And if I come to ledges...

1. Today, I am chaperoning a field trip to....wait for it....beautiful downtown York!!!

2. Well, it is my area of expertise, like it or not. Who better than I to lead a bunch of impressionable fourth graders through the principal beauties of York? I do know what the Conway Cabal was, after all.

3. Given that this is a largely white, suburban school, I'm betting 98% of these kids have never actually been downtown.

4. Now I've got Petula Clark stuck in my head. "Downtown! Downtown!"

5. Remember that scene in Young Frankenstein where Igor says "Could be worse. Could be raining"? Well, it's raining. In the immortal words of L. M. Montgomery, it's raining pitchforks points down. Wet. Cold. Downtown York. Fifty fourth graders. You are all envying me so much right now, I can tell.

Lovely kimberlylittle tagged me for this:

1. The rules of the game get posted at the beginning.
2. Each player answers the questions about themselves.
3. At the end of the post, the player then tags 5-6 people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they’ve been tagged and asking them to read the player’s blog.
4. Let the person who tagged you know when you’ve posted your answer.

What were you doing ten years ago?

Changing my baby's diapers and trying to find a new house.

What are five things on your to-do list for today (not in any particular order):

1. Talk to my friend Kathy.
2. Go to the elementary school science fair.
3. Laundry. Every single freaking day. Laundry.
4. Eat chips and salsa. Because I want to, that's why!
5. Get out that piece of posterboard and sticky notes I bought last week and finally finally finally try to organize this stinking WIP.

What are some snacks you enjoy?

Easier to ask "What are some snacks you don't enjoy?" Because following is only a very brief sample of snacks I enjoy

Rice Crispie Treats
Potato chips
More potato chips
Celery
Olives
Licorice allsorts
Cookies
Popcorn
Brownies

What would you do if you were a billionaire?

Never cook again
Move to England
Travel extensively
Have beautiful gardens
Have my shoes custom made
Endow a forward-thinking school for teens with Asperger Syndrome

What are three of your bad habits?

Procrastinating
Making snap judgments
Watching Law & Order SVU marathons

What are five places where you have lived?

York, PA
York, PA
York, PA
York, PA
and York, PA

No kidding. Sad, isn't it?

What are five jobs you have had?

Secretary at the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board
Doll artist
Writer
That's it.

What six people do you want to tag?

chrissachappell
cindachima
jmprince
arthurslade
minabirdwriter
amymcauley

1. Does Garrison Keillor really mean it at the end of The Writer's Almanac when he says "Keep in touch"? Should I be sending him chatty letters about my doings?

2. Frightening the amount of people out there who believe the movie Amadeus is pure fact.

3. Cranford last night, too short! And boy, you can never count on any character to live through an entire episode.

4. With gas approaching four dollars a gallon, how far would you drive for licorice allsorts? Really good licorice allsorts?

5. I seriously need a new umbrella. I had to walk to the mailbox today with Spiderman over my head.

1. My chair is making this ominous ticking noise when I get up from it. It's just an ordinary upholstered little wing chair, not anything mechanical, which makes it quite an odd occurence. I am rather concerned because it puts me in mind of the ticking of the swing in The Swing in the Summerhouse by the magnificent Jane Langton.

2. I have spatial relationship issues or something. I keep buying things that I think are HUGE only to get them home and find they are quite, quite small. Like the disastrous time I bought flagstones to make a path along the side of the house. As my husband put it "Are these for the model of what the real path will look like?" This time, it was a flower pot. You would think you could tell if a flower pot was big or not. Not me. I swear this thing shrank on the way home.

3. Loved Cranford. Won't even quibble about the hairstyles and costumes.

4. Every single person designing women's shoes hates women. I am convinced.

5. Miss my sweet little girl. I keep bending down to fill her water bowl and looking for her to let her out.

Best little girl in the world. Miss you like crazy already.

Many many thanks to Laura for the wonderful picture.

Hug your fur friends for me today.

I am a linear writer. Not just that my stories start at the beginning and end at the end, but that's the way I write. I start at the beginning and write through to the end. (Because I don't know what's going to happen so I have to write it that way.)

I might occasionally write a little snippet of dialogue or a bit of a scene if inspiration strikes, but the bulk of the work is in a straight line from point A to point B. The end.

But I decided to try something different this week. (Uh huh. Here's your problem, ma'am, right here.) Because writing in a straight line often means sitting for long periods of time, staring at the last line you've written because you have no clue what comes next, I thought I'd try to keep my momentum going this week by writing out scenes that I'm pretty sure I'm going to need but that I haven't reached yet.

