The Telling

This morning I had a thought that took my breath away for a moment: “What if we’re in a post-story world now?”

The novelist in me felt a moment of panic: “What if you thought it was the right moment but really this is the absolute worst moment to tell this story?”

I took a big breath and told myself that we can’t be in a post-story world. We would be lost. Stories are what give us our information, our context. We need them, constantly. If we don’t have a story, most of us just make one up. (Next time you go out to do errands, whether in a vehicle or on foot, bike, or public transportation, see how many times you explain someone’s behavior to yourself. “Jeez, that person must be in a hurry.” “This guy must not know where he’s going, and that he’s holding 10 people up at this light.”)

Maybe, as the Zen story goes.

Everything we share is a story. The postal clerk who recently helped me with a complex mailing task told me so much about her past and present life in the fifteen minutes we spent together; in trade I shared a story that matched hers and made us feel good about our many choices that had resulted for both of us in disrupting long-dominant cycles of meanness and addiction in a family that sometimes felt more like bondage than a support network.

The Pantsuit Nation page on Facebook is a place where millions of people, mostly women and not too many trolls, have recently flocked to share their stories of trying to maintain heartful progressivism amid a rising tide of hatred and bigotry. We still crave these stories. We need to figure out what is about us particularly and what is about the universal experience of being human.

The title of our next home movie

My daughter and I are struggling with the election results and with how to respond. I have started saying, “You can rant a little, but mostly you have to try to do something about it. You have to try to meet your Congresspeople, or write letters or make phone calls or something." She’s even more afraid of getting somehow targeted than I am right now. It breaks my heart all over again to think her fear might be justified.

Which is why we -- and I -- must keep telling our stories and testing that question, is this just about me and everyone I know or is it deep-down about every one of us? Perhaps it will turn out that all that matters is the telling — not the story after all, but the telling.

Baroque Pop and Me

This morning, Uncle Jeff, the DJ on KGNU's Morning Sound Alternative show, is playing Baroque Pop, a favorite genre from my childhood and into the present. His show is placing songs I didn't appreciate before in context with all these other favorite sounds (like the Rolling Stones on Flowers/Ruby Tuesday/Those Satanic Majesties; The Beatles on Sgt. Pepper) that I loved so very much then and still do. A backing track version of Ruby Tuesday by Studio Sound Group is revelatory -- I used to listen to that song so closely that this version feels like something I was listening for, despite my great love for Mick Jagger.

I have a deep love for disco and funk and even some R&B, but I think my love for these genres may have originated with these gender-bending Baroque Poppers and Psychedelians, all the Prog-Rockers and Glam-Rockers I grew up with and listened to. Uncle Jeff talked about wanting to be one of those guys, the glamorous fops in their Carnaby Street fashions (remember Mary Quant?) with the red velvet jackets and the big floppy hats -- I did too.

That's one of the multitudinous reasons I have to write fiction, and why I remind myself to weave this kind of richness into my work wherever I can. I also listen to music, and have been trying my hand at lyrics lately, too. I said to myself, "Self, if I were to write a song for OK Go, how would it go?" That's not too high a bar. It sure is fun to explore, and to make things come out the way I want in the end in songs and stories.

So go listen to some music or do something that turns your imagination loose and wild! And I hope you'll come back and share with me what makes you tick creatively.

Quote of the day: We don't starve.

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 that I don't do any of the other things I am supposed to do. Housework, personal administration--everything else goes to hell. My husband cooks. We don't starve.

--Anne Enright, in The Secret Miracle (a survey of writers' ideas and self-reported habits edited by Daniel Alarcon

File under This is going better than I expected

It's NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) time and I'm so very far behind! By the end of today, if I don't write more today, I will be three days behind. But having allowed myself to give up on completing the writing of my novel this year, I reread what I had written so far and decided to sit down and work on it some more just now. If any of you who know me read it you would know exactly what it is about. I had told my sister about an idea I had for a novel's gimmick--not that novels need gimmicks, mind you, but this actually seemed like an idea that would test the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, which I always think is interesting. My sister liked the idea, too. But then I ended up doing it with material I wasn't expecting to work with, yet.

So. We'll see. Will I have some big writing days and catch up in time to write the thing this month? I think of someone I know in Tennessee who writes 25,000 words in a day and wonder, who am I kidding? Will this take longer to work out than this month? I'm not sure it matters; I can't just put the story aside quite yet, now that I've opened the lid of the box a crack. The ideas in it are already busy like ants; I just have to watch them and see where they go. As I told my BFF, what am I going to say? "No, thanks, come again next year"? I don't think so.

Thinkering Institute: Beyond Newtonian laws

Here a glimpse of what's cooking here at my one-woman think tank.

Isn't that word Geronimo! about that jumping-off, what you say when you let go of the rope or run and leap past the edge, when there's no going back and you're in free-fall for what seems like an flash and a roaring eternity? That is how I'm feeling about the book I'm working on right now. I printed out all 61,000 words of it and read it in one sitting yesterday. It made me happy -- the story and the fact that it occupies a place in the world now. Sure, I see problems all over it, but they're all solvable; there's a whole and a reason for being and a bunch of interesting scenes and people to weave together, and a main character I am rooting for and hope you will too. It's all very exciting and there's still a lot to do. I figure I need about 10-20 more writing days to get to the end of the plot (and I may need an epilogue as well). I was just reading an interesting piece about how Joseph Campbell arrived at the idea of "bliss" (it's not quite what I'd thought: it's more like that Geronimo! moment). My friend Gever may have started me thinking about this when he recently posted about leaping off cliffs on his Tinkering School blog.

The jumping-off part of this project is my attempt to answer violence with nonviolence. My protagonist is still vibrating from the effects of living with the constant, continuous threat of violence, and it takes her a while to be able to conceive of any other way. But once she does, she never wants to go back to the other mode: it feels wrong and bad and soul-destroying. So she has to find a path, to learn to be more creative than everyone around her who just wants to get to the end of the story, to end the bad guy's story, an eye for an eye, tit-for-tat. I still am not sure how I will solve this riddle. There's a Newtonian action-reaction balance I am looking hard at. Is that equilibrium truly necessary or even desirable in this universe?

