January 08, 2009
2009 RESOLUTIONS
One could call 2008 -- The Year Of The Protracted Novel. Alleluiah for microfiction and my Hot Pants friends and my online hideaway that I can drop into and write at moment's notice.
2008 was also the year of getting well, of finding what it would take to have a clear unfuzzy head--out of which arose a sidestep into a couple of MLM businesses--Therapeutic-Grade Essential Oils and Lifewave Patches. Started off doing it for no reason at all and then I began to earn some money which I didn't mind at all. Most of which I have spent, so far, on friends who wanted to use the same products and could not afford it. Good balance to sitting in front of a computer.
Currently reading: Andre Dubus 3 -- Garden of Last Days.
Also on the 'bedside' table: Malcolm Gladwells Outliers, the latest Agni, Atul Gawande's A Surgeon's Notes on Performance, Steven Millhauser Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories...and more
Last finished: Russell Banks The Reserve
Upcoming fiction publications: Online Writing: The Best of the First Ten Years and Action, Yes
Posted by girija tropp at 10:08 PM | Permalink
April 13, 2008
MORE GREAT MOVIES -- DOCOS
When you're recovering from a cold/flu and you've exhausted all the DVD store has to offer and you don't want to watch any old mindless thing, here are a couple of lovely choices... or maybe the second one is not best described as lovely.
Today, I read more of Rumi from The Soul of Rumi by Coleman Barks while it rained and poured and gloomed outside.
Posted by girija tropp at 08:53 PM | Permalink
March 08, 2007
IN LOS ANGELES WITH ONE WEEK LEFT TO GO
If you want to read a detailed account of happenings at the AWP head over to the Emerging Writers Network blog.
I returned from Atlanta last Saturday, late in the night. The return flight was the sort one hopes to avoid - disembarking from the American Airlines flight in Dallas because of engine fuel problems. I got out of the queue waiting for technicians to fix the problem and waited for another flight later on that evening. As I hung out on the airport lounge, I read a wonderful story from the latest Agni - must-read is fiction by Michael Mejia - Report to Ito Sadohara, Head of Tuna, Uokai, Ltd., to the Ministry of Commerce, Regarding Recent Events in the Domestic Fishing Industry AND William Pierce wonderful article that follows.
Our panel, Online Fiction: Words Across The World, worked out quite well. It was great to see some familiar faces in the audience and to find the room fairly full. The writers who co-presented were people I'd collaborated with for so many years -- I met them for the first time the day before.
Before I left Los Angeles, Angela helped me read my story properly. I was surprised at the difference she made. I fell in love with my story all over again. Angela Garcia Coombs is directing the play, Missouri Waltz by Karen Black at the Blank Theatre in Los Angeles in May. Look out for it.
Also amazing for me at the AWP was the row upon row of wonderful magazines and their editors. I checked out magazines that had caught my attention in the past year and collected a few that I fed ex-ed back to LA. How am I getting them back home?
At the moment, I am staying in Los Angeles, in Hollywood, with Angela. I have even, with her help, started a screeplay. She is a great teacher! This is an unexpected turn of events. If you had told me last year that I would be writing a screenplay or that I would be staying in Hollywood...
Tomorrow, we drive up the coast road to San Franscisco at a leisurely pace. In Santa Cruz, we'll have a cup of coffee with Jevin who I met during my last trip, in New Orleans - I went there because I was a finalist in the William Faulkner Awards and got way more than I expected, meeting Pia Eardhart and being introduced to that wonderful city.
Friday afternoon, we'll have lunch with magazine editors, Angela and I met in Belize - what a wonderful trip that was. Then we'll be in the hands of Angela's brother. More later...
Posted by girija tropp at 03:11 PM | Permalink
December 20, 2006
PRE-XMAS IN MY BACKYARD
We don't celebrate so I am extra attuned to all the frantic activity. I am flat out in a different way. My oldest son worked a 96 hr week. I've been cooking meals for the workers at the commercial kitchen and when I get a chance, I escape to our wonderful cafe, Sustenance, at the corner of Brunswick and Johnston, taking my laptop with me. I seem to be working on about 4 stories at once... I think it has to do with all this floating around. When I am needed, I pop behind the counter and serve customers but I get decent chunks of time to write, looking past the photographs on the wall and the pot plants onto the busy street where I can see the Buddha from the cafe windows reflected on the passing trams. Every now and then, I get talking to people. Some great people walk in those doors. Some of them writers. Most often readers. And I promise to update my blog with recommendations. Which I am doing right now.
