Me: I'm going to start the newest fashion trend of 2010.
Mom: Oh, what's that?
Me: Get this: the apron.
Mom: What?
Me: This might be the sherry talking, but I think it's a fabulous idea.
Mom: It's quite the throwback.
Me: Yeah, but like, to wear to the office and around town and stuff. Fancy ones for nights out.
Mom: And what do you think this says about you exactly?
Me: That I like pockets and protecting my clothes?

Here I am again, and the world is suddenly clear, bright, and, hey, I can just make out the fissures in the paneling across the room. We have made contact. There are tiny words scattered around the house from the cut-outs I did for my little book. Some must have fallen off the mat and onto the floor where I stepped on them and carried them on the sole of my shoe, dropped them off one-by-one on each stair and abandoned them like a trail of bread crumbs on the hardwood floor. One lay face-down and camouflaged outside the hallway bathroom until the breeze from a passerby (me) flipped it over to reveal "$10 mil-". Would that I had really found ten million dollars!

Funny that my first assignment in the poetry class ended up being about my mother.
Not-so-funny that the second was about my dad.

I am too timid with my ideas.
I might break something.
They might break me.

Every time I've ever worn contacts I've found myself thinking, my geez! there is so much to see.








Also, I.hate.this.cold.weather.and.I.want.it.to.die!

I have been having some trouble waking up to my phone, which has been my alarm clock for over two years now. It's too easy to hit the snooze button. I set two or three alarms with different tones that go off at three-to-nine-minute intervals three or four times every morning. I finally get up only when it seems futile to calculate how many more minutes of sleep that snooze button will afford me before I have to wake up and hit it again. Essentially, I annoy myself awake each morning.

I think my humor is dry and insensitive. It is certainly much too often misunderstood. Can this be helped? I should work on it. Can humor be dry and sympathetic? I should just stop trying to make jokes. My sense of humor is only 10% effective; the other 90% of the time I just seem to offend people.

I've begun to think that poetry might be a lot more fun than fiction. Shhhhh, don't tell the poets!

Lately my fiction has been called "experimental," which I never heard anyone say at UVa. I had never thought of it as such. In fact, I would say that it is more traditional than what usually passes as traditional fiction these days! My fiction specifically follows a plethora of conventions--there is nothing new but the ideas and concepts. The actual telling of the story is so derivative that I often find it embarrassing. It's not that I'm offended by being called an experimental writer, but I'm afraid that if I am incorrectly labeled in that way it will create a rift between expectation and reality. I have a lot of experience with those kinds of rifts, and they too often turn into explosive disappointments. Does this mean I should attempt to take control of my genre? If I have to be labeled, wouldn't it be better to label myself? I'm toying with the term "theoretical fiction" or maybe "rhetorical fiction." Geez, at least no one here has tried to call it "sci-fi" or "fantasy." If that starts up again, I might just explode. I might just.

My mother, on free verse:

"If it doesn't rhyme or have an identifiable meter, then it's just prose stretched out on a page. It's fake poetry!"

The best thing ever. My granny came over today for dinner and immediately started to admire the hand-sewn manger scene that's out on display in our living room. Her Alzheimer's-addled brain repeated these praises a couple of dozen times throughout the evening and couldn't remember that it was she, in fact, who made the thing in the first place and gave it to our family some twenty-odd years ago. It was the perfect example of both self-adoration and humility.

Granny also admired the family photos on display in the cabinet above the manger scene. She recognized a couple of my school photos as me, and then she pointed to the one photo of my dad and said, "That looks like..." and trailed off. That's the first time she's mentioned her son in the six years since he died, which was around the same time she lost those last remnants of lucidity. I nodded and said, "That's the best photo we have of him," and that was it.

I love how clean the cold that comes with snow feels. Somehow it isn't the same as the bitter cold from the car to the house when I come home late at night. How can I describe it? It smells fresh and crisp, it smells like it looks, somehow it smells like it glistens. And with the world muffled, it smells soft like it sounds too. I've been walking to work because my street isn't plowed yet.

[Bad poem deleted after much deliberated thought.]


I'm taking a poetry class next semester. I hope I learn something about writing poetry. I made up an awesome poem the other day called S/Z. It's a 52-card war game with 26 words that start with S and 26 words that start with Z. The players have to decide which card wins each turn by their own associative values. I haven't decided on the words yet. I was planning on going through the dictionary not-so-randomly. Suggestions welcome. I know you want to play.

Sometimes I feel like I'm just variations on a theme.

I drove to work, which was intense, but fine. There's still a three-inch layer of ice over most of the road in my neighborhood. Agamemnon is a trooper, but he's really not cut out for this. We got caught at the crest of the hill, and all he could do was spin. I had to park in my neighbor's driveway and walk the rest of the way up to my house. I came around the other way tonight, which was better because it was a straight shot up the hill, but my mother said she could hear me accelerating all the way down the road. It is not safe out there.

Two new ideas to explore: stream-of-consciousnesses and [[sound effects]], a.k.a. realistic onomatopoeia. I hate that I always have to look up how to spell that word.