This led to thoughts of how we collectively value things, which of course made me think of Lawrence Weschler's book Boggs: A Comedy of Values, which is one of those books I think should be required reading for anyone who lives in a society and is capable of reading it. Because it's about living in society, I might not choose this as desert-island reading (I like Chesterson's response when asked what book he would take if stranded on a desert island: The Art of Shipbuilding). But I am living in a society that is having to think hard about individual and group values at this moment of economic recalibration, and violence is one of the things groups collectively condone or resist. Not only do we see a lot of violence in our media but many of us are also exposed to acts of violence in our private lives, whether being bullied at school or work, or suffering physical or emotional abuse at home. There's a certain amount of tolerance for violence and bullying, a sense that it can't be stopped. This is backwards I think, and also goes to the heart of our financial crisis. We've come to value some things that intrinsically have no value. We've colluded in endowing them with their power, and now we must dismantle this big facade and rebuild something more sustainable, supportive, and enduring.

Capitalists like to say we saw the collapse of communism a few years ago, starting with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan. I'm sure there are Marxists out there right now crowing about the crumbling edifices of capitalism, too. What I see is the end of an era of valuing money and might in the abstract and the specific. To survive the next era we are going to need to adapt and value other things even more highly: creativity, connection, love, innovation. More money and growth for their own sakes simply aren't sustainable values, in and of themselves. For example, I find it interesting that this country has corporate laws enforcing a growth-at-all-costs belief system that prohibit targets of corporate takeovers from resisting a merger, even if the merger would clearly weaken or destroy the target company's production or business.

I am doing a lot of reading at the same time as all this cogitating and writing the ending of my novel. One topic I am reading about is nonviolence. I have found some interesting things already, having just scratched the surface. I never knew this, but Gandhi said that he learned the path to nonviolence from his wife, whom early in their marriage he had first tried to bully into submission. It wasn't working, he said, and she showed him the path to nonviolence by teaching him that no differences between them made her deserving of how he was treating her. Then I read about how if one person is a tyrant but everyone agrees that person is a tyrant, there is no need to subdue that person because all of society can turn away from the tyrant. I see parallels in the degrees to which we as a society are willing to accept money and might as ideals and to look the other way as despotic rulers looting and pillaging the very things that gave them their strengths. Can't we all just turn away from those outmoded definitions of power and influence and turn instead to the power each of us has within us to do good in the world, to be of service to others and our own truths. What if we weren't all competing to be first to use up the last of the resources and instead were each of us supporting and encouraging the other in engaging with our communities and our very own selves?

I kissed some foot on twitter today

Ruhlman is the what-if-John McPhee and M.F.K. Fisher-had-a-lovechild of our time in his full absorption in all things cooking related, and I'm such a groupie.

I can't help it. I'm a tad aflutter: Michael Ruhlman thanked me today when I paid him a compliment on twitter. I'm reading his latest book, Ratio, and the book pretty much cemented the rock star analogy for me. (He also wrote a trilogy: The Making of a Chef, Soul of a Chef, & Reach of a Chef, good books all. Oh, and he helped Thomas Keller write his cookbook. Amazing. And his instincts are so true, so good; here he's come up with great formulas, great examples, and some amazingly yummy-looking recipes that I have yet to try out. His preoccupation with food is something I recognize; it drives everyone on one side of my family (every last one a gourmet-food seeker, crazy for the stuff).

I am raving about this book because I find it a rare thing, a fine and flexible reference tool in the spirit of Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything. It's more than just a cookbook but rather a liberating way to think about cooking, perhaps even a way to demystify cooking for a whole bunch of people. Once you have learned the basic ratios (and once you've procured a decent kitchen scale with a "tare weight" button), you have a great set of places from which to launch yourself, especially if you are a tinkerer like me who can hardly leave a recipe alone.

In contrast to Ruhlman, who is after some quintessential information about the best ways to prepare food, I keep circling back to what has become something of a new meditation for me: "What if I didn't have the best lunch possible but a good lunch?" What's the difference between best and enough? What does it mean that there is a gap? It doesn't necessarily mean I need to close the gap. I can have a good lunch without making things too fancy.

I heard a great thing -- at least the author of the book where I read it made me feel I heard it: In Beth Lisick's Helping Me Help Myself, Lisick talks about one spiritual guide, one of the people she consults for help in the course of a yearlong life makeover that involves taking the advice of America's most popular self-help gurus, one per month. Irresistible premise, right? I couldn't put it down. It was good, too: She's funny and sharp, if a little mean, which isn't surprising considering her hipster-than-thou life before her grand experiment (even her husband is a super-hipster -- his band opens several shows for Radiohead!) and considering her former disdain for outside expertise of any kind she has a refreshing willingness to submit to the logic of her new 12-pack of teachers. The one that struck me says to a crowd gathered to hear her communicate with people no longer dwelling in the physical world, "A martyr can only nail up one of his hands." I have been chewing on that one ever since I heard it. (And you, dear reader, deserve a prize for most tenacious if you've made it this far without rolling your eyes and clicking to the next big or little thing.)

In other news: The most popular exclamation I hear among the kids at my daughter's school is "What the...?" with equal emphasis on "What" and "the." And today I heard my daughter's schoolmate say "OMG," complete with Valley-Girl emphasis, in conversation. I'm not sure my kid knew what her friend was saying. I wonder whether her friend learned it from older siblings or from TV. I'm guessing the latter. It strikes me as extra ironic because the girl saying it is from a Catholic family. Wouldn't that be taking the Lord's name in vain somehow?

Oh, and there's this little circle thing we do with our knees, where we draw a circle with one knee and then the other. That used to be so hard. I could barely pick my leg up and drag it across my body. It still aches sometimes but today I was thinking, "Where would I be if I weren't doing this?" It's so hard to imagine, I don't even feel like trying.

A teaser from the new novel I'm writing

She'd bombed. Flamed out. Died. Big time.

“Everyone has to do it once,” they told her after, allowing her to bond with them over shared failures. “It's good to get that out of the way early.”

