Jeffrey Ricker's Blog, page 55

No place like home

My old house is for sale.

Michael and I noticed this while we were walking through Tower Grove South last weekend on our way to the grand opening of The Civil Life microbrewery. The route took us past my old street, and my house, the fourth down from the corner on the right, had a for-sale sign in the front yard. On the way back home, suitably fortified with a few pints of Jake's best brews, I pedaled past to take a closer look and noticed that apart from the porch being painted a different color and new plantings in the flowerbeds, not much looked different.

Michael's a real estate hawk, so naturally he found it right away on Zillow and sent me the link. Inside, the rooms were painted different colors, and of course the furniture was different, and out back the new owner had put in a nice new patio, made the porch into a three-season room and painted the garage a really nice sage green.

There aren't many places I've lived that I miss. I don't miss any of my childhood homes, nor most of my apartments in college or afterwards. There was one above Boone Tavern in Columbia that I had briefly after graduation while I was looking for my first real job. I barely had furniture to fill any of the rooms, but it was a corner unit on a downtown street, where I could look outside and see the crowd gathering in front of the Blue Note before a show. I don't suppose I lived there long enough to miss it, just long enough to wish I'd lived there while I was actually in college, because it was a cool location and closer to campus. In hindsight, I probably would have spent too much time going out instead of doing homework.

I also had what I like to consider the only cheap apartment in Clayton, a nice suburb just outside the St. Louis city limits. It was a corner unit also, with the front windows facing a courtyard and the bedroom windows facing a huge tree where crows liked to perch (not so much fun when you want to sleep past seven thirty on a Saturday morning, but pretty all the same). It had the holy grail of apartment living: free garage parking. It was also within walking distance of the Library, Ltd., a venerable independent bookstore that unfortunately sold out to Borders in the late '90s and eventually got knocked down to make way for Centene's office tower. Ah, progress.

Those were rentals, though. The house in Tower Grove South was all mine. Well, it was mostly the credit union's, but it was just me and the cats—and eventually, the dog. I think it was the first place I lived where I felt like a proper adult, and looking at the pictures in the online real estate listing, I was surprised to feel a fleeting sense of nostalgia for it. It was an old house, and it had its issues, but it had character.

I spend a lot of time writing about home in my stories. At first it wasn't conscious, and maybe it still isn't. I know that it's a recurring theme with me, though, so I know to look out for it. It comes from growing up in a military family and moving around a lot, a habit that I carried into my early adulthood.

It's still a nebulous concept for me, the idea of having someplace to consider yourself rooted. What does home mean to you?

My Trouble with 'Help'

I feel a bit like an interloper wading into this topic, but I saw The Help this weekend (as my friend Pamela would say, catch thy knee), and my reaction to it is, well… complicated.

First off, a disclaimer: I saw the movie, but I haven't read the book by Kathryn Stockett. So I can only comment on the film. I am reluctant to wade into the deeper and hazardous waters of a discussion of its messages of racial inequality and the criticism of it as a work that seems designed to make white Americans feel better about a time of gross injustice in our country's history, or about its depiction of women's lives and the limited roles available to any of them in the early '60s South.

I'm reluctant for three reasons: I'm not a person of color, I'm not a woman, and I'm not from the South.

One thing I am, though, is a writer. By the same token, I'm reluctant to criticize another writer's work because I know how much that hurts. But….

The one thing that jumped out at me about The Help after I finished watching it was it has the wrong title.

To quote Pamela yet again, pause… consider… continue.

For those who haven't seen it [POTENTIAL SPOILERS AHEAD], "the help" refers to the black women working as maids in privileged Southern households. But—there's always a but, isn't there?—the stories of those women are told through Skeeter, a young white woman, just graduated from college, who wants to be a writer and also chafes against the constraints of her family, her upbringing, and the casual racism of her shallow, privileged friends. Skeeter ends up interviewing her friends' maids for a book that rocks the community and creates trouble for some of the maids, but lands Skeeter a job in New York by the end of the film.

See, the movie's about Skeeter and her racist friends, not about the maids whose stories she co-opts. This is my problem: it feels to me like Skeeter, perhaps through good intentions, ends up exploiting the maids in a somewhat subtler but no less real way. And—this is the kicker for me—one of the maids wants to be a writer. That would have been a story that would have felt more genuine to me, I think. It would have made their struggle for justice the centerpiece, as opposed to a subplot.

Have you seen the movie? What did you think?

LGBT Mystery Author Showcase

JeffRicker3, a photo by aug2000mba on Flickr.

