Author: Bekki

As You Do

On By BekkiIn This is FeminismLeave a comment

I can tell already that it’s going to be a lazy Sunday, the kind where I stay in my pajamas most of the morning and a good portion of the afternoon.  I’m okay with that.  I woke up and made biscuits, and strawberry coconut popsicles, too.  (As an aside, that link goes to one of my favorite baking sites.  Her pictures are scrumptious, and I’ve yet to try a recipe from her that didn’t work.)

Today is also a closing tabs sort of day, which means you get a couple of little snippets of things that have been going on rather than a single topic blog post.

Neil Gaiman Signing

Tuesday,  A and I went to go see Neil Gaiman reading from his new book, The Ocean at the End of the Land.  It seems like a wonderfully magical, creepy, utterly Mr. Neil type of book.  I’m holding onto it until I have the time to read it with the attention it deserves, rather than in snatches on the subway.  It’s the kind of book I want to dive into and not come up for air until I’ve turned the final page.

The reading was wonderful, and Neil brought Amanda Palmer out to play a song and ask him questions.  Every time I see the two of them together, I’m struck by how palpable a thing their love for each other is.  Not in an on-stage-for-the-fans kind of way, but in a genuinely fascinated with each other kind of way.  (By the by, if you’re interested in ART and the making of ART, Amanda’s blog about the book is worth reading.  Some great thoughts in there about the way we incorporate ourselves into our art.) 

At the end of the night, Neil signed books, and I asked him if, since I’d rather run out of books for him to sign, he’d sign my back instead.  He very sweetly said yes.

Now that it’s gotten warm, A and I have been spending most of our time out in the backyard.  I’m still in a bit of shock that we now own a house, in New York City, with a backyard large enough for a grill and patio furniture and a garden.  A and I do most of our cooking out there.  Everything from pizza to burgers to pork shoulder to smoked duck.  With no AC in the house, being able to cook outside makes such  difference.

The garden’s done up in milk crates, a la Riverpark Farm.  We have corn, squash, tomatoes, bell peppers, hot peppers, peas, lettuce, arugula, radish, broccoli, basil, parsley…  The squash are in full blossom, and the peas and tomatoes are starting to flower as well.  It’s the first time I’ve grown my own food, and there’s something magical about watching it grow.

Backyard

Finally, I’ve been seeing a great deal of talk online recently about the fact that there is a group of men out there who are apparently still living in some 1960’s, Mad Men era world where it’s okay to publicly evaluate women based on physical characteristics and otherwise treat women as less than equal.  (I’m not going to put up links – if you’re curious just search Google for the SFWA debacle or the Kickstarter rape-book incident.)  If you’ve been following my blog, then you probably already have a good idea of my views on the subject.  Which is why I wasn’t going to post on the subject.   Then I saw something on the subway the other day that was simply too incredible not to share.

It’s morning, and the 5 train is packed, standing room only, so I’m standing and reading my book and generally ignoring everyone else around me.  As you do on the subway.  Then I hear a kid sounding out letters, like he’s learning to read.  Cute.  So I look over, and this adorable five year old is sitting on his dad’s lap, reading from dad’s magazine.  Super cute.  Then I realize there’s a large picture of a mostly naked woman taking up a good chunk of the page, and the kid is reading the headline from a sex advice column.  Yeah, you read that right.  The phrase the kid has been laboriously sounding out for the last five minutes is “blow it”.

I didn’t say anything.  I wanted to, but didn’t even know where to start.  Dude, that’s creepy?  Dude, totally inappropriate for a kid? For a public place?  Does your son’s mother know what he’s reading?  Have you considered what you’re teaching your son about the way he should be treating women?

You see my dilemma.  Plus, who wants to get into an argument with the creepy guy teaching his kid to read from Playboy on the subway at early o’clock in the morning?  Suffice it to say, I feel kind of sorry for the kid, who will probably turn out to be the kind of guy who can’t ever get a date and doesn’t have a clue why.

On that note, I’m heading out to the garden.  In my pj’s.

When the Words Won’t Come

On By BekkiIn Musings & RamblingsLeave a comment

For the past few few weeks – the past few months, really – I’ve been having trouble writing.  It came on bit by bit, manifesting itself first in an uncertainty about how my current WIP was going to unfold, then as a somewhat scatter-shot attempt to work on other projects while I let the WIP alone, and now as an inability to make myself sit down and write in the mornings.  Those of you who are writers have probably been here (or some version of here) before.  For those of you who aren’t, I can’t even begin to describe how it feels.  Equal parts frustration and misery, with a dash of fury for seasoning.

It took me 6 years from starting the Persephone novel to querying it.  A good bit of that time was letting the novel sit in the back of my head while I thought about where it needed to go.  At the time, I thought it was because I was busy with law school.  Now, I’m wondering if the sit and stew period is part of my writing process and, if it is, what to do about it.  I don’t want to sit on this novel for another three years.  I also don’t want to find myself writing utter rubbish simply to put words on the page.  I’m not sure yet if the solution is to turn to another project for a time, or to go back to outlining and plotting this one, but neither is going to happen unless I can get myself back into the habit of sitting down to write every morning.

Mostly, I’m trying to be California Zen about it all.  Trying to be okay with my limitations, and with working within those.  Trying to be okay with the fact that I’ve gotten a lot of rejections lately, because that’s what happens to writers, even good ones.  Trying to forgive myself when I don’t sit down and write in the morning.  Because life isn’t going to get any less busy or less crazy, and re-working the balance now doesn’t mean I’m not going to have to do it again in six months, or six months after that.  And, above all, remembering why I write in the first place – for those moments when everything clicks, and the words do come, and everything is golden.

