I have been writing. I got my grant, finally, after these fair few years of trying to figure out what grant committees actually want from me. The truth is that I still don’t know. I don’t know what I did right any more than I knew what I did wrong. And I think that is how it has always been and ever will be with this work. This writing work I have taken rather arrogantly upon myself. I don’t know where what I do right and what I do wrong begins and ends, and maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe that is the point. To do just enough of both so that a lovely counterbalance is struck. Maybe the point is not brilliance but some sort of cancellation. One writes to break even.

I am sitting here in a house that isn’t mine. A friend has gone away. He is coming back tomorrow, and though I am happy to welcome my friend back, I am loathe to relinquish this house. I do good work here, when I am not too distracted. I think I do better work here than when I am at home. Why is that? I have to wonder. Why should that be? I don’t know. Maybe writers need a place to go that isn’t where they eat and bathe and lay down at night. Maybe it is as simple as that. Or maybe it is this house. I feel at home here, in a wonderful way that is not the way I feel at home when I am at home. Here, I feel at home even though it is not my home. And that is something very unusual. For me, at any rate.

Today I read a gorgeous travel article by an acquaintance, Timothy Taylor. Though to call it a Travel Article seems…highly erroneous. Suspect, even, given the breadth and depth of it. It feels more like an incantation, to me. It is that potent and moving. Which is no surprise, given the writer who wrote it. It is…extremely intimate, as good personal non-fiction is. When I read something like it, or in that genre that is as effective and beautiful, I feel so…strange. I feel such a coward. Because I have never been able to do what they have done. I have never been able to write as myself, to risk that by sending it out into the world.

This blog, of course, doesn’t count. Hardly anyone will read it, which is why it is even possible for me to write this to begin with. There is no real intent. But what is it to write something true about oneself with actual intent? I don’t know. I have never tried it. But reading Timothy’s piece makes me want to take a risk. I am inspired to risk something, having read this, safe in my seclusion, not a soul around, sipping tea at a table in a room filled with light, scattering toast crumbs, making sounds in my throat that are the vocal representations of a kind of affirmation that only comes when one has read something True, and must respond verbally, even when there is no one to hear. Especially when there is no one to hear. Another question raised by this reading experience is why what one reads inevitably becomes something about oneself? There is no reading of something without turning it into a mirror that does or does not reflect the self.

Hmmm.

It’s strange, how sad and lowdown it brought me, this old news scavenged from the murky depths of my web browser.

Ellen, I will always read your book. It will always thrill me and murder me and resurrect me. And you too, I guess. Isn’t that what we want? What you must have wanted? For someone to read your book after your death?

Well, that someone is me.

Remember, Ellen. Every word written is a victory against death. Even if to write them is sometimes like being killed.

It’s down to business today, though.

I’ll have to write double-time.

This is the math I’ve come up with:

November has 30 days. I’m only going to plan to write during the week. Therefore, November has 21 working days this year. 50,000 word divided by 21 = 2380.95 per day. That’s not so bad at all. I’m sure I will write far more than that on some days, and on others–not so much.

So far, I’ve written 0 words. But today is the first actually working/writing day of the month. So give me a break.

I think I really will start writing in this thing more often. I think part of me really still feels uncomfortable with the notion of a blog, which is rather ridiculous and backward of me, but there it is. I don’t know what is worse—the thought no one is reading it, that only a few people are reading it (and probably by accident) or that people might actually at some point start to read it. Though most people keep a blog for their readers, I think I still fall back on old notions of posterity and keep it mainly for myself, so I can look back on it and see what I was up to on any given day. Of course, if I never write in it, I am defeating my own hazy purpose.

Anyways. Since last I wrote, I have been embarking on some writing projects of note.

