Theodora Goss's Blog, page 51

Chabon and King

Status report: Today I finished the story I needed to send out, and sent it out. So that's done. I received comments from my second reader on the introduction, and you know what? They're not heavy at all. I'll start revising the introduction tomorrow. I doubt the comments on the chapters will be heavy either. I think I can do this, get the whole thing put together by the 6th. I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to that.

A long time ago, a friend of mine recommended that I read Michael Chabon, and I've been meaning to. But I've been so immersed in the dissertation that I haven't been able to read fiction. For me, reading means going deep, becoming completely immersed in a book. And since I've been immersed in the dissertation instead, since I've gone deep there, I haven't been able to do that. It's difficult to explain, but I haven't had the focus, the concentration, that I usually do. Which is difficult for me, to spend a long period of time not being able to read the way I'm used to reading.

Instead, I've been reading Chabon's essay collection Maps & Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands. At same time, I've been reading Stephen King's On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. The funny thing is, Chabon is clearly the better writer. I don't particularly like King's writing. And yet, as an essayist, King has a quality that Chabon doesn't always have: likeability. I never thought likeability would be important, in a writer. And maybe part of me thinks it shouldn't be? I mean, when I read Hemingway or Fitzgerald, I don't particularly care whether or not they're likeable. So perhaps it only matters in essays?

But I found myself, at the ends of both books, liking King very much even though when he included examples of his own writing to demonstrate his principles, I didn't think they were particularly good. But I liked him as a person, and the final section of his book, which describes the automobile accident that seriously injured him, was wrenching. And I found myself having moments when I wanted to say to Chabon, get over yourself already. Stop falling in love with your own prose, because it's not actually much fun for the reader. I'll give you an example of what I mean, from an essay called "The Recipe for Life." I'm giving you this example because in my book, there's a green sticky marking it: that's where I stopped reading and went on to another essay I liked better. Here's what I stopped on:

"Since reading 'The Idea of the Golem,' I have come to see this fear, this sense of my own imperilment by my creations, as not only an inevitable, necessary part of writing fiction but a virtual guarantor, insofar as such as thing is possible, of the power of my work: as a sign that I am on the right track, that I am following the recipe correctly, speaking the proper spells. Literature, like magic, has always been about the handling of secrets, about the pain, the destruction, and marvelous liberation that can result when they are revealed. Telling the truth when the truth matters most is almost always a frightening prospect. If a writer doesn't give away secrets, his own or those of the people he loves; if she doesn't court disapproval, reproach, and general wrath, whether of friends, family, or party apparatchiks; if the writer submits his work to an internal censor long before anyone else can get their hands on it, the result is pallid, inanimate, a lump of earth."

The problem is, I agree with this completely, and parts of it are terrific although they're embedded in parts that are not.  Yet I keep thinking: Dude, just write. Is it the fear of expressing this particular sentiment that makes you write as though you were constructing a legal brief? Do all those words protect you? Is it easiest said with generalizations? And what's with the semicolons?

Here is King saying something similar:

"Reading at meals is considered rude in polite society, but if you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway."

That packs a punch the Chabon passage doesn't have. And yet, there are places where I love the intellectual games Chabon plays, and I suspect that I would like his novels much better. I read Pet Sematary as a teenager and never read another King novel, mostly because I'm a coward. And yet. Friends have assured me that his short stories are very good.

It's interesting to read writers side by side like this, particularly since both of them are writing about writing. If I had more time tonight, I would include some passages that struck me in King, but I'll do that tomorrow. They're marked with blue stickies.

Do you know what I miss? Having someone to talk to about writing technique at a high level. But until I can reconnect with writer friends again, I suppose this will have to do.

Finding Your Family

Status report: I've heard from my second reader about the introduction. A lot of praise and not a lot to change, so it's looking good. I'm still waiting to hear from my first reader, who will be the one with more elaborate comments, not only on the introduction but on the chapters as well. But I'm grateful for this respite.

In the meantime, I've finished my Folkroots column. I'll be proofreading it tonight and then sending it to Doug. I've already sent him the images. This column will be called "Planting a Magical Garden." Remember that if you want to read my column "A Brief History of Monsters," it's in the August issue, and the October issue will include "The Myth and Magic of Narnia."

So here is my schedule for the next week or so. I have to finish revising a story I promised to a magazine, due September 1st. I also need to prepare to start teaching on the 6th. Other than that, it's just the dissertation. Once I get all the comments, I'll revise it one final time and then submit it to the committee.

