neonanima | Entries tagged with writing

two people in my writing group are working on memoirs. one has led a fascinating life—met muhammad ali and the jackson 5; attended a martin luther king jr. rally; told patty labelle she would never make it on tv with her writhing wildcat performance—to such a degree that i asked if if people constantly tell her "you should write a book!" she said yes.

the other is writing about the long-term sexual abuse she suffered from her older sister. it's a struggle to critique memoir involving such deeply traumatic personal memories. i suggested exploring her family members as characters, and not plunging the reader right away into the eye the abuse and all the emotions surrounding it. she said she wasn't sure how to portray another person's feelings and thoughts, not being that person.

the group is very diverse both age-wise and in how much experience they seem to have writing, in varying formats. yesterday my first submission, the first half of a short story, was on the agenda and am i little disappointed with the feedback i got. it mostly consisted of "writing is detailed," "descriptions are vivid." i need and miss the merciless viciousness of competitive writing majors. i'm flushing at the thought that i'm accomplishing some of what i'm trying to, but if i don't get my feelings hurt soon i'm going to have to go looking for another group.

over the last few days, a blunt, hot pain has been showing up to gnaw at my hip/groin area. sometimes both sides, but usually the right. i might have pulled something at the gym, or i may need to stop napping on my not highly sleepable sofa.

speaking of the gym, i've noticed an uptick in my endurance on my last two trips. i even gently jogged for a minute at a time on the treadmill. the longest i've been able to maintain a jog was five minutes, several years ago. i do solid twenty-minute batches of cardio, i just don't have a runner's lungs.

i'm trying to make a decision on finally changing my surname. someone on the internet somewhere mentioned changing their last name to break generational trauma, and that swayed me from the plan i'd always had to take my mother's maiden name. i found a strain of distant cousins with dark eyes and dark hair, professorships, and an absence of violent crime or accidents that i could find. i found someone who'd invented a solar cooker and giddily emailed him to see if he was the same person i'd unearthed from a late-1800s marriage on my mother's side.

i finished brave new world before i put down any thoughts about the audiobook i finished before that, the master and margarita. i wasn't in love with either. margarita had many stretches of undeniable delightfulness and i love a highly sarcastic, magical-realism misadventure. maybe if there had been more of the talking cat and more of the relationship between the master and his pontius pilate novel, i would have been fully converted. i've run into this issue with stanislaw lem, nabokov's bend sinister, and some russian films: i don't enjoy russian political satire. i can't tell if this is because i don't relate to it or if i find it uninteresting. yet i'm fascinated by russian culture and propaganda. maybe more of the latter before i try more of the former.

brave new world didn't make an enormous impression, either. the prose was much weirder and more interesting than i expected for such a widely loved novel. it would take a supernaturally talented writer to create an engrossing book about a sterile and untroubled dystopia-utopia, to be fair. where late the sweet birds sang was written decades later and is about cloning rather than a highly calibrated test-tube society, but i seem to remember it being preoccupied with similar things that, to me, didn't seem as scary or concerning to me as disinformation-fueled corporatocracy. it's hard to appreciate dated dystopia fiction outside of the ultimate nightmare prophets, orwell and philip k. dick. (maybe this is the year i finally get through a william gibson novel.)

current internet ambiance

Glumlot - Jean Rollins-esque, eerie and surreal AI videos

"The Argument of Afro-pessimism" - Vinson Cunningham, The New Yorker, 2020

6 hours of disturbing unsolved mysteries

Something Was Wrong S20 - catfishing/manipulation podcast

Chappell Roan

i joined a local writing group. i asked to observe a meeting first, because i didn't know what to expect, and they let me. it was on zoom and the group's moderator was in, i think, south america. there were three other people-- a 60s-ish man with white hair and a woman around the same age who talked about how her recent writing inspiration has been the need to tell past generations stories, because she's observing a roll-back of women's rights as someone from the generation that fought to get them. the third writer was quiet and said she wrote literary fiction. i only read part of the white-haired man's story, because we were streaming the two-day moz conference at work and it was in pacific time. i pretended i had a therapy appointment at 6:30.

i enjoyed their company and just listening to them talk about each other's work. i've been trying to actively appreciate writing for its own sake and seeing it like playing on a local softball team. because doing is the fun part. i keep encountering these messages in the wild about how striving and wanting are the best parts of any ambition. i watched fleischman is in trouble, which is all about being almost forty and having to remind yourself to keep growing as a person. and there was a trailer for baby reindeer that stood out to me, where the main character says something like "i thought achieving my dream would make me happy, but now it seems like it has to be a choice between the two." and in the new season of hacks, ava's advice to a fledgling comedienne to enjoy the place she's in right now, because it's the good part.