1)     I competed in and finished a working manuscript for the International 3-Day Novel Contest. My manuscript weighed in at around 100 pages, give or take whatever typeface is used. I packaged it up and mailed it in a conspicuously brown manila envelope. Actually, it wasn’t really a manila envelope. It was an envelope I made myself out of some brown packaging paper I had lying around, because I really am cheap like that. So we’ll see if it manages to rate even an honourable mention when the results of the contest come in. At this point, I barely even think about it without cringing and breaking out into a cold sweat, so I don’t think I am over the trauma of having written an entire “novel” over the course of a long weekend. Ugh. Shudder. I’ll find out in January.

2)     I wrote and submitted yet another grant proposal to Canada Council, and this year I am more hopeful than I ever have been upon completion of a grant application. Which is likely not an indication of anything. I am quite certain I still won’t get the grant. But if I don’t get it for this project (a post-war Vancouver/feminist perspective of the Holocaust and WWII novel) then I can rest easy in the knowledge that nothing I want to write will ever tempt them, and I can stop torturing myself with these yearly “polishing of the old begging bowl”, as my friend Oscar so picturesquely puts it. I won’t know for sure until March. I’m trying not to think about it. Much.

3)     I’ve decided to give NaNoWriMo a try. I want to use the month to write a series of linked stories that go with several I’ve already written and published, with it in mind to send out the collection in December to a few Canadian presses. It’s time I tried to get my own book out there. I know this. Now I just have to get off my ass and actually take the plunge. Gulp. And in the meantime, I will send out the individual stories to places other than Broken Pencil and subTERRAIN. I’m trying to branch out. Descant and Prairie Fire, look out!

I’ve been reading a lot lately. I am going through one of those obsessive reading phases (as opposed to my normal book inhalation diet). Right now I am swooning over Michael Cunningham’s A Home at the End Of The World. Sigh! So gorgeous. I love it utterly. I bought it for 55 cents at the VPL Book Sale earlier in the month. Actually, I was very frugal. I was taking the train home, and didn’t want to buy more books than I could comfortably carry. So I chose 8 or 9 real gems and called it a day. I still haven’t worked my way through last year’s mountain of acquisitions. Several of the books I bought this year are actually doubles of my favourites I am going to send to friends as Yule gifts, so I was even more virtuous than I appeared to be from the outset. There are some books I can’t leave on a table. I just *have* to buy them, no matter how many copies line my shelves. I justify this OCD behaviour by swearing I am going to make gifts of them. Some of them actually do make it into a parcel here and there. Others….well. You can’t have too much of a good thing, can you? Don’t answer that. That is always a rhetorical question when I ask it.

I wrote a short story this month called Down and Out at the Ovaltine Cafe. I hope to place it soon. I’m thinking of sending it to subTERRAIN for their Signs themed issue. I’ve never actually published anything with them, so it would be a nice little victory if they took it.

Oh, yeah—most importantly of all, the Broken Pencil anthology (otherwise known as Can’tlit: Fearless Fiction From Broken Pencil Magazine) I’ve got a story in has finally hit the bookstores.  It was released on Thursday at a launch party in Toronto (I rather feel like I’m still waiting for it to come out, as I wasn’t able to make it to Toronto for the party. That, and the fact that I’m still waiting for my contributor’s copies). It has a wicked awesome cover, and there has already been a review of it posted, both in blog format and on the ECW webpage. So go buy a copy! Right now!

Also, Rhonda Waterfall has her first collection, The Only Thing I Have, out with Arsenal Pulp this month, and one of her stories is being featured on Joyland.ca. I just read it tonight. Go read it too, and maybe we can talk about it.

The book that’s doing this to me right now is White Oleander by Janet Fitch. I resisted reading it for a long time, and I didn’t like it at first—but then I had some kind of strange breakthrough with it, and I can’t put it down, and I don’t want it to end. It’s beautifully written. Usually when I hate a book it has something to do with not being beautifully written enough. The other reason I will usually hate a book is something White Oleander may be guilty of: and inappropriate/inauthentic/unbelievable narrative voice for a young protagonist. I felt that way for the first while, while the narrator Astrid was 12-14, but now that she is 16 and has been through a lot of shit, I feel like she has grown into her voice. I don’t know. It’s interesting. And I’m not sure what this novel is all “about” sometimes. It’s the sort of novel I don’t usually like to read, involving all the Tragedies of Woman. That sort of novel usually makes me so angry I end up throwing it against a wall. Not because I don’t care or feel anything about those tragedies, but because it brings up too much of my own emotional past. Landscape I’m fucking sick and tired of navigating over and over again. I am not a fan of having certain emotions played upon. There is a strange poison in it that lulls and kills.

