amwriting – Page 7 – A Most Unreliable Narrator

were most of your stars out? : a conspectus on writing part i

Writing, real writing, is done not from some seat of fussy moral judgment but with the eye and ear and heart; no American writer will ever have a more alert ear, a more attentive eye, or a more ardent heart than his.

– Adam Gopnick on J.D. Salinger

This has many beginnings.
12 years ago when Justin and I were mere children living in San Francisco, I whined incessantly that all I wanted to do was write. I had been publishing journal entries online since 1996 but they were random and scattered, in content and location. There was no coherency to them with the exception that they were about me, whether about my life or my emotions, but the running theme was that I was somehow worked into the story. And most of it, whether I remembered it or not, is true.
In the spring of 1998, one my co-workers at Slip.Net told me how she decided to start putting her journal entries online in a diary format. I thought this was brilliant and in May of that year, I registered simunye.org. I thought I was being oh, so clever naming it “The Lisa Chronicles,” because that is all that it is — a chronicle of my life. I knew that it was something that could work: professors had praised my writing during my first foray into college that I had more than enough voice to make a living with the written word. Writing an online diary of sorts seemed to be a natural extension of that same concept – if enough people like it, it would spur me on to write more, push me into honing the craft and make something out of it (like every other 20-something pretentious fuck twit who thinks they can write).
But could I actually make a living off of it? I, then, never even bothered to try and find out.
Justin says that if I”m passionate about writing, really passionate as I exclaim during our near monthly argument on the topic, why am I not doing something with it? Why do I push it away and bind it away from me, like loose hair?
Continue reading “were most of your stars out? : a conspectus on writing part i”

A poem and a billet-doux

Justin and I have a tradition in which for every holiday, we will exchange something handmade, typically something that is handwritten. For Valentine’s Day, we decided to write poems/prose to each other and to also celebrate, he’s making homemade enchiladas and I’m making homemade desert crepes.
Below you’ll find our poetic offerings, enjoy.
Him to me:
Untitled
She is clumsy and sweet, this you can tweet!
Of Lisa I will speak, pay attention.
Her merits are beyond comprehension.
I shall point out a few glimmering traits.
But first, you may ask, what is my motive?
To make her chortle, I say, even swoon!
Surely, to me, this would be a great boon!
For now, that reply, will have to suffice.
What? Dear reader, you wish to give advice?
I listen to reason, what shall I do?
Silence? Now you’ve thrown this whole poem askew!
Stanzas run thin, balls destined for a vice.
Through this couplet, I’ll find a way to say,
Darlin’ Lisa, Happy Valentine’s Day!
Me to him:
Ode to Snookie Wookums:
A billet-doux for Justin
I struggle to tell you how much I love you,
Not because I do not know how to say it –
But because it has been said many times before (and in many different ways).
Not just from me to you, or from you to me, but
Shakespeare, Byron, Shelley, Keats — dead white guys
(Your favorite kind.)
Who wrote overly flowery language to describe,
The merest changes in touch, scent and vision of their beloveds,
When they were naked upon the often stained mattresses.
(And why were those mattresses always so stained?)
(Did they not believe in cleaning in those days?)
Or having their woman kill themselves for whatever reason –
(Death, despair, misery – your favorite subjects).
Love, then, is a word we throw about carelessly these post-modern times,
To describe anything we have strong affection for from –
Our pets, food, clothing, movies, to music and cars.
(And do we love, in that we have strong emotion or do we love because we cannot use any other word to describe how we feel for the item we are attached to?)
So then, on this Valentine’s Day –
(A saint who is honored for love instead of being remembered as a Christian martyr in antiquity)
Let me not talk of death, misery, despair, or Nazi’s –
(Thrown in to see if you’re still reading),
But rather let me just tell you that for all of the reasons that I love you,
And for all of the reasons that could possible exist and
Have been turned into a Lifetime Movie Extravaganza –
It is because of your quirks and your stubbornness,
Your strong sense of wavering morality,
Your love of pretentious literature and even more pretentious music,
Your arrogance, your silliness,
Your daring and your bravery,
Your sense of adventure and your resoluteness,
And all of the physical reasons that I adore you so –
(Not stated in case your mother reads this).
Thank you for stalking me all those years,
For proving to be worthy, for believing in me,
For being all of the things that I could hope for and more –
I love you, my snookie wookums, and am every so glad
That I will be dragging you, unwillingly, to the alter in May!
Happy Valentine’s Day, my love!

