I dreamed that sourbunny and I went to visit demiraks_world in Minneapolis. We went to a weirdly small Target and then went roller skating. I couldn't get my skates on but N and K were having fun.

Also, Chicago folks. If you're looking for a place to get fun handmade gifts, think about going to the Shop Columbia store. It's at 623 S Wabash and everything there is made by Columbia students. It reminded me a lot of I Like You in Minneapolis, actually. Lots of photos, handmade cards, jewelry. The hours are completely stupid -- 11-5 most days -- but if you're in the South Loop anyway, it's worth checking out. I'd never been before because of the dumb hours but I was down there early for an appointment before class Wednesday and got to take a look.

So I’m trying (again!) to take a photo every day for a year. I’ve tried twice before, but managed to miss a day a couple of months in. (Oh hai I am a perfectionist.) I have a better system this time — shiny iPhone with camera and also handy alarm that says TAKE A PICTURE at 10.30 every night as a reminder — so I feel better about my chances of finishing.

Over the last month, I’ve had time to think about precisely WHY I’m doing this project. It’s not to be a better photographer, beyond incidental improvements. I take a decent enough snapshot but I’m not interested in fiddly technical bits, though if someone wanted to give me a digital SLR I’d be willing to learn. The iPhone camera has enough quality for me, even if I do pull out my point-and-shoot once in a while.

It comes down to two things, I think. First, I want to gain some creative discipline. I know that interesting things happen when I try to create something every single day — I think it’s some vestige of the Julia Cameron fangirl in me. Plus, I want to document this year. Starting in October. No, I don’t know why. Maybe that crazy back brain of mine knows something I don’t.

The pictures I’ve posted above are the ones I like best so far. Here’s the entire set. If you’re the feed reader type, here’s the RSS feed. Or you can follow me on Twitter, where an automagic tweet appears every time I post a picture.

I still haven’t heard back from Amazon after sending them this awesome letter last week. So boo on them.

However, while waiting, I decided to do a little sleuthing. I searched for the name of the press that put out the book in the first place. After a couple of missteps (”Did you put out an edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover last year?” “This is a doctor’s office.” “So that’s a no?”) I tracked down the publisher and sent him a message. He, in turn, read my blog post and got back to me as soon as possible to let me know that any omissions from the book were accidental and that he was going to print a new, corrected edition and would send me a copy when that was done. I’m quite happy with the result.

I’m not mentioning the publisher’s name because I honestly believe that it was a mistake and I’m not interested in making a further big deal out of what happened. Which means that whoever is ignoring my letter at Amazon dodged a bullet today. A mildly snarky bullet.

Dear Amazon Customer Service,

First, just want to say, love you guys. I bought myself an Amazon Prime membership for my birthday this year and it’s probably the worst thing I’ve ever done for my wallet. I added the Amazon iPhone app and boom! It’s UPS delivery city over here. Not that I’m complaining, but I will say my husband has begun to look very concerned every time I bring another little something inside that eats up our precious bookshelf space.

Anyway, so I’m a student in the Fiction Writing department at Columbia College Chicago, and this semester I’m taking a class about censorship. (Remember this — it will be important later.) My list of required texts included Lady Chatterley’s Lover, by DH Lawrence. Makes sense, right? Lady Chatterley is a book that’s almost iconic for being censored. So I hopped online and ordered the book. Why should I bother walking all the way next door to the school bookstore when I had AMAZON PRIME? I made a pretty big order of books and waited the two long days it took for the books to arrive.

Then I waited for the day to read Lady Chatterley in class. (As part of the Fiction Writing program, we do a lot of in-class reading aloud.) Today was finally that day. Before class, my classmate and I bonded over having the same copy of the book — you can see the cover on the link here. Even our teacher pointed out that the girl on the cover looks a little young. Ha ha, we all said, that is a little creepy. Then we proceeded to read a chapter of the book.

I’m not going to lie — it was a pretty racy chapter. And at the end, there’s a little bit of an extended discourse using, well, the C word. (I’d type it out, but I don’t want to offend anyone. Turns out in a censorship class you use words like that a lot, and it doesn’t bother me to use it anymore, but I trust you know the word I’m talking about.) I didn’t quite remember that bit from when I read the book at home, but I figured that maybe I’d just forgotten, or skimmed over it. My classmate is smarter than I am, though — she looked back in her copy, identical to mine, and saw something horrible.

The discourse on the C word? Totally missing from our copies.

The book I ordered for censorship class has been, in fact, censored.

It’s really funny, in a way. It’s also unfortunate, because I have no idea what else might have been missing from my copy. I was going to be able to check Lady Chatterley off the list of Great Books I’ve read, but I can’t count it now! There might be entire subplots missing!

