Posts from the ‘random’ Category

Jan 13

Anyone who uses “winter” as a verb needs to fall on a sharp stick.

I was just walking behind these two ladies with stupid handbags (on K street, not Madison Ave, mind you) and one said to the other, “Usually we winter in Palm Beach, but Donald’s mother was ill so we had to stay put.”

I think in Minnesota if you said you used winter as a verb, someone would hit you with a shovel. They’d be real nice about it, though. Oh, for sure. But they’d winter the crap out of you with that shovel.

I wish it would snow just one real snow in DC this winter. I hate the snow, don’t get me wrong. But I like to be reminded of it. I like to be reminded that winter isn’t a thing we take control of. It’s a thing that takes control of us.

Dec 31

6 Comments

A Big Fat Thank You at the End of the Year

This has been a weird year.

In a lot of ways it was a bad year. Politics were beyond horrible, work grew increasingly stressful and busy, the crappy economy put a hold on my plans for the future and screwed over a lot of friends and family members, we lost a lot of our literary greats and some budding greats as well, and to top it all off our beloved little girl kitty died unexpectedly in October.

But it’s also been, in many ways, a fantastic year. My writing career really took off, I got published in a lot of dream publications, I found more good literature than I ever knew was out there, I started writing for some great lit blogs and took over as fiction editor at Emprise, I met a ton of wonderful writers and editors and made more new friends than I have since college, I got a promotion at work, and a hilarious little kitten came into our lives exactly when we and our other cat needed her most.

So while I certainly wouldn’t want to live through this year again, I guess I really need to put some serious value on it for all the good things it brought me and the people I love. And I need to thank so, so many people for their love and support and talent and advice and listening ear and just for being as fantastic and wonderful and awesome as they/you are. So thank you. And writers and editors: I can’t wait to meet many of you at AWP next month!

I promise this is as sappy as I get, and I hope you all have a safe and happy New Year’s Eve doing what you love best with who you love best. And I hope that next year is your best year yet.

Dec 22

4 Comments

Is Steve Martin skeeving you out lately? Me, too.

Skeeves. Claire Danes thinks so, too, clearly.

I was practically in love with Steve Martin back when he was singing and dancing and being hilarious and all life-partners with the adorable Bernadette Peters. Even after that, when he was writing little amusing, vaguely clever-even-if-they-tried-to-hard plays.

But now that he’s all trying to play like he’s in with the art scene but also hates the art scene (I guess?), and being kind of obsessed with women a third of his age, he just strikes me as icky and weird. This review is revealing:

The writing in the novel is by turns dull, flat, ugly, and inept. Especially grim are the passages when anyone says anything about art. For example: “However opposite these pictures were, they both worked as historical objects, and they worked as objects of beauty. While the Picasso was deep and serious, the Warhol was radiant and buoyant. The Picasso added up to the sum of its parts: artistic genius combined with powerful thought combined with prodigious skill combined with the guided hand equals masterpiece. The Warhol was more than the sum of its parts: silk-screen, photo image of popular actress, repetitive imagery, the unguided hand, equals . . . masterpiece.” This is so bad, so silly, that one must charitably wonder if Martin means it to be a parody; but what it most resembles is the writing of a college student hurriedly answering an exam question. No dealer or critic, no one who really knows or cares about the history of art and aesthetics, would spout such vacant nonsense. Martin writes of people who “talk art,” but no one in his book is actually capable of doing so, at least not in any interesting or arresting way.

I mean, seriously, I hope he’s trying to be funny, too. But it’s not a very dead-on parody in that case, is it? Some art people are certainly pretentious, but Christ, they’re pretentious in a way that tries to show how much they know about art, not how little.

Anyway, it’s just too bad for Steve Martin.

Dec 17

5 Comments

Time to Start Dreaming

Saks window display to help get you in the mood.

It’s that time of year! (Whether you’re Christian, Jewish, Atheist, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, no religion, any religion, it’s still that time of year, I think.) You know, when you’re simultaneously selfishly materialistic and also extraordinarily generous and full of goodwill.

So in the spirit, I thought I’d share my dream list for Christmas, the holiday I celebrate this time of year. The secular version, anyway. As a kid believing in Santa, it was always fun to imagine all the wild, impossible things Santa might bring me, like a life-sized Death Star or a time-travel device or every Micro Machine ever made or a Ken with decent hair or maybe even a hoverboard. The no-limits was part of the magic. I’d like to hear what you want, too! Just curiosity–and hey, maybe someone who knows you and loves you is reading this blog and will get some ideas.

My Dream Wish List:

A 1969 Jaguar XKE E-type, in the original Willow Green color

An Alexander McQueen Novak bag (and while we’re at it, Kim Novak’s entire wardrobe from Vertigo)

Two Mac Air books, one for me and one for Chris.