It's been an exhausting month.

But there was something specific I wanted to write about today. A friend of mine, also a writer, and I agreed recently that we both felt like aliens, as though we were somehow on the wrong planet. We though about building a rocket ship to get off-world, or alternatively hitching a ride with a Vogon megafreighter. We though, if caught and tortured, we could bear the poetry.

I think that's a common feeling among writers and creative people in general: feeling as though you don't really belong here. After all, there are so many things here that don't make sense (the current political and economic situation, to start). So I started thinking, what do you do when you feel like an alien who has somehow, for some reason, been stranded on this planet?

And I went back to all the science fiction movies made for kids in the 70s and 80s. Here's what you do: you find your family. When you crashed on this planet, or were left on this planet, or however you got here, you lost your family. Your family became separated, and different members grew up in different places. You didn't even know you were aliens, although you always felt different, didn't you? But one day, probably around adolescence, you noticed the lizard skin underneath the human surface. And you realized that you were an alien and started wondering, were there others like you? So you set out to find those others. That's what always happens in the movies.

So you had to start out, probably in an old car, probably across a landscape that looked surprisingly like central California, to find the aliens like you.

That's what we have to do.

My biological family is made of up doctors. I look like them, so they think I am like them – they haven't seen the lizard skin underneath. But I also have an alien family. I recognize my family members at once (doesn't that always happen in the movies)? As soon as I see them and speak with them, I know they're like me. (I meet a lot of them at writing workshops or science fiction conventions. Funny how that works, isn't it?)

I made a decision recently. I decided that I was going to gather my family around me, if not physically then virtually. I was going to make a concerted effort to keep in touch with the other aliens. After all, we speak the same language. We understand each other when the rest of the world looks at us as though we're – well, speaking an alien language. And I was not going to let them go.

My life started with so much loss. (I lost a whole country. Family, friends, over and over again.) I've come to an age when I'm determined not to lose any more – particularly not the people who speak my language. I want to gather them around me so we can agree that this place is nuts, build a spaceship, and decide where we want to go. Or, as they do in the movies, build a place right here on earth where the aliens can live, looking human but being lizard-beings all the while.

And no more losing anyone, ever.

What We Need

Status report: I did it. Today I turned in the revised Chapter 3 and bibliography. That means my readers now have the entire dissertation. Every part of it, except the introduction, has been revised at least three times. And even significant parts of the introduction come from parts they've already seen, because I moved those parts to the front.

At this point, all I need to do is make whatever revisions they tell me to make. And then, the dissertation will go to the committee. That's supposed to happen by Labor Day.

After I sent it off, I drove into town and bought myself some ice cream. I didn't know what else to do with myself. I couldn't focus on anything. This is the hardest thing I've ever done in my life, and the hardest thing about it is the extent to which I've dropped out of life. I've lost touch with friends. Now that the whole dissertation is put together, now that there's so little left to do, I need to reconnect again. Go out into the sunlight and remember that there's a world out there. A real life to live, although my entire life has been intellectual lately.

I've been thinking recently about what we need to live, and it seems to me that we need three things.

The first of those is work we love. For me, that's writing and teaching, but honestly, it's writing above all. When I have free time, I find myself thinking: Now I can write! I want to be able to combine those things more than I do now, teach more creative writing. And of course I want to write more. Once the dissertation goes to the committee, I should be able to get back to the YA novel. I can't wait.

The second of those things is a place where we feel at home. That's different for everyone, of course. I know a musician who's perfectly comfortable traveling around the country, sleeping in friends' houses. But I need a house of my own, a small house with a large garden, filled with flowers. Especially roses. After eating ice cream, I stopped in the library, where I bought a book about creating a rose garden that looks like it came out of an impressionist painting. It was only $2. I want to find that home for myself.

The third thing is love that comes with no conditions or restrictions. We all need someone who loves us as we are, without wishing that we were somehow different. Who wants us to become what we are meant to become. Many of us get that from parents. If we don't, I think we spend the rest of our lives searching for it. Sometimes we get it from spouses. It's one of the reasons people have pets, because while they can't tell us that we're wonderful writers, for example, they can at least love us without asking us to change.

I think those are the three things we need in our lives.

