Amber L. Carter's Blog, page 61

Things just got personal. And real. Real, real personal.

 It's not a stretch to say that my life has completely, radically changed since November. With the opening of a door, I went from single to family in about 60 seconds. And while I've written about it privately, I haven't blogged about personal stuff in a long time because I wanted to kind of give it some breathing room. There were some personal and private things I needed to kind of feel out, first, before I turned this into a safe sharing circle about my new life. And also, talking about your boyfriend all the time is Fucking Boring. Seriously you guys, two girls I follow on Twitter just got boyfriends, and it's ALL THEY TALK ABOUT NOW. And if I've learned anything about blogging and social networking, it's this: Unless you are Melissa & Zach Floyd or Art & Emily Allen, you gotta think very, very carefully about what you talk about when it comes to your romantic relationships. Because half the time, nobody gives a shit. And the last thing I wanted to do was suddenly turn this blog into a sparkle-y, glittering puke-bomb about how great my life was now that I wasn't single anymore.

But I miss it. Having this blog be a personal space, I mean. Last night I read this really great post by a friend from up north, and it hit me like a punch in the stomach...just the nostalgia, of what it felt like to share daily adventures and weirdo conversations and just basically have every post be a literary snap shot of what life is like. And while there's a certain joy and sanctity about keeping your personal life private, I've found that I'm kind of in this unusual and unique position. I never read magazine articles or blogs about long-term relationships or what it means to blend families or cohabitate and all that stuff, because that stuff didn't apply to my life before. I was too busy figuring out who I was and how to date people who weren't douches to even care about that kind of stuff. And then, suddenly, there I was, having to navigate my way around all that stuff with little to no clue about how to do it well.

So I'll be talking about that stuff more, on here. At first it will kind of be a blast from the past, since, like I mentioned, I've written about some of that stuff privately but just haven't posted about it on here. But we'll catch up to the present fairly quickly, and then it will be like...like you guys are here, with me. Like you're a part of my life again. Like we never even lost any time at all! Because you guys were always here, you know. In my heart. Right here *taps chest*. In there. Deep in. You guys.

Also, get ready to read a lot about donuts, because that's pretty much 90% of what this whole new life is all about.

Hope you're all excited about that.

Like being punched in the stomach. Or dipped into a warm ...

Like being punched in the stomach. Or dipped into a warm lake, then roughly pulled out. Today, this morning, homesickness for the Northwoods washed over me in an overwhelming wave of memory and sunshine and water. It's not all that unusual, since about a year ago today I had just begun my new life up there, but the magnitude with which it hit... If the fire in your belly could become a flux capacitor, I'd be on the dock right now, sitting cross-legged and staring out at the sparkling water of Crystal Lake...or breathing in the pine as I hiked along the forest trails in my favorite "I live in the woods!" flannel shirt...or walking down the sunny streets of Hayward, plotting to get Adam to an early Happy Hour on the Angry Minnow patio.

It wasn't a perfect summer, but damn...I was pretty lucky, to be up there, in the woods, when I was.

Are you...Waiting For Love?

Some of you might remember that we've started to feature a poet here on An Amber-Colored Life. I cannot tell you who she is, because, again, I'm not a monster. Besides being an artist, an actress, an entrepreneur, a filmmaker, a peace-summit-leader, and an avid dater of professional sports figures, she is also a poet.

And now, she is a songwriter.



The "video" is 8 minutes. However, it's not really a video...it's just a music track recorded to video. So click play, go back to work, and let the lyrics wash over you, causing you to silently weep to yourself for so, so many reasons...

It's amazing how one courageous step - putting yourself o...

It's amazing how one courageous step - putting yourself out there, going for something that feels big and scary - propels you to take another courageous step, and then another one. I need to start beginning my days with a big fat bravery leap, because after I complete just one - submit a proposal, an application, a PR query - it's like it releases Accomplishment Adrenaline and I'm ready and wanting to do more and more and more.

What writing feels like.

