. Okay then. I carefully dip my hand into the bowl (taking care to touch only one — it wouldn't do to look choosy).
"I knew you'd take the lemon one," Tessie says, still tapping away.
"Why?"
"Because it's the one I wanted."
I hold it out. "You can have it."
A long sigh. "No, apparently I was not meant to have it. You were meant to have it."
"Maybe the others are just as good," I say.
A malevolent look. "We'll never know. I will only accept a lemon one. No that this matters to anyone. I made it perfectly clear to people that I wanted the lemon one and they chose to disregard that and so here I am, stuck with my old blueberry candy, while you get the lemon one." Another malevolent look.
I was confused. Were we talking about candy?
The prompt: Write some dialogue of two characters arguing about something trivial, but they're really arguing about something unspoken.
First Day
"Ooh, is that candy?" I ask Tessie as I pass her desk.
"No, scorpions," she says shortly, not looking up from her computer.
"May I have some?" I ask.
Tessie nods slightly as she attacks her keyboard.
"Do you always set out candy?" I ask. It's my first day, after all, and a candy dish can say a lot about a company's culture.
I'm having a hard time understanding Marden Inc.'s culture: People seem silent and standoffish, yet there was a Happy Hour every Thursday and an office lunch the third Tuesday of the month. Do they save all their chit-chat for those times?
Apparently so, since Tessie has not yet answered my question about the candy. Should I ask it again? Should I take a piece and slink away? Should I take the smallest piece? As the newest employee maybe I should take the smallest piece. Oh wait, they're all the same size. Okay then. I carefully dip my hand into the bowl (taking care to touch only one — it wouldn't do to look choosy).
"I knew you'd take the lemon one," Tessie says, still tapping away.
"Why?"
"Because it's the one I wanted."
I hold it out. "You can have it."
A long sigh. "No, apparently I was not meant to have it. You were meant to have it."
"Maybe the others are just as good," I say.
A malevolent look. "We'll never know. I will only accept a lemon one. No that this matters to anyone. I made it perfectly clear to people that I wanted the lemon one and they chose to disregard that and so here I am, stuck with my old blueberry candy, while you get the lemon one." Another malevolent look.
I was confused. Were we talking about candy?
Saturday, April 28, 2012
Apology Poem
Here's another prompt that asked me to write an apology poem, like William Carlos Williams' famous poem about the plums.
This Is Just To Say
by William Carlos Williams
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
So here's mine:
Late
I know the golden minutes
of my son’s education
must be cherished
And 10 minutes
past the bell
is unacceptable.
But surely the
school board doesn’t want
mommies at work without pants.
Thursday, April 26, 2012
Writing Headaches
This memoir writing is hard. I'm not even sure what I'm writing even makes any sense. I'm trying to unravel our decision to move to San Francisco in 2007, but that year is so fraught with emotion. I'm trying to write about the day I truly understood what we were trying to do, that it wasn't just about selling the house for a good price, but about changing our lives. I'm trying to write about why we wanted to change our lives and what we were missing in Michigan that we hoped to find in San Francisco.
But it's hard. I don't think we really understood what we wanted, and didn't want to see the obstacles. I thought that if we just worked hard and made to-do lists and found a way to clean the dining room's Roman blinds, everything would be fine. But it didn't work out that way.
So now I have a splitting headache and I'm pretty angry at myself for being so blind and shortsighted. We weren't living the life we wanted in Michigan, we were living the life we thought we should want. And even when we decided to sell the house and leave, we still acted the way we thought we should act; I ended up trying to sell the house the way its former owner sold it to us in 2003. But it wasn't 2003 and I wasn't a Mad Professor with an EverQuest addiction. It was 2007 and nobody was going to buy a 50-year old Sears home at a premium price, even if I did polish all those $5 brass cabinet knobs that the Mad Professor had installed.
When I look back at that summer, what I remember best is the fear — thick and tangled with shame and loneliness. I don't really want to revisit those feelings and I'd like to think that I'm in a better place now. But am I really? Have I really grown, or am I the same self-absorbed, magical-thinking person, just with a better apartment and a fatter bank account?
The chapter I'm writing opened with me sitting on the redwood deck of our Michigan house, with soft breezes blowing the spring leaves and the big camouflage draperies our neighbors hung on their trees. (Our neighbor didn't like people looking at her when she sat in her garden.) It was quite idyllic. Now I sit in my sunny apartment in our pretty San Francisco neighborhood and I can see the Bay through the narrow crack between two houses across the street. Have I changed at all? Have I learned anything?