To start off, I'll point to an article in the Boston Glove by Sven Birkerts titled A book and its cover The work of fiction in the age of blockbuster publishing -- I love Sven's articles -- and I have mentioned this before when talking about the editorial intro to each Agni (he is the editor there).
Next: I've finally finished reading The O'Henry Prize Stories 2006. The first story, Old Boys and Old Girls by Edward P Jones is stunning. My sixteen year old started reading it and the book went missing -- I spent quite a while looking for it because I believed that I was the only one in this house who was in love with short fiction -- but it turned out that the anthology had taken off on a tram ride with my son. I loved almost all the stories in here. My favorites being the one already mentioned and Wolves by Susan Fromberg Schaeffer. The concept of David Lawrence Morse's Conceived, I discussed with a screenwriter I met in LA on my recent trip to the States. He was talking about a dream and how it might work as a story and off I went on my favorite subject. Now I am thinking, as I do, about the novels by these authors, The Known World (Jones), The Snow Fox (Schaeffer).
I am not sure what I am going to read next. I still haven't finished the fiction issue of The Atlantic Monthly that I bought when I was in New Orleans. Plus I will be finishing those stories I started. My microfiction does not seem to want to stay small. Pre-trip, it would take months before some of these would want to grow but not so at the moment.
In the meantime, tomorrow is going to be a scorcher and I suggested spearmint and apple juice tea for the cafe, with crushed ice. So I should probably make sure they've got supplies. And Glenn will be coming soon to drive the trailer to the Queen Vic Market for the summer festival there every Wednesday. I am not sure that I am going into town to write but my youngest wants to get to the bank and he wants to know if I'll pick him up from the movies. I told him that I headed home from the cafe at about 9.30 last night but today... I should manage to get more reading and a bit more writing together with the chores. And I promised my sister....
Posted by girija tropp at 10:13 PM | Permalink
September 10, 2006
FINALIZING THE GETAWAY / PREPARING TO TRAVEL TO THE US AND CENTRAL AMERICA
I am blessed by online writing friends and our projects. Even though my days are about lists and doing all the things that I'd put under the carpet for one day, I have been buoyed by daily microfic writing schedule... well, maybe I miss a day here and there.
Void has up my Protein For Brains.
And great news: The story Rockpools from Southword has been selected for Best Australian Stories 2006. Wonderful!
If you live in New York mark this date, Sunday, September 24th, 7 pm, in red for my reading in New York:
Sunday, September 24th, 7 pm: Mad Hatters' Review will be ABC No Rio's featured literary journal. The grant-funded reading, hosted by poet Bruce Weber, will feature Carol Novack, associate editor Elizabeth Smith, and Issue 4 contributor Girija Tropp. The Lower East Side venue is at 156 Rivington Street.
I am flying out this coming Thusday in the most convoluted fashion. Looking at my schedule, one might be forgiven for thinking that it is part of a grand plan to stay in the air as long as possible.
I had my girlfriend Rita come and help me pack. If she said the word 'Hot' it went in the suitcase. Today, I'll have to cull (except for anything that's really HOT).
Itineary: Melbourne - Auckland - Los Angeles. One days break. Los Angeles - New York. Arrive late in the evening with the intention of a sultry date with JFK airport (why else would anyone say all those terrible things about that airport?). After a 6 hr layover, New York - Belize where I'll be spending a week at the Zoetrope Workshop run by Robert Olen Butler and David Bezmoggis (author of Natasha and other stories) and the editor of the magazine.
A week later, I'll fly to New York and land in Carol Novack's place early in the morning, like 1 or 2 am... good thing she lives up late. That evening, we will be at the ABC No Rio where I will endeavour to be coherently Australian.
These last few weeks have been about lists. Reading material for the first leg of my flight:The New Yorker, Wired, Poets and Writers, Gish Jen's Love Wife.