i'm working on turning the rough draft of a new short story into a first draft, which is due to the writing group sunday. having a deadline for it is exciting. knowing that multiple people will read it is exciting. i'm looking forward to seeing if this awkward waking dream about being a queer girl in our current cyberpunk dystopia means anything. the main criticism i've received about my work is that my characters' motivations are murky and there's no forward momentum and i'm allowed to specifically ask for critique about that, which is so great it feels like cheating! that wasn't allowed in college (i don't think)!

went to a park today. it's next to a river and there were people wading, fishing, sitting on the bank with their feet in the water. there was another park on the other side of the same river that i think is still being built, as it was just a chapel, a winding little path through thick woods, a couple of fields, footbridges, and one road lined with construction equipment.

sitting on the patio the other day, i watched a skink skitter along the wall. it had what i think was a moth in its mouth, occasionally chomping but not seeming to make much progress in his dinner. it snapped its stiff, tiny jaws and stared with its black bead eyes without seeming to see. i was reading justine by lawrence durrell, which is dense with philosophy and psychology, descriptions of alexandria, and ornate language. at times it's perfectly what i want in fiction--stories within stories, elaborate guesses, and revelations that only pose more questions, all gesturing toward the delicious and disastrous unknowability of other people. the way durrell describes characters is so layered, revealing them but always alluding to darker, unknown depths. i could be happy picking up even a sliver of this skill from reading him.

saw furiosa on saturday with margot and snek. we invited the wider friend circle in the signal group chat, but one couple is dealing with the latest in ongoing brain tumor treatments, one is in canada, chris and fantasia were getting married at the courthouse. chris sent us a picture of their hands layered over each other wearing their wedding rings and said "sorry we couldn't make it, we were a little busy." i was surprised at how aged his hands looked. they were so red, cracked, and wrinkled. i think i never really looked at them. margot said she liked that their wedding rings didn't match, and reflected their individual tastes instead. i want the bitterness to fully dissolve and to be happy for them. it doesn't really even have to do with him, but the pathological belief that anyone who desired me did so through a veil of dishonesty. like only fundamentally untruthful people, who saw something other than who i am, have ever wanted me.

today i went to kinokinuya to buy pens. there was a specific powder-pink uniball jetstream i bought there when they opened that i lost and haven't been able to find on the internet. weirdly, the online uniball store wouldn't let me add anything to my cart. i rebought the pink jetstream along with a few others sized 0.5mm or smaller, as i have a grand lust for this pen precision that's new to me.

after, i went to a park i'd never visited before. there was a pokemon raid with the lollipop clown space-pokemon that just debuted. there were also several wooden bridges. i can never get enough views of wooden bridges curving into the woods. there was a little marshy area with tall, bright green water grass and mallard ducks idling in the muddy creek. one of them had a cinnamon colored head instead of jeweled green; i wondered if it was another species because it looked a big bigger than the others i know female mallards are brown-speckled all over without a solid-colored head.

i finished ling ling huang's natural beauty and i'll tell you what i told goodreads:

My library loan for the audibook expired and I was going to let this fish go, but I couldn't stop thinking about it. A book intertwining beauty industry capitalism and child-of-immigrants assimilation is almost too insufferably on-trend with contemporary literature, but I enjoyed this a lot and didn't find the take too forced or the main character too morally pure, as is usually the case with today's books about marginalization.

Things I loved: Huang's vivid and engrossing details, such as the narrator's special pianist technique she learned from her parents and the various, horrifyingly plausible organic beauty treatments (eels that suck toxins out of the skin, papaya seeds in the vagina, pores encrusted with tiny diamonds, a cult-diet called Dianaism mandating one emulates the fashion and dietary examples of the famously bulimic Princess Diana, mink pubic hair transplants), the intersection of beauty standards and cultural assimilation as body horror.

Things I didn't like: The whole "I don't do the thing I'm a virtuoso at anymore because my family died in a car crash on their way to see me perform!" is a hard-to-forgive cliche. However, the narrator's relationship with her parents is the heartbeat of this book and I can't say Huang doesn't give new life to the trope. The climax is very rushed and by-the-numbers, designed purely to hurl us toward an ending that, while beautifully conceived, doesn't feel earned.

i say the main character wasn't too morally pure, but she was also far too passive to really say she chose any of the morally gray things she gets involved in. i remain sick to death of this trend in female main characters.

i'm also reading balzac's old goriot, or père goriot as my edition calls it and it's a riot. an absolute parade of moral tennis whiplash, savage superficiality, and idiot passion conquering entrepreneural reason. crimes of the heart galore. wealth and fortune given and gutted in dramatic fashion. balzac did almost nothing in his life but feverishly write, according to the introduction, and that mania definitely comes across in the narrative movement. i've been writing a lot in the margins to try and pay better attention to how in the hell a story actually works. taking the time to write out things like "character learns information from a conversation he wasn't supposed to hear" and "this character's dilemma is a parallel of this other character's dilemma."