I guess the only way to find out is to write this memoir. Let's hope the answer is yes.
Happy Fred, Bitter Fred
 |
| A glacial erratic in a New Jersey park. |
Here's the first prompt: Describe an event from a character's point of view. Then write about the event again from a different emotional point of view.
So I wrote a short piece about Happy Fred, thrilled to be leaving his dead-end museum job. Then I wrote about Bitter Fred.
The Bitter Fred
“I’m quitting my
job,” I told Melanie as we stood in line at the buffet, raising my voice
slightly to be heard over the pompous chatter around us.
Melanie glanced around, but she had nothing to worry about –
the Green Harbor Geology Museum’s biggest donors didn’t care what a lowly
museum fundraiser had to say. They couldn’t even be bothered to listen to the
museum’s director during the award presentation – they just chattered on and on,
ignoring the activity onstage. Those people heard nobody but themselves.
“How can you?” Melanie asked. “What will the museum do
without you? You raised $439,000 with your last campaign!”
“And what did that get me?” I asked. “I called and emailed
people for months, begging, pleading, wheedling, listening to on-hold music and
lies from secretaries. And what did the director say when I presented him with
the total — $439,237? He asked, ‘What, you couldn’t reach an even 450?’”
“What will you do?” Melanie asked, sounding nervous, as well
she might. With me gone, she’d be the one tapped to run my campaigns with no
extra pay until they found a replacement. Knowing the Green Harbor Geology
Museum management, that would be months.
“I have my rock band,” I said, sprinkling cheese on the
Conchiglie. “Now that we have a drummer, I can book some gigs. Those contacts
I’ve cultivated for the museum will benefit me
now.”
“What will you live on?”
“I have savings,” I said airily, walking over to a free
table. Melanie followed, looking a bit pale.
“Really?” she asked. She knew what I was paid, and it wasn’t
much.
I knew she suspected that $439,237 wasn't the real total I raised, that some of the humiliating groveling would benefit me, not the museum. My conscience didn’t
trouble me – why should I respect the wishes of those self-indulgent, careless
donors? They didn’t care about geology, they just wanted to brag and sound
smart.
I took a big swallow of red wine and scanned the room, a
room full of fools. “Come see us sometime. We’re the Glacial Erratics and my
talent and connections will help us hit the big time.”
Melanie looked at me levelly. “I don’t know what your scheme
is, but it won’t work.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re self-absorbed and careless. That name proves
it.”
“The Glacial Erratics? The name suits me perfectly. It suits
our band, which differs greatly from its native environment,” I said.
“Oh Fred,” she sighed. “It’s always the surface with you.
You never dig deeper. And what is the Latin root for erratic?”
“No idea,” I said, trying not to roll my eyes.
“It comes from the verb erro:
to go astray. To err.”
##
Wednesday, April 25, 2012
Memoirs Old and New
It was a beautiful little house, with cheery green shutters and a
perky, pointy, red-shingled roof and little blue trains painted on the
windowsills in Benny’s room. It was a beautiful little house.
And I hated it.
Here we have the first three sentences of my memoir. Yes, that memoir, the one I've been threatening to write for three years now. The tentative title is "Too Small to Succeed" and it's about how the Killer Robot Family changed their lives and barely avoided bankruptcy as the country slid into recession.
I don't know much about writing a memoir, but I've read a few, and some of them I actually liked. My memoir covers one year, from March 2007 to March 2008. I'm still amazed we got through that year; we were definitely walking a tightrope without a net. We had both good luck and bad — the bad luck was always expensive. Heck, even the good luck was expensive. What am I saying: We live in San Francisco — everything is expensive.
As I see it, memoirs generally fall into four categories: My Time Living Abroad ("Eat, Pray, Love"), My Famous Life (Meredith Baxter's "Untied"), My Kicky Concept ("Julie and Julia") and My Horrific, Traumatic Childhood ("Angela's Ashes"). The recession has bred a fifth category: My Financial Train Wreck. I'm trying not to read any of them, despite the advice in writers' magazines, since I'll probably get discouraged. The one I did glance at ("Made for You and Me") promised commentary on the loss of our small towns, homelessness, joblessness and the increasing economic divisions between Americans. My memoir makes no such promises, although I can guarantee a few meltdowns in the "Julie and Julia" style. Anyway, I find browsing memoirs kind of a depressing experience as I find myself looking at the book jackets of "Unwanted" and "A Child Called 'It'".