MORE: Stuff I think is cool: This artist Alison Elizabeth Taylor
Note: Comments have been disabled for the two months I will be away from home.
Posted by girija tropp at 03:44 PM | Permalink
August 14, 2006
IN AUGUST WE TRUST
Today needs to be recorded in my diary as the day when I thought that I wouldn't be able to write a word but found myself adding my daily (which has become every-other-daily) quota to current novel. I am surprised, given the number of extra tasks that I have to take on for the family business, that the novel keeps accumulating.
A week ago, I decided on a moratorium on social events. Yes, I said, this will not do. All social engagements have to be organized around other necessary activities ( for example, excercise) so all those catch-ups had to be during walks. That went by the wayside because when one is flat-out busy, the time to unwind cannot be pre-planned--it gets taken when it can.
Movies to see: Don't Come Knocking the film from Wim Wenders (also see photos and interview in the summer Zoetrope All-Story). The Australian film Jindabyne was extremely good (except for the music which called attention to itself) based as it was on the Raymond Carver short story, So Much Water So Close To Home. Finally, a wonderful debut film Brick, from director Rian Johnson, a kind of noir mystery, screenshots like panels from a graphic novel.
Seen in Carlton bookshop READINGS: Copies of Agni 63 on the shelves. If you did not know they were there, you do now and if you live in Melbourne, you do not have any excuse now not to go and check it out. Great introduction by Sven Birkerts--I always feel, reading his intros, as if I am sitting inside his head and looking out. Also seen was the new issue of wet ink, a magazine of new writing from Adelaide. Check this one out as well -- it is bound to please (plus they have a poetry comp).
Read recently: An article from William T Vollman in the online Poets&Writers where he talks about 'writing with integrity, bending genres, and humanizing the villains'. Absorbing reading. As is this article here, Leaping the Abyss -- Stephen Hawking on black holes, unified field theory, and Marilyn Monroe -- that I found while I was doing some research for my current novel.
Aside from all of this, I have been perusing maps of the US, realizing that any mental pictures I might have made, any geographical maps based on novels read, might not be the full information. Four weeks from now, I leave for the US to write/collaborate/meet writers and friends, to do readings in New York and Boston and perhaps in Greenwood (?), as well as attend the Words and Music Festival in New Orleans (remember I mentioned being finalist for the Faulkner Awards for the novel).
Busy busy busy.
Posted by girija tropp at 09:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
August 06, 2006
NEWS, READS, PUBLISHED AND MORE
I got my copy of SOUTHWORD with my story in it and was tickled to find it labelled - New Writing from Ireland. Lovely story by Colm Toibin in it. Go and buy and read. Lovely collection.
There is also Sleeping Fish with lots of wonderful work with writers Doug Martin, Kim Chinquee, Cooper Esteban/Renner, Liesl Jobson and more. What a lovely website.
In other news, two of my stories are now online at Gambara. Three other will complete a kind of folio in the printed collection of fiction which is come out around March 2007.
Looking forward to: One of my stories coming out in The Mississipi Review Prose Poem Issue this fall. Kim Chinquee also has some work in there.
Towards the end of last week, I was trolling through a google of my name looking for urls to online work and lo and behold, I discovered that I was a finalist in the The William Faulkner Awards for the Novel 2006.
Since I have been blessed with manna recently by my Josephine Ulrick Award win, I thought this was a marvellous opportunity to go travelling to the Words and Music Festival in New Orleans. I will be catching up with fellow writers (oh what a joy) and doing readings in New York, Boston and other places. Have to tune up the speaking voice! In the meantime, I am perusing maps of the United States.
Must Read List:
Utahna Faith's SISTER in Salome
Hmm... where are all my must-reads! I'll come back later and post more.
Posted by girija tropp at 03:30 PM | Permalink
July 12, 2006
UP AND ABOUT IN QUEENSLAND, BEING MADE A FUSS OF
The adventure starts with the taxi driver in Melbourne. Hal is with me since we've been given two return flights and accomodation. He's wondering if can slip in a 'partners' speech. Me, I am too busy with my new contact lenses. I've been meaning to try them out before D-day, been busy working on the novel, and know that I will regret this decision.
