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!

Mockingjay

I finished Mockingjay on the bus ride home this afternoon.

Here’s what I can say spoiler-free: it changed my view of the other two books. They’re cast in a different light when I look back.

That effect was so strong that it feels like I changed as I moved through the series.

I love it when a trilogy does that.

Well played.

Meet and Greet at the IPRC

Last night was the first official event of the IPRC Certificate term– a meet and greet with readings by some of the instructors in the poetry, fiction/nonfiction, and comics tracks. (Aww, I typed “meet and great” by mistake!)

I had cleverly arranged to eat dinner with Sanguinity and LeBoyfriend just down the block at the Thai Peacock. I like that place! Dinner was a thank-you to LeB for caring for the dog and garden while Sang and I went to Colorado; Sang presented him with a small bag of garden tomatoes which had finally turned red just this week. (And it’s an early variety!)

After dinner I still had half an hour to kill at Powell’s before turning up at the IPRC. I cruised through the YA section, which was as always full of books I’ve been meaning to read (Gimme a Call and Will Grayson, Will Grayson among others) and wound up at the Nobel Prize for Literature shelf. Somewhere this week I ran across a blog that’s two people corresponding about reading Nobel authors. Like them, I have never or barely heard of most of the winners, and want to read more of their books. I’ll try to remember to check the Nobel list as I continue my Alphabet Reading project. (Up to O, as soon as I’m done with Speak, Memory and an E. Nesbit and The Time-Traveler’s Wife!)

Over at the IPRC when I got there, a card table was set up in the hall with a muslin bag for each of us students. The bag contained a nametag, paperwork about the certificate program and accompanying IPRC membership, and a perfect-bound journal made in-house by an IPRC intern! Sweet! A tour was just starting as I arrived, so I tagged along even though I think I’ve had two or three tours already at various times. Amy the volunteer had a pitch-perfect tour-guide air– not quite hauteur, but definitely guiding and presenting each room while dressed in vintage wool. There’s so much style at the IPRC. And not a cat-sweatshirt lady writer to be seen! You guys, I have a two-year membership there now. :)

I actually suck at meeting and greeting, so I had an awkward period of drifting around, trying the wheat-free Newman’s Oreologues, and holding up the wall. Judging from the nametags, poetry and comics tracks had the best turn-out, and since there are two fiction/nonfiction sections I still don’t know if I saw anyone who will be in my class on Mondays.

It was hot and muggy up there, but we all crowded into a room borrowed from the ILWU (union of the employees of Powell’s Books!) for the reading. B.T. Shaw read poetry– I especially liked a piece she said she’d read only once or twice before. It kept flipping perspectives from a family’s poppy garden, to the father (“Poppy”) and grandfather, to the act of writing about this (using the names of computer keys as commentary). She threw in some short funny poems, too.

Kevin Sampsell represented the fiction/nonfiction team. There is no Portland Hipster more venerable than Kevin Sampsell, and I say that with total admiration. (He runs the small press section at Powell’s as well as an indie press that’s having its 20th birthday this year.) He read from his memoir A Common Pornography— it made a splash in Willamette Week and so on when it came out earlier this year, but I hadn’t heard or read any excerpts yet. It’s good and I’m definitely going to get my hands on a copy and read it! He also read from a new novel MS, similar in format and tone to the memoir.

Shannon Wheeler read last–or rather, talked, and showed his sketchbooks and cartoons on a screen. He had just been to New Orleans with two dozen writers, artists, environmental journalists, and others to witness and document the Gulf oil spill. I could see how what he’d seen and what he had to say were just bursting out of him– he’s collaborating on a graphic novel, figuring it out as he goes. It was inspiring to see that passion, but also my chair was hard and it was almost 9:00, when I was supposed to meet Sang back at Powell’s for a ride home. I hope I’ll get to hear him again without the time crunch sometime. He’s getting cartooons into the New Yorker, which he says likes to get TEN CARTOONS A WEEK from contributors so they can really work with the cartoonists and develop a stable of regulars. Man, that must be a lot of work.

It was a long day, but I left looking forward to workshop this afternoon. I rode home with Sang and she let me unwind with a little Plants vs. Zombies on her computer while she knitted a hat for our neighbor’s baby shower this afternoon. Now I’m going for a run– nice not to have to get in in early before the heat anymore!–and before I know it will climb on a bus to head for the IPRC again.

Found

Sanguinity and I kept a friend company at the Urgent Care clinic on Sunday, and Sang found this 8 1/2 x 11 document, abandoned on a clipboard in the waiting room:

I don’t think the same person was writing and coloring… so maybe the coloring came first? I wonder who, if anyone, delivered the message, and why it was in writing.