I checked the product page, wondering if I missed a note about it being an abridged version or something, but no. It’s just the first version of the book that comes up when searching.

So, I’d like to arrange a trade. I want a non-bowderlerized version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (for my CENSORSHIP class!) and in return you can have this one back. It’s not in perfect condition — I’ve read it, but I do take good care of my books. No writing or anything.

What can I do to make this happen?

Best,
Eliza Evans
Totally loyal customer

Last weekend, P and I went on a little trip to Madison, a belated anniversary celebration. The twist, though, (there’s always a twist!) was that I didn’t tell him where we were going. For two weeks, I made him guess what we were going to do.

Unfortunately for that big old corner of my soul that loves pranks, P could care less about anticipation. He figured we’d have a good time wherever we went, so he was pretty meh about guessing. “A cabin?” he offered. “A boat ride?” I’m pretty sure his next guess would have been “a three-ring circus?” So of course I spent the remainder of the two weeks asking him again and again where he thought we were going. After a while, he just stopped answering.

Since I spent the two weeks before our trip taunting my husband, I forgot to plan anything for us to actually do. I’d booked hotel rooms; we spent Friday night at Hotel Ruby Marie, a Victorian themed bed & breakfast and Saturday night at Arbor House, where the focus was on being eco-friendly. (Advantage, by the way, to Arbor House, and not just because they had a dual-flush toilet.) And thanks to Erica, I knew we were going to eat at the Eldorado Grill. But other than that? Nada.

Well, there was one thing I wanted to do. A few weeks ago, Christine Merrill posted about going to see dioramas of stuffed albino squirrels in the basement of a funeral home in Madison. I immediately became sick with jealousy. I wanted to see those squirrels and there they were, less than two hours away. So when we woke up on Saturday, I called the funeral home, since the squirrels are appointment only. Sometimes there’s an actual funeral, I guess, and they don’t want giggly, gawking tourists wandering through. So I called up at 8.30 Saturday morning and found out the terrible news.

The squirrels weren’t available on the weekend.

I know, I was shocked too. Who closes their tourist attractions, especially one in such demand as albino stuffed squirrels, on the weekend? I wiped away my tears and grabbed my phone to find the nearest used bookstore, as used bookstores are guaranteed to cheer me up. We spent a pleasant couple of hours at Avol’s Books, got cupcakes (and failed at transporting them,) went to the SERRV store (fair trade heaven, and I got some more tiny bird sculptures,) had an indoor picnic, took a nap, and ate fried macaroni and cheese with BACON at Bluephies. It was a busy day!

The next morning, we were kind of at loose ends. We weren’t ready to head home, but it was cold that day, and I’m afraid of nature, so we skipped the ten-minute walk to the arboretum. Instead, we decided to go to The House on the Rock. Apparently this place is super well known throughout the Midwest, but I never heard about it before I read Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, where it’s the setting for a pivotal plot point.

Here’s the basic history of The House on the Rock, told in dramatic form:

dramatis personae
Frank Lloyd Wright, super famous architect and a member of the Prairie School design movement.
Alex Jordan, Senior, total nutbar.
Alex Jordan, Junior, son of total nutbar.

ALEX JORDAN SR: What’s up, Frank Lloyd Wright? Look at this awesome building I drew, that I traveled all the way to your summer home, Taliesin, to show you.
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT: I wouldn’t hire you to design a cheese crate or a chicken coop. You’re not capable.*
exeunt

Later:
ALEX JORDAN SR points at spire of rock.
ALEX JORDAN SR: I’ll show him! I’m going to build a house right there that he will have to look at forever.

Much later:
ALEX JORDAN JR: I will complete your spirit journey, father, and blast on that spire of rock, even though I don’t yet own it.
ALEX JORDAN SR: And to assist us, I will hire bums from Madison and pay them in bottles of whiskey and checks which I will later burn so it will seem like we did this blasting on our own.

-fin**-

*This line is, reportedly, actually true.
**I pieced this history together from the Wikipedia page. Any mistakes are the fault of that page’s authors.

So he built this house up on a rock. And, you know, from the outside it’s absolutely gorgeous, especially in fall.

And once I got inside, well…

It was completely terrifying.

There was this eerie, creepy music floating through this house, where the walls were made of rock and the carpet was red and looked original to the place. And it was a house — at least, there was a teensy kitchen and sunken living room and loft. But the music was from instruments — piano, violin, organs — that just played on their own; apparently these were one of Alex Jordan’s (many, many, many) obsessions. Throughout the tour there were lots of these automated music machines, some as big as ENTIRE ROOMS, that played on their own or started after putting in a token or two.

There were antiques everywhere! And lovely scrollwork and weird little nooks and let’s be honest here I got more than a little claustrophobic. Luckily we found a little open space in a place called THE INFINITY ROOM.

