writer. screenwriter. learning person. loves being human.
I have finally dug myself out from under the paper and email and various tasks that had become a mountain over me… and I’ve spent this afternoon responding to comments in a frenzy of conversational catch-up. If you’re interested in following or joining some of those conversations, here’s where I’ve been chatting today:
Like a writer after all
The men of Solitaire
Art and money
In praise of process
The trees of life
Thanks to everyone for your patience!
Good photography of all kinds really rocks my world. Good photojournalism is just amazing to me. I connect more with news when I can see it than simply when I read it. And when the person capturing the images is herself connected through long-term exposure to the subject, with all the opportunities — and perspective — it brings, the results can be pretty astonishing.
So I recommend this photo essay by Callie Shell, who has been following the Obama campaign. There’s a companion photo essay by Stephen Crowley on the McCain campaign. Whomever you support, go take a look at the human side of the politicians.
I must share with you again something from Henry Beard’s Poetry for Cats: The Definitive Anthology of Distinguished Feline Verse.
I love the prodigious imagination at work in this little book: the exuberant love of both poetry and cats, and the way that Beard is able to evoke the original poem while making it something utterly… well, cat-like.
It’s a cool thing about people. We just love to put things together in new and interesting ways. We like to create resonances between things we love, whether it’s parties with friends or pop culture references in books. We like to look at the clouds and say, I see a bunny. We like to dance with strangers at rock concerts. And some of us like to read hommages written ostensibly by poets’ cats.
Don’t ask me to explain it. It’s a cat-lovin’ poetry-readin’ human Saturday kind of thing, and that’s all there it to it.
Treed
by Joyce Kilmer’s Cat
I think that I shall never see
A poem nifty as a tree.
A tree whose rugged trunk seems meant
To speed a happy cat’s ascent;
A tree that laughs at dogs all day
And serves up baby birds for prey;
A tree whose limbs are in the sky
Where clandestinely I can spy;
Until it does upon me dawn
It is a mile down to the lawn.
Poems are made by cats like me,
But only you can get me off this goddam stupid tree.
— from Poetry For Cats by Henry Beard.
And you know what else I like about people? That we’ll help each other down from the goddam stupid tree every once in a while. It’s one of the great human things.
Every Friday I transfer posts here from the Virtual Pint Archives.
Happy Friday and a good weekend to you.
No meaningful content here today, brothers and sisters. I am in Clean Off My Desk mode, and it’s not a pretty job, I can assure you. Not a task for the faint of heart. And so I will put on one of my favorite Threadless T-shirts. These shirts give me superpowers, turning me into a hyper-organizing detail-oriented ruthless discarder of All That Is Not Necessary. Oh, and they will also make me rich and give me power over everyone. I am fairly certain I will use this power only for good.
Who shall I be today? A Corporate Zombie?
Or shall I be Treasured? (As in, I believe, “treasured memories.” This is a two-sided shirt that tells a little story…)
If you like these shirts, see what else Threadless has got going on.
And whatever’s going on for you, I hope it is productive and gives you great satisfaction, and perhaps the delusional but nonetheless comforting feeling that this time the desk will stay clean forever and ever and ever…
I used to spend time struggling with the idea of “fairness.”
Do you, ever? Do you think about whether people or situations or the universe itself are fair to you? Or to other people? I’m not even sure I know what fair means anymore… but I’m pretty sure that it’s meaningless to talk about it in any context beyond that of specific personal interaction.
I think it’s fine to tell a friend I think they are being “unfair” — they aren’t taking something into account that they should in this moment, or they are judging me without empathy, or…. well, there are many ways that people who are vulnerable to each other can be unfair, you know? Perhaps fairness and vulnerability are linked in this way… I don’t know, I’ll have to think more about that. But I do know that part of my definition of closeness is that there is space for me to speak and be heard.
But, you know, Life and The Universe and the Random Strangers Of The World do not have to listen to me. It’s not a rule. And so how can I possibly expect fairness from them?
