Maybe I didn't crush any AT-ATs with a log, but I'm still gonna party.

When I saw this tweet and Roxane’s similar news, I was sitting in a commuter student lounge and I squealed aloud, like a little kid. You should, too. And not just because we’re suckups.

Like many writers, I’ve bought BASS faithfully for oh god, this year will be 20 years, how’s THAT for apropos a long time. I read most or all of it, and I like maybe two or three stories. I really dislike no fewer than two or three. Usually, it’s for the same reasons as the year before. (Which, unfortunately, are tangentially linked to the reasons people still waste time trashing MFA programs.)

The last five or six years, though…they have been a little different. I read BASS and had the same reactions, but then I’ve thought I came up through the same system that venerates the periodicals these stories came from. I read stories this year in other periodicals that I know were better than some of the stories here. I don’t think I had a massive head injury. Please…I’m practically middle aged…can’t this world just catch up to that world before I die? 

Today gave me hope. Oh sure, it’s cool that I get to be smug and tell people I was already a fan of Roxane’s and Mike’s work, not to mention Hobart. It’s even cooler that I really mean it. I never turn down an opportunity to be smug. But this is really a victory for anyone who reads BASS and gets impatient. The world will move, and the wait just got a little shorter.

Anyway, my own Tumblr has been a collection of things I find useful for my project. Kinda like a digital notebook. Songs, pictures, videos, snippets. The early stuff is mostly Star Wars reblogs, but I expect that to fan out a bit now. If you want to play along, you can visit and shout from the sidelines here. Warning: I have Tumblr on my phone, too, so this could get a little mumble-at-the-pigeons-y.

On the Tumblr dashboard side, where I look at Tumblrs I follow, it’s all memes mixed with literary stuff, at near-random. I have to say…I am liking that a lot. But if you follow me, I will probably follow you. I’m friendly and fair like that sometimes.

2. I got PANK 6 today and read a fair chunk of it this afternoon. If you are a writer and/or reader who enjoys experiments in form, you owe it to yourself to pick up this issue. I am not just saying that so that I look cool. Hell, I cackled triumphantly in a parking lot yesterday because a clerical error at the pharmacy worked out in my favor! I couldn’t be cool if I tried. Fun facts: My story has four sections. One is totally true, one is totally false, and the other two are in between. Writing it eased me back into telling lies again, after an irritating bout of candor.

Project is back on track. Since I usually keep quiet, maybe I should say what it is?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.