But in the end, I feel this book may not be what I initially thought. I have just over a hundred pages left, so we shall see. And I want to read something else this woman has written—something to guage it against, style-wise. I will say that it is a vast improvement on the last book I read, On Beauty by Zadie Smith—the only fucking part in the whole novel I actually liked was the very last scene. And who knows? That may only have been because I was so goddamned relieved it was finally over.

Until next week, of course.

So yeah. No agent. And I found this out by email, no warning whatsoever. And I am still under contract with the agency, but I am waiting to hear back from one of the other agents as to whether or not she would be interested in representing me. I feel like I am auditioning for a part I thought I already had: a writer being represented by a reputable New York Literary Agency. My mistake, I guess. My reaction when I heard the news was to laugh rather hysterically and forward the email to various people I knew. Is that normal? Likely not. But I’m okay with that. If the agent in question doesn’t feel that we will work together well, I suppose I will just have to move on to other things. I think I’ll submit to an actual Canadian agency next time. Either way it goes, I have options. Or at least I like to think so.

In the meantime, I have a lot of work to do. After the fall, the forthcoming publications are going to be entirely dried up. I feel like I should probably actually do my job and submit some actual work or else I will be one sad little girl come winter, after the initial excitement of Can’t Lit dies down in my fickle little heart. Don’t get me wrong, I’m really excited about it. But I know I will feel like crapola soon after if there is nothing else in the works. And I just want that satisfying sense of working, of producing. I have been far too busy doing shit lately, and I haven’t been writing as much as I want to. I have all of these stories I want to write, all of these places I want to submit to, all of these grand ambitions that are gathering dust as we speak.

I need to sew a permanent Post-It Note to my forehead that reads: Get to fucking work, Hellenes, you slacker. Think that would be at all effective?

In other news, Hal Niedzviecki was kind enough to link back to this blog from his site, after having posted the comments I made on his Face Book page to his own blog in an entry entitled Do Writers Make Bad Bloggers? I think that question will be rather eloquently answered as soon as Hal’s readers hit the link and are redirected back here. I think this blog is a sterling example of why the answer to that question is often a resounding YES! I think I used to be a better blogger a few years ago, when I wrote under a strange little name that wasn’t even the name of a person, and the only people who read the posts were people I knew. I remember writing some pretty intimate shit in that old blog—a series of unsent letters written to someone I was violently in love with come painfully to mind. Would I have the guts to post them here, in this blog, with my own actual name plastered all over it? Likely not. I look back at those old posts, and I both cringe at and exult in my brazenness, the naked dripping of my heart on display and set on fire. Now, if only I had sent those letters instead of posting them in a Friends-Only blog. What would have come of that? I will never ever know.

What about you out there? What do you post in your blogs? Do you tell the truth? Do you tell exorbitant lies? Do you use a pseudonym? Are you actually yourself when you write in them, or some sort of composite version, an Online Fetch, an emmisary sent out into the imaginary realms? What are your blogs for? Why do we feel compelled to read and write them? Do you think writers make bad bloggers?

And for the record, I don’t think Hal is a bad blogger. I happen to like his blog. I just think I have learned far more about him from reading his short stories. And what do I really know from reading his short stories? Maybe nothing much. Maybe we can only imagine things about a writer from reading the shit they make up. Maybe writers have nothing more to tell than the stories they write. Maybe there is nothing more in them. I think I am more than cool with that. I’ll take the stories to anything else any day of the fucking week. So there. And on that note, hadn’t I better go get cracking on an actual bonafide piece of fiction than spending my precious writing time wringing my hands on this blog? Maybe the next story I write will be the Absolute Truth About Everything. Aren’t they all?