Here’s what I saw when we got to THE INFINITY ROOM:

Here is the picture on the wall we missed before going into The Infinity Room. Do you see something missing there? Yeah, I didn’t notice until we got out toward the end AND THE ROOM STARTED BOUNCING.

This is from the end of the room, where there’s a window IN THE FLOOR. Notice my Chuck Taylors — this is also the trip where I learned I’m too old to walk around for hours in shoes without appropriate insoles.

After we escaped, thankfully unharmed, from THE INFINITY ROOM (okay, I promise I’ll stop with the caps now,) we continued on with the tour of the house. There were lots of lovely antiques and books stuffed everywhere, which you know I approved of, and the walls were closing in on me so luckily, luckily we finished that leg of the tour and headed outside to end up right where we started, ready for leg number two.

Which I will get to next time.

To amuse you till then, here is the full set of photos I took.

I read this entry on Editorial Anonymous the other day, about whether unpublished writers should do things like create Twitter accounts for their characters as a pre-emptive publicity strike. The blog post and comments have varying opinions on that tactic, but what I found most curious were comments from people that said that unpublished writers shouldn’t blog at all! Because they should be writing instead! And also Twitter won’t be around in a year so why bother.

I have a few problems with that line of thought. First, I guess, is that I look at social networking as an honest attempt at building community. If you only blog or tweet or post on Facebook to try to sell books, you’re doing it wrong. I’ve been connecting with people online for fifteen years — I was very young when I first went online, okay? — but I am still in contact with some of the people I chatted with then. I kind of think of meeting people online like a snowball going downhill — the group of people you know just keeps getting bigger. Yes, I’ve lost touch with some people along the line, but my online social circle has only gotten bigger since 1995. I’ve met a LOT of those people in real life, too. I even met my husband online. I am a fan of online commnity.

Twitter has been an amazing tool for meeting other writers, none of whom, on my follow list at least, are there just to sell their books. Every day, I get a near-constant stream of articles and conversation about craft and about business. Twitter can be totally, totally overwhelming, though. I’ll get to that.

Why not blog, especially if you enjoy it? I subscribe to something I call the Apprenticeship Theory. I think of being a writer as, well, being an apprentice. Every word you write counts, even if it’s not for the all-important novel. Blogging is great writing practice — you learn how to organize ideas, what works and what doesn’t. And if you’re not communicating clearly, you get instant feedback, usually from a comment that says “What the hell are you talking about?”

I know, honestly, that social networking can be a great procrastination tool. It’s easy to log on, fall down the rabbit hole, and look up three hours later with that precious writing time gone and only a string of “Me too! That makes so much sense!” blog comments to show for it. But that doesn’t mean you have to give up completely so you can slave away in your unheated garret, only emerging to eat a mealy apple and stare through a plate-glass window at all your productive friends drinking champagne and laughing at you.

Some tips:

Write first. That makes sense, right? But maybe you’re like me and would never be able to do that. (I just had to be honest.) I write to a timer. 45 minutes writing, 10 minutes internerding. I started out with 7 minutes writing and 5 internet and moved up from there. My eventual goal is to write for an hour straight. Also, if you’re really moving, it’s okay to ignore the timer that says stop writing. Stopping internet time, though, is compulsory.

Too many Facebook emails? Turn them off. (Settings –> Account Settings –> Notifications.) You don’t need to know every single time someone comments on that picture of your college roommate dressed up as a sexy nurse four Halloweens ago that you accidentally clicked the like button on when she uploaded it last April. Besides, all that shows up when you log in to Facebook in the bottom right corner. It’s more exciting to have like ten of those when you load the page than one or two, anyway. The only Facebook emails I get are when someone contacts me directly by posting on my wall or commenting on something I’ve posted.

Loop emails clogging your inbox? Switch to digest mode. If something happens and you must monitor emails as they come in, just go to the group’s main page. Busy loops might have several digest emails a day, but it’s still fewer than you’re getting now.

While you’re at it, don’t check your email obsessively. My iPhone beeps at me every time I get an email, which, let’s be honest here, is a lot less often than I would actually check it if it didn’t let me know, oh frabjuous day, someone thought of me. Unless you’re waiting for something specific, it can wait the 45 minutes you’re writing on the timer.

Do you have too many blogs to check? Google Reader. Use it, love it. Just search for the name of the blogs you check regularly, add them to your subscription list, and boom. The blogs come to you when they’re updated, saving the time you’d normally use loading all of them, futilely, hoping that someone posted in the six minutes since you checked last. I used to use Livejournal’s syndication this way but frankly Google Reader is much easier. (You could always search for ‘elizawrites’ on there if you wanted to add this blog (hint hint.))

