the pieces of my life

Pie came home with this from school yesterday:

For those who don’t read 1st grade, it says that when she grows up, she’s going to be a writer. The amount of money she will make is “thousands and thousands of money.” She’ll be attending New York University and her best friend will remain Jasmine (that’s Jasmine on the left; Pie on the right).

“Aw,” I said when I saw it. “This is lovely. But just so you know, writers don’t make ‘thousands and thousands of money.’ At least not more than a handful of writers. Most writers make very little money.”

And Pie said, “Not me. I’ll make lots of money! I’m going to write BIG books! Hardcover ones!”

So that’s what I’ve been doing wrong…!

So, it’s not exactly my review, but it’s a review of the issue of Bellevue Literary Review that my essay was in, and I did get a teeny-tiny shout out. Hey, I’ll take it where I can get it!

And so you don’t have to go digging through for my little bitty mention, the very kind Julie J. Nichols wrote in her review:

More pieces dealing with cultural prescriptions about the body, both current and historical, include “The Disordered Body” (about the 1853 Yellow Fever outbreak, Amanda Auchter); J. S. Brown’s delightful personal narrative “The Codeine of Jordan,” in which she battles more than the physical discomfort of a UTI in a foreign land; and “The Colostomy Diaries” by Janet Buttenwieser.

I’m delightful!

(What’s the point of having a blog, if you can’t toot your own horn now and then? I’ll be back to my regularly scheduled skewering of my family next week.)

I wish you people could see the graveyard of abandoned posts I have in my WordPress drafts folder. It’s a very sad folder, filled with half thoughts, nuggets of ideas, and bits of wisdom I wanted to share, but never finished. They eventually became irrelevant or uninteresting to me or just lost. I think one of my new year’s resolutions should be shorter posts that I can finish writing in a single sitting. Not that that’s relevant to today’s post. I just wanted to mention it as I thought of it.

November has come and gone. November brought a fabulous turkey with even better bourbon-cranberry sauce, the remains of my pneumonia (which had me taking a medicine that I couldn’t take within two hours of calcium, which meant a crazed planning of the timing of my milky coffee, which meant I’d often not be human until close to lunch time), and of course NaNoWriMo.

Nanowrimo is done my friends. And, yes, I am a…

I confess, I had extra motivation this year. About halfway through I started experimenting with the program Scrivener. And I am completely hooked. I don’t even use most of the features, but the ability to easily jump back and forth between chapters and even scenes (as opposed to either keeping the entire novel in a single Word doc or opening forty Word docs and scrolling them individually to find my place) was amazing. But I used it on a trial basis. And had to win NaNoWriMo. Because Scrivener promised 50% off for winners (coupon to come soon!). So that was the motivation.

But happily, I didn’t need too much of a motivational push. Because I’m definitely into my new story. I’m loving my visits to the 1930s (the novel takes place in August of 1935). The research has been fun and it’s a new form of escapism, retreating to a world where my protagonist doesn’t even have a phone, never mind an iPad 2. The novel is a mess, in total disarray. I realized midway that I need to restructure it, but that’s what December is for. I need to step back and look at the arc of the plot and figure out how to play with the tension and form to get it where it needs to be. I actually was quite surprised at how the book turned out. I thought for sure I knew what my main character was going to do–if you recall I had actually plotted this out ahead of time–and she completely surprised me! That’s the best part of writing; when things don’t go at all as planned.

Now onward to December! Time to get my hands dirty ripping this novel apart. It’s not that different from all that purging I’ve been doing. Gotta make a big ol’ mess before everything finds a place!

My lovely hubby just made me the most lovely whiskey sour to put me in the appropriate (non-suicidal) Dorothy Parker state of mind for my Nanowrimoing this evening (she may have written about martinis, but she was a fan of the whiskey sour, which I think is my new drink).

It’s good to be me.

“I like to have a martini,
Two at the very most.
After three I’m under the table,
after four I’m under my host.”
–Dorothy Parker

I feel so big time! So, not only is my essay live on the Bellevue Literary Review site, but there’s actually a study guide for reading my essay!

Bellevue Literary Review posted my piece online! Read “The Codeine of Jordan,” if you care to know more about me than you ever wished to!

I saw this originally on Rachelle Gardner‘s blog, but it was too good not to share:

I’m trying a novel idea with my, uh, novel. When I was writing Continuity, I had pages of notes, Excel spreadsheets trying to keep track of dates and events, and a while when I was sitting with my calculator, playing with, “Wait, if she was born here, then she was how old when he did this, and how old would he have been?” Dates are an important element of Continuity, so it was imperative I kept track, but it was challenging.

For my next novel, which is an historical novel, I’ve created a timeline. I don’t know yet if this will really help, but so far it’s been great because I have lots of room to lay out the back story, real historical events, and pieces of my story. I’m hoping this will help me insure the flow is right, and that I don’t accidentally have events in my story happening out of place with the historical events surrounding them. I’ve been playing with a timeline program called Tiki Toki, and so far it’s been quite easy to use.

This is the first time I’ve had a solid idea of where the novel is going to end. I spent about three years working on Continuity, and I didn’t have the ending for about a year and a half. And then it took that second year and a half to tweak it, perfect it, and get it just where I (or actually the character) wanted it to be (and that’s all before my agent’s revisions and then those rewrites and….).