And: “Now you know how the worst night feels. If you can go back out there after a night like that and not take it too personally, you might have what it takes to make it in this hellish business.”

It made Lydia feel better to hear it. 99 percent of people who dream of this probably never ever try it, she thought, with pride. And it's weird but it's a freaking thrill and a half. She was unable to stop the smile from stretching her lips wide. By the end of the night her face had ached from all the grinning. She was high as a kite, soaring over her old life. Plus, she was funny as hell with all those new brothers. If that five minutes was the worst thing that ever happened to her, and she could even stand doing it again, she felt fine about that. If that were true, who knew, maybe she could be the next Seinfeld.

Lydia's secret excuse for her crash-and-burn of a debut was being in disguise. She cut herself a great deal of slack for it instead of beating herself over the head and concluding she was no good. Her material was pretty good, she thought, but it was trickier finding the way to deliver it, while trying on a whole new persona. She couldn't just drop the persona when her set was over like most performers, she quickly saw; if she wanted to snare the bird she would have to keep it up during the bantering-in-the-bar portion of the evening with the comedians' brotherhood after. She had to be Carmen Flame. She liked the joke of having red hair and being named something smoldering and Latin sounding.

It was like trying to join a fraternity suddenly being around all these guys kind of like her, odd balances of Introversion and Extroversion in the Myers-Briggs personality inventory. She hadn't quite figured out who she wanted to be with them yet. She hadn't yet connected well with her audience, or herself, which was making her feel less worthy of connecting with the accomplished fellows in this group, every last one of them (she thought) with more experience in a month than she'd had in her whole life.

Onstage, Lydia had been worried under her false bravado, which of course the audience sniffed out immediately, nosing her jokes as dispassionately as dogs poking around a pile of leaves while she died in front of everyone, afraid her delivery was rushed and trying not hold back from her inclination to be snarky, which she knew could turn an audience on her in a second. Fear made her sweat, drove her on. She dreaded being booed or hooked off the stage. She'd seen one club owner ring a loud bell or buzzer on the performers – they never knew which to expect – that startled each comedian into submission, abruptly ending their desperate not-quite five-minute sets. You could see the stress of wondering on every comic's face a few minutes into each set: Will my sound be a bell or a buzzer?

No mojo that time. Oh, well, too bad, she thought. But she sure liked the electricity and the instant camaraderie of it, and had felt more alive this night than at any time except riding through the country so busy with thoughts of what she might do when she stopped somewhere and started setting down new roots that she hadn't noticed she'd been singing to herself for miles, alternating between “This Land Is Your Land” and “My Country 'Tis of Thee,” the songs' repeating refrains in the background of her mind like Muzak at the supermarket.

I just wrote a 50,000-word novel and boy is my neck sore

I did it! At 11:57 pm on Tuesday, November 30, I copied and pasted my novel into the handy-dandy Nanowrimo word-count validation box: 50,016 words! I am a winner!

But in answer to your follow-up question: No, it's not finished. I tried, really I did, but I couldn't wrap it up that fast. One good thing about where I stopped two days ago (more like one-and-a-half days ago, in writing time): I'm in the middle of a suspenseful part of the story, which makes me want to get back and finish it. Only I'm too sore right now to type more than this.

In answer to your next follow-up question, yes, I'm exhausted. Writing the 50,016 words in the space of one month (a 30-day month, mind you) wasn't as difficult as I've found it in years past. It was plenty challenging nonetheless, and it took a huge push at the very end to finish before the deadline. That may be the most brilliant thing about Nanowrimo right there: that it gives you a seemingly impossible deadline to meet. There are enough other people doing it -- and getting it done early, no less -- that it seems like a perfect stretch goal: tough, but doable. O, that crafty Chris Baty (the guy who started it all a few years ago).

And when you win, talk about intrinsic rewards! You sure don't do it for the purple banner on your Nanowrimo profile. You do it so you have done it. You do it because you'll have thousands of words of a story you wouldn't have written otherwise, even if you have given yourself permission to allow them to be terrible and you'll have to rewrite it all. You do it for the writing itself. You do it to get better at writing a novel. You do it to get better at meeting a deadline. You do it to get better at pacing yourself. And you do it because once you have done it, frankly, it's a little addictive and you'd feel like a wuss if you didn't at least try. At least those are the reasons I do it. Oh, and the awesome reactions from friends and family. It is fun being the person in the family most likely to write a novel in a month! Thanks for your support.

Here's another reason you don't do Nanowrimo: to make other people feel bad. I don't want my accomplishments to be things I can use to make others wish they weren't the way they were, e.g. didn't know how to sit down and write a book (or most of one) within a month. A couple of nights ago I did a Sunday NYTimes puzzle on my own, with only two clues supplied by Mr. D, and I put the puzzle down and thought: I'm better at this.

Now, what good does that do anyone to go around thinking that way? The only reason I would ever say that is to make Mr. D. feel worse. But why would I want do that? Why do I ever act like there's one way to do things, and it's mine, the better one?

Some people are excited to cheer you on when you announce that you've been writing a novel, but plenty of us writers (this one included) have also observed that certain people respond by peering at you as if you'd just sprouted a third nipple on your chin. Admitting you have a blog can draw the same kind of response. Some people roll their eyes and say to themselves, "Oh, so you like seeing yourself think. Big whoop." They wonder whether you're just saying you write personal essays and are really hunched over your laptop writing sci-fi, erotica, fan fiction, or some other freaky online genre in which only other freaky online genre freaks would be interested.

It would be nice to hand over the bound book and say, "Here, read it if you like and tell me what you think." Their eyes would pop right out. And lo and behold, yea verily, an organization called CreateSpace is offering to print a copy of your novel if you win Nanowrimo! I'll let you know how that goes.

So it's not about winning so other people lose. First, in Nanowrimo, if you write anything at all of your novel in November, it's likely more than you would have written otherwise, so you win either way. And second, there's almost always someone who writes faster or more than you, and someone who writes slower or fewer words per writing hour. Comparisons don't really help. Instead of being jealous of people who can write 10,000 words in a day, I tell myself they just get more practice in a day than I do. One of the folks at the IHOP (I keep typing "iHOP" and having to correct myself -- ha ha) said he had written nearly half his novel over the past two days. Think of it: almost 25,000 words in two days. I can be proud of not having "shamelessly padded" my story, as they say on the Nano site, to get to the 50K, though. I tried to keep the story moving. There's not enough conflict but I'll catch it on the rewrite.