When I get up to read my story, knees trembling, vision impaired, and put on the reading glasses that go with these lenses, the text begins to swim. The thing perched on my nose becomes a microscope and the paper looks like a petri dish, convexed at the edges. But I am getting ahead of myself. The taxi driver. The first of the natural storytelling taxi drivers I will meet.
His grandfather was a political activist and fled Mussolini and came to Melbourne. This is the only place that would take 'wogs' and therefore we are a cultural melting pot, cosmopolitan, special. We agree with him, tell him our news. He says that he has taken four authors to the airport in his taxi-driving life, an after-retirement. His driving is a little erratic, over the white median strip. The heating blasts up in my face.
Hal had to get up early to make sure we could get away. Yesterday was production day at the Vegie Curry Man kitchens and this morning was cakes and muesli. The cab driver used to sell muesli bars. He had a big customer base. He talks about racial prejudices. How there are bad and good Lebanese. They were difficult to sell to but, he says proudly, he knew how. All he had to say was Joe-around-the-corner bought from him. Hal gets a customer call on the mobile and we fall silent for a minute.
It is cold in Melbourne. I am rugged up in a feather jacket; planning to stay a few extra weeks with a friend who lives a few hour north of the Gold Coast, to test out my theory that it is easier to write when I am warm. I am planning on a writing spree after the awards ceremonies are over.
I haven't travelled in yonks and when we are airborne, I check out the clouds as if selecting fleece for export. I can tell the difference between clouds. It isn't long before we are starving. The day before has been a full production day and everyone has been up early to make getting away possible. Owning a food manufacturing company means we have become allergic to junk. Hal gets a white bread sandwich on the plane and turns it over in his hands saying that he has not had one of these in thirty years. Everyone else seems to be getting into the grog. I also come to know that it does not take long to get to Coolangata airport in Queensland.
We stare at the blue sky, walk to the beach and turn around to get ready for the awards dinner. The architecture here is not what I expected. It looks temporary. The place is totally geared towards holidaymakers. Service industry. And then we are there and I meet so many amazing people. MTC Cronin who is the poetry judge will become a friend. We are both to discover a shared love of prose poems. There is Frank Moorhouse, fiction judge and Win Shubert who is the force behind the prize. Nigel Krauth who is the chairman of the judging panel. And many more. All the cats are out to literary party.
Some things I could have done better: Prepped a proper thank-you when I get up to talk ( told only as I am eating at the awards dinner that I am up in 5 to read my story--haven't got it, I bleat, but a comp copy without any red pen is handed to me -- which was surprising because I kept wanting to edit as I read).
As I said before, I am using my new contact lenses with new reading glasses which makes for a fish bowl effect. I lean on the lectern to hold myself up and allow myself to swim in a relaxed fashion throught the words.
Nathan Shepardson, the poetry winner, is a treat. I love the poem he reads. His father is a painter, well-known around here, and when Win Shubert who is the 'mother' of the Josephine Ulrick literature award, invites me to her gallery, I make every effort to go visit before heading north. And get a look at Nathan's dad's paintings. All of which is incredibly wow!
Here's a link to an brief mention of the evening on a Griffith Uni news webpage.
The day before we left the Gold Coast and the afternoon of a second reading that had been organized at Griffith's university we (Frank Moorhouse and Inez Baranay, Hal and I) went to the 77th story of the Q building and saw the coastline for miles. I fantasized about what it would be like to have a writing studio up there.
I am going to be staying on a couple of weeks with my friend Kristina to write in the warmth. We get a lift up to Margie's place in Melanie. After Hal leaves to get back (Market Day on Saturday at St Andrews), I come back in the second week and the view from their their house-that-Jack-built is still amazing. We gaze over to the dam and down towards a hidden valley and up to a distant roll of mountains. Their place is designed by an award-winning brother. Tall ceilings, recycled materials, wood and glass, paintings on the wall. A Drysdale. He's a ceramicist, Margie explains as if that explains everything and tells me how she came to own it, a story full of falling in love and laybys and guilty secrets till she finally had to own up to needing the dollars to pay it off. After the night of the awards on the Gold Coast, each day has been one of a kind.
I am staying with Kristina in Eumundi and from the house there is a vast lawn that stretches from one lot of palm trees to the stand behind which the forest rises, impenetrable. I have never been to Queensland before. I am sold.