So, while I was metaphorically sweating bullets at Left Bank Books last night, Mike took lots of pictures of me and all the other authors on hand for the LGBT Mystery Author Showcase. I'm pleased to report that I did not in fact throw up that evening. Also, we sold all the copies they had of Men of the Mean Streets, which contains my story "Murder on the Midway." And 10 percent of the proceeds from the evening's sales went to the LGBT Center of St. Louis. All in all, it was a great night!

Time, suckers

So, let me start by telling you what I'm currently working on: the first draft of my second novel, which I have to finish by December 1. I also have two short stories which I need to finish by November 1. Then there's another story that I need to finish by December 31. All of these are in various states of being half-written.

And today, I was sitting there, thinking about vampires. I've published two stories about vampires: one was in Blood Sacraments, and the other was a one-off published by Untreed Reads. Like a lot of my writing, they're both set in St. Louis. So is my story "Murder on the Midway," which appears in Men of the Mean Streets. That one's been on my mind because I'm participating in an LGBT mystery writer's event at Left Bank Books. "Murder on the Midway" is my one foray into mystery/noir, and as I've been looking at the list of participants, I've been feeling, well, a little (actually, a lot) like a Johnny come lately. These people, their credits are impressive.

And that's when I had an idea: my two vampires? They need to meet. And that's going to require Sam, the private investigator in "Murder on the Midway."

Suddenly, I have something else to write.

I have loved vampire stories for a long time. I started reading Anne Rice's vampire chronicles in high school; read Dracula, of course; got hooked for a long time on local author Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake vampire series; and in recent years was turned on to Christopher Pike's novels. I have not now, nor have I ever read any of the books about the sparkly vampires, but if that's what you like then more power to you. At least you're reading.

I also have loved mystery and crime novels since I was a kid. In middle and high school, many of the first novels I read for pleasure were Agatha Christie's (the others were science fiction: Heinlein, Asimov, and Herbert). My mother turned me on to Patricia Cornwell for a long while. Even so, I felt like I didn't have enough familiarity with noir when I started "Murder on the Midway," so I started watching a lot of old noir films: The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Maltese Falcon, and just about anything else with Bogart in it.

Is there a connection between vampires and noir? Surely, each one treads on the dark side of the street. And surely, at heart the vampire is a predator, but in this day and age, that also makes her a criminal.

And that's where Sam, my Gateway City private dick, is going to come in.

(When am I going to find the time to finish all this?)

Are you a slave to your smartphone?

So, I actually weaned myself off a little of the Apple flavored Kool-aid yesterday. I got a new phone and—brace yourself—it's not an iPhone.

(I feel like the dramatic hamster music should play right here.)

It's not even a smartphone. It's not an Android, a BlackBerry, or… well, are there any others besides those? Probably, but I haven't heard of them.

Anyway, I think I got tired of falling into the habit of taking out my phone every time we walked into a public place so I could check in on Foursquare, Gowalla, or Facebook (my irreverent friend Jodi calls that Facefu—well, you get the idea). Hell, even Yelp wants you to check into places now, doesn't it? Every time the brick in my pocket buzzed, I didn't know if it'd be a text message, a phone call, or an email, a Twitter @ alert, or a notice that it was my move on Words with Friends. Then there'd be a momentary panic when the "20% battery power remaining" warning would flash on the screen. Then "10% percent." Oh my lord, find a power outlet before it's too late!

(Insert dramatic hamster here again. You get the idea.)

Plus, I got a little tired of giving so much money to AT&T, which in turn gives a little too much money (i.e. any at all) to Michele "All I'm Missing Is the Broom and Pointy Hat" Bachmann.

I guess the only thing I'm worried about missing is the ability to tweet at will. But honestly, how much insight can I convey in 140 characters? (I can convey snark in 140 characters though, so that's something, right?)

I wouldn't blame you for thinking I'm a bit of a Luddite: non-smart phone, typewriter, paper day planner. On the other hand, I'm saving my pennies for an iPad, so I guess I'm not in complete Unabomber territory yet. Nevertheless, and I know it's only been one day, but it's nice not having that thing buzzing in my pocket every five minutes.

And it still makes a perfectly decent iPod.

What about you? Have you ever felt like a slave to your smartphone? (I know that Jimbo would say that every gay in D.C. is a slave to theirs, but it could be argued that Jimbo, at least his online persona, is a slave to curmudgeonliness. Note that this is not a criticism.)

Finished edits, gay YA fiction, and who are you writing for?

That noise you heard this past weekend was the lady in the hat with the horns singing. I turned in the final proofreading edits to Detours. Next stop: printing. (Actually, when Detours started as a short story in a fiction writing class I was taking, the title of the story was Next Stop.)

It felt kind of like turning in a final exam, where you want to grab the blue book back from the teacher's hand and read it over one last time just to make sure you didn't forget anything, screw anything up, or leave anything out. Eventually, though, you've just got to let it go.

