Averil Dean's Blog, page 23

Repeat

Tell us your tried and true techniques for focusing when that deadline looms and you need to get work done. In other words, how do you avoid wasted days and wasted nights?

There is no technique. You just have to decide that the work is more important than finding the perfect picture of a clapping seal for your Pinterest board, or uncovering Ellen’s secret shame, or plucking the dog-hair tumbleweeds off the living room floor, or concocting the perfect chana masala when your tried-and-true recip...

Roll

If you’re feeling blah, what is the one thing you do that you can count on to put a smile on your face?

This prompt feels like it’s coming from that smarmy friend who asks you the same question five minutes after you’ve answered it because he wasn’t listening the first time around.

Fuck it. I’m going back to my pages and imaginary soundtrack. If Blackbird were a movie, this song would be playing during the closing credits:

Theme songs, anyone? For your book, for your life?

Warming

Theoretically, summer will return to the polar-vortex-battered Northern Hemisphere. What are you looking forward to doing this summer? If you’re in the Southern Hemisphere, what are your fondest memories of Summer past?

I’ve been sitting here daydreaming about farmers markets and day trips to the beach, and lunches outdoors during lazy afternoons in Portland and Seattle. Blue skies, sandals, sundresses that tickle in a rummaging breeze. Icy drinks jeweled and dripping with condensation, those...

652 posts later…

Do you love to dance, sing, write, sculpt, paint, or debate? What’s your favorite way to express yourself, creatively?

Underwater basket-weaving.

Over to you.

Aces

We all get jealous from time to time — what wakes the green-eyed monster for you?

Big writing talent. Though it’s inspiring to read a powerful book or beautifully crafted passage, part of what’s inspired is jealousy. I sit there staring at the words lined up so sweetly, thinking “read ‘em and weep,” like we’re in a card game and the other writer has just laid down the aces. I slump over my own cards and think, I could never have laid those down, they aren’t even in my hand. Someone else was de...

Someone

Look out your back window or door — describe what you see, as if you were trying to convey the scene to someone from another country or planet.

We live on a biggish piece of land at a bend in the road, in a ranch house built in the 70s. The patio is mossy and crumbling a bit, and a mole has been hard at work at the edge of the concrete—a fact which is driving my dog slowly insane. We have a raggedy lawn surrounded by overgrown rhododendrons, an apple tree, and several unidentified shrubs. Two...

Wonderland

Which subject in school did you find impossible to master? Did math give you hives? Did English make you scream? Do tell!

Yeah, math. The reason it frustrated me so badly was because it seemed like it should be easy. Just plug the numbers into the formula and follow the rules, and everything will come out okay. Only it never did! As carefully as I worked my equations, the result always seemed to be wrong. I remember sitting in front of my notebook once, sobbing my heart out because the numbers...

Zin

If you could return to the past to relive a part of your life, either to experience the wonderful bits again, or to do something over, which part of your life would you return to? Why?

This is one of those Monkey’s Paw questions that makes me wary. Every life is marred by unhappy events that change the course of things, and the temptation is to get behind them and avoid. I had one of those yesterday, when my husband fell out of his rig and broke his arm. I’d warn him if I could: Don’t jump bac...

Groove

It makes me crazy when people wear their shoes in my house. What habit/act drives you crazy? How do you prevent it from happening?

This question reminds me of a label we used to have in the bathroom at work: PLEASE HANG TOILET PAPER IN THE WATERFALL POSITION. My coworker and I would roll our eyes at that. OCD much? But the sign isn’t there anymore. On her last day of work, my cohort peeled off the label and stuck it under my keyboard, and we tittered like children at her boldness.

I am not driv...

Creed

Have you got a code you live by? What are the principles or set of values you actively apply in your life?

Just one, a line from Hamlet. It doesn’t mean for me what it meant to Polonius, so maybe I’ve already bent it out of shape in that special, new-agey way we do when searching for a personal creed. But here it is, for what it’s worth. Truncated and T-shirt ready:

To thine own self be true.