My friend Mark sent me info on this blogging project and I think it is really important to spread the word on it:

Women bloggers in India are blogging against sexual harrassment (called in India “Eve teasing”): blank noise project

Thanks, Mark!

Okay, I’ve known about this for a while but it hadn’t been announced until now–Debut Buy (scroll down on the linked page for the info).

Not only is Ron Currie one of the nicest guys around, but he’s got mad talent to boot. And if you’re not salivating over when you can get your hands on this book, you should be because I’ve read parts of it and it kicks serious ASS. Yay, Ron!

This morning I had a hankering for the sound of the peepers in the spring and lo and behold, Lang Elliot, who is a genuis at recording nature sounds, has it: Spring Peepers.

What do you do when you are at the point of your revision that you are convinced you are writing the most useless, boring, piece of crap ever written? Or maybe you don’t go there, but I do. Every time.

I love you. I hate you. I love you. I hate you.

Okay, so I am turning once again this morning to Stephen Koch’s The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop for some inspiration:

Every writer must be taught how to write every book she or he writes, and the teacher is always the book itself. Writing becomes good by accretion. It builds on itself; it picks up its own cues, it takes its own suggestions. You rarely start out knowing exactly what you are doing or what is to come, and by the time you reach the middle, you rarely know how you are going to get out alive. The project must be your guide, and it will not be finished teaching you the job until the day you type the final page. Then, if you are lucky, it will let you go.

Check out Storyglossia where my pal Kat’s awesome story is featured today–Tracks that Heal.

I’m in the process of revision right now and questioning every decision–the biggest of which was to change the manuscript from 1st person to 3rd. I had an epiphany early last week that I should do this because there were some issues with the narrator; mainly, it was that she seemed omniscient for a first person narrator. She also seemed too confessional and I worry that this would put her whole character in jeopardy–deeming her unreliable, etc.

So I am making this switch and while I had approached it wholeheartedly, now I’m wondering if I’m making the right choice. I believe I am, but, you know, it will suck if I make this switch and then not feel like it’s the right one to make afterall.

But that’s why we keep multiple copies and versions, right?

This morning I turned to Stephen Koch’s The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop for some back up and guidance. I didn’t find anything specific to my cause, but I love what he has to say here:

Meanwhile, classroom overemphasis on “point of view” often leaves writers blind to one incomparably rich perspective that is left out of this discussion. I’m speaking of the voice, the mind, and the “sensibility” of the novel itself. In any decent piece of fiction, there will be certain perceptions and thoughts that cannot be ascribed to any of the characters. They are the thoughts and the perceptions of the work. The works sees, comprehends, and conveys all kinds of meaning that are quite inaccessible to any given character. They belong to the work alone.

I have pretty much read the Fall 2005 issue of Ploughshares from cover to cover now. It is an excellent issues, guest edited by Antonya Nelson.

My favorite stories in the issue all, in a way, deal with family, with coming of age (even if one is middle aged), with love or the lack thereof, and with desire–a need for something that is missing. They are–Just Family, Cowboy Honeymoon, Inkneck, The Bottom of the Glass, and the luminous, hilarious, and horrific If There’s a Hell I Hope You Burn There with the Others:

The last picture I take is of Rachel, stumbling through the double doors under the basketball goal, wiping white spit from her mouth. I ask her what’s wrong, and she asks me if I have ever seen one of my close friends eaten alive. I tell her that I have not, and I put my camera in the cardboard box with the others. I imagine my father and Angie sitting around the kitchen table organizing the photos. I wonder if Angie will cry when she finds out that seventy percent of her wedding pictures are of bloody fish. I wonder which of my pictures will make it to the album and which ones she will throw away.

Got an email about this service and it looks quite cool and useful, so I’m passing on the info to you:

Welcome to TitleTrader, the most effective book, movie, and music swap club on the internet. Titletrader is a free service that allows users to exchange books (paperback and hardcover), music (CDs), and movies (DVDs and VHS) with other community members from anywhere around the world. We have a large selection of titles and the inventory is growing daily, thanks to our users. We invite you to join this exciting free book swap service for free.

In his huffington post post, American Fiction: MIA, Rob Spillman eloquently throws down the gauntlet for today’s young, America fiction writers:

But where are the young, ambitious American writers willing to take on the socio-economic dramas of our times? Surely the Bush administration’s warped fantasia is rich material for fiction. Established writers like George Saunders, Deborah Eisenberg, Aimee Bender, Jim Shepard, and Joy Williams take on our current climate obliquely and deftly, but I worry about the Myspace Generation of writers.

All I can say is, keep your eye on writers like Ron Currie because he is just what the doctor ordered.

“You’re the one that took them… You eat ’em like candy. You’re addicted to them. Just like a cocaine dealer. That’s ten I gave you the last time.”

“You owe me seven bucks and then I’ll give you the bottle. You owe me $6.84 actually, but I’ll tax you.”