Twitter threatening to crush you? It’s super easy to get overwhelmed, especially if you have even a modest number of followers. Leah Jones, social media consultant, came to speak to my RWA chapter about social networking a few months ago, and said something that stuck with me: you don’t have to read every single tweet. You can jump in and jump out when you have a few spare minutes. It’s okay to miss part of the conversation. (This is very difficult for me, by the way.) If there’s something you really must see, the person posting will @msg you. Using something other than just the plain web interface can help, too. Lots of people rave about Tweet Deck but frankly I found it frightening and hid when I opened it up. I use Brizzly on my computer and Tweetie 2 on my phone.

I have not yet discovered a cure for watching three dozen music videos on Youtube or reading six month old flame wars.

I’ve been fighting the internet’s procrastination siren song for a long time, but I’m sure there are many other tips out there to keep focused. Do you have any?

In the fiction writing program I attend, there’s an assignment in Advanced Fiction classes called the Steeplechase. The Steeplechase is dangled over students as something terrifying, a rite of passage that only the strong will survive.* In fact, the Steeplechase is a twelve step writing exercise, that, as it turns out, is excellent for building novel backstory.

One of the steps is called Overall Storyteller, which is meant to focus on the narrator’s voice. I’ve been working on commercial fiction for the last five years, though, so I’m much more accustomed to writing a really close third person POV. Which means that I pretty much dreaded writing that bit. We’d done some similar in-class writing that I really struggled with, fighting against my conceptions of head-hopping the entire time, so I really wasn’t looking forward to writing that short section.

But I soldiered on, and wrote a couple of pages about the town where my novel’s set. At the beginning of the story, my heroine returns (after a twelve-year absence) to the small Midwestern town where she grew up. I thought it would be a good idea if I could get an idea of the town’s history. I started in 1897 and wrote up to the present day.

Frankly, I hated it.

That’s okay, though. I turned it in anyway because I’d fulfilled the assignment and also because I don’t have to love everything I write. I got a bit of good backstory out of it and that was enough.

The other night in class, though, it was my turn to have some of my work read. Including, of course, that section I hated. As I read aloud, I worked very hard to keep my pace slow — I have a tendency to read faster when I think the writing’s not working, trying to get to the parts I think are better, I guess.

Afterwards, the class participated in a bit of Recall. Recall is another thing we do multiple times every classroom meeting. It’s simply retelling what we remember from a story, whether we read it the week before (typically at the beginning of class) or just heard it. It’s a quick way to get feedback on what’s working. It’s a very positive environment; there’s not a lot of criticism. The Story Workshop method is 180 degrees from the typical environment in creative writing classes, where the student presents a story and it’s torn to shreds by classmates. Personally, I think there are times for both approaches — Story Workshop when a piece is in the draft phase, the other (which I call Iowa method, after the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I had a Vague Idea that’s where this system developed, but the internet doesn’t seem to agree with me.) when you’re getting ready to send the work out for publication. But at any rate, my classmates did a little Recall about my work.

Imagine my surprise when almost all of the Recall came from the two pages (out of about six) that I hated the most. There was a comment about how, by writing about people leaving and returning to this little town, I was echoing the theme of the rest of the story.

I was? Oh, I totally meant that. Well, at least my back brain did.

Jenny Crusie calls her back brain The Girls in the Basement. I’ve heard it called the mud, among other things. It’s the subconscious, doing its own little thing back there, writing the story while our ego up front flails around, writing and deleting the same scene or avoiding writing altogether by searching Etsy for tiny bird sculptures.***

We know the stories we’re trying to tell. The novels and short stories and poems are all there, just waiting to be dug out. I once wrote about how my process felt like floating around on the bottom of the ocean, in the dark, scrabbling with my hands and hoping that I’d find a treasure chest. That much, at least, hasn’t changed in the last ten years. But I am learning to trust the back brain to sit up there on deck and steer me.

*Possibly exaggerated for dramatic effect.**
**New blog title, y/y?
***That last bit might be just me.

The winners of personalized copies of According to Jane are #3 heather and #7 Ann Victor.

Thanks for all the great comments, everyone! I hope to have another giveaway soon.

I am so excited about tomorrow! Why? Because my dear friend Marilyn Brant’s DEBUT novel According to Jane is hitting stores! Marilyn is an avowed Jane Austen fan — she even got me to read Pride and Prejudice. (As she assured me would happen, I loved it.) I got a chance to ask Marilyn a few questions about her book and other topics.

Look at that gorgeous cover!

Can you tell me a little about According to Jane?