And how is the writing when you write 1,600 words in a day? 5,000? (Which I did on the last day.) 13,000 (IHOP guy)? You'll never know unless you do it, or unless someone trusts you to read their rough draft. Maybe I or the folks at the IHOP (who all won, incidentally) will rewrite his and publish it; maybe it will have just been good practice and he'll move on to different projects. I'm starting to see how nearly 20 percent of its participants can meet the Nanowrimo 50K deadline but a much smaller percentage become published authors after that. The ones who do seem to be prolific, judging by the small sample I've observed in Nano's forums.

It still seems far easier to write than it is to edit and sell the writing, which are equally consuming and perhaps, despite popular mythology, the more difficult jobs. It seems that writers must be able to turn on the taps regularly but then must spend at least as much time hauling vessels around and hooking up hoses and getting the siphons started to get the writing off their own desks. I want an assistant who would be excited to do all that stuff! My mom pointed out, as usual, right around the time I had the thought: "How nice that you are an editor and a writer." The way I had thought of it was: "I'm Danny and Meg, all in one package!" But they know all about sending their stuff out, which is where I'm ignorant and why I'm as yet unpublished.

So who are the winners here? One thing's certain: there are no losers. I think we're all winners, whether it's at writing a book, or getting dinner on the table, or finishing a work project before a critical deadline, or remaining cheerful despite all odds.

NaNoWriMo day 10, 15,400 words

Again, I come bearing news that this is all going rather well. I'm liking this mettle my main character is showing of late. She's not just parts of me but is more complex, someone I'd like to get to know. I'm still on track wordcount wise, with 15,000 words written that I didn't have two weeks ago. Ten days ago. I had started a version of this story but had gotten sidetracked by a memoir project that now feels like a lot of rehearsal for what I am working on this month. I might have to mine some of what I already wrote someday when I'm struggling to keep up with my recommended daily requirement, as I think of it now. So far, though, I must say the pace is working with my life and habits. Keeps me off the streets, as I often say about writing and used to say about watching films for the BIFF selection committee.

NaNoWriMo, day 6, 10,000 words

Oh, rats. The dreidl song was out of my head for a while....

I just blew past the 10,000-word mark. Yippee skippee! I am enjoying reading what I'm creating. It is good stuff. I'm not holding back. I'm liking my main character's seesawing. She meets this nice lady early on and maybe you think, oh, no, is this going to be all nicey-nice all the way through? A parade of wise crones leading her to her own inner wisdom? But then the next person who says she'll help her is not so nice at all. And there are many more interesting reversals coming up for me to look forward to as the author -- heh, heh. Then a bit of a precipice. Beyond a certain point in my story, I don't have anything plotted. I'm just going to see where she goes from there. I have a feeling she will know exactly where to go.

Sleep well, y'all. I sure will, unlike my poor main character in the scene I just stopped in the midst of so I'll have lots of momentum when I pick it up again tomorrow, which is definitely one of the best writing tips I ever heard.

It's not what they say; it's what you do.

Coming into my own.

What does that little cliche mean to me?

Being this age I'm starting to see how little it matters what anyone thinks -- it's all what you do. I know it sounds teenagerishly obvious, but so what? There it is.

So how do I make my time here matter most?

I seriously think I just have to make myself sit down and crank out the first completed draft of my novel in two weeks (I am not kidding!), working crazy hours and letting myself just get immersed in it. I am going to need rolls of wide butcher paper for mapping the storyline, just to keep myself straight with all the details, but I think doing that will help it work. (This reminds me of Matthue and Brett's creativity workshop revelations about how I see and hear and mentally map things out, which I have ever since found marvelously helpful.)

I had some notion yesterday that I was going to sit down and write for ten hours, but other things kept beckoning and I kept not sitting down to write that at all until I had no more time left. So I thought, where do I get the idea I am going to sit down and write ten chapters? I'm good for an hour or three at once usually, but that's about it. It's hard work, in the way that visiting a museum is hard work. It's a lot to take in at the museum, and a lot to process as a writer, and sometimes I don't even want to go there. But I am always glad when I do, and I would love to just plunge all the way into that story and finish it.

In a recent writing group discussion about why we write, I said in part to reach out to people,to say it's okay to be you. Another person in the group was surprised. She felt it was always just about getting in touch with the event or person or emotion of the scene, the memory.

I do these projects that have been calling out to me: Making movies. Writing my book. Writing songs. A libretto? I am so ignorant of all this! I have several great projects in the immediate future: I have to recut my gomez movie so it's waaaay shorter (i.e., under ten minutes). I have another good idea for a short film I could do over the next few days if everyone is around. (Note to me: It would be great if the chickens would come back from Ft. Collins. Maybe my neighbor would bring them back for this reason if I asked nicely. And gave her a nice bottle of wine.)

Hmm, a young, searching person in the lead in the musical -- Zac Efron wondering if he's gay. What? Musical?! I still can't believe I'm saying this out loud.

There it is.

Why would you want to publish your writing on the internet?

I wrote this in preparation for leading my writing group's workshop today. We met this morning and I spoke about these points. I gave a little Twitter demonstration.



Do you feel there are differences between writing for print and writing online? If so, why? If not, why not? Let's discuss. (We did and agreed that length is a key consideration, because of the limited time and attention people have online; and that one has very little time to attract the interest of an online reader.)

A software developer friend of ours, a fully-grown Bart Simpson-type who has worked at various software-company startups around Boulder, was working on a social media application a couple of years ago. I pooh-poohed it when I first heard about it, although back in 2000, I had been intrigued by the promise of mobile networking software that would -- gasp -- allow you to see which people in your social network were in your vicinity and even where they were.

"Why would you want that?" I demanded. I was still resisting owning a cell phone then.

"Well, there are lots of reasons..." he started, but I had lost interest.

For me, it took seeing Twitter to understand the potential of this idea.