You've also got to figure out what's next. I'm working on my next book, which (as I've mentioned ad nauseam) is a young adult novel. Wait, have I mentioned that? Have I told you what the next book is about? I wonder how much I should spill. Well, anyway, suffice it to say it's YA, and the narrator is a gay sixteen-year-old. (To further complicate matters, his estranged mother, for the record, is an Amazon. Poor kid.) So, you can imagine my unease when I read this account from two writers whose agent wanted them to change the sexual orientation of their gay characters as a condition of representation. You'd think we were beyond that sort of thing in this day and age, but apparently not.

I can't imagine I would ever be persuaded to do such a thing, nor can I imagine I would want to be represented by someone who would ask that. On some level, I can understand why they might—in terms of dollars and cents, there are more straight kids than gay ones, and straight kids might look at a gay main character and say to themselves I guess that's not written for me. But the thing is, when I was a gay kid, everyone I read about was a straight character. I really wasn't specifically represented in print, as far as I read. So were those straight characters not written for me too?

Finding the right voice, or A tone problem

So, I've been thinking a lot about voice lately. I'm working on my second novel (which is actually my third, but I put the second novel in a drawer when the third novel started heating up), which is a young-adult story about a sixteen/going-on-seventeen-year-old boy whose long-lost mother turns his world inside out. (If you've read Speaking Out, you'll recognize the narrator from my story "The Trouble with Billy." No, it's not Billy, but both Billy and Sarah reappear in this novel too.) I started reading chapter one at my writing group last week, and while they agreed it was off to a good start, several of them asked, "Are you sure he's sixteen?"

As it happens, the first episode in the Wordplay podcast (which includes former literary agent turned middle grade/young adult author and social media genius Nathan Bransford) talks about how tricky it is to capture that voice. A book I recently finished reading and which I think does a good job of that is With or Without You by Brian Farrey. And, as if the cosmos were trying to throw everything voice-related in my path at just the right time, there's an article in the latest Poets & Writers magazine by J.T. Bushnell (cute author picture, by the way) titled "The Unreliable Narrator" all about how slippery it is to define, and to capture, just what makes a voice unique.

Jamie, my narrator, sounds either just shy of sixteen or like a kid from an earlier decade, both of which are problems as I'm not shooting for either of them. My writing group is good at pinpointing issues like these, but fixing them is up to me. I have a couple ideas in mind, and I think his voice does in fact sound older as I continue writing, so it may just be a matter of doubling back.

What do you think? What was the last book you read where you thought the voice didn't match the character? And can you name a book where the author did a slam-dunk job of it? I'll probably add suggestions from either category to my reading list.

But I don't want to sound like David Foster Wallace….

Over at Koreanish, Alexander Chee writes about Maud Newton's New York Times article on David Foster Wallace and how his prose style has been imitated and internalized by numerous writing students and has become the de facto tone on the Internet. You recognize what they mean at once: the qualifier-laden arguments that appear to undercut themselves at the same time they make their point, laden with irony, slang, and hipster-ish winks and self-consciousness.

Alex mentions that he's come across numerous instances in his teaching of students who imitate another's style to the detriment of their own, particularly of DFW, and how that imitation really does no honor to the one being imitated and no help to the student. The ubiquity of this DFW tone online caused me to pause and, self-centeredly, wonder, Is he in me?

(That sounds filthy, doesn't it?)

This points to a glaring gap in my own reading: apart from one essay on cruises, I've never read anything by David Foster Wallace. This past week, while I was at Left Bank Books, I nearly picked up a copy of Infinite Jest, thinking it was finally time to tackle that monster—I think it's longer than Anna Karenina, which is the longest book I've ever read, and that took me three attempts. Eventually, I set it down and picked up a young-adult novel by Brian Farrey and a books of short stories by Vestal McIntyre, which together weighed less than Infinite Jest. My wrist thanked me.

I've been blogging since around 2000 or 2001 in various places. As soon as it was mentioned in Alex's blog post and Newton's article, I recognized the style, but I am reluctant to go back through my own writing online to see if there are signs of it there. I suspect there are. I find this particularly disturbing because I never set out to imitate that tone. It's easy to see how it might have trickled into my own language: I've read David Eggers and any number of other young hip Foster Wallace-ish authors, and as Alex and Maud point out, his style is practically the house style of the Internet. It seems impossible to avoid.

I'm egotistical enough to think I should sound like myself, but it's worrisome to me that I might have picked up any of his style by osmosis. That's not to say he isn't worthy of imitation, just that I don't want to. At the same time, it's hard to know for certain without having read more of his work, but that might further the problem, right? So the reason I might not read David Foster Wallace is because I don't want to sound like I'm imitating David Foster Wallace.

Does anyone else worry about things like this? Tell me if you do. Or if you don't.

