Ack!

I'm desperately trying to keep up!

This week I'm conferencing with students, developing a research proposal, fielding crazy amounts of email, developing a group video project, trying to plan a months worth of lesson plans and I've finally gotten serious about finishing a short story for workshop.

It has finally clicked that I need to email out a final draft in twenty days! Twenty days -- less than three weeks -- and I won't be able to edit any more before it gets shredded by the wolves!

Okay, so I signed up for the wolves and I need them to shred so that I can learn and get better but -- still -- wolves!

First dilemma? I don't know which of my three started stories I should focus on!

So I give you Teaser Trailers.

In order from most complete to need uber-work the candidates are:

Ten Days Later

She had been three days in the desert, and still hadn’t adjusted. All the water she’d been drinking to offset Albuquerque’s altitude and dryness had been further offset by an almost continuous flow of cocktails.
[...]
The change in climate had been abrupt. She’d left New York, just gearing up for Summer, to the pressurized plane cabin, down to the climate controlled airport, then outside to a world that finally resembled her insides.

She was amazed at how still she found this new world. The amount of insects and animals slithering around by the daylight was minimal compared to what she was used to. She knew there were things out there, there had to be, just waiting for the night to fall before they made their move.

She hadn’t made a move of her own. All hers had been made for her.
#
She had been in New York six days earlier when her manager called her from Charles de Gaulle to let her know he had sublet the apartment they shared in New York City.

“But I’m living here.”

Before he had left, he had insisted that she stay in the city and paint for the summer. That she stay put even after her gallery showing was over and she could have joined him. He was going to be in Provence by the time the show ended and said it was wiser that she spend the time working instead of traveling. He had always been her manager, sometimes her boyfriend and occasionally her fiancé. She hadn’t objected to the arrangement at the time.

She heard the rushing and squawking and loud speaker announcements sounding off behind him. Defense défumer a la concourse, si vous plait. He hadn’t hinted he was thinking of subletting sublet their apartment before he had left the country. Nor had he mentioned the tenant would be there on the first.

“Ten days. You’ve given me only ten days.”

He confirmed this. And though she could not see him she knew he shrugged; he disliked silences and filled them with empty gestures. “More like nine days.”

She looked at the calendar. He was right.
#
She put down the phone and her assistant called.

“I have to find a new apartment.”

“You’ve got bigger problems than that.”

Cake

The small bells tied to the bakery’s door clink into the glass and draw the clerk’s attention to Sarah. Sarah swallows but her mouth still feels dry. She’s done this every March for the past eight years and still the deception makes her nervous. She’s certain she doesn’t look the part, that she’ll say something and give herself away. That’s why she’s chosen this bakery in Wrigleyville a half mile off the redline Belmont stop. She takes the L to and from work every day but the Belmont is more than twenty minutes south of her apartment. No one here will have seen her before, and she’ll never have to come back.

The clerk eyes Sarah from behind the counter but does not smile. She could easily be Sarah’s mother but there’s nothing motherly about her. Instead her dark hair and dark eyes make Sarah uneasy and, as she would in any storybook, Sarah instantly recognizes the wicked witch for what she is.

Body Museum

It wasn’t until after Tracy had taken the extra job that she learned it was a felony to possess a human skull.

She had been working in the museum since April. The exhibit had gone up shortly after and showed no signs of closing. The other exhibit had been easier to work around – miniatures of ancient civilizations – the corpses were a different story.
[...]
Her cigarette was getting short. The cherry glowed right above the green brand lettering on the filter but she hoped she had one more drag left. It didn’t but she took it anyway. The taste was stale but she’d take it if meant a few seconds more outside. Bones had come in today.

She’d thought that it would get easier to work in this place the longer she was there, and it had seemed reasonable at the time. The displays of humans with their skin peeled off, some completely some in cross sections. She thought it might have been easier if they’d been placed in typical dead guy positions. Lying down on cold metal tables. She could take that, that’s how it looked on TV. Or even standing up like the fake skeleton that was in her high school science room, the one some boys had stolen for an end of year prank. Things weren’t that simple here. The bodies with their pink insides showing were posed. Caught in motion like snap shots. Throwing a ball. Conducting an orchestra. Hand on hip giving a thumbs up. Even one guy acting like everything was totally normal, hands on hips, feat spread, weight balanced on the balls of his feet like he was some kind of jock, or Jet Li, and not even noticing that they’d taken a buzz saw from the crown of his skull right through his torso. Cut him clean in half.