And now, I have some free time. I've done everything I can, until my readers' comments come in. So guess what I'm going to do for fun? Write, of course! And while I do, I'm going to listen to a lovely, if particularly grim, ballad that I discovered recently:

Completely Exhausted

Status report: I'm completely exhausted. As of today, I've sent in penultimate drafts of Chapters 1 and 2. Chapter 2 was the hardest to revise. It takes forever to write footnotes, and I added some long, important footnotes that took a lot of research to construct. Chapter 3 will be so much easier. It should only take me a day, because I'll just be proofreading.

And I sent in the introduction. I want to add a couple of footnotes to the introduction, but those shouldn't be as complicated. So, everything's getting done. But it's taken so much out of me that sometimes I don't know what to do with myself.

Here I am, with all of that taken out of me. I'm looking sort of wan and pale.

And here's my desk, with all the chapters on it. Did I mention that I submitted my formatted abstract for signature? Well, I did. So that's done. You can see the cover sheet on the left.

So there you have it. That's all I have for you today. I'm completely exhausted, and I probably need to take a break, at least for a little while. This is the hardest thing I've ever done, and to be honest, once it's done, I don't think I ever want to do it again. I just want to write about girl monsters.

The plan is to give the completed dissertation to my committee by Labor Day. And then, I can rest for a while, until the defense. That should be in October. And then? Freedom.

Something Extraordinary

Status report: Today I worked on the introduction. I thought I was going to work on Chapter 2, but I wanted to get the introduction done first, just to get it to my readers and out of the way. By the time I go to sleep tonight, it will be done and sent.

That's it for today, just the introduction. I have three footnotes to write before I go to sleep.

What I'm longing for, right now, is something extraordinary. Some sort of adventure, some sort of change, some indication that life won't always be like this. I don't even know what it would be. Just something. I don't expect life to be like a fairy tale, but there must be more to it than this, right? All work, all the time. I feel as though I was able to live for a little while, when I was traveling, and now I'm back to just working, existing in front of the computer. I'm starting to feel like a machine.

That's all I have for you today, just my tiredness and my sincere wish that something extraordinary could happen. So I'm going to post a few pictures of my trip to Asheville. Here is Malaprop's Bookstore, from the outside and inside.

I think I must have gone to Malaprop's three times, while I was there. I didn't take many pictures – I was too busy actually doing things. But I did photograph some details that I thought were interesting, my first morning there, when I walked into town and around the downtown area. On the way, I saw the clematis called Traveler's Joy growing over a bush.

This was a bus stop. It looks like public art, doesn't it?

And finally, metal leaves growing over a doorway.

There were so many boutiques, so many coffee shops, so many art galleries. So many things to see and do, and I could only see and do a few of them. But Asheville is one of my favorite towns, and I hope to go back there again soon.

Writing Like McQueen

Status report: Today, I sent my revised first chapter to my readers. I'm working on the final revisions to all the chapters now. I should be able to send them the introduction tomorrow, and then the second and third chapters by the end of the week. And that will be it. More revisions, hopefully the final ones, and then the dissertation will go to the committee.

So, I'm feeling all right, although tired of course.

I wanted to write at least a little about the Alexander McQueen exhibit. But because I don't have much time tonight, because I have so much to do, I'm going to post a few videos.

The first one is a video put together by the Met that discusses some of the exhibits. These are the things I saw. They are glorious, aren't they?

The second one starts in a winterscape with some beautiful dresses, but quickly goes to one of his fashion shows, in which a dress is spraypainted by two robots. I saw the dress in the exhibit.

Isn't it a weird, wonderful little ballet? What I love is his imagination, how he creates stories out of clothes. All of his clothes are like stories. You feel that his clothes tell stories about the women who wear them.

And here is a video of a hologram that was also part of the exhibit. It's Kate Moss in one of his dresses, originally shown at one of his fashion shows. Again, you can imagine a story, can't you?

What I can't show you is the exquisite workmanship in the clothes. I saw them from less than a foot away, looked right at the stitching, the beading. And it made me wonder, how can I write the way McQueen created clothes? Because what I saw in the exhibit was glorious and inspirational.

And I thought, I know who writes that way: Angela Carter.

Do you remember when I took photos of the Scaasi exhibit? (There were no photos allowed of the McQueen exhibit.) Well, McQueen is to Scaasi as Angela Carter is to Danielle Steele.

So, how can I be a sort of McQueen of stories, without being Carter, since I am not her and can't be her? I think the key is to write with exquisite craftsmanship and imagination. To take things from the past, strange things, political but also fantastical things, and merge them into a whole, a statement. But also to create something beautiful and entertaining, something that someone might wear or read for pleasure. I don't know if this makes sense to you, but it does to me, and it points me toward a place I want to go with my writing, in terms of craftsmanship and in terms of what I do, how far I want to push myself. Which is far, along a strange and beautiful road.

