Molly Gaudry's Blog

I haven’t thought about Fit for a little over a month now, but it seems way longer. It’s been a busy month, I guess. But that’s good(!), according to writer-me, who frequently tells students to have multiple projects in progress in order to get some space while letting drafts rest, and then to realize where the energy is (Project X or Y or Z, for instance) and consequently where it isn’t (maybe it’s time to finally scrap Project WTH once and for all?).

This morning, after a month away, I’m debating whether or not I want to continue with the day-by-day plan of The 90-Day Rewrite, which I was excited about on Day 1 and Day 2. If it’s been over a month though and I’ve abandoned it entirely, then either I’m kidding myself or maybe my 90 days need not be consecutive and I should just accept the fact that I’ll get to them when I get to them (hopefully with better results than these).

So, OK, I just read what Watt writes for Day 3, and he basically says stuff about how we can revisit and clarify moments that we know we need but for some reason just aren’t there yet. He suggests revising by adding a new or different perspective, an alternative or a variation, and seeing what comes of it.

Off the top of my head, I still haven’t figured out what to do with “pine torch” (which I started to worry about here and then began to figure out here). Wow, actually, I never would have realized “pine torch” was still a problem for me on my own today, and I know I wouldn’t have searched for or reread those old posts, which just reminded me (OMG, how much did I need to read these today?) that I am a really slow writer. (How could I have forgotten? Maybe because I’ve felt so guilty about not working on Fit at all for a month?) But anyway, yeah, FYI, slow writers are especially good candidates for having multiple projects in progress at once, so we can actually finish one once in a while, know what I mean? All right, if you made it this far into this post, let me at least leave you with these videos about (1) what we think we need to be doing and (2) just doing it your own way.

Sooo, over the long weekend, I rambled at everyone/anyone who would listen to me think some more about liminality (which, gosh, I guess I haven’t blogged about since 2016, [really?] wow).

So, yeah, giant thank yous all around, especially to:

JI Daniels, who helped me simplify my hypothetical/potential talking points about how we might view a creative writing classroom as a liminal space.

Adam Tipps Weinstein, who made me remember the work of some theorists I’d forgotten about and, on a different note, also reminded me about conversations we once had about “deficit language.”

Dale Enggass, who helped me further simplify my talking points and who also, unrelated, reminded me I’ve been meaning to reread/revisit Violette Leduc.

This guy, whom I do not know, Mark Starmach, who posted this handy guide online about liminality wrt our morning commute, and who also provides this cool illustrated representation of one way of visualizing liminality.

Matt Pinney, who’s got some other ideas for visually representing the concept of liminality to students, which would lead to a productive in-class activity—both in his visual arts classes and my cw classes (we’re working on it, we’re getting there).

Rachel Levy, who asked the excellent question: What’s the point?

And Kirsten Bakis, for telling me to make it personal.

Crap, my alarm just went off and so now I’m cutting into my time for J19 edits and scholarship reviews, so I’ll wrap it up fast with some links to essays on liminality that I’m excited to dive into this week:

George P. Hansen’s “Liminality, Marginality, Anti-structure, and Parapsychology” (whose Amazon bio is 100% what?: “George P. Hansen was employed in parapsychology laboratories for eight years-three at the Rhine Research Center in Durham, North Carolina, and five at Psychophysical Research Laboratories in Princeton, New Jersey. His research included remote viewing, psychokinesis on electronic random number generators, séance phenomena, and ghosts. His papers in professional journals also cover mathematical statistics, deception, skepticism, conjurors in parapsychology, and methodological criticisms. He is a member of the International Brotherhood of Magicians.”).

Ayo Mansaray’s “Liminality and in/exclusion: Exploring the work of teaching assistants” (from Kings College London)

Sandro Carnicelli Filho’s “White-water rafting guides, leisure behaviour and liminality” (from University of the West of Scotland)

Sisirkumar Chatterjee’s “Exploring the Liminality of 'Reality': Reading The Enchantress of Florence” (from Calcutta University)

Nic Theo’s “Considerations on conceptual frameworks for writing liminality into popular film” (from Cape Peninsula University of Technology)

Jonas Soderlund’s “Moving in, moving on: liminality practices in project-based work” (from BI Norwegian Business School)

Angela Cruz’s “Discourses of Technology Consumption: Ambivalence, Fear, and Liminality” (from Monash University)

Arpad Szakolczai’s “Permanent Liminality and Modernity: Analysing the Sacrificial Carnival through Novels” (from University College Cork)

Pat Mahon Daly’s “Liminality and breastfeeding: women negotiating space and two bodies” (from Bucks New University)

Elise Paradis’s “Skirting the Issue: Women boxers, liminality and change” (from University of Toronto)

This week, I started my new gig and got to observe two classes.

