Not exactly. I was live last week. This week I’m postdated. Witty quips about life and love all to come, right after I vaccum and change the litter box. Hahahahah. Hahahaha. Change the litter box. Ha, good one, huh A.? A. is falling off his big black office chair right now. Hahahahaha.

Boy:  I'm going to fall in love with you, Gianna
Girl:  No!  I don't want you to fall in love with me!
Boy:  Why?
Girl:  Because I want to marry someone else!
Boy:  Even when we grow up?
Girl:  Yes!  I'm never going to marry you, ever!
Boy:  But I'm your best friend!
Girl:  You're not my only best friend!
Boy:  But will you still play with me?
Girl:  Okay, but only if I go to your house.

Bottomless iced teas, the Blue Jay who hangs out in my backyard, cheap Mexican restaurants, my gaff, A’s jokes and G’s loopy drawings, and these:

• Joan Acocella’s New Yorker piece on Writer’s Block (Trollope cranked out 3,000 words every morning before he went to work!)

• This food site

• Roger Angell‘s Dry Martini. (Read here by Jennifer McKnight, though much better in black and white on page.)

For now …

 

This was a welcome surprise from Powell’s today, a day where my inspiration has been hard-won and far between: Playboy’s 25 Sexiest Novels Ever Written. Among them, the obvious:  Lady Chatterly’s Lover, Fear of Flying, a Harold Robbins book and Judy Blume’s Forever, but also some fun little ditties like #19: Singular Pleasures — 66 one-paragraph vignettes on masturbating. Why is it on the list?  Well …

“It’s short. There’s no other book like it. We’re not sure it’s a novel, but it is novel. Eskimos do it with blubber; New Zealander’s with sheep’s liver; A woman in Spokane with kitchen implements; A woman in India with a rubber band tree; a couple in America uses gloves, glove tongs and complementary parts of an artichoke.”

Kitchen implements?  Whisk?  Spatula?  Meat tenderizer, garlic press?  The possibilities … anyway, that’s all I have today.

(From Powell’s Blog)

There was an open window in the front room and the woman got up to close it. Two fat houseflies were dead on the sill and she brushed them onto the floor. She’d vaccum tomorrow. The man was gone so she wandered the house, opening doors and entering rooms then leaving them again. There was a pile of clean, unfolded underclothes on a bed downstairs, she left it alone. An empty soup can stood at the sink in the kitchen. Pock marks of activity. The quiet alarmed her.

There was a music box on the mantle over the fireplace. A gift, years earlier, from the man’s mother. The woman wound it up and a yellow bear spun slowly around with a ludicrous grin on its face, to a Frank Sinatra tune. Fly Me To The Moon and let me play among the stars …

The woman felt like drinking champagne. She felt like lipstick. She felt like wearing a long dress and beads and waiting here at the mantle with her arm cocked, a saucy grin, the Sinatra notes tinkling and spinning the bear, but there was no champagne. She settled for a can of cold beer, popping the top with mock theatrics, playing to an empty room, a crowd of teddy bears all twirling and grinning with chipped mouths. She smudged cheap color onto her lips and wound the music back up. The orchestra kicked in somewhere in her head and she smiled and sipped the beer.

Next Week: A Dog Barks in the Night!

[Read here, and here, for earlier installments.]

My great funny friend Mark is having his way with, and getting a little tired of, the list season. Which only inspired me to create a list. So here you go. 10 things that bug me today.

1. Whatever code I screwed up to make an ugly, weird third column in my blog!
2. Our stupid recycling schedule. It’s like, “Glass every third Wednesday, except on Fridays, and only on weekdays that begin with ‘S’; plastics separate from glass, unless you mix them, but then only on lawn clipping Fridays; Lawn clippings on Fridays it doesn’t rain; garbage only on Tuesdays unless you have glass and lawn clippings and plastics, in which case we won’t pick up anything at all.” Bastards.
3. The really gross-looking chair that we keep in the TV room because the cat uses it as scratching post and the kids use it to wipe boogers and A.’s afraid if we lose it all hell will break loose.
4. Mornings. Mornings bug me.
5. The stupid third column sticking up out of my blog! Did I say that already??
6. Amazon reviewers
7. Marley and Me really bugs me
8. Emptying the dishwasher
9. That both those damned tadpoles died!
10. Randy Johnson’s sucky pitching (that one’s for A.)

[Scribbles from May 10, 2005]

  They squatted in the dirt, just over the muddy ground in that way they do where their knees are like rubber bands and fold up tight, where they’re barely off the ground, hugging kneecaps, somehow not quite sitting down.  Their heads are bowed solemn and intent over something, completely focused.  If I could tape this for an hour, I would play it to relax me. 

