On Friday I finished the draft of the big project I am working on. This is my second time through the entire thing. There are one or two parts that I know need attention but I need to do some research first to be able to clean them up. And I know the entire second half will need a lot more work to clear up inconsistencies, eliminate redundancies, make it flow better.
I thought I would just take the weekend off and then sit down today and do a big read of the whole thing. I printed it out, punched holes in the pages, but it in a binder to make it easier to read. And then put the binder on the bookshelf.
I am tired of thinking about it for now. I'm beginning to see Balanchine choreography in my dreams and I've spent more time revisiting my 17-year-old self than seems advisable. I've heard people talk about how you can get too close to what you are working on to do any decent work on it. So maybe that's where I am.
It's another cool, breezy spring day. The beach beckons.
Monday, March 30, 2009
Friday, March 27, 2009
The Huntington Library
I went to the Huntington yesterday and walked the grounds, sat on a bench looking at the lily pond writing for a long time, and wandered through all the exhibits. It was a glorious spring day. The wisteria was just about finishing and the roses were not quite at their peak - so maybe the perfect day to go?
Saturday, March 21, 2009
"Living the Writer's Life"
I'm going back through portions of Eric Maisel's book "Living The Writer's Life." His description of the "inner life" that begins on the bottom of page 63, where he describes the "riotous" and "roiling" inner busyness of a writer, has done more to explain myself to me than anything I've ever read. I'd love to set it all out here but my knowledge of copyright law prevents me. But please -- do read his book if you are interested.
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Hiding From My Gardener
Every Thursday morning I hide from my gardener. I’m usually dressed and sitting upstairs at the computer when the sound of the blower makes me close the window. But every week I forget that it is my house that the crew is attending to and I shrink behind the blind hoping that Mr. Nakata doesn’t see me.
I’m not sure why I don’t want to talk to him. I like gardens more than most people but our current garden is an embarrassment. I live in coastal Southern California where roses bloom until past Thanksgiving and pansies are a winter plant. There’s no excuse for not having our extremely efficient little patch of land be a perfect extension of our lives and an expression of our personality – true Provencal lavender, heavy heirloom tomatos, David Austin roses and Shakespearean butterfly plants. But no. The clay soil is largely ignored by me with just luck and the weekly ministrations of Mr. Nakata providing the only hope.
I can pretend there is a language barrier, but there isn’t. Mr. Nakata is only a little bit older than me, but he presents himself as a wizened old Japanese man only recently released from an internment camp. I know this makes no sense. Perhaps Mr. Nakata’s parents were children in such a place, but still I find it very difficult to communicate with him. He numbles, we interrupt each other, I grasp for plant names unsuccessfully and I always just tell him to do what he thinks is best. So I end up with yet another path lined with pink and white begonias. I know I would have better luck with his Spanish-speaking assistants, but when he is around, they silently pull the mover out of the truck and start their march across our small patch of grass.
The reason I always give for why our garden is a mess is money. I just never seem to be able to justify the money it would take to first design and then bring to life the kind of garden I want. I have children who need to go to college, regions of Italy I haven’t yet seen, bathrooms that need to be updated. Plus I have only a filmy notion of what my garden should look like, although I can recognize its feel and even the sensation of being in it even as I sit here. So it will be a long, delicious project, like a cassoulet that takes three days to cook. I know I could get books from the library about Sissington and attend optimistic spring home tours to see those Mediterranean gardens in San Marino, but I know myself well enough to know I shouldn’t get myself started. When we moved into our old southern colonial in Los Angeles six months before our first son was born all of my nesting energy went into the big square garden in the back and I made my husband plant more than fifty bare root roses in a March drizzle as I watched, benched with toxemia. I know I can get out of control on this.
I can’t even have flowering plants or flowers inside the house. We have two young cats, good hunters and jumpers, who think that flowers are living things to be taken prisoner. When they were only four months old I came home from running an errand to find both of them with bright yellow noses and a vase of sunflowers tipped over on a surprisingly high shelf. I have since watched their faces if someone brings a bouquet to me. Their eyes narrow and they crouch low to the ground, figuring out how to take out a stargazer lily, later, when everyone is gone and the kitchen will be dark and the flowers will be off guard. At this moment, I should be looking out for the pink tulips that I received as a Persian New Year gift, which I have left to fend for themselves in the kitchen.