First, a 3000-level philosophy course called “Theory of Knowledge.”

Then a 1000-level nutrition course called “Scientific Foundations in Nutrition and Health.”

In the philosophy class, students were reviewing William James’s “The Will to Believe” and discussing Susanna Rinard’s work on Robust Pragmatism.

In the nutrition class, students were studying vitamins and minerals.

At one point, their instructor asked them how many colors had been on their dinner plate the night before.

I thought about mine — an avocado bagel, leftover brussels sprouts, and green grapes — and made a mental note to eat more colors every day.

Anyway, what a cool perk of this job!

When I applied, I knew it involved course observations, but I had overlooked the obvious fact that I’d get to sit in on classes taught by people from departments all over the university.

And now I think know a little bit about what some people believe about what other people believe we think we believe about what we believe.

I think?

And I was also reminded about some basic but necessary information about vitamins and minerals and how they’re necessary, for instance, for helping us to fight the germs that have been gathering on the desks and chairs we were sitting at/on for who knows how many years since they were last cleaned, which inspired a collective ewwwwww from everyone in the auditorium at 8am lol. good morning!

I also got to observe an after-observation consultation, for a class that had maybe been about community organizing?

Not sure, exactly, but it sounded cool.

Mostly, we were troubleshooting the group work that happened in that class, and I learned about this catchy little phrase, “think-pair-share,” which is a faster way to get to talking about how we ask students to think about something, pair them up to discuss it, then have them share with the whole class.

I also learned about “teacher-to-student, student-to-student, and student-to-self” interactions (ideally, all three should happen in the classes we observe).

Teacher-to-student might be lecture; student-to-student might be group work; student-to-self involves students finding personal, individual, meaningful takeaways.

Something I realized as a result of my observations and consultations, though, is that I can do better with my beginning-of-class agenda.

So, in the past, my agenda might have sounded something like this: “Today, we’ll start with a quiz on X, then we’ll discuss Homework Y, and before you leave we’ll get a look ahead at Z for next time.”

But now I realize a better agenda might sound like: “By the end of class today, you should be able to [verb] X, and also to [verb] Y, in order to appreciate Z [or, this very important thing about how today’s agenda is related to this entire class overall].

I’m coming down from a pretty intensely packed few weeks, and weirdly this upcoming week is no less congested but it somehow feels like it might be more navigable. I’ve got two readings (one local, one less local) of my own and at least one other to attend, some Skype & Zoom stuff (I tested the latter today for the first time with Tim, who uses it regularly, and who of course encouraged me to dress up for the local reading [lol, remember that time I had so much wardrobe anxiety about being the boring one when sharing a room with Kate and TinTim one AWP?]. I haven’t dressed up since 2010, and now I’m thinking about how femme I really wasn’t when WTMA came out but also about how not too long ago Rachel told me I have “bimbo hair.” Identity is hard and hair is so, so, so much more than people think, and if I could wear anything to promote Desire it would be this because my narrator wears such a veil in order to not be seen by others). This week I’m also starting a new 20-hour/week job—say hello to the University of Utah’s Center for Teaching & Learning Excellence’s newest Graduate Fellow Consultant! You can read about the interview question that may have helped me land the job here, and whaddya know it’s relevant to what I hope this post will be about: David Mura’s A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity, and Narrative Craft in Writing, which has been on my to-read stack for months and which I finally cracked open this morning.

The title of today’s post comes from the end of Mura’s introduction:

Whether in terms of identity of one’s development as a writer or in the task of finishing a book (particularly one’s first book), I see writers as constantly embarking on their own mythical journeys. Thus I view the process of writing as a call to change: We start to write a book in order to become the person who finishes the book.

Certainly, I myself have gone through this experience of change in writing this book. Indeed, through this writing, I have become someone I did not expect to be. That is one of the greatest joys of practicing my craft and finishing a book. It’s my hope that readers will find this book a seminal guide to their own transformative journey.

