Averil Dean's Blog, page 8

Sticky

[image error]Photo by Ivan Samkov on Pexels.com

Ive been watching, shall we say, a fair amount of YouTube. You can learn anything there, from post-apocalyptic building techniques to curly hair care to why the face of Venus is so obscure in that painting by Velazquez. You can learn how to keep a plant alive. How to clean your house. If youre vegan, there are beans and cream-free sauces and waifish young people assuring you that baby steps are cool. You can listen to music and watch short films, and hear...

Teeter

Where do I begin.

Thats a bigger question than I would have guessed. My life is one of fits and starts, periods of frenzy followed by episodes of interminable withdrawal, where my thoughts seem not to matter even to myself. As writers I think we form identities around our work, and these can be tricky to manage; the outlines arent always clear. It becomes a matter of what we should say versus what we want to say, who we ought to be as opposed to who we are.

Ive been trying to be a better...

Love in the Battlefield

I don’t know whether I’ve said this before or said it recently, but I’m a vegan. (Insert your own joke here, my favorite being the one about how you only have to wait five minutes before a vegan will lay claim to his or her veganism, probably while giving you the hairy eyeball and a lecture about where that pulled pork sandwich came from.) I get that I embody the worst of the worst of the liberal mindset, uptight and self-righteous, all holier-than-thou with my almond milk and lentils. I won’...

Blue

And so it goes. My candidate lost, my party lost, and we will now have all branches of government under Republican control.

Much has been said about this already, though for now I’m beyond the point of hearing it. Like many of us I’m engaged in some soul-searching and education about what it means to be an American in 2016, and what it might look like for my kids when they get to be my age. I’m trying to keep my mind and heart open to the possibility that a toxic personality like Donald Trump...

Pleading the 8th

It’s almost over. That’s what I keep telling myself. This awful election will take place on November 8, and after that—assuming Clinton wins, which is an outrageously bold assumption even now—we’ll be able to put all this behind us and return these outsized feelings of fear and loathing, misogyny and racism, this bleak unhappiness and seething self-righteousness to the black box of our national soul from whence it came. Soon we’ll vanquish the monster, collect the prize, and go home, and ever...

Bricks

What do you think about in the middle of the night? Do you wake at 2am as if at the clapping of hands, one moment dreaming and the next intensely awake, eyelids twitching, feet unstoppable, your shoulders creeping toward your ears, hipbones like a stack of bricks under your forearm? Does the pillow always bunch the wrong way? Do you beg yourself to sleep? Do you flop, roll, flop, roll. Count sheep, count unicorns, count the flaws of Donald Trump. Count the hours you might get if you go back t...

Project(ing)

So I’ve started the new project. Sure, it might have been better to take the time to plan this out a little better and give myself a road map, but if I’ve learned anything from the fallow fields of yesteryear, it’s that doing something is better is almost always better than doing nothing, and if you feel like writing you should write. As a result, I’m sort of flashlighting around with this story, hoping to stumble onto a plot without breaking a toe.

It’s not my usual modus operandi. I don’t h...

Sweetie

I have waded into Twitter. The election coverage in particular drew me in, partly out of a certain dark-hearted perversion which is par for the course with me, and partly arising from a genuine curiosity for the subculture that seems to have evolved there: the Twitterverse. Such a beguiling word that I just had to see for myself what it’s all about.

And now I do see. It’s where the trolls live. Where people make up silly handles and call each other names, where we post triumphant links to act...

Lift

I could hardly sleep last night. I’ve been engaged in a back-and-forth with an old friend who took one look at my book idea and knew immediately how to make it nine thousand times greater than the smallish thing I had in mind. What’s more, he gave me permission to aspire, to write it my way, leaving out the stuff I don’t care about, including only and everything that matters to me–to me, to my aesthetic and sense of story, to my obsessions, fears, and dreams. He says I can write this big book...

Elephants

How do you get your shit together and just do it? How do you get over or around or beside yourself and put the words on the page and tell your inner weeble that it truly doesn’t matter whether the words are right or wrong, so long as you manage to toss them outside the swaying bouncy-house of your own imagination? How do you stop the parsing, the self-recrimination. How do you tame this elephant of a story that’s trying to squeeze through the square white doorway of your screen? How do you co...