Trashed Notebook

There was a discarded spiral notebook in a trash can outside my building. It lay there, looking quite pristine, except that it was near a greasy burger wrapper and some other unrecognizable food trash. Why would someone throw away a perfectly good notebook? is what I thought first. And then, Hey, I could use that [...]

No TV

E is working under a very important deadline for an exciting project, so I don’t want to disturb him. Poor E doesn’t belong to a writers’ organization where he rents out a desk (and he can’t pretend to be me and use mine). Therefore, he’s working on his project at home. And I must not [...]

Why You Should Not Go on Vacation

I took last week off from work and spent all of today regretting it. It is just not a good idea to take “vacation.” Or a sick day. Or, god forbid, a personal day. If I want to keep up, I should probably get a sleeping bag and camp out under my desk. This is [...]

My Writing Spot(s)

For some time I’ve wanted to respond to Bloglily’s call to her readers to share their writing spots. I keep meaning to bring my camera, keep forgetting, so for now let’s do without pictures. You know, maybe it’s better this way, because I don’t think it’s the physical spot that matters so much as the [...]

More Noise Please

I write this amid pipes banging from the radiator, video-game revelers in the apartment downstairs, a dog barking, and high-heeled pacing above my head. My neighbor just slammed her door again, making the walls shake. Soon a car alarm in the parking garage across the way will go off, as it likes to late at [...]

Saturday Struggles

I have a proofreading job that I left till the very last minute. I have the first draft of a short story I want to finish. I have a new book I want to read. Who will win this tug-o-war?
JOB: I realize I bore you silly, but I am due Monday morning and you [...]

Birthday Letters

Dear Oral Surgeon About to Extract My Mother’s Teeth This Morning:
You will have your drill in her mouth at the very minute I was born. She called to warn me last night. She is in such pain, and this is the only time her appointment could be scheduled—though she felt bad that it would occur [...]

Everlasting Debt

The iBook being unsalvageable (though E plans to take it apart and see what can be done with its parts), I am now right back where I started. The universe works in mysterious ways. At the moment the universe seems to want me in huge debt and filled with guilt over buying a new computer [...]

Separation Anxiety (Yes, Already)

We have not yet brought my little iBook in to see the Geniuses and, hopefully, qualify for the free fix that I do think we really should qualify for and I hope they read this and think, Hey, she loves her iBook, let’s do a rush job on it and while we’re at it fix [...]

iBook, Come Back to Me, I Am Still Here

In irony, in terrible terrible irony, my iBook went kaput. The screen turned striped, and faded, the grinding sound was abominable, and then it was like watching a mushroom cloud dissipate across my whole entire (screen) life. (I had not backed up in a long while.) I was devastated. I woke up this morning and [...]

The Moment After

I was in the expected table at an expected Starbucks this morning, reading a short story: “The Shape of Water” by Mark Slouka, from his book Lost Lake. Distractions abounded. A girl with ash on her head stared vacantly in my direction. A man with a bike and an old boom box danced on the [...]

Favorite Day

Today is the day my favorite person, e, was born. Thus, I made him banana pancake-crepes (my mother’s recipe) and we will have dolsot bibimbap (what else?) at our current favorite restaurant for dinner. In between we will do whatever he wants. I wish there was a way I could express in writing how I [...]

Borrow-Lust

I am out-of-control. My library card is like my maxed Visa (except no one’s taken away the library card yet). Today I had some books to return from my last trip—and still a bunch more to read at home—and yet I could not leave the building without browsing for more. Who knew what would be [...]

Keep At It (The Yearly Smack on the Head)

This past year has been a long, slow stall for me. I like to brush off the rejections—I tell myself I’m brushing them off—but I wonder if instead I’m hanging on so I can mull over them later when no one’s looking. Truth is, for a year I’ve written things of no real consequence. Ghostwriting [...]

Proximity

It is a strange feeling to sit not three feet from a writer you admire while she marks up her printed pages with a blue pen. You wonder: is that a new novel? a story? something I will soon someday read? But you cannot look. She is here to write, not to be ogled, just [...]

The One Paragraph I’d Save from a Burning Building

Yesterday, I happened upon a paragraph from my graduate thesis, which had been a 500-page novel about my family. The paragraph was in a document from November of 2002. The last time I thought consciously about this project may well have been in November of 2002. I had forgotten that this paragraph existed. How could [...]

Winter Wonderland (Or Something Like It)

Remember snow? That white fluffy stuff that buries the car and closes school and makes for a cool fort at the end of the driveway? Maybe I shouldn’t admit this, but I miss it.

I can’t make much of a fort with this.
It’s also no good for snow balls, and shoes must be carefully chosen, as [...]

Day of Not-Much

I went through my computer’s archives today. I found lines from old short stories; I found openings to novels I had thought I would write—some, quite frightening; I found a paragraph I can’t live without ever seeing again; I found many dead and dying ideas. After all this, I didn’t write a new word, which [...]

Crossing the Line

I am often in danger of crossing the line with my fiction, I know this. It’s not that I write shocking things, or play with form or genre too much. It’s that my fiction isn’t always all fiction. Sometimes it’s semi-real. I often have to change identifying characteristics. I don’t know why I’m inspired by [...]

Sleet

Or is it hail?
Either way, it was hard bits of ice falling from the sky this morning, making quite a forceful patter as I trudged through the snow + ice + the grayish mush that snow and ice turn into once the buses and taxicabs get to it, all so I could get my usual [...]