Of course. But first, thanks for having me as a guest, Eliza! It’s wonderful to be here. According to Jane is the story of a modern woman named Ellie who gets dating advice from the ghost of Jane Austen. It begins one day in her high-school English class, just as Ellie’s teacher is assigning Pride & Prejudice. From nowhere, she hears a quiet “tsk” of disapproval aimed at the antics of the cute bad boy who has been teasing her. The author’s ghost takes it upon herself to stay in Ellie’s mind, offering up her own brand of Regency-era wisdom in regards to romance. Years and boyfriends come and go, but Ellie has a lot to learn about love. And, possibly, even Jane may benefit from a new insight or two.

Where did the idea for Jane come from?
I remember the moment I thought of it: I was sitting in an RWA National Conference workshop (Dallas 2004) presented by Eloisa James. She was discussing the borrowing of classic plots from famous authors, as she’d done with Shakespeare. She asked us to think about which classical lit books we’d read and the authors whose characters and storylines we’d gravitate toward. I immediately thought of Austen, of course, my all-time favorite author. Then I began asking myself questions–what would happen if a modern woman had a Pride & Prejudice-like experience? And what if Jane herself were involved somehow? Then: Oh! What if Jane could give dating advice? I would’ve loved for her to have given me some back when I was single–but, perhaps, Jane was biased against someone in the same way her most famous heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, was prejudiced against Darcy… And the idea took hold and continued on from there.

What does your normal writing day look like?
I try to get emails done in a few half-hour blocks throughout the day (first thing in the morning after my son leaves to school, again at midday if I can, later afternoon, etc.) and, then, leave the rest of the school day to actual writing. But I’m a *very* slow writer. It’s not uncommon for me to take an hour to draft a page or two. So, for me to get a basic five pages done in a day, I literally need 4-5 hours. However, as soon as I think I’m done with a scene, I print it out and force myself to move on. I’ll make any later changes on the hard copy only and, then, revise the full manuscript, based on those revisions, at the end of the draft. I’ve been trying to add in an hour to exercise into the writing day, too, but I can’t say I do that consistently!

What are you working on now?
The book I just finished writing this summer (which will be released in October 2010) is a modern fairytale about three suburban wives/moms who really shake up their marriages and their lives when one of them asks the other two a question that both shocks them and leads their imaginations astray…

What’s the last book you really loved?
In nonfiction, the last book I really found fascinating was Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers. Fiction is harder! I enjoyed Sheila Curran’s Everyone She Loved, Love and Other Natural Disasters by Holly Shumas and the first book (Prime Time) in Hank Phillippi Ryan’s fun mystery series.

You can buy According to Jane at all the major retailers, including Amazon, starting tomorrow but I’m also hosting a giveaway. To win one of two personalized copies of According to Jane, leave a comment on this post with one rule of love you’ve learned, even if it was the hard way — or you can just throw your name into the hat.

Fine print!
Deadline is Wednesday, October 7, 2009, at midnight central time.
I’ll ship anywhere in the world, because I am awesome.
One entry per IP address, please.
Entries MUST be posted at elizawrites.com — entries elsewhere, like on Facebook or via a feed reader, do not count.

If you post a comment and don’t see it right away, please don’t freak out! All first-time commenters must be approved and I can’t always get to them right away. Rest assured, I’ll approve all valid entries.

I kind of have a thing for teensy little birds. I like real birds, too, but tiny bird sculptures are much easier to care for. It’s funny — I was talking with my mom how I got some new ones in the mail and she told me that my grandmother loved to collect bird figurines, too, which I had either never known or totally forgotten. It’s unfortunate that she never had access to etsy, which is where most of these come from.

These little guys came from the same etsy seller. Yes, that dust is meant to be there, why do you ask?

This is the only non-etsy bird. It’s a votive holder, but it has no candle. My house is enough of a fire-trap already, what with all the books and dust. The last thing I need is actual flames.

This is a hand-carved wooden golden-crowned kinglet, which was a gift from P. (If you have cats, I recommend gathering them round and playing the audio on that last link. You’ll thank me later.)

These are not glazed so they’re slightly rough to the touch.

The bluebirds, in their new home.

The ptarmigan arrived today. The adults are glazed but the babies aren’t. The little ones are about the size of my pinky nail.

While I’m at it, a few more bits of art.

Earlier this week, my husband and I were driving home from the city after my class. Our respective commutes went a little crazy once I went back to school, and I had to go and complicate things this summer by deciding to drive in to my classes from the suburbs after trying and failing to make the Metra work for me most of the last school year.

Driving in is cheaper, even paying for parking a half block off Michigan Avenue. I usually don’t have to worry about being late anymore, and that’s accounting for Chicago’s hateful traffic. Before, I barely made it to class on time due to the commuter train’s lackadaisical approach to getting to the station when it was supposed to. Gone are the hours spent in rage as the train halted between stops for no discernible reason. Even better, I never again have to experience that sinking feeling once the conductor announces that the train will be stopped indefinitely because SOMEONE WAS HIT. (It was awful and the train didn’t move for three hours.) Plus, now I get to control when I leave instead of praying I’ll get to the 10.30 train — were I to miss it, I wouldn’t get home till almost 1a. I am getting old. That is not acceptable, even for me.