Two weeks later and I am sitting in the sun. I have dragged a wicker chair onto a vast bowl of a lawn, moving it when the shadows of the palm trees shift around. Kristina is transcribing a phone conference so it is easier for me to be out of the house and I am not complaining. Something has shifted for me in this month. I've had a realization about holding creative tension and not letting it dissipate. So you could say the flow is flowing. Not that I am going to have the two chapters under my belt, only one, and this will need to be transcribed onto the computer, edited as well in the process. But my direction is clearer. And I'm having a marvellous time chatting with Kristina who is a storyteller (fodder for novel no. 3 when it happens). No. 3 has a couple of chapters already written and quite a few other pieces to be worked on and slotted in. Realist fiction unlike my current project.
After I've finished writing, and had a bowl of stewed fruit because I don't want to lunch yet, I sit in the bedroom because the sun has discovered it and read the Harpers I brought with me. I've already finished the Mary Gaitskill story which is why I bought the mag. Then I discover an excerpt from a book by Christian Bok. It was recommended to me by one of the writers in a collaborative project on the Zoetrope site. I am loving it and decide to put Bok on my must-have list.
There is another author I am reading, prolific, recommended but her writing is very blah. I am going to keep on reading. Maybe [Edit: I didn't] Not my cup of tea.
When I get back to Melbourne, I've got a to-do list. I've been collecting cards, especially at the awards night. I figured out at last that I'd seen Margie (MTC Cronin's) writing around. She's got a book coming out from Ravenna Press. But the books of poetry that I got from her have dissappeared. Another to-do -- find the poetry books.
When I left Melbourne, I planned to do a lot of writing on my novel, post-Awards Night and ended up with a quarter of my projected outcome. However, the two weeks have allowed me to come up with some conceptual views for the novel. Kristina is a natural story-teller and I did a lot of listening for novel 3.
In general, I am recovering and getting settled back in Melbourne ( I got bit by a bug in Qld and the wound hasn't got quite healed yet -- made my skin swell on the flight back and I started to cough white froth). This trial was balanced by some wonderful emails in my Inbox telling me that a few of my stories had been accepted for publication.
There were other challenges; my writing space had been appropriated by the biz. I did lots of mantras and deep breathing. As a result, I've found that what I have ended up with is my old writing space back. The whole of the office, in exchange for part of the large living room into which the biz office has moved. We are getting bigger rapidly with one customer and unless we have more customers, infrastructure expense can't be justified.
In conclusion: I want this experience repeated for the rest of my life and I don't mind it getting bigger and better. Quite apart from a few cases of foot-in-mouth disease which I am sure will get ironed out if I have more chances to interact socially with other writers!
Posted by girija tropp at 07:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
May 08, 2006
And What Have I Been Doing Lately
CLICK CLICK
eScene pick Bollywood Times Series 23
Void's Notable Picks Click on Fiction / Notable Stories / Scroll down to April (Sorry, I should have pointed this one out last month!)
AND OTHER ARTICLES OF INTEREST
From Poets and Writers THE CONTESTER: The Long and Short of Story Awards
And from the same magazine a list from AM Homes about the books music and film that inspired during the creation of a book. Notes with self-satisfaction, the David Hockney pool painting ref (I blogged earlier about my son's art life inspiring my writing life).
Farout reading discovered while researching for my novel. The Naked Man festival. This is very funny.
Other weird things: Some of my magazine subscriptions are arriving much later than usual because it looks like someone is opening them and reading before sending them on. Should I consider this another strike for literature, or be irritated?
Posted by girija tropp at 04:13 PM | Permalink
April 16, 2006
Moving Forward Without Signposts and Guidelines
Quarter way through this second novel and I remember that this is the place I got stuck in Hibiscus Airport. Can't imagine it happening again but I did pause to consider the possibility. I rework and edit as I go which is supposed to be a no-no for a first draft, but I am going to try it this way, this time. And it will either work or it won't and I'll learn something out of it. I'm also going to drag a synopsis out of the novel-in-progress to use for my Lit Board funding application. I've missed a day or two of the daily writing routine from time to time and found it so hard to get back into the flow that I've vowed to avoid such breaks. So here I am, sick as a dragon, putting in my daily quota.