I hope you like the videos.

Catching Up Again

I'm very tired.

I know I haven't been as good at keeping up with this blog as I usually am, this month. There are places where I've skipped up to three days in a row. This is a difficult month for me, because there's so much to do. So many things due at the end of the month.  (Do, due.  Yes, I did that deliberately.)

Yesterday I flew back from Asheville, after a wonderful weekend spent walking around the city, eating some of the best food I've ever eaten, and critiquing with Nathan and Alexa. I'll write more about that separately. This is just a short post to say hello again. Now that I'm home for the rest of the month, I'm going to try to catch up.

How am I? Just very tired, as I wrote above. This month, I have three things to finish: my dissertation, a Fookroots column, and a short story. The short story is almost done. I wrote it on the bus home from New York, revised it in Asheville, and will print it out and revise it again here. And then I'll submit it to the magazine that asked for it. We'll see if the magazine takes it, or if I'll need to send it elsewhere afterward. The Folkroots column is my next task. And of course, all along, I'll be working on the dissertation. It's almost done: I just need to add some footnotes. And then my readers will read it one more time, and we'll see what happens – final revisions and then approval, I hope.

I never wrote about the Alexander McQueen exhibit, and I want to write about Asheville and critiquing, so there are some specific blog posts coming. I also want to write about Stephen King's book on writing, which I ended up liking quite a lot.

So that's it, those are all the things I need to catch up on. My agenda. I'm back, I'll try to get back to blogging more regularly than I've been able to so far this month.

And I'll try to get some rest. I know, I just recently wrote about depression. I'm all right, but I need to take care of myself, and that's what I'll try to do today and for the rest of the month. So I can start the school year not quite so tired, more myself than I've been lately.

Saying Thanks

Status report: Today I finished the draft of my introduction that I've been working on. I still need to add some footnotes. But then it will go to my readers. And then we'll revise it some more, and then it will be done. All I have to do, otherwise, is add some footnotes to Chapter 2. And then the whole dissertation goes together, hopefully by September 1st. I actually feel quite good about this. I feel, perhaps for the first time, as though I really am close.

And I want to thank you all for being so wonderful. For all the people who read yesterday's post, and the people who commented, and who encouraged me on Facebook. And the people who told me it gets better, and how it gets better. And even sent me a poem. I honestly don't think I could do it without feeling as though there were people out there who cared and who had gone through some of the same things. I think there are a lot of us who go through these sorts of tough times. I do think it's more difficult for artists, too. Although artists also have something that other people don't have. We have our art. When I sit down to write a story, I go someplace else. I love that, the feeling that I am completely absorbed in the story I'm telling. That I'm a traveler in space and time.

Tonight I'm packing, because once again I will be out of town for the weekend, in Asheville, where I will be critiquing our YA novel chapters with Alexa and Nathan. I think traveling is good for me. It's good to get out of town, breathe the air of another place. And I can't wait to wander around the antiques stores again, and go to Malaprop's. It's been years since I've been to Asheville, and it's quite literally one of my favorite towns, the one I based Ashton, North Carolina on in "The Wings of Meister Wilhelm" and "Lessons with Miss Gray." I want to set a whole suite of stories in Ashton and publish them as a book. Well, someday. Right now I have so many other things to do.

Like pack, and make my lunch for the airplane, which will include chocolate-covered pretzels. My usual traveling treat, that I don't get any other time.

But I will leave you with one pretty image:

That's a chair I found at Goodwill, and to be honest it's a little battered. But doesn't it have nice lines? I had to buy it and bring it home, simply to rescue it from a place where it so clearly did not belong. And it goes with the upholstered chair I bought recently.

That's all I have today, just thanks and a pretty picture and I'll write from Asheville tomorrow!

On Depression

Status report: I've finished Chapters 1 and 3. Chapter 2 needs some more footnotes, for which I'll need to read some sources. But since I've come back from New York, I've been working on the introduction. I have about twenty pages written, meaning most of it. Now I just need to add a section on how my argument fits into scholarship on the Gothic. So I'm reading some books, trying to get that section written.

Once I have the introduction and those footnotes to Chapter 2, the dissertation will be done. And then it will go to the committee.

I know I've skipped a few days of posting. I'm so tired nowadays that I get to the end of a day and I just don't have the energy. Part of that is depression, although right now it's a depression I'm working through, because I know the only way to deal with it is to go through. The only way is forward.