But we only have one car — by choice — so my (darling) husband shifted around his work hours and starts late on the days I have class and we drive home together.

Backstory, much?

This is just to explain why late the other night we were a couple of suburbs away from home when a skunk darted across the highway. Can I just say that I see way more roadkill here, by the way, than I ever did when I lived in a really small town? But I didn’t feel a thump that indicated Pepe Le Pew had shuffled off this mortal coil, at least at our hands, so I choose to believe that he was fine when we left him. (Denial gets me through the days when squirrels lie down in the road and wait for me to drive by and I don’t see why this theory shouldn’t work on skunks, too.)

However.

We drove the same path home the next night and at approximately the same spot there was… an odor. Skunky. Not strong, but enough to get my attention. I think I’m weird, because skunk odor doesn’t actively offend me, but that doesn’t mean I want to, you know, bathe in it.

This morning, when we got in the car to go to the train station for the regular morning commute, P made a face. “I think the car smells like skunk,” he said.

“No,” I told him. “There was probably one outside.” It was the garage, I thought. Or my front yard. Skunk convention at the park. Some rich dude having a bad day at his house. Not my car.

Except when I went to get in the car this afternoon after work, which happens to be pretty far from my front yard… I smelled it.

That skunk is avenging itself from the dead and it waited twenty-three hours till we drove by again to do it.

PS: I am a new regular poster on my friend Andrew’s pop culture blog Slowtimer. Here is my first post over there.

Baby announcement? Or the lamentations of a real baseball fan?
Regional American hamburgers and cheeseburgers. I gasped when I saw the green chile entry.
Average cats. Heh.
Cat and Girl go to the Costume Shop.
Dan Brown’s Twenty Worst Sentences.
Sexual Assault Prevention Tips, Guaranteed to Work!
How I need this bag.
Great Ask Metafilter question about visually stunning music videos.
Time lapse video of the Dubai Metro.
This is a cute bunny.
Oh, space. I love you so.

As a Roald Dahl fan (and George Clooney and Bill Murray and Meryl Streep and and and…) I am REALLY EXCITED for Wes Anderson’s adaptation of Fantastic Mr. Fox.

NSFW, super disturbing sex toys.
Damien Hirst’s pencils are missing!
Neil Gaiman’s personal library.

I really like this song.

I went to Milwaukee over Labor Day weekend and couldn’t stop saying it like Alice Cooper does.

I’ve never been a very good journal keeper, as much as I want to be. I’ve had trouble since kindergarten, when my gifted and talented teacher wanted me to write a full notebook page for a journal entry and I wrote “I lost a tooth,” followed by, like, forty lines of exclamation points. With a pencil, even, so the page got all greasy after a while.

I’ve tried, in fits and starts, to keep journals throughout my life. My past is littered with notebooks and Moleskines and diaries with little locks and little keys, all of them chosen deliberately, with the best of intentions. I write in them, tell secrets, start stories. And after a few days, I just stop. Leave them behind, or keep them out to remind me of what I’m avoiding, as accusatory as inanimate objects can be.

The longest I ever kept a journal was when I tried to make my way through Julia Cameron’s Artist’s Way. She advises one to get up first thing in the morning and write three handwritten pages before doing anything else. Let me make myself clear: I am not precisely a morning person. Before, say, 10a, all I’m good for is driving my husband to the train station and shouting foul invectives at motorists who have the misfortune of pulling out in front of me when they should know damn good and well that we are running late again. I even shock myself with what comes out of my mouth. So when Julia Cameron wanted me to get up early to write junk by hand in a spiral ring notebook, I was, in a word, skeptical, but willing to try.

In the end, it wasn’t the getting up early that broke my nascent habit, but my crippling perfectionism. If I missed a day, it was all ruined! All that work, those two months, down the drain! Missing the point? Yes, I’m good at that. Either way, I abandoned those journals, too.

I’m having to learn how to keep a journal, though. The journal is one of the cornerstones of the Fiction Writing program I attend at Columbia College, and this semester both of my classes are with a teacher who seems to really like them, so I guess it’s all journal time for me for the next few months. As much as I bristle at authority, I am a grade-grubber from way back, so I’m going to do my best. Not forcing myself to get to a certain page count is a start.

And, you know, I get why journaling is important. I’ve just never made room for it in my process.

Do you think journaling is important to your process, or are you more like me? Any tips?

A youtube video about a big egg. Not embedded so as to not ruin the surprise.
Methodist minister confides to congregation that he is transgendered man. This story seems to have a happy ending, which is awesome.

