Author: Holly

I have what I always wanted

First of all, I concur entirely with Cheaper Than Food on the qualities of Nissin curry-flavored ramen. The powder was just a powder. I wouldn’t turn down a stash of this one, but won’t be seeking it out.

I have this very complicated schedule for the new year. On weekday mornings I walk to work with friends (2x per week), go running and catch the late bus (1x per week), read the internet and catch the medium bus (1x per week), or catch the early bus and do some writing downtown (1x per week). I map it all out in my moleskine planner. Maybe no routine will seem onerous if I have to execute it only once or twice a week. And I even have an internet-reading goof-off morning!

Afternoons are similar. And on two of them each week, I go to the university library after work for a generous hour’s writing.

This week is the first week of the term, and students are everywhere with their bags from the bookstore and their cell phones and their bikes and backpacks. They study mostly in groups, it seems like, at the wooden tables along the curved glass face of the library building, on the second floor. Yesterday I snagged the end table and could look down at the greenery and all the people walking from building to building and across the park blocks. There was a low buzz of students talking, but I had room to spread out my notebook and the book I was reading and a copy of the story I was revising, and work in peace. I went back and forth between reading and writing, revising and taking dictation of new sentences that came into my head.

It occurred to me that when I was a college student, I was always wishing that I had time just to read and write. To work on what I felt like working on, instead of miserably cramming down books and dredging up papers. Well, that time has come. Maybe only a few hours a week, but I love sitting in the university library and not being a university student. It is the perfect disguise, better than sitting in a coffee shop. The people at the other tables are doing stuff they have to do (99 percent of them, anyway), but I get to work at my own pace, to my own standards, work on four different things if I want. I love those hours.

Beyond Green Eggs and Ham

What’s a writer’s life without ramen? On a recent trip to FuBonn (the big Asian supermarket in my part of town), I hit the instant noodle aisle and bought one packet each of whatever caught my eye. I always tell myself I’ll find my One True Ramen that way and stock up next time I come in, but then I always fail to keep good records. I have this problem with unusual squash, melon, and citrus varieties, too. Blog and tags to the rescue!

Today I came in from a cold, sunny walk to the Reed canyon, peeled off several layers of clothing, and cooked up some green Korean ramen:

The color comes from green tea powder and chlorella, an algae, and is of course what caught my eye at FuBonn. I suspect these are sold as healthy food, as there is no MSG and no oil packet, just powder and dried vegetables. (But at over 1000 calories and 1600 mg of sodium, can anyone be pretending this is good for you?)

The veggies rehydrated to nice-sized seaweed scraps, which I love. The noodles kept both their shape and a pretty green tinge, and the flavor was a mellow blend of garlic, cuttlefish, and vegetables. I’ll definitely get this again next time I see it!

(photos from a recently retired ramen review blog)

Now to the evening’s writing work: I have seven days to get a story in shape for the IPRC student anthology, if I want to be in it. I feel like a one-trick pony with this story because it’s been my workshop piece, reading piece, mentor-review piece, et cetera ad nauseum. I suppose the remedy is to write something new, huh? But revisions need to happen sooner or later whether it goes to the anthology or not, so now I’m going to clean up my desk and set out all my notes and copies and start working, so I can come back to it all week.

from friday evening to saturday morning


Rabbit rabbit!

The turn of the year saw Sang and me watching the end of Xena Season Four on my laptop, sitting close on the couch and sharing a pair of earbuds because the speakers tend to cut in and out. Before that we tried playing the disc on Sang’s computer, which kept spitting it out for apparently no reason. And of course before that we tried watching it on the TV, but the TV no longer acknowledges the remote, and the tracks weren’t navigable using only the buttons on the TV. BUT WE PREVAILED, with the dog standing on the couch panting loudly in my other ear to protest the gorgeous noisy fireworks set off by the neighbors.