Earlier in the introduction, Mura says that in a section titled “The Four Questions Concerning the Narrator,” he addresses “a question that, given our society’s increasing diversity, has become both necessary and sometimes confusing: Whom is the narrator telling the story to? This question is of a different order than the one posed by [Toni] Morrison—who is the expected reader of the text?—but the two questions are certainly related.” In this section, which is all I’ve read so far besides the intro, Mura shares how he once “asked someone in [his] audience from Maine to explain where she lived to someone from San Francisco. [… And] then asked the person from Maine to do this with someone from Maine.” He says, “The explanation to the person from San Francisco was more generalized; it took longer for the speaker to orient her listener, and she never did get very precise. With a fellow Mainer, the speaker used the names of towns and highway numbers.” Mura says, “In our conversations, we are constantly gauging how much our particular listener needs to know in order for us to be understood.” His four questions—Who is the narrator? Whom is the narrator telling her story to? When is the narrator telling the story? Why is the narrator telling the story?—are especially “crucial and complicated” now, he says, as “it’s become clear […] that the increasing diversity of young writers has only made these questions more essential and relevant.”

Immediately, I thought of my former student, Ankitha, who workshopped a story about a multi-generational family and different members’ relationships to a shared cultural tradition—significant and meaningful to the grandparents, not much more than a performed formality to the adult grandchildren. Ankitha had workshopped the story in India, but she wanted to try it out on American readers. All of us, including yours truly, misread the story. We thought the tradition was significant and meaningful for all the characters and, consequently, we weren’t fully appreciating the conflict—that the young adults (of Ankitha’s own generation, not that that should need clarification, and yet) were ambivalent about making the trip back to India to do this thing for the grandparent. Ankitha told us no one who understood this particular tradition would fault them for this, but she wanted to know: how much explaining did she need to do in this story for us to understand? Explaining, to some extent, would be like writing a story about a runaway bride who held up a bank on her way out of town—and taking a beat to write about the history of white wedding dresses and how this particular bride’s white dress is not at all significant to the story because like everyone else who chooses a white wedding dress she’s just wearing a dress that happens to be white because of a cultural tradition that has zero personal significance to the character as she leads the cops on a high-speed chase across state lines. At some point during Ankitha’s workshop, we had even looked to Tanya, the other Indian student in the room, who sweetly schooled us with a shrug and said, basically: Um, I’m from a different region of India and I’ve never heard of this tradition. That was four years ago now, but I learned some necessary obviousnesses that have stayed with me: (1) Don’t look at Tanya for answers, ever; (2) Be a better reader of Ankitha’s story, always. I remember I said she shouldn’t have to explain, but that maybe she needed to, and/or maybe a brief introduction to the story could be useful. I’m thinking now, though, of Mura’s four questions, and how they could have come in really handy: Who is the narrator? Whom is the narrator telling her story to? When? Why? These seemingly simple questions, easy to overlook when diving right in to a student’s question of what and how much needs to be explained, are indeed “crucial and complicated,” “essential and relevant.”

I’ve been oozing anxiety lately about so many of my recent blog posts being so focused on plot. What I’m about to write here is rough but I’ve been thinking a lot about how so many of the bigger-name short story writers that I read in 2018 are working in what I might go so far as to call the traditional form of the oppressor. Short stories that begin with a paragraph, followed by several more indented paragraphs until the end. Some dialogue in there. Clear character desires. Immediate and pressing conflicts. Endings that are for the most part not happy but function as resolutions. I’m thinking of some of my favorites—Rajesh Parameswaran’s “The Infamous Bengal Ming,” Ken Liu’s “The Paper Menagerie,” Nam Le’s “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice,” Lesley Nneka Arimah’s “Who Will Greet You at Home,” Alexia Arthurs’s “On Shelf,” Helen Oyeyemi’s “My Daughter the Racist,” Krys Lee’s “Goose Father,” Lesley Tenorio’s “Brothers,” Manuel Gonzales’s “The Miniature Wife,” Mariana Enriquez’s “End of Term,” Yiyun Li’s “House Fire,” Kristin Valdez Quade’s “Jubilee.” Granted, part of the explanation has already been stated: “bigger-name short story writers” or those whose books I found because they’ve been well publicized, or because I clicked “Customers who viewed this item also viewed.” But I have been thinking about these traditionally formed stories, wondering if or where I might locate the experimental.