As soon as I tried it out, I was intrigued by the way you could start following anyone. It was the "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" game in a social networking application, and it was proving my theory that really we are probably no more than two or three degrees of separation from most people we would be interested in meeting personally or interacting with professionally.

I found that just being myself and posting updates on the things that stood out at random moments, I had a couple of hundred followers in a fairly short time. And I wasn't aggressively trying to court new followers by following lots and lots of people; it was just a steady progression. I'd follow a few new people every day, choosing a couple of new people to follow here, and a couple more there. Some would follow me in response; others didn’t; others didn’t immediately but started following me a while later.

Today, it takes just a few minutes to start a new account on Twitter, or start a blog on Blogger, LiveJournal, or WordPress. You can apply interesting styles and templates to make your home page look playful or clean or unique; just select your favorite color scheme, or something pleasing that reflects a side of you you're itching to put out there. Any piece of writing has a place online today.

When I sit down to write, I feel like I am mining. I look for the vein. What can I tell that no one has already pulled out of this? What burden must I offload today? What am I most nervous about writing about, what scares the living hell right out of me, or what could make my mother/husband/best friend/a stranger cry?

When I clear enough space in my life -- an hour here, twenty minutes there, or a minute, I invite something in: Okay, I'm ready, I say, sitting down at my keyboard. My intentions fall somewhere along the spectrum from wanting to share a good tip, spin a good yarn, or give myself a little free therapy for my wounded heart. One way I can do this is by writing about those charged moments, the ones that can be the clearest harbingers of what needs to be done next. But sometimes it's just as satisfying to write a haiku about cats or the wild winds.

Twitter has shown me it's a good time in history to start our own channels, to become the pillars of our own media empires, to speak our own truths to power, and to cheer on the big and little things that make our day different from the last. What I see when I look around at the wild world of publishing online is that every kind of writing has a place.

In Making a Literary Life, Carolyn See writes:
"Here are a few things you might write about: Travel, anything from an around -the-world jaunt to the one-hundred-mile trip to see your wife's parents. Camping. Life in RVs. Sexual function. Sexual dysfunction. Good kids. Bad kids. Your weird childhood. Your happy childhood. Whales. Fishing. Hunting. Cooking. Tequila. Keeping a neat house. Keeping a sloppy house. Sleeping pills. Hamburgers. "Profiles" of anybody you happen to know. Alternative medicine. How you got cancer and got better, or didn't. Whatever you're interested in now. "

She's not exaggerating; there are blogs and tweets galore about all of those things and many more.

On Twitter, I'm interested in reaching out to people, but the social scientist in me would also like to see if I can grow a following who will be willing to take risks by investing in each others' work. Like microloans, if everyone gives just a little, everyone weaves a tighter social net, the kind that can even help catch you if you fall. The other night, a friend sent out a message on Twitter that a fellow who had published a children's book just needed a few more people to buy his book and his bank would give him a loan. I saw another person raise more than $25,000 to build new wells in Africa; I was one of the many people who contributed a small amount toward making someone's dream a reality.

So I write my tweets and blog posts with the hope that advancing my own ideas can benefit all of us in some small way. I hope to build connections this way, much in the way that holding a baby or petting an animal stimulates the production of oxytocin and builds trust between people and animals. You know how we tell kids, "There's no such thing as a stupid question, because chances are if you are wondering about it, there is at least one more person wondering about the same thing." Well, I write with the same hope: that if these things are on my mind, someone, somewhere might find it useful to see me attempt to verbally sort them out. And I write hoping to reduce the degrees of separation between us.

Big changes are underfoot in the information revolution. The print media are crumbling, and publishing may mean something completely different five years ago from what it means today. One day, information-gathering "bots" will roam the internets, grouping writings by not only genre or author or titles, but by subjects, themes, settings, or even regional dialects, as easily as we can look up old friends and flames on Google today. So what's most important now is to gather our stories, our thoughts, and our ideas in one place.

Just as we can't find others we're interested in if they don't write and share what they're working on, the same goes for us. We have to not only write down our most pressing ideas but we must also allow others to see what we do. I believe we owe it to each other, to the world, to use our time here to make our mark, whether the exercise has at its center the preservation of family beliefs, values, and rituals; the personal catharsis of storytelling; or a desire to inflict the emotional earthquakes of shock and fear that remind us we are lucky to be alive. The internet has made this easier than ever.

A couple of links to get you started with online publishing:

http://blogger.com
http://wordpress.com
http://twitter.com

OMG! The print media are collapsing!

I can hardly stand it -- honestly, I think about this hours every day these days. Partly because I feel I am a journalist by nature (more on that later), and partly because I know lots of journalists and it makes me sad that this is so soon-to-be an extinct avenue for us writers to ply our trades. I'll have to work a newspaper's crash into this novel I'm writing because it's almost nauseatingly fascinating, in the exact way that a train wreck or building demolition fascinates.

Now it's all about blogging. (But how suddenly the focus shifts! And the game is your content but your marketing, how you are "driving traffic to your web site," and your SEO, and which I had to look up because I didn't know what that was. SEO seems to comes down to writing these shell documents that purport to be about a topic but really sound like collections of up to 500 sentences that include key words. It seems to be all about including in these web articles enough popular search terms to get search engines to find you.)

So now we can go off and earn money with this not exactly writing but more word-gathering, like woolgathering, I suppose. We can hawk a company's wares. But we can't write editorials for our local paper much longer, not the paper as we know it.

And so I grieve. It makes me sad to read Michael Hirschorn's article in the Atlantic, in which he asks what if The New York Times disappears from newsstands "like, this May?" I'm even sadder in a way to have already seen the article's publication Tweeted and have followed the link to read it online days before the hard copy arrived in my mailbox. An era is ending, and coming down hard around us, along with everything else that's imploding right now, right before our very eyes.

We still need to write it all down, I feel more acutely than ever. We need to report the truth about what we know. The newspapers of record are important because they try to get the truth about the matters at hand. The need for this work is critical to an open and democratic society, and we haven't yet figured out how we're going to replace this work. As have the reporters so far who have risked life and limb and peace of mind to go after the stories, we must remain vigilant in our pursuit of the truth, each and every day. If each of us is holed up with our laptop writing nonsense "articles" for not much fun and a little more profit and we have all taken jobs doing PR for one version of The Man or another, who will be left to write the letters when the potholes get out of hand?