Nothing like trashing the genre you're writing in, I always say. My two favorite memoirs are nearly 50 years old: long and rambling, with a wry, funny voice. One is "Minding Our Own Business" by Charlotte Paul, which is the story of a husband and wife who chucked their comfortable lives in Chicago and moved to Washington state to run their own newspaper.
To say their decision to move was impetuous is a drastic understatement. Charlotte and Ed gave themselves two months to quit Ed's job, sell the farm, find a newspaper on the West Coast, buy it, move across the country and start making a profit. They took shocking risks. The whole journey was harrowing. The work hours were insane. The debt was enormous. The entire book gave me a heart attack. Ed himself had a heart attack in Chapter 8. Compared to them, Mr. Killer Robot and I are hopelessly conventional. Perhaps journalists just shouldn't marry each other.
The second one is "The Egg and I" by Betty MacDonald about her adventures as a young wife on a chicken farm in Washington state. I liked how she described making breakfast in the cabin on her enemy, Stove. (Yes, she called her stove "Stove" the way Holly Golightly called her cat "Cat. I guess a person gets lonely on a chicken farm on the Olympic Peninsula.)
"I cleaned Stove's suit and polished the metal handles, poured in half a can of kerosene, and Stove began balefully to burn a little," she wrote.
MacDonald personified everything, like Mountain, with its shawl of pine trees and little Town, spurned by her railroad suitor. She liked to write in her chicken logs regarding chicks' cause of death; "Egg-cema and Suicide." Chicks, I'm told, are really dumb.
What I ought to do, actually, is find some good Great Depression memoirs. Or maybe just read "Grapes of Wrath." Last year I read Benny the Little House books, and one of them, "The Shores of Silver Lake," resembled their situation. Pa had to travel to South Dakota first and the rest followed on the train. Then they lived in a tent, spent the winter house-sitting, and then built a shanty on their claim.
So obviously memoirs have a long and proud tradition and I am glad to be joining it. Maybe I'll open Chapter 3 with my struggles with my own enemy, Blender.
Nothing like trashing the genre you're writing in, I always say. My two favorite memoirs are nearly 50 years old: long and rambling, with a wry, funny voice. One is "Minding Our Own Business" by Charlotte Paul, which is the story of a husband and wife who chucked their comfortable lives in Chicago and moved to Washington state to run their own newspaper.
To say their decision to move was impetuous is a drastic understatement. Charlotte and Ed gave themselves two months to quit Ed's job, sell the farm, find a newspaper on the West Coast, buy it, move across the country and start making a profit. They took shocking risks. The whole journey was harrowing. The work hours were insane. The debt was enormous. The entire book gave me a heart attack. Ed himself had a heart attack in Chapter 8. Compared to them, Mr. Killer Robot and I are hopelessly conventional. Perhaps journalists just shouldn't marry each other.
The second one is "The Egg and I" by Betty MacDonald about her adventures as a young wife on a chicken farm in Washington state. I liked how she described making breakfast in the cabin on her enemy, Stove. (Yes, she called her stove "Stove" the way Holly Golightly called her cat "Cat. I guess a person gets lonely on a chicken farm on the Olympic Peninsula.)
"I cleaned Stove's suit and polished the metal handles, poured in half a can of kerosene, and Stove began balefully to burn a little," she wrote.
MacDonald personified everything, like Mountain, with its shawl of pine trees and little Town, spurned by her railroad suitor. She liked to write in her chicken logs regarding chicks' cause of death; "Egg-cema and Suicide." Chicks, I'm told, are really dumb.
What I ought to do, actually, is find some good Great Depression memoirs. Or maybe just read "Grapes of Wrath." Last year I read Benny the Little House books, and one of them, "The Shores of Silver Lake," resembled their situation. Pa had to travel to South Dakota first and the rest followed on the train. Then they lived in a tent, spent the winter house-sitting, and then built a shanty on their claim.
So obviously memoirs have a long and proud tradition and I am glad to be joining it. Maybe I'll open Chapter 3 with my struggles with my own enemy, Blender.
Sunday, March 4, 2012
Setting Goals
Writing is all about setting goals, we're told. Set specific, reasonable goals with quantitative results. I've set such goals before — I've written down "Revise first 10 chapters of Killer Robot manuscript by midnight, June 12" or "send Video Game play to three theater companies by noon, Aug. 12, without going cross-eyed from reading the picky submission guidelines" or "Get up at 5:30 a.m. to write three days a week without killing anyone." These are laudable goals, of course, and I've dutifully created spreadsheets, started treadmill journals and checked off whiteboard to-do lists.