Certainly, unhappy endings aren’t new, but one way these authors defy short-story tradition is by writing stories that don’t begin with someone falling into a hole but with someone already born or existing in a hole from which there is no crawling out. In Carmen Maria Machado’s “The Husband Stitch,” for instance, girls are born with their ribbons. Another way these authors defy tradition is by carefully triggering readers. Let me tell you, I was so excited to introduce these authors to my students, but because triggers and trauma are real, I had to rethink and revise my syllabus after a very serious conversation with my boss about Machado’s story and students who did and did not read it. So last week, instead of “The Miniature Wife” for external conflict, I used Kevin Wilson’s “Grand Stand-In” instead. I was going to end the term with a week on sensitive approaches to contemporary issues in society and assign Wilson’s “Wildfire Johnny,” but that’s a definite no now too. I’ll go with Kristin Valdez Quade’s “Jubilee,” instead, which wasn’t originally included because it’s not speculative. (I should remind: currently, I’m teaching creative writing in a local high school, not at the U, and that obviously changes some things wrt content in the classroom; and also, they love magic and monsters and moons.) Anyway, like I said, this paragraph is rough, but all of this and more has been on my mind, and all of it’s being incorporated into the nonfiction components of my dissertation, where hopefully I’ll better articulate my thoughts on Western traditions and experiments in literature and contemporary craft concerns for minoritarian writers, including the potentially disidentificatory practice of adopting the dominant form for short fiction (these stories looking like they’re supposed to, the bodies of their texts behaving) but otherwise misbehaving—complicated representations for characters who don’t resemble our most famous short story characters in bestselling teaching anthologies, dramatic tensions that can never be experienced by majoritarian readers (vs. the suburban dramas of Cheever and Carver in a different era), and nuanced creative responses negotiating Morrison’s questions about whom we envision to be the readers of our texts.

I have been blogging about plot a lot lately. And while I haven’t been tossing around terms like legibility, accessibility, enjoyability in my posts about pop-television and James Patterson’s and Shonda Rhimes’s MasterClass lectures and even, gosh, going all the way back to last summer, craft essays by Ben Percy and Leslie Jamison on urgency and commonness, and more recently my defense of Jane Smiley’s defense of inclusive writing that does not exclude folks who just want a good story, basically these are the -ilities occupying a good portion of my public written craft concerns of late — whether experiencing myself the effects of their effects in dominant mainstream entertainment narratives or self-consciously performing blogging by “confessing” here my concerns about the extent to which the study of plot is an unacceptable pursuit. I hope, though, that my extended engagement with the straightforward has not implied disengagement from the rest, or some of the rest at least.

*

Today, over coffee with Jason I kept resisting all the ways he was reading me and my work. He’d say, “You’re undermining” or “disrupting” or “troubling” or “exploding” or “destroying” notions of genre or stability or forms or methods or whatever and I’d just keep shaking my head, “No no no no no.” So WTF am I doing then? Finally I said things along the lines of: I care about existing and established genres or forms that may or may not have been experiments in their day; I write to celebrate, to honor, to pay homage to, and to remind; I remix, I join, I bring together into conversation things thought to be disparate; I’m not by nature (nurture?) confrontational (I guess except for when I’m shaking my head and repeating, “no”) and so while I’m fine if someone else wants to say they read aggression or acts of violence in my formal decisions (disruptions, explosions, etc.), my chosen verbs all start with “re-”: revisit, recall, remind, rethink, reconnect, reimagine, reincorporate, reattach, reply, renew, revitalize, retell, rewrite, reiterate, rewind, revise, rephrase, redo, respond, report, reanimate, reform, redress, reconsider reconsider reconsider — which begins always with consideration. Kindness. Generosity. Belief. And disbelief (but not disregard). Surprise, I hope. And mindful hesitation. Awareness, always, of how much I don’t know but want to.

I threw a chair once, when I was a kid. It was my computer chair, and it had wheels. I was lucky enough to have a computer, first of all, and I’m pretty sure all I ever did on it was race my Mavis Beacon car and try to keep my windshield clear of bugsplat. Anyway, I got mad and threw this chair and one of the wheels broke off leaving ragged plastic behind. My parents made me sit in this chair — uneven, slanting sideways, gouging a disastrous hole in their hardwood floor — for as long as I lived in their house. Let me tell you, I have no idea what made me so mad that day but I never threw another chair again. Maybe in part this is why I resist the terms disrupt, explode, interrogate, obliterate, destroy, and prefer instead to investigate, to wonder, to wander, to be open to. Maybe this post is about the rhetoric of violence in experimental fiction writers’ day-to-day discourse about what experimental fiction does. Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. Maybe call me Mollyanna, despite the fact that it’s always “a damp, drizzly November in my soul,” and so please leave me to this “problem of the universe revolving in me.”

