Another Story Behind A Story

Farr House as it still looked when I ate dinner there.

The Memoirist, a Medium publication that is new to me, just published my memoir Eating at Shirley
Farr's House in which I write about very much enjoying a restaurant in a mansion I later learned was once owned by someone who might not have been happy about me being there.

Once again, there is an interesting story beyond the story in the story.

In the Beginning

This memoir began as an essay for the one graduate course I took more than twenty years ago, an essay writing course at the University of Connecticut taught by Sam Pickering. Now, Pickering is the author of a few books of essays, but you can't find much about him on-line. Given the little I know of him from that class, I am not surprised. He did not seem to be an Internet-embracing kind of guy. At that point, none of the historical material was in the essay. The essay was about a local rube (me) who managed to get into a wealthy person's house by way of the restaurant someone had opened in it after her death, enjoy the place, and then it became even more of a wealthy person's place, ruining my bliss.

The History Involved

To make a long story short(er), the history involved in this story relates to the eugenics movement in the early twentieth century. There were eugenics fans all over the U.S, and the world, since some draw a line between American eugenics and the Nazis. You don't need to know much to think, Gee whiz, don't these things sound kind of similar? The Nazi connection may be why I never heard of eugenics while I was in high school or college, where I was a history minor. Even though I was in Vermont, which definitely was definitely up to its neck in eugenics. Who wants to have been involved with something with possible Holocaust connections?

What Does Eugenics Have to Do with Me Eating Sticky Buns in a Mansion Turned Restaurant?

Well, it turns out the Shirley Farr of My Dinner at Shirley Farr's was active in Vermont's eugenics movement. How active, you ask? Go ahead, ask. She funded what was known as the Vermont Eugenics Survey for eleven years. She spent between fifty and sixty thousand dollars on it back in the nineteen twenties and thirties when fifty to sixty thousand dollars was real money. 

This survey studied a number of generations of families someone had identified as having issues a society didn't want to encourage, issues eugenicists believed were genetic and could be stopped  immediately if these people weren't allowed to reproduce. A number of these families happened to be poor, happened to be Abenakis, or happened to be French Canadian. 

Because, you know, nothing goes wrong in white anglo saxon Protestant families. Absolutely nothing.

Now, I didn't learn anything about the eugenics movement and Shirley Farr until I decided to look her up on-line either while I was writing the original essay or thereafter. And even then, it took a while for me, a second-generation American on my father's French-Canadian side to go, "Wait. Gail. Isn't it odd you were eating dinner in that woman's house? And you took your kids there?"

Still More to the Story!!!

So that was going on in my head, off and on, over the last twenty years. But I did nothing with it because I had books to write that wouldn't sell and humor writing to get started on.

Then earlier this year I decided to start cleaning my massive professional files. My plan was to save anything I thought I could still do something with and toss the rest. I didn't get far, because I found some undergraduate writing that I used for a humor piece and this graduate material about Shirley Farr.

And the rest was doing research to get specific info on Farr, revising to create a little bit of a braided format, and finding an appropriate illustration.

Now I'm done.

The University of Vermont has a great deal of information about the eugenics movement in Vermont. A great deal. So much. 

  

Time Management Tuesday: Procrastibaking Is A Thing And Can Illustrate Attractive Aspects Of Procrastination

I'd seen the term procrastibaking a few times over the last couple of years but just thought it was a joke. Until a week ago Sunday. It sure looks real to me, and I also think it illustrates the four differences between procrastivity/productive procrastination and more demanding tasks described by J. Russell Ramsay in Why the ADHD Brain Chooses the Less Important Task--And How CBT Improves Prioritization Skills in ADDitude.

First Off, Procrastibaking

Articles on procrastibaking, like The Joys of 'Procrastibaking' to Avoid Real Work by Christina Ianzinto at AARP tend to treat it benignly. The AARP article was about a new cookbook, so, yeah, I can see that. In this case, procrastibaking is portrayed as a stress reliever. While Why Work When You Can Procrastinate by Julia Moskin at WRAL News includes some material from psychology professor Tim Pychyl on how procrastination, itself, is "one of the few situations in which people consistently make choices that are demonstrably bad, " over all the tone for procrastibaking is cheery.

Since I've mentioned Tim Pychyl's name, I'm just going to remind everyone that in his book The Procrastinator's Digest A Concise Guide to Solving the Procrastination Puzzle, he says that procrastination has a specific definition within psychology. True procrastination "is the voluntary delay of an intended action despite the knowledge that this delay may harm the individual in terms of the task performance or even just how the individual feels about the task or him or herself. Procrastination is a needless voluntary delay."

