Hey look, Marcia Simmon’s first book DIY Cocktails is out!

I am collecting books I was mentioned in, and I was mentioned in this one. Hurrah!

Marcia wrote this book as part of the Drink of the Week blog. According to the site:

“We’ve concocted the only guide that teaches you to create your own infallible drinks. Using a simple system of basic ratios, you will learn to:

* Mix new flavor combinations for the perfect new blend using the Flavor Profile Chart as a guide
* Master advanced mixology techniques from infusing liquors at home to creating custom-flavored syrups
* Serve the perfect drink every time, whether it kicks off a rowdy party or winds down a romantic evening!”

Buy Marcia’s book here.

I don’t have much to say about AWP 2011, the writing conference I attended last week. There are many posts on it out there, all similar in nature, with people name dropping the cool people they hung out with. I don’t have names to drop. And even if I did, it would be insincere since I didn’t exactly make any deep connections. I just said “Hi, I like your work” and then we made some awkward chit-chat and that was it. I’m not good at networking.

I did enjoy hearing people read. I always enjoy Joyce Carol Oates, whose reading about the recent death of her husband made me tear up. I also liked the reading with Jennifer Egan, Joshua Ferris, Rick Moody, and Benjamin Percy. And so on and so on. I don’t want to tell you every reading I went to either.

Last year’s conference was better for me. I was inspired. I came back with a notebook full of ideas. This year, the panels left me flat. The book fair seemed as obtuse as a high school cafeteria. It was a little disheartening to find that writers fall into a “type,” just like computer programmers or accountants have a “type.” You don’t realize it until they are all jammed in a building together, but there is definitely a certain kind of person who is attracted to becoming a literary writer. And, too, there are further subcategories of sameness–a “type” of person who is a poet, a “type” who writes YA novels, a “type” who writes nonfiction. I doubt any of them would like to hear me say that because it is a characteristic of the writer-type to think of him or herself as unique and special. And I’m sure some of them are.

The thing that most inspired me was the dinosaur section of the Natural History Museum. I had been there before a long time ago, but it didn’t strike me as particularly interesting at the time. That makes me worry about my younger self, because the dinosaur section of that museum is amazing. Here is an armadillo with a shell the size of a boulder on its back. There is an elephant so big, my head would fit underneath its ribcage. Oh, and did you know about giant camels? Imagine that, giant camels!

And then you round the corner, and there it is: the giant ground sloth. Bigger than an elephant with claws like ice picks. I think I know where Godzilla came from:

The picture does not do it justice. These things used to roam around Argentina and Panama eating from 20-foot-high trees. It looks ferocious to me, but maybe they weren’t. Maybe they were as cuddly as the modern sloth:

Here are some obligatory Washington DC pictures. There’s something wrong with my camera, so there are black spots on the images. I should Photoshop them out, but I am writing this in a hurry:

Weird white tap water in our hotel room.

The Capital Building

Dead plants in front of the Environmental Protection Agency. This does not bode well.

Blind man touching the statue of Helen Keller inside the Capital Building’s Visitor Center.

The Washington Monument.

Marcia pretending to be a bill on the back steps of the Capital. You know, like this:

The Should I Work For Free? flowchart. (Click to expand.)

Ah, the ol’ “doing this project for free will give you good exposure” argument. Come on, creative people. You know what I’m talking about.

This feels very true.

I love old paperbacks. The older they are, the better. For example, this version of Howard’s End by EM Forster was originally published in 1921 by Knopf.

I picked it up last weekend at a thrift store for $.30. I think the green cover with the black trees is the bees knees.

I wish I still had my paperback of Days of the Locust by Nathanael West to show you. It might have been an original version of the book–anyway, it had this great modern, abstract cover. Unfortunately, the book fell apart while I was reading it, and no amount of tape could fix it up. I ended up recycling it, and it made me sad, because the book had survived for so many years, and it is such a good book, too.