Pug Will Tear Us Apart (Again) – A Valentine’s Day Ode

As many of you know, I once had three adorable pugs. The pugs, siblings from the same parents but different litters, were obtained from Ex-Fiance #2′s aunt and uncle in 2000 and 2001, who were starting to breed the parents, Lucy and Linus. After Ex-Fiance #2 and I split, the pugs came with me when I moved to Grand Rapids from Virginia in December 2002. One thing I was adamant about was that I was to never split up the pugs as they had been together since they were weeks old and were my family. However, when I was planning to moving to Royal Oak, every single apartment complex, apartments and houses I looked at would not allow more than one pet. A tough decision was made that two of the pugs would be fostered to good friends of mine until another solution was found. In the spring of 2009, those two pugs were then given up to a Pug Rescue in Ohio because their health and well-being were my utmost priority and I could not afford financially or physically to get them back.
Since then, it has just been WednesdayThePug and I, who has also grown to have her own fan base, complete with her own Twitter account. Wednesday has always been an extenstion of my own personality — she’s haughty and clingy, she likes beer and boys, she’s picky about who cuddles against and she always loved me best of all.
Then Justin moved in and I was kicked to the curb in her affections.
Her schedule is our schedule, she is adamant about ALWAYS being between us whether it is on the couch or in bed. When both of us are home, she clings to Justin like his shadow, preferring to lay at his feet if he’s working, near his side when they are on the couch or sprawling on my side of the bed if I get up first. Her bedtime rituals is that she runs around and sniffs the comforter, then burrowing between us under the covers to lay between us, then she comes snuffling out to climbs up to the top of the pillows on our bed (pillow mountain) and will lay there, dead weight, until the morning. Other times she will burrow back out and sleep between us, on top of the covers, refusing to move the entire night making it difficult to adjust our own sleeping during the course of the night.
Wednesday turns 10 this summer and for this Valentine’s day, Justin wrote me a poem honoring her, to the tune of Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart.”
Pug Will Tear Us Apart
Wednesday nibbles hard,
And the temperature runs low.
And the snoring rides high,
With pillow mountain below.
And we struggle for sheets,
Under heavy pug load.
Puuuuug, pug will tear us apart…again.
Puuuuug, pug will tear us apart…again.
Why are my feet so cold?
I look to my right side.
Is this pug that flawed?
Thieving covers with pride.
A tranquil lump of steel.
That we’ve spoiled for life.
Puuuuug, pug will tear us apart…again.
Puuuuug, pug will tear us apart…again.
Do you cackle in your sleep?
My extremities exposed.
This affair’s going south.
My movement becomes bold.
I toss you from your perch,
You slither and claim more.
Puuuuug, pug will tear us apart…again.
Puuuuug, pug will tear us apart…again
Puuuuug, pug will tear us apart…again.
Puuuuug, pug will tear us apart…again

There are stories left to be written. (And hopefully they will be a lot longer than 140 characters.)