So I guess procrastibaking is that with brownies.

My Personal Procrastibaking Case Study

What was supposed to happen on Sunday, October 6:

I had two tasks planned that would improve my upcoming work week.

•  I was going to fold and take care of my clean clothes in the laundry room. I was going to do some of the ironing that has been waiting down there since last winter. We're talking only my clothes. Over the last few years, I've turned into that person who lives out of the clean clothes hamper, which is odd because I wasn't that person when I was washing, drying, folding, and taking care of laundry for four people. But that's neither here nor there. I was going to get my clean clothes dealt with so I wouldn't have to spend time dealing with it on days when I wanted to work.
• I was also going to do some research to support a minor part of an essay I've been rewriting. That would make the writing of that essay during the week go so much faster, because not only would the research be done, it would have been simmering in my brain for a while, which is always a good thing.

What really happened on Sunday, October 6:

I realized I had ten eggs that were going to expire on Monday, October 7. Even though I knew I could be loosie-goosie with expiration dates for eggs, I spent the afternoon of Sunday, October 6 baking

• rosemary sea salt bread
• drop biscuits
• and hermit bars

I bake gluten free, and gluten free baking sucks up eggs. I had only three left at the end of the day. I used them for lunch the next day, in case you're concerned. 

All the time I was doing this, I knew I was proving the point Ramsay makes in his ADDitude article, but I did it anyway. Mainly for this blog post. But still.

What Does My Procrastibaking Experience Illustrate?

J. Russell Ramsay says there are four differences between the small, unimportant tasks ADHD brains (and I'm going to argue other brains, too) select over more critical ones they put off. I ticked every one of them off with my work choice that Sunday.

1. Manual focus, meaning the tasks selected are often physical rather than mentally demanding. Certainly, baking was less mentally demanding than research. There's a lot of material on what I was writing about, and I don't find it terribly well organized. I was not running toward that task with open arms. 
2. Familiar script, meaning something you've done before and will find easier to do. I have been baking for a looong time. Additionally, two of the three things I made I've made a number of times. Sure, I know how to fold and iron clothes. But obviously I don't do it anywhere near as often.
3. Time frame, meaning a definite and predictable time frame. Recipes are all about time. How long was it going to take me to iron those clothes and find the little bit I needed in that research? I didn't know. 
4. Task progress, meaning a clear beginning, middle, and end. Again, what clearer beginning, middle, and end can you ask for than a recipe? I didn't expect to finish the ironing, even if I'd started it. Also, in this particular case I had the end date with the eggs expiring the next day. It was not at all difficult to convince myself that I was working on a deadline.

What Can We Take From All This?

For one thing, beware of procrastibaking! It is not benign and cheerful! If you're truly procrastibaking, it means you're not doing something more important. What is it and how are you going to address it?

For another, when you see yourself choosing to do something that doesn't address an important task waiting for you, ask yourself if you're choosing the lesser "work" because it's less mentally demanding, familiar, has a predictable time frame, and has a definite beginning, middle, and end.  A positive answer to any of those could convince you to take another course of action.

If you're wondering if I ever took care of the clothes and did the research I needed to do, the answer is no to the clothes and yes to the research. I could have taken a few minutes this past Sunday to do some work in the laundry room, but now I have a lot of apples to use up. I made an apple upside down cake instead. 

The Weekend Writer: How NOT To Personalize A Query Letter

There are countless numbers of articles out in the world on how to do countless numbers of things related to writing. Personally, I have become selective about which ones I read, because there really aren't countless numbers of ways to do things. But How Not To Personalize A Query Letter by Tiffany Hawk did catch my eye because of the NOT in the title.

Essentially what she's saying is don't personalize your letter in an illogical way that's not connected to a professional connection. For instance, sometime in the last year or two I submitted to an agent who has an apple orchard. It was all I could do not to say in my cover letter that I love apple orchards. I hope I didn't say that.

Also, don't do any of these things.

Hawk also has a 6-step strategy for finding literary agents that I think is very good. 

Friday Done List

This was probably my most normal work week in quite some time. I'm feeling both stimulated, because work stimulates work in my experience, and overwhelmed by all the stimulation.

