Friday Done List

 Goal 1. Adult Short Stories, Essays, and Humor

• Some of you may recall a short story I talked about for months and months and months this year. Well, I submitted to a publication.
• I wondered all week what I should write next and finally started something this morning.
• Took a workshop at the Northwestern Summer Writers' Conference. No Passports or Visas Required: Imaginative Travel Writing with Faisal Mohyuddin. Because I'm going to be traveling later this year, I projected onto this project what I wanted to see, which was a travel writing workshop. It was not about travel writing. It was about researching places and working them into writing. I've done this kind of thing before, where I've signed up for something believing it was whatever I wanted it to be. This time, just as with the first time, the experience turned out very well. Excellent workshop and generative, in that I came away with some thoughts for three writing projects.

Goal 3. Community Building/Marketing/Branding

• Yeah, yeah, yeah. Some blog posts. Still have to promote them.

I'm in a remarkably good mood this evening, even though I know that next week I'll be tied up most days with family fun. But I have a work plan. What little writing time I have will go to tinkering with the project I started this morning. Otherwise, I will spend what other time I can spare reading. Reading is good.

I love a plan.

Some Annotated Reading July 18

Finished Reading a Book!

Mrs. March by Virginia Feito was one of those books I read about, put on my library list, and by the time I got it, no longer recalled why I was interested in it. Usually that is a neat reading experience. This time I am very sorry I didn't read up on Mrs. March again before reading it. I read this as literary fiction about an unpleasant woman who is falling apart. The unnamed setting appears to be 1960s, upper class New York City, a time and group that always depresses me. I ended up skimming some sections and jumping to the end. 

I am sorry now.

After finishing the book, I did some reading about it and...it's a novel of psychological suspense!  I wasn't prepared for that when I started reading. So I missed what, in hindsight, I now believe were several references to Rebecca by Daphne DuMaurier, a novel of psychological suspense that Mrs. March is reading. And Rebecca is related to Jane Eyre, and I am so mmmm about Jane Eyre. I really regret not being better prepared for this book.

I am not a fan of reading books over again, but at some point in the future, I would like to reread this one. There's also going to be a movie.

An interesting point about Mrs. March, no matter how you read it: I don't see how anybody could find Mrs. March a likable character. And that blows the whole "your protagonist must be likeable" thing right out of the water.

Short Story

Though I have a digital subscription to The New Yorker, I haven't been reading many of the short stories, which is, I'm sure, my loss. I only read So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan, which originally appeared in The New Yorker in 2022, because Peter Hoppock did what the Off Campus Writers' Workshop calls a craft element program about it for them. Oh, my gosh. An incredible story by an author I had never heard of but whose work I'll be looking for now. I signed up for Hoppock's program, couldn't attend, but read the material he collected in which Keegan talked about her writing. A great reading/study experience.

An interesting point: as with Mrs. March, the main character in So Late in the Day is not a likable character. 

Other Things

A family member posted a poem on Facebook by Aliza Grace, a writer I'd never heard of, that packed a bit of a punch. So I looked Grace up, by which, of course, I mean I googled her. Holy Smokes! TikTok's Hottest Gen Z Poet Accused of Blatant Plagiarism by Darshita Goyal at The Daily Beast. A number of years ago, I read of something similar happening with books. While this is not the worst thing in the world that can happen, it is disturbing that it appears these people can't be stopped. There is plagiarism and then, yes, there is blatant plagiarism.

The Lion and Me by John Lahr in the New Yorker is one of those older articles (1998) I enjoy reading when I stumble upon them.

Humor

I Quit Murdering People for 7 Days. Here's What Happened by Philip S. Naudus at Jane Austen's Wastebasket. I love the title of this thing. It is soooo close to titles we've all seen. Over and over again.

The Shirley Jackson Awards Announced. And A Dip Into The Archives For My 2008 Trip To Readercon.

Yes, indeed, The Shirley Jackson Awards have been announced. The awards are for "outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic." As a Jane Eyre fan, I'm particularly interested in The First Mrs. Edward Rochester Would Like a Word by Laura Blackwell. The awards were presented at this past weekend's Readercon.

