Category: Musings & Ramblings

“To You I Bestow”

On By BekkiIn Musings & Ramblings2 Comments

December 31, last day of the year.  Such an arbitrary date.  It would be much for sensical for the calendar to begin again at the spring solstice, when the days balance and the light begins to overtake the dark.  When the world begins to wake after the long winter’s sleep.  But we are where we are, and having not yet been appointed benevolent overlord of the universe, I can’t order the calendar to shift.

Instead, I give you a wish for the new year.

May you find something that has been lost.  Because often, those things that are lost or forgotten along the way are the ones that mean the most to us, even if they have been gone so long we don’t even remember what it is that we are missing.  And may you discover something new, something wonderful, something nobody has ever thought of or dreamed up or imagined before.  But most of all, may you find joy, and someone to be joyous with, and something to be joyful for.

“The Candy Man Can”

On By BekkiIn Musings & Ramblings2 Comments

My birthday ended up something of a bust this year, as it so often is.  Personally, I blame December.  Between snowstorms and the flu and Christmas break…  This year it was the end of the year push at work that did me in. My husband got me a wonderful chocolate cake, but when you’re coming home after midnight to blow our the candles, it looses something.

I decided to make up for it this weekend by making Oreo cookie cupcakes.  Recipe after the break.

Continue reading ““The Candy Man Can”” →

“No Light, No Light”

On By BekkiIn Musings & RamblingsLeave a comment

I feel as though I’ve finally been inducted into the ranks of actual writers now that I’ve received my first rejection.  He was rather sweet about it, kindly offering up sandwich style criticism and a sincere-sounding hope that another agent would find it more to their taste.  Not that it didn’t sting, but it was a kinder and gentler let down than I suspect is the norm.

The whole auction process felt strangely like being back in a freshman level writing workshop. There’s the part where you, the immature writer, gamely attempt to coalesce the whirling ideas in your head into story.  There’s the part where the rest of the class reads it, and doesn’t get it, and then proceeds to give you feedback in the form of variations on what the girl who went first said.  And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the part you’ve been holding your breath for all class, the part where the instructor tells you what he thinks, because let’s face it, he’s the only person whose opinion you really care about anyway, and he says it’s not a bad attempt at characterization and moves on to the next story.

I’m still not sure what to do with the feedback I got.  Most of it revolved around a suggestion an early commentator made about not liking the scene as a flashback.  Which would be fair enough if it was a flashback, but it’s not.  It’s more like a prologue.  This is the story the character tells herself about who – and why – she is.  It’s what she’d tell you if it were late at night, and she’d had more to drink than she should, and you asked her why she looked so sad all of a sudden.  It’s structured the way it is because I want the reader to carry this memory with them throughout the book.  It should be something that they don’t forget – something they cant’ forget – because she doesn’t.

Whether or not that works as a structure point, or a plot point, or a literary device, or a whatever you want to call it is still up in the air.  But it frustrates me that the bulk of the feedback I got was on a point which, in my mind, is moot.

As for the rest of it… The skew of both the entries that got bids and those that didn’t as well as the comments I got made me realize something I hadn’t really thought of before.  The agent matters.  It’s not merely a process in looking through profiles and choosing someone who’s represented authors I like or someone I’d want to have a cup of tea with.  It’s finding the person who’s looking for the type of fiction I’m writing.  Because that’s the person who’s going to ask to read more.

For the curious, the link to the auction page is here.  And if you’ve read this far and are interested in more, I’m still looking for beta readers.

love is a dangerous angel

On By BekkiIn Musings & RamblingsLeave a comment

This was going to be the post about going to meet the husband’s friends from work at the Gramercy and why I love the secret places inside restaurants and hotels.  Not to mention that I still owe you my take on the Baker’s Dozen auction and the fate of my novel.  It’ll have to wait.

I left work early tonight and slipped downstairs to the Barnes and Noble, where I did something I haven’t done in a long time.  I grabbed a book off the shelf and read it.  The whole thing, all of it, at once, in about two hours.

I used to do this fairly often – I’d devour a new novel in an afternoon, or I’d go into Half-Price while I was waiting for my husband to get off work and find myself most of the way through a book by the time they turned the lights off and kicked me out.  I haven’t done it in a while, though, not like this.  Reading this book was like a mad, desperate, frantic grasping that left me battered.  Stunned.

There are two things you should know before you start thinking you wished you could go through an entire book in a few hours.  The first is that you miss things.  I don’t mind this, so much.  It means that each time I read a book there are new details for me to find.  It makes each reading new.  The second thing is that my brain works differently when I read like that.  It’s so busy processing information that everything else stops.  Time compresses in on itself, like I’m going through life at 1.5 speed, so that my sense of time is rendered meaningless.  My focus narrows in to what I am reading and only what I am reading.  I don’t hear the conversations around me, the Christmas music blasting from the speaker above my head.  I exist between one turn of the page and the next.

When it is over, when I have turned the last page and closed the cover,   I feel as though I’m on some sort of drunk.  I struggle to make sense of the real world – the stairs down to the subway, the traffic lights on the walk home.  It seems far away from what I’ve read – unconnected.  In the end, I’m left with a new room in the back of my head, as though someone emptied out a week’s worth of memories into me while I was sleeping.

The book, by the way, was Lauren Oliver’s Before I Fall.  I highly recommend it.

Autumnal

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The city has been reluctant to let go of summer.  The subway tunnels are mid-July stifling, and the trains and busses are still running the AC.  Even the weather cooperated this past weekend, giving us one last chance at shorts and tank tops.  But the trees along my block are starting to shed their leaves, and the mercury has dropped back into the 50’s. The only saving grace is that the shorter days mean more afternoon sun spilling in through my office windows.

It doesn’t feel like I’ve been here a year.  I’ve barely gotten to know my own neighborhood, let alone the city.  And while I can blame some of that on the hours I work, and some of it on the immensity if the city itself, for the most part I’ve been lazy about exploring what’s out there.

I don’t want this to be my city, you see.  I don’t want to claim any sort of ownership over the cracked and bleeding streets, the masses that jostle and shove into subways and busses and office buildings.  When I come back from vacation I want it to be to a city that missed me, not one that flicks its cigarette butt in my direction and mutters “so you’re back again are you,” out of the corner of its mouth.

But it is here that we have landed, among the sirens and the helicopters and the occasional Mexican preacher, all blending together into the white noise that is the closest New York comes to silence.  It is almost home.