My sister, an alternative health practitioner, has been over to support us all--the whole family of dragons are in a bad way. I'd finished shoving some words together and had stopped for a mo and laid aside my laptop on the couch when she arrived. She put oils in my aura and gave me an Indian head massage, and a rainbow drop therapy for my son who had a bronchial wheeze and lent me her oil diffuser. She fixed the rest of the household and left with the cakes that had been leftover from the St Andrews market, a berry and almond tart, a pear and chocolate cake.
I felt like going to see a film to distract myself from bodily ailments but only if I had a magic carpet to take me there. Saw Dear Wendy. the Lars Von Trier film, on DVD last night and it was superb, arthouse. For action and thrills, we saw Inside Man on the big screen on cheap movie night Tuesday. You'd think it was the usual cops and robbers but it had great dialogue, some cool action, the usual star actors, and unusual secondary characters.
Friday night was passover and one of my mother-in-law's friends, a painter, told me she'd read one of my stories and that it read like a postmodern painting. It took me a while to work out that she was referring to the story, Twilight Sky Things Go Bump In The Night in last year BAS. Needless to say, she made my evening.
On another high note, my story Rockpools has just been accepted for the June issue of Southword, magazine of the Munster Literature Centre, and yet another one, microfiction, Man and Dog, to one of my favorite online magazines, Smokelong Quarterly, for their next issue.
I am not even sure if this blog entry is going to be interesting reading--coming as it does at the end of a hard day of illness, writing, and cooking for a family of dragons. Anyway, I promise to do better next time and plan to put together another of those wonderful discussions from a Zoetrope online room. Stay tuned on the blogosphere.
Posted by girija tropp at 10:13 PM | Permalink
April 02, 2006
The Road Well Travelled, The Novelist Hard at Work
We went to see V for Vendetta this evening (good movie); my son watched The Proposition on DVD (great movie); it will be Monday tomorrow and autumn; the mornings are chilly making it difficult to roll out of bed and into the novel. I'd also like to see Tristan and Isolde--if I can find some time, so I guess that's on the maybe list.
Clickables:
A new off-the-wall piece in elimae that will take a short minute to read In the Quiet, Don Quixote. Kim Chinquee has also a couple of lovely pieces in here.
Another thing thou must do is vote at Million Writers Award Notable Stories of 2005 The top ten stories have been announced and Pia Ehrdhart's Famous Fathers is in there. This week when I can scratch the time together I'll be reading through the list!
I have been steadily adding to my novel. However there's been a lot happening--the addition of a new laptop and a new screen and a network so I can send stuff to different printers. And troubleshooting! Howsa writer supposed to write in the midst of this muck?
By getting up at 4 am and reaching for the laptop.
I have made use of many of the methods suggested by the different writers in the discussion presented in my last entry. I find myself changing tactics. I am really enjoying the creation of this novel in a way that is different to the last one. I think I am willing for my first draft to 'feel' imperfect. And to carry on in the dark as the prose turns out totally different to how I imagined it.
I am now 3/4 into Louise Erdrich's novel The Painted Drum and I'm loving it. She did take a chance with all those first person narrators. Fabulous read even though I'm taking a long time to finish it.
One of the books I've taken off my bookshelf is The Writing Experiment by Hazel Smith. I like it. I like using it to warm up. It doesn't really add to my novel in any way but I can use some of the language experiments when I'm stuck; building text from word. Reading it makes me realize how I have come to use some of its strategies in writing by flailing in the dark all these years. However reading about the process does not bring me greater amounts of exciting prose but serves as an 'aha' experience. It also informs me that there seems to be a science to what I have discovered with all that moaning in the dark.
Posted by girija tropp at 10:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)
March 12, 2006
What one does when one is not doing the novel
I'm actually doing amazing stuff given all that's going on around here. I had all my notes to hand but only crafted a little more on what I had last week. I have a strong idea in my head about where this novel is going but the actual doing of it is as if I've never written one before.
So to close the day, I went to Zoetrope to see what my friends were doing and where they have been pubbed lately and here's a site link via Susan Henderson. I put a link to one of my stories up there. But there are lots lots more. Go forth and read.
