On becoming a label whore

So I bought my first Coach bag over the weekend.

This is a big deal for me. First, I have never been the kind of girl to want things just because everyone else has them or because they're the cool things to have. Particularly not with clothes or accessories. If I buy trendy things at all, it's usually ages after the trend is truly trendy, when I have been beaten into submission by the overabundance of said item permanently imprinting itself on my consciousness. You know, sort of like how I am finally warming up to Adele's "Rolling in the Deep."

However, I have recently experienced an irrational yearning for... gasp... trendy things. Like Ugg boots. (I bought Bearpaw boots because they're cheaper but still well made and holy jesus are they amazing. Why did I wait?? Like wearing slippers everywhere.) Or a Coach bag.

I do not spend big money on handbags, people. I set my bag down on the floor of restaurants, kick it under tables at weddings, and cram my lunch into it on weekdays. Really, the notion that I would "invest" in a nice handbag is a joke. Also, I carry the same handbag all year round, every year, until it wears out.

So why, you may be asking, did I just spend an absurd amount of money on a Coach bag? I honestly have no idea. I did learn that part of the reason they're so expensive is that they're very well made and come with a lifetime guarantee. But I just keep repeating that to people in order to justify my unholy love of The Precious.

I absolutely adore my new bag. I can't even pretend that I'm not insanely infatuated with it. Which means, I suppose, that it was a worthwhile purchase, considering I bought it at a discount, am 36 years old and have a good job (meaning I can theoretically afford it and, damn it, I'm old enough to buy ridiculous, expensive things for myself).

But I continue to be plagued by the question... who have I become? Why am I fulfilled by a Coach bag?

Disturbing. And yet... I love my bag. So much. Did I mention that?

Dazzled

A new Snow Patrol album came out yesterday. I'm a huge Snow Patrol fan and I've been eagerly anticipating this new album. It's pretty good. I haven't been able to give it a good listen yet but I've liked the stuff I've heard so far and I can already tell a couple of the tracks will be added to my Snow Patrol favorites.

But while I was listening to it, I realized that I was so freaking excited about it, so ready for it to be great, that it would have taken more work (so to speak) for the songs to disappoint me than it would for them to make me love them. Snow Patrol has already earned my trust and so now I approach anything they do with open arms, ready to fall in love with it.

I'm like that with books, too. I expect and anticipate that every story--especially those by tried and true beloved authors--will kindle something in me, excite me, make me fall in love with it. Like I'm halfway there before I open the cover.

I don't think I'm alone in this, and I think that's kind of cool. We allow ourselves to be dazzled on a regular basis. I like the idea of all of us fans, us lovers of stories and songs and other works of art, having "embrace this" as our default setting.

If I had it all

I was listening to the Dave Matthews song "If I Had It All" the other day and I was struck by how some of the things we, as writers, experience are universal to all artists.

If I were a king
If I had everything
If I had you and I could give you your dreams
If I were giant-sized, on top of it all
Then tell me what in the world would I sing for

It's so true, isn't it? I hate the stereotype that writers (and artists, collectively) are a sorrowful, melancholy (substance-abusing...) bunch but when you get right down to it, if we were all perfectly content with everything in our lives and in the world, what the hell would we write about? I don't think we necessarily suffer more than non-artists but I do think that we are hyper-aware of the places in life where there's a gap between what should be or what was wished for and what really is. And I think we take that awareness and the resulting emotions--sorrow, anger, discontent, heartache, passion, you name it--and put it to good use. :) We make our misery work for us, dammit!

Anyway, it's just something I was thinking about: what on earth would I write about if I was 100% content with the world as is.

Double standard

So Ben and I were out to dinner with another couple a few nights ago. Ben nudged me, pointing to the table next to ours, where a girl (11ish?) was reading a book while her parents and little sister chatted and finished dinner.

I was immediately transported back to my own childhood when I had my nose in a book during every spare moment. I felt a little sparkle of kinship and, cheesily enough, pride for the girl. As if *I* had anything to do with the fact that she was reading. I suppose I just considered her one of my "people"--and, let's face it, nine times out of ten it's a Nintendo DS kids are engrossed in at the dinner table these days, not a paperback.

Which brings me to my point: Ben and I HATE--HAAAAAAAATE HATE HATE HATE--it when we see kids playing video games at the dinner table. Bottom line, we've all got to endure things we don't want to and if you can't handle sitting through dinner with your family then how are you going to be able to sit through three hour meetings at your job? Or four hour labs in college? Or whatever. You get the point.