It didn’t matter how she felt about the exhibit. She had two girls to feed and an aging farm house to keep from collapsing. So she came to work at 11:00 every night. Did what she had to do. Left at 7:00am to drive bus for the school system. But there were bones in the back room tonight. Not bodies like the exhibits with muscle and organs infused with plastic so that she could almost pretend they weren’t real, but a complete skeleton. And this museum didn't show naked skeletons.

Suggestions and comments welcome.

Ad of the Week

Potpurri

If you didn't know this past Wednesday was National Punctuation Day you weren't alone. However Jes does have a great punctuation post over at Running After My Hat that I highly recommend to anyone who claims to care about writing.

There's a new poem up on my website.

My musician friend Professor el Johno (blogs here or here) told me of his intention to compose a piece of music using atrocious sentence constructions that actually appeared in student writing. He described to me how all the layers of music would play together but I don't have a good enough music vocabulary to do a repeat description justice, so I'll just say that I'm terribly amused and I'm jotting down all the mind bogglingly bad sentences I find.

(BTW, I am totally amused to find that the adverb form of "boggle" is "bogglingly.")

Twenty-four hours ago I would have told you that I was not a fan of pumpkin beer. Then I picked up Ichabod at the store. I admit, the attraction was mostly to the label. Ichabod has since become one of my favorite beers, label, pumpkin and all.

I'm spending the weekend grading, reading and visiting my grandmother and assorted aunts and cousins. I shall tell the harrowing story of the fire alarm upon my return.

Grammar Unflummoxed

First, I'm thinking of getting a cat. Don't know if I should. That's her in the picture. She's six months, a major lap cat, she's been fostered not kenneled so she's clean and clear on the disease front ... and there's someone else vying for her! Yikes! Do I really want a cat?

Grammar stuff:
Thank you to everyone who tackled the yucky sentence that typifies what I'm seeing in freshmen writing.

It seemed chilly after the jacuzzi.

Turns out, thanks to Jes making me look it up, that Jacuzzi is a trademarked proper noun so for starters Jacuzzi should be capitalized. I argue that jacuzzi's trademark is going the way of Kleenex though.

Thronesquest was absolutely right identifying the first style error: "the main problem I see with this is that I don't know who is feeling chilly or who was in the jacuzzi." Right on TQ.

I asked my students what is "it" in this sentence. Some of them scoffed and said "the air" but at the same time someone else opened her mouth and said "the weather" and that set them off listing all the possible its. It could have been the water of a pool or lake, it could have been the speaker's skin. My favorite suggestion from my students: "the mood."

Point being that unless the sentence directly proceeding this one makes reference to the air or the mood, the reader is left to guess as to what that "it" could be.

The second style point Jes hit on: "But wait. 'Seemed'? Well, was it or wasn't it? Surely the narrator knows. I think this might be a bogus attempt to avoid the dreaded 'was.'"

"To seem," or "seemed" in this case, is one of those wimp out verbs. We already understand that "chilly" is an approximation, that there is no standard for what is chilly and what is not save the opinion of the speaker so saying "it seemed chilly" is a wimpy approximation of an approximation.

Using phrases like it seemed I was right, it felt like dancing with a bear, there were like two police cars, or we were rather upset, just dance around the actual emotion or action. Jes brought up avoiding using "was" too frequently, but honestly, sometimes the narrator just needs to step up and take control of the situation, build his or her authority and say this is exactly how it was. Go for the jugular. Say "it was chilly." Come on, take that sentence and shake it until it tells you it believes that what you say is what is really going on.

There's a reason we use the phrase tell it like it is with so passion in our culture.

The actual grammar mistake in the sentence no one specifically IDed however everyone fixed it in their rewrites.

It is physically impossible to after the Jacuzzi. You can't after the Jacuzzi. That clause, phrase, chunk (whatever) needs a verb! There has to be an action.

Something can come after the Jacuzzi physically, but that's a spatial relation not a temporal relation as the sentence implies. We muddy the waters of "come after" by using it to refer to to-do lists or agendas ... which makes it seem like one event is coming after another time-wise, but really the reference is to the next physical item on the list not the time doing or discussing that item will take.

In the original sentence we assume "to be" in that second phrase simply because we're trying to make sense of the sentence. "It was chilly after being in the Jacuzzi." We're used to making these assumptions because in spoken English the speaker rarely gets things right the first time and we're very forgiving of that -- particularly if they have hand gestures and a physical context to go with the sentence -- but in writing you have to give the reader everything in the words themselves without any external help, which, when you think about it from a learner's stance, is extremely difficult because our first learned communication has all sorts of props available to us to use. Goodness, how many times in France did I point to an object and say comme ca simply because I had no idea what the word was?

