1.

So I was with my 11 year old in the car, and she was telling me about a story she wrote at school with a group of kids. “There’s this character named James, and he’s skinny. And then there’s this character Maggie, and she’s…I don’t want to say fat…”

“Why not?”

“How about…she’s obese?”

“Why not just say fat?”

“They told us in health class that ‘obese’ is more polite.”

“Really? They said it exactly like that? ‘Obese’ is more polite than ‘fat’?”

“Yeah.”

(I should probably add here that I am fat and obese, and my daughter is neither.)

“I’m not sure I agree,” I said. “‘Obese’ is a medical term, and ‘fat’ isn’t. I prefer ‘fat’ when I’m talking about myself. But other people feel differently. The most polite thing to do is to call people what they want you to call them, no matter what they are. Though I suppose you don’t always know. And in that case, it’s best to find some other way to talk about them.”

“Uh huh,” she said. “Can I play Xbox when we get home?”

1a.

Other terms that people sometimes use interchangeably with “fat” is “curvy” or “women with curves.” I don’t much care for those, either. It is quite possible to be a curvy woman without being a fat woman. And I know firsthand it is also quite possible for a fat woman to be an uncurvy woman. A store employee once called me curvy. I’m sure she was just trying to be kind. But before I could stop myself, I snapped “I’m sorry, but no. I am not curvy. I am not an hourglass. I am not a pear. I AM A POTATO.”

2.

The Paula Deen thing annoys me for a few reasons. Here are three of them.

Reason one: Everyone who makes butter jokes might want to have a look at this or this or this.

Reason two: Paula Deen sells cookbooks and hams and videos and clothes and isn’t hurting for cash. She has a disease that is misunderstood by most, even by some who have it. What does she decide is the right thing to do, under those circumstances? After taking a reasonable amount of time to think it over? Especially when in her own state (and plenty of others, including my liberal utopia one) diabetics who have their disease under control are routinely denied access to private health insurance plans? Advocacy is the right thing to do! She picked advocacy! Of course she did! She’s going to go around the country and persuade state legislatures to take a hard look at what they’re doing to others with her disease! Wait…she’s not doing that? Even though she could be charming, like she is with Craig Ferguson? What the hell, Paula?

Reason three: Did anyone tell Mandy Patinkin to maybe adopt a more stress-free lifestyle, after he started hawking Crestor? Or give him crap for singing about caffeine?

3.

I’m reading a lot more. I’m listening to music a lot more. I am happier for it.

I like to think I have reasonably good taste in reading. You can see what I have read and am currently reading at Goodreads. Last month, I read the sections of this that I hadn’t read already. I read those sections again last week. (I will be honest: It’s frightening to be part of something that cool.)

My taste in music is terrible. It’s so bad that I keep Spotify on Private Session most of the time. It’s so bad that I am listening to this right now:

Time to worry!

4.

The Project. The Project is with me at all times. The characters in The Project are sitting in the waiting room. Some of them have read every issue of Highlights, and they’re tired of watching Cars 2 on the TV bolted to the wall. One of them is sitting at the wooden train table, pushing the cars back and forth between Thomas the locomotive and the caboose. Every time she has to pry the magnets apart, she glances at me, lifts an eyebrow, and shrugs. I don’t know what to tell her yet. It’s getting awkward.

5.

Along with all of the other books I am reading, there is one I haven’t put on Goodreads. That one is about grief, because it’s high time I came back. Even if I’m not the same.

The stars and gift cards aligned in such a way that I picked up a Nook Simple Touch over the holidays. I already own an iPad — my official reason for needing a Nook was fair use photocopying when I teach.

But I’m finding the Nook to be wonderful anyway. It’s small and light and just friendly for reading somehow, in a way that the iPad isn’t. (The iPad is, however, very friendly for curling up on the couch with just about everything else.) I can shove the Nook into any pocket. And I can take many things to read with me at once. I avoid standing in front of my bookshelves agonizing for an hour. Sometimes, I like to agonize…but not all the time.

There’s also the fact that my Nook’s only purpose is to read and browse for books. I could root the thing and open a world of possibilities, sure. But it’s great to read and not have email and phone call and Facebook and Twitter and the weather and celebrity death notifications pop up in the left-hand corner, like they do on every other piece of technology I own. All of this makes me feel very old.

I’ve gotten a lot more reading done lately. That fixes the feeling old problem.

I'm working on a long project. It's been rough.

Over the last couple of weeks, I've been cleaning out my office space. Before, when I tried, I would find things that would make me sad…and then abandoning the task to watch the Bonaparte's episode of Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares for the 35th time would sound like a really great idea. But something clicked this time with the cleaning…and I have no doubt it was having something to do besides the long project.

It's made me start to think about why long projects are so difficult for me. Because I've got a big Tupperware container full of them, and none of them are complete.