Today we hit gold.  A massive tangle of squirming worms when I lifted up the plastic basketball hoop that had been lying on its face all winter.  The worms were furled and knotted into a ball of mud and moss and gunk caked onto the patio from a month of rain.  It was a sight.  There were a hundred, maybe, but we said a million.  It seemed like a million.  Cute little ones, babies.  A. furrowed his brows, silently figured his plan and then began picking them up carefully between two five-year old fingers.  G. put her head as close to him as she could get it, still hunched, squatted, folded over, still focused down, and she began to collect them, too.  The fingers on one hand picked up, the other cupped hand held.  “Okay, come on” A. said, his hand was full, and he climbed up the side of the hill to the fort.  The rule is they are to use the rock stairs, they never do.

more »

  Am reading a 1978 Joan Didion interview from The Paris Review and envying her writing discipline but more than that even, the serenity she commands.  The luxury of being able to demand that serenity, that routine, the strict schedule.  An outrageous concept, at least for me, and most other mothers who write, I imagine.  Take this:

Interviewer:  Do you have any writing rituals?

Didion:  The most important one is that I need an hour alone before dinner, with a drink, to go over what I’ve done that day.  I can’t do it late in the afternoon because I’m too close to it.  Also, the drink helps.  (TD’s Note: Duh!)  It removes me from the pages.  So I spend this hour taking things out and and putting other things in.  Then I start the next day by redoing all of what I did the day before, following these evening notes.

Forget the morning to work, what I would give for that one hour!  Uninterrupted!  The hour to review the work, and then the drink to quell the din – that cyclone of pickups and dropoffs and snacks and spills and tears and screams and doorbells and meals and cuddles and guilt, that rips apart my energy each day.  I envy the order around her writing process.  When I do get a block of time, I type fast and furious and maybe get to review it a few days later, or a week.  Sometimes there are days without the block of time and then I scratch thoughts and ideas out on napkins or the margins of newspapers or on one of the dozens of notebooks I have scattered around.  Recently, I’ve been collecting those jottings and trying to incorporate them in my book because that was the original intent when I wrote them … they’re just never handy when I get the block of time.  I’m doing nothing in any sort of order.  Wa, wa, wa.  I’m going to go get that drink. 

Meanwhile, A. just called from Florida.  I heard splashing from the pool in the background, and then this, “Hold on a minute honey.  Whooo!  Brain freeze, the margarita!”  Then Megan from next door stopped by and I should have had her in, poured iced tea, talked about the zoo field trip coming up, but I didn’t.  I just wanted 10 minutes, dammit.  10 minutes to finish this dumb little post.  And now I’m grumpy.  Not because of A. and the pool but because constant interruption turns 10 minutes to an hour and it’s frustrating, and I wanted the other 50 minutes to drink iced tea with Megan.  Screw it.   

From Day 5 of How to Write a Novel in 100 Days or Less:

“It doesn’t matter what kind of book you decide to write. There are no rules other than that the story has to be very, very interesting. It can be exciting, scary, fun, funny or sad — but it must not bore the reader.”

Edmund Wilson once said of Mary McCarthy that she was wasting her time living a novel when she should have been writing one. I’m doing both at once.

Fictional characters, regardless of how much they resemble real people, are never really real people — real people are not interesting enough on their own, without enhancement. Still, there’s a lot to steal. My own novel (to be mailed to agents everywhere by end of summer), features a neurotic housewife (with vague similarities to me), and a sort of stoic, emotionally challenged husband. The husband is nothing at all like A., and yet real-life A. gives me so many great lines. He also has a number of tics and quirky characteristics that are perfect for my fictional man. An example: the four of us lounged in a coffee shop Sunday morning to duck out of the rain. Kids played with Legos, I skimmed the paper, and Howard — oops! — I mean A. spent most of the time sorting out a big messy pile of Uno cards into their original two neat decks. I snatched that scene right up.

Later I confessed something to A. “I’m sick,” I told him. “You know that fight we had Friday … ” Yes, I wrote it all down! It was a real fight and I fought it like me, but then after we were done and cooling off I thought, what a brilliant fight for my made-up couple! It suited them, actually, much better than A. and I.

If James Frey was guilty of fabricating details of his life to spice up his memoir, I may be guilty of contriving scenes to spice up my real life so I can better depict them in fiction. A., btw, confessed back to me, “Don’t worry, I do it, too.” So now I don’t know if he is speaking to me as A. or as “Howard”. It’s a little creepy, but I must say, tremendously helpful.

Meanwhile, the sun’s out, I have a new Wisteria and I’m late for a walk to the park.