But this girl? Reading a book? I was all, "THAT GIRL IS AWE! SOME! Her parents should be commended! I love it!" When, really, what's the difference?

I mean, I suppose it could have been a homework assignment but let's assume it wasn't (and frankly, she looked like she was waaaaay too engrossed in it for it to be actual "work.") I hate double standards and was quite chagrinned to find myself gleefully engaging in one.

Into the rabbit hole, again and again

I came here to post about a strangely moving image I saw today and got waylaid by another moving image. How curious.

I've been in a particular mood lately: deeply immersed in my writing self and therefore very sensitive to everything going on within and around me. I love these periods of my life but they're intense and difficult to take in long stretches. They also make me want to search for new icons. I can't exactly explain why, but I love expressing myself through my LJ icons. When I'm in moods like this, I love the icons to mirror whatever I'm feeling inside. So, my icon hunt brought me to (natch), where I found some icons based on the art of Ken Wong.

And then I found this.

Ooh I want that so bad. I want it as an icon. As a print on my wall. As a sandwich board sign to wear for the next several weeks. As the cover to this book I'm writing. Want. Want. Want. I may have to email Mr. Wong to see if a print can be made available, despite his professed loathing of email. *covets*

Back to the original image. You know how sometimes sidewalks just...end? Like, they needed a sidewalk for a while, but then they didn't anymore so it just stops, completely abruptly, and the end is surrounded by grass again or whatever? Well, I was driving back from the grocery store this evening, and I saw a young girl, maybe late teens, wearing a backpack and pulling another bag just standing at the end of one of those dead-ended sidewalks. Just...standing there, staring at the end of the sidewalk, as if it was a path of stones through a sea of lava and now that it had ended, she had no idea what to do next.

I drove by pretty slowly--it wasn't that I just caught a glimpse of her at the precise moment she'd paused or happened to look down or something. This girl was just standing there, waiting for I don't know what. I guess, waiting for the next section of her path to reveal itself.

It was quite profound. And sad. And a little cheesy, in that crap-they'd-put-this-on-a-motivational-poster kind of way, even though it was happening in real life.

Welp, back to my girl and my warlord.

ETA: Srsly, ppl. Would you look at this?? The image, the title... I think this will have to be in my house somewhere. *nods*

Guh.

I finished writing a really big scene today -- one that changes everything in my book -- and I am DRAINED. Luckily for me, my pal Erik wrote a really engaging and hilarious post on the mismatch between male and female leads in today's books and movies, so I'm just going to point you there. I highly recommend checking out. Here's one of the many bits that made me laugh out loud:

In Twilight we know two conflicting sets of facts about Bella Swan. One set is that she is fragile, weak, manipulative, catty, incurious, passive and kind of pathetic. This set is pretty much borne out in her words and actions, and a lot of it is stuff she directly says. The other set of facts we know about her is that she is beautiful, precious, lovely, has some sort of spectacular soul and is truly, truly one of God's perfect creatures. We know this because two of the most lovingly described Adonises of the night are dead in love with her and everyone else constantly fights over her attention, forgives her for some really shitty things she's done and treats her like they know she is truly, truly one of God's perfect creatures.

Musings on Economy of Scale

Thanks so much to everyone who cheered me on (and congratulated my word count!) during my Sunday Write-A-Thon yesterday! I lurve to spend a day with nothing on the agenda but words, so yesterday was a lot of fun. Mostly. But we'll get to that in a moment.

As I've mentioned, I'm on a 500-words-a-day goal for this book. I pushed myself harder for my last book, partly because I felt I should simply because Other People Could (dumb) and partly because I was writing adult and writing long, which meant that most days I felt like I would never freaking finish!!! (Final word count on that one ended up at 118K, though I've come to terms with the fact that it needs a good rewrite.)

Somewhere along the way of writing that book, I lost my sense of balance. I became too focused on getting published and forgot about all the living I needed to do in the intervening years. Family and friends would invite us out and, I swear, my gut reaction was a sort of keening noise followed by the thought, "But that time could be spent writing!"

Yeah. That's not how you stay sane, people. Not as an unpublished writer, anyway. If you've got deadlines to meet, that's a different story.