I've also been reading Joan Didion's The White Album. Like a lot of people, I suspect, I have somewhat complicated feelings about Joan Didion. (See this blog's title, natch.) On one hand it's easy to think yeah, if I had most of that life I'd be a better writer. On the other, juuust often enough she'll have a passage that flips me over and dumps me on my head in a way that no one else can. In Blue Nights, which no one seems to think is as good as The Year of Magical Thinking and I'm inclined to agree, she talks about how mementos are a burden to her…and the way she does it guarantees I'm always going to have a copy of that book, no matter what. Even though it's not as good as The Year of Magical Thinking. That's just what Joan Didion does, and it makes it impossible to throw the book across the room when she's talking about lounging by the pool.

Anyway. Not long after I started The Cleanup Project From Hell, I happened across this section in The White Album, where Didion's on a plane to Hawaii, waiting on the tarmac. A man behind her yells "You are driving me to murder" at his girlfriend, and then opens the plane door and leaves. On the flight (which continues as planned, as this is the 70s), Didion can't stop thinking about that moment, and eventually she realizes why.

I disliked it because it had the aspect of a short story [...] I was going to Honolulu because I wanted to see life expanded to a novel, and I still do. I wanted room for flowers, and reef fish, and people who may or may not be driving one another to murder but in any case are not impelled, by the demands of narrative convention, to say so out loud on the 8:45am Pan American to Honolulu.

I am afraid of flowers and reef fish, I think. Of slower speeds, of not being impelled, of drift. But at the same time, over the past few weeks I've also caught myself thinking, more than once: Life isn't a novel. Why are you trying to make it into one?  

I need to figure out a way to reconcile those things, and then maybe there'll be one less in the Tupperware container.

I really dislike Google Reader's new format. Everything is floaty and mouseover-y and I need structure, I'm too floaty and mouseover-y on my own. So I don't look at Google Reader often now. I don't exercise often now, either. Both of these things are having indirect but markedly negative effects on my life. I will start exercising again soon. I'm not sure what to say about Google Reader, though.

For the last six months or so, I've been working on a chapbook. Five of the stories in it have done well for themselves. Lately, I've been working on something new. It makes sense to work on it in Scrivener, when Scrivener has never made sense to me before. For years, it seemed, I'd download the beta, try it for an afternoon, delete it. I actually BOUGHT it this time. And I'm transcribing into Scrivener from my notebook and thinking about backloading other projects into it. What the hell?

Things I never guessed would change, have changed. Scrivener makes sense, Google Reader sucks, I like hard boiled eggs, I wear mascara, I bought a pair of pants in the Normal Person section of a clothes store, I can't watch holiday television specials, and eating an ice cream sundae makes me feel like crap.

God only knows what's next.

I've wanted to have work in FRiGG for a long time, and now I do.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a short autobiographical piece that could serve as the fun facts for those three stories. The piece is concerned with the last ten months of my life. Telling the truth was fun for a while, but now I am getting bored with it again.

This is where I should say something pithy, yet ambiguous. But I am bored with that, too.

One of many excellent posts on creative writing pedagogy over at the Giant. Related, sort of: M. Kitchell on not having an MFA, and Amber Sparks's response.

Ed Champion gets the real story about the Billy.

Celeste Ng on stolen form stories.

Dr. Conan T. Barbarian.

Another great pedagogy post at HTML. C'mon, Giant! Isn't it high time for something that's going to make me roll my eyes, close the tab, and go play Farmville?

This is the post that finally made me follow Courtney Stodden on Twitter.

What Gordon from After the MFA is up to these days.

"I would like one without a sticker on."

A review of one of my favorite short story collections this year so far. (Thanks, Ethel!) Related: Ethel's take on the same collection.

100 celebrity rumors from Adam Moorad.

A selected guide for new writers from Laura Ellen Scott, whose book Death Wishing drops tomorrow!

I have surprisingly little trouble imagining Nicholson Baker with a Fribble and a Fishamajig.

Writing advice from Nicole Monaghan.

That damn trailer made me weepy, too.

I agree wholeheartedly with Kevin.

And finally: Libyan street art. 

Hi, Person I See Regularly, But Do Not Know Very Well:

Thanks for Googling me, because there's something I need to tell you.

I know you've noticed that my hair is really thin. And that you've noticed my scalp is quite visible from certain angles, particularly if I'm standing in front of you, looking down. 

I get that it's weird, especially because I'm female and still of childbearing age. I also get that it's distracting, particularly if I'm nattering on about something and haven't figured out that it's time for me to shut up, and especially if I'm under fluorescent lighting. I've seen you look at my hairline quickly, and try not to look at my hairline, and I have a fairly good idea of what you are thinking. Holy shit, does she know how thin her hair really is? That anyone could imagine her bald? What the hell is up with that, anyway?

I do know how thin it really is. I imagine myself bald all the time. And yes, I know exactly what the hell is up with that. I'm going to explain here, because obviously it's really awkward for you to ask, and even more awkward for me to offer the information seemingly out of nowhere. 

