Archive for May, 2010
I’m alive!!
But barely.
Though it’s not because of the ghost hunt, or anything. The ghost hunt went fine (more on that later). It was only when I came home that I started feeling like crap.
In fact, as I type this post, I’m sitting on the couch, watching The Nanny reruns on Nick @ Nite with my one good eye, breathing through my mouth like one of my brother’s ex-girlfriends, the one whose hair was bleached within an inch of her life.
Being sick sucks.
I’m taking today off for a really long Memorial Day weekend and I know I’m not the only person doing this. Yesterday at work, countless people asked what my plans were for the weekend. (Sometimes I think they do this just so they can tell you their plans.) A few guys want to get their boats in the water, some people are painting rooms in their houses, or planting flowers.
All good things, except maybe for the paint fumes. Fun things, some –need-to-get-it-done stuff. The one thing in common is that almost everyone is planning to attend or host a picnic on Monday after the parades.
I almost never answer honestly when coworkers ask me my plans. Only one person at my job knows I can write (and their finding out was a complete accident). I generally don’t put it out there for people to comment on.
So I mention things that I am going to do. Plant annuals, do some things around the house, and attend a barbecue. But the main thing I want to do is write.
By that, I mean actually get the words onscreen. (I’d say on paper, but my penmanship is so bad, I’d never be able to read them.) Because I write all the time – in my head.
I plot while planting flowers, I find characters while waiting in line at the grocery checkout. I spin little dramas in my head while watching the body language of the couple so pointedly ignoring each other at a party. I’ll be doing it all weekend – except for the few hours I’ll steal to type it out.
Am I the only person to do this or do you write in your head all the time?
If you haven’t guessed already, I’m a bit of an anomaly to this romance writing shiznit. For one thing, I can be a bit of a pretentious ass. For another, I can also be a bit of a loner. Neither are traits conducive to getting along well in a genre where community plays as much a part in success as talent.
I actually joined an RWA chapter a few years ago. Maybe I’m still a member there. I dunno. I moved and never gave them my new address, which should clue you in on how much use I got out of it. I think I poked around on the forums for a day, maybe two, and then gave up when I realized it was a place where everyone shat rainbows and puppies stayed puppies forever.
Yeah.
Wednesday Addams would have better luck in Bible camp than I had at RWA.
The truth is, I’m not a rainbows-and-puppies kind of girl. I don’t like being motivated, praised, high-fived, or complimented. I don’t have a critique partner, and more importantly, don’t want one. Obscure abbreviations and first-timers pins annoy this shit out of me, thanks to years of nothing-is-good-enough conditioning. And my idea of ‘community involvement’ extends as far as resisting the urge to dump vast amounts of strychnine into said community’s water supply.
(Oh, please. Like you haven’t ever wanted to do the same.)
Every now and then, when the planets align and my hormones balance just right, I get the notion to fake it and pretend, just for a little while, that I’m like everyone else. The first time this happened, I met a very nice girl named Rose who was looking for a critique partner to hold her accountable.
“We’ll email each other every day,” she said, “and tell each other what we’re working on.”
“Alright,” I said. “That’s cool.”
Except it wasn’t cool. It was infuriating. Her once-a-day emails tripled, each one more bipolar than the next. Finally, after about a month, she cracked wide open.
“I hate to say this,” she said in what would be the last email I ever received from her, “but this isn’t working. You aren’t helping me out at all. I need someone who will hold me accountable, and you don’t seem to be able to do that.”
I’m still not exactly sure what Rose wanted me to do: drive to her house and strap her to her chair? virtual hypnosis? bribery? extortion? None of those things would’ve made a difference. The ball was in her court. She dropped it. End of story.
That’s the thing that bothers me about the whole ‘community’ concept. Some people have the unrealistic notion that if they belong to a group, they’ll suddenly become smarter, funnier, better than they were on their own, and all of those things they’ve wanted to accomplish will finally get done. Sometimes it pans out. Sometimes it doesn’t. But either way, community is the ultimate get out of jail free card.
To put it in perspective, I belonged to a writing group back in the nineties that was filled with people who were so serious about writing, they didn’t write anything at all. They had to ready themselves for the actual writing process, a process that took days of fasting and drum circles and maybe some naked mud dancing.
OK, so I made that last part up. But there were some serious whack jobs over there.
My first day, I was asked to post an autobiography in the “new members” thread. “Your autobiography must use correctly five different forms of punctuation, three different styles of sentence structure, and be written in second person point of view,” the email said.
An autobiography in second person. I’m not shitting you. Or would that be, you are not shitting yourself?
Anyway, I wrote my bio (or rather, your bio as me), posted it, and waited. One by one, the members came by to offer their sage advice:
“Too logorrheic.”
“There doesn’t seem to be any real theme holding it together.”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t see what all the hubbub is about.”
“NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO.”
“Your font is ugly.”
“You’re trying too hard.”
“You did OK, but you could do better.”
“You write like you’re licking the back of a postage stamp.”*
“I liked that you used ‘zed’ but that was all.”
“It’s like you ate a book on writing and then vomited it back up. Disgusting.”
I could go on, but I think you’ve gotten the gist by now. If the women in my RWA group shat rainbows, it’s safe to say the people on Cheese shat…well, shit.
But even though they weren’t nice, and in fact many of them were quite rude and intolerable, I gleaned something from that group that I’m just not getting out of RWA—that at the end of the day, you’re on your own, and it’s up to you to chase your dreams, catch them, hold onto them for dear life, or let them slip away.
Well, that and the word “deuteragonist,” which you have to admit, is kind of catchy.
So which is it? Does it really take a village to write a book? Or is man, in fact, an island? Sound off in the comments below.
Or if you’re in favor of man as an island, just nod in my general direction. I’ll be sure to feel the winds of simpatico, bro.
* The line about the postage stamp is, hands down, my favorite critique so far.