I was supposed to be interviewed this morning on campus by a filmmaker for a thing, but gray skies and snow flurries got in the way of that, which honestly was fine with me because and so anyway, later in the day I had another interview, during which I was asked a question that made me flash back to elementary ESL classes, to my mother who still tells stories about how when I first got here I had a whole repertoire of Korean nursery rhymes that I sang endlessly on repeat, and then I thought of my former AntiGravity master teacher-trainer, who made me take a vocal/chanting/meditation workshop before she would let me solo teach AG (and lol I was allowed to bring a friend for free and I brought Rachel) and for like all ten hours neither Rachel nor I uttered a syllable but during a coloring break from the singing/chanting/meditating when we had to draw the om symbol on giant posterboard mine (predictably) was big and purple and decorated with lots of tiny pink and yellow flowers and Rachel dug all the black crayons out of the crayon bin and rage-scrawled about a million oms of all sizes on hers, which looked like this, and all the ladies in Lululemon in that intermittently lavender-and-peppermint-DoTerra spritzed room were horrified and I knew then that Rachel and I were meant to be besties and so what if the next time I saw my master teacher-trainer she said, I don’t know when in your lives but someone took your voices away. It’s been years since that day but I got to thinking and (1) I really wish I still had Rachel’s billion-black-oms poster because I’d frame it in glass and hang it on my wall and (2) maybe it doesn’t matter if someone took our voices away because people like us put our words on the page. Have you read Durga Chew-Bose’s Too Much and Not the Mood? When I got to this line, I felt so seen: ”I was too shy to sing louder than a hum. Even today, no matter how simple the tune, I’ll ruin it. The tricky jump of ‘Happy Birthday’ continues to give me trouble.” Me. Freaking. Too. I mean, seriously, who was that little girl all those years ago who sang Korean nursery rhymes while sitting like this and can you imagine, what if she had grown up to be me? And that’s when I answered the question, cool. as. ice.

One day I’ll come back here and update this post with a reveal of the actual question and I promise—all of that will make a kind of beautiful and perfect sense.

I was supposed to be interviewed this morning on campus by a filmmaker for a thing, but gray skies and snow flurries got in the way of that, which honestly was fine with me because and so anyway, later in the day I had another interview, during which I was asked a question that made me flash back to elementary ESL classes, to my mother who still tells stories about how when I first got here I had a whole repertoire of Korean nursery rhymes that I sang endlessly on repeat, and then I thought of my former AntiGravity master teacher-trainer, who made me take a vocal/chanting/meditation workshop before she would let me solo teach AG (and lol I was allowed to bring a friend for free and I brought Rachel) and for like all ten hours neither Rachel nor I uttered a syllable but during a coloring break from the singing/chanting/meditating when we had to draw the om symbol on giant posterboard mine (predictably) was big and purple and decorated with lots of tiny pink and yellow flowers and Rachel dug all the black crayons out of the crayon bin and rage-scrawled about a million oms of all sizes on hers, which looked like this, and all the ladies in Lululemon in that intermittently lavender-and-peppermint-DoTerra spritzed room were horrified and I knew then that Rachel and I were meant to be besties and so what if the next time I saw my master teacher-trainer she said, I don’t know when in your lives but someone took your voices away. It’s been years since that day but I got to thinking and (1) I really wish I still had Rachel’s billion-black-oms poster because I’d frame it in glass and hang it on my wall and (2) maybe it doesn’t matter if someone took our voices away because people like us put our words on the page. Have you read Durga Chew-Bose’s Too Much and Not the Mood? When I got to this line, I felt so seen: ”I was too shy to sing louder than a hum. Even today, no matter how simple the tune, I’ll ruin it. The tricky jump of ‘Happy Birthday’ continues to give me trouble.” Me. Freaking. Too. I mean, seriously, who was that little girl all those years ago who sang Korean nursery rhymes while sitting like this and can you imagine, what if she had grown up to be me? And that’s when I answered the question, cool. as. ice.

One day I’ll come back here and update this post with a reveal of the actual question and I promise—all of that will make a kind of beautiful and perfect sense.