Goal 1. Adult Short Stories, Essays, and Humor

• I received a humor rejection on October 3rd, spent time this week on an extensive revision, and submitted it elsewhere this morning.
• I wrote the new material for an essay revision.
• I finally went through Off Campus Writers' Workshop's offerings for the year to decide what I want to take. I'm not done yet, because I like to check out the workshop leaders. There are a lot of workshops I'm interested in and that helps screen. I often struggle reading very academic writers' and some literary writers' work. My theory is that I probably will struggle with workshops they run, too, so if I have to cut down on workshops, that's a place to start.
• This morning I heard about a flash fiction contest and considered entering it for a while. The entrance fee is larger than I usually like to pay, since contests with entrance fees are really gambling, right? But I made more money this month on Medium than I expected to, and I could submit two pieces of flash, which I just happened to have. But then while looking at files, I realized that I had submitted one of them somewhere else several months ago and haven't heard back yet so that story isn't eligible and did I want to submit just one story for that price? And I spent too much time on that this morning.
• Spent a little time making sure I'm up-to-date documenting what I've sent where. If you read the preceding bulleted point, you know why.
• Decided I need to create a reading schedule. Don't know when that will happen.

Goal 3. Community Building, Marketing, and Branding

• Did a Time Management Tuesday post this week and have plans for several more.
• Did a number of blog posts this week and have plans for several more.
• Promoted a couple of those blog posts.
• Hope to get some blog posts started this weekend
• Finished up still another website update with Computer Guy.

Some Annotated Reading October 10

Books (From my Kindle app) 

System Collapse by Martha Wells. The seventh in the Murderbot series. I love Murderbot. I must say it was off its game in this book. By that I do not mean there was something wrong with the writing. No, I mean Murderbot was struggling. If I had read this closer to the sixth book that probably would have been more meaningful for me. But Murderbot is Murderbot. It is meaningful just as it is. 

Skinny by Donna Cooner. This is very much a YA Cinderella tale about Ever (happily ever after) Davis, a high school sophomore who weighs 302 pounds at the beginning of our story. Her father is alive, unlike Cinderella's, her stepmother is a lovely person, she has a stepsister who wants to be her friend, a male friend named Rat (don't mice figure into the Cinderella story?), and a couple of fairy godmother figures. One of them is a very disturbing inner voice Ever has named Skinny. I wonder if Skinny was unhealthily disturbing. I found this book far more readable than some other books about teens with weight issues. The fairy tale connection made it less of a traditional problem story. Things turn out very well for Ever, as they should, since this is a fairy tale. However, they turn out very well for her because she loses weight, gets a makeover, and buys expensive clothes. When she conforms to society's teen girl norm, all good things come her way. Also, I question whether she could have dealt with Skinny on her own, without professional help. Nonetheless, this was an engaging read that didn't drag. 

Short Form

The Art of Taking It Slow by Anna Wiener in The New Yorker. Sadly these slow biking people are nowhere near slow enough for me.

The Unrivaled Omnipresence of Queen Elizabeth II by Rebecca Mead in The New Yorker. I enjoy reading about royal families, because their lives are like living novels. Maybe they are reality shows. I don't know, because I don't watch those. Rebecca Mead wrote My Life in Middlemarch, which is on my iPad. I have some interest in Middlemarch.

Humor (Yes, I did read a lot of humor this week)

My Cold is Worse Than Yours, I Can Tell by Sarah James at Slackjaw. This is fantastic. Why isn't it getting thousands of claps? 

Just Because I'm A Death Doula, Doesn't Mean I... by Catherine Durkin Robinson at The Haven. For a humor list to work, it needs a really distinctive hook. Which this humor list has.

I Tried Turning Thirty So You Don't Have To (Honest Review) by Meghana Indurti at The New Yorker. Haven't you seen these titles? "I Did _________ So You Don't Have To?" "My Honest Review?" Sure, it is.  

I Only Offered To Do The Dishes At This Dinner Party So I Could Keep Eating by Chason Gordon at McSweeney's Internet Tendency  Nobody offers to do dishes at a dinner party. Nobody.

My Friend Can Be A Bit Much But He's A Good Guy If You Give Him A Chance by Ashton Winters at McSweeney's Internet Tendency  No, he's not. And that's what makes this funny. Incongruity.

