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I joined Pinterest for one major reason. I am returning to my novel-in-progress THE DECADENTS after a couple months’ break from it and wanted to create a digital visionboard to help drive it to completion.
This book has been tricky for me because it deals with some challenging subject matter. It’s also drawing on some raw life material from my years in LA which (it turns out) I’m still processing.
It’s a big departure from my three previously published novels, which I regard as the work of a much younger writer: someone who was still finding her way to her true voice, who hadn’t yet realized the Big Themes of her life – and thus her fiction. I’m not the same person I was back then, and I’m not the same writer. (I like to think I’ve deepened with age.) I’ve also lost a lot of illusions, which means that the personal world I am writing both from and about click for more
Jan 22, 2012 ·
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“I became my own rebellion,” writes Twyla Tharp in her book THE CREATIVE HABIT, and I have loved that phrase ever since I came across it a handful of years ago.
She was talking about her decision to become a dancer/choreographer: generally not a choice of profession that fills parents with glee. She goes on to say:
Going with your head makes it arbitrary. Going with your gut means you have no choice. It’s inevitable, which is why I have no regrets.
I was in my early thirties when I read this and realized that I, too, wanted to become my own rebellion.
Even if I wasn’t exactly sure what that meant. click for more
Jan 14, 2012 ·
White collar conservative flashin’ down the street, pointing that plastic finger at me. They all assume my kind will drop and die, but I’m gonna wave my freak flag high. — Jimi Hendrix
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I have multiple small male children, which means I do a lot of Lego (a pox on those Lego pieces that get lost and screw up the design until you find them three days later when you step on them barefoot). If I go to my laptop after a lengthy Lego session, something strange tends to happen: the keys on the keyboard feel oddly Lego-like. With each touch-tap my brain ‘hears’ and ‘feels’ a Lego snapping into place.
So I could relate when I read about something called The Tetris Effect (even though I don’t play Tetris). From a book called THE HAPPINESS ADVANTAGE:
Tetris is a simple game in which four kinds of shapes fall from the top of the screen, and the player can move or rotate them until they hit bottom. When they create an unbroken line across the screen, the line disappears. The point of the game is to manipulate the falling shapes to create as many unbroken lines as possible.
…In a study at Harvard Medical School’s Department of Psychiatry, researchers paid 27 people to play Tetris for multiple hours a day, three days in a row…. click for more
Jan 10, 2012 ·
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Anything with a low barrier of entry will let in a lot of crap. This is just the natural order of things (of social media, of blogging). But this only makes it more important – not less – to strive for excellence, relevance and meaning.
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You need to have an intention. ‘Developing a readership by attracting strangers and turning them into Fans and maybe True Fans’ is a very different kind of intention from ‘making money online’ or ‘putting up a blog so my agent/editor/writing instructor will get the f*ck off my back’.
I was talking with a young writer who wanted to start building her online platform and said click for more
Dec 30, 2011 ·
The other day I finished reading the kind of novel you develop a relationship with: the characters move off the page to take up residence in your head. Their reality runs like a shadowy river alongside your own, waiting for you to step back into it.
When it was over, I leaped online to check out the author. For the most part, at least in my experience, literary writers tend to eye the social media platforms as if they’re instruments of sexual bondage: I’m supposed to do what, exactly? Surely you’re joking. What exactly is that, anyway?
Still, I was hoping for a blog. I wanted to prolong the experience of the novel by remaining in contact with the author’s voice. At the same time, I was curious about the author. More than curious: I felt a deep respect and even an affection for her.
I had touched her mind.
I had walked through her imagination.
I wanted to show up at her virtual doorstep with the equivalent of a bouquet of flowers to say thank you and let her know how much her novel meant to me. I was ready to evangelize her to the world – or at least my small corner of it. click for more
Dec 24, 2011 ·
“Killing the angel in the house was part of the occupation of the woman writer.” — Virginia Woolf
I give you seven awesome reasons to kill your inner nice girl.
(Or maybe just send her to Cleveland or something.) click for more
Dec 12, 2011 ·
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Why should you bust your ass on your creative content and give it away, online, for free?
How is this supposed to help you?
And it can’t be mediocre stuff, either.
It has to be remarkable, engaging, useful, distinctive…or else no one will care.
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Part of becoming a powerful artist is being a relevant artist.
Consistent blogging gives ideas life and energy as it tosses them to you, dear reader, and you bounce them around and back to the blogger. click for more
Dec 8, 2011 ·
“I’m selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can’t handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don’t deserve me at my best.” click for more
― Marilyn Monroe
Dec 6, 2011 ·
It’s good to disrupt yourself.
My kids went to their father and I went to Palm Springs and Joshua Tree. I’d forgotten how much I love the desert. I felt drawn to it as a kid – to the New Mexico landscapes featured in Lois Duncan’s YA novels, or Judy Blume’s book TIGER EYES – and it was good to be reminded of that.
Shift your location, shift your perspective. We get attached to certain ways of thinking. We don’t realize that we need to change the frame.
So I’m writing this novel, and one day I’ll finish, and decide what I’m going to do with it. I read this piece about reasons not to self-publish. It’s an intelligent, well-written article —
– but something keeps nagging me. Something about the old-school frame that’s shaping the writer’s question. It’s a good question. But is it the truly central question? click for more
Dec 5, 2011 ·
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I went to an exhibit called BEAUTY CULTURE and saw a documentary by Lauren Greenfield in which a woman said something like, “People think that we’re living in a beauty culture now…but we have always been living in a beauty culture.”
I like to look at beautiful women. I admit it.
I’m hardly alone in this; BEAUTY CULTURE is the most popular exhibit the Annenberg Space for Photography has ever shown. A slowly shuffling line of attendees snaked past the walls of photographs.
“There aren’t any pictures of men,” I pointed out to my boyfriend. Although the exhibit didn’t claim to be about women specifically, it didn’t even pretend to take an interest in beautiful males.
(And it’s interesting that male supermodels make a fraction of the money and get a fraction of the attention that female supermodels do. This can’t be just a ‘male gaze’ thing; if women wanted to look at pictures of beautiful men the way some of us want to read vampire novels, for example, I have a feeling that chiseled males in various stages of seductive undress would be selling us everything from makeup to furniture to luxury vacations to wine to footwear.) click for more
Dec 2, 2011 ·