But I can’t help myself from planning and dreaming. I carry a small, insipid camera in my purse and take pictures of houses, of gardens, of glazed blue pots on a doorstep. Someday these will all come in handy. Someday I will be able to walk outside barefoot and in a recreation of those silly 1930’s movies, pick a grapefruit from a tree with one hand and a bunch of arugula with the other. My husband doesn’t believe any of this. While he would love to have an herb garden and fresh citrus fruit within reach, he knows this would come at the expense of countless mornings when he could have been out on his bike, because this is not an undertaking a person takes on alone. But he can relax – he also knows there will always be some other way I want to spend my own time and energy.
I’m not sure why I don’t want to talk to him. I like gardens more than most people but our current garden is an embarrassment. I live in coastal Southern California where roses bloom until past Thanksgiving and pansies are a winter plant. There’s no excuse for not having our extremely efficient little patch of land be a perfect extension of our lives and an expression of our personality – true Provencal lavender, heavy heirloom tomatos, David Austin roses and Shakespearean butterfly plants. But no. The clay soil is largely ignored by me with just luck and the weekly ministrations of Mr. Nakata providing the only hope.
I can pretend there is a language barrier, but there isn’t. Mr. Nakata is only a little bit older than me, but he presents himself as a wizened old Japanese man only recently released from an internment camp. I know this makes no sense. Perhaps Mr. Nakata’s parents were children in such a place, but still I find it very difficult to communicate with him. He numbles, we interrupt each other, I grasp for plant names unsuccessfully and I always just tell him to do what he thinks is best. So I end up with yet another path lined with pink and white begonias. I know I would have better luck with his Spanish-speaking assistants, but when he is around, they silently pull the mover out of the truck and start their march across our small patch of grass.
The reason I always give for why our garden is a mess is money. I just never seem to be able to justify the money it would take to first design and then bring to life the kind of garden I want. I have children who need to go to college, regions of Italy I haven’t yet seen, bathrooms that need to be updated. Plus I have only a filmy notion of what my garden should look like, although I can recognize its feel and even the sensation of being in it even as I sit here. So it will be a long, delicious project, like a cassoulet that takes three days to cook. I know I could get books from the library about Sissington and attend optimistic spring home tours to see those Mediterranean gardens in San Marino, but I know myself well enough to know I shouldn’t get myself started. When we moved into our old southern colonial in Los Angeles six months before our first son was born all of my nesting energy went into the big square garden in the back and I made my husband plant more than fifty bare root roses in a March drizzle as I watched, benched with toxemia. I know I can get out of control on this.
I can’t even have flowering plants or flowers inside the house. We have two young cats, good hunters and jumpers, who think that flowers are living things to be taken prisoner. When they were only four months old I came home from running an errand to find both of them with bright yellow noses and a vase of sunflowers tipped over on a surprisingly high shelf. I have since watched their faces if someone brings a bouquet to me. Their eyes narrow and they crouch low to the ground, figuring out how to take out a stargazer lily, later, when everyone is gone and the kitchen will be dark and the flowers will be off guard. At this moment, I should be looking out for the pink tulips that I received as a Persian New Year gift, which I have left to fend for themselves in the kitchen.
But I can’t help myself from planning and dreaming. I carry a small, insipid camera in my purse and take pictures of houses, of gardens, of glazed blue pots on a doorstep. Someday these will all come in handy. Someday I will be able to walk outside barefoot and in a recreation of those silly 1930’s movies, pick a grapefruit from a tree with one hand and a bunch of arugula with the other. My husband doesn’t believe any of this. While he would love to have an herb garden and fresh citrus fruit within reach, he knows this would come at the expense of countless mornings when he could have been out on his bike, because this is not an undertaking a person takes on alone. But he can relax – he also knows there will always be some other way I want to spend my own time and energy.