It's going to as important as ever before that we each one of us take some responsibility for getting the news out, by writing letters to congress critters, blogging, or doing what we can do to report on the issues before each of us, before the city councils and our governments, all the way up the chains of our companies and our governments.

My blogs could be seen as word collections, I suppose, in which I randomly opine about various topics. But they are my reports of the truth, and no one else's. They capture what I am thinking at a particular moment, and I have found it useful to to see what themes have grabbed my attention over time. I sometimes wish each one of us could do this so we could see "tag clouds" of what everyone in Boulder is blogging about, or what city council members are writing about, or what local artists are saying (oh, wait -- that's Twitter! Well, not really, given the self-selected, early-adopter nature of the Twitter population).

At present I have a large interest in public health and that is what my novel is about, but I also think mass transit and alternative energy are tremendous avenues that can help provide economic and social solutions. So I write in hopes of helping spread the word about how that can be facilitated. I am grateful for the new social media tools, but I can't help starting to grieve the losses of our newsgathering institutions already. I didn't realize how quickly Web 2.0 would mean the demolitions of all these institutions that have been the foundations of my world.

It's as if suddenly someone announced that there will be no more college professors, and all professors will have to compete for jobs that pay $8 to $15 an hour now; that industry is gone. I like so many of us also didn't realize we were plunging into an economic quagmire whose dust and muddy waters are a long way from subsiding, and that is likely to accelerate the decline of the news agencies even further. And I'm not even sure most people realize this is happening yet (I blame my reliance on Twitter for my current angst level). I grieve selfishly, in part: until recently, I thought writing for a newspaper or magazine would always be a career possibility, and now I don't.

What will replace this? I'm having a hard time believing it's e-books, or the computer, and not just because of my old screen and older eyes. And who will send out and pay the newsgatherers? I haven't optimized my site much for search engines (I have a little by adding the metadata in the form of what blogger.com calls "labels" but most people call "tags," metadata being another fave topic of mine), but I know there's value in my perspective here in my little corner of the blogosphere (which I think of as the bloggersphere). I'm convinced there's value in my voice and others' saying, out loud, "I can't believe they still sell Lariam! If you go on a trip to a tropical land, be sure to do your research on it before you take one of those pills. Lariam can be gnarly."

Or, "Gay people are people too, and so are bisexual people."

Or, "We have to love each other."

Or, "We have to look out for each other in traffic."

You get the picture.

Write on. Tweet on, blog on, write to your representative. But keep on reporting on the truth. The media may be vanishing, but the need never will.

I'm Open!

So many meanings, that little exclamation. In the game, ready for any move needed, receptive, allowing for alternatives, even vulnerable. Living online the way I have been coming to do has thrown open some kind of floodgate in my concepts of identity and how good other people out there are but there are exceptions, there are other elements to be aware of, too. I know full well I am also making myself more Googlable, for better or for worse. And I can't help it: it makes me nervous.

What doesn't make me nervous is going to my writing group. I have gotten a good sense of where people are, and where I am. I try to bring in work I'm happy with, but I always get pulled up just right. I'm always surprised and impressed by their insights about my work. This week I brought in a piece that is still mostly a rant, but I got just the criticism I needed to revise it into something that has meaning and value, instead of just leaving it to stew in its own juices.

I keep wondering why it is that I think back on the film Slumdog Millionaire with such affection and it's in part the children, as I said in my Movie Habit review. Although they are forced by their circumstances to try to survive, having been orphaned by a Muslim-hating mob, all their naïve, energetic striving proves inspiring. I also admire the energy and verve of the lead character, Jamal (Dev Patel). It does take a lot for a boy in the slums to become a chai-walla at a call center, and Jamal's face and his entire stance reveal the chasm between these worlds. He persists, despite the hopelessness entailed in coming from the slums of one of the world's megacities, a much more damning fate in India than it is here, incidentally. There's something eternally optimistic about the colors themselves: the blue of plastic tarps setting off a rich palette of yellows, browns, and reds throughout, the film organizing a kaleidoscope of color out of the chaos. I returned to this because of Opal Dream, the film we're screening for our block kids' movie night, which is dark but not too dark. It's definitely not as fluffy and effervescent as Ella Enchanted, or Enchanted or any of the Disney films (although Bambi's pretty darned tragic), but it's a good and provocative story. It's not about people who are being good all the time, probably the downfall of a lot of potentially interesting tales that come out of Hollywood these days. It's about people who are forced to deal with circumstances outside their ken. It's like I said to my friend the other day: even if you don't agree with it, it puts a draft out there to edit, gives you a place to start thinking about some issues.

That's what makes me the mom

Cleaning cat boxes for the zillionth time I thought, as one of my cats studied me while I worked, that's what really makes me the mom, as much as providing a warm lap and loving and feeding them when they're hungry. Really what separates you from all the others is that total willingness to clean up the excrement and excesses of the other. It makes me happy that I have a partner who also wants to help our child and pets in the same ways -- in fact it makes me want to do better, and so we wind up competing to do well by our daughter in a most healthy way.

There's always this terrible pull between writing and other work, and here I sit, choosing to write about it. My friend has made it her normal thing to do projects, and her place looks fantastic as a result. I have put so much time into my writing and reading and viewing and just being the mom that I haven't invested it in my surroundings, and we are still just getting by. It's time for something different, an amazing find. It's time to rent a truck and go touring Kansas to look for furniture. Paint the inside, start with some completely different ideas and found objects. We could even recover what we have, too. That's my kind of challenge. If we did a little road trip, maybe just for a weekend, picking somewhere within 300 miles that had a couple of promising sales coming up, perhaps I could write in the car. Judy wants to go to the Western Slope -- I could take her and poke around over there, I suppose, although I suspect there are so many people like me already poking around that the pickin's are slim.