There are often great things tucked inside these books as well. In a version of Coriolanus by Shakespeare that I have, someone left the top of a plastic bag that held scan-tron test sheets in it, which must have meant that a teacher owned the book. I have also found family photos, receipts, and once, a part of someone’s painting, which the artist ripped up and left inside the book for someone else (me) to find.

This is a hilarious version of Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy. The novel is a classic piece of literature, but the publishers, Signet Book, decided that it would sell better if it was packaged as a steamy romance. On the front, it says, “The romantic classic about a wayward beauty and her scandalous affairs with three dazzled lovers.”

If you have read Far From the Madding Crowd, you know that’s a bit of a stretch. The book is about marriage and love in the English countryside, true, but it’s no Lady Chatterley’s Lover. And then, take a look at the back of the book:

SHE WAS A WANTON WHO NEEDED TAMING

This is my favorite thrift store book find. It’s a small paperback that has been studiously covered with prim lavender wrapping paper. Why?

It’s the scandalous book from 1956, Peyton’s Place by Grace Metalious, about sex and other bad things in a small American town. The original owner probably covered this book so that she could read it in public without anyone knowing what she was doing.

I love to imagine this woman carefully lining the book and carrying it around with her so she could read it on the bus or at her lunch break without any shame. Or maybe she just did that to all her books. Who knows?

(Warning: spicy (but hilarious) language.)

This is so true. Writers, don’t work for free!

I am tired of answering this question: When do you think your novel will be finished, Joy? I realize that people asking me this mean well. They are just impatient for me to have a finished book and are wondering what is taking so long. So I thought I would answer the question on my blog for all to see.

So, I have been working on a novel for a couple of years now. It seems like it should be done. I want it to be done, believe me. I’m sick of it. But it’s not done and there’s nothing to do but keep working on it until it is. But I am working on it. At this point, it has gone through 35 drafts. That number is a little misleading because due to computer difficulties, sometimes I have to save a new draft before reading all the way through. Even considering this, I have edited the novel at least 25 times so far.

It is true that many novelists can write a book in a year, but that’s not me, not yet. At least not with this novel, which is very complicated. Why? A couple of reasons:

The first draft was 560 pages. That is too long. And yet I write tight and try to only put in details that build the story. As a result, finding things to cut is difficult. I am carefully, slowly, winnowing it down. It is currently at 505 pages. I want to get it closer to 450, so I have a while to go.

The novel deals with three interlocking narratives. It is a story about a grandmother, daughter, and mother. The structure of the novel is told from the daughter’s point of view, but the narrative is regularly interrupted with stories of the grandmother and mother. As a result, if I cut something, there is a ripple effect where everything else is impacted by the change. So cutting takes a lot of thought, and thinking takes time.

The novel is set in the past. It spans almost 100 years. So there are questions like “how would a woman in 1887 act if she found herself at a boxing match?” Or “would it be possible to put a piano in a covered wagon in such a way that it could be played during the overland journey?” Or “what happened to German-American immigrants during World War II?” Each question requires research, which takes time.

The world of a novel is complex. There are so many things to consider–emotional nuances, the smells in the room, how well the sentences flow, whether the reader can easily follow along. Each issue needs my full consideration.

I don’t know how to write a novel. Sometimes the way to learn something is to just do it. Novel writing is like that. You have to plunge in and learn as you go. And learning means mistakes, and mistakes mean re-doing things several times until you get them right. This takes time.

Writing a novel makes me anxious. Every day, some yokel on the Internet tells me that book publishing is dying and that no one is reading and that you need to be a celebrity to publish books these days, and so on and so forth. It makes me anxious and sad. That, in turn, leads to me procrastinating by doing things like writing long blog entries about why it’s taking me so long to write my novel. It is hard to write when you are worried that no one will ever see what you are working so hard on. Add to that a lot of time (like years) and it starts to become a complex. I try not to get discouraged by all this, but sometimes I do, and I lose productivity. Usually it’s just a morning here and there, since I’m pretty disciplined, but it does add up.

So there you have it. On the bright side, the novel is closer to a finished book than a rough draft. It feels like a book now, not just some unwieldy Word doc on Kyle’s server. I am notoriously bad at predicting how long it would take for me to finish, but I’m hoping it will be done by the end of the year.