they say that to achieve lucid dreaming, you start by getting into the habit of asking yourself "is this a dream?" i'm hoping that learning to storytell is the same, that if you begin actively noting things you've learned not to think about, you will start to gain control of the dream.

last weekend i went to the goth dance night with snek and margot. it wasn't really goth music, everything either had or was remixed with the appropriate amount of thumpy-thump. we met some young gothlings who were enamored with margot and snek. one of them said she was an actress who was in a karate movie, one was a programmer, another asked snek for life advice and showed off his trilingualness. the karate actress asked if margot and i were sisters. no one has ever told us before that we look alike. i wonder if it's possible we've adopted each other's expressions and started to resemble each other like long-term couples do. we left talking about how strange it still feels to meet new people.

i finished all night pharmacy, a not-terribly-written but tiresome book about a girl who thinks a lot about her russian immigrant jewish generational trauma, describing her own coping mechanisms while being deeply uninterested in and self-aware of them. it was on a list of books i made when i was fantasizing about which books i'd compare my novel to when i was pitching it. so far, both the novels on the list were like a lot of contemporary books i've read by female authors. tales of flawed young women that are boring despite the spooky and semi-supernatural events that happen to them. somehow, no matter what these women do, they seem so passive and impossible to care about. the authors are trying to capture a sense of malaise and late-capitalism hopelessness, i guess, but they're afraid to give these first-person narrators any real, deep flaws that don't arise from extremely sympathetic circumstances so as not to undermine whatever larger message they're trying to convey about Trauma or Injustice and i'm just. so over it. i decided not to read anything published any later than 1985 for the rest of the year.

i started an audiobook of crime and punishment, which is the antithesis of all that. things have mostly happened to the main characters so far vs. him taking action, but it's still vivid and rich and interesting. i just finished the scenes where raskolnikov dreams of an old mare being beaten, then overhears a conversation about how an old woman about to bequeath all her money to a monastery should be killed and robbed. i love the way the dream imagines violence as so senseless and cruel, conflicting with the cool and dispassionate way he's reasoning himself into murder. the dream is a way to make this conflict tense, immediate, and gruesome even before raskolnikov has done anything. this is what i want, what's missing from all these "women's wrongs" books i've been reading. astounding things happen to them and they're numb to them. i don't know who decided that these characters who can't relate to each other and respond to tension with avoidance and introspection are the best way to convey the mood of our time. i know it's an unfair comparison, crime and punishment being regarded as one of the best books of all time, but something to keep in mind. things happening is always better than things happening in the past, things almost happening, or things not happening out of dread and anxiety and disassociation.

i scheduled a solo vacation. i had a blast when i went to portland by myself, but there's so much to do there that i made it through about half my itinerary. i'm worried that i'll just be lonely on this trip. all i want to do is sit in cafes and read, sit outside and read, lay on the beach and read, take one or two long, scenic walks. hopefully write. i desperately need the time away from work but i'm dreading how much work will have piled up while i'm gone.

i went to the gym with margot and snek monday. i took it easy because i still have a cough. it's still deep and rattling. i have to bring something to spit in on the drive to work because so much phlegm is still coming up. this happened at least once before, a few years ago. i remember going to a doctor telling him i was mostly over a cold, but couldn't quite kick the phlegmy cough even weeks later. the mold inspector came on monday and said he should have results back in a week.

i was right. i want to write again. the little signs were there. i was opening up chapters of my novel and thinking "that wasn't as bad as i remember" or "this is actually good" or "wow well said" and wondering what would happen next. i even want to try to finish more short stories. i need to find a way to stop thinking of them so negatively. i think of them as these tickets into your creativity you have to compose. you sell enough tickets, then maybe someone will let you write a novel.

most short stories i've read are all about the ending. at least, that's why they're renown, as far as i can tell when i finish them. i think of short stories as practicing endings and it's true that's where i need the most help. i've written so much to have written so few endings.

i'm reading ashley's blog again. his actual writing is so full of inane, petty cruelty that i get absolutely zero intellectual or emotional nutrition out of, but his journaling is gentle, humble, and jagged with delightful jabs of vicious humor. i can tell he reads criticisms about his work. he's specifically generous toward other writers. he tells all the tricks he knows. he wants more writers in the world. i think he must be a great teacher.

the people were right. twin peaks season 3 is weird, weird. i'm on episode 6 or 7, i think. now that i can see it's kind of the spiritual re-composition of dale's consciousness, i'm starting to fall in love. i hated the dougie thing at first, maybe because he was introduced in such an obnoxious way. a lot of male directors have this thing where they think, i guess, any scene that has a prostitute in it is hilarious. maybe this is a bad taste still left in my mouth from when these scenes were more like "anytime a prostitute is hurt/killed, it's hilarious" because nothing problematic happened and unproblematic scenes with sex workers are great, but still. it felt like sitting in the theater through a nude scene while a 12-year-old boy snickered in the next seat.