I liked my idea of making over our place with lots of sliding doors. For cabinet doors, bedroom and bathroom doors, shower doors. Then we could do something more unified in our house. Brushed steel or nickel tracks suspended from the ceiling, with doors of metal, wood, and glass or wire mesh. It would look super mod and I could do things like enclose my dresser so the cats wouldn't get on it. It would work for bathroom cabinet door/mirror, and for the shower. Perhaps a sliding corner cabinet door, too?

I'm listening to Sia singing "Rewrite", and now "Sweet Potato." What amazing songs! They're all on the CD Colour the Small One. "Breathe Me" reminded me of the brilliance of putting that song over that final episode of Six Feet Under, with Claire (Lauren Ambrose) driving away from all she'd grown up with in her hybrid car, instead of the hearse. Sia's was such a perfect voice to express that feeling, that moment.

Really, it's not just because Diablo Cody is one of my 14 friends on MySpace

The movie Juno keeps coming up in conversations, and I'm not even the one who brings it up. My friend asked me what made me love it, because he liked it but didn't love it and as a fellow reviewer he was curious about that difference. I said it was because of Juno's fundamentally optimistic and generous view of how people are, something I have admired in the work of many directors (with Wim Wenders at the top of the list). Juno is really the opposite of all those other movies it gets lumped in with, in today's popular and profitable goofy youth genre (see Judd Apatow, The Farrelly Brothers) that always seems to feature people as dumb or as obtuse as humanly possible to make a given plot work (e.g., in which freaking universe would Katharine Heigl's character really go for that guy in Knocked Up?) The character of Juno, on the other hand, remains true to her ideas about what she needs to do, whether she's deciding to go to the abortion clinic or deciding to have the baby. I felt some of what she did when I decided to adopt a child from another country: I'm already different. I have nothing to lose by pursuing and honoring my own beliefs and desires here.

And again, this morning, in a conversation about how dramatically linguistic standards have changed, I think I surprised my friend by saying I don't find it difficult to hold the grammar lines anymore but rather feel more and more that I embrace the changes in our language. This time I was the one to bring up Juno as a work that crystallized a new moment in the evolution of our public lexicon. If you imagine Juno having come out in the 1970s, people then would have been shocked and horrified at the crude language and innuendos and frank sexuality in a film about and in part aimed toward teenagers. It would have caused a cultural maelstrom (now there's a word I don't get the chance to use every day -- and notice how every and day are two separate words). Now, the language in Juno is not so far from what you can hear on prime time television shows (especially if you leave the sound up for the promos in between). Diablo Cody's genius in Juno and the reason I think she deserved the screenplay Oscar was that she captured something accurate about the youth culture here at this moment in the United States. Juno makes me feel more optimistic and less depressed about changes in the way we speak and interact, because I know we are all at once using this language in our own ways every day. I share Diablo Cody's faith in us.

So small but so significant

If you have been reading recent posts, this post probably isn't about what you think it's about.

Instead it's about writing for a small handful of people -- a few family members, friends, and a couple of people I don't know very well at all. I know that someone could one day decide to link to my blog and lots of people would pore over my previous postings on my loosely defined and wide-ranging "travels," but I would still feel I was writing for the same five people I picture reading this once in a while. I have just learned there's a new reader to add to my list: a local documentarian who wrote to the site where I have some film reviews posted and requested that I review his film. He didn't just say, "Say, I am a local documentary filmmaker and would like you folks at Movie Habit to review my new film." He asked for me by name.

My work at Movie Habit and on this here bit of the blogosphere often feel like tiny drops in the universe's great bucket. But it is exciting to know that the ripples I make do affect a few people out there.

Having written online for a while now, I still feel it's healthy rather than unhealthy for me to further these relationships with my tribe and with myself out here in cyberspace. These lines of communication help to keep me open and honest with all of us, too (although I find there are still taboos in person and online). But it is a nice zing, like a dash of fairy dust, to know that there's even one more person reading what I have to say for whatever reason. (Movie Habit's webmaster once sent out a reader's brief, disgruntled comment for all of us reviewers to read, prefacing the email, "He hates us! Somebody hates us!" He was so excited that someone felt that strongly about our web site.)

Speaking of films, 'tis the season of doing work I can't talk about much for a while. I just watched a film I really liked, although I don't think it will make it into the festival for which I'm on the selection committee. But it made me think deeply about preparing for that phenomenon of releasing your ideas or art and not knowing nor having any control over what impression they will make on others. How do you prepare for that?

Murakami's ten percent rule

I still remember reading an interview with John Irving in which someone asked him about all those hours he spent writing while his children were small. I believe the question had been about whether he felt any guilt about that time (was the interview a mother, perhaps?). His reply was stunning to me: Irving said he never considered not writing during that time. (Or during any other phase of his life, I would venture to guess.)

I felt that same earthquakey sensation in my psyche when I read about Haruki Murakami's decision to write a novel (and become a runner) in this week's issue of The New Yorker. I was intrigued by his story of how he applied to his literary work the expertise he had gained by running a jazz club, another venture everyone told him was nigh on impossible to succeed at. He said that when he decided to write a novel he also decided to devote more of his time to working for his readers. Also, he figured out that in his club, success depended on having ten percent of his customers to become repeat visitors. If he could do that, he didn't have to worry so much about the other 90 percent of the people, he said. He applied the same principle to his growing group of readers and wrote with the idea of attracting ten percent more readers with every book. That's the kind of thing entire self-help books are based on -- so simple and apparently modest, yet so apparently doable.

I don't know that they ever came up with a similar formula, but I presume bands like Gomez and The Old '97s and Elbow have similar philosophies -- and a similar understanding that hard work on behalf of building your audience is part of the deal. (My first thought is about the dangers inherent in the rock-and-roll lifestyle, like the heavy drinking that is part of Gomez' and Elbow's culture, especially in some of its members, but then I think, those people would be heavy drinkers no matter what they did for a living. Like I said, it's part of their culture.) All the creative folks I've written about here appear to have an artistic gift to share and a grasp on reaching out to and trying to actively cultivate and grow their audiences.