Whether I meet that goal or not is the question.

The other day, I was saying how I should have been a playwright. All my formative reading was in plays. I used to go to the library when I was 15 or so and get out stacks of plays a foot high and sit in my room all night reading one after another. I know, I was the coolest teenager ever.

Anyway, if I were more inclined toward plot-oriented fiction, I might have gone down the playwright path. But after reading this article in the NYTimes, I’m glad I didn’t. Apparently, there is a gender bias against female playwrights in the theater.

At least, that’s according to a three-part Princeton study looking into whether “women who are authors have a tougher time getting their work staged than men.” Short answer: They do. And shockingly, at least to me, it’s the female artistic directors and literary managers who are doing the discriminating.

Ms. Sands [who headed the study] sent identical scripts to artistic directors and literary managers around the country. The only difference was that half named a man as the writer (for example, Michael Walker), while half named a woman (i.e., Mary Walker). It turned out that Mary’s scripts received significantly worse ratings in terms of quality, economic prospects and audience response than Michael’s. The biggest surprise? “These results are driven exclusively by the responses of female artistic directors and literary managers,” Ms. Sands said.

… Ms. Sands put it another way: “Men rate men and women playwrights exactly the same.”

Fascinating. And … disturbing. Less surprisingly, this is also the fault of the female playwrights. There are fewer of them, they produce less work than the men, and the quality of their work seems to be lower. That makes sense if they are working against a bias–it takes a lot of nerve to write knowing that is against you.

Still, despite that, plays by female playwrights make more money than plays by men: “Plays and musicals by women sold 16 percent more tickets a week and were 18 percent more profitable over all.”

“Yet even though shows written by women earned more money, producers did not keep them running any longer than less profitable shows that were written by men.”

Pretty surprising stuff. Depressing too. However, I still refuse to watch a staging of The Vagina Monologues.

Oh British journalism. Sometimes I don’t know what to do with you. Here is an article by a British woman about how hard it is for her, an anorexic, to eat normally for a week. Yes, she decides to live out a fantasy and eat everything she wants like a “normal” person for three weeks, just to see how she fares. (Spoiler: it’s hard for her.) When I read this, I get the feeling of impatience I always get when I read about eating disorders. Who cares about the last time you ate Yorkshire pudding, lady? I realize these people are sick, and I really do pity them, but they are also so boring. Reading about someone’s obsessions is like reading about people’s dreams–they are only interesting to the person who has them.

In the end, she realizes that she is gaining weight, so she suddenly decides to be anorexic again. Because, somehow, “all this eating has proved what I thought all along: food makes you soft, lazy, undisciplined.” Huh? This author comes off as narcissistic and mentally ill, which is pretty irresponsible on The Daily Mail’s part, if you ask me. What’s next, a kleptomaniac who gives up stealing for a week? A schizophrenic with delusions of grandeur explaining why he really is god?

The article does do one thing, however. It shows how utterly pointless eating disorders are. As the author herself says: “Oh, and by the way, at the start of this odyssey I weigh 8st 2lb, which is slight for my 5ft 8in frame. What a silly, empty half-century achievement that is.” Amen, sister.

Publishing is a mess. Here’s proof. Kanye West is writing a book. It is 52 pages, some of which are blank, some of which say things like “I hate the word hate!” Personally, *I* hate the trend of letting every celebrity write a book as part of their brand expansion, but this time it’s extra insulting. You see, Kanye West doesn’t even like to read.

“Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed,” West said. “I am not a fan of books. I would never want a book’s autograph.

“I am a proud non-reader of books. I like to get information from doing stuff like actually talking to people and living real life,” he said.

Great. So the dude is writing a book–or “writing” it, most likely–but he doesn’t read books and is even proud of his ignorance. This is depressing. I don’t blame this stupid guy for wanting to promote himself through writing. I blame the publishers for putting out his book. Back in the day, people had to at least pretend at literacy to write, but apparently that’s gone out the window now.

Bleh.