Category: friday pint

This is the last of the Virtual Pint archives.

The furniture is cleared, the floors are swept, and the virtual pub is now officially closed. But I hope that the spirit lives on, and that the conversations will continue. Start one anytime.

It’s nice to have all the words under one roof. I like it here. Thanks for being a part of it.

Enjoy your day.

• Art and commerce (April 2007) — The economics of art.
• It’s a party! (June 2007) — Nicola’s memoir. It, and she, are made of awesome.
• More hope (August 2007) — The conversation about hope has been ongoing here, in fits and starts, for years. I hope (smile) that it continues.

Every Friday I transfer posts here from the Virtual Pint archives. Yes, this is Saturday. Life is like that sometimes.

The penultimate pints, for your perusal and possible pleasure. Past is becoming present…

• Hope and happiness (December 2006) — Continuing the ongoing conversation about hope. And mystery.
• Screen and short stuff (December 2006) — I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to attend the intensive screenwriting course I mention in this post, but I did recently attend a FilmSchool weekend seminar which was terrific. So much to learn…
• Words in my head all the time (March 2007) — Talking for the first time about “Dangerous Space,” and the sea change in my sense of writing self that led me here, and eventually here.

Enjoy your Saturday.

Every week I transfer posts here from the Virtual Pint archives.

On the InterWeb where time is flexible, we have nearly reached the end of 2006. That means there are only a couple more weeks of Friday pints before we are magically back in real time (whatever that means in the virtual world…)

• Never (November 2006) — It’s a big word, one I don’t use often. But I mean it here.
• More naked (November 2006) — The continuing conversation on where the writer is, and isn’t, in the work.
• The conversation (December 2006) — Nearly 21 years of talking, so far. I hope for another 50 or 60 at least.

Enjoy your Friday.

Every Friday I transfer posts here from the Virtual Pint archives.

Some long stories and rambling thoughts in today’s serving of pints, so let’s just get straight to it:

• Wisconamania (June 2006) — The vagaries of travel and exuberance of conventioneering.
• Naked (July 2006) — The writer is the doorway.
• Agents (October 2006) — Does it matter who you have? Well, think of it as getting married…

I hope all is well with you, wherever you are. Enjoy your Friday.

Every Friday I transfer posts here from the Virtual Pint archives.

• Pretty shiny things (April 2006) — So titled not because of what I say in the post, but what the post says about me. I go through jackdaw phases: Look! A pretty shiny thing! Let’s pick it up and find out what it is! And there I go, off down some trail of learning or doing or just wandering around, blinking happily and stopping for the occasional bottle of wine.
• Meaning and vulnerability (April 2006) — I actually transferred this post a while back, so it will be familiar to some of you. How much of the writer does one find in the work? My current answer: if she’s that good, she’s all there, but none of her shows.
• Slower (May 2006) — Here’s another example of that no-pain-in-public cheerfulness I was talking about in last week’s pint. I was full of despair at this point about everything to do with writing, and was already having the first tentative discussions with Nicola about whether she’d still love me if I wasn’t a writer anymore. She said yes, and held me while I cried, and told me I would always be a writer.

  But I sure wasn’t feeling like one. And so I dusted myself off and started developing Humans At Work. It was something I had wanted to do for years: but here I was, doing it for the wrong reason, doing it because I had lost faith that I could do the thing I wanted most. That was a hard time.

But today is not that day. Today looks like a nice day, and tomorrow there will be dancing, and the thing about life is that if you let it, it goes on. February 2009 is hard, but I’d still rather be here than May 2006. Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, I hope you’re in a good place too.

Every Friday I transfer posts here from the Virtual Pint archives.

• At least to act as if (December 2005) — New year ruminations after a long absence from the virtual pub.

  Why do I go away sometimes? Various reasons. I generally treated VP like a conversation more than a blog, and so if there were no questions, there was generally no conversation. But these days I absent myself because things are busy-good or because things are hard. When things are busy-good, I am so focused that I lose track of time; I am always surprised to come up from the ocean of self and find how long it’s been since I reached out to my virtual friends. When things are hard, I don’t want to talk to anyone, except sometimes for Nicola. I am happy to tell stories; I am not so apt to process current pain in public.

  It interests but does not surprise me that “withdrawal” for me means I stop communicating. I’ll talk, sure. I’ll discuss ideas and thank you for bagging my groceries, and I’ll be cheerful about it. I just won’t talk about anything I feel. Communicating is for me a demonstration and expression of self, even if it’s just May I please have the salt? When my self is wounded in some way, I protect it the only way I know how — by encircling the vulnerable places with silence, making them invisible. I can pretty much define my circle of true intimacy by people who notice when I do this, and people who don’t.

