Zipper

So here I am sitting in my morning writing spot. Sure, the tables were rearranged AGAIN and, sure, the new arrangement now has even fewer tables near outlets (question: do they not like writers coming here? I’ve noticed the group of screenwriters hasn’t been here in a while… Have they all sold their scripts, or [...]

Broken

Early yesterday morning—E still up due to insomnia; me just up for a free couple hours before work—I tried to explain why I feel so broken at the moment. Why I can’t write. Why any talk of what to write, or what I’ve been trying to write, is pointless and should be voided from all [...]

“Antioch Will Stay Open”

To the person who found this blog by searching the above words: I hope so, too.

Window Seat

E made me a reading spot in the bedroom where I promptly, before he’d even finished installing the lamp over my head, slipped back into Haruki Murakami’s After Dark and full-on devoured it. Even though I was sitting before a sunlit window—here, you can see my new view of the fire escape and parking [...]

Outburst

Amid the news of my beloved college in financial crisis (another post on the subject is in progress) our own personal financial crisis is in the works. The irony of the two happening at exactly the same time is too much for me for some reason; I’m having a hard time handling this. The thing [...]

Negato

I was out walking this morning, down the empty sidewalks of Broadway, empty because it was early morning and the shoppers have not yet descended, letting gloomy thoughts of the little that I’ve accomplished so far in this life settle over me. I couldn’t help it. The sky was blue but I didn’t dare see [...]

Reading Aloud

There was a moment, while reading the opening chapters of this book, when I realized I needed to hear the words aloud. All at once, I wanted to share it with E. Though we focus on different art forms, and mostly read entirely different books, we have a similar aesthetic taste, one that complements and [...]

The Wall

I’ve been up against a wall with my writing for some time now. The wall is made of doubt, lots of it, and fear, lots of that too, and it’s bricked me in for a long time. I keep thinking I’m brave enough, strong enough, persistent enough to try to make my way over [...]

All About NYC and Me

My City Crush
I’ve been thinking about Place in fiction, my preoccupation with it (the blue mountains of my childhood), and my avoidance of it (the incredible city where I now live). It was always my dream to live in New York City; as a child, coiled up in those mountains, even then I dreamed [...]

Confrontation with My Inner Writer

What can I say to you? So I slept late. So what. I was tired. Sure, sure, I have no real reason to be so utterly exhausted. But you know what? It could be that you make me tired, what with all your lofty expectations, your self-imposed deadlines, always impossible, your ridiculous sign posts that [...]

Looking Up and Out

Though, each moment, I feel more and more devastated about my college closing, each moment, I find myself somehow more and more content with my days. When I look out my window, I see possibilities. Last night, someone sent me a poem she’d written about my daytime profession. It’s dedicated to me. I’m touched.
It’s almost [...]

My College Is Closing

Just got the news today that my college, Antioch College, a strange tiny school that turned out to be the perfect place for strange and then-tiny me, will be closing in 2008. Supposedly it is closing to design and build a “21st century campus.” Really it’s because they ran out of money and didn’t have [...]

Rereading

I just read over the new opening to my novel. I’d last touched it at the end of April.
As I read, I felt questioning at first, doubts at the new direction, a great many, flooding through my head. Then I turned the page. I kept reading. I felt a prickling down my back, the shiver [...]

Closer

I am feeling far away from myself right now. Far away, at least, from what I wanted out of myself, if that makes any sense. Clocks ticking, time wasted, what-was-I-doing?, why-ever-did-I-do-that?—this sort of thing.
This article got me thinking of all my aspirations—nameless, in the beginning, when I didn’t know what exactly to aspire to. [...]

Facing Reality

My biannual membership dues for my weekend writing spot have to be paid by the end of the month. (Yes, I shell out money so I have a place to go to write. Judging by the number of other writers—novelists, aspiring novelists, journalists, screenwriters, playwrights, poets, people just starting out, people whose names you’d recognize—who [...]

Life Lesson

Here is a lesson in how life goes on without me: A few days away from my favorite morning writing spot and they rearrange the furniture. This morning, my coveted table in the corner was replaced with a napkin station. I’d come a tad out of my way to be there. I’ve realized that, with [...]

Simultaneously Submitted

I am all for bouncing back. Rejection, um, smejection. In fact, I bounced back multiple times and sent out my story simultaneously to some more literary journals I admire. So there. Fingers crossed, maybe I’ll find a place for this particular story yet.
I am also finishing up drafts of two new short stories. (I told [...]

Movie Magic

The trailer for Red Letters, a short film written and directed by E, my other half, is online at IFC Media Lab. Check it out, and—if you don’t mind registering—please vote…
My connection to this film is more than the fact that my other half made it and that I find it deeply inspiring no matter [...]

Denial

After almost exactly four years in one place (and, if I am to have a place where I go during the day to pay the bills so I can write, I always knew that place was not the right place), I have left my job. Four years almost to the day—my last day was June [...]