Averil Dean's Blog, page 9

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...

Dipping

Let’s talk about you:

Where’s the farthest you have been from home? If you could return to another point in your lifetime and start again from there, where would you go? Have you ever been skinny-dipping? When’s the last time you lost your temper, and do you regret it now? Tell me one secret. Tell me one lie.

Spiral

Over the weekend I took a look through all the writing projects I’ve started and abandoned over the past couple of years. There are so many. Short stories and first chapters and failed attempts at poetry. Scenes and parts of scenes. Outlines, character sketches, intriguing settings and strange milieus. So many files, so many spiral notebooks. Such a monumental mess.

Part of what’s happened, I think, is that along the way I’ve lost confidence in my own judgment. I’ll get a short way into a ne...

The Donald Chronicles

A new chapter this week in the Chronicles: people are starting to say out loud that the Republican nominee for President of the United States might actually be crazy. Not crazy as in zany, ha-ha, or crazy like a fox, or politically incorrect or imprudent or what have you, but crazy as in, Holy shit, this country might be about to elect a sociopath.

It’s an opinion that has crept upon us slowly, in part because it sounds so hyperbolic. You tell the other guy his party’s nominee may have some...

French Vegetable Soup

Soup therapy. Is that a thing? Can we agree that it should be? If so, may I suggest this recipe, with the idea that lots of therapeutic chopping followed by a long, slow cooking process is a pretty good cure for whatever ails you–unless you’re trying to make this on a Monday night after work, in which case these qualities will have the exact opposite effect.

Anyway, if the soup doesn’t work, you can always watch a Trump stump speech and play a drinking game around the number of times he says,...

Daddy Issues

Holy moly, what a show we’re having in the U.S. We’ve got idiots left and (mostly) right, with a racist, know-nothing carnival barker playing to the rubes and a know-all history maker with decades of both service and scandal behind her, and millions of Americans suddenly acting like our once beloved country is some third-world hellhole that can’t be improved except by installing this sociopathic blowhard who bellows from the podium, “I alone can fix this,” who invites a foreign government to...

Camo

Saturday night, my husband and I went out for dinner and ended up afterward at a dive bar about half a mile from home. It was karaoke night (actually, every night is karaoke night according to the misspelled sign out front), and there was no shortage of performers. One chick got up and muttered the lyrics to some Taylor Swift revenge song; a balding hipster tried on Wonderwall. The woman operating the computer filled the gaps with standard drinking songs (Linda Ronstadt, Jimmy Buffett), and s...

Cowboy

Last month I took a new job managing a start-up physical therapy clinic. I’ll admit the word “manage” is a little bit tongue-in-cheek at this point, since I’m the only employee for the only provider and a busy day would have us seeing about five patients. I’m sure it won’t take us long to build a full schedule, but for now I often have the place to myself and spend a good bit of time writing, when I’m not gazing out the window at the playground across the parking lot, sucking on dum-dums from...