Seeing that reference to Readercon reminded me that I once went to Readercon. Yeah, this was back in 2008, and evidently I went primarily because I needed to get out of the house and this was easy for me to get to. There were also a number of YA authors there that year. 

I had an interesting experience there, and, yes, it doesn't take a lot to interest me. The interesting experience may say a lot more about me than it does about anyone or anything else. I found rereading my blog post abut it so interesting that I decided to republish it.

July 23, 2008 Aren't You Just Dying To Hear My Story? 

The Archives. Get it?

Okay, so I'm back in town with weekend junk heaped up all around me and even further behind in life than I was last week. But I always have time to pass on my experiences,  so here's the Readercon story I promised you Saturday:

So, I was attending this panel discussion during which the panelists were all going to discuss this book on different types of fantasy. The moderator immediately announces that the book is just wonderful. "You must have this book," he told us and said it would be offered for sale later and we mustn't leave Readercon without it. Then he asks the panelists to introduce themselves. It sounds as if most of them know the author of the book because they all refer to her by her first name.

The last panelist to speak concludes with, "I must say, this is the most poorly edited book I've read in years. It reads as if it had been edited with spellcheck. Be forewarned" and other things of that nature.

Then the moderator acts as if nothing had happened and goes on. He was well prepared and commented on various aspects of the book after which he asked the panelists to respond. Every single time, this same panelist would say something like, "I wish _____ had covered such-and-such a thing" or "I wish_________ hadn't been so judgmental" or "I wish__________ had covered humor."

She wasn't getting a lot of support from the other panelists, but no one was arguing with her, either. Though I have to admit that there was this one guy who I think was some kind of critic, as in Critic, and I couldn't understand eighty percent of what he was saying. He seemed extremely nice, though, so he might have been arguing with Ms. Negativity, and I just couldn't understand him.

I'm finding this all rather odd and uncomfortable making. I start looking around at other members of the audience to see if others are squirming in their seats. I was sitting in the fourth row from the front, so I couldn't see everybody by any means. Still, no one seemed to be laughing nervously or looking shocked.

Finally, the panelist from Hell starts in about how she wished_________ had covered something or other. A voice comes out from the audience, "It was in the section on ___________, Marie!" And the panelist backed right down.

Marie is not her real name by the way.

Anyway, as you may have guessed, the audience member who finally stood up to her was none other than the author, herself. I know this because I turned to look (figuring that since I didn't know anybody there, it didn't matter if every single one of them thought I was rude, which, yes, was just awful of me), caught a glimpse of her, and saw her and her name tag a couple of hours later out in the hallway.

I found this whole episode rather disturbing. First off, I've never seen a public pounding like this at any of the kidlit events I've attended. Or any of the other literary events I've dropped in on. I know I don't get out much, but still. The second thing that freaks me out about this is that no one else seemed to think anything at all unusual was going on. When I have told this story to acquaintances, they are quite taken aback. Well, except for the people this past weekend who were bored. I've googled this subject and checked other blogs. Lots of references to Readercon, one from a person who attended the same panel, but no one even mentioned this particular situation.

So I wonder if this kind of thing goes on all the time at some types of conferences, and the more experienced Readercon attendees thought nothing of it. Or, perhaps this is the kind of thing that a gentlewoman should pretend she didn't notice, and here I am spilling the unsavory story for the whole world to see.

Another New Humor Publication. And This One Has a Really Interesting Backstory. With a Moral.

The college paper 

Today Jane Austen's Wastebasket published my latest humor piece, Does "The Owl and the Pussycat" by Edward Lear Support Our Community's Values? Now, I know that I think everything I write has an interesting backstory, and I am always right about that. But this is a particularly good story.

Last month, I started to clean out my writing files, thinking I would get rid of old starts that I'm not interested in anymore to make more room in the filing cabinet for new work. I didn't get far because the first thing I found was my notebook from my college expository writing class. So, of course, I have to look through it. And what do I find but something called "The Subversive Aspects of The Owl And The Pussycat:  Including A Discussion Of Its Influences On Youth, Sexual Mores, And Society As A Whole."