My birthday is in 12.5 days in which I will be turning 29 for the ninth time (37), which is in spitting distance of 40 which is close to death.
What an auspicious way to being an entry, eh? But, I figured it was the right time to sit down and do half-year update. Because interestingly enough I find myself at a cross-roads, one of my own choosing, A decision doesn’t have to be made this second, but, I need to write it out at the very least to sort it out.
Academically, the school year has been amazing. Going to library school has to be one of the best decisions I ever made. I ended the first full year with a overall GPA of 3.88 (B+ in cataloging, of which I proudly wear), I won the Graduate Student Assistant job at the library, which means that my tuition is now paid for AND I have a job manning the reference desk at the graduate library. For one of my classes, I ended up helping design and implement WordPress for a local Detroit museum and will more than likely end up doing my archival practicum there as the archivist loves me. (She’s also pretty awesome as well!) One of my professors has tapped me to work for her company part-time, making really good money, as a web2.0 consultant of sorts which could possibly land me as a full-time gig when I graduate if it works out. I won a scholarship and am also being pushed to fine tune some of my student papers to publishing worth materials and submitting them to appropriate journals.
Several of my classmates and I are founding a new student organization (a student chapter of the Progressive Librarians Guild) and I’ve been tapped to take over presidential responsibilities of the local student chapter of ASIS&T. I’ve also been blogging over at Tech-Ink: A Librarian Collective about digital issues. I’m also the communications chair for the Graduate Student Union in my spare time.
Academically and professionally, everything is starting to fall into place.
Personally, things have been going on a more even keel. Lily and Pugsley (of ThePugKids) were surrendered to Ohio Pug Rescue when their temporary foster home fell through and I couldn’t take them with me nor could I find them a place temporarily until I could move into a place that would take more than one pet. This was heartbreaking for me, but, it was the right decision as their happiness and stability was my utmost concern over my own selfish need to make sure I kept alll three of the pug kids together.
I still have Wednesday (who has her own Twitter account) and not once has she shown any signs of abandonment by her siblings and seems pretty happy being the only pug in the household. I’ve ditched caging her at night (like I used to do when I had all three) and she sleeps with me on pillow mountain and has also taken it upon herself to wake me up every morning between 7-8am. Justin has taken a deep liking to her because “she’s lazy and I can respect that” but other than that, she turns 9 in July and she is still as cantankerous as ever. I love her even more so.
Life in Royal Oak has turned out to be pretty good to me and I’ve met a lot of awesome people. One of my girlfriends and I have started meeting every Tuesday for knitting night (and yet I’m still no closer to finishing any of my projects) and I hang out with a few other people as well. Most of the time though I spend at home solo as this past semester was really academically stimulating and I now love nothing more than doing nothing.
Justin and I are still going at it pretty strong as he’s been out to see me several times since I’ve moved for extended periods. It helps that he telecommutes for his job so he’s been able to work from the apartment while I go about my merry little way. The apartment is a little over 600sqft which is fine for one person and a pug but when he moves in in July, it will be a bit cramped. Graduation is set forth for end of August or December of 2010 depending on how I get those final classes laid out. And after that? Who knows? Justin and I have a zillion different life styles planned out for us that take us from living in a small English village to a condo in Chicago. Trips are being planned for far off exotic locales such as Florida (well, Key West) and beyond during our vacation times. A proposal and a wedding are sure to follow at some point. I just don’t know when. So over all, life is good.
I’m finding my way around Detroit and I’m fairly comfortable with the city. There are some parts, architecturally, that are so beautiful that it is heartbreaking and simultaneously so desolated and run down, it is also equally heartbreaking. I haven’t done as much exploring as I would have liked, considering that we’ve had such a rough and long winter (snows until end of April) that the idea of exploring just wasn’t palpable. But now that the glorious spring days are here, I’m totally up for it. I do miss watching my daffodils sprout and strut at Wilcox Park the beginning of every spring.
The cross-roads is that last summer I started a writing project of which I only completed one piece of flash fiction, submitted it to several websites for consideration only to find that the databases took a dump shortly after I did the submission and thus lost my work. By the time I found out, I was gutted and also too busy to re-submit and start over. So that project was shelved for the time being. Justin has always been my biggest supporter when it came to my writing and while he’s not the first person to suggest I could make a living at it, he’s been the most vocal and the most pushy about it.
For Single Awarness Day this year the only thing he wanted from me was a short story of which I never wrote. I had ideas™ but nothing ever really came to fruition. Lately, more so then ever, I’ve become envious of people I know who are living the writerly life. It seems that I keep running into people or meeting them digitally who create these fantastic worlds around their writing and the tentacles of their work stretch far and wide. Writing was always the one thing I thought I was quite good at, something I really, really wanted to do and it seems however that the more involved I become with this new profession of mine, the more intense and time-suckage it becomes, the least likely I’ll make a living as a writer – and not just a writer, but an author.
So even though I’m heading on this really great career path that I’m passionate about, there is still this niggling feeling that I need to stop absorbing other people’s work and create my own. This is not to say that I want to give up doing what I’m doing – not by a long shot, but I really need to figure out how how to make the two worlds converge. Lessening up my activity on Twitter might be a good start as well as starting to plot out what it is I want to write. Justin has always said that I could be a really great writer if I start actually writing again, doing something more than dropping non-sequitors in Twitter or writing provocative posts on my blog or other places. The talent is there but it’s waning and it needs to be fed.
I met a friend of mine for breakfast meeting the other day and as it usually is with me, we ended up spending 3.5 hours talking about everything. We both remarked that the tables around us have all turned over at least thrice since we sat down and the lunch crowd was starting to thin out. Much of what I told her about my life seemed incredulous such as the ex-highschool boyfriend who stalked me from Facebook last winter or the reigniting of the relationship with Justin again. Even I admitted wholeheartedly that if I didn’t know it was true myself (and had blog posts, friends and other methods of documentation at hand to prove it), I would have thought I was a total bullshitter. Katishna has always said that I don’t create the drama but that drama followed me where I went.
My life, in a lot of ways, is pretty extraordinary in a Lifetime movie kind of way. Cathrynne wrote of much of what I was feeling recently, about the confessional side of writing. Since 1996, I’ve been pouring out my heart and soul, laying bare everything that I was for the world to see and not giving a damn who saw it. Age, perhaps, has dampened that need for dissipation of the soul. There are some horrors in my life that I’m not sure I want to revisit quite so soon.
The relationship fall-out with TheEx, for example, still reverberates in ways I never expected. Steph, my expert on all things with crazy men, said that it’s almost impossible to think I would be completely healed in such a short amount of time considering the intensity and brevity of the relationship itself. I know she’s right, but me being me wants the fall-out to be over.
Before the winter semester ended, I spoke to one of my professors about going on for my PhD (which she does fully support) but I was worried that I would not bring anything new to the table of research. The best advice she gave was that one can always bring something new to the table, even in academia when it looks like everything has been researched to death, one can always bring a new or fresh perspective on an issue. I think writing is a lot like that – the basics of writing have been done to death, we know this. It’s the original voices and their perspectives that make all the difference. I admire a lot of writers in a variety of genres, so I know it’s possible to do this. I just now have to figure out how and that will start with the short story for Justin, because he asked.