Dr Horrible: Laundry Day

The Snuggie Sutra.

Do You Wanna Date My Avatar?

Ginger cinnamon carmels. Nom, these look so tasty.
Good thread with lots of pop nonfiction recs.
Cooper the cat takes pictures.
Poodles don’t get to have dignity. They get to be turned into pandas and such.

This made me sniffle. Don’t tell anyone I’m a sap.

Papercraft Keyboard Cat!

Johnny Cash impersonates Elvis.

The ur-dancefight.

Sensurround, a terrible idea.

This reportedly took 1500 hours to make.

This turtle got prosthetic legs. Aw.

I’m clearing out tabs. These are some links I’ve come across (mostly from twitter) with publishing tips, news, etc, over the last couple of weeks.

Maggie Stiefvater with a Giant Butt-Kicking How to Write a Novel Post.

Stephen Pressfield on research as resistance.

Things you should be able to expect of your editor. (Yikes)

Nathan Bransford’s Book Publishing Glossary.

William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

Jessa Crispin on Jeff Vandermeer’s Booklife. “To the other writing students, I would tell them another Booklife is possible. One where people are allies and not contacts, one where you work with the people who bring your best writing out of you, who are not necessarily at the highest profile or best paying publications.”

Kristin Nelson on how to get publicity money out of your publisher.

Nancy J. Parra on the perfect pitch.

Rachelle Gardner on tightening up your manuscript.

Rachelle Gardner, again, this time on myths v facts of publishing.

Once again, pulled mostly from what I posted on my twitter account.

Historical food timeline.
Medieval Gastronomy.
Trailer for the Fame remake, which I am exceedingly excited about. (youtube, unfortunately no embedding.)
My favorite protest sign so far this year.

I can’t stop shouting ZARDOZ at my husband.

22 free songs from Nylon mag. (itunes only, ends 31aug.)
Great post from Craftivism about making, seeing, being boldly.
Harlequin is going to sell those great paper goods featuring vintage covers.
The world’s hottest chili pepper, used in smoke bombs to keep wild elephants at bay.
Everyone’s probably already seen this, but John Scalzi on Star Wars universe design fails.
William Pitt the Younger, spendthrift.
For a good time, call.

Decemberists cover Bjork’s Human Behavior.

Doors to the Brooklyn Public Library.

The BANK that’s a FACE.

Target: Women on being old.

Today we went back to the vet for yet another follow-up. The tech weighed Mabeline and she was down almost another pound.

This is bad.

Mabeline took this opportunity to hiss at the poster on the wall (”The Top Ten Reasons Cats Visit the Vet!” featuring a kitten with GIANT EYES) and then growl at me some. I gave her pets. I understood how she felt.

The vet then suggested that we leave her for the ultrasound that we cancelled yesterday. She warned me that Mabeline’s belly would have to be shaved. I got the only amount of levity I could out of the situation, hoping instead that somehow she would end up with a lion cut. Alas, it was not to be.

I spent the day checking my cell phone every five minutes. Finally I broke down and called the vet’s office, only to find out that they were just finishing. An hour later, I finally spoke with the vet.

Everything is completely fine. No blockages, no funny masses, no heart disease, no bladder sand. And no lion cut. Final diagnosis? She probably doesn’t like the new food she got six weeks ago from the CAT DERMATOLOGIST. Apparently Rabbit and Green Pea is also an affront to justice.

Yes, I just spent many hundreds of dollars to find out that my cat is a picky eater.

My mom ran by to pick her up and bring home the bag of new food that we’re going to try out.

She called while standing my kitchen. “Do you think I should put some of the new food in a bowl?”

“Well,” I said. “Usually with cats you have to give them new food gradually and –”

“She’s eating!”

“What? The old food?”

“I just saw her take four big mouthfuls of the old food. Now she’s licking her lips.”

You know how some people order the $500 hamburger, just to say they’ve eaten it?

Since cats have no inherent right to dignity, here’s a picture of her shaved belly. It’s no lion cut, but it will do.

Sorry for those weird tweets. I changed my account name and someone else snagged it, and then somehow loud twitter started working again and I can't figure out how to make it stop.

(eta, okay, is fixed. Now if you want to see my tweets you have to go find them.)

Or, as I’ve taken to calling her, the world’s most expensive cat. My husband and I adopted Mabeline (and later, our other cat, Amelie) six years ago from Tree House Animal Shelter. Tree House is awesome because it’s a house tucked away in a Chicago neighborhood that’s filled with CATS. It’s a no-kill shelter, so you’ll see everything from kittens to cats so old they can barely walk.