Posted by girija tropp at 11:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
March 07, 2006
Is there ever a best time to start anything, A Novel
I started my novel last Sunday. I had the house to myself and everything went splendidly. Good clean prose, I said to myself. At least, until the day after. This one has been waiting in line to be written and is flowing out the keyboard. However, this month is so busy with the family business that I have been pressed into service. I'm finding it hard to write with two hours sleep, after that initial Sunday. But I'm committed to pushing words around without missing a day. I am looking forward, however, to my usual writing schedule.
The excercises that I invented are working marvels for the long form. It is harder to pull everything together and I have paper everywhere. Wish I had a laptop. But then I'd have to sacrifice the latest and the bestest!
My first novel does take me away from time to time. I discovered last week that I had a repeated chapter. The software InDesign works well to pull my completed manuscript together. The version I use is fairly buggy and I need to update it soon... and I will. But it is way better than Word which keeps changing my formatting at will. Most people might not have this problem but as a designer, I have various different fonts that float around everywhere. I've set up styles and named them etc but they don't behave the way they should.
I like to use a particular font for a body of work. With my first novel, it was American Garamond. But I'm now over that and I'm using Americana. Of course, when I send stuff out, I change the entire thing into something conventional like Georgia and this does well for web transmission. But never Times New Roman. Just looking at that font makes me dry up. I like Futura as well. I enjoy picking up books that are set in an unusual but readable type. And I like the way certain publishing houses like Knopf layout their books. Zoetrope All-Story, the magazine, sets the stories in unusual ways--there is always an invited guest designer in every issue. Black Warrior Review that I read for the first time some months ago, was also a treat to hold in the hand, and look at, before getting into the serious business of reading. I can tell from the cover art if I'm going to enjoy a book and I'm rarely wrong. I'm so good at this that my husband sets me onto the library shelves as if releasing a hound to the scent of good fiction.
And I saw, while surfing, a few weeks ago that Frederic Busch had died. And was saddened. Night Inspector was a fabulous novel. There is something about his writing that is so intense.
So that is it for now... tomorrow, back to the novel but first, I'll have to put in a day's work. Soon, I'll have my perfect writing days back. Also, I'm turning off Comments for the duration of my next novel first draft.
Posted by girija tropp at 11:36 PM | Permalink
February 18, 2006
A real writer knows how to get on top of the desk
Sometimes it happens. The desk looks like a storage facility. I've been planning to start work on my next opus in March. On my mental planning worksheet, I'd intended to get a few things done and under the carpet by now, like the GST (quaterly tax on pencil on paper and nibs and so on), stock-up on household goods so that no one would ask me to go down to the supermarket to get toothpaste when I was in the middle of serving a character their just desserts, be nice to everyone so that they can forgive me later--by making them 3-course meals right now, eat icecream, write lots of microfiction because my short-shorts will have to take second place soon, plus of course, clear that desk.
First, I have to clear around the desk, and that is when I notice how my bookshelves are filled with the books I was going to read two years ago. This is the reason all the books I intend to read now are still on the table--there is also the stash that I was going to read yesterday over there in the corner next to the coffee table that I bought from Nipoon. It's one of those art pieces that I could afford only because I knew Nipoon and his wife Namonita. (I tried to put these two names in a story and it didn't work out).
So I decide that the books on my shelves should go in the corner and those in the corner should go on my shelves and some could go on the 'donate' pile. While I am doing this I open my drawer--and find, ohoh, all the notes and stuff that I used when I was stuck on my last oeuvre. I read them through and most of is like reading about someone going off to the crusades.
While I am doing this I have a call from one of the Vegie Curry Man stalls saying that I need to bring up the sign they've left behind; pronto! Luckily, after some deliberation, it is sorted--Shani from the Chai Tent can divert here and pick it up. Meanwhile the 16-yr-old son of this writer is lying in bed groaning about his headache--why doesn't he learn about keeping tidy hours and eating properly? It seems to me at this point that I should clean out the whole house, or at least start on it, because who knows when I'll be able to be a downtrodden mat again!
I manage to empty out my bottom drawer and throw out a few story iterations (what's my secondary storage hard drive for anyway, but to store more effectively in triplicate, so I never have to look at old versions... and rest in the comfort of knowing that they are there, mouldering quietly in space).