Leaning Out

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Yesterday was the first day in forever that I didn’t have to work.  It was wonderful.  I cleaned the house and made a lemon chiffon pie.  Then A and I took a drive down toward Coney Island, stopped at Spumoni Gardens to grab a pizza, and came home to watch Game of Thrones.

It was pretty much a perfect day.  The kind of day that made me think, I’d be happy doing this every day.  Except that would mean I’d be pretty much a stay at home wife.  And wouldn’t that mean I’d somehow failed?

I feel like women of my generation are supposed to want the high powered career, to become the Fortune 500 CEO or the partner with the corner office or the next Secretary of State.  Between the Anne-Marie Slaughter article and the Cheryl Sandburg book, it’s starting to seem like even though we were told we had choices, we were expected to go down the career path.  Which, in its own way, is as strange as telling women their place is in the home.*

I’ve seen a bunch of theories lately about how to keep women in the work force.  They range from tax incentives (treat child care as a fully deductible expense) to work/life balance suggestions (don’t schedule meetings after school hours).  The problem is that all these suggestions go toward disguising the fact that the American workplace is inherently un-family-friendly, rather than implementing the kind of structural value change that would give women – and men – the ability to have both meaningful careers and rich family lives.

Maybe, then, we’re looking at this the wrong way.  What if women are leaving the work force because they aren’t interested in playing by the same rules that men do?  What if women would rather opt out of the system — some by starting their own businesses, some by staying home with the kids — because they don’t buy in to the corporate ethos in this country?

What if the solution is not for women to lean in, but to drop out?

Let the men run the rat race if they want to.  Let them pile up money they don’t have time to spend.   Let them miss the baseball games and the school plays.  And maybe, by the time I have daughters who are the age I am now, the question won’t be why women can’t have it all.  It will be why it took men so long to figure out that there was a better way for everyone.

*If this sounds familiar, it’s because I’ve written about the subject of women in the workforce before.

The Monster in the Maze

On By BekkiIn Musings & Ramblings1 Comment

Plot is not my strong point.

If you’re looking for beautifully written language, for characters with depth and knowledge and humanity, for a voice that’s all it’s own, I’m your girl.  But plot?  I’m terrible at twisting the threads of my character’s fates, at telling them where and when and how to move.  I can give them motivation, but I stink at placing obstacles in their way.

You remember how, in Sim City, you could chose to subject your city to earthquakes or fires or alien invasions?  I was the kid who always disabled that option.  I liked all my Sims.  I didn’t want to see them destroyed.

It’s the same with my characters. I don’t want to make them go through the Fire Swamp, falling into the quicksand and battling Rodents of Unusual Size.  I don’t want to put them into situations they can’t get out of themselves.

The result tends to be that scenes which should be filled with tension end too early.  In my current WIP, one of the characters goes into the forest, gets a little lost, but comes back half an hour later, unscathed, and with strawberries.  In the next draft, she’s going to disappear for more than thirty minutes, and there will definitely be Consequences.  Problem solved.

The harder thing to fix is that feeling of drag around the 2/3 point, right about when the bad guys should be starting to close in.   This happens in my current WIP.  Where there should be several chapters of nail-biting, page-turning, edge-of-the-seat tension, I end up with several chapters of world building instead.  My notes to myself, after I read back through this, were something along the lines of “WTF??”

Fear not, though.  I have a plan.  I’m going to create a page in my Scrivener for the novel titled “Very Bad Things.”  And I’m going to write down all the bad things that can happen to my characters.  All of them.  Everything from death to dismemberment to imprisonment to torture.  When I’m done, I should have enough disasters to keep the plot moving and the pages turning.

Whether my characters forgive me for it is another matter entirely.

 

 

Reaching Up

On By BekkiIn Musings & Ramblings2 Comments

Last week, I emailed Brian White from Fireside Magazine and told him I wanted to help with the Kickstarter.  I offered to match pledges, up to $1000, for an hour.   Truth be told, I’d kind of been kicking myself for not trying to get on board with Fireside earlier.  I backed the first three Kickstarters, but that was the extent of my support.  When it looked like the third one wasn’t going to fund, I shrugged and was a bit sad but figured that was what came of trying to use crowdfunding on an issue by issue basis.

In the year since Brian started Fireside, though, I’ve been doing a lot of writing, and even more thinking.  For better or worse, the traditional publishing market is dying.  Within the next five years, there’s a good chance that people will be able to trade and sell used e-books the same way they trade and sell (and give away and leave in motel rooms and bus stations) paper books.  There are so many, many books being published each year that the chances of any one standing out from the crowd are even slimmer than that of finding the proverbial needle.  And this market, where people no longer believe that a new book is worth $25, where people will be able to sell books for pennies, where each book is competing with millions of others, is the market I’ll be publishing in.

So how does Kickstarter fit into publishing fit into trying to make a living off my writing?

Connections.  I think, more and more, we’re moving back to a place where the artist needs to come down from the ivory tower and be accessible.  This means connecting with people.  Yes, connecting with fans and readers is important, but it goes beyond that.  It’s connecting with the people who read and/or write the same kinds of things you do and with the people who’ve never read a word you write but follow you on Twitter and the people who pass by the blog and leave the occasional comment.  Because over time, the connections start to matter.

It also means supporting other artists.  It’s no good to go out, hat in hand, if you’re not willing to chip in a bit when someone else comes asking.  Because Fireside funding another year means more than having another literary mag that pays above market.

It means there’s a community of people out there who think that stories are worth supporting.  And that’s a community I want to be part of.