Author: Bekki

“(500 more)”

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A wise man once said, the secret to being a great writer is to apply ass to chair.*  So far as wisdom goes, it seems to be accurate and, remarkable of remarkables, working.

In January, I started tracking my writing via spreadsheet.  Eight months later, I have a novel with an agent, a short story ready for submission (already rejected once, poor thing) and a new novel that’s already 1/3 of the way done.  Which is not bad at all.  But what I’ve really noticed, even more than how much I’ve written and how submission-ready it is, is the learning curve.

In 2005, I did NaNoWriMo for the first time.  I wrote a 50,000 word story about a girl who set off to rescue a kidnapped boy from her village and fell in with a group of amazon-type women along the way.  I don’t remember it having much of a plot. For that matter, I don’t think she even rescued the boy.  I haven’t looked at it since the end of that November.  I expect it’s rather terrible.

In 2006, I did NaNo again, after a year of not writing much of anything.  Again, I didn’t have much of a plot, and most of my writing was a frantic attempt to stay one step ahead of my daily word count.  This time, though, I submitted the opening pages to a writer’s workshop.

In January 2007 I workshopped my Persephone story with a mystery writer named Laura Lippman, who gave me enough encouragement that I thought it was worth doing a rewrite.  That spring, I took myself and my new laptop to the Oakland rose garden or to Lake Merritt or anywhere else that was bright and sunny and wrote.  When it was done, I had a passable second draft that still needed a lot of work.

In August 2007, I started law school.  It took me until last summer to drag my novel out of the box it had been hiding in, brush it off, realize it wasn’t half bad, and start revising with a vengeance. That project finished up around March, and of it went into the world.

Around April of this year, I started the new book.This time, instead of writing from scene to scene, I outlined.  I deliberated.  I thought about the choices the character would have to make.  I thought about who she might run into along the way.  Then I started writing, almost every day, with the understanding that if I went to bed at a reasonable hour I would make myself get up and write, but if I had one of those days where I didn’t get home from work until after midnight I wouldn’t beat myself up for sleeping in.

More than anything else, it has made me a better writer. I think about what I’m doing with the story and what I need to be doing constantly, not just while I’m in the chair. Because the muse may come when and where she chooses, but if I’m in my chair in the morning, she’ll always know where to find me.

*  http://samjmiller.com/2012/08/14/clarion-2012-every-brilliant-piece-of-writing-advice/

“A Lack of Color”

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Yesterday, the city closed Park Avenue to traffic and opened it up to everyone else: bikers, runners, walkers, roller-bladers, guys in duck suits. My husband and rode our bikes all the way down to Foley Square, stopping briefly at REI so that I could buy a neon pink sports bra to replace the much too hot T-shirt I was wearing, and decided to go over the Brooklyn Bridge.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked me.

“Why not?”

Because the pedestrian walkway over the bridge was a knotted, tangled mess of bicycles and people spread out four abreast. Even so, I’d rather dodge people than taxis any day, and as we got closer to the top the walkers and bikers sorted themselves out to (mostly) the correct sides of the path. Even so, when we got to the bottom, we decided to go back via the Williamsburg or Manhattan bridges. We made a left at the foot of the bridge, rode north until we saw another bridge, and turned towards it.

That’s where things got interesting. My husband rode up onto the sidewalk toward the bridge (so as to not be crossing the Manhattan bridge in the same lanes as the cars). I stayed on the street, because it looked like the sidewalk made a dead end a few hundred feet up. As I got closer and realized the sidewalk turned rather than ending, it seemed like a good idea to get on it. I didn’t quite turn my wheel parallel enough to the lip of the sidewalk, though, so instead of going up onto the sidewalk the front wheel of my bike slid along it for a moment before the bike went over, sending me bouncing along the pavement.

I threw out an arm to brace myself, and slammed into a dark green plywood wall, taking a bit of skin off my ankle along the way but otherwise unhurt. Then I stood up, shook myself off, and realized that my shoulder hurt. A lot. I did the visual — no bones sticking out, no bleeding — concluded I may have pulled a muscle but hadn’t broken anything, and leaned against my bike to catch my breath. At about this point, my husband came back to make sure I was okay.

“I’m okay,” I told him. “Just give me a minute.” A really weird thing started to happen. First my ears started to feel like I’d stuffed cotton in them, and everything sounded kind of far away. Then things started to get brighter. It was pretty sunny and bright out already, but the leaves on the trees started to look less green and more white, and the pavement was so bright it almost hurt to look at. I closed my eyes a few times, thinking that would make it go away. It didn’t.

“Everything’s getting brighter,” I told my husband. “I’m having trouble seeing.”

“Did you hit your head?” he asked.

I’m pretty sure I didn’t, but it happened really fast – one minute I was riding toward the sidewalk, the next minute my shoulder was slamming into the plywood.

“You’re okay,” he told me, and he decided we were going to go across the street to where it was shady. The walk across the street took forever. It was one of those big two-way streets, with an island in the middle. It took us an entire light to make it to the island. I could barely see anything – the whole world looked like one of those “turn to sketch” photoshop filters, where everything is black and white and drawn in crisp, bold outlines. Nothing that I was seeing made sense.

My husband made me wait for what seemed like an eternity on the traffic island, even though I didn’t see any cars going by, and other pedestrians were walking by us. I wanted to get off the street and somewhere I could sit down so much that I forced myself to focus. Colors started to appear again: the brilliant orange of the “don’t walk” sign, the green leaves of the trees in the shady area in front of us.