Now this was a redneck kid's attempt to write a parody of an academic paper, something she didn't know a whole lot about even though she was, indeed, a college undergraduate. The piece is also now very dated, claiming the Owl and the Pussycat's guitar was an influence on a generation of folksingers and the dancing on the edge of the sand at the end "inspired a whole flock of C beach movies." But at the time the instructor was kind.

More importantly, I looked at this thing last month and said to myself, "You can do something with this."

What I did was reframe it and bring it up to date. It is no longer a parody of an academic paper but a parody of a book complaint to a librarian. Instead of hitting on folksingers and movies, it hits on religion and gay couples. The only carry overs from the original are the concerns about money and the Owl and the Pussycat being alone together while unmarried. Money and pre-marital sex are timeless.

I didn't get far with my file cleaning, because I found two more manuscripts I think I can rework for a humor piece and an essay. One is from the graduate-level essay writing class I took a long time ago, and I don't know how long ago I wrote the other one. I have the typed manuscript. It's probably from a couple of computers back and saved somewhere if I only knew where to find it.

I promised you a moral. It's a moral for writers. Never throw away work. 

Some Annotated Reading July 11

 Books

I whipped through two Regency romances this week, which shall remain nameless, because except for the sex scenes (especially in the first book), I don't have a lot of good things to say about them. As a teenager, I read Regency romances, mainly Georgette Heyer who may have been pretty much all there was at that point. During college I read them during exam week. As an adult, though, I lost interest in traditional romance, mainly, I think, because the ending of a romance is never in doubt. Not much is at stake in those stories. (This is why in the Bridgerton TV world my favorite series has been Queen Charlotte, the only show with stakes beyond when the main characters will have sex, which is no stakes at all, because we all know they will.) What I do read is historical mysteries that feature a couple as the leads, said couples always, over the course of a series, eventually ending up in bed together. I prefer these books to be set in the nineteenth century. Many of them appear to be well researched and often feature some particular historical event or figure, or the culture of a period is a significant backdrop for the story. 

Yeah, the two books I just read had none of that. The author was recommended by an agent in an article I read, and I was able to easily get a couple of her books. All the characters were incredibly good looking, and in each book there are two characters lusting desperately after one another who are kept apart for far-fetched reasons. It turns out that that is not enough for me. I need a dead body. Maybe a few of them.

Live and learn. Or perhaps I should say, read and learn.

Humor

Dining With Us Tonight? by Neil Offen at Muddyum What makes this funny is not the parodies of pretentious menu items. That's been done before. The humor is in the asides, which are not pretentious. "...grown by local farmers who have never knowingly used chemically enhanced hand sanitizers before digging up their lettuce" "For dessert, our pastry chef has concocted a special panna cotta sorbet tiramisu dulce de leche because we've run out of English words on the menu."

After Twenty Years I Have Decided to Wear My Good Underwear by Anne Kyzmir at The Belladonna Comedy. I have so much good underwear.

Iconic Movies Reimagined In A World That Embraces Incontinence by Tobi Pledger also at The Belladonna Comedy. No, enjoying this piece does not say something distasteful about me. Even though I liked it the same week I liked that underwear thing.

Friday Done List

 Goal 1. Adult Short Stories, Essays, and Humor

• Have nearly completed a draft of a new humor piece.
  
• Have read some other Medium authors.
• Found another old piece in the files that I have plans for.
• Signed up for a Northwestern Zoom workshop on travel writing.

Goal 2. Submit 143 Canterbury Road to Agents

• This goal has turned into just submitting any book length work. I submitted a middle grade novel to an agent opening this month for SCBWI members. It hadn't gone out for a couple of years, so I had to revise the letter. Additionally, the form for this submission makes more of comp titles than many agents do, so I had to spend some time coming up with one. Flavia de Luce!

Goal 3. Community Building/Marketing/Branding

• Two blog posts, including this one.
• Promoted the first post.

Some Annotated Reading July 4

I spent my Fourth of July reading on my deck. First time in years I could give a whole day to reading, starting out there first thing in the morning still in my favorite nightgown. Didn't get through as much as
I thought I would, but a good reading day, and reading week, nonetheless. 