Feast or Famine: back to Twitter after 40 days

Going 40 days without Twitter was an interesting experience as I’m terrible at moderation — it’s either feast or famine with me. This is one of the reasons why quitting smoking has always been so hard for me: I WANTED just one cigarette and then I would smoke 12, which meant I would have to buy a pack or bum from someone and the whole smoking process would start all over again. The only way I kicked it this time was not hang out with smokers, which is easy to do since I don’t know any smokers on the east side of the state.
However with Twitter, the problem was that just as I was weaning myself off of Twitter, everyone and their second cousin was joining Twitter. Since this was definitely not a geographic issue (like attempting to quit smoking)¹ but rather a interest issue, what was a girl to do? I decided to to go off of Twitter for 40 days not because I am religious and needed something to give up for Lent² but rather I was spending an inordinate amount of time on Twitter and not allocating that time for other, often necessary, projects. Twitter is not just about reading my public_timeline and tweeting but rather for me it is also about looking at what others are tweeting, following links, researching interests, people and things.
If someone posted a blog entry, I’d end up spending several hours on that blog and then some. I want to to know who I am interacting with, so thus, Twitter became this full-time job of me searching out and expanding my network. I’m a curious cat who needs to know how things are done! I wanted to use the time off from Twitter to do a variety of things though, things that I swore I was NOT doing because all of my time was being sucked in by Twitter.
Things such as: updating lib schooled. more often, personal research, knitting, exercise (WiiFit), homework, writing, cleaning my apartment. I suck at time management and Twitter was fast becoming another obsession that was sucking down my time and like smoking, I couldn’t find myself an easy way to quit. More succinctly, I couldn’t find myself moderating my Twitter activity to do something else.
Feast or famine.
In the Twitterverse (or really, any active online social life), 40 days is almost an entire cycle or IS an entire cycle of birth to death. Fads can come and go in 40 days or less, and with Twitter it went from bubbling under the surface of explosion to totally exploding all over the media. Every single form of media outlet was becoming Twitterized and add insult to injury, bands, authors, celebs, friends, and everyone else in between were suddenly joining the Twitter bandwagon! And I couldn’t add them or read them!
The one and only time I logged into Twitter during this period was when a co-worker asked me a question that required me to do so. But I didn’t look at my public_timeline, I swear. But other than that single instance, I refrained from reading my public_timeline, I did not log into Twitter, I did not follow Twitter links, I did not log into Twhirl or any other application, did not respond to DMs: not a damn thing. The only thing I did was check how many minions were following me because the number kept growing and it was insane! In the 40 days I was gone, the number of my followers almost doubled! Thanks to auto-tweeting on this blog, I tweeted maybe half a dozen times in the last 40 days but not the continual dozen times a day (or more!) that I was doing before.
According to TwitterCounter, the projection that I was to hit 500 minions before Easter was completely feasible — something that Chris and I had a gentlemen’s agreement on (that I would indeed hit 500 before Easter, while he did not believe it to be so). The final tally was 520. And this became the puzzlement for me: I was not tweeting with any regular basis and I was gaining new minions. Why? I came up with the following reasons:

People I knew who created Twitter accounts after my hiatus.
People who were recommended to follow me (via #followfriday or another method).
Key word/geographic search: I gained a lot of new minions because of “librarian” and “punk rock” (@pnkrcklibrarian) in my name. I also gained new minions because of where I live, as it’s listed in my bio.
Hashtag (#) via my own self-created hasltags or via key wording my bio.
Spam bots, auto/serial adders.
MLM market peeps.

Was there a lesson learned in any of this?
Probably in the end I was able to do a bit better this semester than projected because I was able to keep away from the time sucking whore that Twitter had become in my life. But other than that? I came back fast and furious to the Twitter world, as the SomeECard that Chris created for me.
P.S. As of November 2009, I’ve hit nearly 1200 minions. Yeah, I don’t get it either.

1. Yes, I’ve been smoke-free for 10 weeks now. I’ve got the 10-15lbs to prove it too!
2. While I was raised Catholic, I’ve given up all preludes of Catholicism years ago (despite the fact that I went to a Catholic college). Interestingly enough, my mother who is Christian and only practices some tenements of Catholicism (when it suites her) continually gives up men for Lent every year. You can see where my sense of humor comes from, then.

Tweet tweet: Lisa 2.0 or something very similar.

I’ve been writing online since the mid ’90s. Sometime in 2001, when LiveJournal was still accessible only by invite codes, I snagged a code from someone (unintentionally stealing it from the person it was meant for — not my fault that the originator posted it PUBLICLY!) and started using LiveJournal. For a long time, up until 2004 or 2005, I would cross reference entries between my own domain over to LiveJournal. The writing on my own domain slowly petered out and I started using LiveJournal for all of my “blogging” needs.
But I’m a voracious blogger, as it were, known for indepth analysis of the human condition (that sounded totally Pretentious Fucktwattedness, henceforth known as PFT, but I’m okay with that) and short non-sequitors that were mostly one or two lines of text. Stream of consciousness thinking, as it were, are my calling cards. I could start out a post about the joys of doing laundry only to end up discussing the rituals 006 and I used to share. There was never any “thought” process to my writing, it is what it is.
I’ve owned my own domain since the mid-’90s when one could buy them ONLY from Network Solutions (then Internic) and pay exorbitant amount of cold hard cash for the said privileged. I knew friends who ran their own servers, never paid for my own web hosting up until recently and for the most part, maintained (in the blogosphere) at least some sense of anonymity.
For the last couple of years, I’ve felt disjointed on how to combine my “internets” life with my public and personal ones. I’ve had exes who attempted to sue me for libel and slander, ex-employers who found my website and kept tabs on me after I left the company (even after I’ve left on my own accord and I was not dooced) and a local (in-state) family farm who claimed that my using their family name in the title of a piece was ruining their business. I’m everywhere and nowhere and the projects that I started, always seem to fall to pieces while modgirl.net languishes in disarray from terrible lack of upkeep. So thus began the great “re-organizational plan.”

Finish the archives for modgirl.net and never touch that website again.
Start updating She’s Got Plans and cross-reference to LiveJournal.
Keep small non-sequitor stuff to Twitter.
I’ve been asked about the Podcasting plugin that is showcasing on the bottom of this page, here is the scoop: I have over 700 CDs and close to 70 gigs of music, most of which I’ll probably never listen to. I thought it would be great to create a podcast, called AutoMusicBiographically. Each episode, starting with the beginning of the alphabet, I’ll showcase a particular band and discuss how they are relevant to me and to music in general while showcasing a few of their hits. I’m pretty excited about this new project, just need to get other stuff done before I get going on that one. I do, however, have a friend who does audio production work so this should far easier to get accomplished.