So I wrote out five scenelets and now I'm horribly horribly confused! I don't know which one should come next or what order they should be in or anything! They're all crowding each other out there, on my harddrive, jostling for position. "I'm next!" "No, me me me!" "But I set you up!" "Yeah, but you don't make any sense at all unless I have already been established!" "Then where does that leave me??"

I don't know! And if you all don't shut up, you're all going to the recycle bin!

I picked the wrong week to quit drinking Mt. Dew.

So now I have to go look at them and try to figure out which one is logically next and how to bridge the gap between it and where I left off. Thinking is hard!

I feel an obsession coming on! (Don't play if you are one of those people who thinks opera is all screeching. Do play if you want thrills and chills down your spine this morning.)




Now that is one magnificently pissed off queen! Diana Damrau, I would do your laundry. (And you know how I loathe and despise doing laundry, so you know what a powerful statement that is! The heck with pulling carriages through the streets.)

What a difference a day makes! Clearly, psuedo-public whining is also an integral part of my process because after wah-wah-wahing here yesterday, I had a darned good day of writing and produced 1,500 words.

And so it is obvious: I need to whine more. I hereby give you notice, in case you want to defriend me now. I won't be offended.

Yesterday also gave me one of those great writing "surprises" that seem to pop up on their own because you had absolutely no intention or even vague thought that when Eddie went into the church, she would encounter a garrulous charwoman who would drop a bunch of clues on her. Where do these things come from? And isn't it cool???

What is not cool is that what I thought would happen in the church decided not to happen so now I'm not even sure when it will happen or if it will happen at all. It sounds so weird to talk about it this way, as though I have no control over it. If I want this thing to happen, I should just make it happen.

But this is just the way it works for me. When I reach a certain point, it becomes all about following the logic of the characters and the story. I've learned to trust this because most often when I try to make things happen, I am rushing the story. I know I've tried to rush this one over and over and it isn't a story to be rushed. It is unfolding in its own sllllooooooooooowwwwww sweet time. Pushing and hurrying and forcing it only has the opposite effect of bringing me to a screeching halt.

And so...what will happen today? I have to write it to find out.

I have reached the point in my process where I am consumed by fears that my book isn't about anything. (Hence entry title.)

Apparently, this happens every time, though I usually block it out later, the way they say women forget the pain of childbirth. But it's really horrible this time. I am convinced that this book is merely a collecting of interesting little tidbits and details that I liked and threw together and it's not going to add up to anything.

There is no theme.

There will be no theme.

I can't, at this point, even define theme in the abstract.

If this is my process, my process sucks. I need a new process. Where can I get one? Because it's really really hard to keep writing a book that has no point. And as whiny as all of this probably sounds and no matter how many times I've used the word "really," I'm going to let this entry stand in case I forget about this NEXT time, so maybe it will help and I'll be able to look at it and go, "See? This is just your process." And then I'll say back to myself "Yeah, we were going to look into getting a new one of those. How did that work out?" Other me: "Uh, not so well, apparently."

From the search engine phrases that brought people to my website this month. The all-time winner and new champeen:

history of communist stallion of russia

Okay, I wasn't going to do this meme because it would just take too long, the meme where you list allllll the books you've written. Given the fact that for eight years, I worked for the state government in a position where I had a desk, a typewriter, an unlimited supply of paper and nothing else to do...well...I wrote a lot. A lot of crap.

But then Elizabeth Scott threw down this gauntlet:

The best one I've seen is this completely fabtastic blog entry by Cherie Priest--I mean, can anyone really top this: "..in my defense I was in seventh grade when I wrote this one. It was about 200 pages long, and it was about me and my cousins helping a mafia don’s daughter escape from the clutches of a drug dealer inside the Great Pyramid at Giza. Then one day the disc upon which this MASTERPIECE was saved … died. I lost the whole thing. At the time, I was inconsolable. In retrospect, I am overjoyed."

And so I think I have to take up the challenge of supreme awfulness. I have several contenders. ( Click through if you wanna peek in my drawers )

The attractively sepia-toned arthurslade has tagged me for the page 123 book meme. This meme is like one of those fish that dig down in the mud and go into a suspended state in the dirt and pop up again whenever it rains. I think this is probably the third time I've done this one and even last year turned it on its head and made it a WIP meme. (Horrifying as it is to contemplate the fact that I was 123 pages into this same stinking WIP a full year ago!)

So since retrieving the nearest book would entail actually getting up and that would entail disturbing sleeping dog on lap (and I get extra points for typing around dog that, at twenty pounds, is at the outer limit of the definition of "lap dog")I'm going to instead go with page 123 from forthcoming Funny How Things Change by moi, because it's right here on my computer. Remy inherits a car with potential:

“It’s nice, Remy.” Duff wiped his hands on a cloth, still admiring Cassie’s engine. “I don’t know, maybe being encrusted with two inches of crud protected it or something. Or maybe the angels were watching out for it. But considering how long Jimmy owned it, it looks darned good.”

