Averil Dean's Blog, page 17

Rigor

From The Secret Miracle, Edited by Daniel Alarcon:

How rigorous are you about maintaining a schedule?

Anne Enright: My children dictate my schedule—I have done vast amounts since they were born because they keep me from my desk and make me impatient to get back to it. I don’t count words so much anymore, or note beginnings and endings. I work on several things at once, so there is always a file to open and no such thing as a blank page. I like working. What discipline I have comes from the fact...

An Unethical Category

“People do not really want or desire happiness.”

Do you agree?

Patience

At work yesterday, I helped two patients fill out their intake forms. The first was an elderly man who had walked to our office from the group home down the street. He was beautifully dressed in button-down and fedora, and when we got to the part of the questionnaire that asks about his grip, he took my hand and squeezed it hard and asked whether he still seemed strong to me. His skin had a satiny thinness, slipping over the bones, the fingernails pale and delicate as capiz shells. He told me...

Signs

Pre-writing signs, anyone?

Copy

Yesterday, my editor approved the last of the substantive changes to Blackbird. To which I say, Hell YES! This book is done, baby, done for reals! It’s even got a description for the back cover:

On a bitter January evening, three people are found murdered in the isolated Blackbird hotel.

Best friends since childhood, Eric, Rory and Celia have always been inseparable. Together they’ve coped with broken homes and damaged families, clinging to each other as they’ve navigated their tenuous lives. T...

Doodles

I am staring into the abyss: the blank page. I can’t bear the look of it so I draw a line of stitches around the border, a tulip at the bottom, the characters’ names and the name of the town, upside-down and sideways, concentric squares of words with a window at the center and a tiny hand pressed to the imaginary glass. All work and no play makes Jill a dull girl. Sparrow’s head, arrowhead. Row of spices down the margin: clove, anise, coriander, annatto, sorrel, chicory, cardamom, turmeric, s...

Breakdown

Last night I watched a Dutch movie called The Broken Circle Breakdown. It’s hard to describe the impact it had on me without becoming hyperbolic and using the word ‘best’ one hundred forty-seven times, so I will simply tell you that I cried buckets, thought about it all night, still am thinking about it this morning and probably will watch it twice or more again today. I don’t always enjoy stories told out of sequence, but this one was knit together so beautifully and the performances were so...

Dissection

From The Secret Miracle, edited by Daniel Alarcon:

Is there a novel you go back to again and again? If so, why? What does it teach you?

Susan Choi: There are certain novels that, for whatever reason, become inextricably bound up with certain projects of mine, and I read them so intensely for that period that I sort of demolish them. This happened to me with The Great Gatsby while I was writing American Woman. The uncoiling spring of that book’s plot, the awful momentum that takes hold of the ch...

work |wərk|

work |wərk|

noun

1 activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a purpose or result : he was tired after a day’s work in the fields. See note at labor .

• ( works) [in combination ] a place or premises for industrial activity, typically manufacturing : he found a job in the ironworks.

2 such activity as a means of earning income; employment : I’m still looking for work.

• the place where one engages in such activity : I was returning home from work on a packed subway.

• the...

All My Life

This seems appropriately pissy for how I feel tonight. Also, it’s Dave, whose screaming is positively operatic as far as I’m concerned.