Friday, March 13, 2009
Writing Week
It’s Friday morning. That means I am where I always am on Friday mornings – at Pascal’s, in the little wine alcove off the main room, at a café table with slate under my feet.
This is the beginning of my writing week.
A few years ago, when I started writing seriously, I struggled with how to figure out if I was writing enough. I didn’t know how to build a schedule that made sense for me. I was obsessed with reading about writers’ schedules and daily word counts. If I remember correctly, Anne Lamott says 600 words or about two pages a day, Carolyn See says no less than a thousand words a day every day for the rest of your life (that scared me). Others (John Updike, Maya Angelou, Julia Alvarez) were fans of the keep-your-butt-in-the-chair-for-a-set-time-every-day school of thought.
I played around with all of these, but with my crazy work schedule and trying to maintain some normalcy with my family (imagine: “No, Jess, I can’t come see your project at school because it’s Tuesday and you know that I write on Tuesday nights), none made sense.
After a while I came up with my own take on all of this – a weekly word count of 3,500 (very carefully negotiated with myself – 5 days at 700 words a day). At first, like all good lawyers, I started my writing week on Monday morning. But that soon left me in a sweaty panic because Thursday morning would come around and I would have not written anything for the week. Then I joined a writing group that met on Thursday nights. That meant that at least Wednesday would be productive. But the added benefit was that I woke up on Fridays energized and ready to go, ready to implement the changes and ideas I’d gotten the night before.
So I started going out for breakfast on Friday before I went to the office – and realized that was the true start of my writing week. I’d get a few pages done and then if I was able to leave the office early on Friday, do more when I got home. My momentum carried me through the weekend, getting me up early on Saturday when my husband gets up before dawn to go cycling. Then it didn’t matter if I had a dry spell on Monday and Tuesday.
I don’t count words anymore but I did set up a nifty writing schedule on Google calendar to try to get me to a finished first draft of my book by April 1.
Pascal is the perfect place for writing. There’s a low buzz of conversation, the hiss of the coffee machine and weird French pop playing in the background. People come and go but no one raises an eyebrow at me in my little corner. A sign says there’s wi fi but I don’t need the distraction. I think they’d let me sit here all day – my morning cappuccino and croissant eventually converting into a rotisserie chicken with Dijon sandwich and maybe a mid-afternoon macaron. But I’ve never gotten that far. I always get done with everything I have to give and am back out in the parking lot well before noon. Maybe a little writer’s block at Pascal would be okay one day.
This is the beginning of my writing week.
A few years ago, when I started writing seriously, I struggled with how to figure out if I was writing enough. I didn’t know how to build a schedule that made sense for me. I was obsessed with reading about writers’ schedules and daily word counts. If I remember correctly, Anne Lamott says 600 words or about two pages a day, Carolyn See says no less than a thousand words a day every day for the rest of your life (that scared me). Others (John Updike, Maya Angelou, Julia Alvarez) were fans of the keep-your-butt-in-the-chair-for-a-set-time-every-day school of thought.
I played around with all of these, but with my crazy work schedule and trying to maintain some normalcy with my family (imagine: “No, Jess, I can’t come see your project at school because it’s Tuesday and you know that I write on Tuesday nights), none made sense.
After a while I came up with my own take on all of this – a weekly word count of 3,500 (very carefully negotiated with myself – 5 days at 700 words a day). At first, like all good lawyers, I started my writing week on Monday morning. But that soon left me in a sweaty panic because Thursday morning would come around and I would have not written anything for the week. Then I joined a writing group that met on Thursday nights. That meant that at least Wednesday would be productive. But the added benefit was that I woke up on Fridays energized and ready to go, ready to implement the changes and ideas I’d gotten the night before.
So I started going out for breakfast on Friday before I went to the office – and realized that was the true start of my writing week. I’d get a few pages done and then if I was able to leave the office early on Friday, do more when I got home. My momentum carried me through the weekend, getting me up early on Saturday when my husband gets up before dawn to go cycling. Then it didn’t matter if I had a dry spell on Monday and Tuesday.