"Writing is hard, but really rewarding. I think the hardest thing is when you're trying to write something that you don't have yet but you think you'll get... And all you're really doing is scotch-taping it together, a little better each time. Each time you put a little piece of scotch tape on it to tie it together, you feel good... But then that goes away and you kind of go, "I thought I fixed this?"
- Bob Odenkirk, Nerdist Podcast 2/1/2012

Why I hate Jonathon Franzen, reason #45

Mrs. Toczko’s letter, Franzen explained, was essentially about “how terrible it is to have your story taken away from you.” The death of Mrs. Toczko’s son was an enormous part of her life, and it had become “basically one column in a New Yorker piece kind of about—well, very much about someone else.” On stage in New York, Franzen took out the envelope that still held Mrs. Toczko’s letter, and said that even today he could not read it. He wanted to show it to the audience, though, “out of respect for Mrs. Toczko, but also out of inescapable shame of being a storyteller, of taking control of a story like that.”

By this point in Franzen’s story I was no longer thinking of Chris Toczko. I was thinking of David Foster Wallace. The essay Franzen had published two weeks earlier was about Wallace, who had committed suicide two and a half years before. And that essay, called “Farther Away,” was also about “taking control of a story”: In it, Franzen attempts to correct the “adulatory public narratives” of Wallace and his death.
Jonathan FranzenJoe Kohen/Getty Images for The New Yorker
When it comes to Wallace, Franzen is, in some respects, in Mrs. Toczko’s position. He was personally close to him, while most of us fans and readers who have written and spoken about Wallace since his death were not. (At the beginning of “Farther Away,” Wallace’s wife, Karen Green, gives Franzen some of Wallace’s ashes to scatter on the island he is headed to on vacation.) But he was also competitive with Wallace—their friendship, he acknowledges in the essay, was one “of compare and contrast and (in a brotherly way) compete.” (Another reason I was thinking about Wallace: Both “Farther Away” and the Chris Toczko story are about a rival who died.) And beyond simply refuting “the benignant and morally clairvoyant artist/saint” image that arose around Wallace after his death, Franzen insinuates fairly terrible things about his friend, without explaining those insinuations to his readers.

For instance: “I will pass over the question of diagnosis (it’s possible he was not simply depressive) and the question of how such a beautiful human being had come by such vividly intimate knowledge of the thoughts of hideous men.” Of course, Franzen hasn’t really passed over the question of diagnosis; he has explicitly raised it, while also implying that Wallace had to have been like the “hideous men” in his fiction (as though he were incapable of otherwise imagining such hideousness).

Elsewhere, Franzen says Wallace’s suicide was “calculated to inflict maximum pain on those he loved most.” More than once, Franzen suggests that Wallace had deliberately gone “the Kurt Cobain route” and “chosen the adulation of strangers over the love of the people closest to him.” He says that “infantile rage and displaced homicidal impulses [were] visible in certain particulars of his death.” What those “certain particulars” were, Franzen doesn’t say. And I don’t personally feel any deep need to know what they were. But if you are going to make, in print, what is essentially an accusation, you should, I think, provide some evidence for it. (To be honest, I wonder why no editor at the New Yorker insisted as much.) Otherwise, you are not only seizing control of the story, you’re keeping much of that story for yourself.

This is the other reason “Farther Away” feels like a betrayal of the ethics of storytelling as Franzen sketched them on that stage in New York. Defending himself from Mrs. Toczko’s letter, he says:

I was just doing what a writer does, right? I was telling a story, trying to make sense of my life, and passing it along in hopes that it might resonate with other people, and, you know, there’s sort of an exchange of gifts going on here. And it’s my job to give gifts like that. And yet in that envelope was somebody’s painful report on the price of seizing control of the story.

Perhaps Franzen intended “Farther Away” as a similar report. Perhaps he felt that “those who read [Wallace’s] Kenyon College commencement address in the Wall Street Journal and mourned the loss of a great and gentle soul” had unfairly seized the story of his friend. And because there were so many such people, he could not simply write a letter, as Mrs. Toczko had done, but instead had to write an essay for the New Yorker, one that was published the same week as The Pale King, Wallace’s last, unfinished novel. But reading that essay again, between the hard covers of Franzen’s own latest book, it does not feel like a gift.