I do get so inspired when I think this way. It's that frisson of recognition. That inner Aha! I have always been fascinated by how people develop audiences, maybe from going to concerts large and small over the years and seeing firsthand how some people are able to connect with their audiences and the others tend to disappear from the circuits. Same is true for the stories and books and music I've immersed myself in that many others have loved as well (from Laura Ingalls Wilder's frontier stories to the Tao te Ching, from John Irving's eccentrically perverse World According to Garp (I hadn't known you could write novels like that, until I read it and saw how popular it was), from Mario Puzo's and Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather to The Grateful Dead, from Agatha Christie's mysteries to the Oprah show.

But I also feel that in my personal life I have shown almost zero gift for that -- I didn't recognize what it took. I know people who get it, who write the perfect notes at the perfect times and say the right things and stay open, but I feel so much more awkward than that, so inept at maintaining certain friendships, even though I do have a fairly wide network of friends and extended family (both the literal and figurative kind). But I've felt a lack of something in my own life and hence been stingy with myself toward my dearest people on the planet up to now, I feel; that is one of the things that is motivating me to write here and to put my thoughts out there for all to see at last.

I was channel surfing one night recently and PBS guru Wayne Dyer was talking about how he "manifests" all sorts of things in his life. He was talking about "source" and how "source doesn't understand 'not enough' -- it just reflects back what you ask of it." That was another little lightbulb: for so long I've thought something was missing in me or in my abilities, or that I had some lack that others didn't suffer, and lo, it was so. Now, I am seeing my glass as mostly full. I am feeling the gift of this flow of words I can simply turn on when I have feelings and ideas to work through. I am perceiving the value of sharing my truths with others who need to hear them or recognize themselves in them. There's nothing missing at all, it turns out. Surprise, surprise, surprise!

The space between us

I attended a new writing group this morning and am thrilled -- the house is too quiet for how I am feeling! This is a group that started at my in-laws' church and expanded outward (though for all I know I may be the only non-churchgoer in the crowd) and it's about writing life stories.

First a big disclaimer: I will never reveal personal details (names, biographical details, etc.) of the people in the group in my blog. I won't say something different in my blog from what I would say in front of anyone or everyone in the writing group. I don't want anyone to have to worry about what they can say in front of me and trust to be kept private, nor do I want anyone to feel they have to question what I am really thinking that I am not saying when I am in their presence. That's a promise.


Since I got home from the meeting, I've come to one little conclusion: The group writing experience reminds me of what a hopeful person I am at heart. It's good for me to be with others who are listening and responding to their own true voices, their own true stories. Because every one is amazing, everyone else's and mine too. Today there was a tea party at someone's house and a warm introduction, followed by gentle but firm critiquing, just the kind I like. Everyone was so respectful, and so joyful about the opportunity to bring all of our stuff together: our writing and our selves.

And right now it's all reminding me of last night's TV, a reality show I had never watched before. "So You Think You Can Dance?" makes it sound so tough, like the judges must be these high-schooly, mean people, sniggering and pointing fingers. And the show is some of that, but so much more. Each of the judges is capable of being surprising, so there's plenty of natural suspense in the judging of each dancer -- well, the dancers that don't get stopped mid-move and virtually laughed out of the room, that is. The English judge with the fluffy ginger hairdo has a real soft spot for rappers and hip-hoppers, and a sharp eye for talent. The middle woman, with her big hair and brassy attitude, has good observations about technique and is never afraid to laugh out loud, with delight or disgust. The artsy Sharon Stone-lookalike on the end has dance chops, you can tell, yet takes this this parade of hopefuls and wanna-bes and positively embraces what these dancers bring to the stage. She delivers her critiques in the most loving possible of ways, gently preserving the potential dance stars' oh-so-fragile ideas of themselves as dancers and trying to help them lose all the baggage and misinformation that hold them back from becoming real, professional dancers: the bizarre costumes, the out-there quirky personas, the lack of information about what dance is.

After an hour and a half of the show (and there's more tomorrow night!), I found myself full of admiration for every one of the dancers and the judges both for putting themselves out there and for trying to articulate what dance truly is. I love what happens when people create that creative space for themselves and others. I love it in music and Greg Hamilton talked about it in Mystic Ball. It can be a form of meditation and can open pathways to perception and insight. So I too feel joyful and grateful that we can gather and support each other as we share stories in these sacred spaces we create, these spaces where we can define anew every moment what it means to write, to be social, to share.

The driver

This guy, the guy with the pencils and the hots for the dremel tool, tried to draw me out about myself for a few minutes while I was getting to work taping, so I just gave a couple of brief answers ("Yep," "Moved away and came back,") and turned back to my work, without adding, "I'm really a writer," which is the first thing I wanted to say but was immediately glad I'd hadn't. I was wearing a film festival tshirt over dungarees and let him reach his own conclusions. I was just there to work. (And then go home and blog about it after, apparently, hahahahahaha!)

On day two of my adventure, I learned to grout, which at first felt like the activity from hell, until I figured out how to get the stuff to stick. I thought it was pretty fun after all. I got the idea of putting enough grout on there, really mashing it in (which is hard labor -- I'm taking credit on the little workout counter I update online) and making sure there's enough to fill in all the spaces and fill little curves that meet doorframes and a million other details. It's good work. And I have been getting fitter lately, figuring that it was for a good reason. Last time I worked up to painting our house. This time I want to do some decorating inside. It's time for an update.

I enjoy work I can do that is hard, too. Sometimes I think I missed my calling as a brain surgeon or something equally absorbing. Novel writing feels complex in a similar way. Like my brain was made to take all of those possibilities in and keep them running for a while all together. For some reason I'm a sucker for endurance when the outcome matters, too. I have never been able to get that up for racing, running or biking or anything like that, but if it's to do a task or a job (paint a house, get x miles down a river), I'm all over it. I have been pleasantly surprised to notice a tendency in myself I find I like and admire when I'm skiing: I am more and more willing to just go all out down some slope, no matter what it looks like, even off cornices and down little gullies and in trees. (The only exception: those steep volkswagen-sized mogul hills -- those are still scary to me, yet not as scary now that I ski better and am more fit than I have been for a couple of ski seasons.)

Deadlines help, too. I need a deadline for this novel. And for our bathroom project.