Not sure if I’ve ever made it this explicitly clear here on my blog just how much bad (amazing) TV I watch and how much I love it (hate it). After I finished Dark Matter, which I mentioned briefly here, I started The Vampire Diaries and then switched over to its spinoff The Originals. Both of these shows reminded me of having watched Being Human (probably mostly because of the hospital blood bags, lol, vamps today don’t have to bite anyone, they can just sip from a blood bag like it’s a Capri Sun). Anyway, my favorite part of The Originals is how the main characters alternate opening monologues. So, for instance, in one episode, Klaus catches up the audience by saying:

My siblings and I are the first vampires in all of history, the Originals. Three hundred years ago, we helped build New Orleans. Now, we have returned to find the city has a new king, who rules with the aid of a powerful girl. They’ve taken possession of my brother, Elijah. A coven of witches want this girl for themselves; they seek to enlist my help, using my unborn child as leverage, though I suspect they have ulterior motives. So, I’ve made a plan of my own: I will free my brother, and reclaim the city for my family. Then, I will be king.

But in the next episode’s opening monologue, Elijah says:

My siblings and I are the first vampires in history, the Originals. Three hundred years ago, we helped to build the city of New Orleans. We were happy here, a family. Recently, a coven of witches lured my brother back, using his unborn child as leverage. I tried to help him, but he betrayed me to his enemy, the vampire Marcel. Since then, I’ve been held prisoner by a powerful witch. My brother seeks to manipulate others to procure my release. But, I have my own plan. If this witch proves to be an enemy, I will stop her. By whatever means necessary.

So many plans!

But yeah, that’s what I like about these opening monologues, how the show rotates their different perspectives to set up the dramatic tension of the episode ahead, to some extent inviting us to watch the episode through that character’s quest/plan/frame of mind.

My next favorite part is how the dialogue in the opening scenes (which is so bad, but performed well enough by the actors to be slightly less ridiculous) also functions to catch up the audience. For instance, now that Elijah’s been released from the witch and the opening shot reveals both brothers sitting around at home, reading books, their sister Rebekah walks in and says, “So, this is what you do the first time we’re back together as a family? Vampire book club?”

Or, in another episode, Klaus yells at a witch: “We had a deal! You protect my unborn child, I dismantle Marcel’s army. And whilst I’ve been busy fulfilling my part of the bargain, you allowed Hayley to be attacked and almost killed by a gaggle of lunatic witches.”

LOLOLOL yess.

I mean, is this a lesson on how to write dialogue? Noooo, but it is delightful to watch how the actors manage, generally, to pull it off. Usually with much feigned boredom/amusement (book club?) or enraged violence/show of superhuman fury (we had a deal, witch!).

Which begs the question, a question I’ve been asking myself a lot lately: Why do I watch what I watch? And I think I kind of figured it out. First of all, you don’t have to pay much attention, since characters are always catching you up. And I’m usually reading or editing or grading while watching, so. And also because these characters — vampires, witches, werewolves — are marginals in society but central to the show that celebrates their power, their speed, their ability to take lives and save lives. And the extra layer that’s most interesting is how Klaus is a hybrid, a vampire/werewolf, who’s more powerful than either vampires or werewolves, whose werewolf bite can kill a vampire, whose vampire strength can kill werewolves, and whose hybrid blood can heal all. (And there’s a baby on the way, probably even more magical!?) So, here’s a marginal figure (in the world of humans) who’s been made central to this show. While he’s also an inferior species, a freak of nature, and the only one of his kind, who’s been made in this show to be far superior in speed and strength and invincibility.

And that’s it exactly, right? What we like and need in our nonhuman heroes? Outcasts who, despite the outright hate of humans, save humans anyway?

And that’s what I like about this show, that this outcast gives zero shits about anyone but his immediate family members, sort of, sometimes, but maybe not really since he’ll overpower them and lock them in coffins for centuries when they displease him.

He’s horrible. On the one hand, I hate everything about him. On another, he’s a powerful hero/villain/neither with whom an adoptee like me might positively disidentify — the werewolf part of him makes him unlike all his vampire family members; his biological werewolf father is a complete mystery and not (yet) part of his story; other werewolves are uncomfortable around him (if there exists an older Korean person in America who doesn’t express immediate sadness and deep shame for Korea, upon learning I am adopted, I’ve never met them). Also, he has zero interest in his baby, until he learns what his baby can do for him. Having been told by my doc just a few mornings ago to start thinking about a hysterectomy, I’ve been watching and waiting with somewhat morbid interest to find out what happens with this tribrid about to be born. . . .