Books

While I liked Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead by Emily Austin, I'm hard put to describe it, myself. An anxious and depressed young woman struggles to find a reason to keep living when there is so much misery around her? With some dark laughs? (There are some.)  The publisher does a better job with the description: "...a morbidly anxious young woman stumbles into a job as a receptionist at a Catholic church and soon finds herself obsessed with her predecessor's mysterious death." Gilda's anxiety is intense. 

This week I finished reading How to Keep House While Drowning by K.C. Davis. I think an argument could be made that this book isn't really, or at least just, about keeping house. I may feature this in a Time Management Tuesday post. I read an ebook edition I got through my library, and I was on a waiting list for it for a year. I'm ordering a copy for a family member.

Today I finished These Truths: A History of the United States by Jill Lepore. I love historian Jill Lepore, and this book is fantastic. I did spend a few years reading it, though, because my go-to reading is fiction. I read this in the car when someone else was driving and while waiting in doctors' offices. This was worth every minute of my life that I spent on it.

Poetry 

I was doing some research for a new humor piece when I came upon February by Margaret Atwood. Liked it much better than I remember liking her poetry in college. But this is from a book published long after I was in college, so maybe she was doing different kinds of poetry by then. And maybe she's doing still different kinds now.

Because I read that Margaret Atwood poem, I remembered my poet laureate project and looked up the next poet laureate to check out. I'm up to number 5, Karl Shapiro, who was still referred to as a consultant in poetry. Among his poems that I liked were Buick (Yes, it's a poem about a car.) and Ballade of the Second-Best Bed, which should be assigned to every high school kid having to read Julius Caesar and Romeo and Juliet, because it gives Shakespeare a little more interest than I remember him having when I had to read those things.  

Short Reading

The Time I Stole Tama Janowitz's Slaves of New York and Couldn't Stop Reading It by Elwin Cotman at Lit Hub. I was drawn to this because I'd just found my copy of Tama Janowitz's Slaves of New York, and I could stop reading it.

Quince Mince Pie | Owl and the Pussycat  at InLiterature. Yes, I've been doing some reading about The Owl and the Pussycat by Edward Lear, and here is an attempt at a pie made from "mince and slices of quince."

Excerpts from The Space Between by Herb Harris at Craft. This is an editors' choice selection from a memoir excerpt and essay contest. I believe there are others, but this is the only one I've read. Definitely enjoyed it. 

Humor

Frazzled has started accepting humorous essays. Oops...I Neglected to Bring My Son to Preschool Art Night by Brad Snyder is a good one. It has a bit of a memoirish thing going. 

Friday Done List June 28

 Okay. We're talking a better work week here.

Goal 1. Adult Short Stories, Essays, and Humor

• A new humor piece was published on Tuesday. 
  
• Promoted said humor piece.
• Started another humor piece.
• Have some other ideas for short writing.
• Started cleaning old files where I found a couple of things that were supposed to be humor--of sorts--back in the day, and might evolve into more humor now.

Goal 2. Submit 143 Canterbury Road to Agents

• I am done with the agent search for 143 and happy to have it behind me. Unless something drops into my lap, of course. I'll submit again in that case.
• I made two submissions for another project, Good Women. I am also through submitting that, unless something drops into my lap.
• One of the agents rejected it in just 24 hours. That makes me feel she must not have a lot to do, if she can get respond that quickly.

Goal 3. Community Building/Marketing/Branding

• I did four blog posts this week.
• I promoted some of those blog posts.

Goal 4. Nineteenth Century Novel, Which is Just for Fun

• Organized some research links I've been emailing myself on this.

Some Annotated Reading June 27

While I didn't do much writing last month, I did do a bit of reading. Including:

Four Books!

• My cousin Nooch mentioned author Jess Walter in a comment a while back, so last month I read his The Financial Lives of the Poets, a book about a man's marriage and life falling apart. Walter has a dark, deadpan sense of humor that I enjoyed very much. 
• The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older. This is my favorite kind of scifi, a blend of science fiction and mystery. The world of the book I totally understood, which is not something that always happens for me with science fiction. The two main characters reminded me of Holmes and Watson, except that they are both women and the Watson character here is a great deal smarter than the original. They also have a romantic history. There's a second book I hope to read at some point.
• I finished reading The Hockey Sweater and Other Stories by Roch Carrier. In an earlier post, I speculated that these were children's stories, with a child narrator and often a moral point of some kind. I wouldn't say that anymore. I'd like to do more reading about les contes, the kinds of stories Carrier is known for writing, but I'm not finding much in my quick hunt for material. 
• Finally, I read a thriller that shall remain nameless. It plodded along and was extremely improbable. Yet I read nearly every word.