It’s nice to think that things happen for a reason — good things and bad things — because it makes it seem possible to control them if we only understand the cause. It makes it seem that we can interject an element of fairness into these universal transactions. But, you know, it’s not “fair” that Nicola has MS, and it’s not unfair either. MS is in the world, and people get it. It’s not fair that our beloved cat died this summer and broke my fucking heart and that I still cry so hard I get nosebleeds, but it’s not unfair either. All living things on the planet die. It’s not fair that I have specific opportunities that other people don’t, and it’s not unfair either. It’s the result of a million choices that I made, and that some of those Random Strangers made, that ended up bringing us together in ways that changed our lives. That’s what happens. (I recognize that many of my opportunities are a result of social injustice to other people — but I’m not sure I wish to apply the word “unfair” to that anymore. Wrong? Yes, that’s a good word. But this idea of fairness is something else.)
And in the midst of thinking about fairness, today I read this post on Seth Godin’s blog: Maybe you can’t make money doing what you love.
I’ve long felt this way. I knew I would not make a living as a writer at the beginning, and that’s why I was so happy to find myself at Wizards of the Coast, doing work that I could really get behind, that changed me in ways I will carry with me for the rest of my life. That’s where I made the money that let me stop working full-time and focus on my art. And you know, it never occurred to me to think it was unfair that I had to do that. Why should I expect people to support me — to pay for my life on the planet to whatever standard I set for myself — just because I want to express myself? Just because I want to make art?
Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great that people make a living as artists, and I would like to do it myself — but I sure as hell don’t expect it, and I don’t think it’s a direct measure of the value of my art if I do, or if I don’t. I think it’s just what happens.
And the interesting thing to me is that, like Seth Godin, I have lots of negative capability around this stuff. Screenwriting fascinates and compels me because it is both art and work, in all the ways that I understand the latter — creative, collaborative, communication-dependent, and focused on results that do not necessarily reflect only my needs. The opportunity to do it was one of those million-choices confluences. And it gave me the enormous gift of rediscovering pure passion for my writing, and the equally great gift to walk away from standards of commercial success that I could not live up to.
But you know what? If it works out, I’ll have found a way to make money through art.
I used to spend time struggling with the idea of fairness. Now, I’d rather spend time making choices. And seeing what happens.
When I was a little girl, I found a book in the library….
A side trip here. My mom was the librarian of my grammar school, which I’m sure is why I love libraries so much (apart from, you know, all the books). Thanks, Mum (waves at mom through the internet). So I’m not sure if the book I’m telling you about was in the school library, or in the Tampa Public Library which we also frequented, and I’ll tell you what — that one might have had more books, but it wasn’t nearly as good as our school library, seriously. All the books were hard to find (card catalogs, kids, these were perilous times..) and a lot of them hadn’t been checked out in years and smelled like cat pee.
… anyway, I found this marvelous book:
And I fell so hard in love, I just couldn’t stand it. Colleen Moore came from a wealthy, connected family and she knew architects, artists and artisans, designers… and they helped her create a miniature fairy castle (which cost a half million dollars in the 30’s, so you can imagine the opulence).
And it’s awesome. There are teeny working electrical lights, miniature Royal Doulton china, the world’s smallest printed bible. 2,500-year-old Roman statues. Silks, tapestries, murals and paintings signed by famous artists, color everywhere, and all just dripping with imagination… I thought it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I think it was the first time I was seized by fantasy in this way — I was always captivated by story, but I don’t remember any distinctive fantasy stories lodged in me until this book, when I started making up my own stories about the people who lived in these rooms.
When I was older, we took a trip to Chicago and visited the castle in the Museum of Science and Industry. It was very cool to see it in person, but also, in the way of exhibits, it was a bit of a letdown — not because the castle itself was disappointing, but because the experience didn’t have the intimacy of all my hours with the photographs. Reading the book, I could be close to everything. I could stand in every room, imagine the process of creation while reading the text, see it come alive. But in the exhibit, standing at an appropriate public don’t-touch distance behind a barrier — well, that says it all, really.
And so I remember best the castle of the book. But it’s still in the museum, and through the magic of the interweb you can see it up close and personal too. (Be sure to click through all the tabs — under the “Exhibit” tab there is a series of photos of the rooms.)
Go take a look. Tell yourself a story while you’re there.
… for the gift. I’m surprised and very grateful, and yes, I certainly will enjoy it! I will use it on the new Stephen King collection. It will give me superawesome glee to have this, I think King is a rocking storyteller.
And then, well, we’ll see.
Thank you, thank you!
