We have another interview up at Word Pirates. This time Marcia interviewed Ellen Parker from the online journal FRiGG. Take a look.

BTW, Word Pirates really need a logo. Does anyone (who can draw) care to make us one? We are not picky. It should be a pirate and he should be writing. Or it could be the skull and crossbones with say… pens? Help greatly appreciated.

Having a garden means I have to find ways to use up the food it produces. This summer, I’ve made zucchini bread, quiche, pie, and muffins. I’ve made tomato sauce, tarts, and foccacia. I’ve eaten countless cucumber-and-tomato salads and countless mozzarella-tomato-and-basil sandwiches.

Still there is more. I saute it. I roast it. I give it away. Still there is more.

Yesterday, I decided to utilize my over-producing jalapeno plant and my zealously producing tomato plants by making roasted tomato salsa. This meant roasting nine tomoatoes, a half head of garlic, and three jalapenos. To do this, I had to split the jalapenos and take out the seeds. Although I tried to touch the jalapenos as little as possible, it somehow still got all over my hands.

I have been down this path before. You get jalapeno on your hands, you think it’s gone, and the next thing you know, it’s stinging your eyes, your nose, your ear, and everywhere else you have touched. So this time, I was smart. I called my scientifically minded husband and explained my predicament. He got me a glass of milk and told me to stick my hand in it (a base vs. an acid. Science!). I did so. The jalapeno seemed to go away. All was well.

Except, it wasn’t. This morning, I opened my contact case to put in my contacts and

oooooooooooowwwwwwww!

A flash of needle-poking stings and a desperate, desperate grab to pull the piece of plastic out.

Jalapeno: Polluting my contact case and contacts.

Luckily, I had one more pair left. Now I have to go to the eye doctor for a refill.

The good news: The salsa tastes yummy.

Our writing group, the Word Pirates, interviewed editor Dave Housley from the literary magazine Barrelhouse. We asked him lots of writerly questions like how they choose submissions, what kinds of plots they want, what is overplayed, etc. If you are interested in writing, check it out.

My cover story on The Clock of the Long Now is running in this week’s Pacific Sun. Scientists are creating a clock that will be installed in a mountain in Nevada. There, it will quietly tick away the days, years, centuries and finally millennia for the next 10,000 years.

Yesterday, I struggled with questions like “Do these characters seem real? How do I get into this character’s head?” Some characters seemed exceptionally vivid and others seemed flat. It was annoying.

So of course, last night’s dreams were full of ghosts materializing and disappearing. When they materialized, they were fascinating and delightful. Trouble was, I wasn’t sure how to conjure them and had to keep trying different things. Half of the time, my attempts failed.

It was pretty frustrating, overall.

Like a lot of young writers, when I first started out, I kept all my rejection letters. For the past 8 years, whenever I got one, I put it in a file. By now, as you can imagine, that file is getting kind of thick.

Lately I’ve been wondering what the point of keeping them is. It’s starting to seem more like habit than anything else.

At one point, I had romantic and unoriginal ideas about my rejection letters. Like many people, I thought about wallpapering a room with them when I finally “make it big” as a writer. Now I ask myself: Would I really want such a negative and depressing room in my house — A veritable shrine to all the people who told me no?

Not really. In fact, that seems like a stupid idea.

And it’s not as though the rejection letters are that interesting. At least 90% of them are form letters that politely say “thanks, but no thanks.” I don’t even have good rejection letter stories. Only one or two were actually sort of insulting. Once, for example, a person tore the bottom of my cover letter off and wrote, “No thanks” in pencil before stuffing it back into my envelope. But even that seems more like laziness than insult. No one ever wrote “You suck!” on one of my rejection slips.

When I was a beginning writer, everything was a precious icon on the path to eventual success. Now rejection letters are just part of the job. And I know that a lot of writers save them for the same reasons I originally did, which makes the whole endeavor seem pathetic.

Maybe ReadyMade Magazine should have a contest for what to do with old rejection letters.

UPDATE: I went to throw out the file, but when I started going through it, I realized it was a pretty thorough history of my early  publishing attempts. I would never have remembered that I ever sent anything to Guide Magazine, or that I actually sent around my terrible terrible poetry, or that someone at Zoetrope told me that I’ve “got the goods.” It was oddly encouraging and not depressing, like I thought. So I kept the file. Just because.

Last June, I went to the 2006 Rock, Paper, Scissors Championship at Roshambo Winery in Healdsburg. You can read my write-up of the event in the wonderful new issue of Imbibe Magazine. They also published some pictures I took of the event. Go pick up a copy.