“I’ve been thinking about the tenor of your blog voice, and your attempts to break down privacy barriers and truly write as *you* stripped bare and real and all of that. And I’ve been thinking about what it means to write in a truly intimate manner. And I was thinking that when you write your novels and stories, the voice you write in is infinitely more intimate than the voice you write in as yourself (emails, articles from your own POV, your blog). While I find those pieces interesting and intriguing, they do not move me. Why is that? I feel like they should. Like if I am getting a true glimpse of your actual, human life, I should be inordinately moved, somehow. But I’m not. And I think it’s because you hide behind your ideas emotionally-speaking. You don’t really emote in your blog. I feel like I want you to emote, like I should feel like there is this intense intimacy between me as a reader and your voice as a writer. I’m running out of space–will continue below…

“Please excuse any typos–I’m staying up way too late to obsess about this. I’m going to keep talking in the comments section. Is this annoying? I thought it would be appropriate to make these messages public rather than sending a private message. Anyway, as I was saying…

“Why can we as writers create such poignancy and intimacy in our fiction but not in our blogs? And people who are not writers are so capable of expressing themselves in a truly intimate way through their blogs? I’ve noticed this. I am way more squeamish in writing in my blog than so many of the blogs I read. I am trying to figure that out. And I keep reading your blog trying to find similarities. I feel like you are squeamish too. Why are we squeamish? We are writers. We’re supposed to be fearless. But I feel like I am learning that I want to write fearless things, but it doesn’t actually make me that way at all. I’m a liar and a thief by trade. How do I tell the truth about myself the way other people do?

“Maybe I can’t and never will. Maybe I traded that ability in for the gift of being able to write about other people’s truths and intimacies. Maybe I will never be able to tell the truth about myself. Do you think you are telling the truth about yourself? Sometimes I think I tell the truth about myself when I am not even talking about myself. When I am writing about someone who is nothing like me. Maybe a writer can’t do what you are trying to do, because we are too busy self-editing. I don’t think other people are compelled to do that. And that is why I love writing about them, love reading about them. They are so unselfconscious. Maybe you can’t do what you want to do with your blog consciously. It has to be reflexive. What do you think? Am I just tired and crazy at 1:00 AM, or am I managing to say something here? Tomorrow I will read this and be embarrassed, but in the interests of peep culture, I am going to stand by it. Anyways. All I was really trying to say when I started yapping was that I think you write so much about ideas that the messy truth of your life is sort of contained. You talk *about* full-disclosure but perhaps you don’t actually do it. Because you are too self-aware, and you are sort of dress-rehearsing, like “pretending” to watch TV and buy a phone*. Is that at all accurate, I wonder? I don’t know. But I like this. It’s interesting. I wonder what will be the end result of it all. I am going to stop talking now. I feel oddly…exposed! There, that’s something. But I didn’t do anything but express an idea. I should have made some sort of deep dark confession. But I am far too squeamish. I can’t even do the 25 things about me thing. Ugh. Perish the thought! Goodnight. I’ll be reading the blog, lurking about. You might see me from the corner of your eye. These are not criticisms, just thoughts. Friendly observations out of true interest and wondering.”

*referring to Hal’s description of filming the Peep documentary where he was coached by the director to act out getting his first cell phone when in actuality it was already purchased and activated, and having to enact mundane real-life scenes to show the audience that he is a regular dude watching TV with bed-head—“candid” moments that are anything but.

I don’t know what else to say about it at the moment–I suppose I will wait to see if he replies. I’m very interested in what he is doing and talking about. And with the strange ways in which we “communicate” with one another in this day and age. I am not convinced at all that we are in fact communicating anymore. Am I communicating with whatever small audience reads this blog with anything approaching regularity? Likey not. Why am I bothering? Vanity, mostly? A sincere desire to communicate? Neither, I think. I feel more like I have always had a strong reflective nature. I’ve always written in journals. I am not convinced anyone reads this (blog stats=people accidentally stumbling across this and not staying to read anything in my mind). It’s interesting. I’ll keep thinking about it. If anyone is reading this, I hope they will post any thoughts in the comments section.

