May 2012
2 posts
1 tag
“It seemed incredible that it could be the same road, the same asphalt, that they...”
– The Newlyweds by Nell Freudenberger
And We (I) Should Keep Talking
I’ve been a bit absent as of late, but for good reason—work has kicked up in a major, major way. As I mentioned before, I launched a new channel on Glamour.com, Inspired, where we house all of the content about the inspring women we talk about every day, plus an anchor blog, The Conversation, that updates almost daily. As a result, I’ve not only gotten my hands dirtier with this...
April 2012
3 posts
“The moment someone comes across as real and unstaged and comfortable, it has so...”
– Wolfgang Tillmans
“Area code 718 romantics love to see their hometown’s name every time they...”
– “Is Artistanal Brooklyn a Step Forward for Food or a Sign of the Apocalypse? And Does it Matter When the Stuff Tastes So Good?” by Benjamin Wallace from New York Magazine, April 23, 2012
“Watching him roll out his blankets, I wished to ask him what was in his heart...”
– The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt
March 2012
5 posts
You know you’re a professional writer when you can write in any voice, no matter how you’re feeling. Even if it’s not your best day, you just turn it off and go because you have to.
Feels Good to Be Inspired
So, there’s this whole fiction thing that I’ve been working on for the last, oh, billion years, yes. But, since my manuscript has yet to make me a quazillionaire, I do some other stuff to pay the bills, like be an editor for Glamour.com.
Thursday, I launched my biggest project my the years of being there: a new channel called Inspired, taking about news, politics, women’s issues...
“You cut it off and then you keep it in your heart you/Break another one because it makes you start to/Feel alive, I know it gives you a kick/But it’s a lie and you’re just making it stick” —Braid, “The Right Time”
Opening quote to the novel, perhaps?
My Life as a Quarter-Centurion
Roughly three years ago, I’d promised to myself that on my twenty-fifth birthday, I’d be able to walk into a bookstore and snap a photo standing next to my own book. I knew it was an ambitious goal, and I was the only one pressuring myself to make it happen, but with the way things were going with the manuscript—having finished it a few days after I turned twenty-two, and agented...
February 2012
7 posts
No Loitering
Yesterday, things got epic in Park Slope café-loitering land: I have a new chapter one. And, well, that’s pretty weird, considering the absolute newest prose (yesterday) is now co-mingling on the page with the absolute oldest (May 2007).
Now, play nice, kids.
doodlersrevue asked: Any words of wisdom for a wannabe writer?
“45. It ended because another person wants you to need to be with them, with her,...”
– What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank by Nathan Englander
Brain, Meet Function--You Two Should Get...
Well, now I remember what it’s like to work yourself sick—not that I’d ever claimed to have forgotten. The last two weeks have been something of a whirlwind: I was told the back half of the manuscript was wanted, so deliver the back half of the manuscript I would.
That’s about fifty-thousand words for anyone who’s keeping score.
I’ve seen more stunning moons...
Binge editing. Resumption of standard twenty-four hour cycle TK.
…I guess you know you have more than a bit of momentum in you when you’re up at 5 a.m. to write. (And thank freakin’ god.)
January 2012
9 posts
Guys. OK. I’m no oracle here, but I’m fairly certain I’ve unlocked the secret to ultimate writerly productivity: yoga pants, a Goliath-sized wool sweater, the ugliest socks ever manufactured, day-old makeup and M83.
No additions nor substitutions.
“If writers had to wait until their precious psyches were completely serene there...”
– William Styron (via theparisreview)
I just took a risk that I wouldn’t have taken if I didn’t have confidence in my writing. I’m not the kind of person who asks for much, but, if you have some knuckle-mobility to spare, keep your fingers crossed for me, please.
Will You Remember
A bizarre feeling for which one never prepares herself, because she doesn’t exactly anticipate it coming: elimination of all traces of a character trait you’d built in from before the silly conglomeration of words you haphazardly threw on a page one night even became the skeleton of a novel. It’s more of a misfit detail than a character trait, I suppose, but it isn’t...
“At a certain point, while you’re failing miserably, you do find a kind of engine...”
– Jeffrey Eugenides at Le Conversazioni, 2006 via the New York Times Magazine’s 6th Floor blog
Infinite Jest, pages 692-698, Back Bay Books 10th anniversary paperback edition. OR The most flawless pages of fiction I’ve ever read.
Convincing Ourselves In Sleep
One a.m., wide awake. I’m slipping back into an old pattern of not sleeping again, my body not physically able to feel tired at night, though in the mornings I can barely get through a paragraph in my book without my lids going heavy. When the sleep does come, it’s staccato and sweat-drenched.
I spend the hours horizontal but awake writing stories in my head, future plot lines for my...