It’s a fine line between the pleasure of working all the little tricks and oddities required by our old house and its stuff, and a feeling that it’s all one step from collapse. But we’re good, and today we ate our black-eyed peas for luck. (Thanks, Sav-A-Lot! Safeway and Fred Meyer still haven’t clued in that they should lay in extra for this week.) I baked them up with some leftover rice and cans of chiles and tomatoes, with avocado on top instead of collards for lucky green. Okay, so the avocado turned black in the oven, IT STILL COUNTS. (But maybe I’ll go have a green tomato pickle from the fridge. Just to be sure.) Happy new year!

p.s. I don’t have any favorite book scenes featuring New Year’s Eve. But the title of this post refers to Mary Stolz’s The Noonday Friends, in which Marshall, for his fifth birthday when money is tight, gets a ticket “ONE WAY FROM FRIDAY EVENING TO SATURDAY MORNING” from his parents, meaning he can stay up all night like he’s always wanted. You go, Marshall. I was happy to turn in at one-thirty.

Year of the Series?

At the end of each year, my dad, my sister, and I send each other lists of the books we’ve read that year, with a little blurb about each book. (Sanguinity makes a list too sometimes, but not every year.) I eschew the letter grades my dad and sister assign to their books; I don’t like my relationship to the books to be one of picking and choosing, or judging. But I do sort my list into categories and mark my favorites, which I put in my LibraryThing collection to admire and remember along with the favorites of other years. (If you really want to see my whole list, you can view it here in Google Docs.)

What strikes me this year is how many of the books I read were part of a series. Two out of three of my adult-fiction favorites: Lisa Lutz’s The Spellman Files and its sequels, and Kage Baker’s Company series. (The other favorite was Molly Gloss’ Wild Life.) In children’s and YA fiction, I loved The Mysterious Benedict Society and its sequel (I’m saving the third book), finished off the Hunger Games and Life As We Knew It trilogies, and read a whole bunch of other books-with-companions:

  • Joan Aiken’s The Wolves of Willoughby Chase
  • Catherine Clark’s Wurst Case Scenario
  • Grace Dent’s Posh and Prejudice
  • Dianna Wynne Jones’ Conrad’s Fate
  • Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy’s Wedding
  • Phyllis Reynolds Naylor’s Alice in Charge
  • Patrick Ness’ The Knife of Never Letting Go
  • Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu’s The Shadow Speaker
  • Ellen Emerson White’s The Road Home

Srsly, like half my list of books. At the video store I get much more excited about long-arc TV shows than about standalone movies, but I hadn’t realized how much of a series reader I am. It’s not just the additive value of more books by authors I like: there’s a particular pleasure in tracking everything from book to book, the atmospheric changes, the writing quality, the character constellations. Almost a gossipy element. I hope someday I find a series to write. It must be wonderful to have such a rich field to play in again and again, mixing up the familiar and new aspects. Like seeing a place through many seasons and years.

My very favorite kidlit books of the year, however, were two standalones, and I must, must tell you about them in the hopes of tipping someone toward reading them. Christine Fletcher’s Ten Cents a Dance is that rarest of historical fiction, the kind that feels real and not even slightly like I’m being instructed and educated in history. And Frances Hardinge’s The Lost Conspiracy was my long summer book that took me away to an island with multi-cultural details and twisty plotlines and made me not miss Harry Potter one bit.

Thank God there are books to read, every year.

The Shopping News

Yesterday was blech, and there’s not much I mind consigning to the abyss of forgetfulness. But I did indulge in something I very rarely take part in: retail therapy.

These are Step One in my long-planned New Look. (My Old Look involves past-their-prime running shoes.) I put them on in the kitchen yesterday when Sanguinity and I were cooking. “I feel like Harriet the Spy!” I said.

Step Two requires a trip to Sock Dreams. Let me know if you want to go too!

Especially after a weekend of commercial television at the in-laws’, I do see how shopping can keep the feeling of disappearing at bay, and instill a sense of triumph and participation instead. Not as good as making stuff, but easier.