I have to go to bed now. My cousins are visiting from Calgary, and we have a million family-oriented things to do tomorrow, including visiting the awesome Mennonite-run thrift store here in Mission, and going to the drive-in to see Transformers and Star Trek. Life is rough, no?

]]> http://mckinleymhellenes.wordpress.com/2009/06/24/peeping-hal/feed/ 1 M. http://mckinleymhellenes.wordpress.com/2009/06/02/28-and-not-dead-yet/ http://mckinleymhellenes.wordpress.com/2009/06/02/28-and-not-dead-yet/#comments Tue, 02 Jun 2009 18:31:03 +0000 M. http://mckinleymhellenes.com/?p=231 ]]> It has been brought to my attention that I am a terrible bloggist. Yes, it’s true. I never update this blog. Why? Mostly because I’m certain no one is listening. Or more accurately, because I am terrified someone is. Either way, I am stultified. But I really do want to write here more often. I had another blog once upon a time, and I wrote in it quite frequently. The last entry was in December 2006. It wasn’t even a public entry, or a friends only entry. It was a private entry. How typical of me to write a private entry on what is supposed to be a public journal. But I don’t think I yet understand the point of blogging. I feel like I still just write these entries for myself, knowing that someone might break the lock and steal a peek. And be vastly disappointed, no doubt, at the contents therein.

What can I write about? The mundanities that make life both wonderful and banal? Like how I turned 28 just over a week ago. Nothing more mundane than turning 28. Birthdays are a strange business. I don’t know how to feel about them. And they always come too soon for me. I need at least another six months to ease out of one year into the next. I’m still mulling over 27, and now 28 is here. But maybe that’s how it should be. Maybe we are meant to use one year to contemplate the last, while unselfconsciously living it. When 27 started, I thought it was going to be so eventful—but was it? Yes, in some ways. There were interesting and important things that happened, like signing with an agent, for instance—though that has yet to bear any fruit. I also wrote more during my 27^th year than possibly all my other years combined, so that’s something. Stamina has been achieved, though I have been lazy lately. It was something of a rest year for me, after a year fraught with drama from which I am only just recovering (is that what a blog is for—a public airing of personal and emotional grievances? Perish the thought. Shudder at the thought!).

Do the years of our lives start to run together to the point where we can no longer distinguish them from one another? Do we start remembering our lives only in the increments of decades? Or perhaps groupings of 2 or 3 years? I hate that. I want to remember each year of my life separately, as far as I am able. Some years are not very remarkable, and melt into the next. But I don’t want all of them to be like that.

As I was saying, I’ve written a lot this year. Since August, I’ve written a novella, some short stories, half a novel I started the year before and put on hold, then I rewrote said novel to my agents specifications several times over, and some short stories, one of which is the best I have ever written, and I am almost finished another novel, all in the space of ten months. Not too shabby. But still, I feel rather lazy and languorous, because I haven’t been writing much these past 3 weeks. I think it’s the weather—or at least I blame the weather. It’s been 32 degrees here the past few days. I feel lazy and drugged, like I have been infused with liquid opium. I had an uncle who once stole a bottle of liquid opium from a drugstore and after drinking it, fell asleep and didn’t wake up for 3 days. But I digress.

I’ve also written a prodigious amount of letters this year—though not as many as I should have, especially over the winter. I am frightfully neglectful of correspondence in the winter. I just want to burrow in a hole somewhere and die for awhile in winter.

I’m not really saying anything with this entry. I just wanted to post something, so it would no longer be something I should be doing that I’m not doing. Maybe the next entry will be more interesting. Are blogs really interesting, or are they just a way to appease the voyeur inside all of us—the voyeur and the exhibitionist—those conjoined twins of the modern psyche.