An agent that doesn’t care if I’ve written a novel or not

A baby grand piano. This one.

My manuscripts published

My friends’ manuscripts published

Everyone I care about to be healthy and happy throughout the next year

A white lion cub (I wouldn’t keep it in my apartment so settle down. I would pay someone to care for it in the wild and I would visit every day so it would know me and love me and give me kisses.)

A million dollars to spend at independent bookstores and presses.

A million dollars to donate to ASPCA. (And I will be donating–though not a million. I wish!)

An original Rothko or Tanguy or Dine.

What would ask for? What’s on your dream wish list?

Dec 8

17 Comments

Do you ever feel sometimes like writing is too much like a business where you don’t make any money but you run it like a business anyway, like a really poorly-run business?

How come there’s such pressure to publish a book? And you’re not a really serious writer unless you do? Would I be a serious writer if I never published a thing? What if I took my writing very seriously? How much time counts as taking writing seriously? Or is it about the subject matter? What if I only write once a week? What if I write in my head but not on paper? What if I wrote for free? What if I never wrote for free? (I’d never get published, that’s for sure.) Should you want people to see your stuff? Does that make you more or less of an artist? Is it about the process or the product? Are gifted writers artists or artisans? Or both? Who’s an amateur and who’s a professional in a professional/hobby/thing where you don’t make any money anyway?

Just thoughts I’ve been thinking since I started writing again, two years ago now. Just thoughts I’ve been thinking.

Nov 16

3 Comments

Twitter, I Guess. Hmm.

I am very ambivalent about Twitter. I really don’t know if I like it or hate it. It certainly wastes an awful lot of my time. But often with such interesting things! And people are funnier on Twitter, generally, probably because their relatives aren’t getting all of their tweets. And Roger Ebert has the officially best tweets ever. I also like being able to respond to things instantly, but I keep forgetting this shit is public, unlike Facebook, and so I have to be nicer. Which I’m not very good at. I’m a very nice person but not very good at being nice. Which I think are two different things.

Anyway, I quit Twitter for a while but I’m trying it again. If you’re on Twitter, follow me and I’ll probably follow you unless you look really skeevy or something. Like, if you have zero followers and follow 15,000 people.

We’ll see how this goes. Picture me squinting right now in slight suspicion.

Sep 28

In News of the Totally Unsurprising Variety…

Americans don’t know squat about religion.

A drive-by shooting just happened in DC.

Sep 22

6 Comments

I Feel Like Such an Ass Doing it, But…

…as a writer, I have to promote my stuff online. Well, I don’t have to. But if I don’t no one will read it.

I really hate doing this, to the extent that I will often not tell people, even family and friends, and that I have a story up if I just posted about something not long before. It makes me feel icky and all aversional, this self-promotion thing.

If you’re like me, maybe you need to read this. Some good advice in there.

Jul 19

What Seven Year Itch?

My husband and I have been married for seven years today. Damn. That’s a long time–over 25 percent of my whole life!–but it doesn’t seem like a long time. That’s because Chris is like the most fun best friend ever, and who the hell wouldn’t want to spend everything second they possible can hanging out with their most fun best friend?

It’s really the coolest thing about being an adult: you know when you were having SOOOO much fun with your best friend playing video games and eating Oreos and talking and talking at three in the morning and your friend’s mom called and said he/she had to come home and you were both like, oh, man, our fun has to end, what a bummer? Well, being married to Chris is like that except that there aren’t any moms to tell you to come home, and you can eat cookies and play video games and talk all night long if you want to. Being married is an awesome lifelong sleepover.

Happy anniversary, Chris. Now I’m hungry for Oreos.

Jun 10

In Which I Go Back to Being a Blonde

I bobbed my hair and it was looking kind of drab with my dishwater blonde/brown color, so I have gone back to being a blonde. (Well, sort of. I forgot how long it takes to actually go blonde in a way that is safe for your hair. It will take the whole dang summer.) It is more fun, yes, but also more of a pain in the ass. I forgot how blonde hair is a signal, much like wearing a dress, that no matter what the wearer looks like, construction workers should hoot, whistle, and shout suggestive things in the hair’s general direction. There is a lot of construction going on around my home and my work. I also wear a lot of dresses. You can imagine the level of hooting. Today a construction worker told me, “Baby, those are some shoes.” He was not looking at my shoes.

I also forgot how you have to wear less makeup when you are blonde. I put on my usual bright red lipstick and I looked just like a Kewpie doll. It’s been so long that I don’t even have any non-bright lipsticks anymore and I had to wear Cherry chapstick instead. This, I know, seems like not-really-a-giant-tragedy in the general world order of things, but trust me, it was highly upsetting. You think I am kidding but really I’m not. I am vain and I need my goddamn lipstick. I will have to visit Sephora and soon.