I don’t count words anymore but I did set up a nifty writing schedule on Google calendar to try to get me to a finished first draft of my book by April 1.
Pascal is the perfect place for writing. There’s a low buzz of conversation, the hiss of the coffee machine and weird French pop playing in the background. People come and go but no one raises an eyebrow at me in my little corner. A sign says there’s wi fi but I don’t need the distraction. I think they’d let me sit here all day – my morning cappuccino and croissant eventually converting into a rotisserie chicken with Dijon sandwich and maybe a mid-afternoon macaron. But I’ve never gotten that far. I always get done with everything I have to give and am back out in the parking lot well before noon. Maybe a little writer’s block at Pascal would be okay one day.
Monday, March 9, 2009
Artist's Date
I know a lot of people who swear by Julia Cameron's "The Artist's Way."
I bought a second hand copy a few years ago and read it. I thought it was fun but not life-changing. And I immediately bridled at the idea of morning pages, which is the central teaching of the book. I've kept a diary since I was eight and I am now on volume 28. I don't have an issue with finding time to sit down and write what's on my mind. But I don't do it first thing in the morning. The first thing I do every day is to sit in our darkened dining room with a cup of tea and whatever book I'm reading. I find it inspirational to start with the words of others and then warm my courage up to facing my own.
But I do like the idea of artist's dates. When I started my current "schedule" I promised myself I would do something fun and unusual each week. I would go to museums or galleries I've never seen, go to art supply stores to look at the paints, go look at high end jewelry just to see how the stones glitter. But it hasn't really happened yet. I've gotten too involved with my writing project and each day feels like I'm behind and I don't want to leave what I'm doing.
Yesterday I persuaded myself to go for a walk in the late afternoon to enjoy the first day after the time change and cleared my head. I slipped my camera in my pocket and walked to the same park I always walk through, full of native California coastal plants. I wanted to take some pictures of the rocks in the park. But instead, I noticed all of the wildflowers that have bloomed since the last time I took this walk. And I took pictures of all of the different flowering plants I saw. The wildflowers are each so small and are encompassed in so much green that I found I didn't notice how beautiful they were until I tried to capture photos of them. So that was my artist's date for this week.
Thursday, March 5, 2009
Meditation
I’ve been thinking about meditation again. Not actually doing it, just contemplating it.
Ever since I started doing yoga twelve years ago there have been periods when I’ve felt I should be meditating or trying to develop a regular meditation practice.
I’ve tried. I have tapes, now podcasts, books, cushions. But I’ve never gotten much past the squinted-eyed peek at the clock around twelve minutes in. In a group setting I fare better. And it’s the calm, hyper-aware feeling I’ve gotten from those experiences that makes me think about giving it another shot.
This time it’s come up because I’m reading “Less: Accomplishing More By Doing Less” by Marc Lesser, who is a Zen teacher and MBA – a combination right up my alley. I was amused to find a self-help book that encourages me to do what I am already doing. But now, in Chapter 4, he is making a big pitch for a half hour daily meditation practice. Just reading about it makes me tired.
But the idea continues to bob up in my mind (I imagine a Zen teacher would find that ironic). Won’t it help my writing? Won’t it improve my overall outlook if I just push through for a while and establish a habit? Probably. When I read the instructions for developing a mindfulness practice though, they emphasize the objective of becoming adept at pushing random thoughts to the side and returning again and again to the breath. I worry that that’s the opposite of what I’m trying to do with my writing and other parts of my life.
I’m trying to actively listen to those thoughts, those little voices that I became so good at pushing away when I was working so hard as a lawyer. Now that my schedule and my mind are no longer for rent I find that I sometimes don’t know how to make a decision as straightforward as what to have for lunch.