It's Crazy To Think Everyone (Except Me) Is Going To Die Someday by Graeme Carey at Slackjaw Again, why isn't this thing getting thousands of claps at Slackjaw? Is it the word "death" in the title? Because the "death" doula humor piece should get more attention, too. I once used the word "die" in a title on the Medium platform, and, no, that didn't go over well at all. We need to all work on this.

I Am A Lady, And Donald Trump Is My Protector by Devorah Blachor at McSweeney's Internet Tendency. More incongruity humor.

Oh, Yeah. I Had a New Humor Piece Published Two Weeks Ago

Photo by Torsten Dettlaf on Pexels

Here I am, finally promoting Subject Lines I Love to See on My Emails, which was published at Muddy'Um two weeks ago. 

Now, you may ask, what exactly went into writing this, Gail? Isn't it pretty much just a collection of email subject lines that turned up in your inbox? Yes. Except I had to come up with a response to them. And I had to organize them in such a way as to create callbacks, which are a thing in humor writing and which I enjoy as a humor reader. And I had to make the last piece the funniest.

So I did have to do something.

Time Management Tuesday: Reading About ADHD Has Made Me Rethink Productive Procrastination

I haven't been doing much with Time Management Tuesday the last couple of years for two reasons.

1. I see a lot of time management articles on Medium that are clearly written with minimal research and are often rehashes of material others have covered. Not much that's new there. It's a little bit book reportish. This left me with anxiety about producing the same kind of material, which I'd really rather not do.
2. I don't feel I've been doing that great with managing my own time the last few years. Am I being a hypocrite writing about managing time or am I writing about how I deal with a professional problem? I can feel a headache coming on. Seriously. 

But recently I've read a couple of things that caused what we might call an interest flair. I am inspired again! I think I have a few months of time management material here, beginning with ADHD-related material for October, which is ADHD Awareness Month.

Can ADHD Behavioral Approaches Help Others Manage Time?

We recently had a family member diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. This was not a surprise, which I suspect is the case in many families. As a result, I am attracted to ADHD articles and definitely noticed the #ADHDawarenessmonth hashtag on Xitter. That led to one thing and another and some reading on ADHD and productivity and time management. Some of which sounded as if it could be helpful for any of us.

First off, the National Institute of Mental Health defines attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder as a "developmental disorder marked by persistent symptoms of inattention and/or hyperactivity and impulsivity that interfere with functioning or development."  The inattention part is of particular interest to writers, because it involves problems "staying on task, paying attention, or being organized."

Staying on task and being organized are hugely important for writers, because of the incredible, some of us might say overwhelming, array of things we need to do to write something, get it published, and market it. Each one of those aspects of the job require a large number of tasks. On top of that, the majority of us are working other jobs and possibly acting as caregivers for family members. So many balls to juggle. So many possible distractions.

How to decide what to do?

Procrastivity

In Why the ADHD Brain Chooses the Less Important Task--And How CBT Improves Prioritization Skills in ADDitude J. Russell Ramsay describes what he calls "procrastivity" in which people with ADHD procrastinate by working, but working at lower-priority activities. So they are doing things, but not making progress on a more important task. 

Productive Procrastination

When I read about procrastivity, I immediately thought of productive procrastination, something I've written about here a few times. I thought it was such a fine idea I republished the original post in 2022. My favorite willpower guru, Kelly McGonigal (She has a new book out! Or, at least, one I haven't heard of!) used the term "productive procrastination" in a Life Hacker piece on how she works and said, "I may have built my career on web searches I've done when I should have been doing something else." In another Life Hacker interview Ira Glass said, "I procrastinate by working." Though he did describe working at low-priority tasks when he should be writing as a bad habit. He wasn't as positive about it as McGonigal was.  

I've been feeling good about productive procrastination, believing that all those things I did while I should have been working on that last book for four years were a good thing. I was doing something. Anything. Now, after Ramsay's description of what goes on when someone with ADHD ends up in less necessary activities, I'm wondering about what I've been doing. 

Oh, and look. A far more recent Life Hack article, Productive Procrastination: Is It Good Or Bad? by Leon Ho, comes down firmly on the bad side. 

What To Do?

The Leon Ho Life Hack article includes time management techniques to avoid productive procrastination. But the J. Russell Ramsay ADDitude article has some fascinating stuff on why the ADHD mind leans toward low-priority tasks over the high-priority ones that could actually be more helpful for them to do. For instance, red flags for any of us might be noticing that we're spending a lot of time on tasks that are less demanding, more familiar, shorter, and with a very clear beginning and end rather than a big job that's waiting for us. Like writing a book. 