And before you get on me about an auto mechanic saying "darned," you should know that Duff is a God-fearing Christian who goes out of his way to avoid using profanity.

Separated at birth?


Former Pennsylvania Governor Samuel Pennypacker and actor
Claude Rains

(Probably of no interest to anyone but me, but Samuel Pennypacker is my new historical crush, after touring his surprisingly warm and homey "mansion" yesterday. There's not a lot of biograhical information immediately available, but so far my theory that a jerk couldn't have lived in such a comfy and welcoming home is borne out. Also, kudos to the volunteers and docents at Pennypacker Mills, whose enthusiasm and passion made it clear that they adore that house.)

Did you ever have trouble physically moving a character from one place to the next? I'm not talking about transitions but about plain old must-be-played-out-in-scene physical movement.

Because I have spent all afternoon trying to get Eddie into the *&$%@^ carriage. Now there was a lot of stuff going on beyond just picking up her feet and hoisting herself into the mode of transportation. There's James, handing her in, the morning after she just saw him without his shirt on, so naturally, Eddie is a bit flustered and so misses the step into the carriage and has to grab hold of James to keep from knocking her teeth out on the carriage frame.

But I seem to stumble over repetitive words like "step." There is no other noun for the actual little step on the side of the carriage. So she has to step on the step and misstep and miss the step. And then James "hands" her in with his hand and her hand in his hand. And it's the carriage this and the carriage that and too many people looking with looks and oh my gawd, is that an adverb on a speech tag??? People hate those! Kill it! Kill it now! And now I have to think of some way to illustrate the fact that James said "Careful, miss" flatly because God forbid I should just come out and say "flatly." And then it's all so flat and matter-of-fact and I have to go back and try to make it more funny and set it up better so you feel for her and laugh at the same time and try to make it a little steamy and squeeze in a reference to the taut muscles of James forearm. And ye gods, I forgot I have to get Barnaby on the carriage, too.

(And don't tell me to just cut around this scene because I've got my teeth in it now and Eddie is getting in that carriage if I have to take a plunger and shove her in that carriage.)

Wow, Stephen Colbert's map of Pennsylvania is really inaccurate, and I don't just mean the mutant zombies (because everyone knows they're all from Maryland. Ha! Just kidding. A little regional humor there. Here in south central PA, these are the immigrants people are bitter about.)

*Unless there's been a dramatic shift in the riverbed, Harrisburg is on the eastern shore of the Susquehanna, "Amish country" is traditionally considered to be Lancaster County and TMI is in the middle of the Susquehanna, just south of Harrisburg, not in Quarryville.

So I was whining about thoughtfully discussing my WIP with some writer friends, mainly how loooooooong this book is turning out to be and how loooooooong it's taking me to write it because it's so loooooooong. And so, just to make myself a little more crazed, I started listing all the scenes and important points I still needed to write out before I reached the climax and ending. And it was a lot.

But what I missed until it was pointed out to me was the thunderingly huge fact that I could actually list all of the scenes and points I still needed to write out before I reached the climax and ending.

Why this is such a big deal:

I'm a plunger. Of the literary type. Meaning I don't outline or plan much at all before I start a first draft. I start with a situation and maybe a character I like and maybe a vague idea of how things are going to end up but generally zero clue as to what happens in between. To me, that's the best part of writing, the joy of discovery as I work my way through the first draft and get to know the characters and see how they surprise me. It's fun!

Except when it's not. Like when you have no clue what the heck your characters are doing/have done/should do next and you sit for weeks, staring at a blinking cursor and wondering if the Country Inn and Suites down the road is hiring people to wash towels because you're really good at washing towels. Writing, not so much. And that's pretty much what it's been like for the last six months, hacking away at this story in almost total darkness with no clue if I'm hacking in the right direction. (See? I can't even come up with a decent metaphor for it.)

And then it's like someone has switched the lights on and I can see. I know where I'm going. (I just need to write myself there.) Now I forget that this happens every time. I usually reach a point where I've been writing along in total darkness and ignorance and then things just start falling into place and I can actually write an outline for the last bit of the book. This usually happens about two thirds of the way in, but I thought it was never going to happen for this book (mainly because I thought I'd hit the two/thirds point a hundred pages ago; mainly because this is a bugger of a complicated story.)

I know this kind of talk drives the outliners and planners crazy, but I keep discovering this is just the way it needs to be for me. I couldn't possibly do it any other way. How could I have outlined this book? I could not have thought through a skeleton story where I would have known how important the cat was going to be or that there was even going to be a muselar or a Mr. Starling and how he would impact the relationship between Eddie and her mother. I sort of have to go along like a bag lady, picking up things as I go, trusting that they're going to come in handy later. And then when I reach this moment and see how important it all actually was, it's amazingly fascinating and mysterious to me, and I don't care how crazy that sounds.