but after dougie at the breakfast table with his kid and the coffee, i'm fully charmed. i've always loved dale and laura's connection, so ever since someone on reddit likened what dale is going through (lost, obviously in need of help to the point that multiple people he encounters point it out) to laura's crisis, i'm even more bought-in. i was hoping for more of the creepy glass ghost-box. wally brando is great. dana ashbrook aged gorgeously.

started anne lamott's bird by bird last night, even though i'm in the middle of one other book and an audiobook. i like that she begins by describing the eagerness of her creative writing students to get advice on publishing, emphasizing that they have to write for the love of writing first, then publication may follow (unlikely), then maybe making enough money writing to live on (even less likely). fuck all those online courses that promise to teach you how to get published, how to write a best-selling fantasy series, how to sell your novel, how to get an agent.

lamott describes writing as an act still worthwhile—like a person you love, an exercise of emotional and mental fitness, a type of exploration. like stephen king, she recommends writing at the same time every day. king called it scheduling time with the muse instead of waiting for it. eventually, the muse learns to show up on time.

after the first chapter, i sat at my new writing desk for ~500 words of freewriting. a simple vignette about a woman who spontaneously buys a set of paints. i enjoyed it, though the baby-blue, plastic bic xtra smooth mechanical pencil was hard on my fingers. my sister used to get big pink bulbs of skin on the sides of her fingers from holding pencils too long.

i took friday and monday off to enjoy a long birthday weekend. my concentration's a wash. all i can think about is napping. at work they served hot dogs and cheddar flavored chips and grocery-store pumpkin cupcakes, on top of the pizza lunch my department ordered to see off our interns. the little ginger one who gets under my skin just asked if he could help me do anything in his last few minutes-- i said it would be great to have any progress he's made on the last writing assignment we gave him and he went back to playing on his phone. i would prefer a flagrantly shiftless do-nothing to this fake corporate-sunny shit from someone who doesn't want to actually do anything. i won't miss the sighing and staring at his computer with one hand in his hair as if these low-expectation assignments are the greatest burden. more likely it's boredom. here i am, after all, looking for any distraction from rewriting the content on a 5 year old website to reflect a product we're hastily putting out because leadership seemingly just realized that we've rebranded to promote things we don't actually offer, so here's a new thing we're offering to distract audiences from the thing we're promoting that we don't have, except the decoy product doesn't work as promoted either. god.

four visits into my planet fitness membership and i already feel a positive change in my mood. there's something about going to the gym that feels better and more effective than all my other attempts to get fit. maybe it's the simple neurosis of capitalism telling me the only reason to keep doing something is if i spent money on it, maybe the multi-step commerce ritual of it, maybe the diversity of activities that prevents boredom. maybe the sense of community. there's a 60-something woman with bleached blond hair who i've seen twice now on the same treadmill. this time i noticed she had one book open on the control panel in front, another book off to the side waiting, headphones, and water. it was like a tiny little office and i was surprised at how lived-in a machine like that could look. it seemed downright cozy.

creative writing may have made its way into my cycle of hyper-fixations. i looked up listicles for best pens and bought a few on amazon, plus mechanical pencils per margot's recommendation. it reminded me of the feeling of having new school supplies, which i always found so pleasing despite the despair of the summer ending. it must have something to do with unspoiled potential and possibility. there was no saying these crisp no. 2 pencils wouldn't forge clear, logical mathematical formulas unmarred by the frantic eraser flakes of self-doubt. this shining metal compass might be the instrument that fulfills its name and grants me understanding of geometry.

on my lunch hour, i went to target and bought more pens, more mechanical pencils, and pastel post-it notes to lay out my novel on the wall behind my writing desk (margot, savior and angel, took it out of its box and put together for me). i loaded up my novel's pinterest with new pictures from marfa, tx and truth and consequences, nm. so far none of these tools have really helped me write more or better, but it feels like they're part of the ritual of re-entering my story, which is necessary and a distinct shift in my thinking.

a few years ago, i first noticed that the mood to write overtakes me when autumn arrives. last year around this time, i was in the process of submitting two different short stories to 10+ different literary magazines. when i got a rejection from the only non-paying magazine on my list, i gave up submitting. it was disenchanting but necessary. it was the worst possible outcome of my efforts but helpful in the sense that i had to settle with myself whether or not i could be happy writing just to write. then came my first participation in nanowrimo, which i completed successfully and discovered decisively that, yes, this can make me happy even if no one ever reads it, much less pays for it.

the benefit is that i can take these breaks, that i can re-enter writing fresh each time, whereas if i were doing it professionally i would doubtlessly blow through deadlines and be the arch-nemesis of my career's momentum.