Our Clarissa reading group met for the first time Friday night. About twelve of us, mostly students and a few professors, are reading the book in something approaching real time, with a bit of shifting between now and mid-April to even the reading load from week to week. We have different prior experiences of the text: some have read it before, some have taught it, some have abandoned it after valiant past effort. Some have read (shudder) the abridged version — including me. (It was assigned when I was a callow first-year in my very first college English class.) Some of us have examined the HRC’s editions last semester, looking illustrative ellipses for our exhibit. We’re all excited about reading it, because we’re dorks. The reader-response consensus to date: Clarissa is saucier than one might expect, and everybody is impatient for Lovelace’s letters to begin.
I brought lemon poppyseed cookies, baked at the last minute from a recipe I’d never made before. They’re a bit of work, but they turned out to be delicious — light, sharp with lemon and crumbly-sweet. (I used another teaspoon of lemon zest in the dough, which does require a few more spoonfuls of flour, at least at Austin levels of humidity.) I’d been thinking about making oatmeal raisin cookies, but, as one of the professors attending said, those are too comforting. This book needs something a little acidic to suit it.
It’s the first day of the spring semester, technically, and we’re having an ice day. I’ve been trying not laugh too hard about this, or be too much of a “snow snob,” as T. said, but I can’t help it — the last time Smith closed for weather, I think we had about three feet of snow, and the college hadn’t closed for thirty years before that.
So far this means hot chocolate with amaretto, reading the NY Times online, and a bit of Okami. No word on whether UT will close tomorrow, as well, though the forecast does contain more freezing rain.
I took this photo from my bed this morning; hence the upside-down icicle parade.
And it is, in fact, snowing. Just a bit.
The boy I dated in college used to say “inspirado” rather than “inspiration” — partly because he liked Tenacious D., and partly, I think, because he just liked words that sounded as if they should be accompanied by a twirl of the old moustache. These are, of course, both valid reasons.
When I think or talk about writing, I generally put little emphasis on inspiration. I don’t mean to devalue it; those moments of sudden new vision are necessary and wondrous. But persistence, skill, and conscious effort are also necessary, and I’m leery of any view of writing that celebrates inspiration rather than hard work. See the New Yorker article on the genesis of “writer’s block,” which I may have linked here before and probably will again; also see Nephele Tempest’s recent post at Romancing the Blog. Both express, rather more eloquently than I am at the moment, the importance of ass-in-chair to the writing process.
I also wonder if writing novels rather than short stories leads one to think differently about inspiration. When I’m working on a long project, inspiration arrives on a smaller scale: I come up with little insights into structure or character rather than silent-upon-a-peak-in-Darien vistas. Short stories, on the other hand, mean a new world every time.
This is all a roundabout way of saying that, last week, I did have the inspiration for a short story — while on the elliptical at the gym, actually, and listening to Shivaree on my slowly-dying old iPod. I’ve been working somewhat steadily on revising my first novel, and making do with the novel-sized bits of revision-inspiration that come. (We won’t get into the vast difference between revision-inspiration and fresh inspiration. Ahem.)
And you know what? After eight months of very little fiction writing, I’d nearly forgotten how much I like inspiration. It’s a nice feeling. It makes me want to twirl my imaginary moustache.
Via boingboing, an odd, beautiful series of photographs of derelict Soviet bus stops.
I’m thinking about stealing this one for the novel I’m revising.
2006 was a delightful, strange, exciting year. I finished my second novel, completed my master’s degree in fiction, sold my first piece of short fiction, and — last but certainly not least — signed with a literary agent (!). My second novel is just about to go out to editors, and I’ve been working on revising my first.
A brief recap of the writing I did this year:
- Short stories completed: “Things that make one’s heart beat faster” (sold to LCRW); “Selected letters …”; “Daphne”
- Short stories drafted: “The Former Hero”; “Julia Caesaris”; “Lady Emma Hamilton as Charity”
- Novels completed: Novel #2 (once it’s gone out to editors, I may even stop being so overly cautious about using its content-revealing title — shocking, I know)
- Novels worked on: Borne (revision); The White Silk Tent (gathering and editing memoir materials)
Not bad, considering that only four months of the year were officially devoted to writing, as I revised novel #2 for my degree. This year, I want to: finish revising Borne; finish the short stories currently in draft form; and work on an outline for The White Silk Tent. If I can write a few new short stories, that would be a bonus. Tonight my plan is to dig out my sheaf of old notes on Borne and work on outlining more revision ideas.
I’ve just started working on a new short-short for an upcoming reading, too — it should be January 25, at Intellectual Property. More details about this when I have them.
The semester starts in one week — I’ll try not to disappear completely. At the very least, I’ll post monthly writing updates/round-ups here, along with any news on the publishing front, and I’ll try to make my posts much more frequent than that.