I haven’t seen Happy Go Lucky yet, but I can already tell it’s a movie that’ll piss a lot of people off. Because nothing bad happens! And that’s not realistic!
Well, no. Maybe not. And right now I think that’s just fine. I know the difference between realism and wish-fulfillment. And why, I ask you, why is it so bad to just throw ourselves every once in a while into the Great Big Mud Puddle of Smoodgy Fabulous Dreams and roll around for a while?
Dana Stevens argues in this review that “for a moral fable like this to work, the protagonist’s goodness needs to be tested against the possibility of real evil or violence.” I get that — one of the things I loved about Lars and the Real Girl was the tension early on that people would be cruel to Lars, and the marvelous sense of relief I felt when they weren’t. Lars was so realistic in that way.
But I have enough real in my real life right now, thanks very much. So I’ll be seeing Happy Go Lucky. I don’t know if I’ll like it — but if I don’t, I sure hope it isn’t because it’s too happy for me.
No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.
* * * *
Eleanor Vance was thirty-two years old… The only person in the world she genuinely hated, now that her mother was dead, was her sister. She disliked her brother-in-law and her five-year-old niece, and she had no friends. This was owing largely to the eleven years she had spent caring for her invalid mother, which had left her with some proficiency as a nurse and an inability to face strong sunlight without blinking. She could not remember ever being truly happy in her adult life; her years with her mother had been built up devotedly around small guilts and small reproaches, constant weariness, and unending despair.
* * * *
It was the first genuinely shining day of summer, a time of year which brought Eleanor always to aching memories of her early childhood, when it had seemed to be summer all the time; she could not remember a winter before her father’s death on a cold wet day. She had taken to wondering lately, during these swift-counted years, what had been done with all those wasted summer days; how could she have spent them so wantonly? I am foolish, she told herself early every summer, I am very foolish; I am grown up now and know the values of things. Nothing is ever really wasted, she believed sensibly, even one’s childhood, and then each year, one summer morning, the warm wind would come down the city street where she walked and she would be touched with the little cold thought: I have let more time go by. Yet this morning, driving the little car which she and her sister owned together, apprehensive lest they might still realize that she had come after all and just taken it away, going docilely along the street, following the lines of traffic, stopping when she was bidden and turning when she could, she smiled out at the sunlight slanting along the street and thought, I am going, I am going, I have finally taken a step.
— from The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
Eleanor is going to Hill House. What do you suppose will happen when she gets there?
If you have not read this book then I envy you, as I do anyone experiencing a good story for the first time. Read it. It’s short and powerful, frightening not with blood or gore but only through the slow revelations of the fears and madness that people carry inside.
And do see the fabulous 1963 movie The Haunting, directed by Robert Wise and starring Julie Harris as Eleanor. But do not see the stinky terrible deeply stupid horrible bad 1999 remake, ick ick ick.
I’ve always loved Jackson’s work; she was an awesome writer, spare and specific and very good at capturing the superficial interactions of people with all the tar bubbling underneath. She’s a writer that new writers can learn from — about economy, how to report things about a character without stooping to the dreaded “telling,” how to show the nuances of sexual tension or fear or rebellion without pounding it into the reader’s head.
So I was delighted back in 1998 to be invited by Ellen Datlow, fiction editor of OMNI, to take part in a round robin story with Graham Joyce, Ed Bryant and Kathe Koja. The conceit of round robin is that each writer takes a turn with the story, writing a short entry (500 -700 words) as quickly as possible, then passing it along to the next person.
We decided our story should be an hommage to Shirley Jackson, and that’s how we started it, although I think it drifted fairly quickly (grin). It was a fascinating experience working with these folks. I enjoyed coming home from my work at Wizards of the Coast, grabbing a beer on my way downstairs to my basement office, turning on the computer, reading whatever entry had been handed off to me, and then…. just beginning. Exhilarating stuff. Here it is, if you’d like to read it. But, straight up, Jackson is better (grin).
I am going, I am going, I have finally taken a step — who among us does not know that feeling? It’s a pull like leaning over the roof edge of a very tall building. It’s the thrill when everything you know disappears in the rearview mirror and you are clean and new, you could be anyone, and nothing you’ve left behind can touch you. It’s only what’s ahead that will shape you now. Or at least, that’s what we want so badly to believe. Jackson knows better; and Eleanor will find out that we always bring ourselves on these journeys.