My favorite non-writing magazine, Wired, goes at the bottom of a pile beside me. I add--Bomb, a few issues of the New Yorker and Harpers (issues with favorite writers). It's hard to move books into the corner pile because I am tempted to read as I go. I rescue a Granta (Truth & Lies). A few other Granta books try to come for the ride. And here is a Richard Brautigan, Watermelon Sugar that I scored from Amazon about 14 yrs ago because a critiquing partner said my prose was somewhat similar (at that time).
I realize that I have only got 3/4 way through a BASS 2005. Got stuck on the Stuart Dybek story 'Breasts' My husband loved it but I waded... So I put the '05 and '06 versions together with the O Henry Prize Awards 06 that I got only recently. I throw out my old journals, the workbooks, the visual diaries, my final year project in multimedia design.
I lie on the floor and consider what-next. Already 5 pm and no writing has been done--this hasn't happened in yonks and I feel as if I've got out of bed on the wrong side. Since I rolled off the mattress at an ungodly hour--my husband woke to do the St Andrews market gig at 4.30 am and my eighteen-yr-old eldest son got up at 6am to do the Sustainable Living Festival at Federation Square--I heard him sprinting from the gas tanks to the refridgerated van to the commercial kitchen; in and around the garden to the storage rooms and back into the house, door slamming slamming slamming, I haven't stopped a moment, inbetween doing my writing and fixing up stuff for the business during my 'breaks', yet I feel I'm not enough--otherwise why would I feel let down by my efforts?
The next day, I say this to the person who comes to do cleaning in the Vegie Curry Man kitchen, who shall remain nameless--because he is an important poet in the community and his peers would give him a hard time if they knew what he did for a second job. Anyway, this person is also a very wise person and we have great philosophical discussions because he is also a Sufi Master.
I tell him that I feel dissatisfied by everything, my writing included. He says this is good and compares it to the process of giving birth. A child that is just born, he says, does not look so good; one must fix him up, wipe the blood off the body and wrap the body in nice perfumed blankets before an introduction to visitors. This is not quite what I experienced at birth (he excused himself for being male and not an expert on birthing) but I get the metaphor. So long as the dissatisfaction is not for material things, he says, it is good. Something to reflect on: how to get on top of the desk and be happy!
Next: Extensions to my writing excercise:-- Longa Stronga Donga (an advertisement that can be seen while travelling the Hume Highway--for sexual apparatus)
Posted by girija tropp at 10:27 PM | Permalink
February 13, 2006
What more could you ask for?
My partner woke up at 5 am to go and get supplies (organic fruit and vegetables) for the commercial kitchen and I began to surface out of dreamland. I'd like to get out of bed, I thought to myself. But I couldn't quite get the dream, and as I've been in love with my own excercise, I tried to mimic dream state.
The way into this state is to use what I understand from Eckhardt Tolle's book Being in the Now. I try and 'die' to myself, purposefully forgetting that I have a history, letting go of all the meaningful facts that compose who I am. My brain goes into a kind of zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz and my mind gives off a death rattle; I get a feeling that might translate into I'm bored Get me outta here I want to wake up properly This is all bullshit. If I succeed in handling the brain static, I fall back into the dream.
This time, I fell back into sleep! And had a whole other series of vivid dreams which will inform my next writing spree (if I can get all my work done today with some hours leftover). My writing mates on Zoe are having a ball with the excercise and I love what they are producing. Am I biased?
Also, I'm happy today. I have discovered the Track Changes and Comments function in MS Word. So my swapping of my novel pages with a friend is reaching new levels. I've used it years ago when Jodi Daynard at the Boston Review was editing my story prior to publication, but I was a 'passive' user.
Not only have I found life after Word, but there is a tray of organic peaches on my kitchen table. This is the season (mark my diary) when stone fruit are at their best. And tonight, I'm going to a demo of a new-fangled cooking gadget where you chop, blend, cook etc all in the one machine. I can already see myself -- writing on the banks of a river with the sun on my face and my trusty gadget in attendance.
Okay, back to work.
Posted by girija tropp at 12:42 PM | Permalink