Ad of the Week

I love the song that's playing in the background of this ad. It tends to get me sort of emotional/sad -- which probably isn't what the writers intended. Perhaps that just has to do with the overarching mood I've been in for the past month or so. Perhaps it has to do with all the movies I'm watching on TV being things where I cry when I watch them even though I'm watching them for the second (or fifth) time, like V for Vendetta and Apollo 13.

It wasn't until the second time through V for Vendetta that I realized that when the crowd "unmasks" that the camera shows close ups of all the deceased characters: Evie's parents, the movie star, that TV guy and others. The first time I saw it I was simply struck by the grandure of the movie making, by the action and color. Now that I've seen it twice I've realized it is the kind of movie that can be watched twice; that there is more to it than just action and color.

I'm leaving the Grammar Flummoxed post open until Monday, so venture your guesses (the 18 year-olds did).

Oh, and tomorrow the Poem of the Week over on eileenwiedbrauk.com changes - so this is your last chance to get a look at last week's.

Grammar Flummoxed

I never particularly thought of myself as "the grammar police" or even as particularly savvy. I adore books like Words Fail Me and Eats, Shoots and Leaves because they always have new things for me to (re)discover in them!

But compared to my students I'm the Martha-frickin-Stewart of words. Don't even get me started about their shifting verb tenses. I'm actually amazed by the sheer ability to shift tenses back and forth that many times and still believe there is a coherent narrative -- does that make me the Grammar Nazi? I don't know. At least I don't have a mustach like the Soup Nazi.

Grammar Nazi's DIY sentence of the day:

It seemed chilly after the jacuzzi.

Two style issues and one grammar/logic error in the above. Can you find everything needed to rewrite the above a stronger, more articulate sentence?

I was going to answer it right here, right now, but I think I'll leave the comments section open and see what people have to say about the sentence before going all English teacher on it.

I can see you as ... a writing professor

(conversation with a friend)
Friend: I totally see you as a writing professor. With your crowded office and collection of coffee mugs and specialty coffee in the pot 24/7

Me: I'm starting to think of myself that way too. With stacks of paper piled high and clippings and post-its tacked to the wall over my desk.

Friend: And your frizzy-haired writing students who can't put five words together and you to mold them into something profound.

Me: An awkward wooden chair for the students.

Friend: Yes, one that rocks back and forth because the legs aren't even.

---


In other news, I just watched idiot-neighbor-boy take off his eyebrows lighting a grill with more lighter fluid than charcoal in it. The grill, btw, is cozied up next to his house (about 2' away) and he keeps leaving it to go back inside then he comes back out to add MORE lighter fluid each time.

Ad of the Week

Blog of Note

As Aquarius informed me in her comment, Nathan Bransford's blog got listed as the "Blog of Note" for Blogger yesterday. (Thanks for telling me as I hadn't seen it.)

But if Nathan's insanely popular blog just now is making the "of note" list I'm thinking that my time isn't coming any time soon. LoL!

MFA stuff: previously friendly grad students are turning pissy. Previously unapproachable grad students are becoming friendly. Am I being welcomed into the fold?

Tonight: I'm skipping the "creative writing party" despite the rumors of good food and the chance to snoop around the "posh" living space of one of the faculty members in order to just drive home and be comfortable. Tomorrow one of my cousins is getting married so I either need to go home tonight or go home early tomorrow morning. It's a gray outside, and if I don't hit the road I'll likely just curl back up in bed only my neighbor's music isn't conducive to my headache going away so bed is a bad idea. I know skipping a chance to be social is a bad idea but I've been at this for three weeks now; a break from it all this grad school stuff is very welcome.

Hump Day

Things seem like they let up, but they don't really let up.

I thought yesterday was good. I went to the farmer's market here in the morning (amazing produce), then met a student that requested an appointment, got an email saying 'hey I think the class you teach is my favorite so far' (their assignment was to email me from their preferred email account and most didn't bother with content in the email) and even the sweet potato fries I set off the smoke alarm making didn't turn out too bad.

But today. Today is and was long. I spent the whole morning prepping for the class I taught in the afternoon (and yes teaching, since I do not know what I am doing, is taking over my life) and then the class started to go more like a college class. I am watching them physically zone out and fall asleep. Now, if that's how you wanna spend your money then sleep through my class. I do not have enough sympathy to wake you up and I will not have sympathy on your grade when you botch shit up later. But it affects my psyche. I go faster. I fly through things for fear of losing the ones who are still awake and I might just be losing them in my haste.