Let's talk about the participle, past and present, as an adjective and as a phrase.

I definitely balked the first time someone told me to "Just Say NO" to adverbs. I mean, how can you reject a whole part of speech? It isn't as if the adverb is some black sheep of the grammatical family-ly-ly-ly (cheap shot). That lesson makes sense now, however--that an adverb is an easy-way-out kind of descriptive modifier; it's the very definition of tell vs. show. Elementary. Roight.

Now let's talk about something I don't understand: the effective use of the participle phrase as a descriptive modifier. Example: The buildings rose tall from the ground, their rooftops licking the sky overhead like tongues. It's the "licking" that is the present participle. I do not like this. I think it's stylistically inferior to the more active alternative "The buildings rose tall from the ground so much so that their rooftops licked the sky like tongues," or possibily, "The buildings rose so tall from the ground that their rooftops licked the sky like tongues." Doesn't that sound more visceral? In contrast, doesn't the example with the participle phrase sound like passive description?

(Why would you want your description to sound passive?)

I will be the first to admit that I'm hypercritical when I edit, even when I force myself to use a more edifying color than red (there is an example of a participle as an adjective, which is acceptable when used sparingly). It's more that I want the writer to question how she tells a story on a sentence-by-sentence basis to make sure that the whole is cohesive unless the content begs it to be otherwise. My own writing is far from perfect, on the one hand, and on the other, I think even the most celebrated works would benefit from some edits and updates (because perfection doesn't exist, not even for the best writers, and literature should never be static--stories were never meant to be that way). Still the frequency with which I circle, underline, or otherwise censure these participle phrases in others' writing (which includes that of Chuck Palahniuk, who I invoke as an example because I like his writing anyway, for the most part, so it's forgivable) makes me wonder how much of its use is grammatical and how much is stylistic.

How much of it is unnecessarily stylistic?

I spent the better part of yesterday, which is to say all of my free time, trying (there it is again!) to figure out why descriptive participle phrases irk me so much. Sometimes the annoyance is easy to point out: parallelism error, tense change, or, as is most common, ambiguous tense, which results from flimsy writing. It may just be a personal aversion to ellipsis (another structure that is effective only when used infrequently). In the end, I have to admit that the error is not always grammatical and that this may just be a matter of opinion. Rats to that!

I use adverbs anyway. I understand the lesson, I own it, and I still use the occasional adverb. It's important to realize the value of prescriptive advice and when it's effective to ignore it. That said, as soon as I figure out a really good argument against the participle phrase, I'm going to write my manifesto on fiction. It's all happening.

This is fiction overwrought - copyright be damned!

He broke all routine and went back to that little thrift store where the woman with the red coat first sold him the video tapes. On that day, Scott left his apartment one last time. It had been raining through the hot night, and there was a light mist settled across the surface of the road when he slouched into his car. The way seemed clear, but as Scott started the engine, the wind picked up, and water began to pour across his windshield. The wipers could hardly slice through each wave fast enough, and this resulted in a vision-blurring screen that reminded him too much of the little television in his apartment. It was as if the nothingness he encountered in the broken videos had permeated real life. Still, he knew where to go.

Scott parked and shuffled across the tiny lot, but found his clothing soaked through by the time he hopped over a raging gutter river onto the curb. He ducked under the awning that hung over the store. The woman was in the display window, and he watched as she tucked and pinned a blouse of some vintage into the waistline of a denim skirt on a dummy. At first, the woman's back was turned toward him, but as she stepped around the mannequin, a gust of wind blew up under the awning and covered the window with rain spatter, which caused her to look up and notice him standing there. She approached the window immediately and smiled through the glass at Scott, then motioned for him to come inside. But with his faced almost pressed up against the window next to hers and the tips of their noses separated only by a double-layered curtain of melted sand (dripping, dripping imperceptibly over time like a slow-motion hourglass), he found that he could not move at all. He could only stand there and stare at her through the window. He could only study her face through the screen as if it were one of the many he thought he saw in the snow on the television when he searched for a story or some deeper meaning there. He could only look at her and see that very same nothingness.

She continued to smile. He continued to stare.

It went on like this for several minutes as the rain behind him died down. The droplets on the window slowly ran in rivulets to collect in a channel at the bottom where the pane met the casement. Scott suddenly felt impressed by the notion that the young woman was crying despite her smile and that the raindrops that ran down her window may as well have been tears that dripped from her face. The hope he perceived in her gaze disturbed him most. He noted a longing in her eyes, in her pupils dilated almost to the rims of their irises, but it was not a longing for him, not for anything that he could give her. It was a longing for something that he knew now was no longer there, no longer anywhere. It was a longing for anything but nothingness.

The woman motioned again for Scott to come in, but he turned back toward the parking lot. He heard the little security bell over the door ring as he crumbled once more into the driver's seat of his car. He drove away, and he watched through his rear-view mirror as the woman stepped ankle-deep into the gutter river. If he had been able to hear her, she might have lobbed at him the very questions he wished to have answered himself: "What did you find out?" "What do you know?"