Five from 24 in Fifteen

This morning I kept Sanguinity company on the early bus to downtown. She’s going to Seattle on Amtrak today. After we parted I walked to campus, and decided to try writing “5/24/15”: think about a five-minute period within the last 24 hours and take 15 minutes to write it down. Even if you end up ranging beyond the five minutes, there’s freedom from having to catch everyone up from the last time you wrote, or write only about important things.

(I can’t remember for sure where 5/24/15 comes from, but it may be Heather Sellers’ Page After Page. Which, now that I look up the link and read excerpts, has excellent advice about love, writing, and time.)

Anyway, here’s what I got.

As Thanksgiving weekend unspooled, I started thinking more and more frequently, “I have nothing on the calendar for Sunday. I can have all day just to write and putter!” It was like having money in the bank.

Then it was Sunday morning and I was on the couch with the coffee and the internet, and an email came in from Refgoddess wanting to borrow a Messiah score, and did Sanguinity and I want to take a walk with her and her dog when we made the hand-off?

Why, yes, and pretty soon we were chez Refgoddess while D wandered around getting ready for church, going to put a belt on only to find he was already wearing one. And then the rest of us were out the gate with Carbon and realizing we didn’t have to trace the same route we take on our commuting walks! We made a rambly loop around the neighborhood, and just as we were solving (retrospectively) the Thanksgiving Napkin Etiquette Disaster, Sang’s phone rang and it was Bookherd calling her back to arrange meeting up at a movie, and Sang asked me if she should bring Bookherd home for a visit afterward so I could see her too, and

Reader, I panicked. Standing in Refgoddess’ driveway where she has made a labyrinth in gravel. Days do not stay empty! A piece is waiting to be written and it’s due at the IPRC class on the 6th and then there is laundry. Sunday night blues started on Saturday night, this week.

There was still plenty of time, not that I used it well when I was on my own. (I resent using it well! I just want it to be there!) Bookherd came over for leftovers while I finished dealing with the turkey stock and carcass that Sang and Fourgates had got going Thanksgiving night. When the dog gave me his Meaningful Look, I glanced at the clock to see if it was eight o’clock (his suppertime) yet, and it was only six! I was so happy. You wish, little boy, I told the dog.

My relationship with time is really kind of fucked up. (I don’t want a relationship! I just want it to be there!) It was still a pretty good day.

Brought to you by the letter N

The end of N is in sight, in my alphabetical readings. I’m abandoning E. Nesbit’s The Story of the Treasure Seekers, and just started Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. I’ve requested The Time-Traveler’s Wife on CD from the library, so I can listen to it when I run and walk at the track.

I feel bad about the Nesbit. She had a cool life and is one of the early giants of kidlit…but. The book is narrated by one of the children, and the whole time the author is sharing knowing winks with the audience. In the meantime, the kids are acting out tropes from the storybooks they know, in a tedious way that reminds me of the end of Huckleberry Finn. I don’t get who this stuff is for. Are actual children supposed to read this and understand all the things that the characters don’t, and laugh at them? Or are children supposed to read it innocently, on a level with the characters? I have this same problem with a lot of Milne. Do not get it.

Speak, Memory, on the other hand, is enchanting me. Nabokov’s childhood in pre-revolutionary Russia is so far from everything I know that it has that “everyday life long ago = fascinating” thing going on. And there’s something about the precise way he describes thought and emotional patterns that makes me feel like we know each other, like we’re sitting right next to each other. I’m only 20 pages in, but just got to the bit where he talks about his synesthesia and lists which letters in the English alphabet have which colors in his head. I want to do a color picture of his name, and perhaps below it the “word for rainbow, a primary, but decidedly muddy, rainbow…in my private language the hardly prounounceable: kzspygv.”

Early plans for O: Flannery O’Connor and some of the Sharon Olds poetry I haven’t kept up with in recent years.