All these goals failed, of course — some rather spectacularly — with blown deadlines, abandoned journals and undignified displays of temper when I couldn't find any Snapple at 5:32 a.m. But even writers need structure, and I can't just sit at my desk every day and mutter dementedly. Well, I could (and often do) but then I should write something too.
So I'm rushing in the opposite direction, with a single, vague goal with only three words: "Write Every Day." Now that doesn't mean I'm actually sitting at my desk writing (insert merry laugh here), because frankly I seem to diddle away a shocking amount of time. For example, today Mr. Killer Robot and Killer Robot Kid went off to Little League baseball practice, which meant prime writing time for me on a Sunday morning. So I spent two hours at my desk. But of course I wasn't writing; I was putting new ink in my printer, setting up my iTunes, setting up my new speakers, finding the perfect spot for my fan, rearranging my bulletin board, and looking for a half-remembered blog post about dips. When my guys arrived home, my desk and bedroom were neat and tidy but my nerves were a mess, because, of course, I'd written nothing.
Then Mr. Killer Robot and I spent a frustrating afternoon trying to arrange his 401(k) contributions, a process that greatly resembled a typical writing session (lots of squinting and muttered cursing, but few tangible results). Then he and the Kid went out again, and now here I am, at my desk writing, but not really writing, just writing about not writing.
I think I'm paralyzed by my newfound freedom. As of Feb. 6, I've reduced my work hours to devote more time to my family and my writing. The family part is working out great: the house is cleaner, the meals are better, I chaperoned an ice-skating field trip and designed a scarecow costume, and Mr. Killer Robot, who is also a journalist, has been on the front page of our newspaper four out of the last five issues. So this is definitely working out personally. But for the writing? Not so much. I did manage to write a short play about a little chess pawn, which was so weird and incoherent, I immediately printed it out and filed it and haven't looked at it yet.
You see, I have six writing projects whirling around in my head, each demanding its time. The last time I felt like this was at my newspaper job last fall, when I was juggling four special publications in various stages of completion. In one five-day period, I was taking one publication to press, making calls on a second one, assigning stories for a third and attending a judging for a fourth.
Fiction projects, however, are different. It doesn't seem to make sense to juggle multiple projects at once, so I'll have to pick one, power it through, then work on the next one. But which do I pick? The short play I just finished, the short story idea? the memoir? the full-length play? Or the novel?
I'm not sure. What I am sure of is that I'm not going to fret much about publication this year. I'm not going to read much about publication either, since it's too depressing. According to the writing mags, I'm more likely to be killed by a meteor in the shape of Elvis' head than to actually get anything published. So I'll just concentrate on finishing 3-6 of these writing projects this year, just churning them out, powering through carpal tunnel and writers' block, and worry about publication in 2013.
And to do that, all I need to do is follow a single goal:
WRITE EVERY DAY.
All these goals failed, of course — some rather spectacularly — with blown deadlines, abandoned journals and undignified displays of temper when I couldn't find any Snapple at 5:32 a.m. But even writers need structure, and I can't just sit at my desk every day and mutter dementedly. Well, I could (and often do) but then I should write something too.
So I'm rushing in the opposite direction, with a single, vague goal with only three words: "Write Every Day." Now that doesn't mean I'm actually sitting at my desk writing (insert merry laugh here), because frankly I seem to diddle away a shocking amount of time. For example, today Mr. Killer Robot and Killer Robot Kid went off to Little League baseball practice, which meant prime writing time for me on a Sunday morning. So I spent two hours at my desk. But of course I wasn't writing; I was putting new ink in my printer, setting up my iTunes, setting up my new speakers, finding the perfect spot for my fan, rearranging my bulletin board, and looking for a half-remembered blog post about dips. When my guys arrived home, my desk and bedroom were neat and tidy but my nerves were a mess, because, of course, I'd written nothing.
Then Mr. Killer Robot and I spent a frustrating afternoon trying to arrange his 401(k) contributions, a process that greatly resembled a typical writing session (lots of squinting and muttered cursing, but few tangible results). Then he and the Kid went out again, and now here I am, at my desk writing, but not really writing, just writing about not writing.
I think I'm paralyzed by my newfound freedom. As of Feb. 6, I've reduced my work hours to devote more time to my family and my writing. The family part is working out great: the house is cleaner, the meals are better, I chaperoned an ice-skating field trip and designed a scarecow costume, and Mr. Killer Robot, who is also a journalist, has been on the front page of our newspaper four out of the last five issues. So this is definitely working out personally. But for the writing? Not so much. I did manage to write a short play about a little chess pawn, which was so weird and incoherent, I immediately printed it out and filed it and haven't looked at it yet.