With this book, I'm trying to keep the pendulum swinging in a tight range more or less at the middle of the time management arc: words written every day at a pace that will get the book finished sooner rather than later, but will still allow me enough time for novel activities such as: reading! spending guilt-free time with my husband, family, and friends! having--gasp!--free time occasionally!

So far, it's working. :D

I found yesterday's Write-A-Thon interesting on a couple of fronts, though: A. I was absolutely certain I would benefit from an economy of scale by writing for a whole day--and I didn't and, B. even when I love writing, I sometimes don't love writing.

A. Monday through Friday, I typically get my 500 or so words in in about an hour and a half, total: two twenty minute bus rides, plus forty or so minutes of my lunch hour, plus maybe a half hour or so at night. All of those sessions have what we in the Process Engineering biz (my Day Job!) call "process fragmentation" costs associated with them, so I'm not fully capitalizing on any of the timeframes I mentioned. I'm starting up and shutting down my laptop, I'm remembering where I last left off, etc.

I thought that if I wrote for a whole day, largely uninterrupted, I would write at a rate faster than 500 words per 90 minutes. Turns out? Not so much. I wrote 2709 words in about eight hours, but during that time I took breaks for lunch and snacks, and read several chapters of a book when my motivation flagged. Loosely rounding, i still wrote at about 500 words per 90 minutes. I think. Honestly, I'm really bad at math, so I could be embarasing myself here. But anyway, assuming I'm right, I found that statistic both extremely interesting and somewhat disappointing.

This book wants to be written thoughtfully and carefully. I get it. :)

B. I'd started the day with a 2k word goal in mind. Once I checked my trusty spreadsheet, I realized I needed to write closer to 3K to get even with myself. Over the course of the day, I ranged the gamut (wtf does that mean, anyway??) from "I'M GOING TO OWN YOU, WORD COUNT GOAL! YOU WON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT HIT YOU BY THE TIME THIS DAY IS THROUGH!!" to "Okay, this is good. I'm doing fine. Slow and steady wins the race." to actually saying these words out loud to my husband: "There's no way I'll make 2688 but I'm determined to at least hit 2K."

The most interesting thing, to me, was that it wasn't a straight progression, which I could at least chalk up to fatigue. I was up and down and all over the place. I know that I hit an easy patch (meaning the words were flowing and I got caught up in the story) right around 2200 that carried me right up until the end. I checked my word count in the middle of that and I knew I'd make my stretch goal for the day--and at that moment, I felt like I could write 3K! No, 4K! TEN THOUSAND WORDS WOULD BE MINE!!!!

That was crazytalk, natch, but I did have a little rush of motivation there at the end. I just find it so interesting that no matter how deeply I love the holistic art of writing, the act, itself, continues to be a struggle at times. I think that's a mind-bendingly odd concept, but it's one I need to remember for when I hit those rough patches along the way.

On Compulsions, Senselessness of

There are some things I know about writing: that every writer has his or her own process and one writer's process will not work for another, that there are no short cuts in this business, and so on.

And yet, I am still compelled to ask the pointless questions: Where did you get that idea? How do you write such great sentences? Do you plot or pants? Please, won't you tell me how you did this...?

It is a source of continual frustration. I am always looking for the short cut in my core, no matter how much I believe there aren't any and no matter that I know the great stories I aspire to are either in me or they're not--and if they are they'll only be refined by writing them again and again and again.

A smattering

My busy schedule should be subsiding soon and I'm looking forward to getting back to a more regular blogging schedule in addition to more structured writing time. Yikes. Seems like the calendar just jumped up and swallowed me for a while there.

A couple of things for today...

First, I want to point you to Kelly Fineman. Kelly, besides being an all around lovely person, has a really freaking cool blog. She works really hard* to write smart, educational posts that are sort of like mini-classes. Only not boring. :) She's declared June to be Shakespeare month over at her place and, being a fan of The Bard myself, I've had a great time reading all of her insightful information on his work. Go check it out! Did I mention there are contests...?

I thought I'd leave you with this quote to ponder:

"We are monumentally distracted by a pervasive technological culture that appears to have a life of its own, one that insists on our full attention, continually seducing us and pulling us away from the opportunity to experience directly the true meaning of our own lives."
--Al Gore

I thought about how true this is and the cost it has on our relationships and our personal and spiritual** growth, which is unsettling in itself and certainly worth considering. However, the reason I bring it up here is that I also spent some time thinking about what this truth means for us as writers.