I lost my phone/wallet yesterday, so if you need me email’s best for a while.

Before I lost my phone/wallet, I started Shonda Rhimes’s MasterClass while getting ready in the morning.

In the first or second video, she says something that reminded me of what it felt like a really, really long time ago, when I was still inspired by everything.

She says pick a newspaper and read it every day, and then turn the stories into stories—imagine people, characters, in these stories and make the stories human.

I feel like that’s the kind of advice that would’ve made me fill up multiple journals back when I identified as a young person who desperately wanted to grow up and be a writer.

I think maybe that’s not exactly what she says, but it’s what I heard in the bathroom while brushing my teeth and curling my hair and staring at my phone that was propped on my wall-mounted soapdish that I never use for anything except watching stuff on my phone in the morning.

I really miss my stupid phone.

I had to cancel all my credit cards (Wells Fargo, your 24/7 automated customer service line does not work, I’ve been calling for like 12 hours now [but Google hangouts, thank you for existing so I can make any calls at all]).

IDK how I’m going to replace my driver’s license, because the state of Utah only accepts one online printout of the various documents they’ll accept that prove your residency, and, um, all my banking and utilities and university records and etc are online, so.

I tried to set an online alarm to get me up this morning but I didn’t set it right and slept in later than I wanted to, which started up a different set of stupid problems for me today.

Anyway, Shonda also says that if you want to write for television (I don’t, but I love her so I want to absorb everything she says) to watch and learn from your favorite pilots.

She says she watched The West Wing and studied it.

And then she says that we needed The West Wing during the Bush administration just as we needed Scandal during the Obama years, that these shows succeeded in part because they were able to give us what we needed, politically, wrt entertainment.

Intelligent and articulate people who were smarter and more idealistic than us, and who were somewhat unrealistically optimistic on The West Wing.

And a DC where everyone’s corrupt and terrible (but lol still smarter than us) on Scandal.

It’s interesting, I think, and yesterday it made me wonder, what do I need when I watch TV?

But then I lost my phone and during the day while doing work things I couldn’t check my email on my phone to find out if anyone had found my phone and tried to email me about finding it, which would be funny except it’s not.

I think, mostly, I’ve been able to cancel and order replacements for most of the things (thankfully, I have phone insurance; losing the deductible kind of sucks but definitely not as much as it would have sucked to have to pay for a new phone in full).

License and social security card are going to be tricky to replace, but I’ll figure it out, and I think I’ll finally update my passport too so I have some form of ID if this ever happens again.

I lost my emergency cash stash, which really hurts, because until now my phone/wallet has been the safest place for me to keep such a stash, but yeah, cash is stupid and losing it sucks.

I’m sitting here nursing a glass of pinot noir, pretending to be a writer who enjoys a glass of something when they’re working. 

But now I’m not really working.

I’ve just spent over half an hour searching for images of heart-shaped fletchings on heart-tipped arrows, like for a Cupid costume—a good one, preferably, but a cheap Halloween one would do, too—which is the image I wanted for this post because tonight I’ve been working on the bal masqué scenes.

What do you think—silk brocade?

This morning I started Aaron Sorkin’s MasterClass, and I like that he immediately admits he’s better on paper because it makes his super-awkwardness less awkward. 

I totally didn’t expect him to be at all awkward.

I feel better about myself.

A couple weeks ago after I finished all the seasons of GBBO, I needed something new to watch so started Dark Matter.

I sent this clip from the groundhog day episode to all the people I know who might like the show.

I love Android.

God help me, for some reason after I finished that I started The Vampire Diaries.

I’m on episode 30-something, having specifically chosen the show because it has 170-something episodes and I wouldn’t have to pick something else new anytime soon, but yeah, lol, what is this show even.

I’m never going to get to 20 lines.

I’m never going to finish this glass of wine.

I can’t believe Reiny is still alive and seemingly happy and healthy and still jumping on the bed and running around and stuff.

I mean, she’s really old, way older than Boo.

Today J and I, full of ironic but real-enough angst and ennui, totally uninterested in our lifestyle blogger burglar-murderer novel, started a new story we actually like.

It started out as a joke about how I’m a ghost that can’t shake vampires or zombies because they just keep coming, for years, decades even, but also there are boa constrictors, and a guy in a bison costume, and a cabin explosion. 

We are winning at this writing thing.

Cheers.