This month, I plan on using Nanowrimo to get my novel started (National Novel Writing Month: During the month of November, write a 50,000 word novel). I love Nanowrimo. I’ve done it many times in the past. I don’t think anyone can write a novel in a month. Let’s rephrase that. I don’t think anyone can write a solid, well-plotted, well-crafted, interesting novel in a month. But I think that Nanowrimo is fabulous for that initial word dump, for getting past your internal editor and just getting the words down on the page. Starting the novel is the absolute hardest thing to do and Nanowrimo gives you a deadline for doing it. Are you doing Nano? If so, put me down as a writing buddy (my Nano handle is jbrown).

Meanwhile, I’ve got a few thousand words to write today, so I leave you with this thought:

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. –Thomas Mann

Lately I’ve been in a Dorothy Parker state of mind (minus the suicidal thoughts). No matter what I do, it always comes back to Dorothy Parker. She’s appeared here on occasion in my blog, as long-time readers will note. I first discovered her in high school, and throughout the years, I’ve felt her lure. For my research on my next novel–which will take place in the 1930s–I’ve been reading a lot about the Depression years as well as reading of the Depression years, which of course includes old New Yorkers and Dorothy Parker.

Whenever I think of Dorothy Parker and the New Yorker, I think of my paternal grandfather and his stack of magazines that he worked his way through, reading them cover to cover even when they were decades beyond current. Reading things from that era, I can hear my grandfather speaking; his language had the same rhythms, the same refinement as the literature. People were erudite in those days, their vocabularies so much richer. If someone spoke today in the language of the 1930s, people would think he was putting on airs. Oh, excuse me. That phrase is not really used today, is it? They would think he was showing off.

Tonight, I revisited Dorothy Parker, but when I went to look for my trusting Viking Portable from 1980something, I couldn’t find it. I did, however, find a second copy that I didn’t realize I had, the seventeenth edition printed in 1964 (originally published in 1944). The introduction alone, by W. Somerset Maugham, is amazing, and a topic for another post.

Flipping through it, I saw that it belonged to my maternal grandmother, who is not someone I associate with Dorothy Parker. Yet when I started re-reading it for the first time in over a decade, I saw where my grandmother might have been drawn to it. All the pretense for society, the masking of true emotion. That was my grandmother. My grandmother always underlined her books, and I scour those notations trying to decipher what she related to, what she found interesting.

I have inklings, and I’ll draw conclusions when I finish the book, plot out all my grandmother’s lines. But I need to get into a 1930s state of mind. So I switch from martinis to whiskey sours (Dorothy’s favorite drink), place a hat on my head, and travel back to the 1930s.

*”If you don’t have anything nice to say, come sit by me…” —Dorothy Parker**

**EDITED: My father insists this quote should be attributed to Alice Roosevelt Longworth. My web searches indicate it’s Longworth. And Parker. And even Gertrude Stein. So I will leave you with something that is definitively Dorothy Parker:

Drink and dance and laugh and lie,
Love, the reeling midnight through,
For tomorrow we shall die!
(But, alas, we never do.)

One of the dilemmas writers have is knowing where to draw the line when writing about family. Our local writing center, Grub Street, has occasionally offered classes about how to write about family, what to do when family objects to their portrayals, and the like.

This hasn’t been something I’ve worried about in the past. My father has practically begged me to write about our family once everyone who would care about it is dead. Or more specifically, once he’s dead and doesn’t have to hear about it from everyone (this is not me being morbid, folks, I swear. My father really does talk like this). Of course, I should point out that by “family” he means “my mother’s family,” so he has less at stake here.

I do write about family, but more often, I write about things that most families wouldn’t love. Not my family. My essay just came out in the Bellevue Literary Review, and I sent my parents a copy. It’s about me. In it, I have sex. With someone who wasn’t my boyfriend. And I get sick from having sex. In a foreign country. I admit, I had a few twinges about showing it to them, but hey, I’m 43 years old. I lived a long life before I got here. They know it. Now they know it in print. It didn’t bother them at all.

But I have to wonder, now, what will my kids think. Of course I didn’t show them the essay. And I won’t. But someday, when they’re adults, they may come across it. And while I don’t mind, I have a feeling they might. My mother, the artist, frequently has made pieces with a sexual bent, and I remember when Richard, my 10th grade boyfriend, came to pick me up and asked, “Why are there French ticklers in your front hallway?” Okay, the first thing I had to do was figure out what French ticklers were. But then I was mortified. My mother was amused. (The sculpture was of this era, in case you’re curious.) I can imagine the same for my kids. I’ll be amused. They’ll be horrified.

But what about writing about the kids. An essay appeared a couple of years ago about a woman who wrote about her son’s drug addiction. He was not happy with the book, and she was lambasted by the public for writing it. Yet writing scathing things about family is nothing new. Writing things that family members get angry about is also nothing new. I feel like I’m a little inured. Again, I refer you to my mother. She’s made my family fair game in her art (it’s hard to see, but there are some pictures in here of Adam and the boy; she’s also done tons of the Tweedle Twirp); I know she expects me to do the same.

At this point, the kids say things to me like, “Are you going to blog about that?” But they’ve never read the blog. And I’d like to keep it that way for at least a little while. I’ve definitely censored myself since having kids. As bitchy as I can get, I used to be far worse. I’ve stopped singling out people who annoy me, as it was one thing when I had to worry about them hating me (I never cared). I do worry about them taking it out on my kids.

For now, I’ll keep writing. About sex. About family. About life. And I’ll try not to censor myself. Because the kids are going to need something to talk about in therapy!