I don't know how people with chronic depression deal with it. They have my utmost admiration and respect, because even the few times I've had to deal with it, it's been incredibly difficult. For me, it's a condition that happens when I'm under extreme stress, the way I've been this year. Finishing the dissertation had been difficult, but it's been more than that – physically difficult circumstances, being out of the city with a long commute, and all sorts of other things. Just a lot of things all piled on top of each other.

So what does it feel like? Sort of like living in darkness. And when you're out of it but it's still there, it feels like being followed around by a dark cloud. I read in an article that J.K. Rowling was depressed while she was writing the first Harry Potter novel. The Dementors are representations of that depression. That makes sense, doesn't it? They suck out all the light and hope.

For me, right now, the most difficult part is the tiredness. I deal with it by doing what I have to do, but all sorts of other things are left undone. There are emails I haven't had a chance to respond to, for example. But the introduction is getting written. That's the most important thing, right now. And I try to give myself permission to rest. And I try to eat well. And I buy books.

I will write about the Alexander McQueen exhibit, and I will try to get back to posting daily. But just so you know: I'm going to have a difficult month, so bear with me. I'll do what I can.

And I think I'm going to try to write about the depression at least a little, because I know I'm not the only one who deals with it. And writing about it might help other people. I do remember what it's like to be out of it, and that's my natural state: calm, interested in and excited about life. Happy. That's what I'm usually like, and this is an anomaly for me. But it does happen, and when it does, I just need to deal with it.

On the way back from New York, I had two seats to myself. The bus was driving through countryside, so I saw trees all around. It was quiet and calm. And I suddenly realized that I felt exactly right, exactly myself – the person I was meant to be, the person I think I've been trying to become this year. And you know what I did? I wrote a story. I still need to type it up, but I'm going to do that by the end of the month. And then I'll send it to a magazine that requested a story from me. I remember what that felt like, sitting on the bus writing, being myself. I want to get back to that. The only way is through . . .

New York Adventure

It's been a long, tiring day, so I'm just going to post a few pictures from this weekend.

I took two buses to get to New York. I wanted to take pictures of the three bus stops, but I only ended up taking pictures of two. Here is the first one, where I'm waiting for the bus to the station. It looks so rural, doesn't it?

And here is the second one, where I actually got on the bus to New York.

The third one would have been Penn Station, but I was so absorbed in finding my way to the subway that I completely forgot. Oh well. You can see that I was moving from the rural to the urban. And just so you get a sense of the urban, here you go:

That's from across the reservoir in Central Park. I took it on Friday morning. I had just taken the cross-town bus and was walking down to the Met, where I was going to meet Helen Pilinovski, who is a wonderful academic and scholar. We were going to the Alexander McQueen exhibit. On my way, I passed the Gugenheim, which was looking lovely as usual.

Well, that day didn't work out quite as planned. Although we arrived at 10 o'clock, the line was incredibly long.  It would have been a four to five hour wait to get into the exhibit.  You can see how busy the museum was that morning:

So instead of going to the exhibit, we went to the American wing to see some of my favorite objects.  This is one of my favorite parts of the Met.

I particularly like the long, light-filled balconies, where there are all sorts of vases and ornaments in glass cases.

Including ornaments worn by late nineteenth-century Cthulhu worshipers.

And then we went thrift shopping, and then we met Ellen Kushner at a bookstore filled with first editions, including of that odd book, Christina Rossetti's Speaking Likenesses. And then I came back to rest. I had walked all over New York, and I was very tired.

There was no exhibit for us that day, but we were determined to see the Alexander McQueen exhibit, and you can't keep two resourceful women from a museum exhibit they have decided to see. We decided to split the cost of a museum membership and come back the next morning, when there would be extended member hours. So there we were, bright and early, in line at 7 o'clock. Here is what the museum looked like this morning, when I arrived:

Of course, we lined up at the members' entrance, where we were third in line. They let us in at 8 o'clock, and we wandered around the exhibit for an hour. Then we went for brunch, and this afternoon I had coffee with Ellen Datlow, who is one of my favorite editors. There were so many people I wanted to see in New York, and I only got to see a few of them. But I'll be back soon.

I'm not going to describe the exhibit tonight. I'm going to try to write about it tomorrow. It was gorgeous and overwhelming, and I want to do it justice. But tonight you do get at least a few pictures of New York. It's been wonderful being here.