Today M. tells me about the two girls he knew who were murdered when he was younger. I remember the name of the murderer of one of them, but I can’t remember the girls’ names.

A woman outside the restaurant held a plastic bag up to the wind.

New Year’s Eve. What does this mean to me? Another mark in my personal time line which has no marking for husbanad and children. The blank mark is today and it stretches back into the negative numbers and forward into blackness.

Drunken man on the train platform needs attention. No one is willing to give it to him. Where has my need gone?

It is easier not to think of the lives of others. How depressing it must be on Sunday afternoons when the lighting is harsh and when there is no where new for them to go.

Saw Joseph Heller speak at the BPL and he said, “Change is never good.” He has the option to say that. I know he meant it in a larger sense but this is a rash statement to make in front of me.

Fucking psychos all around me. Man putting his money in behind me looked like he wanted to kill me. I just want out I want escape I want out I want escape. My circle becomes smaller and smaller. More compact and restricted.

I don’t want anything and I will get nothing.

All is well right now. In this one instant, all is well.

Question everything and worry all the time. Lie in bed and my thinking reaches this separate plane which I have never experienced. Filing cabinet worry.

Mention a name to get a reaction. Watch one dog walk towards another, head down, back straight as if there were no other way to approach one another. Two joggers pass one another – they breathe simultaneously. The sound of feet on pavement and breathing is not alien to me.

Listening to a mixed tape over and over again.

Sunbathing. As always, this is where I should be. Alone and in the sun. Go away clouds, far away. The leaves turn inside out. It will rain soon. Dark and light. Sun filters through. I drink my second beer of the day. It is 2pm.

If I just held the tip of the page, would it fill up eventually?

The men working on the house across the way go swiftly about their work.

The breeze by the water is heavier, softer.

So what if an American boy in Russia drinks a bottle of vodka a day? He has assimilated. So what if he thinks dark thoughts?

The young woman is allowed to sit with her son.
Overwhelming noise everywhere
The saws and the hammers
The plane overhead
Each day I slip farther from the truth.
I keep waiting for a check to come in the mail.

Her wedding invitation arrives in the mail today.
The guardian angels – men on the train
“it’s my favorite genre – sci fi.”
The two trashy girls, one in white stockings

Broken tooth
I will take one day and stay on the beach
I will take long lunch hours and look for work
A foreign couple, French, make sandwiches on a bench in the cement courtyard. They don’t know that if they walked a few more blocks they could sit on the grass by the Charles.
Broken tooth.

February 29th – a day that only happens every four years

I look for you in all things

Broken tooth – snowstorm – cheap dentist – he pulled it out and I bled all over and went home and J. left me alone hopped up on codeine. Then the new dentist – he and assistant (sassy black woman) got in a fight and he told me he was passing a kidney stone.

California: the burnt hills in Malibu, the smell of sage brush in Santa Barbara, the sunset at Pismo Beach. San Simeon. Driving on the foggy cliffs with the top down and the heat on. Big Sur. The soulful redwoods. The seals in Monterey. And all the time, missing and missing.

My blue blocker lenses made everything beautiful and surreal.

I like sitting in my cold, dark kitchen drinking wine. Winter wrap me in your thin arms and I will rejoice.

If you can be quiet for just one minute you can hear all of the strange life.

He read the girl’s poems and told her that they were “nice”, but on the way home all he could think about was her anger. She was so small, like a little boy with her closely cropped hair so brazenly shorn off in the closed minded farming community. Where did the anger collect…

I bring my eyes down and form a bridge with the light from the door.

– Does she know I’m moving out?
– yes.
– why?
– I don’t know
– This is my bed. Mine. I made it.
– I know.
– It is my bed.
– Do you think she’s going to be in here the second you move out and we will be fucking and fucking?
– What do you want from her? What can you get?
– I don’t know.

I am losing everything and he cries for himself.

The man on the street drives by and waves
Smiling, I think I know him
He looks familiar
He brings his car over
I wave, smile
His face is not known
I don’t know you, I say, covering my own blank face.

The sky opened up a huge cavity in the clouds and I tried to fill it with the smoke from my cigarette.

I remember well playing snooker with you in Glasgow

Today my mum would have been 74 years old, though she would have lied and told you she was 64 (and you would have believed her). Five years ago was the last birthday she was alive. We went to the beach–my sisters, their children, my mum, and I.

I sat next to mum, both of us on lawn chairs. The sun was too much for her so she was beneath an umbrella. I can’t remember if we made it down to the water but she was able to touch the sand. I gave her a necklace with a healing stone. She was wearing it when she died a month later. I have it now.

Four years and eleven months gone and I can’t believe I’ve lived a day without you. Happy Birthday, Mum. I am sending you a chickadee.

Love,
Myfanwy

Do you know how generous my friend Ellen Meister is? I’ll tell you: VERY. She’s got one of my stories highlighted on her blog today: Bridges on Ellen’s Blog. Thank you, Ellen!