  Why am I telling you this? I have no idea, except perhaps that — in the spirit of this 2005 post — I continue to look for ways that I can be myself in my life even when it means being visible, being vulnerable, being so hurt sometimes that I literally cannot speak of it because my voice will not work.

  It was not until the end of 2005, in this December post, that I was able to say (even sideways) in public that I had lost faith in both my novels. It was only to Nicola that I was able to say the real truth: I had lost faith in myself as a writer.

  That’s not how I feel anymore. I can safely say that I will continue to succeed and fail as a writer, but I will never again doubt the rightness for me of doing it. But I’ve been feeling lately, for a variety of reasons, that other people whose opinions matter have lost faith in me. It’s astonishing how much that hurts. But it doesn’t hurt as much as when I lost faith in myself.

  And so my wish for everyone, especially right now when so much is so hard, is that you will do whatever you must to hang onto your faith in yourself. Even if it’s in shreds and all you have is a fingerhold on it, don’t let go. Just hang onto it until tomorrow. Repeat as necessary.

• SBKoE (April 2006) — Here’s a prime example of the “cheerful” described above. That trip to England was brutally hard on both of us. Nicola’s mum was dying, and we all knew that this was our last time together. And then, thanks to an employee of British Midland Airlines, we missed our flight to Seattle, and there I was, begging a British Airways manager to please find a solution that did not involve my putting an exhausted, grieving woman with MS in a hotel for the night and subjecting her to the airport round all over again. He did, bless him forever, and I will always beg for something Nicola needs, but I don’t enjoy it. But I would never have told you that in April 2006.
• It’s your party (April 2006) — And here’s a little something about publishing rights. No angsty backstory (Thank god! think all the non-emos on the internet…)

Thanks as always for reading. It’s nice to have you here. I wish you a lovely Friday.

Every Friday I transfer posts here from the Virtual Pint archives.

This is the most absent I’ve been from the blog in a while. I appreciate the patience of those of you who are still being patient (grin). I’ll be back soon, with new stories. In the meantime, here are some old stories that I hope you will enjoy.

Wishing you well.

• Wonderland (June 2005) — In which Alice returns briefly to sit on the other side of the table.
• Writing and words (July 2005) — Writing and rewriting, weaving words.
• The word road (July 2005) — I said in this post that I was starting to see my writing as a highway. That’s even more true now. More and more clearly, I see that my work is not necessarily about me, but it is certainly a map of me, a journey, a road.

Every Friday I transfer posts here from the Virtual Pint archives.

Sporadic posting here in my corner of the internet this past couple of weeks, due to being Miss Busy Pajamas. Thanks for your patience.

Here is today’s tray of pints:

• Hope for the elections and everything else (April 2005) — I posted this as part of a big roundup I did about hope nearly a year ago, so perhaps some of you haven’t yet seen it. It seems timely, coming as it does only days after an election and inauguration that have inspired more political hope in me than I’ve had in a long time. Maybe because I already see evidence of action. Back in 2005, all I had was hope.
• Continuation (May 2005) — When the story goes on in non-sequential ways.
• Life/story (May 2005) — Balancing the daily details with the story. This one was unexpectedly hard to transfer over, since I had to rebuild all the links and was caught quite unaware by how much I miss my beloved cat.

But it’s okay. Death or not, love is good and the world is wide and the sun is always shining on some part of it. Today that’s enough for me. I hope wherever you are and whatever the day may bring you will be wonderfully enough for you.

Every Friday I transfer posts here from the Virtual Pint archives.

I bought these first two posts over to this blog last May when I wrote about being a writing ally. But there are many new folks here on the blog since then, so here they are.

• Not just a white world (September 2004) — Don’t hang “race tags” on characters.
• Multicultural writing (October 2004) — Why I don’t get a cookie.

After I did these posts, I went missing from the virtual pub for nearly 4 months. Nicola and I quite suddenly and unexpectedly bought a new house, sold ours, didi some fairly hefty renovations to the new place, during which we moved, and about a week after that I traveled across country to do a guest teaching gig at my old high school. Leaving Nicola up to her ears in boxes and contractors and suchlike. It was a really special time for both of us.

But it worked out. And it certainly did jar some things loose, which was part of the point for both of us. Not to shake up our relationship, but ourselves — and then see how we would settle and re-form.

One thing it did was make me a little nostalgic for the people inside my head. As you’ll see in the last post.

• Staying connected (February 25)

Enjoy your Friday.