My friend Nancy says "Trust the process" and damned if she isn't right, as usual.

1) I just wrote a scene where Eddie gets a completely gratuitous glimpse of James without his shirt on. And wet.

2) Why? Because I can.

3) Funny, the difference between what constitutes steamy content in this WIP and the steamy content of FHTC.

4) FHTC stands for FUNNY HOW THINGS CHANGE, which is--I think--the last and final title of my forthcoming FSG novel. It's growing on me.

5) So, I fear, is mold because it's been so dreary and cloudy and cold and damp and when the sun has been out, I've been huddled in here over my computer, writing about wet, shirtless guys who never existed.

6) I get the Mother of the Day award because my husband is out of town and I promised my kids I'd take them to Infinito's. Infinito's is a pizza buffet where the only edible thing is the bacon pizza because the bacon smothers the flavor of the pizza. But you have to eat it the minute they get it out of the oven or it quickly attains the texture of a wet Kleenex. Pray for me.

And yes, I know that's six.

So I watched the second half of the new Sense & Sensibility on PBS. It was impossible not to compare this version to the Ang Lee/Emma Thompson version and there were actually some things about this one that I liked better. I really liked the actress who played Elinor and felt you could see the passions she kept under control just beneath the surface. I also much preferred the scene where Elinor finally pours her heart out to Marianne re: Edward and Lucy. In the Lee/Thompson film, Kate Winslett somehow manages to make that scene all about her and I always want Emma Thompson to smash her head against the wall. But in this version, this Marianne for once finally (and very properly) set her own feelings aside and comforted her sister.

But in this version, the thing between Brandon and Marianne got weirdly creepy with this odd montage of scenes of them sort of courting, including one bit where he is engaging in falconry and Marianne is watching, rapt (because nothing impresses a seventeen year old girl more than the way a man handles his falcon), and he looks at Marianne and calls "Come here!" and she comes, so the impression is that he has trained her to be his good little wife, a falcon in a hood instead of the wild creature she had been. In fact, when they return from the Parkers' after Marianne's illness, Elinor refers to the Colonel dropping them off and walking away as a "horse gentling" technique. So you see, women are wild, flighty creatures who must be taken in hand by older men. Wait! Is screenwriter Andrew Davies a member of the Warren Jeffs cult???

And Andrew Davies had better be paying royalties to Emma Thompson because he ripped her screenplay off mercilessly. There is no scene in the book where Marianne goes out wandering in the rain and is carried back to the Parkers' house by Colonel Brandon. She goes for a walk in the garden and steps off the path into the damp grass and gets her feet wet and then sits in wet shoes and stockings all evening and gets sick. But in both Ang Lee's version and this one, there goes Marianne, out into the rain and here comes Colonel Brandon, staggering under her inert weight. Funnier still in this one, Colonel Brandon goes out looking for her on a white horse (ta da!) and comes back with her on foot. No clue what happened to the horse.

It is the birthday of grumpy travel writer Paul Theroux. The Almanac says:

While living in Africa, he became friends with the writer V.S. Naipaul, who became his mentor and who encouraged him to keep traveling.

Hmm. Maybe he just wanted Theroux to leave?

I hit a spot in my WIP today where I had no clue which direction to go, so I started throwing words at it, like Richard Dreyfus in Close Encounters of the Third Kind where he's just throwing clay on his sculpture of Devil's Tower, only he doesn't know he's sculpting Devil's Tower. That's exactly how I feel about this chapter. I'll go back later with a fork and scrape a lot of it away, I'm sure. Just so I don't reach the point where I'm yanking up shrubberies and throwing them through the window.

Will this method turn out to be better than wandering around the house for days, eating chips, making fudge and finally cleaning out the crisper in my refrigerator? We'll see. It feels better. It feels productive. And if nothing else, I have discovered what doesn't work. I've already backtracked through a couple of pages of Eddie and Caroline having yet another disagreement over Eddie's behavior until I had one of those screeching halt moments where I realized Caro is starting to sound like a pain in the arse and why would Eddie put up with her, much less desire her companionship? A sister has to be more than a scold to be more than just someone you are unfortunately related to by close genetic ties. (Er...not that I speak from experience, beloved sisters of mine.) The first time she reproached Eddie, Eddie really was behaving outrageously. But this time it was a situation where she ought to have had more sympathy for her sister, only the first time I wrote though it, it was just easier to have her get sniffy about it. I have to watch out for that kind of lazy writing.