First: My hair has never been particularly lush to begin with. My sister got whatever Lush Hair Genes there are in our family. I did do a fair amount of dyeing and processing when I was your age, but so did she. I've concluded that the genetic lottery rules that roost, not a history of abuse.

So, I started off with not a lot of hair to begin with, and then two largely unrelated things happened earlier this year: 

1. My appendix ruptured, and I spent eight days in the hospital after emergency surgery.

2. I changed my diet very dramatically, and have lost a lot of weight.

These things can both result in what's called telogen effluvium, which in this case I'll allow you to read about on Wikipedia. If you look through the causes of telogen effluvium, you'll see that "major surgery" and "crash diets" are both there. I didn't adopt what I would call a crash diet, but it was a dramatic enough change from my previous way of eating that I'm certain it contributed to the telogen effluvium. I had the surgery at the very end of April, and my hair started falling out at the end of June…right on schedule.

By the time you met me, I was past the shedding phase. (And be glad, because that really sucked. I had hair all over my clothes all the time, which is even creepier than the current situation.) If you look very closely the next time we talk, you'll see that I have a very subtle layer of fine hair that is crewcut length. It's particularly noticeable where my part and my hairline meet.

It's probably going to take at least six months to a year for regrowth (also known as the anagen phase) to make any sort of difference in the overall volume of my hair. But in the meantime, I'm less fat and most important, I'm not dead. Those were the alternatives, and I am absolutely not using hyperbole. 

I don't tell you any of this to shame you, or make you feel bad about your surreptitious glances. I'm explaining because I'm not really embarrassed by what happened, but we're never in a position where it's right for me to say something. But thanks to the Internet, you've now read this and now know what the deal is. You can even say to me "Hey, I was looking up the World Cup on Google and happened across your blog, and saw the thing about your hair." and I'll go along with that, no problem. Maybe it'll be a little less distracting. And maybe other people's weird things will be a little less distracting, too.

Now, get back to work!

EF

"However, there was also something very passive aggressive about this “meekness.” I had used it as a way to hold back from others."

I have tried to get up at dawn and write, as many writing guides advise you to do. It doesn't work for me. Never has. Lately the first thing I need to do when I get up is have a cup of coffee. My peak writing hours tend to be in the evening, probably because I have scaled back my expectations at that point. 

An apology I hope to be able to use someday myself.

I used to write what I know. Now I write to make sense of things. It never helps me make sense of things, but I do think the writing is better than it used to be. I quit writing for a few years. Part of what brought me back was video games. Part of what brought me back was reading George Saunders' story "Sea Oak," and realizing it was possible to write a story and have a good time. These are all things I have talked about before. I am a long-standing abuser of the word "things."

Andrea Kneeland's excellent contest.

I like prompts, sometimes. I don't like journal prompts. ("Talk about a time you made the wrong decision.") I do like form prompts. ("Write about microwave popcorn sixteen different ways, without ever using the word 'popcorn.'")

Jen Michalski, "The Lady in the Coat Pile."

I've been writing a lot about health in the last few months. I wrote a piece last week that is pure memoir. I spent time on it that I really do not have, and now I don't know what to do with it.

AD Jameson covers the recent pro Magic: the Gathering tournament.

I like reading other writers' work and giving feedback. I wish I was a faster reader. I worry sometimes that my comments aren't useful. I want to be of use, very much.

I do not have time to write a 50,000 word manifesto on this subject, so I will direct you to this instead.

Even though I'm top-level cool with the fact that language is in a constant state of evolution, I'm a snobby jerkface about grammar, punctuation and especially spelling. Blatant, awkward errors make me stabby…especially if the errors are made on behalf of a litmag.

"The shooting stuff is where the challenge lies but it also doesn't actually matter."

Thing (there's that "thing" abuse) I've been saying far too often lately: Writing is nothing more than a series of choices, and that's what makes it so scary and so wonderful.

Emily is definitely on to something.

Ever since I can remember, I've thought of my writer-brain as a spaceship that requires a full crew to operate properly. There are plenty of details about my writing that I'm happy to share. But I will never say who has a job on my spaceship, or what those jobs are. I am fiercely protective of my crew, even when they don't know it. 

And finally: Unless you wish others to be fat and unhealthy, please bring only healthy food. 

People of Boston and environs: I'm reading tomorrow night at the Dire Literary Series in Cambridge, MA with Steve Himmer, Darcie Dennigan, Collier Nogues, and others.

I will likely read my story about ABBA in RE: Telling, which will still never have been read in a bar. Or maybe some Wilford Brimley fanfic. I'm not kidding.

Guns n'Roses:

Sheryl Crow:

Moby:

Kelly Clarkson:

Carrie Underwood:

Trace Bundy:

Igor Presnyakov:

Bonnie Tyler:

The Black Eyed Peas and Slash:

Guitar Hero 2, expert:

Linkin Park:

from Step Brothers: