That Ben Franklin Sure Liked to Keep Busy

So, Philadelphia was flag-freakin'-tastic! The conference was great. Not only was the convention center itself aesthetically appealing, but the sessions were informative, well-organized, and practical. Maya Angelou rocked the house as keynote speaker, by the way. She's saucy + wise, which is a winning combination. I can't even explain how great she was. The word "profound" will have to suffice. And the session that my colleague Wood and I presented went perfectly well. 200 people signed up to attend, which had me a bit worried, but of course thinking about it is far more stressful than acutally doing it. We put a lot of work into our presentation, so are happy with its success. And that it's over.

Dave joined me in Philly so we could twist a mini vacation out of my free time, and we tacked on a couple extra days after the conference as well. We're so glad we did! I'm not sure if it's because Philly is that amazing, or merely because we've been starved for fun, but we had a bu-last! A BLAST! Even walking around the olden graveyards, we were like "this is the best old graveyard EVER! This is so FUN!" I felt like we'd been living on gruel for a year and were finally given a cookie or something. Not even an especially nasty bout of food poisoning tainted our experience. I think someone could have shot me in the leg and I'd still have hobbled my way over to the Liberty Bell, exclaiming "This is the best bell EVER! I love it here!" So regurgitation be damned...we were gonna enjoy Philly! We ate cheese steaks (more delicious than expected), saw a crazy number of "first American" things, like the first bank, first post office, first fire department, etc., visited Independence Hall, and even passed Danny Bonaduce (and his posse) on the street. Dave also got to visit the Ordinance Musem at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Aberdeen, Maryland. In case you're wondering, his favorite tank there is the Grizzly.

Meanwhile, I'm left to ponder Ben Franklin. I suspect people secretly hated him and all his "I'm going to start this up, I'm going to do that, I'm in charge of all this here!" I thank him and everything, but I also think if I knew him in person I might want to slap his glasses off and yell "calm down, already!" Nevertheless, here's to you BF.

Strategic Procrastination

So, how's HP going? I was progressing pretty well, but then decided to start at the beginning again. I'm just not happy enough about those earlier chapters. They need further refining. Part of me thinks I'm procrastinating about moving forward to the really difficult chapters...the chapters that really need work. It's like someone who maybe has an entire garage to clean, but instead spends their time polishing the already-shiny silver. But the other part of me thinks I'm being strategic. The first chapters set the stage for everything that follows, and if the first third of the novel isn't really tight nothing else will work. Adding to the "smart" category is the fact that whenever I change something in the beginning of the book, it has to be followed through during the rest of the book. So if I'm really happy with the first third, then revision in the rest of the novel will go that much smoother because I won't have to re-tie all my literary knots. Whatever it is, I'll be patient with myself. As long as I'm writing, and as long as the novel is improving, then why worry.


Also, quite a while back my super-smart writer friend -- known as JoJo -- read and critiqued my earlier revisions. I read and printed her critique, but then put it aside...thinking I would finish the entire revision first, and then go back and make updates based on her wise critiques. I recently re-read her critiques and decided I should make some of those revisions right now. I'm going to take most of her advice because she's so perceptive, creative, and also because in my mind she kind of represents my ideal audience.


Anyway. Part of me feels I'm spinning my wheels, part of me thinks it's important I take my time with the all-important first third of the novel. No matter what happens or how far I get, soon I will need to start learning about publishing. I don't need to have the whole novel totally revised to start trying to gauge interest. This April I'm attending a class at The Loft on publishing, since I really am clueless about selling my work. I hate selling things! I've been published before, but I'm so lazy about the whole process. That's one thing I will for sure need to correct this summer.

Nothing else going on. This weekend I was sick, Dave spent the ENTIRE weekend hunched over close to 100 student papers, and we watched my parents' cat...whose favorite passtime is watching water drip out of a faucet.

No More Crazy Lady

Dave and I have officially resigned our caretaking position, effective March 1. We'll still, obviously, live in our current place until we buy a house. But now we no longer have to clean up after our rude and careless neighbors (honestly most of the neighbors are nice, but three of them cause at least 90% of the work). And we no longer have to "work" where we live, which means no more dealing with unexpected emergencies, no more knocks on our door at 2am, no more dealing with tenant complaints/issues, no more being on call, and -- best of all -- no more of us having any contact with the screaming, verbally-abusive crazy lady who has been the bane of our existence since we moved in. I could go into all the various ways and reasons we hate this woman, but I'm just letting it go. As of March 1 she simply no longer exists to us.

The caretaking has saved us about $40,000 over the length of our service, and it was a great deal. Despite all my complaints above, it usually was not that much work compared to the money we saved. It allowed us to pay for our wedding and honeymoon out of pocket, go on a few trips, pay off all our debt, live on a single income after Dave quit his job to go back to school full-time, and has now allowed us to save a nice chunk for a house. The demands and frustrations of the caretaking was definitely worth it, considering what the savings allowed us to accomplish. But with both of us working now and with our goals for the most part met, we don't really need the extra savings. At least, we don't need the extra money as much as we need the extra time. As early as September we were talking about quitting, but decided to hold out as long as we could. Now with spring coming up -- and all the annoying duties that comes with that -- we decided now was the time to pull out.

It will seem a luxury to just come home from work and not need to even think about when/if the building needs to be cleaned. I can't remember a weekend where we didn't spend our Saturday doing some kind of caretaking. And how nice it will be to enter our unit and know for certain there will not be a little note under our door alerting us to some new problem or issue that needs dealing with. How amazing it will be to actually feel comfortable spending an evening at home, knowing that our movie or dinner will not be interrupted by a knock on the door. And it will seem blessedly odd to not have to shovel snow or mow the lawn...and to be able to go out of town without making complicated arrangements to cover our duties while we're away. We won't have to police the landlord's policies and deal with the consequent arguments, complaints and (in case of the crazy lady) threats. It's been about 6 years since our home has just been a home, and not merely another place where we work.

So, financially this means less eating out, less spending money, and more strict adherence to our budget. But personally this is a big step toward us taking better care of ourselves and focusing on what's really meaningful right now. So goodbye caretaking! Thanks for everything you've done for us. Goodbye tenants! We'll see you in the hallways, but we no longer care if your toilet doesn't flush or if your neighbor is being loud. And goodbye crazy lady! We never have to speak to you -- or your case worker -- again!

Dave's birthday is Monday and he said quitting the caretaking is the best gift he could receive. Which is good, because now we'll have a lot less money for gifts :)

That said, we're still caretakers through Saturday, and we promised we would clean the building one final time, and sounds like the giant snowfall is not going to wait until our duties are done. Why can't it just wait until next week? So looks like there'll still be shoveling to do. But it will be much sweeter knowing the next time we're shoveling it will be at our own house, and not for people who don't even wipe their feet when they come into the building. And how nice it will be when Dave and I can be the people who don't wipe their feet!!

Valentine Spa

Dave is so patient with me. So, for Valentine's Day we didn't really have specific, directed Valentine's Day plans. But I thought..."hey, wouldn't it be FUN to give each other facials?" All my girlfriends are thinking "totally!" and all my guyfriends are thinking "I could come up with a million things that would be much more fun." But Dave wants me to be happy and is willing to put up with just about anything if it puts a smile on my face. So I gave him a Lush blueberry facial:



During facial (skin tired and worn out, plus general unhappiness about having blue stuff on his face, despite my attempt to convince him he looks like a warrior from Braveheart):

After facial (skin refreshed and renewed, plus general delight that the facial is over and he can get on with his life!):

I had one too, of course. We also had brunch at W.A. Frost's on Sunday, exchanged gifts (I made a small book for Dave, and he gave me unnecessarily expensive diamond earrings even though I particularly asked him not to spend too much money on me), and we watched the movie Sweet Land. Overall it was nice, although we do need to do something to cease the "unending-chore" quality of our weekends. Maybe we need to stop with the caretaking finally.

I also did some work on HP. I'm very happy with the changes I've made. Slow-going as usual, but as long as it's going in the right direction I'm happy.

OMG...I'm NOT Writing!

I was doing so well....and now, not so much. Things get busy. People need one's help. American Idol starts sucking one in to its evil maw. One falls prey to seasonal affective disorder and decides to sleep for an entire month. You know, the usual things. No more excuses, though. This weekend I'll revise and conquer another chapter...and one that requires extensive rewrites at that! Take that, Book! Ha!

I'm looking into all the various methods for self-publishing. Self-publishing is quite the business, I'm learning. Now Amazon has something called BookSurge, which sounds interesting. It would be nice to avoid the whole "trying to sell myself and being repeatedly rejected" thing I would naturally face with traditional publishing...but then again, if I self-publish nobody will ever read my book because I am the worst networker ever and would never sell any copies because I hate selling things in general. Even things I like. But it would be on Amazon.com, and I could publish under a psuedonym and just email people and say "oh, hey, look at this random cool book!" and then it wouldn't be like I was pushing my own book on people. I'm not writing this to make money, but it has taken a big chunk out of my life and it would be nice for something to come of it beyond just being able to smugly say at parties "oh, yeah, I wrote a novel".

That's all I have to say about HP.

Hope everyone has a happy Valentine's Day. Dave and I are celebrating on Sunday with brunch at W.A. Frosts, gifts, and a romantic afternoon of dusting and vacuuming our building. We may also watch Amelie, which is our official Valentine's Day movie.

And happy birthday to my brother Andrew, who doesn't read this blog but deserves a blog-mention nonetheless.