Tree House didn’t know Mabeline’s history when she arrived. She’d lived on the streets for a while, long enough to get a broken tooth in a fight and to have to spend some time in the feral room being rehabilitated before she was ready to move to the adoption floor. “I don’t understand why Mabeline hasn’t been adopted already,” the counselor told us. “We think she must have been someone’s pet, though.” We watched her follow a girl around, batting at the string that trailed off her floor-length coat, and decided she was the kitty for us. Incidentally, though she had been feral when rescued, her personality has never been anything but delightful. I suppose that’s why I keep her around.

I think that the time she was a stray probably wasn’t good for her health; she’s had to go to the vet much more than Amelie has — we adopted Amelie as a kitten from Tree House. But over the last two weeks I’ve spent more time in vets’ offices than I’d like.

She had to go to her regular vet for a check-up before she could go back for a follow-up at the cat dermatologist. (As an aside, yes, I DID feel like I should be featured on Stuff White People Like for taking my CAT to the DERMATOLOGIST. However we seem to have gotten to the bottom of the terrible ear infections that she’s been suffering from for six years and through five different vets (don’t get me started) so I’m grateful that they exist.) Then on Friday night she started having stomach troubles that lasted into Saturday. Her newest regular vet is literally five minutes away, luckily, so my husband was able to take her over that afternoon. She got a couple of injections and stopped vomiting.

And then we realized she wasn’t eating and we didn’t know the last time she had. It’s really, really bad if cats don’t eat for more than, say, a day — they can get fatty liver disease, which, left untreated, can be fatal. So on Sunday I went on a wild total freakout trying to get her to eat. I got advice to try and feed her baby food, yogurt, and kitten milk.

Of course, none of these worked. Have you ever smeared chicken baby food, which by the way smells like Satan’s flop sweat, on an unwilling cat’s face? First I had to catch her, though, which involved a chase up and down the stairs that would have been improved only by the addition of the Benny Hill song. I had to haul my mattress off my bed and pull half the slats up before I could grab her.

And then I fell down.

And then I finally took her downstairs and smeared disgusting stuff all over her face. For my troubles, I got scratched up. Mabeline then hid in the corner of the dining room, emerging only to glare at me balefully. I felt like my mother must have when I wouldn’t eat my vegetables.

Still, though, as much as I got a bit of food in her, she wasn’t eating. We took her into the emergency vet at 9pm. The emergency vet is never a cheerful place; one couple clearly had to put their dog down; another guy brought in a giant golden retriever who had eaten garbage. Later, I heard him on the phone — because I’m a terrible eavesdropper — say that the dog had eaten corn cobs. Corn cobs! From the look on the guy’s face, I surmised that corn cobs are not digestible.

While waiting for Mabeline to finish a round of subcutaneous fluids, we got to watch a show about how these deer broke into a liquor store and bad stuff almost happened. A family had gotten out right in time! The deer might have broken stuff, but they didn’t! The clerk could have totally gotten trampled, but he dodged them! I just looked the show up and apparently it’s called Untamed and Uncut. Just imagine how many people are disappointed when they tune into that one.

She perked up on the way home but still wasn’t normal, so yesterday we took her back to the original vet. For those counting, we’re now at three days in a row. The vet gave her an appetite stimulating pill and sent us home with a can of wet food that smelled, amazingly, worse than chicken baby food. Since Mabeline thinks wet food is an affront to justice and good taste, we also got three syringes with which to spray it down her throat. After being watered down, of course.

You see where this is going, no? It’s been a cat food apocalypse here for the last twenty-four hours. Have you ever tried to shove a syringe into a squirming cat’s mouth, with the hope that she’ll eat what you put there? At first she swallowed, but tonight she got crafty. She let the mess sit there and then spit it out everywhere. EVERYWHERE. She, of course, managed to do this before she was back on the ground, so both Peter and I got covered in it. This was about as pleasant as you’d imagine.

She somehow got food on the back of her head. No, I don’t know how.

There have been some small improvements. We plied her with cat treats until she finally deigned to eat some. I cried. She pretty much wants to eat just the treats, and only a few at that, but I caught her eating a few bites of kibble just now. We’re back to the vet for another follow-up tomorrow. I’m hoping we’re at the end of this little ordeal, if for no other reason than that she’ll somehow develop some other wallet-crippling malady soon, and I’d rather not deal with two at one time, please.

At my house, the rule is only one of us can go crazy at once. I’m thinking about extending that to the non-human occupants, too.

Culled mostly from things I posted on my twitter account (over there in the sidebar.)

Lots of good info over at Pimp My Novel.

Time Enough at Last, my favorite Twilight Zone episode.

Pet Sounds, a capella.

Crasher Squirrel.

Where I Write, offices of SFF writers.

Things You Wouldn’t Know if We Didn’t Blog Incessantly, my new favorite blog.

Shave that Unibrow!

The Top 5 Angriest Pet Models on Etsy.