Short Writing

• Author Cass Sunstein Unlocks What It Takes to Be as Big as the Beatles  A terrific interview with the author of a new book, How to Become Famous, which also sounds as if it could be terrific.
• The Moral Judgements of Henry David Thoreau by Kathryn Schulz at The New Yorker. This is nearly ten years old, and I read it nearly a month ago, so I can't tell you how I came to do that. I've had a very up and down reading experience with Thoreau. I've mentioned him many times over the years here at Original Content, and he gets a line in my most recent humor piece. He is, in short, one of many, many authors I enjoy reading about more than I enjoy reading. Schulz sounds as if she has mixed feelings about him, too. While I was reading what she had to say about Walden, I recalled reading that book and thinking at many points that he had to be joking. Probably not.
• Book Recommendations Based on Your Favorite TV Shows by Kailey Hansen at Buzzfeed. I like this concept, and saw a couple of books I may try. And one I've read.
• Ursula K. Leguin's Home Will Become A Writers Residency by Hillel Italie at AP. I love authors' homes. And I have a bit of a thing for Ursula K. Leguin.
• The Baby in the Corner by Anne Moul at The Delmara Review/The Talbot Fry. I am not a big fan of painful memoir, but this is almost more philosophical than painful. After having just skimmed it again, I wonder if it was, indeed, what the author was going for and not just Gail's perception.
• How Chicago Inspires Writers: Abby Geni and the Lakeshore at The Chicago Review of Books. I read this, because Abby Geni was the leader of a workshop I took recently at the Off Campus Writers' Workshop. It inspired me to think of whether or not Connecticut has inspired me. And I believe it has, but I may save those thoughts for an essay some day. But I will say, it involves Puritans.

Humor

•  I'd Like to Discuss My Child Specifically While You're Trying to Address a Group of People by Caroline Horwitz at Frazzled. Sometimes you'll hear talk about humor needing to be true. While I think you can make too much of that, this piece is definitely a case of truth in humor. That first situation Horwitz uses? I was in a room full of people while something just like that was going on. As God is my witness, I wasn't the mother doing the talking.
• Things I Grew Up With That Seem Weird....Today by Patrick Metzger at MuddyUm This is a very funny spin on those old fart articles about how things were different when I was young. What makes it work is the total lack of nostalgia. "...drunk driving was popular and largely ignored." This writer deserves the 6,000+ claps he got for this piece just for calling Hawkeye Pierce a sanctimonious alcoholic.

A New Humor Publication. With A Bear.

June has been a rough month for me as far as work is concerned. I spent a week celebrating a birthday with a family member. Then there were a number of days of preparation for John the Baptist Day. Then there was some this, and there was some that. 

But I did have a humor piece accepted for publication. Things I Don't Want to Hear from My Hiking Group was published this morning at Greener Pastures Magazine.

This piece as an interesting backstory. But, then, I think everything I write has an interesting backstory. But this one really does!

1. It began when I would do "Things You Don't Want to Hear on the Trail" posts on Facebook after my husband and I had been hiking.

2. Greener Pastures suggested I make some changes in the original submission, including coming up with a different title. (A truly excellent idea. I'll spare you why. Take my word for it.) Between the time I first submitted the bit and the time I revised it, my husband and I came upon our first bear while hiking. The thing was actually coming toward us on the trail. That is why there is now a bear joke in this piece. Originally there was no bear reference. 

3. My husband worked on the first draft with me, since our exchanges on the trail inspired it. At one point he was looking at what I had and said, "How about X?" "No, no," I said. "Y would be funnier." 

I then told him that we sounded like Ava and Deborah on Hacks. Which led to a discussion of which of us was Ava and which was Deborah. To be clear, at my house I am Deborah. If Deborah spent most of her life in sweatpants.