You see, I have six writing projects whirling around in my head, each demanding its time. The last time I felt like this was at my newspaper job last fall, when I was juggling four special publications in various stages of completion. In one five-day period, I was taking one publication to press, making calls on a second one, assigning stories for a third and attending a judging for a fourth.
Fiction projects, however, are different. It doesn't seem to make sense to juggle multiple projects at once, so I'll have to pick one, power it through, then work on the next one. But which do I pick? The short play I just finished, the short story idea? the memoir? the full-length play? Or the novel?
I'm not sure. What I am sure of is that I'm not going to fret much about publication this year. I'm not going to read much about publication either, since it's too depressing. According to the writing mags, I'm more likely to be killed by a meteor in the shape of Elvis' head than to actually get anything published. So I'll just concentrate on finishing 3-6 of these writing projects this year, just churning them out, powering through carpal tunnel and writers' block, and worry about publication in 2013.
And to do that, all I need to do is follow a single goal:
WRITE EVERY DAY.
Friday, February 10, 2012
White King's Pawn
I just finished writing my first new play since I left Michigan in 2007. The need to write another play must have been growing in me for some time, since it took only a few days into my reduced work schedule to churn it out.
I've been working on the play for some time, organizing and preparing my thoughts, writing outlines, setting up a Scrivener template for it. Then today I sat down and started a new Scrivener document and just started writing it. Four hours later — with only a short break — I finished it. It's 17 pages long.
I don't know if it's any good. I don't know if it's worth working further on. I don't know if it will ever be worth submitting. But it's been growing in me since December and it just burst out somehow.
It's a play about a chess game, called "White Queen's Pawn." I got the idea when I started taking chess up again in December. I bought a book at a used bookstore called "Chess Basics" and started working through the lessons on my son Benny's new chessboard. Then I bought another book called "Great Short Games of the Chess Masters" and started working through those.
I am definitely not a natural at chess. Most of the time I don't understand the games I'm acting out. But there's something satisfying about re-enacting a chess game played in Ostend in 1906 or Vienna in 1872 or Riga in 1937.
I was particularly struck by the second game in the book, which introduced a game played in Kaschau in 1893. In this game, the White King's Pawn advanced across the entire chessboard and was a key actor in the amazing finish. The game was so dramatic I played it several times, then showed it to Benny, who nodded politely and went back to his Madden Playstation game.
I couldn't stop thinking about the game, however, and found myself wondering what it would be like to see this game from the little pawn's point of view, the same little pawn who miraculously made it across the board through so many perils and was present at the dramatic finish. I played the game once more and took notes as if I were the pawn: who I was threatening, who was threatening me, what pieces were around me, who was protecting me, who I was protecting.
But it wasn't until I sat down today that I felt ready to actually do it. I approached the script in a very systematic way, letting the natural drama of the game be my plot. Suddenly the characters appeared: the brave little pawn, the brooding king, the sweet queen, the pious bishop and glory-seeking knight, the cunning enemy pawns. The little pawn was like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, advancing bravely into the dark forest following her own brick road to fulfill her wish. I tried to create a narrative trajectory that began a naive little pawn starting her first game and ending ... well ending in a very different place.
I don't know what I'm trying to say with this play -- I've put it away and I can't bear to look at it right now -- but I think the script talks about courage and persistence and ultimately, forgiveness. The Bishop, who started out as a smug strawman for the other pieces to make fun of, turned out to be a vital figure, providing some moral heft to the play.
Perhaps, in the end, this play was about choice: both the chess players and the pieces. For in this play, the chess pieces can influence the game, there's a special, invisible connection between the player and the pieces. A piece can force the player to move impulsively before the player has a chance to think it through, or it can refuse to move, forcing the player to change his or her mind and find another way, possibly to the ruin of all.
For each step the Pawn takes, she must decide to take it. Sometimes she moves from a dangerous square to a protected one. But sometimes she must leave a protected square and forge ahead all alone. At one point she moves from a safe square to a very dangerous one, but she chooses to do it for the good of her comrades, to find that the square was safe after all.
Pawns, by their very definition, are not supposed to have a choice. Their purpose is to be used and sacrificed. But in my play, the pawn has turned the tables and her choices determined the fate of the game.
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