A full fridge

I've been cooking a lot this week. Which is funny, because the week before someone asked me if I like to cook, and I said, "I do, but I don't really have time for it much these days." It's not so much that I made time, but the quantity of fresh foods in the fridge that were going to go off sort of demanded it.

So, since we were up to our ears in tomatoes, I made a great big batch of sauce (one tub in the freezer, one in the fridge—just needs to be whirled in the food processor with some tomato paste and away we go), and then a batch of gazpacho (I was tempted to follow Almodovar's recipe, but I don't have any Valium in the house). There's also a tomato and cucumber salad that I made last week (dousing anything in loads of olive oil and balsamic vinegar will help it keep pretty well for several days—that's my hint from Heloise for you). I also have more pesto than any household can possibly consume in a month. (Into the freezer it goes.) Lastly, for our friend Jane's party this evening, there's a chocolate mousse, made according to Julia Child's recipe, chilling in the fridge.

None of this has anything to do with writing, really. Cooking, like running, is one of those things I used to do when I was stuck on something I was writing and needed to step away. There are a few things I make reliably well—black bean soup, lasagna, omelets, caramelized tofu and brussels sprouts—that I could let my hands go through the steps while my mind wandered.

At the moment, things are chugging along pretty well, though. I'm working on a summary for chapter nine of book #2 (which has no relation to book #1), and I've got summaries of chapters six through eight already done. I've been writing longhand a lot lately, or on my old manual typewriter. I find it helps to get away from the computer and the inevitable source of noise it becomes (for me, at least). Sometimes stepping away from the writing altogether and letting yourself think about other things is the best path back to the work. And if you do that in the kitchen, you'll wind up with something for dinner to boot.

"When in doubt, cook" ended up being something of a mantra for Joel, the narrator in Detours, so maybe this does have something to do with writing after all.

Getting the rhyme wrong

Did you ever see the movie Educating Rita? If so, maybe you'll remember the part where Rita, played by Julie Walters, asks Dr. Bryant what assonance means. After he defines it for her and asks if she understands, she says, "Yeah, it means getting the rhyme wrong." It's a funny line, but it also comes early in the movie, when Rita is just starting her journey. She'll come to understand and appreciate it later, but perhaps also at the risk of losing something essential about herself.

If you haven't read Livia Blackburne's blog, it's fascinating—at least, it is to me. She's a neuroscientist grad student who's also a fantasy write. I'm not a regular reader, but I probably should be, because she often has fascinating insights.

Recently, she wrote an entry on blogging as an "author platform" and started off with the line, "I think blogging is a waste of time." A provocative opener, to be sure, and from there she talks about writers who blog and the tendency to forget who your target audience is online. While she makes some good points, I don't think she successfully backs up her initial premise, but still it's good reading, and it's always good to be reminded to ask the question, who's your audience?

Meanwhile, over at Nathan Bransford's blog, he points out how impossible it is for a traditionally published author to know for certain whether what she's doing in the way of promotion is successful or not, mainly because she doesn't have access to all of the relevant performance metrics to make that determination.

So, on the one hand, remember your audience. On the other hand, you'll never really know for certain whether what you're doing is working.

I started blogging before I really got serious about my writing. It was 2000, and I was teaching myself HTML, and I created a website on Geocities (ugh, yes—you can stop laughing now) and coded everything by hand. Later, I found out that there was a virtual universe of other people writing about everything quotidian in their worlds, but it was all new to me. Some of them were even professional writers. I also found that it was easy to set up a domain, taught myself CSS, cobbled together some plug-ins and created my own website. By then, I had met people all around the country, some in person. The ones who were writers were an encouraging bunch, and some of them were editors as well, or knew editors, and began recommending places I should submit my work.

There's no wrong reason to blog. If you're doing it strictly as a promotional activity, I've found it gets boring after a while, and it would probably end up being the same for your readers. I've blogged for HTML practice, as a writing exercise, for the sense of community it fostered, and occasionally to let people know what's happening with my writing.

And also to post adorable pictures of my pets and my boyfriend.

The social media landscape has changed considerably since then, but I find that I enjoy Alex Chee's tweets about politics as much as the ones about writing; likewise when Susan Orlean posts updates about her hens or sleeping out in her new treehouse. They're writers, sure, but their interests don't begin and end at the keyboard or the notepad, and some of it is bound to be interesting to someone, like me.

There are so many good reasons to blog, tweet, or post a Facebook update. The only reason that's wrong is if it's a chore, as LIvia rightly points out. Don't do it to tick off a checkbox on a list. The best reason, though, is just to share.

Why do you blog/tweet/send smoke signals? Tell me about it in the comments here, or nip on over to redroom.com if you feel so inclined.