For example -- It’s noon. I just finished exercising, so of course I’ll get a salad on my way home. Right? But I’m not hungry. And the salads near the gym are a rip off and I end up eating scary creamy dressing I don’t even like that much. But, I tell myself, that would be most efficient, would fit into a perfect little gap in the day and accomplish a meal. I ask myself what I am hungry for. Nothing occurs to me. The choices scan through my brain – soft tacos, leftover chicken at home, a yogurt smoothie, a frittata with those cherry tomatoes that are getting puckered. I sit in my car, paralyzed, unsure of what to do. How can I not even know what I want to eat for lunch?
But on good days, I sit at my computer and look up when my son comes home from school, and am not able to believe it’s 4:30. Where was I all day? Part of the time I was in New York in 1978, then in St. Petersburg in 1917, and then in the restaurant where my characters were meeting for dinner after a long absence. I look at my history in iTunes and I don’t remember hearing most of the music that was playing all day. This is confusing and exhilarating for someone accustomed to accounting for my time in six minute increments. I get up from the desk and wander to the kitchen. I feel the same satisfaction I did when I won a tough motion for summary judgment. I’m surprised. I’m tired, ready to move on to another activity – making dinner or returning phone calls.
But the idea of sitting down and trying to empty my mind for a half hour is completely unappealing. I’m just figuring out how active and alive my imagination is. I’m afraid to tell it to shut up, even for just a half hour a day.
Ever since I started doing yoga twelve years ago there have been periods when I’ve felt I should be meditating or trying to develop a regular meditation practice.
I’ve tried. I have tapes, now podcasts, books, cushions. But I’ve never gotten much past the squinted-eyed peek at the clock around twelve minutes in. In a group setting I fare better. And it’s the calm, hyper-aware feeling I’ve gotten from those experiences that makes me think about giving it another shot.
This time it’s come up because I’m reading “Less: Accomplishing More By Doing Less” by Marc Lesser, who is a Zen teacher and MBA – a combination right up my alley. I was amused to find a self-help book that encourages me to do what I am already doing. But now, in Chapter 4, he is making a big pitch for a half hour daily meditation practice. Just reading about it makes me tired.
But the idea continues to bob up in my mind (I imagine a Zen teacher would find that ironic). Won’t it help my writing? Won’t it improve my overall outlook if I just push through for a while and establish a habit? Probably. When I read the instructions for developing a mindfulness practice though, they emphasize the objective of becoming adept at pushing random thoughts to the side and returning again and again to the breath. I worry that that’s the opposite of what I’m trying to do with my writing and other parts of my life.
I’m trying to actively listen to those thoughts, those little voices that I became so good at pushing away when I was working so hard as a lawyer. Now that my schedule and my mind are no longer for rent I find that I sometimes don’t know how to make a decision as straightforward as what to have for lunch.
For example -- It’s noon. I just finished exercising, so of course I’ll get a salad on my way home. Right? But I’m not hungry. And the salads near the gym are a rip off and I end up eating scary creamy dressing I don’t even like that much. But, I tell myself, that would be most efficient, would fit into a perfect little gap in the day and accomplish a meal. I ask myself what I am hungry for. Nothing occurs to me. The choices scan through my brain – soft tacos, leftover chicken at home, a yogurt smoothie, a frittata with those cherry tomatoes that are getting puckered. I sit in my car, paralyzed, unsure of what to do. How can I not even know what I want to eat for lunch?
But on good days, I sit at my computer and look up when my son comes home from school, and am not able to believe it’s 4:30. Where was I all day? Part of the time I was in New York in 1978, then in St. Petersburg in 1917, and then in the restaurant where my characters were meeting for dinner after a long absence. I look at my history in iTunes and I don’t remember hearing most of the music that was playing all day. This is confusing and exhilarating for someone accustomed to accounting for my time in six minute increments. I get up from the desk and wander to the kitchen. I feel the same satisfaction I did when I won a tough motion for summary judgment. I’m surprised. I’m tired, ready to move on to another activity – making dinner or returning phone calls.
But the idea of sitting down and trying to empty my mind for a half hour is completely unappealing. I’m just figuring out how active and alive my imagination is. I’m afraid to tell it to shut up, even for just a half hour a day.
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