 -  Slate: Jonathan Franzen’s “Farther Away” is marred by his anger about David Foster Wallace

Upon first reading, I wanted to share this because...well, because I wanted to bring up the question of whether you can still really love someone's writing while also thinking that they're a huge dick (and I do, in fact, think that Franzen is a pompous, arrogant asshole, EVEN THOUGH! I keep trying to give him credit because it's hard for me to believe that Wallace would count such a prick as a best friend, so there HAS to be something good about the guy, right? And yet he just keeps proving that wrong).

But on further review, a deeper issue kept tugging at my brain, and one that I've been wrassling with since I first set about writing books: When the experience is shared with others, how much of that story is yours to tell?

I struggle with this a lot in the writing of THE SPACE YOU TAKE. In HOLIDAY CHICK, I was able to largely skirt the issue by making the book fiction. While there are shades of biographical characteristics and events, they are largely distorted in order to protect everyone else in the book who is not me. THE SPACE YOU TAKE, though...it has to be the truth. And how do you do that, when the entire story centers around people who are no longer here to speak for themselves? And especially when the things you need to tell about are not all things that they would gladly share themselves? How do you honor their memory - and more importantly, the memory that others still hold of them - while also honoring the trust from the audience that you're going to tell the truth?  In the writing of it, I think I've got it figured out...we'll see whether I accomplished my goal, though, when it's done. But at least now I have a cautionary tale of what not to do...how claiming to write a story to "try to make sense of my life" can come off as simply stealing the memory of someone else's someone for personal gain and notoriety. 
I'm aware that this is probably the first and maybe only "I don't wanna do what Franzen did" statement made in our current literary culture. But I don't. 
Because that guy is a dick.

Vote or Die. (you won't really die. Who dies if they don't vote? People used to die *because* they voted, but I don't think anyone died because they were too lazy to *not* vote. I guess what I'm trying to say is: Please vote.)

So for a while now I've been thinking about submitting a talk for Ignite MPLS. Why?

Because:

A. I love hearing myself talk, and what better place to do that than on a stage with a microphone and captive audience?

B. I got some shit to SAY!

and

C. Big fucking goals are surprisingly motivating when it comes to putting your big girl panties on and actually going out for stuff you've only hemmed and hawed about before.

So I came up with two talk ideas. The trouble is, I like them both equally and can see either being totally fun to do while also capable of dropping some knowledge in unexpected ways. With submissions due on Sunday, I gotta decide soon so I can get my proposal in and then anxiously await either soaring triumph or crushing defeat.

So I want you guys to vote on which one you like more. Ready? Here's the short pitch for each one:

Talk 1: In Defense of Earnest (Or, Why Twihards Will Be the Ones To Save the Community Rec Center)
What we miss out on when we're 2 Cool 4 School. 

Talk 2: Pizza Parties & World Peace: Let's Do It, You Guys.
How we can harness the power of pizza parties to change our communities, and ultimately, the world.

Please vote for Talk 1 or Talk 2 in the comments! And thanks in advance for making my hard decisions for me.

This is called kicking my own ass.

Day 1 of 2nd Draft Apocalypse on ALL THE THINGS. The stacks on the left are finished and ready for editing. The stacks on the right need to be revised or proofed to move into 2nd draft status.

 For every two stories I finish, I either get a half hour of Pinterest, a half hour of my favorite TV programming, or an hour of reading. All stories need to be on the right side of the table by noon on Sunday (super ridiculous bonus points if they're done by midnight on Friday so I'm free and clear for Saturdate).

After the whole stack is finished, they'll be dropped gratefully into my editor's lap for corrections and comments, and then 3rd Draft Post-Apocalyptic Rebuilding will begin.

So! See everyone in about a month, when I finally come up for air...


*Only SEVEN days left to grab a hold of the pre-order special of ALL THE THINGS YOU NEVER EVEN KNEW - order before May 1st and you not only get four dollars off a signed copy of the book, but you'll also get yer name (or a name of your choosing) in the actual book as part of a special dedication. Pre-order your copy now, and here.

It's a three second ruuuu-uuuu-uuuule...

I don't mean to overwhelm you with posts, but I couldn't let you start your weekend without schooling you on the three second rule.



And I dare you to watch it for that long. DARE YOU.

The best part is wondering how long it took for all those guys to learn that dance.


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SUMMER OF HUMMERS is BACK!

Do they, Dolores?

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