By the time we crossed the street and I sat down on a ledge, I could see again: the gray granite of the ledge, the faded brown of the benches, the orangey-brown of the wood chips around the bushes. It had probably been about five minutes from the time I fell off my bike, maybe ten. I can’t remember a scarier ten minutes in my life.

We sat for a little longer. I pulled a wipe out of the bag and cleaned the dirt and bike grease off my legs. It was enough to make me feel fully human again. Then we got back on the bikes, and rode back onto the sidewalk and over the Manhattan bridge. I rode so slowly on the way up that even the rollerbladers passed me, but I didn’t care. My ankle was still stinging, and my shoulder hurt, but that was nothing compared to the total terror I had felt a few minutes before.

On the way down the bridge, I smoked those rollerbladers.

“Your private New York”

On By BekkiIn Musings & Ramblings1 Comment

Tonight, I did something that absolutely terrifies me. I went out, in New York City, by myself.

Let me back up a bit. About a week ago, @amandapalmer hosted a discussion on twitter about going out alone. People were all over the spectrum, from “I’ve found some of my best friends by going out to events alone” to “movies, yes, dinner, no” to “I don’t go anywhere without my wubbie and at least ten friends.” But it got me thinking that it’s been forever since I’ve really gone out anywhere alone. I’ve been with my husband so long that if he’s not around, I don’t go out.

So tonight I decided to do something different. I found a 1920’s themed event going on at a bar in midtown and went.

Actually, that’s not quite true. I got all dressed up to go to the party at the bar in midtown. Then, about five minutes after I left my house, I got cold feet and went to the neighborhood bar instead. Where I sat at the bar with a glass of wine and nobody to talk to, feeling rather lonely, and decided I would got back to the house when my glass of wine was empty. And I would have, but then the bartender asked me where I was going, since I was obviously dressed for something, and I told her there was this jazz party, and her eyes lit up light I had the most exciting plans ever.

So I left the neighborhood bar and headed for the subway that would take me to the bar where the jazz party was, half intending to turn around and go back home the whole time, until I found myself at the subway. And even once I’d gotten on the subway, even once I’d found the bar where the party was, I was still tempted to go back home … worried that I wasn’t dressed right, that I wouldn’t find anybody to talk to, that I’d stand in a corner and feel silly.

As I was walking down the steps to the bar, though, a girl having a cigarette asked if I would bring a candle back in to the hostess. And said she loved my dress. And that with the candle I looked like the statue of liberty. And I thought to myself, this might be a good idea after all.

Which feeling lasted precisely until I got down the stairs and into the bar, where I saw that girl taking the cover charge had a pile of cash and no credit card reader. “Do you take cards?” I asked her.

“I think so,” she said. “Let me check with the guy who’s running this. I think he has the swipe thing.”

But he didn’t, and I, having transferred only a credit card and my drivers license to my going-out purse, had no cash and no way to get any. I sighed, and said thank you and I’m sorry and I should have brought cash. Then a remarkable thing happened. A random guy stepped up and said, “I’ll pay your cover charge.” And the girl collecting the money said, “I’ll pay half.”

So he paid my cover charge, and I bought him a drink, and then I met some really interesting people. Nobody asked for my number or asked to buy me a drink or asked me to go home with them. It was the New York I’d always wanted to be a part of, the New York I was sure was out there somewhere. It was, for the first time, my New York.

“Let’s Go Fly a Kite”

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Saturday, A and i went down to the kite festival in Wildwood. He got me into kites right after we started dating. The first time, I spent almost an hour just trying to get the kite off the ground. If you ever tried to fly a kite as a kid, you probably remember the intense frustration of running around in circles holding the kite while somebody else held onto the string and shouted directions at you. It was like that, except that stunt kites take off from the ground, and you get it into the air not by holding it and praying the wind picks it up but by waiting for a good gust and pulling the right way on the string.

Then I got it up into the air – and spent the next hour or so crashing it. Eventually, A took pity on me and we went home, but not before I’d caught a taste of the kite bug. We tried to keep a kite or two in the car, and when he sent me a care package while I was in Den Haag, he packed a kite.

Last year he discovered the kite festival in Wildwood, almost by happenstance, and we went and had an incredible day. This year, we both made sure we were off work for it. There seemed to be less kites this year than last, perhaps because the wind was a bit light. Still, it picked up enough toward the end that I had to work to keep the Flexis in the air and myself on the ground.

Then today, it was brilliantly, wonderfully, summer-y hot, so I made snickerdoodle ice-cream. Recipe to follow if it turns out well.

& I’m not gonna live my life on one side of an ampersand

On By BekkiIn Musings & RamblingsLeave a comment

The house is a catastrophe of shoes, a mad explosion, as if all week we have been running in and taking them off, kicking them into corners and against furniture, only to grab a different pair on our way back out the door. Weeks like this, the house becomes less a refuge and more a way-point: fridge barren, plants screaming to be watered, laundry like a river in flood surging past the banks of its basket. It is like this with children, I suspect, only more so.

***

This was intended to be a longer post, but the day went by in a blur, as sunny Sundays tend to do, and the time I had planned for blogging seems to have fallen away.

I’ll leave you with this thought. I’ve been reconnecting with people I knew when I was sixteen, people I haven’t spoken to in years. What I find fascinating isn’t how much they’ve changed. Rather, it’s how much of ourselves has already settled by the time we are sixteen, so that in talking to someone I knew so very long ago it’s almost possible to make believe it’s only one summer that has gone by.

Friendships are a funny thing. They are more like weeds than garden-flowers, surviving untended and unloved for years at a stretch, existing in the in-between places. And sometimes, they burst brightly and unexpectedly into bloom, setting entire fields ablaze in color.