“‘Some boy I hardly knew in the room below mine heard me staggering around...”
– Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
“Writers are often ashamed at who they are and what they do. Other people are out...”
– Chuck Wendig, “25 Things Writers Should Stop Doing (Right Fucking Now)”
December 2011
6 posts
The Light That's Growing From the Ground
Wow. A hell of a lot can change in a year. But I’ve come to learn that if you’re doing things right, the change doesn’t stop when you switch out your calendar. Keep healing. Keep growing.
…just know I found a better place to rest my head.
MT
Three For the Road
Still with roughly six-hundred pages left in Infinite Jest, I’m now fully-aware that I won’t be finishing any more books this year. So, before I get lost in the time-sucking insanity that is the next couple of weeks, I wanted to remark on the books that’ve made the most impact on me this year, and which chord they struck. I’m not one for year-end countdowns—I’m...
“I guess my life hasn’t always been happy, or easy, or exactly what I want. At a...”
– Jonathan Franzen (via libraryland)
“After completing a book you won’t be the person you were before trying to...”
– Sean Ferrell, “Pathetic email.”
This morning, I got in line at my daily coffee stop, roughly fifteen people ahead of me in the queue. About standard. My attention was in my book as I heard the woman behind me sigh, “This is going to take forever,” gesturing to move out of line and leave. She was a tourist—I knew it much before catching a glimpse of her California license as she paid.
“It...
November 2011
5 posts
Today is shaping up to be an all-around You Have to Be Kidding Me kind of day, but when you start the morning standing next to someone on the F train who is not only also reading Infinite Jest, but is on the exact same page—the exact same footnote—as you…well, how do you expect the rest of the day to go?
I mean. Really.
“…in our desire to think great things about our IT ‘cloud’,...”
– Simon Ings on The Brain is Wider Than the Sky: Why Simple Solutions Don’t Work in a Complex World by Bryan Appleyard in the Guardian
Reversible Souls
Allow me a banality for a second: Things are rarely what they seem.
While I’m still working on substantial revisions on the novel, I started research for a new project. “Project.” Sparing the details for now, I ran across someone who was too fascinating not to talk to, despite it not being the right time to get myself engrossed in something else. But I followed my instincts and...
“Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose...”
– Infine Jest by David Foster Wallace
(Is it okay to start dreaming again?) (When do I know, exactly?)
October 2011
7 posts
Des Lignes Parallèles
When one spends as much time with literary fiction as I do, she’s bound to question what her own work is “about.” Or at least I am, and certainly have been since starting this novel. When caught up reading stories about history and war, social conflict, political commentary through previously-unimaginable worlds, I sometimes find myself asking, “Is my plot substantial...
Today’s toast is to the kindness of strangers who allow us writers to enter their lives before we’re invited. (And another toast to us for taking risks to venture in at all.)
Extremely Deliberate and Incredibly Curated
First: Hi, new followers. There are many of you and I’m overwhelmed and humbled and excited. That reply button is enabled for a reason, so please use it and tell me about you.
Next. This week has turned into one long conversation about craft. Wednesday, I saw Adam Ross speak about Mr. Peanut on a panel at Housing Works. I read the novel earlier this year, and by the end, couldn’t...
Have Heart
Tonight, I hit 80,000 words—a number that I haven’t been able to reach since I started this major revision months ago. Of course, a quantitative measurement isn’t always the best one (hell, most of us could stand to lose a few thousand characters, though that’s another conversation), but as someone who’s been in the process of adding missing pieces, I’m marking...
“I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not...”
– Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
Things that feel ridiculously good to say, Part 1: I am on editorial deadline for fiction.
November first, you’re not even going to know what hit you.
You Know You Have a Permanent Piece
Raging Bibliohalism: Speaking of tattoos, I think it’s groovy that you get a different tattoo for each book you write. Is that an extension of the story, in some way? Or is it an act of closure?
Joshua Mohr: Probably a little of both. I’m pretty tattooed and to me, human skin is our cave wall. How do you want to decorate it? What are the pictures/hieroglyphics/words that speak to what...
September 2011
7 posts
“Being in love is like leaning on a broken reed. It is to be precariously...”
– Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel by Hilary Thayer Hamann
Chicken and Egg
What came first: the kindred or the momentum?
I’m currently in the best situation I could ask for: I’m feeling the heartbeat of what I’m both reading and writing. As my revisions have been taking shape and picking up speed, I’ve also had my nose in a book (Hilary Thayer Hamann’s Anthology of an American Girl) whose voice and style has resonated with me more than...
“It was no longer a surprise to him that every one of the women he met was a...”
– “Madeline” by Sam Allingham, n+1
I’m beginning to realize why, this time around, my writing is feeling more substantial. And it has everything to do with honesty.