For the last five years, I have been talking about going to see Shakespeare in the Park in San Francisco. This Sunday, I finally got to do it. The play was The Tempest.

I expected it to be crowded, because, Come on! Free Shakespeare!, so Kyle, Marcia, Dave, and I got to the Presidio early to get a good spot. However, there were very few people there, so we spread out a blanket and had a picnic and talked. Eventually, Justin and Stephanie joined us as well.

The play was great. I had the usual problem of disorientation that I have with Shakespeare–what is going on? who are these people? etc.–and then I got into it. At one point, some of the wild parrots that live in the area flew overhead and landed in a palm tree. They sounded like children laughing.

Afterwards, we all went out for crepes. They were delicious. While we ate, I had fun with my old Olympus camera, which I had abandoned for my newer Canon. I discovered I missed it a lot.

Stephanie, me, and Marcia reflected in a mirror

Kyle and a blurry Justin.

Justin and Dave, also reflected in the mirror.

The End.

I am half-way through Marisha Pessl’s novel Special Topics in Calamity Physics. So far, I am really enjoying it. It seems to me that whenever one of these new literary stars comes along, there’s usually an outpouring of sour grapes–you know, people complaining that the writer wouldn’t be getting so much attention if she weren’t so young / good looking / wealthy / well-educated / etc.

I guess I can understand that. After all, if you go by sites like this, everyone in the whole world apparently wants to write a novel. So when someone young and pretty does just that, and it is hailed by publicists as The Next Great Novel Everyone Should Read, and that person manages to not only get the ciritcal acclaim but the six-figure advance too, why… that’s just too much for some people to handle.

Personally, I’m glad that a 27-year-old woman can write a good novel and get a huge advance. As a writer, I see that as an encouraging, rather than discouraging, fact. And as long as the book doesn’t take a serious nose-dive in the second half, I think she deserves all the accolades.

However, lest people think that just because a woman is attractive and talented, writing a novel is somehow easy for her, I’d like to point out something I noticed in a radio interview with Pessl, where she talked about how she managed to find the time to write the book (this is also along the lines of what I was talking about in my last entry). I have transcribed that part of the interview:

Interviewer: What were you doing while you were writing this book?

Pessl: I was working as a financial consultant. That was my job out of college. Thankfully I was surrounded by people who knew I was an English major, so they always suspected I wasn’t in financial consulting for the long haul. When I was doing Excel spreadsheets or PowerPoint presentations, I would take chapters of this book with me and work on them in my downtime and during lunch. One of the reasons I don’t talk about my stories while I am working on them is because there is such an impetus to get it down on paper … and when there is that impetus, you’ll find the time.

Interviewer: Well, you make the time.

Pessl: Exactly, you make the time.

Interviewer: Because you have to be very disciplined to make something like this. Did you find that that was impacting your life? Were you missing out on certain things because you were staying home and working on your novel?

Pessl: Oh absolutely, absolutely. My roommate out of college always found me to be–I wasn’t fun like he was. I was always staying in and my nights were spent writing, because usually during the day, I would try to write, but certainly didn’t have enough time. So of course, that impacted my social life.

This has been an awful week with a lot of annoying situations. The good thing is, it has made me think about where I am putting my energies. Energy, like money, has to be focused. If you want to go to Europe for vacation, say, you have to cut back in other areas of your life and keep your eye on your larger goal. In the same way, how I spend my time seems directly related to the person I am. Life is made up of moment-to-moment actions, just like finances are made up of daily purchases.

I fill notebooks with lists. Not long ago, I went through a bunch of old notebooks before throwing them out. I realized that when I designed my time to pursue certain goals–music writing or wine writing, for example– a few months later, I had usually achieved what I set out to do. Sometimes it’s hard for me to connect grand ideas like What Am I Doing With My Life? with small, seemingly meaningless things like writing a list. But seeing the direct cause-and-effect reiterated for me how controllable everything really is, and how connected all the parts of my life are to each other.

I am thinking about this because one of my worst habits is to allow that which does not matter to take over my life. Most of the time they are fun, fivilous things like watching TV or too much socializing. It’s not that I have anything against the fun and the frivilous. It’s just that those things can be a way to procrastinate. The things worth having in life aren’t really that fun, but their rewards are deeper and more long-lasting.

So, if I believe how I spend my time in the end determines how I have used my life, I have to take it more seriously when these things creep in and take over. I have to think that it actually DOES matter if I read gossip sites instead of the news, or go out with friends instead of staying home and working. Time, like all limited resources, shouldn’t be squandered.