And happy birthday to Abraham Lincoln, too. What a cool guy he was.

And hey....remember summer? That was cool too.

Extra Spooky

In case you didn't realize it by all your electronics turning demonic, people acting unusually brittle, and simple tasks becoming monumentally difficult, we are again in a Mercury retrograde. It's almost over now, though. This one was especially tough on us; even Dave (normally critical of my "retrograde rantings") asked me "when is this retrograde over?" (answer: Feb. 1). He's had a plethora of problems at school...oddly enough, they've so far been isolated to the retrograde period, which is I suppose why he's becoming a believer.

Retrogrades are, however, VERY good for working on existing projects, rethinking plans, and looking ahead. So the retrograde has proven quite useful for HP. I've gotten a lot done, although revising always seem to take three times longer than expected. Last weekend I got through my first "ghost" chapter, which has been haunting me (see what I did there?). I initially meant this novel to be rather serious and dark, but over time it has become much lighter and funnier...more of a parody than an actual gothic novel. That's fine, but the question becomes how to balance that tone with the ghost story? I don't want the ghost to be a joke. So I'm very happy to have tightrope-walked my way through this chapter, where I establish the haunting. On top of that, it's also a chapter where I try to establish a connection between Ana and her love interest....this is tricky because there initially wasn't a love triangle in the novel. Now, suddenly, I decided there is. Yes, it's a bit conventional, but I'm trying to find ways to spice it up or make it unusual. The point is, I'm happy to have improved this dasterdly chapter. As with my other revisions, I ended up cutting quite a bit out...but in the end, I think I've made this chapter Extra Spooky!

Other things:

Dave surprised me with gorgeous roses for no reason whatsoever, other than my being awesome (see photo)! He also bought for me a sweet little 1918 hardcover edition of Through the Looking-Glass.

We still haven't packed up our Christmas decorations, resulting in me being for the first time in my life sick of glitter.

I joined Facebook, which I have mixed feelings about.

I'm halfway through War and Peace, which is beyond-amazing.

This morning my friend Cory and his wife had their first child, who wins the "best baby name I've heard in a long time" award: Robinson Gary Funk. Congratualations Robinson! He also happens to be extra extra cute.

OMG...I'm Writing!

I surprised myself. I thought I would continue to procrastinate and hem and haw (whatever that is, but I've heard that people do it when they procrastinate). But I actually have a whole other chapter under my belt! Better yet, I feel wiser approaching the revision this time.

Last spring I remember looking at my novel again after a long break and thinking "wow...this is way better than I remember it being." This time, picking up my novel again after a break, I thought "wow...this is way worse than I remember it being." It doesn't help that I'm reading War and Peace right now. Compared to that my novel seems like a magazine article and barely worth the effort.

My improvements this week have almost exclusively involved taking things OUT, whereas last year it was about putting scenes IN. I'm taking out every sentence that is repetitive or that "tells" rather than "shows." The whole "show, don't tell" cliche is one of those cliches that deserves to be repeated by everyone because it's pretty darn good advice. For instance, I have one scene where my main character Ana stays up all night baking hundreds of cookies for her office. After describing her actions, I have her say (this is all in first person) how she feels obsessed and can't sleep. Do we really need to be told that? Wouldn't it be better to just see her doing something obsessive and staying up all night to do it? Do we need someone who is doing something crazy to turn to us and say "look, I'm doing something crazy"? Anyway. I fired a lot of sentences this week. Sentence unemployment is on the rise.

I'm not happy with my description. It's unsurprising and filled with adjectives and adverbs, rather than a magical combinations of words that convey experience or emotion with strength, efficiency, and freshness. The key is not finding more words, but finding the right words. I have worked on plenty of creative projects in my life, and so far nothing has been more difficult than this. So perhaps reading Tolstoy right now is serendipitous.

I'm also removing or limiting long stretches of Ana talking about her feelings, and moving more toward action...having her do things, talk about the things she did or what other people did, and basically interact with the world more. There's still reflection, but I want the novel to do more, not think more.

Dave asked me if it was hard to cut out so much. It kind of is. I'm cutting some parts that are well-written, funny, and in other ways wonderful....they just don't contribute to the novel and each sentence needs to move it forward or contribute. It can't just be there because I like it. Otherwise it's like that person we've all worked with who is nice enough and makes us laugh, but after awhile you notice they never really contribute and you wonder "what IS it they do all day?" So it is a little bittersweet to hit that delete key, but at the same time it feels good...like cleaning a closet of things you no longer need or wear. It makes room for something better, even though it's hard to let go of what you have.

I'm hoping this weekend to finish the VERY difficult chapter I'm working on right now...it needs a lot of work. This is the chapter where "everything changes". Hope you have a nice weekend and MLK Day!