Mrs. Self Destruct

Posted on March 13, 2011 by Kelly

Despite all of my efforts to the contrary today, chores like laundry got done. This is a struggle lately as I have been spending as much of my Not-Going-To-Coming-From-Or-Being-At-Work time on my various little soul-nourishing projects.

Strip away everything that sucks away the moments and that becomes an easier thing. My Netflix account has remained untouched for months now and I finally have severed the last lingering affections for television by depriving myself of its warm glow. I miss the mindlessness of it all, but yoga fits in that hole surprisingly well.

Unfortunately, that has meant an increase in the day-to-day chaos of life. So days like today, dragged along on the heels of an unnecessarily existential Saturday night spent sorting through thoughts via paper and winding up with an unrelated post about The Cat, days like today become necessary to pull everything back into line.

I am a chaos chiropractor.

I am writing tonight as I have a deadline to produce SOMETHING by. So I’m working on something that’s both old and new. And though it means alienating a few of my current projects, I’ve been letting too many seed ideas pile up like so many pairs of dirty underwear.

And I ran out of clean underwear a few days ago.

See? Deadlines do wonders.

Be good to yourself this week. Take a few minutes to stare at a wall and imagine Everything is on the other side of it.

Posted in Errata, Writing | Leave a comment

The cat in my complex

Posted on March 12, 2011 by Kelly

There’s this cat that lives in my apartment complex. Its owners moved to a different apartment in the apartment complex right before I moved in, but that doesn’t stop the cat from still thinking that it lives in my apartment. So some nights it sits in front of my door, waiting for me to let it in and feed it and pet it and love it.

I’m allergic to cats. So when I hear it pawing at the screen door, I open the inner door and sit down and watch it watching me through the screen. I’ll occasionally put my hand against the metal and it will put its paw or its nose or its back against the corresponding metal on its side and turn around in a circle before sitting back down and watching me again.

It’s become a game.

It has to know that this is no longer its home. It knows that I’m not going to open the screen and feed it and pet it and love it because its new home is on the other side of the courtyard. But that doesn’t stop it from still sitting and waiting and watching. I don’t know what the cat expects me to do. I don’t know if the cat now feels like it has two homes and that it can come and go as it pleases and that by not opening my screen I am committing some sort of cat-sin by denying it access to its past. Its true home.

I couldn’t tell you what the cat looks like. When I watch it watching me all I can see is a something without the ability to affect the design of its life that it can’t understand the door to its past is closed and will never be opened. All I see is frustration. All I see is sadness.

But it still sits and watches and spins in endless circles with its paw or its nose or its back pressed against the metal, remembering the petting and the food and the love because those are the things and the place that made it the cat that it is today.

I don’t know whether to pity that cat for its fundamental misunderstanding of its situation or to praise it for its tenaciousness.

I think that maybe it’s both.

Posted in Errata | 1 Comment

White Blank Page

Posted on March 11, 2011 by Kelly

March is well underway as we slowly drag ourselves back into the sunlight. Even San Diego isn’t immune to the doldrums of winter. The cold that seeps through the thin, uninsulated walls seems to be receding along with the persistent morning fogs. I know this because my ancient heater doesn’t grumble to life as often as it did in the past months and I don’t have to spend ten minutes every morning standing next to my car deciding whether it would take more time to go back up to my apartment to get a paper towel to wipe the condensation from my windows or to just make do with the stack of pilfered Rubios napkins that live in my car.

(The napkins win every time)

Because I promised not to write anymore about works in progress (but I can comment on the progress of works) I’ll be brief:

I sent off my application to a writers workshop I’d been wanting to apply to for over a year now. Now I’m working on forgetting about it. No, it’s not Clarion.

Finished up some long-standing revisions on THE STORY. Sent it out to the next pro-market on my list. Collected my rejection. Sent it immediately back out. Also working on forgetting about it. Hoping this can stop being THE STORY and just become a story by the end of the summer.

That’s it for news.

Got some book reviews brewing, once I get through one of the three I’m in the middle of — one of which is Damon Knight’s Creating Short Fiction (which I finally picked up after reading this review on Tor.com).

Books about writing always feel like parallels to books on weight loss – in that they appeal to a uniquely neurotic population. The people buying and reading both kinds of books hope that somewhere in the pages is a well-hidden quick fix that’ll set them down the road to the happiness they’ve been waiting to hop on for x number of years. But the dirty little secret is that these same people know full well that they’re not going to find it, but that doesn’t stop their hearts from pounding with that familiar hopelessly hopeful anticipation.  Instead they’re likely to encounter the same core advice: it hard work and dedication are key. The difference is that at least the books on writing are generally more well written.

I don’t know why I wrote “they” in that last paragraph. It clearly should have been “we” instead.

And take, for example, this brief excerpt from the introduction from Damon’s book:

“Psychologists have found out a little bit about the personalities of writers. They are individualists, skeptics, taboo-breakers, mockers, loners; they are undependable, likely to be behind on their rent; they keep irregular hours and have strange friends. Professional writers, like criminals, really live outside society; they have no regular jobs, they come and go as they please, they live by their wits.”

Oh, you, Damon. DO GO ON. No really. Please. Tell me who I am. No really. I’m reading this because I don’t know. That shit’s like crack for the identity-challenged.

Ahem.

I’m off to wander out into the warm night to laugh and smile and feel naughty by staying up well past my normal bed time and to make the most out of this weekend and it’s stolen hour.

Go make something that makes you miserable and happy at the same time.

Posted in Books, Viable Paradise, Writing | 3 Comments