The good news is that there is an "oh my god what the fuck am I doing" get together scheduled for tomorrow and led by a grad assistant who's sole job assisting with the 65 sections of this class being taught on campus right now.

Individually the students are great. They come up to me and ask really pointed questions and they have good ideas. But I think the group mentality makes them dumber. But that's true of all groups/mobs.

Then the migraine settled in. I haven't had a headache like that for four years.

And, delightfully enough, between the migraine, class prep and sweet potatoes, I have about 70 unread pages of stuff for my teaching methods class tomorrow. Boo.

And I missed Project Runway. Double boo. (Don't tell me who goes home, I'm hunting for the rerun time.)

---

To answer a question from the comments section previously: the writing workshop has one other person in her first year of her MFA, one in her second, and a bunch on their third, in addition to the four or so PhD candidates. I think the fact that the people who have been there the longest are the most vocal is skewing my perception. And while that is a logical conclusion it doesn't make me feel better.

Aquarius: I will not mess with my hair anymore. Although everyone should read Rebecca McClanahan's lovely essay "Loving Bald Men."

The First Day of Class (Workshop)

I'm not certain that went so well.

Things started off wrong with me being the last person to walk in, making me feel awkward and leaving me sitting immediately to the instructor's right. At least the guy on the left was sitting "around the bend" of the circled tables so he could at least look at the instructor without feeling creepy.

So I was late (not really, I was 4 min early), awkwardly positioned, and extremely aware that the jeans I had chosen to wear had a hole in them and not in a hey-aren't-these-holey-jeans-cool? sorta way. I got to introduce myself last. I got to pick workshop date last. Well, I could have volunteered to go in the first week but I didn't. I chickened out at the last minute in the face of frickin PhD candidates in writing.

Why didn't I take the 500 level class instead of the 600 level? The 500 has undergrads in it not PhD candidates. I could have done that and eased into it.

I think I bombed my introduction. But how can you bomb your introduction? Is it possible for that to be important? Obviously it's not important for my grade, or for how they view me as a writer ... or maybe it does contribute to how they view me as a writer because influences, et cetera, were part of the introduction. I fear I have bombed a social hurdle aspect of this degree. Which I am painfully aware of as there is a need for me to network if I am to teach when I'm done here and I have only three years in which to network (less if you consider that the people that I hope to network with will be out in the world where I cannot influence them in the next year or two).

My first workshop date isn't until the tail end of October. And then the next one is during finals week. I will be the very last student to have a piece workshopped. Part of my grade is turning in "substantial revisions to a draft" so obviously I'll be rewriting that first piece else I'll not be receiving a grade for the class.

I'm just pulling out my hair right now and probably going bald for no good reason.

Ice Cream Truck

I think I accomplished nothing of note over the weekend. I got together everything I'll need to teach today, made them copies of a couple pieces of literary nonfiction and lamented the fact that I had to do it on paper because I don't have the blackboard/e-reserve account thingy set up yet.

My mother came to visit on Saturday, which was lovely. The weather was good but mostly we just talked and cleaned. I was in the process of finishing the dishes when she arrived so she used those minutes to start cleaning other things. See, my mother loves to clean. She likes making things shine. She likes the look of carpet right after it's been vacuumed. And she loves how little effort it takes to get a place as small (and as new) as my apartment clean so she dusted and vacuumed a little and then we went out to lunch.

The rest of the weekend has been spent by me being driven mad by the ice cream truck.

Neighborhoods of college kids in late summer must be a money making demographic for the ice cream industry because the truck has been haunting these streets. Maybe more than one truck because occasionally I'll hear a new song. The first day it was some tuneless melody that I couldn't make out and thought it rather pleasant. But yesterday I was serenaded by 60 minutes worth of "pop goes the weasel" played by a ghost truck that circled incessantly but never turned down my street.

The phantom truck has shown itself once in the two weeks I have lived here. Adding to the feeling that I'm in a cartoon is the fact that it is not a truck at all and instead looks very much like the mystery machine from Scooby Doo.

Up Next: My first MFA workshop class!

Ad of the Week

I think this is the best one yet in this ad campaign.

Michael Chabon Single Handedly Redeems Genre Fiction!

(or something like that)

I'm behind on my interneting so this interview with Michael Chabon is from mid-late August but I've just gotten around to reading it now thanks to Jolie's blog.

Chabon reminds us not to think of writing in terms of good and evil (a dangerous paradigm in any situation) but to instead realize that the great majority of genre writing is crap. 90% as he names it. But that about 90% of literary writing is also crap. About 90% of all writing is crap regardless of genre or pedigree. Good point.