The next morning, Scott woke up and walked to the mirror to revisit his daily routine. First, he would survey his printed body and begin as always with the phrase that he’d emblazoned across his heart—something about “destructive rage”. Then, he would follow the contours of his bones and recite to himself the bits of scripture there. His fingertips would find keloids along his shoulders, which he read like raised bumps in Braille. He would follow his body down to his feet, then walk to the kitchen, flip open a few empty books as he went, turn on the TV, and start a pot of coffee. On this morning, unfortunately, Scott never made it through his bedroom door.

As he slid his palms down his ribcage and over his stomach, as he read his way around his navel, Scott thought he noticed an anomaly in his skin, and for a fleeting moment he worried about an oncoming attack of déjà vu. He cupped his hipbones and covered them, took a deep breath, then revealed each one in the mirror again. The contours of his right hip were still shadowed by the lines of a poem that he thought he once read. When he uncovered his left hip, it stuck out, bare. He rubbed a finger over a patch of skin there that was smooth, shiny, and hairless. It looked like an empty slate against the rest of his body, but he knew somehow that it hadn’t always been that way.


He stumbled and fell back onto the bed. When he looked down, he saw amidst the crumpled sheets a tiny spot of ink. He rustled through the blankets and found a large splotch near the center of his mattress. There was another smaller stain close to the foot of the bed, which Scott traced back to what must have once covered the pink spot on his right ankle. He imagined how the ink, so deeply saturated in his skin, must have bubbled up and boiled over his pores while he slept. It must have looked like black blood as it seeped from his skin overnight.


Scott grabbed a permanent marker from a drawer in his nightstand and sat on the floor near a stack of notes that he had carefully preserved there. Then, madly and methodically, he began recording titles, short descriptions, and even video timestamps on his arms, legs, stomach, wherever he could reach. As he scribbled, he could feel the nothingness as freshly written phrases and sequences already pulled away from his memory. He lengthened his summaries and wrote them on his thighs in smaller and smaller script. Sometimes he began a sentence but forgot what he’d written by the time he got to the end. Other times all he wrote down was the title, and there was nothing else to be said. He persevered, stretched in every direction and at every angle in order to find a space to fill. When he finished, only a single column over his spine remained unmarked.


Books and notes lay in various stages of chaos all around the room, on the floor, and hanging half-open from the bed, the chair, and the table. The mirror that hung behind the door framed it all and doubled the chaotic vision of Scott, pen in hand, standing naked like a graffitied lamppost in the middle of a littered street. He approached the mirror and watched as his reflection increased to life-size so he could examine its text more closely. Here, he discovered that in his efforts to reach every blank part of his body, his limbs had rubbed together—his arms against his sides, his thighs against his stomach—and he’d smeared a significant portion of the ink across his skin. He watched as even the unsmudged words slowly spread into his pores, which made him one, huge, literary stain.


Scott was discovered hanging from over the door frame that led into his bedroom. His neighbor downstairs had complained of a shadow on the ceiling that grew like a pool of blood over several days. When Scott was discovered, his skin was as clear as the day he was born, and the dark puddle of ink beneath him stuck like mud to the shoes of the people who came to take him down.

I just couldn't decide.

The paper bag that I carried held out until the very last moment possible, and then I was staring at a pile of library books on the floor of my car. I hated the rain tonight. It poured the whole way from the library to the parking lot, and that's not a long walk, but it was just long enough to soak through a paper grocery bag, if that gives you some idea.

Half a glass of wine and a two-hour bath later (no kidding), I suddenly realized that I dreamed last night after all. I don't remember anything except the image of a man standing with his back turned toward me, and his skin is covered with all kinds of scars of different lengths as if he had been cut deeply and healed and cut deeply again hundreds of times throughout his life. There is a woman standing in front of us, and she looks at me with some kind of disdain, maybe disapproval, disgust, or just derision. (Ha! I totally didn't have to pull the thesaurus out on that one.) That's it. Kind of strange, huh?

Maybe that explains why I woke up at 3AM for no apparent reason and couldn't fall back asleep until four. A few nights ago, I was just falling asleep, and all of a sudden I gasped and bolted upright in bed feeling scared for my life. I couldn't figure out what had startled me, but as soon as I was awake, I was fine. I remember that my first thoughts were What could that mean?

I've been thinking about dialogue a lot lately. Specifically I've been thinking about dialogue in stories that is uber-realistic, like strings of small talk that seem typical and insignificant. A real he-said, she-said kind of affair. I think it's pretty safe to assume that the average creative writing student will get Hills Like White Elephants served up to her three or five times in her workshopping career as an example, but the lesson there is about subtext. I've been wondering about dialogue that has no subtext. I'm trying to figure out its place in a story and what it could do because I guess I was taught and I've observed that it doesn't really do anything. It's not because I'm looking to defy convention with this or anything, it's just that I'm wondering about its aesthetic possibilities. I encountered this strategy recently in something I read, and I guess I'm trying to figure out a way to like it. It feels kind of like standing in front of some kind of wall sculpture or something at the Hirshhorn. I think it's either 'A to B' or 'Q to R'; I'm just not sure which.