One Story

In my last long post I mentioned wanting to see a fiction zine in a one-story-per-issue format, pocket-sized. Today I ran across One Story, which publishes one story per issue, five inches by seven, by subscription only and mailed out every three weeks. They never repeat an author, so it’s not like the New Yorker that accrues a stable of regulars. I knew some, but not most, of the authors in the list of issues past.

This is the first subscription that has tempted me in ages! I ordered the trial two-issue sample and will let you know what I think.

Un-Still Life With Kleenex

I caught a cold over the weekend, and stayed home from work on Monday. It’s not bad as these things go, so I went to the IPRC for class in the evening. I was scheduled to talk for five minutes about a zine I like. Hmm. I had hoped to dig up an exquisite mini-size fiction zine like the late lamented Lunch Hour Stories, one story per issue, since we’re focusing on fiction and that’s the sort of thing I’d love to put out. But in the time-and-germ crunch I ended up going through my shelves and pulling down Beer Frame. Every writer needs to consider the origins and strangeness of everyday objects like the Brannock device, right? And think about marketing campaigns and slogans like “America’s Favorite Banana Milk”?

It was received politely. I have no idea what other people will bring in when it’s their turn. Fun! When I was scanning my shelves, I realized how many of my zines, even the big names, are now defunct and getting onto a decade or more old. Dishwasher. Zuzu and the Baby Catcher. Beer Frame, too– there were ten issues. (Now the author writes Uni Watch, a blog about sports uniforms. Go look if you want to know what comprehensive means.) Zines are supposedly ephemeral, but once they make it to someone’s collection, they stick around– because if you let them go, you may never see them again, Amazon/eBay or no.

I think I need to lay off the Nyquil. It used to make me delightfully sleepy when I had a cold and took it before bedtime TV, but this week I found myself playing Plants vs. Zombies on Sanguinity’s computer until one a.m. Then I slept on the couch until my alarm went off so I could catch a bus at 8:20. It’s been a long time since I was that groggy. It was REALLY HARD to make myself sit up, make coffee, find clothes. And yet, of course, I did it.

It made me wish I could bring that kind of will and discipline to writing. And kind of mad at myself that there’s just no way. I’ll do that to keep a job, I’ll do it if someone is counting on me. But if it were just for myself and writing, I’d have been sleeping. Could be rebellion, could be a short-term/long-term glitch in my brain…whatever. That’s how it is. SO, I need to make getting up for the job do double-duty, and sneak writing in on top of my workday. I’ve decided to make a habit of staying on campus until it’s time to catch the 5:10 bus, which will still get me home by six p.m. I’ll feel more free to do home stuff when I’m home, and when I’m working well I can do that thing I love of writing three times a day, with sessions before work, after work, and in the evening.

I tried it out today. It’s the first week of classes. I had done my usual thing of skimping on lunch because I was busy, so I went to get a bowl of glorified rice and beans by the MAX stop. I quickly realized two things: students order and pay one at a time, not in groups, and they all do it with credit cards. It’s like no one under 21 knows what cash is. It took forever. But then I got some good work done.

Also, last night while Sang was teaching I let myself play as much Plants vs. Zombies as I wanted (hours! set off my first cob cannons!), and then I deleted my account. Its thrall was starting to fade anyway, and it doesn’t fit with the writing. And now I have told you all and cannot go back.

My new diligence comes from this: KFC meeting next Wednesday, and I need to hand out my story to the IPRC class the following Monday, in zine form. So really, I need to write the story by the end of the weekend. Right now, it is a handful of tentative fragments.

And, my IPRC teacher emailed yesterday to say I’ve been assigned a mentor, and it’s Moe Bowstern, who writes a zine about working in commercial fishing in Alaska, and looks so incredibly cool. I so hope I have something worth working over with her by the time we meet in November! It is not that far away.

I am baffled about where running will fit into all this. I feel like I’ll have to adopt one of those “eight minutes a day” exercise plans. But I’ll let the germs clear out before I worry about it.

Happy October, everyone!