What I'm Going To Do

For the rest of October, I'm going to be looking for ADHD connected material that relates to time management and productivity, in recognition of ADHD Awareness Month. Next week I'll have a personal case study in how I spent an afternoon that illustrates some of what Ramsay talks about in his ADDitude article.

I think I should also give some thought to why I embraced productive procrastination in such a big way. Someone I liked did it? It gave me an excuse to get away from harder work? Yeah, I think that's it. Don't need to think about that any longer.

Also, I'm correct. As I said in the beginning of this post, I should be anxious about jumping into writing lightly researched blog posts.

Friday Done List

The big thing I'm done with is travel and celebrating. Yes, vacationing always provides me with some creative ideas, but they get buried under the work involved to get ready to go somewhere and clean up afterward and the work piling up at home.

Don't you just love First World Problems? I know I do. They're the best possible kind.

I did manage to squeeze a little work in over the last few weeks. Oh! And you know what else! I met my Goodreads reading goal for the year. 

Goal 1. Adult Short Stories, Essays, and Humor

• I had another humor piece published last week, though you'd never know it here, because I didn't get around to doing a post about it. Next week.
• I dug around in old emails and discovered I'd received a rejection I didn't know about a while back.
• Got another rejection a few days ago.
• Started revising that last rejection, because the next place I want to submit to wants fewer words.
• Continued work on an eating-ish memoir piece, which is actually a revision of something I wrote twenty years ago. It's going to have a twist now.

Goal 2. Submit 143 Canterbury Road to agents. (Has turned into submitting any book length work to anyone.)

• I spent a few days making a synopsis for a book I haven't submitted anywhere in years so I could submit it to an agent open to SCBWI writers during the month of September.
• Made the above submission. Yes! I am calling this doing two things. 

Goal 3. Community Building/Marketing/Branding

• Added a number of newly published pieces to the website earlier this summer, which I may or may not have mentioned.
• Added another newly published piece to the website today, so that we're not dealing with so many changes at once. Also updated my bio and took out some dead links.
• Read a couple of things that have inspired me to get Time Management Tuesday going again, at least for the next month or so.
• Wrote next Tuesday's Time Management Tuesday post.

Some Annotated Reading October 3

I have just finished a week of birthday observances, all for the same person. Me. That, on top of the two weeks of vacation less than a month ago has left me reeling over all the minor life and work details I need to address. Overwhelmed.

I did keep reading though. I can always keep reading.

Books

I finished a couple more nineteenth century historical mysteries, both in the same series, which is going down hill as series often do.

I've read some more of Best Travel Writing of 2018. That book is so long.

Short Form

Emily is the Quintessential Privileged White American Girl by Martine Nyx in Cinemania. I started watching this show after it had been out for a season or so for the French with English subtitles. I'd already finished Dix Pour Cent (there is no comparison) and hadn't discovered Lupin. Yes, you do have to wonder, What is the attraction with this show? Even if you don't hate it, as many people do, what is there, really, to even hold your attention?

When Good Artists Do Bad Things by Citizen Reader at Books Are Our Superpower. I don’t know that there is ever going to be a way of dealing with the issue of good artists being bad people.

An Impresario of the Landscape by Stephen Heyman at Lapham's Quarterly. This is an introduction to Louis Bromfield, whose home, Malabar Farm, I visited on vacation. It focuses mainly on him as a conservationist. I have so many thoughts about this guy.

This is Why So Many Bars, Restaurants and Coffee Shops Look the Same Across the World by Charlie Brown at Rooted.  It's because social media has flattened taste. I wonder if other types of media do it, too. But the whole concept of "flattening taste" was new to me. 

Humor

Blurbs Beyond Books by Adam Bertocci at Points in Case. This is a fantastic piece for those of us who really dislike blurbs.

I Thought I Would Have Accomplished A Lot More Today And Also By The Time I Was Thirty-five by Alex Baia at The New Yorker. This is hysterical. I started laughing out loud when I got to "Shit. I'm actually forty-one." And then I felt guilty for having laughed at this suffering narrator. And then I laughed some more.

Humor and pain I’m So Lucky I’m an Adult So I Can Do Whatever I Want by Lisa Hides at Frazzled.

"What About the Cat?" Feedback From an Online Writing Workshop by Helen Raica-Klotz at Brevity Blog.  How funny you find this will be determined by how many writers' workshops/critique groups you've been part of.