We write about life and, whether we portray it exactly as it happens around us or package it in an alternate world, we're siphoning from life's experiences to make the stories come alive. The more indirectly we experience our own lives--to Mr. Gore's point--the thinner those experiences are going to be and the cheaper the stories are going to feel.

Take a few minutes to think about this yourself. Read this post on the Deadline Dames if you haven't already. Consider scheduling a little more time each day that is technology free. :)

*Either that, or she's a genius. Maybe both?
**I don't mean religious here, but rather emotional and soulful -- the growth of the you who you are.

How do you read?

Someone asked me today how I felt about the Kindle. My response was truthful and immediate: it's not a product that interests me at all. I also don't like reading used books for much the same reason.

Reading a book is a very personal and intimate experience for me. I'm slipping into another world for as long as it takes to read those two- or three- or five hundred pages. Sometimes I'm literally slipping inside the mind of another character and the fact that this person may not actually exist in "the real world" doesn't make him or her any less real to me if the writing is good. Reading evokes an emotional response in me -- I'm angered when the characters are angered, I laugh when they laugh, I grieve when they grieve. In short, reading a book is like living a tiny little life inside my own life. Sometimes when I finish a book, I go through a brief period of mourning. I'm not ready to leave that world, to step out of that life, to say goodbye to those characters.

In addition to these gifts (as I think of them) that my books give me, I share quite a bit of my life with my books in return. When I'm reading, my book goes everywhere with me. I read it in bed, on the bus, in stolen moments throughout the day. I read while I'm eating and drinking, while I'm snuggling with my husband and dog, while I'm cooking. I carry the book in my purse, in my coat, it lays on my bed, on my couch, gets tangled in my blankets. It becomes an intimate part of my life while I have it.

An e-reader, whether it be the Kindle or any one of the other brands available, is far too impersonal a way for me to interact with my stories. My books get hard use. When I'm done, I've broken the spine, I've folded down page corners -- sometimes I'll even underline things or make notes in the margins. I can pick up that book a week or a month or a year later and still sense the life I lived while reading it. Even its materials once had a life of their own. The mechanical feel of reading a story through an e-reader or online just doesn't mesh with the way I've come to enjoy my books.

Reading used books evokes a similar reaction for me. I feel that so much of me, my life and the experiences and feelings evoked in me while reading the book are imprinted on it while I'm reading it that I don't care for the idea of picking up on those same elements of someone else's life or experiences with the book if I were to read a used copy. It's just too intimate an experience to share with a stranger.

That's not to say, of course, that I'll never read an e-book or a used book. I've done both, in fact. It's just not my preference. I also greatly respect and admire the e-book industry for the freedom and opportunities its offered to writers over the years. But, given the choice, I'd prefer to read a book in print format rather than electronic.

This whole post brings to mind a very funny story I heard from Dr. Regina Barreca. I had the wonderful opportunity to take several classes and an independant study with Dr. Barreca while at UConn several years ago. She is a talented writer, an engaging professor, HILARIOUS and one of the smartest women I've ever met.

One day in class, she was telling us how she and her husband used to buy a single copy of the books they both wanted to read and simply pass it to each other when the first was through reading it. She went on to say that they began to argue so frequently about the way they each handled the books, that they finally decided to simply maintain separate libraries. Dr. Barreca's husband believes that books are nearly sacred objects -- they are to be handled with proper care and treated with a level of respect akin to the Pope himself. Bindings are not broken, pages are not folded and they are never, EVER to be laid carelessly in the vicinity of treacherous food and drink! Dr. Barreca reads like I do: the sign of a well-loved book is just how many food and drink stains are in it. Because that means you simply could not bear to part with the book for even the twenty minutes it would take to eat dinner.

She even tells a story about how she had to travel for business and was reading some gigantic hardcover book. She was about halfway through and couldn't stand the thought of being without it for the length of her trip but also couldn't find room for the enormous book in her suitcase. She solved the problem by simply *ripping the book in half* and taking the half she hadn't read with her! I'll admit, that's a bit extreme, even for me but, hey. We all do what we've got to do to get our reading in, right?

So, I'm curious to know how you all read? Do you keep your books in pristine condition? Or do they show the wear and tear of a life well-lived? And how do you feel about the Kindle or other e-readers?