And so, what can you expect on She’s Got Plans?

Music, book, television, and general pop culture reviews.
Library school (and grad school) bru-haha.
General commentary on the absurdity of the human populace.
Project updates, including but not limited to: Knitting, cooking (because I’m relatively new to this whole “cooking” thing), writing (I’m working on flash fiction pieces to be compiled for an anthology), exercise and diet shit (gluten intolerance, like everyone else on the planet). The usual project and entertainment crap.
Team Sassy updates. Steph and I are walking 50 miles in October to help combat MS. Cross-referencing both websites with updates.
AutoMusicBiographically. I’m so excited for this project to begin!
Photos. There will be lots of photos.
And whatever else I can think of.

I’ll be tweaking the front end for a bit while I discover new plugins and widgets and of course, start driving users to the website, etc. That’s it for me, for now. I need to get to bed. Good night internets, sleep well and don’t hog the bed.

busy as a bee

I never did finish my NaNoWriMo novel, but congrats to the people who did. I had issues, matter and concerns happen in November and it was perhaps the overwhelming stress of trying to be wonder woman that I just threw down my lasso of truth and said ‘fuck it’.
modgirl.net has been nicely updated, much more than my LJ, which is fine. My new project was installing and using the patch for greymatter to add all the old entries in my journal and use a database instead of doing it singlehandedly. If you want to read the past, be my guest. I suppose I have this fetish that I need to get this completed sometime in my life. I have this fantasy where my children will find the web page and get a better understanding of my life. Nothing like living in the ether.
[Originally published at LiveJournal.]

11.13.01

Seven months from today I’ll be 30.
Last night Paul and I watched some tivo’d episodes of “AB Fab” and the one episode where Paul felt would be reflective of me is when Edina turns 40. He says her attitude is very reminiscent of what I’ll be like when I turn 30, or maybe when I do turn 40.
Rob and I had met for lunch yesterday at a Mexican place close to the vet, which timed out very well since I had go pick up Pugsley yesterday afternoon. I love our vet, even if they are nearly 1/2 hour away, they are open on the weekend for neuters. Pugsley returned home minus his balls and five teeth, and I returned home stuffed on Mexican food.
The talk turned to NaNoWriMo and my writing of the novel. Rob got very serious about literary criticism which wholly made me doubt what I had written. So last night for a few hours I went over what I had written and denounced it as such crap, I plan on re-writing it. I had this lovely idea in my head on what I wanted only to discover that I couldn’t finish it at the current state it was going through.
Last night in bed I half-awake mused that if I rewrote the first three chapters and pounded out 5k a words a night, I could finish the novel in 10 days, leaving me nine days of freedom.
Don’t think I won’t do this.
x0x0x

6290

is how many words I have so far.
I’m feeling really good about the story but, I”m finding I’m losing concentration some times because I keep jumping around. I have to take a break and get away from my lead character because she’s screaming to get out.
Tonight I’ll probably do homework and work on the story later. Decisions decisions.

NaNoWriMo

So,tonight Paul and I are on our way home when I start telling him about doing NaNoWriMo. I will be the first to admit it that I may not finish and that I may not even get somewhat done, but damn it, I want to be able to say I tried. Now, the thing is he said to me something that was unencouraging — and I don’t remember what it is off hand. But it really made me sad (which sounds trite but true) and he said something along the lines of “Well, you have had all these opportunities in these last few months and never followed through” (uh — huh?) and then he went on how it wasn’t my fault and he was encouraging me and that I hardly write anymore — well I DO write — quite a bit. I write to myself in paper journals and I write to friends and I post on all the boards that I’m on. I’m one mad writing fool. I was just fucking pissed that he said that shit to me. This is exactly what I mean by what he doesn’t even have a clue to what I like to do and what I’m about.
Goddamn.
I’m angry.
But yah. follow my progress here on livejournal or here.
x0x0x
Lisa